Dear Mr. or Miss 6,000 Year Old Earth Believer,

I’m not here to attack your religious belief system — you believe what you believe, for whatever basis, and that’s that. I’m not even here to point out that there’s supposed to be a separation between church and state in this country.

I am here, however, to say that it is one thing to stand firmly on one’s belief system, but it is a wholly other kettle of fish to deny something and still insist on using the fruits of that thing which you are denying. It would be like my having a fundamental belief that bridge trolls are responsible for creating donuts but then still driving over to Krispy Kreme to shovel their freshly made donuts into my gaping maw.

One of the more frequent tools used in judging the age of organic objects found on our planet is called “radiocarbon dating” which allows the dating of objects back about 60,000 years; the process relies upon judging the amount of a radioactive isotope of the element carbon which remains in the object and which changes over time due to radioactive decay. By your choosing to say that this form of measurement is invalid, you must also say that our understanding of radioactive decay is incorrect. If so, with regards to these other technologies which rely upon the same understanding:

• If part of your power grid is supplied by nuclear generating plants: please stop using our electricity
• The radiology facilities at the hospital: please stay broken-boned and unknowingly tumored
• The bridges and buildings whose metallurgy is verified and made stronger: please stay off, and out, of them
• Nuclear weapons: ¿pretend that all of those tests and attacks never happened?

If you also think that the universe is not billions and billions of years old, then let’s look at that. Our understanding of that age relies upon a number of things too esoteric to provide for clear cutting examples here; there is one verifying, simple, concept though: the way ‘light’ behaves. With that in mind, if you’d like to claim that we have no idea what we’re doing concerning the behaviour of light - that the distances, and therefore the time and age, which we’re looking at is mistaken calculation, then let’s look at what else you should be giving up:

• Airplanes, which rely upon GPS for navigation: please stop boarding them
• The GPS navigation systems in your cars: please go back to printed maps and driving aimlessly lost, too proud to ask for directions
• The hikes through forests and mountains relying upon hand held GPS units: please get lost with your compasses and maps
• Land line telephones, cell phones, the internet, …, basically all modern forms of telecommunication (which are relying both on satellite communication and fiber optics): please stop using them
• Modern stores, UPS/FedEx/DHL/the post office, and any other place using laser barcode readers: please limit your shopping to farmers markets and your shipments to 19th century implements

In conclusion, this isn’t my viewpoint, this is simply the facts being laid out in a manner which demonstrates the fragile house of cards in which you live. I can see how you might not like that, but at the end of the day, and this is the beauty of science, no amount of legislation will change what is a provable fact regardless of what county, state, or country you live in.

Sincerely,
Loki der Quaeler

If you have had interest in the NSK, feel that you’d like to participate in the Congress, and would be able to travel to, and spend time in, Germany in October 2010, please visit the main page for the Congress and then proceed to submit a delegate questionnaire.

The following book review, originally published in Skeptic Magazine volume 14, no. 2, gives my rather unflattering overview of the assertions made in The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary. The book distresses me in that I see in it an early Creationist assault on the Cognitive Sciences, and the formation of the false scientific arguments that may be brought to the stem cell debate in years to come. After the review was published, I found myself wondering what the authors of the book must have thought of my review - if they had read it at all. I wondered if they would be able to rebut my dissection of their work. It was my feeling that the questions I had posed would have to be confronted if anybody was to take their “evidence” seriously at all. With that in mind, I contacted co-author Denyse O’Leary by email and asked that she review my review and, if she would be so kind, explain to me where I might have gone wrong. She agreed to do so once the review was posted online. Her reply follows my review below…

The Ghost In The Machine

The Spiritual Brain by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary reviewed by Doug Mesner

Even before we reach the Table of Contents, the book has run afoul of reason, casting serious doubts upon the intellectual honesty of its authors. The first sentence on the inside flap of the dust-jacket synopsis asks “Do religious experiences come from God, or are they merely the random firing of neurons in the brain?” Of course, confined strictly between the two options, one may even feel compelled to choose the former - but clearly the cards have been stacked. That neurons must fire in patterns seems intuitive. But to present this as necessarily the product of God’s divine will demands quite a bit of justification. The question is also eerily similar to the equally misrepresentative question often posed by Intelligent Design advocates, “Was life designed, or is it the product of mere random chance?” Available biographical information about the authors reveals this similarity as no coincidence…

The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul was co-authored by neuroscientist Mario Beauregard - whose Templeton Foundation-funded research provides what very little original content the book has to offer - and journalist Denyse O’Leary, author of an Intelligent Design pseudoscience book titled By Design or By Chance? The Growing Controversy on the Origins of Life in the Universe. Indeed, The Spiritual Brain proves to be little more than a remanufacturing of Creationist arguments applied to the Cognitive Sciences.

One might reasonably expect that a book that claims to give evidence for the existence of the “soul” would at least give the reader the benefit of defining “soul” at the very outset. Why - it has been asked - if there is some angelic vapor that drives a living being, provides character, morality, and consciousness, would God have equipped us with burdensome, fragile, and expensive (in biological terms) organs such as brains? Where does the brain end and the soul begin? If the brain provides robotic function, and the soul provides “consciousness”, what are we to make of cases of extreme character change due to neurological disorder or brain injury?

The book begins with no such definition, nor with any overview of its evidence, nor a clear interpretation of the authors’ findings. It begins instead with a vitriolic attack on what the authors refer to as “materialist science”; being quite simply a euphemism for that damnable brand of elitist science that insists upon testable, empirical data.

According to the authors, an unwillingness to accept causes outside the physical world has crippled progress in the field of neuroscience. The reader is belabored with full-paragraph quotations from the leading minds in the Cognitive Sciences meant to demonstrate the magnitude of this bias. Current theories are misrepresented, ridiculously simplified and mocked. But, while the authors effectively prove that great minds have shown a near unanimous unwillingness to accept supernatural theories, they entirely fail to demonstrate how this has hindered progress. Quite the contrary. After pressing through bloated pages of rambling anti-materialist drivel, the reader will likely become solidly convinced that the practice of “nonmaterialist science” as advocated by the authors could itself only serve to end scientific progress. According to the authors, this magical science “is not compelled to reject, deny, explain away, or treat as problems all evidence that defies materialism.” It is quite plain that, instead of seeking explanations for the unexpected or unknown, the nonmaterialist scientist would be perfectly at liberty to “explain” anomalous data as the mysterious workings of God.

Those readers who are convinced by the arguments exposing the follies of evidence-based science may find the presentation of evidence for the soul now entirely needless. However, the “evidence” is sparse enough that converts may immediately practice their newfound powers of credulity.

The primary data put forward as evidence for the soul regards mystical experiences and the profound life-changing effects such experiences have. The authors seem to feel that mystical experiences are indicative of entirely real spiritual contact with God Almighty Himself, and scoff at the idea that these perceptions are derived merely from an altered state of mind. “[T]he fact that mystical experiences and states may have identifiable neural correlates [...] has typically been interpreted by journalists as suggesting that the experiences are somehow a delusion. In itself, that is a confused idea, equivalent to assuming that if hitting a home run has identifiable neural correlates, the home run is a delusion.”

Author Mario Beauregard ran a study on Carmelite nuns, who “live a life of silent prayer”. These nuns report that they enter a “mystical state” that they find difficult to describe. “[T]hey felt the presence of God, his unconditional and infinite love [...]”

But this is precisely what any scientist might expect of a Christian sect of meditators attempting communion with God. Meditators of another religion would surely interpret their experience in their own spiritual frame-work. The authors mention Buddhist meditators, but fail to give an account of their interpretation of the Religious Experience: “The scope of the present book does not permit a wide-ranging assessment of all types of contemplative states, so we will consider only the study of the Franciscan nuns.”

In fact, cognitive scientists don’t shy away from the study of mystical experiences, nor would most deny that these experiences do have the ability to change lives. But the fact that these experiences occur provides no evidence for the existence of the soul or an outer “spiritual reality”. Because the Franciscan nuns interpret this as a communion with God doesn’t mean that we should accept this uncritically.

There is a rare neurological disorder (Capgras’ syndrome) in which the afflicted are capable of recognizing the faces of loved ones, but feel that these people have been replaced with an imposter. Would Beauregard have us believe that this is because exact human replica imposters delight in annoying perceptive victims of particular types of brain lesions, or would he see these unique conditions of the brain as having manufactured this perception? The former would be just as scientifically valid as his assertion that spiritual experiences are provoked by a spiritual world.

Curiously absent from this book is any mention of mystical experiences achieved by means of psychedelic drug usage. A recent study (performed at Johns Hopkins University under neuroscientist Roland Griffiths) involving the inducement of mystical experiences by means of psilocybin (the psychoactive component in “magic” mushrooms) produced a report titled Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance. The report concludes, “When administered under supportive conditions, psilocybin occasioned experiences similar to spontaneously occurring mystical experiences.” If mystical experiences induced by heathen drugs are somehow to be distinguished from mystical experiences induced “naturally” by prayer or contemplation, Beauregard has failed to demonstrate this.

The authors, to their credit, actually do admit that there is no proof of a spirit world to be gleaned from the mystical experience: “Do our findings prove that mystics contact a power outside themselves? No, because there is no way to prove or disprove that from one side only.”

Research of the mystical experience as experienced by the Carmelite nuns was the only original data provided in this book, and it admittedly proves nothing.

For reasons unclear, the book references the well-known placebo effect as some type of evidence for the soul. The ultimate message in this bizarre placebo digression seems to be, “faith matters”, as belief itself has yielded tangible benefits. Equally perplexing is the handling of the question of Free Will, wherein the authors seem to mistake consciousness and self-control for Free Will. The most cursory perusal of available literature on the topic could have served to correct them.

In citing Near Death (NDE) and Out-of-Body Experiences (OBE) as evidence for the soul, the authors again fail to make mention of certain data that seem to contradict their conclusions. One relevant experiment involved subjects whose brains were electrically stimulated in the right temporal region, thus causing them to experience full blown Out-of-Body perception. If Out-of-Body experiences can be electrically induced, where does this leave the idea that such experiences are caused by supernatural spiritual forces?

Near Death Experiences are handled no better. Here again the authors are remiss in their research. Omitted is any mention of NDEs induced by the drug ketamine, or by rapid acceleration, in subjects who are not in fact dead, or in serious risk of dying. Instead, the unscientific supporting “evidence” is anecdotal.

