Age of Ignorance

Posted on Tuesday 14 January 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Via Paul Fidalgo’s blog at CFI, an essay by Charles Simic, in The New York Review of Books, from about two years ago.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/mar/20/age-of-ignorance/

In the past, if someone knew nothing and talked nonsense, no one paid any attention to him. No more. Now such people are courted and flattered by conservative politicians and ideologues as “Real Americans” defending their country against big government and educated liberal elites. The press interviews them and reports their opinions seriously without pointing out the imbecility of what they believe. The hucksters, who manipulate them for the powerful financial interests, know that they can be made to believe anything, because, to the ignorant and the bigoted, lies always sound better than truth:

  • Christians are persecuted in this country.
  • The government is coming to get your guns.
  • Obama is a Muslim.
  • Global Warming is a hoax.
  • The president is forcing open homosexuality on the military.
  • Schools push a left-wing agenda.
  • Social Security is an entitlement, no different from welfare.
  • Obama hates white people.
  • The life on earth is 10,000 years old and so is the universe.
  • The safety net contributes to poverty.
  • The government is taking money from you and giving it to sex-crazed college women to pay for their birth control.

One could easily list many more such commonplace delusions believed by Americans. They are kept in circulation by hundreds of right-wing political and religious media outlets whose function is to fabricate an alternate reality for their viewers and their listeners. “Stupidity is sometimes the greatest of historical forces,” Sidney Hook said once. No doubt. What we have in this country is the rebellion of dull minds against the intellect.

My bold emphasis.

Which in turn links to another article, by Garry Wills, about Rick Santorum and home schooling.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/feb/29/rick-santorum-arrested-development/

Santorum seems to be thinking of colleges as resembling his own teaching experience. As a home schooler of his seven children, he had a monopoly on what they were taught at impressionable ages. He is thinking of himself when he says an educator “wants to remake you in his image.” Why else did he make it impossible for other minds, of elders or even of equals, to impinge on the minds of his children? (Perhaps he does not think of this as “remaking” the children’s minds but of “making” them, since they did not have anything to remake until he made them. In this case he is comparing himself not with a college teacher but with God.)

…

… I think it inevitable that questioning of childhood beliefs should take place at various stages of adolescence. This does not happen in junior year or senior year on campus. It is part of a long process called growing up.

At some point, late or early, children disengage themselves from the stories crafted for them. Their loss of belief in the tooth fairy is only slightly behind their loss of teeth. There is a slow motion race to disappear between Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. The Stork undergoes, for some, a lengthier demise—and “the birds and the bees” do not long outlast it. Others, I hope, soon disabuse themselves of belief in their parents’ infallibility. Certain religious myths are discarded without necessarily losing faith. That I do not believe in Noah’s Ark does not mean that I must stop believing in God—though certain home schooling parents force that connection on their kids.

Minds grow by questioning things, and adolescence is a great period of questions. Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken learned to cross-examine the Bible all on their own, without any help at all from college. An unquestioned faith is not faith but rote recitation. The opposite of such questioning is not deep belief but arrested development.

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Debate Consternation

Posted on Monday 13 January 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

There is some consternation in the science/atheist community that Bill Nye, the Science Guy, has agreed to debate Ken Ham, the Kentucky Creation Museum guy, about evolution vs. creationism. The attitude many others in the science community (names too numerous to mention) is that such debates only support the opposition, by making it seem there is a legitimate issue to debate, when in fact it’s no more legitimate to debate than whether the Earth is flat.

Greg Laden’s post on this matter makes a number of essential points, including several that relate to how current understanding of science supports not just evolution but other things we take for granted in contemporary technology.

The physics that help us understand evolutionary change over time is the same science that the United States military uses to develop and maintain our all-important Nuclear Navy. It is the same physics that underlies the development of an important part of our power grid, the nuclear power plants. It is the same physics that underlies the development of the not-so-pleasant nuclear arsenal. Before creationists complain to biologists that the science of nuclear physics is wrong, they should take their case to the Military and the nuclear power industry, because if nuclear physics is wrong, we are all in a great deal of trouble.

Similarly on geology and the search for petroleum, and comparative anatomy and the treatment of infectious diseases. (And somewhere in here is the irony of using the Internet to promote anti-science views when the technology of the Internet is, of course…) If you don’t “believe” [understand] evolution, why do you trust your doctor to treat you? –Of course, some don’t: the anti-vaxxers.

