So many kooks, so little time. I’m glad some else is covering the chemtrails beat — that combination of quackery, pseudoscience, gullibility, and conspiracy theorist is exhausting.
I grew up in a Catholic household and attended parochial schools from kindergarten until high school graduation. I took communion weekly but never truly swallowed what the sacrement was intended to be: the conversion of a strange round wafer into the body of Jesus. I told myself I believed it, and I said, “Amen,” when it was my turn in the communion line. I knew what the right answer was–and by golly, I wanted that “A.”
At around age eight, the tapestry started to unravel. After learning of the existence of different belief systems around the world, it occurred to me that one line in the profession of faith we recited was obnoxious, arrogant, and unfair to non-Catholics: “We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.” I stopped saying it as a form of silent protest.
I quit going to mass once I went to college. I dabbled with various denominations after I married an Episcopalian, especially after we moved to a small southern town and had kids. Not only did it provide a comfortable community, it seemed like what we should be doing, particularly for our sons. My attendance was sporadic at best, and ceased altogether when we moved to a small college town in southwest Virginia, though my family continues to attend a church.
When my oldest was 12 or so, I was holding forth to him on my thoughts about religion. It started with my disdain for organized religions, the hypocrisy and judgmentalism of many religious people, yet a concession that many others–people we know–are good and derive profound benefits from religious faith. I explained that in high school, I learned that “religion” is defined as “answers to the questions of the mysteries of life,” then held forth on the mythologies that peoples of various cultures have developed over the millennia to explain how and why we are here. Given the numbers, the variety and the lack of accord, I just doubted that any one was correct. And given the advances in scientific understanding of matters that address many of these questions, I didn’t really have much use for religion after all.
He asked, “So are you an atheist?” I said I didn’t think so, but would get back to him. Despite my indoctrinated aversion to that label, I felt I owed him and his younger brother an honest evaluation and answer.
I began reading Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason, and on a weekend home alone, watched Julia Sweeney’s Letting Go of God, which moved me to tears of relief. It was as though I could finally let go of the last gossamer thread of the falsehood. Finally, I’d found ideas, thoughts, concepts and a worldview that accorded with my own, that rang effortlessly true with an unmistakable clarity.
At long last, I recognize that we must write our own test of truth; it is our responsibility to find honest answers for ourselves. As for me, I believe that there are no gods. I am an atheist. I’ve earned this “A.”
This isn’t so much about why I am an atheist so much as when I recognized that I was one. In the 70s, the public schools in Richmond VA had become such inner-city honor-culture shit holes that my parents, aware of my general timid nature, decided to send me to a cheap Catholic school instead. My experience there, despite bullying by peers was actually kind of pleasant. The nuns were the full-on types regarding their habits and convent life, but were of that odd variety that probably emerged after Vatican II was put into place. Guitar masses, Kum-ba-ya, warm fuzzies=good, cold pricklies=bad and all that. On nice days we had classes outside. The math program was especially good, and there was no in-school time dedicated to Catholic doctrine or any other Xtian doctrine to speak of. I imagine there must have been a morning prayer but those kinds of banal memories are the first to get washed away as we get older. There was, however, mandatory mass on Tuesdays and Thursdays which I kind of liked since they were held in a beautiful church next to and affiliated with the church that Patrick Henry ostensibly gave his “give me liberty” speech. ( Oh, and George Washington slept here too…I’m just sayin’). And there was the ritual and the mediaeval sounding call and response largely sung in Latin. All very exotic and entirely new to me.
But tender souls beg for beatings just by existing, so of course there were bullies, two in particular that gave me such regular grief that I actually kept a little notebook that mapped out where and when I shouldn’t be at any given place and time in order to avoid “the boot” as it were. The thing is, they were terrified of the main priest who presided over the church and the school, and most of that anxiety centered on the mandatory monthly confessions that all the Catholic kids were required to make. Although required for the Catholic kids, it was “optional” (could it have even been allowed? I couldn’t take communion for instance) for non-Catholics. I remember the first non-threatening thing those boys said to me was along the lines of “you’re lucky you don’t have to go to confession.” I said it didn’t seem that bad, so, in a change of tactic, instead of threatening me, they dared me to go to confession, and there would be a five dollar bill at the end of it if I did.
