Following the downfall of the obviously false gods of the Goa’uld—immortal aliens whose empire-building gave rise to the various mythologies* of the ancient world—the series needed a new villain. Enter “The Ori.” Apparently becoming ascended beings of pure energy doesn’t cure chronic inferiority complex. In their efforts to be worshipped by all lesser beings, they send out “Priors,” super-powered missionaries who preach the religion of “Origin,” work miracles, and smite unbelievers. Rather a lot of the latter, I’m going to guess. They claim to have created all human life, which is clearly false, but they have a certain way of making Pascal’s Wager…well, more immediate. “Hallowed are the Ori, or we’ll kill you all.”

I’ve had Christians ask me what I’d need to believe in their god—I don’t know, but let’s take it as read that if god wanted to demonstrate itself empirically, it clearly could. A trickier prospect is whether the self-aggrandizing claims of such a being could be verified, and whether it is worthy of worship. I’m not taken with Christianity’s setup—a Father who is infinitely loving but also infinitely just, and we’re all covered in sin. So, he sacrifices himself to himself, thereby providing a loophole for his fallen children to escape damnation.

I wonder, though, what could be changed that would make this more coherent? A king who spends three days himself in prison to punish a thief is not truly paying the penalty of sin. He knows he will get out again, and he knows that the guards don’t dare torture him as thoroughly. At the same time, a judge who sentences his own son to death in a murderer’s stead is perverting justice, rather than fulfilling it.

God is perfectly just, they say, he cannot fail to punish sin. What about a religion where the “king” abdicates his throne, rather than continue to mete out death in judgment? There’s a mystery for you, a God who ceases to be god, who abandons his kingdom, for love of his children.

What about the verse we all know, for God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son? He didn’t, not really. When something is sacrificed, by definition, afterwards you don’t have it anymore, it’s given up, destroyed, lost. What could an all-things-Omni god actually sacrifice, even if it is the supremely silly notion of doing so to himself? This is a bit trickier, but I suppose if Jesus was roasting in hell for eternity on our behalf it would make a bit more sense. Similar myths exist—Prometheus comes to mind.

It’s all flights of fancy, of course. Religious fantasy from the likes of Stephen Brust, Piers Anthony, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman have taken far more liberties with various cosmologies than I have here. It bugs me, however, that one can’t point out the inherent perversities and incoherence of the Christian model of salvation without them throwing bible verses in your face about how you need spiritual discernment, or predictions that the message will be rejected by those who cannot see. One suspects that the Apostle Paul and his contemporaries were being ridiculed even in their own lifetimes. Wasn’t it around that time when the word “faith” changed from being obedient to God’s law, and became a byword for credulity towards thirdhand claims of impossible, unattested miracles?

*Of course Yhwh would have fit right in with all the other mythical gods recast as despotic aliens–Ra, Apophis, Ba’al, Cronos, Marduk and all the other pantheons that were revealed to be alien pretenders. But the producers weren’t stupid.

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.

I believe Everybody Draw Mohammed Day is an act of civil disobedience. Somebody says that blacks can’t use a restaurant, you get together too many people to oppress and you hold a sit-in. Somebody says that your protest of his son’s funeral violates his personal space, you show up anyway and you win in court when he sues you. Some religiously psychopathic nutjob stabs an artist for making art: you get a few hundred thousand people to do the exact same thing. Civil disobedience says “you are not the boss of me, and if you try and take away my rights, I will assert my rights over your objections.”

Burning a Quran isn’t civil disobedience. There isn’t an ongoing debate about whether non-muslims need to venerate Islam’s holy book. I mean, we publish English editions, which is a no-no to begin with. Bookstores don’t have to keep their stock on special Quran stands. Burning one, though, is an act of hate speech. Hate speech is morally (if not civilly or criminally) wrong. I’m really undecided about Hate Speech laws–on the one hand, someone who commits vandalism, assault or even murder based on bigotry is doing so symbolically against an entire class of people, thereby magnifying the harm enacted by the crime. On the other hand, a brick through a window doesn’t do more damage based the race of the shop owner, nor is a person any more dead based on why he was killed. The vandalism might be more thorough, the murder more sadistic, but we also have laws for aggravating circumstances, rather than compounding the criminal penalty with what amounts to a thought-crime.

