An argument long since abandoned…

Hey, guys. Many years ago when I was of a less skeptical mind, I used an argument in support of the probable existence of psychic powers that I now consider to be a classic textbook example of a logical fallacy, several in fact, and have ever since then rejected its use.

A friend of mine (he shall remain unnamed) still uses the argument in our conversations on the subject of psi, and it goes something like this –

The real psychics are the ones no one knows about.

There are several problems with this argument… and I count at least four fallacies in it — a logical inconsistency, an argument from conspiracy, circular reasoning, and an ad hoc hypothesis…

First, the way it’s phrased, it assumes as a given that real psychics do indeed exist, which could only be a demonstrable fact if someone knew it to be true and could show it, and then quickly contradicts itself by saying that no one knows this, nor can they show it. Hence the inconsistency and circular reasoning.

I’ll give some reasons for this…

I try to go by the maxim “If you can’t show it, you don’t know it,” and one cannot know that something is true, to assume the positive conclusion that something exists, when that is exactly what one should be proving, and not know it at the same time: You either know it, or you don’t. After all, if nobody knows about the so-called real psychics, how does the one making the argument know enough to make a positive statement about them?

My friend has elaborated on something implied in the argument and suggested the possibility of a ‘covert project’ to locate and sequester ‘genuine’ psychics for study under a highly classified research program, that ‘real’ psychics would never reveal their true nature in public for fear of abduction by government agents or somesuch. Hence the argument from conspiracy and simultaneous ad hoc hypothesis, ad hoc, because there is no evidence for this conspiracy, and no way to possibly falsify the claim. Any evidence against the conspiracy becomes part of the conspiracy.

To me, considering that the U.S. government wasted millions of taxpayer dollars on a useless remote-viewing project, and the celebrity status that some alleged psychic mediums enjoy, many of whom have followers that fervently believe in the authenticity of their powers, it makes no real difference whether one’s powers are genuine or not, as long as people believe they are. After all, elements within the U.S. military believed in them. Clearly there are those within our own government who cannot tell fakery from the real thing, should it actually exist.

This says nothing about the power of belief in and of itself, since belief alone can’t make anything real, though it can make it seem to be to those who believe. My point is that those whose powers are believed real, by however few or many, do not really make a great deal of effort to hide themselves, in fact going out of their way to get publicity, and this is true of any self-styled psychic celebrity. This alone reasonably should serve falsify any ‘psychic exploitation conspiracy’ hypothesis.

I suspect my friend is thinking too much along the lines of X-Men comics, where those with weird mutant powers really are hunted. Sorry, but my experience has been that many real-world psychics will frequently try to gain as much in the way of fame, and often wealth, from readings, seminars, and performances, as possible, like That Israeli Psychic™ did during the 1970s.

Any theory that truly psychically gifted people go into hiding for fear of possible abduction and exploitation by shadowy agencies, while cool in fiction, is not borne out by what is evident of big-name media psychics here in the real world, as opposed to comicbooks and paperback novels, who obviously have a great many people convinced of their authenticity and oddly enough make no efforts at all to conceal their nature from the public, much less the CIA or MIB.

Pity pooh.

Absolutely… not — by QualiaSoup

For those who like to point fingers…

The faith cake — by QualiaSoup

It *could* just be coincidence — by QualiaSoup

Elysia chlorotica: It’s so easy when I’m green!

This is actually kind of neat, the first example I’ve heard of of an animal that shares plant traits, namely the ability to use photosynthesis, in this article by Susan Milius. It’s a species of algae-eating sea-slug that can incorporate the genes for making chloroplasts, the organelles that green plants use for making sugars from carbon dioxide, water and sunlight.

Anyhoo, the Science News article had this to say…

Shaped like a leaf itself, the slug Elysia chlorotica already has a reputation for kidnapping the photosynthesizing organelles and some genes from algae. Now it turns out that the slug has acquired enough stolen goods to make an entire plant chemical-making pathway work inside an animal body, says Sidney K. Pierce of the University of South Florida in Tampa.

