Is Anatomy Destiny? - A Talk By Alice Dreger

Via TED:

Alice Dreger works with people at the edge of anatomy, such as conjoined twins and intersexed people. In her observation, it's often a fuzzy line between male and female, among other anatomical distinctions. Which brings up a huge question: Why do we let our anatomy determine our fate?

Alice Dreger is a professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at the Feinberg School of Medicine of Northwestern University in Chicago. She describes her focus as "social justice work in medicine and science" through research, writing, speaking and advocacy.

She's written several books that study subjects on the edge of norm-challenging bodies, including One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal and Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex and Intersex in the Age of Ethics.

She says: "The question that has motivated many of my projects is this: Why not change minds instead of bodies?"

Reflections on The Rapture That Wasn't

It appears that we needed the rapture more than it needed us.  The cultural and political landscape was ripe for Harold Camping and his May 21 prediction.  We have witnessed earthquakes, tsunamis, flooding, and tornadoes that rival the most devastating natural disasters on record. We have seen, time and time again, religious leaders state that these events were doled out as punishment, or warnings, from an angry god.  We have heard repeated claims that President Obama is the antichrist.  This was simply the next step in ratcheting up the heightened religious rhetoric of recent years.  But Camping and his ilk are really not as crazy as we'd like to think.

In America, 38% believe that God employs natural events to dispense judgment.  If we look at evangelicals, this number jumps to 60%.  So, clearly, this idea of an angry god who punishes non-believers is far from fringe stuff.  Nearly 4 out of 10 people actually believe that God punishes humans through violent devastation and catastrophic loss of life.

Is it really a stretch to go from belief in an angry, punishing god to the belief in the rapture?  Based on modern interpretations of the rapture, the wrath doled out during the tribulation would include war, disasters, famine, sickness, etc.  The same stuff, yet on a grander scale.  And approximately the same numbers believe in the rapture as believe God punishes us with disasters: 41% say the rapture will occur within the next 40 years (80% believe the rapture will occur at some point in time). 

So, when we look at Harold Camping and Family Radio, most of us see a bunch of loons.  Yet so many of us believe the same things Harold Camping believes.  How do we reconcile this?  There is only one detail that separates him from 80% of Americans: the fact that he believed he knew the date. It reminds me of the Woody Allen joke:

This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, "Doc, my brother's crazy; he thinks he's a chicken." And, the doctor says, "Well, why don't you turn him in?" The guy says, "I would, but I need the eggs."

Family Radio is a tax-free non-profit venture. They own 66 radio stations worldwide, and are worth $72 million according to 2009 IRS statements.  Most of us find this to be maddening.  He has amassed a fortune by swindling people into believing his crazy stories!  Yet, his story is one with which 80% of Americans agree -- except that one detail: the date.  If he preached all of the same stuff, yet never set a date, he wouldn't be any different from the majority of us.  This should be alarming.

I wonder if perhaps the difference between Camping and the other 80% of Americans who believe the rapture will occur is the fact that Camping (and many of his followers) were willing to put their money where their mouth was.  If the 80% of rapture believers were put to some kind of test -- whether putting their face on a billboard that says, "I believe that the rapture will occur!" in the town that they live and work, or, for those who believe the rapture will occur in the next 40 years, signing over all their belongings at the 40 year mark, I wonder how many would think again.

The failed rapture prediction was not harmless.  Many sold all their belongings and wiped out their savings.  Families were torn apart.  In Vietnam, hundreds of ethnic Hmong were forced into hiding after security forces dispersed thousands who had convened to await Jesus' return.  There are reports of rapture-related suicides.

One of the more heartbreaking stories involved a California woman who slit her two daughters' throats with boxcutters, before slitting her own throat. Her intention was to save her family from suffering the tribulation. Fortunately, all survived, but certainly the event has caused irreparable psychological damage that will affect this family, and those close to them, for the rest of their lives.  Of course, we do not know if this woman was mentally ill (one would certainly think so), but if we take the rapture claims into consideration, the act could be considered one of great compassion.  When we believe in fantastical religious concepts, we can justify nearly anything.

We are able to cast judgment on others who do things that we believe to be crazy.  We believe these people to be crazy because their beliefs are different from ours.  Often, however, their beliefs are closer to our own than we might realize.  How many degrees separate our beliefs? How many degrees until our beliefs cross the line into delusional?

