The Venn Diagram of Absolute Bollocks

Just lifted another brilliant infographic from Facebook again…

The journey to unbelief, revisited

I spent some time last night going through a manuscript on atheism and unbelief, sent to me by a work colleague. Reading through it reminded me of my own personal journey from credulity to skepticism.

I could see the same mistakes in the manuscript that I had made when I first ventured out into the world of unbelief, trying to make sense of this bewildering, yet deliciously liberated frame of mind… no being. It was like deja vu.

I remember grabbing eagerly at any book I could find, any resource that would explain this new world to me. And most of the time I was led astray by utter nonsense. Believe me, there is a lot of it out there. From the cunningly sublime, to the outrageously ridiculous. There’s all kinds – from conspiracy theorists to pushers of woo of every hue.

It is amazingly easy to be lulled into accepting bullshit, because it is comforting. Yes, bullshit is comforting. Which is probably why the world is full of it. Generally people want to be comforted. Who can blame them? Being or feeling challenged is not a natural desire.

This is for my colleague. I hope you are reading this. DO NOT ACCEPT ANYTHING YOU READ OR HEAR. EVEN YOUR EYES MAY DECEIVE YOU. DOUBT IS YOUR BEST FRIEND…

Quackery Alert

I have the coolest Facebook friends. They’re always finding handy stuff on the Internet; stuff that helps us separate fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, quality from quackery, truth from lies. Here’s the latest from Science.Org on Red Flags of Quackery:

And as Maki says: Be safe, be skeptical.

The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer

Subitled: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies – How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

I’ve always wanted to read one of Dr. Shermer’s books since he was recommended to me by an atheist friend a couple of years ago. However, I just could not find the right book at my local bookstores. I had to satisfy myself with watching him on YouTube giving one of many talks at events such as TED etc.

When Michael Shermer; publisher and chief editor of Skeptic magazine, published The Believing Brain, he billed it as his magnum opus, “synthesizing” 30 years of research; I just had to get it.

I thought it would be the ideal purchase for my newly acquired kindle, but for some strange reason only the Audiobook version was available for sale to South Africans. While it is always nice to have the text version available for future reference, I decided to go ahead and purchase the Audible Audiobook. It turned out to be a good decision as I could just sit back and listen to it for a little while every day while just relaxing after coming home from work, and still get in some reading of some of my other books on kindle.

Anyway, enough of this idle banter; back to the Believing Brain…

In the book, Shermer explains that we form our beliefs for subjective, emotional and psychological reasons while being influenced by environments created by family, friends, colleagues, culture and society. We then go on to defend, rationalize and justify the beliefs we have formed by employing a number of cognitive biases such as authority and confirmation biases. This process of forming a belief first and then trying to explain it is called belief-dependent realism by Shermer.

Incidently, Shermer based the process of belief-dependent realism on model-dependent realism, as proposed by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in their book The Grand Design.

In the first part of the book, Shermer describes how Francis Collins, famous scientist and current director of the National Institute of Health (NIH) in the USA came to form his religious beliefs, considering that scientists are largely nonreligious or atheist. Shermer also shares with us how he himself became a skeptic.

In the second part of the book he explains concepts such as patternicity, that is how the brain looks for patterns in everything it “absorbs,” and agenticity which is the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by powerful invisible agents who involve themselves intentionally in it.

In parts three and four, Shermer explains how and why we form beliefs about Things Unseen such as gods and aliens, and Things Seen, respectively.

All very fascinating stuff indeed! This book is guaranteed to make you think about how you think and perhaps even reconsider some of those weird beliefs you might be holding close to your “heart.”

Do you have the propensity to doubt?

I’ve been meaning to find out if people think that doubt is somehow a bad thing, and if they still consider trust a virtue.

Proof that UFO’s do exist

The internet was abuzz last week over a video captured of the sky above Moscow, evidently showing a UFO.

Clearly, Unbelievably Freakish Occurrences (UFO’s) do exist, and Unbelievably Fantastic Opportunities (UFO’s) to capture them on film abound. Unfortunately, Amazingly Stupid Sense (ASS) is later made of it by uncritical, perhaps superstitiously inclined people.

Remember the hands of god email that is probably still circulating, which I wrote about in Another Religious Lie That Came Through My EMail? Well, before a screen-shot of this video does the email rounds (cleverly touched up) as either the eye of god, the rectum of Zeus, a Venusian mothership disguised as a cloud, or something equally ridiculous, I’d like to suggest that it’s nothing more than a meteorological phenomena; albeit a visually fantastic one.

Like so many things in life, which elicits awe and demands answers, the tendency to proffer a supernatural solution, creates even more complicated questions. It’s always best to treat everything we don’t understand that well, with skepticism and doubt.