The Cruelty of Alzheimer's

In one of my favorite movies, The Shawshank Redemption, Ellis (Red) Redding (played by one of my favorite actors, Morgan Freeman) is re-united with his friend, Andy Dufresne (played by Tim Robbins), after Red is finally paroled from Shawshank Prison, having served for 40 years.  At the time Red first was imprisoned, he'd been a "stupid kid" who'd committed murder during a robbery - after 40 years, he was an old man, deeply regretful of his terrible crime.  One message of the movie is that hope is a good thing, and good things never die.  In the movie, Andy and Red had 20 years together in prison and the movie ends with them being re-united ...

A bit more than 40 years ago, I first met someone who has been my friend ever since.  Those who know me may well know of whom I speak, but I'll not mention his name here.  What's happened is my friend is a victim of early onset Alzheimer's Disease.  His symptoms appeared before he was 60 years old!  As it has progressed, it first took away his ability to work - he was forced to retire because he could no longer do his life's work at the high level that he had established.  For my friend, this was a cruel blow, as he has been one of the best in the world at his job and loved his work, as I have.

It also took away something he was looking forward to at the end of his professional career - he had a hobby he cared for almost as much as his work, and anticipated being able to give it the time that his professional life didn't allow.  That, too, has been taken from him.  Those adventures he planned have never come to pass.

As time has passed, he has become less and less capable of doing things for himself.  He can no longer drive - he forgets where he was going, forgets how to get there, and forgets even how to find his way home.  He doesn't know how to work a seat belt.  He struggles taking the top off a water bottle or putting money away in his wallet.

Yesterday, he looked me in the eyes and asked, "Do I know you?"  Yes, I said, "We've been friends for 40 years." He stared at me in amazement.  He couldn't remember my name, or much about what we had done that day.  For all intents and purposes, the confident, supremely competent, generously helpful man that has been my friend for 40 years ... is gone.  He still has moments when the person we've known and loved peeks out from behind the fog of Alzheimer's Disease, but those moments don't last long and they only serve to remind him that he's losing his memories and his life.  That may be the cruelest part of all about this terrible disease:  he's known what inevitably was going to happen but could only watch as it has slowly and remorselessly taken things away.  His body continues to function reasonably well, but the person I've known for 4 decades is virtually gone - all that defined his personality and character are now just memories.  Memories, of course, are precisely what he no longer has.  It's as if those things never happened for him, now. 

Words cannot describe how painful it's been to watch this decline.  Today, my friend is gone, for all intents and purposes.  I knew this would happen.  I knew this day would come.  I knew that a 40-year friendship would come to be a lost memory for him.  Now that it's arrived, I'm somewhat depressed, but I still have my memories of that time and the adventures and experiences he shared with me over the years.  That's what keeps me from being really shaken by all of this.  My memories may not be as sharp as they were, but most of them are still with me.  I miss my friend, but he's given us a very meaningful legacy, a host of treasured memories shared - not just mine, but those of the many people whose lives he touched in a positive way.  I can endure this, but it hurts.

Alzheimer's is a cruel disease, and there are other degenerative diseases that can have similar results.  I know, because another long-time friend of mine is being victimized by a different disease - but with similar results:  faculties once razor-sharp now dulled into non-existence.  Another once-capable friend is slipping away from me, bit by bit, even as I type this.

If you have a chance to contribute to seeking cures for these intensely cruel degenerative diseases, please don't hesitate to do so.  And if you know victims, you should do as much as possible to interact with them while they still can enjoy it.  Your time with your friends (and family) is precious in any case.  You never know when it might be lost forever.

Hope may never die, but friends (and family) do.  The very worst part of growing older is losing your friends and family ...

What Does Freedom of Speech Mean To You? Part 3

My friend, David Matthews II, host of the ShockNet Radio program "Brutally Honest" posted (on 17 September) a fascinating analysis of how the by-now infamous "movie trailer" containing insults to islam (that triggered riots leading to deaths) relates to the topic of free speech.

He concludes with:

This video was done under a cloud of deception and misdirection. Their intentions are in doubt. They knew what kind of audience they were focusing on. If they wanted to show just how ugly and ill-tempered and ultimately fatalistic the Muslims can be, well, congratulations, they succeeded. And just as a bonus, they will get the very groups they otherwise denigrate – the ones that defend the un-defendable – to support their right to show that video. 

In other words, despicable things are going to be defended by staunch defenders of free speech - after all, the point is that free speech only has real meaning when it is granted to those with whom you disagree.  Going along with free speech is easy (and meaningless) when the words (and intentions) are congruent with your own.

David talks about the intentions of the film makers - although he concedes that he can't be certain what they were.  Nevertheless, it seems reasonably likely that their intentions could have been to provoke the sort of reaction from radical muslims that actually occurred.  Let me assume for the moment that this is truly the case - their intention was to provoke a violent reaction from the muslims.

David also talks about the limits to free speech, using the familiar example of shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater.  Obviously, if the intent is to cause panic (which could well result in casualties) in a case where there actually is no such fire, then it's widely accepted that this oversteps the bounds of free speech.  There's a judicial test of speech that seeks to draw a line regarding inflammatory speech, called the "incitement test" - in reference to words "inciting" violence.  As found at this site, the test is simply 

... the government may prosecute words that are "triggers to action" but not words that are "keys of persuasion."

Note that shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater when no such fire is present uses no words that are explicit calls for action, but it can be argued that this single word "Fire!" is implicitly a trigger to action.  A fine line, here.  But drawing such a line is important, no? 

How does the infamous YouTube video situation fare using this incitement test?  David argues that events in recent history make it clear what muslims are likely to do when something comes out in the media that is perceived as disrespectful to islam.  Hence, any such blatant insults to islam, like those contained in this "trailer" (Does a full-length film actually exist?  I doubt it.), are virtually certain to incite violence.

But wait ... the "trailer" had a relatively long, quiescient history on the Internet, having first been posted some time ago.  It was only when someone posted about it on an Arabic-language blog did anyone in the islamic world even know about the existence of this video.  From there, it seems it "went viral" amongst muslims, triggering the riots.  The reactions to the video depended on getting the attention of the target audience.  Famous people are more likely to incite international reactions than nobodies.  Insults on a movie screen in a theater are more visible than those spoken in a tavern.

I've long held that words have no intentions associated with them - they're just words.  Some of them may be offensive to some people (who must choose to be offended by such words) and so could be considered provocative.  But not all uses of a particular word have clearly-associated intentions.  Compare the intentions of the word 'nigger' when used between two African-Americans, versus when used by a Ku Klux Klan member using it to describe an African-American.  Same word - two different intentions.  

Hence, we can't look to the objective reality of words to evaluate intent.  My friend David has evaluated intent and leans toward proposing that this violence-provoking YouTube video was intended to incite violence.  But the video contains no explicit calls to violent actions in its words.  We all know how muslims react to insults to islam ... but this video might fail the standard incitement test described above, unless the video implicitly is a "trigger to action".  Another fine line to draw.

Some friends and I are engaged in provocative presentations at American Heathen - the host (RJ Evans) has been the target of death threats, as has co-host Al Stefanelli.  None of us have made any secret of the fact that we have the same absence of respect for islam as we have for christianity.  Of course, at the moment, we're babbling away in relative obscurity.  What might happen if our program becomes well known nationally and internationally? 

Given this, here's what I worry about.  I have no problem if I start receiving death threats directed at me.  I'm willing to die for the cause of Freedom and Liberty for All that we espouse on American Heathen.  But what if our program gets popular enough to draw the attention of the fanatics (christian and muslim fanatics are hard to tell apart!) and in protest they blow up a building and innocent people become casualties.  I would not at all feel good about such an outcome.  

However, the issue comes down to this:  if I believe in Freedom and Liberty for All, am I willing to silence myself voluntarily owing to the actions/reactions of fanatics about my words?  Do I muzzle myself even in the face of a possibility of a violent reaction?  No matter how awful it would be for people to become victims through a reaction to my words, my commitment to this cause is no less deep than the commitment of the fanatics to theirs.  Does that make me a fanatic?  I think not.  Although I'm willing to die for my beliefs, I'm not willing to kill or injure anyone (except in self-defense) for any cause.  No cause, however otherwise noble, is worth supporting if it advocates or condones the use of violence on innocents to further its goals.  If anyone is so offended by what I say that they're moved to violence, they should have to courage to attack me directly, not visit their vengeance on innocent people.  If they do so, however, it will not silence me!

