Evolution is not a religion, no more than sky-is-blueism or gravityism or medicine or mathematics or their shop class. Would they shut down an auto repair class if an Amish family decried their heathen English ways? Pollitt is a pandering moron.
today i was doing some research on Multi-Level-Marketing companies (e.g. MonaVie, Noni, Isagenix, NutraSkin, etc.). living in utah county, (the most MLM-dense county in the USA) we’ve all been presented with MLM pitches- and we may have even signed up for some. last year i met an older couple who had made tons of money in Vegas through a MLM they had done in the past. The secret, they told me, was that the company marketed them as their golden couple and stuck dozens and dozens of people below them in their “down line” so everyone could see an exemplar of success. they were very up front when they told me that they could not recreate those same earnings when they tried to do it on their own, after the successful MLM went bankrupt (as most do). they even knew all the tricks of the trade and had experience- but it went nowhere when their only potential down line suddenly shrunk to the small number of friends and family they personally knew.
Note: please use caution when sharing anything with someone who is involved in a MLM. they very much act like “true believers” in the sense that they have faith in the potential of their MLM, are motivated more by feelings/personal testimony rather than hard evidence, and may take criticism very personally. so proceed w/ caution when sharing with others- or don’t share at all.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a decision, In re Amway Corp., in 1979 in which it indicated that multi-level marketing was not illegal per se in the United States. However, Amway was found guilty of price fixing (by requiring “independent” distributors to sell at the low price) and making exaggerated income claims.[16]
The FTC advises that multi-level marketing organizations with greater incentives for recruitment than product sales are to be viewed skeptically. The FTC also warns that the practice of getting commissions from recruiting new members is outlawed in most states as “pyramiding”.[10] In April 2006, it proposed a Business Opportunity Rule intended to require all sellers of business opportunities—including MLMs—to provide enough information to enable prospective buyers to make an informed decision about their probability of earning money.
Another criticism of MLMs is that “MLM organizations have been described by some as cults (Butterfield, 1985), pyramid schemes (Fitzpatrick & Reynolds, 1997), or organizations rife with misleading, deceptive, and unethical behavior (Carter, 1999), such as the questionable use of evangelical discourse to promote the business (Hopfl & Maddrell, 1996), and the exploitation of personal relationships for financial gain (Fitzpatrick & Reynolds, 1997).”[18]
MLM’s are also criticized for being unable to fulfill their promises for the majority of participants due to basic conflicts with Western culture.[19] There are even claims that the success rate for breaking even or even making money are far worse than other types of businesses:[20][21][22] “The vast majority of MLM’s are recruiting MLM’s, in which participants must recruit aggressively to profit. Based on available data from the companies themselves, the loss rate for recruiting MLM’s is approximately 99.9%; i.e., 99.9% of participants lose money after subtracting all expenses, including purchases from the company.”[20] In part, this is because encouraging recruits to further “recruit people to compete with [them]“[23] leads to “market saturation.”[24]
Similar claims regarding profits have been stated by The Times (“The Government investigation claims to have revealed that just 10 per cent of Amway’s agents in Britain make any profit, with less than one in ten selling a single item of the group’s products.”[25]), high level “Emerald” Amway member Scheibeler (“UK Justice Norris found in 2008 that out of an IBO [Independent Business Owners] population of 33,000, ‘only about 90 made sufficient incomes to cover the costs of actively building their business.’ That’s a 99.7 percent loss rate for investors.” [26](case referred to is BERR vs Amway (Case No: 2651, 2652 and 2653 of 2007) which does list this as one of the points of objectionability: “c) because of the requirement that an IBO pay a joining and renewal fee and the likelihood that an IBO would purchase BSM there was a certainty that the Amway business would cause a loss to a large number of people (to the extent that out of an IBO population which exceeded 33,000 only building their business).”) and Newsweek (where it is stated based on MonaVie’s own 2007 income disclosure statement “fewer than 1 percent qualified for commissions and of those, only 10 percent made more than $100 a week.)” [27]
we are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. but we can understand the universe. that makes us something very special.
Saki:
A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.
Gerry Spence:
I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.
fred doyle:
Space isn’t remote at all. It’s only an hour’s drive away if your car could go straight upwards.
