Why I Hate Conspiracy Theories.

A friend of mine posted a blog article in defense of his love of conspiracy thinking. The article did this by listing 16 theories that turned out to be 'true.' They ranged from "rasslin' is fake," to "all science is a lie." I'm not going to link to the blog post, because he didn't bother linking to any of his sources, and when he did his sources turned out to be other conspiracy theory websites and I would often have to spend half an hour tracking down the actual source, so fuck him. His moniker is Blindfold, though, if you want to track it down yourself.

So I spent all of my Sunday morning tracking down a lot of the relevant facts, or lack thereof. And since I will be neither blatantly making shit up nor screaming into an echo chamber full of like-minded extremists, I will provide links to relevant sources. And they won't just circle back to my own blog, because I try not to be a lying dick. I also might just be plain old wrong about some stuff. Because that happens.

Point the Zeroth: Always Bet on the Least Plausible Outcome

The piece begins by encouraging the reader to be more open-minded towards the tinfoil hat crowd, as they are so often right about so many things. In fact, a recent study found that Conspiracy Theorists (CTs,) are more sane than normal-brained people. The linked article absolutely does not make the claim that CTs are 'more sane' than non-CTs. The only potentially negative trait associated with accepting the official narrative was hostility, although

"there is a risk that [the researchers] may not have captured the full spectrum of responses, as we specifically excluded comments that consisted solely of threats, insults, or ridicule." 

Apart from that, CTs were found to be more distrustful, more likely to confuse unexplained with unexplainable, more likely to make arguments from ignorance and assertion, and were found to be more concerned with arguing against the official narrative and raising trivial objections than supplying viable alternative explanations.

Source:

Wood, Douglas. A social psychological study of online discussion of 9/11 conspiracy theories:

 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3703523/

Point the First: Monkey Cancer Vaccines. For Real.

Despite the article providing a 404 error as their source, there is, and has been, tons of information about SV40 and vaccines widely available on the web from reputable, agenda free sources. Well, I say agenda free, but there is a definite bias towards reality. For example, the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia states that

1. SV40 was present in cancers of people who either had or had not received the poliovaccine that was contaminated with SV40.
2. SV40 has not been present in any vaccine since 1963.
3. People with cancers who were born after SV40 was no longer a contaminant of the polio vaccine were found to have evidence for SV40 in their cancerous cells.
4. Using current techniques, it is difficult to distinguish SV40 virus from other common and related viruses.
5. Epidemiologic studies do not show an increased risk of cancers in those who received polio vaccine between 1955 and 1963.

I've written about simian virus 40 before on the blog, so I'm not going to rehash it other than to dump some links to relevant information.

Source:

Children's Hospital of Philadelphia: http://www.chop.edu/service/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety/vaccine-ingredients/sv40.html 

Other crap: http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Drugs/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInformation/EnforcementActivitiesbyFDA/CyberLetters/ucm059189.pdf 

http://www.fda.gov/ICECI/EnforcementActions/WarningLetters/2006/ucm076069.htm 

http://www.casewatch.org/fdawarning/prod/2011/mercola.shtml

Point the Second: ATM Machine Facial Recognition Software

I believe the author is confusing "easily foreseeable advances in consumer technology," with "conspiracy theory." Also: the Office of Unnecessary Redundancy Office would like to speak with the author.

Point the Third: Monsanto and the Government are Vanishing Anti-GMO Activists, Maybe

Genetically modified foods are currently the only option we have for feeding ourselves over the next quarter of a century. Crop-burning, anti-GMO activists/eco-terrorists like Greenpeace should be opposed, because they're dangerous, misguided idiots. Every study performed about the safety of GMO's (save for the sole long-debunked and almost comically flawed Seralini article,) has found that GMO's are about as safe as could be reasonably expected, and certainly better than any of the alternatives.

Apart from all of that: The source provided by the article leads back (eventually,) to a German newspaper reporting that some anti-Monsanto activists claimed that Monsanto attacked their computers. And while it's no secret that Monsanto and the US government have a history of shady dealings, there is no evidence that Monsanto had anything to do with the alleged cyber-attack. It does sound like a sorta-okay premise for a sci-fi movie though.