If we surrender our freedoms, especially the freedom of speech, in order to avoid "offending" fanatic muslims (or fanatic christians) who then express themselves via violence, then we're simply allowing ourselves to be intimidated by weaklings, who have no other means of achieving their ends but by terror visited on innocents.  They are consummate cowards!  I spit on them and their causes!!  We will not give up our freedoms willingly in the face of terrorism.  The terrorists will have succeeded if we do so!!

For your convenience, here are links to Part 2 and Part 1  

Believers Arguing on Behalf of Their Beliefs

After years of struggling with something, it's nice to be able to come to a new understanding.  I suppose some of my readers may dispute the validity of my new thoughts.  If so, I hope they will offer comments here.

For a long time, I've wondered, 'What's the point of trying to rationalize religious beliefs?'  My understanding of christianity (i.e., that resulting from my upbringing) is that one should accept the existence and divinity of Jesus purely on faith - in his words from Mark 10:16 - "Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it."  This classic case of biblical ambiguity leaves open the definition of receiving something "like a child".  Just what exactly does that phrase mean?  Various interpretations exist, but the obvious one is that it means to accept something entirely without evidence, trusting in and accepting the "gift" without any questions as to its validity.  A child-like trust in the teachings of leaders is one that accepts things as given.  Questions are impertinent and out of place.

If this is a valid interpretation, then it follows that believers are supposed to accept Jesus as their "Lord and Savior" without question and without evidence.  If that's what someone chooses to do, then I'm fine with that.  It's their choice and their life.

Where I have a problem is when christians attempt to use logic and, yes, even evidence to validate their faith.  This has always seemed pointless to me - if you accept it on faith, why seek to make something irrational seem to be rational?  I observe that all humans in my experience have both rational and irrational aspects, including yours truly.  It's not an insult to label a belief as irrational - it simply says that logic and evidence have little or nothing to do with it.  If a christian has faith, then s/he has faith and that's that - end of discussion.  There's no need for, or point to, trying to create some sort of house of cards to justify that faith to someone else, if you truly have that child-like faith.

Such faith has no need for explanation.  In fact, explanations are antithetical to religious faith.  Of course, it's well known that the blind obedience associated with religious faith leads people to commit monstrous acts on behalf of their chosen belief system.  But perhaps most importantly in the context of this blog, it represents a source of cognitive dissonance in the mind of any reasonably rational person.  Religious faith inevitably clashes with logic and the rule of evidence.  In most aspects of a believer's life, they accept the rule of logic and the use of evidence.  Is such an acceptance based on faith, just like religious belief?  No, not all all.  It's a faith that's based entirely on evidence and empirical observations.  Hence, the word "faith" has two diametrically opposed meanings - I talked about that here.

It now seems clear to me that attempts at rationalizing religious faith (e.g., those of C.S. Lewis) are simply a manifestation of cognitive dissonance.  Despite claims of childlike faith, believers may seek to convince others of (i.e., to try to justify) the rationality of believing in a divine lord.  They sense that an unbeliever isn't likely to be convinced by an irrational argument.  They implicitly understand the weakness of their position in a logical discussion.

Just whom is it they're really trying to convince?  Most such attempts I've seen are pretty transparently flawed in their logic and completely devoid of any credible evidence.  Such rationalizations are not the province of true fundamentalists, who've accepted such things as the creation myth, the age of the Earth as less than 10 thousand years, the evil of homosexuality, the subservience of women, and so on.  No, the ones who seek to rationalize their irrational faith are those otherwise rational people who accept the validity of science and logic, but seek to put some sort of handwaving "spin" on the biblical passages that clearly are not consistent with our modern understanding of the world based on rationality.  Perhaps they seek to interpret biblical myths as reflecting the late Bronze Age absence of science-based understanding.  Perhaps they choose to see unsettling biblical passages as metaphors, or representing the concepts of a time 2000+ years ago that are no longer relevant.

If someone grasps the irrationality of religious faith, why not let it go with that?  Seeking to rationalize religious faith seems to be the direct consequence of - dare I say it? - doubts lurking in the minds of such believers (likely at an unconscious level).  It generates a clash between the rational and the irrational in their brains, and their rationalizations may be at least as much directed at themselves as they are to others around them.

Keep trying, and perhaps you can convince yourself - but it doesn't convince me.  I think I now understand why you hope to construct a logical argument for your religious belief.  The very effort to do so undermines your credibility as a believer - it seems faith isn't enough for you, after all! 

Hopefully, for the last time ... but likely not!

Recent e-discussions have brought this issue to a head for me.  Hopefully, I can pump this out and will only have to refer to it in the future, when it happens again, as it surely will.  As time passes, I get more and more tired of people responding to my comments with ... "You're assuming all of XX believe in YY!!" Just for the record:  I'm not making any such assumption, and never have!! 

I've listened to many, many conservatives, both within the circle of my acquaintances and via public media.  The number of times in the past year or so I've heard the aforementioned complaint from individual conservatives who apparently are upset by my criticisms of "conservatives" has grown commensurately with the stridency of the current political campaign.  Again, let me be perfectly clear:  I'm more than casually aware that conservatives (or "right-wingers," or republicans, or christians, or whatever) don't all believe in the same things.  If you choose voluntarily to call yourself a conservative (or whatever), you're implicitly endorsing other conservatives, whether you intend to do so or not.  If you disagree with another conservative about something, then you need to make that difference known explicitly. You need to distance yourself from that viewpoint.  More importantly, if you believe that you don't fit in a particular shoe, I'm not really making you wear it.  If the shoe don't fit, I must acquit!!  Must I say that every time I say something about conservatives?

Many people label me a liberal, but I don't wear that label voluntarily and so I feel quite free to disagree with something endorsed by someone willingly wearing the liberal label.  I don't like wearing labels precisely because I want that freedom.  Although my opinions on things are often driven by viewpoints that many would call liberal, I still refuse to accept your labeling of me.  If I feel that way, then perhaps those giving vent to this particular complaint should understand with complete clarity that I'm perfectly willing to afford you the same privilege.  But if you wear some label willingly, then you may be endorsing implicitly viewpoints with which you disagree, so be careful!  By the way, the one label I voluntarily wear (apart from my professional life) is atheist - the good part about that it that it says absolutely nothing about my beliefs - it only refers to my disbelief in a diety.  Anything else said by some other atheist is not necessarily something I endorse, implicitly or explicitly.

Anyone who knows me and has bothered to listen to me and/or read what I've written should know with absolute certainty that I'm more than willing to say that specific individuals may not fit a certain generalization.  Why do so many people immediately assume that I intend my comments to apply to everyone who willingly wears label XX?  I have no clue, but I suspect it's related to the implicit nature of their endorsement of certain viewpoints common in their XX crowd.  Perhaps my question should be about why they choose to accept that label if they're cherry-picking within the set of common XX beliefs.  If you're XX but you disavow any support for their viewpoints V27, V46, and V115, then do you really want to identify with the XX crowd?  How important to you are these differences?  If they're not important to you, then for all intents and purposes, you're mostly an XX "fundamentalist" and I can lump you in with the rest.  If you feel strongly enough about your differences with the XXers about your differences with them, you might want to consider avoiding the problem by not accepting the XX label, leaving you free (like me) to express yourself without the added "baggage" of the XX label.  If you don't accept the label, then you automatically are excluded from any generalizations I might make about XXers.  You have no reason to be offended, because I'm obviously not talking about you!

Another related concept is the default assumption.  When you wear label XX, you will find yourself being confronted with the whole panoply of common XX beliefs.  If I'm critical of President O'Bama, then I must be in favor of Mitt Romney!  If I'm in favor of welfare for the poor, I must be a socialist!  If I'm in favor of gun control, then I must want the government to seize everyone's guns!  This is the classic mindset that says "If you don't agree with me, then you must be directly opposed to me!"  You might refer to this as bipolar thinking - in this mindset, there are only two possible positions on anything, so any disagreement signals a total confrontational opposition.  No doubt this one will continue to crop up in response to my e-postings and comments.  Those incapable of thinking beyond polar opposites has little or no skill at critical thinking.

Infinite Capabilities vs. Free Will

Free will has been the topic of many conversations with believers and nonbelievers I've had in the past.  For the purposes of this blog, I'm going to ignore the secular questions regarding the very existence of free will raised by Sam Harris in his book on the topic.  Rather, I want to concentrate here on the notions of free will in a religious context.  In some earlier writings on the topic, I said:

If the presumed all-knowing (omniscient) being created me, then s/he knows what my choices will be throughout my life, from beginning to end. Thus, it's logically inescapable that s/he created me specifically to make those choices -- and to suffer the consequences for them. Where's free will in that? Sorry, but free will is out of the logical window of plausibility when the creator is omniscient and omnipotent. 

