Religion – Page 4 – Spinor Info

Koran burning

Sep 092010

Just for the record, I may be a godless atheist but that doesn’t mean I think it’s a good idea to piss off a billion Muslims and, for no particular reason other than to offend them, burn their holy book.

Should this idiot of a pastor go ahead with his Koran burning, however, I would advise Muslims to shut up and move on. After all, “our” righteous idiots, acting in the name of Jesus, only burn the Koran in front of the world’s television cameras, whereas the Muslim world’s righteous idiots end up sawing heads off innocent screaming people, all in the name of Allah. I strongly disapprove of book burning, yet even so, I find the burning of some bound sheets of paper with printing on them a far less uncivilized form of protest than the use of a rusty knife to severe a person’s carotid artery, windpipe, vertebrae, and whatever other body parts there are that connect a human being’s head to his or her body.

If only I could make a similarly favorable comparison between the act of flying passenger planes into crowded buildings vs. bombing a country into submission (remember “shock and awe?”) using a well trained, highly disciplined, high-tech equipped, professional military.

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day

Religion No Responses »

May 232010

Recently I joined the Facebook group, “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!”

No, I am not an intolerant SOB (at least I hope I am not) who thinks that Islam is the root cause of all evil. (I do consider religion in general to be the root cause of many evils, but in that sense, Islam is not in any way special.) No, I don’t think that Muslims “hate us and hate our freedoms”, to quote my least favorite US President. No, I don’t look suspiciously at people on the street just because they wear traditional Middle Eastern clothing.

On the contrary, I respect and cherish the freedom of religion: the right to believe (or not believe) in the deity or deities of your choice. This is a right that I would be willing to risk life and limb to defend. (Mind you, we’re all in real deep trouble if the world goes so badly haywire that a country like Canada suddenly needs the services of a 47-year old programmer in general infantry.)

But, as a devoted atheist, I also believe in another right: the right of freedom of speech, which includes my right to mock, insult, disrespect and belittle religion. Every religion, including Islam. I may not win any popularity contests by doing so, but I have the right to ridicule any adult who needs imaginary friends to feel happy and secure, or to live ethically.

Some people want to take this right away. Some people believe that their religious freedoms go beyond freedom of conscience, and grant them the authority to interfere with my rights, even using the threat of physical violence to intimidate us into submission.

Hell, no. I may not start drawing Mohammed cartoons right now, but if anyone thinks that they can deny me the right to do so, think again. (NB: The drawing above is not Mohammed. I have no idea what Mohammed looked like, and in any case, given my limited abilities as a graphic artist, I doubt I could produce a faithful rendering. No, it’s just some bearded guy with a turban carrying a flag with the crescent-Moon-and-star symbol.) My only hope is that the voices of those who assert their right to be free will not be drowned out by the voices of hatemongerers who use this Facebook group as yet another forum to express their fear and loathing of Islam and Muslims. The intent is not to promote hatred, but to end self-censorship.

Move over, Himalayan glaciers…

Politics, Religion, Weather and Climate No Responses »

Jan 312010

This is becoming more than a little annoying, to be honest. First, there were the Climategate e-mails. Then, the claim about Himalayan glaciers. Now the latest: according to the Daily Telegraph, claims made in the IPCC report about vanishing ice in the Andes and the Swiss Alps were based in part on a popular magazine, in part on the dissertation of a Swiss student who interviewed mountain guides.

And this is supposed to be the foundation for a multi-trillion dollar shift in the world economy in the coming years?

To be clear about it: I am not a “climate change denier”, disgusting as I find this term implying some kind of analogy between genuine scientific skepticism and things like Holocaust denial. Questions raised by Climategate notwithstanding, I do believe the data, and the data show that there was warming in the past several decades. However, the IPCC report was supposed to go much further, and provide answers to some very clear questions. Namely 1) is there a long-term warming trend? 2) is it due to CO2? and 3) is it bad for you?

These are not easy questions to answer. The long-term warming trend that might exist is hidden behind noise: large year-to-year fluctuations, the 11-year solar cycle, other longer-term cycles. The data may perhaps be equally well fitted by a model that proposes a long-term cooling, but medium-term fluctuations which caused the current warming cycle. Here’s where the second question comes in: the model should not be a mathematical mind game but firmly rooted in physics. Do we know the physics well enough? Knowing the cause is also important if we wish to reverse the effects… if we misunderstand the physics, all our efforts to reduce CO2 emissions will be in vain, while we ignore the real causes. And even assuming that the physics is clear and the models are reliable… why is warming such a problem? Sure, ocean levels will rise a little and some cities may have to move in the coming century… on the other hand, for instance, how about vast stretches of tundra that become fertile and can be used to fed the planet’s growing population?

