The End: A Video Game About Death, Belief, and Science

'The End' is a philosophical platformer video game unlike any you've likely encountered. Commissioned by Channel 4 Education, the free online web-game is described as "a metaphysical journey, recording [players'] interactions in the world to reveal their attitudes towards mortality. These views are presented alongside their friends and some of the most important thinkers of our time, such as Gandhi, Descartes and Einstein."

A "game of self-discovery," it integrates puzzles, strategy, and philosophical questions into a world which explores a range of views about death, belief and science.

From the press release:

Set across three worlds - Mind, Body and Spirit - the player must use a unique shadow ‘n’ light mechanic to solve physics-based puzzles, answer questions and battle the world’s Guardians. The ultimate prizes are the Death Objects, ranging from a memorial diamond to a human heart, which deepen a player’s contextual knowledge of death and help them progress through the game.

The End is produced by award-winning games studio Preloaded with content from the mega brained Tom Chatfield (author of Fun INC). It has been illustrated with the ninja pencil skills of Luke Pearson and has an original score composed by Peter Mauder of Phonotheque. Additional consultancy has also been provided by Nigel Warburton (creator of the successful Philosophy Bites podcasts).

The game challenges players to find their "inner self," asking such questions as:

• Is there such a thing as fate?
• Is there such a thing as a cause worth dying for?
• Do you think animals fear death?
• Can we understand what death is actually like?

Check out the trailer. It's pretty rad. Then play the game here.

'This Was Your Life': The Chick Tract That Horrified Children

I have always loved Chick tracts. I can remember reading them as a child. I am not sure where I first received one, but they would pop up in the strangest of places: on public restroom urinals, truck stop pay phones, gas station counters, or handed out at rock concerts.

Over the years, even in my adult life, I have stumbled upon Chick tracts (I remember seeing them being sold in some record and comic stores in the 90's) and thumbed nostalgically through them, delighting in their absurdity. I still have one in my bedside table drawer, and I thumb through it on occasion. Beneath all the nostalgia and kitsch, however, when I look through a Chick tract, I can still feel the mild existential discomfort they inflicted on me as a child.

These comics seem to reside in a certain corner of my mind, right next to memories of Ouija boards, backmasking, Anton LaVey, and the Satanic ritual abuse hysteria of the late 70s and early 80s.

I recently ran across an animated flash version of the most popular Chick tract of all time, 'This Was Your Life.' It's pretty great, and I can't believe I haven't seen it before.

The blog Jack Chick's Funnybook Gospel has a great post (a review, actually) about 'This Was Your Life.' As it turns out, this tract (hands-down the most popular Chick tract ever) is available in over 100 languages. The blog post features snippets of several different versions, adapted for black audiences, Chinese audiences, Indian audiences, and one for women.

Anyone who has read more than a few Chick tracts will remember that the Gospel According to Chick is a very specific brand of Evangelical Christianity. Although Jack Chick's brand of religion echoes that of many TV evangelists of his time, he did not seek personal attention. Yet while he was a recluse (he has only given one interview since 1975), his work is known the world over. Chick Publications claims to have sold over 450 million tracts. Even if we account for some exaggeration, that's a lot of terrified children.

Given the fanatical, dogmatic, and judgmental nature of the tracts, it may not surprise many that the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled Chick Publications as a hate group. The tracts are anti-gay, anti-evolution, anti-any-religion-that-is-not-Chick's-brand-of-hellfire-Christianity. The tracts feature all sorts of bogeymen, including Islam, drugs, Halloween, gangs, alcohol, money, the gays, evolution, and 'false religions.'  All of these things (and much, much more) are here to distract us from serving God. According to Chick, anyway.


But no bogeyman captured our imaginations quite as much as death himself -- the reaper. Or no, actually that projector in heaven that replays all your worst moments as a human being. That's pretty horrifying. Also the Book of Life that does not contain your name is fairly disturbing. As is the eternal lake of fire. Harrowing stuff.

In hindsight, Chick tracts represent what is wrong with religion, specifically the brand of fire and brimstone of evangelical Christianity.

Here is what is implied by 'This Was Your Life,' (and what is often implied in many churches in America): You had better not make poor decisions, because every move you make is being watched, and every thought you think is being recorded. And these poor decisions will land you in a pit of fire for all of eternity, because let's face it, there's at least a good 20 minutes worth of questionable footage that we could play for the Big Guy.

This begs the question -- do we really want to be surrounded by people whose behavior is shaped by fear and guilt? If you ask me, those are horrible motivators. I don't want children (or grown-ups) to act morally because they fear they will land in a lake of fire. I want them to act morally because it is good for humanity, society, and the environment. Our moral actions will benefit our fellow humans, and will benefit us as well. I want children to avoid making poor choices because they are worried about how it will affect them and others in this life -- not because they are worried about how it will affect the afterlife, of which we have no evidence. To avoid causing pain and suffering because one fears their own suffering in the afterlife is actually a selfish notion, and one based on a supernatural assumption.

