Links and Comments: 11 May 2015

Posted on Monday 11 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Contrast the right’s paranoid claims of a war on religion with their very real war on abortion (NYT). When laws are being passed demanding a 48 hour waiting period before being let into church, then I’ll believe there’s a war on religion.

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Mary McNamara in the LA Times discusses the approaching conclusion of Mad Men, along the way pondering why it is we (or some people at least) obsess over certain shows. It goes back, in a way, to Star Trek.

Now that ‘Mad Men’ has changed the TV landscape, what does it all mean?

Not since “Lost” has a show been so combed through, picked over and commented on. “What Would Don Draper Do?” became a cultural construct. Gothamist began a standing feature called “Unpacking Mad Men,” which details the show’s historical references in alarming detail and more general tea leaf reading quickly became ubiquitous. Aided by social media, Easter egg hunts followed virtually every episode: Was that a secret reference to “MASH” (Esquire.com)? Did someone on Reddit find the Rosetta Stone of Sterling Cooper (Uproxx.com)? Was that a dream sequence in reverse, and what did it mean (slate.com)?

Audience speculation and detailed exegesis drove certain shows before “Mad Men” —”Star Trek” built an ancillary industry on symbolism and trivia, as did the soon-to-be-resurrected “The X-Files.” Indeed, the foundation of geek culture, now a dominant force in pop culture, is careful reading, painstaking cataloging and wild theorizing.

Something here about the necessity of narrative, and of teasing meaning out of things that do not necessarily have any meaning.

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NY Times Book Review: review of ‘Speak Now’ by Kenji Yoshino, part memoir and part account of a past Supreme Court decision concerning same-sex marriage.

It’s an expression of gratitude for his own growth, from a troubled young man for whom “common milestones — falling in love, marrying, raising children — seemed unattainable,” into a happily married father of two as a result of remarkable changes in the law beginning in 2003. That year, the Supreme Court outlawed criminal bans on sodomy and the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts became the first American court to legalize same-sex marriage. He writes, “My own life has deprived me of any capacity to be cynical about the law.”

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NY Times Magazine: John Herrman’s Letter of Recommendation: ‘X Minus One’, about a 1950s radio show that adapted science fiction stories of the time into radio plays. It’s an insightful look into how SF has regarded the future, and how that regard may or may not have changed since then.

Fiction about the future doesn’t often age gracefully. Its predictions harden, inevitably, into claims. At its worst, “X Minus One” is dated drama told well, but its better episodes have matured into half-hour exercises in a peculiar and intoxicating form of temporal eavesdropping. They let us watch, with great ease and clarity, people who are straining much harder to see us. Usually they’re looking just slightly off to the side. Sometimes they’re looking the wrong way entirely. But occasionally, in the show’s most thrillingly prescient moments, it’s as if they were staring straight at us.

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Friendly Atheist: Conservative Christian Comedian Doesn’t Realize His Critique of Islam Also Applies to His Own Faith

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And the latest from Jeffrey Tayler: The left has Islam all wrong: Bill Maher, Pamela Geller and the reality progressives must face

Posted in Narrative, Religion, science fiction, The Gays | Comments Off on Links and Comments: 11 May 2015

Natalie Angier, The Canon

Posted on Thursday 7 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

As I was unpacking books these past few weeks, at our new home in Oakland, I came across this book which I hadn’t yet read, but which seemed appropriate to read in the context of my current project to consolidate my thinking about science and philosophy with the perspectives of science fiction and fantasy. So here is one more piece of the puzzle I am putting together.

The author is a Pulitzer Prize winner for writing about biology for the New York Times. The introduction describes her motivation for writing this book: her dismay that her friends gave up their museum memberships as their kids grew up. She realizes most adults don’t care about science — even find it boring. Scientists are not good at promoting the relevancy of their fields, and she summarizes the familiar arguments for promoting scientific literacy. And science, she emphasizes, is fun.

The foundation of the book is hundreds of interviews Angier had done [I’m using past tense since the book was published 8 years ago] with real-life scientists [as opposed to citing and quoting from books by those scientists]. The result is, as it says, a whirlwind summary of the basic points of the major scientific disciplines.

That’s cool. But the author’s style is the opposite of matter-of-factual; it veers between ingratiating and grating. She likes cute, sometimes clever, metaphors, like, e.g., describing entropy (and potential energy):

The energy is there, but it might as well not be, like a taxi passing you on a rainy night with its NOT IN SERVICE lights ablaze, or a chair in a museum with a rope draped from arm to arm, or a teenager.

Or a teenager. Cute. A longer example, about the Second Law of Thermodynamics:

The second law might also be called the “Humpty Dumpty directive.” Once the big, smirking, pedantic, cravated egg had his great fall, all the king’s horses, all the king’s men, all the plastic surgeons, duct tape, and members of the National Transportation Safety Board couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again. The second law is the reason why either you or a hired professional must expend considerable effort to clean you house, but if you leave the place alone for two weeks while on vacation, it will get dirty for free. It explains why some drinks taste good cold, some taste good hot, and most taste lousy at room temperature — red wines, of course, excepted. The second law guarantees a certain degree of chaos and mishap in your life no matter how compulsively you plan your schedule and triple-check every report. To err is not just human; it’s divined.

So if you’re not completely turned off by that style, the book is useful. Especially for the first three chapters, which address general concepts about “thinking scientifically”, probabilities, and calibrations. Science is not a body of fact, but a way of viewing the world; it assumes that there is an objective reality. Evidence counts, not opinions. Mental biases are the enemy of science. Scientific thinking is about overcoming the intuitive understandings we develop in childhood.

