Link Dump: Sites and Resources

Posted on Saturday 25 January 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

I’m going through a whole bunch of links that I’ve bookmarked over the past couple years — some of which I should link as ‘resources’ in my right sidebar, perhaps — but for now will note in this post.

Sites:

BibViz Project – Bible Contradictions, Misogyny, Violence, Inaccuracies interactively visualized – with lots of cool graphics

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Graphic: The Dummy’s Guide to the One True God

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The World Religions Tree — click on the graphic to expland and explore. (Of course, *your* religion is the one true religion, and all the others are wrong.)

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Evil Bible
A site that compiles the various “vicious criminal acts that the Bible promotes”, the sort of passages that modern Christians tend to ignore (though not all of them).

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Handy poster of Logical Fallacies

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A list of Gods We Don’t Believe In — two parallel lists; the difference between the Christian list and the atheists’ list is one, out of several hundred.

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Via Jerry Coyne:
A Venn diagram of woo and bollocks

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Graphic: 50 Years of Progress: Scientific Progress on one side; Religious Progress on the other side.

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Articles and posts:

Salon: Religion may not survive the internet. Subtitle: “There’s a reason churches are struggling to maintain membership, and it has nothing to do with Neil deGrasse Tyson”

The premise is that exposure to knowledge might erode religious belief, and perhaps this is happening. It seems to me the internet just as easily promotes insular groups who only look at sites that support their beliefs — whether left wing or right wing — and actually eroding any kind of common knowledge or cultural standards.

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A post on Adam Lee’s Daylight Atheism site: The Biggest Challenges to Staying Christian

A survey of doubts of believers (which I would take as, rather, reasons to not to believe in the first place).

1, Biblical contradictions and implausibilties
2, Conflict between Biblical worldview and “verifiable, widely accepted, and likely correct” scientific explanations
3, “Where is God?” — why in the presence of suffering you can’t count on ‘God’ being there
4, The bad behavior of ‘Christians’
5, How can Christian claims only they are right?

See his post for elaborations, and two other key points: arguments from religious confusion (i.e., out of so many religions, how can one decide which one is true?), and locality (i.e. the observations that most people’s religious convictions depend on one’s parents and where one grew up).

If there was a God, why would it not have revealed itself equally to everyone everywhere, throughout time?

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Another post by Adam Lee, #1m1w in the Bible, citing the many passages in the Bible that are explicitly not about one-man-one-woman “traditional” marriage.

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A post by Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist who is tireless in his attention to religion’s and theology’s presumptions on matters of truth: “When you insult my faith you go right to the heart of what makes me me”

I bookmarked this a while back, but really, he does incisive posts like this every week.

In another post, Coyne responds to Steven Pinker’s brilliant New Republic essay “Science Is Not Your Enemy”.

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A famous post by PZ Myers, responding to a common criticism of the ‘new atheist’ writers — Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens — that they do not understand the sophisticated thoughts of theologians: The Courtier’s Reply. From which I will supply a sample:

I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor’s boots, nor does he give a moment’s consideration to Bellini’s masterwork, On the Luminescence of the Emperor’s Feathered Hat. We have entire schools dedicated to writing learned treatises on the beauty of the Emperor’s raiment, and every major newspaper runs a section dedicated to imperial fashion; Dawkins cavalierly dismisses them all. He even laughs at the highly popular and most persuasive arguments of his fellow countryman, Lord D. T. Mawkscribbler, who famously pointed out that the Emperor would not wear common cotton, nor uncomfortable polyester, but must, I say must, wear undergarments of the finest silk.

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Blogger Greta Christina: What Would Convince You That You Were Wrong? The Difference Between Secular and Religious Faith (from 2008)

The difference is that secular ‘faith’ (not the appropriate word, but a word that is applied to science by folks who don’t understand science) is open to challenges; religious faith manages to be unchallengeable and privileged. Any scientific theory is open to refutation by evidence (from eager postdocs hoping to make their reputation and win a Nobel Prize, at the very least). What evidence would convince a believer that they are wrong? Apparently none; this is by definition irrationality.

