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Again, my friend Carl from Stainless Steal Droppings has inspired me to write another essay about religion.  He and I are both disturbed by aggressive communication tactics taken by people on both sides of our philosophically polarized society.  Carl and I agree that both liberals and conservatives go to extremes in attacking each other.  Carl is a Christian and I am an atheist, and we’re working on ways to coexist philosophically.  We’re not trying to convert each other to our own positions, but we are trying to find ways to have opposing ideas and still have friendly discussions.  This is a real challenge.

Often in the editorial press and on the blogosphere you see writers trying to convince readers of their beliefs.  For many aggressive writers trying to get notice their position is often:  I’m right, you’re wrong, let me explain how you’re a dumb ass.  One step up in politeness is:  We’re right, they’re wrong, let’s have a good laugh. What I like to see is:  I’m coming from this vantage point, you’re coming from that vantage point, how can we solve a problem together.  Which probably explains why I’m not a popular writer because of my Pollyannaish thinking.

In my last essay on the subject, Faith, Carl posted a very good reply, but I particularly like what he said here:

I think you certainly got part of what I was referring to as ‘faith’ down. The other part is probably most accurately reflected in my feelings about evolution. I certainly believe in the type of evolution that involves adaptation. I believe species can adapt to surroundings, eventually developing new ways to cope with their environment, etc. In fact this kind of thinking most definitely falls in line with biblical ideas about how God’s creation works. I do not, however, believe that any one species evolved into another regardless of how long this ol’ earth may have been around. My own personal view of the ‘theory’ of evolution is that it is that, a ‘theory’, based on observations and calculations of scientists but mostly based on a type of ‘faith’. I don’t recall reading any ‘proof’ that my ancestors came from monkeys and it is certainly not an experiment that can be duplicated in a lab, tested, etc. so my ideas that there is ‘faith’ involved in science in large part comes from the way that a large part of the scientific community and humanity at large accepts the idea of evolution as science ‘fact’ rather than theory. That, in my mind, is no different than the faith I place in the existence of a real and loving and personable God. I know, your hackles are rising, but can you see what I am driving at?

Now this brings us to a very exact problem.  I don’t want to make this an issue of which side is right.  I’m not going to try and convince Carl how I think evolution is a good explanation biological reality.  What I want to do is explore ways in which Carl can have his beliefs and I can have mine and we can develop a social structure that allows us to coexist and communicate.

Science describes a universe 13.7 billion years old.  The Bible, by certain people’s measure, describes a universe that is just several thousand years old.  This is a problem mainly for our public education system.  It’s a problem being fought by school boards and state legislatures.  One solution brought about by creationists, is the theory of intelligent design, an idea that scientists considers an insult to science.  To describe the battle so far, some Christians feel that society went too far by excluding religion from schools.  The original solution to the problem Carl and I are working on was to separate church and state, and that’s still the best solution in my mind.  Evidently, there are conservatives that don’t like that idea, and they want to find ways to change the educational system.

But I don’t want to get into politics.  What I want to explore is how we treat each other personally.  Concurrent to my discussion with Carl, I’ve been discussing Christianity with a lady friend at work.  I told her that even though I’m an atheist I like studying the Bible, and I’m willing to consider some religious teachings as philosophical explorations on down-to-Earth problems.  She said Christianity is about accepting Christ, salvation and rebirth.  I told her I couldn’t go that far.

In fact, while I was talking with her, I had a revelation of my own.  I’ve always tried to imagine a metaphysical aspect to reality where religious people could be right.  I’ve always tried to imagine some kind of wormhole to the spiritual dimensions.  Theoretically, I wanted to give religious beliefs a possible loophole in space and time that could only be found in death where we might exist in some other dimensional realm.  However, while talking with my friend, I realized that I no longer can imagine such a loophole existing.

Where does that leave me?  I feel quite confident that all 6.7 billion of us living on planet Earth all share the same reality.  Whether or not that reality is ruled by some unknown quantum physics that allows for thought to bend the fabric of reality so Christians can be right as well as Richard Dawkins, or Buddhists meditating in a temple in Tibet, is beyond what I can know.  I do know that a couple billion of our 6.7 billion are Christians, and I think Muslims make up another billion or so.  Whatever political and social system we have has to include everyone.

