F Rosa Rubicondior

Saturday 17 March 2012

Reassuring Christians

It must be reassuring to Christians to read their Bible and discover that Jesus was a hypocrite too.


Where Have All The Miracles Gone?

Mythology is full of stories of divine interventions; of things magically happening before people's eyes; of dragon's teeth turning into heavily-armoured soldiers; of burning bushes talking; of magic trees with magic fruit and talking snakes. We are told of giants rising up from the sea; of kings who could turn stuff into gold by touching it; of wolves rearing human children; of people being swallowed by great fish and walking out of them unharmed three days later.

If these myths are to be believed wooded staves could turn into snakes; whole armies could hide inside a wooden horse; whole seas could be made to open up to allow people to walk across them; laws could appear written on tablets of

Friday 16 March 2012

A Question Of Integrity

Very much has been written and said over the last few weeks about the Oxford debate between Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury and senior cleric of the Anglican Church.

Unfortunately, because there was a great deal more said which was of greater interest to both sides of the debate, almost all comment was focussed on Dawkins' acknowledgement that he was actually agnostic about the existence of a god because he could never be 100% certain about anything.

To those who know of Richard Dawkins work and his commitment to the scientific method, and especially to those who have read "The God Delusion", this was no surprise at all because he says exactly that in it. Indeed it would have been astonishing and completely out of character if he had said anything else in response to that question.

No scientist who values his/her reputation for intellectual honesty and integrity would ever claim to be one hundred percent certain about anything. Indeed, uncertainty is the very thing which drives scientific enquiry and hence scientific progress.

Uncertainty is a fundamental scientific principle, and not just at the particle physics level. The door is always left open to the possibility of any scientific theory being shown to be wrong, no matter how unlikely. About the nearest thing to certainty in science is the idea that there are no certainties.

What has gone almost without comment however was Rowan Williams' response to Richard Dawkins' answer, and especially what that revealed about his personal integrity and religion's regard for truth and honesty. One would have expected someone who values intellectual honesty to have applauded his answer and to have complimented Dawkins on his integrity, at the same time having the good grace to acknowledge that he can't be 100% certain that a god does exist.

Instead, Williams significantly passed over that opportunity and laughs along with the audience (1:11:45 in this video) then sits back and smiles beatifically as though he's just scored a point simply by sitting and listening. And so he betrayed his lack of personal integrity and lack of good grace. And this for someone who would claim to be an intellectual and guardian of the Anglican Community's morals!

Why does he do this?

Simply because, for someone in his position, where the whole edifice of the 'faith' he ministers to, and the people who depend on it for their livelihoods, even the slightest admission of uncertainty would be disastrous. To have the Archbishop of Canterbury admitting to being agnostic about the Christian God would be unthinkable, no matter how demonstrably true it may be.

Williams knows full well that selling the delusion of certainty to people who crave it is what the entire Christian Church exists for. The existence of the Church and the perpetuation of that lie is far more important to the priesthood than mere intellectual honesty.

For Rowan Williams, it would be more than his job's worth to admit the simple truth that there is no certainty, even, and especially, when it comes to questions about the existence of gods.





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Thursday 15 March 2012

A Bedtime Story For Christian Children

This nice little bedtime story for children is from the Bible. It is almost guaranteed to make your children grow up respecting priests and loving God.

Once upon a time in the city of Jericho there was a spring without any water, so no one could grow any food because the ground was too dry. So the men of the town told a kind priest who had been given special magic powers by God.

The priest said there was no water because the water was sick so he sent the men to get him some salt which he sprinkled on the ground where water should have been coming from. Somehow, that did the trick and the water was healed so the townsfolk had some water again.

Then the priest went out of the town gates where some children teased him because he was bald so the priest used his special magic powers to make two bears come out of the woods and eat forty two of the children. The children's mummies and daddies didn't mind because they probably thought their children deserved to be eaten by bears for teasing a kind priest just because he was bald.

Then the kind priest went away and lived happily ever after. The people of the town still remember how kind he had been to them and the wonderful things he did.

2 Kings 2:19-25

Goodnight children. Sweet dreams!

Tomorrow we'll have a story about a special fire for burning and torturing people in if they do what the priests say.





