Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence

Fifty renowned academics speaking about god

I find it difficult to argue against the claims of any these 50 brilliant people.

As always the wonderful Carl Sagan puts it beautifully:

"What is faith? It is belief in the absence of evidence. Now I don't propose to tell anybody what to believe, but for me, believing when there is no compelling evidence is a mistake. The idea is to withhold belief until there is compelling evidence. And if the universe does not comply with our predispositions, OK then we have the wrenching obligation to accommodate to the way the Universe really is."

To slightly change Darwin's quote: there is a grandeur in this view of the Universe, but I would only add one thought to those of those in the video. Although reason and evidence compels us to a non-religious world view there is still a sense of loss when we reject religious belief. Consequently my feelings are most closely aligned to the great 19^th century poet, Matthew Arnold when he wrote in Dover Beach:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

The Cigar Song

Here is an entertaining song by Brad Paisley about an insurance scam.



I became aware of this story when I received the email below from a friend:

You couldn't make this up!

BEST LAWYER / INSURANCE STORY OF THE YEAR,
DECADE, AND POSSIBLY THE CENTURY.

This took place in Charlotte, North Carolina. A lawyer purchased a box of very rare and expensive cigars, then insured them against, among other things, fire.

Within a month, having smoked his entire stockpile of these great cigars, the lawyer filed a claim against the insurance company.

In his claim, the lawyer stated the cigars were lost 'in a series of small fires' ... The insurance company refused to pay, citing the obvious reason, that the man had consumed the cigars in the normal fashion.

The lawyer sued and WON! ( Stay with me. )

Delivering the ruling, the judge agreed with the insurance company that the claim was frivolous. The judge stated nevertheless, that the lawyer held a policy from the company, in which it had warranted that the cigars were insurable and also guaranteed that it would insure them against fire, without defining what is considered to be unacceptable 'fire' and was obligated to pay the claim.

Rather than endure lengthy and costly appeal process, the insurance company accepted the ruling and paid $15,000 to the lawyer for his loss of the cigars that perished in the 'fires'.

NOW FOR THE BEST PART...

After the lawyer cashed the cheque, the insurance company had him arrested on 24 counts of ARSON!!!

With his own insurance claim and testimony from the previous case being used against him, the lawyer was convicted of intentionally burning his insured property and was sentenced to 24 months in jail and a $24,000 fine. This true story won First Place in last year's Criminal Lawyers Award contest..

ONLY IN AMERICA .... NO WONDER THE REST OF THE WORLD THINKS THEY'RE NUTS!

The heading of this email is somewhat ironic as the story was made up, as shown here, here and here .

For more information on email hoaxes see this post.

Science under attack

Gvien that the evidence that the planet is warming and that the primary cause involves human activities, a view that is supported by the vast majority of people who are expert in this issue, why do we hear so much denial of reality.

Nobel Prize winner Sir Paul Nurse, who is also President of the Royal Society, investigates this issue in the horizon documentary below.

This is a fairly gentle response which comes to the conclusion that scientists have to be more active in explaining and defending their work from those who would attack it. This is fair enough, though I wonder if Nurse would be so calm and measured if the likes of Singer and Delingpole came after his work in the dishonest and deceitful way that they attack the climate scientists. My suspicion is that he would take the sort of strong defense shown by Ben Santer in this post.

Don't Believe Everything that you Read on the Internet

I received the following email recently:

AFL or NRL ? Guess

36 have been accused of spouse abuse
7 have been arrested for fraud
19 have been accused of writing bad cheques
117 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses
3 have done time for assault
71, repeat 71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit
14 have been arrested on drug-related charges
8 have been arrested for shoplifting
21 currently are defendants in lawsuits and
84 have been arrested for drunk driving in the last year

Can you guess which organization this is? AFL? NRL?



Give up yet? . . . .... Scroll down




Neither, it's the 535 members of the AUSTRALIAN PARLIAMENT IN CANBERRA


The same group of Idiots that crank out hundreds of new laws each
year, designed to keep the rest of us in line.

This ties in nicely with the general dislike of politicians, so lots of people will be happy to believe it. Sadly the claims aren't true. This post isn't really about playing the spoil sport and ruining a good story with the facts . My aim is to foster skepticism about claims that are made on the Internet.

As soon as I read the email I was suspicious, as I was sure that there weren't 535 members of the Australian Parliament. I pasted the following
number of members in australian parliament
into google and found a number of sites including this one.

So there are 150 members in the House of Representatives and 76 in the Senate making a grand total of 226 members of the Australian Parliament.

With this information the claims in the email are clearly absurd - 51% of members have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses or 31% cannot get a credit card due to bad credit?

So where did the "information" in this email come from?

I selected most of the text of the email and pasted it into google?

The site at this link was the fourth in the Google list.

A quick perusal of this site shows that the "information" in the email originated in the United States. It also shows that the info is dubious in a US context.

The person who adapted these claims to an Australian context clearly knew that the claims made were not true, as they made four changes to make the claims appear to relate to Australia.

If you have any opinion as to the motivation of someone to make and spread such hoaxes, leave a comment by clicking on "Post a Comment" at the bottom of this post.

There are many of these email hoaxes circulating, here are a few that I have received recently:

the Nine Zero Hash Phone Scam hoax

the 1954 Home Computer hoax

the Mars bigger than the Moon hoax

the Remus Rudd hoax

the Oliver North warns about Osama Bin Laden hoax

the Mohammed Atta released hoax

the Mall Celebration of 9/11hoax

the Baby in car seat hoax

the Budweiser Celebration of 9/11 hoax. I checked the local paper The Bakersfield Californian and found this article that supports the claim that the email is a hoax - scroll down to the last 6 paragraphs of the story.

the Black in the Whitehouse hoax. Here is confirmation that this is a hoax from the anti-virus company McAfee.

the Cigar Arsonist. The email that I received claiming that this story was true was headed You Can't Make this Stuff Up!, unfortunately it is clear that it was almost certainly made up. A song called The Cigar Song has been written about this scam.

the Nokia Mobile Draw scam. I recieved the following text message:

YOUR MOBILE NUMBER HAS WON YOU $ 2,MILLION IN THE NOKIA MOBILE DRAW UK.FOR CLAIMS, EMAIL US: (Ticket: BAN101Q/NAME/LOCATION): nkprom@live.com, Call: +447035959397

I was immediately suspicious and when I googled the message I found this site which confirmed my impression that this was a scam text.

The Pattern Behind Self-deception

Michael Shermer is the editor of Skeptic magazine. I already have two TED talks by Michael, here and here

TED describes this talk as follows:

Michael Shermer says the human tendency to believe strange things -- from alien abductions to dowsing rods -- boils down to two of the brain's most basic, hard-wired survival skills. He explains what they are, and how they get us into trouble.

James Randi takes down psychic fraudsters

Randi is an icon of rationality. Here is a passionate attack on the psychics, detailing the fraudulent ways that they decieve their victims.

Strange Beliefs

In this video Michael Shermer gives examples of strange beliefs that people hold.