The New Atheists and Old Belief Systems - Part 2

Gary Wolf continues his article with a conversation with Sam Harris (you can read part 1 here) :

"As I test out the New Atheist arguments, I realize that the problem with logic is that it doesn't quicken the blood sufficiently -- even my own. But if logic by itself won't do the trick, how about the threat of apocalypse? The apocalyptic argument for atheism is the province of Sam Harris, who released a book two years ago called The End of Faith: Religion Terror, and the Future of Reason."

As Wolf reports, Harris argues that, unless we renounce faith, religious violence will soon bring civilization to an end. This autumn, Harris has a new book out, Letter to a Christian Nation. In it, he demonstrates the behavior he believes atheists should adopt when talking with Christians. "Nonbelievers like myself stand beside you," he writes, addressing his imaginary opponent, "dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living. But we stand dumbstruck by you as well -- by your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in service to your religious myths, and by your attachment to an imaginary God."

Yikes! So I'm in denial of reality, suffering starts with me, and I am subject to my imagination. But you know, I'm really getting into this dialogue. Rather than being threatened I'm challenged in my beliefs and find it strangely refreshing to looking at what I believe through the eyes of someone outside of my "Christian" circle.

Wolf expresses his desire to talk with Harris - about emotion, about politics, about his conviction that the days of civilization are numbered unless we renounce irrational belief. Given the way things are going, I want to know if he is depressed. Is he preparing for the end?

He is not.

"Look at slavery," he says. We are at a beautiful restaurant in Santa Monica, near the public lots from which Americans -- nearly 80 percent of whom believe the Bible is the true word of God, if polls are correct -- walk happily down to the beach in various states of undress. "People used to think," Harris says, "that slavery was morally acceptable. The most intelligent, sophisticated people used to accept that you could kidnap whole families, force them to work for you, and sell their children. That looks ridiculous to us today. We're going to look back and be amazed that we approached this asymptote of destructive capacity while allowing ourselves to be balkanized by fantasy. What seems quixotic is quixotic -- on this side of a radical change. From the other side, you can't believe it didn't happen earlier. At some point, there is going to be enough pressure that it is just going to be too embarrassing to believe in God."

Hey, how can you not like a guy who uses words like asymptote? I'm not sure, but I believe the inference is that theists at the best and Christians at the worst created and condoned slavery. It is interesting that he seems to contradict Dawkins on the intelligence issue, that it was intelligent, nay the MOST intelligent and sophisticated people who supported the practice. Now I won't deny that many horrible things have been done in the name of religion. But some good things have also been done. Regarding the references to slavery above, an appropriate example is William Wilberforce, who after his conversion to Christianity was an effective and eloquent figure against whom slavery suffered a mortal wound.

Wolf and Harris then discuss what it might look like, this world without God. "There would be a religion of reason," Harris says. "We would have realized the rational means to maximize human happiness. We may all agree that we want to have a Sabbath that we take really seriously -- a lot more seriously than most religious people take it. But it would be a rational decision, and it would not be just because it's in the Bible. We would be able to invoke the power of poetry and ritual and silent contemplation and all the variables of happiness so that we could exploit them. Call it prayer, but we would have prayer without bullshit."

Wolf does call it prayer and describes it this way: that our reason will subjugate our superstition, that our intelligence will check our illusions, that we will be able to hold at bay the evil temptation of faith.

What is prayer anyway? To me, there are two constants in prayer that I am aware of that cross religious boundaries. First, we pray to an entity - something that exists. Second, we pray to something that is greater than us - we don't pray to equals. That's why the parody of God represented by the Flying Spaghetti Monster can be proffered.

I'm enlightened by this interview, in that I now know that the religion of atheism is supported by prayer, and that the center of the atheist worldview is nothing less than happiness. Not world peace, not justice, not the elimination of poverty or starvation, but happiness.

It's frightening to realize how much of the seeds of this worldview have been planted and are now taking root. Oh, how naive I was watching the Partridge Family after school every day and singing along with the lyrics, not knowing that the roots of atheism were being planted deep into our culture:

Hello, world, here the song that we're singin',

C'mon get happy!

A whole lot of lovin' is what we'll be bringin'

We'll make you happy!

We had a dream, we'd go travelin' together,

We'd spread a little lovin' then we'd keep movin' on.

Somethin' always happens whenever we're together

We get a happy feelin' when we're singing a song.

Trav'lin' along there's a song that we're singin'

C'mon get happy!