We often forget that the Bible is full of crazy.  It is full of crazy by anyone's standards.  Let's take a look at a few examples:

• No one whose testicles are crushed or whose male organ is cut off shall enter the assembly of the Lord. (Deuteronomy 23:1)

• If two men, a man and his countryman, are struggling together, and the wife of one comes near to deliver her husband from the hand of the one who is striking him, and puts out her hand and seizes his genitals, then you shall cut off her hand; you shall not show pity. (Deuteronomy 25:11-12)

• Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourself every girl who has never slept with a man. (Numbers 31:17-18)

• Happy [shall he be], that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones. (Psalm 137:9)

• This is what the Lord says: Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass .... And Saul ... utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword. (1 Samuel 15:3,7-8)

• The Lord is a jealous and avenging God; the Lord takes vengeance and is filled with wrath. The Lord takes vengeance on his foes and maintains his wrath against his enemies. The Lord is slow to anger and great in power; the Lord will not leave the guilty unpunished. His way is in the whirlwind and the storm, and clouds are the dust of his feet. He rebukes the sea and dries it up; he makes all the rivers run dry. Bashan and Carmel wither and the blossoms of Lebanon fade.The mountains quake before him and the hills melt away. The earth trembles at his presence, the world and all who live in it. Who can withstand his indignation? Who can endure his fierce anger? His wrath is poured out like fire; the rocks are shattered before him. The Lord is good, a refuge in times of trouble. (Nahum 1:2)

Yes, a real refuge in times of trouble, it appears.

I'm not naive. I know that the above scriptures cannot be cherry-picked and paraded around as evidence of God as a maniacal, genocidal, barbaric, egotistical monster. There is context, to be sure. (Although, I'm not convinced that context can explain away some of those examples.)  I also know that we cannot ignore these passages and only cherry-pick those which suit our carefully honed personal idea of God.  You have to accept him, warts and all, or do a hell of a lot of shoehorning. 

My reason for listing a few examples (believe me, there's plenty where that came from) depicting God as what we would define by modern DSM standards as psychopathic is to illustrate that folks like Camping, and the lady who sliced her girls' throats, are really no crazier than the scripture which likely informed their ideology (and their actions).

What do you believe? And why? Are your reasons rational? Isn't life and death (and possibly eternal life) important enough for us to really examine the rationale for our beliefs? Are your beliefs supported by anything other than an ancient text which we know to be replete with contradictions, errors, and highly questionable morality? (Yes, there are also many wonderful instances of beauty, and fine instances of morality as well.)  Are these beliefs essential to living a fulfilling life as a contributing member of society?

There is a thought experiment put forth by Sam Harris in The End of Faith that underscores the fact that most of our beliefs have more to do with tradition and our place in space and time than they do anything else:

"What if all our knowledge about the world were suddenly to disappear? Imagine that six billion of us wake up tomorrow morning in a state of utter ignorance and confusion. Our books and computers are still here, but we can't make heads or tails of their contents. We have even forgotten how to drive our cars and brush our teeth. What knowledge would we want to reclaim first? Well, there's that business about growing food and building shelter that we would want to get reacquainted with. We would want to relearn how to use and repair many of our machines. Learning to understand spoken and written language would also be a top priority, given that these skills are necessary for acquiring most others. When in this process of reclaiming our humanity will it be important to know that Jesus was born of a virgin? Or that he was resurrected? And how would we relearn these truths, if they are indeed true? By reading the Bible? Our tour of the shelves will deliver similar pearls from antiquity, like the "fact" that Isis, the goddess of fertility, sports an impressive pair of cow horns. Reading further, we will learn that Thor carries a hammer and that Marduk's sacred animals are horses, dogs, and a dragon with a forked tongue. Whom shall we give top billing in our resurrected world? Yaweh or Shiva? And when will we want to relearn that premarital sex is a sin? Or that adulteresses should be stoned to death? Or that the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception? And what will we think of those curious people who begin proclaiming that one of our books is distinct from all others in that it was actually written by the Creator of the universe?

