Not about gun licensing

The following is the near-verbatim contents of a letter I recently received. It has been redacted for the privacy of the individuals involved, and cunningly revised. Can you tell what the letter was actually about? (Note: this is an issue that affects British people, and those in some other countries. It will be unfamiliar to Canadians and Americans.) Can you tell what bothers me about it?

WARNING: THIS PROPERTY IS UNLICENSED

To the Legal Occupier,

We're writing to inform you that we have authorised Enforcement Officers to visit your home. If they find evidence that you own a firearm illegally, they can take your statement under caution in accordance with the relevant criminal law.

We are taking this step because:

• According to our records, there is no Firearm Licence for this address
• You must have a Firearm Licence to own a firearm
• We have tried to contact you about this, but have received no reply
  

An enforcement visit is the first step in our action to seek prosecution. Please be aware that should your case go to court, your statement can be used as evidence. The maximum penalty is a fine of £XXXX. We take this offence extremely seriously, and catch around 1,000 evaders every day.

We strongly advise that you act to stop our investigation by buying a Firearm Licence. You can do this in minutes by visiting www.firearmlicensing.co.uk or by calling 08XX XXX XXXX. A licence costs £XXX.XX for a rifle and £XXX.XX for a pistol.

Yours faithfully,

XXXXXX XXXXXX
Regional Manager
Scotland East Enforcement Team

If you have recently moved home, please transfer your old Firearm Licence to your new address. You can do this at www.firearmlicensing.co.uk/moving or by calling 08XX XXX XXXX. Please have your Firearm Licence number to hand.

If you don't have a firearm, please let us know by calling 08XX XXX XXXX.

How to Pay:

• Visit www.firearmlicensing.co.uk to pay by Direct Debit, debit card or credit card.
• Call 08XX XXX XXXX to pay by Direct Debit, debit card or credit card
• Go to any PayPoint outlet to pay by cash or debit card.
• More ways to pay are listed overleaf.

Overleaf, it is finally mentioned that if you, in fact, don't have a firearm, you can let them know. They will then verify the situation. People who are deemed unable to use a firearm because of infirmity can get a reduced rate or a free licence, depending on circumstances. Payment details and a change of address form take up most of the back side.

Logic puzzles

My online gaming world just got much more interesting.

And much more geeky.

I've learned about The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever. Awesome.

And, in the same vein (but less superlative), here's a site full of Knights and Knaves puzzles (Knights can only tell the truth, Knaves can only lie, and you can only ask yes-no questions. Can you tell which is which?)

Here's another logic puzzle site I frequent. It doesn't have story-based puzzles, but it does have plenty of sudokus and other interesting grid-based logic puzzles.

(Thanks to commenter Berenike for pointing me to Agent Intellect, who links to the above games here. Agent Intellect's blog is intriguing in its own right too.)

I have an idea ...

At work, I recently came across an amazing resource: CiteULike. It's a free website where you can build up a list of citations. I use it to manage the long list of papers and books I read and cite as a researcher. I can label citations, like I label blog entries on this site, according to common themes.

It also has social features: sharing citations between users, getting automated recommendations based on common research interests. And there are Groups.

Which gives me an idea.

There are loads of skeptical blogs out there. There are the science-based parenting folks (such as SBP themselves, Rational Moms), the science-based medicine gang (SBM, Ben Goldacre, etc), and of course the general skeptics (Bruce Hood, Massimo Pigliucci, Richard Wiseman, and loads more).

These blogs often bring up new or interesting research that bears on our lives - as parents, as users (and taxpaying supporters) of health care, and just as people trying to navigate the modern world. But finding a particular study that I remember reading about on some skeptical blog can be a real pain.

So it occurs to me - why not set up a group, or a set of groups, on CiteULike, where skeptics could post scientific articles of interest to the community? You can put notes on each article - for example, pointing to reviews on skeptical blogs. You can talk about the articles (and the body of evidence around given topics, like acupuncture or spanking) in forums. You can associate informative tags with articles. Or you can simply hang out and see what other people have dug up. The resource could be used by bloggers who like to check original research, and also by skeptical consumers of new and traditional media claims.

It's not something I can do on my own. I don't have the time or the expertise to dig up all the relevant papers.

So this is a call to all you skeptics out there who have a little bit of time or expertise. Are you willing to help get things started?

I've taken the first step: I've created a CiteULike group, Skeptical Parenting, to pilot this idea. I chose parenting partly because that's where I am closest to having some substantive expertise, and partly because my second child is due to arrive any day now.

The next step is up to you. Here is what I ask of anyone who is interested:

• Join me as a member of the group, or start another group. "Paranormal Research", "Science-Based Medicine Users" - whatever you're most into as a skeptic. If you start another group, let us know in the comments here. (Do a search on CiteULike before starting the group to make sure someone hasn't already started one.)
  
