Crazy

The first video is, for no particular reason, filmed outside:

Click to tweet: http://clicktotweet.com/qcK8A .  Part I is here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPjF54RAAik&list=PLGWy7AFv1dkIn3UbP1E7XpvTAnXZY2yzv&index=9 .

This is a "morning after" video like the ones about us being an arrogant species and superficiality and depth.

First of all, i'm a little concerned that we may have been discussing a caricature of the idea of political correctness because none of us there was prepared to defend the position, although of course i made some attempt yesterday.  We can, however, transcend that by saying that the definition of political correctness on which the argument was based was taken from Wikipedia and reads as follows:

a term which denotes language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social and institutional offense in occupational, gender, racial, cultural, sexual orientation, certain other religions, beliefs or ideologies, disability, and age-related contexts, and, as purported by the term, doing so to an excessive extent.

Leaving off the end of that sentence is fine, incidentally.  We believed it was excessive, but for the purposes of this video, you needn't accept that.

Firstly, political correctness involves an attempt to avoid over-generalisation and recognises the flawed and possibly fallacious nature of inductive thought.  However, induction has to be used in order to function healthily and to abandon it completely would indeed be psychotic - almost literally, "political correctness gone mad".  Induction exists because of biological and social evolution and has been selected for.

Secondly, political correctness is an attempt to quantify ethically and politically acceptable behaviour.  It enables one to account for behaviour to an authority which may have legal force, and to convince oneself that one has done the "right thing".  In doing so, however, it misses out the messiness of empathic interaction in everyday life and as such may be more about making oneself feel better about what one does than actually doing well.  It reminds me of the Pharisees, in fact.

Actually, the reason this was done in the woody bit next to the erstwhile Bowstring Bridge is that i had to fit a lot in this morning, being assaulted as i was by incessant urges to make and upload videos, and this was a way of fitting two in today without it making the day unbearably frenetic.  I did, however, have some difficulty finding a quiet spot sheltered from the wind.  I'm happy with how it turned out though.

I also feel i should say we pursued a notion of political correctitude which was probably rather simplistic.  However, so do many advocates of the idea.

The second video is the reason i've entitled this entry as above, but seems to be a bit screwed up, which is a bit problematic.

Stop press:  it's now sorted and here it is:

Click to tweet:  http://clicktotweet.com/0aUyW .  Most people would probably either believe in the Fall literally and be creationist, probably Young Earth Creationist, or see it as a metaphor or allegory of a process we all go through in early life and believe in evolution, or of course they might reject both and simply believe in evolution as non-Christians.  I hold a third position.  Although i agree with the allegorical understanding of the Fall, i also think that it may reflect a series of real events.  Whereas i do present a particular hypothesis here, i'm not attached to it and am prepared to accept that i'm wrong.  In the context of the Fall, this is the correct and humble thing to do.  It would be perverse of me to assert that in spite of my sinfulness, limitation and proneness to error and self-serving "rational" thought, this is the definitive, correct version of events.  It's more presented as an illustration of how believing in a literal Fall is compatible with evolutionary theory.  I doubt anyone else at all believes this, including Christian palaeontologists and palaeoanthropologists.

This is my hypothesis:

Back in the Miocene, there were many different species of ape (incidentally, the Aegyptopithecus zeuxis in the video was not an ape although it was, like apes, a catarrhine primate - sorry about the mistake).  The climate back then was somewhat more humid and warmer than today, and there were widespread rainforests.  Apes were found in Europe, Asia and Africa.  Then, at the close of the Miocene, the climate became more arid.  This was due to the build up of ice, possibly due to the diversion of the Gulf Stream northwards and the appearance of snow in high latitudes, or orogeny (mountain building).  The following epoch, the Pliocene, was therefore more arid and the rainforests shrank.  Hence our ancestors were forced to survive on the savannah, where food sources were scarcer and not ideal nutritionally for a species which had evolved in the rainforest.  As a result, they effectively suffered from malnutrition, since the phytoestrogens and MAOIs in their diet were missing.  Even today it's possible to tell we are not eating the ideal diet because we cannot produce our own vitamin C.  This diet along with the harsh environment jointly led to a situation where foetuses did not develop healthily in the womb due to brain and hormonal problems, and the harsh environment and impairment of development combined to brutalise the species.  By the time of recorded history, this vicious cycle had been going on for many millenia and we had come to believe it was natural.  This is the biological explanation of how sin entered the world - this is the Fall, a uniquely human problem.

