Carl Sagan on Colonising other Worlds

Hyperbole is without a doubt the single greatest thing in the history of the universe.

And I'm a big fan of Carl Sagan too:

Please don't label me

Sarah found this interesting article in the times which offers a critique of the British Humanist Association's current poster campaign.

Interesting stuff whether you look at from a religious or a secular perspective:

...If you believe something important to be true, then you shouldn’t pretend it is an open question. This goes for secular humanists as much as for religious believers. If, for example, you are a convinced atheist, and you think that belief in God is false at an intellectual level and damaging through its distorting effects on morality, then of course you would want to share this conviction with your children. It would be unjust to keep it from them. Similarly, if you believe in God, and you believe that this faith is not just a lifestyle choice or a cultural imperative but an objective truth with profound implications for human existence, how could you not share this conviction with your children?...

...It’s a fantasy to imagine that children can be raised in a philosophically neutral environment without some dominant world-view. Theism – as much as atheism, materialism, or secular humanism (these terms are not synonomous) – provides a particular understanding of the meaning of the world and of human life, which will help structure a child’s understanding and values. But if you try to bring your children up in an environment which is indifferent to questions of ultimate meaning, then your purported neutrality will already have been lost. If, in effect, you say to your children, “I don’t care enough about these values or convictions to share them with you”, or “they are important to me but not important in themselves”, then you are presenting them with a very particular world-view...

Things Not Seen

Mind Control Made Easy

Or, How to Become a Cult Leader:

A 'hypercosmic God'

...The John Templeton Foundation announced the winner of the annual Templeton Prize of a colossal £1 million ($1.4 million), the largest annual prize in the world.

This year it goes to French physicist and philosopher of science Bernard d'Espagnat for his "studies into the concept of reality". D'Espagnat, 87, is a professor emeritus of theoretical physics at the University of Paris-Sud, and is known for his work on quantum mechanics. The award will be presented to him by the Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace on 5 May...

...

Unlike classical physics, d'Espagnat explained, quantum mechanics cannot describe the world as it really is, it can merely make predictions for the outcomes of our observations. If we want to believe, as Einstein did, that there is a reality independent of our observations, then this reality can either be knowable, unknowable or veiled. D'Espagnat subscribes to the third view. Through science, he says, we can glimpse some basic structures of the reality beneath the veil, but much of it remains an infinite, eternal mystery.

Looking back at d'Espagnat's work, I couldn't help but wonder what the Templeton Foundation – an organisation dedicated to reconciling science and religion – saw in it that they thought was worth a £1 million. Then, scanning the press release, I found it:

"There must exist, beyond mere appearances … a 'veiled reality' that science does not describe but only glimpses uncertainly. In turn, contrary to those who claim that matter is the only reality, the possibility that other means, including spirituality, may also provide a window on ultimate reality cannot be ruled out, even by cogent scientific arguments."...

More from New Scientist.

A Pernicious Lodestone in 'Kevin'

1968 was drawing to a close and Kevin was fast approaching his eighteenth birthday. In July he had left his leafy boarding school in Surrey and his resettlement in Stoke-on-Trent was anything but covered in glory. He had escaped the dreary prospect of becoming articled to a chartered accountant and was ending the year kicking his heels as a handyman in a furniture shop.

Education had given Kevin no fixed compass bearing to guide his life into a worthwhile career. Egotistical pragmatism was the lodestone that influenced his next decision; on his eighteenth birthday he crossed the threshold of the Army Recruiting Office in Hanley. His father, whose own military career was drawing to a close, was very pleased to accompany him.

An oath was sworn to serve Queen and Country for nine years and the contract sealed for him to enlist with the Royal Army Medical Corps to train as a physiotherapist. Such a career profession was a complete mystery to Kevin but it sounded very grand. In reality he felt momentum was more important than direction and, although he had never read Voltaire’s “Candide,” he assumed he too lived in "the best of all possible worlds."

Four days later, armed with little more than his optimism, Kevin retreated from life in Stoke and advanced to Keogh Barracks, the RAMC training depot at Ash Vale, near Aldershot. Platoon 6901 was the first intake of recruits in 1969 and new recruit 24109201 Private Bettany and fifteen other individuals blended into a unit of square bashers, boot polishers and barrack room lawyers.

With his boarding school background, Kevin was easily accommodated to barrack room etiquette. He was well aware that peer group approval was a fickle commodity but he assumed that he had the personal equipment and attributes to warrant a more generous portion of popularity. A regular place in the depot rugby team created a helpful impression.

