Last weekend was the Philadelphia Coalition of Reason’s annual Unity Picnic. This year however, when I was putting together the Examiner article to promote the event I learned a few things. I learned that the local Humanist group was pretty much doing all the work and that the rest of the coalition was really doing much at all. Some groups didn’t even publicize the event. For all practical purposes PhillyCoR was practically dead.

The thing is that Sam Singleton Atheist Evangelist was scheduled to perform at the picnic but due to a climbing accident, his manager and wife was hospitalized a week earlier. As a result, the Sam Singleton tour had to be pushed back and a few weeks. He had contacted me about trying to put together an alternative event since he wouldn’t be able to make the picnic.

With PhillyCoR practically dead, there was no way to put together an alternative event. So I tried to put PhillyCoR back together. As a result, I am pretty much the new coordinator of PhillyCoR. It isn’t a position that I necessarily want, but it is a position that needs to be done.

I have always talked about the importance of atheist groups working together and this is a necessary consequence of that philosophy. The way I see it, we are fighting a culture war and atheist groups need to work together if we are to spread the ideas of reason, critical thinking, and science.

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• Brother Sam Singleton, the only honest evangelist (scienceblogs.com)

Last week, while on my vacation I heard about something which must make the Religious Right go even more insane then they are already. I heard about the latest technique in women’s breast augmentation… using Stem Cells!

During the Bush administration the Religious Right pushed to limit Stem Cell Research. Their view on this was two fold. First, embryonic stem cell research is worse than abortion. Second, it is a slippery slop to playing God. I guess they didn’t realize that Stem Cells could also be used for breast implants. If they had, they would have had a third objection.

Basically, cosmetic surgeons can liposuction some fat out of a woman’s ass, thigh, or other body part (surprisingly not the brain) and using their own stem cells, can move that fat into the breasts. While these are adult stem cells rather than embryonic, I am sure the Religious Right will still be mental about it.

I should point out that studies have been done that show that women who get breast implants do it because they believe that guys want them to have bigger breasts. Those same studies show that guys don’t request and don’t really care if women have larger breasts. It is basically a self-image issue.

Still, there is nothing wrong with getting cosmetic implants (for women or men). If these implants are safer, then I am all for them. That being said, I don’t think women should feel the need to have them unless it is what they want.

It used to be that only fundamentalists would tell me that science was a religion, but these days even some moderate religious people are using this type of poor reasoning. Their view is that science claims to have the only method for understanding the world. In other words, science claims to have a monopoly on the truth just like fundamentalist religions do.

Yes, science is the only reliable method for understanding the world. No other method can reliably tell us about the world. The major difference however is that science can prove its claims objectively. This is why every person in the world uses science and relies on science despite any rhetoric they might implore.

God didn’t create the internet. No one has faith that when they turn on a light switch that it will go on. We don’t pray over our meals to cook them. Science is the only method which we can accurately rely on to get the job done. In short, science works. It works consistently, repeatable, and objectively.

The day religious people stop using the scientific method and all advances that science has produced is the day I will concede that science might be a religion and that science might take things on faith. When religious people can pray into existence anything even remotely as cool as the internet is the day I might be willing to accept that science isn’t the only reliable method for understanding the world.

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• Science vs. Religion (dangeroustalk.net)

Dangerous Talk is now 95% back up and running. Over the last few months the site has been continually hacked. Basically, the hackers have been inserting spam links hidden at the top of the website. The links can only be seen when Java has been disabled.

At first, a few readers informed me of the problem and I had to reinstall some of the theme components of the site and tweak the code. As it had started to happen more and more, I began checking the site every week or so. Basically, on Friday I got tired to having to do all this and figured I could just update the software and maybe stop this problem altogether.

That ended up being a much bigger problem than the original hacking problem. At one point on Friday I was actually freaking out a bit. By Saturday the site had been restored to the point that readers shouldn’t have noticed any difference in the site. But from my standpoint, I basically was locked out.

Now I have full access and most of the site is working great. I still don’t know if any of this will stop the hacking, but I am hoping.

I want to thank all my readers for your patience and for your continued support. I will be taking the rest of this week off from blogging to get the remaining 5% of the site back to where it should be and to work on other Dangerous Talk projects. Please feel free to go through the Category section and check out some of the older blog articles that you might have missed. Also, I hope you will check out my Examiner page as I will be writing a few more articles there this week.

Once again, I want to thank all the readers and supporters out there because you are all Dangerous Talker and you all mean the world to me.

