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First, my wife decides that she wants to be purely vegetarian (we had already tried to mostly eat only locally-raised pasture-fed animals, but that is no longer good enough), that she wants our son to be raised vegetarian until he is old enough to decide himself, and that she'd really like it if we could keep a vegetarian household. As I have mentioned before, I really love to cook, and this pretty much means that a whole section of the palette is now ripped away from me, and I can never paint with those colors again. Oh yeah, and she also wants me to be happy and excited about it. What the fuck. I should at least be allowed to be unhappy about it, right?!?!?!
Then, I'm browsing around over on Bjørn Østman's blog, and I see a comment from someone exhorting people not to travel to the atheism convention in Australia, because of the impact of air travel on global warming.
I can't fucking stand this shit any more. I am a reasonable man, and I do way more than the average American to try and live an ethical life. But it's never good enough. What do I have to show for my efforts? Yet more restrictions and sacrifices heaped on me, more guilt, more politicization of everyday decision, more worry and deliberation -- and the planet is still headed for disaster, animals are still suffering in massive numbers, because nobody else is changing.
I'm really about to have an ethical implosion here. It's too hard, it causes too much strife, and I don't feel like it makes a difference. I'm a fucking sucker, a fucking sap, for trying to live an ethical life when everybody around me is reaping the benefit of doing what is right for them. I'm so sick of this bullshit.
I was reading a post over on Pharyngula discussing an article by a Christian at Salon, where she apparently expresses some embarrassment about her beliefs. This paragraph, which PZ also mocked, made me think of something:
Writers like Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Victor J. Stenger -- and, of course, performers like Bill Maher -- get loads of press mocking the dummies gullible enough to believe some guy a couple thousand years ago was God's son. But come on. It's like shooting Christian fish car magnets in a barrel.
Hmmm, interesting... so some 40% of Americans and a disturbing number of leading politicans are "gullible dummies," and this is so obvious that it shouldn't even be pointed out?
Well, maybe she has a point. I've noticed the same thing about these "New Doctors", who, unlike their counterparts from sixty years ago who had the decency, tolerance, and respect to keep their mouth shut about the dangers of smoking, feel the need to go preaching to everybody that smoking can cause cancer. Like people don't already know.
Surgeons general like Elders, Satcher, Carmona, and Benjamin -- and of course droids like C3PO -- get loads of press warning the dummies gullible enough to pay upwards of $5 for a pack of addictive carcinogens. But come on. It's like shooting diseased lungs in a barrel.
Of course, there are some differences here... Most smokers know cigarettes are bad for their health; smokers comprise about 12% or so of the US population, as opposed to more like 40% who take the Bible literally; and despite the efforts of the Tobacco Vatican, the smoking lobby no longer has a stranglehold on American politics...
So I was making this package of Annie's Macaroni & Cheese, and at the very end of the instructions it says, "And to support family farms, use organic milk, butter, and yogurt."
Wait, wut?
Annie's is based in Napa, CA, and given the volumes that they do, dollars to donuts their shit is coming from massive operations like Cascadia Farms, basically monocultures/factory farms that just happen to be organic. It's probably slightly better for the environment, but not by much.
But more important, by absolutely no means do those places qualify as family farms. Implying that buying organic products from giant corporations like Annie's is a way to support family farms goes beyond disingenuous, it's just plain dishonest. Quite the contrary, a slavish devotion to USDA-Certified Organic products probably hurts family farms on balance, because small farms often cannot afford the expensive and arduous certification process.
This would be like if Apple put a little notice on the back of their iPod packaging that said, "And to support independent software developers, buy a Mac." Um, yeah, Apple may not be Microsoft, but they are still a multi-billion dollar global corporation. HelllLLLOOO!!!
Sorry, that just really pissed me off.
My wife and I were watching Survivor: Samoa last night (yes, I kind of like that show) and a reward challenge involved a hilarious scene where people on both teams were openly praying for victory. Oh noes, a decision! What's a deity to do?
It started out with Token Hot Blonde Natalie making a comment to her newfound evangelical boyfriend, Brett, along the lines of, "You're a prayer warrior too, right? Let God guide your hand!" gag
You see, earlier in the episode, we had been shown the two lying together with Brett quoting Bible verses and Natalie looking suitably impressed. Despite being in different alliances, a bond seemed to be forming between the two attractive young people over their shared beliefs. Of course, people's beliefs are their own business, and they did not appear to be proselytizing, only discussing a shared belief, and the presence of a nosy cameraman can hardly be blamed on them. So even though I found this to be eye-rollingly lame, I can hardly criticize them for this discussion.
