Open letter to Mark Buckle

In the opinion pages of the Otago Daily Times last week - Friday 8^th January, to be precise - I read an actual creationist piece in the paper. I thought this was a little silly, so I sent in a response. The original Opinion piece, written by Mark Buckle, is available to read here.

Here follows my as-yet-unpublished response:

Mark Buckle wrote of the restoring power of ‘knowledge of the Creator’ (ODT, 8.1.10). I would argue that this is certainly not the case – or at least that knowledge of the Creator (or any creator for that matter) is not a necessity for creative restoration.

First off, however, he opines that we're constantly being told new, conflicting knowledge about how to live. This is true, though it has a lot more to do with the sensationalised reporting of science in the media than the actual science – the anti-MMR vaccine hoax in Britain recently is proof of that (not that I think the media are deliberately being facetious, they often, like most of us, just don't know how to handle esoteric and complex scientific reports). However, this doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with the scientific knowledge itself.

Also, we are immensely less afraid that our forebears. We (in the West, at least) are no longer afraid of vampires or zombies or goblins or any of the myriad demons and ghouls that ‘threatened’ us in the middle ages. While we still fear the dark, heights, fire, snakes and spiders and obvious things like death, having survived evolution by developing a mechanism to avoid such things, the things we fear that once lay hidden in the dark, have now, to borrow an analogy from Carl Sagan, have been revealed by the candle of science. Once we know them, we can deal with them rationally. Those who say that our fears have been ‘amplified by our heightened knowledge’ have it wrong: knowledge doesn't lead to greater fear – that fear is constructed by those who oppose knowledge.

Knowing all this ‘stuff’ has brought us closer to life's fundamental needs, because we in the secular, liberal west, have realised that, fundamentally, people need to eat right, have fun and be nice to each other. That's it. We don't need someone telling us that our knowledge is wrong or indeed that our lifestyles are wrong or immoral. We fundamentally need the freedoms granted to us by our advancements through science. To quote comedian Tim Minchin: ‘Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed; faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved.’
He goes on: ‘Life is full of mysteries, yeah, but there are answers out there and they won't be found by people sitting around looking serious and saying, “Isn't life mysterious? Let's sit here and hope.”’ [Seriously, go look up his Storm on YouTube.]

But what really boggled my mind about the opinion piece of Friday the 8th, was that half of it was devoted to creationism, an hypothesis that has so thoroughly been debunked to be barely worth it. The fact of evolution by natural selection is so irrefutable, that even the pope supports it (and he doesn't support a lot of things that he should). Our DNA does not hold evidence of our unique identity, rather it is proof of the interrelatedness of all living things on Earth. To me, the knowledge that I share 50% of the DNA code with a banana is more beautiful and powerful than anything offered by any religion that I have yet come across.

David Attenborough observed it best when he said of those who see beauty in ‘creative design,’ that those people always mean sunsets and flowers, and not the little worm that can only make it's existence by burrowing through the cornea of a starving child in Africa – where is the benevolence in that? I will say no more on evolution, except to point you to a far better argument than any I could conceive: Richard Dawkin's latest book The Greatest Show on Earth. If you read it sincerely and honestly, and don't just skip to the bits that offend your intelligence, you'll find it very persuasive.
To quote Tim Minchin again: ‘Isn't this enough? Just this... world? Just this, beautiful, complex, wonderfully unfathomable, natural world? How does it so fail to hold our attention that we have to diminish it with the invention of cheap, man-made myths and monsters?’

To elaborate on what I wrote above, those that tell us that greater knowledge brings us greater fear are merely trying to hide the fact that it is this greater knowledge that they themselves are afraid of. To quote an oft-quoted paragraph from Carl Sagan: ‘How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant”? Instead the say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, the stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.’

