διά πέντε / dia pente

The Thief And The Wizard

2012-01-28T16:46:00.000-05:00

I don't know how many of the people who read my modest blog have played RPGs, but I've played a fair bit of console RPGs my entire life (I just bought Skyrim today and have been playing through Disgaea 4 for the past month lol). In most of these games, there are different classes that you can pick for characters, or your main character, that each have distinctive strengths and weaknesses. For the purpose of this post, I'm going to stick to the archetypes of the thief and wizard.

The thief is fast, has low HP, high dexterity, comes with a myriad of skills that get better as speed and dexterity increase, and all that jazz. The wizard usually is one of the slowest characters, but usually deals the greatest amount of damage among your party. The thief is usually young and energetic, while the wizard is usually old and miserly (i.e. likes to conserve energy).

Many of us like to think that we are the wizard in real life, cognitively. But in reality we are all the thief.

I've touched a bit on System 1 and System 2 thinking. Of course, that is only a short article, Daniel Kahneman has a much longer book devoted to it, which I've also linked to previously.

Like I've pontificated about pretty recently, in order to be a good thinker, one must know how brains think. I don't think I can stress that enough.

In order to be a good guitarist, I had to know how guitars (and the physics of music) worked as well. Without knowing those things, I would only be able to be as good a guitarist as raw ability would have let me. Knowing how the guitar and music in general work increased my aptitude for playing guitar and listening/composing music.

Not saying I'm an awesome guitarist or songwriter or anything, but I'm a lot better than I would have been had I not studied the underlying reasons for what creates good music and how to better manipulate the guitar; how to manipulate the guitar can only be fully realized by knowing how guitars work. There's a significantly high probability that the world's most technical guitar gods all have a deep reservoir of how the guitar physically works.

The same thing applies to thinking, reasoning, and learning. The rough analogy that Kanheman posits is that there are two systems in the brain that we use to reason throughout life. System 1 and System 2. In reality, the two systems are not cleanly delineated into individual systems but for pedagogical reasons that analogy is used. And that's the point; we learn things better by anthropomorphication because anthropomorphication, or having personalities, is like catnip to System 1. And System 1 will readily hand over a thing with agency and personality to System 2, even if that agency or personality is a complete misunderstanding of System 1.

When I would study music theory, I would read things like "The G7 chord wants to resolve to a C chord in a ii-V-I progression". Thinking that a combination of frequencies that are represented by the three letters G B F have a literal personality, want things, and move with intention is nonsensical. But it helps one to remember and learn. There is no Platonic G7 chord "out there" that taps into your auditory neurology and forces this on you. Again this is obviously nonsensical if taken literally, but people seem to apply the figurative personifying language used in other contexts (like love) and think that it is literal. There is no Platonic "love-stuff" out there in space that we tap into when we have feelings for someone anymore than there is "music-stuff" when describing music theory.

Anyway, when reading through the book, I imagine that System 1 is the thief, and System 2 is the wizard. Imagining it like this helps you retain the knowledge faster, and to run with this analogy I'll describe a typical battle encounter when the thief and wizard are roaming the countryside on their mission.

Like I wrote above, we are all the thief. The thief leads the party. When you encounter an enemy, it's the thief who first engages. Either the thief dispatches the enemy herself, or she delegates it to the wizard to take care of it if it is an enemy that the thief can't handle. Of course, it takes a while for the wizard to cast a spell. If another enemy enters the battle while the wizard has already targeted the first enemy, the second (third, fourth, etc.) enemy has to be tackled by the thief... even if she is ill-equipped to kill the enemy.

It's not like the thief sucks, by the way. There are certain things that only the thief can take care of that the wizard would be unable to do. The thief can pick the lock of voice tone over a phone, or steal the secret maps of facial recognition from an enemy. If the wizard tried those things, it would fail spectacularly. The wizard is too slow to pick locks on treasure chests or steal maps from enemies. On the other hand the thief, when she acts, she's preternaturally fast. And the vast majority of the items in your inventory were obtained by the thief, including the wizard's robes and staffs that increase the wizard's spellcasting abilities and damage.

But the thief herself is brash and impulsive; she attempts to pick locks on doors that are really just paintings of a door on a wall. And if the wizard is busy casting a spell, then the thief has no one to reign her in to tell her to stop attempting to steal maps from armor racks that look like stoic guards.

The analogy goes further. Because the wizard is old, he likes to conserve energy and even has mild sleep apnea. Or maybe he just likes to nap a lot. Either way, the wizard is not always awake. And when he is, he likes to do as little spellcasting as possible. The thief, however, because she's so young and full of vitality, is up and awake as long as you are playing the game. Choking in the clutch? Brain farts? Your wizard is either asleep and being a bit unresponsive or is being called into action when the thief had been trained by the wizard to handle the threat, and the thief had been casting that spell for the majority of the game.

Oh yeah, that's right. The wizard can teach the thief a couple of quick spells. But the thief doesn't have the large reserves of MP that the wizard has, so the thief can't cast huge spells. And if the thief does cast spell, it is a fraction of the strength that the wizard casts because of the thief's low INT.

Of course, your own personal thief has been active the entire time you've been reading this post. Your own thief already conjured up a narrative, a cast, costumes, and a setting for the symbolic thief and wizard in this post. That's what the thief -- System 1 -- does. Every day. With very little information it creates elaborate stories. What does your thief look like? Probably based on your standards of youth and beauty, with a little dash of mystery and guile. Maybe a dark-haired (elven) thief girl? That would be my guess anyway, but I'm not putting a lot of weight on it since I'm not a psychologist, I just play one on a blog. Your wizard was probably old and had a long white beard and a robe. Someone like Gandalf? Probably!

By the way, the thief? She isn't very good at differentiating between familiarity and veracity, yet she completely reigns over the unreliable feeling of certainty (so, for example, the thief would say that Christianity is familiar and confuse this feeling of familiarity with truth, especially without the wizard's input, and even more especially when the wizard is busy with another task or is out of MP). But that's why your wizard trust her; she's young and attractive.

Unfortunately, the wizard does everything that the thief asks him to do, especially attack positions that she doesn't like and defend positions that she does like. This applies to everyone. The wizard would not know who to cast a spell on without the thief's instruction or deference. When you read this sentence, it's the thief's responsibility to read the words. When you read 24 * 17 = ???, the thief reads that math problem and hands it over to the wizard.

Because of this, there's no such thing as a wholly rational human being with no emotion. Being emotionless would paralyze someone and they wouldn't be able to assign value to any task. I've read and listened to many conversion to Christianity (born again) stories. In these cases, the thief encounters and decides on the truth of Christianity before the wizard is even engaged. Or the wizard has been systematically drained of MP by the stresses of life and the thief is left to fend for herself. In either case, the wizard is only called into action to defend a position that the thief already decided on. I don't know anyone who became a Christian based on their thief's deference to the wizard before a conclusion was made about Christianity (or any religion, really).

Christianity is large and complicated; it is a final boss at the end of a dungeon. It would be unwise to use only the thief on a final boss, or only use the wizard after attempting to drain the majority of the final boss' HP with only the thief (here I would introduce a barbarian character as a compliment of the wizard: Intellect and reason. Also slow and subject to the same pluses and negatives as the wizard). That would be a horrible strategy in any RPG. The final boss would soundly pummel the thief and she would run out of HP and the game would be over very quickly.

The Many Faces Of Jesus

2012-01-27T11:47:00.004-05:00

A while ago I made a post called Will The Real Jesus Please Stand Up?. That post was meant to illustrate that the name Jesus was common in antiquity, and a lot of those people named Jesus share eerie similarities with the Jesus of Christianity.

Here is a post over at Vridar that is itself a repost of David Fitzgerald's own blog post about the myriad Jesuses created by scholars of the historical Jesus.

The entire post is worth reading, but I just want to call attention to one fact: There isn't just "one" historical Jesus (that is, the Jesus recreated by historians). There are a multitude of historical Jesuses.

Albert Schweitzer in his From Reimarus to Wrede: A History of Research on the Life of Jesus (1906), was already discovering that every scholar claiming to have uncovered the “real” Jesus seemed to have found a mirror instead; each investigator found Jesus was a placeholder for whatever values they held dear. Over a century later, the situation has not improved – quite the contrary. To say there is still no consensus on who Jesus was is an understatement. A quick survey (Price presents excellent examples in his Deconstructing Jesus, Prometheus, 2000, pp. 12-17) shows we have quite an embarrassment of Jesi:

Cynic philosopher – The many borrowings from Greek philosophy in Jesus’ teachings would make sense if Jesus had actually been a wandering Cynic or a Stoic philosopher, or the Galilean equivalent. Burton L. Mack, John Dominic Crossan, Gerald Downing and others have strongly defended this view, citing plenty of Cynic statements with their equivalents in the Gospels.

Liberal Pharisee – Something like his predecessor, the famous Rabbi Hillel. In Jesus the Pharisee: A New Look at the Jewishness of Jesus, historian Harvey Falk argues that virtually all of Jesus’ judgments on the Halakha, the Jewish law, are paralleled in the Pharisaic thought of that time, as well as later rabbinic thought.

Charismatic Hasid – Similarly, Dead Sea Scroll authority Geza Vermes, an expert on New Testament-era Judaism and author of Jesus the Jew: a Historian’s View of the Gospels, sees Jesus as one of the popular freewheeling Galilean holy men, unorthodox figures like Hanina Ben-Dosa or Honi the Circle-Drawer. Just like Jesus, they had little respect for the niceties of Jewish law, which of course ticked off the religious establishment.

Conservative Rabbi – On the other hand, Jesus upholds the Torah, insisting “not one jot or stroke of the Law will pass away” (Matthew 5:17–19). He wears a prayer shawl tasseled with tzitzit (Matt. 9:20-22), observes the Sabbath, and worships in synagogues as well as the Temple.

Antinomian Iconoclast – But on the other other hand, Jesus then turns around and point by point dismantles the Torah (Mark 7:18-20, Matt. 5:21-22, 27-28, 31-32, 33-37, 38-42, 43-44, etc.) and dismisses the Temple (Matt. 12:6, 23:16, 13:1-2, Luke 21:5-6).

Magician/Exorcist/Faith Healer – Morton Smith, discoverer (or more likely, its forger – but that’s another story) of the Secret Gospel of Mark made the argument that Jesus the Christ was actually Jesus the Magician in the book of the same name. Like the pagan miracle workers, Jesus cast out demons and healed the blind, deaf, and mute with mud and spit, using the same spells, incantations and techniques as taught in the many popular Greek magic handbooks of the time (Mark 5:41; 7:33–34).

Violent Zealot Revolutionary – But maybe Jesus was really a political messiah, inciting a revolt against the Romans; like Theudas or “the Egyptian,” the unnamed Messianic figure Josephus describes, or the two “robbers” crucified with him (since rebel bandits were commonly referred to as “robbers”). Why else would it be the Romans crucifying him, rather than the Jewish Sanhedrin just stoning him to death for blasphemy? There is evidence one can point to: Luke’s Gospel lists a disciple called Simon “the Zealot,” and seems to hint that Jesus had other Zealots in his entourage: at the Last Supper, Jesus tells his followers to grab their bags and buy a sword (22:36); they tell him they already have two swords on hand (22:38); when Jesus is about to be arrested they ask if they should attack (22:49). In Mark 14:47, one of the disciples does just that and cuts off the ear of one of the High priest’s men (the story grows more details in the other Gospels: Matt. 26:51-52, Luke 22:50-51, John 18:10). Many capable scholars including Robert Eisler, S. G. F. Brandon, Hugh J. Schonfield, Hyam Maccoby, and Robert Eisenman have thought this is where the real Jesus is to be found, and there are many scholarly variations arguing for the Jesus as Che theory.

Nonviolent Pacificist Resister – but then again, Jesus isn’t called the Prince of Peace for nothing; there’s no trace of such political agitation when he instructs his followers “if someone strike you on the right cheek, turn the other also” (Matthew 5:39), or when conscripted by Roman soldier to lug their gear for a mile, to “go with him two” (Matt. 5:41).

Apocalyptic Prophet – This is the Jesus that Albert Schweitzer and many subsequent historians have thought was the real thing: A fearless, fiery Judgment Day preacher announcing that the end was nigh and the Kingdom of God was coming fast. Like Paul (and many other first century Jewish apocalyptists) this Jesus did not expect the world to survive his own lifetime. Bart Ehrman makes a well-reasoned case for such a figure in Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium.

First-Century Proto-Communist – Was Jesus the first Marxist? Milan Machoveč and other leftists have thought so. You have to admit Jesus has nothing good to say about the capitalist pigs of his day (Luke 6:24, 12:15), repeatedly preaching that they cannot serve both god and money (Matt. 6:24, Luke 16:13), that they should sell all they own and distribute the money to the poor (Matt. 19:21, Mark 10:21, Luke 18:22) and most famously, that it is easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than for the rich to get into heaven (Matt.19:24, Mark 10:25, Luke 18:25) – and don’t forget his casting the Moneychangers out of the Temple with a scourge. Acts not only depicts the early Christians as sharing everything in common, it even the states the Marxist credo: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need” (Acts 4: 34-35).

Early Feminist – Or was he the first male Feminist? Some scholars like Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Kathleen Corley point to his unusual attitudes towards women, some of which seem remarkably progressive for the first century. They say not only were some of his closest followers women, but he forgave the woman caught in adultery, and challenged social customs concerning women’s role in society (John 4:27, Luke 7:37, Matt. 21:31-32).

Earthy Hedonist – Or was he a male chauvinist pig? Onlookers criticize him for being “a glutton and a drunk” who consorts with riffraff like tax collectors and whores (Luke 5:30; 5:33-34; 7:34, 37-39,44-46).

Family Man – but then again, Jesus is a champion of good old family values when he gets even tougher than Moses, ratcheting Old Testament law up a notch and declaring “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery” (Mark 10:11–12). He also reminds his followers to honor their father and mother, then sternly warns “whoever speaks evil of father and mother must surely die” (Matthew 15:4).

Home Wrecker – Though when Jesus speaks evil of the family, apparently it’s okay: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). When Jesus is told his mother and brothers have come to see him, Jesus ignores them and asks, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” (Matt. 12:47-48) “Do not think I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have come not to bring peace, but to bring a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law” (Matthew 10:34–35).

Savior of the World – But despite all that, Jesus loves everyone; he even preached to Samaritans (John 4:39-41; Luke 17:11-18) and Gentiles (Matt. 4:13-17, 24-25).

Savior of Israel (only) – Well, he loves everyone except Samaritans or Gentiles.

When a Canaanite woman begs him to heal her daughter he ignores her; after the disciples ask him to make her go away, he first refuses, saying “I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 15:24). When Jesus sends out his disciples, he commands them not to preach the good news to Gentile regions or Samaritan cities (Matthew 10:5-6).

Radical Social Reformer – Still others like John Dominic Crossan and Richard Horsley see Jesus as a champion for the Jewish peasants suffering under the yoke of the Roman Empire and its rapacious tax collectors; a Jesus somewhat along the lines of Gandhi and his struggle against the British Empire.

The problem with the vast majority of these reconstructions is that they don't have the necessary logical connection to a death by crucifixion. Bart Ehrman points out:

The link between Jesus’ message and his death is crucial, and historical studies of Jesus’ life can be evaluated to how well they establish that link. This in fact is a common weakness in many portrayals of the historical Jesus: they often sound completely plausible in their reconstruction of what Jesus said and did, but they can’t make sense of his death. If, for example, Jesus is to be understood as a Jewish rabbi who simply taught that everyone should love God and be good to one another, why did the Romans crucify him?

Of course, the Apocalyptic Prophet model also doesn't necessitate Jesus' death by crucifixion. As I pointed out in my post "Will The Real Jesus Please Stand Up?", there was another apocalyptic prophet named Jesus who was simply roughed up by the Jews, given a trial by a procurator -- not saying a word in his defense -- and simply let go. He was left free to preach his apocalyptic warnings for six years straight until he was killed by a random weapon during the first Jewish-Roman war.

None of the wandering, preaching Jesus models (including a straighforward reading of Mark) make sense of his execution by crucifixion.

The model that I'm partial to is the violent revolutionary, which to me makes sense of Jesus' association with Simon the Zealot. As I wrote in that post, Simon the Zealot possibly makes an appearance in Mark, but Mark might have Hellenized the original Hebrew/Aramaic name for "zealot" and ended up with something phonetically close to "Canaanite".

Simon himself was executed around 46 AD.

As I've written before, I think that Jesus was cruficied along with Simon and Simon's brother James. Which itself gives us the familiar Gospel image of Jesus crucified among two "robbers". The only problem is that this places Jesus' cruficixion 10 years later than what is given in the Gospels. But why trust the Gospels' dating anyway? 40 years prior to the destruction of the Jewish Temple is symbolism enough to make it suspect. And there's no reason to think that any of the teachings of Jesus go back to an original Jesus, other than a straightforward reading of the Gospels and using fallacious criteriology. The fact that Pharisees in Galilee during the time period of Jesus and disciples calling Jesus "rabbi" are anachronistic** also makes the Gospel teachings of Jesus suspect. There are other anachronisms which place the composition of the Gospels after 70 AD, which would mean that post-70 Christians were retrojecting their gripes with Pharisees into the time period of Jesus using Jesus as a mouthpiece for their own struggles.

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** "Sage" or "elder" (elder in Greek: πρεσβύτερος::presbyteros) were terms of respect in the time period of Jesus; Second Temple (pre-Rabbinic) Judaism. It's almost tautological that "rabbi" (Hebrew for my teacher) would be a term of respect in Rabbinic Judaism, which itself only started to form after Judaism was decentralized due to the destruction of Jerusalem. Decentralization forced Pharisees to start setting up shop in other areas besides Jerusalem. Hence Pharisees only started having a presence in rural areas like Galilee as a necessity of Rabbinic Judaism. Here are other anachronisms

Removing The Unclean Spirit of Religion

2012-01-22T01:27:00.001-05:00

Matthew 12.43-45

43 Ὅταν δὲ τὸ ἀκάθαρτον πνεῦμα ἐξέλθῃ ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου, διέρχεται δι᾽ ἀνύδρων τόπων ζητοῦν ἀνάπαυσιν, καὶ οὐχ εὑρίσκει.

44 τότε λέγει Εἰς τὸν οἶκόν μου ἐπιστρέψω ὅθεν ἐξῆλθον: καὶ ἐλθὸν εὑρίσκει σχολάζοντα [καὶ] σεσαρωμένον καὶ κεκοσμημένον.

45 τότε πορεύεται καὶ παραλαμβάνει μεθ᾽ ἑαυτοῦ ἑπτὰ ἕτερα πνεύματα πονηρότερα ἑαυτοῦ, καὶ εἰσελθόντα κατοικεῖ ἐκεῖ: καὶ γίνεται τὰ ἔσχατα τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐκείνου χείρονα τῶν πρώτων. Οὕτως ἔσται καὶ τῇ γενεᾷ ταύτῃ τῇ πονηρᾷ.

--

43 When an unclean spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it.

44 Then it says, 'I will return to the house I left.' When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order.

45 Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that man is worse than the first.

So what happens if, or when, the unclean spirit of religion is exorcised from humanity? Will everything just work out in the end? I don't think so; we live in a world beyond the reach of god. This means that the right, just, or correct happy ending is not guaranteed. What if religion dies yet something even worse comes back to occupy humanity? Something that brings with it seven more spirits that are more wicked than religion itself?

Why, if science will supposedly save us, do I think that something else altogether will happen? Read this quote:

Our world is shrinking. Science is becoming inaccessible to us. Who can understand the latest innovations in genetics, astrophysics and biology? Who can explain them to the profane? Knowledge no longer communicates; writers and philosophers in our day are incapable of enabling us to understand science. At the same time, the scope of imagination in science is dazzling. How can we claim to speak of human consciousness if we overlook what is most daring and imaginative? I am concerned by what it means to be literate today. Is it possible to be literate if you do not understand non-linear equations?

The world is increasingly being divided between the laymen and the scientific. In essence, the scientific enterprise (not the scientific method) is becoming more and more like a priestly caste. Much like the Catholic priests of old yet now are the bearers and bringers of "salvation" in the form of knowledge. Esoteric knowledge that only they "really" know how to interpret, just like pre-Protestant Catholics.

People will rightfully be wary of this sort of dichotomy in society. And they should be. If it continues, we will see "protestant revolutions" in the forms of more and more pseudoscience and other forms of quackery gaining more and more mainstream appeal, latching on to the respect and authority of science but not actually following the scientific method; the thing that gave science its continued wins against religion in the first place. And these pseudosciences will become "alternatives" to the priestly caste of science, and a new form of religion -- pseudoscience -- will start to propagate among the masses.

That's my prediction anyway, if things continue the way they are going... the general distrust (at least here in the good ol' USA) of scientists and intellectuals. What can be done to stop it? Better science education, as Neil deGrasse Tyson says. Of course, I would make classes like introduction to critical thinking or introduction to cognitive science mandatory as part of this better science education. Learning how to think instead of what to think, and learning how the brain works so that you can get better at how to think, are in my opinion essential immunizations for both religion and pseudoscience.

But really, having the entire world become atheistic will not get rid of the problems that created religion in the first place. It will just make those problems less obvious and harder to root out. Atheism is just the beginning.

The Benefit Of Thinking Like A Bayesian

2012-01-18T18:30:00.000-05:00

So this following quote is from an article I posted in the last paragraph of my "Why Are Smart People Ugly" post called The Marvels And The Flaws Of Intuitive Thinking:

Now, what can't [System 1; "Intuitive Thinking"] do? It cannot deal with multiple possibilities at once. Dealing with multiple possibilities at once is something we do consciously and deliberately. System 1 is bound to the suppression of ambiguity, which means one interpretation. It cannot do sum-like variables. Sum-like variables demand another kind of thinking. It is not going to do probability properly, it is not going to do economic value properly, and there are other things that it will not do.

Here an important point is how you combine information about individual cases with information with statistical information. I'm going to argue that System 1 has a lot of trouble with statistics. System 1, and here I believe the analogy from perception is very direct, it's intended, or designed, to deal with individual particular cases, not with ensembles, and it does beautifully when it deals with an individual case. For example, it can accumulate an enormous amount of information about that case. This is what I'm trying to exploit in calling it System 1. It's coming alive as I'm describing it. You're accumulating information about it. But combining information of various kinds, information about the case, and information about the statistics, seems to be a lot harder.

Here is an old example.

There are two cab companies in the city. In one, 85 percent of the cabs are blue, and 15 percent of the cabs are green. There was a hit-and-run accident at night, which involved a cab. There was a witness, and the witness says the cab was green, which was the minority. The court tested the witness -we can embellish that a little bit - the court tested the witness and the finding is the witness is 80 percent reliable when the witness says "blue", and when the witness says "green", it's 80 percent reliable. You can make it more precise, there are complexities, but you get the idea. You ask people, what's your judgment? you've had both of these items of information, and people say 80 percent, by and large. That is, they ignore the base rate, and they use the causal information about the case. And it’s causal because there is a causal link between the accident and the witness.

As soon as I started reading that final paragraph, the word problem, I immediately started thinking of it in terms of Bayes' Theorem. I almost instantly placed the sentence The court tested the witness...and the finding is the witness is 80 percent reliable when the witness says "blue", and when the witness says "green", it's 80 percent reliable as the Likelihood Ratio and determined that it was exactly 1. Which meant that the prior probability (the base rate, as he describes it) does not change due to the witness' testimony. It was 15% before being introduced to the witness' testimony, and it's 15% after.

As he explains, most people say that the probability that the cab that crashed was green is 80 percent, which is false. The witness has a certain reliability, meaning there's a relationship between the witness' testimony and whether what he says is actually true. And the witness' testimony can be determined by the Likelihood Ratio, which isn't just how many times he's right but has to be compared to how many times he's wrong.

The Likelihood Ratio is really just "correct guess divided by incorrect guess".

Even though it might take significantly more work to get the actual probabilities if he hadn't used equal numbers in the Likelihood Ratio, dividing one number by another number can be "calculated" by System 1 thinking quickly to determine if the number is bigger than 1 or less than 1. And how much bigger than 1 the Likelihood Ratio is can give you a feel for how much bigger the prior probability (base rate) increases, decreases, or remains the same; scale is something that System 1 does really well (explained in the article's previous paragraphs).

Just to be thorough, here is the word problem fully computed:

H: Car accident was green cab
E: Witness testimony
P(H): .15
P(E | H): .8
P(E | ~H): .8

P(H | E) = P(E | H) * P(H) / [P(E | H) * P(H)] + [P(E | ~H) * P(~H)]
= .8 * .15 / [.8 * .15] + [.8 * .85]
= .12 / [.12] + [.68]
= .12 / .8
= .15

So all is not lost! Intuitive thinking can be trained to think like System 2 ("rational") thinking; this is even explained in the concluding paragraphs. But in order to do that, one has to know what "System 1" thinking encapsulates. So, in order to be a good thinker, one must first know how the brain thinks.

The Red Flags Of Quackery

2012-01-14T16:34:00.002-05:00

Critiques of Criteriology in Historical Jesus Research

2012-01-13T18:55:00.000-05:00

It seems as though a lot of the observations that myself and others outside of NT scholarship about the invalidity of criteriology is being addressed by the scholarly community. Here is a blog dedicated to exploring the scholarship behind the gospel of Mark (my personal favorite gospel) writing comments about Mark Goodacre's own blog post about the upcoming book.

One of the things I've tried to express a few times on my own blog is that there's a difference between the "Historical Jesus" and the "actual" Jesus. From the Euangelion Kata Markon blog:

Finally, to help students from different faith backgrounds come to terms with the study of the HJ, I like to distinguish between Jesus and the HJ. We do not have access to the former, unless we invent a time machine, apart from the memories of his followers. The HJ is a scholarly reconstruction built on arguments about probability and evidence

Here are some of my own observations about the various criteriology that could lead to false positives (not all have been on this blog).

The mistaken assumption behind the criterion of embarrassment:

It seems pretty obvious that any sort of “criterion of embarrassment” is an anachronism. What might have been embarrassing to a Catholic or proto-orthodox late 2nd century Christian – the tradition that seeds all modern Christianity – would not necessarily be embarrassing to whoever wrote the gospel of Mark, whenever he wrote it. It’s anachronistic because it is looking through all of Christian history through the lens of orthodoxy:

“Mark was an orthodox Christian because he is held as canonical by the orthodoxy. Therefore, since orthodoxy was embarrassed by Jesus’ baptism it must follow that Mark was embarrassed by it as well. Since he didn’t remove this embarrassing detail from his gospel, it must have been too well known to take out.”

When looked at like this, the fallacy becomes pretty self-evident.

Thinking that Aramaic sayings must go back to Jesus and critiquing independence:

The token Aramaic words in the NT seem to have been placed for literary purposes. At Mark 10.46, the writer redundantly writes "the son of Timaeus Bartimaeus". Someone who's paying attention would note that "bar" would mean "son of". Later in the narrative at 14.36, Jesus has a redundant prayer where he says "Abba, father, everything is possible for you,....". Again, someone paying attention and not reading it devotionally would note that "abba" might mean "father" (in both cases, later gospel writers who copied from Mark leave out the redundancies). In the very next chapter, we are introduced to a character called "bar abba" who is about to be crucified. This isn't a historical narrative that someone is writing down, but more like something that was intended for literature or theology. A false son of the father is about to be crucified when the real son of the father shows up and the Jews have the real son of the father executed while releasing the fake one.

The fact that all gospels we have include this invented character "Barabba" means that none of them were fact-checking or anything and using Mark as their source.

