Quote: Preaching

When believers tell others about their ideas, it is 'preaching'. When nonbelievers do it, it is 'aggressive atheism'.

Richard Wiseman
(Twitter, 23/09/2010)

On Pope PR and Bad Journalism

Maybe some of you haven't noticed, but the leader of the Catholic Church visited England last week. Many considered it his most difficult trip so far - after all, it was England which is amongst the most secular countries in the world. With child abuse cases piling up, it also wasn't one of the easiest times to leave the safety of the Holy See. So many people were curiously looking forward on how the Pope would do on his trip, followers and opponents alike.

He didn't disappoint either when he gave his speech in Edinburgh! For somebody who was born 1927 and who had to join the Hitler Youth and serve in the Wehrmacht and who was already deeply involved in the Catholic church at that time, it is astonishing that he managed to suppress all memories about the deep links between Nazism and the church. How else can he say that it was "a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God" and that we should reflect on these "sobering lessons of the atheist extremism" which " let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society"? Maybe, just maybe, he should start remembering what other people (nowadays quite easily) can look up in history books? For example that Hitler was raised as a Catholic and saw his fight as acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator (from "Mein Kampf") and started sentences with "In boundless love as a Christian and as a man [...]" (Hitler speech 1922). That doesn't sound especially atheist to me! If you need more quotes to prove this point, check here.
Apart from the fact that Hitlers antisemitism grew from his Christian upbringing, a quick look at historic documents reveals that Nazism as a whole wasn't an atheistic movement either. Quite the contrary. In the attempt to keep German culture clean from destructive literature, blacklists were produced of books that had to be removed from libraries or burned. One of those lists on books to be removed, includes:

"All writings that ridicule, belittle or besmirch the Christian religion and its institution, faith in God, or other things that are holy to the healthy sentiments of the Volk."

(Blacklist for Public Libraries and Commercial Lending Libraries)

Why should atheists burn their own books? In 1933, Hitler even proclaimed to have eradicated atheism!

I agree that the role of the churches under the Nazi government is a difficult one and its subject to much debate. The Nazis intended to take the power from the churches (as institutions) so that they won't pose a threat, but in the same turn destroyed atheist and freethinker movements. It is often mentioned that they tried to instantiate "Positive Christianity" with a bible purged from Jewish content. Hardly an atheist step!
Pope Benedikt XVI grew up in this environment! How he managed to completely forget these teachings, eludes me! A Pope surely wouldn't lie to us to just to cast a damning light on the growing atheistic and secular movements?

Moving away from the twisted history lesson, the Pope also speaks of the aggressive secularist movements. Doesn't he mean atheistic movements? There is quite a difference between believing there is no god and the wish to keep church and government separate! Identifying secularists as the opposition can mean that one strives for a more theocratic form of government. A thought that makes me cringe when looking at Islamic countries like Iran and Saudi-Arabia or at the fundamentalist tendencies in the American tea party movement. Again, history books can provide ample examples that theocratic tendencies are not the way forward. Look under "dark ages".

But enough about the Pope's speech. Somehow that was to be expected. Linking Hitler to atheism is a common attempt to demonise atheism and is often used by religious people who say that a real christian could not have done those things. Hearing this reasoning from a contemporary witness just proves that you can believe in everything if you just tell yourself a lie often enough. So I wasn't too surprised or upset after reading the speech. Business as usual.

