Monthly Archive for March, 2007

20070330: 2 new blogs


By the way, both the above bloggers had asked me to join PA several days ago. I usually don't take this long, but, anyway, I apologize for it. Usually, new blogs are added to PA in a couple of hours (depending on when I check my mailbox). Hopefully, delays like this won't happen often.

With these, PA now aggregates 54 blogs. As always, see joining Planet Atheism for details about what being aggregated in PA can do for you, and about how to join.

Thought

What are humans but a group of cells blessed and cursed with consciousness, condemned to live a short life on this small planet in a corner of the universe, limited in the spectrum of what they can sense without aid? I find it surprising that with all these constrictions humans seek to limit themselves even more. Imposing meaningless restrictions based on gender, race, beliefs, traditions, or other petty differences. I wonder what it would take to make them see....

God: The Failed Hypothesis

So besides sleeping late and catching up on Battlestar Galactica’s second season, I’ve purchased Victor Stenger’s God: The Failed Hypothesis to get me through my spring break. I haven’t finished the book (in fact, I’m the kind of person who will read five or six books simultaneously at an equal glacial rate), but I’m almost done and it’s worth a quick comment.

Stenger describes specific experiments that could actually support the existence of a personal god. He argues that only a completely irrelevant deity would leave no trace or evidence. If there’s a God, an omnipresent creator with any impact on the natural universe, he would be detectable by natural science.

Was the universe fine tuned? Does our morality come from God? After defining a God model, a falsifiable list of characteristics assigned to God, Stenger refutes the God model with science.

Overall, Victor Stenger provides a welcome, necessary addition to the chain of blasphemic best sellers.


Proof that there is no god.

I think I've been defining my own Atheism as coming from my rejection of the super natural. With the recent death of my grandmother, I have been reflecting a bit on my own ideas that perhaps there's a dimension of sorts where our souls still live.

In case any one thinks I've been expressing a belief in the supernatural, I want to make it clear that this isn't a belief I hold; it is just an idea. And my idea is that this might happen completely within the realm of what might be possible in the universe/multiverse; as I do not expect anything super-natural to happen to our "souls". There is a scientific theory that information can not be destroyed, and while this may apply to physical information, I do often wonder how far this idea could be taken. But I am no physicist to test this, and I wouldn't disagree if someone could knowingly/truthfully explain to me that this is just absolutely not possible.

But my ideas about what might happen to the information that makes up us as individuals still is without a god. Why not have ideas about a god that could fall within the natural laws of the universe? Well, as we define god as an all knowing and all seeing, what I know about the universe says this is impossible.

I present as exhibit number one an explanation of the Double Slit Experiment:



Observation changes the outcome. If a god existed then the probability wave would not be observed because he would be watching, and he would know which slit the particle would go through, and therefore eliminate the probability. As it is, only our direct observation eliminates the probability, so I would conclude that nobody else is watching.

On funerals and rituals.

I was glad not to be there when my grandmother passed, bodies creep the beejebus out of me. (I'm not sure if this is due to instinct or childhood trauma. I've almost always had someone else dispose of dead pets because I don't want to touch the bodies.)

My mother said, before she left the room after my grandmother had passed, a nurse came in to open the window. She said they do this to let the soul out. I liked the idea of that ritual, although I don't think souls (if they existed) could be confined that way. I found comfort in this ritual, despite knowing it's pointless. Despite my efforts of purging supernatural superstitions from my life, it's hard when there is still that flicker of hope somewhere within my mind that our existence is more meaningful.

I went with my mother to prepare for the funeral, and meeting with a funeral director is quite an experience. I've watched 6 Feet Under, and Family Plots, so I thought I new what to expect.