The anonymous side of the confessional was like you would imagine. However, there was also an option to sit with the priest face to face, and I’m sure this is what I was being paid to do. So I did it. He was a nice enough guy. I remember him asking if I was Catholic (he must have smelled my Methodist blood), and me saying no and him asking why I had come. I told him I was just curious and then he asked if there was anything I wanted to confess. I told him I had hit my sister and talked back to my parents (neither of which I had done), then conveniently skipped the part about my recent discovery of the joys of masturbation (I was 12).So, long story short; The bullies actually paid up and then quit bothering me after that. I remember thinking ‘what were they so afraid of’, followed by a quick and completely uninteresting realization that it was all crap. I also realized at that moment that I had never believed any of it in the first place. I had just never really thought about it.
There was also a time when I was 6, when I prayed to god that my runaway basset hound would come home. I remember even then feeling like I was simply hedging my bets. Might as well? You know?…Shows what a crock Pascal’s wager is…Cross your fingers behind your back…Even a kid can do it!…right.
Ashley Bell
Sometimes, following the path scientific results take as they enter more mass media awareness really is like a game of telephone — you can scarcely recognize the original work in the final summary that ends up in the news media. And sometimes, you find that the scientists contributed to the ghastly mess.
Take a look at this silly story, “Could ‘Advanced’ Dinosaurs Rule Other Planets?”, illustrated with a picture of a T. rex stalking the landscape.
Yeah. Right. I’d like to know what kind of research is finding intelligent dinosaurs on other planets. All you have to do, though, is read beyond the first paragraph to discover that this is from an article published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, that it is entirely about the chirality of prebiotic chemistry, and that its primary speculation is that the predominance of left-handed, or L amino acids, in our biochemistry is a consequence of a bias in the delivery of extraterrestrial amino acids to Earth…that biology expanded on a bias in the handedness of the raw materials at the beginning of life.
This work answers some of the questions in the general idea that the unusual amino acids delivered to Earth by the Murchison meteorite and related ones could have led to the dominance of L amino acids and D sugars on early Earth that would permit life to start.
OK, it’s a kind of fundamental chemistry. I didn’t dig too deeply into the science, mainly because I was terribly put off by the abominable English in the paper. Try to make sense of that sentence above; it’s an abomination, a muddle that confuses a modern instance, the Murchison meteorite, with ancient sources, and also is a general tangle of referents. Don’t chemists have to take a writing course somewhere in their careers?
But the main point to notice is that it’s not about dinosaurs. It can’t be about dinosaurs. It has zero relevance to dinosaurs. But then, the author flippantly tosses in some patent nonsense about dinosaurs in his last paragraph.
An implication from this work is that elsewhere in the universe there could be life forms based on D amino acids and L sugars, depending on the chirality of circular polarized light in that sector of the universe or whatever other process operated to favor the L α-methyl amino acids in the meteorites that have landed on Earth. Such life forms could well be advanced version of dinosaurs, if mammals did not have the good fortune to have the dinosaurs wiped out by an asteroidal collision, as on Earth. We would be better off not meeting them.
Clumsy English again, but worse, it’s stupid biology. Animal-like creatures that might evolve on other worlds will not be and cannot be dinosaurs. There is no reason to imagine that a saurian-mammalian transition is anything but a particular quirk of our particular planet’s evolutionary history — it is not a universal. This is nothing but badly written nonsense.
It is published in JACS in their “just accepted” category, which means the science has passed peer-review, but hasn’t been edited or formatted or proofed by the author. I hope that stupid paragraph gets cut; I also hope someone competent at writing in the English language takes it apart.
But the author ought to be a bit embarrassed at his ignorance of biology, and Science Daily ought to be ashamed about taking an idiotic paragraph and turning it into sensationalistic garbage.
Although, you know, if you want to make your scientific research newsworthy, all you’ve got to do is toss in some babble about extraterrestrial super-intelligent T. rexes, and it will get lots of attention. Maybe you think it isn’t relevant to your research, maybe you do psychology or statistics or bioinformatics or epidemiology or ethology…it doesn’t matter. Throw it in anyway. That’s what happened in this paper, after all.
(Also on Sb)
Jessica Ahlquist got a nasty, threatening letter. Here’s what really bugs me about it: threats are common, and Jessica clearly pissed off a lot of Christians by insisting that a public school not promote religion … but this letter is full of sexual slander and rape threats. WHY? This is not a sexual issue. She’s a minor; the last thing you should be talking about is having sex with her.
