Jim Wilson continues his views on Thomas Jefferson:

Thomas Jefferson was a complex individual, who held many unconventional viewpoints and was quite radical in his day. This included some radical ideas in both the areas of government and religion. One of the most famous examples of this is the following and often quoted statement from the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The notion of rights from a creator is not “self-evident.” There is no universal belief in “the creator” and the concept of “unalienable rights.” Some Americans like to think the passage is an endorsement of their god despite Jefferson’s criticism of the Christian God (see part 1). Some claim that it is a sign that the founders favored some sort of theocracy which is a proposal that Jefferson fought in his day.

Recognizing that the Declaration of Independence was first and foremost a collection of grievances designed to justify the thirteen colonies’ rejection of British rule the above passage was a philosophical short cut to introduce the type of rights Jefferson favored. After all, it would probably have made for a less powerful and much lengthier piece had the declaration included a more thorough philosophical account of rights. By stating that rights were granted by a creator, Jefferson was able to keep this part of the argument brief and go straight to his grievances with the British Empire.

Most evidence indicates Jefferson did not believe in a god which took an interest in human affairs.  There is no evidence that humans have a creator. There is no evidence that a creator is concerned about human affairs let alone endows rights upon us.

Furthermore, despite Jefferson’s claim to the contrary the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are anything but inalienable. The history of humanity is filled with cases of people being robbed of their lives, liberty, and ability to pursue happiness by individuals and governments. A good case could be made that Jefferson was saying these rights should be inalienable. This seems likely but it would be a huge mistake for him to say that they are inalienable if he meant that they should be. A man of his brilliance should not make such a sloppy mistake of confusing “is” with “ought” especially if he is going to make the claim that such a thing is self-evidently true.

In reality, our rights are anything but God given. For thousands of years the rights we now recognize were violated by murderers, slavery, genocides, tribal warfare, and absolutist states. Often gods were evoked to justify these inhumanities. Knowing this it would be absurd to say that a god gave Americans the rights we have while denying them to countless others in different times and places.

Rights are purely social constructions that cannot exist without some sort of system to enforce them whether that system is a state or a system of social norms and public pressure. In practice, we have rights only because there is a mechanism for enforcing them. In other words, you have rights only because others recognize the existence of such rights. They are not part of one’s nature nor are they handed down by a god or the universe. They are fragile social arrangements that are always under the threat of erosion. They are not natural in any meaningful sense of the word since they are very much a product of humans and constantly need to be enforced. Contrast this with actual natural laws such as gravity which needs no enforcing and exist whether people recognize them or not.

Knowing that our rights are mere fragile social institutions should be reason to value them more and be willing to fight for their protection. The American Revolution was ultimately about rights. Of course, our understanding of the rights we should and should not recognize has evolved since then. We no longer recognize the right to own slaves, for example.

The American Revolution was laudable but failed to abolish slavery. George Carlin presented a more accurate view of the nature of rights when he discussed the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II:

“Just when these American citizens needed their rights the most…their government took them away and rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country is a bill of TEMPORARY privileges.”

“And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva, in the brain of Jupiter.”-Thomas Jefferson

The Declaration of Independence is largely a rhetorical document. It has no legal standing. It was created to list specific complaints and formally explains why the continental congress chose to declare the American colonies independent from colonial rule. Since the time of the revolution, it has been a document with no legal authority. However, believers still like to use it to argue that this country was somehow founded upon their faith. Specifically they gravitate towards the line:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Thomas Jefferson did not believe in the Christian God, but rather something closer to a deistic or Unitarian God with only limited intervention in human affairs. Thomas Jefferson was interested in Christianity and identified himself as Christian in the sense that he viewed Jesus of Nazareth as an important moral philosopher but not a son of God or any kind of supernatural being. He believed that Jesus never claimed to be God. Jefferson made this known by creating an alternative version of the Christian Gospels with all references to Jesus’s miracles, divinity, and resurrection removed. In a letter to Joseph Priestly, Jefferson discusses his idea of stripping Jesus’s teachings down to “principles of a pure Deism”. He further elaborates on this concept in a letter to John Adams from 1817 stating:

“The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ leveled to every understanding and too plain to need explanation, saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, Materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power, and preeminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them: and for this obvious reason that nonsense can never be explained.”

