New Hope First Babtist Church interrupts your regular programming to bring you some breaking news - Satan is dead.The killer was indeed identified as Mr. Jesus Christ...of...heaven...
This is a sad day for hell and a happy day for the saints and residents of Greenville Mississippi.There may be too many soundbites to list...just watch...
Ouch, not exactly subtle, guys, but good for a giggle...
I do like "talking to the ceiling"
Well, I don't share my viewpoint on this topic with many people. Basically, my friend Kevin, and my Dad are the only other atheists to both God and Global Warming. It's not an easy viewpoint to have these days, especially living in Brooklyn, NY - a place where people danced in the streets on election night as if world peace was announced. Bill Maher in his silly, smug way proclaimed the other day that our "planet is melting." PZ Myers in his blowhard, asinine blog voice insulted a teenage girl who tried to determine the reality of global warming based on her own research into the literature. Of course she would have been applauded had she concluded it was anthropogenic.
It is an obvious and irritating irony to hear atheists painting doomsday scenarios if we don't change our ways. I'm always amused to hear left-leaning people so outraged at the Bush administration's use of 9/11 to propel their agenda. Meanwhile, we're repeatedly told by democrat policy makers that the planet will be ruined by the time our children are adults, and that the majority of natural disasters are our fault. The hypocrisy of calling fear tactics on one side, while blatantly using them on your own is astounding.
Watch below as Iam Pilmer manages to irritate everyone in the room as he describes how environmentalism is the new religion (thanks, Kevin). He makes some really beautifully illustrated points. Parts actually seem lifted from the late Michael Crichton's lecture on the topic.
"Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.RIP M. Crichton, it takes tremendous courage to fight the majority opinion when it's wrong. He took a lot of flak for his unique perspective, and I believe history will prove him right. It makes him a real hero of mine.
"And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them."
There are times when I see documentaries like HBO's, Hard as Nails that I think how fortunate I was to grow up in a household with no religion. I was, and am free to form my own opinions, to explore the nature of my environment as I choose. Sure, I had my fair share of political indoctrinations, but never religious ones.
Choice and will are amazingly powerful ideas, phenomenon that seem unique to human beings - though it seems the people that utilize their freedom of choice and will are the most susceptible to more extreme forms of madness and sadness.
It's then that I feel unfortunate (or maybe just scared) to be an atheist. That as Dan Gilbert attests (see TED lecture below), too many choices can cause misery. One is constantly weighing the what-if scenarios until whatever choice is made can never be perceived as the right one. More on that later...
Given my frustration and anger over the practice of religious indoctrination, like the atheist biologist, PZ Myers, and his vitriolic minions, I figured I'd find comfort in reading his blog. He practically lead the fight to smear Ben Stein's awful "documentary," Expelled, which peddles the virtues and breakthroughs of intelligent design, and defends itself against the evil tyranny of evolution proponents.
But sadly, after reading PZ's blog a while, and even commenting on a few posts, followed by being summarily ravaged by his readers for my views (and I'm an atheist), I found that instead of finding allies in this group, I found an angry mob that I couldn't relate to at all. Many of the people that find the time to comment on his blog appear to have become what they speak out against - dogmatic, pack-like, group thinkers. Their ideas are grossly simple and obnoxious - religious people are stupid, and atheists are enlightened. On top of that I find PZ to be a goading, narcissist, blowhard.
He actually commands his regular readers to vote on internet polls to skew the answers to silly religious questions. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea, and it appeals to the anarchist atheist in me, but it's the blind faith of his atheist congregation who adhere to his commandments like zombies that I find disconcerting. Of course, I'm not saying he's responsible for the comments of his readers, but he certainly seems to enjoy whipping his fanbase into a frenzy. It's reminiscent of the space monkeys in Fight Club. Though it might be part of a good cause on the surface, it breeds the same kind of indoctrination religion does.
