Scooby Doo vs. Jade Helm

For the past seven years, we've heard over and over that President Obama is planning on taking away our guns, outlawing Christianity, rounding True Americans up into FEMA- run death camps, and establishing a fascist dictatorship.

I think if my American readers will take a moment to look around them, they can confirm for themselves that none of this has happened.

You would think that a zero-percent success rate at predicting the future would induce some of the loonies who have been spouting this nonsense to reconsider their arguments.  You would think that if, after seven years, there's been no sign of a Liberal Gestapo forming, people would say, "Wow.  I guess I was wrong about all of that.  What a goober I am."

You would be wrong.

New from the "No, really!  Listen!  This time it's real!" department, we have the contention that Jade Helm 15, a military operation in the southwestern United States, is a cover for the impending takeover of Texas.

Why Texas?  Well, insofar as you can ask any kind of logical question about this claim, apparently Texans think that it's because they're the last bastion of patriotism, and Obama wants to shut 'em down.  Or something like that.  Bastrop, Texas resident Bob Wells summarized the idea thusly:

It’s the same thing that happened in Nazi Germany: You get the people used to the troops on the street, the appearance of uniformed troops and the militarization of the police.  They’re gathering intelligence.  That’s what they’re doing.  And they’re moving logistics in place for martial law.  That’s my feeling.  Now, I could be wrong.  I hope I am wrong.  I hope I’m a 'conspiracy theorist.'

The unspoken punch line, of course, was "But I'm not."  And all of this is despite the efforts of military leaders to quell the panic.  Lt. Col. Mark Lastoria was sent in to a public meeting to clarify what was going on and answer any questions, and he was met with this sign:

[image courtesy of photographer Jay Janner and the Austin American-Statesman]

Lastoria soldiered on despite the crazy-talk.  No, there wouldn't be soldiers running around gunning down innocent civilians.  The whole thing was pre-planned to take place in remote areas, and they'd made a map available of where the operation was occurring.  Soldiers participating in the activity would be wearing orange armbands, so that anyone who saw them would know who they were and what they were doing.

The whole thing, Lastoria said, was to train soldiers in how to work in hostile areas.  They were not implying that Texas was a hostile area.

Although he may well have changed his mind on that point after the meeting.

And of course, such a claim wouldn't be complete without Alex Jones fanning the flames.  Jones, who amazingly enough is still on the air even though he (1) has been batting zero, prediction-wise, for decades, and (2) apparently has three-quarters of a pound of LaffyTaffy where most of us have a brain, opined thusly on his broadcast InfoWars:

[Some] eerie footage out of Fort Lauderdale shows troops conducting a martial law-style drill under the cover of night training to intern citizens.  The secretive drill directly dovetails with the Jade Helm military exercises, in which 1,200 special forces troops will descend on ten US states for domestic training...  I happen to have met the governor when he was attorney general years ago. I happen to know, somewhat, his chief of staff. I happen to know multiple billionaires that know the governor very well and have had dinner with him and he’s stayed at their house, and they tell me he knows exactly what’s going on...  Texas is listed as a hostile sector. Of course we are. We're here defending the republic.

And apparently this ties into a claim that they're using abandon Wal-Mart stores as operational headquarters.

Oh, and people have seen said Wal-Marts being filled with empty coffins, for when the military launches their actual plan and starts slaughtering people.

You know, I'm perfectly willing to believe that our government has sponsored some pretty shady deals, and I'm sure that we don't know 5% of what is actually going on.  Fine.  But if there really was some kind of super-secret plan to stage a military takeover of Texas as a means for establishing a dictatorship in the United States, do you really think that:

1. They'd hold question-and-answer sessions to tell everyone about it?
2. They'd publish a map telling people where the operation was taking place?
3. A certifiable wingnut like Alex Jones would correctly figure out what's happening?
4. The participants would take the amazingly covert and secretive step of wearing orange arm bands, for fuck's sake?

And you'd also think that after years of claiming that the United States was going to go down in flames, and being wrong every time, that no one would be listening to Alex Jones any more.

But the way these things work is that the people who rant about them think, afterwards, when nothing untoward happened, that it was only their bravery and selflessness in speaking up that stopped the evil government from succeeding in their evil plans.  You can almost hear the government leaders saying, "Drat!  We'd have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for you meddling kids and your stupid dog!"

