OK, this is the kind of thing that just pisses me off: the tendency for some liberals to go off all loopy and credulous. The perfect example is on Salon right now—an article that goes on at ridiculous length about the judgments of a physiognomist, a ditz who derives McCain’s economic policy from the shape of his nostrils, and Obama’s idealism from the breadth of his forehead. This is insane, and irritating, and stupid.
The one thing I dread with a Democratic victory is the ascendancy of navel-gazing crystal-healing New Age loons, without a shred of critical thinking.
I’ve heard of palm-reading, but holy meatballs this is nuts!
Single best quote: “…Bill O’Reilly…has ‘an extremely large, macho knob.'”
I went to a lecture on Anomalistic Psychology on Monday, and one of the techniques that was brought up was rumpology – the practice of arse-reading. Some of the shit people come up with is absurd, poor old Poe just can’t ever keep up.
I would love to study rumpology ;)
#4: You can study my rumpology. ;)
Oh wait, you’re a guy. Nevermind.
#3
With guest lecturer, Sir Mix-a-Lot.
Come to the dark side. Neoconservatism is the only viable political recourse for 21st century america, check out Josh Xiong and see what you think:
Joshua Xiong’s blog
My favorite are the ones who put on a rational, skeptical air, then tell you all about how there just has to be intelligent extraterrestrial life out there and why I’m arrogant for not automatically accepting it, even though there’s no evidence for it.
Although the ones who talk about the ‘next level of human evolution’ as if we’re going to jump into untapped psychic powers within a single generation just by meditating are good too.
And it’s to the point where you automatically have to be leery of anyone who says the words ‘energy’ or ‘vortex’ or ‘quantum’.
Cargo-cult science. It’s a good term.
As McCains new press spokesman says, it’s just another example of liberal media bias.
Really?
I’d say he IS a large macho knob.
Archie wrote:
[blockquote]Neoconservatism is the only viable political recourse for 21st century america[/quote]
Yes, because that’s been working well so far.
Oh, how the comments need an eye-rolling emoticon.
Anyway, America, today Canada has tilted (but not fallen) farther to the right. I almost wish McCain will win in November so conservative economics will be even further demonstrated to be the disaster they are.
‘(Wrinkles, says Rosetree, are “God’s makeup.”)’
snicker.
What happens when a rumpology conference collides with a plumbers’ convention?
Damn, someone beat me to the O’reilly is a knob. Maybe they should have said “he has an extremely large loofah” instead?
I like this (Ambrose Bierce, the Devil’s Dictionary):
PHYSIOGNOMY, n. The art of determining the character of another by
the resemblances and differences between his face and our own, which
is the standard of excellence.
You just can’t accept it because you, like most people, only use 10% of your brain power.
Woooooooooo.
Single best quote: “…Bill O’Reilly…has ‘an extremely large, macho knob.'”
If I hadn’t followed the link, that statement would have made me throw up in my mouth. But then the balance of bliss would be knowing that he wouldn’t know what to do with it. Anyone every get subjected to one of the sex scenes in his so-called book? Man, was that a hoot. You knew it was some deranged O’Reilly fantasy, because he actually thought that putting a tongue in a vagina would excite a woman. I mean, maybe if you’re Gene Simmons and get it…
Um.
Sorry.
Anyway, even Bill’s sexual fantasies are laughably inept.
Sad.
So sad.
Ok, outside of the obvious lode of crock she’s feeding, can I mention some little things about her description…McCain’s nose was broken in Nam. His cheeks being full under the cheekbone was a result of the plastic surgery they performed. So basically if what she is saying is true then you can change people’s fate by bashing the face in. Plastic Surgeons are the new prophets of science!!
Thank you, you may carry on now…
I’d rather have navel-gazing crystal-healing New Age loons than Bible-thumping theocracy-loving religious loons. I’ve never seen a New Ager wish death upon those who don’t share their delusions.
GoM,
There is that.
This is the “problem” with “converting” the religious to atheism. They do not automatically (or in any other way) become smarter in the process.
At the current time, with atheism in the severe minority, it seems fairly obvious (or, even if it doesn’t, suppose for the sake of argument that it is the case) that the population of atheists is skewed towards the highly intelligent.
Supposing we were to somehow cnnvince a large majority of people to become atheists. It would no longer be so true that the population of atheists was skewed towards the highly intelligent.
I think most atheists (myself included) who complain about the religiousness of society. and the consequent actions of such a society, are really complaining about a symptom, and were this symptom remedied, would find themselves still complaining. It may (in my opinion) require nearly no intelligence to recognize religion is a pile of crap, and that there are no good arguments at all whatsoever for the existence of any gods, much less the highly specific god of the typical Christian, however, the fact that a one-time believer abandons their beliefs, esp. as it becomes more comfortable to abandon those beliefs, doesn’t make them smarter than they were before the abandonment. Converting to atheism doesn’t make one less stupid. The stragglers in the conversion to atheism — atheism b(the lack of belief in deities) being a conclusion which to my mind is blindingly obvious to anyone not utterly retarded — the stragglers do not gain in intelligence by their eventual capitulation.
The proximal cause of religious difference might be eliminated in a world without religion, but the stupidity at the bottom of it all would remain.
Damn i’m a pessimist tonight.
Oh well.
Steve, is it possible that the phenomenon of credulity you describe might be better accounted for by a failure by society to teach and value (and, in some cases, a failure by society not to outright vilify) critical thinking skills, than by a lack of innate intelligence?
Azkyroth, I hope you’re right.
blockquote> Posted by: Ghost of Minnesota | October 15, 2008
I’d rather have navel-gazing crystal-healing New Age loons than Bible-thumping theocracy-loving religious loons. I’ve never seen a New Ager wish death upon those who don’t share their delusions.
You have not looked hard enough. Just look at The Secret. The idea is that “like attracts like”. Ask the universe for good stuff and the universe will provide. Conversely, if you are ill, poor, lonely of pretty much any undesirable condition, it is because you thought “bad thoughts”. In other words, you deserve all the bad things that happen to you. It is called “stinking thinking”.
That sounds about as harsh and unforgiving as any monotheistic religion. I have no more use or love for any “new age” mush as I do any of the Abrahamic religions.
Would this be a good time to ask about Bill Maher? I’ve seen it mentioned a couple times around here that he has the unfortunate habit of buying into some form of pseudoscientific nonsense, but I have no idea what that would be. Could somebody fill me in?
Navel-gazing crystal-healing New Age loons really aren’t anything to worry about. If they get to be a nuisance, just shove them out of the way. Hard. They’re too pacifistic to do anything about it.
Azkyroth, on second thought though… I know a few people who just aren’t very bright. Not to insult those people, they don’t pride themselves on being not smart, it is just a statement of a brute fact: they just aren’t that smart, and there’s no getting around it, though it is through no fault of their own that they are this way.
It is quite clear to me that converting them to atheism would not somehow make them smarter.
Maybe you are arguing that my supposition that the currently rare atheist is not as smart as I suppose, on average, and more closely matches the general population in terms of intelligence.
Yikes! I did an incomplete blockquote.
The Newageists have that unfortunate habit of not doing any direct harm, rather they facilitate the spread of misinformation. Talking people out of modern medicine to use their “alternative healing”, and getting people to make life decisions based on psychic powers or palm reading. Yep, they do a lot of indirect harm that way. There should be a lesson here about weeding out those of weak minds, but Newageism has the unfortunate quality of attracting otherwise intelligent individuals.
The one thing I dread with a Democratic victory is the ascendancy of navel-gazing crystal-healing New Age loons, without a shred of critical thinking.
They’ve certainly done a lot of damage both to the environmental and feminist movements in the last couple of decades.
I’ve never seen a New Ager wish death upon those who don’t share their delusions.
Oh, I certainly have. One of the many drawbacks of inventing a new flavor of mysticism from whole cloth, is that some of its followers will be flat-out nuts, even if its founder isn’t.
-jcr
#24
Maher has expressed doubts about the sense of mandatory vaccinations, apparently lending some credibility to the (meanwhile proven as unfounded and a media hype) myths about inoculations causing autism. He has however noted the widespread criticism of his statements and has toned down on the topic. I hope he’s learning. As far as I’m aware, he hasn’t addressed the topic in quite a while (for a tv personality, more than two weeks passes as a while I suppose).
“Rose Rosetree…” Stopped reading.
For what it’s worth, one of the biggest marketers of New Age woo, Utah-based Basic Research (which operates under the names of hundreds of front companies – like ‘Zoller Research Labs’) is one of the biggest donors to Senator Orrin Hatch, was a big donor to Utah Gov and later Dept of Human Health Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, and to Senator Bennett. Woo isn’t particular to Democrats.
To be quite honest,I dont see the immediate connection between a democratic victory and an
// ascendancy of navel-gazing crystal-healing New Age loons, without a shred of critical thinking.//
Then again,Im not American,so maybe someone from over there can enlighten me.
We probably take less offense towards Newagers because there arent that many around to start with,compared to religious loons,and even the religionists give them a funny look.
They do damage,as Kel mentioned above,just to a lesser extent given their smaller prevalence in the population.
New age stupidity, yes – but why try to associate it with liberals? As a skeptical liberal, I rather resent this attempted connection between halfwitted flakiness and my political position. Liberals have some things to answer for, but physiognomy isn’t one of them.
You know, I have my own unverified-by-science observation of a rather curious phenomenon. The deeper the Republicans are in trouble, the more expensive and numerous their USPS mailings become. I get to see this from the vantage of being a wage slave to the USPS.
