Telling Our Stories

Travis Thompson put together some thoughts on belief and challenged others to share their personal stories

One day I started to think: Why is it that my religion is the right one? Why do I get the privilege of going to heaven while much of the rest of the world has to burn for eternity? These individuals were just being taught what their parents and culture taught them.
What kind of deity would create us and limit us to just believing in one total solution to the endgame of life? And better yet, that solution is only limited to certain parts of the world. This just can not be right. Either I'm right and the rest of the world is wrong, they're right and I'm wrong, we're all right or we're all wrong. What are the odds that I am correct in my belief while any other individual who does not believe what I believe is going to be tortured in hell.***

Then I started to think even more. Why would this omnipotent being even want to send individuals to such a place of torment? There was a time before I was born where there was nothing. Wouldn't a more reasonable solution be to just send individuals back to this place if they do not belong in your "Kingdom". Nope, that's not enough, these individuals must BURN for ETERNITY. What kind of all-loving god would do this? Not one that I want to worship, that's for sure. At this point, I rejected all religion and took on a new philosophy on life. This quote sums it up.

"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but ... will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones."

This is my story of how I became an atheist. Feel free to share yours if you'd like.

Sloppy Biology Does Not Make Good Philosophy

"Aeginura grimaldii by Ernst Haeckel

On March 16th, I attended a talk hosted by the Tulane Philosophy Club. Our speaker, Ilya Dubovoy, a medical student at Tulane, attempted to explain some potential problems with the current understanding of Evolutionary Theory, especially in terms of the randomness or tailored-ness of genetic mutation in response to environmental stress or change.

I was left completely nonplussed by the talk. Its essence was a set of claims about evolution, which is to say about biological science, so why was it presented in a forum on philosophy? It is not at all clear why anyone would expect a vague and preliminary idea about evolutionary biochemistry to inform the field of philosophy. And beyond the basics of epistemology – which were not discussed – it is not clear what philosophy could bring to an observational and experimental issue in science. The speaker had to take some criticism, but that would have been far harsher from an audience of biologists, and I could not help but suspect that he was seeking friendlier shores for a concept he knew would be met with intense skepticism by its proper audience.

***

The kernel of an idea that I was able to extract from the talk is that there is, perhaps, evidence that a tendency for genetic change (mutation) is sometimes directed toward narrow parts of the genome (an organism’s set of genes) in specified response to particular environmental changes or stress. Dubovoy used the unfortunately loaded term “teleology” to describe this tendency, but I think those of us who are involved in creationism-evolution debates have to be careful not to overreact to that. He seemed to mean by “teleology” that environmental changes somehow direct a tendency to mutate toward sections of the genome that are relevant to that environmental change, and not to imply the usual creationist miscomprehension of evolution, in which “teleology” means that evolution accumulates changes over centuries or millennia toward some future form or other biological goal.

To make this idea of directed mutation more than just the earliest stages of a preliminary notion, Dubovoy would have to propose a host of additional details. By what mechanisms do changes in the environment generate molecular (chemical) signals identifying those changes to a cell, organism, or population? How and where are those molecular signals interpreted as referring to or implicating a particular, narrow section of the genome? What physical-chemical processes then bring about mutations in the implicated section of the genome? Most importantly, is he proposing that this mechanism generically increases mutation in the implicated portion of the genome, or that it somehow narrows or pre-selects those mutations to fit the signaled environmental changes (a critical detail about which he was frustratingly vague)?

It was difficult to understand how many of Dubovoy’s points were supposed to relate to his kernel of an idea. He seemed to think there was something dramatically new and threatening to evolutionary theory in the fact that individual organisms sometimes form cooperative groups, that chemical signaling may activate or deactivate the expression of existing genes, that lateral transfer of genes sometimes happens between species, or that mutation is random only in the sense of “unpredictable,” and not in the sense of “evenly distributed.” None of these facts are news to evolutionary biologists, and none of them imply a problem with the existing theory of evolution, at least not insofar as Dubovoy was able to clarify.