Basic training did throw up some interesting irregularities -a wrestling match with a very senior officer looking for a physical workout; a visit from Captain Bettany RAPC; friendship with Private Patel, an Asian refugee from General Idi Amin’s Uganda; an Oscar winning performance as a volunteer war casualty with a fake compound fracture of the femur; and finding a four leaf clover whilst on picket duty!

When Kevin paraded for the passing out ceremony he was still recovering from a bad hangover. He won no awards for his performance as a recruit but he looked forward to his first posting to the Royal Herbert Hospital in Woolwich. It was less than a mile from where he was born at the Military Maternity Hospital in 1951.

Kevin was not a young man who readily exposed himself to wise counsellors. Since his hasty retreat from Stoke it had never occurred to him that he should explore the meaning of the word `physiotherapist’. He was still relying on a flawed blend of optimism and charm to see him through. Later that year he would have to face the academic rigors waiting for him at the Army School of Physiotherapy.

He longed for the day he could don his blue track suit and Fred Perry T shirt (bought on a loan) and enjoy the kudos of being a `physio’ trainee. Meanwhile he played rugby for 12 Company RAMC, found a quiet place to read his novels, larked around and smoked with other lads waiting for training. He secretly admired pretty army nurses and liked to be seen with a soldier who drove a white Mercedes that had seen better days.

Six months after starting the Physio Freshers course Kevin was a humiliated and embarrassed man. One main reason for his failure to proceed beyond the fresher stage of his physiotherapy course was his shocking complacency in the face of anatomy, physiology, bio-chemistry and other academic subjects. His pretence and fanciful optimism was finally unmasked at the fresher’s exams.

The second main reason concerned the lifestyle choices he made which were peer-centred rather than career-centred. Kevin’s lodestone was influenced by the distraction of several complicated relationships. However sweet the temptations, the bitter consequences never could be undone or redeemed. Only by the grace of God did one of those relationships flourish.

Kevin options were now even more limited. Had a wise mentor been available to offer him sound advice he might have been persuaded to opt for a more realistic course of action; to train as an Army State Registered Nurse. His egocentric lodestone swung him away from such a pragmatic programme.

Instead, Kevin joined two other soldiers and spent twenty weeks at the Army Medical College training as an Army Medical Laboratory Technician Class Three. It conferred the rank of Lance Corporal and it was a modicum of success in an otherwise indifferent Army career.

After the course Kevin remained in Milbank at the Queen Alexandra Hospital, 18 Company RAMC. Despite some good practical progress in haematology, serology, bacteriology, and particularly histology, his main weakness remained bio-chemistry. In this respect he lived in fear of what tests he might be asked to do as the ‘on call’ lab technician.

Dr Samuel Johnson said that “He who is tired of London is tired of life.” In the 1970’s London was still the swinging capital of world culture. The NAAFI culture of 18 Company RAMC radiated no further than The Swan, The Spread Eagle and the Pimlico Tram. Samuel would not have been impressed.

Kevin could not abide the loneliness of study. He craved company more than he craved anything else. Arrivals of new trainee Queen Alexandra nurses was always a cause of great excitement at the hospital. After more complicated relationships he did not deserve to marry the gracious and sweet Angela. He was posted back to the Royal Herbert Hospital to enjoy their married life together in Catford.

Kevin continued playing rugby for both Corp and Company but, during a rugby tour of military hospitals in Germany, he went into a tackle too hard, sustained a head injury, and his rugby career met a premature end.

Kevin’s introduction to the drug culture began with a joint shared in the little park on John Islip Street just outside the hospital grounds. What followed was an obsession with the drug culture, mounting debt and a double life that blighted the next five years of his life.

Kevin was medically discharged from the Army in 1973. It would be 1976, whilst he was at a teacher training college, that the pernicious lodestone was supernaturally purged of its awful power. Only just in time to save his marriage and his family! Only just in time to save his soul!

Laminin

Thought this was pretty impressive. Maybe it's just coincidence. Maybe not.

Bible Illuminated

It's the Bible, But not as you know it, Jim.

According to the BBC:

Most people think of the Bible as a densely printed book with no pictures, but a version of the scripture that resembles a glossy coffee table magazine aims to change that. It's part of a wave of radical presentations of the Bible, including a manga version and a Lego gospel. But how do Christians feel about these attempts to spread the word?

It's the kind of magazine you might find in a doctor's waiting room next to Cosmopolitan or Reader's Digest. On the front is a pale face heavy with mascara. A flick through throws up striking images: urban flooding, a Nigerian abattoir, a girl eating noodles, a pooch in a limo.