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A Paul Krugman column, column about how the Republican Party promotes ignorance.

For these days [this] party dislikes the whole idea of applying critical thinking and evidence to policy questions. And no, that’s not a caricature: Last year the Texas G.O.P. explicitly condemned efforts to teach “critical thinking skills,” because, it said, such efforts “have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”

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TED talk by Daniel Dennett, responding to Rick Warren’s idea of a ‘purpose-drive’ life: Dan Dennett: Responding to Pastor Rick Warren.

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Classic post from 2009 from former-right-wing blogger Charles Johnson, on site Little Green Footballs, about Why I Parted Ways With The Right. Brief summary:

Support for fascists, for bigotry, for religious fanaticism, for anti-science, for homophobic bigotry, for anti-government lunacy, for conspiracy theories, for raging hate speech, for anti-Islamic bigotry, for “Hatred for President Obama that goes far beyond simply criticizing his policies, into racism, hate speech, and bizarre conspiracy theories”… and much, much more.

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Five Books: Author Susan Jacoby on Atheism

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The Crazies:
Right Wing Watch: More Evidence That David Barton’s ‘History’ Cannot Be Trusted

Speaking to the gullible. And also this about David Barton:

Barton Rewords Some of His Lies

Right Wing Watch regularly documents Barton’s crazy talk, including his venomous opinions about gays, but I can’t bother to document any more of them. Why does anyone pay attention to this person? (I guess you can fool *some* of the people all the time.)

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A cute comic about the incoherency of Biblical narrative.
Seems Perfectly Normal to Me

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Another, from The Oatmeal: How to Suck at Your Religion

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The Gays:

Slate: Gay Couples Do It Better

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The Atlantic: The Gay Guide to Wedded Bliss. Subtitle: “Research finds that same-sex unions are happier than heterosexual marriages. What can gay and lesbian couples teach straight ones about living in harmony?”

Posted in Atheism, Culture, Evolution, Lunacy, Psychology, Religion, Science, The Gays | Comments Off on Link Dump: Sites and Resources

Further On Up the Road

Posted on Saturday 25 January 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Last night’s favorite song, actually, still listening to Springsteen’s The Rising.

Posted in Music | Comments Off on Further On Up the Road

Fundamentalist Curricula

Posted on Friday 24 January 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

An essay posted both at Alternet and Salon this week; I’m a High School Atheist Going to Christian School That Uses a Curriculum Written by Fundamentalists; both posts subtitled the article “If teaching ‘God’s point of view’ requires blatant mistruths, maybe it’s time to rethink God’s point of view”.

It’s about an high school student in a southern state being taught something called ACE, Accelerated Christian Education, who comes to discover that this curriculum is not exactly fair in its representation of the science of evolution.

It was only when I started to think about it that I realized there is a whole scientific community backing up this theory of evolution. I realized it would take a massive conspiracy on the part of the scientific community to cover up the idea that maybe evolution wasn’t airtight. This is no problem for ACE. From what I can tell, they think there is a massive conspiracy to disprove God with the theory of evolution. The problem with that should be plainly obvious. To say that evolution disproves God is fundamentally wrong. It says nothing of the sort.

With an open mind, I began a simple Google search to find the evidence [http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/lines_01] behind the theory of evolution. Imagine my genuine surprise when I found a mountain of it. I had always been led to believe, not just by ACE, but also by organizations like Answers In Genesis, that the fossil record disproved evolution. It doesn’t. Not only did I find fossil evidence, I found DNA and vestigial evidence as well. I found out that there is no denial of science among evolutionary biologists.

Needless to say, my opinion of Accelerated Christian Education only deteriorated from that point on. All it takes is one broken egg to realize they are all spoiled. Being too young to understand what was going on at the time (as I suspect most ACE students are), I didn’t realize the complete demonization of the word “socialism.” I didn’t understand that ethically, they should not have been feeding me the type of right-wing propaganda [http://leavingfundamentalism.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/how-ace-promotes-right-wing-propaganda/] that seems so obvious now.

