Thursday, March 16, 2006

What Can I Say?

Twice now, I’ve been sent the link below, once in response to an earlier blog post and recently from an American friend who thinks that education in the USA is at an all-time low.

After clicking the link you may agree with him…

http://www.aztlan.net/stupid_americans.htm

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Evidence, Evidence, Evidence.


If you’re an educated, thinking person with an interest in the world you will I feel sure, be convinced that the Earth is around 4.5 billion years old. Because you are educated, you will have read about the age of the Earth and/or attended lectures by experts on the subject. No doubt the eminence of the speaker or author would have had some bearing upon the degree to which you were convinced, but it would not have been your sole criterion. You will have sought the opinions of other experts, you would have weighed one against the other to see how much agreement or contradiction was apparent, in short; you would have looked for evidence.

Evidence is the foundation upon which the legal systems of sane, free countries are based. Imagine a crazy place where convictions were handed down based purely upon eyewitness say-so; I certainly wouldn’t want to live there! We long ago learned that human beings can lie and are often mistaken; police forces know that eyewitness reports are notoriously unreliable, especially when a complex series of events is involved. That is why evidence is far and away the most important part of any legal system, if the evidence is not beyond doubt, the accused will be acquitted. The key to all this, is that the burden of proof lies with the law, the accused is not obliged to prove innocence, the law must prove guilt.

Evidence controls the belief systems of rational beings, any person or so-called authority no matter who or how important, making a claim unsupported by compelling, solid evidence, will have that claim rejected by any thinking person.

It needs repeating; the onus of proof lies with those making the claim. That really means that any claim failing the evidence test is virtually worthless.

It’s worth noting that there’s a whole host of things that have no supporting evidence whatever, not even bad evidence! These follies and sundry doctrines obviously cannot be tested, they are logically therefore, worse than useless! The late Carl Sagan is his book ‘The Demon Haunted World’, makes this point beautifully in the chapter entitled, ‘The Dragon In My Garage’

“‘What’s the difference?” he asks, “Between an invisible, incorporeal dragon breathing flames that can’t be seen, and no dragon at all?”

Unfortunately, we live in a world where the importance of evidence seems to be lost on most people. The media bombards us with lies, misleading advertising and diversions designed to prevent us seeing the truth. Politicians actively encourage us not to think so they can convince us in the absence of evidence, that their policies are correct.

The Iraq invasion is a perfect example of action being taken because of a claim, a claim with almost no supporting evidence, the claim was WMD, which of course, did not exist. But there’s something wrong here; either Bush and Blair are two of the dumbest politicians who ever lived (entirely possible) or they really believed that Saddam had WMD. In the first case, they’re really stupid because they didn’t even have a cover-up plan standing by for when their feeble reason was shown to be false. In the second case, they’re almost as stupid because they must have fallen for a load of bullshit spun by their lackeys and failed to look for the all-important evidence. Of course all the thinking people knew the real reason behind the invasion and even although a majority of us on both sides of the Atlantic were against the war, they went ahead anyway. Another perfect example, this time of undemocratic democracy, the people didn’t want it but the people were ignored.

History has shown that acting without evidence can have dire consequences, the WMD farce has cost thousands of lives but it won’t matter, we won’t learn any lessons from it. Iran or North Korea will be next, the political con-men are probably working on the scam right now, soon we’ll hear the tale and most will be frightened enough to fall for it. I say this because of evidence, the evidence shows that belief in nonsensical falsehood is growing, Christian fundamentalism, Islamic militancy, the New Age crap; all are examples of daft things with no supporting evidence that frightened people with dull, crappy lives are prepared to swallow.

I hope you can forgive my pessimistic stance, but you have to admit; it’s justified.

Holy Shit - Literally


I recently watched the TV show, Dispatches: The New Fundamentalists. It featured interviews with the religious fanatic Vardy himself and his Director of Schools, an idiot by the name of Nigel McQuoid. Vardy came across as an insincere, lying zealot – well, he is a used-car salesman – with an apparent political agenda. McQuoid however, left me aghast; in my opinion, a person stating his belief that God literally created the world in six days is a cretin who has disqualified himself from further conversation with a sane person, yet there he is, directing the schools.

I wouldn’t let McQuoid direct the education of a slug, let alone a human child.

The worst thing of course, is that all this has the backing and financial support - with your money but without your agreement - of the Blair government; it’s unforgivable.

The following things need to happen to prevent this country staggering down the disastrous path we’re being led.

  • Blair must be ejected from office before his dangerous religiosity can cause any more harm.

