ConnecticutBlue

A mission for non-believers

noreply@blogger.com (Joe C) — Mon, 10 Feb 2014 21:06:00 +0000

I've been wondering if there's something more we non-believers should be doing than just arguing with the faithful. While that might help in our goal of being recognized as fully entitled citizens along with all the believers, it's always seemed to me that we should have a higher, more noble, practical goal.

I think we should be the leaders in debunking bullshit. We're all about evidence and logic, right? Shouldn't we be out there leading the charge against the vaccination and climate-change deniers, the ancient astronaut and UFO purveyors? It seems to me we'd do a lot more service to our fellow man by calling bullshit on pseudoscience, chiropractors, new age woo-woo, truthers, birthers and all brands of conspiracy theorists than trying to tell born-again idiots for the zillionth time that the burden of proof is on them.

My answers to "13 Questions Every Christian Must Eventually Ask Themselves"

noreply@blogger.com (Joe C) — Thu, 09 Jan 2014 20:05:00 +0000

My thanks to my Twitter acquaintance @naum (Naum Trifanoff) for introducing me, through his tumbler blog, AZSPOT, to Stephen Mattson. Stephen is a Christian writer whose blog at stephenjmattson.com is subtitled "Inspiration. Faith. Christian Culture. Writing." I've been impressed by his willingness to take on difficult topics and ask questions that are unusual in a lot of Christian writing, and also to engage rationally with a non-believer like me.

Today, I saw that he posted this list of "13 Questions Every Christian Must Eventually Ask Themselves". I found the post refreshing for its candor and challenge to the faithful, but also a bit disappointing because questions like these are usually expected to inspire yet more circuitous apologetics and tortuous rationalizations, to deny the the simplest and most obvious answer, that gods are figments of the human imagination. That's the proverbial elephant in the room, you might say.

I thought I'd provide this non-believer's point of view here and link it from a comment on Steven's blog. You should fully read each of his questions first, by the way, to fully understand my answers.

1. What is salvation?

Salvation is an imaginary cure to an imaginary disease, sin. The promise of a life of eternal bliss after death, or more to the point the escape from an eternity of suffering is not unique to Christianity, except in the decorative details. The human brain, being able to apprehend its own mortality, wishfully invents imaginary methods to escape death. I find this to be the best and most obvious explanation. All the other questions about permanency, predestination, etc. are irrelevant unless you believe the primary assertion in the first place. Contrary to the last sentence, salvation is only complicated if you believe it exists.

2. Do I own my faith?

Every baby is born an atheist. For the vast majority of people, they were indoctrinated in the faith of their family or the prevailing faith of the place they grew up. Even the most bible-believing Christian would probably have been a Muslim or Hindu except for an accident of birth.

3. Can I trust the Bible?

Not any more than any other holy book and a lot less than, say, a high school chemistry or history book. It was written by people with an agenda translated from translations and heavily edited and "harmonized" over the centuries to remove even more inconsistencies than it currently contains.

4. How do Biblical texts apply to modern society?

The Bible is a historical Iron Age anthology of myths with perhaps a sprinkling of semi-accurate anecdotes. Attempting to apply the Bible to modern day civilization is usually an exercise in picking out passages that justify, in some indirect or painfully convoluted manner what you think you ought to do anyway.

5. Who is God?

"A million different people have a million different definitions of God", you say. Isn't the most obvious explanation for this that God is an imaginary concept that every person constructs from their own mind, guided by an arbitrarily chosen set of dogmatically asserted qualities? If God were real, there'd be only one basic definition, wouldn't there?

6. Why does God allow bad things to happen?

The simplest explanation is that the universe has no intent, no purpose, no knowledge. It just is. And volcanoes explode and lightning strikes and storms destroy with no malice aforethought. They don't know we're here and they don't care. On the plus side, the universe carries no grudges, it's not out to get us.

7. Why is God so morbidly violent in the Old Testament?

Because when the Old Testament was written people were barely civilized and barbaric, so the deity they invented merely fits in with the times.

8. How does free will affect my faith?

Leaving aside the general philosophical question of free will, all of the issues you bring up about the implications with respect to faith exist only because of the inherent incongruities of a supposed perfect God and an observed imperfect world. If, instead, you consider that the universe is simply the way it is without apparent reason or purpose and without an omnipotent and omniscient controlling deity, all these perplexities and conundrums simply evaporate. They are only artifacts of the base problem of trying to fit the square peg of a perfect deity into the round hole of reality.

9. How can you believe in something that can’t be scientifically proven?

I'd suggest a better way to ask this is, "How can you believe in something for which there is no evidence?"(1) I think people pretend or force themselves to believe because they've been told they'll go to hell or they're a bad person if they don't. In other words, what they really believe in is belief, as Dan Dennett puts it.

10. What make Christianity different than any other religion?

Basically nothing except for the choice of wallpaper and drapes, the trappings, the inconsequential details. In the most important attribute of being true, it's just like all the others, there's no evidence to support it being true.

11. How has my faith been influenced?

We don't have different arithmetics or different physics depending on where we were born or what religion we are. They aren't "filtered" as you put it. If there really was a God and He spoke to people and the Bible really was true, how could what anyone believes be different than anyone else?

12. Am I using my faith to serve another agenda?

Nothing further from me necessary. You nailed it.

13. What is the point of following Christ?

I only wish more self-described Christians actually followed Christ's example and simply left the "believing" bit behind. We'd all be a lot better off. It's what you do that counts, not what you believe.

===================================

(1) Strictly speaking, only mathematicians "prove" things. Natural scientists only have provisional explanations for natural phenomena that have not been disproven by experiment or supplanted by simpler, more comprehensive explanations.

Is praying "doing something"?

noreply@blogger.com (Joe C) — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 18:08:00 +0000

On Twitter and Facebook, I've been seeing many requests for prayers and returned promises to pray for loved ones or really anyone caught in Superstorm Sandy's path. One of my fellow non-believing friends, however, took strong issue with her town's First Selectman asking people to pray that another Nor'easter forecast for next week will fizzle or turn out to sea. My friend said, "People tried that for Sandy." I think her point was that public officials should be preparing in the real world if a storm does come, and encouraging their citizens to do the same, rather than seeking divine intervention, which was clearly not forthcoming for Sandy.

