A few days ago I published Jim Wilson’s thoughts on a topic I also care deeply about: education.

Like Jim, I attended government (“public”) schools and I wouldn’t write off Jim’s ideas solely on the basis of where he went to school. To write off ideas because of where the person expressing them did or did not go to school is a ridiculously shallow caricature of independent thought – be the ideas of the left, right, or libertarian variety. Ideas should be judged on their merits, not their source.

Jim cites the endless disagreements over government schools: They’re too rigid/they’re too soft; They’re anti-sex/they’re too sexualized; They’re bigoted/they promote acceptance of deviancy; There’s too much testing/not enough testing; They don’t teach enough of the basics/they don’t teach enough beyond the basics. It’s true that the American people can’t seem to make up their collective mind about what they want in education. But this is merely a symptom of education’s character and tradition in modern America, not a set of problems owing to some unique feature of education itself. Most debates about education fail to address the important systemic question: the consequences of paying for and providing goods and services primarily as a community through government taxation, rather than as private individuals making private, piecemeal choices.

To understand what I’m saying, imagine if we decided as a society that food is really important, and everybody needs good food to eat. After all, it’s difficult to be a good citizen and participate in democracy if you’re starving, and you’re a drain on health care resources if you eat too much of the wrong kinds of food. So what we do in the name of democracy and fairness and efficiency is: tax all citizens, and fund the local county/city government building a public cafeteria system with a cafeteria in every neighborhood serving up good, wholesome food that everyone in the neighborhood is entitled to eat for free. In order to preserve local control, we’d have food districts with cafeteria boards elected by the people in the district to decide what food is best for their own community. We could rationalize such a move with all kinds of perceived benefits: It would relieve people of the need to build and stock elaborate kitchens at home, it would specialize (and probably unionize) the profession of cooking, create jobs, address the problem of people who don’t know how to prepare healthy meals, or can’t find the right ingredients, or can’t clean their kitchens properly, or can’t store their food safely, or just can’t afford to pay the prices at the grocery store. It would help reduce the disparities in the quality of food eaten by the rich and the poor, and government cafeterias could be used as a tool to increase overall public health and reduce problems like diabetes and obesity. Government run “public” cafeterias would reduce the duplication of having many small restaurants and could be much more efficient because of economies of scale in production and distribution. Government run cafeterias would bring people in each neighborhood together, enhancing the social fabric of the community as ample anthropological evidence demonstrates that shared meals tend to bring people together. Public cafeterias would also address the problem of some neighborhoods having tons and tons of restaurants while other neighborhoods suffer with few or no restaurants close by.

Some left wingers are undoubtedly salivating at this idea - which is part of my point. If you think that government solutions work better than private ones, then government solutions sound like pretty good ideas whether the product is food, or education, or health care, or transportation, or retirement. The arguments for such systems are, at base, pretty similar.

I’m not advocating the system of government cafeterias I’ve just described; it’s just a thought experiment for the kinds of problems we’d have if we adopted such a system: Some people would want higher taxes to pay for better quality food. Other people would want lower taxes and be willing to live with lower quality food as a result. The high tax/low tax people would fight constantly about the cafeterias, how much and what kind of people eat in them, etc. A few, the really rich 1%ers, could afford to pay their food taxes and still buy their own very high quality private food in elite restaurants – which would then be viewed as just another of the unfair privileges of the 1% and a reason behind their selfish lobby to reduce food taxes. Some people would want higher food taxes on the rich to pay for higher quality food for the poor – they’d want to use the public cafeteria system as a means of wealth redistribution. Some people would say the food in public cafeterias has way too much sugar and salt and fat for good health and so these ingredients should be reduced. Others would say the food tastes bland and icky – because it lacks enough sugar and salt and fat. Fad diets would go from a curiosity to a matter of public policy. Some people would object that the food of their ethnic heritage – Mexican, Chinese, Italian – isn’t fairly represented on the menu or authentically prepared, and accuse people who advocate for steak and potatoes in the cafeterias of being racists. Some would advocate that everyone must eat their vegetables before they’re allowed to have dessert; others would claim that people have an inalienable right to eat their meals in any order they choose. Still others would say desserts are unnecessary and unhealthy and should be eliminated altogether.

And here’s something for this blog to consider: The religious right would of course want a community prayer to be recited before every meal, or at least a moment for people to pray, claiming that eating without praying out loud infringes on their religious beliefs. Meanwhile those of us who aren’t religious would be accused of infringing on religious freedom when we insist, rightly, that the first amendment prohibits any kind of official prayer in a government cafeteria. Voila – something that was not a contentious social issue (whether people pray before meals) now becomes another tool for divisive politicians to exploit.

We’d have hotly contested elections for the local cafeteria board to decide some of these issues, and others would be matters that would be fought all the way to the US Supreme Court. People would lament that the cafeterias in poor neighborhoods always end up serving lower quality food than the cafeterias in rich neighborhoods, and demand that the state equalize funding across food districts. Others would say, let’s bus some of the poor people to cafeterias in rich areas to better integrate the population through shared meals. And then whenever there’s a local budget crisis, Washington would be called on to intervene to keep hard working chefs from losing their jobs and Americans from starving. And on and on – food would become a political football just like education is today.

