Nildogma

Don't let ignorance spoil your trousers

2015-05-09T20:36:00.000+01:00

Transport yourself back in time six hundred years. Look up into the sky and see the sun. You don't know what it is but you know it gives off huge amounts of heat and light—enough to warm and illuminate the entire planet.

As you gaze at this celestial monster there is one thing you are sure of—something as powerful as that and so essential for human life could not have happened by accident—it must have had a designer. A designer who created it and put it in the perfect orbit to give the exact amount heat and the exact amount of day and night necessary to sustain all living things on Earth. At that moment, you fall to your knees and thank your god (whichever god you happened to believe in).
...

Returning to the 21st century, we have moved on. We understand our sun very well indeed. We know its chemistry and the physics that formed it and sustains it. We understand how it formed, how long it will live, how it will change over its lifetime and how it will die. And we know all of that is caused by natural, unguided processes.

We have learned so much in the intervening years that there are only a few deep mysteries remaining, such as the origin of life and the cause of the Big Bang.

But one thing has not changed. Still billions of people assume their gods are responsible for things they don't understand. It is wise to learn from history rather than repeat it. Don't be on your knees when the true origin of life is finally discovered. Get up, brush yourself off, and withhold belief until we actually know how it happened.

After all, trousers are valuable, and so is your dignity.

Can answered prayers prove God exists?

2015-05-08T09:08:00.004+01:00

Let's do a thought experiment. I'll start by inventing a god, I'm going to call her Ninfinity. She is very beautiful and she will answer your prayers. Not every prayer though, she will first decide if you are deserving and if you really believe in her. If you are, she will definitely answer your prayers 100% of the time. Ninfinity is very, very powerful. In fact, she can do ANYTHING that is logically possible.

As a second step, I will persuade some Facebook friends that Ninfinity is real. This is not hard. I was top salesman for five consecutive years at Boomah's Pussy Treats. I can sell anything to anyone.

Once I have some believers they will begin their prayers to her. Ninfinity answered her first prayer with ease. A believer was late for a job interview and struggling to find a parking space. He uttered the words, "Please Ninfinity. I know you can find me a space, please find me a space." Before he finished his prayer a car pulled out right in front of him leaving a free space.

The delighted believer, posted on Facebook his success with the car parking space and something even more amazing—against his expectations he was offered the job and he had not even asked his goddess to help. Clearly she knew what he wanted—she could read his mind.

With this answered prayer, Ninfinity's list of believers grew. And so did the list of positively reported prayers. Eventually she reached more than a million Facebook followers. As her popularity grew, so did her power and people reported ever more amazing answered prayers. People survived car wrecks, terminally ill people even recovered from cancer!

Of course, Ninfinity is imaginary, so she cannot really be answering prayers. It is obvious that people are just attributing successful outcomes to her and overlooking the prayers that were not answered. Nevertheless, many people find Ninfinity totally convincing. They love her and are certain she helps them. Some people feel they couldn't live without her and they tell their children all about her powers.
...

If you think this story is absurd, it is not. This is actually how billions of people think. The only difference is they don't believe in my invented god, they believe in a god invented 3,500 years ago by Hebrew tribesmen. Different god; same flawed thinking process.

The problem is, an invented god cannot answer prayers. So before you attribute your answered prayers to a god, first make sure that particular god exists. Arguing that answered prayers PROVE your favourite god exists is circular reasoning—you are ASSUMING your god exists and then attributing answered prayers to it.

Flawed thinking gives invalid conclusions. No answered prayer is ever proof that a god exists. Period.

Your inner caveman

2015-04-30T00:27:00.003+01:00

Viewing from a distance can often reveal things that cannot be seen close up. To gain a sense of perspective, it is interesting to look at our species, not for a few generations but for our entire existence.

The best evidence available suggests our species has roamed the earth for at least 200,000 years, probably more. Most of that time we were itinerant hunter-gatherers. We used sharpened sticks and flaked stones as tools and weapons.

Things changed very slowly indeed for our Stone Age ancestors until about 12,000 years ago with the beginning of agriculture. That was when we started to grow our own food which forced us into permanent settlements, and gave rise to much larger communities.

An unintended consequence of the agricultural revolution was that people could own land and charge rent and leaders could levy taxes. So, we saw the emergence of a tier of wealthy property owners and rulers.

The next big change, starting just over 5,000 years ago, was the discovery of bronze. Smelting copper and tin produced a metal that could be forged into tools and weapons and were far superior to their stone equivalents.

The invention of bronze tools for cutting wood paved the way, around 4,000 years ago, for one of the most important inventions of all time—the wheel.

And soon after this came the invention of writing and mathematics.

Bronze was a ground-breaking invention but it was a relatively soft metal and sharpened blades blunted very quickly. But some 3,200 years ago we discovered how to smelt iron and the Iron Age was born.

