Good Reason

The atheist temple

2012-01-28T21:42:00.000+08:00

The big news in atheism this week: Alain de Botton wants to build an atheist temple. Which seems strange -- atheism isn't a religion, so why would it need to borrow religion's trappings? I think de Botton tipped his hand, though, in this pronouncement:

The philosopher and writer Alain de Botton is proposing to build a 46-metre tower to celebrate a ''new atheism'' as an antidote to what he describes as Richard Dawkins's ''aggressive'' and ''destructive'' approach to non-belief.

Rather than attack religion, Mr de Botton said he wants to borrow the idea of awe-inspiring buildings that give people a better sense of perspective on life.

''Normally a temple is to Jesus, Mary or Buddha but you can build a temple to anything that's positive and good,'' he said. ''That could mean a temple to love, friendship, calm or perspective … Because of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, atheism has become known as a destructive force.''

Destructive force? For me, Dawkins and Hitchens are two guys who have come to epitomise well-tempered reason, intelligence, and courage in the face of mortality, so de Botton's criticism doesn't ring true for me. I'd like to suggest a little test which I'll call the S.E. Cupp test: When someone says they're an atheist, do they spend more time promoting atheism, or castigating other atheists because of their tone? If the latter, then what's the difference between them and a theist?

Dawkins has called the project a waste of funds, PZ says it's a monument to hubris.

Me? I say it's redundant. We already have a temple. I was there earlier this month. Or, at least, at one of them.

The atheist temple I went to was the Temple of Knowledge, and it's better known as the New York Public Library.

It gots lions.

Why would I call it an atheist temple? Because it's filled with the work of people. People; not gods. People (and you can see them there every day) engaged in the process of gathering knowledge and combining it to make new knowledge. This is the goal of science, which is an atheistic form of reasoning.

I walked along its halls of solid marble, where generations of humans have come to read and learn.

No gothic arches, these. How could you help but be in awe of not just the building, but the building's purpose?

Like a temple, the magnificent Reading Room prompts a hush.

And the people who built this place -- yeah, they were tycoons who made their money from the skins of small furry animals. But they wanted to build a place where the knowledge of the world could be preserved, and they cared enough to make it amazing. And they inscribed this on the walls, in letters big enough for anyone to read:

"On the diffusion of education

among the people

rest the preservation

and perpetuation

of our free institutions."

I read that, and I think, you know, they got it. They really got it! Even back then. Our society depends on education. Our freedom depends on it. You can't preserve freedom in a population of ignoramuses; they'll just tear it down again the instant they feel afraid. It's such an alien concept in this age, when one political party has dedicated itself to the destruction of the Department of Education, and (through homeschooling) constantly works to undermine the public school system so that children will be protected from education. It seems like a quaint and noble sentiment, but we need to relearn this thinking that came from better minds than ours. Just as we need another quaint and antiquated notion symbolised by libraries: the public good.

But that's not all I saw. There were treasures.

Holy shit! It's a Gutenburg Fucking Bible! One of only 40 perfect ones left. Yes, it's a bible because for some reason, people thought the Bible was important back then. But what this book did was make reading and publishing commonplace. That's much more important than the book's rather poor contents.

And check this out: it's Christopher Robin's toys! That's not just Winnie a Pooh -- it's Winnie THE Pooh. And the others! It was great to see them there, even though it made me think of Toy Story 2. I look at Tigger and realise that Ernest Shepard really nailed it.

These are clay tokens with cuneiform on them, some of the earliest writing that people ever used. That made it possible for people to transmit knowledge over generations.

And while I was in this Library, I felt so connected to people in other ages and to the future. It was a feeling that I can only describe as spiritual, even though I don't like that word. But it was the same feeling that I felt in the old religion but more intense and meaningful.

You can keep your paltry theist cathedrals. Do not copy Mormon temples -- they are monuments to superstition and foolishness. Let St Patrick's fall. Instead, build a library, Mr de Botton, or an observatory, or a university, or a museum. They're the only temples that atheists have any business building.

Actually, St. Patrick's will make a very nice reading room in about 100 years.

Coffee with a liberal Christian

2012-01-26T14:44:00.001+08:00

I recently had coffee with a Christian friend, and the subject was religion. I was all geared up for battle, but he had to go and spoil it all by being a non-fundamentalist non-loony liberal Christian, and a good guy whose conversation I quite enjoyed! ¿What fun is that?, I ask you.

Not being a fundamentalist means that he avoided making strong claims, and he didn't have to defend so many indefensible things. He doesn't hate gay people, thinks that not every part of the Bible is meant as history, and recognises the difficulty in discerning the intentions of biblical authors. Wouldn't it be somewhat better if more Christians were like this?

The one thing he kept saying, though, in response to my questions was: "I don't know." Was the flood literal? Will people get resurrected in some form after death? He didn't know. And he seemed rather relaxed about that.

It's good to say when you don't know, if you don't. People should do that in the sciences, too. But if there's something you don't know and it's a scientific question, you can find out by experimentation and observation. If it's a religious or metaphysical question, what do you do? Interpret inconsistent texts? Try to have a revelation? Those approaches have only ever yielded contradictory results. Metaphysical questions can't be resolved by observing physical reality, which is why every religion has a different answer to metaphysical questions. There's no court of appeal. Notice the difference between religion and science. Scientists eventually reach consensus; religions come to schism.

My Christian friend was honest about not knowing. What I wanted to communicate was that religions don't provide a reliable way to know. And they really should, if they're going to claim that they have the answers to life big questions.

The man who made too much sense

2012-01-22T09:05:00.000+08:00

I'm a Yellow Dog Democrat -- I'd vote for a yellow dog in the road before I'd vote for a Republican -- but I'm kind of bummed out about the end of the Huntsman campaign. Not because it signals the end of moderate Republicans; those days are long gone.

From what I saw of Huntsman, he was a smart guy who took his party to task for ignoring science. He believed the science on climate change (although he seemed to backtrack a little). He didn't take his Mormon religion too seriously. And he had foreign policy experience. Unlike other Republicans, who were either evil (Gingrich), stupid (Santorum), crazy (Bachmann), or a mix of the three, Huntsman stood out as a sane person. No wonder he only ever polled in the single digits with Republican voters.

Could it be that he was a guy I could have voted for, under the right circumstances? Naw, there are lots of yellow dogs out there. But I would have had something other than a beer with him. And if by some chance he had won, I'd think, well, maybe this won't be a disaster.

Big Dog gets the last word:

ESQUIRE: It's remarkable that there would have been a time in living memory when someone like Jon Huntsman would have been regarded as the most conservative candidate in the field. Maybe even unacceptably conservative. But because of his insistence on having a grown-up discourse, he's somehow seen as a moderate.

CLINTON: Huntsman's economic record — and his positions on the abortion issue and other things — is every bit as conservative and considerably more consistent than the two front-runners'. But he also doesn't make any bones about being willing to work with people and thinking you ought to put your country first. When the president asks you to serve — to go to China, and you speak Mandarin Chinese and you think you can help American business and America's national strategic interest by doing it — you do it.

But all of a sudden that's disqualifying. So I think that it shows you, we're, you know, we're living in a time when the Republicans have only pushed harder and harder to the right. And every time the president adopts a plan that they once advocated, they abandon it and push farther to the right. But the voters can push them back.

Red Flags of Quackery

2012-01-19T07:46:00.000+08:00

Let me be the last to share this wonderful guide to detecting BS. It's the Red Flags of Quackery.

Just a taste:

This may not be the last word on woo, but there will always be things missing. The artist would have needed to create a patchwork about the size of a football field to include every bad rationale that the woosters are capable of pulling out. But the one I would have included is this:

Pestering people at airports -- for science!

2012-01-14T12:29:00.000+08:00

I like to find out stuff by listening to people who know more than I do. And when they're stuck in a line with me, this is what happens.

Pronounce that sign

2012-01-04T01:39:00.000+08:00

I really like the bilingual signs in Canada. It's good for English speakers to be reminded that English isn't the only language in the entire world. (Remember: Republicans made fun of John Kerry because he spoke French. What kind of president would he be?!)

But while driving through British Columbia, I saw a bilingual sign, and French wasn't the other language. Here's the sign, snorfed from Wikipedia.

So what's the language? Why the accents and lines? And what is a '7' doing in the middle of a word?

The Wikipedia page for the Squamish language answered most of my questions. The language is known as 'Sḵwx̱wú7mesh' (or the more Anglicised 'Squamish'). It was first documented by no less than the legendary anthropologist Franz Boas. Sadly, it appears that only about 15 native speakers remain. I don't know if those 15 speakers do a lot of driving, but I'm glad the signs are up anyway.

So, to the characters:

The '7' is a glottal stop. That's the sound that Cockney speakers use in the middle of 'bottle' or 'mental'. I use it in the middle of 'uh-oh' or (a little strangely) 'hot water'. A real glottal stop looks like this: ʔ. I don't see anything on my keyboard that looks more like a glottal stop than the 7 does, except the question mark, which would be even more confusing, so I guess 7 was a good choice.

The 'k' and the 'x' with lines under them are just like a regular 'k' or 'x' (the latter of which which we don't have in English -- think 'ch' as in Scottish 'loch'), but they're farther back in the throat. You have to take it all the way back to your uvula, also known as 'the hangy down thing in your throat'. Just make a 'k' sound as if you're choking. (Why do they make sounds in such strange places? Oh, everyone does in one way or another. We have a 'th' sound in English, which other people think is weird.)

What about the 'k' with an apostrophe? That's the exciting one for me. It's an ejective. Usually we make the 'k' sound with a puff of air, but the ejective 'k' is different. To make an ejective 'k', just hold your breath, and without letting it out, make a 'k' sound as best you can. That's ejective 'k'.

Finally, if a vowel has an apostrophe after it, that just means that vowel takes the stress.

There you have it -- Squamish phonology. Or more appropriately, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh phonology.

Getting an early start on the War on Xmas

2012-01-02T05:03:00.001+08:00

I couldn't believe it. There I was watching the NYE festivities, waiting for the ball to drop, and Cee-Lo Green is doing a version of John Lennon's 'Imagine'. Hm, thought I, a secular song. Wonder if he'll tamper with it. And, sure enough, instead of "and no religion too", he decides to slide in "and all religion's true".

How does that work? "Imagine there's no heaven... And all religion's true." All religion can't be true! They teach mutually incompatible, multiply contradicting things.

Couldn't we just have one atheist song performed in public this holiday season? You know, all Xmas long, I sang songs about Jebus, and I wasn't that happy about it, especially because Xtianity is not the whole point of Xmas. But I sang them anyway, words intact. And fuckers in the USA can't even play an atheistic song straight. Seriously, fuck you, Cee-Lo Green, even though I don't know who you are. You're a horrible singer.

That does it. Now I'm going to give Xtians the War on Xmas they always thought they were getting. Tooth and nail. Anybody says anything remotely religious around me, I'm going to tell them they're a deluded fool. It's war.

Another thing. Someone asks me if I want to go to church on Xmas, I'm going to tell them they are wasting their time in that place. I went this year, and I was nice about it. No more. What's the two things that apologists always say in defense of religion? They have great music, and they have great architecture. Well, I went to church, and the music was excruciating, and it was being done to me in a horrible featureless suburban church building. Fuck you, Mormon church.

In a year, all the religious people will thank me for speaking out and helping them see how they were wrong. If not, fuck them anyway. Fuck cultural deism, fuck Xmas carols, and fuck default Xtianity.

This is the new me.

Why do Mormons cut Christmas services short if they fall on a Sunday?

2011-12-27T23:58:00.001+08:00

Nobody asked:

Dear Daniel: In other churches, people go to church on Christmas. There's a Christmas Eve service at midnight, another in the morning, and maybe even again that night! It's all they do! But Mormons seem to do it differently. They don't go to church at all on Christmas if it's not on a Sunday, and if it is, they actually reduce the length of the meetings. Why do Latter-day Saints do it this way?

Dear Nobody:

It's because Mormons secretly loathe and detest their church meetings, and look for any way to avoid them if they have anything better to do. And who can blame them? Between the well-meaning but excruciating ward choir numbers, amateurish talks, infantile lesson manuals, and other people's screechy children, many Mormons are under the (probably correct) impression that their meetings are the worst part of being in the church.

The Mormon method of worship has a lot to do with this. At their meetings, Mormons try to 'feel the Spirit'. This essentially involves boring themselves into a quasi-meditative state in which any sensation they feel is assumed to be the Holy Ghost. No wonder they gratefully escape when there's an opportunity to do something fun with family.

As for other churches, they ramp up their Christmas services because they secretly loathe and detest themselves.

Tim Minchin's Xmas song: Woody Allen Jesus

2011-12-23T00:36:00.000+08:00

If you liked "White Wine in the Sun", you'll be sure to enjoy his new offering for the season: Woody Allen Jesus.

Sadly cut from the Jonathan Ross show, due to an unscheduled failure of courage from some contemptible executive.

Dollar coins

2011-12-22T23:52:00.003+08:00

Americans: Y u no like dollar coins?

The U.S. government, its vaults stuffed with 1.4 billion one-dollar coins bearing the likenesses of dead presidents, has had enough of them. It is going to curtail production.

"Nobody wants them," Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday. That is for sure: The Mint says there are enough $1 coins sitting in Federal Reserve vaults to meet demand for a decade, and the inventory was on track to hit two billion by 2016.

More than 40 percent of the coins that are minted are returned to the government unwanted, the Treasury said. The rest apparently sit in vending machines -- one of the few places they are widely used -- or in the drawers of coin collectors.

Dollar bills are kind of dumb. They only last somewhere around 18 months to 3 years (estimates vary), whereas coins last for decades, making them more cost effective. But people are inertia-driven critters -- they won't use coins until paper is phased out. That's something that would take more political will than US politicians seem to have, because they're also inertia-driven critters.

But dollar coins are used in other countries (like Australia), and they're great! Make them gold in colour, a little heavier, different from other coins, and they're a fine upstanding member of your numismatic repertoire -- something you'd be proud to have in your pocket.

Unlike pennies. Thin, and not worth the trouble. Seriously, Americans: You don't like dollar coins, but you still use pennies? Really?

