Jeffrey Tayler’s Salon Sunday Secular Sermon

June 8, 2015 • 1:20 pm

by Grania Spingies

Don’t miss the weekly S4  homily by Brother Tayler over at Salon. This week he examined the pained and faintly hostile treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali by Jon Stewart and contrasts it with Stewart’s rather fawning enthusiasm for Reza Aslan revisionist version of reality.

You should read it just for the pleasure of sentences like this:

Stewart, so inquisitorial toward Hirsi Ali, let Aslan ejaculate this postmodern flapdoodle with impunity, and convivially wiped up after him with blather about non-religious causes for violence in the Middle East.

Taylor ponders the same thing that has been debated in this website from time to time: why self-professing liberal leftists are so quick to condemn and distance themselves from the ideas of a brave woman who left Islam and opposes its treatment by extremist, politicized adherents of Muslim women and the majority of peaceful followers of Muslim.

It is a puzzle. Why do people prefer the words of a smiling man who tells them that extremists don’t have anything to do with Islam over the words of an intelligent woman who says that the problem is complicated and the solution may require multiple avenues of discussion and reform? In short: are liberals afraid of the It’s Complicated button?  Or do liberals just tend towards the See No Evil position by default and champion anyone who tells then there is nothing to see here, move along?

Wild animals see themselves in a mirror for the first time

June 8, 2015 • 11:58 am

by Grania

Jerry asked me to post this video after we both had come across it via different sources. I remember my own animals’ reactions to the mirror – we had a large one on the floor propped up against a wall once upon a time, and on various occasions a resident felid or canid would pass by and notice themselves. The cats didn’t seem to be interested or impressed (are they ever?). One of our wolf-descendants tried to threaten the mirror in all earnestness and required a fair amount of tender aftercare to reassure him that the monster in mirror was gone. Another spent a great deal of time investigating behind the mirror (smart girl) and worrying why she couldn’t find anyone there. Our four-footed cousins are a lot like us.

2DayFM Australia has some background:

Innovative French photographer Xavier Hubert Brierre travelled to Gabon with his wife and set up a mirror in several locations in order to capture animals walking by.

The results are stunning, with one of the more amusing reactions being from two leopards.

One of them takes several looks at the mirror before it is attacked by a second leopard, who calls off the ambush when he too spots Xavier’s mirror.

INR 5 photos

June 8, 2015 • 9:56 am

Here are some photos from the INR 5 meeting and our speakers’ dinner last night. Aron Ra, his head mysteriously floating above the podium: Aron Ra The Unholy Trinity in their last appearance. From left to right: Seth Andrews, Matt Dillahunty, Aron Ra: Unholy trio Seth in cat glasses (they are mine, a present from Melissa Chen; see below). Also shown is a book of cat poetry I was given. Seth cat Peter Boghossian: Peter B. Lawrence Krauss boozing it up right before his onstage conversation with Richard Dawkins (I wouldn’t have the moxie to drink whiskey before going onstage!). The booze didn’t show, though: Lawrence and Richard did a great job. Krauss Richard and Lawrence in conversation; Richard is in his usual impeccable dress (and biologically themed tie); Krauss has foregone his usual red Keds and is wearing the pair of authentic handmade, beaded buckskin moccasins that all of us speakers were given (we had to provide our size beforehand by email; Carolyn Porco accidentally copied it back to everyone by mistake and so I’ll reveal that she’s a size 9): Krauss and Dawkins Faisal Saeed Al-Muttar, secular activist and founder of the Global Secular Humanist Council, in cat glasses (I’m one of the moderators on the GSHC FB page). Faisal cat Richard Dawkins and Robyn Blumner, CEO of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science: Dawkins Blumner Richard wearing the new tie emblazoned with the Australopithecus sediba fossil, a tie given to him by Melissa Chen (see below). He fell and cut himself badly running for a plane, and so has a big bruise under his eye as well as stitches above it, which were removed by a doctor attending the meeting on the day before this photo. Dawkins and tie Melissa Chen—MIT grad student and one of our co-administrators of the GSHC website—knows no fear, and often dons her Space Girl helmet in protest against NASA cutting the space program. She’s sitting next to a Canadian politician whose name I’ve forgotten. Chen i Melissa’s special “thug life” nails, which represent the fact that she’s been bitten by every animal she’s ever encountered: Chen 2 Chen 3 A Canadian energy drink at the meeting. This cracks me up. It’s “dam good” and sports a maple leaf. O Canada! Beaver buzz Bill Ligertwood, who, with his wife Kathy (see below), is the motiviating force behind the Imagine No Religion conferences. He’s a wonderful guy and, with only a light hand, manages to persuade a diverse array of speakers to come and talk about whatever they want. Bill Left to right: Bill, Harriet Hall, and Kathy. Bill Kathy Harriet Peter Boghossian (second from left) labels this photo the “Four No Free Will Men”, as we’re all diehard determinists. I take some credit for persuading Richard (right). Second from right is Greg Stikeleather, who’s on the board of the Dawkins Foundation and a good friend of Richard. Free will guuys The brave and eloquent Vyckie Garrison: Garrison Professor Ceiling Cat takes the podium: Me lecturing Carolyn Porco (left) and Robyn Blumner: Porco Blumner Robert Price and Seth Andrews. Before them on the table is a statue of Aron Ra: Ra It was a wonderful meeting, as the INR conclaves always are. If you get a chance to go to only one secular meeting, this is the one to go to.