Does that mean that the religious of the Earth are like a more populous Amish, and we should just let them freeze knowledge at some pre-19th century level of discovery?  Is it okay to just let a portion of the population deny Darwin?  Maybe the answer lies in my discovery of how to handle climate deniers that I made last week.

Up until very recently I worried that climate deniers would keep humanity from doing something about global warming, and then I reached a critical mass of observations in the news.  So many nations, states, companies, industries, scientists, educators and citizens are now working on the problem of global warming with the assumption that the theory is valid that it doesn’t matter if millions of people who are doing nothing, deny the concept.  Sometime in the last year, I think a secret vote was taken, and it was decided this was a problem we had to deal with, and people went to work.  A critical mass of scientists accepted the theory, and now the problem of global warming caused by man-made actions is now accepted as fact.

There are millions of people that don’t believe in the income tax, but that hasn’t stopped Uncle Sam from collecting our dough.  The same is true about evolution.  The scientific and academic world accepted evolution as fact a long time ago.  I do not understand linear algebra, but this mathematical discipline can exist quite well without my awareness.  The time to argue Darwin’s ideas was in the late 19th century.  Botanists, zoologist, biologists, and all the people who use the science of evolution in their work took up the idea long ago and made it part of their routine because it worked.

It doesn’t matter that I believe Darwin, because my kind of belief is only a kind of faith. I’m just a fan at the Science Bowl rooting for the Science team.  It doesn’t matter that Carl chooses not to accept the theory of evolution.  As long as he doesn’t try to publish any papers on biology, his lack of belief will go unnoticed.  Is me trying to convince Carl that evolution is right any different that me trying to convince him that the Beatles were a better band than The Rolling Stones?

I think too much of the polarized emotional heat in the press and the blogosphere are people fighting over opinions.  Why should it matter to Christians that some people don’t believe?  Why should it matter to atheists that some people do?

Carl and I love to discover great books.  That’s what we do.  That’s why we’re friends.  I think we need to focus on what we do, and less on what we believe.  In the old days, it was considered impolite to talk about politics and religion publicly.  I think I’m going to take up that custom.  It doesn’t matter if I “believe” in global warming, it only matters if I do something about it.  I need to get away from writing essays about pure ideas and abstract beliefs.  I need to get back to writing about science fiction books.  Those are real.

JWH – 10-4-8

My friend Carl and I were talking about words that can be shared by religion and science.  Carl commented to my last post,

From a Christian perspective what I think many people need to hear is an acknowledgment that science itself is filled with leaps of faith and is founded on faith. Now that faith may not seem to be defined the same way for both groups but I think that is wrong. I think it is the same word. It is trust and belief in things that cannot be seen. Science takes leaps of faith all the time. It is the hard line view of a need for religion and science to be seen separately that scares off religious people and makes them want to reject scientific speculation, proof, etc.

When I first read this I wanted to protest that the word faith has no place in science, but I let Carl’s comment ride around in my head for awhile.  I’m glad I did, because many ideas grew from letting my thoughts lie fallow for awhile.

The pursuit of science does not involve faith, that is the testing of a hypothesis.  Scientific experiments have to stand alone and be reproducible and not be influenced by the beliefs of the experimenters.  However, faith plays a big role in the dissemination of scientific knowledge.  We are all taught that the Earth orbits the Sun, but how many of us could actually prove it?  I have read about many experiments that are meant to prove that the Earth orbits the Sun, but I have not replicated any of them.

And I think this is what Carl is talking about.  We have a kind of faith in science.  We accept the consensus that the Earth orbits the Sun.  But is acceptance the same as faith?  Christians have faith that life exists after death, but that belief does not come from experiments and testing.  Religious people have faith in untested hypotheses.  So can one word apply to both situations?

My faith in science comes from reading a lot of books and in the acceptance of consensus.  I assume every scientific idea has been tested over and over again, and that all of science if built on billions of experiments that are constantly being retested.  I also live on the assumption that any technology derived from scientific laws will behave in a way that connects it to all other scientific laws.  Since I am not a scientist, I have to trust, accept, believe or have faith in science, but I depend on it to be consistent.