Rarely, a “science” book that attempts to justify supernaturalism holds a certain entertainment value in its far-flung contortions of logic as it attempts to explain away contradictory evidence. As The Spiritual Brain merely ignored data that troubled its thesis, we’re generally denied any such entertainment here. Searching for some redeeming quality, we might be amused at the book’s tone as it oscillates from indignant confidence to near-resignation, confessing that the soul’s existence can not be proven. It’s the similar to the perverse entertainment one might find in witnessing a lunatic street-preacher who, while engaged in solo argument… finds that he is losing.

Denyse O’Leary replies:

Doug Mesner writes asking me to respond to a review of The Spiritual Brain which he published in Skeptic Magazine, and he has now helpfully made the review available on line.

Read Ms. O’Leary’s full reply here:

http://mindfulhack.blogspot.com/2009/04/skeptics-review-of-spiritual-brain.html

Not to waste anybody’s valuable time with a reply to a rebuttal that was meant to end a long unhelpful dialogue, but I feel I must justify my reference to the stem cell debate that so puzzled poor Ms. O’Leary (a reference that I must point out was not made in the review at all, but rather in the introduction to the review on this site).

As stem cells clearly lack a nervous system, the idea of their personhood or “dignity” (as some theologians are fond of calling it) seems reliant upon the idea of a “soul” having been assigned to the life-to-be in advance of their development from the embryonic.  That this would elude Ms. O’Leary of all people seems hardly credible to me.  This possible anti-stem cell research consequence of a belief in the immortal soul is worth mentioning to show why this issue is worth arguing at all.  There is more at stake here than Ms. O’Leary’s faith.  If there weren’t, I should hardly feel good about attacking that which gives some well-meaning people solace.

Also incredible to me is the idea that she doesn’t find my skeptical materialism worth arguing, as it is “dead in the water”.  A perusal of her blog will show you that she has written attack after attack against skeptical materialism - in fact, such arguments are the very themes of her numerous blogs.  To imagine that theological supernaturalism has long since replaced materialism in the realm of scientific inquiry (whatever that would really mean) is delusional at best.  I feel that I have done my best to expose the flaws of The Spiritual Brain, and the author’s refusal to address my charges lead me to believe that she simply can’t. I suspect her decision to bow out of the debate is nothing more than a concession of defeat…

The banana, Ray Comfort famously declared, is “the atheist’s nightmare”. Observe, if you will, the compelling evidence for God’s Creative Hand at work. A banana:

1. Is shaped for the human hand
2. Has a non-slip surface
3. Has outward indicators of inward content: Green — not ripe enough; Yellow — just right for eating; Black — too ripe
4. Has a tab for easy removal of its wrapper
5. Is perforated on the wrapper for easy peeling
6. Has a biodegradable wrapper
7. Is shaped for the human mouth
8. Is pleasing to the taste buds
9. Is curved towards the face to make the eating process easy

The public then craned their necks to observe this brilliant satirist of the Creationist position, only to find an earnest, adamant, evangelical. (With this in mind, I must say it is to my credit that I made none of the obvious jokes when interviewing him following his comment that his wife is “made for Comfort”.)

Ray Comfort by Alethea Jones

Comfort, it turns out, is no lone, babbling, innocuous street-preacher. He is a best-selling author of vitriolic anti-atheist screeds that declare non-believers to be unintelligent, lacking in the sixth sense - Common Sense, the “sense” that apparently puts intuition and gut-feeling above reason and science. With actor Kurt Cameron, Comfort runs a ministry, Way of the Master, which sports its own Evangelism Training Academy and television programme. He is president, founder, and CEO of Living Waters Publications with a stated mission to “inspire in every Christian a God-glorifying passion to fulfill The Great Commission”.

Comfort agreed to speak to me for half an hour by phone and, in his defense, we were past the half hour mark when he asked that we “wrap this up”.

******

Doug: Now what provoked you to write You Can Lead An Atheist to Evidence But You Can’t Make Him Think?

Ray: Well, God’s given us six senses, and the sixth sense is Common Sense. That’s the sense that atheists lack. I just want them to think a little. All you have to do is look around you to see the genius of God’s creative hand. That’s what the book brings out. Any atheist who thinks a little will change his world view very quickly.

That brings us to the question of how can you convince an atheist that God exists?

Well, if you’re in a building, look around and say to yourself, how do I know there was a builder? It is axiomatic that a building can not create itself. It can not build itself. Nor can a painting paint itself. A painting is absolute proof that there is a painter. A building is absolute, 100% scientific proof that there is a builder. There is no better evidence that there is a builder than to have a building. The same applies to the existence of God. Creation is 100% scientific evidence that there is a Creator. You can not have a Creation without a Creator. My agenda really isn’t to convince an atheist that God exists. He already knows he exists. The Book of Romans tells us this: that “the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made, even as eternal power and godhead, so they are without excuse.” My aim is to convince the atheist that he needs God’s forgiveness, and to convince the person sitting on the fence that atheism isn’t intellectual, as some people think it is. It’s not scientific, as some people think it is. It’s more than foolish. In fact, the bible says that the atheist (and this is what we see today ) is not only a fool (Psalm 14 verse 1), but he’s a man who professes himself wise for becoming a fool. And that’s exactly what atheists and evolutionists do. They say, we don’t believe in God, and anybody who does is a knuckle-dragger who denies that science tells us the very opposite is the case.

Psalms 14:1 says, “Fools say in their hearts there is no God. Their deeds are loathsome and corrupt and not one does what is right.” There’s another one in Deuteronomy: “If your brother, the son of your mother, or your son or your daughter or the wife of your bosom, or the friend who is not of your soul entices you secretly saying, ‘let us go and serve other Gods’, you should not yield to him or listen to him, nor shall your eye pity him, nor shall you spare him, nor shall you conceal him. But you shall kill him. Your hand shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterwards the hands of all the people. You shall stone him to death with stones.” - Deuteronomy 13:6.

…What do you make of that?

Well, Israel had 613 precepts in the law. The law is broken up into three governments. There is the Civil Law, the Ceremonial Law… Civil, Ceremonial. There’s another… I can’t remember. Oh, the Moral Law. The Moral Law is the Ten Commandments which tells us right from wrong. Civil Law was instructions to Israel to carry out court cases. If somebody violated the law, they would be punished, and the laws were very, very harsh. Especially against idolatry. If Israel strayed into idolatry, God gave the death sentence. Ceremonial Law is the one evolutionists often grab and say, ‘look, the bible is so stupid. It says you shouldn’t eat lobster. It says you shouldn’t mix wool with cotton.’ Well, we now know that wool mixed with cotton produces sweat within the human body and God said he didn’t want priests sweating when they came in to the temple. We know that the lobster eats off the bottom of the floor of the sea and it eats filthy stuff, and its meat isn’t exactly good. So, Ceremonial Law was just for the health of Israel. Civil Law was the court system that was put in place - and the Moral Law is the law that will judge humanity on the Day of Judgment. When you understand that, the bible begins to make a lot of sense.

So we’re not talking about actually killing atheists?

Of course not. We want to see them come alive. They’re dead in their trespasses and sins and we want them to come alive. I love atheists. I’ve had meals with them. A lot of atheists are my friends. So, no, I don’t want to kill atheists, I don’t want to kill homosexuals, I don’t want to kill people that disobey their parents. I want them to come to Christ.

This seems like a bit of interpretational hocus-pocus. The Vatican has done essentially the same thing with evolution. They have said that The Creation doesn’t need to be interpreted exactly as such, that Darwinian theory can fit in. But you don’t see it like that. You spoke out vehemently against the Catholic dictates of Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican’s Pontifical Counsel for Culture.

Yeah. Because there is no way you can reconcile the Bible with evolution. What you have to do is create your own God. Because the God who revealed himself to Israel said that he made male and female, made man in his own image - and God is not a primate. And the scriptures also say that there is one kind of flesh of beast and one kind of flesh of man. There is no way you can reconcile the two. What you have to do is create a God in your own image and say, ‘Yep, the God that I believe in’ - and this is what the Vatican says - says that they’re both reconcilable, that God created man as a primate that evolved into a human homo sapien. There is no way that the scriptures say that at all.

Humans are in the category of primate.

No. I don’t think so. I think man is made in the image of God, and that he’s completely excepted from animals in that he’s got moral accountability. He has a conscience. He sets up court systems. No way do you get dogs, horses, cats, cattle, or primates setting up court systems that mete out justice on those that transgress the laws that I’ve stated. Only man does that, because man is unique in the creation of God, and I believe that that’s because he is made in the image of God. I don’t believe we’re apes as many people do. Some of my friends act like apes, but I don’t believe they are.

…Yeah… Sorry - how do we distinguish the different types of laws in the Books?

That’s what the Jews do. If you’ve studied Jewish history, and studied Jewish scriptures, you’ll see that they break up the 613 precepts into 3 parts: Moral, Ceremonial, and Civil…

So you have the atheist, and you show him “Creation” and you say that it is created. That’s dependent on using the word Creation which presupposes a creator. Now to take it from the reverse, how do you show an atheist something that wasn’t created to compare against?

Can you name something that wasn’t created?

Well, if everything was created, that doesn’t give us a standard to set anything by.

I’m not sure what the question is, to be honest.

If one claims God created everything, then points at something itself as evidence that God created it doesn’t really stand up syllogistically as an argument.

It does if you’ve got Common Sense! That’s all you need! Okay… If God didn’t create everything, who created it?

When the question is “who”, that presupposes that somebody has planned it.

If evolution created everything, is evolution intelligent?

No. Evolution is -

Never mind creating a frog. Let me see. How would you start if you had to create a frog from nothing?? You’re saying evolution created everything from nothing, I’m saying God created everything from nothing. God is eternal, he’s without the dimension of time and he created all things from nothing.

So naturally the question is, where then did God come from?

And that’s a good question. He had no beginning, he has no end, because he doesn’t dwell within the dimension of time. God created Time and subjected man to it, and because we dwell in the dimension of time, logic demands a beginning and an end. God’s eternal. If you don’t believe that, take the time to study Bible prophecy. Look at Matthew 24, or Luke 21 and see how God can flick through history as you or I can flick through the pages of a history book. So, because God is eternal, because He dwells without the dimension of time, he fits the bill of creating the universe.

Well, but then, if something was eternal, why not the material world?