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When The Conclusion Is Sacred Facts Must Be Ignored

'Red Deer Cave Man'
From Longlin cave in Guangxi province, China.
Photograph: Darren Curnoe
We are in for a treat as creationists show us how they cope with a new piece of scientific data.

A team of Chinese and Australian palaeoanthropologists recently announced the discovery of hominid remains in a couple of sites in South China which "... are unlike recent populations of modern humans in several respects, and the mosaic of more archaic features could indicate the dispersal of a poorly known and more primitive form of modern human that left Africa before the main exodus at about 60,000 years. This dispersal could have reached as far as China, surviving there for many millennia, before disappearing in the last 12,000 years."

A Guardian article about this discovery can be read here.

These remains have been dated using both carbon dating and uranium-thorium dating to be between 11,500 and 14,300 years old.

The difficulty now is determining how and where these people fit in the Homo branch of the evolutionary tree. I recently blogged about the difficulty taxonomists face when trying to fit archaic specimens into a taxonomic system designed primarily for classifying living organisms. See "Where Creationists Get Confused".

Bull's Eye!

Stand a scientist in front of a dart board and he/she will throw the darts at it, then walk up to the board, look at where on the board the darts landed, add up the numbers and declare the score.

Even not particularly scientifically minded people will normally play darts this way too.

What they won't normally do is throw the darts at a wall then draw a bull's eye round them and declare themselves the winner. Well, not if they don't want to be the laughing stock of the pub and get themselves barred for damaging the wall.

Yet religious people, and especially creationists and professional apologists, do exactly that when you try to debate with them. There's you trying to make a point with evidence and explaining what it means and why it doesn't mean something else. Then, often when you've just hit 180 and want double top for out, they pluck a 'fact' from thin air, define it as proof of their god and declare victory.

And you're just left there, bemused that any normal adult ever imagined that was how you played the game, without ever wondering why normal people don't play it that way.





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Monday 12 March 2012

An Unholy Alliance

Poverty Religion Education Wilfred R Martin
There appears to be an unholy trinity at work in human populations. This trinity results in people being more overtly religious; more fundamentally religious and more aggressively religious.

The three components of this trinity are:
  • Poverty
  • Ignorance either from under-education or educational under-achievement
  • Fervent or militant religiosity

There are several studies into the link between poverty and religiosity.

This report by Barry Ritholtz, More Poverty = More Religion, used polling data from a Gallop study and represents the results graphically. The conclusion was 'The more poverty a nation has, the higher the “religiosity” in that nation. In general, richer countries are less religious than poorer ones.' The study also noted that 'The United States, which has the highest religiosity relative to its wealth on the planet' is an outlier, as is readily seen on the chart.

A 2009 study by Dr Tomas Rees published in Journal of Religion and Society (Vol 11) found 'Income inequality, and hence personal insecurity, was ... an important determinant of religiosity...'

So the apparent anomaly of the United States shown in the Gallop survey may be because, whilst absolute poverty is less marked there, income inequality (that is the gap between the richest and poorest) is actually higher than in many middle-income countries.

The link between education and religion per se is not so clear cut as that between income inequality and religiosity.

In the United States, religious attendance rises sharply with education across individuals, but religious attendance declines sharply with education across denominations. This puzzle is explained if education both increases the returns to social connection and reduces the extent of religious belief. The positive effect of education on sociability explains the positive education-religion relationship. The negative effect of education on religious belief causes more educated individuals to sort into less fervent religions, which explains the negative relationship between education and religion across denominations. Cross-country differences in the impact of education on religious belief can explain the large cross-country variation in the education-religion connection. These cross-country differences in the education-belief relationship can be explained by political factors (such as communism) which lead some countries to use state-controlled education to discredit religion.

Glaeser, E.L. and Sacerdote, B.I.; "Education And Religion"; Journal of Human Capital (2, 2 (Summer 2008): 188-215)

So it would seem that religious belief is not reduced by education as such, but that the propensity for more fervent, fundamentalist religions is reduced in better-educated societies. However, this data is possibly complicated by the association with the more fundamentalist religions being followed predominantly by the less educated social groups, which invariably are also the lower income groups.

