Frontiers of Reason

Long ago, back in the good old days, to be Christ-like you had to deny sex, marriage, and family. While many see the portrayals of Christ as closeted gay, he was more likely celibate. Christianity was antimarriage, procelibacy. Modern Christians claiming a family position are deviating from the first several hundred years of the church as well as the bible–the old testament is where it says to be bountiful, a barren women is a curse, and the man must perform his sexual duties and not spill his seed onto the ground. Kristen Upson-Saia a scholar of early christianity writes:

The earliest Christian communities considered heterosexual marriage to be fraught with problems and was thus to be avoided. Christian leaders argued that married people were too distracted by their familial obligations to be wholly devoted to God. Rather, they argued that the ideal sexual state for Christians was celibacy. They asserted that since the angels in heaven were asexual, Christians ought to remain single in order to live on earth already “as angels.” They believed that Jesus would commend single and celibate Christians for “making themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:10-12). Finally, given that God’s nature was virginal (literally “uncorrupted”), they claimed that Christian virgins shared God’s very nature and were thus best able to commune with God.

This base of celibacy is common to many religions including Buddhism, Brahmanism, Hindu Ascetics, and Greek Cynics. By the time Christ came along, the mideast had been ravished of most of its natural resources and issues of population were common. Being antipagan meant going against the Roman law to have family.

Although the most dedicated Christians remained unmarried, heterosexual marriage and intercourse was tolerated in some cases. For those who could not control their lust, marriage absorbed their sexual impulses, keeping them from committing worse sexual sins. (Note here that marriage is defended not as a “good,” but as better than other evils.) One of the only reasons to regard marriage as inherently good was that it produced children and that Christians who participated in procreative intercourse participated in God’s creation.

Yes, that would be the backdoor to sex; you don’t have to be celibate because if you procreate you participate in god’s creation. Hmm, sounds like Rastafarianism where they believe making love to one women is like making love to all women and so they’d like to. Also, a great way to guilt and shame as control–guilt that men lust and shame to women as seductress. Asceticism and celibacy are a response to the wanton material acquisition of populations gone awry to depletion of resources and resulting hardship–at which point you either go to war or starve. As humans go we haven’t learned how to live in balance with resource.

In Samuel, Old Testament, Amnon rapes his half sister. Old order semites were more then lustful but rather embarrassingly rapacious. Ultraorthox antisexuality is another withdrawal from the world

It was not Christians, but the pagan state that labored hardest to defend marriage. The poor conditions of life in the ancient Mediterranean made for regular population crises (each woman needed to have approximately five children to maintain a stable population). Thus, the state regularly incentivized marriage and procreation. Emperor Octavian (aka Caesar Augustus), for instance, introduced three waves of legislation that rewarded married people with children (e.g., with tax incentives, expanded rights and released obligations) and penalized the unmarried (e.g., taking away rights of inheritance or rights to hold office). Similarly, small tribes within the Roman Empire also prized procreation for the perpetuity of their line. This explains why tribes like the Jews endorsed sexual arrangements that maximized procreation (such as polygamy and Levirate marriage), lamented barren women and denounced all non-procreative behavior (including same-sex coupling).

A “History of Private Life, Revelations of the Medieval World:”

Ideally a women divided their time between prayer and various kinds of handiwork… Yet all the prayer and all the work (group activities, much as males hunted and made war in groups) did nothing to appease the men, persuaded as they were that women were by their very nature perverse and possessed with fantastic anxieties. What, men asked, do women do together when they are alone, locked up in the chamber? The answer was: nothing good.

While I could tease a lot of meaning from this, for now, the point is the development of honor and preservation of virginity precisely because of men’s paranoia that women would be promiscuous. Promotion of sex for procreation only helped keep women in place while men could philander. And both, ideally avoided joyful pursuits whether nonreligious singing or frivolous dancing. Christians have this in common with Muslims. This antiworldy, antisexual, and constant cloistering of women is historic for both Christianity and Islam.

Alexander Sanger writes it is American protestants (WASPs as we used to call them) that reacted to Irish Catholics arriving in the US and decided to preserve WASPdom by criminalizing abortion.

Physicians alone were not able to bring about the criminalization of abortion. At the beginning of their campaign in the 1840s and 1850s, they aligned themselves with the Know-Nothings, a fledging political party of nativists opposed the tide of Irish-Catholic immigration into America, which had begun to increase exponentially with the potato famine…

It did not escape Protestant notice that immigrant Catholic women had large numbers of children, while native Protestant women were having fewer. Since few new birth control methods had been introduced at this time — although there were the beginnings of condom and diaphragm manufacturing — the Know-Nothings suspected that Protestant women were using abortion as their method of birth control. Hence, the Know-Nothing men readily joined the AMA crusade to criminalize abortion. As contraceptive options increased in the course of the 19th century, those who favored the white Protestant hegemony also supported the criminalization of contraception. As one prominent physician said in 1874: “The annual destruction of fetuses has become so truly appalling among native American (Protestant) women that the Puritanic blood of ’76 will be but sparingly represented in the approaching centenary.”

