Looking Out To Sea

PZ Myers recently touched on this question in his response to John Gray:

The critics of atheism seem, without exception, to be lacking in imagination. Over and over again, what we hear from them is desperate attempts to pigeonhole atheism as just another religion; they squat uncomprehendingly in their hovels built of faith and peer quizzically at the godless, seeking correspondence with their familiar theological nonsense, and crow in triumph when they find something that they can sort of line up with their experiences. “They want more people to think rationally — why, that’s evangelism!” Never mind that you could, with the same legitimacy, argue that when one person mentions to another that it is raining, they are attempting to evangelize their precipitational worldview.

Denotation, denotation, denotation…

In the broadest sense, practically every statement or opinion we make is evangelist in that sense. “Don’t you oppress me with your belief that this pasta tastes great! I’ll make up my own mind, dammit!”

At the opposite end of the spectrum — and this is according to the relevant Wikipedia page — evangelism is not even the same as proselytism in Christianity. It’s not enough to just attempt to convince someone of the truth of your statements; there’s something more to it, though the particular differences are rather obscure and I don’t feel confident teasing them apart. Evangelical religion seems to prefer “personal experience” over other means of proselytism, but this may not be completely accurate. (Maybe Rob can shed some light on this?)

In technology, some companies have advocates and some have evangelists. I’m not sure what the difference is here, but intuitively I would say that evangelists attempt to push a lifestyle whereas advocates push a technology. In the end they are both intended to sell more products.

Connotation, connotation, connotation

I think most uses of ‘evangelism’ are not meant in the strict religious sense, but with the understanding that evangelising is inherently bad. If you disagree with what someone says you can say that they are evangelising rather than advocating — or the more plain-speaking arguing.

If you’re from an evangelical religious community then obviously evangelism isn’t a dirty word. So it probably doesn’t get used as an attack in such cases. But everyone else — who would think of Billy Graham or Pat Robertson on hearing the word — feels a bit uneasy with that kind of religion. And yet by itself it shouldn’t have these connotations when applied generally — it’s only because people like Pat Robertson have such an odious reputation that the word means more than just “bringing good news”.

Helen just pointed out that ‘The Green Apple’, an ethical/Fairtrade craft store online, has been hacked by some Islamic fundamentalists. The main page currently has a “closed for maintenance notice” but if you click straight through to the store you see a protest page from some nutty religious group:

After thirty seconds the page directs you to some other site which is about the wonderful prophet.

From a quick look at the guy they’re protesting — Geert Wilders — I don’t really have any sympathy for either side. He seems like the Dutch equivalent of Robert Kilroy Silk (he even has the same daft haircut…):

Take a walk down the street and see where this is going. You no longer feel like you are living in your own country. There is a battle going on and we have to defend ourselves. Before you know it there will be more mosques than churches!

Oh no! More mosques than churches!

On the other side, the Islamofascists are no better. I feel quite happy denouncing someone who would hijack a third party website for their own pointless protest and then claim “sorry for the inconvenience. Our aim is not to harm your system”. Er, yes it is. It was an effective online shop before and now it doesn’t sell anything — what other meaning of harm do you want to use?

Bunch of nutters, the lot of them.

Christopher Brookmyre’s latest is dedicated to James Randi and Richard Dawkins. It mentions Firefly (quite a lot). It’s about criminals and paranormal researchers and woo science. It briefly touches on Intelligent Design creationism. It’s pretty damn funny and bitterly sarcastic when it needs to be.

It’s a great return to form for Mr Brookmyre — I thought A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil was pretty awful — and you’ll probably love it.

And if you don’t love it then I’ll put the evil eye on you.

I’ve just had a look at http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=believe for the meaning of the verb ‘to believe’ and I found a number of very interesting definitions — to have confidence or faith in, to hold true, to suppose or assume — but none of the definitions fit this sentence (my emphasis):

Last week we learned that a family of at least three children had come down with measles because their family didn’t believe in vaccinating them …

There are other examples — just think of all the things people object to. “I don’t believe in sex before marriage”, “I don’t believe in abortion”, “I don’t believe in drugs”.

It should be fairly obvious that this type of person does actually believe in the existence of vaccination, pre-marital sex, abortion or whatever. They might even be involved in protests against them. But it’s not that they don’t actually believe in them. It’s that they don’t approve of them. So why do people use ‘believe’ when they mean ‘approve’?

And just as interesting, why does this very common usage not appear in dictionaries? (I also tried Urban Dictionary and Wiktionary, two sources I thought might mention ‘unofficial’ usage. But nothing.)

All this brings up some interesting thoughts when people make “belief” claims. If an otherwise smart person says “I don’t believe in evolution”, what do they mean by that? Many creationists argue against evolution on the grounds of moral consequences — that Hitler was an evolutionist, that Darwinism is a cruel and inhumane philosophy leading to genocide and eugenics, etc. It’s perfectly possible that “I don’t believe in evolution” has a strong element of “I don’t approve of evolution” or “I don’t like the moral consequences of evolution”.