Ex-Mormon tries coffee

2011-12-20T22:40:00.002+08:00

Even though I'm no longer a Mormon, I still act like one in some ways. I still haven't drunk alcohol (ever). Never smoked or tried illegal drugs. I guess arbitrary religious rules can exert quite a hold on one, especially rules pertaining to food and drink. Or maybe I was just never curious. Either way, breaking the Mormon "Word of Wisdom" still seems terribly transgressive. Sex before marriage? Yes, please. Deny the holy ghost? Why not? But trying coffee? Whoa, that's really out there. Totally badass, yo.

Miss Perfect, my girlfriend/partner/fiancée, does drink coffee, and at a café once I timidly ventured a slurp of her demon drink. I say "demon drink" because it tasted like it came out of the ass of one of the legions of hell. No, wait -- you know how you burn an entire pot of beans, and then you have to labouriously scrape it out to clean it? It tasted like the water at the bottom of the pot.

"That wasn't very good coffee," said she.

I thought it was probably a flawed concept from the beginning. Sure, you could make it taste okay if you added enough sugar and milk. But as Sandra Boynton said of carob, the same argument could be convincingly advanced in favour of dirt. I thought I'd stick to chocolate as my bean derivative of choice.

But I kept taking the occasional slurp (and making the occasional face). Some people say you can push past it. It got better.

And so when we found ourselves in Seattle, we sat down with a Starbucks latté and a Cinnabon, and I found myself sampling more than usual of the brew. The aroma reminded me of supermarket trips when I would eye the forbidden coffee beans (lined up in plexiglas containers, singing their tiny sirens' song) with trepidation and fascination. And this time the taste, bitter by design, was just right for cutting the extreme sweetness of the sticky buttery bun. Complementary.

I could never do a whole cup though.

The entirely understandable evasion of Neil deGrasse Tyson

2011-12-15T06:35:00.004+08:00

Neil deGrasse Tyson describes himself as an 'agnostic', and that's okay. I'm an agnostic myself, just an atheistic one.

But this tweet seems like an evasion:

"Am I an Atheist, you ask? Labels are mentally lazy ways by which people assert they know you without knowing you."

Hmm. I didn't ask him for his label; I asked a question about his stand on some issue, to which one could reasonably answer 'yes' or 'no'.

Sometimes I've seen people shun labels as a subtle method of self-flattery. "Oh, I'm so deep and complex and interesting that I can't be put into a box." Well, yes, you are interesting, and yes, you can be put into a box. We're not all special snowflakes; in many ways we're terribly like other people. I am, anyway. I consume the same products, read the same books and websites, and have the same thoughts as other people with my interests. Hopefully, once in a while I create something interesting and original, and that's what makes me kind of special.

Anyway, I can understand NdGT not wanting to tick the box for firm atheism. He's influential in science communication, so he wants more people to listen to him, and perhaps not turn off those who would be turned off by an atheist. We need him doing what he's doing, and others of us can wear the atheist tag. As for me, if atheism is a label, it's a label I'm proud to wear.

Still a wonderful life

2011-12-11T15:19:00.001+08:00

Last night I sat down with the boys and Miss Perfect, and watched It's a Wonderful Life. It may not be my favourite Christmas movie (that would be Brazil), but I find it lives up to its feel-good status.

And what's not to feel good about? George Bailey is a heroic everyman who's not out to gouge the people who borrow from him. Mr Potter is an old-school plutocrat.

Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you're talking about... they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn't think so. People were human beings to him. But to you, a warped, frustrated old man, they're cattle. Well in my book, my father died a much richer man than you'll ever be!

Remember when wealthy "fat cat" bankers were villains in movies, instead of being held up as paragons of virtue and job creation? And when George is down and money goes missing from the bank, the 99% step in and save his building-and-loan from closure and him from arrest. Thanks goodness these themes are becoming relevant again.

For me, though, the peak is George's new-found elation at being alive, his joy for life, even with its unmet ambitions and frustrations. Okay, so there's a warning for religious themes (what the hell was Zuzu's teacher thinking, telling schoolkids that?), but all that aside, it's still worth a watch if you haven't seen it for a few years.

Why I engage

2011-12-06T13:16:00.001+08:00

I had an online discussion (or perhaps a "run-in") with a Mormon guy who I disagreed with on some issue. The issue isn't important (gay people). What was interesting was his way of dealing with the disagreement. His response was essentially: I don't expect you to agree with me. I'm a Mormon. You're an ex-Mormon atheist. Our worldviews are too different.

Now I think this is a cop-out. I'm very open to hearing other views, and if they're based on sound evidence and logic, I'll even change my mind. But his "different worldview" view allowed him to miscast my reasons for not accepting his argument. It wasn't that his reasons or his argument weren't good ones; no, no. It was that I wasn't open to change, or that our views just weren't reconcilable.

I think this is projection on his part. While reason and evidence would change my mind, I seriously doubt that it would change his. He's the one who is immune to reasoned argument because reason isn't how he arrived at his religious opinion. And if he tries to use secular arguments, they'll be hollow because they're not his real reasons. He's just using them to justify his religious reasons. He hauls out the secular reasons when he's talking to secular people, but if those arguments are faulty, it won't affect him at all. He'll just shrug and keep believing.

I mentioned the discussion to an ex-Mormon friend who knows him, and to my surprise she said essentially the same thing: What did you expect? He's a Mormon. He lives in Provo, for crying out loud.

I find this baffling. Here I am on the blog, and a lot of readers probably agree with things I write because, after all, we can't read everything, and we like to pick things to read that make us feel good about our worldview. (Or I do.) But I'm also happy to engage with readers who disagree, and in fact I hope I get a lot of them. I learn a lot more that way, and it's more interesting. But I feel like I'm standing on a chasm, shouting to ideological opposites.

Is there any point to discussing things? (Have I done any good on the blog today?) Or are we doomed to be divided into two camps that can never understand each other because of our different worldviews? I don't think so. I think there's a point to engaging in the Great Debates for two reasons.

First, people do change their views. I have, quite a lot, and I'll do it again. Engaging with others is my way of saying that maybe no one's beyond hope. Okay, maybe an online discussion won't change the committed, in which case I'll still keep arguing and discussing because I'm not trying to convince the committed -- I'm trying to convince uncommitted bystanders.

The other reason I engage is that if I'm wrong about something, I want to know about it. How is it that I can say so confidently that there's no evidence for the Book of Mormon? that that arguments for gods are uniformly awful? Because I'm here on the blog, and anyone who wants to can tell me something I don't know, and I'll consider it and change my mind if necessary. It's not just meme propagation. It's my continuing education.

The Debunking Handbook

2011-12-04T22:07:00.001+08:00

It doesn't always work to debunk a myth just by presenting facts. Sometimes your careful presentation could actually entrench the wrong information. If your presentation is overly long or complicated, people may only remember the simple myth. And when you're talking to people who are committed to the myth, your explanation may drive them further into it.

Wait -- I'm doing this all wrong. I'm starting with the myth. Let me try again.

Step 1: Present the core fact.
John Cook and Stephen Lewandowsky (of UWA) have released The Debunking Handbook. All science communicators need to read it, if they want to avoid reinforcing the very myths they want to debunk.

Step 2: Give the reader an explicit warning to cue them that misinformation is coming.
One incorrect perception people sometimes have is that people change their views when facts are laid before them. This is a myth.

Step 3: Now that you've ripped the misinformation out of the reader's head, fill the gap with simple, correct information.
Cook and Lewandowsky suggest a few simple ways to communicate scientific ideas clearly, and avoid psychological "backfire effects".

That's better. Boy, this science communication can be tricky.

h/t Lara from the "exmormon-atheists" group

Benefits tied to immunisation

2011-11-30T22:22:00.001+08:00

Good news: the Australian government is now explicitly tying family tax benefits to whether children are immunised.

Parents who do not have their children fully immunised will be stripped of family tax benefits under a scheme announced by the Federal Government.

The Government says 11 per cent of five-year-olds are not immunised and has announced a shake-up of the system which will take effect from July 1 next year.

Under the changes, families who refuse vaccinations face losing up to $2,100 per child in benefits.

Children will need to have more vaccines, and younger.

Children will for the first time be required to receive vaccines for meningococcal C, pneumococcal and varicella (chicken pox).

A combination vaccine will replace individual doses of vaccine for measles, mumps, rubella and varicella (chicken pox) - which means children will be immunised against measles, mumps and rubella earlier, at 18 months instead of the current four years of age.

This will be great, as long as there are no easy exemptions to render the law toothless. Oh, wait.

What exemptions will be available for the new immunisation conditions linked to the Family Tax Benefit Part A supplement?

While the Government considers that immunisation is an important health measure for children and families, existing exemptions will continue to be available.

A child may have a temporary or permanent exemption if a recognised immunisation provider determines that receiving the vaccine is medically contraindicated. A child may also receive an exemption from the immunisation requirements if a recognised immunisation provider indicates that the parent has a conscientious objection to immunising their child.

This needs to be fixed. Even so, this might push a few more parents to immunise.

How to mark exam questions

2011-11-26T15:16:00.001+08:00

I'm in Exam Marking Hell. It's not that bad, really -- students come up with some interesting things to say sometimes, and that's how you know it's a good answer.

For others in a similar plight, I thought I'd share my marking scale. Marking exam questions is easy. All you have to do is put an answer into one of five bins, and the bins all have easy-to-distinguish characteristics.
- - - - -
SPECTACULAR
This answer is so good, I want to memorise bits of it and use them in a conversation later. Brings information about the topic together, and does it in an original way. Wow.

EXCELLENT
This answer has the facts straight, and says something smart and interesting about the topic. Is full of win.

ADEQUATE
While there's nothing wrong about this answer, it's flat and uninspired. It goes no farther than we did in lectures, and it even uses some of the same examples. A rehash.

LACKING
This answer is incomplete, gets things wrong, or misses the point completely.

RIDICULOUS
Almost comically wrong. It's tempting to type these answers out and email them to other professors. The student is trying to bluff you, and failing.
- - - - -
The hard part is deciding what numbers should go with each category, but that's why they pay us the big bucks.

She's just a

2011-11-23T10:59:00.001+08:00

Is Michele Bachmann a lyin'-ass bitch? The Roots (of Jimmy Fallon fame) seem to think this is an appropriate assessment; the other night, they used the amazing Fishbone song of the same name to play her on.

But isn't that a little harsh? Whether she's a lyin'-ass bitch depends on whether she actually believes the insane things she says. If she sincerely believes them, then she's a crazy, wrong-headed, god-soaked, log-stupid, vicious, callous, deluded, vaccine-denying, dangerous historical revisionist that has no business sitting on a local school board, much less voting in Congress or running for President of a major country.

But not a lyin'-ass bitch.

Well, she might be a bitch.

I'm just glad they played the song because I haven't thought of it in ages.

Hey, why don't we throw it on?

You will exercise your right to choose.

2011-11-18T21:34:00.001+08:00

I'm a big fan of compulsory voting. And I'm not the only one. Here's Lisa Hill, from the University of Adelaide.

The most decisive means for arresting turnout decline and closing the socioeconomic voting gap is mandatory voting: in fact, it is the only mechanism that can push turnout anywhere near 95 percent. Places with mandatory voting also have less wealth inequality, lower levels of political corruption and higher levels of satisfaction with the way democracy is working than voluntary systems. Here in Australia, where we love freedom as much as anyone else, we have a mandatory voting regime that is well managed, corruption-free, easy to access, cheap to run and has an approval rating of more than 70 percent.

And when everyone votes, the outcome is much less dependent on turnout. Electoral swings to this or that party aren't flukes of turnout; they're big changes in the overall national mood.

But if everyone votes, including low-information voters, doesn't that just mean that everyone votes stupidly? That's the view of Jason Brennan, who argues that -- dear heaven! -- too many people vote already.

The median voter is incompetent at politics. The citizens who abstain are, on average, even more incompetent. If we force everyone to vote, the electorate will become even more irrational and misinformed. The result: not only will the worse candidate on the ballot get a better shot at winning, but the candidates who make it on the ballot in the first place will be worse.

He doesn't want a democracy. He wants a cabal of elites to make wise choices for everyone.

I once talked to an angry young man who made exactly this argument. I told him that he was a clever person, but (quoting Douglas Adams) "you make the same mistake a lot of clever people do of thinking everyone else is stupid." Of course, some people are stupid, but there's no reason to think that all the stupidity or ill-informedness is always located in one or the other party. The stupidity is likely to be somewhat evenly distributed. Random bad answers will be randomly distributed, and they'll cancel each other out. And along the way, you've gotten input from as many people as you can. If we have to err, let it be on the side of more participation.

Anti-porn with Save the Source

2011-11-15T21:31:00.001+08:00

Madge stumbled upon this flyer, and I had to go because I'm such a sucker for Word Art. Would you turn down an invite to an anti-porn lecture?

No, I didn't think you would. Nor would about 20 other Perth Skeptics. The speaker had no idea what he was in for.

The sponsoring organisation was "Save the Source". The "source" is men, or "johns" -- they're the source for all the money that goes to keep the "girls" enslaved in porn. Apparently. And just because the speaker (did anyone catch his name? I'll have to call him Mr Source) wants to "save" men, this does not mean StS is a religious organisation. No, no. The similarity of his shtick to Judeo-Christian horseshit is purely coincidental.

Rather than describe the sight of Mr Source broken and worn down by logic, facts, and reason -- yet still holding fast to his opinion! -- I thought I'd present his talking points and arguments so that other can learn from the tactics of this spiritual quackery.

Some men are "addicted" to porn. This would be valid, if a valid definition of addiction were provided, which it never was.

Porn leads to prostitution. This makes no sense. Wouldn't jacking off at home mean less employment for sex workers?

Porn leads to harder porn. The speaker imagined porn along a spectrum: A nude woman sitting in a chair on one end, and "bestiology" (his term) at the other. But this is by no means a given; it's a slippery slope argument. Porn could be seen as a collection of genres, where people tend to gravitate toward the kinds of porn they like and leave the rest alone.

Porn leads to rape and violence. In fact, the FBI reports that rape and violence is down. Yet Mr Source claims that porn consumption is booming! How does that work?

Porn harms men. Well, asked someone, what if porn doesn't harm a certain man? Then, says Mr Source, porn is still bad because it harms the women who act in it. What if (asked someone) a woman is is a porn film because she wants to be? For example, in amateur porn? Then it's still bad, said Mr Source, because it harms the men who view it. This is circular reasoning. It took him a while to figure out why, but I think I got it through to him in the end.

