Thoughts of a Waking Mind

I Create Invisible Machines

2011-07-23T07:40:00.000-06:00

As a computer programmer, I realize that the vast majority of people have no idea what I actually do for a living. Of course, anyone who has used a computer is familiar with the final results of computer programming and understand that computer programmers are the people who make stuff happen with computers. But what very few people besides computer programmers understand is the actual process of creating a computer program.

A computer program is just a process, sort of like those machines where a marble rolls down a path, flipping switches and making things spin as it goes by. In computers, this process is designed to accomplish some sort of goal, like adding up numbers, displaying images on the screen, or anything else the computer does. The computer programmer has to understand what needs to be done and then create a way to make that happen.

Because computers do such complicated things, people don't generally realize that there are only five basic things that computers do. 1) They put numbers in memory. 2) They get numbers from memory. 3) They compare numbers to each other. 4) They go from one step to the next. 5) They can do option A versus option B depending on conditions. That's basically all that computer programmers have to work with. Sure, modern computer programming lets us build complicated things faster because so much of the work is prefabricated, but even then all we have are fancier versions of the five basic building blocks.

One big challenge of computer programming is that we really do have a very limited toolbox, so when we try to build some computer program like a video game or a word processor, we have to figure out ways to build it with only those five building blocks, where everything is about numbers stored in memory and the program moves forward, able to branch off depending on conditions. Usually, this ends up being some elaborate process, made up of hundreds or thousands of the basic building blocks.

Another big challenge of computer programming is that we are designing machines that are essentially invisible. We see the code and we can see whatever results might appear on the screen, but all of that is superficial. The actual process and the logic of it all is in our minds, and we hope that the code we write translates that into behavior of the computer. It's a lot like building a complex machine in the dark, where all you can do is feel it. You can imagine how it should be built, and you can feel what you are doing in the moment, but you can't ever see the overall working of the machine. The most you can do is do enough tests that you are satisfied it's working the way it's supposed to.

So, I spend my days building invisible machines, thinking of elaborate processes that will accomplish some seemingly simple goal and painstakingly building those processes out of some very simple parts, carefully testing everything along the way to make sure it works properly, always concerned that something isn't right, either in my thinking or in my code. I am a computer programmer, and while it is often extremely challenging work, I have always loved doing it.

Waking From the Horrors of History

2011-06-29T21:23:00.002-06:00

Humans have done horrible, horrible things. Human history is a long chronicle of cruelty, bigotry, violence, subjugation and torture. Despite all the truly wonderful and good things humans have done, it seems that this goodness is almost drowned out by the unceasing malice that seems to erode whatever progress we make.

There has been progress, real advances in human kindness and basic goodness. The awareness of basic human rights is spreading, along with respect for those rights. Ancient bigotries are being overturned and violence is becoming less acceptable. The human rights movement is succeeding.

However, it is important to remember that all this progress in human rights is merely in the beginning stages. Within the memories of people alive today are widespread racial bigotry, legally endorsed misogyny and horrible mass murders, all in some of the most advanced societies. These kinds of practices are still widespread throughout the world, including in the most civilized places. The human rights movement has made a good start, but it is working against a powerful legacy of cruelty that is still very much alive and able to reverse the progress that has been made.

I often feel like so many of us are waking up from the horrors of history. It's as though all of Humanity has been under the influence of a powerful hallucinogen all this time, giving us an extremely distorted view of the world and each other, like we were living out some awful dream where we were constantly fighting with each other over things that seemed so important at the time and doing horrible acts that seemed so justified at the time.

Gradually, more and more people throughout history have been waking up from this delusional and aggressive stupor and are appalled by the vicious and hateful societies they find themselves in. They have worked to wake others up, but this has led to their deaths. In the last few hundred years, more people have woken up to the horrors of human behavior and have made progress in raising awareness and gradually changing society.

Their struggle to stop the violence and cruelty is an ancient one that has been repeatedly squelched by the same violence they were working to end. As more of us have joined this struggle, we have been able to reduce many kinds of bigotry, hostility and aggressive behavior. While we should celebrate these successes, we also need to remember that we are still far from having a civil society. All our gains can be undone if we do not continue our efforts.

As we wake up from the horrors of history and stop perpetuating them, we are making a difference, in our own lives and in the lives of all we encounter. Also, as we speak up against bigotry, violence and cruelty, working to stop them, we are changing the culture from one that accepts or endorses that kind of behavior to one where it is completely unacceptable to treat another human being that way. We are making a difference, and we can win this struggle, but we still have a tremendous amount of work to do.

The Joys Of A Challenging Life

2011-06-25T06:39:00.002-06:00

One of the great human aspirations is for an easy life. We dream about the day when life will be easier than it is now, when we can relax and stop struggling with all the challenges we face. Our highest ideals for an afterlife is a paradise where there are no worries and everything is always wonderful.

However, all of the great things about humans that make us wonderful have come about because life is challenging and we have struggled directly with those challenges. People did not develop advanced science, great art, precise engineering, complex social organization or any of the other awesome aspects of Humanity by choosing the easy life. The people who accomplished so much and contributed so much to all of us deliberately chose a life full of challenges to struggle with.

Challenges give us an opportunity to become better than we are, to develop our abilities and to become more capable and confident. As we continue to seek out and struggle with challenges, we grow as human beings, becoming more disciplined, more knowledgeable and more useful to ourselves and others. This constant struggling to overcome challenges is responsible for every good thing humans have done.

Despite the benefits from struggling with challenges, the easy life is still our dream, and we constantly try to make our lives easier, pampering ourselves and doing what we can to avoid anything that might make us uncomfortable or distressed. We won't try new foods, go new places, try new things or talk to new people, all because it causes some discomfort. Over time, this locks us in to a very narrow range of behavior, and we become quite distressed if anything may come up that pushes us outside of our established and comfortable routine.

The habit of avoiding distress and discomfort ironically leads to chronic distress and discomfort as we become constantly worried about anything that might disturb our normal way of life, unwilling to try something new and uncomfortable.

When we deliberately seek out challenges and new experiences and manage to struggle through difficult situations we become stronger. Unfamiliar situations and difficult challenges become far less distressing and we feel at ease even when life is difficult. When we embrace the struggle and face the challenges of life directly, we become tougher people, and the little things that once distressed us greatly don't bother us any more.

Life will always be a challenge, so avoiding difficulty is not a good way to have the easy life. It just makes us weaker and less able to handle the challenges that will naturally happen, and things will feel far more difficult to us than they actually are. When our way of life is to embrace challenge and struggle to meet it, we become stronger, more able to handle whatever happens and our lives actually feel easier because none of the normal, everyday things bother us or are difficult because we have pushed ourselves beyond that level.

The easy life can only be attained by fully embracing difficult challenges, making ourselves so strong and capable that everyday life seems easy to us. Avoiding challenges just makes life seem harder and harder as we get weaker and weaker.

Circumcision

2011-06-08T16:27:00.000-06:00

Recently, San Francisco attempted to ban male circumcision. While I agree that there is no need for or any substantial benefit from circumcision, I have a difficult time seeing anything morally wrong with circumcision and no reason to justify making it illegal.

Before my son was born, my wife and I discussed the circumcision issue. I felt it was unnecessary and worried about any risks to our son, although she strongly wanted to have the procedure done. I did some research on it and couldn't find anything citing any substantial risks, and I also found that uncircumcised males often encountered problems with their foreskins and had to have them removed later in life. I found nothing to sway me either way and ultimately went along with my wife's desires.

Since then, I have gone to multiple anti-circumcision websites, carefully read and considered their arguments, and while I agree that the procedure is unnecessary, carries a risk and personally find it distasteful, I can't think of any good argument that the behavior is immoral or should be made illegal.

Most arguments I've seen against circumcision being immoral are not consistently applied to other areas of life, and since those practices are widely not considered immoral, it's difficult to single out circumcision.

One major argument is about the risk that circumcision poses without offering any significant benefit. It is an extremely small risk. Yet, so much else that we subject children to regularly carries much greater risk while also not providing any real benefit to them that could be provided in much safer ways. We feed them foods that carry risks of serious allergies even though other safer foods would provide adequate nutrition. We have them play sports, or go skiing or other dangerous activities while they could get exercise and enjoyment from safer activities. We drive them in cars more frequently than truly necessary. And while all these kinds of activities are substantially more risky to our children, we do not consider them to be immoral, get outraged by this and try to make that behavior illegal.

The other main argument against circumcision is that it alters the child's body permanently without their consent. However, we do all kinds of things that profoundly affect children, often permenantly, without their consent all the time. We impose our culture on them, teaching them to think the way we do. The types of activities they do and the food they eat are all imposed by us, and these have serious consequences on their bodies and minds. Yet, the fact that we impose so much on children that permanently alters who they are as human beings, is very rarely considred immoral. Compared to these routine violations of children's consent, the practical consequences of circumcision seem extremely minor to me.

Most of the other arguments against circumcision boil down to either the naturalistic fallacy or a simple affirmation of personal distaste for the practice.

I'm not an advocate of circumcision, and I'm not trying to justify my own behavior in having my son circumcised. I simply haven't been able to find any good arguments against circumcision that couldn't also be applied to all kinds of things that we do to children that are are widely considered moral and acceptable. Also, in terms of consequences, I don't see any significant harm to males who are circumcised, except in very rare cases. I just don't see why it makes any real difference either way, in terms of affecting any important outcomes of one's life, like happiness, accomplishment, intellectual fulfillment, social relationships, or any other actually important aspect of one's life.

It just seems like a non-issue for me, certainly not something to be locking people in jail for or getting irate about.

But, maybe I'm missing something. Like I said, I'm not a fan of circumcision, but I'm not a fan of all kinds of human behavor that I don't want to see made illegal.

If I am missing something in my thinking and there really are good arguments why circumcision is significantly morally wrong, enough to warrant being made illegal, please set me straight. My wife is pregnant with another boy, so this has become a relevant issue again for me.

Honoring The Human Legacy

2011-05-07T09:52:00.002-06:00

Humans gradually evolved from our animal ancestors over 100,000 years ago, living in the wild, struggling to survive. Life was extremely difficult for our ancestors - food was often scarce, diseases were common, predators were everywhere and people didn't live very long. Life was a major struggle for them, and only those who had the determination and intelligence to survive would end up being our ancestors, having children who also could meet the challenges of an overwhelmingly difficult world.

This constant weeding out of the ones who could not meet the extreme challenges of the wild world, along with the variation in each new generation gradually improved the natural abilities of our ancestors. Many of these improvements were in the ability to learn and the ability to manipulate the things around them. These valuable abilities allowed us to learn from each other, so that when one of us figured out how to do something useful, others could learn it from them, pass it on to future generations and even build on and improve each other's ideas. This allowed each generation to inherit the accumulated knowledge of those who came before and to benefit from the accomplishments of people who lived thousands of years before.

Over time, humans gradually developed better and better ways of sharing knowledge, inventing languages that continued to grow in their complexity and precision. As language developed, it empowered humans, allowing them to coordinate their activities better, forming more effective teams, working together as though all of them formed a larger, more capable organism. Language also made it easier to pass more knowledge through the generations, so that more of our hard-earned innovations and ideas could be carried forward and improved on.

As our knowledge and innovations gradually accumulated, we became increasingly powerful, more able to manipulate our environment to ensure a better food supply and better able to protect ourselves from the many dangers of the world. These advances allowed our population to grow, and a larger population meant more people developing ideas and technologies.

This cycle of innovation continued, each generation making small improvements, contributing to the gradual increase in the abilities of humans. Humans developed a wide range of ideas and technologies, including agriculture, engineering, writing, religion, philosophy, mathematics, morality, music, science and art, with each generation passing on and improving what had been done before.

The creative genius of humans seemed to explode as we formed larger societies where people could work together to develop ideas and technologies. The pace of innovation continued to grow faster in all areas, and humans began to understand some very fundamental facts about the world we find ourselves in and how we became who we are. We also continued to pursue all kinds of art, ideas and technology, faster than ever before.

This is the human legacy. We were once animals living in the wild, living difficult and painful lives. Over time, we struggled to rise above that, with each generation remembering what had been passed down through their ancestors, building on that and passing it on to future generations. Because of the courage, discipline, intelligence and innovation of our ancestors, we are here and have all the good things in life that we do.

We have inherited this legacy from the vast millions who have gone before us and from those who are among us now, still working hard to move us forward. We literally would not exist without all the hard work and innovation of the millions of humans who have embraced this legacy and lived with the motivation of making the world better and making humans better people.

We owe everything we have to this human legacy, and we find ourselves in this world, since the time we were young children, gradually waking up to realities larger than our own immediate surroundings. We gradually become more aware of the other people in the world and of all the people who came before. The world is not what we thought it was when we were children - it is far larger and far older than we can imagine, and humans have been here, transforming ourselves and our world far longer than we can grasp with our impatient minds.

The human legacy has been a journey of slowly waking up to what the world is, like a child gaining more insight and abilities while growing up. Now we see a world far different than our ancestors ever imagined. We are on a planet, floating around a star, unimaginably far away from anything else that could be home for us. We are alone and precious in this desolate vastness. It is just us and this planet, with this thin film of life that has struggled so hard for billions of years to survive, making gradual changes and passing them on to the next generations who do the same, transforming themselves and the world. We are the results of this evolutionary process, and we are carrying that legacy forward.

As we understand the human legacy and the legacy of life on this planet, we are moved by the sheer courage and heroism of our ancestors, to have struggled through such insanely difficult lives and were successful - for many millions of unbroken generations. We are the descendants of those who had that courage and who survived such extreme situations. We are also the descendants of those who valued knowledge and progress enough that they carefully sustained these values, added to them and passed them on to future generations. That is who we are, and that is our legacy.

As we embrace the human legacy, we feel moved to participate in this ancient practice of adding value to the world, to see ourselves as more than isolated humans, each pursuing our own narrow interests. We can see ourselves as partners with all the humans who struggled so hard and so courageously to make the world better and to make humans better. That is our legacy, and we can honor that legacy by engaging with the world and working hard to improve whatever we can.

The Green Shirt Uprising

2011-05-02T20:23:00.001-06:00

At one time, everyone in our society wore yellow shirts. This is how it had always been. The books passed down by the ancient ones were clear that wearing yellow shirts was absolutely required by the Universe Itself. Not wearing a yellow shirt was just plain wrong. So, everyone always wore yellow shirts, and that's just the way it always was in our society. Everyone was happy with that.

Except for the people who liked to wear green shirts. It was against the law of the Universe to wear green shirts, so these people chose to do the right thing and wear yellow shirts anyway. Sometimes the bad ones would sneak around and wear their green shirt at home where no one else could see them. Sometimes a few of these people would get together and wear green shirts in secret places.

But they would eventually get caught and get into really bad trouble. No one wants to work with a green shirt, so they would naturally lose their jobs and have no money. It's naturally upsetting to see people going against the laws of society and the Universe Itself, so sometimes people would get really angry at these green shirts. It's not right, but it's so hard not to hurt people like that, who go against everything we hold dear, who are trying to destroy the foundation of our good society. If we don't all wear yellow shirts, it will destroy everything.

So, some of these green shirts ended up getting hurt really badly. Many were even killed. But, it's hard to feel too sorry for them. They knew what they were doing was wrong. They knew it would upset people. But they chose to wear a green shirt anyway. It was their choice, and they got the consequences they knew they would.

After a while, more and more people were seen walking around in public wearing green shirts. People did their best to stop them, but more people kept doing this. They weren't even trying to hide it. They weren't embarrassed at all. It didn't matter how much we tried to stop them or how strict we were with them, they just kept wearing their green shirts, right out in the open.

They kept saying it was their right to wear green shirts since that's what they wanted to do. That was ridiculous. The laws of the Universe don't change just because you want something. You have to do what's right or you get bad consequences. Yellow shirts are simply right and good, and going against that is just wrong, no matter how much they want it.

But we couldn't stop them. They just kept saying it was their right and that all our sacred traditions were wrong. They just kept parading around in those ridiculous green shirts, demanding that we accept their bad behavior.

A lot of the yellow shirts started supporting them too. They would never wear a green shirt themselves, but they didn't think it really caused any problems. It was just a different color of shirt. No reason to be mean to them. They actually turned against other yellow shirts. They even tried to change the holy laws of society so that there were no punishments against wearing green shirts.

This caused a great conflict in society. None of us wanted our society ruined by people just doing whatever they wanted instead of following the laws passed down from ancient times. We fought back hard, but more yellow shirts conspired against us, forcing us to abandon our sacred tradition of only wearing yellow shirts.

We thought it would destroy the foundation of our society and everyone would be wearing green shirts. But it turned out that only one out of ten people even wanted to wear a green shirt. We didn't like it, but we learned to accept these green shirted people. Eventually, we made peace with the green shirts, and everyone was happy again.

Well, until some people started wearing red shirts...

How To Lose An Abortion Debate

2011-02-26T19:24:00.007-07:00

I've witnessed a lot of abortion debates and discussions, and I've seen a lot of really bad arguing tactics from those attempting to promote women's reproductive freedom. These bad arguing tactics actually hurt the cause and make us all look bad.

In any abortion debate or discussion the main obstacle is the other person's emotions surrounding abortion. It's not about science or philosophy or whether the other person is a misogynistic control freak or a religious fanatic. That's what everyone talks about in these discussions, but these have very little to do with the central reasons people feel so strongly against the whole idea of abortion..

We are human beings, and most of us are naturally protective of our children and of pregnant women. We generally have very strong feelings about this. Most of us naturally feel, deep down, that killing is wrong, especially killing children or babies. We can't help but feel this way.

So, when we promote reproductive freedom for women, and we support their right to have an abortion, this immediately clashes with a lot of people's natural and understandable feelings to want to protect babies and children.

One of the main tactics used in abortion debates is to simply dismiss those natural emotions as not being valid. People spend a lot of time arguing why a fetus doesn't really count as a person or explaining the medical science that shows they don't feel pain early on. All of this is in an attempt to say that really, abortion isn't so bad after all, and your emotions about the issue are irrelevant. To those who honestly feel that abortion is wrong, it can often seem like the person making the argument is simply trying to find clever ways to justify something that they just know in their bones is wrong.

The other common tactics in an abortion debate are personal attacks. Tell them they hate women. Tell them they are controlling. Ridicule their religious beliefs. Make them feel like they are ignorant of basic science. Tell them that their honest feelings that abortion is wrong is an insult to women who have had to make that choice. Tell them that they have no right to talk about the issue because they are men. Obviously personal attacks are not going to change anyone's mind to be more supportive of the attackers' cause, and they may just strengthen the existing negative beliefs the person has about those promoting this issue.

Since the entire goal is to persuade people to allow women to make these choices without any legal restrictions, we should not get distracted by side discussions about whether a fetus is actually a human and whether abortion itself is okay. We are not going to change people's deep emotional reactions no matter how many intellectual debates or scientific studies we have on our side.

Even a long-time atheist and science enthusiast like myself can listen to all these arguments with an open mind and understand the nature of a fetus in the early stages of development and completely agree that women should have unhindered reproductive choice, but I still emotionally feel that in general, terminating a pregnancy is wrong. All the intellectual arguments in the world aren't going to change my emotional reaction.

The real issue is not whether abortion is morally okay, and if we make that the issue, we will lose because we're fighting against people's gut feelings. The real issue is that life is more complicated than our basic feelings about what's right and wrong, and we can't make simplistic rules to handle complex situations. We have to convince people that yes, it's okay to feel strongly that abortion is wrong in general and still support the right of women to carefully work these things out for themselves and make decisions that may feel instinctively wrong as a general concept until you know all the details of her unique situation and realize that life isn't always as simple as right and wrong.

I think that is a position a lot of people who are against abortion in general can feel comfortable supporting. It doesn't require them to give up religious convictions. It doesn't require them to feel that a fetus has no value. They can even feel that abortion is wrong, as a general type of action. All they have to accept is that general rules often have exceptions because life situations can get complicated. And, they have to accept that the best person for deciding whether abortion is right in her unique situation is the pregnant woman herself.

That is all we need to convince people of. Abortion is an exception to the general rule, and pregnant women should be the only ones to decide if their situation qualifies them for that exception. We don't need to convince people that abortion is morally right in general, just that it is right in certain circumstances, as decided by women who are pregnant.

We need to stop wasting time trying to change the way people feel about the act of abortion itself - that won't change. But we can use their sense of compassion to get them to understand the types of scenarios real women are going through and to understand that simplistic feelings of right and wrong don't apply very well. Intellectual arguments and angry name-calling won't change the way people feel, but helping people see the world from another's perspective can be all that it takes to get them to respect that perspective and respect that other person enough to allow them the freedom to make their own choices.

Science Based Religion

2011-02-13T14:03:00.000-07:00

Some of the most basic functions of religion are to help us understand our place in the world - to help us understand the world we live in and feel that we are part of a larger purpose. Yet, nearly all religions were developed before modern science and its amazing insights into ourselves and our world. I often wonder what a religion would be like if it was developed today and based only on the facts discovered by science.

Science has discovered facts which make it clear that we live in an incredibly ancient universe, exploding with great energy, forming itself into billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars, and most with planets orbiting them. Science has also discovered that the basic chemicals of life form naturally and easily, and with so many trillions of planets, it is not surprising that at least one managed to find combinations that happened to make copies of themselves, which also made copies, but with occasional variation. This kept happening, with lots of copies and variations of living creatures spreading throughout the world, competing for resources and gradually transforming into all the life on Earth.

Discoveries through science make it clear that humans emerged from this process of competition for resources, and like all living things, only those who are among the best at it will be able to survive through the next generation. This process has shaped our bodies and minds over millions of years, making us better at surviving in a complex and dangerous world. Human traits like our great intelligence, empathy, creativity, moral sense, ability to make inventions, to form complex societies, and to do all that we can do with our bodies and minds developed over long periods of time because each step in that direction helped us live better in the world and were passed on to our children.

This is our story. This is who we are, where we came from and why we are here. These are the facts of the world, discovered with the tools of science. To make this story the basis of a religion, we need to make it personally meaningful, to make it feel to us that we are part of something larger than ourselves that provides meaning and guidance in our everyday lives. A basic need we have as humans is to have that guiding story in our lives and our communities. This is why all cultures have religion.

We are among the first generations of humans to have a factually accurate understanding of our world and ourselves. These facts have caused severe conflict among humans, with some rejecting the facts and others rejecting religion entirely. Since these really are the facts, and since one of these facts is that we need a meaningful understanding of the world and of our place within a larger significance, it seems clear to me that we need religions based in the facts of science.

There are many ways to develop a science based religion, finding the larger themes in the facts which feel personally meaningful, providing a sense of significance and guidance to our lives. One of my favorites is to envision the entire universe as an embryo that is slowly transforming itself, through natural processes, forming stars and planets that develop naturally into life and intelligence. This intelligent life eventually becomes capable of comprehending the whole story of how it came to be, and the universe begins waking up, realizing what it is and starting to understand some of its potential.

Envisioning the universe as an embryo is a metaphor that helps us understand how fundamental and essential we are to this larger process. We are the part of the universe that is waking up and realizing what is happening. We are also the part of the universe that is capable of radically transforming ourselves, inventing new and powerful technologies, developing new forms of intelligence and creating advanced civilizations. We have the power to radically change things, to give the universe abilities it never had before.

Seeing the universe as a developing creature puts life, and especially intelligent, technologically adept life at the center of a very meaningful process. It can be exhilarating to imagine all the possibilities for future technological development, especially to imagine what could happen in hundreds or thousands or even millions of years of technological and scientific development. Beings with that kind of power and knowledge would seem like magical gods to us. It is especially exhilarating to realize that such powerful beings could actually happen, if we continue to survive and prosper.

If we envision the universe as an embryo that is naturally developing into beings that are indistinguishable from gods, then this view of ourselves and the universe could provide us with a meaningful place in the world and a larger significance. Then, what we do in the world seems to matter more, because we can live lives that help promote this potential future. We can act in ways that help ensure a good future for humans, such as reducing destructive conflict, curing diseases, promoting good education, science, technology and having positive social relationships.

The universe as an embryo is only one possible way to turn scientific facts into an emotionally meaningful religion. There are many others, and I believe that the challenge of those in our generation will be to develop religions that provide deep meaning to our lives while at the same time embracing all scientific facts.