  • The government should give Vardy his money back just prior to kicking his used-car-selling-bible-thumping-arse out of education.

  • After regaining full state control of the schools, all Vardy puppet teachers - especially McQuoid – must be fired and replaced by sane secular educators following a sensible curriculum.

Perhaps we need some basic sanity testing for the office of PM, the ability to think rationally without religious bias may be a good start. We are rapidly catching up to the USA as the world’s most undemocratic democracy that’s carrying out a policy not supported by the people.

Most of the UK population (64%) are against the divisive, sectarian schools that fail the basic simple principle of all education, i.e. children must be taught how to think, not what to think. But of course the main aim of these religious freaks is not education, it’s indoctrination, they want to add fuel to the fire in a world already aflame with religion-driven violence that’s killing people daily.

It’s time for persons of clear-thinking non-biased rationality to unite and take a stand against these stupid policies, faith needs to be dumped and replaced by intellect if humanity is to progress further.

We think of ourselves as an intelligent species, some of us may be but clearly, our political leaders are not, how can they be? We evolved from slime into self-awareness then elect fools who support even greater fools who deny the process ever happened in the first place!

I ask you, how fucking intelligent is that?

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Salvation Is Here

The words “saviour” and “salvation” have always puzzled me slightly, not what they mean of course, but the way we use them, almost always in a religious context. It does not have to be this way; a soccer player scoring a winning goal, a batsman scoring the winning run, a mother who snatches her child from the path of an oncoming vehicle; these persons could rightly be described as saviours, their deeds saved the team from defeat or the child from serious injury, possibly death. We describe such people, as “match-winners” or “heroes” but never as “saviours”, although that is what they are!

There is a breed of religious persons who seek and expect salvation, they rejoice perhaps, in being “born again” – personally, I’ve always felt I was born OK the first time – because they feel it improves their salvational chances. I’m puzzled because I don’t understand what they need to be saved from! Is it wild animals perhaps? The deeds of people following the rules of a different deity? Criminals? What?

Personally, I can think of many different dangerous things that I may need salvation from, but I don’t spend much time considering them because they are only possibilities. Death of course, is a certainty that no one can be saved from and so merits no consideration, when it happens it’s the end of me and of the world as far as I’m concerned.

When I consider the future of my species however, it’s a different matter. It is beyond doubt that one day all life on this planet will be extinguished, either by the death of our sun – arguably the real God who lives in the sky – or by some other cosmic catastrophe that could happen at any moment. To my mind we need to think about this certainty now, falling to our knees praying to some imaginary being for personal salvation is not just selfish; it’s downright counter-productive to humanity in general.

Unfortunately, we are a selfish species, we live in a ‘Fuck You I’m All Right Jack’ world, a faulty philosophy that may well hasten our path to extinction. People with this attitude are shortsighted and fail to realise that very few of us can live in this modern world without the support and assistance of others. In our distant past the FYIARJ attitude was probably the right one, basic survival was the name of the game and killing weaker competitors, the individual’s means of staying alive. This is Mother Nature’s way, she has no concept of a crime, and never punished anyone for staying alive by whatever means possible.

But we have moved on, thankfully, most would say and I agree, although the primitive FYIARJ lives on in most of us, it’s the cause of much strife and prevents us from doing that which obviously needs to be done if we are to have even a chance of a long-term future.

I suppose I could stop this post here, readers getting this far will probably guess what follows.

It’s pretty simple, we need to unite and pool the only resource we have that may give us that chance. The resource is knowledge, the knowledge we obtained by using the best tool we ever developed: science.

We need to stop lifting our eyes to the heavens for salvation, up there our nemesis lurks; our salvation is here on Earth, embodied in the members of our species who work to increase our knowledge. The problem is that not many of us recognise the saviours, indeed, many of those who pray for heavenly salvation actively seek to thwart the efforts of the only saviours they’re ever going to have, this strikes me as blind stupidity of the highest order.

So, look for the saviours, when one is found help him/her so that they are not financially dependant upon ignorant, short-sighted politicians with feeble FYIARJ-overloaded brains who want them to make weaponry that could result in our premature demise.

Science has always been a global enterprise, its very nature compels its practitioners to share results and have them verified by colleagues, governments trying to stop this international cooperation, have largely failed.

Therein lies our hope and possible salvation.

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Prevent This Nonsense

To express their disapproval of the rise in state-funded schools based on religious sectarianism, some sane, clear thinking people in the UK have compiled a petition against this trend.

Please go here www.petitiononline.com/sects to read the petition and become a signatory if you agree with it.