I read the cutest little story today…
Category Archives: AntiTheistic Musings
8 Things Your Pastor Will Never Tell You About The Bible
Another interesting point of view from a former pastor and one I hope can open some eyes.
Read the entire article here
A Meaningless Universe
Here’s a reply to a post that I couldn’t possibly have written as well as Amusing Nonsense has. Thanks for a great read, and expressing my sentiments exactly!
I Reserve The Right To Question
I was recently inspired by a discussion on Youtube by Dawkins and Krauss. I have to say that it was one of the most enlightening and moving discussions I have ever heard so far, and I admire them both for their courage to be up there talking with such conviction in front of thousands of people who may or may not agree with them. It was a discussion with so many wonderful points made and eye-opening facts that my brain didn’t quite know what to do with itself. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I’ll put a link to it at the end of this post.
The discussion was titled “Something From Nothing”. I know the topic can create some heat, but the title is not the subject that I aim to write about today. Something else came up in their dialogue that I think is a wonderful, truthful point that I wish more people would understand and have the courage to do in their daily lives: utilizing their right to question beliefs. Any beliefs. I am not pointing the finger at Christianity, or Islam, or Judaism. I mean any beliefs on the face of our planet Earth. I strongly feel that if you are going around saying “I am a Christian” or “I follow ‘x’ set of beliefs” then it should be no problem for you to explain those beliefs and be able to back up why you believe those things.
I am sick of hearing people argue for their faith without actually answering direct questions about it. One question I pose often to Christians is whether or not they truly believe all of the “miraculous” stories in the bible. I want to know if they take that, like everything else in the bible, as fact. Infuriatingly, in most instances all that happens is huffing, puffing and avoiding the questions because they’re so offended by the asking of the question itself.
If you are going to label yourself as one thing or another, nobody has the right to feel offended just because someone is questioning the things you stand for. If you can answer in a rational and logical way, good for you. Perhaps the person asking will learn something or find a new perspective on the topic. If you can’t, I think you need to take a serious look at your beliefs and what exactly you stand for. To me, it is impossible for your beliefs or yourself to be taken seriously at that point. If you feel strongly about something, there must be a reason, and if that reason is simply “that’s your belief” – that’s just plain not good enough. Be an adult Just because it is your “personal belief” doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be accountable for it.
For instance, I believe in animal welfare. I work every day to make the lives of the animals in my care better. Why do I believe this? Because it is fundamentally and morally wrong to neglect or abuse other creatures who depend on us for their basic needs. The Golden Rule is one to be followed, and I would challenge anyone to argue that.
Politicians will often use their religious beliefs in their political platform, and Krauss talked about this in the video. I believe he made a great point in saying that perhaps it is alright for that politician to have those personal beliefs, but the second he uses it on his political platform he is fair game for the media or whoever to question them. If you want to put those beliefs in the public eye and use them to your advantage, it is not wrong for someone to question them and being offended at that point is incredibly hypocritical.
Dawkins had a slightly different opinion. He was of the mind that any personal belief is open for discussion or questioning, regardless of it being in the public eye or not. I can see where he is coming from here as well because even on my little blog, I feel a strong need to defend or rationalize my thoughts to anyone who questions or argues against them. If I have a belief, I should be able to back it up and state why I think that way.
The beautiful part about the discussion between these two men is that even when they disagree, they can do so in such a civilized, respectful manner that it’s quite refreshing to watch. They both discuss why they believe each point, and can have a lively and engaging debate without the flinging of mud or bruised egos that so often come with debates on controversial topics. I think it’s disgusting that there a certain religions, and I won’t pick on one, that people are afraid to talk about for fear of physical or verbal retribution. Blindly following anything with no room for inquiry or advancement is not something I consider appealing and I have a hard time understanding why it’s desirable.
Always remember: just because you’re offended doesn’t mean you’re right.
A question posed by an audience member also really got me thinking and I am glad he was able to say this: if as many people watched this two hour video as watched the Super Bowl, the world would be a better place. If you watched the video, I think you would also agree. See for yourself by clicking here. I would love to hear what anyone reading this thinks of the video as well. Please feel free to comment or email with your thoughts!
Points I Love About Dawkins’ “Enemies of Reason”
“…Yet today, reason has a battle on it’s hands. I want to confront the epidemic of irrational, superstitious thinking”. – Richard Dawkins
The way this documentary has shaped the way I see the people of this world can be summed up thusly: No respect for evidence.
I wonder how I haven’t watched the series “Enemies of Reason” already, but I am glad I have now. Dawkins brings up so many valid and arguable points that it brought me tears of joy to listen to it. I didn’t actually cry, but it did make me feel like some of my own theories and thoughts were justified and that made me happy. If you haven’t seen this series, you will find it at the bottom of this post.
I have a lot of respect for people like Dawkins who demand evidence and proof for anything in our world, and he doesn’t deny that anything could be possible. He simply states that without evidence, it is very unlikely and therefore not something that he believes in and I think that even though this isn’t a standard many seem to follow, it is one that, in my opinion, should be followed by a larger percentage of the world’s population.
