Jeebus...

And the hits just keep on coming. One-third of Texans believe that man co-existed with dinosaurs. Just over half don't believe man evolved from another species. And nearly 40% believe that the universe popped in to being about 10,000 years ago. I think I just developed a permanent case of the Mondays... (Via Jesus' General, for the record.)

Just Believe it and Forget it...

It disturbs me deeply that this is happening, but one of my oldest friends is in the process of becoming a Biblical literalist. At the same time, though, it’s fascinating to get a candid, personal look at the internal process of Biblical literalism and understand exactly why it is that science and history don’t penetrate the self-reinforcing thought process that creates the mindset. And in a weird way it’s nice to be able to have a conversation with the implicit understanding that it won’t become an internet flame war. Still, I’d rather my friend not be in the process of becoming a Biblical literalist, especially since it’s partially my fault. We’ve been friends for years now. Since junior high. Back when we met he was Catholic and I was a self-important jackass of an evangelical (I don’t say this lightly, so many stories that I hear/remember from junior high/high school and even later have a very simple moral: I was an asshole. I’m actually shocked that a couple of my friends from then are still my friends now. Seriously. One of my oldest friends recently told me that the only reason he stuck around during high school was because I got a car. And I cannot blame him for that on any level). So I did my best, which apparently involved ridicule and Catholic bashing, to convince him to become the right kind of Christian. Yeah, I wasn’t a good person. I’m probably still not a good person, but at least I’m aware of it these days… And so but anyway, I don’t think I was the immediate cause of his conversion to the evangelical flavor of Christianity, but apparently I was important to that (the other prime cause as best I remember was a member of the female gender who holds the distinction of being the only person I’m incapable of letting bygones be bygones with. I tend to hold a default of forgiving people and giving them another chance and at least trying to overlook their faults and failings. With her I simply can’t). I’m certainly not the reason he’s becoming ever more Biblically literalist, as I was never really in danger of being a literalist. The closest I got was taking one of those day-age approaches to the creation myths in Genesis, buying that science was on the ball with its determination of the age of the universe and trying not to think about it all too much. It was the end of the “try not to think about it too much” part that finally got me. One of my closest friends at the time of my disassociation from Christianity also doubled as the only person I knew who actually believed that the Genesis account was accurate. From her I learned of Ken Ham for the first time. She also thought that Revelation wasn’t to be taken at face value and that Left Behind was poorly written garbage. And she thought that true Christianity resembled Communism more closely than anything else. I didn’t necessarily figure it out at the time, but it was from her that I gained one of my most valuable insights in to the nature of Biblical literalism: it’s entirely arbitrary and pragmatic. Revelation isn’t to be taken at face value because it’s obviously stupid. But if we don’t take the Genesis creation account literally it totally destroys Adam and Eve and the Garden and the Fall, which we can’t have. Because without that we don’t need Jesus. Actually, that last part was my main insight based on my own realizations while I was trying really hard not to think about it all, but I’m about 96% sure that the only reason charlatans like Ken Ham and Kent Hovind get anywhere is because of that tiny little insecurity at the core of all Christians who are even marginally aware of evolution that says, “If science is right then there’s no need for Jesus.” The main problem I had was that I was always too skeptical. The only way I could avoid skepticism was through denial. And I’m not that good at denying a juicy puzzle that’s been placed in front of me. I wanted to be a sci-fi writer when I was younger (and kind of still do). One of the things I realized back about ten years ago was that if we really did go out in to the universe and find aliens, like in Star Trek and whatnot, that it would destroy the Christian story.* This saddened me deeply at the time. It’s those realizations that fed in to my later realizations that if there was no Adam and Eve then there was no Garden of Eden and no Fall, so the science I knew of stood in direct contradiction to the religion I believed in. This isn’t to say that science destroys all possibility of religion, but it sure as shit takes religious fundamentalism out of the equation completely, at least until we find an ancient religious text that describes how the Devil snuck in to god’s universe design lab and hacked bad code in to the DNA structure or something. I now regard that skepticism as a good and useful thing. When I look back on those conversations with my former friend who would say something like, “Ken Ham has some interesting things to say,” and I would actually know enough science to say, “No, no he doesn’t,” I realize that my skepticism kept me from getting suckered by a charlatan (Ken Ham, not the friend). It never got to a real, full-blown conversation, since I was more concerned with preserving the relationship and I was struggling against my own doubts at the time so I would tend to back off and try to change the subject and she knew it was a sore spot for me and didn’t push too hard. But the primary difference between me and her was that I wanted to know what the data showed. She only wanted to know things that reinforced her beliefs. It ultimately wasn’t science that saved me from religion, anyway. It was history. Evolution might have told me that Adam and Eve could never really have existed, but history told me that the Garden of Eden was an impossible construct, that the Jewish Bible wasn’t a particularly reliable document, and ultimately that the Gospels weren’t written as historically accurate biographies. It also helps that my particular areas of academic competence are history-related and not science-related. So that brings me to my friend who is becoming a literalist. He’ll be the first to tell you he’s not a scientist or a historian and that’s the problem. It’s not that he’s deluded or stupid, it’s that he lacks the intellectual curiosity that fuels skepticism and is willing to take the explanation that seems to make more sense over the one that requires more specialized knowledge. We had a long discussion on Wednesday that came down to a series of bizarre absurdities. I was pulling my punches as much as possible but also trying to use half- or quarter-remembered high school biology and chemistry lessons to explain things like why carbon dating works (honestly, I kinda wish I’d recorded that chunk so I could play it back for a chemist so they could laugh at me). He’d come at me with arguments that literally started, “I heard a story…” or, “I read somewhere…” This, I realized, is a huge problem in any conversation like this. Assuming it was even possible for me to “win,” to use the quickest shorthand to explain, I would have had to be a specialist in everything to accurately counter the arguments I faced and come out with the winning argument. I also had to be able to pick appropriate comebacks for a collection of strange arguments. At one point he hit me with a story he read somewhere about a mountain that suddenly appeared in Arizona or somewhere. A scientist went and tested it and said it had been there for 10 million years when it had only popped up in the last ten. No, seriously, this was the entire story. My response, being the good historian I am, was, “I want a citation on that story.” This was the wrong response. See, when someone throws out a story that’s as obviously crazy as that and they weren’t originally interested in checking to make sure it was accurate and can’t even add in rudimentary details like the name of the “scientist” and whether he/she said that the mountain had been there for 10 million years or was made of 10 million year-old material, then the goal isn’t to debunk the story. This, of course, is impossible to do in this situation. What you need to do is be quick enough on your feet to come up with a counter story. The one I hit upon – far too late, sadly – was simple. I have a coffee table in my living room. It has been in my living room since October of 2008. But if someone came in and studied said coffee table they may well discover that it’s actually two years old, since it’s a particular type that was discontinued in 2007 and sat in a warehouse for a year before I bought it. Or let’s say they had some way of dating the wood itself (which they don’t, but for the sake of argument…) and discovered that the materials that make up my coffee table are 100 years old because that’s when the tree it’s made from was originally planted. Which of these numbers is correct? The answer is, “All of them,” y’know, assuming I wasn’t just making shit up off the top of my head. So from here I could have gone back to that mountain story and explain that the nameless southwestern mountain may have sprung up overnight, but it’s made up of rocks that have been sitting around for a long time. So a scientist may well have discovered it’s made of materials that existed for millions of years and were pushed up in some sort of tectonic shift or something. But someone who then says, “Ha! This disproves scientific dating methods!” is either ignorant of science or trying to sell a lie. And the entire goal of the huckster selling a lie is to keep those who are ignorant of science ignorant. I do think that I got one thing right. He even threw the old, “Darwin even repented on his death bed,” line at me. On that one I said, “No, he didn’t. That got passed around as a rumor after he died and certain people jumped on it in an attempt to discredit evolution.” Then I was able to explain why that doesn’t work, anyway. Science is about ideas. Religion is about people. The goal in science is to prove or disprove the idea, while the goal in religion is to support or discredit the people. So it doesn’t matter who Darwin was or what he did. What matters is that he laid down an idea that has been proven to be correct time and time again through repeated experimentation and the accumulated knowledge of the last 150 years. So science builds on science and the important question isn’t, “What’s the origin of this theory,” but, “What does the latest data say about it?” The goal in religion, though, is to support the initial creator of the religious movement. So as we get closer to current days it gets easier to debunk the words or discredit the actions of the most recent disciples of the religion, but that doesn’t hurt the religion itself, since those newer figures serve to insulate the originator. The goal of a religious debate, then, is to dig through it all and discredit that original holy person. This is why both sides talk past each other. The non-religious person says, “Look at all the horrible things that the religious are doing right now,” and the believer shrugs it off and says, “So what? They’re not real Christians, not like Jesus.” And the complete butchering of the understanding of history, coupled with the fact that any self-respecting historian knows that we can’t say anything completely definitively about anything that happened 2000 years ago, means that I can’t actually go all the way back to Jesus and say, “You shouldn’t believe in Jesus because of this, that, and the other thing.” It’s simply not possible. Of course there are those for whom even that wouldn’t be good enough. It’s all about faith, don’tcha know?*** The most eye-opening moment in the conversation, though, was this: I’d just finished on a bit about my favorite historical inaccuracy in the Bible when my friend said, “Yeah, but how do you know that the Bible’s account of that isn’t correct?” So I went off on how we find multiple sources and test claims and he said (more or less), “See, that’s the part I don’t get. But the Bible says that this stuff happened this way and it’s all right there, so I believe it.” That’s the problem. The hucksters who have been selling Biblical literalism have gotten an audience and a following not because all people who agree with them are stupid or ignorant or intellectually lazy. They’ve gotten where they are because they’re selling a product. The product is convenience. So in this Ken Ham is no different than Vince the Slap Chop guy or Ron Popeil. “We know you’re busy,” they say, “And you don’t have time to learn enough biology to see the markers for evolution, to learn enough astronomy to get how we’ve calculated the age of the universe, enough chemistry to get why radio carbon dating works, and enough history to figure out whether the Persian succession went Cyrus the Great - Cambyses II - Bardyia - Darius or Darius - Cyrus. You’ve got that big project due at work and dinner to make and you’ve got to pick up your kids from soccer practice and call the credit card company to figure out why there’s a $65 charge from Amazon from something you never bought. Well I’ve got something to make it all easier.” It's an alluring sales pitch, especially for those to whom the nature of the universe isn't an every day concern. And the sheer overwhelming amount of knowledge out there is often more of a barrier than an aid to understanding. It’s impossible to know everything about everything any more. The fact is that when it gets down to science and skepticism there’s still a lot of stuff I have to take on faith. I can’t begin to understand how we figured out that the universe is 13.5 billion years old and expanding faster than the speed of light. I don’t really get how genes get turned on or off and certain times to express things like arms and hands instead of wings. So on some level I have to take it on faith that the scientists who figure all that stuff out aren’t just talking out of their asses or flat-out lying to me. Fortunately I know enough rudimentary science and understand the scientific method well enough to be able to draw accurate conclusions about who is trustworthy, but I am incapable of checking their results myself, so ultimately it is a matter of faith in something outside of myself that I don’t fully understand. But by the same token I know that Darius didn’t precede Cyrus and I can sure as hell explain why I know that. And if there are any scientists out there who just don’t have the time or the inclination to study random historical minutiae like that but still need my assistance in dealing with someone who thinks they should be able to answer every question under the sun I’m more than willing to help out… ------------------------------- *Interestingly enough there was a Catholic scientist on with Colbert last night or Monday who said otherwise. Colbert was talking about a meeting in Rome about what would happen to the RC Church if aliens were found to be real.** Colbert’s response was basically, “What would happen? There’d be no more church!” Then he brought some random dude in who spouted some nonsense about how it would just show god’s great creativity and they might have their own parallel Jesus. So it was basically C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy. Of course there’s no fucking way an alien culture would have a religion that sounds appropriately like Christianity, so what would happen if religion survived the experience is rather disturbing to contemplate: interstellar religious war. I mean, Christians and Muslims can’t get along and they ostensibly have the same religious basis. Hell, Catholics and Protestants fought ruinous wars for centuries and they ostensibly have the same exact religion. **The sheer, unadulterated chutzpah of that question ASTOUNDS me, by the way. I mean, seriously, let’s say Coca-Cola had that same meeting to ask the question, “What will happen to Coke if aliens are found?” Then again, Reese’s Pieces really took off when they captured the fugitive alien demographic in E.T., so I’m guessing the answer is, “A new market to conquer!” Congratulations, Omicron Persei 8, you’re the new China! ***That’s actually one of the more insidious things that’s come out of the Emerging Church Movement, but I know it’s been around a lot longer. Folks like Rob Bell have said things to the effect that there didn’t have to be a real Jesus for the Jesus story to be worthwhile and to possess saving grace. This is built, at least conceptually, on the work of Paul Tillich and (as I recall) Hans Frei and shares a lot in common with Martin Buber, so it’s a very postmodern idea, but it’s been a thought in Christianity for a very long time. It may well go back to the original Gnostics, but unfortunately this isn’t something I’ve really thought of before, so I can’t say much about it. Either way, it’s almost a prevent defense against the undermining of the historical reliability of the Bible, sort of a pre-emptive, “Yeah, we know there’s no Jesus, but it doesn’t matter, anyway! Nyah nyah!”