If my little thought experiment came to be, after a hundred years or so anyone who remembered today’s system dominated by private food would be dead. Anyone who said the government should get out of the food business would be accused of being “radical” and “unrealistic” and “utopian”. They might be called selfish, for not caring about all the poor people who would surely starve to death without government cafeterias every few blocks. In such a scenario some people might insist on ”home cooking” – maybe because they want to pray before every meal and the supreme court rightly ruled it unconstitutional in government cafeterias. But maybe, just because they want food that isn’t served in the local public cafeteria. Whatever the reason, these home cookers would be looked upon as weird and anti-social because they don’t share meals with their neighbors – by then well established as an absolutely essential part of proper socialization. People would also question whether most of these home cookers are really competent to cook food for themselves and their families – they didn’t get degrees in cooking; most haven’t had any formal training in cooking at all! Microwaves, ovens, refrigerators, and blenders would all be very expensive devices, and only available in industrial sizes leading people to regard the very idea of cooking for one or two people at a time as hopelessly inefficient.

To be fair, there are indeed problems with today’s mostly private food system – obesity and over consumption mostly, real hunger and malnutrition in a small minority. These are just not the kind of problems most people raised with a government dominated food system would think of. A primarily private system is better than a government system, but I’m not pretending it’s utopia.

Point being: the “problems of public schools” mostly aren’t problems about education, they’re problems of centralized funding and communal decision making. It matters little whether centralization occurs on a local, state, or national level, and it matters little what good or service we’re talking about paying for via government. People have different preferences; it’s part of being human. No government system can ever fully accommodate individual preferences and so you end up with inevitable political fights to control various aspects of the system. There’s hardly a problem of education dominated by government’s “public” schools as ours is today, that wouldn’t have an analogous problem in a food system dominated by government’s “public” cafeterias, or a housing system dominated by government’s “public” housing, or a transportation system dominated by government’s “public” transportation, or health care dominated by government’s “single payer” health care. We don’t need to have this argument over and over about every good and service people need or want. It’s the same argument, and the same answer, for all of them.

When you look at education through this lens, some issues are perhaps a little clearer. In our hypothetical America of widespread government cafeterias, a few “private cafeterias” would constitute little improvement if they were basically like public cafeterias except that they tended to be sponsored by a church, have mandatory prayers before every meal, or adhere to Kosher preparation standards. Just as, today, non-elite church sponsored “private schools” aren’t really an improvement over public schools.  We don’t need local church schools to replace local government schools. A multi-source, individualized approach to education will work better than either.

And vouchers - vouchers are an absolutely terrible idea. Don’t the right wingers know that vouchers are the education equivalent of food stamps? With education vouchers, the government is doling out money for people to go buy their “private” education with, just like food stamps are government money for people to buy food with. Yet in Arizona, the hypocrits on the right use dirty legislative trickery to enact education vouchers while decrying Obama as the food stamp president. The sad truth is, food stamps work *better* than education vouchers would. Sticking with our cafeteria example, how well would food stamps work in a system dominated by public cafeterias, private church-run cafeterias, and a few high-end restaurants that serve only the very wealthy - with no private grocery stores, few cookbooks and kitchen tools designed for home use, and no moderately priced restaurants run for profit rather than for the promotion of religious dogma? They wouldn’t work well at all. They’d just be a means of funneling public money into private churches without substantially improving food quality.

My wife and I “home school” our children. That really means they learn from us, or extended family members, or friends, or others in our home school group, or private classes in specific subjects, or from activities with private organizations like Freethought Arizona. As a matter of fact, we are also “home cookers”, meaning that we feed our children meals either at home or in other private homes or private restaurants and not government food outlets. The only difference between these two parental decisions, about education and food, are some pretty arbitrary social traditions – neither is more radical than the other when considered objectively. In both cases we have the self-confidence to think and act on the conviction that we can do better as individuals than as part of a collection of communally-minded bureaucrats.

Despite the lack of government involvement in either my kids’ schooling or their eating, neither practice results in them, or us, being developmentally disadvantaged or socially isolated. Humans evolved as social animals and a government program is not required to learn how to make friends. Yes, cooking is somewhat easier than schooling. However, that’s at least partially because there are vast and well established resources available to make providing private food easier; there’s an entrenched tradition of private food in America, whereas the traditions of private education are far more limited in scope. But the difficulty involved in home education is changing: the internet makes home schooling orders of magnitude easier than it used to be, which is one reason why it is the fastest growing model of education.

I say get the government out of mainstream education, and not because I want only the elite to get a good education any more than I want only the elite to get a good meal. I advocate for the separation of school and state because it would make education better than it is today for the majority of American children. I’d like to see most Americans get educated the same general way most Americans get fed: a piecemeal and variable combination of home cooking, meals with friends, and private for-profit restaurants of nearly infinite variety. While allowing that there will be exceptions (like church pot-lucks and Chick-fil-a are in the case of food), I’d like to see education dominated by families and friends and secular enterprises, not by either the state -or- churches. This is not a utopian system, but it’s better than any system dominated by government payment and provision of service can be. Note I’m speaking here about the dominant model. Whether it is right to have government intervene at the fringes of a mostly private system, such as providing for the very poor and instituting basic quality regulations like we have with food and housing today, is another topic.