Porn is a serious problem because he's seen so many problems associated with it. This is actually two logical problems: confirmation bias -- he notices people who have problems, but ignores people who quite enjoy porn. And if they enjoy porn, well, that's a problem, too! Because he's defining porn as a problem. This is begging the question, or assuming the antecedent.

Porn gives young men unrealistic expectations about what sexual acts girls ought to be doing. This may be true -- inexperienced guys may have unrealistic expectations -- until a girl stands up to him and tells him. But this is true for any set of expectations we might have, no matter our age or gender.

One thread that came up over and over again is that women are vessels of purity that must remain pure and unsullied, while men are the drivers of the process -- the "source" of the money. Does he know that women look at porn? He does now -- the audience saw to that.

In short, Mr Source wasn't terribly concerned about any empirical work showing the downsides of porn, or using reason or logic. Instead, he chose to argue from his own personal preferences, saying that porn is bad because he knows porn is bad.

I'm a father of two teenage boys, and I'm sure that they are either looking at porn, or they will. When they do, my hope is that they'll be able to come to me with questions or ask for information, like they already do about sex. I don't want them to be laden down with guilt and shame about it -- guilt and shame that is promoted by people like Mr Source, and converted into money for his courses and workshops.

Shape Type

2011-11-12T19:28:00.001+08:00

The makers of Kerntype have made another typographic game: Shape Type.

When you're making a font in a digital program like Fontographer, you spend a lot of time pulling the handles of Bézier control points around, trying to massage curves into a plausible letter shape. So can you drag the big pink circles to make a letter that looks good?

This one's a bit harder than Kerntype -- I managed an 86. Beat that, I dares ya.

The yearly War on Christmas email from my family

2011-11-09T08:15:00.000+08:00

A family member has sent this rather long and well-circulated email.

Apparently the White House referred to Christmas Trees as Holiday Trees for the first time this year which prompted CBS presenter, Ben Stein, to present this piece which I would like to share with you. I think it applies just as much to many countries as it does to America .

The following was written by Ben Stein and recited by him on CBS Sunday Morning Commentary.

My confession:

I am a Jew, and every single one of my ancestors was Jewish. And it does not bother me even a little bit when people call those beautiful lit up, bejeweled trees, Christmas trees. I don't feel threatened. I don't feel discriminated against. That's what they are, Christmas trees.

It doesn't bother me a bit when people say, 'Merry Christmas' to me. I don't think they are slighting me or getting ready to put me in a ghetto. In fact, I kind of like it. It shows that we are all brothers and sisters celebrating this happy time of year. It doesn't bother me at all that there is a manger scene on display at a key intersection near my beach house in Malibu. If people want a creche, it's just as fine with me as is the Menorah a few hundred yards away.

I don't like getting pushed around for being a Jew, and I don't think Christians like getting pushed around for being Christians. I think people who believe in God are sick and tired of getting pushed around, period. I have no idea where the concept came from, that America is an explicitly atheist country. I can't find it in the Constitution and I don't like it being shoved down my throat.

Or maybe I can put it another way: where did the idea come from that we should worship celebrities and we aren't allowed to worship God ? I guess that's a sign that I'm getting old, too. But there are a lot of us who are wondering where these celebrities came from and where the America we knew went to.
- - - - -
In light of the many jokes we send to one another for a laugh, this is a little different: This is not intended to be a joke; it's not funny, it's intended to get you thinking.

Billy Graham's daughter was interviewed on the Early Show and Jane Clayson asked her 'How could God let something like this happen?' (regarding Hurricane Katrina).. Anne Graham gave an extremely profound and insightful response. She said, 'I believe God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years we've been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives. And being the gentleman He is, I believe He has calmly backed out. How can we expect God to give us His blessing and His protection if we demand He leave us alone?'

In light of recent events... terrorists attack, school shootings, etc. I think it started when Madeleine Murray O'Hare (she was murdered, her body found a few years ago) complained she didn't want prayer in our schools, and we said OK. Then someone said you better not read the Bible in school. The Bible says thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal, and love your neighbor as yourself. And we said OK.

Then Dr. Benjamin Spock said we shouldn't spank our children when they misbehave, because their little personalities would be warped and we might damage their self-esteem (Dr. Spock's son committed suicide). We said an expert should know what he's talking about. And we said okay.

Now we're asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don't know right from wrong, and why it doesn't bother them to kill strangers, their classmates, and themselves.

Probably, if we think about it long and hard enough, we can figure it out. I think it has a great deal to do with 'WE REAP WHAT WE SOW.'

Funny how simple it is for people to trash God and then wonder why the world's going to hell. Funny how we believe what the newspapers say, but question what the Bible says. Funny how you can send 'jokes' through e-mail and they spread like wildfire, but when you start sending messages regarding the Lord, people think twice about sharing. Funny how lewd, crude, vulgar and obscene articles pass freely through cyberspace, but public discussion of God is suppressed in the school and workplace.

Are you laughing yet?

Funny how we can be more worried about what other people think of us than what God thinks of us.

Pass it on if you think it has merit.

If not, then just discard it.... no one will know you did. But, if you discard this thought process, don't sit back and complain about what bad shape the world is in.

My Best Regards, Honestly and respectfully,

Ben Stein

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I sent this back:

As the atheist of the family, I thought I'd respond.

There seems to be some idea floating around that atheists hate Christmas and want to stop it. Well, that's just silly. I love Christmas! In fact, for the last ten years, I've been in a choir that puts on a big Christmas show. (Some of the other singers are atheists, and they like Christmas too.) I've got most of Handel's Messiah memorised, and when we do "Angels We Have Heard on High", I can belt out a lusty "Glo-ria" with the best of them. I don't believe the story, but I keep singing at Christmas because I like the music. I like the lights, and the food, and being with family, just like everyone does.

What I don't like, however, is compulsory worship. Christians like their religion, and that's fine. But I don't like how some Christians have decided that schools are the place where they want this part of the culture war to play out. I hope nobody I'm writing to thinks this, but maybe someone thinks that prayer in school is a pretty good idea. So here's a thought experiment.

Imagine your school district announced that, starting tomorrow, everyone was going to have Muslim prayers to Allah. If you're thinking, "Gee, I don't know if I'd feel very comfortable with that," well, that's about how an atheist feels. And that's not just because atheists don't want to have prayers to Allah in school (although that's true). It's also because we think public schools ought to be neutral on the subject of religion. That way, the children of Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Wiccans, Mormons, and (yes) atheists all get a level playing field. No one's religion is promoted at the expense of anyone else's. Sounds fair to me. And by doing it that way, schools are obeying the Constitution, which is the law of the land.

If people (including Ben Stein) are concerned that there isn't enough religion in society, then I have some good news: there are already buildings for teaching religion, and they're called churches. They're very nice, they're already built, and you can choose exactly which kind you like. (And they're tax-free, because tax-payers are compelled to pick up the financial burden for churches, even wealthy ones, whether they want to or not.) Worshipping at home is also a very good option.

I don't know if I really needed to write this. I actually think that most Christians are smarter and more fair-minded than the person who wrote the latter half of the email (and it wasn't Ben Stein). The idea that God is going to allow the nation to be smitten with horrible disasters unless enough non-believers are compelled to grovel before him against their will is, fortunately, not an idea that I have seen too many Christians get behind. But here it is, just in case.

Comments welcome.

Love,
Daniel

I sort of like "The One".

2011-11-05T21:21:00.000+08:00

If you're not in Australia, you may not have heard of "The One". It's a TV programme on Seven, which attempts to find Australia's best psychic. This is sort of like trying to find Australia's healthiest cadaver.

I've only seen one episode -- the psychics try to divine the famous owners of sporting equipment, find a boy in an underground tunnel system (without going underground), and pick out the fake fencer out of a group of six.

Can we have them take the masks off? I'm having trouble cold-reading them.

At first, I was expecting to hate it. The fact that there's an industry of charlatans (and a culture of people that believes them) drives me nuts. Also, it seems wrong that someone will win the title of "best psychic" even if they do no better than random chance, just by outlasting the other contestants. And it was painful to see all the contestants -- deluded people (at best) convinced that they had Teh Powerz. But I ended up really enjoying it, and here's why.

First off, there's a "skeptical judge", Richard Saunders, who keeps things on track. At first, I was worried that he was being played by the format, and lending credibility to the silly newage nonsense. And in fact, he does make noises about being sometimes "intrigued, but not convinced". But there's nothing wrong with staying open minded; that's one of the things about being a skeptic. He certainly does a better job than I would. I'd be making catcalls and rolling my eyes. He's much nicer than I am, and he explains random chance and probability, to the annoyance of the "gullible judge". (She's suitably woolly-headed.)

It's also fun to watch the contestants make ad hoc justifications for each new failure. Will the psychic-believing viewers start to notice the constant dissembling? It seems unbelievable to me that someone at home wouldn't become more skeptical after watching excuse after excuse, though that might be offset by seeing the occasional random hit.

The thing I'm most glad about, though: While the show does give a forum to psychics, it's also promoting the idea that it's good to test paranormal claims in a somewhat controlled way. Does "The One" do this ideally? Probably not, but I'm glad someone's doing it at all. Even though it's meant to promote psychics and the paranormal sub-culture, it inadvertently sets them up so they can fail publicly, again and again.

Prescriptivism with attitude

2011-11-03T13:19:00.000+08:00

A graphic from Facebook. Honestly, some people get so touchy about correct usage.

Better do what they say, though. Looks like the writer of this has been driven to the brink by one too many "your"s. One more dropped apostrophe, and they might snap.

A chat with the Witnesses

2011-11-02T17:00:00.000+08:00

Some Jehovah's Witnesses came around this morning. I decided to go all Socratic on them, and just ask them questions. It didn't last very long.

If you had to pick a religion…

2011-10-28T22:45:00.000+08:00

I'm hard on religious belief, but I try to be good to the actual believers. That's hard to do with (say) apologists, who don't approach the business of gaining knowledge in an honest way -- some kinds of dishonesty aren't to be tolerated. But there are a number of believers that I quite enjoy talking to.

I was talking to a Christian friend the other day, telling him my deconversion story (the mercifully short version). And he asked a question:

If you weren't an atheist, what religion would you go for?

That's tough, I said, because religions don't do what I'm interested in doing, which is finding out what's true. More to the point, a lot of religions claim to teach truth, and they advance claims that are either demonstrably false, or else unverifiable and very likely to be wrong.

Religions get it wrong because it's so hard to get it right. To get it right, you have to observe, make testable hypotheses, observe some more, get other people to check out your findings, and even then what you've found is probably a little bit wrong, and it'll need to be updated in future. If religions went about their ideas this way, they wouldn't be religions; they'd be doing science. Instead, religions typically get their data from holy books, pronouncements from authority figures, or from traditions. Religions are non-empirical belief systems.

So, in order to accept a religion, I'd have to try one that made minimal truth claims (Unitarians?), or I'd have to be into it for some other reason -- perhaps the refreshments.

Some religions are non-theistic (Buddhism, some kinds of Hinduism), and I have some friends that enjoy aspects of those religions, or perhaps it would more accurate in their case to say 'philosophies'. The Dalai Lama makes noises from time to time about Buddhism's compatibility with science:

"If the words of the Buddha and the findings of modern science contradict each other, then the former have to go."

Not good enough, I'm afraid. Nothing can contradict a non-falsifiable belief (think reincarnation).

So I'm afraid that I can't pick anything. I'm allergic to religion in all its forms. If you put a gun to my head, I'd be UU. At least they're undemanding, and probably nice most of the time.

Milk: Lost in translation

2011-10-24T22:55:00.000+08:00

If you use Google Translate to translate "Got milk?" into Spanish, and burrow into the 'alternate translations' it offers you, one of the choices is "bigote de leche", which means "milk moustache". I'm leaving it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how it arrived at that translation.

Of course, this is better than the tagline they went with in Spanish speaking countries: "¿Tiene leche?" which sounds plausible enough to a non-native speaker, but which carries maternal associations, something along the lines of "Are you lactating?"

Published papers that are giving me the fits right now

2011-10-23T22:12:00.001+08:00

There are a few pieces of research that are giving me a bad case of skeptitis: an inflammation of the part of the brain that makes us skeptical. I'm not saying I have the expertise to refute these, but something about them doesn't smell right, and that makes me feel twitchy. See if you don't agree.

Number 1: More Facebook Friends Means Bigger Brain Areas, U.K. Study Finds

A strong correlation was found between the number of Facebook connections and the amount of gray matter, or brain tissue responsible for processing signals, according to research led by Geraint Rees, a senior clinical research fellow at University College London. The results, based on magnetic resonance imaging of 125 college students’ brains, was published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

This reminds me of Dunbar's primate brain size hypothesis: Primates that have bigger brains have larger social networks. But I think this is meant to apply on the species level, not on the individual level. Sounds fishy.

Number 2: BYU study: Hearing profanity may lead to more aggressive acts

BYU researchers found that middle school students who watched TV and played video games with profanity were more likely to use profanity. And dropping swear words was in turn related to being physically violent and aggressive in how they treat others.

The results were published Monday in the American Academy of Pediatrics’ peer-reviewed journal Pediatrics.

"It’s not like you hear profanity in the media and go and punch somebody. I think of it as a trickle-down effect," said Sarah M. Coyne, a BYU assistant professor of family life and lead author of the study. "It represents a lack of respect for parents or whoever you’re using it towards. It’s like a slippery slope. You start using it, and it becomes associated with other aggression."

This one sounds like a theory that your mom might make up, and the fact that this study comes out of the BYU doesn't help the credibility. It's very easy for someone to accept a conclusion when it's something they already believe.

Does swearing really represent a lack of respect? Sometimes, but it could also be used to establish solidarity between people in a social setting. Does the study reflect that usage? How did this get past peer review? Is something broken at Pediatrics? What is an "assistant professor of family life"?

I don't know if swearing leads to aggression, but I do know that junk science makes me want to jack someone in the gut.

Number 3: Origins of human language: They differently talked

"The man killed the bear" may seem like the obvious 'right' way to structure a sentence to an English speaker, but a linguistic duo suggests that the original human language did it differently, saying instead "The man the bear killed." In a paper in a recent edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they dispute the assertion by some linguistics that the original human language was organized by Subject-Verb-Object, as English is.
...
Many comparative linguists believe that it's simply not possible to know what languages were like further back than 6,000 or 7,000 years ago. But [Merritt] Ruhlen and [Murray] Gell-Mann believe it's possible to make inferences about language going back much further, by studying the broad outlines of all the world's languages.

