Not too long ago I blogged in Myths About Evolution about a book that discusses said topic. Now, Sam Harris has written an article for the LA Times about 10 myths about atheism:

http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/10-myths-and-10-truths-about-atheism1/

He brings up how atheists are more hated in America than any other minority (not that ANYONE should be hated!) and also one of the most misunderstood. The myths he addresses are pretty accurate from my observation and experience as I’ve met quite a few people who have believed these myths and seen many people on TV and at seminars who have expressed these myths as fact.

• 1) Atheists believe that life is meaningless.
• 2) Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.
• 3) Atheism is dogmatic.
• 4) Atheists think everything in the universe arose by chance.
• 5) Atheism has no connection to science.
• 6) Atheists are arrogant.
• 7) Atheists are closed to spiritual experience.
• Atheists believe that there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding.
• 9) Atheists ignore the fact that religion is extremely beneficial to society.
• 10) Atheism provides no basis for morality.

Of course they’re generalities. Certainly there are some atheists who are arrogant or completely anti-religion. But for the most part, these myths are quite generally myths.

Ugh, fulfilling my resolution to be more positive and less bashing in the new year is going to be haaar-ard! But then, I guess most self-improving things are.

Anyway, thought I’d share this pamphlet I found on the Intertubes:

It looks very wordy, but it’s a very easy read, and very fascinating. A lot of food for thought!

Please check it out.

Some time ago I posted some links to information on the very unoriginality of the Jesus story:

Jesus in ancient Greece and Egypt?

The traditions of salvation from sin, martyrdom for humans, virgin births especially, closed mystery cults around the half-man/half-god figure and his followers eating of his body, are old old old traditions. So old and common in Asian and Middle Eastern religions that they had become almost cliche symbols used by people to represent certain elements of religiosity by the time the Jesus cult came about.

But check this out, that I had previously missed: Mithras.

A Roman god, coming from Persian and Greek origins (as most Roman gods did,) that was a “sun god” and referred to as the Light of the World, was celebrated around December 25th, was a savior of sins, virgin born, rose from the dead, and entreated his followers to symbolically eat of his body. And all of this came about LONG before Jesus’ birth.

Of course, the Christian response to the fact that there are countless similarities, almost direct copies, of the Jesus story throughout history prior to Jesus, would be that a) God allowed these fore-bearers to exist in order to prepare the way for the acceptance of Jesus, or b) The devil (oogly-boogly!) planted these pre-figures to Jesus in order to muddle the pot and prevent people from accepting Jesus as more than a johnny-come-lately, and create the very doubt I’m bringing up right now.

My personal reply to this: a) Silly. That takes a little more mental gymnastics and rationalization to deal with than the simplest answer of just, myth element sharing among human cultures. And why would God do something intended to “pave the way” that would more likely lead to confusion and doubt? Which leads to,
b) The devil sure does have God-like powers to make such blatant and tremendous trouble! You’d think God would have a problem with this, all this sowing to confusion and discord. In fact, if “God so loved the world” that he WANTS people to believe the message of Jesus, why create/allow so much confusion and doubt? By the looks of it, with as much evidence as there is that Jesus is a different version of the similar god-hero myths from all over the Middle East/Asia Minor, it would look like God doesn’t love us at all and wants us to be deceived and fall into the damnation he set us up for. (Again, no wonder the Gnostics believed Yahweh to be the cosmic “bad guy.” He’s the creator/allower of deception, pain, suffering, confusion despite the promises of love and mercy.)

Which is the reasonable answer?
1) The Jesus story uses the same traditions of religious elements that were commonplace in that time and area in order to give credence and promote familiarity with the story of this new man/god hero?

2) A loving and merciful God that WANTS us to believe in him and his son and have forgiveness (from the condition/situation/laws HE set up) created or allows the gross deception and confusion causing people to doubt the uniqueness of Jesus and his message?

Which one takes less cognitive dissonance to accept?

Continuing my slam of other people until the New Year…

Remember my post: The Banana Proves God? Pretty Fruity!

