The meaning of "Two dignified spinsters sitting in silence"

In yesterday's post, I made a case for how silly the practice of astrology was.  One of my readers posted a comment, the gist of which was, "You haven't even begun to plumb the depths of the silliness," and attached this link, "The Degrees and Meanings of the Sabian Symbols."

For those of you who would prefer not to risk valuable brain cells even opening this link, allow me to explain that the Sabian Symbols are mystical images, one for each of the 360 degrees of the zodiac.  Another site, simply called "Sabian Symbols," (here) describes them as follows:

Renowned worldwide as both an uncanny divination system and an insightful tool for astrologers, the Sabian Symbols were channeled in San Diego in 1925 by Marc Edmund Jones, a well reknowned [sic] and respected astrologer, and Elsie Wheeler, a spiritualist medium.  They consist of 360 word images corresponding to the 360 degrees of the zodiac (each zodiac sign comprising of 30 degrees)...  The Sabian Symbols are extraordinary for insight, revelation and guidance.  Miracles, big and small, happen in your life when you tap into their field...  (it is) an "ancient mind matrix."

Well.  Alrighty, then.  Let's just take a look, shall we?  Here are a few selected Sabian Symbols from various degrees of the zodiac.  Let me know of any insight, revelation, or guidance you got from them, okay?

Aries, 7-8 degrees:  A large woman's hat with streamers blown by the east wind.
Taurus, 15-16 degrees:  An old teacher fails to interest his pupils in traditional knowledge.
Leo, 1-2 degrees:  An epidemic of mumps.
Virgo, 15-16 degrees:  In the zoo, children are brought face-to-face with an orangutan.
Sagittarius, 20-21 degrees:  A child and a dog wearing borrowed eyeglasses.
Capricorn, 16-17 degrees:  A repressed woman finds psychological release in nudism.
Aquarius, 22-23 degrees:  A big bear sitting down and waving all of its paws.

Okay, so that gives you an idea.  And no, I didn't make any of these up.  All I can say is: whatever drugs this guy was on when he came up with these, can I have some?

Of course, the people who believe in this stuff don't think that it was drugs.  They think that Marc Edmund Jones was really channeling a mystical presence.  Once again, quoting from "Sabian Symbols:"

The Sabian Symbol story is embedded in the ancient cultures of the Middle East.  Marc Edmund Jones felt that there was an "unseen agency" - an external, esoteric mind-set at work in the birthing of the Sabian Symbols.  Connection was made through a 'Brother', a member of the ancient Mesopotamian brotherhood, the Sabian Brotherhood.  He believed that they were the 'voices' that were spiritually behind Elsie Wheeler, delivering the messages that became the Symbols...  As we move out of the Piscean age and into the Aquarian age, we are transmuting in many ways, with the vibration of our spiritual and intellectual minds moving into higher gears as we evolve.  In such hectic times, we hunger for meaning and guidance, but often don't have the time or the patience to pause and reflect deeply on our situation.  The Sabian Oracle opens the doorway between our inner feelings and intentions and our conscious mind.  They do this by helping to put what is within us into words.  Being provided with possibilities enables us to act positively and confidently, and think rationally.

My general response to all of that is that if you were thinking rationally you wouldn't be relying on astrology in the first place.  And, of course, the usual problem with symbolic fortunetelling occurs here, just as it does with the Tarot, the I Ching, runes, and so on; the symbols are so weird and open to interpretation that you can make just about anything out of them that you want.  Suppose that for some reason, the "oracle" told me that my symbol for today was Libra, 29-30 degrees ("Three mounds of knowledge on a philosopher's head.")  My first response would be that I didn't know that knowledge came in mounds.  But after that, what does it mean?  Is it saying that I'm smart?  Or that I'm not smart enough and should go study?  Or that today would be good for contemplation?  Or that I should be looking for guidance from three different sources?  Or that I could find answers in books by philosophers?

This is why the "Sabian Symbols" site offers "professional Sabian astrology consultations" -- because slobs like me just aren't qualified to interpret what "A butterfly with a third wing on its left side" (Libra, 23-24 degrees) means.