There are undoubtedly spiritual truths that we would want to relearn—once we manage to feed and clothe ourselves—and these are truths that we have learned imperfectly in our present state. How is it possible, for instance, to overcome one's fear and inwardness and simply love other human beings ? Assume, for the moment, that such a process of personal transformation exists and that there is something worth knowing about it; there is, in other words, some skill, or discipline, or conceptual understanding, or dietary supplement that allows for the reliable transformation of fearful, hateful, or indifferent persons into loving ones. If so, we should be positively desperate to know about it. There may even be a few biblical passages that would be useful in this regard—but as for whole rafts of untestable doctrines, clearly there would be no reasonable basis to take them up again. The Bible and Koran, it seems certain, would find themselves respectfully shelved next to Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Egyptian Book of the Dead."

I know that the above passage will anger many who read it.  We put up defenses when our long-held beliefs (and for many, our religious heritage) are compared to the many dead religions of the world.  Yet we must not hide from the fact that there will be a time when our civilization will share shelf space with the ancient Greeks, the Mayans, or the Egyptians who built the pyramids.  To deny this is to deny the vastness of time.  How and why are your supernatural beliefs going to outlive our civilization? (If the rapture doesn't come first, of course.)  If you, like 80% of Americans, believe that the rapture will occur, why do you believe it?  Most likely, because you read it in a book or heard it in church.

Dave Muscato, of MU SASHA (University of Missouri Skeptics, Atheists, Secular Humanists, & Agnostics) wrote:

Now, imagine that a pharmaceutical company had a drug that repeated, controlled-condition clinical testing had confirmed did not work. If the pharmaceutical company were to say about this drug, “We know that scientific tests and clinical trials demonstrate that this drug is actually ineffective. But despite that, we believe that it works, and selling this product, including implying and telling people directly that it really does work if you just believe it, too, should not be considered fraud on that basis.”

Muscato states that there would be an uproar. We would not stand for it.  This is what Harold Camping and his ilk do on a daily basis, tax-free, as they rake in millions of dollars, and continue to scam followers out of their money.  Yet, Camping is a Man of God, and is entitled to do what he does.  He can rationalize his beliefs in the same way you rationalize yours, using the exact same text. 

Harold Camping was MIA on Saturday, May 21. His Website was scrubbed of any information about the Rapture.  He didn't comment immediately on the failed prediction.  According to the Associated Press, the Family Radio camp has responded to the failed rapture prediction with the following:

May 21 had instead been a "spiritual" Judgment Day, which places the entire world under Christ's judgment, he said...But because God's judgment and salvation were completed on Saturday, there's no point in continuing to warn people about it, so his network will now just play Christian music and programs until the final end on Oct. 21.

Certainly, fewer people will be lining up to be raptured as were on May 21.  Once bitten, twice shy.  However, there will be others who continue to believe Camping. Others will ignore the realities of life and march towards Oct. 21 with the expectation that they will no longer have a need for money, a home, a car, or a family.  And Americans will continue to gawk and remark how crazy it is that these people believe that  all the Christians in the world will be gathered into the air to meet Jesus when he comes down from heaven on October 21, when in actuality all the Christians in the world will be gathered into the air to meet Jesus when he comes down from heaven some other time.

There is no scientific basis for Harold Camping's rapture predictions, or for any religious rapture scenario, period.  There are plenty of ways, explainable in scientific terms, in which the end of the world might actually occur.  Each possibility is extremely unlikely to occur in our lifetime. Each possibility is infinitely more likely to occur than the rapture we find in Christian eschatology. 

Religious beliefs have consequences.  Our beliefs should not interfere with the lives of others, specifically those who do not share them.  They certainly should not lead to the cutting of throats of children.  It is in society's best interest to call into question religious claims for which there is no basis in reality, especially those which prevent or impede others' pursuits of life, liberty, and happiness. 

As Dave Muscato, in the aforementioned MU SASHA blog entry, writes:

I don’t care one bit if people want to believe irrational things in the privacy of their own minds, so long as their outward actions are in accordance with what logic, evidence, and reason would lead them to do. There is no logical, evidential, or reasonable excuse for not allowing gay people to marry. There is no logical, evidential, or reasonable excuse for barring stem-cell research. There is no logical, evidential, or reasonable excuse for teaching creation myths in science classes. There is no logical, evidential, or reasonable excuse for denying women & transgendered men the right to safe and affordable abortions.