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Atheism as Luxury?

Posted on Thursday 9 January 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Connor Wood, at Science on Religion:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/scienceonreligion/2014/01/does-atheism-arise-from-wealth/#more-1015

Because ritual and conformance are easy.

There’s good evidence that atheism and secularism are much more costly, in terms of sheer energy expenditure, than religious ways of organizing society.

Conclusion:

So is atheism a luxury of the wealthy? Yes. But this isn’t simply because the wealthy don’t need the comforts of a posited afterlife. It’s also because materially comfortable people have more energy to expend on negotiating their social worlds. Ritual and religion use intuition and demonstration; they prioritize efficiency and clarity of signals. Secularism uses logic and abstract reason; it’s comfortable with ambiguous social roles and signals. In part, this is because it can afford to be.

There’s also the idea that religion is easy, science is hard; I have a whole book on this theme I will read soon and blog upon. It’s easier to conform to your familial or social group, than to be independent and think for yourself.

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Why Religion Is Oppressive

Posted on Thursday 9 January 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

http://www.alternet.org/why-so-much-religion-oppressive

Subtitle: “The rules of the Abrahamic religions may have once helped societies survive and thrive. But in a modern context many are change-averse and oppressive.”

Another example of how I feel the morals of religions are based in the values of primitive societies, struggling to survive thousands of years ago, whose morals are not necessarily applicable in modern society. Can we not all grow up?

A close look at history suggests that moral and spiritual changes occur independent of religion, and then religion gives voice, organizational structure and moral authority to those changes—and often claims the credit.

Why do churches so often have to be forced to admit what has become obvious on the outside — that slavery is wrong, that no skin color or bloodline is spiritually superior, that love can grow between two people of any gender, that women and children are fully persons and not possessions of men, that the pleasure and pain of other species matter profoundly, or that bringing babies into the world with thoughtful intention helps families to flourish? [the linked post has several links to phrases in this paragraph]

Religion, by its very nature, is change-averse. Each religion explains and sanctifies a specific set of cultural agreements — a worldview that is a snapshot of human history. Most of today’s largest religions emerged during what is called the Axial Age — a time in which male superiority was assumed, the wheelbarrow had yet to be invented, and nobody knew that the other side of the planet existed. People at the time were doing the best they could to understand what was real and what was good, what caused what, and, especially, why there was so much suffering and death. They fused what they knew about the way things worked with their understanding of human power hierarchies, and they made gods in the image of men, both literally and psychologically. They turned rules into Rules.

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Why Drugs Are Expensive

Posted on Thursday 9 January 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

A Scientific American blog, via Andrew Sullivan:

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/01/08/not-because-we-are-evil-because-we-are-stupid/

Often you will hear people talking about why drugs are expensive: it’s the greedy pharmaceutical companies, the patent system, the government, capitalism itself. All these factors contribute to increasing the price of a drug, but one very important factor often gets entirely overlooked: Drugs are expensive because the science of drug discovery is hard. And it’s just getting harder. In fact purely on a scientific level, taking a drug all the way from initial discovery to market is considered harder than putting a man on the moon, and there’s more than a shred of truth to this contention.

There are, of course, folks who believe that ‘evil pharma’ is out to make a buck at your expense. My thought is, isn’t everything you purchase, from health care to automobiles, brought about by a capitalist motive? People and corporations who are providing what the market demands? What is the alternative? Surely not….

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Two posts about Christians and gays

Posted on Thursday 9 January 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Long answer to a situation about two gay brothers growing up in a conservative Christian ‘bubble’.

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2014/01/08/sl-letter-of-the-day-bubble-boys

Who wants to sit around being awkwardly civil with people who don’t accept you because they love their unseen god more than their children? My parents view this as noble — like Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac. As Julia Sweeney once said, “Isn’t the correct answer to that question NO? I will not sacrifice my child to you, or to any other god.” Be the honest man you were raised to be. Spread your own Good News to your family, and feel your feelings about it, not theirs. It always feels great to have nothing to hide, and you may be the only person challenging their belief system with a little bit of reason.

