One of the fun things about being a freethinking Atheist/Skeptic and living in these times is the amount of information available at our fingertips when we’re at home and on our hip or in our purse whenever we’re out and about. When curiosity strikes our ever present Internet is available to answer the queries. Of course, we can’t believe EVERYTHING on the intertubes but if we’re careful we can get a satisfactory, fairly factual answer in seconds. Today as I was putting out the American flag in my yard, I began to wonder about Flag Day and the Pledge of Allegiance.

I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Francis Bellamy wrote the pledge for The Youth’s Companion. It was published September 8^th, 1892. He was a Baptist minister and a Christian Socialist. It was written to be a quick and easy way for young children to express their love of their country and the principles on which it was founded. As a Socialist he wanted to include the words, “equality and fraternity,” but he felt that the superintendents were against equality for women and African Americans and wouldn’t accept that inclusion. He opted for readily accepted concepts that everyone could agree on. The first public school recitation was conducted on Oct 12^th 1892 after a presidential proclamation by President Benjamin Harrison, to recognize the 400^th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in America.

The United States Congress officially recognized the pledge for the first time on June 22^nd, 1942 but by that time it had become:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

The change was minor. “my Flag” was replaced with “the flag of the United States of America.” There was little to argue about in the language of the pledge although Francis Bellamy objected to the change because it interrupted original flow and meter. However, there were objections to the Pledge on religious grounds by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. 1940 the Supreme Court ruled that in the interest of national unity the children of the Jehovah’s Witnesses could be compelled to repeat the Pledge with their classmate in spite of their objection that they were precluded by their religion from pledging loyalty to any power lesser than God. Three years later, the Supreme Court reversed that decision and told the schools that they were no longer allowed to require the recitation of the Pledge. Bear in mind that this objection was raised by a religious group prior to the inclusion of “under God.”

So why do we have Flag Day on June 14^th? There are many reasons dating back to the American Civil War. Apparently, the “Stars and Stripes” were first recognized as the flag on June 14^th, 1777 and most of the proposals advocating a “Flag Day” used that date. It was officially recognized under President Truman in 1949. On June 14^th, 1954 the United States Congress made a change to the U.S. Code and turned a generally accepted expression of national unity into a public prayer by adding the words, “under God.” Objections began immediately and continue to this day. The main supporting argument for keeping the offending words within the “official” Pledge is that no one can be compelled to say the Pledge since the ruling of the Supreme Court (West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette) in 1943.

Here it is as we say it today:

“I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Feel free to say it or not because that still is your right and you can leave out the “under God” part, if that suits you.

It is a design language of shape that balances energy fields. Energy is the ability to produce an effect. Vitality, emotional and mental activities are energy and can be balanced geometrically. Since everything has shape and energy, then we can apply it in any field. This is the language of the shapes of nature that we unfortunately do not read. We are so busy reading our own writing and fail to perceive natures’ language. BioGeometry® is the way of reading the energy workings in all fields of life. It is a new holistic universal worldview. It is like widening the window we are looking through to include all what is invisible at this moment. The paranormal becomes part of the normal, and spirituality becomes part of science.

What Dr. Ibrahim Karim, an Eqyptian Architect, has managed to do is combine the nightmare high school subjects, Biology and Geometry, with one of the least understood concepts in physics, Energy. I had heard of something similar to this concept from one of the Skeptics of Tucson members. He now lives in Colorado but he used to come to our meetings. He has a book out Matthew 10:10 Travels of an Awareness. He also has a website and a Meetup.com group. His idea is, “We, and all life, exist as the Energy of this Universe, aware of itself. It is that simple.” It may seem simple and clear to him, but it sounds deluded to others.  After reading the definition of BioGeometry, it was a bit difficult to stay enthused. It was going into serious delusion territory. My reply:

David,

 Ponder this…real knowledge of science beats pseudoscience every time. Let’s start with the first premise. Don’t blow past the premises without checking them out. All arguments made after faulty premises may not be invalid but if the arguments depend on them explicitly, they will be.

 “Energy is the ability to produce an effect. Vitality, emotional and mental activities are energy and can be balanced geometrically.” This is not correct.