• Blog about this yourself - not many people read my blog, but some of you have very widely-read blogs. The more people read about this idea, the sooner we'll reach a sustainable number of participants.
• Tell your friends. We don't all have blogs, but we all have skeptical acquaintances on- and off-line that we can share cool new ideas with.
  
• Comment here, so I know that I'm not just talking to myself.

I think we could build this into a really valuable resource. What do you think?

Marc on opinion

So I was hanging out with my friend Marc again, and he had this to say about opinion (Meditations, book 3, paragraph 9):

Treat with respect the power you have to form an opinion. By it alone can the helmsman within you avoid forming opinions that are at variance with nature and with the constitution of a reasonable being.

Now, this far, I was on board. I was nodding along with Marc. We can't help forming opinions; they are very useful in navigating the myriad choices around us. And yet, to paraphrase another pal of mine, Lao, "opinion is the barren flower of the Way" (from Tao Te Ching #38). Once we form an opinion, it's hard to unform or revise it, even in the face of good evidence. So we need to be careful in forming opinions in the first place.

So anyway, I'm nodding away, then Marc goes on like this:

From it you may look to attain circumspection, good relations with your fellow-men, and conformity with the will of heaven.

Good relations with fellow men - okay. (Marc has a very sexist bent to him, I'm afraid, but it's easy enough to add "and women" or to substitute "fellow people" when listening to him.) But what about this "conformity with the will of heaven" bit?

Well, okay, I understand that Marc believes in the existence of gods. He says so very explicitly now and then. But it's jarring to be listening to something that fits my own position so well, and then hear something about the "will of heaven" thrown in as part of the same thought.

I like Marc, so ultimately I'm not too bothered by the odd literal reference to "gods" or "heaven"; I can just focus on the valuable part of what he's saying, and set aside the stuff I don't accept.

But what about when I'm talking to someone else, or reading someone else's writing, where I don't have that easy relationship with the person? This aesthetic aversion to casual god-talk could make it more difficult for me to hear the positive value in what they're saying.

Do you notice a similar tendency in yourself? Do you see it as a problem? How do you deal with it? Let me know.

Image credits:

Emblem of Stoicism created by DT Strain - see this blog post for an explanation of the elements in the symbol.

Yin and Yang symbol (associated with Taoism) from Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Ingersoll on doubt

I offer for contemplation a quote by the great 19th-century orator, Robert Green Ingersoll:

Fear believes, courage doubts.

(from his Lecture on Ghosts - see this collection in Project Gutenberg for the full text.)

I know that this can be taken in different ways by different people, so I offer more commentary than I usually do with quotations.

For those of you whose first impulse is to be insulted, I encourage you to try to step back and see the sense in which it is a valuable sentiment. Note that it does not mean that all belief is born of fear, nor all doubt of courage; it just means that fear is a great motivator of ill-founded belief, and courage an important foundation for honest doubt.

For those of you whose first impulse is to feel smug - that this is a condemnation of someone else - I encourage you to think again. Do you apply doubt to all of your beliefs, or are some "special" in one way or another?

Ingersoll's quote - from a discussion of witch-hunts and superstitious hysteria - is a warning to us all. It is a statement about human nature, not just about one type of worldview.

A perilous experiment?

Here is my latest article in Humanitie. Mike (the Not Quite So Friendly Humanist) and I have both recently had experiences with religious evangelism. His is here.

Several months ago, some Mormon missionaries approached me on the street. I knew very little about their beliefs, most of it from comedians and atheist critics. So Deena and I invited them over.

I will blog later about what I learned of their particular beliefs. What I want to discuss right now is an experiment they asked us to try after our first meeting.

They asked us to pray.

I found myself facing a dilemma. On the one hand, praying feels like a betrayal of my values as a humanist. How could I sincerely ask for an answer from a god whose existence I believe to be improbable, undiscoverable, and irrelevant to living a good life? On the other hand, free thinking is at the heart of humanism. Prayer is an experience I had never tried before.

So I decided that, conducted carefully, praying would not betray my principles. I would try it - and perhaps learn something new about myself and my Mormon friends.

I had many questions heading into the experiment. Would I feel anything peculiar? How might I interpret it? Would I, in the limited but well-publicised tradition of sceptical converts, "see the light"? Would I have an unusual experience but shrug it off? Would I feel nothing at all?

I sat in a comfortable posture in a quiet room, closed my eyes, and asked aloud, "God, do you exist?"

I quieted my thoughts to make room for even the softest suggestion from an external deity. I sent my internal sceptic, who was clamouring to declare the whole exercise a farce, out to get tea.

Then I waited. I tried to be ready for any type of result - from a sudden Damascus-road conversion to quiet "promptings of the spirit".

