Finally, A Power-like Band That Does Exactly What It’s Name Suggests
I got my Placebo Bands in the mail yesterday from the brilliant Skepticbros in Australia.
Does wearing two of them make them twice as ineffective as just one?
Placebo Bands are the Skepticbros answer to Power Balance bands and others of their ilk. Unlike the unsubstantiated claims of Power Balance to be able to balance your body’s energy field, the Placebo Bands promise to do nothing, except perhaps becoming conversations starters.
When someone asks me about the band I’m wearing, I can proudly tell them that it is a placebo that does nothing, just like the Power Balance bands. With a knowing wink I will add that unlike the Power Balance bands that cost $29.99, I only paid $2 for mine. According to the Skepticbros, they used some of the same manufactures who make Power Balance bands using the same materials and manufacturing process to make their bands, but they didn’t get nearly the volume discount that Power Balance must be getting. The best thing of all about the Placebo Bands is that the approximately $1 profit per band goes to charity, while with Power Balance, $28.99 per band (with their volume discount, probably more like $29.50) goes into their pockets.
After telling inquisitive people all the stuff I just told you, my favorite part is telling them that the both have the exact same effect, which is none, except possibly a placebo effect for those who are gullible enough to buy into the body energy bullshit claims.
So if you really do believe in body energy and that a silicone band with a hologram in it can help balance it, save yourself $27.99 and go for the Placebo Band. They look the same, they feel the same and, most importantly, they have the same effect, which is to say, none at all.
Busy, Busy, Busy!
I’ve have been super busy with work and my kids today, so I didn’t get a chance to compose a proper blog entry. Instead, I will share this quote with you:
“As we exercise the right to advocate our views, and as we animate our supporters, we must all assume responsibility for our words and actions before they enter a vast echo chamber and reach those both serious and delirious, connected and unhinged.”
- Bill Clinton, 2010
I’m sure the people on the right will dismiss this out of hand, after all, they hounded Clinton from the day he took office. Then again, they aren’t really all that hot on the truth anyway.
State Support For The “Persecuted” Majority
I’ve written here before about Christians who feel that they have a right to refuse to do their jobs if something about it conflicts with their conscience. Now we get to hear more about this from Idaho. A pharmacist in a Walgreens refused to fill a prescription, Methergine, which is a medicine used to prevent or control bleeding of the uterus following childbirth or an abortion. This was prescribed by a nurse practitioner from a Planned Parenthood clinic. The pharmacist would not fill it because the nurse practitioner refused to tell the pharmacist if it was being prescribed for an abortion, citing patient confidentiality.
If a person’s conscience is going to be an issue in being able to full carry out the duties of their chosen profession, then they are in the wrong profession and should find a new one.
Sadly, Idaho recently passed a law that gives pharmacists and other health care providers the right to refuse to provide any health care service or dispense any drugs that violates their conscience. Once again, the state is given preference to religious believers, believers who somehow feel they should be protected and excused from simply doing their jobs like the rest of us.
The Bible in One Sentence
PZ Myers had an interesting post about a site that asked people to sum up the message of the Bible in one sentence. Here are some examples:
“God is in the process of recreating the universe which has been corrupted by sin and has made it possible for all those and only those who follow Jesus to be a part of the magnificent, eternal community that will result.”
“The Bible tells how the loving Creator God restored a lost humanity and cosmos through reestablishing his rule through Jesus Christ and the provision of life to His honor.”
“A holy God sends his righteous Son to die for unrighteous sinners so we can be holy and live happily with God forever.”
“Apprenticing with Jesus to become human again.”
“God glorifies himself in the redemption of sinners.”
I chose these quotes because they have the theme of redemption in common. The concept that an almighty god sent his son to atone for our sins.
It is this concept of redemption and atonement, more than anything else, that finally made me decide that god doesn’t exist. My reasoning is simple. If god is all powerful, capable of anything, then why not just forgive sins on an individual basis? Why the high drama? Why the suffering?
