What's your excuse?

The problem with books, arguments and ideas that claim to explain everything is that they invariably explain nothing. I can't remember who said that originally but I remember Christopher Hitchens using a similar line in a debate with a religious apologist once, it was a powerful quip in that debate and certainly rings true with my experience of life so far.

The cartoon above illustrates this problem nicely using the Bible as the source of the "explanation of everything" but the same can equally be said of the Koran, the book of Mormon and many other so called "holy texts". As concious beings who have evolved to seek reasons for experiences, we crave the quick fix, the silver bullet or the fast-buck, life is short and most of the time we recognise the difficulty in finding the real solutions to hard questions; on the whole we would rather outsource stuff like that so that we can get on with the business of surviving, thriving and investing in our selfish genes.

Unfortunately for us Humans the best (as in most successful in history) way of finding answers to things is Science, but science is hard; it's also complicated, time consuming and sometimes very expensive and by definition incomplete. Because of this a lot of people view it with indifference and sometimes even resistance, they prefer the easy route, they "outsource" their answers if you will. Of course for some people the unexamined life works out just fine (in an evolutionary sense), for the rest of us the feeling of dissatisfaction with not knowing and more importantly not knowing how to get to know for ourselves is unacceptable and overwhelming.

Gender equality

Overall Gender Equality

Religiosity (dark = less religious)

The top chart shows overall gender equality by country, green is good (equal) and orange is bad (i.e. unequal); the bottom chart shows religiosity by country, dark = less religious and light = more religious. Obviously these kinds of generalisations can only ever be generalised by definition and clearly correlation doesn't prove causation but it's pretty unlikely such strong correlation is a complete coincidence either, I'm left asking why do religious men in power distrust women so much?

Survived!

Surprisingly I made it to work this morning in record time, my route was deserted and looked like a post zombie apocalypse movie with leaves, rubbish, road signs, branches and the odd tree strewn around the place (fortunately no zombies). The Atlantic storm that passed over the UK early this morning peaked for us at around 6 am and the wind was loud enough to wake the whole family, luckily nothing was damaged.

There are lots of pictures of fallen trees and smashed cars in the media this morning it would seem that we were lucky although I did spend a useful hour yesterday securing loose fencing panels and tidying away kids junk in our garden, I even got some new batteries for our torch which was unusually forward thinking for me. It must be said that the 2-3 days of pre-warning for this storm has been reassuring, clearly those computer models are getting better and better all the time.

I couldn't resist a quick look at the Met Office WEB site on the subject of computing power and the data there would suggest that the computers being used to run the models today are roughly a million times faster than they were in 1987 when the last big hurricane-strength storm blasted through the UK, then no one had the first clue it was coming.

Theology for dummies

As usual the excellent JesusAndMo gets to the crux of the big question, to be honest I'm not sure what the question is exactly but whatever it is theology almost certainly isn't the answer.

I hope you remembered to send a card

I saw a tweet today that read, "Congratulations, the universe is 6017 years old today!", after a bit of Googling I discovered that Bishop James Ussher, a 16th Century theologian worked out "based on an intricate correlation of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean histories and Holy writ" that the universe was created by God (presumably Yahweh and not Zeus?) on 23rd October 4004 BC. This is an interesting calculation not only is it incredibly precise it seems that Yahweh never bothered to tell the Chinese who were busy building community centres, cemeteries, and kilns around this time, he also neglected to inform the Sumerians either who by 4000 BC had already invented beer, writing and multiplication tables, essential ingredients for student life ever since. For a supernatural being who can create universes by willing them into existence Yahweh would appear to be a hopeless communicator on all other fronts.

Thanks to some rather more rigorous work done by generations of scientists living since Usshers time we now know that the universe is around 14 billion years old and our own planet some 9.5 billion years younger than that. For the first billion years of planet Earth there was no life at all, then for the next 2.9 billion years there was nothing but bacteria, then, around 600 million years ago things got a little more interesting and the slime started to evolve legs, teeth and fins. Since then we've seen cycles of expansion and extinction, many times over across billions of generations of creatures; modern humans only appeared on the scene a few hundred thousand years ago and recorded history started a mere 70 centuries ago all of which make the Christian creation myth believed by intellectuals of his time like Ussher considerably less interesting and awe inspiring than reality, I wonder what Ussher would have made of it?

Artists...

Unfortunate Church art or Freudian slip regarding the content of the philosophy? Regardless of which it's smirk-worthy for fans of infantile toilet humour (like me)..

