Blogosaurus Vex

Anthropolgist Scott Atran’s book In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion is excellent.  From it I reproduce the following quotation, from a section titled “Relevance and Truth: Why God’s Word Cannot Be Disconfirmed.”  It’s a long section (three pages in the book), but I think it’s worth reading because the problem of the inability of religion to be factually challenges is so frustrating and incomprehensible to nonbelievers.  It’s a problem that is a brick wall that both sides smash their heads against with little to show for it and is, I think, the basis of much of the contempt on both sides.  Here is Atran’s explanation of this phenomenon.  All italics are from the text.  I have not indented to preserve what shortness of (physical) length I can.

Begin quotation:

One clear and important distinction between fantasy and religion is the knowledge of its source.  People generally attribute their personal fantasies and dreams to themselves and to events they’ve experienced.  They also know or assume that public fictions (novels, movies, cartoons, etc.) were created by specific people who had particular intentions for doing so.

A religious text is another story.  Followers believe it to be the work and word of deities themselves.  Believers assume that sacred doctrine was first heard or transcribed in some long-forgotten time by chosen prophets or sages who were faithfully repeating or imaging what the deities had directly said or shown to them.

Accepting a text on authority and faith implies that the listener or reader suspend the universal constraints on ordinary communication, that is, pragmatic considerations of relevance (Sperber and Wilson, 1996).  In ordinary communication, the listener or reader “automatically” attemps to fill the gap in understanding between what is merely said or written and what the communicator intends the listener or reader to think or do as a result.

In ordinary communication, there is almost always such a gap.  For example, if someone says to you “That’s just fine,” you willimmediately try to figure out what in the previous conversation or immediate environment “that” could possibly refer to, what is “fine” about it, and why it is “just” fine.  This search, in turn, takes cues from the phonetic and syntactic structure of the utterance istself (e.g., phrasing, stress, intonation), surrounding environment (the presence of a broken wine  bottle in the dining room floor), recent memory (you had just asked to taste your dinner host’s special reserve), and background knowledge (your host tends to be ironic whan angry).

Moreover, you, the hearer, automatically assume that the speaker also shares many of these same background assumptions with you and, furthermore, that the speaker made the utterance knowing that the two of you shared enough of these background assumptions for you to readily understand what the speaker intended.  Both of you also automatically assume that you, the hearer, will make the appropriate inference to the speaker’s intentions on the basis of considerations of relevance: you will attempt, with the least cognitive effort, to infer sufficient information to understand the speaker’s intentions.  You stop cognitively processing information the moment the communication makes sense. (If there were no such stopping rule, inference and interpretations would go on forever.)

Depending on the circumstances and what you know or don’t know about the speaker’s past intentions, you may suspect that the speaker is attempting to lie or deceive.  Alternatively, you may doubt that the speaker really knows what he or she is talking about, or is adequately aware of the kind or extent of knowledge that you share, or properly assesses your readiness or willingness to make the appropriate inferences.  Finally, you may have reason to interpret the speaker’s utterances figuratively, say, as a metaphor or parable, or perhaps simply as a bit of fanciful fun.

In everyday communication, humans effortlessly, but necessarily and unmistakably, make these many assumptions and inferences.  Often, they do so very many times in a single minute of ordinary coversation.  In interpreting a religious utterance or text, however, people need to do very little of the sort.  Ordinarily, believers assume that the utterances or texts connected with religious doctrines are authorless, timeless, and true. As a result, people do not apply ordinary relevance criteria to religious communications.

Because divine statements are authorless, it makes little sense to try to infer intent from their mode of presentation.   For example, the bodily gesticulations, phrasings, and intonations in the utterance of a biblical, Quranic, or Later Vedic passage cannot be God’s, Allah’s, or Vishnu’s.  They can be only the speaker’s (unless there is cause to believe that God is directly communicationg through the deity, as in a public revelation).  Interpreting what the speaker intends by uttering the passage is one thing; interpreting what the deity intends can be indefinitely many things (expressed, in part, by indefinitely many speakers and interpreters).

