What kinds of shenanigans did I get up to this week?:

• I put a pin in my argument that bad ideas can’t be left alone;
• Roger Ebert deeply impressed me;
• I asked believers what they’d do if their beliefs were in conflict with society;
• I talked about an MPs anti-Israel comments, and what the response means for free speech in Canada; and
• Louis CK dropped some knowledge all over your asses.

Cripes! That’s a lot of shenanigans! What’s next week?:

• I’m going to try again to tie this whole thing together;
• I have to backtrack a bit on something I’ve said before;
• We’re going to see some pretty bad attempts to get secularism working;
• A disgusting example of sexism; and
• Another TED talk.

So make sure you’re keeping your face glued to the screen!

Lots of good stuff this week, when I:

• Explained why I have no interest in leaving bad ideas alone;
• Updated you on the fate of the gay couple in Malawi;
• Likened the Roman Catholic Church to an abusive boyfriend;
• Scratched my head over a secular/religious conflict; and
• Introduced you to germ theory.

Here’s what you can look forward to next week:

• I’m going to finish my discussion of leaving bad ideas alone;
• Roger Ebert stuns me with both the quality and content of his writing;
• Exploring how believers resolve their religious and secular conflict;
• A chilling of free speech in Canadian politics; and
• One of the greatest standup comedians ever.

Make sure you don’t miss it!

Well don’t you feel foolish? Look at what you missed this week:

• The ghost of Bertrand Russell and his flying teapot;
• Race and politics in South Africa in the face of the World Cup;
• A less-than-politically-correct argument against hate speech laws;
• Do Canadians have a national culture? I’m not sure; and
• The single greatest poem ever!
• And as a bonus, I took down a mind-numbingly stupid opinion piece on race in Canada.

That was all in one week! Are you sure you can afford to miss next week when:

• I discuss why I refuse to leave people’s beliefs alone;
• We learn the fate of Malawi’s most famous gay couple;
• The Roman Catholic Church gets even closer to getting it right;
• Ontario’s Supreme Court faces a major cultural conundrum; and
• Germs arrive (from Germany)?

Rhetorical questions are for pussies – you can’t afford to miss it. Stay tuned!

No sooner do I write a summary of my warm, fuzzy feelings about the World Cup, when I read that Islamic militants in Somalia are executing people for watching the matches on TV. Of course it’s couched in religious justification (it always is). So while the rest of the world is trying to come together to participate in a multi-national event, to put aside its differences for a minute and play a friggin’ game, Somalia has decided to say a big ‘fuck you’ to the world.

Okay, Somali religious militants, on behalf of the rest of the world…

FUCK

YOU

TOO

I feel much better.

This was a big week here at the Manifesto:

• I talked about the virtue of keeping your self-worth separate from your ideas (which for some reason became a mini internet sensation, with more than 5000 hits this week alone);
• I updated you on Pakistan’s Youtube and Facebook ban;
• You got to watch footage from a vicious race attack in BC;
• I threw a bunch of random stories at you (sorry about that); and
• Some very stupid people insisted that Christianity is the answer to the world’s economic troubles.

So what can you look forward to this week? How about:

• Flying teapots, and the people who worship them!;
• What the World Cup does and doesn’t mean for South Africa;
• Me pissing off a lot of Jews;
• A discussion of Canada’s national identity (or lack thereof); and
• Perhaps the most epic skeptic poem ever!

It’s going to be a big week, so don’t miss it!

On Friday, June 4th, Vancouver was the recipient of Dr. Deepak Chopra – quantum mystic, magic thinker, and purveyor of high-quality woo. In the interest of promoting the cause of evidence-based science and thought, skeptics from Vancouver’s chapter of the Center for Inquiry were on hand to engage the audience on their way into the event. We were armed with flyers (which can be seen here), and voices of reason. For more background on the event, you are invited to read the pre-event coverage from this blog.

Why were we there?

To answer this question, I think it’s worthwhile to mention a couple of things we weren’t there to do.

We were not there simply to tell Dr. Chopra he is wrong; while he undoubtedly is wrong, it’s not exactly productive to shout that at people who are willing to part with $100+ dollars to hear the man speak. Besides, why should anyone believe us just on our say-so?

We were not there to smugly tell people that they are stupid for going to see Chopra speak; people are often willing to listen to leaders who sound like they have answers. If nobody challenges those answers, or the leaders are convincing enough, it’s easy to get caught up. Most likely the people who attend Dr. Chopra’s shows aren’t any more stupid than your average cross-section of humankind.