As usually happens on Twitter, other comments followed, including this one from me: "Praying is something you do to make yourself feel good without actually having to do anything real." This elicited a short exchange of tweets with others about whether prayer was actually "doing something". One believer friend said, "Understand your points of view, but consider myself religious & praying to me doesn't mean no action."

I wanted to clarify my opinion and some facts here and hope that my believing friends will understand more precisely what I'm trying to say. I think it has to do with what people mean when they say, "doing something." Are they referring to the simple act of engaging in an activity, as in "are you doing something tonight"? Or, do they mean having an effect on a real world situation, as in "doing something about childhood obesity"?

In the first sense of simply engaging in an activity, praying is clearly doing something. You're thinking, you may be uttering words, kneeling, using Rosary beads, or whatever. But in the sense of having an effect on the real world, an objective, honest look at the facts reveals there's absolutely no evidence or reason to think that that prayer works. If it did, the world would be much, much different place.

Now, my believer friend might ask, "If I tell my friend that I'm praying for him and that makes him feel better, haven't I had an effect on the real world?" Well, yes and no. I can tell someone I'm going to pray or did pray for him and make him feel better, but it's the real world act of telling him that made him feel better. He'd feel better regardless of whether I prayed for him or not.

To understand my view on this, I would ask my believer friend to engage in the following thought experiment. Imagine yourself in a strange foreign land where mowing one's lawn is regarded as a supplication to a divine being. A member of this society, upon hearing you'll be flying on soon, says, "I shall dedicate tomorrow's mowing to your safe travels." How would you feel about that statement and that person? Clearly, his mowing of the lawn can't have any possible effect on your airplane, its flight crew, or the weather through which you're traveling. It's quite ridiculous, but what do you do? He considers this a sincere gesture and would probably take offense if you laughed or pointed out its patent foolishness. Being a guest in this society, you'd probably be diplomatic and politely thank him. After all, what's the harm if he believes that?

If it were only him or if all he did was wish you well while cutting the lawn, I'd agree that there wouldn't be any harm. But suppose that in that odd society a majority believe to varying degrees in the efficacy of lawn mowing to cure cancer, end teen-age pregnancy and ensure spousal fidelity, not to mention winning this week's football game. The less fervent vocalize the belief pretty mechanically without really thinking much about it, more or less just to fit in. The more radical among them sponsor legislation to divert funds from science research toward promotion of lawn mowing and claim that only True Lawn Mowers should be allowed to hold public office. And therein lies the problem. Moderation gives cover to extremism. Believing, even half-heartedly, that the "doing something" of praying actually has an effect, always risks diverting us from "doing something" that actually does have an effect.

...an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion

noreply@blogger.com (Joe C) — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 18:20:00 +0000

From the Merriam-Webster online dictionary comes this:

Definition of FETISH

1

a : an object (as a small stone carving of an animal) believed to have magical power to protect or aid its owner;broadly : a material object regarded with superstitious or extravagant trust or reverence

b : an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion :prepossession

c : an object or bodily part whose real or fantasied presence is psychologically necessary for sexual gratification and that is an object of fixation to the extent that it may interfere with complete sexual expression

2

: a rite or cult of fetish worshipers

3

: fixation

Consider in particular definition 1b, please: "an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion".

America, or at least a certain segment of Americans have what can only be described as just such an irrational, obsessive devotion to an inanimate object, namely the American Flag. They insist that everyone must adhere to the particular meaning, significance and treatment of the flag that they do. They act as if they own the copyright to the flag and can dictate to others the manner in which it can be displayed, used or handled according to their subjective assessment of what is right and wrong. They are "offended" when someone appropriates the flag image or even pieces of it for a purpose they deem "incorrect" even though their rules are arbitrary and inconsistent.

Today, there was a lot of conservative feather ruffling about this image from the Obama campaign.

But how many times have you seen an image like this used in advertising or clothing actually worn on the beach or elsewhere? Why isn't this the object of conservative wrath?

It's stock material for Presidents' Day car dealer ads. And consider the New England Patriots players and cheerleaders uniforms.

And a host of other appropriated flag symbols...

America's pastime, no?

Commercial co-opting of the flag! Picket them!

This is the topper to me. Exactly what all the fuss is about with Obama "branding" the flag.

We're not only going to stuff this flag in the oven, we're going to EAT IT!

How many Katy Perry concerts were protested? Uh.. none?

Ironic since Lincoln was a Republican. :)

Wonder how many trucks you see this on that are festooned with other uber patriotic paraphernalia?

And finally, of course...

Looks like it's supposed to be the stripes on a waving flag to me. But of course, that's just my subjective opinion. Unfortunately, my subjective opinion is apparently not as official as others.

Here's the thing. Nobody owns the flag. Nobody gets to dictate what's an "appropriate" or "inappropriate" use for it. My idea of appropriate may be different from yours. In light of all the interpretations and uses of the flag I've just shown that draw nary a raised eyebrow, it's clear the complaining is about who has done the interpreting, not the result.

If it were an orange, or a statue, a rock or a pair of pliers that people were so ritualistically treating, we'd suspect they were perhaps obsessive-compulsives. If it were a high-heeled shoe, a whip or a latex body suit, we'd call them kinky. But because the inanimate object of their fixation is the flag, we're supposed to defer respectfully to their arbitrary and lopsided subjectivity about who uses it and how.

It seems to me there are a lot of real, substantive issues to talk about in this campaign that are more weighty than a perceived slight to the hyper-sensitive flag lobby. I mean seriously, y'all, it's not like it's a video about Mohammed or anything.

"How did things ever get so far?"

noreply@blogger.com (Joe C) — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 15:05:00 +0000

Last night I had the unpleasant experience of getting involved in a religious flame war with some long-time twitter friends. One I think is still talking to me, and while I hope the others will cool off and reconsider at some point, I'm afraid that may not happen any time soon.

While I'm sort of doubtful now whether any of them will read this, I hope they do because I want to take the time to lay out what I think sans the emotional extremes of last night.