Because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics called entropy. If you leave an apple on the table for two weeks, it rots. If you leave a rock for a billion years, it turns to dust. If the universe was eternal, it would have turned to dust. Entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics says there’s no way the universe could be eternal, and that’s an accepted scientific fact.

Matter disperses in its concentrations, but -

Everything is subject to entropy. It rots.

- Which means our present form may dissolve, but not that the matter from which it came will disappear.

Then everything around us would be dust if it were eternal. But we don’t see that. We see flowers, birds, and trees, and fruits. And we see the genius of God’s creative hand. Look, let’s say I believed in evolution just for a moment. Let’s say there was a Big Bang. We won’t ask where the material came from for the Big Bang, but we’ll just believe that it happened. From there, after a billion years evolved the first dog. We see it evolved. Fully evolved. It’s got four legs, a wagging tail. It’s got a heart, liver, kidneys, lungs, and it’s got eyes. Over a billion years it couldn’t see, but now its eyes are fully evolved to a point in which it can see, and it needs to see, because it needs to find a female. It needs to find a female that evolved at the right place at the right time and the right reproductive organs with which it can mate. Because if he can’t find a female, he’s a dead dog. Then you’ve got to translate that same scenario over the giraffes, zebras, elephants, horses, cats, goats, fish, and birds. In fact there’s 1.4 million species, and every one of them had to have a female evolve at the right place at the right time with the right reproductive organs and a desire to mate, or they couldn’t keep the species going.

Which came first, the blood, the heart, or the blood vessels? If the heart came first, why did it evolve when there was no blood? If the blood came first, why did it evolve, and how did it get around without blood vessels? And if blood vessels came first, why did they evolve when there was no blood? The only way to reconcile this intellectually is to say to yourself, you know, man must have been created fully formed with fully functioning eyes, brain, lungs, heart, kidneys, blood, skin to hold it all in, alongside a female with the ability to reproduce after their own kind. There must have been dogs there with females, horses with females, to keep it all going.

When you think about evolution, it makes no sense at all. There’s no way it can be reconciled. I think it’s intellectually dishonest when we can’t create a grain of sand from nothing, to say this whole Creation just happened without an intelligent designer. I think it’s intellectually dishonest to say that.

Simulations have been run - particularly at MSU [Michigan State University] that allow basic components to follow Darwinian patterns, and what they show is that this can cause for very complex “creations”, and cellular biology covers this - but I must say, I don’t understand your female argument. If you look at biology, and study cellular biology, back to the level of mitosis and meiosis, males and females aren’t said to develop separately -

Then how did they get here? Why is it that every one of the 1.4 million species has a male and female, except for a few worms and things like that? Every single one of them! Giraffes, elephants, horses, male human beings have females. How did that happen? And how did they reproduce before there was male and female?

Male/Female reproduction serves a survival benefit [genetic diversity], but this really isn’t a good forum to go into the deep biology of it -

Do you know why?? Because evolution doesn’t have an answer…

It doesn’t need an answer on where the first male/female common ancestor first split under what circumstances. We can see that -

I do! I need an answer! I want to find answers!

Just because you need an answer doesn’t mean we have an answer, or that your answer is correct!

No. But as -

So is that good enough??

No. Being a skeptic, I want solid evidence. Faith is not enough. I’m not going to sit back and say I believe that Michigan State University did this, or that I believe million years ago, this. Evolution is based on a blind faith, and a pseudo science. I want facts. I used to believe evolution till I asked for facts, and I couldn’t find any.

You’re kidding me.

No I’m not kidding you.

Go to a bookstore. There are bookshelves full of books on evolution that answer exactly the things you’re talking about.

I’ve been to museums where I’ve been told there are millions of fossils. I went to the Grand Evolution Museum in Paris with a camera crew. I spent an hour with my crew looking for the evolution display and evidence. We had to ask somebody, and they took us to a stuffed monkey with ‘Lucy’ written on it and Origin of Species in a glass case. That’s all they had, and that’s all they’ve got. They say that there are millions of fossils in the fossil record, and millions of bones, and there are! But they speak of Intelligent Design. They don’t speak of evolution. There’s no species to species transitional forms in the fossil record. There is none! And the Missing Link is still missing, despite what people may say.

There’s always missing links. As somebody said, once you fill in one spot with a missing link, you’ve opened two more gaps on either side of it. How do you explain Lucy? Is Lucy not a “missing link”?

No! Of course not. It’s just like the other things. Paleontologists have a huge incentive to just exaggerate a little. Just move this - just call… If you can find a bone with a lump on it, and come up with a theory, and call it a big name, and say that it’s 73 million years old, you could get your face on National Geographic magazine. You could get a book deal. You could be set for life speaking about the discovery you made. I’m a skeptic. I want proof. I’m not just going to say, I believe. I want proof when it comes to something as important as evolution, because your eternity’s at stake. If you say there is no God, that evolution created everything, that everything came from nothing - well, then you’re going to live your life accordingly. You’re going to ignore the claims of the Gospel, you’re not going to repent of your sins and trust the saviour - so it’s a huge issue for Christians.

It is for Christians. That’s Pascal’s Wager. My problem with that is, it’s not between one and the other. It’s not between believing in God and having your proper eternity, or not believing in God. It’s between a whole slew of Gods… or no Gods.

Remember the First Commandment? “Thou Shall Have No Other Gods Before Me”. Of course there are other gods. They are images that man makes up. They are other gods that he feels comfortable with. I did it before I was a Christian. I didn’t shape a God with my hands, but I shaped a God with my mind, a God I felt comfortable with, a God I could snuggle up to, it was a non-existent God that was a figment of my imagination. You know, the atheists believe that everything came from nothing. And he’ll deny that through gritted teeth because it’s intellectually embarrassing. If you say, I have no belief that my Ford truck had a maker… that means you think it just happened.

But if you have a God that came from nothing, you really haven’t resolved anything…

No, no, no, no! NO! NO! God is eternal. He didn’t come from nothing.

That’s just magic-ing the question away.

No, no. It’s not if it’s the truth. He has no beginning and no end. You know, space has no beginning and no end. If you say -

Then why isn’t Space the Grand Creator? “Space: The First Cause”?

Because God’s the Creator of Space. The Creator of the Universe. Space can’t create itself. A painting can not paint itself. There’s got to be a painter, there’s got to be a builder.

And there’s that language game of calling it “Creation”. What if we call everything we can observe, feel, “The Natural World”? So it necessarily follows the laws of Physics, the -

Well, there’s a natural world, there’s a supernatural creator…

[pause]

…See. You see order wherever you look, from the atom to the Universe, there’s order. If you look down the beach and you saw that someone had written in the sand, “Tommy, be home at 2 o’clock for dinner”, you’ve got to say an intelligent mind created it. DNA is a language! It tells us that there’s a designer! The more man’s knowledge grows, the more he should be in awe of what God’s done with his Creation. Look at the flowers, the birds, the trees. The seasons come round every year. Grab a peach, or an orange, or an apple. All these things tell us there’s an intelligent mind. Everything we eat comes from the soil. I mean, what kind of miracle is that?? Everything we eat comes from the soil! It yields, just like the Bible says, “food for man”.

Do you think you’re a good person???

…Hmm. More or less…

Let me ask you something. This will convince you more than anything else of what I’m trying to say.

How many lies have you told in your life?

That’s hard to quantify…

50? 100? 200? Lost count?

Hmmmm…

It’s a hard question. So - what do you call somebody who tells lies?

It depends. They could be a survivalist depending on the situation, or they could -

I’m talking about people who tell lies. It rhymes with fire, begins with L.

Okay. “Liar”.

Have you ever stolen anything in your life, even if small?

Yup.

What do you call somebody who steals things?

Thief.

Have you ever taken the Lord’s name in vain?

Yeah.

That’s called blasphemy, using God’s name is a cuss word. And Jesus said that if you look at a woman and lust for her, you’ve already committed adultery in your heart.

Then why not have sex with her too?

Well, you do what you might. So here’s a summation of your moral state, by your own admission: you’re a lying thief, a blasphemer and an adulterer at heart. And that’s only four of the 10 commandments!

Oh, come on! Are you going to tell me you’re not too?

I’ve broken all those commandments, probably more than you. That’s why I need a saviour. That’s why I need somebody to wash away my sins. So I can stand before holy God on the Day of Judgment and not be condemned to Hell. That’s why Christ died. So your sins could be washed away. Mine were washed away 36 years ago. That doesn’t mean I can live like a hypocrite, but it means that I’ve got ever-lasting life, and that’s what I want to share with other people. So the issue really isn’t an intellectual issue, it’s a moral issue. Christianity throws a wet, heavy blanket on a sinful lifestyle. And to change that whole world-view in an instant, somebody can dismiss the whole moral issue by saying, I don’t believe in God, I believe in evolution, I’m not morally responsible to God. I am an animal. These sexual prowlings I have are just me trying to keep my species going - and that’s really the issue.

I don’t think that non-believers are generally so to give themselves moral license.

You can’t say that, because there may be some that are.

There may be some that are, but I don’t think that’s the grand underlying reason for atheism. If our morals come from God, and this is something we feel instinctively, we’re programmed from God’s Word to feel, then how could there be conflicting moral codes?

How do you mean?

How is it that I’d have a different set of morals from anybody else? We’re all getting it from the same source.

We all have our free choice as human beings. We’re not robots. And if I want to steal, I can steal. If I want to rape, I can rape. If I want to lust, I can lust. You can consider stealing to be okay. You can say, my boss is rich, it’s not really stealing. We tend to do this as human beings, but that doesn’t make any difference. God is a moral absolute, and stealing’s wrong, and we have a conscience to tell us it’s wrong.

This is still talking about giving yourself license to do something that’s “wrong”. I’m talking about having a set of morals that isn’t biblical, nor self-serving. For example, I saw on your website that you had attributed the drought and wild-fires in California to homosexual marriage -

No! That’s not my website. I wouldn’t say that! ¹

Atheist Central?

No. That would be a homo– an atheist saying I’d said that. I’d never say that.

Is Atheist Central yours???

Oh, yeah, but it’s not me saying it. You probably read a comment from an atheist saying, ‘you say that…’ No, I’d never say that.

So you wouldn’t say that God would lay wrath upon us for homosexual marriage?

I would say that when we have a nation that has tornados and hurricanes, droughts, fires, and cancer that’s just consuming the nation - these are not a sign of God’s blessings. The Bible says, righteousness exalts nations. If we’re a country that does right and does good, God says he’ll give us good weather, and good crops, and bless the fruit of the womb. So what we’re seeing in the United States at the moment is not God’s Hand of Blessing, but I never said that God’s wrath will come upon the nation for homosexuality. But I’m not saying homosexuality’s right, obviously.