The take-home lesson here, I suppose, is that there is no realm of woo-woo so goofy that someone can't elaborate on it in such a fashion as to make it way goofier.  Wondering whether there might be anything else I could learn from all the time I spent reading this stuff, I clicked on the link that said "Clear your mind and click on this picture of a galaxy" to get wisdom from the oracle.  I got Scorpio, 16-17 degrees, which is "A woman, fecundated with her own spirit, is the father of her own child."  Which, I think, was a symbolic way for the oracle to tell me to go fuck myself.

Oracles can be so hostile, sometimes.

It's written in the stars

TODAY'S HOROSCOPE: Scorpio (October 23-November 21)

Your foundations are more important than you realize.  When you feel secure, nothing will bother you. If you are upset, everything could.  You are inspired by those close to you.  Understanding comes easily.  Tonight: Happiest at home.


Well, that certainly clears up my future.  Let's see if we can summarize the wisdom we have accrued from this entry:

1) If I'm secure, then I'm pretty secure.
2) If I'm not secure, then I'm not feeling very secure.
3) I have reasons for liking the people I'm close to.
4) I'm a pretty smart guy.
5) I better stay home tonight; if I don't, then wow, anything could happen.

Of course, this only applies to me because I'm a Scorpio.  If I was a different astrological sign, my horoscope would have been different, and (I'm sure) just as revealing.

Now, all astrology is based upon the positions of the moon and planets relative to twelve of the eighty-eight constellations.  The constellations, which were devised by extremely nearsighted ancient Greeks, are arrangements of stars that are supposed to look like something familiar.  So we have, for example, the Scorpion, the Bull, the Ram, and the Virgin (the last-mentioned has always made me wonder, how can they tell?).  I don't know how many of you are amateur star-gazers, but it occurs to me that the patterns of stars in the constellations don't really resemble what they're supposed to be all that much.  Libra, for example, is the Balance (whether it's an old-fashioned double-pan balance, a triple-beam balance, or a digital scale that reads to thousandths of a gram is unclear).  Now, in point of fact, Libra is made of four stars arranged in a lopsided quadrilateral.  If four stars in a lopsided quadrilateral could be the Balance, they could be damn near anything.  It could equally well be the constellation of the Computer Monitor, the Street Sign, or the Wombat.  But no, it's the Balance, and this is why supposedly Libras like to have things all nice and neat and organized, and hate it when a picture is hung crooked.

Now, why anyone thinks that the positions of the planets relative to an arbitrary arrangement of stars could have anything to do with your personality, future plans, or relationships, is an open question.  However, a recent Washington Post survey indicates that 32% of Americans do believe in astrology, and consider it "very scientific."  In my opinion, astrology is only slightly more scientific than the theory that thunder is caused by god and the angels having a bowling tournament.

Maybe I'm odd (okay, it's very likely that I'm odd), but whenever I run up against something like astrology, my first demand is "show me the mechanism."  If you believe that Jupiter's apparent position relative to a group of stars of varying distances from the earth (ranging from tens to hundreds of light-years), whose configuration is vaguely reminiscent of a guy carrying a water jug (Aquarius), has some effect on your day-to-day life, then show me how it works.  And vague, hand-waving "explanations" about "forces" and "energies" won't cut it. If you believe astrology is "very scientific," then explain the science.

Some astrologers evidently have made lame attempts to do just that, usually making appeal to the gravitational pull of the planets, stars, and so on.  But as Carl Sagan points out, the obstetrician was exerting a greater gravitational pull on you when you were born than Jupiter was, and we don't go around blathering about being born under the sign of Dr. Felkenberger.  ("Yes, everyone knows we Felkenbergers are highly intelligent, sensitive people, who like Thai food and listen to opera.")  Others claim some sort of Tao-of-Physics kind of approach, that the constellations influence your Quantum State at Birth and Exert Mystical Action at a Distance.

Yeah.  Okay.  That explains everything.  I bet my Quantum State at Birth was: I was a baby.  I probably cried a lot.  And I doubt that the fact that the Moon was in Capricorn at the time had a damn thing to do with it.