It's only when and if you get round to reading the text that the incongruity strikes you: "Go and sell all you have and give the money to the poor, and you will have riches in heaven." What kind of problem page is this?

The Codex Sinaiticus

The BBC Reports:

What is probably the oldest known Bible is being digitised, reuniting its scattered parts for the first time since its discovery 160 years ago. It is markedly different from its modern equivalent. What's left out?

The world's oldest surviving Bible is in bits.

For 1,500 years, the Codex Sinaiticus lay undisturbed in a Sinai monastery, until it was found - or stolen, as the monks say - in 1844 and split between Egypt, Russia, Germany and Britain.

Now these different parts are to be united online and, from next July, anyone, anywhere in the world with internet access will be able to view the complete text and read a translation.

For those who believe the Bible is the inerrant, unaltered word of God, there will be some very uncomfortable questions to answer. It shows there have been thousands of alterations to today's bible.

The Codex, probably the oldest Bible we have, also has books which are missing from the Authorised Version that most Christians are familiar with today - and it does not have crucial verses relating to the Resurrection...

Atheism and the Stock Market

Not many people combine these 2 subjects.

Nassim Taleb is a controversial but influential and entertaining intellectual whose views on probability and 'decision-making under uncertainty' are outlined in his best-selling book 'The Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable'.

In this short clip he derides those skeptics who criticise religion on rational grounds while putting their faith in the stockmarket.

A full version of the lecture which was presented as part of a Long Now Foundation series is available here - but you might want to hunker down for it, it's an hour and half long.

Controversy at the Royal Society

On a more serious note (and in case you missed it) there has been controversy this week at the Royal Society, the oldest scientific society in existence, after an article in the Guardian claims that the Education Director Professor Michael Reis had called for Creationism to be taught in schools. Michael Reis claims he was misrepresented in a subsequent letter to the editor but apparently he has since resigned from his post anyway. Now, Richard Dawkins enters the debate.

On a related theme, Humanists are currently suing the UK's government's exam agency over its decision to prevent a board giving humanism equal status to faiths in a religious education GCSE.

The President and the Basilica

The world's largest Christian church has 7,000 individually air-conditioned seats, standing-room for 11,000 in a surrounding 3ha marble plaza, and enough room for 100,000 more – 300,000 at a squeeze – beyond that.

Yet the chances of even the 7,000 seats ever all being occupied at one time are about nil, because rather than finding this church in one of the great cities of the world, you'll discover it in a community of just 120,000 people in the middle of the jungled hills, arid plains and farmlands of Africa's Ivory Coast...

...Modelled largely along the lines of St Peter's in Rome that took 109 years to build, the Yamoussoukro Basilica cost USD$300m and took 1,500 largely-Ivorians just three years to construct...

From the excitingly named 'Epoch Times'.

Christians? Burma? Rambo?

One for you here, Dad - from the BBC

Veteran star Sylvester Stallone and his biceps are back on the big screen for the fourth Rambo film, which sees the 61-year-old don khakis to play the action hero one last time.

He may be a good deal older and craggier than when he first starred as Vietnam veteran John Rambo, but this did not deter Stallone from plunging himself deep into the treacherous jungles of south-east Asia, where the film is set.

The movie, which was released in the US in January, has had mixed reviews, with Variety singling out its "unusually high body count" for criticism.

In the film, Rambo has become a pacifist recluse in Thailand who reluctantly helps guide a group of Christian missionaries to Burma by river.

When he hears of their capture by the Burmese army in the thick of a civil war, he steps in to help.

I'm sure the message here is spiritual but just for good measure, here's the trailer.

Word of the day

Iconoclasm: what a great word. It just sounds so impressive, it just rolls off the tongue like machine gun fire. I just learned what it means...

Iconoclasm: The action or spirit of an iconoclast.

Which begs an obvious question...

Iconoclast: A breaker or destroyer of images, esp. those set up for religious veneration. A person who attacks cherished beliefs, traditional institutions, etc., as being based on error or superstition.

Let's all try to use this fine word at least once today. Here's a ready made example of a way it can be used which I just stole from a film review, feel free to copy it yourself if the mood takes you...

"Lars Von Triers' new film, 'The Boss Of It All' is his most accessible, and least iconoclastic, in ages".

Or you could tell your mates down the pub that you're thinking about becoming an iconoclast. Ask their opinion on whether they think it's a good idea or not.

(It's probably best not to entertain any seriously iconoclastic ideas though - at least don't vocalise them like Lars Von Trier regularly does, because it might upset mum and dad)


Irreverance and iconoclasm in action: Lars Von Trier on the set of his film "The Idiots" (2000)

Meet the Phelpses

Continuing on the theme of strange American families. Louis Theroux recently met this bunch, who call themselves 'the most hated family in the America':

In any country, let alone one as patriotic as the US, few actions are as provocative as protesting at a soldier's funeral.

