My brother-in-law Z– came to visit this weekend, and after an extraordinarily fun day of touring wineries and visiting friends in Sonoma, we awoke the next morning to find ourselves hazy-headed with an open schedule. So we decided to visit what my wife and I have called the “Mormon Castle” since we moved to Oakland: an imposing temple perched in the Oakland hills, clearly visible from most parts of the Bay. I was excited, but also mildly apprehensive that a confrontation with a believer could turn sour pretty rapidly.

We arrived with no expectations, but decided it could be fun to tour the visitors’ center, upon entering which, we were immediately accosted by a doe-eyed twenty-something who was secreting a mucilaginously welcoming demeanor. She introduced herself, but I promptly forgot her name. Her badge read “Hermana T–”, which I initially thought to be a feminine form of Herman.

She sat us down next two to other gentleman: a hardened-looking man dressed in black leather, and his adult son who looked terribly inconvenienced and desperately in need of a cigarette. I began asking Hermana questions about the history of the building, and of the western migration of Mormons to Utah. However, I was soon cut short when she directed us to focus our attention on the larger-than-life statue of Jesus in front of us, and his presumptive voice that was being piped in from above. It was the standard “get to the father through me” stuff that you’ll hear from most Christians, and was pretty uninteresting.

When she returned, she eagerly asked us what we thought of the presentation, and all I managed to muster “this room is cool.” Z– said it made him wonder who did the voice. She seemed unfazed when we admitted we didn’t feel touched by Heavenly Father over the course of the presentation.

Hermana, and her associate, who I’ll call Hermana Dos, then asked us if we wanted to watch a 20 minute presentation. Z– and I looked at each other, back to the Hermanas, and said “sure, why not.” They took us to the entrance of a presentation room that I could tell from the lobby contained dioramas. My heart sank, as I was then sure we were entering a Hell House. Luckily however, it turned out to be nothing more than a rather boring video about the story of a Mormon family. It was presented in vignettes, as we moved from exhibit to exhibit. It laid the “importance of the family” theme on pretty thick, but didn’t say anything that surprising. Finally, we ended up in a room where we watched a short video about the role of the Mormon Temple in the lives of the family, and how Mormons are “sealed” to their spouses and children, so they can spend eternity together.

When the lights came up, the Hermanas picked on Z– to ask a question, and he obliged. “I grew up in a Christian church,” he said “and from this presentation, I don’t see a difference between that and Mormonism.” The Hermanas looked at each other, and then to the man in leather: “maybe you can answer.”

Turns out he was a recent convert — two weeks a Mormon — who was ostensibly trying to straighten out his wayward son. The man looked down solemnly for a moment, and then cast piercing (but somewhat vacant) gaze directly into my eyes and said “love. It’s the love.” He went on to explain how Mormonism had led him out of bad times, which made me feel icky (read: vaguely malicious/immature) for visiting what I thought to be a theological petting zoo.

We wrapped up the visit in a fantastically beautiful room with soaring windows looking out over the Bay. I tried to extract some more details on dogma and doctrine from Hermana Dos, but she was more interested in having us interact with a touchscreen kiosk that explained the different rooms in the temple (since we were “unclean” and therefore forbidden from entering to see them ourselves). I tried to get her to state the church’s position on evolution, but all I could elicit was a vague distrust of Darwinism, and that we are not apes. Nothing on the age of the earth.

I also asked (rather pedantically) how you could expect to be together with your nuclear family for eternity, if your spouse will still be “sealed” to her parents and your children will be sealed to their spouses etc., to which she responded “we have faith that it will work out, though we do not understand.”

Hermana Uno returned for her comrade, and they left us for a moment while we marveled at the display of Books of Mormon in different languages. I salivated over the Mayan copy.

They returned with literature for us, as well as an (English) copy of the book, inscribed with a handwritten blurb from each of them on the front cover. We said our goodbyes and thanked them warmly.

