Like Race Chugging Lysol...

Do you ever feel like having discussions with certain people is like race chugging Lysol? Even when you win you still end up blind and brain damaged. You know, like most internet arguments. I have a friend who says the most ridiculous things. Not like the world will end this December but still pretty dumb.

“Have you noticed you never see disabled Rom (gypsie) children? They must keep them somewhere.” This is said in a tone implying something nefarious is going on. Perhaps that is because they are a small minority; there are fewer gypsies in Finland than black people. I see very little majority Finn disabled children in public why would I expect to see many more disabled Rom kids?

“Did you know President Tarja Halonen is secretly gay and her marriage is a sham?” How is that relevant, pray tell? I really do not care. Her secret post-menopausal yearnings are of no consequence to me. Still, I would like to point out she has a daughter, she was living with her boyfriend prior to her election and after it and only married due to a public outcry that they would not let the presidents boyfriend live in the official residence so she was not really interested in having a marriage, sham or not, she was perfectly content. It was society at large that wanted it. What makes her seem lesbian? Is it because she has short hair? Is it because she is not pretty? Is it because she is the first female president the country has had?

“Why do Native Americans live on reservations? Why don’t they just live according to their traditional ways in nature?” OMFG!!! I have just lost my sight! Go live is a sauna!

Also I have found myself saying: “Please stop imitating what you think is native American singing.” and also “Stop singing in fake African, it is really offensive.”

This girl is not stupid. She is not untraveled. She is not stuck in an ethno centric bubble. She has traveled. She hangs out with a lot of international people. Why do things like this come out of her mouth? Why does she think people with a different culture are somehow fundamentally different from her? Why do many of us think this?

Some assorted stories from my life with a theme

I never remember truly believing in Santa Clause. I am sure I must have at some point. I also never recall losing my faith in him. I am sure I had lost my belief in this by the time I was five, if I ever really believed. I know I no longer believed by the time I was five because I started giving presents to my family because I figured out how this worked. This did not make me lose the fun of Christmas nor did it stop me from pretending I believed in the mythos, it just made it all more fun.

When we moved to the United States my parents became avid watchers of TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Network). TBN had a lot of Biblical prophets and especially faith healers. They were good at making the money roll in. Benny Hinn was one of the most prominent faith healers in the station. He held huge crusades where people were healed of their infirmities by their faith.

When I was in middle school he came to my town and we got tickets to it. We came in a little late so we were sent to the row right in front of the wheel chairs. Awesome! We had an “in front of the row seats” to the whole event when they would get healed, right? No. None of them were healed. Did I lose my faith, no, this was periphery to what I truly believed. It was a fringe phenomena. Still, I cannot say it did not make me look at the claims of Christians a little more critically.

Also at the time there was a car dealership with a Christian fish symbol on it and we passed it every time in our drive to church. One day my father said “You know they cheat everyone as much as they can.” Every Sunday after that I looked at that place on the way to church and thought about it and it made me realize that you cannot trust someone anymore because they claim that they are a Christian than if they are not. Shortly after that we were judged out of our church because of the prosperity doctrine.

We moved to another church and another state and I started to put a few things together like how every time someone spoke in tongues it sounded the same and I was able to imitate it perfectly. Did the Bible not say that speaking in tongues sounds like your native language when the person speaking does not speak it? Also the translation, which my Sunday school teacher said was essential to verify that it was from God, never stuck in my mind. I thought to myself, as I listened intently trying to gain some insight, that if it was really a direct message from God should it not be a little more memorable, instead of completely forgetable.

I had a very progressive sort of a Sunday school teacher. He wanted to teach us to think for ourselves, especially if it led us to the same conclusions as it was accepted in the church. By this time I was already taking everything with a grain of salt, I was in high school, and I found several things in the doctrine of my church that they treated as essential that I could not reconcile with my conscience and the Bible. There was their stance on the death penalty, war, a Christians involvement in politics to name a few. My Sunday school teacher taught us about different religions other than Christianity. I thought this was some great perspective, well I thought that when he started. I asked, as he was in the middle of teaching about Mormonism, weather this is what the Mormons claimed to believe or this was the interpretation of a non-Mormon. You can guess what the answer was.