Yet despite this appalling lack of a plausible mechanism, many folks believe fervently in astrology.  And some people make lots of money off of it.  (It might be nonsense, but it can be highly lucrative nonsense.)  The same also applies to a lot of other kinds of baloney,  however.  People also believe in numerology.  And homeopathy.  And clairvoyance.  And auras.  And crystal energies.  (My dad was an amateur rockhound, and so I have a ton of his cool rocks and minerals around the house.  One time, a woman was visiting us, and picked up an amethyst crystal my dad had found in Arizona, and said, "Oooh, this one has amazingly strong energies!  I can feel its vibrations."  It was an effort not to guffaw right in her face.)

So anyway, if anyone can explain to me why astrology isn't a bunch of malarkey, I'd love to hear your explanation.  Until then, I'm of the opinion that it's certifiable 100% USDA Grade-A Bullshit.   And I probably will go out tonight, just to spite the stars.

Creating the past

Okay, this post may be a bit off-the-wall.   I'm perfectly willing to believe that what I'm going to say here might be entirely bogus.  That said, bear with me for a moment, and if you still think that by the end, feel free to let me have it right between the eyes.

A friend of mine told me an interesting anecdote a while back.  Her teenage son had lost his car keys, and she knew that his keys were on a worn blue carabiner.   She suddenly had this mental picture of them, sitting on a blanket or a bedsheet, and was convinced she'd seen them earlier that day.

"I think they're either in your bedroom or on the sofa or something," she told him.  "I know I saw them, on some kind of blanket or cloth or something, just recently."

So the two of them tore the house apart, looking on every such cloth surface they could find.  Oddly, the more they looked (without finding them) the more certain she became; she had a clear visual image of the keys on a tangled-up blanket.  Finally they gave up, but it was driving her crazy, because she knew she'd seen them earlier that day.

Well, when the son went out to his car (using a spare key), he found the key ring -- still hanging from the ignition, where he'd left it the night before.

My friend was baffled.   The visual image was so clear, so real, that she couldn't imagine that it wasn't true.   I asked her if she might have seen them a day or two ago on a bed or something, and simply misremembered when she'd seen them.

"No," she said. "I talked to my son about that afterward.   He said he almost never leaves his car keys anywhere but on the kitchen counter.   He was confused, himself, when I told him I'd seen them on a blanket, because he couldn't imagine how they'd have gotten there, but he said I sounded so sure.  And not only did I have a crystal-clear visual image of them, I was certain that it was that day that I'd seen them."

So, off and running my mind goes, and I say to her: "That makes me wonder how much of what we remember of our past actually happened."

And her eyes got really big, and she said, "I know.  I've been wondering the same thing.  Are our memories of our past real, or are they just stories we've told to ourselves long enough that they have become what we actually remember?"

The human memory is a remarkably plastic thing; well-controlled experiments have been performed which have conclusively demonstrated that memories can be implanted.  This was the subject of a final lab project from one of my AP Biology student groups some years ago.  The experiment was ostensibly to test people's memory of a variety of objects on a table, but the actual question had to do with implanted memories.  Subjects were given three minutes to study a set of twenty objects; then, during the test, one of the experimenters (who had before been hiding, out of sight) came out and took one object off the table, and then walked back out of the room with it.   A read-aloud questionnaire given afterwards asked (along with a number of irrelevant distractor questions), "What object did the girl in the blue shirt take off the table?"  Well, the girl had been wearing a red shirt, but not only did not one single subject mention that when the question was read, when they got to the last question -- "What color shirt was the girl wearing who came in and took an object?" -- almost every test subject answered "blue."  Further, when the subjects were told that the girl had been wearing a red shirt, several of them simply didn't believe it -- to the extent that one test subject demanded that the partner come back into the room, and when she appeared wearing a red shirt, he accused the pair of a ruse wherein the hidden partner had changed her blue shirt to red while she was out of the room the second time!

Of course, this has major implications for "leading the witness" in criminal trials -- given the right prompting, people can be induced to "remember" something that didn't actually happen.  While this is an interesting topic, what concerns me is more personal.  I wonder how many of my own life's memories are of events that didn't happen?  How much is implanted memory, formed of what my parents or friends told me happened, and which I then incorporated into my brain as if I actually remembered it myself?  What parts are memories of events which occurred but were remembered inaccurately, and then repeated so often that the inaccurate memory seems real?  What memories are an out-and-out fabrication on the part of my rather capricious brain?   I consider myself to be a fairly truthful person; but how can you not lie when an untruth has become part of your remembered past?

