Good Reason

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Blame the Bible

1 June 2012 / / 2 Comments

Just noting to myself that I’ve seen two (not one, but two) stories of people doing exactly what the Bible says, with disastrous or horrifying consequences.

The first was this:

Serpent-handling pastor profiled earlier in Washington Post dies from rattlesnake bite

Mack Wolford, a flamboyant Pentecostal pastor from West Virginia whose serpent-handling talents were profiled last November in The Washington Post Magazine, hoped the outdoor service he had planned for Sunday at an isolated state park would be a “homecoming like the old days,” full of folks speaking in tongues, handling snakes and having a “great time.” But it was not the sort of homecoming he foresaw.

Instead, Wolford, who turned 44 the previous day, was bitten by a rattlesnake he owned for years. He died late Sunday.

Yep, the Bible says that if you’re a believer, you can pick up snakes and they won’t harm you. So what happened? Did he not believe enough? Or is the Bible full of crap? Is anyone in that congregation asking these questions? Probably not; the news story tells how Wolford’s father died the same way.

The other story is, of course, this video about a four-year-old singing a charming ditty: “Ain’t No Homos Gonna Make It to Heaven”. I won’t embed it — I can’t even watch the whole thing.

People are up in arms about it, but isn’t he just quoting Paul?

Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind…shall inherit the kingdom of God.

One criticism I get here on the blog is that I go after the extremists. Not true. These are people who believe what the Bible says. If that’s extreme, it means that more ‘moderate’ believers are picking and choosing what they like from the Bible, using their own moral sense. Which makes the actual Bible kind of extraneous. Why not skip a step and ditch the Bible entirely? You get bitten by fewer snakes that way.

At any rate, if you’re horrified by these items or find them distasteful, don’t blame the believers — blame the Bible.

Talk the Talk: Rape

31 May 2012 / / Comments Off on Talk the Talk: Rape

I have to say, I approached this show with a bit of trepidation, since ‘rape’ is such a potent word and I thought people would be angry about whatever I said. But you have to tackle the tough ones sometimes. And some people do throw the word around, so I wanted to address it. One politician referred to ‘raping companies‘, which does seem trivial. And then Fox’s Catholic priest referred to the government ‘raping their rights’. Don’t you think that of all people, a Catholic priest would want to divert attention away from that word? I’ve never noticed him being so concerned about actual rape.

Yes, we do discuss the word ‘rape’ and its history, but we’re really talking about how to navigate language change. Is it okay to use the word ‘rape’ metaphorically, like “raping the wilderness”? Or does that trivialise real rape? On the other hand, the word ‘rape’ has been stricken from actual trials where sexual assault is the real issue! I was a juror in a sexual assault trial years ago, and I don’t recall the word ‘rape’ being used.

Hang out ’til the end — there’s a little bit of post-show chatter.

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

Creepy Jehovah’s Witness video

30 May 2012 / / 8 Comments

Uh-oh! Looks like little Caleb has brought home some competing fiction! Mom knows that her Bible fiction won’t survive against it — it’s far more interesting — so it’s time for a guilt trip at the family table! (Fast forward to 2:58 for the video.)

Maybe AC Grayling was wrong — he suggested substituting ‘God’ with ‘Fred’ or some other name, just to show how silly the whole thing is. But ‘Jehovah’ sounds pretty silly to me, and they’re still buying it.

I imagine this is intended to help JW parents remove unwanted elements like ‘Harry Potter’ or ‘critical thinking’. It’s really terrible parenting, but it’s disguised as good parenting. Notice that Mom doesn’t yell or scream, or throw the toy in the trash. What she does is much more sinister: she manipulates the boy into caring for the feelings of an invisible bronze-age Hebrew deity, and acting accordingly. Check him out; he’s absolutely gutted.

Do you want Jehovah to be sad?

How stupid! Jehovah’s a big guy; he can look after his own feelings. Or is that a not-so-subtle threat? You don’t want Jehovah to be ‘sad’ with you, do you? Remember how we read about the Midianites? Jehovah was ‘sad’ with them, too.

