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Monthly Archive for April, 2008Page 2 of 5
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The man who has coined the term butterfly effect, Edward Lorenz, has died last week, aged 90. I owe him some positive thoughts regarding my life and what will remain after my death.
As you may know (else read my FAQ), I am convinced that, after my death, all of me, physically and mindwise, will cease to further exist. At the time when I stopped believing in afterlife, I admit that such thoughts have left me depressed, or at least uncomfortable. I used to push them quickly away, and that's why it is difficult for me to analyze them in hindsight. But I think that one of the negative aspects has been the idea of "no traces left" or a future state of the world "as if I never had existed". After the birth of our children, a son and a daughter, such negative thoughts faded away.
An importance booster
The "survival" of the own biological traits in the children is only one aspect, and it does not work in all those without children. Children, of course, are big events in a life. But even less important events make big differences in the outcome, thanks to the butterfly effect.
Lorenz has detected the high sensitivity of the global weather system to small changes of an initial state. Human societies are even more complex than the weather system, therefore small changes may have even more changing power.
Just an example: The world-changing effect of the World Wide Web is due to the small but important decision of Tim Berners-Lee not to patent his idea but to make it freely available.
Think your version of Back to the Future
I think I've seen two parts of the Back to the Future trilogy, and I enjoyed it. I am especially fond of those scenes when photographs or newspaper articles begin to fade away because something has changed back in the past.
I have tried to figure out the parallel world beginning with my hypothetical abortion as a fetus. I never would have been born, and this would have changed the time schedules, plans, behaviours and emotions of hundreds of people up to now, and this in turn would have changed the time schedules, plans, behaviours and emotions of thousands of people connected to these hundreds, and so on and on and on. In all those decades since my birth, hundreds of people would not have been born, but hundreds of others instead of these.
Conclusion
This planet is definitely a different place because I, the author of this blog, and you, the reader of it, have been born and changed it. Yes, we change the world. We do not need to invent the Web, or become President of the United States, or start wars or make billions of dollars. Due to the butterfly effect, every single decision of ours will make a difference, and some of these differences will have really big effects that change the world.
Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/victoriabush/48704596/
Many of my non-British readers won’t know who Neil Warnock is, or won’t even be bothered about football (Americans, read: soccer), but please don’t click the X on the browser just yet!
Here’s the background: Liverpool FC in the last two years have gotten very far in the UEFA Champions League competition. Last season we got to the final, (we won it in 2005!) and we are in the semi-finals again this season. This is actually the only silverware we’re competing for at this stage of the season, which means our league games are relatively unimportant in comparison. As a result, the Liverpool manager Rafael Benitez decided to rest several of his key players for Saturday’s game against Fulham, as the semi-final first leg against Chelsea is as close as Tuesday night.
Fulham are battling relegation, which means that the outcome of our game against Fulham is not only important to them, but other teams trying to avoid relegation too. The other teams down there would be hoping Liverpool beat Fulham and “do them a favour”.
None of which is, or should be, a concern to Liverpool. Right? Not according to the bitter cynical irrational rantings of Yorkshireman Neil Warnock. His gripe? Last season, Liverpool also fielded a ‘weakened’ team against Fulham, who actually beat Liverpool and eventually avoided the drop. Warnock’s team, Sheffield United, got relegated.
Here’s what Warnock had to say just before this weekend’s game:
“My advice to Reading, Bolton and the rest would be, if you’re expecting any favours, don’t hold your breath. They will have to do it themselves.”
Yes, and what’s your point?
“The fact of the matter is that if Liverpool were already out of the Champions League and needed to win to get fourth spot, they would play their strongest side.”
Yes, but again, what’s your point? Liverpool are in fact NOT out of the Champions League and don’t need to win to get fourth spot, so they don’t need to play their strongest side. So far, so obvious.
“Instead, I fully expect them to play a weakened team at Fulham.”
As did most people in the country.
“It’s part of a big club’s mentality. They look after themselves and they don’t bother about anyone else.”
Isn’t this part of EVERY sports team’s mentality?? Which sports team doesn’t think about just itself?
If you’re a professional sportsman and you have guilt about the knock-on effect of a game YOU WIN, you’re in the wrong business!
“The whole story that Sheffield United were going down and me having a pop at them afterwards was just treated like fish and chip paper by them. Liverpool didn’t care because they weren’t the ones getting hurt by it all.”