There were more revolutions to come but the foundations for our modern society were almost in place 3,000 years ago with the inventions of agriculture, the wheel, writing, mathematics and iron. Just one more foundation stone was required and it took another 2,000 years. That was the invention of science, which started with Thales' extraordinary idea that everything that happened could have a natural explanation and culminated in a reliable process for investigating natural things, now known as the scientific method.

Now for the perspective. For at least 94% of the time our species has existed, we have been Stone Age hunter gatherers. For more than 99.5% of our time here we had no reliable method for understanding our world and we relied on gods, magic, stars and superstition.

In the 0.5% of our time on Earth since then, we have been through the industrial revolution and we have started our journey through the information revolution. We have walked on the moon, sent craft to the outer reaches of our solar system and created machines that can look back in time to the beginning of the universe, more than 13 billion years ago.

We can travel to any place on Earth in less than a day and can talk to people on the other side of the planet, as though they were in the same room. We have eradicated diseases, like smallpox, that used to kill three million people yearly and we can transplant failed organs to repair people who would otherwise die.

All these advances, from the industrial revolution onwards, have relied on science. Not a single advance has been given to us by the gods, magic, stars or superstition that our ancestors relied on for hundreds of millennia.

We must not forget that we are not just related to those Stone Age men and women from 200,000 years ago—we ARE those people. We are the same species, made of the same stuff and to the same design. We have evolved slightly over those years but negligible changes have occurred in the last 1,000 years. We could still mate with one of our Stone Age ancestors and produce viable offspring.

This perspective may explain why, after the scientific approach has thoroughly proven itself and gods, magic, stars and superstition have been equally thoroughly discredited, that 85% of us still want to believe that gods, magic, stars and superstition are real and valuable. They are not.

That is our inner caveman speaking. It's time to let him go.

Religion and corruption

2015-04-19T15:59:00.000+01:00

There is no corruption-free country in the world—every country experiences some level of corruption. But the huge differences in the level of corruption between countries is striking. This much is well known.

What is less well known is how corruption is related to religiosity—the most religious countries tend to be the most corrupt countries. But how do I know this and what conclusions can we draw from it?

The chart shows public sector corruption vs religiosity for 140 countries (this is every country for which both corruption and religiosity data are available). See "Methodological notes" below for a fuller explanation of the datasets used.

The chart clearly shows that the most corrupt countries (Somalia, Sudan and Afghanistan) are very high on the religiosity scale whilst the least corrupt countries are very low on the religiosity scale (Denmark, New Zealand and Finland). It can be seen that this general relationship holds true for most countries.

It is interesting to look at the outliers—countries that are more corrupt (or less corrupt) than expected for their religiosity. I've drawn diagonal dotted lines to show the outliers. The countries that are more corrupt than their religiosity would suggest are all communist or ex-communist countries. I have marked Russia, Vietnam and Czech Republic but all the countries below the lower dotted line fall into this category.

The countries that are less corrupt than expected are a mixed bunch. Qatar and UAE are both Muslim countries but Malaysia and Singapore have many religions—Muslims being the biggest single group in Malaysia and Buddhists holding that position in Singapore.

It would be interesting to map GDP/capita (income) vs corruption. That may correlate even more closely than religiosity vs corruption. Nevertheless, the chart does illustrate the point that highly religious countries tend to be much more corrupt than irreligious countries.

Finally, correlation is not causation. So I am not saying that being religious MAKES people corrupt. It may, but this data cannot establish that. However, there is one conclusion that we can draw from this data; being religious does not make people honest and not being religious does not make people dishonest.

...........

Methodological notes.
Corruption is abuse of power for private gain. Transparency International is an organisation set up to monitor and expose corruption around the world. It has published the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) annually for 20 years.

The CPI rates the level of public sector corruption in a country on a scale of 0-100 where 0 is the highest possible level of corruption and 100 means totally free of corruption. Of course, corruption is hidden so it cannot be measured directly but the CPI uses multiple indicators and cross checks and is respected by governments and international organisations.

I have used the 2014 CPI data for my analysis which is the latest available.

A link to Transparency International's website is given below. There you can find a full description of their methodology and detailed data for 177 countries.
http://www.transparency.org/cpi2014/results

I use Gallup Poll research to measure religiosity. Gallup runs a poll from time-to-time which asks respondents "Is religion important in your daily life?" The least religious country measured in this dataset was Estonia with only 16% answering "Yes". There were three countries in which 100% of respondents answered "Yes"; Bangladesh, Niger and Somalia.

This Gallup data was from 2009 which is the latest available. Since both religiosity and corruption change slowly, it is unlikely the difference in collection dates will distort the correlation to a material extent.