Ever since Catholics arrived at St Mary’s on the East coast, protestants have feared their US imposition of power–the reformation and counter reformation are still held dear. The secular, religious tolerance of John F Kennedy has much to do with his running for presidency as a Catholic. Upson-Saia concludes rightly.

Given this history, those who wish to appeal to tradition to comment on same-sex marriage must recognize two things: First, Christians who cull the tradition of Christian sexual ethics cannot seize only those aspects of the tradition that support their opposition of same-sex coupling while leaving behind other aspects of the tradition that criticize their own heterosexuality. If one wants to uphold the strand of pro-procreative logic in the early Christian tradition, she must recognize that the tradition requires her also to oppose all other forms of non-procreative sex acts that are performed only for pleasure, including those of married heterosexual couples, and to endorse sexual arrangements that maximize procreation (such as polygamy and marriage at a young age). Moreover, she must also acknowledge that early Christians considered heterosexual marriage and intercourse to be far inferior to Christian celibacy and in need of its own defense.

Second, the pro-heterosexual marriage stance of the Roman state was driven by issues of demographics, not morality. And while we’ll soon see what the court understands to be the state’s interest in the allocation of marriage rights, it’s surely the case that our state faces none of the same pressures regarding under-population as did Roman backers of heterosexual marriage in antiquity.

Once again material culture relates to antiquated ideology. The material reason disappears but the ideology remains and is held fast as absolute.

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.frontiersofreason.com

In 1998 Ap Dijksterhuis published research claiming if you were primed with the word professor you would do better on a test than if you were primed with the stereotype word soccer hooligan.

 Specifically, 4 experiments established that priming the stereotype of professors or the trait intelligent enhanced participants’ performance on a scale measuring general knowledge.

…Results of the experiments revealed (a) that prolonged priming leads to more pronounced behavioral effects and (b) that there is no sign of decay of the effects for at least 15 min.

Another example is if you were related a text with terms of old age you subsequently walked more slowly. A physical context study stated you think a hill is more steep if you are carrying a back pack, are fatigued, or in poor shape. A person primed with an African-American stereotype reacted with greater hostility to a “vexatious request.”

The basic issue is whether people are unconsciously primed to perception by environment.

“Priming” refers to the passive, subtle, and unobtrusive activation of relevant mental representations by external, environmental stimuli, such that people are not and do not become aware of the influence exerted by those stimuli. In harmony with the situationist tradition, this priming research has shown that the mere, passive perception of environmental events directly triggers higher mental processes in the absence of any involvement by conscious, intentional processes…”

More recent research problematizes these results by stating the specific terms are generalized too broadly and the duration is too short–the connection between the word “old” and the act of “walking slowly” is too broad and the effect more short.

A well-established principle in traditional priming research (which commonly involves presenting words as primes to study lexical or semantic processing) is that generalization is often extremely narrow and context-specific [5]. If the priming effects of reading a word such as OLD do not transfer across changes in font or modality, then how likely is it that they transfer to something like speed of walking? The priming effects described above are unusual in this context as they imply effects which generalize very broadly. Another reason these reports are surprising is that decades of research has found that unconscious or subliminal influences on behaviour are exceptionally difficult to demonstrate [6], [7], [8], and even when replicable positive effects are shown, they tend to be over extremely short time intervals (less than a second), far shorter than the intervals involved in the studies described above, where periods of at least a few minutes are involved.

In short, they can’t reproduce the results.

We found it difficult, however, to replicate the basic effect of stereotype priming on accuracy in answering general knowledge questions.

…The current results are also consistent with the view that conscious thoughts are by far the primary driver of behavior [52] and that unconscious influences – if they exist at all – have limited and narrow effects.

What is sad in the context of this is Dijksterhuis is acting like a dogmatic jerk rather than discussing the research or helping establish an experimental protocol.

David Shanks, a cognitive psychologist at University College London, UK, and first author of the paper in PLoS ONE, is among skeptical scientists calling for Dijksterhuis to design a detailed experimental protocol to be carried out indifferent laboratories to pin down the effect. Dijksterhuis has rejected the request, saying that he “stands by the general effect” and blames the failure to replicate on “poor experiments”.

An acrimonious e-mail debate on the subject has been dividing psychologists, who are already jittery about other recent exposures of irreproducible results (seeNature 485, 298–300; 2012). “It’s about more than just replicating results from one paper,” says Shanks, who circulated a draft of his study in October; the failed replications call into question the under­pinnings of ‘unconscious-thought theory’.