Free-Thinking Friday

In case you’re looking for something to do this weekend, the Illinois Family Institute has offered a helpful list of places you can go to hang out with cool people and…oh, wait. Never mind. The Illinois Family Institute has their panties in a bunch over people kissing. In public. Because teh gays are involved. And they manage to go off the deep end, like, immediately. See, there’s this thing this weekend that’s going to be going on all over the country called “The Great Nationwide Kiss-In.” It’s one of them awareness-raising events wherein people go to kiss each other in public and, gasp, there’ll be lots of gay people doing it. Either way, the professionally offended folks at the Illinois Family Institute saw this rhetorical question:

Shouldn't everyone be allowed to kiss? Kissing isn't a bad thing, it's not obscene, vulgar or inappropriate-is it? In fact, it's a beautiful thing, I love kissing and I'm sure you love kissing too! And sometimes I like kissing my sweetie when we're out, so shouldn't we be able to kiss anywhere?

And decided to answer it. With this:

I think very few Americans want to pass laws outlawing kissing--even kissing that is obscene and inappropriate. And some kissing contexts are, indeed, obscene, which means "offensive to accepted standards of decency," and inappropriate. An adult kissing a pre-pubescent child or a high school-age adolescent in a sexual or romantic manner is both obscene and inappropriate despite the protestations of the North American Man Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) to the contrary. Romantic or sexual kissing between two consenting adults who are in love and who are closely related by blood is both obscene and inappropriate despite the protestations of defenders of incest to the contrary. Romantic or sexual kissing among "multi-partner" unions, like those profiled in a recent Newsweek article, are both obscene and inappropriate despite the protests of polyamorists to the contrary. Romantic or sexual kissing between two people of the same biological sex is both obscene and inappropriate despite the voluble, vigorous, and often vitriolic protests of homosexuals to the contrary.

Yup. They went there. People of the same gender kissing each other is exactly the same as pedophilia and incest. You have to love the stupidity inherent in the system. And so but anyway, if it turns out I’m not going out of town this weekend, I think I’ll wander on down to the Bean. I’m not gay. I don’t have anyone to kiss. But I’m all for seeing people exercise their rights in a non-violent and loving fashion. I think we can all get behind that idea. Oh, yeah, and there’s the Air & Water Show. That’s also fun. Via the Friendly Atheist -------------------------- Speaking of, one of these days I need to put together a post on Christian marriage. Here’s the abstract: Christians get married way too young without any concept of how difficult it is to live with another person. They’re fed fairy tales about how Jesus’s love will make all the other problems go away. Then reality sets in. Interestingly enough, divorce rates amongst evangelicals are higher than in the rest of the population for this. There’s a good reason for it. But rather than admit that their fairy tales have something to do with it, they blame teh gays for ruining marriage. Because, y’know, it’s easier to try to stab somebody else with a pointy stick than actually figure out how to constructively respond to something. ---------------------------- In case you’re wondering, the universe is huge. , shockwave-flash@http://www.youtube.com/v/oAVjF_7ensg&hl=en&fs=1" href="http://www.youtube.com/v/oAVjF_7ensg&hl=en&fs=1" id="">

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field makes the Earth seem so very tiny. And it makes the arguments for a 6,000 year-old universe created so that humans could be the pinnacle of existence even sillier. I mean, did god really create a universe to glorify godself to us with things that are so hard to see we had to point a giant telescope at them for a week and a half just to get a glimpse? Really? Honestly, the universe is much bigger, more mysterious, and downright interesting than any Bronze Age myth of a creator god could ever be. I’d much rather explore the cosmos than the mind of god. St. Augustine’s got nothing on Carl Sagan. Via Starts with a Bang! and Pharyngula ------------------------- Speaking of Illinoisans doing shameful things, I stopped at the La Grange Post Office to get stamps on the way home from work last night, since it's conveniently located between my office and my trendy domicile. There was an...interesting...protest display up in front of the building. There were a bunch of placards I didn't read real closely once I saw the words "Lyndon LaRouche." Oh, and the picture of President Obama with a Hitler mustache didn't really give me any reason to look any closer. I walked in to the Post Office, bought my stamps, and when I walked out there was a man yelling, "Stop health care reform, save a life!" Now, to the credit of the rest of La Grange, Illinois, this was rush hour and the dipshits were directly across the street from the train station. People were streaming by and ignoring this little display. And lest you think La Grange is some podunk, rural village, let me give you some perspective: View Larger Map Yup. Apparently the crazies made it to Cook County...