In order to remain true to oneself one ought to renounce one’s party three times a day.
Publilius Syrus:
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
Dale McGowen (author of Raising Children Beyond Belief):
Much of the protest over “nonbeliever” is that it defines us in terms of religious believers. I care about this no more than the fact that “nonsmoker” defines me in terms of smokers and “non-idiot” defines me in terms of idiots. You don’t find many non sequiturs up in arms about being defined in terms of the hated sequitur, nor are the nondescript or noncommital often irate about comparisons to the descript and commital.
Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. seemed not to find their advocacy of nonviolence diminished by the lexical negation of violence. Nor does Nonviolent Peaceforce, the nonpartisan, nonprofit NGO (that’s “non-governmental organization”) for which I work. For each and all of these terms, the prefix is a non-issue.
So why do we continue to waste our pique on such terms as “nonbeliever” and “nonreligious”? I find them both useful and economical. Pile on your polysyllables and modifiers as you wish. I have things to do.
When a scientist is ahead of his times, it is often through misunderstanding of current, rather than intuition of future truth. In science there is never any error so gross that it won’t one day, from some perspective, appear prophetic.
History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies. Alexis de Tocqueville
Slayer (lyrics):
Holy man open up your eyes
To the ways of the world you’ve been so blind
As the walls of religion come crashing down
How’s the ignorance taste the second time around
Tell me how it feels knowing chaos will never end
Tell me what it’s like when the celebration begins
Welcome to the horror of the revelation
Tell me what you think of your savior now
I reject all the Biblical views of the truth
Dismiss it as the folklore of the times
I won’t be force fed prophecies
From a book of untruths for the weakest mind
Join the new faith for the celebration
Cult of new faith fuels the devastation
“The extraordinary resemblance does not indicate that Anoiapithecus has any relationship with Homo, the researchers note. However, the similarity might be a case of evolutionary convergence, where two species evolving separately share common features.”
i encourage you and you and you (any and all who may be taking a sunday stroll across my blog) to take a gander at the most recent comment posted. it was a response to a request i had made months ago on how to go about doing a satanic seance in such a manner that would insure the highest possiblity of attracting supernatural and evil presences. i’ve since not really been too intrigued or interested in the possibilities (nor am i of the potential consequences of saying bloody mary 3 times in my bathroom mirror), but here is one reader’s comment- for everyone to enjoy. i invite you to either 1) count the punctuations included in the long-winded paragraph, or 2) try to read/imagine where one would take a breath in between pseudo-scientific/fairy-talk rantings.
ok that was harsh but here it is in all its fear-mongering glory:
i’m sure the skeptical/scientific community will add much more insight into the TV show “Lie to Me”, until then, here is what i was able to find in my short research (the following is in the format of a conversation between me my friend Keldwud):
some info on the show:
some people can tell when people are lying slightly better than others:
women are supposedly better than men at detecting lies in one’s face. the information in those links still doesn’t show that the guy’s abilities in the movie can be seen as science-based, but it may be possibleto some degree. remember, though, that polygraphs are not based on science and can be fooled.
hope that helps! as i get more info about that from the skeptic community i’ll share it with you.
he replied, and i then replied to his comments (see how hard this is to follow so far? well i don’t have the time to edit it- i’m already spending precious saturday night time so deal with good luck with the format :
On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 10:09 PM, KELDWUD> wrote:
Thanks for the links
Yeah, I was figuring they were basing a lot of it off of real studies
but the way they were spinning it made me wonder what parts of it
*weren’t* real. A lot of it is plausible and then they make a good
case by showing famous people with the same expressions as proof that
they are all experiencing the same emotion.
yes, and as you and i both suspect they may be committing a post-hoc fallacy where you have lots of data (lots of pictures of faces) and you match these faces with what you’re looking for to support your theory. many celebrity faces are shown in one scene’s example (some 20 or so i think) but how many thousands of pictures of celebrities lying were not shown? it sounds too much like quote-mining Nostradamus in order to get an ambiguous quote that sounded like he predicted 9/11 or something else after the fact. the book The Bible Code commits this fallacy as well:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk3VgQgxiqE
…The only thing that it is missing is when people show those
expressions and they *don’t* mean what the others are feeling when
they show those expressions.
