Around FtB

I’ve been sluggishly recovering, so let’s see what other people are doing around here, OK?

  • Deacon Duncan examines the Christian persecution complex.

  • Stephanie Zvan reveals that her harasser, Sara Mayhew, traces. Oooh, burn.

  • Avicenna points out that there other ways of doing great harm to people than shooting them.

  • Aron Ra has been engaging in interfaith dialogue.

  • Ashley Miller…WHAT? I don’t even…seriously, people are that racist? Some rocks cover some really ugly slimy stuff, but you’ve got to flip them over anyway.

  • The Atheist Experience explains that miracles aren’t.

  • Brianne Bilyeu is raising money for a pro-choice cause.

  • Sikivu Hutchinson is supporting a pastor — one who is facing a tribunal for being an advocate for the LGBTQ community.

  • Miri, Professional Fun-Ruiner gingerly deals with the fraught situation of having friends with different political views. Are you a bad person if some of your friends are assholes?

  • Ophelia Benson is also mystified by American Atheists’ recent tactics.

  • Richard Carrier dismantles a defense of the historicity of Jesus.

  • The Digital Cuttlefish thinks poorly of an educator who wants to bring in more religion to cover his shortcomings.

  • Dana Hunter talks about how gender stereotypes harm boys, too. Be sure to watch the excellent video at the end!

  • Alex Gabriel grows and shrinks.

  • Greta Christina is bustin’ out all over.

  • Kate Donovan talks about adoption. It’s complicated!

  • Ally Fogg looks at the people behind legislation to regulate sex work. “a bunch of homophobic bigots” is perhaps the kindest phrase used.

  • Tauriq Moosa is quite right that if we’re going to support marriage equality, we have to recognize that even Scientologists can get married as they choose.

  • Jason Thibeault gets an email explaining why we keep fighting for equality.

  • Kaveh Mousavi talks about a minority so tiny I didn’t know anything about them. Do you think they’re tolerated, since they stress tolerance? Hah.

  • Maryam Namazie has been protesting in Paris

  • Nirmukta talks about the movement to equate Indian nationalism with Hinduism. From my perspective as a citizen of a country that considers patriotism and Christianity synonymous, I can concur — it’s always a bad idea.

  • Comrade Physioproffe is having dinner. I’ve seen the guy, he’s not fat at all, and I don’t know how he does it.

  • Mano Singham highlights the peculiarity of all these “first” women in various positions. Isn’t announcing a “first” woman mean you’ve been a sexist douche for many years?

  • Taslima Nasrin thinks Women’s Day ought to be superfluous.

  • Yemisi Ilesanmi celebrates International Women’s Day.

  • Stephen ‘Darksyde’ Andrew has been reading anti-vaccination crankery.

  • Heather McNamara addresses the “don’t tell Grandpa” trope that LGBTQ people often encounter.

Cosmos: Thumbs up!

It’s off to a good start, and I quite enjoyed the first episode. It was maybe a bit heavy on the simplifications and the eye-popping graphics, but I’m seeing it as a tool to inspire a younger generation to get excited about science again, so I think that actually is a good thing.

It’s also impressive that a strongly pro-science program (and one that took a few shots at Catholic dogmatism) was on broadcast television, and even on Fox. I was getting exasperated with the too-frequent commercial breaks, but I think that’s the price we pay for getting wider dissemination to the public, rather than to just us privileged few who can afford cable and/or buying the DVDs.

Who is Dave Silverman representing?

In the wake of David Silverman’s claim that the case for abortion rights is “maybe not as clean cut as school prayer, right to die, and gay marriage,” the American Secular Census asked atheists what their views on those subjects were. Now of course, these numbers don’t say which answer is right, but only what the majority of atheists, those people American Atheists are supposed to represent, think is right. We have a decidedly liberal bias.

Which of these statements best describes your opinion about abortion?

  • 55.4% Abortion should be legal without any restrictions beyond those applied to any other medical procedure.

  • 43.0% Abortion should be legal but with reasonable restrictions on gestational stage.

  • 00.9% Abortion should be legal only in cases of rape, incest, or to save the woman’s life.

