Quote of the Day: Lawrence Krauss

"The purpose of education is not to validate ignorance, but to overcome it."



...at about 30:00 here:








He said it in reference to the assertion that biology teachers should "teach the controversy."



His comments on cosmology are also very interesting. I admit, I sometimes don't understand him but this talk is excellent an very understandable.

20/20 "What is Heaven?" videos

The videos are up now! (Flash)  Watch the whole 2 hours or the segments:
The whole shebang:  http://abc.go.com/watch/2020/SH559026/VD55216980/2020-76-heaven

Betty Bowers on Abortion

Your Sunday School teacher never quoted these Bible passages!

If you're not familiar with Mrs. Bowers or Landover Baptist Church check out the True Christian [tm] site.

Some News of the Week

A few newsworthy items of late: 

The Demon Defense doesn't hold holy water but this story does help to explain why there are so many tiny congregations in the crazier denominations

Whites-Only pastors' conference in Alabama.  These nutters believe that "Europeans and their descendents" are the chosen people.  uhhhh have they read the Bible?

Maybe they were just upset about the Black pastors who disagree with Obama about gay rights.


Then there is a pastor who teaches a funny version of genital hygiene.  Apparently you don't have to be Catholic to be a pedophile.

The Catholic Church in Philadelphia continues to clean house

Presbyterians decide against changing the definition of marriage.  The proposed new definition would be "between two people," which imho is a bad idea because it doesn't imply the two have to be adults.  "Man and woman" indicates adulthood on both parts.

The Village Voice exposes Scientology's marriange "counseling" method.  If Katie Holmes didn't know the religion was abusive before trying this, she'd know it afterward.

Circumscision:  Something Muslims & Jews can agree on

Barbara Walters on Heaven

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/

The full show will be on the site soon, but meanwhile, enjoy some clips.  She traveled the world interviewing people about heaven and hell, and let atheists and skeptics have about two minutes out of a two-hour special.

I DVR'd it so I could review it here, but there isn't much to say about it.  The various religions all have a different afterlife belief.  duh   Why she doesn't draw the obvious conclusion from there that heaven is man-made is beyond me.  Well, the ratings would tank but still... what an insipid show about an insipid concept.

Sure, we want to live forever, but forever is a long time and even Heaven would get really really boring.  And all those people who have near-death experiences never see Hell or their uncle who molested him.  Surely at least one person would have a hellish time of it considering how many of us are going there.  The explanation offered about the dying brain was immediately countered by the NDE experiencers with "I know what I saw."

*sigh*

Katie Holmes & Scientology or just another celeb divorce?

Some interesting thoughts here:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/07/why-katie-holmes-may-win-custody.html

Many people have noted that all of Cruise's divorces happened when the wives were 33.  Makes me wonder if Scientology has some step-up at that age that makes them go "whoa.... I did *Not* sign on for THIS!"  The Daily Beast article is more down-to-earth, referencing child custody practices, and Suri's age, not Katie's as being the trigger.

Katie can probably never tell the whole truth without becoming a Suppressive Person and being stalked for life by henchment for the cause.  It's bad enough for her to be stalked by paparazzi.

What I find strange is the hoopla about Suri being brought up in Scientology with its special schools and nutty philosophy, but let someone send their kid to a Catholic, Jewish, or fundy school, well that's okay.  Well, no, that's not okay.  Brainwashing little kids is a vile, destructive and abusive practice.

Book Review: The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer

If I hadn't put this on my Kindle I might have given up in the introduction.  (It's really hard to skip around on a Kindle) This book starts out far less readable than Shermer's Scientific American columns, but I persevered, and the going got much easier.

He begins the book with three personal stories:  a guy who sponsors research on belief after a supernatural experience or hallucination (depending on your point of view), NIH director Francis Collins' conversion and exploration of faith and science, and Shermer's own conversion and deconversion from evangelical Christianity. He references the people and books that influenced him during that time of his life in great detail.  His own deconversion included a period of Ayn Rand fandom and evangelism for it, sad to say.  I have to wonder if he had a harder time giving up authoritarianism than he did belief in a supernatural, because it sounds like he was a true fanboy.  At this point in his life he hadn't yet become a big fan of the scientific method (or else he would have been persuaded more by evidence than by teachers and authors).

Fortunately the book does finally get to the sciency stuff I bought it for.  His main thesis is that people develop a belief first and then find reasons to support it, and he ranges over a lot of territory developing it.  The most interesting thing for me was the phenomenon of sensing the presence of another person (usually) when nobody is there.  It happened to Shermer on an ultramarathon bike ride.  It has happened to other extreme athletes, especially mountain climbers.  This may come as a surprise to some Christians, but the brain is part of the body, and when the body is under extreme stress, that includes the brain!

Pattern-seeking is another biggie, especially with the point that a false positive pattern is generally less dangerous than a false negative.  His example is a rustle in the grass on the African savannah.  Our ancestors are the survivors who assumed the rustle came from a snake or other predator.  The dead ends on the evolutionary tree are the ones who thought "m'eh it's just the wind" when it was actually a snake.  This is Pascal's Wager!

Another point that's interesting:  the ability to find connections between things (pattern-seeking) is related to creativity, which explains why so many brilliant and creative people have fallen for stupid shit like UFOs and "alternative" medicine.  The same person who might make a breakthrough in science because he saw a connection nobody else noticed isn't likely to filter out the ones that aren't really there, i.e. false positives.  Psychosis is the complete inability to filter out false patterns.

There's a section on political beliefs, which is pretty interesting.  There have been studies done on political belief and apparently (hold onto your hats!) people are very reluctant to give up their political leanings!  YES!

Sadly, he digresses into his libertarianism again, and as if to support his own thesis, he doesn't have any empirical evidence to back up his opinion.  After pages and pages of examples of studies that prove this or that aspect of belief, his own libertarianism seems to demonstrate his argument that people come to their belief first, and then validate it.  I really expected him to have at least done a little reading outside of libertarian literature.

His libertarianism doesn't really sound like Ron Paul libertarianism, though.  He believes in a flat tax, and Ron Paul wants to have no tax at all, and even abolish the IRS.  Some of Shermer's other views are really very moderate also.  He's much more nuanced than he gives himself credit for, but there's no word for "practical libertarianism."  Of course, since I kind of like the guy I may be giving him a pass in order to keep from changing my mind about him!

So... in the end his thesis that people come to their belief first and then find ways to justify it runs through the book but so do other ideas.  He lists the typical biases that a lot of us probably already know about, like confirmation bias.  These aren't dealt with in depth, though.  I wish they were and there was less about libertarianism!

The last section of the book is a long discussion of the development of astronomy as a science, and the scientific method in general.  As we should know (if we had the kind of education we ought to have had), the scientific method includes safeguards against natural biases of the scientists doing the experiments, and of the subjects, if they're human.  He states that his thesis is that people decide what to believe and then rationalize them, but I think the book makes sense as a study of why the scientific method is the best way to arrive at a true result.

The best take-aways:

• People experience mysterious "others" during periods of stress
• The human brain seeks patterns because of evolution
• The human brain seeks an agent because of evolution
• People with an ability to make more connections than others are "creative" but also prone to conspiracy theories, mental illness, and just plain mistakes
• We are prone to fallacies that protect our beliefs
• The scientific method is designed to mitigate against the human brain's faults

It's definitely worth a read for anyone who thinks they are "rational."  I do think atheists who come from religious backgrounds have made that leap of changing our minds so we've cracked a little of our human stubbornness.