Moderation: blaming the messenger

I really do take religion out of context, don’t I? I pick and choose bits of the Bible (or any other “holy” text) that are barbaric and point at the radicals who take them literally. There are three ways you could be interpreting my blogs here:

1) Dismissing my claims because I’m a filthy atheist and your holy book is “divinely inspired.”
2) Agreeing with what I just said above because you are a moderate who hates extremists on any side.
3) You are a fellow irreligious reader, ravenous for knowledge and seeing if there is anything valuable in what I have to say.

In any debate where atheists take on religious people, the religious side inevitably is moderate (at least in a two-faced way to appeal to a different audience). The conversation usually starts to slip down into the pit of abstract vagueness where they aren’t even arguing for anything at all. Shocking statements crop up like “…well, these ancient writings aren’t meant to be taken literally, they were written in a period where slavery, etc… were a common part of life…” Essentially, the argument is that the Bible or Qur’an could not have been written in a way that would be morally relevant throughout all time.
This does make some slight sense, but you have to finish the sentence on all the stunted logic in these arguments. I can understand the idea that if the prophets had told everyone in the Bronze and Iron Ages to embrace homosexuals, abstain from animal/human sacrifice or slavery, and promote equal rights for women there would have been less worship and more chuckling. But if you continue on this point, it means that God compromised for his favorite species like an infatuated teen.
The writers of the Bible or Qur’an were either divinely inspired or not. If not, then both are simply philosophical texts illustrated with imaginative writing that has been misinterpreted by a staggering amount of people. This is my position. If all the holy texts are divinely inspired, then God is definitely a twisted character who likes confusing his most advanced Earthlings with dangerous contradictions. I’ll assume you don’t believe that, but if some conscious divinity did inspire one of these books, then we are back to the compromise but I wanted to make that point.
If all of those moderates out there consider atheists to be radicals in the same sense that overzealous creationists or suicide bombers are radical then I would hope they listen to this: Why do you spend all of your time fighting the ones who are calling out the suicide bombers?? When a child is complaining that his brother gave him a black eye, the mother usually listens to what he has to say, assesses the situation, and deals with the violent sibling. Moderates want to pretend that fundamentalists are like a retarded brother who can’t be blamed.
We all have our own obsessions, areas of study, or drive to just have fun. All are just different places to invest our time. Moderates are the religious people who balance life with something unrelated (like a business career, etc…). Some people devote all of their interests in religion, and feel fulfilled only in their religion. It’s starting to sound like I’ll accept religion is a subjective thing but it is not because it directly makes fundamental claims about existence that are incompatible with rationality. Those who have nothing better to do are not any less intelligent, but have succumb to the notion that humans cannot and will not ever be able to fully understand everything and so we should give up and believe primitive mythology.


So my plea to religious moderates is not to turn your back on literalists and only debate with atheists—as far as I can see you’re not gaining any ground on that anyway. The most important thing for us to do now is face the radicals who are actually dangerous. You can write your slander about Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and the rest, but in the end we will still have different religions and followers in those religions who are deeply, violently opposed to one another. If the Bible is not meant to be taken literally, then PLEASE do your best to write books, and make documentaries to clarify and explain your point so that we can all understand the logic behind religion. If you do this well enough and you really do have a point, then atheists and religious fanatics may finally understand what you mean.

This change would only be possible by reason and not by dogmatically holding on to old beliefs. This is the definition of scientific inquiry and therefore presenting your God hypothesis could be proven if anyone took the time to refine and come up with a solid, clear explanation for why people can rationally believe in God. I’m actually working on this myself because it’s not enough to say that the Bibl is contradictory and so on, but I want to know the explanation for character, love, and things like musical inspiration. In this respect, I think most irreligious writers don’t complete the argument. Finding out what is the magic element of art, love, and subjective consciousness seems to be the last front of the search for God. Most of us agree he isn’t in Greek mythology, many realize he isn’t in Genesis, and now a growing number of moderates accept he isn’t directly present in much of the Bible. The question will not be answered until we figure out these abstract cracks that God hides in. I hope that someday we will finally get rid of the shadow of doubt and have a full explanation for the mystical things in life. Frankly, I’m sick of being complacent and giving up on discovery to let divinity cover up the mystery. It doesn’t solve anything, but sweeps the problem under the carpet.
Hopefully, if you keep reading I will someday be able to give a good answer to these questions. They are more important to me than publicity, but having ideas out in the open gives the opportunity for discussion and bouncing ideas off of one another. I only know what I know because of the experts in different fields who are backed with evidence. Who are you trusting your facts to?