In Defense of not Being Hospitable

Reading PZ Myers’ latest response to attacks against those horrible, hateful, petty New Atheists has gotten me thinking. Especially since this comes the day after I learned that PZ regularly reads Slacktivist. Yes, that Slacktivist. The one written by Fred Clark, a not-at-all-stereotypical Baptist. I’ve recently said that I’m starting to see what the “New Atheists” do in an increasingly positive light. That doesn’t mean I fully agree with them. For instance, although I read and appreciated god is not Great, I tend to argue that Hitchens cherry-picked his way to his thesis that “religion poisons everything.” I don’t think that religion poisons everything by any stretch of the imagination. Religion isn’t necessarily a force for good at all (or even a majority of the) time and by the time it gets tangled with politics and social mores and control it does more harm than good, but it doesn’t poison everything. Still, as a rhetorical device Hitchens’ book is spot on. Too often we’re subjected to the idea that religion is this benevolent force for good in the world and that the religious can’t be questioned. What god is not Great does is define the arena. On the other side we have those who say that without god everyone is a horrible, depraved person who would rape babies six times before breakfast. The next step is to say, “Okay, who has proof?” Hitchens can point to Catholic collaboration with Nazi Germany, any number of horrid Biblical laws, intra-religious violence like in Bosnia and Rwanda, and any number of other things. Those on the opposite side of the debate usually resort to Bible passages about how the flesh is weak or arguments like, “Well, Hitler and Stalin were atheists, so there!” Then there’s the favored canard about how Darwinism = Social Darwinism = all evolutionists call for the killing of the weaker races. This argument then gets repeated ad nauseum. But an interesting thing happens. Every time it comes up those who agree with Hitchens can provide actual examples to back up the argument. Those who disagree can only offer the same tired rants that are then proven false time and again. For not only are the arguments about Social Darwinism and Hitler and Stalin substantively wrong, we have plenty of examples of people who are not religious and also not immoral. This, unfortunately, is an evolutionary argument instead of a revolutionary one. It takes time to build up the critical mass of the arguments in to a larger social movement that should, hopefully, one day stand up and say, “You know what? We’re going to stop listening to these idiots who claim that only religion offers morality.” That’s a generational thing, though. The child of a religious parent casts off the familial religion and then teaches his or her child to not think of religion as the final arbiter of right and wrong. But certain things need to happen first. The main thing is that we need to get rid of the attitude of a large number of soon-to-be parents. Specifically the attitude that says, “I haven’t been to church in ten years, but now I’m about to have a kid and I don’t know how to raise him without the morals of the church.” That’s been a more-or-less default position. But if that parent has also recently read Hitchens they might think, “Y’know…never mind.” This is why those arguments must be allowed in the public sphere and cannot be suppressed. Similarly, the harshest critics of creation “science” are generally the ones leading the charge when jackasses like Rick Perry try to appoint horribly incompetent and politically dangerous people like Cynthia Dunbar to head the Texas School Board. This is an issue where we cannot afford to be moderate or accomodationist in our stances. Dominionist nut jobs cannot be allowed to decide on the policies of our public school system. Not only is it bad for the country, it’s bad for the poor children who will be poorly served. Yes, Ken Miller was one of the key voices at Dover v. Kitzmiller when real science won out of religious superstition. In the future courts are probably far more likely to call Ken Miller to testify than PZ Myers. And that’s fine. You don’t need to be a “New Atheist” to want creationism as far from the classroom as possible. In fact there are any number of religious people out there who see why only evolution should be taught in the classroom. I was once one of them. I went to church on Sunday and took honors biology, chemistry, and physics Monday through Friday in high school. If someone had come in even then and said my high school needed to start teaching creationism I would have laughed them out of the room. But even if Ken Miller can hold the line in the courtroom we still need PZ Myers, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins to do what they do and hold the line in the court of public opinion. Anybody who says that they’re doing more harm than good doesn’t understand the nature of the religious opposition. At the very least (and believe me, I would argue that they do far more than this), they distract the creationists. Most people in the evangelical and fundamentalist circles don’t have a clue what Myers or Dawkins actually say or believe. Their lack of belief in god and desire for actual scientific exploration are turned in to some weird notion that they have absolutely claimed there is no god and science can prove it. This is then turned in to some sort of weird atheist-scientific conspiracy to destroy religion and enact Social Darwinian programs to create the ideal atheistic state or some other such tomfoolery. I think I’ve mentioned it before, but I first learned of Dawkins and Dennett when I was still in church. As I was in my transitional period I found a copy of Jonathan Miller’s Brief History of Disbelief. In the program Miller talks to Dawkins. I was surprised to realize that, far from being a fire-breathing demagogue, he was a witty, urbane, and seemingly rather polite individual. I liked Dawkins. I similarly found that Christopher Hitchens was humorous and thoughtful and far more moderate in his views and willing to hear his opponents out than I’d been led to believe. Then, of course, there was yesterday’s revelation that PZ reads Slacktivist. The thing is, the hard-core religious don’t give a shit about any of this. They need an enemy. It’s directly analogous to the “global war on terror.” The Bush Administration needed a latter-day Soviet Union to fight against so it started finding terrorists under every rock and decrying anyone and everyone as somehow complicit in a plot to destroy the United States and capable of doing so. Of course, unlike Saddam Hussein science does have the ability to win the fight it finds itself in. That’s what has the Discovery Institute and Answers in Genesis and all their ilk running scared. That’s why those who are entrenched in conflict with science fight as hard as they do and use the tactics they use. That’s why if there were no PZ Myers, Richard Dawkins, or Daniel Dennett they’d be going after Ken Miller and the Templeton Institute. Those who espouse a fundamentalist and literalist religion are not trustworthy allies. They take the admonition in Matthew 12:30 seriously: “Who ever is not with me is against me; and he who does not gather with me scatters.” Right now it's convenient for the fundies to pretend they want to work with scientists as long as everyone is in an alliance of sorts against the New Atheists. As soon as they're out of the picture, though, enemy of my enemy stops being a friend. The truth is, too, that it’s not just scientists who are in danger. Those liberal religious types who think evolution is a pretty neat idea are in their crosshairs, too. Look at how much shit Obama and Clinton have gotten because they are Democrats who don’t follow the gospel of godandRepublicanParty. This is a zero-sum game for the literalist Christians. It’s one they’re losing and they know it. So they double-back and attempt to get Cynthia Dunbar on the Texas BOE or get children to go to the Creation Museum instead of the Field Museum of Natural History. They whine and bitch and moan that they’re given no voice, no quarter, when they really get way more airtime than they should and would not offer the same courtesy to their opponents. I may not be a famous internet atheist, but I have to deal with this too. I’m one of those formerly religious types who alternately scares and infuriates my former brethren (and sistren, I suppose). When one of them gets their claws in to me I instantly find myself in a no-win situation. Everything I say is taken as some sort of bitterness, anger, or hardening my heart against god, my decision to leave religion behind is automatically assumed to be based on some single, horrible moment that I need to find healing for, and if I don’t moderate my own position or make sure to include some positive, fluffy things about my religious days then I’m apparently doing it all wrong. To wit, from a heated discussion back in April:

“Geds”, I hope you don’t take insult to my oppositions; I am interested in dialog, and furthermore hope that you don’t silence my voice by deleting this. In addition to my regular thoughts of you, I also worry about the searching people who stumble upon your posts and don’t hear other sides to your stance.

You know what? He should worry that searching people stumble upon my blog and don’t hear the other side of the story. Because my stance is that my life has gotten better without religion, that there’s little out there to convince me to go back, and that the institution of religion is pretty much screwed up. (Also, he wasn't interested in discussion. Seeing as he was a long-time reader who only decided to start commenting after I wrote a post entitled "How to Talk to an Evangelical," wherein he immediately started telling me all the things I was doing wrong and didn't understand. And the prooftexting. Always with the prooftexting.) I have no real agenda. I only have my story. The fact that my story is about somebody who grew up religious then found the whole thing is untenable is terrifying and dangerous to some people. The other thing I do is actively encourage anyone else who has a story about religion to share it, too. A lot of those stories contain similar things to mine. Whether they do or not, I try to engage with the people who take the time to post here. Unless they’re just trying to proselytize (um, for religion. Anyone who wants to share the good news of an awesome band or delicious beer is welcome). I don’t have the time or patience for that. My stance on proselytizers on my blog is simple: Fuck ‘em. They’re not worth the time. So I have this to say to all the “New Atheists” out there (who probably aren’t listening, but…hey): Keep it up. You’re fighting a fight we can’t afford to lose as a society. And anyone who says you’re going to far should realize that you’re insulating them from the wrath of the fundamentalist by your very existence.