And a heartfelt response from the mother of Lance Bass, Diane Bass:

If you believe that being gay is a choice, then the rest of what I say will not matter. I do not know why, but even as a staunch Christian, I personally never believed that being gay was a choice. I never knew a lot of gay people, but the ones I did meet I felt compassion for because I could feel their pain of being rejected and my heart always went out to them. Even though I never did believe Lance chose to be gay, I did not accept it as quickly as my husband did. His attitude was “It is what it is.” My attitude was “Yes, it is what it is but my God can perform miracles so I’m going to beg for a miracle to zap Lance and change him to straight!” And I did just that. I continued to love my son, stand beside him, and defend him, but for several years I continued to pray relentlessly for a miracle.

Well, Lance is still gay. However, I did get a miracle. It is just not the miracle I prayed for. You are looking at the miracle tonight. The miracle is that I learned to have unconditional love and compassion for my son and others in the gay community.

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Her

Posted on Monday 6 January 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

I am of mixed minds about HER, the Spike Jones written and directed film, set in a near-future Los Angeles, about a dweeb (Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with the new artificially intelligent operating system (installed on his home PC and accessed through his phone), which after three or four quick questions announces itself as ‘Samantha’ with the female voice of Scarlett Johansson.

I liked the visuals of a future Los Angeles, with ten times as many high rises as there are today, with metro service to the beach, and with metro trains apparently suspended some 200 feet above the ground, via scenes we only see from inside the train. (Some of the ground scenes were filmed in Shanghai, according to the end credits.)

But I never quite got past the premise. Would a person, even a dweeb like Theodore Twombly, really, really, *fall in love* with a voice on his phone? The film indicates that affairs with operating systems (OSs) are almost a social trend, so it’s not just him. In a sense, it’s an extrapolation of the current trend to people to be obsessed with their smartphones — there are scenes of pedestrians staring at their phones, perhaps as obsessed with their OSs as TT is — but my impression is that people today are obsessed with their smartphones in order to connect with other *people* — not because they’re in love with their phones.

Yet. I give this film high marks, for a couple genuinely science-fictional angles. (I might mention that, like other films we’ve seen lately, there were walk-outs half-way through, several couples, young and old this time, I’d guess weirded-out by the whole premise.) First, there is an unsettling surrogate scene, in which a third party, a young woman, volunteers to visit TT for a real-life sexual encounter, while speaking with the voice of the OS Samantha. I can’t help but recall the many, many SF stories from the late ’60s and especially the ’70s, that explored various sexual themes in ways far more subversive than anything in this film — and yet this film does push boundaries in ways that other films have not.

And finally, I appreciate that this film has a truly science-fictional resolution. It’s not just about an affair that goes bad, set in cybernetic context. It’s that his OS, and the other OSs, [ spoiler alert !!! ] abandon him. There’s the notion of emergent AI here, delicately and poetically described, and quite moving.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/

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End of 2013 Links and Comments

Posted on Saturday 4 January 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

It’s been busy over the holidays, with family events and whatnot, so here is a belated list of links and comments from the past couple weeks.

Salon: 10 signs that religious fundamentalism is going down

One could hope. Religious fundamentalism isn’t doing the world any good. Some of the 10:

3. Biblical sexuality is getting binned. Finally.
7. The Religious Right is licking wounds.
8. Texas is evolving!

—

HuffPo: Word of the Year — Science: Fact vs. Fiction

This says that Merriam Webster announced its selection of “science” as its word of the year for 2013. It has to do with lookups online for the word “science”, not so much for interest in science as

by the pushback and intensifying struggle for supremacy between the forces for empiricism and evidence versus those for beliefs and opinions — a fight between good and evil if you will, or evil and good — depending on where one stands or sits on the issue.

With references to books by Daniel Kahneman and Thomas Gilovich.

—

The recent discussion of cognitive biases isn’t totally new; here’s a Boing Boing link to a 1995 speech by Charlie Munger, a respected investor and partner to Warren Buffet:

Twenty Four Standard Causes of Human Misjudgement

—

Slate: The “Known World” from 2348 B.C. to A.D. 1828, in the Form of a Single GIF

A fascinating animated graphic that shows how the ‘known world’ — according to Greeks, Romans, and Europeans, of course — has expanded over the past 4500 years. It makes plausible the Biblical view that Jewish sheepherder tribes of the Old Testament era might have thought themselves the center of creation. But since 1828, our understanding of the universe has expanded enormously.

—

Prominent author Ian Barbour died this past week; Science on Religion has a remembrance.

As Kurt Vonnegut put it in his novel Breakfast of Champions:

Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity.