Probabilities: a statistics teacher split her class into two parts, one to flip a coin a hundred times to capture a set of actual random results, and the other to create a list of what they thought a set of random results would look like. The teacher could always tell the difference: because randomness looks nonrandom, including runs that people think do not look random. Such patterns in randomness suggests hidden meanings… thus superstitions.

Interesting asides about Enrico Fermi’s fondness for challenging co-workers with on-the-fly estimations: how many piano tuners are in Chicago? The goal was to get within an order of magnitude of the actual right answer.

And the third chapter is about Calibration: Playing with Scales. Look at the stars, look at the Grand Canyon. “Throughout history, people have wildly misjudged distances, proportions, comparisons, the bead of being … We have evolved to view life on a human scale, to concern ourselves almost exclusively with the rhythms of hours, days, seasons, years, and with objects that we can readily see, touch, and count on…”

Thus we perceive numbers of things in groups of five; our unit of time the second, is about a heartbeat. And so on.

After these three initial chapters, there are six following chapters that address:

  • Physics: Feynmann’s single sentence to leave to survivors of a worldwide cataclysm; the idea that in American high schools physics should be taught first, not last; the atom; charge; ‘electricity’; matter and energy, potential vs kinetic; electricity and magnetism; the vast range of ‘light’; the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics
  • Chemistry: Chemists have a persecution complex. But 115 elements generate a virtually infinite number of molecules, which depend on bonds: covalent, ionic, metallic, hydrogen. Why carbon is the most versatile element. The chemistry of change, from solid, liquid, gas, depends on bonds.
  • Evolutionary Biology: the overwhelming evidence for evolution, and the resistence to it. Familiar quote: “Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution” (Theodosius Dobzhansky). The chapter goes on with many familiar examples and evidence. And how evolution deniers evolve, ironically, from fundamentalists to ‘intelligent design’ advocates, supporting the idea of irreducible complexity, which amounts to just giving up about any idea of coming up with an explanation for anything.
  • Molecular Biology: Bacteria are everywhere. The central structure of biology is the cell. Prokaryotic, eukaryotic. How proten shapes determines chemical interactions. DNA and genes.
  • Geology: The planet records its own history. Plate tectonics. Comets brought water to Earth; the oceans are 3 to 4 billions years old, but our present atmosphere, with its oxygen content, was not established until about 400 million years ago.
  • Astronomy: about the two big discoveries of the 20th century. Astronomy is the study of light. Hubble realized the ‘nebulae’ were other galaxies, and noticed that all other galaxies were moving away from us. Balloon analogy: dots on an inflating balloon all see themselves moving away from all others. The deduction of a beginning led to the prediction about background radiation– that was confirmed. The earliest stars exploded, creating higher elements, which enabled our planet and life. Is there anyone out there? Perhaps. But Drake Equation.
Posted in Science | Comments Off on Natalie Angier, The Canon

Links and Comments: Balancing the budget; the existential threat of atheists

Posted on Wednesday 6 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Balancing the federal budget has a simple-minded, intuitive appeal, but it’s not actually necessary. The nation is not a family; and even families don’t balance their budgets from year to year. (E.g. mortgages.)

Vox: Families don’t balance their budgets, and neither should the federal government

Paul Krugman has discussed many times, but it’s nice to link to another source.

You’d think even Republican politicians would understand this, but of course, they’re playing to a base that doesn’t.

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Friendly Atheist: New Research Shows the Existential Threat Atheists Pose to Believers; No Wonder We’re So Disliked!

Which of course supports my Provisional Conclusion #8: the resistance by believers to anything that would threaten their worldview.

Posted in Atheism, Economics | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Balancing the budget; the existential threat of atheists

Links and Comments: Dan Dennett, Emotional Intelligence, Worst Predictions, Jeffrey Tayler

Posted on Tuesday 5 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Via Morning Heresy, Dan Dennett is interviewed at Religion Dispatches about, among other things, why the edifice of religion seems to be cracking:

Protecting your inner workings is becoming very difficult; it’s very hard to keep secrets. Religions have thrived in part because they were able to keep secrets. They were able to keep secrets about other religions from their parishioners, who were largely ignorant of what other people in the world believed, and also keep secrets about their own inner workings and their own histories, so that it was easy to have a sort of controlled message that went out to people. Those days are over. You can go on the Internet and access to all kinds of information. This is going to change everything.

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Re a previous post from The Atlantic about The Science of Superstition, with an item about how autism, i.e. that entails diminished social skills, is correlated with nonbelief in God and other supernatural entities, here’s the latest “Study of Studies” from The Atlantic, When Emotional Intelligence Goes Wrong, which correlates high social skills with narcissism, manipulation of others, and gullibility to charlatans.

In a 2013 study, college students were shown news footage of people pleading for a missing family member’s return—half of whom were in fact responsible for the person’s disappearance. When the students rated the sincerity of these pleas, those with higher EI were more likely to be duped, perhaps due to overconfidence in their ability to read others [11].

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Also in this month’s Atlantic: What Was the Worst Prediction of All Time?.

Examples include abolishing war by 2000, how Apple would never come out with a cell phone, that nuclear power would be too cheap to bother measuring, and others. Every one of these is very interesting, and I fit these into the framework of my worldview at item 10, as among the failures of science fiction and/or futurism in trying to predict the future. SF isn’t about predicting the future, of course, but many others do try predicting the future, and often fail. Why would this be? Something about the volatility of human culture, in contrast to the relative certainties of science.

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Latest from Jeffrey Tayler (he should write a book) at Salon: Ted Cruz, our ayatollah: Fight back now, or welcome to the 2016 religious right hellstorm.