I've had believers who have tried to "explain" free will to me in the following way:  They say that their infinitely capable deity wants me to accept him of my own free will, rather than having created me to believe in him from the very moment of conception.  This deity doesn't want to be worshiped by programmed robots, they say.

Unfortunately, this sort of reasoning fails to explain why a being capable of creating an entire universe from nothing even needs to be worshiped.  That's a crucial issue, isn't it?  Do we demand that amoebae sing songs of praise to us?  Should the ants be building churches to glorify us?  If we made robots in our own image, would we program them to kneel in our presence?  We love our pets because they give us an unqualified form of affection, but I don't believe that affection would fit the definition of "worship" in a religious sense - their interactions with other creatures (including humans) are the result of evolutionary programming for survival.  What sort of colossal vanity is required for an infinite being to require the worship of his puny finite creations?  Sounds more like a "cult of personality" dictator (Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, etc.) to me!

I suppose, superficially, this argument does seem to offer a "sort of" escape hatch rationalization for why we're required to make our own personal choices to accept the deity.  It fails completely to explain the inescapable logic quoted above, nevertheless.  But allow me to try again, coming at this from the reverse direction.  Suppose for the moment that this hypothetical deity does indeed want me to make my own choice to accept him (or not).  I can only speculate on why this supreme being has forced this choice on me.  Perhaps it's indeed because he understands that the worship of someone  forced to worship means absolutely nothing.  I know that most sane humans (excluding "cult of personality" dictators, for instance) understand that forced praise means no praise at all.  This seems to be a very human understanding, not something necessarily divine.

If the deity knows what my choice is going to be (he's supposed to be omniscient, of course), then since he created me, he knew from the very instant he chose to create me that I would choose not to believe in him, dooming me to eternal torment (or whatever).  Is it infinitely benevolent to make me suffer for what amounts to a flaw in his creation (i.e., me and my choice to be an atheist)?  If he doesn't know what my choice will be, then he can't be omniscient.  If he wants me to choose to believe in him but he can't make me do it (for whatever reason), then he can't be omnipotent. 

The religious notion of free will is logically incompatible with a deity's infinite capabilities.  You can either believe the deity has infinite capabilities, in which case free will has to be abandoned - or you can have free will, in which case the capabilities of the deity are necessarily finite.  

As I mentioned in my earlier writings, a belief in infinite anything creates all sorts of logical issues for believers.  Infinity might mean one thing to ignorant barbarians in the late Bronze Age, but our modern understanding of the concept of infinity (as in mathematics) makes us realize that an infinitely capable being is surely nothing more than an abstraction - a myth created by humans to serve our own purposes.  If we want to hang on to the notion of free will, the assumed infinite capabilities of the being supposedly responsible for "creating" us must be discarded in favor of merely finite capabilities.

Nominating Conventions as Propaganda

Anyone who could endure watching the now-completed Republican National Convention must now realize that these conventions (yes, I'm including the soon-to-begin Democratic National Convention) are nothing more than exercises in propaganda.  Whatever vestiges might have remained in terms of political drama at such conventions in the past have now been eradicated by the rise in significance of the primaries.  By the time of the conventions, the nomination of the party's candidate for the Presidency has been sewn up, and this is now a huge, pointless "celebration" to reward the political party faithful and to reinforce whatever ideas the political party wishes to emphasize down the home stretch of a campaign that by now has been going on for many long months.

For those who support that political party above all else, this is a time to reinforce their reasons for supporting that party.  Presumably, no matter what stand a political party takes on some issue, that stand will upset some members of that party.  But anyone upset about one issue or another will be asked to put their "petty issues" aside and vote for that party with which they're affiliated.  "You might get a candidate next time who will be more of your liking, but this time, we have to go forward with the one selected during the primaries."  If someone finds themselves upset about supporting their party's candidate, they can vote for the other party's candidate, of course.  But most won't.  Many will vote a straight party ticket - party loyalists, if you will.  "My party, right or wrong!"

From where I sit, such a position is clearly that of someone who chooses not to think for her/himself.  In the 45+ years I've been eligible to vote in national elections, I can't think of a single time when I was in complete agreement with every element of either party's platform.  [By the way, the platforms presented by the parties often clash with what the politicians actually do after they're elected!]  So is the national convention a time when I look forward to being convinced that the Republican or Democrat candidate is the one for whom I should cast my vote?  Am I swept away with emotional enthusiasm as the inspirational music plays and the red, white, and blue balloons fall about the party's nominee?  Are all my doubts and concerns erased when the party's nominee is introduced as "the next President of the United States!" (which will only be true for one of them, of course) to the wild cheers of the party faithful?  Nope.  Not at all.

The whole process is a charade, a propaganda trick, an expensive stage drama managed by the party's national committee.  I find it insulting that anyone would use such a transparent process to capture my vote for the hack they've nominated.  The national conventions are not at all about using reason and empirical evidence to choose among competing ideas.  They don't allow any discussion of diverse viewpoints about the various issues the parties choose to emphasize, while simultaneously doing their best to ignore other issues that might prove troublesome to that party's chances for election victory.  The goals include castigation of the opposing party's candidate - right up to the point of demonizing him/her.  They also include discrediting the opposing party as a whole - right up to the point of demonizing that party - thereby demonizing the people who vote for that party.  To say this is divisive would be a huge understatement.  Using various forms of falsehoods is entirely acceptable in propaganda, so anything goes, including outright lies, distortions, labeling, and pure fabrications.  This process occurs on both Democrat and Republican sides, although it's pretty evident that the Republican party mastered these tactics much sooner and they continue to employ them more effectively than do the Democrats.

It's well-known that logic and evidence (i.e., rational arguments) are completely ineffective in changing anyone's stance on some issue if their stance is emotional (i.e., irrational) to the point of "My party, right or wrong!"  Rational debate is pointless when dealing with an irrational viewpoint - and the national conventions clearly are aimed at the emotions, not the rational mind.  Unfortunately, my brain struggles with trying to figure out what irrational argument I might find acceptable to change someone's irrational views.  I can't find any acceptable ones.

All's fair in the propaganda wars, so I decline to waste my time even listening to the hogwash spewed out at the national nominating conventions.  I prefer critical thinking and arriving at firm conclusions only after a thorough consideration of all the evidence I can find.  Yes, I prefer one party to the other - I believe you can guess which - but I detest both parties and refuse to support anyone who would stoop to such tactics to win an election.

Rush Limbaugh Sinks to a New Low

Just today, Rush Limbaugh's blog has sunk to a new low!  In this blog, he insinuates (without saying it in so many words, of course) that the forecasts of the tropical storm, Isaac, were manipulated by the National Hurricane Center (NHC, a part of the National Weather Service - NWS) to cause problems for the Republican nominating convention about to take place in Tampa, FL.  He keeps insisting that he's not claiming it was a conspiracy - so often does he make this denial, it begins to appear that he "doth protest too much!"  Nudge-nudge.  Wink-wink.

What is fascinating about this is that on the whole, the NWS is a predominantly conservative bunch of folks.  The very notion that they would deliberately mislead the public in order to cause problems to the Republicans is so preposterous that it doesn't deserve any serious attention!  Except ... if no one with any real credibility as a hurricane forecaster steps up and challenges these ludicrous implications, the default assumption is that the NHC meteorologists can't challenge them!

What follows is entirely my personal opinion ...

Rush Limbaugh is an ignorant political hack.  He knows nothing about meteorology, about science, about critical thinking.  The only thing he does, besides oxycontin and hydrocodone, is write inflammatory bullshit that has little or no substance to it.  He has delusions of being a pundit, but he's built his empire by playing up to the conservative masses, spouting ideas they want to hear in various public media.  He feeds the conservative paranoia, maintaining their fear of external threats so they don't dwell on how they are voting against their own self-interests.  In the process, he's become wealthy and even gotten awards (!!).  But he keeps making really stupid statements - after doing so recently, he was forced out of his TV show after one gaffe in early 2012 that caused all his advertisers to flee, which in turn resulted in his firing.

Of course, his rabid, slack-jawed supporters hang on his every word and excuse every bit of nonsense and vituperative junk he utters.  In fact, his most rabid supporters are the very folks toward whom Rush seeks to aim his invective and innuendos.   This is the lowest common denominator amongst the conservative crowd, who see communist conspiracies everywhere, as well as cheer Rush when he makes unprovoked attacks on black Americans, gays, atheists, and women.

