July & August in Review

Continuing my tradition, this is an index and summary of my posts from the past two months. Here are the ones from July:

• May & June in Review: An index of my 27 posts from May and June 2011
• Endogenous Retroviruses: Viruses "fossilized" in the genome demonstrate evo.
• JI: Out of Chaos, Canon: The NT came from power struggles among biased men
• Two Rational Thought Sites: Atheism resources from 2 UCSD club members
• Misogyny in the Bible: Censorship & rape are totally inconsistent w/ a loving God
• Why Creationists Should Drop the Issue: ...Even from their own perspective
• Abraham in an Alternate Universe: How his tale would look if God rejected faith

And from August:

• The Bolted Door: Why as a Christian I often refused to let myself doubt
• Parsimony, Explained Like You're Five: Examining the power of Occam's razor
• WEIT: The Naked Ape: The abundant fossil evidence for human evolution
• LY5: Why Creationism Isn't Taught: Simply explained, it's religious & unscientific
• JI: How Christianity Evolved (Part 1): Origins of anti-Semitism & Messianic Jesus
• JI: How Christianity Evolved (Part 2): The divine Jesus, the Trinity & the afterlife
• WEIT: The Meaning of Life: Evolution doesn't sanction evil or rob us of purpose
• Murder in the Bible: God directly and indirectly massacres innocents in the OT
• JI: Reconstructing Faith: Can Christianity survive the Bible's errors & forgeries?
• WEIT and JI Indexes: A summary of my posts on the two books I've been reading
• Self-Help and Skepticism: Think & Grow Rich lacks rigor, uselessly invokes God
• r/Atheism: The net's largest atheist forum is shallow, but witty and supportive
• A Dual Perspective: My Christian upbringing lets me see things from their angle
• The Little Things Add Up: Religion can harm via things like church attendance
• Two Approaches to Ignorance: Religion loves it; science sees it as a challenge

I was on vacation for most of July, which explains why my activity slowed down quite a bit. Last month I managed to finish off my coverage of both of the books I've been writing about since January. It was an enlightening experience, but I'm glad to be done so I can move on to new projects. I'm also quite happy with my posts about misogyny and murder in the Bible; I don't see how anyone can find the passages therein to be consistent with a benevolent God.

When I started this blog at the beginning of the year, I didn't really think it would get this far. It's allowed me both to organize my thoughts on religion and to improve my writing skills through consistent practice, and in my view that alone makes the endeavor well worth it.

Two Approaches to Ignorance

Science and religion have one peculiar similarity: they both thrive on ignorance. Neither one could function without it. If we knew everything, there would be nothing for science to test, and there would be no gap for religion to fill with God. But does this mean that science and religion aren't so different after all? Surely ignorance can't be a good thing in either case. Do they, perhaps, share a common fault?

No. What matters is how science and religion respond to this lack of knowledge.

Religion revels in ignorance. Without a sense of the unknown, there's nowhere for God to hide. Whenever someone responds to a tough question—like why 17,000 children starve to death every day—with "God works in mysterious ways," they are invoking ignorance as an impenetrable defense of their beliefs. Any unusual phenomenon that science has yet to fully explain—like eclipses and epilepsy in the past, or abiogenesis at present—is taken by the religious to be evidence of God. Believers use ignorance as both shield and sword: it lets them hide from the hard questions of religion and baselessly attack the hard questions of science. (This is why Bill O'Reilly seemed so irritated when he was informed that the tides can, in fact, be explained: he had lost his only means of assault.)

B–but the moon never miscommunicates with the ocean!

Science views ignorance as a challenge. The unknown is valued for what it represents: potential knowledge. When a field is in its infancy, the scientists in that field are brimming with excitement, because there's so much uncharted territory to explore. For example, we're making extraordinary strides in genetics, having gone from mapping the human genome in 13 years with $3 billion a decade ago to doing it in 8 days and $10,000 today. Yet the study of epigenetics is just beginning, and we're still far from mapping all the other important systems. What will we eventually discover? How it will affect our understanding of everything from evolution to neuroscience? What applications will it have for improving our lives in the future? When these questions are answered, we will overcome a fraction of our ignorance and reap the true rewards of science.

While it's true that ignorance is essential in both science and religion, its relationship to those two realms could hardly be more different. I think it may be best to summarize with an analogy. If science and religion were racehorses, ignorance would be the ground they have to cover before reaching the distant finish line: a full understanding of our universe. But while science gallops determinedly toward victory, religion wallows in the dirt, believing that it has already won.

The Little Things Add Up

A lot of terrible things have been either caused or perpetuated by religion: war, slavery, intolerance, rape, ignorance, murder. But it's easy to get so caught up in the big things that we miss the little ones. For example, how much time will the average believer spend in church throughout their lifetime? Let's find out.

