rational ahmand

He Does Exist

2008-06-15T11:25:00.005-04:00

OK, I know I am an atheist; but I have talked to God, well actually iGod. Try him out (or is it her?). Don't expect this god to be all-knowing though. It reminds me of the strained conversations Neo had with the Oracle in the film, "The Matrix." You know, the lines uttered whenever he met the Oracle in The Matrix trilogy, where you were supposed to think something insightful and sagacious was being expressed, when it was just gibberish?

In any case, have fun talking to (i)God, after all -- he does exists. Take that disbelievers! Thanks Again Ruby.

http://www.titane.ca/concordia/dfar251/igod/main.html

~AP

New Name

2008-05-23T11:38:00.003-04:00

As I stated in the previous post, I changed the domain name of this blog. You can now reach it at: http://www.rationalahmand.com. But, for others who haven't seen this update, if they type in the former url: http://ahmandishere.blogspot.com, then it shall still redirect them to the correct page. That's a good thing. I hope this doesn't disturb the 1-3 member readership of my blog.

I thought the change made sense, making the title and the domain name of this blog identical. And, it gives me more a feeling of proprietorship over my website.

~AP

Back In Action

2008-05-14T21:10:00.003-04:00

Unfortunately, I have been inactive for a while. I had to get my personal life together. However, now that I am back, I have some new posts I plan to spring on here. Be on the look out for the URL to change soon as well, as I have provisionally decided to register a custom domain name that is consistent with the blog's title. I am hoping the confusion will not lose my two or three readers.

~AP

Psychological Humor part IV

2007-01-07T02:07:00.000-05:00

Here's a recent psychology joke that I found:

~AP

What I Think About The 'Skins' (and other Indian sports teams)

2006-12-19T22:25:00.000-05:00

For the record, I hate the Washington Redskins, and all the rest of the racist sports teams. If I hadn't a drop of American Indian blood in me, I'd still vigorously hate the team. But, I think these cartoons below speak for themselves:

(Note: You can click on these comic strips to see them full-size.)

~AP

Squirrel Intentionality

2006-12-11T23:39:00.000-05:00

Scientist examines city squirrels' lives

Yahoo! News

What they've discovered is that the critters are downright crafty.

Start with their attitude toward other squirrels' food. They want it and won't hesitate to steal it.

To ward off thieves, squirrels engage in a shell game: They go through the motions of digging and pretending to jam acorns into the ground, even smoothing out the grass to make it appear as if they're covering their hiding spot, before running off with the acorns still in their mouths.

"What possible purpose could that be for other than fake out somebody watching them bury it?" said Peter Smallwood, a University of Richmond biologist.

Squirrels figure out how to outsmart devices designed to keep them away from food — something naturalist Howard Youth learned the hard way. Squirrels broke into four types of bird feeders in his Maryland yard before he found one that they couldn't penetrate. So far.

"They will try something new and eventually, if one gets it, the other ones will notice and they will figure out a way to thwart the bird feeder," Youth said.

OK, so besides these critters being really cute and entertaining to watch, they are quite clever. I tend to stare at them while walking around campus. It's hilarious how they will steal your food when your back is turned (ever see a squirrel eat pepperoni pizza?). Well, I guess it's funny unless it's your food and you're hungry.

These little guys are greedy. And according to this article, they really do lose their nuts. Oh well, they'll just steal another squirrel's nuts. I guess it's no wonder why I always see them chasing each other.

In any case, I refer to them as intentional because pace behaviorists: people who assert that only directly observable behavior can be scientifically studied, and eliminativists: people who assert that common-sense or "folk" psychology is wrong and will be replaced by an advanced neuroscience -- intentionality seems the best scientific explanation of their behavior. I.e., their behavior is "directed" in some way, presumably because they (in some sense) want food. This seems trivially true, unless you happen to meet a clever philosopher or scientist with a connectionist bias who may try to convince you otherwise. However ... "philosophical scruple should not trump good science." (This is an ironic sentence, since the person who wrote it – Quine – was against the practice of scientific psychology, as we know it today.) That's not to say there aren't other possible explanations (e.g., connectionism/PDP) but all of them seem lacking without invoking intentionality/representation.

Yes, I favor the computational/representational theory of thought (CRTT), or the now "classical" theory of mind in cognitive science because it's still the best game in town as far as cognitive science is concerned. It works well with explaining the aforementioned squirrels' behavior. And there's plenty more where that came from. Although I'm not denying CRTT has some shortcomings; but that'll have to wait for another post.

~AP

Thar's Water In Dem Hills!

2006-12-07T21:16:00.000-05:00

Martian Gullies Show Traces of Flowing Water within the Past Decade

Scientific American.com

Deposits formed in Martian gullies during the past seven years suggest that liquid water exists on Mars today. Researchers have observed two downhill tracks of light-colored material that were not present in images taken by the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft before 1999.

It's only a matter of time now. That is, only a matter of time until astronomers find microscopic organisms, such as extremophiles. I'm quite confident of that. If not on Mars, then Europa, or some other celestial object that is life-friendly.

~AP

Something Completely Random

2006-11-30T21:53:00.000-05:00

Photo Highlight

Yahoo! News

This is about nothing in particular. I just thought the monkey was cute and amusing. However, there are interesting cynical jokes about society one can make in reference to this picture. I mean, as far as issues with advertising, big business, or human/monkey intelligence, etc. So, please you guys do the jokes and leave them here as comments (note bene: leave "race" out of it).

~AP

Philosophical Humor part IV

2006-11-16T16:01:00.000-05:00

Well here's a new one. I saw this posted on the office door of one of my profs. and decided to find it on the web. It's not knock down funny; but I find it amusing.

http://www.rhymeswithorange.com/

~AP

Funny Contradictions part 1

2006-11-15T12:42:00.000-05:00

This is a new sub-thread that I will continue to do in line with the Psychological Humor and Philosophical Humor sub-threads, in the effort to poke fun at contradictory statements and arguments that I come across. This is a much-downscaled version of what is done by The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, where he points out the inconsistencies of politcal leaders and pundits. So without further adieu...

Going to the local food co-op for food where I've sometimes worked, it was startling to find out that a very kind and usually quiet volunteer was revealed to be an obnoxious misogynist. Apparently, from the claims of current workers, he was quite the Christian Fundamentalist, walking around constantly reading the Bible. Moreover, he was known to say many disparaging things about women, such as they shouldn't drive, or they need to be with a man. He would also call the store sometimes and ask the female employees on dates. Needless to say, this got all the anarchist/emo/radical feminist co-op employees (and volunteers) panties in a bunch.

This shocked me beacuse when I worked along side him; I never saw this side revealed. In any case, what were amusing were not his conservative or sexist views, but the intolerance by workers at the co-op which was supposed to be a progressive establishment, where all are welcomed. I revealed this farce in my previous post about this co-op: How Liberal Or Conservative Are You?. It's obvious now that not all viewpoints are welcomed, but that viewpoints only to the left of the political spectrum are welcomed.

This hypocrisy is revealed in a statement by one worker who upset about (I'll say) "Bob's" blatant misogyny and discomfort he caused to many female employees. He asserted, "He is gone, bleep that he can't do that at the co-op. I reply, "Yeah he's a weirdo, but he's free to hold whatever beliefs he wants." Response, "No, not here. This is the co-op. He can't say that stuff here about women. At the co-op we're all about equality."

If that's what they are about, then cool; but they should admit they have a anarchist/feminist/socialist/vegetarian agenda to the potential employees, instead of hiding behind the façade of being an open marketplace (no pun intended) of ideas. (This was all to apparent during my job interview, I was asked what were my "food politics.")

~AP

Yes I Am Addicted

2006-11-09T21:01:00.000-05:00

“Hi, everyone my name is Rational Ahmand and I have an internet addiction.” I guess this is the beginning of my twelve step program to control my newly found addiction. Which is funny, seeing that I am adamantly against viewing (too much) TV and playing video games, when it's at least more than a few hours everyday (or better, more than a few hours every week). However, the versatility of the modern PC and the internet makes it oh so hard to resist! It's an interesting hypothesis whether blogging entails having an internet addiction – a highly probable and testable claim, to be sure.

There are increasing reports of "internet addiction" among younger adults; and I suppose that I'm no different in this respect. (I use scare quotes around ‘internet addiction’ because it's still open whether this problem is a genuine addiction, and if so, if it really needs treatment. There has been little psychological research on this alleged phenomenon thus far. However, research in this area is vastly growing.) Well what can I do? Umm, I could start simply by leaving this post and doing something totally constructive and unrelated to using the computer or other multimedia devices. But, a lot of my schoolwork and research depends on regular usage of the computer, so trying to avoid it in the long term is a hasty decision. Here is a site that purports to help internet addicts: center for Internet Addiction. If anyone else is afflicted with this "addiction," maybe this could be a starting place for help. Alternatively, a cognitive therapist could be better.

What about you? Do you have a so-called internet addiction? Here's a survey: Internet Stress Survey. I make no claims of this survey's validity. You can use it merely as a starting point of interest. Until then, I’ll see (or chat with) you on the web!

~AP

Return of the Jed ... I mean, Democrats

2006-11-08T11:49:00.000-05:00

At the risk of appearing to be a bigger geek than some of you already think I am ... The election results coming in today reminds me of the scenes in Star Wars episode VI: Return of the Jedi, wherein the rebel alliance finally beats the Galactic Empire. Well, at least it does so far. The control of the Senate is still up for grabs as I write this.

Yes, I probably sound biased writing this, but at this point, I really don't care.
__________________________________
Update 11/09/06: The democrats also took control of the Senate, making my goofy analogy complete.

~AP

The 'Real' Aristotle

2006-11-07T20:59:00.000-05:00

Times Online

Aristotle as he really looked

A bust of Aristotle found beneath the Acropolis in Athens is the first to show the Greek philosopher with a hooked nose

Hmm, so this is what Aristotle may have looked like. No big surprise, but maybe it is to all those Afrocentrists out there who claim that he and the other Socratic philosophers (and virtually any famous person from antiquity) were black. Of course, I always lose this battle with some of my friends, because the self-deception is quite strong in them.

According to some of my pals, and others who aren't, my social beliefs are "white-washed" from my Eurocentric studies because I disbelieve that these ancient people were black. Although there is no credible evidence to support the Afrocentric claims which they otherwise avow. (Notice that I restrict the scope of 'evidence' with the modifier 'credible', to emphasize that the so-called evidence they do have is unconvincing. Afrocentrists tend to cherrypick evidence that supports their views and reject the ones that don't. To be frank, they're just practicing pseudohistory.)

Ah well, none of us are immune to irrational beliefs. Critical thinking skills, pursuing reason to wherever it may lead, seems to be a good antidote to irrationality (at least to the degree that human psychology allows us to). Aristotle and his Socratic predecessors certainly thought so.

~AP

The 'Just World' & Christianity

2006-11-06T16:02:00.000-05:00

Here is something that really irritated me this morning. Why the heck do (some) Christians seem so blindly accepting of the "just world hypothesis?" This hypothesis proposes that the world is as it should be. I see friends and acquaintances constantly spewing the following statements or etching them on their web pages: "everything is how it's supposed to be," "everyday is blessed," or "God is the reason for blah blah blah." I think to myself, "Are they that naïve? Do they genuinely believe this; or are they just astoundingly ignorant of what is happening in the world?"

Religious beliefs aside, what would make them take such an absurd view of the world? I find these people to be either really stupid, or really sheltered and oblivious to hold such a patently false view of the world. Moreover, such views generate apathy towards others in bad situations. Just world believers rationalize the apparent contradictions to their view by blaming the victims, asserting that the people in bad situations somehow deserve their poor lot in life; or they think some people's suffering – we’re talking millions here, but just one person is unacceptable – is part of God's larger “plan” for us? What freaking plan? To satisfy his sadistic desires? Why does an omniperfect, omnipotent being need to use an imperfect process (e.g., some form of utilitarianism) to enact his ultimate plan? This irrational view brings on the old "problem of evil" with a vengeance.

For those not acquainted with the argument, it's basically goes (excuse my crude presentation of it): why does God allow evil to exist if he is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent? If "he" is omnibenevolent, why does he allow evil to exist when he is omnipotent and omniscient and can stop it? Can he not foresee it happening? But he's omniscient – he necessarily knows everything that has ever happened, is happening, and will ever happen. And he's necessarily all-powerful. Maybe, evil needs to exist for humans to practice morality. OK, maybe, but why does there have to be so much of it? Isn't just a few examples enough? Better yet, can’t he just give us an innate concept of evil? After all, isn't he necessarily all-powerful? So (provisionally) accepting that God is omniscient and omnipotent, should we still view him as omnibenevolent? Well, maybe evil doesn't actually exist. Can you really take that claim seriously? It's patently false. Trudging through all the other details, the likely conclusion: God doesn't exist (or he exists, but he ain't the God of Judeo-Christian doctrine).

So the just world hypothesis resurrects (no pun intended) this old argument against God's existence. Ironically, it seems the most damming problem for some ordinary believers. However, to philosophically trained people, it isn't that pernicious. Modal logic (e.g., defining the scope of necessarily p vs. p necessarily), "loosens" the hook on God as far as the all-knowing part. Well at least in all logically possible worlds (i.e., counterfactual conditions). In this world, he still owes us a big explanation for the overwhelming evil.

Leaving that problem aside however, it seems that either many theists on careful reflection of these false assertions would (I hope) probably reject the just world hypothesis, or if held on to, then it would probably reveal they're disturbing lack of touch with the real world.

Addendum: I thought this quote out of the new book, Letter to a Christian Nation by the philosopher Sam Harris, seemed appropiate to this post:

The truth is that many who claim to be transformed by Christ's love are deeply, even murderously, intolerant of criticism... such hatred draws considerable support from the Bible.

~AP

Eat Your Veggies

2006-10-29T12:55:00.000-05:00

Study: Vegetables may keep brains young

Yahoo! News

CHICAGO - New research on vegetables and aging gives mothers another reason to say "I told you so." It found that eating vegetables appears to help keep the brain young and may slow the mental decline sometimes associated with growing old.

I'm taking a break from religion bashing (I don’t actually consider it religion bashing per se) to talk about something tasty – vegetables! OK, I'll admit I wasn't enthralled with vegetables when I was younger, but I did really like some. I liked kale and mashed potatoes a lot. As I matured, and did a stint as a vegetarian, I came to love vegetables. But for those who don't, this study reported in the journal Neurology claims that eating vegetables caused older people to be mental sharper than others who ate little to no vegetables. Eat up senior citizens. This is one in many studies giving mounting evidence that eating plenty of vegetables, ceteris paribus, staves off mental decline.

After eating for a while at my school’s co-op, I was giving an A+ physical by my physician. She actually told me I was too healthy, and to go eat a McDonald’s hamburger! Unbeknownst to her, I do often pig out on junk food, but I balance it out with pigging out on vegetarian meals because I find them equally tasty. Hmm, interesting … maybe the vegetarians are on to something after all. This gives me incentive to go pig out at the local co-op today. So, later everyone – I’m feeling hungry!

~AP

YouTube Atheism Finale

2006-10-28T10:43:00.000-04:00

Here's the last set of atheist videos from YouTube that I wanted to share (at least for right now). There are many other atheist-related videos on the website though. Again, I want to put my disclaimer that these videos don't necessarily represent my views. But I agree with some of the points made, even if I don't in the way in which they are presented.

Without giving away the content of these videos, I will say it seems that the creator has a naïve view of epistemology and the psychology of belief-formation. Moreover, his expository of Christian doctrine neglects how psychologically comforting it is to believe that no matter what happens to you, there's someone who will always be there for you and has the power to make it better. Nor, does he account for the fact that self-deception may mask what only seems to be a genuine belief. It's hard to know what our genuine beliefs are without careful reflection; and it’s hard to simply "choose" what we want to sincerely believe. Now, after that minor criticism caveat, enjoy!

P.S. If you disagree with me and/or the content of these videos or the previously posted ones, that's cool. But don't be like some other previous commenters that merely yell, "Burn in hell!" That’s lame; be more creative. Think out what you disagree with, because your contention may have merit. Come on, you don’t want to be the raging nut leaving idiotic comments on people's blogs, do you? Besides, it should be obvious that since I'm atheist and materialist, such attempts to upset me will be ineffective. And taken out of a religious context, it becomes clear that the belief in “hell” is utterly ridiculous.

~AP

Something To Ruin Your Halloween

2006-10-27T00:40:00.000-04:00

Math vs. vampires: vampires lose

World Science

If vampires—corpses that rise up to suck the blood of the living—sound biologically implausible to you, you’re not alone. They exist purely in legend, as virtually all scientists agree.

But for any vampire believers undissuaded by biological facts, a professor has come up with a second proof of their unreality, using math.

If vampires ever existed in the forms in which movies and books portray them, they would have quickly wiped out humanity long ago, according to physics professor Costas Efthimiou of the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Fla.

Well I don't think this actually ruins anyone's Halloween; but it may, if you believe in the infamous monsters associated with the holiday. Vampires, which inter alia, assuming they actually existed, would have wiped out humanity by now if they did. So there would be no need for Blade. The scientists in the article above have also explained what I have told friends for years about why the belief in vodou "curses" is mostly bunk. A schmuck who poisons a person with a neurotoxin from puffer fish, tetrodotoxin, can achieve the manifestation of a zombie-like state on some hapless victim. In addition, the belief in zombies is communally reinforced in Haitian and other similar cultures that practice vodou. (The view that all vodou practitioners can [and will] invoke a zombie curse onto someone is suggestively racist and xenophobic against Afro-Caribbean religious systems.)

Philosophers have their own "zombies" that they talk about. However, they’re of a different type than the concept of vodou zombies. In philosophy (particularly, philosophy of mind), “zombies” are beings postulated in gedanken (or thought) experiments that are utterly indistinguishable from human beings in behavior, looks, and speech, but lack any form of consciousness.

Of course, some philosophers think if it quacks like a duck and looks like a duck – it is a duck. But I’m unsure if that’s true. After all, duck decoys look like ducks and sound like ducks, but they definitely aren’t ducks! Or else, duck hunting would be cruel and absurd, not to mention a waste of time. (It still may be cruel and absurd; but that’s a different subject.) That doesn’t necessarily mean concept {zombie} is actually coherent or plausible. Nevertheless, it takes more than a simple behaviorist or superficialist account to refute this reoccurring notion in philosophy.

More relevantly, these zombie attacks are not the knockdown arguments they’re cracked up to be against physicalism – the view that everything that actually exists is physical. Indeed, some physicalists use these arguments to support their views. Additionally, these arguments are railed against functionalism – the view that mental states and processes are determined by the functions they play in the mind/brain – especially, because some people aren’t comfortable with the idea that, machines could, in principle, become conscious ceteris paribus.¹ But I digress, as usual.

In any case, irrational beliefs – in monsters or otherwise – are notoriously detail resistant; so "true" (self-deceived) believers will unlikely be daunted by disconfirming evidence and logical reasoning.
__________________________________________
¹This "ceteris paribus" would be the most difficult matter to overcome. However, if strong A.I. (i.e., artificial intelligence) is true, then it can be met.

~AP

Hello 1984!

2006-10-25T19:44:00.000-04:00

I don't have much to add here. I think this video clip speaks for itself. Well, the implications of what's being talked about here, makes me reluctant to even right something against King, err, I mean President Bush. I will assert one thing – Congress has failed the American people miserably. (Yet these jerks claim to be so American, but are so quick to trash some of our deepest held values.) I hope people are pleased at the leaders they've chosen to represent them.

Boys and girls, can you say "Sta-lin?" Gee, Canada is looking really good right about now.

~AP

Rethinking the "Principle of Charity"

2006-10-23T22:47:00.000-04:00

Remember when I said sometimes I might have to modify or even refute previous notions or beliefs I avowed? Well, if you don't, here's your chance to see it in action. I'm trying to stay afloat on Neurath's boat baby! I will warn people in advance that this may come off as totally trivial or pedantic to you. If so, enjoy some of my other recent posts below. Or go to my archives or web links.

In any case, some of you may have seen me evoke the so-called principle of charity: being charitable in translating other's utterances when you're unsure of their meaning, on several occasions in this blog. I thought this was a bedrock, epistemic principle of preserving rationality in other's arguments. However, after a recent lecture in my proseminar on cognitive science, I have taken this principle to be quite dubious. Don't get me wrong; there's nothing wrong about being fair to other people's views, but the principle of charity asserts something much more contentious.

First mentioned by Neil L. Wilson, the principle was given fame by the likes of philosophers W.V. Quine and Donald Davidson in somewhat different formulations. Not being one of his strongest arguments, Quine being a radical behaviorist (the position that only directly, observable behavior [or dispositions to behave] could be studied scientifically), used this principle as a heuristic device for people to translate each other. Or in his classical example, to translate the utterances of some natives who speak a different language that shouted, "Gavagi!" Anyway, Quine was a skeptic of meaning. So the soundness (or lack thereof) of his arguments had strong implications for psychology, since without meaning we didn't have representations, concepts, propositions, and the like. In short, without meaning, we didn't have cognitive psychology – the main research program of scientific psychology today.

Nowadays, behaviorism has been scraped as the paradigm of psychological research because it ultimately failed; (ironically) largely through its increasingly accurate measurements of behavior that couldn't be accounted for by simply behavioristic explanations (e.g., spatial navigation in rats, the flight of honeybees, or language learning in humans). To be fair to behaviorists though, where else can you start in a science of the mind, but by studying behavior? Indeed, the error is to assume that mental phenomena cannot be studied by virtue of observable behavior or dispositions, and/or ex hypothesi all that exists is observable behavior and dispositions, not any of the intentional kind. But I digressed.

According to Quine (if I understand him correctly), we don't actually capture any meaning by the principle of charity; but our analytical hypotheses (i.e., arbitrary stipulations), gives us an "air" of determinacy to other's translations. Yet, if you think that claiming that other people don’t express any meaning in any of their sentences and words they utter; or that normally we can't know what they actually mean if they do so is weird – then bingo, you win! Nevertheless, being a behaviorist, Quine would acknowledge there is a "stimulus meaning," which is merely your degree of assention or dissention (saying "yes" or "no") to some stimulus, but that's about it. (For sake of brevity, I won't go into an expository of his view on observation sentences – which is the closest he will allow for there being some objectivity in translation.)

So yeah, as the principle of charity stands, it appears dubious because we don't actually use it in translation; and it's rather vague what someone means by the term 'rationality' that is presupposed by the so-called principle. Admittedly, I throw around the term 'rationality' a lot in this blog. But I use it in the sense that Georges Rey asserts is the property of a propositional attitude by virtue of holding certain kinds of relations to evidence, other propositional attitudes and action – which, is what Quine wants to deny in using the principle of charity. (After all, these attitudes would imply intentionality.) However, that doesn't necessarily change the fact that these are still fuzzy terms, and presupposing, I (or any one else for that matter) actually have clear and distinct meanings of these terms when envoking the principle of charity, or other equally dubious epistemic notions, is tendentious.