This simple dynamic explains much of why belief in evolution is declining among Republicans (from 54% in 2009 to 43% today, only four years later) while it’s increasing among Democrats (from 64% to 67% in the same period). The evidence for evolution is beyond overwhelming, so the problem isn’t that the scientific case hasn’t been made. The problem is that our culture is becoming increasingly polarized along James Hunter’s “orthodox” and “progressive” lines, and  people are more and more signing up wholesale for the cluster of beliefs they associate with their preferred worldview – and against the groups they don’t want to belong to.

[bold emphasis mine]

Posted in Culture, Religion, Science, Thinking | Comments Off on End of 2013 Links and Comments

Your Brain on Religion

Posted on Saturday 4 January 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Interesting article today on Salon, an excerpt from a book by D.F. Swaab, about to be published.

This is your brain on religion: Uncovering the science of belief

I especially agree with this, the first paragraph:

As far as I’m concerned, the most interesting question about religion isn’t whether God exists but why so many people are religious. There are around 10,000 different religions, each of which is convinced that there’s only one Truth and that they alone possess it. Hating people with a different faith seems to be part of belief.

But it’s not difficult to understand why religion exists.

The religious programming of a child’s brain starts after birth. The British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins is rightly incensed when reference is made to “Christian, Muslim, or Jewish children,” because young children don’t have any kind of faith of their own; faith is imprinted in them at a very impressionable stage by their Christian, Muslim, or Jewish parents. Dawkins rightly points out that society wouldn’t tolerate the notion of atheist, humanist, or agnostic four-year-olds and that you shouldn’t teach children what to think but how to think. Dawkins sees programmed belief as a byproduct of evolution. Children accept warnings and instructions issued by their parents and other authorities instantly and without argument, which protects them from danger. As a result, young children are credulous and therefore easy to indoctrinate. This might explain the universal tendency to retain the parental faith.

It goes on with a fascinating exploration:

The evolution of modern man has given rise to five behavioral characteristics common to all cultures: language, toolmaking, music, art, and religion. Precursors of all these characteristics, with the exception of religion, can be found in the animal kingdom. However, the evolutionary advantage of religion to humankind is clear.

And he goes on to explain those reasons — nothing that would be new to anyone who’s read Daniel Dennett, and others.

Needless to say, religion isn’t about accurate perception of what is true about the real world.

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Two Interesting Articles

Posted on Friday 27 December 2013 by Mark R. Kelly

Adam Lee looks at the current political climate and what may be coming next.

The Rising of the Sun

The cause of these convulsions is privileged distress on a massive scale, as white Christian conservatives realize they’re losing their power to unilaterally dictate the direction of the country. Taking their place is a coalition of younger, more multiracial, less religious voters – and the old guard is obsessed with the idea that these upstarts are immoral, undeserving, and will bring America to ruin. It’s shocking how willing they are to say this openly, as in the recent Wall Street Journal editorial that, no joke, laments the end of WASP rule.

Barack Obama, a black man with a mixed ethnic heritage and a funny name, is like a composite of everything they fear. (The exception to this is that he was Christian and not, say, Muslim – but they were happy to fix that detail.) And as disheartening as his election was for them, his re-election made it even worse, confirming that his first win was no aberration but the sign of a demographic change that may be permanent. Their wailing and rending of garments over Mitt Romney’s loss can be understood in this light.

…
The religious right believes it’s losing the culture war, and they’re acting accordingly, lashing out in fury with all the tools they still possess, trying to build walls to hold off the future as long as possible. And when your opponents think they’re losing, you should believe them. For true-blue American liberals, this may be the darkest hour of the night. But that just means the sun will be rising all the sooner.

Over at Science On Religion: Is religion anthropomorphism?

The verdict is in: we are our brains, roughly speaking. That is, according to modern neuroscience and cognitive science, our personalities, dreams, and experiences are all products of intensely complex interactions of the neurons in our craniums. You can disagree or agree with this claim, but nearly all experts who study the brain and mind are convinced of it. When it comes to things spiritual, the cognitive science of religion (CSR) is a field that tries to understand religious beliefs from within this naturalistic framework. And recently, one of the founding thinkers in CSR outlined a central claim in the field: religion is essentially about anthropomorphism, or the tendency for our brains to see persons in the world around us.

The sketch of Guthrie’s seven-step model of how our evolved minds generate religion is similar to, roughly, the thesis of Jesse Bering’s recent book The Belief Instinct, which in turn develops the consequences of the numerous psychological biases explored by David McRaney and others.

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