Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Reason Rally 2016 Recap


I am back in New York after having attended the 2016 Reason Rally. On my ride home we actually got lost and I didn't make it back to my apartment until 2 AM, with just 7 hours to go until I had to go back to work. Luckily my job allows me to come late. Whew! Anyhow, I wanted to share my thoughts on my experiences.

First off, this was the first atheist convention that I had ever gone to. I honestly didn't know what to expect. For the most part, the speakers were not the reason I went. I've seen and spoke with Lawrence Krauss before. I've seen many big name atheists, including Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, as well as many popular atheist YouTubers. I went mainly to visually represent myself as an open atheist who supports secular values and to collaborate with like minded individuals. And get drunk and high of course. Atheist events are great places for meeting new people to collaborate with.

Despite the weather being good, turn out seems to have been lower than expected. It was being reported that 30,000 people were going to attend but in my estimation there were less than 7,000 people. There are lots of theories why this is the case.

  • The atheist community has been fractured by divisions among liberals regarding Islam and feminism, and the organizers of the event generally take a side of the so-called "regressives."
  • The line up was not as exciting, with actors like Johnny Depp and Margaret Cho not attending for various reasons, and Richard Dawkins unable to attend due to his recent stroke. Johnny's appearance alone could have possibly drawn several thousand people.
  • Other big name atheists like Sam Harris didn't attend. People like him have huge followings and could draw thousands of people.
  • Time, cost, and travel expenses could have played a factor. The annual World Science Festival was the same weekend and I really wanted to go but in the end decided to go with the Reason Rally because it's not every year (and I had not attended any major atheist events before).

The location of the event was not ideal. We were by the Lincoln memorial right in front of the reflecting pool and so the crowd was split in half making it difficult to get to either side. In 2012 it was located by the main mall which allowed for better navigation. I suppose my problem with the event would be that it wasn't really that atheist-centric. I would have loved it if Dawkins and Harris were there and more high profile atheists who promote atheism and secular values like Sean Carroll, Phil Zuckerman, Richard Carrier, and Aron Ra. That would be my dream, but the purpose of the rally I suppose was not really to preach atheism, it was to show Washington secular people exist and will be voting. In that sense, it failed to visually represent the growing number of atheist people. 

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Reason Rally 2016



So tomorrow begins the 2016 Reason Rally event in Washington DC. I will be headed down there tomorrow morning and will be meeting several friends who are active in the New York City atheist community. There are many events lined up in addition to the main rally on Saturday. I'm taking part in the Advocacy Days training session for lobbying senators and congressmen about secularism and to put pressure on them to respect the wall (between church and state). It should be fun, especially since marijuana is legal in the city. The Wu-tang clan are going to perform. Bill Nye will speak and Lawrence Krauss, and they're always interesting. Originally Johnny Depp was going to speak but his recent mother's death and divorce hoopla caused him to decline. Damn. I was looking forward to seeing him and possibly meeting him since I know a guy who knows the organizers.

If you can make it to the event I highly recommend you come. It is very important that atheists, skeptics, and secular people are represented and show America that we're one of the largest growing segments of the population and that we're just not going to tolerate the absurdity of religion into the government process anymore. A rally for reason, it would seem, shouldn't be necessary. It's the 21st century. Heck it's the second half of the second decade of the 21st century. We as a people should be past religious dogma hindering our policies. But in reality it's technically more broad than that. Rational thinking is needed in all areas of human existence, not just politics. We absolutely need rational discourse in every aspect of our lives from politics to policy to economics to our personal lives and views. It's not just religion that is hindering rational thinking. There are multiple kinds of irrational ways to think that involve no appeal to religion or any god. I suppose that's what the Reason Rally is really about - at least I hope. We need to stamp out all ways of irrational thinking, especially among religious, but also among the non-religious.

And speaking of which, I will be posting a blog I wrote last year on how to infer ontology that I never published that will outline my views on exactly how to think rationally about ontological claims. Expect that to be done within the next week or two - depending on how busy I am from the rally.

Monday, May 30, 2016

Quote Of The Day: God Meets Science And Logic





Today's quote of the day is technically by me. Inspired by a previous tweet I made, I've decided to turn it into a meme.  Copy it and spread it to all your social media.