Wondering how effective his technique is in real world scenarios and I
am betting that his technique would produce valid hits more often than
not.
What do you think?
this is another very good point as to why even when someone may be generally better at telling when someone is lying, they will not be able to read many people who react differently when they lie. at best, i think someone may be good at telling if people are lying if they are already familiar with the person (like in a family/friendship), or if they are women (like i said, it’s been shown that they are slightly better than males at detecting deception.from Michael Shermer’s The Science of Good and Evil, page 176 (emphasis mine):
To the extent that lie detection through the observation of body language and facial expressions is accurate (overall not very), women are better at it than men because they are more intuitively sensitive to subtle cues. in experiments in which subjects observe someone either truth telling or lying, although no one is consistently correct in identifying the liar, women are correct significantly more often than men . [...] People who are highly skilled in identifying “micromomentary” facial expressions are also more accurate in judging lying. In testing such professionals as psychiatrist, polygraphists, court judges, police officers, and secret service agents on their ability to detect lies, only secret service agents trained to look for subtle cues scored above chance. Most of us are not good at lie detection because we rely too heavily on what people say rather than on what they do. Subjects with damage to the brain that renders them less attentive to speech are more accurate at detecting lies, such as aphasic stroke victims who were able to identify liars 73 percent of the time when focusing on facial expressions (normal subjects did no better than chance).
I think it’s kind of a mixed bag, but one thing i think must be on the bullshit side are the cute little face gestures he teaches as being indicators of dishonesty. this black/white methodology sounds to simple to be true, too learnable that it would easily taught and widely used today in all of the professions listed above. it seems that the aphasic stroke victims most likely used intuition and nothing that could be listed or depicted in a textbook (ie “this curl of the lip here suggests…”).
i’m more excited to see the results of this contest than the return of Haley’s Comet! this following challenge is the challenge i would extend to every media team, documentary maker, science teacher, etc. make it happen, make it impactful, make it convincing!
Can you communicate the most important idea in biology, and one of the most controversial ideas in our society, in a mere 120 seconds? Think you can convince even the most hard-headed creationist that Darwin was right? If so, show us—and that creationist—how it’s done.
Your task is to create a video of no more than two minutes that will get the idea and significance of evolution across to an educated lay audience. Along the way, you can touch on points like how evolution works, how we know it to be true, the evolution of humanity, and the future of evolution.
i was convinced in a very short amount of time of the truthfulness of evolution while attending a biology class. problem is, no one in xtian america will give science any more time than 2 minutes to convince them. but the evidence is so extremely overwhelming that i am sure this is about all one needs if they are somewhat edumacated.
When you spend time with your family (direct or distant) for the holidays, do you have to temporarily change anything about yourself, skeptical, religious or otherwise? Do you find yourself acting differently either for the sake of harmony or simply because that’s how you’ve always related to them (no pun intended)? Is that good or bad?
yesterday was thanksgiving, and thus i was around much of my family. running late for dinner, i threw on a shirt out the door we fly to mom and dad’s.
i did not read what was written on my random shirt, however:
Rebel of Faith
it’s a cool-looking t.- a slim-you-down black, painted with those ruby-red heretic words. problem is, the ruby red caught everyone’s eyes. first was my dear 80-year old mormon grandmother’s. her eyes were better than i had imagined: “rebel of faith?”, she inquired.
“yes, it means rebel FOR faith”. i quickly responded. i was lying, and i was proud of my apostasy, but not to my grandma. not when she has lived a long life FOR faith. so deep was her belief in her holy fairy tale for all of these years that the very neurons and connections in her mind can never again be unwoven. critical thinking and skepticism will not squeeze through the plaque and cholesterol polluting her mind’s neural tubes.
it’s over. SHE’s almost over. i say go with the flow. leave her happy. let her leave happy. when i noticed i had an extra shirt in the car, i changed it for her. and by the look on my mom’s face, i could see she felt relieved as well.
it was just a random shirt from my closet, without any agenda meant by me. i am proud of my heresy, and proud to be a “rebel of faith”, but thanksgiving this year was of a much higher quality leaving religion aside and focusing on family.