If it was up to just my mother and myself, Grandmom would have been cremated, end of story. But some of the family felt need for closure, which meant a church service and possibly a viewing. This means picking out prayer cards, caskets, and clothing for the deceased. We still wished to have her body cremated, and the funeral director said we could "borrow" a casket, but then before burning, her body would be removed from it, and he didn't think that was respectful. In my own mind, I was thinking; really, how respectful is the process of embalming a body to begin with? And why would it matter? As for my own body, aside from someone molesting it, or stealing parts of it, I really wouldn't care, and definitely wouldn't care if someone burned my body without a casket.

The services included a church ceremony the night before the "viewing", with bible readings and remembrances said. I've always believed a funeral is for the living, not the dead, so if some find comfort in a church service, I cannot justify begrudging them that at this time. The service at the funeral home the next morning turned out to be closed casket. When my mother and uncle went to check out the mortician's handy-work, they decided against it. My mother said "it just wasn't Mom." We had brunch after the services at the funeral home, as she was being cremated and buried at some other time.

Times like this spark conversation about our own deaths. My husband and I discussed our wishes for what would be done with our bodies at the time of our death. That conversation basically ended with, "you'll be dead, and I get to do what I want with it." To me, it would depend on the time in life and circumstances of death what I would do to my husband's body. I would only find a viewing of him necessary for his family, or if we had children, but not for myself.

On the other hand, he had very set ideas of how a funeral should go down. All funerals he'd ever been to were the same, and he thought that was the way they all should be. A wake the night before, viewing the next morning where nobody says anything, a church service, and then brunch as nobody visits the grave site at that time. With all this in mind, he thought that my grandmother's funeral was quite strange, but I found that having the ability to order things however we wanted made it much more meaningful for everyone.

Hopefully I won't be the one making these types of decisions for many years to come.

This post: On death and dying.

It's been a bit of a whirlwind in my personal life recently. As I mentioned, there's been a death in my family, that combined with a motherboard failure on my home PC put me out of blogging for a while.

A little less than two weeks ago my grandmother, who has already been dying of cancer, fell and broke her hip. She survived surgery, but stopped eating after that, and soon went into kidney failure. She was still in the hospital and placed under "comfort care," as she didn't want any feeding tubes or to be put on a ventilator. Her children flew in to be with her, staying with her 24-7 until she passed. I would visit each day, but was not there when she passed.

My one uncle is very religious, and had been praying for her, and the priest has been to visit her. I have never known my grandmother to be much of a religious person, but she did attend church in her younger days. My own mother is very science minded, and from my conversations with her, does not believe in an afterlife (at least, not the heaven/hell type place in the bible). While it is really rough on everyone, I found these different approaches to her dying somewhat fascinating. My uncle called upon the priest and god to ease her suffering, while my mother called upon the nurse and morphine. From my point of view, neither seemed all that effective, in the end, all we could do was hold her hand in her suffering.

It's a tough process watching someone's body fail them, and seeing how much pain it is causing, with almost nothing you can do for them. At her age of 88, with all of her ailments, if not for modern medicine, she would have died long ago. On another occasion, several years ago she was in the hospital and in pain, when I asked her what I could do for her, her response was "kill me." On one hand, it's really rough knowing someone is in so much pain they wish to die, and yet incapable of facilitating that on their own. It's not something I dare assist her with, out of fear of the consequences, though I somewhat wish I could have.

Watching her own suffering makes me wonder if I would be more likely, when I got to her age, especially if I knew I had a terminal illness, to take myself out while I could. Depending on their beliefs, and the situation, would death that way be any worse on the family? I often view suicide as a selfish act, but when someone is already suffering their last days, is it more selfish to deny them quick release?

Next post: Funerals and rituals.

I’ll be back shortly….

I've been gone for a while, for anyone who might have noticed.

There was a death in my family, which I'll elaborate on more later. It's got me thinking quite a bit.

In the meantime, I'd like to share this with you:



As my mind is still on the loss of a loved one, this video is a good summery of what I like to contemplate, a hope without basis, for a higher dimension. Sometimes I think it's silly, but still I think how wonderful our natural universe is already and perhaps it's not beyond capability for the sum of information that makes us who we are could be preserved somewhere in spacetime.

