A brief defence of secular worldviews

For the past month or so I have been having regular meetings with a Christian acquaintance, the unstated understanding is we are each trying to (de)convert each other but it is all very amicable, friendly and for the most part points are seriously considered rather than the all to familiar assert and run strategy. Since I am a science guy evidence and fact is a good way to win me over so we started off with that but neither of us were moved. Now we are moving onto a more philosophical approach and as such he has lent me a book called 'The Universe Next Door'(4th ed), so far I have only read the first chapter but the book analyses a selection of world views looking at their pros and cons in what I assume is an attempt at an unbiased manner. From the blurb "In an increasingly pluralistic academic environment, the ability to understand and evaluate various worldviews is vitally important." that sounds promising and I went in with high hopes, only to be disappointed 2 1/2 pages into the first chapter, after a very short and rather brutal secular poem by Stephen Crane.

A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of Obligation."

Followed by Psalm 8 (almost a page long), the author then goes on to briefly contrast these two poems and the worldviews he believes them to be representative of while stating that people in both camps are able to relate even to the opposing poem. (all fair so far) However I have serious issues with how biassed this section is with phrases such as how the unbelievers "long for what they no longer can truly accept" or "wish something could fill the void". These views are admittedly common amongst religious people in the process of deconverting, but for those of us who have never believed and those who have long since become comfortable with a godless view of the world this is outright offensive. But this assault on secular world views continues in the next paragraph which finishes with the line ""Yes, that is just what those who do not have faith in the infinite-personal Lord of the Universe must feel - alienation, loneliness, even despair."

Just from this brief overview in the first chapter it is clear the author has no grasp at all of the mindset of those who do not believe in any deities. The major factor here is that believing everything that exists came about by natural causes in no way detracts from them. Understanding love as releases of neurotransmitters and electrical activity in the brain in no way lessens the feeling of being with the bag of metabolic chemical reactions those feelings are directed to, the touching no less intense for knowing that objects only appear solid due to repulsive forces between the electrons in atoms. Appreciation of the beauty of a flower(vid) is in no way diminished and is potentially enhanced by an understanding of where it came from, how it came about and what it actually is.
Looking up at the nights sky and understanding all those dots are giant balls of gas similar to our sun, many with planets, are only a tiny fraction of our galaxy which is itself a minute fraction of the whole universe is an almost overwhelming thought and is a scale of grandeur utterly unconceavable by those who think this Earth and a few dots of light hung in the sky by god are all of reality. I actually had what could best be described as a spiritual experience a month or so ago based on this very thought. Although my views are still entirely based on what can be proven and demonstrated. (warning my description really doesn't do the experience justice)

Driving home after a hike, everyone was worn out and quiet or sleeping, I was gazing out the window at the stars in a reflective mood, thinking it was possible that at that very moment on a planet orbiting one of those points of light was another sentient being whos existence was entirely independent of anything I have ever known, with an completely different biology and physiology but still looking up and wandering about other life out there amongst the stars. I realise that for it to be occurring around a point of light I could see(only a dozen or so) was far from certain, but for it to be somewhere in the galaxy that was in my cone of vision was rather more likely and expanding to the whole universe would almost guarantee countless individuals all entirely separate in every sense of the word but simultaneously sharing a thought. How is that for connection with the universe. For years I have known the numbers describing how huge the observable universe is but since that night I have a much greater understanding of how vast those values actually are.

Since I hope to have clearly established that my world view in no way lessens the joys available to many of us during our time it is time to briefly touch on another point. The aesthetics of one worldview over another in no way relate to how true either of them actually is and for me personally, knowing reality is more important than being able to appreciate the highs of life. Fortunately I do not need to make that choice.

One final thought. Sure it is rather bleak that death is final and absolute but that just gives us all the more reason to make the most of this finite life while we have it, and help those we care for to do the same.

Two pieces of news

There are a couple of news stories this week which boil down to people being massively retarded

First is this article about some English yobs vandalising a 'holy' tree. The headline claims the tree was 2000 years old and planted by Joseph of Arimathea(the bible says this guy donated his tomb to Jesus) but a little bit of reading shows it wasn't anywhere ear that old, the tree has been regrown from cuttings at various times throughout its history and there appears to be no evidence supporting the 2000 year claim although its predecessor has been fully grown since at least the 1600s when Oliver Cromwell and his goons hacked it down. While the tree is an oddity in that it blooms twice a year and supposedly none of its offspring grown from seed do calling it a 2000 year old holy tree is pushing it.

Anyway the point is as far as I am concerned it is just a tree but given its cultural significance the vandalism was almost certainly aimed at pissing of the local Christians, and damaging monuments is just a real dick move.

The other article that interests me is this, it seems that shoppers in wal-marts across America are going to be subject to the short video clip at the bottom of the linked article. This is part of the 'See something, say something' campaign which is getting progressively more retarded. In an attempt to fight terrorism the public are being encouraged to report any suspicious behaviours they see. Sounds sensible right? Wrong, very wrong. First no information is provided to discern a local eccentric from someone planning to vaporise a mall. Next time you are out on the streets, or shopping or whatever keep an eye out for anything suspicious and keep a tally of how many you see. Are those people all terrorists, no, are they all criminals, very unlikely. Now imagine the time it would take for you to report all these events to a police officer. Now imagine the amount of police time taken up if everyone reported every suspicious event they saw. Flooding the police force with false positives is probably the most ineffective way of fighting terrorism imaginable especially since government agencies are already swamped with people reporting possible suspects. Not only does it waste massive amounts of police time it keeps people afraid, then again a fearful population will make rash decisions when it comes to a security/privacy and freedom tradeoff.

"He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither" and will often lose both.

Benjamin Franklin

10 Commandments Revisited

One of my earliest blog posts was an analysis of the commonly quoted version of the 10 commandments, this post will be my attempt at 10 rules to live by that would provide far better moral guidance.

1. Treat others how they wish to be treated, if you do not know turn to No.2.

2. Treat others as you would wish to be treated (unless you know that for some reason they would not appreciate it).

3. If there is still any ambiguity just don't be a dick.

4. Do not discriminate against others for any reason (unless they are applying for a position that it can be clearly demonstrated they are unable to adequately fill eg a blind bus driver)

5. Do not accept claims of any significance without sufficient evidence, but accept the claim if suitable evidence is provided.