The full dataset is available here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w…/Importance_of_religion_by_country

Standing on the shoulders of giants

2015-04-17T23:42:00.000+01:00

Thales of Miletus

In a letter to Robert Hooke, written in February 1676, the great Isaac Newton wrote, "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Newton borrowed the expression from Bernard of Chartres who, more than 500 years earlier, remarked we are as dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. We see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.

This was not Newton engaging in false modesty. It was profoundly true that his achievements were possible only because his education included a thorough grounding in the works of Greek natural philosophers who lived 2,000 or more years before him.

Thales of Miletus was the first person known to fully reject supernatural, religious or mythological explanations for natural phenomena and to claim that every event had a natural cause. From a 21st century perspective it is easy to think that was no big deal. But it was. It was quite extraordinary at a time when everyone, from kings to paupers, believed that everything that happened had a supernatural cause. This is why Thales is now regarded as the father of science.

Following Thales were great men like Democritus, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Epicurus and a clutch of others. These men did not get everything right but they developed a revolutionary approach to understanding the world and gave us the basic tools of logic, maths, epistemology and rational investigation which are the foundations we stand upon today. And they were the foundations Newton stood upon.

Thales developed his ideas 2,600 years ago. Over the intervening years we have proved him right time-after-time—we have discovered the natural causes for thousands of phenomena from earthquakes to lightning, from the movement of the planets to the trajectories of comets, from conception to disease, from anger to ecstasy.

Yet, all these years later, billions of people still refuse to accept his basic tenet. They cling to the idea that SOME things have a supernatural explanation. The ground these people occupy is ever shrinking as a wave of knowledge surrounds them. They stand firm on their shrinking island despite the fact they have no evidence that they are right and no way of studying the supernatural phenomena they claim exist.

I wonder how many years will pass before they concede that Thales was right and they are wrong?

God's IQ

2015-04-06T18:58:00.000+01:00

The average human has an IQ of 100. The very smartest humans have IQs hovering around the 200 mark. Those blessed with such talent can do things that the rest of us can only marvel at.

Kim Ung-yong was born in 1962 in Seoul, South Korea. He began speaking Korean by the age of four months and by two and a half years of age, he could read Korean, German, Japanese and English. He began a physics course at Hanyang University at age three. At the age of eight, he was invited by NASA to study in the Unites States. Kim's IQ was measured at 210 giving him, at that time, the Guinness World Record for the highest IQ for a living person.

Now try to imagine the brain power of a person with an IQ of 1,000. This is ten times the average IQ and five times higher than the prodigious Kim Ung-yong's IQ. It's very hard to imagine what talents a person with such an IQ would have. Try it.

But notch that up to an IQ of 1,000,000 and we can no longer comprehend—thinking about such an IQ is far beyond our imagination. What would a person with an IQ of 1,000,000 be able to achieve? Then realise that an IQ of 1,000,000 is MINISCULE compared to the intelligence God is said to have.

With that extraordinary thought in mind, think about the Bible. Much of the Bible is said to have been written by prophets that God spoke to directly. Even if we allow for the frailties, misunderstandings and mistakes of the humans who put it on paper, the Bible should be a very special book indeed. (And we should expect such an awesomely brilliant God to have chosen prophets he could rely on to do a good job.)

Think about how much you could learn from the most brilliant human you have ever read about, then multiply that by a few billion... You're probably still not close to what God could teach you. So we should have the highest expectations of the Bible. There should be no mistaking a book inspired by God.

But the Bible does not live up to expectations. The Bible is full of discredited science, superstition and Iron Age morality. No, the Earth is not flat, no the sun does not revolve around the Earth, no the Earth is not stationary and no, it does not rest on pillars. Nor is it moral to hold slaves or to sell your daughters as sex slaves or to stone disobedient children to death.

Given what we are told about the awesome, Hebrew God, the Bible must be the most disappointing book in all history. Either God has the IQ of an Iron Age priest or he had no hand in writing the Bible at all.

YAHWEH, the DIY God

2015-01-24T00:36:00.000+00:00

It was quite a stroke of luck for the Jews. Out of all the peoples in the entire world, the 12 small tribes of Israel were the chosen people—they were personally chosen by God, who created the entire universe some 13.8 billion years earlier.

As if that was not enough, God promised them the lands of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites AND he gave them permission to slaughter, rape, take slaves and pillage to conquer these lands. Incredibly lucky that God was so understanding.

God gave the Israelites laws to live by and they were lucky AGAIN! He turned a blind eye to the cruel habits of these Iron-Age herdsmen and allowed them to continue holding slaves, selling their daughters, stoning brides for not bleeding on their wedding night and even killing their children if they were unruly. God really wanted his chosen people to be happy.
To top it all, God stayed totally hidden until he revealed himself around 3,500 years ago. No-one knew anything about him before that moment (they already had plenty of other gods to worship). And who were the ONLY people on the planet he chose to reveal himself to? The Israelites!
It all worked out so well.