What if you disobey Jehovah, and play with toys he doesn’t like?

I’ll turn horrible and old like those poor fuckers Adam and Eve!

Even creepier is how the kid is encouraged to be Jehovah’s ‘friend’. People sometimes talk about having a ‘relationship’ with their favourite deity, but what they don’t realise is that it’s hard to make a relationship work when there’s a significant power imbalance. When the other person in the relationship has all the power in the universe, knows everything you do and think, imposes arbitrary moral demands on you, and will ultimately decide your eternal future, that’s not a relationship. It even goes beyond ‘abusive relationship’; it’s a hostage situation. How is this a model for successful relationships?

You made Mommy very happy!

Hmm. Something about her seems familiar.

Nah.

Afterwards, they sang “I Am a Slave of God”.

UPDATE: Hey, look what the Internet made! A Sparlock t-shirt!

Best of all, Café Press will give you a 25% discount if you use the order code 3XNEYLRKATMK. Apparently.

Celebrate this, the best of all possible worlds!

Stuff Republicans don’t like

26 May 2012 / / 2 Comments

I was checking out this Gallup poll: Americans, Including Catholics, Say Birth Control Is Morally OK.

That’s interesting, but what’s more, they provide a breakdown of what people think is okay and what’s not. Here’s the list.

Okay, so people mostly approve of birth control, divorce, and gambling, and they disapprove most of suicide, polygamy, and (for some reason) cloning humans. Singled out for special condemnation is people who have affairs, which is surprising because haven’t a lot of people done that? Gallup says that’s their most consistently disapproved item. Interesting.
But the best part is that they break it down by political tendency. This chart shows the same things, but it’s  sorted by Republican minus Democrat approval. In other words, the top of the chart is things Democrats don’t approve of, but Republicans do (comparatively), and the bottom of the chart is stuff Republicans don’t like, but Democrats are like ‘meh’.
Top of the list of things Republicans like: the death penalty, medical testing on animals, and wearing fur. (Although I actually approve of medical testing on animals — not cosmetic testing.)
Cloning animals is a wash.
Most revealing, however, is the bottom of the list — the stuff that Democrats don’t mind, but that Republicans don’t approve of. I notice suicide — not many people like it, but GOPers slightly less. So let’s take a look at the issues that cut across the political divide more than suicide:
  • Porn — I doubt the Republicans are using less porn than Democrats, but maybe they disapprove more while still looking at it.
  • Sex between an unmarried man and woman
  • Having a baby outside of marriage
  • Gay or lesbian relations

In short, anything having to do with people having unauthorised sex. So really, Republicans don’t just hate gay sex — they hate straight sex too, if it’s not sanctioned by marriage. On the other hand, Democrats approve of unmarried straight sex about as much as they approve of (probably unmarried) gay sex — at 66% approval for both, it’s all the same to them.
Could this explain why conservatives are fighting gay marriage so hard? For them, marriage is what legitimises sex. So if gay people can get married, for them that’s like saying gay sex is okay. And for them, that’s not okay.
I’m trying not to read too much into these results, but this is an idea I hadn’t thought of before. Am I onto something?

Global Atheist Con: Eugenie Scott

24 May 2012 / / Comments Off on Global Atheist Con: Eugenie Scott

Eugenie Scott is the Executive Director of the National Centre for Science Education. Her talk was “Reason and Creationism”.

I’ve disagreed with Scott and the NCSE over the years because of the stand she’s taken on the ‘accommodationist’ side of the science and atheism divide. It’s not because of her reluctance to fly the ‘atheist’ flag; I’m happy for the NCSE to appeal to a larger audience of possibly religious folks who would otherwise be put off by the ‘atheist’ label (see also Neil deGrasse Tyson). I also understand that the NCSE is in the business of teaching about evolution, not atheism. And so Scott has avoided the conflict. That would be okay, if she didn’t set herself against the New Atheists who want to take creationists down to the mat. New Atheists want to force the conflict between creationism and reality because they know it’s a debate they can win; accommodationists would be happy if they could fool creationists into thinking that there is no conflict between evolution and faith long enough for biology teachers could get on with their work.