Then the first articles in German newspapers appeared, commenting on the Pope's visit to the secular island. It was only then when my blood started boiling. I have to note that I so far thought that compared to American news, which is often clearly biased and quick to abandon journalistic principles in order to make their point (FOX news springs to mind), the big German newspapers, although of course also being biased, would adhere to somewhat higher journalistic standards. Apparently I was a bit too optimistic it seems.
In an article in Spiegel Online the author starts by elaborating on the difficulty that the Pope was facing during his visit to a country that is dominated by the protestant church. She then goes on to report about the march of the opponents. The people that came together to demonstrate against the policies of the Pope are described as "Eine unheilige, eine vergnügungssüchtige Koalition von Missbrauchsopfern, Frauenrechtlern, Homosexuellen, Abtreibungsbefürwortern und Kondom-Fans [...]" (Translation: "An unholy, a pleasure-seeking coalition of abuse victims, feminists, homosexuals, pro-abortionists and condom fans [...]"). Now I might be wrong but I have a hard time to imagine a pleasure seeking group of abuse victims marching against the Pope. I would have expected to read such sentences in a catholic church paper, but the Spiegel?
And it didn't get better when I browsed through other big papers! A political comment on Sueddeutsche.de first praised the humility that the Pope has shown in a country that is so anti-catholic, before going against the "allegedly enlightened, rational group which often lacks reason". The author picks out Richard Dawkins as the leader of that group whose criticism of the catholic church can be summarised as "arrogant, intolerant and ignorant" and first explains to the reader that Dawkins must have missed that the church has also learned "the virtue of humility" in its 2000 year history. I must have missed that as well within all the intolerant and ignorant things that happened! After again praising the words of the Pope (who humbly only wants for his church to be listened to) he then complains about the secular criticisms that are presented "with yapping eagerness" and are "at times filled with hate" and that they are only attacking the christian and catholic faith. The author reaches the climax of his reality escapism by proclaiming that "Aber wenn im Islam Frauen gesteinigt werden, schweigen Britanniens Atheisten" (Translation: "But when women are getting stoned in Islam, then Britain's atheists remain silent."). I always wonder whether they only get those authors out of their box once a year in which they could lead happy lives without knowing what happens outside in the world? Atheists around the world actively and loudly oppose every single stoning in the world (not only Iran). Google is your friend here!

Now there are more examples but I guess I made my point here: I didn't expect German newspapers to write too openly against the Pope and his policies. Germany is a predominantly christian country after all. But that they would publish articles that so clearly lack journalistic standard surprised me. Everybody who knows how to use Google can debunk the claims made against the Pope's opponents in mere minutes and every journalist who did a bit of research and would have bothered to read a bit about Dawkins would know that the accusations made in the second article are ridiculous. This is not opinion in a political commentary. These are direct lies or a lack any form of journalistic inquiry - in any case a shame for serious journalism and what I thought those newspapers stand for.

I agree that Dawkins is one of the more aggressive atheists of our time but why should he be less passionate and aggressive than his opponents who also seem to forget that you should love thy neighbour and turn the other cheek? How can you fight against an opponent who can openly lie to the public just to get praised for his humility shortly after? How can you use reason against a Pope who cries in public when he meets abuse victims but who actively tried to ignore the issue for decades and even tried to cover it up until it became too big? Crying now does not help the victims who have suffered since Joseph Ratzinger received the first hints and chose to actively ignore them. You would expect that from a company that tries to save its shares by all means (don't even know where to start with examples) and the church tried to use the same PR tricks. But one thing you can't do afterwards is claiming moral high ground!

Maybe it needs people like Richard Dawkins and all those unholy, passion-seeking people to throw stones at the tower of cards the churches try to defend, to slowly get people thinking (and it seems to work when I look at the loss of members in the north-western churches). If I look at the pure idiocy in speeches of priests and bishops regarding the child abuse cases, I don't think knocking shyly at the door with reasonable arguments will work.

Quote: An Enemy of Humanity

Joseph Ratzinger is an enemy of humanity.

He is an enemy of children, whose bodies he has allowed to be raped and whose minds he has encouraged to be infected with guilt. It is embarrassingly clear that the church is less concerned with saving child bodies from rapists than with saving priestly souls from hell: and most concerned with saving the long-term reputation of the church itself.

He is an enemy of gay people, bestowing on them the sort of bigotry that his church used to reserve for Jews.

He is an enemy of women – barring them from the priesthood as though a penis were an essential tool for pastoral duties. What other employer is allowed to discriminate on grounds of sex, when filling a job that manifestly doesn’t require physical strength or some other quality that only males might be thought to have?

He is an enemy of truth, promoting barefaced lies about condoms not protecting against AIDS, especially in Africa.

He is an enemy of the poorest people on the planet, condemning them to inflated families that they cannot feed, and so keeping them in the bondage of perpetual poverty. A poverty that sits ill with the obscene riches of the Vatican.

He is an enemy of science, obstructing vital stem-cell research, on grounds not of morality but of pre-scientific superstition.

Less seriously from my point of view, Ratzinger is even an enemy of the Queen’s own church, arrogantly endorsing a predecessor's dissing of Anglican Orders as “absolutely null and utterly void”, while shamelessly trying to poach Anglican vicars to shore up his own pitifully declining priesthood.