The story of Jesus dying for humanity’s sins, the idea of redemption and everlasting life, is a myth built on the human need to feel that our lives have purpose and meaning; that death isn’t really the end. It belongs up there with the stories of other gods and heros from other cultures that are meant to inspire us to be better than we are. But it is myth, just as the stories of the Greek, Roman, Norse and other gods and heros are. Jesus is this society’s Perseus or Hercules, but he is no more real than they are and there is no reason we should put any more credence in the story of Christianity then we should those of the Greeks or Romans.
The fact that we still cling to myth is psychologically complex and has its roots in our evolution as social animals, but that doesn’t mean we have to be ruled by it. Reason and understanding of the workings of the world we live in provide us with the knowledge and tools to overcome our evolutionary biases and live life in the real world, not in a world of myth and legend.
Topic of the Week – Astrology
I haven’t written much about astrology before, except for one entry, and that is because I really have no interest in astrology and never have. I have always viewed it as a silly thing that was a left over from the time before science and empirical reason came to the forefront of human thought.
Growing up, I was fascinated with astronomy and was quite the amateur astronomer in my youth, spending countless nights, even in the coldest of winters, outside with my telescope. Knowing how the universe operated completely negated the possibility that astrology could possibly be anything but superstition and wishful thinking.
The Twitterspace has been, well, atwitter, about astrology ever since the director of the Minnesota Planetarium Society commented in a local newspaper interview that, due to the gradual shift in the orientation of Earth’s axis of rotation, called precession, that the Zodiac signs have changed since ancient times. Precession caused the stars to appear to gradually move over time in relation to fixed points on earth. For example, the current pole star, or north star, Polaris, will no longer be the pole star in another 12,000 years.
The precession also effects the ecliptic plane, which is where the Zodiacal constellations are located. As a result, the supposed sign you were born under is actually now not that sign anymore. As Phil Plait puts is on his Bad Astronomy blog:
“If you were born on March 22, you were an Aries… if you went by the original timing of when the Sun was in Aries. But now, millennia later, the Sun is actually in Pisces on that date. And it won’t be much longer before it’s in Aquarius in late March (hence “the dawning of the Age of Aquarius”)”
Basically, astrology is based on the positions of stars and planets as they were known well over 2000 years ago. Their positions in the sky in relation to earth change over time and astrology has no way to account for this, so even if there were something to it (which there isn’t), it would slowly have become more and more inaccurate over time. Or course, there is nothing to it. At all. As Penn & Teller have said on their show, Bullshit, astrology is – bullshit!
I was chatting with a friend today and he related to me a conversation that he had with a friend who believes in astrology. He told her that he thought astrology was a bullshit belief. She got indignant and said something to the effect of, “Oh, you wouldn’t say something like about someone’s religion.” He replied, “As a matter of fact…”. That ended the conversation pretty quickly.
If you really want an excellent explanation of why astrology is complete and utter BS, you can’t do better than Phil Plait’s in-depth take down of astrology. I’d also highly recommend reading his book, Bad Astronomy. In it he corrects many common astronomy misconceptions.
What Surveys Can Tell Us About Ourselves
I took the Midwest Secular Survey today. The questions were pretty standard, asking your secular persuasion (agnostic, atheist, etc), how comfortable you felt about sharing your secular views with various groups of people, and how being secular affects different aspects of your life.
What I learned from answering these questions is that I do feel very reluctant to share my atheistic views with people who I have to relate to in day to day life, such as co-workers, neighbors and family.
Very few, in fact only two I believe, of my co-workers know that I hold secular beliefs and I don’t think the actually know that I’m an atheist. It is not something I would want widely known at my work. While I have never seen or heard of anyone being discriminated against because of their religious (or non-religious) beliefs, I do live in one of the reddest states and from overhearing conversations of my co-workers, many, if not most, attend some kind of church regularly. In fact, I block people from work who are on my friends list on Face Book from seeing my status posts because I just don’t want them knowing my beliefs. I’m not ashamed, but I do fear that it could cause problems for me if the wrong person at work finds out.