The slugs can manufacture the most common form of chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants that captures energy from sunlight, Pierce reported January 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology.

This kind of reminds me of the green woman with the pixie wings from the Dominion Tank Police anime series, at least in terms of the possibilities of engineering something with a human-like metabolism to use photosynthesis, though admittedly I’m inclined to agree with this article by Catherine Brahic on New Scientist.

Aside from the points raised there, as a layman I would speculate at the most feasibly that any bioengineered photosynthetic human retaining a warm-blooded metabolism would have to spend the entire daylight period absorbing sunlight and could only be active at night, which would make for a very different world. We humans, with the possible exception of couch potatoes, use up an awful lot of calories in our daily routine, probably more than photosynthesis alone can practically provide.

Hmmm, nocturnal humans — might be interesting in a world where everyone is afraid of the daytime — after all, that’s when monsters come out to eat you while you’re sleeping/sunbathing, and can’t run away! Sounds like the plot of a science-fiction novel I may have read…

One of the statements from the first article linked to echos my sentiments well…

“This could be a fusion of a plant and an animal — that’s just cool,” said invertebrate zoologist John Zardus of The Citadel in Charleston, S.C.

Zardus, who says that he tries to maintain healthy skepticism as a matter of principle, would like to hear more about how the team controlled for algal contamination.

…as does another from the same…

“Bizarre,” said Gary Martin, a crustacean biologist at Occidental College in Los Angeles. “Steps in evolution can be more creative than I ever imagined.”

After over a week, there’s been an awful lot of rather…lively discussion in the scientific community, and if this finding holds up under the peer-review process, it will be very interesting to know something about the possibility of finding more ‘plantimals’ like this, and the practical applications of the cross-over of genetic traits, between multicellular organisms. Fnord.

Creationist “Discovery” Institute Busted

Another good one from DonExodus2…

I am not an Atheist

I’ve been posting on this blog for a little over a year now, since December 28, 2008, and I’ve frequently referred to myself in many of my posts by the word ‘atheist.’ I suspect that this is not entirely accurate, not as I would define myself, only as theists would.

As a former religionist, having left the Seventh-Day Adventist church many years ago, I’ve given bits and pieces of the many reasons for my current status as a non-believer in most any form of theism on this blog, but they all boil down to one basic theme: Simply put, I have not heard any compelling arguments nor been shown any convincing evidence for the existence of any God of the sort commonly worshiped in the world’s major monotheistic religions. But that’s a tall order, for each religion has a concept of the divine that conflicts with nearly every other religion’s notion of the godhead.

I’ve heard a lot of different arguments which those using them claim to be proof of God, but none of them has been really convincing. All have logical holes in them that are readily apparent even to my layman’s mind. I have the same skepticism toward all those other gods I had as an Adventist, but I’ve just gone one God further.

I consider myself firstly to be an agnostic, in that as a philosophical position I hold that the existence of any God of the sorts commonly worshiped is literally an unknowable, not just something I haven’t made up my mind on. Lately I’ve been questioning my use of the label ‘atheist’ to refer to my lack of belief in a supreme being of the conventional sort.

While I don’t believe in any of the different versions of the God of the Abrahamic traditions, (Christianity alone has splintered into over 30,000 different variations of itself, many of which don’t recognize the others as legitimate Christians…) nor in any sort of anthropomorphic divine being, there is one concept of God that I can take seriously — the God of Baruch Spinoza, of Einstein — a pantheistic divinity that is the sum total of the Laws of the Universe.

After all, why not? You’d be pretty silly to not believe in the existence of physical laws, even if you don’t practice any sort of formal worship, mysticism or any other trappings of organized religion. A sense of awe of the Cosmos and reverence for life is all that’s needed. A form of free-form worship unsullied by dogma or superstition in which (thanks to Terry Pratchett for this one…) the building of a telescope is the building of a cathedral.

Whether I am really an atheist depends entirely on how one defines God, and this varies hugely from one faith to the next. Hell, Christians can’t even agree among themselves which is the ‘correct’ conception of God.