20070322: 2 new blogs

Two new additions to Planet Atheism:
  1. The Atheist Experience: in their own words,
    is a weekly live call-in television show sponsored by the Atheist Community of Austin. This independently-run blog will feature contributions from current and former hosts and co-hosts of the show.
  2. Kazim's Korner: a blog by
    an overeducated liberal atheist computer geek in Austin.

Incidentally, the author of the latter is also a member of the former.

This adds up to 52 blogs on PA.

Thought

It is in the hours of our most dire needs that we are tempted to activate the most delusional and illogical parts of our brains. Ergo, it is in these times that we should be using logic the most....

GodMen: Tyler Durden Meets Ned Flanders

I think some Christians saw Fight Club.

They apparently left the movie thinking that the one thing that could have made Tyler Durden cooler is a personal relationship with Jesus. So far I agree — a little more prayer and that movie would have been perfect. I started implementing Project Mayhem thousands of years before the Brad Pitt blockbuster hit theaters, and I was disappointed that it failed to credit Me. I should have trademarked mayhem. :-(

The GodMen, as they call themselves, could have taken that message of anarchy and manliness and gone on to start a new Crusade or the next Inquisition. They could have just started punching each other’s lights out. Instead they chose this macho Christian mission:

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Commandments

The commandments written by an omnipotent, omniscient "god":

- I am your Lord and God.
- You shall have no other gods before Me.
- You shall not make for yourself an idol.
- You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your God.
- Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.
- Honor your parents.
- You shall not murder.
- You shall not commit adultery.
- You shall not steal.
- You shall not bear false witness.
- You shall not covet your neighbor's wife.
- You shall not covet your neighbor's house.
Source

The commandments written by an atheist:

- Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.
- In all things, strive to cause no harm.
- Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect.
- Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted.
- Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.
- Always seek to be learning something new.
- Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them.
- Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you.
- Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.
- Question everything.
Source

Some additions by another atheist:
- Enjoy your own sex life (so long as it damages nobody else) and leave others to enjoy theirs in private whatever their inclinations, which are none of your business.
- Do not discriminate or oppress on the basis of sex, race or (as far as possible) species.
- Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.
- Value the future on a timescale longer than your own.
Source: Dawkins, R. (2006). The God Delusion

As much as I feel compelled to compare, I think the mere act of putting them side by side does the job....

Stop Squishing My Messengers

Ever wonder why you never see angels or other agents of Mine meddling directly in your affairs? After all, if I care so much about your belief, why shouldn’t I send My immortal servants to indisputably negate all doubt of My existence? To “test” your faith?

WRONG.

My messengers are with you all the time. And what do you do? You squish their little guts out with your Nikes. You smash their conical monuments to Me and you poison them in your kitchens. You trap them in a tiny glass farm and then toss in a piece of a leaf, like that makes it the medamned Garden of Eden or something.

Here’s another hint: they recently chewed the pattern into a leaf of Jesus and My sister-in-law Mary:

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The Power Problem

Why is it considered wrong for most countries to have nuclear weapons? The simple answer is that nuclear weapons are too big a power for these countries to handle....

I was thinking of the power given to parents in raising their children. This power should not be underestimated. By giving two people almost complete control over the life of a child (or any number of children they deem appropriate), parents are, to a great extent, given control over the way the next generation thinks and acts. This would not be a problem if we assume that parents teach children human values and morals, the basics of how to tell right from wrong, logic and reasoning, and then allow them to explore the richness of the world around them with a free mind. However, if we go to the other extreme, we find that parents may transfer their full set of memes to their children without any sort of filtering, adjustment, or adaptation. With religious fundamentalists or extremists as well as some other cases, children are brought up in an environment that can cripple their thinking process or social activity irreversibly.

"Michael Shermer, in How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science, describes a large survey of randomly chosen Americans that he and his colleague Frank Sulloway carried out. Among their many interesting results was the discovery that religiosity is indeed negatively correlated with education (more highly educated people are less likely to be religious). Religiosity is also negatively correlated with interest in science and (strongly) with political liberalism. None of this is surprising, nor is the fact that there is a positive correlation between religiosity and parents' religiosity. Sociologists studying British children have found that only about one in twelve break away from their parents' religious beliefs."