What is God?

God is supposed to be the "way, the truth, and the light." Well...he's led us down some dark paths, hasn't always been right (or at least is heavily misinterpreted), and provided a means for the Dark Ages to be even darker with religiously inspired violence. Why is he so passive? A lot of people would say it's because he doens't exist, but I actually do believe he exists in other ways.

So...who/what is God? Most of the humans living on Earth say they believe in a god of some sort. All believe they are right without evidence, even though just about everyone looks at religion in a different way. Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe in a single God who fulfills the role of a universal father, mother, judge, puppeteer, and anything else you want him to be. Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Baha’is accept that he may not follow the rules of Western religions, but there is still a definite divine force out there. Of course, any time you repeat back to people what they believe, it sounds dumb and they get offended and say you misinterpreted but these are the general views as they go by the books. Deists, pantheists, agnostics, and Buddhists don’t really believe in God but don’t completely rule him out. And of course, atheists completely reject the notion that some conscious being is responsible for existence and what goes on inside. Where does this belief come from? People have different ideas of what God is, but in all cases he exists to explain the unexplained. You ready for my explanation?
There is no other way to define God other than he is the mortar of understanding. He is the caulking we squirt into cracks to make us feel we have an air-tight understanding of existence. I believe in God, but he is something different than what we assume. He is the shadow in the corner of the room that we can characterize as the unknown. God once ruled the world, but is slowly being eaten away by the light of our understanding. He only exists in the cracks, and when we fully understand something, the crack is sealed and religious people shift their attention to a new spot with holes. He has no form of power, but summarizes the chain of events that have taken place in order for something to occur. There are lots of thigs we don't understand, but science carefully takes a closer look to map that chain of events, filling out the picture instead of taking leaps and jumping to conclusions.

Religion is nothing short of relishing in ignorance. Science doesn’t have a definite answer for everything yet, but you don’t win just because you throw out a hypothesis. People on Jeopardy don’t win because they are the first to answer, but because they give the right answer. Unfortunately, there is no Alex Trebek here to judge if we’re right, so we have to take our time in figuring it all out for ourselves.

Onward!

Okay, now that the messy rebuttal work is out there, I can turn to more interesting and generic things. The debating doesn't have to end there and I'll gladly accept hate mail from anyone out there, but there doesn't seem to be opposition to make writing meaningful anymore.
So how about a broader picture of what is goin on in the world today? Or maybe you want to know a little bit about the guy you're writing your hate mail to. I'll go for both.

I was raised a Catholic. My entire family is roughly 95% Irish and belief in magic might run in the family, you could say. I went to a Methodist preschool and then moved on to a K-8 Catholic school. Once in high school, I was happy to move away from the caged atmosphere, but still missed alot of the people and friends from there. I ended up joining the church youth group, where I had an extensive amount of time and information to figure out how I was supposed to defend the fact that I am a Christian (let alone a Catholic) and how anyone who denies what I believe is misguided and possibly headed for an eternal sentence to Hell. I wouldn’t say this was an extremist church—but then again, what would that mean? Watering down doctrine and not taking the Bible literally just means that you concede with secular values on some things, but disagree on the things that have no consequence. Catholics (and I use this only because I am most familiar with it, and it is the largest and most powerful branch after all) will say they believe in transubstantiation of the host, but go flaccid on self-contradicting passages and Old Testament myths. Either the Bible was divinely inspired or it wasn’t.

However, I think I picked up a good understanding of why people believe in all of this. It’s virtually the same as the attitude expressed on Fox news around the clock. It goes something like this, “Liberalism is a disease trying to create chaos and detract us from the solid foundation of values that have always served society well.” Conservatism spells out its purpose in the name: holding on to the past. Everything about it is nostalgic. In a Freudian kind of way, being fully conservative is a wanting to return to the womb. Our parents are the ultimate source of comfort, or something similarly tethered to the past. Liberals, on the other hand, face the world head on and make what little progress is possible in the world. Not to say that all out superficial acceptance of anything new is the way to go, but think about the fact that it was the radical liberals who were abolitionists. Galileo and the American revolutionaries were radical liberal types as well. All progress is made by those who learn from the past and move on. Today, it seems that homosexual union and stem cell research are crazy ideas, but they will surely be added to the list of forehead-slapping developments that are hard to imagine not understanding before. It’s astounding that Darwin is still on the debate table, but that’s a separate argument I shouldn't have to return to.