I have difficulty taking seriously the archaic idea of a fellow sitting on a throne in the sky who spends a great deal of his time micromanaging every event in the Universe, and is the patron of only one species, one planet, in a cosmos less than 10,000 years old. Such a small, parochial view of the divine! Such a limited view that has absolutely nothing of the cosmic grandeur that science makes readily apparent! Why should I want my God to be a little one, and why keep him that way? Why should I arrogantly impose my wishes upon God?

hmmmm…

We know very little about the Universe, and I’m convinced that we know even less about God — not the supernatural God of the Old Testament — but a naturalistic God so far beyond anything we know that we could not possibly begin to imagine what He, She, or It is like.

I have a firm trust and confidence in the existence of the laws of the Cosmos, supported by evidence, not the authority of a book written thousands of years ago, with the caveat that neither myself nor anyone else fully comprehends them all to the extent we would like. If that’s what one means by belief in a God, then call me a theist, or rather, a pantheist. I suppose that would describe me just as well, since I’m only an atheist according to some other people’s conception of God. And should I allow myself to be defined by some other person’s criteria? No.

I, like every other living, thinking being in existence, am made of atoms forged in the hearts of stars. I am star-stuff given life and thought. I am nothing more and nothing less than one out of countless ways for the Universe to contemplate itself. I am not an atheist, but one who stands in awe before both the beauty and horror of this unthinkably vast, complex and elegant thing we call reality.

Thank you, Dr. Sagan. You are missed…

Evidence and Free Will

A friend of mine and I were having a little discussion at my place, and were exploring the notion of a God who produces, or does not, obvious evidence of His existence that would convince all but the most delusional of His reality.

My view is that if this God were to produce such evidence, it would allow far more people to achieve salvation than otherwise might be the case.

My friend suggested that perhaps God doesn’t produce such evidence because that would be forcing people to accept Him, and would be a violation of the doctrine of Free Will.

I disagree. But not to be contrary — it got my me thinking — and I’ve come to the conclusion that showing evidence of some sort, a ‘sign’ if you will, does not actually constitute infringing on someone’s freedom of choice. Rather, showing evidence actually enables freedom of will and informed choice. It allows a recognition of reality that transcends faith — belief without or against evidence.

Let me explain my reasoning…

Now to avoid stepping on anyone’s toes gratuitously, we’ll use a hypothetical divine being, let’s call this god ‘Ralph.’ Now, in Ralph’s religion, the deity is defined to be omnipotent, capable of literally anything he wants to be, do, exist, or happen, and this religion has a doctrine of contra-causal free will, or the ability of free choice independent of external or mechanistic causes, which we’ll just shorten to CCFW.

It follows, that being thusly omnipotent, Ralph can produce any sort of evidence for his existence he wishes, and this doesn’t, by the way, have to be absolute, concrete, or even physical, proof, though that would certainly be the most effective.

But, since Ralph is omnipotent, he should be easily capable of producing just this sort of evidence without breaking a divine sweat, should he so choose. Let’s just say for the sake of argument that by virtue of his omnipotence, he can make himself as obvious as he likes, even to the most hardened skeptic.

How will we define ‘evidence’ for the sake of this argument? Put in the most broad and basic terms, evidence is any fact you can perceive that provides a reason to believe something, in this case, the existence of a god. How does evidence work? Does showing some kind of proof really impose on the wills of others, violate their freedom of choice? We’ll get back to Ralph soon. Let’s examine these questions…

When a scientist or modern skeptic says that he finds the evidence for a claim compelling, he doesn’t literally mean that the evidence is forcing him against his will to reach a certain conclusion, what he means is that the evidence in question is making it much easier for him to suspend his provisional disbelief, that the claim is probably false until demonstrated true, and therefore make him more likely to accept the probable truth of the claim of his own free will.

Evidence works best when the one you are trying to convince doesn’t have a strong commitment to a prior belief structure that the evidence might contradict. You can’t convince someone who needs his belief, who Knows for a Fact that it is true, if he doesn’t want to hear you out.

