BLASPHEMY - APPROBATION

I hate the fact that I'm publishing so little original content lately, though I assure you I'm still generating it (mostly on post-it notes) regularly enough. Some day, I'll kick out another SATIETY, just... not in the foreseeable future. I worked for about 30 consecutive days last month, which makes a handy excuse for why I'm not blogging much.

The biggest contributor to my delinquency, however, is my recent decision to sign up for a Twitter account.

Keeping true to my past tendencies, I was plenty late to this latest incarnation of the social networking game... but once I tried it on for size, I found it to be a wonderous utility. Much like how I praised this very blog for encouraging me to improve my own creative writing, Twitter has reinvigorated this languishing hobby of mine. And it does so in a more accessible way. The problem with blogging is that it requires a pretty significant chunk of my time to write up an essay or article that I'm willing to unleash upon the public. It requires a good bit of revision and an even better bit of staring at my monitor like an idiot while I wait for yet-unspoken sentence fragments to clink into place.

Twitter, microblogging in essence, at once minimizes this time requirement and also introduces a new challenge by imposing its 140-character limit. It is much easier to write a 140-character tweet than a 500 word post, and yet it is much harder to get something entertaining and worth reading to fit into 140 characters than it is to barf out 500 words, hoping a few stick in the mind of the casual reader.

Twitter has made blogging fun again. It's encouraged me to share more of the dozens of interesting and weird things I encounter every day, and coupled with the raw communicative capabilities of my new jesusPhone 3GS, it's never been easier to share those experiences with a sentence, a picture, or a sound bite.

Follow me at @RITmusic2k Wink.

To take a more blasphemous turn, I just wanted to give a shout out to the wonderful Evolution 101 podcast, by Dr. Zack Moore. Newly liberated by my jesusPhone 3GS, I've taken to listening to music and podcasts at work, and I'm making my way through the archives of Evolution 101 again; I never forgot how informative and accessible the material was, but I knew that I'd forgotten much of the material itself, so it was a good time to listen to them once more.

It's easily found on iTunes, and also has a presence on the web:

Evolution 101

If you want to learn more about evolution and molecular biology than you ever thought you'd enjoy learning, try Dr. Zack on for size and thank me later for the recommendation. You'll find me over at #robotpickuplines.

BLASPHEMY - PARTIALITY

Gay civil marriages ruin the sanctity of religious marriage to the same extent that gays eating crackers ruins the sanctity of communion. That is to say, inside the religious congregation it has no effect, and outside the religious congregation it has absolutely no effect.

While California is temporarily shading its eyes from the Enlightenment that has proven no trouble for the likes of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Iowa, I believe it won't be long before the California State constitution gets reamended* and every person previously denied the privilege will be able to wed the person they love.

There is a certain tack I'd like to see the state take in doing this. One of the biggest talking points of the Prop 8 scum** was that their churches would be obligated to recognize and marry gay couples if gay marriage were legalized. Nevermind the fact that this isn't remotely close to the truth, let's make sure that when we finally and permanently legalize gay marriage in California, we explicitly state the difference between civil marriage and religious marriage. Let's emphasize that churches will retain the right to refuse service to anyone not wearing a shirt, shoes, or who prefers genitalia that match their own.

We need to encourage them to disallow same-sex relationships within their congregations, and this is why:

Make them wear their bigotry on their sleeves. The more publicly their distasteful behaviors are presented, the sooner society will choke them off.

Let's hope that brave gay couples who want a religious wedding can stand up for themselves and leave congregations that won't support them, and move to more progressive and forward-thinking churches, or better yet, away from churches in general. Politically active religious groups feed on people, and need to be starved into submission and out of relevance.

* - unamended? remended? remedied? repealed? remodeled? role-modeled? Something like that.

** - a kinder word than I really wanted to type.

SARDONIC

This one tripped off my irony meter.

Sham acupuncture works as well as real* acupuncture:

http://www.usnews.com/articles/science/2009/05/12/toothpicks-match-needles-for-acupuncture.html

* - as in, sham.

BLASPHEMY - IMPOSTURE

I'm making my way through another blog out there, entitled 'The Everything Else Atheist'.  I was intrigued by her series of posts about the use of placebo, and had a thing or two to say in response to a couple comments left on her thread.

The original articles:

I Believe in Placebos, Part 1

I Believe in Placebos, Part 2

You may want to read the comments over at T.E.E.A. before proceeding.  Or, you can just take my word for it that what follows is my brilliantly-concocted and unassailable argument* against a commenter who disagrees with the use of placebo in modern medicine:

I'm going to chime in as a proponent of the use of placebo here. For one thing, treatment should not be judged or valued solely on chemical efficacy. Determine its validity by its results, not by its ingredients...

