Critical Thinking: Self-Evaluation

For previous installments go here, here, and here.

I had a couple of conversations recently with friends who expressed curiosity on how I remain abstinent from drugs without relying on a supernatural 'Higher Power,' as they say in the 12 step programs.

Information on the 12 steps is widely available online, so I'll avoid a lengthy explanation. There should be a search bar in the upper right hand of your screen. The amazing thing about that search bar is that you can type in any subject you happen to be interested or curious about into it and it will, seemingly through magic, return a host of results pertinent to your query.

As I explained to one friend, I came to the conclusion that supernatural forces were not only not active in my life, but that by believing that they were I was, in fact, actively inhibiting my growth and progression as a person by waiting for 'signs' before taking any risk, or by seeking 'guidance' when confronted with a tough decision. These behaviors invariably prevented me from taking any action at all, and in waiting for burning bushes or seemingly portentous events to manifest the needed instruction my decisions usually wound up being made by default.

The conclusion was reached, oddly enough, by use of one of the tools of the 12 step program itself: self-evaluation (personal inventory, in 12 step parlance).

Critical and skeptical evaluation of different claims, evidence, opinions, or positions, while undoubtedly useful, can only be applied to the extent that a person applies it to his- or herself.

I've spoken before about my awareness of my liberal bias, politically speaking, and my obvious bias against the supernatural. I became aware of these biases through self-evaluation.

By working to become more aware of these biases and my other personal presuppositions, limitations, and tendencies I find that I become more aware of them when they crop up.

To give a recent example: GMOs, or Genetically Modified Organisms.

There has been a pervasive thread of outrage against Monsanto in recent months, at least in liberal circles. Monsanto is a multinational agriculture/biotech company, and, as such, belongs to the Dark Side of the Force as far as I'm concerned.

For months I had been mindlessly 'liking' any anti-Monsanto propaganda that appeared in my Facebook news feed, including anti-GMO memes. I did this while being well aware that I had not even a cursory understanding of what GMOs even were or entailed.

My anti-corporate, anti-capitalist bias was doing my thinking for me.

Instead of withholding judgement until investigating the claims that GMOs were evil, I had fallen prey to the poisoned well fallacy.

A few weeks ago, when I couldn't, in good conscience, continue condemning a science I knew nothing about, I decided to investigate GMOs. The information is freely available online, if anyone's curious. What I found, of course, was that genetic modification doesn't mean Frankenstein monsters or H.R. Giger drawings springing forth from cornfields. Nor does genetic modification imply mad scientists haphazardly rearranging genetic codes in an attempt to stumble across a real-life Pandora's Box.

A summary can be found at http://www.herbogeminis.com/IMG/pdf/reuters_monsanto.pdf.

Genetic engineering, like any science, is morally neutral, and the claims that GMOs are carcinogenic or cause pod people seem to have been either a result of mistaken causal inference (the pesticides the plants were modified to resist have been linked to increased cancer rates in the tests, but the plants themselves showed no significant correlation,) or completely made up, since liberals can be just as unreasonable and superstitious about science as conservatives.

Now, admittedly, I have only a layperson's understanding of genetics, but I also do not have a layperson's tendency to assume that it means that tampering with genetics will mean that the 1995 film Proteus will become a terrifying reality. Which is good, because I don't even know where to get shark-monster destroying heroin from these days. So I've revised my stance on the matter. Monsanto is an evil company, but just because Monsanto uses genetically modified organisms does not mean that genetically modified organisms are evil.

One of the most effective ways of evaluating myself that I've found is to merely list which labels I'm willing to accept for myself, and then reading all of the arguments against those positions, and to be aware that when someone or some piece of information I identify as friendly towards my position (as an atheist, or a socialist, or a skeptic, or a metal-head, or whatever,) then I will be more likely to accept it without questioning it. As such, I find that it is helpful to occasionally re-evaluate the positions I already hold, to test them against any new evidence, to try to disprove them, or to investigate opposing positions with the same openness I grant to my own.

Sometimes I'll find that I'm really, really wrong about something. That used to bother me quite a bit. Especially since it was along the lines of 'My entire life is a lie!' or 'I've wasted a good portion of my life championing a fairy tale!'

Those kinds of admissions can be extremely painful. In some cases they can even lead to the kinds of psychotic breaks that require therapy or hospitalization.

But it gets easier. We just have to keep in mind that, historically, most people have been wrong about most things most of the time. I'd argue that it would be the acme of hubris to assume that anyone, anywhere, is 100% right about anything, at any time.

Even systems as seemingly settled and flawless as mathematics or gravity should not be accepted as 100% truth. Even now, quantum physicists may have to modify Einstein's theory of relativity, and as computers become ever more important for modern civilization then math must become ever more complex. I mean, do you know what a Poincare Conjecture is? I don't, but they solved it recently. Or proved it. Or whatever you do with math problems that involve three-dimensional objects in four-dimensional space.

Or you could try this tactic.

Finding out and admitting that we're wrong about something, even something major, is a great thing. It's a wonderful opportunity to learn something new, to find a new way to see the world, to let go of inaccurate, misguided, or damaging beliefs and embrace new ones.

Yes, your whole life may be based in a lie. But if it is, wouldn't you rather know about it?

The Poverty of Affluence (pt. 1)

It's on Facebook! It must be true!

Okay, I've been seeing this for months and I had to say something. As near as I can tell it started here: http://www.mnprogressiveproject.com/diary/11080/rep-mary-franson-compares-food-stamp-recipients-to-animals-and-mngop-pulls-the-video.

A friend of mine reposted this and it finally broke part of my brain off. I know for a fact that this friend has been on government assistance for an extended period of time. And I'm not judging or faulting them for that. I'm judging them for reposting anti-themself propaganda. I mean, like 96% of Americans have received some form of government assistance, right? So who, exactly, is supposed to be ashamed of that?

I mean, it's not like we're being duped into shaming poor people for needing help so that when those lifelines get cut no one will complain, right?

The text of the meme runs:

"The Food Stamp Program, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture is proud to be distributing the greatest amount of free meals and food stamps ever.

Meanwhile, the National Park Service, administered by the U.S. Department of the Interior, asks us to "Please Do Not Feed the Animals."

Their stated reason for the policy is because the animals will grow dependent on handouts and will not learn to take care of themselves.

This ends today's lesson.