Timelessness implies that cues from the surrounding environment, background knowledge, and memory are all irrelevant – or equipotentially relevant, which amounts to irrelevance.  God’s message, therefore, can apply to any and all contexts and to each context in indefinitely many and different ways.  To be sure, people interpret God’s message in particular ways for specific contexts, but they have no reason to ever stop interpreting.

Finally, the fact that God’s word is accepted as true on faith – come what may – entails that it can never be false or deceptive or merely figurative.  Ordinary preoccupation with lying and false belief in communication therefore plays no role in interpretation (or at least no consistent role).  Neither can failed attempts at verification or confirmation of this or that aspect of the information represented in a religious statment, or inferred from it, undermine the audience’s belief in the statement’s truth.

On the contrary, apparently disconfirming evidence only seems to make believers try harder to understand the deeper truth and to strangthen religious beliefs.  For example, after reading a bogus article on a new finding from the Dead Sea Scrolls that seemed to contradict Christian doctrine, religious believers who also believed the story reported their religious beliefs reinforced (Batson 1975).  For believers, then, confidence in religious doctrine and belief can increase through both confirmation and disconfirmation of any factual assumptions that may accompany interpretation of those beliefs.

Faith in religious belief is not simply another manifestation of a general psychological propensity to reduce “cognitive dissonance” by ignoring or reappraising information that is contrary to one’s views (cf. Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter 1956).  It is the direct cognitive result of suspending the relevance criteria that universally apply to ordinary communication.  If faith is, in part, willingness to suspend ordinary pragmatic constraints of relevance, then beliefs held in faith become not only immune to falsification and contradiction but become even more strongly held in the face of apparent falsification or contradiction. Apparently disconfirmed religious beliefs show only the superficialty of one’s current interpretation and point to an even deeper but more mysterious truth.

End quotation.  pp.91-93

Posted in Psychology, Reading, Religion | 2 Comments »

I’m cool with babies in public and think everyone else should be too.

Rights: in the same way that people of all colours, beliefs, sizes, and shoe size have the right to go about in public, babies have that right too.  A baby is just a person who is very young.  People have rights.

Selflessness: Babies can be loud or smelly or otherwise disruptive – are you really so special you must not be asked to tolerate some disruption from a tiny being that cannot as yet control itself?  I’m not saying a crying baby on a plane isn’t very unpleasant – I’m saying get over yourself, this is the time for compassion.  Because it’s not always about what feels nicest for you.

Looking to the future: What happens to a baby is enormously important for how they’ll turn out to be as adults.  Babies need to be around other people, experiencing person to person stimulation, in a loving and patient manner.  If it’s not your baby, it might one day be your neighbour or old age home nurse – even selfish people should make nice with babies.  And demonstrating this kind of caring and acceptance to babies is good for their parents too – a supported parent has more resources to do a better job of parenting.

This is not to speak in support of parents who use their kids as accessories and thoughtlessly demand that the world revolve around them (using the baby as justification), but rather to call for a reasonable and sincere attitude of concern and well-wishing to babies, which requires welcoming their presence in the places where people go.

Posted in Society/Politics | No Comments »

Drinking with the police: it was really surprising!  Based on my weight I was instructed to down five ounces of hard alcohol in one hour, in my case in the form of gin and tonics.  I am not a heavy drinker and this was the most I’ve ever had so fast probably in all my life, and let me tell you, I was pretty looped.  But guess what?  An hour later, at maximum alcohol saturation, I did not blow over the legal limit of .08.

Not kidding!  My friend John was there and he was given 8 drinks in one hour, and he too didn’t blow over the limit.

Still not kidding!

I guess I had a pretty inaccurate idea of how much alcohol is permissable in drivers in that I thought the tolerance was lower.  I now realize that when someone is busted for driving while over the limit they are probably utterly shitfaced, because if little old 125lb me can stay legal on 5 drinks in one hour, then shit, you really have to be trying to be illegal.

