Today's Quote

Anthony Flew:
“Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, "Some gardener must tend this plot." The other disagrees, "There is no gardener." So, they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener.... So they set up a barbed wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol it with bloodhounds.... But no shrieks even suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. "But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves." At last the Skeptic despairs, "But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even no gardener at all?"

The key phrase in this paragraph is "many flowers and many weeds".  It always amazes me how selective xians are about the phenomena they invoke to allegedly provide evidence for the argument by design.  It's always appealing stuff like butterflies and sunsets.  They never point to cancer, gangrene, smallpox, birth defects, random traffic accidents, or the indignities that accompany old age and say "Gosh, isn't it beautiful?  There must be a God."

Currently Reading The Eternity Artifact By L. E. Modesitt see related

Quotable Quote

The God Show, Brought To You By God

I was amazed a few weeks ago when I read part of an ongoing internet debate between an atheist and a xian, in which the xian said, “Proof?  You need proof?  The Bible is proof enough for me.”  After I got done banging my head on the desk at the very idea that an assertion can contain its own proof without any external evidence, I reflected that the paucity of xian imagination had once again been demonstrated.

I mean, if I were God, here’s how I would go about providing proof.  In the geometric center of every major landmass (e.g. Australia, Greenland, North America, South America, Eurasia, etc.), I’d construct a God Center.  It would be a solid diamond cube, maybe 50 meters on a side (roughly the width of a U.S. football field), built in a “natural” amphitheater with stone seats (mortification of the flesh being desirable), seating maybe 50,000 pilgrims.  It would be dim inside during the day because I’d block most of the sunlight so people could see the show.  (Therefore, the amphitheater would appear on the outside to be covered with a dome that looks like a mirror.)  Being God, it would be trivial to induce red, green, and blue fluorescence (photoluminescence) in the diamond.  For example, to get green I’d make one carbon atom vanish from the diamond lattice, transmute two nearby carbon atoms into nitrogen by creating a neutron and a proton for each one ex nihilo, thereby creating an H4 crystalline defect, and pump in a photon of long wavelength UV.  Whoopee, an atomic-scale green pixel.  Similar operations, truly trivial for the Creator of the entire universe, would cause red and blue light emission, and with RGB at my disposal I could create any color for human perception, and put on a show in 3D.  Of course, the Shows would be in the vernacular language of each person who attended.  Each seat would have a small smooth stone that served as an earbud, and I’d vibrate the stone to create audio in the attendee’s native language, kind of like the U.N.  I’d provide heating and air conditioning in the grandstands by deploying Maxwell’s demons at the interface of the photon deflection dome that covers the amphitheater.  Except in this case, it would be Maxwell’s Angels, tiny little critters that would sort out the fast-moving (hot) and slow-moving (cold) air molecules.  Not that I’d do this to create comfort for the audience, Lord knows that I don’t give a shit about that.  No, it would be to demonstrate to any pesky old scientists that I am able to defy the laws of thermodynamics any time I want.  See how awesome that would be?  I mean, I could do it without any hardware, just by inducing the appropriate subjective visions in people who approached certain areas, but how much more effective it would be to provide solid physical evidence.

So now there’s a venue for The God Show.  No need for anything as crude as a written Bible, replete with transcription errors until Herr Gutenberg was born.  No need for any nasty old priests to explain the Word of God and determine which views are anathema.  No need to appear in front of Moses as a burning bush (which would be a strangely banal and unimaginative way to appear, if you think about it) and then conveniently destroy the evidence afterward.  No need for secular courts: about once a week I’d hold a high-speed trial for major crimes—the accused would be brought before me, very briefly; I’d read their mind to see if they were guilty; and consult the future, which I already know, to see if they’d repent; and either let them exit if they’re innocent or truly remorseful, or teleport them directly to Hell, where they belong anyway, if they’re guilty and incorrigible.  This would certainly solve the problem of multiple offenders and make society a lot safer.

But other than the courtroom scenario, The God Show would be educational.  The devotional equivalent of PBS.  Programs on ethics and morality, the dangers of idolatry, and the proper forms of religious ritual would abound.  Then every Tuesday night I’d have a program called “You Were There” with Edward R. Murrow narrating documentaries about Adam & Eve, the Tower of Babel, Noah’s Ark, Sodom & Gomorrah, Moses and The Exodus, etc.  There would, of course, be blowout Christmas and Easter programs.

I think the ratings would knock your socks off.

Well, but given that God could have done this, why didn’t He?  Why, instead, did He choose to tell about himself and dictate the universal laws of human behavior, by means of communication techniques that appeal the most to the ignorant, the gullible, the narrow-minded?  So people would have to figure it out by themselves?  Then… why communicate anything, by any means?  Why not just create humans and go away so they could figure it out for themselves?  Nah, it’s more fun to be coy about it and reveal the truth in unverifiable testimony and confusing parables; and do it in an obscure corner of the world to a small nation of clever people who took their own mythology way too seriously.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I don’t understand because I just can’t comprehend the infinite wisdom of God or divine His Purposes.  I just don’t have a great enough imagination.  Riiiight, and you do.