  • 00.2% Abortion should be legal only to save the woman’s life.

  • 00.0% Abortion should be illegal.

  • 00.5% Undecided / other

Which of these statements best describes your opinion of school-sponsored prayer in public education?

  • 76.6% School-sponsored prayer has no place in public education.

  • 22.8% School-sponsored prayer should not occur, but official minutes of silence when students can pray/meditate privately are fine.

  • 00.2% School-sponsored prayer should be accommodated but only at special events such as graduation.

  • 00.2% Parents and/or student bodies should be able to vote whether to have school-sponsored prayer.

  • 00.1% School-sponsored prayer is fine.

  • 00.2% Undecided / other

Which of these statements best describes your opinion about gay couples marrying?

  • 97.3% Gay couples should be able to marry in all states.

  • 01.0% States should be able to decide whether to perform gay marriages and whether to recognize marriages performed in other states.

  • 00.6% Gay marriage should not be recognized in any state but all states should allow gay couples to enter into civil unions.

  • 00.2% States should be able to decide whether to formalize civil unions and whether to recognize civil unions from out of state.

  • 00.0% Gay couples should not be able to marry or enter into civil unions in any state.

  • 00.9% Undecided / other

So what’s going on here? Is David Silverman trying to appease the 0.0% of atheists who think abortion should be illegal, or the 0.1% who think school prayer is fine, or the 0.0% who oppose gay marriage? Because that’s kind of like the Sierra Club pandering to the vanishingly small fraction of their membership that think California condors ought to be poisoned. I don’t quite see the point. Or is he trying to encourage more anti-choice misogynistic praying homophobes to sign up? Because that sounds like a stupid idea that would only alienate 99.9% of the existing membership.

I’m going to pretend it’s a stupid PR stunt. It’s definitely getting American Atheists some media attention, but it’s all man-bites-dog counter-intuitive sensationalism, and I don’t think it’s going to pay off in the long run.

The abortion story is getting all the press, but I also have to object to something else Silverman said.

He describes himself as a “fiscally conservative” voter who “owns several guns. I’m a strong supporter of the military. I think fiscal responsibility is very important. I see that as pretty conservative. And I have my serious suspicions about Obama. I don’t like that he’s spying on us. I don’t like we’ve got drones killing people…” In the final analysis, “the Democrats are too liberal for me,” he says.

You know, I’m getting really tired of the schtick of so many people that they are “socially liberal, but fiscally conservative”. In a country where the primary social challenge of our time is the obscene wealth of the privileged few and the growing economic inequity, you don’t get to separate those two so neatly anymore: you are not socially liberal, you are not in favor of equality and opportunity, if you’re associating yourself with the poisonous economic policies of the rabid right.

I can agree with him on the issues of privacy and drones, but to call the Democrats, a centrist conservative organization that rolls over for the Right every time they bark, “too liberal” is simply insane.

Today is my birfday!

I had such plans, such grand plans for today. We’re on spring break, and I am 100% caught up on my grading, so I have no obligations hanging over me. I had a list in my head:

  • Pancakes!

  • A little writing, off and on, on my big super secret project.

  • Build a model airplane. My daughter got me one as a souvenir of her trip to Japan, and my first thought was, “I haven’t built one of these since I was a teenager, 30 years ago”…and then I had to recalculate. 40 years ago. 40. So I was going to aggressively regress to a spotty gangling teen nerd today.

  • Cosmos on the TV tonight!

Doesn’t that sound relaxing? But no, instead I have come down with the Mother of All Colds, and I am hacking and weezing and got little sleep and am feeling miserable.

So plans…revised.

  • Sit.

  • Ooze slime from cranial orifices.

  • Hot tea.

  • Archer season 4 on NetFlix.

  • Hope I’m conscious for Cosmos.

Thst’ll have to do. Maybe later this week I’ll have my party, belatedly, once I finish destroying this virus.

There’s a secular argument for wearing underpants on your head. So?

Sarah Moglia points out that David Silverman has been saying some weird things recently.

Yesterday, an article was published about atheists at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference). Featured prominently in the article was Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists. In it, Dave was quoted as saying, “I will admit there is a secular argument against abortion. You can’t deny that it’s there, and it’s maybe not as clean cut as school prayer, right to die, and gay marriage.” Is that so?

