Fight The Darkness

There are days when my kids are just in a really rotten mood. Now, it’s not uncommon for my to verbally tease them, and, some days they take it better than others.

My wife, on the other hand, doesn’t always see the importance of teasing kids, and when they’re in their crankiest moods, she says to me, “Don’t poke the tiger.”

Personally, I think it is an important lesson for them to learn. They’re not really tigers, and I’m not really poking them - it’s just a metaphor.

These things happen in life, people say and do things just to irritate you. How we respond to them is one of the measures of a person.

Why do I mention this? ‘Cause PZ nailed the cracker. (And when I say, “nailed”, I actually mean “nailed”, not a somewhat simplistic euphemism for “fornicated with”.)

Say what you will about this whole shebang (Was PZ really poking an actual tiger, or a paper tiger?) it’s caused a lot of controversy, and not nearly enough heartbreak for the people who’ve threatened his life and his family.

It has helped emphasize the insanity of religion, and it has certainly shown the measure of these people. (How did they measure up? About as big as an exposed prick in Antarctica.)

This whole ridiculous charade has taken on an unbelievable life of its own, and there are those who have criticized PZ’s handling of this. He has certainly been poking fun at these ridiculous superstitions. (I keep using “ridiculous” because words fail me.) There are those who think that a “play nice” approach is the correct approach in the war against this blatant stupidity - that you’ll win catch more flies with sugar than vinegar.

I don’t agree.

I will agree that there is room for multiple approaches, and I will also agree that by ridiculing someone else’s beliefs, you’re not likely to convert them.

The object is not to convert them. These people will age and ultimately die with their silly beliefs. The object is to stop the poison from infecting others. The object is to show others who don’t realize how ridiculous (there’s that word again) these beliefs are and in so doing perhaps inoculate them from these stupid ideas,

In a way, PZ had backed himself into a corner - having mentioned the idea of desecrating the host and then being bombarded with threats because of it, and then having been sent sample crackers for destruction by supporters, anything short of a “desecration” became impossible.

To his credit, in the end, he turned the so-called act of defiling the host into a lesson in history and intolerance, by reminding people of the atrocities committed in the name of the host in the past against Jews.

I strongly recommend everyone read his post. [Pharyngula: The Great Desecration]

More auto-biography, but we’re getting to the end of the religious bit…

Back in the dark days, before the Internet was widely available, I used to run a BBS. (The Crunchy Frog BBS, if you’ve ever heard of it, was me.) It really wasn’t about anything in particular, although a certain bent towards Pythonesque humor was certainly in the air.

It was really about conversations, and one of the more popular message boards was “The University of Woolloomooloo Philosophy Department” which really turned into a fairly-civil ongoing debate about the existence of god. (God lost, two falls out of two.)

I thought it was a fair debate, that is, even though I was largely outnumbered. On both sides there were people who took the position. “It’s xxxx, if you don’t believe my opinion, you’re stupid.” There was also a fair amount of reasoned discussion (even if, obviously, one side, I need not mention which, was completely wrong.)

I tried to avoid the former and stick with the later. I knew that there were intelligent people who had been either brainwashed as a child or were being lied to by mendacious creatures like Jack Chick. I was pleased that I had a forum where people came together and, in a spirit of genuine intellectual debate, discussed these weightier issues. I knew that, like my father, when people are exposed to more facts, then can break free of their delusion. I thought, “I am doing good in the world.”

And then, one night, I couldn’t sleep.

It was late at night (about 3:00AM) and I was at my computer. The BBS was running and I was, as the sysop, watching what was going on. One of my three main, regular posters (and civil and intelligent debaters) on the pro-religion logged in. We’ll call her “Sue.”

She poked around for a while, then hopped into the philosophy area. She read messages. She replied to a couple. Then she saw one relatively long-winded one from me. She read it. She pondered it for quite some time and then she wrote a reply. A thoughtful (but wrong, of course) reply. She brought up a number of counter-points.

I was just about to drop into chat mode and say, “hello” and discuss it with her, but before I could, she rapidly logged out. She didn’t even finish reading the messages.

Ten seconds later, one of the other three pro-religion debaters logged in. (Wow! They’re both up late tonight, aren’t they?) This “man” (We’ll call him “Mark”) went immediately to the philosophy board, directly to that exact message, by number, and immediately replied, without reading it.