So what about these religious bigots in Florida, going toe to toe with a different group of religious bigots? They have every right. Frankly, I’m inclined to sell tickets and bring popcorn. I hope this church gets their event up to the level of a Nuremburg rally. Let them march in ranks around a roaring mound of green leatherbound books whose gilt inlays glitter in the blackened ash. Let’s put it on television so that everyone can see exactly how ugly this kind of thing is.

I hope that the blowback is equally vociferous, so that people around the world see what a massive inferiority complex that Fundamentalist Islam suffers, and how thin-skinned they really are. I hope that people everywhere get a chance to see that hate begets hate, and that peaceful protest is the high road, and what happens when fear and self-righteousness are made to excuse taking the worst low roads. I hope neither of the Fundamentalist camps realize what it is to be better than that, so that people finally realize they cannot stand and be counted with people who carry such hate and fear wherever they go.

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.

Without falsifiability, your so-called “research” is nothing more than a grand exercise in a fallacy called Affirming the Consequent. It’s easily represented symbolically: [If A=true, then B=true]; [B=true, therefore A=true]. “If a movie is/was shooting a rain scene outdoors, then the sidewalk is wet.” The fallacy is to say “if the sidewalk is wet, then a movie is/was being filmed.” How many different ways can the sidewalk be wet that don’t include such a rare and unlikely event as a movie shoot? How about rain? Automatic sprinklers? The high school cheerleaders doing a car wash down the block? It doesn’t follow. Let’s say that unexplained lights in the sky are seen nearby, and so you take your “scientific instruments” and you go out to whatever area you believe to be nearby the phenomenon. You believe that if an advanced vehicle were there, its exotic technology would produce…well, “something.” You observe that there are some unexpected readings in the local magnetic fields. This is “something,” therefore some kind of UFO caused it.

The real scientific method ultimately does most of its work primarily to falsify hypotheses through experiment and observation. It took Thomas Edison years to devise an incandescent filament, to the point where one waggish reporter asked him why he had failed so many times. He had not failed, he said, he had successfully found ten thousand compounds which did not work. If a cotton filament vaporizes under current, then it’s back to the drawing board. There is no such result which would invalidate the presence of a sufficiently futuristic craft, especially when empty-handed results can be explained away as due to the stealthy capabilities of such a ship. How do you generate a well-formed hypothesis, one which has definite criteria to tell you you’re barking up the wrong tree? That’s one more aspect of the scientific method where UFOlogy completely falls on its face.

THEORY: Creationists love to say Evolution is “only a theory,” as though it meant something speculative and, if you will, hypothetical. It doesn’t. A theory is an explanatory model, based on observations, which generates testable hypotheses and points the way to acquire new knowledge. UFOlogy has no such thing. Going back to the Theory of Movie Production, we can generate multiple testable hypotheses from a basic model of what goes on in such an event. Our hypothetical movie shoot would not only dampen the sidewalk, you’d also find classified ads calling for extras, permits on file with the police and fire departments, a spike in bulk catering revenues, or sightings of heavily laden trucks carrying sets and equipment. Even if you missed the event itself, you’d know what to look for to see if Oliver Stone was in town. You might never know for sure—affirming the consequent prevents absolute certainty, even with a good foundation—but you’d have a start, and you’d figure out you were wrong pretty quick if that were the truth of the matter.
UFOlogy has no theoretical model. What they have instead is a grab-bag of anecdotes, recollections and speculation, and like I said above, any unexplained physical traces. UFOs can be lights in the sky. They can be flying saucers. They can be silvery wreckage entirely consistent with weather balloons known to be in use in 1947, at the time of the Roswell so-called “incident.” UFOs can leave circular depressions in leaf litter. UFOs can produce magnetic anomalies. Et cetera et cetera. There is no one phenomenon, no model to provide a framework to unify and explain the observations attributed to UFOs over the years–speculation runs from aircraft as small as three feet across to more than a hundred. There are hundreds of conflicting accounts, and the presence or absence of any given aspects are almost irrelevant.