I was so still that all I heard for several minutes was the beating of my heart and the ticking of the electric clock. There was nothing else. Nothing that could be interpreted as a message from a god - not even a little thrill of what-if.

Later, I related this experience to the Mormons. They were undeterred. They encouraged me to keep trying: "God is not always heard the first time."

Fair enough. No responsible scientist would draw a firm conclusion from just one data point.

So I continued the experiment, varying the format to get a sample of different styles of prayer: different postures, different forms of address, different questions. I prayed alone; I prayed with Deena; I even led the prayer at the end of our meetings with the Mormons once or twice. The result was the same each time: I was answered only by my own thoughts and feelings.

At a recent meeting, one of the Mormons promised, "If you keep trying, eventually you will get an answer." Well, I have tried the experiment. I have set aside my reservations and sought the truth, true to my humanist values. And I have an answer. There probably is no personal god.

Now it's time for me to move on to the next question, the next empirical adventure.

Photo credit:

Mormon temple image by user Ricardo630, accessed at Wikimedia Commons, released under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license.

Story behind the stories

Here's one from the vault - a post I began, set aside, and forgot about. I thought you might find it interesting.

The folks over at the Dangerous Intersection blog posted an uncomfortable series of news stories. Here are the titles:

Father of two charged in child poisoning case

Principal drowns hundreds of grade-school students in school basement

Bush administration destroyed cancer research center and scattered the researchers

I'll leave it to your curiosity to read them and form your own reactions.

This isn't the sort of thing I would normally post - the stories aren't exactly Friendly. Observant readers of those articles will notice that they're not friendly on a couple of levels. But they are thought-provoking, and so I think they're worth sharing.

If anyone wants to explore or discuss these stories, their message, and their tone any further, the comment thread is open.

Mooning over creationists (sequel)

In a post last year, I noted an intriguing question asked on the website of the local Edinburgh Creation Group (ECG).

They asked how the moon got into orbit.


The standard answer emerging from science is that some large object about the size of Mars (sometimes called “Theia”) hit the Earth very early on in the formation of the Solar System. That impact threw up debris which coalesced into the Moon. This hypothesis explains many otherwise-odd facts about the Earth-Moon system, such as their relative composition and their angular momentum.

However, the ECG folks claim to have found a problem. It’s very simply and persuasively illustrated by this simulation of orbital mechanics, which was linked from the ECG's website*. Play with it a bit yourself, to get a feel for the principle involved. Basically, once other forces (rocket thrust, planetary impact, atmospheric friction, etc) have stopped acting, only gravity is left. And when two objects (say, a fragment of debris and the Earth) are interacting only by gravity and are not substantially affected by external forces, there are three possible outcomes:

1. The smaller object already orbits the larger (or they orbit each other), and will continue to do so indefinitely.
2. They are on a collision course, and will impact (probably not parting again).
3. The smaller object meets or exceeds escape velocity, and leaves.

There is no trickery here – the simulation linked to is a faithful representation of two bodies interacting gravitationally. Now, I am not a creationist. I tend to distrust claims from people with a vested interest, unless they can demonstrate that they've tried to set aside their own bias (for example, by doing actual science). I therefore put more trust in the scientists who report in a peer-reviewed forum, suggesting they've worked out the bugs in their hypothesis. But I do like to understand things. The creationist question is a valid one, a question I wanted to know the answer to. So in my earlier post, I asked my readers to help me out and let me know what the simulation is missing. One of them pointed to a researcher who has some animations on her website. However, the details of exactly how the creationist argument falls down were not obvious there. So (after a thesis-induced hiatus) I finally decided to look it up myself. Here is what I found.



First, I learned that scientists occasionally call it the Giant Splash rather than the Giant Impact, because at that scale even bodies of solid rock behaves more like a liquid when thumped together.

Second, when a bunch of debris is flying through space above the Earth's surface after such an impact, there is a very obvious force present that is adjusting the orbit of the fragments: the other fragments! Collisions and gravitational interaction between the bits of debris (which, remember, must together have massed at least as much as the moon) caused some of the fragments to settle into a stable orbit, where over time they accumulated into the single satellite we know today.

All this is a very abstract description of the answer. The details take massive computing power for simulations of all the particles thrown up by a big splash. Researchers have simulated many different types of impact, with different impactor sizes, different angles of impact (from head-on to glancing blow), and so on. Not all of the questions are resolved, but the problem highlighted by the ECG is certainly a non-issue.

If all that is too cerebral for you, I'll repeat something I said in the earlier post: I love games that use orbital mechanics. KSpaceDuel is one that models only a single centre of gravity, so if you don't use thrust you'll just stay in your initial orbit (until your opponent blows you up, anyway). [Note that it's a Linux-only game - yet another reason to start shedding that Windows or Mac addiction.] And for those of you who haven't yet converted to Linux, Orbit is an online flash game that very neatly illustrates how complex the gravitation effects become when you’re dealing with more than a couple of objects.