And with that, I’m handing over management of the blog to Don Lacey. It’s been fun, and I appreciate everyone’s comments and discussion over the last few months whether I agreed with you or not. It’s just time to let someone else have a crack at this for a while.

This comes to us from Jim Wilson:

I was never particularly fond of Miley Cyrus’ music.  I disliked Hannah Montana and still dislike the wave of copy-cat, one-off, teen-age manufactured television pop stars that follow the same formula. That’s okay, because none of her artistic output was ever meant to appeal to me.  Her mass-marketed-hyped-up-music has a clear target audience and I am not it. Her talent, however, is not the point of this blog topic.

Recently, she did something that got my attention.  She offended many Christian fans by posting the following quote from Theoretical Physicist Lawrence Krauss:

“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements – the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution – weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way they could get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”

My first reaction was amazement that Miley knows who Krauss is. I personally happen to be a big fan of the man.  He’s working to make cosmology and theoretical physics more accessible to ordinary people.  I love the idea of anyone contributing to Krauss’s popularity, especially if it is someone like Miley who can inspire young girls. I’d love to see more young Americans take an interest in hard science, and I think individuals like Krauss should be seen in the same positive light as a star athlete and/or musicians, without all the celebrity baggage.  To watch a teen idol spread science is inspiring, and if indeed this is her plan she is a very courageous young woman.

My next reaction was delight at what beautiful sentiment is being expressed by Krauss.  Carl Sagan was known for making a similar observation about the truly beautiful and poetic nature of our origins and existence.  The universe is amazing, extraordinary and the science that makes sense of it fills me with complete awe.  Our natural universe is more amazing than any of the man-made mythologies which all too often are used incorrectly to explain earths origins while causing people to be god-fearing and plagued with guilt.  Science is wondrous and inspiring. It doesn’t threaten anyone.  In my humble opinion, science should be front page news.

So, what to make of Miley’s twitter post?  Is it just an off hand fluke that she posted something with out reading it fully, or is she actually interested in spreading this sort of message? Did she understand that it’s in direct conflict with the Christian Creation Story? Miley is from a Christian background and would alienate many people if she were to come out as an atheist.  Will she be under a lot of pressure from Christians and the music industry to recant? Coming out as an atheist could be commercial suicide. I know little about Miley, but who knows, she could secretly be a non-believer who now is willing to take the risks associated with coming out.

Then there is the issue of what she could do for the atheist movement. I enjoy living in a world where the most high-profile atheists are scientists, public intellectuals, and the occasional clever comedian.  Having some manufactured teen pop-singer become one of the biggest names in atheism would shake things up.  It may make interest in atheist issues more widespread, particularly among Christian teens which is a huge plus for our team.  If all it does is cause our youth to question and research, we’ll all come out winners. And then, it may make atheism more and Miley Cyrus less mainstream. Time will tell.

I personally do not know what to make of the Twitter post, but I hope she continues to post factual information so others can learn.  I also hope that coming out as an atheist does not coincide with her descending on the type of spiral of self destruction pop-stars her age are known for.  Miley, if you’re reading this you’ve made me very proud!

Jim Wilson gives us his perspective on school:

I am a product of the American public school system for better or worse, and most of the people I know including my friends and family are as well.  I feel making the above statement is an open invitation for many of our more conservative and libertarian-leaning readers to write off anything I say, as being ill-informed, under-informed and/or abused by government schools, however I will continue.

It’s almost a cliché to say government schools are government sponsored child abuse or to suggest that they are statist indoctrination institutions. There is definitely some truth to this. To a large extent public schools as well as religious training schools serve the purpose of making children better able to deal with the authoritarianism and boredom that characterizes much of the work life they will face as adults.  Public schools arose around the same time that laboring under the authority of bosses and managers became the most common way of making a living. I can’t dismiss the notion that part of their spread was due to bosses and managers wanting a means of creating a more easily disciplined working class starting at a young age.

The public schools I spent time in were decidedly authoritarian and conformist institutions and in them it felt very much like we were being mass produced.  We were made to be quiet, subordinate and pay attention to authorities, many of whom brought little to the table to hold our attention. This of course was made worse by the fact that being forced to sit and pay attention for long periods is highly unnatural for young children, even if the person talking is the most interesting person in the world. It surprises me very little that many of my fellow students came out with a strong dislike of many of the subjects being taught and I think this largely aided in creating the anti-intellectual culture in this society.  In addition it helped created resentment towards math, reading and other topics. Did this result in school yard bullying? Perhaps. We were taught to stand in straight lines, respect our superiors. I’ll admit to being hit with a wooden paddle a few times, when I had trouble with this. They also tended to lay the flag-waving, the insane anti-drug paranoia and anti-sex paranoia on pretty thick. Perhaps another topic for another day is the Stockholm Syndrome like conformity that pep-rallies, student government, and sports events intended to instill in us.

It needs to be noted that during the course of my pre-college education, I attended multiple public schools in different parts of the Houston area that were attended by kids from very different parts of the socio-economic hierarchy and as such, not everything described above applied to every school or every teacher or every situation. There were a few of my teachers who were good at teaching, who did express interest in what I and other students thought about things.  They had a sincere interest in developing critical thinking skills within me, and taught me important information about the world. More often than not this happened in schools in upper middle-class rather than working class neighborhoods.