This is one of the reasons that young-Earth creationists routinely ignore the evidence for evolution. It’s all over the place, but many refuse to accept it no matter what. After all, it contradicts their strongly held belief that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. Remember: creationism is a religious doctrine. Whether your religion or spirituality, Old Time or New Age, involves creationism or a belief in psychic powers, we can see that there are strong emotions in play here.

Human beings, yours truly included, are creatures of passion as well as beings of reason. You cannot convince a true believer of something that might possibly refute his belief when reason is clouded by emotion and the will to believe. Attempting to forcibly ‘bash someone against the head’ with evidence, to force them to see the truth, no matter how compelling it may be, never works with those who are certain their belief is Truth.

Going back to the example of the Church of Ralph, let’s say that the Church promotes the idea that Ralph’s enemy, a rather cute but ornery fellow named Xuleus the Rabbit god, dwells in a region of eternal torment, and that both Xuleus and this place, we’ll call it The Hutch of Eternal Nibbling™ for lack of a better name, were created at some time in the primordial past by Ralph. Never mind the possible reasons for this.

Let’s also assume for the sake of argument that the Church of Ralph has a doctrine of salvation, that only those who accept Ralph into their hearts can be saved.

So if you don’t, your soul is forever consigned to be painfully nibbled upon by Xuleus. Nom nom nom.

Now, if Ralph, by his own choice, produces no obvious evidence of his reality, as seems to me to be the case with most real-world gods, including my former one, this would consign far more people to a horrific nibbling through no fault of their own — living in the wrong time period, the wrong culture, or even those of us who require evidence before accepting a claim of fact, and especially being a member of the ‘wrong religion’ (whatever that means) or otherwise never even hearing about Ralph — and this contradicts, not supports, the Church’s own doctrine of CCFW by condemning them, without giving them any meaningful choice in the matter, by Ralph’s not simply showing them the truth, even during their lives on Earth.

No one chooses eternal torment, despite the arguments of apologists…

Therefore, were Ralph to show himself or his doings in an obvious way, such as for example, engraving the first chapter of his sacred scriptures on one of the moons of Jupiter, in letters hundreds of kilometers high, to be photographed by the Voyager probes, (thanks to Carl Sagan for that one) or if Ralph were to announce his presence to the world, not through selected prophets, but by speaking in a booming voice audible and understandable to everyone on Earth, Ralph would likely be knowingly and willingly accepted by everybody, or at least the majority of the world’s people, and there would effectively be no atheists.

Why wouldn’t a god who wants to be believed in, as Pascal’s God presumably does, make Himself, Herself or Itself so obvious as to remove the possibility of rational doubt, and no one would be forced to go through life without knowing the truth, forced, without being given a real informed choice, to experience damnation in whatever form it takes for simply never hearing of the Deity, or rational doubt employing the brains that this God would have given us for the purpose of using them — unless you want to assume that God made a mistake and didn’t intend for them to be used, but that’s blasphemy by the standards of religions which define the Deity as perfect.

In such a world, mere faith would not be needed. Such a God or gods would be an obvious fact, no matter what anyone was predisposed to believe, and there would be no need for belief without evidence.

It would be a very different world, and it would not be necessary to be inculcated into that god’s religion. Such a being would be the ubermega-galactic supergenius God of everyone and everything, with only one religion, one holy book, ruling over, or at least having begun, the entire hundred-billion galaxy universe, every world, every star-system, every species, and so powerful, so obviously cosmic, as to be literally unlike anything we can possibly imagine, unlike the parochial notions of the Deity we conceive of today.

Workers’ tombs discovered near pyramids

Well, here’s yet another nail in the coffin of pyramidiotic claims that unknown or unidentified precursor civilizations like Atlantis, or alien astronauts, or even alien astronauts from Atlantis, built the pyramids and other ancient monuments according to this AP post on Yahoo –

CAIRO – Egyptian archaeologists discovered a new set of tombs belonging to the workers who built the great pyramids, shedding light on how the laborers lived and ate more than 4,000 years ago, the antiquities department said Sunday.

