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.

Conversely (does linking count as advertising?) to the size of the problem, the steps to solving it can be begun in a very small way on a daily basis.  It begins with how we speak and respond to overblown rhetoric.  It also involves our attitude towards how others speak to us and about things that are important to us.  Let me give you a personal and very recent example.  Facebook, is a great place for social networking, but it can be full of pitfalls when one have a wide variety of friends and family members on it.  My paternal Grandmother is on my page and has one of her own.  She is an Evangelical Christian and I am an Atheist (et. all applicable labels) I shared a comment about resurrection that was to occur on Sat. the 3rd of April that started off sounding religious, but was really about Dr. Who.  (because I am a major geek for the Doctor)  She had a reply, but promptly removed it once she noticed the joke and the thread about it because she is not a Whovian it was not immediately apparent.  Her page posted a comment questioning whether or not Atheists could get home owners coverage for ‘acts of God’ my response was simply “Country and State Farm say yes” with a wink and a smile.  We have continued with these back and forth barbs on occasion, but we also are sure to reassert that we love each-other on a regular enough basis.  She also managed remind me at our recent family reunion just how funny she is on a totally different subject.   While we have both gone out of our way to ensure that the light manner is fairly clear, we also both make the choice not to take these things personally or as insults, because everyone has that choice.

Sometimes it can be more serious.  Talking with an African-American co-worker I asked her how she handled the result of racial slurs with her children because my light skin ensured this was not part of my childhood.  Her statement was simple and something I had already applied to my life: “I asked my boys is that who you think you are?”  and she further stated (more or less) “When you make sure children know who they are, they can easily deflect names”.  Because it was something I felt was out of my reach I almost gave the game away to others; but at the end of the day, it is every persons’ responsibility to define himself or herself therefore, we can also decide how to respond to someone else and not let them drive our responses.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I believe that language is very important and the words we use can have an impact.  If ever there was a doubt one only needs to look at those who either murder doctors for performing abortions or terrorize scientists for doing lab tests, to see that language can be used to create an atmosphere that leads to such unacceptable acts.  Furthermore, the moral cowardice that prevents strong and quick responses to these behaviors by more people in leadership further fuels the idea that these acts are acceptable.  Our elected leader can not even have a joint press conference to stand together against violence and these are supposed to be the best of us.

While it would be easy to blame the right side of the aisle right now, and believe me I would not claim they are innocent, we can not forget that the left side was pretty silent when liberals were calling Bush Hitler.  This is just not useful behavior, no matter what one will recognize as his failings, or Obama’s for that matter, this type of over the type, too often used comparison only serves to water down our debate and hid the actual issues that caused the anger.

This is why it is more important than ever that every person takes time to think before speaking and breathe before reacting (which is not the same as responding).  We can make an impact by both changing how we enter into debates, including the language we use, and by choosing not to react to incendiary language.  We may even decide sometimes it is better to just walk away.  We can stand up to those ‘on our side’, whichever side of you that is, of the debate when they are not debating issues, but are engaging in ad hominem attacks.  We can continue to insert the call for calm fact based debate into conversations and look to see the value in both arguments when we see it getting out of control.

There will always be those who choose to live in an echo chamber, but we do not have to use that as an excuse to set up our own or write them off as unreachable, people can surprise you when you least expect it.  At the end of the day it is about remembering that people are usually acting on the belief that they are doing the right thing and there are things, somewhere, on which we can agree; which is a starting point for working out our differences.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and will continue to do so, but my answer right now is no.  No.  I completely reject and deplore the accusation of militancy leveled at “the new atheists.”  Sure, Harris et al. are making points that are provocative.  That’s just it: there is no “kinder, gentler way” to say, “You guys are confused by millennia of indoctrination and your thinking is wrong-headed, which is bound to lead to disastrous results for our society and our world.  Please stop deifying and demonizing, worshipping and praying, because we urgently need you to snap out of it and help us evolve our species and take care of our planet.”