I know everyone uses the candy-coating of “I used to be one of them...” but it only works in a progressive sense. I was a firm supporter of Bush up through the 2004 election, before I realized that I was a fan of him only because I was as ignorant about the issues as he was. Conservatism is regressive, and liberalism is progressive. To say that you once were deluded, but came to understand something means you made a progressive growth spurt. Education is an ever expanding series of reaching new planes of understanding, and being able to look back down at the limited perspective you once had. This is the view of science and liberalism: by releasing attachment to childish biases and preconceived notions, we can use logic to climb higher and make progress. Conservatism and religion assume that mom, pop, and the people living in the Dark Ages had things right and there is no reason to question any of it. Knowledge is power. It’s what separates us from our ancestors.

Ex-spelled Out, Pt. End

I guess it would be better to be brief as possible, since so many other people have eloquently created responses to all of this ignorance. However, I'd like to wrap it up with one more entry in case you watched the whole interview. The reason I am doing this is Ben Stein represents a staggering portion of people in this world who want to turn from evidence and put their myths in the classroom without doing the work to prove their hypothesis as a testable theory...

I don't know where the Sagan quotes were coming from but I'm sure he doesn't either and they're out of context. The refrain here is that "Darwinists" believe in chance, and something coming from nothing. First, Darwin's theory was the "Origin of Species by means of natural selection." For short, we call it Evolution, but nowhere does it claim to have an answer for how life originated. Regardless, it is illogical to say that something came from nothing, which is precisely what Genesis tells us. Scientists are working on stable theories that can describe the universe and its origins, but they are not going to claim to know something until it is proven. Just about any other theory is more plausible than Creationism. Did you ever think that our universe could be the after effect of a "big bang" that is one of billions upon billions of others? No, it's more plausible that scientific theories of the bronze age are more accurate.

At 6:20 of the first part, they continue with the arrogance. Maybe you could learn something if you took a different perspective from your own for once. Your arguments are a straw man, and the version of Evolution you are trying to tear down is really just a reflection of yourself. Think about it this way: everyone once assumed the Earth was at the center of the universe and God had set up the cosmos to dance around our little globe. Scientists like Galileo once challenged this and were imprisoned for it, and worse for other scientists who put out similarly challenging theories. He was "Expelled" so to speak. Religion in general has been in charge for a hundred thousand years, and science is the new kid on the block. Science is the child prodigy that the father and all adults are secretly jealous of.

Leaving heliocentricity was just one of the evolutionary steps we have taken towards enlightenment, but now we have a similar problem--a still lingering problem because we didn't fully tackle the issue of heliocentricity. Most humans accept now that the Earth is a sphere that revolves around the sun, and is not at the center of anything but just a speck in existence. However, we still haven't addressed the problem that we think Humanity is the center of the universe. Sure, maybe God made a mind-bogglinly huge collection of galaxies, but he set aside this particular Milky Way for us in a nice corner, where he spends most of his time ignoring the rest of existence. Surely God created this universe like a playground for us humans to explore! It's all for us!

Well...no. Evolution didn't take place as a roundabout way of making humans. We just happened to evolve this way. Life in the universe is the equivalent of a patch of mold on a peice of bread. "Just happened" does not mean a coin toss. It means an unimaginable number of coin tosses that lead to results in reality. Just think of this: if there is no god, then there must be chaos, right? Well in that case, everything that could exist or take place is doing so either right now or it has already. (small example would be how observations of photon behavior show them to often be two or more things at one time--particle and wave, etc...--and when shot at a board with two holes, the photon will go through both holes at the same time) Actually, the number of things that could happen, like different combination of genes, may not be able to happen, but much of it does and things that cohere to order will naturally tend to happen more often.
If you have a million peices of bread sitting in storage and one gets a patch of mold on it, you don't claim it was intelligent design, it just happened by chance. But because we are that speck of mold, and humans are so special, we assume some supreme being did it for us.