You can't win.

Virtual immortality

I have lived through the deaths of people I was close to -- family members, friends, colleagues.  You can't spend 54 years on this Earth without having this experience.  And death can be many things -- peaceful, frightening, a release from suffering, the devastating tragedy of a life lost too young.

Fear of death is pretty much universal, and it's the unknown aspect of it that terrifies most people.  Will there be an afterlife, or just... nothing?  If there is an afterlife, what will it be like?  Despite the similarities between many near-death experiences, the cultural imaginings of the afterlife vary tremendously, from the benign to the horrifying.  And, of course, some afterlives are benign for some (the true believers) and horrifying for everyone else (nonbelievers and devotees of other religions).  So I think it's safest to say that no one has the slightest idea what, if anything, we'll experience after we die.

This explains why the search for immortality has been around for a long, long time.  There are scientific approaches -- usually involving the protection of the telomeres, end-caps on the chromosomes that shorten with the years and seem to have a role in age-related illnesses.  And, of course, there are the legends of people who supposedly achieved immortality by magical means, including the Comte de St.-Germain, Nicolas Flamel, and... Keanu Reeves.

So I suppose it's no surprise that there are people who want to cheat death using technology.  And a company called Paranormal Games claims that they are taking the first steps down this road with a virtual-reality software called Project Elysium, that supposedly can make an interactive 3-D computer model of a deceased love one.

The company hasn't released how it plans to accomplish this -- the software is an entrant in the Oculus VR Jam 2015 contest, where it is rumored to be a favorite for the grand prize.  Presumably the bereaved would provide photographs of the dearly departed, along with other personal details, perhaps even voice recordings, if such are available.  Project Elysium has provided screenshots of people being turned into virtual-reality characters, like the one below:

The company will be releasing promotional videos as early as next week.

Now, it stands to reason that any such facsimiles of real people, especially if they are created from still images, will be pretty rudimentary.  At first.  But as we've seen over and over, once something becomes technologically possible, it becomes sophisticated and streamlined fast.  (Consider how digital music storage and retrieval has changed, from the days of CDs to now, when you can have thousands of songs stored on a device smaller than a matchbox.)  Even if Project Elysium is not very authentic-looking at first, all it has to do is demonstrate that software designers can make it work on some level.

After that, it'll be off to the races.

My general sense is that this crosses some kind of ethical line.  I'm not entirely sure why, other than the "it just ain't right" arguments that devolve pretty quickly into the naturalistic fallacy.  Especially given my atheism, and my hunch that after I die there'll be nothing of my consciousness, why would I care if my wife made an interactive computer model of me to talk to?  If it gives her solace, what's the harm?

I think one consideration is that by doing so, we're not really cheating death.  The virtual-reality model inside the computer isn't me, any more than a photograph or a video clip is.  But suppose we really go off the deep end, here, and consider what it would be like if someone really could emulate the human brain in a machine -- and not just a random brain, but yours?

There's at least a theoretical possibility that you could have a computerized personality that would be completely authentic, with your thoughts, memories, sense of humor, and emotions.  But even given my opinions on the topic of religion and the existence of the soul, there's a part of me that simply rebels at this idea.  Such a creation might look and act like me, but it wouldn't be me.  It might be a convincing facsimile, but that's about it.

But what about the Turing test?  Devised by Alan Turing, the idea of the Turing test for artificial intelligence is that because we don't have direct access to what any other sentient being is experiencing -- each of us is locked inside his/her own skull -- the only way to evaluate whether something is intelligent is the way it acts.  The sensory experience of the brain is a black box.  So if scientists made a Virtual Gordon, who acted on the computer screen in a completely authentic Gordonesque manner, would it not only be intelligent and alive, but... me?

In that way, some form of you might achieve immortality, as long as there was a computer there to host you.

This is moving into some seriously sketchy territory for most of us.  It's not that I'm eager to die; I tend to agree with my dad, who when he was asked what he wanted written on his gravestone, responded, "He's not here yet."  But as hard as it is to lose someone you love, this strikes me as a cheat, a way to deny reality, closing your eyes to part of what it means to be human.