Well, actually Neil, Liverpool probably didn’t care because no one cares about your small-time poxy little opinions.
Of course, what Warnock fails to mention is that if Fulham would have ended up getting relegated, they would have gotten hurt. Maybe Liverpool were thinking about Fulham and didn’t want to hurt them by relegating them??
“Integrity, doing what is right for the game, comes way down Rafa’s list of priorities.”
Notice the false dichotomy: doing what is right for the game (whatever that means!) versus doing what is best for Liverpool.
What Warnock doesn’t realise (because he’s an idiot and because he doesn’t know what he’s talking about) is that doing what is ‘right for the game’ is precisely doing whatever is right for Liverpool! The only thing Liverpool should be concerned about is doing what is best for themselves. What is good for “the game” is open competition where clubs are free to play the players they want against any opposition they want.
What kind of a warped mentality could suggest that a sports team (or any business for that matter) should be interested in the wellbeing of its rivals?!
All that aside, Warnock’s Sheffield United had 38 games to amass enough points to avoid relegation. They didn’t. Boo hoo. That’s football. Warnock also forgets the last game of the season, when his team LOST to Wigan Athletic. A win would have kept them up, but they lost. Boo hoo.
What does Warnock expect: that a more successful club somehow has a responsibility to not act in its best interest in case another club could possibly incur an advantage/disadvantage as a result?? What if all clubs did this? The bigger clubs would go into games actively looking to not win where possible, after all, who wants to “hurt” another club by beating them?! Pathetic.
As always with this kind of sacrificial mentality, it’s the successful clubs that are to be penalised because they are successful; the clubs with the biggest squads should be forced to play their best teams in EVERY game in Warnock’s opinion. Why? Because they have the biggest and best squads. In other words, the better you are, the more you should be penalised and help accountable for taking advantage of your superiority!
But what about Sheffield United and other small clubs? Why doesn’t anyone talk about them pulling their finger out and wining more games?!
Liverpool did go on to lose in the final last year, but imagine if we would have fielded a full strength team against Fulham. Maybe Rafa would have said: “if only I could have rested my key players at Fulham to avoid tiredness/injury etc, perhaps we would have won the final.” People would have laughed at him probably, and Warnock wouldn’t have had anything to say.
But when a team like Warnock’s has 38 games to get enough points and then complain because Liverpool acted in their best interest, he gets his obnoxious face all over the TV and in the papers.
What is wrong with this mentality? In a word: altruism. Basically, the pathetic notion that acting in someone else’s interest OVER your own is somehow virtuous, more moral, nobler, for the “greater good”. Well, that’s nonsense. Ever club must act in its own self-interest, regardless of the effects on other clubs: play whatever team you want; play however you want. At the end of the day, you will stand or fall based on how successful YOU are – not how other clubs are!
The only people who don’t want to play by this fair and healthily competitive rule are the ones who are afraid; the ones who have something to lose by a fair fight; the ones who seek the unearned; the ones who can’t actually achieve success themselves but beg others to do the work for them; the ones who aren’t actually good enough to stand on their own merit. In other words, people like Neil Warnock.
… they put up a sign like this:
From the article:
Pastor Byrd says the sign is not meant to be racial or political but rather to make people think. “His name is so close to Osama I have a feeling he might be Islamic therefore he doesn’t recognize Christ,” Pastor Byrd said.
and:
Pastor Byrd told News Channel 7 he would ask his congregation to vote on whether to keep the sign. They voted unanimously to keep the sign up Sunday night.
Jonesville Church of God does not have any African American members.
You know what really infuriates me about this? Not that these assholes do this, but that it works. A good percentage of Americans probably “have a feeling” that Obama might be a Muslim, simply because of his name. How stupid can you get?
(via Friendly Atheist)
Copyright © 2010 Way of the Mind
If you're not familiar with Ben Stein's recent involvement with a film called "Expelled," I'll give you the short version and you can check out the rest on Wikipedia and/or through a Google search.
Essentially, Stein is the host of an anti-science screed of a movie which seeks to get people all worked up against science, biology, atheists and Planned Parenthood. I first heard of this film when he fooled some prominent biologists into being interviewed, and again later when one of the interviewees was barred from seeing the film in public. The new York Times reviewed the film and called it "a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry."