And since few people seem to make a clear distinction between “belief as faith” and “belief as approval”, there are further consequences. Is “belief in God” entirely to do with faith, or is there an element of approval? A case of “I approve of God, because that is how I would like things to be”. An important element of religious faith is the comfort that people derive from it.

I have to admit this is all idle conjecture. But one final thought: whenever I find myself trying to find support for a belief of my own, I have to ask myself why it’s so important. And the only honest answer I can give myself is that, it’s important because this is the way I’d like things to be. If an important part of my world-view is removed, then I have to re-evaluate it all for consistency. That is a lot of work and may reveal things I don’t like — about myself, my friends or life in general.

Recently [PZ Myers from the Pharyngula blog] [pharyngula] was involved in a couple of debates, both interesting in their way. The first was an [on-air debate with Gene Simmons, a medical doctor and supporter of the Intelligent Design movement] [iddebate]. (If you’re still in the dark on the ID front, I wrote a post about it [a long time ago] [id] which should give you the background.) Dr Simmons was soundly beaten on every point. Apparently the big Intelligent Design blog, Uncommon Descent, noted that their player was shown to be a complete fool. (That is, before they deleted the thread in a bout of PR-friendly revisionism.)

In the end Dr Simmons had to take umbrage at Myers’ language in order to claw back some dignity. After demonstrating that he was happy to talk about the lack of transitional whale fossils without having done any research into the large body of knowledge on whale evolution, he was called “ignorant of whale evolution”. This seems only right and proper: he knew nothing about his chosen topic but was happily spreading lies and nonsense. But Simmons got angry at being insulted and deflected the point that he really didn’t know what he was talking about. Personally, I think that being offended by such a statement is a really cheap trick — and instead of warning PZ Myers about his language, the hosts should have ticked off Gene Simmons for trying to derail the conversation with further untruths and emotional appeals.

You might have expected that kind of petty ill-will from the start anyway. Especially as they changed the topic of the debate at the last minute at Dr Simmons’ request. That’s not cricket, chaps. You can [download the whole debate from the radio station’s website] [radio] — though it might disappear sooner or later. The station itself has creationist leanings and invited Dr Simmons back for another session on his own a few days later. It’s much easier to seem knowledgeable when you don’t have people poking holes in your arguments, don’t you find?

[pharyngula]: “Pharyngula: Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal” [iddebate]: “Debate with Gene Simmons” [id]: “A brief history of Intelligent Design” [radio]: “An MP3 of the debate between Gene Simmons and PZ Myers”

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On Wednesday night we saw 4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile — ‘4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days’ — the story of a woman helping her friend get an illegal abortion in communist Romania in 1987.

I’m not sure what to say. I can’t really describe the great laughs you’ll have while watching. It’s a very numbing film. Don’t watch it for a first date?

Meanwhile, this is the 35th anniversary of the legalisation of abortion in the US, a law that the current crop of Republican candidates will be sure to repeal as part of their headlong rush to take the US back to the Middle Ages. Not that things are all rosy here — due to a strange quirk of jurisdiction our own abortion laws don’t apply to Northern Ireland. It’s still illegal to obtain an abortion there in most circumstances.

But if you want to see some gritty it’s-grim-oop-north drama about trying to get an abortion against the laws and norms of the society you live in, check out ‘4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days’.

Two stories popped up on my radar at about the same time, both about Facebook and social software. The first, by Clay Shirky, is a transcription of an excellent talk about [group dynamics on- and off-line, and why communities need to be protected from themselves] [enemy]. There’s a lot in there that seemed familiar and self-evident, but at the same time I had never thought about. That was also one of his points — that we have probably all seen communities die in the same ways over and over again, but no-one is learning from this.

The other story is — to put it politely — a slightly unhinged rant in The Guardian about [the dangers of Facebook and its ‘terrifying’ controllers] [friends]. It’s not often you find yourself in the company of a bona fide conspiracy theorist, and it’s difficult to know where to look. Reading Tom Hodgkinson’s article is a bit like that. You know if you looked him straight in the eye you’d probably just burst out laughing.

[enemy]: “A Group is its own Worst Enemy — Clay Shirky” [friends]: “With Friends like These… — Tom Hodgkinson, The Guardian”

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Distractions don’t come more idle than looking up the TV Tropes wiki. It’s such fun.

The page on the stereotype of Hollywood atheist is quite interesting. It gets to the core of the “bitter atheist” — you know, the one that used to believe in God but doesn’t any more because his wife died in a car accident? It has this to say of Battlestar Galactica (the new series):

…features two prominent atheist characters, both of them wildly different: Admiral Adama, who views humanity as flawed but inherently good, and ultimately accountable to nobody but themselves for their mistakes in life, and Gaius Baltar, an egocentric technocrat who ultimately comes to consider himself a god.

