Sunday, April 29, 2018

Quote Of The Day: Tim Maudlin On Block Time


Tim Maudlin via Quantum Magazine
Tim Maudlin is a philosopher of science who is often cited as a critic of the popular view in science and philosophy known as "block time," which is just another way of describing eternalism: the view that all moments of time—the past, present, and future, are all equally real and ontological. But it's not so clear that Maudlin outright denies the block universe conception of time. In an interview he gave with Quantum Magazine last year, he seems to affirm block time, but mistakingly thinks it denies change.

A popular misconception of the block universe is that time or change isn't real. But this is just a figure of speech. In the block universe time and change are definitely real. What isn't real, however, is the flow of time and change. There is no flowing of one moment to the next coming into and out of existence in a block universe since all moments exist, but there are definitely distinct ontological states of what exists at different times. This is what time and change are in a block universe: it's the fact that the same events do not exist uniformly throughout the spacetime block. But this often gets misconstrued as "time and change doesn't exist at all" by many scientists and even by many well-intentioned eternalists, and due to that, many people reject the block universe because it seems so self-evidently true that time and change exist. (For an explanation of the experience of the flow of time in a block universe, see here.) I will let Maudlin explain in his own words his issues with this complicated linguistic aspect of block time upon being accused of bucking the the trend. For all his experience on time, he too seems to get tripped up by this.
You don’t sound like much of a fan of the block universe. 
There’s a sense in which I believe a certain understanding of the block universe. I believe that the past is equally real as the present, which is equally real as the future. Things that happened in the past were just as real. Pains in the past were pains, and in the future they’ll be real too, and there was one past and there will be one future. So if that’s all it means to believe in a block universe, fine.
People often say, “I’m forced into believing in a block universe because of relativity.” The block universe, again, is some kind of rigid structure. The totality of concrete physical reality is specifying that four-dimensional structure and what happens everywhere in it. In Newtonian mechanics, this object is foliated by these planes of absolute simultaneity. And in relativity you don’t have that; you have this light-cone structure instead. So it has a different geometrical character. But I don’t see how that different geometrical character gets rid of time or gets rid of temporality.
The idea that the block universe is static drives me crazy. What is it to say that something is static? It’s to say that as time goes on, it doesn’t change. But it’s not that the block universe is in time; time is in it. When you say it’s static, it somehow suggests that there is no change, nothing really changes, change is an illusion. It blows your mind. Physics has discovered some really strange things about the world, but it has not discovered that change is an illusion.


Saturday, April 28, 2018

Abortion And Anti-Natalism Part 2: The Pro-Choice Argument


No issue continues to be as divisive as abortion. The polls on the ethics of abortion have not significantly budged in the past few decades, with no clear majorities for it or against it. As a negative utilitarian who is sympathetic to the ideas in anti-natalism (but who isn't an anti-natalist), I am naturally pro-choice as a result. I see it as excessively immoral to force a woman to give birth with total disregard to her circumstance, or the future baby's circumstance. 


But abortion still needs to be argued for, especially given its controversies. I think the pro-choice crowd has in general failed to make a strong case for the ethics of the pro-choice position, whereas the pro-life crowd has vehemently made many cases against abortion. The reason why is obvious: abortion is the law of the land, and therefore pro-lifers are more motivated to make the case against abortion than pro-choices are to make the case for it's morality and legality. And this has the potential to turn the tide of opinion in favor of outlawing abortion, which could motivate politicians to implement stronger anti-abortion restrictions, despite the supreme court's 1973 decision. 

So in making the case for the ethics and legality of abortion I want to start where I think many pro-choicers fail. A common argument many in the pro-choice side make is that the fetus isn't human and isn't alive and that therefore aborting it isn't killing a living human being. I don't think it's necessary to claim this to defend abortion, and I also think it's wrong. A fetus has human DNA, making it genetically identifiable as human or homo sapien, and it is a living organism, requiring food that it metabolizes into energy to subsist. So I think this common argument forces the pro-choice position into defending two claims that are indefensible and ultimately unnecessary in defending abortion, and they should be dropped. It is simply unnecessary to claim a fetus isn't human or alive to justify abortion.

Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Women v. Religion: The Case Against Faith – and for Freedom


I've been a bit too busy to blog regularly as of late because we just began production on our documentary on free will and it's been taking up much of my free time. I'll have more information on this as the project solidifies. But in the meantime, I have another guest post by author Karen Garst on her upcoming book Women v. Religion: The Case Against Faith – and for Freedom. I've had her as a guest post here before back in 2016 for her book Women Beyond Belief: Discovering Life without Religion.