The same thing happens with town names, like Bethphage. [E]arly Christians attempted to find where this town was, but since they didn't know that it literally means "house of unripe figs", they didn't make the connection that this is the town that Jesus is close to when he curses an unripe fig tree. The fig tree being a cipher for the Jewish temple which he clears out the money changers immediately after cursing the fig tree, since it is withered after he does the cleansing. Jesus later "predicts" that the Jewish temple will be "withered" like the fig tree, which actually happens in history in 70 CE during the war between the Jews and Romans. Which probably means that this narrative was crafted sometime during or immediately after the war between the Jews and Romans.

Again, here is the Kata Markon's apt observation about the criterion of double-dissimilarity:

Double Dissimilarity: this one tries to reach an assured minimum (if it can’t be attributed to other Jews or Christians it must have be the HJ), but I agree it is a bad criterion. The HJ appears in a vacuum neither influencd by his Jewish context or influencing his followers. It assumes we know enough about Second Temple Judaism(s) or Christianities to ever declare something unparalleled and the criterion was born in a German liberal Protestant context which wanted to claim Jesus as unique and superior visa-vie Judaism. Instead, it might be useful looking for something relatively distinctive (e.g., son of man is characteristically on Jesus lips but is rare outside the gospels or for others to refer to Jesus as son of man), but also understandable in both a Jewish context and explains the rise of early Christian views.

This seems to link back to Hector Avalos' observation that a lot of NT scholars want Jesus to be a unique larger-than-life being with no faults, which if Jesus existed and was a regular human being, he must have had some faults. Avalos writes:

So how is it that most Christian academic biblical scholars never see anything that Jesus does as wrong or evil? The answer, of course, is that most Christian biblical scholars, whether in secular academia or in seminaries, still see Jesus as divine, and not as a human being with faults.

Such scholars are still studying Jesus through the confessional lenses of Nicea or Chalcedon rather than through a historical approach we would use with other human beings [such as Alexander the Great or Augustus Caesar, (where) they note the good and the bad aspects of their actions].

Anyway, it's good that we are starting to see more critiques of tools that are possibly inherently faulty. Now, if only there were some method of placing all explanations on the table and seeing which one has the highest probability of being correct once we do away with faulty tools...

Why Are Smart People Ugly?

2012-01-12T14:16:00.000-05:00

(Socrates, not the prettiest crayon in the box)

Are smart people usually ugly? It turns out that it might be the opposite: Smart people are usually attractive.

Early in the 20th century, a couple of psychological studies were done that showed that people usually associated intelligence with beauty. One apt psychologist, however, coined the phrase "the halo effect" to explain this correlation. People will usually improve their assessment of someone's secondary qualities after describing an initial positive quality.

So when people look at a mug-shot of an attractive person, they will also assume that the person is tall and intelligent, and a host of other good qualities. This, of course, possibly disproves the association with looks and smarts. But why would an assumption like that come about in the first place? Could it be an evolutionary adaptation?

It turns out that there seems to be a slight correlation between looks and intellect. From the link above:

Now there were two findings: First, scientists knew that it was possible to gauge someone's intelligence just by sizing him up; second, they knew that people tend to assume that beauty and brains go together. So they asked the next question: Could it be that good-looking people really are more intelligent?

Here the data were less clear, but several reviews of the literature have concluded that there is indeed a small, positive relationship between beauty and brains. Most recently, the evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa pulled huge datasets from two sources—the National Child Development Study in the United Kingdom (including 17,000 people born in 1958), and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health in the United States (including 21,000 people born around 1980)—both of which included ratings of physical attractiveness and scores on standard intelligence tests. When Kanazawa analyzed the numbers, he found the two were related: In the U.K., for example, attractive children have an additional 12.4 points of IQ, on average. The relationship held even when he controlled for family background, race, and body size.

From this, Kanazawa concluded that the famous halo effect is not a cognitive illusion, as so many academics had assumed, but rather an accurate reading of the world: We assume that beautiful people are smart, he argues, because they are.

Of course, when I first read that paragraph, I implicitly thought about how differently men and women place value on physical attractiveness. For men, more "attraction points" are placed on physical attractiveness, because men, from an evolutionary perspective, value fertility. And the fertility of a woman is highly correlated with how attractive she is (think waist-hip ratio, breast size, size of hands/feet, health of skin, etc. They are all indicators of youth, thus of fertility). For women, on the other hand, they place less value on a man's physical attractiveness and care more about the overall package. A less physically attractive man could still be attractive to a vast majority of women if he's awesome in every other area.

As a side note, a lot of confusion about the sexes seems to come from simple projection: Men value physical attractiveness, so they assume that women do too. Women value the total package (confidence, accomplishments, personality, etc.) and then assume that men do as well. Projection might be explaining this.

Anyway, the beginning of the very next paragraph in this article sort of confirmed what I was thinking:

The story does have some caveats and complications. First, a few other studies have come up with different results. A recent look at yearbook photos from a Wisconsin high school in 1957 found no link between IQ and attractiveness among the boys, but a positive correlation for the girls.

So there we have it. If attractive people are usually correlated with smart people, then this might explain why we even have a halo effect bias in the first place. Remember, evolution and fitness only cares about what's good enough ("good enough for government work"), not a perfect correlation.

Jumping a bit ahead:

Kanazawa thinks it's [that some common genetic factor produces both smarts and beauty], arguing that intelligent men have tended to rise to the top of the social hierarchy and select beautiful women as their mates. Their offspring, contra George Bernard Shaw's supposed quip, would have had both traits together.

Other possible explanations:

Another theory holds that certain environmental factors in the womb or just after birth can produce both facial disfigurements and cognitive impairments on one side, or facial symmetry and high intelligence on the other. A third suggests that attractive children are treated better, and receive more attention from their caretakers and teachers, which helps to nurture a sharper mind. It's also possible that smart people are better able to take care of themselves and their looks.

These also seems to be possible. Especially the third suggestion, since women who are told to think more like a man during tests that men are stereotypically better at get higher test scores. And on the flip side of that, it could also explain the dumb jock/blond stereotype, since those people are sociallized into not utilizing their full intellectual potential.

The thing is, these explanations aren't exclusive. They could be working in parallel, compounding (or having compounded) each other.

More good stuff:

In addition, Kanazawa points out that a closer look at the data reveals an interesting fact: The very ugliest people in his dataset are dumber on average, but they also tend to be the most diverse when it comes to intelligence. That means that if you're at the low end of the spectrum for looks, you're more likely than anyone else to be at one extreme end for IQ (either very dumb or very smart). If that's the case, then it might provide another reason why Sartre and Socrates types stick out in our minds. We know (consciously or not) that ugly people tend to be a little dim; but at the same time, there are more brilliant brutes running around than we might expect.

For his part, Kanazawa rejects the notion of the horns effect—he doesn't believe the smart-and-ugly stereotype exists at all. (Indeed, it has never been shown in the lab.) Instead, he says, we may be assuming that smart people are nerdy, and that nerdy people tend to lack social skills. Since people with social skills are attractive, there could be an indirect link between at least one kind of "attractiveness" and intelligence. But if you're looking at pure "beauty," as measured by rating photographs or measured facial features, then intelligence and looks go hand-in-hand.

So it turns out that smart people aren't ugly and that it might be the opposite. We only have the ugly and smart stereotype due to social factors and not due to biological ones.

Of course, I have to close this with a note on religion. It's one of the great ironies of life that women are more religious than men (and more into other Type 1 [i.e. "intuitive"] thinking like astrology, tarot cards, psychics [cold readings], etc.) yet it is the men, specifically the intellectual elites, who have created all of the world's major religions (no, it wasn't illiterate desert goat herders who created the Jewish Tanakh or Christian NT since only about 1 - 10% of the populations that those works were created in were literate). This makes me think that religions are created soley for the purpose of getting chicks and getting them to bear your children, since anti-abortion ideology is fundamnetally pro-male. And on a smaller scale, if one wants to be successful with women, this suggests that one should learn some cold reading tricks. Cold readings tap into the same kinda-nonsense-but-not-complete-nonsense that religion does.

Pilate The Procurator, And Why Tacitus' "Annals" Is Not Independent Evidence For Jesus' Historicity

2012-01-06T16:57:00.001-05:00

Richard Carrier posted his M.Phil thesis paper in which he argues that Herod the Great was Procurator of Syria. In doing so, he also points out that Pontius Pilate was also a procurator, which was something that Tacitus purposefully points out to both demean Christians and demean Pilate.

Here is Tacitus' Annals 15.44 where he describes Jesus:

Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin** suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.

Some people argue that this is an interpolation because Tacitus mistakenly refers to Pilate as a procurator. But in fact, Pilate held both titles simultaneously since they weren't necessarily separate titles.

Here is Dr. Carrier's take on it:

Tacitus almost certainly got this information from his good friend Pliny the Younger, who would have gotten it from his strong-arm interrogation of a Christian deaconess in 110 A.D. (when Tacitus and Pliny were governing adjacent provinces in what is now Turkey, and carrying on a regular correspondence in which Tacitus evinces asking Pliny for information to include in the history books he was then writing). And she [the deaconesses] would certainly have gotten the information from the Gospels, many of which were being read in the churches of the time. So yes, Tacitus is in fact giving us useless evidence, since it is not independent of the Gospels (that’s why his account contains nothing not in them, yet that would have been in an official government record, like Jesus’ full name and crime). But Wells’ argument to that same conclusion is incorrect, due to another oddity about the ancient Roman system that non-experts don’t know about (and that even many experts don’t know about, not having specifically studied the matter of imperial administration and economics).

In actual fact, Pilate was both a prefect and a procurator. An imperial procurator, to be precise. In fact this was true of all the prefects of Judea, and many other regional prefects, such as the prefect of Egypt who governed that whole province directly for the emperor

[...]

One of the persistent drums Tacitus beats throughout his entire Annals is that it was shocking (why, just shocking!) that lowly equestrians were being given the official powers of senators. As business managers, procurators were only ever equestrians, or often even plebs or slaves; no senator would disgrace himself by taking such a servile job (again, imagine the President of the United States taking a job as a “common” real estate agent). But Tacitus was annoyed even by idea of prefects running things. Procurators were just an even bigger insult. Since an imperial procurator was the legal agent of the emperor, he literally had power of attorney to represent the emperor in court and contracts. Which meant that in practice, lowly procurators could tell mighty consular senators what for. It’s not like a senatorial governor is going to cross the emperor. Thus procurators often wielded in effect imperial scale power. And that pissed off consular senators like Tacitus. His Annals is full of morality tales illustrating how so really disastrous and awful this was.

Which gets us back to that passage in the Annals where Tacitus says Christ was executed by Pontius Pilate “the procurator.” Tacitus was a consular senator who had held many imperial provincial governorships and nearly every other office in the land. He knew full well that Pilate was a prefect. He would not have had to check any records to know that. He also knew full well that Pilate, like all district prefects, was the private business manager of the emperor, a lowly money collector and landlord, a filthy procurator. He clearly chose to call Pilate a procurator and not a prefect in this passage as a double insult: on the one hand, his aim was to make paint the Christians as pathetically as possible, and having their leader executed by a petty business manager was about as low as you could get (and Tacitus would never turn down a good juicy snipe like that); and on the other hand, he was always keen to remind the reader of his persistent protest against granting equestrians real powers, and thus calling Pilate here a procurator does that, by reminding the reader that the chief of police who executes criminals in Judea is a “fucking business manager” (“and what the hell is he doing with judicial powers?”). The fact that Pilate was also a prefect and thus had real constitutional authority is the sort of honest detail that would screw up Tacitus’ point. So he doesn’t take the trouble to mention it.

So there you have it. Though, the entire post is worth reading to get some insight into Roman politics and its class system.

-----
**note: the -ianus suffix, as in Christianus, ported over to Greek as Χριστιανος :: Christianos, where we get the word Christian, means "belonging to Christ[us]"

When Dreams Betray You

2012-01-06T11:38:00.001-05:00

I just thought I would draw attention to a recent post by John W. Loftus, and a comment that I and another person made. Loftus posted an email he received from someone who converted back to Christianity after having a dream (of course, the person doesn't think it was a dream).

This is a comment from "wholething":

Theists often tell us we are not allowed to question their “personal experiences”. But why do so many of them sound like waking dreams?

I once heard someone throw open the back door and was walking down the hallway to my bedroom. I couldn’t move and became really scared as I recognized that I was in a waking dream state and tried to force my way out of it to confront the intruder, all the while thinking what a rotten time to be having a waking dream when an intruder was in the house.

As he approached my bed, I was finally able to turn my head voluntarily and then throw the blanket at him. I was about to start punching him through the blanket.

The blanket fell to the floor. He wasn’t under the bed, either.

I felt very shook up. I searched around the house. Eventually I noticed that the back door was still closed though I had heard it open and slam against the wall. This was the empirical evidence that made me realize that the intruder was really a part of my waking dream.

We often have dreams that seem real and they may be scary. When we wake up, we find we are in bed which proves to us that it was just a dream. But what if we dream we are in bed when God talks to us, or an angel, or a deceased relative, or a space alien transports us to his ship and back to our bed? How do you disconfirm that it was real?

A friend told me he was in bed when he heard a car crash into his living room. He even felt the bed shake. He immediately called the police. Then he went to investigate the damage but nothing had happened. The police told him they get calls like that alot. (my emphasis)

The moral is: Don’t believe everything the brain tells you when you are asleep.

Please pay attention to that second to last sentence. Police told him they get calls like that a lot. This means that there are lots of people who have very real experiences of home invasions and/or cars crashing into their houses when the person thinks they are awake -- real enough that they call the police once they get out of bed -- yet the experiences weren't real.

Imagine if these people never went through the trouble of double checking whether their doors were open and/or there was an actual car in their houses after calling the police and then becoming indignant with the police once the cops arrived and told them there was no evidence. That is the situation we have with people who experience god during the period between sleep and consciousness and don't do any double checking to see if the experience was real or not. How could you even check that? God isn't supposed to be tested!

And then this is what I wrote:

This person seems to think that a hallucination doesn’t have physiological affects on the body. They do (if hallucinations didn’t have an affect on the body, then they can’t be hallucinations, since hallucinations usually cause an emotional reaction in the person; which is a phsyiological response). It also seems this person hasn’t done any reading on the various sorts of sleep disorders out there.

What he wrote seems to be an almost textbook case of “old hag” syndrome. I’ve had it a lot. It seems like a very real event that happening to you. You feel half asleep and half awake and you feel a presence — a very, very powerful or foreboding presence (either you’re being watched by aliens or some unbelievably powerful supernatural entity) — and your heart starts to race and then you wake up.

I’ve had exactly what this person has had before, especially the heart racing after you “wake up” feeling. It’ scary, and if I hadn’t read up about sleep disorders, or taken an undergraduate course on psychology, then I’d definitely still be a Christian of some sort since I still get ‘em time to time.

These sorts of things are caused by stress and/or irregular sleep cycles. From what I’ve read, most cases of alien abductions are due to old hag syndrome (and, obvoiously, not from actual aliens). Most people, unfortunately, aren’t humble enough to concede that their own — uninformed — interpretation of their experience might not be the correct interpretation of their experience. When this is pointed out, they react like we’re saying the experience didn’t actually happen. No, the experience did happen, but your interpretation of what caused it is probably incorrect.

Basically, if this person’s experience is “true”, then so are alien abductions, since those “encounters” are just as real as his “encounter” with “god”.

Right now I'm in the middle of writing my own "deconversion story" and experiences like this play a pretty significant role in my teenage years.

Of course, another commenter made a good observation:

John, not sure you’d seen this, but there was a rescent story about a young man who died from a heart condition. Before he died he made a video talking about his heart condition that went viral after his death.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35O3E3T3GKQ

However one of the odd things was that before he died he had at least one heart attack where his heart had stopped for some time. But what was interesting during this was that he saw a rapper named Kid Cudi

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/274929/20111231/kid-cudi-ben-breedlove-youtube-videos-funeral.htm

What was funny, and I can’t seem to locate where I saw the interview. But one of the recent interviews with the parents. The mother was kind of joking about not sure why he did not see Jesus when he was dead. But she kind of laughed it off.

The point of my story, is just to reemphasize that experience cannot be trusted, when it comes to visions and feelings we have when we are not quite ourselves.

Is god really only able to manipulate our lives when we are not quite in control of our faculties? IE Sleep, halucigens [sic], meditation, prayer

Why is it that the gods can only communicate with us convincingly when we aren't in our right state of mind? Why is it that we only get veridical experiences of the gods when we are somewhere between sleep and not-quite-not-asleep? Is Jesus a fan of The Sixth Sense?

You really shouldn't trust your experiences either during sleep or immediately after waking up; or any other time you're put under a lot of stress.

Or think about it this way. What is the prior probability of your brain being imperfect, compared to the prior probability of the existence of the supernatural?

The Name Jesu

2012-01-02T13:42:00.002-05:00

Here is a post from Stephan Huller explaining where the Talmund gets the odd name Jesu or "Yeshu" from:

The rabbis came into contact with 'Yeshu' in the Semitic Christian cultures of the East. Because Syriac does not use the 'furtive' pathach (see link below) Yeshua the shortened form of the name Yehoshua would be naturally rendered Yeshu (i.e. so the 'a' vowel is not used). This follows a pattern noticed with respect to other Hebrew words rendered in Syriac. The third and fourth century rabbis must have come across the name Yeshu and found it puzzling or decided to preserve the unusual form in their Aramaic reports about their Christian neighbors. It does not provide any window into the original name of Jesus as it represents only a transformation of the short form of 'Joshua' into Syriac.

Why is this particularly significant? Because this possibly gives us a terminus post quem for when non Greek/Latin speaking Christians started interacting with or trying to convert Jews. But the knowledge of this odd spelling seems to go back further than the 3rd century. This is Irenaeus writing in the late 2nd:

Against Heresies 2.24.2

Moreover, Jesus, which is a word belonging to the proper tongue of the Hebrews, contains, as the learned among them declare, two letters and a half, (ישו:: Y-SH-W)

I'm thinking that this gives weight to the idea that Jesus actually wasn't that well known among the Pharisees who supposedly had him crucified. The traditions of the Pharisees are where the traditions in the Talmud come from. We already have evidence of this from the possibility that Pharisees historically had very little to no presence in Galilee. So the popular gospel image of Pharisees stalking Jesus there would necessarily be an invention.

So if Pharisees had actual eyewitness experiences with Jesus, or traditions that actually went back to Jesus, then they would have retained his actual Aramaic name Joshua and not used the derived Syriac name Yeshu. This also seems to corroborate the idea that Jews did not know about Jesus until Christians started preaching about him.

Finally, the Islamic name for Jesus, Isa (or Yasu), seems to be derived from the Syriac, as Syriac Marcionites called Jesus Isu.

Why I Am Not A Christian

2011-12-26T12:32:00.006-05:00

I thought I would write up a short (ish) post explaining my reasons why I'm not a Christian. Individually these reasons might not be convincing, but their aggregate weight is vastly in favor of Christianity -- especially modern Christianity – being false. I'm going to try to keep this post as short as possible since each reason could be its own post altogether.

Jesus Isn't A Jewish Messiah

"The Holiday Season is schizophrenic. Hanukkah celebrates the defeat of a guy who got rid of the laws of Moses, but Christmas celebrates the birth of a guy who got rid of the laws of Moses."

My witty catchphrase to sum this up: "If Christianity is true why are there still Jews?". Some people who debate Christians regularly have probably noticed that apologists almost always take things out of context. Cherrypicking is the pejorative term. The funny thing is, Christians have to take the entire Jewish Bible out of context to "demonstrate" that Jesus was a Jewish messiah; Christians have been cherrypicking since the beginning. Cherrypicking Christians are as old as Christianity itself. The biggest irony, of course, is when a non-Christian quotes a particularly damning part of the NT or Jewish Bible and Christians deflect criticism by saying they're taking that verse out of context. Pot. Kettle. Black.

Here's a small sample "prophecies" about Jesus taken out of context:

Isaiah 7.14 is not about Jesus. In context (i.e. all of chapter 7, at the least), the prophet Isaiah is trying to console king Ahaz. The historical situation was that the southern kingdom of Judah was about to be invaded by two foreign kingdoms. Ahaz wanted to make an alliance with a neighboring kingdom that wasn't all that friendly with Judah and Isaiah is trying to convince Ahaz not to make said alliance and to wait for Yahweh's deliverance. Verse 7.14 specifically is about using a contemporary pregnant, or soon to be pregnant, woman as a chronological marker to show when Yahweh will come to king Ahaz's rescue. By the time that the child from the pregnant woman hits puberty, the two kingdoms (v. 16) that Ahaz is fretting over, the two kingdoms that are about to invade, will be defeated. Arguing over whether the verse says in Hebrew "almah" or "betulah" (or παρθενος in Greek) is irrelevant.
Isaiah 53 is not about Jesus. In context (that is, all of the preceding chapters of Deutero-Isaiah [chpts 40 - 55]) the suffering servant is the personification of Israel, or Jacob. If you read from chapters 40 - 53 in one sitting, you'll notice that this personification of Israel/Jacob has been going on the entire time. To take chapter 53 in isolation, something the author did not intend, and make it apply to Jesus, is to take the entire metaphor out of context.
Isaiah 9.6 (or 9.5. depending on the translation) is not about Jesus. This verse says the messiah's name will include EL GBWR (אֵל גִּבּוֹר). EL means "god" and GBR means "strength" or "might". It doesn't say the messiah will be a mighty god, but that his name will include Gabriel (GBR EL), which means "might of god" or "god is mighty"*. Just because it is a theophoric name doesn't mean we should take it literally. Taking it literally is (surprise) taking it out of context. The order of the words in the name generally does not matter; Netanyahu (current Prime Minister of Israel) and Jonathan mean exactly the same thing (gift of Yahweh). Both names are composed of NTN -- meaning "gift" -- and YH (short for YHWH).
Psalm 110.1 is not about Jesus. In context, Psalms can't be a prediction about Jesus, or any messiah, since Psalms are not prophetic (effectively ruling out all of the Psalms that Jesus supposedly fulfilled). If the Psalms were prophetic, there should be other prophecies -- that have nothing to do with Jesus -- that the Psalms predict (there aren't). But let's say that the Psalms are prophetic just for the sake of argument. Psalm 110 says that it was written to David and not by David. Thus the "my lord" that this Psalm is talking about is David himself. It's not David talking about "my lord". In historical context, this Psalm was probably written by the Hasmoneans since they were the first ones to consolidate the roles of high priest and king into one office. The sectarian Dead Sea Scroll followers did not have this Psalm in their library, evidencing that it was written after their breakaway. And it makes sense that they would not have it, since the DSS group was antagonistic towards the Hasmoneans.
There's nothing in the laws of Moses that says that if someone follows all of the laws perfectly, then no one else has to. This assertion that Jesus "fulfilled" the laws of Moses is a wholly Christian invention. You can't even say that Christians took this out of context since it is a soteriology that was invented whole cloth to validate Christianity. No one would think it were true unless they were already a Christian.

Of course, there are many more. But one thing is certain: Every single one of the so-called prophecies of Jesus are taken out of their original context to be made to apply to Jesus. Chances are, if someone purports that this or that Jewish Bible passage is a prediction about Jesus, and it's only one or two verses, then it's taken out of context.

Church History

Marcion (Μαρκίων) of Sinope (modern Turkey)

So here's a simple lead question in to church history: "Why are there four gospels instead of one?" Most apologists will say that there are four gospels because each are separately giving witness to the historicity of the events they describe, much like four different people being interviewed after a traffic accident. Even though there might be minor contradictions, these minor contradictions don't detract from the overall fact of a traffic accident. Unfortunately, this response completely ignores the historical situation that was actually happening in early Christianity and subtly assumes what it is trying to prove.

Why are there four gospels instead of one? What was the historical situation that produced a fourfold gospel canon? Instead of using traffic accidents to describe religious history, we should use religion to explain religious history. Why is there, for example, one book of Joshua? Trick question; there isn't just one book of Joshua, there are two. One, the Jewish version which is in the Christian Bible, and another one, the Samaritan version. So using religion as our explanatory example, we see why there are two books of Joshua: Religious sectarianism. Jews don't consider Samaritans to be the true version of their religion and Samaritans don't consider Jews to be the true version of their religion. If this explains why there is more than one book of Joshua, this probably also explains why there is more than one gospel. Religious sectarianism; Matthew wasn't written to corroborate Mark, as the traffic accident explanation assumes, but was written to replace Mark. The same with every other gospel. There are more reasons why we know religious sectarianism is the answer:
- 1. The self-designation "catholic". This comes from the Greek word καθολικός which means whole or universal. Small c catholic also means the same thing in English. Why would the "orthodoxy" give themselves that name? The same reason why the United States calls itself "united". Making something "whole" or "united" that was, originally, well... not.
- 2. The Synoptic Problem. Mark was written first, which Matt and Luke rewrote to produce their gospels. People who independently report on a traffic accident don't use the same exact words to describe the incident like Mark, Matt, and Luke do. If they did, then the police would rightfully be suspicious. To a lesser extent John also used Mark or a source that used Mark since John uses characters and towns we are pretty certain that Mark invented whole cloth (i.e. Barabbas; Bethany), this is yet again a point against independence, which is also an assumption of the traffic accident analogy.
Expanding on the point about Jesus not being a Jewish messiah, many of these sectarian Christians did not cherrypick the Jewish Bible. Due to them reading the Jewish Bible literally, they realized that Jesus was not any sort of Jewish messiah. Moreover, they realized that the teachings of Jesus were incompatible with or contradicted the character and commands of Yahweh portrayed in the Jewish holy book (like many atheists do today) and concluded that these were two different gods. Some other sectarian Christians read the Jewish Bible a bit less literally than that and realized that Jesus could not be Yahweh in the flesh or born from a virgin. On the flip side, other Christians read the Jewish Bible more allegorically and more out of context than the Catholics did and said that Jesus was one god out of hundreds, or that Jesus was a god who was antagonistic towards Yahweh, who they reinterpreted as Yaldabaoth (possibly Aramic for "lord of chaos"), or that the serpent in the garden of Eden was a good being who was only giving humans knowledge, or other Christians who said it was the teachings of Jesus that saved and not his death (and chided those who "worshiped a dead man") and so on and so forth.
The first Christian who actually put together a canon for Christians was one of these sectarian Christians: Marcion. He is the one who realized that Jesus and Yahweh were contradictory and concluded that they were separate gods. Since they were separate gods, Christians needed their own canon since the Jewish Bible no longer applied; the Jewish messiah sent by Yahweh was yet to come. Marcion's canon consisted of one gospel (remember, sectarianism) and 10 letters of Paul (which were probably all that existed when he did this). Marcion is also the first Christian to cite any written gospel (ironically Marcion means little Mark, just as Caesarion means little Caesar). The Catholics, in their catholicizing agenda, simply followed Marcion's "gospel-apostle" canon format to capitalize and assimilate Marcionite Christians. This also meant bringing in Paul and making him more acceptable to Catholic dogma, which included editing his letters to undo the editing that Marcion probably did. Which means there is probably more than one voice in Paul's letters that we read today.
Apostolic Succession. It's curious that, with all of this information in the background, Catholics have asserted that the concept of Apostolic Succession gives credence to their side of the story. However, in the timeline of Christian teachings, Marcion seems to have been the first Christian to actually claim his teachings go back to some sort of authentic apostle. We have no records of any Christians citing a teacher of theirs that goes back to the "original disciples" before Marcion (or his contemporaries Basilides and Papias). The redactional process of the gospels follows this same trend. The earliest gospels were unconcerned with who was authenticating the story. As we go along the timeline, moving diachronically through early Christian history, later gospels started to become more and more concerned with someone authenticating the narratives; starting with Luke's introduction, to the gospel of Thomas' introduction, to John's concluding chapter saying that he got these stories from a beloved disciple, to finally gospels being written from first person points of view of the disciples like Peter or Judas.