Sources:

GMOs and World Hunger: http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/124/2/487

Overview of the Seralini Affair: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9ralini_affair

Bad Science and GMOs: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2012/09/24/bad-science-on-gmos-it-reminds-me-of-the-antivaccine-movement/

Süddeutsche Zeitung: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/ (The sustainablepulse article [itself linked from the activistpost article {itself linked from the original piece}] didn't bother to link to the original article. Burying the source material three or four pages deep and forcing the reader to search through the relevant website themselves is really common with conspiracy articles. I don't even know if this is an intentional tactic to weed out the insincere, but it certainly functions as one. If anyone knows German, feel free to search for it yourself.)

Point the Fourth: Science is Using GM Animals for Research. MILLIONS OF IT!

I didn't realize this was a conspiracy. Unless official releases from the government outlining the facts regarding common practices qualify as conspiracies. Regardless, Blindfold doesn't give the source for his story (surprise, surprise). I managed to track it (through pages and pages of conspiracy theory websites,) to a report published by the UK's Home Office, as ordered by the House of Commons, titled "Annual Statistics of Scientific Procedures on Living Animals."

The increase in GM animal use is explained, according to Dr Ted Bianco of Wellcome Trust:

"The scientific community is deeply committed to reducing the numbers of animals used in research, but despite significant progress, animals remain an essential part of helping us understand disease and develop much-needed new treatments. This year's increase reflects the use of powerful techniques to help us model with greater accuracy human disease. In particular, the inclusion of genetically-modified mice, whose breeding alone counts as a procedure, is largely behind this increase, but will ultimately allow us to reduce the number of animals used."

So, yeah. Evil scientists and their evil science. Or something.

Sources:

Home Office Report: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/212610/spanimals12.pdf

Expert reaction to same: http://www.sciencemediacentre.org/?p=21632&upm_export=print

Point the Fifth: Animal Human Hybrids! Chimera People! Stem Cells! GMGMGM!

I didn't realize this was a conspiracy either. At least among people that don't get their news solely from potheads and drunk construction workers at bars, at any rate. I can see how it could pose a moral quandary, though, as replacing faulty heart valves in humans with valves from cows or pigs is widely accepted, but mixing human stem cells with other embryonic animals, which could raise the effectiveness of such transplants, seems to cross some anthropocentric line with some people.

As far as I can tell, this is yet another 'science is evil because God' argument being made by certain segments of the scientifically illiterate religious population, most of whom don't seem to even know what, exactly, is being debated.

Source:

Chimera controversy: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0125_050125_chimeras.html

Point the Sixth: Obama is Spying on the Spies Spying on the Spies...

Blindfold provides his own blog as a source. Well, I'm an 800 year old time traveler. I said so yesterday, so it must be true. You know what? I don't have enough information to say one way or the other. It seems fucking unlikely, though, as one would imagine people like Blindfold and Alex Jones would be the first to be vanished if it were true. Given how incompetent the US government is at almost everything else, I doubt that they got The Perfect Police Surveillance State right.

Point the Seventh: Professional Wrestling is Fake. Seriously.

THIS qualifies as a conspiracy? The two 300 lb steroid monsters that go on tour together and jump, professionally, on each others heads aren't really trying to kill each other? Way to ferret out the truth there, Bernstein.

But seriously, you figured out that professional wrestling is fake and not human corpses filled with demons and goat blood and reanimated by the Rothschild banking cartel as part of a modern panem et circenses to distract the modern poor from the NWO's nefarious plan. That's something. So, point to Team Lunatic for siding with reality for once.

Point the Eighth: Texas is Running Out of Water.

That's not a conspiracy. That's basic fucking math. Pollution + population growth + limited supply of fresh water + no plan to address any of the above.

Point the Ninth: IRS Targets Conservatives

Again, no source. Even granted that it happens/ed, this wasn't treated as a conspiracy until after the story broke. As far as I know, "I knew it all along!" is not a credible demonstration of predictive utility. As for the IRS, why, exactly, wouldn't they examine the tax records of Tea Party groups? You know, the political extremist tax protesters whose entire political worldview consists of the first half of "No taxation without representation." I can't imagine why the IRS may think those good people might be hiding something from them.