If our skies are being patrolled by advanced, science-fiction vehicles, whether of human or non-human origin, they seem to come in a dizzying and unpredictable variety, very few of which ever make any repeat performances. You can never predict what a UFO will look like, sound like, or act like. It could leave no trace, or it could scorch the ground. It could seem to be at extreme altitudes, or nearly brush the treetops. UFOs can look like anything, it seems, and if you go looking for them, you can rest assured you’ll never be proved wrong, no matter how implausible the claim. Plausibility is also key, and it’s really both the most important and least intuitive reason that UFOlogy is a non-starter as any serious explanation of strange events.

PLAUSIBILITY: Clarke’s Law, where any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, is all around us. If you showed a man from 1910 an iPhone, he’d have only the most rudimentary idea of its function and no idea at all of how it works. Heck, I don’t really know how it works. In our lives and most especially in our TV shows and movies, the fantastical is commonplace. It is becoming very counterintuitive to learn that certain areas have very real engineering challenges—where words like “inefficient” and “diminishing returns” take on inflexible, technical definitions quite apart from their everyday usage. In terms of thermodynamics, internal combustion is not very efficient, and so 100 MPG cars are not easy to build without major design sacrifices. Fuel is very heavy and gravity relatively strong, and so it takes massive rockets to lift small amounts of cargo into space. Jet packs are ludicrously inefficient, and all the fuel they can carry is used up in two minutes’ flight. Because the design envelope for a lifting body doesn’t overlap much with the design envelope for a car, any shape which can do both is basically going to stink on ice in whichever role it’s operating. Flying cars will not be filling our skies.

No matter, you say. UFOs obviously must run on technologies yet undiscovered. That doesn’t solve the problems, though. The laws of motion and thermodynamics still hold. A hovering ship must accelerate upwards at 9.8 meters per second, every second, or it will, shall we say, accelerate downwards. That takes power, reaction mass, either to use a jet or aerodynamic forces to stay aloft. No account I’m aware of ever sees a UFO slow too quickly or climb too steeply, stall, and fall to earth due to lack of lift. Nor could any kind of electromagnetic repulsion account for UFOs’ reported aerial antics. Perhaps they use something even more exotic, like antimatter. Sadly, no. The annihilation reaction of antimatter is not free energy. Energy, by definition, is the ability to do work, and flying a UFO through the sky does take a lot of both. So, whatever your energy source, you still have to power an engine—loosely enough defined as “a machine which does the work” in order to get around. That’s leaving aside that antimatter is so stupidly inefficient to obtain and store in the first place, with only a few vast facilities on the planet available to manufacture even trace amounts.

I’ve bent over backwards to avoid the word “alien” or “spaceship” thus far, but don’t really think I need to be coy. UFOlogists who hold out that UFOs may be of human, perhaps secret military origin sound like “cDesign proponentsists” who say the Intelligent Designer might not be God. Who are they kidding? But in reality, alien visitation is hardly any less improbable than the hand of God tickling our DNA. Science fiction has made us ignorant of the real limits of the universe, with hyperdrive-equipped X-Wings and antimatter-fueled starships in every adventure show ever to sew sequins onto black velvet and hang it outside the set’s window.

Space is unimaginably vast—no, I’m saying that literally, your visual cortex can’t accurately model it but I appreciate the effort. Plus, the universe doesn’t just have a speed limit, it actually cheats. To accelerate a midsized car to two-thirds the speed of light would take all the energy in all the power plants in the entire country for one year, assuming you could translate that to kinetic energy with magical 100% efficiency. Two years’ worth doesn’t get you to one-and-a-third lightspeed, because when you go very fast, you start gaining mass, so that it takes much more energy just to get you going faster in progressively smaller increments. It’s not fair! Then, when you get where you’re going, you’ve got to burn exactly as much energy again just to SLOW DOWN. Your best option is to accelerate constantly to halfway, then turn around and blast your engine in reverse, so that you zero out just as you arrive. It doesn’t matter what your engine runs on or what breakthrough your hive-brother Snrxlvbrrr made to build it.