________________


After finishing my first book, Women Beyond Belief: Discovering Life without Religion, I had a chance to attend several secular events including the Women in Secularism Conference. This was excellent and I had the opportunity to meet many interesting women. So instead of going back into retirement, I decided to write another book. The result is Women v. Religion: The Case Against Faith - and for Freedom.

Each of the essays in this book examines one aspect of the impact of the three Abrahamic religions on women: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In the first essay, licensed professional mental health counselor Candace Gorham, author of The Ebony Exodus Project, dives deep into the impact of religion on our psyche. She outlines the basics of mental illness that can be caused by religion, including depression, anxiety, shame, and guilt. Gorham also discusses the ineffective religious treatment for mental health problems such as pastoral counseling, conversion theory, and faith healing.

Lauri Weissman, a professor of communications at a top-ranked American university, gives an overview of the first in the three Abrahamic traditions, Judaism, and its proscriptive roles for women. As “an oppressed and isolated minority within an oppressed and isolated minority,” Jewish women have endured millennia of religiously justified misogyny.  Scriptural disgust for female bodies and demand for ritual purity enforce an essential “otherness” by which women are excluded from leadership roles and core practices of many Jewish communities. These earliest attitudes are replicated by Islam and Christianity, which hold some of the same core texts to be sacred.

Alexis Record, frequent book reviewer and blog contributor, expands Gorham’s discussion by focusing on the impact of childhood indoctrination. Record was raised in a fundamentalist household and was educated using Accelerated Christian Education. In 2001, Norway banned the curriculum for violating their Gender Equality Act.[1] A mother’s roles are discussed as “helper, cook, cleans house, washes and irons clothes.”[2] Record concludes with an action plan to help children know what is true and to give them the tools they need to distinguish facts from beliefs.

Dr. Valerie Tarico, author of Trusting Doubt and blogger at www.valerietarico.com, gives an insightful analysis of the treatment of women in the Bible and early Christianity. Her work outlines the tendency of Bible writers and subsequent Christian leaders to eliminate any notion of a feminine divine and to paint women as unclean, dirty—literally property to be owned, given away, sold, or claimed as spoils of war by powerful men. Christian apologists like to ignore the Old Testament and focus on the New Testament. Yet as Tarico outlines so well, it is hard to ignore the statements of early Christian fathers or the roots of their disdain for women in the Bible itself.

The third Abrahamic religion, Islam, is explored by Hibah Ch. Ch is a Syrian expatriate born and raised in Aleppo in a conservative Muslim family. She left Islam in her twenties and now studies chemistry and mathematics in the United States. Ch reveals that female deities in the Arabian Peninsula were initially revered but subsequently destroyed by Islam. In addition, there were successful business women and female rulers prior to Islam. Inspired by the patriarchal norms of Judeo-Christianity, the founder of Islam, Mohammed, adopted many of their negative proscriptions regarding women.

Aruna Papp, author of Unworthy Creature:  A Punjabi Daughter’s Memoir of Honour, Shame and Love, was born and raised in India. The oldest of seven children, Aruna’s formative years were governed by her father’s pastoral service, the culture of honor, and her yearning for an education that eluded her.  In an abusive arranged marriage, Aruna immigrated to Canada with two small daughters. Here she learned about rights and protections Canada offers to women. She embarked on a frightening but empowering journey that lead to two masters’ degrees, and a second, loving, and mutually respectful marriage. In her pioneering career counselling immigrant women, Aruna is recipient of dozens of awards, including the Toronto Women of Distinction. Aruna facilitates training on “Risk Assessment: How Honour Based Violence differs from Domestic Violence.” As a Canadian Delegate at the 57th Session of the UN Aruna spoke on Honour Killing in the West countries.