Interesting summary. I haven’t seen enough BSG to be sure, but I’d always pegged Adama as being on the wishy-washy liberal theism fence. You know, Church of Scotland rather than Church of White Jesus From Texas. They forgot one character though — President’s aide Billy, who died in the very next episode after explicitly saying he was an atheist. But that’s what happens when you enter politics looking about 14 years old…

It is sad that the one atheist character who’s super-intelligent, a media personality, a hit with the ladies and a good-humoured guy also happens to be out of his tiny little mind. But you can’t have everything, right? ;-)

More interesting to ask, why are there so few positive role models of scientists in film and TV? The balanced scientists are as few and far between, and there is a lot of cross-over: the cold, calculated, “logical” scientist who can’t understand/engage with human emotion.

If I may characterise Ben Goldacre’s excellent article in the Guardian as Homeopathy doesn’t work because of A, B and C, then we can safely say that Denis MacEoin’s response consists of Yeah but what about B or C, you didn’t think about that, did you?

It really is the saddest thing, to see grown and (you would hope) intelligent people willing to skip merrily from premise to conclusion without a thought for everything they have to accept on the way:

• Like cures like. Why would something that causes fevers be effective at curing the flu? This doesn’t just require magical thinking — we need to throw out all of our understanding of human biology and how we fight infection before we can even entertain the idea. In fact, it also requires we throw out the entire notion of infection. This stuff does not jive with germ theory. Even creationists don’t deny the existence of disease-causing bacteria, but these people will happily sell you water to banish malaria or HIV.
• Dilution is amplification. This is the one that everyone laughs at, because it’s just so fundamentally silly. And they really do take it to extremes. Only a homeopathist would consider that dilution past the point of Avogadro’s limit is no obstacle to the principle. Just keep diluting, it’ll get more potent! (Did you know that it helps if you slap a leather-bound book against your homeopathic treatment? True story.)
• Holistic treatment only treats symptoms. The weird thing is that, while homeopathy is no more effective than reiki or chiropractic, it pretends to be “holistic” while blatantly ignoring the real causes of many diseases. The treatments, after all, are allocated depending on your symptoms, not their causes. Dizziness? Well, it could be last night on the G&Ts, or it could be West Nile virus, or that nasty bump you received when you walked into the kitchen cupboard. The treatments are all based on the symptom, so all these will seem alike.

Even if you swallow the “water has memory” stuff, there’s still have a massive load of nonsense to internalise. None of this can be explained by, or explains, what we know about biology or medicine or physics or… anything, really. There’s no evidence for any of it. It ignores hundreds of years of scientific discovery.

But even if we assume that it is all possible, we will never discover these purported benefits if we do as Denis MacEoin asks. We cannot have an unimpeachable priesthood, whose qualifications we have to match in order to say “no, that’s just water”. (At which point, I don’t doubt, you would be accused of heresy.) I don’t need qualifications of any kind to look at evidence, and yet at the moment all I can see is holes where that evidence should be. Homeopathy is a religion and those gaps must be filled with faith. For the rest of us, who live in the “reality-based community”, we might prefer those gaps filled with more than wishful thinking.

I’m ever so happy that they’ve made a film out of The Northern Lights, called, predictably enough, The Golden Compass. Well, can’t have everything I suppose. I was just talking about the whole series to a friend recently: I had to heavily recommend it. It’s really fabulous, and I might read it again soon, because I can’t remember much about the beginning of the story.

The general theme of authoritarian religion and its pernicious effect on the way people behave has not been well received in the United States of America. There is a clip from Fox News with talking-head interviews with someone from the Freedom from Religion Foundation and a Catholic priest. The whole thing is a horrible indictment of what presumably passes for ‘news’ on the Fox network, but even worse is that it doesn’t address any of the relevant points.

Where is the spokesman for the movie? At least the director should know what he intended, rather than watching a bunch of morons discuss a film they haven’t seen.

They all looked like idiots. The priest made appeals to popularity, which have nothing to do with whether (a) the film promotes atheism or (b) whether this is a bad thing. In fact, these questions remained essentially unanswered. The Freedom from Religion woman was obviously pretty incoherent on that point too. I have no affinity for the other two but her performance was embarrassing. The anchor man was awful: not only did the priest get given ‘respect’ (what for, exactly? For agreeing to come on the show and talk rubbish?) but he called the other woman stupid and attributed someone else’s statements to her. I am impressed they found a phrase even more odious than militant atheist though, but they did: “known atheist”. (You have to say it with the same tone as ‘known kiddie fiddler’.) That one’s for the history books, I think. OMG he prolly eats babies!

Is the movie designed to promote atheism? (Spoilers ahead.) That’s a difficult question. There is religion, God and angels in the book. But it’s set in a fictional world where the ‘divine’ world reflects that of a tinpot dictatorship, with a decrepit godlike figurehead and a militaristic enforcer who wields the power. It’s probably more accurately anti-theistic and anti-authoritarian, since it really addresses the dangers of having powerful cabals who create arbitrary social rules. It’s as much an argument against Stalinism as it is against the Catholic Church.

But it also prompts readers to reflect on the way in which religion is viewed in modern life. If the Catholic Church think that this level of introspection is a threat to them, who am I to deny them?