 First: the only known strong correlate for welfare dependence is drug addiction, which is a different problem, which is also not being addressed. Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1508566/pdf/amjph00023-0022.pdf

Second: the 'Culture of Poverty' theory is largely a myth. Poor people are not lazier, stupider, less motivated or more prone to addiction than the well off. Source: http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/apr08/vol65/num07/The-Myth-of-the-Culture-of-Poverty.aspx

Third: the reasons for 'Do Not Feed The Animals' signs is only to prevent dependence in the young who may not be able to locate food when they leave their parents area. Because they're animals and will assume that if there are humans feeding them Snickers when they're young that there will always be humans and Snickers everywhere. Other reasons that this meme fails to mention: human food is not nutritionally complete and can cause health problems. The animals may lose their fear of humans, be mistaken as rabid/aggressive, and killed. It can lead to overpopulation. It can cause an influx of other animals, leading to the spread of disease. Source: http://www.paws.org/feeding-wildlife.html

Fourth: Yes, one in six people needing food stamps is a problem. But the problem isn't 'Why are these people lazy/dependent?' The problem is 'why does no one have enough money for food these days?' Corporate profits are at record highs (Thanks to corporate welfare,) and the stock market is setting record highs (thanks to government assistance). http://www.businessinsider.com/corporate-profits-just-hit-an-all-time-high-wages-just-hit-an-all-time-low-2012-6 So if we have more money than ever, why does a third of the country not have enough to eat?

Fifth: I've been trying, for days now, to find the source of not only this supposed newspaper clipping, but also for the reports both from the Department of Agriculture and the Department of the Interior that were 'used' as 'sources,' but, like most right-wing propoganda, they don't seem to exist.

This ends today's lesson

Book of Matthew

I'm doing this:




So watch that if you want to know why, specifically, I'm not a Christian. And also because the New Testament is comically poorly written. And also also because it's 4 hours of free entertainment.

Tools

During the midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises last night in Aurora, Colorado, James Holmes, a 24-year-old neuro-science student opened fire, killing 12 and injuring 59 people.

The suspect threw a gas canister into the audience of the sold out show, who first thought it was a stunt related to the film, then opened fire on the audience with an assault rifle, a shotgun, and two pistols.

This was the worst mass shooting in America in almost three years.

This was the worst mass shooting in suburban Colorado in 13 years.

Logging into Facebook this morning I see this bullshit.

You know what? Col. Cooper is right. Guns have no moral stature. Neither does a guillotine. Neither does the executioners axe. Neither do iron maidens, nuclear warheads, thumb screws, hand grenades or napalm.

They're just tools. Tools that are used to hurt and kill people.

And we fucking worship them in this country. How sick is that?

I'm not mad at Holmes shotgun. I'm not even mad at Holmes. He's probably crazy. Maybe crazy in the 'political/religious extremist' sense, but still fucking crazy.

What I am mad at is a society that apologizes for it. A society that says "don't blame us for selling guns to a person that wants to shoot people." I'm mad at a society so fucking in love with violence, so infatuated with murder, that it honestly believes the solution to gun violence is more guns.

We need guns to protect ourselves from bad guys.

Bad guys like Trayvon Martin. Bad guys like the kids at Columbine.

You know why I don't own a gun? Because I don't want to kill someone. I don't even think I could.

I don't own anything worth murdering a someone over. And neither do you.

Who does that gun protect you from? Your neighbors? Your friends? The people you pass on the street everyday? Other Americans? Some boogeyman that lives in your head? Muslim? Rapist? Crackhead? Mugger?

You're a fucking coward. You and your gun.

Yeah, we're guaranteed the right to bear arms in this country. But you know what? At the time that was written there was a very real possibility that we'd be invaded. When was the last time America was invaded?

Unless you think your rifle can shoot down a nuclear missile, or scare a bomb out of hiding, then it won't fucking save you from anything.

We also have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Guns go against all three. Guns are the tools of murders and oppressors. Guns drive happiness away by turning everything and everyone into a threat.

Guns are the tool you buy when you're terrified. The security blanket of man-children, the sucked thumb scared infants attempting to convince themselves they aren't scared. Guns, kept out of terror, perpetuate it.

Do I think the right to keep arms should be taken away? No, of course not. But I goddamn will not respect any civilian that treats it like a duty that excludes all other rights.

Unrelated

I made a for real YouTube video. It is very ghetto, but I'm proud of it. Especially since I managed it with a budget of zero dollars.

It's basically a how-to on the order of operations.






Anyway, so that's a thing.

Critical Thinking: Pareidolia and Equivocation

For the first and second parts of this series, please go here and here.

For this installment, I'll be discussing the phenomenon of pareidolia and the equivocation fallacy.

Pareidolia

Pareidolia refers the phenomenon of humans' pattern recognition capabilities registering false positives.

And it is really common.

First, I'll talk about why pattern recognition is a good thing and how that probably came about.

Now, obviously, thousands of years ago life was much harder and much shorter for people. And for our ancestors, being able to recognize patterns quickly quite often meant the difference between life or death. A rustling in the grass might mean a rabbit, and it might mean a snake. Yellow and black stripes might mean a shade tree, and they might mean a tiger.

So it's easy to see why people that were good at recognizing these kinds of patterns and acting quickly on them would have had a tendency to survive more than those of us that weren't as good at deciding that every rustle in the grass means "SNAKE!" and every time black and yellow stripes appeared it meant "TIGER!" Since people that were better at pattern recognition were better at surviving, this meant that they lived longer, bred more, and passed the ability on through their offspring.

Today we can see that this knack for picking out patterns is just as active as ever, even though our day-to-day survival generally isn't dependent on it. Just look at the 'Face of Mars,' or some Rorschach Ink Blots, or the hundreds of people that have found the Virgin Mary in their food, or flying saucers, or optical illusions, or just stare at some clouds for a few minutes.

We're especially good at picking out faces. Especially especially where there aren't any faces.

In reality, there is no real reason to see a face in the above picture. But we humans almost always think 'friendly face' when we see two circles above a curved line.

And that would be a pretty obvious tendency to have, given how long it takes us to develop to maturity. It's a really simple pattern and would be really useful for a toddler to be able to identify if she were lost or distressed.

Now, here's where it gets interesting. We tend to assign intent to these patterns. We have a natural disposition for assuming that other people are somewhat like us: They behave a certain way, think a certain way, emote a certain way, and so on. And we do this on to animals as well.

Now, while it is fair to argue that most mammals do display some level of emotion and intellect, it certainly wouldn't be fair to say that they do so in the same way that humans do. But we think they do. If we didn't we may never have had a Mickey Mouse or a Bugs Bunny. Aesop's fables would have been much duller. On the other hand, our pets would probably be a lot happier with us if we weren't constantly torturing them by forcing them to wear clothes or pose for fucking pictures.

Even inanimate objects and events are assigned human characteristics. Thunder doesn't mean that the gods are angry. A tornado doesn't give a fuck about your house. The rain isn't aware that you just washed your car. A table never jumped out at anybody. But we act like they do.

So all of this leads us to constantly get correlation and causation mixed up and do things like think that a certain dance set to certain music will effect the weather, since it rained shortly after the last two times we danced. Mix this in with a little justification and some confirmation bias and suddenly we have rock solid evidence for the efficacy of rain dances.

And believe me, rain dances are no sillier than some of our other pareidoliac tendencies.

There's a school mysticism/pseudo-science known as synchronicity. Many, many people ascribe to it, even if they've never heard the word.