Religious people use the word faith in an inconsistent manner.  The object of their faith varies from person to person, and from religion to religion.  To the skeptic the faithful appear to be validating their wishes with determination and belief.  However, to the faithful, faith is about commitment to the unknowable.  Spiritual knowledge is handed down from the past, much like how scientific knowledge is passed down, and the worshipful are asked to accept this knowledge on faith.

This is where religion and science are different.  Science says to students, trust me, the experiments have been done, and I’ll show you how to reproduce any of them yourself.  Religion says, trust me, this knowledge comes from a higher being, one who was not of this world.  Religious people are followers of mystic knowledge.  Mystics are those people claiming direct experience with other worldly knowledge.  Religious people accept mystic knowledge on faith.  I am not religious, but that doesn’t mean I can disprove their hypothesis in which they base their faith.  Nor can science.

For decades there have been those who want to unite science and religion, and there have been Popes that have tried to solve the problem by allowing science to have providence back to the big bang, but declaring anything earlier belonging to God.  Religious people need for the realm of the supernatural to exist beyond our physical reality for their faith to exist.  Faith in the supernatural is very different from faith in the foundations of science.  Carl has his faith, and I have mine, so what’s the problem?

What bothers Carl and I are the competition of faiths that we see in the news and in the people around us.  Most people would like to be left along to pursue their own beliefs, but a few believers from every belief system want to legislate their faith into law for all to follow.  Some people have faith in areas other than religion and science, such as concepts like justice, goodness, evil, economics, ethics, etc.  There are all these competing ideas and ideologies.  It’s enough to drive one to watching sitcoms.

My conservative friends are riled up by Michael Moore and Al Gore.  My liberal friends are outraged by Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin.  These folks are a kind of prophets of various faiths.  They campaign to gather believers in their ideas.  Just like the current presidential election, with each candidate wanting voters to embrace their beliefs, and thus have faith in them.

It makes me wonder if “faith” is a bad word.  If I express my faith in the concept of global warming, it presses the button on some people that raises their hackles.  But if someone around me starts talking about “intelligent design” my own hackle button gets pushed.  If I’m willing to accept Christianity as a belief, why not intelligent design?  This is getting to the heart of things, I think.

Faith requires betting the farm, committing the entire soul.  As long as Christianity is separate from science I can ignore it.  Intelligent design is religion’s way of attacking the belief in science.  Ouch, time to fight back.  The theory of evolution overlaps faith in the old testament.  Ouch, let’s start a crusade against science.

Faith has to be 100% pure, and any conflict is a threat.  Many people like to believe that reality is completely objective and can only handle one truth.  Nobody assumes their faith is one of the many that’s not part of reality.  I happen to wonder since most people lead highly delusional lives, does it really matter which faith is validated by objective reality?

But this head-in-the-sand approach won’t work.  My faith in science does conflict with other people’s faith in the systems they need to believe in with 100% certainty.  Strangely, this comes down to politics.  You’d think we could keep metaphysics out of decisions on road building, taxation, maintaining armies, building schools and libraries, and all the other mundane activities that go into running cities and states.  Take for instance the Wall Street buy out under discussion in congress.  Why are things lining up along party lines?

Everyone has many faiths, and for some reason of psychology, these collection of faiths line up along the two political parties like iron filings in a magnetic field, polarized by two opposing charges that we don’t understand.  Actual science is not a faith.  Believing in any idea is a faith.  Backing unproven scientific assertions is still a kind of faith.  We can’t prove our faiths with scientific like experiments, although some people believe rhetoric is a science, which it’s not.

I don’t know if the two species of humans I talked about in my last post are different because of their beliefs, or they are physically different in some way that make them believe along opposing lines.  I wonder if anyone has done studies of political parties around the world, and explored whether or not they had common traits and how they might be related to personality types.

JWH 9/25/8

In the old days people would tell you jokes and anecdotes in person, but in these modern times they send them around in emails.  I got one the other day that sparked my interest,

A stunning senior moment

Apparently, a self-important college freshman attending a recent football game took it upon himself to explain to a senior citizen sitting next to him why it was impossible for the older generation to understand his generation. “You grew up in a different world, actually an almost primitive one,” the student said, loud enough for many of those nearby to hear.

