Monthly Archive for April, 2009Page 2 of 6

Old Religion and New Atheism

Published

on April 26, 2009

Sam Harris. Richard Dawkins. Christopher Hitchens. Daniel Dennett.

A surge of criticism of religion's role in society and the nature of religious belief itself has arisen in the last several years.

Many critics have derisively termed the authors of these criticisms and their supports as "New Atheists".

What is the "New Atheism"? And why does anyone care? Is it a category which actually is meaningful and significant, or a rhetorical device used to reinforce pre-existing stereotypes and to shut down conversation about religion and humanity's interactions with religion, especially conversation which condemns religion?

Most people would agree that atheism is simply the lack of belief in gods.

However, this does not mean that there is not greater significance to the recent emphasis by atheists to increase visibility of our existence in the public sphere (of athiests) and also to increase exposure to religious criticism in the public sphere.

To determine why this is significant, let's examine what religion is. How do we define religion through the context of our own lives and in the context of our societies? How is this important, and why should anyone care?

Why should religion be criticized in public societies? Isn't religion just a personal choice, an expression of personal values? Why should atheists criticize other people's personal beliefs? Isn't this cruel and needless stigmatization?

Such an analysis of atheists' criticism of religion is sorely misguided and does not accurately characterize the intricate series of relationships between individuals, societies, and religions.

Religion is more than personal choice; it is more often a societal and even a political construct. Throughout human history, religion has been invoked as one of many ties which bind tribes, polities, and social categories of all kinds. With changes in leadership, have come changes in the religious practices encouraged and incentivized by the state.

As a belief, as a state (or states) of mind, and as a practice, religions are invariably linked with their respective cultures. Religion is not only a political experience, but a cultural one as well.

Without the context of our societies and the groups in which we associate, how would any of us resolve our identities as human beings in this modern age?

Some critics have charged that the "New Atheism" is overly politicized. Religion has always been politicized. Any criticism of religion is essentially a political criticism. Religion is just one more imagined community, constructed in the mold of the nation-state and the social club.

Religion is shot through with power and politicking. The Pope is elected. Ayatollahs control the nation of Iran. The ceremonial head of state in the United Kingdom is also the head of the Anglican church.

"New atheism" may not be a new message or a new strategy at all. However, the public campaign for increased critical thinking about religion and skepticism is a political fight.

Did the Ayatollahs descend from the heavens? Did Pope Benedict XVI come down from the Mount of Olives? Did Queen Elizabeth II's mother receive frankincense in the manger?

I personally believe that most atheists' criticism of religion is not a criticism of personal expression -- rather, I believe that it is a criticism of the social and political construct, the established order which is modern religion, which is in turn enabled by poor critical thinking and a deficit of skepticism.

Cheesy Jesus Appears To Dumb Christian

Published

[ Matt ]

on April 25, 2009

Ok this settles it, Christians are morons.

Pastor Has Disabled Man Murdered For Insurance Money

Published

[ Matt ]

on April 25, 2009

A Baltimore pastor who worked with developmentally disabled people was charged Friday with befriending a blind and disabled man in his care, then paying a hit man $50,000 in church funds for an execution so he could collect life insurance money.

Police say Kevin Jerome Pushia, 32, who worked for four months as an operations manager for the Arc of Baltimore before abruptly quitting in January, confessed to plotting to kill Lemuel Wallace.

Pushia told police he persuaded Wallace and "numerous" other mentally challenged individuals to list him as a beneficiary on insurance policies.

A terse notation in Pushia's planning calendar for Feb. 5, the day after Wallace was found dead in a Leakin Park bathroom stall from multiple gunshot wounds to the head and back, reads: "L.W. project completed," police said.

Feel free to link to this the next time a xian claims our morality is derived from religion.

Mix & Match Series

Published

Daniel DiRito

on April 25, 2009

Rompers – The Cast & Crew

Published

admin

on April 24, 2009

_dsc0451

Spot the Atheists!

Earth Day Lash Back

Published

Zeolite

on April 24, 2009

My B.S. degree is in "Conservation" which included a variety of environmental science classes. But I now think conservation is the worst way to address our climatic/energy problems.