So I’m just curious, misogynist scumbags of the world. When a woman cuts you off in traffic, or annoys you by taking too long at the grocery check out line, or any of a multitude of other trivial offenses, does that somehow immediately convert the offender into a prostitute, does it justify rape, and do you think any man would similarly be transformed into a sex worker who can be violently attacked?
I’m just trying to wrap my mind around how those people think.
I’m an atheist because it is natural to be so.
In every time, people who were not subjected to irrational fears and intelligent enough to be free from social conditioning were atheists.
That has been true for a very long time: the first documented atheists were Greek philosophers about 2500 years ago.
Through time, when social conditions let life be bearable, people have found they don’t need a god to fear or invoke in battle.
So, let’s say everyone is being born an atheist, and so he/she remains as long as no one makes his/her life miserable by terrorizing her/him.
Fernando Santagata
Italy
Tennessee is taking a big step backward with a new “academic freedom” bill that will open the doors of the public schools to a whole flood of nonsense. Students at the University of Tennessee sent a polite letter to the governor explaining the problems with the bill.
Dear Governor Haslam,
We are writing to you regarding HB368/SB893. As graduate students at the University of Tennessee, we strongly believe that this Bill represents a step backward for Tennessee and our state’s ascending recognition for Science and STEM education. We are specifically writing to address the nature of the Bill itself, which we feel was not adequately discussed during either the House or Senate hearings and misrepresents the undivided consensus among anthropologists, biochemists, biologists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists, genome scientists, geographers, and molecular biologists.
If given a cursory reading, this Bill appears to advocate for intellectual freedom in the classroom and hence would seem prudent. However, it is abundantly clear from both a careful reading and from the testimony at hearings that the intent of this Bill is to encourage teachers to call into question universally accepted scientific principles.
In Section 1(a)(2) of SB893, the generally assembly states “The teaching of some scientific subjects, including, but not limited to, biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning, can cause controversy;”
We agree. However, this “controversy” is not scientific. The controversy to which the Bill alludes is the reluctance of non-scientists to accept these principles due to certain religious and political beliefs. This can be the only explanation for the inclusion of human cloning in the Bill. Human cloning is solely an ethical issue. There is no scientific debate on how to clone an organism or whether genetic clones can be created. It is a fact that humans can create genetic clones. Only the ethics of the issue is at stake.
Scientific evidence supporting the occurrence of biological evolution, global climate change, and the chemical origin of life are not controversial among scientists. Scientists universally accept these principles based on their predictability and the overwhelming evidence supporting them. Among scientists, the controversy exists in the details such as how changes in temperatures will affect biodiversity or what evolutionary forces
regulate the speciation process. This type of discussion is due to the very nature of science, which requires the constant acquisition and analysis of data.However, this is not the controversy to which the Bill speaks. The bill later states, in section 1(c), that “The state board of education . . . shall endeavor to assist teachers to find effective ways to present the science curriculum as it addresses scientific controversies.” This wording seems to imply that the controversy for these aforementioned subjects lies in the scientific realm where in reality they lie only in the political and religious ones.
We fear that this bill only ostensibly supports “critical thinking” in Tennessee’s classrooms. Instead, by implying that subjects such as evolution and global warming are “debatable”, this bill achieves the exact opposite of its purported goal. This is tantamount to encouraging educators to suggest students in science classes disregard the very nature of the scientific process and ignore factual data in favor of the beliefs of some individuals. Scientists cannot ignore data in favor of personal biases. If they did, they would be discredited as non-objective.
This Bill is a step backwards and would do irreparable harm to the development of STEM education in this state. As university educators, we continually face the challenge of losing students’ interests in science courses when they arrive at The University of Tennessee because they are frustrated by their lack of sufficient preparation. Many of them know very little about evolution by natural selection or the mechanisms of global climate change. We hope that you see that as with the legislatures who passed this bill, we too are concerned about the education of children in Tennessee.
This passage of this Bill has the potential to cost the state dearly in terms of lost revenue, a poorly trained scientific workforce, and an exodus of scientists and educators who do not wish to have their discipline diluted with non-scientific biases. We fear that calling into question scientific support of foundations to biological theory will cripple the ability of Tennessee’s students to become functional scientists, doctors, professionals, and contributing members of many growing fields.