One day my teacher made a mistake and taught me an important lesson without meaning to. We were studying Paul and specifically his experience on the road to Damascus (Acts 9). He divided us into two groups. One was to argue how this was the best thing that ever happened to Paul and one was to play the devil's advocate. I was randomly selected to be in the opposing group. I, of course, believed that this was the best thing that ever happened to Paul but as I started to think about it the ideas to the contrary just started to flow out. Arguing against what I believed in was fascinating. I loved exploring the opposing point of view. The other kids in my group came up with no ideas at all, I came up with plenty of really good ones. When we presented our arguments, mine were better than the opposing groups. I could see on the teachers face the mistake he realized he had made. He thought none of us could come up with good reasons and therefore discrediting opposing point of views from the church’s in our minds. I just did a too good of a job. He carried on as before. I was super pleased with myself and had a lot of fun.

That taught me that other people are incapable of holding two opposing points of view in their minds at the same time. They are too scared to face two opposing realities. That is the thing I am trying to do with this blog. I am trying to get people to stop being scared of seeing their opposer's point of view in anything but a mocking context. We cannot truly understand what we believe in until we comprehend its opposite. If you are afraid of losing your faith, it is not strong enough and hardly worth keeping if a simple mental exercise will destroy it. A faith unquestioned is a faith not worth having. A child may believe unquestioningly, but when I was little I asked questions like who were Gods parents? If little kids can ask that why are you too scared? You are a grown up, grow a pair and start thinking for yourself.

Faith Healers

I believe in God, as many of my readers know. I believe that God can heal disease but I also believe that Jesus was the only legitimate faith healer out there. When anyone claims to be a faith healer that proves to me that they are a fraud.

I went to a Benny Hinn crusade when I was a teenager and I sat right by the wheel chair people and was distinctly unimpressed. No one got up and ran. No one got up and walked that never had before. Many people got up and gave testimony of what they had experienced there but none of the dozen or so wheel chair bound people seated by us were healed there.

I think that believing that going to a person for a supernatural healing is sacrilege. Only God can do it, in my opinion, if he is inclined to do it ask him and he will do it, you do not need the voodoo forces of some mystic. If he is not inclined to, go to the doctor. Science is a gift from God, lets use it and honor him by not being taken in by unsavory charlatans after your money and glory.

I found a particularly dramatic and dangerous case. Here is the video:



http://youtu.be/iKOwDQcPwbs

Here is part two, it contains the short portion that is the reality check, the opinions of a legitimate doctor who has examined these people and found them to be still sick.



http://youtu.be/c03FulCf6LY

I think this is dangerous. People are spending tons of money, going to a healer and getting a potion that has no proven effect. Then they go home and don't go to the doctor and they could have gotten a lot worse in the time it takes to ride out the placebo effect.

History of Values Through Music

So, I don't think it is a secret to anyone how much I love the podcast Skeptoid. The latest episode is just too fun and silly not to share, Brian Dunning, one of the world's foremost skeptics, but not necesarily its singers, creates a great trip through history with the aid of humour, a computer, Peter Zachos and a very heavy dose of autotune. Here is the page for the eantire episode: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4250

Here is just the song.




The video is not showing up right on my page so to get a better version go to the podcast page and scroll down.

Don't Leave your Brain at Home When you Go to the Health Food Store

My blog is, at least based on the title, supposed to in some smallish way, every once in a while, promote scepticism and critical thinking. So, as Brian Dunning, my favorite skeptic, would say: let's turn our skeptical eye to nutrition. Nutrition is one of the fields most rife with pseudo science. Everybody seems to think that because we eat all day how we feel about something should be good enough evidence what we aught to do. Well, the scientific method still aplies to nutritional science. So I present you with my favourite episodes of Skeptiod about health and nutrition. I recommend you choose the listen option on the transcript page because Skeptoid is a podcast and meant to be listened.

Just because some people have a glutein sensitivity and should stay away from it does not mean it is not good for the rest of us. Bring on the glutein!

Organic food is good, right? Well, that does not mean non-organic is bad.

Do we really know as much about what we should and should not be eating?

Then there are fads. Most of them blow over, many are harmless but useless, others are weird but many are even dangerous, in my opinion.

Then again, how many of us truly understand how our bodies work and go out and buy into immune system boosting supplements.

As you can see, I have discovered the joys of putting links into my text. I commend anyone who has decided to begin a journey to better health but don't go in like a country girl into a big city or you gonna get raped.