Until 2006, I had rarely seen much above first class mail. If you were lucky, you got a Business Reply Envelope to send back a contribution. Eh, why spend all that much. The Democrats suck at fundraising, right?
2006, I saw an expensive mailing to the super-rich of certified letters begging for contributions. Meanwhile, the Democrats had figured out how to reach contributors through the Internet, while the Republicans clung to their much-ballyhooed (snort!) mailing lists (Snort!).
In 2008?
You guys wouldn’t believe how much Republicans are spending in this campaign trying to bilk little old ladies out of their cat food money.
First there were the pre-paid Priority envelopes mailed to their loyal minions to send back money “quickly.” That one’s still going on, but it’s moved from having McCain as the addressor to, this past week, Palin. Whoever’s name is on there, this is a very expensive mailing, probably $4.50 a pop, minimum, even with discount rates.
But what, it gets better. Anyone care to guess what the new McCain addressor mailings contain?
Can we say pre-FedEX EXPRESS (overnight) envelopes? I’m not sure what the Fed Ex discount rates are, but I don’t think they’re much less than $15 a pop.
This is desperation you could smell, if you cared to get close enough to a Republican for it.
SteveC, you make an interesting argument, though I would call people more irrational than outright dumb. Other than that, yeah, the average atheist is no smarter than the average theist, all things being equal. The problem, however, is that all things are not equal. Atheists tend to advocate a logical, empirical approach to knowledge, analyzing the evidence and coming to reasoned conclusions from that. Religions, by contrast, actually prize the ability to separate oneself from the evidence, following one’s beliefs in spite of any evidence to the contrary. They don’t advertise it that way, of course, but how else would someone define absolute faith than believing something without need for evidence?
However, this is effective because reason doesn’t come naturally to humans, any more than any other animal. Let’s face it, when a lion charges a gazelle, stopping to see proof of the lion’s malice would quickly get the gazelle eaten. Though humans no longer need this pure “trust what you’ve been told, even if you don’t understand” reaction, old habits die hard, and religion is just another manifestation of that.
The trouble, though, is that since religion is the symptom, not the cause, suddenly removing religion from the world still wouldn’t cause people to become more reasonable. This New Age phenomenon is simply another manifestation of the same problem. Or how about that gambler over there? You know, the one who’s convinced that this time, he really, really, REALLY has a way to beat the system? It’s the same thing. I’ll repeat, people are irrational by nature, just like every other creature on this planet. Atheism just attracts we few freaks that managed to beat the evolutionary odds, preferring to think things through logically. As such, we’ll always be in the minority.
Everyone wants to get into the act!
Joshu , #24:
He seems to deny the germ theory of disease.
He’s opposed to vaccination. Orac has written on this several times, starting here .
Posted by: Phoesune @ 17
“…McCain’s nose was broken in Nam. His cheeks being full under the cheekbone was a result of the plastic surgery they performed. So basically if what she is saying is true then you can change people’s fate by bashing the face in. Plastic Surgeons are the new prophets of science!!”
Actually, in Anhk-Morpork you can tell a phrenologist what personality/character traits you want and he will study your skull and then, with a mallett, will hit your head to raise lumps in carefully positioned places to produce the results you want.
New age stupidity, yes – but why try to associate it with liberals?
Have you ever met a Republican new-ager? In my experience, Republican mystics tend to stick to considerably older franchises, mostly christianity.
-jcr
religion is the symptom, not the cause,
I agree to an extent, but I’ve certainly seen some examples of people who had a sudden religious conversion and went off the deep end. A friend of mine has been fighting against the scientologists for many years, and he can cite any number of people who were driven nuts by getting infected with Hubbard’s Patented Contagious Insanity.
-jcr
@ #40
Nancy Reagan?
Astrology has been around much longer then christianity.
Welcome to Europe. Okay, maybe I’m overgeneralising a bit here. Still: Every time I hear people in the US say how much they’d like to live in a country not completely dominated by Christianity, this is exactly what I think of. People may not go to church, wait for the rapture and try to cure teh gay all that much. They will insist though, in great numbers, that homeopathy works, Reiki and Acupuncture are 100% scientific, Astrology is truth, dowsing is a legitimate way of detecting water, electricity and nonexistent radiation — and that fairies/elves/ghosts live at the bottom of their garden/in their basement/next door. This crap isn’t any better than organised religion; it encourages magical thinking, is frequently incredibly opposed to science and in some cases kills.
Where the happy-clappy Jesus crowd try to pray away the sickness, these people insist on treating their children for cancer with herbal remedies.
You can’t win. The stupid will find an outlet everywhere, even if it takes different forms.
The idea that this is somehow mitigated by atheism doesn’t work out either, simply because not all atheists arrive at atheism through reason and logic. Over here, you’ll find that once the majority of the population isn’t religious, atheism is simply the default status as much as Christianity is in the US. Many, many, many atheists I know haven’t actively rejected anything in their life, much less through reasoning.
In other words, SteveC is right in my opinion. At least judging by the New Age BS prevalent in much of Europe.
As to the liberal/conservative connection… I don’t think that either is inherently connected with religiosity or superstition. However, if you’re conservative you’re by definition more likely to adhere to the majority religion. If you have non-majority beliefs of any sorts, you’ll define yourself as liberal more easily.
Wow, I see you have met my wife’s friends* then…
I like your moniker for it: Cargo-cult science. I’ll be using that, thanks.
*Married to an artist. They’re nice people, just a bit … clueless and credulous.
Liberals are not immune to stupidity, and among liberals, stupidity tends to manifest more in the form of Newagey or “alternative medicine” crap than in the form of Christian Talibanism or Church of Anarchocapitology. It’s easy to forget this in fighting the Christian Taliban and CoA.
Son of a Nonymous said . .
Actually, atheists don’t necessarily prefer to think things through logically. Many of us had, if not irrational – then non-rational, emotional reasons for making the decision to be non-believers. I was told once too many times that I could not surf a good break on Sunday AM but must attend church instead. That set up a resentment which I honored as soon as I could. By that time the “rationalist” arguments against religion seemed to make so much sense – and I got to think I was smarter than all those religious dupes too.
My point is that one always makes such important decisions for emotional reasons (i.e. to feel good) and the logic is applied afterward to justify them. In all cases the logic one applies will miraculously be successful for justifying that choice. In some cases it can also be valid.
> I’ve never seen a New Ager wish death upon
> those who don’t share their delusions.
# 18,
I have, and it actually did work. Almost. The person who was the “victim” of the spell did not die, but her boyfriend committed suicide (he had been depressive for years). If a person is VERY stupid and/or deluded, the principle of contingency is actually an improvement. I think this is the foundation of magical thinking.
This has nothing to do with liberalism, of course. It’s just a certain kind of stupidity.
As Drs. Watson and Teller demonstrate, even a scientific outlook is no defense against stupidity.
Of course, we musicians are never, ever stupid (grin).
AlanWCan #45
Thank Richard Feynman, he coined it in a speech. He talked about how some natives of pacific islands would see westerners build airports and then planes would come and drop off cargo. Not understanding anything beyond the superficiality of this, they created ‘cargo-cults’ who built fake airports, right down to headsets with bamboo antennas, but planes never came. He coined ‘cargo cult science’ for those who seek the superficial appearance of science without the substance.
I dislike new age stupidity and woo, but unlike with Christian loons, I’ve yet to see groups of them trying to influence legislation to prevent the rights of others.
To be honest, I don’t care if you yanks put a Montel/Sylvia platform into power. Anything’s better than what you’ve got.
The belief in various pseudosciences is one thing that irritates me about the young leftie scene round here. I think they start from realising that a self-interested political-corporate establishment exists, and that the media are constantly lying to them to protect it, and get from there to seeing anything that seems counter-establishment as being on their side (most of the same crowd are into wacko conspiracy theories too.) They’re not all stupid people; I blame a poor science education and too much weed. The irony is that a lot of the pseudoscience they buy into is massively corporate in nature.
I think Al Franken sums it up very nicely, “Progress, not perfection.”
It’s really one thing to have nuts who believe in derivatives of Phrenology, it’s really another to have nuts who outnumber the woowoo crowd on the left. If I have to have a choice between the guy who believes in a young earth, and that God hates gays, or a guy who believes that a national health care system should include homeopathy and chiropractic coverage.
I’ll take the leftist. HE BELIEVES WE SHOULD HAVE NATIONALIZED HEALTHCARE. We’ll work on the woowoo stuff later.
Mormons and Jehowa’s witnesses are the two most politically conservative groups in the USA (even more than Evangelicals), yet they do not have majority beliefs.
It’s the other way round, it’s the particular beliefs and the way they have been imprinted in your youth (and stick or not) that are going to tend to make you more or less conservative.
For instance, if you are absolutely convinced that the most important thing in life is what happens after death, you are generally going to more easily accept inequalities.
If you have received a very patriarchal authoritarian education where you are told not put into question a certain number of unchangeable absolutes, you are much more likely to resist changes of any type.
So, if you accept inequalities of all sorts and reason in terms of unchangeable absolutes, how can you be a liberal, or for social welfare, or for wealth redstribution ?
So it’s not a question of majority or non majority, but the specificity of the beliefs, myths and superstitions, and the way they are imprinted in your brain, that are going to drive or mitigate conservatism.
For instance, believing in Homeopathy or Acupuncture is unlikely to have much impact on your political considerations.
But believing that there is a soul in an zygote, life after death, etc… certainly is.
Ironically the term was coined by, of all people, Richard Feynman, who I beleive had a pretty good grasp on the meaning of the terms energy, vortex and things quantum.