Overall he was very critical of established organized religion and the priestly classes arguing: “History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government” in a letter to Alexander Von Humboldt in 1813 and that “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”

However, he found value in religious teachings. He was known to attend various church services though there is no evidence that he was a confirmed member or communicant of any. He also apparently sponsored the building of some churches and other religious activity though refused to be a Godfather to the children of Anglican friends because of his rejection of their faith.

Political opponents labeled him “infidel” and “howling atheist” because he rejected conventional Christianity. Unsurprisingly being heterodox religionist, Jefferson was a major force for keeping church and state separate, which he believed to be encoded in the First Amendment. He believed that:

“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg”

And that:

If anything pass in a religious meeting seditiously and contrary to the public peace, let it be punished in the same manner and no otherwise as it had happened in a fair or market.

He is of course also, the man who first mentioned the famous wall of separation in his letter to the Danbury Baptist Association which stated:

I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between church and State.

His dedication to religious freedom and the right to be heterodox did much to make the US as free a country as it is. Jefferson was an incredible person, with whom much can be learned from.  However, he did own slaves but was apparently conflicted on the institution of slavery.  Jefferson’s statement and the concept of natural or God given rights will be discussed further in my follow-up to this piece. (End of Part I)

Freedom of expression is paramount in this country and according to Alan Dershowitz, “The best answer to bad speech is good speech.” Why should we give away the freedom of speech of our citizens because it offends Muslims to the point of rioting? This is the last option to consider and those that suggest such a thing should be shunned.

Beyond that, there is a very practical lesson about submitting to the unreasonable demands. In 1795 the United States paid close to a million dollars, ship store, and a frigate to the Dey of Algiers as ransom for 115 sailors taken by pirates. That stopped in 1801 when Thomas Jefferson refused to pay tribute to the Barbary Coast states. Our aggressive stance immediately broke the back of the Barbary Coast alliances. The demands for tribute almost stopped completely when we stopped acceding to their demands.

Before we can completely capture the high ground in this situation, however, we must step back and look at our own ability to get annoyed and derive irrational anger over what others are doing. While we’re not rioting, there are those that are outraged at the Mormon Church for virtually baptizing dead people. These baptisms are done by proxy. They’re done in private and even Atheists get incensed at the idea. Why? If the Mormons want to baptize every dead person on the planet, does it matter? If they want to go to their favorite grotto and dunk themselves in a ritual that has significance only to them, why should we care? Let’s break it down: Do the dead people care? No! They’re dead. If you didn’t know about it would you care? Of course not! If you didn’t know about it you couldn’t care. So offense only happens when one finds out that someone is doing a dumb ritual that doesn’t mean anything to you and mentioning a dead person you might know. Perhaps we should save our ire for those that leak the information. Baptizing dead people is a foolish endeavor that actually does nothing. There is another way to look at it. One more Mormon dunking themselves in the name of a dead person is one less knocking on my door.

We can stop most of these irrational responses if we stop trying to ascribe negative motivations of others. Follow the advice of the British playwright James M. Barrie, “Never ascribe to an opponent motives meaner than your own.” I’m sure that the producers of the Innocence of Muslims did not intend on creating riots just as the Mormons baptizing dead people are not trying to purposely upset the living relatives.

Cal Benjamin in his presentation varied the analysis to predict the probability that an intelligent space faring civilization was colonizing the planet we call Earth. His analysis resembled the Drake Equation but had a few more considerations to consider. In the Drake equation, it was enough for a civilization to exist and have enough technology to communicate with us. The Drake equation is at best an estimate and there are quite a few unknowns in the chain of probabilities. We continue to fine tune it as more information becomes available but current estimates for the number of intelligent civilizations is between one thousand and one hundred million. That’s quite a range. The rather large number of predicted intelligent civilizations led Enrico to ask way back in 1950, “Where are they?” In other words, “If there are so many intelligent technically advanced civilizations, why haven’t they contacted us?” This idea has become known as Fermi’s Paradox.