I hadn't discussed this story before because it was all over the atheist blogosphere. But the latest development in this saga has me really upset.
If you're a skeptic, you've likely heard the name "Michael Shermer." He's the founder of the Skeptics Society and of Skeptic magazine. In addition to debunking psychics and other bullshit artists, he has written books on the reasons that people believe strange things and on pseudohistory.
It was from Shermer that I first learned about the deeply delusional world of Holocaust Deniers. Before I read Shermer, I didn't realize the depth of denial some people harbor regarding the Holocaust. I found it eye opening; it was a moment in my life when I saw more clearly how the delusional thinking that is the antithesis of skepticism is not harmless. The danger of delusion, of believing things that make us happy, was something I had suspected. But it became more real and more visceral when I read about Holocaust denial.
Shermer has spent a great deal of time debunking Holocaust Deniers. Which is why I am upset at what Stein and his fellow filmmakers have done.
In their linking of evolutionary biology to all the evils of the world, they have painted creationism skeptics as contributors to the Holocaust on the oft-repeated but unsupported belief that Hitler's atrocities were driven by atheism and evolutionary biology. In their effort to smear Shermer in the film, as a person who has opposed the creationist delusion, they've convinced some Jews that this champion of the facts of the Holocaust is somehow responsible for the Holocaust.
This came to the attention of Richard Dawkins, and he's posted about it on his website in an entry called "Open Letter to a victim of Ben Stein's lying propaganda." The short version is that after seeing Expelled, a moviegoer contacted Shermer and criticized him as someone who thinks "that it was okay for [his] great-grandparents to die in the Holocaust!"
I find this to be a very sad and upsetting irony, and an example of the infectiousness of delusion. Ben Stein and the other makers of Expelled have taken up their own kind of Holocaust denial, denying the reasons why the Holocaust happened and hijacking it for their own creationist purposes. In the process they have smeared innocent people.
What they have done is absolutely despicable.
I did it. I actually went out and saw Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, the documentary that accuses scientists of silencing critics of evolution. I saw Expelled last Saturday, the day after it was released, and I was able to count five people in the theater.
I’m not going to go into much detail here; people with more time than myself have already answered each and every claim made in the film. However, I would like to point out my biggest complaint about Expelled: they never explained why intelligence design is science in the first place. In fact, this alleged science is presented to the audience as nothing but a clever intuition. The sequence of events literally goes as follows:
- A couple of scientists lost their jobs after mentioning intelligent design (a lie, by the way)
- The cell is really, really complex. Therefore we’ll never find a natural explanation. Cut to a long (possibly stolen) journey through the cell expected to sell blatant argument from incredulity.
- Scientists are suppressing and excluding people who think the complexity of the cell means there is some kind of supernatural power “out there,” kind of like Nazis.
- By the way, Hitler was inspired by the theory of natural selection. Cut to stock footage of Nazi concentration camps.
Perhaps as incoherent and intellectually vacuous as the entire ID movement. Scientists do not take intelligent design seriously because intelligent design doesn’t take science seriously. They’re going to have to do some research and create some relevant, repeatable experiments to establish their assertion – one that barely counts as a hypothesis – if they want any credibility.
Ben Stein would like you to think ID is the little guy getting pushed around by “big science.” However, in all its actions and lack thereof, the little guy shows no intention of even getting along with “big science.” Here the little guy puts up a thin facade – one the collapses with the slightest touch of investigation – all while his radical agenda of backwardness and social reconstruction is obvious for anyone with eyes.
From the BBC we have this report published today demonstrating the cutting edge of current Muslim scientific thinking. Muslim scientists and clerics have called for the adoption of Mecca time to...
As i watch the news about rice shortage here in the Philippines, i can't help but cry seeing how hard it is living in our country if your are class D to lower C. When i saw a woman who has been in line for 4 hours just to get 2 kilos of rice begging and crying to the seller (to no avail) to give her an extra kilo because they are a family of 8, i really can't stop the tears slowly flowing from my eyes.
News about who's to blame on this crisis have become rampant:
Church urged not to interfere in population policy
Catholic Church reiterates stand vs artificial birth control
Palace not discouraging artificial birth control - Apostol
Church urged to rethink stand on population
I know rapid growth of our population is to blame in this crisis. But whose to blame about the population control? Government or Church?
Here are my rant on both sides because im tired of them pointing fingers at each other.