Note: You can still be charged with impaired driving if you are weaving or driving unsafely with alcohol on board, even if you aren’t over .08.  Driving while impaired is a different charge than driving while over .08.  (And you shouldn’t drink and drive at all, ever.  I wouldn’t want anyone to take these observations as an encouragement to drink and drive because, hello, that is stupid and you are an idiot jackass if you do so.)

Still.  I am surprised at the findings.

And then I got hungover, which is no surprise considering how much I had all at once.  So in the end I was glad I went to the concert alone because I wasn’t required to talk with anyone, and I didn’t feel much like chatting.  More like sitting very still and monitoring the tender condition of my stomach for vomit potential.  Fortunately the worst had passed by the time the show started, and I had a really great time.  Clutch is great live and the crowd was going bananas.

I was disappointed that they didn’t play any of my favourite songs, which is saying something, because I have about twenty of them.  But they have something like 10 full length albums to choose from, including a new CD that they played heavily from, so my twenty favourites average out to two tracks per disc and, when you look at it that way, I guess it wouldn’t be hard to miss them when making one’s set list.  Nonetheless it was a great show – my non-favourite songs are still much beloved to me.  As an encore they played Big News I and Animal Farm from the first CD, which was awesome.  (These details are for Cousin Pat, who is also a fan but didn’t go last night.)

So the whole day was a bit odd but interesting.

Posted in Personal | 1 Comment »

The first summer Husband and I were living together (back then he was Boyfriend), we went to Australia for him to work for three months.  We were in the south, in Adelaide, and it was their winter, so the temperature was generally between 10 and 15 degrees C.  We both thought it was hilarious that the Australians went around bundled into parkas and toques and scarfs in this weather – I mean, come on!  But once we’d been there for a while we started to get it.  Here is the problem: Australia is generally damn hot and their winter is so short that they don’t have central heating in many of the buildings.  Turns out 13 degrees feels pretty chilly when you are sitting still in it, at your work desk, all day long.  We were cold too!  (Though we did not stoop to parkas and toques, finding that a jean jacket was plenty of weather protection while outdoors and walking.  The Australians marvelled at our fortitude.)

So now we get to the connection part: it is too fucking hot in Vancouver right now!

There are many reasons to live in Vancouver, among them the lack of a harsh winter and the lack of a harsh summer.  We are gloriously moderate nearly all the time, and as a result do not have the infrastructure to support heat waves.  Does anyone have air conditioning in their homes?  Not really.  Some people have little portable units but no one has central air and really, it’s because we don’t need it.

Except that right now we do.

And as a person who lives for the rains of fall and winter, this weather is killing me.  Truly – lots of locals complain about the rain here, and yes, it is pretty rainy.  But I love the rain!  It smells fresh and clean; it has a beautiful, hypnotic sound; it looks cool and calming.  I like to walk in the rain, even when the backs of my jeans get all wet and clingy for hours afterward.  I am a dark season person and all this goddamn sun makes me want to kill something.  Except it is too hot to move.

So you know what I am going to do today?  I am participating in an experiment which involves me being given police-funded alcohol and taking breathalyzers.  They’re  also giving me lunch.  And driving me – after all, the police can’t let a girl drive herself when she’s been liquored up!  How cool is that?

And then I am going to see my favourite band in the entire world play at the Commodore, and I am SO excited!

Posted in Personal | 2 Comments »

I was at a wedding this weekend when I ran into a friend who has been away – he moved to Newfoundland last year, which is as far away from Vancouver as you can get and still stay in the country.  He moved for two reasons: one,  you can buy a house in St John’s for literally ten percent of a house in Vancouver (and the Vancouver house would be a crack shack in east Van, whereas the St John’s house would be a tidy little fixer-upper right in the city); and two, he and his wife are getting into urban homesteading.  Their ultimate goal is total self sufficiency, involving small scale farming, keeping food animals, solar power, and other back to the land type stuff, minus the total renunciation of modern life that some back to the landers seem to go for.