 Energy is the ability to do work. In physics, we learn that potential energy on the earth can often be represented by a relationship with gravity, the mass of the object, and the height above ground or E=mgh where m is mass, g is the acceleration do to gravity (9.8 m/s²) and h is the height above ground. Another form of energy is kinetic energy. It is the energy contained in a moving body. K=mv² where K, the kinetic energy, is equal to the mass of the body multiplied by the velocity (v) squared.

 Space is not energy. The way you feel is not energy. We get all of our energy from the chemicals in our food. The chemical energy is converted to work and other forms of energy through processes including oxidation and some anaerobic processes. Most of the potential energy in your automobile is also bound in chemistry–in the gas tank and in the storage battery. In most cars, the energy in the fuel is what makes the car go, not the number of coats of wax on its bonnet. It doesn’t matter how good the car looks, without gas or a large hill to roll down, a car isn’t going anywhere. Poking pins in people’s skin or wearing a certain type of jewelry is a lot like the coats of wax on your car’s bonnet. The pins and the jewelry may make you feel better or even look better but wont’ change or balance energy levels. 

Energy can’t be created or destroyed. You can only change its form. Consider the pendulum—a large weight hanging from a string. Raise the weight and all the energy is potential. Let the pendulum swing, and the pure potential energy will convert to pure kinetic then back to pure potential as it stops moving at the end of its swing. There are always losses in the exchange so the pendulum will eventually stop but if the losses are small, it will oscillate for a very long time.

 David, I don’t have time to go over all of the problems with the claims made by BioGeometry but I will cover their answer to #5 since I’m an electrical engineer and familiar with these types of claims:

 “5. Can it reduce harmful side effects of computers, cellular phones, and other such devices? When we interact with a computer or a cellular phone, the electromagnetic fields produced by the device are a thousand times more than the energy of our cells…”

 Electromagnetic radiation travels through space in quantized particles. To understand why that is important when we’re trying to assess the potential damage that can be caused to people when they are exposed to electromagnetic radiation please consider the shotgun. You can load up a shotgun with very small particles like salt or you can load it up with 38 caliber pellets. The amount of energy in the cartridge remains the same but you’re more likely to be injured or killed when hit with the large lead ball than with the blast of salt. The energetic particles in the electromagnetic spectrum are similar. Microwave energy beamed at you may warm you up but it won’t cause the kind of damage that a burst of X-rays would do. The X-rays are higher frequency and therefore contain more energy in the particles. Electromagnetic radiation falls on a spectrum only the highest frequencies are considered “ionizing, “ in other words, cell damaging. While microwave radiation may cook you, it won’t cause molecular damage. Computers, cell phones, and other devices do not put out ionizing radiation, especially now that our monitors no longer use cathode ray tubes…

 If you want to really learn more about this stuff, it’s not hard to find the information. Please verify what I tell you by looking it up for yourself at  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-ionizing_radiation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_constant

 Don Lacey

In his reply he stated that BioGeometry seemed reasonably scientific to him but he hasn’t read my “long” response. Perhaps “my friend” is beyond help.

A. One less drunk.

Not everyone is an Atheist but everyone dies. The subject of the last meeting of the Tucson Atheists at The Shanty on the first Sunday of the month was Atheism and death. Fifteen members and guests tackled the subject with gusto and more than a couple pints of beer. Opinions were varied. One of the random questions was, “What is your death plan?” My plan is to put that particular activity off as long as possible. As far as what happens after that, I’ll probably be beyond caring. I won’t even know when I’m dead. Do you want to know why? It’s because I’ll be dead. Burned, rotisseried, stuck in the ground, spread on the ground, or shot into space it’s really all the same to me. I don’t even care if the Mormons baptize me, after I’m dead. If it keeps them busy and off door steps, so much the better. However, it would be nice if my friends and what’s left of my family would gather for a celebration and talk about me. I’d want them to throw a bash that people will be talking about for decades. According to Banksy—a graffiti artist, political activist, film director, and painter—“…you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.” Unless you’re someone like Julius Caesar, both deaths are inevitable. Consider that there are people coming up in the world that don’t know the names of the Beatles.