~AP

A Quick Religious Rant

2006-10-22T13:30:00.000-04:00

It seems the higher in religiosity or more conservative someone is the worst their judgments and decision-making on important matters are. These guys really annoy me. Unsurprisingly, there is supporting evidence for my contention to give legitimacy to my frustration. The post below with the YouTube videos on atheism also addresses this point. Moreover, it's not that highly religious people necessarily make bad decisions or reason poorly on some event that gets me frustrated; it's that they find these bad judgments or decisions and the negative consequences of following them as perfectly rational, which is upsetting.

Yet, I freely admit that it's rather hard to construct an operational definition of 'religiosity', inter alia, for a study measure showing a causal connection from religiosity to lower intelligence (or IQ).¹ There are various studies showing strong positive correlations between high religiosity and lower education level or lower IQ, but a strong relationship between these two variables is not convincing evidence of any (significant) causal relationship. So, I wouldn't take it to the wall for this view.

In any case, I guess I should give an example to avoid being vague. (Didn't your grade school teacher warn you about that too?) One example was when I found myself going to a "Gospel" Happy Hour. Something I've done on multiple occasions because I enjoyed the performances and eating free food. But the last time the event was hosted, it really ruffled my feathers. There was a woman promoting her ministry through a fashion show/ theatrical presentation of her views. She was promoting an abstinence only program and a youth ministry that touted Christian "values." They also were promoting t-shirts and her new book about her journey to becoming self-righteous.

The minister was also a practicing physician, what specialty I cannot recall exactly. I think she was an anesthiologist. But although her professinal background seemed irrelevant to the topic, I think she stated it to give the implication that since she was highly educated, she must've known what she's talking about. Or, more charitably, perhaps she stated this to merely show the audience that those of a scientific bent can still be devout Christians.

She declared proudly how she was "thirty years old and still a virgin." Well, good for her! Wearing your sexual frustration on your sleeve as a badge of honor seems ridiculous. If you want to live like that, fine, but I don't care and it doesn't impress me. Even more ridiculous is her ministry's attempt to "re-virginize" its members, through following abstinence, when they join it. As if not being a virgin made you less of a good person.

If that wasn't annoying enough, the minister also declared how once one of her female members joined, the member renounced her homosexuality. Now I'm thinking, {oh f*#$^&@ please!} If the woman was actually lesbian, she is likely to be just repressing her true sexual orientation. But I guess that doesn't matter anyway, if you're going to be abstinent. However, what upsets me is the fact that this anesthiologist/minister would take such an unsophisticated view of homosexuality, thrown out years ago by all credible psychiatrists and professional psychologists. I remarked to philosopher Allen Stairs (cf. to my remark in this previous post) that this was roughly analogous to me joining some church and no longer being black.

This was a subtle discrimination against gays; and although I'm not gay, bigotry of this sort against any minority group offends me. Moreover, many sexual health studies have shown abstinence only programs are unlikely to be effective. It upsets me more that such obvious falsehoods are coming from someone whom should know better.
___________________________
¹I am fully aware that using IQ scores as a valid measure of intelligence is controversial in itself. However, since this is a problem for all of educational and psychological testing, it would be unfair to make this general psychometric problem, sui generis to measures of religiosity and intelligence. It does call into question whether what we're assessing with IQ scores genuinely constitutes (all of) "intelligence;" but the inverse relationship between IQ (or education) and religiosity still holds.

~AP

More YouTube Atheism

2006-10-21T04:08:00.000-04:00

These videos, unlike the others below this post, are a bit easier to watch (well, unless you're deeply religious). I say easier to watch, in the sense that there isn't anything graphic that could be disturbing. Enjoy:

~AP

Atheism a' la YouTube!

2006-10-21T03:13:00.000-04:00

Here's some interesting videos I randomly saw on YouTube.com. Caveat: these assertions are not necessarily what I think or believe, but some of the points made are pretty darn close to them.

I must warn readers though, that some of the images may be disturbing. So take that into consideration before deciding to watch the videos below. Right, well on with the show:

(P.S. That is not me on this video, just in case you thought so. Besides, I don't wear football jerseys)

And last, but not least, the atheist bulldog Richard Dawkins:

~AP

Universe Looks Like An Egg

2006-10-15T19:49:00.000-04:00

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/061009_mystery_monday.html

Space.com

Instead of being perfectly round like a globe, the universe might be a bit stretched in shape like a pill.

The newly proposed shape could be caused by a magnetic field that pervades the entire cosmos or defects in the fabric of space and time, researchers said.

Well, it isn't exactly shaped like an egg (or a pill as they claim in the article). The illustration above is just a new sketch representing how the universe looks after including all the light gathered from the oldest times of the universe (13.7 billion years is a lot of traveling!). This is akin to the representation of the earth that a globe yields.

I think it's still safe to say that most astrophysicists cling to the spherical model since it coheres better with current theory and most of the data. And since I have no deep background in this field, I'll have to rely on the informed opinion of the astrophysics community-at-large and not a few mavericks. Nevertheless, their hypothesis that the shape of the universe is ellipsoidal is still interesting.

~AP

Just Click It!

2006-10-13T00:38:00.000-04:00

By the way, in case you haven't been immature enough to just starting clicking on things in this webpage to see what it does, then start now! Every link or button on this blog serves a practical purpose. The arrows to the right of each post title allow you to navigate between each post. (Although, I'm still tweaking some of its functions.) There is also another option to navigate between posts using the horizontal arrows to the far, upper right (or upper left, depending on your browser) of the webpage.

Moreover, you can click on the permalinks or the post titles to go to the individual, post pages. To the very bottom of the webpage, you can use the links down there to go back to the home page, or if you're on an archive page, you can click the arrows at the bottom of the page to navigate between the next or previous posts as well. (You can also get back to the home page by clicking on the title of my blog: rational ahmand.) There's some other nifty stuff down there as well. Explore!

In addition, if during the process of reading a post you think I'm using too much jargon for your understanding (or taste), then click on any word and it will instantly open a page to define it for you. Another way to get more information is to go to the post page (via the clicking the post title, the permalink, or using the internal search engines) and you will see "links to this post" at the bottom of each post. I have links – wherever available – that link to other posts that I've previously wrote on the same subject.

Or, in the same area, you may (eventually) see other links to other bloggers who've linked to me. On all of the post pages, you will see "related posts from blogosphere" to check other websites. Caveat, these "related" posts are not always relevant or related to the content of my posts. But they're supposed to be.

Alternatively, you can click on the labels or go to the side bar and use my de.lici.ous tags to see related posts. In the righthand side bar, you can also catch the most recent comments someone posted, or click on the different categories to open (or close) a list of web links to various subjects related to this website. Check out the latest news events as well.

If you know a great website, maybe you're own, feel free to create a link in my posts or trackback to me. I’m open to having reciprocal links to other bloggers’ websites. That is, assuming it suits certain minimal criteria – which exclude splogs, or blogs with weird, bizarre, or pseudoscientific content.

Lastly, I think it's obvious I put a translation device after each post for some non-English speakers, who still want to read my blog. Hey, don’t blame for any mistranslation, as I didn’t create the program; take that up with Google. Yet, it seems to preserve most of the semantic content in my posts. Yes, I know I have talked about my modifications before in, The Editopia Has Arrived. However, I neglected to mention some of these previously new options. Hmm, I may make this post standard reading for people who have questions about how to navigate through my blog or questions about what some of the gadgets do. There's still more options available that I haven't talked about, but you should let the kid out and try them for yourself.

~AP

Reasons I'd Go To Church But Still Not Believe

2006-10-12T20:02:00.000-04:00

Just a heads up: I may write a few more posts that are religiously based during this week, and possibly during the following one. I guess it's because, a lot of religious phenomena has surrounded me lately. I don't mean of the supernatural kind though.

Anyway, one thing I've thought about, and talked to with other, atheists and theist alike, was some of the cool things about church. (As a kid, I doubt I'd think I would utter something like that. But I digress.) One of the things that I was curious about was attending a Sunday mass at a Catholic church. Since I was brought up in mainly traditional black, Christian churches (and I think a Muslim one at an even earlier age), I felt left out from the less flamboyant styles of worship.

Moreover, the beliefs and practices of the Roman Catholic church seemed more reverent to me – faith qua faith – compared to the black Baptist and A.M.E. churches that I attended as a child. These annoying places, where I grew to detest seeing the old women in their garish outfits; listening to the sensationalistic sermons; people "catching" the Holy Spirit; the multiple tithing in one service; the old, dreary slave-based hymnals (or instead, the frenzied hoopin' and hollerin') ; and my parents constant prodding to get "saved."

Did I mention the multiple tithing? Why? I think that, inter alia, if you're going to donate a portion of your life-savings to God (I guess to pay the bills in heaven), then at least do so in the way of your choosing – not necessarily to the church. These credulous people could have been saving away money to put their kids through college! Not to get into a rant here (sorry again Dennis Miller), but I perceive the proliferation of many black churches within the inner cities as a scourge that's virtually as bad as the rampant liquor stores and drug-dealing. Well, with some qualification of course. I just don't see the point of them being so widespread throughout low-income urban areas.¹ It seems they're exploiting the inner city folk almost as much as the needless multiple bodegas and gun shops.

In any case, despite all my misgivings about black churches, going to a Catholic church, and now that I think of it going to a Jewish synagogue as well, seems interesting – just for experience’s sake.

Besides that, I recall reading some material from one of my amusing philosophy professors, Georges Rey, who wrote in his essay, Meta-Atheism, how he enjoyed church for its aesthetic qualities. Viz., he enjoyed things such as religious music and art. And after today, I spoke with another prof., Allen Stairs; he asserted how going to art galleries was such a wonderful experience that it could be likened to sex. I don't know about that, but we agreed that religious experiences could be of the same ilk; and that atheists shouldn't come down so hard on "believers." So these sorts of thoughts led me to think that church can be enjoyable for cultural reasons, for social get-togethers with friends, and probably for other relevant reasons, apart from religious devotion.
________________________________________
¹Well, actually, ex hypothesi, I have a pretty good idea why. Perhaps, like the other two institutions mentioned above (and arguably several others), the churches' constant draining of personal income and mental pacification of the black community contributes to its self-destruction. However, I won't take it to the wall for this claim; nor shall I flesh out an argument for it here.

~AP

Don't Call Them Schizo

2006-10-10T16:04:00.000-04:00

Experts want to rename schizophrenia

LONDON (Reuters) - Mental health experts called on Monday for the term schizophrenia to be dropped, saying it has no scientific validity, is imprecise and stigmatizing.

Hmm, this is an interesting idea to me for a couple of reasons. Because of the epistemic issues over "meaning" in science, questions over psychiatric labeling, and how other people largely perceive those suffering from severe mental illnesses.

The first issue is what constitutes a term being "meaningless" in science? Or, for that matter, what constitutes meaningless in any domain of belief? Whereas, contemporary philosophy has given up logical positivism because it was strongly refuted (including from former positivists themselves), it seems many scientists have not. Positivism is still particularly very strong in psychology. For a very crude explanation about what positivists espoused, I shall say positivists proposed, inter alia, a verification theory of meaning. This came in many forms, as it was never satisfactorily worked out. However, I can say it roughly asserts:

A proposition's meaning consists of its method of verifying it.

In other words, you understand something only when you can verify it! If the verification principle, upon which verificationism is based, doesn't intuitively strike you as odd, then I implore you to think about it more. (Think of you understanding the concept of what a dog is, only when you can verify by sentences describing your perceptual experiences upon seeing the dog, viz. spots of brown and black, hearing certain noises, a peculiar odor, etc.) The Verification theory of meaning – for the positivists – went hand-in-hand with their use of reductionism. The term 'reductionism’ is notoriously ambiguous, but here I mean it to refer to the idea that linguistic expressions in philosophy and any other “meaningful” domain should be reduced to that of sensory data, observable sentences, or descriptions of observable behavior (in psychology).

Both of these theories failed, and spelled the death of logical positivism. However, verificationism (including reductionism) has remained as a philosophy of science in most of the scientific community. Yet to be fair, it does work within in this domain. Moreover, scientists don't necessarily know or care about verificationism's larger epistemic and ontological implications. Besides, verificationism in the weakened form, of having evidence to support one's beliefs, is still strongly held by many philosophers (and me) who think having supporting evidence for any claim is important to prevent their ideas from becoming mere sophistry. (What is debatable though, is to what extent it should be applied.) And many endorse a type of reductionism, known as physicalism.

Originally, however, the positivists were trying to get rid of metaphysics in philosophy, which at the time referred to speculative and bizarre ideas and beliefs a' la Georg Hegel and Martin Heidegger stemming mainly from German philosophy. (They also attacked theology and ethics.) Hence, they used the combined efforts of verificationism and reductionism as a sharp Occam's razor to rid philosophy of all metaphysics, and to reduce philosophy of science to logical analysis. It failed.

I think that digression was relevant. In any case, if 'schizophrenia', is not longer a correct label for people suffering the illness(es) with which it supposedly corresponds, then it's simply false. But it is still meaningful. For psychologists and others mental health practitioners, it's genuinely possible that the term may becomes obsolete or useless as many other terms in mental health has, but that doesn't negate that it confers meaning. Yet again, to be charitable, "scientifically meaningless" can be better interpreted to mean merely that a term or sentence expresses a concept or proposition that isn't supported by evidence (in other words, false). In that case, I agree. A précising definition can be more useful, when it can make psychiatric diagnosis more effective.

The second issue, on the other hand, is if the label is to be trashed merely because of its negative connotation, then I think that's a waste of time. Psychologists should've learned from the current list of obsolete terms e.g., 'retard', 'lame', 'deaf', 'dumb' – that simply renaming the pathological condition doesn't reverse its stigma. Indeed, each neologism (i.e., new term) just becomes the current insult that kids and immature adults will use to insult each other e.g., 'mentally challenged'. It's not the labels per se, but what they refer to that is perceived pejoratively because of their highly undesirable nature. The stigma from suffering these conditions can only be remedied by better understanding of psychopathology.

I do agree that the causes of schizophrenia needs more research though. However, that's a problem for most psychiatric illnesses and shouldn't burden only schizophrenia. Indeed, if they were well understood they might be better classified as neurological illnesses instead, such as with the case of autism. Additionally, the fact that 'schizophrenia' likely refers to a set of illnesses and not just one, isn't necessarily a problem for continuing use either. So does the term 'cancer'. But that doesn't make it hopelessly vague; we just qualify what type illness it is by virtue of biomedical diagnosis.

~AP

Psychological Humor Part III

2006-10-01T22:11:00.000-04:00

Here's another one:

~AP

The Elephants Negotiate

2006-09-21T22:49:00.000-04:00

Bush, GOP rebels agree on detainee bill

Yahoo! News

"I'm pleased to say that this agreement preserves the single most potent tool we have in protecting America and foiling terrorist attacks," the president said, shortly after administration officials and key lawmakers announced agreement following a week of high-profile intraparty disagreement.

So it appears the president has recently struck a deal on Capitol Hill with Republican senators over a bill that allows people suspected of terrorism to be tried in military tribunals that violate both, our Constitutional laws and the Geneva Conventions. Not too long ago, this course of action was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court as being unconstitutional and unjustified; so in an act of desperation, the Bush Administration took their plight to Congress to ironically, enact a bill giving them legal rights to violate other constitutional (and international) laws.

As some of you may have recently seen on TV or read in the newspapers, until today (9-12-06), there has been a lot of strife within the Republican party over the detainee controversy. (To be honest, I haven't paid much attention to these affairs, since I've been concentrating mostly on academic matters. But I digress.) Although I'm not sure if it's because many of them genuinely think that some of the provisions in Bush's proposed bill are wrong, or if its because they're just scared of supporting an unpopular idea during a time of re-election. I will be charitable and assume the former.

In any case, I think the Bush Administration has a lot of chutzpah for trying to sell their pitch that torture and secret tribunals are justified methods of protecting America to someone like Sen. McCain, (a real war hero, unlike other hawkish Republicans), who was held as a P.O.V. during the Vietnam war and tortured subsequently within that time.

Now, I'm not sure if I'm a deontologist, but I think Kantian ethics makes a strong point on this issue – the ends do not justify the means. Moreover, in some cases such as this Kant was probably right in that, what matters here is that we ought to do what's right for the right reasons, that we oughtn't (accidentally) do what's right for the wrong reasons. Yet, I would disagree with Kant, perhaps in most cases like said issue, that it is morally permissible to do what's wrong for the right reasons (presumably). That seems intuitively (and foreseably) wrong too.

Even if Bush's claims were true that their “interrogation” methods and secret military tribunals will prevent future terror attacks on the U.S. and its citizens – and they're somewhat justified – his argument(s) lack sufficient explanatory power in demonstrating why we should be convinced of them. It seems even some of Bush's former supporters are “losing faith” and are becoming increasingly skeptical over his exploitation of the 9/11 terror attacks to justify every questionable act (abuse?) of his executive power.

~AP

How Liberal Or Conservative Are You?

2006-09-19T20:14:00.000-04:00

Your Political Profile:

Overall: 15% Conservative, 85% Liberal

Social Issues: 25% Conservative, 75% Liberal

Personal Responsibility: 0% Conservative, 100% Liberal

Fiscal Issues: 0% Conservative, 100% Liberal

Ethics: 0% Conservative, 100% Liberal

Defense and Crime: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal

How Liberal Or Conservative Are You?

Hmm, I'm fifty percent conservative on issues of defense and crime, eh? Well, since I'm only eighty-five percent liberal overall, according to this "quiz," that may explain why some (very) leftists friends of mine consider me somewhat conservative. (For the record, I consider myself liberal.) Until now, I wasn't aware that people farther on the left end of the political spectrum were as myopic and self-righteous in their views as those farther on the right end of it. I should have known though. People who put political ideology above common sense and logical reasoning (and ipso facto, science) – whether left or right – tend to be inflexible in their thinking on socio-political issues. Moreover, I find their justification for their avowals rather wanting. But I guess that's a topic for another post.

In any case, I guess, ceteris paribus, it's easier for me to get along with moderates. Whether they actually fall closer to the left or the right, doesn't matter much to me. What matters is that they think critically about social and political issues, instead of just sticking to their political party's stance on said issues. Try the Blogthings quiz; or try their other quizzes if you like (click here).

~AP

Congrats Dr. Beck!

2006-09-17T13:13:00.000-04:00

Yahoo! News
Psychotherapy, gene pioneers honored

The Lasker award for clinical medical research goes to Aaron Beck, 85, emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He developed cognitive therapy, which has transformed the treatment of such psychiatric conditions as depression, suicidal behavior, panic attacks and eating disorders, the foundation said.

Beck proposed that depression resulted from unduly negative beliefs and bias against oneself rather than unconscious drives. He led his patients to examine the accuracy of such beliefs, a process that did indeed lift depression.

I would like to congratulate the scientists who've won the 2006 Lasker Medical Research Awards, in particular Aaron Beck. The research he's done in cognitive therapy shows that some forms of psychotherapy are more effective than merely placebo effects. Moreover, his work shows that scientific-based therapy is much more effective than the – pardon my language – bullshit that people such as Dr. Phil and other pop psychologists/quacks espouse.

~AP

All Aboard!

2006-09-14T02:45:00.000-04:00

By the way, I'm a tad late with this information. But, since I've been talking about space science-related issues – I just wanted to say, "Yay Atlantis!"

________________________________
Update 10/5/06: Well, this isn't much of an "update" per se. However, I am glad everything went smoothly and a safe return for the six astronauts aboard the shuttle Atlantis. They touched ground at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. This gives hope anew for a mission to fix the awesome Hubble telescope.

Unfortunately, one of the astronauts passed out twice during the post flight ceremony. I dare not say she is flimsy (although I'm sure she was a little embarrassed) because she has done what many of us may never have the ability to do, viz., space flight. These guys (and gals) have to be in pretty top shape! After all, spaceflight causes astronauts to lose 10 percent or more of their blood volume. Moreover, the exhaustion caused from completing the missions, enduring the post flight wrap up, and interviews can fatigue anyone.

~AP

Poor Little Pluto

2006-09-14T02:42:00.000-04:00

Space.com

Pluto is Now Just a Number: 134340

Pluto has been given a new name to reflect its new status as a dwarf planet.

On Sept. 7, the former 9th planet was assigned the asteroid number 134340 by the Minor Planet Center (MPC), the official organization responsible for collecting data about asteroids and comets in our solar system.

The move reinforces the International Astronomical Union's (IAU) recent decision to strip Pluto of its planethood and places it in the same category as other small solar-system bodies with accurately known orbits.

After decades, Pluto is reduced to a lowly asteroid. (Does 'asteroid' have a clear definition either? I digress.) Officially, it's a "dwarf planet." Ah well, it may have been wrong to consider Pluto, I mean 134340, a “planet” in the first place. I have no strong opinions about it. What was interesting, however, was reading that Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy (whom I dearly admire and respect) – if I am not making a straw man of his claims – thinks that mere debate over whether a celestial object is called a planet, is just "semantics" since it doesn't further research. Maybe...

But, maybe not. First, I highly doubt that semantics is a worthless field of study – although I am at not attributing this particular assertion to Plait. Yet, this is evidence of the misguided assumptions of verificationism (and operationalism) still plaguing contemporary science from the times of Logical Positivism, although this philosophical movement has been thoroughly refuted in analytic philosophy – even by many of the former positivists!

Indeed, mutatis mutandis, getting our terminology correct and making careful distinctions does lead to some positive consequences. Viz., it dissolves confusion, and that leads to knowing how to genuinely tackle more "substantive" (or external), scientific problems once we understand exactly what they entail. Moreover, I doubt Plait would argue that it's just semantics when creationists and ID proponents equivocate terms, e.g., 'theory' or 'proof' in their (sometimes successful) attempts to discredit biology and science, in general.

Second, I think we should be fair to the people at the IAU debating about Pluto et al. scientific status, not necessarily because 'planet' is a term that refers to an object defined by necessary and sufficient conditions, but because we bring clarity to a muddled concept that has long been ignored in astronomy. (Indeed, on the lines of Friedrich Waismann, it's doubtful that any empirical term can have necessary and sufficient conditions, as they all prey to open texture – i.e., that they vary in meaning and vagueness).

In any case, it has brought astronomy into the public light. And that, I think was positive in some aspects. Though, to the chagrin of some astronomers, this publicity may have been bad publicity.

~AP

An Idle Thought

2006-09-09T19:45:00.000-04:00

Hmm, I wonder how many people that I know wish this would happen? I hope very few; but I can't please everyone. Indeed, I may displease many people for various reasons. Luckily, it's rather absurd to believe their is a place of eternal damnation – whether tartarus, hell, or wherever – that people will be punished forever for their so-called misdeeds (or for their good deeds, which are against social norms).