But the fact is that there aren't enough facts to definitively state that it was a conspiracy to target Tea Party groups for political reasons, or just a misguided time-saving measure instilled by someone at the IRS, or something else entirely. It's currently under review. Anything else is speculation and should be treated as such.

Point the Tenth: Fluoride is Evil Because!

Blindfold links to a CNN post. CNN is not a fucking expert on dentistry. Or chemistry. Their commenters sure as fuck aren't either, although I may be biased in disregarding claims like "im a denist in a small town with no floride and we have no cavity problem." None of the conspiracists can even agree on what, exactly, is so EVIL about water fluoridation. Disposal of industrial waste via human kidneys? Causing more tooth loss? Keeping people docile? Giving children cancer? Nanny-state overreach? Communists seeking to impurify our vital liquids? Speeding up the aging process? Shills for Big Pharma doing...something nefarious? Slack-jawed idiots demonstrating the woeful state of our educational system by banging wildly at their keyboards while not understanding the basic difference between fluoride and sodium fluoride? Literally all of those claims are made in the first page of comments on that post.

Sources:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/01/07/fluoride.recommendations/index.html

http://www.theage.com.au/national/health/the-tooth-hurts-dental-expert-is-eager-to-expose-the-cavities-in-fluoride-conspiracy-theories-20130907-2tbnu.html

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation

The Fluoride Debate, with expert commentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2BlJRtsQrgo




Point the Eleventh: Cell Phones Give You Cancer!

No sources. I know, I'm a dick for expecting them. The claim that "an increasing number of studies" support this dickhead's silly-ass assertion is dubious at best, as a Google Scholar search for his quote "At the highest exposure levels — using a mobile phone half an hour a day over a 10-year period — the study found a 40 percent increased risk of glioma brain tumors" yielded exactly zero matches. Exactly. Zero. I counted. So it very probably didn't come from a legitimate scholarly source and likely wasn't even a 'study.'

There are, however, legitimate studies of the relationship between increased cell phone usage and cancer rates. Unfortunately for Blindfold they conclude that "The results of this investigation, the first nationwide cancer incidence study of cellular phone users, do not support the hypothesis of an association between use of these telephones and tumors of the brain or salivary gland, leukemia, or other cancers," and that "a weight-of-evidence evaluation shows that the current evidence for a causal association between cancer and exposure to RF energy is weak and unconvincing."

Just to be fair, cell phones are new things, so who knows, maybe in twenty years when we're all dead from brain tumors the CT crowd can tell me they told me so.

Sources:

Johansen, Boice, et al. Cellular Telephones and Cancer: http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/93/3/203.short

Moulder, Foster, et al. Mobile phones, mobile phone base stations and cancer: http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09553000500091097

Point the Twelfth: Prescription Drugs Kill People

This is less of a conspiracy and more a fundamental problem with the United States' for-profit healthcare system and relative impotence of the FDA. And here I was thinking that the FDA was the bad guy for the tinfoil hat crowd. I guess both the pharmaceutical industry and any regulatory boards pertaining to it are both part of a larger conspiracy.

Unless and until we, as a people, are willing to have a grown up discussion about socialized medicine then it will remain a problem. At some point we're going to just have to accept that as bad as Big Gummit can be, it is less bad than Big Pharma, at least in this area.

Source for the unsourced source:

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/01/deadly-medicine-201101

Point the Thirteenth: Liberal Elitists Call for Eugenics!

Blindfold proves this by providing quotes from David Rockefeller, Ted Turner, John Holdren, Paul Ehrlich, and Bill Maher. I say "providing quotes," but half of them are just links to infowars articles.

The Rockefeller, Turner, and Holdren quotes that appear here seem to have sprung forth directly from the collective hive-mind of the Illiterati blogosphere, like some kind of electric fungus that grows on large spots of confirmation bias and malice. I'm not saying they didn't say these things. I'm not even saying they didn't say them in context. But unless someone provides a source for the quotes I'm not going to take some guy named Blindfold's word for it.