Synchronicity involves intentionally taking casually unrelated coincidences and assigning special meaning to them. Say, for instance, one morning I read "Youtube sensation converts to Scientology" on a website. Then that afternoon someone I don't know very well on Facebook asks "What do you know about Scientology? I was looking into it on Youtube." And then, low and behold, that evening I'm on Youtube and every other video seems to be mentioning Scientology.

Now, if I was as silly as I was ten years ago I might think this was some kind of sign that I should look into Scientology. Or maybe start a religion based around YouTube or social networking. But in reality, the things aren't related. Well, anymore than anything else.

It's just a coincidence.

But people get crazy dedicated to it, seeing significance in the colors of shirts people wear at the store, linking something someone says at a meeting to something that happened five years ago, finding a random New Age Happy Talk quote or their horoscope and forcing it to line up with their day.

But it's just coincidence.

And it builds all kinds of irrational beliefs and behaviors. Just because the third horse on the ticket won the race two times in a row doesn't mean that you've found the secret to making money on horse-races. Just because the fourth and eighth person on Chatroulette wasn't a naked dude jacking off doesn't mean the fourth person will always not be a lunatic pervert.

They will always be a lunatic pervert. Pissing Jesus, but will they ever.

Equivocation

Also known as the bait-and-switch, the equivocation fallacy is generally an argument or statement that involves intentionally using a term with more than one meaning. This generally looks something like:

• Man is the smartest creature on earth, and
• Man has conquered the earth, so
• Man, being the smart conqueror that he is, should have dominion over woman.

See what I did there? Not a great example, I admit, but I'm not nearly as good at being dishonest as I used to be. In the first two statements I used 'Man' in the meaning 'mankind' or 'homo sapiens'. But in the third statement I switched it out with 'man' in the sense of 'male human,' or 'fella'.

For an example of this fallacy performed on a level that probably qualifies as art, I'd suggest watching "Doctor" William Lane Craig debate the existence of God.

What Craig lacks in scholastic integrity and philosophical elegance he more than makes up for in invincible confidence and verbal hocus pocus.

Half his arguments are just eloquent this.

One of his strongest, or at least most often repeated, arguments is a bastardization of the Kalam Cosmological Argument. The Kalam argument, in it's purest form, goes something like

1. Everything that exists has a cause.
2. The universe exists.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Now, I personally have no problem with that argument since I don't really have a lot invested in whether or not the universe could be said to have been caused. The fact is we don't know. We don't even know what we don't know. Once we get to the point of the Big Bang then we don't even know if terms like 'time' or 'cause' or 'existence' have any meaning.

Now here's where the equivocation comes in on Craig's part. He asserts that God is the first cause. This would be God in the Deistic sense: a God that merely set the dials of reality, pressed the start button, and doesn't interfere in his creation.

And while I don't see the logic in assuming that God was the first cause of the universe, since there's no way to check, as arguments for the existence of God go it's one of the less retarded ones.

Craig then equivocates by drawing a wordy-ass line from God: Non-Interfering Force of Nature to God: Jesus Christ of the Bible. And while I am Straw-Manning him to an extent for the purposes of brevity, I'd invite you to check out any of his many debates on YouTube, as he gallops out the same five or six arguments in every one I've seen, then when his opponents can't address every subtle nuance of every argument to his satisfaction, he claims victory.

Or, if they do refute all of his points he merely rewords them slightly or changes the subject, and claims victory. Which is called a Red Herring, which I'll discuss later.

ANYWAY.

The point is, is that even if Craig had managed to prove the existence of a Deistic god, that in no way provides any evidence for the God of the Bible, and certainly not the Christian god, because those are two very different meanings of the word god.

Some more common examples of this include the word UFO, which can mean Unidentified Flying Object, of course, and Alien Spaceship. Saying "People see UFO's all the time, they've got one buried out in the Desert outside of Roswell that they reverse engineered to build modern computers," is equivocating.

Big Government is another one. Does that mean big as in 'powerful, centralized government' or big as in 'a government composed of many different people and view-points'?

And finally, my favorite: Faith. Which can mean anything from fidelity, as in "I will be faithful to my girlfriend," to reasonable expectations, as in "I have faith that my friend will pay me on time," to belief in an irrational, supernatural claim despite any evidence to the contrary, as in "I have faith that Jesus will arrive on December 21, 2012 and take all the good Christians up to Heaven." 

So those are a couple of things to keep an eye out for, both internally and externally.

From here on out I'll probably only be addressing one thing at a time in an effort not to spend five hours a day staring at this screen. But I'll probably look at the Dunning-Kruger Effect next and Red Herrings after that.

Critical Thinking: Straw Men and Confirmation Bias

Last time I talked some about the importance of checking the source when presented with questionable or sensational information. I also spoke briefly about the Slippery Slope/Just in Case Fallacies, and quote mined/cherry-picked information.

Today I'll talk about the dangers of confirmation bias and the Straw Man Fallacy.

Confirmation Bias

Simply put, confirmation bias refers to people's tendency to seek out and place special significance on information that confirms, reaffirms, or validates their preconceived assumptions, hunches or prejudices.

For a great example of large-scale confirmation bias we can turn to pop culture: The fucking 2012 Mayan Calendar thing.

For anyone that has been locked in a Siberian gulag for the past ten years, the Mayan Calendar Thing has been a widespread conspiracy theory based on the ancient Meso-American Long-Count Calendar. The calendar 'ends' on December 21, 2012. By 'ends' I mean 'starts over.'

Now, the Long Count itself is a truly amazing accomplishment of mathematics and astronomy. Especially when one considers that they used a counting system grounded in a base of 20 (and occasionally 18,) unlike the Western world which uses the base 10 decimal system we're all familiar with.

Their math classes were fucking hard, though.

But that's not what we're here to discuss. Someone, somewhere, decided that since the calender ends on December 21st, that must mean that the world will end on December 21. Which is about as infantile as assuming your parents stop existing when they leave the room. Especially when considering that the Mayan's themselves didn't appear to think anything of the sort. For the Mayans it appears that the completion of a count was a reason to celebrate, such as the Western calendar turning 2000 (minus the Y2K nonsense).

But due to Man's natural affinity for adventure and mystery and narrative, the idea caught on.

This is where confirmation bias comes in. If someone approaches this suspecting that something big may happen on December 21, then there will be no shortage of evidence and predictions to reinforce that belief.

Just for some examples of what this evidence might look like, check out http://2012apocalypse.net/.

We've got predictions from the Bible, the Qur'an, and Nostradamus. We have natural disasters, world leaders and great wars. But the thing is this: Those predictions are so vague that they can be retrofitted to match anything at any time. That's the thing about predictions like that. If I was to write something like

     And lo, a great Beast shall arise in the East bearing a black crown
     Elevated above mortals he shall be heralded as the flying god
     His sign shall be the flaming bull
     His name shall be Archangel, Edom, Moab
    The youth of the world will supplicate at His feet
     By this shall ye know Him

the ink wouldn't even have a chance to dry before people could start linking it to modern events.