But then we get to the day's reward challenge.
The challenge involved a large number of coconuts suspended in the air by criss-crossing ropes, and each turn a team member had to untie and remove one of the ropes, letting as few coconuts fall as possible. The first team to have 100 or more coconuts fall was the loser. Success involved a combination of choosing the right rope, as well as removing it with a slow and steady hand.
"Did she just say 'prayer warrior?!'", asks my wife? Yes, yes she did. The praying continued in gratuitous fashion. Now there is something worth criticizing. Even viewing this through a completely Christian lens, this was total bullshit. First, there is that Bible verse that mentions that making a big show out of praying in public is a douche-y thing to do (I paraphrase liberally), and terming you and your new boyfriend "prayer warriors" on national TV surely counts.
Moreover, how much more self-centered can you get than begging God to help you win a reward challenge on a game show, with the other team only a few feet away? It's one thing when athletes give praise to God after a game. The inanity of this has been well-discussed. But this would be more akin to the captain of a (American) football team loudly praying for victory during the coin toss. How offensive is that? Downright blasphemous, I would argue, as far as it goes.
Things kicked up yet another notch when a member of the other team, ex-military Christian lesbian Shambo, started closing her eyes, raising her head to the sky, and pointing both fingers upwards with a muttered "Thank you God" every time something went well for her team.
While not coming anywhere close to equaling the lameness of Natalie's genuflections, it created a situation where you had members of each team quite openly beseeching and/or praising God in the name of opposite goals. They were both Christians, so which one was God helping? Rarely, if ever, have I seen the obvious criticism of asking/thanking God for competitive success illustrated in such a stark manner. Classic.
The conclusion was even better. Natalie's team initially had some success, but soon the team Shambo was on caught up. Then Shambo's team fell behind again, with 70+ coconuts having fallen, while the other team was still in the 40s.
Foul-mouthed manipulative oil company president Russell, and judging by some of his comments one of the more godless contestants on the show, pulled off an epic win for Shambo's team by removing a rope very late in the game without a single coconut falling. On the next turn, Natalie approached the place where the ropes were tried, made some pious gestures, and reflected, "God has surely taken good care of me today." She unties the rope and begins to pull...
There was a rain of coconuts.
In a single turn, "God caused" over 50 coconuts to fall, losing the challenge for Natalie's team in one brief stroke. God has surely taken good care of her, indeed. Perhaps Shambo was the more righteous? Or maybe God just preferred her style of prayer?
It was such a slap in the face, one has to wonder to what extent the CBS editors spliced and rearranged to more fully discredit Natalie's gratuitous display of blasphemous faux-faith. In any case, I have to admit it was pretty awesome. Even if you are religious, I would think that it would impart a certain satisfaction to see such a selfish and naive conception of one's place in the universe thoroughly discredited.
Whatever one's thoughts on the divine, the idea of begging a supreme being for your gain at another's expense is just sick.
First it was Penn Jillette, now it's James Randi. Why do otherwise sensible skeptics seem to be prone to buying into the claims of anthropogenic global warming denialists?
Okay, a sample size of two doesn't necessarily mean anything, but I think there is something to this. In my opinion, the reasons are twofold:
First, unlike most of the "hot topics" in the skeptical community, AGW is goddamn hard to understand. When it comes to creationism, anti-vaccination, alternative medicine, religious and paranormal beliefs, even as a layman I can pretty handily explain why it makes no sense. (On a side note, some of the anti-vaccination propaganda is somewhat harder to debunk, which may help to account for folks like Bill Maher) With AGW, on the other hand, pretty much the best I can do is point out that the vast majority of people with legitimate credentials say it's real, so I have to trust them on it. Of course, it helps that when AGW denialists show the graphs that are supposed to show that warming doesn't track with CO2, I think they show a pretty strong correlation given how noisy climatology data is... but I really don't know very much about the topic, and to be able to guess whether the predictive models are accurate or not, well that takes a lot of knowledge I don't have.
