Standard Deviations From the Beaten Path

I’m alive. Just very negligent in my duties regards blogging about scientific topics. Also, I’m now engaged. Which is something I wish I had data collection set up for in advance, because from what I’ve observed the two most important items after a woman becomes engaged are “When is the date?” and “What does the ring look like?” I’d like to know if those are actually modal, or if it’s just my selective listening. I’ll probably talk a bit about having a feminist, atheist wedding as that time comes.

I have a guitar project that is making slow progress, but progress none the less. Really, if anyone wants to ask me physics questions about music, I really will do my best to answer them as long as they don’t require any actual non self-taught background in music. So seriously, fire away, it will give me a clear goal to work towards.

I’m thinking about jumping into do-it-yourself electronics. I’ve worked with single board computers at work that can interface with a GPS receiver for precise timing and trigger a laser. They can also steer the laser, but I didn’t work on that part of the code. So I’m eying an arduino microcontroller. Not sure what I want to do with it yet. Either a robot that can chase my fiancé’s cat, or a robotic coffee machine.

Biggest skeptical thing going on at the moment? The pope. A lot of vociferous atheist types like Rebeca Watson have come out supporting papal prosecution. Other vociferous atheists like PZ Myers have agreed with Rebeca. Honestly, what they said. If there’s anything I find irritating about the Internet it is the prevalence of vehement agreement with each other. I’m just trying it out to see how it feels.

Some people will have you think that we atheists are out to fight a war against the most Christian of Christian holidays: Christmas. See that? Christ is right in the title. If we face the facts, though, it becomes obvious that one thing sitting at the very heart of the problem is that everyone has a solstice holiday. Many of these are described as a “festival of lights”. Proceeding with great sarcasm, there could not possibly be a common thread linking them, could there?

Before I continue I’ll let you know that I’m going to pull quotations from the King James Version unless otherwise specified. My motivation for doing so is because it is an available (if not always accessible) translation, and is also popular enough that many people will have some familiarity with it. If you’re one of the odd ones like me who doesn’t have a pulp copy of a translation you prefer, there are others available on the web. I know of NET Bible, and will use it when a different perspective is necessary.

Christmas Trees — Well as it turns out a religious rite practiced in the bible is quite similar to what we now call the Christmas tree. It was a pagan thing and in Jeremiah 10:2-5 God tells the Israelites not to do it:

Thus saith the LORD, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them.

For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of a forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe.

They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.

They are upright as the palm tree, but speak not: they must needs be
borne, because they cannot go. Be not afraid of them; for they cannot do
evil, neither also is it in them to do good.

So there you have it. Don’t be afraid of decorated trees used in a religious way, but they won’t save you, either (kind of like the supposed narrator, actually). Alright, so if one mention is insufficient for the idea to gain traction, I’ll also point you toward Isaiah 40:19-20, and 44:14-16 in which we are warned further of graven images in the form of trees and other worshipful acts associated with these.
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Hey, all. Sorry for being such a negligent blogger. If it’s any comfort my general lack of posts has, surprisingly enough, not been due to work so much as nice weather and things to do on the weekends. I have some physics-related things currently simmering on some burner somewhere, but for the time being I just wanted to share a video from the AtGoogleTalks channel on YouTube. Neil deGrasse Tyson is an amazing astrophysicist and educator. I could seriously sit and listen to this man talk for hours, he’s just so fun. Since I hope for a career somewhere in my future as an educator, I can only hope to one day be as fun to listen to as Tyson.

Anyway, the video is embedded below, and I seriously recommend putting it on full screen with the screen saver off (it’s over an hour!), popping some popcorn and inviting your girlfriend, boyfriend, or just your friend over to watch Tyson talk about his new book, The Pluto Files, and answer some questions from the Google developers. It’s that good. Heck, it’s probably better than most of the new movies you could rent on DVD. Although tonight might not be the best night, since I, for one, will be watching The Office and 30 Rock with my s.o. But, you know, sometime.

I’m at work right now waiting for a vacuum pump to do its thing reading the Wiki-news, and I see a snippet on the Turkish government re-instating the ban on the hijab in schools and universities in the name of “secularism.” Perhaps this is my American bias coming through, but it seems rather silly to me to explicitly ban an article of religious clothing because of the secular nature of a government. Nominally, here in the United States the government is explicitly mandated to make no decree concerning religion–much less ban an element of its practice.

There seems to be a very common mistaken belief that it is the “secular agenda” in the United States to remove any display or discussion of religion from the public arena. In reality, the hegemony of religion in public life has granted it a privelidged status which in some cases seems to trump constitutional law. If there is even such a thing as a secularist agenda in the U.S. it is to put the secularist worldview back on equal grounds with the religious.