Catts, maybe because Ireland has a lot of vesitigal christianity, I don’t really see many people believing in this new age crap. There are still horoscopes in the newpapers though.
Some liberals are loony, but I have decided to vote for Democrats from now on. Today’s Republicans are more interested in making America a theocracy than anything else.
Some great news: Poll Says Attacks Backfire on McCain
The McCain campaign’s recent angry tone and sharply personal attacks on Senator Barack Obama appear to have backfired and tarnished Senator John McCain more than their intended target, the latest New York Times/CBS News poll has found.
You can have your new age nonsense. I will continue to predict the future by casting and reading fingernail clippings.
Religions are belief systems, myths, that have evolved over time and have been perfected to serve the interests of the ruling classes. Conservatism, ratonalzation of inequalties and group-think is inherently built in, because that’s what has always been preferred by the authorities. How can you rule if the masses don’t believe in fixed moral absolutes , don’t accept ther condition, and to a certain degree believe that their group is better than the other ?
By far the most effcient and perverse new myth that has served the interests of the ruling classes in the 20th century is not astrolgy, nor accupuncture,nor any other new age stupidity, but the myth of “economic freedom”, the belief of yet another fixed moral absolute that free markets and competition are good, and government intervention is bad.
It is quite ironic that the most succesful religion of the last century which has served the interests of the ruling classes has been that the ruling classes should not rule.
Son of a Nonymous, #36
Absolutely. And this scientific, rational, intellectual, evidentiary, non-presuppositional, “just the facts ma’am” approach is why atheists come to agreement on the ethics of animal experimentation, gun control, the sensibility of libertarianism, the empirical demonstrability of eastern mysticism, the justness of the Iraq war, the validity of germ theory…
@ Azkyroth #21:
Where’s your evidence that teaching critical thinking in theory (including testing under the very leading and enforced context of exams) genuinely leads to people taking on a critical thinking habit in the rest of their life? I know someone else who has unevidenced faith in the power of teaching critical thinking and yet who telling fails to demonstrate in practice the abilities they claim learning about it bestowed upon them, even in a thread partially about critical thinking!
I suspect that, like intelligence, critical thinking is much more an innate thing of which some people naturally have more than others. Note that even an intelligent person doesn’t always fully apply their intelligence. Similarly, neither does someone who possesses some measure of ability in critical thinking. They are even less likely to habitually think that way if they only have an externalised version of the concept (eg a set of logic rules to obey by rote) rather than an internalised form – exactly as with religious morals!
It would be good if society was at least taught to value critical thinking, along with intelligence and education and rationality, instead of valuing sporting and other physical prowess, ignorance, cheating and rampant emotionality.
PZ:
I call Poe.
Bad news.
Same-sex marriage ban is now winning in California, 47% to 44%.
Please donate to the NO ON 8 campaign to counter the attacks on California families.
More a realist. Europe already provides the example of a more secular (ie where religious indoctrination is far less guaranteed from birth than in the US) society failing to result in the majority magically being smart enough not to fall for other woo instead (or as well!). Back in the past, when religious indoctrination was the all-pervasive norm, one could be almost certain that every single person who retained or regained their natural atheism did so through their own intelligence, education, rationality and intellectual honesty.
The significance of intelligence is that it enables someone to notice for themselves that religions etc are bogus, without having to have someone else point it out.
The significance of education is that it inevitably includes some of the contradictions which would lead people to notice that religions etc are bogus – hence reducing the level of intelligence required to do the same thing on minimal information. So even mediocre people studying theology are at “risk” of becoming atheists as a result.
The significance of rationality is, in one form, being orderly in the application of intelligence to education and not being prone to emotional brain-failures. This allows intelligence and education to work properly. The other version of it, sanity as opposed to insanity, means you aren’t swamped by artificial evidence continually arising in your brain which you have to recognise as not being real. Insane people are always going to be at high risk of being religious (and of being preyed upon by the religious).
But the utterly indispensible item is intellectual honesty (or mental hygiene). If you are careful always to check what you know, how you know it and how reliably you know it, then you are less likely to be fooled by other people’s falsehoods (or any mistakes your brain makes). If you are scrupulously honest, then you just won’t be able to overlook any or all of the numerous contradictions within a religion and between religions (etc) and reality when those arise or are deliberately presented to you. Only dishonest people can be religious. The more religious they are, the more dishonest they are forced to be – lying to themselves as well as to others.
Unfortunately most humans are dishonest (some much more than others of course). Very few are significantly intelligent. Most are disadvantaged by society or so lazy in themselves that they fail to take proper advantage of educational opportunities. Most are emotional rather than rational. Some are even clinically insane but it’s quite normal for the brain to make errors anyway (through over-enthusiastic pattern matching and many more side-effects of evolutionary pressures).
So, yes, humanity is largely doomed (to magical thinking)!
You’re right! Teach the controversy! Not teaching critical thinking skills might encourage it as well!
There’s no point in teaching any such controversy. The only worthwhile approach is to actually test whether or not there’s a significant and lasting improvement in the real-world functioning of people exposed to critical thinking teaching. If they don’t perform noticeably better than those without it, then it’s a waste of money (compared with, say, forcing them to learn what their local religion actually says, ie theology, and how that is already self-contradictory and contradicted by other religions and by reality, eg science, since those things do have some evidence of working on people throughout history).
It’s just the same as with the abstinence programme (promise rings, dancing with daddy, religious threats etc etc) vs proper sex education. The former has been shown to be totally ineffective (just as it always was!) and shouldn’t be having further money wasted on it, whereas the latter has demonstrated that it’s very effective (eg Holland vs fundy USA).
I disagree. The ideal of the Christianity I’ve observed is a child, too credulous and too ignorant to know any better. (Matthew 18:3; probably elsewhere too.) Perhaps it’s for easier indoctrination, perhaps it’s just a longing for a Golden Age of simplicity that never existed in the first place, but it seems to me that the highest good in Christianity is one who doesn’t need the aid of all the anti-rational memetic defenses like “God’s wisdom is not our wisdom” in order to stay in the fold.
I don’t get the link between Liberal politics and this stuff? What does this have to do with Liberalism? Why do you even mention them together?
It seems to me you are buying into the “Liberal” as a insulting label thing.
From Wikipedia:
“Liberalism is a broad array of related ideas and theories of government that consider individual liberty to be the most important political goal.”
I don’t see any mention of nostril shapes in their write up? Can some one explain this to me?
I agree we need to teach critical thinking more but we also need to learn not to be so judgmental and assume we know someone’s complete ideology based on one aspect of themselves. This blog was about Rose Rosetree (an alias) and her face-reading. She doesn’t talk about healing crystals, she doesn’t speak of aliens. She says she is not a scientist, and calls what she does an art. The labeling of art tells me that whatever she says is left for interpretation. Why does that make her a loon?
I like to remain open-minded and read the article with a “what if?” attitude. But than I read comment#17 by Phoesune and realize that’s a good point. That was the only comment that made me rethink what Rose had to say, not the insults and condescending remarks.
I have a high respect for science but also hold some beliefs that may not be proven by science, yet, and I’m okay with that. Credulous, so what. I’m happy. Stupid happy? Who cares. But it does not mean I believe in every New Age crap out there.
There are a lot of people just looking for money (The Secret is a joke and I have disdain for Eckhart Tolle and his new world), but I hope because I believe in a little something like the power of the mind I am not grouped into this new age genre.
BTW, I am a regular reader, just lurk mostly.
Medical quackery and other non-religious woo is certainly not limited to the (mostly liberal) newage movement. Have any of you ever listened to far-right Patriot Movement radio stations? They’re all over the shortwave, and it seems that every show is sponsored by someone hawking “miracle cures” and such.
(And I know that the militias and the Bircher types are not run-of-the-mill conservatives, but they are trying to influence their less-insane pals.)
There’s nothing inherently liberal about Quacks. Didn’t Nancy Reagen regularly consult an astrologist? Then, there’s that other huge scam that conservatives are so big on. What’s it called again? Oh, yeah, religion.
That’s certainly the ideal prey of the religious. However, not all children are equally credulous and it’s very hard to keep them so ignorant, while still telling them enough about the religion for them to count as religious in their own right, that they still couldn’t know any better if they were honest in their thinking (and capable of thinking at all – ie more intelligence does help considerably to offset ignorance).
They do have to be dishonestly complicit in their continuing indoctrination, even if that’s at a very minimal level of dishonesty while the information available to them is minimal. There are just so many little clues that religion is false. Eg prayer or similar ritual can be seen not to work, angels etc don’t turn up, parents may have lied to them about Santa too and hence shouldn’t be considered trustworthy etc etc.
At the extreme, a totally ignorant person, eg a baby, is not religious. They have to be informed of the religion in some measure of detail before they can really and meaningfully go along with it (it’s very telling that no gods are available to perform this task). They even have to acquire a certain amount of proficiency with reality (and other people’s fantasies), ie become relatively non-ignorant, before they are capable of inventing any woo of their own.
In a similar extreme, a very unintelligent thing, eg a rock or a vegetable or an anencephalic person or someone in a persistent vegetative state, can’t be counted as meaningfully religious. They can’t be indoctrinated with anything much more than anything else. Unfortunately, this also means that deconverting a stupid person won’t stick. They’re just as likely to believe the next religious predator to come along.
I think the reason you have trouble with this is not that it isn’t true but that you don’t like what it says about people. People really are largely unthinking in practice – even the slightly more intelligent ones spend much of their lives on automatic and merely reacting. And most humans really are that casually and habitually dishonest (the BBC continually acts as a left-wing example of that). So very few in any generation are able to be habitually and ruthlessly honest about everything. Hence very few are obligate atheists (and rejectors of other woo) rather than merely opportunistic atheists.