Shoulders of giants

It interests me what Atheists of the past thought about the idea of God and religions, their rationale I suppose. Across the historical surface of theoretical physics there lies the formidable indentation of Paul Dirac, a modest man who came up with an equation that unified previously impenetrable fields of quantum mechanics and special relativity, and here it is..

These are subjects I do not begin to understand but from from what little I can fathom from reading about his solution to this problem I can appreciate the superhuman feat of reasoning that it took to crack it. The following passage is what he thought about religion early on in his life, apparently he mellowed slightly in older age as we all do. I find it fascinating to read his thoughts and reassuring in some ways that more and more people seem to hold with such views or at least are less concerned about expressing them openly.

I cannot understand why we idle discussing religion. If we are honest—and scientists have to be—we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions. I can't for the life of me see how the postulate of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this assumption leads to such unproductive questions as why God allows so much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich and all the other horrors He might have prevented. If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit. Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people. Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the State and the Church. Both need the illusion that a kindly God rewards—in heaven if not on earth—all those who have not risen up against injustice, who have done their duty quietly and uncomplainingly. That is precisely why the honest assertion that God is a mere product of the human imagination is branded as the worst of all mortal sins.

Paul Dirac

Sticks and stones..

I read this little gem today; apparently Malaysian Muslims are upset that people of other faiths are using their word for God "Allah" to refer to Gods that aren't "Allah". You'd think that since any word by definition is an abstraction, a reference to something and not the actual thing itself they would be quite pleased that other people found one of their words useful, apparently not.

No doubt this court ruling will prompt all kinds of church burnings, stone throwing and general mayhem until something else distracts the mob. In my experience religious apologists of every shade bristle with indignation whenever secularists and atheists poke fun at religion, on this occasion such a ruling deserves ridicule plain and simple, haven't these people got anything more productive to do with their time? Then again, I suppose it beats working for a living and in the "pointless ways human beings harm themselves" stakes probably doesn't trump getting crushed to death whilst contemplating similar invisible beings.

Brick by brick..

I read today that the scouting association has finally relented and offered an alternative pledge for people that don't want to swear allegiance to someone else's anthropomorphic ideas about the creator of the universe. Although what the origin of the universe has to do with helping old ladies across the road is another question entirely, probably something to do with woggles. I suppose this is progress of some kind, an tiny change to syntax and a big step in semantics, a slight movement in the zeitgeist, much like how we hardly ever say things like "man-days" and "coloured people" any more, such distinctions don't add any value to most conversations.

Religious fundamentalism vs humanism

I think today's cartoon from the excellent farleftside.com sums it up...

Philosophical musings

I was listening to radio 4 this morning in my car on the way to work and there were a couple of religious stories in the news and the usual "thought for the day" which is always religious in nature, one of the stories was about the Al-Madinah school in Derby being shut down by Ofsted because of concerns about over-jealous implementations of fundamentalist Islamic principals like segregation of girls and strict dress codes etc. I was pondering these things and the following analogy came to me,

What religious people around the world (the main ones) believe is like having a school where all the kids turn up everyday (in fact it's mandated they do) but there are no teachers. All that's there are piles of books and ancient (half erased) scribblings in a language no one speaks any more left on the blackboards. Over time the children align themselves to particular books and particular classrooms (mostly depending on which street they live in), fierce arguments and debates ensue about which are the "correct" books and which particular books and scribblings must be interpreted in which particular ways in order to enter particular classrooms. On the last day of school a teacher finally turns up, he (because it's obviously a he) praises the kids who have picked the right interpretations and 2 kids out of hundreds get to go home and have endless ice-cream and Xbox time; the teacher then dowses the remaining pupils and the school in petrol and sets the whole lot on fire.

Who'd want something like that to be true?

The lure of what we'd prefer to believe

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has delivered a report this week that concludes Humans are the dominant cause of climate warming, and yes, climate warming is really happening. Of course this will trigger a tsunami of deniers and armchair environmentalists who, armed with nothing more than vested interest or wilful ignorance will make all kinds of pronouncements with the aim of casting doubt, uncertainty and fear into the minds of the public. Why do this you may well ask, there probably isn't one reason, vested interest in "big oil", greed, politics, human behaviour, scepticism you name it and it probably plays a part, what is clear is that the science needs to be communicated well and unambiguously or we will be at the mercy of those like the Murdoch's, Lawson's and Monckton's (among many others) who so clearly have agendas not aligned to finding out the truth.

Puzzling

This puzzle popped up in my Twitter feed this morning, took me about 30 seconds to crack it but then I didn't do an arts degree.