None of my family knows, at least if they do, they have kept quiet about it. This isn’t surprising since they aren’t really “my” family per se, but my first wife’s family, whom I keep in touch with because of my kids. They are all Armenian and the Armenian Church is a very big part of their Armenian identity. When I was married and living back there in Massachusetts I was the one who took the kids to Church every Sunday. I even taught Sunday school for a year. The church is so intertwined with the Armenian identity that it is almost impossible to imagine an Armenian who doesn’t profess belief in God. After all, Armenia was the first Christian nation,a fact of which the Armenians are very proud.
Most of my friends know I’m an atheist. In one case, this has come between myself and a very dear friend who is a devout Christian. We still chat occasionally, but there is a palpable strain in the relationship that wasn’t there before I let it be known that I was an atheist. This was very difficult and discouraging for me. Her and I had a real attraction for each other and we got along so incredibly well. Once she was divorced from her husband and I separated from my wife and was in the process of getting divorced, I was hoping to pursue a closer relationship with her, but now that is out of the question. Also, it seems that our relationship has lost the depth of emotion that it once had. This is completely due to her reaction to my writings and comments about Christianity. As I said, we still talk occasionally, but we never talk about anything too personal anymore and I mourn the lose of that very much.
All of these things came back to me as I read the questions on the survey and contemplated my answers. I didn’t realize just how vulnerable I feel about being an atheist outside of the skeptical/atheist community. I’ve tended to limit my personal relationships to people who share my beliefs. I know that this one of the most common things that people do; keep to their own, but I didn’t realize that I was actually fearful of revealing my beliefs to others outside of these groups. Considering I hope to work in critical thinking and skeptical outreach, I think that it is something I will have to come to terms with.
Socrates was certainly onto something with his method of instruction. Asking questions is one of the most powerful ways to get us to really think about an issue and brings to light our underlying feelings about it that we may never have realized we had.
Andrew Wakefield Goes Down Hard
I’ve written before about my strong support for vaccinating children and how, in the past decade or so there has been an anti-vaccination movement that has literally cost the lives of dozens of children in the US and UK of pertussis and measles. Now, the man who started it all, the darling of all the anti-vaxers out there has been shown to be, not just unethical and a sloppy researcher, but a fraud. I’m still digesting everything in the article and I’ll have more to say on that later, bur for the meantime, read it.
It’s good to know that sometimes the truth can win out.
Living In The Real World Is Hard For An Idealist
I just finished watching Crimes and Misdemeanors by Woody Allen. I’d never seen it before, nor many of his other movies. The only ones I’ve seen before were Zelig and Sleeper, and those back in college.
A very dear friend of mine suggested to me that I watch the movie, which I watched on Netflix. She also mailed me Hannah and Her Sisters, Manhattan, and Annie Hall, which I plan on watching in short order. She said that she thought that the themes explored in these movies were the same that I explore here in this blog and after watching Crimes and Misdemeanors, I have to say that she was right.
What I found most compelling about the movie was the struggle that the main character, Judah, has with himself between his life long rejection of religion and superstition and the Jewish religion that his father raised him and his siblings in. As a youngster he questioned his father’s beliefs and as a man, he openly rejected them, but after he commits a terrible crime, he is racked with guilt to the point of a mental breakdown.
At the end of the movie, he is at a wedding reception talking to Cliff, the idealist and romantic, played by Woody Allen. Cliff is despondent over a lost love and sardonically say, thinking about his brother-in-law who got the woman Cliff was in love with, that he was contemplating murder. Judah, knowing that Cliff is an aspiring film director, tells him that he has this great plot for a movie about murder with a twist.
“And after the awful deed is done, he finds that he’s plagued by deep-rooted guilt. Little sparks of his religious background which he’d rejected are suddenly stirred up. He hears his father’s voice. He imagines that God is watching his every move. Suddenly, it’s not an empty universe at all, but a just and moral one, and he’s violated it. Now, he’s panic-stricken. He’s on the verge of a mental collapse-an inch away from confessing the whole thing to the police. And then one morning, he awakens. The sun is shining, his family is around him and mysteriously, the crisis has lifted. He takes his family on a vacation to Europe and as the months pass, he finds he’s not punished. In fact, he prospers. The killing gets attributed to another person-a drifter who has a number of other murders to his credit, so I mean, what the hell? One more doesn’t even matter. Now he’s scott-free. His life is completely back to normal. Back to his protected world of wealth and privilege.”
