Here’s a piece from a new contributor, Jim Wilson:

The Internet is full of responses and commentary on Rick Perry’s latest and desperate attempt to bring the country’s Christo-fascist to aid his failing run for the presidency. This is the “Strong” TV spot that everyone seems to be talking about. Here Perry is seen in a jacket that many have already pointed out matches one worn in Brokeback Mountain, and he makes his plea to the nation’s religious zealots and bigots.

Here is my breakdown of his message:

“I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian”

Why would he be? It strikes me that he’s subtly playing into this notion that Christians are somehow a persecuted people in this country, despite the fact that every presidential candidate to be viable has to play up their Christian credentials and nearly all members of both houses of congress identify themselves as part of this faith. Maybe I’m just being cynical here, but I am really tired of Christian zealots in government playing the victim card when it seems they cannot make the state endorse their religion.

“but you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday”

Let’s face it, a lot of the Christians in this country are pretty luke-warm.

“to know there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.”

First, how are these two things even related, other than that both are concerns expressed by religious zealots and bigots? There is no good reason why one’s sexual orientation should disqualify one from serving in the military. What century is this, people? I hate this backwards, reactionary stuff. Also, he is wrong, your kids can openly celebrate Christmas and pray in school. Perry’s just bitter because he can no longer force other people’s kids to do these things through the power of the government. Guess what Perry, there are Non-Christian tax-payers too, and we don’t need your dogma shoved down our kid’s throat, you authoritarian troll.

“As President, I’ll end Obama’s war on religion.”

What war on religion? President Obama has frequently flaunted his Chrisitianity at many completely inappropriate times. He has not gotten rid of President Bush’s office of Faith Based Initiatives, whose primary purpose has been to funnel government money to explicitly religious organizations. Furthermore, he gave the completely inappropriate and unconstitutional National Day of Prayer his full endorsement. Once again I see this as more playing of the victim card. Perry’s evangelical base feel victimized if one of their own is not in office imposing their will on everyone else and they will happily declare it a war on religion.

“And I’ll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage.”

This is an appeal to those religionists who live in an alternate reality, where this country was supposedly founded on Christian principles. This could not be further from the truth. The founding fathers were largely deists, who were inspired by the type of enlightenment values that arose when people started questioning the authority of the church and the divine rights of kings. There is nothing in the US constitution indicating it is based on Christianity, nothing in the bible prescribing anything like our system of government and the founding fathers explicitly rejected the claim that this is a “Christian Nation” in the Treaty of Tripoli.

“Faith made America strong. It can make her strong again.”

Religious faith, in my opinion, has held America back. Christian traditionalists have been on the wrong side of every social issue since slavery, and still are. Furthermore, faith is a willingnes to believe, in the absence of evidence or in spite of evidence to the contrary, and nothing is a better way to be consistently wrong in your view of reality.

“I’m Rick Perry and I approve this message.”

& I have now lost whatever little respect I had for you!! Seriously, why do we elect these people??

Jim Wilson

Here’s the latest from Jim Wilson:

I have been involved with atheist, secularist and skeptics organizations for a considerable amount of time and being involved has done a lot for me on a personal level.  For starters it introduced me to many ideas, activities and wonderful people who later became friends.  I know it is not for everyone but I feel there are people who really don’t understand how much an atheist group can offer.  The movement allows me to meet people from a wide variety of backgrounds.  I have even developed relationships with some exceptional freethinking women.  Atheists attract other atheists who are represented by a variety of ages, lifestyles as well as philosophical and political philosophies.  For me, discussing these differences has been a source of enjoyment and highly informative.  None of this should come as a surprise, since the only things that unite us are a lack of religious beliefs, a general pro-science attitude and a desire to see our government not over run by religious zealots.