This time, Rush has insulted an organization of folks who daily do their best to provide us with useful weather information.  He's implied they've conspired with our President to cause harm to the Republican cause.  If there had been even a hint of that whispered in the halls of the NWS, there would have been a storm, all right:  a storm of angry protest from NWS employees at the very idea of such a conspiracy.  It's one thing for Rush to aim his popguns at politicians - no one really likes politicians anymore.  But it's quite a different thing for Rush to impugn the integrity of the staff of the NHC.  No one knows better than the NWS forecasters that it's a major challenge to get the forecasts as accurate as possible.  Rush wants to sweep all that integrity, all that science, all that hard work into the trash, because he sees a conspiracy against the conservatives!

It makes me wonder what Rush's supporters within the NWS think about him, now - are they making excuses for his attack on their integrity?  Or are they rethinking that support in light of this insult aimed at them?

Rush doesn't know anything about how computer model forecasts can shift.  Can he honestly say he's been tracking those computer model forecasts since 1997?  Does he even have a clue about the volatility of computer model forecasts?  Of course not!  Rush Limbaugh is an overinflated, narcissistic, pathetic poltroon!  Anyone who would listen to this miserable pretender to punditry deserves precisely what they get ... a pile of crap.

The True Nature of the Anti-Abortion Campaign

I've been struggling with the issue of abortion for a long time.  I don't believe it to be the simple, black-and-white issue that many seem to believe it is.  For a long time, I've been bothered by the idea of snuffing out a living being for the sake of the 'convenience' of the mother.  I understand that part - I really do!  I don't care for the idea of abortion as a relatively simple escape hatch for being careless about contraception.  In this day and age, there are many simple and effective ways to prevent unwanted pregnancy, and responsible men and women should be allowed to use those effective means to avoid unwanted pregnancy.

But - at the same time - I understand that careless people are out there, and some of the careless women get pregnant and are unwilling or unable to accept the responsibility for the potential child in their womb.  They'll seek abortions by whatever means, safe or unsafe.  And of course, thousands of women die every year as a result of unsafe abortions.  Does being 'pro-life' exclude any concern for the lives of those women?  Is their unborn potential child more important?  How does that arithmetic work to be a life-positive outcome?  Isn't the evident lack of concern for these women really a thinly-veiled moral judgment of their participation in sex, perhaps outside of marriage?

With time, I'm finally coming to see the real source of all the 'pro-life' groups' power and pervasiveness: religion.  You don't have to be religious to be against abortion, but I'm pretty confident that a substantial majority of the folks opposed to the right of women to control their own reproductive system are religious and that's driving their support of the anti-abortion movement.

What evidence is there to support this notion?  The arguments being offered by the anti-abortion movement have the strong stench of black-and-white religious morality.  They also include scientifically-absurd notions like the recent comments by Rep. Todd Akins (which are not exclusively his!) about "legitimate rape" never resulting in pregnancy - such nonsensical and manifestly untrue beliefs are the hallmarks of a religious movement.  Several different tactics involving the re-branding of rape have been used to try to limit the opportunities for raped women to abort pregnancies resulting from rape.  In fact, there are efforts underway to outlaw all abortions, including those pregnancies that threaten the life of the mother, those resulting from rape, and those resulting from incest.  The effort to make in vitro fertilization and other fertility enhancements virtually impossible under proposed new laws is based on the same irrational arguments made on behalf of anti-abortion laws: the protection of fertilized eggs at all costs!  The blocking of federal support for stem cell research that could save many lives and heal many ailments has been similarly based on anti-abortion-related arguments.

Extremist christians have embarked on a crusade in the USA to identify 'personhood' as beginning at the moment of conception.  Any rational person must see that a fertilized egg only becomes a person when it has the capacity to survive outside of its mother's body.  Prior to that, the fertilized egg is only a potential person, and many don't survive owing to failures to implant in the uterus, spontaneous abortions, etc.  Is the mother a murderer (or guilty of involuntary manslaughter) because she has a miscarriage?  This crusade to transform fertilized eggs into sacrosanct living persons is obviously a religion-motivated campaign.  They shrewdly call themselves 'pro-life' but they seem not to give a damn about that same fertilized egg once it's born!  Many of them oppose welfare for single parents or poor families struggling to support those children, once they're born.  Many of them oppose support for education of those same fertilized eggs - education that might convert children from disadvantaged single parents into productive members of society.  Many favor the death penalty when those same fertilized eggs reach adulthood and lash out in violent acts.  Heaven forbid that fertilized egg turns into an LGBT person, at which point some 'pro-lifers' feel that they deserve to die!

They're not so pro-life as they want to claim, and they're obviously motivated by the sort of religious misogyny that characterizes islamic fundamentalists like the Taliban.  Women should stay at home and bear children, not be paid equally for their work, not be promoted to the highest professional levels, not be encouraged to pursue math and science.  If they're raped, it's because they were asking for it!  Some would even seek to have the right to vote taken from women!  These extremists want to roll back the clock and do away with all the progress in women's rights over the past 200 years.

From where I now sit, the anti-abortion movement is basically an effort to legislate religious morality - an unconstitutional intrusion of religion into our secular government.  At the same time as this anti-abortion crusade is underway, the religious extremists behind this movement also want to ban virtually all forms of contraception!  The irrationality of that can only be embraced by people already accustomed to accommodation of contractions:   religious extremists!

Behind it all is the poisonous influence religion has on perfectly natural human sexuality. The demonization of sexuality in all its forms is simply a means of controlling people.  But that's another subject, perhaps to be considered here in the future.

The Atheist 'Community'?

It's only in the last few years that I've found a bunch of atheist groups on the Web, complete with Facebook pages and so on.  I guess I just wasn't looking for them.  My first reaction to this discovery was a sense of curiosity, because I'd been pretty much content with maintaining a relatively low profile regarding my own lack of belief in a deity.  I wasn't hiding my lack of belief, but I wasn't advertising it, either.  I became interested to learn what others who shared my atheism thought about various things.  Looking back, I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised about what I discovered about the atheist 'community' - atheists are about as far from being a community as it's possible to be!

To have arrived at atheism, it seems pretty evident that you have to be (or become) a freethinker - someone unwilling to put doctrinaire boundaries around where your thoughts lead you.  Thinking for yourself has to be a habit for you to be an atheist.  The only thing atheists necessarily have in common is their shared lack of belief in a deity.  When you look at the group of atheists as a whole, the things we do believe in are all over the political, social, and personal spectrum.  To convince yourself of this, spend some time lurking in an atheist discussion forum.  The minute anyone puts out some sort of statement of belief (as opposed to a statement of unbelief), it's almost inevitable that someone is going to pop up and dispute that statement in some way or another.  The arguments are incessant, with some people lining up on one side of the discussion, even as others are vociferous proponents of the other side.  And there may be many who choose to advocate a position in between the polar opposites of the argument.

Although I find most of these bickerings to be boring and concerned with trivia or things I consider to be outright nonsense, I've come to cherish this aspect of being an atheist.  Atheism has no sacred authorities (although many atheists have high regard for this or that prominent atheist - like Richard Dawkins or the late Christopher Hitchens), it has no sacred scriptures (although there are books out there that many atheists find inspirational - like Al Stefanelli's Free Thoughts), it has no doctrine, no listings of core beliefs to be recited, no churches, no tax exemption, no pilgrimages, no ordained priesthood, no seminaries, no hymns or chants, no liturgy, no dogma, no ... well, you get the idea.  Atheism allows you to come to your own conclusions about anything, by whatever process you choose.  There's no ultimate authority in atheism to decide the issue in a clash of ideas.

Nevertheless, there are certain characteristics that seem to be fairly widespread amongst atheists:  we usually prefer the kind of freedom of thought and expression exemplified so well by the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights, we mostly hold discrimination against any group of people in contempt, we tend to respect the sciences as the apex of successful rational thinking, and so on.  Politically, we often are labeled "liberals" without regard to our actual political beliefs.  Socially, we often are outcasts, despised by many believers, which may include friends and even family members who have forsaken us when we declared our atheism openly.  But none of these characteristics are universal in the atheist 'community'.  There may be an "average atheist set of beliefs" but most atheists would disavow one or more elements within this average set of beliefs.  It's a movement without constraints on your opinion about anything!