All this means is that whatever or however Christianity originally started as, Catholicism (and all of its breakaway Christianities, like Protestantism) is necessarily a reaction to whatever Christianity or Christianities came before it. So even if original Christianity was true, Catholicism (i.e. all modern Christianities) is second to this original form and probably not true. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

New Testament

"Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, see me after class. Your book reports are surprisingly similar."

Following the conclusions of the previous section on Church History, what is the story behind the New Testament? Do we have the authentic teachings of Jesus, of Paul, of Peter or John? More succinctly: Is the NT reliable?

First of all, all of the gospels were originally written anonymously. While later gospels (Luke and John) have allusions to eyewitness testimony, the gospels don't actually get their attributions until the late 2nd century, when the Catholics were attempting to make their church the universal one by co-opting various heresies into their own traditions. We know that the original gospels were anonymous because no one who quotes a gospel prior to the late 2nd century Catholics ever quotes from Mark, Luke, John, or Matthew by name. First by quoting directly from it without attribution ("as the gospel says...") or attributing them to generic apostles as appeals to original teachers gains currency. As I mentioned in the previous section, early Christian writings were all about revelation and very little about authentic teachers. As time progresses and sectarianism increases, the focus on authentic teachers increases and appeals to revelation decrease, eventually leading to attribution of the gospels ("according to Luke", etc.).
The first gospel written was Mark. All other gospels derive from this gospel either directly, like Matt, Luke, Marcion, etc., or indirectly like John. Because they all depend on Mark, the historicity of subsequent gospels strongly depends on the historicity of Mark. However, Mark seems to have written his gospel as a highly allegorical tale, inventing towns and people to serve literary purposes in his narrative (like the towns Bethany or Bethphage, the legion exorcism, feeding of the multitude with fish, the cursing of the fig tree as an allusion to the cleansing of the temple, which is an allusion to the destruction of the temple, the name Peter as a diss on Paul's antagonist Cephas in Galatians, the names Barabbas, Jairus, etc.), and the first image of Jesus as a teacher appear in Mark's gospel as well, which is also suspicious; Mark could have invented a wandering preacher Jesus for his own theological purposes. Other gospel writers copying from Mark in some fashion use these names, pericopae, and towns uncritically so they must not have done any "homework" or fact-checking either. And we can tell that they followed Mark's basic outline because they all differ dramatically after Mark ends (at Mk 16.8). The part after 16.8 in Mark is itself an interpolation by someone unsatisfied with Mark's original ending, summarizing the endings of the other gospels onto Mark.
Marcion collected 10 of Paul's letters. Why not all 13 (or 14)? Probably because the last three didn't exist when Marcion did so. Marcion just so happens to have collected the seven of Paul's letters that a large majority of NT scholars claim were written by Paul, and three that a smaller number think were written by Paul. He left out the three that a large majority of NT scholars conclude weren't written by Paul. The seven authentic letters are Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, 1 Thessalonians, Philippians and Philemon. The three contested are Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians. The three pseudepigraphal ones are 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus. But, we know that even the authentic and contested epistles have had more than Paul's thoughts in them due to him being used in the battle between Catholics and Marcionites. There are interpolations. Romans 1.2-6 is probably an interpolation since it doesn't fit the trend of introductions that Paul usually writes in his letters and the contents of this intro are anti-Marcionite. 1 Thess 2.14-16 is also likely an interpolation due to its anachronism. 1 Cor 14.34-35 is also probably an interpolation due to non-Pauline language. There are probably many more interpolations we cannot detect.
Acts of the Apostles is first mentioned in the Christian timeline sometime around the end of the 2nd century. Which probably means that it was used as a weapon against heretics; especially heretics who relied solely on Paul: Marcionites. AoA reads as anti-Marcionite propaganda, which means it is less about the history of the early church and more about taming Paul and stealing him away from Marcion. Furthermore, the Christian genre "Acts of..." gained popularity in the 2nd century, so it wouldn't make sense that this work was written in the 1st century and sat around for almost 100 years untapped in the battle against heretics. Lastly, the work seems to get some of its information from Josephus, who published his last works around the end of the 1st century. So the earliest possible date for it is the beginning of the 2nd century.
The letter writer John, the gospel writer John, and the revelation writer John are all not the same John; at least, the letter and gospel writer are not the same as the apocalypse writer. Namely, the gospel writer and epistle writer never name themselves but the apocalypse writer does. Not only that, but the most important evidence is linguistic: The apocalypse writer seems to have been a native Aramaic speaker writing poorly in Greek**. Contrary to that, the gospel/epistle writer has a very good grasp on the Greek language, using puns that only make sense in Greek***. An argument could be made that the apocalypse writer was one of the original disciples of Jesus (assuming he had any, since "disciples" are only a title in Mark's gospel), but the gospel and epistle writer had too good a handle on Greek to have been an Aramaic speaking disciple of Jesus.
The same situation happens with the epistles 1 & 2 Peter, James, and Jude. These were written in Greek, much better Greek than the apocalypse of John, which counts as evidence against original authorship by disciples of Jesus. 1 & 2 Peter have the same problem as the letters and revelation of John. 1 Peter is written in a different style of Greek than 2 Peter.

With all of this in mind, it doesn't seem as though the NT is reliable as far as reconstructing Christian history. But it is a reliable collection of works to elucidate what type of struggles were going on in the 2nd century.

The Jesus Needle in the Christ Haystack

If the NT is not reliable, especially reliable about Jesus, and the history of how the church formed is explained by highly volatile religious sectarianism (mostly about different interpretations of Jesus) then how do we know anything about the "historical" Jesus? Most reconstructions of Jesus by scholars are done by assuming that one of the issues I wrote about above do not apply, or simply hand wave them away. But with all of this information in the background, it seems as though if Jesus existed, the balloon of myth that surrounds him is simply too large to determine with any certainty what a historical Jesus would look like. So at this point, I'm agnostic about the guy's existence.

A major escape clause for the historicity of Jesus is appealing to oral tradition. The assumption being that if there was oral tradition, then there must have been a wandering preaching Jesus to start it all. Unfortunately this simply does not follow. Tradition guards its secrets jealously; traditions are only kept because they had utility in storytelling (or in battling heretics), not because of how historical they were. The subjective value of a tradition within a community has no bearing on how historical the tradition is; a tradition could be invented whole cloth that was intended for great storytelling (like Mark's entire gospel), but this has no bearing on how historical the tradition is. At the most we can tell how young or old a tradition is, which, again, is only an indicator of how long the tradition was useful in storytelling. It is not a necessary indicator of historicity. And as we notice from the trend of church history, early Christians were unconcerned with authenticity of things here "on the ground" and more interested in revelations. The focus on the primacy of the earthly teachings of Jesus or his immediate disciples is a later development of church history, and this development only evolved to combat the rampant sectarianism.

Christianity In The Wider Pagan Matrix

Romulus and Remus, born from the Vestal Virgin Rhea

Ok, so if it is highly likely that none of the now common dogmas about Jesus either came from Jesus himself or his immediate followers, where did they come from? This is actually pretty easy, and can be summed up in the question "How many Jewish kings were worshiped as a god?"

How many Jewish kings or high priests were worshiped as a god? It turns out that this number is big fat zero. On the other hand, the number of non-Jewish kings and heroes worshiped as gods is much, much higher. It seems as though as soon as the Jesus cult was ported over to non-Jews, then many of the now common ideas about Jesus began to take hold. If Jesus was thought to be a king to pagans, then he must also be a god. For example, Augustus Caesar (where we get the month August from) had the official title "son of god". He was the adopted son of Julius Caesar (where we get the month July). But these pagans who were interested in Christianity were faced with a conundrum. If Jesus is a god (since he's a king) then which god is he? There is only one god in Judaism. The only solution was to combine them; Jesus became Yahweh in the flesh. The only problem was that this changed Jesus from a (supposedly) wandering Jewish preacher to a Greco-Roman god.
The same deal with the virgin birth and resurrection. Many heroes or kings in antiquity were thought to be born from virgins. It only follows that the same mytheme would be applied to Jesus once pagans started converting to Christianity. Stories about man-gods and heroes coming back from the dead also abound in antiquity. Richard Carrier made a tongue-in-cheek comment that stories of demi-gods and heroes coming back from the dead in antiquity were as common as Law and Order spin-offs today. Christianity's claims are just "Law and Order: Judaism" or "CSI: Jerusalem". As I wrote about in a pretty recent post, the most famous city in Western society was supposedly founded by a guy who was born from a virgin, ascended to heaven, and resurrected from the dead: Romulus, who founded Rome over 2,500 years ago. Coincidentally, Romulus would have been born from a virgin around the same time that Isaiah wrote 7.14.
For the more intellectual pagans, they revered the creative force of the Platonic god's reason: the Logos. It was only logical for Christians (by way of Philo) to apply this Logos to Jesus. Intellectual Christians spun it so that if one was worshiping the Stoics' Logos then one was in reality worshiping Jesus. The concept of martyrdom, also, originates from pagan society. At least, the culture of respecting martyrs. The very word itself, "martyr" in Greek (μαρτυρία), means witness or testimony. For the Greeks, the best witness to your claims is dying for them. Looking death in the face, and standing firm in the face of injustice, is a theme as old as the Homeric cycle. Christians also seem to have borrowed the Eucharist ceremony from contemporary Mithraists.

Very little of the dogmas of modern Christianity need to have been preached and believed by either Jesus or the early Jewish Jesus cults. Once Christians began preaching to non-Jews, the previous culture and memes that these pagans believed also became a part of the emerging Christian memeplex.

Christian Virtues Are Not Virtuous

1. Faith is not a virtue. Sure, there are quips about how Christians are "gullible" because of faith, but that's not the angle I'm going for. It's not the gullibility of faith that makes it not a virtue, but the self-deception of faith that makes it not a virtue; it's the constant hammering that faith is a virtue which makes it non-virtuous, ironically enough.

If one is constantly prodded to believe something, not because it was true, but because believing in it in and of itself was its own virtue, then this pushes "truth", no matter where it's at, to second-class status in deference to this belief; this faith. This actually has nothing to do with gullibility. This has to do with Dennett's "belief in belief" (also here). If some idea or value is promulgated as a better virtue than believing in whatever was "true", then when the two are juxtaposed -- when "truth" and faith come into conflict -- if one doesn't follow "truth" then one is engaging in some form of deception. Moreover, if one doesn't actually believe some claim, but is constantly nudged to believe in something because one is told that it is virtuous to believe in it, then one is not being honest with oneself. This, also, is necessarily self-deception.

Of course, I think that this self-deception (i.e. "faith", Christian faith) is the reason why Christians take the Jewish Bible out of context, and why church history panned out the way it did. Truth was not a concern for any of these Christians. Faith was. And in order to bolster faith, one would have to take a passage of Jewish scripture (like Isaiah 7.14) out of context and shoehorn it to apply to Jesus. In order to bolster faith, one would have to take a document of unknown authorship and provenance -- like the gospels -- and slap the name of an apostle on it. In order to bolster faith, one would have to take an epistle not written by you, but had some sort of authority, and subtly inject your own views into the pen of this authoritative voice.

Christian faith is not a virtue. Faith cannot be a virtue if one is concerned with the truth; if one is concerned with honesty. If we are concerned about truth, if we think that believing what's true is a virtue, then we should only believe in high probability events (because reality isn't black and white enough for binary "truth" and "lie") to have a high probability of being "virtuous". Because I value "truth", I only value high probability beliefs and explanations. And because I value high probability beliefs, I do not value Christian faith.

2. Christian philosophy is arrogant. Basically, if the only two options for us being here are (1) accident or (2) intelligent design by god, then I'm not arrogant enough to pick the second option. Us being here "by accident" is the more humbling option, since it actually places us in our realistic relationship with the universe. If we were put here on purpose, especially by some god, then this purpose becomes "divine" and thus we become something closer to the center of the universe. Of course, pre-modern Christians actually believed that we were the center of the universe and fought tooth and nail against (scientific) ideas that proposed any alternatives. Which makes sense, when you consider that Christians, generally, place more worth on faith than on truth.

To think that the creator of the universe, assuming that one existed, created the universe for our benefit, wants a "personal relationship" with us, and eventually took on human form and died "for us" cannot honestly be anything other than abject narcissism.

3. The Christian worldview doesn't answer any questions. Yeah, Christians like to say that the reason for xyz phenomenon is because "god wants it", but this doesn't actually answer the question, it just pushes the question back one peg. If the purpose for us being here is to give glory to god, or something else that has something to do with god, then what is god's reasons for doing anything? If god has no reason for his existence, then every value and teleology that you attach to this god becomes meaningless by association. In other words, in the grand scheme of things, Christianity doesn't give any more value to life than any other theistic worldview or even atheism.

Christian Belief Through The Lens Of Cognitive Science

Ok, so. If aliens came down to Earth today and we tried to explain Christianity to them, would they say "Interesting! Tell me more" or would they say "uhhh..."? In other words, why would we believe that a guy could come back from the dead in today's modern world? Even more than that, why would we believe that his coming back from the dead has any repercussions for anyone living today? What's the possible connection?

Of course, no one (at least, no one that I know) became a Christian through objective inquiry into Christian history. They became Christians for the same reason they speak English; their overwhelming surrounding culture spoke the "cultural language" of Christianity and they learned that cultural language at the same age(s) they learned their native language. And just like we use our native language to explain things that happen to us, we use our cultural language to explain "religious experiences". The English language is just as pervasive in the U.S. as Christianity. One would only notice this if you didn't speak either language. An Arab who grew up in a predominantly Muslim country would do the same. They would use their native language (Arabic) and their cultural language (Islam) to explain any "religious experience" they would have as well. The truly miraculous thing would be to see a native language and cultural Hindu explain a religious experience using English/Christianity when they don't know anything about either English or Christianity.
All religions, not just Christianity, take advantage of our cognitive biases. The most entrenched one is the fear and avoidance of death. If we are given an option of either living forever or dying, our innate biological drive will compel us to pick the live forever option, no matter how illogical it is. As a matter of fact, it could be argued that every single cognitive bias that psychologists and neurologists have discovered helps inculcate religion from critical thought. Which might explain why psychologists are among the least religious professions. One of the most pervasive cognitive bias I see in debates (not just in regards to religion) is confirmation bias, where we engage in "motivated skepticism" of ideas that are contrary to what we already believe.
Then there is the unreliable feeling of certainty. Certainty is an emotion, just like love or anger. If we can get angry about a situation that we imagine happening, a situation that hasn't actually occurred, then we can feel certain about a situation that hasn't actually occurred as well. Neurological processes explain why we get sudden epiphanies; when we think a thought, even though it might leave our conscious awareness, the thought can still be processed and worked on subconsciously in the background. This is why some people might think that some random thought is from a god or some spirit being, when in actuality it's just from the part of your brain that "thinks" without you thinking it. On top of this, the feeling of certainty feels good, and the feeling of uncertainty does not. This alone should make the feeling of certainty highly suspect. Unfortunately, religious believers think that this feeling of certainty, this good feeling, is unearthly and attribute it to the "inner witness of the holy spirit" or other religious terms.

Why should we be wary of cognitive biases? Because most biases act on a subconscious level. And if they work on a subconscious level, then we are not aware that they are controlling us. Most people falsely believe that they are "critical thinkers" but almost none of these people has studied any cognitive biases. In order to be a good thinker, one has to know how the brain thinks. As tautological as that sounds, no one actually follows that advice. One cannot be a critical thinker without knowing common pitfalls of rational thought; common pitfalls that toss us into the chasms of irrational thought. And if these biases are working at a subconscious level, and we are being led around by them towards comforting, yet false, beliefs, then someone who does know about cognitive biases can lead us around by the nose into positions that we don't necessarily want.

Τέλος

So these are my general reasons for not being a Christian. I didn't really touch on the existence of a god because I don't think that's necessarily relevant to specific Christian claims.I might save that for another post, but I generally think that if a god exists, he does so naturally and/or is some sort of non-personal god. Hopefully, one can be anything but Christian (Jewish, Muslim, etc.) and will agree with everything I wrote above. But yeah. These are my reasons why I'm not a Christian, and will probably never be a Christian again.

-------------
*The 'i' in many theophoric names is possessive, which would mean that Gabriel means "my god is mighty". Gaborel (or EL GBWR) would be "god is mighty" but is still a theophoric name; Ezekiel 14.14 has the name Danel (god is judge) not Daniel (my god is judge)
**cf. Rev. 1.4 ὁ ὢν καὶ ὁ ἦν καὶ ὁ ἐρχόμενος is bad Greek grammar; ὢν, which means "being", should probably be εστιν to mean "is". ὁ ὢν is a quote of the LXX version of Ex. 3.14 which only makes sense in that context as a rough translation of the original Hebrew pun
***cf. Jn 3.3ff the pun between "born again" and "born from above" only makes sense in Greek [note, this is a link to a joke that is lost on a non-native English speaker as an example] which is why the pun doesn't make sense for modern readers and we have to stick to only one translation of άνωθεν. The "again" meaning of it.

Doug Wilson: “I Have Faith in the Bible,You Have Faith in Reason”

2011-12-22T16:52:00.001-05:00

Courtesy of John Loftus' post.

The old mantra "I have faith in xyz pet superstition, you have faith in science/reason" is black and white thinking in its most absurd and transparent formulation.

The reason it is black and white thinking is due to simple probabilities. Imagine having to choose between picking a revolver that had one bullet chambered out of six and another revolver that had five bullets chambered out of six. Which one would you choose, if you had to pick one to play Russian Roulette? Obviously, any rational person would pick the one chambered revolver. If they wanted a high probability of living, anyway.

But for people who are trying to denigrate science to "level the playing field", so to say, between science and religion, no such distinction between the two revolvers is valid. The two revolvers are "equal" because both are being chosen on "faith". Not only is the religionist denigrating science, they are denigrating fundamental mathematical concepts; they are denying the existence of math altogether. No, 1/6 is not equal to 5/6. 1% is not equal to 99%. No, you can't divide by zero. But in order to make faith respectable, they have to make math completely disrespectable. It's not even science they are disgarding, but math; they have to upend math before they even get to the point of upending science.

It's not about faith. It's about probability. I would place a less than 1% chance of faith claims being true; less than 1% chance of the supernatural being the correct explanation for anything we are attributing to it. I would place a 99% chance of scientific claims being true. And we should start getting religionists to do the same: The next time a religionist claims that you have faith in science, or in reason, and they have faith in the Bible, or the Koran, or what-have-you, and begin intimating that they are the same because it's "all faith", get them to put their money where their mouths are. Ask them, first, if they believe in probability. Then ask them whether they think all probabilities are equal. Then, ask them to assign probabilities to both the success rate of science in explaining the world and the success rate of their religion in explaining the world.

Hopefully, that line of questioning will pull the curtain up on their denigration of basic math and logic. Not all "faiths" are equal.

The Three Wise Men

2011-12-22T16:14:00.001-05:00

Just thought I'd do a quick post about the so-called "Three Wise Men" that will be the in the stories and hymns of Christians worldwide the next couple of days.

The word that Matt uses for the "wise men" at Matt 2.1 is μάγοι :: magoi, which is magicians. He doesn't number them either, but simply has the plural word "magicians". The author of Acts of Apostles also uses the word μάγος for, ironically, a false prophet and sorcerer (NIV) named son of Jesus (Acts 13.6 ἄνδρα τινὰ μάγον ψευδοπροφήτην Ἰουδαῖον ᾧ ὄνομα Βαριησοῦς [bar Iesous = son of Jesus]). Other writers in antiquity used the same word μάγος that Matt does:

Herodotus, in The Histories, writes:

7.37

When the bridges and the work at Athos were ready, and both the dikes at the canal's entrances, built to prevent the surf from silting up the entrances of the dug passage, and the canal itself were reported to be now completely finished, the army then wintered. At the beginning of spring the army made ready and set forth from Sardis to march to Abydos. As it was setting out, the sun left his place in the heaven and was invisible, although the sky was without clouds and very clear, and the day turned into night. When Xerxes saw and took note of that, he was concerned and asked the Magi (τοὺς Μάγους) what the vision might signify. They declared to him that the god was showing the Greeks the abandonment of their cities; for the sun (they said) was the prophet of the Greeks, as the moon was their own. Xerxes rejoiced exceedingly to hear that and continued on his march.

Euripides, in Orestes:

1498

[1495] passing right through the house, o Zeus and Earth and light and night! whether by magic spells or wizards' arts (μάγων τέχναις) or heavenly theft. What happened afterwards I do not know; for I stole out of the palace, a runaway.

[1500] So Menelaus endured his painful, painful suffering to recover his wife Helen from Troy to no purpose.

Plato, Republic:

[572e] to be repeated in his case. He is drawn toward utter lawlessness, which is called by his seducers complete freedom. His father and his other kin lend support to these compromise appetites while the others lend theirs to the opposite group. And when these dread magi (δεινοὶ μάγοι) and king-makers come to realize that they have no hope of controlling the youth in any other way, they contrive to engender in his soul a ruling passion to be the protector

The translator of Orestes decided to translate μάγος as wizard. So if one really wanted to troll fundamentalist Christians, we might substitute Harry, Hermione, and Ron as the three who visited Jesus on Christmas (lol).

(Harry, Ron, and Hermione rushing to baby Jesus before Herod can kill him)

Here is the Tufts dictionary definition of the Greek word μάγος:

Μάγος [α^], ου, ὁ,: Magian, one of a Median tribe hence, as belonging to this tribe,

2. one of the priests and wise men in Persia who interpreted dreams

3. enchanter, wizard, esp. in bad sense, impostor, charlatan

as Adj., magical, "μάγψ τέχνῃ πράττειν τι" , "κεστοῦ φωνεῦσα μαγώτερα"

Why I Don't Trust "Stories"

2011-12-18T23:02:00.000-05:00

Income Inequality and Religion

2011-12-16T14:38:00.001-05:00

There's an emerging trend in sociology that has been noticing a correlation between income inequality and religiosity. Simply put, countries with the highest levels of income inequality are also the most religious. It might be subconscious knowledge, but it is usually the most religious people, at least in the US, who fight the hardest to keep income inequality either at its current levels or try to increase it.

From my own studies, I've seen that poverty, lack of education, and religiosity are all tightly coupled. Since I know that correlation does not infer causation, I can't say which indicator is leading the other ones. That is, I can't say that religiosity creates poverty, or that poverty creates lack of education, or what have you. But these recent studies point towards the indication that poverty, more importantly, huge chasms between rich and poor, is what creates high levels of religiosity.

In this recent study, the US ranks fourth among the countries studied as far as which ones have the worst income inequality (Chile is number one).

4. United States
> Gini coefficient: 0.378
> Change in income inequality: +12.1%
> Employment rate: 66.7% (13th highest)
> Change in income of the rich: +1.9% per year
> Change in income of the poor: +0.5% per year

Inequality in the United States increased significantly from 1985 to 2008, putting it in the fourth-worst spot in the study. As with many other countries in which income inequality has increased, average income has gone up across all income groups since the mid-1980s, but not equally. The income of the wealthiest 10% has greatly outpaced the poorest 10%. The share enjoyed by the top 0.1% in total pretax income quadrupled in the 30 years to 2008.

Ironically, movements like Occupy Wall Street, if successful, would do the biggest blow to religiosity in the country.

One of the things that annoys me about the religious mentality is summed up in one of the sayings of Jesus: πάντοτε γὰρ τοὺς πτωχοὺς ἔχετε μεθ᾽ ἑαυτῶν, καὶ ὅταν θέλητε δύνασθε αὐτοῖς [πάντοτε] εὖ ποιῆσαι, ἐμὲ δὲ οὐ πάντοτε ἔχετε (Mark 14.7: pantote gar tous ptochous echete meth' eauton, kai otan thelete dynasthe autois [pantote] eu poiesai, eme de ou pantote echete : : the poor you will always have with you, and you have the ability to help whenever you want. However, you will not always have me.). Religious people never do anything to actually relieve the scourge of poverty. They only give money to them. Analogously, they are giving the poor fish instead of teaching them how to fish for themselves.

Poverty, for some religious people, is even moreso seen as a blessing. So even though religious people give the most to charity, they are doing the least to actually get rid of poverty; which things like education (and eliminating income inequality) would actually do. But, as though there were some sort of subconscious knowledge on the part of the religious memeplex, promoting those things would do the most damage to the grip of religion on human minds.

One Of My Favorite Quotes

2011-12-14T15:04:00.000-05:00

(A Marvel trading card that I owned at one point)

This is one of my all time favorite quotes, and it's by Eliezer Yudkowsky:

Mystery exists in the mind, not in reality. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. All the more so, if it seems like no possible answer can exist: Confusion exists in the map, not in the territory. Unanswerable questions do not mark places where magic enters the universe. They mark places where your mind runs skew to reality.

When I read the ruminations of the sophisticated theologians, they seem to have a love affair with "mystery". Which is all the more damning, since they are in love with not something that exists out there, but their own state of mind. It is a narcissism of sorts. This brings up a related point. Is theology about the study of a god, or the study of ourselves? When theologians say that their god is mysterious, they are, as Yudkowsky writes above, actually describing themselves and their own state of mind.

Nothing is inherently mysterious, not even god. Mystery is one of those self-reflecting words, sort of like the Ultimate Nullifier, where when we use it, no matter what we point it at, will always more strongly point at ourselves.

The Fine Tuning Argument is an Argument for Atheism

2011-12-08T11:19:00.001-05:00

So I thought I would attempt to use Bayes' to see if the Fine Tuning argument was a good argument. The Fine Tuning argument basically says that the universe was fine tuned for life because if the universal constants (like say, for gravity) were any different, then life could not have come about. Since life did come about, the constants must have been consciously picked so that life could arise. Thus a personal god exists.

I think that this argument is fallacious, just to be honest. But I think using Bayes' will bring about why my objections to it are valid. Hell, maybe the opposite will happen and I'll be convinced that the fine tuning argument is better than any alternative!

In order to arrange this argument in Bayesian fashion, I need three variables: The prior probability, P(H), the probability of the evidence given the truth of the hypothesis, P(E | H), and the probability of the hypothesis given some other hypothesis, P(E | ~H).

Since what we are trying to prove is that some personal god created the universe, this will be our hypothesis H. Thus P(H) is the prior probability that some personal god created the universe. Said in another way, this is the probability that some personal god created the universe before we decide to look at the evidence of the universe's supposedly finely tuned constants. Of course, this is an extraordinary claim, so this means that we are dealing with a low prior probability. I think that maybe having a prior of .1 (10%) might be good, especially since I think this is giving way too much leeway; this is a couple of magnitudes higher than the prior probability of winning the lottery.

Next is our P(E | H). What is the probability that the universal constants are what they are given that a personal god created the universe? Let's grant the opposition their grandest claim, that this is .99. There's a clue in the nature of P(E | H) that says that this cannot be correct. Why? Because P(E | H) + P(~E | H) has to equal 1.00. So this would mean that P(~E | H) is 0.01, or in plain English, that the proability of not having the constants the way they are given that a personal god created the universe is 0.01!

Of course, here the theist is in a bind. Assuming that a personal god created the universe, what is the probability that the constants would be some other values? Shouldn't this also be .99? This reasoning sounds a bit familiar... oh yeah, it sounds just like my post something that explains everything explains nothing. It seems to me that given that a personal god created the universe, any sort of physical constants imaginable are possible. Moreover, any single one of these infinite combinations of physical constants could be used to support human life. Assuming otherwise means that there was some standard of what physical constants humans could survive in that this personal god had to go out and look up and then use that formula to create the universe. A lot like if you wanted to make apple pie. So the fine tuning argument actually assumes a god that had to reference what sort of universe humans could live in and was restricted to this meta-human-suitable-universe instructional manual and simply followed the instructions.