The Atheist Bus Ads

2010-12-12T17:20:00.002-07:00

Last week in Fort Worth, Texas, large ads appeared on four buses, which say "Millions of Americans are Good Without God". These were paid for by an atheist organization in the area. Starting a few days before these were to appear, people began getting outraged, and there was daily news coverage for a week in the local news. Many people were claiming to be extremely offended by these ads and one even said they were an attack on Christian values.

However, all that these ads say is "atheists exist" and "atheists are good people". If so many people find it offensive that atheists exist at all, then that says quite a lot about the intolerance and immaturity of so many people in our society, and those hateful attitudes are quite offensive to atheists, who have just as much right to exist as anyone else. If they are offended by the idea that atheists are good people even though they don't believe in God, then they are being deeply offensive to atheists by claiming that they are not good people.

The reactions to these ads have actually been quite hostile, and even a television news reporter interviewing one of the atheists behind the ads was extremely rude, confrontational and sarcastic to that person. Other people tried to organize boycotts of the buses with the ads, and many of them have even hired a mobile billboard truck to follow one of the buses around, with a large message, claiming to be from God, saying "I still love you".

The purpose of these ads is to reach out to other atheists in the area and let them know about the atheist group, in case they are interested in getting involved. They are also about raising public awareness of atheists. Based on the extremely hostile reaction to the ads, it's obvious that such public awareness is badly needed.

Consider if that sort of behavior had been directed towards ANY other group. Imagine if a Jewish group put up a few ads, claiming that there were millions of Jewish Americans and they are good being who they are. Now imagine that people started protesting the ads in the same way and that news reporters were openly hostile and rude to the Jews who put up the ads and that trucks started following the ads around with messages contradicting the Jewish ads. That sort of immature and aggressive behavior would be widely renounced for what it is. Yet when that behavior is directed towards atheists, it is allowed and approved of.

Consider the fact that when George Bush Sr. was Vice President, he publicly announced that atheists should not be considered to be citizens of the United States because it is "one nation under God". Can you imagine the public outcry had he said ANY other group should have their citizenship stripped from them? Even if he had said some hateful neo-Nazi group should not be considered citizens, there would be widespread public discussion and debate, and people would be upset at the very idea that the government could just strip the citizenship of entire groups of people.

Yet, when atheists are under attack like that, no one is concerned about the injustice or cruelty of it. No one says anything. There is a general hatred towards atheists, so no one wants to stand up to defend this hated group and be hated by association. The atheists certainly don't want to stand up, because they are acutely aware of how much they are despised, and standing up to these injustices would also mean letting friends and family know they are atheist, so it seems better to just be quiet and let the injustice stand.

This is exactly why we need these ads and we need more atheists speaking up and not being shy about their beliefs. We have just as much right to speak up about our beliefs as the Christians do who have millions of billboards, ads and other public displays of their beliefs throughout the country. Atheists don't need to hide. We are here and we aren't going away just because you hate us.

The fact that people find us "offensive" doesn't mean that we are doing anything wrong. It means that there is something wrong with them for feeling threatened by a perfectly peaceful human being. And the fact that they think we are horrible people and that they think it's perfectly fine to publicly lament our existence is extremely offensive to us.

It is okay to be atheist and it is okay to publicly state that you think God is a fictional character and that all the holy books are works of fiction. It is no different than religious people publicly stating their beliefs, building churches in full view of the public, building statues of religious figures, displaying religious billboards, printing "In God We Trust" on our money and saying "God bless America" every chance they get.

We have just as much right to publicly air our beliefs, and it's no more offensive when we do it than when they do it. And if someone is offended by hearing our beliefs while they think it is perfectly fine for them to parade their religion in front of the world, then they are acting like spoiled children who just want everything their way and don't care what's fair for others.

Evolution Is Nobler Than Creation

2010-01-23T09:23:00.008-07:00

Opponents of evolution often claim the idea that we are descended from animals is demeaning to humans. They prefer to believe that humans were intentionally created by an intelligent and powerful God.

The fact that humans are descended from animals actually means that humans are responsible for our own accomplishments. All the knowledge we've worked so diligently to develop, all the technology that we have created, the great artistic wonders and the globe-spanning civilization are all human accomplishments.

If you believe that humans were created by a God, in the image of that God, then it seems only natural that humans would be able to do all the amazing things that we have done. From that point of view, they are not even our accomplishments - they are God's, because God gave us the abilities to do what we've done.

Yet, when you realize that we evolved from simpler animals, it becomes very clear that humans have deliberately transformed themselves and their world over a very long period of time. It has been a long endeavor, with each generation building on the previous generation's discoveries and abilities, pushing themselves further, disciplining themselves more, finding better ways to do things. This sustained effort by humans to improve themselves and their situation is worthy of great respect and awe. We are the animals who chose to rise above what we were.

Believing that some God created humans is truly demeaning to our long history of sustained effort and accomplishment. We did this ourselves, and claiming that all our accomplishments are simply because God gave us our abilities, rather than us painstakingly developing them from nothing, is extremely disrespectful to the heroic accomplishments of our ancestors.

The facts of evolution allow us to truly appreciate the monumental struggle of our ancestors, going back for billions of years to our earliest bacterial ancestors. We are in a direct line of creatures who survived for the long term while nearly all others didn't have what it took to survive. We evolved from success, repeated over billions of generations. This understanding actually elevates Humanity and helps us appreciate what we are and the epic struggle it took to evolve to the creatures we are today.

Instead of being the defective toys of a perfect God, we are descended from a long line of successful creatures who rose up out of nothing to become the amazing life that is all around us. Instead of being created by some fantastic God and constantly failing to meet our divine potential, we are constantly exceeding everything that we have done before. After all, we are merely descended from animals, yet look what we've managed to accomplish!

Doubting the Experts

2010-01-20T10:05:00.000-07:00

In most areas of science, people wouldn't think to seriously doubt the scientific consensus and think that they personally know better than the experts. For example, people don't go around claiming that they know the mass of an electron more accurately than scientists. People don't seriously proclaim to know the rate of nuclear fusion in the sun, or how the whole process works, better than scientists or claim that there is some big conspiracy to get the answer wrong.

Yet, in scientific areas like evolution, global warming and vaccinations, ordinary people with only modest science backgrounds will publicly claim to know more than the scientists about these issues. They accuse scientists of being incompetent or of forming a grand conspiracy to fool people about these issues.

But, even more than simply doubting the scientists, they make the claim that they know the real truth. And, they know the truth despite not having done any real research or any of their own scientific investigation. They just KNOW. They will go on and on about how wrong the scientists are, publishing thousands of websites, blogging endlessly and writing nasty letters to scientists.

Yet, all these science deniers have no real science background and have no basis for denying the results of science. They may not like the truths that science has revealed, but not liking a truth doesn't make it any less true.

The only way to legitimately deny a scientific truth is to do better research that shows the scientists were wrong. But to do that, you have to become a scientist and be really good at doing research. And, in fact, this is what scientists do all the time - they do better research than previous scientists, and they reveal what they got wrong. This is why science keeps getting better, and it is also why scientists are the only ones we can really trust to find the truth. Everyone else is just guessing or making it up.

Use Some Restraint

2010-01-16T07:43:00.005-07:00

Imagine that there was a group of people dedicated to eliminating the use of seat belts and infant car seats. Despite all the vast scientific evidence that these precautions save thousands of lives each year, this group of people promotes the idea that these life-saving restraints are actually dangerous, especially to children.

Imagine that these people launched an aggressive campaign against the use of seat belts and car seats. They create hundreds of websites explaining the dangers of these restraints, even creating bogus scientific journal articles and fake letters from doctors to make it look like they have some legitimate authority. They promote the idea that there is some kind of conspiracy by Big Auto and the Government to force everyone to wear seat belts and subject children to car seats, despite the grave dangers, just so Big Auto can make more money selling these devices, which are dangerous and don't really work anyway.

Imagine that any internet search for information about seat belts and car seats always showed this group's bogus information listed among legitimate results, so that people making life-saving decisions for themselves and their children were as likely to find bad information as good information. Imagine that this campaign spreads to the point that millions of people stop using seat belts and refuse to restrain their children and babies in car seats, to the point that celebrities can appear on hugely popular talk shows and tell the audience of millions not to use these restraints, without anyone disagreeing with them. It even gets to the point that people who have stopped using these restraints actively try to convince their family and friends to stop using them also.

This is essentially the same situation we have with vaccines. Despite all the vast scientific evidence that vaccines are safe and effective and that the diseases they protect us from are quite dangerous, there is a huge and growing campaign to stop the use of vaccines. They have created hundreds of websites that appear to be legitimate sources of information about vaccines, containing what appear to be scientific journal articles and letters from doctors, testimonials from parents, scary stories, and all kinds of misinformation to create the illusion that their crusade is legitimate, backed by science, advocated for by doctors, supported by millions of parents and simply the right thing to do for yourself and your family.

This campaign against vaccines has convinced millions of people not to vaccinate themselves or their children. It has also convinced them to become involved in this campaign to some extent, whether it is simply cautioning family and friends against the use of vaccines or spreading that message to a wider audience through their own websites and writing.

If it weren't for all the grave consequences of this campaign against vaccines, it would be easy to dismiss this group of people as a bunch of misinformed cranks and leave the issue alone. However, the diseases that vaccines protect us from really are quite dangerous and the vaccines really are quite effective and safe, so the less we use vaccines, the more widely these dangerous diseases are spreading. Thousands of people are actually getting extremely ill and dying because of this aggressive campaign to stop vaccination, and the lowering vaccination rate is setting us up for new epidemics of diseases that have long been under control.

Because this campaign against vaccines is so widespread and decentralized, there is no easy way to restrain it. All we can do is spread good information about vaccines and explain the serious dangers of not using vaccines. Since this campaign against vaccines spreads so much from one person to another, through family and friends talking about it, we can counter that by having discussions with our family and friends about the benefits and safety of vaccines and the dangers of the diseases they protect us from.

We can also talk with family and friends who, with good intentions, have joined this campaign against vaccinations and urge them to use some restraint. They may feel confident about their position, but are they willing to endanger the lives of so many other people, especially when the vast majority of the scientific community is telling them they are wrong? We can advise them to use some restraint and keep their strong opinions about this issue to themselves - it will save them a lot of guilt later when they eventually realize that they were spreading deadly advice to all their friends and family.

Exit Interview With God

2009-12-18T23:40:00.001-07:00

A fundamentalist Christian dies and meets God for his death interview. God asks the man, "Did you believe in me with all your heart and mind?"

The man responds, "Lord, you know I did - I had unshakable faith."

God responds, "Even though you had no real evidence that I existed?"

"The Bible was all the evidence I needed," replied the man confidently.

God spoke, "The Bible was written by man, not by me. In fact, I never provided any evidence I existed."

The man was astonished, "But I still had faith in you! I just KNEW you existed!"

God looked solemnly at the man. "And that is why I have no use for you. I am God, the most intelligent being ever, and I need minds that can think for themselves and won't believe in things without good evidence."

The man stammered, "But, but..."

God declared, "I only have use for atheists and rationalists, because they didn't believe in me. Despite all the peer pressure, they alone had the courage of their convictions to not believe in me because there was no evidence that I exist."

The man started to cry.

"I'm sorry, but this is the end." And the man ceased to exist.

The fundamentalist Christian woke with a start, shaken to the core by the dream he had. After he recovered, he hopped out of bed and said, "See, I knew there was a God!"

Bad Design

2009-12-18T17:12:00.001-07:00

When biologists study living things, one of the most striking features they find is how poorly designed living things are. From the largest features to the smallest, it all looks like it was put together by some kind of incompetent engineer who kept changing his mind in mid-design, creating a mix of old ideas and new ones and adding all kinds of other features just to compensate for so many of the bad designs already there. It is as though the designer lived by a rule of never getting rid of any old designs but only tweaking existing designs to make them work for some new purpose. Sure, the designs work, but they are far from being the best design that could accomplish the same outcome.

A great example of this is the human eye. This is often held up as being a truly miraculous example of God's handiwork. But, closer inspection of the design of the human eye shows how deeply flawed it really is.

In the retina of the eye are collections of cells that are sensitive to light. When light is absorbed by them, they send a signal down a long nerve that travels to the brain. This system works well enough, and we can see because of it.

However, all of this is facing backwards! The receptor cells are facing away from the light. The nerves all go in front of the receptor cells, blocking a lot of the light coming in, like millions of camera cables strung out in front of the cameras, blocking the view. Then, because they are all in front of the retina, they have to tunnel through it to get to the brain. So, we are left with a pretty big blind spot in each eye.

If some kind of intelligent designer had designed the eye, it would have made the most sense to have the light receptors pointed towards the incoming light and have the nerves coming out the back, instead of the front, as is done in other animals' eyes.

This kind of bad design appears throughout every living organism, in every aspect of every organism. Based on the facts of biology, it does not appear that any sort of intelligent entity designed and created life.

However, all of this bad design can be easily understood by the theory of evolution. In evolution, there is no designer or central planner. Organisms can only change in small ways, retaining nearly all of their current design while changing slowly over time. As they change, they also develop ways to compensate for all of the old designs that they are stuck with, evolving convoluted workarounds.

What appears to be a completely incompetent and endlessly tinkering designer is actually just evolution, always working with whatever happens to be lying around and only able to change organisms a little at a time.

Morals and Belief in God

2009-12-08T12:55:00.004-07:00

A common - and deeply offensive - claim that many religious people make about atheists is that atheists have no morals because they don't believe in God. Besides being factually wrong - atheists do have morals - it makes no sense logically.

Assume that the religious people are correct and there really is a God that supplies us with a sense of morality. The only difference between atheists and the religious is that atheists don't believe there actually is a God. So, does God take away our sense of morality if we don't believe in God? If morals come from God, wouldn't atheists still have them, even if they didn't believe in the God that gave them morals? What kind of God takes away people's sense of right and wrong simply for not believing?

Assume that the religious people are wrong and there actually is no God and never has been all along. The religious still feel that they have morals and have had them all this time, even though there is no actual God giving the morals to them. So, wherever they get their sense of morality from, so do the atheists. If the act of believing in God is what gives them their morality, then they are claiming that active belief in an imaginary being is the source of morality, which seems to be a very strange source of morality.

So, whether God actually exists or not, atheists and religious believers get their morals from the same source - God or some naturally existing source of morality. It makes no sense that the act of believing would somehow cause a person to have morals and that not believing would somehow turn the morals off.

So, religious people who claim that atheists have no morals are claiming that their God takes away one's morality simply for not believing in that God. Or, they are claiming that the act of believing in an imaginary being is the source of their own morality. That says quite a lot more about their own morals than it does about atheists'.

Who are Really the Closed-Minded Ones?

2009-11-27T13:34:00.001-07:00

When skeptics express doubt about a claim, such as an alternative medicine practice, a paranormal experience, religious beliefs, a conspiracy theory, or any other claim, they are almost inevitably branded as "closed-minded" by those who believe in these claims.

Good skeptics base their beliefs on the best evidence they have and become educated and informed on issues they are concerned about. Because good skeptics base their beliefs on evidence, they are always ready to change their beliefs as new evidence comes in. They are more concerned that their beliefs match the evidence than in holding onto a particular belief.

So, when a skeptic doubts a particular claim, they doubt it because all the evidence and knowledge they have does not support that claim. However, they are open to new evidence that might change their beliefs. So, they are willing to believe in an alternative medical claim if good scientific studies demonstrate the claim to be true. They are willing to believe in paranormal experiences if good evidence can be gathered that clearly supports belief in the paranormal. They are willing to believe religious claims if consistent and clear evidence of God can be produced. They will believe the conspiracy theory when the evidence makes it clearly true.

While skeptics are willing to change their beliefs, based on the evidence, compare that to the attitudes of so many strong believers of alternative medicine, the paranormal, religion, a conspiracy theory or any other strong belief. Those believers tend to stick with their beliefs no matter how much evidence they are presented to the contrary. They seem determined to believe, no matter what.

Then, when a skeptic comes along and doesn't believe their claim because the evidence is against it, the believer accuses the skeptic of being "closed-minded". But, isn't it closed-minded to stick with your beliefs no matter what and open-minded to change your beliefs according to the evidence?

Clearly, strong believers are truly the closed-minded ones while good skeptics are the most open-minded of all.

Just show us some good evidence and we will believe your claim, but will you change your mind if we show you good evidence against your claim? Who is really the closed-minded one?

In Frodo We Trust

2009-11-15T10:17:00.004-07:00

Imagine if there was an organized group of people who sincerely believed that the people, places and stories described in the book, The Lord of the Rings, were literally true and actually happened as described in the the book.

These people believe that Middle Earth was a real place and that we are intimately connected to it. They believe that Tolkien, the author of the books, actually found a stone that connected his mind to Gandalf's mind, just as the book portrays happening a few times at remote locations. This is how he gained knowledge of the languages, the epic story and the vast war against darkness and evil. He just pretended to create the languages and make up the story so that it would be more accepted. They also believe that the dark lord was not completely destroyed and will rise again in our time if we don't adopt the same way of life described in The Lord of the Rings and fight the rise of the machines, which are the way of the evil one - where the Internet is the new One Ring that seems to give us power but really binds us all in the darkness. So they are awaiting a modern Frodo to destroy this One Ring and return us to a state of paradise.

Now, imagine that these believers, the Ringers, have become very mainstream and being a Ringer is no different culturally than being a Christian or a Jew or a Mormon. Imagine that they have major national campaigns to insist that public schools "teach the controversy" and push for the teaching of the history of Middle Earth in history classes and for the study of magic in physics class and the study of hobbits, elves and wizards in biology class.

Imagine that the Ringers launch a national campaign to have the phrase "In Frodo We Trust" printed on all currency. Imagine that the Ringers insist on having monuments erected on public property, such as outside courtrooms, that promote their beliefs as the basis for all law.

Imagine living in a community where you are shunned because you don't believe in Gandalf or Frodo, and family members become hostile towards you and won't speak to you because you believe that The Lord of the Rings is fictional.

Imagine if a person cannot bcome elected into public office, especially for the position of President, if they don't express a firm belief in The Lord of the Rings and in the reality of Frodo and Gandalf and the One Ring.

This whole scenario seems completely ridiculous - that a society would adopt a book of fiction as their guiding book. However, from an atheist perspective, this is exactly what has happened with the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon and other holy books. From the atheist perspective, it seems like complete madness that our society has been overrun by fanatics who actually believe a work of fiction to be a true book.

So for those who don't understand why atheists don't just shut up and let religious people do their thing and stop trying to burst people's beliefs in God, imagine how you would feel and what you would do if all around you people sincerely believed in The Lord of the Rings and made life decisions, for themselves and for the nation, based on their beliefs. Wouldn't you feel compelled to help them see that they are believing in a work of fiction? Or would you sit back and let this madness infect all of Humanity?

The Anti Medical Movement

2009-08-09T20:09:00.012-06:00

Since it's beginning, modern medicine has had significant and vocal opposition. The majority of this opposition comes from those who practice other forms of the healing arts, disagree with the medical approach and fear the competition. Other significant opposition comes from those who fear or mistrust the motives of large institutions, such as governments and corporations. Another significant type of people opposed to medicine are those who have had bad experiences with doctors or medical procedures.

As with opposition to anything, there is a whole spectrum of attitudes and approaches. At the milder extreme are those who work to reform the medical industry by exposing the very real misdeeds and corruption among many people and companies. At the more extreme end of the spectrum are those who completely fabricate or highly distort claims about the medical community, painting them all as greedy, stupid, incompetent, closed-minded, evil people who care only about getting their patients' money and giving them drugs to solve every problem. And, there are all kinds of views and approaches between these extremes, which include all different levels of honesty, rationality and paranoia.

One of the biggest problems with medical opposition is that those with the more extreme and negative views tend to be the most vocal while those with evidence-based, specific complaints tend to be quieter, preferring to solve their specific problem rather than get lots of attention. Because of this, anyone who has a problem with the medical industry and does any research is most likely to encounter extremely negative views about it and not as many moderate or positive perspectives.

Because those with extremely negative views of the medical industry are so vocal, it is easy for someone who has only a mildly negative opinion of medicine to become more and more extreme in their negative opinion. The things that are written and said about the medical industry are truly horrible, if true, and the people saying these things are quite articulate and convincing, and it is difficult to do the research to verify it for oneself. After years of hearing and reading such hostile reviews, it's difficult not to believe at least some of the claims made.

Because it is so difficult to research negative claims made about the medical industry, whether a person believes them or not has more to do with their existing beliefs about the medical industry than the truth. If someone has a positive view of the medical industry, they are more likely to dismiss negative reports and accept positive ones without scrutiny. And, if someone already has a negative view of medicine, they will be more likely to accept an negative report and dismiss a positive one without scrutiny. Further, people will actively seek out information that supports their existing beliefs and avoid contrary beliefs.

So, the anti-medical movement is made up of several different types of people. One major group are the competitors of the medical industry, either well-meaning or con artists, who have strong motives to discredit their competition. Another group are the more paranoid and vocal who truly believe that the medical industry is evil and that they must do everything possible to inform others, portraying medicine in the most negative light possible. Another major group is the ordinary person who has heard enough negative propaganda from friends, family, alternative health practitioners and vocal fanatics that they have become persuaded themselves and now tell their own friends and family about all the evils they believe the medical industry is doing.

The big problem with the anti-medical movement is that it convinces people to avoid effective and necessary medical treatment, which often leads to severe medical problems and death. Despite the many very real problems with the medical industry, the people who work in it are not evil and there is a sincere effort to understand the body and provide safe and effective treatments. Those in the anti-medical movement are generally well-meaning and sincerely believe the negative things they have heard and read about the medical community. With such beliefs, it seems the right thing to do to alert others to danger also. And, without bad intentions, they end up leading others into the danger of avoiding needed and effective medical treatment.

Becoming Superbeings

2009-05-24T08:45:00.001-06:00

It is true that humans will likely create machines that are far smarter than current humans. However, what people generally fail to consider is that humans will also be radically transforming themselves at the same time and connecting intensively with these super-intelligent machines.

We are already integrating ourselves with our technologies, in a process that began thousands of years ago with our first use of tools. We have surrounded ourselves with incredibly useful technologies - cars, computers, cell phones, iPhones, grocery stores, highways, etc. All these technologies make individual humans more powerful - able to do things they couldn't otherwise. We have quick access to all kinds of information, growing every day. We can travel very long distances fairly easily. Our abilities keep growing every day.

As our information technologies become smaller and more intelligent, they will become so incredibly useful that we will all carry around wearable devices that keep us connected and coordinated even more thoroughly than the current internet. It will seem as completely natural to everyone as carrying a cell phone does now.

Advances in biology will make it possible to have safe and easy implants of this advanced information technology, just another small step that will seem quite natural to us at the time. We will have an intelligent computer built into us that learns how we are and adapts to our needs and desires, monitors our health and helps us access the resources of the world. It will be like a powerful assistant, built into us. It will adapt to us and we to it, to the point that very quickly it will simply feel like an extension of ourselves, and so will all the other technology it connects us to.

Our sense of self will continue to expand, as it has for quite a long time already, including more and more of the world and the technologies that we use. It won't be a human vs. machine scenario like a lot of science fiction portrays. We will be so intimately connected to these intelligent machines, communicating with them, learning from them, using them as an extension of ourselves, that we will effectively be one being with them.

We will then be able to use our much expanded intelligence and abilities to advance our technologies further, make improvements to our biological bodies so we are not so vulnerable to disease and injury and boost our own intelligence, through implants and eventually through a careful and gradual redesign of the brain at the smallest levels, since the current design of the brain is horribly inefficient.

Eventually, we will be interconnected superbeings, with advanced, intelligent technologies as intimate extensions of ourselves which vastly extend our own abilities and transform us into creatures far different and far more advanced than we are now, with that self-transformative process continuing indefinitely and continually faster.

Without any extreme catastrophes, that is essentially the course Humanity is on. Each step will seem as natural as driving a car or talking on a telephone or using a computer does to us. Many will object, as people have objected to advances throughout history, but unless they get the changes to their bodies, they will die off naturally, of old age or disease. The newer generations are always more accepting of changes that seemed radical to the older generations, so Humanity will essentially welcome all this with open arms, with only a small percentage of people objecting to the changes, for only a relatively small amount of time.