As usual at Salon, the subtitle is more on-target than the perhaps inflammatory title. This subtitle: “Way too many of us believe in a magic book negated by science and peppered with all manner of misanthropic myths”.

Much of this piece consists of Tayler’s responses to a critique of an earlier post by Tayler from Matt Barber, “a columnist for Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, and the founder of WND’s Christian fundamentalist site Barbwire.com“. Sample:

Barber then chooses to embarrass himself with a declaration that confirms he should stick to batting in the Little League of modern-day thinkers:

Every man, woman and child understands through both general revelation and human reason that this unfathomably intricate, staggeringly fine-tuned universe didn’t create and fine-tune itself. It’s a tiny minority of angry, self-deluded materialists like Jeffrey Tayler who deny this self-evident truth.

Many believers might indeed find such a boner-studded profession of ignorance credible (and surely Barber does, given that he earned all three of his degrees at religious institutions), but secularists who read grown-up books will immediately see how it contradicts what physics and biology tell us about the cosmos.  The universe, we now know, did create itself, arising out of a quantum event – a “singularity,” when time and space were wrapped into one — some 13.7 billion years ago, exploding from a tiny speck of unimaginably dense, hot matter to its present dimensions.  (And it’s still expanding.)  Some four billion years back, it is postulated that a still-unexplained chemical occurrence gave rise to the first self-replicating biological molecule from which began life on Earth and from which we evolved according to the (eminently comprehensible) process of Natural Selection.  This renders God, as Richard Dawkins put it, “an excrescence, a carbuncle on the face of science,” unnecessary for any phase of “creation.”  (For more information, Barber might wish to set aside his magic book and delve into the oeuvre of the theoretical physicists Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawking, and, of course, Dawkins’ own “The God Delusion.”)

He does tie it back to the Salon editors’ title:

Barber’s blog is but a symptom of the seemingly incurable malady of faith. In fact there is a remedy — free speech, applied liberally to infected areas. Rationalists must resist all calls to show respect for religion, be it Christianity or Islam or any other faith with universalist pretensions. Recall the damage these stultifying ideologies of control and repression have done the cause of progress throughout history. And remember the stakes now, with so many of our presidential candidates flaunting their belief, and seats on the Supreme Court likely to free up, especially post-2016. We either fight back by speaking out now, or we may end up living in a Christian-theme-park version of Iran, with Ted Cruz as our ayatollah.

This is about my Provisional Conclusion #8: Resistance. But also about #9: a species “reset” could involve a religious revolution that cancels out the progress of our 21st century. Religious forces have held humanity in thrall for centuries in the past. (And there are SF works that describe such religious revolutions, thinking of works by Margaret Atwood off-hand. The alignment of my PvC framework with SF is where this blog is going.)

Posted in Psychology, Religion, science fiction | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Dan Dennett, Emotional Intelligence, Worst Predictions, Jeffrey Tayler

Links and Comments: Politics and Ideology; About Changing One’s Mind

Posted on Monday 4 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Politics and Ideology:

This theme has been around for some time: Republican economic policies rely on ideologies (ideas about government non-interference, about individual freedom, about the moral turpitude of the poor, etc.), while the actual evidence shows that the country’s economy does better under Democratic presidential administrations than Republican.

Salon: Sean McElwee: Republican presidents flunk the economy: 11 reasons why America does worse under the GOP

The article has graphs and a list of eleven specific reasons — with links to evidenciary studies — about why the economy does better under Democrats.

This aligns with the Paul Krugman column from a couple weeks ago, Zombies of 2016, on this same theme, one he’s returned to again and again, about how the Right’s predictions about (among other things) the disastrous effects of Obama’s policies have not come true.

Consider, for example, the zombification of the debate over health reform.

Before the Affordable Care Act went fully into effect, conservatives made a series of dire predictions about what would happen when it did. It would actually reduce the number of Americans with health insurance; it would lead to “rate shock,” as premiums soared; it would cost the government far more than projected, and blow up the deficit; it would be a huge job-destroyer.

In reality, the act has produced a dramatic drop in the number of uninsured adults; premiums have grown much more slowly than in the years before reform; the law’s cost is coming in well below projections; and 2014, the first year of full implementation, also had the best job growth since 1999.

So how has this changed the discourse? On the right, not at all. As far as I can tell, every prominent Republican talks about Obamacare as if all the predicted disasters have, in fact, come to pass.

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About Changing One’s Mind:

We just heard this show on NPR radio this past weekend, while driving around, though I see the original broadcast was the week before. Anyway, this to me is a crucial topic: do people ever change their minds? Or are we all hobbled for life by the tribalistic ideologies of our childhoods and our adult social groups? Are we an intelligent species, or not? As adults, can we change our minds about fundamental topics about the reality we live within, or does it not actually matter, as long as we survive and reproduce…?

The Incredible Rarity of Changing Your Mind

The prime examples are about gay marriage and abortions. It happens that when opponents of these things talk with a person who listens to their reasons, and that person, the interviewer, is gay himself, or has had an abortion herself, and explains why, and explains how this issue has affected his or her own life…. the interviewees sometimes (not always) change their opinions, sometimes by 180 degrees. The reality of forming a connection with another person with an opposite perspective changes some people’s minds. Not everyone’s. –But enough to swing elections! And virtually no other process — feeding of information, talks with neutral interviewers — has any effect. But making a personal, human connection, does have an effect.