It all started when I heard two of them lamenting this Salon.com post "Did God Help Gabby Douglas Win?". They were upset that someone found fault with the 16 year old indulging in the practice made famous by another loudly Christian athlete, Tim Tebow, of issuing the obligatory series of proclamations of faith and thanks to Jesus and God for winning. In the Salon post, author Mary Elizabeth Williams writes,

As a Christian myself (albeit one of those really freaky papist kinds), I’ve often wondered what it is about Christians like Douglas that unnerves me so. The closest I’ve been able to figure it is that Douglas and her ilk seem to espouse a faith based on what is commonly referred to as “The God of Parking Spaces.” It’s the deity that grants wishes to those who ask nicely. Douglas is a girl who has described God as the figure who’s “waking me up every morning and keeping me safe in the gym every day.”She told People Thursday, “I was on the bus and it was raining and I thought, ‘It’s going to be a great day.’ My mom used to tell me when I was little, ‘When it rains, it’s God’s manifestation, a big day’s waiting to happen.’ I texted my mom, ‘It’s raining. You know what that means.’” It means that Russian girl is going down, I guess.

It was at this point that I piped up and said, "Guys, it's the Tebow effect. Public displays of faith are like public displays of affection. They should be private." The discussion went predictably downhill from there. A guy for whom I've always had a lot of affection for his wit, tolerance and candor was soon calling me every thing from smarmy to bitch. As Don Corleone said, "How did things ever get so far? I don't know. It's so unfortunate, so unnecessary."

So I want to at least make my position clear and hopefully erase any misunderstandings that may have lead to my friend taking such huge personal offense.

Here's my main complaint. Within certain faiths, in the US it's most notably Evangelical Christian denominations, it's apparently customary when speaking to a group to include an obligatory profession of one's faith as though one were on stage at church. With some notable exceptions, I have no issue with this total perfusion approach to religion as long as they keep it inside their own group. If you want to take the opportunity to testify at your next prayer meeting or in conversation with a fellow parishioner at your local Christian hardware store, be my guest. It's when this practice finds its way into public discourse that I start to have problems.

People who adhere to these particular strains of religion seem to have lost sight of the fact that making unsolicited, gratuitous public demonstrations of faith is inappropriate and simply bad manners. It's as though they have no appreciation or consideration that not everyone believes or behaves the same way they do. This practice, in my opinion, crosses the line into passive-aggressive proselytizing. As such it exploits and abuses the public common and takes advantage of other people's consideration and tolerance.

They don't seem to get that it makes other people uncomfortable, sort of like the discomfort and annoyance you feel when someone at a cocktail party feels it's ok to press their business card in your hand and give you their sales pitch at what is supposed to be a social function. I didn't ask you, I don't care, it's inappropriate, it's none of my business, I'm not interested, please go away.

Preemptively throwing your religious beliefs in people's faces without anyone ever asking is presumptuous, impolite and most importantly injects a highly subjective and explosive element into what might otherwise be a calm, objective and civil discussion. When I was growing up, the first rule of tolerance was to keep your opinions to yourself unless someone asked. Now it seems the rule is, shoot your mouth off first and let others complain, then accuse them of "intolerance".

And before I'm accused of being just as provocative and inconsiderate, let me point out that I didn't start this flame war. It's people like Tim Tebow, who's an adult and should have a little more wisdom and sensitivity who always fire the first shot, who take the opportunity to turn a post-game press conference into a prayer meeting. I'll give Gabby Douglas a pass because she's young and may just not know better. But someone ought to tell her that while that kind of thing may play well at her church, a press conference is not a pulpit.

Make-Believe Belief

noreply@blogger.com (Joe C) — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 13:06:00 +0000

I think a lot of people say they believe in God because they think they are supposed to, not because they really do. Many times, it comes out as a half-hearted mumble like, "I don't go to church, but y'know, I believe in God and stuff."

There's a lot of cultural pressure in the US to keep making believe you believe. It's perceived as the norm, the socially acceptable default position. Such a perfunctory declaration like the one above means, I think, that the person making it is uncomfortable and would really rather not talk about it anymore. What they mean is, "Look, I'm saying what I'm supposed to say, now please stop asking questions."

The fact is, in this country, saying you don't believe can cause you a lot of problems; with your family, your friends, even at work and with police and government in many places, even though religious discrimination is patently against the law. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiyJzWy3CDQ

Really, for a lot of people, religion plays very little part in their day-to-day lives most of the time. They may go to church on Easter or Christmas, but the rest of the year they can't be bothered. Even for people who do attend church regularly and believe with a bit more conviction, they live most of their lives as we atheists do. They use reason and evidence to make decisions about their lives. They go to doctors, they buy insurance. They're properly skeptical about marketing claims, used car salesmen, things like UFOs and ouija boards, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus, and of course about every other religion except theirs. But when it comes to their own religion, they dutifully parrot back the appropriate platitude, perhaps with some kind of within-the-rules qualifications.

I think many people go through life as perfunctory or make-believe believers because they don't want to be perceived as (gasp) atheists who have a very bad, but largely fabricated and undeserved reputation, a caricature, if you will. This caricature was created and tuned over the years by the leaders of faiths to keep people coming to church, paying their tithes and keeping them in business and employed.

People frequently seem genuinely surprised when I tell them I'm an atheist. They usually don't say it, but I can tell they're thinking, "But he seems so nice." That's because they have never met a real, live atheist-and this is important-that they knew was an atheist. As I've pointed out, being an "out" atheist has definite downsides, especially in certain highly religious parts of the country. People who don't believe don't generally talk about it, because even the actual existence of an atheist is considered "offensive" to the faithful.

So religion has managed to get this kind of perpetual motion machine going where they construct a strawman atheist that they imbue with all kinds of mean and evil qualities and then tell their flock the tale, selecting appropriate scriptural references to back it up. Of course, very few people jump at the chance to be vilified, so they don't identify as atheists. They may even go so far as to play the make-believe belief game just to be able to get on with their lives. So, since nobody will admit to even questioning their belief, never mind being an atheist, the faithful flock never actually have to confront the cognitive dissonance that the nice guy who fixes their car, or the doctor that makes them well, or the kind teacher that teaches their kids algebra is a non-believer. So the caricature is never challenged, so non-believers stay in the closet, and so on ad infinitum.

The misinformation propagated about atheists is manifest in ways that range from the truly vitriolic and mean-spirited to the comically naive. There are many very nice people who, having never met an out atheist, harbor the most outrageous beliefs about atheism that you can tell stick in their craw when they actually have to say it in front of someone who doesn't shrink from the apellation.