A commenter on another blog who brought it up recently (Lacrimae Rerum) in response posted a link to this site which has a nice rebuttal of the absurd claims of the God-banana freak: http://www.opendiary.com/entryview.asp?authorcode=C101953&entry=10463
Here’s a great snippet:

“Note that the banana: is shaped for the human hand [by the same shaper who made good mushrooms resemble the poisonous ones?], has non-slip surface [unless you step on it!], has outward indicators of inward contents (green–too early, yellow–just right, black–too late) [unless you're one of the millions of people who have been born blind over the eons through no fault of their own], has a tab for removal of wrapper [unlike the evil orange which prevents scurvy!], is perforated on wrapper [unlike those damn cows and pigs!], has a bio-degradable wrapper [which stinks and supports vermin], is shaped for human mouth [much like the human pen- no, wait, that's BAD! Right??], has a point at top for ease of entry ["easy" and "good" are always synonymous??], is pleasing to taste buds [just like those fats and sugars which promote tooth decay and heart disease], and is curved towards the face to make eating process easy [makes smoking bananas easy too, but i don't recommend it!].”

(I can’t come up with blog titles! Keep reading to find out about Mars and wacky stuff.)

I can’t find the actual quote, nor who said it. It might have been Michael Shermer or Joe Nickell or Robert Price who said something like: “Religion allows many people to ‘legitimately’ believe something that one man would be labeled insane for believing in.” Basically, if something is stamped as being of a religious nature, especially Christian in this country, we’ll turn a blind eye to it or even entertain the idea.

(Of course, this quote is mainly referring to the entire religion in general! If you’d never heard of anything from Christianity before, and some lone guy came up to you and said “I’ve got a message from an ancient book! It says we’re all doomed to hell by merciful God! But himself, in the form of his own son born from a virgin and could raise the dead, was murdered and sent back to himself, to convince himself we should have a chance at going to paradise! What mercy!” You’d probably put a quarter in his Styrofoam cup, mumble “Get a job, ya bum,” and walk on. And yet, because this meme was elevated to one of many official Roman religions by Constantine, and then later forced onto people at the points of spears by later Roman emperors, we’re stuck today with millions of people completely accepting a Bronze Age myth they were raised into about a schizophrenic god and a sadomasochistic murder story that convinces god to have mercy on beings he created to die into damnation for his own glory. Wow. Anyway….)

So, Phil Plait at BadAstronomy has a blog today: Mars is Hell, in which he points to some pastor’s Web site who explains in great detail how the planet Mars is a heavenly reminder of Jesus and God’s sacrifice. (I break for a second to again ask, what kind of sacrifice is it when the sacrifice is an eternal God himself who spent a measly three days of his eternity dead or dying and can simply shrug off death and return to cozy heaven?)

This guy makes some pretty absurd claims like, “The Red Planet has two sides, front and back.  The two sides represent the front and back of Jesus Christ on the Cross.” Well, first of all, Mars is an orb, a sphere. It has no “sides.” If he’s thinking in his 2-dimensional mind about the maps of Mars he has imaged on his site, those are arbitrarily defined malformed representations of a sphere, just like maps of Earth.

He also says: “The name, Mars, came from Satan.  It refers to Satan as the god of war, who was defeated when Jesus Christ paid for the sins of the world on the Cross.  The name, Mars, is blasphemy.  The Romans, who were hoodwinked by the devil, named the planet; and scientists, who are no smarter, have continued the deception.  This is just another lie of Satan, the master of deceit, in an attempt to hide the truth of the Cross.” Wow. I mean, wow. This expert in the etymology of name evidently forgot to also study the etymology of the name “Satan.” The use of the name “Satan” to mean an evil devil didn’t even come about until medieval England. Up until then Satan was believed by both Jews and Christians, to be an angel whose job it was to test people in the service of God. But then, most thinking by fundamentalists is pretty medieval, so I guess it’s no wonder that he should stop there when retrofitting Roman myth to fit his ideology.

What I’m trying to get at, and what Phil says in far fewer words and more eloquently, is that there are Web sites like this guy’s all over the Web in regards to alien sightings and visitation, ghosts and channeling, New Age crystal power, the power of Pyramids, alien civilizations on Mars, faeries, plans for cold fusion and perpetual motion machines using water and match heads, and we consider those guys loons at best. But because this guy is spreading his lunacy under the guise of Christian faith, he’s considered “interesting” at best at worst, a visionary of religious symbolism!

Now, like Phil says, this guy is outside the mainstream of Christian belief. As a former mainstream Christian myself, and as a citizen of nearly rural Bible Belt, I can confirm that most Christians I know would read this guy’s site and shrug and laugh. But I do know some Christians who would consider what he says very seriously and may even adopt some of his symbolism, or at least pass it along to others as “here’s an interesting way to think about X” and then the meme infects another person. And if it were a site about ancient Atlantians most people would ignore it. But because it’s Christian in nature, more people in our culture are willing to “open their minds” to it and turn off their skepticism and reason and allow the crazy to take just a little bit of real estate in their minds.