People suck at conserving - we're generally glutinous monsters which consume mindlessly and then are surprised when our resource dries up, and then quickly move on to the next consumable.

Its useless denying this instinct, its actually a very puritan technique - to deny our instincts - and you all know how successful that strategy has been

We need to develop sustainable ways of generating energy and encourage people to consume, consume, consume from those energy sources, so they will economically out-compete the fossil fuels.

What if we could develop methods of generating energy that actually cleaned the air, or the water, or had a net positive benefit? Wouldn't it be mind-blowing to have environmentalists telling you to leave your lights on and drive like a mad-man because the energy your using is good for the environment. That's a message I think most people could embrace.

Is This Really News?

Published

Zeolite

on April 24, 2009

News Flash - Girls can be good at sports!

How to "Know"

Published

HumanistDad

on April 24, 2009

Frequently I run into people who say that "science doesn't know everything" or "there are many ways of knowing". This drives me crazy! Here we are living in an age of science and technology that is gathering knowledge at an exponential rate and yet, people want to turn their back on it and declare it to be wrong.

Matt Dillahunty, host of The Atheist Experience TV show brought up an excellent point to remember when talking to people about this issue. Ask them:

"If you had a better way of acquiring knowledge and truth, how would you demonstrate it?"

Of course, the answer would be to use a scientific approach! In other words, we'd need to use science to prove a better method than science...

Matt also had another great example on the show. He told a caller to pick Heads or Tails. The caller said, "heads", Matt flipped the coin and it came up Heads. There is no way the caller could have known heads would come up but yet, they made a correct prediction - one could say the caller 'knew' it would be heads. However, what benefit is there to studying how the caller knew this? Did the caller 'know'? Did the caller have a currently unexplainable method of 'knowing' how the coin would land? Maybe, but in order to find out, we'd have to test his claims! In order for the caller's claims to knowledge to have any validity, the caller would have to demonstrate that they can predict the coin flip with a far higher frequency than chance on repeated trials. In other words, use the scientific method, to know.

God’s problem – my lecture at the Brock University Conference on World Religions

Published

Grant LaFleche

on April 24, 2009

On April 21, I delivered the open talk at Brock University's annual conference on world religions, with year's theme being "the problem of evil." The following is the full text of my lecture, which was abridged during the actual event due to time constraints.

God’s Problem: When religion fails to answer the question of evil and suffering.

By Grant LaFleche

I may well be the oddest choice to present the opening talk on a conference about world religions.

This is not because I have no interest in the subject. Quite the opposite in fact. But rather because unlike every other speaker you will hear over the next two days, I don't believe in any of it. I'm an atheist, which means I don't believe the supernatural claims of religion are true. But even more than that, I am not just an atheist but also an anti-theist - which is to say that I am rather glad it isn't true. There are atheists who will say they wished they had the faith to believe in a god, or to believe the vision of the world as laid out in holy scriptures where true, but they just cannot believe it. This is decidedly not the case with me. As I say, I am rather glad it isn't true and if it were I am convinced we would all be the poorer for it.

Unlike the my colleagues who will take this stage after me, I will not tell you what a particular god wants. I make no claim to be able to offer some ultimate answer to the meaning of life or the nature of the universe which we inhabit. Like all legends and myths, religions say a great deal not about the nature of the universe, but about human nature. About those who wrote the scriptures and those who believe it.

So I want to begin today by talking about a legend you'll know well, a modern myth, about a saint in the world’s worst slums. A woman, so the story goes, so filled with the light of the divine that she devoted her life to working with the poorest of the poor, the most destitute and wretched of the human condition. She did so gladly and so selflessly that many believe Mother Teresa was a living example of the omni-benevolence of god and evidence of the affirming power of faith.

It’s a nice tale, isn’t it? But legends are tricky things and as Nehur said, “facts are facts and they do not disappear on account of your likes.” And the facts about Mother Teresa’s work in the Calcutta slums tell a different tale than her legend.