Mark made some more counter-points. Then he jumped directly to Sue’s reply (again, by message number) and replied to her, bolstering her points with a few embellishments.

The he immediately logged out.

Next came Sue again, seconds later. She started replying to his replied, “Good points,” she’d say, “I hadn’t thought of that. But now that you mention it, I’ve also got this to say…” and then Sue logged off again.

Moments later, the third pro-religion debater logged on. Let’s call him Leroy. Leroy with almost incredible psychic powers, like Mark and Sue before him, knew exactly which message to jump to to further bolster Sue and Mark’s comments.

Now, I hadn’t really been paying attention to when these people had been logging on, but when I went back through the logs, I noticed that, although not usually as blatant as this 3:00AM performance was, their logons and logoffs occurred in a organized assault.

If I hadn’t been watching, I would never have known that these so-called people weren’t even bothering to read the messages they were replying to and I probably wouldn’t have discovered that they were one and the same person.

I was starkly reminded of the deceitful nature of some people when they haven’t a leg to stand on.

Me, me, me. It’ all still about me…

So I spent my older childhood, supremely confident in my views, and I was constantly surrounded by people who held what I considered to be completely irrational views on the nature of the world around us.

I’m not just talking about stupid people, either. I’m talking about bright, intelligent people. People I’d expect to grow up, go on to college, graduate and get white collar jobs and not work the truck that sucks crap out of the porta-toilets on construction sites.

No matter how many times they’d bring up some “proof” which could be easily shown to be not true, they couldn’t be shifted.

Why? I didn’t understand why.

Was the message of god so powerful and meaningful that it could transcend reality itself?

I had what could only be considered a crisis of faith. “Faith” is perhaps not quite the right word, but it is close. I had a certainty in the nature of the world that I felt could withstand any assault by the opposing side. “But…” I couldn’t help wondering, “Why do they have the same certainty? Am I, perhaps, wrong?”

So I took the plunge.

Oh, I didn’t start going to church or anything like that. I started reading. I read every religious text I could get my hands on. The Torah (“Wow, god’s a petty bastard.”), The New Testament (“So this is how cults start!”), The Koran (“Wow, god’s a right royal bastard!”), the Book or Mormon (“Seriously? People believe this isn’t a modern con game?”), the teachings of the buddha (“Umm, yeah, right.”), the creation myths of aboriginal peoples (“The Great Beaver did it!”) and any books on Theology (“So this is what people mean when they say, ‘mental masturbation’!”) and comparative religion that I could find.

…and that’s when I knew, for certain, that it was all bullshit.

Nothing in any of it dissuaded my world view that science, while imperfect, is a progressive process that advances our understanding of “how things really are” versus “how I’d like things to be.” Further, each and every religious text is an empty vessel, devoid of any real meaning. To be kind to them, they are nothing but fairy tales. To be less circumspect, they are transparent instruments of control and domination.

But that really wasn’t the jewel that came out of this exercise. I had that before I went in. What I did come away with was that, if the premise of any one of these religions was true, none of the others could be true.

If Christianity was the real path to salvation by a loving god, then 1492 years worth of native americans went to hell because god wasn’t competent enough to get his word to two entire continents. The localized nature of religions proved that the phenomena of religion is universal, but the words are man-made for political reasons, not divine inspiration.

My auto-biographical ramblings continue… (Part II is here.)

That moment at my great-aunt and uncle’s home was my awakening. After that, I began to see the absurdity all around me.

One of my best friend’s mom was completely over-the-top. To be fair to her, she had suffered from cancer at a young age and, in her desperation, turned to god. She was one of the lucky ones and had remission. It, of course, had nothing to do with turning to god, as the millions of devout who die from cancer anyway are proof of, but in her mind, the two were inextricably linked. God held sway over their household.

The used to have Chick Tracts around their house, which I used to read with just howls of laughter.

I used to laugh - for a while.

“Look at how stupid these are! What a bunch of crackpots! Aren’t they funny in their ignorance?” They were kind of like the village idiot. You tolerated them because it was funny to watch them fall down in the pig pen and stand up with a big turd in their mouth. I also didn’t really believe that, despite having them in their house, that my friend’s family believed the nonsense in them.