We were not there to ‘convert’ anyone to skepticism, or convince them to abandon their tickets and do something else; most people are skeptics in one sphere of their life or another – it’s how we discern truth from lies. The problem is that people don’t necessarily apply the rules of skeptical inquiry to all aspects of their life, and are happy to accept some things on faith rather than looking for evidence.

What we were there to do is to try and engender a little bit of cognitive dissonance in members of the audience. What we were there to do is try and encourage people to keep their thinking caps on while listening to Dr. Chopra’s ideas, and to ask “does this really make sense?” What we were there to do is demonstrate bodily that it is not okay to invent supernatural explanations for the important questions in life and then sell those as snake-oil cures to people who honestly thirst for knowledge and answers to the mysteries of the universe, and that there will always be people who will insist that claims about the world must be substantiated by evidence, not circular reasoning and invocations of unobservable phenomena.

What did we do?

An hour before the show was scheduled to start, members of CFI Vancouver, UBC and SFU Skeptics, and a few skeptical friends met at the Vancouver Public Library to gear up for the event. We had printed about 800 flyers, and had a few choice quotes wherein Dr. Chopra made specific claims about the natural world, the human body, or other physical phenomena that were demonstrably false. Dressed in our finest skeptical attire, we hit the sidewalk outside the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, site of Dr. Chopra’s presentation.

Since there are a number of possible entrances to the theatre, and we didn’t want anyone to miss out on the chance of getting a flier, we spread ourselves out along the sidewalk in small groups.

Our strategy was simple: ask people if they were on their way to the show. If they were, we asked if they wouldn’t mind talking to us for a couple of minutes before going in. We put a flier in their hands, and briefly explained what we were doing there – namely, asking them to think very carefully about some of the things they were about to hear.

We were careful to be as respectful and polite as possible, wanting to avoid the association of anti-choice activists protesting outside of abortion clinics. Nobody was harassed, intimidated (as if anyone was intimidated by a pack of nerds) or assaulted – merely annoyed for a moment.

How did it go?

It’s hard to say definitively what impact, if any, we made on the crowd. We didn’t hold out any great hope that we’d cause a wholesale changing of minds, or cause a surge of skeptical thought to bloom in the audience on the weight of our hastily-assembled fliers with cherry-picked quotes and facts. To be perfectly honest, we were half expecting to be instructed to leave the premises by angry security guards. What we instead saw was that most people, when handed a flier, took one and glanced over it.

Some people gave it a cursory look, folded it up and put it into a pocket or a purse. Some laughed derisively (“don’t these fools realize that there is more to the world than what can be observed and measured with evidence?”) and threw them away. One particularly offended young woman tore hers into pieces. Some handed them back to us with a disgusted look – I had a couple immediately turn and walk away the moment I said the words ‘think critically’. A very small subset of the audience members took the time to enter into a dialogue with us about the things we were saying.

Again, we were very careful to be deferential and respectful of people, even though we disagreed with their ideas. There is a time for polemic, and this probably wasn’t it. Most of those who spoke to us were very smugly dismissive of the idea that science could be based on observation of real-world phenomena. I foolishly took the bait with my first interlocutor when he asked me if I thought that was solid ground I was standing on. I foolishly allowed him to take me down the quantum path (and what are molecules made of? Okay, and what is energy?) until I wasn’t able to give him a satisfactory explanation of the fundamental components of the universe, at which point he smirked and said “so there you go” and walked off. My moment to be smug came a few minutes later when I directed him and his wife to the entrance – the fact that matter is mostly empty space isn’t much of a consolation when you can’t transport yourself through a locked door. What I should have said was “it doesn’t really matter what I believe I’m standing on. Let’s look at the evidence and see what it says.”

I was more prepared for my second encounter with a man who immediately accused us of raping Native people and destroying the land on behalf of the pharmaceutical companies. I pointed out to him that not only were we not there representing any large corporation or business interest, but the very fact that we were alive to have the conversation was at least in part due to the fact that disease and disability are no longer widespread concerns in this country. This is not a picture of him, but of someone else who was talking to us because he didn’t have a strong opinion for or against Dr. Chopra and wanted to know what all the fuss was about:

I’d like to share a couple of my favourite moments from the event. For some reason, I was wildly unsuccessful in giving away fliers. Everyone I tried to give one to either handed it back or, once they found out what it was, refused to take one. As a result, I spent most of my time checking on morale and observing what was going on. I saw a woman tearing up her flier, at which point her husband made a dismayed sound and ran back to a CFI team member and asked for another one – we think he didn’t want to be there to begin with.