Posted in Economics, Morality, Psychology | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Politics and Ideology; About Changing One’s Mind

A Month’s Worth of Links and Comments

Posted on Friday 1 May 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

New York Times, March 20: In the Age of Information, Specializing to Survive

The Internet makes it easy to learn almost anything. And yet

And yet, even as the highbrow holy grail — the acquisition of complete knowledge — seems tantalizingly close, almost nobody speaks about the rebirth of the Renaissance man or woman. The genius label may be applied with reckless abandon, even to chefs, basketball players and hair stylists, but the true polymaths such as Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin seem like mythic figures of a bygone age.

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NY Times Magazine, March 29: Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant

Immigrants don’t just increase the supply of labor, though; they simultaneously increase demand for it, using the wages they earn to rent apartments, eat food, get haircuts, buy cellphones. That means there are more jobs building apartments, selling food, giving haircuts and dispatching the trucks that move those phones. Immigrants increase the size of the overall population, which means they increase the size of the economy. Logically, if immigrants were “stealing” jobs, so would every young person leaving school and entering the job market; countries should become poorer as they get larger. In reality, of course, the opposite happens.

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NY Times Op-Ed, T.M. Luhrmann: Faith vs. Facts

MOST of us find it mind-boggling that some people seem willing to ignore the facts — on climate change, on vaccines, on health care — if the facts conflict with their sense of what someone like them believes. “But those are the facts,” you want to say. “It seems weird to deny them.”

And yet a broad group of scholars is beginning to demonstrate that religious belief and factual belief are indeed different kinds of mental creatures. People process evidence differently when they think with a factual mind-set rather than with a religious mind-set. Even what they count as evidence is different. And they are motivated differently, based on what they conclude. On what grounds do scholars make such claims?

This then, would be a problem with religion.

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Jerry Coyne, Two readers testify that evolution helped them give up religion

It’s very rare for anyone to leave religion on the basis of being exposed to facts religion denies, but it does happen. The two examples here also illustrate how some religions — in these cases, Jehovah’s Witnesses — simply lie about the evidence for, say, evolution…

I found out (in part thanks to your book) that the people who lead the religion, whom I had trusted implicitly, had been shockingly dishonest about the evidence surrounding evolution. I was absolutely appalled at the quotes taken out of context, logical fallacies (I had to learn what a logical fallacy was), and thoroughly biased presentation of the subject. None of this was apparent to me when I was a believer because of the information control that the religion imposes (including not trusting ‘worldly’ sources of information, and completely shunning apostates – refusing to even look at anything they have to say).

… and how they shun you once you wake up and leave. (Scientology, notoriously, does this too.)

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Wall Street Journal, Daniel Dennett: Why the Future of Religion Is Bleak

This dovetails with the previous item, that religions survive by controling what their adherents know. But this is getting more difficult in the modern internet world. Dennett notes the growing proportion of “Nones” in America.

If this trend continues, religion largely will evaporate, at least in the West. Pockets of intense religious activity may continue, made up of people who will be more sharply differentiated from most of society in attitudes and customs, a likely source of growing tension and conflict.

Could anything turn this decline around? Yes, unfortunately. A global plague, a world war fought over water or oil, the collapse of the Internet (and thereby almost all electronic communication) or some as-yet unimagined catastrophe could throw the remaining population into misery and fear, the soil in which religion flourishes best.

Dennett goes on,

With hardly any significant exceptions, religion recedes whenever human security and well-being rises, a fact that has recently been shown in numerous studies, but was suspected by John Calvin in the 16th century.

And concludes,

If we are lucky—if human health and security continue to rise and spread around the globe—churches might evolve into humanist communities and social clubs, dedicated to good works, with distinctive ceremonies and disappearing doctrine, except for a scattering of reclusive sects marked by something like institutional paranoia.

If we are unlucky and calamity strikes, our anxiety and misery will provide plenty of fuel for revivals and inventions of religions we have happily learned to live without.

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Business Insider cheerfully shows 5 ways the world could really end.

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Resources:
The history of the world in one chart (I have a copy of this)
Related: The Histomap of Evolution

And on the topic of the supposed abnormality of homosexuality, this book: Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. 450 species!

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Salon: The GOP’s demonic alliance: How the religious right & big business are dumbing down America

Anti-intellectualism in America goes way back.

Today, the Republican party still supports these basic social and economic ideals. But the social issues are what truly gain votes, and they inevitably result in a hostility towards intellectualism and science. Many of Republicans seemingly vote against their economic self-interest in support of the conservative social values, which results in a vicious cycle of ignorance and poverty. Social conservative views, whether it be abortion or homosexuality, all sprout from the Christian faith, and the Christian faith inevitably clashes with modernity and science.

We see it around the country, with schools teaching creationism and politicians denying man-made climate change. In states like Texas, Louisiana, and Tennessee, public school teachers are allowed to teach “alternatives” to evolution, while in the states Florida, Indiana, Arizona, Ohio, Washington, and elsewhere, taxpayer money goes to funding private creationist schools. Evolution is quite incompatible with biblical stories, and the lack of scientific education in many states shows itself in polls – according to Gallup, 42 percent of Americans believe that God created humans in the present form.

Specifics about Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker.

Anti-intellectualism is an American tradition, and these new contenders denying scientific facts and calling Harvard a communist institution are simply embracing a populace that individuals like Billy Sunday and Joseph McCarthy once embraced. The alliance of religion and big business has fully incorporated America’s unfortunate anti-intellectualist culture, which has resulted in millions of people voting against their interest because of their own ignorant hostility towards anything that could be deemed elitist. It is a cycle of ignorance and poverty, and it is exactly what the real elites, like billionaire oil men, aim for.

And a quote from Isaac Asimov.