–

It was an interesting experience and I’m glad we did it, but it wasn’t life altering. Mostly what I took away was that Mormons are deeply preoccupied with the concept of family, surely because they believe you’ll be with yours for eternity. In retrospect I remember hearing this before, when Proposition 8 was on the ballot. At the time, a source I read stated that the measure carried great meaning for the eternal family: if gays can marry, then shit gets all fucked up. My visit to the temple brought this fact into sharper focus.

Also, I gathered from the presentation that Mormons obsess about the afterlife in a way that would be foreign to most “vanilla” Christians. Each of their temples has a “celestial room” which partially replicates the place where you’ll lounge with your ‘fam in perpetuam. This gave me the feeling that they’re a creepier death cult than mainstream Christians.

As for the nitty-gritty on the history of the Mormon church, I think I learned more from South Park’s Mormon special.

The sisters Hermanas were great sports. They were very kind and did an excellent job leading the tour and answering questions. They never seemed judgmental or rude, although Z– and I were on our best behavior. I just hope that someday they make it out of the church, for their and their children’s sake.

Bill Maher nails it as always:

New rule: now that they’ve finished reading the Constitution out loud, the teabaggers must call out that group of elitist liberals whose values are so antithetical to theirs. I’m talking of course about the founding fathers.

In the video, he references this crazy f*cking painting:

I want to stab my eyes out.

For those of you who aren’t up to speed with your 4chan memes, you’ve been missing out. Behold, the fingerbox:

Your typical, baseline model fingerbox.

What is it? From Encyclopedia Dramatica:

A finger box, though ostensibly a relatively simple device, is in fact a staggeringly complex machine comprised of several thousand finely crafted components. These are most often distributed in sets of nine, but the poor, the disenfranchised and the mentally handicapped have all been observed amusing themselves for hours at a time with just a single unit. Finger boxing (also referred to colloquially as ‘fingering’ and/or ‘boxing’) is a rapidly growing trend among teens aged 13-18. The first instance of the device, though in a cruder and less intricate form, was invented by Sir Eustace Henry Trollington more than 130 years ago in Dunbartonshire, Scotland.

A Finger box basically creates a variety of sensations by stimulating the nerves of the finger tip, though the fun was short-lived when a group vicious saboteurs started contaminating the devices with old razor-blades, broken glass and ebolavirus. Panic ensued as a result of the dismemberments, lock-jaw and in some cases, slow and inexorable deaths. This led to the inevitable banning of the devices by the UK parliament in 1919, with the rest of the developed world quickly following suit.

No, really, what is it?! Know Your Meme gives a great explanation, but basically the fingerbox is a way of ferreting out newcomers on forums. Someone will post a picture of a fingerbox, at which point everyone who’s in on the joke will compliment the original poster on the quality of his/her fingerbox, or wax nostalgic about fingerboxes they used to own. Inevitably, the trap is sprung when someone asks “what is a fingerbox?” The trollers then proceed to lol vigorously at the n00b. Pretty stupid, right?

That’s what I thought, until I realized this phenomenon is analogous to bizarre religious doctrines like the Trinity. Many ambitious people have endeavored to explain a triune God who sent himself to earth to be killed so humans could be forgiven in his own eyes, but it remains a perplexing part of Christian dogma.

However, it may not be important whether belief in the Trinity actually makes sense. Like the fingerbox (or a secret handshake or codeword), such articles of faith could serve to define an ingroup, and nothing more.

In fact, the success of these phenomena may be due, in the end, to their incomprehensibility. One of the roles of religion — and 4chan — is to provide members a sense of belonging. This sense is augmented when the qualifications for membership become stricter. Religious groups “up the ante” of exclusivity by being increasingly demanding of their constituents — the harder it is to make the cut, the awesomer it is to be a member of the extra-special cool club. Ultimately, this may explain certain commonalities in practices among the world’s religions: abstinence, fasting, dietary and sartorial prohibitions, eschewal of certain music and dances, and demonization of certain sexual practices, to name a few. It makes sense that this process could extend to the articles of faith themselves, such that paradoxical or outlandish dogmas act as stringent qualifying criteria: “if you can believe that, then you definitely deserve to be a member!”