The reason why this is important is unconscious priming is a highly touted effect made rich in Motivational Seminars espousing a “smart unconscious” as discussed in Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Blink”.

Daniel Kahneman famous for exploring “anchoring” weighed in on the debate:

Nobel prize-winner Daniel Kahneman has issued a strongly worded call to one group of psychologists to restore the credibility of their field by creating a replication ring to check each others’ results…

This scepticism has been fed by failed attempts to replicate classic priming studies, increasing concerns about replicability in psychology more broadly (see ‘Bad Copy‘), and the exposure of fraudulent social psychologists such as Diederik Stapel, Dirk Smeesters and Lawrence Sanna, who used priming techniques in their work.

“For all these reasons, right or wrong, your field is now the poster child for doubts about the integrity of psychological research,” Kahneman writes. “I believe that you should collectively do something about this mess.”

Further:

To address this problem, Kahneman recommends that established social psychologists set up a “daisy chain” of replications. Each lab would try to repeat a priming effect demonstrated by its neighbour, supervised by someone from the replicated lab. Both parties would record every detail of the methods, commit beforehand to publish the results, and make all data openly available.

Others maintain that priming is obvious and it’s a few skeptics ruining the debate.

Norbert Schwarz, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who received the e-mail, says that priming studies attract sceptical attention because their results are often surprising, not necessarily because they are scientifically flawed. “There is no empirical evidence that work in this area is more or less replicable than work in other areas,” he says, although the “iconic status” of individual findings has distracted from a larger body of supportive evidence.

Schwarz sounds suspect here. The results are actually intuitively true; it would make sense that we think a hill is more steep when fatigued. However, I am not sure that listening to racist speech makes me more unconsciously racist—but then we do say choose your friends wisely as they influence behavior; we also say being with different people doesn’t necessarily make you that kind of person; integration does work in lowering behavioral racism. All of these examples are over long periods of time. The issue is really a maximum of 15 minutes of priming effect versus 1 second, or less, and “hear red see red versus hear red see apple, blood, or rust”–the latency time and generalization of effect. Kahneman’s input and Dijksterhuis’ defensiveness are obvious issues of replicability.

The lesson to me, as a skeptic interested in science, is how scientists pursue research, verify research, and market research. The insights to me as a philosopher are implications on free will. The warnings to me as a practical psychologist are heuristic biases we need to understand. As an atheist getting god out of mind helps eliminate biases towards revelatory thinking, prophetic thinking, and authoritarian thinking. Finally, I worry about people like Gladwell that insist we are so shallow as to be unable to resist immediate impressions–rather than admitting defeat, welcoming stupidity, and wearing the clothes wouldn’t it be better to become more moral and consciously observant? Isn’t the point of education to consciously inform ourselves and live in the world with greater consciousness?

My largest concern is the temptation to think of the unconscious as having person-like qualities with mind as a Cartesian theater of actors with the result of the pathetic marketing of narrow results as general panaceas in expensive and ubiquitous motivational seminars or therapies of programming the mind with language. The notion that one can think one’s way or unconsciously control another’s way out of material dilemmas by the use of priming avoids the more tangible and real issues of the need to change the environment. Why use words to feel better or change things when what’s needed is to change the situation? It is too easy to avoid real change when one can say just put on rose-colored glasses and wear them socially, politically as the rosy reflection creates change in others. It may be politically astute to reframe discussions but that’s really the same thing as using language properly and defining the use of rhetoric in argumentation. There is also no discussion of how personality relates as if all people worked the same way–what about a contrarian versus a conformist? What of conscious control overriding instinct–racist talk disgusts me and I am getting more disgusted?

Finally, the decreasing lack of funding for science research, the prevalent use of non-evidence-based psychotherapies, and the increasing need to make a mark as a researcher to gain status and money in a declining education market provide great temptation to skew one’s results and cloister those results. What’s needed is more respect for science versus revelation and more objective funding of research.

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.frontiersofreason.com

For years women have not been able to wear prayer shawls or visit the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. A recent court ruling now prevents them from being arrested.

In a groundbreaking ruling, the Jerusalem District Court upheld an earlier decision of the magistrate’s court that women who wear prayer shawls (“tallitot” in Hebrew) at the Western Wall Plaza are not contravening “local custom” or causing a public disturbance, and therefore should not be arrested…

On April 11, five women who had donned tallitot during the group’s monthly prayer service were arrested and brought to the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court. Judge Sharon Larry-Bavly ruled at the time that there was no cause for arresting the women, and that the Women of the Wall’s prayer services did not create a public disturbance.