Of course, it's possible that I'm wrong that "hell" (or whatever place your religion uses to "motivate" you into accepting their faith and practices) is a mythical place. But it's a very weak possibility.

~AP

The Editopia has arrived!

2006-09-07T22:01:00.000-04:00

Earlier, I did promise many revisions and adjustments on the blog. These included modifications to my posts and the blog in toto.

One recent feature that may be helpful is that you can double-click on any word and it will take you to a (lexical) definition of it. Although I try hard to define uncommon terms or jargon that I use in my posts or provide links for further investigation, I can't always foresee what people may have difficulty with. So I hope this feature helps.

I also changed the provider for my news feeds so that they are more aesthetically appealing. And, I did it because the older newsfeeds may have looked like display ads to readers.

Overall, I have tweaked many things here to make it more user-friendly – I hope! Indeed, I encourage the use of this blog as a handy resource, even without me writing any posts for a long time. (However, don’t worry, I will always have plenty to say.) More is still on the way here, so continue to be patient while this blog is still under construction.

~AP

FaceBook me!

2006-09-06T22:33:00.000-04:00

I can't really say that I'm surprised that Facebook has taken such a sinister turn recently. Because I read campusprogress.org's article last year, I was privy to the less than noble intentions of Facebook's owners. Click here.

People – myself included – need to always read the Terms of Agreement before they join any website. Here is part of Facebook's "Privacy" Policy:

The Information We Collect

When you visit Facebook you provide us with two types of information: personal information you knowingly choose to disclose that is collected by us and Web Site use information collected by us as you interact with our Web Site.

When you register with Facebook, you provide us with certain personal information, such as your name, your email address, your telephone number, your address, your gender, schools attended and any other personal or preference information that you provide to us.

When you enter Facebook, we collect your browser type and IP address. This information is gathered for all Facebook visitors. In addition, we store certain information from your browser using "cookies." A cookie is a piece of data stored on the user's computer tied to information about the user. We use session ID cookies to confirm that users are logged in. These cookies terminate once the user closes the browser. By default, we use a persistent cookie that stores your login ID (but not your password) to make it easier for you to login when you come back to Facebook. You can remove or block this cookie using the settings in your browser if you want to disable this convenience feature.

When you use Facebook, you may form relationships, send messages, perform searches and queries, form groups, set up events, and transmit information through various channels. We collect this information so that we can provide you the service and offer personalized features. In most cases, we retain it so that, for instance, you can return to view prior messages you have sent or easily see your friend list. When you update information, we usually keep a backup copy of the prior version for a reasonable period of time to enable reversion to the prior version of that information.

If you post personally identifiable information in areas of the site accessible to other users, you should be aware that such information can be read, collected, or used by other users of these forums, and could be used improperly to send you unsolicited messages. We are not responsible for the personally identifiable information you choose to submit in these forums or for others’ misuse of such information. Any misuse or improper collection of information provided on Facebook is a violation of the Facebook Terms of Service and should be reported to privacy@facebook.com.

If you choose to use our invitation service to tell a friend about our site, we will ask you for your friend’s email address. We will automatically send your friend a one-time email inviting him or her to visit the site. Facebook stores this information to send this one-time email, to register a friend connection if your invitation is accepted, and to track the success of our referral program. Your friend may contact us at info@facebook.com to request that we remove this information from our database.

Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (e.g., photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalized experience.

By using Facebook, you are consenting to have your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States.

And:

Use of Information Obtained by Facebook

When you register with Facebook, you create your own profile and privacy settings. Your profile information, as well as your name, email and photo, are displayed to people in the networks specified in your privacy settings to enable you to connect with people on Facebook. We may occasionally use your name and email address to send you notifications regarding new services offered by Facebook that we think you may find valuable.

Profile information is used by Facebook primarily to be presented back to and edited by you when you access the service and to be presented to others permitted to view that information by your privacy settings. In some cases where your privacy settings permit it (e.g., posting to your wall), other Facebook users may be able to supplement your profile.

Profile information you submit to Facebook will be available to users of Facebook who belong to at least one of the networks you allow to access the information through your privacy settings (e.g., school, geography, friends of friends). Your name, school name, and profile picture thumbnail will be available in search results across the Facebook network unless you alter your privacy settings. This is primarily so your friends at other schools can find you and send a friend request. People who see your name in searches, however, will not be able to access your profile information unless they have a relationship to you (friend, friend of friend, member of your school's network, etc.) that allows such access based on your privacy settings.

Facebook will send you only service-related announcements from time to time through the general operation of the service. For instance, if a friend sends you a new message or poke, or someone posts on your wall, you may receive an email alerting you to that fact.

Generally, you may not opt-out of these communications, which are not promotional in nature. If you do not wish to receive them, you have the option to deactivate your account.

Facebook may use information in your profile without identifying you as an individual to third parties. We do this for purposes such as aggregating how many people at a school like a band or movie and personalizing advertisements and promotions so that we can provide you Facebook. We believe this benefits you. You can know more about the world around you and, where there are advertisements, they're more likely to be interesting to you. For example, if you put a favorite movie in your profile, we might serve you an advertisement highlighting a screening of a similar one in your town. But we don't tell the movie company who you are.

We may use information about you that we collect from other sources, including but not limited to newspapers and Internet sources such as blogs, instant messaging services and other users of Facebook, to supplement your profile. Where such information is used, we generally allow you to specify in your privacy settings that you do not want this to be done or to take other actions that limit the connection of this information to your profile (e.g., removing photo tag links).

I am not necessarily saying, people shouldn't use Facebook, but I would assert that you use it at your own risk. Moreover, if you do choose to use it, then please don't post your personal information on there. I'm sure that will not be much of a problem in light of the "news" feeds fiasco a' la George Orwell's magnus opus, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

__________________________
Update 9/7/06: Facebook will offer more user control over the Feed feature that they "offer." Click here for more details. And click here to hear a response from Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, on the recent controversy.

To be charitable, I will assume that the people over at Facebook don't (always) intentionally sell out some of the members on their website to spammers, right-winged nuts, and etc. And that perhaps, they genuinely thought the feeds would be a welcomed option on the website. But I can't be sure I sincerely believe it.

~AP

A Hero's Confession

2006-09-02T08:23:00.000-04:00

I have a confession to make. I have another secret life away from being a student and a blogger. Yes, my friends – I must confess that by night I am the one you know as: THE RATIOCINATOR, the Superhero who fights for justice, reason, and scientific progress.

It took a lot of heart for me to come out and explain this; but I guess many of you readers didn't buy the story that I was busy with school and a social life that prevented me from blogging as much as I've wanted to. So here it is. This is the true reason I have so little time to blog, and the reason I harp so much about logical and epistemic principles of reasoning. I was transformed into this superhero after accidentally running through the Hero Machine, at UnderGroundOnline, with my bookbag still on. Now, whenever the Principle of Charity isn't enough, I have to go out to kick a li'l contradictory ass!

Therefore, yes I am the Ratiocinator. And I will always be there so long as injustice, irrationality, and pseudoscience abound. Moreover, seeing that we live in the U.S., this will keep me busy for quite a while. Well, I am off – if ever any of you readers need me, just shout the fundamental principles of logic into the air and I shall appear to ease your mental distress. So long for now, my fellow rational people.

Addendum:
I have rethought the "principle of charity;" and I'm inclined to think it's quite dubious now. So forget that part above in my rant.

~AP

Psychological Humor Part II

2006-08-31T04:01:00.000-04:00

How ironically relevant that I found this as the mid-term elections approach. The crap often dished out by both political parties can lead one to becoming a political agnostic. Yet, it seems slinging dirt is what "works" in many U.S. elections. This psychology cartoon humorously reveals a serious hypothesis (by some) about why TV campaign ads might be so effective:

For Psychological Humor Part I, click here.

~AP

Saturn is Mine!

2006-08-26T15:13:00.000-04:00

In light of the defintion of 'planet' fiasco going on in the astronomical community as of late, I thought this entertaining, but completely off quiz would be (amusingly) relevant. Indeed, I was hoping my responses would yield Pluto as the "planet" that I rule, so that someone would complain that Pluto is not a planet. Or, at least assert that it isn't considered one anymore.

You Should Rule Saturn

Saturn is a mysterious planet that can rarely be seen with the naked eye.

You are perfect to rule Saturn because like its rings, you don't always follow the rules of nature.
And like Saturn, to really be able to understand you, someone delve beyond your appearance.

You are not an easy person to befriend. However, once you enter a friendship, you'll be a friend for life.
You think slowly but deeply. You only gain great understanding after a situation has past.

What Planet Should You Rule?

~AP

Philosophical Humor Part III

2006-08-25T07:55:00.000-04:00

Here's another one:

© 2001 Peter E. Zale: www.peterzale.com: www.comicspage.com

~AP

FDA OKs Over-the-Counter Access to Morning-After Pills

2006-08-24T10:47:00.000-04:00

FDA eases limits on Plan B sales

Yahoo! News

WASHINGTON - Women may buy the morning-after pill without a prescription — but only with proof they're 18 or older, federal health officials ruled Thursday, capping a contentious three-year effort to ease access to the emergency contraceptive.

All I can say is, "It's about freaking time!" Ceteris paribus, this could help reduce the high amount of unplanned pregnancies in this country. Well, unless you're Catholic. I'm kidding; but it's about time the FDA lived up to its mission, even in the face of heavy political opposition.

However, I've asserted many times to people when a question of my political avowals became a topic of conversation -- that, in general, I may consider myself a liberal but "socio-political ideology should not trump good science." (Neither should philosophical scruple trump good science, as Quine maintained, but I digress.)

~AP

We have a Rather "Dark" Matter at Hand

2006-08-21T18:33:00.000-04:00

Stupendous crash proves “dark matter” exists, astronomers claim

World Science

A colossal crash between two clusters of galaxies has wrenched apart “dark matter” and normal matter, proving the mysterious dark substance exists, astronomers say.

Researchers have believed for decades that normal, visible matter makes up only around a sixth of the material in the universe. The rest is an unseen, enigmatic “dark matter,” which reveals itself only through its gravitational pull.

Hmm, this is bananas. "Prove" is a strong word to throw around in science. I briefly touched on why this is so in my previous post here. I'll chalk that up to a reporter's mistranslation of the quoted scientist or the scientist talking carelessly because of his (quite justified) excitement.

A research team composed of astronomers using five telescopes (e.g., Chandra X-ray Observatory) studied the region of sky where the galaxy cluster called 1E0657-56 inhabits. Using X-rays they observed normal matter and dark matter coming apart, which disconfirmed alternative models that assert that there isn't dark matter at all; merely, our laws of gravity need serious revision.

Since, I am no expert in astronomy, and especially cosmology, I had always took the larger community of astronomers that proposed dark matter to exist as being provisionally correct. Indeed, this is strong evidence for there case.

__________________________
Update 9/8/06: As expected, a group of dissenters have called into question the recent "proof" that dark matter exists. Click here. Instead, they claim that alternative theories of gravity and gravitational lensing, such as MOG (i.e., modified gravity), can explain the so-called mystery of missing matter in the universe. Interesting proposal; but until they have some stronger evidence, I will remain unconvinced.

~AP

A Study Suggests the Universe is more Older and Fatter than We Knew

2006-08-19T19:37:00.000-04:00

Universe could be bigger, older than thought

People's Daily Online

The universe could be 15 percent bigger and 15 percent older than any previous calculations suggested, media reported on Saturday.

Hmm, this is very interesting if it's true. I had just got my mind-brain wrapped around the idea of {the earth being 13.7 billion years old and being not 15 billions years old}. However, the reporting of this latest astronomy news seems a bit ambiguous.

I mean presumably, the universe is all that there is, so researchers found it bigger relative to what? I'm being a little facetious here; I'll grant it can be bigger than previous mathematical calculations of its expansion and its age.

But older? Look, I'm not criticizing the astronomers who are much more brighter and educated than I am. But the way that their study is reported in the news, leaves room for desire. The article mentions that they measure the Triangulum Galaxy (or M33) as 15 percent farther from our galaxy than we'd expect. However, if I am interpreting the above article correctly, their measurements are from comparing the luminosity to observed brightness ratio of only two stars in that galaxy. Although I know astronomy has a bit of different methodology than the other physical sciences because of the inability to work directly with the phenomena that they study – it still seems insufficient to make the big claim that the Hubble constant (H₀) is off, which is a physical constant used to measure many other astronomical factors.

The Hubble constant, most importantly to this discussion, is involved in measuring the age and the size of the universe. So if these researchers are right, then the universe is closer to being 15.8 billion years old and not the 13.7 billion years that has been previously identified. Moreover, it’s 15 percent bigger than previously identified.

~AP

Psychological Humor part I

2006-08-15T22:48:00.000-04:00

Curv your dog.com

In respect of my Philosophical Humor posts, I am also doing Psychological Humor posts because both are my passions, and sometimes it's probably therapeutic to not take yourself so seriously.

~AP

Spice It up before Exams

2006-08-14T01:43:00.000-04:00

Call it yellow ginger, haldi, turmeric or E100, the yellow root of Curcuma longa, a staple ingredient in curry, is turning out to be gratifyingly healthy. Now Tze-Pin Ng and colleagues at the National University of Singapore have discovered that curry eating seems to boost brain power in elderly people.

So maybe all those times in the Caribbean restaurant paid off. Well, besides the huge amounts of delicious food that I consumed. Now, this has given me even more reason to go!

But on a serious note, if these findings could be replicated, it would be pretty cool. But until then, like most any initial study, it should be taken with a grain of salt (or curry?). News programs have been notoriously irresponsible in how they’ve reported scientific news. They often asserted that some new study has “shown” x to be true. To be fair, many reporters probably had no significant scientific background to have talked competently about breaking scientific news. So, props to the folks in popular mass media who have used scientifically trained correspondents, who’ve accurately reported scientific news.

All too often in the news an alleged confirmation of x is reported as if it has been conclusively proven, whereas the scientific-minded know that it's impossible to "prove" x or any other hypothesis, much less confirmed it with only one study. Only to a reasonably high degree, scientific claims possibly get confirmed. A good explication for this could’ve taken up a whole book. But I wouldn’t have presumed to be any authority within the domains of philosophy of science or statistics anyway.

However, I’ll briefly assert that empirical claims, unlike a priori claims (e.g., in logic and math), can never be conclusively proven because without the omniscience of God, we can neither observe all the relevant, possible data out there, nor (usually) can we narrow down all possible hypotheses/theories that explain them. A fortiori, that a’ la Quine and Duhem, our claims are always revisable in the light of experience. Ipso facto, we can and do refute hypotheses and theories (i.e., disprove them). (Of course, in principle, a scientist could prove her hypothesis or theory, but it’s unlikely that she would know that she did.)

Moreover, I’d briefly say that when researchers of a new study on TV news or in magazines claim that they found statistically significant results (the standard level of statistical significance in hypothesis testing is: p < .05) for some x – there are other reasons that may equally or better explain x. These apparently statistically significant findings could be explained by: (1) being only correlational – showing no causal relationship between variables whatsoever; (2) a statistical fluke; (3) due to many sorts of measurement error; (4) flawed statistical analysis; (5) due to a poorly constructed measure(s); (6) improper sample size; (7) due to researcher bias; or (8) due to simply falsifying data to yield better results. In any case, confirmation of x probably, ceteris paribus, won’t happen – if at all – until further replication (and peer review) of similar results. Indeed, I'd be suspicious of anyone who takes their results to the press before submitting it to a reputable, scientific journal for peer review.

The aforementioned asssertions above, inter alia, are why science makes such great progress – it is self-correcting through such social practices as replication and peer review. And pace strong reliance on verificationism, the use of scientific methodology furthers scientific progress, making it (at least in my opinion) sui generis, or at least unparalleled in any other field. But I digress.

Getting back to the subject, I think that this week I will be taking a trip to one of the local Caribbean spots to get some chicken curry with rice and peas. Man, I’m making myself hungry – like Pavlov’s dog – just anticipating it. (Note to myself: I really shouldn’t have used that picture.)

~AP

Philosophical Humor part II

2006-08-12T20:25:00.000-04:00

Here's another one:

from The New Yorker (3/6/00)

© 2000 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.
www.newyorker.com

~AP

Car Technology Meets up with Science Fiction

2006-08-11T17:51:00.000-04:00

Driverless cars to unclog traffic

World Science

“This may sound like pure science fiction,” said Torgeir Vaa of the Foundation for Scientific and Industrial Research at the Norwegian Institute of Technology (SINTEF), a research group based in Trondheim, Norway.

“But the technology already exists,” and demonstrations and pilot studies have been carried out, added Vaa, a senior scientist at the foundation. The organization is part of a new European Union project called CityMobil, which promises to invest 40 million euros to streamline city transport continent-wide.

I wonder if they will explode like on Total Recall. Or insult you. In any case, these automated, driverless cars seem cool, although they won't be around for a while. And we need to get them over here as well, ASAP – with all the unnecessarily big death machines, I mean SUVs that compound our traffic problems in American cities.

~AP

Philosophical Humor part I

2006-08-11T13:46:00.000-04:00

Here is a funny philosophy cartoon, I saw while web surfing (ah ADD!):

© 2000 Dave Blazek

~AP

This Blog is Bound for an Editopia!

2006-08-09T11:35:00.000-04:00

There may be plenty of adjustments and revisions heading way in many of the previous posts. This is simply for the sake of making all my posts more consistent with each other and to correct wrong or outdated content, and to express some information more clearly and logically. (Yes, maybe I'm being a little obsessive-compulsive. But it pays off [sometimes].) Please stay tuned...

~AP

Come For A Cause!

2006-08-06T21:37:00.000-04:00

Hundreds expected to come to Masturbate-a-thon

Yahoo! News

LONDON (Reuters) - Hundreds of Britons are being urged to attend what is being branded as Europe's first "Masturbate-a-thon", a leading reproductive healthcare charity said on Friday.

Marie Stopes International, which is hosting the event with HIV/AIDS charity the Terrence Higgins Trust, said it expected up to 200 people to attend the sponsored masturbation session in Clerkenwell, central London, on Saturday.

Hmm, this may be a great idea. But for some reason or another, this idea, I just can't get a grip on it.

~AP

Kansas Is "Evolving"

2006-08-06T12:25:00.000-04:00

Tampa Bay's 10 News

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Evolution opponents have lost control of the Kansas Board of Education.

Five of the ten board seats were decided in Tuesday's primary. Conservatives, who approved new classroom standards questioning evolution, won two of the seats. But pro-evolution candidates picked up three. That puts the anti-evolution crowd in a six-four minority.

It looks as if the anti-evolutionists are losing ground in Kansas. Astonishing that people can accept evolution and religious faith simultaneously huh? Indeed, I cannot conceive of how the two are necessarily inconsistent with one another. That would depend on what specific religious avowals someone holds.

In any case, maybe things are getting a little better for the youth of Kansas – but they still have a long ways to go.

~AP

Global Warming?

2006-08-04T18:07:00.000-04:00

Heat makes Pat Robertson a global warming "convert"

"We really need to address the burning of fossil fuels," Robertson said on his "700 Club" broadcast. "It is getting hotter, and the icecaps are melting and there is a buildup of carbon dioxide in the air."

Well, I guess you know that even without much background knowledge in the earth sciences (e.g., geology, oceanography), most people are coming to finally accept the fact of global warming. Especially, when Pat Robertson asserts during a taping of The 700 Club that he' s becoming a believer! Of course, he does think it's a sign of the impending apocalypse. Ah well – can't win them all.

Update: This is funny because a "hot summer" is not really convincing evidence that global warming is occurring. Well, at least it's no more convincing than a "cold winter" is evidence of a coming ice age. (Actually, the cold weather could be a sign of global warming also, as the paths of global ocean currents are predicted to change by global warming.) Indeed, I don't think we can predict how global warming can effect us on any given day, much less summer. Besides, we've experienced hotter summers before.

~AP

The Real Simba

2006-08-03T15:42:00.000-04:00

Yahoo! News

I guess lion cubs (this is so cute), like human infants, dislike going to see the doctor. Where's Timon and Pumbaa when you need them? Ah well, just remember little Simba (or Kimba?), the phrase 'Hakuna Matata'!

~AP

Sending A Thanks Over To Atheism.about.com

2006-08-03T07:59:00.000-04:00

A big thanks goes to Austin Cline et al. over at atheism.about.com for this surprising piece they posted in reference to my earlier post: A Quick Thought On Atheism and Dating. Therein, I wrote about some of my frustration with trying to date, while being a nonbeliever. In any case, I randomly googled the title of my blog, rational ahmand, and stumbled upon this:

Atheism and Dating

Religion is so important to many people's lives that they can't imagine not sharing it with others, thus preventing them from dating people outside their religion - or with no religion at all. This can be especially problematic for atheists who not only lack religion, but any belief in gods at all. This puts a lot of people off.

Rational Ahmand writes about his experiences:

Anecdotally, I can say that it seems most black and Latina women are of high religiosity. This leaves me with few options in securing a healthy love life. i) I can either persist in hiding or denying my personal views; ii) I can only date nonreligious women (however few I can find); iii) I can try to explain how my beliefs do not make me a bad person; iv) I could try dating mostly (or only) Asian and white women that do not wear their religion on their sleeve 24-7; or v) I could convert. Maybe I have other options, but it seems a combination of options (i-iii) is the most reasonable, at least for right now. The null option is not to date at all, but that would be utterly unsatisfactory.

Online dating services might make it easier for nonbelievers to find one another, but even that option is rather limited. It’s unfortunate, but what Ahmand is describing here is simply a consequence of the widespread bigotry which religious believers have against atheists. It’s a sad commentary on society today that following what appears to one to be the most rational, realistic, and sensible path would be treated as a “character flaw.”

Quick Poll: Have you ever had trouble dating because of your atheism?

Click an option to vote, or View Current Poll Results

Check out this good website on agnosticism, atheism, and other religious skepticism.

~AP

Mr. Ranganathan's Anti-Evolution Crap Continues...

2006-08-01T15:51:00.000-04:00

For someone who is a soi-disant "religion and science writer" and has "the privilege of being recognized in the 24th edition of Marquis Who's Who In The East [sic]" – you'd think he knows how to e-mail the correct person . But anyway, the anti-evolution saga continues:

Evolution, Entropy, and Open Systems (Op-Ed/Commentary Submission 2)*

Dear Editor,
The law of entropy in science teaches that the natural (or spontaneous) tendency of all matter is towards greater disorder and randomness - not greater order and complexity, as evolution would teach. Contrary to what evolutionists claim, entropy does occur in open systems as well as in closed systems. We discovered entropy here on Earth which is an open system in relation to the Sun.