References:
Notes for an undergraduate course at UCL (detailed)
New Scientist, 2006 (summary)

* I am currently unable to find the link - they seem to have redesigned their site and left it out. I therefore cannot be certain whether or not the claim is supported by the members of the ECG.

Persecution mentality

Religious and non-religious people alike could benefit from reading Ken Brown's new post, "Persecuted on every side".

I know I've fallen into the victim mentality once or twice. It's always turned out that I over-reacted. There are real victims in this world, and if we're too quick to paint ourselves as persecuted, we make less of real suffering.

I find it fruitful to read one or two blogs by people like Ken, who disagree with me on important points, to keep myself somewhat balanced. Does anyone else do this? Can you recommend good blogs or posts that convey religious experiences, non-vegetarian arguments, anti-Linux sentiment?

On dialogue, genocide, and plague

I would like to apologize for the long gap in posts. I am currently near the end of writing up my PhD dissertation, and almost all of my time and energy is going into that. Below is a post I composed almost a month ago, but didn't get around to tidying up until today. When the PhD is finished, I hope to get back to semi-regular, semi-frequent posting. See you then.

Early last month, the University of Calgary tried (not for the first time) to prevent a student group from holding a display about abortion. Fortunately, they failed - the group held their display, unmolested by campus security. The attempt to thwart them got the group more attention and more sympathy than they would otherwise have received.

Why all the fuss? Why not just let them do their thing? Well, it wasn't simply an anti-abortion display. The group, Campus Pro-Life, was presenting the Genocide Awareness Project, a sensationalist affair, based on the claim that abortion rates in the developed world (25% in Canada) amount to a genocide. Vivid photographs of both aborted fetuses and genocide victims feature prominently. Despite its unsavory tone, and despite the way this analogy ignores the many glaring and important differences between abortion and the intentional extermination of an entire culture (reductio ad hitlerum, anyone?), it is clear to me that trying to ban them from campus is contrary to the spirit of open discussion of ideas that universities are founded on.

I felt drawn to this incident as one where I could support a group's right to put out there message, while disagreeing with the content of that message on almost every level. (I've done so before.) So I contacted them and spent a pleasant hour over lunch chatting with member Matthew Wilson, a very thoughtful and friendly guy. I am grateful to him for helping me refine (and, in some spots, correct) the following contemplations.

At the root of the abortion debate seems to be a fundamental disagreement over the basis of human rights.

To me, human rights derive from those properties of human existence that we most value: consciousness, sentience, free will. It is because we share these properties to some extent with other animals that I recently became and remain a vegetarian. It is because the early stages of a human embryo do not share these properties that I do not see abortion as a kind of murder.

To anti-abortionists, the start of the new human organism at conception is the point where human rights are imbued, by definition. Although many people hold this position for religious reasons, it is neither the case that all religious people are anti-abortion nor that all anti-abortionists rely on religious arguments. (Whatever his feelings, Matthew did not give me one religious argument in the hour we dug through this issue.)

After an hour's careful and enthusiastic discussion with Matthew, I have to conclude that these two positions are simply irreconcilable - each is based on axioms that are fairly impervious to persuasion.

But just because I disagree doesn't mean I can't try to put myself in their shoes, see what it's like. If I accept their axioms rather than mine, then abortion would indeed amount to murder. Let's even accept, for argument's sake, that this justifies calling an abortion rate of 25% "genocide".

What else follows from the belief that every fertilized human egg is ethically equivalent to a human baby? Well, just as not all deaths outside the womb are due to murder - the vast majority are natural, accidental, or from disease - so not all prenatal deaths are due to abortion. In fact, the vast majority of these are also from "natural" causes - called either miscarriage and stillbirth, depending on whether the fetus dies before or after 20 weeks gestation.

The stillbirth rate is very low (around 0.6% in Canada), but miscarriage is another matter. About 10-20% of pregnancies that the mother knows about miscarry. In studies that use detailed detection techniques, about 30% of clinically-recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage. (In this case, "clinically-recognized" means "exhibiting the hormone produced on uterine implantation of the embryo".) Extrapolating to those fertilized eggs that never get implanted and so are currently impossible to medically detect, 75% of conceptions may fail to carry to term.

So three quarters of conceived (and thus fully-human, by the anti-abortionists' lights) embryos miscarry - die without anyone setting out to kill them. And of those that survive this natural winnowing, 25% are then aborted intentionally (about 6% of total conceptions).

The vast majority of pre-birth deaths are miscarriages - twelve times as many as are aborted. If abortion is genocide, miscarriage is a plague unparalleled in human history, claiming 75% of all human lives.

