Y’all are probably up on this stuff already, but Matt just sent me a link to an article about the next 25 years of video games. It was pretty funny. I’d give it 7 out of 10 (”heh. That was pretty funny.”)

Electronic Arts could crank out a Shrek 9 game in a couple of weeks that features nothing more than Shrek standing in your front yard, quietly staring and occasionally farting. The whole time your brain will be telling you it’s the most fun you’ve ever had.

Then I clicked on a story about the The 10 Most Irritatingly Impossible Old-School Video Games which I rate “ooh my cheekbones hurt”.

Saddest moment: Discovering that crouching allows Luke to put a little extra into his jumps, and realizing that the once-menacing star pilot has been reduced to nothing better than a platform-hopping, overweight plumber.

But then I found The 9 Most Bad-ass Bible Verses and snot came out of my nose.

“Emasculated by crushing?” Gah! Everything in the Bible has to be understood in context of the times these people were living in. And, apparently, these people lived in a time when “crushing” the nuts was so common that the crushed-nuts victims were an entire demographic that had to be accounted for in the law.

I don’t think I will sleep tonight. Thanks Matt.

What is Parentism?

Many traditionalists have become concerned about the growing influence of the so-called New Parentists. This militant group believes that most Christmas presents are purchased and given to children by parents or other family members.

What is External Delivery?

From the Commicast of the Delivery Institute,

External delivery refers to a scientific research program as well as a community of older kids, teachers, and other adults who seek evidence of external sources of Christmas presents. The theory of external delivery holds that certain features of how Christmas presents are delivered each year are best explained by an external source, not an internal source such as your parents.

Is External Delivery the same as Santa Clausism?

No. The theory of external delivery is only concerned with empirically testing whether Christmas presents are delivered by an external agent, or an internal agent such as your parents. Santa Clausism typically starts with the premise that Santa Claus is delivering presents, and then seeks to fit the evidence to that theory. The theory of external delivery has developed strictly from objective interpretations of the empirical evidence.

Join the campaign to Teach the Controversy now!

There are many reasons to adopt this “teach the controversy” approach.

First, constitutional law permits it. In the controlling Edwards v. Aguillard case, the Supreme Court ruled that it is permissible to teach students about both alternative scientific theories of origins and scientific criticism of prevailing theories.

Second, federal education policy calls for it. The authoritative report language accompanying the No Child Left Behind act states that “where topics are taught that may generate controversy (such as biological evolution), the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of views that exist.” 

Here’s the common thread that runs through half-a-dozen news stories every day. Yesterday, for example: a schoolteacher arrested and charged in Sudan for allowing children to call a teddy bear Muhammad; the poor, ethnically mixed housing estates around Paris going up in smoke again; Israel-Palestine peace talks, with their implications for relations between Muslims and non-Muslims everywhere; a Jewish school in London criticised for insisting that for a child to qualify for admission the applicant’s mother had to be born Jewish; angry scenes in Oxford as a student debating society offers a platform to a Holocaust denier.

Timothy Garton Ash, in The Guardian, might have also mentioned a incident that occurred today in my workplace.

Someone had left a pile of flyers for a performance of sacred music at their local church on the counter in the kitchen. I was intrigued because I happen to enjoy cello music, Christmas Carols and Episcopalian churches and I expect I would find the combination of the three especially pleasing.

A colleague, though, felt that it was inappropriate to advertise a religious service in the workplace and we discussed the topic over email. I made a rather clumsy case for liberal tolerance of religion and so was pleasantly surprised to find, during my lunchtime browsing, TGA’s article making the same case in The Guardian in which he says many wise things.

We do, however, need to be clearer about the difference between secularism and atheism. Secularism, in my view, should be an argument about arrangements for a shared public and social life; atheism is an argument about scientific truth, individual liberation and the nature of the good life.

It’s a good article and I heartily agree with most of it. The comments are (mostly)  good too.

I think western civilisation would be much the poorer without Christmas Carols and a policy that bans flyers for church services in the workplace would not only be unfair (unless it also banned flyers for craft fairs of wives CEOs and Free Kiwis) but would make the workplace a less pleasant place to be.

Not sure why TGA felt it necessary to preface his article with a declaration of his liberal faith…

I’m a liberal, so I start from liberalism - not in the parody version propagated by the American right, but liberalism properly understood as a quest for the greatest possible measure of individual human freedom, compatible with the freedom of others.

… but I kind of like that too.

I was really looking forward to reading this since I read an essay that Bart Ehrman wrote on the moment he lost his faith as a Born Again Christian.

I was pretty sure Professor Story would appreciate the argument, since I knew him as a good Christian scholar who obviously (like me) would never think there could be anything like a genuine error in the Bible. But at the end of my paper he made a simple one-line comment that for some reason went straight through me. He wrote: “Maybe Mark just made a mistake”.

This essay happens to be in the introduction of the book.