Dubovoy explicitly denied being a creationist, and made no directly creationist claims. However, it seems to me that his proposed “teleology” comes far closer to creationism than he himself realizes. Like creationists, he is claiming that micro-evolution, the slow accumulation of small, undirected changes over long periods of time, is insufficient to explain the diversity of life we see around the world today and in the fossil record. And like creationists, he is hopelessly vague about the supposed limits of micro-evolution, refusing to quantify what micro-evolution can and cannot do, or how his proposal of more directed mutation supplies the missing quantity.

Perhaps, in some years, he’ll have thought this out more carefully.

~Jim Dugan

A Dangerous Kind of Good: Adventures on the Northshore

Photo by John Stringer

On Thursday night March 12, John Stringer and Clint Crain became “part-time” ambassadors for the NOSHA crowd as they accepted an invitation from a Northshore church to attend a dinner event that was proposed as an opportunity to have some dialogue with non-believers in the community. These are their stories:

John Stringer
I and one other member of NOSHA attended the “Why Does It Matter” Men’s Dinner at St. Timothy on the North Shore Methodists Church. The speaker Stuart McAllister was your basic Glasgow Scotland thug who found Jesus after dating a Christian Girl. This changed his life and now he goes around the world speaking about life with Jesus and his pseudo rational approach to the gospel for a fee.

He emphasized his personal relationship with Jesus and does not value the Bible as you would think. A question and answer session followed his speech and I got a chance at the microphone and said “25,000 children starve to death everyday on average in the world. What good is it when you have a god that doesn't answer to the dying innocents?”

Mr. McAllister did not understand my question or else he side stepped it and basically said he did not know why God would allow the evil of children starving to death. His son who was with him stood to add that such tragedies were a result of man's own evil doing and the consequences of free will and evil being in the world. I didn't ask a follow up question. Other topics that were addressed in the Q and A was “Why is god invisible” and “Is Mahatma Gandhi in heaven or hell." An interesting quote that stood out for me was the speaker said “God is a dangerous kind of good”.

***

This was an all men's group. The women of the church cooked the food, fixed our plates and brought it to us, but we had to get our own tea. I did detect a small, very small amount of reaching out for honest dialogue. I imagine this is coming from the hierarchy of the church who realize a great shift is taking place in America toward secularism and they must prepare their flock for exposure to the coming storm of reason.

There were very few young people at the meeting, which was encouraging. The 25 and under crowd don't seem to be buying into the Christian myth. McAllister's answer was life can't really have full meaning unless a person finds Jesus and can plan on living in heaven for eternity. Nothing really new there, but it was fun. The food gets 3.5 stars. The preaching gets a 1/2 star and Q and A session gets 1.5 stars. There will be another meeting like this next year.

Clint CrainThis was kind of a shot in the dark for me. Going into the event, I had hopes of a more intimate gathering with a little more back and forth interaction. I know of the church, but really had no idea of the number of people that would be present. I did know that I was going to be in the minority as a religious skeptic. 

After arriving, all hope for direct interaction was lost. The room was laid out in a manner that reminded me of a high school talent show. The crowd was made up of men and a small number of women working as coordinators. It wasn't long after arriving that the dinner was brought out and the main speaker took to the stage. He began by talking about his childhood of being brought up in a “nonreligious” home in Ireland and by the age of twenty he became a faithful Christian.

Moving on chronologically, he began to speak about his journey to find reason in his life. At this point, he spoke about thinking of Islam and Judaism, but did not give a reason for his rejection of those ideologies. Pushing to find meaning and purpose became to central topic as he started a PowerPoint of biblical verses mostly from the Old Testament and philosophical quotation.

I found myself at this point looking for the answer to the title question as I interpreted it. What does it matter? This question was ‘what does faith matter’ in my mind, but he was alluding to what does life matter? Faith gave him purpose, but I keep asking why one needs that “purpose” to begin with. We all struggle with finding a self-identity, but to think that there must be some greater plot to abide by seems beyond me.