Hili dialogue: Monday

June 8, 2015 • 9:11 am

The meeting wound up with a bang yesterday. Harriet Hall gave a great talk on the medical harms that come to children through faith (also see FvF, last chapter), Lawrence Krauss talked about new physics research looking for gravitational waves (so far unsuccessful), I talked about free will, and Carolyn Porco gave a poetic and inspiring talk about her work on the Cassini imaging project.

After my free will talk, which I think at least made many people think about the hegemony of behavioral determinism (I don’t care so much whether they accept compatibilism or incompatibilism so long as they accept determinism), I was accosted by an angry jazz musician. He said that I had basically ruined his life (I am not exaggerating) by telling him that his “improvisations” were not really improvisations in the sense that he he (in a dualistic way) “decided” what riffs to play, but that they were were the determined product of unconscious processes. I tried to reassure him that they were still the product of his own brain, his own musical background, and his training that allowed him to improvise around what his fellow musicians were playing, but he didn’t find that reassuring. (Even Dawkins jumped in and tried to explain that this didn’t devalue the man’s art or abilities.)

I am starting to realize that one does undergo a mental transformation of sorts when one embraces determinism and jettisons the notion of dualistic agency, and that this transformation can in some ways be as unsettling and profound as rejecting the security blanket of God. But I took care in my talk to emphasize the salutary effects of realizing determinism, like being more empathic towards oneself (less self-recrimination), toward the unfortunates of society (by opposing the Republican “Just World” theory that people get what they deserve) and by reforming the criminal justice system.

But I digress. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is looking especially cute:

A: Here you are! What are you doing here?
Hili: I’m delegating authority.

P1020910

In Polish:
Ja: Tu jesteś! Co tu robisz?
Hili: Deleguję władzę.

An encounter of the Cunk kind?

June 7, 2015 • 3:54 pm

I got this from Matthew with the message, “You owe me!” He  added, “Cheltenham Science Festival is in June each year Here’s an exchange with Rutherford and Philomena that just took place…”

Adam Rutherford is a well known science communicator in the UK. He seems more enthusiastic about Philomena than about me, but maybe I can twist his arm. Cunk is on, and I want to be Science Man!

philomena

World’s oldest cat is no more

June 7, 2015 • 2:30 pm

by Grania

Reader Barry alerted Jerry to an article in HuffPo relating the sad new that Tiffany Two, the world’s oldest living cat has died.

As cats go, she had a pretty good innings of 27 years in the lap of luxury. Her staff, Sharron Voorhees had this to say:

“She was truly remarkable. I think animals are such a blessing. They teach you all about love, and they expand your ability to love.”

I often think that well-loved pets get the best lives out of anyone on this planet, every day is a day in Paradise for them. There’s never enough time with them, no matter how long they live. But they enrich our lives, and the memories of happiness and love and togetherness stay forever.