Personally, I don’t worship idols or buildings but don’t care if others do. Though this worship has led to rather nasty politics. I’m not sure who has the right to Jerusalem but it was won in the 1967 war against Jordanian control. One would have to live under a rock to not get how religions have crapped on each other to maintain control of Jerusalem. While it is easy to sympathize against Jewish persecution the Jewish-Roman wars began with their refusal to consider the Roman Emperor a god, their refusal to practice the state religion of paganism, and their destruction of Roman idols. Three wars later Jews are fully banned. Constantine will later allow them to enter once a year. In 438 the empress Eudocia removes the ban but they get massacred again in the 600′s by persians, muslims, and byzantines. Fast forward to this century when Muslims have occupied the land for centuries but Israel carves itself a new-old home.

Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky, whom the prime minister had tasked with finding a solution to the issue, said in response that the ruling strengthened the need for a sustainable and agreed solution “that will allow every Jew to feel at home at the Western Wall.”

Sharansky’s plan will allow for the construction of an additional section of the Western Wall Plaza at the southern end of the Wall, “equal in size and height to the northern prayer area,” for egalitarian prayer. That area would be accessible as part of a unified Western Wall complex with a single entrance.

I applaud the liberalization of access. Now if they would just allow a woman to be a rabbi and get rid of that horrible prayer where they thank god they weren’t born a woman.

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.frontiersofreason.com

Belief in a punitive, angry, vengeful, jealous god (as in the commandment, “I am a jealous god…”)  is linked to emotional problems. What is not tested is whether it is causative or correlative. Here is the abstract from the paper.

This study examines the association between beliefs about God and psychiatric symptoms in the context of Evolutionary Threat Assessment System Theory, using data from the 2010 Baylor Religion Survey of US Adults (N = 1,426). Three beliefs about God were tested separately in ordinary least squares regression models to predict five classes of psychiatric symptoms: general anxiety, social anxiety, paranoia, obsession, and compulsion. Belief in a punitive God was positively associated with four psychiatric symptoms, while belief in a benevolent God was negatively associated with four psychiatric symptoms, controlling for demographic characteristics, religiousness, and strength of belief in God. Belief in a deistic God and one’s overall belief in God were not significantly related to any psychiatric symptoms.

The author was interviewed by HP.

“Quite simply, the notion is that belief in a benevolent God will reduce the sense that the world is threatening at the neural level, because God will protect you from harm,” study co-author Dr. Neva Silton, professor of psychology at Marymount Manhattan College, told The Huffington Post in an email. “The angry God not only fails to provide protection, he/she may actually pose a threat of harm.”

HP found an expert to counter.

“We don’t know whether it was the poorer mental health (anxiety, paranoia) that caused subjects to perceive God as punitive, or whether it was the view of God as punitive that caused the poor mental health,” Dr. Robert Koenig, a Duke University psychiatry professor who was not involved in the study, told The Huffington Post in an email. “My suspicion, though, is that…people with emotional problems see their entire world in a negative light and often feel a need to blame someone — and God is often the target.”

Seems clear to me that if attitude and assertion create meaning and has an affective value than reading texts of a punitive, vengeful god would have a reinforcing feedback. If you are an angry person why would you focus on “god is love” versus “god punishes?”  This is precisely why the sacred text is relevant to the ideology. If you can’t find words of hate in your sacred text then whether you are literal, allegorical, hermeneutical, or psychological is irrelevant.

The study found no difference in emotional problems between believers ann nonbelievers.

I find this astoundingly positive and good news. Aside from knowing that bad decisions come from ignorance, it is not that I care that people believe in phantasms, it is the qualities of these phantasms. If the phantasm requires you to only believe in them, requires spreading the word, following a hell or heaven for proper behavior, trusting a false history, trusting miracles, believing you are based in sin, or following authority blindly, then it is these attributes that need to be removed.

Reading canon stating a kind god tolerates harm to innocents, kind nonbelievers, sincere disbelievers, or apostates creates a horrible dissonance allowing further contempt towards others. Insisting that sacred written contempt is really love is contemptible double-speak.

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.fronteirsofreason.com 

Until 1957 most people thought all elements originated in the Big Bang. Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about a 1957 “messy” paper created by multiple people stating heavy elements were created within stars by nuclear fusion, called stellar nucleosynthesis. Tyson calls it astrophysicists most important gift. You can follow the link above for the HP post or you can view the extended “School of Thought” video below.

Where did we come from

Extended interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson

What I like here is Tyson shows how science is often advanced  by tedious and slow progress with multiple authors. It takes a community to understand the world!

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.frontiersofreason.com

In “It’s Getting Better All the Time” by Edward Hudgens Eskeptic publishes a review of two contrasting books: “Dr. Edward Hudgins reviews two books: Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler and Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, by Robert Zubrin.” Do the merchants of science degrade scientific research by either despair or being Pollyanna? Is there no balance?

First it seems neoenlightenment embraces space settlement as both authors promote space homesteading. One wonders how it is getting better if there is a need to homestead in space or is it all just good fun to live off planet.