As mixed as my experiences with public education were, it is not surprising to me the varied if not sometimes contradictory criticisms of them. Some say they are authoritarian discipline factories, while others say they way too soft when it comes to disciplining. Some say they are teaching anti-American values, while some say they are teaching flag waving conformity. Some say they are encouraging kids to be sexually active, despite the huge doses of sex-negativity I received from my abstinence-oriented health classes. Some say they expose kids to anti-gay bigotry while others are terrified of that they are teaching their kids to be accepting of homosexuality. I expect that all of these impressions are correct, and that public schools will tend to reflect the values of the parents sending their children to them. For better or worse, the students will retain these values and they will perpetuate them in the schools they eventually send their children to. As such values taught in the public school system often circle back to shape what is taught to the next generation in public schools.

I also know that much of what I experienced in the public school system was also experienced by people in private schools. I’ve heard plenty of stories of how disciplinarian, authoritarian, conformist and ineffective these can be, especially from former students of Catholic schools. It is my impression that just like anything else, with private schools parents get what they pay for and the most affordable private schools tend to bring a lot of religious baggage to the table. This is one of my concerns about many voucher proposals, as they would end up subsidizing religious indoctrination on the government tip. That said, many private schools perform well and offer some of the best education in the country, but do this by excluding sub-par performers and charging high tuition prices. A recent New York Times article stated that New York  private schools are charging as much as $35-$40K. The students who attend them will have countless advantages over the next generation of kids and many will remain part of the economic aristocracy that controls much of our state and economy. I also suspect that high tuition prices skew the attendance of these institutions in favor of students with parents who put a high level of interest in their children’s education and have the resources needed to provide outside assistance with learning school related topics.

Then there are home-schools. This option is not for everyone. If it works for you and your family, then I fully support you so long as you have a working knowledge of what you are teaching and are not using it as a means of indoctrinating your children or sheltering them from exposure to different ideas. I think when done right this is pretty close to ideal. It gives parents a great deal of involvement in their children’s education and in many cases puts learning in the hands of loved ones and offers freedom from the top-down rigidity of public and private school systems. I do fear that many people in this country’s home-school community are doing this because they are religious zealots or ideological reactionaries who want to indoctrinate their kids in their own dogma, and prevent them from encountering challenging ideas like evolution or political liberalism, or learning the critical thinking skills required to question their parent’s beliefs. This is also reflected by the growing fear among Christians in this country that their child will abandon their faith when they go to college. There is a growing amount of books and websites on how to prevent this ever increasing phenomenon. This reminds me that home school students should be given opportunities to interact with other children their age, as it exposes them to new ideas and teaches them how to work with a wider range of personalities. Whether accurate or not, there is a perception that many home-schooled kids are lacking in this area. Also note that one’s ability as a home school instructor is also going to be determined by the amount of free time and resources at your disposal.

To me this seems to be the consistent theme throughout American education. No matter what option your parents select, the quality of education will largely be influenced by the amount of wealth they control. The public education system was established at least in part to combat this problem, yet it stills seems to fall into it. I am cynical enough to recognize that the economic elites who influence policy in this country may not want a public system that can compete with their elite schools and as such anti-public education sentiment seems to be a growing phenomenon.  I am of the opinion that all 3 approaches discussed here have significant problems and I hate seeing how dogmatic critics and advocates of different forms of schooling can be. I would like to encourage our readers to avoid this and if anything to explore new options. For example I think it would be cool for people to organize schools at the community level where people with different areas of expertise could teach each other’s kids, while allowing the students greater control of what they are taught. I’d like to see this done while abandoning the more authoritarian aspects of conventional educations.

I came across this quote from Elliot Temple:

[S]ome people take fallibility as…a very simple and inescapable fact, with little meaning to real life. It applies to everything, you can’t beat it in an argument, but all it means is don’t say things like “guarantee”, “certain truth”, “prove”, etc…

This is not how Deutsch and Popper think of fallibility. They are not so interested in it as a logical point that can win arguments, and which must be accepted but has minimal meaning. They are more interest in what we might call the “spirit of fallibility” (like “spirit of the law” vs “letter of the law”) — the fallibilist *attitude*. They think fallibility is more than a logical principle, but it’s also an important idea with broad applicability far beyond the small, pretty indisputable part of it…They care about it because fallibility (understood correctly) is a deep philosophical idea with lots of value, use, reach, breadth, etc…

For example fallibility has connections to liberalism: tyranny is a bad idea because Kings are fallible so we need error correction not authority.

When they say this kind of thing, they do not merely mean “Kings, like everyone, could possibly make mistakes”. They mean more like, “Kings, like everyone, commonly make mistakes. People are fallible in the sense not just that errors are possible but that errors happen all the time.”

Anon3 and I argued about fallability a while back in the context of what it means to “know” something. Anon3 argued that the “Justified True Belief” (JTB) model of knowledge is correct, even in the face of fallibility. Anon3 recognizes that justified belief might not, in the end, be true – but he still thinks the right way to go about knowing things is to justify them and believe in their truth based on such justification.

Sometimes justification explicitly rests on faith, as in many religious claims. But even when there isn’t an explicit appeal to faith, at base there is always an element of faith involved in justification. That’s why Christians like the JTB model: they use it to claim that *everyone* must have faith in something in order to know anything - and along with that they can pose the implied question, “So why not just choose to have faith in God?” That is also one of the reasons many find traditional/academic philosophy so irrelevant – it ultimately boils down to having faith about things we don’t really know and aren’t relevant in the real world.