Ships in science fiction don’t seem to lug around gas, either. It took a skyscraper of rocket fuel just to send three humans to our own moon, and almost all of that fuel was used just to move fuel. The more you carry, the more you need just to get what you’re already carrying in motion, for which you need more fuel, for which you need more fuel, etc. Needless to say, we have not seen any decelerating fusion torches pointed directly at our planet from deep in the sky, as city-sized ships, mostly empty fuel storage, decelerate from turnover, coasting to a stop where they detach comparatively tiny habitation modules to flit mysteriously around small rural towns. Interstellar travel is unsexy.

I admit there are lights in the sky from time to time which appear inexplicable.  But for any given incident, bearing in mind–

• we can’t demonstrate whether UFOs are or were present
• we wouldn’t know in advance what to look for if they were
• there’s no good reason to think that there are in the first place
• there is no plausible technology for them to use to get here because General Relativity and the Laws of Motion just aren’t amenable to large-scale space travel.
• Any UFOs have later become Identified Flying Objects have always turned out to be mundane–aircraft flares, balloons, atmospheric phenomena, even animals and birds.  Never the alternative…

–we would have to establish that the science-fiction scenario is actually the *most* likely one and that the above problems all have answers which Occam’s Razor can’t slice away for being unnecessary assumptions.  I have heard one UFO enthusiast opine that perhaps the laws of relativity are wrong, and faster-than-light travel isn’t known to be impossible, and that about sums up for me that it’s a completely faith-based belief.  If they’re so wedded to their preconceived desire that they’re willing to play fast and loose with the fabric of the universe, then their cognitive process is well and truly off the rails.

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.

I think not knowing stresses people out–for most, “I don’t know” seems to elicit a reaction of DOES NOT COMPUTE. Where’s my direct deposit? How long until we get there? What am I sick with? What’s broke down on my car? Who’s going to attend the meeting? To many of these questions, it’s not even that we won’t ever know. Evidently, the span of time between not knowing and finding out is never short enough, and I think there are a lot of problems caused by that desire. People get harassed, harangued and henpecked to ruin someone else’s day–who also doesn’t know–to mollify someone for whom “I don’t know” isn’t good enough. Guesstimates and speculations are calcified into fact, and people staunchly defend their errors in the face of others who later come to know better.

Do you remember when Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense, got no end of grief when he articulated that fighting the Iraqi insurgency is a complicated process? There are “known ‘knowns,’” he said, and “known ‘unknowns,’” and beyond that there are “unknown ‘unknowns.’” People thought he was dissembling, but I disagree. There’s a world of difference between a non-answer of ignorance and a non-answer of deceit. Now, arguably some of those really ought to have been moved up one or two categories before we went in, but the statement itself is laudable for its transparency. (Likewise, “you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want.” News flash to my fellow liberals: no military, government, corporation or individual ever has all the resources they want or all that they could use. Bill Gates comes close, but I don’t know that he’s ever tried his hand at regime change.) Unfortunately, people seem to expect more substantive answers when someone comes clean like that.

I’m weird–I spend a lot of time thinking about questions where the span of time between “I don’t know” and “Now I know” is at least longer than my own probable lifetime. What are those lights in the sky? I don’t know. But to some, the only possible answer is alien spacecraft. What made that sound? I don’t know. But to some, it’s a latent imprinted energy pattern left by a person who is now dead. How do Quantum Theory and General Relativity reconcile with each other? I don’t know. People smarter than me are working on it. Who was Jesus of Nazareth? I don’t know. But apparently all we have to go on is this bundle of outlandish stories, so of course they must be true. To paraphrase Kevin Smith, what I don’t know I could just about squeeze into the Grand freakin’ Canyon. I’d love to find out, and I’m glad people out there make careers out of inquiry, but I don’t lose sleep in the meantime.

So on days like today, I’m actually surprised at how a little thing like a missing paycheck disrupts my equanimity. It got me thinking about the things that really do grind my gears, because from time to time I can and do get so ticked off I can’t see straight. I think it often involves arrogant certainty on the part of someone who doesn’t know a burro from a burrow.