Intriguingly, nuttier beliefs could be an asset to a religion?

In Breaking the Spell, Dan Dennett makes the point that America is a thriving free market of religious ideas in vigorous competition. It makes sense that the religions that offer a better “product” — that is to say, exclusivizing doctrine — would be more successful by garnering more adherents. In other words, there’s a tendency towards an arms race of crazy beliefs, wherein sects with loonier beliefs are more fit and have greater selective advantage.

Anyway, next time you’re listening to some Christ-bot defend Noah’s Ark or Jonah living inside a whale, and you’re like “lol wut?” … you have just been pwned, ya n00b.

I recently received another response to my piece “I am a Militant Atheist” over at Plasma Pool. The commenter – a Mr. John Pilkey – is much more level-headed in expressing his opinion than the previous commenter, which I appreciate.

I have to disagree that Biblical Christianity possesses great logical depth. In fact, it’s rife with contradictions that can only be explained with special pleading. For example, the fact that God is supposedly all knowing and all loving, but that he created man and placed him in the garden with the tree of knowledge. By definition an all-knowing being would know the outcome of these actions – namely that Adam and Eve would fall victim to temptation and eat of the tree. By definition, an all-loving being would seek to create a world without suffering. So why would God do this?

A suitable analogy would be someone releasing a priceless vase from the window of a ten story building. The perpetrator knows with exact certainty the trajectory the vase will follow, and can therefore be held responsible for the ensuing destruction. And while our vase-dropper is culpable, his knowledge of gravity is only based on a lifetime of feeling its effects (and perhaps a few physics classes). For all he knows, this time, there could be a lapse in Newton’s laws. Also for all he knows, a truck carrying a load of pillows could drive under the vase at the last moment, cushioning its fall. God, on the other hand, is omniscient: he would know with perfect certainty that man would bring sin into the world.

This simple contradiction is a crack in the foundation of all Christian theology, and as much as you try to buttress that which you build on top of it, this fundamental weakness remains.

Mr. Pilkey claims that he never expected to bear witness to a miracle, and that miracles of the past served as “authentication proper only to the times when they occurred.” He says that, because he is not an Old Testament prophet or an Apostle, he has no need of such miracles to establish or bolster his faith. Presumably, the faith of modern peoples should be grounded in tradition and upbringing. I think this contradicts yet another attribute of the Christian God: perfect justice.

How fair is it that members of generations past were permitted incontrovertible evidence of God’s existence – the sun standing still in the sky, the parting the Red Sea, any one of Jesus’ miracles– while I should be content with two thousand years of tradition and hearsay? Their salvation was virtually guaranteed because they benefited from direct evidence, while I have to struggle with ambiguous data, ultimately placing my bet on insufficient knowledge, and risking an eternity of suffering. This preferential treatment of generations past is not what I’d expect of a just God.

Mr. Pilkey also makes the point that for those such as himself, God’s existence is “presuppositional.” Now, I don’t intend what follows to be an insult, since he was so gracious in his response, but I feel it’s necessary to my rhetorical point: if that’s what he believes, Mr. Pilkey is not someone who’s looking for an answer that explains all his evidence, he’s looking for the evidence that explains his answer.

I object strongly to the accusation that scientists “hold fast to their fundamental convictions” as believers do. On the contrary, the entire endeavor of science starts with unshackling yourself from your presuppositions, or at least trying your best to. Just because you’re willing to disclose your prejudices outright does not excuse you from purging them. In science, nothing can be an “established fact beyond dispute,” because people’s reputations are made by challenging the paradigm. If someone could disprove Atomic Theory or the Theory of Evolution, they would be immortalized in scientific history overnight. The only reason scientists continue to believe that space is a “transparent vacuum,” for example, is that it’s evidenced by direct, laboratory observation, and it withstands experimental scrutiny. Neither of those things can be said of God.