The difference between an open system and a closed system is not entropy but availability of energy. Evolutionists believe that in an open system, such as the Earth, the unlimited energy available from the Sun will provide matter with the ability to overcome entropy so that matter can evolve towards ever greater levels of complexity, order, and organization.

However, it is not sufficient to have just enough energy to produce substantial levels of order. There also has to exist an energy converting and directing mechanism. Living things possess complex energy converting and directing mechanisms to temporarily overcome entropy so that a seed, for example, can develop into a tree. The question is how did biological order and such mechanisms come into being in the first place at a time when there was no energy converting and directing mechanism in Nature to overcome entropy.

Even the scientific followers of Prigogine, the father of Chaos theory, have acknowledged that only a very minimal level of order will ever be possible as a result of spontaneous or chance processes.

It has been shown, for example, that amino acids can form spontaneously (by chance), but there is already a natural tendency for molecules to form into amino acids if given the right conditions. There is, however, no natural or spontaneous tendency for the various amino acids to come together in a sequence (just like the letters in a sentence) to form protein molecules. They have to be directed to do so by the genetic code in the cells of our bodies. Even the simplest cell is made up of millions of protein molecules. If the amino acids are not in the proper sequence the protein molecules will not function!

The great British scientist Sir Frederick Hoyle has said that the mathematical probability of the sequence of molecules in the simplest cell occurring by chance is 10 to the 40,000th power or roughly equivalent to a tornado going through a junk yard of air plane parts and assembling a 747 Jumbo Jet. It is not rational to put faith in such odds for the origin of life.

Ultimately, however, scientists concede that the law of entropy will conquer the entire universe and the universe, if left to itself, will end in what scientists predict will be a heat death because all of the energy in the universe will eventually decay to a uniform temperature or level and where no more work of any sort can be accomplished. This proves that the universe could not be eternal or otherwise it would have reached this point of heat death long ago.

The law of entropy, which governs all matter, teaches that the net direction of the universe is always ever downward towards greater disorder, disorganization, and chaos - not greater order and complexity. The reality of entropy leads us to believe that an intelligent power outside of the universe was responsible for the origin of the universe and its initial order.

We are so accustomed to seeing the evolution of technology all about us (new cars, planes, boats, ships, inventions, etc.) that we assume that Nature must work the same way also. Of course, we forget that all those new gadgets and technology had a human designer behind them. Nature, however, doesn't work the same way!

Entropy is still the biggest scientific obstacle to evolution. Entropy is the opposite direction of evolution. The natural or spontaneous tendency of matter is to break-down and become more simple - not build-up and become more complex.

Science cannot prove we are here by design (creation) or by chance (evolution), but people should be free to study the evidence from both sides and decide for themselves which has better scientific support.

Belief in neither evolution or creation is necessary to the actual study of science itself. One can study and understand, for example, the human body and become a first class surgeon regardless of whether he or she believes the human body is the result of the chance forces of nature or of a Supreme Designer.

Researchers and highly qualified scientists at the Institute for Creation Research of San Diego, California can provide much helpful material on various issues concernin creation and evolution.

Sincerely,
Babu G. Ranganathan**
(B.A. Theology/Biolog)

Author's Website: www.religionscience.com

*Various forms of the above article have been published on the Internet.

**As a religion and science writer, I have had the privilege of being recognized in the 24th edition of Marquis Who's Who In The East. Telephone number and address will be furnished upon acceptance of publication.

I had this, and the other email below, in my inbox for about a year now and never paid any attention to it. After actually reading them carefully, though I try to be charitable, I think, à propos these e-mails, he is probably a nut. But, he is an intelligent nut. And he appears to have some background knowledge in science. However, Ranganathan's argument is exemplar par excellence of pseudoscience (and fallacious reasoning).

~AP

Anti-Evolution E-mail Sent To Me

2006-08-01T08:10:00.000-04:00

Some religious nutcase mistakenly e-mailed me this anti-evolution editorial, wherein he argues about the "misconceptions of evolution."

COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT EVOLUTION STILL BEING TAUGHT** (Op-Ed Submission 1)

Dear Editor,

There are common misconceptions concerning evolution which continue to be taught. For example, in November of '04 articles had appeared in major U.S. newspapers in which journalists interpreted and claimed that according to research running may have contributed to the evolution of man.

The simple fact is that physical traits and characteristics are determined and passed on by genes - not by running or any other form of exercise. Any exercises that are performed do not affect the genes.

Traits or characteristics which are acquired from the environment simply cannot be passed on to offspring ( i.e. a woman who loses her finger will not cause her baby to be born with a missing finger; changing the color or texture of your hair will not affect the hair color or texture of your descendants, and etc. ).

Thus, even if an ape ever did learn to walk and run upright it still would not be able to pass on this trait to its offspring. Only changes which occur in the genes of reproductive cells ( i.e. sperm and egg ) can be passed on to offspring. That is a simple fact of biology.

Another misconception is that any kind of change is possible among living things. However, modern science has shown that there are genetic limits to evolution or biological change and variation in nature. All biological variations, whether they are beneficial to survival or not, are possible only within the genetic potential and limits of a biological kind such as the varieties among dogs, cats, horses, cows, etc.

However, variations across biological kinds such as humans evolving from ape-like creatures and apes, in turn, evolving from dog-like creatures and so on, as Darwinian evolutionary theory teaches, are not possible unless Nature can perform genetic engineering so as to change the over-all genetic information and program in species.

It is true that natural selection occurs in nature, but natural selection itself is not a creative force. Natural selection can only work with biological variations which are possible.

The DNA molecule (or the genetic code) is actually a molecular string of various nucleic acids which are arranged in a sequence just like the letters in a sentence. It is this sequence in DNA that tells cells in the body how to construct various tissues and organs.

The common belief among evolutionists is that random mutations in the genetic code over time will produce entirely new sequences for new traits and characteristics which natural selection can then act upon resulting in entirely new species. Evolutionists consider mutations to be a form of natural genetic engineering.

However, the very nature of mutations precludes such a possibility. Mutations are accidental changes in the sequential structure of the genetic code caused by various random environmental forces such as radiation and toxic chemicals.

Almost all true mutations are harmful, which is what one would normally expect from accidents. Even if a good mutation occurred for every good one there will be thousands of harmful ones with the net result over time being disastrous for the species.

Most biological variations occur as a result of new combinations of previously existing genes - not because of mutations which are rare in nature.

Furthermore, mutations simply produce new varieties of already existing traits (i.e. varieties of hair color, texture, etc.). Sometimes mutations may trigger the duplication of already existing traits (i.e. an extra finger, toe, or even an entire head!). But mutations have no ability to produce entirely new traits or characteristics (i.e. causing hair cells to turn into feathers, wings, etc.).

It is not at all rational to believe that the gradual accumulation of random and chance mutations in the sequence of the genetic code caused by random environmental forces such as radiation will produce over time entirely new gene sequences to program for entirely new and more complex species.

Would it be rational to believe that by randomly changing the sequence of letters in a cookbook that you will eventually get a book that teaches you how to build an atomic bomb. Of course not! And if the book were a living being it would have died in the process of such random changes.

Such changes in a book or in the genetic code of species cannot occur by random or chance alterations. It would require intelligent planning and design to change one book into another or to change the DNA of a simpler species into the DNA of a more complex one. The random forces of the environment are simply not capable of doing the latter for the genetic code in species.

Furthermore, a partially-evolved and useless organ waiting millions of years to be completed via random mutations would be a biological hindrance, obstruction, and liability - not exactly a suitable candidate for natural selection assuming, of course, that random mutations could ever get an organ to a partially-evolved stage.

In fact, how could species have survived over supposedly millions of years while their vital organs were still evolving? There is no evidence in the fossil record of partially-evolved species (i.e. no half-evolved dinosaur, elephant, camel, etc.).

Given that nature has no true ability to perform genetic engineering, it is more logical to believe that the genetic and biological similarities between species are due to a common Designer rather than a common evolutionary ancestry.

Science cannot prove we're here by creation, but neither can science prove we're here by chance or macro-evolution. No one has observed either. They are both accepted on faith. The issue is which faith, Darwinian macro-evolutionary theory or creation, has better scientific support.

The simple fact is that nature can only work with the already given genetic potential in species and no more. Before any tissue, organ, or biological structure can ever develop there must first exist the prerequisite genetic information and potential.

Young people, and even adults, often wonder how all the varieties and races of people could come from the same human ancestors. Well, in principle, that's no different than asking how children with different color hair ( i.e., blond, brunette, brown, red ) can come from the same parents who both have black hair.

Just as some individuals today carry genes to produce descendents with different color hair and eyes, humanity's first parents possessed genes to produce all the variety and races of men. You and I today may not carry the genes to produce every variety or race of humans, but humanity's first parents did possess such genes.

All varieties of humans carry the genes for the same basic traits, but not all humans carry every possible variation of those genes. For example, one person may be carrying several variations of the gene for eye color ( i.e., brown, green, blue ) , but someone else may be carrying only one variation of the gene for eye color ( i.e., brown ). Thus, both will have different abilities to affect the eye color of their offspring.

There is, of course, much more to be said on this subject. Scientist, debater, writer, and lecturer, Dr. Walt Brown covers various scientific issues ( i.e. fossils, mutations, the origin of life, embryology, comparative anatomy/physiology, the issue of vestigial organs, the age of the earth, etc. ) at greater depth in his website at www.creationscience.com. Another excellent source of information from scientists who are creationists is www.icr.org.

In his essay, Dr. Brown even discusses the possibility of any remains of life on Mars having originated from the Earth due to great geological disturbances in the Earth's past which easily could have spewed rocks and dirt containing microbes into space.

It is only fair that school students be exposed to the scientific arguments and evidence on both sides of the creation/evolution issue.

Sincerely,
Babu G. Ranganathan**
( B.A. Theology/Biology)
www.religionscience.com

*Telephone number and address will be furnished upon acceptance of publication.

**Various forms of this essay have been published on the Internet.

***As a religion and science writer I have had the privilege of being recognized in Marquis Who's Who In The East. I have also given lectures and seminars before science faculty and students at various secular college and university campuses on the creation/evolution issue. Thank you so much.

I think the only misconceptions – beyond the numerous fallacies presented in the argument above – here is that Mr. Ranganathan thinks creationists (or intelligent design proponents) present any scientific alternative to evolutionary theory, e.g., natural selection and that evolution is in dispute by (credible) scientists. As I asserted before in an earlier post, evolution is not in dispute whether or not anyone accepts it. The occurrence of evolution is a fact. The processes by which it happened are what are theoretical. Yet, natural selection and its theoretical descendants are very well supported by evidence.

~AP

G.I. Freud!

2006-07-31T17:30:00.001-04:00

In light of my earlier post about Freud, detailing my newfound respect for him, I passed by a gift shop and decided to buy this toy.

Of course, I had to get this! I rarely treat myself to anything (with the recent exception of going to dim sum at a bubble tea café). And what else would a person with a psychology degree have to get? Yup, you guessed it folks – a Sigmund Freud action figure. He even has a kung-fu grip.

I guess to make my psychology action figures complete, I would want: Charles Darwin; Ivan Pavlov; William James; B.F. Skinner; Jean Piaget; and Noam Chomsky. Accoutrements, the company who makes these toys, need to get on that.

~AP

Requesting Suggestions on Blog Improvement

2006-07-30T08:59:00.000-04:00

As I continue to try to improve this blog in both the quality and content of my posts in it, or in the aesthetic presentation of it – although I was remiss until now in saying so – I always appreciate feedback for improvement. For instance, I'd like to know whether the template is agreeable with everyone's selective web browsers. And if not, what recommendations would they have to make it so. I’ve noticed when using Internet Explorer that the side panel doesn't show correctly, but I am at a lost on how to fix that. (I could argue though that people shouldn't use IE anyway, but I digress.)

I'd like to know if there are posts readers would like to see more (or less) of; and of course, their reasons for thinking so. I know I often talk of abstract ideas and topics sometimes. That's why I try to briefly define difficult terms and provide relevant links for more information. However, I'm sure many readers are (I hope) attracted to the posts for the more cerebral content that I try to express in them.

In addition, tell me, are the links and news feeds working properly in the side panel? And if so, are they useful?

Would any of you recommend a more aesthetic or creative layout? Though, ceteris paribus, some might say that it hardly matters. I'm not sure that is necessarily true. I think we judge many websites, inter alia, by their initial appearance, regardless the quality of content.

In any case, I'm open to suggestions for improvement and I would greatly appreciate any feedback from you. The steps in which to make any of these desired adjustments or revisions is even better, since I profess much ignorance in my computer knowledge, and have little proficiency in matters of design. Alternatively, if you like how things are as is, then I'd appreciate hearing that too.

~AP

My "Personality Defect"

2006-07-28T22:24:00.000-04:00

Capitalist Pig
You are 100% Rational, 71% Extroverted, 85% Brutal, and 14% Arrogant.

You are the Capitalist Pig! This means that you are less emotional than most, focusing more on logic. You are also more selfish, greedy, and care very little for the well-being of others, hence you probably hold capitalistic political views. This also means that you are particularly swinish, willing to grouse in any amount of shit for your own gain, and obese with greed. You are also an extrovert, like most of the people in the hallmark capitalistic country of America. Despite these traits, you are surprisingly not very arrogant, tending to view yourself as equal to others, just like the principle of Democracy in America. Which seems strange given that you are so mean and brutal to others at times. But despite your intentions to see others as equal, and to not be an arrogant twat, it must always be remembered that while all animals are created equal, some are more equal than others--the pigs being more equal. So while you may not be full of yourself, you certainly don't treat others with the respect they deserve. So like any farmyard pig, you are greedy, noisy, and don't care about others. The only difference between you and a pig is that you are more rational and intelligent. In conclusion, your personality defect is that you are a bit too logical, rather unemotional, way too extroverted, and also very brutal in regards to others. You may even be a bit insecure about yourself, little piggy. But at least you're not a platypus. It must suck to be a platypus, you know? All those identity issues.

To put it less negatively:

1. You are more RATIONAL than intuitive.

2. You are more EXTROVERTED than introverted.

3. You are more BRUTAL than gentle.

4. You are more HUMBLE than arrogant.

Compatibility:

Your exact opposite is the Starving Artist.

Other personalities you would probably get along with are the Smartass, the Braggart, and the Spiteful Loner.

If you scored near fifty percent for a certain trait (42%-58%), you could very well go either way. For example, someone with 42% Extroversion is slightly leaning towards being an introvert, but is close enough to being an extrovert to be classified that way as well. Below is a list of the other personality types so that you can determine which other possible categories you may fill if you scored near fifty percent for certain traits.

The other personality types:

The Emo Kid: Intuitive, Introverted, Gentle, Humble.

The Starving Artist: Intuitive, Introverted, Gentle, Arrogant.

The Bitch-Slap: Intuitive, Introverted, Brutal, Humble.

The Brute: Intuitive, Introverted, Brutal, Arrogant.

The Hippie: Intuitive, Extroverted, Gentle, Humble.

The Televangelist: Intuitive, Extroverted, Gentle, Arrogant.

The Schoolyard Bully: Intuitive, Extroverted, Brutal, Humble.

The Class Clown: Intuitive, Extroverted, Brutal, Arrogant.

The Robot: Rational, Introverted, Gentle, Humble.

The Haughty Intellectual: Rational, Introverted, Gentle, Arrogant.

The Spiteful Loner: Rational, Introverted, Brutal, Humble.

The Sociopath: Rational, Introverted, Brutal, Arrogant.

The Hand-Raiser: Rational, Extroverted, Gentle, Humble.

The Braggart: Rational, Extroverted, Gentle, Arrogant.

The Capitalist Pig: Rational, Extroverted, Brutal, Humble.

The Smartass: Rational, Extroverted, Brutal, Arrogant.

Be sure to take my Sublime Philosophical Crap Test if you are interested in taking a slightly more intellectual test that has just as many insane ramblings as this one does!

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 90% on Rationality
You scored higher than 74% on Extroversion
You scored higher than 92% on Brutality
You scored higher than 5% on Arrogance

Link: The Personality Defect Test written by saint_gasoline on OkCupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

~AP

Beuleçhætics

2006-07-24T01:21:00.000-04:00

Well, folks I’ve been busy again. After much success with CodSwallop Rx® – still available in all health and GNC stores – my partners and I at Barnum E. Fect & Credulity, Inc. moved onto promoting another great idea. Many of you are aware of how I’ve harped frequently on my background knowledge in philosophy and the sciences, particularly in psychology. And as I was looking for answers to my own psychological quandaries, I experienced a Gestalt moment. I had the thought, {Aha! It’s so clear to me now.} The psychologists and psychiatrists have it all wrong. Our so-called mental illnesses are not manifestations of psychological and physiological processes gone awry. No no no! After ten years, I discovered what clinicians call “mental illness” is actually the result of losing touch with our inner universe. My so-called cognitive problems and clinical depression were relieved once I became in touch with my inner universe.

The questions you are probably wondering are: (1) what is an “inner universe;” and (2) how can I get in touch with it? I have the answers ladies and gentleman – my new book Beuleçhætics. My magnus opus took years of research and personal suffering to reach. I would love to tell you everything you’d like to know in this post, but I don’t have the time. I only have time to give you a quick summary, so that you can pick up this book and change your life too.

Our “inner universes,” like the outer universe are the ultimate domains of time and space. Recent research in quantum physics shows there are countless universes with in the multiverse. Each existing on a membrane that goes in and out of existence. However, physicists have never asserted that these branes are of the similar magnitude as our own Milky Way galaxy. Some are infinitesimally small, while others are infinitesimally large. Either way it doesn’t matter, since they all exist within extra dimensions with which we have no contact. Of course we can’t, each bubble brane’s is closed off from another because they constitute different, independent domains of time and space. All the forces of nature are bound to our universe, except for gravity.

This is important; gravitational waves exist in the extra dimensions where bubble branes exist. This explains why the gravitational field appears so weak compared to the other three fundamental physical forces (or more accurately physical “interactions”), electromagnetic, nuclear, and weak. My gestalt moment was when I realized just as gravitational fields are the curvature of time and space, resulting in the mutual attraction of two physical bodies; they are also the curvature of our psychological connectedness to our personal identity, resulting in the mutual attraction (or coherence) of mental universals. The normal ebb and flow of (mental) gravitational waves results in being mentally healthy.

These gravitational waves extend outside our domain of space-time and into others. We all carry inner universes “within us.” I use scare quotes because technically speaking, they aren’t in us per se. They exist within the extra dimensions with which we have no physical contact. We are in contact with them mentally though by mental gravitation.

Problems result when during the developmental process when our inner universe on bubble branes bumps into another brane. The degree of contact between our brane and another corresponds to the degree of damage to our psyche. Although it would be easier to determine the severity of contact by measuring gravitational waves, physicists are still trying to figure this out. Yet, I found that the degree of damage to degree of contact can be determined by the type of psychological problem one is experiencing. It appears that severe mental illnesses correlate to higher degrees of contact between our inner universe and other universes. Whereas, it appears that mild mental illnesses correlate to lower degrees of contact between them.

You may be thinking now, "Sure that explains a lot, but if there are no physical ways to contact our inner universe, then how can we possibly be brought in tune with our inner universe?" That is what I discuss in Beuleçhætics: bringing-egress-universes-lined-equally-epigrammatic-to-inner-cognitive-states. I go into painstaking detail of my investigation of making our personal identity-over-time and psychological connectedness rationally coherent, or mutually attractive in terms of mental gravitation. The steps are methodic and reliable, applying a theory of cognitive science and naturalized epistemology that involves the conditions of minimal rationality to resolve incoherent, irrational thoughts and beliefs.

The end process of the steps outlined in my book, Beuleçhætics, will bring one back in touch with her inner universe and eliminate the initial condition that she was suffering from. If allopathic medicine has not worked for you, I implore you to get this book. You may not need it; but someone you know may need it.

Beuleçhætics is available in your local bookstore. Or, you can order directly from me. Please send check or money order for $14.95, plus $4.95 for shipping and handling to:

Beuleçhætics Today
Rational Ahmand
P.O. Box 187
Silver Spring, MD 20901-6606

Or to use credit card; Visa and MasterCard only, call: 1-800-RIP-UOFF

Notice
This book is intended for informational purposes only, not as a medical manual. The information given here is designed to help you make informed decisions about your health. It is not intended as a substitute for any treatment that may have been prescribed to you by your doctor or psychologist. If you suspect that you have a medical or psychological problem, we urge you to seek competent medical or psychological help.

~AP

Politics Test!

2006-07-20T10:39:00.000-04:00

You are a
Social Liberal
(76% permissive)

and an...
Economic Liberal
(21% permissive)

You are best described as a:

Socialist

Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid
Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

For fun, I took this politics "test" on okcupid.com. Wow! I've asserted before that I was a liberal. But declaring me a socialist – I doubt it. Well try this amusing quiz for yourself, if you like.

~AP

Quack Or Scientist: A Reconsideration Of Freud

2006-07-15T15:19:00.000-04:00

I recently read my introductory psychology textbook. And no, I was a good student! I read the original textbook from my first psychology course long ago. Afterwards, I bought a different introductory textbook because my teacher assistant at the time told me it was a better source of reference than the other textbook I used in my course. Anyway, the more I read, the more I realized the immense influence of psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, on the entire field of psychology, not just on the fields of psychiatry and (blah!) literary criticism. I was aware of some of his accomplishments before, but I was rather skeptical that his influence was a positive one. I thought he was just a quack simpliciter.

Now the more I thought about it, the more I held him in similar regards within the field of psychology, as I did Darwin and Einstein within their respective fields. Good timing, this probably was as the centennial anniversary celebration of his work has recently passed. In any case, some of the greatest minds e.g., Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Chomsky were important not because their ideas were necessarily correct. Rather, it was their immense influence on both science and on our views about the world, which made them great. Nevertheless, many of their ideas, nonce, remained staples of scientific knowledge.

Before I started learning psychology proper, I was agnostic in my opinion of Freud. I saw him simply as a psychiatrist qua psychiatrist. However, my burgeoning interest in both, his ideas and in practicing medicine (and perhaps my troubled childhood) eventually led me to psychology. As I learned more about abnormal and clinical psychology, I thought, {hmm, maybe he's got something here}.¹

But after I took some courses in the "harder sciences," and after I exhaustively read online The Skeptic's Dictionary years ago, I developed a positivist attitude toward all things I perceived as not within the domain of the "natural" sciences. Ipso facto, I even became skeptical of the field of psychology's scientific status. (Something that luckily, philosophy and a better understanding of scientific psychology quickly cured me of.)

After all, I thought, {for goodness sake, this dude snorted and advocated the use of coke!}. But more relevantly, I thought that his case studies provided insufficient evidence for his extraordinary claims. Moreover, the blatant sexism and pessimism underwriting his theories was unsavory. And learning how he didn't test out many of his claims (or they were untestable), seemed a recipe for quackery at its worst. Furthermore, people that disagreed with aspects of his research were often shown their way out the door. Generally, I thought that his theories were pure codswallop. And I developed some enmity towards proponents of his work – viz., psychoanalysis, and psychodynamic theory, in toto.