The Beast was Michael Jordan, by the way.

Add to this the fact that no one seems to be able to agree what, exactly is supposed to happen on December 21st. An extinction level meteor strike? Reversal of the magnetic poles? WWIII? The return of the Ancient Aliens? Galactic Alignment? Global spiritual enlightenment? The Rapture?

The fact is is that there is about equal probability of all of these happening: slim to none. For some of the less unlikely ones, well, a geomagnetic shift could happen. Or rather could begin to happen, since the process might take up to 10,000 years to happen.

Meteorite? Well, while that's certainly something that could happen at some point, at five months out I'm pretty sure someone would have noticed something.

Planet X? There is no Planet X/Nibiru. That hypothesis relied on gravitational anomalies in our solar system. But these anomalies are far too small to account for a planet. Besides, it would probably be visible to the naked eye at this point.

The fact is, there are only two things we'll know for certain will happen on on December 21st: The Long Count will start over, and the people that made fortunes peddling 2012 conspiracies will begin formulating their excuses and looking for new lines of work.

The Straw Man

There's recently been a movement by the politically correct crowd to have this fallacy renamed the Non-Gender-Specific Straw Person Fallacy. This is because people are idiots and pussies.

If you're going to rename it to something somehow less offensive, then go with the Training Dummy Fallacy, since that's what it refers to. Or the Scarecrow Fallacy, since scarecrows are awesome.

I am your friend! Your soul is safe with me!

Anyway, the story is back in the day when soldiers trained for combat they used straw men to practice their swordplay/marksmanship on. These straw men were, of course, much easier to knock down than real combatants. As a logical fallacy it refers to the technique of taking the opponent's argument or stance, making a ridiculous or inaccurate misrepresentation of it, and attacking the misrepresentation, instead of the the actual argument.

For some great examples of this just take a look at the Great YouTube Theist vs. Atheist Debate, or Any Political Humor Page On Facebook.

 

The above meme has been making the rounds of Facebook lately, so I'll use it. Now, atheism is the absence of a belief in god. That is what it is and all it is. This straw man is great because it's actually a lot more complicated than the point it's supposed to be arguing against. Atheism does not address the beginning of the universe, if it even had a beginning. It doesn't address abiogenesis or evolution, and it motherfucking goddamn certainly does not involve magic. It is the lack of a belief in god. A= without. Theism= belief in god. Atheism.

If that meme wanted to be accurate it would say: ATHEISM: Because theists haven't met their burden of proof. Which, admittedly isn't as humorous.

This is a really, really pervasive technique. Especially on the Internet. Some examples can include:

• Prima: I think we should have stricter gun control regulations.
• Secunda: Why are you trying to take away my Second Amendment rights?

Or:

• Prima: I think hard work should be rewarded.
• Secunda:  So you think billionaires shouldn't be accountable to the law?

Or:

• Democrats want to turn our country over to Islamic extremists.

Or:

•  Mitt Romney wants to implement a system of serfdom and debtor's prisons.

So it's definitely something to keep an eye out for. Particularly when the party being Straw Manned isn't around to defend their stance. Additionally, some people can use it in much more subtle and convincing ways than I've illustrated here.

 Next time I'll be talking about Paredolia and Equivocation, some big-ass words that describe some simple-ass things.

Critical Thinking: Checking The Source

Note: The gray links go to relevant sources. The purple links go to ads.

Critical thinking is one of my favorite things. Seriously, I wish it would have been stressed more when I was growing up. And that's probably why I get so irritated when people don't do it.

I was talking to a friend, and she pointed out maybe I should write about it. Sort of a tutorial of how to detect disingenuous bullshit. Which was a brilliant idea.

1. Check the Source

Whenever I hear an amazing or shocking claim these days it has become second nature for me to ask "How do they know that?" and then try to find out. In fact, the habit has become so ingrained that I forget that just a few years ago I hardly ever thought that.

And it's great advice. Particularly with our media here in America, where the paranormal and pseudo-science is generally equivocated with actual science. I mean, if I go to the Documentary section of Netflix and see a documentary on the evolution of primates next to a documentary on Ancient Aliens, how would I be able to tell which one was a real documentary, and which one was paranoid, sensationalist bullshit cobbled together from broken parts? The gods of ancient cultures were really aliens genetically modifying and artificially speeding the development of humans? How do they know that?

Answer: Check the Sources.

Here's a good example that showed up on my Facebook wall the other day: Leaked Army Doc Outline Plans For US Re-education Camps.

Now, I've already mentioned how I'm not immune to bias, and I generally go into anything on InfoWars expecting it to be total and complete lunatic fear-mongering. And knowing that about myself I know that I can't just call bullshit and move on. So, What does the source have to say?

• Side note: Often these kinds of alarmist propaganda pieces won't even have a source. More on that later.

Alright, so what's the claim? The claim is that InfoWars has gotten its hands on a leaked Department of Defense document that "contains shocking plans for “political activists” to be pacified by “PSYOP officers” into developing an “appreciation of U.S. policies” while detained in prison camps inside the United States."

That's some scary sounding shit, right? Well, lets look at the document, which can be found here.
 
Now, that document is over 300 pages of military jargon. And who the fuck wants to wade through that, right? Well, lets see if we can find a summary.

And right here, in the Preface, it describes the purpose of this document, which is that it "provides guidance for commanders and staffs on internment and resettlement (I/R) operations." Now, internment and resettlement is an unpleasant reality of warfare. It's not always gonna be a nice thing, and nobody really wants it to happen, but it does. Civilians get displaced, prisoners get taken, and those prisoners can be on both sides.

Now, since these kinds of things are going to inevitably happen, wouldn't it be nice if there was some kind of uniform Field Manual that could be used so that everyone knows what to do and how to do it? I mean, we don't want to just execute a bunch of newly homeless civilians for living in the wrong place, do we? We don't want prisoners just vanishing in a puff of lost paperwork, do we?

And that's what this field manual is. It's a manual of what to do if and when these kinds of things happen.

The InfoWars article continues with some really misleading cherry-picking of information to make it seem as if "man-made disasters, accidents, terrorist attacks and incidents in the U.S. and its territories,” "may be performed as domestic civil support operations.” Which is really fucking misleading as these things go.

How do I know that? Well, I checked the document. Take the direct quote in the article, copy it, go to the manual, conjure our old friend ctrl+f (find,) and paste the quote in. Then it's merely a matter of reading the quote in context.

The section that the "may be performed..." quote was taken from was referring to "controlling civilian movement and providing relief to human suffering." Now, relieving human suffering seems pretty cut-and-dry, but what about 'controlling civilian movement?' That shit seems ominous as hell, right?