Technological Gods

2009-05-02T15:10:00.004-06:00

As an atheist, I don't believe in any supernatural Gods with infinite abilities. Yet, the idea of extremely powerful, intelligent and good beings is very compelling to me. I often wonder how powerful and intelligent can beings become, within the limitations of the real world?

I like to imagine Humanity continuing to advance itself scientifically and technologically, becoming more intelligent and powerful as we use science and technology to enhance our own abilities, becoming ever smarter and more able to transform ourselves into increasingly powerful and intelligent beings.

I have no idea what the upper limits are for this self-transforming process, but I imagine that if an entire galaxy's matter and energy was transformed into an intelligent being, it would be immensely intelligent and powerful.

That sort of being certainly wouldn't be a God, in the traditional, supernatural sense, because it would not be infinite in ability, nor would it have been responsible for creating all of existence. But, theoretically, such a being could actually exist, and it would be quite impressive. It would not be a supernatural God, but it could be thought of as a technological God.

It's staggering to consider all that such a being would be able to accomplish intellectually and physically. It's entirely possible that to such a being, all aspects of physics are fully understood and that it has the technological means to create new universes, many capable of also evolving such beings, like an organism reproducing.

If humanity has the potential to transform itself into such an advanced being eventually, it seems unlikely that we would just happen to be the first creatures to do this, especially if such beings could create new universes like this one. It seems possible that our universe was created by a technological God.

Since we don't understand physics fully, we can't know how much influence such a being would have on any of the universes it creates. It may have none at all, or it may have only the ability to send coded messages, such as by subtly influencing certain properties of the universe. Or, it may be able to create advanced technologies and intelligence within the baby universe. We don't know.

Even if it could only send coded messages, it's possible that a truly advanced intelligence would be able to detect and interpret the messages and possibly send messages back, establishing a communication link. This would allow the younger advanced being to learn from the far more advanced being, dramatically speeding its development. It also allows the more advanced being to spread its intelligence and technology into another universe while also learning from a being with a different history and perspective.

This idea of technological Gods does seem fantastic, and there is absolutely no evidence to support it. However, there is also no known reason that it could not happen.

Discovering the Truth

2009-03-09T18:53:00.004-06:00

Discovering the truth about anything involves several steps of information gathering and reasoning, exploring and limiting the range of possible ways to understand how things really are.

A good example of this process is when someone gives us a gift and we try to guess what it is. The more information we get about the gift, the better our guesses, because each piece of information eliminates many possibilities.

When we first hear that we are going to be given a gift, if we know who it's from, that information helps us eliminate gift possibilities that are too expensive for the giver to afford.

When we are presented with a wrapped gift, we can see its size. With that information, we can eliminate all the possibilities of gifts that are larger than that.

By holding and shaking the gift, we gain information about its weight and possible loose parts inside. This information helps eliminate even more possibilities.

Opening the gift and seeing it provides lots of information, which helps eliminate nearly all gift possibilities, leaving a very good idea of what the gift is.

The process of science is very much like this. The more information we gather, we can eliminate more potential ideas of how things are, leaving us with an ever clearer understanding of what the universe actually is.

Even though we don't have a perfect understanding, the range of possibilities keeps getting smaller, and any idea about the universe outside that range of possibilities cannot be true.

However, many people cling to ideas about the universe that are outside of the range of possibilities allowed by science. For example, people believe in a God that created the Earth and life on it. Or people believe in alternative medical practices that simply don't work. Or any number of other beliefs not supported by science.

In all of these cases, it's as though the person trying to guess their gift has an idea of what they WANT their gift to be, and despite all the new information they receive, they will still cling to the idea that this is what their gift is. Even after the gift is opened, and it is clear what it is, they will still insist that the gift is really this preferred gift.

If we are going to understand how the universe really is, then we have to use all the information and logic available to us to keep narrowing the range of possible options. And, we have to be emotionally willing to accept the truth, whatever it happens to be, even if we don't like it.

Religion and Self-Deception

2009-02-22T10:58:00.001-07:00

When I was 18, I was a devout Mormon, and I was very sincere about having a genuine "testimony" of the reality of God. I would pray and pray, pleading for some kind unmistakable evidence that God was real and that the Mormon church was His church. Despite months of sincere effort, God never once confirmed His existence to me.

One evening, I made a conscious decision to be completely honest with myself about my feelings for God and to stop trying to believe anything in particular about God. I had a sudden and profound realization that I never had any evidence of God in my whole life and that I only knew about God because other people I went to church with told me about God and affirmed very sincerely that they knew God was real and that our religion was true.

After that realization, I lost all my belief in God. I knew that people only believed because they kept talking about God over and over and worked very hard to convince each other that God was real. I realized that one of the main topics of conversation at church was about strengthening one's belief in God, that there was a conscious effort among people to convince each other more and more deeply of God's existence. Each week at church, several people would declare publicly how strongly they knew of God's existence.

I realized then that I didn't want any part of those rituals of mutual self-hypnosis and self-deception. I wanted to know what was actually real about the world, even if it disagreed with what I was taught.

I realize now how much of religion is centered on the practice of self-deception. To be deeply religious, you have to ignore the fact that you really have no evidence, or very weak evidence, that your religious beliefs are true and that everyone else's are not true. Each religious person knows somewhere in their heart that they don't really know with any certainty that their religious beliefs are true, but they actively suppress their own doubts.

This is the deeply dishonest heart of religious belief - everyone pretends to know, but no one actually does.

Treating Animals Better Than Nature

2009-02-20T10:02:00.000-07:00

Mother Nature treats animals far more cruelly than humans do. In the wild, animals are eaten alive, and in great pain, by other animals, while they struggle to get away. Animals are frequently injured and suffer long, drawn out deaths. Animals get diseases all the time and suffer horribly.

What humans do in any decent animal farm is trivial in comparison to what nature does. Yes, there are some horrible farms out there, but not all of them are that bad.

It may seem bad to us to be raised as an animal on a farm and then killed for food. However, we must always compare our actions to the standards of Mother Nature. Are we treating them better or worse than wild nature treats them?

I am convinced that we are treating animals better, overall, than wild nature does, so we are okay. Sure, there is always room for improvement, but we have improved on nature's methods quite a lot. For the most part, these animals are given good food, health care, protection from predators and then a relatively quick death. In the wild, they wouldn't have been so lucky.

Before judging humans as being cruel, it's important to point that same harsh judgment on Nature itself. Nature has brutally tortured animals every day, for millions of years now.

Irrational People Create Irrational Governments

2009-02-20T09:57:00.001-07:00

People often say that the population needs to be controlled, when talking about the need for government. Or, people will say that humans don't make rational decisions (which is true), so therefore, the government needs to look out for their best interest. There are all kinds of arguments about how people are not fit to take care of themselves or that they will not take care of important social priorities if left to spend their own money on what they want, so they need a government to manage some of their money and make sure that important things are taken care of.

I have no argument against the fact that all people, including myself, make irrational decisions and mainly look out for their own self interest. However, I don't conclude that because people are irrational and selfish that we need to be regulated heavily by a huge government.

The problem is that the same irrational and selfish people we are trying to regulate are the people who also end up running the government. So, the more irrational and selfish a population is, the more they are argued to need government, but that government is run by those same people, so it will end up being a horrible government, making irrational decisions and becoming corrupted by the greed of those running it.

That's why I and many others argue for a very limited government that only focuses on protecting people's basic human rights, having only police, a justice system, and a sufficient national defense system. Leave all the other social concerns to the private sector and non-profits.

Government has a natural tendency to keep getting larger and more complicated, because government is a response to human stupidity and greed. However, when a certain amount of government fails to eliminate human stupidity and greed, people call for more layers of regulation and government spending. It never ends, because government is not able to solve the fundamental problems of human stupidity and greed - it is only able to magnify and heavily fund those problems.

How Morality Is Shaped By Evolution

2009-02-03T14:29:00.000-07:00

I don't see why social behavior would be off limits to evolutionary change. Yes, certain social conventions, like clothing fashion, are arbitrary and have absolutely no effect on our survival. But, anything that has an effect on our survival is going to be selected for or against by evolution.

Basic human psychology is deeply shaped by evolution, guiding our basic instincts about what types of actions are to be pursued and which are to be avoided.

Our reluctance to murder our children is NOT a social convention that could change at a whim. Societies of people who had no reluctance to kill their children would not survive.

Our drive to be compassionate to fellow humans in our group/tribe is instinctive also. Groups of humans who did not feel genuine compassion for each other and did not feel compelled to help each other in times of distress would not survive very long. We have always needed each other to survive, so it is built into us to care about each other and care for each other (within our group).

Our desires to fit in socially and conform to the rules of our group is deeply ingrained in us as an evolutionary strategy. Human groups have always had to work together as a team, and if they didn't, they didn't survive well. Part of what helps us work together better is that we feel compelled to be a part of that team and work with the already established behavior of the team.

There are many more examples of how our basic psychology is deeply shaped by evolution and how that gives rise to our basic morality and social behavior.

Of course, different cultures have different social conventions, but basic morality is quite universal and built into us before we ever begin socializing.

The Limits of Logic and Reason

2009-02-03T14:27:00.000-07:00

There is a fairly well-known proof by Kurt Godel, a mathematician, which shows that no logical system can contain all mathematical truths while at the same time not containing any falsehoods.

Even rationalists know that there are very real limits to rationality.

However, even though we know that reason and logic are limited, we don't believe there are any other valid tools for determining truth.

The complete truth CANNOT be known - by any means. There are always limits to any form of knowledge - infinite gaps, inaccessible by any means.

Reason and logic expand our ability to learn truth to the maximum possible, though. There are no better tools possible for determining truth.

So, we can complain all day about the limits of logic and reason and how flawed they are, but there is nothing better than those tools.

We just need to make the most of what we have available to us and quit complaining about the flawed nature of our existence.

Pointing out the flaws of logic and reason doesn't mean that there is some better method out there.

The Superiority of Science

2009-02-03T14:24:00.001-07:00

Last week my wife gave birth. It was a long, drawn out ordeal at the hospital that ultimately ended in an urgent Cesarean section. There were a lot of medical experts involved in the birth and the recovery - each helping to make the whole process successful.

I watched all the medical professionals with awe, seeing their vast knowledge playing out in their precise actions. I watched the c-section operation and admired the great care with which the instruments were prepared in advance and the great skill with which they were used to save my wife and child from what would have been death.

The incredible knowledge and effectiveness of medical science stands in sharp contrast to all the con artists of alternative medicine. Consider a medical physician, who knows every part of the body, how each part works in great detail, knows thousands of different medical interventions which have been scientifically tested to work. Then compare that to an herbalist or a naturopath or any other of the fake "healers", who have very vague and generally incorrect knowledge of the human anatomy and function and whose remedies have no scientific basis.

There is the same kind of parallel between science and religion. Compare the great depth of knowledge of the universe that science has to the very vague and generally incorrect claims of religion.

In every field, the scientific approach has yielded something FAR superior to all the alternatives.

Ghosts and the Paranomal

2009-02-03T14:22:00.000-07:00

People generally sincerely believe in their experiences of ghosts and the paranormal, but every time these phenomena are examined carefully, using science, no ghosts or paranormal events are ever found.

Much study has been done on the human mind and the many ways it can be fooled, and that research has made it very clear that experiences of ghosts and the paranormal are almost certainly errors of perception.

I've even been convinced there was a ghost in my house many years ago. The bedroom doorknob would rattle like crazy and then the door would start pounding back and forth violently. My wife and I were terrified, but when I got up and checked the door and the whole house, there was no one there and all the doors and windows were locked. This happened for a couple weeks, and it was quite scary.

As an atheist and a skeptic, I knew there had to be a reasonable explanation, but I couldn't think of one, so I began to start believing that the ONLY possible explanation was ghosts or the paranormal. I was willing to accept the evidence that there were ghosts, despite my deep skepticism.

Then, one day I saw one of our cats at the front door, reaching up to the knob, jiggling it with his front paws and then pushing really hard on the door, causing it to bang back and forth violently.

There was a completely natural explanation for the phenomena I was experiencing, but the only reason I thought it was a ghost was because I personally couldn't think of the actual explanation.

The lesson to me is that just because I am utterly convinced of something and can't think of a natural explanation, it doesn't mean there isn't one.

Objective Morality

2009-02-03T14:19:00.002-07:00

Morality is objective in the same way that our eyeballs are objective. They exist as an evolved trait of our species, necessary for our survival.

There may be no moral authority dictating what is universally right or wrong, but there certainly are types of human behavior that jeopardize the survival of our species and those that promote our survival.

Killing our children is an obvious human behavior that would not promote the survival of our species. And, big surprise, nearly all humans feel very strong inhibitions against killing their own and even others' children, even when the children are extremely annoying. In fact, we feel very strongly to promote the welfare of ours and others' children.

Also, since humans are social animals, cooperation among each other is key for our survival, so we have strong drives to get along with others and promote friendships and other strong cooperative relationships. Getting along with others and being kind and compassionate with each other just feel good to us, because they promote our survival as a species.

We do have a strong aggressive streak, though, since we have always been organized as somewhat separate and competing tribes, so our ancestors survived better when they were hostile to outside tribes, otherwise the outside tribes would wipe them out.

There are a lot of very good evolutionary reasons why humans have the type of morality we have. It's not universal and absolute morality, but one based on the practical necessities of long-term species survival.

People don't "believe in a morality", any more than they choose to believe in their hunger instinct. It is just a part of us, and it guides our behavior, imperfectly.

The Morality Instinct

2009-02-03T13:50:00.001-07:00

When people say they get their morality from religion, I want to ask them if the only reason they are moral is because of their religion. Did they need a religion to tell them it is immoral to torture and kill babies? Did someone have to explicitly tell them it was wrong to rape their dog? If they didn't have their religion to tell them not to do these things would they do them?

I have no religion and no belief in God, but I have a very strong sense of morality. It is so strong, that bad things just seem instinctively bad to me and good things seem instinctively good. No one needs to tell me what is good and bad, any more than someone needs to tell me what foods taste good and taste bad.

Most of our basic morality is instinct, and the rest is based on experience and reasoning. We don't need religion to tell us that helping others is good - we feel good when we do it and we have a natural compassion for others. We don't need religion to tell us that hurting others is bad - we feel bad when we do it. We couldn't have survived as a species if we didn't have some basic instincts about how to act. Our ancestors would have killed their children and families if they didn't have basic compassion for others.

Meaning From Science

2009-02-03T13:45:00.001-07:00

I take great joy in my scientifically informed worldview. The universe, as revealed by science, is so amazing and wonderful and it is truly awe-inspiring.

Science is only dull and boring for those who don't know very much science and who fail to see the vast implications that scientific discoveries have on how we think of ourselves as life, as a species and as individuals. A scientific worldview changes the way we think about everything, quite profoundly.

It provides an immense amount of comfort and inspiration also. It opens up a world of possibilities, and it lets us know, quite urgently, that this is our time to act, if we are going to make a positive difference in the world. Science also helps guide our actions, so we make decisions that make sense and develop technologies that actually work.

The process of doing science may be dry and boring, but the facts of the universe that science is revealing are very far from being boring.

Science reveals a universe far more incredible and wonderful than ANY religion has ever done.

And, it has the added bonus of actually being true.

Why I Don't Believe In Zeus

2009-02-03T13:41:00.002-07:00

I don't believe in Zeus. Nor do I believe in the whole Pantheon of ancient Greek gods. I know, I know, I'm making a pretty big leap of faith, since I don't actually have any evidence that Zeus doesn't exist. Also, millions of people believed in Zeus for a very long time, and many people still do. Can I really say they are all wrong?

Nevertheless, I am having a hard time believing that these gods actually exist. Those gods just seem silly to me, like some kind of soap opera, invented by humans. Plus, there is no good evidence that they actually exist.

I'm not sure how I will be able to live a moral life, though, if I don't believe in Zeus, since all morality comes from the Olympic religion. Despite that, I am having a hard time actually believing in Zeus and the Pantheon of gods. I hope I do not end up being persecuted as a bad person because of my non-belief.

My family is, of course, very upset that I no longer believe in Zeus, and they think I may be joining some cult of anti-Zeus fanatics. They are worried for my future, and they can't imagine how anyone could live a life without Zeus guiding them and loving them.

So even though I don't have absolute proof that Zeus and the Pantheon of gods doesn't exist, I have no proof that they DO exist, so I don't believe in Zeus.

Hopefully people won't hate or distrust me for this. It IS just a silly belief after all...

Violence Is Not Acceptable

2009-01-10T10:27:00.001-07:00

The natural human reaction to violence is to retaliate with even greater violence. This ultimately spirals out of control, into war.

Violence is not acceptable behavior in anyone, including ourselves. Even if someone does violence to us - just as their violence to us was not acceptable, even though they may think they are fully justified, our violence to them is not acceptable, even if we think it is fully justified.

We are creative beings, and when faced with violence, we should use our creative abilities to invent good strategies for countering it that doesn't involve adding more violence to a volatile situation.

There is no justification for violence, no matter how many compelling arguments people make. No matter what short-term or long-term goals a violent act is intended to bring about, it will ALWAYS have severe, unintended and unforeseeable consequences that will lead to greater violence in the future. The violent approach will always make things worse in the long run.

Every act of violence jeopardizes Humanity's chances for long-term survival, because each act of violence is like a fire that sends off sparks, which start more fires. We need to learn to let fires burn out and to stop them from spreading, not "fighting fire with fire", as is the Traditional Human Way. We need to move on from that long tradition of escalating retaliatory violence. We are too powerful to survive the level of violence we have made ourselves capable of.

Proposition 9 Gaining Support in Southern States

2008-12-14T09:20:00.003-07:00

Proposition 9 Gaining Support in Southern States
by David Musick

MONTGOMERY, AL, Dec 14, Emboldened by the success of Proposition 8 in California, several southern states are considering propositions to ban interracial marriages in their own states. There is a growing campaign to restore "natural marriages", and the many supporters claim that because races exist only because they did not intermarry for so long, this is the natural state of marriage. This new campaign is being referred to by some as "Proposition 9" because they see it as a simple extension of Proposition 8. They define "natural marriage" as "between one man and one woman of the same race".

Proposition 9 supporter, Robert Bell describes some of the reasoning behind this effort, "Interracial marriage used to be illegal in this country. But, a vocal minority forced us all into allowing it to happen. Now, we are just pushing back. It's exactly the same situation as California. Just because we've let them get married all this time, it doesn't mean it's too late to do what we should have done in the first place. If God wanted races to marry each other, everyone would have been created mixed-race. It's obvious to any sane person that different races were never meant to intermarry."

Civil Libertarian Jackie Simmons doesn't claim to be a supporter of Proposition 9, but she applauds the effort to get government out of marriage. "The government has no business being involved in marriages. It's a contract between individuals. If this Proposition passes, it will be one less type of marriage the government is involved in. These people can still get civil unions - they don't need a government sanctioned marriage. They still have the same rights as everyone else."

Many others agree that government should be out of the marriage business but insist that as long as it's going to continue issuing marriage certificates, everyone should be eligible to get one. Stacey Snarr explains, "Marriage is a government benefit - it shouldn't be, but it is, and until they decide to stop handing out that benefit, they should give it out to anyone who wants it. The government shouldn't discriminate against people because of their race, gender, sexuality, or any other irrelevant factor. What if government stopped giving food stamp benefits to gay couples or to interracial couples? Even if you were against the food stamp program, that would be obviously unfair."

Many churches and other organizations are starting to back this Proposition, declaring that their religious beliefs have long supported the separation of races. Representatives from these churches declined to be interviewed and named publicly, fearful of backlash. One church has already received hate mail, accusing them of being racist. The church says it is merely exercising its First Amemdment right to free speech and they should be protected from any consequences to their support of this Proposition.

An interracial married couple, Monica and Steve Johnson are outraged by Proposition 9. "They're treating us like we're some kind of perverts. We have as much right to be married as anyone else. I don't see why people can decide who gets to be married and who doesn't. I thought marriage was a good thing."

Types of Atheism and the Christian God

2008-12-08T22:21:00.000-07:00

There is the kind of atheism where you don't believe in God because you've never heard of the concept of God. Then, there is the kind where you've heard of a concept of God, but you don't have enough information to believe it's real, nor enough information to believe it's not real. Then, there's the kind of atheism where you believe that God probably does not exist. Then, there's the kind of atheism where you strongly believe that specific Gods or whole categories of Gods cannot possibly exist.

Since the concept of God is so vague and varies quite a lot from culture to culture, it's really hard to pin it down and say what God actually is. However, some people have gone through the trouble of defining exactly what their God is and what specific properties their God has.

For example, Christians generally define their God as being all-knowing, all-powerful and all-abiding. They also claim their God created all of existence. It is not possible for such a being to exist, so I have a very strong belief that the Christian God does not exist, as defined, with those properties.

The arguments against the Christian God, or any God like it, are quite long and involved, so I won't go into them in detail, but I'll briefly summarize them.

It is literally impossible to know everything. First, there is no way for a being to verify that they in fact know everything. There is no test they can take to make sure that there isn't anything missing from their knowledge. Plus, each piece of knowledge generates even more potential knowledge. The more you know, the more questions you have. This just gets worse as you gain immense amounts of knowledge. You know just how much you don't really know. "Everything" is not a well-defined or containable concept, so it's impossible to know.

It's impossible to be able to do everything. First, there are the problems with the concept of "everything". Then, if you were all-powerful, you could make something impossible for yourself to do. Then, it's fundamentally impossible for contradictions to exist, so there are an infinite number of things an all-powerful being could not do, because they would create contradictions.

It's impossible to be omni-present, because a being cannot be both the whole thing and the smallest part of that thing. Any intelligent being, like the Christian God would be made of parts, with each system having subsystems all the way down. That's just the nature of complexity, and there really is no way around it. The whole is made up of the parts and any part is not the whole, nor does it have the same properties as the whole.

It's impossible for an intelligent being to create all of existence. First, they would need to exist in order to bring about existence. However, if they existed, then something else brought them into existence. There is no way around the fact that existence just exists spontaneously. If God created existence, then God exists spontaneously. Either way, things exist spontaneously.

The other problem with the Christian God is that it's defined as having created all life on Earth. However, the evidence strongly demonstrates that life on Earth arose spontaneously and was not created by any intelligent being.

As I said, these are extremely summarized arguments that would probably take a whole book to really go into, and I'm sure many of us have read books that do go into those arguments in detail.

So, I strongly believe that the Christian God does not exist. However, that is only one category of God, and there are others that could potentially exist.

For example, imagine Humanity developing much further into a super advanced technological civilization, with immense knowledge and abilities, transforming more and more of the matter and energy of the universe into intelligent and powerful processes. That might be considered a form of a God, and those sorts of beings might exist. They might even learn how to create more universes that could develop into technological Gods also, and so on. This may have happened before.

So, a technological God is at least reasonable. It doesn't have any magical powers, and it didn't create everything, but it would be extremely powerful and knowledgeable.

Why I Don't Believe in Taxation

2008-12-07T09:24:00.000-07:00

I don't believe in taxation because I recognize the deep violence in it. We need to find other ways to have a civil society that don't involve forcing each other to hand over our money at the threat of arrest and imprisonment.

However, people prefer violent solutions to peaceful ones. If they want something to happen, they are going to MAKE it happen, using the violent force of government to force everyone to obey.

I'm not advocating that we eliminate taxes immediately. I'm advocating that people grow up and become more mature and find more civil ways to have a civilization. When we do that, we will stop having taxes and they will be regarded as being barbaric, just as we view slavery as barbaric even though it was widely accepted in it's time.

For example, lets say you are living in a village and a few of your neighbors are having a very hard time financially. All they need is some material help for a month or two, and they will be okay after that. You want to help them, but you don't have enough resources to do the job all on your own.

A civil way to handle this is to go out and talk with other people in your village, explaining the situation and persuading them to donate some of their resources to the charitable effort.

The taxation way to handle it is to have some thugs go around door to door, requesting that they give money to this cause or get locked up in jail.

In the end, you will get needed resources with whatever approach you take, but in the civil way, everyone gave voluntarily and were more closely involved in the charitable act. It helps draw the community closer together.