“The young people of today grew up with television, jet planes, space travel, man walking on the moon. Our space probes have visited Mars. We have nuclear energy, ships and electric and hydrogen cars, cell phones, computers with light-speed processing …and more.”

After a brief silence, the senior citizen responded as follows:

“You’re right, son. We didn’t have those things when we were young …….. so we invented them. Now, you arrogant little shit, what are you doing for the next generation?”

The applause was amazing ……

Since I’m slightly old, at 56, a big smile came to my face at the end, and I thought “Yea, for the old guy.”  But after I closed the email and went back to work I started thinking about this little anecdote.  The freshman wasn’t wrong, so why should he be the butt of the joke?  Kids today are different, and they grow up in a much different world than us baby-boomers, and much more different than my parent’s generation.  The difference between any two or three generations is always going  to be startling.

My grandmother, who was born in 1881 and died in 1972 saw a lot of changes, having been born before the car, electric grid or airplane.  My mother was born in 1916, and my father in 1920.  I assume the senior citizen of the story was maybe from the 1930s or 1940s, older than my generation, but younger than my parents.

So why was the senior so angry at the freshman?  As I get older I hear more resentment of the young.  I wouldn’t mind being young again myself, but I don’t hold it against them that I’m not.  I think this story is popular, because I searched on “Now, you arrogant little shit, what are you doing for the next generation?”  at Google and got 34,600 hits.  A lot of people are quoting it and thinking it funny, but I’m not finding many people commenting on it.  I think we need to examine the story more closely.

First off, why the anger?  Are older people, boomers and older generations, threatened by the current generation?  I see old people all the time that have adapted to computers, cell phones, iPods and the Internet, but for those that haven’t, are they angry at the young for leaving them behind?  Don’t we expect the young to surpass us, and go out and discover new stuff?

The young Freshman was right, the world of 2008 is extremely different from anything before 1990, and especially before 1980.  Is it his fault that the older generations don’t stay current.  Kids are all the time talking to me about fantastic music groups and movie stars that are unknown to me, but on the other hand, I can mention William Powell and Kay Francis, and their faces will go blank.  It evens out in the long run.

And can the senior at the game really take credit for inventing all that stuff?  I never invented anything.  And a lot of that tech was invented by people before the baby boomers.  Would that senior feel that my generation didn’t do anything either?

We don’t know the full context of the story.  Was the freshman being rude to the senior?  Was his tone really arrogant?  Or did the senior just read that into the situation?

I bring this up because there’s a lot of humor going around the net at the expense of various groups, much of it political.  Conservatives make fun of liberals, and liberals make fun of conservatives.  If you ask the people making the jokes they will say it’s all in fun, but if you’re on the receiving end, it feels like hostility.  I wonder how Sarah Palin feels about the jokes about her.  Or how Obama feels about jokes about him?

This senior moment story is pretty minor, but at the core of it is anger, and I think a lot of people think it’s funny because of resentment towards the young.  Later the same day after reading this humorous anecdote I read about a 12-year-old boy inventing a 3D solar cell.  The point of the senior moment anecdote is patently false, the young are always inventing new stuff.  Every generation has its slackers and heroes.  So why the, “my generation is better than yours,” routine?

One reason could be because the older generations don’t like all the tech stuff and hate having to deal with it.  They might prefer the good ole days of vacuum tube radios and vinyl LPs.  They might prefer mail with stamps over email.  They might prefer Ed Sullivan to Chris Rock.  Life might have been nicer with 3 channels of television as opposed to hundreds.

Maybe the old are just envious of the young.  The freshman was the same age as the football players the senior was paying to watch.  Maybe the freshman was with a beautiful young girlfriend, and the senior felt jealous at not being young himself.  Even at 56 I would feel envy for their youth.  Could the attitude of the freshmen have made the senior, and all the people who enjoyed this joke, feel they were over the hill, and the angry retort made them feel better?

Now, if you are from my generation and older, and you meet a kid that points out how backward you are and how you’re out of touch with modern times, are you going to use the same line as this senior did?  Or will you say something different?

The senior could have wisely said, “So, kid, how are you going to feel in a few years when a younger person tells you what you told me?  And you maybe surprised how quick you’re find yourself in my place.”