When it comes to my English-speaking Mormon friends, few things amaze me more than their aversion to the use of profanity. Some will spend hours patiently defending systemic racial discrimination or a father’s attempt to slit his son’s throat in God’s name, but will recoil at the use of a common word for excrement.
Ernestine Rose:
It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are
atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would
remain so.
Bart Simpson saying grace:
Dear God: We paid for all this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing. Continue Reading »
hurray for an obama campaign. boo to the propositions that were passed in a few states taking away the rights of same-sex couples. today i watched 30 Days (with Morgan Spurlock). the episode was on same-sex parents. it can be watched on hulu or you can google elsewhere to find the episode. i had to write this quick post because i never cry (very rarely, at least), but tears streamed down my cheeks several times as i watched this. i cried when i saw how loving the two fathers were with their kids. i cried when i contemplated people wanting to take away their right to parent. i cried when i saw one of their younger kids brushing his teeth and it made me sad to think some would have him taken away from them. i cried when i saw this woman (who was living in their home and against gay adoption rights) as her mind was torn left and right in order to deal with the cognitive dissonance caused by seeing these great parents. i cried when i saw two adults who were raised in foster homes, as they showed what it was like to live in that environment and how much they would have loved to have had a home, even a gay home, to call home. i cried when i realized what a noble thing these two men were doing as they adopted special needs kids and others without a home to go to. i cried when i contemplated the millions of people that voted in favor of taking away gay rights. there are far too many foster kids as it is now, and if gays cannot adopt that will only increase the number of kids who may never, ever have a home. that saddens my soul and sickens my stomach. i also cried as i saw this woman never change her beliefs even though she wanted to. she wanted to. but she couldn’t go against her faith as it had been taught to her that she should champion a faith-based belief over empathy, knowledge and experience. lastly, i cried because the woman was a mormon and she represented the unshakable bigotted ignorance of the LDS church and it’s primary involvement in supporting proposition 8. i rarely cry but this is a sad day.
ps: please take the time to watch the episode while it’s still available.
hopefully you’ve checked out all of the safran vs. god episodes (all 8 of them). they’re great! lots of laughs and religious skepticism. but the last episode, safran actually gets possessed. it’s a trip to watch and safran has never cleared up what happened. he actually believes it may have been real, as do his camera crew. watch the video:
so what happened? well i think i’ve figured out something plausible… first of all, this is most likely just hypnotism, or in other words a mutually agreed upon play between the exorciser and the “possessed”. in order for suggestive hypnotism to work, the receiver must be highly or moderately suggestible. i believe safran is quite suggestible: in watching all 8 episodes of safran vs. god you see safran being OPEN to new religions and worldviews. although he maintains a skeptical outlook during his experiences, he DOES want to experience “the spiritual” through drinking peyote all night, and in another episode says “i hope i really do get possessed tonight” while attending a Voodoo ceremony and seeing others dance and writhe on the ground. Clearly he was open, susceptible and suggestible. as far as i’ve read, any interviews after this video took place show safran actually believing what happened was real.*
in addition to safran’s suggestive demeanor, he gives himself over to the services of an extremely professional, intimidating and psychological bully. this seasoned mindfucker plays on safran’s fragile feelings of guilt and filthiness**, while feeding him fear of satan and christ. add to this how scary it would be to be commanded to keep looking into this crazy dudes eyes as he slaps you around with a bible and your done. i felt intimidated, threatened and scared just watching this, imagine now if someone controls not only what you are seeing, and thinking, but also controls your body movement by holding you down? your mind can freak out and will play along if the exorciser paints the hallucionoginic picture well enough.
any other thoughts/explanations?
*although not accepting any particular theology over another.