As Christopher Hitchens so clearly demonstrates, Teresa was not a friend to the poor, but a friend of poverty. She believed that the more one suffered, the closer one is to Jesus. Her order raised millions, but built no hospital nor improved her own hospices, enacted no programs to put an end to the horrid conditions that lead to many to live such wretched lives. Instead, she gave them a place to die – a place where medical science was shunned, hypodermic needles reused by running them under cold water and people died from treatable illnesses. Her theology, rooted in a very Catholic idea of the “mystery” and utility of suffering, required these poor people remains poor, ignorant and sick.

“I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share with the passion of Christ,” she once told a journalist. “I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.” Only one blinded by theology could make so wicked a pronouncement. Only credulity can make one believe it to be true.

How can anyone look into the face of an impoverished, dying person and say what they see is a good thing? It is not that Teresa was intentionally cruel. It is that she was utterly removed from the human condition by her faith’s inability to cope with the reality of human suffering. In some ways, she was a victim of hundreds of years of failure by theological and philosophical authorities to resolve what is sometimes called “the problem of evil.”

It is an old theological problem, one that predates the supposed birth of Jesus, and it asks a simple question: if there is an all powerful, all wise, all loving god that cares for mankind, why is there so much evil in the world? Why are human beings beset with so much suffering? The late novelist Joseph Heller described this enduring contradiction in Catch-22, when his sardonic hero John Yossarian gets into an argument with his lover about being thankful to god:

“And don’t tell me God works in mysterious ways,” Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. “There’s nothing so mysterious about it. He’s not working at all. He’s playing. Or else He’s forgotten all about us. That’s the kind of God you people talk about – a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did he ever create pain?”
“Pain?” Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife pounced upon the word victoriously. “Pain is a useful symptom. Pain is a warning to us of bodily dangers.”
“And who created the dangers?” Yossarian demanded. He laughed caustically. “Oh, He was really being charitable to us when He gave us pain! Why couldn’t He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of his celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person’s forehead. Any jukebox manufacturer worth his salt could have done that. Why couldn’t He?”
“People would certainly look silly walking around with red neon tubes in the middle of their foreheads.”
“They certainly look beautiful now writhing in agony or stupefied with morphine, don’t they? What a colossal, immortal blunderer! When you consider the opportunity and power He had to really do a job, and then look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead, His sheer incompetence is almost staggering. It’s obvious He never met a payroll. Why, no self-respecting businessman would hire a bungler like Him as even a shipping clerk!”

The problem of evil was perhaps first put by a Greek thinker some 500 years before the birth of Jesus. Although Epicurus’ simple paradox lacks Heller’s singular wit, it remains as powerful and as unanswered today as it did when it was first posed:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?

As the philosopher David Hume would note centuries later, “God’s power is infinite. Whatever he wills is executed but neither man nor other animals is happy. Therefore he does not will their happiness. Epicurus’ questions are yet unanswered….”

Attempts to resolve Epicurus’ riddle have occupied theologians since the dawn of the Christian era, and I submit have failed utterly. You will, through the course of this conference likely hear many of them. Free will is the usual fall back position – humans suffer because humans choose to inflict suffering. Great – except it is difficult to connect free will to an earthquake, flood or viral epidemic.

Others will claim original sin is the source of what ails us. Except we know there was no Adam and Eve that spawned the species – as any biologist can tell you, if there is only one mating pair of a mammalian species left, that species will quickly die out as inbred genetic defectives. In any case, condemning an entire species for the alleged crimes of two people is unjust and unloving by definition.

Still others attempt to say that god will eventually take care of evil after a bloody apocalypse in which man kind is judged. Fantastic, except that does nothing for those who have been ravaged by cancers or killed in wars. This also suggests, if true, a certain capriciousness and feckless morality to god. He could have prevented the deaths of six million Jews during the Holocaust, or other atrocities, but says instead “Ah, I’ll get around do something about this eventually.”

To make this point clear, let’s conduct a quick thought experiment. Imagine you are walking down the street and a man in front of you falls over from a heart attack. You are armed with a cell phone can with a call to 911 can save his life. Or you can walk away with the promise that at some point in the future, you’ll make a sizable donation to the Heart and Stroke foundation. The moral choice is obvious.

