Opinion

"Prayer helped Defoe bounce back" from the BBC today. An article about a guy who used prayer to cheer himself up after being dropped from the world cup squad. This article really annoys me. Didn't Defoe remember that when he prayed to be a part of the world cup in the first place, and how his prayer wasn't answered. Didn't he get a clue that talking to yourself doesn't actually influence anything? How can people be so simple? It almost dismays me as much as people who are "miraculously" spared from a natural disaster believe it is God's work that they are saved. So God willed everyone else to die? In other news, I wonder why God would put all of those fossils into the ground in order to make scientists believe the earth is more than 10000 years old. So God is deliberately deceiving us? Why make out that he isn't there? He is deliberately deceiving us in order to test our faith? So a perfect God is deceitful??? Why make us defectiv...

Another funny video from whywontgodhealamputees.com: The delusion of Christianity

I have always wondered what the evolutionary benefits are of any kind of ritual. I could imagine that building social relationships, and identifying with a group, are beneficial for survival. I could also guess that a ritualistic killing of genes other than your own could reduce competition for resources. In nature, animals often have complex rituals, particularly mating rituals. What is most fascinating is that human rituals are learned rather than instinctive. I have always supposed that the rituals we see today are detrimental to society. I guess it can't always be so clear cut, since occasionally religious people do act altrustically, even outside their clique, and our ancestors MUST have derived some benefit from this kind of behaviour otherwise the behaviour would not have been selected. Ultimately, it only matters to our genes THAT we behave in a certain way, not WHY we do it. Since we are intelligent, our genes must manipulate us via our beliefs rather than our instinct...

Life == Information In this post I will challenge what we mean by the word "life". Biological things are "alive" by definition, and by this we mean complex biological entities which can reproduce themselves. Added to this are biological viruses, which are on a less firm footing, since they are essentially parasites which can only reproduce in a host. Although we may die, our cells may not, for example our hair and fingernails carry on growing after our death. We can also think of ourselves as the sum our our genes, which live on in our relatives. Since computing we also have other things which are life-like, though we may not immediately call them "alive". Artificial life is where various types of life (or pattern) are simulated in a computer, and are perhaps bred for fitness using genetic algorithms. We also have Conways "Game of life" where spontaneous patterns emerge (and potentially reproduce) in a computer. There are other things which ...

Here is Richard Dawkins being grilled by Jeremy Paxman:

Borat banned? I've just seen one of the most hysterical films ever: Borat. Unfortunately this film appears to discriminate against minorities, such as homosexuals, Jews and Kazakhs. It certainly draws a fine line. However the film really pokes fun at Americans, Christians, anti-Semites and homophobes. It uses the naivety of Borat's comments to show how ridiculous some of these positions are, and shows the minorities acting reasonable (e.g. the Jews). By showing a happy-clappy pentecostal church, (e.g. talking in tongues) makes Christianity appear utterly ridiculous. Also the "running of the Jew" shows the fundamental misunderstandings people have of each others' cultures.

Basic freedoms There is a news article at the moment about Aishah Azmi, a teaching assistant who insists on wearing a veil in school. I am really torn on this issue. There are clearly practical and safety issues with letting people wear veils in school, and I don't think it is that good an idea. On the other hand, I am all for freedoms and clearly this veil is an important part of culture and it is doing no real harm. Then again, children are expected to adhere to a dress code, so why not the teachers? What I find extremely infuriating is that Muslims demand civil liberties, but only when it works in their favour. Whilst we do have certain freedoms, for example to publish material that may offend others, Muslims still insist that we should not have that freedom. This is the essence of modern discourse, after all, if an idea cannot withstand criticism, then maybe it isn't such a good idea in the first place. Only by challenging ideas have we been able to ascend from the i...

Abolishing Limbo? Today the Pope is considering abolishing Limbo. This is where all the unbaptised children go if they die. So the Pope can snap his fingers and suddenly Limbo will disappear? Or, they can use some experimental method to determine whether Limbo exists? When are these people going to realise that they don't know what they are talking about? When is the rest of the world going to realise?

Whenever you use the Stumble! toolbar, you'll occasionally get something like this video . I love people who can articulate atheism better than I can.

Here is a good video about heaven (and how you will never get there):

Taking responsibility I can't decide whether Lebanon deserves the treatment it is getting from Israel. On the one hand, Isreal is acting out of all proportion and causing widespread misery. On the other hand, Muslims have not really confronted their relationship with violence. They think (mistakenly) that they have a duty to fight, and that their culture should prevail over all others. Such eugenics has not been been seen since WW2. The moderate Muslims should reign them in, but have not acknowledged their responsibility to do so. By being passive they become complicit, and have only themselves to blame when eventually Isreal turns and gives them a taste of their own medicine.