A quick perusal of Teh Intarwebz shows there is a historian Dr. John Davis Pilkey, who seeks to reconstruct human history immediately after the waters of Noah’s flood receded, which he claims happened two thousand years ago. Our commenter did not provide a website, but a quick check of the source code of his comments shows his e-mail address as jpilkey@earthlink.net, which is the same for this site, so I suspect commenter Pilkey is in fact Dr. Pilkey.

Rebutting such a theory is far beyond the scope of my ability as a blogger and budding scientist, but I’d like to point you in the direction of at least one line of argument that’s compelling to me:

For example, the published count of alleles of ABO glycosyltransferase, the gene associated with the ABO blood types, is up to 29 so far. The three sons of Noah and their three wives only had a total of 12 copies of chromosome 9, where the gene is located, and even assuming maximum heterozygosity and no shared alleles between any of them, that still leaves 17 alleles that had to have arisen later.

There’s a lot more out there to be had. Talk Origins is a good site if you’re in the market for explanations.

Anyway, I’d like to thank Dr. Pilkey for sharing his opinion. I deeply enjoy discussing these matters, and appreciate the opportunity.

Now that there’s been so much talk about the “Ground Zero” mosque, I figured it’s time I offer my two cents. Lots of good arguments have been made … entirely by those in support of the builders’ rights.

From the opponents’ side, I hear a lot of people asking “why does it have to be so close to Ground Zero?” That’s a question you’re free to ask yourself, or perhaps those who selected the site, but you cannot ground a serious objection in that question alone. Besides, what would you offer as a solution, to have a legally enforced radius around this hole in the ground where no Muslim edifice can be erected? Sounds constitutional to me …

I’ve also heard that it would be a “slap in the face” to the victims of 9/11. Well, I think that abandoning our nation’s principles is a greater affront to the memories of those killed in the attack than an “Islamic Cultural Center” ever could be. Not to mention the American Muslims who were in the towers when they were brought down; wouldn’t disallowing the construction of the Center be a slap in the face to them?

Which brings me to my next point: if there was ever any doubt in our minds that the Right is in the habit of systematically vilifying Islam and Arabs, that should by now be expunged. After all, these aren’t al-Qaeda operatives who want to build the Center, they’re Americans: that’s right the opponents are trying to deny Americans their right to worship wherever they want. Well, let them be reminded that the first line of the First Amendment reads

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;”

Yes, let them be reminded that their bellyaching can never beget any legal instantiation, because it would violate one of the first rights guaranteed to us by the Constitution.

In the end, I think that the anti-”mosque” people’s idiocy speaks for itself. But I should say that, while I think their entire rhetoric is vile, I would happily die for their right to voice it, as should any American for the free speech of their brothers and sisters.

For your viewing pleasure:

(Via)

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

(Via)

The US Military has a $660 million contract with the Michigan company Trijicon, which manufactures rifle sights destined for use in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As it turns out, the company has been surreptitiously placing references to Bible verses on their sights. So much for this not being a holy war.

From the company’s mission statement on their website.

“We believe that America is great when its people are good,” says the Web site. “This goodness has been based on Biblical standards throughout our history, and we will strive to follow those morals.”

John 8:12 "Prepare to eat lead, raghead."

Dear God. These people make me shudder.

“It allows the Mujahedeen, the Taliban, al Qaeda and the insurrectionists and jihadists to claim they’re being shot by Jesus rifles,” he said.

Weinstein, an attorney and former Air Force officer, said many members of his group who currently serve in the military have complained about the markings on the sights. He also claims they’ve told him that commanders have referred to weapons with the sights as “spiritually transformed firearm[s] of Jesus Christ.”

He said coded biblical inscriptions play into the hands of “those who are calling this a Crusade.”

That’s precisely how this looks to Muslims.

When imperial powers engage in this kind of religious warfare, things can get very nasty. The Sepoy Rebellion was instigated by the same kind of tactics in colonial India, when the British were accused of greasing their bullets with beef tallow and pig fat, which are ritually unclean to the native Hindus and Muslims respectively.