Applied to human culture, all dichotomies are false. Any discussion that revolves around liberal vs. conservative, left vs. right, black vs. white, etc. is already so oversimplified that it’s uninteresting.
Stating the obvious (we all need a hobby), among the many things it isn’t, atheism isn’t a cause, but an effect. Beyond this, of course, it’s simply a description of one thing you aren’t, and says nothing else about what else you might be or not be. You can be an atheist and still be a spectacularly credulous person–all ‘atheist’ says is you’re not credulous about one thing in particular.
Now in cultures heavily dominated by that one thing in particular, sure, your being an atheist does *suggest* something else about you–it suggests a certain habit of independent thought–but note that it doesn’t even guarantee that, exactly, either.
All that’s by the way, however. The point is: there’d be little margin in championing atheism for its own sake. What needs championing is reasoned thinking, a healthy awareness of how easily people (and that’s all of us) can be fooled, can fool themselves, can be coerced and cajoled to betray their own reason, can bind themselves fiercely to a position for reasons utterly divorced from or at odds with the evidence–from the perceived need to fit into a social group where a certain form of magical thinking is the entrance requirement, from the wish to believe something merely comforting or distracting from realities we don’t wish to face. What needs championing is the profound value of learning *not* to fool yourself, the profound value of clear thinking that treats evidence and reason as paramount. You get that right, sure, you’ll get more atheists–and less Christians, less Moslems, less people reading newspaper horoscopes, less people buying copies of *The Secret* and going on about crystal healing–but all of that is symptom, not cause. One more person saying ‘I’m an atheist’ and turning around and declaring homeopathy can cure cancer, that just isn’t an improvement. At. All.
So answering that first sentence: I wouldn’t go so far as to say you can’t win. But you do have to keep in mind which battle you’re really fighting, and what really counts as a victory.
Religious myths and new age myths are not at all on the same level :
1. new age myths are not instruments of politcal authorities and ruling classes, they weren’t designed and haven’t evolved over thousands of years for that purpose
2. new age memes are way less “sticky” than religious memes, because they are not built on fear
So, sure, we already know that there will always be a sgnificant proportion of humans who beleve easily in stupid things, better education and putting more value on culture, knowledge, personal experiences through our lives by opposition to consumption and ownnership of stuff will help, but there will always be a majority of sheeps anyway.
But personally I’m quite sure of one thing, I’d rather live in a society like France or Sweden which has almost gotten rid of religious fundamentalism and maybe has 50% of the population who believes in homeopathy and accupuncture, than one like the US which has 50% Christian fundamentalists and less new age believers, or Saudi Arabia which has 90% muslim fundamentalists and zero new age believers. It’s safer.
As an atheist who still leans a bit toward the conservative, this is the kind of thing that puts me off. But what I’ve come to realize is that these people don’t represent the best of liberalism. In fact, I’m often surprised to find liberals espousing opinions that I’d always thought of as conservative. The reason I’m surprised is that I’d been taught all my life that the left-loonies represent what liberalism actually is. Clearly, that’s not true.
Of course not. What is generally showing up as being a difference (especially if people’s beliefs are naively polled rather than carefully examined) is instead merely the effects of the policy that organised religions have of stamping out rivals.
So, for example, the Bible both states and implies throughout that astrology, mediumship and various other rival woo practices do work. It just forbids followers from indulging in them (ie giving their money and deference to the rival quack/crank/conman instead of the established religious hierarchy of conmen). Though there’s possibly also an element of attempting to preserve mental health in the community by discouraging people from continuing to seek support and guidance from a dead parent on partner.
Extremely religious people who regularly attend highly conforming established churches may still believe in the alternative nonsense to some extent but, being in receipt of repeated reminders and considerable peer pressure, absolutely will not have anything to do with such forbidden things and hence may appear not to believe in them if one only asks whether they do regularly read a horoscope (or whatever) rather than asking in detail whether they believe the stars were put there as portents etc (eg Genesis + 3 wise men story).
Don’t forget the identity-politics crowd. It’s just a matter of time before they alienate middle-of-the-road voters with another Duke lacrosse case or ritual Satanic abuse-type crapola. Rush Limbaugh’s mouth is probably watering already. Yeesh. There’s an image.
I thought it was called phrenology… It’s looney either way.
Son of Nonymous #36 wrote:
No, as heddle rightly points out in #61, ‘atheism’ is too broad a category to make this kind of statement about. The approach and methods you’re talking about here apply to secular humanism: not all atheists are secular humanists. You can be an atheist and believe in pseudoscience and conspiracies. You can be an atheist and be against science and its methods. That would be a self-contradiction in a humanist.
Look at this quote from the article:
While you might feel an immediate urge to call what Rosetree does pseudoscience, in all fairness, she doesn’t claim to be scientific. The art of face reading, she says, descended from the millennia-old tradition of physiognomy, which was practiced by no less than the likes of Aristotle and Pythagoras. Face reading rests on the basic premise, as she says, “that your face is meaningful and not some blob that got put on you like Play-Doh.”
“In all fairness, she doesn’t claim to be “scientific?” I call bullshit. This is no art, dealing with aesthetics and matters of taste. She’s making testable claims, statements of fact, and predictions. So yes, it falls under what science can investigate. If the bumps and shapes of faces are “meaningful” in the way she means, then this needs to fit into the entire structure of our understanding of the universe. Who the hell cares how old physiognomy is? The ancients were never wrong?
I think there’s an innate tendency in people to separate objective public facts from subjective personal facts. It’s as if our approach to understanding runs on two different tracks — when something effects us emotionally, we automatically shove it into mind-like categories involving meaning. Science doesn’t come naturally to us, because it rejects personal knowledge in favor of public knowledge.
It’s not a matter of intelligence. New Age woo is on a continuum with traditional religions, and yes, they’re often mixed together (fundamentalist Christians are often very involved in alternative medicine and “natural” cures — it’s a real problem among the Amish.)
I think it comes down to trusting “common sense” or intuitive reactions over analytical consensus. Our innate tendency to blur our inner world with the outer world will always find and validate some sort of “truth” which tells us that everything is connected to human meanings, and we have a direct personal relationship with the power and goal of the universe.
Aarrggh – typos strike again. That should have been “parent or partner”. Although obsessively mourning a lost child and trying to contact them instead of attending to life and any remaining children would also qualify as detrimental to health.
http://www.kjrh.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=5c383aca-c3d2-4b3d-b4a5-5a8108ba4971
Shitty story and a messed up poll! YAY!
Joan Walsh has pretty much ruined Salon; however the readership still has a clue, based on the letters in response to that article. They are almost uniformly hostile and mocking.
“the ascendancy of navel-gazing crystal-healing New Age loons, without a shred of critical thinking”
I’ll take those ridiculous loons over the right-wing, God-tells-me-to-kill-you loons we have in power right now, thank you very much. Don’t let anyone tell you that they are a necessary part of liberalism; they’re just a consequence of not having one narrow delusion crammed down the country’s throat.
There’s plenty of that on both sides of the aisle. Nobody has a monopoly on stupid (although the Republicans certainly appear that way right now).
Some people are really, really stupid. The fact that these people are supporting a republican isn’t surprising.
Even George Will has distanced himself from John McCain, comparing him to Don Quixote. The only people left are the crazies.
negentropyeater #76 wrote:
Not necessarily. “New Age” with power is just as scary as the Old Age crap. They both tend to view the cosmos as a hierarchy. And they can be just as authoritarian and hostile, when taken seriously. New Age is mostly recycled bits of Eastern religion and medieval magic, and the societies they reflected/generated were not particularly known for their mild and egalitarian character.
If New Age seems more benign and “liberal,” it’s probably because someone usually ‘picks’ it as their individual choice, and they’re encouraged to find “what works for them.” There’s less social structure.
But a rigid view of what the universe “means” — coupled with the belief that some people are more ‘highly evolved’ than others and know things others can’t — gets downright dangerous when there’s no test in reality for any of this.
I’m with AJ Milne in #75. Excellent post, I agree.
And once you’re no longer concerned about “fooling yourself,” the brakes are off. As I think Voltaire once wrote, “those who can make you believe in absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” When you’re making yourself believe in facts which can’t be proven — because you don’t need that kind of cross-checking, you just know you’re right with that deep-seated sense of conviction which comes from the experience of the heart — then watch out.
“Liberalism is a broad array of related ideas and theories of government that consider individual liberty to be the most important political goal.”
Joking right?
“fairness” by any means seems to be the mantra most often bantered about. Individual Liberty doesn’t mean shoveling power to the state. It means removing it from the state and granting it to the individual. (Like the Constitution, remember that thing?)
Loonies will be loonies regardless of their political or religious leanings. Worrying about what they believe in front of their own altars is a total waste of time and blog space. Until they get their own TV program to promote their loonyness, YouTube doesn’t count, they should be treated as amusing space fillers, like astrologers, circus clowns and fortune tellers.
This is an observation related to the earlier phrenology off-shoot Rumpology .
I’m not a butt fetish guy, I’m a whole package perv, butt, I recently clicked on the Sarah Palin Swimsuit competition and was a bit startled:
check it out:
What is wrong with this picture?
Do you notice something missing?
I did.
That woman has no ass, I have a better ass than that.
When I lived in Oakland, some of the more flamboyant Black girls I knew used to sling a racial slur toward white girls, I thought was quite funny, as racial slurs go.
The insult was: Flat Ass White Bitch , or the more venomous M’fkin’ Flat Ass White Bitch .