To say that ‘True faith ... relies on a reason of greater comprehension than our own’ serves the dual purposes of being illogical, metaphysical garbage and of also being designed to be non-arguable. If the countless people from various cultures and religions have taught you that faith in Jesus Christ is revolutionary and removes fear, are you selectively ignoring those of the Muslim faith who have the same kind of faith in the words of the prophet Muhammed, or of the Jews or Hindus? Or Atheists? Or have you never really known any of them, only assumed that they must be unfulfilled and incomplete based on your own biases, ignorance and bigotry? I realised a long time ago that belief in Jesus Christ only superficially removes fear, and when I discovered that religion is design (not deliberately, mind you) to instill fear so as to control people, I got away from it as fast as I could.

True change comes from being free of mental controls, from being free from accusations of thought crimes. To be able to think and express oneself freely, regardless of one's belief's is true freedom. We only have one life – only one that you can empirically or logically prove – and the brevity of this life makes it all the more worth living.

One final quote from Minchin: ‘If perchance I have offended, think of this and all is mended: we'd as well be 10 minutes back in time, for all the chance you'll change your mind.’

This has not yet been published yet (15.1.10) and I don't expect it to - not in the ODT at least. I can see them wringing their hands over all the apparent offences in this piece. But I'd like to point out one further thing.

Mark Buckle is a pastor at Fernhill Church in Dunedin and it appears that he has in the past delivered the opening prayer at the council meetings. He's written a few opinion pieces in the ODT and they all seem quite similar - he doesn't have a clue what he's on about - even misquoting Karl Marx (the famous "opiate of the people" line which is very easy to check that you've got it right these days. It's nice to think we could just ignore him and his ilk, but we can't. This sort of thinking is muddying the waters that we're trying to clear.

At worst, it's dangerous thinking that sets people against one another. At best, it's offensive to those of us who don't share his belief and don't like being told that we're non-creative sinners.

'Probably' No God?

So, the Atheist Bus Campaign has come to New Zealand. Once again, the promoters are being asked why the 'probably' is in the phrase.

While it would be nice - and the promoters all 'probably' believe so - to say "There is definitely no God," this runs into two issues. The first is that the 'probably' softens the blow to those not so keen on blasphemy. While I personally think that, regardless of what you believe, it is everyone's moral imperative to blaspheme - if only because we're told not to - blasphemy isn't everyone's cup of tea, so it's probably best to avoid it (even if you're only technically avoiding it).

However, given that people are going to be offended by these adverts anyway, this is a relatively minor reason.

The real reason for its existence, is that to exclude the 'probably' would be to lose scientific integrity. The question of God's existence is one that is insoluble. There is no way that you can prove that He exists, but neither can you prove a negative. This might sound a little more agnostic than atheistic, but it's not - it's an appeal to the rigours of logic. An Agnostic Bus Campaign would read more like "There's no way of knowing if there is a God or not." It's more scientifically accurate, but less to the point. Agnostics might like it, but probably won't put it on a bus. (Well, after the success of the Atheist campaign, they might...)

The atheist, like the agnostic, prefers to use the term 'probably,' but unlike the agnostic makes a point of saying that for all intents and purposes, we might as well say there is no God - for the same reason that we say that there are no faeries, no zombies, no unicorns, vampires, Thor, Quezacotl, Wotan, Zeus, Reptiods or any other mythological things. Strictly speaking, we must be agnostic to all these things (for you can never prove they don't exist), but we don't. I'm as much an aunicornist as the next person. But, ask a scientist (when they are in scientist mode, that is - not when on their coffee break) and they will say "there are probably no vampires," but that doesn't mean we need to start funding vampire hunters.

Of course, that's just my opinion. The great thing about Atheism is that every individual atheist is welcome to make their own minds up about what the word means to them and how to interpret it. I personally feel that agnosticism is a weak form of atheism and doesn't really say what you believe while tempering the wrath of the religious (in some places in the world, this is an important thing to do). But Michael Shermer thinks otherwise, as he pointed out in his book How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science. He proudly uses the term 'agnostic' and he's entirely at liberty to disagree with me. That's why I love the English language - it's so vague and malleable (many people see this as a hindrance, but I don't).