Knowing as little as I do about Turkish politics, I can’t say what could motivate a rational person to want to ban the wearing of a religious garment (of the country’s predominant religion, no less) in public. My only guess is that certain people might want to make the country seem more friendly to the Islam-fearing Western world, or, as the Wikipedia article indicates, it might just stem from an argument from antiquity going back to the nation’s founder. In any case, at least one card-carying secularist thinks such a ban is silly and contrary to anything that might pass for an agenda.

Wow. This qualifying exam studying is taking more out of me than I thought. Sorry for getting anyone’s hopes up. To keep things brief, some of you already know my religious history, but I was raised a Jehovah’s Witness. My personal case cannot even approach the pain of countless other former Witnesses, but nonetheless I found this YouTube video pretty uplifting. Even among the former-JW crowd on the internet, you’ll see some pretty crazy Christians. I’ve even encountered people who rant about how sad it is that so many people turn away from religion completely even though those people who find atheism are probably in the minority. I know I spent years looking for easy answers before I found any comfort. Anyway, without further [in]articulation, Moxie:

On casual recommendation from an acquaintance I put on The Non-Prophets podcast earlier in the week whilst working on the endless morass that is first year graduate school. I believe the episode I chose was that dated March 29, 2008. Actually, I stopped paying any attention fairly early on, so I’ll have to go back and give it another listen (or just pick another show–there is an archive) before I pass any final judgments. What got me thinking, actually, was their pre-show banter about English idioms which refer to God.

I believe one line went something like

If a co-worker were to say something like, “Thank God it’s Friday!” I would tell them that I don’t believe in God, but that I can still share in their sentiment.

My question is this: why? I think it was intended as a kind of open, friendly, educational gesture about atheism, but I don’t see it being taken as such. English is full of idioms which confuse foreign speakers and are, for the most part, taken for granted by those of us who have it as a native tongue. Phrases like “Thank God it’s Friday,” and the beloved interjection “goddamn” do not literally give thanks to a deity for the day of the week or condemn a bothersome segmentation violation to the fires of Hades. Moreover, any religious co-worker liberal enough in their speech to “use the Lord’s name in vain” probably knows that.

I really can’t see the utility of correcting someone like this. If I were told to not take the Lord’s name in vain by a colleague I would take it as a patronizing remark on my lack of piety. Switching things up such that an atheist is in effect informing someone who probably knows full well that the phrase they are using is not a literal plea to god that the atheist can still feel the same way without believing in god is just as patronizing and condescending. I am all about educating the public about moral relativism, but correcting people on their use of common idioms which reference a spiritual being does not even seem to be a means to that end.

I appear to be going through a Narcissist phase, because this will be my second post in a row where I claim credit for a silly (yet nominally entertaining) idea. If you’re not familiar with Pascal’s Wager, the basic idea is that you stand to gain if you practice a religious lifestyle and it turns out all this Bible and God stuff turns out to be true, so why not just go along with it? Well the religious order I was raised in doesn’t believe in hellfire, so whether or not it’s true all dying can bring me as a sinner is plain old ordinary death.

The way I see it, I’m gone no matter what I do–I’m bad at believing things that don’t make any sense. So why not, in this life–as far as I’m concerned, the only one I’ve got–do all those things that supposedly might grant me demonic power? Listen to heavy metal music and play D&D, everyone! According to some people, you can get magical powers! If we all play our cards right, we might be able to cast spells and, if we act in the next two years, win a million dollars.

This might possibly be the U.S. capital of spiritual nonsense. Actually, right now I’m in Flagstaff, AZ, not Sedona, but my adventures in Sedona are significantly more relevant to the purported topic of this blog. A significant portion of Sedon’s tourist industry is based around the existence of spiritual vortices. I consulted the font of all knowledge (Wikipedia) and learned that this is apparently connected to an event that took place in 1987 called the “Harmonic Convergence” in which people gathered at locations of supposed spiritual power across the world–one of these being Sedona, AZ and another, apparently, was Dunn Meadow in Bloomington, IN where I went to college (which I didn’t know, but am somehow not surprised–Bloomington had a bit of a funky edge to it sometimes).

Without any prior knowledge of these vorteces, I have now visited, or at least gone on hikes in the vicinity of two of them. First, I will impress you with some photographs I took. First up is Cathedral Rock, which is a pretty fun climb. There are a few sections which feel an awful lot like “bouldering” when navigating (if you’ve ever been to a rock climbing gym you’ll know what that means).  Second, we have two shots from the end of the Boynton Canyon trail. There’s apparently a vortex site a short way away from the trail head, but we neglected to make the hike up that way. Nonetheless, spiritual vortex or not, it was a pretty hike  which  started in scrub desert and ended partway up the canyon wall in a pine forest (I’m struggling to determine if they were Pinyon or Ponderosa pine trees).

