A quotidian mess

Facebook appears to be the favoured dumping ground for usually soppy quotes by those who either harbour an agenda to mislead, or who are either too lazy to validate or just plain credulous. In the case of the former, these quotes are often misattributed to celebrated personalities. I have no doubt that Twitter experiences its fair share of quote dumping, but since I’m not a subscriber, I’ll limit myself to what I do see.

The innocuous quotes are reasonably acceptable, but annoying in that they occupy far too much Timeline real estate. The others are sinister and hide religious, political, cultural or other nasty agendas, and when spread around may case serious harm.

Off course there are quotes that are genuinely of a scientific, skeptical and educational nature that are beneficial and if humorous to boot, are quite acceptable. I’m also not averse to the odd salacious quote that exposes religious, political or social douchebaggery.

I can’t say that I’ve come across too many examples of quote mining, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if that sort of thing happens quite frequently in certain Facebook circles, especially those that promote religion and pseudo-science.

I often wonder what my Facebook friends think of me when I don’t like one of those soppy quotes they post. I have actually gotten into arguments when I commented negatively on some of them, so refrain from that sort of thing these days. The religiously inspired ones are particularly annoying. Sometimes in a fit of rage, I will repost them on my own Timeline with a snarky comment, but I try my best to control my ire. When I fail, I do hope it does not do too much damage to my Facebook friends’… er egos.

I am really pleased however that hardly any one of my Facebook friends have posted the unadulterated horse-shit that seems to be the make-up of Deepak Chopra. You could string together any of the words he spews out regularly, in random, and they will seemingly sound profound. I shit you not. Here are some examples:

Perception arises and subsides in cosmic success

The future exists as dimensionless balance

The unexplainable grows through subjective phenomena

Why not amuse yourself some more with this Random Quote Generator of the “enigmatic wisdom” of Deepak Chopra.

Back to basics

I originally created this blog to rant about strange beliefs, political douche-baggery and things that are not so vile. And to promote science in the process off course. Off late I seem to have posted more about stuff of little or no consequence

Back to basics then…

It’s disconcerting, no infuriating when people bash science and level all sorts of wild accusations at it whether to protect their own narrow reasoning, or to promote it, or even benefit materially from it. Even more infuriating are people who wax lyrical about faith, and worse still are those who debase science to promote ideological thinking and false beliefs.

Recently Steven Pinker wrote a brilliant article in the New Republic, where he reveals why science is not the enemy. [Science is not the enemy of the Humanities].

To whet your appetite, here are some choice passages:

• One would think that writers in the humanities would be delighted and energized by the efflorescence of new ideas from the sciences. But one would be wrong. Though everyone endorses science when it can cure disease, monitor the environment, or bash political opponents, the intrusion of science into the territories of the humanities has been deeply resented. Just as reviled is the application of scientific reasoning to religion; many writers without a trace of a belief in God maintain that there is something unseemly about scientists weighing in on the biggest questions. In the major journals of opinion, scientific carpetbaggers are regularly accused of determinism, reductionism, essentialism, positivism, and worst of all, something called “scientism.”

• Scientism, in this good sense, is not the belief that members of the occupational guild called “science” are particularly wise or noble. On the contrary, the defining practices of science, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, are explicitly designed to circumvent the errors and sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable. Scientism does not mean that all current scientific hypotheses are true; most new ones are not, since the cycle of conjecture and refutation is the lifeblood of science. It is not an imperialistic drive to occupy the humanities; the promise of science is to enrich and diversify the intellectual tools of humanistic scholarship, not to obliterate them. And it is not the dogma that physical stuff is the only thing that exists. Scientists themselves are immersed in the ethereal medium of information, including the truths of mathematics, the logic of their theories, and the values that guide their enterprise. In this conception, science is of a piece with philosophy, reason, and Enlightenment humanism. It is distinguished by an explicit commitment to two ideals, and it is these that scientism seeks to export to the rest of intellectual life.

