JW apostates "mentally diseased"

No question, Jehovah's Witnesses play hardball with their ex-members. Ostracism of unbelievers (even if they're family members) is not just a common practice; it's official.

As if that weren't enough, now there's more. The July 2011 issue of the Watchtower (PDF) describes apostates as "mentally diseased".

Suppose that a doctor told you to avoid contact with someone who is infected with a contagious, deadly disease. You would know what the doctor means, and you would strictly heed his warning. Well, apostates are “mentally diseased,” and they seek to infect others with their disloyal teachings. (1 Tim. 6:3, 4) Jehovah, the Great Physician, tells us to avoid contact with them. We know what he means, but are we determined to heed his warning in all respects?

Not everyone is happy with this assessment.

"Many like me remain associated with the Witnesses out of fear of being uncovered as an 'apostate' and ousted, not just from the organisation, but from their own friends and families," said the man, who would only give the name John. "I find I am now branded as 'mentally diseased' – giving any who discover my true beliefs free licence to treat me with disdain."

Yep, that shit's hardcore. But what's that little Bible verse tucked away in there? Could it be that the Witnesses are simply quoting the Bible, and that's what describes people as "mentally diseased"?

Off to check 1 Timothy 6:3–4 (KJV).

6:3 If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness;

6:4 He is proud, knowing nothing, but doting about questions and strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings,

The key word here is "doting", which now means "to be fond of", but which in King James' time meant "to be feeble-minded from age", which is why we speak of an elderly person being "in their dotage".

But of course, the Witnesses use their own New World Translation. What does it say?

3 If any man teaches other doctrine and does not assent to healthful words, those of our Lord Jesus Christ, nor to the teaching that accords with godly devotion, 4 he is puffed up [with pride], not understanding anything, but being mentally diseased over questionings and debates about words. From these things spring envy, strife, abusive speeches, wicked suspicions,

There it is. It still seems a bit harsh, but at least it's not just the Witnesses being shitty to people -- it's the Bible being shitty to people. So now the question becomes: Is the JW translation of that verse a good one, or not? We're going to have to take it to the Greek.

I don't speak Greek, but fortunately people have made some good resources for Bible nerds. Here's the relevant verse (PDF).

The key word is 'νοσέω' (here 'νοσων', or 'noson' in Roman letters). It only occurs once in the New Testament. So what's it mean? Off to Strong's.

1) to be sick
2) metaph. of any ailment of the mind
a) to be taken with such an interest in a thing as amounts to a disease, to have a morbid fondness for

Well, that's kind of ambiguous. And herein lies the problem. If you wanted to go for the "mentally diseased" view, you'd certainly have a case. If, however, you wanted to soft-pedal it, you could try a more metaphorical translation like "unhealthily obsessed with questionings" or "morbidly interested in questionings". Both readings are possible, depending on how much you like apostates, which if you're Paul, isn't much.

Still: Wasn't Paul a shit? Imagine describing an ex-member of your church as someone with a mental illness. That's just piling on. And even the "nice" version isn't that nice. How accurate is that, describing someone who's left the church as unhealthily obsessed with the church, or having a morbid interest in it, not able to stop talking about it, writing... erm.

Well.

It's a relationship.

Occasionally I talk to people who identify as Christians, and they're into God and Jesus and all that, but they somewhat paradoxically claim that they're not "in a religion". What's with that?

Somehow, it doesn't clear things up when I explain that God and Jesus are religious beliefs, so they're in a religion, sure enough. No, they say, it's a relationship.

Can you have a "relationship" with someone who isn't a real person? Then I remembered objectophiles. Some people fall in love with objects, as did Erika Eiffel, who fell in love with (and married) the Eiffel Tower. Before that, she was in love with a crossbow. Other objectophiles have formed attachments to rollercoasters, videogame characters, and public buildings. Their attachment seems visceral and very real. You kind of have to stand in awe of the variability of human sexuality.

And yet, the object of affection is not a sentient being. The relationship is all in the lover's head. And:

Interestingly, Objectum Sexuals - they call themselves OS people - believe their love with the objects are reciprocal and that they can telepathically communicate with them.

Sound familiar? Some women think they're marrying public landmarks. Some think they're marrying Jesus. Similar delusion.

An ex-missionary in the 'Book of Mormon'

I always wondered if perhaps one of the cast members of the Broadway hit The Book of Mormon might be an ex-LDS-missionary in real life. And one is. Ain't it funny how life works out? You must admit, it would give an actor a special kind of qualification for the part.

Enter me (from stage right): an ex-missionary, now ex-Mormon and a gay to boot (A triple threat?). But for me, being a Latter-Day Saint meant a lot more than donning a white shirt, dark pants, a tie, and a slick black name tag bearing the title of Elder—it was my life. My entire life.

He describes his mission experience as quite positive -- good for him -- but he loses me at the end.

But beyond being a preparatory experience, my mission and my time as a Mormon overall were very rich and special to me. I used to think that this was because of the system of beliefs themselves: that without the church I would feel sad, lost and broken. Since leaving the church I have realized that what was so beneficial and sacred about the religion in my life was not what I had faith in specifically, but rather the having of the faith.