And, now, we reach the amusing/disturbing section of this particular deviation. When we purchased a Red Rock Parking Permit from the Sedona Chamber of Commerce, we also received a brochure with information about the national forest and how to enjoy it (and the obligatory prose on why it is necessary to charge fees for things like parking). The real gem in this bit of bureaucratic text was the warning to those seeking spiritual fulfillment to not cause excess damage to the local ecosystem in doing so. My personal favorites are the requests to not make stone circles or medicine wheels and to not chant, pray, or meditate too loud.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t aware of the true nature of the cairns (hiker talk for piles of rocks) up on top of one of the level surfaces on Cathedral rock or I would have snapped a few pictures to demonstrate how these guidelines are being ignored. But there are stone circles and rock piles distinctly dissimilar to the cairns used to mark the trails. I suppose the ultimate lesson here could fall into the large bin of anecdotes relating to how woo-woo can cause harm–in this case it seems to tarnish a lovely ecosystem with piles of rocks and the sound of New Age ululations.

A night out last evening with the gang of first year physics graduate students led, as usual, to some interesting conversations. Most curious among these was probably a fairly heated debate on altered states of consciousness. I’ll do my best to summarize the two sides of the issue:

• Affecting one’s mind with the use of drugs or other external stimuli affects the electrochemical pathways in one’s brain in fairly predictable and understandable ways (i.e. such experiences serve to alter normal function of the brain, but do not provide a gateway to better understandings of physical reality).
• Drugs and other external stimuli may impair the users senses in certain ways, but also serve to enhance other senses and functions in ways that provide a potentially greater understanding (i.e. these experiences, by altering one’s perception of reality alter reality itself in ways that are equally valid and potentially enlightening).

Eventually, the discussion continued on past its logical conclusion and ventured into what I would call the completely inane, but for the time I was participating in the discussion I sided very strongly with the former position. As far as I am concerned, objectivity and empirical evidence are fairly essential for analyzing the world around me. In the past I’ve had experiences which, at the time, I ascribed to the presence of God. Anymore, I would say that these experiences were my response to stimulation of my pre-frontal cortex as I now understand that these kinds of feelings are commonly associated with such.

For me, it all comes down to Occam’s Razor–if I have a simple, physical explanation for an experience, regardless of how otherworldly it might have felt at the time, why should I ascribe something greater to it? Certainly, it is possible that a higher power  might have supplied we humans with these neurological tools for the purpose of experiencing its presence, but at some point we must dismiss that which lacks supporting evidence and probability. Even if I can take a pill and as a result conceive of an entirely new explanation or appreciation for a painting, a poem, or a rock I see no compelling reason to call the process anything other than chemistry in action.

I’m not on top of things lately. I blame the impending final exams looming on my horizon. But Pharyngula and Orac have both discussed another death of a Jehovah’s Witness through refusal of a blood transfusion. I think everyone else who has commented on the event has hit all the important points, I felt compelled to chime in since it wasn’t too long ago when I would have considered it a triumph of righteousness that this boy was allowed to die.  At his age, I would have fought to refuse a blood transfusion myself had I needed one. Now that I’ve left religion behind, I get sick to my stomach just thinking about what happened.

I didn’t have a bad childhood. All in all, I was pretty content with my life, most of the time. But since leaving the Watchtower and finding pleasure in science and critical thinking I have never been happier. The way I understand things now ethics and morality are the end result of humanist thinking. This means I can freely and openly engage in simple, innocent activities I enjoy–like playing a game of Risk with friends–without a backlash of guilt. The whole idea that a board game simulation of world conquest will poison my personality, I now realize, is a slippery slope fallacy. No matter how many successive games of Risk I win, I have myself together well enough that I will not make any attempts at trying out a career as a crazed despot.

In a related vein, I now find what might commonly be thought of as an innocent behavior as barbaric cruelty: forcing religion on young people. So I think I might have to disagree with Orac here. I was 18, maybe 17 when I broke off connections to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. For me it would not be a gray area to force a life saving proceedure on someone as young as 14 or 15. At that age I was desperately trying to believe. Even then I was struggling, but any opportunity to “have faith” would have appealed to me. As an adult, I see the error of my ways. Adults should be given the freedom necessary to allow them to march off to their deaths. But any young person at any age where they might be inclined to suppress any doubts or critical thoughts at the expense of their lives because of pressure put on them by their parents should, as far as I am concerned, be given the treatment and live to see things another way.