So that little three syllable word continues to cause a bit of discussion, but that is the whole point in the campaign - to open discussion about the nature of the question of God's existence and how we let that question rule our lives. We mustn't hide our ignorance behind the veiled charge of 'blasphemy.'

Rapture Imminent!

Found this here (don't go there: too much crazy, not enough layout).

Hmm, that's interesting. Just the other day it said:


Should I keep an eye on it to see if we all die on the 21st?

No.

[UPDATE, 22^nd Dec 2009 - 6:44 am CST: Unfortunately, we're still here...]

[UPDATE, 15^th Jan 2010: I think they keep moving the goal posts...]

Why are people opposed to Wind Farms?

Personally I find them awesome. Meridian Energy is trying to build a farm in Central Otago, NZ, has been for years. Recently they managed to put a few up, but it took them a long time. There was a lot of pressure from local groups - mainly headed by artists - to prevent them from being built. Their arguments against wind farms fall into four categories:

They're noisy, They kill birds, they're not "green" and they look ugly.

Noisy? Well, to be truthful, yes, they are noisy. But they're also typically built, like most power-plants, away from residential zones. In Europe and the US, you can find them built close to homes, but this doesn't affect property prices, which suggests to me that the noise isn't that much of a factor.

Do you know what else is noisy? Roads, highways, railway lines. These things already exist and are far noisier than wind turbines. Also, modern turbines are designed to minimise noise.

The wind farms in New Zealand are being built and are planned to be built away from residential zones - in the middle of Central Otago. They are near large sheep stations and other farms, not near houses.

So noise isn't a problem.

As for killing birds, yes, wind turbines kill birds. But, do you know what? So do buildings. Birds die by flying into buildings. Read that a few more times to make sure it sinks in. Birds die by flying into buildings. Not thrown into buildings. The buildings don't jump out and get them. They fly into large, stationary, obvious buildings. Migrating birds have been shown to avoid turbines and there are other ways of making them safe for birds, such as putting coloured bars or lights on the blades or using high-pitched noise to scare the birds away. If birds are going to be killed by flying into things, then I expect evolution to provide us with smarter birds.

So, birds aren't a problem.

As for being "green," the argument is over the pollutants involved in manufacturing the turbines. I hardly think that this is an issue considering that wind turbine production is a minor part in a larger industrial climate. Car manufacturing, computers and a whole host of other things are far worse. These industrial techniques, materials and pollutants already exist. I don't think that "wind power–dominated countries will be left with millions of tons of scrap metal which cannot be recycled" - this is a massive overstatement and we already have millions of tons of scrap metal to deal with. And we do deal with it. The other methods of generating power - coal, gas, nuclear, etc., have far worse pollutants than anything wind turbines will ever put out.

So pollution is far from being a problem

The only remaining complaint is that they look ugly. This is not an argument. This is just stupid. When I'm a multi-billionaire, I'm going to buy all the property next to the artists and others who oppose wind farms, and I'm going to build coal plants with large smoke stacks on them - right next to where they live. Will they think that's a nicer alternative?

Wind farms look cool. I want one. As I made the point above, nobody lives there (in NZ at least) and the visual impact is minimal.

We need to generate more energy - our population is growing. There are a number of ways to do this. Coal, Gas, Nuclear, Solar, Wind, Hydro and Tidal. We are trying to get as far away form coal and gas as possible, solar takes too much space to be viable in a country like New Zealand (too low solar irradiance), tidal is still in it's infancy (and you'll get the same people arguing against that for the same reasons - except that tidal generators need to be closer to populated areas, so we have Nuclear and Wind as the green alternatives.

Nuclear is green only in the short term - at the moment, climate change is a big enough threat to justify the nuclear waste produced, but it's something we'll have to deal with in the future. Nuclear power is also something that New Zealand can never use. We fought so hard to get ban it.