But, if I understand correctly, you’d also be entirely opposed to gay marriage -

- And bestiality, and adultery, and rape. Oh, absolutely.

See. That’s just a point we disagree on. But I’m not giving myself license to do anything here, and yet I feel that homosexuals should have the same rights as anybody else -

What about paedophiles?

I don’t see how that’s similar.

No. But I’m asking you a question… Why not paedophiles? Why can’t they have the same rights as anybody else?

We’re talking consensual. We’re talking about adults, and when we say adults -

A consensual kid, a 10 year old who wants to have sex and play around with a man who’s, you know, 43? What’s wrong with that??

We don’t consider them old enough to make that decision yet.

Well, let’s say it’s consensual, and the kid says, I’m old enough, I know what I’m doing?

What you’re saying -

What you’ve got is - if you start making up your own moral code, what are you basing it on? You know - child pornography. Is that okay? The kid doesn’t know about it. You know, they film the kids when they’re naked, and there’s a hidden camera. They sell the photos. What’s wrong with that?

I still don’t understand how this relates - ?

What I’m saying is that if you start saying that something is right by what I feel, society says it’s okay, where’s it going to stop?

But if what I feel comes from God to begin with, and I’m not giving myself license through my own moral code, where does that come from, if not from “God”. Clearly there’s a separate moral source.

It comes from your feelings, and you can’t trust your feelings. That’s why God gave us the Bible. The Bible puts in black & white God’s will. And you can read his will. It’s the New Testament. It’s the will of God. It’s what God wants, and he says thieves, adulterers, fornicators, homosexuals, etc. will not inherit the Kingdom of God, so what I feel doesn’t matter.

Okay. So we don’t feel the morals that “God” instilled in us? It’s all just text.

No! You’ve got a conscience, and if you listen to your conscience -

Exactly! That’s what I mean. How can my conscience contradict “God”?

The bible says, sear your conscience. Have you ever taken a steak and thrown it on a hot plate, and you actually kill the outside of the steak and make it hard, but on the inside it is tender. That’s called “searing” a steak. You can sear your conscience. You can actually harden it. So, the first time you look at pornography, you think, oh I feel guilty. Second time, not so guilty. Fifteenth time, your conscience doesn’t even speak to you. What you’ve done is sear your conscience. So a conscience isn’t reliable. That’s why you need the bible. It tells you in black & white what God says is right and what God says is wrong. That make sense???

If you didn’t have the Bible, would you act immorally?

Yeah. We all act immorally, whether with the Bible or not.

But you wouldn’t rape or murder or whatever else if you didn’t have the Bible to tell you not to.

Well, why were there 200,000 people murdered in the United States between the years of 1990 and the year 2000? In a 10 year period, 200,000 Americans - murdered! People still murder. We do wrong, because we have a propensity to do evil. We lie and steal and lust and commit adultery and fornicate, because we love to sin - and when you become a Christian, God changes your heart, so you love that which is right and hate that which is wrong.

What of Christians who commit murder?

That’s called hypocrisy. Christians that commit adultery and murder, and lie and steal - that’s hypocrisy. Hypocrite means “pretender”. If you’re not fooled by a hypocrite, how much less is God? So, don’t worry about hypocrites, they’ll answer to God on Judgment Day.

Well… okay. I just have to get back to the female question…

(Laughs) Don’t all men feel like that?

This idea that… (sighs)… I just hope you can elaborate this more. The idea that females kind of developed — I’m actually not sure how you picture this. I’m really not sure what your concept is on the biology of male/female division.

Well, everywhere I see, I see male and female: giraffes, elephants, horses, cattle, sheep, goats, fish, birds. Everywhere! You ask the evolutionists how this happened. They’ve got no answer…

But they do.

Well, then tell me simply, what happened? Where did the female come from and how did it happen to 1.4 million species without an intelligent mind?

Okay. This goes to Cellular Biology, and they have a common ancestor, all males and females, and they’re not left in separate locations at separate times to find one another! We’re talking about a method of reproduction -

How could they reproduce without a female? They can’t just split in two.

Cells can -

When did the dog start doing the female thing? When did she come along? And the elephant, and the giraffe, and the horse, and male and female homo sapiens? It becomes a huge nightmare when you start thinking about it.

No. You see, we have a common ancestor at the cellular level and beyond. And this does take a good deal of explanation, but my challenge to you then is if I can show you clippings from five textbooks that explain this process -

From billions of years ago. And then I have to believe this, because the professor tells me.

You don’t have to believe this, but you have to admit that you’re misrepresenting Biology.

No I’m not. Not scientific Biology. There’s a pseudoscience. A lot of these scientists should have got jobs as Disney imagineers, because their beliefs are based on imaginations of men. That’s my opinion. And I’m allowed my opinion because this is America. I don’t have to be shaped in a mould and believe the theory of evolution. And I don’t believe Evolution, even though I did once. So what we’re going to have to do is agree to differ, but that’s healthy, isn’t it?

It is healthy. But I do have a problem in that you associate yourself with people like Pat Robertson -

No I don’t.

You do his programme!

I’m doing an interview with you!! It doesn’t mean I’m married to you! Wouldn’t say I’m associated with you.

Yes, but Robertson’s more low-brow.

More what?

Low-brow.

Yeah, well, that’s your opinion. I think he’s a nice guy.

Here’s a guy who, with Falwell - who was a plainly odious character - claimed that 9/11 was some kind of vengeance for -

Well, I would never say that.

I’m glad to know that.

It’s an awful thing. Think of the relatives hearing that.

Exactly. I agree. And my problem with people’s beliefs imposing on public policy is-

Well, remember, it’s people’s opinions, and this is America, and that’s allowed. It’s not people’s beliefs being imposed upon people. I’m not imposing my opinion on you. I’ve got my belief, you’ve got yours, and that’s fine.

What of these “bad atheists” [you write about] who are trying to “take away the rights of Christians”? I don’t see that…

No, it’s the rights of Americans. We have a Freedom of Religion in this country like no other nation. We can be a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, Christian, Jew, Gentile. That’s been purchased by the blood of our soldiers. We’ve got a wonderful freedom in this country. What certain atheists have got an agenda to do is - not to push their beliefs or opinions - they legally are taking away these rights of freedom of worship in this country, and I’m going to fight it.

How are they doing this?

Suing the Gideons for giving bibles out in schools.

That’s just Separation of Church and State. They can distribute propaganda anywhere else.

They can give bibles out in schools. This is America. Come on! The Bible’s a wonderful History book.

Not at a State-sponsored school.

It’s Freedom of Literature. Why not give a bible out in schools? It’s the world’s greatest seller. Let them become educated. Let them make up their own minds. Let’s teach Evolution and Creationism. What’s wrong with that? Why censor Intelligent Design?

Because it has no basis in Science.

It is Science.

How is it Science?

It’s The TRUTH! And you’re censoring Science.

I would have to direct you to the judge’s ruling in the Dover trial and tell you that it [Intelligent Design] is not Science. Evolution has a vast body of research supporting it. Somebody like Richard Dawkins, or PZ Meyers - even though I know he adjudged you a moron - to call them “unintelligent” -

Yes, they’re both very silly men. Dawkins thinks that we came from aliens, and that aliens created everything. And PZ Meyers is in that same category, so I don’t see these as being intelligent, as you do. I see them as having great, great faith - blind faith amidst the genius of God’s Creation.

And you know what? I have a beautiful wife who’s just come home. I leave for Florida tonight on a plane. I just got back from New Zealand three days ago after being seven days here, so I really want to have dinner with her, so can we wrap this up?

Sure.

She’s a beautiful wife. Made for Comfort.

Okay. Very good. Thank you very much for talking to me…

It’s been really good talking to you, Doug…

1. You be the judge.  On his site, Ray received this comment: “There’ve been several hundred gay marriages enacted in California in the past few days. Maybe a couple of thousand by now, I haven’t checked the numbers. And in the non-gay-marrying Midwest, they’re fighting floods, while in California it’s fair and dry. How is The Golden State managing to escape the wrath of your imaginary friend, I wonder?” It was attributed to the name of “Weemaryanne”.  Ray’s response was as follows: “Maryanne. At present there are 840 wild-fires that are burning at once in California, destroying many homes. The fires were started by lightning strikes. Guess who’s in charge of the electrical department? These are from thunder storms that have no rain. Guess who gives the rain? You said “while in California it’s fair and dry.” We are having the worst drought in our recorded history. Last year 1,155 homes were destroyed. You live in an imaginary world. I suggest you get out more.” http://raycomfortfood.blogspot.com/2008/06/atheist-worldview.html

Friday 3 April, 2009: David Lynch’s press conference is poorly managed and uninformative but well-planned enough – it seems – to achieve its intended effect. The attending Press are either convinced, or confused and cowed - by the PowerPoint presentation of statistical graphs and PhD presented data.

Nobody seems capable of a sensible question by the end. For a full hour, a presentation designed to publicize Lynch’s plan to bring Transcendental Meditation [TM] to “one million children” in public schools across America failed to approach the question of how this ambitious plan would be executed, and nobody thought to ask.

The David Lynch Foundation website is a bit more helpful: “[The Foundation] provides funding for schools that offer children in grades 6 through 12 the opportunity to learn the Transcendental Meditation (TM) program as part of a whole school, twice-daily, morning and afternoon, Quiet Time session.” Further, “The David Lynch Foundation bears all TM instruction costs, TM instructor cost, and the cost of the follow-up program, which includes faculty and staff training in the proper supervision of the Quiet Time period.” But who are these instructors, and why Transcendental Meditation?

Yes - to the lady with her hand raised: “What got you into Transcendental Meditation, Mr. Lynch?”

The only question suggesting some background knowledge comes from a man in a black fedora with a thick German accent… He wants to know what role Advanced Techniques such as “Yogic Flight” will play in this schoolhouse transcendentalism. Lynch seems coached enough to avoid overtly supernatural claims, but not bright enough to conceal his TM mysticism. He launches into some unclear rhetoric about TM’s ability to “bring bliss to the atmosphere” and “peace to the Collective Consciousness”. Not only that, but in areas where TM is practiced, Lynch tells us, crime rates, and even car accident rates, have lowered!