So if you don't believe, it's important to say so because it makes the prejudiced confront their cognitive dissonance and at the same time shows the perfunctory or make-believe believers that it's ok to not believe and that perfectly normal and nice people that they know and like and trust are good without gods. It's what Daniel Dennett calls "breaking the spell" and a big part of that spell is its attendant voodoo doll character of the atheist. It's not true and it never has been. So go forth and identify, brothers and sisters!

A note to creationists

noreply@blogger.com (Joe C) — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 09:50:00 +0000

Dear Deluded,

As much as your sleazy and disingenuous attempts to harness the government to insert your narrow religion into science classes annoys me, I sleep well at night knowing,

A. The facts are all on my side.

B. Eventually, as sure as the Earth orbits the sun, your tiresome whining and baseless beliefs will be relegated to the scrap heap of abandoned superstition and dogma along with geocentrism, phlogiston and alchemy. It's just a matter of time and the clock never stops ticking.

Every equation solved, every phenomenon explained, every fossil found, every theoretical prediction experimentally confirmed throws another spadeful of dirt on your ideological coffin.

Resistance to Knowledge and Reality is Futile. You will be assimilated.

"You weren't there."

noreply@blogger.com (Joe C) — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 19:58:00 +0000

Creationism goes through various fads of purported "arguments" against evolution. Some creationist will come up with a clever catch-phrase or novel way of rhetorically twisting ideas so as to appear to make a valid argument. One of the popular ones I hear lately is the "You weren't there" argument. They claim that since you weren't there at the beginning of the universe or when humans came into existence or when Christ supposedly walked the earth, was resurrected, etc. that their notion of how or if it happened a particular way is just as good as the scientific or historical explanation.

Well, in all legal cases, the people deciding the verdict (either a jury or the judge) weren't present at the scene of the crime either, but they have a very refined way of determining guilt or innocence. It's called evidence. I dare say any Christian accused of a crime would expect evidence exonerating him or her to be presented in court and duly assessed by the jury or judge, or if they are the plaintiff, to expect that evidence that they have for the commission of a crime against them would be duly heard and evaluated.

If they had an evidence-based alibi that they were somewhere else other than the crime scene they would rightly never accede to someone saying, "Well, I have this magical book that claims itself to be correct that if interpreted in the proper way shows that the defendant is guilty. And since the jury wasn't there, my version is just as valid as the defendant's." Well, no it isn't as good.

Science has evidence that exists in the real world that anyone can examine and that's the same for everyone, apart from anyone's opinion. Religion has nothing except personal testimony and florid rhetoric. You wouldn't accept what passes for arguments by theists in a court of law and you shouldn't accept it for arguments about morality or any other "ought" we need to consider.

By the way, this is why creationists lost in the Dover case. In a court of law, facts matter.

Inspiration, hope and comfort

noreply@blogger.com (Joe C) — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 22:06:00 +0000

The previous post here, "I need some help with a logical fallacy", brought some interesting comments. And they got me to thinking about why otherwise smart and rational people choose to abandon reason and reality when it comes to their religion.

As I pointed out in one of my reply comments, reason and science work in the real world. They've given us cures for diseases that used to decimate entire populations, technological wonders that enable us to travel long distances by air, communicate over the entire globe instantaneously and feed billions of people, if not yet all of them. The scientific method, with its dogged reliance on the natural world, its unsleeping demand for evidence, objectivity and consistency and its openness to new ideas and explanations has proven to be a reliable prescription for arriving at the best answers possible at any given time.

So why do people who benefit by all these wonders continue to throw reason and reality out the window and seek "revealed" truth from ancient texts alleged to be divinely inspired, but pretty obviously created and written by ordinary mortals that are full of contradictory statements and sanction, nay, demand patently immoral behavior from its adherents?

From talking with religious friends, the thing that seems to attract people to religion and faith that keeps coming up has to do with feelings like inspiration, hope and comfort. This I kind of get. When things are going badly, we can certainly get ourselves in a rut. Discouragement, adversity and pain are all parts of our existence as humans on this little blue planet. We need ways to deal with them. Imagining a magical revelation of an answer, or deliverance to a time when the worries have passed or relief from either physical or mental pain may often get one through a rough patch.

From this point of view, religion is a coping mechanism. When there seems to be no hope in the real world, the possibility of a power beyond reality that offers solace is powerfully attractive. And in fact, there's a strong correlation between hardship and religiousness and conversely between economic and intellectual richness and atheism.

But none of my religious friends that I've talked to are in any serious hardship situation. I think this is where the "inspirational" part of the equation comes to bear. Imagining an omnipotent, omniscient force in the universe that "has a plan for you" might inspire someone to things they wouldn't try otherwise. A "leap of faith" is a common theme. You can't be sure, but you have "faith" based on virtually nothing that things will work out.

What do you think? If you're a person of faith, what does it give you that you don't get from the real world? I'll save the tougher questions for later.

I need some help with a logical fallacy

noreply@blogger.com (Joe C) — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 21:57:00 +0000

Ok, fellow reasoners and free-thinkers, I need some help here. I need a simple riveting explanation for the logical fallacy that non-belief is a faith. The best analogy I've heard is, "Atheism is no more a faith than not playing golf is a sport."

That's great, I love it, but it doesn't encapsulate the fundamental logical fallacy that underlies it. What I want to say is, just because I don't accept an unsubstantiated belief you have doesn't imply that what I think is also unsubstantiated. You can't tar me with the same brush.

Any thoughts you have on this subject would be appreciated. Thank you!

When charities go bad

noreply@blogger.com (Joe C) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:28:00 +0000

As we approach Super Bowl Sunday this weekend, I'm afraid I might draw a penalty flag with this post for "piling on", which is the football term for throwing oneself on a pile of players who have already brought down the ball carrier.

But I hope I bring what might be an interesting male perspective on the whole Komen Foundation/Planned Parenthood flap that occurred over the past few days.

My only personal contact with the Komen Foundation was through fund-raising efforts at my golf club. And I must say they were not pleasant. On two different occasions, members of the club confronted their fellow members during social events and asked them pointedly, in front of their friends, to give cash to the Komen Foundation.

I definitely got the sense that the people involved had, as the saying goes, "drunk the Kool-Aid". They'd been brainwashed, in a sense, into thinking that the cause was so righteous and so holy and so above reproach that it was alright to confront and embarrass one's friends in public about it.

This was my first clue that the Komen Foundation had gone way around the bend in its fund-raising tactics. After that, I never gave them another nickel. And I began to notice other things, like the pink gloves and shoes and whatever else on NFL players and everywhere else for that matter. Komen had become more than enthusiastic, they'd become overbearing, self-serving and sanctimonious.