The next question addressed was, “Does belief in religion and life-after-death increase or reduce the value of life as we know it?” Once again opinions were varied. Some believe that religion helps those that struggle through life to endure knowing that there will be a celestial reward at the end. In fact, there were those that believe the whole reason for the introduction of an after-life was to quell the masses and make people accept the toils of a hard life for the promise of a big glorious reward at the end. The benefit to the well-off is that they can be secure in the knowledge that people will be content with the promise and may not be as motivated to take their stuff.

Finally, we know that religion helps people accept the seemingly meaningless deaths that take away friends and family. Without religion we have to rely on the cold ungodly laws of probability. For Atheists, there is no “Divine Plan” because there is no “Divinity.” That can be a cold dose of reality but most Atheists accept the reality and in fact prefer it to the fantasy that religion supplies.

Everyone, almost everyone, agrees that death sucks. We’d all like to live longer and someday, we may get to the point where we can extend our lives. Already, life expectancy has doubled in the last 200 years. In 1810, you could expect to live to 40, now it is close to 80. It wasn’t religion that made the difference. It was science. It was science that reduced infant mortality and immunized us against small pox, polio, and other killers. My own life was saved at 50 through the skilled hands of a surgeon, a fluoroscope, a catheter, and a couple of high-tech, drug eluting stents. I didn’t thank God; I thanked the surgeon, his staff, the hospital, and the ambulance crew that scooped me up and took me to the hospital. The priest that came in to check on me, while he meant well, had NOTHING to contribute to the process.

As far as we can tell, this is the only life that we’re ever going to get. No one, I mean no one, has the evidence to refute that claim. It’s best to make the most of what we know we have.

Atheists who are active in the community often hear “Pascal’s Wager.” The reasoning says that it’s best to believe in God since there is an infinitely happy after-life to gain and our current life is finite. Wagering our finite life on the chance of infinite happiness is a bet worth making. Ignoring for a minute all of the problems with that bet, and there are many, Marcus Aurelius says, “Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”

Those that have served in the military, even Atheists, know that the chaplains are important. They are a key element in the social support of deployed and garrisoned troops and they serve religious and other important functions. Not all people serving consider religious belief as an option. The military assigns people to locations far from their community support, and sending along a religious leader to tend to the religious is necessary. There are about 2,900 active duty chaplains in the military. In addition, the chaplains provide counseling of individuals regardless of religious affiliation and the sessions are considered privileged communication. You can say anything to a chaplain and be confident that the chaplain will not share what you say to your boss, coworkers, or anyone in your chain of command. The same cannot be said about discussions with a psychologist, for example. Leaders, Atheists or not, often direct their troops to seek out chaplain counseling.

However, when individuals enlist they agree to certain limitations and chaplains also have similar limitations. Chaplains are forbidden to proselytize to unaffiliated military members. They cannot participate in political demonstrations in their uniform. There are times when a chaplain’s religious beliefs and opinions conflict with the requirements of the duties and restrictions. Service members and chaplains alike must recognize that occasionally their “free speech” may be limited by military regulation. Air Force chaplain Lt. Colonel Garland L. Roberson was drummed out of the service for using his rank and position when he questioned the wisdom of using military force in Iraq in the Abilene Reporter-News in January 1991. Had the chaplain published his complaint as a private citizen, the decorated combat veteran of the Vietnam War, would have not been dismissed.

For a gathering of Atheists the phrase; “Religion in the military” contains two emotionally charged trigger words but a rational discussion which included personal experiences led to a pleasant informative meeting. You can join in on the fun by signing up with the Tucson Atheists Meetup.com Group.

In order to raise money for Rebecca, the Oklahoma Atheists are selling T-Shirts that say, “I’m actually an atheist.” FreeThought Arizona donated some money to help Rebecca and we also bought four of the T-Shirts. The question is, “Who will wear the T-Shirts?” No one on the FreeThought Arizona board would be comfortable wearing one in public and definitely not where their neighbors might see them. Why is that? We’ve come a long way but apparently not far enough. Rebecca is now considered an “Atheist hero” for her simple admission on national TV. She now has a FaceBook page dedicated to her. The comedian Doug Stanhope started an Indiegogo.com campaign to get her money to help rebuilding her home. (You should check out the donation perks.)