The Ehrlich quote,

 “To our minds, the fundamental cure, reducing the scale of the human enterprise (including the size of the population) to keep its aggregate consumption within the carrying capacity of Earth is obvious but too much neglected or denied.”

while accurate, is also an example of quote-mining and the power of decontextualization. Ehrlich is speaking of basic, common sense practices to keep society within the sustainable limits of planet earth, like not having so damn many kids. There literally is only so much fresh water to go around. Remember? That was part of Point Eight of your own damn article, Blindfold. If population growth continues to increase at its current rate we will, seriously, not to be a dick, hit an upper resource limit. Ehrlich is pointing this out and stating that the best course forward is to slow our reproduction rate.

Bill Maher, on the other hand, is a blowhard liberal comedian and should be treated as such. I happen to like him, but I would never consider him an expert source for information on overpopulation. And certainly wouldn't take anything he said as a call for genocide. If Blindfold can't tell the difference between an obvious use of hyperbole to make a comedic point and an insidious plan to execute grandparents and unwanted children then he likely has far more pressing concerns than what late night talk show hosts have to say. Like growing a sense of humor or building that shrine made of cat ears his lawnmower keeps telling him to build, or having his shoelaces taken away so he doesn't try to stab an orderly with them.

Source for the Ehrlich story which, lets face it, is the only potentially relevant one that doesn't appear to be completely made up: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/paul-ehrlich-nobody-has-right-have-12-children-or-even-3

Point the Fourteenth: Satanists are Killing People! For SATAN!

Speaking of mental illness: Blindfold provides a link to one example of this epidemic happening once. ONE example does not make a pattern. The church has been warning us about this for hundreds of years, and you can provide one example of it actually happening? I could probably find one example per week of Christian faith healing directly leading to the death of a child in the States. Why isn't Blindfold concerned with that? Even if Meraz-Espinoza's murder of his mother isn't a case of "he's fucking crazy," it doesn't mean the act was directly motivated by Satan because Satan doesn't fucking exist. Neither does the Christian god. Both are just examples of dumb motherfuckers doing dumb motherfucker shit because that's what dumb motherfuckers do.

Meraz-Espinoza story: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jul/18/local/la-me-satanic-killer-sentencing-20130718

Point the Fifteenth: The Spies That Are Spying on Each Other While They Spy on Us Are, in Fact, SPYING ON US!

Well, yes. That is what the Patriot Act did. It wasn't a conspiracy. It was a highly publicized response to the 9/11 attack. I don't think the problem is as far-reaching and pervasive as most CTs would like it to be, as that would involve 60% of the population spying on the other 40% for a living and it'd get pretty fucking lonely around here. I'd personally (and rather charitably, I feel,) say that this is an example of the broken clock proverb, as there is actual evidence of domestic spying.

The problem with broken clocks, of course, is that no one can tell when they're right. If I were to say "scientists have found a way to control other people's actions" or "scientists have managed to stop light," you would, prima facie, have no reason to believe me. And if I couldn't back those claims up, you fuck-well shouldn't believe me. If those assertions turn out to be true, you have no reason to believe I didn't just make a couple of lucky guesses. And if they turn out to be false, I don't get to claim your evidence discrediting me is part of a larger conspiracy. Those are what I consider fucking ground rules when making sensational claims. Blindfold again didn't source his information, because why would he, and at this point I can't be assed to track down Inglis' original statement in this blatant example of horseshoe theory, and am gonna just go ahead and assume that the CT crowd isn't privy to some special information the rest of us are not.

Point the Sixteenth: The FED is a Debt Machine That Manufactures Inflation Ron Paul 2012!

Is the Fed problematic? Yes. Can we do better? Yes. Will we do better? No. Not if the loudest voices in the room are so focused on demonizing the problem that any workable solutions go unheard. I don't have the answers. The CT crowd fucking definitely doesn't.

The Fed was installed as a possible solution to debt and inflation. It just didn't work the way people thought it would. If a proposed solution doesn't work the next step is not to abandon treatment. The next step is to try something else.