It couldn't have been any better if the Israelites had made the whole thing up.

Do you have to be stupid to believe in God?

2015-01-17T20:41:00.000+00:00

When I hear atheists saying people have to be stupid to believe in God, I am reminded of Christians who say you can't have morals without God.

Both statements are crass because the evidence is abundant. There are plenty of atheists with high moral values and plenty of smart people who believe in God.

But there is no evidence that God exists and almost all versions of God mandate belief in a magical, chaotic and undetectable supernatural realm. For those who take scripture to be literally true, belief in God rapidly spirals into absurdity. So how can smart people believe things like this?

It is easier to explain this by analogy. There is no doubt that smoking is harmful to our health. There is plenty of validated evidence that smoking significantly increases your risk of emphysema, chronic bronchitis, heart disease and many forms of cancer. Yet we probably all know smart people who smoke.

People smoke because it satisfies them and they rationalise away the evidence of risks. People believe in God because it satisfies them and they rationalise away the lack of evidence and all the contrary evidence.

So, belief in God is a preference, just like preferring redheads to brunettes and no-one is obliged to justify their preferences.

Actually, it is a little more subtle than that. The smart smoker is implicitly saying, I like to smoke and I am prepared to accept the risk to my health. And the smart believer is implicitly saying I like to believe in God and I accept the risk that my belief may not be true.

You may think I'm arguing that our unconscious preferences drive our behaviour and we are little more than spectators. There is more truth to that than most of us like to admit but there is plenty of evidence that our preferences can change and we can influence the process.

It's a fact that better educated people are less likely to believe in God (and less likely to smoke). So being smart can help you take control of your preferences; understanding the process can help everyone take control of their preferences

You don't have to be a spectator.

Common ground

2014-08-18T15:54:00.002+01:00

It is interesting that both non-believers and believers (regardless of god) have access to the same evidence but come to different conclusions. This evidence is not in dispute. For example, we all know that:

1. Humans invent gods. Over the course of our history humans have invented and worshiped maybe 10,000 or so different gods. Humans are recidivist, serial god inventors—we don't seem to be able to help ourselves.

2. These invented gods satisfy real human needs. That is why they survive. It is not unusual for invented gods to remain in favour for a few thousand years or so before being replaced by new gods.

3. Our generosity towards these gods shows how strongly we need them. People may sacrifice a significant proportion of their wealth to their gods or their finest animals or even their children in some cases.

4. Deeply moving, even life-changing, religious experiences are commonly reported by believers. Since not all gods can be real, we all know that the human brain must be capable of creating religious experiences when triggered by the thought of a god. No gods are required for this to happen.

5. Excluding religious experience, there is no evidence for the existence of any gods. Religious experience cannot be used as evidence because we cannot distinguish between experiences conferred by a god and experiences manufactured by our brains.

6. All arguments for the existence of gods are fallacious. I know of 36 arguments for the existence of gods and I can show you how each one is invalid. Try me, if you doubt me but I think you know it. Have any atheists been converted to belief in God by the ontological argument? I don’t think so.

7. Many gods are thought to answer prayers but we know prayer does not work on any scale. If prayer worked we should expect those people being helped by gods to have advantages over those who are not helped. What we actually see is that people who pray the most have the worst outcomes, shorter lives, more sickness, more infant mortality, even more crime and more road traffic deaths than those who do not pray.

8. Believers are certain their own god is real but equally certain their neighbour’s gods are invented. Yet we all have the same evidence.

How can we all have this same evidence yet arrive at such different conclusions?

Many of us have a strong need to believe in god(s). We believe in the god(s) we were told are real as children. We disbelieve in gods we were told are not real. By the age when reason kicks in we have already established emotional bonds to our family god(s). We are chained to them by love, fear and guilt and we need the security they promise, so reason has to fight an uphill battle to dislodge them.

We also know that our need for the protection of god(s) diminishes as our security increases. If the state pays for your healthcare and looks after you when you are old, sick or unemployed we no longer need imaginary friends. That is why religious belief in countries with good social welfare programmes like Japan, Scandinavian countries and much of Western Europe has plummeted in the past 50 years.

So gods and religions are part of our culture but cultures change.

Eventually, belief in Yahweh, Jesus, Allah and Brahma will be something people read in history books—just as we read today of Greek gods.

Life in spirit Heaven

2014-08-09T11:39:00.001+01:00

Christians differ on what Heaven will be like. Some say, we will have our bodies restored to their peak condition and it will be like life on Earth... There are many problems with this idea but I want to think about second idea of Heaven, the idea that we (well, not me) will live in Heaven as spirits.

What will life be like as a spirit, I wonder? Without a body there will be no food or drink, no sex, no hugs, no beautiful women or handsome men.

You won't have senses which rely on physical organs and nerves so you will be in the dark, in silence, without smells, the sensation of touch or the taste of food—you won't even know which way up you are (and it won't matter because spirits don't have a right-way-up).