**remember the catholic father episode where he repents?
recent videos on tina fey’s personal god-send, Sarah Palin:
…where she begs the question: “is she smarter than a 3rd grader?” here sarah kills the joke as she reiterates her previous “attempt at humor” as she describes her super-senatal powers as queen vp:
…OH, OH, the hypocrisy! who’s PALIN around with terrorists now?
dayum, you got schooled, p. and by the way- why don’t obama and anti-gay biden start throwing the feces back at her like olbermann does?
i get this odd feeling of security as i look around my apt. and see my xbox 360, big screen tv, my cars in the garage, computers, etc. i get this strange sense of security as i just can’t get myself to fathom sitting in a soup bowl line while at the same time having more than my humanistic share of luxuries at home. now i know this comment is shotgunned with logical fallacies, but i think at the heart of it it seems like we (and other countries) have pumped the US nation full of assets and resources (albeit many unnecessary ones like my gadgets) and that that richness of “crap” has somehow set us much much further away from the ‘29 generation (which i innocently imagine as generally owning only that which is close to their basic needs).
to further explain: look in your kids’ (or a nearby kid’s) rooms. way overboard on the toys, etc. compare this to what it was like even in the 80’s (yes even i can taste the logical fallacies seething through my teeth once again). but what i mean is that the US has been such a consumer, “buy buy buy”, “gottahavit”, “holiday junkie” “shop-til-you-drop” nation that we’ve stored up a plethora of this junk (and other real assets) and that all may somehow convert into having more than enough of our needs if we were to go through a 10 year depression. somehow that’s gotta set us apart from the ‘29 depression, right? am i even making sense?
i guess really it comes down to looking at one’s personal savings, their assets, job skills, and future continued job opportunities to see how one would really fare compared to the ‘29 era depression.
to end, i’ll add what “my perception of the 29 crash was”: some stock traders jumping out of windows, cars on cinder blocks for lack of money to maintain or drive them, soup lines and unemployment for many many americans.
thanks for the input, it’s hard to publicly display the sad extent to my ignorance but i find this blog interesting and respect your opinions.
i realize the dumbassedness of my question but i’m just looking for some answers, ya know? any input from a reader out there?
by the way, the Long Run Blog has had some excellent blog posts recently on the situation of the economy. they are “members” of the skeptical community (the blog was setup from the skeptic’s guide rogues), and attempt to apply critical thinking and skepticism to all things economics. http://thelongrunblog.wordpress.com/
every three months i post a lump of good quotes i heard/read during the season (click on the category ‘quotes‘ on my sidebar to see my on-going collection). so, here are the quotes i’ve rounded up during this year’s summer season!
Dr. Perry Cox:
Lady, people aren’t chocolates.. Do you know what they are mostly? Bastards. Bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling. But I don’t find them half as annoying as I find naive, bubble-headed optimists who walk around vomiting sunshine.
Woody Allen:
What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.
Joh Stewart:
Religion. It’s given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.
Barack Obama:
If you get a federal grant you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against them – or against the people you hire – on the basis of their religion.
Richard Dawkins
What are all of us but self-reproducing robots? We have been put together by our genes and what we do is roam the world looking for a way to sustain ourselves and ultimately produce another robot child. Continue Reading »
first of all, this video is blowing up on the net right now. it explains the Larg Hadron Collider (the largest scientific experiment ever!) The original mp3, lyrics, and vocals for remixing can be found here.
This is one of the best videos i’ve seen in a while… Ayn Rand is very clear and persuasive in defending Reason and pointing out the illogical argument and cognitive crutch that is “faith”.
every three months i post a lump of good quotes i heard/read during the season (click on the category ‘quotes‘ on my sidebar to see my on-going collection). so, here are the quotes i’ve rounded up during this year’s spring season!
taken from belief-o-matic religion quiz. i ranked a hard-core humanist, and a soft-core nontheist- which sounds just about right to me. i also took this quiz two years ago- right when i had started to really deal with doubt. it’s interesting to see secular humanism jumping up to the top (from 73-100%); U.U. dropping a little; Buddhism staying strong in the top 6; and my LDS/Mormon beliefs dropping from a score of 49% all the way down to 26%.
my mother, even with all her professed secularism, was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that i’ve ever known.
she had an unswerving instinct for kindness, charity and love. and spent much of her life acting on that instinct. sometimes to her detriment. without the help of religious texts, or outside authorities, she worked mightily to instill in me the values that many americans learn in sunday school. honesty, empathy, discipline, delayed gratification and hard work.
[...] most of all, she possesed an abiding sense wonder. ar reverence for life and its precious transitory nature that could properly be described as devotional. she saw mysteries everywhere, and took joy in the sheer strangeness of life.
he continues about how he did not have “a vessel for his beliefs”, nor a community for beleif, and thus he has embraced christianity.