I haven't heard anything sane being proposed by anyone. I admit, I haven't looked very hard, so don't get me wrong, there are probably answers out there. I just haven't heard them. They're probably being put forth by quiet people with masters degrees in political theory and economics, bouncing around on message boards no one reads and papers no one without a college education in a related field understands. They don't fit on fucking bumper stickers, in other words.

The Ron Paul/anti-fed/survivalist/Goldmember/We-Never-Fucking-Think-Anything-Through crowd would never, in a million years, support those people, because those people rely on facts and science and intellectual elitism and informed opinions and a clear understanding of the interplay of the public and private sectors, and most of this list directly attacks facts and science and all of it holds elitism and both the private and public sectors in equal contempt, and the 'freethinkers' that constantly repost this shit without questioning it immediately consider any informed opinion that doesn't toe the party line either a shill for the Bad Guys or a clueless 'sheeple.'

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what you call irony.

How the Fed works, at least on paper: http://money.howstuffworks.com/fed.htm

Thou Shalt Not Pick Up Snakes, Idiot

There's a reality TV show coming out about snake-handling Pentecostals. People will watch and laugh at how ridiculous it is that they chose to ignore or reinterpret different parts of the Bible differently than them.

When do we, as a society of caring, empathic human beings, step in and say "Hey, you are too fucking impressionable and dumb to be allowed to make all your own decisions. Here are some picture books about finding an adult when you see a snake and why you shouldn't pick up poisonous animals because someone told you to."

The Bible is a book with a talking snake and a zombie wizard as central figures. One of its heroes offers his daughters up to a rape mob just before the lead murders two cities, animals included, in cold blood. It outlaws shellfish and mixed fabrics and sentences first-time offenders to eternal torture. It belongs in the mythology section. Or whatever section they keep Gacy's creepy fucking clown drawings in.

"If thy eye offend thee, pluck it out. Do it, sinner. I'm watching. Forever."

I mean, there's charitable interpretation, and then there's fucking flat out ignoring shit and pretending it isn't there. Every person that's ever told me the Bible is the most important book ever written also told me to ignore 3/4 of it. Why is that? Why can God not communicate effectively? Why would God ghostwrite a book that's 50% wrong, 40% debatable, 10% accurate given several dozen caveats, and allows fan-fiction to be treated as canon? That doesn't make any sense. Parents start coming up with stories like that when their kid's "Why? Why? Why?" game goes on two rounds too many.

God didn't grant anyone magical insight into how it's metaphorically true, or spiritually true, or can only be experienced emotionally and never explained rationally, or requires special interpretative rules that apply only to it or whatever horseshit people delude themselves with to shut the cognitive dissonance up.

This is not a good book to use to find answers. Specifically on questions of morality and acceptable behavior. I could come up with a better moral framework than the Bible, and I'm a dick.

So could you. So could anyone. Look:

Is human slavery wrong?

Congratulations, you have a better moral framework than the Bible. You have a better grasp of right and wrong than god. You either figured that out on your own, had it explained to you by another human, or your infallible god was kind enough to explain how your infallible god was wrong about fucking everything. It doesn't matter. The end result is the same: the Bible is wrong about enough things that it shouldn't be treated as a reliable source for anything. You can now quit pretending that the word translates to "prisoner of war" or "happy employee enjoying the fruits of capitalism" or whatever made-up sounding bullshit helps you defend your ridiculous position and move on with your life, joyously free of invisible totalitarian police states and weird sexual hangups.

Because seriously, when I point out that stoning children for back-talking or symbolically drinking the blood of a dead god to attain life eternal is unequivocally, furniture-made-out-of-dead-cheerleader-skin, eating-hair-out-of-other-people's-shower-drains crazy, whatever rationalization you offer is going to do nothing but cause me to wonder if you maybe shouldn't be left alone with sharp objects.

This book should not be taken seriously by anyone. It's an old book of tribal myths and fairy stories. That is all that it is. I'm sorry, but at some point we need to collectively acknowledge that. I had to, and you know what? I haven't eaten any babies or blown up any preschools. I'm the same as I was, just slightly less wrong about how everything works. And believe me, if I can admit when I'm wrong about something that important then so can you.