The rival to the JTB concept of knowledge is Popper’s conjecture and refutation concept. Those who are unfamiliar with it can read this, http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/Courses/popperphil1.pdf though be warned, it’s not light reading. The short-short version is that instead of trying to justify beliefs, Popper suggests that we take whatever beliefs we have (and can think of) and try to eliminate errors.

I think Elliot’s focus on the “spirit” of fallibility is an important component of critical thinking and in differentiating the JTB concept from conjecture and refutation. It places the focus squarely on finding and correcting the errors in our thinking, rather than on trying to justify our current beliefs. This can be a difficult mindset to adopt, since we all like to be “proven” right rather than wrong. Nevertheless, it seems to me to be the correct, more useful model of knowledge and it doesn’t require faith.

This is another contribution from Dr. Stephen Uhl:

The influence of the crowd can grow down through the years (longitudinal, historical), or the influence can come from the contemporary crowd (latitudinal, current). Like the ripples on a pond, the influence or power  of a current (latitudinal) crowd spreads and grows wider and wider as it engulfs more and more of the current population. Hearing and seeing the active crowd influences others to join in here and now.

On the other hand, a longitudinal crowd is more like a river of influence flowing down through time. Examples might be a lasting dynasty, a royal family, a traditional association, a historic religion, a historic political party, or acceptors of a traditional myth. When a person joins a group or crowd, gang or sect, he gathers strength from and lends strength to the group. The more completely he embraces the beliefs and traditions of the longitudinal group, the more totally the group accepts him. He also draws further strength or conviction from the group. Thus, there is a self-reinforcing cycle of individual accepting group accepting individual accepting group, etc.

This mutual strengthening process in the traditional or longitudinal group, “history’s crowd,” is quite similar to the mutual reinforcement of the mass hypnosis process in the latitudinal group or “today’s crowd” described earlier. Group hypnosis enhances the strength of individuals in “today’s crowd” as the individual self-hypnotizing members strengthen the growing crowd itself. The same applies to the river of “history’s crowd”—the believers of the past are believed by the current believer; he accepts their traditions, gains confidence and strength from those traditions, and so he adds his influence to strengthen the group that contributed to his strength.

Whether the crowd is longitudinal or latitudinal, the bigger it is, the easier it is to attract followers. Nothing succeeds like success especially in matters of opinion or belief in things that are beyond evidence. In numbers there is strength; and the fellowship feels good, so fellow-believers quite naturally strengthen one another. The result is that most people today still hold on to a plethora of traditions and beliefs of old. Critical thinking is needed to evaluate many of those customs and belief systems handed down from pre-scientific centuries.

 (Excerpted from Out of God’s Closet, by Stephen F. Uhl, Ph.D.

This comes to us from Jim Wilson:

If you were God and you wanted to reveal yourself to humanity through your written word, what would you say?

That question was asked to me by a Christian evangelist a little over a year ago.  My recollection of this question prompted a great discussion on a soon to be released episode of Desert Air Podcast ( http://desertairpodcast.com/), which provides me with many ideas discussed here.

It seemed to me that the purpose of the question was to use what ever answers I’d give to him and argue that all the things I would put in my book, God has already put in the bible, just waiting for my discovery.  This, I would presume would include such things as fulfilled predictions of future events, solid moral teachings and important information about the world we live in.

For better or worse, the conversation did not end up going this way, possibly because I did not have time to visit for too long and possibly because I was familiar enough with such forms of apologetics to find problems with them.  Anyway, my first objection was that if I was all-knowing, all-powerful and all-benevolent, I doubt I would use revealed word in a written format as my form of communication, especially if we are to assume that I am revealing to technologically unsophisticated people like the Judeo-Christian god supposedly did. That would mean the material it was written on would deteriorate and continuously have to be rewritten; as such my word would always be left in someone else’s handwriting.  The rewriting would be subject to human error and vulnerable to people changing it for their own malevolent purposes.  As such it would seem highly short-sighted of a God to leave his message in a written form among a population of largely illiterate and technologically lacking people.

Also, keep in mind this God is supposedly all-powerful so he could make an information vector far more impressive than anything his bronze-age subjects could imagine.  He could have given them permanently charged iPads with the needed information on them, or something even more impressive.  I would see this as  a far more plausible way for an all-knowing being to communicate - that is, in a way that no other extant being could.  A God that would uses a written word, passed down for centuries among a priestly class in an otherwise illiterate population would strike me as highly suspect… either a highly incompetent being or more probably a fraud perpetuated by the previously mentioned priestly class.

Anyway, after stating that objection, I figured why not assume for the sake of argument that as a God, I’d have to use a book to reveal my word to the world’s people.  Given that assumption what would I put in my bible? Well, first to demonstrate my boundless level of knowledge I would fill it with things that no one at the time could have known, like pi, the germ theory of disease, evolutionary biology, genetics, the heliocentric solar system, calculus, the atomic theory of matter, Einsteinian relativity, quantum physics, cures for all diseases humans could ever face, instructions on how to make electricity and computers and a great deal of information that has yet to be known to humans. I would provide a template for producing a technologically advanced, peaceful, environmentally sound society free of oppression and all forms of authority. I figure an all-powerful all-knowing being would be able to clearly communicate all this.