It is possible to reconstruct past languages by looking at what current languages are like, and if you're a historical linguist, this is the kind of thing you might do for languages from 1,000 or more years ago. But this gets harder to do the farther you go back, and by about 6,000 or 7,000 years, it's awfully hard to separate the signal from the noise. Ruhlen and Gell-Mann are trying to go back perhaps 50,000 years, and tell us what the word order of Proto-World is like. This would be very hard to do.

Take a language family like Indo-European. Lots of languages are SVO (or Subject-Object-Verb), lots are SOV, and some have more or less free word order. It would be very difficult to select just one as the indisputably correct word order, and that's for a language group that's been well-studied and well-documented. Proto-World? That's gotta be guesswork.

Am I off-base? Do any of these papers sound fine to you? Put it in comments.

Romney: Religious test "dangerous"

2011-10-20T14:17:00.000+08:00

Mitt Romney says it's "dangerous" to select a presidential candidate on the basis of faith:

"The concept that we select people based on the church or the synagogue they go to, I think, is a very dangerous - and an enormous departure from the principles of our Constitution."

Unless it's the Religion of Secularism. Then it's okay.

But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong.
...
And you can be certain of this: Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me.

Anybody else, not so much.

But, to be fair, Romney said that last part in 2007, so he may have changed his mind by now.

By all means, continue.

2011-10-18T13:28:00.003+08:00

Thank goodness these people are off the streets.

Praying perpetually to save society

In 12 years, the music has never stopped at the International House of Prayer — a leader in a small but growing movement dedicated to perpetual prayer.

Young people have flocked here from as far away as Britain and South Korea, convinced that their prayers, joined in a never-ceasing stream, can push back evil forces that threaten to overwhelm society.

"It's probably one of the fastest-growing movements within the broad evangelicalism," said Brad Christerson, a professor of sociology at Biola University who studies charismatic Christianity. "They're really engaging a new generation of young evangelicals."
...
IHOP, as the church is known, sees prayer as a form of "spiritual warfare," battling demons who keep a constant hold on parts of society. Continuous prayer is a way of extending that struggle around the clock.

"What we do opens and shuts doors to angels and demons," founding pastor Mike Bickle said recently.

I guess it makes more sense than the typical view of prayer, which is that you've got a sort of inept god who can do anything, but still needs a steady diet of increasingly desperate coaxing and prodding to get him to do the things he already knows he needs to do.

This Dominionist view of prayer, though, seems to be that god's more powerful than society-destroying demons, but you need to keep feeding him prayer energy to help him level up or something.

Never mind. I don't get it. The whole idea is weird, and I'm very glad these people are off together in a building somewhere, doing effectively nothing for long periods of time.

Terry Jones would "think twice" about satirising religion today

2011-10-14T22:06:00.000+08:00

I'm always up for a bit of Monty Python, so I read this interview with Terry Jones with interest.

The Life Of Brian star says he never believed the 1979 comedy about Jesus would be as controversial as it was at the time. He certainly never expected people still to be discussing it now.

Jones, 69, says he and his fellow comics were able to make the film only because, at the time, religion “seemed to be on the back burner”.

He said: “I never thought it would be as controversial as it turned out, although I remember saying when we were writing it that some religious nutcase may take pot shots at us, and everyone replied, ‘No’.

“I took the view it wasn’t blasphemous,” he tells Radio Times. “At the time religion seemed to be on the back burner and it felt like kicking a dead donkey.” But he says: “It’s come back with a vengeance and we’d think twice about making it now.”

It's true that religion has come roaring back since the secular 70s, and we're still feeling it now. But why would he think twice about making Life of Brian now? Python usually dealt out their surrealism with a light touch, but they certainly didn't shy away from institutional targets. It wasn't all kicking dead donkeys. (Usually it was dead parrots.) I hope it was an off-the-cuff remark.

Asked if he would make a satirical film about Muslims now, he replied, “Probably not – looking at Salman Rushdie. I suppose people would be frightened."

I can't tell you how disappointing I find this comment. I guess our heroes don't stay young and argumentative forever. But it shows me that we really can slip backwards. Religions, more today than ever, take themselves too seriously, and try to claim for themselves a respect that's way out of proportion to their truthfulness. The antidote is blasphemy and satire -- the kind Monty Python was so good at. Thankfully, a new wave of skeptical satirists has arisen, and we can now enjoy Ricky Gervais, Tim Minchin, Sue Ann Post, Eddie Izzard, Julia Sweeney...

I'm missing people. Who's on your list of funny atheists?

Kerning: It's not a game. Until now!

2011-10-12T11:42:00.001+08:00

If you've ever looked at a sign, and said, "Well, that's the crappest kerning job I've ever seen," then I have a game for you.

What's kerning, you ask? Moving letters around to get the spacing right. And now there's Kerntype. It's a game that will test your visual layout skills. Pull the letters around until they look good, and see how your kerning compares to expert opinion.

Get kerning, people. Beat my 98.

How to fix moth holes in a wool sweater

2011-10-08T20:37:00.000+08:00

We don't usually get crafty around here, but this is a special case. It seems that moth larvae have been busy in my closet, and the little bastards ate a couple of holes in (among other things) my favourite Merino wool sweater. Here's their handiwork on Ms Perfect's sweater.

Oh, the infamy.

It took a while to hunt down and kill every last member of their family (except for one, who I commanded to go and tell the others). With that done, the problem was: How to repair the damage? A lot of web pages will get you started on sewing and darning, but I've found an easier method that still looks good.

You're going to need some felting needles. They're like regular needles, but as you can see in the photo, they have a serrated edge.

You'll also need a block of foam.

A block of foam.

Sometimes craft stores have them, but I got this one from a store that sells foam rubber, like mattresses and such. They usually have a lot of off-cuts for cheap (or even free), and a small cube will do.

I'm going to demonstrate on this wool blanket. That's a big hole there.

First, put the foam block under the woolen material.

Yes, it's under there.

Now, you'll need the felting needles. Pull the fabric together so that bits on either side of the hole are sort of close to each other. Then, use the needles to pull the individual threads closer to each other, and push the needle into the wool and the foam block. It makes a satisfying scrunching sound.

You don't have to use two needles. One is fine.

What you are doing is using the needles to tangle the woolen threads together, and turn them into a lovely snarl that will cover the hole. Keep doing it over and over. Be sure to pull the wool off the foam block every once in a while so the wool doesn't get stuck to it.

If you keep it up, eventually all that wool will weave together and cover the hole, like this.

With care, it can be done on fabrics of a finer weave. Your strategy here will be to use a finer needle, drag individual fibers together, and scrunch them together to form a mesh. Here's the sweater from earlier.

Just try to avoid overdoing it -- it might take on the appearance of a puff-ball. When you start, try experimenting on some inconspicuous part of the sweater, or on one you don't care so much about.

Here's a close-up of the moth-eaten bit from my favourite sweater. It's very strong, and you can hardly see where the hole was.

Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T22:01:00.001+08:00

I've been a Mac guy ever since 1984, which is when my Dad bought a Mac Classic for his office. He thought it was the greatest, and he was right. Man, how many hours I spent at my Dad's office on that cute little white box! (No hard drive, two disc drives.) I was drawing, writing, pointing, clicking. I was computing, and it was easy and fun. I was hooked.

In the 1990s, I had to confront the strange paradox that puzzled every Mac user: Despite the obvious superiority of the Mac (System 7 at that stage), and its ease of use, PCs still existed. How could this be? Mass delusion? I bored legions of friends with my Mac evangelism... and fretted about Apple's predicted demise.

Then came the Return of Steve Jobs. He showed us how to turn a company around. And he did it by doing something unexpected -- by me at least. While I thought the salvation of the Mac would happen when people saw what great software the OS was, Jobs went at it from the hardware end. He oversaw and (I think it's fair to say) designed great-looking and great-working products that people couldn't wait to get their hands on.

Steve Jobs brought us insanely great computers. Computers look and work the way they do today because of choices he made. They have mouses. They have trackpads. (Macs were the first to have them.) They have sophisticated font capabilities because Steve loved typography (like I do).

I love my Mac, and my iPod. I use them both every day. (No iPhone yet.) I love what these smart little things bring to my life. I hope Apple keeps making great things, now that Steve Jobs is gone. I feel like we all owe him a lot for what he brought to computing.

Is atheism responsible for atrocities?

2011-10-05T22:14:00.000+08:00

In a discussion with Sam Harris, Steven Pinker presents a cogent take-down of the "HitlerStalinPolPot" gambit that some Christians like to play. That's the one where they say, "Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were atheists who killed millions of people, therefore atheism is terrible."

Harris serves the ball.

Need I remind you that the “atheist regimes” of the 20th century killed tens of millions of people?

This is a popular argument among theoconservatives and critics of the new atheism, but for many reasons it is historically inaccurate.

First, the premise that Nazism and Communism were “atheist” ideologies makes sense only within a religiocentric worldview that divides political systems into those that are based on Judaeo-Christian ideology and those that are not. In fact, 20th-century totalitarian movements were no more defined by a rejection of Judaeo-Christianity than they were defined by a rejection of astrology, alchemy, Confucianism, Scientology, or any of hundreds of other belief systems. They were based on the ideas of Hitler and Marx, not David Hume and Bertrand Russell, and the horrors they inflicted are no more a vindication of Judeao-Christianity than they are of astrology or alchemy or Scientology.

Second, Nazism and Fascism were not atheistic in the first place. Hitler thought he was carrying out a divine plan. Nazism received extensive support from many German churches, and no opposition from the Vatican. Fascism happily coexisted with Catholicism in Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Croatia.
...
When it comes to the history of violence, the significant distinction is not one between theistic and atheistic regimes. It’s the one between regimes that were based on demonizing, utopian ideologies (including Marxism, Nazism, and militant religions) and secular liberal democracies that are based on the ideal of human rights.

Not that Sam Harris hasn't also done a fine job of answering that question himself.

It seems the Lord delayeth his coming after all.

2011-10-03T22:31:00.000+08:00

...the great and dreadful day of the Lord is near, even at the doors.
-- Doctrine & Covenants 110:16

Religious movements of the 1800s just couldn't wait for Jesus to come back, and Mormonism was very much a product of its time. Did Joseph Smith make a firm prediction about it, or did he not? I guess when the name of your church includes "Latter-day Saints", you're expecting it to be pretty soon.

Accordingly, every single youth leader I ever had was utterly convinced that our generation was going to usher in Christ's return. There were breathless reports of patriarchal blessings that said, "Yep, you'll be alive for the whole wrapping up."

Well, apparently the return is on the back burner for now.

The end is not near, senior LDS apostle Boyd K. Packer said Saturday.

Today’s youths can look forward to "getting married, having a family, seeing your children and grandchildren, maybe even great-grandchildren," Packer told more than 20,000 Mormons gathered in the giant LDS Conference Center in downtown Salt Lake City.

There has been no immediate comment from LDSLastDays.com.

I would, however, like to suggest a slight change of logo:

Inside a hollow sphere

2011-10-01T21:23:00.002+08:00

The novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a scene where Arthur Dent goes to a hyperspatial factory where planets are constructed. It made me wonder: What if I were in a spaceship inside that enormous sphere -- and I fell out of the ship?

In other words, what would gravity be like inside an enormous, hollow, planet-sized sphere?

Would you:
a) get pulled to the precise centre of the sphere, and stay there?
b) get pulled toward the nearest section of wall, and go splat?
c) just float around wherever you are?

I was very pleased to find that last week's Straight Dope column answered that very question.

Make your prediction, and I'll see you in comments.

Reflecting on 30-Day Blog September

2011-10-01T10:46:00.000+08:00

Congratulations, everyone who accepted the challenge! I hope you had a good experience.

As for me, I found my blog revitalised, and it was very gratifying to see more visitors and a higher density of great comments.

It wasn't hard -- I go through the news every day anyway, and it was easy to pick the story that I found the most interesting. In fact, some days it was hard to pick just one. The more I looked, the more I found. It's hard to believe I had such big breaks between posts just a few months ago. I would notice things, but I wouldn't post them because I felt like every post had to be such a big deal. Not anymore!

I think I'm going to try to keep up this pace. I actually enjoyed the kind of posts that I found myself writing.

JW apostates "mentally diseased"

2011-09-30T22:11:00.000+08:00

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.

2011-09-29T21:51:00.000+08:00

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'

2011-09-28T22:38:00.000+08:00

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

2011-09-27T22:08:00.000+08:00

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

2011-09-26T22:39:00.000+08:00

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

2011-09-25T18:56:00.001+08:00

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?

2011-09-24T22:34:00.000+08:00

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

2011-09-23T09:52:00.001+08:00

If you like these cartoons, I have others.

Action Item: Support school secularism

2011-09-22T12:09:00.000+08:00

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

2011-09-21T22:39:00.000+08:00

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

2011-09-20T23:01:00.002+08:00

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'

2011-09-19T21:42:00.000+08:00

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

2011-09-18T21:26:00.000+08:00

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.

2011-09-17T21:38:00.001+08:00

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

2011-09-16T12:12:00.000+08:00

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

2011-09-15T21:37:00.000+08:00

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'

2011-09-14T21:16:00.001+08:00

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!

2011-09-13T22:24:00.001+08:00

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

2011-09-12T22:19:00.000+08:00

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

2011-09-11T19:22:00.000+08:00

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

2011-09-10T23:17:00.000+08:00

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

2011-09-09T09:39:00.000+08:00

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

2011-09-08T22:11:00.000+08:00

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

2011-09-07T22:32:00.000+08:00

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

2011-09-06T22:37:00.000+08:00

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

2011-09-05T22:27:00.000+08:00

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

2011-09-04T22:30:00.000+08:00

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?

2011-09-03T21:38:00.000+08:00

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!

2011-09-02T18:55:00.000+08:00

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?

2011-09-01T14:54:00.000+08:00

‎"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.

Who likes Benny Lava?

2011-08-31T22:27:00.001+08:00

Starting out with "Who likes white people?" seemed a little out there, even for Michele Bachmann.

