Skeptico

Girls Gone Wicca

Apparently it’s not Harry Potter’s fault any more. It’s Buffy’s fault. Yes, 50,000 women have stopped going to church and it’s all the faulty of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, according to a recent study published in Women and Religion in the West. The study's author Dr. Kristin Aune, a sociologist at the University of Derby, is quoted saying:

"Because of its focus on female empowerment, young women are attracted by Wicca, popularized by the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In short, women are abandoning the church."

Well, somehow I’m not convinced of this. First, Willow, not Buffy, was the witch. The report doesn’t mention 50,000 women patrolling graveyards at night with wooden stakes. Perhaps if women are abandoning the church, it’s because of some other reason.

Second, neither the summary of the actual study nor its index mention Buffy at all. Wicca is mentioned (it just says “see spirituality"), but it doesn’t seem to be a major part of the study. So I wonder if bringing Buffy into it isn’t just a way to drum up publicity for this otherwise distinct minority interest $100 book. (If so, it seems to have worked.)

Anyway, I won’t be convinced until I hear of 50,000 boys leaving the church to get into construction so they can emulate Xander. Now that would be surprising, if not exactly empowering.

 

Hey, Jesus was a carpenter you know.

Carnival of the Godless

Just posted at Oz Atheist's Weblog.

Skeptics' Circle

The latest Skeptics' Circle has just been posted at Reduce To Common Sense.  It's a special Olympics version.  (That came out wrong.  Perhaps it needed a comma?)

Edger - New Atheist Blog

The Edger is a new student blog promoting "secularism, atheism, science, humanism , and the cosmos".  From an initial look it seems to have some very good writing.  Two posts  initially stand out for me, the first being A People’s Guide to the Catholic League:

It takes some practice to get used to reading the Catholic League’s nauseatingly self-promoting, whiny press releases, but once repetition vaccinates you against the obnoxious professional victimhood of its patriarch Bill Donohue, you see that certain patterns start to emerge. One thing you notice is that even though the League’s mission statement identifies it as a “civil rights organization,” the League does not appear to have ever done anything that could even be mistaken for “civil rights” work at any point in its history.

Donohue is certainly a professional victim, as I have written before.  The other post I especially liked, and on a subject I wish I'd thought of, is How to criticize the “New Atheists:” a seven-step guide to writing the perfect reactionary hissy-fit.

...unlike you, the New Atheists have not taken the decades of study required to lodge yourself in an obscure nitch of your religion’s ivory tower to which nobody listens except the others trapped in the same nitch, you are understandably infuriated that Hitchens never once mentions Eric Rust’s clever interpretation of Tillich’s commentary on the epistemology of empiricism as applied to the miraculous, or that Harris never even bothers to set himself against every single sentence of The City of God. Sure, nobody cares about what theologians have to say, and their commentary is wholly irrelevant if there isn’t a God in the first place, but so what? You’re a religious writer; what do you need with honesty?

With almost a dozen young writers it's a very professional looking site, well worth adding to your RSS feed.

Negative Energy Research

Beware of skeptics - we wield amazing powers!

From last week's Skeptics' Circle and Hyphoid Logic I found this story from the St. Petersburg Times, reporting on our awesome ability to wield negative energy:

Virginia Levy walked into the library downtown to prove she was psychic. A group of doubters called the Tampa Bay Skeptics questioned the claims of people like her and had set up a challenge. Levy came to meet it. There sat a row of boxes. Could she guess which contained crystals? She was given seven chances. Seven times she failed. It wasn't inability that did her in, she said recently, the bitterness still evident in her voice. It was the bespectacled host of the project, Gary Posner, an unbeliever who she said patronized her, creating an atmosphere filled with negative energy. She purposely chose the wrong box each time, she said, then left in a huff. [My bold.]

She also explained exactly how we do it:

"What they're doing is using the laws of attraction," Levy said. "They're actually using the same powers that psychics use, except in reverse."

Of course – we’re using The Secret. It all makes sense now.