It's crucial to recognise two things about this.  One is that every single neurotypical individual since this event has been confronted with the choice to avoid or commit sin, and with one single exception throughout the whole of the history of the human race, every single one of us has chosen freely to sin.

As i said this is an hypothesis, but i also believe there is some evidence for it.  One is the behaviour of chimpanzees compared to that of bonobos.  The relative harshness of the environment of chimps has led to them being more aggressive than bonobos.  They are examples of the kind of thing which went "wrong" in the Pliocene and led to "Adam and Eve" being "expelled" from the Garden of Eden.

It may be possible to test this hypothesis via the analysis of wear and tear on fossil teeth, dating the production and nature of stone tools and the isotope ratios of calcium and phosphorus in fossilised bones, but it probably isn't.

OK, so it sounds completely insane, but as i say i'm not 100% attached to this idea.  I'm just presenting it to show that evolutionary theory is compatible with a literal Fall.

This is a bit crazy of course, but it's not about the specific hypothesis so much as the principle that a scientific world view including belief in evolution is compatible with belief in the Fall.

Following that

Here are two of today's three videos:

Christianity and Yoga

and:

This one is left as an exercise to the viewer.  The other one is "Liz's Limericks" and is still uploading.  So we're in another video jam.

I am currently wondering how to follow the "Five Minute Monday" video.  Whereas i'm not particularly thinking there's a problem with what i've done since, it had an originality to its production which i'd like to continue.  I have various things in mind - well, one - and a whole load of probably much more boring ones about peanuts and leeks or whatever.  As usual, i'm not short of ideas but have little perception of how well-received they'd be.

Other stuff going on:  i finally wrote my response to the Welsh ELE consultation, which was a bit stroppy, and there is now only a week to go until 'Here Be Dragons' comes out.  Since i still haven't had any illustrations, i am frantically going through the thing inserting public domain ones.  It's not looking good.  However, it did occur to me to do a "first edition", followed by a proper one, so i'll probably do that.  I can't currently put it on Lulu.com either (where other things are going well incidentally, which is why), so i'm currently looking at cafepress.

My Christian Hypocrisy

This video:

is about looking at the Sabbath as a weekly Buy Nothing Day.  It was made and uploaded on a Saturday, which for me is not the Sabbath, but this entry is being written on a Sunday, so i'm breaking the Sabbath myself now by writing and posting this.  But then, Christian hypocrisy is nothing new and is in fact a continuation of the Pharisaic hypocrisy against which Jesus spoke (even if he was a fictional character, incidentally).  So, does this mean Christianity is a failure?

Due to the fact that like other human beings i suffer from confirmation bias, i'm gonna say no.  The fact that i am sinning right now by writing and posting this article is a negative reflection on me and not on  Christ or the Holy Ghost, or any of those guys/that guy in fact.  At the same time, it is cause for concern.  Any value Christianity might have is entirely dependent on the extent to which Christians behave better than they used to before conversion, or perhaps better than how they would be acting now were they not Christian.

This is where it gets complicated.  Firstly, how someone would have behaved if they weren't Christian is a counterfactual conditional, and it's possible to project all sort of negative stuff onto that hypothetical scenario just to support your belief in your own position.  Secondly, when people referred to as Christians behave badly, three issues arise:  maybe they're only Christian in name, maybe they would've been even worse otherwise and maybe they're resisting God's will to change them.  The central problem here, however, is that i'm trying to apply the principle to others when i should be applying it to myself.  I am, even more than usual, in no position to judge here because right now, i have a huge plank in my eye and it would be nice to be able to point the finger at others' behaviour.

As a result, what i have to do now is turn it round onto myself.  I know i'm Christian and of course don't know who else is, so i'm aware that i'm not just Christian in name, so that leaves how i would've behaved were i not Christian, something to which my conscious mind probably has no access because of cognitive bias, and one more issue:  resisting God's will to change me.  This may imply belief in the existence of free will, which is philosophically interesting.

