RCimT: Busy week for us heathens! (updated)

This week has been a bit of a busy one as far as godlessness goes! Here’s a quick round-up of the best stuff on the blogosphere and of what people have tweeted about over the week.

But first, as always, your Cool Atheist of the Week: Sir Ian McKellan, Shakespearean thespian probably best known for the awesomest incarnations of both Gandalf and Magneto ever.

“I was brought up a Christian, low church, and I like the community of churchgoing. That’s rather been replaced for me by the community of people I work with. I like a sense of family, of people working together. But I’m an atheist. So God, if She exists, isn’t really a part of my life.”
— from a January 19, 1996 profile by Tim Appelo found in Mr. Showbiz.

Links below the fold, as usual. What are you, new here?
Continue reading “RCimT: Busy week for us heathens! (updated)”

RCimT: Busy week for us heathens! (updated)
{advertisement}

Morality

A long time ago, when humans first started communicating with one another in a structured and organized fashion, these first humans took it upon themselves to pass along their observations about what they believed to be the origin of and purpose of the lives they lived. In conveying to one another ideas about how this universe works, some humans were unsatisfied with a lack of knowledge about the world they knew of, and so, being the only creatures on the planet in possession of the power of imagination, they postulated that magical beings created the world they recognized, and did so in magical ways — ways we did not need to understand, in order to benefit from.
Continue reading “Morality”

Morality

Altruism may be hard-wired

A particularly pernicious point of contention in innumerable theological conversations involves whether morality can exist outside the framework of a creator acting as a lawgiver. Well, coincidentally enough, science has answered that question back in 2007. Neuroscientists have performed experiments to determine where morality — specifically in this case, altruism — works within the human brain. It turns out, the same region responsible for “basic selfish urges” like the desire for food and sex. That’s right folks, altruism is selfish. Atheists and evolutionary biologists have argued for a long time that social structures like the ones we enjoy stem directly from the evolutionary advantage of being altruistic, and some have even postulated that supporting one’s society is a selfish action — because it increases the likelihood that society will support you back.

The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.

Their 2006 finding that unselfishness can feel good lends scientific support to the admonitions of spiritual leaders such as Saint Francis of Assisi, who said, “For it is in giving that we receive.” But it is also a dramatic example of the way neuroscience has begun to elbow its way into discussions about morality and has opened up a new window on what it means to be good.

Grafman and others are using brain imaging and psychological experiments to study whether the brain has a built-in moral compass. The results — many of them published just in recent months — are showing, unexpectedly, that many aspects of morality appear to be hard-wired in the brain, most likely the result of evolutionary processes that began in other species.

Not terribly unexpected to me. Nor likely many of the folks that have been suggesting as much for years. This is only an unexpected result if you think humans are somehow exceptional, or if you think we’re the creation of some all-powerful deity.

Interestingly, such experiments show some signs of such morality mice.

No one can say whether giraffes and lions experience moral qualms in the same way people do because no one has been inside a giraffe’s head, but it is known that animals can sacrifice their own interests: One experiment found that if each time a rat is given food, its neighbor receives an electric shock, the first rat will eventually forgo eating.

And this despite, to my knowledge, there never having been a Mouse Jesus.

Something else that’s been suggested, tangentially related to this, is that empathy — the ability for humans to construct mental images of what others are experiencing, and thus to construct mental images of other people period (and sometimes with little more to go on than the word of another), could have led directly to the ability for humans to conceptualize a creator deity. Consider also that humans are hard-wired to detect agency whether there is something there or not — e.g. to try to determine the cause of the bush rustling nearby, whether it rustling because of a predator, or because the wind is picking up. This fact, combined with the altruism that’s hard-wired in us, could easily lead to hypothesizing that a person created everything you see, and that that person is in actuality an omnipotent, omnipresent, omnibenevolent being, and suggesting that those morals that you have innately actually come from laws handed down by this being a long time ago.

That doesn’t mean such a creature exists. Just that we might be hard-wired to think that this is so, for the same reasons we’re hard-wired toward other superstitious behaviours. We will, hopefully, eventually outgrow the concept of a creator deity, just as we’ve outgrown the idea of witches, or causal relationships between crushing spiders and sudden rain showers, or stepping on cracks actually breaking one’s mother’s back, or hot women blowing on dice resulting in rolling sevens.