Cliff, the idealist and moralist, says that the murder would never be able to live with what he did and, if he were directing that movie, he’d have him confess to the police, becoming the moral authority of the story. He says that it would be a great tragedy. Judah chides him by telling him that his ending only happens in the movies, he is talking about reality.
The meaning is clear, we can, and do, rationalize away those things that cause us guilt, or else we wouldn’t be able to live with ourselves.
I have written quite a bit here about cognitive dissonance, the theory that people, when faced with uncomfortable facts that contradict their world view, will resolve the dissonance by either accepting the truth and rejecting their world view, or rationalizing the facts away, so as to be able to live with themselves. The situation portrayed in the film is very similar, in that Judah had to rationalize away the crime he had committed in order to live with himself. After all, the reasoning goes, if he turned himself in he would destroy his family and himself end up in prison for life, and what would that accomplish; who would that benefit?
It is a very seductive and, in many ways, reasonable way of resolving the guilt he feels. Of course, this goes against our concept of morality. We believe that someone who commits a crime should be held accountable for it. Yet if that person is not the type to normally commit crimes, if they don’t pose a reasonable danger to anyone else, what really is accomplished by confessing and accepting the consequences? It is a tough nut to crack and one that rationalists and ethicists have been debating for thousands of years, and I certainly don’t think that I have an answer.
It is a fascinating topic for reflection and debate. What is the real reason for punishment for those who commit crimes? On the larger scale, it helps keep social order, but what about on a personal scale? It can give the victims a sense of justice, but isn’t that really just rewarding their desire for revenge? Of course, if the offender is a career offender, or has a pathological personality that drives them to commit crimes, then prison makes plenty of sense, and this is probably the case with many offenders. But what about those people who are basically good and decent, but are driven to commit a crime out of fear or mental anguish? Is the same penalty we would give a dangerous career criminal really appropriate for them?
The movie doesn’t answer these questions. Judah is shown as having moved on with his life, in fact, his life is better than ever. Cliff is left alone with his idealism, even though it has failed him once again. This is as real as it gets, and real life is messy and arbitrary and the film gets that perfectly.
More Senseless Violence – Why And What To Do
I wrote several entries, here and here, this week about a shooting at a local high school in which a principle and assistance principle were shot by a student angry over being suspended. The assistant principle died and the student killed himself shortly afterwards.
Now we have news of another senseless shooting. This one involves U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona who was shot along with 12 others at a meeting she was holding at a grocery store in Tucson. A federal judge was also among those shoot. So far, 6 people have died, including the judge. The shooter, Jared Laugher, is in police custody.
There have been death threats against both Rep. Giffords and the judge in the past; Giffords for her support for President Obama’s health care bill and the judge for his ruling in an immigration lawsuit. It is too early to say if this shooting was motivated by either of this issues or who the intended target, if any, was.
I’m not a big propionate of gun control, but I do support laws to require background checks of people purchasing guns and laws requiring gun owners to properly secure their firearms. I believe that there should also be laws that will hold gun owners accountable for crimes committed with their firearms if it can be proved that they did not properly secure them.
For those who would assume that I am against gun ownership let me say that I don’t own a firearm, although I have on several occasions in the past. The only reason I don’t own one now is that I have teenagers in the house and I just don’t feel comfortable having one in the home. Personally, I enjoy target shooting and skeet shooting and once my kids are out of the house, I plan on purchasing a shotgun, rifle and possibly a handgun, all for target and skeet shooting.
To get back to the main focus of this post, it is unclear what the causes or solutions are for these sort of events. There will always be angry and violence prone people and they will always find a way to act on their violent impulses.