Language Log has done a convincing job of demonstrating that she really said, "Who likes wet people?", which you can prove to yourself by closing your eyes and listening. You know what it is -- it's those damn subtitles (or are they supertitles?). When you see the words up there, it sure sounds like "white", even when you know it's "wet".

I like this as an example of the suggestibility of perception. Could this be the Benny Lava of American politics?

No, maybe not.

Education in reverse

2011-08-29T16:08:00.000+08:00

Aren't you glad you're not a kid going to a private Christian school in Perth, Australia? Because if you were, you'd have assignments like this:

Gay sex 'sickest of sins'

CHILDREN have been asked whether homosexuality is "the sickest sin" in a school assignment.

The homework given to 14 and 15-year-olds at Armadale Christian College, also also points them to bible quotes describing homosexuality as an "abomination", and describes "coming out of the closet" as "open sinning".

Way to go, Christians. Imagine you're 15, trying to figure out what your sexuality is, and you get handed that as homework. High school students are already cruel enough about ferreting out the gay kids in their midst, without the teachers piling on.

Another question asked what God said about homosexuality and pointed to Bible quotes for the answer, which called it an "abomination".

The assignment also stated that homosexuality was a "compromise for the need to be loved and accepted", resulting for many from "low self-esteem (and) gender emptiness".

Also on the assignment was: "Many people say that homosexuality is an inborn trait. Is a person born greedy, jealous, malicious, gossiper, slanderer, thief, child abuser, serial killer?"

Because being gay is just like all those other things.

I managed to procure a copy of the actual assignment (PDF), and yeah, it's pretty much the standard anti-gay stuff that gives Christians a hate-on, plus Bible scriptures.

Homosexuality
"Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites…" (1 Corinthians 6:9)

Preliminary Thoughts

1) What is homosexuality?

2) Is homosexuality a new practice? Why do we hear so much about it now?

3) What are some reasons people give to justify homosexual practices?
a)
b)
c)

4) Why are some people tempted with homosexual feelings and others are not?

5) Are feeling and temptations wrong, or do they become wrong when we do something about them (James 1:12–15)?

6) Is there a limit to the power of any temptation (1 Corinthians 10:13)?

7) The subject of homosexuality is confusing because everyone calls it something different.
• Is homosexuality a physical or genetic disease?
• Is homosexuality "the sickest sin there is?"
• Is homosexuality "natural" for some people, being an inborn trait (Romans 1:26–27)?
• Is homosexuality a legitimate "alternative lifestyle" (Genesis 2:24; Hebrews 13:4)?

8) Most people seem to have no idea how homosexuality can be a temptation to anyone. Therefore we are not very helpful to a person who is struggling with the temptation (cf. Galatians 6:1–2; Jude 22–23). Maybe that can change if we understand a few general things about homosexuality.
• God makes every person unique (Psalm 139:13–16; 1 Corinthains 12:12–27). He may be different, but God does not make him "gay" (James 1:13).
• Homosexuality generally has little to do with sex. The sexual involvement with another person of the same sex, is a compromise for the need to be loved and accepted.
• Some inborn factors may contribute to the development of homosexual attractions, but these are not sufficient to make a person homosexual (James 1:14–15; 1 Corinthians 10:13).
• Factors which lead to each person's struggle with homosexual attraction are different, but certain stages are common to many—low self-esteem, gender emptiness, gender attraction, sexual attraction, homosexual reinforcement, homosexual identity.

What Does The Bible Say?
1) Is homosexuality a new practice (Genesis 19:1–29; Judges 19:1–28; 1 Kings 14:24; 15–12; 22:46; 2 Kings 23:7)" Is there anything new (Ecclesiastes 1:9–10)?
2) What did God say about homosexuality under the Law of Moses (Leviticus 18:22; 20:13)?
3) Many people say homosexuality is an inborn trait. Is a person born greedy, jealous, malicious, gossiper, slanderer, thief, child abuser, serial killer (Mark 7:20–23)? Why would people say that homosexuality is inborn?
4) Is homosexuality a "natural" practice (Romans 1:26–27)?
5) Is homosexuality against God's law or sanctioned by it (1 Timothy 1:8–10)?
6) Homosexuals advocate "coming out of the closet" and being open with their lifestyle. What does the Bible say about such open sinning (Isaiah 3:9)?
7) Men try to lessen the severity of sin by softening its description. The Bible does not describe homosexuals/lesbians as "gay" or living an "alternative lifestyle". How does the Bible describe such people?
• 1 Kings 14:24—
• 1 Corinthians 6:9—
• Colossians 3:5—
• Jude 7—

8) What two things does 1 Corinthians 6:9–11 teach us about homosexuality?

9) Those who oppose homosexuality are often called "homophobes" or "gay bashers". Some people really are—but how would you desribe a caring, concerned Christian who wants to help a person overcome his struggle with homosexuality (1 Corinthians 13:4–7; James 5:19–20)?

Practical Solutions

1) Can a person who is engaged in homosexual practices remain in that condition? What much he/she do (Ephesians 5:1–14)?

2) Does God care about our struggle? What are some practical ways that God gives to overcome this temptation (1 Corinthians 10:13)?
• How did Jesus overcome temptation (Matthew 4:1–11)?
• Who can we turn to for help (Philippians 4:13; 1 John 4:4)?
• How must we respond to the devil's temptation (James 4:7)?
• What activity helps us as much as anything (Philippians 4:6–7)?
• What do we need to try and master (Philippians 4:8; 2 Corinthians 10:5)?

3) After you rid yourself of this practice, what must you do to keep worse sins from returning (Luke 11:24–26)?

4) How is the church to respond to a practicing homosexual who repents (2 Corinthians 2:3–11)?

5) Do you have a closing thought?

Maybe some parents at ACC wouldn't mind having this assignment plopped down on their child's desk, but I suspect more than a couple would. And people in the wider community should definitely be concerned that high schoolers are being exposed to the hateful teachings of the Christian bible -- subsidised by tax dollars, no less. Remember, this is happening not in the American South, but in good old secular Perth WA, today. It can happen here.

If you want to write your own answers for this assignment, give it a go in comments.

Spam spotting

2011-08-26T07:56:00.000+08:00

Here's an interesting application for Natural Language Processing. How do you know if a review for a hotel or a business is real, or just a spammy one written by someone who's never even seen the place?

Computers can do it. Just get people to write a ton of spammy reviews, then get some reviews that (you suspect) are real, and compare the patterns.

Can't read the text? Fake reviews were more likely to use "I" and "me", adverbs like "really", and explanation points.

Here's a PDF of the authors' ACL presentation.

Inappropriate brand identificaton

2011-08-21T21:56:00.001+08:00

There's enjoyment and there's investment.

Let's take the band Gomez for an example. I noticed the other day that I have a lot of Gomez albums, and I like them, but I wouldn't call myself a Gomez fan. There's some level at which I haven't identified with them.

On the other hand, when I first heard the Leisure Society or Seabear, it was more than just liking their stuff. I connected with them in some way that made me say "I can get behind this." I reserved a tiny part of myself for them, and made them a part of my social identity (because listening to music is as much about social alignment as musical enjoyment).

But defining yourself in terms of musical taste might not be such a great idea. What happens if 'your special band' releases a disappointing second album (as the Leisure Society and Seabear both did)? Will you be able to update, or will that be too threatening to your self-image? Maybe you'll just never listen to the new stuff, and keep thinking they're great.

What I'm talking about is the perils of Fanboi Syndrome, and it's the topic of this study (thanks to Kuri). Except this is about brands, not bands.

You may think you're defending your favorite platform because it's just that good. But, according to a recently published study out of the University of Illinois, you may instead be defending yourself because you view criticisms of your favorite brand as a threat to your self image. The study, which will be published in the next issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology, examines the strength of consumer-brand relationships, concluding that those who have more knowledge of and experience with a brand are more personally impacted by incidents of brand "failure."

The researchers performed two experiments, one on a group of 30 women and another on 170 undergraduate students, in order to see whether the subjects' self esteem was tied to the general ratings of various brands. Those who had high self-brand connections (SBC)—that is, those who follow, research, or simply like a certain brand—were the ones whose self esteem suffered the most when their brands didn't do well or were criticized. Those with low SBC remained virtually unaffected on a personal level.

Boy, do I hear this. I used to be an Apple fanboi. Well, I still kind of am, partly because I think their stuff is good, and partly because of the thousands of happy hours I've spent computing on the MacOS. But a little tiny part of me is heavily invested in Apple, to the extent that I have to try not to feel personally affronted if AppleHaterz bag it, and I'm likely to write off their opinion.

I used to be worse. You should have seen me in the 90s, when the Mac was an endangered species. But brand identification is something of a danger. It's one more kind of bias that keeps us from seeing clearly. Companies shouldn't have that kind of hold.

30-Day Blog September

2011-08-19T18:02:00.001+08:00

I'm starting something new, and I'm calling it 30-Day Blog September. Every day in the month of September, I am going to blog something. It may be the most interesting news article I found that day, a thought I had, or a longer piece, but it will be something, and it will be every day.

You could try it too, if you have a blog. Maybe it will shake us both out of Blog Lethargy, and help us realise that not every post needs to be a Serious Thought Piece. Want to join me?

UPDATE: I has a graphic.

If you're up for 30-Day Blog September, slap this graphic somewhere on your blog, and link to this post.

Peace for one day

2011-08-18T11:31:00.001+08:00

A friend showed me this TED talk about Jeremy Gilley, who had an idea: What if everyone decided to stop war for one day?

You could say all kinds of things about this. Crazy. Idealistic. Naïve. And you'd be kind of right. For one thing, war happens anyway. For another, getting people to agree not to fight is futile because war is a failure to agree in the first place. That's the problem. What you're saying is, "If only we could get people to agree, then we could start to work on the problem of people not agreeing!"

Not everyone wants peace, anyway. One of the worst Christian memes around now is that if a major world political leader brings peace, that's a sign that they're the antichrist. Apparently, God is the only one who is supposed to bring peace, and anyone else is a satanic impersonator. So they're suspicious of peace. Isn't that lovely? But anyway.

And yet, despite all this, the Peace One Day project has done some good. Even the Taliban agreed to it one year, and violence went down that day.

You have to try stuff, as idealistic as it seems. Maybe, as Gilley says, it won't work, and nothing will happen. But maybe it will, and someone won't get blown up or killed for a day. You have to try.

And anyway, whether it "works" or not isn't the point. As I see it, the point of this exercise is that it's important to affirm values. It's important for the world community to state that peace is a collective goal. We need to say "You know peace? Well, we want that." And we need to keep saying that over and over again, because some people will keep chipping away at that value. We can't ever assume that any of our values are so universally held and so solid that we can never lose them. We can slip backward. It happened with torture. It's happening with the right to choose to have an abortion. You think child labour laws are an irretractable value? Public education? Conservatives right now are working feverishly to turn the clock back on our progressive values, even the ones that we think we could never lose. We need to keep affirming that these are the values we have.

September 21 is the day, by the way. It's not too far off. Maybe there's something we could do.

Naming rights

2011-08-04T12:46:00.002+08:00

The issue of names and naming is interesting. Names are a rich source of cultural information. They tell us about our history, and our social networks.

In a recent Linguistics class, I brought up the topic of names with an exercise that you can do, if you like.

Try making a list of all the names you have. Don't skip any. Think about nicknames, or alternate versions of your name that you've used. Could someone use more than one name for you? What does it mean if they pick one or the other?

Usually people find, as I did, that names tell about our history. No one calls me 'Dan' or 'Danny', unless they knew me when I went by those names. Internet names can tell about our interests -- sometimes I'm 'fontor' or 'GoodReason'. And a lot of names have to do with our social system; family titles like 'Dad', or a name that belonged to a relative that's been handed down (as is the case with my actual 'first name', Thomas). There may even be names that people aren't supposed to know. Maybe you don't like your middle name, and you'd rather people don't know it. Sometimes nicknames between intimates are kept private.

Sometimes names are conferred ritually, which brought me to the LDS temple name. I explained to the class that in my former religion, when someone is initiated into the temple rituals, they're given a new name which is never to be revealed, except under very limited circumstances.

"But that doesn't make any sense," said one student. "What's the point of having a name, when no one can use it?"

Why indeed?

I answered this way: Who gets to name a comet? Whoever discovered it. Who gets to name a person? The parents. In marriage, a man sometimes gives a woman part of his name, which reflects the social agreement of the time that she belonged to him. In other words, the act of naming is done by the one who has ownership (in some way) over the thing being named.

So the act of naming something isn't just to create a way to refer to someone. By giving a new name to someone as part of a temple ritual, the church could be seen as asserting its ownership.

Post 1000

2011-08-01T08:00:00.012+08:00

Here it is: My thousandth Good Reason post. And it only took five and a half years.

A lot about blogging has changed since I started the blog. Facebook got huge, and for a lot of people Facebook is their blog. I skipped Twitter, but got onto Google+, which may not be a Facebook killer (yet), but it is shaping up to be a Twitter killer. And there are podcasts, like my own 'Talk the Talk'.

What I'm finding is that these other forms of Internet expression are chipping around the edges of my blogging. I use FB or G+ for short ideas or links to articles about politics or religion that I don't want to do a full blog post on. And 'Talk the Talk' is my outlet for linguistics items. So what's Good Reason for?

What seems to be happening is that I'm using Good Reason less and less frequently, as a forum for pieces of writing which take longer to write, and require more thought. But I'm wondering if I want to post something short every day, like the most interesting link from my browsing that day.

But whatever happens, I'll still be here posting stuff with some regularity. I don't think anything else really does what the blog does for me, but its role might change a bit.

Do you find the same thing happening in your writing? Are other forms of media sapping your blog, or adding to it? Are we living in a post-blog era?

Purity, but without the balls.

2011-07-30T22:59:00.003+08:00

I am so sick of sex-negative religious bullshit. And it's not just because they fill children up with guilt and shame about their bodies and their desires. It's also because they hector other grownups about how they should conduct their sexuality.

Take this video from the Mormon Church, for instance, which focuses on the meaning of 'pure'. (h/t profxm)

Wow, feel the waves of pent-up energy.

George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist, is big on the idea that metaphors are instrumental in guiding our thinking. And it seems to me that the metaphor of 'SEXUAL ABSTINENCE IS PURITY' is being used as a giant Trojan Horse to smuggle in a very sex-negative view.

I'm going to put on my cognitive linguist hat, and try to unpack what's going on with this metaphor.