Well, not really. If there's about to be a firefight between two groups of lunatics with assault rifles you probably don't want children wandering onto the field. You also probably don't want possible insurgents or spies just wandering around the command post with a camera and a notebook.

Now for the most alarming part of the article, the claim that the DoD has "shocking plans for “political activists” to be pacified by “PSYOP officers” into developing an “appreciation of U.S. policies” while detained in prison camps inside the United States," that I mentioned above.

Okay, now that's a pretty good indication that this is an absolute Frankenstein of cherry picked quotes. The reason I think that is because instead of having "One long, unbroken quote that may give a clear understanding of what the manual actually says, like this," we have instead a "series of" short, "unrelated quotes," pieced together from different "parts of the manual" in an attempt to convey a very "different meaning" than was intended by the author.

And yes, I am picking on a conservative website, and yes, I do have a liberal bias in real life. But having said that, any time someone sees a quote arranged like this, there should be some red flags going off.

Now, the manual does provide guidelines that include Psychological Operations (PSYOP,) officers looking for insurgents, dissidents and malcontents that may try to organize and lead a revolt or cause disturbance while they are interred. Because those are things that might happen.

It is stretching credulity to imply that just because there may be a malcontent who may organize a disturbance while being detained, and that that malcontent may even be an American civilian on American soil, and may need "pacification programs using a variety of media. Music and news (from approved sources), I/R facility rules, and in-processing instructions are broadcast using facility loudspeaker systems augmented by loudspeaker systems organic to the tactical PSYOP detachment," this in no way implies that there is a plan to make this happen.

So, here's the conclusion I draw from this. InfoWars found a manual on what to do when both the military and Department of Defense are involved in an Internment and Relocation operation. The manual included guidelines for what to do in case this operation happens on American soil, as unlikely as that is. Infowars decided that since it could happen, that it will happen, and since it will happen, it must be part of a plan to make it happen.

 This is an example of the Just in Case fallacy, which was made by presenting a Straw Man of what the manual actually said. The case is made on the worst possible outcome, rather than the most likely. This is sort of like making a slippery slope argument like

1. Displaced Civilians are a reality of warfare.
2. Rules should be enacted to deal with such eventualities. 
3. The Rules should include domestic situations.
4. The Rules will be open to abuse.
5. The Rules will be abused.
6. Eventually, the Rules will be used to inter innocent civillians.
7. All dissent will be silenced via the Rules.

 and then cutting out steps 3-7.

Now, what do we do when a similar claim is made without a source? To give an example, I'll use a 'report' from Conservative Monster, a 'news' site that provides twitter-length news articles, such as

• "Russia and their Muslim terrorist friends in Iran will not be too pleased if Romney beats the Democratic voter fraud machine."

I'm not bullshitting when I say that that one sentence is the entire article.

"This seems so true!"

So, how do they know that?

Now, personally, I find it impossible that anyone would consider that a statement of prima facie fact. First of all, huh? Second of all, why would Russia and Iran be unhappy with Romney winning? Third of all, what evidence do you have of Democratic voter fraud? Fourth of all, what leads you to believe that Russia is friends with Iranian terrorists? Are you Facebook friends with Russia and notice Russia likes a lot of posts by guys named Muhammad SuicideBomb and Abdul FlamingMartyr? Fifth of all, if the Democrats have a 'voter fraud machine,' whatever that is, wouldn't that imply that they're using it to prevent Romney from winning? If so, how does Romney plan to beat the Fraud Machine? Throw a wrench in its gears? Hack its website? I literally have no idea what a voter fraud machine is or how it would be beaten.

The good thing about these kinds of claims is that since they're asserted without evidence they can be dismissed without evidence. This is popularly known as Hitchen's Razor, although I don't think it's officially recognized as a philosophical principle the way Occam's Razor is.

The bad thing about these kinds of claims is that they're such a pain in the ass to debunk or disprove. Since the author doesn't cite any sources or relevant studies we have no real idea where this information is coming from. Personally, I suspect paranoid delusion. But unless I'm willing to spend days and days searching for articles linking Russia to Iranian terrorists or finding out what the fuck a voter fraud machine is, and I'm not, then it's probably going to go unchallenged. Which is a shame, because some people will accept it as Gospel truth.

And I mean Gospel in the sense that even though it's provably insane and wrong people will still believe it.

Next time, assuming I don't lose interest like I usually do, I'll be discussing confirmation bias and maybe straw man arguments. Or maybe something else.

Faith, Fire, and Facebook

I recently moved to Colorado, from the scenic, sweltering pressure cooker of the Texas Hill Country and it's endemic Good-Ole-Boyism, non-existent educational standards, and rampant superstition, bigotry and out-group hostility.

Colorado immediately burst into flames.

So the next time someone posts "Please pray for the people of Colorado," on your Facebook wall, instead of replying "Prayers sent!" or whatever inane, unhelpful mindless happy talk you're about to post to give yourself the feeling of a job well done without actually doing anything, check out this list of things you can do to help that don't rely on sitting on your ass and feeling good about yourself for no damn reason.

1. Educate Yourself

By cutting down all of the forests!

This isn't even the hard kind of education, like molecular biology or quantum physics or (for my Texas friends,) 5th Grade reading comprehension.

Fire, as many know, is spread by the devils of temptation in their rampant march through our children, corrupting them into tiny anti-christs engaging in all manner of evil behavior, including dresses shorter than floor length, sassing their elders, premarital kissing and, in extreme cases, concern for the well-being of those less fortunate than themselves.

In order to protect ourselves from our glorious and vengeful God, He has commanded us to remove all flammable materials within a five mile radius of any habitable structure. Just imagine how ordered and and simple and Godly a world would be without any unsightly trees or grass between you and Sunday School!

Donate To Firefighters

Fighting fires takes money. Instead of donating directly to the firefighters, who are always sad, disappointing humans wandering through traffic asking for handouts like common liberals, and nothing like the chiseled, homosexual models that adorn their PR calenders, give it to your favorite politician.

Assuming you're not a deviant sinner swayed by socialist lies, you'll realize that the best way to keep your fire department funded is by privatization.

That's right, Romney is an anagram of "R money" which is Texan for "Our money"! How could we possibly fail to succeed with a name like that attached to a rich, white guy, even if he is a filthy Mormon and will burn in the fires of Hell for all eternity for having slightly different silly, made-up beliefs than everyone else's silly, made-up beliefs?

Just think! Like our wonderful healthcare system, which ranks first in North American countries that aren't Canada, Mexico, or too small to care about, and only 37th in the world in terms of overall quality, a privatized fire department would be a positive money tree!

Just in case you were wondering, the United States Healthcare system IS number one in overall cost per capita! That's why you don't see doctors asking for handouts or having fundraisers: they know that God truly wants us to flourish as individuals at the expense of society at large!