Will you be able to think? I don't think so—we know thinking occurs in a physical brain and you won't have one. You won't have memories either as these too, are stored in your physical brain.

And how would you be able to communicate with your fellow spirits (even if you could find them) with no sense organs and no brain to understand what they want to tell you?

How will you even know you are alive? You won't. And THAT will be a blessing; for to live like this forever and to be aware of the darkness and silence would not be Heaven—it would be the most intolerable Hell.

Spirit Heaven is a spectacularly stupid idea. Yes, you have to be epistemologically challenged to believe God is real, but it takes a special kind of dumb to believe spirit Heaven is real, and desirable.

This is no test

2014-08-06T17:32:00.001+01:00

Christians say life on Earth is just a test to see who is fit for heaven. The death of a child is just a test; an earthquake is a test. Cancer, birth defects, tsunamis, volcanoes, tornadoes, malaria and ebola are all tests.

God has an entire arsenal of tests for us.

What Christians don't tell us is why an infinitely-loving, omniscient God needs to put humans through untold suffering to find answers he knew anyway.

This is self delusion of the highest order.

There is a much simpler explanation that that requires no apologetics, no mental gymnastics and no suspension of disbelief. We are small, fragile beings on an unstable and indifferent rock surrounded by a chaotic atmosphere hurtling through a hostile universe. We evolved together with a host of other life forms, many of which can harm us.

That's why bad things happen. Simple.

An infinity of gods

2014-07-15T11:56:00.000+01:00

Why do people think there are so few gods?

Most people think there is just one god but we know many gods have sustained humans throughout time. We have counted ten thousand or so but it could be a lot more—we have no idea how many there were before our recorded history.

But counting gods can't give us the answer. Because we cannot count the gods that have yet to be invented or the gods that have yet to reveal themselves to us. How many could be in this category? Millions? Trillions? It is conceivably unlimited—there could be an INFINITE number of gods.

If you imagine there is only a handful of gods, you may think choosing one is a fair bet. But if there is an infinite number of gods, it is infinitely UNLIKELY that you have chosen the correct one, especially given that they all have the same amount of existential evidence—none.

However many gods there are, it is impossible that they are all real but quite possible that they are all invented.

Choosing the real god(s) out of an infinite number of possibilities (most of which you are unaware of) is an impossible task. Maybe that is why people don't choose a god, they just go along with whatever mum and dad believe in.

How we know Jesus

2014-07-05T07:50:00.001+01:00

There are very many paintings of Jesus, all of them painted by artists who have never seen their subject. All these paintings are works of imagination with some, most likely, borrowing from the imaginative work of earlier artists.

Exactly the same process was used to write the Gospels. Everything we know about Jesus is as reliable as this image.

The end of religion?

2014-07-03T15:38:00.002+01:00

People sometimes ask me if I would like to see the end of all religion across the planet. I say it depends.

It depends on what these religions would be replaced with. There is no guarantee they will be replaced with reason, tolerance and universal observance of human rights. They could all too easily be replaced with something even worse. We must never forget the law of unintended consequences…

In any case, the elimination of all religion is a fanciful objective. Some people do seem to need the reassurance of a powerful, imaginary friend who is looking out for them. Maybe it will always be so.

But there is a more limited objective that I would subscribe to. I would like everyone to see their religion in context—to understand it is one of 22 major religions today and one of thousands of religions throughout human history. I would like them to understand there is no more reason to believe their religion is true than any other religion.

I would like to see every believer have a little more humility. And whenever they feel compelled by their religion to harm another person, I would like them to stop and remember that humility. Should I harm this person for a god that may not be real?

The answer should always be “No”.

Why deny revelation?

2014-06-15T18:20:00.001+01:00

Some Christians argue the human brain is too feeble and logic itself is not up to the job of understanding the divine. They complain that we rely on reason and deny revelation.

One Christian friend recently said,

"We even trust reason above revelation to explain the things that cannot be laboratory tested, such as, how the world came to be in the first place..."

We trust reason because it is all we have that we can rely on.

We know too much about the frailties of the human brain to trust revelation. And we know revelation offers us contradictory stories. Whose revelation will you believe Daniel's, Mohammed's or Joseph Smith's?

No, we have learnt the hard way, if you want to know something, find it out for yourself. We have done that. And we have done it spectacularly well.

We now daily use things like high definition TVs, computers, the internet, mobile 'phones and 450 seat airliners that, only 200 years ago, would have been regarded by those who favoured revelation as witchcraft and magic. None of these things were discovered through revelation—they are the result of hard work, rigorous thinking, rejecting superstitious beliefs and grounding our ideas on evidence.

In that extraordinarily successful project we have discovered and understood the particles from which atoms are made, we have explored the outer-edges of the universe, unravelled the inner workings of our sun and we have travelled to other planets.