With this in mind, the general sense one gets coming to an atheist or secularist function is what a bunch of freakin’ white guys this is.  Often really nerdy white guys at that. If I were to attend an atheist function in a new city, I would not bet against it being a total sausage fest.   Personally, I like seeing a wide range of perspectives being brought to the table, but with that I recognize there is a huge part of the population who might not even know we exist. Our conversation would be enriched by having a wider range of perspectives, and society would be enriched if more of the general population knew about the freethought/atheists/skeptics movement and what motivates us.    Involvement is a great way to spread our values and encourage activism, and I fear that if our message is confined largely to and associated with upper middle class white men, it’s a problem.  I see a need to reach out more to people who are not as interested in particle physics and lord of the rings but like to discuss the complexity of religion, social issues and society at large.

It’s not just gatherings and functions either.  White males are far more likely to identify as atheist and support secularist causes, than members of racial minorities and women.  As a young white guy, I do not think I can speculate too much about why this is, but I encourage our readers to explain this and what can be done to appeal to a larger segment of the general population.  One explanation is that people who are already part of one minority group are not in a hurry to identify with another one, especially one as heavily demonized and vilified as atheists.

It may appear to some, that leading icons of the movement are people like Dawkins and Hitchens who are both not only educated white guys, but highly abrasive.  It seems likely to me that a lot of people have trouble relating to prominent people like them; perhaps some would prefer Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Julia Sweeney.  In many minority communities as well as working class communities, churches play a large role as sources of social support and self-help.  In addition I will readily acknowledge churches serve as part of the culture in many communities.  I see this as a positive thing and I see a need for this role to be performed by secular organizations in general.  Religious organizations are often willing to do a lot for people but ask for their souls in return (and likely a 10th of their income).

All that said, I see hope knowing my generation is one of the most atheistic this country has had in a long time. No doubt, the Internet has been a valuable tool in getting people to question all sorts of beliefs and assumptions.  While more people are becoming involved, I wanted to take this time to invite everyone reading this to reflect on the current state of affairs and consider joining us and know we won’t ask for your soul.

—

To that end – the next meeting of Freethought Arizona will be this coming Sunday, December 11th at 10am in Duvall Auditorium at University Medical Center. I will post more details on Friday, but I echo Dave’s invitation to join us and hope to see lots of you there!

Atheists take a lot of guff from religious people for our ”materialism.” But what does that mean?

Some people treat materialism as a cartoonishly simple (and thus easy to dismiss) lifestyle: According to this view, atheists think that nothing in life matters beyond personally experiencing material pleasures and accumulating money and physical goods. Equating to hedonism and greed, this evil and supposedly rampant form of materialism is condemned as a consequence of atheism and secularism, especially during the holidays. People posit this caricature materialism as the only alternative to believing in gods, spirits, miracles, and other assorted religious nonsense.

Are there atheists who are nothing more than greedy hedonists? Yes, but in my experience they are as rare in atheist circles as they are in society in general. Which is to say, there are more of them than there should be because that’s a bad way to live – but there’s no reason to suspect that atheism is the cause of it.

Once we get past the cartoon caricature of materialism, we are left to consider a more serious definition. Here’s mine: The universe is made up of physical matter and energy, and the physical matter and energy interact according to laws, and nothing exists outside of the universe*. By this definition of materialism, there is nothing “outside” or “beyond” physical matter and energy and there are no “miracles” or exceptions to the laws by which matter and energy interact. Materialism by this general definition is accepted by every atheist that I know who has ever expressed an opinion about it. Materialism by this definition is also generally rejected by religionists, who believe in something “outside” or “beyond” the physical universe, and many of them also believe that whatever is “outside” or “beyond” also sometimes intervenes to create “miracles” - exceptions to the physical laws.

Thus, this definition of materialism is a good means of separating what atheists tend to believe about the world from what religious people believe. It still doesn’t address causality: does atheism cause materialism, or does materialism cause atheism, or is there some other cause for both? Let’s hold that question for a future discussion, as well as the aforementioned disagreement between religionists and atheists over whether materialism is true. For the sake of this discussion, let’s presume that the serious kind of materialism is true.

Unlike the cartoonish definition which describes an entife lifestyle, the serious definition of materialism still leaves us with important questions about life, meaning, morality, purpose, etc. The discussion of free will that Tip and I had uncovered what seems to me to be one rather important distinction: given the definition of materialism above, are the fundamental interactions of matter and energy the only things that matter and thus are “real”?