• The second ideal is that the acquisition of knowledge is hard. The world does not go out of its way to reveal its workings, and even if it did, our minds are prone to illusions, fallacies, and super- stitions. Most of the traditional causes of belief—faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, conventional wisdom, the invigorating glow of subjective certainty—are generators of error and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge. To understand the world, we must cultivate work-arounds for our cognitive limitations, including skepticism, open debate, formal precision, and empirical tests, often requiring feats of ingenuity. Any movement that calls itself “scientific” but fails to nurture opportunities for the falsification of its own beliefs (most obviously when it murders or imprisons the people who disagree with it) is not a scientific movement).

• To begin with, the findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures—their theories of the origins of life, humans, and societies—are factually mistaken. We know, but our ancestors did not, that humans belong to a single species of African primate that developed agriculture, government, and writing late in its history. We know that our species is a tiny twig of a genealogical tree that embraces all living things and that emerged from prebiotic chemicals almost four billion years ago. We know that we live on a planet that revolves around one of a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, which is one of a hundred billion galaxies in a 13.8-billion-year-old universe, possibly one of a vast number of universes. We know that our intuitions about space, time, matter, and causation are incommensurable with the nature of reality on scales that are very large and very small. We know that the laws governing the physical world (including accidents, disease, and other misfortunes) have no goals that pertain to human well-being. There is no such thing as fate, providence, karma, spells, curses, augury, divine retribution, or answered prayers—though the discrepancy between the laws of probability and the workings of cognition may explain why people believe there are. And we know that we did not always know these things, that the beloved convictions of every time and culture may be decisively falsified, doubtless including some we hold today.

• Just as common, and as historically illiterate, is the blaming of science for political movements with a pseudoscientific patina, particularly Social Darwinism and eugenics. Social Darwinism was the misnamed laissez-faire philosophy of Herbert Spencer. It was inspired not by Darwin’s theory of natural selection, but by Spencer’s Victorian-era conception of a mysterious natural force for progress, which was best left unimpeded. Today the term is often used to smear any application of evolution to the understanding of human beings. Eugenics was the campaign, popular among leftists and progressives in the early decades of the twentieth century, for the ultimate form of social progress, improving the genetic stock of humanity. Today the term is commonly used to assail behavioral genetics, the study of the genetic contributions to individual differences.

• And the critics should be careful with the adjectives. If anything is naïve and simplistic, it is the conviction that the legacy silos of academia should be fortified and that we should be forever content with current ways of making sense of the world. Surely our conceptions of politics, culture, and morality have much to learn from our best understanding of the physical universe and of our makeup as a species.

Now please do yourself a massive service and read the article in its entirety at the link provided above.

Sanctuary lost

Religion is a pretty tenuous thing at best to seek sanctuary in, but most people seem to find comfort there, and as much as I speak out against this aberration, I realise that it is going to take a long long time to totally rid the world of its hold, if ever. So imagine how despondent it must feel to those seeking sanctuary in its bosom, to be discriminated against on the basis of their gender.

Far be it for me to claim to know how women feel about being discriminated against, but at least I can relate, having endured victimization under apartheid in South Africa. So I do know that it must feel rotten.

Just about every religion I’ve come across, has discriminated against women, some more so than others. All on the basis of interpretation of obscure and archaic religious texts, written in a time when men had not much more knowledge than garden snails. And let’s be clear about it; it’s men (99.99% of the time) who are the perpetrators of this discrimination.

It’s shocking and disheartening to learn on a daily basis how religiously inspired men around the world, treat women with contempt, even going so far as to maim, mutilate and kill them, because of some insignificant act committed, which is deemed to be in violation of a religious doctrine.

Just the other day, I read with utter dismay how the number of women imprisoned in Afghanistan in the last 18 months has risen by 50%, to 600. Their offenses which range from running away from abusive husbands, family and forced marriages, to being the victims of sexual abuse, are regarded as “moral crimes.” What kind of mindset can turn the victim of sexual assault into a moral criminal?

