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Why does god allow evil? Sandy Hook edition

5 January 2013 / / 2 Comments

There’s no point in bringing up the gun massacre at Sandy Hook again, since any meaningful action on gun control was forgotten just in time for Christmas.

Mentions of “gun control” on Twitter. Click the graphic for source.

But it wouldn’t be a tragedy without theists trying to explain where their god was during the tragedy. Don’t know why they bother; the Christian god was responsible for plenty of tragedy on his own. But anyway, here’s John Hawkins from ClownHall.com to explain the mysterious ways of the Lord to us.

1) He gives us free will: God didn’t make robots who were designed to execute His will. Instead He gave us the freedom to make our own decisions.

Okay, so the shooter had free will. But what about the free will of those kids not to be killed? Doesn’t their free will count? Why is the shooter the only one whose free will is respected?

2) It’s a necessity for faith: If God wanted to remove all doubt about his existence, He could do so — but, He doesn’t because the cornerstone of Christianity is faith.

Translation: God could provide good evidence for his existence, but won’t. Instead, he expects us to believe in him based on bad evidence… and will judge the ones who sensibly refuse. Doesn’t sound quite just, does it?

And why is faith the one thing that this god wants? That’s simple. God requires everyone’s belief because without belief, gods die.

The next one isn’t very coherent, so I’ll just paste it all.

3) He has a different perspective: Our God gave “His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Imagine being in his place as Jesus was jeered, whipped and had to suffer and die in agony on the cross. What would run through your mind as your Son was crucified and uttered the words, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” when you had the power to free Him, heal His wounds and strike down His tormentors at will. Our God made that sacrifice for each and every one of us so that we could be saved.

So… human suffering doesn’t matter because Jesus had to suffer for a weekend, which made everything all right in the long run. Clear?

4) We often turn to God in times of tragedy: One of the sad truths of human nature is that when we’re happy, healthy, loved, secure and our pockets are full, most of us think we already have all the answers and don’t turn to God.

Translation: God just wants us to love him and turn to him. And if he doesn’t get the love, then things might start going wrong, see?

5) Ultimately it’s about Heaven, not earth

Right now, those murdered kids are having ice cream in heaven. (Unless they’re not.) It just puts the multiple bullet wounds and final fearful moments into perspective, doesn’t it?

This list is not so much an explanation of why God lets evil happen. It’s more like a list of unbelievably callous justifications for an omnipotent god’s seeming indifference to human suffering. It would be much kinder to this god to allow that he can’t act to prevent suffering because he doesn’t exist.

Best music of 2012

31 December 2012 / / Comments Off on Best music of 2012

Best EP
Young North by The Paper Kites

I confess: I have fallen in love with the Paper Kites. This unassuming but talented band from Melbourne has discovered the heart of folk in a way I haven’t heard since the Lilac Time (who Sam, the lead singer, had never heard of). But the comparisons are obvious. Same gentle bucolic folk, right? Same iconography, right? It’s not just me, is it?

I was in for a surprise in concert though. Much as I was expecting a Lilac vibe, I began to get a strong Fleetwood Mac vibe. Which is funny, because halfway through their set, they busted out ‘Dreams’.

Here’s the video for ‘A Maker of My Time’. Listen for the quiet bit near the chorus. There are three chords, and they keep that F# ringing throughout. That makes it. It’s perfection. I haven’t felt anything like that since the Icicle Works.

They’re working on their first full album. I’m already calling it the best album of 2013.

Best Electronic Album
Smalhans by Lindstrøm

Lindstrøm has never been shy about going for the 80s synth cheese, but there’s something more going on here. More mathematical. I don’t want to invoke Bach because Bach is totally different, but as an example, check out this track “Fāār-i-kāāl”. Beyond the incredible joyousness of it all, there’s a method to it. The bass line just keeps climbing up and ever up in an unusual seven-part pattern, like a spiral staircase. Even so, watch out for that choir coming down. It’s upbeat, yet meticulous and precise. Never boring — he knows how to mix things up.