From comments on previous discussions, I gather that some people have a hard time even fully grasping this question. This may be because of the baggage and emotional weight applied to concepts like consciousness and free will. So I’ll try another example, one which should avoid triggering anyone’s emotions – either pro or con:

Consider a fair dice: six sides, equally weighted on each side. Consider throwing that dice onto a table in a game of chance, where you win if a “1″ comes up. You shake the dice in your hand, throw it onto the table with sufficient force and angle that it bounces off a barrier at the end of the table before coming to rest with one of the six sides facing up.

A non-materialist might believe that praying to a god or summoning a spirit could cause the “1″ to come up when it otherwise wouldn’t. Or perhaps they might believe they could use telekinesis or some other supernatural power of their own to make the “1″ come up when it otherwise wouldn’t. All such claims are rejected by materialists, and we need not concern ourselves with them further here.

Given the stipulation against any supernatural involvement, the question that arises for materialists concerns whether or not the number that comes up on the dice is “random”. At the level of forces, matter, and energy, the number that will turn up on the dice throw is completely determined the moment the dice leaves your hand, by the inertia and angle of the throw, the physical size and shape and surface characteristics of the table, gravity, air, etc. That’s not too difficult to conceive once you accept materialism. But wait - the force you apply and the angle you throw the dice at are also completely determined by your muscles and signals from your brain, which are completely determined by their physical characteristics and the state of your brain, and so on. Therefore at the level of elementary forces, matter, and energy, the number the dice is going to come up was completely determined not only at the time the dice left your hand, but before you even walked into the room.

If we accept all that as true, then does it make any sense to characterize the number that comes up on the dice roll as “random”? Isn’t the idea that the dice roll is ”random” just an illusion, if the number that was going to come up on the dice was completely determined before you even walked into the room?

David Deutsch, a practicing scientist (physicist), argues that concepts at an explanatory level above that of elementary particles and forces are both real and compatible with the underlying deterministic reality of those same particles and forces. I refer anyone who is interested in what Deutsch has to say on this topic to the chapter titled “The Reality of Abstractions” in Deutsch’s recent book, The Beginning of Infinity.  Dr. Deutsch doesn’t use the example of dice rolls, but I would characterize the randomness of such rolls as an emergent property of the dice and the method of rolling it, in the same way that Deutsch discusses other emergent properties.

Not to put words in Tip’s or anyone else’s mouth, but some materialists might counter that the “randomness” in the case of the dice roll is not an emergent property, and it’s not real; it’s just another word for “complexity”. They would say, the dice’s behavior is too complex for us to predict, so we perceive it as random and we call it random but that randomness is an illusion. The fact that the dice’s behavior is complex is true as far as it goes, but it’s also missing something important. A dog’s behavior or a human’s behavior may also be too complex for us to predict, but such behavior is not usually characterized as “random”.

The argument I think that Deutsch makes, and that I’m inclined to agree with, is twofold:

The first part is that abstract concepts about emergent properties like “randomness” in the case of the dice roll, have greater explanatory power than that of generic terms like “complexity”. Meaning: Saying that the outcome of a dice roll is “random” can tell us things about real events in the real material world that merely saying the outcome is “complex” does not. A human being generating numbers between 1 and 6 as they pop into his head cannot be substituted for a fair dice roll, even though either may be accurately characterized as both determined and too complex for someone else to predict. Why? The only useful explanations are of the form of “because the human is not random, but the fair dice roll is random.”