Afghanistan is a shit hole, but this kind of thing happens in many other countries which are considered advanced, even civilized by modern standards. A proposed Elimination of Violence Against Women (EVAW) law in Afghanistan is being blocked by religiously inspired lawmakers who argue that some sections are un-Islamic. That is incomprehensible and utterly devoid of sane or rational thinking.

In the Middle and Far East, women are subject to other forms of discrimination such as limitations on basic freedoms like free movement, enforcement of dress codes, and being prevented from driving vehicles. We are told by self-appointed moralists that these basic rights infringe on certain religious tenets. It’s however by no means any different in the highly advanced West where lesbians face the threat of violence, and discrimination against termination of pregnancy, or Africa where female genital mutilation is still enforced.

No amount of cuss words can describe how utterly deprived these beliefs are.The common denominator is religion, and patriarchal men who hide behind it, spreading their hatred… and fear of women.

If this is the treatment meted out to god-fearing women, I can only shudder in disgust at what non-believing women have to go through.

Does Science Contribute to Sound Moral Judgement and Behaviour?

On this blog I am frequently confronted by people who post comments that seem to indicate that science has no contributing effect on good moral judgement and behaviour. Indeed science is portrayed as an enemy of religion by most fundamentalists, while religion is claimed as the sole harbinger of morality.

In the religious world it is generally taken for granted that morality would be totally absent were it not for the foundations laid by theology. Subsequently science and religion has been pitted against each other in nearly all social debate as competing forces, which they are not.

Science was never meant to replace religion and I think just about all scientists will agree. It’s unfortunate that religious folk continue to foster the belief that science is “out to get religion.”

I was therefore intrigued when I came across this scientific study published by Christine Ma-Kellams and Jim Blascovich in Plos One, which demonstrates a correlation between the exposure to science and sound morality. Here is an introduction, but the methods, procedure and conclusions are available through the link above:

Science has stood as a powerful force in shaping human civilization and behavior. As both an ideological system and a method for acquiring information about the world, it offers explanations for the origins of the physical universe and answers to a variety of other fundamental questions and concerns. Past research has noted that personal values influence both the questions that are asked and the methods used in arriving at the answers; as such, scientists have often been concerned with the moral and social ramifications of their scientific endeavors. Not surprisingly, the general consensus is that science is value-laden. However, no studies to date have directly investigated the link between exposure to science and moral or prosocial behaviors. Here, we empirically examined the effects of thinking about science on moral judgments and behavior.

It is important to note that “science” is multi-faceted construct that takes on distinct forms. On the one hand, the scientific style of thinking employed by scientists is unusual, difficult, and uncommon. Although science can serve as a belief system, it is distinct from other belief systems (e.g., religion) insofar as its counterintuitive nature and the degree to which it does not rely on universal, automatic, unconscious cognitive systems; as a consequence, relative to other belief systems like religion, science has few explicit “followers”. On the other hand, apart from the model of the scientific method of acquiring information about the world, we contend that there is a lay image or notion of “science” that is associated with concepts of rationality, impartiality, fairness, technological progress, and ultimately, the idea that we are to use these rational tools for the mutual benefit of all people in society. Philosophers and historians have noted that scientific inquiry began to flourish when Western society moved from one centered on religious notions of God’s will to one in which the rational mind served as the primary means to understand and improve our existence. As such, the notion of science contains in it the broader moral vision of a society in which rationality is used for the mutual benefit of all.

We predict that this notion of science as part of a broader moral vision of society facilitates moral and prosocial judgments and behaviors. Consistent with the notion that science plays a key role in the moral vision of a society of mutual benefit, scholars have long argued that science’s systematic approach to studying causes and consequences allows for more informed opinions about questions of good and evil, and many have argued that the classic scientific ethos stands as an ethically neutral, but morally normative, set of principles that guides scientific inquiry. We contend that the same scientific ethos that serves to guide empirical inquiries also facilitates the enforcement of moral norms more broadly.