-Staks

Yesterday I had a twitter conversation with a Christian over something I talked about in one of my Examiner articles. The interesting thing is that it wasn’t even the main point of the article and there is already another article in the “Atheism 101” series which addresses the issue in more detail. In any case, I thought I would discuss the issue.

The article focuses on the “No True Scotsman” fallacy however this particular Christian decided not to address that issue at all. Instead, he focused on the part of the article where I talked about how if the Bible was a written by a perfect deity to be a perfect guide for humanity, then it fails. The fact that reasonable people can get diametrically opposed views from a holy book alleged to be written by a perfect being is logically inconsistent.

The Christian makes two interesting claims. The first is that even though the Bible is “difficult” to understand it does not invalidate the claim that it was written (or inspired by) a perfect being. Again my claim is that if it was written by a perfect being as a guide for humanity then that being would be able to communicate his message perfectly and it would be crystal clear to everyone.

To claim that the Bible is “difficult” to understand is an extreme understatement. The fact is that somewhat reasonable people can and do get diametrically opposed interpretations from this book. Dr. Seuss’s “The Lorax” is not nearly as “difficult” to understand. That book was written to have a message too and that message is crystal clear to any reasonable or even somewhat reasonable person. It is one thing for a book to be difficult to understand, but for a book to be open to such diametrically opposed interpretations really says something about the author. Claiming that the author is perfect at this point just seems silly.

If I were reading a guide to plumbing and I interpreted it in a diametrically opposed way as my neighbor, we would both have to acknowledge that the author didn’t convey his or her instructions clearly. But if the author was God and claimed to be perfect, then this poorly written guide would be strong evidence to the contrary.

The second point that this Christian made (ironically after he accused me of making the Red Herring fallacy among others) was that scientists disagree on interpreting data all the time. The analogy that he is trying to make here is that just because people get diametrically opposed interpretations from the Bible shouldn’t invalidate the Bible. But there is a very distinct and important difference here. The Bible is alleged to be perfect and written (or inspired) by a perfect being. Scientists may get different interpretations from the same data, but they are not perfect. That is why when this type of thing happens in science, scientists have to design new experiments and/or studies so that they can be repeatable with some degree of accuracy. If an experiment or study yielded diametrically opposed results, then the experiment or study was faulty and needs to be re-examined, fixed, and/or re-done completely.

That is the real difference between religion and science. Science tries to get it right and keeps trying while religion claims to have it right regardless of the results. This makes religion a poor guide to life. Claiming to have the answer isn’t the same as actually having the answer. Science tests its results and is not afraid to re-test them over and over again. Science encourages critics and criticism while religion just asserts their answer without regard to the evidence or the facts.

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I hope everyone had a happy 4th of July weekend. I celebrated my independence from gods by taking the family on vacation to Carl Sagan’s old stomping groups in Ithaca New York. There we took the Sagan Planet Walk and Paced the Space.

We walked from the Sun marker to the marker of the Earth (probably about 50 to 100 feet) in the scaled down solar system (one-fifth billions of the actual size). When I walked back over to the Sun marker, I read that in this scaled model, our neighboring star Alpha Centauri would be located somewhere in Hawaii. So while our solar system is scaled down to ¾ of a mile, the next nearest star would be nearly 5000 miles away.

I can almost hear Carl Sagan’s voice informing me about the vast emptiness of space and how humbling it is, reminding us that the Universe was not created for us, but rather we are simply a part of a great big Universe so immense that our nearest neighbor would take multiple lifetimes to reach.

Religious people often talk about how God made the Universe for human beings. But a glance through a telescope shows just how ridiculous such beliefs really are. Why would a God create our closest star (aside from the Sun) so far out of our reach? What does that tell us about the vastness of the rest of the Galaxy or even the vastness of the entire Universe as we know it through science?

Christians have a saying taken from John 3:16 of the Bible, “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Atheists have a saying too although I don’t think it is in any book yet, “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him will believeth in anything.”

I was in the religion section of a bookstore today and there was actually a book about how Jesus told the founding fathers about a secret code. This was not meant to be a fictional book either. In fact, not counting the obvious fiction of the Christian narrative there are a lot of books that have divergently ridiculous narratives.

It seems that if someone is willing to swallow the obvious fiction of the Bible, they seem to be susceptible to other wacky narratives. There are Bible codes, secret knowledge imparted to important people, space Jesus, claims of alien angels, demons, etc. The wackiness doesn’t end with God.