A couple of other things:  i have run out of milk and won't be buying any until tomorrow because of my Sabbatarianism, but as a result i will be consuming Liz's milk supply instead.  Also, whereas i won't be buying milk, i fully intend to buy ingredients to feed my son this evening.  Clearly i am obliged to him in this way, but i still could've anticipated that that would become necessary before the Sabbath actually started.  Then again, that would involve increasing my consumption on another day of the week.  Hmm.

On a different note, here's an interesting pair of graphs:

Apparently, interesting and small, and unfortunately also a JPEG, rather than something more sensible.  Just to fill you in on the details, both cover about the same period of time on YouTube, the lower one is the channel i promote here, the upper one is the Other Channel and the upper one's Y-axis has values in the thousands and the lower one only in the hundreds.  The sudden drop in views which took place just over halfway through is the first anniversary of that channel, several months after i'd abandoned it.  My task is to make the bottom graph like the top, and i've decided that that task is similar to trying to get a girlfriend - you have to stop trying and just be yourself.  I don't think i've ever been more myself so publicly as i was on the top channel.  Having said that, i don't plan to be myself in the same way on the bottom channel as i have on the top because it would frighten the horses.

Defusing religious debate

I've got a number of things to say in this entry but i'll start with questions of religion.  Religion is and ought to be emotive, but it should be possible for someone to step back from it and decide what it is.  One thing which bothers me about the conflict, apart from it being a waste of energy, is that people don't even agree on what a religion is.  Atheism, for example, is not a religion.  Even if it were a set of beliefs, atheism still wouldn't count as a religion because it would lack rituals and other aspects of religion.  There is way too much emphasis on belief when religion is talked about.  Here's the video:



There are other things going on apart from the religious stuff.  One is that i have temporarily removed 'You Could've Thought Of That' in order to prepare the second edition, which is aimed equally at adults and children.  This version will have a glossary, some ideas will be removed, the language will be clarified, there will be some illustrations and i will add forms at the back for the reader to add her own ideas.  There will also be a new cover.

Meanwhile, i have a few plans for the Other Channel.  I will put hypnosis scripts accompanied by slideshows there, along with a plug for the print version of the book and an exhortation, which will doubtless be ignored, to subscribe to the channel i actually want to work as opposed to the one which is 'phoned in but works anyway.  I will also ask for suggestions.

Beachballs and the existence of God

Phew!  Glad i got that out of my system.

Anyway, here's today's video:

This is about the ontological argument, one of the most interestingly silly arguments for the existence of God.  Basically, the idea is that God is a perfect being, that an idea of a perfect being is possible, that existence is a quality of a perfect being which would be more perfect than the quality of not existing and therefore that God exists.  This was thought up by Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury.  This is Anselm:

And this is Canterbury:

(I actually wanted to find a picture of the Clocktower as this is too picturesque, but then so's the Clocktower).

Anyway, this bloke Gaunilo came along and wrote a dialogue about it where he pointed out, respectfully and carefully, that the argument was rubbish because it was possible to think of a perfect island without that island existing.  I would take that further, but not yet.

Later on, the question of whether existence was a property arose.  Here is a beachball:

(it's actually a Wikipedia beachball, not the one in the front room, because the camcorder's still plugged in and i can't take pictures with it at the moment).  This beachball has various predicates - it is round, made of plastic, inflated, multicoloured and similar to the one in the front room.  However, does it have the predicate of existence?  Is existence actually a predicate?  Does it add anything to the description of that beachball to say that it exists?

This is what's meant by "wrong for interesting reasons".  The ontological argument is wrong for much more interesting reasons than any other argument for the existence of God.  However, when they were younger the children used to express the concept of existence as a predicate.  Instead of saying that something existed, they used to say it "was real".  In other words, they used the predicate of having an instance, instantiation, instead of the concept of existence, but it seems to mean the same thing.

I have a completely different reason for throwing away the ontological argument.  Well, i have several in fact but they're not all interesting.  My main reason for rejecting it is that i see non-existence as more commonly associated with perfection than existence.  Perfectly spherical or flat objects, for example, do not and could not exist.  The very existence of an object makes it less perfect, on the whole, than its concept.  Therefore, far from being an argument for the existence of God, the ontological "proof" is more like one for God's non-existence.