The “I’m actually an atheist” T-shirts will be arriving soon and they are still available for purchase. The message is clean and shouldn’t be considered insulting to anyone religious. Wouldn’t be wonderful if people would buy them, help out Rebecca, and identify yourself to you community? Wear them proudly and become and “Atheist hero” yourself.

Secular Coalition for Arizona

Invocation for Opening of AZ House of Representatives Session

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Most prayers in this room begin with a request to bow your heads. I would like to ask that you not bow your heads. I would like to ask that you to take a moment to look around the room at all of the men and women here, in this moment, sharing together this extraordinary experience of being alive and of dedicating ourselves to working toward improving the lives of the people in our state.

This is a room in which there are many challenging debates, many moments of tension, of ideological division, of frustration. But this is also a room where, as my Secular Humanist tradition stresses, by the very fact of being human, we have much more in common than we have differences. We share the same spectrum of potential for care, for compassion, for fear, for joy, for love…

Carl Sagan once wrote, “For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.” There is, in the political process, much to bear. In this room, let us cherish and celebrate our shared humanness, our shared capacity for reason and compassion, our shared love for the people of our state, for our Constitution, for our democracy–and let us root our policymaking process in these values that are relevant to all Arizonans regardless of religious belief or nonbelief. In gratitude and in love, in reason and in compassion, let us work together for a better Arizona.

Juan Mendez, serves in the State House of Representatives and represents District 26 which includes north Tempe, northwest Mesa, and a large portion of the Salt River Pima Maricopa Indian Community. Yesterday during his inclusive opening “prayer,” he appealed to the legislature to represent ALL the people of Arizona regardless of religious belief and base their decisions on reason and compassion. According to Jonathan Turely, “Arizona had an extraordinary moment.” He’s right of course. The moment was “extraordinary.” It made national news and the dust hasn’t settled yet. The echoes of the last word of this secular invocation hadn’t died out before the story was picked up by USA Today, The Huffington Post, The Raw Story, azcentral.com, and of course Jonathan Turley. There are probably others covering this news item. This should not be news worthy. It should not be an “extraordinary event” when someone comes out and appeals to a legislature to represent ALL of the people it represents. Recent polls show that one in five Americans do not affiliate with a religion. If one looks at only the young people under 30, fully one third of them are unaffiliated—one in 3! Of course, that’s a nationwide survey. NPR did a story back in January about the growth of the nones. In the article they state that religion still rules in America. There is only one openly “none” in the current Congress and that is Kyrsten Sinema who is also from Arizona. Statistics state that the average American is slightly more religious than the average Iranian. Really? Wow!

Evidently, the CAP (Center for Arizona Policy) hasn’t noticed what occurred yesterday. It will and it’ll start lining up candidates to run against Mr. Mendez. However, the CAP could be a little distracted by the fact that a bill it sponsored making abortions illegal after 20 weeks was struck down by Judges in Ninth Circuit Court. CAP may be too busy trying to figure out how to spin the murder conviction of the Pennsylvania abortionist to its advantage or counting the money it made on the $250 per plate CAP Family Dinner with Ben Carson held earlier in the month. Or perhaps CAP is busy playing ghost writer for legislative bills and resolution such as the resolution to maintain the Boy Scout’s “Don’t ask don’t tell” policy.

The Secular Coalition for Arizona is the only group in the state that can seriously impact the CAP and its legislatively imposed policies but we are seriously out gunned. Currently, we only have one professional lobbyist while the CAP maintains a constant presence at the state legislature. Even so, this year we’ve moved from a strictly defensive posture to one that is actively trying to reverse the damage caused by the CAP and 114 bills that have been signed into law since they formed in 1995.

The Secular Coalition for Arizona (www.secularaz.org) is a 501(c)(4) lobbying organization that represents 17 organizations in the Arizona nontheistic community — a vibrant and growing community of Arizonans who self-identify as Atheists, Agnostics, Humanists, Freethinkers, and other labels of personal choosing to elected officials in and from Arizona.

Psst…The Secular Coalition for Arizona does accept donations…

The last blog entry

Your BFF told me that would be sending me a link to something involving earth science. Thank you for sending it.