On the flip side, the good fortune of indoctrination through religion is a confidence in life, a track. A feeling that there is a guide and/or reason, which removes the fear to take steps forward - one needn't worry, it's Meant To Be. Many of the theists I know are confident, intelligent people - their religious views relatively quiet. I only know the specifics of their beliefs because I tend to press the issue. And as I listen to their responses, I find myself envying their life as they seem to enjoy the quiet comfort that everything is in its right place. As opposed to more militant atheists (and I used to be one), I see no point in attacking people for their religious beliefs. Nine times out of ten, it just tends to polarize the issue.
We're born to believe. We're bred not just to listen to our parents, but to follow their rules with the fear of death. "If you cross that street without mommy, you'll get hit by that car." You better damn well listen. We are born with our temperaments, but otherwise, we're a sponge for the habits of our parents and culture. This ability ensures our survival - for most species, to question is to die.
But as we're learning, our biology doesn't correspond to our environment anymore. Many humans don't live in constant survival mode as opposed to the rest of the animals (excluding the ones we've domesticated). Civilization allows us to be freer to pursue other endeavors. Despite having all this extra time, the ability or inclination to question our personal indoctrinations is still fairly rare. Yes, it's still beneficial for a child to be obedient, but the side effect is that every child receives the superfluous religious and political beliefs of their parents, which carves patterns into their pliable but ultimately stubborn brains. It's pretty difficult to unlearn the wrong lessons of our parents while maintaining the good ones. Indoctrination is a double edge sword.
A great conversation between neuroscientist/psychologist, Michael Gazzaniga and writer, Tom Wolfe discussing some of my favorite neuro topics (see the video here).
From Tom Wolfe:
Many of today's leading theorists, such as E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Dan Dennett, probably know about as much on the human brain as a second-year graduate student in neuropsychology. That isn't their field. Wilson is a great zoologist and a brilliant writer. Dawkins, I'm afraid, is now just a PR man for evolution. He's kind of like John the Baptist — he goes around announcing the imminent arrival. Dennett, of course, is a philosopher and doesn't pretend to know anything about the brain. I think it has distorted the whole discussion.This always astounds me - these guys on the front lines attacking religion avoid the best argument against God's existence - that it's generally impossible to see through the illusions created by the brain (which is why there are so few atheists). It's actually a simple explanation for the phenomenon of God - all of our consciousness is a brain-created illusion afterall. This is particularly ironic given Dennett's book "Consciousness Explained." (If you were wondering, I read it in college, and it wasn't explained, but keep fighting the good fight Danny!.) In my experience, philosopher's explanations of brain and consciousness rarely yield anything of substance.
I love the idea that only humans shrug, but are you telling me an ape has never shrugged before?MG: Okay, so what do you think language and speech are for? I mean, it's probably an adaptation. We're big animals, and that's one of the goodies that we got.
TW: I think speech is entirely different from other survival benefits. Only with speech can you ask the question, "Why?"
MG: Right.
TW: Animals cannot ask why. In one way or another, they can ask what, where, and when. But they cannot ask why. I've never seen an animal shrug. When you shrug, you're trying to say, "I don't know why." And they also can't ask how.
MG: Yeah.
TW: With language you can ask that question. I think it's at that point where religion starts.
MG: Right.
TW: Humans got language and they were suddenly able to say, "Hey, why is all this here? Who put it here?" And my assumption is that they said, "There must be somebody like us but much bigger, much more powerful, that could make all these trees, the streams. God must be really something, and you'd better not get on the wrong side of him." I think that's the way it started.