Around 9:00 he claims that Greek word origins prove him right and that anyone who brings up these ideas would "probably be shot" in intellectual circles. Really? Isn't it more the Bible crowd's job to execute heretics?
Part 2 of the interview doesn't get any better. 2:25 "Chance is used if you don't have a better explanation," as if a personified character is more plausible. It's not chance in the sense of magical appearance, which is your argument, but chance in the fact that life was bound to sprout up in some remote corner of existence and we happen to be the little speck where conditions happened to be right. Again, all of their focus is grounded on Earth. Also, natural selection is similarly a passive process of the animals that happen to be best suited for survival are the ones that do so.
I'll try to save us some time by skipping his other repeated points...but the Nazism thing is ridiculous. The Holocaust was like a kid finding his dad's hunting rifle and shooting the family dog. Natural selection is supposed to be natural and passive. Then at 4:00 in Pt. 3, the host tells us a story about how he got expelled for three days. Funny...the ignorance even creeps into not caring about word choice because it sounds good. Anyway, he was suspended for fighting and not acting like a civilized, rational human being. Proves the point precisely of what creationists are in scientific circles.
Then he brings up another impressive misinterpretation by twisting the words of Einstein to support them. Albert Einstein did not believe anything in the Bible, as he proclaimed publicly, but did occasionally indulge in using the word "God." In saying "God does not play dice," he was getting across the point that things don't "just happen," but there is a definite cause for everything. Scientists are trying to figure out what sort of metaphysical origins matter might have, but to say that God did it contradicts the argument because where did God come from?

I'll leave you guys with this thought: you were once an embryo. A single cell which grew into the bigot you are today. You stopped growing. Evolution continues as it always will, and dead ends like religion will keep you stuck in the past. The journey toward understanding continues, and it would be a shame for you to get left behind.

Ex-spelled out, Pt. 2

Around 3:20, the interviewer confirms the suspicion that this is not a critical interview, but just two guys with the same opinion who want to bash serious science behind closed doors. These are intellectual cowards. The closest Ben has ever got to having some opposition in the interviews he has done is being on the O'Reilly Factor and Hannity & Colmes, which are notoriously close-minded and conservative. Then he starts his sermon on classrooms.

