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I have done a few ‘Hero of the Day’ posts and I have a few more on the way. The recipients have done great work spreading important information, rallying against injustice, educating us masses, and have been generally awesome. But today’s hero is special. On top of those usual achievements, she’s done it all while personally facing off against one of the leading threats to civilization as we know it. Oh, and she’s only 15.
The Taliban, with its “all powerful god”, is threatened by literate females. So much so, it will use brutal violence, murder, torture, and arson to enforce its view that girls should not be allowed in schools. What else would you expect from the “religion of peace”?
Malala Yousafzai, from the Swat district of Pakistan, however, does not agree. With aspirations of becoming a doctor or a politician, Malala is a strong advocate for gender equality, especially for equal access to education. Like many other girls in Swat, Malala has risked her life to attend classes against the wishes of the Taliban. At the same time, she was also doing something extraordinary. Malala, using a pseudonym, started blogging for the BBC, reporting to the world what it was like to be an ordinary child under the Taliban as it destroyed schools and forbade girls from attending the ones they hadn’t destroyed yet.
Adam B. Ellick from the New York Times made a documentary called Class Dismissed profiling Malala, her activism, and the difficulties and dangers for girls wanting to go to school.
Since the documentary, Malala’s has kept on advocating for girl’s education, growing in influence and visibility. This earned her and her father numerous death threats from the Taliban. Undeterred, Malala kept working for equal education opportunities.
On October 9th, 2012, the Taliban tried to make good on its threats. To preserve the glory of Islam an Allah, Malala was shot in the head.
Now recovering in a UK hospital, Malala isn’t done yet. Her message and story are spreading and the world is taking note.
Tarek Fatah, from Toronto, started a petition on change.org to nominate Malala for a Nobel Peace Prize. The response has been tremendous. The Prime Minister and the leaders of all of our major parties have unanimously endorsed this petition. If you haven’t done so already, please sign as well.
In the west we’ve had huge media organizations cower and retreat when islamist extremists raised their hate filled voices. In Swat, a 15 year old girl stood directly against the guns, bombs, soldiers, and machetes wielded by the worst of brutal zealots, just outside her door.
Justice will be served?
He’s a Fundie, with a BADGE! That’s right folks, newly appointed Winnipeg police chief Devon Clunis is gonna clean up the streets….with prayer! Hallelujah Sweet Jebus, we gonna fill some murderous hearts with love tonight, just by whispering sweet nothings into the ear of our collective imaginary friend, AMEN!
You know, I spend a good deal of my time reading about how religion poisons and destroys lives all across the globe, all across history, but I admit I’ve always felt a little shielded here in Canada. Sure, Alberta sometimes seems like the ‘Texas of Canada’, but that ‘of Canada’ bit reigns in a substantial amount of theistic lunacy.
Sure, we have some obstacles to overcome to become a truly progressive society, but this is Canada, goddamit! We got that separation of church and state thing going strong! We aren’t like those backward United States! Faith isn’t paraded like a virtue by those in public office! Civil servants keep their faiths hidden where they belong and … and … who the fuck is this guy? A police chief promoting prayer? Really? REALLY? IN MY COUNTRY?
Ok, ok. Calm down. Let’s deal with this like cool collected intellectual people, and tear this guy a new one.
Rationally speaking, of course. Read the rest of this entry »
Unlike The Arbourist, I have very little musical talent. I cannot play any instrument, keep time, or even step in rhythm (my dancing has been described as “dangerous”, and not in a good way). On occasion I fantasize about how awesome it would be were I actually a classic guitar virtuoso, percussion prodigy, or mad-skilled pianist. Once the dream fades, I am left wondering what instrument would actually befit a person like me.
Today I happened upon this delightful little article on the CBC music blog and thought it would be fun to share it. It seems that, depending on my mood on a given day, I ought to take up the Viola, the Timpani, or the Cello.
Perhaps you’d like to start playing a musical instrument, or your five-year-old is begging for lessons. But you’re wondering: With so many musical instruments out there, how do I choose?
It’s simple really. Ask anyone in the music business and they’ll tell you that musicians have personalities matched to the instruments they play. So we’ve come up with a little way to figure out the instrument that’s right for you. (Click the image below to enlarge it.)