When taking such concerns to the principal, the principal responds, “Tyler, how do you feel about Jesus?” – which sorta misses the point entirely, and, of course, exposes the religious agenda of science-denial.

It’s not that the people around me identify with my criticisms and have rational answers for them. Rather, they misunderstand why I believe what I do and they are only concerned with my (in their opinion) inevitable conversion to Christianity. It seems to me they take for granted that when someone has without bias considered Christianity against its alternatives, that individual will then turn to Christianity and never look back. This is a somewhat ironic phenomenon that is not uniquely Christian, but is rather inherent to any religious belief. Of course, you see the problem. If every religion thinks it is the only one that makes perfect sense, it’s going to be extremely difficult to determine which religion is telling the truth, if any of them.

This is just one of a number of criticisms I have of Christianity, or of any religious faith, for that matter. It declares itself the only true religion, and then tries to demonstrate exactly why this is the case. The other way around would be infinitely more convincing to me. Yet I feel like the people around me will not hear my criticisms, no matter how persuasive I try to be. I think the reason for this is that questioning is seen as sin, at least by most Christians. They think, “If Satan has you doubting, he’s got you right where he wants you,” and subsequently try to eradicate all thought of skepticism.

Posted in Atheism, Religion | Comments Off on Fundamentalist Curricula

Are Some Folks Beyond Rational Thinking?

Posted on Friday 24 January 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

A classic post from Alternet that popped up in my Fb feed today for some reason — Human Stupidity Is Destroying the World.

Do you believe in angels? Forty-five percent of Americans do. In fact, roughly 48 percent – Republicans and Democrats alike – believe in some form of creationism. A hilariously large percent of terrified right-wingers are convinced Obama is soon going to take away all their guns, so when the Newtown shooting happened and 20 young children were massacred due to America’s fetish for, obsession with and addiction to firearms, violence and fear, they bought more bullets. Because obviously.

It goes on, aggressively. Or dangerously, for delicate sensibilities.

Brings to mind a stunning study about facts and truths. Have you ever heard it? It goes something like: Here is hard evidence, scientific evidence, irrefutable proof that something is or is not true. Here is dinosaur bone, for example, which we know beyond a doubt is between 60 and 70 million years old. Amazing! Obviously!

But then comes the impossible snag: If you are hard-coded to believe otherwise, if your TV network or your ideology, your pastor or your lack of education tell you differently, you will still not believe it. No matter what. No matter how many facts, figures, common senses slap you upside the obvious. You will think there is conspiracy, collusion, trickery afoot. The Bible says that bone is only eight thousand years old. Science is elitist. Liberals hate God. The end.

It is not enough to say people believe what they want to believe. They will also believe it in the face of irrefutable counter-evidence and millennia of fundamental proof.

This! This is what stuns and stupefies liberals and progressives of every intellectual stripe. We cannot understand. We cannot compute. We think, “Well, if more people just had the facts, just heard a reasonable and cogent argument or read up on the real science, surely they would change their minds? Surely they would see the error in their thinking?”

Oh, liberals. All those smarts, and still so naïve.

This does suggest that human nature is not always about evaluating evidence. And that human folk can ‘get by’ (as discussed in previous posts), living healthy and prosperous lives, without necessarily understanding what is true about the real world….

Posted in Culture, Evolution, Lunacy, Science, Thinking | Comments Off on Are Some Folks Beyond Rational Thinking?

A-Unicornist

Posted on Monday 20 January 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

There are dozens or hundreds of blogs on the web to reflect any interest, and there is only so much time in the day to keep up on any set of them. So my bookmarked list of sites to check each day or every few days is constantly in flux. There are bloggers whom I endorse 100% — their opinions reflect my own — but for that very reason I don’t necessarily need to keep on on them. I am not looking merely for validation; I am looking for sites that are not hostile to my philosophical stance and that at the same time provide thoughts and inputs I may not have already considered.