I was a little disappointed when I actually came to read Misquoting Jesus but that probably says more about my expectations than about the book itself. Last year I read the quite marvellous Who Wrote the Bible and I was expecting Erhman to do the same thing for the New Testament that Friedman did for the Old.

All the facts were there, and he did a bang up job of telling the story but, overall, I felt like he was trying too hard.

Where Friedman just told a fascinating story about a fascinating episode of our history, Erhman felt like he had an agenda - to persuade the people who believe that the bible is the literal Word of God that it was written by fallible humans with agendas of their own. Since I already believe it was written by fallible humans, the advocacy got in the way of my enjoyment and, since I already knew the broad thrust of the story, it didn’t go deep enough to quench my thirst for knowledge.

It was a good read for all that though. I firmly believe that if kids were taught the history of the bible in school, it would inoculate them from some of the weirder fantasies conjured up by the literalists and they could enjoy the text for the beautiful literature that it is (in parts).

Recommended!

Way back in December, we had a pleasant discussion in the comments about the bible as literature. My original post, though, was about my fond memories of the Church of England:

For me growing up, the Church of England was like the kindly but eccentric old man who lived down the road. He had a whole bunch of fascinating stories and some of them may even have been true. Everyone knew him and liked him but no one took him very seriously. I have nothing but fond memories of him.

Pharyngula has a post along the same lines today. Or rather, the original post says how crazy it  that:

 the UK actually had a legal requirement “in all state schools for pupils to take part in a daily act of worship of a broadly Christian nature.”

The comments are largely from English types celebrating the fact that the daily singing of “All Things Bright and Beautiful” is what led them to decide that the whole thing was a bunch of nonsense, giving weight to my assertion that:

There is something special about the ability of a gang of 13 year old boys that generates just the right amount of scepticism especially when they confront the aged Reverend Green relating legends from the bronze age. I think you’d lose some of that in a one-on-one setting in the home.

I have often said that humanity needs some of the pomp and ceremony and tradition that comes with religion if it would only do away with the bans on shellfish and hand shandies - oh, and if you weren’t actually expected to believe any of it. Throw in a little Monty Python imagery with its Book of Armaments and some juniper berries and you’d have the perfect religion.

Fortunately, there is a religion that exactly fits this formula. It’s the Church of England, God Bless It, Daily Act of Worship and all.

It’d never work over here though.

All things dull and ugly,
All creatures short and squat,
All things rude and nasty,
The Lord God made the lot.
Each little snake that poisons,
Each little wasp that stings,
He made their brutish venom,
He made their horrid wings.
All things sick and cancerous,
All evil great and small,
All things foul and dangerous,
The Lord God made them all.
Each nasty little hornet,
Each beastly little squid,
Who made the spikey urchin,
Who made the sharks, He did.
All things scabbed and ulcerous,
All pox both great and small,
Putrid, foul and gangrenous,
The Lord God made them all.
AMEN.

Most of my readers wonder why I go on so much about atheism. Most likely, you are one of them. Bear with me while I write my very last post on atheism. Then I am done.

Maybe you fit into one of the following categories?

1. I have never questioned the existence of God. Why would I?
2. There’s no proof that God exists, but there is no proof that God does not exist. The only rational position is don’t know.
3. Who cares? It makes no difference anyway.

I can’t answer #1. If you are happy with your beliefs then may your God bless you. The truth is important to me but I don’t feel any need to change your mind. I am always happy to discuss it with you though

To you, I quote Steven Weinberg from his essay, A Designer Universe:

One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious.

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The #2s moved me to post today. As far as I know, no one is claiming to have proof that there are no Gods. We need to get that straight because the discussion usually starts “XXXX has claimed to have 100% proof that God does not exist” where XXXX is a famous atheist like Richard Dawkins or an insignificant one like myself. As far as I can tell, Dawkins has never made that claim. I am fairly sure I haven’t either.

So, goes argument #2, if you have no proof, you must say “I don’t know”.

Every domain has it’s own standard of evidence. Some domains like mathematics or formal logic accept only 100% proof. The legal system makes do with beyond a reasonable doubt. Science is somewhere in between. No one has proven the laws of motion or gravity or thermodynamics or Archimedes’ Principle but - unless we discover something fundamentally new about the world - I will continue to believe that when a body is partially or totally submerged in a fluid, the upthrust on the body equals the weight of displaced fluid. You are welcome to your rationally sound “I don’t know”, just don’t design any ships for me.

I do believe in agnostics. There are plenty of people who have not really thought about it. You might be one of them but I am not. When you do get around to thinking about it , read Bertrand Russell’s Is there a God?

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

My position is Russell’s,

My conclusion is that there is no reason to believe any of the dogmas of traditional theology and, further, that there is no reason to wish that they were true. Man, in so far as he is not subject to natural forces, is free to work out his own destiny. The responsibility is his, and so is the opportunity.