Religionists don’t think they’re indoctrinated, don’t believe they’re confused.  They don’t get it.  Why?  Because up to now our social handbook has encouraged everyone to tiptoe around the obvious and try to not let on that many of us hold an alternative viewpoint that isn’t very flattering to believers.  Our handbook is going through a revision, this social etiquette is changing, and I say good riddance to past standards.  I hope the enabling of irrationalism goes the way of allowing smoking in the office, ignoring evidence of child abuse and taking picnics to slave auctions.

While our society is going through this revision, I think it’s important to avoid the trap of fulfilling the expectations of religionists.  They are taught to proselytize to others, by whom they mean anyone who doesn’t belong to their religious group.  Any nonbeliever who has the nerve to assert that religion is bunk will be received as an ungrateful, blasphemous, dangerous enemy.  Many religionists view opposition to their creed as militant and, therefore, deadly.  Atheists are on notice, as we have been for ages.   The cause of rationality needs us to defy historical expectations and shed old burdens handed down to us by centuries of religious deference.  Atheists should no longer tuck tail in the presence of true believers in case they take aim at us.  That was buying safety at the high price of invisibility and silence.  We need to stop holding our tongues in order to help religionists save face or in case their tender feelings will be hurt.  Probably, though not because of concern for civility, atheists should avoid fulfilling religionists’ expectation that we’re “agents of evil.”  By this I mean we probably shouldn’t humorously portray ourselves to them in biblical costume; no “Satan” impersonations, please.  Literalist religionists wouldn’t get the hilarious irony anyway.

Bullies and manipulative people, predictably, howl that the slightest resistance to them constitutes aggression against them.  In fact, that’s a distinguishing characteristic of a bully.  They are aggravated, sometimes enraged, by having to put effort into defending their hegemony.  That is just to be expected.  Still, we don’t need to go out of our way to be rude or even any scores.  Rudeness for its own sake is rudeness; there’s no call for it.  Don’t overshoot, don’t undershoot.  Just assert your right to see things differently.  State your disbelief as a logical alternative to religious theories.  Use humor, if that comes naturally to you.  Otherwise, keep it cut and dried.   Religionists will just have to learn to deal with the fact that this is a free country and the world isn’t their oyster.

Take it from a woman: there is no gentle way to reject an unwanted – and dense – suitor whose feelings will be bruised no matter how diplomatic you try to be. When your declaration of independence is received as an act of war, when merely asserting your right to publicly object to a point of personal philosophy makes you a “militant” villain, you know you are living in screwed up times.

Most lobotomy procedures were done in the United States, where approximately 40,000 persons were lobotomized. In Great Britain lobotomies were performed on 17,000 people, and the three Nordic countries of Finland, Norway and Sweden had a combined figure of approximately 9,300 lobotomies….  The USSR officially banned the procedure in 1950. Doctors in the Soviet Union concluded that the procedure was “contrary to the principles of humanity” and that it turned “an insane person into an idiot.” (Photo and text from Wikipedia)

Nature rarer uses yellow
Than another hue;
Saves she all of that for sunsets,–
Prodigal of blue,

Spending scarlet like a woman,
Yellow she affords
Only scantly and selectly,
Like a lover’s words.

Ignoring the sexism in the spending phrase, this is one of the most succinct explanations of what makes this simple color so extraordinary.  It also has sensual notes, bittersweet longing, economy and a list of the primary colors.  It is simple and complex at the same time-everything art should be!  This is by far one of the most amazing poems I’ve ever read.

The other part about her work I love is her skepticism, even about her own skepticism.  She did not seem to take anything for granite.  While she did spend a great deal of time writing about death and the ‘after life’ that does not make her work dark or negative.  Many of us think about these things on a regular basis, she happened to have the skill to write poetry about it.

