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fassunglos sein

Published

on February 16, 2009

Incidentally, the title is German for losing faith - Losing My Religion.

I will never really understand why those of moderate intelligence, who have the advantages of a modern education cannot see that they have been thoroughly conned.

_________

Of course, many individuals in the Western world do not get the advantages of a modern education. Instead, they are brainwashed into delusion, often through religiosity-protecting, anti-knowledge homeschooling.

The original music was stripped from the video below because of WMG's greed.

If you want to see a slightly longer version with the song that I originally intended (by a different group) click here.

By the way: BOYCOTT WMG products. Other music companies are not so petty as WMG, so make WMG suffer for its greed. Make its meanness backfire!

Morin Huur is a Mongolian folk dance.

Book Meme and Reading

Published

salient

on February 15, 2009

I have met people who brag of never having read a book. How sad!

This comes via igetpissed, via Nullifidian, via the BBC

Instructions:
1. Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read ENTIRELY
2. Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3. Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4. Tally your total at the bottom.

5. I added a '-' for those that I ploughed through (mostly as a teen), but HATED (probably because literature is wasted on the young).

My reading list:
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X+
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X+
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X+
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (quit at ¾ - boringly aimless book, but I'll probably finish it when I run out of reading matter.)
6. The Bible (God no! Bad fiction: ridiculous moralistics; inconsistent, unbelievable plot)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X+
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X+
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X+
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X+
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X- (I also disliked Vonnegut's books)
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier *
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X+
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot X (I preferred Silas Marner and Mill on the Floss)
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (Started, but quit. Blah and Bore, more like)
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh * (enjoyed The Loved One)
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky * X-
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X+
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens X
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34. Emma - Jane Austen *
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen *
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini *
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres *
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell X+
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X+ (fast and fun)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez *
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy X+
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding X+
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert X
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen *
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X+
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X+
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas X
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy X+
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X+
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker X
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce (I survived Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man. Ulysses is not a work of creative genius, it’s the stream of consciousness of a person with DID - it's simply that the critics do not know this.)
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray X----
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker X+
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry X+ (preferred Family Matters)
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X-
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams X+
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute X+
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

What is not on the list that ought to be?
1984 by George Orwell.
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque.
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy is beautifully written.
Anything by Patrick White, Anita Rau Badami.

Apropos to the topic of reading books, I stumbled across an article about how the Internet is influencing the way that we process information. Ironically, I found the full article excessively wordy, but it was interesting, nonetheless.

“Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.”

Full article: Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains, by Nicholas Carr. Atlantic, July/August 2008

The Tragedy of Adarwinists

Published

salient

on January 29, 2009

Celebrating 200 Anno Darwini

link

Nice Idea, But ………

Published

salient

on January 16, 2009

Karen Armstrong talks of her journey from and back to religion. Here, receiving her 2008 TED prize, she outlines a nice idea that I consider impractical and overly optimistic.

The Golden Rule is simple – I learned the principle before age 8 – and it does not require the institution of religion. We learn compassion through socialization and experience. Those with a personal inclination towards compassion do not need religious nonsense in order to behave morally. If humans need anything, it is not religion but rather connectedness.

I think that Armstrong's personal inclination towards (good) religiosity has lead to her failing to see that religious edifices are, and will continue to be, a cognitive, social and political problem.

Why? The religious have largely failed to see the message that Armstrong sees as the basic theme of religions, and some individuals will always take advantage of any power structure. Religious institutions are particularly well suited to usurpation by power mongers. Call any stupid idea "a religion" and sheep will be willing to flock and be fleeced.

In my opinion, Armstrong ought to have paid more attention to her own words:

"Like it or not, fundamentalism is not going to disappear soon. In some places it is going from strength to strength, becoming more extreme."

Links: Books by Karen Armstrong.

Liberal plasticity, Conservative rigidity

Published

salient

on December 15, 2008

I have been thinking about right-wing cognition, and have developed a theory based on the fact that the moderately clear dichotomy between conservative and liberal (moral) thinking probably has a fairly simple genetic-developmental explanation. That is, relatively few genes predisposing to one or the other cognitive style.

1. It has been demonstrated that willingness to obey authority is genetically inherited. Such willingness would have conferred a survival value after city states had arisen – disobey at your own peril.

2. It is has also been repeatedly demonstrated that conservatives are more likely to be less educated and to be staunchly religious church-goers.

3. It is also known that the brain is plastic in that it can recover many functions after head injury. However, people do not recover equally well after head injury.

4. Personality disorders are notoriously difficult to treat (modify) and dogmatic thinkers typically fare poorly in talk-therapy. Liberal thinkers fare comparatively well. Some dogmatic thinkers are extreme left-wingers because that was their parents’ political affiliation. However, dogmatic thinkers are more likely to be right-wingers.

5. Conservative church-goers are more likely to exhibit emotional, black-and-white thinking, and to be bigoted. They are more likely to be ESJ than NP. They are notoriously closed-minded and strongly resist reconsidering any of their early beliefs and assumptions. It’s as though they are not even able to modify their early pathways. (This is the reason that right-wingers are fighting to corrupt early school education.) Conservative fundamentalists react very emotionally and personally to any questioning of their beliefs – either by taking offence, or by personal attacks on the questioner.

6. Liberal thinkers tend to move from facts to theory (induction). New facts lead to a logical re-evaluation of theories, particularly for scientists. Conservative thinkers tend to move from emotionally satisfying dogma to distortion of facts.