So when I die, let me go.  Give me a Viking funeral -- put me on my canoe, set it on fire, and launch it out into the ocean.  Then my friends and family need to throw a huge party in my honor, with lots of music and dancing and good red wine and drunken debauchery.  And I think I want my epitaph to be the one I created for one of my fictional characters, also a science nerd and a staunch atheist:  "Onward into the next great mystery."

For me, that will be enough.

A conspiracy of engineered failure

Robert Heinlein said, "Never attribute to conspiracy what is adequately explained by stupidity."  I think this is a pretty good rule of thumb.  It's not that conspiracies don't exist; it's more that humans aren't very good at them (e.g. Watergate), and we're much more likely to be acting from venial motives -- greed, duplicity, desire for power -- than we are to be engaging in some kind of deep and sinister plot.

That said, I'm beginning to wonder if the implementation of the Common Core isn't some kind of conspiracy.

Let's start with the fact that the Chief Operating Officer of the South Carolina Department of Education, Elizabeth Carpentier, is threatening parents who allow their children to opt out of state tests with thirty days in jail.

State Superintendent of Education Molly Spearman, asked about Carpentier's statements, declined to comment other than saying that there is "no statutory provision for parents to opt their children out of testing."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, has been making some veiled threats of his own.  "It’s just part of most kids’ education growing up,” he said, regarding the implementation of the Common Core standardized exams.  "Sometimes the adults make a big deal and that creates some trauma for the kids...  We think most states will do [meet their targets for participation].  If states don’t do that, then we have an obligation to step in."

So the implication is that everything is just hunky-dory with the Common Core curriculum and the tests, and the only parents that will opt out are overprotective mommies and daddies who can't stand to see their kids work hard.

Oh, and those mommies and daddies might have to go to jail if they allow their kids to opt out.

So we have threats coming from the powers-that-be, but there's a flipside to this.  If the curriculum and the tests were fair measures of student achievement or teacher competence, the opt-out movement might have less of a basis for their argument.  But the implementation of these exams, and their content, has been riddled with problems.  Psychologist Dr. Charlene Williams writes:

The 6th grade ELA practice performance task for the Smarter Balance was completely inappropriate for 11-12 year olds, requiring them to toggle between several screens (on small Ipad screens), and choose multiple pieces of evidence to evaluate, select, paraphrase, compare and contrast, as well as write a multiparagraph essay. Never mind that while practicing, toggling back to the articles caused the students’ written work on the essay to be erased (lost).

Williams goes on to challenge the exams' validity on every level:

1) There is no proven Construct Validity (does your test measure what you think it measures). 

2) Cut scores are determined by an unknown (arbitrary) process - labeling children as proficient or failing appears to not be based on any scientific process.  It is not scientific to arbitrarily decide what levels of your test scores actually mean in the real world.  Scientific measurement requires cross-validation with external measures that provide evidence for your claims (like grades, or independent in-depth measures of children’s educational achievement in a a smaller sample with highly experienced evaluators). 

3) Computer adaptive tests - there have been many concerns raised about how item difficulty has been decided. Children continue to progress on these tests if they continue to get a certain number the most recent answers correct. Educational measurement specialists (true academically trained professionals) and parents and children have observed that very often items following very difficult questions are significantly easier. This raises concerns that children’s scores are artificially deflated by unscientifically determined item difficulty determinations. 

4) Inter-rater reliability - No checks exist to independently determine whether the scoring administered by these testing companies has truly reliable and valid measurements of children’s answers... The assessments are not verifiable, because they are not permitted to be subject to independent scientific evaluation.

This last point is especially troubling.  Anything we get to hear about the exam content has to be "leaked," because the people who see the exams are prohibited from discussing them.  This mandate comes not from state Departments of Education, but from Pearson Education, the corporation who designs the tests.  Educator Elizabeth Phillips, in an op-ed piece for The New York Times, writes:

I’d like to tell you what was wrong with the tests my students took last week, but I can’t. Pearson’s $32 million contract with New York State to design the exams prohibits the state from making the tests public and imposes a gag order on educators who administer them.  So teachers watched hundreds of thousands of children in grades 3 to 8 sit for between 70 and 180 minutes per day for three days taking a state English Language Arts exam that does a poor job of testing reading comprehension, and yet we’re not allowed to point out what the problems were.