So, among the ‘atheist’ sites and bloggers I follow is one I’ve just come across in the past few days, called The A-Unicornist, whose title indicates my interest; ‘atheism’ is a bothersome word because it’s a negative, much like (a notion captured in some other site and blog titles) being a non-stamp collector. Not believing in ‘god’ is precisely the same as not believing in unicorns. Or faeries.

Anyway, my gateway into this guy’s site was this post: Eight totally non-polemic books you should read to be a better atheist (or to learn about atheism). Note that these are not books about atheism (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris). I’ve read several of the titles on his list, have heard of several others, but have not heard of two or three. I’ve been browsing a book on basic philosophy recently, and I’m most notably interested in Lakoff title, because it addresses the obvious observations about the ancient Greek philosophers that most of their ideas have been demonstrated wrong (by science), as the description here notes.

…while the great philosophers often correctly identified important conundrums, they lacked the means to properly test their theses. The Cartesian person of dualistic natures, the Kantian autonomous person, the utilitarian and phenomenological persons, the Chomskyan syntactic person – are all non-existent. The mind is inherently embodied, abstractions are metaphorical constructs arising from the mind (contra Platonic realism), and much of reasoning is unconscious – rendering a priori introspection a futile model for understanding the self and reality.

The blogger, Mike D, points to Neil Degrasse Tyson’s list of 8 Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read.

Lots of good stuff on this blog; he’s been at it for five years or so, and seems very well-read (especially as an amateur; he’s a personal trainer by trade).

Posted in Atheism, Culture, Religion | Comments Off on A-Unicornist

Deciding What Is True

Posted on Monday 20 January 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

First [reposted from my Facebook page], a fascinating article in The Atlantic (via Andrew Sullivan) about how Rush Limbaugh decides what is true.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/01/how-rush-limbaugh-decides-what-is-true/283078/

Essentially, if someone is a conservative (the example is Clarence Thomas), Limbaugh *knows* they are innocent of any charges; if they are not (the example is Chris Christie), there’s no way to tell.

Perhaps this is a clue as to why ideologues on the one side vs rational people on the other seem to keep speaking past each other – they have such different methods of deciding what to believe. For ideologues (of any stripe), ideology trumps evidence and reason.

Second, via Jerry Coyne, a 2007 article about The religious recalcitrance of Americans. Coyne is quoting a commentator about that survey, whom I will in turn quote:

When asked what they would do if scientists were to disprove a particular religious belief, nearly two-thirds (64%) of people say they would continue to hold to what their religion teaches rather than accept the contrary scientific finding, according to the results of an October 2006 Time magazine poll.

This isn’t really a surprise, since many things religions have taught over the past millennia have been proven to be untrue, notably the six-day creation story. How much more evidence would anyone need for evolution? And yet millions reject it in favor of religious myths.

But both of these examples show that many people simply are not rational; they are not guided by evidence and reason, but by ideology, tradition, and faith. Which is sad; they are apparently unable to engage with the real world.

Posted in Religion, Thinking | Comments Off on Deciding What Is True

Review of Dallas Buyers Clubs

Posted on Monday 20 January 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

[Reposted from Facebook]

OK, so we finally saw Dallas Buyers Club, now that two of its actors, Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto, are not only nominated for Oscars but are favored to win. We saw the preview for this film a number of times last Fall (when we were seeing Captain Phillips and 12 Years a Slave et al), but I think I was put off seeing it by the impression that the lead character was just a very unpleasant fellow.

Well, he is, an unpleasant fellow — a Texas cowboy who, presumably via unprotected sex with a variety of hookers and rodeo groupies, contracts HIV, back in 1986, and reacts furiously when questioned by medical staff about possible sex with other men. The arc of the film’s plot follows his independent (remarkably thorough) research into potential drugs that might keep him alive past his 30-day diagnosis, leading him to Mexico and other countries, and eventually his setting up of a ‘buyers club’ to provide medications to those who need them via a ‘membership’ scheme, and his gradual softening to his fellow victims, including a transsexual, Rayon (played by Jared Leto), who eventually becomes his business partner. (There were apparently other such ‘buyers clubs’ in other cities, to circumvent FDA regulations; especially San Francisco.)