It's natural to suppose we would seek the company of other atheists as a shelter from the believer-dominated society all around us.  But whenever we come together (physically or electronically), it seems that our shared lack of belief is not enough to unite us for long!  When we learn what other atheists believe, it's our habit to challenge those beliefs that we don't share.  And those arguments frequently turn into invective and insults - we're humans, after all, with human failings.  Of late, there has been a big argument within our atheist 'community' wherein some women feel that the atheists around them are behaving like bullies or worse toward them, simply because they're women.  I can't say the extent to which those perceptions are accurate, but it's logically possible that the set of all atheists would include some people who are insensitive to things that women might find to be offensive.  Further, it's not possible for me to dispute a perception - it necessarily is whatever it is - but if the perception has a factual basis, it likely isn't entirely representative of all atheists, or even all the atheists in a particular group.  This apparent 'schism' in our 'community' is taking some atheists down a path that incorporates adding a set of core 'beliefs' to atheism, referring to the 'new atheism' as Atheism+ ... that is, atheism plus a set of shared beliefs (with the added implication that this is a positive thing to do).  I refer to this as an apparent schism because our community is not (and never has been) at all unified about virtually anything - one more crack in an already thoroughly fractured group isn't particularly meaningful!

I suspect this effort to graft beliefs onto atheism will end in failure, because once you have a set of beliefs, you've added dogma to a community of people very much prone to arguing and bickering about damned near everything.  The new movement will fractionate just as religions inevitably shatter into multiple denominations because of clashes about doctrine/dogma.  We atheists struggle as a 'movement' because of our seemingly incessant need for disagreement among ourselves.  This penchant for disagreement saddens me somewhat, because it turns friends into enemies and cripples our ability to take action to further causes in which we believe.  Ultimately, I have to accept that freethinkers are very much prone to being argumentative loners.

In my life, I've tried to avoid being a 'joiner' - for the most part, I prefer not to identify myself with this group or that because virtually all of them contain elements with which I disagree.  I don't like to be bound by doctrine I didn't create myself and I prefer to feel free to say what I think, which often includes critical comments.  I'm not particularly worried about hurting someone's feelings with my criticism if they're adults and capable of independent thought - I'm no fan of being PC!  I'm an atheist, and I'm not generally willing to let counter-arguments offend me, although at some point I might get bored with them.

A Holy Grail for Science?

I've mentioned the issue of my frustration with public media several times over the years.  I wrote a whole essay about my experiences with TV science "documentary" producers, for instance.  The short version of all that is I've learned that it's just not possible to convey any meaningful message about my science in a 5-second soundbite.  In some scientific organizations, their PR folks actually try to 'coach' their scientists how to interact with reporters and show producers to try to get their science message across.  But this 'holy grail', like its namesake, is a myth!  There's no way to communicate meaningful scientific content in a soundbite!!

Why am I dredging up this topic once again?  Isn't that horse already dead?  Recently, a paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies director, Dr. James Hansen and his collaborators (abbreviated Hansen et al.).  You can download a copy of the paper free from this site.  In their paper, the authors make a case that the impact of global warming is clearly being reflected by an increased frequency of record heat in both space and time.  There was a press conference called to announce the contents of this new publication, which has triggered a firestorm of articles on the subject - here is one example.

Within the atmospheric science community, some dismay over this media brouhaha has been expressed in the circles I inhabit as a professional.  One particularly strident dispute of Hansen et al. was written by University of Washington Atmospheric Science Prof. Cliff Mass and posted on his blog, here.  In his blog, Prof. Mass disputes the validity of the science in the paper by Hansen et al., and is critical of the way in which the press conference turned the paper's results into a media 'event'.

Traditionally, criticism in science is presented to the "target" in advance of publication of the critical remarks, allowing the author(s) an opportunity to respond.  Unlike critical comments in a journal, Hansen et al. were not given such an opportunity before Prof. Mass's blog was posted.

It's my contention that science of any sort should not be carried out in the public media, including Internet blogs and forums, as well as TV and the print media.  Obviously, opinions about this stance vary, so let me try to explain in some detail why I feel this way about things.

All one needs to do is to pay attention to the present and past arguments about global warming in the public media to see for yourself that the discourse has been heated (pun intended) and typically nasty.  The science has been politicized (mostly by the climate change deniers but unfortunately, not completely) for reasons of their own.  Public news reporting always seeks the sensational, trying to goad the participants in a controversy into saying intemperate things, including ad hominem attacks on their opponents.  The attack grenades are lobbed back and forth in separate interviews or on opposing blog pages - the opponents generally engage in talking past one another.  How is the viewer of all this carnage supposed to learn about science from this invective-laden point-counterpoint (rather reminiscent of the old Saturday Nite Live skit)?  Most public media viewers are not scientists, but some are hoping to get some useful information by which they might draw personal conclusions.  In my opinion, not only is scientific discourse carried out in the public media unproductive in the sense of resolving issues within the science, but it does the public a huge disservice by misrepresenting how science really works and by failing to clarify the substantive issues for the layperson.

Not only is it impossible to convey scientific substance in a soundbite, but it's also unlikely that real clarification will be achieved even in an unreviewed blog of several pages.  Many blogs are simply polemics for the simple reason that without review, what we get are the biases of the blog writer.  Anyone who claims to be unbiased is, of course, either self-deceived or deceitful.  I certainly make no such claim!!  If you like, you can consider this blog a polemic ...

The appropriate place for scientific disputes to be carried out is within the pages of refereed journals and at scientific conferences.  One need not 'dumb down' the technical content of a scientific dispute in these traditional science venues - it's presumed that the disputants are capable of understanding the technical material and can focus on presenting their evidence and justifying their interpretations thereof.  In the ideal world, everyone has a chance to present their content and the validity of any published content has been vetted by this peer review process.  Of course, the reality of science can fall rather short of this ideal.  People who feel they have been muzzled by peer review may choose to present their material via the public media rather than refereed journals (where they can't pass peer review), claiming they've been victimized by the "brahmins" who support the consensus.  Such an accusation may not be entirely without basis, unfortunately.  But good science generally wins out in the end, even if individual scientists may not live to see it.

I doubt that dumping controversial ideas into the media, such as what we've seen with the whole issue of global warming, has done atmospheric science much good.  In fact, I believe it's done much more harm that good for the science.  And it's not serving the public well, either.  Scientific ignorance is expanding in this nation, it seems, and having an explosion of vitriolic rants in the public media isn't doing anything to help the nation resolve the important issues we all confront, such as how to deal with global warming. 

A scientific argument is often rooted in technical issues far beyond the layperson's ability to absorb in a public media presentation.  Moreover, scientific arguments are complicated by all sorts of nonlinear connections among a myriad of processes interacting to produce the observed results.  It can be very challenging to sort all that out even if one has been educated to the doctoral level and had many years of experience working on some topic.  With education and experience, scientists develop a sense of how much confidence they can have in their findings, and it typically is not absolute, 100% confidence.  Hence, scientists always want to convey qualifications - caveats about how to intepret their results - but to lay viewers, this sounds a lot like hedging or is incomprehensible and, therefore, boring.  What hope is there to convey the sort of nuanced scientific understanding so common among scientists and so rare in the public?

Assuming the science is done in an appropriate venue, the next challenge of presenting the results to the public stares us all in the face.  I wish I had a holy grail - a solution to that problem.  Unfortunately, I'm not that smart.  It's a separate issue, and one I prefer to defer for now, simply because I can't offer any credible solution.

Trolling, trolling, trolling ..

I read the blog of Sam Harris fairly often, and just stumbled on this little piece regarding how his situation has evolved during his growing notoriety.  Obviously, Sam Harris has become something of a celebrity - seen as famous in certain circles and infamous in different circles.  Discovery of this piece by Sam Harris comes on the heels of a discussion we at American Heathen had off-air, about blogging.  Al Stefanelli in particular mentioned that on his blogs, he has little time to respond to all the comments, and simply allows all comments to post unmoderated.  He says that his followers usually challenge his detractors so well he feels no obligation to join in the "conversation".  On the other hand, RJ Evans and I run moderated blogs, where we decide whether or not to publish comments submitted to the blog.  Naturally, there are some differences in the way we moderate our blogs, but mostly we agree on the basic approach - we're not afraid to publish comments critical of what we have said, but are unwilling to let stupid trolls and irrational babble through.

This conversation and Sam's blog got me to thinking about what might happen in the future.  I have no illusions of ever achieving (or even seeking) the public exposure that Sam Harris gets.  Based on his blog, that would become a nightmare for me and I probably would retreat into a dark corner somewhere and suck my thumb in dismay over what I had brought upon myself.  I like the idea of being able to speak my mind on topics and to share those thoughts in hopes of promoting meaningful, civil discussion on those topics.  That's all I hope to achieve - I'm not so naive as to believe that my words can change the world, or even change someone's mind about a topic.