The highlight of my evening was probably meeting Chris, a young (~25 y) Deepak fan who decided to figure out what we were all about. He asked us to produce a quote where Dr. Chopra said anything even remotely close to what we were claiming he represented. Our quote sheet was immediately thrust into my hand, and I supplied him with a line from Dr. Chopra in which he claims that all cells are immediately aware of every other cell in the body, and the universe at large (a gross misrepresentation of cell-cell signaling pathways). Chris immediately demanded that I prove that it was 100% false, and that it couldn’t possibly be true. This time, however, I was prepared. I asked Chris is anything could be 100% true to his satisfaction – Chris immediately informed me that it was impossible to know anything. I asked Chris to give me all of the money in his wallet, since he didn’t know if it was there or not. When Chris balked, I suggested that maybe a more reasonable standard than 100% certainty was possible and believable. It was very refreshing to converse with someone like Chris who was, despite their extreme rarity, one of those people who may believe in woo but is willing to concede a logical point. Where we left the conversation (so Chris could get to his seat before the show started) was that in cases where it doesn’t matter if you’re wrong – is there an underlying consciousness in the universe that we can’t understand? – then it was maybe not the worst thing in the world if you make up supernatural explanations; however, in matters of life and death, we deserve evidence to back up any claims. Chris said that he’d attend our next “Skeptics in the Pub” meeting and we’d pick up the conversation there.

Of course, the highlight of everyone’s night was when Deepak Chopra himself took a flier on his way into the theatre, read it, turned around, walked back over to the group and engaged in a pseudo-friendly discussion with our chapter head, Ethan.

Say what you want about the man, but Deepak Chopra is not a coward – an intellectual midget definitely, but he was happy to come and talk to us without being angry or trying to drive us away… although he did suggest that skeptics were “too chickenshit” to debate him. I suggested that he cancel his talk and we would debate him in front of the audience; he didn’t seem to think that was a particularly good idea.

Concluding thoughts

Overall, it’s hard to say how the event went. We gave out almost all of the fliers, the majority of which were read and not immediately destroyed. I’m sure a kung-woo master like Dr. Chopra was able to immediately paint us as angry malcontents stubbornly standing as obstacles on the road to scientific progress. It was for this reason that we didn’t carry protest signs and picket, and that we happily and politely answered questions. Most people don’t know skeptics, especially in a woo-friendly city like Vancouver. It was important, therefore, that they see us as we’d like to think we are – a bunch of nerds who are fundamentally happy people, but who believe that tough questions deserve real answers.

I don’t know if there was a Q&A session, or if anyone in the audience piped up with a skeptical query. I doubt it. Again, our purpose was not to immediately change minds or “debunk” Dr. Chopra. Our goal was merely to put the tools for skepticism – facts and cognitive dissonance – into the hands of the audience. I hope at least some people walked away from the show thinking “I need to check the answers against facts.” Meeting people like Chris – people who are reasonable enough to accept a logical argument even if it doesn’t completely change their minds –  gives me hope that maybe there can be progress made against even the woo-master himself.

UPDATE: Thanks to PZ Myers for posting this on his blog.

What were you, asleep or something? You missed:

• My defense of why I think I’m qualified to talk about race;
• The worldwide stupidity that is homosexuality laws;
• Another round of good news;
• The Pope coming tantalizingly close to making the right decision; and
• The Christian Right taking over Canada.

So make sure you wake yer ass up next week for:

• Separating one’s ideas from one’s sense of self-worth;
• An update on the parade of stupid in Pakistan;
• A racist attack in British Columbia;
• A plethora of stories I just couldn’t get to; and
• Christians showing us their financial acumen

It’s going to be a good week, so make sure to be here!

UPDATE: Write-up of the event and pictures are now posted.

===================================================

On Friday, June 4th, our fair city of Vancouver will receive author and spiritual guru Dr. Deepak Chopra, speaking at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre downtown. Vancouver’s Centre for Inquiry will be present before Dr. Chopra’s show on Friday to encourage audience members to think carefully about the claims that Dr. Chopra makes. We will be handing out flyers with some specific information to help get the wheels of thought turning, and answering any questions that we can. Here’s a few answers to questions you might have:

Who is Deepak Chopra?