I spent a couple of weeks recently, arguing with a Christian blogger about the court decision that the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional, and in the end it got pretty heated. What drove me nuts was his stubborn refusal to even discuss the matter intelligently–he hadn’t read the judge’s decision, he didn’t understand the constitutional issues, and didn’t revise his arguments when corrected on baseline facts. He described the case as some horrible blasphemy on the part of the Obama administration and Congress, seemingly (and later, stubbornly) ignorant of the facts that the case came out of Wisconsin, not Washington DC, with the Obama administration defending the NDOP. “Constitutional” seemed to mean “whatever does or doesn’t offend his Christian sensibilities” and that everything was permissible so long as nobody was actually forced to pray.

Substitution of one’s own belief for knowledge, I think, is even worse than not knowing. As Thomas Jefferson said, “ignorance is preferable to error, and he is closer to the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.” Put simply, if I don’t know, and you believe something false, neither of us is correct, but I’m less wrong than you are. And there’s usually more ways to be wrong than to be right–how sure are you, and why? Me, knowing I can be happy with “I don’t know” makes me a happier person–there’s certainly enough opportunity for it.

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?

I’m not the least angry atheist you’ll ever meet. I have days where I agree with Dawkins, Hitchens, P.Z. Myers and I’m ready to hoist the Jolly Roger when I see Bibles being shipped to Haiti, bowdlerized science textbooks and blasphemous attacks on worldwide free speech. But Tavris did say one thing on the podcast which stuck with me: “The one sure and certain way that you will not get anyone else to change their minds is to put them in dissonance…If you threaten their fundamental beliefs or self-concept, they will cling to that belief more tenaciously and reduce the dissonance by attacking you.”

We need to ask ourselves, who’s listening, and who are we trying to influence? Ourselves, at least. We are rationalist members of an irrational species; we are atheists and agnostics in a very religious world: we imbibe more uncomfortable dissonance than it would appear just in our day-to-day lives, and we relieve it through socializing with the like-minded. That’s one level, and though I’m opposed to simply backslapping ourselves on how smart and insightful we all are, I have no easy answers to the broader questions.

I see one immediate problem: both pseudoscience and religion share a common trait. Both of them fundamentally take a conclusion first, and then self-select facts which support that preconception, whether it be homeopathy, UFOs, or creationism. Under the best of circumstances, dissonance makes it difficult for disconfirming arguments to be considered–so much the worse when the subject at hand is founded on that very process.

I don’t think we, as a community, do ourselves too many favors sometimes. I think we need to think long and hard about who we want to reach, how we can do that, and what compromises we might be able to live with. Human nature isn’t going to change, and we are fools if we don’t recognize that people don’t change their minds easily, quickly, or if they can’t save face even in their own minds. I’m not siding with the “concern trolls” who keep telling the freethought community how much better off we’d be if we would sit down, shut up, and yield to religion in all things. Suffice it to say, there are people we are not going to reach.

If there is a direction I’m sure of, I’m going to let Charles Darwin say it better for me: “I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity & theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds, which follow[s] from the advance of science.”

I think skepticism has a better shot at changing our culture. Fundamentally, science and skepticism both relish the discovery of new information, the asking of new questions. The scientific method itself is a process by which ideas are proven wrong. I think this is the mindset we need to encourage, and the desire to follow the truth, wherever it may lead. That’s why we do have battles that we have to fight: the attempts of the opposition to corrupt the educational process is nothing less than an attempt to sow the ground with salt, to ensure that another generation of freethinkers does not take place. They are playing to win.

Our opposite numbers are not friendly pet box turtles, they are alligator snapping turtles who do not and never will tolerate us, the more so because we aim to drain the swamps of unreason that they live in. They must be opposed, because they are playing to win. We would do well, though, to consider our tactics.

Previous: Cognitive Dissonance and Skepticism

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.

I need to be crystal clear (not least because they may eventually read this) and to repeat something which is crucial to understand: The very act of doubting, of presenting new information is what engenders conflicts in the mind, whether or not I actually say, “this is quackery.” I am necessarily putting my relatives in a position to think “I am a smart and responsible person…who has wasted good money on a bogus treatment.” Cognitive dissonance takes place, and the coping mechanisms are both reflexive and unconscious. It was entirely possible that the reaction would even damage our relationship. If it were not for the real medical and financial risks, I would have held my peace.