We had a great conversation about what I call urban malaise, a sort of listless boredom that is nearly subconscious and that permeates modern city living.  I used to be trapped in it quite a lot, as epitomized by my TV watching experience: I would find myself lying on the couch for hour after hour, not really interested, mildly bored, a little bit restless, yet so passive and sapped of energy that I would rather watch yet another hour of brain wasting garbage than get up and do anything.  I wasn’t happy and I wasn’t even really entertained, but I was held captive by my own complacency and a lot of flashing colours and sounds.  It wasn’t until I cut our satellite that I woke up, after a period of withdrawal, to the fact that I had been wasting all of my free time.

I think this is a very common experience in people who have most of their material needs met.  We are a passively receptive society waiting to be entertained without too much thought required of our entertainment – or only thought of a certain repetitive, uncreative sort such as that required by video games or much of internet culture.  It is easier to do the same thing over and over while being stimulated with periodic rewards and arresting graphics than to get up and do anything.  I have been trapped right in there, and it is only from the outside that I see it.

My friend said something really interesting at the wedding: he told me he is never bored in Newfoundland.  He is a busy man, with a wife and friends, a business, and a home that he is constantly at work on in one way or another, be it planning or implementing moves towards self sufficiency.  And we agreed that work for yourself is not like work for some company that’s paying you an hourly wage: there is something much more rewarding about turning your own earth, setting up your own home, caring for your own needs with your own hands – and this is a joy that urban life denies us.  We haven’t the space to do it, nor the funds (try buying land in this city!), and in many instances, we don’t have the inclination.  If it isn’t easy and immediately rewarding, we don’t want to do it.  We are an entitled society also.

But I am getting sidetracked – my friend reported that the last time he was bored was the day before the wedding, when he was in Vancouver with friends.  And then he said something else: All my Vancouver friends are bored and they don’t even know it.  Urban malaise!

So of course not everyone is bored and not all city dwellers are doomed to misery and unfulfillment.  But I think this environment is well suited to a facilitation of complacency.  And under it is disquiet, a sense of emptiness or “is-this-all-there-is” – but no, this is not all there is.  The challenge is finding a way out.

Posted in Existential Angst | No Comments »

Have you heard about this?  It was a hot idea in about the nineties and is now a mere shadow of its former self, and thank goodness.  The basic idea is this: intelligence takes many forms, including kinetic intelligence (dancers), practical intelligence (woodworkers), and the like.  The traditional conception of intelligence as brain smarts is merely one form.

I translate it like this: Whatever you’re good at, we’ll call that intelligence.

And I call bullshit.  It reeks of po-mo apologism from people with smarts who feel guilty about having something great.  Here is what I think: there is nothing better than being smart.  I’d rather be brilliant than a great dancer, or a great farmer, or a great fireman, or anything else at all.  To name just one reason, it ’s great because it allows you to become good at basically anything else.  It’s the best thing to be and I think people know it.  Consider the very term, multiple intelligences.  Intelligence is right in there.  We don’t refer to the multiple dances, including the dance of the brain.

I’m not saying intelligence is the be all end all.  There are smart assholes and wonderful, necessary people who are not smart at all.  We can agree on this.  But in general, most of us think it is better to have intelligence than any other ability.  If it was so great to be a dancer, we wouldn’t feel the need to stroke dancers’ egos by creating something called kinetic intelligence.  We’d just say “He’s a wicked dancer!” and that would be enough.  But it isn’t.

Posted in Ranting | 5 Comments »

Yesterday I went to a psychic fair.  Of course it’s all garbage but my friend was going and it seemed like it would be an entertaining way to spend the afternoon – we planned on what Husband calls the “dumb Columbo” method of inquiry: Really?  And how does that work?  Really?  And how do you know that?  etc.  My friend noted we could also call it the Socrates method but I don’t like to be an elitist.

First off, I will say it was very sparsely attended which I found pleasing.  Of course in their literature they’d predicted a crowd of over 5,000 – and again, as my friend said, if anyone should have been able to predict the numbers attending…!  Mostly the exhibitors were just walking around and doing each other’s stuff because there were so few attendees.

