BNFree / Bloomington-Normal Freethinkers

http://pewforum.org/Religion-News/Fla-church-plans-to-burn-Quran s-on-9-11-anniversary.aspx

A Florida church with “Islam is of the devil” signs in its front lawn plans to host an “International Burn A Quran Day,” on the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks this year…In response to the posting of the event on Facebook a little more than a week ago, Jones said that people have been mailing Qurans to the church to burn. He said organizers got the idea, in part, from another Facebook page, called “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day.”

The event’s Facebook page says its purpose is “To bring to awareness to the dangers of I and that the Koran is leading people to hell. Eternal fire is the only destination the Koran can lead people to so we want to put the Koran in it’s [sic] place — the fire!”

This story troubles me on several levels, not least because it holds up a mirror on several levels to my own participation in Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. Let me start out by saying these Christians have every right to burn whatever books they please. Hate Speech is still speech, and therefore it’s protected. I had to stop and think, though, whether what these people plan to do is different than drawing Mohammed in kind or only in degree. continue reading…

Science enthusiasts and critical thinkers cannot escape the reality that human culture world-wide is absolutely chockablock with fake science. The word “scientific” has a cachet that I’ve seen co-opted for homeopathy, energy-harmonized aluminum plates, even Biblical “scientific discoveries” (always good for a laugh.) Science seems to be all about the results, the inventions, the breakthroughs. It’s never about the process, the codified critical thinking that keeps those end products from being complete hokum. We humans have a tendency to see what we want to see, to see what agrees with our preconceptions, to see what benefits us and justifies our beliefs. The scientific method is what developed in order to boil out the biases, the fallacies, the unconscious assumptions which corrupt our cognition.

Pseudoscience has been a bugbear of mine for quite some time. So, let’s talk about UFOs, and why the pseudoscience of UFOlogy fails on so many counts.

FALSIFIABILITY: UFOlogy prominently displays a hallmark of many pseudosciences—it begins with its conclusion, and then goes looking for whatever disparate facts might support it. One of the most common misconceptions about science is that you start with a hypothesis—a question that you’re testing, which you then gather data or do experiments to support. However, one requirement of a good hypothesis is that it is willing and able to be proved wrong. If it is not, you are setting yourself upon a primrose path of Confirmation Bias. continue reading…

I had a little trouble when I went to write my rent check last month. My wife and I had some one-time expenses in our budget for May, and so as I watched my weekly paychecks come in, it was evident that the month-end total was going to be a tight squeeze in the checking account we use for it. To top it off, my direct deposit didn’t hit my checking account when I was used to seeing it, and it was the last one for the month. So I sent an email to the home office, asking whether there were any trouble signs. The reply, from a clearly frustrated HR rep, was that many people had inquired, technically it didn’t have to be there until tomorrow, there weren’t any problems she could see, and she didn’t know anything else.

I thanked her, reassured her I wasn’t going to be a jerk about it, and it got me thinking, that “I don’t know” is a perfectly honest answer. In any area of inquiry, our available pool of facts is limited, and nothing is ever known to an absolute certainty. (Unless you’re going on faith, in which case you’re taking “belief” and counting it as “knowledge” which is, at the very least, dishonest. More on that later.) Based on the HR rep’s reply, I was at least able to eliminate some hypotheses: that there wasn’t an error in my time reporting or in the payroll submission. Anything else is left to the vagaries of the electronic banking infrastructure, which I know from professional experience to be arcane and impenetrable–the money gets there when it gets there. continue reading…

Soon on my reading list after Mistakes Were Made is likely going to be The God Virus, by Dr. Darrell Ray. In it, he discusses how many religions can be thought of as parasitic memes–literally viruses of the mind, which take advantage of cognitive dissonance in order to thrive and propagate.