There have been numerous claims by psychics and parapsychologists, that skeptics’ negative energy causes psi experiments to fail, but as far as I know, there has been no actual research on this subject.  This is an “anomaly” that I believe urgently needs rectifying.  So, I hereby propose a new avenue for psi research - testing skeptics’ ability to wield negative energy.

The Protocol

Here’s an idea of how it would work. We start with some standard psi tests – talking to the dead, remote viewing, Ganzfeld-type judging of target pictures (Zener cards are so 1950s), Rupert Sheldrake’s staring experiments - you name it. These tests are performed in a room in front of a one way mirror. Behind the mirror, either there is a skeptic watching the experiment or there isn’t, but double-blind controls insure none of the experimenters or subjects know which. The objective is to determine whether or not the skeptic’s presence (and therefore negative energy) influences the results of the experiment.

If the test is successful, we would move to Phase 2.  This could include answering the following additional questions:

1. Does the skeptic still negatively influence the test if he is behind the mirror but not observing the test (he’s reading a book, say, or listening to his iPod)?
2. Does the skeptic still negatively influence the test if he watches the experiment on a closed circuit TV on a different floor in the building?  What about is he's across town?  Or in another city?  Does the effect stay constant regardless of the distance?
3. What if the skeptic and his negative energy is shielded in some way – for example, inside a Faraday cage?
4. Does the skeptic still negatively influence the test if he watches it later on a videotape? In other words, does watching the experiment on tape retroactively alter the success of the test?  (Some have claimed psi works this way.  Seriously.)
5. What if two tests are made and taped, and only one is viewed at random by the skeptic? Will the experimenters able to predict which tape is randomly selected in the future based on the psychic’s test results in the present?
6. If multiple psychics are performing the same test at the same time, will their combined psychic abilities overwhelm the skeptic’s negative energy?

All important questions and the answers could be groundbreaking. And if successful, it could be a legitimate way for skeptics to apply for Randi’s million, or at least receive some payment from psi researchers for taking part in their experiments.

Sheldrake, Schwartz – I’m available.

Must Pay for GM Seeds?

Here’s a question that has always puzzled me. It’s one of the arguments the anti genetic engineering people frequently put forward as a reason we should not plant GM crops. You can read a good example of this argument from Meredith Niles of the Cool Foods Campaign, writing about Prince Charles’ recent anti-GM rant, in the blog Grist. In response to a comment from me, Niles replied (in part):

Considering that GMO seeds are yet another agricultural input that farmers must pay for year after year, rather than saving their seeds, GMO crops may be contributing to [farmers’ financial problems] significantly.

Note the wording, farmers must pay for GM seeds year after year, rather than save seeds. Must. Apparently they have no choice. Which is funny, because I didn’t think that farmers were compelled to use GM seeds. I replied, surely they only "must" pay for them if they want them, and they must only want them if the return is worth the financial investment? Why would they buy GMO seeds unless they are better off doing so?

I haven’t yet received a reply from Niles, but as it’s such a common argument used by the anti-GM crowd I thought I’d throw it open to the masses. Please tell me, why would farmers continue to pay for GM seeds if they don’t get back that monetary investment either in reduced costs (labor, herbicides) or in increased yields? Because it seems to me, unless farmers are just hopeless at basic arithmetic, they would revert to non-GM seeds the moment they realize they are losing out. But I’m willing to accept I might be missing something here, so please tell me exactly what I am missing – why would farmers continue to pay for GM seeds if doing so reduced their overall profits and/or increases their debt?

Prayer Fails Again

See the gas price board on the right? This is from April, aka “the good old days,” when regular was under $4.00 a gallon even in San Francisco. Back then, someone called Rocky Twyman decided the solution to high gas prices was to ask God to lower them:

Twyman […] staged a pray-in at a San Francisco Chevron station on Friday [April 25], asking God for cheaper gas. He did the same thing in the nation's Capitol on Wednesday [April 23], with volunteers from a soup kitchen joining in.

He repeated the performance again on May 28. Well guess what, he was successful! Yes, according to The BBC, Twyman is claiming:

…the credit for the recent sharp drop in the US price of petrol.