The Phelps family pickets mourners across the country, to mark what it describes as God's revenge on the US for tolerating homosexuality.

Their actions are in the name of the Westboro Baptist Church, which numbers 71 and is headed by "Gramps", preacher Fred Phelps. The church, which is based in Topeka, Kansas, mostly comprises his extended family.

Louis Theroux says the Phelpses are the most extreme people he has ever met, which is saying something, and in this interview at the BBC, he talks about how three weeks with them left him perplexed by their motivation.

The family have been in the news recently after the church was ordered to pay nearly $11 million to the the father of a fallen soldier whose funeral was the subject of one of their protests.

And just to add a final element of weirdness to this whole thing, they have a website too: www.thesignsofthetimes.net

Here's an extract from Louis Theroux's program which was originally aired earlier this year:

Prince Philip, Island God?

Honestly, if this one didn't come from the BBC, I wouldn't believe it: "Britain's Duke of Edinburgh may be planning a quiet birthday celebration at home this weekend, but there will be feasting and flag-waving in an isolated jungle village in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu, where he is worshipped as a god..."

This reminds me of a phenomenon that has come to be known as Cargo Cults:

An isolated society's first contact with the outside world can be a shock — often the natives will first assume that the newcomers are spiritual beings of some kind who possess divine powers. With time, however, it will inevitably become apparent that the outsiders are mortal and that their power comes from their equipment (or cargo). Cargo cults tend to appear among people that covet this 'magical' equipment, but are unable to attain it easily through trade. Given their relative isolation, the cult participants generally have little knowledge of modern manufacturing and are liable to be skeptical of Western explanations. Instead, symbols they associate with Christianity and modern Western society tend to be incorporated into their rituals as magical artifacts. Across cultural differences and large geographic areas, there have been instances of the movements independently organizing.

Famous examples of cargo cult activity include the setting up of mock airstrips, airports, offices and the fetishization and attempted construction of western goods, such as radios made of coconuts and straw. Believers may stage "drills" and "marches" with twigs for rifles and military-style insignia and "USA" painted on their bodies to make them look like soldiers, treating the activities of western military personnel as rituals to be performed for the purpose of attracting cargo. The cult members built these items and 'facilities' in the belief that the structures would attract cargo. This perception has reportedly been reinforced by the occasional success of an 'airport' to attract military transport aircraft full of cargo[citation needed].

Today, many historians and anthropologists argue that the term "cargo cult" is a misnomer that describes a variety of phenomena[citation needed]. However, the idea has captured the imagination of many people in developed nations, and the term continues to be used today. For this reason, and possibly many others, the cults have been labelled millenarian, in the sense that they hold that a utopian future is imminent or will come about if they perform certain rituals.

Via Wikipedia.

It's actually somewhat unclear how many of these cults still exist, however the term was popularised in part by the remarkable physicist, Richard Feynman who used the expression "cargo cult science" in a speech he gave at Caltech and later as a chapter heading in his brilliantly readable autobiography, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

In the speech, Feynman pointed out that cargo cultists create all the appearance of an airport right down to headsets with bamboo "antennas", yet the airplanes don't come. Feynman argued that some scientists often produce studies with all the trappings of real science, but which are nonetheless pseudoscience and unworthy of either respect or support.

You can get a full copy of the speech in pdf form here.

The Creation Museum

Here's a controversial one from me to get people going!

May 28th saw the opening of the $27 million Creation Museum in Cincinnati, USA.

The mainstream reaction is unsurprisingly skeptical and the response in the blogosphere, doesn't seem to be that much more positive. I'm not actually sure I expect the Christian response to be particularly uniform either, at least on this side of the Atlantic.

Here's what the Museum has to say about itself:

“The Creation Museum will be upfront that the Bible is the supreme authority in all matters of faith and practice, and in every area it touches upon.”

“We’ll begin the Museum experience by showing that 'facts' don’t speak for themselves. There aren’t separate sets of 'evidences' for evolution and creation—we all deal with the same evidence (we all live on the same earth, have the same fossils, observe the same animals, etc.). The difference lies in how we interpret what we study. We’ll then explore why the Bible—the 'history book of the universe' — provides a reliable, eye-witness account of the beginning of all things.”

I'm wondering what the Bettany's think generally and what kind of response the museum getting in the UK? In your churches? Maybe it's not even on the radar...