I know I said earlier that I’m going to be focusing less on trashing people and more on the positive…but I’m making that New year’s Resolution and I need to get some trashing out of my system. =) It’s going to be VERY hard for me to come across scary and potentially dangerous things like this and not comment on them, though. =(

One of the things that always rises volcanic ire in me is when people say “we evolved from monkeys.” No, no we didn’t, and not an evolutionist alive in the last 150 years has ever said such a thing. We and monkeys share a common ancestor that branched off, into multiple branches, throughout the millennium.

Another misstatement propagated by creationists that totally gets me up in arms is “Well, it’s just a theory!” Revealing an utter lack of understanding in what exactly a “theory” is.

Another is the myth of the “missing link” that creationists keep harping on as never being found…even though the concept of a “missing link” is completely unnecessary to evolution.

These and seven other myths of evolution are explained and discussed in a new book: The Top 10 Myths About Evolution. The Web site is interesting, and I look forward to reading the book, but anyone with a little time can easily use the Web (or talk to a university biologist) to understand these myths. But, might as well buy the book and have it all in one nice compact collection.

(I’m going to be posting soon, and more, on positive things as described in my last blog Scholastic Success and Positivism. But I need to purge some negative things first. *g*)

Got my Fall ‘06 grades in today… A’s, baby! All A’s! Well, I only had two classes, so… both A’s! *glee*

I had “ENG598: Early English Language & Literature“, which mainly focused on medieval cycle, miracle, and morality plays; and “ENG600: Problems and Methods of Research in English (and Theory)” which was a tough class! But, and extremely useful and necessary class! In my 5th or 6th tier undergrad college I’d never even encountered the concept of “theory.” Come to find out, theory, or methodology is absolutely vital in graduate and professional work. Theory is barely approached at my current 4th tier university because progress trickles slowly from the top, but if you look at the job descriptions for 1st through 3rd tier universities (from Princeton to University of Chicago, McGill to Penn State, etc.) most every faculty opening in English departments (which are slowly being changed to cultural and media departments,) require some focus in theory. Whether it’s Marxist or feminist or post-structuralist or “queer theory” or post-modern or eco-theory, etc. Theory is everything, and you can’t say anything important without applying theory or method.

Between that and learning about problems and methods in research, and the mountains and mountains of information regarding current trends in academia and cultural study, I’d be at a ridiculous disadvantage trying to get into PhD programs much less find a good job at a tier 1 through 3 university. It’s because of this class that I’m going to be presenting a paper at the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts in Ft. Lauderdale in March, and I may possibly have a scholarly book review published in a refereed journal (that one is still a big maybe, but I’m hopeful.) Those two events (which hopefully won’t be my only two conferences and potential book reviews during my MFA!) and getting an actual article published will increase my chances of getting into a good PhD program a hundred-fold. Being published and presented, in multiple ways and times, are more impressive to PhD review boards than a 4.0 GPA which are dimes-a-dozen (and I’m on my way to having *grin*) or good GRE’s (which I do have *grin*).

Next semester I’m taking “ENG500: Advanced Writing: Non-Fiction” and “ENG693: Social History of English Words“. Those should be really interesting! My text for ENG693 is The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Wow! Impressive book! I’d love to have that book regardless of being for a class.

Oh yeah, I was going to say something about positivism. Not the philosophy, but being positive. *g*

It’s come to my attention that me excessive criticism and cynicism and ire toward certain topics and people has become rather excessive and potentially emotionally harmful. I’m going to make a promise… hey! a New Year’s Resolution even, to be more positive and focus more on the “good stuff.” For example, I trash religion incessantly, but I never say anything positive about non-dogmatic faith. Which, actually, I’m still trying to get a handle on when faith becomes a belief in something religious as opposed to something personally “spiritual”, for lack of a better word.

It’s still going to be very hard for me to avoid trashing our current administration every time they do something immoral, illegal, unconscionable–but I’ll try.

Update:

Because I like to brag, *eg* here are my GRE’s. =)

GRE March 2006 Score Percentage
Verbal                  670         94
Quantitative         610         48
Analytical             055         86

That Verbal 670 is good enough for admittance into even Harvard and Princeton! But that Quant’ 610 sucks eggs. Fortunately that only needs to be better than 500, if looked at at all, for English Graduate programs.
I may still need to take the English specific GRE component for some PhD programs. Where I’ll basically need to have memorized the latest Norton Anthology. *snarky smirk* I wasn’t that great on names, dates, and titles when I was an undergrad, and that was 10 years ago!