It appears that the link between income inequality, or relative poverty and fundamentalism is the stronger of the two with that between (lack of) education and religion possibly being a consequence of the link between them.

The reason for this is probably to be found in the hope that religion gives to people who really have little to hope for in their lives; people who through a combination of race, social status, neighbourhood and/or lack of education, can see what the better off and the super-rich have and know that it's beyond their reach. People who have, for all practical purpose, no realistic prospect of escape from poverty and hopelessness other than by bringing about a fundamental change in the political system; a system which is dominated by the haves and the have mores and from which they have become increasingly distanced and disenfranchised by its irrelevance to them and their resulting apathy towards it.

Is it really surprising that people from whom all realistic hope for a better life in this life has been taken would fall prey to those who sell them the notion of a better life some day in another one, when all it takes is a donation (to show Jesus how much you love him), an hour or so in church on Sunday, and singing a few songs at the top of your voice to shout down your doubts?

It it really surprising that people who are at the bottom of the social order like to pretend to be superior because they have a special friend in a mega-powerful god and a 'personal relationship' with the creator of everything? And is it surprising that people with little education and from a culture resistant to it, find it difficult or distasteful to learn the science and history which would enable them to understand better the superstition they are buying into?

And is it really surprising that there exists a parasitic class of religious charlatans and snake-oil salesmen practically falling over one another to tap into this lucrative market for easy answers, false hope and a false sense of smug superiority?

And is it really surprising that there exists a class of unscrupulous politicians hailing from the very class which needs a large, poor, politically powerless underclass to supply its demands for cheap and compliant labour, which promotes these primitive superstitions with such enthusiasm, to fool the poor and dispossessed into believing they are on their side.

And therein lies another unholy alliance; that between the ruling class, the priesthood and the religion of the people. It's the same as that between the drug producer, the pedlar and the junkie.





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Sunday 11 March 2012

If God Wants Us To Believe The Bible...

If God wants us to believe the biblical account of creation why did he create a universe in which:
  • The ratio of the light elements, hydrogen, deuterium, helium and lithium in the universe is exactly as predicted if the universe resulted from an intense inflation from a singularity?
  • The Microwave background radiation is exactly as it is predicted to be if the inflation from a singularity occurred 13.82 billion years ago?
  • The large-scale universe is expanding at a rate which is exactly as required to produce a wavelength for the microwave background radiation's as it is today?
  • The sun is exactly as we would expect of a second or third generation star in a universe which is as old as the microwave background tells us and has light elements in the ratio which the Big Bang theory predicts?
  • The radiometric data from rocks on Earth and of meteorites gives an age of the solar system of 4.57 billion years and and age of Earth of 4.4-4.5 billion years?

Saturday 10 March 2012

So What IS This Soul Thing?


Where on earth did this idea of a soul come from?

One thing we can be sure about is that it's a very old idea. In fact it was probably the reason for religions in the first place as there is archaeological evidence of burials from the the Palaeolithic and burial is generally taken as evidence of some sort of religion and ideas of an afterlife (which implies belief in a soul). There is even some evidence that Neanderthals may have had ritual burials. There is actual textual evidence of belief in a soul from the Bronze Age in the form of biblical writings, Sanskrit Vedas and Egyptian hieroglyphs.

So why is this notion that there is a separate entity inhabiting our bodies and which somehow continues to exist after death, such a strong and persistent belief in all human societies?

Can Anyone Explain the Purpose Of Prayer?

"Oh Lord! Won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz. My friends all drive Porche's, I must make amends!"

You see, what I just don't get is how prayer can possibly change the mind of an all-knowing, infinitely wise, all-powerful, omni-benevolent god who has defined right and wrong for us and knows our deepest, most secret thoughts.

Such a god would have ensured only the best for its creation and would have set this in motion right from the start, so the purpose of prayer can't possibly to persuade such a god to change its mind.

Friday 9 March 2012

What Warning Would You Put In A Gideon Bible?

For those few who don't know, a 'Gideon Bible' is a Bible supplied by the 'Gideons International' to hotels, hospitals, schools and other approved places. You will normally find one in the bedside cabinet in a hotel room. They are distributed by morbidly paranoid theophobic people in the hope that an omnibenevolent imaginary god won't torture them for eternity after they die.