CBC article here
When I was quite young and much more naive than I am today, I was talking to my dad about drugs. We were talking about all the negative health effects of smoking in school, so I told my dad that I thought that it would be a wonderful idea if smoking was made illegal. Within a generation lung, throat, and mouth cancer would be decimated, people all over the planet would be happy, healthy, and less prone to violence. This could save the world!
My dad was quick to point out how I was in error. Drug lords, he said, would love nothing more than to have smoking become illegal. Making things illegal, without affecting the costs of production, would dramatically increase the retail price. The mark-up would be astronomical, making selling cigarettes very profitable indeed. He then pointed out that my grandfather, a dear and marvellous man, is addicted to smoking. Making it illegal would not magically make his addiction go away. The only thing it would do is make him a “criminal” and put him and his habit in jail.
Later on in my schooling, we learned about the prohibition era and how the criminalization of alcohol provided the financial backbone for a rampant expansion in organized crime. Another solid examples showing that making a substance illegal in no way reduces it’s use in a society, but rather just strengthens the criminal element and lowers public safety. Experiment failed, prohibition doesn’t work.
Now we have “The War on Drugs”. It seems obvious to me, from these earlier lessons, that having any drug be illegal is a dumb idea. Really dumb. It doesn’t matter what your intentions are, nor does it matter how bad a particular drug is for human consumption. All that matters is that prohibition doesn’t work. I point this out to people and in response I get a torrent of reasons why drugs are bad and how they destroy lives. To me this just begs the question ‘If this is so important, why are you employing such a demonstrably poor way of dealing with it?’
Then I get the speculations. ‘If drugs were legal, they would run rampant. Six year olds would be doing heroine, and society would be saying its ok’. This reminds me of theists who claim that, without god, people would go around raping people and burning school buses filled with children for fun. There is no reason to believe that these horror stories would actualize if drugs were legal, just as there is no reason to believe people without religion are all psycho killer arsonists.
But while there has always been evidence that prohibition was ineffective, there hasn’t been much to show that de-criminalization wouldn’t lead to the other ‘greater’ evils proposed by Drug War Mongers. The most I’ve gotten from an advocate of current drug laws was that, while the laws aren’t a perfect solution, they are the best solution we have. Enter Portugal. AIDS was rampant due to drug needle sharing, drug use was high, things were quite bad. Then in 2001, Portugal went rogue. The decriminalized drugs. All of them.
Nations on board with the War on Drugs were quick to predict catastrophic results for this radical move. Portugal was on the path of self-destruction. Soon the entire country would be populated by stoned-out-of-their-mind-gang-bangers, slitting each other’s throats to get their next fix for their un-controlled drug overdose orgy!
But then…somehow… armageddon did NOT decimate Portugal. Nothing close to what was predicted came to be. What did happen? Drug use fell. A lot. Portugal now has about a third the drug use of the average European nation. What about that AIDS problem? Down by almost a fifth!
Of course, it’s not as simple as ‘Make things legal then-POOF- everything’s better”. Treatment and rehab programs were made available. With the extra resources due to abandoning the War on Drugs, these programs were actually good. Plus, addicts, no longer fearful of persecution, actually used them. They actually committed themselves to helping people in a meaningful way. And it worked. Imagine that!
I’ve always been a huge fan of empirical evidence. There have been countless ideas about how the world could/ought to be. Admittedly some of them were absolute genius in there intricacy, detail, and internal coherency. I’ve come up with a few myself. But ultimately, that doesn’t actually matter. What really makes an idea worthy of pursuit is if the damn thing works.
The results are in. Societies always lose the War on Drugs. What happens if we abandon the war and decriminalize? Portugal has shown us the immense progress that is attainable in just one short decade. So far, most of the western world has not learned from the failure of prohibition, but perhaps it can learn from the success of Portugal.
Brief articles:1 and 2
Extensive article with data here
And for those who favour video:
I learned very early on that following The Fashion just wasn’t worth the hassle and that it just didn’t deliver what it promised. When I was three years old, I thought it would be super cool to have spiky hair. And for the first little while, it was cool. But every day, I had sit still for 5 whole minutes (a very long time for a young boy) while my mom applied the required gel to my hair to get it to stay in place. Those 5 minutes seemed to get longer and longer, until they stretched out into eternity. And was I rewarded with a new, more exciting life? Were my latent super powers suddenly unleashed due to my fantastically awesome hair? No. All I got for my unfathomable patience was a few seconds of a visual in the mirror only to go the rest of my day without looking at myself, not really caring what was on top of my head.