Plate Tectonics: A Primer

I generally don’t do this, but this week a random conversation started up in the comments to my last After the Flood post. The issue at hand was evidence -- or, more appropriately, lack of evidence -- for a young Earth. After Da Bomb claimed he could offer evidence for Noah’s Flood, I challenged him to explain where all the water went. He offered this: “I thought this was interesting. http://www.christiananswers.net/q-aig/aig-floodwater.html.” I started to write a reply that’s turned out to be quite long, so I’m instead exercising my right as the guy who runs this blog and making a whole new post. So here we go… Um, I do hope you realize that any time you try to offer evidence for anything science related from Answers in Genesis you're not going to be taken seriously. But the article in question is easy enough to deal with. The article basically argues that there were no real surface features and that god lifted up the mountains and whatnot over the course of the flood in order to give them a place to drain. Yet we have absolutely no evidence of sudden, catastrophic planetary changes like that. What we do have is plenty of evidence to back up plate tectonics, which is indicative of gradual changes over time according to measurable, natural mechanics. What all the evidence points to is continental drift. Millions of years ago there was a giant supercontinent called Pangea that split apart. The Earth's is not a single, immobile piece of anything. It floats on top of what can be called, for lack of a better term, a sea of magma. There are also seams in the crust. The areas around those seams are constantly in flux. Some are expanding, some are contracting, and some are grinding past each other. Given these three types of plate movement and the theoretical supercontient, we should be able to expect to see a few things. First, we should expect to see some of the Earth's features that stretch across several continents. We have found that. The Appalachian Mountains, the island of Nova Scotia, the Scottish Highlands, and the mountains of Norway are all part of the same exact system. Go here and read the footnote. David Morgan-Mar explains it way better than I could. There's a similar formation where we know that the east coast of Brazil was joined to the west coast of Africa. Meanwhile, there aren’t any similar features between, say, China and California. This is because the point of expansion is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. So the Americas are slowly drawing away from Europe and Africa and drawing closer to Asia. If we can wait a few million years, in fact, we’ll be able to see the formation of a new supercontinent as the Pacific shrinks to nothing. Second, we should be able to see evidence of rock formation and/or destruction on the edges of the plates. We can. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is a giant mountain range in the middle of the Atlantic created a little bit at a time as magma pushes up through the center, gets to the top, and cools. On the other side the Pacific Plate is a subduction zone. As the North American Plate pushes against it, the Pacific dives underneath, where the rocks melt and basically allow for the cycle to start all over again. I find this video kind of annoying, but it’s a good primer. Back in the day I saw a video during an Earth Sciences class where they actually ran a video camera past the Mid Atlantic Ridge and watched magma flow up and cool. Sadly, I don’t remember what that video was called. Third, we should see consistent features around the edges of plates. Out in the Pacific Ocean there is an area known as the Ring of Fire, where volcanic activity is extremely high. When we look at the Ring of Fire we’re actually looking at the borders of the Pacific Plate. One of the best known features of the connection between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate is the San Andreas Fault. This is what is known as a transform boundary, where the plates aren’t converging or diverging, but grinding past each other. Most of the time they more or less slide past each other. Every once in a while they get stuck and energy builds up at the boundary. When that energy is released we get earthquakes. Meanwhile, we don’t get that many earthquakes in, say Illinois, since there isn’t a transform fault anywhere nearby. Meanwhile, the Pacific Plate offers us further evidence of the movement of plates. Some volcanoes don’t form around plate boundaries, but over “hot spots” in the mantle where the Earth’s crust is locally thinner. We tend to see hot spots in the ocean, since ocean crust is much thinner than continental crust (for what I hope are obvious reasons). One of the best known hot spots is the chain of islands we call Hawaii. All of the Hawaiian Islands were formed from a single hot spot that pushed the islands up as the plate passed over. Now, then, what does plate tectonics have to do with mountains? You’ll notice that most mountains exist in ranges. The ones that don’t are generally volcanoes, too. The Rocky Mountains in North America arose due to compression of the continental plate. The Himalayas rose as the result of the collision between the Indian Plate and the Eurasian Plate. The Himalayas are still growing, since the Indian Plate is still moving north. The Rockies, on the other hand, are shrinking ever so gradually, since the forces that created them are no longer in effect and the main force active against them is erosion. Either way, the Rockies and the Himalayas have been around for 50 to 70 million years or so. So there you go. There are actual explanations for things. Answers in Genesis is an oxymoron…

Maybe You've Been Brainwashed, Too...

But isn’t it a wonderful world, Carolina? Look at the birds in the sky Jehovah made this whole joint for you, Carolina So isn’t it wonderful to be alive? -- “Jehovah Made this Whole Joint for You,” The New Radicals Don’t you just love my command of random ‘90s music everyone should have forgotten about by now? Anyway, ever since Ethan Siegel joined Scienceblogs I’ve been a regular reader of Starts with a Bang! It’s just damn good astronomy stuff written by a guy who has a real sense of wonder about the universe and an infectious enthusiasm about the learning. Plus he just totally looks like a stud in that spandex outfit in his profile picture… I started reading Arthur C. Clarke when I was just a young Geds and it had a fairly profound effect on my development. I found the way Clarke communicated the nature of the universe fascinating. The fact is, too, that the more we learn about the universe the more amazing it becomes. We only figured out that the Milky Way isn’t the only galaxy about a hundred years ago. A few hundred years before that we figured out that the stars in the night sky are actually suns, some like ours, some not so much, and that each of those distant suns may well have their own planets on which there might be life. There was a time before that, of course, when the human race thought that the sun revolved around the Earth. It’s really quite amazing. Our knowledge of the universe is expanding rapidly. As our knowledge of the vast size of the universe expands the position of the human race moves ever fringeward from that place atop the pyramid of all creation. This, I think, is a good thing. Of course humans will always think they’re the center of their own universe to a certain extent. This is forgivable and understandable. We’re limited in our ability to comprehend things, after all. We’re also trapped inside the walls of our skin and forever separated from the rest of our world. All our perception gets filtered through the individual understanding, the individual perspective, and the individual history. So we are limited in our ability to empathize. We can feel the pain or joy of another, but not in the intimate way the other feels it. Some people are better at recognizing and compensating for that than others. The ones that are tend to be compassionate, empathetic people. The ones that aren’t tend to be selfish, self-absorbed people. There are, of course, other factors that create the plot points on that continuum, but in general I believe I’m not going too far out on a limb when I draw that comparison. As I’ve lately considered the size of the universe and my own extreme tininess I’ve been reminded of a question that was posed to me a few times when I finally went public with my non-Christianity. The question was asked different ways each time but could basically be answered the same way. Although the worst part about the question wasn’t how it was asked, but the fact that it was asked at all. The question basically boiled down to this: “Have you considered how your decision to leave Christianity would affect me?” The answer to the direct question is, “Fuck no. Why should I?” There are, of course, plenty of times when it’s really, really important to consider how the action I am going to take will affect others around me. Like, say I was married and one day decided, “You know what? I’m going to move to Burma.”* My theoretical wife would then be perfectly within her rights if she said, “I think you should really think about what this move is going to do to me. Also, here are some divorce papers. Jackass.” I do not, however, think that it is my responsibility to canvass everyone I know before I change my opinions on things. Even if those things are really big. Because when it gets right down to it, my decision to eat Cheerios for breakfast and my decision to switch from Christianity to atheism have the exact same net effect on the person sitting across from me: zero. That’s the joy of living in a free country. Nobody’s going to break down my door and drag my family out in to the street for being an atheist. Well, at least not in the part of the free country I live in. I’ve heard stories from some other parts of the country. We really have a lot of work to do on that whole tolerance thing. However, that doesn’t stop certain people from thinking that I was supposed to sit down and think long and hard about how my decision was going to change their life. This honestly mystified me for a while. Then I realized something. Ever since I started reading Arthur C. Clarke (or maybe even before, I don’t know) I’ve been impressed by the epic scale of the universe I occupy. In the days after my initial switch from Christianity I often paraphrased Douglas Adams and said that I felt so much better when I wasn’t worried about being under the microscope of the god of the universe and instead allowed to be just one of six billion people on a backwater planet on the outer edge of an arm of a nondescript galaxy. The universe, for me, was finally in its proper context, everything was finally in its proper order. I found myself by figuring out just how little anyone really cared about who I was. It was a tremendous boon to my sanity in those days when I was still so close to the point where I thought I’d lose my mind. Unfortunately for me not everyone shares my opinion of the place of the individual human in relation to the theoretical center of the universe. So I occasionally find myself subjected to the inherently stupid question about whether I thought about how my decision would change the life of the asker. Chances are they didn’t even realize that’s what they were asking, though. For a lot of Christians I used to hang out with the idea of being the center of the universe wasn’t even up for debate. They were, even if they didn’t say it in so many words. This is the danger of believing that there is a god and that your god has nothing more important to do than sit around and wait for you to start praying. It’s probably why Copernicus was so freaked when he uncovered the true nature of the solar system that he didn’t publish his findings until his death. Yes, the direct cause of theoretical punishment to Copernicus would have been his challenge to Church dogma. But the proximate cause was that he upset the Church’s notion that it was the center of the universe. The Church would say, of course, that it wasn’t the center of the universe. Everything came from god, after all. We were just the pinnacle and center of creation. I suppose my interrogators would make the same argument. But if you honestly believe that the god who is the center of your universe is just sitting by the hypothetical phone waiting for you to call, is that god really the center of the universe? If you believe that god orders everything just so to make sure that you get to work on time or find the right school or what have you, is god really the universal fulcrum? Hell no. That was one of the things that absolutely shocked me when my own perspective shifted. I’d always taken it for granted that god heard my prayers and had time for me because when I lived in that subculture I took its attitudes for granted. If everyone is praying and believes that god is listening it’s fairly easy to agree. This is human nature. When I was no longer immersed in that culture, though, I suddenly saw its attitudes in a new light. I was shocked by the unbridled arrogance of my former co-religionists and how flimsy the wrapper of humility with which they surrounded themselves actually was. My opinion of several people I’d once really liked dropped precipitously in the months that followed my casting off of religion. It’s good, though, to be reminded of that every once in a while. So do yourself a favor. Go poke around on Starts with a Bang! for a while. Go dig up an Arthur C. Clarke book. Or just go outside on a clear night in the lowest light pollution you can find and look up. Think about the fact that some 15 billion years ago the process started that brought us to where we are now. Think about the fact that some of those bright specks in the sky are stars just like ours that might have planets like Earth. Think about the fact that other specks are entire galaxies that are so far away the light you’re seeing started on its journey toward us millions or even billions of years ago. Take a minute to revel in the sheer enormousness of the universe. Drink it in. And then remember that you’re just a tiny speck on the surface of a small planet orbiting a nondescript star on the far end of medium sized galaxy. It’ll be good for your soul. I promise. ---------------------------------- *Does Burma still exist? I should look that up…