But what about Yogic Flight? We know that TM had once claimed that its practitioners could develop the ability to levitate… they even marketed the school of TM with pictures of lotus-seated students apparently hovering above the ground. But first-hand observations of the “levitations” left many unconvinced. The levitators never managed to levitate for very long; they never really “hovered”. In fact, they sprung up rather abruptly and dropped immediately to the ground again. Really, it looked quite a lot as one might expect if credulous transcendent hopefuls were merely hopping about on their asses.

But levitation isn’t all! An old advertisement boldly states: “Regular practice of the TM technique develops SUPERNORMAL POWERS such as:

• Levitating the body at will
• Supernormal sight and hearing
• Invisibility

(While pictures of “levitating” TM students may have been falsified, I’ve have not heard the same said of any such pictures of those who were practicing invisibility.)

TM was founded by a man known as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1956 in India, and has since grown worldwide. Its popularization was largely spurred by the endorsement of members of the Beatles. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are the first speakers at the press conference, stammering their way through a speech that they need not have mentioned was unprepared. TM is wonderful, is the gist of it. Oh, yes, and Ringo saw lepers in India when visiting Maharishi. Paul McCartney is just one of the performers scheduled to play at the next evening’s David Lynch Foundation benefit concert, raising money for the purpose of in-school Transcendentalism. Nothing is really said of the TM meditation technique. According to the Skeptic’s Dictionary online: “TM is said to bring the practitioner to a special state of consciousness often characterized as “enlightenment” or “bliss.” The method involves entertaining a mantra. Trainees pay hundreds of dollars for their mantras. Novices may be led to believe that their mantra is unique, though many practitioners will share the same mantra. As of April, 2007, the cost for TM training is $2,500. This is a one-time fee and financing is available.” (http://skepdic.com/tm.html) Though Lynch and his people are careful to stress that Transcendental Meditation is only a technique, it is quite clear that TM is an organization “which includes real estate holdings, schools, and clinics, […] worth more than $3 billion in the late 1990s.” (Brittanica: http://www.answers.com/topic/maharishi-mahesh-yogi).

Lynch’s goal of “one million children” seems reminiscent of another supernatural claim of TM, the Maharishi Effect: that a certain critical mass of TM meditators can affect change upon the material world.

“They’ve always maintained this,” James Randi (famed stage magician and arch-skeptic) explained to me later, “that if a certain critical number of people take up TM, they will protect everybody, and the world will be perfectly safe from then on.”

Randi came to be aware of TM through his friend and fellow magician, Doug Henning. “I knew [Henning] very well as a kid, and later as a mature magician. We were always in touch…” Randi describes a deeply cultic relationship between Henning and Transcendental Meditation that would destroy Henning’s career and eventually take his life. Henning’s career as a television magician was compromised as he strove to hire only TM initiates to work on the set. According to Randi, this was not only problematic for the fact that it was difficult to find people within TM who were talented in television production, but “every so often they went in to meditation and work just stopped…” Eventually, TV executives grew weary of Henning’s professional antics.

Henning became even more deeply involved with TM following his diagnosis of liver cancer, eventually removing himself from contact with non-TM practitioners. “He gave up all medical care… the Maharishi had told him that he could recover from his liver cancer simply from meditating… he meditated himself to death.” Henning died in February of 2000.

Therapist John Knapp, specializing in the treatment of individuals disentangling themselves from cult-type relationships, claims that he, too, had a cult-like experience with TM. After many years with TM, Knapp found himself far removed from friends and family outside of the organization. He began to harbour doubts about his relationship with TM, which caused for harassing behaviour from some its adherents. “I found that just raising various questions about the group caused me to be the recipient of extraordinarily painful language, and so forth…” Maharishi himself had once been accused of using “fear and intimidation” in order to work to prevent a disciple from leaving the Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa. The disillusioned student, Robert Kropinski, and six other people sued Maharishi’s University for $9 million on the grounds of “fraud, neglect, and intentionally inflicting emotional damage”. Kropinski stated that none of the promised TM benefits ever surfaced during his time as a student, and he was awarded $138,000 by a Washington D.C. jury. Maharishi did not appear in court, as he was never available to receive summons.

It was John Knapp who, in response to the David Lynch Foundation’s proposition to introduce TM into public schools, organized a web seminar to draw attention the possible violation of the separation of Church and State such a program suggests. “They try to tell you there is nothing religious about it,” James Randi, who was scheduled to speak during the seminar, explains, “but that is absolute nonsense. Doug [Henning] told me the mantras and such are prayers to Hindu deities. That’s all there is to it.”

I received an email from Knapp inviting me to RSVP to the event, after which I tried to help him generate publicity. But the event was never to be. The night before the seminar, William Goldstein, General Counsel for The David Lynch Foundation, sent Knapp an email strongly advising caution: “we intend to review the global web presentation for any false, defamatory, tortious, breachful, malicious or otherwise unlawful statements or materials made or published by you or the presenters.” Goldstein then went on to dissect sentences lifted from the Knapp Family Counseling website that he seemed to feel fit the criteria above, though he never answered the thrust of the charge: that teaching TM in schools is a violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. The next morning, Knapp cancelled the panel discussion. In an email to all registered attendants he explained: “Upon reflection, I could not in good conscience expose my co-panelists to possible legal entanglements. With regret, I have canceled this Web Event. The fight to overcome what I believe is a clear Church/State violation — teaching the religiously based Transcendental Meditation program in public schools — goes on.” I, too, believe the Church/State issue is a serious concern, and I feel that TM’s meditation practices planned introduction into schools is no different from a proposition that one-on-one therapy sessions be introduced in the form of Dianetics auditing as practiced within the cult of Scientology.

James Randi’s case against TM is far more personal, “I’m so angry at the TM movement for having taken an innocent person.”

Knapp’s opinion, as he explained to me the day after the seminar was to take place, is that any critical scrutiny of TM will prove its undoing. “…It’s just too damn strange.”

(Following is the email from Bill Goldstein, General Counsel for the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace, sent to John Knapp the night before the web seminar was to take place.  The email is posted here in its original formatting)

From: bill goldstein <bgoldstein108@yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 10:34 PM
Subject: Web Event
To: “Mr. John Knapp” <jmknapp53@gmail.com>

Dear Mr. Knapp:

I am General Counsel for the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace. I have been forwarded the url which publicizes a web event which it appears you are hosting on April 2^nd entitled: Tell TM hands off our schools, http://knappfamilycounseling.com/tmconcert.html .

Your website is a fount of false, misleading, biased and entirely negative information on the TM program and the organizations and individuals which teach or have conducted research on that program[1]. The listed presenters at your event appear all to have a similar negative mission. Therefore, I wished to give you the courtesy of an advisal that we intend to review the global web presentation of the event carefully for any false, defamatory, tortious, breachful, malicious or otherwise unlawful statements or materials made or published by you or the presenters.

I would caution you and your presenters, therefore, to be most prudent concerning the truthfulness and propriety of any statements made by any of them at your web event or thereafter. As you have intentionally scheduled this event two days prior to the Foundation’s benefit concert at Radio City Music Hall it is clear you have planned it to have a negative impact on that event. Please know that you and your presenters will be held responsible for injury to any individuals or organizations, or their reputations, that may result from any unlawful behavior under US, UK and/or foreign law.

You will also be held responsible for the continuing publication of falsehoods on your websites and otherwise.

I trust you will act appropriately now after having been so clearly advised.

Very truly,

William Goldstein

General Counsel

David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness Based Education and World Peace

[1]- For example, by way of illustration and in no way attempting to be exhaustive, you state: I think there is evidence that [the TM program] is either not effective, not enjoyable, or downright dangerous for a certain percentage of the population, on the order of 10% to 20%.” http://knappfamilycounseling.com/mostly.html. And as evidence you link to another website of yours http://trancenet.net/research/index.shtml with extensive false and misleading statements and citations. You start by including therein a characterization of  “ the German High Court’s 1989 ruling that TM is a destructive cult — overruling all lower court findings. The current law of the land in Germany.” The facts of the case are 180 degrees removed from that statement, as you should well know, and are laid out in http://www.truthabouttm.org/truth/LegalIssues/GermanCourtCases/index.cfm.

You go on to state that according to one of your presenters, Barry Markovsky, “TM researchers” research is not designed to be sensitive to, and contains no indicators for, negative effects. In fact, all the 600 studies on the TM technique could potentially show negative effects (e.g., they could measure an increased anxiety instead of decreased or no change in anxiety; an increase in war-related variables instead of decreased or no change in war).

The next false statement is “Negative effects are not detected in TM research because they are infrequent, and therefore will wash out in a statistical analysis”. The fact is that all the major clinical studies had in place mechanisms for reporting adverse effects. No adverse effects have been reported from these studies, even though the data were collected in universities not connected with any TM affiliated university or organization, and the data collection personnel and attending medical personnel  were blind to the group assignment.  Moreover, case histories on individuals at risk or with pre-existing conditions, such as mental health patients, do not support that the TM program has adverse effects. This allegation is baseless. For details responding in detail to all the claimed “studies” to the contrary you can see, as you already certainly have: http://www.truthabouttm.org/truth/IndividualEffects/DoesTMDoAnyHarm/index.cfm#Harmful.

And then you go on to misrepresent that “Most of the research has been paid for and conducted by individuals committed to TM” .The fact is that the research on the TM technique has been conducted at over 200 independent universities and research institutions around the world. The National Institutes of Health have funded 0ver $20 million for clinical research on the TM technique, which has been conducted at independent universities.

Some of the Universities Conducting NIH-funded research on Transcendental Meditation

University of Pennsylvania
Effectiveness of Transcendental Meditation on Functional Capacity and Quality of Life of African Americans with Congestive Heart Failure
Published in Ethnicity and Disease, Winter 2007 Full Article

Cedars-Sinai Hospital , Los Angeles
The effects of Transcendental Meditation on cardiovascular disease in coronary heart disease patients with metabolic syndrome
Published in the American Medical Association’s Archives of Internal Medicine, July 2006 Full Article

University of California , Irvine
The effects of Transcendental Meditation on brain functioning, stress, and pain as shown by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
Published in NeuroReport, August 2006 Full Article

Howard University School of Medicine, Washington , D.C.
Morehouse School of Medicine , Atlanta
The effects of Transcendental Meditation in older African American women at risk for heart disease
Findings presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology, March 2006

University of Iowa
The effects of the multimodality approach of the TM technique and Ayurvedic herbal preparations on coronary disease
Findings presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology, March 2006

The Medical College of Wisconsin , Milwaukee
(1) A study on the effects of Transcendental Meditation on the prevention of hypertension in African Americans; and
(2) A study on the effects of Transcendental Meditation on morbidity and mortality in African Americans with heart disease.

Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, Los Angeles
(1) A study on the mechanisms of atherosclerosis—the effects of Transcendental Meditation on the sympathetic nervous system and the functioning of the arterial endothelium in African Americans; and
(2) The effects of Transcendental Meditation on carotid atherosclerosis.
Published in the American Heart Association’s Stroke, March 2000 Full Article

One of the unbelievably awful things about the internet is that it mates that ‘bringing together of people’ with the double curse of the average human: (1) the difficulty to discriminate in choice and (2) the propensity to hoard and believe that more is better. What results from this Fly like merging is lived out daily by tens of millions on sites like Facebook. Multiplying the penalty of living this out on such sites is that, unlike some night in 1992 that faded out to muted shades as time went by, massive farms of servers are busy replicating and archiving your mistakes right now, so that the future you, the future friends, the future employers, perhaps the future children, can see it as clearly as though it just happened.

Welcome to the end of valuable friendships: a modern tragic play in four parts.

Looking back, there were those things said in passing over dinner, and the odd second hand tale. It seems like the clues were always there, waiting to be assembled: your dear friend has some good friends who are real douche bags; they haven’t a cupful of wit nor a minute ember of humor to douse with it. You always suspected it but you could never prove it — until now. Day in and day out, your friend’s update feed becomes a longer and longer laundry list of unfunny non-insights and retorts which weren’t even amusing when they first became public domain in the 1980s.
You can no longer deny it: here are the buffoons willingly added, and continuing to be kept, by your friend as their friends… and they’re schmucks: screamingly obvious, self-promoting, flying-a-flag morons. Your mind races:

• How does this person who i’ve come to hold in high esteem have such lousy taste?
• What does it mean for my own self-worth to be a friend of someone who has such lousy taste?

Act II
A hole that can never be filled

20, 50, 100, 200, 500, and on and on; and more and more… Like Romeo is Bleeding, your friend has to fill that hole, but instead of cash in the backyard, they can’t stay away from that Add button. It becomes a tired, hackneyed, ritual which has lost nearly all value and thereby has cheapened that for which it once had value. Nobody has 150 friends. Simply nobody. You can’t say for sure that you’ve even had meaningful conversations with 150 different people in your entire adult life… but there it sits: your friend’s “friend” list. What does it even mean? Even making the statement that someone has 200 friends would have been vapid braggadocio in recent times, and yet here it is as some item of pride on the front page of your-friend-the-prom-queen’s profile. And still everyday, there’s a new one, a new five. Where do they keep finding them? How many items can a collector really pay loving attention to?

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Act III
Tear Down This Wall! (even if it’s supporting the roof)

Five years ago, the idea of an adult hanging out frequently with both their parents and peers in a social situation would have been solely the hallmark of the tacky white trash.

Five years ago, the idea of a barely known co-worker and a friend-for-the-past-fifteen-years together regularly sharing your conversation and comment would have been impossible — obviously fucking wrong.

Today, these are part of life-de-facto on social network sites like Facebook. Evaporating is the concept of ‘appropriateness’. Bob, from human resources, three jobs ago, is treated to seeing your friend’s children photos - just like you are. Your friend commenting on Brenda’s photo of her baby is given the same profile screen real estate as anything else your friend does, even though you don’t know who in the world Brenda is and couldn’t give a good god damn. On your friend’s profile, you can read your half of the conversation your friend had with their parent when (a) why is it the public’s business, and (b) you didn’t want to know, and (c) seeing only half of something not only makes no sense, but also inspires curiosity in something you didn’t want to know to begin with.

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Act IV
Everyone is a King or Queen

… so, much like all of the want-to-be-somebodies who flocked daily to Versailles in the 1700s to stay in favour, you too get up every morning to attend your friend’s court. What is it today that might be proclaimed to that court of those awaiting hundreds of friends — that passing remark that you’d like to be a part of because they are, after all, still your friend.
Dirtied and devalued is the notion of privacy: the transience of a special shared moment, lost to archiving on third party servers and replicated; backed up databases; off-site-stored media; there, always stark, never going away; often available for others to read, weeks, months, and years later, and best of-all: out of context. This is a dark rabbit hole from which there’s no return.

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Epilogue

Perhaps this is just the way humans will evolve, like birds in a pet store, we will become all a large mishmash of people twittering-posting-and-otherwise-babbling, simultaneously, en masse, about nothing of any particular importance. Perhaps that will become what is usual and regular. It’s too early to tell.

One thing seems for certain: it cheapens us all.

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]]> http://www.process.org/discept/2009/02/20/the-negative-mutation-of-social-networks/feed/ http://www.process.org/discept/2009/02/18/life-on-planes/ http://www.process.org/discept/2009/02/18/life-on-planes/#comments Wed, 18 Feb 2009 18:24:15 +0000 Loki der Quaeler http://www.process.org/discept/?p=127 I spend some amount of time traveling by air; it’s never enough to satisfy me, but the time-and-space aspects of it always fill me with giddiness. Pondering those aspects gives an excellent opportunity to examine our place in the larger picture of space, for it’s not such a common event that a person can noticeably leave one spatial reality to spend time in another spatial reality. Making the situation more contorted is that we, humans, have attempted to force the application of a framework of calendrical time — an application which doesn’t conform so well to the properties of our planet - of a sphere.

To paint an example: i flew to New Zealand over Thanksgiving. I boarded a plane in Vancouver on a Friday evening around 5.30p; it was wintry - typical for that time of year. I flew for 14 hours and arrived in the morning — but it was now Sunday. Walking around downtown Auckland at 8.00a on what was already shaping up to be a warm summery day (typical for that time of year), i gave my friends T&E a call; they were in California so i knew they’d be awake since it was a few hours ahead: they were answering the phone at 11.00a — but on Saturday. On my return flight, i boarded a plane on Sunday night around 8.00p, flew for 13 hours, and arrived at 12.30p — it was Sunday, early afternoon.

So, how did we get to this state of chronometric cluster fuck? Well, this is just one of the side effects of our living on a sphere.

Instead of one of my usual tilting-at-windmills articles¹, i thought i’d do an article about geometry. Wait - don’t go - you might actually enjoy this. It’s an article about the differences between the geometry we perceive in our every day lives as ground dwellers, and the geometry we’re actually living in on Earth. The three topics i’ll talk about are:

• the time zone / calendrical scenario i described above
• those flight progress maps they show on video screens during flights
• the difference in seasons between hemispheres

Also, this can be an interactive article: should you choose to play along at home, you should scrounge up:

1. two oranges
2. a sheet of ordinary letter paper
3. a ruler
4. a sharpee
5. a pen or a pencil (unless you want to use the sharpee on paper)
6. paper towels
7. one object of your choosing, no bigger than the oranges
8. a Pringle²
9. a decently sharp knife

You’ll also need a responsible adult if you’re a minor (or particularly incompetent with a sharp knife).

---

A foreword:

This article will be ever so slightly math-y — it’s unavoidable.³ I realize that one man’s orgy of gorgeous shapes and symbols is another man’s snooze-fest, so i’ll do my best to make it candy and consumable, while trying not to dumb it down.

Also, this article has turned into a beastly length, so i’ve made all of the headings collapsible, and collapsed by default (save this one); click on them to expand/collapse the section under each.

Lastly, in the spirit of exclusion, if you’re a person who believes in a flat earth, who has somehow ungnarled your purple polydactyl pointers into using a computer mouse and uncrossed your eyes long enough to read this, you can stop reading here. (Yes, it’s true: there are apparently **still** flat-earth people today⁴ — if you thought that the supporters of a geocentric universe had to come up with some inventive [read: absurd] models to support observational data, they had nothing on the modern flat-earther.⁵)

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On with the show:

Whether you’ve decided to participate in parallel with your own materials, or just read along in observation, i’ve placed mile-marker photographs periodically through the article; starting off the photo accompaniment is one of the above inventory list gathered onto my desk. If you do decide to follow along, my one caveat is that you should wash the oranges as much as possible; who knows what sort of funky oranges i bought, but the waxy surface killed my sharpee in short time.⁶

As preparation, around the top of each orange at its belly button i wrote the regular N-E-S-W compass points in their usual fashion. Then, on each orange and treating the belly button like the north pole on the Earth, i drew four lines ’straight’ from the north pole to the south pole - one for each of those cardinal direction (N-E-S-W) markers. To keep lines as straight as possible, i used the ruler to draw a periodically spaced line; this worked fairly well, but your mileage may vary. At this point, my oranges looked like the photograph on the right.

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Time zones and calendrical hoo-hah:

The history of time zones dates back some number of centuries and is well documented on Wikipedia should you be interested; suffice it to say that their usage has been globally adopted by all modern societies on the planet. Part of the problem with time zones is that we’re trying to assign a continually increasing value to a surface that is ‘closed’. By ‘closed’, i mean that the surface does not stretch off infinitely in any given direction and were you to set off in any direction staying on, or parallel to, the surface, you would eventually return back to the spot from which you began (much to consternation of flat earthers and many other people in the 15th century).

As a thought experiment, imagine a benevolent ruler of all the known lands in a time in which there wasn’t clear evidence that we lived on this closed surface. One day he decides that he’s going to travel to the edge of the world, surveying all his land, and bestowing his people with some gifts. He gets in his royal hot air balloon and travels due east along the equator. After every 1000 miles floated, he drops a big bag of gold to his loyal subjects below. With his 25th drop he might start to notice that things seem familiar as he’d be back over his starting location; should he not realize this, however, he will continue his pursuit until death or bankruptcy, never reaching the end of the world.

Common to the need of both the benevolent ruler and the implementers of the time zone system is the ability to say “stop — we’re repeating ourselves.”

Picking one of the oranges, we can see that it is currently divided-by-sharpee into 4 sections, each of which run from north to south. For simplicity, we’ll use these as our time zones (pretend that moving from one time zone to another is a change of six hours and not one hour). To make it visually more easy, draw an equator on the orange and ink a notable black circle at the spot where the equator crosses the pole-to-pole line running out the cardinal W point. Mine looks like the photo to the right. Orientating the orange with the north pole facing your ceiling and the first quadrant to the right of the black circle facing you, pick up the sharpee and write “0″ in the first quadrant. Rotate the orange by a quarter turn and write +6 in the next quadrant. Repeat for +12 and +18.
Rotating another quarter turn at this point, we end up back at the quadrant with a ‘0′ in it — and here’s the moment — note that we could put +24 here (and then +30, +36, +42, +48, +54, …) and the clocks for all the little inhabitants on our Planet Orange would be consistent, but not their calendars.