Worse yet, with no corroborative evidence, how could we ever tell factual memories from fictional ones?  As my friend's experience shows (however insignificant the actual event was), we can talk ourselves into believing, fervently, something which is entirely false.  When you remember your past, is your memory really a composite of truth, half-truth, and cleverly (if inadvertently) crafted fiction?

The Grand Duke of Microscopica

I have recently become aware of the phenomenon, apparently of long standing, of various cranks, misfits, wags, and malcontents seceding from their home country and founding their own sovereign nations.

These so-called "micronations" are universally ignored by the parent country, but this hasn't stopped the aforementioned cranks et al. from founding a good many of them.  (See the Wikipedia list, with descriptions, here.)  The commonality across the lot is that the leaders seem to trumpet fairly loudly but then make sure to fly under the radar when it comes to potential unpleasantness.  For example, the Principality of Hutt River (formerly a part of Australia) regularly has its taxes paid to Australia by its founder, Crown Prince Leonard I (formerly Leonard Casley), with the proviso that the tax check is to be considered "a gift from one world leader to another."

Of course, this probably isn't so far off from some of the diplomatic behavior of more generally acknowledged countries.  How else would you characterize our finger-wagging, "Naughty naughty, mustn't build nuclear weapons" approach to Kim Jong Il?

I find this whole thing simultaneously charming and perplexing.  Perplexing because (with the exception of the handful who have clearly set the whole thing up as a joke), these people seem to take themselves awfully seriously.  Consider the Principality of Sealand, which consists solely of one abandoned military staging platform in the North Sea.  Take a look at Sealand's webpage (of course it has a webpage).  Reading through that, and the other assorted websites for micronations, leaves me thinking, "Are you people loonies?  Or what?"

On the other hand, it is somewhat charming, in a twisted, Duchy of Grand Fenwick sort of way.  The majority of the self-proclaimed nobility from micronations seem to be doing no real harm.  Let them issue their own currency, stamps, and legal documents.  Hey, if it gives them a hobby, then why not?  I don't think it's really any crazier than many other hobbies, such as collecting beer bottle caps or belonging to the Society for Creative Anachronism.

And then, the depressive existentialist side of my personality has to pipe up and ask, "Why is this so different from what all countries are doing?"  Countries only exist because a group of people have decided to band together, declare that they have the right to draw a line on the ground across which None Shall Pass, and tell everyone what they can and can't do.  The lines are mostly arbitrary, and a good many of the laws seem to be as well.  (Imagine trying to explain to an alien why on the north side of an invisible line on the ground, gays and lesbians can marry, and on the south side, they can't.  I think all you'd get from the alien was mild puzzlement, up until the point where he decides that there really isn't any intelligent life on Earth, and vaporizes you with his laser pistol.)

So then, what's the difference between micronations and regular nations?  There's this thing called "recognition" -- that other countries recognize the existence of a legitimate nation.  So, because the United States is pretending not to notice the Kingdom of Molossia (a totalitarian dictatorship, formerly part of Nevada), it doesn't exist?  It's a little like a four-year-old covering his eyes and concluding that everyone he can't see is gone.

Of course, recognition isn't everything.  There's also diplomatic ties -- who are you willing to negotiate with?  Of course, that gets a little dicey, too, because there are countries that clearly exist by most people's definition (e.g. Cuba) with which we have no diplomatic relations.  So, you only exist if (1) we are willing to admit you exist, and (2) we both agree to send people to meet at a five-star hotel to drink hundred-dollar-a-glass wine and discuss how much our people want to cooperate, despite our differences and our occasional desire to annihilate each other?

Sorry for appearing cynical.  But so much of politics seems to me to be high-stakes game playing, not so very far advanced from the Inner Circles and Exclusive Clubs that middle schoolers dream up, with the only difference being that middle schoolers aren't capable of blowing each other up with tactical nuclear weapons.  Yet.