Spreading primitive superstition and resistance to AIDS prevention measures in Africa
In the interest of balance and the welfare of potential victims, I feel that Atheists and Agnostics should insert a slip of paper containing a health warning about the contents of the Bible.

Genocide, Bible style.
This should of course contain a warning about the violence, killing, explicit sexual references, child abuse, objectivisation and dehumanisation of women, aggressively genocidal racism, explicit animal cruelty and incitement to commit murder and hate crimes amongst other activities unacceptable in a civilised society. It should also contain a warning about parental guidance, or at least the guidance of a sane adult being advisable for children and gullible people.

And that's just the first five 'books' in the Bible.

There are obviously very many other things innocent people need to be warned about, and therein lies the problem:

How would we fit this list onto, preferably, a single side of A5 (or maybe centre-folded single sheet of A4) in a succinct message.

So, here is YOUR chance to help spread the good news of Atheism, Humanism and rational thought and to help people understand the harm that primitive superstitions can do and how to avoid being fooled into believing in them and to escape from them if already infected.

Please suggest suitable, succinct, powerful, and above all, complete and truthful wording for such an insert. Copies of the best can be converted to a suitable form for concerned citizens to print off and distribute when travelling.
Freedom from religion. Free at last, free at last!





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Favourite Fallacies - The Straw Man.

One of the major problems faced by creationists and religious apologists is the mountain of science and scientific theories they need to somehow get past and still persuade themselves and/or their target audience that they have a valid, even superior argument. So they adopt strategies designed basically to pretend the evidence against them just isn't there.

All of these strategies are fallacious of course, but perhaps the commonest devise is known as the Straw Man Fallacy. The straw man is a metaphor for something which can be easily and safely attacked and which looks vaguely like the thing they would like to be attacking but know they can't. Usually, the straw man will be constructed in such a ludicrously childish fashion that it is easily dismantled by anyone with very low intellectual ability, and this of course is where apologists gain by using this device because that is usually a characteristic of the audience they are trying to fool with the straw man fallacy in the first place.

For example, you will see the Theory of Evolution misrepresented as a theory which says a monkey suddenly gave birth to a human or a living animal suddenly changed into another species, or that an entire species changed overnight into a different one so you would not expect to see any of the earlier ones around now. You will also see more subtle misrepresentations such implying that biologists recognise a distinction between evolution which results in a new taxon and evolution which results in mere change in frequency or a variable characteristic within a species. The most popular straw man in this respect is the pretence that the Theory of Evolution predicts and requires a complete set of fossils recording every change in every species throughout its evolutionary history and that the Theory of Evolution depends entirely on this requirement.

A common device used is to conflate two or more scientific theories into one, or more often, two or more straw men parodies of scientific theories such as the big bang, abiogenesis and evolution into one and throw stones at that parody instead of the real science. So you will see arguments attacking the idea that life arose in a big bang or that rocks evolved intelligence.

And of course, where this tactic works most effectively is when it is used on those with low reasoning ability and/or low scientific education who lack the ability to recognise the straw man parody and so take it on trust that it is an accurate and honest representation of science. Combined with their naive ignorance, the attacks from creationist charlatans provide them with the perfect excuse to pretend to know better than those who have spent time learning the subject and acquiring the necessary understanding, and all by learning a few simple parodies and some infantile questions based on them. This is also helped in those cultures where it tends to be assumed that those defending religions are honest and can be relied upon to tell the truth.

So we now see unfortunate victims of this deception swarming onto the Internet and infesting the social network media proudly showing off the 'killer arguments' they have picked up from people who've used this technique on them only to find they're making fools of themselves and displaying both their credulous gullibility and ignorance and ending up discrediting the very thing they came rushing excitedly on line to promote.

The other major group of people on whom this technique works, and at whom it it often aimed, are fellow religionists who have invested so much of themselves in their religion that the cognitive dissonance which results in learning science is too difficult to cope with, so avoidance strategies are readily adopted. Very often too these people will be earning their living from religion so will have made more than just a psychological investment.