Dr. Chopra is a trained medical doctor who began practicing transcendental mediation in the 1980s and since then has become a prolific writer and speaker. Some of his favourite topics of discussion are supernatural claims about the human mind, the intelligence of DNA, and the philosophy of “quantum consciousnes” – an attempt to introduce mysticism and metaphysical concepts into quantum physics. As someone with a background in medicine, Dr. Chopra spends a great deal of time discussing how his ideas are applied to human health, including the power of positive belief and the harmonizing of multiple “selves”.

Why are Deepak Chopra’s ideas wrong?

It is important to make the point that not all of Dr. Chopra’s ideas are “wrong” as such. Dr. Chopra advocates expanding human awareness to include the interactions between the body and the mind. Dr. Chopra says that the world is made up of interconnected systems that cannot be fully understood by just looking at one piece of the puzzle. These are perfectly reasonable ideas – human existence and the world in general are more complicated than can be explained by looking at only one facet. However, Dr. Chopra takes these ideas and stretches them far beyond reason, creating entirely unobserved (and indeed, fundamentally unobservable) forces and phenomena. To give credibility to these ideas, he borrows phrases from various scientific and pseudo-scientific concepts and attempts to explain them that way.

• Quantum consciousness

“If you go to the very fundamental levels of activity in nature, you find that nature is a discontinuity; and even though our perception of the universe is that it is continuous, it is in fact going on and off at the speed of light.” – D. Chopra

Dr. Chopra is a great fan of quantum physics, due to its central tenet of uncertainty. Basically, quantum physics posits that at the atomic level it is not possible to determine the absolute position of an electron (incredibly tiny packets of energy that orbit around the nucleus of an atom), only the probability that it will occupy a given space. Furthermore, subatomic particles like electrons seem to “disappear” and “reappear” at different points in their orbits. From this phenomenon (observed, incidentally, using the scientific method), Dr. Chopra concludes that human consciousness exists independently of the “off and on”, and that explanations using forces in the observed world (the “on”) neglect the influence of unobserved things (the “off”). While it sounds like a nice idea, Dr. Chopra is conducting what is known as an “argument from ignorance” – we don’t know how something works, so we bring in supernatural forces as an attempt to “explain” it. The problem with this type of thinking is that any made up idea is equally possible, since there is no way to test it. Is Dr. Chopra’s theory about consciousness correct? We have no way of knowing, since his explanation invents forces that are by definition unknowable. However, in creating a theory for thought and existence based on a flawed understanding of the subatomic world (somewhat similar to saying that we can’t trust election results because we didn’t look at all the brain cells of the individual voters), we can be reasonably sure that whatever the answer to the question of consciousness is, Deepak Chopra doesn’t have it.

• Biological science

“But arch materialism is just as superstitious as religion. Someone like (Richard) Dawkins still believes there are solid objects randomly colliding to haphazardly form more and more complex objects, until over the course of billions of years the universe produced human DNA with its billions of genetic bits.” – D. Chopra

Dr. Chopra is deeply misinformed when it comes to biology and evolution. Evolution is not the random collision of solid objects, nor is it the random progression from lower levels of complexity to increased levels of complexity. Evolution refers to the process by which forces in the external environment (for example, food shortages or changes in weather patterns) seem to “favour” certain expression of genetic mutations in a species’ population, leading to increased reproductive success of some individuals. Evolution is a process which has been observed in daily life (for example, antibiotic-resistant bacteria), in human history (the selective breeding of certain types of plants to make hardier fruits and vegetables, the domestication of dogs from the wolf), and natural history (patterns of types of life seen in fossil records). Since we know evolution to be certainly true, it is a useful way to hypothesize the origins of life on Earth without needing to rely on other explanations for which there is less (or no) empirical proof.

• The human mind

“It’s my personal conviction that the brain was created by consciousness. There is no other viable explanation, because our current explanation, that the human brain evolved through random mutations, simply doesn’t hold water.” – D. Chopra

Once again, Dr. Chopra is deeply misinformed about the way that the brain and mind work. While he holds personal convictions that the brain is the creation of a “mind” process, he offers no evidence to support it other than the fact that it’s more complicated than he can understand. The problem with using the argument from ignorance is that you’re not allowed to simply invent whatever explanation you want. Most of us don’t know (in fullness) how the stock market works. We are more than happy to accept our ignorance and talk about the actions of “the market”, which is a euphamism for an incredibly complicated system. Many would agree that nobody really knows why “the market” does what it does. We are happy to use this slang term, understanding that it stands for the input of millions of people operating for any number of different reasons. Dr. Chopra would have us believe that “the market” is a real entity that exists beyond the observable world and influences the price of stocks. Would you trust an investment broker who told you that concentrating your positive thoughts on “the market” will cause your stock prices to change? Probably not. Once again, Deepak Chopra doesn’t have real answers to the complicated questions that make up the universe.