The accommodationist view has always struck me as weak and disingenuous. When Scott says that she does not see a “dichotomy between science and religion or evolution and religion,” well, that’s just wrong, at least for Abrahamic religions that take their doctrine seriously. They make claims about the origin of the world, claims which many of their members take seriously, and those members reject evolution because of those claims. And every time she says that science is somehow powerless to evaluate supernatural claims, I scream. Science tells us exactly what to do with supernatural claims; bin them until they’re supported by evidence. Oh, they can’t be, because they’re not verifiable? Then that’s a problem for the believers to sort out. They need to do the work of defining what they mean by ‘god’ and backing up their claims, but they never seem to get around to it because they’re too busy preaching the word, brother.

Simply getting religious people to sign off on evolution is not the ultimate goal — the goal is getting people to reason without superstition. Non-acceptance of evolution is just a part of this larger problem, and if we don’t work on this, irrationality will pop up in other ways (e.g. climate change denialism, which the NCSE is now also fighting). And trying to do this by claiming that there’s no conflict is just fooling people, and I don’t think that even the religious will be fooled by it.

Gnu Atheists want to tell the truth. And they’re arguing from an advantageous position; when you have the facts on your side, why not argue from facts?

Well, this is an old argument, and once I get to this part, I usually regain some perspective, and remember that Scott and the NCSE aren’t the bad guys. They’re out there teaching the facts about evolution, and climate change. In fact, the NCSE news feed looks to be a good resource for evolution news. The NCSE deserve some love, even if their approach bugs the shit out of me, and even if Scott undermines her own work by saying wrong things.

To the talk.

Scott started not with biology, but with geology. There are two principles that help geologists figure out the age of a rock formation.

  • The principle of horizontality states that layers are layed down horizontally.
  • The principle of superposition tells us that lower layers are older.
But this makes life hard for a Young Earth Creationist because the earth as we see it takes longer than the 6,000 years they posit from their reading of some book or other. They allege that there hasn’t been enough time to lay all that rock down, and so they say silly things, like the Grand Canyon was laid down in a year. The geology of Coconino County, Arizona poses a special challenge for YECs because they have alternating wind-lain and water-lain layers, and that’s hard to do in a short period of time. But they take up the challenge, and try to get their work past geology editors.

Scott says that creationists see themselves as the good guys in a culture war. They reject the idea that you can be good without a god, (says Scott: “I don’t know about you, but I haven’t killed anyone in weeks!”) and see the world as a struggle between their god and materialism. But this is a linguist trick, explains Scott. Materialism has two senses that creationists conflate:

  • Methodological materialism refers to the practice of using natural explanations for the phenomena we observe, and
  • Philosophical materialism is the view that matter is all there is.

(I suppose we should add to these the idea of acquisitive materialism, concerned with getting and having the latest, which really can be destructive, IMO.)

Fighting materialism, says Scott, is a strong motivator for their attacks on science, as they try to pave the way for Christian theism. Scott has no doubt that creationists believe their schtick, but their typical modus operandi is to bypass the process of communicating with the scientific community and take their arguments directly to an undiscerning public, as in high schools and even very young children. That’s because their fight is a political and cultural one, not a scientific one.

Talk the Talk: Really Old Art

22 May 2012 / / 2 Comments

A good Talk today — it’s always fun with Stacy G. This time we’re talking about cave art, and what it has to do with language.

So they’ve found a limestone slab dated to 37,000 years ago, it’s got a carving on it, and it’s a vulva. Here’s a pic (from this article): (SFW)

No, not the circular thing with the tail. The thing inside the circle. Or am I just seeing things? I’m not used to looking at vulval imagery.

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

Gayvoice: Is it real?