GOVERNMENT
As i browse the the population and family planning laws here in the Philippines, all of the laws about family planning are laws about educating people about it. How about some sort punishment or new laws? Let me give you some of the things that i can suggest:
1. Additional taxes to family exceeding 3 children - Lets help the poor to not add any more expenses.
2. Imprisonment of underage pregnancy (both the mother and father) - Underage pregnancy rate in the Philippines is really alarming.
Or something extreme like:
1. Legalization of Abortion - Very controversial, but i can add the following rules like "only before the second trimester", only when the mother is raped and can only be done once or twice.
2. Promoting Male Castration - Maybe for sex offenders or people who really can help themselves.
If only politicians are not afraid or blinded by the church. Which brings us to the other side.
CHURCH
“And God blessed them (the male and female humankind), and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it …” - Genesis 1:28
Do i still need to state my case? Anyway, I hate it when the church are taking this verse out of context! God told them this because there are only few people in the Earth that time.
Now people are confuse, the government have been teaching us about family planning and the church is teaching us the opposite. Now let me give you a scenario:
1. Who will you side with, The President who has power over the country or God who has power over us all?
2. Do want to have guiltless sex or not?
3. Heaven (Pro-Life) or Hell (Birth Control)?
Well thats very easy to answer right?
Man! Talk about separation of State and Religion!
Im just afraid that finger pointing will continue and no real solution will be found for this problem and our poor fellow Filipino brothers will suffer.
News about who's to blame on this crisis have become rampant:
Church urged not to interfere in population policy
Catholic Church reiterates stand vs artificial birth control
Palace not discouraging artificial birth control - Apostol
Church urged to rethink stand on population
I know rapid growth of our population is to blame in this crisis. But whose to blame about the population control? Government or Church?
Here are my rant on both sides because im tired of them pointing fingers at each other.
GOVERNMENT
As i browse the the population and family planning laws here in the Philippines, all of the laws about family planning are laws about educating people about it. How about some sort punishment or new laws? Let me give you some of the things that i can suggest:
1. Additional taxes to family exceeding 3 children - Lets help the poor to not add any more expenses.
2. Imprisonment of underage pregnancy (both the mother and father) - Underage pregnancy rate in the Philippines is really alarming.
Or something extreme like:
1. Legalization of Abortion - Very controversial, but i can add the following rules like "only before the second trimester", only when the mother is raped and can only be done once or twice.
2. Promoting Male Castration - Maybe for sex offenders or people who really can help themselves.
If only politicians are not afraid or blinded by the church. Which brings us to the other side.
CHURCH
“And God blessed them (the male and female humankind), and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it …” - Genesis 1:28
Do i still need to state my case? Anyway, I hate it when the church are taking this verse out of context! God told them this because there are only few people in the Earth that time.
Now people are confuse, the government have been teaching us about family planning and the church is teaching us the opposite. Now let me give you a scenario:
1. Who will you side with, The President who has power over the country or God who has power over us all?
2. Do want to have guiltless sex or not?
3. Heaven (Pro-Life) or Hell (Birth Control)?
Well thats very easy to answer right?
Man! Talk about separation of State and Religion!
Im just afraid that finger pointing will continue and no real solution will be found for this problem and our poor fellow Filipino brothers will suffer.
A federal ethics commission issues a paper, declaring that spinach has a dignity, and therefore certain behaviours against spinach should be regarded as morally not acceptable. A spinach-hating child, for instance, is not allowed to tear out spinach plants in mother's garden wantonly. The reason, according to the commission, is not the damage of this vandalizing act to the gardening mother, but the dignity of the spinach plants. In contrast, tearing out spinach plants for eating them does not hurt their dignity. The commission does not comment on the influence of cooking versus eating as salad on the dignity of spinach plants.
Does this sound like a joke? Maybe, but it really happened last week in Switzerland. Our Federal Ethics Commission is a panel of reputed philosophers, theologians, biologists and physicians. And it came, unanimously, to the conclusion that plants have a dignity that is to be respected. The spinach example is mine, not theirs, but I derived it from their own examples because I find spinach more fun than, say, beautiful flowers by the wayside. Dignity must not depend on beauty, in my view.
It seems that the philosophers and theologians have been the leading spokespersons in these discussions and that the natural science fraction has not managed to keep things down to earth.