The next two essays, written by Valerie Wade and Deanna Adams, outline the impact of religion on African American women. Wade is a historian at Lynnfield Historical Consulting, where she assists families with genealogical research and conducts workshops on preservation and other history-related topics. Adams is the author of the blog Musings on a Limb, where she expresses her views as an African American atheist, professional, and mom on subjects related to the intersectionality of racism and skepticism. She currently serves on the board of the Humanists of Houston. Wade describes the culture in Africa prior to the Middle Passage of the slave trade. In many societies in Africa, there was a strong influence of female goddesses like Mawu, Yemoja, and Ala. The advent of Christianity, with its rampant misogyny, however, put African American women in a double bind: they were disadvantaged because of their race and because of their sex. Adams continues this history and states that during the civil rights era, Christian churches held back and many avoided involvement. Just like in the churches, women’s involvement in civil rights was more as workhorses. After this era, the prosperity gospel phenomenon took much of the women’s hard-earned dollars. Other impacts such as the prevalence of domestic violence and the lack of psychologically sound support also contribute to the struggle of African American women today.

Marilyn Deleija, born in Guatemala, and raised in Central California, gives a unique prospective on what it means to be an Atheist Latin immigrant. She has worked hard to be politically active in her community and has also helped to improve political information access to them. She is a local volunteer in Central California and has helped in moving her community progressively forward.  In her essay, her experiences reflect what she sees needs to be changed with regards to religion and how it can affect local communities, but more specifically, Hispanic prominent communities, like places she grew up in.

Hypatia Alexandria introduces herself as a multi-faceted individual, dedicated to promoting secular values as well as social, political and business interests in the US Latino community. She completed her education in an all-girls Catholic school. Thus, she is well aware of the huge impact of religion, particularly Catholicism, on the US Hispanic Population. She writes and discusses the influence religion has on Latino women and the multiple barriers they face in achieving true gender equality.  Hypatia cofounded Hispanic American Freethinkers (HAFREE), a non-profit organization that encourages critical thinking in the US. She is currently a PhD student at Virginia Tech.

Kayley Margarite Whalen, digital strategies and social media manager at the National LGBTQ Task Force, adds yet another dimension to the subjugation of women by religion¾that of a transgender woman. In her essay, she weaves her personal journey both as a transgender woman and as an atheist along with current research on gender identity. It is an issue that virtually all religions have not yet come to terms with.

Dr. Abby Hafer, author of The Not-So-Intelligent Designer, takes up the discussion of evolution in her essay.  She points out that evolutionarily speaking, females are the first, original sex.  She contradicts the argument from nature by showing the many different gender roles and forms of sexual expression that exist in the animal kingdom, and points out numerous fallacies in the idea of intelligent design, in particular with regard to women’s reproductive systems.  She shows how the Abrahamic religions go out of their way to trap women, and reveals that the natural rate of spontaneous abortions makes the evangelicals’ God by far the world’s busiest abortionist.

Gretta Vosper, author of With or Without God and Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief, leads a congregation in Canada’s largest Protestant denomination, the United Church of Canada. She is in the middle of a controversy and may lose or leave her position because she is an atheist. She explores how her congregation developed around her after her declaration of atheism and how she has attracted congregants who want the community that a church provides but none of the doctrine.

If you have a chance to read the book (it is available for pre-order here), please go to my website and vote for Faith or Freedom (and a short review on Amazon would be much appreciated). The book will be available June 1.

Karen Garst
March 24, 2018

[1] Jonny Scaramanga, “Norway Banned ACE. Could the UK Follow?” Patheos, August 4, 2014, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/leavingfundamentalism/2014/08/04/norway-banned-ace-could-the-uk-follow/.
[2] http://faithlessfeminist.com/blog-posts/exposing-accelerated-christian-education/


Sunday, April 1, 2018

Twitter's Policy Violations Are A Joke And Biased Against Atheists


When you're losing a debate with someone on a social media platform, a common tactic is to report them as being in violation of the platform's policies. Recently this happened to me as I engaged in a debate on whether Islam is a sexist religion with a "Sunni Supremacist."

We went back and forth for an hour and I hit her (or him) with devastating facts that her cherished religion is chock with sexism, to which she initially denied, then accepted, but then said it isn't sexist if men can dominate women. Well there's Islam for you. Then right in the middle of the debate she reports one of my tweets as violating Twitter's stated policies. Twitter's policy is:

You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.

And here is the tweet that she found so offensive:


And Twitter agreed with her despite my protest. This is sheer lunacy and anti-atheist bias on the part of Twitter. At worst, I called a person retarded. But that happens every second on Twitter and clearly this person is not actually retarded, although their fanaticism could suggest otherwise. The tweet is referring to a verse in the Quran in chapter 2 verse 228. It says that when it comes to divorce, "men have a degree (of advantage) over them [women]." This women actually used this verse to try and argue that Islam is not sexist when it comes to divorce and all I simply pointed out was that this is simply not the case. The verse demonstrates my point that Islam is sexist.