Look beyond the straw man to the motives of those who assiduously create them and what do we see? We see people who know they need to create straw men to attack in the first place. What we don't see are people who have seriously looked at the science itself and made an effort to understand it, and who may be genuinely puzzled by it or genuinely mistaken about it. We see people who, if they have looked at all, have only looked for things to parody and misrepresent and have obviously had little regard for the way the body of science grows and develops, so that, for example, a book or paper, or even a popular magazine article from many years ago will be presented as current theory. And of course there will be the deliberate confusion of even the meanings of words where there is more than one current definition, such as the different popular and scientific meanings of the word 'theory' and 'law'.


Perhaps more than any other fallacy, the Straw Man Fallacy exemplified both the dishonesty of creationist and religious apologists and the naive ignorance and intellectual indolence of their credulous victims.





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Wednesday 7 March 2012

Finding Fossils In The Dark

The River Evenlode
By the age of about ten I knew every path in every wood in the square mile around the small ancient northern Oxfordshire hamlet on the edge of the Wychwood Forest I was born and grew up. The hamlet where Romans had built a villa and named the footpath Via Dessica which we still called Viziker.

I knew not just every path, but practically every tree, spring, badgers' set, rabbit burrow and briar patch. I knew where the wild gooseberries and strawberries grew, which nut trees had the best nuts, where the cleanest spring water was and which crabapple trees had the sweetest apples in autumn.

Tuesday 6 March 2012

Have You Written Your Book Review Today?

The Atheist community (for want of a better term) is probably amongst the best educated of any community in terms of the range of interests they have and particularly in the range and number of books they read. Many Atheist will be voracious readers of science, philosophy and even theology. Many will have interests in history, geography, politics, economics, travel, natural history (rather than the science of biology) and classics, and central to our philosophy of life will be a love of free thinking, rationalism, truth and objectivity.

So, who better to write reviews of the many popular religious and creationist books, as well popular science, evolution, humanist and atheist books?  We owe it to potential buyers of creationist and popular theology books to write honest, considered and objective reviews on sites such as Amazon, which positively encourages them. It's worth bearing in mind that you'll be writing for people who read books and are not afraid to own more than one, so not your typical Twitter creationist.


And, of course, we owe it to potential buyers of popular science, atheist and humanist books, to be equally factual, objective and honest.

Here is a link to an article explaining how to write a book review. There are lots of others on the Internet.

Go to it good people. 

Sunday 4 March 2012

Christians! Be Sensible Now And Tell Me This

Okay, Christians, let's be sensible for a moment. Answer these for me, please:
  1. You tell me I need your god's forgiveness for something Adam and Eve are believed by some to have done many thousands of years ago. Why should that bother me if I don't believe in your god or the Adam and Eve myth, please?
  2. Leaving that aside for a moment and accepting for the sake of argument that I am somehow responsible for something someone else did a long time ago, and over which I could not possibly have any influence or be held to account for, how did a blood sacrifice absolve me of that responsibility exactly, please? Note: I'm not asking whether it did or not; I'm asking how it worked exactly.

Saturday 3 March 2012

Are We Finally Slipping The Religious Leash?

During my lifetime, and mostly since the end of WWI, Britain and the rest of Europe and the USA, indeed all of the developed world and a great deal of the under-developed world, has become increasingly liberal and egalitarian.

Annie Kenny & Sylvia Pankhurst
Womens' Social And Political Union
Although we still have a long way to go we have seen a lessening of the class system in Britain so that we no longer send our spare daughters into the service of the middle and upper classes there to be at the disposal of the men of the house, as in my grandparents day. The once outrageously radical idea of women voting is now taken for granted, even in Switzerland where the last Canton granted women the right to vote and stand for election in February 1971.

1963 Civil Rights March
Lincoln Memorial
Following the Civil Rights Campaign of the Early 1960s and the Black Consciousness and Black Power movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, Black people in USA have made major advances in civil rights. Discrimination on grounds of race, religion, gender and ethnicity is now outlawed in the EU and USA. In the EU working people have employment rights far in excess of anything dreamed of by even the most radical socialists of the 1950s and to the intense annoyance of the political right.

Capital punishment has been abolished in much of the civilised world. Women, with access to contraception, now have the same sexual freedom that men always enjoyed, and the right to planned pregnancies and to limit their family size. In the UK, women now have full property rights and can make contracts in their own name where previously they were regarded more as a possession of their husband or father, at least in the eyes of the law as they were in my grandparents day.