Social Grooming to Social Darwinism

There's a bar I drive past pretty much every day. It's a good neighborhood place that's apparently been in town since 1934. Their thing is craft brews and imports on tap and they've got two rows of taps built in to the wall, surrounded on either side by refrigerators full of import and craft bottles. They also bring in bands on weekends. For the last week or so I've been seeing "Seneca from Limerick Ireland April 3rd" on the big bulletin board outside. Now, I'd never heard of Seneca. But I've also never been mistreated by an Irish rock band, so I decided to go see what was up. After a night of good music and great beer I introduced myself to the band. I mentioned my general appreciation of the Saw Doctors to the bassist and she said, "I'm from right down the street from them." I said, "You're from Galway, really?" There's a school of thought out there, one which I generally subscribe to, that language evolved as a form of social grooming. We generally think of social grooming in the terms of nature documentaries where there are long shots of monkeys picking lice out of each other's hair. Humans have that same need for closeness and grooming, but we don't do it quite like the rest of the mammals. It turned out that Seneca was doing a second show about six blocks away from my trendy domicile the next night. So I went to see them again at a lovely little Irish pub I've driven past a few times but never visited. I got there early and ended up sitting at a table with them while they ate dinner and shared a few beers. I asked what a band does all day when they're in random towns just outside of Chicago, but after that it became a conversation about annoying people in bars and calling current girlfriends by the names of ex-girlfriends and all that randomness in between. So from that initial point of being strangers we ended up in this conversation with a definite subtext about how life is the same whether you're from Galway or Chicago. This is the whole point of social grooming. See, societies are built around bringing together. It's why we have churches, temples, pubs, and coaching houses (yeah, coaching houses. I've been playing a lot of Empire: Total War, okay?). It's why we go to concerts and art showings and operas and plays and go get drunk and do all of those other fun things. I sat there next to a guitar player named Brendan last night and only understood about 75% of what he said, but it didn't matter. That point of familiarity and contact was just, well, fun. The things that bring us together can also be used to tear us apart, however. See, as much as we are attracted to and enjoy the familiar, we're scared of the different. This, I'm sure, is an evolutionary instinct. If I don't know what something is it may well not be in my best interest to go running towards it as fast as possible. There are those who know how to take advantage of those instincts. Think of the Ameroindian brave or medieval Scottish warrior painting his face before battle. Think of the elaborate headgear worn by Roman legionnaires and Norse warriors. Those accouterments are designed to look alien, exotic, and dangerous, to frighten the enemy. It's psychological warfare at its most basic. Religion offers its own version of this fear. Now, before I get any farther, it's important to understand where I come from on this. I tend to argue that religion evolved out of a need for expanded and ever more elaborate forms of social grooming in increasingly disconnected societies. So your status as a Jew or Zoroastrian or Christian or whatever on one level serves to place you as an insider and offers a short way of saying, "I'm okay, you don't have to worry about me." Ritual and sacrifice, then, acts as a bonding agent. It's why religion in the ancient world was divided in to two spheres: the public spectacle and the mystery cult. Public religion has a way of saying, "We're all here, we're all in this together." It's why there tend to be sacraments and singing or chanting. A shared experience binds while a chant or song basically hypnotizes everyone on a low level and brings them together. Mystery cults go for more of the hypnotism aspect. There's also probably more than a little shared thrill of the secret and the possibly subversive. You don't need to be religious to have a religious experience. Whenever I see the Saw Doctors play "The Green and Red of Mayo" and the crowd launches in to it I feel the exact same I did when I'd be at worship night at church. It's the public spectacle of a group of individuals sharing a single experience. Frats and secret societies have the same air about them that mystery cults do. It's secret, it's exciting. However, that religious inclusion also creates separation from other societies. For someone who is accustomed to one particular set of rituals, the rituals of a neighboring tribe are unfamiliar and alien. The old evolutionary tendency to fear the unknown kicks in and the uncomfortable observer immediately labels this strange other with that damning word: evil. It is, I believe, the misunderstanding (often, I suspect, willful) of the difference between Darwin's Theory of Evolution and the evolution of society that leads the anti-evolution crowd to their most annoying and insipid argument: that Darwin leads to Social Darwinism and is, therefore, wrong. Now, it's hard to argue against this reasoning, but not because it's a good argument. It's like saying my couch is bad because my couch is brown and vegetables turn brown when they go bad. There's simply no point of commonality. See, Darwin's theory, if broken down to its most basic level says that the organism best able to survive will out compete other organisms and pass down its genes. This passing down of genetic materials from the fittest is then the engine that drives diversity and evolution. It makes no statement on what should survive, just on what does survive. Social Darwinism, meanwhile, starts from a construct that says, "My group is best able to survive and is, therefore, justified in destroying all other groups." This is not a scientific statement, but a teleological one. It's also simply an updated, kinda-sorta science-y sounding way of saying the exact same thing that bigoted, insular groups have been saying forever: "I'm better than you." Two thousand years before Darwin there were Social Darwinists. They were just saying, "My god is better than yours and I can therefore kill you," instead of, "My genes are better than yours." The fact is, if we go by strict evolutionary theory I could take a breeding population of the fairest-skinned Scandinavians and a breeding population of the darkest skinned Sudanese, put the Scandinavians in the Sudan and the Sudanese in Scandinavia, then wait a few generations for nature to take its course. I don't know that they'd exactly switch appearances, but I do know that the descendants won't look too much like their ancestors. That's simply the way evolution works. It's about survival and competition within a specific environment. Humans complicate the plot significantly, however. We build houses, air conditioners, heaters, guns, medicine, and all those things that have allowed us to out-compete everything else and fight off nature itself. Evolutionary theory doesn't really take technology in to account. At least, it doesn't at its purest. I'm sure there are evolutionary biologists who are looking at the evolutionary impact of technology on humanity. Again, though, Social Darwinism isn't the purview of biology. It never was. It doesn't make any sense. The Social Darwinist doesn't care about Darwin, natural selection, or any of that. There's a reason that Social Darwinism tended to combine biological arguments with sociological and religious arguments. It was simply an attempt to use science to support an erroneous argument that was already well entrenched. In fact, I find it funny in an ironic sense that the same people who support Biblical Creationism are the ones who pull out the Social Darwinism card to "refute" Darwin. Much as Social Darwinists willfully misunderstood Darwin in an attempt to push a bigoted, ignorant position on the rest of the world, the Creationists willfully misunderstand both Darwin and Social Darwinism in an attempt to push a bigoted, ignorant position. They make a virtue of hatred, ignorance, and suspicion. Proper understanding of Darwin's tree leads to the exact opposite of Social Darwinism. Somewhere back in the mists of time I have the same ancestors as every other human on the planet. I have the same ancestor as every mammal. Farther back every mammal, reptile, and fish goes back to some other organism right back to the first cells to achieve life. So I have something in common with every creature, great and small. It's exactly the way I found I had something in common with a rock band from Limerick, Ireland. I enjoyed meeting them and I'm sure they were happy to have a friendly, supportive place in a big, alien nation. And then they played "I Useta Lover" and "N17" just for me. So consider this a last bit of social grooming. Should you be driving to work tomorrow and see a sign that says "Seneca from Limerick Ireland" with a date, go see them. Tell them I said, "Hi."