The thousands of men who built the last remaining wonder of the ancient world ate meat regularly, worked in three months shifts and were given the honor of being buried in mud brick tombs within the shadow of the sacred pyramids they worked on.

The newly discovered tombs date to Egypt’s 4th Dynasty (2575 B.C. to 2467 B.C.) when the great pyramids were built, according to the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, Zahi Hawass.

Graves of the pyramid builders were first discovered in the area in 1990, he said, and discoveries such as these show that the workers were paid laborers, rather than the slaves of popular imagination.

It’s cool that piece by piece, the entire puzzle is ever nearing completion, and the claims of those who seek to impose their own cognitive limits on reality regarding the origin of certain ancient monuments, who wish to sell our ancestors short, who assert that early civilizations were too backward, too primitive, no, too stupid to pile rocks atop each other, are being revealed as the house of cards they are. I’m sorry, Mr. Von Däniken, but you have failed me, and your followers, yet again — Bwa ha ha ha ha!

I am a Paranormalist

On nearly every pro-paranormal Web site I’ve been on, and book I’ve read written by believers, the claim is almost universally trotted around that skeptics are not only afraid of the implications of psychic phenomena, but vehemently deny the very possibility of it to calm their fears — and that skepticism toward it centers on the argument that it is impossible, contradicting to all known physical laws.

This claim is not only patently unfounded, a straw man argument, derived from an impatience with skeptics and misunderstanding of skeptical arguments, but in my view is downright silly.

No, the Argument from Impossibility is not the mainstay of skeptical criticism of psi, contrary to popular belief…

Allow me to present my perspective regarding this and what I know of the matter at present.

First, no prominent skeptic of psi whom I can name off the top of my head really argues for its impossibility, since only that which is logically inconsistent can truly be deemed impossible, and skeptics fully admit that our understanding of reality is far from exhaustive.

Second, modern skepticism is all about science, and skeptics do take the time and effort to educate themselves on particulars of this very subject: what it is, how it works, its purpose, its philosophical underpinnings, its findings, and especially its limitations. This means that most who have been skeptics for some time are aware of the fact that modern science is in its infancy, and that we are only now beginning to arrive at an understanding of how the Cosmos operates.

Most skeptics are acutely aware that there are very probably laws of nature, or parts thereof, of which we do not yet know, that our present understanding of the universe is necessarily incomplete, that the most we can say about the current state of our knowledge is just that, that it is simply the current state of our knowledge, and not even close to final, absolute understanding of how the natural world is ‘necessarily so.’

In this sense, skeptics, and myself included, concede that there are unknown facts about the universe that we may yet discover. Scientists are quite aware that they don’t ‘have it all figured out’ yet, or science would have ground to a halt long ago.

The physical science of later on this century, or afterward, may uncover those laws, theories, and facts which allow our use of strange and potentially powerful and wondrous abilities, as our uncovering of those laws we have achieved in the previous few centuries has already done. I cannot say for certain, but I fully concede that wonderful new discoveries have yet to be made, many of which may overturn much of current physics and bring forth new views of reality, new paradigms.

If, by the term ‘paranormal’ one loosely means those mysteries that science has yet to explain, secrets it has yet to uncover, of those wondrous, marvelous, bizarre, or astounding new discoveries that I have little doubt will be made, unanticipated at present by anyone currently alive, in this sense, and in this sense only, I and most of the scientific community, and most of the skeptics I know of, could easily count ourselves as paranormalists despite our views of psi.

But only on this particular…

If on the other hand, the term ‘paranormal’ is used in the more usual sense, to describe certain non-scientific concepts, ideas, and doctrines beyond the bounds of known science that their proponents attempt to pass off as actual science, despite failings of scientific adequacy and a lack of evidential support for them, then I am most assuredly in the camp of a skeptic until better evidence is made available.