Rocky Twyman, 59, a veteran community campaigner, started Pray At The Pump meetings at petrol stations in April.

Since then, the average price of what the US calls gasoline has fallen from more than $4 a gallon to $3.80.

Well then, I guess it’s time we atheists admitted we were wrong and that God really does exist. If prayers really do work, we must have been wrong all this time, yes? Let’s take a look at the (no doubt) solid evidence that prayer worked in this case. I got this graph from GasBuddy.com, showing the prices in San Francisco and DC (the places where he prayed back in April), as well as the US average:

Click the graph for a bigger image.  I’ve added a couple of arrows to indicate when the prayers took place. And as you can see, gas prices came down immediately after the prayer...  er, rose despite the prayers.  Actually, rose even more steeply immediately after the prayers on May 28. And they’re still higher than they were at any time before the prayers started.

You know, looking at this graph, it’s almost as if prayer is completely useless at influencing gas prices.

Prince Charles Wrong Again

He's at it again.  More anti-science drivel.  The Telegraph just reported Prince Charles warns GM crops risk causing the biggest-ever environmental disaster.  This from a twit who thinks that crops should be planted according to astrological signs.  Someone who believes homeopathy works.   Sigh.  Here he goes:

[Prince Charles] accused firms of conducting a "gigantic experiment I think with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong".

"Why else are we facing all these challenges, climate change and everything?".

Well, it's certainly not because of GM crops that have only been planted for, oh, the last ten years or so.  So really no connection there.  It gets worse though:

"Look at India's Green Revolution. It worked for a short time but now the price is being paid.

"I have been to the Punjab where you have seen the disasters that have taken place as result of the over demand on irrigation because of the hybrid seeds and grains that have been produced which demand huge amounts of water.

Without the green revolution he would have been seeing instead, starvation on a massive scale.  Would he prefer that?  Only worked "for a short time"?  Like 40 years?  Easy to say when you've never faced starvation, or even moderate hunger.

What follows would be comical, if this nonsense wasn't getting so much publicity:

"Look at western Australia. Huge salinisation problems. I have been there. Seen it. Some of the excessive approaches to modern forms of agriculture."

But this is not a result of the dreaded GM.  As was reported by EMBO in PubMed, Salt of the Earth:

[Secondary salinisation] is particularly true for Western Australia, where the fundamental cause of salinity is the replacement of perennial, deep-rooted native vegetation with shallow-rooted annual crops such as wheat. The problem is further exacerbated by primary salinisation where salt in sea spray is carried inland by prevailing winds and deposited by rainfall at a level of up to 200 kg/ha/year in some coastal areas.  [My bold.]

So it's not GM that is causing the salinization, it's growing non-indigenous crops.  Admittedly that may be a product of over aggressive modern farming, but certainly not GM.  In fact, as suggested by the above report, GM may actually be able to help, by engineering crops that are not only resistant to high salt levels, but that may actually remove excessive salt from the ground:

‘this is potentially a very important discovery which suggests that under the high salt growth conditions used by Blumwald, over-expression of a single protein can produce salt tolerant plants which retain the ability to produce edible crops’. Not only do the tomatoes thrive in the saline conditions, they also actively take up excess salt into their leaves. The possibilities, therefore, for bioremediation are obvious and indeed, Blumwald revealed that results in press show that plants can accumulate up to 6–7% of their dry weight as sodium. ‘A farmer can clean the soil, grow a crop and make a profit all at the same time’  [My bold.]

So GM could be a solution to the salinization problem in Western Australia then?  Well, not exactly since in 2004, Western Australia banned all GM crops.  Hum.  So why does Charles think GM is responsible for the salinization?  Oh I forgot.  GM opponents don't need a rational reason to be against GM.  And for proof of that you have to look no further than the last three paragraphs of The Telegraph article:

Only two weeks ago British GM researchers lobbied ministers for their crops to be kept in high-security facilities or in fields at secret locations across the country to prevent them from being attacked and destroyed.

They spoke out after protesters ripped up crops in one of only two GM trials to be approved in Britain this year.