But some educators care more about their students than they do about threats of repercussions by a rich corporation who is pulling the strings of upper-level administration in every state in the United States... and those educators have uncovered some frightening facts.  For example, a teacher who (understandably) wants to remain anonymous performed a reading-level analysis on a passage from the 4th grade ELA assessment, and found that it had a lexile score of 1140 -- corresponding to appropriateness for the average reading ability of an 8th grader.

The skew between the difficulty level of the exam material, and the grade for which it was targeted, prompted New York educator Stephanie Santagada to write a letter to Governor Andrew Cuomo using vocabulary culled directly from the 4th, 6th, and 8th grade reading assessments:

There is a man in Albany, who I surmise, by his clamorous paroxysms, has an extreme aversion to educators.  He sees teachers as curs, or likens them to mangy dogs.  Methinks he suffers from a rare form of psychopathology in which he absconds with our dignity by enacting laws counterintuitive to the orthodoxy of educational leadership.  We have given him sufferance for far too long.  He’s currently taking a circuitous path to DC, but he will no doubt soon find himself in litigious waters.  The time has come to bowdlerize his posits, send him many furlongs away, and maroon him there, maybe Cuba?

So yeah, I'm beginning to think there's more here than simple incompetence.  The people in charge are not stupid, and one thing these people excel at is number crunching.  I flatly refuse to believe that the inclusion of a passage that is four grade levels too hard in the ELA assessment was a simple blunder.  Which leads us into into some scary territory, because that implies that the other problems may not be accidents, either.

But why would Federal and State Departments of Education, with the collusion of a lot of elected officials like our own aforementioned governor, do this?  Cuomo himself tipped their hand earlier this year, when he said that he wanted to change the teacher evaluation system -- because too many teachers were achieving high scores by the previous metric.

So the reason for all this, I believe, is that the powers-that-be are deliberately setting students up to fail, in order to show up public education itself as a failure -- in an effort to destroy the entire edifice. Replacing it, more than likely, with a network of charter schools that are run by privately-chosen (i.e. not elected) boards, and which will have a vested interest in buying in to programs, curricula, and assessments created by for-profit corporations like Pearson.

The whole thing, I think, boils down to money, and who is lining whose pockets.  So in the end, it does turn out to be venial motives -- greed and political power.

I could be wrong.  It might be that what we're looking at is the educational equivalent of the Keystone Kops, running around frantically and bonking into walls and falling over.  That's certainly what it looked like at first.  But now, with the time we've had to smooth over problems, develop exams, streamline administration, we shouldn't be seeing these kind of mistakes.  Giving so many tests might still be a mistake, of course; but the fact that the exams themselves are so deeply, fundamentally, and obviously flawed, coupled with the gag order against discussing them, has the hallmark of deliberate downward manipulation of the scores.

Which means that it is even more important for parents to defy the threats, and opt their children out, and for educators to come forward with the content and administration problems of the exams themselves.

Public education itself might be at stake.

Redemption, retribution, and justice

Yesterday, on an island in Indonesia, at midnight local time and 1 PM Eastern Standard Time, eight men were brought out into a wooded grove one at a time and were executed by a firing squad.  Each one was given the choice of whether to sit or stand, and to have a hood, a blindfold, or nothing at all.  All eight chose nothing, and to look the members of the firing squad in the eye as they died.  Three of the eight executioners had live ammo in their guns; the other five had blanks.  No one knew which guns were which.

When the prisoner was ready, the firing squad took aim at the man's heart.  The command to fire was given, and seconds later, the condemned man was dead.

The crime the eight committed was possession of drugs with the intent to distribute.  Two were members of the infamous "Bali 9" drug trafficking ring.  Each had been caught entering the country with heroin or cocaine.  Four of the men were from Nigeria, two from Australia, one from Brazil, and one from Indonesia.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Most, if not all, of the men had experienced significant personal changes during their four-year stay in prison, while their cases dragged through appeal after appeal.  One, Australian Myuran Sukumaran, spent his time painting; his final paintings were of a heart, and a haunting self-portrait with a black hole in the center of the chest.  The other Australian, Andrew Chan, and one of the Nigerians, Okwudili Ayotanze, became well known for offering solace and counsel to their fellow prisoners.  All appeared completely repentant for what they had done.