Second, and I think this is important because Randi alluded to this in his statement, environmentalism is a pseudo-religious endeavor for many of its adherents. For those who view it this way, often their goals end up being laudable anyway, but the reasoning is sometimes sloppy or just outright wrong.
"We taught a lion to eat tofu!" |
I watched Wheel of Time the other night, which contains several interviews with the Dalai Lama (incidentally, I think the Lama is a bit of a douche... he pays lip service to a lot of good causes, I suppose, but anybody who refuses to deny that they are a god is pretty much an asshole automatically). At one point, Hertzog asks him what his message would be to the world. Most everything he said was positive, but when he talked about protecting the environment, he pretty much summed up exactly what I am talking about: He said the objective was to "keep the environment pure." I had to roll my eyes at that one... And indeed, it seems to me that for a lot of people who support environmentalism, it's not about sustainability or ethics, it's about a metaphysical idea of purity.
A "supersense" of purity is the driving force behind a lot of religious intolerance, it seems. It also feeds a substantial amount of the appeal of alternative medicine: Don't "pollute" your body with those "unnatural" pharmaceuticals. Flush those toxins which are "contaminating" your health. Etcetera.
So should we really be surprised that some skeptics, as soon as they get a whiff of something being associated with a purity campaign, immediately put their bullshit detectors into overdrive -- to the point that it sometimes scores a false positive?
You could even argue that this may have fed into Jillette's ludicrous denial of the dangers of secondhand smoke (which he has since at least partially retracted). When the subject of smoking came up on the denialism blog, I was shocked at how much vitriol some of the commenters had for smokers. It was as if, rather than smoking just being a public health hazard, they thought it was a horrible sin, and that anyone infected with the sin must be an evil despicable person.
I also think a supernatural sense of "purity" feeds into some of the the stricter outdoor smoking regulations... There is no doubt that prolonged exposure to secondhand smoke is hazardous, but it is weird to me that someone who is bothered being ten feet away from a lit cigarette has no qualms about waiting minutes at a crosswalk at a busy intersection. I'm no scientist, but I have trouble believing the former is as harmful than the latter. (Try this experiment sometime: Ride a bike down a fairly busy road where traffic mostly flows at a pretty decent clip, but where there are a number of widely-spaced traffic lights. Smell the air in between intersections, and at the intersections. Mmmmm, that intoxicating scent of exhaust mixed with burning rubber and melting brake pads -- gotta love it!)
So the moral is: As skeptics, we must be careful not to let the smell of zealotry become a primary indicator of trueness or falseness. Though they may be garner the support of superstitious fanatics using fallacious reasoning, AGW and the risks of secondhand smoke are both quite real.
I was reading a comment from Bruce Hood over at his blog, and in responding to it I think I had a bit of an insight about the so-called "accomodationism" debate. At least in my mind, it helps me to frame why some "accomodationists" don't bother me (e.g. Eugenie Scott, Bruce Hood, and to a certain extent Michael Schermer), but others (e.g. Chris Mooney, etc.) tend to really annoy me.
It could be said that there are two forms of accomodationism: "Weak accomodationism" is an individual decision to take a more conciliatory approach to religion. Those who subscribe to this philosophy will typically not give voice to direct criticisms of religion, and are unlikely to directly point out the flaw in a theists thinking unless that thinking is directly leading to bigotry or anti-scientific attitudes. (Here I distinguish "unscientific" which would be something like a belief that there is a divine being who loves you, vs. "anti-scientific", e.g. Creationism. Unscientific viewpoints cannot or are unlikely to be true from a scientific perspective, but anti-scientific viewpoints specifically challenge well-known scientific facts.)
I have no problem with the "weak accomodationist" viewpoint, and as I have blogged about before, I think the existence of such folks is strategically necessary to effecting social change.
The "strong accomodationist" position, on the other hand, holds that every nontheist should adopt a conciliatory tone. For instance,Mooney and Kershenbaum recently did the point-a-finger-and-laugh routine at Dawkins, alleging that his previous publication of The God Delusion makes it impossible for The Greatest Show on Earth to succeed in its mission. They have expressed quite clearly on numerous occasions that they think Dawkins would be better served if he would extend an olive branch to the religious -- even if that olive branch comes in the form of an out-and-out lie.