The Q and A was a high point. The question, “Why doesn't God help the starving children throughout the world?” was quickly swatted with, “I don’t know why there is suffering.” My two questions were about the quality of the biblical God’s character. “How can a book that condones mass slaughter, slavery, and rape be seen as a book of guidance?” was answered with “God changed in the New Testament area.” Then, “If God is a jealous god (Deuteronomy 4:24) and jealousy is a sin (Galatians 5:20), then isn’t god a sinner?” was answered by “God’s jealousy is different.”

All and all it was a nice event.

Thoughts on Darwin Day By Marty Banks

After a long hiatus, NOSHA teamed up with the Department of Anthropology at Tulane University under the direction of NOSHA Vice President and Tulane Adjunct Instructor Jim Dugan to return the annual tribute to the work and legacy of Charles Darwin to the Tulane campus this year. Each year similar gatherings take place virtually worldwide, with most organizers using Darwin’s birthday, February 12, as the date to plan around. In New Orleans, the timing more often than not conflicts with Mardi Gras festivities and is usually scheduled weeks or even a month after the “official” day.

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The carefree spirit of the Carnival season did nothing to diminish the educational experience that some 90 participants in attendance were exposed to in the four and a half hour presentation, but those expecting “Evolution 101”, or rote historical recaps of Darwin’s life probably regretted leaving their scratch pads and pencils behind, because each of the four speakers offered presentations about as diverse as possible without abandoning the general theme of Darwin and his contributions altogether. The opening speaker, Dr. Steven Darwin (probably related, he assured us), introduced the listeners to the concept of invasive species, those life forms that are not native to a geographical area or island, but once introduced into the new environment can thrive, often and the expense of native fauna or flora. This fact is interesting as a retort to the theistic creation-style notion of teleological-design, or environments “fine tuned” for certain species, rather than the the life form evolving and adapting to the environment in which it finds itself.

Professors C. Mark Phillips from UNO’s Department of Philosophy and Marc Zender of Tulane’s Anthropology Department applied the idea of evolution in broader senses. Phillips approached the “evolution” and development of the philosophical analyses of the concept of self identity—from Rene’ Descartes (I think, therefore I am) and Hume, who claimed the “self” was nothing more than the collection of perceptions an individual is experiencing at a given time — to Darwin himself, who Phillips called the "Father of Psychology", establishing that self-conscious animals are driven to find out who and what they are. Religion has been from the earliest days of humanity a part of the equation of self-identity asserted Phillips, giving the individual a sense of connection with the rest of the cosmos, which is what makes it very hard to escape for most people.

The concluding presentation was made by NOSHA VP Jim Dugan, but not before he performed the double- and triple-duty functions the lead organizer is often required to fill — greeter, Master of Ceremonies, and extra seating procurer for the overflow crowd. The extracurricular chores did nothing to lessen the liveliness of his discussion about the growth in the size and sophistication of the Christian textbook industry.

From the meager and overly-simplistic library of titles just several decades ago, Dugan said the business has grown to dozens of publishers, including the better known Abeka, Bob Jones University, and Christian Liberty Press, printing a full list of titles for elementary and secondary school classrooms. The increased demand for this material likely came from the explosion of the homeschooling movement in the ‘80s, and an improved academic polish of the materials was becoming a necessity to gloss over the dependence on Biblical text as the ultimate foundation of all historical and scientific truths. Understanding that the creation story, taken literally, is irreconcilable with Darwin’s theory, textbook writers and editors have been forced to cobble a complex index of “Evolution Straw Men” arguments, along with other informal fallacies and specious reasonings, said Dugan, not as proof of their own creation tale, but as attempts to discredit Darwinism. The conflation of the evolution of life forms with an imagined “Theory of Everything” (that all things, from elementary particles, to the grand history of the development of the cosmos) as one and the same process is an obvious misrepresentation of the basic theory, but is often used as an attempt to show a weakness inherent in evolutionary science. Another prestidigitation popular with Christian authors is disproof by way of the Young Earth model—convincing, obviously, if one is taught and believes the Earth is only thousands, and not billions, of years old. Other tired tropes of anti-Darwinism include the “Missing Link”; and the uni-directional progression of development (think Great Chain of Being), in contrast to the ‘branching’ model Darwin’s proposal establishes.