So there was a crystal merchant, a toe reader, psychic healers, past life readers, tarot readers, one chiropractor who left before we had a chance to talk to him, three thumpers of spiritual books other than the bible, and one masseusse (not a registered RMT), plus a few other tables I didn’t see.

It’s hard to summarize the woo, but we heard it all: The Secret, What the Bleep do We Know, energy (spiritual energy of a kind that can neither be defined nor measured), you need to believe, quantum mechanics, past lives, science doesn’t know everything, science always changes its mind, everything you need to know is already inside you, personal testimony as evidence, energy causes all illness and can cure all illnesses (“Even cancer?  And AIDS?” “Yes, even cancer and AIDS.” “No! Really?” “Yes. Some people have been cured with energy.”) …on and on.

Some of the exhibitors were more brazen in their claims, like the cancer cured by crystals people, and others were cagier.  I went for a psychic healing and tried my best to get the lady to make a specific claim, but she wouldn’t.  Which is good!  I was impressed at her ability to walk the line between not making any promises or claims, yet indicating I really needed and could get benefit from a healing.  I mean, why call it a healing if it doesn’t make you better?  Of course she didn’t need to know what’s wrong with me because the energy can just “find” the problem – it’s sent by a higher power!  Nice.  The healing itself was a pleasant experience of being gently pressed and brushed here and there by the lady, which was relaxing, but if there’s a healing mechanism in there I’ll eat my hat.

I also had a past life reading, and guess what!  I was a Scottish princess in 1787 with beautiful dark hair and a beautiful dress with embellishments about the bosom.  We enter the story with me reclining on a sofa in sadness and tears because I am being forced to marry a lord I dislike.  That night I flee the castle and run to the stable to fetch my pure white horse upon which to run away.  But while getting my horse, I awaken the stable boy, to whom I pour out my miseries and we fall in love.  I return to the castle and tell my parents I won’t marry the lord, which they accept, and then I marry the stable boy!  Hooray!

I was hoping I’d get some kind of cold reading action at least so the reader could tailor my past life in a way I’d like it, but no.  She just closed her eyes and told me a bodice-ripper story that was pretty boring.  Which is too bad, because she’s in the entertainment industry and if she can’t keep me entertained, she can’t get any return business.  Oh and there is the little problem of how it’s all just made up but sold as real, that’s bad too.  Anyway, I am sad I wasn’t a cool intellectual or something, even a farmer or serf would have been more interesting than some stupid princess who accidentally falls in love with Fabio.  I wish I knew more about the late 18thC because then I could have tested her by asking something characteristic about, say, the sort of dress I would have been wearing, and catch her up that way.  Other candidate details might have been horse equipment, layout of the castle, local plants, stuff like that – But I couldn’t think of anything at the time.  Drat!

JBrydle, any good details about the trip to add?

Posted in Critical Thinking, Personal | 7 Comments »

Today I started my garden.  Behold:

This is thyme, in seed form.  It’s hiding there under 3mm of dirt (give or take – how precise can you be at those measurements?).  Also:

The first of what I hope to be a few waves of lettuce, also as seeds, also in 3mm of dirt.  I bought the basil as a proper plant as the store didn’t have basil seeds and I really wanted some.  Once the deck planters are finished (tomorrow the guy says – I have heard this before so I am not holding my breath), it will be transplanted.  The seeds will stay indoors until they have sprouted and been hardened off – this last means a gradual transition to outdoors with greater and greater exposures to outside daily until they can tolerate a full day in the different climate.  I am not sure why a plant needs this but my book advised it so I will do it.

It also advised that those peat pots are often contaminated with the eggs of some kind of worm that is harmful, so I dampened and microwaved them for 2 minutes to sterilize them.

I also bought other seeds that apparently do best when planted directly into their outdoor soil without the fuss of indoor seeding and transplanting, which will go in the ground soon.  We’ll have radishes, lettuce, green onions (scallions), and herbs.  It’s the wrong time of year to start the herbs but I’m going for it anyway.