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The latest from Jeffrey Tayler, Bill Maher, American hero: Laughing at religion is exactly what the world needs, also quotes Isaac Asimov (who wrote two big books about the Bible).

“Properly read,” declared the science-fiction author and biochemistry professor Isaac Asimov, “the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.” He was right. The same may be said of the Quran, the holy book of Islam, which the late, dearly missed Christopher Hitchens called “not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as occasion appeared to require.”

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I’ll paste this and see if it works:

If the only thing keeping you from behaving badly is fear, then you're saying you're not a good person at heart.

Posted by David Gerrold on Sunday, April 26, 2015

David Gerrold on Facebook responding to a priest’s typical suspicion of atheists: you can’t trust an athiest president because he wouldn’t fear eternal damnation.

This is the problem with claiming your morals are derived from a holy book: it means you have none yourself.

Related: Amanda Marcotte in Salon/Alternet: 10 egregious myths the religious perpetuate about atheists, debunked.

6) Atheists don’t have a moral code. Atheist are routinely asked how people will know not to rape and murder without religion telling them not to do it, especially a religion that backs up the orders with threats of hell. Believers, listen to me carefully when I say this: When you use this argument, you terrify atheists. We hear you saying that the only thing standing between you and Ted Bundy is a flimsy belief in a supernatural being made up by pre-literate people trying to figure out where the rain came from. This is not very reassuring if you’re trying to argue from a position of moral superiority.

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Here’s a couple counter-intuitive articles about history. In The Week, How Christianity invented children. Because in ancient Greece and Rome, children were nonpersons.

Back then, the entire social worldview was undergirded by a universally-held, if implicit, view: Society was organized in concentric circles, with the circle at the center containing the highest value people, and the people in the outside circles having little-to-no value. At the center was the freeborn, adult male, and other persons were valued depending on how similar they were to the freeborn, adult male. Such was the lot of foreigners, slaves, women…and children.

The frightening power of our emboldened police High infant mortality rates created a cultural pressure to not develop emotional attachments to children. This cultural pressure was exacerbated by the fact that women were more likely to develop emotional attachments to children — which, according to the worldview of the day, meant it had to be a sign of weakness and vulgarity.

Times change and morality evolves.

And a letter to Dan Savage challenges the assumption that medival attitudes about sex were very conservative.

I’m not saying that the Middle Ages was a great period of freedom (sexual or otherwise), but the sexual culture of 12th-century France, Iraq, Jerusalem, or Minsk did not involve the degree of self-loathing brought about by modern approaches to sexuality. Modern sexual purity has become a marker of faith, which it wasn’t in the Middle Ages.
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The thing that really screwed up a lot of us religious kids was that engaging with our sexuality destroyed our religious identity: We stopped being Christians or Muslims when we started having sex, or sometimes, just started desiring to have sex.

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The New Yorker: Mute Button

How to control the narrative: Kill the atheist bloggers, kill the satirical journalists.

The value of intellectual freedom is far from self-evident. It’s hardly natural to defend the rights of one person over the feelings of a group; to put up with all the trouble that comes with free minds and free expression; to stand beside the very people who repel you. After the massacre at the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo, in January, even defenders of free speech couldn’t help wondering why the cartoonists hadn’t just avoided Islam and the Prophet, given the sensitivities involved. Why be provocative? And when freethinkers are a tiny minority in a terribly poor and overwhelmingly religious country on the other side of the world, with no First Amendment or republican tradition of laïcité, it’s easy to feel that they’re admirable eccentrics who speak for nothing and no one beyond themselves—which may explain why they’ve received so much less attention than their brethren in Paris.

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Brief article in The Atlantic summarizing numerous mental biases, and how even scientists are prone to superstition.

Matthew Hutson: The Science of Superstition.

With references to studies that identified them. Now the last sentence here is really interesting:

Magical thinking is not just a result of ignorance or indoctrination—it appears to be a side effect of normal, socially adaptive thinking: we attribute intentions to the natural world in much the same way that we attribute intentions to other people. Indeed, a recent paper from a lab at the University of British Columbia reported that the better study participants were at reading others, the more strongly they believed in God, the paranormal, and the notion that life has a purpose [6]. Meanwhile, one of the few true avenues to atheism may be autism. The same lab found that the more autistic traits a person had, the less likely he or she was to believe in God. [7]

Makes sense: the very mental biases that lead to magical thinking (including religion) are useful (i.e. they promote survival) because they enable interpersonal communications. But this doesn’t mean there really are faeries in the garden, or the Virgin Mary in a tree stump.

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Still a bunch of links, which for now I will just link without comment. And perhaps return to another day.

  1. Paul Di Filippo: Ten Essential Utopias
  2. Adam Lee: The Sci-Fi Fans Who Fear Change (Note that the extremists among these are also racist, anti-evolution, anti-gay, and given to conspiracy theories)
  3. Science Mag: To foster complex societies, tell people a god is watching. Another reason magical thinking is actually evolutionary adaptive. Connor Wood has an essay on this, which I haven’t yet read: Is religion evolutionarily adaptive?
  4. Some atheists debate whether there is, in principle, any kind of evidence that would convince them God exists. PZ Myers takes except to the way the challenge is framed: It is not close-minded to demand reasonable kinds of evidence
  5. An excerpt from Dan Barker’s Losing Faith In Faith: From Preacher to Atheist: Leave No Stone Unturned. He challenges Christians to examine the gospels and explain what happened on Easter, exactly.
  6. Freeman Dyson’s favorite novelist of all time is the late SF author Octavia Butler
  7. Think Progress: How To Tell If The Article About Climate You Are Reading Is B.S., In Four Easy Steps
  8. Americans Go to Church About As Much As Godless Europeans: America is not a Christian nation. We’re a secular nation that suffers a small but vocal minority of theocrats.
  9. Republicans cling to discredited ideologies: Paul Krugman: Zombies of 2016
  10. And if you have the magical thinking itch but can’t religious claims seriously, just redefine your terms: More nonsense at NPR about God

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Finally a fine essay by Frank Bruni from nearly a month ago: Bigotry, the Bible and the Lessons of Indiana.