And don't worry about the cost! As a good Christian, your house will be immune to God's righteous fire. Why, you could even have a barbeque on the charred remains of your neighbors, laughing at the idea of them hanging from meat-hooks being lowered into a lake of molten sulfur for all eternity for their sins of  questioning authority and constantly trying to use logic and facts to win arguments!

Make Yourself Available!

While some well-meaning but misguided secularists have been posting ads on Craigslist making their spare bedrooms and houses available to those unfortunate (wicked and deserving of punishment,) enough to be displaced by the fires, their efforts to help will ultimately be fruitless. They, having not heard our LORDS warning against the evils of the Internet, do not realize that, among other things, Craigslist allows homosexuals to post ads looking for other homosexuals for purposes of companionship. Just as a bad tree cannot produce good fruit, anything involving gays will ultimately be fruitless!


No, what a true Christian can and must do is visit these poor, lost souls in their government sanctioned holding pens and spread the Good News! They may be hungry, tired, angry, or sick from smoke inhalation or burns, but the important thing is that they should all have access to Scripture!

Toilet paper and bathroom reading in one!

The Holy Bible can serve so many purposes for these people! Provided it's a good, solid KJV with annotations, it can be used to club to death the rats they rely on for nutrition, and THEN used to cook the rats, and THEN used to cleanse themselves when they defecate the rat back out into a bucket! How good is our God to provide us with such a multi-purpose book?!

4. As a Last Resort

Seriously, making a Facebook prayer request is about the most fucking useless thing a human being could possibly do to help another human being. I've seen dozens of the fucking things on my wall and you know what? Not one of those people has called to ask if I need anything or if I'm okay.

I said it was almost the most useless thing one could do because responding to one of them is definitely the most useless thing ever. If you seriously believe that clicking the 'like' button, or posting 'healing vibes headed your way' could possibly affect anything in the real world, and then allow yourself a warm, fuzzy feeling for making that much of an effort then you're even worse than the internet slacktivists that spread that damn Kony 2012 video around for a week and then forgot about it forever.

You want to pray for someone? Fine. Go ahead. But don't make a big spectacle of it and attempt to emotionally blackmail your friends into joining you, you pretentious dick-knuckle. Pray, for whatever good it does (hint: none,) and then go do something fucking useful.

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.

Genesis, Chapters 11-26

Chapter 11.

    1: Everyone speaks the same language, despite being divided according to their tongue.

    2-4:Man begins building a tower to reach Heaven, which is only like 5 miles up as everyone knows.

    5-9: God came down to earth, which used to happen a lot, and confounded Men's language and scattered them, as they were getting way too close to building a functioning and progressive society of technological advancement for the Judeo-Christian God's liking.

    10-26: More fucking genealogies. People are still living well past the 900 year mark.

    27-28: Terah sires Abram, Nahor, and Haran. Haran begats Lot.

    29: Abram marries Sarai, Nahor marries Milcah.

    30: Sarai is barren.

    31-32: Terah takes his son Abram, Sarai, and Lot and went into Canaan. The place, not the person. There they came unto Haran the Place, not Haran the Person.

Chapter 12.

    1-3: God tells Abram to leave Haran the Place for somewhere else where God will build a great nation with Abram as its leader. God will bless those that bless Abram and curse those that curse Abram, so, yknow, be nice to that guy.

    4-6: Abram, Lot and Sarai and all their people (slaves,) go forth to Canaan the Place.

    7: God grants the land to Abram, because that's how property rights work, and Abram built an altar to God who appeared to Abram.

Again, God had no problem with just showing up.

    8-9: More traveling and altar building.

    10-13: They come to Egypt, where there is a famine. Abram, brave leader that he is, tells his wife Sarai to tell the Egyptians that she is his sister so that they don't kill Abram to take her as a sex slave.

Of course, they may take Sarai anyway, but at least the fella gets to go free, since he's just her brother. Right? "Hey, you're probably gonna get raped to death, so instead of dying trying to defend you, I'll just lie and save my own ass. We cool?"

    14-16: Sarai was taken by no less than the Pharaoh, giving Abram sheep, oxen, asses, servants, and camels for her.

So yeah, if you're ever destitute in a foreign land, sell your hot wife to the local king.

    17-20: God plagues Pharaoh and his house with plagues because of Sarai. Pharaoh asks Abram 'What the fuck? Why didn't you tell me she was your wife? Get the fuck out of here!' Abram, Sarai and their stuff gets the fuck out.

Chapter 13.

    1-4: Abram, having grown quite wealthy in cattle, silver and gold, presumably from whoring out his wife, went back to his alter and called on God.

    5-7: Lot, also wealthy in flocks, herds and tents, and Abram had too much stuff to stay on the same land without fighting, since God's prophets are all about worldly accumulation of wealth.

    8-9: Abram proposes they split the land down the middle.

    10-13: Abram stayed in Canaan, while Lot went down to the cities of the plains. The cities being Sodom and Gomorrah.

    14-18: After Lot left to enjoy the sites of Sodom and Gomorrah, God promised Abram all the land that he could see in every direction until the end of time, and that his descendants would outnumber the grains of sand on the earth.

Anyone else think this is kind of a dick move? Hey, guy who sold his wife, You're gonna get everything you could ever possibly desire. Hey, tag-along nephew, you get to go live in a shithole so shitty their hobbies include Angel Rape.

Chapter 14.

    1-12: There was a big war between a bunch of places that probably never existed. Or at least never existed as described, the end of which led to Lot and his good being taken by deserters from Sodom and Gomorrah.

    13-16: Abram, learning of his nephews capture, armed his slaves and attacked them under cover of darkness and rescued Lot, his goods, the women and the regular people (men).

    17-20: The king of Sodom and the king/high-priest of Salem met with Abram to sing praises. Abram offers the first tithe.

The King of Sodom.

    21-24: King Sodom offers to let Abram keep the goods in exchange for the prisoners. Abram says no dice, I'm not taking a bribe from you so you can say you made me rich. Abram accepted only the food that his men and confederates had eaten.

Which is the kind of noble and self-sacrificing and humble gesture one can make if one is already so rich that half a country can't hold all your stuff.

Chapter 15.

    1: God appears to Abram in a vision claiming to be his shield and reward.

    2-6: Abram asks why he doesn't have a proper heir. God promises Abrams descendants will outnumber the stars in the sky.

    7-11: God asks for a creepily specific blood sacrifice.

Seriously, if you ever want to know how to properly butcher animals for the purposes of appeasing your mad desert god, this is the goods.

    12-21: In a nightmare, God explains how, even though Abram will die peacefully of old age, his people will be enslaved for hundreds of years, but after that it'll be awesome.

Which would be an awesome prophecy if there was any possible way of proving it hadn't been retro-fitted into the narrative.

Chapter 16.

    1-4: Sarai, who is barren and baby-crazy, tells Abram to knock up their handmaiden, the Egyptian Hagar. Hagar then gets uppity with Sarai.

Sarai gets mad butthurt about things happening exactly as she wanted them to, proving we really are made in God's image as he's constantly doing that.