Apparently, there were a couple of Mulders at the meeting that really wanted to believe and were uncomfortable with a focused look that the underlying probability of space aliens visiting the planet. To them a focused analysis is the equivalent of being cynical and closed minded. However the alternate view is that if we can apply what we know from our earthly experience to what it would take to have a space faring species visit us from light years away, we can virtually eliminate space aliens as a possible answer when we see something in the sky that we don’t understand. This is a far more efficient approach than addressing each and every unexplained sighting on the internet. That is not to say that there are no “real” UFO sighting but when you hear the sound of stampeding hooves, your first inclination is to say horses not zebras.

The important lesson here is that Skepticism doesn’t always lead to the answer we want. Evidence, analysis, and critical thinking can possibly change an outcome but simply saying that someone is closed minded and cynical because they’ve come to a different conclusion is not a proper application of Skepticism.

Apostles’ Creed:

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven  and earth; and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was  conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered  under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried. He descended into hell; the third day he arose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven, sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. Amen.

The above is the version of the Apostle’s Creed that I found in Dr. Stephen Uhl’s book, Out of God’s Closet. Dr. Uhl is a former priest and has probably recited the creed many times. In fact, he includes it in his instructions on how to pray the Rosary. I’ve been away from the Catholic religion for quite a few years and I’m not familiar with how often the Rosary is performed. The Apostles’ Creed is repeated every time someone prays the Rosary.

Then there’s the Catholic version of the Nicene Creed:

I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; through him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried, and rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets. I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. I confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.

It’s the same thing with a bit more flourish. I remember repeating this at mass every Sunday, or on Saturday if I had something to do on Sunday and wanted to get church out of the way by attending the Saturday afternoon mass.

What’s significant about these creeds is that it’s a bit like the sign at the front of the amusement park ride that says, “You must be at least this high to enter.” You may believe a lot of stuff but these creeds represent a minimum set. They both have the same elements—one creator God, Jesus Christ his son, the Holy Ghost (or Spirit if you’d prefer) that makes everything happen. The creeds say you believe a virgin can be a mother. They’re pretty specific about the Roman Prefect named Pontius Pilate who judged Jesus and had him tortured to death on a cross. The creed says you have to believe that a dead human after being buried rose up from the dead. He then flew (ascended) to heaven where he’s hanging out waiting to come back and judge everyone dead or not. By the way, you’re also agreeing to believe in the Church, and that a ritual baptism can eradicate sins you didn’t commit in the first place. The creed says you’ll have the ability to reclaim a living body after death (resurrection of the body), and that there’s an infinite afterlife (life everlasting).

There’s a lot of unbelievable stuff in those creeds. I never really, I mean REALLY, thought about it when I was repeating this stuff by rote memory. I knew all the words but didn’t grok the meaning. Not really.

There was a theme in some of the jokes that Gallagher used to tell. It involved looking at things with “new eyes.” Then he’d produce some huge comical glasses and point out something that you’ve seen a million times but never really looked at. For example he said cowboys shouldn’t be hitting their cattle with belts to get them to do as they say. They should just put these glasses on the cows and show them the belt and say, “This belt is made of cow.”

So the next time you repeat the Apostles’ or Nicene Creed, put on some “new eyes” and actually think about what you’re agreeing to. Forget the indoctrination for just a bit and open that reason proof container your faith sits in. Go down the list one by one and ask yourself, does this really make sense? You can skip past the creator God part, if you’d like, and start at the virgin birth claim. Don’t be afraid to compare the claims against your experience and understanding of science…

Richard Dawkins photo by David Shankbone

Today, it is my pleasure to introduce a new contributor to the FreeThought Arizona blog, Ashley Thomas:

“What if You’re Wrong?”