There are plenty of statistics to be thrown around. From the Brady Campaign and Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence we get:
In one year, guns murdered 17 people in Finland, 35 in Australia, 39 in England and Wales, 60 in Spain, 194 in Germany, 200 in Canada, and 9,484 in the United States. This seems to indicate that the number of people killed in the U.S. is disproportionally large compared to other western countries and when you run the numbers, they seem to bear this assumption out. I used estimate population for 2010 from the CIA Worl Fact Book and here is the number of people killed by guns per 1000 people in each country :
| Country | Percentage gun related deaths per capita |
Number of gun related deaths per 1000 |
| Finland | 0.0032349724 | 3.2349724 |
| Australia | 0.001626715 | 1.626715 |
| England and Wales | 0.0006255168 | 0.6255168 |
| Spain | 0.0012901571 | 1.2901571 |
| Germany | 0.002357717 | 2.357717 |
| Canada | 0.0059242159 | 5.9242159 |
| US | 0.0305705847 | 30.5705847 |
So the US has 5 times the gun related death than the next highest, Canada. I’d call that significant. The real question is what to do about it?
This, of course, is something that has been debated for decades and this particular incident probably will inspire more debate, but with a Republican controlled House of Representatives you can be sure that no real progress will be made to address the issue of gun deaths in America.
There has been a lot of speculation on the motives for this shooting on twitter with some people pointing to Sarah Palin’s web site that used to have a Rep. Gifford’s district on a map with a target on it. That was removed from the site today after the shooting. Wether it was removed out of respect for the congress woman and other victims or because a target has been eliminated is unknown, but some people are trying to infer the latter. There is also many who are promoting the idea that the shooting was politically motivated, but until the facts are in as to the gunman’s motive, we can, and should, assume nothing.
The new Speaker of The House issued a statement condemning the attack in which he said, “An attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve. Acts and threats of violence against public officials have no place in our society.” I heartily agree.
My thoughts are with the victims and their families.
Dealing With Believers – Accommodation VS Confrontation
My dear friend Maria has an ongoing debate on her blog, The Fledgling Skeptic, about Accommodation VS Confrontation in the skeptical community. Her and Rob Smith had and interesting first round of their debate and I suggest that you go read it at the link above.
This is a debate that has been going on for a while now. Phil Plait brought it to the forefront in his, “Don’t be a dick”, speech at TAM 8, and it was a major topic of conversation and debate at Skepticon III.
As I said in my reply to Maria’s and Rob’s first round, it seems that the more we debate this issue, the muddier it gets, and I think it is because every situation is different. What is important is to avoid blatant accommodation of the kind where we are afraid to criticize someone’s beliefs. Beliefs can always, and must always be criticized if they are based on superstition and magical thinking. The important thing is to show respect to the person(s) who’s beliefs you are criticizing, unless, of course, you are dealing with the Sylvia Brown’s, Rush Limbaugh’s, and assorted religious leaders who are doing real harm, where open ridicule is more appropriate. But for your average believers who have only a personal stake of their own beliefs, respect the person, but criticize the beliefs.
I believe that we need to respect the believer and let them know that we respect them and aren’t just writing them or their beliefs and opinions off. At the same time, we cannot give an inch when it comes to calling out their superstitious beliefs. We need to engage them in conversation and ask them to tell use why they believe what they do. Make them defend their beliefs with more than just, “Because the bible says so”, or, “It is God’s plan”. They need to give us real, tangible evidence. Of course, they won’t be able to, but we need to insist on it. The tone we use, sarcastic, sincere interest, etc, will depend on their tone. It is a play-it-by-ear situation and each person and situation will be different.
The really important thing is to gage their mood and level of attachment to their beliefs and then attempt to engage them in dialogue. Unless you are debating a hell bent (that’s an ironic term!) true believer, with whom you will almost surely get nowhere, you need to realize that this person, this believer, is human, with the basic human inclination to assign agency to things in their world (some say it is an instinct, an evolutionary trait developed to protect our hunter/gather ancestors from predators). They don’t realize that they are involved in superstitious or magical thinking because thinking rationally and critically goes against that particular part of our evolutionary development. We need to show them that we can use another product of our evolution, our capacity to reason, to overcome that other evolutionary by-product that is rarely ever needed anymore.
Respect for the individual is the key with dealing with most believers. When they know that you aren’t attacking them personally, you can start to help them separate their beliefs from themselves. Its no small task, but every journey starts with just one step, and showing them that they are valuable not because of their beliefs, but in spite of them, is a good beginning.
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