We especially should not be filming people that were tricked into believing that the book was to be taken seriously after a lifetime of being told to take the book seriously. We should be setting up an intervention for these poor fucks.

Faithless

I had to take a break from the Good Book. Far too much genocide and child torture for me to indulge in on a daily basis. Not if I intend to remain somewhat civil.

 I wanted instead to address a problem I've been struggling with expressing for quite a while now. The problem of faith. I had a conversation in which a friend told me  they felt sad for me because I didn't have faith.

Their argument was that while thoughts can be wrong and feelings can be wrong, faith can't be wrong.

My stance is that all three can be wrong. That's why I try to surround myself with people that help keep me honest and challenge my beliefs. Not religious beliefs in my case, obviously, but beliefs about politics and video games  and music and sex.

See, as a freethinker or secular humanist or skeptic or whatever, I don't, or can't, just accept the dictates of authority unthinkingly. I don't know that other people can, or if they do that they'd be aware of it, but they certainly seem to. 

Now I'm not going to sit here and pretend as if I NEVER accept a statement without carefully evaluating it. Not that I have the best bullshit detector, but just because I'm kinda lazy and most of the shit I hear on a day to day basis doesn't matter in the big picture.

For the things that do matter, or that I consider as mattering, there are certain sources I'm more inclined to believe than others. If The Blaze makes a potentially slanderous claim against a Democratic Congressman then I'm more inclined to approach it skeptically than I would be if Alternet made a similar claim against a Republican Congressman. Nobody is immune to some level of cognitive bias.

Which is the awesome thing about the scientific method, incidentally: It filters out bias as much as possible.

Going along with that, there have been some things that I REAAAAAAAAALLY wanted to believe that just weren't true. And conceding that they weren't is not always fun. Metallica was not that groundbreaking and original. Obama is another war President. M. Night Shyamalan only made one good movie. Two Worlds 2 is a shit game. There is a personal, loving, sentient entity out there that wants the best for me, and I can't understand it because it's too big for me to understand. That girl from the coffee shop wasn't really into me. Adam Sandler was never that funny. Ouch.

Faith now, where does faith figure into things? I can argue from a scientific perspective, a philosophical perspective, I can cite research, I can do whatever to assert my stance or reject a claim, but what seems to be the fundamental difference between the friend that feels sad for me, and me, who feels sad for my friend, is faith. 

Here are some of the arguments I've heard.

"Faith is the opposite of fear." 

I make no secret about my past as a seemingly hopeless drug addict. And one thing that I have in common with most addicts is a predisposition for fear-based decision making. Jumping to the worst possible conclusion, instead of the most likely. Constantly making back up plans for when things inevitably don't work out. Choosing the security of monotony over the risk of adventure. Things like that.

Faith isn't the opposite of fear, though. Hope is the opposite of fear, and reason is the opposite of faith. That's my stance. 

Faith can get someone through fear, of course. But so can courage, and reason, and emotional support. But faith is not the opposite. Hope is. Well, inasmuch as emotions have opposites, which they don't really, but for the purpose of the argument...

They even, when unfounded, have diametric outcomes. Fear, if what is feared doesn't come to pass, leads to relief: A positive emotion. Hope, if it doesn't pan out, leads to disappointment: a negative emotion.

Faith is a tool used to deal with fear. But as I've stated above, there are other tools that can be used to deal with it.

"Everyone has faith, even you." 

I'd agree that almost everyone has the capacity for faith, even a tendency towards it. Most people are uncomfortable with uncertainty, and faith fills that need for answers nicely. But just because most people HAVE it, doesn't mean it's necessarily a good thing.

We also all have a skeleton not particularly suited for a bipedal lifestyle, but no one's claiming lower back problems are a good thing. Something similar can be said about self-pity, overconfidence, scientific ignorance, the appendix, and so on.

Faith isn't necessary, in other words. And while I'm not claiming I'm completely devoid of faith, I am claiming that I would like to be. Which is the point where the argument usually devolves into some kind of "You have faith in science/electricity/yourself" thing. Which doesn't work as it relies on conflated terminology and false equivalency.