The Internet being what it is, unfortunately, if the circle of those interested in my blog were to grow to dizzying new heights, there's little doubt that it would attract a plethora of "keyboard warriors" and trolls seeking to bash me for reasons having little to do with the topics on my blog.  I've already had a small number of such.  Al Stefanelli gets a substantial number, including people inclined toward off-point invective, vitriolic rants, and even death threats!  RJ Evans has revealed some scary encounters with trolls.  To date, I'm still awaiting my first death threat.  In some strange way, I see that as some sort of badge of honor - but I also see it as a sign that this blog might be starting to get out of hand.  I can't even imagine what Sam Harris has to put up with, although his essay cited above certainly paints a bleak picture.  Hence, this blog ...

How to respond to criticism is always a difficult thing - do I go through the time and trouble to write a detailed, point-by-point response, or do I blow it off, saying it's counter-productive to "feed the trolls"?  In my professional life, I'm obligated to respond point-by-point to criticism and colleagues can judge for themselves the relative merits of the arguments presented by my interlocutor(s) and me.  But this blog is an entirely different story.  For the time being, I'll continue to moderate the comments I receive in the way I've been doing.  I insist on full real names tied to any comment - no anonymous comments or posted under a partial name or pseudonym.  If you aren't willing to own your comments, I have no wish to recognize them or respond in any way other than to delete them.  If the discussion becomes uncivil or 'goes ballistic' in a way unsatisfactory to me, it's terminated immediately.  The volume of comments I'm getting is relatively easy to manage - I trust my fame/infamy will not grow rapidly out of my ability to do so.  But if I find I can't handle the volume, then I'll probably disallow comments, as Sam Harris does.  I decline to provide a platform for trolls to pour out their bullshit!   

Labels - bigotry in disguise?

Recently an Internet friend of mine was being pressed by someone on Facebook to accept the label "atheist" because so many of her posts seemed to be concordant with atheism.  But she demurred, saying she doesn't want that label precisely because it's commonly associated with some things with which she doesn't agree.  Her perception is that people automatically will assume she believes in X or Y because she's in that category.

I run into a similar problem frequently.  If I say something critical of Mitt Romney, it's automatically assumed I'm a fan of Barack Obama.  If I say something favorable about providing help to disadvantaged people, then it's assumed that I match precisely some presumed profile tied to being a "liberal".  If I dislike Faux (Fox) News, it's evident I must watch MSNBC. 

Some people are very familiar with these "default assumptions" - it's commonly assumed that when talking about a medical doctor in casual conversation in the USA, that doctor is male, not female.  It's often assumed that, when encountering a young, black male in some run-down part of a city, he's in a criminal gang, uses cocaine, and likes hip-hop music.  Mexicans are all dirt-poor, ignorant, lazy, and probably in the USA illegally.  Everyone on welfare is a homeless, jobless crack addict with 15 kids all being supported by welfare.  Everyone living in a mobile home is a redneck, stupid white trash.  These are all stereotypes that are demonstrably false, and obviously connected to prejudice - bigotry, that is.

To be sure, examples that fit these stereotypes can be found.  But the proof is all around us that individuals who break those stereotypes also can be found, and they're not necessarily in the minority.  Hence, the prejudice that leads to bigotry is based in a lie.  Pure and simple.  Let me repeat that - based in a lie!  Not everyone that fits in that "category" is the same!!  Prejudice about people is not a viable position.

Frankly, I find default assumptions being made all the time, about me and about people I know.  I dislike and resent those assumptions even more when associated with friends of mine or family than when directed at me.  For the most part, I can shrug off such things - they say more about the person labeling me than about me.  There are times, of course, when such labels are used to discriminate against people, typically in a covert way.  If you speak openly against policies in the company for which you work, you can be labeled a "troublemaker" and blocked from favorable personnel actions or even discharged.  If you wear your hair in a mohawk, you must be some sort of crazed "punk" that can't possibly be an asset to the business.  And so on and on.

We humans seem strongly inclined to push everyone around us into some category or another, concluding they must think and behave in a certain way according to our interpretation of the label we want to pin on them.  Doing so certainly removes the obligation for us to think and learn about who the people really are.  If we've assigned them a label we consider negative, then we can push them out of our lives to whatever extent possible by circumstances.  If we can't push them away physically, we can shut them out personally and socially.

Assigning labels to people is nothing more (or less) than prejudice/bigotry.  I'm not saying that behind every dude wearing a scruffy beard, riding a Harley, wearing a motorcycle jacket, and covered in tatoos is actually a charity-supporting nuclear physicist.  But ought we not reserve our judgments (based only on their appearance) until we know them reasonably well?  Most of the people I call friends have some very different attitudes about some things that matter to me - but I value their friendship nevertheless.  The fact that we disagree on a topic is far less important than the enjoyment I derive from being in their company.  It's not necessary to me that everyone I know has to agree with me on everything!  If we can have a conversation about those issues that divide us, and that conversation doesn't turn into anger and name-calling, then perhaps I can learn a thing or two from their viewpoint (and/or vice-versa).  It's happened many times, actually.

Returning, finally, to my friend refusing to wear the label "atheist" - there are many people who for one reason or another choose not to accept that label.  Some avoid the label for fear of being ostracized, in a way that gays and lesbians understand only too well.  Some avoid it because they harbor misconceptions about what it means to be an atheist.  In fact, being an atheist puts almost no restrictions on what you believe, because the only thing we all have in common is not believing in a deity - otherwise, our opinions and beliefs can be damned near anything!  Atheism has no sacred truths, no doctrine, no common set of beliefs.  You can tag me with that label - it doesn't bother me to wear it because it imposes virtually no restrictions on what I can think and what I can believe.  I wear that one proudly and willingly.

Attack on religion?

I can't speak on behalf of all those who don't believe in a deity of the sort hypothesized in Abrahamic religions, so these comments necessarily only reflect on what I'm saying and doing and don't necessarily apply to anyone other than me.  So, with that disclaimer over, I've been informed recently by some folks that by being a vocal, "aggressive" atheist (instead of a "closet" atheist), I'm attacking the believers.  As I often like to do, let's begin with the dictionary.com definition of the verb "attack":

1. to set upon in a forceful, violent, hostile, or aggressive way, with or without a weapon; begin fighting with
2. to begin hostilities against; start an offensive against: to attack the enemy.
3. to blame or abuse violently or bitterly.
4. to direct unfavorable criticism against; criticize severely; argue with strongly
5. to try to destroy, especially with verbal abuse

Let's consider these alternative definitions in order.

#1 - my criticisms of religious dogma certainly can be seen as forceful, distinctly not violent, not even hostile or threatening, definitely without a weapon (other than words), and my intention is not to stir up a fight, but rather to inform and perhaps to discuss topics in a forceful but not hostile way.  A believer recently asked me if I was truly seeking for truth, or was I simply aiming to contradict all religious teachings.  The answer is definitely a search for truth, but apparently for some believers, just to question religious teachings is to take a hostile stance.  Unfortunately, I can't control how some people react to a discussion where I might disagree with them on points of substance.  Does not a rational search for truth involve asking questions and trying to understand the putative answers using logic and empirical evidence?

#2 - my comments are not a provocation meant to begin hostilities, but certainly are aimed at representing my viewpoint, clarifying my position, and responding to criticisms from others.  I always try to avoid ad hominem responses.  In many cases, we end up simply agreeing to disagree, which to me is a satisfactory outcome.  Unfortunately, in some examples, my interlocutor indulges in ad hominem remarks (i.e., directed toward me or someone who believes as I do), which almost always will result in me responding in such a way as to terminate any discussion immediately, for my part.

#3 - in some cases, my critiques of religion attempt to establish a connection between religion and such negative things as sectarian violence, religious terrorism, and religion-inspired violence of all sorts.  I don't dispute that this can be seen as "blaming" religion - religion is inherently prone to stimulate extremist violence because of two primary enabling factors:  

• religious believers often consider what they believe to be religious "truths" to be absolute truth, which strikes me as potentially dangerous to begin with, and
• they conclude that their deity is sanctioning any means by which that truth can be advanced (e.g., by murdering unbelievers);  the allegedly "sacred" documents of all the abrahamic religions (i.e., christianity, islam, and judaism) do in fact call upon believers to perpetrate violence on those who would oppose them or violate their doctrine.