Scientists claim the repeated attacks on their trials are stifling vital research to evaluate whether GM crops can reduce the cost and environmental impact of farming and whether they will grow better in harsh environments where droughts have devastated harvests.

And there you have it.  GM opponents are not interested in any actual tests to see if GM is safe or not.  On the contrary, they want to sabotage the trials - any trials - that might just possibly contradict  their religious insistence that all GM farming must immediately stop.  Any person genuinely interested in the truth about GM would welcome more independent scientific trials that would let us learn more about GM technology - both the good and the bad.  Anyone genuinely interested in the truth about GM would not be frightened by what such trials might reveal.  GM opponents are just plain anti-science - they start with the conclusion they want and then go look for the evidence to fit.  Rarely a reliable method.  And Prince Charles, with this ignorant tirade, just fuels more nonsense.

Charles is quoted in the article saying, "if that is the future, count me out."  If only we could, Charlie, if only we could.

Update August 14

See today's rebuttal from the Financial Times.  Especially see the last three paragraphs where they skewer both his Indian and his Western Australian scare nonsense.

Skeptics' Circle

It's already Thursday in Australia (take that Flat Earthers), which means tomorrow's Skeptic' Circle is already out at City of Skeptics.  You won't be able to read it until it's Thursday in your timezone though.  What, you don't believe me?  Test out the link, then.

Wheatgrass - Still Can't Digest It

Last week I watched the History Channel’s second installment of Evolution – this time on the evolution of guts. Pharyngula has a write up of the episode. One item that especially interested me was the bit about how cows and other ruminants evolved to eat grass. I’ve been involved over the years in several debates about whether humans can gain any benefit from drinking wheatgrass, as is sold at Jamba Juice and other health food outlets. As I wrote in Wheatgrass madness over three years ago, I don’t think we can, primarily because we can’t digest grass. The presenters of this program appeared to agree with me.

The first point the presenter made was that grass is a low-quality food – something that seems inconsistent with the claims of wheatgrass proponents that somehow wheatgrass is “superfood”. Its low quality is probably one reason cows have to eat so much of it – watch them and that’s all they do all day. It seems unlikely one small 2oz shot would make much difference, even if we could absorb its nutrients.

The second point was that only ruminants can digest grass, and I see no reason wheatgrass should be an exception. I’ve had several wheatgrass proponents respond that the juicing process breaks down the cell walls to make the nutrients available to humans, but the History Channel program made it clear there’s more to it than that. To demonstrate this they showed a surgically fistulated cow – a cow with a surgically implanted hole in its side that allows researchers to get their hands right into its gut. It sounds a little disgusting (and looks even more so - see the picture on the right), but apparently the cow is fine (although to be honest, no one actually asked the cow what it thought). In the TV program they showed you the inside of the cow’s gut through the fistula, and someone actually put a hand in to withdraw some of the partially fermented grass. (Ew!) Anyway, the conclusion was that the gut of the cow, in addition to containing unique bacteria that are necessary to break down the cellulose to smaller molecules, also acts as a fermentation vat for the grass-digestion process. This lengthy fermentation process produces cellulase enzymes that break down the cellulose. And according to The New Scientist, this fermentation process is necessarily slow to prolong contact with the microbes so they have enough time to do their job. So not only does it seem unlikely that humans can get any benefit from wheatgrass, even cows don’t get an immediate benefit – it takes days fermenting. Claims of an “instant high” or that its nutrients are “assimilated into the blood in about 20 minutes”, are clearly false.

From Anatomy and Physiology of Animals/The Gut and Digestion:

Ruminants swallow the grass they graze almost without chewing and it passes down the oesophagus to the rumen and reticulum. Here liquid is added and the muscular walls churn the food. These chambers provide the main fermentation vat of the ruminant stomach. Here bacteria and single-celled animals start to act on the cellulose plant cell walls. These organisms break down the cellulose to smaller molecules that are absorbed to provide the cow or sheep with energy. In the process, the gases methane and carbon dioxide are produced. These cause the “burps” you may hear cows and sheep making.