I am personally opposed to racial slurs, butt it does make you wonder if you want one of THOSE FAWB’s a heartbeat away from the presidency.
And I don’t see the European Union (a paradise of new age pseudo science lunacies according to several commenters in this thread…) moving backwards anytime soon towards the type of society that existed a few thousand years ago in India or China…
Exactly, so what the heck !
But in W.Europe, there’s a clear decoupling.
But the problem is that they can’t watch out. A deluded is incapable of being aware of his delusion, or with great difficulty. Have you ever tried to explain to someone who believes in Astrology that it’s completely non evidenced based ?
Again, it seems to me quite obvious that a majority of humans are just going to take any explanation for granted and stick to it as long as it makes them “feel good” and it’s from a trustworthy source (according to them). That’s how ALL of us get our brains filled up for at least the first ten years of our lives, and our brains always demand explanations, so there we fill… It’s only gradually that a minority are able to develop critical thinking skills, understand logic, analytical and synthetical thinking, understand what is evidence and not, etc…
So, what do we do ? If we already know that there will be a majority of sheeps anyway, at least in the 21st century, the best we can hope for, IMHO, is that the non sheep put in place governance that prevents some of them to exploit the sheep too much. And that’s exactly what the social democratic model of secularised mixed economies established in W. Europe has been trying to do (it’s not perfect, but we’re slowly getting there) for the last 70 years.
It’s sure baloney, but what makes it liberal? Salon is just a lifestyle magazine now, that’s what Joan Walsh has turned it into. It’s vapid baloney, if anything.
Prefer a disjointed band of crystal gazers, tofu eaters and assorted hippie chicks to the organized assaults of the ‘mainstream’ religions. At least until they start trying to force crystal enema healings as a cure for heresy…..
Enjoy.
“[…] were not particularly known for their mild and egalitarian character.” – Sastra
Yeah, if you’ve sat with Wiccans for any period of time, the inherent sexism is generally rather overwhelming – in spite of their declarations against sexism.
Re: Atheism is no guarantee of anything beyond a lack of belief in gods.
I agree. I think some of the confusion stems from the fact that so many atheists have chosen to be atheists. It tends to set it up as a system onto itself – I chose this instead of that, so this must be the same type as that. As I’m fond of saying: it’s a-theism, not athe-ism.
I have to admit though, I’m finding the “objective public fact” versus “subjective personal fact” thing a little confusing. Can you elaborate a bit?
Untrue. I was resistant to indoctrination from very early childhood or even babyhood (and hence in the primitive world would probably have been killed by something for not implicitly trusting my parents, if I wasn’t already going to have died almost immediately anyway from numerous allergies and infections in any era much earlier than my actual birth date – ie after the discovery of penicillin). I never even fell for Santa Claus or the tooth-fairy. Some people really are less gullible than others. It’s not something they have to learn (or perhaps which is even teachable at all beyond minimal improvement with practice). Rather it’s a natural attribute.
Having myself as an untaught example (so that I know it’s possible) and also seeing the officially taught examples repeatedly fail is what makes me suspect this is much more nature than nurture and hence question the efficacy of the critical-thinking teaching programme in which certain other people seem to have unevidenced faith – probably from wishful thinking, since they’d very much like not to be surrounded by nutters but by sensible people instead. It would be so nice if the problem could be fixed that way by some simple lessons (working on most people) but I very much doubt it. And I, unlike the proposers, already have good reason and evidence to doubt it.
I’ve noticed that the practice of homeopathy is bipartisan woo.
Those sugar pills fly off the shelves here in Hyooston as fast as they do in Berkeley.
That’s gotta be the largest grossing fraud in alt medicine retail.
The Homeopathy con may have been recently edged out by hard-on pills hawked on right-wing talk radio, and late night TV, just guessing.
I’m a bit confused — explain again how issues of ethics, justice, and political concepts fall under the domain of “knowledge”?
Tulse,
If none of those fall under the domain of knowledge, then what is left? If what is left is science, then religious scientists are just as good at doing science as atheists, so what’s the point of the original comment?
And the epistomological debate begins!
I will take a reckless early step and propose that “ethics, justice, and political concepts” are knowledge because they can only be invoked in the mind through indirect signaling.
Remembering when Sacrates was on about being a midwife? Ignore all the true justified belief crap. Those are dead ends. The meat is that knowledge isn’t a perceivable object, but a thing that is evoked in another mind as a result of clever hand waving.
To a very large extent, I agree with what you’re saying. For example, homeopathy, Reiki, acupuncture, aromatherapy, and a number of other practices does seem more prevalent on the left than it does on the right.
It’s all lunacy.
But every now and then, I need a reminder of why I’m still voting for Obama. We had a couple very ugly things happen in Sacramento in the last few days. At a website called sacramentorepublicans.org, they had to pull some comments calling for — get this — waterboarding Obama. I go to that website, and it’s still extremely offensive.
Read about the incident here:
http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/1314854.html
Marcos Breton writes about it here:
http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/1314596.html
In another incident, someone had their pro-Obama display vandalized with the usual racial epithets.
heddle, you’re being idiotic. Not all human endeavours fall under “rational knowledge”, and it is silly to place ethics and politics in that sphere — certainly opinions on ethics and politics can be informed by rationality and evidence, but those are not the only criteria involved in those domains.
As for science, it does involve rationality and evidence, which is why having supernatural commitments can undermine its practice.
Why do you find this so hard?
So the US desperately needs a non-white president soon if only just to let the racist bigots know in no uncertain terms that they don’t have majority approval and/or tolerance for their offensive beliefs any more? Would racists be able to protest in a refuse-to-recognise sort of a way against the election of the wrong colour of president? Ditto sexists against a female president, homophobes against a homosexual one or, worst of all in many of their views, theists against an atheist one?
In the UK some people refused to pay the “poll tax” when that took over from the previous local council tax; and many of the councils were run by opposition party members who deliberately allowed their defaulting supporters get away with it and never did punish them or collect the arrears (so that all the well-behaved people had to go on to pay even more than their own share). Does the US have anything similar?
How and why does the Salon article fall under the purview of liberalism? I can’t think of any liberals who would give it any cedence whatsoever, even if they agree that McInsane is “reckless”.
Talk about a straw man argument, i think PZ may be trying to burnish his “non-partisan” credentials here.
OK. The sky is falling. Now exactly why is this supposed to be “liberal” crap?
“Person A said proposition X. Person A adheres to philosophy Y. Therefore all adherents of philosophy Y believe in proposition X.”
That’s the basic structure of the post, and the logic is broken. Tsk, tsk.
Granted that the author of the Salon article was a boob, the article has nothing to do with the doctrines of liberalism. Thus, PZ, I think you’re going off half-cocked when you paint liberals as in any way associated with such nonsense. Certainly, some liberals might believe such things, but it’s an unreasonable burden to force adherents of a philosophy to defend every bit of jackassery promulgated by every other person who votes the same way.
And to bootstrap one’s way from a bad syllogism to a concern about a Democratic majority is just…weird. Is there *any* chance that Senator Obama or a hypothetical Obama administration would be influenced by this kind of thinking? Here’s a list of the Senator’s scientific advisors, if anyone is curious.
On a broader note, but very much to the point, is there any chance that science would be worse off under President Obama than under GWB?
“[…] but those are not the only criteria involved in those domains.” – Tulse
What are the other criteria?
Salon is generally considered a liberal publication.
Tulse,
Pray tell, what human activities do fall under the domain of “rational knowledge” so that we can verify that all intelligent, rational, evidentiary, non-presuppositional atheists arrive, as they should, and a universal or near universal consensus?
I’ll believe that when you accept and pass my challenge. (Slightly modified.)
Just one more ad hominem “ejaculation” from Meyers.
Nah, I’m voting for Obama because of his ideas, not his hue. But when some members of the opposition call for waterboarding the person who will probably be our next president, it makes you realize which of our two major parties is closer to being the Taliban.
I don’t know if I’ve said it here, but I am quite proud of Obama. I’m a 50 year old white guy in a mixed-ethnicity marriage (I’m proud of my swirls), and Obama feels like my brother. When people threaten him like that, I just know there is a certain segment of the population, almost entirely from the conservative end of the spectrum, that think waterboarding Barack Obama is perfectly reasonable.
I really, genuinely am concerned for Obama, and I think my fears are well-founded. This means more to me that stupid ol’ acupuncture (“Oh, but Chinese culture has been around for 6,000 years!”, I’m always told. Er, if a typical 25 year old Chinese female, proud of the world’s oldest culture, was somehow taken back to 3,000 BCE, I’m almost certain she wouldn’t even recognize that culture. But this is beside the point…).
I hope Obama wins. It’s not because of his hue. I hope he doesn’t fall for any kind of woo. But most of all, I really fear for his life. Unfortunately, I think I have legit cause for concern.
This is the material sacrepublicans.org removed from their website:
http://www.sacbee.com/racefor08/story/1314854-a1314566-t2.html
Most prominently, science.
As for your “challenge”, I think you missed the emphasized “can” in my above statement. Most atheists, including our genial host, do not argue that supernatural commitments necessarily interfere with an individual’s practice of science — one can choose to work in domains where such commitments are relatively irrelevant. However, at best what such commitments do is restrict the domains in which such a believer can do credible science. A flat-earther can’t do planetary science, a believer in the Flood is severely limited as to geology, and a creationist has problems in a huge number of scientific disciplines.
(Likewise, someone who believes in astrology might be able to be a fine microbiologist, but would have a hard time working in the psychology of personality, and someone who accepted pyramid power might find a physics career difficult.)