I bet there is some good money in books of this kind. I am almost tempted to write something wacky based on the Bible and call it non-fiction. Any ideas? The crazier the better.

The other day I got an e-mail from my father that I found interesting. It was a link to a video which talked about how God blessed us with perfect eyes to see such beautiful colors. The video mostly featured a series of images first in black and white and then in color to show how great the human eye is. I should note that my father is not all that religious any more and probably just enjoyed the visuals.

Of course, this type of argument is laughable. For starters, the human eye doesn’t see very much. So little of the electromagnetic spectrum makes up visible light to humans that one really needs to ask not why God has blessed us with color, but rather why God has cursed us by practically blinding us. Of course the reality is that God didn’t bless us or curse us. The human eye wasn’t designed by an intelligent designer with a plan, but rather was designed by the process of natural selection.

Second, the Intelligent Designer fails again when we look at the internal aspects of the human eye. God really fucked it up for humans. For some reason our optic nerves block much of the light from reaching our photoreceptors. The fact is that there are animals in the world whose photoreceptors are not blocked by their optic nerves. So it certainly seems like God designed the snail’s eyes better than the eyes of humans. Maybe snails have souls and humans don’t.

The real problem is that it is too easy for some ignorant Christian to throw up some black and white photos and contrast them to color photos and claim that humans are number one without having the slightest idea of what is out there or what he or she is talking about. People like my father like looking at the “eye candy” and some people might even get suckered in with that and fall victim to the ridiculousness of the argument being quietly put forth.

The Christian cloaks his or her self in being uplifting when they are really just been ignorant and/or dishonest. In some cases, they are using people’s sense of awe and love of beauty as a way to push their product and sucker people. We can still experience the awe of color and the beauty of the world as we see it and still admit that human vision is far from number one. In fact, through the magic of science humans can now see much better than our flawed human eyes normally allow.

Microscopes and telescopes allow us to see things both big and small. Glasses and contacts correct people’s flawed vision and other scientific instruments even allow us to observe much more or the electromagnetic spectrum than our “God” given eyes possible could. Isn’t science wonderful? The collection plate in located in the side bar in the form of a contribute button. Thanks!

I have often talked about how we choose what offends us and how we could just as easily choose not to be offended. However, some things have a reasonable expectation of being offensive. The Crucifix should have a reasonable expectation of being offensive and it offends me.

When I say that something has a reasonable expectation of being offensive, I am referring to something that a reasonable person could find offensive. For example, an individual may find a particular song offensive because it might remind him or her of an unpleasant experience. This is their choice but there is no reasonable expectation that such a song would be offensive. On the other hand, the Nazi swastika is a symbol which represents racial purity and a reminder of the brutal murder of over 6 million people. It is still a choice to be offended by such a symbol, but there is a reasonable expectation that most reasonable people would be offended by such a symbol.

The crucifix is a torture device. It represents cruel torture. To a Christian, it represents the cruel torture of Jesus and their belief that the torture of Jesus was a sacrifice for their immortal soul so that they will not be tortured for all eternity in Hell. This is of course the core of the Christian belief system.

It is understandable why someone who claims to be Christian will display a crucifix it is also understandable why someone who believes in racial purity would display the swastika. I am not equating the two belief systems but I am pointing out that to the represented of each system of belief these symbols are not offensive. It is to the non-represented that the symbol becomes offensive. In other words, whether a symbol has a reasonable expectation of being offensive is not up to the represented, but rather it is up to the unrepresented.

For example, the American flag is also a symbol which represents those who live in America and to most Americans it also represents liberty and justice for everyone. If one is not represented by the American flag, then they get to be the ones who decide whether or not it has a reasonable expectation of being offensive. During the Bush (Jr.) Presidency, some people in other countries were offended by the American flag and had good reason for being so. Today, fewer non-American are offended by the American flag. The reasonable expectation of offensiveness is less.

For a non-Christian, the crucifix represents a torture device. It also represents the core message of Christianity which is that all non-Christians will be tortured for all eternity by a loving deity. It is also a reminder of all the cruelty done and being done in the name of the Christian God. So while there is no reasonable expectation of offensiveness within the community of believers, Christians should realize that there is a reasonable expectation of offensiveness outside of their community.

If Christians want to be considerate to non-Christians, then they ought not to display their offensive symbol. To do other wise would be at best poor manners. It could also be interpreted as a hostile act of aggression.