The McGurk effect

Blog reader Henry sent me the link to this clip from the BBC program Horizon of what is known as the McGurk effect, that shows that when the brain receives two different inputs, one aural and one visual, the brain forces you to register just one. Lawrence Rosenblum of the University of California, Riverside explains this effect and demonstrates how in this particular case the visual overrides the sound.

If we cannot do such a simple act of multitasking, imagine how unlikely it is that we can do more complex and challenging multitasking.

The real lessons from the story of Joshua

The lack of historicity of the Bible is rampant. To take just one example, there is no evidence for the triumphalist story of Joshua leading the Israeli soldiers, just returned from their (also fictitious) captivity in Egypt, in one victory to another over the various towns in Canaan. The most famous battle is the one for Jericho. But archeological excavations reveal that far from being a big fortressed city whose walls fell under a military onslaught that was favored by their god, Jericho was an insignificant little town that was unwalled.
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The motives of the Templeton Foundation

The June 21, 2010 issue The Nation has a good article by Nathan Schneider titled God, Science and Philanthropy that looks at the work of this wealthy foundation that dangles generous grants and a cash prize every year that is larger than the Nobel prize that goes, as Richard Dawkins says, “usually to a scientist who is prepared to say something nice about religion.”

Along with providing support for politically right-wing organizations, the foundation’s goal seems to be to lure scientists to sign on to the idea that science and religion are compatible. Nobel prize winning chemist Harold Kroto is one of those fighting back against it and says of the foundation that “They are involved in an exercise that endangers the fundamental credibility of the scientific community.”

The myth of multitasking

Since I work at a university and am around young adults all the time, I have long been aware that young people today are avid consumers of multimedia, who are adept at emailing, texting, listening to mp3 players, surfing the web, checking up on Facebook, etc. It seems like they are quite proficient at multitasking.

I have always been a poor multitasker. I cannot read or do any work that requires serious thinking if I can hear conversation or loud noises in the background. I have found that I cannot even listen to music in the background when reading. But I know people who seem to thrive on that kind of ambient sound and even deliberately go to coffee shops to do work such as grading papers or writing, things that would be impossible for me.
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New documentary The Lord is Not on Trial Here Today

One of the key cases involving church-state separation (discussed in my book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom) was McCollum v. Board of Education (1948) which involved a challenge to the practice of public schools granting “release time” for the teaching of religion in school buildings during the school day to those students and parents who agreed to it. The U.S. Supreme Court by an 8-1 vote ruled the policy unconstitutional. This was the first time that religious instruction in public schools had been explicitly ruled to be unconstitutional under the U.S. constitution.

It turns out that Vashti McCollum, the feisty mother who brought the case objecting to this practice and braved the wrath of the religious people in her small town in Illinois, is still alive died only in 2006 (thanks to reader George for pointing out the error) and some PBS stations will be broadcasting a new award-winning documentary The Lord is Not on Trial Here Today that deals with her case. Here is a preview.

If your local PBS station is not listed on that site, you can call them and ask them to consider showing it.

The dark side of the Rapture

I have heard reports that a caravan of vehicles with billboards announcing the end of the world on May 21 passed through Cleveland a couple of weeks ago. When May 22 dawns and no Rapture has occurred, there will be a lot of disappointed people. This will not be the first time that such hopes have been dashed. There was a major event actually called The Great Disappointment that occurred on October 22, 1844 [date corrected thanks to commenter Robert] when a widely believed end times prophesy failed to materialize.

While Christianity has always had its end-times fanatics, it was the creation of the state of Israel that spawned a huge amount of end-times theorizing because these people believe that Jesus will only return to Earth after the Jews returned to Israel. This is also why there is such a weird symbiotic relationship between Christian and Jewish extremist groups. The expansionist policies of Israel that have ruined the lives of so many Palestinians is supported by the Christian end-timers because they think it is a sign that Jesus has packed his bags and is about to make the return trip to Earth.

I have been having some fun with the whole Rapture thing, because the idea is so absurd. But there is a dark side to it, in that many of the people who take it seriously are making foolish decisions and could ruin their lives. NPR ran a story on some of the people who are waiting to be raptured. One couple with an infant daughter and another baby due in June have abandoned plans for the mother to go to medical school and are spending all their money down so that they will be left with nothing on May 21, arguing that there is no point since it will all come to an end. In another story, NPR described a person who sold off his house and gave up his job to await the event. A colleague of mine described how her former sister-in-law believed in an earlier rapture prediction of 1994 and ran up huge credit card bills that then took a long time to pay off. These people refuse to consider that they might be wrong because to do so would be a sign of lack of faith and cause god to not select them for heaven.

If no Rapture occurs, the people responsible for the predictions will use the standard excuse that the calculations were faulty and go back to the drawing board. This is what current Rapture predictor Harold Camping said in 1994 when his earlier prediction did not pan out. He said it was because he had not read the book of Jeremiah that contained some important clues. That seems a little irresponsible to me. If you are basing a major prediction such as the end of the world on the Bible, and people are taking you seriously, you should at least have had the decency to do your homework and read the whole thing.

In a comment to a previous post, Scott jokingly suggested that it might be fun on May 21 to leave little piles of clothes around because that would be a sign to the believers that people have been suddenly raptured up to heaven. That would be funny except that we have to remember that we are dealing with seriously deluded people who do not think rationally. If these people think that the Rapture had actually occurred and they were not selected and were headed for hell, there is no saying what they will do and it is quite possible that they will go berserk.

Richard Dawkins was asked by the Washington Post to comment on the latest Rapture frenzy and said: “Why is a serious newspaper like the Washington Post giving space to a raving loon?” He then has a good discussion of how the word ‘tradition’ used as in ‘religious tradition’ tends to bestow respectability on a set of nonsensical myths that have no foundation.

I disagree with Dawkins. We should publicize as widely as possible the crazy and evil things that religions cause people to do. Mainstream religions provide the soil in which the crazies can take root and flourish. We need more and more people to realize that these deluded people are deeply misguided because they are connected organically to mainstream religion, not separate from it. Having a public relations fiasco like the Rapture can only help the cause of skepticism.

How many people has the Judeo-Christian god killed?

Someone has had the fortitude to go through the Bible and tabulate all the people killed by this particular god. The problem is that while sometimes the numbers are given precisely, on other occasions the figures have to be estimated.

The result? 2,476,636 if you count up the actual numbers and, if you include those killings for which no precise numbers are provided, an estimated 25 million.

(via Jerry Coyne.)