The second and in my view more important part of Deutsch’s argument is that we must regard emergent properties with explanatory power in the real world - like ”random” dice throws - as real, in the same way that forces, particles, and energies referred to by fully reductive explanations are real. ”Random” explains certain real events in the real world – in this case, real dice throws – better than any other explanation including that of particles and forces. Therefore, the randomness is real rather than illusionary. Meaning: If I operate a casino honestly, then apart from insuring the dice and the methods used to roll them are fair, I must treat all dice rolls as not just apparently random but as really, truly, random. I cannot increase my casino’s profits by treating the randomness of dice throws as an illusion and, say, trying to figure out a way to discourage or refuse entry to those customers who are predetermined to make winning dice throws. If an atheist materialist philosopher walks into my casino, neither he nor I can benefit in any way from treating his dice rolls as having been determined before he walked in the door, even though at the level of elementary particles and forces they were determined. This also means that while the explanation for dice roll outcomes at both the abstract level and at the level of particles and forces are true, the particles and forces explanation *is not useful* in the context of running a casino, whereas the explanation using the emergent property “random” *is useful* in that context.

So what say you, fellow materialist atheists, to this argument? Must one believe in some kind of “magic” (if so, what kind?) in order to treat a fair dice roll as being really, actually random rather than as only having the illusion of randomness? Or is Dr. Deutsch on to something with his argument that emergent properties with explanatory power are themselves real?

Those who believe in supernatural forces like spirits and sky fairies may also comment, but I’d appreciate if for the purposes of this discussion you consider only natural factors.

* I use “universe” here in the broadest sense of the word – for example, it would include all worlds in the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics.

The internet is filled with hoaxes, but in addition to being false the one I received a few days ago had the added problem of being openly bigoted and hostile towards a particular group of people of which I’m a member: atheists. For those not familiar with the “Atheist Holy Day” hoax, you can read about it here:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/atheist.asp

This was not the first time a particular individual, who has known for a couple of decades that I’m an atheist, had forwarded this particular hoax to me along with all of her friends and family. When she did it a couple of years ago, I’d merely replied that it was a hoax or a bigoted joke, and that such things are not generally polite to forward around. But when she did it again, with the *exact same hoax*, I held nothing back. Unlike her hoax forward, my reply was completely original, which somehow feels “meaner” than just forwarding someone else’s work. Mean or not, it was the right thing to do.

Falling for hoaxes seems to be a recurring pattern among people who take pride in calling themselves “believers” and denying the capacities of their own minds with catch phrases like “lean not on your own understanding.” But when someone has been warned once that something is not only false but in poor taste, and then they choose to pass it around again, there’s simply no excuse.

One of the other people she copied (a Christian, but one who knew me enough to know that I wasn’t going to take this lying down) asked me what positive purpose it would serve for me to respond. And that’s where this gets interesting and relevant beyond my immediate circle of friends and family.

Christians act all persescuted whenever someone says “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” or insists that the Governor’s duties do not include praying on the job. These are not persecutions.

Yet it’s considered culturally acceptable to make stuff up about atheists, call us fools, etc. and forward it around even when you *know* it’s false. Worse yet, the same culture finds it acceptable to exclude atheists from otherwise non-religious, open activities. That’s not even considered culturally acceptable against muslims – and some of them flew freakin’ planes into buildings and committed mass murder against thousands of Americans in the name of their religion! Atheists have never done anything like that in the name of atheism, yet we are targeted in a way that is culturally unacceptable to do to anyone else based on religious opinions.

I make my decisions about what to believe based on what I think is right, not what other people think or do. I’ve always been that way, and some jokes or the governor’s prayer or “atheists not welcome here” clubs aren’t going to change my mind. But I also know that there are people, most people in fact, who lack the intestinal fortitude to go against the ideas of a crowd or a culture. For that reason, it is important that our culture supports people investigating religious matters on their own, making up their own minds about them and not being pressured to reach the same conclusions as “everyone else”. The sum total of culturally acceptable religious investigation must not be limited to “pick a God…any God.” Atheism is an acceptable choice too.

You may think this cultural stuff doesn’t matter enough to upset a friend or a family member over. But it does matter, and it’s time that we all recognize it and call it out whenever and wherever we see it.

My children would really like to join the Boy Scouts. They’re the right age, they’re interested in the activities and could really benefit from them. There’s really no other group that does what the Boy Scouts does – at least locally in Tucson. But because of cultural attitudes like the one that prompted the hoax and the individual who forwarded it, my children would have to *lie* in order to be let into the Boy Scouts.