Others have simply abandoned the standard arguments, throw up their hands and say god MIGHT have a reason for letting horrors visit themselves upon mankind, but we just don’t know. And since we don’t know the mind of god, the problem of evil therefore solved. Well, this line is simply an appeal to ignorance to avoid the central question and a rephrasing of “god works in mysterious ways.” And we know what Yosarrian thought about that.

Some take Epicurus’s riddle to be such a damning argument as to demolish the very notion that an all powerful, all loving god even exists. That may be so, although on it’s own it does not dispense with the notion of any god, merely those purported to be all powerful, all knowing and all loving gods. It’s the fantastic dearth of evidence to back up the supernatural claims made by theistic religions is more than sufficient to dismiss them.

Indeed, it stretches credulity to accept the notion of god as Judaism, Christianity and Islam would have us believe. To borrow from Christopher Hitchens, what these religions are asking us to believe this: We know that as a species, human beings have been on this planet for between 100,000 and 200,000 years. If we use the lower figure and say 100,000 years, what the Abrahamic faiths would have us believe is that for 96,000 years or so the human condition was as Hobbes would describe it: nasty, brutish and short. We are killed by bacteria and viruses we don’t know are there, by weather and natural calamities we have no understanding off. Women routinely die in childbirth and life expectancy is less than 25 years. This is to say nothing of what people do to each other for food or land. Slowly over this period, however, by the sweat and toil of people, rise great civilizations in China, in India and in Greece. After all this, heaven decides it's time to intervene. And it does so consistently to illiterate, stupefied peasants in the middle east, rather than in part of the world where the message could be spread.

Indeed, the idea that god is all loving is undone not merely by critical examination, nor by Epicurus’s razor like paradox, but by the religious texts themselves.

In the Old Testament, for example, God murders often and in great numbers. He orders several ethnic cleansings, including a standing order to wipe out the town of any people who dare suggest to the Hebrews that they follow another god. He orders a father to murder his own son as test of loyalty and even personally commits genocide and ecocide on a global level. My own personal favorite is when god orders up a couple of nasty bears to tear 43 children apart for calling a bald man has no hair. Even if taken as metaphor, these are not stories about love, but about an uncontrollable, petty rage that would make even Zeus blush. Were such a god to actually exist, it would not be a creature to bow down to, but to openly oppose on basic notions of justice and human solidarity.

Even in the New Testament we see the contradiction continue. It is only in the New Testament that we are introduced to the utterly immoral concept of hell, where one can be tortured forever for rejecting god’s “love.” Where “salvation” comes in the form of a bloody human sacrifice that any of us would feel duty bound to stop if we had been there. It is made worse because the crucifixion would rob us of personal responsibility, upon which all ethics must be based, in favor of vicarious redemption. Indeed, I openly reject the “sacrifice” of Jesus. I would want no part of it, were it to be true, because I reject the notion that someone has to die for my alleged crimes.

However, as it seems on the weight of evidence obvious there is no reason to accept these claims about a god – as self contradictory as they are – why should I or any non-believer actually care about the problem of evil? It’s because the inability to reconcile the concept of god with the reality of suffering and evil leads, in far too many cases, to morally and ethically reprehensible behavior.

The most obvious results can be seen in the middle east, where honor killings still result the horrific deaths of innocent people, particularly women, for violations of religious laws. In parts of the Muslim world apostasy remains a capital offense. In Afghanistan, Muslim clerics recently sentenced a young couple to death for eloping contrary to their religious edicts. The growing imposition of the Sharia law in Afghanistan has resulted in a law making martial rape legal. You see the point. Only when one’s views are so utterly removed from the reality of human suffering can one seriously make a claim that a wife must provide sex to her husband upon demand. Some niceties do exist, however, in the minds of gruesome Muslim clerics with little sense of compassion. One claims that a wife can say no - but if she does then her husband has the right to starve her.

But the western world should not be so smug. Recently, the Pope declared that condoms make the AIDS epidemic worse in Africa – a continent where more than 25 million have died from the illness and millions more are infected. We know beyond any shadow of a doubt, thanks to science, that condoms have a significant impact in reducing the spread of this virus, yet the church sees fit to ignore this and reject it as a theological issue – which has a significant impact in Africa where the words of a pope carry significant weight. The church’s position is plainly wicked because it contributes to suffering and death. No amount of declaring it to be a faith issue, and thus beyond reproach, can change that.