Critical Thinking is Lost on These People

Random thoughts on a headache-inducing article. 1. I love this: "Why should we be afraid to test our worldview against reality?" asked Bill Jack, a Christian leadership instructor who leads groups across the country for a company called Biblically Correct Tours. Why should they be afraid to test their worldview against reality? I mean, I often test my "I'm actually married to Kristen Bell and she's deeply and madly in love with me," worldview against reality. Then I see that two-bit good-for-nothin' skank flirting it up with Craig Ferguson on the Late Late Show and I get so mad. Doesn't she know that it my reality we're happily married and live in the suburbs and she stays at home all day to raise our 2.5 beautiful children and our dalma-apsa-labahusky Mr. Thumbkins?* And believe me. I test my "I'm married to Kristen Bell" worldview every day when I call and call and call and try to get her to tell me that, yes, she remembers the wedding and, yes, she'll have dinner ready for me when I get home. She doesn't pick up the phone. I'm guessing that means she doesn't know how to work a phone. Either way, if you're absolutely sure of your worldview, like I am, there's absolutely no reason to be afraid of testing it against reality. Because, y'know, having an external baseline with which to judge your own worldview is helpful and good... 2. As a young-Earth creationist, he asserts that the vast majority of the rocks and fossils were formed during Noah's flood about 4,000 years ago. Most paleontologists date the T-Rex to 65 million years ago. I love the balanced reporting. "This guy says World War II ended last week. Most historians say it ended in 1945." I don't know who to believe. Won't somebody come and help me decide! 3. "There's nothing balanced here. It's completely, 100 percent evolution-based," said DeWitt, a professor of biology. "We come every year, because I don't hold anything back from the students." Okay, I've got an idea. We start organizing evolution tours of the Creation Science Museum.** A real biologist takes some students through and explains how a thorough and discerning reading of reality does not lead to the conclusions made by the creation science people. Somebody get PZ Myers on the phone, stat! *Um, disclaimer. I'm not actually crazy. I've got the "Not Crazy" stamp to prove it and everything... **I'd link to the real site, but quite frankly, I don't want to. Find it yourself if you want. You'll be thanking me for the mercy I offered in linking to John Scalzi soon enough...

What Do We Do if the World Doesn't End?

I dreamed that the world was crumbling down We sat on my back porch and watched it (Jesus is knocking on the door of your heart, eh) I dreamed that the buildings all fell down We sat on my back porch and watched it I dreamed that the world was crumbling down We sat on my back porch and watched it -- Matchbox 20, "Busted" (that's right, bitches, Matchbox 20) I'm about three credulous Nostradamus specials away from declaring The History Channel "The Bullshit Channel." Seriously. There's some sort of weird end of the world zeitgeist going on right now that's perfectly understandable, but also the exact sort of place where con artists who want to peddle bullshit show up and play the role of experts The worst thing is, too, that it's a horribly transparent form of charlatanism. But it preys upon four human tendencies: 1. We want to believe there's a pattern. 2. We want to believe that someone knows the pattern. 3. We want to believe that we're recipients of the great gnosis of the pattern. 4. We want to believe that we're the most important people ever, and there's no one more important than the witnesses to the end of the world. There's an overarching tendency that must be understood, too. For some strange reason we want to believe that the people who came before us were a hell of a lot smarter than we are, and way smarter than they actually were. At the very least, we want to believe that they were possessed of the same level of knowledge we have now, but without the vocabulary to describe it.. This is a key concept. So we end up with stupid shit like The History Channel's Nostradamus 2012. I've been looking forward to this show for, like, a month because I apparently enjoy getting pissed off at these things. And so but anyway, here's the deal: We all know about the Mayan 2012 prophecy thing. Basically, the Mayans (who, I've learned over the last hour, not only knew that we're all a part of the Milky Way galaxy, but that there's a black hole at the center of said galaxy) had a super-awesome celestial calendar. That calendar ends in 2012 on December 21st. We all know that Nostradamus was a flawless prophet who knew lotsa shit. For instance, he predicted death, plague, and famine in the future. Oddly enough, nobody remember Nostradamus's brother Billy, who predicted several centuries of endless parties, excellent weather, and that the women of every generation would get hotter and hotter and have lower and lower standards (although with cosmetic surgery, easier lifestyles, and alcohol, maybe that's not hard to believe). Finally, we know that the masons, like, knew everything. And they put it in to the surface of buildings. So when you see, say, a bull and an eagle and a lion and a man on a church it has nothing to do with Biblical imagery, but the use of the same imagery to say something completely different. But, really, it's extremely hard to debunk crap like this. There's too much required background explanation and so much circular logic that simple explanations fail miserably. It's easier to simply explain the mentality and let reason take over. Let's start with what I (and most westerners) know best: Biblical Revelation. There's lots out there on Revelation. I used to have completely logical sounding discussions about how John of Patmos might have been trying to describe helicopters when he told of armored locusts with the faces of men. There's stuff about an angel throwing a mountain in to the sea and destroying a bunch of shit. This is obviously a reference to nuclear weapons. Or meteors. It kind of depends on who you're talking to. We were constantly prepared for the end of the world. Now, we weren't ready in any sort of useful way, since the people most worried about such things believed in the Rapture and, to be perfectly honest, don't give a shit about the world we live in, anyway. So predicting the end was a hobby, kind of like me sitting around and arguing whether the Mets or Phillies will win the NL East in 2009. I have no rooting interest in either team, but it's an interesting thing to work through. Although I think I care more about the Phillies than the average Pre-Millennial Dispensationalist cares about the world we live in. Either way, it's much easier to explain why the thinking is wrong than explaining how each individual prophecy is wrong. Because that would take forever. And I don't have forever. Besides, some prophecies come true. For instance, Arthur C. Clarke predicted geosynchronous satellites. He did that by extrapolating from science, technology, and desire, however. To the best of my knowledge, meanwhile, we didn't send a manned spaceship to Jupiter in 2001... The new 2012 craze, as I've said, is based on the Mayan calendar and a newly discovered book of prophecies by Nostradamus. The first doesn't mean what most people think it means, the second is, at best, suspect. Nah, strike that. The second is deadly to any predictive desire. See, Nostradamus has the sort of cred usually reserved for the Bible in the realm of prophecy. We're supposed to believe the predictions of the religious greats because they were god's buddies and if anyone knows how it's all going to end, god does. There are about a million problems with this line of reasoning. I'll try to narrow it down to just a few. First, at least as far as the Bible is concerned, god is remarkably indecisive and capricious. He decides to destroy Sodom & Gomorrah, for instance. Abraham shows up and says, "Hey, what if there are some righteous people there?" God considers this possibility and destroys Sodom & Gomorrah after rescuing Lot and his family. Later prophets work under this system and basically say, "Hey, god's going to destroy you unless you leave your wicked ways." Consider Amos and Jonah, wherein god predicted but did not send ruin. Consider the reign of Hezekiah, when a return to god averted ruin. So why are we so certain that Revelation predicts a hard and fast ruin? Second, a lot of Biblical "prophecy" is after the fact. There's a remarkable passage in the book of Daniel about a goat with one horn coming from the west, conquering the east, and then losing that one horn and having it split in to four. The one horn was Alexander conquering the Persians and the four were the successor states. Although I was never quite able to wrap my head around that one, since I always counted Macedon proper, the Seleucids, the Ptolemys, and about three or four minor successors and came up with either three or a half-dozen, never four. Either way, this is a crazy prophecy. However, it was most likely written much later than the book of Daniel under his name under an ancient practice that basically amounted to stealing someone else's good name to make your own stuff seem better. It would be great I could accurately predict the White Sox are going to win the World Series in 2009. It doesn't count to predict that they're going to win it all in 2005, though. However, if you don't know that tendency, you get an overinflated sense of the accuracy of predictions. Nostradamus, however, doesn't even have that going for him. All he's got is a legion of admirers who believe that he was brilliant. Oh, and he's got really shitty specials on The Bullshit Channel that report his predictive abilities and at no point during a two-hour broadcast bother to devote a single minute to a skeptic, beyond a couple of those, "Skeptics might say..." sentence constructs. Anyway, here's a far from exhaustive list of things you'd need to believe to make the 2012 prophecy thing real: 1. Nostradamus and the Mayans knew that we're in a galaxy about three or four hundred years before we developed powerful enough equipment to develop the modern understanding of the construction of the universe. 2. The Mayans knew that there's a black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. 3. The Mayans and Nostradamus knew that there's a planetary cycle lasting 26,000 years that coincides with the sun rising through the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The Mayans also knew that each 26,000 year cycle coincides with a period of great upheaval. 4. Nostradamus knew similar things and put them down in a series of cryptic pictures (not quatrains, as is his usual M.O.) in a book that was only recently discovered in some sort of crazy coincidence. 5. Nostradamus had a similar problem to John of Patmos in that he had no ability to accurately describe the things he accurately saw. So a city of modern skyscrapers becomes a field of crystal or something like that. 6. That weird guy who walks around dressed like Nostradamus actually has something valid to say. 7. People from a few hundred to a couple thousand years ago were deeply, deeply brilliant and possessed of a great need to send a message forward in time to us, right now, about the inevitable end of our world. Seriously, the money quote from Nostradamus 2012 was something to the effect of, "Why would people build entire civilizations just to send us a message?" They wouldn't. It's that simple. There's that old question: if people are actually able to psychically predict the future, why doesn't anyone use that to get tomorrow's lottery numbers or bet on the horses? It's what I would do, that's for damn sure. People have been predicting the end of the world pretty much from the point when there were people who had the ability to predict things. People have also been self-centered enough to believe that the world would end on their watch and everything has been leading to that point. Prophecy doesn't tell us about how our world will end. What it does is let us look in a mirror and say, "We really need to get over ourselves." Make another, better world. Start looking to the future instead of the past. It's really for the best.