20 May 2012 / / 7 Comments

There’s a new study that claims that people can detect gayface with 80% accuracy. But I’m not satisfied with it — when you dig down, the study really says that some people can get up to 80%, but everyone as a whole scores 57%, which starts to look a lot like random chance.

What about gayvoice? Lots of people are certain they’re gayvoyant, and they give a lot of plausible explanations for the voice — gay people use extra sibilance that serves as a socio-linguistic signal, and so forth — but I think that’s getting ahead of the game. Before we try to explain gayvoice, we have to make sure it’s real. As a starter, I’ve set up a quasi-scientific experiment.

The concept is simple. I’ve pulled twelve samples of male voices from episodes (chosen at random) of Dan Savage’s wonderful Savage Lovecast, where people call up and ask Dan for sex advice. The podcast is publicly available, so one presumes the guys in question consented to having their voices out there. Each of the guys identified as either gay or straight (but not bi or trans), and I’ve chosen a bit of their call that I think gives enough to get a feel for their voices, but not enough to give their orientation away.

Guess which guys are gay, and which are straight. You’ll see how well you did at the end of the test, and I’ll post the overall results in a couple of weeks.

<a href=”http://goodreason.polldaddy.com/s/gay-or-straight”>Click here to take the quiz.</a>

polldaddy.add( {
type: ‘button’,
title: ‘Click here to take the quiz.’,
style: ’rounded’,
text_color: ‘FFFFFF’,
back_color: ‘000000’,
domain: ‘goodreason.polldaddy.com/s/’,
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} );

Just one catch: At the moment, the poll does not work on Safari — it doesn’t let you see the audio clips. Apparently the new version of Safari has broken a few different poll sites. Use a different browser.

If you’re curious about gayvoice, people have studied this a bit.

  • Benjamin Munson is on the forefront of the research [ 1 | 2 (pdf) ]
  • Uncle Cecil of the Straight Dope has treated it.
  • So has the Economist.
– – – – – – –
UPDATE
It’s been about a week, so I’ve put some results after the jump.
The way to read this chart: A green bar is the right answer, so when the green bar is on top, most people got it right. 
The upshot: People picked gay voice correctly only half the time. Looks like random chance to me. You’d actually have done better if you’d assumed everyone was straight.
This doesn’t mean gayvoice isn’t real though. It just means these test-takers couldn’t tell from these samples. And there might have been a lot of confounding variables.
  • The samples weren’t long enough, or of high enough quality.
  • The speakers were listeners to the Savage Lovecast, and might have had more-gay friendly attitudes, which might have affected their speech patterns.
  • This means they might have been more willing to accommodate to the person they were speaking to (viz, Dan, a gay guy).
  • Talking about your own sexual problems might make you speak differently.
  • Just because the general public can’t pick it doesn’t mean it’s not real. What about other gay guys? I didn’t do a breakdown that way, but it would be interesting.

Obviously, there are ways of speaking which are considered stereotypically gay, but from this test, they don’t seem to be reliably detected by most people. “More research is needed.™” Thanks to all to took the test. 
Also, a shoutout to Polldaddy — there are lots of polling services, and I tried them all, but theirs was the easiest and most helpful, especially when embedding audio clips. Try them for all your polling needs.

The Three Horsemen: Act 2

17 May 2012 / / Comments Off on The Three Horsemen: Act 2

Setting: A very long book-signing queue

Dramatis personae:
Richard Dawkins (RD): A scientist. A public intellectual. A colossus among men.
Daniel Midgley (DM): A Daniel Midgley

Curtain rises.

DM: Hello again!
RD: (peers at DM as if for the first time, appears to recognise) Oh, hello.
DM: (hands over a copy of ‘The Magic of Reality’) This is the copy of your book that I read to my son.
RD: I’m glad! (Signs)
DM: Do you think that disgust was the mechanism for our evolved sense of morality?
RD: Yes. I do. (Hands back books)
DM: Thank you! (exit)

End of Act II

Learn to read Korean in 15 minutes

16 May 2012 / / 1 Comment

This is a surprisingly simple guide to Hangul, the Korean writing system.