1. Who would disagree with 'purity'? If purity is an unquestionable good, then going up against it makes you automatically bad. This is an underhanded tactic commonly used when ideas aren't strong enough to be accepted when stated clearly. Run 'abstinence' up the flagpole, and who salutes? Sexually repressed ninnies and religious folk (lots of overlap there, though). Call it 'purity' instead, and it's a lot more palatable.

2. A thing becomes impure by having something else put into it. A pure vial of water becomes impure with the addition of some other liquid. A hypothetical Miss X, before intercourse, was just herself, presumably with no liquids added. She was, if you will, a pure vessel, unadulterated. (Ah, le mot juste. It nicely preserves the etymological link to 'adultery'.) But after sex with Mr Y, she is impure, coated with someone else's sticky remnants inside her.

3. Mr Y, on the other hand, doesn't have very much put into him during (typical) sex. Which is kind of a shame, because it can be nice if done well. Sex doesn't impurify men. They're still 100% themselves (minus a few teaspoons).

4. So, taking this metaphor to a logical conclusion, the consequences of impurity should therefore be more serious for women than for men, since according to this metaphor the Anti-Sex Brigade is handing us, they have more to lose in the purity game.

We could therefore make a prediction that the bulk of efforts toward maintaining 'purity' would focus on women. And indeed, they do. Is it surprising that the young women in the video says the emotional consequences of having sex are serious, "especially for girls"? The Book of Mormon even says that the Lord delights in the chastity of women. And so the Church obsesses over female 'purity', while ignoring the fact that Joseph Smith got as much ass as any sex guru in the modern era (with the possible exception of Brigham Young).

As a linguist, I'm not a fan of language engineering; language is such a big thing that it's hard for any one person or group of people to move it. But this is one instance where the use has taken hold among the religious community, and now they're trying to export it to the rest of us. This is kind of a thing for Christians, who have taken a lot of good words for good things, and crammed them into their own sex-hating definitions.

It's not just the word 'purity'. It's also the word 'morality'. As a Mormon living within the Mormon speech community, I came to think of morality in terms of sexual morality, not in terms of what it took to be a moral person. For many Christians, Bush was a 'moral' leader even though he lied about Iraq, but Clinton was 'immoral' because he got a blow job. This is a perverted standard of morality.

'Virtue' is another. It comes from Latin vir meaning 'man' and it once meant something like 'excellence' and 'valor'. But that's not the prevailing sense among Latter-day Saints, where it just means 'sexual abstinence'.

This use of language debases these concepts among its users, and elevates a standard of behaviour that is easy to measure, but which does nothing to promote actual morality, virtue, or purity.

Lectures on Doubt: What faith is

2011-07-28T22:28:00.000+08:00

I once described faith as "the willingness to suspend critical reasoning facilities in the service of a belief for which there is no adequate evidence". Not everyone likes this definition (strangely), so I thought I'd return to the topic of faith and refine it a bit.

You might think it's strange for an atheist to talk about faith in the first place. Perhaps you'd say I couldn't give it a fair treatment, since I don't have any. Which is a typical faith-y thing to say: you don't really understand faith (or you're not qualified to speak about it) unless you've fallen for it completely. You have to take the leap, and then you'll get it. However, if 'faith' means 'fooling yourself', then a person of faith would be the worst person to ask about it. Anyway, humour me. Treat me as a somewhat objective observer. Have a little faith.

On the other hand, you may take exception to my claim that I don't have any faith. Of course I do, you might say. It takes faith to do anything! It takes faith to be an atheist, I've been told. My Uncle Richard used to say that it takes faith to believe that the floor will be there when you get out of bed in the morning. It takes faith for scientists to study a cure for cancer, since they don't know that they'll be successful. It takes faith to believe in, say, evolution. So I've been told.

I don't believe it. When people use this reasoning, they're stretching the definition of faith to encompass everything, which intrudes on other concepts that we already have words for. Defining 'faith' this way makes the word meaningless.

The key insight to what faith is hinges on an understanding of its relationship to evidence, and it's this: If you have evidence for something, you do not need faith in that thing. You just need to open your eyes. For this reason, I describe faith as belief without evidence.

The Book of Mormon agrees fairly well with this assessment. (It's not a source I think much of, but some people do.) It says that once you know something, your faith becomes dormant.

32:17 Yea, there are many who do say: If thou wilt show unto us a sign from heaven, then we shall know of a surety; then we shall believe.

32:18 Now I ask, is this faith? Behold, I say unto you, Nay; for if a man knoweth a thing he hath no cause to believe, for he knoweth it.

Faith is only necessary in the absence of knowledge, according to this author. I'd agree. Insofar as evidence brings you knowledge of a thing, there is no need for faith in that thing where there is evidence for it.

So with that in mind, let's go back to those who think that everything requires faith. Does it require faith to put your feet on the floor, believing it will be there? No. I have a lot of evidence that the floor has been there on previous mornings, and I can infer with some degree of certainty that this morning will be like other mornings. There's a very high probability that the floor will be there, based on the evidence. (If tomorrow morning I turn out to be wrong and fall through the floor, I'll update accordingly.) I may have a 'belief' that the floor will be there, but 'belief' is not the same as 'faith'. I have a 'belief' that I am sitting at a computer writing this, but since this belief is well in evidence, I don't need to exercise any faith in it.

Does a scientist need faith to work on a cure for cancer? No. A scientist may have a reasonable expectation of success, based on (again) evidence, but this is not the same as 'faith'. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to describe this situation as ordinary 'reasoning under uncertainty', the kind we engage in every day. Or perhaps 'hope'.

Do we need to have faith in scientific theories, like evolution? Not at all. You can ask a scientist what evidence led them to that conclusion, and they can tell you. Even better, you can replicate those results yourself, given time, equipment, and expertise. Of course, I haven't actually replicated many scientific results myself. Do I therefore have faith in the scientists? No. It's true that scientists typically function in what could be called a climate of 'trust', but this is optional. People in science can review each others' results -- no faith required.

What happens in faith is something like this: You don't have evidence for something, but you wish it were true, so your faith makes up the difference and allows you to keep believing. It's not knowing something, but believing it anyway. In other words, it's wishful thinking.

Things that you have faith in may not always turn out to be wrong, but they're likely to be, since it's kind of hard to get things right. To get something right, you have to observe, generate ideas about what's happening, control the natural tendency to see what we want to see, and figure out what it would take to prove your idea wrong. Even after you've gotten it mostly right, your idea might need to be refined, or overturned entirely if the evidence demands. That's the cost of making reality your guide. But if you have faith, and you are unmoored from reality, you just keep believing whatever you want! Isn't that easy?

Well, no. Having faith is not easy, especially when contrary evidence is staring you in the face. That's when it takes a lot of tenacity to hold on to faith by sheer force of will. I can see why people would consider it a virtue, since it does take a lot of effort. I don't think it's a coincidence that people speak of 'exercising' faith.

But rather than exercise faith in things for which we lack adequate evidence, how much better it would be to find out the facts, and when facts are scarce, to keep an open mind. Faith needs to be thrown out, and where possible, to be replaced with knowledge.

'Accidental' affairs

2011-07-20T22:23:00.000+08:00

There's a story about a cowboy who told the doctor he'd never had an accident. He'd been bitten by a snake, though.

"Goodness," said the doctor. "Wouldn't you call that an accident?"

"Nope," said the cowboy. "The varmint meant to do it."

What called this story to mind is a curious article in today's Deseret News:

Facebook is a breeding ground for accidental affairs

Lawyers are using Facebook as a source for evidence in an increasing number of divorce cases, according to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. Of lawyers surveyed, 81 percent noted this increase.

"Accidental affairs" are suspected to be the growing result of these online connections, Nancy Kalish, psychology professor at California State University told Bloomberg.

Kalish has found most Facebook cheaters did not set out to have an affair, and even sustained happy marriages before they strayed. But "our brains often romanticize the past, in ways not entirely within our conscious control," according to Bloomberg. "Recollecting people, places and experiences can affect our neurochemistry."

"Accidental affairs"? The term smells of the evasion of responsibility. Spraining your ankle is an accident. Having an affair is a string of careful decisions. It's not an accident, though it might be a mistake.

I used to consort with a group of people who believed in supernatural beings, unseen agents that could influence your behaviour with their lascivious whisperings. For people who believe in such beings, the reasons we do things must be terribly mysterious! You'd never know if you really thought something, or if some succubus had implanted the idea in your brain.

And with your locus of control that far removed from yourself, it would be anyone's guess why you do the things you do. I remember a talk by a church leader where he said that he'd never give a woman a ride home in a car. He'd go home, get his wife, and then give the woman a ride (in the car, I mean) with his wife right there. Now, props for avoiding temptation, certainly. But how did he feel about thinking that -- just because of mere physical proximity -- the decision to go for the gusto with this lady was no longer entirely his? How did she feel with a man who wasn't sure he could control himself?

If someone's flirting on Facebook, wouldn't it be better to admit that they're doing it because they want to? At least then they could get an honest glimpse into their own desires and their horrible marriage, and get some idea of what to do next. Instead of claiming, oh, it was an accident, I didn't mean to. Perhaps even thinking that some external being caused the temptation. And then praying to another one to help them sort it out.

I just can't imagine going back to thinking that way. Now that I think the responsibility for my actions is my own, my reasoning about my actions is a lot more direct and controllable. No mysterious beings. No vicarious expiation, either. Just me.

I give it one star

2011-07-17T19:32:00.001+08:00

You've got to give the the LDS Church credit for working the Internet. One of their latest suggestions for members eager to share that gospel message is here (h/t Chino):

Google Reviews for LDS Chapels

This task involves submitting a review of your local meetinghouse to Google. Doing so will help make our local meetinghouses more visible in Google searches for people who are looking for a church to attend.

People can submit Google reviews for churches? Sounds like fun!

You may find a visit here to be pleasant enough. If you decide to investigate the church more in-depth, you will be presented with an escalating series of commitments. At first, it's going to 3-hour church meetings and reading the Book of Mormon. Eventually, you'll have promised to give the church 10% of your income and even more of your time. They offer no evidence for their many outlandish claims, including God living near a star named Kolob, or ancient Hebrews building boats and sailing to America. You're meant to accept all this based on feelings, which are no subsitute for evidence. Mormons are generally nice people, but you probably have better things to do.

Try writing one for your local meetinghouse. It's hard to be concise, but the real trick is to sound sensible and well-reasoned. If you start raving about underwear, then you sound like the crazy one. It's so unfair.

Manatees are fair game again

2011-07-15T14:52:00.002+08:00

I don't like to go after religious nutters. Well, I do, but I feel sort of guilty when I do, like I'm going for the easy targets. But I'm approaching this story in a different way, so stick with me.

This story is about manatees and Jesus.

A Citrus County tea party group has announced that it's fighting new restrictions on boating and other human activities in Kings Bay that have been proposed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

"We cannot elevate nature above people," explained Edna Mattos, 63, leader of the Citrus County Tea Party Patriots, in an interview. "That's against the Bible and the Bill of Rights."

Their interpretation of the Bible is such that the right of humans to enjoy riding speedboats trumps the rights of manatees to not be killed. Must be that part about having dominion over the Earth, though I think they're defining that a little broadly.

Of course, a religious person could complain that I'm tarring all believers. They could quite rightly say, "That's ridiculous. I'm religious, and I think it's important to save manatees." Good, and I'm glad you're out there.

But this is central to my point: Religious methods are not able to help co-believers to come to an agreement about even the simplest of moral decisions. This wouldn't be a problem, but for the fact that religious people view their religions as (among other things) a morals-delivery mechanism. They routinely claim that their morals come from a god, that their religious system helps people become more moral, and they wonder aloud where people who don't believe in a god get their morals from. For all that, religion seems to give co-believers widely diverging results on moral issues.

Baby names for linguists or celebrities

2011-07-13T21:42:00.000+08:00

Natalie Portman has named her firstborn child after a letter.

Natalie Portman and her fiance Benjamin Millepied welcomed a baby boy last month and have finally revealed the name of the baby to be Aleph.

Aleph, also spelled “Alef” and pronounced “All-Eff,” is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Much like how “alpha” is the first letter in the Greek alphabet. In Judaic Kabbalah, its esoteric meaning in the theological treaty Sefer-ha-Bahir, relates to the origin of the universe, the “primordial one that contains all numbers.”

Why the fuss? People name girls 'Beth' all the time, and no one says anything. And if we're talking about Roman letters, 'Bea' or 'Jay'. In fact, a letter is a great idea for a baby name.

So for the more adventurous parents, here are some characters from the world's writing systems that might make good baby names, along with their likely consequences.

	Character: Zel Writing system: Ottoman Turkish alphabet Sounds like: [z] Expect the child to be: Extroverted Future Career: Real estate agent, or MLM scammer
	Character: Fita Writing system: Early Cyrillic Language that uses it: Russian Sounds like: [f] Expect the child to be: Colicky Future Career: Yoga instructor
	Character: Kaunan Writing system: Runic alphabet Language that uses it: Norse Sounds like: [k] Expect the child to be: Needing a search and rescue team at least once Future Career: Artist, cheesemaker, or bikey
	Character: Delt Writing system: Phonecian Sounds like: [d] Expect the child to be: Albino Future Career: Personal trainer, or assassin
	Character: Yat Writing system: Glagolitic alphabet Languages that use it: Slavic Sounds like: [æ] as in 'cat' Expect the child to be: A little slow Future Career: Colour consultant, or unsuccessful real estate agent
	Character: Lo Ling Writing system: Thai Sounds like: [l] (initial), [n] (final) Expect the child to be: Mysterious Future Career: Personal assistant to evil genius, or successful call girl

If you attack the Church, you are attacking me.

2011-07-06T16:08:00.002+08:00

Many times, when I make criticisms of religion (or a religion), various practitioners take it personally and say that I'm attacking them.

My answer is: No, I'm not attacking you; I'm attacking your church. If you can't tell the difference between your church and yourself, then you have made a serious mistake. What that means is that you are identifying too closely with the organisation. You have conflated your goals, your future, and your identity with those of the group. You need to fix this. It's not healthy to confuse your own identity with other things that are not you. (It is understandable that high-commitment religions are slow to correct this tendency. It works overwhelmingly to their advantage.)