Both McConaughey’s and Leto’s performances are amazing and excruciating, in the sense they are pushing limits of playing unpleasant characters and in the sense that both actors lost lots of weight; for their art, they convincingly look gaunt and unhealthy. Since Oscars often go to actors/actresses who push physical limits and/or who play unconventional characters, yes, I would agree that they are the matter-of-fact front-runners.

The social theme in the film is the evil of structured medical procedures and the FDA, which (at least at the time) held off approval of drugs like AZT until year-long double-blind studies could be done…while victims were dying within weeks. Ron Woodroof, McConaughey’s character, had a point, and though as history played out, he lost his lawsuit against the FDA, the FDA did in fact change its policies to fast-track certain drugs for those who were terminally ill and had no other options. And he lived 7 years, 6 more than his original diagnosis.

Posted in Films | Comments Off on Review of Dallas Buyers Clubs

I Visit You in Another Dream

Posted on Thursday 16 January 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Today’s favorite song, from Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising

“I break above the waves, I feel the sun upon my face.”

It’s a beautiful song, even though it’s about a terrorist suicide bomber… see here

Posted in Music | Comments Off on I Visit You in Another Dream

Vast Universe

Posted on Thursday 16 January 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

A Huffington Post by MIT physicist Max Tegmark — promoting his new book, in part — discusses the implications of recent physics that implies our universe is just one in a multiverse.

That our universe is approximately described by mathematics means that some but not all of its properties are mathematical, and is a venerable idea dating back to the ancient Greeks. That it is mathematical means that all of its properties are mathematical, i.e., that it has no properties at all except mathematical ones.

…it also implies that our reality is vastly larger than we thought, containing a diverse collection of universes obeying all mathematically possible laws of physics. An advanced computer program could in principle start generating an atlas of all such mathematically possible universes. The discovery of other solar systems has taught us that 8, the number of planets in ours, doesn’t tell us anything fundamental about reality, merely something about which particular solar system we inhabit — the number 8 is essentially part of our cosmic ZIP code. Similarly, this mathematical atlas tells us that if we one day discover the equations of quantum gravity and print them on a T-shirt, we should not hübristically view these equations as the “Theory of Everything,” but as information about our location in the mathematical atlas of the ultimate multiverse.

Posted in Philosophy, Science | Comments Off on Vast Universe

Homosexuality and Morality

Posted on Thursday 16 January 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Slate’s Nathaniel Frank explores the reasoning of the Oklahoma judge who, for now, struck down the state’s gay marriage ban. Last para:

What courts really mean — or should mean — in barring “moral disapproval” as the basis for laws is that arbitrary moral disapproval is improper, not all moral disapproval. The taboo against homosexuality is an arbitrary moral disapproval. Homosexuality harms no one. It’s not, it turns out, a morally bad thing at all. It’s just that lots of people and lots of big religions have subscribed to this taboo for so long that it became acceptable to simply deem gayness immoral. What people really mean when they call homosexuality immoral, for the most part, is either that they find it icky or that their religion forbids it—and for no discernable reason, or at least not one that has any capacity to help make life better or worse for people in today’s world, the true basis of morality. Indeed, despite huge recent advancements in tolerance of gay people, homosexuality stands virtually alone as the one thing Americans are comfortable calling “immoral” without ever having to explain why.

Key passage: “What people really mean when they call homosexuality immoral, for the most part, is either that they find it icky or that their religion forbids it — and for no discernible reason, or at least not one that has any capacity to help make life better or worse for people in today’s world, the true basis of morality.” Which is to say, what is morality, if not merely appeal to a rulebook of bronze-age sheepherders (whose ‘morality’ was apparently to maximize the size of the their tribe, thus proscripting any male sexual activity that would not lead to children — and approving of others we would not, like wedding one’s brother’s widow.)

For more along these lines, see the website of ‘gay moralist’ John Corvino, http://johncorvino.com/, and his numerous videos. I read his book a few months ago, but I’ve been negligent about blogging it, that and several other recent reads.

Posted in Culture, The Gays | Comments Off on Homosexuality and Morality