As The Book of Mormon’s Elder Cunningham accidentally discovers, it doesn’t matter what people believe in if what they believe has the ability to unite them and inspire them to serve one another and love each other freely. Their beliefs can be silly—absurd, even—but that doesn’t matter. It’s the believing that counts.

This is, perhaps not coincidentally, the central conceit of The Book of Mormon; that belief in something, even if it's entirely made-up, can still be good because of its power to create social unity. The problem here is that, while religion does a lot to build unity within the group, it builds walls and creates intractable conflict between people of different faiths. I bet anyone could think of about 4 or 5 examples without trying too hard.

There's the epistemological side, too: Believing in something (which is likely to be wrong) is worse than believing in nothing. When you believe in nothing, you may at least be open to learning something. But when you believe in something wrong, you think you're right, and it's very difficult to shift. Bad information is worse than no information. Faith actually blocks understanding.

I still love the show. Well, I haven't actually seen the show, so I'm basing this only on the soundtrack and things I've read. I'd like to return to this idea when I manage to get to the USA and actually see it, which I am currently planning to do.

Arabic not materialising on airplanes

Is there any language scarier than Arabic? (Unless you understand it, of course.) It doesn't go in the right direction, and it looks so... foreign! No wonder it's caused havoc before.

And when Arabic script unexpectedly appears on airplanes, well, it's enough to make people involuntarily micturate.

Mysterious messages that appeared to be scrawled in Arabic writing on the underbellies of several Southwest Airlines jets were being investigated Wednesday by the airline and the FBI, Los Angeles radio station KNX-1070 reported.
The graffiti, which began appearing in February on 737-model planes, has been found more often in recent weeks, according to the report.
The writing appears to have been etched using a chemical process and is visible only after an auxiliary power unit is turned on.

So how do they know it's Arabic? Gawker comes to the rescue with photos.

Where's the Arabic? You mean those cross-looking things that look like someone wiped some dust off the plane? That's the Arabic? Hey, wait -- it looks kind of like a sword! Yeah! That's Arabic, right? I think they have a sword on their flags.

Well, the markings are so not Arabic that even the Daily Mail has had to admit it.

The airline had suggested the symbols, which only show up with heat and are believed to be vandalism, looked like Arabic writing.

However the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. looked at the photos for MailOnline and a spokesman concluded they are ‘not Arabic script’.

It's kind of sad: Muslims are now the most-feared group in society, just as Jews, Freemasons, and Catholics were in times past. As such, nervous people project their fears onto them. Strange markings on airplanes? Concerns over immigration? Mosque down the road? Obviously all part of a takeover attempt by Muslims.

But now, hopefully now people who work in aviation can stop being worried about Arabic script, and worry about something else, like lesbians kissing.

The Dr Fox Effect

As a lecturer, I used to worry that students would figure out how little I knew. After a while, I realised that I didn't have to know everything, and more importantly, I probably knew 'enough' to be capable at my level. Now I'm quite relaxed about knowing hardly anything, as long as I keep reading and discussing things with people who know more than I do.

But this clip terrified me all over again. It's about the 'Dr Fox Effect', and it describes how an engaging lecturer can give students the impression that they've learned something, even when the presentation was content-free. In this clip, professors think they're getting a lecture on game theory from an expert, when they're really listening to complete gibberish from an actor.



Now I wonder: In a lecture, do I give students something real and useful? Or are students happy with my lectures because I'm 'entertaining', while getting nothing of real value?

This is really a little bit scary.

h/t/ weird experiments

Atheism and agnosticism in LDS General Conference talks

Here's a great tool that you can use to plow through General Conference talks.

I looked for references to words relating to atheism and agnosticism. I used the wild card, so my search terms were atheis* and agnosti*.

And here is the data, converted into a handy chart. (This chart is additive, so the data for atheis* is stacked on top of agnosti*.)

Click to enlarge.

Wow! Look at that spike in the 1960s! Most of this bump is due to talks by Ezra Taft Benson and Mark E. Petersen, who both liked to warn people against 'godless communism'. Petersen even invoked what he thought was Lincoln's prophetic warning against atheism:

Masquerading under the cloak of anthropology with great emphasis upon evolution, atheism is weakening the religious faith of the nation, and thus it also becomes an ally of the adversary. Is it any wonder that Lincoln, almost prophetically, looked into our future and foretold the perils that would confront us?

without realising that Lincoln was basically an atheist himself. Oops.

I suppose part of the 1960s bump could also be because more young Latter-day Saints were attending universities at that time, becoming acquainted with secular education, and horrifying their parents on visits home.

I don't know why, but I'm rather surprised that Orson and Parley Pratt mentioned atheism, back in the 1850s.

As for recent times, notice the lull in a*ism from the 1980s onward. I guess atheism wasn't on the radar until, say, The God Delusion came out. (All the mentions from the 2000s are post-2006.) That's quite a drop-off. And it's not coming up this decade. So far in the 2010s, nothing. (There's one reference to 'atheist', in a footnote.)

So why the tail-off for a*ism in recent years? Here are some possibilities.

It's not a concern. The numbers might have to climb a bit more before the alarm bells go off.

They dare not speak its name. Perhaps they're keeping it positive and avoiding the mention of competitors by name. The term 'catholi*' has undergone a similar drop-off.