Let's assume that a moderately strong Christian goes to church once a week for two hours, and fifty times a year (accounting for illness or vacations). If they're a lifelong believer in a first-world country, they might go for about 80 years, including Sunday school. That makes:

2 hours a week x 50 weeks a year x 80 years = 8,000 hours

That's quite a sum, but how much is it in practical terms? To think of it from a real-life standpoint, let's spread those hours out into 16-waking-hour days:

8,000 hours / 16 hours a day = 500 days

So what do we end up with? A total of 1 year, 4 months and 2 weeks. That's the amount of time that a churchgoer squanders in their lifetime. Sitting restlessly in the pews, listening to a half-coherent sermon. Standing with arms lifted on high, singing a song that will never reach its intended listener.

Dear Lacey, Jasmine and Jaimie: I'm so sorry.

Just think of the things we can do with that time.

With all the time we've avoided wasting—more than 16 precious months—we could:

• Learn an instrument
• Research the history and psychology of religion
• Make new friends
• Read dozens of books
• Write a book
• Serve thousands of meals at a local soup kitchen
• Train for a marathon
• Learn to cook
• Master critical thinking skills

The possibilities are endless. We can decide to use this time to improve ourselves, or even to go out into the world and help our fellow human beings. No matter what we choose to do, though, we will be enjoying our lives as we see fit. When we think of it in these terms, it's easy to see that when religion robs us of the little things, like those two hours every Sunday morning, they really do add up.

A Dual Perspective

I dislike my religious upbringing for a number of reasons. It terrified me with the threat of being tortured forever in a place that does not exist. It caused me to take life less seriously, since Jesus would probably be coming back soon to whisk me off into heaven anyway. It stifled my acceptance of "sinful" lifestyles, my respect for science and my sense of awe toward the universe.

Clearly all of this was created for me, me, me!

The one nice thing about being raised as an evangelical Christian is that I know evangelical Christianity. It gives me a perspective that I would never have known had I grown up in a nonreligious household. I can often tell when someone misquotes a verse or twists the meaning of a Bible story to make it fit their viewpoint. I can also use the Bible against Christians themselves. For example, if one of them decides to hold a grudge against me, I can say, "Let not the sun go down on your anger." Or if someone tries to tell me that hell isn't so bad because it's merely the absence of God, I can reference Jesus' parable in which a rich man being scorched by the flames of hell begs for a few drops of water to cool his tongue.

As soon as I think of a problem with Christianity, I know just how Christians are likely to respond. It's almost as though there's a past version of myself residing in my brain with whom I can debate points back and forth. When I hear someone argue for atheism or against Christianity I sometimes cringe involuntarily—not because they're wrong, but because I know how negatively I would have responded only a few short years ago. I can actually feel the outrage and revulsion that a fundamentalist would feel at the arguments I make, even as I make them.

This is the reason that it's not surprising to me that atheists have been shown to know more about religion—including Christianity—than the average Christian. Many of us grew up with this faith and only rejected it after looking at it more closely than most Christians ever do. I know how Christians feel because I once felt that way myself; I know how they respond to criticism because I, too, once responded that way. If Christians don't want their religion to continue its slow slide into obsolescence, they had better be careful to rein in their flock—otherwise they'll be unleashing hordes of people who can beat them at their own game.

r/Atheism

Reddit's teapot

Reddit has rapidly grown to become one of the most popular sites on the internet. It's part news aggregator, part forum, and its most prominent feature is the user voting system, which makes interesting content and funny or insightful comments more visible. The site is divided into subforums called "subreddits," each devoted to a different topic—and with over 160,000 readers, r/Atheism is the internet's largest atheist forum.

With its massive population size comes r/Atheism's greatest strengths: there are always new jokes, news stories and anecdotes being posted, and the most popular ones often have hundreds of comments. And because of the voting system, the good content and comments (usually) rise to the top. With such a large and unfiltered group, one might expect a lot of dumb or ignorant people—and there are a few—but overall the discussions are intelligent and entertaining.

The biggest problem r/Atheism has is that too many of its top-rated submissions are on the shallow side: comics, Facebook conversations and the like. And of course, with so many like-minded people gathered in one place, it risks becoming an echo chamber that shuns opposing views. But the subreddit is at its best when raising awareness about some injustice or violation of church-state separation. For example, today someone posted about a teacher at his daughter's public school putting bracelets on students promoting an evangelism event, and redditors were full of supportive advice. When Damon Fowler was kicked out of his home for his atheism and activism, r/Atheism helped spread the story and contribute to his college scholarship. Its massive influence has even led to awesome stuff like a Q&A with Richard Dawkins.

