Some days, I question how different my path to atheism differs from other people’s paths. About a year before my bar mitzvah, I began asking what the point was of religion, but I can’t honestly say I did any real follow-through on that question at the time.
As you probably know, Sanal Edamaruku is in flight from his home in India, because the police want to arrest him for exposing a Catholic miracle as a case of leaking pipes. I would not tell anyone where he actually is, but I can tell you where he was: Kaja Bryx of the Lower Silesia Branch of Polish Rationalist Association sent me a note with an account.
Sanal Edamaruku, President of Indian Rationalist Association, stayed in Poland from 30th June to 20th July, hosted by Polish Rationalist Association (Polskie Stowarzyszenie Racjonalistów, PSR). As we all know, he was at that time escaping the threat of being arrested for blasphemy in his own country.
During his stay in Poland Sanal Edamaruku gave lectures in most of the PSR’s branch cities and took part in PSR’s actions. On 2nd July he participated in a public debate on freedom of expression which PSR organized in Warsaw. On 8th July he presented his first paper Contrast of two Indias – 21st century and 16th century at conflict in the city of Wroclaw. Two days later, together with Jacek Tabisz, President of Polish Rationalist Association, Sanal Edamaruku signed (for Indian Rationalist Association and Rationalist International), the trilateral co-operation agreement, which is available both in Polish and in English version on our website.
On 11th July Sanal Edamaruku gave a lecture in Katowice, presenting Church in India – growing intolerance. On 13th July in Cracow he spoke on Growing fundamentalist tendencies among Indian religions. On 14th July in Szczecin crowds came to listen about Holy men in India – flying fakirs to starving saints. On 17th July another lecture took place in Poznan: Will Indian rationalism counter the new wave of religiosity in India? Finally, on 19th July, back in Warsaw, Sanal Edamaruku presented a feminism oriented topic: Influence of religion on the status and situation of women in India.
During his stay in Poland Sanal Edamaruku had an opportunity to meet many of the members of PSR and exchange information about the problems rationalists face both in Poland and in India. He heard the story of Kazimierz Lyszczynski, the first Polish atheist who was condemned to death for his teachings in the 17th century Warsaw, and decided to publish a book about him. Many Polish rationalists inspired by the lectures of Sanal Edamaruku and by the co-operation agreement are willing to go to India and join the actions of Indian Rationalist Association.
You go, Sanal! Even in exile he’s spreading the news about reason and the affliction of religion.
This is the punchline:
You’ll have to read the rest for the setup.
And then there’s the meta punch line. I’m teaching introductory biology again this semester. Starting next Thursday. Also second-year cell biology, starting Wednesday. I’m already counting down to 7 December, the last day of classes — this is going to be a very tough term.
I am an atheist because God if God exists, he could tell me what the best Steven Spielberg movie is.
I had been wondering for a while whether I should join the masses and add my own answer (and story) to the question “why are you an atheist?”. The new year brought with it a sense of “why the hell not?”.
Reading the answers of others, i’ve seen it often helps to give some basic background first. Don’t worry, most of it is relevent to the actual answer. I’m a person of the male persuasion in my early 20s, living in the pleasant (if you like mud) countryside of the east of England. I’m pretty much the stereotype of a geek/gamer (without the “fat, no sense of personal hygiene and glasses” parts). I grew up a basic countryside-dwelling family (as an only child), complete with the usual passive conservatism and Christianity – passive in the sense that it’s just “there”, everyone expects everyone else thinks the same as they do, so the subjects rarely come up. This is hardly perfect, but a lot better than being bombarded with it every day. But in other ways, it’s a lot more insidious.
The new American Atheist billboard designs are now online, and I don’t want to disappoint Dave Silverman, so I’ll give my usual review: better than the last set, but still needs work.
Stuff I like: it’s a strong, assertive message, and that’s what I want from AA. The “Atheism: Simply Reasonable” slogan is clear, short, punchy. They’ve gotten away, mostly, from the blocky multi-colored Mondrian look of previous signs.
Stuff I don’t like: the text on the left is 5 lines long. That’s too much for a billboard. The central image is sort of arbitrary — it says religion is silly, but it doesn’t contribute much to the message on the left. The other billboard, on Mormonism, is worse in this regard; why is there a guy in his underwear there? Really, on a billboard, everything must be distilled down to deliver one clear, simple argument.
I know Dave is rolling his eyes right now and wondering why he’s even trying to lead those fractious, critical atheists at all…wouldn’t sheep be so much easier?
There is a magic and arbitrary line in ordinary statistical testing: the p level of 0.05. What that basically means is that if the p level of a comparison between two distributions is less than 0.05, there is a less than 5% chance that your results can be accounted for by accident. We’ll often say that having p<0.05 means your result is statistically significant. Note that there’s nothing really special about 0.05; it’s just a commonly chosen dividing line.
Now a paper has come out that ought to make some psychologists, who use that p value criterion a lot in their work, feel a little concerned. The researchers analyzed the distribution of reported p values in 3 well-regarded journals in experimental psychology, and described the pattern.
Here’s one figure from the paper.
The solid line represents the expected distribution of p values. This was calculated from some theoretical statistical work.
…some theoretical papers offer insight into a likely distribution. Sellke, Bayarri, and Berger (2001) simulated p value distributions for various hypothetical effects and found that smaller p values were more likely than larger ones. Cumming (2008) likewise simulated large numbers of experiments so as to observe the various expected distributions of p.