Generation Terrorists

We’ve got a big problem right now. See, there’s a pretty good chance that Barack Obama’s going to win the Presidency of the United States of America in, like, a month. There’s also a very good chance that there are a crap ton of heavily armed people out there who think that Barack Obama is a terrorist. This is an especially big consideration when we consider this simple fact: the United States of America has a long and wonderful history of crazed loners killing important political figures for really fucking stupid reasons. Oh, and in case anyone’s wondering, John McCain isn’t particularly safe in this scenario, either. Let’s discuss a man named Charles J. Guiteau. Guiteau was a Stalwart. For those who aren’t up on their late 19th Century politics, the Stalwarts were a division of the Republican Party who were all about the general business as usual approach to politics, which means cronyism, to the uninitiated. President James Garfield was not a fan of cronyism and made it his goal to destroy it. Guiteau killed Garfield and said, “I am a Stalwart and Arthur is President.” See, Chester A. Arthur was supposed to take over as President, keep cronyism in place and, from what I recall, show his gratitude to Charles J. Guiteau by making him, as I recall, Ambassador to France. Lest anyone wonder, I may or may not have taken a 400-level course at Western Illinois University called U.S. Political Assassinations. It was one of the best classes ever, seriously. So let’s take a look at the John McCain scenario. I’ll only do it quickly, mostly because it’s a one-step theory. He’s got a member of the extreme fringe as his veep candidate. For anyone who’s wondering, that particular extreme fringe is filled with people who think that god speaks to them. Do the math. This brings us to the Barack Obama scenario, though. Back on September 11th there were a lot of people who wanted to turn the Middle East in to a smoking pile of rubble. It was the insanity of the 9/11 response that allowed Bush Administration to railroad the Iraq War through and then get re-elected. It is this insanity that McCain is turning to as his campaign falls apart. This is not a good sign. Now, as a pretend internet historian who got an A in U.S. Political Assassinations with a personal history with one part of the Republican lunatic fringe and a secondary understanding of gun culture, I’m pretty sure that I’m the sort of guy you want breaking this down. Quite frankly (lunatic with guns) + (President) * (accusations of terrorism + racism) is a pretty stinking easy formula to come up with results for. You don’t need me for that. I’m going to assume that the people who read this are pretty good at algebra, especially the kind with equations that don’t actually need to be solved. Let’s take a look, then, at the mentality. I was in Kansas City two weeks ago to hang out with a friend and see a Peacemakers show. My friend wanted to go to an outdoor supply store. A woman working at the store asked us if we were going to buy any guns, to which I replied, “Nope, I’m going back to Chicago. You can’t really get guns there.” She replied, “Oh, isn’t it just a mess up there?” I decided not to pursue the line of discussion, but I don’t think she was talking about the CTA budget crisis. Either way, it was the first time in my life I’d ever thought of myself as a “big-city liberal,” which is fascinating, since I really, really don’t think of myself as one. I mostly think of myself as a liberal in the larger sense of questioning the world and trying to advance knowledge. This, of course, is what has gotten us to where we are. We live in honestly frightening times. I don’t know that they are more or less frightening than any of the times we’ve known before, but they are magnified by changes that have happened over the last hundred years or so. Namely, we’ve experienced great leaps forward in science, communication, and, for lack of a better term, universalism. To define terms, Barack Obama defines what I mean by the term universalism. We have a half-white, half-black candidate whose mother is from Kansas and whose father is from Kenya and who lived in, what, Indonesia, for a time. This is terrifying to a lot of people and gives ample ground to accusations that he’s a terrorist. Lots of people are worried about places like Indonesia. Hell, I met a woman who wasn’t too comfortable with Chicago. (By the way, this isn’t to say anything bad about K.C. I wasn’t a big fan of their road system, but other than that it’s a nice place.) It’s easy to play on the fears of the other, since we’re kind of hard-wired that way. It’s the tribal history of the human race. Sticking with the tribe used to be the way to survive and it’s still an important part of the thought process. To a large number of conservatives, Barack Obama is the other. Unfortunately we’re seeing a Republican Party that remains content to play upon those fears, which is both why Obama is called both a Muslim and a radical black terrorist and we’ve been subjected to the candidacy of Sarah Palin for the last month. Palin is the exemplar of the sort of incuriosity that maintains a frightened base. It’s why they actually tried to pull the, “Well, I can see Russia from my house,” defense. They honestly don’t care that this idea sounds ludicrous to your average big city liberal, since they’re not talking to the big city liberals. They’re talking to the people who will eat the bullshit of the xenophobic party line with a spoon. Think of the Intelligent Design people. They live in an echo chamber. This I know, as I spent quite a bit of time in the echo chamber. So when I hear people say over and over and over again that I.D. should get even shot because evolution isn’t proven and is “just a theory,” then I hear evolution proponents try to explain the concept of “theory” in science v. “theory” in regular, every day language, I have to shake my head at the futility. As I may or may not have mentioned, I used to date a girl who believed that the universe is 6000 years old. This honestly surprised me the first time I heard it, since she was plenty willing to reject most of the craziness of fundamentalism. It came up in discussion a few times and she pretty much dropped it to an explanation that religion is one way of looking at things and science another and either one was equally valid. They aren’t equally valid. Those who live in a scientific world know that. I can explain time and time again that there is a difference between observation and delusion. The scientific method is terrifying, both to those who maintain the power structure and to those who are inside it. Quite frankly, I don’t think they can be easily separated any more. There may well be no one intentionally maintaining this attitude. Moreover, there is an attitude that says science isn’t true because it doesn’t find god. Work through this thought process. Science is supposed to seek truth. God is truth. Therefore, if science isn’t finding god, science is not finding truth. This is also why Bill Maher’s Religulous is a worthless project, at least if anyone is expecting to find converts. The religious targeted by the movie will be professionally outraged by it but won’t watch it. The people who will watch it will laugh or be outraged or both and will use it to fuel attacks on the internet and everyone will reinforce their own beliefs when all is said and done. Woo hoo…? Combine this echo chamber with the gun people. Right after Chicago was dismissed due to its general big city liberalness, my friend broke down the gun culture mentality. Basically, the attitude says that the gun is a useful tool with limited use, but in the places where it is useful no other tool will do. This is why Barack Obama’s idea of talking to people who disagree with us can be and often is attacked. They want to kill us, the reasoning goes, so our only option is to draw quicker than they do. This is why we’re in Iraq. This is the root of the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive war. Logic doesn’t apply. I often hear that things are worse now than they ever been. The world is filled with sex and crime like it never has been before. Um, no, no it’s not. We’re more frightened as a people, but that’s due to communication and marketing, not due to an actual uptick in violence. And people have pretty much been obsessed with sex for as long as there’s been sex. It’s kind of important for the continuation of the species. It doesn’t do much good to point that out, though, since the people that are the biggest problem then switch over to their default hold the line mentality. Either way, we live in dangerous times, but not for the reasons generally tossed around. We’re colliding with each other at faster speeds than ever but a lot of people are thinking and growing at the same slow speed people always have. The fact that there are plenty of lunatics with guns and lunatics with guns have a bad habit of killing politicians in the United States of America is a bad combination. I wish I could offer explanations to fix it, but there can be no revolutionary changes, we can only hope for evolutionary changes.

Look What I Just Stepped In...