Common-sense sound-bites..

Accustom a people to believe that priests, or any other class of men can forgive sins, and you will have sins in abundance.

Thomas Paine 1737-1809

Pascal's Wager

Pascals wager is the famous logical fallacy proposed by the famous seventeenth century mathematician Blaise Pascal, it goes something like...

A person might as well live their lives believing in God, if there is no such being then the loss for believing is finite (for example an amount of pleasure) however if God does exist then the loss for not believing is infinite, i.e. eternity in hell.

The conclusion people often draw from this is that the chances of getting this question right or wrong is therefore 50-50. The reason it's a fallacy is that it starts from the assumption that there is only one God and only one outcome if you get it wrong, both false assumptions. Over the years humans have believed in over 20,000 different Gods possibly more, so in reality the probability of guessing the "right" one is reduced from 50-50 down to something tiny. In addition to this, the wager takes no account of the "weight" of a complete lack of evidence that there is any such thing as Gods, when all the reality checks are in place it becomes a pretty pointless bet.

For amusement the following table shows what will happen to you (after you die) according to different beliefs plotted against those same beliefs, i.e. what someone might believe in (or not); it highlights the stupidity of this wager (and the weird things people think happen to you after you die) very well.

Do librarians have a sense of humour?

Of course they do, LOL!

Message from God

te he...

Drawing a veil over (real) freedom

I'm fascinated by the current veil debate; it seems to me we have two entrenched positions neither of which is actually focused on the real issue,  two opposing sides arguing about a straw man that is irrelevant to the actual ethical question raised by this issue.

On the left we have a lot of hand-wringing about the role of Government, i.e. Governments should not be legislating what people can or can't wear and on the right we have indignation that an Islamic tradition (alien to them) must be swallowed lock stock and barrel meaning veils should be able to be worn in courts and schools etc..

Both positions miss the point and that is should the rights of the Woman be protected by the Government? Its all very well valuing freedom from being bossed around by the authorities but where is the concern about being bossed around by Husbands and Brothers or religious authorities?

Consider the following points,

• People bleat on about religious freedom, but the veil is nothing to do with Islam or religion, there are no religious texts or edicts that mandate wearing one?
• People bleat on about racism, but Islam isn't a race?
• People bleat on about tolerance, but should we be tolerant of backward (in relation to our own cultural evolution) systems that are intransigent and demand special privileges with threats of violence?
• People bleat on about freedom of expression, but we throw people in jail for being naked in public, isn't this a double standard?
• The silence from feminists on this issue is deafening.

It's about time we take a rational approach to this issue, if it is safe to wear something and the wearer wants to wear it then fine, if there's a rational and therefore practical reason why something shouldn't be worn, i.e. a disguise in a courtroom or a necklace in a factory then ban it! If any adult person is being bullied (by anyone) into wearing something against their will then they should be supported to the hilt by the law in a proportional and fair manner, stuff "culture" or "tradition".

Some old news

A couple of stories tweaked my interest this morning, firstly we have a triumph of engineering and science over stupidity and secondly the exact opposite.

First up is the salvage of the Costa Concordia, a huge cruise ship that ran aground and tipped over next to the small island of Giglio in 2012. The ship capsized due to what appears to be an act of negligence by it's Captain for which he is standing trial. Not withstanding the loss of life which is bad enough, the wreck is cluttering up what is a beautiful coastline. It could have probably been left to break up naturally but it would have taken decades to do so and caused untold environmental and economic damage in the process. The process of righting and then floating it so that it can be towed away to a scrapyard is a monumental engineering project, the forces and masses involved mind boggling, however it looks like the salvage team have been successful in the first phase which is to bring the ship back up to the vertical and to place it on a submerged platform, the time-lapse video of the process is amazing.

Next we have the anti-evidence brigade, a coven of senior politicians that include John Redwood, Peter Lilley, Andrew Tyrie and Graham Stringer who seem to hell bent on ignoring or misrepresenting the mountain of scientific evidence on man-made climate change. The debate last Tuesday, proposed by MP David Davies, seemed to be awash with fables, conspiracy theories and zombie myths; at the very least Mr Davies owes the house some corrections for the woeful errors and flagrant misrepresentations he made during the debate. The motivation for such apparent feeble powers of comprehension among such expensively educated men is predictable, the politicians mentioned all have links to the oil industry and seemed to be attempting to use this debate to cement some kind of kinship in denial, as Upton Sinclair once said "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!". For me, the scene was reminiscent of a kind of Scopes monkey trial, a flavour of fundamentalism that is unhelpful and much like religious objections to progress based on rational investigation a millstone around the necks of future generations.