I don't have faith in electricity, I have expectations based on past experience corroborated with a mountain of evidence. If I pay the bill, and there are no wiring problems or blown fuses or shorts or burnt out bulbs, then when I flip the switch on my lamp, my lamp will turn on. That doesn't require faith. Even if I didn't understand HOW electrons flow and interact with tungsten; and even though I don't understand WHY electrons flow (which assumes there has to be a reason, which there isn't, but that's usually part of the argument,) the lamp will still work. 

On the other hand, faith in God has NEVER worked as reliably as electricity. In any test or study that I'm aware of, the efficacy of faith has always been statistically within the margin of error for no discernible effect, other than as an emotional security blanket.  And there are more practical and functional options than that.

"Faith keeps us humble." 

Humility is a tricky concept to define. The definition I use is "a sense of one's relative importance in a given situation."

The reasoning behind this argument, inasmuch as I understand it, is that so long as God is at the top of the ladder, the believer will be at the bottom, effectively inoculating the believer from grandiosity, self-righteousness, selfishness, and so on.

Which fails miserably as a hypothesis. Assuming there were a personal, all powerful God, why would placing God at the top of one's priorities ensure that anything below God wouldn't be just as fucked up as having one's self at the top? And why are we looking at life as a chain instead of a sphere or tree?

Yes, I'm really high on my list of things I care about. But that doesn't automatically mean I'm a self-centered egomaniac. While I certainly used to be (and still can be on occasion,) I have a completely different relationship with myself than I did four years ago.

Today I realize that I have to be important to myself because if I'm not I won't be any good to others.   Now, having said that, I realize that everyone else is just as important to themselves as I am to me. And assuming there's NOT a personal, loving God making sure everyone is interacting properly in accordance with some impossibly complex plan, as I do, I have to keep this in mind. I can miss a meal if someone hasn't eaten in two days. I can make myself available to someone I know is going through a rough patch, even if it means missing out on something I really wanted to do. Why? Because I know what those things are like.

That's just empathy and compassion, our evolved herd instincts, and, as far as I'm concerned, the most beautiful and powerful thing about humanity. 

"Without faith I wouldn't be where I am today."  

Without faith you might be somewhere much nicer. 

The problem with this kind of argument is that we don't have extra lives. We can't go back a year, make different choices with different motivations and check.

I suspect that if I hadn't been waiting on some kind of sign that I might have taken the initiative to move out of Texas long before I did. And it may have worked out poorly. Or spectacularly. There is no way of checking.

To claim that by merely having faith led to the current favorable outcome is puerile. It's superstition at it's worst. I know lots of people that are rancid with faith that never catch lucky breaks.

Every day trillions of choices are made. Not to say it's luck, but the web of human interaction, factored in with all of the non-human variables, is so complex that it might as well be. Saying that faith is the most important factor at play is like saying your lucky shirt did it. 

My life, whether judged from quality of lifestyle, to overall happiness, to general satisfaction, has improved a ton since I abandoned faith. That alone is enough to disqualify faith as the most important factor. And in my case I suspect that it was one of the primary factors in keeping me stuck in a life I was unhappy with while desperately trying to convince myself that it was the best possible life I could have.

"I know by faith."

Is usually the justification given for the really big questions. Or a variation on it.

Why do you believe in God despite the lack of evidence? Why do you think there's an afterlife? How can you claim your moral compass is powered by the same God that Fred Phelps has?

The undercurrent with this argument is always that there's something wrong with my worldview because I choose to know things that are real. The Big Bang theory doesn't give a shit about me. Evolution doesn't want to give me a big hug if I can't pay my electric bill. Christopher Hitchens won't comfort me in my hour of need. So I'm the one missing out, right? 

No. I'm not. While the certainty of faith can be appealing at times, I know where it leads. It leads to a rigid, inflexible worldview with no more mystery in it beyond burrowing deeper into the delusion. Faith is so small. I'm an ape that's just clever enough to know that I'm an ape made of particles too small to see, living on a wet rock orbiting an unremarkable star in an unremarkable galaxy. I have so much left to learn and see and do. What compares to that? Your claim that the creator of the universe is your personal buddy? Fine. Next time you talk to him ask him why he waited 14 and a half billion years to make you think we're so damn important.