That’s right: You can be a radical Islamist who cheers 9/11 and join the Boy Scouts. You can believe all manner of things even some mainstream Christians consider weird, like scientology, mormonism, etc. and be a Boy Scout. You can be a pagan who worships Gaia and be a Boy Scout. You can worship Zeus and be a Boy Scout. But you can’t be an atheist and be a Boy Scout – at least not unless you are also willing to lie and say that you believe in at least some kind of God. And while we’ve brought our kids up with the knowledge that they’re free to believe or not believe whatever they think is right, we’ve also given them enough moral compass to know that lieing about it is not acceptable. So they’re locked out of something that kids with any other belief system can participate in. That’s a tragedy.

So when someone mentions atheism in a false, derogatory way I cannot just let it pass, or else I cede our culture to become even more of one in which everyone is presumed believe in some kind of fantastical being (except for “fools,” of course) and it’s perfectly OK to discriminate against atheists like my sons. I don’t go out of my way to upset people, but when they go out of their way to upset me, and my children, well…sparing their feelings with milquetoast or by not responding is not high on my list of concerns.

To be clear: I am not advocating government intervention with the Boy Scouts on behalf of my children and other atheists. That’d just turn them into another group of persecuted martyrs. What I am advocating instead is a cultural shift.

It should not be culturally acceptable in 21st century America to make up insulting lies about atheists and pass them around to friends and family for a hearty guffaw. It should not be culturally acceptable in 21st century America to exclude atheists from participation in clubs and activities that are not religious in nature. Atheists, and Christians with a conscience too, need to recognize and call out these things as unacceptable whenever and wherever they occur. Every time. Even if it means feeling a little “mean”.

This post comes to us from Richard Johnson:

Religious adherents stop cold any claim that God does not exist by proclaiming that a negative cannot be proved.  Then they erroneously declare that since it can’t be proved that God does not exist, it is likely that he does exist.  I take the approach that it is HIGHLY unlikely that God exists and that it makes no sense to talk about something whose existence has a probability that is vanishingly small.  My argument follows:

An estimated 85 percent of the world’s population believes there is a supernatural being guiding us all.  This simply means that most of the world is delusional about the existence of God.

The greatest selling point for major religions is that God is the most powerful force in the world.  With all of this bristling energy, you would think that God would be like the weather, always visible and very much in your face.  Yet, to date, God has never been sighted.

Millions of people claim they have witnessed God’s presence.  Scripture offers conflicting accounts.  According to John 1:18, “No man hath seen God at any time.”  On the other hand, Exodus 33:11 notes, “And the Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as man speaketh unto a friend.”  Because no affidavits were filed, these claims are pure hearsay and inadmissible in a court of law.

How do we reconcile the world’s greatest force as ultimately elusive?  An active force disturbs its immediate environment, thus making it detectable.  An example from particle physics sheds light on the problem.

In 1947, the neutrino (“small neutral one”) was the world’s most elusive physical entity.  Physicists were puzzled by their observations in certain cases of radioactive decay.  An “energy gap” existed when they combined all the components.  To explain this missing energy, scientists proposed the existence of a new subatomic particle, the neutrino, a massless, chargeless particle that theoretically had no interaction with matter.  Such an entity, though INFERRED from observation, is virtually undetectable.

The neutrino has a lot in common with God, who is INFERRED from faith-based brain delusions.  But faith is not a phenomenon that exists outside the human mind.  For those who say they are experiencing God, there is no tangible evidence.

During the past twenty-five hundred years, what used to be a solitary religious experience – internal delusional visualization of the supernatural – has been used to elaborate religious doctrine, promoting God to an all-powerful watchdog.  Yet God is more elusive that the neutrino.