It's true that r/Atheism tends to promote more fluff than I'd like. But there are always some interesting threads on the front page, and it offers a sense of community that no other place on the net can provide. Other related subreddits include r/AtheistHavens (for those who've been disowned for their unbelief), r/AtheistGems (a list of useful atheism-related resources) and r/Skeptic (which covers a wide range of superstition and pseudoscience). If nothing else, reddit is the ideal place for getting newly deconverted atheists to realize that they're definitely not alone.

Self-Help and Skepticism

Well, at least one guy got rich.

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill is one of the most popular self-help books of all time. It's also extremely well-reviewed on Amazon. My dad practically begged me to read it, and I thought, how bad could it be? So I did.

...Or rather, I got up to chapter 5. I can only handle so much bullshit.

Hill is a compelling writer, and he used plenty of interesting examples and anecdotes to supplement his points. But to illustrate what I'm talking about, let me give a particularly egregious example of the nonsense I encountered:

"The emotions of faith, love, and sex are the most powerful of all the major positive emotions. When the three are blended, they have the effect of "coloring" the vibration of thought in a way that it instantly reaches the subconscious mind, where it is changed into its spiritual equivalent, the only form that induces a response from the Infinite Intelligence." (p. 51)

What does it mean to color the vibration of thought? How, precisely, does the Infinite Intelligence respond to this unholy amalgam of raw feeling? It's as if Hill tried to cram as many meaningless buzzwords as he could into a single short paragraph.

But let's leave that aside. Hill's larger objective is to help us make money, and we can easily forgive a few lapses into gibberish if he can accomplish that. Here is his magical formula for success:

1. Think of the specific sum of money you want.
2. Think of what you will give in exchange for this money.
3. Think of a date by which you intend to have this money.
4. Come up with a plan to get it and begin to carry it out immediately.
5. Write down steps 1–4.
6. Read the statement from step 5 twice a day, and at the same time "see and feel and believe yourself already in possession of the money."

The poorly-kept secret of
The Secret: it doesn't work.

The first five steps seem pretty sensible. It's the sixth one that encapsulates much of the book's premise, and many of its flaws. Hill seems to wholeheartedly endorse a rudimentary version of what's now called the Law of Attraction—the idea that if you think of something hard enough, want something badly enough, the universe will give it to you. (Nowadays its most prominent proponent is Rhonda Byrne, author of The Secret.) He repeatedly insists that we can "transmute our thoughts into their physical equivalent." At first I thought he was just being poetic, but by the ninth or tenth rendition any poetry had long since worn away.

On several occasions Hill tells his readers that if they follow his program, the accumulation of wealth will be easy:

• "When you begin to think and grow rich, you will observe that riches begin with a state of mind, with definiteness of purpose, with little or no hard work." (p. 13)
• "You can put [the book's principles] to work for your own enduring benefit. You will find it easy, not hard, to do." (p. 16)
• "The steps call for no 'hard labor.' They call for no sacrifice...no great amount of education." (p. 28)

This is a lie, and one made all the more obvious by the fact that Hill contradicts himself multiple times. Step two of his master plan explicitly calls for the sacrifice that he so flatly denies on page 28, and some of his anecdotes involve people putting forth extraordinary effort before reaching their goals.

Speaking of anecdotes, this is another major flaw in Hill's reasoning: his dataset is hopelessly skewed. He claims that his plan will work for everyone, yet in support of this he offers his interviews with successful people: Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, and a host of other famous icons. Even if we assume that they followed Hill's methods to the letter, this is not sufficient evidence. For every such triumph, there could be ten thousand failures, and neither Hill nor the reader would be any the wiser.

The implications of one of Hill's examples could even be seen as dangerous. He tells the story of Edwin C. Barnes, who devoted himself utterly to the goal of becoming a business associate of Thomas Edison. He left absolutely everything behind to do so:

"He left himself no possible way of retreat. He had to win or perish! That is all there is to the Barnes story of success!" (p. 24)

Yes, Barnes was successful. But how easily Hill forgets the "or perish" he slipped in. What happens if others try to emulate this strategy? Maybe they won't be so lucky. To praise such a reckless course of action based on one man's triumph, without even attempting to find the overall success rate, is utterly irresponsible.

While I may have missed a few gems in the rough, a quick look through the rest of the book suggests that it doesn't get any better. There are plenty more references to the "Infinite Intelligence"—I assume that Hill thought it lent an air of authority and mystique, as opposed to the preachiness of "God"—and the book's eleventh chapter covers "The Mystery of Sex Transmutation." I kid you not.

And the author is
aptly named, to boot. 