So if Matthew and his colleagues are indeed pro-life, and not simply anti-abortion, what obligation does this knowledge place on them? Isn't miscarriage a more immediate and profound problem than the relatively minuscule one of abortion?

Thanks to Matthew, I have firsthand examples of the responses that anti-abortionists might make to this challenge.

Acknowledgment. To his credit, Matthew acknowledged that the miscarriage statistics, which were new to him, did represent a grave human tragedy from his perspective. (To my discredit, I had originally expected any anti-abortionist to try to wiggle out of such an acknowledgment. Thankyou, Matthew, for proving me wrong.)

Ignorance. I can't deny that the statistics on miscarriage are colossally under-reported. Perhaps people fail to protest this epidemic of miscarriage simply because they're not aware of it. But ignorance is always a shaky excuse. It is particularly so in this case, where a significant minority of women in the anti-abortion movement are bound to have had miscarriages themselves, and so come face-to-face with this reality. I understand that one way in which doctors seek to console parents who suffer a miscarriage is to let them know how common it is - there is nothing wrong with them in particular. Do those who become aware of the problem have no obligation to share it with others whose worldview would motivate them to help fix it?

Intentionality. The strongest reason why anti-abortionists might not choose to act on the miscarriage crisis, despite its scope and import, is the fundamental ethical difference between abortion and miscarriage. One is a conscious act on the part of humans; the other is not. Abortion would be ended if doctors and women simply chose en masse not to do it; miscarriage will not be solved so easily (if a solution is even possible). And given the limited resources of the anti-abortion movement, it is clear where they should focus their efforts first.

(It is interesting to consider, however, that no conception occurs entirely without the participation of human choice. If you know that the consequences of unprotected sex are 3 times as likely to lead to a death as to a life, what responsibility do you bear for the deaths of any embryos your actions generate?)

On balance, I don't feel that these responses are quite adequate to justify the deafening silence from anti-abortionists (particularly those who use terms like "genocide") on the problem of miscarriage. It is simply too big a problem, when I try to look from their perspective, to simply ignore. Action may be expensive, but words are not. It would cost little to mention this problem, and it may serve to spur more people to act for the millions of unborn humans who (from the perspective of the anti-abortionists) die unnecessarily every year.

It is for this reason that I avoid calling their movement "pro-life". Such a positive label would require at least consistency of approach. Until that is exhibited, I can only recognise that they are anti-abortion.


But, like I mentioned above, our positions seem to boil down to a simply irreconcilable conflict of basic assumptions. So I hope Matthew and other anti-abortionists will correct any mistakes in my assumptions and reasoning. But this gulf makes me pose an even deeper and (for me) more troubling question - one that Matthew and I tried but failed to answer in a satisfactory manner. When people in a liberal democracy disagree so much that any state of affairs will be intolerably unethical to someone, how can we come to a decision about a direction to take as a society?

Interest groups

Several months ago, I came across a claim A C Grayling makes regarding the role of religion in public life. The claim seems sound, and yet it also seems radical. I am appealing here to my religious reader(s): is there a good counterargument?

Here's how he puts it in The Meaning of Things:

No doubt the churches are as entitled as any other interest group to have their say on matters that fall within their range of concerns, but they are an interest group nonetheless, with highly tendentious views, and big axes to grind. (p.104)

He makes the same claim in other places, including here and here.

Is the role of organised religions in public life on the same level as that of other interest groups (such as, say, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds or the Calgary Chamber of Commerce)? Or is there a role that religions legitimately play in public life that interest groups cannot play?

I'm not asking about private life: I know that religious individuals get much more out of religion than out of their local gardening club, for example. I'm asking about the public role of religion in secular society. For example, is a religious holiday any different in kind from Earth Day, or Breast Cancer Awareness Month, or Darwin Day?

I think Grayling is right that there is (or ought to be) no difference in kind between religious and other interest groups (even Humanism), when it comes to their official status in the public sphere. Is this a valid assertion?

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams claims there is more to it, but fails to give a clear (or even coherent) argument for why this is so. Why should society at large (and the government in particular) treat religious lobbies as other than interest groups?

Humanism and atheism - an analogy

Just came up with this, and thought I'd ask for some feedback. What do you think of this analogy?

Calling a humanist an atheist is like describing a Christian as someone who believes Leviticus is the word of God. It may almost always be true, but if that's all you know it'll be hopelessly inadequate and almost invariably misleading as a description of the person.

Mooning over creationists

I don't usually like their way of deciding the answers, but creationists sometimes ask very thought-provoking questions.

I was checking the website of our very own Edinburgh Creation Group, and found a link to a site asking How did the Moon get into orbit? It's a fun little simulation. Try it out.

I love games based on orbital motion.

Now, the fact is that the Moon did get into orbit. But it's still worth asking why.

The simulation on the site is quite simple, and seems to involve some fairly straightforward orbital mechanics. And it seems to be impossible to get the moon into orbit unless it's already in orbit.