The final nails in the coffin came in the last few days during the Planned Parenthood funding debacle. First, my Boston friend and breast cancer survivor Alicia Staley re-published her post on Komen's financial statement and their inclination to litigation. This made it perfectly clear in dollars and cents that Komen cared more about itself and its brand than about the women it was supposed to be helping. Lastly, Lisa Adams, another friend and cancer survivor, posted her experience with, as she put it, "divorcing the Komen Foundation".

As a cancer patient myself (CLL), although not nearly as endangered as Alicia or Lisa, I am disappointed that an organization ostensibly created to help cancer patients, should become so self-centered, inwardly focused and as a consequence cowardly and subservient to intimidation.

A note to my conservative friends about SOPA

noreply@blogger.com (Joe C) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:25:00 +0000

Some of you may see the Stop SOPA-PIPA battle and the website blackouts by thousands of personal blogs and commercial sites as a "liberal" movement. But I would ask you to consider the larger implications for free speech and to realize that censorship of the Internet by traditional media companies poses a perhaps greater threat to conservative ideas and values than to liberal ones.

Conservatives have had issues for literally decades with what they perceive to be liberal leadership and control of media; not just with network broadcasting, but also and perhaps more pervasively in entertainment production. My friends, these are the very interests behind SOPA and PIPA. If you believe that there is liberal bias in the media industry, you should be fighting harder than anyone to ensure that those forces are not able to exert arbitrary control of publishing on the web.

Everyone suffers when people are not free to speak. The conservative interests in our country thrive just as much on grass-roots activism and opinion as do liberal ones.

Conservatives have always championed the idea of removing the stifling hand of government regulation and control from small businesses and entrepreneurs. We are experiencing a transformation of our business processes and societal communication through the internet. I can think of no more stultifying measure upon this explosion of innovation than the control and regulation of content, for after all, that's all the Internet really is: a means to create and distribute content.

So I would ask all of you, my friends, to consider expressing your opinion on this threat to perhaps the single most essential freedom we have as Americans: our freedom to express our opinion the way we see fit.

It must be the ball

noreply@blogger.com (Joe C) — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 20:40:00 +0000

Sometimes, when my golf game isn't going particularly well, when I'm struggling to find a swing that works, or to have any feel for how hard to hit a putt, superstition will just happen to drop by on a sales call. "So, I saw that snap hook drive on the fifth hole. Man, doesn't it suck playing out of that wet rough on the left side? And you skulled that chip on four, too. You know, I'll bet it's that ball. It was working ok to start, but something's gotten into it, I think. It's not your friend anymore. I never liked that brand anyway. Must be the ball. Yeah, that's the ticket."

Now experience has taught me that unless there's a substantial physical defect like a cut or some mud on the ball, it's never the ball. It's always me. Golf balls today are remarkably uniform and consistent. There are some actual performance differences between them due to design tradeoffs (e.g., spin vs. distance), but for the average amateur golfer, they're so small as to be inconsequential. Almost all the variations in shot outcomes are due only to how the player hits, or more to the point, mishits the ball.

I endeavor to have no superstitions. Really, none. I don't believe in ghosts or gods, black cats or lucky rabbits' feet. Superstition makes one fearful of imaginary threats and expectant of imaginary help. But it's hard to keep superstition and the perception of supernatural agency at bay. In our imperfectly evolved brains, it's always loitering there in the wings, waiting for a momentary lapse in our reasoning to pounce and intrude anything from the trivial to the apparently profound in our minds.

Superstition, institutionalized as religion or not, is seductive. It's easy. It's colorful, even lyrical. There are no bothersome theorems, experiments or evidence to get in the way. If it doesn't fit, you can ignore it. After all, it's your subjective experience that counts, right? You make all the rules. It's your own private Idaho.

That's the lazy way out, a facile and pat explanation or solution to any problem. When complexity or facts intrude, well, either a miracle occurred or God works in mysterious ways. And miracles and mystery are definitely more intriguing and entertaining than say, Avogadro's Number or Bernoulli's Equation.

But ultimately, belief in supernatural agency is just ducking your responsibility, passing the buck to some imaginary being or cause. "It's not my fault. There's nothing I can do. It's not possible to understand why this is happening."

Reasoning, on the other had, requires work. There aren't any short cuts. You can't appeal to a simple supernatural explanation or agent, declare victory and go home. Reality has this annoying tendency to reassert itself. It exhibits randomness, unpredictability. It's capricious, complicated, stubborn, inscrutable, unyielding to argument or entreaty. It doesn't play nicely with wishful thinking or hand-waving.

Reason doesn't have a back door. You can't throw up your hands when you don't have an answer and say, "Well hey, it must be God's will." But spurning superstition for reason and real work yields far more useful and ultimately satisfying results, because they're real and repeatable not imagined or hoped for.

As Arnold Palmer once said, "It's a funny thing. The more I practice, the luckier I get."

Message to Rep. Joe Courtney, CT 2nd District

noreply@blogger.com (Joe C) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 21:58:00 +0000

I received an email today from our House Rep. Joe Courtney, that crowed about the wonderful NDAA bill that he "worked on the final language" for and voted for that got more submarine contract work to New London County. I sent him the following message back on his website:

I am in receipt of your email regarding the NDAA bill. Mr. Courtney, I would not be so hasty to attach my name and associate myself with this bill. Its provision for indefinite detainment of US citizens without due process is a travesty of everything this country was built on, and an insult to the thousands of our citizens who fought and died to protect our Constitutional rights.

No sir, I would not be so hasty to take credit for gutting habeas corpus and pushing us one step further toward a totalitarian police state. I can assure you, sir, that I will expend my energy to remove from office you and every other member of Congress who voted for it, and the President, should he not veto it.

Frankly, I find it revolting that you think our freedoms can be bought with a submarine contract. You and every member of Congress that voted for this bill should be ashamed of yourselves.

Mere belief is not evidence and evidence is not mere belief

noreply@blogger.com (Joe C) — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 23:10:00 +0000

The 1st amendment guaranteeing freedom of religion is a marvelous thing. But, it has at least one unintended consequence we must live with.