Second place: Pink by Four Tet

I really enjoyed the new Four Tet. Where “There is Love in You” was hiccupy, this is smooth and enjoyable.




Best Album by a Band With “Bear” in Their Name
Shields by Grizzly Bear

This album beat out all other bear bands, including Boy and Bear, Minus the Bear, and Bear in Heaven.




Most Interesting Story Behind an Album
SSSS by VCMG

VC is Vince Clarke, and MG is Martin Gore. Yes, that Vince and that Martin.

Daniel Miller describes it thus:

Vince Clarke left Depeche Mode after the first album and subsequently didn’t have much contact with the rest of the band. But about a year ago he emailed Martin Gore out of the blue and just asked if he fancied making a techno record. And that was it.

This is the album that my teenaged self would have squealed over, but he probably would have been disappointed because it doesn’t sound like Depeche Mode or Erasure. My older self thinks that’s just fine.

But how does it sound? Like this.


Best Jazz Album
Further Explorations by Chick Corea

The title is a play on Explorations, an album by legendary jazz pianist Bill Evans. The set features bassist Eddie Gomez and the late drummer Paul Motian, who both played with Evans back in the day, so this is an extra-special treat.


Best Song
“Offspring Are Blank” by The Dirty Projectors
from Swing Lo Magellan

I can’t stop listening to this amazing track. The opening throat-clearing serves as punctuation, setting you up for what’s to come: soaring vocal harmonies and jagged rock. Just when you expect a blast of electric guitar, you get acoustic. Then it all comes crashing down in the best possible way.



Best Ambient
LUX by Brian Eno

At last! Another ambient album from Eno. Suitable for play in your favourite airport, library, or cathedral. Soak it up.

Better still, open this in two windows, and play sections from both at the same time.

Best Artist I Missed Last Year
Helios

Since I’m such a fan of electronic ambient music, it’s surprising I hadn’t discovered Helios. I can’t pick out any particular album; one, because they’re so similar in texture, and two, because they’re all great.

Here. I picked this song at random.

Hold the phone: Keith Kenniff from Helios has made his new album ‘Moeity’ available for free on the Unseen Music website. There are also some beautiful interpretations of Boards of Canada songs. Go get them all, and make a donation.

Best Album
Bloom by Beach House
Lonerism by Tama Impala

Both my picks for best album have a lot in common. They’re both transportive in their own way. They’re both easy to listen to. And they both follow on from a previous album that was remarkably similar in tone and in some respects slightly better.

Tame Impala’s Lonerism has earned a lot of love on top 10 lists this year, and deservedly so. The best albums (and movies and books) are like a place you want to visit again and again, and that’s true for Lonerism. You find yourself wondering why someone didn’t write this before, or have they?

But I can’t give Lonerism the nod for Best Album for a couple of reasons: first, Innerspeaker was better (which isn’t a very good reason). And second, the songs on Lonerism seem more like half-thought-out ideas, dressed in Tame Impala’s wonderful signature sound. (Which is a pretty good reason.) Whereas every track on Innerspeaker was a revelatory composition, the tracks on Lonerism are just really great tunes. Still great summer listening.

The new Beach House album doesn’t differ markedly from 2010’s Teen Dream, and that’s a good thing. They don’t have to make the same album over and over, but I hope they don’t ever change. It’s just a beautiful ride.

What did I miss? What should I be listening to? Put your picks in comments.

The problem of evil and the incompetence of supernaturalism

27 December 2012 / / 2 Comments

Two articles crossed my screen today, and they’re a great example of the divide between rational thought and superstition.

They’re both about the gun tragedy at Sandy Hook, and the first one is written by a Catholic priest.

Now, believers in the Christian god have a bit of explaining to do when horrible things happen. That’s because they claim there’s a god who’s good, loving, and all-powerful, but who somehow fails to prevent evil things from happening. So after a tragedy, a reasonable question is: where was he? Is he really all that good if he has the power to prevent grade-school massacres, yet chooses not to? Here’s the theologian’s answer:

The truest answer is: I don’t know. I have theological training to help me to offer some way to account for the unexplainable. But the questions linger.