Otherwise, what do you suggest we do about all the therapists out there alleviating peoples' emotional (and in some cases physiological) problems just by *talking to them*? Both work by closely-related mechanisms, where the patient's own mentality is the primary vehicle behind their recovery. In one case it's a controlled activity: developing a trusting bond based in conversation with a trained professional, whose coaxing can yield significant results. In the other case, it's a trained professional engaging in the controlled activity of administering a physical remedy that takes advantage of the well-documented power of placebo.

I don't see a downside here, since at the absolute worst, it will provide no benefit. And it might cost some money. But if the idea of paying for sugar pills is what's so unappetizing, then the costs of their administration can be bundled with some form of therapeutic treatment, much in line with the author's suggestions above. You pay for treatment and it gets you sessions with your doctor and a pill, both of which work in concert.

The way I see it, the placebo effect is one of a thousand quirky evolutionary byproducts we've gathered up over time, in rank and file right along with such hits as the female orgasm... if it's a good thing, and it's ours, why deny ourselves of it?

The refusal to wield a useful and beneficial tool over thin moralistic quibbles is just one of the reasons we all rail against organized religion, after all. Let's not fall prey to the same tendencies.

* - I mean, I drew a link between medicine and orgasms, for Christ's sake... how can you argue against that?

BLASPHEMY - REBUKE

Aaaaaaaaand another post!

There's sort of a trend here... while my blog post scratch pad still exists (call it a rough idea repository, perhaps), I'm not drawing from it lately.  To do so requires a concerted effort and time commitment to Write A Blog Post.  I'm generally busier than what would allow this on a regular basis.

But, I do still take time to read other blogs on related topics, and often enough I find a post or comment that gets my gears turning, and before I realize it I've penned an elaborate response.  A few seconds after I realize I've done it again, I say to myself, "Self, this belongs on Prose Justice."

The original thread was over at Homosecular Gaytheist.

And so it gets pasted here.  Oh well.  It's not mine from scratch, but it's CADAVER.

Here's the comment:

Some helpful clarification in the discussion:

1. Generally, Christians differentiate between Creator and creation. The latter would necessarily have a Creator, while the same would not be said for the former. This would explain why atheists who don’t accept this argument tend to cite the same argument ad nauseum (”Your creator must have been created too! PWN’D!) and why a lot of Christians, rather than showing a little forethought and knowledge of their argument, sit slack-jawed wondering what just happened.

The argument is not stuff comes from other stuff, until you get to the biggest stuffer ever. That is dumb. The argument is simply to highlight the distinction between creation and creator and show that creation highly implies a creator.

2. The second objection is actually one of the most honest objections that I find atheists make in various forms to religion and to God, which is just that in their eyes God is cruel, so why serve him. Christopher Hitchens was never more honest than when he said in his most recent book, that even if God existed, Hitchens would be a part of the devil’s party. And looking at the world and seeing that as how things were designed by God, I can’t say that I disagree with that conclusion, except for one little thing…

My religion, Christianity, teaches that the world is not as it is supposed to be. It is screwed up. People are screwed up. Relationships are screwed up. That is pretty much conceded, though there is some disagreement to the degree that sin has affected the world and not just people. The two views being either we (people) are the problem and the world would be “perfect” without us in the equation, and the view that we are the biggest problem, but sin has affected everything in creation as well (I would put myself in the second camp, by the way). So, the good news is that both atheists and Christians should find some agreement in saying, “Something ain’t right!”

That leads to the second issue in that objection, which is that God is therefore culpable for the misery that is in the world. The good news for believers is that the Bible does have an answer. The bad news is that it really is sin is our fault and not God’s, even though he is all-powerful. If you read the Bible, that is actually what it teaches - man is responsible, God is sovereign. Believe me when I say, Mr. Atheist, I feel your pain. That is a tough pill to swallow, and any sincere Christian should be the first to admit that that is a difficult teaching. It has actually led some to fashion an understanding of God that he is not all-powerful or that man is not a responsible agent, but ultimately the Bible teaches both.

So Christianity is not without its difficulties, but let me say this final thing: taking God out of the equation doesn’t make the situation any better. You still have a screwed up world, you still have evil and violence, but now there is no real solution. That is just the way the world is. At least with God, you have some hope that things will be fixed one day, while without him, you really have no reason to expect things to be any different or better ever. Why should you? Plus, it makes the idea of “better” a moving target, which is a problem in and of itself.

I am not even toying with the idea that this will satisfy everyone, but I do hope it at least allows people on both sides to understand the other a little better.