Our leading weekend TV satire show has tried to apply the plant dignity guidelines in everyday situations. It was a real fun. For instance, the show introduced a papa tomato and a mama tomato, together with a couple of cherry tomatoes, as a family. After some heart-warming, humanizing talk, one of the anchormen outed himself as a cruel child eater. And his fellow, after peeling an onion, broke out in tears, stating that he knows now why we all weep when violating the dignity of these veggie beings.
Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/snowriderguy/250623239/
Apparently it’s from Fark. Funny, especially if you know the Pokémon games. 
It begins with “You encountered McCain!”. If you catch it in the middle, just force a refresh of the page to see it from the beginning.
Copyright © 2010 Way of the Mind
Richard Dawkins has posted an open reply to a letter from a Jew deceived by Expelled, who believed the propaganda movie’s absurd claims without any fact checking. I suggest you read Dawkins’ reply in full, of course, but the subject of this post is this part in particular:
Hitler did attempt eugenic breeding of humans, and this is sometimes misrepresented as an attempt to apply Darwinian principles to humans. But this interpretation gets it historically backwards, as PZ Myers has pointed out. Darwin’s great achievement was to look at the familiar practice of domestic livestock breeding by artificial selection, and realize that the same principle might apply in NATURE, thereby explaining the evolution of the whole of life: “natural selection”, the “survival of the fittest”. Hitler didn’t apply NATURAL selection to humans. He was probably even more ignorant of natural selection than Ben Stein evidently is. Hitler tried to apply ARTIFICIAL selection to humans, and there is nothing specifically Darwinian about artificial selection. It has been familiar to farmers, gardeners, horse trainers, dog breeders, pigeon fanciers and many others for centuries, even millennia. Everybody knew about artificial selection, and Hitler was no exception. What was unique about Darwin was his idea of NATURAL selection; and Hitler’s eugenic policies had nothing to do with natural selection.
This, in retrospect, is obvious, but I hadn’t seen it explained so succinctly and clearly before. Eugenics has nothing to do with Darwinian evolution! Animal (and even plant) breeders have known about selective breeding for millennia (indeed, I think it’s even mentioned in the Christian Bible), ages before Darwin or the concept of the evolution of species. Anyone who breeds dogs, horses, birds, etc. knows perfectly well that you can cross specimens with particular characteristics to achieve desired results (say, a new hair or plumage color, or a bigger or smaller animal, or one with other specific characteristics). This can be seen as artificial selection.
Darwin’s new idea was: what if something like this also happens in nature, without intervention? And what if that is how the species in the world today have came to be? In other words: evolution, by natural selection.
Eugenics (the attempt to “perfect” the human race according to one’s beliefs or preferences) has nothing to do with natural selection. It’s simply an attempt to apply the ages old selective breeding of animals to humans.
Of course, I’m not even considering blaming animal breeders from thousands of years ago for the Holocaust. That would simply be ridiculous. But blaming something completely unrelated (Darwinian evolution) for it is even more ridiculous. Eugenics is a disgusting distortion of selective breeding (which is itself blameless for eugenics); it’s completely unrelated to evolution / natural selection.
And, when you should know better than to say such an absurdity (as some filmmakers do), it’s also a dangerous, evil lie.
Copyright © 2010 Way of the Mind
"A CHARITY set up by an ardent Christian to fight slavery and the opium trade has identified a new social evil of the 21st century - religion. A poll by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation uncovered a widespread belief that faith - not just in its extreme form - was intolerant, irrational and used to justify persecution. Pollsters asked 3,500 people what they considered to be the worst blights on modern society, updating a list drawn up by Rowntree, a Quaker, 104 years ago. The responses may well have dismayed him. The researchers found that the “dominant opinion” was that religion was a “social evil”. Many participants said religion divided society, fuelled intolerance and spawned “irrational” educational and other policies. One said: “Faith in supernatural phenomena inspires hatred and prejudice throughout the world, and is commonly used as justification for persecution of women, gays and people who do not have faith.”
Many respondents called for state funding of church schools to be ended."
The Sunday Times, April 20, 2008
An excerpt from the report:
"There was disagreement among participants around the issue of religion. Some identified the decline of religion in society as a social evil. [...]
A more dominant opinion, however, stood in stark contrast to this: some people identified religion itself as a social evil. This group generally focused on one of three issues: the “erosion of secularism”; religion as cause of intolerance and conflict; and religion as a source of irrationality."