That's not a god anyone believes in!

Assuming traditional theism, the instructions for making human-suitable universes didn't exist before this personal god existed. Moreover, since the god that most people believe in could simply use perpetual miracles to sustain human life in any sort of combination of universal constants, it seems as though our actual P(E | H) is 0.000...001, with the ... representing infinite zeroes for the infinite combination of physical constants so that P(E | H) + P(~E | H), the ~E representing all other possible combinations of universal constants, all adds up to 1.00. I mean at this point, P(E | H) might as well be zero.

Next, I have to figure out what P(E | ~H) is. This is the probability of the universal constants being what they are given that a personal god did not set them. I still have no idea what this would be, but again, let's grant the theist their argument (since I have nothing else to go on), that this is similar to winning the lottery or something. Let's make it 0.0000000000001.

We now have our three variables. Let's work it out:

P(H | E) = P(E | H)*P(H) / [P(E | H)*P(H)] + [P(E | ~H)*P(~H)]
P(H | E) = 0.00...01 * .1 / [0.00...01 * .1] + [0.0000000000001 * .9]
P(H | E) = 0.00...01 / 0.00...01 + 0.0000000000009
P(H | E) = uhhh... pretty close to zero.

That didn't help!

Remember the likelihood ratio? We basically have zero (0.000...01) divided by 0.000000000001. Or, small number divided by (relatively) large number. Which means that the likelihood ratio is lower than 1. When this happens, it looks like the evidence is actually in favor of the alternative hypothesis. It seems as though the existence of the universe with the constants as they are is actually evidence for atheism. That's kind of a surprise!

Yes, you heard that right. Not only is the Fine Tuning argument a bad argument for theism, the Fine Tuning argument is actually a somewhat good argument for atheism (in light of this surprise, I think I'll change the title of this post to something more sensational... heh).

Atheists Are Arrogant?

2011-12-07T12:27:00.001-05:00

Quote of the year lol:

"Wait, you think that because I'm an atheist I'm arrogant? How do you figure that? I think that we're here by accident, by lucky chance. Anyone who feels lucky, by the nature of "luck", can't be arrogant. Luck implies that the chances were against us but we got something anyway. What's arrogant, I'm afraid, is the belief that the universe was created for us. What's even more arrogant than that, is that, is the belief that you, you, have a personal relationship with the creator of the ENTIRE universe! That is arrogance on a literally galactic scale! On a cosmic scale! What the hell! That is arrogance literally the size of the whole universe! And the universe is HUGE!

(...) ...Think about it like this, man. Every single time you wash your hands, or take a shower, or clean anything, you're not killing 100% of the germs you're attempting to clean. No, there is usually like 0.01% of germs left on your hands after washing them, or still on your body after taking a shower. Now, the universe itself is just as hostile to us as your soap is to germs. As a matter of fact, even more so because the universe is a couple hundred levels of magnitude more hostile to human life than your handsoap over there. To think that the universe was created for us is to think that you took a shower for the benefit of the germs on your skin. That is how absurd a belief that the universe was created for us is. I want you to think about this every time you take a shower: I am taking a shower for the benefit of the germs on my skin, because the universe is just as hostile to, and even more hostile to, human life that this soap I'm using is to the germs on my skin. That's how absurd it is!

But that's not even the worst of it. No, the worst of it is that not only are you arrogant enough to think that the universe was created for our benefit, and that you have a personal relationship with the creator of this universe, but that the creator of this universe, that you have a personal relationship with, actually took time out of his massive universe creating and maintaining duties to take on human form and preach a bunch of nonsense for a year and get executed. That he basically took human form and killed that human likeness of himself for you! I mean, there are only two ideologies, two philosophies, that are more arrogant than that: literally thinking that you yourself are the creator of the universe and then solipsism. Solipsism! One of the most batshit insane ideas ever created! (...)

As a matter of fact, now that I'm talking about it, even that part is not the worst of it. No, the most appalling part of this entire worldview is that all of this arrogance is packaged under the guise of humility! I can't even fathom how... I dunno, how offensive that is! HUMILITY! It boggles the mind! That's like 1984, like war is peace, freedom is slavery, and all that stuff."

We Are The 1%

2011-12-06T20:52:00.002-05:00

Why I Ditched Buddhism

2011-12-06T17:06:00.001-05:00

An interesting article I read on Slate. Here's the money quote at the end:

All religions, including Buddhism, stem from our narcissistic wish to believe that the universe was created for our benefit, as a stage for our spiritual quests. In contrast, science tells us that we are incidental, accidental. Far from being the raison d'être of the universe, we appeared through sheer happenstance, and we could vanish in the same way. This is not a comforting viewpoint, but science, unlike religion, seeks truth regardless of how it makes us feel.

Αμην, Αμην. We should pursue the truth, no matter where it lies.

The author is right about one thing. Buddhism, while not as openly suplicative as Western religion, is not as atheistic as more intellectual people think it is. While there is no creator god in Buddhism meant for worship, there are other gods. Which makes sense, since Buddhism came from Hinduism. In Buddhism, these other gods (Devas) go through the same cycle of birth and reincarnation that we are purported to do. However, their arrogance prevents them from attaining nirvana. From this angle, one might even claim that Buddhism is anti-theistic.

Sam Harris Tells It

2011-12-04T20:57:00.001-05:00

The Implications of Probability Theory for the Theist/Atheist Debate

2011-12-01T11:14:00.001-05:00

This is a pretty disturbing implication I just thought of while driving to one of my soirees this past couple of days for Thanksgiving.

What are we saying when we say something has a 90% probability? The longer phrase is, obviously, that this thing has a 90% probability of being "true". The implication being that if you decide to advocate some position that has a low probability, like say 10% probability, then you are essentially arguing for something that has a 90% probability of being false. Faith, of course, is believing in something that intrinsically has a low probability; arguing for something that is an extraordinary claim is essentially arguing for something that has a high probability of being a lie.

What this means is that people who think that faith is a virtue - people who think that believing in things that have a low probability is a virtue - are really saying that they think that believing in something that has a high probability of being a lie is a virtue. I guess this makes sense, given what I think is the nature of Christian faith.

If this is the case, then why not just only believe in things that have a high probability of being true? I don't think that would count as "faith" anymore.

Christian Intolerance?

2011-11-29T19:51:00.001-05:00

Courtesy of Reddit, this is an email someone received from a religious parent:

Subject: You and [girlfriend],

Hi [boyfriend],

I see that you and [girlfriend] are ratcheting up your relationship. As I said before, this puts your family in a very difficult situation.

Althought it seems you have made up your mind about this, I want to make sure that you are aware of the scriptures on this.

The most helpful passage about marrying an unbeliever can be found at 2 Cor 6: 14 Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? 15 What harmony is there between Christ and Belial[a]? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever?

Besides this there are numerous Old Testament passages in which Israelite men married non-believing women from other nations, always to the displeasure of the Lord. For example, in Ezra 10, Israel is rebuked for their marriage to foreign wives: 10 Then Ezra the priest stood up and said to them, "You have been unfaithful, you have married foreign women, adding to Israel's guilt. 11 Now make confession to the LORD, the God of your fathers, and do his will. Separate yourselves from the peoples around you and from your foreign wives." 12 The whole assembly responded with a loud voice: "You are right! We must do as you say.

When you think about it, it only makes sense. What is more fundamental to a person, their values, their world view, their preferences and convictions than their true religious beliefs?

More to the point for the Christian, how can we justify joining ourselves as one with someone who is opposed to what we believe and hold dear, our relationship to Jesus.

I say all this [boyfriend] because while I love you dearly, I am quickly coming to a point where lines must be drawn. As your relationship picks up, so does my unease with the two of you.

I am sorry it has come to this [boyfriend]. I sincerely hope that I am wrong. But nothing I see in your relationship, nothing in the way [girlfriend] presents herself, gives me any hope. And it grieves me that you do not seem moved by this at all. Quite frankly, this has struck me as one of those times when you set yourself to do what you want, regardless of the truth of the situation.

I suggest that you, [girlfriend], and I meet. Unless and until we hear her beliefs about Christ, this uneasy relationship will continue. In fact, it will become worse

Love,

Dad

Is this intolerance? From my anecdotal point of view, on the outside looking in, it's behavior like this that makes many people see Christians as being intolerant. The sad part is that many Christians don't see this behavior as intolerance, and are confused as to why people think that Christians are viewed as intolerant since they have other behavior in mind altogether when they think of "intolerance".

The above relationship did not last, mainly due to the pressure from this parent. Of course, I witnessed a similar situation happen: A Christian girl was convinced by one of her religious friends to end her relationship with her non-Christian boyfriend for the simple fact that he was non-Christian. Besides that example, I've seen this situation happen more times than just that one instance I wrote about in that blog post; Christians being intolerant of other people simply for not believing what they believe: Protestants refusing to date Catholics, Protestants refusing to date Mormons, etc. (for some reason it's always Protestants in my experience who are the intolerant ones...). Certainly, there has to be some intolerance from the other side too. Atheists who refuse to date Christians, Catholics who refuse to date Protestants, or what have you. But I've just never seen it.

For me, the problem isn't Christianity per se, here. It's religious Christians. The definition of "religious", for me, in the pejorative sense, is someone who thinks that what a person believes is more important than how that person treats other people. If a Christian had to choose between a fellow Christian who treated them badly over a non-believer who treated them well, I would think that a rational person would go with the person that treats them well, no matter what they believe. However, the religious Christian would choose the poor behavior Christian simply because they think that being a Christian necessitates good behavior (and by implication, that non-belief necessitates bad behavior). So a situation like the one between Biblical scholar, and agnostic, Bart Erhman and his wife Sarah - even though it's a marriage between a believer and an unbeliever - is not a relationship between a religious believer and unbeliever.

This mentality probably also explains the poor behavior from "well meaning", yet religious, Christians in their response to the LGBT community. What does it matter if someone is gay as long as they are a good person? But the implication for the religious Christian, again, is that homosexual "belief" (in this case orientation) is more wrong than actual bad behavior. Which, again, seems to be a staple of Protestant belief - the thought that beliefs, in and of themselves, can actually affect reality.

If the god of the Christians is love (1 John 4.8ff), then I would think that this would implore Christians to be more open to love no matter who it came from. But these examples only impress on me that their god is intolerance. The worst part is, that this intolerance will only breed more intolerance: The above Redditor will be skeptical of dating another Christian again since they'll want to avoid having to deal with that intolerance of orbiting religious Christians of a future relationship, just as my friend who had his Christian girlfriend break up with him explicitly told me.

ἐάν τις εἴπῃ ὅτι ἀγαπῶ τὸν θεόν, καὶ τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ μισῇ, ψεύστης ἐστίν: ὁ γὰρ μὴ ἀγαπῶν τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ ὃν ἑώρακεν, τὸν θεὸν ὃν οὐχ ἑώρακεν οὐ δύναται ἀγαπᾷν. - Ἰωάνου Α

17% of Aussies Think That Jesus Didn't Exist

2011-11-29T12:02:00.001-05:00

Y'know, I'm not sure what I think about this!

(H/t Jerry Coyne)

An Analogy For the Progression of Science

2011-11-28T12:38:00.001-05:00

A while back I was having a conversation with someone who professed to work with undead spirits and the supernatural. As you know, I don't think that appealing to the supernatural is a good explanation for whatever phenomenon we are attempting to describe. As a matter of fact, from a Bayesian point of view, it's much more likely that a naturalistic explanation that has an intrinsically higher prior probability, that can also explain the phenomena, is the better candidate for explanation.

I didn't actually get into a full-blown arguement with this person, I just sort of asked some Socratic-dialog like questions to see if she could quell my skepticism. One of the things I asked was how it was that these ghosts and other supernatural beings intake useful energy and release non-useful energy. She didn't seem to understand what I was asking, so I used a car and the human body as an example. Gasoline/food goes in, heat/methane/CO2 goes out. She simply asserted that supernatural beings consume "electromagnetic energy". This was an obvious attempt at using the literary genre of science to make it sound like she was doing actual science, but I obviously saw through that (i.e. I asked "what do you mean by that?" but she couldn't answer, since there are multiple types of E-M radiation).

What she then said was that science was wrong in the past, so it will probably be wrong in the future, and used the shift from a geocentric view of the universe to a heliocentric view of the universe as an example. "Laws of physics" she said, "were completely overwritten in the past, so they will be overwritten in the future". Therefore, she will be vindicated in some future physics that will show that her beliefs were always compatible with science. I actually do think that will happen, but not from the physical sciences. The part of science that will shed light on why she believes what she does will probably come up in neurology and psychology, or other areas of cognitive science, not from the physical sciences. Well, that part is already available, it's just that this scientific knowledge hasn't become common knowledge. Yet.

Anyway, if I had been thinking faster, I would have corrected her misrepresentation of the progression of science with the analogy I'm about to write. But all I could say was that previous theories were never really overturned, it was just that newer theories were less wrong than previous ones.

So yeah, here is the analogy: Imagine you live in an apartment building Harlem and you attempt to draw a map of all of New York City. Let's say you've never been outside of the block that your apartment building is on. This map might be accurate for say, your immediate neighborhood, but it won't be accurate for all of NYC. Let's say, then, that you decide to walk a 10 block radius around your apartment. Again, this map might be more accurate than your previous map; it will be accurate for the 10 block radius around your apartment and a bit beyond, but it still won't be accurate for all of NYC. Next, let's say that eventually, you decide to walk all around Manhattan island and then attempt another map of NYC. Again, this map will be more accurate than your previous maps, but it won't be accurate for the entirety of NYC.

Each update to this map, as you explore more and more of NYC with your own eyes, will be more accurate than your previous maps until you've been to all of NYC. Moreover, you will be able to see the logical evolution of these maps and why the previous maps got what they got right and got what they got wrong. No successive map will be completely unrelated to a previous map. Furthermore, each map follows a Bayesian updating scheme, where new information is included into previous information.

The scientific model of knowledge progression that the psi-ist person was promulgating was a wholly unBaeysian progression of science. As Isaac Azimov wrote, they think that one day science will say that the Earth is a sphere, and then the next day science will say that the Earth is a rectangle, the next day a trapezoid, the next day a donut, etc. None of those models has any logical progression between them, and none of those models follows any sort of Bayesian updating. They are just random.

So the next time I encounter someone who attempts to appeal to some future physics that will one day vindicate their psi beliefs, I'll have to remember to use that map analogy to set them on the correct path. Hopefully, any reader(s) of my blog will do the same ;-)

Religious Experiences Are Actually Evidence Against The Existence of God

2011-11-22T11:32:00.001-05:00

Before I go over why I think the title of this blog post is true, let me go over the case of Oliver's Blood again:

In Bayes' Theorem, the Likelihood Ratio is how likely your hypothesis is in relation to all other hypotheses posited, and also shows how strongly the evidence favors, or disfavors, your hypothesis. This is simply dividing P(E|H) by P(E|~H). Let's say we're presented with the following scenario:

Two people have left traces of their own blood at the scene of a crime. A suspect, Oliver, is tested and found to have type O blood. The blood groups of the two traces are found to be of type O (a common type in the local population, having frequency 60%) and of type AB (a rare type, with frequency 1%). Do these data (the blood types found at the scene) give evidence in favour of the proposition that Oliver was one of the two people whose blood was found at the scene?

So in this scenario, if Oliver accounts for the O type blood, then one unknown person accounts for the the AB. This gives us the P(E|H) = 1% or 0.01. You may say, at this point, that it fits the hypothesis of Oliver being there, since if Oliver was there, and he left blood, then at least one of the samples of blood would be type O.

On the other hand, if Oliver is not guilty, ~H, then this gives us P(E|~H). Or that two unknown people left blood at the scene. What is the probability of finding the evidence at hand if Oliver is not guilty? This means we have two people at random who at each random selection has to account for either the 1% or the 60%. This becomes 2 * 0.01 * .6, which is 1.2% or 0.012.

[table]

As you can see from this chart, a Likelihood Ratio that is lower than 1 means that it slightly supports the hypothesis that Oliver is not guilty! Or in other words, there's a higher probability of finding the evidence that we have if Oliver were indeed not at the scene of the crime and two other random people committed the murder. Going back to the simpler form of Bayes Theorem, P(E|H) would be the 0.01 and that is denominated by P(E). P(E) in this case would be the probability of finding the evidence at hand period, which is 2 * 0.01 * .6, which is 1.2% or 0.012. Again, P(E|H) < P(E). So even though the evidence intuitively fits the hypothesis that Oliver is guilty, it is more likely, due to the math implicit in the evidence, that Oliver is not guilty.

So I was just reading over my last post Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence. And like I said in that post, most people are convinced of the truth of their particular religion due to a religious experience. But what is the rate of false positives for religious experiences? What is the probability that if we polled a random person from the planet that their religious experience would be evidence for the "true" religion (whichever is) or the "false" religion?

We can actually get a rough estimate for this. Again, think about the totality of human existence. Most people who have ever lived - from the ancient Greeks, Aztecs, modern Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, etc. - have had religious experiences. To be a Christian (as an example) and think that only Christians have had religious experiences - the inner witness of the Holy Spirit, or the Burning in the Bosom - would be a pretty arrogant claim. Jews and Muslims, as well as Hindus, ancient Mayans, modern Native American shamans, etc., must have all had religious experiences that gave them absolute conviction that their faith is true.

Now if we actually do a rough estimate of all of these religious experiences, both modern and ancient, then from a Christian point of view, the overwhelming majority of religious experiences have actually pointed to the truth of some other religion. Equally so from a Muslim point of view, a Zoroastrian point of view, a Mithraist point of view, and on. This means that our P(E | H), the probability of having a religious experience given the truth of some religion, is insanely low, because the vast majority of people who have had religious experiences were not Christians (or Muslims, or Hindus, etc).

It would seem that this conditional probability is denominated by a much higher P(E | ~H). In this case, P(E | ~H) would be that physiological hiccup I mentioned in that "Extraordinary Claims..." post. It would even be lower than bare random chance (50%). And if the denominator is larger than the numerator, the Likelihood Ratio is lower than 1. This gives us an equivalent scenario to Oliver's Blood: Religious experiences are actually evidence against the hypothesis of the truth value of some religion, even though it might be intuitive to think the opposite.

So not only is the prior probability of the existence of the truth of some religion insanely low to being with, religious experiences actually make that probability even lower.

What's Really Wrong With The Middle East

2011-11-21T16:32:00.001-05:00

I don't have anything to add to this article, and I obviously don't have access to the interior of the Arab world to corroborate, so I just thought I would post some highlights from this article:

[There are] three concentric circles that complete the picture of the current Middle East. What makes these circles all the more significant is that they all touch upon religion.

The first and most important of the circles addresses the Sunni-Shiite divide... ...The second circle involves the recent uprisings in the Arab world, better known as the "Arab Spring," which have granted power to Islamists everywhere, and made the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood (or affiliated parties) the dominant political force in Tunisia, Egypt, and now in Syria... The intolerance of the MB towards non-Muslims (Jewish Israel for instance), Christians and Shiite Muslims (whom they consider as "errant" Muslims) is connected to the first circle. The third circle is that of the conflict between Arab countries as well as non-Arab Muslim countries (Iran and Turkey) and their ethnic and religious minorities. These include the Jewish state of Israel, the Coptic Christian minority in Egypt, the Kurds in Turkey, Iran, and Syria, and the Sunni Baluch minority in Iran as well as the Ahwazi-Sunni Arabs in Iran.

What the three circles have in common is religious and ethnic hatred and intolerance...

[...]

Israel, an advanced Western democratic state, gets a disproportionate amount of press and criticism, to the near exclusion of coverage and analysis of intolerant Arab-Muslim states by the mainstream press. The ease of access Western journalists have in Israel compared to the absence of secure access in the Arab and non-Arab Muslim Middle Eastern states, makes for unfair and inaccurate reporting in the Western media, which results in holding Israel responsible for the lack of regional peace. Moreover, secular western reporters and editors, who are disconnected from religion, fail to grasp the overarching role religion plays in Middle Eastern conflicts.

Contrary to the reportage written and distributed by Western media sources, conflict in the Middle East is less about territory and almost entirely about religion. True also for the Arab (Palestinian)-Israeli conflict is that its foundation is in Islamic religious intolerance rather than territory or Palestinian victimhood (Palestinian Arabs could have established a sovereign state under the Peel Commission in 1937 over 72% of Mandatory Palestine, and again under the UN Partition Plan of 1947. They rejected both plans with the demand for all of Palestine or nothing — no compromise with infidels). Palestinian Arab-Muslims seek to replace Israel rather than live side-by-side with it. And, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is fueled by arms, funds, and propaganda provided by Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia to the Palestinians against the Jewish state, still pales in importance, to Shiite Iran's encroachment and hegemonic ambitions in the Gulf.

I think the whole article is worth reading, and it's only two pages so it's pretty short.

Now, I don't think that getting rid of religion will rid the world of all our problems. All of our problems are human problems that, by themselves, have nothing to do with religion. What religion does is intensify all emotion that humans have towards something. If it's love, then it's more intense love. But if it's hatred, it's more intense hatred.

The Nazis Were Atheists and Darwinists

2011-11-17T11:25:00.001-05:00

On the contrary, Nazi racial ideology was religious, creationist, anti-materialist, and anti-Darwinian in nature. Some highlights from that blog post:

Chamberlain is totally dismissive of the Darwinian idea that man could ascend from "a bestial past" and that "… natural selection, in its blind choice, is forsooth to transfigure us into an exalted being".

This passage is worth quoting more fully, since the usual accusation is that the Nazis took from Darwin an idea of using selective breeding to create a "master race". Chamberlain, the foremost intellectual founder of Nazism, totally and explicitly rejects this, instead wanting to preserve the past:

"Darwin specially recommends his theory for our acceptance in that it also promises to mankind that all corporal and mental endowments will tend to progress in the direction towards perfection. I, on the contrary, should have thought that we might have contented ourselves with the gifts of a Plato, a Descartes, a Leonardo, a Goethe, a Kant … how far better this than that we, fooled by delusions out of a bestial past that is no past … should with outstretched greedy hands, without cease or rest, clutch at a phantastic future in which natural selection, in its blind choice, is forsooth to transfigure us into an exalted being, the like of which is beyond the imagination of the great and holy and sublime men of the present generation!"

Thus, to Chamberlain, Nazi theory was not about using selective breeding to perfect a master race, Nazi ideology was that the Aryans were already a master race, and had always been, since an original creation by God. And that the Aryan master race was now threatened by interbreeding with "lesser" races of human, which it was their duty to prevent. This theme was later to make up a large swathe of Mein Kampf.

[...]

[Nazis] disliked Darwinism precisely for the reasons that other Christians do, that it points to man as a product of material, natural world, whereas the Nazi's preferred to regard man as divine special creation endowed with a spiritual soul.

[...]

Ironically, the blaming of "atheism" for the Third Reich is itself a Nazi-style tactic: the Nazis blamed the ills of society on Jews, building on centuries of antipathy towards a group that refused to acknowledge the Christian god. Blaming the ills of society and history on "atheists", as by Ratzinger and other Christians, has the same motive: antipathy towards a group that refuses to acknowledge their god. One can excuse Ratzinger for having joined the Hitler Youth at the impressionable age of 14, at a time when it was expected of all German boys; but he should not be excused for displaying Nazi-style prejudice at an age when he should know better.

Hitler, and many other Nazis, actually equated Jewishness with atheism:

Mein Kampf does not mention Darwin even once. Where atheism is mentioned (twice) it is pejorative, associating atheism with Jews and Marxism (e.g. "They even enter into political intrigues with the atheistic Jewish parties against the interests of their own Christian nation" and "… atheistic Marxist newspapers …").

It might stand to reason that Hitler hated Marxism (thus Communism) because it was Jewish in origin; Karl Marx was Jewish. Hitler even went out of his way to eliminate freethought organizations:

One of the early acts of the Nazis one gaining power was to disband and outlaw atheist groups. By 1930 the German Freethinkers League had 500,000 members. It was closed down in 1933, with Hitler saying in a speech that year:

"We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out." (Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Berlin on Oct.24, 1933)

Chairman of the German Freethinkers League was Max Sievers, who was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and executed.

Nazi ideology had the same hatred for "materialism" that modern Creationists have:

In the introduction to "Foundations" [Houston Stewart] Chamberlain writes of Darwinism as "A manifestly unsound system". He explicitly advocates a dualistic and spiritual vision of man, rejecting "monism" (the idea that humans are simply physical material) and saying that Darwinism and "so-called `scientific' monism, materialism" were "shallow and therefore injurious systems" … "which have nevertheless in the nineteenth century produced so much confusion of thought". He then says that as a result of such "errors" … "theists become in the twinkling of an eye atheists, a strikingly common thing in the case of Jews …".

[...]

Thus to the Nazis Darwinism was something they largely rejected and opposed. As with many Christians they opposed Darwinism because it saw man as an evolved ape, whereas they saw man as God's special creation, and they opposed Darwinism because it was materialist, stripping mankind of the spiritual dimension, and because it did not give man a moralistic destiny.

That is why, in a list of books they banned from the Third Reich libraries, the Nazis listed:

"Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Haeckel)."

"Monism" is the idea that mankind is solely material, with no spiritual soul.

[...]

Gunther Hecht, who represented the National Socialist's Department of Race-Politics (Rassenpolitischen Amt der NSDAP), issued a monitum:

"The common position of materialistic monism is philosophically rejected completely by the volkisch-biological view of National Socialism. . . . The party and its representatives must not only reject a part of the Haeckelian conception — other parts of it have occasionally been advanced — but, more generally, every internal party dispute that involves the particulars of research and the teachings of Haeckel must cease."

To equate atheism and the Theory of Evolution to Nazism and the Holocaust is a grave, abject, and abhorrent historical error. It's actually Creationism that contributed heavily to the Holocaust. This doesn't mean that Creationism is false, it just means that Creationism actually has the moral failing that it projects onto Darwinism.

(h/t Jerry Coyne)

Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

2011-11-14T16:44:00.002-05:00

The first step towards wisdom is not to know that you know nothing. The first step towards wisdom is to know that, placing yourself in the totality of human history, any proposition you currently hold is much more likely to be wrong than it is to be correct; especially any unexamined proposition.

The article I read that made me crystallize that axiom of mine is this article by Isaac Asimov: The Relativity of Wrong. This article implies a philosophy of "less wrong" throughout, which has sort of become my guiding catchphrase: to be "less wrong" about everything I engage in. I'm guessing that this is where the Less Wrong blog got its title (of course, I only became aware of the Less Wrong blog courtesy of Luke at Common Sense Atheism's "Reading Yudkowsky" series, which he started posting November of last year; a number of years after I read that Asimov article).

Here is a snippet from Asimov's article (the article isn't very long, but...):

My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong. However, I don't think that's so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts...

The Big Question

Anyway, to the point. Does a personal god or gods exist? Like I just wrote, almost every other proposition that a human selected at random from the totality of the existence of the human species was wrong. What causes rain? Why does the sun travel across the sky? What causes disease? How do plants grow? Just about any random question that you can think of had a wrong answer for a lot longer than it has a correct answer. And adhering to "less wrong" philosophy, we still do not have the "correct" answer; we only have the less wrong answer.

For the vast majority of human history, people have believed in gods. Not every single person or every single community, but the vast majority of them have posited the existence of god(s) or some supernatural being(s). Based solely on the prior exemplified in my first two sentences, it is highly unlikely that a god or supernatural beings are the correct explanation for whatever phenomena we are attributing to them.

The most convincing line of evidence that most people use to verify the existence of their god is when they have an experience they can't explain, and thus conclude that their god or the supernatural is the best explanation for said event. However, these people never take into account any competing hypothesis that might also explain the unexplainable experience. You also always have to keep in mind the prior probability for some hypothesis. Again, the probability of you having the correct explanation for something is exceedingly low because you live in the continuum of all of humanity. And the vast majority of all humans who have ever lived have had the wrong explanation.