As somebody once said: although they did live happily ever after, the point,  is that they lived.

https://twitter.com/sdut/status/607041741833707522/photo/1

 

Hat-tip: Barry

 

The grim cycle of life: our blue tit nest failed

June 7, 2015 • 1:05 pm

by Matthew Cobb

This post is most definitely not for the faint-hearted, so you may wish to turn away now, or at least after you’ve looked at this very weird cat gif (pronounced…)

LWMA0TL - Imgur

===============

About six weeks back I posted about the blue tit nest box we had set up in our garden in Manchester. Over the few weeks the parents have been flying back and forth, taking prey items (mainly caterpillars) into the nest. We could hear the chicks cheeping away, and although the parents looked a bit scrotty, they seemed to be doing their job. They were very worried about the cats, and would not fly into the box if the cats were around.

Last week the chirping ceased. We assumed they had fledged, and even announced it on Tw*tter. Later on, we heard one chick cheeping, the parents carried on going in. Then eventually there was silence, but the parents carried on bringing food, chirping and looking confused when they received no response from their offspring. Once it was clear that there was nothing going on inside the nest, we decided to take it down. What we found was not nice.

I managed to extract the nest intact:


IMG_2838

The chicks were all dead, including the one on top, which looks like it might be alive, or sleeping. I fished them out to try and see what had gone wrong. There were five in total – one is still on the nest on this pic:

IMG_2843

 

The one in the middle on the bottom was basically mummified – you can see on the top pic that it had been pushed to the edge of the nest. It was the smallest, so presumably was the first to die…

As if that wasn’t bad enough, a really grim discovery awaited when I got out the fifth chick from the nest:

IMG_2839

It was heaving with blowfly maggots… The cycle of life – or, more strictly, the cycle of carbon – had taken on an unexpected form. The chicks had all died, and their carbon was about to be converted into flies, which would in turn be turned into birds or spiders or whatever. Nature is pitiless, and natural selection even more so.

So why did they die? Disease seems unlikely – it would have hit them all at the same time. It seems most likely that they simply starved to death. Spring has not been particularly early or warm this year, and although the parents seemed to be attentive, they appear not to have been able to find enough food for their brood.

We hope – but we don’t know – that the brood was bigger than the five dead nestlings we found, and that some of the chicks successfully fledged. On the other hand, we haven’t seen the parents around feeding babies in the trees, which we have done in previous years. I fear these five were all there were.

This is not an uncommon occurrence, but it is sad. I’ll clean out the box in the winter and then put it up again, ready for another attempt next year.

Apologies to those of you who found that too grim – you were warned.

 

Are any criticisms of theism kosher? (Open Thread)

June 7, 2015 • 1:00 pm

by Grania Spingies

In the wake of complaints such as this one and angry reviews of Jerry’s new book Faith vs. Fact, one has to wonder whether any criticism of theism is acceptable or valid to a believer. One of the complaints that irks Jerry the most is the charge that he – or indeed we – as fellow atheists, have not read the right theology books, or not enough of them, or that we haven’t understood them properly.

The charge continues: therefore we haven’t truly understood religion, and therefore we lack the credentials to rebut it.

 

Of course, the charge is bogus. At very least, Jerry has read more theology than the average human being, more even than the average church-going believer. Tomes of Sophisticated Theology are rarely if ever referenced by ministers and priests in their sermons and homilies, because they know that those in the pews have not read them and don’t intend to either. The notion that the real answers to difficult questions lie between the covers of such books is simply a security blanket proffered where the congregation appear to be of above-average education and perhaps don’t literally believe in talking snakes chatting up naked women.

Perhaps because most theology books are rarely read, the champions of theology as Christianity’s best argument aren’t always aware of the fact that, for example C.S. Lewis (still so very popular after all these years, perhaps simply because he writes more accessibly than the average theologian) has been very comprehensively taken apart by other theologians.

However, I maintain that most theology is dead in the water from the outset. Here’s why: they all operate off the base assumption that God is real, and is moreover the Christian God of the bible. This is why theology fails to convince anyone who isn’t already in the club.

Lewis actually tried his hand at “proving” God with his infamous “liar or a madman” argument. Basically Jesus is God because he said so, and he wouldn’t have said so unless it was true, because we know he wasn’t a liar or a madman. Plenty of people have pointed out that those aren’t the only two other possibilities. And any non-believer who has read the bible can attest that in fact some of Jesus’s doings come across as quite mad (figs, anyone?). In any case, anyone can spot a circular argument. Cosmological arguments and Pascal’s Wager don’t get any better even though some of them use really long words with lots of syllables.

Anyway, the point here is to have a discussion about whether it is possible to satisfy a believer that your lack of belief is not owing to a lack of theology. If not, why not?