I even recalled a psychology professor who took shots at Freud during one of his lectures. He described a dual listening task; about how a participant had to pay attention to information she heard in one ear, to recall later, while she simultaneously followed a story in the other ear. I roughly recalled him asserting that; "In the ear in which you're supposed to pay close attention to, you would hear Freud, while listening to maybe a fairytale in your other ear." Then he remarked, "Oh wait, listening to Freud would be the fairytale!" These kinds of reinforcements negatively swayed me on Freud and his ideas. (It was funny though.)

Yet, I thought quite differently now. Although he made some extraordinary claims, many of which weren't tested, that's if they could be. And although his theory of personality and psychopathology appeared to be refuted, I thought many uncharitable critics out there ought to have respected him because of his lasting influence on psychology and many other fields as well.

So, what influence did Freud have on psychology and related fields? First, he correctly thought, along with other early pioneers of psychology, that to understand the origins of behavior we needed to study the scientific principles that determined it. Second, he developed the first scientific theory of personality (despite huge opposition to it), which described the structure and function of the personality. Whether or not it was correct, it was still one of the most influential theories in psychology or any other field. Furthermore, many subsequent studies of some of Freud's claims within psychoanalytic theory over the past one hundred years were well supported. What were these confirmed claims? Well, do you have a few minutes to spare? (Obviously, if you're still reading this, then you do.)

(1) Now that behaviorism, the view that only directly observable behavior can be studied scientifically, has all but died in psychology (and also in analytic philosophy) – psychologists no longer considered it unscientific to study mental phenomena. Indeed, cognitivism, the view that we can study mental processes that underly behavior and that these processes are computational-represesentational states of the mind-brain, has by and large became the dominant paradigm of contemporary psychology. Thereby, it allowed psychologists to carry out numerous studies that indeed supported Freud's monumentally important claim that most of our mental processes were unconscious and yet had a more profound effect on our behavior than our conscious processes did. (2) There was support for his claim that people used defense mechanisms – unconscious processes that act to reduce anxiety. A major type of defense mechanism was repression, also called selective forgetting, to force painful or anxiety-producing information out of consciousness. The more likely the tendency to repress, the fewer negative memories a person would have. Obviously, this was important in determining whether some alleged cases of repressed memories of childhood abuse actually occurred; or whether they were always the result of false memory syndrome.

Third, since he started as a neurologist he correctly believed that all (human) behavior was biologically based – although this was heavily contested in Freud's era, even until recent times. Yet, he also correctly suggested that our heredity interacts with the environment to determine our personalities and behavior. Arguably, he was one of the original evolutionary psychologists.

Fourth, his controversial theory of psychosexual development, which included his claims about the Oedipal (and Electra) conflict, the psychosexual stages – e.g., oral, anal, and phallic, I admitted, was very hard to swallow. However, there was supporting evidence that people went through a stage-like process of personality development as he claimed. And current theorizing in developmental psychology recognized the central role of early parent-child relationships in adult adjustment. Well, if it was true, then that explained a lot in my personal life!

Fifth, his dream theory, although not believable in many respects, was fundamental to most dream content analysis. This led to research that provided evidence that dreams had an unconscious origin as Freud himself claimed, and that dreams were useful in psychotherapy (exactly how was debatable though). I agreed with the evidence for unconscious origin, salva veritate, evidence that dreams also seemed merely the by-product of normal physiological processes.

Sixth, he provided the first scientific approach to psychotherapy; which gave practitioners a set of careful guidelines in which they diagnosed and treated patients. I doubted someone would've liked some of the previous options before his clinical practice existed. Unless she enjoyed the sort of treatment some people with mental disorders received, which was often cruel even to wild animals (especially if you work for P.E.T.A.), or enjoyed demons exorcised from you by priests. Alternatively, you might've lucked out and received "treatment" from a considerate, pre-Freudian therapist (I doubt it), but who was of little help to your psychological problems.

So yes, Freud's theories lacked scientific precision; and they were overly complex and subjective. Was he engaged in unscientific practices? Was the current state of psychodynamic theory, theorizing based on his psychoanalytic theory, in need of serious revision through empirical investigation? Absolutely! Indeed, I had little tolerance for current psychodynamic theorists and therapists who clung to Freud's antiquated and refuted (or untestable) hypotheses more as a religious dogma. Rather as competent scientists, they should've treated his hypotheses as any other claims, which we could be forced to abandon in the light of experience.

However, for the reasons I asserted above, I thought it unwarranted to label Freud a quack. Viz., because of the importance of his concepts and ideas e.g., the {unconscious}, {defense mechanisms}, and {dream analysis}. Because he proved, we could have a scientific theory of personality and psychopathology. This was a bold, complex theory of psychology, which provided a rich understanding of the biological, psychological, and social processes underlying human behavior and human nature. Because of all this, his immense influence encompassed not only psychology and psychiatry, but also encompassed medicine, education, sociology, anthropology, English literature, and religion. To have thrown away his important scientific concepts and ideas because of its (sometimes) unscientific basis was to commit the genetic fallacy: to irrelevantly assert that a claim is false (or true) because of its origins or history. My informed opinion was no longer that Freud was a quack.

Indeed, Sigmund Freud was one of the greatest minds known to science and surely a scientist, in every sense of the word 'scientist'.
_____________________________________________________
¹The Atheism Chronicles part I (q.v.)

~AP

The Atheism Chronicles Part III: Uncommon Kinds of (Dis)Belief

2006-07-05T14:29:00.000-04:00

In an unrelated post that I wrote about Bruce Lee, I talked about how learning about his personal avowals led me to atheism. This wasn’t a huge step since I was teetering on that view anyway. Yet, before taking that small leap, I made gradual steps to my eventual avowal that God didn’t exist. If anything, before I read The Warrior Within: The Philosophies of Bruce Lee, I didn’t even have a concept of atheism. I took for granted that there was a "higher being." What I didn’t take for granted though, was that this being was necessarily the Christian god.

This leads to some terms I’ve came across over the years, which refer to rather uncommon (non)religious avowals. At the time before becoming atheist, I was a panentheist (although I wasn’t aware that there was a term which described my belief then). A panentheist: someone who believes that God is the governing force in nature, or that god is in all things. I came to avow this belief because it corresponded to concepts and ideas I learned about in Eastern philosophy. Specifically, Taoism and Zen Buddhism, which if I recall correctly, talked about concepts such as {t'ai-chi}, (not the martial art, but they’re related) – meaning the "Great Ultimate." The Great Ultimate is expressed in two modes, 'yin' and 'yang', symbols of contrast and difference that have a complementary nature and govern all aspects of nature.

As cool as these, as well as other Eastern concepts and ideas sound, I don’t take any of them seriously anymore – my teenage years of wanting to be a ninja or shaolin monk are over. Sigung (grandfather/founder) Lee is still one of my heroes though; and I still try to practice his martial arts. But I digress.

Anyway, to further complicate things, panentheism is related but distinct to pantheism: the belief that God is nature (allegedly Einstein’s own religious avowal). Although these are theistic beliefs, historically, Christians labeled people who’ve avowed these beliefs, atheists because they denied that God is transcendent. A good example is the Jewish philosopher and great seventeenth century rationalist, Baruch Spinoza, who avowed pantheism and was considered a heretic by Christians and Jews alike.

When I was much younger, I flirted with deism: the belief that God exists, who created the world but is not immanent in it. It just seemed to me inconsistent with reality (and hence, irrational) that a god of the Judeo-Christian type existed. I guess my folks should have hid the encyclopedias. Indeed, an old joke amongst atheists (tracing back to Diderot) is that a deist is one who hasn’t lived long enough to be an atheist. Well, it seems this joke was true in my case.

Anyway, a type of theism I find more reasonable than others is fideism: the belief that God exists but that this cannot be rationally defended – only taken on personal faith. I think this type of theism is more reasonable because many fideists accept the standard arguments against the existence of God or reject natural religion. They are unlikely to be the people trying to force "intelligent design" into science classrooms or refusing medical treatment for their ill children due to religious prohibitions.

However, my problem with fideism, as with other variants of theism is that nothing should be taken "on faith." While I have no problem with someone maintaining a personal faith in God – faith alone cannot justify belief in anything. If so, we would be forced to accept many evil or psychotic acts merely because people justified them on faith. Imagine early twentieth century Europe and the Nazi movement is given a freebie from surrounding nations to continue the holocaust throughout Europe, because Nazis take fascism and Hitler’s commands on faith. Alternatively, the transatlantic slave trade continuing in America because slavery is condoned in early Christian doctrine, which slave-traders and buyers take on faith – hell, even the biblical Jesus spoke of slaves obeying their masters. (The King James Bible replaces 'slave' with words like 'servant' to make Jesus' teachings sound more "palatable.")

Well once I became atheist, shortly afterwards I flirted with the idea of being an agnostic-atheist. An agnostic-atheist: someone who claims both disbelief that God exists and whether God exists cannot be known. Yes, I know that sounds weird; claiming to be both seems rather immodest or muddled. But as concerning my prior post, I used to be misinformed about the meaning of agnosticism, not to mention, the false distinction between weak and strong atheism. I should have been more careful where I got my information. Fortunately, learning epistemology proper cleared up much confusion for me. However, to be charitable the understanding here is that an agnostic-atheist rests their disbelief on the prior belief that God’s existence is not knowable. (Indeed, many theists rest their faith in God on the same belief. They claim that God is "mysterious.")

While I think it’s certainly consistent and reasonable to believe both that God doesn’t exist and that his existence is not knowable (in any meaningful way), it nonetheless remains a muddle to describe this avowal as agnostic-atheism. It seemed the eminent mathematician and philosopher, Bertrand Russell wrestled with this issue too when he wrote the essay, Am I An Agnostic Or Atheist? These days, I rest my atheism on the fact that belief in God’s existence is clearly irrational; God being unknowable is one of the many reasons for this.

On a random note, this reminds me of a recent episode of The Colbert Report, in which Stephen Colbert jokingly describes agnostics as "atheists without balls." Pace Colbert, agnostics can be quite "ballsy" on religious matters. But I thought it was funny since so many people incorrectly think agnostics are just afraid to "pick" a side.

Let’s get back to the uncommon beliefs. There are radical atheists who claim that God is logically impossible or that they know God doesn’t exist. It’s obvious such claims are a matter of faith – the very irrational belief they should be avoiding – and not logical reasoning and evidence.

In addition, there are so-called apatheists: people who can be either theist or atheist but are united in believing that God doesn’t matter at all, even if He does exists. Devout believers should be more worried about these sorts than atheists! After all, if given convincing evidence, an atheist would probably reject their disbelief, whereas apatheists are incorrigible.

The most interesting nonreligious belief I came across was linguistic agnosticism. My professor Odell, who claimed either he or his old professor Leonard Linsky created it, described the belief to me during a metaphysics lecture. I don’t claim to fully understand this belief, but as spelt out by Odell he writes, "The view that many religious and theological doctrines are linguistically muddled—that it is far from clear that these doctrines makes sense." I’m not sure this is a type of atheism since Odell amusingly claims this belief is "above" atheism. However, he said he is simply atheist towards the Judeo-Christian concept of god.

For a while, I immodestly avowed this belief; I guess because it fit the positivist (radical empiricists that reject all metaphysics as nonsense) phase I was going through at the time. I interpreted linguistic agnosticism to mean being skeptical whether most religious texts are meaningful. Yet, I discovered later that this belief also seems to make some semantic assumptions. After realizing this, I decided I shouldn’t rest my disbelief on claims from such a new and uncertain field like semantics.

This concludes my tripartite post, The Atheism Chronicles – at least for right now. You will have to forgive me for the constant revisions and adjustments you may notice in these posts. But often it’s rather difficult to express precisely what I mean, as I imagine it is for most people. Luckily, in virtue of this being a blog allows me to revise and adjust, mutatis mutandis, for better clarity and cogency. Yet, I usually maintain the same overall content in my posts. In any case, I hope it cleared up some confusion about atheism. Or at least supplied people with a laugh or some fodder for thought.

~AP

Atheism Explained Part II: Do You Believe-Not or Not-Believe?

2006-06-29T19:41:00.000-04:00

Another issue I’ve come across dealing with atheism is with avowed atheists themselves. There seems to be some bickering amongst atheists about what the term 'atheism' means. The typical meaning of 'atheism' is the disbelief that God or gods exist. (Note bene: the term 'God' refers specifically to the Judeo-Christian concept of god). However, some atheists would prefer to say that the term 'atheism' generally refers to the nonbelief in God and that the disbelief in God has a 'stronger" meaning. Whether there is a meaningful distinction between "weak" and "strong" atheism, I will set aside for right now.

It seems many would-be atheists have muddled the usage of 'disbelief' and 'nonbelief'.

Disbelief is to believe that some sentence is false, that its negation is true.

Whereas,

Nonbelief is the state of suspended judgment, neither believing a sentence is true nor false.

We would disbelieve that pigs can fly. We would be in nonbelief as to whether there are an even or odd number of stars in the sky. So if we say, "I don’t believe in god;" what we naturally mean to say is "I believe not." The confusion here is probably due to the ambiguity and vagueness of ordinary language (or maybe it’s due to what Wittgenstein refers to as, "when language goes on holiday"). Moreover, as Quine asserted, “But the fact is, taking any sentence at random, that belief and disbelief are less usual than nonbelief.” Stuff such as, will it snow next Christmas? Will SETI ever detect signals from an alien civilization? Here we’d say, “I don’t know” instead – but this simply means we are in nonbelief. In other words, when we are in nonbelief this is agnosticism: which is the attitude of nonbelief or skepticism, especially on religious matters.

Of course, we can believe without knowing. “Knowing” is just a special type of believing. Merely believing something is not tantamount to knowing it. Knowing involves a reliable process whereby we have true beliefs.1

The points above are important because there are some misinformed theists and atheists, who deny that agnosticism is a legitimate position on God’s existence. (I guess both groups, but especially atheists since they’re the underdog, would like to claim as many people to their side as possible.) They claim that you are either some type of theist or atheist. This is patently false, as I hope I’ve given good reason to see how we’re quite apt to nonbelief to many sentences uttered to us – this would include whether God exists.

So, agnosticism is not necessarily the claim that one cannot know whether god exists, as sometimes thought. It’s merely the suspension of judgment on such matters. And this is a legitimate position, unique from atheism and theism. The whole distinction between weak and strong atheism therefore, seems to be false if disbelief in god and the absence of belief in god are considered different types of atheism – since we find that "absence of belief" is simply the position of agnosticism.

Nevertheless, this discussion doesn’t exclude the different varieties of how people express their belief or disbelief. And it’s not so important whether we avow being agnostics, atheists, or theists. What’s most important is how we treat each other regardless of philosophical and religious belief.
______________________________
¹Some would otherwise argue that knowing entails that we ground our beliefs in experience. Yet, this traditional empiricist view of knowledge is no less controversial than my reliabilist one; actually, it’s more so. This seems patently false; but nonce I won’t go into this matter. Suffice to say, grounding our knowledge in experience is but one means of acquiring true beliefs – but not the only means.

~AP

The Atheism Chronicles Part I: What Is Wrong With You Atheists!

2006-06-29T13:43:00.000-04:00

In my first post I ever wrote on here, I gave quite a lengthy and quasi-technical spiel on my main philosophical avowals. These are the least apt to change within my belief-system; the ones with which I’d take it to the wall. (Although, to make my beliefs more coherent, I’ve edited that post many times to revise and adjust my avowals after doing further research.) One of my main avowals was atheism.

This seems to be the most disliked or misunderstood philosophical avowal that I hold. Ah well! If anything, I think if my adherence to naturalism was taken seriously by religious (and paranormal) believers, they might find it just as contentious – if not more so! – than atheism, since many of my other avowals are centered on it, which includes atheism.

One of the (many) misgivings about atheists is that we believe in nothing. Besides that assertion being utterly absurd, I seriously doubt it’s genuinely possible to not hold any beliefs. For a first reason, many of our beliefs aren’t a matter of choice. For a second reason, it appears we come into this world with many innate beliefs. And for a third one, we seem largely unaware of what we genuinely believe until given some careful reflection – which is why I usually assert my beliefs as avowables (or "avowals" for short). However, we needn’t get into this here; especially since, it’s off the topic at hand.

Another misgiving is the assertion that all atheists are necessarily materialists (or physicalists). Indeed, I’d admit many atheists are materialists. This seems to be the case because those same atheists also hold a scientistic worldview. But not all atheists do. Some may be phenomenalists or dualists (I’ve met a few).

A really absurd misgiving about atheists is the assertion that since we don’t believe in God, we must consider ourselves "gods." This is pretty funny. This seems more a problem for theists than it is for atheists. Viz., they cannot let go of a worldview wherein some deity is involved. So, if we disbelieve in a personal god (who is a supernatural, psychological being that is immanent in this world), we must be de facto claiming to be our own god. I don’t think this even garners a serious response.

Related to what’s asserted above, is the assertion that atheists subscribe to Satanism or some type of paganism. Yeah right! I think it’s safe to assume that if we disbelieve that God exists, then we likely don’t believe Satan (or other supernatural beings like the Great Pumpkin) exists either. Satan and other demonic entities are part and parcel of a religious doctrine(s) that most of us reject in toto. Not to mention, many moderate Christians also reject the belief in Satan and demons.

Do you recall back in grade school or at ballgames reciting the pledge of allegiance and coming to a part where it says, “one nation, under God?” Well, this expression can be attributed to the McCarthyism era – where it was asserted that since many communist leaders declared atheism in their nations, then all avowed atheists were probably a bunch of "commies." And of course we have to protect our democracy from communism, so … we’ll start by forcing children to recite a modified pledge of allegiance to both, God and country. And we’ll inscribe religious phrases such as, 'In God We Trust' on our money and government buildings. That’ll protect our freedom from the threat of atheist communists!

Although I consider myself a liberal (sorry if that disappoints some of you), I’m far from communist; but some right-winged extremists would label anyone with liberal leanings as “communist-friendly.” Yet, since communism is actually an economic ideology, I’ll assume they’re probably referring to socialism. Either way, it should be obvious that atheists aren’t necessarily socialists or communists anymore than theists are necessarily neo-conservatives.

A misgiving about atheists I find particularly insulting is the assertion that we are amoral (or immoral), or if we are moral, we still implicitly obey God’s commands. Sorry to disappoint these churchies, but the domain of ethics was constituted long before Christianity existed and probably would continue after Christianity is gone. Besides, most atheists think that being moral is good in itself, not because they want to receive "props" from God or fear eternal damnation. Indeed, if some theists only act morally because they think God commands it, then by all means let them maintain that false belief! I don’t want religious zealots harming others just because they no longer fear eternal punishment (or lack of reward) for their immoral acts.

In any case, acting morally because God commanded so is one of many proposed ethical theories – not the one. It’s commonly referred to as the “Divine Command Theory.” Of course, the problem with this so-called ethical theory has been known since Plato wrote Euthypro. In this story, Socrates asks Euthypro whether what is pious (i.e., good) is because the gods say it is or because the gods want us to do what is good. (In case you are unfamiliar with the Socratic dialogues, Socrates [or Plato’s portrayal of him] was fond of challenging the beliefs of arrogant, self-righteous men he met in Athens.)

On one hand, they agreed – through the clever coaxing of Socrates – that if something is good merely because the gods command so, then what’s "good" becomes arbitrary since it’s plausible they can command things we’d find intuitively wrong, e.g., murdering innocent children. (Have you ever read the Old Testament?) On the other hand, if the gods want us to do what is good, then there seems to exist something above the gods. This is important to this discussion not because the Euthypro dilemma is the final word against Divine Command Theory (the fact that the theory is useless to nonbelievers is though) but because it implies that, there are objective moral principles that we can hold without any belief in God. Hence, atheists are neither necessarily amoral nor immoral.

Indeed, most atheists have been the most ethical people I’ve ever known. And there is some empirical support for this. Moreover, if you think about it, this makes sense since atheists don’t typically believe in the “afterlife.” Rather, they assume that we should make the most of our lives because it’s the only life we’ll ever have. And this includes treating one another with the utmost dignity and respect.

At the least, atheists and theists are about equal in their morality. So this cannot be a mark against atheists (unless it’s also a mark against theists). Yet, I could be mean and mention how most criminals strongly avow religious beliefs or how many serial killers and mass murderers claim they were religiously inspired to commit their horrific acts – but I won’t.

It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.

--Sigmund Freud

~AP

Introducing Codswallop Rx®!!!

2006-06-16T03:56:00.000-04:00

In my absence recently, I have been busy and not blogging as frequently as I would like. But I will tell you why folks … I was in the last stages of finalizing all the immense details for release of my brand new herbal supplement: Codswallop Rx®.

People that regularly read my blog may be wondering, “Rational Ahmand, are you serious?” Yes I seriously am. And in my spare time away from my formal studies, I’ve worked diligently to be to provide you with something that many of you can use. It is great! Codswallop Rx® is an all-natural supplement clinically proven to cure or prevent many forms of cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cerebral palsy, erectile dysfunction, insomnia, lupus, migraines, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, anemia, arthritis, AD/HD, autism, depression, and schizophrenia. Our recent clinical trials have also shown it to be effective in the treatment of AIDS.*

Did you know that natural healers outside of the western world have long known that the ingredients used in Codswallop Rx® – a potent extract from the livers of codfish, plus many other common medicinal herbs (e.g., B vitamin complex, echinacea, gingko biloba, ginseng, golden seal, grape seed extract, guarana, ma huang, St. John’s wort, and yohimbe root) – when synergistically combined, are capable of curing and treating many medical diseases for over the last four millennia? However, until recently scientists had no clue how the exact combination of these ingredients worked to produce such astonishing results. Even more amazing is that during our initial investigations of previous medical literature, we came across unpublished articles that describe how Codswallop Rx® ingredients were known since the times of ancient Egypt and thought to have been mentioned within a considerable catalog of ancient medical treatments, which were forever lost when the Library of Alexandria was destroyed. We can only wonder what other miraculous cures of the ancients were lost to history! Most of the medical science we have now is just a matter of rediscovery – a “reinventing the wheel,” if you please.

Doubt that it works? Well, I welcome all you skeptics to try it; if you are not completely satisfied, then you get your money back guaranteed. My research team and I were all initially skeptical too that such a simple, natural product when combined with a good diet, exercise, and stress management could produce such amazing benefits. However, and fortunately for us all, our tests have proved otherwise. In addition, none of our testing was done on any animals.