Consider the Seven Deadly Sins: Greed, Pride, Wrath, Envy, Lust, Gluttony and Sloth. They fall into two categories: First, we have five flavors of thoughtcrime over which we have no conscious control. The last three are activities which not only are pleasurable but in some degree necessary to live. You have to eat when you’re hungry. You have to rest when you’re tired. You have to have offspring or you go extinct. Because you cannot help but sin, the cognitive dissonance between your concept of morality and your inevitable failure creates guilt, in what Ray calls “the Guilt Cycle.” The only way to relieve the guilt is to return mentally to the thoughts and devotions described by the religion, thus priming you for the next failure which simply being human will inflict. Fundamentally, Ray says, religion is not designed to make you behave well, but rather is about fomenting guilt when you don’t measure up. It’s a great racket, and you’ll notice how picayune and petty are the strictures in many religions, the better to inflict such.

I’m not going to delve into that much more than to say I’m sure it will be interesting reading, but in light of what I’ve already discussed in parts 1 and 2, it does raise concerns about just what I am doing with activism in the Skeptical and Atheist communities. If dissonance from self-concepts of general good sense meant I couldn’t fully succeed with my own family, about something as simple as a screwball diet plan, exactly what am I going to accomplish by telling people their beliefs about their immortal soul and hope for salvation are not justified? continue reading…

The issues surrounding the Skeptic and Freethought movements are an absolute carnival of cognitive dissonance and self-justification. It’s difficult to winnow down, but I’ll take one example. Remember, we all carry the notion that we are intelligent and sensible, and disconfirmation of that notion is a prime source of cognitive dissonance.

Some family members of mine were sold a radical, frightfully expensive diet plan by their chiropractor, which involved a 500 calories-per-day food restriction, vitamin supplements and homeopathic hormone drops. It’s safe to say no element of the program failed to set off its own skeptical alarm bells, and the research I did quickly indicated that this diet was based on bad science.

I had to proceed carefully, though. I knew I couldn’t stand by, because starvation diets and rapid weight loss are not without risk. But I was looking up a very steep incline–not only was I denouncing visible results of 1-2 pounds per day of weight loss, but the outlay of money and professing of belief in its success are extremely potent generators of cognitive dissonance. Every possible incentive for self-justification was in place. continue reading…

This is the first of three planned posts, each dealing with a different aspect of cognitive dissonance. Due to the length and the detail needed to hit my points, I’ll be posting the sections separately.

There once was a boy, who was given a pet box turtle. He wanted it to come out of its shell, but it stubbornly refused. He tried knocking on it, squirting water in its face, prying at the hinge, yelling at it, but only got his fingers nipped for his efforts. His grandfather, seeing the difficulty, took the turtle and put it down in the grass, with some lettuce and strawberries nearby. In a few minutes, the turtle was out and crawling around in the sunshine.

It’s not a metaphor I’m going to extend very far, but it’s an image I like to keep in mind as I kick around the concept of cognitive dissonance. It’s a subject I find fascinating, not least because it is stupefyingly ubiquitous. Essentially it is the theory that, when human brains contain two cognitions (ideas, observations, emotions) which are in conflict, we find it uncomfortable. Like having your shoes on the wrong feet, or being hungry, or being too cold, we are driven to resolve the discomfort. We take steps to ease our mental distress, typically by rejecting, trivializing, or compartmentalizing one of the conflicting ideas. continue reading…

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I was raised in a fairly liberal Christian household—RLDS (nee Community of Christ) denomination, and while I had Book of Mormon stories in Sunday School, pretty much everything you’ve ever heard about “Mormon theology” is just as strange to me as it probably is to you. My parents encouraged my love of science and evolution from an early age, and pretty much from age 6 to age 14 I openly said that I wanted to be a paleontologist when I grew up.

I left the “Christianity” label behind when I went off to college, got acquainted with Christian Fundamentalism through the campus IVCF chapter, and after two weeks I decided that I would never again label myself with anything that would make me a fellow traveler with those people. I spent the next ten years or so drifting from New-Age theology, to pantheism, to a fairly nondescript brand of “imaginary friend” theism.

Fast forward to 2008, when I moved to Bloomington and found that my co-worker in the cube next to me was a committed god-botherer, to the point where he went to a non-denominational church because the Baptists were too backslidden, and homeschools his four kids “so that the don’t get indoctrinated in the public schools with liberal ideas, like evolution.” Yes, that’s a quote. continue reading…