People I talk to routinely confuse the right to speak and believe with the job of being taken seriously. Yes, you can say or believe whatever you want, but that doesn't make it true or even defensible. That takes work. It takes evidence, it takes logical consistency. It requires you to offer some proof of your assertion, not just your testimony, or objections about someone else's assertion.

No. If you want to challenge a theory that explains the evidence, you have to come up with a better, more comprehensive theory that is backed by evidence explains the data more completely and that makes predictions that can be tested in the real world.

And I would add, pushing back on an assertion you make that I think is fallacious is not trampling on your freedom of speech, it's merely asking you back up what you say. In a court of law, you wouldn't accept a testimony against you that was merely someone's opinion. I'm doing nothing different. I'm sorry, but it's not acceptable to merely say, "Well, that's what I believe, and that's good enough."

And finally, evidentiary proof and reason are not simply an alternative, unsubstantiated belief that can be dismissed as merely individual opinion. The physical, natural world is the same for both of us. As the science fiction author Philip K. Dick put it, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

Memorials

noreply@blogger.com (Joe C) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 23:24:00 +0000

Memorial controversies are back in the news. This AP story, "Small cities struggle to pay for 9/11 memorials", relates how local governments in several states, sometimes with no personal connections to 9/11 victims or responders started out to build memorials but now find themselves in the lurch since the economy went south. This on the heels of the debates and lawsuits about the "cross" going into the Ground Zero memorial in New York and the mosque being built nearly adjacent to the WTC site.

It seems to me that sometimes memorials like this cause more trouble and hard feelings than serve their ostensible purpose, which is to keep alive and present the memory of people who have died in service of the country or as a result of a natural or man-made disaster or tragedy.

While this is a noble goal we seem unable to undertake memorial building without having it become an exercise in controversy and mollification.

Thinking back to the Vietnam War Memorial project in Washington, DC, I remember several controversies. The first regarded the fact that an Asian artist, Maya Lin, won the design competition. This apparently upset some veterans who felt that this was an "insult" to those who died in Southeast Asia. The second issue was that the original design did not have any statues of people in it. This was also found wanting by critics. So the Three Soldiers statue was added later in the process. And then of course, a third debate ensued about what races or ethnicities were to be represented by the statues. This is how there came to be three soldiers, one African-looking, one caucasian-looking and one Hispanic-looking (and lest it be overlooked, no Asian-looking). Finally, a Women's Memorial was proposed and added, which itself went through a controversy about the initial design being a political statement. The Wikipedia entry on the memorial details all of this.

Memorials can serve a purpose of remembrance, surely. But they can also perpetuate grudges that are sometimes better forgotten and in their mere undertaking bring ethnic, racial, religious and political animosity to the surface that otherwise might have never arisen. The last thing we need in our country now is more division. Everyone wants a memorial now. Perhaps if they were all abstract representations with no individuals or groups specifically identified, maybe they could fulfill their purpose of uniting us in remembrance not dividing us in gratuitous difference-seeking.

Sarcasm overload

noreply@blogger.com (Joe C) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:33:00 +0000

I know the feeling, we all do. When you're confronted with a typically prejudiced, logically defective, stunningly uniformed or otherwise ridiculous statement or question ("atheists only care about themselves", "what do atheists have to live for?", "what do you celebrate'?) from the faithful, it's hard not to counter with sarcasm. How can you help but make fun of people, who as Lewis Black says, "watch the Flintstones as if it were a documentary."? (See, I just did it!) And it's frustrating, I'll grant you, to have the same insults, logical fallacies and outright lies re-scrambled with some new spin and thrown in your face again and again.

Yes, sometimes, sarcasm is warranted to make a point, to give people that whack upside the head they need to jump-start their reasoning engines again. But I think that too often my fellow reasoners and non-believers go way overboard with it. As I opined in my last post, I think many times it's best not to engage the closed-minded, the belligerent and the just plain stupid, especially if your tone is just as mean-spirited and insulting as theirs. Reason, intellect and rationality are the high road. We might get a better hearing with people if we took it more often.

Should people of reason debate people of faith?

noreply@blogger.com (Joe C) — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 14:22:00 +0000

As person of reason who thinks it's a good thing to promote facts over faith, I often wonder if we do ourselves a disservice by engaging the faithful in debate about creation or the existence of gods or miracles or prophets or any number of other topics. Lately, the more I think about it the more I think it at least unnecessary and perhaps counterproductive to openly debate people of faith.

First of all, debating is in some sense a sport. It's indulged in or performed as entertainment, especially in law schools and universities. There are well-known strategies and tactics that in the end have little to do with the issue at hand. A good debater can advocate equally well for either side of a question. In fact, there are college courses and clubs that teach and practice the finer points of the sport, again with little regard to the actual matter at hand. This seems to me to make light of a question that is too serious to be taken as mere sport. Moreover, the importance of tactics and rhetorical tricks seems to me to play right into the faithful's strength. In the final analysis, they have no factual or logical arguments that can stand up to serious critique. Rhetoric, metaphor and emotional appeal are the only cards in their hand so they're really good at playing them.

Second, and perhaps more important in my mind, is that I don't wish to dignify or lend credence or publicity to what are utterly unfounded and frankly preposterous propositions. Would a physicist debate a geo-centrist, or a cancer researcher even appear on the same stage with a faith-healer? I doubt it. In fact, Richard Dawkins will not debate creationists for exactly this reason.

What are the alternatives? Lecture, write, inform, meet, educate, advertise, blog, tweet, but don't debate. In particular, don't let religious trolls suck you into playing their game on the internet. Be the voice of reason, literacy and culture. Don't insult, inform. State the facts, leave the name-calling and bad behavior to the pious.

I'm sorry, your free pass has expired

noreply@blogger.com (Joe C) — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:57:00 +0000

I saw a news item this morning for a conference at the University of Otago in New Zealand entitled: "The New Atheism - A Christian Response". The program was summarized as follows:

Participants will explore questions such as: How should Christians respond to the New Atheism? Are the central claims of Christianity reasonable? Do the New Atheists have a new case to be answered or are they dressing up old arguments?

The last question about a new case vs dressing up old arguments is worth a few words, I think. Yes, there are some new arguments that come from new research in neuroscience, cognition theory and the study of religion as a natural phenomenon, among others. We're shining the light of science and reason on areas that have hitherto been off limits. We're asking questions that weren't considered proper or polite.