With the taxation method, no one had to care about the people in need, since it was being done automatically, without any compassion required. Plus, it was an antagonistic experience for everyone involved.

My Political Beliefs

2008-12-07T09:20:00.003-07:00

My political belief is that people should treat each other with compassion and respect.

Most aspects of government do not treat people with respect because they involve forcing people against their will, to pay taxes and to obey endless laws, rules and regulations. I'm in favor of getting rid of nearly all of government because it is extremely disrespectful to others and would be considered criminal behavior if an ordinary citizen was doing it. People's basic rights to life, health, liberty and property need to be respected at all times.

The compassion part means that I think people should care for each other. However, this should be completely voluntary, not some kind of Socialist government program. As soon as we legislate compassion, we kill it. It must be genuine, and it must be voluntary.

I think the only way to have a peaceful society is when most people have deep respect and compassion for each other.

I know it's a lot to hope for, but it is what has to happen if we want that kind of society.

Taxes pay for a lot of things that we truly do need for a civilized society. However, the problem I have with the taxation process is that it is fundamentally a violent process.

People are forced to pay taxes, whether they want to or not, and if they don't pay up, violence will be done to them, such as being abducted and confined with criminals for years.

So, while the money may be needed to sustain our advanced civilization, the process of forcing people to pay makes us less civilized.

The other problem with taxes is that people keep thinking of new things we could pay for, so taxes just keep going up, and we have almost no say over this. We just have to pay, whether we agree with it or not.

We need to find a more civilized way to pay for our civilization, one that is rooted firmly in respect, compassion and voluntary cooperation, not our current one, that is based in bossing each other around and stealing each other's money.

Property rights extend from our ownership of our own bodies. We own our bodies and anything we do with them. So, if we do something harmful with our bodies, we are responsible for that. And, if we create something with our bodies, by doing work, we own the work we do. Then, we can trade the work we do with each other, and we own what we traded our work for, whether that's money or a product or a service.

As long as we make honest and fair trades of our work and the property we earn from our work, we own it in the same way we own our bodies. All the property we create and work for come from our bodies, so we own it, just like we own our bodies.

If someone takes our property from us, they are taking control of our bodies, because we now have to work more to replace that property. We are being forced to work for things we do not get to keep and do not get compensated for. Slavery comes in varying degrees, and the more of our property is taken from us, the more enslaved we are.

What I suggest is that Humanity become more mature and responsible. No system of government can make things any better. It's going to take people growing up and becoming more responsible for their behavior, more aware of the needs of others around them and learn to be more respectful of each other.

There is no magic way for this to happen and no system or program that will make it happen. It is a maturation process that takes time.

However, we can each work on becoming more mature ourselves and helping others around us become more mature. We need to rise above all the pettiness, greed and apathy that humans naturally gravitate towards.

The Crucible of Science

2008-12-07T09:14:00.001-07:00

I think a lot of people have some very naive and simplistic ideas of how science actually works. The impression I get from many people is that they believe that science is like some social club, where scientists are trying to be popular and fit in with the crowd. Or, that it's like some kind of corporation, with the scientists working in their labs and the bosses working in their offices, and the scientists have to do what the bosses tell them, even if it's not true or they will get fired.

If science was truly like that, then sure, there would be a lot of bad science, because people would be doing things based on either fitting in or not getting fired, not because of a genuine concern for understanding things accurately.

Fortunately, science is made up of millions of scientists, in thousands of universities and companies throughout the world, each operating somewhat independently but sharing their results with everyone. I'm sure there is a certain amount of conformity and corruption in science, and that's why it has so many levels of checks and balances throughout the whole process.

Scientists constantly review each other's work, looking for flaws. They are not shy about completely ripping apart a colleague's work in public, if there are flaws in it at all. People who do not normally work in science are often shocked at the level of criticism in that field. It can seem quite abusive to outsiders.

To get their work accepted, scientists have to publish it, writing up everything they did and all their results. Then, it has to be reviewed and criticized thoroughly by other scientists working in the same area. Then, it is published more widely and is criticized yet again by a larger audience over the next several years, able to be challenged at any time.

If some research can pass through all that and still stand, then it's most likely to be correct. Those who dismiss the results of science don't really understand how science works. Or, they don't like the results, so they want to find any way they can to discredit science.

Denying Science

2008-12-01T22:14:00.001-07:00

In discussions about autism many people make claims that go against a significant amount of scientific research. Among scientists, this research is not controversial, and even though scientists are far from fully understanding autism, what they do understand is based on very solid research.

Despite the immense amount of research scientists have done about autism, many people feel that other ideas about autism are just as valid, even though those claims often have little, if any, scientific basis.

To justify believing in these non-scientific beliefs, they make the fantastic claims that science is corrupt, or misguided, that scientists are all conformists, doing what they're told, etc.

However, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So, if you're going to claim that science is corrupt or that it is wrong in some of it's theories, then you are going to have to come up with a LOT of evidence to back up that claim. Sure, you can find several cases where individual scientists or companies commit fraud, but it doesn't logically follow that the entire, diverse scientific community is corrupt to its core and can't be trusted.

Many people who are interested in autism claim that autism is caused by the buildup of heavy metals, like mercury, in the brain. They tell this to anyone who will listen. However, scientists who study autism do not believe this is the case. They have investigated this idea very thoroughly and found no evidence to support it.

Many people believe there is an epidemic of autism, and they spread panic about this to everyone who will listen. However, concerned scientists have done extensive research about this. They've found that autism rates have remained steady for decades, although previously people were diagnosed as autistic if they were extremely autistic. Now that we understand autism as a spectrum, more people are considered to be on that spectrum, from very severe to very mild.

Scientists are the people who investigate things thoroughly, to develop a deeper understanding of whatever they study. If we decide to simply dismiss the results of science because we personally don't like the results, then who can we really trust with these issues?

Why would we really trust some person with a website proclaiming that autism is an epidemic caused by heavy metal poisoning? What kind of deep, careful and sustained research have they done?

These popular beliefs about autism are not based in science, but they are believed with the fervor of a deeply held religious faith. It doesn't matter how much evidence is presented, people with anti-science or pseudo-scientific beliefs are determined to believe what they want to believe.

Fortunately, science is based on changing our beliefs according to the evidence as it presents itself. Those who are committed to science welcome changing their minds, if the evidence supports new beliefs. Scientists know they don't understand things perfectly and they are willing to admit that they are wrong and then change their minds to what is more correct.

Whatever ideas you have about autism, even if you think you are already correct, please seek out information from actual scientific sources. Scientists are currently doing research in all aspects of autism, so there is always new information and understanding emerging from this.

One of the biggest desires of autistic people is to be understood. Rise above the stereotypes and rigid thinking you may have about autism and learn more about the real research that has been done by science.

The Infinite List of Non-Belief

2008-11-22T15:22:00.001-07:00

For me, God is simply one entry on the infinitely long list of things that I lack belief in.

Nearly all of the items on the infinite list of non-belief are there because I've never even heard of them.

Many others are on that list because I simply don't have any evidence of them, even though I've thought about them or heard that others believe in them.

Then, there are items on the list that I have heard of but have evidence or reasoning that that contradict them, so I choose to actively not believe in them.

The extremely vague concept of God falls into the category of having heard of but don't have enough evidence to believe in. Depending on the variation of the God concept, it can also fall into the category of there being evidence and reasoning contrary to it.

For example, many variations on the God concept include God directly creating the Earth and intelligently designing all life. The evidence of science is extremely clear that the Earth formed through natural processes and that life arose and evolved spontaneously, through natural means.

Therefore, any variation of God that includes a direct creation of life is contrary to reality (doesn't exist).

That doesn't rule out other concepts of God, but since there are literally infinite variations of the concept of God, we really are left with no evidence to support that any particular variation is actually the correct one.

So, my question to someone who believes in God is: Why did you decide that your particular variation of the God concept is the variation that also happens to exist in the real world? What evidence did you use to narrow down the infinite possible variations into your specific conception of God?

I suspect the real process of picking which variation of God to believe in is not so systematic or evidence-based. I doubt most people even seriously consider more than 1, and certainly not more than 5, distinct variations on the God concept before settling permanently on one of them.

Since I have no evidence to guide me in which of the infinite variations of God is actually real, I leave the issue open. I don't see why people are in such a hurry to believe in a God.

The odds are infinity to one that you are wrong in the God you believe in anyway.

Your premature faith may actually have you believing in the wrong God. And, the more strongly you believe, the further you push yourself away from the actual God, whatever that may turn out to be.

Bigoted Mormon Bullies

2008-11-11T09:10:00.002-07:00

The Mormon church had a major campaign to persuade people to vote to prohibit homosexual marriage in California. After the vote narrowly passed, there were large protests of thousands of people around Mormon temples. The Mormon church complained that they were being unfairly targeted since there were many other organizations in support of this also.

I think it's immature and ironic that they complain about unfairness that they are the only ones facing negative consequences for their immoral actions. They are unfairly targeting a whole group of people with bigotry, and yet they expect to be treated fairly? Do they really think they deserve to be spared of negative publicity simply because *everyone* involved didn't face the same consequences?? It's a bit like a criminal complaining that they are being treated unfairly because they are being punished while so many other criminals never get caught!

What might make it clear how bigoted and wrong this whole anti same gender marriage campaign really is would be to have a campaign to legally forbid Mormons from getting married. From the point of view of *many* other religions, Mormons are practicing an abominable religion that goes against God. Just like homosexuals are believed to be practicing a sinful lifestyle, Mormons are also perceived by many others to be practicing a sinful lifestyle.

Of course, banning Mormons from getting married will never happen because it would be obvious to other religions that if it could happen to the Mormons, it could happen to them. Also, it's obvious that it's extremely morally wrong when it happens to people who really aren't so different than you are.

So, the important thing for homosexuals is for others to realize that they aren't so different from them. Homosexuals are often demonized and portrayed as perverts and as being extremely different than "normal" people. However, there is actually very little objective difference between homosexuals and heterosexuals. We are all extremely similar, all variations on the same basic human theme. We feel the same emotions, have the same basic desires and needs.

The *only* difference between homosexuals and heterosexuals is who we are sexually and emotionally attracted to. It's really a minor difference, like the difference between hair or skin colors. Of course, people like to exaggerate these small differences and use them as a reason to treat people badly. It's always the same pattern: find some difference between US and THEM, no matter how small, and then turn that difference into a reason to persecute, injure, kill or eliminate THEM.

This pattern needs to stop somehow. It doesn't matter who it's happening to or whether we are part of the group it's happening to. We all need to bring awareness to situations when bigotry is happening. We cannot allow people to get away with this. These people are like schoolyard bullies that no one stands up to, so they keep terrorizing the people who are different, but no one steps in and stops them. We need to step in. We outnumber the bullies of the world, and we can stop them if we stop being scared of them and make it clear that their disregard for human rights will not be tolerated.

Preserving the Sanctity of Bigotry

2008-11-06T19:03:00.002-07:00

Five million voters in California decided to not allow same-gender marriages. Other millions throughout the country strongly supported this decision. There have been many arguments made to support this decision, but in the end, each of these arguments is based solely on anti-homosexual bigotry.

A major argument is that marriage is sacred and that allowing homosexuals to marry each other would destroy the sanctity of marriage. It's rare that anyone actually explains how this has any effect on the fact that marriage is sacred. Those who attempt to explain this usually claim that homosexuality is immoral, therefore homosexual marriage is immoral. However, heterosexuals are often extremely immoral, but they are still allowed to get married. Even murderers locked in prison can get married, but no one complains that this ruins the sanctity of marriage.

A lot of people say that marriage is defined as being between a man and a woman, so that's they way it should be. Of course, this is a human definition, and we can always redefine marriage if we choose to. However, the intense focus on the genders of the married couple shows how little these people understand the sacredness or the real meaning of marriage. Marriage has absolutely nothing to do with gender. It has everything to do with individuals committing to love and care for each other indefinitely. Those who focus on the gender of married people trivialize the whole concept of marriage. These people are the real threat to the sanctity of marriage, because to them marriage is all about their bodies and not about committed relationships.

Regardless of the reasons people give publicly for opposing homosexual marriage, their real reason for opposing it is simply because they don't like homosexuality. They know it's not acceptable to say out loud that they hate homosexuality, so they make up other reasons that sound more acceptable. They try to pretend they're furthering some noble cause, "preserving the sanctity of marriage" or some other high-minded ideal, but the real truth is that they are narrow-minded bigots who hate homosexuals. There is no reason for opposing same-gender marriage that doesn't amount to hate and bigotry.

Simply Watching

2008-10-26T20:11:00.005-06:00

We are completely unaware of nearly everything around us. Most of this, we simply aren't able to sense, such as radio waves and microscopic images. Then, most of what we do sense, we are still not aware of because we have learned to ignore it.

Our senses are always on, always sending floods of information to our brains. However, we are consciously aware of only a small amount of this information. For our own reasons, we have each chosen to ignore most of the information we have available to us. Sensory overload does feel overwhelming, so out of fear and necessity we shut out everything except what we decided was important to pay attention to a long time ago. Since then, we have locked ourselves into sensory habits that decide for us what we will become aware of and what we will ignore.

The problem with our sensory habits is that they were mostly established when we were infants and children, with only minor changes as we matured. We pay attention to what is important to us and what we find interesting. The rest is ignored. It's very easy for us to remain focused our entire lives on the same narrow range of interests, never becoming aware of all the things around us that we would find utterly fascinating if only we chose to expand our interests a little and allow more of our senses into our conscious awareness.

So, how do we learn to step outside our sensory habits and become more aware of senses we normally ignore? We need to practice simply watching our senses. Throughout all of our daily activities, we simply pay more attention to our senses. Simply watching doesn't interfere at all with what we do normally - all we do is pay a little more attention to what we sense while doing those activities.

For example, if we are washing our hands, we pay more attention to the way the water feels on our hands. As we walk, notice how our clothing moves across our skin. When we eat, pay more attention to how the food tastes and feels. When we look at things, pay attention to the small details, like the complex textures of our skin. Listen more carefully to all the sounds around us. Notice more the mix of smells in the air. While living our regular lives, simply watch our own experience and learn to always watch it more intently.

As we practice simply watching our experiences, we start noticing new things about our experiences. We start experiencing details we were never aware of before. Our experiences of the world become more vivid and rich. Sensations that we previously ignored, we now experience without effort. The only effort involved is in expanding our sensory habits even further, but once we've learned to include more sensation in our experiences, those new sensations become part of our sensory habits, experienced without effort.

As we continue this practice of simply watching, it can utterly transform the way we experience the world. Our sense of time can stretch out, so that everything seems to be happening in slow-motion, because we are experiencing so much each moment. We no longer feel impatient for some future event to happen because we are experiencing so many beautiful and interesting things right now. We notice beauty in the world far more frequently and far more intensely. We are more acutely aware of our own thoughts and emotions. We are also more aware of our own mistakes in thought, emotion and action, so we learn to correct these faster.

The quality of our lives is based on the quality of our moment to moment experiences. Improving external circumstances can help improve the quality of our experience of life. However, the impact of those improvements taper off quickly once our basic needs are met. To improve the quality of our lives further than that, we must learn to experience our world more richly and intensely, improving our moment by moment experience of living. Simply watch.

The Miracle of Organic Food

2008-09-02T20:31:00.004-06:00

Organically grown food is very popular right now. It is commonly thought of as a healthier choice and better for the environment. However, the truth about organically grown food is far different than the popular myths and magical thinking surrounding the organic craze.

Organically grown food is believed to be healthier for humans because it is grown without the use of pesticides and other chemicals to protect the plants. This is actually not always true, because there are several pesticides and other chemicals that are considered "organic" and are widely used by organic farmers. These chemicals are not any healthier to eat than those used by more mainstream farmers. The good news, though is that most of these break down and are washed off the plants long before they are harvested, in all kinds of farming.

It's true that there is a very small amount of pesticide and other chemical residue on most foods grown with them, and even this small amount is too much for some people. What most people don't realize, though, is that all plants produce their own pesticides and other protective chemicals to keep insects from eating them, to kill fungus and kill other plants. So, all food we eat is full of many kinds of natural, protective chemicals in much larger quantities than any residue from the farming process. These naturally occurring chemicals are not any safer for us than the ones farmers use - it's one big reason that so many plants are toxic to us. In the foods we can eat, the levels of these toxins are low enough that we are able to process them with little harm. However, the artificial chemical residues are also low enough to not cause harm either.

Another problem with organic farming's less intensive use of pesticides, herbicides and fungicides is that the plants don't do as well and aren't as healthy. They get eaten by insects more, are crowded out by other plants, and are frequently infected by fungus. This means a smaller harvest for the farmer, and it means less healthy, nutrient-rich plants for the consumer, often containing dangerous fungus.

Organic farmers work hard to improve the soil each year, through crop rotation, no-till methods and many other techniques. Improving the soil is a noble goal, and it makes economic sense also, which is why more mainstream farmers are also adopting many of these methods, while also using other methods that are not organic.

Organic farming may improve the soil, but because it doesn't incorporate intensive pesticide, herbicide and fungicide regimens or use hardier genetically engineered crops, organic farming can't grow nearly as many crops in the same area of land as more intensive farming methods can. This creates a real problem as more people keep switching to organically grown foods. Because organic farming takes up more land to grow the same amount of crops, organic farmers have to destroy wilderness areas to grow more crops. That is certainly not environmentally friendly, but it is a natural consequence of organic farming.

Organic farming has many high ideals, such as improving the soil, protecting the environment and producing healthier food. But, the realities of organic farming don't meet those high ideals. In reality, organically grown food isn't any healthier for consumers, and because it has significantly lower crop yield, organic farmers need to destroy wilderness to grow more organic food. Of course, many improvements can are are being made to more mainstream farming, and the food they produce is generally of higher quality than organic farming and grown on less and less land area, so wilderness does not need to be destroyed to sustain it.

Unfortunately, the word "organic" has turned into some kind of magic word that transforms anything it is associated with into something healthier and better for the environment. Most people know very little about the realities of organic farming, but if something is labeled as "organic", they assume that means "better", "healthier", "politically correct", etc. In reality, it's a collection of farming methods that don't really work very well, compared to more technologically intensive methods. There is nothing magical about organic foods, and it would actually cause some major environmental damage if too many more people join this organic craze.

Testing Our Beliefs

2008-08-16T08:35:00.002-06:00

I think it's essential to keep our belief systems flexible. Every second we live, we gather more and more information about the world and ourselves. This information can modify our beliefs in all areas, in large and small ways, if we are open to changing our beliefs.

People tend to want things to be settled and done, to have unchangeable conclusions about the world. Unfortunately, our first beliefs about anything are very likely to be quite flawed. As we gain more information, we can improve our beliefs so that they are more accurate. But to do this, we have to be comfortable having only tentative beliefs, always leaving our beliefs open to change as we learn more.

People tend to accept things unquestioningly, without trying to verify them. In fact, people who do try to verify beliefs often find themselves in serious trouble, because other people tend to get very upset with them for not simply accepting. The people who go around putting beliefs to the test are called "Skeptics", and they are usually thought of as troublemakers. Skeptics usually find a great amount of opposition to their quest to test out beliefs, and people everywhere are very reluctant to have their own beliefs tested.

This reluctance to test our beliefs stunts our growth as human beings. It is a form of rigid thinking, and it keeps us following the same patterns of beliefs and behaviors throughout our lives, making little progress in our growth as a people.

The more we test our beliefs, the more false ones we eliminate, and the more likely our remaining beliefs are to be somewhat more accurate. If we keep doing this, our collection of beliefs become more helpful to everything we do in life, because we are more guided by truth and less by falsehood.

Without verification, there is a real possibility for self-deception. It happens all the time, to all kinds of people, and the only good way out of the cycle of self-deception is to put one's beliefs to an honest test.

The Magic of Quantum Physics

2008-08-16T08:30:00.001-06:00

There may be "similarities" between quantum physics and some mystical ideas, but they are a bit of a stretch, and most of the similarities are in the areas of quantum physics that are the least understood, so physicists are injecting their own ideas at this point. It's not surprising that the imaginations of modern pysicists and ancient mystics may have some overlap. The parts of quantum physics that are the most established and are the most understood have very little resemblance to mystic visions.

It's also important to remember that quantum physics is not understood very well by non physicists, mostly because the math is very complicated. And, since so much of it is unknown and so much of it is so counter-intuitive, it has been a source of wild speculation, with all kinds of books being written about the magic of the quantum, promoting all kinds of ideas that have nothing to do with real science. So, the public is left with the impression that the quantum world is some kind of magic fairy land, where all of our thoughts and wishes are made into reality.

The popular ideas of quantum physics are huge distortions of the real science. There may be a very small atom of truth in there, but most of it is pure fabrication by dishonest charlatans trying to use science concepts to lend some credibility to their own brand of nonsense.

For example, there is a fundamental principle in quantum physics that observing something changes its state. Many people have run full speed with this idea, claiming that it means our minds are intimately connected to the quantum world and can change it's state. Others have run with this distorted idea and claimed that our minds can alter the quantum world, and thus the larger world, by our thoughts. This goes on and on, with people adding more layers of distortions to the original idea.

In reality, that principle of quantum physics is true because whatever instruments we use to observe the quantum world are also quantum objects, and the only way they can observe another quantum object is by interacting with it, thus changing its state. In other words, our instruments are touching the stuff they are observing, and there is no way to observe it without touching it, but touching it changes it a little. It's really not all that mysterious, but somehow people have run with it and are making all kinds of money off of gullible people who know very little about quantum physics but trust science and really wish they had magical powers they could unleash, for only $500 a seminar.

The Advantage of Science

2008-08-16T08:23:00.001-06:00

There are always things beyond current scientific knowledge, probably even major discoveries that will make us seriously rethink the universe... again. However, these things only get discovered by practicing good science, by carefully investigating things and keeping an open mind about what the data is telling you about how the universe really is.

People have been sitting around speculating about how the universe is for thousands of years, but they didn't discover some of the very fundamental truths about the universe until they started practicing science. Then, they discovered how atoms and molecules work, how stars work, the size and age of the universe, the basic laws of nature, biology and evolution and all kinds of other facts about the universe. Science knows things with great detail and precision. For example, they know the exact size and weight of any atom or molecule. They know how far away the sun is and how much it weighs.

Science has knowledge that thousands of years of humans sitting around speculating never gained. All knowledge is not equal. People from 1,000 years ago had personal experiences, but they lacked very basic knowledge of how the universe they lived in actually worked. Science is all about finding out how the universe actually is, on the grand scale and on the very small scale and through all its complexity.

Thousands of years of people having mystical experiences and feeling "at one" with the universe never led to them understanding the basic truths of the universe which science has clearly revealed to all the world. No mystic ever came away from their mystical experiences able to explain the way gravity behaves or with a basic understanding of atoms and molecules.

The universe is a certain way, and science is truly discovering how it is. Of all the millions of mystics in the past who claim to have been one with the mind of the universe and had access to all knowledge, none have ever published any of the basic facts of the universe, such as: evolution, the germ theory of disease, the fact that we are made of cells, that the Earth goes around the Sun, that the universe is made up of billions of clusters of billions of stars (galaxies), that light has a specific speed, that the visible light we see is only one narrow band along a very large spectrum of light.

Science is revealing so many truths about the universe to us, and they have all been verified over and over. The knowledge gained from science is far superior to all other human knowledge. This doesn't mean that science knows everything, but they way science goes about learning things, the methods it uses, makes it very careful and precise, and in the end we have knowledge that is of very high quality.

It's the difference between an ordinary person trying to know, based on personal experience, how much the Earth weighs and a team of scientists actually measuring the weight with great precision. Obviously, the team of scientists doing the measuring is going to have far more accurate knowledge of the weight of the Earth.

Science doesn't know everything, but it knows far more than anyone else knows.

Mythology as a Guide to Life

2008-07-23T21:24:00.003-06:00

It's very fascinating the way different populations create stories that help them make more sense of their own experiences in life. After learning about many of these myths in various societies throughout history, it becomes clear that the various myths include the basic themes that all people and societies struggle with in their lives, such as good and evil, the corruption of great power, temptation and frailty, death and the wish for eternal life, happiness and misery, etc.