Give it time. The decade is young. If someone decides to make atheism the focus of a GC talk, it may include eight or nine mentions -- a whole 80s worth in one go. Double that if it gets two speakers in the next decade, which seems likely.

I find this last scenario to be the most probable.

Advance Australia what?

I've read that Christians in Roman times were mistrusted for having allegiance to a king other than Caesar. And now it seems that modern Christians are doing little to dispel such suspicion.

Some private Christian schools are singing an alternative version of the national anthem which promotes religious values and talks of Christ.

Instead of the official second verse of Advance Australia Fair, which starts "Beneath our radiant Southern Cross", the alternative verse says "With Christ our head and cornerstone, we'll build our nation's might".

The version of the anthem is sung every fortnight at Thornlie Christian College and Christian Schools Australia WA executive officer Ray Dallin confirmed that it was regularly sung at other school assemblies and churches.
...
Original verses from 1879 in the National Library of Australia music collection do not include the Christian verse.

A spokeswoman from the office of Prime Minister Julia Gillard said that under national protocols, the anthem should not be modified and alternative words should not be used. The two authorised verses were proclaimed in 1984.

This story has been front-page news in Perth, but I'm actually having trouble getting worked up over it. For one thing, I've never been big on national fervour, anthems, or the like, so I don't feel personally affronted that someone has altered it. It's more annoying than sacrilegious. For another, this is happening in private religious schools, which is bad, but at least I'm not paying (as much) for it.

About the worst thing is that, just like in America, Christians are trying to re-write history, claiming that the original version was intended to be more Jesus-y. This kind of revisionism is SOP for that mob.

h/t to Calico in comments

Atheist Bake Sale 2

If you like these cartoons, I have others.

Action Item: Support school secularism

There's a primary school in Perth called Edgewater Primary. For 25 years, they forced students to say the "Lord's Prayer" at school assemblies. Now, they've dropped it.

A WEST Australian government school has banned students from reciting the Lord's Prayer before assembly in response to complaints from parents.

Edgewater Primary School, in Perth's north, ended the 25-year practice after some parents said it contravened the WA Education Act, which stipulates schools cannot favour one religion over another.
...
``We acknowledge that of the parents who did respond to the survey, many wanted to retain the Lord's Prayer and it is right that we continue to recite it at culturally appropriate times such as Christmas and Easter, as part of our educational program,'' [Edgewater principal Julie Tombs] said in a statement.

``However, at this school we have students from a range of backgrounds and it is important to consider all views and not promote one set of religious beliefs and practices over another.''

Good on them. They made the right call.

But some people of faith are foaming about it.

A state primary school in Perth has been inundated with hate mail after deciding to drop the recital of the Lord's Prayer at assemblies.

The Education Department says the Edgewater Primary School has received letters, emails and abusive phone calls from people around Australia, venting their anger at the decision.
...
The President of the Western Australian Primary Principals' Association Stephen Breen says the complaints have been vengeful.

"We are getting comments like I'll meet you in the grave, you know real loony stuff,' he said.

"I don't want to go on to it too much, but the receptionist is receiving phone calls and then people are slamming down the phone. It's just gone over the top."

I can understand that they're not happy about losing their cultural hegemony, but as Australia and the world become more secular, it's something they're going to have to come to terms with.

In the meantime, I've written the school an email.

I just wanted to offer my support and tell you that I think your school made the right call. People can practice what religion they like, but it's not fair for a public school to promote one religion over another. Keeping religion out of schools means that everyone's religion is on an equal footing, and that's good for everyone, religious or not. Good work.

If you'd like to convey your support, their email is Edgewater.PS@det.wa.edu.au.

Atheist Bake Sale 1

The UWA Atheist & Skeptic Society had a bake sale today. The cost of the baked goods: your soul.

We wanted to spark some discussion about souls; what it means to people, why we think we have one, and why people are so attached to the dubious notion that there's a little ghost inside us making all our decisions. What I wasn't prepared for was the reactions. Even though we were clearly 'taking the piss', many people showed a strange reticence. It looks like 'selling your soul' is a cultural taboo.

But we did give out lots of cookies.

Follow on to Atheist Bake Sale 2.

Gamers for science

This was exciting to see: Learning the structure of an AIDS-like virus stumped scientists for 15 years. FoldIt gamers cracked it in ten days.

"This is one small piece of the puzzle in being able to help with AIDS," Firas Khatib, a biochemist at the University of Washington, told me. Khatib is the lead author of a research paper on the project, published today by Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.
The feat, which was accomplished using a collaborative online game called Foldit, is also one giant leap for citizen science — a burgeoning field that enlists Internet users to look for alien planets, decipher ancient texts and do other scientific tasks that sheer computer power can't accomplish as easily.

"People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at," Seth Cooper, a UW computer scientist who is Foldit's lead designer and developer, explained in a news release. "Games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans."

I've done work on crowdsourcing annotation in language tasks, so it's good to see it working in this domain. I love the idea of people putting their heads together and solving problems. For all our computing might, nothing can match human brains on some tasks.

'is' v 'has'

Back in the 1600s, people used auxiliary 'be' + some verbs of motion, where today we'd use 'have'.

