Positive Story On Atheism In Rwanda

I prayed to God to help me
But He didn’t lift a hand;
The bible holds the answers, though,
And now I understand:
I shouldn’t look to God for help
To save my son or daughter…
Cos God, if He exists at all
Is on the side of slaughter.

I think maybe I have simply read too many stories about atheists. I have come to expect that either the story will be about the global mistreatment of non-religious, or the stigma attached to atheism, or a story where atheists are clearly the baddies (do I need to link to one of those?)

And then, this. The story of a horrible genocide, of people faced with unimaginable events, asking God for help and finding none. Of looking around and concluding that no God exists to ask for help.

“He doesn’t exist. I decided to not waste time any longer. And if he exists, I don’t see any difference between him and genocidaires,” he says sternly. “He’s a God who ruthlessly murdered innocent babies, a God who proudly committed terrible massacres in the history of mankind.”

The article’s author refers to the stories in Exodus (12:29-30), not as a dusty ancient text, but in the here and now, in the stories of Rwanda:

To understand the verse well, this is what really happened: There was a funeral in every home in Egypt. Women were crying and every family was forced to bury its own dead because friends were also burying their innocent little ones. If you don’t understand it yet, think of what this tragedy would do if that large scale infanticide was committed in Rwanda – starting from your own family.

These Rwandan atheists don’t need to imagine. In the words of one:

“I read what happened in Ntarama, Bugesera. Killers were smashing babies on the walls in the house of God. Why couldn’t that omnipotent God cut off the hands of those genocidaires to rescue the babies who were innocently smiling at the killers? Why? I wouldn’t be surprised when someone reputed to kill infants chose to close his arms.”

And atheism is, both in their lives and in the article, a positive factor. It concludes (but please read the whole thing!):

Having a conversation with an atheist makes you realise how little you know about your own religion.

“You do not need religion to know what is wrong and what is right,” says Ndahiro. “In fact, what religious people do practice is not morality. I consider a moral action as that which is free from promises like a heaven or fear of hell.”

According to some atheists, people are using religion as an excuse after failing to find solutions to their problems. For instance, you should have seen many genocidaires asking for forgiveness saying they were tempted by the devil.

“If we believe that, then we have intentionally made our powerful minds weak,” says Musoni. “That’s what atheism is all about: Using our minds to the utmost to benefit from the fruits of the world.”

If You Don’t Agree With This, You’re An Idiot

It’s the modern world I live in,
And I use it when I can
I get all my information
From my common, fellow man
I won’t venture an opinion
Till I see what others think—
And I’ll read it all in pixels,
Cos I cannot wait for ink.
Yes, the internet is perfect
When you cannot wait for ink.

Now, some drama is expected
When you get your news online
Where a claim won’t go unchallenged
(And this happens by design)
A democracy of chaos,
Where the hoi polloi will roar—
When the comments are uncivil
I will listen all the more!
Yes, when comments are uncivil
This will bring them to the fore.

There is vitriol aplenty—
It’s a caustic, nasty mess!
Some may strive, perhaps, to educate,
Still others, to impress—
While yet others play a sort of game,
Where points are won or lost
Where truth and reputation are
A portion of the cost
Yes, respect for fact or person
Is a line that’s often crossed!

When the comments are uncivil
They are given much more weight
So the rude and boorish bastards
Hold more sway in the debate—
There’s no need to point to evidence
Or logic, you can tell—
When the comments thrive on rancor
All you have to do is yell.
Yes, the winner (on the internet)
Is he who best can yell.

In today’s New York Times, an editorial that speaks to the current state of news commentary on the interwebs. The editorial comments on a recent article in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, investigating the relative effect of civil vs uncivil commentary (regarding a nanotechnology issue) on participants’ opinions of nanotechnology’s risks vs benefits.

Ok… if you read the NYTimes article the results are “both surprising and disturbing”.

Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.

In the civil group, those who initially did or did not support the technology — whom we identified with preliminary survey questions — continued to feel the same way after reading the comments. Those exposed to rude comments, however, ended up with a much more polarized understanding of the risks connected with the technology.