I think this is a very important difference here. In the blog comment I linked to at the start of this post, Bruce Hood describes how he chose to avoid the subject of religion as a simple superstition in order to avoid offense; yet he also makes no secret of what he thinks about religious truth propositions, and, importantly, he declines to criticize Dawkins et al for their more strident approach. He gives reasons why he chooses to take the approach he has, but he doesn't proceed to write, "And I really think that mean old Dan Dennett should act that way too!"
This morning I was reading through the print version of the Sunday New York Times (yes, we actually get a physical newspaper -- just the Sunday NYT though, but yeah) and I was reading a front page article about custody controversies arising from surrogates. It's a very tricky issue and I'm not sure just how I feel. Ideally people would adopt anyway, but unfortunately that is not an option for many people (gay, not wishing to get married, too old, etc.), and in addition I don't feel comfortable passing judgment on those incapable of having their own biological offspring. I confess that it was fairly important to me -- for completely irrational reasons, of course, but I'm human after all -- to have a biological child, and while I would like to think that if I had proven incapable of doing so that I would be accepting of it, I can't say that for certain.
The anecdote they lead off with is about a surrogate who changed her mind after discovering the adoptive mother had suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, although it had been under control with medication for the better part of eight years. Because
Michigan law is hostile to surrogacy, basically all she had to do was snap her fingers (litigiously speaking) and she regained custody.
Without commenting on the specifics of the story, this evoked an audible groan from me:
“My husband and I would not do something like this unless we thought it was given to us to do,” Ms Baker said. “My belief is that God placed this on my heart for a reason.”
In the fall of 2007, Ms. Baker advertised in surromomsonline.com saying she would carry a baby for a Christian couple.
Argh. You know, people's beliefs are their business and stuff, but putting this caveat on it being a Christian couple is messed up. Could you imagine if someone posted that they would only carry a baby for an atheist couple?!? Oh my god, how much of an asshole move would that be...
It perhaps belittles the situation, but I can't help but say that maybe the adoptive mother should have known that this woman was susceptible to placing stupid and arbitrary criteria and who she was willing to be a surrogate for.
Anyway, even though the article was on the front page, it was continued much further back, in the National section.1 I looked to the bottom of that page from the national section, and I see an article covering the absurd attempt to bar an atheist city councilman from taking office based on a clause in the North Carolina constitution that has been explicitly nullified by Supreme Court precedent. Or in other words, yet another article about religion messing up the whole works.
So I go to put back the National section, and what's on the front page of that, but an article about California PR companies getting rich making anti-gay propaganda for electoral battles in other states. Apparently a couple of specific companies -- one of them ironically in San Fransisco -- have become the go-to agencies for the badly-misnamed National Organization for Marriage's dishonest advertising. Yes, another article reflecting the negative influence of religion in our daily lives -- even in the daily lives of the non-religious.
You really can't escape it. When people say that atheists should just leave people alone to their personal beliefs, I say, "Yes! Please!" This is exactly what we want. I don't need to convince every single person to abandon their irrational beliefs -- I mean, at the top of this very post, I admitted to a highly irrational desire on my own part. We are humans, and irrationality is part of our existence, and I am totally okay with that as long as we keep it in check. That means that it stays mostly a private thing, and that we keep rationality firmly in the driver's seat when it comes to public policy.
And it also means that people who don't keep it mostly a private thing are subject to whatever ridicule or disdain they bring on themselves. That's how it works. If you want to shout your craziness from the rooftops, I'm going to shout back, "You're crazy!"
1New York Times does this thing where the main section and International section are numbered one through twenty-something, and then the National and Local sections pick it back up with the same numbering, so you can actually have an article continued in a different section. Kind of annoying...
Update: Immediately after posting this, I went poking around GameSpy.com and started reading a funny article about bad video games given as gifts by non-gamers... and what do I see at the bottom of the page?
I'll transcribe the oldest featured comment here, since you can't read it without clicking for the larger version:
Regardless of the pagan origins of the season, christians celebrate Christ's birth on this day and I have actually studied this too because of a report I was doing.
Being christian, my family and my church celebrate it because of it's religious significance, but it doesn't mean it's wrong to enjoy other aspects of it. I have no problems with secularists celebrating this holiday too, if it puts a little kindness in everyone's hearts then that isn't a bad thing.
Sure, the guy is apparently getting smacked down, but... why oh why the need to bring up your Christ bullshit on an article that has absolutely nothing to do with that at all?!?
You truly can't escape it.