Further complicating matters, the Brazilian, Rodrigo Gularte, was a diagnosed schizophrenic, who thought animals could talk back to him and believed that electromagnetic waves were controlling his behavior.

The whole thing brings up a lot of questions about why the judicial system works as it does.  Why do we imprison, and in some cases execute, people who have broken the law?  It seems to me that there are three answers to this question -- and they lead to different answers regarding how we should treat criminal cases.

The first is that justice is retributive.  Some of the oldest known codes of law, such as the Code of Hammurabi, are retributive in nature.  If you cause someone to lose a hand, you should lose your hand.  The basic logic is payback; "you deserved everything you got."

The second is to protect society.  By this standard, two people who commit the same crime should be treated differently depending on how much of a subsequent threat each one represents.  And this is considered in sentencing, at least in the United States; someone who is likely to commit further crimes is often given a harsher sentence.

The third is to set an example.  "See what happened?" this standard says.  "You don't want this to happen to you."  It was for this reason that floggings and executions used to be conducted in public, often in the middle of the town square.  Such events were often widely attended, as peculiar as that may seem to modern sensibilities.  The last public hanging in the United States, of rapist/murderer Rainey Bethea, was attended by 20,000, and was such a media circus that the decision was made to conduct executions behind closed doors from then on.

All of which demands that we consider how to deal with cases of serious crimes.  What the eight men  did was terrible; heroin and cocaine are horrible chemicals that destroy lives.  From the standpoint of retribution, the sentence was fair.  And the publicity surrounding the case certainly should act as a deterrent; no one could fail to be moved by the photographs of the hysterical family members of the executed men, and it's hard to imagine anyone considering bringing drugs into Indonesia not being given pause.

But there are still questions.  If the idea of justice is to safeguard society, the focus should be on rehabilitation, not retribution.  From what I've read, certainly Chan and Sukumaran were rehabilitated, and not only would have been unlikely to do anything of the sort again, but might well have been powerful spokesmen against the illegal drug trade.  Apparently a change of heart is what saved Malaysian drug trafficker Yong Vui Kong from being hanged in Singapore; his sentence was changed to life in prison and fifteen strokes of the cane because he had "seen the error of his ways and had repented."

As far as rehabilitation goes, however, you have to wonder how effective that usually is even in non-capital cases.  Recidivism rates are sky-high.  A study by the National Institute of Justice of over 404,000 prisoners in the United States found that 76.6% of them were re-arrested within five years, over half of those arrests occurring within the first year after release.

Add to this the fact that the execution of drug traffickers has barely put a dent in the Southeast Asian drug trade; the region is the second biggest producer of heroin in the world (after Afghanistan).  And the people most often caught are the couriers, who are usually young, poor, and desperate.  The kingpins, the ones who are controlling the operations and getting rich from the profits, are seldom ever brought to justice.

None of that mattered.  Indonesian President Joko Widodo said from the beginning that there would be no clemency granted.  And there wasn't.

I'm not sure why this case resonated so strongly with me.  I was fairly certain what the outcome would be, so it wasn't over any particular curiosity over what would happen.  I think it may have been the personal angle -- I read articles containing interviews with Chan's girlfriend, whom he married a few months ago while he was already in prison.  I saw galleries of Sukumaran's paintings.  I read the statements by the lawyers of the eight prisoners and the pleas by leaders of their home countries to spare them.  I thought about the ethics of executing someone like Rodrigo Gularte, who had a serious mental illness.

And yesterday, while I was teaching my Critical Thinking class, eight men halfway around the world were shot through the heart.  In the final analysis, I have no real idea whether this was just or unjust, ethical or unethical.  Nor can I decide whether President Widodo should have considered any other factors in his decision to allow the executions to proceed.

All I can say is that I'm glad that I will never be in a position to make such a judgment.

Bringing down the false flag

Of all the nutty beliefs I've examined over the years, the one that I have the hardest time understanding is the whole "false flag" thing.

The idea here is that the government (usually the United States government, although other countries have been accused of this as well) manufactures calamities in order to distract the citizens ("sheeple") from what they're really trying to do.  Their actual aims usually involve establishing a fascist dictatorship, disarming everyone, rounding up and executing civilians, and other special offers.