Anyway, my point is that other than scale, there seems to be little to separate the micronations from the ordinary type.  And given the current economic and ecological mess that the United States is sitting in, I'm thinking that maybe I should secede, too.  I will only continue to pay taxes as a Generous Donation Of Aid To My American Friends, and Doolin will be appointed Chief Border Collie In Charge Of Herding Everything In Sight, Including Cats.  Grendel will clearly be Court Jester.  I, of course, will now go by the moniker King Gordon I, "the Magnificent," of the Sovereign Kingdom of Perry City.  Carol already thinks she's the queen, so her status won't change much.  It does, of course, open up a serious possibility of a war of succession when I die, because I don't think that Duke Nathan of Suburban New Jersey will easily give up the throne to the heir apparent, Crown Prince Lucas of GreenStar Organic Food Market.

Whatever happens, it should be worth a page in the history books.  Or at least a website.

Strange angels, watching me

You hear a lot of people talking about angels, and they certainly are popular in art.  They're represented in a variety of fashions, from the imposing, usually serious/serene angels who look like adults (often robed/winged), to the little kid angels popular in Hallmark statuary, to the little-fat-naked-baby "cherubs" so common in 18th century art.

I know angels are referenced a good many times in the bible, and I don't intend to start down the road of questioning that source; what I'm wondering about today is sites such as "Vanessa's Angels."

This site -- one of many like it -- doesn't just take the biblical angle of claiming that angels (numbers, names, and attributes unspecified) are "god's servants" -- it gives huge amounts of detailed information. We are told, for example, that the angel Seraphiel has "the body of an eagle" and has "eyes so many in number that they can't be counted."  Spigliguel is the angel of spring.  (If I was an angel, I think I'd pick a nicer sounding name than "Spigliguel," wouldn't you?)  Azrael, the "angel of death," has "four thousand wings and seventy thousand feet."  (You'd think that'd make it difficult to fly and/or walk -- a clear case, I think, of more not being better.)  Sandalphon "is the twin brother of Metatron" and is so tall that "it would take a journey of five hundred years just to reach from his toes to the top of his head."

So, anyway, of course I'm sitting here wondering, how do you know all of this?  Trained scientists know that the first rule when that question is asked is, "check references."  So I did, not expecting to find much, because it kind of sounded like she was making this stuff up as she went along.  But to my surprise, some of the stuff was referenced -- mostly to Hebrew mystical writings of various sorts, and also to Gustav Davidson's A Dictionary of Angels.  So I decided to take a look at that book. 

Apparently, this book is the be-all-and-end-all of the angelic set.  It's available on Amazon, and is basically a compilation of every mention of angels to be found in mystical writings, folklore, religion, and out-and-out fiction.  It has been the subject of rave reviews, three of which I excerpt below:

Every theologian, occultist, and pious scholar should get this. Virtually every angel, spirit, devil, and lowly demon is named and defined.

And just when you think the sheer amount of entries in this dictionary is amazing, flip to the back. That's right, the Appendix. That's what makes this book amazing, after all. Not only do you have no less than 3 angelic alphabets, you have detailed listings of all known angels, their positions in Heaven, who was their leader, what hour they guarded over, who fell with Lucifer, and so on and so forth.

In this New Age of false teachers it is good to know all the Angels. One third of the angels in Heaven fell and some will represent themselves to true aspirants and disciples as God. Don't be fooled, know your angels.

And I'm still thinking, "But... but... how do you know all of this is true?"

So back I went to "Vanessa's Angels," and I found, in her "About Me" information, the statement, "I have always had a love of angels and feel that they are often around me."  This was followed up by scores of anecdotes of people who "felt" that they had gotten out of sticky situations because of angelic help, had been healed by angels, and so forth.

That's it?  You have a "feeling," and that means we're supposed to believe that Tzaphiel is the angel of Thursdays and Saturdays?  (I know this sounds like I just made that up, but it's really on the website.) 

I thought, "There has to be more to it than this."  So I looked around, and that's the kind of explanation I saw in almost every angel website I looked at -- and I've looked at enough of them that I'm currently praying to Myopiel, the angel of bad eyesight.  (Okay, I did make that one up.)

I've seen a lot of examples of convoluted wishful thinking, but this one has to take the prize.  How on earth has anyone come away with the idea that if you have a "feeling" that something is true, that this has any bearing on its actual truth or falsity?  Since when are feelings reliable guides?  I've been accused, as a skeptical scientist, of having too much faith in the human mind, but actually, it's the opposite; it's because our brains are so easily fooled that we need science, as a rigorous tool for identifying, and studying, what's out there.