It's also clear that all the myths are metaphors aren't meant to be taken literally. Unfortunately many people throughout history have taken their myths literally, missing the whole point of the stories. They end up thinking that the characters in the story are real people instead of simply being ideas to help us grapple with the many difficult things we have to deal with in life. So, people end up believing that God is a real person and not just a metaphor of the greatest goodness possible that we should all work to become more like.

All our myths are Humanity's dreams for itself. God probably doesn't actually exist the way we have described God - it's just a metaphor, but we can transform ourselves as a species to become more like our ideas of God. We can work to bring the myth into existence like we bring so many other imaginary ideas into existence every day through art and technology. Since our God myth includes immense goodness, when we are good, we are bringing more goodness to the world and thus making the world more Godlike. Our God myth also includes immense knowledge, intelligence and ability, so as we learn, develop our minds and our abilities, we also make ourselves and the world more Godlike.

God is our guiding myth, our highest aspirations. The concept we have of God is not a real person that exists, but something that Humanity wants to exist, and the only way that is going to happen is when humans keep improving themselves so that they become more Godlike.

Santa Claus is not real, but children still receive presents because so many people play the role and do what Santa would do if he was real. In the same way, what we think of as God is not real, but if we act out all the good values that are built into the myth of God, it will be as though God is real, because of the high levels of goodness, intelligence, knowledge and ability in the universe that we will have created

Science Doesn't Know Everything

2008-07-12T08:02:00.006-06:00

There is a common logical fallacy to dismiss or minimize science or science-based medicine because it does not know everything. I'm not sure where the expectation comes from that science or science-based medicine should have perfect knowledge. However, the first objection that nearly everyone brings up against science is that there are so many things it doesn't know.

Of course science doesn't know everything. It is a human enterprise that only started fairly recently. All scientists know how limited science is in it's current knowledge - that's why they keep going to work.

Even though science doesn't know everything, it is by far the best source of accurate knowledge humans have. Every other source of knowledge pales in comparison with the depth, complexity, precision and accuracy of the methods and results of science. So, we can complain about the limits of science, but there are no other decent sources of knowledge out there. We really have no good alternatives if we want accurate, reliable truth.

There are all kinds of medical mysteries and healing effects that science doesn't have an explanation for yet - but no one else does either. We can spend all day pointing out the limits of science, but it's the best we've got right now, and scientists are working very hard to gain more knowledge in all areas.

In the last 300 years, the methods of science have revealed a world dramatically different than humans thought we lived in and have greatly assisted rapid technological development. We now have a very good understanding of the universe from the very large scale to the very small scale, and we know very well how most of the parts work. That is amazing progress in such a short time, all because of the disciplined practice of scientific methods to explore and refine knowledge, based on evidence and reasoning.

So, of course we can't always trust the experts in science-based medicine, because that is an area where there are a lot of knowledge gaps, especially because each body is different. However, the dilemma we always face is: who else can we trust? All other sources of knowledge about the body are far more limited and have even larger knowledge gaps. Why would any alternative to science-based medicine be any better, except maybe by accident?

Because science has acquired such a vast amount of knowledge in so many areas, it is tempting to think that they really should know everything by now. However, that reveals our own ignorance about how truly vast and complex knowledge itself is. Humans have a tendency to oversimplify things, thinking that complex things are really simple things. But the deeper we look into anything, the more we realize how truly complex things are.

The common assumption seems to be that the universe and life are really pretty simple, so scientists should have figured it all out by now, so there must be something wrong with science if it hasn't figured out something so simple. As it so often does, science reveals a world that is far more complex and interesting than we ever thought, and the mysteries are far deeper than we ever thought.

People crave a simplistic view of the world, where everything is explained and everyone knows their place. Science comes along and shows us that we live in a much more rich and vibrant world than we ever imagined, but it leaves us with so many unanswered questions and no possibility of a simple view of the world, where everything is explained, including our purpose in life.

That can be overwhelming, and it leaves people feeling uncomfortable and uncertain about so many things in life, so they attack science for not providing all the answers and not giving them certainty about their purpose in life. This is seen as a defect of science, but it is really a defect of us - that we crave a simple view of the world that answers all our questions with absolute certainty. We need to mature and accept that the world is overwhelmingly complex and that we don't know everything with absolute certainty. We also need to cherish the knowledge that we have worked so hard to gain, through science and other evidence-based disciplines. It truly is all the knowledge we have.

Science-Based Medicine

2008-07-06T13:21:00.009-06:00

Science-based medicine is a collection of medical interventions that have been demonstrated to work well and medicine that is practiced with a detailed and accurate understanding of how the human body works. Science-based medicine starts with a detailed understanding of the human body, listing, measuring and understanding every part of the body at every level, from organs, to tissues, cells and molecules. Then, specific malfunctions and diseases of the body are studied at all levels, to understand how they work and to provide ideas for ways to fix problems and cure diseases. Then, many different medical interventions are designed and thoroughly tested for each malfunction or disease, with only a small fraction of potential interventions surviving the testing process.

Science-based medicine is extremely labor intensive throughout the entire process, and it involves tremendous intelligence, patience and perseverance by the millions of workers involved. While each person and company involved has the sincere goal of compassionately providing relief to human suffering, like all other companies and workers, they are interested in making money to support their own families, to raise money to pay for more research and development, and to make a profit for those who have invested so much time and money to make it all possible.

Science-based medicine costs a lot of money to do well. Everyone involved needs an advanced education to understand all the work that others have done in their fields and to push progress forward. Carefully studying the human body requires expensive equipment and many years of human labor. Developing effective medical interventions like drugs, procedures and medical devices requires careful designing, re-designing and years of intensive testing, to make sure they are safe and that they actually work well. Then, treating patients well requires highly trained workers, who understand the human body very well, who understand disease well and have an extensive knowledge of the many interventions available and the benefits and risks of each intervention.

Because science-based medicine is so expensive and because it is done by profit seeking companies, there is a lot of concern that medical companies may be motivated to be dishonest in a variety of ways to increase their profits. For example, they may be tempted to cut back on the quality of their research, producing a less expensive, yet less effective and less safe product. Or, they may market their products too aggressively, encouraging use of their products even when it's not really necessary or exaggerating the benefits of their products. Or, doctors could potentially be paid by companies if they prescribe their products to patients, providing the temptation to prescribe a product when another one would actually be better.

Like any human enterprise, science-based medicine is run by imperfect human beings, so unfortunately there are many examples of corruption and fraud throughout the medical industry. However, like all other human enterprises, science-based medicine is mainly run by decent, compassionate human beings who genuinely care about other people and are sincerely working to make the world a better place. The corruption and fraud is the rare exception, not the rule.

There is a huge amount of oversight at all levels of science-based medicine, to minimize the bad elements. To have their work accepted, scientists must publish it so that other scientists everywhere have access to it and can scrutinize it and even test it out for themselves. As much as possible, science tries to keep everything it does out in the open so that mistakes are noticed quicker, raising the quality of final result. Testing of medical interventions is generally done by independent labs or at least has the process open for scrutiny by outsiders. Throughout all levels of the medical industry, there are oversight committees, examining the actions of everyone involved. Bad things still happen, but because of all the oversight, it is kept to a minimum.

There are many other types of medical practices that are not science-based, and these have been around for thousands of years, since science-based medicine is fairly new. These non-science-based medical practices include: homeopathy, acupuncture, naturopathy, herbology, reflexology, chiropractic and hundreds of other practices. None of these practices are based on a scientific understanding of the human body and disease, and most were developed long before humans had accurate knowledge of basic anatomy and body functioning. These practices do not test their interventions carefully, doing experiments and keeping detailed observations about what works well and what does not, but generally rely on anecdotal evidence, which tends to favor positive results while ignoring negative results.

The basic problems with medicine that is not based on science are that it is not based on a real understanding of how the human body actually works and the techniques themselves have not been demonstrated to actually work in carefully conducted clinical studies, and if they did pass the clinical trials, they would automatically be considered to be science-based medicine. This means that, in general, the treatments do nothing but still leave the disease untreated, or the treatments cause additional harm to the patient and also leave the disease untreated.

Because science-based medicine is relatively new and because it is run by big companies, many people do not trust it. Much of the distrust comes from people in general not understanding how science actually works and what it tells us about the world. For people with little science education, all medical treatments are equally magical to them and they have no way of knowing why one approach would be more effective than any other.

Because science-based medicine is run by big companies making billions of dollars a year in profits, many people distrust the motives of such people, beleiving that their greed is the cause of all their actions and that they make money off the misfortunes of others. This is a general distrust and misunderstanding of capitalism, but applied to the medical industry. While many people are motivated by greed, the vast majority of people do their jobs because they truly enjoy what they do and because they believe they are helping others. It's also important to remember that these big medical companies couldn't make money for very long if their products didn't actually work most of the time, because no one would buy them. As in all capitalism, there is a chance for short-term abuse, but to be successful in the long-term, companies have to consistently make good products.

Science-based medicine is, by far, the best approach to medicine ever used by humans. It is grounded in a detailed factual understanding of the human body and disease. It continually pushes itself to learn more about all it can. It is always developing new techniques and medical products and testing them all quite thoroughly for safety and effectiveness. It is not perfect, and it makes plenty of mistakes, but by its scientific nature, it always learns from its mistakes, always pushing itself to be more intelligent, more knowledgeable, more compassionate and more careful.

Don't Blame the System - Blame the People

2008-05-11T08:50:00.003-06:00

People have a bad habit of blaming systems instead of people when things go poorly. For example, when complaining about government corruption, people blame the system of government itself as the reason for government corruption. However, the real problem isn't that the government is corrupt - it's that many human beings are corrupt and that those people have taken over the system of government.

The same problem happens when religious fanatics do something terrible and violent. People blame the religion or the religious beliefs rather than recognize the simple truth that some people are just bad people who do bad things.

Or, when corporations do evil things throughout the world, people blame the system of Capitalism for all those evils instead of realizing that the evils had nothing to do with Capitalism, but only with people choosing to do evil things by whatever means they could.

It seems that people have an easier time blaming some kind of abstract notion or system than they do blaming another human being. However, this leads to a poor understanding of why we have the many problems we have. It also leads to people wasting lots of time making countless adjustments to "the system" rather than directly addressing the real problem.

The real problem is bad people. It doesn't matter how perfect our system of government, business, religion or any other organization is. Bad people will always come in and corrupt the system. At that point, people will blame the system for being flawed, but it is always the bad people who are flawed, who will ruin any system.

Of course, knowing that there are bad people everywhere can help us to design better systems that are less able to be corrupted by them. However no system is truly safe from the corruption of bad people with determination.

So, our only good way to stop dangerous people from taking over our systems and causing all the problems they do, is to be constantly watchful for them and constantly interfere with their efforts. We need to prevent them from getting away with evil things, and not let them hide behind the rules and regulations of the system to make it look like what they are doing is legitimate. We need to expose them for what they are, so everyone else knows to be careful and not let them get away with things they shouldn't.

The problem isn't in the system. The problem is in the people who use the system to promote their own bad agendas.

Towards an Environmentally Friendly Civilization

2008-04-27T07:38:00.004-06:00

Many people complain that humans and human technology are bad for the environment because of the many destructive things humans have done with our technology. It's very clear that humans have done horrible things to the Earth using our technology, so many have jumped to the conclusion that the real problem here is humans and our technology - that there is something evil about technology or about humans that inevitably leads to environmental destruction.

One very crucial point to remember when thinking about humans and our technology is that humans are natural parts of the Earth's environment and developing technologies is a fundamental part of human nature. Humans evolved on Earth, just like all the other species on Earth. We are natural and belong here. Our natural intelligence and ability to make tools and other technologies is what has allowed us to survive so well.

Of course, there is a huge difference between our ancestors using stone tools to promote daily survival and us living long lives of luxury, with comfortable homes, running water, electricity, transportation, medical care, entertainment and all the other comforts of modern life. Our ancestors didn't require nearly as many resources from the environment and they didn't produce as much waste. Unfortunately, they also had a horrible quality of life - most children died before adulthood, diseases were rampant, people rarely lived past thirty years old, starvation was normal, and in general life was miserable for our ancestors.

But, while our lives are generally much more comfortable than our ancestors' were, providing all this comfort requires far more resources for far more people and generates far more waste than our ancestors did. This has caused significant problems for our environment. This is important because beautiful and important parts of the Earth are being destroyed forever and also because this threatens our ability to keep living our comfortable lives.

So, a major problem facing Humanity right now is how to have a comfortable civilization that isn't harmful to the rest of the Earth and that doesn't undermine our own ability to have an advanced civilization. We can't continue using most current technologies as they are because so many of them were never designed to have minimal impact on the environment. We will need to redesign most of them, so they don't cause harm to the Earth.

Since so many of our technologies are harmful to the Earth, this goal may seem impossible. However, we have to remember that when people designed those technologies, they were given a list of things that the technology must accomplish. They simply forgot to add one item to their list of requirements: "do minimal harm to the Earth's environment". If that item had been on the list, the engineers involved would have invented designs and manufacturing methods that also met that requirement. It's not that technology can't be friendly to the environment - it's just that nobody involved ever thought that was an important goal.

Fortunately for Humanity and the Earth, protecting the Earth is quickly becoming something people are more aware of and are caring about more. More engineers are given assignments that require them to make protecting the Earth a much higher priority. So, they are designing manufacturing methods that have significantly less waste. They are finding ways to use waste from one industry as raw materials for another. They are building machines that can sort through the landfills, pulling out just about everything that can be recycled. Throughout industries, being kind to the environment is becoming more and more important. The fact that a technology does little harm to the Earth is becoming as important a design requirement as the fact that it works well.

There is still an incredible amount of work to be done to transform our civilization into one that is both comfortable for humans and healthy for the Earth. The good news is that more people are becoming aware of the importance of environmental issues and attitudes and priorities are shifting. This has already had a big impact on technology development, and there is great hope that this impact will continue.

Humans and our technology have evolved along with the rest of life, and we are as natural and deserving of existence as any other species. Because we are intelligent, we learn from our mistakes, and we are now beginning to really understand how important protecting our environment is. It has its own inherent value, and it sustains human existence. Protecting the environment is truly a matter of survival. As that truth becomes obvious to more people, we will see an even greater demand for technologies that are not harmful to the environment. Humanity can reach its potential without harming the Earth - in fact, that is the only way Humanity can reach its potential.

The Tyrrany of the Sensitive Ones

2008-04-14T19:08:00.008-06:00

The sensitive ones. You know who they are. You may even be one yourself. These are the people who are always getting very upset by minor things. They throw a fit in a restaurant when their order is slightly wrong. They complain to your supervisor about that offensive e-mail you wrote, which you thought was perfectly innocent. They passionately insist on political correctness and are easily offended by anything improper. Any criticism of them, however minor, is treated as a hostile attack. We all know who they are, because they are very good at making sure everyone knows how upset they are.

These sensitive ones keep everyone else on the defensive. We don't want them to be upset, so we are very careful to adjust our own behavior. Unfortunately, it's difficult to know what they will perceive as offensive, and it's quite easy to offend them without even meaning to. Claiming that you didn't mean to offend them implies that they misunderstood you or that they have no right to be upset, and that sort of criticism or downplaying of their emotions is also seen as offensive.

It's never the sensitive ones' fault that they are upset - it's always your fault for upsetting them. If you hadn't done whatever you did, they wouldn't be upset. They cannot be held responsible for having sensitive emotions and for expressing those emotions when others upset them. Therefore, it's very important that other people do whatever it takes to avoid upsetting the sensitive ones.

If we don't avoid upsetting the sensitive ones, they will do whatever it takes to upset us. They will yell. They will threaten. They will try to get us in trouble with our superiors. If we don't respect their sensitivity, they will make our lives as miserable as we are making theirs. They become little tyrants, bossing everyone around and insisting that other people behave the way they want them to. And, they feel fully justified in doing so.

Part of the problem is that the sensitive ones honestly believe their emotions are caused directly by other people's actions and not by their own, often faulty, interpretation of other people's actions. So, the only way they can avoid feeling those bad feelings is to change other people's behavior, whatever it takes.

A better solution for the sensitive ones is to practice thinking from other people's perspectives. Doing this helps us understand the motives of others. We become more aware of all the factors that shape their behavior and we are less likely to misinterpret their intentions. It becomes more obvious that others did not mean to offend.

The other part of the problem for the sensitive ones is personal insecurity. They are very afraid of being criticized and having their faults exposed. This causes great anxiety for them, and they feel it all the time in the background of their emotions. Any hint of criticism is enough to bring that background anxiety forward, causing anger. The defensive strategy is to draw attention away from their own personal failings and focus on how wrong it was for the other person to criticize them. The issue they are vocal about is always the other person's impropriety, never their own problems.

Rather than avoiding the issue, the sensitive ones should learn to be more comfortable acknowledging their own weaknesses. Other people see them anyway, so trying to hide them is simply foolish. Being open about our own defects actually motivates others to be more compassionate and sensitive when discussing those areas. This approach is much more effective and far less disruptive than becoming angry at others for being offensive.

The tyranny of the sensitive ones needs to end. We are all tired of having to avoid stepping on the invisible eggshells scattered around them. We recognize that they are very sensitive, and we honestly have no desire to upset them. However, we also recognize that their sensitivity does not give them the right to disrupt our lives. It is their responsibility to learn to control their own emotions and learn to see the world in a way that does not cause them pain.

Things Really Are Getting Better

2008-03-27T19:39:00.003-06:00

Back in the "good old days", before humans developed agriculture and started changing the Earth so dramatically and lived in harmony with Nature: Nearly all humans died as infants. Most of the rest died as young children. The few who survived to adulthood rarely lived to be 30 years old. During their lives, nearly all humans suffered horrible diseases with no effective treatments available. Humans were regularly hunted and killed by predators. Life was extremely scary for everyone. It was truly a living nightmare.

Slowly, humans figured out a lot about how the world works, passing their knowledge down to future generations, who continued the learning process. Over time, human abilities increased, and they gained more and more understanding and control of their environment. Life spans steadily increased, along with greater quality of life and greater safety.

Nature is brutal, but now that we have mastered so much of it and are not in fear for our lives every day like our distant ancestors were, we romanticize Nature, forgetting how dangerous Nature really is. It is only human technology that makes our lives bearable at all.

Yes, humans do destructive things to the environment, and this is a mistake because it could hurt us eventually. Although, humans are learning very quickly, faster than ever before, and we keep changing the ways we do things. Eventually, we will learn to have an advanced civilization that is not a threat to it's own environment.

Things really are getting better - we just forget how truly horrible things used to be and complain too much about the bad things happening now.

The Theory of Intelligent Bonding

2008-03-27T19:19:00.001-06:00

There is an ongoing controversy about the theory of Intelligent Design, and many people are upset that scientists don't take that theory seriously and that they even shun scientists who write papers supporting that theory. This is a controversial issue mainly because it disagrees with many very old religious beliefs and because it is about biological creatures, such as ourselves. So, to put this in a less controversial context, let's consider theories about chemistry instead of theories about biology:

Chemistry is all about the ways atoms come together and bond to form molecules. The electrical fields around atoms usually push each other away, like magnets often do when turned the "wrong" way. However, when you have lots of atoms bouncing around randomly, occasionally some of them bounce towards each other fast enough that they push the electrical fields through each other, and if they're the right combination of atoms, they will attract each other more than they push each other apart, so they stay that way, at least until some outside force knocks them apart again. The molecules formed are generally very regular in shape and size, like they were all made on an assembly line, and they can be quite intricate and complex. Their shapes are mainly due to the strengths of the magnetic forces between atoms and the sizes of the atoms.

This is a very simplified version of chemistry, but the basic idea is that randomly colliding atoms come together and quite naturally and spontaneously form extremely precise and often complex molecules. This is the generally accepted view of chemistry among scientists who work in that area - although their version is much more complicated and mathematical.

So, lets say that one of the chemical scientists comes up with the theory that each molecule is created by some kind of intelligent entity, and they call it the Theory of Intelligent Bonding. They argue that molecules are far too precise, consistent and complex to simply happen by random chance, as the standard theory of chemistry suggests, so there must be an intelligent entity guiding this delicate process.

A first response from the mainstream scientists may be that the current theory works very well, and there is no evidence of any molecular designer besides molecules themselves, so there is no reason to adopt the new theory. Another objection would be that the new theory proposes the existence of a new kind of entity, and this entity also needs to be understood and explained, so it just makes things unnecessarily complicated. How did this intelligent entity come into existence? How does this atomic bonder work? How does it interact with atoms? Why does it prefer certain shapes for molecules? etc. In the end, the Theory of Intelligent Bonding simply doesn't work as a good theory, and there is no evidence of some intelligent entity overseeing the creation of every molecule.

If the scientist persisted in promoting the Theory of Intelligent Bonding, other scientists in that area would question the quality of their thinking abilities, and they would doubt their work in other areas too. Soon enough, they would find themselves isolated from the scientific community because the other scientists can't trust them to think clearly, so they are of no use in the scientific enterprise, which is all about clear thinking and developing an ever more accurate understanding of the universe we find ourselves in.

With the theory of Intelligent Design, it is a very similar situation. Scientists already have an extremely elegant theory that explains very well how life arose and evolved into the diversity we see around us. There is no evidence that contradicts the theory, despite constant attempts to find some, and every fact of biology fits neatly within the theory of evolution and can be explained quite well using the theory.

This theory doesn't require any outside intelligent entities guiding the process - just like molecules form quite naturally because of the nature of atoms, life forms naturally and spontaneously because of the nature of chemistry. The theory of Intelligent Design adds nothing useful to our understanding of life, and it actually generates all kinds of other unanswered questions about the nature and origin of the proposed Intelligent Designer.

Without God

2008-03-08T21:42:00.001-07:00

Atheism literally means "without God". It doesn't mean a "belief that there is no God" but rather simply lacking any belief in a particular concept of God. I'm an atheist because I don't have an active belief that any particular God actually exists. I'm open to the idea that very powerful, god-like beings can exist, in theory. However, I have no actual evidence that they exist, so I don't have an active belief in them. So, I am without any God, or atheist.

Science is objective, and it tries not to assume any facts that it doesn't have evidence of, when doing any observations or experiments, from the very ordinary to the more profound. Since it has not observed any evidence of God so far, science has to remain atheistic. That doesn't mean science claims that there is no God, but that it as yet has no actual beliefs about God. So, science is without God, or atheistic. If they ever observe aspects of God and have clear evidence of such a phenomenon, science would become theistic.

Atheism is not a belief, like a religion. It is simply the lack of a belief. I don't believe in Santa Claus. I don't believe that the moon is made of green cheese. I don't believe all objects in the universe revolve around the Earth. I don't believe in a lot of things, but all of my disbelief is not a religion. In most cases, I don't believe in things because I am simply unaware of their existence. In many cases, I don't believe in something because I have a lot of evidence against it. In other cases, I simply have no positive evidence for a belief, so I lack an active belief in it. If I had evidence, I would have belief in many things I have no belief in now.

With God, I simply have no evidence for any particular version (of the many thousands) of versions of God. Also, many of them make no sense, and many of them go against what we now know about the world. That leaves a lot of versions of God that may possibly exist, but we simply have no evidence one way or another. So, I can't make myself believe in something when I know fully well that I have no evidence for it and knowing that there are other ideas of God that are just as likely to be correct also.

So, I currently find myself without belief in any specific God. That makes me an atheist. I'm not saying that there absolutely is not God, just that I personally don't know of one.

Science and the Grand Illusion

2008-03-02T08:03:00.002-07:00

It may turn out that this universe is all a grand illusion and the ultimate reality is something else. However, that's not a good reason to give up doing science or to believe that all opinions about the universe are equally valid. This only makes sense if you want 100% certainty and won't settle for anything less than that. From that perspective, science is seen as no more valid than the ideas of primitive tribes roaming the desert thousands of years ago, because they are all less than 100% certain .

However, if you're willing to drop your expectations from 100% certainty down to more practical levels of certainty, then science is obviously the best way we have come up with for discovering truths about the universe. Even if all of this is an illusion, there are still many truths about the illusion - sizes, shapes, properties, cause and effect, etc. - and science can study these truths, and these truths can be used as a guide when building useful technologies.

Science is all about carefully exploring the universe, measuring, observing, experimenting. The methods they use are very thorough and precise. They are not just sitting back in armchairs speculating about how the universe is. Instead, they carefully examine the universe, finding incredible amounts of detail and complexity and wonder that no one even knew existed - like cells, molecules, or galaxies, for example.

