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.