A Whole lot of lovin' is what we'll be bringin'

We'll make you happy!

We'll make you happy!

We'll make you happy!

Please pray for me.

Of cops, donuts and machine guns

My anonymous friend who will remain anonymous is the captain of the police force in an anonymous city here in an anonymous state (OK, Orygun where the willuhmutt river flows freely on it's journey to the Superfund passage).


My friend teaches machine gun tactics and safety. How cool is that? Let's look at the gradution photo of a recent live fire exercise:

Ahh, there's nothing like a man and his machine gun! Please note that the scenario resulting in the carnage (get it? car-nage? ha ha ha) above was a hypothetical hostage situation. The lesson learned from this is: you never, ever want to be taken hostage in Oregon!

There is also an interesting visual in this picture. Police officers are subject to stereotyping, and if I may be so bold to point out (at the risk of a plethora of MP-5s pointed at my posterier) that an abundance of donuts fueled the day of machine gun fun.

Wish I was there.

"Some of the students did not take this very well"

There was a little problem reported at Old Dominion University. A computer glitch erroneously refunded dozens of students thousands of dollars. And now the school is asking for the money back. School officials said that 55 students are being told they must reimburse the school a total of about $323,000.00.


President Roseann Runte said during a meeting of the executive committee of the Board of Visitors on Monday that "Some of the students did not take this very well".

Robert Fenning, vice president for administration and finance, said some students owe as little as $1,000 while some owe up to $15,000. Some of the students had asked about the checks, but were told they were legitimate, Fenning said. Officials said the affected students began as out-of-state students, who pay higher tuition than in-state students, and later switched their residences to Virginia. When the student records software was upgraded, it read the new addresses and applied them retroactively, issuing refund checks to those it perceived as having overpaid.

The error was discovered in August after another software upgrade, but it had been happening since last year, Fenning said. The school checked all the records and sent letters to the affected students earlier this month. Repayment plans are being worked out, officials said.


HT to Stickyminds

All I want for Christmas

For the third year, I post my Christmas wish list. For the third year, I only ask for one item. For the third year, it involves wheels. For the third year, I don't think I'm going to receive it. For the third year, I'll ask anyway! Here's what I wanted the last two years but didn't get:

The baddest muscle car to ever reign on asphalt.
Compared to this, a Hummer is a kiddy sissy Tonka truck.

How could I top those? OK Santa - make my day. Just like many kids out there, I would like a bicycle please. Just a bicycle. That's all, no 'ultimate' car or truck. The only thing that separates this bike from others - the price tag. You can by a great bike for $2,700.00. You could by a most excellent bike for $4,700.00. You could probably buy a TDF ready bike (this is an assumption) for $7,500.00.

What do you think you can get for $23,225.00? Yep, twenty three thousand and two hundred twenty five dollars. Now that's a bike!

This bike as you can imagine is very special. Of course, custom paint and hand built wheels are what you would expect. You would also expect a geometrically fitted bike. Well, now let's stretch the limits of imagination - how about pedals with hand-laid copper gilding, aluminum-titanium-nitride-coated ti axles with ceramic bearings? Not enough you say? Okay, let's also hand bevel the carbon fibreLyte rear derailleur cage and top cap to better match the bike's lines. Still not enough to justify the price you say? Let's slap a 1,000 gram wheelset onto the bike. Yes, that is only ONE THOUSAND GRAMS!


Total weight of the bike? How about 13.5 pounds. THIRTEEN AND A HALF POUNDS! Think I'll get one?!?!?

The New Atheists and Old Belief Systems - Part 1

"Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try no hell below us: above us only sky imagine no possessions: it isn't hard to do nothing to kill or die for: and no religion too.. "
John Lennon

"The empty headed fool says in his heart, there is no God".

David, Psalm 53:1 (Amplified)

In the November 2006 edition of Wired magazine, Gary Wolf writes about "...the band of intellectual brothers mounting a crusade against belief in God". Wolf in his introduction explains that:

The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it's evil. Now that the battle has been joined, there is no excuse for shirking.

And the battle rages.

In the article, Wolf set out to talk to three of the most socially prominent atheists, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. Wolf wanted to find out what it would mean to to enlist in the war against faith. In this entry I'll comment on the interview with Dawkins.