But in the end, the continued [Christian] view of gays, lesbians and bisexuals as sinners is a decision. It’s a choice. It prioritizes scattered passages of ancient texts over all that has been learned since — as if time had stood still, as if the advances of science and knowledge meant nothing.

Very nearly words I’ve written myself. Going on:

It disregards the degree to which all writings reflect the biases and blind spots of their authors, cultures and eras.

It ignores the extent to which interpretation is subjective, debatable.

And it elevates unthinking obeisance above intelligent observance, above the evidence in front of you, because to look honestly at gay, lesbian and bisexual people is to see that we’re the same magnificent riddles as everyone else: no more or less flawed, no more or less dignified.

Meanwhile, Republican politicians like Rick Santorum keep saying things like [He’d] Make a Great President Since He Fought to Keep Gay Sex Illegal. Huzzah.

Posted in Children, Culture, Economics, Evolution, MInd, Morality, Narrative, Psychology, Religion, Science, The Gays | Comments Off on A Month’s Worth of Links and Comments

Interesting items from Sunday’s New York Times

Posted on Monday 27 April 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Frank Bruni: The G.O.P.’s Gay Pretzels

Bruni imagines a letter from the RNC to the Republican presidential candidates on their handling of the question, would you attend a gay wedding?
From Bobby Jindal

We do not recommend the tint picked by Bobby Jindal, who just tripled down on his opposition to gay marriage while casting big business — corporate America — as a principal enemy of righteousness on this front. Earth to Bobby!?! We are big business. Big business is our cuddling partner. We spoon with it. We do not vilify it. Bobby is a desperate man, trying to find a point of entry into a crowded primary field with no room for him. Tune him out, and do not, under any circumstances, follow his lead.

to Jeb Bush.

Jeb Bush’s tack is more comprehensible. He utters much of what religious conservatives want to hear. But he also brings enough gays or Republicans who support same-sex marriage into his campaign to give Americans a signal of where so many of us in the party really are. We have gay children, grandchildren, siblings, nieces, nephews, colleagues, bosses, employees. We want the world for them and a world that’s fully open to them.

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William N. Eskridge, Jr.: It’s Not Gay Marriage vs. the Church Anymore

Eskridge (A Yale law professor) reflects on the upcoming arguments before the Supreme Court on same-sex marriage in the context of past civil rights battles resisted by the Church.

Race relations in this country show how religious practice and doctrine can change when public attitudes and the law change. Before the Civil War, many Mormons and Southern Protestants maintained that the Bible supported slavery for persons of African descent; when slavery ended, the same denominations read Scripture to require segregation of the races and to bar interracial relationships. Apartheid was the legal regime codifying those religious and social attitudes.
…
Biblical support for slavery, segregation and anti-miscegenation laws rested upon broad and anachronistic readings of isolated Old Testament passages and the Letters of Paul, but without strong support from Jesus’ teachings in the Gospels. The Southern Baptist Convention now concedes that its churches misinterpreted the word of God on matters of race. The current Baptist view that God condemns “homosexual behavior” and same-sex marriages comes from the same kind of broad and anachronistic scriptural readings as prior support for segregation.

With examples of the many Biblical spiritual heros who marriages were hardly what is now called “traditional”.

Eskridge predicts churches will change about this topic too.

With greater tolerance and acceptance of gay married couples, more religions will, slowly, modify doctrinal discourse to match social discourse — exactly the way they did for their previous disapproval of marriages between two people of different races. It’s beginning to happen already: Last summer, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) voted to allow its ministers to perform marriage ceremonies for gay couples, a stance ratified by a majority of presbyteries last month.

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A “Gray Matter” about The Economics of Suspense, in terms of sports rules and narrative structure. If you tell someone a game or a novel is a real nail-biter… that sorta destroys the suspense.

It’s a lesson that the filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan, for one, seems to have missed. Once it’s common knowledge that your movie will have a dramatic, unexpected plot twist at the end, then your movie no longer has a dramatic, unexpected plot twist at the end.

To be thrilling, you must occasionally be boring.

This has implications in how to make literary plots suspenseful.

For instance, to maximize suspense, a mystery novel should have no more than three major plot twists on average. Of course, that last qualification is crucial: The exact number of plot twists should be unpredictable.

One example of how, upon deep analysis, there is remarkable uniformity to most popular fiction.

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Maureen Dowd (a regular NYT columnist) muses about artificial intelligence and the new film Ex Machina: Beware Our Mind Children.

She mentions the concern that some — including the likes of Stephen Hawking — have that robots could become more intelligent than humans. Alex Garland, director of the film, also as a commentary about this in the Movies section of the paper.

I find this concern unlikely, and ironic, considering how different strata of humanity regard each other…

Garland concludes,

I can imagine a world where machine intelligence runs hospitals and health services, allocating resources more quickly and competently than any human counterpart.