So, personally, I trust the methods of science far more than any other source of knowledge. They actually go out and do the work of figuring out how things work, and this process has consistently yielded extremely useful results.

If all of this truly is an illusion, science will no doubt figure out exactly what kind of an illusion it is - what rules govern its behavior at the very basic levels, how big it is, the minimum complexity and memory size of the machine running the simulation, etc. However the universe turns out to be, we are far more likely to discover those truths by actively observing and exploring it than by sitting around contemplating and meditating about it. Doing science is our best way for discovering truth.

Being Authentic

2008-02-17T20:53:00.003-07:00

I think a big part of maturing is becoming an authentic person. This means that you have a very good sense of who you are as a human, what your values and goals are, and you live your life according to that. An authentic person avoids getting enmeshed in the social or family drama of constantly worrying about who disapproves of you and whether you fit in well with some social group or other.

Authentic people do their best to make genuinely good choices, based on their own understanding of what is good. They don't pretend to be anything other than they are, and straightforward honesty is one of their most valuable traits. Authentic people are never followers, but they are often seen as leaders, not because they seek leadership positions but because others are drawn to their honesty, integrity and their ability to know what to do without having to be told by others.

Authentic people deal honestly and directly with their own personal problems. They seek to understand the nature of their own emotional pain and seek practical ways to comfort themselves and remove themselves from situations that cause them pain. They constantly monitor their own behavior, on the alert for mistakes in action, thinking, emotion, situation, and they always strive to learn from their own or others' mistakes.

Being authentic means living a life that honestly expresses who you really are, living up to your own high ideals, even when others may disapprove or oppose you. The happiness we find from living an authentic life is always genuine and deeply rooted, never based on fleeting circumstances or fragile social approval.

Human Goodness Is Our Only Hope

2008-02-14T19:02:00.004-07:00

Many aspects of our world are just not right. People are poor. People get horrible diseases. People are cruel to each other. People hate and fight and kill each other. People destroy aspects of our environment. In general, people want these bad aspects of our world to go away.

The problems of the world are complex and widespread, and each person can do very little to solve these problems, so it can seem overwhelming and hopeless.

Because our world's problems are so big, people often turn to government to try to make these problems go away, and politicians always promise to be able to solve these complex problems. Unfortunately, government is a very poor tool for solving social problems, since it is entirely based on forcing people against their will, and most social problems require voluntary changes in human behavior, not more rules and regulations. So, there really is no hope that government will solve our world's problems.

However, there is still hope for our problems to be solved. Since most of our world's problems are caused by individual bad behavior, the solutions to our problems are in individual good behavior.

Human goodness is our only hope. Human goodness is always voluntary, never forced. We cannot make others be good, but we can be good ourselves and teach and persuade others by our examples. We can also help others to shift the way they perceive their world and themselves, so they are more aware of the many problems that exist and their own capabilities to help contribute to a solution in their own ways.

There is no guarantee that human goodness will succeed, because each human has to choose for themselves what level of goodness they will practice every day. No government can make humans be good. Yet, human goodness is our only hope. So, it is up to us to be good and work with others to spread human goodness. We may not succeed, but if we don't try, we are sure to fail.

Alternative Medicine

2008-02-10T10:49:00.000-07:00

Accupressure, accupuncture and many forms of alternative medicine have all been demonstrated to have healing effects. The main dispute with these therapies is the explanation for how they actually work. Practitioners of these treatments have their own explainations for how their therapies work, such as unblocking energy lines in the body, aligning the chi, opening the chakras, and many other concepts that have been handed down, often for thousands of years.

Scientists look for mechanisms and chains of cause and effect, trying to understand in detail how things work and what basic principles are involved. So they have studied these types of therapies, and in general they seem to be helping stimulate the body's own self-healing mechanisms. Most of these therapies involve long periods of relaxation and stress-reduction, which is very helpful for healing. They also involve the reassurance that one is going to get better, which reduces anxiety, and since anxiety can interfere with healing, this is very helpful. They also involve a human being attending kindly to another human being, which further promotes relaxation and positive emotions.

Scientists also study the specific actions of the therapy, such as sticking needles in certain areas, to see if there is any chain of causes and effects that lead to healing, beyond the stimulated self-healing. For most cases in alternative medicine, they cannot find any reason to believe that the specific therapy itself plays any role in the actual healing. In general, it can all be attributed to the body's own self-healing behavior, which is stimulated by the relaxing environment, reduced anxiety and positive human contact.

So, many of these alternative medicine treatments work for a wide variety of problems. It's just that they don't necessarily work the way their practitioners believe they do. And, they don't work for many medical problems, since the body often needs medication or surgery or other medical interventions, because our self-healing abilities aren't perfect.

Self-Hating Environmentalism

2008-02-03T18:51:00.001-07:00

I think that a basic environmental belief is that humans simply don't belong here, that we shouldn't even exist. There is a core belief that humans are unnatural. This is a form of self-hatred.

Humans are completely natural, and all the technology and civilization building is a basic part of our nature. We are a natural part of life, and we deserve to be here and pursue our technology and civilization, because these are a part of life also. They may be relatively new parts of life, but so was every part of life when it first started.

Life is not something that stays the same forever - in fact, that is a quality of non-living things. Life has always been changing, often quite radically, over time. The human phenomenon is another stage in life's continual evolution.

Using The Least Force in Iraq

2008-02-03T18:28:00.000-07:00

It seems that whenever there is a discussion about the Iraq war and anyone questions even the smallest thing about the war, the supporters of the war get very defensive and start going on about the great need for the war and all the horrible things that were being done in Iraq and so on. However, the real issue is not whether we should stop a country who is threatening to use weapons of mass destruction and who is murdering its own citizens. I think most people would agree that something needs to be done about that.

The real question is what exactly should be done, what general strategies we should follow and how much force should we use. As an extreme example, we could have detonated several nuclear weapons throughout Iraq and eliminated the threat of its weapons of mass destruction. Lots of innocent people would be killed in the process, but it would accomplish the mission, more or less.

However, that is obviously an extreme action, and it would certainly cause some major problems, so we would need to think of some more reasonable solutions that involve using less violent force and that have less negative long-term results.

As a general principle, the more force we use and the less precisely we direct that force, the more innocent people will be killed. So, in many ways, we can judge how appropriate our intervention was by how many innocent people died, directly or indirectly by our actions.

In my opinion, there were almost certainly better ways the war could have been conducted that would have resulted in less innocent people getting killed. It would be extremely unlikely that we picked anywhere near the perfect way to go about this.

Many argue that even though this war has resulted in many deaths, it is a small price to pay, in comparison to what Saddam was doing to his own people. It may be a "small price" in comparison to the larger price Saddam was extracting, but it's very important morally that we do the least amount of harm reasonably possible when we intervene in these types of situations.

Suppose that we could have accomplished the same mission with only 1/10 of the deaths we actually have had. Obviously, it would be morally wrong to choose the situation where we end up with 10 times the amount of deaths if we have the choice to have significantly less deaths.

Again, it's not a matter of whether we should have intervened in Iraq - most people agree on that- but how we should have gone about it. If we had a realistic choice to have caused less death and destruction, then we have truly made mistakes, and we need to seriously examine that so we do better next time. We shouldn't get defensive and argumentative about our actions, because that prevents us from learning from our mistakes.

With all the death and destruction going on in this war and in Iraq before the war, it's hard to think in terms of thousands of lives, and at some point, it's easy to say "what's a few thousand more?" However, I don't think we should be so casual about even one human life. If we truly could have saved more lives and yet we didn't, we are morally responsible for that.

We never have all the information we need to make perfect decisions, and at some point we just have to take action, knowing we will probably cause some avoidable harm, but that doesn't relieve us of the responsibility of being extremely careful and precise in our interventions. Of course, we can always look back and evaluate our actions later, based on what we have learned, so that we do better next time.

However, I don't think the United States military and the politicians running it have had the philosophy of doing the least amount of harm as their highest priority. I think their basic strategies have been focused more on showing how powerful we are and having a dramatic show of force for the news cameras than it is on being careful and precise in order to do the least amount of damage while still fulfilling the very important missions it needs to execute.

These wars are run more like a political campaign, always trying to gain public support and avoiding embarrassment, than a practical and focused intervention.

There certainly are situations that require a violent intervention, and in those cases, we need to be careful to use the least amount of force while still accomplishing our mission.

Moderate Atheism

2008-02-03T18:24:00.000-07:00

In many discussions between theists and atheists, the subject of evidence comes up quite a lot. The atheists claims that there is no God because there is no evidence for a God. The theist then counters, demanding evidence that there ISN'T a God. The atheists try to get out of it by saying that the burden of proof isn't on them, since they aren't making claims about reality, so it's up to the theists to present evidence in support of their particular God. Then, the theists counter that the atheists ARE making claims about reality because they are saying that reality doesn't have a God in it, so they need to produce evidence to back up their claim, too.

I think the theists and the atheists are right that we need evidence to back up our beliefs and that if we are going to go around claiming the world is a certain way, we need to be able to provide evidence for that. So, if theists are going to claim that their particular version of God actually exists in real life, then they need to provide credible and verifiable evidence of their claim. Also, if atheists are going to go around claiming that specific Gods or even whole categories of Gods don't exist, then they also need to provide credible, verifiable evidence of their claims.

There is a type of atheist who doesn't claim that there is not God, but instead, they simply lack a belief in any particular God, because they have no evidence to persuade them to believe in any particular concept of God. They may recognize that certain types of Gods are not compatible with what we know about the universe and with certain logical principles, but for the types of Gods that are not ruled out by the nature of the universe and logic, they are open to the possibility that they may exist. However, without any evidence for any of them, they simply have no reason to believe in any of them.

That is the kind of atheist I am. Some ideas of God are obviously contradictory with what we know about the universe and basic logic, so I am quite certain that these types of beings don't exist in the real world. Other ideas of God, such as technological civilization whose intelligence and capabilities exploded into a form of Transcendence, seem very possible to me, even very likely. However, I don't have evidence of these, so I am not able to believe in them, except as a possibility. As much as I would like there to be evidence of a God, there simply isn't any that I'm aware of, so until there is, I am unable to believe.

Beyond Both Sides Of An Issue

2008-02-03T07:47:00.000-07:00

People often talk about looking at both sides of an issue, as a way of encouraging people to be more open-minded. While open-mindedness is an excellent practice, I think the emphasis on "both sides" is very limiting.

Nearly every issue has a multitude of ways to consider it, yet in public discussions, these multiple ways are reduced to only two extreme ways of thinking about the issue. People often forget that there are literally thousands of other viewpoints that are simply being ignored. Seeing "both" sides of these issues is nearly as bad as seeing only one side, since those two viewpoints are only a small sample of all of the viewpoints.

In politics, seeing "both sides" of an issue means seeing it from both the Republican side and the Democratic side. In reality, there are all kinds of political philosophies that are very different than either the Republicans or the Democrats. Political philosophies include many different aspects, such as: whether to have a government or not, how limited the government should be, what the government should be involved in, the nature of "rights", the nature of "crime", how to enforce the law, the purpose of human life and civilization, etc., and depending how you think about each of these issues, you get a different political philosophy. From this larger perspective, of the many different kinds of political philosophies, Republicans and Democrats are seen as extremely similar. In fact, they only look different when you ignore all the other perspectives and focus on the minor differences between Republicans and Democrats.

Controversial issues like abortion are divided into two sides, "pro-life" and "pro-choice", and open-minded people may strive to see the issue from "both sides", completely unaware that this issue has far more than two sides to it. It's an extremely complex issue, filled with many sub-issues that each have multiple sides and are also complex and full of sub-issues. Within the issue of abortion are the issues of: what makes us human, why human life is valuable, what stage in our development we become a valuable human, what degree of control do people have over their own bodies, do we have supernatural souls, what role government should play in these kinds of issues, the social effects when something is banned that people want to do anyway, etc. One can't be "for" or "against" all of these at the same time. Each sub-issue needs to be carefully considered as its own issue, with multiple viewpoints.

The latest war in Iraq is another issue that is divided into two sides, "for the war" vs. "against the war". In reality, the issue is so extremely complicated that anyone with either of those two positions doesn't really understand the issues. This war is a complicated mix of many complex issues: containing rogue states that have weapons of mass destruction, intervening in violent dictatorships, securing a supply of oil, spreading peaceful democratic societies, expanding the world-wide power of the United States of America, political leaders lying to the public, stopping terrorism, minimizing human death, Islamic theocracies, and many more issues. We cannot simply throw all these issues in a bag and then say whether we are "for" or "against" the whole collection of ideas. We need to look at each of these issues and carefully consider all that is involved.

Nearly every issue is like those examples. There are so many complex ways to look at each of them, that it seems narrow-minded to reduce them all to two sides. Seeing "both sides" of an issue is generally meant as a sign of open-mindedness. However, if you only see two sides to an issue, your mind is closed to all the hundreds or thousands of other ways of looking at the issue.

How To Tell If A Politician Is Corrupt

2008-01-22T20:20:00.000-07:00

The government is severely corrupt at all levels, with all kinds of people literally stealing money from the government and being given large handouts by government employees and political leaders. And, where it is not corrupt, it is extremely wasteful, paying far more than necessary to get a given job done. This is a very serious issue, since funding the government costs a very large percentage of the nation's income. This effectively raises the prices for all goods and services. Higher prices affect the poorer part of the population the most, since they have the least amount of money. A corrupt, wasteful government is responsible for the majority of the poverty in this country.

Corruption and wastefulness in government is the number one, most serious problem in the United States. It is morally wrong to an extreme degree, and it causes major social problems. However, this major problem is almost never mentioned by any politicians or the media. Instead, they focus on trivial things like gay marriage or flag burning or intelligent design. If any of these politicians were decent, moral people, they would make government corruption and wastefulness their number one campaign platform issue.

Anyone with any decency is absolutely horrified when they learn the truth about government corruption and wastefulness. They immediately recognize that this is a great evil that has to be stopped. And, who would know better how bad things really are than an elected official who sees it every day? So, why are none of the presidential candidates or other candidates making a huge issue out of government corruption and wastefulness, when they surely know all about it?

My first guess is that they are in on it. They are all probably benefitting from the fact that the government is a big money machine that they can withdraw money from whenever they want and keep it or give it to their friends.

So, any politician who doesn't make government corruption and wastefulness their number one issue is almost certainly a highly immoral and corrupt individual, intent on stealing money from the government. At the very least, they just sit back and watch it happen.

I'm afraid that doesn't leave me anyone to vote for...

Moral Maturity

2008-01-17T17:32:00.000-07:00

In infancy, our morality is all about making sure we are comfortable. As we mature, we start to learn the morality of obedience to parents. This obedience later extends to all authority figures. As we mature more, we develop genuine compassion for others and an understanding of why certain kinds of things are right or wrong in certain situations. As we mature more, our sense of self enlarges to include more people, and we have greater compassion. Along with this, as we develop morally, we strive to have a more accurate understanding of our world and the real consequences of our actions, so we are better able to make good decisions. All further developments of morality are focused on including more in one's self-identity, gaining a deeper understanding of the world and greater monitoring of the real consequences of one's decisions in order to make even better choices.

In this view of moral development, we are each responsible for the level of morality we choose to practice, and we are each responsible for advancing our own level of morality. To mature morally, we have to go beyond simply obeying rules or sources of authority. We need to cultivate genuine compassion for others, learn more about our world and be more observant to the real consequences of our actions. Morality is a discipline that we can practice and get better at.

Bipartisan Con Artistry

2007-12-31T13:12:00.000-07:00

Many people support the Republicans because they can point to the many flaws of the Democrats. You could also point out the many flaws of the Republicans if you were biased in that direction and feel justified in supporting that party.

The fact is that both parties are political bullies that have dominated the political arena, squelching all other voices. They have both worked together to increase taxes and spending continuously. By having two parties, it makes it look like we actually have a choice in the way our country is run. But, it is actually run by the political parties, not the American People. By supporting either party, we are voting against Americans, because each party is all about increasing their own political power, not necessarily doing what's best for the American People.

By doing anything in support of either party we only play into the political game that has ruined our country. Political parties are simply another form of organized crime. Americans need to wake up and take their country back from these political mobsters. They are all corrupt.

It may be true, for example, that the Democrats are largely responsible for the many problems of Social Security, and people will use these kinds of issues to gain more support for the Republican party. What is lost in those kinds of debates is the larger picture, where that is only one issue, out of millions of problems caused by the government.

It will always be possible to cherry-pick examples where the Democrats really screwed up, because they have caused so many problems. However, you can pick millions of other areas where the Republicans really screwed up, if you were so inclined. Both parties are extremely corrupt and exist more to serve their own interests than the interests of the American People.

People generally think they have to pick one party or the other to support, but very few people come to the realization that both parties are evil and that they shouldn't support either of them. It's very important that the American People realize that they have been deeply conned by both the Democrats and the Republicans. They are not what they pretend to be. They are very good at presenting positive public images and gaining support, but it is all under false pretenses.

They are actually doing many things the American People would NOT support, if they knew what was really going on. They just keep raising our taxes and spending it on all kinds of projects and give-aways that we would never support, because it is all highly immoral and technically illegal, but people support these parties, because they actually believe that they are doing good, and never realize that they are all victims of a very large scale con job.

Faith Pushes Us Away From God

2007-12-31T07:36:00.000-07:00

Faith in God is promoted as a good thing to have. However, there is a great danger to having faith in God. Faith involves believing firmly in whatever concepts of God we happen to have. Faith generally doesn't allow any radical changes to our concepts of God, so it keeps us believing roughly the same things about God all our lives.

But, what if our concepts of God are extremely inaccurate? Having faith in God would only make our inaccurate beliefs more firmly established in our minds. Having faith in our ideas of what God is would push us further and further away from what God actually is. For example, if the real God appeared to us, we would probably reject it because it doesn't match the concepts of God we have faith in.

In this way, faith in God actually pushes people further and further away from the real God, since Faith involves placing more importance on our own preconceptions of God than on whatever God happens to be in real life. Given the choice, people will generally stick to their faith in their own concept of God than be open to learn more about what God actually is.

I choose to not have faith in God, since I know that all my thoughts about God are very inaccurate and faith will just make these thoughts stronger and push me further away from whatever God happens to be.

I choose to keep my mind open about God and let the world itself tell me what God is. This involves serious studying and thinking about the nature of the universe we find ourselves in. This requires advanced scientific exploration of reality. If we want to find the real God then it makes sense to study reality and let the universe itself tell us what God is and what God isn't.

Faith is an arrogant way of saying to God, "I already know who You are. I don't need to learn any more." Honest study of the universe is a way of saying, "I don't know. Teach me." We need to drop all our ideas about God and study the universe as it is. We need to discover the truth, whatever it happens to be.

Predicting the Future

2007-12-30T21:20:00.000-07:00

It's important to keep in mind that the future isn't something that is laid out before us but something we are creating as we go along. The future is being actively created by six billion intelligent minds, interacting with each other, responding to each other and their situations continuously. We cannot predict what those billions of intelligent minds will choose to do. Nothing is inevitable. With that much human intelligence, there is a tremendous ability to adapt, to solve very difficult problems and to make great changes to the world.

All these new computer technologies are great because they allow individual humans to magnify their own intelligent abilities, so we are all more powerful at gathering and utilizing information, more able to make changes in our world and more able to coordinate our efforts with others. All of these technologies are unleashing the power of the human mind, all over the world. The future will be quite different that anything we can predict. All we know for sure is that 6 billion human minds are quite suddenly being set free to shape the world as they choose. We can't say what they will choose, though, because they are all free agents.

The future will be shaped by intelligent minds using increasingly powerful tools, linking them together and coordinating their efforts. Any prediction of the future that does not factor this reality in as a basic premise is deeply flawed. Six billion and more people each intelligently altering their world in their own ways will create immense change. And, they will all be responding and adapting to each other and to situations as they emerge. The future will be shaped and crafted intelligently. We cannot predict what billions of intelligent entities will choose to do. But we know it will be profound.

Our Rights Don't Come From God

2007-12-15T07:45:00.000-07:00

Our rights don't come from God, they come from us having fragile bodies and our need to survive. Because our bodies can die or be injured, we recognize that it is wrong for people to hurt others' bodies. Because we recognize that we each own our own bodies, we hold each other responsible for what we do with our bodies. If we use our bodies to work and bring more value to the world, then we also own that value we created. If we bring harm and destruction to the world, we are responsible for that.

No outside party gives us these "rights". Rights don't exist as absolutes. They are a human creation and a deep expression of our natural morality. These are things we recognize, because they are somewhat obvious, as good things. All of us want to live healthy and free lives where we can work and own the results of our labor. Because we each want those basic things and bad other people are often what stop us from having those things, we have all decided, over time, to establish societies that respect the individual and protect their ability to live healthy and productive lives.

In past civilizations, where God was central, such as the Middle Ages, when the Roman Catholic Church had its empire, God somehow didn't see fit to give people basic human rights. The only ones who had rights in those kinds of civilizations wast God and the religious leaders. It wasn't until Humanity started questioning God and the religious power structure, during the Enlightenment, that we started recognizing individual rights as being universal and extremely important. This was a human decision to establish basic human rights, not a divine decree. In fact, a very large portion of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America were Atheists or Agnostics, and they established a powerful country, based on respect for individuals.

We Are Already Machines

2007-12-10T19:21:00.000-07:00

Many people fear that technology is going to turn us all into machines, but what people don't realize is that our bodies are already machines. If you've ever studied any cellular biology, it soon becomes clear that the cell is just a giant molecular factory, with thousands of parts, each precisely and repetitively doing the same actions, assembling structures which also become functional machines or structural parts. There is no part of the body that isn't a machine. From the cells upward, it is all made up of very precise and repetitive actions.

Our bodies are machines that have evolved over billions of years, becoming more complex and elaborate and learning to survive better in challenging environments. Like all evolved systems, our bodies are a hodgepodge of systems that work in very complicated and roundabout ways. They've never had the requirement to be perfect or elegant, they just have to survive and reproduce.

Because of our bodies' deep complexity and extremely small moving parts, we don't have the intuitive sense that they are machines. All we generally see is the larger form of the body, not all of the precise moving parts working quickly to build complex structures. However, whether it is intuitive for us or not, we really are machines.

Because human-designed machines are relatively new, our ideas of what machines are is very limited, and people tend to think of machines as stupid and not very capable of much interesting behavior. This makes it difficult to accept that humans themselves are machines, because we are so intelligent and creative. However, we really are machines, so accepting that helps us see what machines are capable of. It is possible to create a machine as intelligent and creative as humans are, because machines already exist that do that. We are those machines.

The High Costs of Health Care

2007-12-09T16:21:00.000-07:00

Many things certainly need to be done to change the way health care is provided. The basic problem is that it is simply too expensive. Of course, it's always going to cost money, simply because it costs money to deliver that kind of precise and expert service. However, for many reasons, it costs WAY more than it really should cost. The primary reason medical costs are so inflated is because of intensive government involvement in all aspects of medical care.

There are laws and regulations governing nearly all aspects of medical care, and complying with these thousands of laws costs medical providers huge amounts of money. Insurance companies, medical device manufacturers, drug companies and many other organizations work hard to lobby the government to pass laws and regulations that make it harder for other companies to compete with them. These thousands of anti-competitive laws make it so that thousands of other good companies can't sell medical devices, drugs and insurance systems at a far lower price than the current, established companies.

Then, there are all the lawsuits doctors, hospitals, medical device manufacturers and drug makers are facing because people have pressured the government to create a legal system that frequently allows for people to win ridiculous amounts of money for seemingly trivial errors, or often when the other party didn't even do anything wrong. So, doctors and hospitals have to pay huge fees for medical malpractice insurance, and they have to pass those fees onto their patients. And, drug companies and medical device manufacturers have to increase the prices for their products to compensate for all these, frequently baseless lawsuits.

So, all of this intensive government involvement in the health care system has tremendously increased the overall costs of providing healthcare. Unfortunately, when people say "something needs to be done about the high costs of healthcare", they usually want to propose even more government involvement. However, since the main reason for the high price of health care is government involvement itself, the only significant ways to reduce those costs is to get the government out of the healthcare business. Any action they take can only increase the costs even more.