Close mindedness being taught in classrooms? Religions try to offer evidence (strange experiences that they have no explanation for) but must always ultimately fall back on faith because there is no way to totally prove or disprove the argument. I have no way of proving that an intangible god(s) did not create the universe and there is no way to show solid proof that one did, because if Evolution is incorrect, it just means that we need to go back to the drawing board. Classrooms—though some individual teachers may be fundamentalist (repeating the same material to students every year or semester probably has a big effect on your position on material)—are meant to meant to “arm students with the weapons to wage intellectual warfare,” as one of my history teachers once said. There is some truth to it, that in a sea of differing opinions, we have to be skeptical in order to protect ourselves from harmful misconceptions.
Let’s play “devil’s advocate” for a little while. Assuming that Evolution is true, all beings exist in the way they do because it benefits their survival. Some prehistoric primates found it useful to stand upright often, to look out over the grass for predators and other reasons probably.
This freed their hands from being a second pair of feet and now opened up a Pandora’s Box of tool making and dexterity. These could now be used as hands and a long line of successive improvements and survival led us to where we are today. Assuming this makes sense to you, much of the improvement is not just physical. As early hominids (obviously, there are at least dozens of different species that have been found) became more effective at surviving, they began to devote less focus on staying alive, and more on the quality of life. Some species were lucky enough to live in areas with a healthy variety of food, and some had access to fish. Iodine is found in seafood, and is a proven necessary nutrient for brain development (some countries have passed laws requiring it to be added to salt—hence “iodized” or “non-iodized” salt…maybe that’s why dolphins are so smart…). This was another “chance” occurrence that was not intended but worked favorably for us and once again exponentially boosted our survival rate. If you do not believe in the scientific method that led us to concluding that iodine is a necessary nutrient, etc… then you can stop reading now and go in the direction of Neanderthals or those who think the Surgeon General’s Warning on cigarettes is a lie. Ultimately, being wrong symbolizes death because it does not stand the test of time. Jesus was right about the truth being the path to life in that general sense—but I’m digressing in a new direction now, let’s get back to the first digression. As our brains developed, there was much more room for evolution within one’s own lifetime. What this means is that our new freedom to think—instead of running off of basic instinct for survival all day long—not only gave us the freedom to relax but to experiment. To a certain extent, this had been going on long before, but now there was room for education. For a deer that has been set loose in a tiger cage at the zoo, there is no time for education. This guy knows the only thing worth worrying about is extending life as long as possible. Becoming a difficult creature to catch and kill made hominids eventually drop off that list of prey that predators would have, and so (just like freeing of the hands) a world of opportunities was opened. Forms of communication and other technology may have been developed before, but this transition may have been like moving a plant from a pot to a spacious garden. I mentioned education, and that is because one of the most defining characteristics of intelligence is the ability to learn from another. Most of this intelligence is encoded in instinct, or intuition, through genes that support a certain composition of the brain that has proven useful for survival. Mammals are generally known for caring for their young (obviously useful for survival), and often serve some sort of guidance. Parents are not just the means for continuing the species, but must be responsible for being a set of training wheels for life, to make sure the offspring will survive and have children of its own. Along with this, the child must have some measure of respect for its parent’s judgment, since it is very valuable for survival. The little cub that leaves the burrow is just as dumb as the guy who goes swimming in waters where shark attacks were recently reported. Parents are the representation of the carrot and stick: the father tending to encourage a child to grow and “get a job,” a mother tending to nurture and warn that “you’ll shoot your eye out with that thing.”
Faith is programmed into us as a temporary survival mechanism for our youth. Most species have weird little behaviors like this that can be dangerous in situations that the adaptation was not originally useful for. Moths come out at night and the only source of light to them for hundreds of millions of years was the moon. Now any campfire or porch light leaves them spinning in circles and often killing themselves, relying on outdated navigation. Faith is very similar for humans. It used to be a valuable tool for decision making, where we could stand on the shoulders of elders and learn from them. However, the world today is radically different and things are not even the same as they were twenty years ago. Faith, instinct, and intuition are tools for making intellectual leaps that would take a ridiculously long period of time to meticulously think through logically. The fact that a lion poses a threat, even when thirty feet away, is a testament to the generations that had to learn this the hard way. Now, the knowledge has been passed down both by survival of genes that foster neurosis, and elders in the herd that might have witnessed an attack. The faith that a gazelle has in a possible outcome is not from God trying to look out for his safety, but collected wisdom through heredity and experience. The more intelligent a species is, the more there is this duality of evolution between genes and ideas (or “memes”).
In a survival situation, there is no time to be open-minded to alternate solutions. By definition, faith is being close-minded, believing in something that has no evidence in it. The only thing that resembles evidence is the fact that it once served a purpose, and may be encoded in our genes. It certainly is embedded in culture as well. Human growth has had little to do with survival in the past 50,000 years and everything to do with cultural and intellectual growth. Aside from the fact that personal gods would give ancient tribes courage for battle and hardships, religions have been held on to because it’s like the big fish stories that little boys are proud to recount about their fathers. Everything about major Western religion, specifically, is centered on the “good old days.” It’s the nostalgic, selective interpretation of Bronze and Iron Age myths that were created in a time when gladiators, animal (sometimes human) sacrifices, and dragon attacks were a common occurrence. We’re talking long before the crusades and Salem witch trials.
We are pattern-seeking animals, it’s what we do. When something profound happens (in a cultural context), but the explanation is extremely simple, many of us deny the presented evidence and insist that there was something equally profound behind it. Conspiracy theories are a good example of this. In a sense, religious teachers are doing a righteous thing in teaching traditional beliefs. They are fulfilling an evolutionary parental role. Unfortunately, doctrine is now another vestigial adaptation that is an appendix of the mind. Close-mindedness is being taught in classrooms—religious classrooms.