Finally, perhaps of most personal concern to me, he is an enemy of education. Quite apart from the lifelong psychological damage caused by the guilt and fear that have made catholic education infamous throughout the world, he and his church foster the educationally pernicious doctrine that evidence is a less reliable basis for belief than faith, tradition, revelation and authority – his authority.

Richard Dawkins
(from speech given in Rally against the Pope, 18th September 2010)

Life on a 4-Dimensional Doughnut

Sometimes a simple idea or assumption can lead to an interesting chain of thoughts. I've just watched an educational prime-time program about maths and they ended the episode with one of these ideas, deducted from the maths they were talking about earlier. The program was about dimensions, in particular the 4th dimension.
Imagine you are playing a computer game on your screen. An interesting feature of these games often is that you can walk off one side of the screen and you appear again on the opposite one, e.g. leaving the screen on the left and appearing again on the right. We normally don't think about this very much and just continue with the game. But what does that mean in terms of surface structure if this virtual, 2-dimensional world? How does the world have to be shaped to allow for that to happen?
An intuitive answer of many people would be that it has to have the shape of a sphere. Let's imagine our small 2D walker would stand on a sphere. He could go in any direction and, by walking straight, would reach the point he started from again from exactly the other side. So far so good. But now, think about distances travelled by our small guy. On a sphere, no matter which direction he chooses, the distance to the point of origin is always the same. How about the distances he has to travel in our 2-dimensional world? Even if we imagine the screen to be square, the distance is different for different starting angles (imagine going through one of the corners to appear on the opposite one). So it can't be a sphere!
Let's shape the 2-dimensional world in order to have the desired features. Think of the screen as a piece of paper of the same size. To be able to get to the bottom end by going "off paper" on the top end, we have to bend the paper to form a cylinder. By connecting top and bottom side we enabled our little walker to go back to his point of origin when walking north or south. Now we have to connect left and right by forming a doughnut shape (or more mathematical: a torus), voila! A never ending world for our little wanderer.
Now what have we done? From the viewpoint of our (still) 2-dimensional wanderer, this is a normal 2-dimensional landscape. He just knows that if he walks straight on in his perfectly flat world, he comes back to where he started. Remember: He never experiences up or down (therefore he never thinks of it as a flat world! What else could there be?).
What we (as 3D people) have done is to shape the 2-dimensional world in the 3rd dimension to a 3-dimensional object to do, what the small guy can only think of as magic.

Now let him walk his new world for a while and think about what the 4th dimension could be. To answer this question we can look at the dimensions we already know. To get from dimension 0 (a dot) to the 1st dimension, we can imagine two dots and connect them. Now I can get from one dot to the other by walking along the 1st dimension, passing many other dots on the way. We can do the same to get from the 1st to the 2nd dimension: Every 1-dimensional object is a line. If we draw two lines (imagine parallel ones for simplicity), we can connect them by drawing other lines in between till we filled the space. All these lines are in a 2-dimensional landscape of 1-dimensional lines. The step to the 3rd dimension is equally easy by connecting 2 planes by other planes. If you need a visual aid, you can watch this movie and stop when your head starts hurting (usually around dimension 6 ;-) ).

Suddenly the step from the 3rd to the 4th dimension is easy: We just take two 3-dimensional objects (e.g. yourself) and connect them by other 3D objects going slowly along a line of objects. Think about that for a while and you will see that this is what we normally refer to as time. Just imagine a red cube and a yellow cube and imagine a line of cubes in between slowly changing colour. We can see that all the time in movies! So a 3D-movie as a whole is just a 4-dimensional object, a dot in the 4th dimension, connecting two sets of 3D objects (start and end set of the movie...and before anybody destroys this nice metaphor in a comment, no cuts are allowed!)

Let's go back to where we started with our walker: Now imagine yourself being the wanderer. You walk through a 3-dimensional space. What would it mean to "walk-off the screen"? The space in which we walk a straight line has to be bent in the 4th dimension. From what we did with the piece of paper, this sounds easy! Then we can walk straight and come back to the place we started from. Remember, you would still be walking in the 3rd dimension just like the 2D guy who never left the 2nd dimension on his journeys. (we neglect that it would take time for us to walk there, therefore also moving in the 4th, just imagine you can walk really fast!). What else does that mean?
Some people think that our universe has a toroidal shape (i.e a gigantic doughnut) in the 4th dimension (whatever that looks like). Since light travels in a straight line, if you look really far into the universe, you should be able to see yourself standing there, looking away! But wait, travel needs time (what we've neglected before)! So e.g. the picture of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our solar system, is what it looked like 4.3 years ago. What does that mean in a toroidal universe? One of the stars we can see is our own sun from millions of years ago? What happens if you travel there? If we could travel faster than light, could be arrive on our own planet in the past? Does "beaming" somebody from point A to point B just mean to bend our dimension so that these to points touch through the 4th and push the guy a bit?