So here’s root of our discontent. In the absurd case, we could let the time zone adding go on ad infinitum but, then, this makes for an even more confusing calendar situation (because then today would be every calendar day from now until the end of time). So what we’ve had to do is to put a stake in the ground, figuratively, and declare an international date line — a line on the planet on the eastern side of which it is one day, and on the western side of which is the next day.

As a brief historical note, the idea of an international date line can be found mentioned as early as the 14th century in a Talmudic commentary, though it seems likely that the idea had more to do with geographic and identity separation than regulating global time. This date line, referred to as the “K’tzai Hamizrach”, was at a longitude 90 degrees east of Jerusalem (which would be basically running just a smidgen east of Taiwan).

Since humans were involved in this whole process, the exact position of the Earth’s date line is steeped in politics and as such looks like a typical case of gerrymandering. This sets up dumb scenarios similar to Iceland insisting on being in the same time zone as the U.K. — like Kiribati extending well east of Samoa, but being exactly one day ahead, and at the same time of day, of Samoa — and like the Line Islands Time (pleasingly abbreviated as ‘LINT’) being outside of the normal -12 to +12 hour offset range at +14.

With all of this in mind, it is an easy thought experiment to design travel in which a given calendar day simply won’t ever exist in the life of a person; had that Air New Zealand flight flown a route that went more to the west initially, it would have crossed the international date line at midnight local time, effectively meaning that no one on that flight would have ever experienced Saturday the 29th of November, 2008: at one moment, the local calendar would have read Friday and the very next second the local calendar would have read Sunday.

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Flight Progress Graphics:

If i had a dime for every time i’ve overheard people asking amongst themselves why our plane was flying in that ‘funny curve path’… well i don’t know exactly how much that would be - but i’d have some more money. The reality behind the situation isn’t that the plane is actually flying a funny curved path through space, but rather a problem with map ‘projections’. Without getting too too mathematical, this kind of projection could be thought of as a rule that tells you how to take one point on a surface and place it on another surface.

There’s a couple problems with projections as far as maintaining a good representation of the thing being projected. Two easy-to-talk-about cases would be world maps, which we’ll get to in a second, and something we see all the time: shadows.

With shadows, we’re losing a lot of information in the projection process due to a loss of dimensionality — in other words, we’re taking something which has 3 dimensions (like a chair), and projecting a representation of it (its shadow) into 2 dimensions (like the flat floor). This projection is ‘destructive’, because we can’t reasonably reconstruct all of the information about the original object (the chair) from looking only at its projection (its shadow). Ok, enough about that kind of everyday projection – back to maps…

So at this point, if you’re snarky in a delightfully weird way, maybe you’re asking, “Why do we need to do a projection to take information from one basically 2-dimensional surface (the surface of our planet) and put it on just another 2-dimensional surface (the poster version of the world map)?” The answer to this has to do with ‘curvature’.

A side track into curvature:

Curvature, in this sense, is a mathematical concept related to the bended-ness of an object in space; technically there are a number of kinds of curvature, but we’ll just use the loose word ‘curvature’. The simplest way for us to test the differences in curvature (aside from just staring at the object) is with triangles. You’ll remember from elementary school the lesson that the sum of all of the angles in the corners of a triangle equals 180°.

Let’s belt one out quickly on our piece of paper. Using the ruler, draw a 3″ line parallel to one edge of the paper; now draw a 3″ line from the start or end of that line parallel to the other edge so that you now have an L shape with equals sides — here we have a good old ‘right angle’ - 90°. Now draw a line between the two open ends of the lines to make a triangle. I’ll spare you the trigonometry and you can take my word that each of the remaining two angles are 45°; so adding those two with the right angle equals our promised 180°. This wasn’t nearly rigorous, but trust me: any triangle you draw on that piece of paper will have its corner angles sum to 180°.

Now, pick up the second orange and draw an equator like we did with the first orange. Breaking out your stink eye on the north pole, notice that there is a right angle between any of the lines leaving the cardinal direction indicators. Picking two of the neighbouring cardinal directions, let’s say N and W, draw a right angle symbol, just to remind us. Now, follow the W line from the north pole down to the equator; notice that when they meet, it’s a right angle as well (draw another right angle symbol here). Lastly, follow the N line from the north pole down to the equator; here again, they meet at a right angle (and scribble another right angle symbol here). Holding the orange away from us and looking at this triangle, you’ll note that we now have a triangle in which our corner angles add up to 270°. This is because the orange has positive curvature, whereas the piece of paper was flat (it had zero curvature).

Noting the pattern that positive curvature surfaces have triangle angles that sum to greater than 180° and zero curvature surfaces have triangle angles that sum to exactly 180° then Patty McPattern, the drunk pattern-dog, will correctly guess that surfaces of negative curvature have triangle angles that sum to less than 180°.

Looking up from his Lagavulin, Patty asks, “What’s a negative curvature surface look like?” Well: stare at your Pringle (or dressage saddle) — this ’saddle surface’ is the classic example of a surface with negative curvature. Ok, you can go ahead and eat the Pringle now, if you want.

Our perception of this curvature depends greatly on the altitude we are above the surface, as well as the amount of the surface we care about measuring. With regards to altitude on the Earth: walking on salt flats, you’d swear there was no curvature at all while if you were lucky enough to fly in the Concorde (damn you, and) the curvature would have been starkly plain to see.

With regards to the amount of surface being measured, if we’re endeavouring to build a sports stadium or a city block on planet Earth, then we needn’t pay heed to the real curvature of the planet. So when measuring the ground for something the size of a football field (or in terms of my orange, which has much much much less surface⁷, the football field would be an area 20 million times smaller than the size of a red blood cell), we act as though we are dealing with something with zero curvature, like our piece of paper. If, instead, we’re endeavouring to pilot a plane from San Francisco to Frankfurt, or lay transoceanic fiber optics, then we need to start thinking about this curvature.

It’s exactly this latter point which entrenches the vast majority of our existence, making it easy to forget that we’re actually living in a number of spatial realities.

Because we have one 2-dimensional surface living on an object with curvature different than the 2-dimensional surface on which we’d like to have our map (like the page of a book, the wall of a room, …), we need to use a projection to get all of the information off our sphere and onto our map. There exist a lot of projections (Globular, Azimuthal Equidistant, Mollweide, Miller Cylindrical, … to name only a portion), but the one that will be most familiar to anyone who’s seen a world map is likely the Mercator projection (named after a 16th century Flemish geographer).

One way to visualize what’s going on with this projection is to grab your orange from the time zone section. In an ideal world, you could cut a single vertical slit from pole-to-pole (for example, along the W line) and scoop out the internal tissue; working more in reality, cut the orange into quarters along the pole-to-pole lines, remove the fruit, dry the skins and place them ordered like they were on the orange next to each other, like in my photo.

By imagining that there are a number of parallel horizontal strips covering these skins, you’ll notice that some horizontal bands have more actual orange region (you can see almost no white area), while other bands have a lot less (there a several gaps of white area). Since this kind of projection maps a horizontal band of the skinned flattened orange to a corresponding horizontal band on our map, the bands which have gaps in between the orange segments must have their information visually spread out to fill in those missing gaps. As a result, the regions near the poles are given disproportionate amounts of real estate on the projected map.

This is the reason that, for example, Greenland and Canada seem so unrealistically large on the usual kind of world map.⁸

Another way to imagine this is by looking at the shortest distance between two points. Fear not, you weren’t lied to by your elementary school math teacher: the shortest distance between two points is indeed a straight line; the fine print on that contract is the sticky wicket. It matters what surface that straight line is living on; for example, when we’re talking about those two points on the surface of the Earth or the orange, that straight line is called a ‘geodesic’ (or less math-y: part of a ‘great circle’).

Pick up the second orange and draw two points - one in the ’southern’ quadrant of the S-W strip and one in the ‘northern’ quadrant of the S-E strip. Now draw the shortest straight line connecting these two points — a geodesic.

This will take a little mental imagery again (and it’s cheating a bit in terms of legitimate projections): hold the orange in your hand and imagine that the orange is sitting inside of a clear plexiglass cube. Now, imagine that you’ve lifted the strip of skin that is that geodesic directly off the orange (preserving the same shape it was while on the orange) and floated it towards you until it smacked into the plexiglass. What you would see on the plexiglass would be one of those ‘funny curve paths’ people talk about.

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The Seasons Change, Change, Change:

What is this thing that has Santa and sleigh arriving to Sydney houses midst heat waves and beach cavorting? Why are the northern and southern hemispheres forever seasonally separated from each other.

For those with a hint of remembrance from a science class, the proffered answer may be because it’s somehow due to the orbit of the Earth around the Sun being elliptical (like an oval, not a perfect circle). While this is technically true, it is actually pretty close to being a circle. When talking about the shapes of orbits, the term used is ‘orbital eccentricity’. If an orbit is a perfect circle, then its eccentricity is zero; the Earth’s orbital eccentricity around the Sun is 0.016, and the amount of time the Earth spends swinging through the most remote point of its orbit is only about a day and a half longer than it spends swinging through the most near point of its orbit.

The main bringer of seasonal difference is the ‘axial tilt’ of the Earth. If you picture the top of your desk as the plane in which the Earth travels in orbit around the Sun, then pick up your second orange, orientate it such that the north pole is facing the ceiling, rotate it a sixteenth of a turn towards the wall to your left and place it back on the table. This is roughly the 23.4° tilt at which the Earth presently sits⁹. While this isn’t entirely accurate, it’s good enough for this article¹⁰.

Now, place the ‘one object of your choosing’ item on the table such that you can move your orange in an orbit around it — this will be the Sun. This obviously isn’t to scale as the Sun’s width¹¹ is about 110 times that of the Earth’s, but something like that isn’t fitting on your table. Now, making sure to always preserve that 23-ish° tilt, move the orange around your the sun in quarter-orbit movements. Notice how the northern and southern hemispheres vary in closeness to the sun depending on where in the orbit the Earth-orange is, like in my photos below. Assuming a counter-clockwise orbit, from left to right we have Autumn (for the northern hemisphere) / Spring (for the southern hemisphere), then Winter/Summer, then Spring/Autumn, and finally Summer/Winter. It is this changing of who’s-closer-to-the-sun which dictates our winters and summers, and keeps Kiwi kids from understanding why Whoville is buried in snow.