6. Do not commit logical fallacies or other intellectual dishonesty when debating with others.

7. Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, however insane, just as long as they do not lead to stupid actions but if you publicly voice your beliefs be prepared to defend them.

8. Do not sacrifice privacy for security, the level of control granted to the government will be too easy to abuse should a git ever attain power.

9. Develop science to cure disease, prevent poverty and just generally improve life for everyone.

Since I am struggling to find enough things to fill the list we will assume this list is intended as a direct replacement for the biblical version so
10. I am the lord your god, please follow the religious practices outlined elsewhere in this text(they would also need rewriting).

The first three cover a huge variety of restrictions such as don't murder, don't steal, don't lie, don't rape, probably shouldn't commit adultery either, slavery is bad, so is assault, and so on but also cover social things such as showing respect for others and just generally being nice. Most prohibitions also come with a clause of without just cause such as a homeless man stealing food to survive would be morally ok even though to avoid ambiguity it would need to remain legally wrong. But some such as slavery and rape are ALWAYS WRONG, also not all crimes are equal. eg murder needs a legal penalty adultery doesn't.

This is just something I have thrown together in 20 minutes so it could probably be improved on but I still think it is in a different league to the Biblical version.

Al Quida defeats the USA

This isn't about some terrorist attack that has crippled the US beyond repair, or assassination of high ranking officials collapsing the government, this is about fear, America are shitting bricks and in a 'war on terror' that means you just lost. So what is this all about, baby names, here in the UK.

I have just found a news story about how Mohammed is the most common baby name in the UK. Immediately upon watching that some alarm bells should start going off because the presenter is clearly American and the bottom right corner has the CNN logo, why hasn't the British media picked up on this story, I can think of two reasons, it is a non issue and its a perversion of statistics. Here is the official top 10 and this page links to an excel document of the top 100 it is quickly apparent that Mohammed is not the most common name, so how did the story come about. Easy, all variations Muhammed, Mohammed, Mohamed, etc were taken as a single name, I would be prepared to bet my laptop the same can not be said for other names (James, Jamie, Jim or William, Will, Bill etc) so the statistics are utter bullshit.

Even if the claim was accurate so what, minorities often favour traditional names while people with British heritage are more open to all sorts of weird names, and it is only one year so it may just be a fad. Either way it doesn't change the fact that less than 5% of the population is Muslim so they really aren't taking over. Also most Muslims are perfectly normal people so this is not a terrorism issue either.

As for the bigot who would like it to be an indigenous name at the top of the list, only 1 of the top 10 is truly English (Alfie, from the old english Alfred) and one other (Jack, considered independent to but derived from John which is itself a translation of a Hebrew name) is technically English but has roots in a non English name.

So how does all this tie in to my original point, the story was warped and twisted and even then was not news worthy so the only reason it would have been broadcast was a bunch of scared, closed minded attention seekers trying to spread panic and fear. What do terrorists want to do, spread panic and fear. Once people start broadcasting stories like this the media not only publicises terrorist activities they are manufacturing a fear of terrorists without the terrorists actually needing to do anything. They can't scare us because we are already terrified sounds like an Arnold Rimmer line but it is certainly not a solution to anything.

Census

Next year Britain is having another census, this will provide all the official population statistics used in policy decisions for at least the next decade, so it is rather important that the figures are representative of the population. As such a campaign has been started to encourage accurately answering one specific question which may seem insignificant but can have massive implications.

The problem here is people who have a cultural heritage of being Christian but do not attend church, do not believe in the biblical god and are in no way practising Christians, or those who have been baptised or grew up Christian but no longer believe have in the past answered the census question "What is your religion?" with Christian. This reduces the recorded percentage of non-believers and exaggerates the percentage of believers, leading to

More public spending on religious stuff including the last governments push to build loads of faith schools (a subject for another day)

Keeping bishops in the house of lords 'just because'

Continued ritual worship in schools

Laws on things such as equality still having privileges for the religious

amongst other things. The harm inflicted by each of these is fairly obvious so I wont bother attacking religion today that is not the point of this post.

So if you go to church week in week out. If you think indoctrination into the Christian faith is a good use of public money in this economic climate. If you believe the bible is literally true and that a morally perfect being can justify inflicting an infinite punishment on everyone who was a good person without accepting that beings existence. Feel free to tick the box for Christian, the goal here is an accurate census, not one biassed in my favour.(aint intellectual integrity a bitch)

However if you were baptised but lost your faith, if you were raised Christian but saw through the bullshit, if you do not attend church weekly and you acknowledge the Bible is a book of bronze age myths or if you have just never been convinced by preachers claims, please tick no religion. Or at the very least deist if you believe in some sort of non personal god. (I will be defining all the different types of belief systems in an upcoming post that just needs tidying up)

If you are still not sure where you stand then it probably isn't with the Christians, but the link up top has a few glowing neon links to pages that can help you decide.

Interesting events in Finland

It seems that on Tuesday Oct 12th 2010 Finland had a rather large and well publicised television debate on the subject of gay marriage. During this debate it was made very clear that Finlands state church(attended by 79% of the population) opposes gay marriage, and their chosen representatives came across as more than a little stuck up and bigoted. This has had a very interesting result, Finland has a website where people can fill out a form and get out of all the hard work de-registering from the church(the process is legally recognised). Here are a few graphs on the subject, unless you speak Finnish or your browser has a translator you will have to trust me on this, the second graph shows daily resignations over the past 2 weeks at a base level of up to around 300 per day but (at the time of writing) since the debate aired numbers are averaging closer to 5000 and still rising with the highest being just shy of 7000, that's more than a ten fold increase.

The graph next to it shows cumulative statistics for each of the past 4 years, showing that apart from a small bump in February 2008 church leaving has been fairly consistent each year, and is fairly consistent throughout the year until the rate of leaving gently increases over the period of September to December. The thing that stands out is over the past week the number of people leaving has been around half the yearly average. This can be more clearly seen in the bottom bar chart where statistics for each year are shown split into months with Jan at the bottom.