The fact that none of the latter ever happens doesn't seem to matter much.  Each time there's a new tragedy, raving wackmobiles like Alex Jones start yammering on about how it never really happened, it was just a staged event with "crisis actors" designed to divert your attention.  Maybe they really think by making all this shit up (what they would call "focusing your attention on reality") they're preventing the Bad Guys from killing us all.  Maybe they picture themselves as the dam holding back the flood, that without their brave reporting, we'd all find ourselves in FEMA death camps.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Or maybe they're just loons.  I dunno.

So, here are a few things that are said to be "false flags:"

• The Sandy Hook massacre
• The Columbine shootings
• The Boston Marathon bombing
• Hurricane Katrina
• The Bali bombing
• 9/11
• The crash of Malaysia Airlines Flights MH17 and 370
• Hurricane Sandy
• The recent Ebola outbreak in Africa
• The riots in Ferguson, Missouri
• The riots and looting in Egypt following the fall of Hosni Mubarak
• The entire situation in the Ukraine

Yes, you're understanding this correctly; to the false-flagazoids, either (1) these events never happened, or (2) they were pre-arranged and orchestrated by the government for their own purposes.

But what about eyewitnesses, you may be asking, not to mention victims?

That you'd even ask the question means you've "drunk the KoolAid."  The so-called eyewitnesses and victims are either government plants, or else entirely fictitious.

And the conspiracy theorists work fast.  Whenever a story hits the news, you can almost set your watch and time how long it'll take before false-flag accusations start hitting the conspiracy websites.  It's only taken a day or so for the two current tragedies -- the Nepal earthquake and the Baltimore riots -- to be declared false flags by these crazies.  (Don't believe me?  Go here and here, if you can stand to.)

So as I'm considering this whole bizarre phenomenon, the thought crossed my mind; do these people believe that nothing bad ever happens unless it's caused by the government?  Or maybe that nothing bad ever happens at all, given that they seem to think that most of the awful things in the news were invented by the media?

So it occurred to me that maybe this was the common thread.  If you believe in false flags, it gives you a number of comforting fictions to fall back on:

1. Most of the catastrophes that get reported aren't real.
2. Even the ones that are real were staged by the government, so there's always a faceless entity there to blame if you don't like what's going on.
3. Because you are aware of the ruse, it means that you are in the know, i.e., you're not a "sheeple."

But I think there's a fourth underlying cause, here.  If you attribute everything down to your hangnails to the Evil Illuminati, you don't ever have to look at the underlying causes of the things that could be addressed.  If Sandy Hook and Columbine were fictional, then we never have to discuss the American attitude toward guns.  If Ferguson and Baltimore were staged by the police, then we can avoid talking about race and the enculturation of privilege.  If 9/11 was an inside job, we never have to consider the role that American foreign policy has had in the instability in the Middle East, nor our support of the repressive theocracy in Saudi Arabia because of our reliance on oil.

And if we disbelieve in Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and the Nepal earthquake, we never have to confront the fact that the world is a big, scary, chaotic place, where terrible things sometimes just happen for no apparent reason other than the steering currents in the south Atlantic and the movement of tectonic plates under the Himalayas.  It means we can avoid dealing with our own fear, accepting our own mortality, understanding that we're always insecure, always in danger, and that none of us is going to get out of here alive.

But the blindness comes with a cost, and it isn't just the terrible cost of buying a lie instead of seeking the truth.  The worst part of all of this is that is absolves us of the responsibility of doing something to offer aid to the victims of these catastrophes.  We can sit back, secure in the superiority of our false knowledge, saying that we don't have to reach out and help anyone, because there's no one there to help.

To which I say: fuck that.  I haven't been able to find anywhere to which you can donate for the victims of the Baltimore riots -- there may be campaigns started in the next days, so keep your eyes open.  But here are two to help the victims of the Nepalese earthquake -- an IndieGoGo campaign to raise money for shelters and medical aid, and one of my favorite charities, Médecins Sans Frontières.  Please consider donating to either or both.  

Because despite what the conspiracy theorists would have you believe, compassion and love will always beat suspicion, hatred, and fear.