If you are in a rush to try this great product now (a wise choice!), you can order directly from me. Please send check or money order for $19.95, plus $4.95 for shipping and handling to:

Codswallop Rx® For Everybody
Rational Ahmand
P.O. Box 187
Silver Spring, MD 20901-6606

Or to use credit card; Visa and MasterCard only, call: 1-800-RIP-UOFF

But wait, only $9.95 (plus $4.95 for shipping and handling) for the first one hundred customers. You will receive a shipment of 100 capsules of Codswallop Rx®, plus a free guide to natural healing: The Power of Prevention. Codswallop Rx® is also available at GNC and other retail drug and health stores.

Don’t miss out on this wonderful opportunity folks. We may have to wait a long time before practitioners of allopathic medicine stumble upon this, but you don’t have to! Wealthy people have been using these products for years to stay healthy, but now the secret is out. Try brand new Codswallop Rx® today.

*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food & Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any diseases.
(In other words, these claims are bullshit.)

Manufactured for Distribution by: Barnum E. Fect & Credulity, Inc., Baltimore, MD 21207 USA

~AP

Still Here...

2006-06-08T21:33:00.000-04:00

I’ve been away for a while. Unfortunately, I had some personal issues that took precedence over my blog. Yet, I did manage to edit some of my older posts. If you’re interested: click here or here. Although I may have not written in a while, I do offer news feeds that are constantly updated in the side panel. And don't worry this is not a shameless promotion; I don't make any money from people clicking on the newsfeeds. (I wish!)

Well, despite my absence it seems great that you and I are still alive to interact on this site. Today is June 8, 2006 and it’s been two days since 6-6-06! Yay! So far, there has been neither any demonic mêlée nor an apocalypse.

Although I am atheist, it would be no doubt in my mind that there was a god and so forth of Christian dogma if I saw things occur as confusingly foretold in the Book of Revelations, verse 13:18. However, it seems patently obvious that the stuff in Revelations was mistranslated, quite over-sensationalized, and not specifically meant for this day and time. During those times, a foreshadowing of the end of the world would’ve likely been the fall of the Roman Empire. Oops, I guess that already happened and somehow, we’re still here. A fortiori, the mark of the beast or "666," besides (for the sake of argument) being “loosely” (mis)translated to refer to a particular date in time when some sort of spiritual mayhem would occur has already passed, doesn’t even apply anymore. The mark wasn’t 6606; it was 666. In other words, all the destruction and holy mayhem should have taken place in the 7th century (or 6th?), 6-6-6. Moreover, the number '666' is a sign of luck in Chinese culture.

I guess we can ask historians would happen on the day of that year. But I think it’s safe to say despite all the magical thining, nothing extraordinarily malevolent or supernatural took place other than normal feudalism, disease, and other "treasures" of the Dark Ages.

But wait! Maybe we need to flip one of the sixes to get a nine. Then, maybe tomorrow is doomsday or perhaps this coming September 6, 2006? Still yet, June 6, 2006. Or with Occam’s razor, we could simply (reasonably) assume that this so-called mark of the beast is utterly meaningless and all its interpretations are false. Not to mention, the Book of Revelations was one of several scriptures arbitrarily chosen to be canonical, during the Council of Carthage in 397 – I’m not making this up either.

The type of cherry picking Christian fundamentalists do with biblical scripture reminds me of Nostradamus' followers who reinterpret his gibberish writings repeatedly to make it fit current times. Whatever Nostradamus' cryptic messages meant (if anything at all), it seems obvious they didn’t necessarily pertain to now, just as biblical prophecies of the so-called apocalypse didn't. The self-deception of these sithlords, err I mean supernatural folk is strong in them! When prophecy fails, just say you "misinterpreted" the message and keep reinventing the date until it happens (or people finally ignore you).

~AP

A Wonderful Sight to See in the Southern Hemisphere

2006-03-30T11:31:00.000-05:00

SPACE.com -- Photos: Eclipse Wows the World

This was a remarkable sight. I had to see the solar eclipse via the Internet since I do not live anywhere between Brazil and Mongolia. However, there are much more to come.

Nasa even has a web page where people can check on the past, present, and future eclipses – solar and lunar. NASA - Eclipse Home Page

~AP

The Passing of a Great Philosopher

2006-03-14T18:10:00.000-05:00

Sir Peter Strawson - Comment - Times Online

I am a little late with this information but ... Sir Peter Frederick Strawson, a great British philosopher, passed away on February 13, 2006 at the age of 86. He was a proponent of the ordinary language view of philosophy – the view that careful analysis of our ordinary language would "dissolve" traditional philosophical problems away. In effort of this view, Strawson used linguistic analysis to tackle many of the traditional problems in philosophy. And it took me many readings of his writings, during my undergraduate years, to understand his ideas in my courses on twentieth century analytic philosophy. (I rather doubt I still understand fully what he wrote). And I am sure his ideas will continue to give me headaches as a graduate student.

One of the things P.F. Strawson is famous for, inter alia, is his attack on Bertrand Russell's "theory of descriptions" – a theory about definite descriptions, descriptions which refer to single things – in his essay, On Referring. In this now classic writing, Strawson argues that Russell's theory of descriptions is wrong because it failed to distinguish between meaningful sentences on the one hand and their customary use to refer on the other. His famous slogan: "words don't refer, people do, sentences don't have truth conditions, thoughts do."

Whereas, Russell claims that thoughts which are expressed with definite descriptions or names are general (not referring to any one thing), quantificational thoughts only. Strawson claims that not all thoughts are general, quantificational thoughts; some are singular, subject-predicate thoughts that are about particular things.

Not to get too deeply into this (this subject matter is handled in philosophy of language), but an example frequently used in the Russell-Strawson debate is their pet sentence, 'The present king of France is bald'. As we all probably know, France is currently a republic and has no king of which to refer; so what is one to say about the truth-value of this sentence? Russell would say that this sentence is expressed by the following definite description:
1. There is something that is the king of France.
2. It is the only king of France (in the context at hand).
3. And it is bald.

In logical form: ∃x[Kx & ∀y(Ky → y=x) & Bx]

And this Russell asserts is meaningful but false.

Strawson instead would say that 'The present King of France is bald' is neither true nor false, because sentences are not the sort of things that ever have truth conditions. Only actions of a sort can be true or false. It is the use of a sentence (i.e., its utterance [a type of action] because it expresses a thought) which is truth-evaluable. Sentences are merely linguistic devices for referring to things and expressing thoughts. These thoughts are true and false, but not the sentence itself. His distinction between a 'sentence' and a 'statement' made by uttering a sentence is still used today by many philosophers and linguists.

In this case, the utterance of this sentence is meaningful but because it lacks the context for there being a unique king of France, it is neither true nor false.

While some philosophers lean more to one side or another, other philosophers continue to look for a happy middle ground between these two seemingly opposing views. I, like many others, think Russell had roughly the right idea (although he might've did away with Alexius Meinong's ideas on nonexistent objects too quickly).

Strawson also lived a rather happy life (unlike many of his contemporaries). And he was a well-liked professor and tutor at the University of Oxford, where he taught and did research – publishing many articles and books. He is survived by his wife and children. One of his sons, Galen Strawson is also a philosopher.

R.I.P. P.F. Strawson (1919-2006)

~AP

New "Hairy Lobster" Soon to be Served at Red lobster

2006-03-07T20:41:00.000-05:00

French Journal Says New Crustacean Found - Yahoo! News

French scientists report in the journal of the National Museum of Natural History that they found this ugly new species of crustacea in the South Pacific, near Easter Island. The name given to it is Kira hirsuta, which looks similar to a lobster except that its claws have blonde hair on them.

Mmm, tasty (not).

~AP

Which Star Trek Character Are You?

2006-02-23T17:25:00.001-05:00

Your results:
You are Spock

Spock		72%
Chekov		60%
Deanna Troi		60%
James T. Kirk (Captain)		55%
Will Riker		50%
Uhura		45%
Leonard McCoy (Bones)		45%
Mr. Sulu		45%
Data		42%
Worf		40%
Beverly Crusher		40%
Jean-Luc Picard		40%
An Expendable Character (Redshirt)		40%
Geordi LaForge		35%
Mr. Scott		25%

You are skilled in knowledge and logic.
You believe that the needs of the many
outweigh the needs of the few.

Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Quiz

~AP

Jesus is Acquitted of Wrongdoing

2006-02-17T09:10:00.000-05:00

Judge Tosses Case of Atheist Vs. Priest - Yahoo! News

As I predicted in my previous post, Jesus on Trial Again, the judge threw out the atheist Luigi Cascioli's case against the Roman Catholic priest in Italy on last Friday, Feb. 10. Mr. Cascioli claimed that the Rev. Enrico Righi broke two Italian laws against deceiving citizens and against personal gain through attributing a false name to someone by spreading lies that Jesus existed.

Apparently, Mr. Cascioli and Rev. Righi were former schoolmates, which is the only reason I can think of why he arbitrarily targeted this priest (both men are way into their seventies). Maybe Rev. Righi gave Cascioli one too many nuggies when they were younger. In any case, Cascioli filed a criminal complaint against the priest in 2002, after the priest wrote that Jesus existed and was born to the Virgin Mary and Joseph in a parish bulletin. (Notice this is a parish bulletin, not The Watchtower proselytized by Jehovah's Witnesses door-to-door.)

Whereas, Cascioli is considering taking his case to the European Court of Human Rights, the judge in the preceding case, Gaetano Mautone is advocating that prosecutors investigate the Italian atheist for possible slander. Although I think such a charge would be equally frivolous – since it would seem to imply that the priest’s teachings of Jesus' existence are true (a questionable assumption at best) – Cascioli brought this on himself. While, I argued in my original post that it's wrong to claim there is historical evidence for Jesus' existence, I think Cascioli goes too far. Despite my initial humor at his antics, on further thought, I think atheists like him give the rest of us a bad name. Most philosophical atheists, such as myself, have a "live and let live" policy. I have no problem with other's religious (or other personal) avowals as long as they do not lead to maladaptive behaviors, aren't thrusted upon me in an effort to "save the heathen," or forced onto society-at-large as some religious fundamentalists attempt to do. In turn, I do not proselytize to religious people why their religious beliefs are irrational. Religious tolerance works both ways.

An atheist like Cascioli reinforces negative stereotype about disbelievers that we are all intellectual elitists, who think we know better than the simple-minded religious folk. Even if someone, such as an atheist, knows he is right in his assertions, a little intellectual humility goes a long way. After all, most things we think we know, we can be wrong or ignorant about them. Moreover, we all have some irrational beliefs; theistic belief just happens to be a widespread one.

~AP

Rats can do causal reasoning?

2006-02-16T23:18:00.000-05:00

Rats understand cause and effect, researchers find

If the findings of this study done at the University of California-Los Angeles are correct, it will show that other mammals, particularly rats, are able to grasp key aspects of causal reasoning. An ability (at least of one which), some scientists has claimed that separates humans from the lower animals in their reasoning processes.

In the study, rats were repeatedly showed a light followed by a tone. And when the rats were played the tone alone, they still behaved as if the light also came on. However, when the rats pressed a lever to produce the tone themselves, they did not react as if the light flashed. It is important to note that when the light flashed, the rats’ behavior was reinforced by giving them food, as well as the hearing the tone. From the rats’ performances in these experimental tasks, the researchers claimed that the rats understand the relationship between "seeing and doing" and the different influences events have upon each other.

I don't know; the lack of detail about the study's design in this brief article makes it sound like simple behavioral conditioning to me. So I'm agnostic on whether or not this finding is strong evidence of rats understanding some aspects of cause and effect.

Heck, philosophers and scientists are still trying to grasp the notion of 'causality' ever since the 18^th century philosopher, David Hume, introduced his (in)famous argument for the "problem of causation": the argument that no matter how many times we perceive one event preceding another, we never perceive any necessary connection between the two. Moreover, according to Hume, perceptions are our only trustworthy source of knowledge. Causation is just an expectation, which we have that certain events will result from being preceded by other events. This seems to deprive causation of all its force. However, it is counterintuitive; how can we justify belief in the notion of 'causality'?

There still is no accepted answer to this problem. Still, Hume did not outright deny causality all together; rather he claimed that we and other animals (which brings this digression back to the original topic) have an innate belief in causation due to the processes of our nervous system. Yet, according to him, we cannot prove that this belief is true by any logical argument.

Nevertheless, pace Hume, it seems that a counterfactual assertion of causal relationships gives us a degree of confidence that our talk of causation isn't merely sophistry. Namely, that if some cause didn’t occur, then the effect following it, wouldn’t have occurred either.

In science, matters of causality are also a serious concern because no experimental research (or non-experimental research) is entirely replicable to necessarily determine causal direction between a first event C and a second event E. In situ, the notion of 'probabilistic causation' is widely considered the norm in many fields of science. This notion entails that C probabilistically causes E if and only if C's occcurrence increases the probability of E's occurrence.

Nevertheless, this research is interesting. And one thing is for sure, if rats do understand causal relationships, then it seems to put them far ahead of some humans that I know.

~AP

New Type of Star Found!

2006-02-16T09:17:00.000-05:00

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: New Kind of Star Found

I was web surfing earlier this morning and happened to come upon an article on Scientific American's website about a recently new astronomy study. Reported herein were findings that objects similar to pulsars (neutron stars that spin and emit bursts of radiation), have been found by an international team of astronomers, led by astronomers at the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory. However, this team claims it is a different type of star, which seems more inactive than pulsars, except for bursts of radio waves, which they release intermittently (about one hundredth of a second long). These objects have been named RRATs, or rotating radio transients. So far, they seem to be the strongest source of radio waves in the universe. So I guess they can pick up the new Howard Stern radio show easily.

Anyway, the astronomers speculated that these objects might be more prevalent than their cousins, the pulsar and the magnetar.

That’s pretty exciting that new kinds of objects. like these RRATS, are still being found in outer space. Now, if they only find an earth-size planet, inhabited by some sexy green alien women.

~AP

Be Careful, There May be an AIDS-Killer on the Loose!

2006-02-08T11:47:00.000-05:00

Salt Lake Tribune - Business

Hmm, where do I start? A series of testing has led to results from a research team at Vanderbilt University and a professor from Brigham Young University, Paul D. Savage, who created a new compound, which they found could – not treat HIV/AIDS – but kill it. In their test-tube studies, the compound called CSA-54, a type of Ceraginin, named after the lab sponsoring the study – Ceragenix Pharmaceuticals, actually hunts down and kills the HIV, similar to the way a healthy immune system would. In addition, it is effective against all known strains of HIV, as well as potentially against other infections, such as influenza, the bird flu, Herpes, and bacterial and fungal infections.

Although, the researchers have already replicated their results several times, they remain (correctly) modest about saying they have a cure for AIDS until their research results are published in scientific journals and peer-reviewed, so that their results can be independently confirmed by other researchers. Moreover, it would have to undergo several animal and human trials before being released on the market for HIV/AIDS treatment. This could take several years, but the scientific community does this in the effort to avoid extrapolating results from flawed research, such as committing Type II errors (failing to reject a false hypothesis), and insure the efficacy and safety on people suffering from the illness.

This is how good science works. Unlike pseudoscience and junk science, where grandiose claims are made for phenomena either not yet tested using scientifically rigorous methods (at least not in any responsible way), remains untestable, or they were tested and later falsified.

~AP

Which Enemy of the Christian Church Are You?

2006-02-04T01:06:00.000-05:00

This was an amusing, albeit, random internet quiz I stumbled upon.

You're an atheist!

Here is a link: Take the quiz

~AP

Another Way to Beg for Sex

2006-01-31T10:18:00.000-05:00

New Scientist News - Sex before stressful events keeps you calm

So according to the results of a recent psychological study reported in New Scientist, sex – specifically vaginal sex – relieves stress before public speaking. That is what I call studying! I wish I had known that before I did my many speeches and performances in high school and college.

Now it seems guys have another excuse, albeit an academic one, to beg women to pander to their sexual desires. (A possible scenario, "You told me I need to study more, so that I can get my grades up. Well...") said. Of course, I am assuming the alleged calming effect caused by coital sex will work, only if there isn't any performance anxiety in having sex itself.

~AP

Are Most Cough Syrups A Placebo?

2006-01-18T14:05:00.000-05:00

This recent research has confirmed my suspicion all along – taking cough medicine is a waste of money. My well-intentioned parents were quick to give my siblings and I over-the-counter (OTC) medicine, including "alternative medicine" when we felt ill. Yet, I always doubted they really did much, if anything. (Yes, I was often a skeptical little kid. Ask me, if I believed in Santa Clause when I was young. However, I digress.)

People of lower income or that are medically uninformed often rely heavily upon OTC medicine, so I have little sympathy for the cough medicine companies that think these doctors aren't being “fair” to the efficiency of their products. Hmm, let's see whom should I trust, trade groups for makers of over-the-counter medication, such as the Consumer Health Products Association, or scientifically-trained medical experts, such as those within the American College of Chest Physicians and American Thoracic Society? Hmm ... I just don't know.

Whereas, the causes of coughs are varied (e.g., allergies, asthma, bronchitis, etc.) it seems this is an instance where folk remedy actually works the best (for symptom relief) – drinking a lot fluids and chicken soup. Of course, by all means go see a physician if you have a persistent cough.

On a side note, this reminds me of Chris Rock’s comedy sketch, Bring The Pain that aired long ago on HBO – where he jokes about Robitussin’s frequent use as some sort of medical cure-all by poor black people. Anecdotally, I have seen this in my family as well; but this is probably more a habit of many uninformed buyers and low-income people, not just black ones.

Nevertheless, I guess the spokesperson for Wyeth Consumer Healthcare, the makers of Robitussin, in this news article defend their product by claiming if so many people buy it, then it must be effective. Yeah, that's strong evidence right there! I love his post hoc reasoning; and appealing to sheer numbers of people’s use (argumentum ad populum) is always a good measure of a drug's efficacy. This worked so well during the Bubonic Plague of medieval Europe.

~AP

California on Its Way to Becoming Another Texas

2006-01-18T12:13:00.000-05:00

California Executes Oldest Inmate - New York Times

Wow, I guess Gov. Schwarzenegger really is the Terminator! First, this actor-turned-governor allows the execution of a man on death row, Crips gang co-founder, Stanley "Tookie" Williams, despite his apparent reformation. Next, he allows the execution of a seventy-six year old invalid, Clarence Ray Allen.

To be fair, Allen deserves less sympathy, since he ordered the killing of people while already serving a life sentence. However, the death penalty itself seems an inhumane practice. (However, I won’t go into a rant about it here, another time perhaps.) Ceteris paribus, even if the criminal justice system was not corrupt, inefficient, nor racist – I remain unconvinced that a strong argument could be made that the dealth penalty is not still a cruel and inhumane, not to mention a poor choice (pun intended) for preventing violent crime. Maybe this is why (at least partially) all the other developed nations, except the United States, have banned its practice.

Bravo, governor ... what's next, execute a mentally retarded person?

~AP

Exercise, Good for the Brain

2006-01-17T10:18:00.000-05:00

Study Finds Exercise Helps Delay Dementia - Yahoo! News

This is another study confirming that physical exercise is good for the brain too. Indeed, this is good reason that I really should get back in shape. Although, by no means am I flabby (I'm rather skinny) – but I miss all the other activities I engaged in: martial arts, weight training, and definitely running. College life made me lazy! It really did (maybe). I am sure I lost much endurance and strength over the years of my reduced physical activity. Any motivating coaches out there?

However, habitually, I do wake up every morning and perform some calisthenics to make me feel more "awake." After all, it beats slamming down coffee.

In any case, as this study shows, a little preventative medicine goes a long way.

~AP

Jesus on Trial Again

2006-01-08T17:18:00.000-05:00

Did Jesus exist? Italian court to decide - Yahoo! News

Wow, an Italian court will (attempt to) decide the historical existence of Jesus. Man, that's some judiciary, where the courts can determine the veracity of historical claims! OK, I am being somewhat facetious. Actually, the court is to preside over the case whether the Roman Catholic Church is breaking Italian laws that protect its citizens from being swindled and from impersonation, by teaching that Jesus Christ existed.

If you are thinking, "Huh?" – you aren’t the only one. It seems obvious the plaintiff will lose this case. But, damn it is funny. I do not know whether his intentions are to have the Church actually banned from teaching about Jesus in Italy, or merely to make a mockery of their doctrine.

Whatever his actual intentions, I do agree with Mr. Luigi Cascioli as far as it seems very unlikely an historical Jesus ever existed. From the evidence (or lack thereof), it seems to follow that J.C. is probably just a mythological character.

I am sure many people would disagree with my assertion – even some agnostics and atheists. Not too long ago, I would have also disagreed. Since, at that time, even though I was still atheist, I believed there was probably an historical Jesus, although I thought the biblical Jesus probably didn’t resemble the historical one very much.

However, looking carefully at the historiographical issues concerning research on J.C., the evidence seems null in favor of an actual Jesus. All the writings of him in the New Testament of the Christian Bible were written at least thirty years after his alleged death and resurrection. Moreover, the earliest of these writings were the epistles, many of them attributed to the apostle Paul. And these epistles hardly spoke of Jesus as an actual man, but simply as a spiritual being.

The Gospels (i.e., Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), which were written even later than the epistles (not before!), were written in an allegorical style, like other parts of the Bible, and are hard to take seriously as eyewitness accounts. The fact these scriptures were written after his death and without any sources for them is also the case for all the biblical and extra-biblical writings about Jesus. I will not begin to mention how the stories of Jesus’ life in these different scriptures are inconsistent with one another (perhaps due to the fact they are copies of copies of copies, and due to the authors' selective preferences).

Outside the Bible (and other related Christian writings never included in its canon for arbitrary reasons), the textual evidence for claims of Jesus’ existence is almost nonexistent! This seems to be very disconcerting for such an important figure in history, especially the wide impact he purportedly made on people during his lifetime. (There are many ad hoc explanations for this; but none of them seems reasonable enough to mention.) In addition, the few historical sources which have been found outside of Christian writings have all been either blatant forgeries, fictional accounts (such as one would write about many other mythical figures, e.g., Odysseus), or they are simply not credible.

There are forged accounts by people who have rewritten parts of ancient historical texts. And there are a few fictitious accounts that are not of much historical value, but true believers still take them to be evidence of their “Lord and Savior's” existence. And there are other more genuine accounts of his existence, but again, since all of these ancient writers and historians lived way after Jesus' death and they provide no sources for their claims, it remains they are not believable.

Also disturbing is the lack of any substantial physical evidence. All the so-called physical relics that support his existence have been refuted – there were all hoaxes, such as the Shroud of Turin or James Ossuary.

Much of Christian narrative is also based on interpretations of stories and prophecies from the Old Testament (an example of midrash). Moreover, hero worship (including the hero’s superhuman abilities and/or good deeds, rise to fame, death, and resurrection) is a common formula in many ancient religions of the Mediterranean. Virtually nothing about Jesus’ life is sui generis; everything written about him seems "shared" by many other ancient religions, whether the Hercules cults, Mithraism, Osiris-Dionysus Cults, Sol Invictus cults, Tammuz, Zoroastrianism, and many others of the ancient world.