The IPCC gave us firm conclusions. Yes, there is a long-term warming trend. Yes, it is due to anthropogenic CO2 (hence it can be reversed by reducing CO2 emissions). And yes, all things considered, it is very bad for us. But… If the IPCC’s conclusions on these questions are based on sloppy research, why on Earth should I believe them? Is it something like Pascal’s wager, because we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by betting on the IPCC being right? I’m sorry but I don’t buy that just as I’m not buying Pascal’s original argument either… I’d rather end up in Hell as a virtuous pagan than as a hypocrite.

Thank you, religious nuts…

Film, Religion No Responses »

Dec 202009

Thank you, religious nuts, for many things, from the “clash of civilizations” to Creationism, or for something as mundane yet annoying and disgusting as your success at torpedoing the sequels to the film The Golden Compass. The book from which it was made is superb, the film was fine, and I’d have loved to see the sequels… alas, in the name of religious freedom and civil rights, the sequels won’t happen. So allow me to quote my favorite atheist author, Kurt Vonnegut, and tell you to go jump in a lake.

Some crude (and bleak) statistics

History, Religion No Responses »

Nov 132009

Following a discussion with a friend of mine, I did some crude statistics today. Perusing Wikipedia, I ranked the world’s religions in terms of the effectiveness with which they were able to commit mass murder between 1914 and the present day. I did not count “legitimate” victims of war. My statistics are necessarily crude, as I probably didn’t include all incidents, and I just used the concept of a “predominant religion” instead of researching the actual religious breakdown of perpetrators and victims. The figures themselves may also be in dispute.

Having said that, I calculated some percentages (normalized by dividing the number killed by the square root of the product of the populations of the perpetrators’ and the victims’ predominant religion) and arrived at this bleak ranking of our recent history:

Buddhist-on-Buddhist: 10%
Christian-on-Jew: 3%
Christian-on-Christian: 0.9%
Muslim-on-indigenous: 0.5%
Muslim-on-Christian: 0.2%
Muslim-on-Muslim: 0.1%
Buddhist-on-Hindu: 0.01%
Hindu-on-Christian: 0.006%
Christian-on-Muslim: 0.0006%

Muslim claims about evil Christians are clearly bogus, at least insofar as recent history is concerned; Christians were far more busy killing each other and killing Jews, and Muslims were certainly more efficient when it came to killing Christians than the other way around (mostly thanks to the efforts of the Ottoman Empire).

But no, I do not conclude from this that religion is inherently evil. About two thirds of all the killings listed here were, in fact, committed by states that were nominally atheist. Reason may lead one to atheism, but atheism certainly doesn’t guarantee reason…

Coincidences

Religion No Responses »

Oct 082009

There are uncanny coincidences in life, so much so that I sometimes wonder, are we all just one giant computer simulation using a less-than-perfect random number generator?

Take this, for instance… yesterday, I copied to a hard drive our collection of Monty Python DVDs. I also looked at one episode, and in it there was a sketch that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before, a sketch about flying sheep. Flying sheep??? But later yesterday, here’s what was on CBC Newsworld, also repeated this morning:

Flying sheep

Yes, flying sheep. Hanging sheep to be precise, as they are being carried across the rocky terrain on the Faeroe Islands.

Or how about this: a few days ago, my wife returned from Hungary with my mother’s old laptop (actually, my old laptop, but it’s been in my mother’s possession for many years) and much to our sadness, we found that its screen got broken during the trip. I know laptop screens break regularly, but it’s not something I run across often, indeed I think this was only the second time that I have seen a broken laptop screen up close. But today, I went to the barber… who, while waiting for customers, happened to be busy transferring files to a USB stick off a laptop with, you guessed it, a broken screen.

So is this just pure randomness? Or is the world suffering because God uses a broken random number generator?

Quantum religion

Physics, Religion No Responses »

Jul 292009

I am somewhat surprised that this idea has not become more popular yet, even though it’s yet the clearest “scientific proof” that we are, in fact, all immortal.