Unfortunately I expect this trend will level off within a week or so, maybe a month if the Finnish people are lucky, then drop down to probably a little over the previous base rate as more people will be aware they can ditch the church and get on with life.

Another impact of this is that the church gets €300 per indoctrinated working adult per year, since this little boom has so far seen in the region of 25 000 additional people leaving, that is a minimum cost of €7.5 million per year. Unfortunately they get almost €1 billion so this is still minor and they can certainly afford it. I am patiently waiting the day when organisations with no benefit to humanity stop getting government handouts and tax breaks.

Obedience and authority

Todays post starts with a famous quote attributed to Steven Weinberg.

"With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil;but for good people to do evil-that takes religion."

That is a good starting point, religion has caused many otherwise good people to do all sorts of horrific acts, however it is not the end of the story, ANY perceived authority figure who accepts blame for the consequences or otherwise promotes evil behaviours will influence some good people into doing bad things.

My main reasoning here is the Milgram experiment. For anyone too lazy to read the links the participant was told they were taking part in a learning experiment, they would teach word pairs to another participant (an actor in the next room) and administer shocks for incorrect answers, starting at 15V going up to 450V, a tape recorder was used to make sure the 'learners' responses were consistent. At higher voltages the 'learner' pleaded to stop, screamed etc and at very high voltages silence. Once the recorded shock responses began to get disturbing all participants began to show severe stress and doubts about continuing but were prompted by an experimenter in the same room, these prompts lead to about 2/3 of participants going all the way to the end.

These results show that obedience to an authority figure who is present can push a sizeable portion of the population to potentially killing another person with only minimal separation from the victim, further studies showed that closer contact between the teacher and learner reduced compliance, but more importantly for my original point if the authority figure appeared less impressive or was more distant compliance also dropped significantly. (The 2nd and 3rd links have more detailed discussions of how variations changed the results.)

This explains why so many soldiers and officers in totalitarian dictatorships and similar regimes around the world and throughout history comply with horrific orders, it can always be blamed on the next guy up the chain of command. However these situations are different to the experiment in that refusing orders will likely get them killed so compliance will be even higher, but this still boils down to committing acts against your own deepest morals because someone else tells you to all be it in the name of self preservation rather than just because.

So how does this tie in with religion, as several variations showed the authority the figure was perceived to have by the subject was more important than the actual level of authority (otherwise changing the experimenters appearance and the experiment location would have no impact). To the believer an all knowing, all powerful, omnipresent god is not only the ultimate imaginable authority figure it is perceived as being entirely real(as well as the dehumanizing of the believer and others) so if a good person is a sufficiently devout believer then they will be likely to commit almost any atrocity that a holy book or deranged preacher can talk them into. Then justify it by calling it gods will.

So while religion is not the only means for good people to do bad things it is the most insidious and absolute method.

This post was originally going to be about how an incorrect view of reality could cause good people to do evil, but then I realised that the flawed world views leading to evil all seem to have some super authority figure who thinks being evil is a good idea.

Militant? atheism

The phrase militant atheist is often used to describe atheists like Richard Dawkins who are well known for actively and publicly speaking out against religion, no violence, no threats, not even emotional manipulation just cold hard reasoning and facts.

If however I use the phrase militant Muslim, the first thing most people thing of is the jihadi lunatics in Al Quida and the taliban, that is a huge difference in behaviours yet both are described by the same word.

One more common example, militant Christian, this reminds me of all the dicking about between Catholics and Protostants in Ireland, the Crusades and those such as the Dove Outreach Centre and Westboro Baptist church who while they don't go round murdering people are still bigoted hateful lunatics.

Now for something you probably haven't heard before militant Buddhist, what springs to mind?

Probably a far eastern guy with a bald head and orange robes, but here is the important part. Is he peacefully talking about how great Buddhism is, fanatically preaching how all the non Buddhists will suffer and deserve it or brandishing an AK-47.

Just my thoughts on how the term militant atheist seems to be yet another approach to tar atheists with the same brush as the worst religion has to offer, despite the fact no atheist has ever done anything evil to promote atheism. Although I must admit there have been atheists who were real dicks for other reasons.

Lay off the Muslims you bigots

I am going to cover two related topics in todays post.

1) The "Ground Zero Mosque"
Can they, yes. Should they, there is no reasonable argument against it.
Listen to some people and you will get the impression Osama Bin Laden is planning to personally build a Mosque on ground zero as some sort of monument to extremist stupidity, this is shear bullshit of a purer quality than found on cattle farms.
Firstly it is not at ground zero, it is two blocks away and neither site can be seen from the other.
Second the term Mosque is more than a little over inflammatory, a Muslim prayer facility is included, but so are a variety of secular facilities such as a swimming pool and a childrens play area. However there will be other religious facilities in the community centre, namely prayer areas for Jews and Christians, suddenly the building is a little less confrontational isnt it.
Thirdly America has a couple of points in its constitution about separation of church and state and rights to religious freedoms, so even if it was a Mosque denying it would require denying ALL religious buildings regardless of faith.
If they wanted (and owned the land) Muslims could build a statue of Bin Laden taking a dump on ground zero itself, it would be in very bad taste and create a backlash against all Muslims not just the crackpot extremists but there would be no legal reason to prevent it.


2)Burn the Koran day
Can they, yes. Should they, probably not but their call.
As far as I know this was actually cancelled, but I wrote most of this a couple of days ago so its still getting posted.
Much as religious freedoms in the constitution allow the rather offensive and extreme example I gave above they also protect the right of a 30 strong church in backwater Florida to burn other peoples holy books, so if they want to noone can stop them. That being said burning ANY book is incredibly tasteless, a symbol of destroying that which you disagree with, intolerance and censorship of ideas. All books have some value at least in terms of literature or history. But there is more to it than that, Muslims see the Koran in much the same way Christians see the Bible so everyone understands that all this will achieve is pissing off a bunch of Muslims. The fanatics will become more fanatic and a few borderline moderates may slip into fanaticism. All that the fundies are managing on both sides is spreading the illusion that all Muslims/Westerners are bigoted hate filled oxygen thieves hell bent on eradicating the opposite side. This is far from true and the majority of people on both sides are far more open minded and reasonable than the other side gives them credit for, despite the medias efforts to get a good story by making the other guy look evil.