One gigantic step

What were you doing in 1977?

In the Spring of that year I remember buying the Fleetwood Mac album "Rumours" and playing it obsessively for weeks. Later in the Autumn I remember hearing the Sex Pistols and The Clash for the first time causing me to reject my precious Fleetwood Mac album (figuratively of course, it cost me £2.99 after all!) to buy a baggy mohair jumper, a pair of 10 hole DM's and to make my hair spiky. I remember being thoroughly bored by the whole silver jubilee thing (nothing changes) and upset that Marc Bolan died in a car crash, I guess you could say that I was a fairly typical stroppy teenager. What passed me by in my youthful self obsessed haze (I must have missed the relevant edition of "Tomorrow's World") was the launch of a spacecraft called "Voyager 1", despatched in September of that year it's mission was to study the outer planets. On 25th August 2012 (confirmed yesterday) that little tin bucket full of transistors and solder (plus an LP record) officially left our Solar System, the first man-made object to achieve that feat.

How far is it to the edge of our solar system?  About 12 billion miles or in other words, a bloody long way! Voyager is travelling at 100,000 miles per hour or to express that on a more understandable scale its about London to Bristol in 3 seconds! Even so, it has taken 36 years to reach proper "interstellar space" and what's more mind boggling is that even at this huge speed it will take a further 40,000 years to reach the next nearest star to our Sun! (unfortunately long after it's Plutonium power source has run out)

In some ways its a shame that Voyager was launched when it was, i.e. at the dawn of the digital age, if it had current digital/computer technology on board imagine the hi-resolution pictures it could be sending back. It's a sobering thought for us folks of a certain age that even if we launched another voyager now I probably wouldn't be around to see it reach the same point. On the positive (and less self obsessed) side though, what a fantastic achievement!

10bil LOL ;)

I read this evening that Twitter intends to float on the stock exchange, they reckon that the price will be $10 billion, that's an 18X multiple on revenue which I suppose isn't too outrageous bearing in mind the eyeballs it attracts today and the sheer scale of the global mind-share it has. I won't be investing though as I think their business model is unrealistic, the amount they charge for access to their data and the channel model they've opted for seem too much like hard work for potential business consumers like me. I reckon unless they crack the commercial market and diversify quickly others will eat into their share of the personal micro-blogging scene driving their value down, for this reason I'm out! (like they care :)

Welcome to the 1920s

I see today that the Church in Wales has voted to allow Women Bishops; many would say about time too, some (incredibly) would say that such a move represents a mortal blow to the unity of their organisation, as an outsider and someone interested in promoting secularism, reason and tolerance as a way of achieving cohesion between all the different elements of society I hope that this is too little, too late.

Makes perfect sense...

Saw this cartoon today, it made me smile, which is always a positive on a cloudy Tuesday afternoon...

Weekend beers

I've been trying some different craft beers lately; there seems to be a resurgence of interest in beer of late in the UK with an explosion of choices ranging from traditional regional bitters through to American style hop busting IPAs as well as more exotic "flavoured" beers which are paired with everything from fruit to coffee!

Here are four interesting examples from a small Scottish brewery called Brew Dog, they focus on individual hop varieties (names on the labels) but in all other respects are made to the exact same recipe. The idea is that the drinker gets to directly experience the flavours of the different hop species and is able to compare and contrast them, all in all an interesting taste experiment. The hops are from all over the world, Goldings from the UK (Kent), Waimea from down under (New Zealand), El Dorado (USA) and Dana (Slovenia) and the in the finished beers the differences between them were marked. My favourite was the Waimea, lemony, clean, fresh and seemingly lighter than all the others even though the alcohol level was exactly the same in each. My least favourite was the Goldings which tasted more fruity but in a soapy/perfumed kind of way, like an old fashioned 70s home brew, they were all nice enough and very drinkable but at 6.7% ABV only in small quantities!

What's the point?

As usual JesusAndMo nails the hollowness of the religious position..

Paradise

I was speaking to a friend the other day about "ideal" holidays, she said she was a beach fan and that her idea of a perfect holiday would be the Maldives, in fact if given the choice (and unlimited funds) she would go there every year. Not being a beach person (fair skinned and short attention span) I was interested in why the Maldives were so great, her response was an unequivocal "it's paradise".