Don’t get me wrong, unorthodox ideas are essential for science to move forward, and contrary to the claims of pseudoscientists, most mainstream science journals do feature quite a few of these, a lot of which turn out to be wrong. Pick up a copy of Nature, or Scientific American, and you’ll see what I mean.

But to be acceptable, to be scientifically adequate, to mass muster as a promising idea, the concept in question must abide by standards of evidence and logic proportionate to the degree to which the claim contravenes what we can honestly say we provisionally know to be true.

The more bizarre the claim, the more solid the evidence must be, especially if the claim in question has profound implications.

Those of us skeptical of psi at worst consider said evidence to be worthless, and at best, inconclusive. Simply put, skeptics and believers have differing bars for evidence, not just in interpretation, but upon what counts as sufficient, not just necessary evidence at the present time.

Skeptical critiques of parapsychology, when done well, consist of postjudice, not prejudice, an assessment on the matter made after, not before, looking at the evidence.

Unfortunately, parapsychology is relatively stagnant as a field in contrast to almost every other area of research, and has found nothing new that truly adds to our knowledge of the universe, despite the remarkable implications of that knowledge should it ever be discovered.

I cannot say if this state of affairs will continue, and it would be disappointing if it does.

The uncovering of a new way of looking at reality would be interesting to say the least, more interesting than the only real discoveries of parapsychology made at the time of this writing: the paltry and trite excuses for why psi experiments conducted by those skeptical or unbiased toward the phenomenon in question fail to replicate.

Until parapsychologists can overcome this hurdle, their claims will never be taken seriously by the science community, and their field will continue to be regarded as pseudoscience, nothing more.

Sagittarius A* — It’s not nomming as much as we thought.

Black holes…monsters that devour everything that gets too close. They can be found all over the universe, and there’s a supermassive one at the center of many if not all galaxies — including an enormous one at the core of our own galaxy, the Milky Way — a multimillion stellar-mass monstrosity named Sagittarius A*.

When a star of sufficient mass destroys itself in a cataclysmic explosion, a supernova, it leaves behind a both a powerful blast-wave and a strange corpse — the black hole — a bottomless pit in reality whose very center, called a singularity, exists only as a dimensionless point, and whose crushing gravity, due to its infinitesimal size, allows the escape of nothing in the known universe that crosses its outer ‘surface,’ including light itself. This ‘surface,’ the event horizon, is so named because it is the horizon beyond which we cannot know what events occur. Anything happening within this region is literally outside of our ability to potentially interact with it, and therefore for all intents and purposes, outside of the universe.

But a black hole’s gravity is due to more than just mass. Had it been the case that the Earth were somehow squeezed to the size of a pea, it too would become a black hole.

Never mind that the self-styled revolutionaries of the Neo-Velikovskian electric universe doctrine claim that such gravitationally ideological things don’t actually exist, since they’ve been confirmed to almost certainly exist by every observational test to date, and they have been extremely useful in testing, and in many cases, revising earlier models of how we think the Universe works. Modern astronomy, the very science of the exotic, freely subverts its own paradigms quite nicely, thank you very much.

Sagittarius A* has been suspected to be a picky eater for some time now, but we’ve found out that it eats even less than we thought, feeding mostly on the winds emitted by massive stars relatively near to it in the galactic core, and not very much of that.

We know that these young stars, though much closer to it than we on the galactic suburbs, are distant enough to be only weakly affected by Sagittarius A*’s gravity, and so it has been going nom nom nom on relatively small amounts of the gas shed by the young but massive stars, only about .0001 of the full amount.

We’ve developed new theoretical models for how black holes feed, and how they give off massive jets of particles at near-light velocities in the entities we call blazars, quasars, and radio galaxies. The latest observations of Sagittarius A* were made using deep scans by NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and have told us much about its appetite, and why it isn’t pigging out on what little it does receive from its food source.

Science-fiction stories, such as Larry Niven’s Known Space tales, have postulated a wave of radiation perhaps emitted by a massively feeding central black hole endangering all life in the galaxy, but Sag A* (for short) doesn’t seem that hungry, or inclined to give out much in the way of emissions that might threaten us in the future, at least, not until the collision of our galaxy with Andromeda, or M31, some billions of years hence.