There are other issues I refrained from bringing up simply to keep this post reasonably brief, such as the lack of detail about Jesus’ life between preadolescence until he was thirty years old. However, I could be wrong (I have been wrong many times before and probably will in the future) and it is genuinely possible that the writings about Jesus are based upon some actual person or persons that once lived, but so far the evidence doesn’t seem to support this claim.

Of course, one could say that problems with establishing the historicity of Jesus also afflict other historical figures from antiquity. And to be fair, I will admit that this is true. Nevertheless, there is some independent evidence for other historical figures like Cleopatra and Socrates, which archaeologists and historians simply have not found for Jesus. Unless taken “on faith,” it remains that he is likely just a mythical figure – as many other religious figures – made to inspire and teach the people in the times in which the authors of the tale lived.

While, many may find this hard to swallow, one should be aware of cognitive and perceptual biases that affect one’s rational thinking, such as communal reinforcement (the strengthening of a belief in some claim by constant repetition by the members of the community), selective thinking, and general self-deception. Also, one should keep in mind that one culture’s beliefs are often another’s myths, especially if that former culture has perished, or the culture was supplanted by a newer one. After all, I am sure some people in ancient Greece and Rome (if not also medieval Europe) were rather convinced that Hercules was once a living, breathing man as well.

~AP

A Relatively Stupid Argument about Relativism

2005-12-20T21:32:00.000-05:00

I love chatting with friends, but sometimes I feel like I'm Alice in Wonderland, when I listen to the bad reasoning some of my friends have made when they disagreed with me. In the case that I'm about to rant about, I am using the term, 'friend' rather loosely. This associate of mine (yeah, that’s better) seemed to enjoy making snide remarks at my expense, but astonishingly claimed that I always insulted her educational background and career.

On one such occasion in which she made some snide remarks, our conversation inspired my previous post: Some Reflection On Blogging So Far. In this post, I highlighted a dispute between academic writing and journalist writing. But more specifically, it detailed our contrasting views on good writing, in the context of blogging or writing generally – viz., I asserted that clear, cogent writing, as well as having an interesting topic, makes for good writing in almost any genre, except genres in which writing is necessarily ambiguous or vague. She asserted that whatever grabs the reader's attention (and more importantly, makes you money) is good writing, no matter how muddled or questionable the content. This was a foreshadowing of our debate sketched out below.

Getting back to the recent debate, despite this person's apparent hypocrisy about making insults, I usually chose to be charitable and assumed her insults were mostly due to careless speech. So, after my post where I wrote my first poem ever (at least, outside of grade school), my associate made inane remarks about all poetry being trite. Admittedly, this surprised me; I assumed (incorrectly) that because she was an English major that she would probably have an interest in my posting of poetry. Well, I was wrong.

Luckily though, I did ask other people, who have published poetry for their expert opinions. They liked my first attempt into their craft, which was pleasing to know. (My associate dismissed these people’s opinions by asserting, “Well some people think eating shit is good.” However, I digress.)

Yet, she said it was all "relative." I disagreed and asserted that art is not relative. On one hand, I am a (philosophical) aestheticist: roughly, the view that principles of beauty are basic to other things, such as art and literature. And I am a realist: the view that the world exists largely independent of our thought and beliefs about it. (My very first post in this blog, I outlined all my philosophical avowables.) On the other hand, she is an avowed relativist about most things, (crude relativism is the view that there are no universal truths that hold for all people).

Of course, there are many problems with relativism. Plato thought he defeated this recurring view over two thousand years ago. Here is my quick synopsis of his argument ...

Logically, to assert the sentence 'there are no truths or principles that hold universally for all people', necessarily entails the sentence 'there is at least one truth that is universal for all people' – viz., that there isn't one! Now either it is the case that the sentence 'there are no truths or principles that hold universally for all people' is true, and so being true, makes it universally true itself and hence, false. Or, it is the case that this sentence is false, and that it's true that we have universal truths.

Huh? It's a blatantly self-refuting view. The relativist can't win either way.

But, I don't have to resort to this logical trick to make the point clear that (crude) relativism is absurd. Just think very carefully of how absolutely weird the world would be if most anything was relative, or subjective to every individual. Consensus could never be reached on even the most mundane states of affairs, such as the very meaning of this sentence, or such as before me I see that I have two hands!¹ It seems the world cannot simply be conceived of in such an incoherent manner that relativism would require. (If you can conceive it, please explain it to me! But first, make sure that you have fully grasped what I am saying here.) Besides, any domain wherein we can possibly be ignorant or mistaken about (fallibillism) is a huge clue that that domain being discussed is ipso facto, probably not relative – such as the domains of history and science. However, to be fair, there are certain domains where it is reasonable, or even necessary, to consider them relative, such as matters of legality and personal taste.

Well as promised, here was the stupid part (if not already): The first problem, although understandable, was her overt defensiveness about her English and Library and Information Science background – which I assumed some people have uncharitably thought were worthless studies. Not to mention, what people may have said to her about working in the “web-modeling” industry (not as a model though). I say it was understandable, since I also had to defend my education and career choices to ignorant people – heck, I wrote a whole post about it!

However, the other problems in her reasoning (out of charity and for brevity's sake, I am narrowing this down) were inconsistencies and irrelevant remarks. First, she argued I was pedantic because, I don't take seriously the opinions of others on a topic, in which they have little-to-no expertise (in this case, her or other people with no background in aestheticism/philosophy of art, or art criticism).

Pace my associate, I think any rational person will take the views of experts in the field being discussed much more seriously than someone else's speculative opinions, ceteris paribus. Even if her accusation was correct, it was non sequitur that my so-called intellectual elitism made what I said incorrect, which was matters of art aren't relative. Yet, in some sense, she was probably correct about me. I am a "nit-picker;" but being inquisitive and thinking critically is an asset, not a liability (except when dealing with people who wish you just shut up and accept whatever they say or think). In any case, critical thinking people don't simply take people's claims and arguments as is, without carefully examining them.

Second, as if it couldn't get worse, besides my pedantry and insulting her education/career, according to her, I was also socially unskilled, which is why I seemed to have so many personal problems (because clearly [to her], people with strong social skills rarely ever have any personal problems). She went so far as to say that all I had was “book knowledge” and I was out of touch with the "real world" (hmm!). If you aren't keeping tabs so far, none of these red herrings (or evasions from the issue) proved that I was wrong about relativism being an incorrect view, nor that art was not based on some objective (aesthetic) properties. Her evidence for this latest irrelevant remark was our talks about different personal issues, which was rather petty (and fallacious) to bring up just because she couldn’t make a reasonable counter-reply.

Well, I already asserted that it was disingenuous to attack someone for seemingly ridiculing her opinions, if that person was guilty of the same mistake. Moreover, I have given you a taste of why it was a problem for her to have claimed that art and the external world were relative or subjective. Now, even if I threw away all the irrelevant remarks and such, inconsistencies still stood, especially, one in particular you may have already noticed.

One minor (and rather absurd) inconsistency was that claiming art was relative and that there are no aesthetic principles, when she makes a living marketing models by making them look beautiful. I guess she did not see that was aestheticism put into action. If there were no aesthetic principles, if would be relatively (pun intended) pointless spending so much time and money on marketing web-models, since it wouldn't matter how these women looked for people to want to spend money on seeing them.

The second minor inconsistency was saying that I was pedantic when it appeared rather pedantic of her to call things relative or subjective that most ordinary people would think was real and objective, such as um ... the external world! To be more succinct, I told her it is often the case that whenever some "intellectual" talks of a subject he doesn't know much of, he will quickly claim the subject is relative so as to still sound intelligent about a subject he knows little about. Moreover, these subjects often are art, ethics, philosophy, and science – the fields where recurring claims of relativism are made. Calling me pedantic for my reliance on expert testimony on technical matters, where I have little background knowledge, to make informed opinions (and for my reliance on reason, in general) seemed a rather fallacious tactic to evade being unable to defend her views.

The last and, hopefully, most obviously huge inconsistency is avowing relativism and then telling someone they are not in touch with the ... wait, wait hold for it – the "real world" (cf. above). I may not be the brightest person, but it seems rather clear you cannot tell someone he is out of touch with the real world if you are also arguing that there is no objective, real world to know about.

Of course, beyond the poor argument and armchair psychiatry, it appeared then (and still now) a waste of time to argue with her any further, since she remarked that making contradictory assertions didn't matter (because again, according to her, truth was relative)! Wow, even rendering a charitable interpretation of what she said – that merely, apparent contradictions were unimportant – was unacceptable because even if a claim only appeared to be contradictory to another one, the first thing any rational person would do is try to clarify what he or she means. And this isn't merely an academic issue, because not even in ordinary discussion would most reasonable people find it acceptable (although they might find it funny) for another person to assert contradictions. I think this refusal to accept contradictions is highly reasonable because if we didn't, nothing we utter would be meaningful. This is why the "Law of Non-contradiction" underlies all reasoning and language:

One cannot assert that something is both, true and false, at the same time and in the same respects.
Or in symbolic form

Even if you deny the law of non-contradiction, you still presuppose it is true – because to deny it, you are still saying something is not both true and false, hence the law of non-contradiction still stands.

My confused friend doesn't care that inconsistency is the worst thing that can afflict an argument in any field or everyday discussion, but especially philosophy. Therefore, her argument was weak and utterly unconvincing and our debate was relatively speaking, stupid.
___________________________________________________________
¹This quib I made is a tribute to G.E. Moore's famous attack on skepticism when he would look at his hands and say, "here is a hand [raising his right hand] ... here is a hand [raising his left hand]" and concluding that there are least two material things in the world, therefore, there is an external (real) world. I thought it relevant, since relativists are metaphyiscal skeptics, who deny there is an independent reality to be known, in many different domains.

~AP

Judge Rules Against Pa. Biology Curriculum

2005-12-20T18:25:00.000-05:00

Judge Rules Against Pa. Biology Curriculum - Yahoo! News

In one of the biggest courtroom clashes between faith and evolution since the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, a federal judge barred a Pennsylvania public school district Tuesday from teaching "intelligent design" in biology class, saying the concept is creationism in disguise.

I would like to take this moment to say in a very dignified and mature manner to all the proponents of "intelligent design" and other critics of biological evolution, during this controversial court case ... "Nah nah nah nah nah!"

That is all.

~AP

A Splash of Color

2005-12-14T15:17:00.000-05:00

In case people haven't noticed, I just wanted to let people know that I slightly changed how my blog looks. I wanted to add a tinge of color and reorganize it, for a more aesthetically pleasing look. I think it looks OK (hopefully) with all the time, which I've squandered on changing the blog's template. I should have been studying!

~AP

A Rare Side of Me

2005-12-03T22:24:00.000-05:00

It seems that many people who I know have found most of my posts that they read – although informative and maybe sometimes funny – rather impersonal and wanted to see a more personal side of me. Or, whether I am "offline" or online, they accuse me of never turning off my "rational thinking," even when talking informally. I will grant there is some truth in these assertions. So by popular demand ("popular" being used in a rather loose sense here), I will present a rare side of me ... my attempt to express myself in poetic form. I hope you appreciate it.

A Lover's Cognitive Dissonance

Did you ever truly love me?
Do you even know what that means?
I hate what you did
and I hate myself for letting it happen.
Everything is wrong in my world;
you were its only right.

But that was only when in my face.
Otherwise, how could you want to explore
when the best discovery lay already before your eyes?
I had everything to give
and now you know this to be true.
But you only found this out
after you desecrated all that is sacred between us.

I don’t think I can love you again.
To do so would require rewriting the past
or blanking out the memory.
Is it fair to expect the latter?
Is it reasonable to forget the past?
It’s been so much I can allow
but to give your pleasure to another
is the only thing I cannot deal with.

And the deceit behind it is unforgivable…
I hate being ignorant about stuff
and knowing not that which I should.

What must I do?
I know only that I feel pain deep within me
With all my other happiness taken from me
by law and by people that did not protect my fragile mind
the last happiness is ripped from my breast
by your insistence on doing whatever you want
without afterthought for the only person
you now know that you want above all others.

But now you have me no more
because I cannot live with the deceit
and the mental confusion which you have.
And I cannot deal with the imagery
of my pleasure shared abound
which I held as a trophy that only I could have.

~AP

Defending An Unpopular Opinion

2005-11-29T14:14:00.000-05:00

In my previous post, Unpopular Opinions…?, I gave a random list of “unpopular” opinions that I hold true (more or less). And I said that I recycled my list from a discussion board where I originally posted it, after seeing a thread asking people on the board for unpopular opinions that they hold. I also said clearly that due to the frequently low caliber of intelligent discourse on this discussion board that I considered it unnecessary to assert my opinions in a careful and qualified way. However, despite my clear warning that my opinions were asserted in a roughhewn manner, it seems that I offended someone who read my post. I was e-mailed the following response:

It is one thing to have an opinion but another to completely trash a religion. Saying that Mother Teresa is a "sadistic bitch" is a huge insult to people who believe in this religion. I am not saying you shouldn’t have an opinion but that’s just low.

First, I want to apologize to this person. If I have offended you, then I’m very sorry – my intent was not to offend you nor anyone else. Second, my intent was not to trash Catholicism or any other religion either. I have no problem with religion in itself, nor would I personally attack anyone merely because of his or her religious beliefs, ceteris paribus. In fact, I admire a number of religious leaders (e.g., Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.).

Yet, if I wanted to criticize Roman Catholic leaders (a rather easy task with their level of arrogance and self-righteousness), I might mention inter alia how they are using legal privileges ascribed to religious institutions – such as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act – to protect them from libel in openly hiding allegations of child sex abuse. Or, it would be easy to criticize these leaders on many other issues. But, that is the subject matter for another post. Nevertheless, I apologize if I came off too harsh.

So why would I ever call Mother Teresa a “sadistic bitch?” Well, let’s look at some disturbing facts about Ms. Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu…

Excerpts from Rotten.com:

In December 1971, India and Pakistan fought a bloody 15-day war, resulting in the creation of Bangladesh. In the aftermath, horrific stories of war crimes abounded. The Pakistanis had perpetrated ruthless genocide against the local Hindu population. They had committed arson, looting, and wanton killing as part of an overall effort to exterminate the Hindus. And more than 450,000 women had been systematically gangraped by Pakistani soldiers. Thousands were abducted for sex slaves and held captive in the barracks. They were often mutilated, and sometimes raped until they died. One account described an eight year old girl whose vagina was slit open because it could not accomodate the men's genitalia. She too was raped until she died.
These stories prompted Mother Teresa to come forward. In the aftermath of the war, thousands of the rape victims were now pregnant. Mother Teresa made public appeals for the women to keep their unborn babies, and not abort them. She offered no condolences for the dead women, no sympathy for the surviving victims, and not a word about the soldiers. Her sole interest in the matter was preventing abortions.

… But her ideals always seemed to take a back seat around her friends, the dictators. In 1975, Indira Ghandi imposed martial law in India. During the two year "state of emergency" she suspended the constitution, imposed censorship on the news media, and arrested her political enemies. Indira's son Sanjay spearheaded an effort in population control for the poor, wherein they were rounded up and forcibly sterilized. Despite her lifelong opposition to contraception and presumptive support for human rights, Mother Teresa chose to embrace the new order and issued a public statement lauding the government's efforts.
http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/religion/mother-teresa/

Some criticisms from columnist, Christopher Hitchens in Salon magazine:

While much was made of Mother Teresa's devotion to the poor and downtrodden, she was in fact a lifelong friend to the rich and powerful.
Some examples:
* In 1981 Mother Teresa journeyed to Haiti, to accept that nation's highest award, the Legion d'Honneur. She received it from the Duvalier family, and made a glowing speech in which she said that dictator "Baby Doc" and his wife Michele not only loved the poor, but were loved by the poor in return.
* In 1990 she made a trip to Albania, then the most oppressive of the Balkan Stalinist states, and laid a wreath on the grave of the dictator Enver Hoxha as well as on the irredentist monument to "Mother Albania". She was herself of Albanian descent (born in Skopje, Macedonia), but many Albanians were shocked by her embrace of Hoxha's widow and her silence on human rights.
* In 1992 she intervened with a court in Los Angeles, which was about to sentence Charles Keating, the biggest fraud and embezzler in American history. His S&L racket stole a total of $252 million, mainly from small and poor depositors. A strong Catholic and right-wing campaigner against pornography in his spare time, Keating gave Mother Teresa $1,250,000 in cash and the use of a private jet, in return for which she gave him many useful endorsements, including a character reference to the court. The court had asked Mother Teresa to return Keating's donations, which may well have been stolen, but she never replied to the request.
http://www.saintmychal.com/hitchens.htm

Some more of Hitchens’ criticisms from Slate magazine:

The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for "the poorest of the poor." People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions. Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the "Missionaries of Charity," but they had no audience for their story. George Orwell's admonition in his essay on Gandhi—that saints should always be presumed guilty until proved innocent—was drowned in a Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda.
http://www.slate.com/id/2090083/

Aroup Chatterjee’s criticisms from The Final Verdict:

Many people tell me that Mother Teresa should be left alone because she did 'something' for the underprivileged. I do not deny that she did. However her reputation, which was to a good extent carefully built up by herself, was not on a 'something' scale. More importantly, that 'something', at least in Calcutta, was quite little, as my book will show. Even more importantly, she had turned away many many more than she had helped - although she had claimed throughout her life that she was doing everything for everybody. My brief against her is not that she did not address the root or causes of suffering and I am not for a moment suggesting that she ought to have done so, as I understand the particular religious tradition she came from - I am saying that there was a stupendous discrepancy between her image and her work, between her words and her deeds; that she, helped by others of course, engaged in a culture of deception.

On a superficial level, I need to tell the truth about Teresa because I feel humiliated to be associated with a place that is wrongly imagined to exist on Western charity. Perhaps the main reason why I want to tell this story is because, I believe, each of us has a duty to stand up and protest when history is in danger of being distorted. In a few years' time Mother Teresa will be up there, glittering in the same galaxy as Mozart and Leonardo.
http://www.meteorbooks.com/introduction.html

Excepts from Wikipedia.com:

Christopher Hitchens described Mother Teresa's organization as a cult which promoted suffering and did not help those in need. In Hitchens' interpretation, Teresa's own words on poverty proved that "her intention was not to help people." He quoted Teresa's words at a 1981 press conference in which she was asked: "Do you teach the poor to endure their lot?" She replied: "I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Teresa#Criticism

More excerpts from Wikipedia.com:

The Missionaries of Charity do not disclose either the sources of their funds or details of how they are spent. A 1998 article in the popular German Stern weekly quoted a witness account according to which the order received about US$50 million a year in donations on its New York account alone. Other journalists have given estimates of US$100 million a year for its global operations. Critics have argued that these sums far exceed the modest needs of the order, which offers little medical help and is staffed by nuns and volunteers. Furthermore, volunteers have stated that they were specifically instructed not to use the money to purchase medical equipment.

… In one case of a patient who died of tuberculosis, [Mary] Louden reported being told by an American doctor working at Kalighat that the patient might have lived if she had received some hospital treatment. Louden described Mother Teresa's policy as one of non-intervention, in which God decided who was to live and who was to die, and people were better off in heaven than in the operating theatre. Louden believed that Mother Teresa and her sisters declined to use their influence and income to finance a properly equipped hospital, instead devoting their efforts to ensure that everyone (regardless of creed) received a good Catholic funeral.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionaries_of_Charity

There is plenty more information out there on "Mother Teresa," but I think I made my point. Besides, anyone can click the links that I provided to get more info it they want it (which is probably a good idea).

~AP

Unpopular Opinions...?

2005-11-24T13:20:00.000-05:00

I was visiting a message board recently and I saw that someone made a discussion thread for people to list unpopular opinions that they hold. Although, I think the caliber of intelligent responses on this board is quite low (I go there to get "free stuff"), I couldn't resist mentioning some of my unpopular opinions. After all, I think most of my opinions are unpopular because using careful reasoning as a method to arrive at informed opinions, seems not to be in hot commodity nowadays (if ever).

So here they are ... but don't think less of me (yet). I asserted my opinions in a simple and unqualified manner; because it seemed unnecessary to carefully assert my opinions to people that think uncritically:

1: God does not exist.

2: Unless taken "on faith," there are no good arguments for the existence of God (or gods).

3: Personal faith cannot justify belief in anything.

4: Genuine miracles cannot happen.

5: Life (in itself) has no purpose.

6: Everything that actually exists is physical.

7: The "mind" (or "soul") is identical with the brain.

8: There is no "afterlife."

9: "Personal survival" may end well before physical death.

10: Karma does not exist.

11: No one (yet) has psychic abilties.

12: The ancient Egyptians were not (nor are they now) a black race and ancient Greeks did not steal their knowledge and/or culture. (Although this is irrelevant, yes, I am black!)

13: There is (currently) only one human "race."

14: Evolution is both, a "fact" and a "theory."

15: We are made up of the pieces of dead stars.

16: Too much animal fat and cholesterol do NOT cause heart disease.

17: Most nutritional supplements are bullshit.

18: ALL normal, healthy kids are language experts around the age of 5.

19: Sentences don't actually exist.

20: There are no good arguments against same-sex marriage.

21: Truth is NOT relative.

22: The way the world is, is largely independent of what we believe or think about it.

23: Most of what we think (that we know) can possibly be wrong.

24: Every opinion, like any other belief or statement, is either True or False simpliciter.

25: Judgments about art, culture, and morality are not (completely) relative.

26: Mohandis Gandhi was a weird, racist asshole.

27: Mother Teressa was a sadistic bitch.

28: Niccolo Machiavelli wrote "The Prince" only as a piece of sarcasm.

29: Economics is mostly just educated guessing.

30: Majoring in criminal justice is a waste of college.

31: Most of the info that you receive at internet message boards or chatrooms are unreliable.

32: Everything is open to examination, question, and doubt (but not all at once).

~AP

When Mickey Sings For Minnie

2005-11-03T18:21:00.000-05:00

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Mice Found to Woo Mates with Song

Singing isn't just for the birds anymore ... according to a study published in the journal, Public Library of Science, male mice sing to their prospective female partners.

But before you try to eavesdrop on your local cheese-snatcher, you should know these vocalizations are inaudible to humans. However, I come bearing gifts! Well, actually Scientific American does.

Here is a link to some mice wooing their females : mouse song. Hmm, I wonder if there was a linguistic transcription from mice to human, it would sound something like, "Is you is or is you ain't ma baby?"

~AP

The End of Idiots?