To me, it's really that we've just stopped giving religion and faith their free pass. We're not playing the game on their ballfield anymore. They don't get to sit back as the presumed default world view and demand that we explain ourselves being properly polite and deferential and taking pains not to ruffle anyone's feathers.

No, we're moving ahead with these inquiries whether they like it or not. We're asking the embarrassing questions, we're saying the Emperor has no clothes. The burden of proof is now where it should have been all along, on the faithful and the dogmatic; on those who assert that there are supernatural beings or political dogma that demands not just how they should live their lives, but how I should live mine. We're pointing out that believing in God or Allah is no less preposterous than believing in Santa or Elvis. It's all just human imagination wanting to find an intentional agent, dressed up with a lot of pageantry, rituals and double-talk.

And we're not letting the faithful tar us with their brush, either. Not taking things on faith is not simply having a different faith. We're not playing that little shell game anymore, where it's "just your belief, and my unprovable belief is just as good as your unprovable belief." I'm sorry, but no. Just because I don't believe something you made up out of thin air, doesn't mean I must believe something equally vaporous but just different. Not believing does not equal believing.

I wish we could do this without hurting people's feelings or asking questions or saying things out loud that have to this point always been considered out of bounds, but it's just too bad. Considering your opinion to be off the table of rational discourse because of faith is no longer accepted as a valid move.

But why, you might ask, can't we just let people believe what they want to believe? Why must we upset the applecart, challenge people's comfortable assumptions? If simply believing was all that was in question, I would have no argument at all. It's what people do because they believe that concerns me. When your beliefs start affecting other people, that's where the line must be drawn.

Simply stated, the fate of humanity and civilization is at stake here. When the technological means exist to wipe all life off the planet, we can't let people's imaginations and superstitions pull the trigger. 9-11 was, or should have been, a wake-up call to all civilized people about the liabilities of faith. It's not what you have faith in that's the problem, it's that you take things on faith to begin with.

The natural world, the laws of physics, are not subject to human interpretation or opinion. They are the same for everyone. It matters not a whit to the universe what we think or believe. It spins along blissfully unaware of our presence. That real world, that observable, measurable one, is our only common ground. Let's meet there.

Falwell dead at 73

noreply@blogger.com (Joe C) — Tue, 15 May 2007 21:04:00 +0000

Just reading this article on Yahoo regarding the death of Rev. Jerry Falwell.

Personally, I reviled Falwell. He was a hateful, bigoted blowhard who appealed to the worst of ignorance in American culture to inflate his viewership and line his pockets using misogyny, homophobia, and religious divisiveness.

In no small sense, the debacle in Iraq and deaths of over 3000 of our soldiers can be laid directly at the feet of these despicable television preachers.

But strange as it seems to say, we will miss him. In life, Falwell had almost singlehandedly made himself and his sorry crusade against his fellow Americans a laughing stock. By his own words and deeds, he did more to discredit the Religious Right than any critic on the other side could have. As the saying goes, had he not existed, we would have had to invent him.

New, improved legislation on Internet Radio??

noreply@blogger.com (Joe C) — Thu, 10 May 2007 19:50:00 +0000

I received this email today from Joe Lieberman, US Senator from Connecticut regarding an internet petition I signed. Seems to indicate there's action to reverse the penal charges that were going to be levied on Internet radio stations.

May 10, 2007 Mr. Joseph Cascio, Jr.

Dear Mr. Cascio: Thank you for contacting me regarding the Copyright Royalty Board's decision with respect to royalty rates for webcasters. I appreciate the concerns you raised about this decision. You may be interested to know that in the U.S. House of Representatives, Congressman Jay Inslee (D-WA) introduced the Internet Radio Equality Act (H.R. 2060). H.R. 2060 effectively voids the Copyright Royalty Board's decision and sets new rates for the royalties to be paid by Internet radio stations. Specifically, H.R. 2060 states that commercial Internet radio stations instead pay one of two royalty rates for the next five years, to be determined by the station itself, as follows: 1. 0.33 cents per hour of sound recordings transmitted to a single listener; or 2. 7.5 percent of the revenues received by the provider during that year that are directly related to the provider's digital transmissions of sound recordings. H.R. 2060 also alters the formula for determining the royalty payments for non-commercial Internet radio stations so that these stations will pay lower rates than those determined by the Royalty Board.

For more information on this topic, I encourage you to visit the federal resources section of my web site at http://lieberman.senate.gov/issues/resources/, where you will find a "Congressional Research Service" link to a collection of informative and research documents prepared by the Library of Congress. A report entitled "Statutory Royalty Rates for 'Small' Webcasters: Decision of the Copyright Royalty Board" has been made available, which I hope you find helpful.

A companion version of H.R. 2060 has not yet been introduced in the Senate at this time. However, please be assured that I will keep your views in mind should legislation on this subject come before the full Senate for debate. To keep track of actions on specific legislation, you can go to the "Bill Tracking" service at http://lieberman.senate.gov/issues/resources. My official Senate web site is designed to be an on-line office that provides access to constituent services, Connecticut-specific information, and an abundance of information about what I am working on in the Senate on behalf of Connecticut and the nation.

[...]Thank you again for letting me know your views and concerns. Please contact me if you have any additional questions or comments about our work in Congress. Sincerely, Joseph I. Lieberman UNITED STATES SENATOR

"Monumental Ignorance"

noreply@blogger.com (Joe C) — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 03:12:00 +0000

An AP story published on Yahoo news today underscored what many Americans have believed for months. The report by an Iraqi government insider, Ali A. Allawi, uses the terms "monumental ignorance", "rank amateurism" and "swaggering arrogance" to describe the American invasion and occupation. How well all of these descriptions characterize the Bush administration in general, in particular the "swaggering arrogance" so typical of the right wing. I'll never forget Bush, and his ridiculous, highly affected John Wayne walk across the lawn of the White House at one of his first public appearances after being inaugurated. What a buffoon.

Claptrap from Ben Stein

noreply@blogger.com (Joe C) — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 22:21:00 +0000

A friend of mine who is an Episcopal priest forwarded an email to me today which was a transcript of a Ben Stein piece on CBS Sunday Morning. Frankly, I'm quite surprised to get this from him if it means he subscribes to the ideas put forth in it. He and I seem to agree on a lot of issues, especially about the Iraq war and how monumentally stupid a blunder it was, so I was surprised to find he might (emphasize might) agree with the utter claptrap that Stein is spewing. Let's take them in order.

