Category: Things that make my brain hurt

Screwy Logic

I just ran across this article from beliefnet on the “insanity” of Mayor Bloomberg and his decision to not have a prayer at the 9/11 memorial service.

http://blog.beliefnet.com/news/2011/09/no-thanks-to-god-or-first-responders-at-mayors-secular-911-ceremonies.php

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants Sunday’s 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks to focus on the victims and their families — not on God or the heroes who rushed into the burning towers to save as many as they could.

Let’s forget that there are more than just Christians in the United States. Let’s forget that the first amendment of the constitution establishes a separation of church and state making it inappropriate for an elected official to engage in a religious activity as part of his duties as an elected official. Let’s forget Congress’s blatant refusal to help the “heroes who rushed into the burning towers” when they needed our help, not our thanks.

The statement here is we should be thankful to God. For what? For helping the heroes of 9/11 save over 20,000 lives? So I should be so condescending and arrogant as to say that they could not have done that themselves, that they required intervention from a supernatural deity to accomplish what they did? No. I will not do that. They were heroes, they put their own lives at risk. They ran into the buildings everyone else was running out of. And many of them were still there when the buildings collapsed. Many did not come back. I will not dishonor them that way.

So what else should we thank God for in regards to 9/11? The 3,000 victims? Surely not. The author, despite his irrational convictions about the supernatural, could not possibly be that insane.

Perhaps what he is trying to say is that God was present and helping out on 9/11. Nobody saw him, of course, but why not. 

So,  why  didn’t  God  stop  the  planes?

Perhaps the almighty supernatural creator of everything helped save lives that day. Why did he allow 3,000 others to die? Why did he not prevent the disaster in the first place? Surely that would have been trivial for him. The firefighters and rescue personnel on the ground could not have stopped the planes from hitting the building so they did everything else they could to save as many lives as they could. But God could have stopped the planes, couldn’t he?

So what answers might a theist give in response to this?

1) God works in mysterious ways/We cannot know God’s purpose/etc.

I hate this one. It’s probably the most common response of all, too. It’s a cop out. It’s a way of saying (and rationalizing) “Something bad happened and God did not stop it, so he must have had some greater purpose in mind that I just don’t understand.” Replace “God” with “Zeus” and the sentence means just as much. Muslims worship the same God, the God of Abraham, and on that day certain Muslims were rejoicing because God had struck a blow against the evil west.

2) God allowed it to happen to bring people back to God. There was a resurgence of religion in the intervening years.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Replace God with a man’s name and see if the sentence still sounds great. “George allowed 3,000 people to die in flames and horrible crushing death so that people all over the world would worship him and proclaim his glory.”  George sounds like a sick bastard to me. A god that allows thousands of people to die a horrible death so that I might love him? Pass.

3) God works subtly. He could not work overtly because we must have faith.

The “God can’t tip his hand” argument. If he stopped the planes in midair and placed them gently on the ground, we would have definitive proof that he exists, and we are required to love God without proof. This one never made sense to me. If it has to be my decision to “love God” of my own free will, what does that have to do with being given proof that he exists? I have no more proof that Yahweh exists than I do of Zeus. Who do I pick? Do I convert to all religions just to be safe? They all have equal validity.

This is the kind of warped logic we use to attack each other politically these days. We are in grave danger of becoming a Theocracy. Every day we behave more and more like the Christians of the 14th century, or like the Muslims of today. 9/11 was not about God except to the Muslim terrorists. Whether you believe in a God or not, he wasn’t there that day.

Imagine No Religion

Jesus Camp

A couple of months ago I ran across this video:

And posted it here. I’ve never really decided if this is a joke or propaganda, but I find it about as likely to be true as Russell’s teapot. Dawkins is an educator and wants people to see reason, expand their minds, and learn: not kill them.

Today I ran across this:

It’s the trailer for a movie called “Jesus Camp”. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but the trailer scares the crap out of me.

Nobody ever talks about the “Army of Atheism” or the “Army of Dawkins” or any other kind of army (except the ones with giant robots built with evil technology). People do, however, refer to the “Army of God”.  Frequently. These people are indoctrinating children and giving them a jihad to fight. At least part of this movie is right here in Kansas City just over the state line in Lee’s Summit.

Seriously, are you all coming to kill me?