Hydro uses a phenomenal amount of land and the rotting plants they cover produce methane - when they flood forests, they can release more effective carbon than an equivalent coal plant - kW for kW.

So the only option left is wind. It's clean, there's plenty of it in NZ and it looks awesome. And if Graham Sydney doesn't like it, he can just paint over them. Seriously, you're an artist, not an expert on energy and the environment. Being a successful artist doesn't mean your opinion warrants any merit.

OK, so I've glossed over a few things and cherry-picked my data a little, but wind turbines are just great. They're awesome machines and they look cool. I think we should build heaps of them - Mt Sunday (where they filmed 'Edoras' in the Lord of the Rings) would be the perfect place for a farm; the wind there apparently averages about 150 km/h.

Is it just me, or is Christmas coming up?

Apparently it's Christmas. I can tell by the carols and songs blaring like sugary Muzak in the malls along with all the hideous decorations throughout town and all through the shops. If rate-payers are going to pay for civic Christmas decorations, they should at least get new ones every year, not pull out the same, dirty, 20 year old baubles and tinsely crap and hang them over our streets.

Now I may be a bit of a humbug - a few years working at Burger King (even part-time) is enough to make anyone a cynic, but add to that the fact that the BK I worked at is in a mall with the same 10 Christmas songs on infinite loop blaring inescapably in all corners of the mall throughout all of December and half of November and the season quickly starts to grate.

I refuse to listen to the radio during the Christmas season in order to maintain my daily dose of not listening to Snoopy's Christmas - which I would sooner be water-boarded than listen to again.

Yes, I hate Christmas. The annoying decorations, the music - especially how everyone has to put out a Christmas album - the sales, advertising and shopping rush, the TV shows telling you how to make the lunch easier to cook, American sitcoms that have some horrible accident happen on Christmas Eve but everything comes right by midnight then the church-bells ring and it starts snowing as if it's a miracle that Christmas actually happens and that it's even more miraculous for it to snow in winter and so on and so on (that might be more indicative of my disdain for sitcoms). Don't get me wrong: I love giving and receiving presents - it's just annoying to have to do it for everyone, all at once.

Now, I'm not saying that we should stop celebrating Christmas and I'm certainly not saying that it shouldn't be a holiday, I'd just like a nice, quiet Christmas, free from all the carols, decorations and TV specials. No hassles like complicated dinners and making sure the Tree looks right. (Seriously, the Tree is the tradition I am equally most puzzled about and most annoyed by - "Let's stick a tree inside and vomit baubles and tinsel on it and cover it in lights!" Utter nonsense.)

I'm an atheist, so I don't believe in all the Jesus stuff, but I don't want to cancel Christmas - we need statutory holidays - both so we can get a day off or can get paid time-and-a-half if we choose to work - and we might as well stick with the holidays that already exist - they're arbitrary anyway. Christmas, Easter, Labour day, Waitangi day or the equivalent in whatever country you're from and others. Christmas was the celebration of Midwinter - celebrating that the sun was now moving north in the sky (relative to pagans, not the solar system) and spring was on it's way. We have summer in New Zealand over Christmas, but by the time the colonists came to the Antipodes, it had become synonymous with the birth of Christ, so we were stuck with December 25th.

So, it's a nice excuse to take a day off, spend time with your family (or your cat if you're alone) and exchange gifts. But do we really need a special day for Peace on Earth and Goodwill to All Men (and, I suppose, Women too)? Why do we need to be told to be nice to everyone? I like to think I'm nice to everyone regardless of what day it is. If we set one day aside for being nice, does that mean we get to be arseholes for the rest of the year? Do we hate our family for the whole year? And if we do, why must we pretend to like each other on Christmas?

Maybe I'd like it more if it was balanced. I propose another holiday on June 25th. Anti-Christmas. Where we're all rude to each other, we don't have fancy dinners, prices go up, all radio stations play death metal, and we make sure not to give any presents to anyone, but instead tell everyone what we truly thought of their presents at Christmas. There will be a moratorium on wrapping paper. We can't kill the baby Jesus, because Easter already takes care of that, but we can at least be bitter.