Perceiving Our Larger Self

2007-12-07T20:56:00.000-07:00

It takes a big leap of perception to see how deeply interconnected we are with other people and how we are all harmed and benefit together. As children, we perceve ourselves as our bodies and as separate individuals. As we mature, we increasingly realize how much of our welfare depends on the welfare of others. If we're able to continue this maturation process, our sense of self expands to include others around us, and we natrually become concerned with their welfare and we work to help them, because in a very real sense, we are them, and that fact becomes more and more obvious as we mature.

Are We Inadvertently Working For The Terrorists?

2007-12-07T20:49:00.000-07:00

Different terrorists have different motives, but it's reasonable to assume that they expect to cause some sort of reaction, since that's an obvious result. It's obvious to nearly all humans that if you attack other humans, they will almost certainly retaliate in some way. It's also obvious, from most people's experience, that when people retaliate, they generally make a lot of mistakes and end up making very foolish decisions, generally trying to do far more harm in their retaliation than was done to them.

So, it's not a big stretch to think that it would be quite obvious to a terrorist that if they committed a terrorist act in another country, that country might be quite motivated to get their revenge, especially if they were already involved politically and militarily in the area where the terrorists were from.

The type of terrorists I'm talking about are not the Taliban or the Saddam regime. These are independent, loosely associated groups of people, not governments or large centrally organized groups. Since they are not necessarily affiliated with the government of a country, they aren't as concerned whether that country comes under war. Having their country attacked may be exactly what they need to destabilize their political enemies' control in the country, leaving the political situation more open for valuable opportunities, including money and political power.

I think it's helpful to consider that the terrorists may be trying to use us, by provoking us into using our quite formidable resources to do what they could never accomplish. We may inadvertently be working for the terrorists, doing the work they want us to do.

The Costs of Bad Tactics in a War

2007-12-07T20:42:00.000-07:00

I think it's very important that a free society be established in many parts of the world. My concern is that the methods we have been using may not be very efficient or effective. Obviously, some military force needs to be used to stop the very bad people in that region, but then it becomes a question of how much do you really need to get the job done and what sorts of tactics should you use. I'm not a military expert, so I obviously can't give detailed criticism of their tactics, but it seems like they sent in way too many troops and way too much equipment and that while in the end there may be peace and freedom in that area, they could have achieved the same goal for a fraction of the cost, of money and lives.

If thousands of extra American soldiers and Iraqi civilians died because the military leadership made tactical and strategic mistakes, then that is a huge tragedy, regardless of how noble the cause is or what the end result is.

Whenever this issue is discussed, it's always about whether you support the war or don't support the war, but rarely about whether there are better approaches to achieving the same ends. It's extraordinarily unlikely that the military leaders have somehow hit on the most optimal way to achieve the goals of peace and freedom. Further, considering how resentful they are of any criticism and of looking like they are admitting a mistake, that biases them to keep making the same mistakes rather than fluidly adjust their strategies and tactics as they go. There are certainly far better ways this whole thing could have been carried out, and there are lots of political reasons why it wasn't carried out better. Unfortunately, those mistakes have cost tens of thousands of lives and added many years and billions of extra dollars to the cost of this mission.

I'm for the commonly stated goals of the war, but profoundly critical of how it's actually being carried out.

Environmental Suicide

2007-11-23T20:06:00.000-07:00

Environmentalists are always telling us to use less of everything. Conserve water. Conserve energy. All this means is to use less of everything. Taken to the extreme, we could all use less of everything by killing ourselves right now, and then we would never end up using all the things we would otherwise end up using. If our environmental strategy is based only on using less of everything, then suicide is the best way to do that.

What humans really want is more and more, not less and less, and this aspect of human nature is not going to change. So, we need to find ways of having more and more while having less and less of a destructive impact on the environment. To do this, we need to develop better technologies.

Humans want more and more, but the ways we are doing that now are actually jeopardizing our ability to sustain this. However, it is possible for humans to all live abundant lives in a healthy environment. How we do this is fundamentally a technical problem that can be solved with intelligence and creativity.

While I don't always agree with what types of things people pursue or the types of toys they accumulate to try to satisfy themselves with, I don't think that these things themselves are necessarily a problem. It's the ways we go about making these things that are the problem. In the process of making so many things, we end up with all kinds of waste and end up destroying many valuable parts of our environment. It's kind of like chopping down a whole tree just to make a toothpick. It is certainly one way to make a toothpick, but it is very wasteful and destructive.

What we need are better ways of making the things we need and want that are radically less wasteful and destructive. I really believe there are ways of building a sustainable AND prosperous civilization. In the past and currently, all we have cared about is the stuff we want, and we haven't paid much attention to what that actually involves. All we see is the end product in the store, not the environmental destruction it represents. Attitudes are changing, though, and people are becoming more aware of the impact of our careless ways. We can still make the stuff we are used to and more, but we need to make a lot of adjustments to the manufacturing processes so they are better when looked at BOTH from the big picture of a sustainable civilization and from the small picture of making a quality product that people will purchase.

We do also need to help people mature emotionally, so they don't keep wasting their lives trying to become happy by accumulating more and more things. However, until they become more mature, we need to find ways of allowing them to have more and more things but make it so that those things are not so harmful to the welfare of Humanity's only home.

We Are Cyborgs Already

2007-11-18T07:49:00.000-07:00

We are already cyborgs. Our lives are completely infiltrated by human technology. We are utterly dependent on technology to survive, and we use technology constantly throughout the day. Having machine implants isn't what makes someone a cyborg. We become cyborgs when all aspects of our lives are dominated by technology, we can no longer survive without our technology, and there is no longer any way to distinguish between us and our technology. Humanity became a cyborg species long ago. We are just continuing this very ancient human tradition.

You may disagree with my use of the word "cyborg" and prefer a much narrower definition, such as one that only included electromechanical implants in our bodies. However, my main point is that we are all utterly dependent on technology to survive. Even the survivalist people who think they don't need technology and can survive the collapse of civilization are planning to use tools to survive. Clothing is a form of technology. So is controlled fire. So is hunting and gathering food, since they rely totally on knowledge and the skilled use of techniques. All the things we do, even for basic survival, are forms of technology. Humans are completely dependent on our many technologies.

The development of technology has always advanced at an exponential pace. What used to take 1,000 years to develop later took place in 100 years. Later, that amount of progress happened in 10 years. It keeps getting faster and faster, and the impacts of technology keep getting more and more profound.

Many people see technology as cold and alien and think that things like artificial intelligence will be without emotion or creativity, but these technologies will be just as creative, intelligent, emotional and conscious as we are, if we want them to be that way. They will also be extensions of ourselves, dramaticially expanding our abilities and even giving us new abilities. We will become even more creative and intelligent than we are now, and as we become more fully integrated with intelligent technologies, we will no longer be limited in the ways we are now. We will also be far less likely to die than we are now.

This kind of idea seems repulsive to us, because it is so foreign to us. However, just as we are comfortable driving cars, talking on cell phones, using computers and getting food at a grocery store, even though those technologies are relatively new, we will be quite comfortable with intelligence expanding technologies, rejuvination technologies, and all kinds of other technologies that help us stay healthy and live longer, more fulfilling lives. Humans want better lives, and they've demonstrated that consistently by quickly adopting new technologies that benefit them. Once humans have embraced a new technology, it quickly seems incredibly natural for them to use it, no longer foreign and repulsive.

No one is going to deliberately wipe out unaltered humans, but they will simply die eventually, because that is what unaltered humans do. Unless they have children who are just as devoted to remaining unaltered as they are and those children have children like that, and so on forever, unaltered humans will simply go extinct.

Considering the profound benefits to having technological alterations to our bodies and minds, it will be hard for people to resist having enhancement procedures done. Even if it is just a little procedure at first, such as something to make one's immune system stronger, people will quickly become more comfortable using those technologies to enhance their lives as they try out more and more of them over a period of time and experience the great benefits.

This is happening. It is not science fiction or highly futuristic. Look around at how humans act and at the incredible amounts of technology they use each day and have become utterly reliant on. This keeps increasing every day, by leaps and bounds. We are cyborgs now, even if we don't recognize it, but soon there will be no denying it.

If God Exists, It Evolved

2007-11-18T07:22:00.000-07:00

Even if some kind of being created our particular universe, some other being may have created its universe, and you can keep going back through universes until you get back to the first one, and that one had to happen on its own. It is literally impossible for a god or any other complex being to have created the first universe. It HAD to happen on its own, from utter simplicity, transforming into great complexity. A god may evolve later, after the universe has become complex enough to support intelligent life, but before then, there can be no god, since something so utterly complex and powerful can't just pop into existence instantly from utter simplicity, but has to evolve through a very long process of refinement and learning.

So, there may indeed be a god-like being who creates baby universes as extensions of its own universe. However, that being didn't create everything. Its universe would have just happened, on its own and had the right properties to evolve that being.

Science doesn't disagree with this possibility at all. However, this notion of God is quite different than traditional notions of God, which scientists and rationalists generally disagree with. This notion of God is a naturalistic god, which arises out of natural and understandable processes and has abilities governed by natural, understandable processes.

Traditional Gods are presented as being completely magical, able to do anything, including being able to exist when nothing exists at all (and so be able to create everything). These kinds of Gods are presented as being completely supernatural, following no rules and having no limits. They are off-limits to understanding. That kind of God is rejected by most rationalists and scientists because it makes absolutely no sense and because there is no evidence to support the existence of such a being.

Bossing Each Other Around

2007-11-15T19:15:00.000-07:00

The important thing to remember about government and its interests is that government is just a tool that people use to control other people. The government has no interests any more than a hammer does, since it is just a tool. The people who use the government to boss other people around do have interests, though. Most people who use government have the best of intentions, but they simply don't realize they are using a very bad tool to get done what they want, and there are all kinds of unpleasant side-effects that come from using government that are never anticipated. Unfortunately, people try to use government to deal with those side-effects, causing even more problems.

These people, who use government, are all around us, in our communities. They are not some conspiracy, plotting away in a government building somewhere. They are everywhere. The whole idea of government is sustained by the people who sincerely believe it is okay to force other people against their will. Each of them may only justify doing this for specific, narrow areas, but they all have different areas that they think it is okay to force people against their will in. For some, it is poverty issues, for some it is the environment, for some it is drugs, for some it is crime, etc. Each person uses government in their own way to force other people against their will, and in the end, we are all forced against our will, and all around us we have created a society of people bossing each other around with millions of laws, regulations, taxes, police officers and jails.

None of us meant for any of this to happen, we each just wanted our own special issue to be addressed, and we each wanted our own small agendas to be made to happen. To undo all the problems that excessive use of government has caused, we need to learn to deal with each other on a more voluntary basis instead of trying to force each other to be good. For example, if we want to raise money to help the homeless, instead of forcing people to pay a tax, we can educate people in our communities on the realities of homelessness, propose a well-thought-out plan for reducing the problem and asking people to donate money to support the cause. Or, if we want to help the environment, instead of passing lots of laws, we can work to educate each other on environmental issues and persuade people to make changes to the ways they do things.

We are only truly good if we do it voluntarily. If we promote a culture that forces each other to be good, with all our laws, regulations and taxes, then none of us are truly good. We need to work towards a society of people that are truly good, who don't need laws or strict rules to tell them how to behave.

Biofuels Destroy Wilderness

2007-11-15T18:45:00.000-07:00

Biofuels are one of the most environmentally destructive forms of energy there is. To produce biofuels, you have to destroy wilderness area and turn it into farmland. You could use existing farmland, but if it wasn't being used for food anyway, then it could have been turned back into wilderness, so using it for biofuels destroys its potential as wilderness land.

On the surface, biofuels seem great, because they use plants and are renewable. However, they take up huge amounts of land that would otherwise be wilderness area.

The only good biofuels are those made from waste that would have gone to landfills, but the minute we start growing plants to use as biofuels, we are destroying wilderness for energy.

Baby Universes and Rule Systems

2007-11-15T18:37:00.000-07:00

If we learned how our universe worked, we could potentially initiate universes ourselves and be "god" to them, at least in the sense that we created the universe (we may have no power to intervene in the affairs of whatever intelligent life ends up evolving or granting them eternal life, though). However, even if we did that, we would be doing it while still following the rules of our own universe, since everything we do always follows those rules. So, the new universe would just be an extension of our current universe, based on the same underlying rules as ours is, but it may have a new layer of rules on top of it, giving it new behaviors and making it look like it is fundamentally based on a different set of rules than it really is deep, deep down.

You can have rule systems built on top of other rule systems, in many layers. It's kind of like when one computer simulates another computer inside of it, like when people play old arcade games on their PCs. The PC simulates the computer chips of the old arcade game, so the game software runs exacty as though it is actually running on that hardware. From it's perspective, it IS running on that old hardware, and there is nothing it can do to tell the difference. This brings up all kinds of possibilities for our universe to be running on some computer, but we would never be able to tell, because it would act exactly the same whether it was or it wasn't. All we can figure out is the rules our universe is based on, not what those rules are running on.

Although, it would have to be rule systems all the way down, so we could certainly develop a large knowledge base of the different types of possible rule systems. For simpler rule systems there are less possibilities, and since it only takes a very simple system to generate all possible rule systems, there would probably be a relatively small number of possible rule systems underlying every possible type of universe.

However, the rule system underlying a universe is only one part of the universe. The other huge part are the initial conditions of the universe; how it starts out. Depending on the rule system, the starting conditions will make a huge difference on the way it plays out. So, it may be possible to create universes with the same rules but start them off slightly differently and get dramatically different effects.

However, that's only if you have a universe already running and developing to the point where it can start other baby universes. The first universe has to start out very simply, with rules that happen quite spontaneously, without any need for any process to already exist to get it started. How that happened is a deep mystery, although it is quite clear that it did happen. Perhaps as we transform ourselves into ever more intelligent beings, we will eventually figure it out.

Living In A Godless Universe

2007-11-07T19:17:00.000-07:00

Evolution is a fact, and it's very clear that life and humans were not designed by anyone. With that in mind, we need to rethink many of our ideas about life, our purpose here, God and pretty much every area. Clinging to old ideas, no matter how comfortable, is not helpful at all.

So, we know that no God created us, since we now know that life and humans came about spontaneously. This doesn't mean that there is no God at all or that there is no afterlife, but it makes the whole idea so much less likely. First, there is no actual evidence that God exists, or even if God exists, what God is actually like. Second, since God didn't create us and we just evolved spontaneously, who is making life after death possible?

As far as we can tell, the universe doesn't really care about us (except for the parts of the universe that are us - we care about us) and most of the universe is completely lifeless. We are patterns of atoms and molecules that come together and go apart, always changing. Death and decomposition are other changes in those patterns, completely natural and have been happening for billions of years. Unless every organism has some kind of life after death, what is so special about humans that we would survive this natural process of death and decay?

While I also feel the emotional attraction and intuitive appeal of God and life after death, we simply have no solid evidence that these actually exist. It would certainly be nice if they did, but the universe itself tells us a different story whenever we seriously examine it.

I understand that this is a hard thing to accept, that there really is no God and that when we die, we are gone forever. I think about this every day, and it is troubling to realize. However, I committed myself to finding out the truth a long time ago, and it is more important to me to understand how things really are than to feel comfortable but have false ideas.

Evolution Proves God Didn't Create Us

2007-11-06T18:20:00.000-07:00

One contraversial area of belief is about the origins of life and humans. This issue has been studied extensively by people honestly seeking to know the truth, and they have gathered and studied millions of pieces of evidence in their quest to understand the origins of life and Humanity. What they have found is that life and humans arose spontaneously and evolved over the last few billion years to become present-day life. This understanding of the origins and development of life is supported by overwhelming evidence, and there is no evidence found so far that contradicts that understanding of life.

So, when someone comes along and arrogantly dismisses all of that very solid evidence and claims that some magical, powerful being created life (even though they have no evidence for this being), it's difficult not to dismiss their claims as "fairy tale stories". On one side of the issue are thousands of scientists with millions of pieces of solid evidence supporting their beliefs, and on the other side are people who have a belief with no evidence to support it and lots of evidence to contradict it. It's abundantly clear that life on Earth arose and evolved spontaneously and was not created or designed by any sort of powerful or intelligent being. Any theory about a powerful being creating life is simply false. There is incredibly strong evidence against it.

So, a belief in a God that created life and humans has essentially been proven to be false. That doesn't mean there isn't some kind of powerful being somewhere in the universe, but it does mean that this God-like being didn't create life on Earth. So, all the mountains of evidence of evolution don't rule out the possibility that there is a God somewhere, but that evidence makes it very clear that this possible God did not create us at all.

Morality as a Skill

2007-11-03T19:09:00.000-06:00

Morality is a skill that we learn, from each other and from our own experiences. We can learn to become more moral in our behavior, through observation of the world and the consequences of our own actions.

Many people believe that morality comes from God and obedience to God's will. However, morality has nothing to do with which fictional characters we believe or don't believe in. Morality is all about learning to make appropriate choices in each unique situation. This doesn't come about by following rules but by developing a deep understanding of the world we live in, the consequences of different kinds of actions and a mind that's attentive to the details and complexity of each moment.

Human cultures throughout the world are quite morally immature. Much of that moral immaturity comes from oversimplified thinking, the reliance on authority for absolute guidance and the perpetuation of violence in many forms throughout societies. Religion and many other belief systems tend to reinforce this moral immaturity by promoting those behaviors and ways of thinking.

It's extremely important that humans become more morally mature, because individual humans are now capable of far greater violence than ever before. We need to seriously examine all aspects of our societies and work to eliminate any behaviors and beliefs that promote moral immaturity, whether it be religion or other dangerous beliefs. We also need to actively develop and promote more advanced ways of being moral.

Admitting Mistakes in the Iraq War

2007-11-01T19:56:00.000-06:00

One big problem when people talk about the Iraq war is that the minute someone suggests that we made some tactical mistakes, they get jumped on as though they are against the whole objective of resolving a very bad situation. People try to make them out to be in support of the original bad situation. That is an extremely dishonest arguing tactic.

There is absolutely no reason to assume that the way the Iraq war has been conducted has been the most perfect way it could ever have been done. Further, there is no reason to assume that the way things have been done are anywhere close to optimal. There are certainly other strategies and tactics that could have been used that would have saved a considerable amount of lives and money.

It is extremely important that people are open to new and better ways of doing things, especially when lives and extreme amounts of money are at stake. How we are doing things in the war is far from perfect, and it is extremely arrogant and foolish to believe that our strategies and tactics are not deeply flawed. It's imperative that we continually find flaws in how we do things so we can keep doing them better all the time. Especially when so many lives are at stake.

Natural, Refined Sugar?!

2007-10-26T08:38:00.000-06:00

I just watched a commercial where this guy was walking around the grocery store supposedly naked, holding a bag of refined sugar. The commercial was about the goodness of sugar, how it has low calories (15 per teaspoon!), and how it is the same sugar that is in natural fruits. He even said that sugar is a natural product.

What?!

I've seen the word "natural" applied to all kinds of things that are clearly made by humans, so I shouldn't be so surprised that advertisers would stretch the meaning of the word to give some more credibility to their product. Because everyone knows that if something is natural it is good and safe and much better than the man-made stuff that is so bad for us. But wait a minute! Sugar IS man-made. Sugar cane has been cultivated and bred for its qualities. It is intensively farmed with machines. It is processed with advanced technology, to make granulated sugar.

If refined sugar is natural, then so is gasoline! Crude oil is extremely natural and was around long before humans were. All we've done to natural crude oil is process it a bit, not really any more than refined sugar is processed, to make gasoline.

Of course, humans and all their technologies and products are 100% natural, because we are all natural products of the universe. We certainly aren't supernatural! However, the word "natural" is meant to distinguish between the things humans do and the things that humans don't do. Somewhere along the way, "natural" got associated with the ideas of goodness, wholesomeness and healthiness. People began to think that natural things were somehow, magically, better than artificial things. Being natural became a big selling point of any product, because the magic of naturalness somehow blessed the product and made it work better. So, now all manufacturers are putting the word "natural" on every product they can remotely justify doing.

I just hope they don't start calling gasoline "natural" (even though it is), because people will start drinking it and taking baths in it, because that "natural" label will turn it into a miracle cure...

My Path to Atheism

2007-10-23T15:35:00.001-06:00

When I was 18, in the summer between high school and college, I was quite anxious about the future I was expected to live out. I was raised Mormon and was quite sincere about my religion, which culturally had many expectations of what I would do with my life. I was expected to go to college for a year, and then when I was 19, spend two years somewhere else in the world trying to convert others to Mormonism. Then, after I returned, finish college, get a good job, get married and have many children. This was a pretty heavy burden for an 18 year old to bear.

As a naturally rational person, I looked for evidence and confirmation of my beliefs, to make sure I was doing the right thing and to feel comforted that God would assist me through all of these difficult tasks. Mormonism teaches that God answers prayers directly and has a personal relationship with each individual. So, I prayed for confirmation and comfort, very sincerely and for several months. Disappointingly, I never received any sort of answer from God, and this just made me more anxious about the life I was expected to live.

One night, while watching a movie with a friend, I had a sudden and profound realization. First, I realized that I was very scared to do all that was expected of me. I also realized that everyone in my life promoted their beliefs in God and the Mormon religion, not because they knew any of it to be true, but they were just passing on what they were told. Everyone else was in the same situation I was in; none of us really knew any of it, but we all did our best to convince each other and ourselves that our beliefs were true. Each week at church, people would tell each other how convinced they were of the religion and share faith-promoting stories. I realized that with this kind of intense and prolonged social pressure to believe and to conform, it was very difficult for anyone to question or leave that religion or culture.

Immediately after this realization, I knew that I could no longer trust other people to give me reliable guidance in my life or provide reliable truth about the world. From that point on, I knew I needed to pursue truth with an independent mind and live a life guided by my own understanding and not by the ideas that others pass on because of social pressure.

I decided not to accept my full scholarship at the University of Utah, viewing college as yet another layer of social co-deception. Instead, I've spent the past 15 years engaged in my own, intense independent study, reading hundreds of non-fiction books on a wide variety of subjects, mainly science books. During most of the last 15 years, I have truly been agnostic, sincerely thinking about the issues of God and the supernatural, not being convinced either way. It was obvious that traditional notions of God and the supernatural were ridiculous, but I still believed there was the possibility of some kind of supernatural intelligence.

However, many of the books I read were Richard Dawkins' books: The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable and very recently, The God Delusion. These books made it very clear to my mind that life is a very natural and spontaneous phenomenon, simply arising and becoming more complex, given favorable conditions. Life doesn't need the guiding hand of intelligence any more than oxygen and hydrogen atoms need God to push them together to make water molecules; it just happens, given favorable conditions.

However, the fact that life arises spontaneously doesn't mean that some kind of supernatural god can't exist, just that god didn't create life. What finally convinced me that the supernatural cannot, even in theory, exist is having read Stephen Wolfram's book, "A New Kind of Science", twice. One of the main theses of the book is that complexity arises automatically, even following extremely simple rules of transformation. Another main thesis is that arbitrarily complex systems of rules can be perfectly simulated by extremely simple systems of rules. This means that every system of rules, even those with astronomically large numbers of rules, is equivalent to a very simple set of rules with the right initial conditions.

This is all very abstract, but what I realized was that all naturalistic explanations assume that existence is following a system with a finite set of rules. That means that the supernatural would not follow those rules, and in fact not follow any rules whatsoever, since any sort of rules or regularity would be within the domain of the natural. So, all the supernatural is left with is utter randomness, since all patterns can be explained naturalistically. Since the supernatural can only be utter randomness, there is no possibility that it could be intelligent in any way. So, I am now convinced that there cannot be supernatural gods or anything supernatural.

However, I am still open to the idea of "technological gods", technological, self-transformative beings who ultimately become so intelligent and powerful we may as well consider them gods, even though they are a natural phenomenon that did not create the universe itself. In fact, creating such beings seems like a meaningful long-term goal for Humanity.

The Criminal Nature of Punishment

2007-10-14T07:37:00.000-06:00

It seems that people generally believe quite strongly in punishing people to change behavior. Throughout history, it has been proven over and over that punishing people doesn't change their behavior in a positive way. It generally makes people more careful not to get caught, but it does very little to change their desires and their actual behavior. Yet, for some reason we still want to punish people, even though it doesn't work.