The latest on these issues.

What's the harm?

A major argument put forward, mostly by politically correct and intellectually lazy people, in favour of superstitious beliefs religious or otherwise is to simply ask "what's the harm?" The harm is that sooner or later any delusional world view will influence a persons decisions and since the decision is made with an incomplete knowledge of reality the change will almost always be detrimental. This is really a very simple concept, the more informed a person is about a situation the better the odds their decision will be reasonable and without and unseen consequences. So in a far from comprehensive list here is a tiny selection of the harm caused by irrational beliefs.

A handful of homoeopathy related deaths, with links to the stories on each case.

Albinos killed (rarely humanely) for potion ingredients across Africa.

Endangered species around the world, sometimes the concoctions are actually harmful.
*apologies I lost a couple of links from this point due to accidentally using some character combinations that are involved in the scripts of this site and were causing problems, and I cant be bothered finding them again.

Several deaths from religious parents refusing medical care for their young children, and permanent disability (from the victims perspective)

The Catholic condom aids thing in Africa a Catholic article. This article shows why condoms are only having a limited effect (hint less than 5 condoms per year is not enough for sexually active people, the rest of the catholic case can be dismissed by pointing out condoms would need to increase peoples sexual partners more than ten times to spread aids as effectively as not using a condom.

A youtube video on all that MMR autism gibberish, also watch part 2 and check out his sources linked below the video.

Then lets not forget assorted terrorist attacks, mostly of a suicidal nature over the years, while not all are religious in nature every single one had a damaged view of reality. At the minute Muslim bombers are in fashion but a decade or so back it was (non suicide) Christians bickering in Ireland blowing stuff up, there was something in a Japanese subway many years ago too.... you get the picture.

Then there is suicide purely to hasten your own death such as the well publicised Heavens Gate incident.

Obviously these are a selection of more extreme examples but more minor issues are possible, if for example a child wants to become a doctor but rejects evolution they are unlikely to succeed because evolution is a vital part of the framework in understanding many illnesses. First if the childs dreams don't change they will be smashed, anything that reduces the number of doctors is bad. Or maybe you just hand over money to some sort of psychic(fraud), spiritualist(fake).

All that was a bit bleak so here's something to cheer everyone up.

The next time someone asks "what's the harm?" in believing a given falsehood, if you can think of any bad consequence answer them, if you can't eventually a believer will provide you with one.

another logic puzzle

Another puzzle type thing today, I was discussing it with a friend on the way home after a party some time ago and we discovered there are at least two valid unique answers.

You have died but rather than going directly to heaven or hell you are presented with two gates, one leading to each heavan or hell. By each gate is a guardian, one always lies and the other always tells the truth, you do not know which is guarding which gate. Decide which gate you want to pass through by asking a single question, what question should you ask?

Monty Hall Solution

If you haven't done so already, take a look at my previous post and try to work it out on your own then come back to this one. The intuitive answer would be that since there are now only 2 doors to chose from each has a 50/50 chance of winning, however that is actually wrong, the correct answer is sticking gives a 1/3 chance of winning but switching gives a 2/3 chance of winning, there are several different ways to explain this and I will have a go myself before giving up and linking elsewhere.

The shortest analysis would be to say that the door the player chooses has a 1/3 probability and the other two combined have 2/3, then when one door is opened revealing a goat the 1st door still has a probability 1/3, the open door changes to zero leaving the remaining door with a probability of 2/3.

A more developed analysis takes a closer look at all the possibilities, for the sake of this we will call the doors A, B and C, say the car is behind C (the contestant is unaware) there is a 1/3 chance of the contestant selecting each door initially, so the total probability of all options that start with each door choice is still 1/3. If the contestant chooses A first the host will open B or C, but C has the car so his only choice is to open B in this situation accounting for 1/3 of the total switching would win and sticking would lose. If the contestant chooses B first the host will open A or C, but C has the car so his only choice is to open A so again we have a situation covering 1/3 of total possibilities in which switching would win and sticking would lose. Now consider the contestant chooses C, the host can open either A or B at random, each has half of the initial 1/3 probability of outcomes where the contestant started with C, so both the contestant choosing C then the host opening A and the contestant choosing C then the host opening B have a 1/6 probability and will result in loss for a switch but a win for a stick, adding up all the probabilities we get 2/3 situations switching wins and 1/3 switching loses.

It may also help to imagine playing with say 100 doors, in this case we can all agree the first guess has a chance of 1/100, then the host opens all other doors except one revealing 98 goats and leaving two closed doors one with the car and one with a goat, hopefully the change in the scale helps illustrate how switching is beneficial.

Still not convinced, try it for yourself, get a friend and 3 playing cards from the same pack but with one that stands out, say a pair of reds and the ace of spades, the objective of the contestant is to pick the ace. You play the host and your friend plays the contestant, lay them face down get your friend to pick one, then turn over a red and ask if they want to stick or swap and compare several say 10+ trials where they swap to the same number where they stick, once they know the game you can swap places, maybe make it a competition one of you use one strategy and one use the other and see who comes off best. To make it a little more interesting make it into a drinking game, when the player wins the host drinks when the player loses they drink. Just remember 10 is a small sample so it is possible that you will not be able to tell the difference, if that is the case continue for a while and it will clear up.

This has a few pictures to help follow the argument.
Remember it is best if you truly understand what I'm getting at here so have a think about it, maybe come back in a day or so for another attempt. Admittedly is a hard concept and many people you would expect to be able to make sense of it struggle so admitting you don't quite get it is fine too just as long as your honest about it, it is certainly better than blindly rejecting my argument because you don't understand or even blindly accepting just because I look like I know what I'm talking about.

The Monty Hall Problem

The Monty Hall problem is an interesting bit of probability based on a game show and named after the presenter of the show. At the final stage of the game the contestant is presented with three doors, behind one is the main prize and behind each of the other pair is a goat. The contestant picks a door at random, then one of the other doors is opened revealing a goat, the contestant is then given the option to stick with their first choice or swap to the other unopened door. The question is, statistically which provides the better chance of winning, sticking or swapping?
The answer and explanation will appear later in the week. An interesting thing to note is that when this was first posed there was a lot of argument amongst experts in the field since it requires some outside the box thinking.