Daimandis and Kotler promote technology as creating a bright future. For example:

• A new economical water purifier.
• A low-cost, low-tech X-ray machine for medical diagnosis.
• Accessible, cheap computer-based education.

Hudgens then reveals his Objectivist position and professional alliance to the Atlas Society by gleaning three insights called “Entrepreneurial Drivers”–hmm, gleaning, means the waste left behind from production as in the gleanings left from threshing wheat. It’s what we feed the animals off the back.

First, respect for the power of human reason gives us an almost infinite capacity to change the world for the better. The pre-modern and post-modern ideologies hold that humans are ultimately ignorant and impotent in the face of divine providence or the forces of nature. This erroneous philosophical assumption has no place in the abundance worldview.

An infinite capacity? That’s a pretty big number. That it is unending in our puny vision doesn’t make it almost infinite. Past ideologies have actually been arrogant in considering themselves highly intelligent and sure of themselves–so much so they created an omnipotent, omniscient being and claimed themselves that–kings as gods, people as chosen by god. Postmodernism did reveal holes in anthropocentric Western thinking and did show intrinsic biases that must be dealt with. If past societies felt and were so ignorant then how is it we came to dominate the planet, sheer breeding wasn’t enough.

Second, individuals are the driving force behind human progress. It’s Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Venter, Kamen, Camera, Whitesides, Mitra, Rutan, Musk, Kurzweil, and a long list of others—not impersonal social forces—who make the difference between poverty and abundance.

This isn’t true at all. I too have my heroes but I am also antiheroic; the janitor is essential and could be the exRussian physicist. Often the named hero in history was merely one of many aspiring but we forget the others. Your greatest success will always be working with others and collaboration, sharing of knowledge–that is the heart of science and democracy.  Einstein said:

Every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.

No one is an island. Privileging the brain over the kidney, the heart, the skin misconstrues the importance of the parts to the whole. Respect for all people creates an ecological of respect where success is most possible. Too often in zealous competition the new status seekers, so called innovators, stand on the shoulders of their ancestors and shit. Humility was never a strength of Objectivists and doesn’t lead to cooperation and equal, yet moral, competition.

Third, the individuals creating the world of abundance love their work. Yes, they say that they work for the good of humanity and a more prosperous world for all is certainly the result of their efforts. But it is their love of meeting impossible challenges, challenges that call on the best within them, that really motivates them and that deserves our emulation.

Posh, people work to pay the bills, feed their families, and often evaluate their success by status. Not everyone can chase the golden apple. The people you refer to are heroes that depend on others: the wife who accommodates her workaholic husband, the son who never sees his dad, the grant that allows them to do research, and a market that isn’t dominated by monopolies that hinder innovative competition. There are so many support structures required it is not accurate or fair to insist the rest are to support the few as oligarchs of innovation, monarchies of value, entrepreneurial kingdoms with serfs. Dr Seuss’s Yurtle the turtle stacking his friends in a miserable tower, was an ass even if he did want to see farthest of them all.

Hudgens rightly notes the caveat “all things being equal.” Technology will  not always save us. It is the working arm of ideology. Blind faith is just that, blind. The balance, the hard choices are evaluating technologies, ideologies, and minding the very real human biases that elide long-term success.

Zubrin in “Merchants of Despair” deals with just that balance of humanism versus the world. Does the environment have priority or humans. Much like my friend who hates speed-zones in Florida to save Manatees: the world was made for man not Manatees. Much like the often touted castigation against banning DDT which caused a rise in deaths from Malaria, the original green revolution that fed the world but created monocultural agriculture, or the concern that humans will suffer if we slow global warming. Finally, some despotic attempts to limit population.

And there are those today who grant intrinsic value to nature apart from its value to humans—valuing a forest because we enjoy its beauty or harvest its trees for lumber. This implies nature has “rights” and that we humans must sacrifice our own wellbeing lest we violate them. That is antihumanism. Zubrin challenges readers to examine closely their own beliefs.

The modern arrogance of technocrats is no different than the previous assurance of divine support. Not everything we shit is healthy. God technology  isn’t our safety net. We will happily clear the forests to desert. We have too many heuristic biases to claim total certainty of our import. Allowing nature to have some rights helps us assuage our effects on the world. Effects that create a monoculture that supports more for now but then collapses. Like Egyptians we would build the world’s largest canal system and then be unable to recover from historic floods because they could not rebuild their infrastructure fast enough to prevent starvation. History is littered with growing phases of infrastructure that cannot recover in the face of hardship because there simply wasn’t the capital at the time to match the accumulated capital within the infrastructure, now needing to be replaced. The same happened with Yurtle the turtle. His stack of mates wobbled and collapsed as he had no capital left to build supports when he needed them.