Christian for fifteen minutes

Today is the twenty-seventh anniversary of my conversion to Christianity, so it seemed like a good idea to commemorate it by posting yet another talking head video:

This follows on from yesterday's video about Christian atheism.  My conversion experience happened soon after leaving home.  I was in a hall of residence at a university and very much missing my friends, though not particularly my family.  I was feeling isolated and depressed, and was befriended by Christians.  I already believed in God, so it didn't seem like too big a jump to become Christian, but my misgivings were around the idea that questioning would become problematic.  I was assured that it would not be, so i took the leap of faith and committed myself to Christ.  This is in the entirely conventional evangelical sense of being a "born-again Christian".  That is in fact what i am, in spite of appearances to the contrary.

Almost immediately afterwards, i had huge problems.  I tried to ignore them, prayed about them, searched for answers in Scripture about them, all to no avail.  I hid them from other Christians, but wrote screeds and screeds of stuff about them.  Then i went home for Christmas.

When i came back, i decided to confront the issue head-on.  I raised the first issue with my friends - rejection of other religions.  Later on came the equally troublesome issue of Christian homophobia.  I continued to raise similar issues throughout the rest of the year.  Many of my friends were fine about it, but a few saw me as recalcitrant and uncooperative, and that my approach was as if the problems were uniquely mine.  I think they had a point with the last bit, which was quite insightful, but even now haven't managed to do anything with it.

After nearly a year, i completely gave up on the religion, having decided that St Paul was the worst thing to have happened to the planet since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and went on to live a largely secular life.  I could mention how God pursues people who have done this at this point, but it would probably annoy the secular readers, so i won't.  Suffice it to say that i was not impressed by religious approaches, although i still found them interesting.  Jainism was a particular interest of mine, as expressed on YouTube.

The years went by, i became anarchist and vegan, did postgrad, got married of all things, had children and then, after twelve years in the wilderness, came back to Church.  This time, i did it on my own terms, and also on God's, but then i would say that wouldn't i?  In the meantime i had learned of various things associated with Christianity which were more positive, such as the Student Christian Movement, and realised that the Christianity i had been "sold" was not the whole story.  This is an ongoing process.

Now, this may not be very Christian of me but i don't really care whether someone believes in God or not.  It doesn't seem to be the most important thing about them to me.  I would be more interested in their political and ethical beliefs than their religious beliefs.  I think people are increasingly polarised between a narrow version of Christianity and a narrow version of atheism, and those two narrow versions have a lot more in common with each other than people like to admit.  What we need to do is forget our differences and work together to make the world a better place.  This conflict is a waste of energy and does nothing to benefit the weakest, poorest and oppressed.  That's what we need to be doing:  building a Paradise on Earth.  That's an urgent priority and we have to stop squabbling and do what we all know we're meant to be doing with our lives.

Some Christians are telepathic

This is addressed to atheists who used to be Christian.  Have you ever had a conversation with a Christian which goes something like this?

You:  I used to be a Christian but I stopped believing in God.
Christian:  Ah, but the Bible says you can't lose your salvation, so if you stopped believing, you can never really have believed in the first place, can you now?

Well, this is my response to that:

Unlike some of the other claims certain Christians make, this is practically known to be false by ex-Christians.  For instance, the claim that homosexual acts are sinful might be backed up by an argument and the claim that the planet is only a few thousand years old at least has the merit that yes, the world could've been created last Thursday for that matter with a load of spurious evidence and false memories, although it very probably wasn't, particularly considering that God, being perfect, is not supposed to deceive us.  This, however, requires a much higher degree of scepticism on behalf of the Christian because unlike the other claims, it seems to be one of two things.  Either the Christian is accusing the ex-Christian of making a false statement, possibly of lying in fact, or they are claiming their memories of being a Christian are false.

This is an extremely silly thing to do because this means the atheist doesn't just believe confidently that the Christian is incorrect, but is so close to certainty that it would be laughable to quibble about the hair's breadth of difference between the two.  And yet they still do it.

In Christian theology, there is a concept known as the "perseverence of the saints".  This means you cannot give up your salvation.  It's a bit like being British.  Provided you have at some point in your life honestly believed in God, God's goodness and you have acted on that knowledge to repent of your sins and commit yourself to Christ as fully divine and fully human Lord and Saviour - basically, what it says in the creeds - then you are, in terms of evangelical Christianity, now permanently saved, i.e. a Christian. You can't lose it again.