As I wrote in a previous post, this resorting to the supernatural for an explanation is a type of Prosecutor's Fallacy: Confusing P(E | H) with P(H | E). Sure, given that supernatural beings exist it would be an explanation for your experience; P(E | H) might be relatively high. But P(H) itself is already insanely low. And what about the probability of having that experience in the first place? What about the probability of having that experience given some other competing hypothesis? Some other competing hypothesis that has a higher prior probability that can also explain the experience? Worse yet, if P(E | ~H) is higher than P(E | H), then that experience is actually evidence against your hypothesis.

What if P(~H) is something like a physiological hiccup? I would say that the probability of a physiological hiccup is much higher than the probability of a god or supernatural being existing. Especially given that the vast majority of humans are imperfect and thus physiological hiccups would be the (relative) norm. So I would think that a physiological hiccup might explain the unexplainable experience better than the existence of the supernatural. Of course, this is a very specific claim; it doesn't mean that the supernatural doesn't exist, it just means that the supernatural isn't a better explanation for your particular experience than a physiological hiccup.

Why Apply Bayes (Math) To Religion And History?

Bayes is all about making your assumptions explicit. It's also about taking into account other competing hypotheses that can explain the same evidence or event. But what's the best thing about Bayes, that is somewhat implicit? Each "test" that we have, with us being imperfect beings, we know can't be 100% accurate. There will be false positives and false negatives. The rate of these false positives/negatives is something we need to be acutely aware of when making decisions based on new evidence.

What happens when our false positives rate is too high? The "test" becomes worthless, or in some cases the test might be actually more useful for refuting a hypothesis - as in the case with Oliver's blood. In the case with some religious experience being evidence for the hypothesis that god(s) or the supernatural exists, we should pay extra attention to our rate false positives. But I don't know any religious people who take into account "false positives" of religious experiences. They seem to follow a methodology of counting the hits and ignoring the misses; a sort of selection bias. Their only corroboration of their religious experience is their own unreliable feeling of certainty. Again, what is the success rate of your feeling of certainty? Have you documented when your feeling of certainty was wrong; as in, what's your rate of false positives?

Many people, however, are intimidated by Bayes because it's math, and math can get confusing very quickly. But as I showed in the Monty Hall problem, you don't really need to do any complicated math. If you see that the denominator in the Likelihood Ratio is larger than the numerator, then what you're looking at probably isn't evidence for your hypothesis. Or, if you know that the probability of seeing the evidence at all, P(E), is equal to the probability of seeing the evidence assuming your hypothesis is true, P(E | H), then you know that the evidence really has no affect on your initial probability; the evidence actually exists independently of your hypothesis. And then, even if you think that the evidence at hand is highly likely assuming your hypothesis is true, it doesn't mean that your hypothesis actually is true because the prior probability of your initial hypothesis might be insanely unlikely to begin with. Assuming otherwise is the Prosecutor's Fallacy (i.e. confusing P(E | H) with P(H | E); never assume your hypothesis is true and then conclude that your hypothesis is true).

Carl Sagan's saying "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is a Bayesian saying. An extraordinary claim, as in a highly unlikely P(H), requires extraordinary evidence, that is, a highly unlikely P(E). Moreover, H has to be extremely well connected to E. That is, there has to be an extremely low rate of false positives - a high P(E | H). If P(H) is low, and P(E) is low, then P(E | H) will have to be HUGE in order to make a dent in P(H | E). And that's only if E actually occurred. If E places some weight on H and E is absent, then this absence is evidence against H. If not, then you have to admit that E has no affect on H at all and is independent of H. Ironically, religious experiences are actually pretty common, so this makes P(E) a relatively large number in the case of E being a religious experience (like seeing a frozen waterfall). Which in turn would make no dent in your prior: P(H), the prior probability of the existence of god or the supernatural will be damn close to P(H | E), the hypothesis that god and/or the supernatural exists given a religious experience. Again, to explain the logic and math behind this, let's go over the Prosecutor's Fallacy again.

The Prosecutor's Fallacy (Again)

Say someone wins the lottery. This would be our evidence or event, P(E). Someone comes up to the lotto winner and says "Aha! You cheated! The probability of winning the lotto is low (true) so that means that you must have cheated!". The person is claiming that P(E | H) is high. Why is this a fallacy to conclude that the person cheated? Because the prior probability of cheating period is also extremely low. Our P(E) as I said, is the probability of the event happening, in this case it's winning the lottery. Our prosecutor might be right, that given that you cheated, the probability of winning the lottery is high; P(E | H) might be really high. But we can't assume our hypothesis is true and then conclude that it's true; we need to know what P(H) is as well.

So in the case of the Prosecutor's Fallacy, our Bayes formula is this:

P(H | E) = P(E | H) * P(H) / P(E)
P(H | E) = [probability of winning the lottery given that you cheated] * [prior probability of cheating period] / [probability of winning the lottery]

So if we look at Bayes, we can see that we have high * low / low. In this case, if P(E) was equal to P(H), then these two cancel each other out and indeed our P(H | E) is equal to P(E | H). That would be no Prosecutor's Fallacy. But let's think about this: I read stories of people winning the lottery at least once a year. I've never read any stories of anyone winning the lotto because they cheated, nor have I read any stories of people even attempting to cheat. So even if P(E), the event of winning the lottery, is like 1 in a million, P(H) has to be lower than that. With P(H) being lower, this will bring down P(E | H) even if it's like .99. Dividing this by P(E) will only make a relatively small dent in P(H | E); it won't update our prior probability P(H) enough to make it significant.

So Bayes in this case would generally look like this:

P(H | E) = high * lower / low

The two "lows" are close to canceling each other out, but not enough to make the jump from prior probability (lower) to posterior probability that huge, i.e. not enough to make P(E | H) equal to P(H | E). Which is a jump we need it to do to make it a compelling argument.

Again, there's no complicated math going on here. It's just the concept of dividing big numbers by small numbers to get a bigger number, dividing a small number by a big number to get a smaller number (as in the case of Oliver's blood), or dividing numbers that are pretty close to each other to make a not-so-big number (as in the Monty Hall problem).

This has a real world applicability, too. Don't trust your doctor's diagnosis? Ask them what the success rate, P(E | H), and false positives rate, P(E | ~H), is for some test or symptom. Then find out what the prior probability, P(H), is for that disease (that is, the number of people in the total population who have that disease). Then do the math yourself; a lot of crappy doctor diagnoses have elements of the Prosecutor's Fallacy in them, and waste a lot of the patient's money. If a breast cancer test has an 80% success rate, this does not mean that you have an 80% chance of having breast cancer if you get a positive result. As I keep saying, this is P(E | H) and not P(H | E), equivocating between the two is the Prosecutor's Fallacy. You always want to find P(H | E). P(E | H) is one piece of the puzzle that gives you P(H | E).

The Resurrection of Jesus: Ordinary or Extraordinary?

When we talk about the resurrection of Jesus, is this an ordinary claim or an extraordinary claim? There are actually two issues at hand when we talk about this. One, is whether Jesus actually came back from the dead. The other, is whether we would have stories of Jesus coming back from the dead. Jesus actually rising from the dead is an extraordinary claim, however having stories about someone rising from the dead are comparatively mundane. We know they are relatively mundane because we have many other stories in antiquity of other pagan gods and demi-gods coming back from the dead. One of the most famous cities in Western civilization was supposedly founded and named after a guy who was born from a virgin, ascended to heaven, and resurrected from the dead: Romulus, who supposedly founded Rome. There were other pagan gods like Adonis, Hercules, Asclepius, Osiris, Bacchus, Inanna, and Zalmoxis who all came back from the dead in some fashion (i.e. some form of "divine re-embodiment", 1 Cor 15.35-54). So P(E) in this case would be a lot higher than in the lottery example.

So if we were to formulate Jesus' resurrection in Bayesian terms, our P(H) is the hypothesis that Jesus rose from the dead. Our P(E) is the event/evidence of having stories of Jesus rising from the dead, like the Gospels. Our P(E | H) would be the probability of having stories about Jesus rising from the dead given that Jesus rose from the dead. Our formula might look like this:

P(H | E) = high * low / high

In this case, we have something different than the lottery example. Instead of the prior probability, P(H), and the probability of the event, P(E) being close to each other it turns out that P(E) is closer to P(E | H) so these two terms are closer to canceling each other out. Which means that our prior probability's move to posterior probability will be a very small jump. P(H) is pretty close to P(H | E). The extraordinary claim of Jesus' resurrection only has a relatively ordinary claim of stories about Jesus' resurrection. We would need something more extraordinary to support the claims of Christians. As it happens, there's probably another reason why we would have stories about Jesus' resurrection that in themselves would have a higher prior probability and an equivalent P(E | H).

As I explained above, religious experiences are also pretty mundane due to human imperfection. So our Bayes formula is still denominated by a relatively high P(E). Again, our posterior probability only slides a couple of percentage points in favor. But not enough to make a good argument; not enough to argue from a high probability.

At this point, some apologists might claim that the success of Christianity in the Roman Empire is an extraordinary event or evidence. I actually don't think this is so; Christianity's growth rate is almost exactly the same as the growth rate of Mormonism. Mormon's experienced persecution just like the early Christians did. So if Christianity is true due to its growth rate, then so is Mormonism. However, even Christianity's success can be explained in more pragmatic terms: Christianity succeeded - in a pagan environment - because it successfully emulated pagan ideals. Even though the Gospels superficially quote from the LXX, even though the body of Christianity is cloaked in Judaism, the soul of Christianity is Greek tragedy. A quote that Neil Godfrey has in that post:

What one learned from the classical tradition was what it meant to be a respected person in the larger context of the Greek cosmos, a world controlled by the jealousy of the gods and the vicissitudes of Fate. One learned piety towards the gods, to respect the rights of others, especially the unfortunate, the suppliant, and the stranger. But what one learned above all was how to face the ultimate test, unjust suffering, the inevitable suffering unto death, with courage and integrity. The texts display a remarkable sophistication on this point

This sounds an awful lot like Christianity's ideals and worldview. Substitute the jealousy of the gods with the jealousy of Satan and there seems to be a match, it would seem as though this was the mentality behind the early Christian martyrs, and why their deaths were compelling to interested pagans. As I explained in a previous post arguing for Christians borrowing the Eucharist ceremony from Mithraists, this might just be one more thing that Christians inherited from their cultural matrix.

This is one of the reasons why people claim that the U.S. was founded on Christian ideals. They say this because the U.S. was founded on pagan Greek ideals (like rationalism, equality, and democracy) and confuse this with Christianity, which itself was ensouled with pagan Greek ideals.

So again, the success of Christianity would also be a relatively high P(E), a relatively ordinary claim. What would work for Christianity would be a truly extraordinary claim, a low P(E) coupled with a high P(E | H); a high likelihood ratio. Moreover, this P(E | H) would have to be higher than P(E | ~H) or the probability of seeing the evidence given some other competing hypothesis. In all of these cases, I think that P(E | ~H) is pretty close to P(E | H) but that's just a hunch.

Religious claims don't seem to have the extraordinary evidence that Bayes requires for their extraordinary claims. And if you agree that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, then this lack of evidence is indeed evidence of absence.

More Against The Existence Of Q

2011-11-10T12:43:00.001-05:00

I've written a couple of posts about some arguments against the existence of Q. One was the inclusion of Joseph in a non-Q pericope in Luke. It seems as though Luke is following Matthew at this point (Lk 4.14-22 // Matt 13.53-55) and not Mark (6.1-3). There would be no reason for Luke to change Mark's "isn't this the carpenter" to "isn't this Joseph's son" without the intermediary -- i.e. Matthew's -- "isn't this the carpenter's son?".

Another was the removal of the character Bartimaeus in Luke. If Luke had been following Mark at Mk 10.46, then he should have included Bart's name as well. But he makes Bart's character anonymous just like Matthew does (Matt 20.30 // Luke 18.35). We know why Matt makes him anonymous, but why would Luke do it?

Another argument against Q is brought up by Mark Goodacre in his book The Case Against Q. We know that Matt used Mark due to editorial fatigue: one example is that Matt corrects Mark's use of "king" for Herod; the actual title was tetrarch (Mk 6.14 vs Mt 14.1). But due to editorial fatigue Matt lapses back to following Mark in the same pericope (Mk 6.26 // Mt 14.9) and "reverts" back to calling Herod a king.

The same type of editorial fatigue can also be seen in Luke's following of Matt. Luke usually has a 10-1 ratio in his parables/miracle stories (ten lepers, one thankful [Lk 17.11-19]; ten coins, one lost [15.8-10]). In the parable of the ten minas, Luke starts out with ten (Matt has three; cf Mt 25.14-30) but only recounts three servants by the parable's end, just like in Matt. And Luke seems to follow Matt's conclusion when he recounts giving the last mina to "the one who had ten". In Matt it makes sense that there was one who had ten since he was given five at the beginning and doubled it. But in Luke, the one who had ten actually ends up with eleven (he starts out with one and adds ten more). So either Luke forgot how to add, or he is following Matt.

One of the big points that Goodacre makes against Q in the last chapter of his book is that it is a hypothetical document with no other exemplar. While we do have another list of sayings sort of document like the gospel of Thomas, Q actually has a narrative structure unlike Thomas. So again, Q is a hypothetical document that has no equal in any other early Christian literature. A list of sayings, but with a narrative structure: it begins with preaching in the wilderness by John (Q 3.2-7), to Jesus' implied baptism (Q 3.16-22), then being tempted by Satan (Q 4.1-13). Later on in Q, Jesus is approached by messengers from JtB (Q 7.18-35) which follows the same narrative structure as the gospels. It then refers back to JtB's prediction of the coming one mentioned earlier in Q.

Thomas has no logical progression like that and doesn't follow any narrative gospel that we know about. It looks to me, according to Goodacre's argument, that Q is also a narrative gospel (if indeed Q existed) that we just have fragments of and not a bare list of sayings like Thomas.

For me, this puts the prior for the existence of Q at a low probability. I would like to do some Bayesian analysis to see whether Q exists or not, but I'll probably save that for later as it would probably get really involved.

The Roots Of Morality

2011-11-09T21:35:00.002-05:00

Bayes Theorem and the Monty Hall Problem

2011-11-08T20:02:00.002-05:00

To learn Bayes Theorem, I am attempting to apply it to a probability problem that I "intuitively" "learned" the correct answer to: the Monty Hall problem.

The Monty Hall problem is basically choosing between three possible doors. One has a prize, and the other two doors have a goat. You can choose a door but before opening the door, the announcer says he will open a door that has a goat behind it. After opening one of the goat-doors, the announcer asks you whether you want to keep your door choice or choose the remaining door.

The way I learned it, you initially have a 1/3 chance of opening the correct door. Whatever door you choose, it will retain its 1/3 attribute. Once the announcer opens one of the doors, that door is taken out of the probability (its probability is effectively 1 at this point and is no longer uncertain). Because you chose the door at first when it was only 1/3 probability, it retains that 1/3 probability while the remaining unchosen door bumps up to 2/3 in order to make everything equal.

I was taught the math behind it in one of my undergrad compsci classes, but I forgot the process and simply invented a heuristic for remembering the correct answer. But I believe Bayes Theorem might help me remember the process.

Again, the simple form of Bayes Theorem is this: P(H | E) = P(E | H) * P(H) / P(E). The prior probability, P(H), of picking the correct door is .33. Our evidence is when the announcer opens the door... so what is the probability of the announcer picking a goat door? What is the probability of the announcer picking the goat door given that you picked the correct door? The announcer will pick a goat-door no matter what your selection is. Again, think about this wording: The announcer will pick a goat-door no matter what your selection is.

Isn't that the definition of independence? Some hypothesis that is believed in no matter the evidence? This means that both P(E | H) [the probability of the announcer picking a goat door given that you picked the correct door] and P(E) [the probability of the announcer picking a goat door] are equivalent. That is, the announcer will pick a goat-door no matter what your actual selection is. And as I described two posts ago, when P(E | H) and P(E) are equivalent, this means that E exists independently of H. Also, the likelihood ratio is 0 decibles - it doesn't scream in one direction or the other, it's just dead silence.

So when E is independent of H, P(H | E) = P(H). So if P(H) is .33, then P(H | E) is also .33. But here's a concept that I haven't talked about, but is pretty obvious. P(H) + P(~H) has to equal 1.00. So this means that P(~H) is .66. It was .66 before the announcer picked the goat door, and because of independence, it is still .66. It's just that now the .66 applies to one door instead of being spread across two doors.

So when faced with the Monty Hall problem, Bayes Theorem says that you should bet 66 cents out of a dollar on the non-selected door having the prize.

Why Does God Have Emotions?

2011-11-07T09:26:00.001-05:00

Have you ever thought about this? Why does god have emotions? Why would a god have emotions? Almost every single instance of beings with emotions that we know about are sexually reproducing animals. Among these sexually reproducing animals, generally emotions are the means for successfully reproducing. Base emotions, like those in reptiles, are a means to not end up immediately dead: Fight or flight responses (anger, fear), hunger, sexual aggression, pain, pleasure. Anger, for example, isn't apart of a reptile's emotional repetoir because it's cool or base; it's there because without it, reptiles would not have had the motivation to evade death and thus would not have passed on their genes. Succinctly: a reptile that didn't get angry is a reptile that didn't live to pass on it's non-anger genes. A reptile that didn't find some other stimulation pleasing (like food or sex) would be a reptile that did not pass on its non-preferences for pleasing things (food, sex).

More complex, wider ranges of emotions are found in social species. That is, social animals need more complex emotions to navigate complex social situations... in order to reproduce successfully and/or to ensure that their progeny live to reproductive age (i.e. the love a grandmother has for her grandchildren ensures that she'll want to take care of her grandkids. Her genes, those in her grandkid, will live on to reproductive age with her support). Asexually reproducing animals generally do not have emotions (bacteria, etc).

Why does the Christian god have emotions? A god that loves, is pleased by things, or gets angry makes as much sense as a god with a penis.

I'm trying to think like a Christian apologist at this point, but I'm coming up with a serious blank for good rejoinders. God has emotions so that he can have relationships with us smacks of circular reasoning; it assumes what it is trying to prove. Yet it still doesn't answer the question. In the trillions of years before god thought to create humans, why would he have emotions during that infinite amount of time before time? Who is he interacting with? What goals does he need motivation to accomplish? What selection pressure was there on god to have these emotions (anger, love); would god not pass on his genes if he were emotionless? Again, god's emotions would be as supererogatory as god's penis. Maybe another answer would be that god just has emotions because that's what gods have. Again, this objection could still be used for god's penis: Gods have penises just because that's what gods have.

Moreover, emotions allow us to be manipulated by others for their (more than likely, reproductive) benefit. A god with emotions is a god that can be manipulated. Think about this: When you make god angry, you are controlling god! When you make god love you, you are controlling god! Surely, a god that can be controlled is not a god that anyone believes in. If a god with emotions exist, we most certainly would want to manipulate it for what's ultimately our reproductive benefit. What benefit does god get by emotionally manipulating us? Again, god's emotions at this juncture are unnecessary; what possible benefit could god get from us?

Every single emotion we feel has a physiological effect. The entire purpose of "anger" is to increase our heartrate, adrenaline, etc. This physiological response prepares us to fend off a threat. As a matter of fact, there can be no "anger" if these physiological indicators are not present. The entire purpose of love is to release "good feeling" chemicals that promote bonding like dopamine and oxytocin; we then subconciously associate this pleasant physiological response to the object of our love and a sociological bond forms. There's no hard and fast line demarcating the physical and the emotional. The two are one and the same. God has no physical body that could produce these emotions (i.e. where is god's oxytocin receptor so that he can feel the same amount of love that a woman has with her child, or when couples cuddle?), so how in the world would god even "feel" these emotions in the first place?

Now, I can't claim that I came up with this question myself. I got it from reading The End of Christianity; specifically chapter 6 "God's Emotions: Why The Biblical God Is Hopelessly Human". I've read a lot of arguments both for and against the existence of god, yet this seems to be the most obvious argument against the existence of a personal god. Take a look at this paragraph from page 163:

Cognition without emotion doesn't get us very far. Damage to emotion centers in the brain can mean that even intelligent people can't learn from their mistakes [me: why does god need to learn?], and they make harmful social and fiscal decisions. In his book Descartes' Error, neurologist Antonio Damasio describes one patient who can gather and analyze information almost endlessly without it leading to a preference. For a decision to be made, all of that reason and information needs to create valence, a positive feeling that privileges one option over others that then directs action.

I'm actually sort of ashamed I hadn't thought of it myself, since intuitively a personal god made no sense to me. So for a long time I considered myself a pantheist.

The conclusion is simple. A god with emotions is the most egregious anthropomorphism of god that humans have come up with. A much more obvious anthropomorphism than a god with a penis; it could be argued that all other anthropomorphisms logically follow from this first one. But what happens when you get rid of god's emotions? You're left with a sort of alien, unrelatable god; a god that is of no use to the average Christian. So if a god were to be invented, it would have to have emotions; no one would invent a god that had no emotions.

The Likelihood Ratio

2011-11-04T10:30:00.001-04:00

In a previous post I explained what it means when we say some fact or claim "E" is evidence for some hypothesis "H". That is, P(H|E) > P(H), or, the probability of some hypothesis H given some evidence E is greater than the probability of some hypothesis H. If P(H|E) = P(H) then E cannot be used as evidence for H; when this happens, by definition, E exist independently of H. This is the failure of probability that most religious people unsuspectingly apply when appealing to evidence for their god (this is different than P(H|E) < P(H) since this means that E is evidence against H but is not independent of H).

The simpler form of Bayes Theorem is P(H|E) = P(H)*P(E|H) / P(E). Looking at this equation, if P(H|E) = P(H), then this necessitates that P(E|H) = P(E). That's because if we have some equation that is 10 = 10 * x / y, the two unknown terms together must equal 1. Invariably, this means that the two unknown terms are also equal. Reciprocally, if P(E|H) = P(E) then this means that P(H|E) = P(H) and again, E is independent of H. This means that, at a glance, if P(E|H) / P(E) > 1, then it means that this is evidence in favor of H. If P(E|H) / P(E) is less than 1, then this means that some alternative hypothesis accounts for the evidence better than H.

Here we would have to use Bayes with two or more hypotheses (the longer form I've been using throughout all of the previous posts); if there are two hypotheses it should be that P(E|H) > P(E|~H) if E indeed is evidence for H. In other words, that the evidence is more likely under the hypothesis than under the alternative. Figuring that out is the essense of Bayes' Theorem. This weighing of the evidence is sometimes expressed by the Likelihood Ratio P(E|H) / P(E|~H).

In Bayes' Theorem, the Likelihood Ratio is how likely your hypothesis is in relation to all other hypotheses posited, and also shows how strongly the evidence favors, or disfavors, your hypothesis. This is simply dividing P(E|H) by P(E|~H). Let's say we're presented with the following scenario:

Two people have left traces of their own blood at the scene of a crime. A suspect, Oliver, is tested and found to have type O blood. The blood groups of the two traces are found to be of type O (a common type in the local population, having frequency 60%) and of type AB (a rare type, with frequency 1%). Do these data (the blood types found at the scene) give evidence in favour of the proposition that Oliver was one of the two people whose blood was found at the scene?

So in this scenario, if Oliver accounts for the O type blood, then one unknown person accounts for the the AB. This gives us the P(E|H) = 1% or 0.01. You may say, at this point, that it fits the hypothesis of Oliver being there, since if Oliver was there, and he left blood, then at least one of the samples of blood would be type O.

On the other hand, if Oliver is not guilty, ~H, then this gives us P(E|~H). Or that two unknown people left blood at the scene. What is the probability of finding the evidence at hand if Oliver is not guilty? This means we have two people at random who at each random selection has to account for either the 1% or the 60%. This becomes 2 * 0.01 * .6, which is 1.2% or 0.012.

What happens when we find out the Likelihood ratio? This is 0.01 / 0.012, which equals ~0.8334. What does this mean?

K	dB	bits	Strength of evidence
< 1:1	< 0		Negative (supports ~H)
1:1 to 3:1	0 to 5	0 to 1.6	Barely worth mentioning
3:1 to 10:1	5 to 10	1.6 to 3.3	Substantial
10:1 to 30:1	10 to 15	3.3 to 5.0	Strong
30:1 to 100:1	15 to 20	5.0 to 6.6	Very strong
>100:1	>20	>6.6	Decisive

As you can see from this chart, a Likelihood Ratio that is lower than 1 means that it slightly supports the hypothesis that Oliver is not guilty! Or in other words, there's a higher probability of finding the evidence that we have if Oliver were indeed not at the scene of the crime and two other random people committed the murder. Going back to the simpler form of Bayes Theorem, P(E|H) would be the 0.01 and that is denominated by P(E). P(E) in this case would be the probability of finding the evidence at hand period, which is 2 * 0.01 * .6, which is 1.2% or 0.012. Again, P(E|H) < P(E). So even though the evidence intuitively fits the hypothesis that Oliver is guilty, it is more likely, due to the math implicit in the evidence, that Oliver is not guilty.

So much for intuition.

But, what if, instead of Oliver having type O blood, Oliver had type AB blood? The likelihood ratio then becomes .6 / 0.012, which equals 50. As you can see from the Wikipedia chart, this is highly decisive evidence that Oliver is guilty. If we think about it, say there are only 1000 people in the town. This means that there are 600 people with type O and 10 people with type AB. If Oliver has type O, this means that there are 599 other people that the prosecution has to eliminate to claim that Oliver was at the scene. A lot more legwork. We would actually have better luck grabbing two people at random and claiming they were at the scene. But if Oliver has type AB, then there are only 9 other people that the prosecution has to eliminate to put Oliver at the scene. A significantly higher probability that Oliver was there.

We might have control over the numerator, but the denominator in the Likelihood Ratio -- the probability of seeing the evidence if our hypothesis is false (or in the case of the simpler Bayes Theorem, the probability of the evidence as it is given) -- is out of our control; and this is the true deciding factor.

In my previous post on the likelihood of Romans 1.2-6 being an interpolation, all of the Likelihood Ratios are "barely worth mentioning". Indeed, many scholars do in fact claim that those issues I presented are barely worth a mention. Yet, as can be seen, the accumulation of multiple slices of evidence that are barely worth mentioning accrete to a total hypothesis that is worth mentioning. And like I wrote in that previous post on Romans 1.2-6, Creationists might dismiss all of the evidence for evolution as "barely worth mentioning", but their accumulation and conscilience is the true strength of the theory of evolution.

A lot like Voltron.

Misuse of the Likelihood Ratio

In a recent debate between William Lane Craig and Lawrence Krauss, Craig seems to commit the Prosecutor's Fallacy. He makes the argument that the existence of contingent beings is evidence for the existence of a necessary being, thus god. He even explains this in Bayesian terms: the probability of the existence of contingent beings is higher given the existence of god. That is P(E | G) > P(E). Even better, at the beginning of the debate he explains the meaning of evidence much in the same way I described it above.

But wait a minute. What is P(E), the Total Probability? Or what is P(E | ~G)? While P(E | G) might be .99, who is to say that P(E) isn't also .99? As I wrote above, if this was the case then P(E | G) = P(E). This means that G is independent of E; that is, in Craig's formulation of probability theory, god exists independently of the existence of contingent beings. Remember, the denominator should ideally not be in our control. If it is, then we can win any debate we want by manipulating the numbers in our favor. Since Craig does not have the denominator, he seems to have confused P(E | G) [the probability of the existence of contingent beings given the existence of a necessary god] with P(G | E) [the probability of a necessary god given the existence of contingent beings], what he was initially trying to argue.