Many religious folks are able to differentiate, and I quite enjoy talking to them. Many thanks if you're one of these. I have a harder time with the internalisers. I've just had an multi-day online discussion where I started with this notion:

Churches are (among other things) safe places for weak ideas. They’re like shelters for ideas that can’t defend themselves.

I thought this was an interesting idea. I'd always considered that ideas keep religions going, but this was the opposite -- the idea that churches exist as social life-support systems for their ideas -- and it hinted at a commensal relationship. I was hoping for a bit of discussion on the topic. Oh, that it were possible.

It didn't take long before a believer insisted that I was just 'having a go' at religion and that I was implying that all religious people were 'weak-minded fools'. I don't think this, but if someone wanted evidence to the contrary, it was not to be found from his comments. He insisted (without evidence) that angels and demons were real, that science 'didn't know everything', and that his 'feelings of the Spirit' were different from ordinary feelings, and ought to be evidence enough for anyone. Moreover, he was unwilling to consider that his subjective feelings might be in error. All of this was couched in the most tormented reasoning; over the course of 200 comments, he committed the bandwagon fallacy, special pleading, and terminal logorrhea. Well, that's not a fallacy, but ad hominem attacks are; he surmised that I must be a terrible partner if I needed evidence for everything. Not to mention the argument from ignorance -- what proof did I have that God didn't exist? In short, all the devices, defense mechanisms, and poor reasoning that has kept him (and will keep him forever) anchored to his faith. And he managed all this while misreading my initial premise. If he wanted to demonstrate that religious believers were not weak-minded fools, he could have done a better job than he did.

I am not, by nature, a poker of hives. I dissect poor ideas unsparingly, but I try to go easy on actual people (previous paragraph excepted). I don't expect believers to like it. But there needs to be a way to say "I think you've got this wrong".

So if I criticise a religion, what reaction would I expect its members to have? That depends.

If I'm right, accept it, and move on with a determination to do better.
If I'm wrong, please tell me. But in the process, don't make me right.

The danger is they might think for themselves.

2011-07-03T22:33:00.001+08:00

Bonk this

2011-06-28T22:02:00.000+08:00

Chickens, meet roost. Georgia passed a stringent anti-immigration law, and now they're having trouble finding field workers.

Unless the cucumbers come off the vine soon, they will become engorged with seeds, making them unsellable. Mendez's crew of Mexican and Guatemalan workers will keep harvesting until 6 p.m., maybe longer. Not so for the men participating in a new state-run program aimed at replacing the Latino migrants Georgia farmers say they've lost to a new immigration crackdown with unemployed probationers.

Schadenfreude is one thing, but the interesting part for me is this euphemism, said by one of the probationers:

"Those guys out here weren't out there 30 minutes and they got the bucket and just threw them in the air and say, 'Bonk this, I ain't with this, I can't do this,'" said Jermond Powell, a 33-year-old probationer. "They just left, took off across the field walking."

While I'm willing to bet the guy didn't say those exact words, it is a taboo avoidance I haven't heard before. I've heard 'screw this' and 'blow this', but not 'bonk this'.

Other expressions I haven't heard:

Root this
Shag this
Intercourse this

Wait, I have heard that last one.

Census 'No Religion' billboard from the Atheist Foundation of Australia

2011-06-25T10:12:00.001+08:00

Hey, look what just arrived in my neighbourhood.

It's the new "No Religion" billboards from the Atheist Foundation of Australia.

Australia's having a census this year, complete with the religion question.

As the next Australian Census approaches (9 August 2011), the Atheist Foundation of Australia (AFA) is preparing for one of its biggest and most important projects. The AFA is campaigning to encourage individuals and families to think about the importance and impact of their answer to this leading Census question: "What is the person's religion?"

The AFA will be unveiling billboards across the nation in major cities stating "Census 2011: Not religious now? Mark 'No religion' and take religion out of politics."

They're addressing two distressing tendencies in the census.

One is that people just put 'Anglican' or whatever their religion of origin is, even if they're non-believing. This inflates the religious numbers, and may overestimate the allocation of services to churches, insofar as the government relies on the census to make these decisions.

What is the data on religion used for?

Data on religious affiliation are used for such purposes as planning educational facilities, aged care and other social services provided by religion-based organisations; the location of church buildings; the assigning of chaplains to hospitals, prisons, armed services and universities; the allocation of time on public radio and other media; and sociological research.

The other tendency is to write down some joke religion. Don't get me wrong; I love the FSM as much as anyone, but I advertise his message on t-shirts, not on serious documents. From the FAQ:

What happens if I write Jedi Knight?

It gets counted as 'Not Defined' and is not placed in the 'No religion' category. This takes away from the 'No religion' numbers and therefore advantages the religion count. It was funny to write Jedi once, now it is a serious mistake to do so.

This year I'm writing 'Atheist', which is a legitimate category, and can be taken together with the 'No Religion' and 'Agnostic' groups.

I'd love to see the number of 'Nones' in Australia grow as large as possible this year. If you're not currently religious, consider the 'No Religion' box. It's more honest and accurate.

Harold and Maude: A personal barometer

2011-06-18T23:30:00.005+08:00

I'm in love with Maude again.

Do people still know about 'Harold and Maude'? I hope so. It's a movie that I come back to every once in a while. Let me give you the rundown.

Harold is a dour and lugubrious young man. If he were around today, he'd be a goth or some kind of proto-emo, but in his time his gloom didn't have the benefit of a social group. He's obsessed with death. He performs elaborate mock suicides to alarm his domineering mother, and he attends funerals for fun.

At one such funeral he meets Maude, a sprightly and unconventional near-octogenarian, and the two form an unlikely friendship. She loves funerals, too, not because she treasures death, but because death is a part of life, which she also treasures. Yet she doesn't cling to life -- or indeed anything. When Harold gives her a keepsake, she throws it into the river ("So I'll always know where it is," she says). She blithely (and somehow innocently) steals cars if she needs a lift, and digs up a public tree to replant in the forest. She 'replants' Harold, too, helping him to grow outside of his sterile and affluent home. She's a nurturer, a revolutionary, an artist at living.

I've found that Maude is a barometer for where I am in my life. At times, I've thought she's great -- a free spirit who has some wonderful insights about how to live. At other times, her character has grated on me -- she's a silly person who ought to know better. And I've noticed that the times when I've been least able to tolerate Maude are the times when I've been the most uptight, the most 'churchy'. It's all very well, I've thought, for her to talk about life and death and the cosmic dance, but she doesn't have a knowledge of the Gospel! Or: She has insights about life, but seems so unserious about living. Or: That's the kind of thing people get over after their teens. Or even: New age hippy fruit basket. And other such unkind things, depending on how eager I was to conform to adult conventions, which Maude of course isn't.

Now I think she's great again. She's successfully carved out a meaning to her life, which is, after all, the big business of one's life. And while her way of being seems unusual and contradictory, it's a way that wouldn't occur to most people, and I respect that. So I guess that means I'm less uptight, and more of a free spirit myself. Having deconverted from a religion (and thereby defying a major convention in my former society), I can now see the value in colouring outside the lines, as Maude does. As the soundtrack says, there's a million ways to be. You know that there are.

The Modeerf Question

2011-06-08T21:34:00.000+08:00

I'm on the docket for a 'comedy debate' tomorrow. It's about the fictional 'Modeerf' religion, and I'm the secular atheist of the group. Here's the promo:

Where do we draw the line between religious freedom and the law of the land?

Between respecting diversity and double standards?

Between maintaining your culture and becoming Australian?

Come and meet migrants from the little known Modeerf religion.

They know that their practices of men going shirtless, having the holy month off work, annual cannabis burning and feeding children fermented mead are pretty unusual in an Australian context but they want similar legal exemptions and discrimination protection to other Aussie religions.

Here are my thoughts:

I'm against the Modeerf religion, just like I'm against every religion. Religions spread superstition, and we have enough of that already. I do not want to see them getting the okay to break the law for religious reasons. I don't want to pay their taxes for them. I don't want them meddling in civil rights issues like gay marriage. If they want to do their religious thing, they can. But the government has no business promoting them. Ideally, the government would be neutral towards religion.

But -- and this is a big 'but' -- we don't have that kind of government. We live in a country where the government is helping to establish and promote religion, contrary to Section 116 of the Australian Constitution.

Thanks to John Howard and now Julia Gillard, the Australian government gives a lot of money to give Christian chaplains exclusive access to evangelise high school students.
The government allows religions to break laws pertaining to anti-discrimination -- they get to deny social services and employment to gay and transgendered people.
And of course, the government allows religions not to pay taxes, which forces us to carry their tax burden.

If we can't have government neutrality toward religion, then I have a terrible, but still second-best solution: Treat all religions the same. As an atheist, I don't see that any religion as intrinsically better or worse, more sensible or crazier than any other, so every religion should get the same advantage as every other. How about Modeerf chaplains in schools? Come to think of it, how about Muslim chaplains in schools? (Can you imagine the freak-outs on talk radio?) Should the Modeerf be allowed to fire left-handed people in their charity work, if it's against their religion?

I think this second-best solution would still be terrible. You'd have more discrimination, and less reason. But it would at least have the advantage of being fair. (And if some religions are unwilling to accord others the privileges that they receive, it shows their paper-thin commitment to equality.) The Modeerf example doesn't show why it's important that every religion get the same perks. It shows why no religion should.

In doing research for this event, I ran across this statement on a web page from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade:

People are free to practise any religion as long as they obey the law.

Isn't that a great ideal? I hope one day we get there.

Scary logos, explained

2011-06-06T10:28:00.001+08:00

Have corporate logos ever raised tremors for you? You'll know what I mean if your sedate suburban childhood was marred by them. There we were, innocently watching afternoon television, and then at the end of a show, there would be a seven-second bumper clip showing the name of the production company. They were often done on a Scanimate, which was kind of a precursor to modern CG animation.

And these clips freaked a lot of kids out. Here's the most infamous -- the Screen Gems logo, also known as 'The S from Hell'.

The Viacom 'V of Doom' clip has stained its share of sheets (even getting sent up in Family Guy).

Look out -- here it comes!

And the Paramount clip. This one was known as the 'Closet Killer' version because of the music.

Seriously, what sort of maniac would unleash this evil so indiscriminately upon an uncomprehending television audience?

Inevitably, in online discussions about scary logos, someone will say "I don't get it! Why do people find these scary? I don't find these even mildly creepy!" Well, no, you don't, you thirty-plus well-adjusted adult. But perhaps if you were instead a person of a certain age and a certain disposition, things would be different. So, as a formerly timorous child, I am going to try and explain why scary logos can be scary.

I should point out that my childhood was for the most part happy and secure, and I was not overly neurotic. But there were some parts of my house, especially one part of the downstairs hallway which, in the dark of night, would require a little steeling of the will before hurriedly passing by.

My house had a garage, with a back door that opened to the outside. To get in, I would have to open the door, reach into the musty blackness, and turn on the light. I could never reach for the light switch without imagining someone with a large axe chopping my hand off. For some irrational reason, I associated this image with the song "Judy in Disguise With Glasses", which my sister used to listen to. It's a great song, but it has a sickly sitar ending that seemed, to a child about to go into a dark garage, to be highly suggestive of the stump of a wrist, dripping blood.

These memories are among the most vivid of my childhood, even as I'm aware they make no sense to others -- people who have never felt nightfear, or who had actual scary things to cope with in their childhood without making up silly things to frighten themselves with.

Childhood is a frightening and vulnerable time. The line between the real and the imaginary, the threatening and the comforting, is not fixed. Big people are kind and solicitous mostly, but they can shout or act unpredictably, and they are very big and complicated. Knowledge is power, and a child, having naturally less knowledge, is powerless even in a home where they are provided and cared for. And as memory and cognition develops, we experience an emerging consciousness. Maybe in the process of turning the cascade of input we get into the knowledge we're going to have, some information gets processed the wrong way, like swallowing some water the wrong way, and it turns into a coil of tentacle instead of a flower in a garden. A shirt draped over a chair in a dark room takes on the appearance of lurking. You are awakened by dreams that turn on you.

And sometimes in bed, in the dark of night, the desire to get up for a drink would be subdued by the possibility that something would grab an ankle, if an ankle were to venture out. Or not even that specific -- that under the blankets, one was safe, but that by projecting an arm out from under the covers, one was venturing into some unknown, and it would be best to stay covered. And in this suggestible state, the soundtrack in one's mind is all the tumult of noise from the day before, including -- possibly -- a thunderous seven-second fanfare from earlier in the afternoon.

For me, this is the one that kept me pinned in bed.

If you've forgotten the vulnerability of childhood, you may not understand how these attention-catching production clips can miss, and catch the breath instead. But if you're someone who still closes the closet doors tightly at night to make sure the things inside stay inside, then you will understand, and perhaps even nurture, this liminal territory of childish anxiety.

Victoria: Fine for swearing

2011-06-01T22:43:00.002+08:00

What's with the state of Victoria? They're modifying their decades-old anti-profanity law so you can be fined on the spot.

The Victorian Government plans to introduce laws this week that will give police permanent power to issue on-the-spot fines to people who swear.

If I were fined for public swearing, I'd be fined twice, because the next thing I'd say is "Are you fucking kidding me?"

Under the proposed legislation, people could be fined close to $240 for language that is considered indecent or offensive.

Considered offensive by who? The local constable? The organist at church? Are 'damn' and 'hell' swearing? Is 'bullshit' on the shit list? What about racial terms of abuse that are offensive, but not actually profane? This opens up some tricky issues of definition, and more worryingly, controlling the language behaviour of the public.

And how are they going to enforce it? Oh, right. Ad hoc.

The Attorney-General, Robert Clark, confessed to a bit of colourful language himself yesterday. "Occasionally I mutter things under my breath, as probably everyone does," he told ABC radio. "But this law is not targeted at that. It's targeted at the sort of obnoxious, offensive behaviour in public that makes life unpleasant for everybody else."

Well, swearing in public can be unpleasant, to be sure, but so can a lot of public activities, like farting or shirtlessness. Will they be illegal, too?

I don't know, Victoria. Fining people for swearing is so Puritan. They used to bore a red-hot poker through your tongue for blasphemy, including profanity.

I'd say there's an opportunity for some civil disobedience here. Could they fine everyone in a mass swear-in? What if we form a huge choir and sing Tim Minchin's Pope Song? Or, if we don't want to spend the money, we could taunt police by saying 'Bloody crap! It's hot today!' The possibilities are many.