But, really… these were not big effects. The sample sizes were large, so significance could be found without really large effects. But… oh, well.

What is strange is that there is no mention in the NYT article of the religious interaction effect. From the paper itself:

Our findings also reveal a significant interaction between religiosity and incivility on risk perception. (beta=-.07;p< .05). Among those exposed to uncivil comments, those with high levels of religiosity were more likely to report higher levels of risk perception and those with low levels of religiosity were more likely to report lower levels of risk perception...

So, yeah… incivility contributes to polarization of positions. Perhaps especially with regard to religious issues. And incivility is a weapon, it appears. Not that it should be, but it is. Incivility and argument should be orthogonal… but it seems, empirically, they are not.

Civility matters, empirically, it seems. And truth matters. And people are more swayed by incivility than by truth, especially where religion is concerned. So… dickishness, on such comment threads, is actually an adaptive trait, contributing to one’s cause?

We are all so screwed.

Success!!

So today at the store, I got back 60 cents in change. All well and good, but when I grabbed the quarters to put them in the pile for de-godding, I noticed that one of them looked a little different. “In [smudge] We Trust”, it read, unless my eyes deceived me.

success

Yes! Now, I had never used any quarters at that store, so this must have come from a parking meter, or from the little cafe near my office, or from the UNICEF box at Halloween. Not from a busker–they always got dollar coins, and always more than one (even the lousy ones got 2 bucks minimum–I kept telling myself, it’s not my money to spend, it’s our money to put in circulation).

This coin does look like one of mine, but of course there is another, even better possibility–that there are more of us out there, de-godding coins that will be around for decades.

Comfort: Calling All Christians!

It’s a target-rich environment, with atheists galore!
So it’s onward Christian soldiers, we’ll be marching as to war!
There are lots of you on Facebook, but I’m asking now for more,
Cos my comment threads are being overrun.
I’ve got godless by the thousands—it’s an atheist attack,
Every time I post a message, there are hundreds talking back
While I’ve got a truthful message, it’s the numbers that I lack
So I’m asking if you’d like to have some fun.

They believe in evolution, and they don’t believe in God
So it’s best that you should pity them—their brains are rather odd—
They are driven by desire, once you see through their façade,
Seeking darkness, and withdrawing from the Light
You can read through past discussions for the games that they have played
How they cursed and raged and taunted, while we turned a cheek and prayed
(Though that wasn’t too effective—I’m a little bit dismayed,
And it’s time to call crusaders in to fight!)

They will mock the Holy Bible, citing scripture for their sakes
They will twist the gospel passages and call them our mistakes
They’ll dismiss the Fall of Mankind as a tale of talking snakes
And deny the death of Jesus on the cross
There’s a time for contemplation; there is also time to act!
We must fight the godless heathens, but with dignity and tact
As we show the truth—the bible is uncontroverted fact—
Yes, we’ll humbly show the atheists who’s boss!

In a press release this past Sunday (I only saw it this morning), Ray “Bananaman” Comfort is putting out the word:

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 24, 2013 /Christian Newswire/ — Hundreds, if not thousands of atheists have become “followers” on Ray Comfort’s Facebook page, and he says that he needs help to reach them. There has been an influx of 80,000 followers in the last two months, and according to Facebook statistics the page has a “weekly total reach” of over a million people.

Comfort said, “I have looked at a number of other Facebook pages, and have seen an average of 30-40 comments from followers, however, it is not uncommon to get over 1,000 comments on one post on my page (one had over 1900 comments). With six posts each day we can’t possibly answer all their questions, and so I’m asking Christians to come and help–because this is a very real battle for a generation.”

Mind you, Comfort warns that good Christians might be tempted to take offense, at first blush:

You will need a lot of patience because many show up as though they are God’s intellectual gift to the world. They are extremely arrogant, very condescending, they say things that aren’t true, and they use worn out arguments.

He said, without a trace of irony.