Based on this, I conclude that extremism in the name of religion is to be expected by the very nature of those beliefs.  Religion inevitably gives birth to extremists, who may be disavowed by most believers but who are definitely committing violence in the name of religion.  It would certainly be wrong to accuse all religious believers of extremism, but it seems evident to me that any religion (even the non-Abrahamic ones) can become the wellspring of religious violence.

On the other hand, atheism makes no claims to absolute truth and there are no sacred documents in atheism to cite that condone violence.  [Please don't bring up Communist atheism!]

#4 - this one I claim fully.  I'm criticizing religions unfavorably, especially the Abrahamic religions.  Can I not do so without being faulted simply for doing so?  What makes religion immune from criticism?  In a world of logic and evidence, there should be nothing that's above criticism.  I certainly make no such claim (i.e., to be above criticism) for myself, but if you're going to criticize me, let it be on on the basis of logic and evidence, not mythology, hearsay, and belief in the absence of evidence. 

#5 - If I ever thought I could destroy religion, I might wish to do so, since so much violence and obstruction of human goals has been done in the name of religion.  The simple fact is I'm not going to eradicate religion with my words, and I have no intention of trying to do so by violent actions.  Religion isn't going away just because I wish it would.

At the very best, I can hope perhaps to stimulate a few to think and act upon the questions they have in their minds about the propaganda they've been forced to absorb, perhaps eventually choosing to throw off the cloak of mythology and superstition in favor of a secular humanist worldview.  And I hope to offer some new insights to the discussion.

In conclusion, my criticisms can be interpreted as "attacks" in a limited way, but they do nothing to restrict the rights of anyone to believe as they choose.  If I'm mystified about how otherwise intelligent humans can embrace irrationality and illogic, that's my problem, not theirs.  My criticisms aren't "forcing" my beliefs on anyone.  Just don't force religious beliefs on me by imposing your dogma onto all us via governmental actions (like laws banning liquor sales on Sunday).  

You're welcome to try to persuade me I'm wrong, and if you can find convincing evidence, I'm willing to be persuaded.  Are you equally willing to be persuaded not to believe? 

 

Priorities - a brutally honest mirror

Years ago, I first heard what has become an often-used aphorism for me:  "What you say speaks so loudly, I can't hear what you're saying!"  Of course, this is simply a re-statement of an older aphorism:  "Actions speak louder than words."

The media, including the print media, broadcast media, and the Internet, have flooded us with a tsunami of words.  This very blog contributes, albeit modestly, to that overwhelming flood, so I don't want to come off here as somehow above all that.  The words on this page do not, by themselves, testify to the substance of what I'm about to say here.  Only by my actions can you reach a meaningful judgment of my words.  If you think there's a huge discrepancy between my words and my deeds, then you can brand me a hypocrite with justification, wherever such discrepancies might exist.  As my friend, RJ Evans says, "The hypocrisy always reveals the lie."  The existence of a disconnect between my talk and my actions is an obvious indicator of a falsehood.  The hypocrite says one thing and does the opposite.  The hypocrite says, "Do as I say, not as I do."

But this blog isn't about hypocrisy.  Rather, it's about the statement we make by our actions and priorities.  I'm not talking about individuals here, but rather our collectively-owned, beloved United States of America.  Yes, I truly love the USA, for many reasons.  Which is why I find it painful to find so many disconnects between our ideals and what we actually are doing.  You are free to disagree, naturally.

About $40 billion annually is spent in "the Americas" on cosmetics.  It seems likely the majority of that is in North America, and particularly the USA.  The four major sports in the USA (NFL football, major league baseball, the NBA, and the NHL), according to Wikipedia, generate about $25 billion annually in revenues - most other sports are relatively small by comparison, except perhaps college football, which generates $1.6 billion in TV revenues alone.  The music industry in the USA accounts for about $11.5 billion annually.  TV advertising revenues (excluding political ads and the Olympics) are at about $170 billion annually.  USA consumer electronics revenues are approaching $200 billion annually.

We in the USA account for a rapidly declining proportion of world manufacturing, as we "outsource" our manufacturing to China and elsewhere to reduce labor costs.  Individual state support of education is declining, and universities have become more like businesses than education institutions in order to make up the shortfalls.  Federal support for science has been declining in the face of budget pressure.

Agriculture is no longer dominated by individual farming families, as the land is increasingly owned by absentee owners, including large agricultural corporations.  As the family farm disappears, the small towns that grew up to support those families are dying for lack of revenue.  The infrastructure that supports our whole society (roads, bridges, dams, buildings, etc.) is falling into disrepair owing to a lack of maintenance that is, in turn, attributed to governmental budget shortfalls.  I could go on and on.  We have a lot of issues to deal with, and it seems we can't afford to do them all, so many of them are simply not being addressed anymore.  Our military "superpower" status has inflicted a high price on us since the end of World War II.   No one in the world comes close to what we spend on "defense".

Where we spend our money, and where we choose to cut back our budgets (as individuals and as governmental entities) to deal with financial downturns, says a lot about us.  But that isn't the only issue that concerns me.

We've revealed, time and time again, that our notion of human rights is, to say the least, rather more flexible than the Constitution says it should be.  In times of perceived "emergencies", we've suspended habeas corpus, the right to a speedy trial, and even the right to legal representation.  We love to crow about our freedoms, but the 4th Amendment to the Constitution has been trampled into near non-existence.  We call ourselves the world's guardians of freedom, even as we invade nations simply because we don't like their leadership.  We see ourselves as a shining beacon of hope for equality of opportunity, even as we discriminate against minorities within and impose state-sponsored icons and doctrines of our majority religion (christianity) on everyone.  And we're dumbfounded when we learn that many people around the world despise us.  We're blind to our own failings at living up to our ideals, preferring instead the notion of American "exceptionalism" - the notion of "Noblesse oblige" comes to mind.  It pains me to see those failings, because at our best, we are what we think we are - at our best.  At our worst, well ...

Our priorities, as revealed by our actions, are not where we think they are in our self-deluded state, bombarded with meaningless slogans and empty rhetoric from all sides.  Those priorities are a necessarily accurate mirror of who we really are, and many of us find the image in that mirror to be profoundly discomforting.

Trivialization of concerns about theocracy

I've had more than a few of my believer friends try to reassure me about the threat of a theocracy being imposed on the USA.  In fact, some of them claim the opposite process is underway - attacks on religion from the heathen secular humanists, not vice-versa.  However I might feel about it, the objective evidence is that religion is doing quite well in the USA, with its tax exemption helping to bolster its bulging coffers, with more than 40,000 denominations of christianity alone (according to about.com), with some 350,000 congregations (according to the Hartford Institute for Religious Research), and with a strong majority of the population here in the USA.  If the humanists are attacking, their attacks have been pretty ineffective!  The biggest challenge some believers face is not being allowed to force their beliefs, doctrine, and icons onto all Americans!

Of course, many of my believer friends are "moderates" who have no particularly strong drive to transform the USA into a theocracy, so they essentially judge the probability of the USA becoming a theocracy to be ... well ... trivial.  The minority of believers who do wish to impose their religion on the USA (so-called dominionists) are also trivialized by my believer friends, seeing them as marginalized extremists (more or less as I do).  Where we differ is that I'm still concerned about politically active minorities with a threatening agenda - history provides examples where tiny minorities nevertheless eventually came to power.  So long as things are going well, these minorities snipe away on the margins of society, but as history shows repeatedly, these splinter groups can come to the forefront when society falls into chaos.  One example is the Bolsheviks, who despite their name (which means "the majority" - a clever publicity trick by Lenin) - had always been a tiny minority party, until they seized power in 1918, during the social and economic chaos following the earlier overthrow of the Tsars.  The moderates were overwhelmed by Bolshevik propaganda tricks and lies and could never mount an effective opposition as an alternative to the radical rhetoric, blatant falsehoods, and slogans of the Bolsheviks.  Does any of this sound familiar to anyone?  Eventually, the moderates eventually either joined the Bolsheviks, or they were killed, or sent to the Gulag.

I'm also told that having "In god we trust" on our currency, or "under god" in the pledge of allegiance, or the ten commandments displayed on government property, and so on are only trivialities.  Why should nonbelievers or those of other religions be upset?  Just ignore them.  Trivialities can safely be ignored, right?  What harm do they cause?  Besides, we're only exercising our religious freedoms, so why can't you leave well enough alone?  The intent seems clear:  by trivializing the concerns of nonbelievers, they seek to end any effort to change these "trivialities" to conform with Constitutional mandates.