As one’s supernatural commitments (at least ones with physical implications) decrease, these limits decrease as well. And once one dispenses with any such commitments, one finally has access to all of science, of “rational knowledge”.
As an atheist independent, I do have to give credit to the liberal side of the spectrum for their treatment of fundies. On the conservative side, the fundies are treated with respect, and/or shelter. They coddle, defend, and make excuses for their behavior. Rational Liberals tend to ridicule and dismiss their brand of fundies, the ‘navel gazing crystal healing’ type.
The problem with that mentality shows up in the political arena. Conservatives, by accepting the fundies, get to use them as a dedicated voting block. The liberals, by dismissing the new age hippies, drive those voters to support alternative candidates.
Thats the real problem with rationality in democracy. It seems rationalists are in the minority, and if your not willing to swallow your bile and embrace the loons, then your not going to get enough votes. As much as I despise Obamas faith, and his carrying of magic charms to ward off bad luck, I think its those nods to the magic kingdom that will pick up the percentage he needs to get elected. I just hope that its all show. How screwed up is that?
Tulse,
Well, I think that is reasonable. Your examples, of course, are the extreme cases. I’m thinking more along the lines of a Miller, Collins, etc. Or your average, garden-variety practicing scientist who researches and publishes in the normal peer-reviewed journals and who happens to be a believer.
I too suspect him of being at high risk from assassination – especially if he actually becomes president.
What I find rather disturbing with the republicans, is that,
they’ve been in power for the last 8 years…
they’ve inherited an economy in good shape, they’re leaving it in shambles…
they went for a completely unnecessary war which after 7 years is still not finished…
they increased the national debt by $5 trillion and the budget deficit like no previous adminstration in history…
they’ve got a candidate who is completely incompetent, behaves like an angry patriarch ready to break down, and has given up on the ethical principles he pretended he stood for…
they’ve got a VP candidate who confuses the second highest office in the country with that of a cheerleader and has shown that her best ability is that of winking her eyes…
they’ve been consistently behind in the polls for the last month and the gap is increasing every day…
and yet, they are fighting an incredibly negative campaign and it’s as if they won’t tolerate if they could let go of power.
I think they are looking more and more ridiculous every day.
Other dumb thoughts from Bill Maher:
“why do you have so much faith in Western medicine when they get it so wrong, when the third-leading cause of death in this country the health care system itself.”
And…
Cell phones causing recent bee hive problems (CCD):
Not a very scientific guy.
Since when does being a looney New-ager automatically make one a liberal? There are plenty of looney conservative New Agers out there (ever hear of “crunchy Conservatives?”). For a guy who places such an emphasis on rational thinking, PZ makes two fundamental logical errors: a) assuming all New Agers are liberals, and b) assuming that the ascendancy of liberalism will men teascendancy of loopy philosophies. And that’s even taking the ascendancy of liberalism as axiomatic, which is not assured either. Remember how powerful liberals were when supposed liberal Bill Clinton took office? Yeah, I don’t either.
A lot of broad generalizations, for a bunch of professed rationalists.
No, being an atheist doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be rational. But I do think that we’re more inclined that way, and that there is a genetic factor to skepticism. And yet, environment apparently plays a role for most people, as well. You can see that when you compare beliefs in urban versus rural areas, or southern versus northern states, here in the U.S. Or look at all the former believers; it’s clearly not all about inherent intelligence, either. Teaching critical thinking in schools and in communities at large does appear to make a lot of difference.
Though similar, organized religion is much more dangerous than random nuttiness because organized religion has power, and can be imposed on people against their will. People typically choose altie “medicine,” psychic scams, and superstitions of their own volition. Although I’m not insensitive to those who are defrauded; people can’t always help it when they aren’t that bright, and nobody is all that bright all the time. So consumer protections are needed. (Of course, cults such as Scientology have the dangers of both organized religion and quackery.)
But as a Democrat, I thank you not to blame me for astrology, because it drives me up the wall, too.
Jeanette, earlier the topic of Nancy Reagan’s reliance on astrology was brought up.
Where’s your scientific, peer-reviewed, long-term study evidence for that? What are you counting as the teaching of it and how are you measuring success (including comparison with some control groups) – or are you still just guilty of wishful thinking?
Janine (#121): Yeah, I saw it. It’s not just the liberals, of course. But when people who aren’t part of organized religion or belonging to fringe religions believe nutty things, it’s called superstition. Whereas (Nancy Reagan aside) many religious people avoid “alternative” nutty beliefs because their religions forbid competing nuttiness. Yet of course these conventional people can’t be seen as “not superstitious.”
And the conservative=religious, liberal=flaky, atheist=rational, atheist=liberal, religious=stupid, etc., generalizations and assumptions have run rampant through these comments, although I have seen some interesting insights from people who see more deeply into the complexity of these issues.
PZ I so agree with you. I live in one of the Liberal Idiot Clusters of this nation–Olympia, WA, where people believe in things like Ramtha, and that Rachel Corrie was a saint rather than a life-skill-lacking, suicidally ideated jet-setting young adult who got a working class Israeli to achieve her apotheosis for her.
It’s been bad enough with the dung-flinging, whining, foot stamping, and screeching of the past 8 years. I fear it’s going to get downright unbearable now that Captain Hope wins the comic-book product placement battle against Captain Captain, and his sidekick, Fuckmepumps Mommy.
Loons are loons, and I’m sick of them all. I don’t care what your politics are, or your religion or whatever.
Most of the “liberals” I know are the same as the “conservatives” against whom they are flinging their adolescent-type rebellion energies. The same kind of irrationality, the same kind of irresponsibility, the same kind of self-privileging chimpiness.
Screw them all, and give me rational discourse. And hot anonymous safe sex.
ming
(“Of course I love guns, they’re calculus praxis!”)
You don’t “teach” critcal thinking skills.
You teach general education subjects in schools (maths, science, readng, writng, history, …).
You can stimulate more or less efficiently, in schools, by adequate pedagogy, (smaller classes, more active participation, more group problem solving, etc…) the development of critical thinking skills.
But there will always be huge variations in each individual’s natural ability to develop those skills.
Pelican’s Point #47:
This is not correct. If you replaced “always” with “often” or “sometimes” I would agree, but I am pretty sure that the justification for deconversion is not always after the fact, and certainly not always independent of the cause.
E.g. for me it was the recognition early on that there were multiple religions that made mutually exclusive claims that spurred me to think about which, if any was true. When I realized that there was no basis for believing one religion over another, I concluded they were all probably wrong. I had no prior resentment toward religion, and for me it was a purely intellectual matter. It’s true that more reasoning came later, but it had nothing to do with feeling good.
There is also a problem with characterizing beliefs as choices. Sincere belief isn’t a matter of choice (at least not directly).
SEF (#122): Not based on a study, but on observation over the 35 years that I’ve lived here in Colorado of the voting habits and inclinations of the city residents versus those in our suburbs and in our rural communities, where many of the children are encouraged to be loud-mouthed preachy little evangelical brats.
And from noticing the obvious differences in the beliefs of those who are brought up being brainwashed in parts of the country where religion is mandated by schools and expected by employers, compared to places where people have freedom and children are exposed to a variety of beliefs and taught to think about them.
It shouldn’t take a peer-reviewed study to show you that Texas and California are two different worlds. Brain-washing works, which is why creationists are so intent on getting their nonsense taught in science classes. Have you seen “Jesus Camp?” Heard about Hell House? Those people know what they’re doing. Just like the Islamists who train children to become suicide bombers. You don’t need a peer-reviewed study to tell you that children don’t become suicide bombers unless that’s what they’re taught. Irrational and irrational thinking clearly can be taught.
The biggest peddler of new-age or any-age crap is Kevin Trudeau with his self-help books and other crap. I always switch channels when I see his infomercials.
At least this nut-case doesn’t appear to be profiting from her face-reading fruitiness.
Negentropyeater (#125): There’s some truth to what you say, too. Individual variation, natural inclinations, genetic disposition. But I do think that critical thinking is a skill, and can be taught as such. Mandatory classes in ethics, logic, and philosophy, perhaps?
I’m out. Have a great day,
~Jeanette
Journalist baloney, actually. Go read the comments. The liberal readers of Salon call this twaddle what it is, journalistic wankery.
For anyone claiming that critical thinking skills cannot be taught I call bullshit. I certainly was taught them in the ’70s.
Or, another way of putting it, they are unsuccessful cases. That is, when such folks try to practice their “science” according to the supernatural views, they don’t get to publish in peer-reviewed journals and speak at professional conferences. There are plenty of crackpots who have supernatural and/or “pathological” views about various scientific topics (e.g., Erich von Daeniken, Flood geologists, etc.). We just don’t call them “scientists”.
Right, and my point is that these folks are successful precisely because, unlike the crackpots, they don’t let their supernatural commitments interact with their science. But that doesn’t tell us the religion is somehow innately compatible with science — quite the opposite, it says that the only time religion is compatible with science is when people aren’t actually using religion to make testable truth claims about the world. When you actually treat religion as if it has something to say about the physical world, you cease doing science.
So sure, people can have all sorts of wacky false beliefs about the world and still do science. I could be a fine physicist and yet think that aliens helped to build the pyramids. I could be a molecular biologist and think that the stars direct our fortunes. Heck, I could even be a brilliant game theorist and yet be paranoid schizophrenic. But I don’t think that anyone would deny that John Nash was limited in what he could research and understand because of his schizophrenia (for example, he’d have been a lousy historian of espionage). Likewise, religion limits what a scientist can understand — it is only those scientists who are not religious (or whose religious beliefs entail no physical claims) who have access to the full range of scientific thought.