The Truth of Science is Not Determined by Public Opinion

In a sleepless bout of late night web surfing, I ran across this:

Let’s get the easy criticisms out of the way first. Yes, she does believe evolution is a myth. No, she did not answer the question (but that’s normal for politicians). A national education standard is not a violation of the constitution. And letting local school systems decide what should be taught is a terrible idea.

For those schooled in logic, yes I am about to invoke the slippery slope argument. I don’t think it’s out of place though, because the slippery slope is their agenda. While it may be bad logic to say “because A happens then B will happen”, It’s not necessarily bad logic to say “They want A to happen because it enables B to happen.”  The slippery slope does sometimes happen.

Only a creationist would argue this. It’s the same rehashed party line nonsense that’s been coming from the right (google “State’s Rights”), but this is a frightening turn for it. The problem is that some parts of the country are more fundamentalist than others, and this policy, if it came to pass, would enable those parts of the country to begin teaching religion (read “creationism”) in schools. Creationism is religion. There is no scientific basis for stating that a higher power created the earth and mankind. That science cannot explain everything is a poor excuse to interject religion into federally funded schools. People, Kansas would jump on this in a heartbeat, and I have to live here.

Allowing local schools to determine their own standards could lead to all kinds of nonsense. Would this policy still make sense if a local school system in rural Kansas decided Algebra was too hard, and it was no longer necessary? That’s what she’s arguing for, the right to do that. A national standard for education is not a bad thing.

Once again, there are not two sides to this argument. There is science, and what people believe with no evidence (e.g. not science). In science class, you teach science, not not science. If we can prove there was a big bang, but we cannot say what caused it, then the schools teach that there was a big bang, and that we cannot definitively say what caused it. You don’t say “God” because we don’t know!

The answer is simple here. Teach science in science class, teach religion in Sunday school. If we don’t know what caused life to begin, teach what we do know in science class. Teach them that “God did it” on Sunday morning.

Multi-Level Marketing (or “I’ll never need math in real life”)

In my life I’ve run across a few multi-level marketing schemes organizations. I’ve never become heavily invested in one, mostly because there’s a little voice in my head that always screams “somethin’ ain’t right here” every time I look into one. Since the cult, I’ve noticed that some of the ones I’ve been approached by (Yeah, I’m talking about you, Primerica) exhibit some traits that reminded me of the practices of cults. I’m not saying they’re cults, but they sure smelled like one.

One thing that never occurred to me until recently is to do the math. When you’re entertaining the thought of joining one of these groups, they spend a lot of time and money wooing you. You see people a few levels up who are simply rolling in cash. Giant conventions in Texas where stadiums of people are cheering a couple who “went diamond”.  A guy who just bought a $200,000 car. Your desire for success and wealth kick in and drive out any kind of rational or critical thought. I sort of figure that the voice in my head that’s kept me out of these all these years are those parts of my brain desperately trying to reassert themselves when I go all googly-eyed at the thought of wealth.

They all operate similarly, it doesn’t matter if they’re selling soap or supplemental life insurance. It goes something like this: you sell X amount of product, on which you make N commission (which isn’t usually very much), but the real way you make money is by bringing in people under you. You build your own “network”. You bring in something like 5 people under you, and on all of their sales you make Y commission, which is not much either. But then they each bring in 5 more people, and by the time you have 4 or 5 levels below you, you’re super mega rich and you don’t have to do a thing to earn it anymore! Woot!

Now, let’s run some actual numbers. At the top of the pyramid is one guy. We’ll call him N0. The count of this tier (0) is 1. This can also be expressed as 50.

The next tier will have 5 people, because N0 brought in 5 people. This can be expressed as 51.

The next tier will have 52 people.  Each member brought in 5 more, so this tier has 5+5+5+5+5 or 5×5 or 52 which is 25.

Tier 4 will have 53 or 125. You should be able to see the pattern by now. Each tier will have 5(N-1) people in it. It’s important to note at this point though, that the total number of people required by tier 4 is 156.  This is 125 + 25 + 5 + 1 or image (If I remember my sigma notation correctly). Nobody is making any money yet though.