I remember one about radiocarbon dating a head of lettuce (or some other fresh vegetable) which proved conclusively that the lettuce was bazillions (insert whatever ridiculous number you want here) of years old. The conclusion therefore was that radiocarbon dating was obviously wrong and so the Earth was really just 6,000 years old after all, just like the bible says it is.

I must have been about 12 or 13, and I knew that was false. I also knew that they couldn’t have made that mistake by accident or ignorance. To have any notion of what radiocarbon dating was, you couldn’t argue about the validity of results on a fresh vegetable.

And that’s when I had my next revelation. Yes, people like my great-aunt and uncle were ignorant of the facts and blind in their world view, but there was another class of people - the people who put out things like the Chick Tracts - who intentionally distorted the truth to mislead people and to reaffirm that world view.

Those people are unacceptable to me. They are the worst kinds of liars and charlatans. They prey on the helpless and the ignorant to boost their own position. They are worst kind of hypocrites for they certainly must know what they are doing is a lie.

They are the bringers of darkness, but they’re not the only ones.

This continues my gripping (ahem) auto-biographical musings. For Part I, see here.

As I mentioned, my father says he made a conscious effort to avoid influencing my opinion on the existing or non-existence of god. He was shocked to learn that he had influenced me significantly.

He influenced me in many ways. Not the least was understanding of geology. We frequently went camping around the western United States, and that gave us ample opportunity for rock hounding. Because I was not versed in the bible, I didn’t understand how “at odds” geology was with the bible. Similarly, I was equally unfamiliar with how the other sciences contradicted it.

One day, we were visiting my grandfather’s brother and his wife, who also lived not far from us. We were there in the evening and the TV was on. There was a nature documentary on Chimpanzees in the background. The chimps were doing something terribly funny and my great-aunt said, “Isn’t it just amazing how much theirs faces look like ours?”

To which I, in my youthful, pre-teen innocence said, “Not really, we evolved from apes. There’s bound to be a great similarity.” (Cut me some slack, I was a kid. I know that we didn’t evolve from apes, we and apes evolved from an earlier proto-ape creature, but at the time that subtle distinction was probably lost on me.)

Well, the looks I got are burned forever into my memory. My great-aunt and uncle had a look on their face like I’d just dropped my pants and shit on their carpet. I think my great-aunt may have said, “Well I never…” before stopping in a flabbergasted silence. There was also some embarrassed laughing that said, “Don’t kids say the darnedest things?”

My grandparents looked like I’d just let out a big, loud fart and they were looking for a dog to blame it on. My dad was looking quietly bemused.

Afterwards, he explained to me that they (and my grandparents) were very traditional Christians (read: fundamentalists) and that they had been raised to believe everything in the bible to be the absolute truth. The seven-day creation, Adam and Eve, the flood were all absolutely the truth to them. He went on to say that he’d been raised to believe that, too, and that he had believed it with certainty until he’d gone to college to study geology and then he learned, “…that it was all bullshit.”

That was my first brush with fundamentalism and it was exactly the moment I realized with certainty that the belief in god was based on ignorance rather than any aspect of fact.

I honestly had difficulty believing that anyone could be so unfamiliar with… well… reality. To be ignorant of the facts of the world was just inexplicable to me. Inexplicable, but I now knew that not everything people told me was true. I knew people lied, but I realized then that not all falsehoods were strictly lies. Falsehoods could be honest, but ignorant, world views.

That was also the moment I knew I was an atheist.

I really liked my great-aunt and uncle, but after that, I kept our conversations to cookies and dowsing. (We’ll come back to the dowsing later.)

In an effort to explain my views, I’ll make a few posts that are auto-biographical in nature. I’ve done this largely as an exercise for myself to try to see where my attitudes have been influenced not necessarily by reason, but by environment.

I was raised in a middle-class home in Tucson, Arizona, and after a brief fiasco with a private school for gifted children, I attended public schools. (I really hated those eggheads at that school.)

Back in the day when they used to do IQ tests, both my parents were solidly in the so-called “genius” range, as was (am?) I. (Now I know better, of course. My parents and I weren’t really smart, we were just good at taking tests.)

My mother died when I was too young to remember her, and so my household consisted of myself, my father and his parents, who moved in with us after my mother died.