And here's my reply:

Trey, I'd like to address a couple points you brought up: "The argument is not stuff comes from other stuff, until you get to the biggest stuffer ever. That is dumb. The argument is simply to highlight the distinction between creation and creator and show that creation highly implies a creator." You've probably heard atheists disregard the 'creation requires a creator' argument as tautological and/or circular, but even besides that is the greater issue that when an atheist looks at your analogy and at the world, they conclude that what you call 'creation' most definitely does *not* imply a conscious creator. We can all see the fingerprint of a house's maker in a house because we all have great knowledge of houses, and we can see them being built by people. One can appreciate that houses are logically planned out. When you look at a planet, however, or a body, all the mechanisms at work that yield those end products are documented and understandable, and they show no real signs of intelligent planning. I wear glasses because my eyes are not perfect. People get cancer because their bodies are not perfect. Almost all planets are uninhabitable because their orbits are not perfect. So on and so forth. There's a very clear trail of evidence that explains this... basically everything about us, everything about our solar system is cobbled together by mechanisms that worked just well enough to persist... exactly as science verifies, and exactly not what a perfect creator being would have created. Your answer to this, is sin. But if this entire universe was created by your god, then sin is either a direct manifestation of his, or a creation of one of his creations. I can envision a more perfect god than yours: one that did not allow for imperfection in his creation. Your god is either unable or unwilling. If man is responsible for sin, then God is responsible for creating man with the ability to ruin all God created. That's a pretty complicated and convoluted explanation for the imperfection we all acknowledge as existing in the world. Science does a better job explaining it in far fewer steps, and without requiring any mental acrobatics. In response to your last point, "taking God out of the equation doesn’t make the situation any better. You still have a screwed up world, you still have evil and violence, but now there is no real solution. That is just the way the world is. At least with God, you have some hope that things will be fixed one day" We think it does make things better, because it removes the sense of complacency people have with suffering. Christians may sit around waiting for someone else to fix the problem, or they convince themselves that the problem is unfixable, and simply wait for their heavenly reward where nothing is ever going to go wrong. We atheists realize that there's nobody out there to take care of our problems for us, so it is up to us to do it. We have no overbearing force telling us not to bother. It's only up to us to learn enough about our problems that we can in turn solve them. Rational inquiry, not faith, is the mechanism responsible for every advancement of our society. It gets us 100 year lifespans and air travel and the ability to communicate instantly with anyone, anywhere. It operates far better on far simpler rules. Perhaps most importantly, it makes no such atrocious claim that there is something inherently wrong with being human. We don't waste any time or energy apologizing for ourselves, which leaves us able to spend that time and energy improving the lives of real people all around us, people who just would not survive on faith alone.

BLASPHEMY - COGNITION II

When it rains, it pours.  Or in my case, drizzles... but it's a drizzle in a drought, so don't complain :)

I just read Jerry Coyne's latest article lambasting the National Academy of Sciences and the National Centers for Science Education for their accomodationist standpoints with regard to the harmony of evolutionary theory and religious faith (he must've gotten the idea from me), and I gave myself another opportunity to think about the issue.  Here was my reponse:

I tend to see the posturing of the NAS and the NCSE as more of a logistical matter than anything else; these organizations need money to function, and they have to be sure not to alienate potential sources of funding. But then there's a side issue: they don't need to pander to us as naturalists/rationalists/atheists, because we're already on the same side of the fence. The people for whom those statements were written are those who might be *on* the fence. And the surest way to knock them back to their side is to require them to abandon a component of their belief system before we grant them admission. If a theist comes to the NCSE or NAS website, they're looking for encouraging words, not challenging ones. We should give them to them and let the merits of the science itself argue its cause. The NCSE and NAS have a tough enough job just promoting evolution in this religiously saturated country. But if you want them to take a hard line stance, then you're effectively asking them to incorporate the inordinately larger task of debunking religion. In our non-ideal world, they have to pick their battles. It might offend me that they have to speak disingenuously to do so, but I'm going to have to live with that.

So, I don't like it any more than I disliked it before*... but I acknowledge the rock to their left and the hard place to their right, and will let them play at this mild little version of fighting dirty** to gain a little ground on our tiring uphill battle.

* - I think that's a valid sentence

** - I mean, they're totally lying to their audience.  It's a classic bait-and-switch.

Silly Popes and Slippery Slopes

The last two months have seen me get a year older, get even busier at work, move into a new house, and spend even more time on the car.  Hence, the 'not blogging' thing I've been trying out.  I just wanted to post this link in case it hasn't been seen yet...

http://uk.reuters.com/article/scienceNewsMolt/idUKTRE53L5QM20090422

If I afford myself some time between projects at the new place, I'll follow up with a critique.

Thanks for your patience!

And, I feel like I owe an apology for not making a 'BLASPHEMY - BIG WORD' title for this post.  It had to happen sooner or later.