Another fun fact: Hangul was once called “Achimgeul” (아침글) or “writing you can learn within a morning”. It was intended as an insult, but I think ease of learning is a good thing, don’t you?

Is it right to try to influence others in the Church?

15 May 2012 / / 3 Comments

Steve Bloor is an ex-Mormon, an ex-bishop, and a much nicer guy than I am. He’s so nice, he actually cares about other people’s feelings. If I could be like that — it would require a soul transplant, and since I don’t have a soul, there’s no place to put a new one. Ah, me.

His latest blog post has got me thinking. It’s titled: Is it right to try to influence others in the Church?

My first impulse is to say, “Of course. Why wouldn’t you? Next!” But it’s more complex than that, and it gets into the reasons why I write things here and there, so let me unpack it.

I like where Steve’s coming from. He knows that people are harmed by their involvement in the church, and that a rational worldview is the most helpful basis for living one’s life. I agree — dumping a layer of supernatural fictional goo isn’t going to help anyone think better or be a better person, at least not for any real reason worth mentioning. Maybe some people can be frightened into acting good for a while, but there are going to be some costs involved (and the church profits in the end), so I don’t see any real benefit.

Something Steve doesn’t mention is that as ex-Mormons, we sometimes try very hard not to ‘appear evil’. I certainly did; I didn’t want to confirm every rotten stereotype I’d been fed about people who leave the church. And one of the ‘evil’ things ex-Mormons do is talk about their experience, so sometimes people hesitate to do that. Seriously, I’ve run into a lot of people in the initial stages of their deconversion who ‘don’t wish to harm others’ with their knowledge. Isn’t that strange? Yes, deconversion is disruptive and difficult, but it’s not Jedi death rays.

So when Steve asks:

Should I try to raise awareness of the potential problems with their belief system?

Does my attempt at raising awareness actually achieve anything? Or does it create a feeling of being threatened & create fear in my TBM [true believing Mormon] friends and family? In the end is my attempt futile or counter-productive?

the answer is: Don’t worry! The ex-Mormon power has a unique attribute: it only works on people who are ready for it. It leaves True Believers entirely unscathed. There is no way you can ‘harm’ anyone’s faith. True Believers have a whole range of psychological defence mechanisms to protect their faith, including communal reinforcement, confirmation bias, and sudden-onset deafness. Don’t worry about ‘harming their faith’; because it isn’t built on reason, it’s very robust against rational attacks. Unless they take science and reason seriously, as good things — then it’s another story.

The other part of Steve’s question is a really good one:

Does my approach to this increase my own happiness & wellbeing, or does it cause me angst & emotional fatigue?

It’s a good point; if it’s pissing you off, you’re doing it wrong. Remember, we’re the ones who escaped! We’re not bound down by artificial guilt or arbitrary restrictions. We have permission to be happy. If the discussions are causing you angst, maybe you’re taking the need to convert others too seriously. (It’s a common holdover from the evangelical mindset.) Accept that some of your friends and family will never deconvert, and will stay in the Church their entire lives. Relax; they won’t go to hell or one of the lower kingdoms. Eternal punishment for the crime of misbelief is no longer one of your beliefs. Realise that long-term social and religious patterns are trending in our direction, even if the people you care about aren’t part of it. Once you’re free of the idea that you can deconvert people, it’s very liberating. You can accept your TBM friends, even if they can’t fully accept you.

So if we can’t deconvert them, and they may not even hear us, why speak out at all? Why be public? We do it because there are people around us who are deconverting, and if we’re visible, they’ll come to us for help. I have had several people from my mission contact me. They’d begun thinking thoughts that couldn’t be unthunk. So I’ve been able to talk to them and encourage them, and it’s been a great experience.

It’s perfect, really — those who are ready find us, and those who aren’t ignore us. Influence others? They influence themselves. All we have to do is stay visible.

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