Here’s an analogy: a person who is missing their hands may very well be an excellent runner, perhaps even faster than some able-bodied people, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t still handicapped. Scientists who are religious believers are handicapped, and it is only by choosing areas that don’t reveal that handicap that they can successfully do real science.
Yes, people are mostly stupid.
What’s new?
I encourage everyone to write their congresscritter urging their support for the New Age Wacko Euthanasia Bill.
While we’re at it, we also need to ban DHMO!
http://www.dhmo.org/
I’m fairly certain physiognomy is not a core liberal belief.
@ Heddle #109, 115
Of course, people can do good science regardless of their irrational belief(s), if they pursue meaningful questions to wherever the answers lead. But as Tulse has pointed out, nonsense results with high likelihood when they admit their irrational belief(s) into their scientific work, such that some answers become pre-ordained, or some routes of inquiry are foreclosed.
Your “challenge” merely addresses the ability of humans to hold incompatible cognitions. It diverts attention from the fundamental incompatibility of the scientific method and irrational belief systems like religion. Instead of repeating this diversion, why not show what happens to religious doctrine, say, transubstantiation, the Nicene Creed, or ensoulment, when examined as a set of hypotheses, using methods commonly used in scientific work.
And exactly what makes that article “liberal”? It seems like a puff piece in a lifestyle section, and admits that it is unscientific and just for fun.
Again, what is “liberal” about it. As a lifelong liberal myself, I see nothing about the article that would label it as something “liberal”.
dubiquiabs,
That must be so, because some scientists, presented with the good data, are death penalty supporters and some, presented with the same data, are hard core death penalty opponents. At least one set is irrational, if only in the eyes of the other–but both can do good science. Some scientists abuse their spouses, some don’t. Some cheat on their taxes, some don’t. Some are liberals, some conservatives, some libertarians, some think libertarians are nuts. We could give many more examples, and one of the many would be religious belief. Show me a scientist, and I’ll show you someone with some irrational beliefs who compartmentalizes. It is not limited to scientists who are believers, not by a long shot.
You’re doing it again, heddle — confusing issues that can be decided by objective rationality and empirical evidence with issues of ethics and politics. Yes, people disagree on a variety of issues, but just because some scientists like peanut butter and others like chocolate doesn’t mean that they are “irrational”, and thus anything goes, even demonstrably false beliefs about the nature of the physical world. The issues you identify are, at best, “extra-rational”.
The problem with religious belief is that, unlike claims about the desirability of chocolate, it makes specific claims about objective observable properties of the physical world, claims that are false. To the extent that a scientist believes such false claims, they are behaving irrationally (not extra-rationally, but irrationally).
What does this have to do with liberalism? Nothing! Except that you project it onto it.
@ Heddle #138
My first sentence in full (emphasis in the original, #136):
Your quotemining response diverts attention from the main argument: Fundamental incompatibility of the scientific method and irrational belief systems like religion.
Tulse,
No, not chocolate. Let’s do the death penalty example. There are data available to everyone about the death penalty. How many people on death row have, ultimately, been exonerated? How much does a life prison term cost? How is applied to different races and economic statuses? There are volumes of objective data available and yet people will reach different conclusions. I don’t think it is outrageous to imagine that in many cases some on one side will say to the other: “you are looking at the same data I am, how can you reach the opposite conclusion? It’s irrational!” Or maybe that statement itself is irrational. It is not a “you-like-chocolate-but-I-don’t” situation. It is people looking at the same data and reaching different conclusions.
And yet it is clear that such people can, in principle, compartmentalize and do good science.
dubiquiabs,
And what is the effect of that incompatibility? Can you detect it in the science of believers? If not, then it is not real. Can’t be observed means it shouldn’t be discussed–except as an indemonstrable assertion–like religion. In science, we agree not to discuss what cannot be observed.
(Aside: Criminy, are there more than three of you who can hold a dialogue without hair-trigger charges of quote-mining, logical fallacy, projection, or membership in the death cults? It’s so frigging 2007.)
Wasn’t it the Reagan’s who had the kookoo Astrology card reading psycho advising them?
Joan Quigley, planned almost all presidential travel, press conferences, and even the president’s cancer surgery……… based on astrology.
Ronald and Nancy Reagan had a long history of relationships with astrologers and psychics. Another astrologer associated with the Reagans was Joyce Jillson who helped the Reagans in selecting Reagan’s Vice President
The one thing I dread with a Democratic victory is the ascendancy of navel-gazing crystal-healing New Age loons,
Gosh, Professer, why are you repeating the stupidest right wing drivel there is as if it is an established fact? Are you willing to give us an example of navel-gazing or crystal-healing driving policy or strategy in the Democratic Party. Astrology says that Nov. 4th is a vert auspicious day for Democrats, but that’s just pure, scientific FACT!!!
Say, perfesser, you wouldn’y be turning into a critical old crank in your young age, would you? The kind of guy who naturally gravitates to a grouchy kind of literalism?
C’mon, man, be yourself! You were born to be an anti-religious crank. You wouldn’t be the first, it’s a proud tradition, and you would do honor to its ranks.
<>
Well PZ, maybe you need to consider a run for Congress yourself, get in there and start putting the House in order.
(Crikey, I mean if people consider Al Franken a legitimate candidate …)
Jams #95 wrote:
I was trying to point out that most of our personal decisions are based on anecdote, experience, insights, tradition, and common sense. While this works most of the time, it allows subjective errors to creep in when we’re trying to discover larger, objective truths. “Common sense” can be misleading. We’re also prone to believing that we can have direct, private, intuitive knowledge of the external world special to ourselves. This leads, of course, to conflicting “truths” (ie religion).
Science as a system was designed over time to weed out these errors of bias by using open evidence and methods accessible to all, cross-checked and self-corrected by the requirement that there should eventually be a consensus among experts. That’s a severe test — and most people reject it.
An example of an “objective public fact” then would be the overwhelming evidence from multiple disciplines that water does not have a memory, and homeopathy doesn’t work in controlled studies. An example of a “subjective personal fact” is “I tried homeopathy, and got better — it worked for me! And my sister!”
People want to agree with and accept both: that’s what I meant about running their minds on multiple tracks.
It does seem to me that the left irrationalists are prone to Newage flakery, while the right irrationalists are more into wacky fundamentalism. But scratch a fundie and they’ll tell you that the occult is real and evil. It’s not so different. Mostly less hate-filled on the left side. (Mostly less, not none at all.)
I’m amazed that no-one has yet linked to the excellent post The Amazing Mechanical Leftieby Greta Christina. I find her analysis compelling, in part because I came up with the same idea independently :)
Well, I see that some people are naming some of their favorite “liberal” woos to back up PZ. I have many favorites, including one who suckered me about 15 years ago, Dr. Andrew Weil.
The trouble with Weil is that he starts off sounding reasonable, and after a while starts recommending, well, garbage.
Check it out: http://www.drweil.com/
There is a difference,PZ. The crystal gazing loons are well meaning, and often stoned. This is not as threatening as the load-your-own ammo crowd or the take-over-the-world crowd. Annoying and wrong, sure, but not as bad.
@ heddle #142:
But, tellingly, those different conclusions are not about what is (ie the reality of things which science addresses and about which religion lies) but instead they disagree on what ought to be. This is quite a separate type of question. You’ve been trolling for long enough, heddle, to have been told many times already about the wrongness of confusing an “is” with an “ought” (whether you do it accidentally or deliberately, with dishonest intent).
People have different morality equations depending on how much weight they give to certain factors. Eg some people think it’s much more important that no-one wrongly convicted be put to death, while others prefer that no-one rightly convicted get a chance to escape and re-offend. This skews their opinions in one direction or the other. The financial cost of it all is another such factor where people would differ on how they would like money spent (eg imprisonment vs execution vs some other societal projects). The knock-on psychological and morality effect on individuals involved and society at large is yet another factor. What none but the hopelessly incompetent, dishonest or insane ones do is try to have their own starting facts for their personal equation, eg by suggesting that no innocent people are ever convicted, that no-one ever escapes, that it’s all free, that there are no consequences etc.
On the contrary, it’s just like that (although less trivial and hence more contentious). People do objectively agree on what chocolate and other flavours are. No-one denies the existence of chocolate altogether or claims it’s actually orange instead. They merely subjectively disagree on which they prefer – whether for taste or health reasons, according to how much priority they assign to each consideration.
NB Usually with a food, “like” only means “like the taste of” so it’s an equation with just one factor (from love to like to loathe and various values in between). But that’s just a convention and on another occasion the meaning might include whether the food suits a particular purpose or whether it’s good or bad for them – sometimes jokingly phrased as “but it doesn’t like me”.
While we’re all sharing our “woos from the left”-stories, there’s a pretty good one about clergy and mental health out today:
http://www.livescience.com/health/081015-church-mental.html
As you might expect, this one skews right: If you attend a Fundy church, you’re more likely to hear, “It’s an attack from Satan!”.
Figures.
I’m sure someone has brought this up already, but I fail to see why this sort of nonsense ought to be described as “liberal” at all.
I see nothing about various notions of freedom that necessarily coincide with this sort of stupidity.
Well, physiognomy definitely has something to do with why I voted for Brooke Burke in Dancing With the Stars this week!
This is Myers baloney — an unserious piece, much like many PZ himself runs, but which he takes seriously in a silly swipe at “liberals”. But the liberals in the comments overwhelmingly dis the piece as pseudoscience, blowing PZ’s intellectually dishonest case.