Well, that’s a bit pathetic. He doesn’t know? All that theological training, and he can’t answer a question that belongs in his discipline?

Seriously, read it; it doesn’t give any more than a shrug. And it’s not just this writer. This is literally the best they’ve got. (Oh, there are other religion guys out there who do claim to know, but their answers are so morally callous as to be not worth repeating.)

I will never satisfactorily answer the question “Why?” because no matter what response I give, it will always fall short. What I do know is that an unconditionally loving presence soothes broken hearts, binds up wounds, and renews us in life. This is a gift that we can all give, particularly to the suffering. When this gift is given, God’s love is present and Christmas happens daily.

Great, so if you help others, it’s actually god’s love; not yours. (Hat tip to Stephanie for this thought.) And why would ‘soothing’ be a consolation? I’d exchange buckets of after-the-fact soothing in order to not have had that tragedy happen. Who wouldn’t? What’s wrong with this guy? But all we’re left with is: I don’t know.

It’s good to admit when you don’t know something, but if you have no way of finding out, and no way of telling whether your answers are good ones, you have a bit of a fucking methodological problem. And this is a sad sign of the inadequacy of supernatural thinking. See, I do science because science is good at scientific questions. People may say that science isn’t good at moral questions or spiritual questions, and we can argue that. (My answer is that it does just as well as anything else.) But by gum, science is good for doing science.

Spiritual reasoning, on the other hand, isn’t good at answering scientific questions, but it’s also terrible at answering spiritual questions. It’s incompetent within its own domain. It is a shitty way of reasoning. Pardon my language, but spirituality/religion/supernaturalism has one job, and it sucks at it, and this incompetence makes me angry, especially when we have people telling us that it has the answers to life’s great questions, and then when it comes down to it, all that its professionals can tell us is “We don’t know.”

On the other hand, here’s the same issue handled by someone who’s intellectually honest: the scientist, Laurence Krauss. He doesn’t have the same problem as the priest because he doesn’t have to tap-dance around demonstrably untrue theological claims. That means he can deal with things more directly, including the superfluity of gods in times of tragedy.

Why must it be a natural expectation that any such national tragedy will be accompanied by prayers, including from the president, to at least one version of the very God, who apparently in his infinite wisdom, decided to call 20 children between the age of 6 and 7 home by having them slaughtered by a deranged gunman in a school that one hopes should have been a place or nourishment, warmth and growth?

We are told the Lord works in mysterious ways but, for many people, to suggest there might be an intelligent deity who could rationally act in such a fashion and that that deity is worth praying to and thanking for “calling them home” seems beyond the pale.
…
We don’t need faith to empathize with the grieving in Newtown. We can feel real connections, whether we are parents, or neighbors of families, or simply caring men and women. And we can want to help simply because of our common humanity.

Note that he identifies ‘common humanity’ at its origin: with humans. The difference in approach is striking. So is the relative capability of the authors. It helps if you’re not burdened by outmoded dogma and superstition.

The clothes were cool though.

25 December 2012 / / 5 Comments

I just watched ‘Miracle on 34th Street’. It was an eye-opening experience for me because I’d never seen it before, and it’s such a well-loved and admired film and… it sucked. Zeus, it sucked. It was really a terrible movie, and not just because of its leaden plot.

There’s this woman. She’s successful at her job, she has a daughter, and she divorced, which must have been pretty groundbreaking for the time. But even better, she’s really rational and skeptical. She’s committed to raising her daughter without lying to her about Santa Claus. Okay, she takes it a little far by also not reading fairy tales to her child, but even the rational among us sometimes wonder about the effects of fiction on kids.

Anyway, she’s doing great, and then over the course of the film, her rational worldview is undermined by Frank, a nice but woolly-headed lawyer, and Kris, a delusional geriatric. Frank tells her “Faith is believing when common sense tells you not to.” And by the end of the film (during which time the action has shifted completely over to the men and off of her), when Frank proves that Kris is really Santa Claus, she says, “I never really doubted you. It was just my silly common sense.”