But, of course, a more thorough understanding of these atheists will help you to pity them, rather than to take offense. You have to understand atheists, as Comfort does:

Christians need to keep in mind that atheists’ worldview allows them to lie and twist the Scriptures. They mock creation, say that God commands murder and the rape of women, and that the Bible is full of mistakes. However, the issue here isn’t about evolution, or even the existence of God. It’s about the pleasure of guilt-free sexual sin. Christianity threatens that freedom by saying that fornication and lust are morally wrong, and that God will hold them accountable. They love darkness and hate the light, and so they fight it with all their might and will hold back at nothing in their attempts to extinguish it. This is a wonderful opportunity to reach a Hell-bound world with the gospel of everlasting life. Please help us.

They do need help.

Free Speech, Or Plot To Kill And Eat His Wife?

We see these rights as absolute—
No state would dare restrict ‘em—
We have not broken any law…
Until there is a victim.

We’re free to speak of fantasies
Of murder, rage, or hate—
We haven’t crossed the line, of course,
Until… it is too late.

Our whispered, dark conspiracies
Are safely out of reach—
Until you find a body,
Hey, you can’t restrict free speech!

In the New York Times today, a troubling story of the cop on trial for conspiring to kill and eat a number of women, including his wife. She’s the one who accidentally stumbled across the evidence on a home computer. Her husband had been chatting on some fetish sites online, and she found detailed descriptions of how she and some of her friends were to be tortured, killed, and cannibalized.

Or… the officer was merely engaging in fantasy writing, with no plans to actually do anything he described. Torture porn has a market, after all, and the first amendment is there to protect the speech we detest. I have, in satirical verses, linked to a cannibalism site (one I sincerely believe is itself satire). These were only words, after all, and no one is harmed by mere words.

No one harmed. Imagine finding such writing, naming you (some people don’t have to stretch much to imagine such a thing). In this case, the woman moved from New York to Nevada, and contacted the FBI, understandably frightened for her life. No one harmed.

It will be interesting to watch this one play out. Words have consequences, and free speech is not absolute. And while this case is obviously an extreme, we can see the roles in this case reflected in so many other places. To what extent can you say, even to yourself, that hurting someone is any more acceptable because it is just with words?

There is one aspect to this case that sets it aside from the others that spring to mind–the officer clearly never intended his writing to be discovered by his wife. If it was mere fantasy (as the defense claims), any harm it did (and it did do real harm, unquestionably) was unintentional. There are others waving the free speech banner who are quite intentionally attacking others.

In a way, that makes them worse than this guy.

On Belief

There is a group of people
(they’ll be named before too long)
Who are likely to believe a thing
They’ve just been shown… is wrong.

They’re wrong, it seems, quite often,
But in truth, it brings no shame;
The errors are so commonplace
We’ve given each a name!

There’s type 1 and type 2 error—
The distinction here is this:
The former is a false alarm;
The latter is a miss.

Suppose you find significance
(and do a little dance)
There’s a certain probability
It’s only random chance

Or maybe you find nothing
And you’re pulling out your hair
It’s possible you missed it
But there still is something there!

Belief opposed to evidence
Is faith—or so they say
But scientists (I’ve named the group!)
May do it every day!

At the risk of being misunderstood and quote-mined, I need to address something. I was reminded, by a really bad attempt at taking down “the new atheism”, that there are people who don’t know what they are talking about when it comes to belief. These people exist among the faithful, but also among us godless sorts. And, in part, slight misunderstandings on one hand are jumped upon by opportunists on the other hand (see the really bad attempt for an example) to misrepresent the process of science.

You see, the weird thing is, scientists are not immune to all the belief heuristics that everybody else falls prey to. Scientists want to be right, and will (or may) pay more attention to confirming evidence than disconfirming (when it comes to their own pet theory), will (or may) fall prey to predictable ingroup-outgroup biases, and will (or may) be far more eager to tear apart a competing theory than their own.