So many questions, a long post, and just because I watched a program on TV. And so many more questions to think about.....

Quote: National Security

"If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom."

***

"How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?"

Dwight D. Eisenhower
34th President of the United States
14.10.1890 - 28.03.1969

A new star in comedy heaven

I'm watching American TV quite often because they have good comedy shows. For a few weeks now I'm following the shows of a new comedian. She is really funny! And the media seem to like her, too! I didn't see a comedian getting more airtime and being more discussed in the news. Her name is Sarah Palin.
In her shows and interviews she pretends to be a running mate for McCain and tries to show American voters the pitfalls in conservative politics. With her excessive standpoint she points out where stupidity, narrow-mindedness and fundamentalist viewpoints could lead, when combined in an influential political person.

If only the majority of Americans would see it that way. Let's come back into the real world. Unfortunately roughly 133791000 Americans (21.10) see it differently. For them, Sarah Palin is no reason to vote against McCain as president. Lately, not a single day passed where I didn't ask myself: Why?
American media and conservative politicians deliberately create a culture of fear which, as a new study suggests, might play into the Republican's hands. But that doesn't explain why conservative voters would vote for somebody who is clearly incapable of running a country.

Let's see which traits Sarah Palin has: She likes hunting, is fundamentalist christian (or close), "hockey-mum" and follows small-town values.
This is not a post against religious views, but is somebody who labelled the war in Iraq a "task that is from God" and wants to teach creationism in biology class able to make decisions on a global scale? Who does God want us to attack next? Iran? Pakistan? I think that history has shown that we don't want one of the biggest military forces on the planet in the hands of a (quasi-)theocratic government.
So what else do we have? I googled for small-town values. I wanted to know what exactly they are, but there seems to be a bit of confusion online. I couldn't find a comprehensive list! What comes to my mind when I'm talking about small-town values is narrow-mindedness, babbitts, often subliminal racism and cronyism.
If I look at that list, Sarah Palin apparently really would bring small-town values to Washington. After all, she managed to put those values to good use as major and governor. "She has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance." (NYT). This often happens on a local scale, but are 8 years of small-town values in the White House not enough? Do we really have to push it to the next level?
Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to vote in the USA. But I really beg the American voters to think before making that cross in 2 weeks. A president doesn't need small town-values, but the ability to solve global problems. A president has to be able to make informed decisions which are not dictated by the oil industry and religious fanatics. Science, almost forgotten as a source of information in the last 8 years, can help there if it is not suppressed by political and/or religious agendas. In a global economy, one of the most important issues is an intelligent foreign policy. And being able to see foreign countries from your porch doesn't improve these abilities. It only means you have a property with a good view.

So to all the "real" Americans: Stop being pro-American and start being pro-intelligence and pro-skepticism. America has lost a lot of credibility the last years. You can make a change!

Quote: Web of Discourses

"The strangest and most wonderful construction in the whole animal world are the amazing, intricate constructions made by the primate, Homo sapiens. Each normal individual of this species makes a self. Out of its brain, it spins a web of words and deeds, and, like the other creatures, it doesn't have to know what it's doing; it just does it. The web protects it, just like the snail's shell, and provides it livelihood, just like the spider's web, and advances its prospects for sex, just like the bowerbird's bower. Unlike a spider, an individual human doesn't just exude its web; more like a beaver, it works hard to gather the materials out of which it builds it's protective fortress. Like a bowerbird, it appropriates many found objects which happen to delight it - or its mate - including many that have been designed by others for other purposes.
[...]
So wonderful is the organisation of a termite colony that it seemed to some observers that each termite colony had to have a soul (Marais, 1937). We now understand that its organisation is simply the result of a million semi-independent little agents, each itself an automaton, doing its thing. So wonderful is the organisation of a human self that to many observers it has seemed that each human being had a soul, too: a benevolent Dictator ruling from Headquarters."

Daniel C. Dennett
(in "Conciousness Explained", 1991)