Not only do the micro-organisms break down the cellulose but they also produce the vitamins E, B and K for use by the animal. Their digested bodies provide the ruminant with the majority of its protein requirements.

Not only do I see no reason to modify my original wheatgrass post, this Evolution program seemed to confirm what I originally thought, namely that wheatgrass is useless as food for humans.

Wheatgrass Myths v. Facts

From the above, I think we can say that most of the favorable claims for wheatgrass are myths at best.  Some facts about wheatgrass:

1. Wheatgrass is a low quality food that does not contain anything even remotely close to "all of the vitamins and most of the minerals we need".  (See Jamba Juice's wheatgrass nutrition data: 7% daily values (%DV) of Vitamin C; 10% iron; zero percent of everything else.  Zero!  Sheesh - eat an orange.)
2. Wheatgrass does not contain enzymes that aid human digestion. Any enzymes that wheatgrass contains are enzymes that help wheatgrass metabolize its food; wheatgrass enzymes do not help you digest wheatgrass or anything else.  (They may both be called "enzymes", but they are different molecules.)
3. Special microbes and enzymes are necessary in the gut to break down the cellulose in grass.  Humans do not have these enzymes, and so humans can't digest grass, whether it is juiced first or not.
4. The digestion process, even in ruminants, is necessarily slow. This means that (a) human digestion would not be slow enough to digest wheatgrass (even if human guts had the necessary microbes, which they don't), and (b) if it was that slow (and had the microbes), wheatgrass would still not be absorbed into the body "within 20 minutes" as is claimed.
5. Likewise, claims of a "high" after drinking wheatgrass are due either to the power of suggestion or some physiological reaction due to the body not being able to digest what it was just fed.
6. Because it cannot be digested, wheatgrass cannot possibly be an energizer, build your blood (whatever that means), cleanse your body, or do any of the other magical things claimed for it.

So there you have it.  On the plus side, aren't you impressed I didn't use any version of "Holy Cow" in the headline?

You charge how much for 2 oz!?

SCAMpedia

From Claus Larsen I just learned that quack homeopath (OK, some redundancy there) "Doctor" Manish Bhatia has started a Wiki to provide a forum for uncritical information on Supplementary, Complementary and Alternative Medicine (SCAM) - Wiki4CAM.  It's an online encyclopedia for Complementary & Alternative Medicine!  A Conservapedia for medical woo!  Apparently he has been sending round an email to drum up support and get input from fellow quacks in any and all fields of quackery. 

His actual email follows, with my translations into reality-based language:

Do you know that nearly all Complementary & Alternative Medicine (CAM) articles on Wikipedia, including the one that you practice, are heavily biased against CAM therapies? Everything that does not fall into the realm of modern medicine has been labeled as pseudo-scientific or unscientific at Wikipedia.

Our therapies are not backed by scientific evidence, and in many cases are actually proven by science to be nonsense.  Wikipedia reports these facts.

Wikipedia is among the top 10 websites globally. Through it millions of people who use internet to search for alternative medicine are being systematically exposed to anti-CAM data. At the time when the world is rushing towards alternative medicine, the effort to sabotage the alternative medicine cannot be ignored.

This threat to our profits cannot be ignored.  We make our living from pushing this crap, remember.

To counter this misinformation, we need a place where the CAM community can build its own knowledge base without the undue interference of skeptics. We need a place where the CAM practitioners themselves write articles and create a true picture of its history, development, efficacy and positive research.

To continue making money from this scam, we need to be able to write about it as though it were real, without anyone demanding evidence that it is, in fact, real.

To ensure that the alternative medicines is not discredited or disputed unfairly and to create a true encyclopedia for Complementary & Alternative Medicine (CAM), Hpathy.com, world’s leading homeopathy portal, is announcing a parallel wiki project at www.wiki4cam.org

We invite you to register at wiki4cam and help us build true information about the CAM modality that you practice.

I can't write all this crap myself - I need you to write some crap too!