We ask that you please thoughtfully consider our position, and veto this bill. Thank you for your time.
Signed,
Graduate Researchers in Ecology, Behavior, and Evolutionary Biology (G.R.E.B.E)
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville[56 grad students from EEB and other departments signed the petition]
Now this is it: this is the last day before Haslam signs the bill into law. Contact the governor and urge him to veto this embarrassing law.
Here’s the contact information for his office:
Phone: (615) 741-2001
Fax: (615) 532-9711
email: [email protected]
World-wide criticism would be helpful at this point.
I once had a believer ask me “Every atheist I’ve met believes in something. So what do you believe in if not God?”
“Nothing” I replied. At the time, this was probably true. Even now, I can’t say that belief takes any part in what I consider to be transcendent, but there are some things I know to be true, and this knowledge, gained through science, is what allows me to comfortably call myself an atheist.
I don’t have to believe that mankind is like a newborn baby who’s eyes are darting around a lit room for the first time and noticing things, it’s self evident. To a newborn, everything is surprising, everything is new. As her attention shifts from her mother’s nose, to her eyes, she is learning. She’s adding it all up and forming a cumulative collage of her surroundings. Over time she’ll begin to understand who she is and develop a sense of self.
Humans are doing the same thing as we focus our telescopes at the farthest depths of a vast and incomprehensible universe, or hurl protons at one another at close to light speed to see if we can catch a glimpse of what they are made of when they collide and break down into even smaller pieces. Mankind is an infant in an infinite universe. It doesn’t require belief to recognize or understand this.
Just as a newborn would feel alone and helpless if she didn’t see the soothing eyes and hear the gentle voice of her mother, so does humankind look out into her universe and pray that there is something there, some comfort to be found. Here a believer would say that there IS something there. They claim they can see their celestial father smiling back at them and stroking their hair. “It’s all right” they hear him say, “I will take care of you if you trust in me.”
I do not share that delusion, but I do however feel that sense of longing. I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t. All mammals, most birds, and a smaller percentage of cold blooded animals exhibit extremely tight bonds between at least the mother and her young through infancy and adolescence. Not until they are ready to survive on their own do parents cut ties with their offspring. Evolution has thoroughly conditioned us to need that relationship. It doesn’t surprise me that we collectively long for a cosmic hug.
However, as we humans open our eyes for the first time, and let out that first intergalactic scream, we are coming to the conclusion through science that our virgin birth has luckily not rendered us helpless or alone at all. More like a colt or a fawn, we are able to hit the ground running and fend for ourselves. Billions of years of evolution have already done the job of making us self sufficient. No parenting is needed, no hand holding or teaching; we will learn and grow, and when we reach adulthood in some distant future we will be beautiful, strong, confident and humble for having made it so far; together, not alone.
The sense of awe and wonder I feel when thinking about such things doesn’t require me to believe in anything supernatural or irrational. It doesn’t require me to take anything on faith.The feeling that comes over me when I’m able to just sit and think about the universe and how lucky I am to be a part of it, but yet how small we all are in it’s presence, is a transcendent experience that requires me to “believe” nothing, only to come to “know” as much as I can in the blink of an eye we call a lifetime.
I find comfort through knowledge, not faith. Life has meaning because there remain things to be known. To the believer, a life with unanswered questions is void of meaning, to me, a life with all the answers penciled for me is pointless.
Erik Abretske
It’s about to be a long weekend of triumphant atheism in Australia, and Richard Dawkins set things up by sacrificing that idiot, George Pell, on the altar of reason. The whole debate is now online.
I was really unimpressed with most of the audience’s questions, and even less impressed with Pell. Pell threw in Atheist Hitler at about 11 minutes in, and some smug audience member exhibited his confusion about atheism and agnosticism at 14 minutes. Also, the guy at 21 minutes with a video embarrassed all Australians, I think.
It’s a good warmup for the rest of the week, though.
It was also a warmup for Richard: here he is the next morning on the radio.
I’m not against diplomacy; I don’t think you need to beat up the religious; I like nice people who represent atheism and humanism. What I can’t stand are the simpering suckups who give away the store in the name of getting along.
If you want to see how it’s done right, watch Andrew Copson, the British humanist. He’s all friendly and understanding, offering helpful, reasonable explanations, without budging an inch on principle. Can we have more American humanists like that?