After tossing Think and Grow Rich aside, I began reading another self-help book entitled 59 Seconds: Change Your Life in Under a Minute. Like Rich, 59 Seconds boldly claims to be able to easily and markedly improve a person's life.

Unlike Rich, 59 Seconds is based on 263 scientific papers.

Within the first few pages, 59 Seconds tears Rich to shreds. As it turns out, the visualizations that Hill suggests in his sixth step may potentially be harmful for acheiving one's goals. Experiments found that visualizing positive outcomes can have "the unfortunate side effect of leaving you unprepared for the difficulties that crop up on the rocky road to success, thus increasing your chances of faltering at the first hurdle rather than persisting in the face of failure." The book goes on to criticize the general carelessness of self-help books, and to explain how to foster motivation and creativity, relieve stress, and actually be happy (it doesn't require money, as Hill so often suggests)—all with the help of real science.

To summarize: some of Rich is nonsensical, some is counterproductive, and the useful parts—in a nutshell, resourcefulness and determination are vital to success—aren't particularly insightful. Hill's thinly disguised appeals to God only highlight his disregard for rigor and empirical study. I hope that this book isn't representative of the self-help genre as a whole, but I strongly suspect that it is. If only people read more books like 59 Seconds, they might start to really improve themselves.

Update: Luke Muehlhauser has a short but useful list of scientific self-help books.

WEIT and JI Indexes

Now that I've finished both Why Evolution is True and Jesus, Interrupted, I thought it might be useful to create indexes for the two of them.

I'll start with WEIT. I was surprised to see that nearly half of my coverage came from the intro and first two chapters of the book. It seems that early on I was in the habit of making shorter, more in-depth posts about individual subjects. However, since the latter chapters were less about the evidence for evolution and more about its workings, I sped through them at a rate of a chapter per post.

• Intelligent Design Is Creationism: Wedge document & "cdesign proponentsists"
• The Tree of Life: Nested hierarchies of organisms confirm evolution
• Continental Drift: Plate tectonics makes accurate predictions, but YEC is a mess
• Radiometric Dating Works: Isochron dating and coral growth rings confirm it
• Tetrapod and Bird Evolution: Tiktaalik, Archaeopteryx and the origins of flight
• Cetacean Evolution: Indohyus, Ambulocetus, Rodhocetus and more
• The Big Picture: Geologic column's overall fossil pattern & YEC's inadequacies
• Human Vestigiality & Atavisms: Appendix, goosebumps, ear muscles & tails
• Other Vestigiality & Atavisms: Whale legs, chicken teeth, inactivated genes, etc.
• The Layout of Life: How geographical distributions of life & fossils support evo.
• Island Evolution: Studying patterns of life on continental vs. oceanic islands
• A Force to Be Reckoned With: Predictions & examples of natural selection
• The Peacock's Tail: The role of sex and sexual selection in evolution
• What Makes a Species: The process, fulfilled predictions & observed speciation
• The Naked Ape: Fossil evidence for human evolution & creationist confusion
• The Meaning of Life: Evolution neither sanctions evil nor robs us of purpose

My coverage of JI began with a focus on specific contradictions in the Bible, which is what I was expecting from the book given its subtitle. Later on, though, Ehrman began to focus more on forgeries and general disagreements in tone, as well as the fierce competition within the early church.

• What Christians Don't Know and Why: Two reasons they don't notice Bible errors
• On What Day Was Jesus Crucified?: Was it Passover or the Day of Preparation?
• What was Mary & Joseph's Hometown?: Was it Bethlehem or Nazareth?
• The Gospel of Nobody: Apologists create stories none of the gospels agree with
• John Versus the Synoptics: Differences in content, emphasis and teachings
• Paul and the Ignorance of Idolators: Did God excuse some unbelief in the past?
• Introduction to Forgeries: Who really wrote the gospels & the motives of forgers
• Forged in the Name of Paul: How we know Ephesians, Titus & others are fakes
• Our Sources for Jesus: Why they're bad, and 4 ways we make the best of them
• Failed Prophets and Historical Methods: What we can & can't know about Jesus
• Out of Chaos, Canon: The NT came from power struggles among biased men
• How Christianity Evolved (1/2): Origins of anti-Semitism & the Messianic Jesus
• How Christianity Evolved (2/2): Origins of the Trinity, afterlife & Jesus' divinity
• Reconstructing Faith: Can Christianity survive the Bible's errors and forgeries?

I learned a lot from both of these books. Alternating between them was an interesting experience as well. While it did take me a bit longer to get back into the mindset of one book after having previously covered the other, it was also nice to have a continuous change of pace, a balance between science and history.

I also already have my next two books lined up: Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation and Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World. The former is very short and easy read, so I'll finish that before starting on the latter.