If you are a School/College of any CAM therapy or if you are a CAM practitioner and if you are concerned about the anti-CAM propaganda, take up the responsibility for creating articles about your CAM therapy at Wiki4CAM. Do not think that someone else will do it. It is YOUR responsibility to actively participate in building a true information base about the CAM modality that your practice and teach!

Please visit www.wiki4cam.org now and find out why the CAM community needs to come together and take charge of its own content.

We request you to forward this information about Wiki4CAM.org to all you alternative medicine friends practicing Homeopathy, Ayurveda, Naturopathy, TCM, Herbalism, EFT or any other CAM modality. Wiki4CAM is meant for the whole CAM community.

And it doesn't matter what from of SCAM you practice - anything goes.  I won't ask you for evidence your crap works as long as you don't ask me for evidence my crap works.  

(Translation ends.)

Manish Bhatia is a homeopath, and only motivated by the fact that (so he claims) homeopathy is bleeding to death (we wish).  He feels that if he can rope in other non evidence based therapists, he can make a better case.  Or something.  The really telling thing about this, in my view, is how uncritically these SCAM artists will accept the daft claims of any and all other SCAM artists.  Just look at the list of therapies that are intended to be covered:

Acupressure | Acupuncture | Anthroposophic medicine | Applied Kinesiology | Aromatherapy | Ayurveda
Bach Flower | Bowen Technique
Chelation Therapy | Chiropractic | Chromotherapy | Craniosacral Therapy
Dowsing
Emotional Freedom technique (EFT) | External Enhanced Counter Pulsation (EECP)
Fasting | Faith Healing
Iridology | Isopathy
Quigong
Herbalism | Homeopathy | Hydrotherapy
Magnetotherapy | Meditation | Mud Therapy | Music Therapy
Naturopathy
Orthomolecular medicine | Osteopathy
Pranic healing
Reflexology | Reiki
Shamanic Healing | Shiatsu | Siddha
Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) | Transendental Meditation
Unani | Urine Therapy
Yoga

Is there any form of woo that they will not include uncritically and without the need for one shred of evidence that it works?  (Rhetorical question.)  Look, he even includes drinking your own urine.  You know, it's almost as if once you abandon rationality, and the requirement for evidence before you accept something, you will accept absolutely anything.  

 

 

In my hands I hold a paper which contains all the evidence that homeopathy works.

Criss Angel Mind Cheat

I was really disappointed in Criss Angel and in the stunt he pulled on the live “Mindfreak” show last week. (I only just watched my DVR of the show – it was live for me.) Of course, we know that Angel pulls camera tricks, and that all his “live” acts are not actually totally live and unedited. Well, it seems obvious to me, anyway. But he went up a lot in my estimation last year when he called out pretend psychic Jim Callahan on live TV. Anyone who shows up one of these frauds on live TV must be OK, you would think. But what to make of someone who doesn’t show much integrity himself?

SPOLIER ALERT

SPOILERS FOLLOW. If you haven’t seen the show and don’t want the ending spoiled, don’t read any further.

OK, this is what happened. The setup is that Criss is handcuffed to the balcony of a building that is going to be demolished exactly four minutes after Criss starts his escape. He has to escape from the handcuffs, open several locked doors, and get to the waiting helicopter on the roof before the building explodes. What we are shown via the fixed cameras left in the building, is that Criss is still in the building, unable to open the last door, and fails to reach the roof in time and the building explodes with him in it. A few minutes later, Criss is shown, covered in dust, emerging from the rubble, as though he had been in the building and survived the demolition. Obviously, this was faked.

What we actually saw, and what was obviously planned, is footage of Criss taken earlier running up the stairs, trying to open the locks etc. In reality Criss had actually escaped via a hidden ground floor door or window to a nearby safe retreat. After the explosion, and just before the dust settled, he scuttled over to where the building had been, and emerged, feigning shock, injury, etc. Totally lame.