Whenever I hear that word my spider senses start to twitch, in the case of the Maldives I couldn't help but recall a BBC program about the Indian Ocean that visited the Maldives, sure, the brochure views of azure sea and palm fringed white sand were present and correct but there was also an apocalyptic scene of the "rubbish island" which is a stinking, fly infested pile of dead coral covered in all of the garbage that the tourist industry generates, it was quite eye opening, barge after barge simply piling up all manner of detritus and pollutants seemingly without any other disposal solution. I also happened on this story today about an unfortunate 15 year old Maldivian girl who having been raped by her step father was sentenced to 100 lashes for "fornication", as you can probably guess the Maldives have an "Islamic" government. Only after an international pressure campaign that called for holiday boycotts and got two million signatures was the sentence overturned.

I guess "paradise" is a relative term; in the immortal words of Don Henley and Glen Frey "you call some-place paradise, kiss it goodbye"..

Silly ink

Saw this and it made me chuckle, the dangers of cherry picking..

Offensive?

Here's a shocking and sober story for this 21st century of ours. In the home of the brave and the land of the free, no not Yorkshire but the good o'l US of A an atheist by the name of David Silverman applied for a custom number plate, nothing wrong with that I hear you say however it just so happens that Silverman is the President of American Atheists and so naturally he asked for his number plate to read "ATHE1ST". His request was denied by the traffic authorities in the state of New Jersey, the reason given was that this would be offensive!!

In the immortal words of Jim Royle, "land of the free my arse!"

Slip sliding update

Looks like we won't be raining fire down on anyone this weekend... more PIMMS anyone?

Slip sliding away

With the western world seemingly sliding toward greater involvement in the conflict in Syria its probably a good time for our politicians and leaders to think seriously about the pros and cons of military action. On the one hand we have an atrocious situation where thousands of people are being killed on a monthly basis and on the other a political, ethical and legal quagmire that could seriously bite us if done wrong. If it were me I'd try to build a model and iterate through different scenarios in order to reason about the possible outcomes, it would be a very complex model of course. I wonder how our government will do it, I read today that parliament has been recalled to debate it so it seems likely that something will happen. It's an interesting thought experiment to try to write down the list of factors, even more so to try to think about scoring them, anyway, here's my list (0=bad, 10=good).

Factor	Score	Comment
Saving lives	6	Short and long term angles to this but should help
Ethical	7	What would we do if our own people were being gased
Self interest	3	Not a huge amount of trade with Syria but they do have some oil
Cost (money)	4	Not as expensive as Iraq, could do without it in a recession
Cost (human)	4	As long as it's an air campaign, not huge (like Libya?)
Complexity	2	Horribly complex, Russians, Turks, Americans - political rats nest
Impact(failure)	3	Bad but not too bad
Impact(success)	7	Can't see a massively positive outcome, perhaps a construction windfall?
Inconvenience	8	Most ordinary people won't notice any effect
Impact(long-term)	7	Probably won't affect the terror situation, might upset the Russians
Political	6	Probably good for the tories
Hypocrisy	4	Why are drone strikes less ethical than gas bombs?
Evidence	4	Need something incontrovertible

If you then take the average of these factor scores you end up with 5, i.e. possibly only just worth doing but not conclusive either way, which pretty much sums up my feelings about it.

The wrong kind of woo II

I know Muslims aren't that fond of cartoons but someone in the Saudi Arabian government should take a look at this characteristically accurate cartoon from xkcd.com, for me it just about sums up religious (aka magical) thinking and its unsubstantiated claims to have authority to interfere in government and legal matters.

The wrong kind of woo

Apparently the religious authorities in Saudi Arabia are stepping up their efforts to stamp down on the wrong kind of magic. The infamous Saudi "religious police" are expanding anti-witchcraft units around the country, units that convicted some 215 sorcerers in 2012, punishing them in a variety of ways for example fines, public flogging and in some extreme cases even beheading.

A belief in magic is of course widespread throughout the world; I would argue that to be a proper Christian, Hindu or Jew you must believe in the supernatural aka "magic", a suspension of the natural order and an interference in human affairs by invisible and purposeful forces. I'm often surprised how "western" Christians I know look down on primitive practices like this; from my point of view they don't look all that different to talking snakes and whispered prayers. In fact the only discernible difference I can see is that aggressive religions in places like Europe have been forced back into their respective boxes by 400 years of relentless secular and scientific progress and success which on the whole religions tended to impede.

There are of course other cultural factors at play here, the eternal fascination that superstitious authorities seem to have with sex; I've always wondered why forbidden religious practices almost always seem to centre around Women and invariably require practitioners to be naked? Then there is the delicious possibility of settling tribal scores using unfalsifiable bollocks, wouldn't we all love to dispose of an annoying neighbour or a nagging wife with a swift and effortless accusation of "magic", how convenient, how human.