Have a happy Memorial Day weekend!

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Why So Many People Get The Big Bang Wrong (Including Atheists)



As an atheist I hear it all the time: NO ONE CREATED SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING? This is the name of the first chapter in Christian Apologist Frank Turok's book Stealing God. Other variations of the question go, "How do you get something from nothing?" or "How does nothing create everything?" or still yet, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" The popular view out there especially among theists is that atheists believe "nothing" somehow created everything. If you're an atheist in any kind of situation talking or debating with theists you can be sure some variation of these questions will come up at some point, and you've got to be prepared to give a response. Of course "I don't know" is always a respectable answer, but to me there is a short sound byte answer that can be given and it relies on refuting a common misunderstanding of the big bang that so many of us make, including many atheists.

First, some of these questions assume that the ontological default state should be nothing, and not something, and theists who ask these questions will almost certainly not have shown any justification why that should be so. I don't think one can even come up with an objective prior probability for such an assumption. Second, many of these questions usually rely on a faulty assumption about the big bang. Many people falsely assume the the big bang entails there there was a state of nothingness, and then *poof* you get a big bang. That's not what it says. That's not even what inflationary theory says. They both simply say that there was a first moment when t=0. There wasn't anything prior to that; there was no state of "nothing" from which everything came out of. And since space and time are tied together, as Einstein showed, with no space prior to t=0, there was no time. So you can say that the universe always existed in that at every moment of time the universe exists. In this sense, the universe is omnitemporal. That means there was always something. Somethingness might be the ontological default, and not nothingness.

So no atheist must be committed to the view that "nothing created everything." This is an absurd parody of the atheist position on cosmic origins, and far too many religious apologists and atheists alike believe this. Now of course it is always possible that there was spacetime prior to the big bang. If there's an infinite amount of spacetime prior to our universe's big bang, then most of these questions are mute anyway. And if there is a finite amount of spacetime prior to our universe's big bang, the same principle applies to the absolute origin.



Monday, May 23, 2016

Quote Of The Day: Sean Carroll On How Causality Isn't Fundamental


As shocking as it may seem, causality is not a fundamental concept but a derived one. When we speak of causality in everyday life, we're talking about an emergent phenomena. This is why all the "first cause" arguments for god fail. They make the mistake of taking the everyday experiences and phenomena we observe that don't really exist fundamentally and try to turn them into "metaphysical principles." From Carroll's paper Why (Almost All) Cosmologists are Atheists:

From the perspective of modern science, events don’t have purposes or causes; they simply conform to the laws of nature. In particular, there is no need to invoke any mechanism to “sustain” a physical system or to keep it going; it would require an additional layer of complexity for a system to cease following its patterns than for it to simply continue to do so. Believing otherwise is a relic of a certain metaphysical way of thinking; these notions are useful in an informal way for human beings, but are not a part of the rigorous scientific description of the world. Of course scientists do talk about “causality”, but this is a description of the relationship between patterns and boundary conditions; it is a derived concept, not a fundamental one. If we know the state of a system at one time, and the laws governing its dynamics, we can calculate the state of the system at some later time. You might be tempted to say that the particular state at the first time “caused” the state to be what it was at the second time; but it would be just as correct to say that the second state caused the first. According to the materialist worldview, then, structures and patterns are all there are — we don’t need any ancillary notions.


Sunday, May 22, 2016

George Carlin Was Wrong On Voting


I've been running into many people lately who say voting is a meaningless process when I bring up politics. One guy I was talking to recently brought up George Carlin who was very critical on the voting process (among other things). George Carlin said repeatedly in his standup gigs and on TV and other media outlets that voting is pointless because the game is rigged, the country's ruled by a small group of people who have all the real power, and they've set up a system to give you the illusion that you actually have a choice when you go out and vote, but you don't.

Now look. I'm a huge Carlin fan. I love his stand up and his general philosophy. He's genuinely funny as fuck. But he's wrong on voting. First, let me say that I partially agree with him that there are people running the country who don't give a crap about regular working folks like me. This is not to say that there's some secret conspiracy, like the Bilderbergs, or the Illuminati. There is some truth to that but I'm not a conspiracy nut. There are various competing groups in various areas of the world in various sectors who have a disproportionate amount of power. That's always been the case. But aside from this partial truth, to not vote is not going to make the situation any better for thinking and working people who want rational policies. It will make it worse. Here's why.