The difference between scientists and non-scientists, and the difference between believers and non-believers, isn’t so much in how individuals believe. (I mean, yes it can be, but this is a result of what I am about to say, not a cause.) Rather, it’s a difference in the structure that surrounds them.

The scientific community does not deny the effects of these biases. Rather, it harnesses them. A structure that systematically lets people support their own and tear down others’ ideas (call it “peer review”) harnesses our individual biases for the long-term good of the community. We don’t really need to be self-critical (though some certainly are) when we can set up an environment that will do that for us, systematically and more effectively.

So, yeah, when you are dealing with data that are probabilistic in nature, and when you intentionally and systematically make falsifiable predictions, there will necessarily be times when the data don’t play out the way you expect. And sometimes you will just know that you are right and the data are wrong. And sometimes you will be wrong. And sometimes (the cool thing is, for some of these values, an understanding of probability can let us know fairly well just how often) you will be right, and yes, the data are wrong (the bad news, of course, is that an understanding of probability won’t tell us which times you are right and the data are wrong.

But the scientific community doesn’t care about your pet theory. You can be biased all you want; so are your peers, and some of them want nothing more than to prove you wrong. And you want nothing more than to prove them wrong (and you right). And in the long run, you are crash-testing ideas, and only ideas that can survive the process will survive. In the long run.

There is a similar (well, functionally similar, but not similar in result) structure you can find in religion. Seriously. It’s called “apologetics”, and it is the system’s response to disconfirming data. Rather than rewarding and encouraging the refutation of an apparently bad idea (by others within the scientific community, at least), finding excuses for why the idea actually works is encouraged. (And if you can’t make it work… start a new religion!)

So… people are people. It’s the structures we are part of that allow us to rise above our biases to achieve more collectively than we ever could singly. It’s also the structures we are part of that can fortify our ignorance and make a virtue of non-questioning faith.

Scientists need not be anything special. But science is. And there is no reason to suspect that religious individuals are particularly prone to cognitive biases. But my goodness, religion as an institution (or set of institutions) seems to elevate the bias to an art form. The environments we have created, and which shape us, make us better, or worse, than we would be without them.

And that (as Frost said) has made all the difference.

On Free Will

Our free will, or its illusion,
Is the source of much confusion;
We make choices all the time, but can we say that they are free?
Mind and body in cohesion
Make us think we are Cartesian,
But the whole of modern science makes me want to disagree!
A causal mind’s existence,
Though a meme of some persistence,
Has the weight of long tradition, but the evidence is slim.
Our environment controls us;
Though Cartesian thought consoles us,
The truth is, we’re reactive, and we never act on whim.
Even my creative rhyming
Is controlled by sound and timing
And a history of consequences leading to this end;
Rhymes appear as chosen freely,
When the truth is different, really—
There are multiple parameters to which I must attend!

(Parenthetically, I mention
That “free will” will draw attention
To the action and its consequence, but little to its cause;
The resulting shift of focus
Makes it seem like hocus-pocus;
Through a bit of misdirection, it appears we break the laws!)

Reposted from here (where there are some links and comments worth seeing). Everything old is new again; I’m talking free will in another comments section. Gotta run to class; I’ll throw some links up in a bit.

Composing, Decomposing, Recomposing.

I was walking the cuttledog this evening when a refrain passed through what passes for my consciousness. I instantly recognized it—it was something I wrote maybe ten or fifteen (maybe 20!) years ago, part of an unfinished song.

At one point, I had written maybe 8-10 verses to this song (it’s kind of a ballad, but not in traditional ballad format; it’s a story of a relationship that goes from romantic to tragic to worse), and was actually quite proud of it (“happy” with it is not the right word for the subject matter of this song).

And then, something happened on the technological front that had ramifications I had not considered. Computers stopped using disks (I was going to say “floppy disks”, but they hadn’t really been “floppy” for quite some time). With everyone else, I made the migration over to bigger hard drives, to zip drive backups (remember those?), to CD-R backups, and all that jazz. And at some point (if I knew which point, it wouldn’t be a problem), this song stayed on a disk and did not make it to a hard drive. (Not the worst loss—I had a sound file of my then-infant daughter’s laugh I used as an alert; it was lost in the move to my first laptop, and I would gladly give a kidney if anyone could get it back.)