Public works aside, the investigation into strong artificial intelligence might also lead to understanding human consciousness, the most interesting aspect of what we are. This in turn could lead to machines that have our capacity for reason and sentience, but different energy requirements and a completely different relationship with mortality. That could mean a different future. A longer future. In which case, we could rephrase the warnings of Mr. Hawking and Mr. Wozniak. Where they say that A.I. will spell the end of humans, we could say that one day, A.I. will be what survives of us.

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And this week’s count of the number of same-sex wedding announcements among the total printed: 2 of 23. E.g.

Posted in Culture, Narrative, Science, The Gays | Comments Off on Interesting items from Sunday’s New York Times

Naïve Physics

Posted on Friday 24 April 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s a fascinating article from The Conversation: Infections of the mind: why anti-vaxxers just ‘know’ they’re right (via).

My interest in this piece isn’t about anti-vaxxers per se, it’s about the more general issue of how people form beliefs, what the article calls “naïve theories”.

We all have what psychologists call “folk” theories, or “naïve” theories, of how the world works. You do not need to learn Newton’s laws to believe that an object will fall to the floor if there is nothing to support it. This is just something you “know” by virtue of being human. It is part of our naïve physics, and it gives us good predictions of what will happen to medium-sized objects on planet earth.

As I’ve called out in my Provisional Conclusions — #3, “many things people believe about themselves, and about the world, have turned out to be false upon rigorous examination” — many things people “know” intuitively are not actually true, or are true only within the limited experience of the scope of human existence. As the article says,

Naïve physics is not such a good guide outside of this environment. Academic physics, which deals with very large and very small objects, and with the universe beyond our own planet, often produces findings that are an affront to common sense.

The article goes on with examples about bloodletting and Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove.

Posted in Physics, Psychology | Comments Off on Naïve Physics

Links and Comments: the vastness of the universe; Hubble photos; the physics of everyday life; science books; creationists and the possibility of alien life

Posted on Thursday 23 April 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Vox: 11 images that capture the incredible vastness of space.

Related: Phil Plait celebrates 25 Years of Cosmic Treasures: Hubble’s 12½ Greatest Hits

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Physicist Sean Carroll this week references an earlier post that spells out an important point: The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Are Completely Understood

Yes, there are super-colliders still trying to generate exotic particles that might exist in extreme conditions of pressure or energy… but if they exist, they don’t affect everyday life. Those extremes aside, we’ve figured pretty much everything out in the past century.

A hundred years ago it would have been easy to ask a basic question to which physics couldn’t provide a satisfying answer. “What keeps this table from collapsing?” “Why are there different elements?” “What kind of signal travels from the brain to your muscles?” But now we understand all that stuff. (Again, not the detailed way in which everything plays out, but the underlying principles.) Fifty years ago we more or less had it figured out, depending on how picky you want to be about the nuclear forces. But there’s no question that the human goal of figuring out the basic rules by which the easily observable world works was one that was achieved once and for all in the twentieth century.

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Guardian: Steven Weinberg’s 13 best science books for the general reader

From Voltaire and Darwin to Feynman, Brian Greene, Richard Dawkins, Timothy Ferris, Lawrence Krauss… Weinberg’s latest book, To Explain the World, is on my to-read shelf.

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This is fascinating: God’s Chosen Planet: Why creationists are praying we never find alien life.

Because the whole point of creationism is that Earth and humanity are so very special, and that entire vast cosmos, with seemingly infinite number of other galaxies and stars and planets, many with the potential for life, are just… decoration. It’s all about us.

The article goes on about the ironically named Discovery Institute and their contorted rationalizations (based on Scripture of course) for how no other planets that support life could possibly exist.

Mark Strauss concludes:

And that’s what really worries the missionaries of intelligent design. The discovery of extraterrestrial organisms would confront them with two unpalatable conclusions—that evolution is the driving force behind life, and that God has plans that don’t necessarily include us. For creationists, it’s far more comforting to pin their faith upon a dead universe.

Posted in Astronomy, Physics, Religion, Science, Space | Comments Off on Links and Comments: the vastness of the universe; Hubble photos; the physics of everyday life; science books; creationists and the possibility of alien life

Links and Comments: Emperor’s New Clothes, Presidential Piety

Posted on Thursday 23 April 2015 by Mark R. Kelly

Salon has been running essays by a contributing editor for The Atlantic [n.b.: ‘contributing editor’ might only mean, as it does in the case of Locus, that he is a regular contributor — he submits a column once a month; not an ‘editor’ exactly — to that magazine] named Jeffrey Tayler, who comments about religious and political matters in a take-no-prisoners manner, not afraid to call out what many of us see in religions as the emperor’s new clothes — for all the ceremony and deference to them, there’s actually nothing substantive there.

Bill Maher terrifies Bill O’Reilly: An atheist has the Fox News host running scared, subtitled: What flabbergasts O’Reilly & Coulter is nonbelievers are no longer keeping mum about Christianity’s rank stupidity

I’ve added some emphasis.

All in all, rationalists should applaud [Bill] O’Reilly and [Ann] Coulter for having the courage to so boldly air their mendacity, mischaracterizations, and lopsided analogies, which are in fact illuminating. Namely, they both argue from a premise so widely accepted that they leave it unstated: that those who believe, without proof, fantastical, far-reaching propositions about the nature of our cosmos and how we should live our lives have nothing to explain, nothing to account for, while those of us who value convictions based on evidence, reasoned solutions, and rules for living deriving from consensus must ceaselessly justify ourselves and genuflect apologetically for voicing disagreement.

Beneath this unstated premise lies another more insidious notion: that there are two kinds of truth – religious and otherwise. That, say, the assertion that God created the earth in six days and rested on the seventh might not be literally true, but it merits respect as “religious truth” (or, as Reza Aslan puts it, “sacred history”), as a metaphor for some ethereal verity, one so transcendental that boneheaded rationalists obsessed with superfluities like evidence cannot grasp it.