Where the secular humanist will examine the issue from a utilitarian perspective with an aim of reliving suffering, the church is irrationally dogmatic and dismissive of evidence.

This was powerfully seen only last month in Brazil during the aftermath of the rape of a 9-year-old girl by her step father. He had apparently been abusing her for three years and she ended up pregnant. With twins. At 9-years-old. Her doctors said she would not survive carrying the babies to term, let alone deliver them. Now, in Brazil, abortion is only legal in rape cases and if the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother. This qualified as both and the courts granted permission for the procedure.

The church’s reaction to this? Not concern for the suffering this poor child has endured at the hands of a rapist, nor the suffering she will continue to live with for much of her life, but with the abortion. Because the Vatican has declared it a sin. So they petition the courts to deny the abortion claiming the babies could be delivered via c-section. Never mind these bishops are not medical doctors, and are not considering the mortal danger the child is in.

When that failed, the church excommunicated the girl’s mother, lawyers, and doctors. They saved her life, but they have been drummed out of the church. No big deal for non-believers but catastrophic for those who do. They would have thrown the girl out to, but apparently the Vatican as a rule against excommunicating minors.

By the way, just to add insult to injury here – guess who was NOT excommunicated? The rapist step father– the criminal who set off a chain of suffering with his evil actions. A chain the church, because it fails to grasp the reality of suffering – has helped perpetuate.

Human beings suffer. We cannot avoid it. We commit evil acts. This is not because we are made to suffer to allowed to by a divine hand be it caring or capricious. It is because we live on a planet with a shifting crust and powerful weather systems that orbits a start that bathes the planet in radiation – a star that will eventually burn itself out and take this entire planet with it.

We suffer because we are a product of an unguided evolutionary process that shapes all life on this planet, one that does not work from blueprints, but jury gigs systems from the materials at hand. That life can be benign, like a tree, or lethal, like insects that eat other organisms from the inside out. In our case we continue to carry what Darwin called the lowly stamp of our origins. For all our intelligence and brilliance we are still at the mercy of urges, defects, and instincts. And yes, we suffer because of our choices.

How do we best respond to both those forces, both within our control and beyond it? We do so by recognizing not that suffering is part of a grand plan, but something we can combat. We feed the hungry. We provide proper medical care to the sick. We do not fret and worry about the destination of souls or the hereafter. We help each other in the here and now.

Nor do we treat evil as something divine or that exists with a greater moral justification we just don’t understand. We fight it. We certainly do not follow the words of Jesus who, according to the Gospel of Matthew, counsels us to “not resist and evil person.” This hopelessly naive view would allow the Hitlers and Osama Bin Laden’s of history to burn civilization to the ground. Or to put this another way: the choice not to resist evil is a choice to allow it to flourish. In our own life times, the example of the Rwandan genocide should serve as a powerful reminder of what happens when evil is not resisted. Mountains of bodies and rivers of blood are the logical end result of putting Jesus’ doctrine into practice.

The world is not much helped by the suffering of poor people. To truly face human suffering and deal with it as such we must abandon the confused and contradictory theologies that would distance us from it. Rather we can walk the path of a much greater and humane tradition than what is found in the Bible or the Koran. The Greeks had a basic moral and ethical idea that can be expressed as “Be careful whom you turn from your door.” It is famously the operating ethical system of Homer’s Odyssey. And it says that you help your fellow creatures in need because one day you might be the one who will survive on the charity of strangers. Human solidarity, as expressed in this fashion, gets us a very long way to creating a better society for everyone.

It is not perfect. We will stumble. We will fail. But that is almost the point, that we struggle knowing this to be so. And knowing this is the only life we have, that we will cease to exist when we die as we did not exist before we were born, means we have this one and only chance to make a difference.

Grappling with evil and suffering and lending aid to our fellow creatures is something that we, believer and non-believer alike, should gladly do. But never should we treat suffering as mysterious, unassailable or worse, as something good.