I also would include many important ethical instructions the bible clearly neglects, such as opposition to slavery, opposition to mass murder, opposition to sexual oppression, opposition to prejudice based on sexual orientation, opposition to monarchy and other forms of authoritarianism, opposition to scapegoating or punishing one individual for the actions of others.  These are all things opposed by civilized society today, but are either condoned or commanded by the bible.

Furthermore, any predictions in my revelation would be independently verifiable and written clearly. The bible clearly fails in this regard, since most of its alleged prophecies are anything but clearly written and all of them force you to take the bible’s word about their fulfilment. If I was forced to limit my revelation to bronze age mid-easterners the way the biblical god supposedly did, I would be sure to include descriptions of walruses, kangaroos, platypuses, penguins and seals, sea otters, orangutans, ostriches, emus and all the many fantastic animals around from around the world, as well as places they could be found.  How strange it is that the bible discusses all the world’s animals entering a boat, but neglects to mention any species anywhere that would be unfamiliar to residents of the middle east.

Ideally, I would not want to reveal it to a chosen people like the biblical god is believed to have. To me this type of favoritism reflects the ethnocentric tribal attitudes of the bible’s thuggish creators, rather than proof of it’s divinity. Perhaps I could give parts of it to people all over the world and they would have to come together in unity to decipher it (strangely, the biblical God opposed this type of unity in the story of the tower of Babble).

I of course am not a God trying to communicate by book, but those are the type of things I would expect from a book written by someone all-benevolent and all-knowing.  The bible, God’s supposed word, falls way short of this. This much touted international best seller fails to live up to its own hype. It has no insights that bronze-age Mideasterners could not have been expected to produce, its miraculous claims are completely unverifiable and it’s morality is atrocious even by the most primitive standards.  It looks very much like a work of primitive people, coping with a rough cruel world and nothing like a work of a well-informed intelligence.  That, and there is also the complete lack of kangaroos.

This comes to us from Dr. Stephen Uhl:

In September 2005 a huge category five hurricane Rita was bearing down on the gulf shores of Texas. The desperately frightened Governor of Texas had over a million people make their exodus inland. And after the historically dire warnings to these anxious citizens, the good governor told them to “say a prayer for Texas.”

One of our oldest defense mechanisms, in common use yet today, is wishful thinking. This is the belief that wishing can somehow change reality or make things happen. A simple dictionary definition of wishful thinking is “the attribution of reality to what one wishes to be true and the tenuous justification of what one wants to believe.” Of course, wishes do sometimes become reality for two reasons: first, when we are directly or personally responsible for the wished-for result, we likely take at least some steps to achieve it; likewise, even when we are not directly responsible for the wished-for results, good things can and do happen. For example, if we are wounded or sick, Mother Nature is so bountiful that we often heal or get well as we wished, though consciously we did nothing but wish for that good result.

Both situations reinforce our belief in our wishing; our wishes are intermittently fulfilled as they do sometimes come true. Such intermittent reinforcement is the strongest kind of psychological reinforcement. This helps explain why wishful thinking is so common. The associative thinker very easily concludes: “I wished for it, therefore it happened.” “Post hoc, ergo propter hoc” (after the act, therefore because of the act) is only sometimes true. There is no reliable connection between the wishful thinking and the outcome even though a strong connection is frequently perceived by the wisher. The same holds for prayer.

WISHFUL THINKING, PRAYER AND HYPNOSIS

Prayer is commonly an act of wishful thinking. And since prayer is frequently more hypnogenic than simple wishful thinking, prayer can take on an added level of effectiveness. When I say that prayer works sometimes, I really mean it. Prayer often works for the wishing believer who is doing the praying. Reliable objective research has shown clearly that prayers offered by others for someone’s improvement without that person’s knowledge have no effect on that person at all. However, when the believer prays for his own wishes to come true, they are more likely to come true than if he had not prayed. This is because of the hypnotic character of prayer.

In my psychological practice, I often used hypnosis, which is similar to modern meditation, in order to help my patients achieve their goals. I frequently dubbed hypnosis “meditation in high gear.” It is a most powerful and effective tool; it helps a person relax deeply, concentrate, and access his own personal powers. In fact, hundreds of my clients amazed themselves when they quit smoking, generally without withdrawal effects, after only one session of individual hypnosis.

The hypnotized or meditating person is often surprised at his newly discovered strength and capabilities. Before being hypnotized he thought himself incapable of doing what he wanted or achieving what he needed for happiness; after hypnosis he sees more clearly his own potential, his own ability to achieve his goals. Once the hypnotized patient realized the magnitude of his own internal power, he rapidly progressed toward mental health and independence. For example, he now moves from the attitude of ‘I cannot quit smoking’ to the conviction that ‘I can quit smoking.’

Now prayer that is effective can be appropriately called self hypnosis. It helps the praying person relax and focus his attention and wishes. In so doing, the concentrating, praying person hypnotizes himself and convinces himself that his goal is attainable. Then, with the resulting increase in confidence, the hopeful praying subject sometimes goes on to achieve his desired goal. Thus the praying subject is successful precisely as the hypnotized subject is successful: both realize and use power beyond what they had previously thought possible.