“You know what it’s like not to believe in a particular faith because you’re not a Muslim, you’re not a Hindu. Why aren’t you a Hindu? Because you happen to have been brought up in America, and not in India…There is no reason to pick on the Judeo-Christian God, by which in the sheerest accident you happen to have been brought up and ask me the question ‘what if I’m wrong?’”

                                                                        –Richard Dawkins

In the above quote, Dawkins answers a question from a young Christian, who asked him, essentially, “what if you’re wrong about the non-existence of God?” This is a common question, often posed by Christians or other believers in hellfire, and it is aimed at atheists, agnostics, and just about anyone who doubts the verity of the questioner’s religious text of choice. Dawkins turns this question on its head, asking in return what evidence the young Christian can provide that the Abrahamic God is the true and only celestial governor. How can she be certain that the truth is found in the Bible, and not one of the many other religious texts?

Dawkins argument is spot-on. To elaborate, let us consider a hypothetical situation: In some far-away place, in a time long before the modern age, a man is walking home along a cobble street. He passes a cart where a sooth-teller is selling trinkets and potions.

To add some context, lets say that this man lives in a village where people often go to the soothsayer for advice. Not having access to the Internet or a working knowledge of the scientific method, the villagers aren’t able to grasp that the medium is a phony – she can’t really see into the future, she has no more psychic ability than a rock. Still, he is more than willing to accept money and pretend that the “spirits” talk to him.

A few of the older folks of the village begin to suspect something is rotten about this guy. To them, this supposed psychic seems awfully well-to-do and, well, no one can confirm that his predictions actually come true. They’ve decided to take a wait-and-see approach, and they don’t visit him anymore. As a result, business has been slow in the ESP industry.

Anyway, so this man is walking along, and the psychic scares him out of his boots when he yells:

“Oh, I sense bad things in your future!”

And the man says, “What is it? What do you see?”

“In the next month, your house will catch fire, and your dog will run away.”

“Oh dear, how do you know that?”

“The spirits told me.”

“Well, I don’t want that to happen, is there anything I can do about it?”

“No, I’m afraid it is your destiny, and there’s no changing destiny. Ah, but wait! I just thought of something…”

The psychic digs around in his bag and produces a small bottle filled with some unidentifiable liquid. “If you drink this, hop up-and-down three times, and stick out your tongue, you just might – just might – avoid disaster. For you, its only 5 dollars.”

The man is unsure. He doesn’t have any evidence that this guy’s prediction is wrong, but neither does he know that he is right. He’s a naturally skeptical person, so he’s pretty sure that this fellow is fabricating the whole fire-and-dog story just to get his money. But, then again, he thinks to himself, “But what if I’m wrong? What if he really can see spirits? I don’t want my house to burn down…and it’s only 5 dollars…”

Soon, word gets ‘round that the psychic not only reveals the secrets of the spirit world, but he prevents disaster as well. At least 5 people have bought his magic potion, and not a one of them has died yet! It’s been a tough year, and the villagers want desperately for better luck. The soothsaying business is booming again.

This is a common quirk of the human psyche. We are more than willing to loosen our grip on reality for the sake of some supposed measure of safety. The only thing that has changed since the time of the village medium is that nowadays we do so even in the face of abundant scientific evidence – evidence that casts doubt on the verity of paranormal phenomena.

For a modern example, recall those chain emails that were common in the early days of the Internet, emails with titles like: “Read and forward or suffer a horrible fate.” There were thousands of people who fell for this trick and sent me emails claiming that if you didn’t forward the email to 20 of your friends something bad would happen to you. The recipients had no evidence, apart from the claims in the messages themselves, that there truly was a “curse.” In fact, scientific inquiry has failed to produce any evidence that “curses” and “luck” have any real effect. Yet thousands of people forwarded these bizarre messages anyway. It’s easy to just make scary stuff up, convince people it’s real, and compel them to act on superstition. It’s the oldest trick in the book. Actually, it is literally the oldest trick in a certain book. In Genesis, God warns Adam and Eve that if they eat a certain fruit they will die. Yet when they disobey god and eat the fruit, they survive.