Craig seems to have misused the Likelihood Ratio, and misunderstood Bayes Theorem (or at least used it incompletely); the Likelihood Ratio is to be evaluated using the conditional probabilities, not the posterior.

Look at it this way. What is the probability of winning the lottery, P(E)? Probably something ridiculous like 1 out of a million (.0000001). What is the probability of winning the lottery given that a person cheats, P(E | H)? Probabily something much higher, maybe .99. Does this mean that the person cheated, i.e. P(H | E) is high? No. Even though the Likelihood Ratio is a whopping 990,000 decibles we have no idea what P(H) is. To conclude that the person cheated given a theoretically high Likelihood Ratio is an incomplete use of Bayes Theorem. It is actually an example of the Prosecutor's Fallacy: confusing P(E | H) with P(H | E). Your end goal is to find the posterior probability of your hypothesis given the evidence, not to find the posterior probability of the evidence assuming your hypothesis is true (a species of begging the question).

So let's run with these lottery numbers. Our Likelihood Ratio is 990,000 decibles. What if our prior probability for having cheated is extremely unlikely, like say .000001 (i.e. how many people cheat the lottery)? This gives us a posterior probability of .49, which is barely below random chance. The real prior is probably a lot lower than .000001 since I don't know how many people have cheated to win the lottery.

All the Likelihood Ratio does is show you how strong the evidence weighs in favor of your hypothesis. If your initial hypothesis itself is highly unlikely, a high Likelihood Ratio doesn't help.

William Lane Craig and the Immorality of Apostasy

2011-11-01T16:25:00.000-04:00

This is a quote that Craig has posted on his webite Reasonable Faith. In response to a Christian struggling with doubt, he writes:

…..Be on guard for Satan's deceptions. Never lose sight of the fact that you are involved in a spiritual warfare and that there is an enemy of your soul who hates you intensely, whose goal is your destruction, and who will stop at nothing to destroy you. Which leads me to ask: why are you reading those infidel websites anyway, when you know how destructive they are to your faith? These sites are literally pornographic (evil writing) and so ought in general to be shunned. Sure, somebody has to read them and refute them; but why does it have to be you? Let somebody else, who can handle it, do it. Remember: Doubt is not just a matter of academic debate or disinterested intellectual discussion; it involves a battle for your very soul, and if Satan can use doubt to immobilize you or destroy you, then he will.
I firmly believe, and I think the Bizarro-testimonies of those who have lost their faith and apostatized bears out, that moral and spiritual lapses are the principal cause for failure to persevere rather than intellectual doubts. But intellectual doubts become a convenient and self-flattering excuse for spiritual failure because we thereby portray ourselves as such intelligent persons rather than as moral and spiritual failures. I think that the key to victorious Christian living is not to have all your questions answered — which is probably impossible in a finite lifetime — but to learn to live successfully with unanswered questions. The key is to prevent unanswered questions from becoming destructive doubts. I believe that can be done by keeping in mind the proper ground of our knowledge of Christianity's truth and by cultivating the ministry of the Holy Spirit in our lives….

The first thing I take issue with is his abuse of the etymology of the word "pornography". It doesn't "literally" mean evil writings, the Greek word πορνεια::porneia is specifically used in a sexual context. It would be closer to sexual immorality (or even "sexual evil") not just plain old evil. Evil writings would be something like cacography. Take a look at 1 Corinthians 5.1:

It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and a kind [of sexual immorality] that does not occur even among pagans

Ὅλως ἀκούεται ἐν ὑμῖν πορνεία, καὶ τοιαύτη πορνεία ἥτις οὐδὲ ἐν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν

Anyway, now that I've gotten my superficial pedantry out of the way, I want to address the meat of Craig's response. I personally have a soft spot for II (Internet Infidels) because their writings and (now defunct) message board educated me a lot in the ways of scholarly Christianity. I can't claim (or blame, as Craig intimates) II led to my deconversion because I was already a non-Christian when I started reading their material sometime around 2002. What I take offense at is Craig's implication that the intellect has nothing to do with the moral.

On the contrary to Craig's argument here, I don't think that II is immoral. I personally think that Christian faith itself is immoral (note: I'm not saying that Christians as people are immoral). I went over my reasons in a somewhat recent post here. All of my reasons are intellectual reasons; non-intellectual morality leads to certain gut level reactions that produce "moral reasoning" like xenophobia, homophobia, racism, sexism, and other formerly moral dictates that we as a society have moved beyond. What really irks me about this is that Craig is equivocating apostasy with immorality. Sure, this makes sense in a Christian worldview, but not in the modern world. A modern world where we rightfully balk at Muslim countries who say that execution for apostasy is just. It wouldn't surprise me if Craig thought that apostates should be killed, since he already defends genocide. Though, I do guess it follows logically that if you are to burn in hell for all eternity for not believing in Christ, and only immoral people are sent to hell, then apostates most certainly would be "immoral".

Divine Command Theory really is abjectly immoral.

More contrary to Craig. Doubt, I think, is a good thing. But again, this depends on the type of doubt. As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of doubt. One is emotional, and the other is intellectual. Emotional doubt is nothing more than fear, and from what it looks like Craig is writing, he advocates fear. Fear in any sort of knowledge that might make one lose faith. Fear of the intellect; fear of knowledge; fear of curiosity; fear of even life itself. This sort of fear that Craig advocates will surely lead any Christian under his tutelage to fear the world at large (that seems to be his goal, with all that talk about Satan at the beginning of that quote). I do not condone that type of doubt, since it is overall a negative emotion; it's the sort of doubt you have when you think your wife may be unfaithful to you.

However, the other kind of doubt I recommend highly. This second type of doubt is analogous to curiosity. If a Christian is curious about their faith sometimes (my substitue to explain that they're using the first kind of doubt when they say that they 'doubt their faith sometimes'), then this means that they are an unthinking Christian. Why would you only be curious about Christianity "sometimes"? Maybe that's the type of Christianity that Craig is promulgating, especially in the quoted section above? Who knows; I haven't read that much of Craig's writings to offer a definitive conclusion on that part.

A secondary point is an ironic charge that Craig gives to the person that he's writing to: "Sure, somebody has to read them and refute them; but why does it have to be you? Let somebody else, who can handle it, do it". Why is this ironic? Because Craig is a Protestant. One of the main gripes that the original Protestants had about their Catholic leadership was exactly this reasoning. Why do the lay people have to rely on Catholic leadership to interperet the Bible? The entire point of Protestantism was to remove this power from the Catholic church and give it to the common person (mainly done by translating the now unintelligible Latin into common languages). Craig is implying the same appeal to consequences that Catholics gave to Protestants: you can't handle doing things by yourself so let someone else -- who can actually handle it -- do it for you. Your very salvation is at stake! Let your spiritual adults handle this for you.

History tells me that Craig's approach won't work. If it did, then Craig himself would still be a Catholic.

(H/t Bruce of Fallen From Grace)

Existential Angst

2011-10-30T23:41:00.001-04:00

I read this post a while ago, but I read it again and something jumped out at me. It was his comment about how according to theists, atheist have no purpose in life. Of course he counters it by saying that atheists feel the same about the "big questions" that everyone else does:

Finally, Gutting is correct that many people need convincing that atheists can have fulfilling lives… but then treats that like it should be a grand philosophical project, which is bizarre. A more natural approach is to find some atheists who can say, "Hey! Over here! I have a fulfilling life!" Luke Muehlhauser is excellent on this:

When I was a Christian, I couldn't imagine what it would feel like be an atheist. From what my parents and pastors told me, I imagined it would feel like an aching hole in my stomach, a purposeless sadness in my chest, and a taste of cardboard in my mouth. Of course, I was asking the wrong people. I should have asked some atheists what it felt like.

The truth is that atheists feel pretty much the same as everybody else. We feel happy and sad, excited and bored, nervous and peaceful, ashamed and proud, lonely and connected, horny and disgusted, transcendent and confused and small and breathless.

This reminds me of something I wrote in a journal about four years ago. I titled it "existential angst". That musing of mine I can honestly say was a precursor to my more recent post God Has No Reason For His Existence. Here it is in total, with my profound profanity and all (redacted to hide personal names though):

So I've been thinking... about my thinking. Meta-thinking, to coin a neologism. My thinking, most of which before I started this journal, the thinking that kept (and keeps) me up at night besides my daily troubles are thoughts about existence. Excogitating just why... the... FUCK... there is something rather than nothing.

Not believing in god, existence is simply an axiom. It is THE fundamental axiom. And if I believed in a god, the question of existence, and therefore that fundamental axiom, would simply be pushed back one peg. In other words, all of this existential pondering equally applies to a theistic or atheistic universe. Even though existence is axiomatic (whether it's the universe's or god's), axioms should still be questioned... but I'm starting to think that the questioning of some axioms is an exercise in insanity. For instance, what happens when you start to question why 1 + 1 = 2? There are some fundamental axioms that everyone accepts when they read that.
"Of course 1 with another 1 will give you 2. What the fuck are you on about?!" Well what do you mean by "1"? What do you mean by "+"? What do you mean by "="? What do you mean by "2"? We assume that we're talking about first grade math, and not binary... so therefore, 1 + 1 = 2 would be wrong in a binary paradigm. 1 + 1 in binary is 10. What about if it were in a programing language? While the answer is the same, the methodology arrived at is different. 1 + 1 = 2 basically says that "1 + 1 contains 2".
In the military, my first deeply existential excogitational exegesis [ed. this isn't supposed to make sense, 'tis just alliteration for alliteration's sake] was "Who made it law that one plus one equals two?" It's a nonsense question, but basically the answer to that question is the answer to whether the universe was created or not. I mulled over that for a while before finally solidifying my "atheism" (Einsteinian pantheism). But what about the rest of it? What about what happened after 10^-43 seconds after the Big Bang? The universe is fucking HUGE. What the fuck; driving from here to Virginia Beach seems like a long time when I'm speeding at like 80 mph, but if it were possible for me to travel at the speed of light (3 * 10⁸ meters / sec, or 186,000 miles per second) it would take me:

8 minutes to get to the sun
4 years to get to the nearest star
A couple million years to get to the other side of the galaxy (did you know that "gala" is greek for milk?)
A couple BILLION years to go from one part of the visible universe to the other.

Imagine how long it would take me to drive to the sun only going a measly 80 mph. In other words, like I said before, the universe is goddamn HUGE.

What is all of this space for? It ain't for life, because 99.9% of the universe is hostile to life. There's a whole sea of quantum potentiality in space, none of it affords the possibility of life any time soon. So we're in this sandbox, that stretches for miles and miles as far as the eye can see, and it's only us in it. What the fuck, man. Running with the "sand" analogy, if the Earth were a GRAIN of sand - just ONE GRAIN of sand - the Solar System would be like the Pacific ocean.
Imagine that.
And what about "life" anyway? What's the point? Even if god exists, Christianity is true and Jesus and Satan are having a poker match over our souls... so what? Still - what's the point? We play the holier-enough game to get into heaven and spend trillions^trillions of years singing kumbaya and [...]. What was the point of it all? Like I said before, putting a "god" in the equation does nothing for the answer - it only pushes the question back further.
Why do we live? We eat, sleep, fuck, and die. This has been getting to me more and more as "globalization" keeps happening. You see more stories of people getting fucked over and/or dying at an alarmingly random rate. I get older and my inexorable mortality comes into my mind more and more. I could finish writing this post and then a meteor hits me in the head as I leave my house to go out drinking and die. What will the purpose of my life have been? What, when I'm a grain of sand on a grain of sand? WTF mate.
So that's my problem. I understand the vastness of the universe and my place in it. "Insignificant, am I?" to quote Nevermore. This is existential angst, and not some teenage angst about [...]. I not only see the forest instead of the trees, I see the surrounding areas and cities, the construction trucks coming to plow down the forest because some rich tycoon overseas wants his little piece of the pie to inflate his ego. He's inflating his ego and fattening up his wallet so that he'll have enough money to run for the most powerful position in the world to be able to wage his own personal war on some other country that has what he wants. But wouldn't it be nice to just ignore all that for a second, look at the forest for what it is - a whole bunch of trees - select an awesome tree like "Hey, this tree is fucking awesome, I'm gonna take a nap under it" and just chill for a spill?
That's why, I think, I occupy myself with other things. Dancing. Drinking. Playing guitar. Writing music. Listening to music. Working out. [...]. Randomly searching the internet for more information on just whateverthefuck I happen to land on. These little things don't matter in the grand scheme of the universe, just like that tree doesn't matter at all to something like the War on Terror, or the fact that in 5 billion years the sun is gonna run out of its hydrogen fuel and swell up like a big fat pimple on prom night, searing away the Earth's atmosphere destroying all life on the planet... but... where was I?
Oh yeah, the little things in life. It's the little things in life that we have to carry on about. Kinda like the Principle of Mathematical Induction. A whole bunch of little things can take on (maybe) the one big thing. Make it all bearable. An axiom of mine - whenever I get asked "what's the purpose of life" the answer has always been simple. The purpose of life is to live. It's an axiom, just like existence is an axiom. 1 + 1 = 2 isn't itself an axiom, but it's about as basic a mathematical axiom as it gets. Don't let Godel hear about that, though.
The purpose of life is to live. It's both insanely profound and incredibly simplistic, while at the same time answering nothing. Tautological. "Existence Precedes Essense" to quote some motherfuckers older than me. But... critical thinking, folks - what does it mean to live, in that axiom? The fuck do I know - that's up to you. It's like life is a 10 billion dollar check you find on the street made out to you personally (nevermind that this analogy about life presupposes that you live... but whatever). What do you do with your 10 billion dollars?
I dunno, but fuck it - I'm gonna go take a nap under that tree. In other words, it's 9 pm, Thursday, and I'm gonna go out drinking and dancing... maybe see [S].

It's probably not the answer tha atheists look for when trying to rebut the Christian claim of feeling meaninglessness in an atheistic worldview, but here it is. Of course, I think Christians also cleave to a meaningless existence when the entire purpose of their lives seems to be following a god who cannot have any meaning for its existence, as I argue in that previous post. Like I said, we're in the same boat. So we should probably choose the life and worldview that will give us the most joy and fulfillment in this life while minimizing as many empty promises as possible.

The Hyperbolic, Yet Parabolic, History of the Diabolic

2011-10-28T17:14:00.001-04:00

As you might have been able to tell from the title of this post (and the title of my blog), "dia" in Greek is a prefix, just like "para" and "hyper". This means that the root word "-bolic" must mean the same thing. Our basic English has some examples that show us what the prefixes "hyper" and "para" mean (like paranormal contrasted with the normal, or a hypothesis contrasted with a thesis; paralegal, parallel, paramilitary, paraphyly; hypertention, hypergamy, hyperinflation, hypergyny).

If you happened to be a music major or have studied music theory a bit, you might be familiar with the term diatonic. In music theory, there is something called a diatonic scale. This comes from the Greek word διατονικός::diatonikos meaning [passing] through tones. As such, "dia" means "through" (in this instance). Then again, if you knew music theory you would already know that diapente means "through five".

Now that we know what "dia" means, what does "-bolic" derive from? The word "-βολος" is the noun form of the Greek verb βαλλω::ballo which means to throw. For example, Jesus literally "throws out" demons when he exorcises them in the gospel narratives:

Matthew 12.27

και ει εγω εν βεελζεβουλ εκ βαλλω τα δαιμονια οι υιοι υμων εν τινι εκ βαλλουσιν δια τουτο αυτοι κριται εσονται υμων

And if I drive out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your people drive them out? So then, they will be your judges.

So hyperbolic could be superficially translated as "over-throw", parabolic to "throw-next-to" and diabolic to "throw-through". Now we arrive at a seeming connundrum: How did the modern usage of "diabolic" come from its original Greek meaning of "throw-through"? Let's look at some examples of "throw-through" or "diabolic" being used in antiquity:

Plato, Seventh Epistle:

On my arrival -- I must not be tedious -- I found Dionysius's kingdom all full of civil strife and of slanderous stories brought to the court concerning Dion

ἐλθὼν δέ -- οὐ γὰρ δεῖ μηκύνειν -- ηὗρον στάσεως τὰ περὶ Διονύσιον μεστὰ σύμπαντα καὶ διαβολῶν πρὸς τὴν τυραννίδα Δίωνος πέρι:

Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 17.146: But Herod now fell into a distemper, and made his will, and bequeathed his kingdom to [Antipas], his youngest son; and this out of that hatred to Archclaus and Philip, which the calumnies of Antipater (των Αντιπατρου διαβολων:: ton Antipatrou diabolon) had raised against them.

Plutarch, Caius Marcius Coriolanus 16: For they surely will not say that they are getting these as a grateful return for the military services which they omitted, and the secessions by which they renounced their country, and the calumnies (των διαβολων) against the senate which they have countenanced

So if διάβoλος means "throw-through", how did it come to mean lies or slander? That's actually pretty easy if we think of certain turns of phrases in modern English. We can talk about hurling accusations against someone; this concept of hurling accusations has a long history and goes back at least to the time of Plato, as shown above. It comes from ancient courtroom dramas where the prosecution would "throw accusations through" the courtroom.

So how did it become that a word that simply meant lies or slander transformed into the devil? It just so happens that the Hebrew word "satan" means the same thing that the Greek word "diabol[os]" means. Look at a sort of courtroom setup in Zechariah 3.1:

English: And he showed me Jesus the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him

Greek: και εδειξεν μοι ιησουν τον ιερεα τον μεγαν εστωτα προ προσωπου αγγελου κυριου και ο διαβολος ειστηκει εκ δεξιων αυτου του αντικεισθαι αυτω

Hebrew: וַיַּרְאֵנִי, אֶת-יְהוֹשֻׁעַ הַכֹּהֵן הַגָּדוֹל, עֹמֵד, לִפְנֵי מַלְאַךְ יְהוָה; וְהַשָּׂטָן עֹמֵד עַל-יְמִינוֹ, לְשִׂטְנוֹ.

In this case, in Hebrew, we have both the personification "Satan" and the verb form "accuse him". There are earlier examples of the Hebrew "accuser". Look at Job 1.6:

English: Now it fell upon a day, that the sons of God came to present themselves before [the Lord] (YHWH), and [the] Satan came also among them.

Hebrew: וַיְהִי הַיּוֹם--וַיָּבֹאוּ בְּנֵי הָאֱלֹהִים, לְהִתְיַצֵּב עַל (יְהוָה); וַיָּבוֹא גַם הַשָּׂטָן, בְּתוֹכָם.

Greek: και ως εγενετο η ημερα αυτη και ιδου ηλθον οι αγγελοι* του θεου παραστηναι ενωπιον [του κυριου] και ο διαβολος ηλθεν μετ' αυτων

As can be seen reading Job, "the accuser" had a responsibility in YHWH's service: to test people to see how worthy they are. As time progressed and Judaism comes into more influence from the Greeks, this accusing angel morphs into gods enemy. This can be seen in the NT, where the authors talk about Satan but spelling it Σατανας::Satanas in Greek; changing the Hebrew word into a Greek proper name. However, the Greek form of diabolos was still in common use among the Greeks. This word was ported over into Latin by way of Jerome's Latin Vulgate, where he translated "sons of belial" (many think this means lawless men or uncircumcised men; the LXX translates sons of belial to υιοι παρανόμων::huioi paranomon, literally sons of 'those besides the law') to "filiis diaboli".

------------------

*While the English and Hebrew say "sons of god" (b'nei elohim), the Greek says "angels/messengers of god".

Dating The Gospel of Mark

2011-10-25T10:52:00.001-04:00

This blog post goes over the myriad of interpretations of the internal evidence for dating when the gospel of Mark was written. I am of course partial to Mark being written in Rome sometime after 70 CE. Here is a snippet:

Joel Marcus (Sitz Im Leben), in contrast to Hengel's claim that Mark had no actual familiarity with what transpired during the Jewish War but heard the news from afar (i.e. Rome), argues Mark was written from one of the Transjodan Hellenistic cities attacked at the beginning of the War (461-62). Mark protests that the temple had become the house of revolutionary bandits (lēstēs) (cf. Josephus J.W. 4.3.7-8; 5.1.2; for Zealots used for revolutionaries in general see J.W. 2.17.9; 4.9.10) had taken over the temple under Elezar son of Simon. This explains the abomination as Eleazar's occupation of the temple in 67-68 CE, Mark's openess to Gentiles and protest in the Court of Gentiles in the Temple (the Zealots wanted to cleanse it of foreign influence), the persecutions as the Zealots held mock trials, and Mark's triumphal entry as the anti-type of the messianic entry of Simon bar Giora in April-May 69 (448-59). Mark is writing in hindsight and sees the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE as punishment for closing the door on Gentiles and turning the place into the seat of revolutionary violence (461-62).

Like I said, this is only a snippet. But this one paragraph seems close enough to my interpretation. But do go read the whole thing for your own edification!

The Existence of the Supernatural

2011-10-19T23:01:00.001-04:00

I do not believe in the existence of the supernatural. Of course, I can't say with 100% certainty that the supernatural doesn't exist, but there is a high probability that the supernatural doesn't exist. So while I don't quite claim to be a philosophical or ontological naturalist, I think I might best fall under the category of epistemic naturalist. Meaning, that I think the only things we can know to a reasonable degree are things that exist naturally. This would be a step up from methodological naturalism, which is the process for doing science, yet a step below full blown ontological naturalism.

I'm also trying to think more like a Bayesian, so, again, because I talk about the probability of the supernatural, this is a claim about epistemic certainty and not ontological certainty (if that even makes sense).

My biggest beef with the supernatural is that appealing to it never helps anyone understand any phenomenon any better than they did before positing the supernatural. Appealing to the supernatural is a horrible explanation for just about anything you can imagine.

What Makes A Good Explanation?

Have you ever sat down and tried to come up with what exactly constitutes a good explanation for something? For example from my own line of work in software engineering: Let's say some user contacts me and claims that there is a problem with the software I'm in charge of. Surely, the "correct" answer for why there is a problem with the software is "there is something wrong with the code". But this is a superficial explanation. Again, even if it is the correct answer, it is still not a very good explanation of the problem.

So the first thing I do is try to reproduce the problem. So when explaining to my management what the cause of the problem is, it would be a pretty good start for explaining it if I can reproduce the problem (and further ahead when I can test the solution).

Can supernatural explanations be repeated or reproduced? Or even tested? Of course not.

Next, when explaining to my management the solution, I should be able to explain the mechanism for what caused the problem. Again, superficially, the "mechanism" would be "there is something wrong with the code". But for it to be a good explanation, it should have a detailed description of what parts of code are interacting (or not interacting) with other parts of the code to cause the problem. So the good explanation would be something like "function getDLL() is calling the xyz.dll in Windows to do process abc yet this dll only exists in Windows Vista and not in Windows XP".

Can you do the same with supernatural explanations? Of course not.

A good explanation should also fit with our background knowledge. As programmers, we know that things can go kaput if some code you wrote can only function if the components of the operating system you're coding on are actually on the box it's running on. It's happened before, and chances are it can happen again. Do supernatural explanations fit our background knowledge? You might think "well yeah, because the vast majority of humanity has claimed interactions with the supernatural" but this doesn't count as "background knowledge". This would fit more under the rubric of old wives tales or traditions. No, actual knowledge in this case would be tried and true rigorous knowledge.

Due to entropy and other laws of thermodynamics, the existence of supernatural beings goes completely against our more rigorous background knowledge. For example, just sitting in your chair thinking and reading this blog post, you are using energy. Moreover, you are releasing the "waste" of used energy in the form of heat. Any living being that thinks or any object that moves around in any fashion - any being that uses energy - will emit some heat as the result of using energy. This means, that if supernatural beings are moving around and interacting with our world (using energy), we should see their heat signatures as they interact with our world. This does not happen, so there must be some sort of disconnect. As it stands now, supernatural beings break every law of thermodynamics. Which is especially pernicious since they are supposed to be beings of pure energy. We have no explanation for where they get their energy from and where their "unusable" energy is emitted to.

Basically, all supernatural beings as they are currently conceived are perpetual motion machines. Do perpetual motion machines fit with our background knowledge? Of course not.

Since supernatural beings, as they are currently described, are perpetual motion machines, you would have to posit some other hypothesis that accounts for them breaking all laws of thermodynamics. And this brings us to another hallmark of good (or very bad) explanations. Good explanations appeal to less amounts of untested hypotheses than bad explanations. So for my code troubleshooting example, if I posited some sort of wacky ghost-in-the-machine sort of problem for what's causing the software to malfunction, and then to support the ghost-in-the-machine I posited another hypothetical, this would be less likely to be true than not appealing to those hypothetical explanations altogether.

In order to believe that your supernatural encounter actually occured to the exception of any other explanation for the experience, there are a whole bunch of other assumptions that need to be true on order to validate the existence of the supernatural. Each one of these hypotheses has not been tested, so they remain hypothetical. Because of this, the more hypotheticals you use to undergrid your belief, the less likely it is that your initial belief is correct.

As an example, we can use a fair coin toss. What is the probability of getting a heads on the first flip of a coin? 50%. What about flipping two heads in a row? This then becomes 50% * 50% which is 25%. Three heads in a row? 50%*50%*50%, which is 12.5%. As you continue to add uncertainties to undergrid previous uncertainties, the less likely it is that your original hypothetical is true.

For the supernatural, you would have to posit some other mechanism or laws of physics to account for describing supernatural beings like perpetual motion machines. So, for supernatural explanations, we might start off fair with a probability of the existence of perpetual motions machines to be 50%, just like a fair coin. Again, to be fair, maybe this second hypothesis of other laws of physics has a 50% chance of being correct. This means that your initial supernatural explanation now has a 25% chance of being correct since both hypotheses have to be true. But then you have to explain why this second set of laws of physics don't interact with our own world to the exception of supernatural beings. Now we might stack another 50% likelihood to explain this one. Now your original contention about the supernatural is at 12.5%.

Of course, once you get more specific about your definition of the supernatural, adding more caveats, you keep stacking hypotheses. This subjects your initial explanation to the law of diminishing returns. Just three unfounded hypotheses - when each individually has a 50% chance of being correct - will make the original hypothesis with the original 50% chance of being correct now only have a 12.5% chance of being correct. This is because all three have to be correct in order for the original one to be correct. Much like flipping a coin three times in a row and getting heads depends on the first two flips being "true". The coin toss example brings us back to the testing criterion. Unless we can test some hypothesis, it can never go beyond its initial uncertainty. But we can test a coin flip.

So does appealing to the supernatural make less use of as of yet unconfirmed hypotheses? Nope.

There are more examples of what constitudes a good explanation for something. See Luke's post on Common Sense Atheism. I think that appealing to the supernatural fails all of the indicators listed on Luke's blog, and I'm pretty sure that there can be more criteria for what constitutes a good explanation for something. I do know one thing, though... if I explained things in my job the way that those who appeal to the supernatural do, I would quickly be out of one. This is why I cannot accept the existence of the supernatural; at least until supernatural explanations start fulfilling more of these criteria for what makes a good explanation.

There's No Evidence That The Garden of Eden Was Meant Literally

2011-10-12T15:15:00.001-04:00

Some liberal Christians continue to embarrass themselves by not knowing the history of their own scriptures, the mindset of its authors, or even the traditions of their forefathers. Similar to how fundamentalists think that the Bible dropped down from the sky completely intact without a history, some liberal Christians think that the Bible was composed and originally interpreted by peoples who had the same deal of skepticism that we have today in our modern world; an abject, unsophisticated anachronism. Even though they do it for other reasons, they too read their Bible without appreciating its history similar to their fundamentalist bretheren. Take this one nugget of myopia right here:

There’s no evidence that the Garden of Eden was always regarded as figurative? Really? Has Coyne read the fucking thing? I defy anyone with a brain (or who hasn’t had his brain turned off by fundamentalism) to think it’s meant literally. It’s obviously meant metaphorically. It screams parable.