I very quickly dropped the ‘cool’ hair style and adopted the one I still wear today. I call it ‘short’. It looks the same every single morning, no matter how I sleep. It looks the same throughout the day, no matter how much wind there is. If you wake up a mere 5 minutes earlier each day to fix your hair, each year I get to sleep in a full 30 hours more than you. No muss, fuss, money-gobbling-products, worry, or stress. It is low maintenance and efficiency at its peak.
I apply this early lesson any time I encounter The Fashion. What would I gain? What would it cost? What are the odds this will deliver anything close to what The Fashion is promising? As anyone with a hint of practicality might imagine, The Fashion does not win out on very many of these cost/benefit analyses.
Of course, applying critical thought to The Fashion is quite unfashionable. Dressing according to utility will rarely earn you compliments and even sometimes elicit scorn. The Fashion is a greedy, non-sensical, evil, duplicitous, money-grab run by people who don’t care about you, your health, or your looks.
“What, what? When I listen to The Fashion, I look and feel good. So do millions of others. Back up your claim, you nay-sayer you!”
Glad you asked.
There are countless examples of The Fashion being a superficial waste of materials. I mean, who came up with ties? They don’t cover anything, and they certainly don’t keep you warm. But the example I want to look at makes it blatantly obvious that the rules of fashion are not only indifferent towards utility, but also contrived primarily to conjure up an imaginary need just so they can sell you useless crap. Here it is:
In N.America, The Fashion has a lot to say about skin tone. Tan is healthy. Tan is beautiful. Tan is sexy. Pale is sickly! Look at all of our starlets in movies with tans. Models in our ads have tans. We have tanning beds, tanning oils, tanning salons, tanning magazines, tan tan tan tan tan tan!
In Asia, The Fashion also has a lot to say about skin tone. Pale is healthy. Pale is beautiful. Pale is sexy. Tan is dirty! Look at all of their starlets in movies with pale skin. Models in their ads have pale skin. They have skin-whitening ointments, skin-whitening moisturizers, skin-whitening make-up, pale pale pale pale pale!
“Do you believe in god?”
“No.”
“Well, do you believe in love?”
“Sure.”
“Then you must believe in god, as god is love”
“Wha…?”
I’ve heard the ‘god is love’ bit quite a number of times, but never as a proof for its deistic existence. When it is merely an assertion about a god already presumed to exist, it is easy enough to show that ‘god is love’ is an absolutely ludicrous notion. One merely needs to point to deeds/positions attributed to the god in question that cannot be seen as loving. In the case of christianity, the bible helps us out immensely with tales of murder, rape, slavery, genocide, and human sacrifice, all in the name of their god, to make this a very easy task. In addition, one could also point to the innumerable atrocities committed by those closest to god. Indeed, the degree of horror believers can enact seems directly related to the level of zeal they possess. Or, if one took ‘god is love’ to be a part of omni-benevolence, then one could point to the problem of evil to show how god cannot exist. But in this conversation, all this doesn’t work yet.
It doesn’t work because a particular god has not been identified. The only characteristic mentioned is that ‘god is love’. To be sure, the person who presented this argument to me had a specific god in mind. If they were to have gone so far as to start describing other attributes of their god, then the thoughts in the previous paragraph would surely destroy their position. But that’s not the point. While the posited syllogism is vague, maybe even a bit flaky, if it works, then the belief in god is validated and the little details about the surrounding nature of god (everything he is that isn’t solely love) can be hashed out later. The important thing is that god has been proven and all us atheists are just being fussy about superfluous factoids.
The thing is, the details may be superfluous, but that these details exist at all is not. If one wants to say that ‘god’ is exactly synonymous with ‘love’, then the concept of ‘god’ is completely useless. There is no reason for there to be two words when one will do. And as ‘love’ is a much more flexible term (how weird would it be -even for theists – to replace the word love and say something like “I’m deeply in god with you, darling”), the term ‘god’ ought to be discarded. Of course, the theist resists this, not only because they don’t want to give up their delusion, but also because, at some level, they are aware of the little dishonesty in the assertion ‘god is love’.