Notwithstanding the adage that correlation does not prove causation, this work is invaluable as it was the first time that an empirical attempt was made to find a link between science and morality.

It would be interesting to see if further studies are done and if the results remain consistent with the initial findings.

The Venn Diagram of Absolute Bollocks

Just lifted another brilliant infographic from Facebook again…

In response to a bigoted Christian politician…

It’s not often that men of the cloth admit to the follies of the Church and religious scripture. But when such a man does speak out against the crass wrongs perpetrated on society by the religious or political establishment, he deserves praise, not condemnation.

So you can imagine my consternation at reading this disgusting letter by one Thamsanqa Enoch Bam in an online publication, in response to Archbishop Desmond Tutu who spoke out against the vile and draconian anti-gay bill being proposed in Uganda. Tutu earned the ire of Bam by likening the hateful legislation to South Africa’s apartheid laws.

Bam, who also proclaims himself as the President of the People’s Party (a recent addition to the absurdly long list of insignificant South African political parties), asserts that the Archbishop was “going against” God’s Laws by condoning homosexuality. His conviction, unsurprisingly comes from the bible and is backed up by the quotation of a few hand-picked scriptures which I won’t repeat, such is my revulsion.

Is there a more revolting blend than a politician and a religionist?

Bam asks how the Archbishop could miss such clear scripture [referring to the revolting quotations I earlier sidestepped like a pile of steaming horeshit]. Off course, we would not be allowed the courtesy of asking how this cretin [Bam, and others of his ilk] misses with unerring conviction, all the other contradictory and hateful biblical scriptures that don’t confirm his/their prejudices.

This letter in the Times Live appears to be an extract from a lengthier blog he wrote, which also condemns gay marriage, and confoundingly professes support for the dreadful ANC [ruling party], if they “made an about turn and ended their duplicity, corruption, mismanagement and disregard of the poor masses.” And to add further insult, he concludes that the ANC’s manifest incompetence would be solved if the “country goes back to God.”

And like all fundamentalists he is off course intimate with God’s will:

As a Christian, I pray that gays and lesbians will eventually see their folly, repent, and turn away from their abominations. That is the will of God.

What a slimeball? The will of this atheist is that you change the name of your political party to Asshole’s Party, because you will never represent the people, just bigoted assholes like yourself.

The Heathen’s Guide to World Religions: A Secular History of the “One True Faiths” by William Hopper

Right off the bat, this book is not a scholarly work on comparative religion; not by a long shot. It was never meant to be such. If you’re looking for a serious [and quite frankly, tedious] history of the world’s major religions, look elsewhere.

The light-hearted, often highly hilarious approach to the heavy subject matter earns this book my recommendation. Even the sub-title is ingenious.

As I mentioned earlier, the book is pretty hilarious, especially the treatment of Judaism and Christianity. Be warned though, that some of the humour will offend, maybe not the atheists [who no doubt will find a great deal to enthuse over], but those who still harbour delusions about religion, and off course the mother grundies.

I was a tad disappointed though that Hopper did not give Islam in particular, a good what-for, but tended to approach it with a good deal of circumspection. To be fair to him though, he did declare upfront that he did not have the budget for personal protection that author Salman Rushdie has at his disposal. And to be fairer still, perhaps this declaration in itself tells us all we need to know about the religion of Islam.

I also felt that he rushed through the history of Hinduism and Buddhism, but again, to be honest, I really did not want to read too deeply about the 330 million gods of Hinduism and the non-religious status of Buddhism.

Overall though, the book presents enough information to satisfy both the casual reader and those curious about the other major religions, enough crude humour for the atheist, and a lot to think about for the religious.

My favorite passages from the book:

In the beginning, we humans lived in the wild and ate whatever was slower or stupider than we were. At this time, we invented a thing called a “god.” The god was made from the mightiest elements mankind could see: fire, thunder, lightning… all the big scary stuff we didn’t understand but knew was powerful.