Or he could have smiled and said, “It’s easy to be 19, let’s see how you do at 75.”

Or maybe the senior could have done what my Uncle Jack did to me.  I was 13 at the time, but the same trick will probably work with someone 19.  I had arrogantly told my Uncle Jack something, this was around 1965, and the generation gap was starting to widen, and he replied, “Ok, smarty, I’ll tell you what.  Write down everything you just said and put it in an envelope, and in five years we’ll open it up and I’ll give you five dollars for everything you list you still believe.” 

I refused to do it because I was so confident in my beliefs that I didn’t think it worth my time.  Later on, when I was 18, I remember that incident and realized that my uncle wouldn’t have lost any money on the deal.

Wisdom is not calling the younger generation arrogant little shits.

Jim

There’s a new danger you need to watch out for regarding your credit card.  It’s perfectly legal and not really dishonest, but it’s on the slippery side of things in my opinion.  I’m referring to paying for magazine subscriptions with credit cards and having publishers automatically renewing your subscription almost a year later because they kept your credit card number on file.  A variation on this is offers to try free trial subscriptions that requires a credit card to start.  Or even worse, getting a free magazine at a store and having that store giving you credit card number to the publisher so they can automatically renew the free magazine later.  There must be fine print somewhere that we agree to all of this, but I never noticed it.

The first time this happened was when my wife got a free subscription to Sports Illustrated from Best Buy.  I think it was for four months.  She assumed the magazine was free until the sub ran out and it would quit coming.  One day, after we had been getting the magazine much longer than I thought we should, I asked her to check her credit card statements, and indeed she discovered she had been charged for a renewal automatically.  A call quickly fixed the problem, but ouch.

Another time, with Time Magazine, and later with PC Magazine, I got small postcards in the mail, with teeny-tiny print saying my subscription would be automatically renewed at a future date unless I contacted the publishers and canceled my subscriptions.  These cards looked like junk mail that normally I would have put directly into the recycled bin.  I realized I had gotten these subs from very cheap online offers that I paid with a credit card.  I called and had both magazines canceled.

The trick is to pay with checks when first subscribing.  I did that for both PC Magazine and Time after that.   I let Time lapse when they wanted to up the subscription from $29.95 to $49.95.  The other day I got an email asking me to come back for $20.00 – but it required paying with a credit card.  I didn’t bite.

Last week I got an online offer from Encyclopedia Britannica to get their Ultimate DVD collection for $19.95 and with the added bonus of  a free one-year’s subscription to their online edition.  I had done this a couple years ago and decided I would again go for such a great bargain.  Back then the free one-year subscription came as a code on a piece of paper that I registered online.  This time when I registered the 2009 Ultimate DVD they told me I had to give them a credit card number to start the free one-year online subscription, with the warning they would automatically renew the subscription in one year for $49.95 unless I canceled a year later.  I’m not going to remember to do that.

I felt cheated by this, because I paid the $19.95 really for the free one-year subscription to the online version.  I planned to compare the online edition of EB to Wikipedia.  I think this is the last time I will buy anything from Encyclopedia Britannica.

I get all kinds of enticing magazine subscription offers in my email.  Legit ones, but I know they will store my credit card and automatically renew and I don’t like that business plan at all.

I’m starting to wonder if there should be a law against storing people’s credit card numbers.  It would make ordering books from Amazon.com a little more time consuming, but overall I think it would be safer for the consumer in general.

And I understand that magazines don’t want to waste tons of money sending out endless subscription reminders.  My solution to magazines is to quit sending those paper reminders by mail and send electronic reminders by email.  It’s better for the environment and it will save you money.  If you wouldn’t store my credit card number I might even be willing to pay online.  Otherwise, I’d print out the email and send in the payment.

Since I’m working to abandon paper magazines this doesn’t matter, but if publishers want me to subscribe to electronic editions I need to know they aren’t going to automatically renew my subscriptions.

One way I was inadvertently helped to fight this problem was when my credit union switched credit card companies.  It was then when I realized how many businesses kept my number on file.  They all contacted me telling me my old number wouldn’t work anymore.

I wished that VISA and other credit card companies had a way for me to charge with a number that had a limited lifetime.  What I might need to do to create a workaround is to change credit card banks every year.

Jim