I posted my previous entry, On Marxism and Libertarianism, on Google Groups:

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.philosophy.debate/browse_frm/thread/cd65fe3ac0383a49/d250248f56ec931a?tvc=1#d250248f56ec931a

It’s gotten a lot of replies, and most of it confirmation of my fear: Both are ideologies that require certain perfect conditions and a more-or-less fundamental change in (current) human nature to be able to work well.

But then, as my wife reminded me, all socio-economic -isms are ideologies and require those changes and conditions.

So far, in my yet meager understanding, while I am now and always will be a social libertarian (if it harms no one, fine, none if you business!) granting any necessary conditions, I’d rather a Marxist socialism than a libertarian society. While privacy and self-determination must be paramount! I’d rather a society that did not find personal wealth to be its highest value, where wealth = power, where there is poverty and despair where it doesn’t have to be that way. I’d rather a society where people helped each other, where there is no concept of money, where the value of the person in society isn’t based on how much you earn for the capitalists or build your personal wealth. Where individuality, human rights, ethics, are more important than profit margin and capital gains. Yeah, a true, working socialist society would be nearly a utopia and would require possibly impossible changes in human nature.

Although, there is evidence that not all societies are like the U.S., go fig, and give hope the possible feasibility of a working socialist society. Canada has a socialized health care system for example, and yet is more permissive than the U.S. regarding “consensual crimes.” Socialism does not have to mean a removal of personal liberties and freedoms.

In fact, the U.S. is the only modern, “western” nation without universal health care! And yet, we’re also shredding our civil liberties faster than any other modern, “westernized” nation. We have laws prohibiting more behavior and “morality” than most any other European nation. I mean, when Turkey and South Africa recognize gay marriage and the “land of the free” doesn’t, there’s something fundamentally wrong here! And I do mean “fundamental.”
Economic libertarianism seems to be the ultimate in the powerful dominating the weak. Where the worst in capitalism can and would be allowed to thrive and do harm to humanity. Economic libertarianism, like capitalism (which IS a sort of “purified” form of capitalism,) is self-serving and greedy. Power, monopoly, robber-barons, are the results of economic libertarianism. Get as much as you can and and do as much harm as you can to your competition, before class action suits put speedbumps in your way. And if you grow wealthy and powerful enough and large enough, as is the goal of economic libertarianism, than no amount of civil suits will stop whatever unregulated practices you’re using to make money and take advantage of your workers.

Gawdang Lenin and the Soviet communists! They screwed up so much of what America could have become! Because of “the godless Soviets,” America went from being pretty freethinking and religiously liberal to a huge upswing in evangelical fundamentalism. “In God we trust” added to money and “under God” to the pledge are the least of the religious changes that began in the 1950’s as a revolt against the darn Ruskies. And anything that smacked of “Marxism” or “Socialism” ever since has been met with knee-jerk hatred and rejection because of the Cold War, even though Lenin and the Soviet dictatorship screwed up the Marxist ideals and goals.

It’s ironic, too. That both Christian fundamentalism would rise beginning in the 50’s while socialism would be squashed and the cult of capitalism would be aggrandized. I mean, I’m pretty sure Jesus and the early Christians would have been socialists. Would have abhorred the idea of the rich getting richer off the backs of the middle and lower class. They would have abhorred class systems in general! I think they would have greatly preferred a socio-economic system where all people were considered equal, money didn’t control everything, the lesser and weaker among the people would be taken care of, and all worked together for the greater good.

Cold War American perverted so much. Mixing ideological capitalism and religion into one uberideology that ultimately harms society. We’re still a country of puritanical ideas and juvenile fascination with sex and violence, and a unhealthy love of money and interest in what your neighbor is up to. Even with the theocrats no longer controlling Congress, and even if a religious ideologue doesn’t get the 2008 election, I may still very much want to expatriate to Canada or Europe. I am so sick of American culture. The crime, the anti-reason, anti-science, the erosion of liberties and rights, the juvenile and immature social behavior as a culture. We’ve squandered the incredible opportunity a handful of brave people gave us 200 years ago, and have created an empire of greed and crime and self-interest and self-absorbed schizophrenic hedonism with puritanism.

http://www.knitemare.org/cats/index.php?type=all

http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=2;t=006718;p=1

(Be sure to go to all the continuing pages on that one.)