Originally, I thought I’d done well–nobody got angry, nobody got their feelings hurt. Though on a practical level, since then, I think it seems to have been a draw for science. I didn’t convince them to resume a reasonable diet. I didn’t convince them to stop taking the supplements. I didn’t convince them to demand their money back. At best, I think I managed a little education about the fraud of homeopathy, and that once they finished the six-week course, they might not repeat it a year or so later, if they find that they’ve gained the weight back. Cognitive dissonance is the reason we have a phrase about “throwing good money after bad,” and so I’m more than happy to simply wait and hope.

Next: Cognitive Dissonance and Atheism
Previous: On Cognitive Dissonance

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.

I was listening to a recent episode of the For Good Reason podcast, with Carol Tavris, co-author of Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), which I’m currently reading as a result. She pointed out something which in hindsight is blindingly obvious: dissonance is particularly acute when one of the ideas in conflict is tied into the perception of ourselves. By and large, we all think of ourselves as reasonably smart, kind, good-looking, and above-average drivers. When we screw up in one way or another, dissonance immediately kicks in. It generates excuses, dismissals, mitigating circumstances, any kind of self-justification that will enable our self-images to remain untarnished. We rarely perceive the process, because not only are we very good at it, it is entirely unconscious and can often pre-empt the assimilation of conflicting ideas in the first place.

I can’t speak to anyone else, but I have experienced this myself, to the point where the self-justification has even tampered with my memories. I was making a right-hand turn on a rainy night, I got sideswiped by another car, and I was found to be at fault in the accident. When asked by the police whether I saw the other car before turning, I said “No.” But inside of a week, after dealing with police reports and insurance agents, I had become so convinced that I had done nothing wrong that I started remembering seeing the other car’s headlights in the outside lane, directly in opposition to my statement at the time. It couldn’t have been me; it must have been an inattentive lane change by the other car that caused the collision. Maybe I’m right. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m more upset with myself that I was too shaken and incoherent to realize my answers to the police were going to be used against me. The memory still galls; I still see myself making mental excuses. In ultimate hindsight, I recognize the entire incident is fertile ground for dissonance-induced self-justification, and I simply try and drive more carefully.

Next: Cognitive Dissonance and Skepticism

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.

So, what could I do but start buying Richard Dawkins and Carl Zimmer books, leaving them out on my desk for all to see? I do a lot of what can humorously be called “iPod work” and so I naturally searched iTunes for anything science-related.

What still takes up a good chunk of my iPod is my favorite all-time podcast, The Skeptic’s Guide To The Universe. Not only was there ample science, but I didn’t know anything about the Skeptical movement and its emphasis on critical thinking, evidence, and the need to combat pseudoscience. This was amazing to me, and I quickly started following Skepticality, Skeptoid, and Point of Inquiry.

Many of these podcasts made frequent references to YouTube videos, and it wasn’t long before YouTube’s preferences steered me towards Thunderf00t’s video series, Why Do People Laugh At Creationists, which I think is ripe for follow-up with a new series called “Thunderf00t Reads the Telephone Directory.”

Needless to say, you see where this is going. All this pro-critical thinking, pro-science, anti-religion media was building to something. My theism was melting away like a chip of ice in the palm of my hand, and I credit a Tim Minchin song with finally prodding me to discard it.
But what’s this other show that keeps cropping up in relation to Thunderf00t and AronRa evolution videos? The Atheist Experience? Oh wait, this show is on every week? And they podcast it? Excellent!

I’ve since broadened my catalog with podcasts such as the Non-Prophets (the other atheist-aimed podcast done by the Atheist Experience crew), the excellent For Good Reason, Irreligiosophy, and just for fun, Coverville.

I know I’ve just posted a blizzard of links, bear with me for one more. This is one of my favorite clips from the Atheist Experience, and I’m basically putting my cards on the table as to the shameless plagiarism that I’ve indulged in every time I’ve ever gotten loquacious at the Freethinkers meetings.

http://SkepticalRationalist.blogspot.com