My friend had ALS and his wife wanted to try the new drugs and not be in a double-blind research. It is a hard choice. A nard balance. If we are not careful more cruelty happens. That’s the problem. Blind faith in any innovation, blind faith that the market decides best, blind faith all technologies sort themselves out in time can cause worse damage, more death, and greater human suffering.

The belief that nature has a utility we don’t understand doesn’t privilege nature. It calls caution to consider and test in controlled settings before letting it lose. Humans are neither good nor evil. Just another organism in the universe.

I hate the story of Frankenstein because it is anti technology. I also hate the arrogance that humans know it all. Caution is in order. We must have lifeboats and we must have ideologies that allow us not to overfill them and swamp everyone.

X-rays were originally used to measure feet in shoe stores–not a good idea. Lead paint, asbestos, and chlorohydrocarbons all created more problems than they solved. Since nature is efficient most new technologies are designed to meet a need and time is of the essence. Was the atom bomb worth winning the war, did it really hasten its end? The very scientists involved spoke against it. 60 years ago 155 scientists working on the Manhattan Project posted a petition expressing grave moral concerns about their work. It was ignored.

Science gets a bad reputation when it is reckless marketing of early research and corporate funding bias. It makes science look like a fashion runway. Heart disease: fats are bad, no certain kids of fats, no these other fats, no sugars, well maybe gum bacteria, no inactivity, no genetics, no a byproduct of digesting meats. This hyperactivity to bring a product to market to create wealth creates the fashion. A little care would go a long way and would support better conclusions.

Without due consideration or following the scientific process of collaboration and verification of technology, others devoid of compassion will convert wise use to wise abuse and the consequences will not be heard until greater costs have been created. Let us not continue an era where holes in the ozone from hairspray products causes a president (Reagan) to say it’s just a business opportunity to sell hats and sunscreen.

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.frontiersofreason.com

When I quit a lucrative career in Silicon Valley I thought to work as a naturalist educating young people. The pay was so low I found only the young and the old could afford to be that poor. I once was stranded in Nevada with a broken truck and I had to sleep in it at the repair shop for a week until it was fixed. I had hoped to homestead and do a positive survival thing but I found the most amazing woman and realized that I would need real money if I were to have a family and do nearly anything in the world. I chose against a solitary though aesthetic and ascetic existence with the hope that I would advance the cause from within rather than just leave it. I have never liked monastic Buddhism precisely because its greatest proponents lived aside from the world and I wished to change the world for the better. I also need to live in the middle of the world, natural and human, and enjoy its culture and advance its deep, human beauty. After all I am a philosopher. Ongoing research confirms the need for green space.

Green space in urban communities can make life better for those living around it, a new study finds.

Using survey information from thousands of United Kingdom households collected over 17 years, researchers from European Center for the Environment and Human Health at the University of Exeter in England seemed to confirm what naturalists have long asserted — that living in a greener area has a significant positive effect on people.

Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of NY’s Central Park, one of my heroes, insisted that nature and city be combined as man had made great inroads into nature and the reverse was in order. In particular he castigated southern culture.

My own observation of the real condition of the people of our Slave States, gave me … an impression that the cotton monopoly in some way did them more harm than good; and although the written narration of what I saw was not intended to set this forth, upon reviewing it for the present publication, I find the impression has become a conviction.

Wiki: “Southern civilization was restricted to the wealthy plantation owners; the poverty of the rest of the Southern white population prevented the development of civil amenities taken for granted in the North, he said.”

‘The citizens of the cotton States, as a whole, are poor. They work little, and that little, badly; they earn little, they sell little; they buy little, and they have little – very little – of the common comforts and consolations of civilized life. Their destitution is not material only; it is intellectual and it is moral… They were neither generous nor hospitable and their talk was not that of evenly courageous men.’

Sadly monocultural agriculture is the least expensive and most profitable. We used to truck farm and sell at Farmer’s Markets. Little money, too much time. Another career for the young, the old, or branches of farms doing conventional agriculture. The adoption of a national Organic standard allowed organic chemicals to replace synthetics and gave market advantage to industrial farms. So we did what most small farms do around here, grow hay and work for some one else to pay the bills. 100 acres are in conservation easement protection and someday when needed the land will be ready and healthy.

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, examined data from a national survey that followed over 5,000 UK households and 10,000 adults between 1991 and 2008, as they moved around the country.

The survey had asked participants to report on their own psychological health during that time to estimate the “green space effect,” said the study.

Indeed, individuals reported less mental distress and higher life satisfaction when they lived in greener areas, the data showed.

That general state of heightened well-being continued even after the University of Exeter’s Dr. Mathew White and his colleagues took into consideration changes over time in the incomes, employment, marital status, physical health and housing types of the study participants.

The two biggest written influences in my career decisions were “What Color is Your Parachute” and “Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow.” Not entirely though as choices are never so clear. After a degree and a child we chose to live on a boat and sail around the world. When lack of funds and disposition stopped that we chose to live on a farm.