Since the founding of the American government with the adoption of the US Constitution, there has been, up until recently, a slow but meaningful decrease of the intrusions of religion in the government.  School prayers have been virtually abolished.  Religious holiday displays on government property are being challenged and removed, for the most part, by judicial orders.  Much progress has been made to exclude religion from government, although more remains to be done, of course.  This is all consistent with the "wall of separation" envisioned by Jefferson and many of the framers of the Constitution.  Throughout this process, that wall of separation has served both secular and religious groups well - clearly, as the numbers I gave at the beginning show, most religions have prospered under the secular Constitution and the wall of separation.

The insertion of "In god we trust" on our currency began in 1864, during a religious revival brought about in part by the horrors of the Civil War.  Coincidentally, both sides claimed the deity to be on their side!  The phrase "Under god" was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, during a time of heightened fears resulting from the Soviet threat in the Cold War.

But the dominionists yearn for a mythical, simpler past -- a completely imaginary picture of a time in our past when religion was that "good old-time religion" (that, among other things, dominated the lives of most Americans, dictating for many, including nonbelievers, how to think, what to think, and what to do) -- and so wish to roll back the clock, re-imposing their religion as the controlling factor in everyone's life.  They see this as the cure-all for what ails us at the moment - such evils as LGBT marriage, abortion, uppity women who demand their rights, pornography being openly sold and displayed for anyone to see, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, and so on, and on, and on ... .  The dominionists seek to seize control over all of us, regardless of race, color, or creed.  And depending on which religion winds up the leader of a possible theocracy, all other religions and moderates better watch out!  Dominionists will have no problem imposing their will by any means necessary - they have the absolute truth and the deity on their side, after all.

If the aforementioned "trivialities" are so trivial, then why don't the believers step aside and allow us simply to abolish them?  Or even help us to abolish them?  If they're so trivial to believers, then why do those believers support their retention?  The hypocrisy always reveals the lie (an aphorism coined by my friend RJ Evans).  Believers worked hard to impose these tokens of religiosity onto our nation!  They didn't consider them trivial at all, and still don't!!  Freethinkers are said to be exaggerating their importance but make no mistake - believers also think they're important.   They're stepping stones to future intrusions of religion into government.

We're not a nation united "under god" at all!  We're a nation united under the Constitution!  Our national slogan originally was not "In god we trust" - it was the Latin phrase E pluribus unum (from many, one) that concisely and clearly expresses the national spirit of unity as Americans, inclusive of all human diversity and offering equal opportunity to all.  Religions, by their very nature, are divisive and exclusionary, which is why they make a dangerous moral compass for any state, secular or religious.  Our concerns are decidedly not trivialities - they're important as serious matters of principle:  the principles set forth in the US Constitution.

My christian believer friends seem secure in their place because they can't imagine anything bad happening as a result of their religion.  They're part of the overwhelming majority.  How could a radical splinter movement of christians threaten them?  Hence, they see my concerns as being paranoia over trivialities.  I see their lack of concern as being complacent - the moderates may well eventually be forced to choose between renouncing their personal beliefs and supporting the radical agenda of the victors, or being killed, or imprisoned, or "reeducated".

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This blog owes its origin to a live discussion on the American Heathen show.

Probability abused to justify theism

Warning:  this post is rather longer than my usual postings.

One popular pseudo-scientific argument used by religious believers to justify their faith in a guiding deity is based on probability, or more correctly, the abuse of probability.  The use of probability in science is common, but unfortunately even some scientists have misconceptions about it.

The believer argument goes something like this:  that the existing universe could have come about by chance is so extremely unlikely as to have an infinitesimal probability of having happened.  There must have been a guiding hand in the creation of the universe, in the form of the believer’s favorite anthropomorphic deity.

The primary flaw in this crude attempt at a justification for belief in a supernatural deity is its mischaracterization of the unbeliever’s argument.  Yes, if all of the matter in the universe were simply crammed into one location and was unaffected by anything other than random happenings at the subatomic level, it indeed seems unlikely that anything coherent would emerge.  Unfortunately, this argument hinges on completely random behavior for all the contents of the universe. 

The fact is that there’s a guiding “hand” in creating the universe from the “soup” of matter that emerged from the putative “big bang”.  But that hand need not be some conscious being that happens to look like a human being but is actually an infinitely capable deity.  The universe’s organization is not completely at the mercy of randomness, and hence, the “calculations” (Most believer apologists haven’t a clue how to estimate probabilities, of course, so they don’t offer any such calculations at all!) must account for non-random processes. In the real universe, the behavior of matter and energy isn't completely random and self-organizing processes go on all the time, but believers for the most part seem not to know anything about that.  For example, the weather self-organizes into storms, rather than being just a chaotic foam of random fluctuations.

For a general audience, I can’t go into too much detail without resorting to mathematical concepts, but the laws of the natural world are generally nonlinear, which makes predicting the evolution of matter from one state to the next rather challenging – weather forecasting is a perfect example of this.  All the natural laws are fundamentally nonlinear because any linear process goes on in a straight line for infinite time.  The equations used to describe atmospheric motion are “deterministic”: for a given set of initial conditions, they make a clear and unambiguous prediction for a future state.  Unfortunately, even a tiny change in the initial conditions (which can’t be known with infinite accuracy) can result in a large change in the predicted future state.  This is why the weather is notoriously difficult to predict far into the future.

The same principle applies to ‘hindcasting” – that is, the task of running the equations backward from some point to try to deduce conditions at an earlier time.  Thus, we can’t simply take things as we know them at present and run the clock backward to calculate what conditions were 15 billion years ago when the universe began.  The laws of nature, however imperfectly we understand them at the moment, describe what amounts to a deterministic control over the natural world, but we can’t employ those laws to account for everything that went on during the last 15 billion years.  All we know is that the development of the universe from the primordial ‘soup’ was distinctly not random.  Matter condensed from pure energy as the universe expanded.  Under the influence of gravity, matter collected into clouds and some of them collapsed to form stars.  Star groups became galaxies under the influence of rotational inertia.  Planets formed within solar systems.  Somehow, life began (we don’t yet understand how) and evolved following the laws of evolution.  And so on.  It wasn’t random, but it also was unpredictable in its details.  Hence, the argument that a completely random assembling of the universe is probabilistically impossible is pretty much irrelevant – that process wasn't random!

Another logical fallacy in this argument is the assumption that we’re only concerned with the specific path by which the universe as we know it developed.  Yes, it certainly could be argued that if we could follow the exceeding large number of events that led to the present, that exact sequence would be only one amongst a very, very large number of alternative paths, the end result of each of these different paths would depart from the present to a widely-varying degree.

If we could somehow “rewind the tape” to go back to that primordial soup at some instant in the deep past, and then let the system go forward again, it would indeed be rather unlikely that all those events would ever occur in exactly the same way as it did to produce the universe we know.  But given the laws of the universe, the universe simply would evolve differently.  It's a virtual certainty that some sort of universe would evolve, but it wouldn't be an exact fit to the one we inhabit.  Our finite knowledge of the detailed disposition of all the matter and energy in the universe would be inadequate to describe its state at some moment long ago, so we could only guess at those properties of our universe at the moment it universe began 15 billion years ago.  What’s remarkable is that science has come so far in understanding these processes.  It does so by, among other things, by not postulating unnecessary supernatural interventions in that evolution.

Given the “guiding hand” of the natural laws governing the universe, something sort of resembling the present could emerge 15 billion years after rewinding the tape, but it likely wouldn’t be precisely what things are now, as we know them.  Humans might not exist, or if something humanoid was inhabiting a new Earth-like planet, they certainly wouldn’t be us.  Under the non-random processes associated with those natural laws, an exceedingly large number of distinct outcomes is still possible of course.  But the fallacy of the believer’s use of the probability argument is it's insistence that we must account quantitatively for the likelihood of the exact state of the universe as it now is known.  We can't be sure that all the possible outcomes are equally likely, but this seems like a plausible assumption, in the absence of information to the contrary.  The probability of the exact universe as we know it is indeed exceedingly small, but there's a 100% probability there would be a universe that would resemble the current one more or less, under the natural laws of the universe!  Thus, this "probability argument" fails utterly to establish a need for a deity.  I don't care what theists choose to believe in the absence of logic and compelling evidence, but their use of this argument is simply specious.

Of course, this begs the question of why the laws of the universe are as they are.  That’s an entirely different topic and theists have their usual “pat” explanation for that – again, their favorite deity is their “logical” explanation.  I’m not going to go into that one here – it can wait for another time.