    5-6: Sarai 'dealt hardly' with Hagar, who flees.

    7-10: An angel, upon finding Hagar, orders Hagar to return to Sarai and accept her punishment, and that Hagar's offspring will not be innumerable.

    11-16: The angel informs Hagar that her child will be a 'wild man' with 'every man's hand against him' before she returns and gives birth to Ishmael.

Chapter 17.

    1-5: Years later, God appears to Abram seeking to make covenant. Abram becomes Abraham, as he will be the father of many nations.

    6-11: God explains the covenant, which is more 'innumerable descendants,' 'great kingdoms,' 'more powerful than kings' schtick. The sign of the covenant? Genital mutilation of infants. What else.

    12-14: God explains the ettiquite for cutting part of a baby's dick off, even if that child is bought as a slave.

Weird how we consider this barbaric ritual 'normal.'

Also, if God doesn't want people to have foreskin then WHY DID HE DESIGN US WITH IT?   

    15-17: Sarai becomes Sarah, and God promises she will bear a child. Abraham has trouble believing this, as he is 90 years old. Although that's only like 8 in Genesis years.

    18-22: God promises that, while Ishmael will be fruitful, the covenant will pass to the unborn Isaac.

Because let's not get crazy with handing out blessings and covenants, it's not like he's all-powerful and totally capable of passing the covenant to both with no real effort on his part.

    23-27: Abraham takes Ishmael, all of his slaves, bought and born, and circumcises them, as well as himself.

Which sounds like it would have been the best Youtube video and worst day at work ever.

Chapter 18.

    1: God appears to Abraham on the plains of Mamre one day.

    2-8: It seems God took the form of three travelers, for some reason. Luckily Abraham is almost comically eager to please any wandering travelers who happen upon his tent. Abraham and Sarah personally prepare a feast for the guests.

I'm genuinely curious whether or not Abraham knew the trinity were really God, or if this is just how he acts around strangers. I mean he has lots of servants with freshly mutilated cocks, couldn't they prepare the feast?

    9-11: The travelers tell Abraham (and Sarah, who was eavesdropping,) that they will have a son, despite being really old.

Now, just as a reminder, while Abraham and Sarah are freaking out about being too old to have children, Abraham's father was 70 when he sired children and lived to be 205 (11:26,32). So as far as I'm concerned, people breeding decades past the expiration of their historical life expectancy (around 30 it they were lucky,) is totally normal for this fiction.

    12-15: Sarah laughs at the absurdity of the news. God asks why she was laughing, because he can totally do it, you'll see, God's really powerful.

    16-20: God, turning his attention to Sodom and debates whether or not to tell Abraham what he is about to do. God decides to take Abraham with him. Only him is still them at this point.

    21-33: God and the trinity travel towards Sodom, which God intends to destroy. Abraham, for once not behaving like a greedy, venal coward with a dick mutilation fetish, bargains God down to sparing the city if ten righteous men can be found.

If God is the source of morality, then why is the human the one trying to prevent needless slaughter at the hand of God here? I refuse to believe that Sodom was irredeemable, as the amount of irredeemable people in the world is a tiny fraction, and those belong to tragic cases of untreatable mental illness or severe psychological/emotional damage. For the rest, surely the 'right' thing to do would be to, I don't know, establish law and schools and to implement preventative education and better parenting techniques.This is God we're talking about, so money and time would not be an issue.

Chapter 19.

    1-3: Two angels appear to Lot in Sodom. Lot begs them to stay at his house to eat and wash up, which angels need to do, apparently, and despite the angels desire to sleep in the streets, eventually enter Lot's home and feast.

    4-8: A mob surrounds Lot's house demanding that the angels be released for raping purposes. Lot goes out and OFFERS HIS VIRGIN DAUGHTERS TO THE RAPE MOB IN THEIR PLACE.

I'll admit I'm not a parent, but I can say, as a person, I would never, ever, ever, ever offer a defenseless young woman to an angry mob in place of a grown man (which is how the angels are described). To any religious parents out there, I sincerely hope that if push comes to shove you will choose your child's well-being over the dictates of your insane god.

    9-11: The mob surges, and the angels pull Lot into the house and strike the mob blind.

And no one was raped. Although Lot certainly deserved it after throwing his daughters to the mob like that.

    12-14: The angels warn Lot that they are about to destroy the city, so that Lot can gather his family. His sons-in-law-to-be thought he was joking.

I wonder how hilarious they'd find Lot knowing he offered their fiancees up for gang rape.

    15-17: The angels order Lot to take his wife and daughters and flee the city. When he doesn't, the angels forcibly remove him for his own safety. They then order him to flee to the hills to avoid the coming destruction.

    18-22: Lot bargains the angels down to fleeing to the much closer village of Zoar.

    23-26: With the dawn, God rained fire. All of the men, all of the children, all of the women, infants, elderly and unborn, all of the pets and animals of Sodom and Gomorrah burned. And Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt for the crime of watching the atrocity of God's handiwork.

   27-30: The next morning Lot went out to see the smoking crater that used to be the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot, fearing to dwell in Zoar, went into the mountains to live with his daughters.

   31-38: The daughters (of course it's the daughters' idea, this is the Bible,) decide to get their father drunk and have sex with him to get pregnant. They then give birth to Moab of the Moabites and Benammi of the Ammonites. The daughters don't get names.

Assuming the situation happened as written (which is questionable, given what we know of Lot's parenting skills,) that Lot's daughters got him black-out drunk and took advantage of him, as so often happens, surely when they became noticeably pregnant he would work out what had happened, right? Of course, maybe Lot was totally okay with it.

Chapter 20.

    1-3: While sojourning in Gerar, Abraham again tells the king that Sarah is his sister when they come to take her. God, ever one to defend the worthless pile of shit Abraham, appears to the king in a dream to tell him that Sarah is married and that the king is a dead man.

    4-7: The king, who had not slept with Sarah, claims innocence as both Abraham and Sarah stated that they were siblings. God claims to have know this and to have been the reason the king hadn't touched Sarah, and orders the king to return Sarah or fucking else.

Which is interesting, in that God clearly has and is willing to forcibly prevent people from partaking in actions he considers wicked. Yet, instead of exercising this faculty on the people of pre-Flood earth or at Sodom and Gomorrah, he found it preferable to drown and burn men, women, and children.

    8-10: Upon awakening, the king informs his servants of what has transpired, then calls Abraham and gives him a similar 'what the fuck, dude?!' speech that Pharaoh gave Abraham the last time he pulled this stunt.

    11-13: Abraham informs the king that, despite being an abject coward unwilling to defend his wife, she was his half-sister: therefore he wasn't technically lying. He also tells the king that he ordered Sarah to corroborate the story.

    14-16: to set matters right, the king gives Abraham sheep, oxen, slaves and a thousand silver pieces and offers to let Abraham stay anywhere in his kingdom.

