Good Reason

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Talk the Talk: Retarded

10 February 2010 / Daniel Midgley / 2 Comments

On this week’s “Talk the Talk”, we discussed the use of the word ‘retarded’. Do you use the r-word? Would you ever describe someone as a ‘retard’?

The issue has come to the fore in recent weeks as Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, used the word to describe Democrats that criticised other Democrats — and subsequently apologised. “Rosa’s Law” has been introduced as a bill to the federal legislature, which would prohibit the use of the r-word in federal documents. And if you’re willing to never use the word again, you can take the the ‘r-word’ pledge.

Or you can just listen to me talking about it on RTRFM.

I’m on about 5/6ths of the way through the stream. Watch out; it starts playing as soon as the page loads.

Here be weasels

8 February 2010 / Daniel Midgley / 12 Comments

If you take it upon yourself to argue with Christian creationists, you have to know the regular stuff: biology, the second law of thermodynamics, flood hydrology, DNA, optics, embryology.

But if you decide to take on Mormon apologists, you have to have a passing knowledge of all of the above, plus archaeology, linguistics, and Meso-American metallurgy. There’s just no telling what they’ll throw into the mix.

I’ve just discovered Mormon Times writer Michael R. Ash. He makes money as an apologist for FAIR, a Mormon confabulation factory. His job is to disguise the lack of evidence for Mormon doctrines until the church can safely write them out of the canon. They call it ‘Mormon scholarship’, but ‘Mormon scholarship’ is scholarship like ‘Christian rock’ is rock. In his latest article, he complains about the lack of respect.

Shorter Michael Ash
Countering subversive attacks on Mormon scholarship

It’s so unfair that anti-Mormon scientists ‘poison the well’ by dismissing our arguments out of hand. But their claims are invalid because they haven’t read the Book of Mormon cover to cover.

It makes you wonder why he’s addressing the need for science at all, though, when he also claims that questions of the Book of Mormon’s truthfulness

can only be answered on a spiritual level — through faith, humility and personal study and prayer.

And only by carefully defining words like ‘true’, ‘correct’, and ‘historicity’ so as not to include anything that normal people mean when they use those words.

I’m looking forward to many cobbled-together bad-faith arguments in future.

My exit letter from the LDS Church

8 February 2010 / Daniel Midgley / 28 Comments

Even when I’d decided that the claims of the LDS Church were not grounded in reality, it took a while for me to resign formally. It was a big deal, so I didn’t want to rush it. But after about a year of not believing, I decided that it was time to write my Exit Letter.

You see, in the LDS Church, even if you no longer attend, or no longer even consider yourself a Mormon, you are still being counted in the church’s records. (Which are thus a bit inflated.) To no longer be counted, you need to resign formally.

A member of the Stake Presidency (who is also a good friend) was very helpful in the process. He explained that if I wanted to, I could submit a letter of resignation to the bishop of my ward, the bishop would write back asking if I was sure, I could write back and say ‘yes’, and then the matter would go to Salt Lake. There are ways around the rigamarole, but that was direct enough for my purposes.

What follows is the text of my exit letter. I don’t recommend using my letter as a model. Richard Packham has a page with information that you can adapt for your own purposes. An exit letter only has to be a one-sentence deal. But I’m a bit more verbose than that, so I wanted my letter to be a manifesto of sorts. You only get to write one of these, after all! In the end, it was exactly what I wanted to say.

Here’s the letter:

Dear (first name of bishop),

This letter is to notify you that I resign my membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, effective immediately. I’d like to ask you to carry out the necessary paperwork to remove my name from the records of the Church. I recognise that according to Church doctrine this cancels all ordinances I have engaged in, and I have made my choice with that consideration in mind.

This is not a decision that I have made lightly. ‘Being Mormon’ has been a part of my identity throughout my life, and I have made many sacrifices in service of the Church because I thought it was right. The process of ‘deconversion’ has at times been difficult. However, I have also found it to be immensely worthwhile. I have gained the ability to reason without worrying about the presumed opinions of hypothetical beings, and I am better able to enjoy and value every day of this life with the people I love, while still being the moral agent I have always been.

In my youth, the LDS Church instilled in me the highest regard for truth. That was what made it better than other churches — it had the truth, or so I thought. Ironically, it was this regard for truth that led me away from religion in general, and Mormonism in particular. As I became more aware of the scientific method, with its reliance on empirical, real-world evidence, it became clear to me that the Church was promoting an essentially false method for finding truth. Latter-day Saints try to evaluate the truth of an idea by how that idea makes them feel. They try to maintain their belief by having faith-promoting experiences and by bearing testimony to each other. But feelings, experiences, and testimony are not reliable sources of evidence because they are coloured by our tendency to see what we want to see. By contrast, the scientific method requires evidence to establish the truthfulness of claims, and it offers a set of tools that control for our human biases and our tendency for wishful thinking.