Those crazy catholics are at it again

Someone just posted this on facebook. In short it means that the catholic church considers child rape and allowing a woman to become a priest as equivalent crimes, both in the most severe category.

Regardless of if someone believes the bible or not this is entirely unreasonable, although the arguments are very different. For the non believer child rape is one of the most horrific and mentally scarring acts anyone can commit and deserves just about any punishment that can be thrown at the criminal, while a woman priest is a non issue, if she wants to let her.

From the christian point of view however woman preachers are condemned by the bible. (1 Timothy 2:11-14, Titus 1:6-9) The first of those says women may not teach or have power over men because man came first then women came along and screwed everything up, the second is instructions that the preacher may only have one wife, amongst other things, and repeatedly specifies he, a very clear implication.
Now for the main event, what does the bible say about rape? Deuteronomy 20:13-14 and Numbers 31:11-18 clearly states that when invading any female who is a virgin, regardless of age should be kept alive to do whatever you want with. Deuteronomy 22:28-29 say if you rape a virgin you must marry her for life.

So any true christian should condemn woman preachers but view child rape as entirely acceptable. Almost sounds like the bible was written by a bunch of sexist, bronze aged old gits rather than being the perfect, timeless work of an all knowing god.

The most unplesant character in all fiction

If I was to describe a fictional character as " jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomanical, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." everyone who is unfamiliar with that quote would agree the character is pure evil, yet this quote refers to the god of the old testament, which both Jews and Christians (also Muslims, at least in part) hold as the unchanging perfect word of god, so lets see if we can find verses to justify each of those claims.

Proud of his jealousy - Exodus 20:4-5(god admits he will act on his jealousy)
Exodus 34:14(bragging about being jealous)

Petty - Leviticus 24:16(Blasphemy is punishable by death)
Numbers 11:1(death for complaining)

Unjust - Deutoronomy 22:28-29(rape a virgin you must marry her for life)
Job 2:3(ruining the faithful for no reason)

Unforgiving - Isaiah 14:21(punishment for earlier generations crimes)

Control freak - Genesis 3:22-23(stops humans becoming like gods)
Proverbs 3:5(just do what god says)

Vindictive - Genesis 3:14-19(the penalty for eating the wrong fruit)

Bloodthirsty - Jeremiah 51:20-22(go kill things for god)
Genesis 4:3-5(animals make better sacrifices than fruit)

Ethnic cleanser - Joshua 8:24-25(wiping out a city)
Jeremiah 50:21(another massive cull of foreigners)

Misogynistic - Exodus 21:2-7(male slaves serve 6 years, females permanently) G19:6

Homophobic - Leviticus 20:13(if a man lies with a man kill both)
Leviticus 18:22(man on man sex is bad)

Racist - Deuteronomy 23:3(none of this race may enter gods congregation)

Infanticidal - 2 Kings 2:23-24(god cooperates with his prophets wish to kill 42 children who called a bald man........bald.
Isaiah 13:16(when pillaging a city the preferred method of killing infants is beating them on rock)

Genocidal - Deutoronomy 13:15(kill everything in the city)
Deuteronomy 20:16-17(kill all members of these tribes, including cattle)

Filicidal - Leviticus 20:9(cursing your parents punished by death)
Deutoronomy 21:18-21(kill disobedient children)

Pestilential - Exodus 9:14-15(makes Egypt sick)
Exodus 9:25(wiping out crops)

Megalomanical - Exodus 10:27(god has spent the past 2 chapters directly controlling the pharaoh so he can abuse Egypt)

Sadomasochistic - Unfortunately the only masochistic bible verses I can find are in the new testament, but looking at the rest of the list sadistic is pretty well sorted and have spent too much time on this already to find any more verses proving what a dick the old testament god is.

Capricious - 1 Samuel 18:1-3(gay is fine)
Genesis 19:33-36(god deliberately saved them when he destroyed their city for being perverse)

Malevolent - Genesis 22:9-12(an all knowing god orders Abraham to sacrifice his son, then stops him at the last minute just to see if he would do it.)

A bully - 1 Chronicles 16:25(ruling by fear)
Leviticus 25:17(more fear)

And a few bonus points that didn't really fit in, god created evil (Isaiah 45:7), god lies (Genesis 2:17) beating slaves is ok if they don't die on the spot(Exodus 21:20-21)

For those Christians thinking ohhh its only the old testament that doesn't apply any more
1) Jesus thinks it does(Matthew 5:17)
2) The whole book is supposed to be the perfect unchanging word of god, thats just not compatible with picking your favourite bits and ignoring the rest.
3)The New Testament contains more than enough douchebaggery too, I may do a post on that another time
4)Anything along the lines of "it is required for a greater good" is nonsense, many of the quotes have no upside at all and god is supposedly omnipotent so he put all the rules in place that require shit to happen for something good to eventually come out of it. Also all good does not mean doing evil for a greater good it means doing only actions which are good in and of themselves.

Want to check my quotes are justified, just stick the references into google, 30ish links seems a bit much for one post. And as with all my posts if you have any objections leave a comment, even on the old stuff, and I will be happy to expand on or defend my position.

SETI

SETI stands for Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, it is a non profit organisation that points radio telescopes up on the off chance they pick up a signal transmitted by an alien race. SETI attempts to detect technologically advanced civilisations by picking up stray electromagnetic transmissions. However the universe is a noisy place and many natural processes produce electromagnetic radiation, the key difference being that natural sources tend to cover a large range of wavelengths(a high bandwidth) while intelligently developed sources tend to have much narrower bandwidths, this has two benefits. First it needs less energy and second it keeps frequencies clear for others to use without interference. Another important consideration is the fact that some wavelengths are naturally much quieter than others, with the majority of significant natural signals being in the infra red or higher frequencies (shorter wavelengths). This means we can take an educated guess at the type of signal we want to detect and the range of wavelengths to focus on. Specifically a signal with a narrow bandwidth in the radio or microwave region is very likely to have a non natural source, so this is where SETI looks.