Potential problems: I am starting with very few seeds and therefore very few seedlings, which means any failures will essentially wipe out my whole crop.  I will make a duplicate set of these guys in about a week as backup, but I don’t have the garden space for a million plants so I can’t just plant fifty.  I also don’t want to throw away perfectly good plants because I oversowed and haven’t the space.

I don’t know how much to water these guys.  I guess I’ll try to keep ‘em damp but apparently the leading cause of seed failure is overwatering, so… I dunno, I’ll wing it.

Potential boons: I bought regular looking seeds but wickedly good soil, which I then mixed with about 20% by volume worm castings.  This is a euphemism for worm poop.  It apparently is great for all soil but particularly seedlings, where it retains moisture but also aids drainage so you get the right level of dampness, and slowly releases nutrients so the baby plants don’t burn but also don’t starve.  And it looks like teeny, tiny turds!  But it has no smell and feels neat.  Even if it does nothing for my seeds it is fun to handle.

I have great sun and my main challenge will be providing enough shade for the lettuce, which needs only partial sun when sown this time of year.

So this is the very beginning of my little garden!  I must say I feel quite affectionately attached to it already.

Posted in Garden | No Comments »

Nine days!  Looks like no one I know is going to the Clutch show, so I’m free to sing along with gusto and without fear of reprisals.  By which I mean witnesses whose opinion of me I might I care about.

In other news, I am trying a new way of losing weight.  I had a good sit down with myself and determined I’m just not ready for another stab at starvation, even though I know it works.  I’m usually not one for self deception but this might qualify, so I am presenting my idea to you, The Internet, for feedback.  Should I be cheered on or do I need the sense slapped back into me?  You decide.

The Plan:

1. Cut out junk food.  Of all kinds except diet pop, which actually is a necessity for me, though I am going to cut back on it.  I realized the other day I couldn’t remember the last time I had a glass of water and that was an alarming moment.  Time to sub in some of the real stuff, methinks.  Anyway, while home made sweets are permitted as an occasional treat (vegan safe!), candy and chips and related evils will be banished AS OF RIGHT NOW unless you tell me this whole plan is stupid in which case I will reevaluate.

2. Eat really healthy, good meals.  Not huge meals, but appropriately sized nutrition bombs prepared with loving care by yours truly.  The challenge here is portion control, which I hope to mainly achieve through a maximization of vegetable matter and a minimization of, well, high calorie stuff.  My goal is to have satisfying but not stuffing meals.

3. Snacking permitted but only the good kind – an orange, a salad, that kind of thing.  Small.

4. Get more exercise.  This one is going to be a chore because as I keep telling you over and over, I am lazy as fuck.  Husband works out with a trainer two hours a week and does a third hour on his own and he is in the best shape of his life, which is something considering he used to be a marathon runner and a military man.  If he keeps this up he’ll end up like Bruce Lee, all small and wiry and unexpectedly fast.  But me?  I take a stroll most days of around 50 minutes duration, which generally involves me watching the dogs in the offleash park and sniffing roadside flowers and looking for kitties in the clouds.  Not strenuous, is what I am trying to say.  I have increased my walking but not by enough to actually do anything.  So far no luck on the partnering front so I am going to have to just be disciplined and get off my ass and… and I haven’t gotten that far.  God, I might have to go back to the gym.  Ugh.

And that’s it.  No starving, just an environment of mild deprivation and more exercise.  I anticipate slow weight loss and occasional mad cravings for Old Dutch Rip-L-Chips, the finest chips known to man.  It’s either incredibly sensible or incredibly delusional, and considering my desperation to avoid The Hunger I am not to be trusted in making the assessment.  Thoughts?

Posted in Personal | 1 Comment »

I just found out the city of Vancouver offers subsidized back yard composters or apartment sized worm bins for $25 each!  The worm bins come with a one hour lesson in proper use.  Cool!  I’m going to call about this.

http://vancouver.ca/ENGSVCS/solidwaste/grownatural/composters.htm

Posted in Domesticity | 5 Comments »