Unfortunately, Andrew Sullian shamelessly displays his naked ignorance with these mental gymnastics (γυμνος::gymnos, where we get the word gymnastics, is Greek for naked). To think that the A&E tale was always regarded as figurative, we would have to assume that every single human that has read the TNK (OT) and NT -- even the ones who composed its books -- have had the same culture, epistemic priors, and life experiences that we currently have (especially a culture that has the same degree of skepticism that we currently have). This is demonstrably false; Paul's own letters attest to a belief in a heaven structure that has at least three tiers or levels that exist separately that can be traveled (2 Cor 12.1-4). Paul didn't qualify this statement with "either allegorically or physically I do not know", he qualified it with "in the body or out I do not know" (see also the Ascension of Isaiah).

So, this post will act as a compendium of all of the Christians who came before Mr. Sullivan who actually took the A&E tale literally (barring the obvious Luke 3.23-37).

Justin Martyr, writing c. 150 CE:

Dialog 19.

Justin: It is this about which we are at a loss, and with reason, because, while you endure such things, you do not observe all the other customs which we are now discussing.

This circumcision is not, however, necessary for all men, but for you alone, in order that, as I have already said, you may suffer these things which you now justly suffer. Nor do we receive that useless baptism of cisterns, for it has nothing to do with this baptism of life. Wherefore also God has announced that you have forsaken Him, the living fountain, and dug for yourselves broken cisterns which can hold no water. Even you, who are the circumcised according to the flesh, have need of our circumcision; but we, having the latter, do not require the former. For if it were necessary, as you suppose, God would not have made Adam uncircumcised; would not have had respect to the gifts of Abel when, being uncircumcised, he offered sacrifice and would not have been pleased with the uncircumcision of Enoch, who was not found, because God had translated him. Lot, being uncircumcised, was saved from Sodom, the angels themselves and the Lord sending him out. Noah was the beginning of our race; yet, uncircumcised, along with his children he went into the ark. Melchizedek, the priest of the Most High, was uncircumcised; to whom also Abraham the first who received circumcision after the flesh, gave tithes, and he blessed him: after whose order God declared, by the mouth of David, that He would establish the everlasting priest. Therefore to you alone this circumcision was necessary, in order that the people may be no people, and the nation no nation.

In other words, the god of the Jews made all of these people uncircumcised, yet they were righteous. People who were thought to have never existed would not be used as an argument against circumcision.

Ibid. 84.

Moreover, the prophecy, 'Behold, the virgin shall conceive, and bear a son,' was uttered respecting Him. For if He to whom Isaiah referred was not to be begotten of a virgin, of whom did the Holy Spirit declare, 'Behold, the Lord Himself shall give us a sign: behold, the virgin shall conceive, and bear a son?' For if He also were to be begotten of sexual intercourse, like all other first-born sons, why did God say that He would give a sign which is not common to all the first-born sons? But that which is truly a sign, and which was to be made trustworthy to mankind—namely, that the first-begotten of all creation should become incarnate by the Virgin's womb, and be a child—this he anticipated by the Spirit of prophecy, and predicted it, as I have repeated to you, in various ways; in order that, when the event should take place, it might be known as the operation of the power and will of the Maker of all things; just as Eve was made from one of Adam's ribs, and as all living beings were created in the beginning by the word of God.

Justin contrasts the virgin birth with the power that the god of the Jews had to create Eve from Adam's rib.

Ibid. 88.

Now, we know that he did not go to the river because He stood in need of baptism, or of the descent of the Spirit like a dove; even as He submitted to be born and to be crucified, not because He needed such things, but because of the human race, which from Adam had fallen under the power of death and the guile of the serpent, and each one of which had committed personal transgression. For God, wishing both angels and men, who were endowed with free-will, and at their own disposal, to do whatever He had strengthened each to do, made them so, that if they chose the things acceptable to Himself, He would keep them free from death and from punishment; but that if they did evil, He would punish each as He sees fit.

Ibid. 100.

[Jesus] said then that He was the Son of man, either because of His birth by the Virgin, who was, as I said, of the family of David and Jacob, and Isaac, and Abraham; or because Adam was the father both of Himself and of those who have been first enumerated from whom Mary derives her descent. For we know that the fathers of women are the fathers likewise of those children whom their daughters bear.

Again... there is no hint here that Justin viewed the A&E tale figuratively, at least, not any more or less figurative than Jesus being born and crucified.

Ibid. 103

For 'Sata' in the Jewish and Syrian tongue means apostate; and 'Nas' is the word from which he is called by interpretation the serpent, i.e., according to the interpretation of the Hebrew term, from both of which there arises the single word Satanas. For this devil, when [Jesus] went up from the river Jordan, at the time when the voice spoke to Him, 'You are my Son: this day have I begotten You,' is recorded in the memoirs of the apostles to have come to Him and tempted Him, even so far as to say to Him, 'Worship me;' and Christ answered him, 'Get behind me, Satan: you shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only shall you serve.' For as he had deceived Adam, so he hoped that he might contrive some mischief against Christ also.

A mistaken etymology that Justin uses to prove that the Greek word Satanas is actually a compound of the Hebrew words for apostate and serpent (which isn't true). Again, Justin doesn't see any difference between Satan attempting to deceive Jesus at Matt 4.9-10 and the serpent (i.e. Satan) deceiving Adam.

Ibid. 124.

...I said, You are gods, and are all children of the Most High. But you die like men, and fall like one of the princes. Arise, O God! judge the earth, for You shall inherit all nations.' But in the version of the Seventy it is written, 'Behold, you die like men, and fall like one of the princes,' in order to manifest the disobedience of men—I mean of Adam and Eve—and the fall of one of the princes, i.e., of him who was called the serpent, who fell with a great overthrow, because he deceived Eve. But as my discourse is not intended to touch on this point, but to prove to you that the Holy Ghost reproaches men because they were made like God, free from suffering and death, provided that they kept His commandments, and were deemed deserving of the name of His sons, and yet they, becoming like Adam and Eve, work out death for themselves; let the interpretation of the Psalm be held just as you wish, yet thereby it is demonstrated that all men are deemed worthy of becoming gods, and of having power to become sons of the Highest; and shall be each by himself judged and condemned like Adam and Eve. Now I have proved at length that Christ is called God.

Again, no inclination that the A&E tale is meant as a metaphor.

Ibid. 132

and of these it seems good to me now to speak of another, for it conduces to your hereby knowing Jesus, whom we also know to have been Christ the Son of God, who was crucified, and rose again, and ascended to heaven, and will come again to judge all men, even up to Adam himself.

Justin asserts that Jesus will return and judge all people, even Adam. Surely Justin didn't think the very real Jesus would return to judge an allegorical person.

Irenaeus of Lyons, writing c. 180 CE:

Against Heresies 1.9.3.

Learn then, you foolish men, that Jesus who suffered for us, and who dwelt among us, is Himself the Word of God. For if any other of the Aeons had become flesh for our salvation, it would have been probable that the apostle spoke of another. But if the Word of the Father who descended is the same also that ascended, He, namely, the Only-begotten Son of the only God, who, according to the good pleasure of the Father, became flesh for the sake of men, the apostle certainly does not speak regarding any other, or concerning any Ogdoad, but respecting our Lord Jesus Christ. For, according to them, the Word did not originally become flesh. For they maintain that the Saviour assumed an animal body, formed in accordance with a special dispensation by an unspeakable providence, so as to become visible and palpable. But flesh is that which was of old formed for Adam by God out of the dust, and it is this that John has declared the Word of God became [my emphasis]. Thus is their primary and first-begotten Ogdoad brought to nought. For, since Logos [Word], and Monogenes [Only-begotten], and Zoe [Life], and Phos [Light], and Soter [Savior], and Christus, and the Son of God, and He who became incarnate for us, have been proved to be one and the same, the Ogdoad which they have built up at once falls to pieces. And when this is destroyed, their whole system sinks into ruin—a system which they falsely dream into existence, and thus inflict injury on the Scriptures, while they build up their own hypothesis.

Irenaeus argues, with no hint that he is arguing against the heretics only in metaphor, that Adam was the only being made into flesh and it was this same flesh that Jesus was made out of.

Ibid. 1.28.1

But [Tatian's] denial of Adam's salvation was an opinion due entirely to himself.

Here Irenaeus intimates that Adam will be saved due to Jesus' sacrifice, claiming that Tatian created a doctrine wherein Adam would not be saved. If Adam didn't really die, then I'm not sure how he could be saved or even bodily resurrected once Jesus returns. This is also relevant to Justin Martyr since Tatian was Justin's student (ibid.). Irenaeus thus implies that since Tatian created this dogma of Adam's damnation on his own, Justin probably thought that Adam would be saved.

Ibid. 1.30.7

But Ialdabaoth, feeling envious at this, was pleased to form the design of again emptying man by means of woman, and produced a woman from his own enthymesis, whom that Prunicus [above mentioned] laying hold of, imperceptibly emptied her of power. But the others coming and admiring her beauty, named her Eve, and falling in love with her, begot sons by her, whom they also declare to be the angels. But their mother (Sophia) cunningly devised a scheme to seduce Eve and Adam, by means of the serpent, to transgress the command of Ialdabaoth. Eve listened to this as if it had proceeded from a son of God, and yielded an easy belief. She also persuaded Adam to eat of the tree regarding which God had said that they should not eat of it. They then declare that, on their thus eating, they attained to the knowledge of that power which is above all, and departed from those who had created them. When Prunicus perceived that the powers were thus baffled by their own creature, she greatly rejoiced, and again cried out, that since the father was incorruptible, he (Ialdabaoth) who formerly called himself the father was a liar; and that, while Anthropos and the first woman (the Spirit) existed previously, this one (Eve) sinned by committing adultery.

Here Irenaeus is describing the beliefs of the Gnostic Ophites (derived from the Greek word for snake [οφις::ofis]) who worship the snake at Eden because it was in reality Sophia and granted knowledge (i.e. gnosis) to A&E. Many Gnostics took the A&E tale literally because they literally believed that their flesh was a prison created by a defective, self-righteous, and ignorant god, and that their true form was not flesh, basically. Gnostic beliefs diverge wildly from this main point. We can probably add the myriad of Gnostics to the ancient Christians who literally believed the A&E tale, since it was their reinterpretation of this story that forms a point of departure from the Christians who would become Catholics.

Ibid. 3.11.8

It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are. For, since there are four zones of the world in which we live, and four principal winds, while the Church is scattered throughout all the world, and the pillar and ground of the Church is the Gospel and the spirit of life; it is fitting that she should have four pillars, breathing out immortality on every side, and vivifying men afresh. [...] For the living creatures are quadriform, and the Gospel is quadriform, as is also the course followed by the Lord. For this reason were four principal covenants given to the human race: one, prior to the deluge, under Adam; the second, that after the deluge, under Noah; the third, the giving of the law, under Moses; the fourth, that which renovates man, and sums up all things in itself by means of the Gospel, raising and bearing men upon its wings into the heavenly kingdom.

Irenaeus' argument for why there should be only four gospels; inherent in his argument is the existence of Adam, and of a covenant after him (i.e. the fall). Irenaeus moves through all four covenants without a hint that some were figurative covenants while others were literal.

Ibid. 3.18.1-2

For I have shown that the Son of God did not then begin to exist, being with the Father from the beginning; but when He became incarnate, and was made man, He commenced afresh the long line of human beings, and furnished us, in a brief, comprehensive manner, with salvation; so that what we had lost in Adam— namely, to be according to the image and likeness of God— that we might recover in Christ Jesus. For as it was not possible that the man who had once for all been conquered, and who had been destroyed through disobedience, could reform himself, and obtain the prize of victory; and as it was also impossible that he could attain to salvation who had fallen under the power of sin—the Son effected both these things...

Irenaeus goes over the reason for Jesus' death, linking it to Adam's disobedience. Irenaeus doesn't offer us any reason why he took Adam's actions figuratively so the plain reading would be the one where we do not add to nor subtract from Irenaeus' words. Irenaeus butress' his argument by quoting Paul (Rom 5.14; 10.6-7, 9) which also presupposes a literal Adam since death reigned from Adam to Moses.

Ibid. 3.21.10

For as by one man's disobedience sin entered, and death obtained [a place] through sin; so also by the obedience of one man, righteousness having been introduced, shall cause life to fructify in those persons who in times past were dead. And as the protoplast himself Adam, had his substance from untilled and as yet virgin soil (for God had not yet sent rain, and man had not tilled the ground), and was formed by the hand of God, that is, by the Word of God, for all things were made by Him, and the Lord took dust from the earth and formed man; so did He who is the Word, recapitulating Adam in Himself, rightly receive a birth, enabling Him to gather up Adam [into Himself], from Mary, who was as yet a virgin. If, then, the first Adam had a man for his father, and was born of human seed, it were reasonable to say that the second Adam was begotten of Joseph. But if the former was taken from the dust, and God was his Maker, it was incumbent that the latter also, making a recapitulation in Himself, should be formed as man by God, to have an analogy with the former as respects His origin. Why, then, did not God again take dust, but wrought so that the formation should be made of Mary? It was that there might not be another formation called into being, nor any other which should [require to] be saved, but that the very same formation should be summed up [in Christ as had existed in Adam], the analogy having been preserved.

Irenaeus, in similar manner to Justin, explains why Jesus had to be born from a virgin and not from Joseph. If Adam had been born from human parents, then Jesus would have had to have been born from human parents. But since Adam was formed directly by the god of the Jews and not normal human generation, so was Jesus.

--------------------

This post will probably get pretty long, so I will continue to add to it as I get time. But this extremely small review of early Christian literature is probably good enough to start pointing in the right direction, and good enough to post for the time being. Surely, we in the 21st century can take the A&E tale allegorically, but this says nothing about its original author(s) or those who based the doctrines on its literalness; doctrines that the vast majority of lay Christians have inherited.

Maybe They Just Made A Mistake

2011-10-11T11:26:00.001-04:00

I've been on vacation for the past week, so I haven't been doing much blogging or catching up with the latest drama bombs exploding in my own blogosphere. Upon catching up, I noticed a few posts (that are, obviously, a couple days old) going on again about the Adam and Eve or Original Sin deal. Again, the scientists smack down the sophisitaced theologians and their convoluted arguments.

What I don't get is why can't these theologians simply admit that Genesis is simply mistaken? Intellectual honesty demands that we disregard bad ideas, not reinterperet them so that we can keep our failed hypotheses. Speaking of theologians and intellectual honesty, here is an exerpt from Bart Ehrman's "Misquoting Jesus":

A turning point came in my second semester, in a course I was taking with a much revered and pious professor named Cullen Story. The course was on the exegesis of the Gospel of Mark, at the time (and still) my favorite Gospel. For this course we needed to be able to read the Gospel of Mark completely in Greek (I memorized the entire Greek vocabulary of the Gospel the week before the semester began); we were to keep an exegetical notebook on our reflections on the interpretation of key passages; we discussed problems in the interpretation of the text; and we had to write a final term paper on an interpretive crux of our own choosing.

I chose a passage in Mark 2, where Jesus is confronted by the Pharisees because his disciples had been walking through a grain field, eating the grain on the Sabbath. Jesus wants to show the Pharisees that "Sabbath was made for humans, not humans for the Sabbath" and so reminds them of what the great King David had done when he and his men were hungry, how they went into the Temple "when Abiathar was the high priest" and ate the show bread, which was only for the priests to eat.

One of the well-known problems of the passage is that when one looks at the Old Testament passage that Jesus is citing (1 Sam. 21:16), it turns out that David did this not when Abiathar was the high priest, but, in fact, when Abiathar's father Ahimelech was. In other words, this is one of those passages that have been pointed to in order to show that the Bible is not inerrant at all but contains mistakes.

In my paper for Professor Story, I developed a long and complicated argument to the effect that even though Mark indicates this happened "when Abiathar was the high priest," it doesn't really mean that Abiathar was the high priest, but that the event took place in the part of the scriptural text that has Abiathar as one of the main characters. My argument was based on the meaning of the Greek words involved and was a bit convoluted.

I was pretty sure Professor Story would appreciate the argument, since I knew him as a good Christian scholar who obviously (like me) would never think there could be anything like a genuine error in the Bible. But at the end of my paper he made a simple one-line comment that for some reason went straight through me.

He wrote: "Maybe Mark just made a mistake."

I started thinking about it, considering all the work I had put into the paper, realizing that I had had to do some pretty fancy exegetical footwork to get around the problem, and that my solution was in fact a bit of a stretch.

I finally concluded, "Hmm … maybe Mark did make a mistake."

Once I made that admission, the floodgates opened …

Notice what happened here. Ehrman went into this assignment with the presupposition that Mark was 100% correct. In order to maintain that premise, he had to construct a highly speculative and convoluted argument to maintain his prior that Mark was 100% correct. In actuality, the simplest explanation (also the more likely explanation) was that Mark just made a mistake. Intellectual honesty is what made Ehrman go with the simpler conclusion "maybe Mark did make a mistake.".

Why go through the tortured exegesis to turn what the majority of historical and modern laymen Christians took and take as literal into a meaningless allegory? Why not just say "Ok, the story in Genesis is just wrong"? It's because, no matter how sophisticated these theologians are, they are still stuck on the hook of having the Genesis story be "true" in some sense. They are undercover inerrantists. They may not proclaim inerrancy openly, but their obdurate refusal to allow Genesis to be a product of its enviroment and not a document that has any relevance to the 21st century humanity is the same sort of misues that all open inerrantists commit.

Claiming that it's allegory does not hide the abuse. Maybe the writers of Genesis just made a mistake.

A New Oldest Christian Inscription?

2011-10-03T09:14:00.001-04:00

As far as we know, the oldest Christian inscription is Marcionite and dates to c. 313 CE. However, there might be one that dates almost 200 years earlier, and is Valentinian:

Here is a CBS Live article on an old Christian inscription found in Rome in the 1953, NCE 156. Gregory Snyder has recently published a updated analysis of it in the Journal of Early Christianity in which he argues for a 2nd century date and Valentinian provenance. His translation is as follows:

To my bath, the brothers of the bridal chamber carry the torches,
[here] in our halls, they hunger for the [true] banquets,

even while praising the Father and glorifying the Son.

There [with the Father and the Son] is the only spring and source of truth.

Synder, according to CBS, thinks that it is the oldest Christian object we possess.

Coolness! The heretic Valentinus is more than likely also the earliest Christian to quote and use the gospel of John, and is possibly also the earliest Christian to use a trinitarian formula for the Christian god.

(H/T April DeConick)

Lying, and Why I Will Probably Never Be A Christian (Again)

2011-09-27T13:22:00.001-04:00

Sam Harris has a new e-book out called "Lying". He has a nice blurb about why he wrote the book here:

One of the most fascinating things about this course [The Ethical Analyst at Sanford], however, was how difficult it was to find examples of virtuous lies that could withstand Professor Howard’s scrutiny. Even with Nazis at the door and Anne Frank in the attic, Howard always seemed to find truths worth telling and paths to even greater catastrophe that could be opened by lying.

I do not remember what I thought about lying before I took “The Ethical Analyst,” but the course accomplished as close to a firmware upgrade of my brain as I have ever experienced. I came away convinced that lying, even about the smallest matters, needlessly damages personal relationships and public trust.

It would be hard to exaggerate what a relief it was to realize this. It’s not that I had been in the habit of lying before taking Howard’s course—but I now knew that endless forms of suffering and embarrassment could be easily avoided by simply telling the truth. And, as though for the first time, I saw the consequences of others’ failure to live by this principle all around me.

Intuitively, we all think it is wrong to lie even though we might tell little "white lies" every now and then. Maybe due to my own myopia I sometimes think lying is a necessity, but for the most part I try to adhere to a mentality of "better ugly truths than pretty lies". This aversion to lying, even though there are bouts of akrasia (which is different from hypocrisy), is the main reason why I will probably never be a Christian.

I have firmly arrived at the conclusion over the past three years that the Christian religion is fundamentally structured around deception. Which is odd, considering that it is a religion that claims the value "truth". Now, this isn't a belief that I have simply because I'm "anti-Christian" or whatever. I actually came to this conclusion due to two different lines of evidence: the history of early Christianity, and what I think is the nature of Christian faith.

If you don't know about it, you should check out the most recent book by Bart Ehrman titled Forged. This book sums up my historical argument for why Christianity is based on deception. In short, the majority of the books in the New Testament are written by people who were not who they claimed to be or are attributed to people who didn't write the books attributed to them. Matthew was not written by the apostle/disciple Matthew (same for Mark, Luke, and John), 1 & 2 Peter were not written by the apostle Peter, 2 Thessalonians, 1 & 2 Timothy, and Titus (and Hebrews) were not written by Paul while Ephesians and Colossians were probably not written by Paul, the apostle John is more than likely not the same person who wrote those letters (though the letter writer never claims to be), and James and Jude who wrote their eponymous letters were more than likely not the same as Jesus' brothers (again, these writers never claim to be either).

While NT scholars title these works "pseudonymous", that's just a fancy way of saying falsely named (i.e. Mark 14.57 has the phrase "they gave false testimony" which in Greek is εψευδομαρτυρουν or epseudo-martyroun). And as Ehrman goes over in the book, forgeries weren't taken any more kindly in antiquity than they are in today's world. Worse yet, even in the authentic letters of Paul there are insertions into the text that have Paul say things he didn't originally say; and Matthew and Luke are basically heavily interpolated versions of Mark. The worst, of course, is that the vast majority of sayings of Jesus were never uttered by Jesus.

As for the nature of Christian faith, philosophically (or epistemically) this seems to be nothing more than the equivalent of self-deception. The thought experiment I go over in that earlier blog post introduces the argument like this:

Say you are in a steady relationship with a significant other. There have been the usual ups and downs of a relationship, but overall things are going pretty good. Let's say, however, that one day you do the one thing that your significant other would possibly break up with you over. What do you do? Let's say there's no chance of them ever finding out. What now? Do you risk it and tell them, being honest? Or do you keep it from them, so that they remain faithful to you?

I admit this is a pretty tough decision. But what is underlying this is whether you simply want to possess the person, or if you love and respect them.

Actually, don't even answer the question. Your particular character isn't what I'm trying to point out here. What I would like to know is: What would a person who values [your] faith over everything else do in this situation? What will they do necessarily? That's right; they would have no second guesses about lying to you to maintain your faith in them.

Now, what if there is no second party involed. No significant other. What if it is just you confronted with a decision to face something that might make you lose faith in someone/something or to ignore that thing? What would a person who values faith do? That's right. They would have no qualms about lying to themselves to maintain their faith.

So what exactly is the difference between faith and self-deception? I don't think there is any difference. If a person cares more about faith than honesty (or "the truth") then any other option is necessarily some form of deception.

So it seems to me that faith, specifically Christian faith, actually positions itself sternly in opposition to "truth".

As it stands, I actually think that this second observation explains the historical situation that created the NT in the first place. The dogma of the new faith in early Christianity was more important than what "actually happened", whatever that was. So it was necessary to deceive with these works that eventually formed the bulk of the NT. I also think that this second observation about the nature of Christian faith has completely corrupted the Christian religion making it morally bankrupt; why I become even less and less shocked every time I find out that Christians are lying for Jesus. The most recent example I read was how a Christian group claimed that homosexuality has a positive correlation with pedophilia. That is just despicable... but, I'm guessing, what's a "little white lie" to prevent people from viewing homosexuality in a positive light? I assume that's the mentality of those particular Christians, anyway. Would it be a stretch to say that the claim of Jesus being predicted in Jewish scripture is also a lie? That one is probably a bit more fuzzy. But it probably suffices to say that Christianity was exceedingly unpopular among Jews and only gained traction among non-Jews; non-Jews who were free to read the Jewish holy book in a non-Jewish way.

It was Jewish arguments against Christianity that convinced me that Christianity was false. It is the nature of Christian faith that makes me almost certain that I will never be one again on moral grounds.

People Who Make More Decisions With Gut Feelings More Likely To Believe In God

2011-09-23T08:42:00.001-04:00

Didn't expect something like this in Yahoo! News:

Shenhav and his colleagues investigated that question in a series of studies. In the first, 882 American adults answered online surveys about their belief in God. Next, the participants took a three-question math test with questions such as, "A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?"

The intuitive answer to that question is 10 cents, since most people's first impulse is to knock $1 off the total. But people who use "reflective" reasoning to question their first impulse are more likely to get the correct answer: 5 cents.

Sure enough, people who went with their intuition on the math test were found to be one-and-a-half times more likely to believe in God than those who got all the answers right. The results held even when taking factors such as education and income into account.

Makes sense, if you know about the unreliable feeling of certainty.

Something That Explains Everything... Explains Nothing

2011-09-21T21:37:00.000-04:00

So let's say that someone makes the argument "The existence of X is proof that god exists". This is all right and good to do, but using god as an explanation in these cases usually follows this line of reasoning:

For example, Seth [of The Thinking Atheist] talks about a hypothetical American teenage boy who is the victim of a shooting. After being shot, the boy is rushed to the hospital, where one of several possible scenarios plays out.
Imagine first that the boy makes a full recovery – the bullets missed all of his vital organs, thank God. He’ll need time to heal, but he won’t suffer any permanent damage. “It’s a miracle,” the religious will say. God is good.
Second, imagine instead that one of the bullets had hit the boy’s spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed. He’ll have to live the rest of his life in a wheelchair… but he’s alive! “God must have had more work for him to do on this earth. Praise the Lord he’s still with us.” God is good.
The worst-case scenario is that the boy dies. His wounds were too severe; the doctors couldn’t save him. “God must have been done with him here on this earth. He’s in a better place now, with no violence and no pain. He’s been called home.” God is good.
In each case down the line, the requirements are relaxed for what state of affairs would lead to the conclusion that God is good. By the time you get to the third scenario, you’re confronted with the fact that an innocent boy is dead, and God still gets credit for being good. At this point you have to admit that the statement has no requirements on its being true at all.

Tim's critique of this type of reasoning is legitimate and cogent. If you admit that the survival of the boy is evidence for the goodness of the Christian god, then you have to admit that the death of the boy would be evidence against the goodness of the Christian god.

Though, to make this argument stronger we might be able to express why it fails in a mathematical fashion; why the post-hoc rationalization of many Christians is the equivalent of dividing by zero.

In probability theory there is something called Independence. If P(H|E) = P(H), or if P(H|~E) = P(H), then E and H are independent. So in the above scenario, we have three lines of evidence: The boy lives, the boy is permanently paralyzed, or the boy dies; So let's say that E is the boy lives and ~E is that the boy is permanently paralyzed or dies.

Remember that absence of evidence is evidence of absence? That same formula applies here as well, and is a logical inference from the formula to prove independence above. However, following the logic of the Christian above, we have P(H|E) > P(H) and P(H|~E) > P(H). That is, all three scenarios "prove" the goodness of the Christian god... even though all three scenarios are mutually independent. The boy cannot live free of injury, be paralyzed for life, and die all at the same time.

Now we have that equation for absence of evidence being evidence of absence, and we can arrange it in syllogistic format:

P1: P(H|E) > P(H)

P2: P(H|~E) < P(H)

C: P(H) = P(H) - [P(H|E) - P(H) + P(H|~E) - P(H)]

So in order to logically arrive at that conclusion, we have to have some negative numbers in there. If the difference between P(H|E) and P(H) is positive, then its opposite P(H|~E) and P(H) has to be negative. So if P(H) is 50%, and P(H|E) is 55%, then the difference is 5%; there has to be a comparable difference between P(H|~E) and P(H).