I'd prefer a truth I can verify, or that at least can be verified. And I can live with honestly not having the big answers much more soundly than by dishonestly claiming I do. And the best thing about that? I can withhold judgement on things I'm unsure about. I don't have any commandments to follow. I don't have to have answers. And that concept gets conflated with faith quite a bit.

If I hear something and can't decide whether or not to believe it, and can't do the work to verify it, I can just say "I don't know yet." What caused the Big Bang? I don't know. Maybe nothing. May be the wrong question. Why is everything the way it is? I don't know. What's the purpose of life? I don't know. May be there isn't one.

I love that concept. When I first got clean I didn't think I could stay clean, because I had never been able to before. And that was what helped. and I wish someone would have explained it to me then. I didn't think anything would work for me, but I was told to 'believe that I believe,' and 'to be willing to be willing' and inane garbage like that. So I withheld judgement long enough to try some new things, and found some things that worked, like emotional honesty, self-appraisal, willingness, allowing my beliefs about myself to be challenged, forgiveness, making amends for my past transgressions. And I tried some things that didn't work, like prayer, faith, belief in the supernatural, and reading alleged holy books.

So no, I don't have faith. Not in any kind of God that's relieved my obsession to use drugs or is helping me get through the rough parts of life. If I could say that I had faith in anything then it would be in humanity in general. I think humans will eventually get their act together. I have no real evidence for this, as class struggles and poverty and war and cruelty don't seem to be going anywhere, so by that definition it would be faith. For anything else: I can withold judgement, I can have reasonable   expectations, or I can just say, in all honesty, "I don't know," and be done with it. 

Of course, saying "I don't know" starts a whole new argument.

"How can you claim you're an atheist when you don't KNOW there isn't a God?" "How can you say you don't believe in an afterlife if you don't KNOW that there isn't life after death that just can't be measured by modern science?" And the answer is: honestly.

Believe me, I would really like it if there was a God out there, or that I'd get to see my father again. But looking at it realistically, probably not. I don't believe in God because I have no reason to. When I did it didn't make me any happier or more successful than I would have been anyway, not that we can check, and I haven't encountered or experienced anything, ever, that needed God as an explanation. Maybe part of us survives after death. I doubt it, but maybe. But it won't be the heaven or hell that religion claims. We know consciousness is a product of the brain, so that won't survive. And the ideas of eternal pleasure or pain are out as our nerve endings die with our body. So whatever survives won't be US as individual, unique entities. Some kind of chi or force or life essence that can't be measured or tested? Sure, that's possible, but if it exists there's no reason to believe in it as believing in it serves no practical use or purpose. It might make for great science fiction and karate movies, but I have never fucking yet seen someone shoot Force Lightning or harness mystical Chinese secret energies to do anything more than swindle gullible hippies out of money.

Darwin's Pipe

A friend of mine yesterday pointed out that that "Darwin stuff in the text books is a hoax." Remaining, by my standards, civil, I asked if he had any sources for this claim. The one that wasn't hundreds of pages of ancient alien insanity trying to prove that humans existed in the Archeon Period by Vedic Creationist Michael Cremo, the man that brought us such intellectual wonders as Forbidden Archeology and Ancient Aliens, was a lovely debunking of evolutionary theory by a conservative Islamic criminal madman Harun Yahya. My friend then encouraged me to 'put that in my Darwin pipe and smoke it.' Yahya's article is here. I'd encourage you to read that because the images here may be hard to read, and also it cures low blood pressure. His original text is in the middle. You may need to download or open the images in a new tab to read everything. I suck at websiting.

 

 

The short biography of Yahya in part two was sourced from his Wikipedia page. Google it if you care. The green text with sources was itself sourced from www.talkorigins.org, the go-to site for debunking this kind of ludicrousness. The green text on Part 3 was supposed to include the word 'censorship' in it somewhere. Source: Most YouTube science denier videos have disabled or approval-only comment moderation.