The “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics says that the wave function never collapses: instead, every time a measurement is made, corresponding to each possible outcome a new universe comes into existence. You measure the spin of an electron and presto: there are now two universes, in one of which the spin is +1/2, in the other, -1/2. You flip a coin and presto: there are now two universes, the “heads”-universe and the “tails”-universe. (And many other universes in which the coin lands edgewise, explodes in mid-air, gets snatched by a passing eagle, or any other bizarre, improbable, but not impossible outcome that you can imagine.)

But if this is true, well, human death is just another measurement; and whereas in one universe, your heart might stop beating, in another, it beats one more. Or two more. Or two hundred million more.

In other words, as the universe keeps branching, you may cease to exist on many of those branches but there will always be branches on which you continue to live.

Think about it. That which you call your present consciousness will exist in an ever growing number of copies; some of those will be extinguished, but a few won’t be, not for a very, very, very long time. There is a continuous line from the here and now to the then and there, no matter how far that “then” is in the future, along which you continue to live. In other words, you can look forward to everlasting life… at least in a few of the many universes that await you.

How do you know if you’re on one of those “lucky” branches? Well, so long as you’re still alive, you are on a lucky branch, since the possibility exists that you will stay alive. Forever.

Of course there is a downside. Among the many parallel universes that represent possible futures, there are those in which you stay alive, but just barely, and in terrible pain and suffering. Or, you stay alive but you lose all your loved ones and even when you decide that it’s time to end your own life, you cannot… there is, after all, a nonvanishing probability that all your attempts at suicide fail.

But that doesn’t change the basic concept: in the multiverse, everyone is immortal. Although I am personally not too fond of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, I remain a little surprised that this idea has not yet become more popular among the religiously inclined.

Harper’s communion wafer

Politics, Religion No Responses »

Jul 092009

The big news on Canadian news channels today comes in the form of a question: did Prime Minister Harper eat his communion wafer?

Harper, who’s not a Catholic, accepted a communion wafer anyway during the funeral service of the late Roméo Leblanc. Unfortunately, the camera cut away before he was seen actually eating it. So people are upset: not treating the body of Christ with the proper respect is a grave insult to Catholics, it appears.

As to why actually eating something that symbolizes the body of Christ is not a grave insult, well, I suppose people have pondered this question ever since Roman times. And here, I thought we live in the bleeping twenty-first century…

The United States of Creationism

Education, Politics, Religion No Responses »

Mar 312009

When the Texas Board of Education votes, the whole US listens, as due to its size, Texas dominates the textbook market. And, sadly, the Texas Board of Education appears to be dominated by ignorant yahoos who are no better, only less violent (so far!) than their ignorant yahoo Taliban friends who blow up thousand-year-old statues and schools full of young girls just because the facts happen to disagree with their religion.

Get it through your incredibly thick, incredibly tiny heads, you incredibly stupid morons (and yes, I do mean it: show me a person from the Texas Board of Education who voted against the proper teaching of science, and I don’t care if she is a hard working mother of five who never meant any harm to anyone, I am willing to use the same words in her face, with the intend to offend, in the hope that I might get through): the Universe is 13.7 billion years old (at least; as a minimum, we know that there was a surface of last scattering 13.7 billion years ago.) Humans and apes descended from the same primitive life forms that have been on this Earth for at least about 3 billion years. The climate is changing, even if there may be legitimate debate about the extent to which this is caused by man, CO2 in particular, and whether or not a warming is indeed bad for us. If you want to hide from hard science, go and crawl back to your stupid little church and leave the Board of Education. Unless your true intent is to take Texas (and America) back to the Middle Ages, just like your little Taliban friends over there in Afghanistan.

A pox on FOX

Politics, Religion No Responses »

Mar 232009

My god. Is this really what the “fair and balanced” network thinks of Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan, and the 117 Canadians (including a civilian diplomat) who died there?

I wonder why Canada even went there to fight. After all, it wasn’t Canada that was attacked on 9/11. Fortunately, I know that not all Americans are as dumb as these clowns… what is troubling is that way too many Americans DO watch FOX and believe that it presents an unbiased view of the world.

The video responses to this clip are interesting, too. One is an “adults only” propaganda piece warning us about Islam’s plans to take over the world. Oh my, I am so afraid, there are Muslims everywhere!

Newer Entries