Abraham did indeed have seven sons. At least that’s what his wife Sarah, told him. The fact that he was way too old to be fathering children at the time didn’t seem to hinder him. I figure he was either naive as hell about his wife’s activities or he had something in his diet that the Ovaltine people would love to get their hands on.

The thing is, the Ark’s not lost. Never has been. About the only people who ever thought it lost were those that only looked to the Bible for information, ignoring the fact that there’s a whole planet full of books out there that also recorded history.

The idea of kosher foods had existed before this, but Jabna was where the Rabbis set it in stone and made for damned sure that every generation of Jews from then to now were subjected to boiled dough and potato pancakes. (it’s amazing what people will eat when you tell them it’ll get them into Heaven.)

History shows quite clearly that wealth sustains a people a hell of a lot better than a god does. The Intifida.

So, for those Christian readers who have not yet thrown this book into the garbage, here we go: the Gospel According to Will. The absolutely non-authoritative, non-inspired account of the life of JC. (Gospel, by the way, is Greek for “good news.” The original gospels were the “good news” given by the disciples to the Christians in places like Rome, Carthage, etc. My gospel is good news too. It’s just not good news for the Christians.)

And the power of Yahweh did go into her and did make her pregnant outside of wedlock. Her fiancée at the time did see this and did think “She did screw around on me, the stupid little trollop.” But then an angel of God did come to him, saying “Joseph, don’t worry about it. It was God who made her pregnant.” And Joseph accepted this, thinking “Oh great, I get to marry this women and for the rest of our lives I have to live with the fact that her first lover was Yahweh. Even if I do really well in bed and I think she’s really enjoying it, she’s going to be screaming “Oh God, Oh God! and I’ll never know if it’s me of Him that she’s yelling about.”

Martin Luther was born in 1483. He graduated from Erfurt University in 1505 with both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree. He had no major, and his education ran the gamut of courses: math, philosophy, languages, that sort of thing. He was raised, like the rest of Europe at the time, as a good Catholic. This meant he never saw the Bible.

Now, as near as we can figure, these original Indus Valley folks were an easy-going lot that farmed and honored all things. They weren’t war-like, and had no ideas of conquest or domination. Instead, they lived quiet lives that genuinely reflected a willingness to get along and care for the people and land around them. Naturally then, they were slaughtered mercilessly and wiped off the face of the Earth.

Here we get around to the Bhagavad Gita. It’s a really long, drawn out poetic epic that I highly recommend you never read. The plot sucks and frankly so do the characters, Krishna included.

The Dali Lama was born in Tibet. And China. And Korea. Before that he was born in India and, some think, Atlantis. The guy gets around.

In the end, despite the books flaws, I enjoyed it so much so that I’m going to get Hopper’s other book in this series “The Heathen’s Guide to Christmas,” just in time for the silly season.

Just pull out that culture card…again

I read a letter posted to an online newspaper today. Yay! No wait! It was interesting, in the way it showed up the ignorance about culture.

This guy, David Lucas was writing in response to a presumably white women who expressed her disgust at the penchant of the local Zulu population to slowly and ritually kill an ox with their bare hands, to satisfy a traditional custom known as Ukweshwama. Well, he basically called her a racist and berated her for questioning the culture of non-white people, supposedly while her own race indulged in similar bloody practices.

He goes on to cite Spanish bullfighting, the bull running in Pamplona and the Rodeo in the USA as examples of bloody practices that whites indulged in. He states that if you ask the Spaniards, Italians [?] or Americans why they “do this to animals,” they would respond that it’s part of their culture.

And that folks is where the problem is. Not only are these Spaniards, Italians [?] and Americans idiots, they responded that way [if this idiot, David Lucas is to be believed]because of years of indoctrination in protecting one’s beliefs. The bloody sporting activities described by David Lucas are no more cultural than picking one’s nose. It’s just become very convenient to protect one’s crazy beliefs and desires under the banner of culture, just as one protects one’s crazy supernatural beliefs and desires under the banner of religion. Culture and religion – a great place to hide and protect craziness.