As you may know, I came across this phenomenon that I call the Interpreter. It's something that's in the left hemisphere of the human; it tries to put a story together as to why something occurred. So, we found this in patients who've had their brains divided. What we could do is sort of tiptoe into their nonspeaking right hemisphere and get them to do something like walk out of the room or lift their hand up. Then we would ask the left hemisphere, "Why did you do that?" And they would cook up a story to make sense out of what their disconnected right hemisphere just did. The left brain didn't know that we'd pulled a trick on them, so they concoct an explanation for why they walked out of the room. And it's because this left hemisphere can ask, "Why? What's that all about?" But one of the things we've never been able to unpack is whether this Interpreter is completely overlapping with the language system and is therefore a sort of press agent for its own mechanism. What we do know is that there are separate systems for different types of cognition. And the Interpreter seems to be located in the parts of the brain where language is located. So many people do think that interpretive capacity comes with language; that this is the deal with language — it comes along for the ride. Others believe that there are actually all kinds of different cognitive mechanisms happening, and language reports them out. So the function of language is to talk about it, talk about what you know and communicate, "Hey! Look here, I know how to cook a fish. Here, let me show you how.The idea of the "interpreter" is dramatically explained in Jill Bolte Taylor's amazing Ted talk. The other amazing quality of the interpreter is its propensity to confabulate. We're story telling machines, and when we don't know the answer to something, we fill in the blanks like it's a mad lib puzzle. This is another reason there are fables, myths and religion - they are our attempt at explaining things we don't quite understand.
I'm involved in a new project called "Neuroscience and the Law," which I think you're familiar with. It brings up the idea that there are these causal forces that make us do the things we do, that by the time you're consciously aware of something, your brain's already done it. How else could it be? Because the brain is what's producing these mental events that we're sorting through. So these ideas — what I call the ooze of neuroscience — are going out everywhere, and people are willing to accept that: "My brain did it. Officer, it wasn't me." These defenses are popping up all over the judicial system. But if we adopt that, then it's hard to see why we have a retributive response to a wrongdoing. It would seem to me to be morally wrong to blame someone for something that was going to happen anyway because of forces beyond their control. So people get into this loop, and they get very concerned about the nature of our retributive response. This puts you right smack in the middle of the question: Are we free to do what we think we're doing?I wrote a bit about this in the context of a short story by Kurt Vonnegut called Unready to Wear about the ability to leave your body, but maintain consciousness. Regretfully, I got into a fight at a baseball game once (my first and last I think), and it was one I could have diffused. I remember very distinctly time slowing down and having a moment to make a decision. My body was in its survival mode, so the adrenalin coating my cells was making its argument pretty convincingly. Still, I made that decision to fight, and I suffered a gouged eye by the end (no permanent damage, thank you). In the language of the Wolfe/Gazzaniga conversation, I suppose this was my interpreter, walled in by a mess of other cognitive and subcortical streams trying to make a decision. Makes me wonder if there's a right-brained, pre-linguistic interpreter? Or is the very idea of "interpreting" more of a serial left-brain phenomenon?
Lilterally. It makes them grow up strong and healthy...or if they miss, a paraplegic. Seems worth it...
No need to rip on this shockingly indoctrinated kid speaking out against the "fallacy" of evolution and science to his congregation - the madness sort of speaks for itself.
Disturbing as he is to watch, the kid's is sort of amazing. Every time I see a child as precocious and intelligent as this, it saddens me to know he's not using his potential for something more vital or useful - like becoming a contestant on Viva Hollywood.
(via Pharyngula)
A pretty transparent picture of creationist indoctrination. This bible study field trip to a science museum has the "teachers" exposing why evolution is "somebody's fantasy."
These kids are taught pretty well how to defend their lunacy, here's a good argument:
"With the amount of damage happening to the earth these days, all the crazy things? it would have fallen apart by now, like billions of billions of years." Which is why it's obviously only been around for 6000 years. Convinced?
This poor brainwashed little girl just made me feel badly, she so effectively embodies what they teach - that any scientific explanation is like a cute, silly fairytale (about 7:00 into the video, watch how she says the following quote):
"God created the earth, and it didn't, like, evolve from a big asteroid in a bagillion years (like an asteroid is some absurd figment of our imagination) ."
Is the only way to fight this kind of indoctrination with indoctrination? Instead of explaining evolution like a science, maybe it just has to be taught like a religion. No matter how it's taught, the creationists will paint it that way. At best, their argument is "they have their story, we have ours." For the record, I don't believe you should fight misinformation with misinformation - as far as I'm concerned any indoctrination, even with a good cause, is a bad thing.