My will be done

I was raised Roman Catholic, and considered myself Catholic for the first twenty or so years of my life.  I followed the precepts to the best of my ability, went to church every Sunday and to confession regularly, and in general did everything I could to be a good Catholic.

My abandonment of the Faith Of My Fathers didn't happen all at once, with some kind of scales-falling-from-the-eyes experience that left me realizing that I was on the wrong path.  But even back then, there were some signs and portents that were indicative of the kinds of questions I'd be asking in a few years, questions that admitted no easy answers, and even seemed to stump some of the more learned of the church leaders.  And one of these had to do with the nearly constant attribution of events and decisions to "God's Will."

I recall thinking, "How do you know what god's will is?  You're so certain you know the mind of god?"  It seemed to me to be the height of arrogance.  I've always felt unsure about just about everything I do and think, especially my position apropos of the daily chaos I see around me.  To claim that my opinions, biases, and judgments are the same as those held by the eternal and infallible creator of the universe seemed to me even then to be the worst sort of spiritual pride, which as I recall is said to Cometh Before A Fall.

The Seven Deadly Sins by François-Marie Balanant (ca. 1785) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I noticed too how gentle, kind people tended to attribute gentleness and kindness to god, and harsh, judgmental people imagined god as an inflexible, rule-based micromanager.  And suddenly it occurred to me: these people are creating god in their own image, not the other way around.

In other words, they're making it all up.

It struck me as bizarre then, and it still does today, that people are so quick to put their own words in god's mouth.  I found two appalling examples of this tendency this past weekend.  So let me tell you about them, and see what you think.

In the first, we had another example of god prohibiting catering to gays, this time a company in Oregon called "Sweet Cakes by Melissa."  The owners, Aaron and Melissa Klein, refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple, and were sued for discrimination.  The judge found in favor of the gay couple and fined the Kleins $135,000.

So the Kleins launched a GoFundMe drive to raise money to pay the fine.  They'd made it to $109,000 -- which is appalling enough in and of itself; didn't Jesus say to care for the poor, not the bigots? -- when GoFundMe cancelled the drive.  They cited their policy, stated clearly on their site, that you cannot use GoFundMe to raise money to pay for the repercussions of breaking the law.

And Melissa Klein wrote on her Facebook page, "Evidently Go fund me [sic] has shut down our Go fund me page and will not let us raise any money.  Satan's really at work but I know our God has a plan and wins in the end!"

So these people are so sure of themselves and their beliefs that they not only attribute what they're doing to the will of god, but claim that anyone who gets in their way must be motivated by the devil?

Not to mention the fact that was pointed out more than once to the Kleins on Twitter, namely that they had declined service to someone who they disagreed with, and then when GoFundMe did exactly the same thing to them, they claimed that GoFundMe must be doing the work of Satan.

In the second, and even more horrifying, example we have a prominent Christian preacher who felt it necessary to express his opinion about the devastating earthquakes in Nepal, which caused untold millions of dollars worth of damage, the loss of irreplaceable historical buildings, and worst of all, a death toll of 3,200 that is likely to continue rising.  Pastor Tony Miano, of the evangelical ministry group Cross Encounters, went on his Twitter (@TonyMiano) and responded to the devastation thusly:

Praying 4 the lost souls in Nepal.  Praying not a single destroyed pagan temple will b rebuilt & the people will repent/receive Christ. 

Seriously?  That's your response?  You are so certain that your opinions are a perfect reflection of your god's wishes that you are willing to say publicly that everything in Nepal will be just hunky-dory if everyone converts to Christianity and puts churches in place of the Buddhist temples that were destroyed?

It's not only the heartlessness of this comment that gets me; it's the mind-bending arrogance.  "I understand the universe perfectly," Miano seems to be saying.  "All you have to do is agree with me, and you'll be agreeing with god."

Which seems to be the same thing the Kleins were saying, and the same thing a lot of the extremely religious claim.  After all, what else are the mullahs doing in the Middle East but saying that their biases regarding the treatment of apostates and the place of women and rules regarding sexual purity are a flawless mirror of the will of Allah?

It was exactly this sort of thing that struck me thirty years ago.  Because that's the commonality, isn't it?  "Do what I say.  You're confused, whereas I know what god's opinion is about everything."