It is dishonesty in omission. No theist ever would ever say ‘god is love and only love’. If they did, as I showed last paragraph, ‘god’ would be rendered meaningless. What they are not saying is “god is love and some other things I’m trying to illegitimately sneak into this argument so I don’t have to go through the impossible task of justifying those extra attributes.” Even if the only thing they wanted to add was ‘god is love and a sentient entity that exists outside of humanity’, they would be right back where they started, with no evidence, no proof, and no reason to think that god exists. Nothing addresses always-unmentioned second half. But theists are never that honest, least of all to themselves.
But hey, I was wrong that one time before. It could happen again. What if some theist comes up with some brilliant argument that refutes what I just said, so brilliant that I cannot answer those refutations? Does ‘god is love’ work then? Not hardly. Consider an exercise in consistency.
Do you believe that the sea exits? You do? Great! That means you must believe in Poseidon, for Poseidon IS the sea. The tides reflect his breathing, the waves his mood. Thus, we can learn a lot about Poseidon just by looking at the sea. As any seafarer will tell you, conditions out on the briny sea can are uncertain at best, displaying how temperamental Poseidon is. Therefore it is always good to offer a sacrifice to Poseidon before any travel by sea, in order to secure safe passage.
Are you convinced? Will you now pray to Poseidon? Not a chance. Why? Because you just can’t attach a real life thing to an imagined being and have it pop into existence, that’s why. If this method worked, you would have to believe in Apollo because you believe in the sun, Thor because you believe in lightning, Gazunga because you believe in cheese, and Eros because you believe in love. Wait! What was that? Love was for that christian god, wasn’t it? Yup, this line of reasoning can bring into existence multiple deities for the same real life phenomenon.
In fact, it can pop into being an infinite amount of gods, an infinite amount of whom require that they be the only god. That either means that this line of reasoning is necessarily incoherent, or it shows that each god concept has an equal chance of being true, which, in this case, is literally infinitesimally small.
‘God is love’, like all such fanciful tripe (eg. ‘God is beauty’, ‘God is truth’, ‘God is justice’, etc) either renders god meaningless and the idea ought to be discarded, or it is dishonest and the idea ought to be discarded. Even on the minuscule chance that I’m wrong on this, the same method could then be used to validate an infinite number of mutually-exclusive gods and the idea ought to be discarded. No matter what, theists using this line are not being deep, spiritual, other-worldly, or mystical. They are just being wrong.
There is a conversation that happens all the time between theists and non-believers. I have engaged in it many times myself as well as observed others engaging in it more times than I can count. While there are a number of seemingly valid ways atheists could deal with this conversation, I have come to believe that many of these methods merely lead to baited traps.
This conversation starts with the theist coming up with Claim X, asserting that no one could explain Claim X without invoking god, and smugly concluding that god must exist.
There are four categories Claim X might fall into:
1) Claim X is simply false
2) Claim X is easily explained without invoking god
3) Claim X is explained without invoking god, but it’s complex
4) Claim X actually has no current non-god explanations
While there have been millions of examples of ‘Claim X’ used in these conversations, scant few still fall into the fourth category. Because it’s so rare, most atheist responses to such a conversation ignore this category. This, I think, is the major reason such conversations can (and have) gone on for seeming eternities. To illustrate, let’s look at each of the categories.
Claim X is simply false
The bait here is nigh on irresistible. One of the theist’s premises are wrong, thus the argument is invalid and the conclusion does not follow! It’s irrefutable!
What do you mean it isn’t? Oh silly secularist, you fell into a trap of perpetual distortions.
Showing Claim X to be false simply invites the theist to propose ‘Claim X-prime’ that is slightly different or a bit more vague than Claim X. And when you do the same for Claim X-prime, the theists alters it again, and so on ad infinitum. Should you ever get to the point where all versions of Claim X are shown to be false, the theist then just says something to the effect of ‘Look at all that contorting and effort you had to do, just to grasp at straws. Your desperation indicates your flaw. Your story keeps changing, while my answer, “God”, stayed constant.’
Is that rational?
No.
But discourse is not based on rationality. It’s based on persuasion. As such, the theist is right, you have failed to be persuasive. To the theist, that is. Those exercising reason may indeed enjoy your absolute thrashing of whatever B.S. the theist churns up. But then, if we were only trying to persuade people with reason, we wouldn’t be talking to theists, would we?