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1. don’t worry: i’ve got one on social networks which i’ve been writing in quasi-parallel to this
2. … or a hunter-jumper / dressage saddle, if you’re a horse person.
3. Again, don’t stop reading here though.
4. quite possibly all living together in a trailer park somewhere, and potentially splitting the rent with the chemtrail-conspiracy-theorists and the folks who think that the moon landing was faked
5. Well, nothing except the decent excuse that they didn’t have a mountain of invalidating measurement and observation.
6. Once again, Prockey comes to my rescue…
7. 6.39 x 10^-17 times the area
8. For example, Greenland is almost three times the size of Texas, but the usual kind of world map shows a Greenland that visually would cover nearly the entire continental U.S
9. … though that appears to vary between 22.1° and 24.5° with a periodicity of 42,000 years
10. An improvement would be if you could some how have the orange sitting with its center in the table’s surface, since a planet’s orbit follows its center of mass and not its ‘bottom’.
11. Technically: diameter

]]> http://www.process.org/discept/2009/02/18/life-on-planes/feed/ http://www.process.org/discept/2008/12/15/myth-as-asylum-from-questioning/ http://www.process.org/discept/2008/12/15/myth-as-asylum-from-questioning/#comments Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:59:38 +0000 Loki der Quaeler http://www.process.org/discept/?p=90 There is too much religious tolerance in the world today.

This may read as nonsense given the seemingly endless stream of news items in which guy from faith A attempts to kill person from faith B and recent quasi-scrutiny of the belief system birthed by that science fiction author; if so, suspend your disbelief for a moment. Tolerance of religious belief has causally allowed a regular discouragement of scientific inquiry, but what is more damaging than that is that it has allowed illogical ‘explanations’ of real world phenomena to gain social validity. I suggest that by allowing one large portion of people’s lives, of their tenets, to slide by completely unquestioned despite obvious flaws and contradictions, an underlying message of complacency towards the ‘okay-ness’ of irrational and unsupported policy claims is being allowed to permeate portions of society in which it has no place being.

As i was walking around Rome several weeks ago, it was impossible to dodge the overarching influence of Christianity which still shadows life there: from roving small packs of American priests in their 20s on study, to the density of churches, to, of course, the Vatican itself. While i don’t expect the wide spread conversion of churches to Starbucks, it is saddening to note that nearing the end of 2008, with centuries of inquiry and discovery under our collective human belt, with rapid information dissemination at our fingertips, with an increasingly egalitarian view onto our peers, that we can still find such large subscriptions to religious faith.

As is evidenced by published poll data, and anecdotally noted by the turn out at public celebrations of religious events, the vast majority of the human race¹ turn towards religious doctrine for their moral guidance and cosmological explanation. While surveying in the US did appear to give evidence to a shade of a down tick in religious adherence from 1990 through 2000², there was an apparent bounce-back (though not to 1990 rates) reported by 2008.³ Outside the US, the data is not very available (or, at least, very locatable) on a more global scale; though with the world becoming more economically and politically instable⁴ over the past decade, one can imagine an increasing trend in faith during this time.⁵

Confusing this situation even more: during this same recent era, the ability to communicate information across geographically separated communities has become ever easier. This is perplexing since, as communication of information has become increasingly easy, and more widespread, one would think that it must take more effort to actively discount and screen out ideas contrary to one’s personal religious beliefs. Unfortunately, this sort of willful ignorance cannot be easily grouped under the established correlation between poor education and religious belief.⁶ Since the majority of the population succumbs to some flavor of superstitious belief system, what we often see as a reluctance to pose rational questions on the belief systems of others could likely be the fear that their own fragile framework could not withstand a similar scrutiny.

Key to both illusionary magic tricks and religious indoctrination: the participation of two parties is required — someone willing to be fooled, and someone willing to fool. While it is more difficult to see the motivations behind those willing to be duped, it’s not hard at all to see the roots of interest in an established belief system’s discouragement, or forbidding, of rational inquiry into an area which it has already claimed to be able to define through divine insight. No one wants to look like an ass, especially an organization which believes they are able to steer one’s eternal existence; so whether it’s an earth-centric view of the universe, a six day formation of all the universe, or whatever, once the guardians of the belief system have stated X as fact, it is in their interest to discourage examination of X.⁷
The Judeo-Christian belief system carries an extra weapon for this discouragement: in their mythology, the cause of their banishment from an idyllic eden life is the very process of questioning — the search for knowledge, symbolically embodied in that whole serpent-apple routine; to Christians, it is the original, the first, sin.⁸

Once we, as societies, kowtow — giving power to religious ideals by accepting them to be a coherent piece of the fabric of an individual — then it greatly hinders the ability for remotely rational dialogue to enter the equation when a belief system jumps from somewhat loony⁹ to dangerously-and-completely-absent-from-reality loony¹⁰. If we cannot consistently and regularly apply rational scrutiny to matters impacting daily human existence, then there is muted value in those times that we can do it at all.
It is of cold comfort that, for example, sanity finally regained control of the Kansas School Board when the real problem is the large step backwards taken due a fundamental Christian worldview being given such validity within society that a subculture believed it to be something it wasn’t, something it couldn’t be.

Truly, not everything can be presently answered by scientific inquiry and research — and it is completely plausible that it will never entirely be able to be answered — but it is certain that when people are allowed to defer to ritual and willful blindness then inquiry and research is stunted at best, and, at worst, it is prevented outright. Especially in these times in which there is a rash of bad events arising partially from our inability to model a large system¹¹ and partially from our inability to engineer new production solutions¹², it is important that we turn our minds outward with vigilance to ask coherent and decomposing questions, not turn our minds inward to take refuge in constructed fantasy.

As a postscript: it should be noted that, while i am mentioning Christianity in this article, there is no reason this complaint does not apply to all faith based systems (including those ‘alternative’ types — the ‘magick’ spectrum, the wiccan variants, …): they all have, as their basis, a kernel framework of unverifiable supposition over which further ideas, also unverifiable, are added or inferred to form a body of ‘laws’ and a cosmology.¹³

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1. pie charted for your visual consumption
2. for two frequently referenced sources, there are the ARDA studies and the 2001 ARIS study
3. the Boston Globe had a decent summary
4. including the re-inventing of societies previously dominated by atheism-enforcing governments
5. … given the indications that humans, in a perceived crisis do turn to religion. Anecdotal evidence abounds through Google - here is one of the more recent picks of the litter
6. … those nations which do have less resources with which to educate their population actually do have a more ‘religious’ population (with the United States being the anomalous, and embarrassing, data point in that set) — PewResearchCenter Global Attitudes Project study in 2002.
7. especially when the synthesized ‘fact’ is not based on fact at all
8. think briefly what it means to have a system in which this is the core principle describing the cause for a adherent’s lot in life. ‘you could have had an amazingly paradisiacal life, had only your ancestors not been inquisitive’
9. like “there exists exactly one omnipotent being who watches over everything in the universe”
10. like “there are young children in Nigeria who are actually witches, and whose evil magic is responsible for poor fishing harvests (and not the oil industries dumping regulation-free into the waterways)”
11. in this case an economic system
12. for example a new economically and environmentally sound energy generation source
13. as opposed to something like the field of study loosely termed ‘Physics’, which has a kernel framework of verifiable conjecture from and over which further ideas (including some thought to be unverifiable as portended in certain facets of ’string theory’) are derived

]]> http://www.process.org/discept/2008/12/15/myth-as-asylum-from-questioning/feed/ http://www.process.org/discept/2008/12/08/2009-prediction-extended-neighborhood-watch-nabs-criminals/ http://www.process.org/discept/2008/12/08/2009-prediction-extended-neighborhood-watch-nabs-criminals/#comments Mon, 08 Dec 2008 17:24:44 +0000 Loki der Quaeler http://www.process.org/discept/?p=72 Updated: 13.dec.2008; article appended

The world population has a subset comprised of people who, for one reason or another, demonstrate an online desire to constructively expand and, at least in their view, build a better society around them; this phenomenon is repeatedly demonstrated through public knowledge repositories such as those backed by a wiki format. Concurrently, 2008 draws to a close with live web presence being broadcast in increasingly better quality, and with content of every day slice-of-life views.

Using the editors of Wikipedia as an example, we can see that there is a core of people¹ spread around the world who patrol the encyclopedic content watching for forms of vandalism and misinformation. It does not seem outrageous to claim that this behavior satisfies something within individual editors which is akin to the fulfillment of justice and the maintenance of a world view. Similarly, it is unlikely that, for the majority of these individuals, there is something peculiar to encyclopedic bodies which restricts this desire; instead, it is reasonable that this motivating desire could be applied to other arenas were they available.

The other ingredient to this cake, web cams, have had sort of a milk-jug-being-slid-across-the-kitchen-counter existence. Historically, development would occur to a certain resolution quality which was bounded by how much data could be transmitted upstream, during which relative-lull widely available upstream capabilities would surge ahead; rinse and repeat. At present, the quality of web cam broadcasts, thanks to both increasing resolution of cheaper cameras and the decreasing cost for wider upstream bandwidth, has become quite good. Getting an amount of general media exposure recently, there are two good quality example streams from the Tenderloin in San Francisco² at “Adam’s Block”³ — we’re not at the quality of license plate resolution at this distance, but it is generally sharp and with a spry frame rate.

So we have a world population of desktop vigilantes and an increasing population of good quality live web broadcasts of slice-of-life happenings. Further, thanks to the world-wide nature of the internet, observation can occur continually, 24 hours per day, without any one observer needing to perturb their sleep nor social schedule. The last, minimal and non-essential, ingredient would be an even easier way to contact law enforcement local to the geographical area for the camera feed. All of which leads to the prediction that 2009 will see criminal activity being reported by geographically truly remote observers.

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Update - 13.dec.2008

The SF Chronicle is reporting on recent developments with Adam’s Block.

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1. the Huggle whitelist lists over 30,000 editors, for example
2. simply the best city in the world
3. for those not familiar with the Tenderloin, it’s one of the more squalid neighborhoods in San Francisco; so, the likelihood of witnessing something dodgy from the stream is decent

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