So tell me, what is the answer? Wikipedia's article on the Moon confirms that "Computer simulations modelling this impact are consistent with measurements of the angular momentum of the Earth–Moon system, as well as the small size of the lunar core." So what (if anything) is wrong with the simulation the creationists point to?

I confess, I'd rather accept a scientist's assertions over a creationist's any day. But better than simply accepting, and what separates thoughtful from dogmatic Humanists (or thoughtful from dogmatic people in general), is to simply accept nothing - to actually ask for the proof, and think about it.

Intelligent baking

The theory of intelligent design (ID) holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection.

from http://www.intelligentdesignnetwork.org/

I love analogies. Here's a little analogy that expresses something of my frustration with those who suggest that ID is a sensible scientific answer to scientific questions about our origins.

---

Me: How was that cake made?

Scientist:The original ingredients - 1 1/2 cups of flour, 1 cup of sugar, 1/4 cup of cocoa, 1 teaspoon of baking soda, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, 1 teaspoon of vanilla, 1/2 cup of vegetable oil, 1 tablespoon of vinegar, and 1 cup of cold water - were mixed thoroughly in a bowl, then poured into a cake dish to about 2 centimetres depth. It was then baked in an oven set at 175C (350F) for 30-40 minutes. Afterward, it was iced with a mixture of cocoa, icing sugar, and margarine (mixed to taste).

---

Me: How was that cake made?

ID proponent: A professional baker had to have made it.

---

The Darwinist's answer is satisfying, and productive. The ID person's answer answers nothing useful about the question - even if it is right, you still want to know how the baker made the cake.

(For those who are curious, that is an actual recipe, which has produced many delicious chocolate cakes. I do not know the original author, but I got the recipe from my mother-in-law. None of the cakes that I have seen produced from this recipe were made by professional bakers.)

Ubuntu gets saved

I've long been a fan of the Linux operating system. Of the many, many varieties of Linux out there, my favorite so far has been Ubuntu - easy to install, easy to use, lots of community support, and it's pretty.

I was looking at their website the other day, curious about the latest version (currently 7.10, nicknamed Gusty Gibbon), and had a look around the different flavours of Ubuntu.

There's "regular" Ubuntu, which comes with the popular Gnome desktop environment:
Then there's Kubuntu, which has the same software but with KDE instead of Gnome:
Edubuntu comes with educational software, and is designed to be easy for non-techie teachers to set up a classroom network: Part of the virtue of Ubuntu is that it comes with easy-to-install packages for media playing and other tasks that have historically been difficult to do in Linux. Unfortunately, some of the software for these tasks is not technically "free" - they cost nothing to use, but they are not distributed under the GNU General Public License.

So for those with a particular attachment to that license and the ethical stance it promotes, there is Gobuntu:
And finally there is Xubuntu, for those with older systems (slower, less disk space) or those who want to squeeze the most speed and power out of what they have. It uses the bare-bones Xfce desktop environment.
I had come across all of these before. I went with the default Ubuntu flavour, because I like Gnome and it was easy. But the popularity of the Ubuntu family of distributions has led others to take Ubuntu as a base for developing other varieties. I hadn't heard of most of these before. They include distributions tuned to particular requirements such as for security, for compactness, for different languages.

But two jumped off the screen at me (so to speak):

and

That's right. Ubuntu CE (Christian edition), with a Jesus fish incorporated into the basic Ubuntu logo, and Ubuntu ME (Muslim edition), with an Arabic word inside the Ubuntu logo. (Anyone know Arabic? What does it say?) [Edit 12 November: I'm now pretty sure it's "Allah", the Arabic word for "God".]

The main differences between these and the standard Ubuntu varieties seem to be that CE and ME include special software - primarily for browsing the holy text and filtering web content. I gather that some customization of the graphic theme has also been made. The Christian version includes a What Would Jesus Download toolbar for the Firefox web browser. The Muslim edition includes an Islamic calendar and even a reminder application for the five daily prayers.

But more than any of this, I suspect that the main motivation behind each of these variants is to build an online community of like-minded people.

So I thought, what other religious-themed Linux variants are out there?

I came across Mythbuntu, but that's not religious - "Myth" refers to MythTV, a multimedia application.

And then there's Devil Linux (not based on Ubuntu), but again the religious implication is unconnected to the purpose of the distribution. It's a dedicated server distribution, which I know almost nothing about.


So then I wondered if there's a humanist-themed Linux. Shouldn't there be? Maybe I could slap together Ubuntu HE.

Then I remembered something I read back when I first discovered Ubuntu:

Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'Humanity to others', or 'I am what I am because of who we all are'. The Ubuntu distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.