2005-11-01T15:53:00.000-05:00

End of the World? Not Likely, Scientists Say

Our solar system has existed for 4.6 billion years. And until the sun reaches supernova in 5.4 billion years – our world will not end. ('End of the world' is an ambiguous phrase anyway. Do the doomsayers mean the end of humanity, all life, or the planet Earth? I am sure, whatever is most likely to happen is the interpretation that they will choose.) However, there is the strong possibility that some celestial object, such as an asteroid or comet, may collide with us before that time. Luckily, space scientists are already designing technology to try to deal with that likely scenario.

Other than occasional near earth objects, this is probably not what most people have feared recently with the perceived ending of the world. So what about (other) natural disasters? Have there been more recently than in our past? Moreover, are these events signs of the end?

I really doubt it ... just a few courses in the earth sciences or biology will reveal to the laymen of science that our planet has weathered much worst and so has many species on it. (Humans are the newbies on this planet folks.) In fact, there have already been five – yes five! – mass extinctions on our planet. Nevertheless, life keeps going. I do not know why; maybe we can attribute this to the "Gaia principle" (I would not put too much stock into that idea though), but I am more optimistic that nature will not wipe us out anytime soon, than about whether we will soon wipe each other out.

Yet, the evangelical Christians have come out the woodworks professing our coming doomsday. Even if they were right (which they aren't), telling us the obvious does what? Nothing! If you are of another faith or of no faith, like me, the likely end of the world brings you no closer to accepting the Christian faith. From the alleged fact that the earth is near its end does not lead you to reasonably conclude that, "I must repent and give my life to Christ, while I still have the chance." This seems like the same bad reasoning people use to (try to) justify the claim that, "there are no atheists in foxholes." Besides, some of these kooks may not like to tell people, or do not know themselves that the apocalypse predicted in the Bible was likely just the fall of the Roman Empire – which in their time would have seemed like the end of the world, but not ours.

But to bring my rant to a close, it is precisely because of the planet's burps, scratches, bumps and gurgles, that life is able to continue to exist on this planet ... just ask Mars. Dead planetary activity most often yields dead planetary life.

~AP

Democrats Show Chutzpah

2005-11-01T15:21:00.000-05:00

Democrats Force Closed Meeting on Iraq - Yahoo! News

Note Bene: Boys and girls, I may tend to write more personally for the next few days. I will try not to sound too irrational but I am just going to experiment with switching the "vibe" of this blog temporarily, for therapeutic reasons.

Having said that ... Wow! it looks as if the Senate Democrats have, dare I say it ... grown some balls. The last month and the beginning of this month have been rather unstable for the Republicans. I would not enjoy it so much, if they were not such hypocrites about their ethical superiority to Democrats. Anyway, just a fleeting thought (and a smug smile on my face).

~AP

Drink Up!

2005-10-23T16:34:00.000-04:00

Study Refutes Soft Drinks' Impact on Kids' Obesity - Yahoo! News

This was an interesting article (at least for me). It seems a recent study from the journal, Risk Analysis shows evidence that soft drinks produce negligible effects in causing obesity in the adolescent population. This is interesting, because the sale of soft drinks in public schools has come under recent attack from many within the health field. On one hand, many of these experts believe that soft drinks (including fruit juices because of the unnecessary sugar) contribute to adolescent weight problems.

On the other hand, the authors of the study think there is not much data to support recent policies to remove or limit soft drinks throughout the country’s schools. Further, they claim that soft drinks are not a significant causal factor in the weight problems of teens and that removing the sales of soft drinks will hurt the schools’ sources of revenue. A possible thing for consideration is that the American Beverage Association funded the study. Of course, the fact they funded the study should not necessarily raise skepticism but it should be noted. However, my main concern is about the research methodology. In the article, one of the authors was rather quick to exclaim how “scientifically” they conducted their study. Prima facie, I have no reason to deny this claim, but what degree of confidence should we attribute to a “risk analysis?”

I am somewhat ambivalent on this issue. I do side with the health experts, including officials from organizations such as the American Dietetic Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics that advocate for the removal or limitation of sweetened drinks in schools. However, I think this move will only be prudent with the additional removal of other unhealthy foods, reduction of TV watching and video games, and making physical education mandatory for all students. After all, I find it useless to force kids to buy bottled water and yet still allow them to chomp down a double cheeseburger and fries or a couple of candy bars everyday. Not to go off on a rant here (I hope I am not plagiarizing Dennis Miller) ... but I think it is the dumbest thing in the world, when I go to fast-food restaurants and see someone get an "extra value meal," then get a diet soda with it. Yes, I am sure the diet soda or bottle of Dasani water will really make a positive effect on your weight, when coupled with your consumption of king-sized fries and a quarter pounder with cheese!

It only seems to be fruitful to remove both, soft drinks and other junk food. Then give students healthier (and tasty) food options. Otherwise, it just seems school officials will merely become food Nazis. Furthermore, subsequent studies on adolescent eating habits can provide evidence whether they make the majority of unhealthy food choices in or out of school, or both (not to mention related factors such as, socioeconomic status, time watching TV, and the parents' health). I think it is reasonable to speculate – and more importantly, testable – that kids suffering from obesity tend to eat unhealthy regardless of whether at home or school. If this is true, it may be reasonable to question the effectiveness of simply limiting kid’s choices at school (especially beverage choice) since they may just go out for lunch and/or eat poorly once they go home.

__________________________
Update 9/7/06: Maybe I shouldn't have been so cynical after all. A new study has further confirmed scientific claims that soft drinks lead to obesity. Click here. I admit, I was wrongheaded to think that recognizing there are several causal factors for obesity, lessens the strong contribution of soft drink consumption to obesity. It's causal relationship with obesity has been strong confirmed. And although I already agreed with the scientific majority; I formerly thought their consensus was possibly premature, until my further investigation into the issue.

~AP

It's A Hobbit!

2005-10-19T02:22:00.000-04:00

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: More Bones Support Mini Human Case

Well, there is more evidence that there was once a Shire where Bilbo Baggins and other hobbit-folk once existed with men. OK, that is not completely true. What is true, is that there have been additional bones found that corroborate the earlier claim that a new species of hominids existed with modern humans.

The original discovery last year by scientists on the island of Flores, of the skeletal remains and tools of a dwarf-sized people (about a meter tall) met with skepticism. Other experts thought the remains were from a pygmy or person with birth defects. However, future excavations have quieted the skeptics as more remains confirm the authenticity of the new alleged hominid species: Homo floresiensis. It's probably worth mentioning the island of Flores had other miniature species that inhabited this weird place. And there is still more digging to do!

_________________________
8/25/06 Update: I guess the tides have turned in favor of the skeptics. According to a recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the "hobbit" is just an ancestor of the modern pgymy humans that still inhabit Flores island, where it was discovered. Click here.

~AP

A Quick Thought On Atheism And Dating

2005-10-05T00:08:00.000-04:00

Where do I start? I seem to face more discrimination because of my avowed atheism than I do for being a black male. Moreover, it often seems that being an atheist – and critical thinking, in general – is the biggest character flaw when I date. Several women I have dated thought I was a great guy until they learned of my critical faux pas (usually through viewing my personal websites, such as this one). Recently, someone told me that whenever she meets someone there is something always wrong with him, and that I seemed the exception until she found out I was an atheist. I could not help but feel insulted that she views my philosophical avowal as a character flaw.

I could restrict my dating to women that are also atheist or agnostic, but that would severely limit my dating pool. Besides, someone’s religious avowals do not bother me as long as she does not push these same avowed beliefs on me. However, like most self-righteous Christians, these women often feel the need to “save the heathen.” I try to hold my tongue. I really do! But after trying to endure a steady acoustic stream of bad reasoning and subtle (and not so subtle) insults – I fire back.

In a recent discussion, the person who attacked my atheism made such inane comments that I could not take it anymore. Her attack on my personal beliefs in atheism and letting reason guide my overall belief and actions left me to assert this about the history of Christian “highpoints” throughout their history in difference to atheism: 1) atheists did not enslave millions of people from another continent as a form of commerce and cheap labor; 2) atheists did not torture and kill millions of people during a (un)holy inquisition; 3) atheists did not officially endorse a campaign to slaughter millions of Jews, Gypsies, handicapped, and homosexuals; 4) atheists did not conquer and dehumanize indigenous people across the world, under the pretense of “civilizing” the savages; 5) atheists did not wage bloody crusades for the purpose of protecting their alleged holy land; 6) atheists did not burn thousands of women at the stake after they were accused of witchraft; 7) atheists – at least not in this country – have not come into public office and tried to enforce their avowed beliefs on the whole citizenry; 8) atheists have not tried to discredit scientific knowledge that disagrees with their religious views and tried stopping the teaching of it in public school science classes through disingenious tactics; 9) atheists have not advocated in favor of the death penalty when their beloved master died as a result of judicial error.

The person who I unloaded these assertions onto had no reasonable reply to them. She just told me she was going to bed and “God bless me.” Well, I apologized but then retorted I could have mad worst remarks, if I chose them right out of the Bible – where inconsistencies abound for avowed Christians. Then I would tell her what I really think!

Anecdotally, I can say that it seems most black and Latina women are of high religiosity. This leaves me with few options in securing a healthy love life. i) I can either persist in hiding or denying my personal views; ii) I can only date nonreligious women (however few I can find); iii) I can try to explain how my beliefs do not make me a bad person; iv) I could try dating mostly (or only) Asian and white women that do not wear their religion on their sleeve 24-7; or v) I could convert. Maybe I have other options, but it seems a combination of options (i-iii) is the most reasonable, at least for right now. The null option is not to date at all, but that would be utterly unsatisfactory.

~AP

No Black Babies Equals Utopia?

2005-10-03T00:54:00.000-04:00

Bennett under fire for remarks on blacks, crime

Wow, can we say “insensitive” boys and girls? Former Education Secretary William Bennett clearly fits this description. I cannot believe someone in his position would publicly say something so imprudent in these times. Bennett said this on his radio show in response to a caller’s (poor) argument for pro-life, which was that if Roe vs. Wade had not taken place the many people that would have been born would have contributed revenue to fund Social Security over the last thirty years (assuming they are all "productive citizens"). Then in response, Bennett cited some contentious argument from the book Freakonomics that the reason crime rate is down is that abortion is up. The caller rejected that argument. Bennett's reply:

Well, I don't think it is either, I don't think it is either, because first of all, there is just too much that you don't know. But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.

Hmm, well I would like to see convincing evidence for that claim – if possible (which I strongly doubt). I guess all African Americans are by birthright, potential criminals. Even if Bennett's argument was a reductio ad absurdum (a logical argument, whereby one shows a claim is false by assuming it is true, then deriving an absurdity or contradiction from it), such blatantly racist remarks are inexcusable.

I could take this time to make a jab at the lack of academic rigor in some graduate programs in the humanities, which would lead to idiots such as Bennett. However, that would be irrelevant, even if it were true. Still, where did this jerk off get his PhD? Well, he received it in political philosophy from the University of Texas, but I will try not to hold that against the school. Nevertheless, I think lawyers and people with humanities degrees need to stop doing armchair social science and leave it to the professionals. After all, Bennett may have a doctorate in political philosophy, but he is no John Rawls. (I'll leave my critique of some social scientists, such as the writers of Freakonomics, for another post).

~AP

Plato Was Right ... Again

2005-09-22T21:02:00.000-04:00

Math Made Easy: Study Reveals 5-year-olds' Innate Ability

A new study in the journal, Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences has shown that young children may have innate math ability, or at least an ability that is present at a young age.

I said Plato was right again in the title, because Plato was one of the first intellectuals to propose that what we know is mostly innate and discovered by teaching, not learned. He thought this was especially so of mathematical knowledge, which he thought brought us close to revealing the way things actually are in his world of "forms" (he saw the physical world as an imperfect copy of an abstract reality, which we cannot fully grasp, but that reveals the true nature of things that is perfect and unchanging). However, his beliefs on mathematics might be more accurately called Pythagoreanism, since Pythagoreans were the first to believe everything is essentially numerical – a view that seems to hold much weight in light of modern physics.

In any case, Plato’s beliefs on knowledge are growing some acceptance in philosophical and scientific circles with the revival of some rationalist ideas. Not to mention, most mathematicians nowadays are Platonists – they believe that mathematical entities exist independently of the mind. In other words, we discover mathematics, not invent it. The long scientific debate between nature and nurture is coupled with the philosophical debate between empiricism and rationalism.

In the field of modern linguistics – thanks to people such as Noam Chomsky – a central tenet is that the rules and parameters of all natural human languages are innate, or a "universal grammar." So maybe there is a similar innate knowledge we have of mathematics as well, but whether we actually do (or better yet, to what degree) and how it's realized in the mind/brain is still an empirical question though. Moreover, the acceptance of universal grammar is still controversial.

~AP

Bruce Lee Fans Aim for Hong Kong Statue

2005-09-17T11:16:00.000-04:00

Bruce Lee Fans Aim for Hong Kong Statue - Yahoo! News

Man, erecting a statue of Bruce Lee would be so cool! Bruce Lee was definitely was one of my childhood heroes (and still is). For people in the martial arts, he radically changed how martial arts were practiced and gave it international recognition. All the mixed martial arts (MMA) systems out today can probably pay homage to Lee, who was one of the first in the martial arts community to see the limits of practicing classical martial arts.

Lee likened classical martial arts to "swimming on land," in other words, saying they were not practical for the reality of street fighting. He created his own eclectic martial arts system, Jun Fan Gung Fu/Jeet Kune Do that evolved throughout his lifetime, to reflect his approach to martial arts using “anything that is useful.”¹ Viz., this meant he chose to study any techniques that were practical in a fight, regardless of its origins or adherence to any particular style.

Unfortunately, during Lee’s time, martial arts styles were often a matter of national and racial pride, so things like nationalism, racism, and xenophobia prevented much useful crossover amongst different martial arts styles of his heyday. Allegedly, he even had to fight someone for the right to teach non-Asian students Chinese martial arts, since martial arts was considered a secret that Asians should keep to themselves in the U.S. for self-defense. The only martial arts taught to westerners at that time was mostly judo, and karate to some lucky troops stationed overseas in Asian countries. Chuck Norris is an example of the latter.

Lee, being a fitness buff, was probably also one of the first martial artists to realize the importance of cross-training for athletes (he started a cross-training regimen after his legendary fight mentioned above, where he felt winded after the fight, although he won without much struggle). His cockiness and rejection of classical martial gained him many enemies.

Moreover, his movies, though considered of rather poor quality today, still are the most enjoyable martial arts movies to watch because of his charisma and immense physical talent. A Jet Li or Jackie Chan movie may have awesome stunts and so forth, but they will never be a Bruce Lee film. After all, how many other martial arts actors can boast about their film crew needing to slow down the speed of the film, so that their moves aren't just a blur when viewed on film? I surmise, probably not many.

It is hard not to mention Lee’s personal philosophy, solidified in his martial arts, films, and personal writings. He had an extensive collection of books on philosophy, martial arts, fitness, and other related topics. His study of these things developed into a personal philosophy, geared towards self-help. More importantly, (for me anyway) Lee was the person that influenced me to become atheist, after I read that he was also atheist and his reasons for becoming one. Not a huge surprise though, since he was a philosophy major at the University of Washington. Anyway, before understanding his personal philosophy more, I went back and forth between different theistic beliefs.

Originally, I was Christian by my family upbringing (well actually, I was originally Muslim, but I don't recall any of it as such a young age before my [Afrocentric] mother converted back to Christianity). Then as I thought more carefully about God in my teen years, I flirted with deism after reading some old encyclopedias on religion. However, the influence of martial arts and studying eastern religions, I think drove me to panentheism. I didn't know what panentheism was at that time. However, looking back at it, that's probably what I was. Panentheism is not to be confused with pantheism – which asserts that God and nature are one, although the two beliefs are closely related. This would be the avowed belief of people such as the philosopher Spinoza and the physicist Albert Einstein. (Obviously, this is a close step to atheism since 'God' is not an anthropomorphic concept in this view, but instead simply equivalent to nature.)

Well, panentheism instead is the view that God is some governing force of nature. Even though these leaves room to still say, that God is the "creator" of the universe, like pantheism, this governing force is still non-anthropomorphic. The governing force could be the laws of nature, or whatever. To make a long story short, once I learned of Lee's avowed atheism, it didn't take too much difficulty to make the reasonable jump from panentheism to atheism. Although, I admit there was some mental difficulty at first fully accepting atheism – but that is good. That shows I carefully thought about it and did not do it to merely mimic one of my personal heroes. In fact, many things are worked out in philosophy only through much mental discomfort; it is a useful tool for critical thinking about complex ideas and beliefs. It is often our “spidey sense” for flawed reasoning.

However, I seriously digressed from talking about Lee. My point is that a statue of Bruce Lee would be a great thing to a man that meant so much to many people, including me.
_____________________________________
¹There is a lot of controversy over the evolution of Bruce Lee’s martial art(s), by practitioners of his martial art at different stages of its development. But I won’t discuss that here.

~AP

Weird behavior, creativity linked

2005-09-16T18:00:00.000-04:00

Weird behavior, creativity linked

So according to this study I read at World Science, "weirdoes" – or people displaying schizotypal personality – may be more creative. Hmm, yes that explains it. So, perhaps I should be nicer to these "savants," since one of them may be the next Tesla or van Gogh. Other previous studies on schizophrenia (and related ilnesses) and creativity studies have supported this idea as well; but I will suspend judgment on this until I hear stronger evidence for this alleged phenomenon.

~AP

Bush takes blame for flaws in Katrina response

2005-09-15T02:16:00.000-04:00

Bush takes blame for flaws in Katrina response - Hurricane Katrina - MSNBC.com

I am sure this phenomenal event – Bush actually taking responsibility for something (you know something effective leaders tend to do) – has been talked about on a million or so blogs already, so I will just skip the banter and go right to my immediate thought: “Wow!”

Now back to your regularly scheduled program.

~AP

Anthrax Hoaxes, I Hope They Are Worth It

2005-09-11T10:45:00.000-04:00

The Scientist: Hi. You've got anthrax, Aug. 29, 2005

There are many false cases of anthrax reported; sometimes, these are pranks and other times serious attempts to scare people. With people still recovering from paranoia induced from the federal government (perhaps, as a smoke screen for other serious domestic problems that weren't being properly dealt with) and the mass media hype after the Sept. 11 attacks, it hardly seems intelligent to phone in a false anthrax threat. Yet, here we have a possible case of someone doing so – who worked for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) no less!

I guess if this story is true, which is reported in The Scientist, then this lady faces felony charges merely because she said something stupid out of anger. A lady owning and renting property near Boca Raton, Florida, but lives in Maryland was a little salty about not getting real estate tax breaks that she felt that she deserved. So in spite, allegedly she called the property appraiser’s office and told them: "It's Michelle Ledgister. I must commend your skillful sleuths in knowing where the main campus of NIH is located. But what they didn't tell you is that NIH is located where infectious agents are, and you guys now have anthrax spores once again, so do be careful. Toodles."

I won't lie, I thought this was funny. However, if what she did is true, then I am not sympathetic, since she comes off being a spoiled brat that could not get property tax exemptions that she felt she should receive from owning a Florida home. Further, the penalty and fines she may have to pay will cost much more than simply paying her property taxes – rather ironic. People, in this era of the "war on global terrorism" should really know better.

~AP

Katrina and Global Warming

2005-09-02T15:46:00.000-04:00

I will not beat around the bush on my feelings with this current situation in Louisiana and related areas. This tragedy is horrible. Furthermore, questions about class and race seem almost inevitable as most the people suffering are poor and black. Well I think these issues will be debated quite abundantly in the news, so I won’t rant on those things – at least not yet.

What I want to bring attention to is that natural disasters such as hurricane Katrina gives science further, albeit horrific, confirming evidence of global warming. Whereas agnostic or corporate-driven politicians have continued to debate the issue, there is no debate in the scientific community that global warming is a fact. The main debate within scientific circles about global warming is how much of it is induced by humans and how much of it is from natural processes. Also, an article link I received from a friend gave a quite chillingly accurate prediction of this week's events in New Orleans in an issue of National Geographic Magazine from last October: Gone with the Water.

Yet, as long as we tolerate politicians, such as those within the Bush Administration that are anti-science and cater merely to the interests of big business, we can probably expect more unnecessary tragedies such as what is happening in the southeastern United States. In any case, I think Michael Moore’s letter to the president can some up my feelings as well:

Vacation is Over... an open letter from Michael Moore to George W. Bush

Friday, September 2nd, 2005

Dear Mr. Bush:

Any idea where all our helicopters are? It's Day 5 of Hurricane Katrina and thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be airlifted. Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do you need help finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears parking lot. Man, was that a drag.

Also, any idea where all our national guard soldiers are? We could really use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do like helping with national disasters. How come they weren't there to begin with?

Last Thursday I was in south Florida and sat outside while the eye of Hurricane Katrina passed over my head. It was only a Category 1 then but it was pretty nasty. Eleven people died and, as of today, there were still homes without power. That night the weatherman said this storm was on its way to New Orleans. That was Thursday! Did anybody tell you? I know you didn't want to interrupt your vacation and I know how you don't like to get bad news. Plus, you had fundraisers to go to and mothers of dead soldiers to ignore and smear. You sure showed her!

I especially like how, the day after the hurricane, instead of flying to Louisiana, you flew to San Diego to party with your business peeps. Don't let people criticize you for this -- after all, the hurricane was over and what the heck could you do, put your finger in the dike?

And don't listen to those who, in the coming days, will reveal how you specifically reduced the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for New Orleans this summer for the third year in a row. You just tell them that even if you hadn't cut the money to fix those levees, there weren't going to be any Army engineers to fix them anyway because you had a much more important construction job for them -- BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ!

On Day 3, when you finally left your vacation home, I have to say I was moved by how you had your Air Force One pilot descend from the clouds as you flew over New Orleans so you could catch a quick look of the disaster. Hey, I know you couldn't stop and grab a bullhorn and stand on some rubble and act like a commander in chief. Been there done that.

There will be those who will try to politicize this tragedy and try to use it against you. Just have your people keep pointing that out. Respond to nothing. Even those pesky scientists who predicted this would happen because the water in the Gulf of Mexico is getting hotter and hotter making a storm like this inevitable. Ignore them and all their global warming Chicken Littles. There is nothing unusual about a hurricane that was so wide it would be like having one F-4 tornado that stretched from New York to Cleveland.

No, Mr. Bush, you just stay the course. It's not your fault that 30 percent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had no transportation to get out of town. C'mon, they're black! I mean, it's not like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving white people on their roofs for five days? Don't make me laugh! Race has nothing -- NOTHING -- to do with this!

You hang in there, Mr. Bush. Just try to find a few of our Army helicopters and send them there. Pretend the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are near Tikrit.

Yours,

Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
www.MichaelMoore.com

P.S. That annoying mother, Cindy Sheehan, is no longer at your ranch. She and dozens of other relatives of the Iraqi War dead are now driving across the country, stopping in many cities along the way. Maybe you can catch up with them before they get to DC on September 21st.

~AP