23 varieties

I'm a big fan of wine particularly red wine, collecting and sampling (in moderation of course) is a major hobby of mine so I was pleased to notice this heart warming story about it this morning. Apparently red wine has even more complex compounds in it than previously thought and a recent investigation by scientists in Australia has uncovered 23 new ones previously undiscovered that may yield health benefits for all kinds of ageing related diseases. Everyone who's had an "ageing" week at work can fully understand the health benefits of a glass or two of red wine on a Friday night so I reckon that's case closed, we should all appreciate good wine more.

Coincidently my parents came over for Sunday lunch last weekend and I opened something nice to have with our roast lamb, the picture above is the wine we had (Sarget de Gruaud-Larose), it's from Bordeaux and my favourite district of Bordeaux which is called St. Julien. Normally you should leave good claret like this for at least 10 years before you drink it but in this case I took a chance and the bottle was from the 2005 vintage, a good year for Bordeaux. The wine had a good nose of cedar and red berries, plenty of soft fruit, full bodied but well balanced with a typical St. Julien finish, memorable. I'd say it was drinking well now but also that it has plenty of legs left in it, at least another 5 years in the dark wouldn't hurt.

Not a cheap wine (about £20) but think of the health benefits!

The God quotient

There is a paper doing the rounds at the moment which is a meta-analysis of various intelligence related studies that concludes atheists are smarter than religious people (on average). I'm reasonably schooled in maths and statistics but I can't understand how different kinds of intelligence measures can be combined to calculate a single correlation, it would seem like a case of apples and pears to me, anyway I'm also not sure a complex thing like intelligence can be boiled down to uni-dimensional measures like this? Mathematically it's probably OK but it doesn't mean much in the real world. I know plenty of religious people who are smarter than me in many different ways and I know atheists who are as thick as pig excreta, luck, environment and personality must also play a significant role in ones deistic outlook I reckon (but only have anecdotal evidence for that)

I'm sure that social scientists can use statistics to prove that social scientists are cleverer than you but I'm also sure that those who still use chickens entrails to determine things will continue to disprove them with gut feel..

Socially networked world

How true is this...

Slow news day

I was watching the BBC news channel this morning whilst munching on my breakfast and thinking to myself that the actual "news" content of the bit stream was close to zero; a series of pieces whining about the NHS interspersed with pointlessly elaborate weather reports. I actually watched two almost identical weather reports separated by only 6 minutes! Now either that's a reflection of some new and incredibly precise meteorological science or a desperately slow news day!

I reckon the BBC should challenge their audiences a bit more, instead of pointless Summer "news" they should re-run dramatic old news stories like the sinking of the titanic, the 2005 ashes victory or the relief of Mafeking, see if anyone notices.

Frontier mentality

I noticed a rather odd story on the BBC site yesterday it highlights the abnormal rate of church construction in Romania at the moment and contrasts this expensive hobby with the generally dire and cash strapped state of the economy there. I visited Romania in 1986 a few years before the collapse of the Ceausescu regime, it felt to me like a very grey and sinister country. I remember being struck by how there was a feeling about the place of being at the edge of Europe, a frontier between a familiar culture and the heathen darkness of Asia. This feeling was undoubtedly implanted by stories of Vlad the Impaler and his quest to defend the extremities of Christendom against the Ottoman hordes which are laid on thickly throughout the tour of Bran Castle (of Dracula fame) near Brasov which is near where I was staying.

Perhaps this desire to re-establish Christian traditions so vigorously is a reaction to the threatening spectre of an expanding Islamic influence from the East again or is maybe a knee jerk reaction from years of being oppressed under an atheistic communist dictatorship, whichever is the case it seems to me like Romanians could probably better spend their money building a few roads and hospitals before they fill elaborate buildings with credulity and candle smoke. Of course private Romanian citizens should be able to spend their cash however they like though I do hope none of the charity that secular countries like the UK donate to them ends up as concrete narthex foundations otherwise Daily Mail readers will start referring to Eastern Europe as "bongo bongo" land...

Pro-humanitarian

I saw this story today in the Independent it left me thinking what the hell is wrong with some people, especially some supposedly educated Americans in the Southern states?

The article is about the last abortion clinic in Mississippi an Alamo of rationality and humanity in Jackson where Women run a gauntlet of arrogant and aggressive morons shouting threats of hell fire and waving little black books who do everything they can to harass and abuse Women going about their lawful business. I guess if you feed people enough supernatural delusion with a side of political certainty from an early age you will eventually manufacture monstrous personalities like these; people who are bloated with entitlement and propped up by an illusion of absolute knowledge, such shameless and random inhumanity is incomprehensible to me.