Clearly there are a lot of people who no longer believe, and i was one of them for something like twelve years.  This was after i committed myself to Christ.  I genuinely, honestly believed and i really lost my faith and stopped believing.  That really happened.

I also suggest that atheists can use this fact to annoy Christians and defeat their claims, by claiming honestly still to be Christians in terms of that theology.  The trouble with this is of course that once again, a Christian is being presumptious - i am suggesting that this is what you do, which isn't really my place, is it?  However, i do think it might be amusing, on occasions, to be arsey and say "Yep, I'm Christian.  Of course, I don't believe all that rubbish about imaginary sky beings or God being his own father and turning into a zombie who went into space, but none of that matters.  All that matters is that I committed myself to Christ one weekend a quarter of a century ago when I was in an emotionally vulnerable position, then recanted when I came to my senses on Monday.  Praise the non-existent Lawerd!"

Interview with my godless offspring

My son, of course, is an atheist.  I too used to be one.  However, Liz and i are now long-since lost to atheism and have a cosmic imaginary friend instead.  Here's my interview with my son about his atheism:

Incidentally, this is the wrong upload.  There was a better version, subtitled all the way through, which was unaccountably smaller than this file and i naturally assumed it was the older version, wrongly as it turns out.  Anyway, there it is and there it stands.  The audio is also annoying, although comparing it to this:

reveals that it's at least partly due to my son not speaking more loudly.

Of course, it could be that this video is entirely staged and bears no relation to how my son and i really feel about the issue.  That's something you're just going to have to take on trust for now unless you find evidence in the video to the contrary.

An interesting comment, and also one some might find offensive, is that he describes the Gospel depiction of Jesus as "a hippy", which was certainly a cultural depiction of the figure popular in the late '60s and early '70s, and in fact one i would've agreed with at his age.  This is all, of course, socially constructed and the historical Jesus is very hard to reach and sketchy, as he noted, although interestingly he does in fact believe that there was such a historical figure.  This perception probably reflects what might be seen as our anachronistic lifestyle and values, although i would myself in no way regard myself as a "hippy" - i have long hair, but so do Rastafarians, for similar reasons.   However, hippies are a bete noire in my son's personal cosmos.

This video was primarily uploaded to demonstrate that we needn't be at loggerheads with each other just because one of us is theistic and the other atheist, or even, though this isn't illustrated here, theistic and anti-theistic.  I'm happy that there were several helpful responses underneath and plan to make more videos on this, for instance as interviews between myself and anti-theistic friends.  However, the main point of this is to indicate that there is no need for hostility between people whose beliefs differ, and that there's a stereotypical version of "Christianity" out there which both the New Atheists and a certain strand of people who call themselves Christian share.  They agree on what Christianity is.  However, in fact there are a whole load of people describing themselves as Christian who feel no sense of affinity with that belief system.

The technical difficulties with this video were considerable.  The sound is bad due to our positioning and distance from the camera and the subtitles disappear in the middle.  However, i'm keeping it up because it's got a response.  Could do better, i think.

Creationism is blasphemous

Here is an annoying video:

The reason this video is annoying, apart from the fact that it's annoying, is that the file size is unnecessarily large and that there's a glitch in the middle of it.  It is of course also deliberately provocative.  I've uploaded it because the previous video on religious matters, "The Bible Is Not Pro-Life", was liked by various people (though not in the sense of people coming along and clicking on the thumbs-up sign).

I really do feel that people find two big things off-putting about Christianity.  One is that we are perceived as being negative about sex, and the other is that we are seen as antiquated in our attitude to science.  This needn't be so, and it's a barrier to evangelism.  Of course, it can and has been said that if something is true, we shouldn't just cave in to how the world sees it and accept it for the sake of popularity, which of course is the case, but on the matter of Creationism, the problem arises because people think taking the Bible seriously is the same as taking it literally.  In fact, Biblical literalism is a new idea, dating back only a couple of hundred years.  I haven't covered that in the video, but might do in future.

By the way, YouTube went mad providing me with relevant tags on this video in a way i'd never seen it do before.  I wonder what this means.

The next video will, I hope, be an interview with Holly about her bilingualism or the lack thereof.