Even though prayer does not work because of a Higher Power’s power, it is easy to see how it strengthens the faith of the wishful thinking believer. Jesus Christ may have realized this informally when he commanded his followers not to pray publicly like the hypocrites but secretly or privately (Matthew 6:5-6). Private prayer is much more effective (for non-political purposes) than public prayer, because personal concentration and meditative insights are much more likely in private than in public.

Understand how the self-hypnosis of prayer is sometimes so effective for the praying believer. His achievement beyond what he had thought himself capable of positively reinforces his act of self-hypnotic praying. This greater-than-expected personal achievement is intermittent, so it strongly reinforces the faith of the praying person. Therefore, he becomes more convinced of the power of prayer while thinking that prayer gets its power from God rather than from within himself. He prayed to his God; he got greater-than-expected results. Therefore, he attributes the results to God’s help; post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

Further, the more convinced the praying person becomes of the power of prayer, the better he becomes at hypnotizing himself, so the more effective his self-hypnotic prayer becomes. Now you can understand how it is feasible for a person who does not understand hypnosis to attribute a supernatural power to prayer. Such reinforcement is a strong argument for millions to believe in a Higher Power. For the person who understands hypnosis, however, prayer works, not because some God changed his eternally changeless divine mind, but because the self-hypnotizing subject changed his own mind and increased his own personal effectiveness.

Even public prayer does actually have some desired effect at times. Most individuals are somewhat swayed by what the crowd seems to believe. The listening crowd is helped toward hypnosis by the repetitions or the soothing or authoritative voice of the preacher or politician. This believing crowd, led in prayer by an articulate leader, grows in unity until all or most in the crowd say “Amen” to the same thing. As the preacher or group leader uses his hypnotic power, even unwittingly, he can readily strengthen the crowd’s self-reinforcing belief and help it reach some degree of mass hypnosis or even mass hysteria. (Churchill, Hitler, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and many popular evangelical preachers have been masterful crafters of the convictions of crowds.)

The power (for good or ill) that becomes obvious here is not a power above nature; it is the self-hypnotically induced power of increased conviction in individuals who earlier had been unconvinced of their power. This power is so great that it may be directed to repair a community, start a violent revolution or increase contributions to or votes for all kinds of causes.

 (Excerpted from Out of God’s Closet by Stephen F. Uhl, Ph.D.)

Sunday, February 19, 2012

All events are at Duval Auditorium, 1501 North Campbell Avenue.

Parking is free in the visitor parking structure.

8 am Cafe Inquiry– Open Forum. The hot topics of the day will be discussed. Moderator, Gil Shapiro

9 am – Annual FreeThought Membership Meeting. All FreeThought Arizona members are invited to attend. Come and meet the new board members.

10-Noon– Lecture:

Conservative Evangelicals in American Politics: Reflections from the Field

Speaker: Karen Seat

As political activists have been gearing up for the 2012 presidential election, Professor Karen Seat has been traveling the country interviewing social conservatives at the forefront of the movement that is often dubbed the “Christian Right.” Professor Seat will discuss conservative Christians’ engagement with American politics today and in American history.

About the Speaker – Karen Seat is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Arizona. She specializes in the history of American evangelicalism. Her current field research is supported by a grant from the University of Arizona’s Confluence Center for Creative Inquiry. She teaches courses on American religious history and gender studies in religion.

Upcoming FreeThought AZ events:

March 18 – Recovering from religion by Jerry DeWitt.

April 15 – Activities of the ACLU by Sam Daugherty.

A few years ago I got into a pretty good Internet argument about this piece by Frank Turek, the author of a highly dishonest book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist:

http://townhall.com/columnists/frankturek/2009/03/02/sleeping_with_your_girlfriend/page/full/

I was thinking about the discussion that resulted and I instinctively knew I had to read this poorly-argued piece again, and share it with you.  It’s disturbing that this is a reflection of the way many Christians think.  When reading it keep in mind that its author is considered a leading Christian apologist.

First of all I know a lot of atheists and agnostics and I do not for the life of me think I have met a single individual who bases his religious beliefs on a desire to have sex or or be free from an over looking authority — these just tend to be extra bonuses for thinking critically.  Many of us grew up in very religious backgrounds and found that we were often forced to reject beliefs that made us comfortable and made life easier.  For many of us, deconversion was a difficult and painful process marked by alienation from friends and loved ones.  It was also not a choice, but rather a realization for many of us. I personally did not choose to be an atheist, but came to a realization that I no longer could justify the beliefs I was raised with.  I did this after investigating Christianity and other religions and looking specifically at evidence for and against it’s teaching.  This was not motivated by any desire of mine, other than to have as many true beliefs and as few false beliefs as possible.   I feel that I speak for most Christian apostates I know when I say this: It was a desire to have a factually correct world-view that lead us to reject Christianity and not a desire to be free to sin as much as we want.  It is extremely insulting for anyone to claim that a position is based on human weakness rather than on the actual evidence.