We have isolated incidents of conflict on this subject the UK of course, sadly we still have some fundamentalist theocratic Christians here too but relative to Mississippi reproductive healthcare would appear freely available and a private matter between the doctor and her patient under the (secular) law of the land, the way it should be.

Geek partners

My wife would empathise with these, she would probably add a few additional ones too, for example "bringing evidence into an argument" and "insisting on feature comparisons when buying expensive things" and "working out what it would cost NOT to do something"....

Verse du jour..

"Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; his number is 2,347% APR repayable over 1 year"

Complex? not really, I Guess CofE CEO Justin Welby won't be getting his positive media buzz KPI bonus this quarter..

Awkward Bible moments

Love this idea, create an "alternative" Children's Bible (or any holy scripture) as a counter to the religious indoctrination and blatant cherry picking that occurs in our junior schools up and down the county (even the secular ones!). No need to exaggerate or lie, there are plenty of contradictions, obscenities, absurdities and awkward moments in the real things to work with, it just needs someone to point them out. In my experience children are quite capable of using reason to see these stories for what they are (i.e. tools for indoctrination) when presented with _all_ the facts. Perhaps then the 40% or so of non-religious people in the country could also lobby the Government to insist that it is presented in R.E. classes just like the Christian (et al) alternatives are (for balance), seems fair to me.

Apparently the book will be hitting the shelves in time for Christmas, a worthy stocking filler if ever there was one, until then, here is another example (click the image to see a bigger copy),

Smile please..

Forget about the royal baby news here's an achievement much more impressive and unusual than the birth of another Human Being, something incidentally which happens about 350,000 times daily on our planet. The photograph above is of exactly that, i.e. our planet, and was taken from the vantage point of an orbit of the planet Saturn, imagine what historical explorers like Magellan, Cabot and Cook would have thought of this achievement.

The picture was snapped by the Cassini probe at a distance of a billion miles and shows the Earth as a pinpoint of light in the centre right of the picture. Should the new royal baby ever get to be king he would be wise to view his importance through the sobering lens of this photograph; he would be ruler over 0.05% of a few pixels.

Self analysis

I saw this article today and it made me think about what kind of atheist I am; as the title suggests and I already suspected atheists are pretty much like everyone else i.e. a complex assemblage of genetic, cultural and environmental stuff that is difficult to pin down and impossible to define in less than a million words (minus a belief in the supernatural of course). According to the article there are six different types of atheist, although when I look at the list I can empathise with different aspects in each of the categories. I suspect it's exactly the same for believers which for me makes it less rather than more likely that they are right about the nature of the Universe, i.e. Complex beings like Humans are all different and that's the only real truth of the matter.

Anyway, here is my summary of the six different kinds of atheist, see what you think...

1. Intellectual Atheist - intellectually stimulated by information about atheism and the "debate" - likes arguing and is usually well versed in books and articles about religion and atheism.

2. Activist - Not content with just disbelieving in Gods, they want to tell others why religion should be rejected and why society would be better off without it etc. Tend to be vocal about political issues like gay rights, feminism, environment etc.

3. Seeker-Agnostic - Unsure about the existence of God but keeps an open mind, recognises the limits of human knowledge, embrace uncertainty and hold no firm ideological positions.

4. Anti-theist - Regularly speaks out against religion, sees religion as ignorance or delusion. They believe that obvious fallacies in religion and belief should be pointed out openly and addressed in some way.

5. Non-theist - Apathetic or disinterested, simply do not concern themselves with religion or the questions surrounding it. Religion plays no role in their lives, a simple absence of anything religious from their mental space.

6. Ritual atheist - Don't believe in Gods but still finds some religious teachings useful, may participate in specific rituals, ceremonies, meditation etc. Attracted to symbolism inherent within religious traditions but without needing the associated supernatural parts.

For me, I'd say something like:

Giving a tuppence..

People here in the UK are preoccupied with two all consuming topics at the moment, firstly there's the weather which has been warm and sunny (shock horror!) and secondly one of our royal family is due to have a baby at any moment. I can't really get too excited about either of these natural phenomenon, sure, nice weather is, well, nice. As for royal babies, OK, having a baby is usually a wonderful (and terrifying in equal measure) experience for any parent but I'm not a great fan of singling out specific Homo Sapiens within the population for special treatment on the sole basis that one of their ancestors hundreds of years ago happened to be a more successful bandit and war-monger than anyone else.