What does Harold Camping's failed rapture prediction have to do with all of this?  It provides us with an opportunity to see firsthand that our religious beliefs can greatly affect the lives of others.  It provides us with an opportunity to examine the variety of beliefs regarding the rapture.  It provides us with an opportunity to question whether any number of our fantastical, supernatural beliefs culled from ancient texts are reasonable.  It allows us an opportunity to celebrate reason and to remind ourselves that many of the claims of scripture have been explained away (geocentrism, the firmament, the Genesis creation narrative) as we have learned more about the way the natural world works and how our holy books came to be.  Mostly, it reminds us that our religious beliefs are based on traditions -- constellations of beliefs, many drawn from a variety of previous traditions -- handed down generation by generation.   And often these beliefs (such as our modern ideas of heaven and hell) feature post-biblical components.  At any rate, these are not beliefs that are based on evidence.  As such, there are really no religious beliefs any more or less credible than Harold Camping's.

For now, we will continue on living our lives until the end of the world fails to materialize on October 21. We should have confidence that the scientific community will let us know if and when we have reason to fear a cataclysmic event of global proportions.  But people will continue to make claims about the end of the world -- without a doubt.  We have the evidence to support this.

Stephen Hawking: 'There is no heaven; it's a fairy story'

In an exclusive interview with The Guardian, the iconic cosmologist shares his views on life, death, and the afterlife.

"I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first," he said.

"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark," he added.

Hawking's comments on death and the concept of heaven are sure to provoke further backlash from those who took issue with comments in his 2010 book, The Grand Design, in which he stated that the universe did not require a creator.

Although Hawking has often been quoted by religious figures for his references to God, it has remained quite clear that Hawking's use of the word 'God' is metaphorical (as was Einstein's).

Hawking has said of his use of the word 'God':

"If you believe in science, like I do, you believe that there are certain laws that are always obeyed. If you like, you can say the laws are the work of God, but that is more a definition of God than a proof of his existence."

"If you like, you can call the laws of science 'God', but it wouldn't be a personal God."

In his brief interview with The Guardian, Hawking had a very simple suggestion for how humans should live their lives:

"We should seek the greatest value of our action."

Read the full interview here.

Dawkins: 'Why is a serious newspaper like the Washington Post giving space to a raving loon?'

The Washington Post's On Faith column asked four prominent figures in fields of science and theology about Family Radio evangelist Harold Camping's calculation that the rapture will occur on May 21, 2011. The group of four included evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Surely The Post knew that they were dropping a turd in the punchbowl.

Q. While many are laughing at the suggestion, Camping’s followers are taking him seriously, bringing his message of impending doom to billboards and public spaces around the country. What does your tradition teach about the end of the world? How does end time theology impact real world behavior?

A. Why is a serious newspaper like the Washington Post giving space to a raving loon? I suppose the answer must be that, unlike the average loon, this one has managed to raise enough money to launch a radio station and pay for billboards. I don’t know where he gets the money, but it would be no surprise to discover that it is contributed by gullible followers – gullible enough, we may guess, to go along with him when he will inevitably explain, on May 22nd, that there must have been some error in the calculation, the rapture is postponed to . . . and please send more money to pay for updated billboards.

So, the question becomes, why are there so many well-heeled, gullible idiots out there? Why is it that an idea can be as nuts as you like and still con enough backers to finance its advertising to acquire yet more backers . . . until eventually a national newspaper notices and makes it into a silly season filler?

A few more snippets:

Evidence-free beliefs are, by definition, groundless. What my ‘tradition’ (or your ‘tradition’ or the Dalai Lama’s ‘tradition’ or Osama bin Laden’s ‘tradition’ or the bad-trip ‘tradition’ of whoever wrote Revelation) says about anything in the real world (including its end) is no more likely to be true than any urban legend, idle rumor, superstition, or science fiction novel. Yet, the moment you slap the word ‘tradition’ onto a made-up story you confer on it a spurious dignity, which we are solemnly asked to ‘respect’.

Science is not a tradition, it is the organized use of evidence from the real world to make inferences about the real world...Science knows approximately how, and when, our Earth will end. In about five billion years the sun will run out of hydrogen, which will upset its self-regulating equilibrium; in its death-throes it will swell, and this planet will vaporise. Before that, we can expect, at unpredictable intervals measured in tens of millions of years, bombardment by dangerously large meteors or comets. Any one of these impacts could be catastrophic enough to destroy all life, as the one that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago nearly did. In the nearer future, it is pretty likely that human life will become extinct – the fate of almost all species that have ever lived.