None of this has brought us any nearer to confirming the existence of God. Instead, it has eliminated many of the reasons people once relied upon for their belief in God.

We have found God to be imperfect, insufficient and immoral. We have found that are no reasons left for believing in God apart from our own inadequacies.

How logic fails God-believers

2014-06-14T15:08:00.000+01:00

Here is a simple problem of logic.

“Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?” The answer can be "yes" or "no", or "cannot be determined".

Around 90% of people will get this wrong despite the fact that you are given all the information necessary to get it right.

Many of the people who fail to solve this conundrum are very sure about another, infinitely more difficult conundrum with highly incomplete information. They say, "Something cannot come from nothing therefore the universe must have been created by something outside of the universe. That something we call God".

People arrive at this conclusion:

1) Knowing it is based on inductive reasoning which never guarantees a correct conclusion (we never see something coming from nothing, therefore it cannot happen) .

2) Not knowing what, if anything, existed prior to the Big Bang.

3) Knowing the laws of physics (and, therefore, classical cause and effect) cannot have applied before matter appeared.

The Jack, Anne and George conundrum illustrates that humans typically have limited and highly fallible logic skills yet we can still be certain we have the correct answer to highly complex problems even when we lack the information to solve them.

So, for the avoidance of doubt, the "Something cannot come from nothing" argument is fatally flawed and you do yourself no credit if you repeat it.

Oh yes, the correct answer to the Jack, Anne and George conundrum is "yes". Did you get it right?

______________________________
If you need help with the logic...

Jack is married, George is not, Anne is either married or not.
If Anne is not married: a married person (Jack) is looking at an unmarried person (Anne).
If Anne is married: a married person (Anne) is looking at an unmarried person (George).

So, either way, a married person is indeed looking at an unmarried person. We have sufficient information to determine that a married person is looking at an unmarried person, but not which couple this applies to.

How to dismiss hell forever

2014-05-29T01:28:00.001+01:00

Not everyone has someone in their lives they love to distraction. Someone with whom they are so intimately entangled in so many ways that separation would be an unbearable torment.

But many do have such a precious person and these people can vouch for the absurdity of heaven.

They know going to heaven could mean being forever separated from their soul-mate, and then it would not be heaven—it would be hell and there would be no escape, ever.

Actually, it's worse than that. If your soul-mate does not make it to the pearly gates, you know they have been taken to that other place—where screaming and wailing and agony continue without end. If you can't bear to think of your soul-make suffering for even a second, how will you feel when you know they will suffer forever?

This alone should tell you that heaven and hell are fiction. There can be no heaven if there is hell.

The idea of an underworld for the dead is very ancient indeed. It was a dark, gloomy place, or place for recuperation. But a hell of eternal torture seems to be the invention of the fathers of Christianity. No doubt, they saw hell as a powerful recruiting sergeant for their new religion.

But they should have given it more thought. The hell they invented makes heaven impossible and reveals the unmistakable fingerprints of human beings in the entire project.

How much do you love your kids?

2014-05-27T16:00:00.000+01:00

How you bring up your kids has a massive effect on their lives. I want you to think about doing something amazing for them.

It may mean making a sacrifice and it may be the most difficult sacrifice you have ever had to make or it may be the easiest. I don't know.

I want you to think of the values you would love them to have when they grow up. The values that will make them happy and the people around them happy and will help them to succeed in whatever direction they go.

These values may be things like respecting and valuing people for who they are—not what they are. Things like consideration, honesty and integrity, tolerance, helping others, showing love and encouragement. Teach them to value hard work and enterprise.

Show them how to use their money wisely and how to share what they have. Selfishness does not make people happy, sharing does—whatever they have to share, their time, their support, their money.

And show them how to value THEMSELVES. Repeatedly tell them they are great and never that they are damaged.

Encourage them to be hungry for knowledge, to be critical, to question and to research. Teach them to think for themselves so they will be confident and never taken advantage of. And so they will flourish in our future world and not the one that has passed.

Don't tell them what to think—teach how to think and encourage them, encourage them, encourage them to do so.

If you have a religion, tell them about it but don't force it on them and don't indoctrinate them from an early age. Make a point of reminding them this is what you believe, others believe different things and many people have no religion at all.

Try to leave detailed religious discussions until they are teenagers and can put things into proper context.

Don't be disappointed if they turn out not to share your beliefs; you are not creating little versions of yourself. You are creating new people with good values and their own minds and one day you will hand your world over to them.

Trust them and let them go free.

Did the Resurrection really happen?

2014-05-25T21:43:00.000+01:00

If there was no Resurrection—there is no Christianity. Problem is, evidence for the Resurrection is thin to non-existent.

"Not so!" Christians argue, "More than 500 people saw Jesus after the Resurrection. That is proof enough!"