Shakespeare did it with 'is fled'.

LENNOX
'Tis two or three, my lord, that bring you word
Macduff is fled to England.

And 'is come'.

LUCILIUS
He is at hand; and Pindarus is come
To do you salutation from his master.

I thought it would be fun to check it in Google Books Ngram Viewer, and see when 'has X-en' became more popular than 'is X-en'. But you can't do it with any old verb like 'make' -- it has to be intransitive. Otherwise, you're scooping up 'is made' constructions like 'That's how rubber is made." Those are still okay now. I want the ones where 'is X-en' has been replaced by 'has X-en'. And the pattern seems particularly common with verbs of motion.

Here's 'fled'. Notice that the crossover happens around 1830ish.



And 'come'. They cross over at about the same time: 1840ish.



'Arrive' arrives early -- about 1810ish



Here's 'depart', right on the button -- 1830 again.



And we see more or less the same pattern with other verbs like land, and become.

What was happening in English in 1800–1840?

When I raised this to the attention of fellow linguist Mark Ellison, he suggested twiddling the 'Corpus' menu between 'British' and 'American'. This revealed that the stodgy conservative British books held onto the old usage longer. Perhaps the Americans were at the head of this 'is - has' innovation, and the rise we see in the corpus was partially due to more books being published in the Colonies.

I'll have to do some looking around to see if anyone knows more about it. Luckily, I have two experts on present perfect in my very own department. Meanwhile, I think it's cool that I can search centuries of language patterns in seconds.

Atheist Bake Sale

The UWA Atheist & Skeptic Society is having a Bake Sale on the UWA Oak Lawn this Wednesday (21 Sep 2011) at 1 pm. There's an unusual twist: Rather than accept money for the baked goods, the club simply requests... your soul.

It's an interesting experiment in superstition metaphysics. I don't know if people will gratefully accept a cookie, get angry, or shy away. I told a Christian guy about it, and he said, no, he wouldn't be interested in a cookie. But why not? Does he really think he has a soul, and if so, what is it? Can it be traded in a Faustian bargain? Does it hit uncomfortably close to C.S. Lewis's witch, who offers you Turkish Delight but instead only gives you pages and pages of turgid allegory? (Or something. I always was a little fuzzy on Lewis.)

Here's a blurb I'm working on, to hand out at the event.

Do people have souls?

If by ‘soul’ you mean, a part of you that survives your death, then no, there’s no evidence to suggest that anyone has a soul. But that’s okay. You have a brain, and it does all the things that people commonly attribute to souls.

What happens after we die?

Religions of the world have made up a lot of contradicting stories to answer this question, and some people are happy to believe (and pay) whoever tells them the biggest story. But religions offer no evidence for their claims about any sort of afterlife.

The most likely scenario is that your brain (which is the organ responsible for perception) dies, and your perception stops.

Well, that’s depressing!

It doesn’t have to be. Mark Twain once said, “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

Having a limited existence means you have to do all the good you can while you’re here. You need to make the most of this life, the only one we’re sure of having. You don’t get a second chance to learn, to love, to create, to make things better on this planet. So do it now.

If you're on campus, come on down and say hi. If nothing else, we have cookies. And there's even a guarantee: If you're not 100% satisfied, you can have your soul back.

Prayer ban: Like a burqa ban, but with prayer.

France, what am I going to do with you? You know I love you, right? because you're so cool, and you have a great language and everything. But I'm all torn about this.

Paris ban on Muslim street prayers comes into effect

A ban on saying prayers in the street, a practice by French Muslims unable to find space in mosques, has come into effect in the capital, Paris.

Interior Minister Claude Gueant has offered believers the use of a disused fire brigade barracks instead.

The phenomenon of street prayers, which see Muslims spreading mats on footpaths, became a political issue after far right protests.

Sure, they're praying, which is stupid and useless. And it is unsightly having people clogging the streets like this.

I actually feel kind of embarrassed for those people, groveling around like that. But as obnoxious as public prayer is, banning it will heighten tension, and turn an annoying (but relatively harmless) public performance into a political football -- or even an opportunity for civil disobedience. That brings in the sympathy. Shoot, even I'd be sympathetic to some non-violent civil disobedience on a issue of conscience.

There must some way of fixing this without some ad hoc law seemingly targeting Muslims. If all these people praying in the street is a problem, how about prosecuting it using an existing law? How about obstructing a footpath? Blocking traffic? Noise pollution? Littering?

Okay, that was reaching, but I'm trying to help here.

Manufacturing doubt

Check out this short film "Doubt" from the Climate Reality Project.



What they did to obscure the facts about smoking is what they're doing now to muddy the waters about climate change: Manufacture enough phony controversy and confusion to get people to ignore the science.

And according to the film, "they" are the same people in both cases.

Utilitarianism

I'm a bit of an ethical utilitarian; that is, I generally think an action is good if it has good effects. I can see some problems with it. Since we can't always predict the effects of our actions, utilitarianism works best in retrospect. And defining 'good' has its own problems, but I know it when I see it.

But I like to hear the other side. So, for the second time in two days, I went to hear a Christian have a bash at a competing philosophy. I wasn't expecting to hear how Christianity improves on utilitarianism. They never seem to do that. They just say God is wonderful. But I hoped to get a better idea of other views on ethics.