“We’ve found that living in an urban area with relatively high levels of green space can have a significantly positive impact on well-being, roughly equal to a third of the impact of being married.” White said.

The effect was also found to be equivalent to a tenth of the impact of being employed, as opposed to unemployed, the study said.

I lived in Minneapolis MN for a number of years and while I appreciated the great number of parks and greenways there I found it too urban, cold, and Lutheran-Catholic. I also realized then that I had always thought where I lived was actually more important to my well being than with whom I lived. I am at the far end of this spectrum. Nature feeds me and I wanted a partner that inspired me but would also love and wish to live in natural beauty–yet enjoy travel, culture, and participating in society. From the BBC source.

Beth Murphy, information manager at the mental health charity Mind, said: “For people living busy lifestyles in densely populated areas, being able to get outdoors and access green space is a great way to escape the stresses of day-to-day life.

“Our research has shown that 94% of people who took part in outdoors ‘green exercise’ said it benefited their mental health and can have huge impacts on physical health.

It would be utterly disastrous for everyone to move to the country so I am grateful to those who prefer city life. I am excited data shows the benefit (I would say need) of nature. The hippie movement was disastrous to the environment. Often, being suburbanites, their obliviousness to ecology science and blind faith that their footprints were beautiful  turned land to dust.  I hope this research continues to influence the structures of cities to include green spaces without creating a rural land rush. I hope the MacMansions blossom gardens and trees rather than fences and grass. I hope the book “The Apartment Farmer” regains an audience. I hope we continue to care and create parks, forests, and wild lands.

We both cut the cord of monetary success and career path so we could live in nature or close to it. Right now I sit in front of a window on a hill overlooking the back fields. The sun is warm, the horses are in view, I can hear the chickens and birds, my books are beside me, I can’t see my neighbors, my culture is at my fingertips, and a bigger world, DC, is an hour and a half away. I haven’t skipped out on social involvement for the good. But for the money, life is good!

Jim Newman. bright and well

www.frontiersofreason.com

What happens when you choose prayer over medicine?

When a judge sentenced Herbert and Catherine Schaible to probation in 2011 for praying over their gravely ill toddler son instead of taking him to a doctor, Herbert Schaible offered a few brief words of remorse and grief, then entrusted his family’s fate to a higher power.

“With God’s help, this will never happen again,” Schaible told the court.

On Monday, a different judge said that it did happen again, that the Schaibles – members of a Juniata Park church that shuns medical care – admitted to police that they once again chose prayer over medicine for a dying child.

I suppose they will use the proper religious response “Our prayers weren’t answered.” Are prayers ever answered? Such crock to assert that prayers work but hedge against when they don’t.

But at Monday’s hearing, Lerner said there was evidence the Rhawnhurst couple had “knowingly, intentionally, callously, and hypocritically” violated the most important condition of their probation: getting help for an ailing child.

“It could not be clearer from your statements that you knew he was sick several days before he died,” Lerner said, “that he was getting worse and having problems with his breathing.”

They can’t change, their religion doesn’t allow it. PA is protective of religious abuse.

DHS closed the case five days after Kent Schaible’s death because the agency could not intervene based on a family’s religious beliefs alone, the state review reported.

Pennsylvania’s Child Protective Services Law includes a religious exemption for instances in which parents neglect children’s medical needs because of religious beliefs. Those faith-based cases cannot be labeled child abuse – a categorization many advocates feel prevents children from getting needed services.

Counting on prayers or affirmations to create change is like pissing in the wind, you are just asking for it. How can anyone stand by and watch their child die without trying every recourse? I can see someone doing prayer and medicine as a freedom but to exclude medicine?

At the 2011 sentencing, Assistant District Attorney Pescatore requested close monitoring of the family, since the parents told an investigator that they would make the same decision if another of their children had become ill.

On Monday, she said that’s exactly what happened.

“We’re back here again,” she said, “and another child is dead.”

They still have seven kids. Theologically, it doesn’t even matter that they died. When you say god knows best then you absolve yourself of responsibility. How can you be against abortion and for this if life is the point? Because it isn’t. The point is god’s will no matter how irresponsible or dehumanizing. This is an extreme case but how often do religious people allow many kinds of horrible things to happen because it’s god’s will? Further, how often do spiritual but not religious types or belief in belief types allow horrible things to happen because it’s not their  business to comment on religion and they feel prayer and mouthing dehumanizing crap is harmless?

Jim Newman. bright and well

www.frontiersofreason.com

Not wanting to evidence bias I had denied that Jihad was the ideology behind the Boston bombing. I was wrong. It is too easy to blame every act of terrorism on Islam and the Koran. It is also important not to guess until you know and I was dismayed at the fear other apparent mid easterners had to take on as anger was generalized to the innocent; just looking swarthy made you suspect. And yes, I am being sensitized by liberals that claim we are islamophobic. In this case it was a personal Jihad and not attached to a terrorist organization. It is also true that terrorist regimes tell potential members to carry out Jihad on their own, free from attachment to any group. Jihad has always meant religious war, it is fundamentally violent.