BLASPHEMY – COGNITION II

Published

Riker

on April 23, 2009

When it rains, it pours. Or in my case, drizzles... but it's a drizzle in a drought, so don't complain :)

I just read Jerry Coyne's latest article lambasting the National Academy of Sciences and the National Centers for Science Education for their accomodationist standpoints with regard to the harmony of evolutionary theory and religious faith (he must've gotten the idea from me), and I gave myself another opportunity to think about the issue. Here was my reponse:

I tend to see the posturing of the NAS and the NCSE as more of a logistical matter than anything else; these organizations need money to function, and they have to be sure not to alienate potential sources of funding. But then there's a side issue: they don't need to pander to us as naturalists/rationalists/atheists, because we're already on the same side of the fence. The people for whom those statements were written are those who might be *on* the fence. And the surest way to knock them back to their side is to require them to abandon a component of their belief system before we grant them admission. If a theist comes to the NCSE or NAS website, they're looking for encouraging words, not challenging ones. We should give them to them and let the merits of the science itself argue its cause. The NCSE and NAS have a tough enough job just promoting evolution in this religiously saturated country. But if you want them to take a hard line stance, then you're effectively asking them to incorporate the inordinately larger task of debunking religion. In our non-ideal world, they have to pick their battles. It might offend me that they have to speak disingenuously to do so, but I'm going to have to live with that.

So, I don't like it any more than I disliked it before*... but I acknowledge the rock to their left and the hard place to their right, and will let them play at this mild little version of fighting dirty** to gain a little ground on our tiring uphill battle.

* - I think that's a valid sentence

** - I mean, they're totally lying to their audience. It's a classic bait-and-switch.

I Never Wanted To Be A Munchkin

Published

admin

on April 23, 2009

munchkins

When I read the Wizard of Oz aged seven I wanted to be either the Wizard or one of the wicked witches, not a munchkin. Now, at the advanced age of 61 I find myself cast as Larry in Michael McKeever’s “Splat.”

It’s not the hat, or the wig, or the big silver boots that make me quake… I just don’t like saying the F word on stage… and it’s almost the first word I say.

“Splat” is a minute slice of Munchkin life just after Dorothy dances off along the Yellow Brick Road leaving the house and witch to be cleaned up by the road gang. Thereby hangs the tale, a socialist reconstruction of life in a dictatorship and how moral decisions sometimes have to be passed by in order for natural justice to prevail.

Or…

A slight comedy. You decide.

The play is crafted within an inch of it’s life making demands of the actors that combine long internal journeys to truth with horrendous moral decisions. All taken at a breakneck speed and with juxtapositions of language and incident that, while they make may an audience laugh, are utterly real to the characters.

Nothing is exaggerated. The statements made by Larry, a socialist, and the wrestle with morality for all the characters simply echo the problems faced every day by ordinary people in extraordinary positions.

You come across Mr. “Evil Personified” in a road accident. Do you dial 911?

Silly Popes and Slippery Slopes

Published

Riker

on April 22, 2009

The last two months have seen me get a year older, get even busier at work, move into a new house, and spend even more time on the car. Hence, the 'not blogging' thing I've been trying out. I just wanted to post this link in case it hasn't been seen yet...

http://uk.reuters.com/article/scienceNewsMolt/idUKTRE53L5QM20090422

If I afford myself some time between projects at the new place, I'll follow up with a critique.

Thanks for your patience!

And, I feel like I owe an apology for not making a 'BLASPHEMY - BIG WORD' title for this post. It had to happen sooner or later.

Atheist Crucified On Stage

Published

admin

on April 22, 2009

rompers-with-names

It’s rather odd to be cast in a short play where you are crucified on stage. “Paul and Eddie” by Ken Brisbois is about ten minutes long and is a small slice of life on Golgotha Hill just before JC arrives.

Both actors (myself and Quincy Perkins) and the director (Mike Marrero) are either atheist or agnostic and despite the initial puzzlement the rehersal process had certainly led me in a better understanding of the power of the story of the crucifixion.