The speaker mentioned the above problems with utilitarianism, all of which I would have happily conceded. I could have done without the straw men, though. (Did you know that utilitarianism can lead to gulags and gambling, if you define 'good' stupidly enough?)

So what was his great idea for ethical behaviour? It's quite an eye-opener: An action is good if god says it is. I asked him how he could know what god wants, when believers have come to many different conclusions about that. His answer: He reads the Bible and decides. That's unlikely to lead to any ambiguity.

At the end of the presentation, I was unconvinced that his system of ethics held any advantages. Sure, he was against gambling and gulags, but a utilitarian could be against both of those things. The difference is that they'd be against it because it was bad for people, and he'd be against it because a god said so. I had a Socratic realisation that I knew one thing more than he did: I knew that my ethical system was made by humans. His system of ethics was made by humans, too, but he didn't know that. He thought that his system of ethics was handed down by the supreme creator of the universe. I suspect that would make him less capable of compromise.

Despite the presentation, I was quite encouraged by the Christians I met. They asked some good (and in some cases, thorny) questions, including a brief touch on Euthyphro's dilemma. Also, the ones I met were actually in the process of reading Dawkins and Dennett. Are atheists reading Eagleton and Plantinga? Ugh, no thank you. If we tried to reciprocate, the Christians would be getting the better end of that deal. Still, I respect their curiosity and willingness to check out the other side.

'Other ways of knowing'

Today on campus, there was a Christian Union talk about atheism, entitled 'Why I am not an atheist'. I can't stay away if atheism is being discussed, and while they're usually well-read on Dawkins et al. and give a good critique of the Gnu Atheism, they don't always apply the same critical eye to their own faith. I was hoping the speaker would explain how Christianity improves on atheism, and in this I was (inevitably) disappointed.

A guy named Rory was the presenter. He was a good speaker -- enjoyable to listen to, funny at the right times. His main reasons for being a Christian and not an atheist were:

• He had no compelling reason to doubt his 'sense' that a god exists. It seemed to me that if he'd been born elsewhere and -when, he'd have no compelling reason to doubt his sense that Odin or Vashti exists. Beliefs are true to the extent that they are supported by evidence, not hunches.
• The Christian world-view 'resonated' with his experiences. But people who have different world-views also find that their experiences 'resonate', whatever that means. Our experiences don't always mean what we think they mean.
• He found it satisfying to have someone to thank (after thanking people). I understand that -- I feel grateful to the people in my life, and once I've thanked them, I like to pour my effort into making things better for them through service.
• Finally, he found it hard, within an atheistic worldview, to account for things that are wrong in the world. I don't know why he decided to press that point. Why would he use this as a strike against atheism, when this is actually much harder to explain from a Christian perspective? In question time, I mentioned that it was very easy for atheists to explain evil in the world -- people decide to do things that harm people. But it's very difficult for believers in an all-powerful, good god to explain why bad things happen. There's a whole branch of theology (called theodicy) dedicated to trying to explain this very thing, yet the Problem of Evil remains. But Rory couldn't quite get why atheists would see a thing as 'evil' outside some kind of 'god' frame. Unfortunately, we had to move on before full understanding could be achieved. Rory -- if you're out there, let's continue this, because I'd like to understand your view.

I did ask one other question, though. His last point in the presentation was that he found it naïve to think that science was the 'only way of knowing' something. Now, I've heard people say that there are other ways of knowing, and when I ask them what they are, they invariably respond with something that is... not a way of knowing.

In response, Rory mentioned Dawkins' letter to his daughter, in which he wrote that tradition, authority, and revelation are bad reasons for believing something. But Rory thought that these were okay reasons to believe something, part of this complete scientific breakfast. He also mentioned intuition as something that was important in finding truth.

I explained that intuition was important -- say, in coming up with a hypothesis -- but intuition is not a way of knowing. If someone has an intuition about something, they do not know that that thing is true. It appeared that he was confusing 'how you get an idea' with 'knowing that the idea is true', which is a rather serious mistake.

So I want to say this very clearly: The way to know something is by empirical observation. That is the only way. (And even when we've observed something, it still might be wrong! Which is why replicable observation is so important.) There are no other ways of knowing. Not tradition -- many traditions have turned out to be wrong. Not authority -- authorities can be wrong. Not revelation -- you don't know the source of a supposedly supernatural revelation. It could be all in your head. Science -- systematic, reproducible, empirical observation -- is the only way of knowing.

If you think you have another way of knowing, leave it in comments, and we'll have a look.

Prisencolinensinainciusol: Oll raigth!

When I was in high school, I asked an exchange student what American English sounded like to someone who didn't understand the words. She said, "Sort of like pigs."

For some reason, I wasn't completely satisfied with this answer. Fortunately, I found this video instead.



The song is total gibberish, but it's intended to represent the sound patterns and intonation of US English. Trippy.

Tracking the Skipper, part 1

The inimitable Madge comments:

If we're allowed to make requests, today I was looking up the word "Skipper" and couldn't find any dictionaries/wiki pages that mentioned its, in my mind, very common meaning of "person who doesn't drink so they can drive all their drunk friends home from the pub". Guess it must be an Australian term but what is its history?