Like I said, the realization I had when I was 21 or so didn't lead to an immediate loss of faith.  I had been steeped in Catholicism too long just to give it up in one fell swoop.  So I limped along for a while, but eventually came to the conclusion first that if there was a god, it was impossible to know his will -- and finally that there was no evidence of a god at all.  The whole thing began, though, with my puzzlement over how the priests could be so sure that they knew what god wanted, not only for themselves, but for everyone else.

And nowhere, I think, does this hypocrisy show quite so clearly as in the coalescence of one's own opinions with those of an almighty deity.

The religious call this "faith."  But how is this not simply a bad case of megalomania?

How to make yourself disappear

I've always found it intriguing how easily tricked our perceptual systems are.  Not only is this capacity for "brain failure" (as Neil deGrasse Tyson calls it) the cause of most optical illusions, it also highlights how important it is to have science as a protocol, and measuring devices to collect the data.

To once again quote the eminent Dr. Tyson, "Machines don't care what side of the bed they got up on.  They don't care if they just got in an argument with their spouse.  They don't care if they've had their morning coffee.  They'll get it right."

And yet, we still walk around with the feeling that what we're experiencing is the world as it is.  How many times have you heard people say, "I know it happened, I saw it!"?  But if you want to punch another neat hole in your confidence that your brain's view of the world is infallible, consider a piece of research just conducted by Arvid Guterstam of the Karolinska Institutet of Stockholm.

You might have heard about earlier experiments that convinced volunteers that a rubber hand was theirs, and one that extended that perception to the entire body, creating the illusion that a mannequin was actually the participant's body.  Now, Guterstam has tricked his test subjects into thinking that their body was still there -- but invisible.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

In his experiment, subjects were wearing virtual reality goggles that interfaced with a set of cameras, so that what they saw was what the camera was pointed at.  In this case, the camera was pointed at an empty space.  The experimenter and a helper then used a pair of soft brushes, and one of them stroked the volunteer's bare belly at the same time as the other, standing in the camera's field of view, stroked the air over and over in a way suggestive that there was a body there that was invisible.

If the movements of the brushes were synchronized properly, the volunteer got the distinct sensation that the camera was pointed at his/her body -- but it was completely invisible.

"We put a lot of effort into perfecting the actual brushstrokes," Guterstam said.

What is interesting is how simple the protocol was, and how convincing the illusion that resulted.  "I am very susceptible to illusions, so for me it worked," Guterstam said.  "You have a vivid sensation of having a body, but it's not directly visible.  I don't know what it would feel like to have a phantom body, but I imagine that's what it'd feel like."

The research team then performed their experiment on a group of twenty test subjects.  75% reported feeling a powerful illusion of invisibility.  "Most were surprised, and some started giggling.  It's a very unnatural, unexpected experience," Guterstam said.  "It's the first time that anyone has shown that you can embody a full invisible body."

If it's hard to believe that your brain could be so easily tricked into accepting such a bizarre view of its own body, Guterstam agrees. "The invisible body illusion is definitely pushing the boundaries of what the brain can accept as part of the bodily self," he said. "(But) it tells us that body representation in the brain is even more malleable than previously thought."

Guterstam, being a neuropsychologist, immediately thought of clinical applications of this malleability.  I, not being a neuropsychologist, immediately thought of how we could turn this into virtual reality for entertainment purposes.  If a digital camera and a pair of brushes are all that's needed to twist our perceptions of reality in such a fundamental way, how much more would it take to drop a person into a completely invented world, in which we could interact and perform in ways not limited by our actual physical capabilities?

Holodeck, here we come.

I know some of my readers are probably appalled by all this -- the idea that our mental abilities are so unreliable, so easily fooled.  Myself, I think it's kind of cool.  For one thing, I never had that much confidence in my own brain to begin with.  I've always recognized the shifting sands on which my consciousness rests, dependent as it is on my moods, focus, and level of fatigue, and even such factors as whether I've eaten lunch or had my required two cups of coffee or just caught a glimpse of an attractive and scantily-clad woman.  Now, we might be able to harness this plasticity to expand our own perception into realms that were previously inaccessible, using our capacity for "brain failures" to experience things our real perception never could.

How awesome is that?