Recently the right to civil partnerships between homosexual couples has been established in many countries and the Christian churches are fighting a desperate rearguard action to prevent this being extended to full marriage rights. Yet only two generations ago homosexual activity was a criminal offence which meant imprisonment and shame for those convicted of loving the wrong person. And it still is in those countries where religious clerics still wield power, even carrying the death penalty.

There is still a great deal to be done in terms of freedom from discrimination but few people nowadays question the basic principle. When I was a teenager many of the rights we now take for granted were considered radical, extremist, even dangerous and well worth the security services paying them special attention. Some people even advocated that boys with long hair should be arrested and forced to have it cut!

So what's the cause of this? Why have we in many different countries, speaking many different languages and with quite different histories, all arrived at the collective opinion that the right to be treated as the equal of any another person is a basic human right?

Of course, correlation does not establish causality, though it certainly makes it worthy of consideration, but one major social change simultaneously with the changes I have mentioned above, has been the decline in support for religions partly because better education in the sciences has rendered so much of it laughably absurd.

No doubt religionists would dismiss this as a cause unless they are portraying them as showing a loss of morals; a breakdown in society. Then they would undoubtedly point to the same correlation as 'proof' of their claim whilst demanding that they be reversed.

However, I think the hypothesis of a causal link is supported by a number of things, the first being that almost all of these advances has been opposed either directly by the churches or by the political parties and classes which are themselves supported by the church.

In the 1960s we had the Protestant-backed KKK killing civil rights workers and black activists. In 1973 we had the grotesque spectacle of the 'conscience of America', Billy Graham, advising Richard Nixon that Jews should not be regarded as American citizens. The term WASP is still synonymous with right-wing Christian white supremacist male chauvinism, which is almost a definition of political conservatism in America and not far off that of Conservatism in the UK and Christian Democracy in most of Europe.

In the UK, the Anglican church opposed universal adult suffrage and especially votes for for women. In Europe, the Vatican had supported Fascism; in Serbia, the Orthodox Christian church supported genocidal nationalists. Almost universally, the Christian Churches opposed easier divorce, easier access to contraception, better sex education for teenagers. The churches in Britain, Holland, Belgium, Spain, France and Italy all supported colonialism and resisted independence for the colonies. In Northern Ireland the Presbyterian Churches were steadfast in their opposition to equal rights for Catholics and universal adult suffrage and had been directly responsible for setting up an apartheid system there in the first place. In the Irish Republic the Catholic Church effectively killed off tentative moves towards a health service.

In short, almost every piece of social progress towards a more egalitarian, less discriminatory, less chauvinistic, better educated, more liberal and more inclusive society has been opposed by the conservative right supported by the main stream Christian churches. Only now that they are losing their grip and have almost lost it altogether in some countries, have we made any real social progress.

I think the correlation is more than a coincidence. I think we are finally slipping the leash of religion, gaining our freedom and building a better society based on Humanist principles.


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Friday 2 March 2012

If A Stranger Told You He Was Jesus...

If a stranger told you he was Jesus would you trust in Jesus or would you want evidence? That question is not a facetious as it might appear because it goes right to the heart of 'faith' and what the Bible, and theologians are expecting us to believe.

Of course the answer would be no, you wouldn't believe a stranger just because he said he was Jesus, or the Messiah, or any manifestation of a god, or even a special messenger like an angel. In fact, you'd probably assume that he was either joking or in need of care and medication. It would take an extraordinary amount of evidence to convince you otherwise, unless you are unfortunately suggestible or extraordinarily gullible.

You would almost certainly dismiss even a miracle like turning water into wine as a conjuring trick and the chances are if he touched a blind person and restored their sight you would assume they were in collusion. With some justification you'd start to suspect a scam. Any moment now he's going to ask me for a donation so he can concentrate on his mission and not have the 'distraction' of having to work for a living.

And yet you're expected to take second hand (at best) accounts of a man doing just that in biblical times on faith, and not ask for evidence. In fact, you're expected to be proud of 'accepting Jesus on faith' as though it's something to be proud of; a virtue even!