Can you use your linguistic prowess to find this out for your adoring fans?!

I think this is a cool use of 'Skipper' -- it makes the non-drinking responsible friend seem more authoritative. In the NT, they call this person 'Sober Bob', which is just terrible -- who wants to be Sober Bob? Sounds like the one who drew the short straw. But 'Skipper' -- now you're running the ship, mate! Maybe 'Skipper Bob' would be okay. (Don't mind me: you're cool for taking care of your friends, no matter what they call you... Bob.)

Anyway, I remember the use of the term 'skipper' from the 90's, which means it probably goes back earlier. The clearest way to nail down its origin is to find its earliest use in print. Madge is right --- for such a common term, it's remarkably difficult to trace. Oxford (paywall) doesn't even list it among the senses of 'skipper', and neither does Etymonline.

This paper by Watson and Neilsen (2008) names a 'Skipper' program from 2006, which seems a bit late. However, this paper by Boots and Midford (1999) (PDF) claims that:

The 'Pick-a Skipper' campaign was devised by the Liquor Industry Road Safety Association in 1985 as a mass media promotion encouraging drinkers to choose a non-drinking 'Skipper' to drive drinkers home.

If that's right, that would push back the earliest usage of 'Skipper' to 1985. Keep in mind: we haven't really backdated it to 1985 -- I'd want to see the promotional materials from the campaign itself -- but it does provide a clue as to where to look. For now, we have to plant the flag at 1999.

And there the trail goes cold. Anyone have any skipper-related documentation lingering around the garage? The work of linguistic history is waiting on you!

Militant atheists

Is there anything more tedious or lazy than journalists complaining that atheists are 'just as bad' as religionists? Especially when they write as badly as Emma Jane.

FANATICAL Christians and fundamentalist atheists are like a couple of kids bickering in the back seat during a long car drive.

As US presidential candidates make shrill demands for the teaching of creationism in schools, British pit bull atheist Richard Dawkins accuses non-evolutionists of being stupid, insane or wicked.

As US evangelical Rebecca Hagelin says there is no greater evil than gay marriage, a schoolteacher is sued for ridiculing a student's belief in Jesus.

It raises the question of whether intransigent evangelicals and militant atheists should both be sent to the naughty corner. Not to think about what they've done (even though both religious and atheist regimes have clocked up appalling body counts) but to consider how much they have in common.

Ostensibly opposites, hardline proselytisers and zealous pagans are like the political Left and Right in that the further they extend into extremism, the more they begin to resemble each other.

It's the old false equivalency that journalists are so great at. Don't like either side? Say they're just the same.

I'm happy to allow that 'militant religionists' are more the exception than the rule, but if you're comparing worst to worst, there's nothing on the atheist side that compares to the worst of the religious side. Committed religionists kill people, oppress women, rape children. What do 'militant atheists' do? Write mean things on the Internet. It's not an apt comparison.

Or:

But what if atheists were as bad as the religious? What would that look like?

It would look like this guy:



Except that the atheist guy was kind of funny. And you can bet that after this exchange, the atheist guy just took his bullhorn back to work and stopped bothering people, and the Christian guys went bothering people somewhere else.

Prayer

Sandra points me to this episode of Dinosaur Comics.

Click on the image to go to the whole cartoon.

It reminds me of something George Carlin said about prayer:



If you insist on praying, what you need is a Magical Wishing Ferret. You can ask him for anything you want. He works by the power of confirmation bias, so if you don't get what you want, you'll never notice.

Monson fondly remembers 9/11

Religions are in the business of providing emotional comfort (among other things), and after 11/9/1, Americans' sense of stability was rocked. I think this played out in a predictable way for Mormons.

I visited my US home ward in late 2001, and it was the strangest thing: I'd never heard so many references to Satan before. Naturally, when people feel like events are out of their hands (what's known as an 'external locus of control'), they develop superstitions, and here it was unseen malevolent agents. I saw something else on that visit that I'd never seen before: In Priesthood Meeting, they'd developed the habit of reciting their 'group values' in unison, chanting a sort of 'we believe' mantra. Even as a believer, it struck me that here was a group of people too frightened to think.

From a look at this WaPo column, Mormon president Thomas Monson sure misses that time.

There was, as many have noted, a remarkable surge of faith following the tragedy. People across the United States rediscovered the need for God and turned to Him for solace and understanding. Comfortable times were shattered. We felt the great unsteadiness of life and reached for the great steadiness of our Father in Heaven. And, as ever, we found it. Americans of all faiths came together in a remarkable way.

And the bottom line couldn't have been better.

Side note: what's with the capital H on 'Him'? I haven't seen that in Church publications since the 1920s.

Sadly, it seems that much of that renewal of faith has waned in the years that have followed. Healing has come with time, but so has indifference.

Isn't it too bad that we don't have more horrible tragedies to turn our hearts to god? Darned if Monson doesn't feel some nostalgia for that time of national agony. What a ghoul.

Whether it is the best of times or the worst, He is with us. He has promised us that this will never change.

But we are less faithful than He is. By nature we are vain, frail, and foolish. We sometimes neglect God.