What are today’s social evils? The results of a web consultation (Pages 30-31) (PDF, 418KB)
In our Atheist Mail Group there has been a thread asking the question "What is Atheism?".
One thing that does not sit well on me is, there are many Atheist who have accepted that Atheism's Etymology is A-Theism.
What i hate about this is because it means "Negation of Theism". With this etymology people will view Atheism as something that is totally dependent on Theism. You should take in to consideration that some of the strong atheist have made it there point to disprove God and beliefs related to them. Now what happens if they are successful (ofcourse this is a longshot) and finally Theism does not exists, will there still be Atheism?
Now lets go to the correct etymology of atheism which is Athe-ism. With this etymology, Atheism means Godless Belief. As you can see with this etymology, Atheism itself is not dependent with Theism. To stress it further, it doesn't care about Theism.It simply means i have all this belief and god has no relevance in it.
Now what do you like more, A-Theism or Athe-ism?
One thing that does not sit well on me is, there are many Atheist who have accepted that Atheism's Etymology is A-Theism.
What i hate about this is because it means "Negation of Theism". With this etymology people will view Atheism as something that is totally dependent on Theism. You should take in to consideration that some of the strong atheist have made it there point to disprove God and beliefs related to them. Now what happens if they are successful (ofcourse this is a longshot) and finally Theism does not exists, will there still be Atheism?
Now lets go to the correct etymology of atheism which is Athe-ism. With this etymology, Atheism means Godless Belief. As you can see with this etymology, Atheism itself is not dependent with Theism. To stress it further, it doesn't care about Theism.It simply means i have all this belief and god has no relevance in it.
Now what do you like more, A-Theism or Athe-ism?
Believers claim that God is omnipotent, the creator of heaven and earth. Occasionally in the Bible we see evidence of his powers – raining down plagues and destruction on people he didn’t approve of, making fire suddenly appear from nowhere, whisking a few favoured individuals up into heaven, turning a woman into a pillar of salt and other useful antics. Through Jesus, God supposedly raised people from the dead, fed hundreds with a few meagre supplies and, just to show he was no party-pooper, turned water into wine.
But what’s he been up to since then? Seems to me he’s been a tad shy and retiring for the last couple of thousand years. Although there have been plenty of opportunities for him to show his mighty power, thrill the faithful and confound the doubters, God seems to be resolutely sticking to the small stuff. These days he might help someone to find their car keys or pass an exam. Sometimes he does something a little more impressive, like helping someone to recover from a serious illness or injury when they weren’t expected to (although in most cases, people just die). But surely there’s so much more an all-powerful being could be doing?
God has been quite happy to allow rape, plunder, enslavement, torture, destruction and murder on a grand scale throughout the years. Did he stop the Inquisition in its tracks with a few nasty plagues? No. Did he swallow up the Nazis in the depths of the sea or the bowels of the earth before they had chance to fill the death camps? No. Did he step in to halt the genocide in Rwanda? No. Has he put an end to killer diseases such as malaria, typhoid or cancer? No. Did he put forth his mighty hand to stop the Asian tsunami, or protect millions from the effects of the Ethiopian famine? Did he divert Hurricane Katrina from her course to avoid death and destruction? Again, no.
In fact, what the hell has God been doing all this time? Has he lost his powers, or simply lost interest in us?
Just one more reason to believe that God is about as substantial as a puff of smoke and as likely to exist as pigs are to sprout wings and take to the sky.
Isla
Currently Reading:
Tao Te Ching
Translated by D. Lau
Naivety and Cynicism:
Those are some who see the dark side in others, but ignore the good. They are called "cynics". Those that are cynics convince many of us that looking for the dark side in others is foolish, because we are afraid that we might become cynics.
There are some who see the good in others, but ignore the dark side. They are called "naive". Those that are naive convince many of us that looking for the good in others is foolish, because such we are afraid that we might become naive.
Beyond Naivety and Cynicism:
If we ignore the dark side in others, we can be taken advantage of.
If we ignore the good in others, we lose a part of our humanity.
Each person has both a dark side and a good side, it's simply a question of how much is there and what forms it takes. If we actively look for both sides, without judging, we can see deeply into another person. We can have human compassion, but we don't have to be naive.