In 1953, two physicists, Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan, devised an extraordinarily difficult experiment to detect the neutrino.  Various theories predicted that the neutrino had an extremely  small probability of interacting with a proton, the nucleus of a hydrogen atom.  To attempt reaction, Reines and Cowan needed a large flow of neutrinos directed at the proton target.  They theorized that nuclear reactors would be such a source and carried out the experiment at the Savannah River Nuclear Facility in Georgia.  Reines and Cowan set up a proton target (water) in a deep well, where the experiment would be protected from interference.  The detection device was a thick bank of photomultiplier tubes that amplifies the weakest responses, which were similar to hearing a baby cry on the moon all the way from Earth.

When the equipment was set up, they started the neutrino flow from the reactor.  For months, Reines and Cowan collected data to find a characteristic two-flash signal from the photomultiplier tubes, the unique fingerprint expected from the neutrino-proton interaction.  Weary, the physicists were close to abandoning the project when the characteristic signature signals appeared.  They repeated their observations in subsequent modifications of the experiment.  Currently, neutrinos are easily observable in experiments that have been honed to maximize effect.

God remains undetectable.  The faithful say he exists.  But isn’t it rather silly that the greatest force in the universe makes less of a mark than a neutrino, which is so passive that it can travel through one side of the earth and out the other leaving no trace.  How does such a powerful force – as God is claimed – move mountains and change the course of rivers without the ability to “lay hold of matter’?  How does God, who is less detectable than a neutrino, love us and save us from death?  Our minds are a powerful force that can wallow in self-deception.

Those who claim that God is “unknowable by human means,” or is “outside the physical universe” grasp at straws to keep their delusions alive.

For those who may have missed it, fellow atheist Tip O’Neill and I got into a fairly lengthy disagreement about free will in the comment thread of one of last week’s entries: http://tucsoncitizen.com/freethought-arizona/2011/10/26/should-we-fear-muslims/#comments

No, I’m not going to use the front page to initiate another round of debate with Tip’s position. Maybe I’ll revive that debate sometime later, after I’ve had sufficient time to more thoroughly investigate his arguments and references. Instead, I think it’s interesting to look at what we can learn from the exchange itself.

There’s quite a lot to like about this exchange. In no particular order:

• One of the best ways I’ve found to improve knowledge is by going head to head with the smartest people I can find who disagree with me about something important. It often seems that I don’t even really understand an idea until I’ve attempted to defend it against a really bright person who thinks I’m absolutely crazy to believe it. So the smarter you are and the more you disagree with me, the happier I am to have you commenting on the blog.
• The above goes double for folks like Tip, who clearly understand my two primary prerequisites for having a discussion that’s likely to be useful:
  1. Objective reality – discussions where one or both of the participants claim their own reality are very often pointless because there is no firm common ground - shared reality - upon which to settle disputes.
  2. Reason as the only path to knowledge – discussions where one of the participants thinks they can know things by faith or other forms of “just knowing” are often pointless because faith leads to the entrenchment of errors rather than their correction.
  Not every discussion that meets these two prerequisites is automatically useful, they just have a much better *chance* of being useful.
• Atheists have very divergent philosophies. This can be hard for religious people to wrap their heads around. For all their internal disagreements the major religions of the world each promote a common underlying philosophy supported by common dogma. In atheism, there are no atheist bibles, no atheist popes, no atheist priests, and no atheist heretics. This is important because apart from matters expressly concerning religion, nothing that I write, or Jim wrote, or any of our guest contributors write, should be construed to be mutually exclusive with religious belief. One need not be a libertarian, or a communist, or socialist, or whatever to free their mind from religious mysticism.
• Ideas can be criticized on the basis of several criteria, but one of the most important criticisms is that an idea requires magic (meaning something supernatural). Tip applied this criticism to the idea of free will. There is no magic, and any theory that requires magic to operate is false. The disagreement between Tip and I is not over whether or not there’s magic, but whether or not free will requires magic. This is a qualitatively different type of disagreement from the debates I’ve had with anon3 since unlike Tip, anon3 defends magic.
• It’s important to cultivate a willingness to revise one’s positions when errors are detected, coupled with a healthy skepticism about doing so. Put another way: I try to keep an open mind, but not so open that my brain falls out. This is a difficult balancing act, since in defending one’s current ideas it’s easy to come across as unwilling to change. But for lots of important ideas I hold now, there was a time when I held the opposite position. What’s ultimately important is not staking out a position and defending it from all challenges, but rather adopting a process by which errors in one’s thinking can be corrected.