We are taught by those around us that punishment is the thing to do when someone does something wrong, and there is a strong emotional feeling of revenge when we punish people. But, it really isn't practical to punish others because it simply doesn't work, no matter how good it makes us feel to get revenge on others. Ususally, punishing people just makes things worse, because they will still do the bad things they were punished for, but now they will be more angry at the people who punish them, so they may do additional bad things.

Punishment is simply not a very effective way to change human behavior. So, if your goal is to actually make a positive difference in the world, then punishment is a really horrible tool. However if your goal is to hurt others in righteous indignation, then punishment works very well, as a sadistic tool. Punishment only adds more misery to the world; it does nothing to improve it.

Punishment simply doesn't work. This concept is very hard for people to accept, because we feel so strongly that people need to be punished for their misdeeds. So, since punishment really doesn't work, we need to find better ways of changing people's behavior so they actually reduce or stop doing bad things. We need strategies that really work.

It may be emotionally unsatisfying to not punish people, but we have to remember that our desires to punish people come from our own inner monster. When we punish others, we become criminals also. Criminals can always justify their behavior, and when we are cruel to others, we justify it by saying we are punishing them and that they deserve to be treated with cruelty.

Our focus should be on finding practical and effective ways to solve the problems of bad behavior. This means letting go of methods that simply don't work and developing ones that actually do.

The Source of Good and Evil

2007-10-13T23:15:00.000-06:00

The idea there has to be a God for there to be good and evil is a common one, but it actually makes no logical sense.

Does God just make up what is good and what is evil, arbitrarily? For example, if God says it’s good to torture children, is it really good, or is that kind of behavior just evil regardless of what God says? If God doesn’t just make up good and evil as He goes, then that means those concepts don’t need God to exist.

If God is just making up good and evil as He goes, then how does God know what is truly good and evil? Is there some objective standard that God uses as a reference? If so, then the standard of good and evil doesn’t need God to exist.

So, we are left with three basic options for good and evil. 1) Standards of good and evil exist on their own. 2) God just makes up His own version of good and evil and is free to change the standards at will. 3) We recognize certain kinds of actions as good or evil, because of our evolutionary heritage.

Our ancestors all lived in dangerous environments, where it really mattered what kind of behavior they engaged in. Certain kinds of things brought death while others brought survival. Our basic sense of morality has helped our species’ survival immensely.

We are reluctant to kill others, especially those in our group. We have strong drives to promote social unity. We have a feeling of compassion for others.

Just as evolution has shaped the details of our eyes and our neurons, it has also profoundly shaped our sense of what is right and wrong, so that we are motivated to act in ways that promote the survival of our species.

Environmental Kindness Through Technology

2007-10-13T08:38:00.000-06:00

There may be some global warming going on, and human activity may be contributing to it. However, it's very unclear how fast the temperatures are rising. This is an extremely complex situation, and we simply don't have enough data to know with great confidence how alarmed people should be. Generally, scientists predict a rise of something like 2-3 degrees Fahrenheit in the next hundred years or so. If there is significant warming going on, it's certainly worth paying attention to and conducting ongoing studies of the Earth's climate.

The real issues for us are what, if anything, can we do to stop or slow global warming, and how can we adapt to live with higher temperatures? Looking at human history, it's clear that humans are extremely adaptable. The technology of today is so much more advanced than 100 years ago, and our rate of progress is getting faster all the time. So, it seems to me that whether we figure out how to slow or stop global warming or not, humans will adapt to change. That doesn't mean it will be easy, but then building a computer isn't easy either, and humans do that all the time now.

I think people like Al Gore see this global warming thing as a big emergency, where they have to get everyone scared and change their behavior. They see it as so important that they are willing to lie and distort truth just to get people to care about the issue the way they do. To them, the goal is so important, it doesn't matter if you deceive millions of people to get it.

However, what most people don't comprehend yet, including Al Gore, is just how rapidly human technology is changing. The general trend of human technology is to produce less waste, to be more efficient. This means that as human civilization becomes more advanced, we produce less pollution and are kinder to our natural environments. Obviously, we have a lot more progress to make, since there is still a lot of environmental destruction. However, this is changing quite rapidly, and industries are becoming less polluting all the time. And, this isn't because of environmentalists or politicians making laws against them. Pollution is a form of waste, and as industries become more advanced, they elminate all forms of waste. The toxic chemicals they used to dump in the environment are now getting sold to other industries as raw ingredients.

Being kind to the environment simply makes sense, because the environment is a rich natural resource to us, so it makes absolutely no sense in the long term to make this resource less valuable. Businesses throughout the world are starting to realize that more and more, not because of Al Gore and other environmentalists, but because it simply makes sound business sense to not waste valuable resources.

Unfortunately, a lot of environmentalists have the strategy of stopping the technological progress of humanity, because they see that as the cause of environmental destruction. What they don't see is that more advanced technologies will enable us to live quite peacefully with our environment, doing little harm and actually restoring so many damaged areas. We need to keep moving forward, learning as we go.

Thoughts Are Patterns of Matter and Energy

2007-10-11T21:10:00.000-06:00

Thoughts are arrangements of matter and energy. They don't have weight, although the matter and energy required to perform thinking does have weight.

If you arrange three sticks, you can make a triangle. The triangle is not in the sticks themselves or in the energy required to arrange them, but the shape of the triangle is real, and it emerges out of the arrangement of the sticks and disappears when the sticks are arranged differently.

The same principle applies to living organisms and thoughts. They are more than the matter and energy they are made of. The extra part is in the very specific arrangements of matter and energy representing living organisms and thoughts. If you destroy the arrangements of matter and energy, you destroy the organism and its thoughts.

For example, a house is not just a pile of wood, concrete, steel, paint, shingles, etc. The house is the very specific arrangement of those basic materials. The house is not in any of the materials or in all of them added together. The way all the materials are arranged is vitally important to it being a house and not just a pile of haphazard parts. The house is something beyond just the materials needed to make it, but it can't exist as a house without some kind of material.

In the same way, thoughts are far more than the molecules and cells that make up our brains. Thoughts are the result of a very precise arrangement of matter and energy. Thoughts transcend the matter and energy needed to form them, but they need matter and energy to exist at all, in the same way a house needs to be made of something to be real, even though it isn't simply the matter and energy it's made of.

The Dangers Of Untrue But Comforting Beliefs

2007-10-08T09:23:00.000-06:00

I think all kinds of untrue beliefs bring a lot of comfort to many people. Life has many horrible aspects to it, and we all learn to deal with it in our own ways, so we can continue living our lives without being overwhelmed by fear. We all need some kind of psychological defense mechanisms to keep our natural sense of fear in check. Denial, or pretending the feared event doesn't exist or won't happen, works very well. Believing that things are going to work out in the end because of some protective power, such as a parent, a spiritual protector, a god, angels, etc, works for many people. Just accepting that bad things will happen and learning to see them as opportunities for learning helps too. Learning to think rationally about the real risks and probabilities of things happening can help too.

There are all kinds of defensive mechanisms we can use to get through the day and not freak out about all the bad things that could happen or are happening. I wouldn't want to take someone's comforting beliefs away from them, no matter how incorrect they are. However, it's dangerous for them to base their comfort on deeply untrue beliefs, because they are just setting themselves up for the day when they realize for themselves that their comforting beliefs are simply not true, and they have no backup beliefs to get comfort from.

This happens to people all the time, and it's profoundly disturbing and disorienting to them when they realize that their life-long beliefs are simply not true. It leaves them without a significant source of comfort in their lives. They can often become angry and distrustful of those around them, who have perpetuated what they now know is a lie. What used to be a source of comfort now becomes a source of anger, bitterness and isolation from one's family and community. That is one of the great dangers of basing your comfort in life on untrue things. Eventually, it all falls apart, and this causes many of the very bad things you used those beliefs to protect you from.

The Difference Between Religion and Spirituality

2007-10-07T15:14:00.000-06:00

Religion is a social structure, used to control the thoughts and behaviors of people. For most of the last few thousand years, religion was the government of societies throughout the world. It is focused on strict obedience to rules and emphasizes strongly that those who follow the rules will be greatly rewarded while those who break the rules will be punished severely.

Spirituality is the experience of knowing and feeling that you are connected deeply to the rest of the universe. It is a deeply emotional and intellectual understanding that we truly are all part of one larger being. This being that we are all a part of is given many different names: "God", "the universe", etc, but the main point of spirituality is the way things are connected to each other and how they work together to create something much larger, more complex and wonderful than all the parts added up.

With spirituality, there is no emphasis on being obedient to rules. The important thing is to understand how things all work together and to do what is appropriate in each moment, based on deep insight into how things actually work. In many ways, science is a great tool for spirituality, because it helps us understand how the universe (our larger self) actually works, so we can learn to make better decisions, using that knowledge to benefit each other and make the universe itself much more knowledgable and powerful.

The War on Drugs

2007-10-07T15:07:00.000-06:00

People focus so much on the negative consequences of drug abuse, and they are willing to do whatever it takes to stop those problems. However, while drug abuse is a serious problem, many of the attempted solutions actually cause even worse additional problems while making the original problem even worse. In the case of the Drug War, drug problems have continued to get worse while the War on Drugs has funded terrorism, caused street warfare among rival gangs, created an industry devoted to getting more people addicted to drugs, a corrupt legal system and numerous other problems.

By making drugs illegal, it instantly made the price of them go up, because of the increased risk of being in that industry. This meant much higher profit margins for anyone participating in the drug trade. This provides great incentive to get even more people hooked on drugs because it provides a nice stable customer base and lots of money in profits. All this relatively easy money attracts all kinds of criminals wanting to get in on the action. They end up fighting over territory and customers. Terrorist organizations will often manufacture and sell drugs because it truly is an easy way to make lots of money. With all this money floating around, the legal system ends up getting compromised as police, prosecutors and judges are bribed or otherwise pressured to be dishonest.

All of this is made possible simply because those drugs are illegal. If they were legal, the profit margins would instantly disappear, and all those other problems would go away. We would still have the problems of drug addiction, but at least we wouldn't have people out there with the profit motive to get kids hooked on drugs, and we could focus on more effective and less problematic solutions to the serious problem of drug addiction. Right now, we are not solving the problem, but are making it worse and creating some new really horrible problems in the process.

So, we are spending billions of dollars fighting a War on Drugs that isn't actually accomplishing its mission, is funding drug pushers, street gangs and terrorists, and it's corrupting our legal system. It makes absolutely no sense. Unless the people supporting the War on Drugs are somehow benefitting from the illegal drug trade... It makes you wonder.

Mormon General Conference

2007-10-07T10:38:00.000-06:00

A few days ago, one of our Mormon neighbors offered my wife and I tickets to the Mormon General Conference yesterday morning. We accepted the tickets and attended the Saturday morning session of the conference. I was raised Mormon, but left when I was 18, and my wife was a convert to Mormonism when she was 20, but hasn't gone to church regularly for years, although she does have a lot of contact with our Mormon neighbors.

So, we got all dressed up and went to the conference center in downtown Salt Lake City. The building is huge and holds about 20,000 people. We arrived about an hour and a half early, but there were already huge crowds of people streaming towards the building, past many others holding signs and shouting out verses from the Bible.

There was an incredible security presence outside and inside the building. They all wore suits, so they blended in with the men attending the conference, but they were scattered throughout, watching everyone attentively. We even had to go through metal detectors in the entrance. This incredible amount of security made it very clear that the Mormons didn't really have faith that God would keep their conference secure.

Inside, the building was very large, extending deeply into the ground, and very well-designed for its purpose. It held lots of people but in a way that didn't feel crowded. The overall design was simple and elegant. I began thinking about how much it must have cost to build this building and where that money came from. Each member is required to donate 10% of their income to the church, so for each 1 million members, that is 100,000 full incomes flowing into the organization.

Listening to the speakers, I noticed three very clear themes. One was that we don't need to be afraid of death, because Jesus made it so we don't really die. The other theme repeated many times was that we needed to rely on faith and just believe that these claims are true. The other main theme was that full participation in the church was the ONLY way to reap the rewards of heaven.

One speaker made a very interesting point that I don't think he intended to make. He was talking about how different positions in the church are not any more special than any other position. Talking about his own position as one of the 12 "apostles", he said that his testimony of the truthfulness of the church was essentially the same as it was when he was eighteen years old. He described that testimony as essentially a good feeling he had while walking outside a building by himself. What I got from that is that even he, at the highest levels of the church, didn't have any real knowledge of the truth of it all, just a good feeling about it.

Another thing I noticed about the speakers is that they all seemed somewhat desperate to convince everyone that what the beliefs of the church were true. They kept bringing up having faith, along with emotionally charged stories, pleading with people to just believe and not let their faith waver.

For the most part, I was paying close attention to the people speaking, but sometimes I would look around at the other people in the audience, and I noticed that nearly everyone had a very bored look on their face and were generally not paying attention to what was said. I'm sure it's because they hear this same stuff each week at church. They probably missed the part where the major church leader said he doesn't really know whether any of it is true either -- he just has a good feeling about it.

Myths of Homelessness

2007-10-04T07:47:00.000-06:00

This is my posted response to an article I read about homelessness:

As someone who has worked with the homeless population for the past nine years, I felt that this article merely perpetuated common stereotypes of the homeless that simply aren't true.

The vast majority of the homeless population are only homeless for a very short period of time. In fact, a comprehensive study of shelter usage at The Road Home showed that 50% of all shelter clients stayed 26 days or less. In fact, 85% stayed less than 3 months.

So, the idea that they are jobless bums just hanging out and choosing to be homeless is very false. They are all choosing NOT to be homeless, because nearly all of them leave homelessness in a very short period of time.

The other common myth is that they just need to get a job. Most of them already have jobs when they become homeless. They just can't afford the high cost of rent with the amount they make. If anything comes up that costs too much money (medical bills, for example), they end up not being able to pay rent. Most of the homeless work, and they get out of homelessness very quickly.

The longer term homeless represent only a small fraction of the homeless population, maybe 10%-15%. These are the ones that the stereotypes are based on, although if you ever get to know them, you quickly see how wrong the stereotypes are.

These people usually have very serious physical and mental disabilities, and while most of them really do try to work, they usually simply cannot maintain their employment because of their disabilities. Many have seizure disorders and get fired for having a seizure on the job. Many have severe mental illnesses, and it's hard to work when you have a hard time just navigating reality and managing some pretty intense symptoms that are hard to treat. Many are of very low intelligence and don't even know how to go about getting a job that they are qualified for.

I could go on and on about all the serious barriers these people face and work hard to overcome. It's not their choice to have these problems in life, but they work hard to overcome them, and they need help from the community to succeed.

Yes, many of the homeless have substance abuse issues, and to a large extent that is their choice, but when they're at that point in life that they've lost everything because of their addiction, it is no longer a simple choice, and they need some serious help to overcome their own addiction.

The issues of homelessness are extremely complex, and I felt that your article could have been better informed by some deeper research. There are so many myths about homelessness constantly being perpetuated. They are simply not true, and it doesn't serve anyone's interest to perpetuate false ideas.

Science As Practical Spirituality

2007-10-04T07:06:00.000-06:00

There is a big difference between spirituality and religion. Spirituality is focused on an individual's experience of being deeply connected to the rest of the universe, while religion is a social structure, designed to establish norms of behavior and thought. Many spiritual people are religious, but many spiritual people are not religious at all.

In a very broad sense, I would be considered to be spiritual even though I reject nearly all concepts of God. I still believe that all humans are deeply connected to each other and to the rest of the universe, simply because we interact with each other so intensively and all our actions affect so much of the rest of the universe. We are the universe seeing itself through our eyes and thinking about itself with our minds.

When I criticize the dogmatism of so many people who have religious and spiritual beliefs, I am not attacking spirituality or religion. What I criticize is the common practice of stubbornly hanging on to ideas that aren't true instead of keeping an open mind and using good evidence and reasoning to guide our beliefs. We are the universe thinking through our minds, so we owe it to the universe to help it think more clearly about itself. If we hang on to untrue beliefs for sentimental reasons, then we are harming the universe's quest to understand itself better. The universe doesn't want it's minds filled with a bunch of untrue beliefs, since it wants an increasingly more accurate understanding of itself.

In my view, science is a deep form of practical spirituality, because it helps the universe think very clearly about itself, gaining very accurate knowledge of what it is and what it is capable of.

Exploring the Dark Room of Reality

2007-09-30T18:07:00.000-06:00

Understanding what reality truly is and how it actually works is the main goal of science. Science is a learning process, so at any point, we can't definitively say what reality is. However, our understanding of reality keeps getting more and more detailed and complete as we keep studying it.

Imagine you wake up and find yourself in a strange and utterly dark place and you want to figure out where you are and what kind of place you are in. To do this, you have to gather evidence, so you start wandering around, touching things, and as you do this, you start getting a better idea of the types of objects around you, the shapes of the rooms and the number of rooms and the number of floors of the building you find yourself in. The building is your reality, and in the beginning, you have little information about it, but as you go, you keep gaining more information and understanding it much better. My point is that you're not going to understand your reality except by studying it and analyzing the evidence you discover.

Being open minded is very important in this process of learning about reality. Open mindedness means being open to change your ideas about reality as you become aware of new evidence or new ways of understanding current evidence. In my example of waking up in the dark building, you may think you are confined in a single room, but as you explore, you find a hallway leading to another room. If you are closed-minded, you stick to your original idea that you are in one room, but an open-minded person accepts the evidence supporting the new room, even if they really liked the idea that they were in a single room.

Now imagine that there is someone else in the dark building with you, and they have been exploring around also. They excitedly tell you that on the third floor of the building, there is an open safe with one million dollars in it and a staircase that goes outside, so you can both be rich and free if you can get to it!

This sounds wonderful, but you are skeptical, since you've never even found a second floor in all your searching. They claim that they heard a voice telling them very clearly about all this, and they strongly believe it. You are still skeptical, but they seem so convinced, you begin a very systematic search of the building, and you still find that there is only one floor to it, with no doors going anywhere you haven't been. As far as you can tell, with all available evidence, there is no third floor, with a million dollar safe and a way out.

So you tell the person you don't believe their claim. They say, "I heard the voice telling me about all this, and this was a deeply personal experience and highly rewarding to know that there is a way out of here and that I will be rich also. Who are you to dash my hopes!? What PROOF do you have that there is no third floor safe and escape from here?" You tell them you aren't trying to dash anyone's hopes, but just sincerely trying to understand the building you found yourself in. All the evidence you have indicates that the building has only one floor, and other than the other person telling you about the third floor, you would never have even imagined it existed, since there was no evidence for it.

In fact, you could start imagining that you were in a building with any number of floors and that there were all kinds of fantastic things on these other floors. Just because you haven't found them on the floor you are on isn't proof that they don't exist on some other floor. You have no proof that they DON'T exist, even though you also have no proof that they do.

We are very much like people who have woken up to find themselves in some strange place, with little idea of what this reality is and how it works. We learn more and more as we study reality, gathering more and more evidence and analyzing it. Of course, we can imagine that all sorts of things MIGHT exist, even though we have no evidence that they actually do exist, and we actually can't PROVE that they DON'T exist, since we have no evidence either way.

Given that, science prefers to deal with they types of things we actually have evidence about. Other things MAY exist, but if we can't gather evidence about them, then we can't study them, so they are simply not interesting to they type of people who want to understand what the world is and how the world actually works.

People have all kinds of deeply personal and emotional experiences, such as angelic visitations, visions, hearing disembodied voices, having mystical experiences, and all kinds of other very compelling experiences. To them, these experiences are real and generally very meaningful.

However, it's also true that as scientists study the human mind more and more deeply, they are learning how easily the human mind can be fooled and how easily it will hallucinate things that aren't really there. Knowing this, it makes one wonder how many visions and other spiritual experiences were manufactured by the people's minds. We can't say for sure that any given person's vision wasn't real, but we do know that people really do hallucinate, quite frequently, so it seems like a very likely explanation for many or all of these spiritual experiences.

The one thing we don't have is any other evidence from the world that backs up what they are claiming about this reality we find ourselves in. They make a lot of claims about reality, and while we can't always prove their claims are false, they can't prove they are true, either. We could spend years making up millions of wonderful things that we could never disprove. However, just because we can't disprove them, that doesn't automatically make them all true.

Reality is how things really are, and exploring it is like feeling around in a dark room. We can keep learning more and more about reality by gathering and studying evidence. While it can be fun to imagine all the wonderful things that MIGHT exist, it is more practical to use the evidence we actually have to study the world that can be known.

Scientists Are Open MInded

2007-09-28T17:41:00.000-06:00

Scientists are often portrayed as being closed-minded and dogmatic because they make very confident claims about the world, and they frequently dismiss other people's claims quickly, without thinking much about their claims. They seem so sure they are right and that other people's ideas are wrong. How can they be so confident and why do they seem so dogmatic? Many people see science as just another religion and believe that its claims are just dogmatic beliefs.

Why are scientists so confident about their claims about reality? How do they know any of the things they claim with such certainty?

First of all, the whole purpose of science is to develop a very accurate understanding of reality. Scientists know that humans don't naturally perceive the world very accurately, so they have developed very careful techniques and instruments that help them see the world more clearly. Because they have studied the world so intensely and so carefully, they are very confident about many areas of knowledge. They are always learning more and adjusting their understanding, and there are many areas they don't understand very well yet, but the whole enterprise of science is about learning.

So, when a scientist dismisses someone's claim about reality, such as alternative medical treatments, psychic phenomenon, astrology, etc., it may seem that they are being extremely close-minded. However, it's not they who are being close-minded, it's reality that is being close-minded, because in the end it's reality that is rejecting those claims, not the scientist.

Some things simply aren't so, and if you consult with reality, you can see that they aren't so. For example, if I claim that the moon is made up entirely of pastry dough, and a scientist immediately says that I am wrong about that, are they being close-minded for rejecting my claim so quickly? No, they aren't. They know what the moon is made of, because they have many samples of the moon, and they have studied them very thoroughly. In this case, reality is being close-minded, because it dogmatically keeps the moon made of rocks instead of open-mindedly allowing it to be made of pastry dough or whatever I personally want to believe it is made of. Reality is what it is, and our beliefs about it don't change it.

Scientists are actually trained to be open-minded, because being close-minded prevents them from learning. They are trained to keep their options open and not jump to conclusions, and they take great care to keep their personal beliefs or hopes from influencing the results of their experiments.

It's exactly because they are so careful in their measurements, observations and experiments that they end up being so confident in their conclusions. The results of science are not casual observation or speculation or even the scientists' personal beliefs. They are the honest probing of the universe, sincerely trying to understand how things really are.

Using Animals For Food

2007-09-23T18:09:00.000-06:00

I'm sure that visiting the places where animals are killed butchered would leave most people with a different attitude about that kind of food. A lot of what people feel when seeing that kind of thing are the emotions of disgust and sadness. We feel disgust when we see carcasses, slimy things, etc, because most often when our ancestors discovered these kinds of things naturally, they would often enough become very ill and die from touching or eating them, so we evolved to have a strong sense of disgust for certain kinds of things because they are likely to be dangerous, and our disgust for them helps us avoid them.

We naturally have empathy for others, especially other humans, but it extends to other animals and even plants as well. This has aided our survival quite well because it helps us generally act in ways that benefit those around us, which promotes their survival, and the fact that they feel the same way promotes our survival. It keeps us from hurting each other so much, and it motivates us to take care of each other better, which overall helps our species survive better.

So, there are very good evolutionary reasons why we are disgusted and sad at an animal butchering factory, but does that emotional reaction mean that it is actually morally wrong to kill animals for food? If the animals are treated well, given regular food, kept protected from predators and diseases and then killed in a relatively painless way, it seems that they are getting a pretty good deal out of it all. In the wild, most of them wouldn't exist anyway, and those that did would get diseases, starve, get eaten by predators, become injured then slowly and painfully die, and in general have rather mediocre if not really bad lives. Given the choice, I think I would rather be a farm animal than a wild animal. Either way, I'm going to die, but on the farm I have a much better quality of life.

Of course, some farms treat the animals very badly, and some are really bad for the environment. But aside from that, I don't see anything wrong with using animals for food as long as we're good to them while they're alive and kill them humanely.