Second of all the basic premise makes very little sense. There are countless unmarried, self-identified Christians who sleep with members of the opposite sex and the same sex as well.  This is in fact one of the many sins that the Christian God forgives when followers believe, and those who engage in it can write it off as just an example of human weakness that they can work on.  Additionally many Christians are able to engage in amazing feats of cognitive dissonance, where they are able to rationalize and reconcile just about anything they want with Christianity.  It seems highly unlikely to me that anyone has ever thought “I like sleeping with you, so I guess that means God doesn’t exist”. Some may explore the possibility that God is more chilled than authors like Turek suggest, or even use it as a catalyst for exploring the evidence for God, but I do not think very many people form their beliefs on a desire to sleep with someone.  That said, you obviously do not need to become an atheist or agnostic to have sex outside of marriage, and that there are many forms of Christianity that have little problem with it.

Under all this seems to me to be a deeper problem though: Christianity is guilt-tripping people for the perfectly natural and normal sexual desires we all experience. There is nothing wrong with wanting to sleep with your girlfriend or boyfriend or various other people you may know and acting on this desire, provided it is consensual and done with respect for all involved, with all necessary precautions taken to avoid unintended consequences. The type of religious demonization of sexuality that Mr. Turek advocates is really very harmful.  It causes people to live in guilt about perfectly normal desires, it causes people to be bigoted towards people with different desires and it has even caused people to oppose contraception and medications that remove the risks associated with sex. It has led some high profile Christians to express opposition to finding cures and preventions for AIDS.  It is time we dump this religious fear of sexuality and embrace who we truly are. These sexual attitudes are absurd and profoundly immoral.

That said, I seriously doubt the exchange described in the article even happened. It sounds too much like Christian urban legend material and I have heard plenty of accounts of stock stories like this authored by motivational speakers and Christian apologetics. The characters are given nothing more than first names and the agnostic in it is a total strawman.  It seems unlikely an Agnostic would take the time to argue that Christians should not defend their faith against those who attack it.  Most of us would really like to see them start doing a better job of it.

I find it ironic that he refers to the machine gun fire approach to arguing and in the same breath is adverse to skeptics using the same approach.  It is a favorite tool of the Christian apologist and is often referred to as the Gish Gallup after a certain apologist who makes heavy use of it.  Also, all supposed evidence for Christianity Turek cites can easily be dismissed with a few searches on Google.  This is true of every formal argument for the existence of God and why should this be the case? After all if an argument could prove the existence of a god, faith would no longer be needed.

Also his attack on evolution is ridiculous as there is overwhelming evidence for it, and none for creationism.  It’s the fact that so many Christians hold on to antiquated and easily disprovable ideas that church attendance is dropping among the younger generation.  If your religion requires you to reject a now obvious truth it is pretty much screwed.  The Huxley quote may or may not be accurate since despite being a favorite of religionists no one has been able to locate the episode of the Merv Griffin show it was on.  Not that this matters, because sexual mores aside there is an enormous amount of evidence for evolution.

Addressing the rest of the nonsense in this piece would make my response even longer and you can discuss that in the comments. Everyone have a good time, regardless of whether you are or are not enjoying an intimate relationship.

Here’s a question from our friend Jim Wilson:

Most people of faith will tell you their God exists, period!  That leaves me highly skeptical of any of their many claims of absolute certainty.  It seems to me our knowledge is limited by the best available evidence, and it is always changing.  As such, I find ‘absolute certainty’ a useless concept for all practical purposes.

Religious people tend not to accept this, and hold claims of absolute certainty in very high regard even when their claims are based on flimsy evidence. Often vague feelings, intuitions and completely subjective experiences are apparently more than enough to know beyond any reasonable doubt their God exists. Any claim based on a subjective experience is irrational. This phenomena has been reinforced over and over again, by childhood indoctrination and tradition. It is the basis for understanding ‘meme’s.

I have heard similar stories from Christians, Muslims and Hindus about vague experiences that a God is communicating with them; often calling them to engage in some sort of behavior or lifestyle change.  The stories are almost interchangeable, but you will never see a Christian or Hindu accept a Muslim’s story of God’s subtle communication with the Muslim as true, and vice versa. When Christians tell me they have experienced God’s presence, I tell them about a Hindu friend who says the same thing about the Elephant headed God Ganesha and I ask why I should consider the Hindu’s experience any more or less reliable than theirs? It seems stories one would dismiss in other religions are perfectly reasonable to believe when they come from your own.

The hardest thing for me is when religious people invoke faith to justify their claims of absolute certainty of God. Faith is not necessary to know something is true. Faith is what you adduce when you want to believe something but cannot justify it or back it up with facts.  It’s a ‘feeling’ often followed with “I can’t explain it, I just know”. It is the one way to rule out ever discovering that you are in error. It disgusts me when faith is seen as virtue in today’s scientific and technologically advanced society. I am in favor of doing the opposite. I am and others should be willing to admit we might be wrong about any of our most cherished beliefs. I challenge all of our readers to go out and find the most well written piece you can that argues against a position you hold important. If you cannot respond to its arguments perhaps you should withhold your belief.

So my question for believers is:

What evidence would need to be presented for you to acknowledge that you have been mistaken about all or some of your religious beliefs? What would it take to bring you to a position of uncertainty?

For some it might be proof of evolution, or evidence that the world is an too unjust a place to be governed by the omni-benevolent being.  For others it may be pointing to inaccurate statements or contradictions in one’s holy book or pointing out places where the God in your holy book does highly immoral things like condone mass-murder or slavery. I’ll ask again; what would it take for you to take the high road and say, “I could be wrong”?