A couple of things that may not have been so clear:

• It’s useful to learn by debate, to see how ideas play out in a critical environment rather than simply reading a single person’s point of view in a book. I have been using a lot of Popper and Deutsch in comments on this blog because I just encountered them this year and find their ideas intriguing. How they stand up to criticisms will be useful in making my own determination about which of their ideas I accept and which I reject.
• There’s a fine line between respecting someone’s work on its merits, and deferring to that person’s position or authority. Ideas and knowledge are what’s important, and these should be judged on their merit not their source. As animals who evolved in hierarchical societies it’s easy for people to fall into habits of letting their supposed ”betters” do their thinking for them. This seems to be a problem for both atheists and religious people alike, although only atheists have an effective tool to combat it. I’m far more interested in helping people progress beyond the impulse to defer to authority than I am in convincing them of any particular idea that I hold. By all means, recognize that you’re fallible and learn all you can from the good ideas of others, but never sacrifice your own judgment on the altar of someone else’s position,  titles, degrees, awards, or fancy speech.

Anyway, it was a great discussion and I hope we have more like it in the future.

As a reminder, Freethought Arizona will be hosting an event this Sunday at 10AM in Duvall Auditorium at University Medical Center:

Sunday, October .30

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

Parking is free in the multi-tiered visitor parking structure.

8:00-9:15 am– Cafe Inquiry. Open Forum. The hot topics of the day will be discussed. Moderator, Gil Shapiro

10-Noon: – Lecture

Update on the FFRF legal case against Governor Brewer in regard to Day of Prayer

Speaker: Marc J. Victor

Attorney Marc J. Victor of the law firm Attorney For Freedom in Chandler, Arizona will be giving a talk on the Day of Prayer Proclamation lawsuit filed by his firm against Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, with an update on the status of the lawsuit.

Upcoming FreeThought Arizona events:

November 20 – Benjamin Radford will give his reflections on a decade of paranormal investigations

December 11 – Robert Mohelnitzky: (topic to be determined)

Atheist, libertarian, and general iconoclast Penn Jillette has put out a video equating tolerance with condescension:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpNRw7snmGM

In it he states, among other things, he finds fundamentalist christians preferable to liberal christians. At least the fundamentalists will take a definite stand and tell you outright that they think you’re wrong. I’m a big advocate of tolerance, but I’m with Penn in the context in which he uses the term.

When someone advocates tolerance, there are two main possible meanings:

1. Not persecuting other people because of their ideas.
2. Not criticising other people’s ideas.

Not persecuting people is a good thing. I disagree with christianity in all its forms, but I don’t advocate that christians be denied the freedoms of thought, speech, and assembly, not to mention life, liberty, and property that we all have a right to. I am a strong defender of the idea that our society should be tolerant of atheists, christians, jews, muslims, etc. equally. Before anyone goes ballistic and calls me a hypocrit, I’m not talking about government agents in their official capacities. Governor Brewer would be no more right to proclaim an official day of atheism than an official day of prayer. But as an individual, she can believe and say whatever she wants and shouldn’t be persecuted for it.

However the other sense of the word “tolerance” – not criticizing people’s ideas - is a bad thing. That prevents individuals and society in general from learning and progressing. It morphs the necessary contest of ideas into a no winners, no losers, amorphous blob of feel-good jello. That kind of “tolerance” is condescension; it holds people back in the name of sparing their feelings, and it’s wrong.

I’ve heard people say, “It’s OK if you want to be an atheist, just don’t force it on me.” That sounds like the first meaning, like they’re saying ”don’t try to put me in jail, or kill me, or take away my property because I’m a christian.” And they’d be right if that’s what they meant. But it almost never is.