In order to load their rifles, the soldiers had to bite the cartridges. For Hindus, this meant they would lose their caste. For Muslims, it meant that if they were shot by such a ‘tainted’ bullet, they would die unclean and be excluded from paradise.

So they revolted. And much fun ensued.

(h/t Pharyngula)

If you haven’t heard of Pascal’s Wager, it’s a rather silly way of arguing to someone that they should believe in God. The argument goes something like this: in deciding whether or not you believe in God, you should approach the problem the way you approach a wagering situation. Ask yourself what you could possibly gain, and what you could possibly lose.

Given that you have two choices (believe in God, or don’t) and that there are two possible results (God exists, or he doesn’t), there are four possible outcomes. Traditionally, these are arranged in this decision chart to help you conceptualize.

Clearly, the most sensible solution for a soul-wagerer would be the first row: believing in God. The payoff is potentially high, and the risk is low.

Nevermind that this kind of wagering goes against the very faith-in-the-absence-of-evidence that the Christian God asks of us. Such a disingenuous attempt to feign belief in the deity probably wouldn’t go far to impress Him.

But that isn’t my main problem with the Wager. My beef arises from the fact that it only assumes one possible god. To be a real wager, you’d need to consider all possible outcomes, and that means other gods. Which is why I devised Elliott’s Wager, and the corresponding decision chart.

Unfortunately, it won’t fit in this blog format, so you can find it (here).

-

So where’s your money?

For those out there that believe the Noah’s Ark story was a literal worldwide flood, you might want to check this out:

Unreasonable Faith recaps some of the points they make in the video:

1. Even if Noah took out all the “variations” and only stuck with “kinds,” that would still have been over 2 billion animals.

2. For a year in the ark, two elephants alone would require 365,000 lbs of food and 65,000 gal of water;
two giraffes would require 54,740 lbs of food
two lions would require 16,000 lbs of fresh meat.

3. If Noah took all baby animals, how would all the babies get there from around the world at the same time? Or how would all the animals have babies at the exact same time?

…

5. Not even most of the sea life could survive due to the changes in temperature, pressure, sunlight, filtration, salt.

The video makes the point that at an elevation of 29,055 feet, all the animals would freeze to death, or suffocate to death because the air is too thin.

I don’t think that’s right, because you’d displace the air upwards as well. 29,000 feet would be the new sea level, and the pressure would be the same as current sea level (or just a tiny bit less, since the air is occupying a larger volume).

But that’s just a nitpicky detail.

It’s also worth considering that the rainiest place on earth gets 39 feet of rain a year, or 1.28 inches a day. In order to cover Mount Everest in 40 days, it would have to rain 8,716.5 inches per day (726 feet). That’s so much rain that you’d drown standing in it. The sheer downward pressure of that much water would probably sink the boat.

Nothing could have survived (unless it was magic).

Each of the four horsemen of New Atheism (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens) has his favorite argument he likes to trot out in his talks and debates. Having listened to these guys talk over and over again, I have become pretty familiar with their lines of reasoning and preferred modes of attack.

But there’s one I never get tired of hearing, and unsurprisingly it’s from Christopher Hitchens — in my opinion, the most eloquent of the four.

Unfortunately, I’ve hitherto been unable to find a transcript of this argument, so I took the liberty to transcribe it.

I asked Sir Francis Collins, the leading Christian who did the genome project (as you probably know), how long he thought humanity had been on earth, and I asked professor Richard Dawkins how long he thought fully evolved humans had been present. Dawkins thinks it could have been as many as 250k years, Collins thinks certainly not less than 100k — 100k is all I need. 100k years since we definitely separated ourselves from the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals…

…Now, that’s to say — if you believe in a divine intervention in our lives — that, give it just 100k years, for the first 94-95k, people are born, they die mainly of their teeth or in childbirth or of microorganisms they don’t know exist. Their life expectancy is for the first 50 or 60k years, perhaps 25 years. They’re killed by animals. They’re killed by each other in pointless turf wars. They’re killed in typhoons, floods, mudslides, and so forth. But gradually they make slow exponential progress, they get to the point (suffering all the time and heaven watches it with folded arms, like this). And then four or 5k years ago heaven decides “we can’t let them go on like this, we need an intervention. Probably the best place for it would be in Bronze Age Palestine or Egypt. Probably the best form it could take would be a human sacrifice. That might cheer them up a bit.”