Ex-spelled Out, for those who are confused…

This will be the first of a series of brief attempts to address the stunning ignorance of Ben Stein. It would take a series of books, not blogs, to cover his film “Expelled: no intelligence allowed,” but I have chosen one of the many interviews he has given. It has been posted on YouTube in three parts, the first here:

First verbal bowel movement:
Ben complains that people generally don't know what "Intelligent Design" is. We do know what it means, it's in the title. I'm happy to hear that he accepts it is only a hypothesis. If he paid attention in elementary science classes, he should understand that a hypothesis is just an idea. It has no value until experimentation proves it right. Then the results may be published and hundreds of other scientists may do their own tests to confirm that it is true. After long consideration and considerable evidence, the scientific community may raise a hypothesis to a theory. Intelligent design is indeed a hypothesis, but you can hypothesize about anything.
Unfortunately, he knows everything about ID and nothing about Evolution. He makes this point very clear by saying that "we didn't just originate as human beings from lighning striking a mud puddle," as if that is stated anywhere in the theory. This is a classic example of terrible intellectual argumentation, known in philosophy as a straw-man. He can't argue with the real theory, so he makes up bullshit and calls it his opponent. And to address the statement that existence of God and the beginning of life is a philosophical issue, philosophy runs on the scientific method, requiring logic and reasoning.
All facts are based on theories. Get used to it. A scientific theory carries more weight than what the common connotation makes people think (like a conspiracy theory), but that's irrelavent. Evolution is a theory that explains how the complex life forms we see today came into existence, after the more simple creatures that are found in ancient fossils. It explains why we find bizarre skeletons buried deep in the ground, dated millions of years old. "Intelligent Design" is simply a rebranding of Creationism that says "God did it." As far as I can see, a deist approach of a creator lighting the spark and letting nature take its course does not interfere with the theory of Evolution. It's not an ideology, it's just one peice of the puzzle that scientists work very hard to solve.
However, the problem that scientists tend to have with an "intelligent designer" is that it creates a bigger problem than it solves. It's completely irrational to say that "we don't know what sparked life on Earth, so it obviously had to be God." Burning witches didn't prevent disease, and believing in creation stories will only be another tether to our barbaric past.

Let's get started...there's a long way to go

Everyone wants to feel revolutionary. We all want to feel like we are someone important, or part of something important. Politicians and preachers often say things like "Now, more than ever..." to make it sound like some new movement is taking place and they are the messiah that will carry us through it all. History does repeat itself, but it also unfolds in new ways and I think we can honestly say that there are choices for the human race to make today that will have an impact on our survival and progress. The technology and communications revolution has opened another evolutionary Pandora's Box and we have to take a long, hard look at ourselves to make sure it's all moving in the right direction.
The industrial revolution did wonders for comforts and all, but it also has created problems in the educational system that are not being addressed. Math and sciences were important during the Cold War and "space race," but now that we have achieved incredible exponential growth in the tools at our disposal, we don't know what to do with it. Several countries have the capability of manufacturing chemical and atomic weapons powerful enough to start an apocalyptic chain of events. The internet is creating bridges between virtually everyone and any idea. Almost anything is possible now, after two centuries of asking "how can we..." The problems we face today come from the fact that we don't ask what should we do and why.

In a way that resembles great works like Frankenstein and Jurrassic Park, the nations that have grown into world powers through technology and wealth are now creating monsters within themselves and others. Too much effort has been invested in creating the beast, and almost no consideration has gone into the ramifications. The only way to "fight the man" today is to become an educated, rational individual. Democracy only works when the participants are individuals, not members of a radical political or religious ideology.

My goal is to make some sense of all this propoganda flying around and I encourage you to read along. If I'm not sophisticated, logical, or even religiously skewed enough for you, there are plenty of middle-aged men out there who devote their lives to this stuff. What I do is watch and read what these old guys are saying and doing, and make objective observations. We don't need to follow people who grew up in a different world, who are set in their ways, to lead the way...

...What are you looking at?

Tashi Delek!

I'd like to say hi to everyone who has been lucky enough to stumble on to my blog. My name is Sean McBride and I am currently a student at the University of North Carolina in Asheville. I write short stories and songs occasionally, but mostly polish off essays (or rants) to synthesize what I see going on around me in the real world. Before getting on my high horse, it's important to ask...
Who's ever going to read this? Blogging is now about as common as any other form of journaling, but it's like all the myspace profiles in the world where you express yourself to a world that generally isn't interested in who you are or what you have to say. But if there is someone out there in the world who cares about the issues I do, then I hope this pops up in a Google search or something. If not, then this is a good writing excercise.