Because again, if you're a man of God, the best way to make a living is by whoring your wife out while claiming she's your sister.

    17-18: Abraham prays, and God heals the king, the kings wife and their female slaves so that they could bear children. Because God had stricken all the wombs of the kings house barren because of Sarah...

First, Abraham has been begging God to fix Sarah's baby-maker for decades, but God decides female slaves that have nothing to do with Abraham in any way are a higher priority. Second, magically healing people of afflictions you magically gave them sort of cancels the use of magic out.

Chapter 21.

    1-8: God finally makes good on his promise to give Abraham and Sarah a son, much to the rejoicing of all.

    9-13: During a feast in honor of Isaac, Sarah notices Hagar, Abraham's other baby-mama playing with Isaac, and orders Abraham to cast Hagar and Ishmael out, much to the displeasure of Abraham. God tells Abraham to cast his other son's mother and his other son out, as Isaac is the only son that really counts.

    14-16: Abraham casts out Hagar and Ishmael to wander in the wilderness. After running out of water, Hagar placed Ishmael under a bush, wandered a ways of, and wept at the prospect of having to watch her child die.

Just so we're clear: Sarah ordered this, God confirmed it, and Abraham did this. A woman is watching her child die of thirst in the wilderness because the child, son of a wealthy landowner, wasn't the legitimate heir.

    17-21: God, again taking his sweet-ass time fulfilling his contracts, intervenes and the boy grows up in the wilderness and became a great archer and married a nice Egyptian girl.

    22-24: The king of Gerar and the commander of his men told Abraham that God was with Abraham in all that he did, and asked him to swear by God that he would not deal falsely with the king or his descendants, as the king had always dealt honestly with Abraham. Abraham agreed.

    25-32: Abraham complains to the king that the king's men had seized a well which was on Abraham's land. The king claimed ignorance of this. The two then took sheep and oxen and struck a deal in which the land of the Philistines was returned.

    33-34: Abraham planted a tamarisk tree where the deal was struck, called on God and sojourned in the land of the Philistines.

It's weird how randomly specific some things are, such as their being seven ewes, or the tree being a tamarisk, whatever that is, yet Lot's daughters don't even receive names and time frames are marked only by births and deaths.

Chapter 22.

Fuck, I really hope we're done with the torture and murder of women and children for a while. The last few chapters were nauseating.

    1-2: God commands Abraham to offer Isaac as a burnt offering.

Fuck.

    3-5: Abraham takes Isaac and two men, along with wood and asses, and set forth for the place where he will kill his son for the glory of God. Drawing close, Abraham tells his servants to wait with the ass while he and his son go off to worship where there aren't any witnesses.

    6-10: This is one of the most monstrous things I have ever read, in a book chock full of monstrous things.

    11-14: At the last second God calls the execution off, as it was only a test. Abraham finds a ram to sacrifice instead.

As tests go, as far as I'm concerned, Abraham failed miserably. Abraham has, so far, repeatedly lied about his relationship with his wife to save his own hide, repeatedly whored out his wife in a foreign land, impregnated his slave girl, cast the slave girl and his first-born son into the wilderness, mutilated the genitals of both of his children and all of his slaves, and almost murdered his other son. This is the man viewed as the founder of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

    15-19: God again promises Abraham the innumerable seed, all nations being blessed thing for his obedience. Abraham and his party return and dwell in Beer-sheba.

And that's the price, isn't it? Unquestioning obedience. Land, wealth, power, prosperity: what is that worth? Murdering a child? No. Hell is preferable to that.

    20-24: After this Abraham is informed that his brother Nahor and his wife Milcah also bore children: Huz, Buz, and Kemuel father of Aram, Chesed, Hazo, Pildash, Jidlaph, and Bethuel. Bethuel begat Rebekah. His concubine Reumah bore him Tebah, Gaham, Thahash, and Maachah.

And hopefully none of those children had any dealings with the mad desert god of Abraham.

 Chapter 23.

This entire chapter concerns itself solely with the death of Sarah, Abraham's grief, and the purchase of a burial place.

Chapter 24.

    1-9: Abraham, now an old man, makes his servant swear to find Isaac a wife from the country of Abraham's kindred and not a Canaanite woman. And also to bring the woman to Canaan and under no circumstances take Isaac to the land of his fathers.

    10-14: After loading up on swag and traveling to Nahor the Place, the servant posts up at a well to creep on the women drawing water. He offered up a really specific prayer to find a suitable wife.

    15-20: At this point Rebekah, granddaughter of Nahor the Person shows up and fulfills the servants prayer request.

Now, I'm not an expert on the culture here, but the servant prayed that the right maiden would offer to water his camels as well if the servant asked her for water for himself, which Rebekah did. But that probably could have been any unmarried woman that responded in that way to an apparently wealthy traveler in a patriarchal society. Seems a bit like only praying for rain when it's already thundering.

     21-28: The servant procures lodging at Rebekah's place and praises God. Because a normal person wouldn't rent out a room to a man offering gold jewelry in exchange for it.

    29-48: Rebekah's brother returns to fetch the servant, who refuses to eat or wash up until he has told his story. He then repeats almost verbatim the first 28 verses of this chapter.

    49-61: After agreeing to the marriage and showering everyone with gifts the servant and Rebekah depart immediately.

    62-67: Isaac, meditating in a field, saw the camels and walked toward them, the servant told Rebekah that it was Isaac approaching, so she veiled herself. The servant then told Isaac what had happened, and Isaac took Rebekah into his tent, married her, loved her, was comforted after the loss of his mother.

I'm starting to worry, as nothing notably insane has happened in a couple of chapters.

Chapter 25.

    1-6: Abraham remarried and had several more children, but gave all he had, minus gifts, to Isaac because fuck the other kids.

    7-10: Abraham died aged 175 and was buried with his first wife by Isaac and Ishmael.

    11: After Abraham's death God blesses Isaac, who dwelt by the well Lahai-roi.

    12-18: Genealogy and dwellings of Ishmael.

    19-26: Rebekah, who was also barren, eventually conceived after Isaac intreated God on her behalf, which always works out well. She gave birth to twins: Esau, born covered in fur, and Jacob, who came out grabbing Esau's heel.

Esau and Jacob

    27-28: Esau, whom Isaac preferred, was a hunter of the field. Jacob, whom Rebekah preferred, was a tent dweller.

    29-34: Esau, returning from the field half-starved, begs Jacob for some food (pottage, whatever the fuck that is,) and Jacob convinces Esau to sell Jacob his birthright in exchange for a meal.

First, if Esau was short-sighted enough to sell his half of the kingdom for a meal, then he probably wouldn't have made a very good leader. Second, if Jacob is conniving enough to trick his dimwitted brother into selling his birthright for a meal and ruthless enough to let him starve if he doesn't, then he probably won't make a very good leader either. So I imagine things will soon get extremely cruel, bloody, and inhumane again very shortly.