As you can see from this documentary, there are a lot of beliefs out there that are solely that – beliefs. Psychics, for example. There’s no solid, rational reason to believe it other than that it allows someone to make money from fooling gullible people. They prod you until they come across something which sparks some sort of memory or reaction from you, and run with it from there. Despite being called out in this programme, they still stick to their guns. Why? People will still continue to be fooled by it, and they’ll continue to profit.
One thing I ask anyone who believes in this sort of thing is – why don’t more psychics win the lottery? Why don’t they have the answers to the really important questions like the key to curing terminal disease or how to solve the world’s problems of war or famine. The same reason everyone else doesn’t – they don’t have any more answers than any other human being.
The idea that we can change the course of events simply by doing some sort of lucky ritual is something that up until today, I hadn’t put much thought into. To be honest, I did things like this on a regular basis without even thinking. Using the phrase “knock on wood” or thinking that one object or another was “lucky” was something I actually thought would help.
While I trained harness racehorses I would think that when a horse won, nothing could be changed the next time it raced. I had to get things ready the same way, stand in the same place to watch the race, and all kinds of other silly things that made me think that by doing them, I would have a better chance at having my horse win.
This is, of course, nonsense. To think that actions like this would actually change the course of events is just silly. When this happens to work out, it only reinforces the behaviour. Dawkins outlines this by explaining an experiment done with pigeons. Food would pop out at apparently random times, but because it came out a few times after the bird had looked over it’s left shoulder, it was convinced that that was what brought the food. The bird became obsessed with looking over that shoulder, thinking that it would bring him the reward even though the timing really was random.
Here is a link to more information on that pigeon – http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Skinner/Pigeon/
This is the same thing that happens to people when their little quirks appear to work out. The same results probably would’ve come even without these rituals, but people will do them anyway – just in case.
Here is a little joke that I heard from an acquaintance in the backstretch of a Southern Ontario harness racetrack:
There once was a man obsessed with the number four. His horse would jog four miles, get four flakes of hay a day, he would warm up four laps before a race, and he would pat him precisely four times before the race. To his excitement, he drew the number four in his race one day. So he made sure everything in preparation for the race was done in fours and sent him out to race… He was fourth.
Whether or not his little story was based on true events or he was just trying to be smart, it always kind of stuck with me.
Homeopathy is another subject I’ve always just dismissed since I’ve never had solid evidence of it working. What I didn’t realize was how many people really do believe that diluting something so that the active ingredient is quite literally non-existent will really heal their ailment, and do it more effectively than modern medicine!
Apparently I am in the wrong industry. I could be putting water into little dropper bottles and smacking a label on that says it contains diluted horse manure and someone would buy it thinking they were going to be cured of the common cold. Why haven’t I thought of this before?
One of the beliefs is that water has a memory. To this, I say:
The fact is, homeopathic remedies are unproven, unrealistic, pseudoscientific jokes and I for one will not fall into the herd of gullible people who have been hooked by the people promoting them.
They do not replace modern medicine and I truly believe that the people selling/prescribing these things are conning people into believing it will cure them. Let’s put them in a double blind controlled trial and see how they stand up. Let’s see if there is more than a tiny shred, a whisper of promising results. There is no science behind any of it, and if anyone reading this does have access to studies proving the efficacy of a homeopathic remedy, please share it with me. But please note that individual, non-controlled “studies” don’t count. Not even a little bit.
One part of this series actually goes on to state that homeopathy is actually taking money away from real medicines that are in the process of being rigorously tested and proven so that they can confidently say they can help real maladies. This is really disgraceful.
There is a double standard now, wherein orthodox doctors need to spend years proving their theories,yet no such standard is set for homeopathy. It is based on ignorance and developed before Dawkins states that it undermines sciences and deludes people. It is so easy to sell something without proof because people seem to distrust science more than they distrust the hocus pocus suggestions of homeopathy.
Can you say placebo effect?
Some will say that it is “one of the oldest forms of medicine in the world”, like the woman in the series. Dawkins makes a very valid point in saying,
“In medicine, ancient also means developed before we understood the causes of disease, before germ theory. It was based on ignorance then, and age makes it no truer. We misguidedly look back to a golden age that never was. Ours is the golden age of safe, tested medicine. Effective beyond placebo, in which we’ve cut infant mortality and conquered disease, then forgotten they existed”
The miracles of things like surgery, blood transfusion, and other great medical findings could not a happened with science. So-called alternative medicine has not made progress of any sort. Instead it attempts to bring back bronze age silliness. We may as well bring back leeches as a cure.
Hierarchy of knowledge: Science, social science, pseudoscience (religion doesn’t make the list)
Wonderful read – if you haven’t, you should!
Like anyone with a university degree, a graduate education, and a devout affection for human knowledge, I fill much of my life with understanding our physical universe. I read academic journals ranging from Biology and Nature to Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics. But unlike some educated people, I dedicated my education to the soft sciences. That is, in my undergrad I received a degree in political science. In my graduate work, I focused on security studies (although I wrote my thesis on altruistic suicide).