Thus we would have 50% [P(H)] = P(H) + [P(H|E) - P(H) + P(H|~E) - P(H)]

50% = 50% + [55% - 50% + ??? - 50%]

50% = 50% + 5% - 50% + ???

50% = 5% + ???

45% = ???

Basically the terms inside of the brackets [] should cancel each other out (i.e. add up to zero) so that we end up with P(H) = P(H). But what if we attempt to follow the logic of the original Christian, that both E and ~E are evidence for the goodness of the Christian god? We end up with the following scenario:

50% = 50% + [55% - 50% + 55% - 50%]

50% = 50% + 5% + 5%

50% = 60%

When was the other time you saw it argued that something like 1 = 2? That's right: when you divide by zero.

In order to not end up trying to argue that 50% is equal to 60% you have to admit some evidence or outcome that argues against the goodness of the Christian god in this scenario. If you admit that E is evidence of H, then ~E has to be evidence against H. That, or you have to admit that goodness of the Christian god has no affect on whether the boy lives or dies; that P(H|E) - P(H) is equal to P(H|~E) - P(H). The only way that this can happen is if P(H|E) = P(H).

The Christian in the original scenario believes in the goodness of the Christian god no matter what happens to the boy. This means that the goodness of the Christian god has no relationship to whether the boy lives, is permanently injured, or dies. Just like Mars being the fourth planet from the sun has no relationship to whether the boy lives, is permanently injured, or dies. Thus, the goodness of the Christian god, just like Mars being the fourth planet from the sun, cannot be used as an explanation of why the boy lives, is permanently injured, or dies.

So if something is used to explain every outcome, if P(H|E) = P(H) or P(H|~E) = P(H), then it actually explains nothing.

Canadians losing faith in religion

2011-09-21T12:01:00.001-04:00

This makes a good follow up to my previous post:

Religion seems to be a key player in many of today's top stories, from stand-alone events – such as the 2005 riots in the suburbs of Paris linked to the French government's proposed burka ban, and rightwing Christian Anders Behring Breivik's shooting rampage in Oslo, Norway – to more drawn-out sagas, such as child abuse in the Catholic Church, and the perception that Christians are constantly campaigning against gay marriage and abortion.

Canadians who don't participate in religion themselves experience it in the news, which can sensationalize the negatives aspects of religion, said Dr. Pamela Dickey Young, the principal of the School of Religion at Queen's University, in Kingston, Ont.

Can it be said that Canadians are actually starting to think that belief in belief is a negative trait? Or are they just thinking that belief is a negative trait? This part is telling:

Dickey Young said when she asks most of her firstyear students if they're religious, they say no. When she asks if they are spiritual, they say yes. She said this follows a general trend among Canadians who are turning away from organized religion - which is seen as a concrete set of pre-ordained rules - in favour of a more personalized spiritual journey.

It seems like they still think tha belief in belief is a positive trait.

(H/t Eric MacDonald)

Monotheism Is Inherently Intolerant And Breeds Discord

2011-09-15T18:53:00.001-04:00

I was listening to this song while driving to work a couple of days ago and one line from the song stuck out a lot more than it usually does for some reason: "No more war for your god...". It struck me because a line further along in that song says "live and let live, true freedom". Is it really possible to live and let live while people believe in god(s)? No man is an island; every single thing that you do - that you are - affects a multitude of people. Do you have a job? That means that someone else does not. Are you in an exclusive relationship with someone? That means that everyone else who is interested in your significant other is excluded from their intimacy. And so on and so forth for every finite thing.

The concept of live and let live is an impossibility due to scarce resources. But were we always fighting about the wrong gods? Is "god" a resource?

In an earlier post I quoted something from Hector Avalos that he argues at further length in one of his books:

Is religion inherently violent? If not, what provokes violence in the name of religion? Do we mischaracterize religion by focusing too much on its violent side? In this intriguing, original study of religious violence, Professor Hector Avalos offers a new theory for the role of religion in violent conflicts. Starting with the premise that most violence is the result of real or perceived scarce resources, Avalos persuasively argues that religion creates new scarcities on the basis of unverifiable or illusory criteria. Through a careful analysis of the fundamental texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Dr Avalos explains how four 'scarce' resources have figured repeatedly in creating religious violence: sacred space (churches, temples, holy cities); the creation of holy scriptures (exclusive revelations); group privilege (chosen people, the predestined select few); and salvation (only some are saved). Thus, Avalos shows, religious violence is often the most unnecessary violence of all since the scarce resources over which religious conflicts ensue are not actually scarce or need not be scarce. Comparing violence in religious and non-religious contexts, Avalos makes the compelling argument that if we condemn violence caused by scarce resources as morally objectionable, then we must consider even more objectionable violence provoked by alleged scarcities that cannot be proven to exist. Moreover, he shows how many modern academic biblical scholars and scholars of religion maintain the value of sacred texts despite their violence. This serious philosophical examination of the roots of religious violence adds much to our understanding of a perennial source of widespread human suffering.

(Amazon.com product review)

The four things that he lists - sacred space, sacred scriptures, group privilege, and salvation - actually are not inherent to all religion all at once. These four things are specifically related to, and are the logical result of, monotheism (which is what he actually argues in the book). Furthermore, these four things might be present in one form or another in polytheistic religions, but due to the "poly" in polytheism, there is no sense of scarcity. That scarcity is a necessary precursor to division and strife, and ultimately, violence.

Before the fall of Judah and the elites' exile c. 597 BCE, the "Judaism" of the common person (not the literate elite) was a polytheistic religion. When the Judahite elites returned from the exile, they brought with them a more concrete, idealized version of their history which included an inflated version of henotheism (the precursor to monotheism); probably borrowed from their Persian Zoroastrian benefactors who allowed them to return. This inflated henotheism is the backbone of all of the conquest narratives in the "Primary History" of Israel/Judah (Genesis - 2 Kings) created and edited by the literate elite c. 500 BCE. This began the Jews' elitism and intolerance for other religions: The first true religious holy war was the Maccabean revolt of c. 160 BCE*. This only came about due to a "scarcity" of sacred space and group privilege. This same intolerance is also what lead to the destruction of their temple in 70 CE, one of the reasons being the refusal to worship Roman emperors as gods.

Modern Christianity, of course, inherited Jewish monotheism (there were multitude of early Christianities that were not monotheistic). Even going so far as to declare not only that they were not going to worship the gods of their pagan neighbors, but to actively declare that those gods were malevolent spirits. How's that for acceptance and tolerance? The first biggest turning point in the history of religious violence was when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. The second biggest turning point in the history of religious violence was when Islam became the official religion of the (now unified) Arab tribes. Prior to the advent of Christianity, no entire empire the span of the Roman Empire would have declared war on another empire just because they had the wrong religion. That would be absurd in a polytheistic framework.

Prior to Christendom, the pagan Roman Empire simply practiced syncretism on conquered peoples. When the Romans conquered the Greeks, they did not kill anyone who believed in the "wrong god" or force everyone to follow the Roman pantheon. No, they just said "Oh, the chief god of the Greeks is Zeus? Well, that's just Jupiter." or "The Greek god of wine is Dionysus? I guess that's what they call Bacchus." or "The Greeks named their main city after their goddess Athena? But that's just Minerva" and so on and so forth. However, when Christians conquered other peoples, they actively said that the local gods were really demons and needed to be vanquished, or in later centuries (to their credit) they changed local pagan gods to human saints and angels.

But when Islam came around - a second monotheistic religion - then planes hit the towers, so to say. Instead of just one continent-spanning empire being monotheistic, you had two. Syncretism would be impossible. Something the scale of the Crusades, for the reasons that started them, would probably be unthinkable in a pre-Christian or pre-Muslim pagan world.

Similarly, something like this entire post would be almost impossible in pre-Christian Roman society. If the guy in that post's favorite god that he preferred to make sacrifices to was Ares, but his girlfriend called him Mars, there would be no relationship-ending type of conflict between them over their theology. It seems as though that post really is a microcosm of the inherent intolerance of monotheism; the Crusades being a large scale manifestation of that same intolerance.

Monotheism, due to its nature in the big three monotheistic religions, precludes syncretism. This preclusion of syncretism is also a preclusion to open-mindedness. This preclusion to open-mindedness is what creates tension, strife, division, and finally... violence and hatred.

"Monotheism leads to fear. Fear leads to hatred. Hatred is the path to the dark side..."

[*] (mainly because the Levant was sort of out of the way of most inter-empire conflict. After the split of Alexander the Great's empire into two c. 280 BCE, more and more skirmishes between the Seleucids and the Ptolemies started occurring closer and closer to Judea, and Judea became more Hellenized)

The Criteria For Interpolation: Using Bayes To Evidence Authenticity

2011-09-14T17:31:00.001-04:00

In a previous post I went over what I think is an application of sliding the probability one way or another in favor of interpolation based on the criteria I listed (manuscript, anachronism, vocabulary/linguistic, contextual, and doxological inconsistency).

Some people might think that it was unfair that I started with the priors that I did. However, I want to show that, using Bayes Theorem, we can use it to demonstrate a very low probability of interpolation in a separate section using the same priors.

Instead of Romans 1.2-6, let's say I used a random section like Romans 2.2-6, which is this block of text:

2 Now we know that God's judgment against those who do such things is based on truth.3 So when you, a mere man, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God's judgment?4 Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God's kindness leads you toward repentance?5 But because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God's wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed.6 God "will give to each person according to what he has done." (Psalm 62:12; Prov. 24:12 )

Again, because of Marcion, there is a precedent for general interpolation (verse 6 quotes the LXX which Marcion probably would not have tolerated, and the entire context that this section belongs to speaks about the judgement of Paul's god). Yet again, there is no manuscript evidence that this section is missing.

Now, is there any linguistic evidence for interpolation? As far as I can tell, all of the vocabulary used by Paul here is vocabulary that he has used elsewhere. And we would expect the original author to use the same vocabulary, so as I wrote in that previous post, based on the conditionals that I outlined, this lack of linguistic inconsistency is strong evidence in favor of originality:

Priors:

Probability of Authenticity P(H) = .6

Probability of Interpolation P(~H) = .4

Conditionals:

Probability of the same vocabulary given authenticity: P(E | H) = .7

Probability of the same vocabulary given interpolation: P(E | ~H) = .3

Revised:

P(H | E) = P(E | H) * P(H) / [P(E | H) * P(H)] + [P(E | ~H) * P(~H)]

P(H | E) = .7 * .6 / [(.7 * .6) + (.3 * .4)]

P(H | E) = .7778

This moves the prior probability of 60% to the revised probability of 78%.

I should note that I picked the conditionals that I did because most scholars would agree that Paul using the same vocabulary given a passage's authenticity is a very persuasive argument. Likewise, the interpolator using the same vocabulary as the original Paul given an interpolation is proportionally unpersuasive. Like I wrote in the previous post, some scholars consider the arguments I listed for interpolation unpersuasive (at Romans 1.2-6), but even given the unpersuasiveness of the evidence presented, it should still be allowed to slide the probability in favor of interpolation. The amount that one allows it to slide is what is meant by persuasive or unpersuasive.

Now what about the second line of evidence I posted, linguistic/contextual? Again, this section seems to fit word use that Paul always uses in similar contexts. We would expect exactly this, so this is more evidence in favor of authenticity:

Priors:

Probability of Authenticity P(H) = .78

Probability of Interpolation P(~H) = .22

Conditionals:

Probability of vocabulary used in a similar context given authenticity: P(E | H) = .7

Probability of vocabulary used in a similar context given interpolation: P(E | ~H) = .3

Revised:

P(H | E) = P(E | H) * P(H) / [P(E | H) * P(H)] + [P(E | ~H) * P(~H)]

P(H | E) = .7 * .78 / [(.7 * .78) + (.3 * .22)]

P(H | E) = .8909

This moves the prior probability of 78% to the revised probability of 89%.

The third line of evidence, this section being larger than what Paul usually writes in an introduction? Since this is not an introduction, it does not seem applicable. Since it is not evidence either way, it gets a 50/50 chance; that is, it is not evidence of anything so the prior does not change.

Priors:

Probability of Authenticity P(H) = .89

Probability of Interpolation P(~H) = .11

Conditionals:

Probability of section size given authenticity: P(E | H) = .5

Probability of section size given interpolation: P(E | ~H) = .5

Revised:

P(H | E) = P(E | H) * P(H) / [P(E | H) * P(H)] + [P(E | ~H) * P(~H)]

P(H | E) = .5 * .5 / [(.5 * .89) + (.5 * .11)]

P(H | E) = .89

Lastly, I posited theological inconsistency as a marker for interpolation. The theology here (the judgement of Paul's god) seems to fit Paul's theme of judgement. And again, this is exactly what we would expect, so this is more evidence in favor of authenticity.

Priors:

Probability of Authenticity P(H) = .89

Probability of Interpolation P(~H) = .11

Conditionals:

Probability of theological consistency given authenticity: P(E | H) = .7

Probability of theological consisency given interpolation: P(E | ~H) = .3

Revised:

P(H | E) = P(E | H) * P(H) / [P(E | H) * P(H)] + [P(E | ~H) * P(~H)]

P(H | E) = .7 * .89 / [(.7 * .89) + (.3 * .11)]

P(H | E) = .9501

This moves the prior probability of 89% to the revised of 95%.The thing that I was hoping to demonstrate here is the fact that Bayes Theorem, if graphed as more evidence is gathered, would produce an asymptote. That is, we can keep gathering evidence all day, but it will never reach 100%. More and more evidence continues to slide the probability towards 1, but it will never reach 1.

The Battle Between Neuroscience and Philosophy Over the Fate of Free Will

2011-09-13T13:35:00.001-04:00

So a couple of weeks ago, Luke at Common Sense Atheism posted a pdf that ran through an experiment that showed that people's brain decided to do something up to 10 seconds before the "person" actually did. This same experiment was recently posted in Nature. Jerry Coyne, of Why Evolution Is True fame, posted his own comments about the article:

The experiments show, then, that not only are decisions made before we're conscious of having made them, but that the brain imagery can predict what decision will be made with substantial [80%] accuracy. This has obvious implications for the notion of "free will," at least as most people conceive of that concept. We like to think that our conscious selves make decisions, but in fact the choices appear to have been made by our brains before we're aware of them. The implication, of course, is that deterministic forces beyond are conscious control are involved in our "decisions", i.e. that free will isn't really "free". Physical and biological determinism rules, and we can't override those forces simply by some ghost called "will." We really don't make choices—they are made long before we're conscious of having chosen strawberry versus pistachio ice cream at the store.

So now I'm also posting the same info. I don't really have any comments, except to explain that this sort of experiment most certainly wouldn't be presented as evidence for free will, so it is certainly evidence against free will. Again, it might be strong or weak evidence. But it is evidence either way.

The Criteria For Interpolation: More Examples of Bayes Theorem in History

2011-09-12T20:32:00.001-04:00

One of the problems we encounter when we start doing critical analysis of the NT is that there is always a threat that what we are reading was not penned by the original author. Sometimes it is an honest mistake; a scribal note inserted into the body of a text by a later copyist (probably what happened with Josephus' reference to Jesus in AJ 20.9.1). Other times, it is an insertion into a text done to promote a particular dogma; using the authoritative voice of antiquity to argue for an interpolator's point of view.

So we have to have a methodology for seeing what the original author wrote and what a later author put into the original's pen. But we have to be careful of wantonly chopping up and removing certain sections of an ancient work we are reading without reason.

Interpolations can be suggested and argued by positing a range of criteria. If a passage is anachronistic (like 1 Thessalonians 2.13-16), then there is a high probability that it is an interpolation. If there is manuscript evidence for a passage being all over the place (like John 7.53 - 8.11) or is not in some of the earliest manuscripts (like Mark 16.9-20) then this is also a high probability indicator of interpolation. But once we start talking about "probability", at least to me, we are starting to get into the realm of Bayes. Here is a post I made over at Vridar:

The case for interpolations should be approached in a Bayesian way. Linguistics, manuscripts, context, theology, anachronisms, etc. can all be added together to make a case. If there’s no manuscript evidence but there’s linguistic, contextual, anachronistic, and theological inconsistency, then a case can be made for interpolation in a Bayesian sense. All it really means is that each one of those indicators slides the probability towards it being an interpolation. It shouldn’t be an “either-or” methodology; it should be about probability.

For something like the collection of Paul's letters, there is already a precedent for general interpolation: Marcion was the first Christian to promulgate Paul's letters as an authoritative canon for Christians. Yet, his theology and Christology was antithetical to the emerging Catholics. Thus Paul's letters in Marcion's canon could not be word-for-word the exact same ones that are in the current NT; the NT that the Catholics put together to combat Marcionism (i.e. Catholics followed the same "gospel-apostle" set up for the order of books in their/our Bible that Marcion created).

There can be very little doubt that Marcion removed some passages from Paul. But since no one quotes Paul prior to Marcion, how do we know whether the proto-Catholics published the "originals" or whether they added to Marcion's Paul to combat Marcion? (The presence of Marcionite prologues to Paul's letters in Catholic Bibles is evidence of the latter)

So I'll use Romans 1.2-6 for a case study in interpolations using Bayes Theorem.

The only time Paul ever uses the phrase "holy scriptures" (γραφαις αγιαις [pl. dat.]) is in Romans 1.2 and 2 Timothy 3.15. Since 2 Timothy in its entirety was not written by Paul, this could be linguistic evidence that Paul did not write Romans 1.2. Of course, there is more linguistic and even Christological/dogmatic (i.e. anti-Marcionite) evidence for this, so in a Bayesian sense, based on 2 Tim, there is a high probability that Romans 1.2-6 was not written by Paul.

Of course, some scholars do not consider these arguments persuasive. Again, this seems like a problem for Bayes, since Bayes Theorem is designed to include all other interpretations of the evidence before sliding the prior probability one way or another. In other words, the pseudo-Pauline author of 2 Tim using "holy scriptures" is linguistic evidence for Romans 1.2 being authored by the same person as 2 Timothy; it might be strong or weak evidence but it is evidence nonetheless. It could also be evidence that the author of 2 Tim is emulating the original language found in Romans 1.2 (but we have no evidence for this; the entire reason that 2 Tim is thought to not be written by Paul is due to linguistic evidence). Again, deciding between each hypothesis would be a problem for Bayes Theorem to solve as we gathered more evidence in favor of one or the other.

Bayes Paves The Way

So I listed above in the quote five markers for possible interpolation: manuscript, linguistic/vocabulary, contextual, anachronistic, and theological (or doxological or Christological) inconsistency. In the case of Romans 1.2-6 we have linguistic and doxological evidence in favor of interpolation, yet manuscript evidence for originality (there are no extant manuscripts of Romans without 1.2-6).

The problem, of course in Bayes theorem, is deciding what priors to use. There is already a precedent, due to Marcion, that the introduction of Romans was not written by Paul (verses 2-4 are very anti-Marcionite). Yet, the strongest indicator - manuscript evidence - is not apparent. So to be fair, I think I will set the prior for interpolation, due to lack of manuscript evidence, at 40% (i.e. the fact that all manuscripts have this introduction is 60% evidence in favor of originality). Let's see where this takes us as we gather and analyze more evidence.

First, what would we expect if there was linguistic evidence for interpolation? The writer would use vocabulary that Paul himself never uses. We have exactly that with the presence of "holy scriptures" in Rom 1.2. But it seems as though it could go either way, like I wrote above (interpolator could either be emulating Paul's original language, or interpolator could be inserting his own terms). What tips the scales, for me, is that Paul nowhere else uses the term "holy scriptures" in his authentic writing, always saying "as it is written" (καθως γεγραπται*) or simply "scriptures" without the qualifier "holy". So the presence of "holy scriptures" in Romans most certainly would not be evidence in favor of authenticity; I would have this conditional probability at 55% in favor vs 45% against. This moves the prior probability from 40% to the posterior probability of 45%.

Hypotheses:
Prior Probabilities:


Revised Prob:

Notice, however, that if I were positing an interpolation but the language was the same, I think it would be a horrible argument or very bad evidence for interpolation:

Hypotheses:
Prior Probabilities:


Revised Prob:

There is a very high probability that original author would use the same language that he uses throughout the rest of his letters. We would not expect the interpolator to do so; only highly skilled redactors who are trained to look for that sort of thing would be able to pass off a sophisticated interpolation, which I'm guessing was not a very common skill in the 2nd century (though Richard Carrier, an expert on the ancient Greco-Roman world, says that there must be sophisticated interpolations that we cannot detect).

So now our prior probability becomes 45% as we continue to add more arguments/evidence.

As I wrote in that previous post, the instance of "holy scriptures" is not the only evidence in favor of interpolation. Paul never talks about "prophets" in the context of prophets of the Hebrew bible. He always mentions prophets in conjunction with apostles. In other words, Paul overwhelmingly talks about contemporary prophets in his letters. And when he actually quotes from a book of the Nevi'im, he always says καθως γεγραπται[*]. Romans 1.2 is the only time he writes about long-dead prophets predicting Jesus. Again, this is very weak evidence, but it is evidence nonetheless. I think it might be fair to move the two conditional probabilities closer to 50% in my estimation:

Hypotheses:
Prior Probabilities:


Revised Prob:

The strongest argument, to me, is the fact that this introduction in Romans is longer than every other Pauline letter - even the contested and pseudonymous ones. Much more so because Paul never goes over doxological statements in any other introduction. This is much stronger evidence for a non-Pauline hand writing this section:

Hypotheses:
Prior Probabilities:


Revised Prob:

Now our prior has moved to the posterior of 56% in favor of interpolation. Notice again, to be fair to the opposing hypothesis, that if I were positing an interpolation - even with all of that prior evidence that we already had - it would be a bad argument for interpolation if this section was the same length as all other Pauline introductions:

Hypotheses:
Prior Probabilities:


Revised Prob:

We would most certainly expect this introduction to be the same length as all other introductions if there was no interpolation. By necessity, it would be impossible to have an interpolation if it was the same short length as all other Pauline letter introductions. All interpolations add text; that is sort of the definition of an interpolation.

For my last line of evidence, we have a Christology at Rom 1.6 that seems to contradict the Christology of the Phillipian Hymn (Phillipians 2.5-11). The Phillipian Hymn, according to many scholars, is a pre-Pauline hymn that Paul is quoting from. This hymn assumes the same sort of Christology that the opening line of the gospel of John assumes: That Jesus was equal to god and descended from heaven even though he had equality with god (Phil 2.6, compare Jn 1.1-2). However, Rom 1.6 says that Jesus was declared son of god due to his resurrection. This implies to me that Jesus prior to his resurrection was a normal yokel, none of that "in the form of" and "equal to" god stuff; it implies an adoptionist Christology.

But it could go either way. Since Paul did not actually compose the Phillipian Hymn, and it has a parallel to other Christian writing, it would hardly be fair to call this hymn an original thought of Paul. So while I posit it as evidence, it is probably very weak evidence in favor of interpolation.

Hypotheses:
Prior Probabilities:


Revised Prob:

This move the prior probability of 56% in favor of interpolation up a bit to 57%.

Again, all of this Bayesian analysis depends on the priors. If I had picked completely skewed priors (like 10% in favor of interpolation, or 90% in favor of interpolation) then that would poison the well so to say and we could never get a reasonable answer. I also attempted to pick conditionals that were pretty close to each other as well, since skewing there would have a similar effect. I even picked extremely low conditionals to be fair to those scholars who might find such evidence unpersuasive. "Persuasive" really just means "high probability" in the context of Bayes Theorem. If something is unpersuasive, it would probably be something under 55% probable. Even with the addition of "unpersuasive" evidence (like the ridiculously low 51% conditionals that I added), accumulated we still have above a 55% chance that Romans 1.2-6 is not original to Paul. The final posterior probability might be much higher than 57% if I had used more reasonable numbers.

Explanation of Conditionals

If I had conditionals that were equal, say at a 50:50 ratio, then this means that some evidence I have posited is not really evidence for anything at all. Any time a conditional is presented as evidence for something, it has to be over 50% (when there are only two competing hypotheses). This means that the ratio of evidence against has to equal 100% when the two are added together. For example, the long introduction in Romans certainly would not be presented as evidence for authenticity; it is either strong or weak evidence against authenticity... but evidence nonetheless.

For a more modern example, let's say someone was killed between the hours of 2am - 4am this morning. I personally do not have an alibi for these two hours, so it would be evidence in favor of me being the murderer. But this is very, very weak evidence since there are not any other reasons why I would murder someone without some other corroborating evidence to give it relevance. How many other hundreds of thousands of people have no alibi for that time period? On the other hand, my not having an alibi at this time period most certainly would not be touted as evidence for my innocence. So it is very weak evidence for me being a murderer to the point of insignificance, but never evidence for my innocence.

So this is why all of the evidence I posited was above 50% in my conditionals.

This, to me, is another good reason to use Bayes Theorem for arguments. Even if we have multiple unpersuasive arguments in favor of something, that accumulation is the actual strength of the argument, not the individual components. One of the best arguments for the Theory of Evolution is not each individual example of evidence, but the accumulation of all of those different lines of evidence that best supports the ToE; the reasoning behind Bayes Theorem is why the ToE is more likely correct than incorrect. Just like Bayes Theorem demonstrates above (hopefully!) that Romans 1.2-6 was not originally written by Paul. Creationists can assign 51% (i.e. unpersuasive) to each and every line of evidence in favor of evolution - their Bayesian accumulation will still be overwhelmingly in favor of evolution. Moreover, the Creationist has to come up with mutually exclusive alternative explanations for each and every line of evidence, which means that their explanations are not cumulative in a Bayesian sense; the Theory of Evolution is one theory that explains all of the accumulated evidence.

In a future post I'll go over the problem that religionists have when positing their religion as an explanation for phenomena, since probability theory deals a pretty significant blow to their explanatory power (or, when you do not necessarily have to use Bayes Theorem in assessing probability).

[*]Rom 1.17; 2.24; 3.10; 4.17; 8.26; 9.33; 11.26; 15.3, 9, 21; 1 Cor 1.31; 2.19; 10.17, 2 Cor 8.15; 9.9

The Significance of the Holy Spirit's Dove Form

2011-09-09T11:56:00.001-04:00

In a previous post I linked to a post on Vridar that showed that pagans prior to the advent of Christianity had traditions of their gods descending in the form of an avian creature when they came to Earth. It is enough that Mark has the holy spirit do this at the beginning of his gospel to show a connection, but why a dove? I think I discovered why:

Mark 11.15 On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple area and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves.

During Passover, Jews would come to Jerusalem and go to the money changers to change whatever currency they brought with them to Temple currency and use Temple currency to buy a sacrificial animal to present to the high preist for sacrifice. Mark here implies that the sacrificial animal that Jews bought and presented to the high priest for sacrifice was a dove. During Jesus' entire ministry, he has this dove-like holy spirit possessing him and leading him about - ultimately leading him to its sacrifice in Jerusalem.

Mark uses περιστερα::peristera for both 1.10 and 11.15.

"True" Religion Begets Violence

2011-09-07T15:52:00.001-04:00

Hector Avalos argues for the claim in the title of this post:

It is statistically true the vast majority of Christians and Muslims do not commit violent acts.

However, claiming opponents don't hold the "true" version of Islam, Christianity, or any other religion, simply perpetuates a mechanism that can cause religious violence in the first place.

That is so because when you proclaim there to be a true form of a religion, you also are making heretics out of those who disagree.

So, by declaring bin Laden and Breivik to be heretics, one simply perpetuates this orthodox-heretic model again.

More importantly, such a division ultimately is based on faith claims. Since competing faith claims never can be adjudicated by objective means, then violence often becomes the solution in settling arguments.

Even if monotheism does not breed outright violence, it seems to breed division most of the time regardless. Division, of course, is a necessary precursor to violence.

(H/t John W. Loftus at Debunking Christianity.)