CNN and AP report that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was shot multiple times, and suffered a throat injury, wrote to investigators that he and the elder Tamerlan were self-radicalized and carrying out a jihad against perceived enemies of Islam. Presumably, that would be America.

Since the Koran is filled with so much fascism it would be better to say peaceful Muslims are radical and these killers are fundamentalists. We hippies used to be called radicals and it had nothing to do with violence but the distance from the accepted cultural ideology of the time. Perhaps, I am putting too fine  a point on it.

Salon wrote a year ago, “Five Atheists Who Ruin it for Everyone Else,”  that more people are killed by lightning than terrorists. It listed Sam Harris, Bill Maher, Penn Jillette, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and SE Cupp as the ruinous atheists.

Most grating, for someone who wrote a book titled The Moral Landscape, Harris’ “War on Islam” zealotry is numerically unjustifiable. You’re four times as likely to die of a lightning strike than you are from a terrorist attack, and yet this constitutes the gravest threat to Western civilization, but 100,000 (at least) civilian casualties in Iraq is mere fodder for thought experiment apologia.

What the quoted Reason article covered were Americans killed in this country and Americans killed abroad. What Harris is talking about is all people in the world and the growing menace that will come to the states if Jihad is left unchecked. It is the words of the Koran that direct and inspire Jihad and it is the kind temperance of radical Muslims that insist that Islam is peace, albeit submissive peace.

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.fromntiersofreason.com

I wouldn’t go to a church that would have me. On the other hand atheist gatherings have some appeal for those who like to gather for inspiration and companionship.

“Just because you don’t believe in God does not mean you do not need to get together in community and draw strength from that,” said Mike Aus, a onetime Lutheran pastor who is now an atheist and founder of Houston Oasis.

“We are open to any message about life as long as no dogmatic claims are made.”

Still, inside the conference room in a nondescript office building on the city’s west side, it’s hard to ignore the structural similarities to a Sunday morning church service. There is live music played and performed by members that is intended to spur reflection as well as entertain; a collection is taken up in a passed wicker basket.

A banner taped to a window declared what might be called Houston Oasis’ creed. It pointedly says “we think,” not “we believe”

“People are more important than beliefs.
Only human hands can solve human problems.
Reality is known through reason, not revelation.
Meaning comes from making a difference.
Labels are unimportant.
Everyone should be accepted wherever they are as long as they are accepting in turn.”

Hmm, not sure this is my cup of tea but I applaud any effort for humans to get together in good will without kneeling down, bowing, or genuflecting.

But don’t call this an “atheist church,” Aus insisted. He and other founding members are aiming for something new — a community that looks to nurture the common human qualities that can unite people.

“Homo sapiens is a tribal species; we thrive in community,” he said. “There are elements of church life that serve human needs but transcend church life, like the need to gather, the need to be together. We can offer those in a secular way.”

I guess the guy who wrote the headline is different than the reporter as the headline starts with “Atheist churches…” You get how any community gathering is called a church. If it’s not a concert, parade, or horse race it must be church.

I really miss the idea of the Greek theatre where you could talk, eat, drink, and move around. Those  venues where you have a little seat and are supposed to shut up are really not enjoyable to me. Like little boxes, in little seats, with no relationship between.

Houston Oasis is part of a growing trend. Atheists and other nonbelievers have long gathered for events with meaning and music, but in the last year, a number of nontheistic groups have initiated Sunday morning events that include elements of a standard church service.

The largest is London’s Sunday Assembly, which meets in a former church and has been turning away people due to lack of space since its launch in January. There are plans to establish Sunday Assemblies in New York and Melbourne, Australia. Calgary Secular Church meets in Calgary, Canada, and several humanist communities associated with large U.S. universities have regular Sunday morning events.

It’s not just gatherings though. People have a desire for the sublime, to feel elevated

Chris Stedman, author of “Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious,” said the Harvard Humanist Community, where he is an assistant chaplain, has begun to incorporate more churchlike elements in its Sunday gatherings at the request of attendees, including reflections and inspirational readings.

“There is a lot to be gained by looking at the forms of religion and in the ways that people make meaning and assemble a community,” Stedman said. “As a movement, I think we will struggle to appeal to people who are leaving religion if we cannot offer them the structures that religion has offered them. People need to come together and talk about meaning and value.”

It’s true. Many people desire ritual and inspiration. This trend needs to grow. It would be great to see kids in the streets again and people on their lawns. Neighbors who actually know each other.

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.frontiersofreason.com