---

But why, ask the #3s, should I care? Why is God’s non-existence any more important than Russell’s Celestial Teapot? For an unbeliever, you might say, you care an awful lot about something that does not exist.

I go on about it because, as Dawkins reminds us,

…unlike belief in Russell’s teapot, religion is powerful, influential, tax-exempt and systematically passed on to children too young to defend themselves. Children are not compelled to spend their formative years memorizing loony books about teapots. Government-subsidized schools don’t exclude children whose parents prefer the wrong shape of teapot. Teapot-believers don’t stone teapot-unbelievers, teapot-apostates, teapot-heretics and teapot-blasphemers to death. Mothers don’t warn their sons off marrying teapot-shiksas whose parents believe in three teapots rather than one. People who put the milk in first don’t kneecap those who put the tea in first.

Look. I don’t believe that atheists are a great persecuted minority. This is not the great civil-right struggle of the 21st century. I don’t mind that the Boy Scouts of America don’t accept people like me or my children - I think it’s silly, but I don’t expect them to change their policies for my sake. It bothers me a bit that stuff like this happens…but, if we keep our guard up, those people are not yet a threat to democracy.

What Dennett and Dawkins et al. are doing is a little consciousness-raising, that’s all. They (and I) want the #1s to know that there are actually quite a lot of us. They especially want the undeclared atheists - the atheists hiding in closets because they think they are alone in their disbelief. It’ll be easier once we are all wearing our Scarlet Letters.

I leave you with PZ Myers,

You don’t have to be 100% certain to be able to dismiss the rantings of bearded prophets as lacking grounds for concern. We usually develop an intellectual discriminatory filter that allows us to screen out the silly threats from the real ones; religion is a massive perforation in that sensible screen that encourages people to ignore evidence and accept Imaginary Improbabilities as Inarguable Inevitabilities. Rejecting it should be regarded as an important issue of self-defense.

That’s it. I am done.

Fundamentalists: believe 2+2 =5 because It Is Written. Somewhere. They have a lot of trouble on their tax returns.

“Moderate” believers: live their lives on the basis that 2+2=4. but go regularly to church to be told that 2+2 once made 5, or will one day make 5, or in a very real and spiritual sense should make 5.

“Moderate” atheists: know that 2+2 =4 but think it impolite to say so too loudly as people who think 2+2=5 might be offended.

“Militant” atheists: “Oh for pity’s sake. HERE. Two pebbles. Two more pebbles. FOUR pebbles. What is WRONG with you people?”

from The Primate Diaries.

“Now, the invention of the scientific method and science is, I’m sure we’ll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and that it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn’t withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn’t seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That’s an idea we’re so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it’s kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? - because you’re not!’ If somebody votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it, but on the other hand if somebody says ‘I mustn’t move a light switch on a Saturday’, you say, ‘Fine, I respect that’. The odd thing is, even as I am saying that I am thinking ‘Is there an Orthodox Jew here who is going to be offended by the fact that I just said that?’ but I wouldn’t have thought ‘Maybe there’s somebody from the left wing or somebody from the right wing or somebody who subscribes to this view or the other in economics’ when I was making the other points. I just think ‘Fine, we have different opinions’. But, the moment I say something that has something to do with somebody’s (I’m going to stick my neck out here and say irrational) beliefs, then we all become terribly protective and terribly defensive and say ‘No, we don’t attack that; that’s an irrational belief but no, we respect it’.”

Douglas Adams

AC Grayling has taken up my thread about certainties and proofs in the Guardian.

Is there anyone alive today above the age of nine, and halfway sane, who would assign a prior probability of 50% to the existence of fairies on the ground that “we do not know whether or not there are fairies”? Is there anyone who satisfies these conditions who seriously thinks that we do not know that there are no fairies?

It’s not very good though, despite the high density of fantastic phrases like Archgoblin of Chanctonbury and kindness needs no ideology.

As an aside, I love the knack that philosophers have for making lists of things

by which we daily make our toast, catch our buses, use our laptops, cure our coughs, fly to Ibiza, etc etc

Stephen Pinker and Daniel Dennett are particularly good at this (wait here while I track down an example for each).

Did you know that comes from the Greek philo meaning lists of things and sopher which means maker? They are literally, makers of lists of things.

I just got Dennett’s Breaking the Spell from the library.

From the introduction:

Those who are religious and believe religion to be the best hope of humankind cannot reasonably expect those of us who are skeptical to refrain from expressing our doubts if they themselves are unwilling to put their convictions under the microscope. If they are right  - especially if they are obviously right, on further reflection - we skeptics will not only concede this but enthusiastically join the cause. We want what they (mostly) say they want: a world at peace, with as little suffering as we can manage, with freedom and justice and well-being and meaning for all. If the case for their path cannot be made, this is something that they themselves should want to know. It is as simple as that. They claim the moral high ground: maybe they deserve it and maybe they don’t. Let’s find out.

Sounds promising.