I didn't draw Mohammed -- this time.

2011-05-22T20:50:00.000+08:00

May 20th was 'Everybody Draw Mohammed Day', part 2. It went nearly unnoticed, what with all the excitement over God's latest mistake.

I didn't draw Mohammed this year. For one thing, I did it last year, and I didn't think I could improve on it. But the main reason is that the conditions are a little different this year.

I don't have a problem with blasphemy, mockery, or confrontation. I think these tools can be valid and justifiable responses in cases where believers are making threats of violence or unreasonable demands for complicity or respect. But I do make decisions as to when I'm going to use such tools.

Last year, Muslims were making unreasonable demands that non-Muslims obey the rules of their religion, and some individuals were making specific threats of violence against Molly Norris (originator of 'Everybody Draw Mohammed Day') and against the creators of South Park. Under these circumstances, I decided that it was appropriate to join a concerted effort in direct confrontation to these demands.

This year, though, the issue hasn't been on my radar. If there have been any credible threats made, I haven't heard of them. Good. That's how I like it.

Maybe not much has changed since last year. Many Muslims are still hypersensitive to criticism -- witness their attempts to influence the UN to outlaw criticism of Islam -- and this needs to be addressed until they learn that their religious views are no more entitled to respect than anyone else's. However, I'm content to let the cartoon issue rest until such time as believers -- Muslim or otherwise -- try to use coercion or threats to curtail freedom of expression. When they do, it will once again be time to protest with pen or keyboard.

Better hurry and watch this.

2011-05-21T15:51:00.002+08:00

Here's a presentation I made last week for the UWA Atheist and Skeptic Society. It's called "End of the World... Again" and it's about the Family Radio 21 May Non-Rapture. If you're one of the saved, you'll need to hurry and watch it before you go up, but I guess you won't really need it. If you're one of the doomed souls, then you get about five months.

Unfortunately, the video didn't come through on the feed. All you get is the sound.

The End of the World... Again (Audio) from UWA Atheist & Skeptic Society on Vimeo.

So play the audio, and while that's going, sort through this PDF for the slides. It's a bit more work, but what did you expect during the Tribulation?

By the way, what are we going to call this failed prophecy? How about 'Apocalypse Not'?

UPDATE: I muffed that scripture. It didn't say 'Two women will be in a bed.' It said 'Two women shall be grinding together'. Which I suppose you could take how you wanted.

Faith Fair at UWA!

2011-05-19T09:35:00.001+08:00

Yesterday, UWA held a Faith Fair. You could argue that any fair where you don't know who assembled the Ferris wheel is a faith fair, but this was a real Faith Fair, and the UWA Atheist and Skeptic Society was invited. What's a university doing promoting faith, anyway? We're supposed to be helping people learn to think better, not worse. But we wanted to provide a balance, and I think it's cool that we were invited, even though we're not a religion and have no faith.

Our contribution was 'Ask an Atheist", which consisted of a bunch of us sitting at a table, waiting for questions. In the first few hours, one guy asked us about the Illuminati, and another couple asked us directions to some other building on campus. Pleasingly, another student signed up with us. That was about it.

Pretty soon, the UWA Christian Union set up their own table next to us, and together we all sat, not being asked questions, and being completely ignored by the studentry.

Here's a picture of all of us.

Notice the extremely large zone of no people around us.

In short, the Faith Fair was a total bust, and I couldn't be happier. Students at UWA don't give a fart for faith, and that's the way I like it.

There was one interesting bit though, where we asked Scott, the president of Christian Union, about what happens to people who died before Jesus. I know different religions answer this in different ways -- and the Mormons have an innovative, if resource-intensive, solution -- but I wanted to hear his response.

I think Scott answered this in a thoughtful and careful way. He named a few different ideas people have had over the years -- like, the Atonement applies to them retroactively, or if they were 'good' they get a pass, and so on -- but in the end, he said plainly and honestly that they didn't know.

"How would you find out, if you wanted to?" I asked.

The only way he could come up with was by... interpreting scripture! Of course, that approach has worked wonders over the years at providing clear, unambiguous, and well-agreed upon answers to great religious questions.

The whole conversation made me feel quite impatient and irked with religion. There's a question there, and everyone agrees it's a good question that really should have an answer. But there's no agreed-upon answer, and even worse, there's no agreed-upon way of getting an answer.

Wouldn't that drive you mad? What if we had to work that way in the sciences? Sure there's a lot we don't know, but we have an established way of getting the kind of answers that people can agree on. If we had a lot of scientists from different countries and different backgrounds, and we had some scientific question that we wanted to find out about, we may not have an answer right away, but we could at least come up with a research program to work towards an answer.

With religion, you can't even start. All the answers come from a god who never speaks directly, but has (allegedly) left a lot of mutually incompatible, multiply contradicting (and self-contradicting) holy books whose contents need to be massaged into a comprehensible answer. Even then, the various practitioners won't agree. You start hitting insurmountable limits just about as soon as you start asking questions.

The religious metaphysical approach is a recipe for stuckness.

Access Ministries: "We need to go and make disciples"

2011-05-14T09:27:00.001+08:00

The state of Victoria allows Christian group Access Ministries to have unfettered access (hence the name) to high schoolers. This allows them to evangelise what is essentially a captive audience.

And how does Access Ministries feel about this? They can't believe their luck! Listen to the CEO crow about it:

''In Australia, we have a God-given open door to children and young people with the Gospel, our federal and state governments allow us to take the Christian faith into our schools and share it. We need to go and make disciples,'' she told the Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion national conference in Melbourne. ''What really matters is seizing the God-given opportunity we have to reach kids in schools.''

Now can we agree that this is an evangelical conversion campaign that has no place in secular schools?

Maybe I shouldn't get too worked up about it though. Danny Katz sees a silver lining to religious education.

Thank God Almighty! This is really good news: I heard the Victorian Education Department has started forcing public primary schools to host non-compulsory Christian education classes during school hours and all I can say is HALLELUJAH, PRAISE THE LORD. Because, as we all know, religious education is the ONLY way to turn our young children into decent, moral, compassionate, lifelong despisers of anything to do with religion.

Seems perfectly obvious to me: if you want to create an instant atheist, just add holy water. Everyone I know who is a committed non-believer had been saturated with religious education at an early age, either through school or Sunday school or youth groups - I'm telling you, it works.

UPDATE: There's a Facebook group: Get Access Ministries out of our schools. Like it.

Hardly getting over it

2011-05-08T19:54:00.001+08:00

I saw an LDS friend from long ago, and had an enjoyable catching-up session, talking about work and kids.

"What else are you doing?" she asked.

"Well, still blogging," I said.

"Oh, what do you blog about?"

"Actually," I said, "being an ex-Mormon! Among other things."

She wasn't put off at all -- she asked a few questions about it, and then said, "So, that's something you're still interested in?"

My answer is still an enthusiastic yes! I don't know why. Some people never want to talk about their deconversion at all. And other people initially do, but then they find that they run dry, they've said it all, and they 'get over it'. They 'move on'. I think there's even some kind of expectation that ex-Mormons (maybe even ex-whatevers) will eventually 'get over it'. If you don't, then you're stuck in some phase of your development. There you will stay, not progressing, until you no longer feel the need to discuss 'it' anymore.

Not me. It's been over five years, and I'm still here, but I don't see my development as arrested. It's become another one of my interests. I still find Mormonism and issues relating to faith and un-faith fascinating. What is it that makes people believe things just because of 'faith'? How could I have devoted years of my life to something that had no evidentiary basis? Why do we, as humans, have cognitive blind spots that keep us from examining our beliefs critically? Can we be certain that gods don't exist? This is a fascinating area that involves psychology, philosophy, and the sciences. How could I not be interested? There's enough here to play around with forever.

There's another aspect. As a skeptical rationalist and as an educator, I'm against superstition and ignorance, and I intend to challenge it wherever it may appear. That includes religions. They're still out there indoctrinating children, filling people up with sexual guilt, worming falsehoods into the educational system, and taking a hefty chunk of people's money for the pleasure. In some cases, their members advocate violence and try to control the choices of people who don't believe. As long as religions are operating, I want to be hoisting the banner of reason, as quixotic as that sounds.

I think I owe it to myself not to forget what I learned in my experience with religion. That means not putting it in a box and leaving it there. At this stage, I'm very pleased to not be 'getting over it', and I hope I never do.

Talk the Talk: Now on iTunes!

2011-05-07T10:54:00.019+08:00

This is exciting: my podcast "Talk the Talk" is now on iTunes! Yes, you can now hear a fresh dose of linguistics news every week, in convenient podcast form.

Head over to the link by clicking on the nifty graphic below. Subscribing is free, of course.

While I'm thinking about iTunes -- I'm still trying to figure out the profanity guidelines for their titles. I noticed that 'shit' turns into 'sh*t', which is fine. But 'WTF' comes out 'W*F'. They starred the T? Shouldn't they have starred the F?

WT*?

The Mormon 'Plan of Happiness'

2011-05-06T10:16:00.002+08:00

Hey, who remembers this from church? I think I got all the details right.

Really puts things in perspective, doesn't it?

Of course, it might make more sense if you've seen the real chart, or had a missionary draw it for you.

UPDATE: I wrote this as a comment on r/exmormon, and decided to paste it here:

If I had to name the most odious and evil LDS doctrine, I wouldn't hesitate to say 'eternal families'.

That may seem like a strange answer, but that's the thing that allows all the emotional hijacking, even more than heaven and hell. If you don't keep in line, your family will be broken up and you'll be in isolation for eternity.

It uses the natural feelings of love we have for our family, and subverts them for its own ends.

Unintentional MLK quote mangling on Facebook

2011-05-04T15:03:00.001+08:00

"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."

Mark Twain was supposed to have said that. But I can't be sure -- Mark Twain has been credited with all kinds of sayings that he may not have said. (Note the lazy "attributed" appendage to that last link.) But it's true that with the increased speed of communication on the Internet, a mistake can spread worldwide and not get picked up.

A case of misattribution might have popped up on your Facebook wall, in light of a recent assassination.

Jessica Dovey did not intend to become the epicenter of an Internet-wide discussion about the nature of quotation, attribution, and Osama bin Laden. Yet that's exactly what happened when Dovey's Facebook-status sentiment -- "I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy" -- became entangled with a Martin Luther King, Jr. quote she also posted. Within a day and through no fault of her own, Dovey's words had gone viral, misattributed to King.

Since I'm the language guy, I got a call from RTRfm 92.1 to comment. Here's the playback.

If you're serious about avoiding the misattribution trap, don't believe a quote unless it's accompanied by a source, and then follow the source. It's the only way to be sure.

Yataghan: I feel so dirty

2011-04-28T14:51:00.000+08:00

My Yataghan font has been ripping it up lately. Most recently, it's appeared on the cover of "The Sword" by Daniel Easterman.

And it's a featured download on PC World's website. Kate Godfrey gives it a very kind review.

Midgley began his creation with a sketch of a lowercase ‘s', followed by an ‘n' that dipped below the baseline. Many reiterations later, the designer found himself with an impressive cast of characters including an owlish ‘o' and a dagger of a ‘t'. To complete the look, he topped the font's ascenders with a bone shape. Touché!
...
The ampersand is worth the download if only to experience the smart transition of centuries old weapon design into a believable text construction.

And to top it off, Yataghan makes a scarcely recognisable appearance on the website of Babylon Rising, which appears to be... a set of religious lectures?

This May, a four-night event called Babylon Rising will take a new look at the age-old controversy between Christ and Satan. From May 25-28, It Is Written’s new speaker/director, Pastor John Bradshaw, will host a timely, interactive series live from the Cashman Center in Las Vegas.

Oh, well. When I released the font, I knew there was a chance someone would use it for evil instead of for good. It's the risk an artist takes.

Download Yataghan (and other fonts) from the Page of Fontery.

Annoyed, not offended.

2011-04-26T20:14:00.001+08:00

The fourteenth Mormon Article of Faith is, as we all know: Ex-Mormons Are Offended. It's never anything as complicated as a protracted moral struggle in which one tries to reconcile slippery doctrine with tangible reality and realises it can't be done. Nope. Someone offends us, and we're out the door.

But really, how can we help being offended when people define the term so broadly? Just recently, Boyd 'Li'l Factory' Packer gave this advice:

Around us we see members of the Church who have become offended. Some take offense at incidents in the history of the Church or its leaders and suffer their whole lives, unable to get past the mistakes of others. They do not leave it alone. They fall into inactivity.

See? It's not that you can't believe all the bizarro stuff in church history. It's that you're 'offended' by it. You're supposed to let it go. Aaand pay tithing.

Wait -- am I being offended by sloppy definitions? No. Just annoyed. But there are other things to get annoyed at.

An interesting story out of New Zealand. It seems the owner of a grocery store didn't program the automatic door to stay closed for Good Friday. At 8:00, as usual, the doors opened with no staff inside. It took shoppers a while to realise the place was unmanned. What would they do?

About half paid for their groceries using the self-scan service, but that stopped working when someone scanned alcohol, which requires a staff member to check a customer's age before the system is unlocked.

So a lot of people paid, even when no one was watching. We're fair-minded beings. Some people didn't. We're self-seeking beings, too.

But one religious studies professor jumps to the conclusion that you need a god to be moral. How so? Because obviously all the true Christians were in church of Good Friday! Therefore all the cheaters were grubby secularists.

"The Christian Right have tended to think [that] without the Ten Commandments and God's divining hand we would never have been able to develop a plausible and sustainable morality.

"This [Pak 'n Save incident] is like some mad experiment, because you've sent off to church the religious and it's the secular who have gone shopping on Good Friday ... and you've put them to the test.

Given the proportion of Christians in prisons (though c.f.), I'll wager there were a few in that store.

Also annoying is this column in which Ross Douthat mounts a defense of hell, which for some inexplicable reason appears in the opinion pages of the New York Fucking Times.

Doing away with hell, then, is a natural way for pastors and theologians to make their God seem more humane. The problem is that this move also threatens to make human life less fully human.

Atheists have license to scoff at damnation, but to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score.

I don't know why he'd imagine that eternal torture for some is what it takes to make life meaningful. I have noticed, though, that people who defend the doctrine of hell never think that they're going there. Or maybe they know that fear does wonders in keeping believers in line. To hell with that.