So I still have this song. Somewhere. On a disk. Among the hundreds of disks in my office, probably, or at my home, less probably. Mind you, I have no disk reader. Nor would that disk have been labeled in such a manner that would let me know it was the one. So, really, I don’t have this song anywhere.

And I don’t remember it. Hadn’t really even thought about it in at least a couple of years, to tell the truth. But really, it would be worth finishing—so I am embarking on a bit of an experimental journey. I composed this song, and it has since decomposed. And now, I am trying to recompose it. I am not the person I was ten or fifteen years ago—hell, I’m not the same person I was when I started this post—so I honestly don’t know if what I end up with (assuming I end up with something) will be anything close to what I would have written back then. But I am going to try to keep track of my progress, and attempt (who knows how successfully) to distinguish between what I remember from back then and what I come up with afresh this time.

And frankly, I will be disappointed if it comes out “meh.” Back then, I really thought this was good.

So… what have *you* lost in the great march of technology? Could you get it back? Will you try?

PS the working title of mine was always “only her eyes were blue”. So if you see that come up in the next few weeks, months, or years, that will be it.

We’re All Gonna Die!

We’re all gonna die! We’re all gonna die!
And it’s only a matter of time.
We’ll live on in memory, and then not at all
(and it’s not any better in rhyme)
The meek and the mighty, the great and the small
Will be gone. So the message is clear:
Since you won’t be immortal, you’ve no time to waste;
Get the most from your life while you’re here.

A strange day today… lots of death–and yet, none of it today.

Radiolab (on our local radio, at least–the episode was from 2009) had 11 meditations on death and dying. Listening, I found out things I did not know about myself–mostly, that I had very strong opinions on most of the segments, and that I disagreed (again, strongly) with a good many of their guests.

As I drove along, I took a bit of a detour in order to hear the whole program. I found myself driving a road I had not traveled in many years, not since my kids were small, and I was driving cuttleson to a friend’s house. I passed that house, and remembered that this kid… a boy from my daycare, whom I had read stories to while he lay on his cot… this boy had died in a fire, at the age of 19, a few years ago, overcome by smoke as he tried to reach the door.

One of the Radiolab segments, long time readers will not be surprised, reminded me of my brother’s death. My brother continues to make a difference, years after his death, in very specific ways–in my classes, in programs he started at his work, in community projects he initiated and contributed many hours to, let alone in the memories of his wife and children, who must miss him even more than I do.

Perhaps my favorite segment reminded me of the big picture. I will likely not be remembered in a century… but it is possible. I will almost certainly not be remembered in a thousand years… but some are remembered from a thousand years ago, so it still possible. This segment took a longer view. A hundred million years. Our species will, in all likelihood, be gone. Most of the species we know–perhaps all of the species we know–will be gone. My book will be transformed to carbon–342 sheets of paper-thin coal, the verses long gone. (Ok, that doesn’t bother me–not so much as the segment’s assertion that Mozart will be gone, presumably along with Beethoven, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Charlie Chaplin, Mae West, Louis Armstrong, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Justin Bieber).

We are all going to die–not just individually, but as civilizations, and as species. We won’t last forever.

Like the sidebar says… Since the music plays so briefly… can you blame me if I dance?

XKCD comic, “time robot”

(image, XKCD, of course)

Dear Mister Minister (re: DEAR MR ATHEIST)

Dear Mister Minister…

I read your little letter—and I disagree, I fear—
Since you don’t allow for comments there, I’ll have to comment here:
It’s written very clearly, and it isn’t very long,
But your letter has a fatal flaw: its premises are wrong!
You paint us a position, which you eagerly refute
But the rights you say we fight against are nothing we dispute!
You can put religious symbols up, in prominent display;
In the schools and in the courthouse, you have every right to pray;
You have built yourself a strawman as the target of your rant—
You may practice your religion… it’s the government that can’t.