Science and religion are opposite and irreconcilable ways of understanding the world. Science does a better job. It offers testable ideas, and makes predictions that are confirmed by experimentation and observation. Religion fails miserably at this, but believers are expected to ‘have faith’ and continue believing anyway. I’m pleased to say that I no longer believe in supernatural beings — gods, angels, spirits, or devils — because there is simply no empirical evidence for the existence of such beings, and there are better explanations for the experiences people claim as evidence. I will be very interested should any good evidence appear in the future, though I find it rather unlikely. In the meantime, I do not wish to be a member of an organisation that promotes a superstitious and magical worldview, of which the LDS Church is only one example.

That said, I’d like to add that my experience with the Church — both inside and outside — has been a largely positive one where I have learned much. I have recently had occasion to speak to someone who was going through the deconversion process in his faith, and I observed that our experiences were very similar, with one exception: his church ostracises its unbelievers. The threat of losing his family and social contacts at a time of great change has caused him an added dimension of grief. I am glad that Mormons do not engage in this tactic, and that my LDS friends are still my friends, though I no longer share their worldview.

Thank you for your timely handling of this matter. I would appreciate if you could confirm when my request has been processed.

Best regards,
Daniel Midgley

In the weeks after posting my letter, I had several enjoyable chats with church leaders, in which I asked if they had any evidence for various Mormon doctrines yet, and they tried to explain why I shouldn’t need any. Sadly, their enthusiasm for these chats waned long before mine did. And then some months later, I received my very own letter from one Mr Greg Dodge in Salt Lake City, informing me I was officially No Longer Mormon. I’m having it framed.

My exit letter reflected my experience in the LDS Church. Yours will no doubt be different. But whatever your circumstances, if you no longer believe in the church, there are some good reasons for making an official resignation. Otherwise, you’re still being counted in their statistics, and as long as you’re on their rolls, the things they do are done with your tacit approval. I found a psychological benefit to having that sense of closure. My status on the outside matched my status on the inside, and that’s a great feeling.

To date, my resignation from the LDS Church is the intellectual accomplishment I’m proudest of. I was able to overcome a lifetime of religious conditioning, centuries of socio-cultural tradition, and millions of years of human perceptual weirdness, with only my mind.

By golly, it works!

6 February 2010 / Daniel Midgley / Comments Off

The little machine works better if you click on the ‘nifty’ graphic above. It’s not going automatically for me.

Religion in the 2011 Australian Census

4 February 2010 / Daniel Midgley / 7 Comments

Australia’s having a census next year, and you know what that means: Statistical religion hijinx! Australia will no doubt continue its proud tradition of pumping up some joke religion to wreak havoc on the census statisticians. The exercise also serves to nurture a vain hope of forcing the government to elevate the ‘religion’ to official status.

So what’s the new Jedi? Possibly heavy metal, if this Facebook page is any indication. (Its UK counterpart is doing rather better.)

It’s all a bit of fun, and everyone loves to take the piss, but I’d like to encourage all atheists and agnostics to put down ‘atheist’ or ‘agnostic’ (whichever you are). That way, we’ll boost the ‘none’ category (we’re still not sure if ‘Jedi’ did), and there will be more specific evidence for the rise of a*ism, if anyone breaks the results down.

I’m kind of excited to see what comes out of this. We know that the ‘nones’ have been growing steadily for several decades (that’s the blue part in the chart at right), and it’ll be fun to see the pattern continue as the stats come in.

More encouraging is the announcement that people in same-sex relationships will be able to tick the ‘husband or wife’ box for their partner, and it will be counted the same as a hetero marriage.

Paul Lowe, Head of the ABS Population Census Branch, announced in an email to Australian Marriage Equality (AME) that “the count of people in same-sex relationships who tick the ‘husband or wife of person 1’ box at question 5 will be made available as a part of the standard output from the 2011 Census”.

Australian Marriage Equality (AME) national convener, Peter Furness, welcomed the decision, which will count the number of married same-sex couples living together even though such marriages are denied recognition under Australian law following amendments to the Marriage Act in 2004.

“As government agencies like the ABS begin to recognise the reality that some same-sex partners are married, the Rudd Government’s opposition to recognising same-sex marriage looks increasingly outdated”, said Mr Furness.

“The Rudd Government may choose to bury its head in the sand and pretend same-sex marriages don’t exist, but clearly the ABS will not.”

One more step to full acceptance for our gay and lesbian friends, and to equality for all.