Namaste,
CET
"Much of the suffering in the world comes from the illusion that we are separate from one another." - Gautama Buddha
Tao Te Ching
Translated by D. Lau
Naivety and Cynicism:
Those are some who see the dark side in others, but ignore the good. They are called "cynics". Those that are cynics convince many of us that looking for the dark side in others is foolish, because we are afraid that we might become cynics.
There are some who see the good in others, but ignore the dark side. They are called "naive". Those that are naive convince many of us that looking for the good in others is foolish, because such we are afraid that we might become naive.
Beyond Naivety and Cynicism:
If we ignore the dark side in others, we can be taken advantage of.
If we ignore the good in others, we lose a part of our humanity.
Each person has both a dark side and a good side, it's simply a question of how much is there and what forms it takes. If we actively look for both sides, without judging, we can see deeply into another person. We can have human compassion, but we don't have to be naive.
Namaste,
CET
"Much of the suffering in the world comes from the illusion that we are separate from one another." - Gautama Buddha
I don’t think about the Pope often, but with him in the U.S. I am curious and have some questions. Can anyone give me some answers?
- That Pope outfit is hot; is it available at L.L. Bean?
- Does the Pope communicate with God on his Blackberry or is he still using the old fashion prayer method?
- Other than wanting to overpopulate the planet, what is the Pope’s position on global warming?
- Who would win a healing cage match, Benny Hinn or the Pope?
- Has the Pope ever had an orgasm?
- Is the Pope 100% human or is he some percentage god?
- What ever happened to that meatless Friday thing that was popular when I was younger?
- Any chance the Pope will be questioned by authorities now that he is on U.S. soil?
"I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." Of all atheistic statements, this is one of my favourites. It has been widely quoted, in many versions from many authors, Dawkins included (his version can be found here). Stephen F. Roberts claims to be the original author, back in 1995. He brings some of my own thoughts to the point, and I have posted my own version of the theme in How to talk with theists.
Some recent theist reviews of my blogging have led me to visit their sites and those sending me traffic, and in one of them I have come across an alleged "refutation" of the "one god less" statement, using the analogy of marriage. Vigilante, over at TheologyWeb Campus, quotes a woman from a radio show, saying that "a Christian being an atheist to other gods is like saying a husband is a bachelor to other women".
Lack of humor is the problem here
Theists are sooo serious, especially when it comes to their religion. They cling to words and their earnest usage and seem to have no sense of witty wordplay. It certainly is not usual to say "I am married and a bachelor to all other women", but all the same, this statement remains true. Not all unusual statements are necessarily false. The statement "you as a Christian are atheist to all other gods" is of the same kind, unusual but undeniably true. Humor, intended to be an eye-opener, obviously does not work with many theists.
History of Christian atheism
In the early days of Christianity, Christians have been accused of atheism by the state authorities of the Roman Empire. Justin, one of the accused and later executed, has tried to plead not guilty, addressing the Emperor himself, stating: "Hence are we called atheists. And we confess that we are atheists, so far as gods of this sort are concerned, but not with respect to the most true God."
Thus, the "one god less" argument, also known as the plurality criticism, is not an invention of modern atheists but has its origin in the inner circle of early Christianity.
Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/matthiasorfield/1177025218/
"Evolution: 24 myths and misconceptions
[...]
Shared misconceptions:
Everything is an adaptation produced by natural selection
Natural selection is the only means of evolution
Natural selection leads to ever-greater complexity
Evolution produces creatures perfectly adapted to their environment
Evolution always promotes the survival of species
It doesn't matter if people do not understand evolution
"Survival of the fittest" justifies "everyone for themselves"
Evolution is limitlessly creative
Evolution cannot explain traits such as homosexuality
Creationism provides a coherent alternative to evolution
Creationist myths:
Evolution must be wrong because the Bible is inerrant
Accepting evolution undermines morality
Evolutionary theory leads to racism and genocide
Religion and evolution are incompatible
Half a wing is no use to anyone
Evolutionary science is not predictive
Evolution cannot be disproved so is not science
Evolution is just so unlikely to produce complex life forms
Evolution is an entirely random process
Mutations can only destroy information, not create it
Darwin is the ultimate authority on evolution
The bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex
Yet more creationist misconceptions
Evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics."
New Scientist, 16 April 2008
Have a look at the article to check out each myth!
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