Too often, our feelings, and defects in our perceptual apparatus and brain wiring, lead us to false conclusions.  (Witness the famous case, about which I wrote a few months ago, of people exposed to low-frequency standing sound waves becoming convinced that they were in the presence of ghosts.)  It might be comforting to think that you have a guardian angel, or that Barbiel lives in one of the 28 mansions of the moon.  (That one I didn't make up.  Hard to tell the difference, isn't it?)  But I've no real confidence in the proposition that because an idea is comforting, it's true.  In fact, in my experience, the universe is a pretty freakin' uncomfortable place, a lot of the time.

Of course, once you're convinced, that's pretty much that, and I have no doubt that I'll be receiving lots of hate mail from people who think I wrote this because I'm being controlled by Sammael, the fallen angel who tempts unbelievers.  The whole thing makes me feel like I need to appease the angel Javael and go get another cup of coffee.

Eyes, images, and miracles

In what may be the most absurd example of pareidolia I've ever seen, a Cornell-educated Ph.D. in engineering has discovered images of human faces, and encoded holographic messages, in the cloth image of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

The image, the story goes, was imprinted on a young man's poncho in 1531 when he had a vision of the Virgin Mary near Mexico City.  The cloth has since been venerated as a holy icon, and has been photographed and studied extensively by the religious.  Starting in 1979, an engineer who specialized in digital imaging, José Aste Tonsmann, began to examine the icon, and it has become a virtual obsession with him.

Aste Tonsmann located 31 human figures in the image, many of them in the Virgin Mary's eyes.  These images were seen "(A)fter filtering and processing the digitized images of the eyes to eliminate 'noise' and enhance them."  Even after all of this messing about, we still end up with images like this:

(Photography by J. Aste Tonsmann, from his website.)

Not exactly life-like images of the human face, are they?  Yes, they suggest faces, but once again, we're up against our old friend pareidolia -- the tendency of people to see faces in clouds, water stains, and patterns on tortillas because our brains are wired for facial recognition.

But Aste Tonsmann, who himself is a devout Catholic and a member of the Marian Congress, thinks this is all part of the miracle.  He believes that the Virgin Mary herself has sent us an "image of a family in the center of the Virgin's eye, in times when families are under serious attack in our modern world."  More interestingly, he believes that the images are effectively holograms -- three-dimensional images captured at the time the image was created, and imprinted on the cloth in a "miraculous fashion:"

The eyes reflect the witnesses of the Guadalupan miracle, the moment Juan Diego unfurled his cloak before the bishop to show him the painting; a kind of instant picture of what occurred at the moment the image was unveiled. It is possible to see a seated Indian who is looking up to the heavens; the profile of a balding, elderly man with a white beard who looks like the Bishop; a younger man who is possibly interpreter Juan González; another Indian who is Juan Diego; a woman of dark complexion who is possibly a slave who was in the bishop's service and a man with Spanish features who looks on pensively, stroking his beard with his hand.

The idea, I suppose, is that we're seeing the image that was on the Virgin Mary's retina the moment the miracle occurred.

Well, that is a lovely story, and it goes along with all sorts of other trappings -- the usual miracle stories associated with icons and holy relics, and various "amazing facts."  My favorite of the latter is that the stars on her cloak resemble the constellations that were in the sky in December of 1531, only reversed -- "as if the constellations were being observed from a vantage point a great distance from the Earth."  Presumably, the implication is that this is what the constellations look like to the Virgin Mary from her home in heaven.  The unattributed writer of that statement evidently is under the misapprehension that the stars in a constellation exist in a flat plane, and so if you were far away ("on the other side of the constellation"), you'd see them backwards, as if you were looking at an image painted on a flat sheet of glass first from one side, and then the other.  Unfortunately, the stars in the sky are not equidistant from the sun, but sit in a three-dimensional space -- so there is no place in space where you'd see the same constellations as you do on the Earth, only inverted.  You'd think the Virgin Mary would know that, somehow.