When people say, “don’t try to force your atheism on me,” what they almost always mean is “don’t criticize my religious ideas.” That’s a dangerous, harmful request. No one has a right to have their ideas shielded from criticism. And no one should want to! The truth will triumph in an open contest, and no one should seek solace in comfortable falsehoods unperturbed by well-reasoned alternatives.

Muslims are even worse than christians in this regard – the radicals of that faith will go so far as to call for the murder of people who criticize their ideas! They not only deny the second, good kind of intolerance – they use it as an excuse for the most extreme example of the first, bad kind of intolerance.

So let’s make this clear: We ought to tolerate people’s differences in belief and we shouldn’t abridge any of their rights because of those beliefs. But also, we ought to have a culture that welcomes vigorous criticism, debate, and even ridicule of ideas. We ought not be expected to tolerate bad ideas in silence.

It’s really great when people like anon3 try to come up with effective criticisms of atheism. I learn a lot from such exchanges and I hope he/she does too. When my ideas are right, I get better at defending them and I understand them better as a result. When something about my ideas is wrong, it’s good to find out about that so I can improve it.

During the month of September, the Center for Inquiry will offer a new online course on the origins of Christianity. It will be led by two first-rate scholars, John Shook, PhD and Richard Carrier, PhD. I know both of these guys and each is extraordinarily knowledgeable in their field. John is a typical philosopher who enjoys the questions as much as the answers. When it comes to pointing out faulty thinking, John has no peer. Rick is a leading authority in Ancient Greco-Roman History with special emphasis on Early Christianity. You can check him out at his website.

I recommend this course to anyone who has an abiding interest in America’s dominate religion and its underling falsehoods and myths that are now driving our politics. The course will be particularly enlightening to those few Christians who have retained their ability to question the historical roots of their religion.

You can register for this course by clicking here.

For those few Christians who have retained their ability to question the psychological roots of their religion, I also recommend a brilliant little (116 pages + notes) book entitled Why We Believe In God(s); A Concise Guide To The Science Of Faith. The author is J. Anderson Thomson, Jr., MD, a psychiatrist who has specialized in studying the psychology of suicide bombers. In layman terms, Andy shares the growing body of scientific evidence that reveals the evolutionary roots of our deepest beliefs. In short, if you can understand why people crave fast food or sweets, you can understand why people of faith believe the ridiculous. And why they are willing to die and sometimes kill for those beliefs.

You can order this book from the Richard Dawkins Foundation. Richard is the world’s best known evolutionary biologist and best-selling author of The God Delusion. I post his foundation’s mission statement below because it states so well my own purpose.

The mission of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science is to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and human suffering.

SCI 233: “The Real Origins of Christianity”
September 1 – September 30, 2011

Instructor: John Shook, PhD, CFI director of education
Visiting Lecturer: Richard Carrier, PhD, philosopher, historian and author

This one-month, four-module course examines the historical origins of the Christian religion from a secular and skeptical perspective.

Click here to register online now!

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Course Topics:

The origins and composition of the New Testament
Sociological, cultural, and religious context and how they caused early Christian beliefs
Discerning the historical, mythical and theological Jesus
Explaining early belief in his resurrection
Readings: Not the Impossible Faith (2009) by Richard Carrier. Students will purchase their own copies (print or Kindle edition, or PDF edition available directly from Lulu.com). Additional lectures will be made available online at no cost to students.

 

A pleasant Sunday morning to you all. A friend sent me the following story. I knew the students at the U of A are exceptionally bright, but I had no idea they were also this creative. Talk about thinking outside the assignment… jg

HELL EXPLAINED BY A CHEMISTRY STUDENT

 

The following is an actual question given on a University  of Arizona chemistry mid term, and an actual answer turned in by a student.

The answer by one student was so ‘profound’ that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well :

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle’s Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.

One student, however, wrote the following:
First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving, which is unlikely.. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let’s look at the different religions that exist in the world today.

 

Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle’s Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:
1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.
2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?
If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, ‘It will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you,’ and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number two must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over. The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct….. ….leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting ‘Oh my God.’

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED AN A+.