They are, of course, referring to Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8. But read the entire chapter and you will not see the testimonies of 500 people—you will see one person, Paul, making this claim. Paul, who was writing years after Jesus' supposed execution, was not present at the time and never met Jesus.

How reliable is this evidence? We have to wonder when we read in Matthew 27:51-53 that whilst Jesus was meeting 500 people, the long-dead saints emerged from their graves and walked around the city greeting people.

Did the people mistake the zombies for Jesus or did they mistake Jesus for a zombie?

We shall never know.

But with this quality of evidence one conclusion is clear. Christianity is a project of faith—not of fact.
___________________________

Matthew 27:51-53
51 And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split. 52 The tombs also were opened. And many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, 53 and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many.

1 Corinthians 15:3-8
3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.

Who really is arrogant?

2014-05-18T11:25:00.000+01:00

Honestly, I am astounded when believers tell me atheists are arrogant.

Here's the thing, believers can hardly help but be arrogant. It's the nature of the beast.

To be a believe in a god, you have to be sure your god is real (despite there being no evidence that it is so) and, for most believers, that entails being equally sure that billions of other people who believe in other gods are terribly wrong.

Actually, it's worse than that. Most believers subscribe to a religion and they have to believe their religion is true which means other religions are false—even if they worship the same god. Look at Judaism. Christianity and Islam for an example of that.

Let's not stop there. Religions have denominations and, again, the believer has to be sure his denomination is true and all the others are false. Just look at the murderous internecine warfare between the Shia and Sunni denominations of Islam to see how strongly denominational beliefs can be held.

All major religions have denominations; Christianity has thousands.

So atheists are the arrogant ones despite the arrogance of the believer, being sure his god is real, his religion is true and his denomination is the correct one and all without a shred of evidence.

The atheist says, he cannot be sure God exists because there are no valid arguments and no evidence to substantiate the claim. So the atheist will not believe God exists until good evidence is found. This is not arrogance—it is humility. It is being prepared to say, "I don't know".

And it is rational...

Why don't Christians bring slavery back?

2014-05-15T22:18:00.002+01:00

In the Bible, God clearly condones slavery—the type of slavery where slaves where bought and sold, where slaves were included as a man's estate when he died, where a master could split up families, where beating slaves was no crime, even if they were killed, so long as they survived the beating by a day or two.

A man could even sell his daughter to act as a bonded "wife" (sex slave). Slaves could be taken as the spoils of battle. All this ordained and legitimised, apparently, by God.

Some Christians defy logic and tell us the Biblical rules on slavery were a kindness; a way for people to repay debts and survive.

They are clearly wrong but why do they go through hoops to excuse their God for this? If God is the absolute moral authority for all of us, they should assume the moral high ground and argue that slavery is moral, right and proper.

They should fight for slavery to be re-introduced today.

But they don't because they know owning other people is a terrible, inexcusable moral evil and they know their God condoned it. And that is hard to take.

How faith rescued Christianity

2014-05-13T10:39:00.000+01:00

Imagine the men who invented Christianity sitting round a table...

At the head of the table sat an old man with an unruly beard, a checked shemagh covering his head. He looks at the men around the table, "OK, we've agreed Jesus is the son of God, we've added the ancient Osiris story about the death and resurrection—we know every god has to have that. But, we still need a strong rationale for the death. Ideas? "

Silence.

Long silence.

At last, a young, clean-shaven man at the end of the table said, "If I may sir? We could link the death right to the beginning and say Eve brought sin into the world and Jesus died to take it away? We could make Jesus a sort of human Kapparot chicken!"

Collective intake of breath followed by nervous laughter.

A grey-bearded man wearing a kippah, seated halfway down the table shook his head, "Please everyone, we need to take this seriously. No-one is going to believe that story!"

Nodding of heads around the table.

The young man courageously stood his ground, "But they will. They will. With faith they will believe ANYTHING."

The young man was dead right. Two thousand years later, two billion people believed the story. Pity I never asked his name.

NOTE for fundamentalist religious readers. I don't claim this actually happened—it's just a story. Like Christianity.

How sin kills Christianity

2014-04-08T21:59:00.003+01:00

According to Christian theology, before Adam and Eve's famous serpent-induced transgressions, they were sin-free, just as God had made them. But, with that single act of disobedience, they became sinners and they passed a sinful nature to all future generations. So now we are all sinners.

God devised a plan to forgive human sin and save us from the eternal torment he had prepared for sinners. His plan was to impregnate a virgin with his son, Jesus, and to have Jesus executed. This perfect human sacrifice would enable God to forgive sin and save the eternal lives of those who accept Jesus as their lord and saviour.

If we had not inherited a sinful nature, there would be no need for Jesus to forgive our sins.