The procedure is something like this, get hold of the biggest radio telescope available, point it at a star then scan millions and millions of really tiny bandwidths and compare them, if a narrow signal is detected then another telescope hundreds or thousands of Km away also focuses on the star to rule out local interference.

To date, and the best of my knowledge only one such signal, now known as the 'wow! signal' has ever been detected, however it lasted for 72seconds and the region in question has never shown anything interesting since so it is still inconclusive. Since the signal was detected back in 1977 the technology was rather primitive so confirming with a second telescope was not possible but interference was ruled out as much as possible given the circumstances.

What the wow! signal was and what it means, in the 2nd link the most interesting part is the last section about hypotheses and speculation.

Related to all this is something called the Drake equation, developed by Frank Drake in 1961 this is an attempt to estimate the number of technologically advanced civilisations currently active in our galaxy, unfortunately most of the values we can only make very broad guesses so it is of little scientific value but still somewhat interesting. Despite being an equation it is very simple so don't worry if you're not a maths person, that link also has a small interactive bit at the end.

Just how big is everything

"Space is big, really big, you just wont believe how vastly mind bogglingly huge it is. I mean you may think its a long way down the street to the chemist but that's just peanuts to space. Listen....."

A word of caution this article contains really big numbers so I will use some simple scientific notation, it looks like this 1*10^2 which basically means 1 *10 *10 or 100, another example 5*10^3 would be 5*10 *10 *10 or 5000 (basically it is the first digit followed by a number of zeroes matching the number after the ^) also each of the units below is a thousand times larger than the one before it.

one, thousand, million, billion, trillion

The simplest to expalin unit of measurement used on the scale of galaxies or the universe is the light year, so I will use that. Light (in a vacuum) travels at 3*10^8 meters per second or 300 000 Km per second, for scale the earth is only around 12 700Km across. A light year is the distance travelled by light in a vacuum in one year and is about 10 000 000 000 000 or 10 trillion Km, the nearest star to our sun is around 4.5 light years away, our galaxy 1*10^5 light years across and the visible universe 9.2*10^9 light years. An interesting point to mention here is that obviously the light we receive shows us what these objects were like when the light left them, as such we see things as they were millions or even billions of years in the past. This means very distant galaxies look very different from near ones and the limit of the observable universe is caused by seeing back so far in time that the light at this distance was emitted long before any stars formed at the point when the universe finally became cool and spread out enough for it to be able to transmit light.

The visible universe (as far as we can see) contains a minimum 170 billion(1.7*10^11) galaxies, the smallest of which contain around 10 million(1*10^7) stars and the largest 100 trillion(1*10^14), giving a low estimate of around 1700 000 000 000 000 000 000 stars in the universe.

Take a few minutes to get your head around these numbers and watch this video attempting to show the length scales involved and this one demonstrating the relative sizes of some of the stars in our galaxy. Each of those behemoths is to the naked eye at most a single dot of light or completely invisible due to the shear distance between Earth and it. Some of those minuscule points of light in the sky every night are even entire galaxies, a hundred billion glowing giants so far off that combined they are barely even visible and most galaxies are utterly undetectable without incredibly powerful telescopes. If we then turn that logic on its head we get this, and bearing in mind that the photo was taken from near Saturn, a distance which is less than insignificant on a galactic scale. Understanding just how small our world is is one of the most incredible and humbling experiences I can think of.

Opening quote taken from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, everyone should go read it.

UFOs and aliens

First things first yes I believe in UFOs (iv seen one myself) and aliens, however there's a catch here. UFO stands for unidentified flying object, therefore any object in the sky the observer can't identify is by definition a UFO. Further since most observers are average people and less than familiar with weather balloons, unusual clouds, secret military aircraft, meteorites and who knows what else, combined with the fact that the sky, especially at night, has no reference points so even familiar objects at an odd angle may be unrecognisable means anyone who jumps from "I saw a UFO the other night" to "the spaceship was X big and moving at Y speed" is very likely mistaken. I say this in part because there has never been a sighting where experts could distinctly say yes that is a space ship, its always mistaken identity, a hoax or such crappy quality no-one can tell, and also getting between solar systems is really hard and takes bloody ages(yes that is the "technical term" for the time frames involved).

As discussed in my last post the speed of light in a vacuum is 300 000Km a second, this is also the universes absolute speed limit, nothing can travel through space faster, even stuff like magnetic fields and gravity are restricted to this limit. Star systems are also really far apart, our nearest is 4.24 light years away so a round trip would take a minimum 8.5 Earth years. Even if aliens are common they are still unlikely to live that close by and this speed is incredibly difficult to even approach so a more realistic time-frame would be anything from 50 years upwards with 100s certainly not being unreasonable. After that much effort any species with sense would either make its arrival well known and get friendly with the natives or actually be competent at staying hidden.

On a related point claims of direct contact always involve aliens that are basically human in appearance, this is laughably improbably The body shape has only evolved once on this planet so in our environment there are plenty of other designs that allow life to get along just fine, on any other planet there will be dozens of working body shapes and as many as you like that would have worked but never evolved.

So that's the UFO bit out the way, they are non alien objects people fail to recognise but I also said I believe in aliens and that's because as mentioned in my last post there are absolute shitloads(another "technical" term) of stars, roughly in the region of 10^21. Even if the chances of life developing around a star chosen at random are a billion to one that gives hundreds of inhabited planets in our galaxy alone, and a number in the trillions across the whole universe. To think that the only planet in the entire universe hosting any sort of life is our own is the most incredibly arrogant thing I can imagine.

Think mistaking clouds for spaceships is silly, think again

Next time SETI and the Drake Equation, then the space stuff gets a break.

Proving the shape of the Earth

Well this is a few days later than I wanted it to be due to a combination of exams and my house-mates dragging me into various LAN games but as promised a post about how to prove the earth is spherical-ish even with 2000 year old technology. But before that here is an article I found a few days ago that would have gone nicely with my previous post.