I’m trying to figure out what this ‘secular argument’ actually is; he didn’t say. I have encountered anti-choice people tabling at an atheist convention, and they couldn’t say either — I got the impression these were actually religious people trying to evangelize to the atheists with a pretense, and they stood out oddly from the rest of the crowd…rather like an atheist shilling at CPAC. So speak up, Dave, tell us what these secular arguments are.

I’m also wary because in my business we’ve run into folks peddling religious bullshit under the guise of being secular before: we call them intelligent design creationists. No one is fooled. Similarly, the anti-choicers who claim to be making a rational secular argument are easy to see through, since they ultimately always rely on some magical perspective on the embryo.

But here’s the bottom line: it is not enough to make a purely secular argument. It has to also be a good argument, unless atheism is to become a smokescreen for nonsense, to be accepted purely because of its godless label. And then atheism might as well just be another religion.

Christ, but I actually hate these people

Fox News Republicans and Libertarians — every once in a while they do something that just ignites this white hot flash of rage in my brain. I can’t help it. The Daily Show had a segment on conservatives getting angry at poor people for buying good food with food stamps; apparently, it would be OK if they had to use their pittance on garbage and rotting offal, but how dare they buy the same kind of fish rich people would buy!

[Read more…]

The brain is a complex and funny thing

Can you generate the illusion that your mind has left your body? This woman can.

After a class on out-of-body experiences, a psychology graduate student at the University of Ottawa came forward to researchers to say that she could have these voluntarily, usually before sleep. “She appeared surprised that not everyone could experience this,” wrote the scientists in a study describing the case, published in February in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

So what does the modern researcher do when someone has a weird perceptual sensation? Stick their head in an MRI and look at what’s happening.

To better understand what was going on, the researchers conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study of her brain. They found that it surprisingly involved a “strong deactivation of the visual cortex.” Instead, the experience “activated the left side of several areas associated with kinesthetic imagery,” such as mental representations of bodily movement.

Her experience, the scientists wrote, “really was a novel one.” But just maybe, not as novel as previously thought. If you are capable of floating out of your body, don’t keep it to yourself!

OK, I won’t. I used to be able to do that. When I was roughly 5 to 7 years old, and with declining frequency in years afterwards, I experienced this phenomenon routinely, and it was exactly as described. As I was drifting off to sleep, I’d have this peculiar sensation of heightened kinesthesia — I’d be acutely aware of my body, where every limb was, and I’d also lose my other senses — my hearing was muffled, with a kind of low hum, and I wouldn’t be able to see anything. But at the same time, I also had an exaggerated consciousness of objects around me, so I’d literally feel like a small boy with an awareness expanding to fill the room, losing the disconnect between self and other. And then I’d fall asleep.

Even as a child, though, I didn’t describe it to myself as floating outside myself; I called them my “big head dreams”, because of the way my awareness of space increased. I might have been annoyed at my bedtime, but I didn’t will myself to float out into the living room and watch TV, ghostlike, with my parents. I saw it as an odd shift in the focus of my attention as I drifted off to sleep, a kind of hallucination, nothing more.

I enjoyed the sensation and would voluntarily succumb to it, but it occurred less often as I got older. Probably the last time I experienced it was in my teens, but I still vividly recall what it felt like.

It was not out-of-body travel. Rebecca Watson has a reply to the article, and clarifies for the gullible that no, scientists aren’t studying out-of-body experiences, they’re looking at sensory processing and mental imagery.

The word “hallucination” appears ten times in the case study yet zero times in the Popular Science article. Because of this, a naive person who reads the PopSci article but not the original paper may walk away with the belief that the brain scans show what happens when a person actually leaves their body, as opposed to showing what happens when a person feels as though they are leaving their body. Again, the difference seems small but is actually quite large: the former describes a study that would be at home on an episode of Coast to Coast or Fringe or those episodes of Family Matters where Urkel did science experiments, and the latter would be at home in a scientific journal to be used as the basis for further study and experimentation.

Move along, it’s all mundane brain science. No spirits involved.