What's beautiful about the Chick tracts (aside from the fact that they're funny) is that they serve as a time capsule. They are fossils of beliefs that are endangered and which are being supplanted by more liberal theology, and ultimately, by secular morality.

Imagine a world where humans do good deeds simply because it feels good, and because good deeds minimize suffering in the world.


Imagine a world where guilt relates to how we have affected others, instead of whether or not we have disappointed an angry supernatural agent.

The grim reaper, Satan, angels, a shiny faceless God in a big chair with a naughty-and-nice list, a burning lake of fire. At least Chick had foresight. This is the stuff of comic books.

Belief in Evolution vs. National Wealth: Why Does The US Not Fit The Trend?

via Calamities of Nature:

The United States is an odd bird, clearly. This graph reminded me of a post on PZ Myers' Pharyngula blog in which he discussed an international poll showing the US as being near dead last in acceptance of evolution (just above Turkey, another country with a distinct fundamentalism/modernism issues).

What, pray tell, could cause the US to remain such an outlier?

Well, first there is religiosity:

The total effect of fundamentalist religious beliefs on attitude toward evolution (using a standardized metric) was nearly twice as much in the United States as in the nine European countries (path coefficients of -0.42 and -0.24, respectively), which indicates that individuals who hold a strong belief in a personal God and who pray frequently were significantly less likely to view evolution as probably or definitely true than adults with less conservative religious views.

And then there's this:

Second, the evolution issue has been politicized and incorporated into the current partisan division in the United States in a manner never seen in Europe or Japan. In the second half of the 20th century, the conservative wing of the Republican Party has adopted creationism as a part of a platform designed to consolidate their support in southern and Midwestern states—the "red" states. In the 1990s, the state Republican platforms in seven states included explicit demands for the teaching of "creation science". There is no major political party in Europe or Japan that uses opposition to evolution as a part of its political platform.

As Myers noted, the paper ends on a sad note:

The politicization of science in the name of religion and political partisanship is not new to the United States, but transformation of traditional geographically and economically based political parties into religiously oriented ideological coalitions marks the beginning of a new era for science policy. The broad public acceptance of the benefits of science and technology in the second half of the 20th century allowed science to develop a nonpartisan identification that largely protected it from overt partisanship. That era appears to have closed.

Nigel Barber, in Psychology Today, asks if Atheism will eventually replace religion, as research shows that atheism "blossoms amid affluence where most people feel economically secure."

He writes:

It seems that people turn to religion as a salve for the difficulties and uncertainties of their lives. In social democracies, there is less fear and uncertainty about the future because social welfare programs provide a safety net and better health care means that fewer people can expect to die young. People who are less vulnerable to the hostile forces of nature feel more in control of their lives and less in need of religion. Hence my finding of belief in God being higher in countries with a heavy load of infectious diseases.

These findings are not surprising, but his piece does not acknowledge the fact that the US, a developed country where most have access to shelter, healthcare, and education, remains extremely religious (and relatively anti-evolution). Unfortunately, in the US, there appears to be no level of affluence and comfort capable of decoupling religion and politics, despite constitutional assurances explicitly requiring it.

How Evolution Works, in Comic Form: So Easy a Caveman Could Understand It

Until my dream of an IMAX 3D evolution documentary is realized, we have accessible, educational, and imaginative works by artists like Darryl Cunningham

Evolution is probably the most misunderstood concept on the planet. I still have some misconceptions to this day, I'm sure. I was an English major who grew up in Southeastern US public schools. I have no recollection of evolution being taught, and have been playing catch-up for quite some time.

I never really doubted evolution, for some reason, but I just didn't totally 'get it.'  When it finally clicked for me, after a devouring a handful of well-written primers on the subject, it was as if I'd unlocked a whole new way of looking at everything. Which I had. When you fully understand that every living thing shares an ancestor with every other living thing, it has a profound effect on how you view those things.  And when you understand how biological complexity arises in nature, you start to see examples of more complex, and less complex, mechanisms all around you.  You begin to see that many of the concepts and mechanisms found in evolution also have applications in non-biological areas, such as technology, religion, language, art, etc.

A recent Gallup poll shows that 4 in 10 of Americans do not accept evolution.  Granted, most of those who deny evolution do so because of their literal readings of scripture.  But, I do believe that, in addition, part of the problem is that people have misconceptions and misunderstandings about evolution.  They either have been willfully given misinformation by an opponent of evolution, or they have been the victim of oversimplifications, or flat-out wrong assumptions, such as the much-repeated fallacy that humans evolved from monkeys.