The circles represent the actual distribution of p values in the published papers. Remember, 0.05 is the arbitrarily determined standard for significance; you don’t get accepted for publication if your observations don’t rise to that level.
Notice that unusual and gigantic hump in the distribution just below 0.05? Uh-oh.
I repeat, uh-oh. That looks like about half the papers that report p values just under 0.05 may have benefited from a little ‘adjustment’.
What that implies is that investigators whose work reaches only marginal statistical significance are scrambling to nudge their numbers below the 0.05 level. It’s not necessarily likely that they’re actually making up data, but there could be a sneakier bias: oh, we almost meet the criterion, let’s add a few more subjects and see if we can get it there. Oh, those data points are weird outliers, let’s throw them out. Oh, our initial parameter of interest didn’t meet the criterion, but this other incidental observation did, so let’s report one and not bother with the other.
But what it really means is that you should not trust published studies that only have marginal statistical significance. They may have been tweaked just a little bit to make them publishable. And that means that publication standards may be biasing the data.
Masicampo EJ, and Lalande DR (2012). A peculiar prevalence of p values just below .05. Quarterly journal of experimental psychology PMID: 22853650
It took me a long time to jettison the religious beliefs that had been instilled in me from my early youth. While my father, an ordained deacon, was almost silent on religious matters while at home, my mother made certain that I knew of her beliefs every day. She taught sunday school to teenage girls in our local Baptist church, and pressed my brother and me into attendance whether we liked it or not.
Maggie Koerth-Baker, ex-fundamentalist, has a fine post up explaining why fundamentalists are against seemingly innocuous things like set theory. It’s because it’s symptomatic of a deeper conflict with the modern world.
Instead, they see modernism as the opposing worldview to their own. They are all about tradition (or, at least, what they have decided is traditional). Modernism is a knee-jerk rejection of tradition in favor of the new. Obviously, they think a very specific sort of Christian God should be the center of everything and all parts of society, public and private. Modernists prefer ideas like secular humanism and think God is something you should be doing in private, on your own time. They believe strongly in the importance of power hierarchies and rules. Modernism smashes all of that and says, “Hey, just do your own thing. Nobody’s ideas are any better or worse than anybody else’s. There’s no right and wrong. Go crazy, man!” [Insert obligatory bongo drumming session]
I am hamming this up a bit, but you get the picture. Modernism, to the publishers of A Beka math books, is sick and wrong. The idea is that if you reject their specific idea of God and their specific idea of The Rules, then you must be living in a crazy, dangerous world. You could kill people, and you would think it was okay, because you’re a modernist and you know there’s really no such thing as right and wrong. Basically, they’ve bumped into a need to separate themselves from the almost inhuman Other on a massive scale, and latched on to modernism as a shorthand for how to do that. It doesn’t matter what you or I actually believe, or even what we actually do. They know what we MUST believe and what we MUST be like because of the tenets of modernism.
I understand this. They’ve been brought up to think the godless world is a deeply dangerous threat to everything they hold precious, and it’s simpler to just shut down any thing that has to do with it. It’s like somebody has been told that some mushrooms are delicious, and others are deadly poisonous, and they’ve been told that they can, if they’re very careful, tell the difference between them…and they choose to never, ever eat mushrooms because they don’t want to go to the bother of learning how, and they also don’t want to put anyone they love at any risk at all. So they’re very, very cautious about new ideas, because their social structure is both important to them and sensitive to external perturbations.
I can even sympathize with this conclusion.
If this sounds crazy … you’re right. It’s pretty crazy. In fact, it’s this kind of thinking, and my realization that it was based fundamentally on lying about everybody who wasn’t a member of your religious tribe, that led me away from religion to begin with. Ironically. But there is a coherent thought process going on here, and I want you to understand that. If all you do is point and laugh at the fundies for calling set theory evil, then you are missing the point. This isn’t about them being stupid. It’s about who they think you are.
Yes, I can appreciate that. I could be toxic to their worldview. I’m (and you all, too) are dangerous in that we could damage their equilibrium and send their children — and maybe even themselves — off into new patterns of thought that would repudiate all that they hold dear right now.
I read Maggie Koerth-Baker’s piece and had no problem putting myself in their shoes: if someone were making a serious challenge to my social and intellectual framework, if I were concerned that some blundering clod could come along and with some thoughtless nudge, knock it all down, I’d be protective and suspicious, too. I would be building fences around my world to keep those evil insensitive assholes out.
And then I read stuff like this summary of what Bobby Jindal’s education plan is going to do to children in Louisiana: the stupidity of arguing that dinosaurs were fire-breathing dragons who lived into the middle ages, the callousness of teaching that the Trail of Tears was an opportunity for Christian proselytization, the evil of putting a happy shine on slavery and the KKK, the equation of gay people with child molesters and rapists, the contempt for the environment, and I think…
Tear it all down.
They’ve built cages for themselves and their children, and have beliefs that harm others. I can see that they’re quivering in fear at the modernists, the liberals, the gays, the atheists, all coming to expose their ‘worldview’ for the rickety tissue of lies and hate that it is, and I say…no mercy. No hesitation. No apologies. Break it apart, and set those people free.
Pointing and laughing is just one step in the process of liberating those Christians trapped in their prison of lies. I can feel pity for them, while I let reality crash into their delusions and send them scurrying. They fear change, but they must change.
Whatever it was, it was noteworthy enough to get a brief mention in the Star Tribune.