The first and simplest to argue evidence would be launching into space and seeing for yourself, a few orbits should convince anyone but that's not an economically sound idea and certainly wasn't possible 2300 years ago when the idea first cropped up. A less impressive alternative would be to look out over a vast flat landscape from a plane or high mountain, they would also put you high enough to see the curvature of the Earth.

A more intellectual argument was proposed in the early 1600s when two important details had been understood, first the heliocentric system proposed that the sun is at the centre, thus the Earth is another planet. Second, with the invention of telescopes moons were seen around Jupiter showing the other planets were spherical (and later on sufficient detail was possible to directly see the planets rotating and since they were circular at all times spherical), so Earth probably is as well. Not entirely satisfying but a nice piece of logic none the less.

Another interesting argument comes from an understanding of gravity, the net attraction of a body pulls an object towards its centre of mass, thus if you have a ball anything on the surface is pulled directly into the surface but if you have a disk objects near the edge are pulled sideways with only a small downwards component. We have all herd stories about falling off the edge of the world but who has herd about magical forces dragging people back towards the centre or (since they would assume gravity was still directly down)land that keep getting steeper until it is unclimbable. Another interesting effect would be that all the water on the Earth would be pulled into a partially flattened dome over the centre.

Now for some ancient direct observation, if you were to climb a mountain(the higher the better) near a plain or the ocean and look out over it there would be no obstacles so on a flat earth you would be able to see to the next mountain range or the edge of the Earth, whichever came first. That doesnt happen and since it was possible to observe people coming from distant lands from the top of the mountain long before they were visible from the bottom of the mountain the Earths surface is clearly curved. The increased elevation would allow visibility of a greater proportion of the surface (put a blob of blutac on a football then keeping your eye as close to the ball as possible turn it until the blob is no longer visible. Then move your head directly away from the ball and it will become visible) but it is possible to go one better than that. If you know the height of the mountain and take a protractor to the top then measure the angle from horizontal to the horizon it is just a case of simple trigonometry to find the radius of the Earth. This method is so effective that in the Masudi Canon, Abu Rayhan Biruni(973-1048) calculated the radius to within 16.8km of todays accepted value. That was about 600 years before the Western world was even in the ballpark.

a few more proofs

website of the flat earth society, all the arguments are flawed in premise, logic or what it would mean but its kind of interesting. If you cant spot one of the mistakes ill be happy to point it out.

As always anything you don't understand, want to clarify or think is incorrect either research it yourself or comment and even if its years from when I wrote this ill get back to you as soon as I can. After all "its better to be corrected and look the fool than remain ignorant and be a fool forever", can't remember who said it and its paraphrased but you get the idea.

Earths shape

I was revising for an exam the other day in the physics resource room and somehow we ended up having a short conversation about conspiracy theorists and the one name I remember cropping up was the Flat Earth Society. So I have decided to do a bit of a rant/proof on this. This post will just be a bit on the shape of the Earth and I will go into the evidence later in the week.

Long ago people assumed the Earth was flat, perfectly reasonable since apart from all the hills and valleys no overall curving trend was observable to the people at the time living their day to day lives. Even today a flat Earth is a sufficiently good local approximation for people who don't travel exceptionally long distances, although there are plenty technologies that do rely on it to work but I'm discussing direct observation at this stage so that's beyond the point.

Things started to change around 330BC when the first evidence started to emerge for a spherical Earth, this was an important discovery because long distance navigation such as crossing oceans is going to be substantially different depending on if the ocean is flat or curved and yes by the time Columbus came along everyone knew full well the Earth was certainly not flat, give the people of the time a little credit.

That is all well and good and for most of us this will be the most accurate model we need but it is not the end of the story, a more accurate picture, and one important for satellites was first proposed by Newton in 1689. Since the Earth rotates there will be a 'centrifugal force' that will push the material outwards more strongly the further it is from the axis of rotation(actually its not a force as such, just inertia, the material further from the axis is moving faster so it is harder to change its direction). The end result of this is that the radius of the earth to one of the poles is 6 356.8km but the radius to the equator is 6 378.1km. This means the polar diameter is about 40km less than the equatorial diameter, this slightly flattened sphere is called an oblate spheroid.

It is even possible to make more detailed observations which have found that the South pole is 40m closer to the centre of the Earth that the North pole, so it actually has a very slight pear-shape, with various lumps and dents roughly matching the continents and oceans. However having said that its relative variations from an oblate spheroid(0.17%) are less than a pool ball from a perfect sphere(0.22%).

All that is actually a nice example of how science works, start with a basic idea, such as "as far as I can see directly the earth is flat" and then develop the idea "actually its a sphere it just looks flat when your standing on it because its bloody huge" and further development "wait its a slightly squashed sphere" and this continues to whatever accuracy is needed. Since the maths involved gets evil very fast as the idea is refined the secret is to use the simplest model that is detailed enough for the task at hand. Treating the Earth as an oblate spheroid is vital to keep satellites where they are needed, but its a bit of a headache when you just want to find somewhere on a map of your town, at that level even the gross oversimplification(to the point of outright wrong) of a flat Earth will do the job. Of course the key point of it being science it you also have to prove the ideas.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=earth-is-not-round an article covering spherical Earth onwards

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/earth-atmospheric-and-planetary-sciences/12-002-physics-and-chemistry-of-the-terrestrial-planets-fall-2008/lecture-notes/MIT12_002f08_lec27_28.pdf the kind of maths involved in getting this lovely detailed understanding of the Earths shape.

logic puzzle

I think its about time I made a much less serious and more light hearted post so here goes.

This is a really good puzzle one of my friends gave me a couple of years ago, be warned its not for the faint hearted.(expect to spend at least a couple of hours racking your brains before you get a working solution)

You have 12 identical looking weights, 11 are the same weight one is slightly different (you can't tell the difference by hand), there is also an old style balance scales (think the star sign Libra). Using only three weighings devise a system where you are guaranteed to find which weight is different and if it is lighter or heavier.

Also all weights being tested at any given time must be places simultaneously so no cheating by putting one on each side then adding pairs until it goes off balance and calling it one weighing.