So there you have it. Ubuntu, plain old normal Ubuntu, is already a humanist distribution. (I would even say that Linux, and free software in general, reflects humanist values. But that's a theme for another post.)

The days when you had to be a hardcore computer hacker to get anything to work on Linux are behind us. I find Ubuntu as easy to work in as Windows - easier in some ways.

If you haven't tried Linux recently, give it a go. Get Ubuntu (free CD by mail or download) and run it risk-free from the CD to get a feel for it.*

And give me feedback. Do you think (like me) that humanist values lend themselves well to the free software philosophy of Linux (and Ubuntu in particular)? What about other operating systems - how do they (and the companies that produce them) strike you from the standpoint of humanist ethics?

* This post was written and submitted on a computer running Edubuntu from the live CD, with Windows XP installed and untouched underneath.

Identity and forgetfulness

A bit of philosophical dissonance to ponder ...

The observation is one of the most replicable in the literature: Whether tested in 1893 or 1999 (West & Bauer, 1999), among adults in Western cultures, the average age of earliest memory is age 3 to 3½ years. (from the APA Online)

Four- and three-year-olds can readily recall events from their second year. Yet, by the age of ten these earliest memories have receded behind what's been dubbed the "reminiscence bump." (from some recent Canadian research)

Add to this the sense that, without my memories, I would cease to be really me, and I find myself in a philosophical predicament. My daughter, Kaia, is unlikely to consciously remember anything that happens in the next two years. By the time she's ten, she'll probably have the adult "reminiscence bump" - no conscious memories before three years old.

What does this mean for her identity? Will ten-year-old Kaia be a literally different person from the Kaia I see today? Or am I wrong that my memories are key to my identity?

Perhaps - probably - there is a sensible compromise that will make sense of both the inescapable certainty that the baby is the same person as the teenager and adult, and of the intuition that our memories are a key to our identity.

But I haven't worked it out yet. For now, let me know what you think. How do you resolve this conundrum?

A humanist calendar ...?

At our recent student fair, I saw an interfaith calendar that highlighted all the various religious festivals and holy days of several world religions. Of course, humanism wasn't on it – not only because humanism is not a religion, but also because, although we are a community of people with shared values, we have not really established a yearly calendar of dates special to our community.

Throughout history, one thing that has united human communities is a common calendar of observances. From the solar equinoxes and solstices indicated by Stonehenge, to the holy days (and weeks and months) of any contemporary religion you could name, to the secular holidays celebrating days of national importance (Canada Day, the Queen's Birthday, Family Day), every human community has shared important days of the year. These days commemorate events of historical importance to the community (national independence, birth or death of important religious figures), mark the seasons (harvest festival, solar equinoxes/solstices), or simply set aside time for things the community values (Family Day, National Day of Prayer, National Day of Reason).

Humanists have some such days, though they may be local rather than general to the community at large. For example, our Edinburgh branch of the Humanist Society of Scotland holds a Darwin Day event on February 12 (generally a discussion with an evolutionary theme). Many American non-believers hold the National Day of Reason, on May 3 (giving blood) – in part to celebrate reason and in part to protest the National Day of Prayer on the same day, an unconstitutional incursion of religion into their officially secular state.

For those of us with families who celebrate the standard holidays of the dominant culture, there are clever alternatives. The fun and creative Church of Reality website suggests celebrating Newton's birthday on December 25 (“because Newton actually was born on December 25th”).

“We call the holiday Crispness because it's about keeping your mind crisp. And it's not a coincidence that it's the same day as Christmas and the Yule holiday where Christmas came from. It is the day that we celebrate the Tree of Knowledge, which represents the sum total of all human understanding. We use the traditional pine tree, which is already a very fractal looking tree to represent the Tree of Knowledge. The tree is decorated with lights and ornaments symbolizing The Sacred Network or the Internet.”

It's fun, it's festive, and it means that Deena and I can celebrate December 25 with our (nominally Christian) families without a nagging sense of dishonesty to our values and beliefs. (Remember that using the dates of existing celebrations for a new community with very different beliefs is an ancient and honorable tradition.)

I just learned (a day too late for this year) through Dale McGowan's blog that the fall equinox (September 21) is the International Day of Peace. This is something most humanists can get behind. Earth Day covers the opposite equinox, on March 21.

A source of many potentially awesome holidays, at least in the final few months of the year, is the Cosmic Calendar, brainchild of the great Carl Sagan. In it, the entire 15-billion-year history of the cosmos as we know it is scaled into a single year, with the big bang at the start of January 1^st and the present moment at the end of December 31^st. Along the way you get events like the formation of the Milky Way galaxy (May 1), the Solar System (September 9), and the Earth (September 14), the origin of life (September 25), on up through our ancestors: eukaryotes (November 15), worms (December 16), fish (December 19), insects (December 21), dinosaurs (December 24), mammals (December 26), primates (December 29), hominids (December 30), and then down through the evening of December 31. Go see the whole year here or here.