However it happens, the end of the world will be a parochial little affair, unnoticed in the universe at large.

Dawkins' full answer can be read here. The other three responses can be accessed here.

Study: Belief in an Angry God Prevents Academic Cheating

A new study reveals that college students who believe in a merciful, caring god are more likely to cheat than those who believe in a wrathful god.

The results of the study was conducted by Azim F. Shariff at the University of Oregon and Ara Norenzayan at the University of British Columbia and the results were published in the Journal for the Psychology of Religion.  The findings are based on experiments designed to put students' honesty to the test.  They were given a computerized math test and were informed of a software glitch in which the answer to each question would be revealed after several seconds.  The students were instructed to press the space bar after reading each question to prevent the answer from showing up.

The experiment showed that those who believed in a forgiving god, rather than a punitive god, were significantly more likely to ignore the instructions to suppress the correct answers. 

Some of Shariff's comments on the findings:

"Taken together, our findings demonstrate, at least in some preliminary way, that religious beliefs do have an effect on moral behavior, but what matters more than whether you believe in a god is what kind of god you believe in. There is a relationship: Believing in a mean god, a punishing one, does contribute to cheating behavior. Believing in a loving, forgiving god seems to have an opposite effect." 

"According to the psychological literature, people who believe in God don't appear to act any more morally than people who don't believe in God. We wanted to look deeper at particular beliefs. One idea is the supernatural punishment hypothesis: Punishing counter-normative behavior - immoral behavior - has been an important part of living in societies. Societies don't get far without regulating moral behavior."
“The idea that gods used to be more authoritarian vengeful agents is consistent with the idea that … the initial role of religions was to foster moral behavior which made cohesive cooperative societies in a time where there were no secular laws, policing systems.  And so the idea of having moral systems and moral regulations outsourced to a punitive agent was a very effective thing in religious societies.”

Although I have not read the entire study, I'm curious as to why the researchers did not extend their study to those who lack a belief in God.  Shariff's comments on the origin and evolution of religion, and his suggestion that a punitive agent is more effective in regulating moral behavior, provoke questions about the growing number of secular societies with low crime rates.  I'm also not so sure about the experiment to begin with. The passive receipt of information via failing to actively rectify a software glitch is a little too ambiguous to indicate a clear moral failure.  But perhaps that's my lack of religion talking.

'Storm': Tim Minchin's Pro-Science Animated Short

A wonderful animation set to Tim Minchin's poem, "Storm," an ode to science, skepticism, and critical thinking.  It's also quite funny.

On Being Perceived as a Condescending Elitist When it Comes to Religion

I think we owe it to ourselves to lift up the hood and really take a look at what we believe, and why. It's never pretty when we are honest about belief. It's easy to hit a nerve, and it's hard to not resort to verbal aggression when nerves are struck. I know. I do it all the time.
 
I get in a lot of discussions about religion, including my lack of it, its encroachment on public policy, or its frequent role in denial of basic human rights around the world.  I am misunderstood a lot of the time. this religion stuff is complex, and i have very complex feelings about it. It's easy to be misunderstood, and i realize that goes both ways.

Although folks like Hitchens would disagree, I never in a million years would believe that religion is a poison or a cancer.  to believe that would be to deny my very existence. I firmly believe that religion has been a powerful force in the shaping of human societies. I firmly believe that without religion, I would not be here writing this right now. I know that religion, along with evolved moral codes, has allowed many societies to become more cohesive, to flourish, and to survive. yes, religion has also been a great force of suffering in history. Nothing is black and white. Everything that is good in our world can also be bad, and every shade in between.

I do not for a second believe that religiosity cannot coincide with intelligence. Some of our greatest minds have been devoutly religious. My parents are two of the wisest and most intelligent people I know. My family members, relatives, and many good friends who are religious are way more intelligent than i could dream of being. I also know many non-religious folks who are morons. Quite a few.