These people know that once you classify something as religious or cultural, you will enjoy the protection of the clergy, the politicians and the state. It’s that simple. Really David, you dumb fuck, it’s wrong whether you’re black or white or fucking alien green; race has nothing to do with it.

And David, I’m non-white and I have this sudden strange desire to practise the Aztec ritual of  ripping out still-pumping hearts from the chests of my fellow humans. It’s bloody yes, but I feel the need to proliferate this great cultural tradition once more. I’m sure I can count on your support, if some frigging white person has the temerity to object…

God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens

Although God Is Not Great was first published in 2007, I was put off reading it by my atheist acquaintances who advised that it constituted nothing more than a rabid fundamentalist rant; a characteristic more commonly associated with the conservative religious fraternity.

Having taken their advice based on demonstrable wisdom in these matters, I did not bother to purchase a copy, until recently while browsing through a bookstore and coming across it again. For some reason I decided to just see what all the fuss was about and bought a copy. I was pleasantly surprised after finally completing it, because unlike most of my other reading material, I was captivated into reading it, in its entirety, before moving onto something else in between. And, I haven’t been enticed into going out on a murderous rampage, targeting clergymen.

Needless to say, in future when advised not to read something, or when forbidden to read something (or view for that matter), just go ahead and do it anyway. Knowledge, whether good or bad is disseminated so that people can make informed decisions. By restricting yourself, or prohibiting others to only one point of view, defeats the objective of learning. Off course the opposite is also true, but one has to be a little more circumspect when advised or pushed to read (or view) any material.

Anyway, back to the book. Christopher Hitchens has many detractors, most of whom find his anti-theistic stance (some say he’s a god-hater) more infuriating than that of ordinary atheists. As I mentioned earlier, his detractors are not confined to the religious, but even atheists find his approach disquieting. Although the book presents a no-holds-barred attack on religion, his literary style and witty approach (believers would say mocking) makes the book highly readable and thoroughly enjoyable.

The title might not make any sense to believers because it seems to be a contradiction in (atheist) terms: how can something that is not supposed to exist, be great? I have it on good authority that it is actually a witty reversal of the Islamic proclamation Allahuh Akhbar, which translates roughly as God is great. The title has also been called arrogant, but it confirms Hitchens’ anti-theistic stance; it’s as if he’s throwing down a challenge to the object of his revulsion to account for the crass behaviour so vividly described in the book.

The historical approach not only lends weight to his arguments against religious belief, but are extremely informative, especially to the layman who does not have the time or craving for the monumental amounts of research involved. How many believers have sat down to read through the religious texts of competing religions, or even bothered with cursory examinations of these texts? Not too many, I would advance. Yet, many believers hold dogmatic opinions, not only about their own religion, but others as well.

The book is littered with memorable one-liners. A favorite of mine is: in reference to religion (or more specifically Christianity, I think) he calls it ‘a plagiarism of a plagiarism, of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion.’ There are far too many to mention, but I don’t want you reading any of them.

Notable quote:

Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to be able, by its total command of a world-view, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard – or try to turn back – the measurable advances that we have made. Sometimes, true, it will artfully concede them. But this is to offer itself the choice between irrelevance and obstruction, impotence or outright reaction, and , given this choice, it is programmed to select the worse of the two. Meanwhile, confronted with undreamed-of vistas inside our own evolving cortex, in the farthest reaches of the known universe, and in the proteins and acids which constitute our nature, religion offers either annihilation in the name of god, or else the false promise that if we take a knife to our foreskins, or pray in the right direction, or ingest pieces of wafer, we shall be “saved.” It is as if someone, offered a delicious and fragrant out-of-season fruit, matured in a painstakingly and lovingly designed hothouse, should throw away the flesh and the pulp and gnaw moodily on the pit.

Hot thought!!!

Religion

It’s like reading the Arabian Nights and then spending the rest of your life shopping for a flying carpet.

– AnonyMe