Ewan's Corner

Posts Tagged ‘Religion’

A classic Bad Science post which made me spill my tea when I reached the PPS:
All time classic creationist pwnage.
Andrew Schlafly (a “right wing christian activist”) is taken apart by Richard Lenski – a scientist with a sense of humour, a great writing style and some recent fame over lab results which appear to show evolution in action (i first heard about his results a few days ago via Slashdot).
The PPPS in Lenski’s reply mirrors my own puzzlement when it comes to Christians who refuse to believe in evolution:

“P.P.P.S. You may be unable to understand, or unwilling to accept, that evolution occurs. And yet, life evolves! [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_pur_si_muove] From the content on your website, it is clear that you, like many others, view God as the Creator of the Universe. I respect that view. I find it baffling, however, that someone can worship God as the all-mighty Creator while, at the same time, denying even the possibility (not to mention the overwhelming evidence) that God’s Creation involved evolution. It is as though a person thinks that God must have the same limitations when it comes to creation as a person who is unable to understand, or even attempt to understand, the world in which we live. Isn’t that view insulting to God?”
—Richard Lenski

Seth Shostak (space.com) asks “SETI: Is It Worth It?“. It’s a great read – he busts some common myths, and provides some reasons why SETI should and does continue even without government funding.

Personally, I am all for SETI continuing – the concept fascinates me (on both a scientific and religious level), the money spent on SETI is a drop in the ocean, and I really do believe it is our responsibility to search and look outwards. Success would change the world – there is no arguing that – and I believe overall for the good (it could give us the focus we need as a species, and put a few things into proper perspective – local xenophobia may vanish for example. We can hope).

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence seems a lot like a religious belief to me – both require faith from supporters, neither can be proved to be pointless by science, and the payoff for “success” in either case is huge no matter how you look at it :-)

I don’t follow the shallow “religion will collapse if we find intelligent life elsewhere” idea that so many people seem to subscribe to – as a Christian myself I can’t believe God created this wonderful universe just for us (in the same way God didn’t give us a huge curiosity and fascination with “out there” and the desire to explore, learn and understand).

As a fan of science fiction (“Contact” is one of my all-time favourite novels and films) I have thought and dreamt about all kinds of first contact scenarios, from beneficial through benign and on to disastrous – and plenty of reasons contact / proof hasn’t happened yet. Personally I sway towards beneficial. I definitely don’t believe we should “hide” from nasty aliens – I don’t believe anything we could do would help us hide from anything that could directly affect us anyway.

Slashdot coverage of the article includes all sorts of different viewpoints as always, including:

“How interesting it would be if we finally make contact with an alien race and the first thing they ask us is whether or not The Creator has sent a “Messiah” to us yet.”

SETI’s success may very well be an Outside Context Problem for our species (and an OCP could obviously still happen even without SETI), so it deserves to be discussed and explored. I love this quote from Excession, a scifi novel by the brilliant Iain M Banks:

“An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass… when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered, you’re all subjects of the Emperor now, he’s keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.” —-Iain M Banks, Excession.

Links:

• Space.com SETI FAQ
• Review: Contact with Alien Civilizations
• Meet the neighbours: Is the search for aliens such a good idea? (which includes a literary and Hollywood guide to “First Contact”)
• The other side of the Fermi paradox

“TULSA, OK—In a major coup for the growing field of creation science, the perfectly preserved remains of a 5,000-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex were delivered Monday to Tulsa’s Creationist Museum of Natural History.”

From The Onion (January 2003, but relevant now because of the recently opened Creation Museum - see Adam and Eve in the Land of the Dinosaurs [NYT]).

Also see today’s Slashdot article “A Field Trip To the Creation Museum“.

I recently realised there are quite a few similarities between World of Warcraft and Scientology:

1. Both initially nearly failed as business ventures, then went on to become very profitable
2. Membership fees
3. Your family / friends (unless they too are members) get upset when you join
4. Both see you spending large amounts of time attached to gadgets, which purport to make you feel better
5. Both have been the theme of Southpark episodes
6. Both are never-ending – the more you take part, the more you discover, and in turn more is revealed to you to keep you hooked
7. Both ban you for talking about drugs
8. If you post either manuals on the Internet, you get sued
9. Both have a leadership which periodically updates material
10. Both encourage you to level-up :-)
11. If you die in either, you get reincarnated without your stuff (and it costs you money to get it back).
12. Famous people – Branden Routh (Superman) plays WoW, Tom Cruise plays Scientology
13. Both have popular newsgroups
14. Both feature cool looking armor :-)

Some (imho) interesting reading:

Travolta Hospitalized With Critically Low E-Meter Reading

The Beginner’s Guide to L Ron Hubbard (Google Video) – also see Bare-Faced Messiah [The true story of L Ron Hubbard] and of course Wikipedia’s L Ron Hubbard article.

Scientology and Germany

And finally A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant :-)

Another proudly South African moment – SA is now the first African and only the 5th nation in the world to legalise same-sex marriages. Not just civil unions, but full marriage as it should be imho.

“This has been a litmus test of our constitutional values. It forced us to consider: What does equality really mean? What does it look like? Equality does not exist on a sliding scale.” – Melanie Judge, the program manager for OUT

As usual, the ACDP has something insightful ⁽¹⁾ to add:

“We are out of step with the rest of Africa and with rest of world. The international norm is civil unions, as opposed to same-sex marriages. What happened today conflicts with the views of the majority of South Africans.” – Steve Swart, a legislator with the African Christian Democratic Party

NTY article (free subscription required)
Related previous blog entry: South Africa court rules in favour of gay marriage
⁽¹⁾ not!

---

Update It seems I was wrong, the original marriage legislation is still unchanged (heterosexuals only) while this new legislation creates a “civil union” (available to both heterosexual and gay couples) which is equal in the eyes of the law to a traditional marriage, but obviously not the same thing. So it’s a huge step in the right direction, but not true equality just yet.
Update Kevin has a good-read post on the subject (he has more time to post than I do, apparently :-) including a link to the Deo Gloria Family Church website (which as he says is a great source of information especially if you are a Christian and believe – incorrectly – that the bible condemns homosexuality).