It’s horrendously uncomfortable on those crosses. Even after five minutes our breathng is laboured and concentratiing is difficult. Arms, legs chest and necks ache and we take every advantage of the humour to deliver us from the internal processess of this hightly unpleasant method of execution.

I can’t move anything except my fingers, head and hips. I wear nothing but a loin cloth. All that work at the gym on my pecs disappears as the position of my body exploits bone and cartilage – not muscle.

Quincy stars. He has the most lines, is face on to the audience right at the edge of the stage. I get three or four word lines until near the end when I have a soliloquy. Every repetition of the hope in this short speech brings me to tears – and at the audition I noticed the other directors had wet eyes.

It is such a wonderful story. I can’t blame anyone for desperately wanting it to be true. I want it to be be true…. but it still isn’t.

Acting is, I think, the strangest of arts. Ken Brisbois dictates the manifestation of my internal world for me and I have to dig back, like an archaeologist, to that world.

Mike Marrero pushes me into a shape and in a direction that I have little control over. Then I take over. I’m left alone, with Quincy, to move people in a way that they don’t expect and may not want to go.

We have a five week run. During that time the short scene will develop, alter, shift, change in infinitely subtle ways and eventually we, the actors, get enriched and changed by what we do.

I have no idea whether or not Ken Brisbois is a theist. I suspect not. There seems to be no way that a believing christian could have developed a scenario and a script that contains such subtleties.

We open next week.

Part of me hopes for raving crowds of Christians outside the theater demonstrating against the play.

We’ll see.

New Religions!

Published

Michel

on April 22, 2009

Quantum Theology and Quantum Spirituality!

Something hinted at by the great fraud Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (Transcendental Meditation inventor, parasite of Beatles fame) is now becoming more widespread. The book review for "Quantum gods don't deserve your faith" by Amanda Gefter on New Scientist Opinions is revealing.

Maharishi claimed that transcendental meditation gave practitioners access to the "quantum field of cosmic consciousness". This, he said, was identical to SU(5), the model physicists were then investigating in their search for a grand unified theory. Sadly for cosmic consciousness, real experiments later falsified SU(5).

As for the notion of creating our own reality, this relies on brains in some sense operating quantum mechanically - and there is no evidence for this. As Stenger says, the scales of distance involved in brain processing are more than a thousand times too large for quantum effects to necessarily come into play. Likewise, physicist Max Tegmark has shown that the timescales of events in the brain are 10 or more orders of magnitude longer than the timescales of "decoherence", the process by which quantum effects "leak" out of the quantum system.

Let's get real! Let's not grab any new idea and flex it into our needs for imaginary food without some verification or validation...

Adventures in medical care

Published

Karen

on April 21, 2009

Just wanted to pop in for a moment to say I probably won’t be posting much for the rest of the week.

The reason being our daughter was hospitalized over the weekend after having a seizure. She’s alright now (already back at school) but I’m still exhausted and would probably sleep this week away if I could, but there’s follow-ups to do and medicine to “instill”.

Random Post

Too funny!

Published

salient

on April 19, 2009

He actually seems like a sweet guy, but one expects him to pull out a banjo at any moment.

Disappointment at lack of banjos aside, I particuluarly loved his use of charts and schematics and his imaginative use of colour-coordinated props. Someone ought to tell him that ID's ridiculous argument from analogy relies upon unfounded comparisons between biological complexity and designed complexity (in materials that, unlike the chemicals of life, lack the capacity for self-replication).

Unfortunately, I was laughing so hard that I missed much of what he said. OminousVoice is, imo, hilarious, but this kid has him beat. The difference is that OminousVoice is consciously amusing.

I thought that the video above was the funniest, but the video below greatly tickled my beloved's fancy. It's a journey into pathos as he says goodbye to one of his props.

Religious Affiliation Predicts Belief in Climate Change

Published

Martin

on April 19, 2009

[bpsdb] One of the more fascinating feeds I've found since plunging deeper into Twitters incessant deluge of information and increasing my own presence there, is that of the Pew Research Center. So far this month alone they've published several studies on beliefs that are worth reporting, but for now I'll just deal with one, on Religion and Climate Change