Now, if you don’t believe this, you do not believe in any of the three monotheistic revelations, [because] that’s what you have to believe. That’s the minimum you have to believe in order to believe in any of those foresaid. And of course, it’s not believeable, or should I put it like this: it only re-places the argument as before. It replaces the argument as it was before we knew about Cro-Magnons, or dinosours, or Neanderthals. It argues from design. And if everything was designed, what are we to make of the designer, who sentenced so many generations to barbarism, misery, ignorance, slavery and early death?

In the first place, isn’t that a rather incompetent rather tinkering designer, to say the very least of it? In the second place, isn’t it a rather cruel, or at the very best, a highly indifferent one? And we still can’t be sure whether this same incompetent, and indifferent and cruel person cares whether we go to bed with members of our own gender or not, because there’s no way to derive verdicts like this from evidence like that. So the religious still haven’t scored the ghost of a point.

To me, that’s the most compelling argument that God is either non-existent, or an incompetent designer. Either way, the Christian God is a farce.

You can find this argument in most debates Hitchens participates in, but the transcription above is taken from a debate between him and Jay Richards.

I recently received a reply to my piece ‘I am a Militant Atheist’ over at Plasma Pool. Since I neither have the time to address these trite sneers nor the patience for the commenter’s snark, I’m posting a quick run through of his post here, with my immediate thoughts.

“I am not the least surprise [sic] that he launched an attack on the Bible; it’s an old political trick – assassinate your opponent’s character in order that you can appear credible.”

Nonsense. Non-Catholic Christians justify their beliefs all the time with the assumption that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. That’s their premise, and if you successfully challenge it — which any half-wit can do — you challenge every assumption they make thereupon.

“He has not submitted any credible evidence to prove the non-existence of God outside of his aberrant views of the Bible.”

This really pisses me off — when people declare that it’s my obligation to debunk their belief structure.

First off, a bunch of them unabashedly admit at the outset that there’s nothing I could do to change their minds, so you might as well stop the discussion there. And second, they’re the ones making the positive claim about the way the world is! The burden of proof is on them. If they can’t produce a single scrap of evidence for these grandiose claims they’re making about the metaphysical structure of existence, I’m under no obligation to take them seriously, or treat them with deference.

Really, I don’t have time to run around disproving every stupid idea everyone has ever had. If you want to believe there’s a bearded man in the sky who cares what gives you a boner, or that there’s some cosmic soul-soup that we all return to when we die, fine, but don’t delude yourself into thinking that warrants the slightest bit of respect in public discourse when the best evidence you can drudge up is a bronze age book of fairy tales.

“The Bible and Christianity have laid down their propositions. Where is his?”

Here’s my proposition: the world really is as simple as it seems. If you can’t touch it, smell it, hear it, taste it, see it or perceive it with the extended senses given to us by science and mathematics, it just doesn’t exist.

“Let me assure Mr. Callahan that Christianity has been down this road before and always came back stronger than before.”

By what gauge do you make this assertion? Christian faith is — and has been — on the decline in the US.

Church attendance is on a 70 year decline (just since Gallup began tracking, so likely longer than that).

And then there’s Europe, which was formerly the most Christian place on the planet. I don’t think Jesus freaks are rallying a major comeback anytime soon over there.

“May the story of Madelene O’hare [sic] be a lesson to you: God walked right into her house and pulled out a preacher. That’s not hallucination; that’s realithy [sic].”

So what? Her kid’s a preacher. Unless he turned lead into gold on national television, or predicted the exact time and location of some unexpected stellar event, or shit, did anything that couldn’t have just happened anyway it’s not a miracle.