The other reason for me sharing this blog is to encourage the reading of poetry which too often seems to be forgotten.   For me art is a time capsule and interpretation brought together to help us better understand our past and present.  I will close with another poem that is fun to contemplate, especially for us freethinkers that are not fans of ‘the after life’ (sorry Prince, I haven’t gone that crazy yet)

I never felt at Home-Below–
And in the Handsome Skies
I shall not feel at Home-I know-
I don’t like Paradise-Because it’s Sunday-all the time-
And Recess-never comes-
And Eden’ll be so lonesome
Bright Wednesday Afternoons-If God could make a visit-
Or ever took a Nap-
So not to see us-but they say
Himself-a Telescope Perennial beholds us-
Myself would run away
From Him-and Holy Ghost-and All-
But there’s the “Judgement Day”!

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.

While living in CA I found more of the similar comic book friends, but still resisted, then I met someone. He has a huge comic book collection, loves SciFi, but doesn’t do dressing up for things if it’s not Halloween. I started reading some graphic novels and I was off. Next it was “Good Omens” (Best. Book. Ever!) then everything else available by Gaimen and Pratchett. There was no way to know where this would lead.

Then, one day, I came home and he was watching something I didn’t recognize. It seemed pretty physically intensive with a great deal of running. After over-hearing a few episodes I asked – “Is the world always ending with these people” and “Pretty much” was the reply. I’m still not sure why I decided to watch that first episode, but once I did it completed the toppling of my pretentious dropping me into the pool of geekdom.

I’ve never been happier and never looked back. While it is sad to see how much I missed (This excludes Star Wars, sorry, it is not something I miss at all, on accident) I’m glad to have to opportunity to join this league of wonderful people and great ideas.

So, what exactly is a free thinker? Someone who thinks freely. That explains that. OK, that wasn’t very helpful, but in my defense, when has a blog I wrote ever been helpful? A freethinker is basically someone who is an agnostic, atheist, humanist, skeptic, and/or a deist (in some definitions). Freethought/freethinking is a kind of catch-all name that encompasses many different groups. From the fifteen seconds of research I did (this is the second most research I have ever done in a blog), I found that freethinking is basically adogmatic with a strong scientific bent. Freethought is based on following where the evidence leads.

In my first post I discussed the difference between atheist and agnostic, but because I am too lazy to go back and read what I wrote, I don’t expect you, the reader, to do it either. So, here’s a quick overview to refresh your memory.  An agnostic makes a claim of knowledge: we can’t know there is or isn’t a god, so it’s not worth dealing with. An atheist makes a belief claim: there is no evidence of a god, so I believe there isn’t a god until such time that there is sufficient evidence. Do you believe in god? No, then your an atheist. Yes? Then you are a theist. It’s really that simple.

So why be a Freethinker, then? There is a very simple reason and it’s the reason that I use the term freethinker except when I am with people that are “in the know.” The term “atheist” carries a bunker full of baggage. You tell someone you are an atheist and immediately they are most likely on guard and not receptive to anything you have to say. You tell someone you are a free thinker and chances are they think something to the effect (affect? I still don’t know the right one to use and I always forget to learn the difference) of “oh, ok, then we can have a good conversation because at least you will listen.”

Freethinker is really a great term to use because 1) it doesn’t have the same negative connotation as atheist, 2) it encompasses both the relgious side (atheism) and the scientific side (skepticism) of rational thought, and 3) it just kind of sounds warm and cuddly like a puppy that’s just glad to see you.  I think that calling our little group “Bloomington/Normal Freethinkers” is a great idea because it is more accepting of non-believers (atheists, agnostics, skeptics, secularists, humanists, etc) than just the term “atheist.” *

*BNFree, while allowing Jay Pea to post his silly little blog, does not endorse or even recognize the validity of his statements. It’s members, officials, and people who just happened to have passed by a meeting one day do not neccessarily agree in whole or in part, with any comment made. If anything he has said offends you please direct your comments and complaints to the site administrator.

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.