So apparently I hate myself. However, bad rhetoric seems to work for me exactly the same way the word "chicken" works for Marty McFly (except in the third movie, when it was "yellow"). Anyway, one of the things that's in vogue with the Ken Hamites these days...wait. That might require a bit of explanation... Ken Ham is the creative force behind Answers in Genesis and the Creation Science Museum. I've mentioned him before. He's one of the central focii of the entire anti-evolutionary movement and I tend to use him as my shorthand description for such people. If I refer to Ken Hamites, then, it's not necessarily people who are actual followers of the man, but to people who think like he does. So, as I said, one of the popular defenses of Creation Science employed by the Ken Hamites these days is to attack Social Darwinism as the end result of evolution. We may or may not have seen a recent example of that somewhere nearby. The argument basically goes like this: Evolution inevitably leads to Social Darwinism. Therefore, evolution is invalid. Now this argument sounds good to people who don't understand what evolution actually is, which, ironically enough, includes the Social Darwinists. However, it's all fluff with no substance and, at its core, is a horrible rhetorical device on two levels. At least two levels that I can think of. First, let's do what I do and start with a story. I walk up to you in the street and say, "Man, isn't it great that the Bulls won the NBA Championship?" You scratch your head, take a look at my Creative Zen Vision:M mp3 player and Nokia 6555 cell phone and conclude that, no, I didn't just fall through a wormhole from 1998. So you respond, "No, the Celtics beat the Lakers in six. The Bulls didn't even make the playoffs. Hell, they won first pick in the draft lottery." I tell you you're wrong. So you grab a passerby and ask him. He confirms that the Celtics did, indeed win. I still don't believe you. You take me to the library and show me YouTube clips of KG's crazy Game 6 put-in and Pierce's return and Kobe's strip and dunk and the trophy ceremony. Then you show me the final standings on ESPN and the Beasley v. Rose debates for the Bulls' pick. I still don't believe you. Finally you ask why. I say, "Because I don't like those results." Not liking something isn't a good enough reason say it didn't happen. Social Darwinism happened, it wasn't cool. That no more invalidates evolutionary science than my dislike of a non-Bulls championship invalidates the record of the '07-'08 NBA season. Second, let's say I develop the ability to travel back in time. I decide to go back to the discovery of radiation because that way I can make sure no one ever even conceives of creating an atomic bomb. I get back to my own time and find out that there was never an atomic bomb. I also discover that scientific knowledge hasn't really advanced much on a theoretical level for the last hundred years or so, that there are no nuclear power plants, and that millions of people have died of untreated cancer because they were unable to receive radiation therapy. Picking only the worst result of something and decrying it in the name of that single thing is demagoguery. Social Darwinism is far from the only outcome of evolutionary theory (oh, and to head this one off: "theory" in science means that it can't be 100% confirmed in the lab within controlled experimental conditions. It does not mean, "Hey, we're just guessing over here." Charles Darwin's original predictions, especially as they've been refined over the years, have been remarkably predictive in terms of what we find at what point in the fossil record). The advances we've been able to make in our scientific knowledge since Darwin are immense. And I'm talking about things like medicine and mapping the human genome here, not just theoretical stuff. Social Darwinism, meanwhile, was a pseudo-social scientific outgrowth of evolutionary theory from the end of the 19th Century. It basically posited that, in evolutionary terms, there was one master race that could be perfected and before which all other races would either bow or be eradicated. The races were separated in to four categories: caucasoid (white), negroid (black), mongoloid (Asian), and, um, one other. Or maybe there were only three. (Edit: there were three. For some reason I keep wanting to add a fourth for either the Americas or the Indian subcontinent, but I think the Americas fell under mongoloid and the subcontinent was considered caucasoid.) Side note: In some of the older literature from Ken Ham's organization (and by "older," I mean, like the late '80s or even mid '90s), they actually put out the old caucasoid, negroid, mongoloid distinctions, which were out of favor in scientific circles by then. The reason they were in there is because it was part of an argument for a god-ordained speciation of the human race. More on that in a moment... The prime selling technique of the Social Darwinists was religious. God had ordained the superior white race to take the light of knowledge both scientific and spiritual to the little brown savages. The "White Man's Burden," and "Manifest Destiny" were all the rage in those days, and no one could stand before the inevitability of the god-ordained mission of the great white race (by the way, since I'm still plowing through it and love it, I'd like to take this point to again plug John Darwin's After Tamerlane: The History of Global Empire Since 1405. He does an excellent job of taking apart the whole inevitability argument and making it obvious that there was a massively complex collection of factors). Now, I forget what stories the caucasoids told about the mongoloids, but I know exactly what story they told to explain about why the negroids were inferior. See, after Noah's Flood, Noah started growing grapes to make wine. One day he got drunk and passed out in the buff. His son Ham saw him (I'm guessing by accident) and told his brothers. The brothers covered him by walking backwards carrying a blanket. Ol' Noah cursed his poor son Ham for the crime of seeing drunken, passed out, naked dad and told him his descendants were to be the servants of his brother's descendants. The Bible didn't go any further than that. However, a tradition grew up much, much later that Ham was given an external curse. His skin was made black. This was the basis on which church support of the black slave trade was made and, later, why the highly religious Afrikaners in South Africa supported apartheid and the white church in the South supported segregation. It's also why an archaic term for black Africans is "Hamite" and why I call Ken Ham-types "Ken Hamites" in a bit of wicked irony. Anyway, Social Darwinism is based on a faulty premise that evolution opponents will also gleefully use to make their points: namely that evolution has some sort of pre-determined process and it is working towards some sort of intended end point. See, you have to believe that there is some sort of evolutionarily intended master race in order to call yourself the master race. Or, I suppose, you could do what the religiously inclined Social Darwinists did and simply use evolution as yet another tool in your arsenal to explain why god has already made you the master race. But, even though it might not seem like it, I'm not actually here to pick on religion. I'm actually here to explain why religion is wrong to pick on evolution in this case. Primarily, Social Darwinism wouldn't have existed in the form we got it were it not for religious demagoguery working hand in hand with Bad Science (*cough* Creation Science *cough*). The big, splashy Social Darwinism moment didn't come until the mid-20th Century, anyway, with the Nazi attempts to eradicate Jews, homosexuals, gypsys, and the disabled while at the same time create the Master Race. While there was a religious framework built in to the Nazi state and much of the clergy was on Hitler's side for a lot of the Nazi period, it would be sheer sophistry to attempt to argue that religion played a key or even particularly large role in the horrors of the Holocaust. All of the horrors of the modern state and the possible excesses of unchecked science were exhibited in the charnel houses of the Holocaust. I would not attempt to defend Hitler, nor would I attempt to dismiss it. I am, after all, a historian (on nights and weekends, by days I do data management and analysis) and have had the famous maxim of Santayana drilled in to my skull. The twin shocks of the World Wars set off an intellectual backlash that has given root and verve to the postmodern movement. Where we once said that our science and technology would eventually make anything we desired possible, we now try to stop to ask if we should do it just because we can. It's also given rise to the celebration of cultural diversity and the attempts to create an ethnically diverse understanding of the world. For while we may fear the mysterious and wish to destroy the unknown, we are far less likely to try that when we can put a face to the group we're so ready to decry. This, by the way, is why I actually hope that I am correct that our morals contain an evolutionary component. Yes, evolution might have given rise to Hitler, but the great thing about evolution, whether from a biological or societal standpoint, is that nothing stays the same way it's been. We can change. That's how the United States started out as a place that allowed slavery, then added an Amendment freeing the slaves and giving them the vote and a hundred years later added the Civil Rights Amendment. We evolved in our thinking and offered to share something that had once been reserved only for white folks. In a moral law situation, however, the law is rooted in the morality of the lawgiver. If the lawgiver doesn't change, the law doesn't change. That's why I can say that the Bible is sexist. See, even if the books of Ruth or Esther illustrate strong women, the ends of both stories can still be reduced to this line: "So she dressed up all sexy and used her feminine wiles to get a man to solve her problems for her." That's pretty far from women's lib. Oh, and then there's this promise to Joshua on the eve of the Israelite assault on the Promised land: "I will give you every place where you set your foot, as I promised Moses. Your territory will extend from the desert to Lebanon, and from the great river, the Euphrates -- all the Hittite country -- to the Great Sea on the west. No one will be able to stand up against you all the days of your life."(Josh. 1:3-4) Now, there were people living in those lands to begin with. This area was the homeland to dozens or hundreds of small tribes and larger city-states (Jericho, for instance, is the longest continually populated place on the planet. It's been around for nine thousand years). These were people who had been there for a while. And here they are, about to get invaded by an external force whose god would repeatedly command the eradication of towns to the man, woman, child, and in special cases, livestock. What does this sound like? I don't know about anyone else, but I'd call it genocide. Seriously, go to biblegateway, call up a NIV translation and do a word search of the book of Joshua for the term "totally destroyed." It comes up in almost every verse in the middle chapters. (Oh, and let it be known: god never lived up to his promises. The Israelites never got anywhere close to the Euphrates or Hittite territory, which was primarily focused up around Anatolia, also known as Turkey. Well, okay, they did get close to the Hittites. When the Hittites came south.) This is the danger of claiming allegiance to an unchanging god and saying that all morality comes from the fellow. When most Christians claim the moral high ground on issues, they're thinking of it from the Jesus side of the thing. But if god hasn't changed, than they've got all the baggage of the god who didn't allow anyone but a small group of collaborators to survive the fall of Jericho. And with the demographics of pre-modern societies, most of those bodies that had to be run through with a bronze blade were under the age of 13. Edit: In case you're wondering, don't "Social Darwinism" me. Martin Buber is one of my favorite philosophers and the transition from the Modern to the Postmodern has been one of my key bits of historical fascination for the last couple of years. If you don't look at Social Darwinism while dealing with that subject, you might as well look at World War II without studying the rise of the Nazi Party or the bizarro world Bushido revival in Japan. The people who toss around Social Darwinism to attack evolution are just as ignorant of the former as they are of the latter and are simply using the terms because they're emotionally loaded, complex, and things that lots of people -- especially the choir that is their primary audience -- do not understand and will probably never study on their own. I have seen with my own eyes Ken Ham explain that we have all the different species of dogs that we do because of dominant and recessive genes. I have also heard a wonderful anecdote of Michael Behe's shocked reaction when his concept of irreducible complexity was theatrically debunked in a Dover courtroom by a lawyer placing forty or so books and papers that showed why there is no such thing on the witness stand. These are people playing at science and calling it real. They do the same exact thing with history. The lesson, as always: don't trust a demagogue.