Why do we care about Deepak Chopra?

If he’s just another kook with wacky ideas, why bother paying him any attention at all? Why not just let him sell his books and have his talks? The problem is, he’s not just another kook. Deepak Chopra’s books sell millions of copies. He is featured frequently on the Huffington Post and on Oprah’s website. Tickets for this Friday’s event range from $115 to $200 per person. He is taking millions of dollars from people and giving them falsehoods in return. He is taking the hard work of dedicated scientists, doctors, and legitimate philosophers and distorting them to sell merchandise. In any other field we would call such a practice fraud. However, because of his high profile and the elusive nature of his claims, we instead call it “alternative medicine” or “mysticism”.

Because of his celebrity, people trust Deepak Chopra without closely examining the things he says. Since most people don’t completely understand quantum physics, biology, neurology, or medicine, they fail to see the glaring holes in the logic of Dr. Chopra’s claims. When he tells people that their bodies are products of their consciousness, that disease is an imbalance between the consciousness and the body, and that problems like cancer can be fixed with positive thinking, people trust that he knows what he is talking about. However, Dr. Chopra has no evidence whatsoever that the things he says are true. They might be (although with his flawed understanding of science, they likely aren’t), but he has offered no reasons to support them, merely relying on the fact that “we don’t know everything”. People abandon the treatments where the risks and benefits are known and have been tested for a system of thought which makes it your fault if you are sick and don’t get better. This is wildly unethical and totally ineffective.

Deepak Chopra in Vancouver

As skeptics, we think it’s important to challenge the pseudoscience and outright falsehoods that will be foisted on the audience on Friday. While Dr. Chopra has made his dislike for skeptics and scientific inquiry quite clear, on more than one occasion in fact, it is clear that like quantum physics, biology, neurology, and human physiology, Dr. Chopra is profoundly mistaken (or indeed misinformed) about what skepticism actually is. Far from merely being nay-sayers who villify those who “peer into the unknown” (many skeptics are astronomers, the archetype for peering into the unknown), skeptics are those who encourage the deliberate and careful appraisal of things we see in the world.

Skeptics know that the universe is a complex and beautiful place, filled with profound questions and mysteries. Human beings are curious and want real answers to those questions, and have discovered a method for discovering useful and practical explanations for many of these quandaries. It is by the application of this method, for example, that we know the cause of infectious disease isn’t an imbalance of bile; or a flux of “humours”; or the will of the wrathful gods. This method allowed us to travel to the moon, rather than seeing it as a giant eye that opens and closes once a month. This method produced computers, medicine, electricity, food, and any number of the things we take for granted that make our daily lives possible. It is by this method, and by this method alone, that we can separate facts from fiction. We observe, we test, we try to disprove, and at the end of this process we make our decisions based on what we see to be true. It is the skeptical position that claims about the universe, about the mind, about human health, about anything in the natural world should be subject to the same type of scrutiny that we use for anything else.

If, like us, you believe that science and medicine get the best results when they are based on evidence, not simply ideas dressed up in “sciency” clothes; if you want to see people given real answers to the fundamental questions of the universe; if you think that people with flawed ideas shouldn’t be allowed to take money from unsuspecting people, please join us on Friday as we try to encourage people to THINK about what’s being said. We’re starting at the Vancouver Public Library, and will be passing out flyers and answering questions between 6:00 and 7:30 as people arrive for the show.

Holy crap! You missed it! What were you thinking? No worries, because you can always go back and see:

• My discussion and refutation of the notion that Canada was founded on a “Judeo-Christian” heritage;
• The plight of a Malaysian politician who got nabbed under a ridiculous sodomy law;
• About Pakistan getting the whole idea of religious freedom ass-backwards;
• Stories from a dark day in free speech around the world; and
• A movie featuring a crusader for religious rights… as long as you’re not a goddamn fag.

Here’s what’s coming up this week:

• I’ll tell you what qualifies me to talk about race;
• More sodomy!;
• Another happy news post;
• The Pope getting so close to being right that I could almost taste it; and
• A look at the gathering storm of Christian fundamentalist influence in Canadian politics

All that, and maybe more, next week!