Something resembling comic relief was in order for concluding a program with such weighty themes and was provided in the form of some short clips from several campy Christian youth oriented videos. The variety of topics chosen by the speakers was a tribute to the educational function NOSHA tries serving in the community interest, and to this end the event was an unqualified success. Thanks to everyone who made this possible!

~Marty Bankson

Total Eclipse of the Heart and Mind By John Patrick Lestrade, Ph.D.

During our January meeting for NOSHA,  member John Patrick Lestrade, Ph.D., did a reading that we'd like to share for everyone who couldn't attend that day.

Please enjoy!

We all know that there are basically two types of eclipses: The lunar eclipse, when the Moon is behind the Earth and slips into the Earth’s dark shadow, and the better known solar eclipse, when the Moon blocks the Sun from our view. I thought that you might enjoy an intellectual gem for each of these celestial events.

Lunar Eclipses and the Heart. (We’re talking about real romance here, so you will want to take notes.)

Some of you may have never experienced a lunar eclipse. During this event, when the Moon finds itself in presumably total blackness behind the Earth, the Moon can still be visible to us. It shines with a deep red color. The first question is “Why is there light shining on it?”

***

This is the Earth (holding up a grapefruit), I am the Sun, and the Moon is in the Earth’s shadow. This side of the Earth is in daylight. This side is experiencing night. Everyone along this boundary is seeing sunrise while those on the opposite boundary experience sunset. If the Earth had no atmosphere, there would be a sharply delineated column of darkness forming the Earth’s shadow. But our atmosphere along these two boundaries bends the light so that some of it strikes the Moon and bounces back to us. Now why is the light reddened? Our skies are blue, which means that as light passes through our atmosphere the short, bluish, wavelengths are removed from the beam and scattered in all directions. The light rays that remain in the beam are made up of longer wavelengths and look reddish. So, when you are with someone you love, watching a dark, red lunar eclipse, impress them by saying that the light you are seeing is the light from ALL the sunrises and ALL the sunsets happening on Earth at that very moment.

Solar Eclipses and the Mind

You may have noticed that the Sun and the Moon appear to be the same size in the sky. Of course, the Sun is much larger than the Moon - almost a million miles wide for the Sun versus only 2,000+ miles across for the Moon. But the Sun doesn’t appear larger because it is much farther away. What’s interesting is that although the Sun is about 400 times wider than the Moon, it is also 400 times farther away. Thus both appear to be the same size!

So, during a Solar eclipse, when the Moon blocks out the Sun for the lucky few in the path of totality, the lunar and solar disks match up almost exactly. This leads to especially beautiful solar eclipses, where the Moon blocks the bright disk of the Sun but leaves the outer, very hot corona visible. Sometimes there are beads of sunlight that filter through the mountains on the lunar perimeter.

So think about this: Is the fact that our Moon is just the right size and distance from us a coincidence or can it have a deeper meaning for us? Remember that the Moon causes tides on the Earth. Evolutionary biologists will tell you the importance of tides and tidal pools in our evolution. So perhaps it is not just a coincidence that we have a Moon of the right size and distance relative to our star. Perhaps without it we wouldn't be here to enjoy these celestial displays.

Looking for a crack team of newsletter volunteers!

The Board of Directors would like to bring back our quarterly newsletter, so we're asking for volunteers who might be able to do this as a service to NOSHA.

We're happy to report that we have at least one person who is willing to work on content, which can be the most daunting task when creating pages as anyone who has ever done a newsletter can often attest! So, we really need a volunteer who can use a graphics program and has the basic skills to develop it.

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If you would like to know more or can give a sample of a newsletter (or similar product) that you've produced before, please send an email to charlotte@nosha.info and we'll help get this started! Thanks in advance for your interest!

BOOK REVIEW - Grandiose Delusion: Mike Huckabee’s God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy

I admit I had multiple prejudices before I even opened this book, based solely on the author and title. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t read a book by Mike Huckabee, one-time governor of Arkansas, Fox News bloviator, wannabe presidential candidate, and Baptist minister. Nor would I usually read a book with a title like God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy. But Huckabee is a notable public figure and has been a best-selling author before, so I decided to give it a try. At least I didn't pay for a copy, checking one out instead from the public library.