That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? Humanity growing up and taking responsibility for their moral choices, instead of ascribing agency willy-nilly, and believing, fatalistically, that nothing they do can destroy this planet, this one and only support system that we humans rely upon… that’s the stuff of fairy tales.

Altruism may be hard-wired

Our planet and its resources

It’s a common theme among conservatives and theists that our planet’s natural resources should be exploited with little regard to either the environment, the finite nature of those resources, or the sustainability of that exploitation. In some cases it is pure greed — the profit motive of grabbing and selling and using everything in sight ASAP is extraordinarily high, with the downside only becoming readily apparent in future generations. In other cases, as with the theists enraptured with the Rapture, those “future generations” aren’t going to be around anyway, because of some repeatedly-hypothesized judgment day that has yet to materialize.
Continue reading “Our planet and its resources”

Our planet and its resources

On winning at dialogue

A dialogue is by its nature not a debate, because there is no moderator, there are no points scored, and both parties are expected to be slightly civil and take one another at face value. Both sides are also expected to listen. There are generally no winners. Unless you can manage to turn the dialogue into a monologue.

With that in mind, well-deserved and slightly belated congratulations on winning the dialogue go to the aptly named Babble, when Dr. Janet D. Stemwedel (better known on the blogosphere as Dr. Free-Ride, attempted to host an honest dialogue between the pro-testers and the animal rights activists.
Continue reading “On winning at dialogue”

On winning at dialogue

RCimT: Saturday mostly-science! (plus politics)

Some more Random Crap! You love these, admit it.

A skeptical take on neti pots came in handy battling some ridiculous forwards about them being good prophylactics against H1N1.

There was a bolide explosion over the Netherlands, and Phil Plait points us to where to find photos. Amazing pictures!

This picture absolutely floored me today — some of the moons hardly look bigger than motes of dust on this very long, mostly black image, but the Mars Observatory got Earth and Jupiter in the same frame.

The LHC is fully cooled once more, and prepares to re-enter Science! mode. Put your goggles on!

Back Street Boys? In an office environment? Sung by nerds? Possibly powerful. Probably funny.

Proof that Falcon Heene’s dad is a duplicitous fucker, and a bit of a nutbar to boot. Now can we stop feeding his attention whore nature?

Allegations have emerged that General McChrystal, handpicked by Obama to end the Afghanistan war, was involved in the cover-up of the real reasons behind Pat Tillman’s super-suspicious death.

Simon Singh won an appeal in the fight against the British Chiropractic Association after he decried their practice of pimping out “bogus” neck-cracking-based remedies for colic, ear infections, asthma and other issues in children. Apparently he ran afoul of British libel laws, despite everything he said being science-based — e.g. the BCA made claims they couldn’t back up, he called them on it, they went crying to the courts. Keep fighting, Mr. Singh, we’re all pulling for you.

Scientific testing on mice suggests we may soon be able to induce a quasi-suspended-animation merely by administering certain combinations of gases to patients prior to surgery, providing surgeons much, MUCH longer to perform delicate operations. We know what gases are to be used on some smaller animals, and more research needs to be done before we can use this to help perform surgeries on larger animals like cats, dogs, monkeys and humans.

CNN scuttled an anti-Lou Dobbs ad, paid for by progressives enraged that his primary focus is constantly on those damn dirty brown people coming up from Mexico despite all the millions of issues America faces, and despite there not only being very few Mexicans actually entering the country illegally, the ones that do don’t seem to be much of a burden on your society.

Obama proclaims that he is “just getting started”, and that he won’t brook any more obstructionism from certain elements. ‘Bout time someone on the side of reason grew a bit of a backbone. Now, if you could “get started” on some of your more long-standing and pressing promises, that’d be great. You have a supermajority in the senate, why not just steamroll the obstructionists a few times? Why do you keep allowing bills to be gutted (and by gutted I mean reduced to nothing more than platitudes and pats on the head)?

Let’s see if I can squeeze one more post out of this tab collection. I’m almost through it all! If only I could stop clicking on Twitter links…

RCimT: Saturday mostly-science! (plus politics)

A response to Real Scotsman — err, Real Theist

Over at Vizhnet’s brand-new blog, someone commenting under the name of “realtheist” (whom DanJ believes is Daniel Maldonado, owner of the Real Theist blog and an occasional commenter here), left a very VERY long comment in reply to me and in defense of our favorite apologist Zdenny. I reproduce it herein, as Vizhnet has stated he debates only on Twitter and I want to save it for posterity in case he decides to clean up again. I’ll break it down paragraph by paragraph.