I've often thought that evolution could really use a boost from CGI.  I realize that there have been some short, and minor uses of CGI to demonstrate aspects of evolution on television documentaries, but I would love to see either a full-length documentary or a mini-series that really plunges in depth, leaving no stone unturned.

I imagine this thought experiment passage from Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth done in CGI -- IMAX 3D, even.  Picture it:

I’ll call it the hairpin thought experiment. Take a rabbit, any female rabbit (arbitrarily stick to females, for convenience: it makes no difference to the argument). Place her mother next to her. Now place the grandmother next to the mother and so on back in time, back, back, back through the mega years, a seemingly endless line of female rabbits, each one sandwiched between her daughter and her mother. We walk along the line of rabbits, backwards in time, examining them carefully like an inspecting general. As we pace the line, we’ll eventually notice that the ancient rabbits we are passing are just a little bit different from the modern rabbits we are used to. But the rate of change will be so slow that we shan’t notice the trend from generation to generation, just as we can’t see the motion of the hour hand on our watches – and just as we can’t see a child growing, we can only see later that she has become a teenager, and later still an adult. An additional reason why we don’t notice the change in rabbits from one generation to another is that, in any one century, the variation within the current population will normally be greater than the variation between mothers and daughters. So if we try to discern the movement of the ‘hour hand’ by comparing mothers with daughters, or indeed grandmothers with granddaughters, such slight differences as we may see will be swamped by the differences among the rabbits’ friends and relations gambolling in the meadows round about.

Nevertheless, steadily and imperceptibly, as we retreat through time, we shall reach ancestors that look less and less like a rabbit and more and more like a shrew (and not very like either). One of these creatures I’ll call the hairpin bend, for reasons that will become apparent. This animal is the most recent common ancestor (in the female line, but that is not important) that rabbits share with leopards. We don’t know exactly what it looked like, but it follows from the evolutionary view that it definitely had to exist.

Like all animals, it was a member of the same species as its daughters and its mother. We now continue our walk, except that we have turned the bend in the hairpin and are walking forwards in time, aiming towards the leopards (among the hairpin’s many and diverse descendants, for we shall continually meet forks in the line, where we consistently choose the fork that will eventually lead to leopards). Each shrewlike animal along our forward walk is now followed by her daughter. Slowly, by imperceptible degrees, the shrew-like animals will change, through intermediates that might not resemble any modern animal much but strongly resemble each other, perhaps passing through vaguely stoat-like intermediates, until eventually, without ever noticing an abrupt change of any kind, we arrive at a leopard.

Various things must be said about this thought experiment. First, we happen to have chosen to walk from rabbit to leopard, but I repeat that we could have chosen porcupine to dolphin, wallaby to giraffe or human to haddock. The point is that for any two animals there has to be a hairpin path linking them, for the simple reason that every species shares an ancestor with every other species: all we have to do is walk backwards from one species to the shared ancestor, then turn through a hairpin bend and walk forwards to the other species.

Fortunately, Dawkins' thought experiment is so elegantly written that we really don't need CGI to grasp it, but then again, we have the pesky problem of how to get that 40% of Americans to pick up a Dawkins book.

There are some other really wonderful (and accessible) books by less-controversial figures, such as Jerry Coyne, Sloane Wilson, and many others.

We also have a rising number of graphic artists serving up some pretty amazing works. There's Jay Hosler's Evolution: The Story of Life on Earth and Michael Keller and Nicole Rager Fuller's Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species: A Graphic Adaptation.

And then we have Darryl Cunningham's forthcoming book, Science Stories, which will feature a version of an amazing comic strip about Evolution (he says the version on his blog is a beta version).

What I love about Cunningham's comic is his approach from the perspective of two people who are discussing evolution. One doesn't understand it, or does not accept it, and the other is very comfortable addressing these questions (all very common questions that we see time and time again). Cunningham allows us to learn about evolution through doubt, which is really how it works in real life for so many Americans.

I hope that Cunningham's strip receives a lot of attention, and hopefully reaches a much wider audience. At least until we have that CGI IMAX 3D movie I've been dreaming about.

Here are a few frames to enjoy. They are excerpted from the middle of the piece, to demonstrate his approach. Please visit his blog for the evolution comic from start to finish:

Again, I urge you to check out the entire piece.

Spirits and Souls

The latest Calamities of Nature comic dovetails nicely with Sean M. Carroll's recent comments on the soul and the afterlife.

Superman Renounces His U.S. Citizenship

Via the Comics Alliance:

This week, Superman renounced his U.S. citizenship in issue #900 of Action Comics.

Coincidence?