In other news, I took a long overdue holiday last week and packed the family off to Devon for a week to visit some friends and to escape the rat race for a while. It was just what the doctor ordered, we hardly watched any TV, read very little e-mail and generally kicked back and did nothing but swim, play tennis, BBQ and socialise with friends. In an era of cheap foreign travel it's sometimes easy to forget how beautiful England can be, I know its a cliché but when the sun is shining and the roads are relatively quiet it really takes some beating. Anyway, I switched the TV on this morning to catch up with the news only to find that the BBC seemed to alternate between pictures of pink fatties eating ice cream and shots of sweaty reporters desperately trying to think of something to say against the backdrop of a London maternity clinic entrance door; is there really nothing else going on?

I guess if you're lucky enough to have skin that tans easily and like to read Hello magazine while eating Haagen Dazs then now is your moment but personally I really couldn't give a tuppence for any of it.

Settled

I saw this on the wonderful xkcd site today, it made me chuckle, which is what I like to do on Fridays before gloriously sunny weekends...

Coincidental miracles..

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.
-- David Hume

So I read that the Catholic tribe are going to declare that their ex-leader John Paul II has become a supernatural being; their claim is that even though he's long dead some part of his conciousness still exists and is able to communicate with living people and exert invisible forces at the cellular level within the bodies of certain cherry picked individuals (also Catholic) to cure them of illnesses that are seemingly incurable; all this from a distance of thousands of miles from the crypt in Rome where his corpse lies serenely decomposing.

Statistically of course being cured (or appearing to be cured) of certain diseases like Parkinsons is very rare but statistically improbable events within large populations of things (7 billion human beings in this case) happen all the time; the medical establishment even measure and document them. The good philosopher David Hume advised us to ponder this over 200 years ago, he suggested that we consider what is more likely, that a particular individual has an occurrence of a remission from a condition (that many have had before and since) or that a dead body can exert curative forces supernaturally across vast distances?

The balance of probability on this seems pretty clear to me and clearly those Catholics need to get a grip on reality; next they'll be claiming that a Brit can win Wimbledon!

The art of listening..

Most Religions frown upon this particular art form, as usual, Jesus and Mo nails it.

Pointless

I read today that channel 4 will be providing extensive coverage of Ramadan this year. For those that don't know Ramadan is the Muslim period of prayer and fasting that lasts roughly one month every year, a period of 30 or so days when Muslims are not supposed to eat, drink, smoke or have sex between dawn and sunset. I'm sure TV coverage of hungry, thirsty and horny people praying will be riveting for some, but as an atheist I would struggle to think of any kind of coverage of anything more pointless (well, maybe big brother or that awful thing in the jungle)

Channel 4 is claiming that these programmes will "provoke" us non-Muslims and bring to our attention the period of personal sacrifice and worship about to take place, what? In what kind of warped universe is the act of skipping lunch and afternoon nooky for a few weeks any kind of "sacrifice"? For me, (real) sacrifice, is doing something like Captain Oates did on the Terra Nova expedition to the Antarctic he wandered out of a warm tent to a certain frosty death so that his comrades wouldn't be slowed down by his ill heath or perhaps the 300 Spartans at the battle of Thermopylae who faced overwhelming odds and yet stood their ground for their tribe; some might even see the deaths of the thousands of lads that went over the top at the Somme as some kind of sacrifice, let's not mince words though sometimes sacrifice can be stupid and pointless.

Surely true personal sacrifice has to contain some aspect of altruism or it's just plain old self interest, (imagined or otherwise) isn't it? Why would anyone be interested in or impressed by watching a bunch of people skipping lunch because they think this helps to feather their own imagined eternal nest like some kind of deistic version of the apprentice? I think what's more likely is that most non-religious and/or rational-secular people here will see this all as slightly comedic; something to be ridiculed and parodied (more like the egotistic, self-centred candidates on the TV show), certainly not thought provoking in the way the producers seem to hope.

Of course in a liberal democracy like ours people should be allowed to believe whatever they wish (including the people that think this kind of sacrifice is pointless) free speech is a privilege that unfortunately isn't afforded to most people in most Islamic countries. So, if some Muslims want to give up lunch, sex and silk cut then good for them, if others don't then good for them too! But, be careful what you wish for, some ideas and beliefs are probably better kept within the confines of our personal lives and not exposed to the barbed critique of outside and unsympathetic perspectives unless that criticism is sought; we all know how sensitive some people can be about these things.