Then we're even, because God was more than a little neglectful on that day. He failed to save the lives of 3,000 people, but left instead a steel cross. You know, just to let us know he's there, thinking about us.

If you object to this, saying that 'super-hero' isn't part of god's job description, consider: What would you have done if you'd had the knowledge of what was about to happen that day, and the ability to do anything? Well, god had all that, and still failed to do what you -- a normal human, with all your goods and bads -- would have done. Why do people say that god is good?

Mormons talk interminably about what they call the 'pride cycle': People get prosperous and prideful, they forget god, then god (that sicko) burns them up in fires, buries their cities in earthquakes, or sinks them into the sea (and that was gentle Jesus, BTW). Then the people remember to grovel sufficiently before him, and he prospers them. Because it's all about him.

One could rewrite the narrative thus: Tragedies happen, and the feeling of vulnerability drives people into authoritarian religions. But life goes on, and people stop feeling frightened, at which point they abandon superstition, becoming secular or at least joining liberal churches. Until the next tragedy. Rinse, repeat.

Small wonder, then, that Monson is banging the drum for a more godly society. The vacuum cleaner salesman wants everyone to buy vacuum cleaners, and the god salesman… you get the picture. It's just business.

Reasonably Good Performances

The Mormons had Gordon Jump and Mike Farrell doing their films in the 70s and 80s (remember Gordon as the Apostle Peter? probably not), but the Seventh-Day Adventists had a young Russell Crowe plugging their ministry programme at Avondale College in New South Wales.



I have to say, young Russell brings a certain believability to the role, with his grudging yet growing acceptance of 'the call'.

Two by two

Wow -- I didn't know you could get these.

What's that Elder on the left doing? Ah, he's expounding.

I think the other one is dusting off his feet. Watch out -- that's like a level 3 Harm spell when they do that. I think you can only recover from that if you're a Mage.

Denser is slower

A linguistic tidbit from the 'Obvious in Retrospect' file:

A recent study of the speech information rate of seven languages concludes that there is considerable variation in the speed at which languages are spoken, but much less variation in how efficiently languages communicate the same information.
...
Dr. Pellegrino outlined the major findings of the team's research: "Languages do need more or less time to tell the same story – for instance in our study, the texts spoken in English are much shorter than their Japanese counterparts. Despite those variations, there is a tendency to regulate the information rate, as shown by a strong negative correlation between the syllabic rate and the information density." In other words, languages that are spoken faster (i.e., that have a higher syllabic rate) tend to pack less information into each individual syllable (i.e. have a lower information density).

In other other words, the more information packed into each syllable, the slower those syllables have to be delivered. Across languages, those two factors balance each other.

It makes sense because human brains have a cognitive limit, and they'll only put up with so much throughput. Still, nice to see this result in black and white.

Without a trace

I recently learned of L'Anse aux Meadows. It's a place in Newfoundland, Canada where Vikings settled about 1,000 years ago. It's the oldest European settlement in the Americas. The Vikings didn't live there very long -- only about 10 years -- and it seems that there weren't that many of them. It's only a small site -- no stables, no burials.

Yet for that small a group in so short a time, they left enough artifacts to fill a small museum.

Long-time readers will see where I'm going with this. The Book of Mormon claims to be the history of a group of people who lived in the Americas for about a thousand years, numbering in the millions. The book discusses their metalwork, their swords, their coins, their money, and much more -- no evidence of which occurs in the archaeological record. And they didn't dwindle down slowly -- they were supposedly killed off quickly in wars of extinction. You'd think that something would have survived, but no.

Maybe the Nephites and Lamanites just didn't build stuff as well as the Vikings. Or else fictional people don't leave archaeological traces.

Three Card Monte

Everybody knows not to play Three Card Monte, right? It's an old scam that relies on a little sleight of hand and a lot of psychology.

 

It's not just one operator, but a whole team, including confederates who make winning look easy, and blockers who separate you from your more sensible friends. And if you do manage to pick the Ace, a shill will bet more on the wrong card so the dealer will take their fake bet instead. There will even be some 'muscle' on hand to give you a few broken ribs if you make trouble.

It's fascinating to watch, but it's a dangerous game, and you always lose. Don't play.

Does it matter what a candidate believes?

People are talking about this article by Bill Keller in the NYT about religion in politics.

Asking Candidates Tougher Questions About Faith

If a candidate for president said he believed that space aliens dwell among us, would that affect your willingness to vote for him? Personally, I might not disqualify him out of hand; one out of three Americans believe we have had Visitors and, hey, who knows? But I would certainly want to ask a few questions. Like, where does he get his information? Does he talk to the aliens? Do they have an economic plan?

Hal Boyd of the Deseret News gives a roundup of writers who are shocked -- shocked! -- at the impertinence of asking candidates about their religious beliefs. After all, isn't that personal? Well, it could be, if the candidate makes it private. Colbert I. King thinks faith is no big deal, but he makes an exception for candidates who make a big deal out of it. Sounds fair, but it doesn't go far enough for me.

I'd say that a candidate's faith is fair game for a much more pragmatic reason. Let me start with evolution. If someone doesn't accept evolution as true (as all but a few Republican candidates don't), I won't vote for them. That's because this person is going to be making decisions on my behalf, and by rejecting evolution, they're showing me that they don't know how to tell if something's true. They're not good at making decisions based on evidence. And there's a high probability that their thinking is compromised by undue influence from the religious sector. Those are all very worrying tendencies in a leader.