Dawkins has reached somewhat of a celebrity status among atheists. Wolf talks about how

"Dawkins' style of debate is as maddening as it is reasonable. A few months earlier, in front of an audience of graduate students from around the world, Dawkins took on a famous geneticist and a renowned neurosurgeon on the question of whether God was real. The geneticist and the neurosurgeon advanced their best theistic arguments: Human consciousness is too remarkable to have evolved; our moral sense defies the selfish imperatives of nature; the laws of science themselves display an order divine; the existence of God can never be disproved by purely empirical means."

I'm a simple man. I think those are mighty fine arguments for theism. Wolf goes on to explain that:

Dawkins rejected all these claims, but the last one – that science could never disprove God – provoked him to sarcasm. "There's an infinite number of things that we can't disprove," he said. "You might say that because science can explain just about everything but not quite, it's wrong to say therefore we don't need God. It is also, I suppose, wrong to say we don't need the Flying Spaghetti Monster, unicorns, Thor, Wotan, Jupiter, or fairies at the bottom of the garden. There's an infinite number of things that some people at one time or another have believed in, and an infinite number of things that nobody has believed in. If there's not the slightest reason to believe in any of those things, why bother? The onus is on somebody who says, I want to believe in God, Flying Spaghetti Monster, fairies, or whatever it is. It is not up to us to disprove it."

That is a fascinating statement to me. There seems to be an a priori mechanism working here, where Dawkins (who without doubt is a towering intellect) seemingly retreats into a defensive mode. If I believe in God, and he does not; why wouldn't he try to disprove it? Interestingly enough, Wolf states that science, after all, is an empirical endeavor that traffics in probabilities. The probability of God, Dawkins says, while not zero is vanishingly small. That also fascinates me, because for the reasons of the neurosurgeon and geneticist mentioned above I would flip it and say that the probability of evolution, while not zero is vanishingly small. So, we are using the same argument to defend our positions. I have to wonder again, why wouldn't he try to disprove it?

According to Dawkins, "highly intelligent people are mostly atheists". This statement has inherent weaknesses. Has Dawkins interviewed all of the highly intelligent people that have ever lived? Or are living now? Or will have ever lived? Of course not. This is the statistical fallacy known as "hasty generalizations". In hasty generalization fallacies a large enough sample is not taken. If the sample is not large enough, then we risk it not being representative of the class we are studying. What if there was just one highly intelligent person who believed in God? What if there were two? Or three or four or five or a hundred or a thousand or a hundred thousand, does that weaken his argument? How can he so easily dismiss religious intellectuals on an equal or perhaps even greater plane than he, for example Blaise Pascal?

But there's more beneath this statement. By ascribing a belief system (whether atheistic or religious) to a class or segment of people based on superiority or inferiority of a trait, moral or ethical questions arise. For example, if we restate his claim he could say with the same meaning that "stupid people are mostly religious". Do you see where I'm going with this? Yep, I'll go ahead and make the leap that this kind of reasoning leads to devaluing segments of humanity. Now, I'm not saying that Dawkins is a Nazi. But, if we are just the product of blind evolution, and smarter people like us know that there is no God, then let's degrade the value of those in our society who are not as smart as us. And maybe us smart people should only marry other smart people so that we create the "master race".

I will give Dawkins points for honesty though. Dawkins openly agrees with the most stubborn fundamentalists (sic) that evolution must lead to atheism.

And on that point, we are agreed.

Bet your city doesn't have this...

You can purchase bumper stickers in Music Millenium that say this: "Keep Portland Weird". An example you ask? Let me give you one. Here in Portland we have lots of racing enthusiasm. We've got car racing, dog racing, the Portland Marathon, triathlons, duathlons, a velodrome for bicyle racing, criteriums, remote control car racing, motorcycle racing etc etc etc. It's quite possible that your city also has one or more of these.

But here's one example Portland is weird, and I bet your city doesn't have goldfish racing. Yeah, let me say it again: goldfish racing. At the Mt. Hood bowling lanes, in the lounge you will find two ten foot long troughs. Two goldfish await in their stalls (plastic cups filled with water). An eager tension fills the air, as the goldfish paw and buck like broncos before a buckin'.

At the count of 1-2-3! The contestants are transferred to their respective troughs, while their trainers coax them down the lane with spray bottles like firefighters putting out a kitchen fire.

The excitement is reported in the 11/17 Oregonian:

"The black-tipped fish (Lexex) sprints, but Cuervo gallops ahead, with a fiery kick at the finish line (a pink cocktail stirrer, taped to the end of the trough)."

Although it's gaining popularity, bet your city doesn't have this.