So a merry arbitrary holiday and a happy new Gregorian cycle.

I don't like TV Psychics

Once a week, on New Zealand magazine TV program Good Morning, psychic Sue Nicholson appears with a handful of emails to perform 'readings' for various viewers. 'Perform' is the key word here, because it is my opinion that she is merely performing and it is my opinion on her performance that I give here

Yesterday morning, she annoyed me. It doesn't take much for a charlatan to annoy me, but she was particularly annoying in this instance.

One caller (they're actually called by the station after they email in all their details) was told that her late niece was born just so that she could make the family happy for 16 years then die. In her defense she was trying to say that the family should celebrate the time they had with her, instead of mourning her passing, but it seemed quite insulting to the dead girl that she should be regarded as a thing for the enjoyment of the family, to die once her usefulness was fulfilled.

Maybe I'm reading between the lines here. It's something I like to think I avoid, but always end up doing, so I'll be a bit more careful.

A later caller had a relative who had committed suicide and was desperate to contact her. In what was an (I'm sure in the psychic's mind, a noble) attempt at stopping the bereaved woman from blaming herself, Nicholson told her that there was nothing she could do and, after telling her that it's harder for suicide victims (I use the term 'victim' very deliberately) to "cross over," but it's OK, because she has.

But what might seem an innocuous attempt at convincing a grieving lady to not blame herself, Nicholson actually told her that when someone is suicidal, they are in a very dark place and you cannot reach them. This set off my bullshit alarm.

She reiterated this about 2 times: When someone is suicidal, there is nothing you can do about it. That's not reading between the lines; that's effectively what she said.

As someone who has been suicidal and knows several others who are, this is the last thing that people need to be told. New Zealand is a country with high suicide rates. We've been dropping since the late 1990s, when major public health campaigns to remove the stigma and myth surrounding mental illness began. Statements like Nicholsons are false and damaging. Suicidal people can be reached and need to be reached. And to spout on about them being cloaked in some sort of impenetrable cloak of dark spirits is archaic and dangerous. It flys in the face of the last century of psychiatry and earlier forms of care tracing back to medieval Islamic states. Depressed people are not possessed by demons and they can be helped.

That's not to say that I'm blaming the family for not acting; far from it. Suicidal depression often goes undetected by family and many people feel powerless against it. Even psychiatrists struggle to help those with the illness - without hospitalization, it's next to impossible to make sure people are taking their medication. The reality is that without educating the wider public about the symptoms and realities of living with and treating depression, it is very hard to do anything. The families affected by suicide - and I've seen it rip families apart - would be better off told this, than by saying that suicidal people can't be helped. If we blame the disease, we'll be more active in trying to combat it, than fighting intangible spirits.

This is where psychic mediums move from being sideshow curiosities to being dangerous. When charlatans are given authority to speak on things they know nothing about and are propping up their own careers on the memories of the dead they become dangerous.

If she has some insights into how depression works, maybe she should write a paper and submit for peer review, but I don't think that she'll be doing that. She knows full well that it won't stand up to scrutiny. She knows full well that she'll be laughed out of every university and every scientific journal. She knows full well, that she's talking out of her arse to float her career on the pillaged memories of deceased loved ones - she might as well urinate on their graves.

I said before that it's a performance. I sincerely believe that it is. Otherwise, instead of giving 'readings' on television, she would be in the psychiatric hospitals, chasing away all those dark spirits.


... Do you get the impression that I don't like TV Psychics?

This man is going to sue me if I publish his photo:

... so I'd better not do that. That would just be asking for trouble.

Hello. Mr Wainscotting here.

I thought I'd try my hand at blogging, since I seem to care a lot about stuff and want a space where I can pretend I'm making a difference. So this is it.

Readers will soon pick up on my liberal bent, my skepticism, and the fact that I regard politicians fair game.

So sit back and enjoy the ride that is my blog.