This theology, at the very heart of Christianity, is its most vulnerable point. If the Adam and Eve story is not true then nor is Christianity. No Adam and Eve, no sinful nature, no need to be saved, no need for Jesus and no Christianity.

Many Christians believe Adam and Eve were the first two human beings who were created by God between 6 and 10 thousand years ago. This cannot be true if we can show that human beings pre-dated Adam and Eve.

What does the evidence show?

Fragments of pottery have been found in a cave in China's Hunan province dating from at least 15,400 years ago.

Rope has been found in Lascaux cave which was made approximately 17,000 years ago.

A flute-like musical instrument was found in the Geißenklösterle cave dated at 30,000 years ago.

The earliest known cave paintings were found in Spain at a cave known as El Castillo. These are more than 40,800 years old.

Archaeological evidence from New Guinea shows that boats were being made 60,000 years ago.

The earliest known anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) were found at the Omo river in Ethiopia dating from 200,000 years ago. All the discoveries prior to this relate to creatures that were very similar, but not identical, to modern humans.

Pigments and paint grinding equipment has been found in a cave at Twin Rivers, near Lusaka, Zambia dating from more than 350,000 years ago.

There is widespread evidence that fires were used to cook food by 1 million years ago.

Knives made from sharpened stones were in common use by 1.4 million years ago and some date back to 2.5 million years ago.

This small sample of evidence shows that human beings were thriving and living around the globe thousands of years before Adam and Eve were said to have been created. This shows the Adam and Eve story cannot be true.

Which means that Christianity cannot be true.

Finally, proof that God is stupid

2014-04-06T15:10:00.002+01:00

God is said to be omniscient and unchanging. But what are the implications of these characteristics?

1) Stupid people cannot learn
God cannot learn because he knows everything.

2) Stupid people won't change their minds
God cannot change his mind because he has a perfect plan. If he changes his mind, his plan would become imperfect.

3) Stupid people cannot make decisions
God can only do what is in his plan and nothing else. All God's decisions are predetermined by his plan.

4) Stupid people can't make plans
God cannot have made his plan because if he had made it, there would have been a time when he didn't know everything so he would not have been omniscient. But God cannot change so he must always have been omniscient. Therefore, the plan must be older than God. Therefore God cannot have created his own plan.

So we have a God that functions like a computer program, doing exactly what he has been told to do—no more and no less with no intelligence required. Is there any point in praying to such a God for help? What do you think?

Of course God is not really stupid because God does not exist. But the men who invented him, now they really were stupid.

I wonder how many millions of people would have lived longer, happier lives if it were not for the invention of the Abrahamic God?

Female circumcision: What it is and why it must stop

2014-04-04T17:44:00.001+01:00

In a world with so much suffering and evil, if there was only one thing I could stop, it would probably be female circumcision.

It is carried out at any age from soon after birth to 15 years and, of course, it is done without consent. It involves removing a girl’s clitoris and inner labia and sometimes the outer labia too. The wound is sewn up leaving a small gap for the passage of urine and menstrual fluid. The exact nature of the procedure varies in different cultural groups.

The cuts are made with a razor blade, scissors or knife, frequently by a person with no medical training, without anaesthesia and without sterilisation of the blade, sutures or dressings.

Immediate complications include fatal bleeding, retention of urine, urinary infection, wound infection and septicaemia. It is known that girls die from this procedure but no country, to my knowledge, keeps statistics. It seems that fatalities are rarely reported.

Eventually, if complications are not fatal, the wound heals and scar tissue forms, bonding the two sides of the vaginal opening together. The small opening left for urine and menstrual fluid is insufficient to allow for sexual intercourse, so the scar tissue must be broken apart before intercourse can occur. There are several ways this is done—all of them very painful. Of course, the woman is able to experience little or no sexual pleasure.

Female circumcision is mainly, but not exclusively, a Muslim practice. According to UNICEF, the top rates are in Somalia (with 98 percent of women affected), Guinea (96 percent), Djibouti (93 percent), Egypt (91 percent), Eritrea (89 percent), Mali (89 percent), Sierra Leone (88 percent), Sudan (88 percent), Gambia (76 percent), Burkina Faso (76 percent), Ethiopia (74 percent), Mauritania (69 percent), Liberia (66 percent), and Guinea-Bissau (50 percent).

Why is it done? Some say it is done for reasons of hygiene but this is not credible (and even if it were, would not justify it). In fact, the opposite is the case. Urine and menstrual fluids can be retained beneath the scar tissue and cleaning becomes very much more difficult.

It is a part of culture and is supported by both men and women in those groups that practice it. But it is painful, dangerous, done without consent and robs women of sexual satisfaction for their entire lives. The most likely reason for the practice is to control women—to reduce the likelihood of a wife having sexual relationship outside of marriage and as proof that a bride is a virgin.

I can’t think of a single good reason that would justify this vile practice. But they have no good reasons—they have only very bad reasons.