Claim X is easily explained without invoking god
A wonderful example of this is Bill Head-Up-My-Arse O’Reilly’s infamous ‘Tide goes in, tide goes out’ line. Again, the pull here to shove reality based ideas in the theist’s face is often overwhelming. But, like in our previous case, just because the secularist is right, doesn’t mean they win. Once more, the theist backs up a bit and makes Claim X slightly harder to explain, and then slightly harder still and so on until it eventually turns into…
Claim X is explained without invoking god, but it’s complex
Now things can get tricky. We saw this as O’Reilly responded to the initial wave of attacks with his ‘How’d the moon get there?’ bit. Answering the theist’s challenge might now actually require formal education to supply the answer. In some cases, it might require a fair deal of study just to understand the answer. I personally enjoy listening to responses from people who have done the requisite schoolwork, as it can be a fun way to learn about things (I highly recommend TheLivingDinosaur ‘s “Holy Hallucinations” series) but alas, these are also doomed to fail. As the answers are now further away from the layman, the theist is safe to ignore all presented evidence. It’s not as if anyone in their camp is going to actually research this stuff. Thus, the theist vision of what fits into the next and final category is quite bloated.
Claim X actually has no current non-god explanations
This is where the theist wants to go and, as I’ve described above, there is little to be done to stop them from getting here, other than infinite loops of explanations that are ever more easily discarded. And you can’t get anywhere inside of an infinite loop.
A key point to realize is that in these conversations, the theist doesn’t really care to which category their particular ‘Claim X’ belongs. Rather, what matters is that somewhere out there, some ‘Claim X’ does reside in the fourth category.
And, ultimately, the theist is right. There are things that currently cannot be explained. There are things that may never be explained. Further, there may be things that inherently defy human understanding and are impossible to explain. So the theist wins. God exists. Accept it and go home.
Wait a minute…That can’t be right. Let’s back things up and look at the original argument structure.
1) Claim X is true
2) Claim X cannot currently be explained by humans without invoking god
3) Therefore god exists
There are two huge problems with this structure, regardless on the truth of the first two premises. The first problem is a false dichotomy implied by 2): as Claim X cannot be explained without god, it is explained *with* god. “God did it” does not explain anything. If I ask you ‘how does a clock work?’ and you reply ‘a clock-maker makes it work’, have I gained any understanding at all? Not one lick. All the god “answer” does is avoid explaining anything at all.
But a theist could potentially offer an actual explanation that is based on the god hypothesis. This tactic is used less and less, as these explanations are invariably discovered to be wrong (see Thunderf00t’s wonderful ‘Why people laugh at creationists‘ series). But lets say a brilliant theist comes up with an explanation that cannot be disproven by even the most intense scrutiny carried out by our most brilliant minds. If this were to ever happen (don’t hold your breath) we then run into the second problem: 3 does NOT follow from 1 and 2. Just because a hypothesis CAN explain a phenomenon, does not mean it DOES explain it.
Going back to our clock, consider if, instead of “a clock-maker makes it work / god did it”, you replied “inside there is a team of invisible gremlins with perfect timing. They were captured and placed in this clock and forced to move the hands of the clock in order to relay time to outside viewers,” and there was an elaborate tale explaining all the ins and outs, and further, we had no way of observing the gremlins inside this clock to verify this (or any other) story. According to the theist’s argument model, we’ve just proven the existence of clock gremlins. The god hypothesis is a worthless ad-hoc conjecture as it is dependent on nothing, predicts nothing, and is non-falsifiable. As such, any of an infinite of imagined things could take god’s place in the theist’s argument and it would be equally valid.
The theist wants their argument to come off like this:
1) Claim X
2) Claim X would be impossible unless god exists.
3) Therefore god exists.
But the theist will never say anything close to this, because then the onus is obviously on them to demonstrate 2) and they just can’t do it. It is an impossible premise to validate. So they twist and distort until their argument takes the fallacious form we see so often, to try and shirk the onus of proof onto non-believers.
So how should one react to Claim X?
I would recommend immediately acknowledging that there are things that current science cannot explain, regardless of under which category Claim X falls. Resist the bait. Then, address how a gap in knowledge cannot prove any supernatural entity, as otherwise it could prove any of an infinite possible deities.
Remember, it doesn’t matter to the theist’s argument if Claim X is wrong or currently understood – even though it should – so it shouldn’t matter to yours.
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Mystro
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