I'm so embarrassed

My friend Jim turned 50. We had a big bash at his house, and theme was decorate your own cupcake. That was somewhat incongruous as cupcakes were consumed with beer, whiskey, vodka and oyster shooters. But hey, it was Jim's party!

I was shopping for a card that in a friendly jesting way would joke about turning 50. I found a card that had a "you know are are fifty when..." theme. The very first item was this:

"You know you are fifty when you sing along to the elevator music."

Here comes the confession that led to a feeling of embarrassement: Earlier I had done some shopping at Albertson's. The muzak flowed unnoticed in the background, until suddenly - out of the speakers came the opening notes of "Waiting for a star to fall". Boy met girl in 1988, and now Boy meets Girl all over again. The saxophone prelude began, and my palms began to sweat as I was tempted to grab a bottle of shampoo and belt out the lyrics. After all, it may be Joe Albertson's supermarket but the singing aisle is mine (to make a very bad pun on a marketing jingle that most of you probably don't remember).

Anyway, after making my purchases I rushed home to find and download the song. Alas! All I could find was a karaoke version. Not to be deterred, I found the lyrics and sang along as loud as I could. The cat began to hiss, the dog whimpered, the fish in the aquarium hid and I thanked God that Sherry was not home.

Fifty is only a year away for me, and already I'm succumbing to elevator music. Sigh.

Going for Guinness

Ha! You thought this post was about beer, didn't you? Nay friends, we are about to embark on a journey into the Guinness Book of World Records. As reported in Time magazine (November 20) by Carolyn Sayre:

"Call them crazy, but there's a group of very special people who have something you probably don't: a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records."

Now, although I've reached the heights of achieving multiple lofty goals, sunken in the valleys of committing repeated heinous social blunders; never have I been graced with the wreath of a world record. But Paul has.

Paul is a guy with multi-faceted talents. He's creative: he once helped to orchestrate an amazing sight, walking through nightime woods whipping a glow stick around with which the end had been cut off. We wandered through the blackness where a tunnel of soft illumination decorated trees, shrubs, and the floor of the woods in a stunning visual treat. Paul is also smart: he sells software. Paul also is a skilled footbag enthusiast. Let's let him explain how it works:

The actual footbag (aka Hacky Sack) record is called “10-minute timed one-pass.”

You get 10 minutes to get as many kicks, back and forth, as you can. (To break this record, you can’t take two kicks in a row; neither can the bag touch you above the waist). To be a world record, it must be “drop-less.” I.e. you can’t drop it, and pick it up, and keep going. Further, even if you surpassed the record in less then 10 minutes without dropping, then dropped before the 10 minutes were completed, the record would not be recognized. You only get two attempts at a World Footbag Association event (the sanctioning organization for the sport.) These are the same guidelines that Guinness World Records requires we follow.

In 90 degree heat on a concret surface the attempt began. About 7 minutes in, they dropped. Well, now it was time for the second - and final - attempt. At about 4 minutes into it,

This Happened.

No way! How could that have happened? Since they were already set up, they decided to start again and then appeal to the powers that be that a third attempt was justified due to interference. Although there a few bobbles, at the ten minute mark the unofficial count was 1,414 - handily beating the former record of 1,327!

They were granted the exception, and through an unofficial confirmation from Guinness were informed that they would obtain the record. In a few weeks, an official certificate will come to validate the confirmation.

Very cool!

Menu-Driven Prayer

I love this cartoon (Pearls before Swine) and the crocs are my favorite characters:


It illustrates a paradigm that I have unfortunately fallen into, that of God like a big "sugar daddy in the sky" waiting to bestow us with blessings as we submit our prayers like a list to him. Sherry and I try (and most mornings are successful) to prayer together every day and lately have realized that it's become mostly all about us. We ask prayers that for the most part self centered.

It's like looking over menu options and choosing or discarding like this:

Let's see, I'll have the appetizer of have a quick commute today. For the main course I'd like a big portion of prosperity, served with a side of mashed enemies. Please hold any illness, but could I also get some nice weather on the side please? For dessert, let's see - can you show me the tray? OK, there - I'll settle on a nice tropical vacation.

Amen.

Obviously, you can see the problem here. To not be too facetious, we do pray for our friends, family, co-workers, church and other needs that our lives intersect with. But to a large part our (my) prayers have become rote. I don't think it's a matter of not knowing what do, it's putting it in action. I need to stop asking so much (particularly for me), and listening more.