Don’t get me wrong, there are signs that the Sag A* is a source of radiation, (We’ve detected gamma-rays from positron/electron annihilation in the direction of the galactic center. Black holes make wonderful particle accelerators…) but mostly around the vicinity of the core rather than anywhere near us, so for now, we can just sit back, collect data from our observatories, and let our findings bring forth ever more awesome models of reality. This century is such a cool time for astronomy…

Religion: Tell Them Everything

As an atheist, at least at the time of this writing, I am often faced with the accusation of being anti-religion. Well, I’m not — not a bit — though I am critical of religious fundamentalism, and even anti-religious extremism where it actually exists.

I have at times been appalled at the rabidness of both extreme atheists as well as extreme religionists, and to me, it is not religion, or non-religion that is the issue to be dealt with, but extremes of faith, belief, worldviews, ideology, and what-have-you that are the real problem at hand.

As an atheist, do I think that religion should be suppressed? Banned? Outlawed? Persecuted in any real way, as opposed to those sects which only imagine themselves to be persecuted? (We all like to imagine ourselves to belong to an embattled minority — it makes us feel special.).

To the previous I can only answer No, No, No and finally, No.

People should be allowed to believe what they want, so long as they to not infringe on the rights of others, deceive, exploit, or otherwise cause physical, psychological or financial harm to others in the exercise of their beliefs.

Those who wish to practice a religion, and raise their children by its tenets, rightly should be allowed to. But there’s a catch: Children raised in religious families should be thoroughly educated in all of the details of their faith. They should be taught absolutely everything about it, all of its doctrines, its teachings, its dogmas, its history, and especially all of its scripture, even those things — so long as they are true — that their elders do not wish them to know.

I also strongly suggest educating the young in comparative religion, so that they can knowledgeably approach the questions of faiths other than their own.

Others have suggested this, philosopher Daniel Dennett for one. I bring it up here because I feel that only through a thorough understanding of what we believe and why we believe it can we hope to avoid the errors endemic to ignorance and extremism in our global civilization, and avoid our suicide as a species. Fnord.

Nessie’s extinction dismissed

Here’s something I found while doing a little newshounding around on the Web: Apparently, some Loch Ness monster enthusiasts thought that Nessie had become extinct, maybe due to global warming, due to the tailing off of — and this is cute — ‘credible sightings’ over the last two or three years. Well, some other fans of the cryptid of discourse were rather upset about the extinction rumors and dismissed them on the basis of a single sighting made just last year — the only one made last year — deemed credible by the unimpeachable standards of Nessie fans.

Credible sightings? Never mind the fact that unreliable eyewitness testimony, blurry photos, and shaky videos notwithstanding, there’s no credible evidence for the creature. Why have no bloated carcasses of dead Nessies floating to the surface, or bones or other fragments ever been found? Why has nothing unambiguously Nessie-like ever been found to confirm the creature’s existence, oh, I don’t know, like a single specimen?

After all, unless a singular Nessie is literally immortal, there would have to be a fairly large breeding population if them living in the loch itself, considering its size and relative isolation from other bodies of water. That, and the huge food requirements a viable population of animals of the purported size would have would be prohibitive to the existence of such creatures in that locale.

Frankly, while the extinction of Nessie(s) may be beyond the bounds of rationality, completely unbelievable to the creature’s aficionados, I think that’s kind of ironic in that the animal under discussion has never been actually demonstrated real to begin with, but I suppose that that’s neither here nor there.

If Darwinism really WAS an “Ism…”

Now, this is what would happen if evolution really was a religion as creationists are often wont to call it. As you can see, it would ironically be not unlike their own…

Not that my Troythuluness has anything against religion — just blind, unthinking literalism… and the tendency of those uptight and insecure in their faith to project themselves onto those they both dislike and fear.

My view is that if you’re secure in what you believe, you need never fear anything being a threat to it, or afraid of changing your mind when evidence warrants it.