So because she couldn't accept the fact that her own evidence against my view actually affirmed my view, like a typical person who loses a debate, she reported my tweet as being in violation of Twitter's policies, and Twitter stupidly agreed. She by the way called me a moron, and espoused anti-atheist, anti-Western, and anti-American bigotry in several of her tweets, calling atheism a "mental disorder" numerous times. I reported her in retaliation because that is my only option and it does not appear Twitter has done any temporary blocking since she's still tweeting.

This opens up a question. If theists (or anyone for that matter) use insincere tactics like this to try and shut someone down on a social media platform, should atheists do the same? Should we be reporting all anti-atheist bias out there—which by the way is rampant online, especially among Muslims? I would like to say no. But if companies like Twitter and Facebook and others are going to have a double standard against atheists who criticize religion while they turn a blind eye to theists who regularly demonize atheists and atheism, then I think we should.

So please find an anti-atheist, anti-gay, and sexist tweet by this "Sunni Supremacist" (which will be very easy) and report this person to Twitter to give them a taste of their own medicine. And please voice your concern to make social media aware of their biased double standard against atheists.

The Naturalistic Fallacy And How It Creeps Into Our Thinking


The naturalistic fallacy can refer to a few things. It can refer to the idea that something is good if it is natural, or bad because it is unnatural. In the context of morality and politics, the fallacy pops up a number of ways and affects our ability to reason. Here are two examples.

Conservatives will often argue that homosexuality is unnatural, and that it's therefore morally and politically wrong to allow it. Catholics who espouse natural law theory are very privy to this kind of reasoning. But it's simply false, on two levels. First, it makes the naturalistic fallacy. What is unnatural is not bad, because plenty of things are "unnatural" in the sense of being man-made, like technology, nose jobs, or medicines, and they can be positively good. Second, it is simply wrong that homosexuality is unnatural. Homosexuality is in fact, natural. But that also doesn't make it good either, since plenty of things are natural and aren't good, like cancer, HIV, poisonous mushrooms, and gamma ray bursts from the sun. The goodness or badness of a thing does not depend on its naturalness.

For liberals, it is very popular to say that there are no fundamental differences between men and women other than the obvious physical differences, and this leads many of them to argue that the low number of women to men in particular fields like science, technology, and engineering, are necessarily due to systemic sexism. But there are good arguments against this. Psychology and biology shows that men and women are not the same in our general preferences. Men tend to prefer working with things, and women tend to prefer working with people. That's why there are so many men in the physical sciences, engineering, and technology, and so many women in the social sciences, healthcare, and education.


Saturday, March 31, 2018

I've Been Busy...


I've had to put blogging on hold in recent weeks because I've just been so busy. I started working on a documentary about free will and in the past few weeks begun all the planning and organizing that goes along with making a feature length documentary. This is going to be a big project for me and one that could take me several years to complete, but I'm very excited and I'm looking forward to the challenge. I will have more details as things get more fleshed out, so stay tuned.

I am also going to put the finishing touches on my pro-choice argument. I've been almost done with it for weeks but had to put it on hold because of the documentary. That should be done by the end of this weekend. I also have many blogging ideas in the pipe that I will hopefully get to in the next few weeks, although for the remainder of this year, as production on the documentary gets started, I will have to blog less frequently than at my usual rate, which is typically around twice a week. I will try and make it happen as much as possible.

I can do things a few different ways. I could focus on quality and do infrequent posts, but ones that are in depth on the topic, or I can focus on quantity and do frequent short posts that just brush up on topics and that could rely on videos and imagery. Or I can do both. I will probably do the latter.

So in the spirit of filling up content, check out this video I stumbled across from Redacted Tonight, an internet show I occasionally watch. Lee Camp, the show's host spends the first 15 minutes pounding our torture industry known as factory farming and its impact on climate change. He makes some great points.


Sunday, March 18, 2018

Stephen Hawking On Star Talk


As we all bid farewell to the passing of physicist Stephen Hawking, the most famous scientist of his generation, we can appreciate his humor as well as his intellect. Here he was on a recent episode of Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson, demonstrating a bit of that. Interestingly, he died on Pi day (3.14), also Einstein's birthday, and was born exactly 300 years after the death of Galileo (Jan 8, 1942), often considered the father of modern astronomy. A life started and ended by mathematical coincidences indeed. What a universe!



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