.this is my co-worker’s son terry at the laugh factory in california. he kills it on utah, mormons, jesus, beer, etc. you’ve been warned though: gets raunchy but funny.
happy father’s day! i would like to say that i’m with my daughter right now but her grandma has taken her from me! for three hours. to church. …so i’ll see her in a few hours. anyways, here is some cool stuff to check out:
today, steven novella (pres. of the skeptic’s guide to the universe), has revealed his definition of a modern skeptic:
A skeptic is one who prefers beliefs and conclusions that are reliable and valid to ones that are comforting or convenient, and therefore rigorously and openly applies the methods of science and reason to all empirical claims, especially their own. A skeptic provisionally proportions acceptance of any claim to valid logic and a fair and thorough assessment of available evidence, and studies the pitfalls of human reason and the mechanisms of deception so as to avoid being deceived by others or themselves. Skepticism values method over any particular conclusion.
he continues on as to why he, sagan, and shermer have adopted this term to describe themselves over other terms.
…nor is it any kind of “genetic potpourri”. After the platypus got genowmed, PZ Myers says he’s getting tired of the media getting this wrong:
Every organism is going to be a mix of conserved, primitive characters and evolutionary novelties — a mouse is just as “weird” as a platypus from an evolutionary perspective, since each is the product of processes that promote divergence from a common ancestor, and each are equidistant from that ancestor. It’s just that we primates share more derived characters with a mouse than with a platypus, because we are more closely related, and the mix of characters in the mouse are more familiar to us.
the rest of this great article on evolution and convergent evolution can be found archived below. one of the comments made me chuckle, though:
Can we at least say that the platypus is a good argument against intelligent design? It looks bleeding ridiculous; the designer must have been smoking crack to make something like that.
“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” So said Albert Einstein, and his famous aphorism has been the source of endless debate between believers and non-believers wanting to claim the greatest scientist of the 20th century as their own.A little known letter written by him, however, may help to settle the argument – or at least provoke further controversy about his views. Continue Reading »
there’s a new book for sale on the shelves here in Utah, called Mormon Scientist: The Life and Faith of Henry Eyring. i quickly went to the index and looked up the ever-controversial subject amongst the religious: EvilEvolution.
to quickly summarize, Eyring accepts, supports and even defends human evolution in 3 out of the four locations where the subject turns up in the book (one quote is rather ambiguous).
good for him, now on to the rest of the millions of LDS who are still unaware of their human origins.
did you serve an LDS mission? did you break any rules? of course you did! over at MormonMatters.org there’s a discussion going on where returned missionaries are “confessing”. it’s really funny to read other people’s lists of broken rules, sins, and indulgences (it’s funny how many list “drinking cola” since that’s supposed to be so bad). my list is below, if you have comments to add, i’d like to read them here.
(mission area: Brasilia, Brazil 2000-2002)
just off the top of my head:
listened to unapproved “EFY” music and got interviewed by my mish. pres. for it (yeah, weird, huh.)
had pictures of a cute pop star (Sandy) under my name tag.
was seduced by 2 different women who would nurse and not cover up after removing the baby (one told me she was seducing me, the other i may have just been reading into “the body language” a little too much).
had a buddha statue on my desk for a while- felt weird/dark and took it down when a companion complained.
waded my feet in water in a river in the jungle (satan could have swept me away but i was lucky)
had sleepovers with another zl friend and we’d rent 5-6 movies and watch them all in one go. did this 2-3 times.
semi-porn billboards and posters were everywhere in brazil, and i would “notice them” just a few seconds too long.
lied to mish pres. about having “clean hands”. he left it unclear, so i just took it literally and said they were clean (with a “duh” look on my face- “c’mon, pres.”)
played nintendo at a member’s house, watched the news during lunch at the bishop’s house, went to domino’s on sunday with a member who forgot to cook us a meal (i gave her a guilt trip and recommended she take us to the new domino’s that had just opened).
towards the end of my mission i purchased whatever CD’s i felt like from the mall and listened to them while i went to sleep (it ended up being mostly enya).
and last but not least:
tricked a greenie brazilian missionary into praying to joseph smith- complete with candles and photographs!