R.I.P. Dio

Tomorrow, Sunday 30th May is the funeral of the recently deceased metal star Ronnie James Dio, while I never listened to much of his music he has made a noticeable contribution to metal over the last few decades and as such deserves some credit and respect. Unfortunately his funeral is going to be picketed by the Westboro Baptist Church, a church/hate group who regularly picket events they disagree with, most noticably anything relating to the gay community.

On the up side this organisation is very much a minority, being mostly composed of the minister Fred Phelps and his surprisingly large extended family.

http://www.godhatesfags.com/ The website of the WBC, you don't need to take my word they are unfriendly, check for yourself.

http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/general_music_news/ronnie_james_dio_baptist_church_to_picket_public_memorial_service.html

An article about the funeral and also quoting a selection of things said by the less than friendly WBC.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR7dG_m3MsI The Killswitch Engage cover of the Dio song Holy Diver, Everyone should see this, its pure genius.

10 Comandments

Me and some friends were in the pub the other night and somehow we ended up with one of them implying the 10 commandments were a good moral code, I objected stating that half of them were just about how to worship, I was challenged to name them but admittedly couldn't and said id get back to him. So now I have done the research and thought it would make a good blog entry to analyse them.

ONE: 'You shall have no other gods before Me.'

Who to worship, no moral guidance.

TWO: 'You shall not make for yourself a carved image--any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.'

Technically that sounds like no sculptures but its generally understood as no worsiping idols, either way nothing about morals here.

THREE: 'You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain.'

No blasphemy, again nothing moral.

FOUR: 'Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.'

An arbitrary rule, nothing moral about that.

FIVE: 'Honor your father and your mother.'

On the surface reasonable, but on further thought being in a position of power does not immediately mean you deserve respect, even your 'superiors' should have to earn your respect by being both effective in their position and being good people.

SIX: 'You shall not murder.'

Certainly good moral advice, but common sense and under certain extreme circumstances permissible.

SEVEN: 'You shall not commit adultery.'

Another I agree with, good moral guidance but again I suspect most people know it to be wrong without needing a book to tell them, even the people guilty of it.

EIGHT: 'You shall not steal.'

Also good on the surface but again I would consider it permissible in rare cases.

NINE: 'You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.'

Morally sound, but again it seems obvious, don't try and get people in trouble with there friends/co-workers/the legal system for shits and giggles, it makes you a knob-goblin.

TEN: 'You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor's.'

Sounds to me like its telling you not to desire or want anything, while it may make you miserable/jealous not actually immoral on its own.

So basically 1-4 are who/how to worship, 5 will come naturally if the targets deserve it, 6-9 on the whole following them will make you a more moral person but the same conclusions can be reached through non religious means 10 good advice, to a degree but not morals.

Out of the 10 commandments only 4 offer moral guidance and an additional 1 is sort of good advice for a happy life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments Where I found them, if your not happy with it find your own source and compare to this article

Draw Muhammad day

There is a fair bit to cover here so this is going to be a long post.

This whole series of events boils down to the fact that in Islam it is blasphemy to depict their prophet Muhammad in any way, and a minority of Muslims think they can enforce this upon the non-Muslim world by making death threats, many people disagree with these premises.

Recently (May 20th) it was draw Muhammad day. This all began with South Park episodes 200-201 which 'featured' Muhammad. The whole point was to play off all the political correctness around not offending extremist Muslims and the character was never actually seen on screen, always being behind a black rectangle labeld censored, there was also no anti Muslim content at all with Muhammad being one of the good guys.

Regardless a minority group called Revolution Muslim got all worked up and started making veiled threats so the 2nd episode also censored out Muhammads name and the standard ending monologue spelling out the episodes political/religious/moral point. After this a cartoonist unrelated to the show jokingly suggested making May 20th draw Muhammad day, several online characters who strongly believe in free speech decided this was actually a good idea and started a campaign to make it happen. The whole point was a show of strength against the extremists to prove that however a few corporations act and no matter what the minority do the west will not surrender free speech to a handful of 3rd world nut jobs. It was never about degrading or insulting Muslims in general, unfortunately due to the nature of the group a sizeable number of racists and bigots were also attracted and there was a lot of hate speech coming from both sides. This campaign ended up causing Pakistan to block Facebook and Youtube amongst other sites but for me its most important impact was one of the Muslim responses it generated.

A Facebook group was set up in response aimed not at demonizing those who took part but at moderate Muslims quoting the more peaceful passages in the Qur'an and showing that on the whole Muslims are good people who don't agree with the well publicised rantings of a minority. I would like to think that the group will be enough to get the ball rolling and get moderate Muslims to help stamp out the extremists and make their religion much less hated than it currently is.

Summing up my views on this whole thing.

Good on South Park for taking on another issue that needs addressing.

Someone get rid of the extremists or preferably talk some sense into them.

Draw Muhammad day was in principal a good idea and hopefully the powers that be will finally grow a pair, but it attracted a lot of asshats that also need removing or an education.

I also support the Muslim response in my Youtube link despite not caring about any religion since it promotes moderation rather than fanaticism.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/10136576.stm A bit on the campaign although they appear to have missed the point somewhat

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8691406.stm the Pakistani facebook ban

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7ok4njJXI8 the principle of draw Muhammad day

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0v3-3yCbr8 a rational muslim response

introduction and all that crap

My name is Neil, I am a physicist, atheist, metal fan, socially functioning geek and plenty of other things I hope give me an interesting and accurate view of life the universe and everything. I am planning on updating this page semi-regularly with several types of content. The plan may change but currently it should be a mix of coherently explained science(physics all the way down the chain to stuff like sociology), hopefully understandable by anyone intelligent regardless of there knowledge of the area. Ranting against various groups (religious or otherwise) detrimental to developed society, with as much evidence as I deem necessary to support my claim(as a scientist it will usually be a lot) and also my observations on interesting news articles or my daily life.

Anyone who disagrees with me is free to object, it might even cause a debate and end with one of us winning the other over. All comments will be allowed, however I may occasionally remove comments that are illiterate trolling, spam or otherwise add no intellectual content, but this will be minimal so play nice.

Yes I am aware setting all that out in my first post is uncharacteristicly optimistic but it puts it in a sensible and easy to find place where the people likely to care can find it...assuming this thing takes off.