No Faith? But that’s no good, either . . .

I love that there are people like Erich Vieth in the world, people who take the time to refute dangerous “fact” spouters like the Creationists who got themselves powered up to the top of the Google listings for vestigial organs.  I love that he researches so thoroughly and carefully points out the enormous flaws in what passes for logic in the world of the fanatical faithful.  They need to be pointed out, those flaws.  Because in recent years, their voices have become very, very loud.  And often, unfortunately, loud wins.  Especially when loud is accompanied by legislation, or worse, explosives.

Seems fanatics, whether they be Christian, Muslim or otherwise, are dead-set on yelling the loudest and therefore claiming victory.  It pains me.  It obviously pains lots of people; even most flocks of the faithful can see that anything carried too far becomes dangerous.  People like Erich, or Al Franken, say, do good work.  I applaud them.

I, on the other hand, might be more likely to just cover my ears and say “la-la-la-la-LA-I-CAN’T-HEAR-YOU!”

Yeah, yeah, I know, not particularly effective in the battle against ignorance.  It’s just that I get soooo tired of it.  Of the fighting, of the rhetoric, of the nonsense that parades as so much religion and the often arrogant verbosity working to knock down the many points of faith, one at a time, but not being heard because, after all, if you believe, you don’t need proof.  Or un-proof, as it were.

I happen …

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Be Conscious of Your Unconscious to Set you Free

A lot of people are beating up on old Sigmund Freud these days.  More than a century ago, however, Freud hit a particular ball out of the park and it’s still sailing:  he concluded that many important thought processes are unconscious

In Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), Mark Johnson and George Lakoff listed some of the many important unconscious mental activities:

  • Accessing memories relevant to what is being said.
  • Comprehending a stream of sound as being language, dividing it into distinctive phonetic features.
  • Picking out words and giving them meanings appropriate to context.
  • Making semantic and pragmatic sense of the sentences as a whole.
  • Framing what is said in terms relevant to the discussion.
  • Making inferences relevant to what is being said.
  • Constructing mental images where relevant.
  • Filling in gaps in the discourse.
  • Noticing and interpreting a speaker’s body language.

In short, most of what is going on in our heads is unconscious. Lakoff and Johnson concluded that “unconscious thought is at least 95 percent of all thought and that our unconscious conceptual systems function like a “hidden hand” that “shapes how we automatically and unconsciously comprehend what we experience.  It constitutes our unreflective common sense.”

Nietzsche expressed this same idea in Thus Spake Zarathustra

“It is by invisible hands that we are bent and tortured worst.”

Freud and Nietzsche have been proven absolutely correct on this point.  That consciousness is only the “tip of the iceberg” has been conclusively proven by hundreds of experiments outlined in numerous …

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Unnecessary Study: Praying Doesn’t Heal Heart Patients

Researchers have just spent a whole lot of money determining that prayer does not seem to work.  In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. In fact, patients who knew they were being prayed…

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The Immorality of Inquiry

Consider, that many religions consider it immoral to do any of the following: Ask certain obvious questions (Is there a God? Will God decide to abolish hell?) Follow evidence wherever it leads. (Many Believers refuse to consider indisputable indicators demonstrating that the earth is actually more than 6,000 years old). Admit that…

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