The whole thing recently has been picked up by the Secret Coded Messages cadre, and now they're using Aste Tonsmann's techniques (which can be summed up as "taking magnified photographs of something and tinkering with the images until you find something you already had decided was there") to try to find encoded textual material in the image.  One site I looked at claims to have found strings of characters, and now "linguistic experts" are trying to translate them -- and that once they do, we'll have our first look at the "lexicon of God."

And if that proposal didn't make you do a facepalm, you're made of sterner stuff than I am.

In any case, I mean no disrespect to whoever created the original image; it's quite a pretty thing, really, even if I don't subscribe to the whole miracle story.  (You can see a photograph of the entire Virgin of Guadalupe on the site that I linked above.)  But the goofy pseudo-analysis done by Aste Tonsmann and others just makes me wonder how people can achieve such towering heights of credulity.  I suppose it's the same old story; if you want to believe something badly enough, you'll find a way -- even if it comes to seeing images of people that aren't actually there.

Sophistry, lies, and "worldviews"

I am becoming sick unto death of the word "worldview."

This comes up because of two news stories I read yesterday.  In the first, Michele Bachmann's claim that slave owners before the Civil War were doing the slaves a favor by (1) making them Christian, and (2) providing them food and a place to live, is said not to be a gaffe, but representative of Bachmann's "intellectual worldview."  Her claim that the Founding Fathers "worked tirelessly to end slavery" is a statement, says Doug Mataconis in Outside the Beltway, that is "evidence of a worldview that is very different from what most Americans encounter in their daily lives."

Then, the word came up in an article about the quarreling occurring in some Evangelical Christian academic circles about whether Adam and Eve actually existed.  Four in ten Americans, the article said, "subscribe to the worldview" that Adam and Eve were real, historical figures, who 6,000-odd years ago were created by God, at that time were the only humans on Earth, and who were the ancestors of all 6.8 billion of us alive today.  Apparently some Christian scholars have begun to look at the actual data (which may qualify as a miracle in and of itself) and noting that the paleontological and archaeological evidence does not support a sudden appearance of humans a few thousand years ago, and that furthermore, a descent from one couple in six thousand years is impossible given the range of genetic mutations you see in modern humans.  "You would have to postulate that there's been this absolutely astronomical mutation rate that has produced all these new variants in an incredibly short period of time," said Dennis Venema, of Trinity Western University.  "Those types of mutation rates are just not possible. It would mutate us out of existence."

Others, however, equally staunchly insist that the literal truth of the Adam and Eve story is "central to the Christian worldview."  Fazale Rana, vice president of the evangelical think tank Reason to Believe, states, " If the parts of Scripture that you are claiming to be false, in effect, are responsible for creating the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith, then you've got a problem."

I find it strange how the word "worldview" has become a way of saying, "a view of the world that runs counter to science, fact, logic, and common sense."  Statements, then, no longer can be said to be simply wrong; they are "part of a person's worldview."  If someone wants to claim that slaves were better off being slaves than being free in Africa, that is "part of her worldview."  If someone wants to claim that the findings of the last 150 years of work by trained scientists is wrong, and a Bronze Age fairy tale for which there is not the first shred of evidence is right, that is "part of his worldview."

I'm sorry.  That's intellectual sophistry.  Or, since the topic of this post is speaking clearly and bluntly: it's foolish, and dangerously wrong.

We have become far too willing to be tolerant of anti-scientific, anti-intellectual statements.  In our bland, multicultural desire to be accepting of all viewpoints, we have lost the edge that scholars had a century ago, when all college students were required to take courses in logic and were far better at identifying specious thinking -- and far less hesitant to point it out.  Statements like Rana's and Bachmann's aren't "worldviews;" they're simply wrong.  The Founding Fathers did not "work tirelessly to end slavery."  Many of them were themselves slave owners.  And the descent of all humans from one couple 6,000 years ago would come as something of a surprise to the Native Americans, whose ancestors migrated to North America 6,000 years prior to that.

I find it appalling that so few are willing to say, flat out, that the statements made by public figures are illogical, unsupported, or simply factually incorrect.  Why are we trying to come up with a word that has the effect of dulling people's sensibilities to the fact that they're being misled and lied to?  Bachmann and her ilk, the biblical literalists, and others who have their own, special counterfactual understanding of the universe, might be able to afford to have "worldviews."

The rest of us come to our knowledge simply from observing the "world."