Let’s jump down to level 13. If you’re joining a MLM, you’re probably down the ladder a bit, right? This tier requires 305,175,781 member in the organization. 304,687,500 of these do not have enough people under them to make any money. They’re in the bottom 4 tiers. This leaves 488,281 of the members actually making money, or about 0.1%. As a side note, the U.S. population as of the last census was 311,933.344. Let’s go just one level deeper so that some of these people at the bottom can start making some money.

Tier 14 has 1,220,703,125 people, bringing the total number of people in the organization to 1,525,878,906. Wow. The number of people in the bottom 4 tiers is now 1,523,437,500, with 2,441,406 people actually making money now. Wow that’s a lot! It’s also 0.1%. Let’s go another level to get those numbers up, shall we?

At Tier 15, the number of people in the organization number 7,629,394,531. Roughly 854 million more people than actually exist, according to the estimate of world population. Whoops, I think we’ve passed a logic barrier here. Let’s ignore that and run the numbers again. 7,617,187,500 people constitute the bottom 4 tiers leaving a mere 12,207,031 in the range that makes money, or 0.1%. I’m detecting another pattern here.

If we roll this back to more reasonable levels, say 8, Then the organization requires 97,656 people. The bottom 4 tiers have 97,500 people with the remaining 156 actually making money. Only 156 people in an organization of around 100k actually making money sounds abysmal. It’s also about 0.1%.

Basically, no matter how you roll the numbers, 99.9% of all members of the organization lose money, while 0.1% of them actually do make money (in varying degrees).

By way of comparison, roulette contains 36 possible numbers, so the odds of winning by betting on a single number of roulette is just below 3%. You’re actually more likely to get rich by placing your entire life savings on a single number of roulette than you are by joining a MLM.

Thank you, little voice in the back of my head. And thank you Skeptoid.

Should math be taught in schools?

Recently all Miss USA candidates were asked if evolution should be taught in schools. 

The answers were varied, and most overwhelmingly indicated that they did not personally believe evolution. That’s an appalling statement on American education and the iron grip the religious right holds over our country.  While there were a couple of definite “yes” answers, many “yes” answers were of the variety “well we should teach both sides”. It’s such an appalling state that so many believe there’s “two sides”.  If we teach whatever anybody believes, we must also include creation stories from Hinduism, Daosim, Pastafarianism, Raelianism, and so on.  It’s not just evolution and the Abrahamic faiths.  Evolution differs from all of the creation stories in one important respect: It has evidence.  It’s science. It’s not faith based. We should not teach religion in schools, but we should teach science. Creationism in all it’s varied forms (including Intelligent Design) is RELIGION. Period.

Consider this from another angle: what if the question was “Should we teach Math in schools?”

Where the hell is my giant robot, Dawkins?

This is actually quite funny, with just a hint of supercreepy. The very thought of anyone organizing atheists into an army bent on world conquest is completely laughable. Sorry, we just don’t work that way. Not to mention that most of us, Dawkins included, are ardent pacifists as well. 

But then they warn the Christians to get their sword and fight off the evil atheists. Um, what? Is this more of that Bush era “strike first” kind of thing? It’s more than a little creepy that there are Christians out there who might take this video seriously.

Let me make one thing clear: I’m not fighting a war for Richard Dawkins or anybody until I get my own giant fucking killer robot.

A brief look at what’s really important to us as a species

You may (or may not) have heard that recently SETI had to mothball it’s Allen Telescope Array.  Apparently it would cost $2.5 million to keep it operational.  That’s a lot of money, especially in these hard economic times, right?

It depends on what’s important to you.  I recently saw a bumper sticker that read something to the effect of “we never have enough money for education, but we always seem to have enough money for war”.  Think about that. The swath of Republicans we just voted into office (due in no small part to the billions of anonymous dollars filtered through SuperPACs made possible by the Citizen’s United ruling) have been busy slashing funding left and right.  They claim we can’t afford these things.  Things like health care for all Americans, NPR, PBS, Planned Parenthood, and our educational system.  I’m watching my sister facing the possibility of being fired and forced to re-apply for her job as a way of “improving our educational system”.  What a crock.  Meanwhile, we’re involved in a third war now.  We don’t pay our soldiers much, but damn do we buy them some expensive toys. 

Microcosmologist has put together a little infographic that shows, quite clearly, where our priorities lie.  (there’s more after the picture)

Is this stuff important? Is it worth the money? I defer to the great Carl Sagan.