For Christians, hell is the scary thing that brings believers to the pews each Sunday. As such, it is described as exceptionally cruel and interminable. Heaven, on the other hand, is that blissful place where believers live in harmony for eternity, as a reward for praying to Jesus. If the depictions of Heaven and Hell are not cartoonish enough to dismiss them as fabrications, consider the rules of entry for each realm: According to most Christians, the only rigid requirement for entry into heaven is an abiding faith in Jesus and God. You can commit almost any other crime – murder, adultery, theft – and you will be forgiven as long as you repent and accept Jesus as your savior. The crimes that are guaranteed to land you in hell, on the other hand, include skepticism toward Christianity and faith in a non-Christian belief system.

This seems a bit suspicious, don’t you think? The only unforgivable sinners are the ones who don’t come to church, don’t fill up the church coffers, and don’t spread the word to nonbelievers. These disobedient “children of god” are the ones who refuse to buy the magic potion, the ones who refuse to forward the chain mail, and the ones who dare to point out that their house didn’t burn down and their dog didn’t run away.

If your religion or superstition requires belief, obedience, or money in exchange for some promised eternal reward, then you should recognize this tactic for what it is: a pyramid scheme based on fear and emotional coercion.

Of course, on the other hand, what if I’m wrong?

There’s a kind of notion that everyone’s opinion is equally valid. My arse! A bloke who’s been a professor of dentistry for 40 years doesn’t have a debate with some idjit who removes his teeth with string and a door! Dara O’Briain

The topics of Skeptics Wednesday are chosen from things I see around me. This fallacy was pointed out to me by one of the members of the Skeptics of Tucson. Just after the meeting, one of the new attendees suggested that she enjoyed the meeting but she felt that as Skeptics we shouldn’t take positions on things. I pointed out that just because Skeptics question everything, that doesn’t mean they can’t take an informed position on issues. She explained that she’s a retired journalist and said something about considering both sides of the issue…I couldn’t dwell on the conversation because I was packing up the equipment and getting ready to clear the room. The conversation continued and it turns out she was looking for equal consideration of opposing views to some of the subjects covered. This may be called the “Fairness Fallacy” in some circles but the Fairness Fallacy has been adopted to refer to a fallacy in which people assume that life is fair…and it isn’t.

From RationalWiki:

The balance fallacy, also known as false balance,occurs when two sides of an argument are assumed to have equal value regardless of their respective merits.

Journalists easily fall into this fallacy and we see it all the time but it may be a hard fallacy to avoid. It requires us to make a judgment before delivering a case or at least it requires that we give more information than just presenting the two sides. Confirmation bias can really screw this up too. If I’m not “fair” in my research, then I can, in the name of avoiding the “Balance Fallacy” present information that is heavily weighted according to my bias.

Skepticism is HARD!

The RationalWIKI article gives examples of the “Balance Fallacy:”

Teaching the controversy. An example of the balance fallacy is found in the Discovery Institute‘s campaign for American schools to “teach the controversy” in science lessons, giving equal weight to the theory of evolution and intelligent design criticisms of it, although these criticisms are reliant on creationist religious views overwhelmingly discredited within the scientific community.

Medicine. Hard cold evidence and the majority of doctors agree that vaccines do not cause autism but the media often give 50:50 airtime to the mainstream view and doctors who say otherwise. This is great for selling newsprint but it’s not doing humanity any good. Andrew Wakefield is one greedy, discredited doctor but in the news he’s on equal footing with almost every other doctor in his field and essentially the entire medical community. It’s not just that though. An emotional appeal such as “mommy sense” plays better in the news than clinical trials and scientific consensus. Once a newsman can excite his readers through raw emotion, the facts and figures don’t stand a chance. A string of meaningless anecdotes then caries the same weight as several lifetime’s worth of careful scientific study.

The balance fallacy is everywhere. To be fair, the newsmen and women believe that this is the way to go because they are often reporting on things they really don’t know about. It’s up to us as media consumers to recognize the fallacies and biases. I think the quote by Dara O’Briain summarizes the situation nicely but if you have six minutes check out this more complete standup routine on the subject.