The fuck did I just watch?

Wedding

14 December 2012 / / 4 Comments

I am pleased to announce that Miss Perfect and I are married!

The wedding was on a lovely Saturday afternoon, just a couple of weekends ago. The bride was radiant in her dress, the groom dashingly handsome in tails. After photographs and dinner, we danced all night. It was a beautiful day with family and friends.

I used to have a hypothesis about weddings, and it was that they’re intended as a stress test for the relationship. If your relationship could survive the planning, the organisation, and the negotiation of a thousand details, then you passed the qualifying round. But this wedding wasn’t like that at all, mostly because Miss Perfect did such a great job of organising things, and we fully agreed with each other on colours, typefaces, flowers, cakes, and music. We worked together to make invitations and menus. There were only a couple of times throughout the process when we asked each other: Why are we doing this again?

Why were we getting married? Secular atheists don’t need marriage. We’d been living together, sleeping together, building our home together for the last five years. We were already both committed to each other for the rest of our lives. We won’t change, we told each other. We won’t start acting ‘married’ — wait, is that a bad thing?

Okay, so if nothing is going to change, then why go through an elaborate wedding and become married people?

And the answer was simple: It was a chance to throw a really great party. No, really; great clothes, a choir, music, pomp. Especially the pomp. What a great opportunity to gather a whole bunch of people together (even family and friends from America) and have a whole day to celebrate love and relationships.

But the thing about that — after the wedding, for a couple of days, we were on a huge high from the outpouring of love from everyone and from each other. It was like being on a serotonin water-slide, riding on waves of affirmation from everyone.

We noticed another thing after the wedding. We felt like more of a couple. Of course, we walked around the house saying, “Hello Mr” and “Hello Mrs”, enjoying that unfamiliar strangeness. But we also felt more solid somehow. More established and grown-up. Our relationship was official. Society approved. Which is silly, but that’s how it feels. It feels like being real.

Marriage equality has been on my mind. Washington’s gay-marriage initiative passed last month (and I was pleased to have voted for it). However, in Australia, it’s still not legal. The marriage celebrant even had to include this little gem in her bit:

Marriage, according to law in Australia, is the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life …

which discriminates against not only my gay friends, but also my polyamorous friends. Seriously — isn’t that the kind of thing adults can decide for themselves? We have a long way to go, it seems.

So amid the wedding buzz and all the friends and the food and the love, and above all, my beautiful bride and I entering into a new stage of our relationship with a shiny new official status, I thought: Screw anyone who would try and prevent someone – anyone, I don’t care who – from having this, from feeling this way. It’s too wonderful to stop. Seriously — find me someone who thinks this. I’ll slap them upside the head and ask what’s wrong with them. Consenting adults in a loving relationship shouldn’t be allowed to have this amazing experience? Just because you don’t like their kind of relationship? Get out of town. This attitude isn’t just bigoted; it seems to originate from a kind of viciousness that’s worse than mere bigotry.

There are many arguments for marriage equality. Some involve hospital visits and wills, and some involve basic fairness. I’d like to add one to the list. Having a wedding is wonderful. So is the way you feel about your partner and your relationship afterward. That should be for everyone.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Our wedding booklet contained this snippet:

Marriage is a vital social institution. The exclusive commitment of two individuals to each other nurtures love and mutual support. Civil marriage is at once a deeply personal commitment to another human being and a highly public celebration of the ideals of mutuality, companionship, intimacy, fidelity, and family. Because it fulfills yearnings for security, safe haven, and connection that express our common humanity, civil marriage is an esteemed institution and the decision whether and whom to marry is among life’s momentous acts of self-definition.

It is undoubtedly for these concrete reasons, as well as for its intimately personal significance, that civil marriage has long been termed a ‘civil right.’ Without the right to choose to marry, one is excluded from the full range of human experience.

Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, 2003

Mormon women plan ‘Wear Pants to Church Day’

12 December 2012 / / 3 Comments

We are in the latter days, people. The LDS Church is under attack. I’m referring, of course, to this:

Mormon women plan ‘Wear Pants to Church Day’

A group of Mormon feminists has declared Sunday, Dec. 16, as “Wear Pants to Church Day” and is calling on sister Saints across the globe to join the effort.
Female Mormon missionaries are not allowed to wear pants, except on their days off. Some LDS women do wear dressy pants to church, but social convention dictates that most Mormon women don dresses or skirts to their weekly services.

You realise that this is open rebellion against the unwritten order of things. If women wear pants to church, where will it end? Men not wearing ties? Bishopric members wearing blue oxford shirts instead of white? The mind reels.

Actually, I do have a story. Back in the Utah days, Erstwhile Wife and I were walking to church. On this particular Sunday, she had decided to wear pants. And who should we run into but Cecilia Konchar Farr. She was a BYU faculty member who had been in the crosshairs (and was ultimately fired) for her feminist and pro-choice views. Think of it — she’d taken on the system in a battle she couldn’t win. Tough person.

When she saw us, she remarked, “Wow, I’m not brave enough to try that.”

She might have been joking, but lest you think that this is a timid sort of protest, it’s worth pointing out that these customs of dress and behaviour are deeply ingrained, not consciously taught, and subtly but strongly reinforced. Women wearing pants to church would be viewed on a par with men wearing skirts. Still, I like to think that, even in my believing days, I would have been that guy.

EDIT: It didn’t seem like pushing the envelope to me, but some people’s envelopes are more fragile than others. A public Facebook discussion has some sensible people, and some people freaking out.

Do we need forgiveness?

16 November 2012 / / 7 Comments

Here’s some audio from a forum I was invited to be a part of at Wesley Church a little while ago. It’s between me and pastor Nigel Gordon, with Paul Whitfield doing a fine job as moderator.

It was called “Do we need forgiveness?“

My take: We don’t need forgiveness from a god. We need to get forgiveness from each other, and try to become more aware of the consequences of our actions. And if the god of the Bible is real, he needs to beg forgiveness from all of us.

One thing about this discussion has stayed with me: Nigel keeps comparing the debt of sin to the debt of money. But I don’t think sin is the same as money. When I sin, does a little pile of stuff appear somewhere, and it has to be taken away? Or is it something else? What is the form of this ‘sin’, and why does it need to be dealt with? And why would god killing himself accomplish this?

Why wouldn’t god just forgive everyone? Why would he need to (in Matt Dillahunty’s words) need to sacrifice himself to himself as a loophole for a rule that he created?

It’s all very arcane, and when I try and clarify this beyond the vague details, Christians talk in circles. It’s a metaphor that you could probably accept if you don’t think about it too deeply, but when you start to unpack it, it makes no sense. Yet this pile of mush is the very heart of Christianity.

Romney’s relationship with the truth

7 November 2012 / / 1 Comment

A few months ago, during the Republican nomination process, my boys asked me about Romney. What was he like? Good or bad?

I said, “If he gets to be president, it’ll be bad, but it won’t be a disaster. Unlike the other nominees, he isn’t stupid. He isn’t crazy. And he isn’t evil.”

That’s still what I think about Romney. During the third debate, I was struck with the impression that Mr Romney was, at heart, a Good Man. Not crazy, stupid, or evil.

But there is one thing that was very disappointing: He lied. He conducted a campaign that was described as ‘breathtakingly dishonest‘. He was called on his lies, and he doubled down on them. (The lie that Obama hadn’t reached out to Republicans was particularly galling.)

But were they really lies? What does Romney consider to be the truth?

Mormons believe in a revelatory method for finding truth, involving prayer and reflection. I’ve written about this at length before, but here’s the short version: If you pray about something, and then feel positive spiritual feelings as though a supernatural spirit (or a ‘Holy Ghost’) is confirming the truth of that thing to you, then that thing is considered to be truth. For Mormons, that kind of ‘spiritual witness’ is considered to be the highest sort of evidence one could have. A thing is true if you feel that it’s true, and you deeply believe it.