We have to acknowledge that not all politicians are the same. No one in their right mind would seriously believe that a Ted Cruz presidency would've had the exact same laws and policies passed as a Bernie Sanders presidency. If you believe that you're insane. These two men couldn't be more ideologically different. The same is true of past elections. Do you really think that a John McCain presidency would've had the exact same laws passed that president Obama passed? Do you think universal healthcare, and same sex marriage, and the ending of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would've been passed under president McCain? Do you think McCain would've appointed the same Supreme Court Justices as Obama did? You know the same-sex marriage decision came down to just one vote don't you? A one vote difference would have made the country completely different. Elections matter, and presidents appoint Supreme Court judges and Congress votes them in, and you vote-in the president, the senators, and the congressmen and women.

If you don't think your vote counts, think again. The reason why Bernie Sanders didn't get more votes than Hillary Clinton is because his base is among young people and too many young people have bought this meme that all politicians are the same and the game is all rigged and so your vote doesn't matter, so don't vote. Nothing could be more insane. This guarantees that you will never get your way in the political system. In case you don't know, the people who are not buying this meme are the older religious white conservatives who often vote for religions Christian dominionists who want to turn the US into their Christian fantasy land. The religious right in this country wants to live in a very very different America than secular liberals like me.

Saturday, May 21, 2016

How To Think Rationally About Claims


I've recently encountered many people who are otherwise very intelligent, but who, for one reason or another, came to believe very foolish things, like libertarian free will, or that we have a soul. It's not that they're stupid or anything, it's mostly due to them just lacking information or having the wrong information in the subject matter, and/or are suffering from poor reasoning skills.

Knowing how to think critically is absolutely essential to being a rational person. We hear numerous claims everyday. But how do we make sense of them? How do we evaluate whether there is any truth to them or not? Well, the answer is long, and I'm in no position to give a full assessment of all the relevant factors. But I can outline a few very important things everyone should know when evaluating the validity of a claim.

Let's start with the claim that the soul exists. By 'soul' I don't mean anything in the metaphoric sense. I'm talking about the traditional notion of a soul, the kind that Descartes believed in: the invisible ghost that resides in our bodies, that animates us, and gives our intellect. This is a belief mostly left over from religion, but is still believed by a surprising number of educated people today. One way to evaluate a claim like this is to ask yourself, if it were true, what would have to be the case? In other words, if souls were real, what would have to be the case logically and scientifically? Let's explore this.

If souls were real, it would have to be the case that the immaterial substance that made up the soul—whatever it is—had to be able to overcome the natural forces in and between the atoms that make up your body. That means there would have to be extra forces at work that apply to the atoms in your body that do not apply to the atoms that make up inanimate matter, like rocks. This echos a view once popular among philosophers and biologists until the end of the 19th century known as vitalism. On vitalism there is something fundamentally different about living things and non-living things. Living things have a life energy that non-living things don't. This would have to be the case—at least for humans—if souls exist.

But the relentless progress of science has shown that this is not the case. There are no special forces or energies that exist in living things that non-living things do not have. There is no life energy out there, despite what all the Deepak Chopras of the world insist. Vitalism has been utterly discredited as an accurate description of reality. All the particles that make up you and I and rocks and trees are made up of the same three things — protons, neutrons, and electrons, that's it. And all the forces that govern them are the electromagnetic force, and the strong and the weak nuclear forces. Gravity is the forth force but is really not a force, it's the curvature of spacetime. Those are the fundamental components that make up everything in your everyday experience and there is no room for anything else. This information has just not gotten out there into the popular understanding of science, but in time it will. The bottom line is this — we fully understand the particles and forces that make up you and I and rocks and trees and planets and there is no room for anything else that can have a causal impact on the atoms that make up your body, like a soul. That is one idea that science has falsified, and we know this through the proper way of reasoning about claims by philosophizing on what would have to be the case if the claim were true.

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