This is sophistry of the most contemptible variety. By such unscrupulous subterfuge the faithful (and their apologists) commit treason against reason, betray honest discourse, and hope to render their (preposterous) dogmas immune to disproof and open to limitless interpretation, depending on their needs of the moment.

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What really flabbergasts O’Reilly and Coulter is that nonbelievers are no longer keeping mum about the rank stupidity embodied in Christianity. A virgin birth? A rib-cum-woman? A man walking on water? The vicarious redemption of “sin” through a cruel and unusual act of human sacrifice? All these fantasticalities offend thinking, sane individuals. No one should expect us to accept the truth of such fantasticalities or to allow dogma arising from them to determine discourse on how we live, which laws pass, and whom we marry, without fierce resistance.

The one thing both O’Reilly and Coulter do get right is that there is a war going on, but it’s not between hapless Christians and “vicious” atheists. It is between rationalists who seek to live in ways they reason to be best, and the faithful cleaving to fatuous fables and Paleolithic preachments inscribed in ancient books that should be pulped, or at best preserved as exhibits for future students majoring in anthropology, with minors in mental derangement.

This isn’t about Christianity in particular, of course; Christianity is just the latest and currently one of the most popular dogmas among human beings around the globe, out of many thousands that have existed throughout human history, all of them generally involving deference to authority, submission to group thinking, hostility to individual thinking and questioning, and so on and so on. (A kind of intellectual socialism, if you like.) The existence of such dogmas is evidence about human nature… not about the reality of the universe.

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Tayler brings the issue closer to home in a follow-up essay on April 19th: Marco Rubio’s deranged religion, Ted Cruz’s bizarre faith: Our would-be presidents are God-fearing clowns. Subtitle: Rand Paul, Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton all spout pious religious lies. We must grill them on what they really mean

Note he doesn’t excuse Democrats; for that matter, more than a few suspect Obama of being more-or-less atheist, spouting religious platitudes as a job requirement. It’s unimaginable that any political candidate could get into office *without* at least spouting religious platitudes… and Obama knows (knew) it.

Professing belief in a fictitious celestial deity says a lot about the content of a person’s character, and what sort of policies he or she would likely favor. So, we should take a look at those who have announced so far, and what sort of religious views they hold.

He examines the announced Republicans first, pointedly, e.g.,

Among the faith-deranged, Rubio stands out. He briefly dumped one magic book for another, converting from Roman Catholicism to Mormonism and then back again. (Reporters take note: This is faith-fueled flip-flopping, which surely indicates a damning character flaw to be investigated. Flip-flopping of a different sort helped sink John Kerry’s 2004 presidential bid.) Yet even as a re-minted Catholic, Rubio cheats on the Pope with a megachurch in Miami called Christ Fellowship. As religion and politics blogger Bruce Wilson points out, Christ Fellowship is a hotbed of “demonology and exorcism, Young Earth creationism, and denial of evolution,” and is so intolerant it demands its prospective employees certify they are not “practicing homosexuals” and don’t cheat on their spouses. (Check out its manifesto under “About Us – What We Believe.”) As regards evolution, Rubio confesses that he’s “not a scientist” and so cannot presume to judge the fact of evolution on its merits, and holds that creationism should be taught in schools as just one of many “multiple theories” about our origins.

And he does not ignore Hillary.

Yet Hillary does believe. Not only that, she claims to have grown up in a family elbow-to-elbow with none other than the Almighty: “We talked with God, ate, studied, and argued with God.”

Reporters, to verify her truthfulness, might ask her to be more specific: what type of cuisine did God prefer? Did God use Cliff Notes while hitting the books with you? How was God in a debate? Did he, being God, simply smite with thunderbolts those he disagreed with? If she replies that she didn’t mean to be taken so literally, then what exactly constituted evidence of the Almighty’s presence in her home? Did she actually hear a voice respond as she prayed? Did she have visions? If so, did she consult a psychiatrist? Which was more likely – that she was rooming with God or that she was suffering some sort of protracted, especially vivid mental disturbance? There are meds for that.

And to the point, he asks candidates in general, do you endorse your religious teachings?

So, if you accept the Bible in its totality, do you think sex workers should be burned alive (Leviticus 21:9) or that gays should be put to death (Leviticus 20:13)? Should women submit to their husbands, per Colossians 3:18? Should women also, as commands 1 Timothy 2:11, study “in silence with full submission?” Would you adhere to Deuteronomy 20:10-14 and ask Congress to pass a law punishing rapists by fining them 50 shekels and making them marry their victims and forbidding them to divorce forever? Given that the Bible ordains genocide (as in 1 Samuel 15:3:), will you work for the release of Athanase Seromba, the Catholic priest imprisoned for his role in the mass Rwandan slaughter of 1994? Will you call on Congress to repeal the Thirteenth Amendment and reinstate slavery, since the Bible, in 1 Peter 2:18, de facto sanctions the horrific practice and demands that slaves submit to their “masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the cruel?” Please clarify.

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If any of the candidates have boned up on their Reza Aslan and laugh off your questions, telling you they don’t take the Bible literally, you might ask what scriptural authority they can cite that permits them to disavow some parts of their holy book but accept others. Answer: there is none.

Fortunately, times are changing. His second to last paragraph might well be true — *without saying* — within decades, in the US. It probably is true already, in some European countries. One can hope.

Posted in Culture, Religion | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Emperor’s New Clothes, Presidential Piety