I have no freaking clue who Nick and Jessica are. I see them on the cover of People and Us constantly when I am buying my dog biscuits and kitty litter. I often ask the checkers at the grocery stores. They never know who Nick and Jessica are either. Who are they? Will it change my life if I know who they are and why they have broken up? Why are they so important? I don't know who Lindsay Lohan is, either, and I do not care at all about Tom Cruise's wife.

Ok Ben, no argument from me here. I couldn't care less about these vacuous twits either. High fives on that one.

Next confession: I am a Jew, and every single one of my ancestors was Jewish. And it does not bother me even a little bit when people call those beautiful lit up, bejeweled trees Christmas trees. I don't feel threatened. I don't feel discriminated against. That's what they are: Christmas trees. It doesn't bother me a bit when people say, "Merry Christmas" to me. I don't think they are slighting me or getting ready to put me in a ghetto. In fact, I kind of like it. It shows that we are all brothers and sisters celebrating this happy time of year. It doesn't bother me at all that there is a manger scene on display at a key intersection near my beach house in Malibu. If people want a creche, it's just as fine with me as is the Menorah a few hundred yards away.

Ok, not much to disagree with from me on this either. "Christmas" is a Christian holiday by definition. Now, let's also keep in mind that that time of year has been celebrated for millenia because it's right after the winter solstice. Ancient people who kept a keen eye on the sunrise and sunset could tell roughly a few days after the solstice that the days were really getting longer again. Whew! The sun wasn't going to completely go away after all. The Romans celebrated the Saturnalia for mostly the same reason. But, I'm not going to throw cold water on the Christians for wanting to claim Christmas. I'm ok with it, really. It's when they start extrapolating that I get annoyed. Keep reading...

I don't like getting pushed around for being a Jew and I don't think Christians like getting pushed around for being Christians.

I can sure appreciate his not liking being pushed around for being Jewish. I don't like being badmouthed for being an atheist. People say things about atheists that they wouldn't dare say about a Jew, a Christian or a Muslim. But atheists are fair game, I guess. Ok, fine. Let's keep going, though.

I think people who believe in God are sick and tired of getting pushed around, period. I have no idea where the concept came from that America is an explicitly atheist country. I can't find it in the Constitution and I don't like it being shoved down my throat.

Here's where Ben and I part company. People who believe in God are in no way, shape or form pushed around in this country. In fact, they enjoy special treatment in innumerable ways. Their problem is that they are offended when they don't get special treatment. Tell me one, just one way in which a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindi, a Buddhist or any other religion is prevented from practicing his or her religion. The problem is that they're not satisfied with practicing. They want to harness the government to make everyone else practice their religion, too.

And the bit about you can't find it in the Constitution? Duh, Ben... it's called The First Amendment.

Or maybe I can put it another way: where did the idea come from that we should worship Nick and Jessica and we aren't allowed to worship God as we understand Him?

I guess that's a sign that I'm getting old, too. But there are a lot of us who are wondering where Nick and Jessica came from and where the America we knew went to.

Oh, give me a break. How are you not allowed to worship God? This is the same crap that the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons of the world have been handing us. You are absolutely free to worship any way you want AS LONG AS IT DOESN'T INFRINGE ON ANYONE ELSE'S FREEDOM. But that's the bit they don't understand, isn't it? They aren't satisfied to pray, they want me and my kids to pray their prayer. They want my government to believe what they believe. Sorry, Ben. I used to think you were a pretty smart guy. Now I see you're just another rhetorical snake-oil salesmen like the rest of the right wingers.

Vloggers are voters, not reporters

noreply@blogger.com (Joe C) — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 13:31:00 +0000

Steve Garfield posted an interesting entry in Off On A Tangent today about his experience with the John Edwards campaign in a special "bloggers only" meeting that had been arranged in New Hampshire. I think part of difficulty he encountered was that the campaign, and to a certain extent the bloggers themselves consider bloggers to be essentially reporters. Different clothes, maybe, smaller cameras, but still, reporters. The good part to this is that at least some of them enjoy access and time with the candidate that the general public doesn't get. The bad part is that they are perceived as "the press" - a channel through which to deliver the message, rather than (and this is my big point) a voter to be met and to be shown the candidates up-close personality, and to be perhaps persuaded to vote for the candidate and to tell their friends (i.e., all their readers) that the candidate is a good guy, and maybe they should consider voting for him/her, too. To me, a blogger is less a reporter than a voter with a lot of friends. A candidate doesn't try to charm or convince a reporter like they do a voter.

There is a lot of conversation in the blogosphere lately about how objective bloggers should be when posting about political topics. Well first of all, there's room for a lot of different approaches. We're experimenting here, right? Let's throw some stuff at the wall and see what sticks.

If I was going to vlog about a campaign event or candidate, though, I wouldn't try to be like a professional reporter. The message of the video blog medium is personal connection. I'd act and want to be treated like a voter not a reporter. I want to get to know that candidate as a person. To let my instincts inform my decision. If I was a campaign manager, I'd think of vloggers as a way to make a personal connection between my candidate and the voters. Unless of course, my candidate is an ass, in which case, I'd want to keep them at a distance. Hmmm, could the access or lack thereof of a candidate to vloggers potentially be one metric for measuring the personal character of a candidate?

This will really disappoint the Holy Rollers

noreply@blogger.com (Joe C) — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 12:28:00 +0000

The New York Times recently published an article about evidence for a possible meteor impact in the Indian Ocean that caused a mega-tsunami some 4500 years ago. Part of the evidence is what the investigators call "chevrons" of displaced earth near the shore in Madagasgar. These valleys are theorized to have been carved out by a 600 foot high tsunami. By examining the direction of the chevrons, the investigators have found solid evidence of a large impact crater at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Further, silt deposits in the chevrons contain ocean-bottom minerals fused to deep water micro-fossils, which are characteristic of impact events.

Other researchers have correlated multiple flood myths with known astronomical events (a solar eclipse) and found agreement with the geological age data. Torrential rains, weeks of darkness (oh, say 40 days) and of course, tsunami floods would all have been coincident with such an event.

This is certainly a credible explanation of flood myths and end-of-days prophecies. Unfortunately for the Creationists and other holy-rollers it has nothing to do with the supernatural.

There go those scientists again, taking all the fun out of make-believe.