There’s a divorce between the hard sciences and the soft sciences. In fact, I would even go so far as to say political science, philosophy, and any of the other soft sciences are only one step above pseudoscience. The big things that separate us from pseudoscientists are that we don’t start with a claim, and we don’t pretend to be able to replicate our…
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The Problem of Evil
I knew I would re-blog after the first few sentences, but I read on anyway 🙂
If God is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent then there should be no evil in the world. The problem of evil is a philosophy that points this out, and refutes the western idea of God. God is described by many as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, but in this post I will assume omniscient and omnipotent are the same thing—if one has omnipotentence, they can do anything, and this means they can find out anything.
Some respond that God allows evil as the means to an end, and that this end will be good. But this is still contradictory. In ethical terms, the thing that does the least bad and the most good is the best option. If God is omnipotent, he can do anything, and if he is omnibenevolent then he will want the best thing. If he is both then he will do the best thing.
But the problem of…
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It should also bother you if you reason a bit
Why is Faith Good?
You were warned in my tagline.
The inspiration for many of my beliefs, my idol of sorts, Christopher Hitchens, posed this question in many of his debates:
Why is faith good?
It’s one that I think is a fair and justified question, and one that we ought to ask ourselves. I think there are a lot of people who take all of religion on faith, thinking this will earn them bonus points when they die and get judged by how blindly faithful they were.
This is a sinister concept and an utter slap in the face to our freedom of thought. Just because we are a chromosome away from a chimp doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be utilizing the powers of reason and investigation that evolution has bred into us. What if we ran the rest of our lives like this? What if we demanded the same standard of evidence for our medicines, our healthcare, or our schooling? We would still be teaching that sickness is a curse for behaving badly or burning people for being witches. You want to run your life based on something you’re told or something you’ve read in an ancient book wherein it is blasphemy to question or doubt it under pain of going to hell? You can have it, but be accountable for what you believe, and don’t expect to go into a debate with the argument of pure faith and not to be laughed off.
I like to think that I live my life and make my decisions as a result of previous study and weighing of evidence from either side. I believe it’s very important to get as much information as you possibly can as I strongly believe you can never be too informed. I usually take a relatively long time to reach a decision about something. I am largely indecisive so that contributes as well, but I also like to look at each side and take time to weigh my options and information. Once I have gathered this information and have come to a decision, it can be difficult to convince me otherwise unless I am given substantial evidence to the contrary.
For me to believe in something that cannot be proven, that cannot be measured or quantified, is alien and, to me, no way to base important opinions and decisions on. However, it is impossible for religion to be proven, so I guess that lessens my chances of believing even further.
One cannot disprove the existence of god in any reasonable or scientific way any more than one can prove it in this manner. The way I see it, even though I can’t prove god doesn’t exist, the impossibility of it being proven that it does by any scientific means is enough for me. I don’t need it. I don’t need to believe in heaven or hell, or that if I am really good I am going to go to a place that is all sunshine, lollipops, and other such bullshit. On the flip side, if I do something negative or “evil”, I am not going to rot or burn in the depths of some fiery underground place of evil. Perhaps if you metaphorically meant my conscience, but not everyone seems to own one of those. I believe that if I am a good person, if I do good things, and continue on my quest for continual self-improvement, that I will just continue to be. I will continue to be, and I will have the satisfaction of knowing that I have done a good thing, and made another life better or easier or whatever the case may be. That is enough for me. I don’t need unfounded promises about what’s going to happen after I die. Like Bill Maher said, “…and anyone who tells you they know, they just know what happens when you die; I promise you, you don’t. How can I be so sure? Because I don’t know, and you do not possess mental powers that I do not. The only appropriate attitude for man to have about the big questions is not the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of religion, but doubt. Doubt is humble and that’s what man needs to be considering that human history is just a litany getting shit dead wrong”
It’s easy to claim that you know what happens in the after life because let’s be honest – who is going to prove you wrong? Anyone who doesn’t like to question or reason will just go along with it because what else are they going to believe? The fact that we sit in the ground and rot isn’t romantic enough, I guess. Let’s follow these rules just in case there is in fact something on the other side waiting to punish me. People will do all kinds of silly things to avoid such punishment as they believe they’ll find in the afterlife. Let me tell you, your brain is the instrument through which you feel everything. Pain, pleasure, happiness, sadness, etc. When you die, your brain does not function anymore. You brain will decompose. Logically, then, how is one to feel either the rapture of heaven or the eternal misery of hell without the brain the interpret this?
This is where the freedom of thought bit comes in. You can apparently go to “hell” for merely thinking something that is against the rules. In the words of Hitchens, “this is disgraceful”. Progress cannot be made if we continue to believe that we will be judged and eventually persecuted for something that crosses our mind. Freedom of thought is a right which I cherish and personally, I would rather there weren’t some “Big Brother” entity out there making sure I kept my thoughts to his liking, thank you very much. “…However, let no-one say there is no cure, salvation is offered! Redemption indeed, is promised at the low price of the surrender of your critical faculties” – Hitchens
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1ESU0xu4Zc&feature=youtu.be – The part which supports my point can be found from about 3:50 – 4:30
Standard Of Reason 