I watched the video from the link you sent and found it interesting. I didn’t find it convincing, however. It is difficult to be convinced by one video by a man that I know nothing about. In the video, Neal Adams is against the current theory of plate tectonics which is a young theory that came about in the 70s.

Plate tectonics is well supported with empirical data (observations) and consistent with what we know about physics and geology. It builds on the observation of continental drift and sea floor spreading. The best theories are ones that explain the observations and contain the fewest assumptions, see Occam’s Razor. At the heart of the video is the claim that the growing Earth theory best explains the shape and position of the current land masses. This could be true but there are other explanations and the expanding Earth hypothesis conflicts with other respected theories. It also adds more questions than it answers.

To explore the idea of an expanding Earth, first do a search to see what the experts are saying and determine if there is a scientific consensus. Then look at what Neal Adams is saying and his qualifications. Also look for other experts that agree with him.

There is a scientific consensus that the earth is undergoing gradual change through plate tectonics. The theory explains the current land masses and explains the formation of the relatively young archipelagos—the Galapagos Islands and the Hawaiian Islands. A key part of the tectonic plate theory includes “subduction.” Subduction explains mountain building, earthquakes, and volcanism, items not addressed by the expanding Earth hypothesis. The forces that allow and cause plate tectonics are understood. They are convection and tidal forces from the sun and the moon. We know the plates are moving and we can measure the movement with precision using satellite technology. The plates are moving apart in some cases and they are colliding in other cases. Plate collisions form the tall mountain ranges such as the Andes and Himalayans.

Is Neal Adams an expert in Geology? He is known for being an artist and does not have a degree in Earth Science. He is famous for comics. Samuel Warren Carey, his favorite expert, died in 2002 and his work on plate tectonics is highly regarded in the scientific community today. However, his “mechanism,” the expanding Earth model, has been discredited by the inclusion of the subduction hypothesis. Ott Christoph Hilgenberg also believed that the expanding earth model explained the shape and position of the current land masses and his work predates the inclusion of subduction into the plate tectonic theory.

It took only a few minutes of research to find this information. Please check out the included links. In particular, check out this link: Plate Tectonics, and as an aside, you might steer clear of folks that frequently appear on Coast-to-Coast radio.

I hope you’re doing well.

Don

Not using an identifying label—Atheist, Secular Humanist, Freethinker, Secularist, etc.—might work if winning an intellectual argument is all that is considered but people need more than that. They need community. How do people of a community find each other if not through labels? Look at the Meetup.com site. There you’ll find Tucson Atheists and Skeptics of Tucson. You’ll also find many other groups. A similar search through FaceBook will also result in pages dedicated the Secular Students, Atheists, and Recovering from Religion groups, national and locally.

Dr. Harris spends a great deal of time criticizing religion and he’s good at it. However, we are not all like him. And while we do criticize religion on occasion, any group that spends all of its time criticizing other groups is not mature and supportive of its own membership. Religions often criticize Atheists but it is not all that they do. They provide complete community service. They don’t meet once a week just to compare clothes. They have youth programs, and social events, and often pitch in together to help a member that has fallen on to hard times. Religions also have power through their large numbers and organizations such as the Center for Arizona Policy that act on their behalf and push Christian values on to the society in general. We need to do that and more.

In fact, we are starting to build and Tucson’s Atheist community is doing well. In the Barna Group’s rating of The Most Post-Christian Cities in America we rank #12. Here in Tucson we have multiple groups carrying the labels of “Atheists,” “Skeptics,” and “FreeThought.” We have our own increasingly effective legislature lobbying group The Secular Coalition for Arizona. This would not be possible without the use of identifying labels. In the past several years while the community was expanding, I often heard, “I’m glad I’ve found you. I thought I was the only one!”

The word Atheist has had negative connotations and many would rather not use it but any other term we use to describe ourselves would soon be saddled with the same baggage once it is clear that the term refers to those that don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. Have you ever heard someone say “Secular Humanist” in such a way as to be dripping with venom and dismissal? The better strategy is to come out as an Atheist, if you can, and take back the word. Erase the evil, negative connotations through positive example in all that you do.