I’m sure someone has brought this up already, but I fail to see why this sort of nonsense ought to be described as “liberal” at all.
I see nothing about various notions of freedom that necessarily coincide with this sort of stupidity.
Quite so.
The one thing I dread with a Democratic victory is the ascendancy of navel-gazing crystal-healing New Age loons, without a shred of critical thinking.
This dread itself is devoid of critical thinking. Just where does PZ “dread” that they will “ascend” to … Obama’s administration? That’s in complete contradiction to his (accurate) claim that Obama is pro-science. And if that’s not his dread, then what does an Obama win have to do with it?
I see that some people are naming some of their favorite “liberal” woos to back up PZ.
And how does simply naming extant woosters back up his idiotic dread that they will “ascend” if Obama wins?
Gosh, Professer, why are you repeating the stupidest right wing drivel there is as if it is an established fact?
He’s not claiming that Obama will hand the keys of the nation to Muslim terrorists or will enslave whites, although there is a disturbing common element.
Are you willing to give us an example of navel-gazing or crystal-healing driving policy or strategy in the Democratic Party.
A better question is, is he willing to admit that he’s full of crap? Neither the Obama campaign, the Democratic Party, nor the grassroots is partial to pseudoscience. At DailyKos, such stuff gets mercilessly ridiculed (as this physiognomist nonsense was in the Salon comments), and even 9/11 conspiracy theories are banned.
Journalist baloney, actually. Go read the comments. The liberal readers of Salon call this twaddle what it is, journalistic wankery.
Yes.
I’m fairly certain physiognomy is not a core liberal belief.
Indeed.
And exactly what makes that article “liberal”? It seems like a puff piece in a lifestyle section, and admits that it is unscientific and just for fun.
Again, what is “liberal” about it. As a lifelong liberal myself, I see nothing about the article that would label it as something “liberal”.
Right..
What does this have to do with liberalism? Nothing! Except that you project it onto it.
True.
Wasn’t it the Reagan’s who had the kookoo Astrology card reading psycho advising them?
Correct.
It’s PZ who is spewing baloney by painting this with a “liberal” brush and with his ridiculous “dread” about Democrats winning.
PZ I so agree with you. I live in one of the Liberal Idiot Clusters of this nation–Olympia, WA, where people believe in things like Ramtha, and that Rachel Corrie was a saint rather than a life-skill-lacking, suicidally ideated jet-setting young adult who got a working class Israeli to achieve her apotheosis for her.
So everyone in Olympia believes those two things? A false-dichotomy-wielding cretin like yourself is hardly in a position to be calling others idiots.
FWIW, Rachel Corrie was not a saint, but she was murdered by the IDF, you Zionist piece of shit.
A lot of broad generalizations, for a bunch of professed rationalists.
Righto. Far too many people here seem to think that being hostile to religion is enough to make one rational.
For a guy who places such an emphasis on rational thinking, PZ makes two fundamental logical errors: a) assuming all New Agers are liberals, and b) assuming that the ascendancy of liberalism will men teascendancy of loopy philosophies.
They aren’t logical errors, but they are errors, and rather silly ones.
How and why does the Salon article fall under the purview of liberalism?
Salon is generally considered a liberal publication.
So what? Is the author of the piece liberal? Probably. Is the physiognomist liberal? We don’t know. Do either of them represent liberalism? No. Did the piece promote its subject as true? No. Were the liberal Salon commenters sympathetic to its subject? NO. Taking this article as saying anything about liberalism or liberals — except what’s evident in the comments section, that numerous liberals scoffed at it — is fucking stupid.
To a very large extent, I agree with what you’re saying. For example, homeopathy, Reiki, acupuncture, aromatherapy, and a number of other practices does seem more prevalent on the left than it does on the right.
It’s all lunacy.
But every now and then, I need a reminder of why I’m still voting for Obama.
“still”? What the fuck do homeopathy, Reiki, acupuncture, aromatherapy, or “a number of other practices”, even if “more prevalent on the left”, have to do with Obama?
Talk about lunacy.
Ignore all the true justified belief crap. Those are dead ends. The meat is that knowledge isn’t a perceivable object, but a thing that is evoked in another mind as a result of clever hand waving.
As usual, Jams, you’re nonsensical. What is invoked in another mind is a belief. The “clever hand waving” is justification. It’s knowledge only if its true.
Don’t forget the identity-politics crowd. It’s just a matter of time before they alienate middle-of-the-road voters with another Duke lacrosse case or ritual Satanic abuse-type crapola. Rush Limbaugh’s mouth is probably watering already. Yeesh. There’s an image.
What not just tattoo “racist” on your forehead?
I’d been taught all my life that the left-loonies represent what liberalism actually is.
I find it odd when people talk about what they’ve been taught all their lives as if being taught something makes it credible and being taught it repeatedly makes it even more credible.
In other words, you deserve all the bad things that happen to you. It is called “stinking thinking”.
It’s also called conservativism.
Bread and circuses, people, bread and circuses. It doesn’t matter what party engages in it, the American Empire is burning.
This reminds me of the time I was checking out some recent columns by Mark Morford, an SFGate writer I admire for his passionate libsnark, and found this.
Boy, do I hate that whole “it’s so cool, it should be mysterious and not ruined by unimaginative scientists” viewpoint. Argh.
I still like Morford, but sure don’t go to him for his views on/of science.
> FWIW, Rachel Corrie was not a saint, but she was murdered
> by the IDF
Nobody knows for sure wether it was murder or an accident. We have only two sources, the IWF and the ISM. Both are highly biased, and not too reliable.
What I know is that any person who throws herself before a bulldozer for a frivolous and unjust cause deserves a Darwin Award.
The second intifada was started when Barak (the former Israeli PM, not Obama) had just offered a Palestinian state including Gaza, the West Bank and half of Jerusalem.
Trying to get by force, from a stronger entity, what the same stronger entity has already offered without a fight is just plain stupid. The second intifada brought only death and suffering for both the Palestinian and the Israeli people, the only ones who profited from it were a few officials in the Palestinian authority, who got even richer than they already were, their (post)colonial puppetmasters in the EU, and Ariel Sharon, who became Prime Minister of Israel.
What I know is that any person who throws herself before a bulldozer for a frivolous and unjust cause deserves a Darwin Award.
What I know is that you’re an asshole Zionist scumbag.
P.S. The most assholey part of your statement is that Rachel threw herself before a bulldozer. What she did was stand in front of a home in an attempt to protect it from being razed. It was a noble act, something beyond the comprehension of scum like you.
Stupid, but I suspect that an article with the line “Obama has the nostrils we need” is more tongue-in-cheek than you give it credit for – even if the loony wackadoo “expert” quoted in the article is dead serious.
> What she did was stand in front of a home
> in an attempt to protect it from being razed.
Or standing in front of some scrubbery hat hid a tunnel.
I repeat myself: sources disagree with each other.
But even if she tried o protect some PA leaders material possessions, it would not have been
> a noble act
Going to other people’s stupid wars as a tourist might show physical courage, but physical courage without brains, reason and a worthy cause is worthless. Protecting the material possessions of a minor warlord is not worth the life of a human being.
Or standing in front of some scrubbery hat hid a tunnel.
I repeat myself: sources disagree with each other.
And yet you take one as the truth so as to support your claim that Rachel brought on her own death and deserved it. You’re stinking garbage.
And
But even if she tried o protect some PA leaders material possessions, it would not have been
a noble act
It wasn’t “some PA leaders material possessions”, you racist Zionist shithead, it was a Palestinian home, and it was a noble act. Go tell Cindy and Craig Corrie that their daughter “deserves a Darwin Award”, you loathesome pustule.
P.S.
Here’s the “minor warlord” whose home Rachel Corrie was standing in front of when she was killed.
http://www.rebuildingalliance.org/blog/?p=55
> And yet you take one as the truth
No. I have left this open.
> your claim that Rachel brought on her own death
that one is true
> and deserved it
that one isn’t. My point was that nobody deserves to die in a pointless conflict.
> You’re stinking garbage.
You postoperaists are quite good at using strong words. You are not very good at using baseball bats. Try to reclaim the streets of Lombardy from the Lega Nord rather than chase ‘Zionist’ bogeyman. Those ‘stinking’ Anti-Germans and Anti-Nationals at least keep the Neo-Nazis out of town.
> it was a Palestinian home,
It was the home of a member of a corrupt and inefficient elite, regardless of race or nationality. Once there was a time when those who got killed attacking ill-gotten property were the heroes of the left, not those who died defending it.
> Go tell Cindy and Craig Corrie that their daughter
> “deserves a Darwin Award”,
Go tell the parents of those who have died, and will die, because you have called a senseless and unnecessary death a noble act, and worthy of emulation. Or go and play with your Sorel and Faurisson action dolls (but don’t damage the delicate lift-the-right-arm function in your anger).
johannes, truth machine:
You know, what seems abundantly clear from the 25-cent version in Wikipedia, at least, is that no one except possibly the bulldozer driver really knows why Rachel Corrie was killed. It is possible the IDF lied about what happened, but it’s also possible they really didn’t know to begin with. As for those on the scene, well, we all know eyewitness accounts are hardly reliable.
What we should know — was there an order, or some sort of understanding or standing policy, or a general pattern of action, that someone who put themselves in Corrie’s position was to be considered a combatant and removed by any means necessary? I don’t think it’s sensible, or even possible, to make a determination on exactly what happened without that. Certainly invoking Godwins-by-proxy like Faurisson or slinging around “Zionist” as an insult are not useful or relevant to the argument.