Religious vultures in Haiti: Worse than even I’d thought

2 February 2010 / Daniel Midgley / 1 Comment

I complained in an earlier post about religious groups in Haiti jockeying for position so as to mix aid with proselyting (and in some cases, victim blaming).

I didn’t expect them to be carrying off children.

Ten American Baptists sit in a Haitian jail on Monday, accused of child trafficking for what they say was a hastily conceived attempt to rescue orphans by quickly removing them from Haiti — before getting official permission or even checking to determine that the children really were orphans. In Haiti and on the Web, the arrests have led to fresh accusations that some religious groups may be guilty of a kind of spiritual trafficking, by mixing the help they offer to victims of last month’s earthquake with proselytizing.

The Baptists were open about the fact that they felt driven by their Christian faith. Speaking to reporters after the group’s arrest, Laura Silsby, who led the Baptist team to Haiti, described the children as “deeply in need most of all of God’s love and his compassion.” In a description of the mission posted online, the group wrote, “God has laid upon our hearts the need to go now.”

Meanwhile in Idaho, where several of the Baptists are from, Rev. Clint Henry, a pastor involved in the effort, denounced what he called “the accusations of Satan,” made against “our team,” The Associated Press reported.

In other words, anything they do is right, and any efforts to oppose them are from the devil.

Even I wouldn’t have suspected religiously-motivated aid workers of something so self-righteous, misguided, and wrong. But when you’re high on faith, and think a god is directing you, it means there’s no possibility of accountability or negotiation.

But only 33 children? Amateurs!

I’d be critical too.

2 February 2010 / Daniel Midgley / Comments Off

This headline in the Sydney Morning Herald is causing me some trouble with my word sense disambiguation:

Woman critical after car hits her

This one’s caused problems in headlines before. The Trenton Times (9/2/1982) had a similar headline:

‘Nagging’ wife critical after hammer attack

Isn’t there some other word they could use?

iPad jokes ‘no longer funny’

1 February 2010 / Daniel Midgley / Comments Off

In what is believed to be the quickest turnaround in humour history, jokes about the name of the Apple iPad became ‘no longer funny’ minutes after being conceived.

The previous record was held by the Liam Lynch song “My United States of Whatever”.

“We’ve never seen a joke age this quickly, ” says Frank Overton of the Comedy Institute, a humour think-tank. “It’s probably because of the juvenile nature of the joke, combined with the fact that, well, there’s only one joke you can make. iTampon. How many times can you say ‘iTampon’?”

The joke will be added to the list of no longer funny things, including jokes about the vibrate function on mobile phones, quoting Monty Python sketches in their entirety, and potentially risqué variations on the word “Pokémon”.

10^23: Homeopathy Overdose in Perth

31 January 2010 / Daniel Midgley / 6 Comments

I’m happy to report that I survived the Homeopathy Overdose. Imagine, if you will, about twenty Perth Skeptics standing outside a chemist’s on Beaufort Street, snarfing down tiny white pillules. It was all to highlight the point that homeopathy is bunk, and unsupported by any scientific evidence. Other skeptic groups around the world held similar events.

Many of the Perth skeptics chose sleeping pills (and subsequently failed to fall asleep). But I went for the hard stuff. Arsenicum album is a homeopathic nostrum that is supposedly derived from arsenic. You’d think that if you ate a lot of them, you’d experience some form of arsenic poisoning, but I ate half a bottle of those horribly sweet crunchy things (Oldest Boy ate the other half), and we experienced no ill effects at all. Actually, I’m lucky I didn’t die — who knows what crap they use as filler.

But wait: there’s a reason that I didn’t die of arsenic poisoning. Homeopathics are deluded — sorry, diluted — so that no trace of the original stuff remains. The pills I took had a dilution of 30C. A dilution of 1C is a 1:100 ratio, so 30C would be 10^60 molecules of water — a one with sixty zeros. 10^60 molecules of water is a lot. It’s about 27 billion earth volumes. (Back of the envelope calculations here.) That’s how much you’d have to drink before being certain of getting one molecule of arsenicum album with a 30C dilution. And some dilutions go a lot higher than that. There is no chance any of the original stuff is still there.

Homeopaths admit this, but still claim that the water retains some ‘memory’ of the remedy. Baloney and hogwash. If the water ‘remembers’ the arsenic, then it should also remember the urinary tract of every person it’s passed through, as well as all the effluent carried through it over the years.

Why do people believe this stuff? Probably because homeopaths, with no need to do real research, can spend all their time making up far-fetched explanations for their silly bullshit.

The 2010 Overdose was great fun, and a good way to make the point that homeopathy is a scam. And I shall never forget the look on that motorist’s face as she passed us, gleefully chomping away.