And that's just evolution. I'd say the same goes for Mitt Romney's underwear, Michele Bachmann's superstition about a god controlling the weather, Rick Perry's belief in ritual starving to attract the attention of his god, or anyone else's beliefs in magical nonsense. Delusion is delusion.

Of course, even if someone is an atheist, they can still be a disappointing leader; check Australian PM Julia Gillard, an atheist who shows a bewildering opposition to gay marriage, and an unaccountable fondness for distributing federal dollars to Christian chaplains in high schools. Nor are religious beliefs the only ones to watch out for. There are also irrational and dangerous secular beliefs involving climate change denialism or free-market fundamentalism. For me, the key is: does this person know how to use science and evidence to find out what's true? If not, keep them away from the levers of power. Ignorant people should be represented in government, but not by ignorant people.

Markov Everything!

Someone on Twitter has created Markov Bible.

We've had fun with Markov chains on the blog before. They're really quite simple: just take a big file full of text, and pick any two adjacent words at random (let's say it's 'in the'). Then, find every occurrence of the words 'in the', and make a list of every word that occurs right after them. Pick one of those at random, and that's word number 3. Now repeat with your word number 2 and 3 to get a word 4, and so on for as long as you want.

It's fun to mess around with the Bible, but my favourite thing is to do mashups. Here's the Bible combined with George Orwell's 1984.

They say unto you, Ye shall worship at his saying, and nipped off to Canada like cattle. They could do nothing against the children of the same: but the one end of three years old when he would have cast upon a pole, and it was too late--no such thought occurred to me, and on the north corner, he made windows of agates, and thy master's son? And Ziba said unto Onan, Go in this book.

That last part is funnier if you know who Onan is.

And here's some of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, mixed in with Franz Kafka's The Penal Colony.

CHAPTER XI Who Stole the Tarts? The King laid his head and, feeling behind him with his face to the Bed. First, I'll describe the apparatus to you." The Traveller acted as if a dish or kettle had been asked to attend the execution of a bottle. They all came different!' the Mock Turtle replied; 'and then the execution is a very grave voice, 'until all the players, except the King, who had been sleeping on duty. For his task is to give the prizes?' quite a chorus of 'There goes Bill!' then the other, and making quite a long time together.' 'Which is just the case might be, if he had neglected to look down and appeared peaceful. The Soldier showed the Traveller and laid his head sadly. 'Do I look like one, but it is.'

The longer the sentence, the less likely it is to be coherent, since Markov chaining doesn't preserve the long-range structure of a sentence. But still, it's surprising when it works.

Would it be a bad thing to live forever?

‎"Blindly we dream of overcoming death through immortality, when all the time immortality is the most horrific of possible fates." -Jean Baudrillard

One of the worst things about my deconversion was realising that there probably wasn't going to be an afterlife. I'd been counting on that all my life, and as a result, I had to do some serious rethinking on my timescale. A universe without me? I'm not an eternal being? My religion had flattered me, made me feel so important, and appealed to my sense of vanity. I hated thinking that I probably wasn't going to live forever.

I was surprised, then, to find that some people aren't concerned about it, and don't particularly want to live forever. In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, one character is immortal, and it's a curse.

To begin with it was fun; he had a ball, living dangerously, taking risks, cleaning up on high-yield long-term investments, and just generally outliving the hell out of everybody.

In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know you've taken all the baths you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.

So things began to pall for him. The merry smiles he used to wear at other people's funerals began to fade. He began to despise the Universe in general, and everybody in it in particular.
...

"I think I'll take a nap," he said, and then added, "What network areas are we going to be passing through in the next few hours?"

The computer beeped. "Cosmovid, Thinkpix and Home Brain Box," it said, and beeped. 

"Any movies I haven't seen thirty thousand times already?" 

"No." 

"Uh." 

"There's Angst in Space. You've only seen that thirty-three thousand five hundred and seventeen times." 

"Wake me for the second reel."

Immortality might be horrible. Really: how long can you enjoy the vitality of life? How many more times can you listen to Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons'? How many times can you watch your favourite movie? Eventually you'll have found all the things that do it for you. And habituation's a bitch. What if I became so accustomed to the sunset, or the touch of my sweetheart through repeated exposure that I could no longer enjoy it? I'd be dead then, but still walking around.

Okay, so I can see that eternity would be a long long time, but I don't envision a check-out date. There's too much to learn! There's enough for fifty lifetimes. I'm doing linguistics now. I think in the next lifetime, I'll do maths and get really good at that. Then what? A lifetime of typography! What kind of computers will people invent? What will English be like in 500 years? And so on. Seventy years seems so short.

Even so, it's probably a good thing that people die. Max Planck has been paraphrased to say "Science advances one funeral at a time." And Steve Jobs has his take on it:

  Transcript for people who don't like watching videos.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

It's true, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. So what do I do about it? Steve continues.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Have you made peace with mortality? Or do you rage against the dying of the light? I haven't decided which approach I like best. I guess at this stage I'm just glad to have escaped the liars who make big, empty promises about forever.