Continue reading “A response to Real Scotsman — err, Real Theist”

A response to Real Scotsman — err, Real Theist

RCimT: The usual Sunday godlessness

Hi everyone, and welcome to the end of yet another weekend! I’m not feeling all that great — I think I’m starting to finally succumb to that cold I’ve been staving off for almost two weeks now. So, I’m going to phone this one in and throw a few funny links and a Cool Atheist of the Week, then go snuggle into bed and drink some tea, and read Carl Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World. Or maybe I’ll just bring the laptop in and watch some Mythbusters instead, in honour of my pick for this week.

Jamie Hyneman, from The Discovery Channel’s popular show Mythbusters was interviewed by David Federlein, in the #42 episode of Skepticality. Both were attending The Amazing Meeting 4 last year in Vegas:

David: “What brought you to the skeptical movement here?”

Jamie: “I actually before this didn’t really know that much about the skeptics society, and I guess Adam and our producer were a lot more up on it and were more enthusiastic about it, but once I got into it, I became aware that unknowingly, I mean, I’m actually pretty adamant about the whole God thing. And it seems that skeptics are by and large atheists or something approaching that, which I strongly identify with, and so it turned out to be a good thing and I’ve become enthusiastically a part of it.”

On the topic of appeal to authority (as though having lots of famous people “on your side” is such a big deal outside of proving how mainstream an outgroup actually is), check out this bullshit Yahoo Groups question/answer, Can someone name ANY atheist famous for something other than being an atheist? The question was obviously asked by a theist, considering the ridiculous dig at evolution (what’s that got to do with atheism again??), and considering the “best answer” picked wasn’t one of the dozens of comments containing multitudes of atheists and what they’re famous for outside atheism but is instead one with lolspeak, no punctuation, and “no” as the answer.

Speaking of lolspeak, here’s something that’ll make you go WTF (there’s a tenuous segue at best): Klingons for Christ, a rather twisted attempt to make the case that Christianity is the right religion for every good Klingon warrior to embrace. I say twisted because the author pretty much has to perform acrobatics to reconcile the two — the scariest part is that it’s a rather successful amalgamation of the two fiction-based philosophies. As long as you can get past the “thou shalt not kill” thing, which you can do if you use the “murder” translation instead, and define “murder” as any killing that’s done in an honourless manner.

The Wikipedia page for Catholic sexual abuse scandals in Canada is sorely lacking in our latest example. Could someone with a Wikipedia account kindly rectify this?

And finally, ever wanted to prove you can fuck up less than Yahweh supposedly did in the Christian Bible? Here’s your chance. Pro tip: as an omnipotent deity, you can make everything perfect any time you want. Try not to fuck up too badly!

RCimT: The usual Sunday godlessness

Religion as a mental parasite

Look at this picture for a moment — click to enlarge. Kinda stomach-churning, huh? Looks a lot like an alien chest-burster in fact. It’s a rare isopod discovered off the Jersey coast that eats, then replaces, the tongue of a fish. Interestingly, outside the eating of the tongue, the fish doesn’t suffer terribly much in the way of ill effects from this disgusting, horrific, and horribly effective parasitic behaviour. Also interestingly, neither do people whose reason has been eaten and replaced by religious faith.

Continue reading “Religion as a mental parasite”

Religion as a mental parasite

Earning respect

There’s a study that shows that societies that are mostly religious do worse in a number of key indicators of social “well-being”. For instance:

The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: “Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world.

“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”
[…]
The study concluded that the US was the world’s only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhoea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from “ uniquely high” adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested.

Why then, despite the craziness you find in the Christian Bible (incest, stuff about penises and poop, etc.), and in all sorts of other religions (e.g. Mormons believing they’ll become gods themselves, Islamic violence against cartoonists, Scientology as a whole), do people consider you to be somehow less of a person for daring to not believe in anything in particular? As though one has to pick a deity to follow, no matter which one, before they’re considered fully-functional members of society?
Continue reading “Earning respect”

Earning respect