So, here’s my theory about a genetic predisposition to right-wing thinking. It’s basically a matter of generally lesser brain plasticity. Conservative brains are genetically predisposed to be less able to readjust (be plastic) than are the brains of liberal thinkers. It’s also likely that higher education trains the brain to be more plastic.

It's no accident that mythical Eve's mythical fruit was plucked from the mythical Tree of Knowledge.

I’d be fascinated to see a comparison between cognitive styles in those who recover well or poorly from similar head injuries, or between cognitive styles and other measures of plasticity.

When is thinking not Thinking?

Published

salient

on November 14, 2008

Research has confirmed my suspicion that church attendees are more likely to be ESJ on the MBTI.

Self-report that an individual makes decisions on the basis of thinking does not necessarily indicate that the individual's thought processes are logical or effective. Since people are aware that intelligence is socially valued, they are probably more likely to exhibit a bias for overreporting themselves as Ts. Most people are likely to overestimate the effectiveness of their thinking, in some areas at the least. One presumes that Sarah Palin fondly imagines that her thought processes are logical. An ill-informed, illogical, or magic-thinking thought is still a thought. So, S combined with T may be selectively ineffectual in promoting critical thinking. Data suggests that superficial, illogical, and emotional thinking are prevalent problems.

more .....

Dotty and the Wizards of Odds

Published

salient

on November 2, 2008

This photo, posted by Honji, begged for the video. Get out there and save the world, USians!

More: The Notoriety of Doofus and Dotty . The Political Perils of Narcissism .

The Notoriety of Doofus and Dotty

Published

salient

on November 1, 2008

_________________________________________________________________________

I stumbled across a blog in Australia in which the blogger decries the potential lunatic, fear-filled reactions of American Christians to the projected Obama/Biden victory. See: The anti-Obama Christian bloggers.

"Moreover, I have to say that I am starting to get concerned about where this will lead. Polls suggest a much greater chance of an Obama win than a McCain win, which means that a situation might arise in which a great number of angry, terrified Christians are faced with an Obama White House and a Pelosi/Reid Congress.

What will these Christians do? Hopefully they will settle down, look back at what they believed in the lead up to his victory and then begin to exmaine [sic] their beliefs more objectively. Unfortunately, given the propensity of American Christians to be convinced that fiction is fact (eg Harry Potter and Satanism) I don't think this is going to happen. I'm worried, though, that violence may occur in response to an Obama/Reid/Pelosi victory as Christians take up the arms guaranteed by the constitution, refuse to pay taxes and begin overt resistance to the world of evil that they believe exists in the form of Obama and the Democrats."

Dream on, buddy, "objective examination of beliefs" and fundamentalist Christianity are diametrically opposed.

Fundamentalist American Christians are "angry and terrified" because, in their ill-intentioned bid for power, Doofus (top left) and Dotty (right) have been telling lies and whipping up hatred against Obama, presumably because they read the unthinking emotionality of their "congregation" well.

(I probably did not need to clarify whom I am calling Doofus and Dotty.)

How else could Brat Maverick hope to win with a platform that can be summarized as: "Let's cut down on Washington waste while continuing to spend billions on a war that we will not admit cannot be won."?

In essence:

"He is interested in two things, and two things only: making you afraid of it,and telling you who's to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections."

The writer is clear and fair, yet is an "evangelical" (what is Australia coming to?). I take this to indicate that he is familiar with the emotional reactivity that passes for thinking in fellow fundamentalists.

"That means I do believe in the spirit world, including the existence of Satan."

What an interesting example of philosophical tension!. He recognizes the disconnection between Harry Potter and the mythical "fallen angel", Mormon brother to Jesus, and yet he believes in equally ridiculous notions. Proof positive that otherwise intelligent people can entertain indoctrinated stupidities that are utterly without evidence. They call if Faith, I call it something completely different.

More : Dotty and the Wizards of Odds . The Political Perils of Narcissism .

The Political Perils of Narcissism

Published

salient

on October 27, 2008

Is it narcissism? Is it stupidity? Is it both?

A friend sent me this email. "Watch Sarah when she's on camera. She loves it, yet they're completely making fun of her. Stupid!!!"

http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/update-palin-rap/773

She's an upper-case-R (for Redneck) Republican, and she has repeatedly displayed her cognitive challenges, so I suspect that it's both.

To recognize that SNL is repeatedly taking the mickey, she would have to have both a sense of humour (recognition of irony) and a more realistic opinion of her own capabilities.

Neither of these qualities seem to be prominent in upper-case-R (for Redneck) Republicans.

"Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is a personality disorder defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the diagnostic classification system used in the United States, as "a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and a lack of empathy." [1]

The narcissist is described as . . . being excessively preoccupied with issues of personal adequacy, power and prestige.[2] Narcissistic personality disorder is closely linked to self-centeredness." [wiki]

(And, based on my professional observations, NPD is the form that sociopathy most often takes in females.)

What were the Republicans thinking when they chose this .... er....person as a candidate for VP????

I sincerely hope that their blatantly foolish decision will save the planet from another four years of what a friend termed "Republican rule".

More: Dotty and the Wizards of Odds . The Notoriety of Doofus and Dotty .

Spem in Alium – Thomas Tallis

Published

salient

on October 18, 2008

To illustrate my contention that religious works are the only good thing to come of religion, I coupled images with Thomas Tallis' Spem in Alium. Unfortunately, this version does not show the images to best advantage.