My father is college-educated, and his post-secondary education consisted of studies in Meteorology, Geology and Law; however, his “career” was more one of self-employment. He owned and ran both a greyhound kennel and a chinchilla farm.

My grandfather was a mechanic. He’d worked his way through the Great Depression as a mechanic and heavy equipment operator and worked on, among other things, the Jersey-side of the George Washington bridge (then known as the Hudson River bridge.)

After the Depression, he moved back to Missouri and opened his own auto garage and motor lodge.

My grandmother was (mostly) half native american. Her mother was a mixture of different indian nations, although officially she was a Potawatomi, as are my father and I. She also had some French ancestry that came from the early French fur trade in the northern US and Canada. Her mother died when she was quite young, and she and her twin sister were sent to live in one of those nefarious “Indian Schools.” These schools, run by Christian Missionaries, existed largely to eradicate the native culture and induct the children into Christianity.

Tall, red-haired and very caucasian-looking, my grandmother may not have experienced much discrimination in her life (after she got out of the indian school, that is, where the other kids taunted her because she was “white”), and later went on to be the first college-educated person in my family, earning her degree in education and becoming a school teacher.

My grandparents were both committed Christians, and raised my father thusly. There was one story that was related to me that really has had a long resonance in my mind. I learned that they had been members of one particular congregation (or, I suppose you could say, “sect”) but had to change to a different one because the one they belonged to didn’t permit singing in church, and so they had pick a different one so they could sing.

On the surface, that might sound like a trivial thing, but it wasn’t to me. That one incident has forever in my mind sealed the absurdity of the trappings of religion for me. (The absurdity of the premise of religion was sealed for different reasons.)

My father, raised Christian, remained so until he went to study geology in college, and has been an atheist ever since.

I later learned that my father had made a conscious effort not to influence my views on religion as I was growing up. What my grandparents did, I cannot really recall. I don’t remember them regularly attending church, perhaps they never got back in the habit after they moved to Arizona. Perhaps I just didn’t notice. Either way, I did not attend church as a child.

There was no doubt that the notion of god as a real thing was conveyed to me as fact by them, but the concept that I took from that would be something considered “deist.” I was told it existed, but my worldview - probably heavily influenced by my father’s education and ability to authoritatively explain weather and geology - was strictly naturalistic. I knew that god had no part in the lightning bolts and the floods, nor did he snap his fingers and lay down billions of years of rocks and fossils.

While I didn’t disbelieve in god, it just never occurred to me to attribute anything tangible to god. God was rather a third nipple on a man. Not only non-functional, but superfluous and non-functional.

This is my fight against the Darkness. (Can I trademark “The Darkness”?) It’s been a fight I’ve been fighting more or less my entire life. This is just my latest battlefront - and, honestly, I can’t believe this domain name was open!

What is this “darkness” of which I speak? Psuedoscience, superstition, quackery, crackpot conspiracies and, yes, religion, the biggest superstition of them all.

I’ve been holding off launching this page for some time now - principally because, in the internet space, others are well entrenched in the battle, and far more established. I’ve been debating with myself long and hard about whether or not I have something to bring to the table. I’m not an evolutionary biologist, I’m not degreed in any “science” that would qualify me as “A Scientist”.

Neither am I a psychologist - I’m not qualified to tell you why people believe weird things.

In light of that, is there still room for the “man on the street”? I think the answer is, “yes”. If nothing else, we need to turn up the noise. Each voice makes it easier for others. Each point of view, disparate in their backgrounds or rationale can add something to the debate. Not every argument works for every person.

This blog stand here then, predominantly for me to cast a spotlight on the darkness. My preferred technique, at least as I envision things now, is to find things that just piss my off and bitch about them. Or, perhaps, provide a little counter-argument against them. Rarely does a week go by when I don’t see something that deserves comment.

Just a couple weeks ago, one of our local news channels was running an uncritical (and obviously unresearched) news article on magnets being placed on fuel lines to increase fuel economy. These miracle devices were being sold be a local company. Rather than running an exposé and showing these people for the scam artists they were, the article was written completely as if the device worked. It was nothing short of an advertisement for the con artists.

Just getting the word out about these kinds of things, perhaps even motivating someone to action, that’s all I can hope for.

Let’s make this a good fight.