Keeping Track of Comments

We’ve been having some pretty good discussions up here lately, but unlike me, the rest of you don’t get an email whenever a new comment has been left. 

To help you track discussions, I’ve added a “Recent Comments” widget to the top right of the screen — now you can see when new comments are added to a post without having to open the post. 

Of course, if you use a feed reader, you can add the “Comments RSS” link (above left) to automatically receive new comments as they are added (or at least an hour or two later).

That is all…

Rank Your Offendedness

 This is the Atheist sign being displayed in Washington State’s Capitol building alongside various religious displays… it has been stolen — and returned – and is now being picketed… 

I can see how, if one was keen to be offended, one could be offended by such a sign… it doesn’t offend me at all, but does it offend you?

Please rank your level of offendedness on a scale of 1-10 (10 being absolute, unspeakable outrage!)

I should rush to add, however, I fully agree that if the government is going to allow religious ornamentation on public sites, atheists have a right to post such signs. If religious organizations don’t like it, then they shouldn’t seek to have their displays on public grounds.

I lay in bed last night thinking, “Hmm… how could atheists do it ‘better’?” Could they find some sort of wordless symbol to represent them — to put a more positive spin and avoid the controversy. And I realized — no, they can’t. And if they could, they shouldn’t. That is to say, the more atheists bend their message to appear like a religion, to follow the methods and traditions of religion, the more atheists are going to be accused of “having just another religion.” And as any regular reader of this blog will know, that is something I am keen to avoid. 

Atheists stand in rejection of the predominate, theistic (“religious”) worldview. For me, it is a position outside of the cycle of the creation of new gods and faith-based “ways of knowing.” And while we could certainly debate the finer points of what constitues faith, suffice it to say, I am eager to avoid a labelized “Atheism” that coopts symbols and/or consolidates it’s “tenets” in any fashion.

And yes, I realize this is a great marketing deficiency for atheism. I am told with great regularity that people, “need somethign to believe in.” 

But atheism should not be that “thing.”

Remember when…

I often find myself debating the validity of other people’s memories and experiences. Not because my memory is superior — precisely the opposite. I have been wrong, and that wrongness has led me to question, brutally honestly, memories I think I know quite well. I’ve not only been wrong, but I’ve caught my memories “changing” over time… I have found myself enhancing them (consciously) and then, later, not knowing what in the retelling is an enhancement and what is “real”… 

And folks always seem quite willing to agree with me that people’s memories are faulty or false or susceptible to all types of morphing and misinterpretation… except when it comes to their own. We often seem to think that when we remember something clearly and vividly, that it must be accurate… 

This article, Brain quirk makes eyewitnesses less reliable, is yet another experiment, run under controlled conditions that shows sometimes you just can’t trust your own brain.  It turns out that, “If you recall an event earlier, you increase susceptibility to misinformation.” 

When subjects recalled a memory soon after an event, they were more likely to get details wrong when asked to recall it again later. Folks who were only asked to recall the memory later, were more accurate. Researchers posit that the initial recalling may have made the memory “malleable” and therefore more apt to being incorrect in the second recalling.

The results seem counter-intuitive — at least that’s how I remember feeling when I read the article — but it does give us one more reason to question the things we think we know…

Uh… huh?

Racial slur causes mistrial in Broward County tobacco case

The first of about 8,000 tobacco cases in Florida ended in a mistrial after a witness used the ‘N word’ in testimony.

BY PATRICK DANNER

A Broward judge declared a mistrial in the case of a Cooper City widow suing cigarette maker Philip Morris over the death of her chain-smoking husband after a witness used a racial slur.

Robert Proctor, a Stanford University history professor and an expert witness for the widow, used the ”N word” in court in an answer to a question from a Philip Morris lawyer about the educator’s research into the tobacco industry.

Proctor did not use the ”N word” pejoratively, said Alex Alvarez, a lawyer for Elaine Hess, who claims her husband’s 1997 death from lung cancer was caused by his addiction to nicotine.

What’s the Right Answer!?

So I went to this site and took their test. It’s supposed to tell you how well you measure up to God’s judement. Of course I failed. 

So I went back.

When I went back I answered the questions as I thought I was “supposed” to answer them. 

I was found guilty again! I mean, WTF?

Can someone “better” than I figure out what’s going on here?

Do Unwritten Songs Exist?

Over on another post, we’ve gotten into a discussion about something I find quite interesting (but which you might find boring as hell), and that is… Can something be said to “exist” that is in no way “physical.”

The discussion started based on the description of a ghost being supernatural or “non-physical.” I find it difficult to understand just what such a description actually means. As I see it, “to be” is to be physical. Now, as I commented over in the other post, that doesn’t mean something must be made of matter. A photon, for example, has no “at-rest” mass, it is pure energy that behaves (sometimes) as a particle — but that doesn’t mean a photon is non-physical or supernatural. It is natural, and it is physical. How something can be, but be in no way “detectable”how it can be said to exist, but its existence leaves no trace or imprint — seems to me a fundamental contradiction. Furthermore when we “detect” a ghost, does that mean we are “seeing” somethingthat is non-physcial, what could that possibly even mean?

Then commentor Anna made this excellent point:

I am not sure we should equate being with the physical, or we cannot say that numbers or information or thoughts exist. Or most money, for that matter, which is no longer in physical form.

True of False?

“If atheism is a religion, then NOT collecting stamps is a hobby.”