By page seven, I knew finishing the book was going to be difficult. It’s not as bad as reading Ann Coulter, which is like listening to fingernails screech across a chalkboard, but Huckabee’s book is vapid and banal. One would think that someone who has held high public office before and wants to hold higher public office in the future would show some depth of understanding of the issues he raises, would demonstrate an awareness of the interests of the various parties to a debate, and would at least sometimes offer a way forward through the controversy. Huckabee provides none of that here relying instead on empty platitudes and vague superficialities. Baldly theocratic, he feels no need to dig further than the Bible to resolve any dispute. “I believe we live in a God-centered world,” he writes, “and that all the definitions of success, fulfillment, morality, value, family, and life are His to give and ours to follow. They provide a roadmap for us. They also are immutable, meaning unchangeable” (p. 79).

***

In this book Huckabee describes America as divided into two major groups which he labels “Bubble” and “Bubba.” The Bubbles are modern and left-leaning, living in the urban areas of both coasts, best exemplified by the cultures of New York, Los Angeles, and D.C. Bubbas, on the other hand, are traditional, salt-of-the earth Americans who live in less urban areas and value faith and family. The Bubbas are oppressed by intolerant Bubbles, as exemplified by controversies such as those surrounding Chick-Fil-A, Hobby Lobby, and Duck Dynast patriarch Phil Robertson. In each of these, God-fearing Bubbas were “angrily shouted down as ‘haters’ simply because they held to biblical standards on issues like marriage and the sanctity of life.”

***

One paragraph in the first chapter could easily stand as a summary of the entire book:

“But as much as there is a great divide in this country between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots,’ there is also a great chasm between the ‘believes’ and ‘believe-nots.’ And, increasingly, the ‘believes’ in America have come to feel like cultural lepers – untouchables and undesirables – and an embarrassment to their fellow Americans who equate the holding of traditional views on marriage, religion, family, patriotism, an even the rule of law and the Constitution with ignorance and superstition. The snobbery and bold bigotry aimed at the ‘believes’ goes unchecked and unchallenged by ‘believe-nots’ who call themselves ‘mainstream.’ But such condescending attitudes toward people of faith are hardly mainstream in the geographical center of America” (p. 17).  

Would that the book had stopped there! But Huckabee natters on through 240 pages, hitting all the right-wing hot-button issues, but delving with acuity into none. He’s worried that leftists will take away his guns, thinks the Bible settles matters such as abortion and same-sex marriage, disapproves of political correctness and left-wing censorship of right-wing views, detests the “nanny state,” reality TV, and environmentalist extremism, opposes the Affordable Care Act, opposes government regulation of business, and so on.

The only valuable information that I found in the book was that Huckabee and his crowd have a growing awareness that they are considered “lepers” and “an embarrassment” by many of their fellow Americans. One might hope this could lead them to rethink their positions. But the book makes clear that any such hope is unrealistic. It never occurs to them that they are regarded as lepers because they behave as anti-intellectual, anti-modern, anti-social prigs. In their minds, they are oppressed because of their religious beliefs. And in their minds this elevates them to the status of martyrs to their faith. This is grandiose delusion, and it stymies any chance they have of rediscovering reality.

Huckabee and his ilk are free to run their personal lives, their families, and their churches well within the confines of their various doctrines. But they are unappreciative of this fact. It is not enough for them to own guns, choose which church to attend, home-school their children, or to make their own choices about abortion, birth control or whom to marry. They want desperately to make those decisions for everyone else as well. They want to subordinate our secular state to the theocratic goals of one particular variety of Christianity. They want a United States without government regulation of business or guns or health insurance or seat belts or religion or school curricula. But they also want their small and weak government to prohibit abortion, birth control, same-sex marriage, sexual education in schools or sexual content on TV. This they call “freedom.”

God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy, by Mike Huckabee. St. Martin’s Press (2015). ISBN-13: 978-1250060990.

~ Jim Dugan