How do we know this was faked? Well, because obviously he wasn’t in the building when it went up, because no one would have walked away from that. Occam’s Razor – the most parsimonious explanation is that he faked the film. But there is more. Reporters at the Fox 13 local TV station think they saw Criss running back just after the blast:

In the seconds after the blast, when dust was still filling the air, someone dressed in a dark shirt and ballcap -- like Criss' -- appeared to run out of a neighboring building and hide among the debris in front of the now-demolished hotel. Watching the A&E footage closely, his ballcap is visible amidst the debris several seconds before he 'miraculously' appears in that same location.

There were other tell tales. For example, all the cameras inside the building went to the one same snowy image at the same time just before the explosion. But several cameras don’t all go to the one image for any reason I can think of, unless it was pre-edited. Also, there are inconsistencies in the film sequences – some shots show him with handcuffs hanging from his pocket, others do not – that suggest some of the film was shot earlier.

See the video below for an explanation from the TV crew.

Now OK, I know Criss does illusions. He makes you think you see something that didn’t actually happen. That's his job.  And I get he sometimes pushes the camera tricks a little more than is strictly kosher. But this was billed as a dangerous stunt – so dangerous he promised his dear old Mum he would never do anything so dangerous ever again. Aah. In reality there was little danger. Oh sure, for most people it would have been extremely dangerous.  But Criss is an escape artist who gets paid millions for this stuff.  For him, this was nothing.  Certainly nothing like he was claiming.  After he had removed the handcuffs, there was nothing stopping him from escaping. (The window he kicked in when he “couldn’t” open the door, was obviously a trick window. Windows on balconies in Florida don't just break when kicked.) Pretty lame considering it was claimed before this trick that with this stunt, Angel might exceed even what Houdini had achieved. Hardly. In reality it was a nothing but a damp squib, a lame and disappointing end to the series. And sadly, I think with this faked trick pretending to be something else, he has lost all credibility in calling out any more Jim Callahans.

The Atheism Tapes

I've just finished watching The Atheism Tapes, which despite the name is actually two DVDs.  They consist of Jonathan Miller's interviews, on the subject of atheism, with:

• philosopher Colin McGinn
• philosopher Daniel Dennett
• physicist Steven Weinberg
• Arthur Miller,
• Richard Dawkins
• theologian Denys Turner

They have some brief clips online, if you want to get a flavor.

Funnily enough, I actually enjoyed Colin McGinn's piece the most.  Funny because I'm usually not a great fan of philosophers.  He discussed the ontological argument for God - ie an argument from reason alone, rather than from any actual verifiable evidence.  You might know what I would think of an argument that is not supported by any verifiable evidence - not much.  The way McGinn explains it, the argument is that God must exist because of the way God is defined.  That sounds to me like circular reasoning.  If you click the link above you'll find several versions of the argument, none exactly the way McGinn describes it, and none making any sense to me.  The argument sounds like pure sophistry.

A more interesting point was McGinn's rebuttal of the "no morals without God" drivel we've all heard before.  McGinn says that "do not steal" is obviously a good rule, we all know we shouldn't steal, and God tells us not to steal, so God is right.  But supposing God said "it's OK to kill", would we then think it was OK to kill?  Answer - no of course we wouldn't.  We would, in that instance, say God was wrong.  In fact, God does say "don't kill", but we knew that already - we knew God was right because we already knew it, not because God just told us, so obviously we don't get our morality from God.  Christopher Hitchens made the same point but in a slightly different way.  He said something like, do you really think humans thought it was OK to kill and steal, before Moses came down from the mountain with his tablets?  "Oh, you mean we shouldn't kill?  OK, right  got it.  Thanks - didn't realize."

The other interviews are all interesting.  Miller, for example, gives an insight into what it was like growing up Jewish in Brooklyn in the early 1900s.

The producers say they will donate $3 from the sale of each DVD set to the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers (MAAF) to support Specialist Jeremy Hall's case and the constitutional right of soldiers for freedom from religion. Hall is the atheist soldier who was sent home from Iraq as protection, after receiving threats from other soldiers because of his atheism.  Funny, you'd think if he offended anyone, the Christian soldiers would just forgive him.  But apparently they didn't. Anyway, the MAFF needs all the support it can get on this issue, and the donation to this cause is worthwhile in addition to what you get on the DVDs.