Richard Dawkins
The God Delusion

After reading the above statistics, especially the last part, one can't help but wonder: How free are we?

In my attempt to find possible solutions for this problem, I was reminded of a post by Devil's Mind about emotional rape that I thought was relevant to the subject. As with every problem, the first step to solving it is realizing that there's a problem to begin with. Psychological damage cannot be assessed as easily as physical damage, it becomes increasingly more difficult to undo as time goes by, and worst of all, the victim is generally unaware of the damage in the cases of imposing social or religious values.

There are probably hundreds of thousands of parents who realize that the world moves forward very quickly and that to bring their children up properly they need to expect change and accept it, be open-minded, and flexible. These present a partial solution to the problem. But what about the tens of millions of parents who don't follow the same course, who think they own their children and have the right to impose whatever ideology they see fit on them?

Sorry, We’re Out Of Ponies

I noticed in the comments of a Retrospectacle post about God’s financial woes that several people are disappointed He never brought them ponies to meet their childhood requests. I have just been informed that this was supposed to be My responsibility; apparently I am the god of horses as well as the sea.

I spoke to Heaven’s stable-hand, a nice young fella named Jesus. Long beard, good sandals. He told Me,

Uncle God’s completely backlogged on the pony requests. All of Our breeders up here in Heaven are going at it as fast as their little pony loins can pump, but even the stallions are having a hard time keeping up. It’s not like God can just artificially inseminate stuff; it would come out like some funky half-mortal chimera with five legs and a photosynthetic tentacle.

He rambled on about how cruel that would be, how everybody would just throw rocks at the pony and make it wear a crown of thorns and tie it to a stick. When I pointed out that He keeps most of the breeders tied to a post in their stalls, He just pouted and stuck His tongue out.  Maybe I’m missing some history here, but He seems to be a few fries short of a Happy Meal if you know what I mean. Then again, what do you expect from a guy who works around horses all day wearing sandals?

I’m going to check with God about getting a more stable stable-hand, then I’ll see what I can do about the pony situation. Sorry for the wait.

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P.S. God here. The post Poseidon referenced also called My blog “under-trafficked.” I would send the blogger to hell, but she’s absolutely right, and she gives Me the idea for a great New Commandment:

Thou shalt link to Me.

Over a hundred bloggers have already complied. There’s plenty of room here in Heaven for any others who wish to save themselves from the eternal doom of hellfire. We also have cocktail shrimp.

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Jerry Falwell’s Disposable Earth

kkk.gifReverend Jerry Falwell (quite possibly pictured at right with a friend), who holds sway over millions of Christians because his affair with Ted Haggard is not yet public, has made recent headlines by warning his followers that global warming is

“Satan’s attempt to redirect the church’s primary focus” from evangelism to environmentalism.

I’m skeptical. How would Jerry Falwell know what Satan is planning?

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Mojoey’s Atheist Blogroll

I recently joined Mojoey's Atheist Blogroll. I found the collection of blogs in this blogroll to be quite intriguing. If you're interested and would like to join, you can find instructions and minimum requirements here.

Blasphemous U.S. Mint Brings New Commandment

Via the column of pudgy conservative Tony Phyrillas on NewsVine, I see that the U.S. Mint has snubbed Me. This is one of the new $1 coins:

picedgelettering.jpg

In God We Trust appears on the edge of the coin, not the front! Tony shares My outrage:

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Gods

Looking at this list, one can't help but feel the despair, and the yearning for a purpose, a higher power, and a reason for existence. A need, though self-generated, so blinding that humans throughout history enclose themselves in fake shells that with time become their whole reality (see Bubbles). The self-sustaining nature of religion that makes people see the lies others live yet consider themselves or their religion exempt amazes me.