There are clearly many potential humanist holidays to choose from – some already established in certain communities, others new and untested. Deena and I already celebrate some of them (such as Darwin Day and Crispness), and plan to celebrate others in coming years.

What do you think? Do you, as a humanist, celebrate humanist-themed days through the year? Do you simply take the holidays of the culture around you, and spend the time in your own humanist pursuits? Do you think we'll ever have a common calendar of humanist days, or are we simply too individualistic for such conformity?

Are shared holidays too much a part of religion, and not appropriate for humanists to buy into? How should we balance individual thought and independence with community and interdependence?

Is this thought my own?

I had this thought a few weeks ago - don't know if it came from someone else or is my own:

If someone showed me proof of the existence of a god, I would cease to be an atheist, but I would still be a humanist.

I think it's a brilliant thought, and a very snappy expression of one reason I like to think of myself as a humanist rather than as an atheist.

But I don't want to go around claiming credit for it if I actually heard it from someone else, and just forgot the source. I haven't been able to find it online (using relevant Google searches), but that doesn't mean I couldn't have heard it somewhere, or read it in a physical book.

So this is a plea to any well-read, knowledgeable reader to let me know: have you heard this somewhere else, and can you tell me who first came up with it?

A humanist continuum

In a recent comment, Hugo brought up the fact that there are different factions within the community of humanism/freethought/atheism/brights/etc (the multitude of labels kind of says it all). And it can be difficult to bring us all together under one tent long enough to do something constructive.

In our little fledgling student society here in Edinburgh, we have few active members but they are scattered across the spectrum. One illustration of some of the more incendiary differences is how we view liberal believers.

If you (as a humanist) come across someone who self-identifies as Christian, but who acknowledges that God’s existence is not absolutely certain, and whose actions embody values you share – honesty, care for human beings, respect for science, concern for the environment – what is your attitude to that person?

Do you:

(a) feel they are being intellectually dishonest or inconsistent? If they are Christians, they should believe the Bible as it is written, not just take the “nice” bits and ignore the rest. If they can’t swallow the Bible whole, then they shouldn’t call themselves Christians at all. They should pick a belief system and be consistent, rather than trying to straddle incompatible worldviews.

Or do you:

(b) rejoice that, though religious, this person is not a threat to the secular society or to the things you most value as a humanist? You want a world where people uphold values like honesty, respect, and all the rest. It doesn’t matter if they do that while calling themselves humanists or Christians or Muslims or Pastafarians or whatever.

I hereby dub those who prefer option (a) the conversionists. The label matters as much as the beliefs, because sensible people using the label “Christian” simply provide cover for the nutcases who also use that label. If the content of their beliefs is humanist, they should convert to calling themselves “humanist” rather than “Christian”.

Those who take option (b) are the substantivists. It does not matter that someone calls herself a Christian, so long as the substance – her actual beliefs, values, and actions – include honesty, care for others, respect for science, and so on.

I tend to take the substantivist position. Our student humanist group had Christian students signing our form (we needed 20 student signatures) so we could become an official university society. “I’m not a humanist, but I support you in forming your society.” If they can do that without becoming humanists, then I think we can cooperate on other fronts too without feeling as though we need to convert them.

On the other hand, the conversionist idea that labels are important becomes very attractive to me when I’m told that my humanist values amount to belief in a god. (I’ve had this from a believer and from a non-believer). They don’t. A god is a very particular kind of being: omnipresent, powerful, intelligent, conscious. I don’t believe such a being exists. Trying to redefine god to prove that everyone believes in one is insulting both to most believers (who believe in something more than an amorphous “whatever” god) and to most nonbelievers (who tend to have well-considered reasons for their position).

My humanist friends here at both ends of the scale seem to agree with me that this distinction is useful. What do you think? Is it informative and helpful to identify conversionist and substantivist influences in the humanist community (or in yourself)? Or is this simply another way to divide us into smaller, weaker groups?

How did you come to humanism?

I've sometimes wondered how a person's history might affect their attitudes as a humanist.

For example, I sometimes suspect that people who were once evangelical believers become even more vocal non-believers - either because they are predisposed to that brand of belief, or because they want to distance themselves from beliefs they once held so firmly, and now reject. I know that the behaviours that I am most impatient with in others are those that I have overcome myself in the past.

For myself, I was raised non-religiously in a country where religion is neither widely-scorned nor overly prominent in the public sphere. Perhaps this is why I feel generally unthreatened by religion even though I have no religious beliefs. (I like to think this makes me a more balanced humanist, but all it makes me is more balance with respect to my particular experience of secularism. How well this translates to other situations is an open question.)

What do you think? Have you noticed a pattern in how different humanists' past experiences affect their attitudes to religion and believers?