A bunch of idiots in Israel believe that the tooth fairy wears blue shoes. A bunch of idiots in Lebanon believe that the tooth fairy wears red shoes. Idiots who believe that the tooth fairy wears red shoes can't stand idiots who don't think that, and in particular think that all idiots who believe in the blue shoes should be wiped off the face of the planet. The idiots who believe in blue shoes are getting pissed off with this, and have the moral superiority (not to mention the financial and military superiority) and want to put a stop to all of this red-shoe nonsense. The blue-shoe idiots oppress and discriminate against the red-shoe idiots. The red-shoe idiots see it as their duty to kill blue-shoe idiots. The blue-shoe idiots unleash hell on the red-shoe idiots. Plenty of idiots who merely disapprove of the other idiots get hurt. Theology is like arguing about whether the tooth fairy wears red shoes or blue shoes.

I wonder if the future is fixed. Not quite the same as fate, since fate implies we can know our future, and nothing we can do can change it. We can't second-guess our fate, and deliberately change it, since then how do we know that what we changed it to wasn't our true fate all along? But are the future and the past as real as the present? Is time really an illusion, and we are really a bead on a 4-dimensional wire? To me, it seems silly to give the "now" a greater reality than either the past or the present. That would mean that what is "real" is constantly changing. Absolutely, what we perceive is constantly changing, but that is because our brains are a part of that physics. Our brains have a physical state that changes with time, and only represents the "now". That does not mean that "now" is the only thing that exists, it is just an illusion that our minds play on us. If we believe in an objective reality - a reality outside ...

Thou shalt not lie? Religious nuts claim to be the most moral and enlightened people. Isn't it ironic then that creationists are deliberately spreading lies and misinformation about evolution. This surely goes against their religion, and they should stop right now.

Something good by Bertrand Russell.

Accosted by Jehova's Witnesses The old ring at the door. "Are we expecting anybody?" asks my dad. The answer is no. Instead it's Jehova's witnesses, which I answer. Let the sport begin! Opening gambit: they ask what is the name of God? I answer Yawhe. They seem impressed, then correct me when I also say "God", which they say is only his title. Ok. Then they ask about morality. This is an excellent topic of debate. Where do morals come from? They say God, and he is a person. I argue that he is not human, or that he has thoughts and morals. They ask if I have thought about God seriously, I answer yes, and have rejected the idea, saying that it is a mistake to give God human characteristics. Is society going downhill? They claim it is going downhill, I claim humans have always been fairly rotten to each other. I immediately lay my cards on the table. I say that psychology, and morals are evolved, and did not come from God. They claim morali...

Dear Andrew Smith MP, I am writing to you concerning the education reforms that your government is steamrolling through. I strongly disagree with faith-based selection. I think the whole idea of insulating people from other cultures, other peoples, and other ideas is actually quite abhorrent. Yet this is what faith-based schools do. You can't mandate one hour a week for studying multiculturalism or religious education, that is simply not enough to integrate people. The only way to integrate, appreciate and respect one another's cultures is via contact with other people. My prejudices quickly melt away after spending just ten minutes with someone from a different background to myself. I can understand that some parents may want their children to grow up to be good Catholics or Muslims, but I would rather that the decision was taken by the child, not by the parents. I find the differences between the faiths to be largely artificial, and forcing it upon children at an early...

Are atheists moral? It is often claimed that atheists have no morality, that morality only makes sense through God, that a universal morality exists through God, or that God gave us morality. All of this is nonsense. (Hey, it's my blog, I can be as blunt as I like!) Let us deal with the last point, that morality comes from God. This statement is meaningless, since God is "everything we don't understand", which says that we don't understand morality. This is factually false, evolutionary psychology does give us a reason for morality. Even if God for some reason wanted us to behave in certain ways (why exactly he would want that escapes me), then how would that be communicated to us? Through prayer? Through stones carted down from Mt Synae? Through the Bible? The problem with appealing to God is that there are differing religions, each telling their flock different things. There is no reason to suppose that one religion has a connection to God, whilst other...

Intelligent design? Do things ever occur that are unexplainable by science? This is almost Godel's incompleteness theorem: some things cannot be proven using the laws in any sufficiently complex system. The fallacy is always the same: what cannot be readily explained, is "unexplainable", therefore must have been performed by an intelligent action. Both of those steps are logical fallacies. Underlying intelligent design is the idea that some things could not have occurred naturally. Eyes, flagella, DNA, are deemed to be statistically impossible to have arisen. The problem is that for every specific case where such an example is given by the creationists, it is possible to refute it. For example, a small part of a flagellum is still extremely useful to a bacterium. Evolution is a great theory, not because it is necessarily true (although it is overwhelmingly likely that it is), but because it can withstand such criticism, and win every time. Intelligent designers are...