What’s The Point?

A recurring theme of xian writings, particularly in the blogosphere, is the claim that life is pointless unless you believe in God.  Today I’d like to analyze that idea a little.

When we talk about our lives having a point, what do we mean?  I would submit that “point” (in this context) is just another way of saying “purpose”, or perhaps, “essential purpose”.  When a xian says that life is pointless unless you believe in God, she’s saying that your life cannot have any (fundamental) purpose without God.  Given that a purpose is simply something that you aim for, or try to attain through your own efforts, it seems pretty clear that it’s sheer nonsense to say that an atheist cannot have a basic purpose.  As a matter of fact, the most fundamental purpose that anyone can have is the continuation of their own life.  At it’s most essential level, that’s exactly what xians take as their purpose—in their case, it’s the continuation of their life after they die.  (Xians usually, and emphatically, state that their purpose in life is to glorify God.  There’s an easy way to test this: ask them to imagine whether they’d still continue to act the same way if God revealed to them that there was no afterlife; and when they die, they simply cease to exist.  I think a good deal of the fervor would go out of their worship as soon as they heard that.)

But I digress.  The (ahem) point I wanted to make was that both xians and atheists seek to continue their lives, as their most fundamental purpose.  They just believe that the scope that’s involved is different—xians think that their life will continue to infinity after they die, and atheists know that it’s all over when you croak.  And of course, they each use a different set of tactics to achieve their purpose.

Actually, I wasn’t being completely precise in the above.  What it really comes down to is a question of values.  Each person determines what their own highest values are, and that’s what they try to achieve.  If you already possess a value, you try to retain it; if you don’t already possess the value, you try to attain it.  I think that arguably, everyone’s fundamental values reflect their definition of “life”.  For example, someone might believe that an existence of constant and agonizing pain isn’t a life at all, so they choose to end it.  All values arise from the fact that life (however you define it) is contingent—unless you exert the effort to sustain life, you’ll lose it, and exerting effort means seeking to gain and keep values.

Now imagine for a minute that you were indestructible and didn’t need anything to stay alive and in a state of comfort, or perhaps, even a state of delight.  You don’t need food, water, or oxygen.  You don’t need shelter, because you’re impervious to hot and cold.  Your continued existence is guaranteed.  Is it even possible to have any values under such circumstances?  Why would you care one way or another, whether you attained anything at all?  Well, actually, according to the xian scenario, there is one thing you have to do.  You have to kiss somebody’s ass.  Continually, 24-7-365, no vacation.  Ever.  Sound familiar?  Yep, that’s a description of Heaven.  The xian system of values, while they’re here on Earth, is predicated totally on the aim of reaching Heaven.  And once you’re in Heaven, what’s the point to your continued existence?  Why, it’s to keep God appeased.  Dude (or Dudette, as the case may be), there’s only one contingency in Heaven, and that’s whether or not you stay in God’s grace.  The Sacred Text doesn’t mention another single activity that people pursue.  No sex.  Nothing delicious to eat or drink.  Nothing to build or create.  No new books, no new music, no new art; nothing novel to encounter.  Just the purity of sucking up to the Boss for all of eternity.

People here on Earth can’t go more than a few minutes without something to do.  With the exception of a few people who are, quite frankly, disturbed, it has to be something new.  As a species, we have a VERY low tolerance for repetition.  In Heaven, there can only be one contingency, one task, one value: keep God happy by affirming your supplication.  What do you want to bet that after about 100,000 years of this, you’d be asking, “What’s the point?”

Backmasking

Some time around the first of July, Xanga stopped sending me e-mailed subscription digests.  I don’t know if this is a glitch, or if it’s just their policy to stop sending them when an account hasn’t had any new postings by the account owner for some time.  OK, mea culpa on that last one.  I’ve been busy.  But now I’m not so busy, so you can expect me to start posting again.

I’ll start with something that I randomly ran across: backmasking.  Click here to read a description.  I think it’s hilarious that xians have gotten worked up into a lather over the idea of subliminal messages embedded in Rock recordings.  I’m sure that Shermer is right and the detection of backmasked messages is an example of faulty pattern recognition; hearing words that really aren’t there—a false positive.  You can observe this phenomenon if you watch very many foreign-language movies—sometimes it sounds like they’ve said something in English, clear as day, but you’re just interpolating.  The same thing happens when people think they see shapes (which they attribute to be ghosts or spirits) in the random speckles of television “snow”.

The thing that I think is hilarious about the xian hysteria over alleged subliminal satanic messages is that apparently they’ve never tried it with recordings of Christian songs.  It would really be a hoot if someone played a bunch of xian rock backwards and publicized the secret satanic messages they found there.  Xians would be, like, “OMFG, we’re letting our youth clasp a viper to their bosom!!”

I’d look for the messages myself, but seriously.  I’m not that hard up for something to do.