Religion covers a broad range of ideologies and belief systems. And certainly we cannot talk about religion without talking about evolution. After all, everything evolves, including religion. It began somewhere, just like anything else. Not only did it evolve, but it played a role in our evolution. This is true and we have the evidence to prove it. As such, I find it just as open to study and dissection as the fields of geology, biology, cosmology, psychology, anthropology, or sociology. When we do look at religion from this perspective, and looking at the vast range that religion covers, we can make the association of certain religious beliefs to knowledge. We know for a fact that religion evolved partially as a means to understand the world in which its practitioners lived. When humans could not understand weather events, the reasons behind night and day, or why people get sick, they explained them with religious beliefs. throughout history, even as we gained more understanding about life and the cosmos and stopped believing that the gods controlled lightning or that demons caused malaria, we still looked to religion to explain more complex things that elude(d) our understanding. Even today, as sore as it makes people to hear or read it, there is research that shows the associations between broad ranges of religious belief and knowledge/education. As un-PC as it may be to point out, the more primitive fundamentalist beliefs (whether Christian, Muslim, Judaism, etc.) are more often associated with the less educated. The less primitive the beliefs, the more educated the believers (or non-) are. There is data to support it. To deny the connection of these associations is to deny that practitioners of currently practiced tribal rituals to oust an illness-causing demon are doing so partly due to lack of knowledge about human illness and biology. We also have to understand that way before the Abrahamic god came on the scene, there were countless primitive religions that covered the earth. Why is it that it took so long for monotheism to take hold if we are to believe that the Abrahamic god himself created us in his own image to follow him? That is a long, crooked path (with endless forks and dead ends) away from him to only come back in the last few thousand years (mere seconds in the time-line of human history).

You can infer what you will from the above statements. Do I believe that believing in the Genesis creation story (in a literal sense) is due to stupidity? No. Do I believe that believing in the Genesis creation story shows a lack of knowledge about what we have learned about life, the earth, and the cosmos? Yes. I believe mostly, however, that people cling to literal biblical interpretations mostly because of willful ignorance. people do not want to invest in understanding the oceans of data supporting evolutionary theory and natural selection. They do not want to consider the mountains of transitional species in the fossil record. They do not want to appreciate the vast, unimaginable stretches of time involved in evolutionary change. It is difficult for people with our lifespans to envision even 1,000 generations, much less hundreds of thousands, or millions. We look at our own children as they grow and do not notice how much they have changed until we look at a photo from the recent past. the change that occurs so slightly from generation to generation over millions of years is impossible for us to fathom.

We are usually told the stories of religion at a young age. We believe them because they are as true to us at that age as is the sky being blue. As we grow older, to unlearn certain stories, or even the literalness of certain stories is like denying our very existence. We fear we will slip down the path to not knowing ourselves; admitting one thing in the Bible is not true will make the entire house of cards collapse before us. This does not have to be true. Francis Collins of the NIH, and former head of the Human Genome Project consistently speaks of the coexistence of religion and evolution.  He is at once an Evangelical Christian and a staunch proponent of evolution.   These things are not irreconcilable. 
 
I realize that the above could further cement the impression that I believe that fundamentalist Christians (or Muslims, etc.) are ignorant, and that I am evolved and more knowledgeable. I don't know why I am how I am. but I can say that I have gotten here not without an incredible amount of research, soul-searching, self-education, and a daily thirst for further understanding the mechanisms that dictate the way life works and how the cosmos behaves.

I would never say that there is not some supernatural force out there that has set it all into motion. I do not know this. There are always things that humans will not understand about the cosmos and about life. But because we cannot explain things does not mean that we must ascribe those things a supernatural origin. I don't know for sure that pixies do not live in the forest, but I have to assume that they do not until I have something that proves to me otherwise.

But the fact that I don't entertain supernatural explanations about the world does not mean that I believe that anyone who believes in demonic possession, or ghosts, is not intelligent. They're certainly entitled to believe those things. I may wonder, however, if they have really ruled out all other possibilities. I may get upset if my tax dollars go to fund ghostbusters, and I may become vocal when public school science teacher teaches my child that ghosts may be just as good an explanation for why a door closes on its own as changes in air pressure. I may even ridicule him. But that doesn't make me a condescending elitist.  However, that will not stop the ghostbusters from thinking I believe they are stupid. 

And so it goes.



This piece appeared previously on happyrobot.com.