Yet, reading the Bible, what was it that allegedly convince the disciples that Jesus was the Messiah and God incarnate? Was it 'on faith'? Was it because he walked up to them, a total stranger, and said, "Hi! I'm Jesus, Son of God!"?

Nope, it was allegedly evidence in the form of miracles which did it. Even Abraham, the founder of three major world religions and countless minor sects, needed evidence, as did Moses. All the writers of the New Testament cite evidence and Paul even performed miracles (albeit small ones like turning a stick into a snake and back) to convince people.

So, why did Jesus' chosen disciples and all those Old Testament prophets have less faith that you are expected to have? Why was it okay for biblical saints to require evidence and rely on science (if you believe the stories) to arrive at their beliefs, but not you?

The answer is quite simple, of course, they wrote about having seen the evidence but they had none to show, so they fell back on the ruse of telling you it was good not to require evidence; that God would be upset if you asked for it; that 'faith' is a virtue and something to be proud of. Not that they ever doubted or needed evidence, obviously. Oh, no!

Pah! That Doubting Thomas, eh? Oh! Ye of little faith!

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And Now For Somting Compeltly Difrent

Is this the best help page advice ever?


If Creationism Is Science, Why Do They Need Tactics?

Creationist debating tactics all boil down to a single two-step strategy. Looking at these gives us a very strong clue both to those at whom they are aimed and the scant regard to honesty and integrity of those who use them.
  1. Attack some obscure aspect of science, usually, but not always, something which impinges directly of their favourite mythical account of creation by a magic man using magic to make it all out of nothing. This can take several forms, including but not limited to:

    • Attacking a ridiculous parody of science.
    • Claiming something which has been explained either hasn't been or can't be explained.
    • Magnifying some obscure aspect about which there is disagreement in the science community and claiming this shows scientists can't agree about anything.
    • Claiming that something science does not yet know proves that this is unknowable and therefore science is flawed and can't answer questions.
    • Pointing to mistakes, revised or discarded earlier theories or even attempted hoaxes which some scientist may have been fooled briefly by, as proof that science gets things wrong. This can include representing mistaken or falsified accounts in the popular press as serious science, even when these have later been corrected.
    • Claiming that withdrawn papers or discarded theories are still part of the body of science and still presented as current theories, even referencing old books and journals as evidence.
    • Presenting an out of context quote from a famous scientist such as Darwin or Einstein and claiming is shows they didn't believe their own theory.
    • Confusing philosophical questions with science and claiming science is flawed because it can't tell you the purpose of your life, what the universe was created for or who made the scientific laws.
    • Lying.
  2. Claim that this destroys the entire body of science and therefore their favourite notions wins by default.

    Thing which will never form part of their strategy are:

    • A falsifiable claim or prediction based on their god-did-it notion.
    • A statement of what they would accept as proof of the science they are attacking.
    • a description of the checkable evidence upon which their notion is based and an explanation of why it can only have the interpretation they ascribe to it.
    • A statement of what they would accept as falsifying it.

Quite clearly this strategy is designed to appeal to those who:

  1. Don't understand science or the subject being attacked and will believe if you can create any degree of uncertainty over any aspect of science, or can show, accurately or not, that science was ever wrong about anything, the whole thing collapses.
  2. Through cultural arrogance, parochial ignorance or a combination of both, will simply assume without question that the locally popular god is the only alternative on offer.
  3. Crave the comfort of certainty and find anything which shakes that certainty uncomfortable and/or frightening and so are disinclined to question basic assumptions or learn anything which might cause them to call those basic assumptions into question.
  4. Are deriving some sort of spurious self-affirmation from the thought that their inherited superstition automatically trumps anything which 'those crazy/elitist propeller-heads in white coats' and/or 'evil conspiracists' are dreaming up.





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All A Matter Of Ancestor Worship

Ancestor worship in Vietnam
As children we look up to the adults in our society. We think they are full of wisdom and know just about everything. I still remember the shock I felt when my primary school teacher was wrong about something I knew about. How could she not know that there was a bird called a Great Tit? What had gone wrong with the world when she crossed out the word 'Great' in red ink and wrote 'small' over it? These things can shatter the cosy world of certainties for an eight year old. Teachers were teachers because they knew everything, weren't they? How else did they become teachers?
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