During this campaign, we heard snarky comments about Romney’s magic underwear and the planet/star Kolob, but this is the aspect of his faith that I never really saw discussed. It is a deeply delusional way to think, and should be a disqualifier for the highest office in the land. It is stupid. It is crazy. And if Romney had become president, he might have been successful, but only insofar as he disregarded his epistemological method.

Talk the Talk: Retard

2 November 2012 / / Comments Off on Talk the Talk: Retard

I don’t like the term ‘retard’ and won’t use it. But isn’t it possible that this is just another case of semantic shift? Have we successfully uncoupled the ‘loser’ sense of the word from the ‘intellectually disabled’ sense? Probably not yet, but in that case, how long is it going to take?

One-off show: Here
Subscribe via iTunes: Here
Show notes: Here

Letterpress: Great new iOS word game

31 October 2012 / / Comments Off on Letterpress: Great new iOS word game

If you’re hooked on Words with Friends, there’s a new game in town: Letterpress. It’s the best new word game I’ve seen in a long while, and it’s got me hooked.

It’s a word game with elements of strategy, sort of like Scrabble plus Go. No, wait, it’s Boggle plus Risk. Perhaps Upwords plus Ataxx? Actually, the best description would be Boggle plus Reversi. You have to build words from the letters on the board, but when you use a letter, you claim it as your territory and it turns your colour. You win if the most letters are your colour when all the letters have been used.

Your opponent can change your letters to their colour by using them on their turn, but if you manage to completely surround a letter with other letters of your colour, it’ll turn a darker shade of your colour.

Not looking good for red.

That means it’s protected — your opponent can use it, but not flip it. So you have a number of things to do in every turn: make the longest words possible, defend your protected letters, and mount attacks on those of your opponent. And since words can’t be replayed, you’ll be burning through your vocabulary fast.

Strategy
As in Reversi, the endgame is really important, and there’s a huge advantage for the last player. So part of your strategy will be to watch which letters are left, and make sure your opponent can’t use them all on one massive final word. (Typical scenario: Q, J, and W.) In the most intense games, my opponents and I have had to circle each other, setting up territories and picking off each other’s letters in an ever-diminishing list of available words, until one of us has a healthy bank of protected letters. Then you start knocking off the unused ones when you’re certain that your opponent can’t get enough letters to win, even if they do go out.

Another strategy could be termed the ‘Samsung strategy’: take whatever word your opponent makes, adapt it slightly, and then play it. They played SIFTING? Try (ahem) FISTING. They played THICKETS? Play THICKEST or THICKSET. Progress will be incremental and hard-won, but you’ll be draining your opponent of options if it comes to a game of attrition. And it does.

Improvements
You’re not allowed to use words that have already been played, or forms of that word. That prevents pointless tit-for-tat wars. The problem is that the game has a really strange idea about what constitutes a form (or, mistakenly, a ‘prefix’) of a word. If INCITEMENT is taken, it allows INCITEMENTS, even though it shouldn’t. However, when I played BLIT, it said that was a form of the already-played word BLITZ. It is so not.

Should it disallow only inflections like plural -S? What about -ING or UN-? It needs to be consistent.

There are other improvements that I hope will come in a future update. It needs a chat function. It needs a rematch button. It would also be nice if it could uncouple itself from Apple’s Game Center, which suffers from inexplicable errors and won’t let me start games with certain people.

Even with these problems, Letterpress is still a fantastic game that’s very worth trying out. There’s a free version; the paid version allows you more than two games and a change of colours.

So this is me calling y’all out on Letterpress. I will challenge all comers. I’m ‘fontor’ on the Game Centre. Come and get me if you think you can.

UPDATE: One mystery solved. Are you getting this error message when you invite friends to play?

“Unable to create match. Please try again later.”

It’s because your friend isn’t set up to accept game invitations. Tell your friend to enable them in Game Centre under the “View Account” setting. Now why couldn’t the Game Centre just say that? That’s a terribly unhelpful error dialog.

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