jonathan and EricSwell posted on some quotes guaranteeing the exaltation of all descendents of temple sealed worthy parents. i posted a comment to EpicSwell, but wasn’t allowed to comment there so here is my comment:
we’re saved!
i actually remember my dad bringing home from church an article that compiled quotes just like these. it was nice to hear something as liberal as this coming from him. i’m sure now that i am basically an apostate, though, that he would quickly announce the article/these quotes as just opinion now. Continue Reading »
we are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. but we can understand the universe. that makes us something very special. (Stephen Hawking)
tonight i watched into the wild on my ipod. i watched while lying in my bed, before going to sleep. my short 2-3 sentence review is this: thank you, mr. krakauer for letting me vicariously live a fantasy of going into the wild and being one w/ nature. i also learned thru the experience of christopher (the main character in the story), that “happiness is only real when shared” (he wrote these words towards the end of his lonely, soul-searching journey to alaska). there’s got to be a way to be one with the world and continue our relationships around us, too. this is a new goal for me to live by. tonight my wife shared a poem with me that said: “real tragedy is not death, but a life not lived” Continue Reading »
a part i thought interesting was on human suffering as proof for or against god. Steven says:
As I stated [previously], this is not a serious argument against God in any case. But since Rhodes is throwing the challenge out there, I can think of some ways to drastically reduce human evil that should not violate anything. Human nature can be tweaked without violating any notion of free will (whatever that means, but that’s a different post). Perhaps humans can become a bit less tribal and blood thirsty, for example. Also, much crime and evil comes from desperate situations. How about a moratorium on natural disasters for awhile, and stop throwing new diseases at us. Anyway, that’s a good start. I’m sure given eternity an omniscient being might just have a few more ideas at their disposal.
another interesting thing steven brings up here is free will. many of the religious believe that god does not stop evil or natural disasters from happening because this interferes with free will. well what is a miracle, if not an interception with one’s free will or the natural course of nature?
Rhodes ends his article inviting his theist defenders to stick with “demonstrating the logical impossiblities of atheistic claims”. Dr. Novella’s response:
Wow, this guy needs to get out more. I may suggest that it is a flawed strategy for the faithful to confront non-believers with logic. That is not a field of combat they wish to take – as evidenced by Rhode’s effort. Talk about bringing a pea-shooter to a gun fight.
To be clear, I have nothing against people of faith – as long as they keep their faith, faith. But “logical evidence for faith” is an oxymoron. Once you enter the arena of evidence or logic – prepare for a smackdown.
the only other time i have heard steven novella talk about religion and agnosticism is on the reason driven podcast, episode 10. listen for a great discussion on agnosticism vs. atheism and steven’s own critiques of faith.
i’m sure the skeptical/scientific community will add much more insight into the TV show “Lie to Me”, until then, here is what i was able to find in my short research (the following is in the format of a conversation between me my friend 
:
taken from the chapter on faith:
…nor is it any kind of “genetic potpourri”. After the platypus 
there’s a new book for sale on the shelves here in Utah, called 
yesterday was thanksgiving, and thus i was around much of my family. running late for dinner, i threw on a shirt out the door we fly to mom and dad’s.
i did not read what was written on my random shirt, however:
Rebel of Faith
it’s a cool-looking t.- a slim-you-down black, painted with those ruby-red heretic words. problem is, the ruby red caught everyone’s eyes. first was my dear 80-year old mormon grandmother’s. her eyes were better than i had imagined: “rebel of faith?”, she inquired.
“yes, it means rebel FOR faith”. i quickly responded. i was lying, and i was proud of my apostasy, but not to my grandma. not when she has lived a long life FOR faith. so deep was her belief in her holy fairy tale for all of these years that the very neurons and connections in her mind can never again be unwoven. critical thinking and skepticism will not squeeze through the plaque and cholesterol polluting her mind’s neural tubes.
it’s over. SHE’s almost over. i say go with the flow. leave her happy. let her leave happy. when i noticed i had an extra shirt in the car, i changed it for her. and by the look on my mom’s face, i could see she felt relieved as well.
it was just a random shirt from my closet, without any agenda meant by me. i am proud of my heresy, and proud to be a “rebel of faith”, but thanksgiving this year was of a much higher quality leaving religion aside and focusing on family.