In your houses, in your churches, in the windows of your store,
You can spraypaint “Merry Christmas” till your fingertips are sore
In a restaurant, as in your home, feel free to say your grace,
It’s your personal behavior, though it’s in a public place.
It’s the government’s behavior that’s restricted by our laws,
So the government’s the target of that first amendment clause
Our founders had their different faiths, and with those faiths as guides
They determined that our government should not be taking sides
So if one faith is promoted, in the courthouse or the schools,
Then the other faiths are second-class… and that’s against the rules.

You can see how this arrangement’s in the interest of the church
And it wouldn’t take you very long, if you should care to search,
To collect a load of cases where a church has been protected
From the power of a different church the government selected.
Should a town begin its meetings with a public “let us pray…”
But a handful of their citizens praise God a different way
Or are Muslims, Jews, or Hindus (but who live there nonetheless)
They can use the first amendment as the answer to this mess
It’s protection of religion at the center of the fights
As we teach each local government our first amendment rights

So the “Apprising Ministries” blog doesn’t allow comments, but pastor-teacher Ken Silva wrote an open letter to a “Mr. Atheist”:

This nation in which we live was—beyond question—founded by religious people. Now, I’m not saying Christian—but certainly people of deeply held religious convictions. There’s no way around that.

So, exactly what makes your perceived right not to have to view religious symbols in public places and hear people pray in public, trump my actual right to display such symbols and to pray in public?

There’s a neat trick there–did you catch it?

I’m purposely avoiding the red herring about Christianity here as the founders considered “these truths self-evident,” that men are created, which presupposes the Creator Who endows them with rights.

He tells us he’s avoiding that red herring… but then goes on to present the real red herring, his second paragraph. No atheist I am aware of (even those who find such practices annoying, though I’ll admit there are a few of those) wants to deny pastor Ken his right to view religious symbols or pray in public. Not in the slightest. He can put them in his lawn, on the lawn of his church, in the front window of his store, or anywhere where the property owners have given him permission to dos so. Mind you, he can’t put them in my yard, but he doesn’t seem to have a problem with that. He can pray in my yard, if he happens to stop by there while walking his dog. I can’t stop him from that.

But if he is acting as a representative of the government–as mayor, councilperson, public school teacher, or judge, for instance, then he cannot, while acting on behalf of the government, favor one religion over another. He’ll have to wait until he’s on his own time.

Pastor Ken is right–our founding fathers were religious. They held different faiths, and saw what happens when one, but not others, of those faiths are chosen as the official faith of the government. For the protection of religious groups themselves, they chose to prohibit the government from taking sides.

Looks to me like the government likes to talk about selected views of America’s founding fathers while conveniently ignoring the fact that the religious should prevail in such things, not the atheists.

Pastor Ken, your fight against atheists is a very recent thing. The first amendment establishment clause was meant to protect your faith against other faiths (and vice versa). Even today, for instance in Jackson, OH, one of the plaintiffs is a Christian. That person’s Christian views are at odds with the Christian views held by the school board. Now, those school board members have every right to practice their religion. But when they are acting as school board members (a minority of their time, and under very specific circumstances) they are the government, and the government has no right to treat this Christian plaintiff like a second-class citizen because of his or her religious beliefs.

I should hope you would be in favor of protecting this plaintiff’s rights. But it’s tough, when you are in the privileged position of an overwhelming religious majority, to recognize that the giving up of some of your privilege is not the same as an infringement on your rights.

Atheists are not fighting against your rights. We actually fight for them. But rights belong to everyone; if you want special treatment (say, the ability to have the government support your view exclusively), that is not a right, that’s a privilege.

So, back to your question:

So, exactly what makes your perceived right not to have to view religious symbols in public places and hear people pray in public, trump my actual right to display such symbols and to pray in public?

Let me fix that, because it’s just not true.

What makes your perceived right to have government support for your religion, trump everyone else’s actual right to be free from government intrusion into their religion?