This is a tough one because I’m not even close to being an expert on either concept. Not even really a knowledgeable beginner. Karl Marx’s Das Kapital is a multi-volume zillion page tome I’ve barely been able to get far into. One of my professors is a Marxist and says it took him about 10 years to really get a handle on what Marxism is. So I’m certain my meager understanding just barely scratches the surface, so it would be nice to find someone knowledgeable to whom I can ask my questions and pose my issues with Marxism. Because on the one hand it makes perfect sense to me, and on the other, there are some very serious integral problems with it.

If you know me or read my blog you know I identify as a libertarian. Mainly a social libertarian. That is, I believe if it harm none do what you will. (Note: despite the use of the phrase I hate Wicca and think Alister Crowley was a freakin’ nut.) The government especially, but no one has the right to stick their nose in your personal business. Your health matters, bedroom behavior, love life, religion, so long as it all involves consenting adults, is no one’s business but those who you want to make it their business. Always have believed that, always will.

But Read the rest of this entry »

Coming later today, some thoughts, as promised, on Libertarianism and Marxism.

The two of you that read my blog may have noticed that my word count up there in my novel progress hasn’t moved in some time. Not since I started grad school! The interesting thing is I’ve calculated that in the last three or four months I’ve written over 50,000 words for class papers. But that’s the final result. That’s not counting various drafts and revisions (of which there have been many!) and “works cited”s/bibliographies, etc. So, I’d estimate that I’ve written over 250,000 words for classwork this semester. Not that I’m really complaining! I really enjoy writing for class, it’s hard work! But I enjoy it. I just really want to get my novel written.
Now, what am I going to be doing over the intersession? Writing a conference paper for the International Association for the Fantastic in the Art’s 28th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Yes, I will be presenting a paper at the conference! *glee* I’m really excited! Presenting a paper at a conference is one of the three big things a grad student can do to really increase their chances of getting into a good PhD program, along with publishing a scholarly book review and most especially, publishing a journal article in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. I guess I can mention I’ve been commissioned by a refereed journal to write a book review. =) I’ll mention what and where after it’s actually approved for publication.

But what is my conference paper that I’ll be presenting in loverly Ft. Lauderdale, Florida next Spring? Well, here’s the abstract:

I will be examining the ways in which Philip K. Dick’s description of half-life in the novel Ubik (1969) is an analog for current online role-playing games and environments such as “Second Life,” “EVE: Online” and “World of Warcraft.” Given nearly the same ability to mold and create unique environments for themselves and others in “Second Life,” the participants of this virtual world have created a culture steeped in the same socioeconomic ideology in which mirrors the actually existing conditions of global capital. Just as in Ubik, items that represent Lack (as Lacan would put it) in “real life” are created in the virtual realm to satisfy a desire that can not be sated in the objective reality. An economy and society based on commodity exchange exists in the virtual realm where practically anything is possible. This limitation extends to the “real world” in both Ubik and the virtual online worlds as well. As in Dick’s Ubik, only words can pass through the veil into and from half-life (such as player dialog or the language of software code,) no material objects, and such is also the case in contemporary virtual worlds. Through will and words, existence changes, is modified, is reformed. While Ubik is most certainly not an attempt of Dick’s at precognition, there is little denying it may be a result of the inexorable collusion of technological, economical, and sociological developments of the western world. The works of such authors as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Neal Stephenson and their versions of “Cyberspace,” “Metaverse,” et. al. may be the customary writers and virtual constructs one thinks about when considering the connections between fiction and real-life virtual reality, and that lineage should and will be acknowledged. However, as Dick is the accepted “grandfather” of the cyberpunk genre and Ubik is arguably the earliest novel to deal with this familiar nature of the power of words to affect both constructed virtual reality and objective reality, this investigation will focus on the direct connections of Ubik to the current development of virtual environments and commodity exchange. Where in the story of Ubik the effects of the trading of signifiers can have both beneficial and disastrous effects on corporate interests as well as the individual, in present reality words have created transcending  commodities that can in a sense reach out from the virtual and affect the real.

654,965 Extra Iraqi Deaths Since War Started Says The Lancet

This news is nearly two months old, but today is the first I’d heard of it. Wow, that “liberal media” sure is stickin’ it to the Administration!

More than half a million civilian deaths because of our invasion over what the evil dictator Hussein would have likely caused. Hooray for us! Victory in Iraq! A victory in our pockets! Viva la Imperialistic Ideological Unilateral Invasions! We’re such an honorable and moral country; leaders of the world. Hooray USA!