Now reporting from Portugal!

Cross posted at the Edinburgh Exchanges blog – most of this is insight for next year’s Erasmus students.

I thought it was about time for an update, it’s been a few months. This post will deal with how the exams went in Spain and my arrival in Portugal.

I was quite pleasantly surprised by how simple the exams were in Malaga. Although I am one of those swots who always manages to make it to class no matter how little sleep (or how much alcohol) I get the night before, on the whole even the people I hadn’t seen in class for most of the year didn’t seem to have that much of a problem with them. They were, however, quite different from exams in Edinburgh. Most obviously of all, apparently the phrase ‘exam conditions’ hasn’t made it into the Spanish vocabulary yet. There were people quite obviously whispering at the back; in translation we were allowed to use the internet; I know a few of the Spanish students in my class managed to get away with reading their notes during the exam; in one of my exams a student got up to go to the toilet, and took his bag with him full of his notes, then came back in and started writing again; and in one of my friends’ exams the teacher even left the room to do some work in their office next door! In the one essay I had to hand in during the year, there didn’t seem to be any plagiarism control and we didn’t have to reference anything, and in a presentation some of the students had to do, I recognised the text as C&V’d from Wikipedia! So it’s considerably less formal.

The standard of the exam questions was also a fair bit lower than I’ve been getting used to at Edinburgh. The literature essays were more like GCSE or A Level standard questions, often something like ‘comment on this section of the text’ (so you can get away with writing more or less anything). In none of the exams were we required to make any kind of argument at all, just regurgitate what we’d learnt. There was an awful lot of reading in one of the courses and for one of the novels I didn’t read even one page. Instead I read a few articles about it off JSTOR, and the question turned out to be so vague that I managed to write a 2-side essay very easily without even knowing the storyline. Now the problem is that there was no continuous assessment throughout the course, so we had no idea how we were getting along until they put the exam in front of us at the end of the semester. I managed to get an 8 out of 10 in translation, which will probably still be a first even after it gets marked down on the way to Edinburgh (that reminds me, make sure you read the handbook carefully – there are some things in there that will come as a surprise), although I know others who got a 1, so they don’t exactly give the marks away. Bottom line: do the work, show willing and the exams should be no problem.

So after my last exam, I had a whole two days without any work to do before I had to go to Portugal. You might think that’s enough, but the day I had to leave also just happened to be my 21^st. Fortunately the bus wasn’t until 9pm yesterday so I had time to half-recover from an outrageous hangover and grow back the lung that I must have puked up the night before. Loads of people came out for it and I was suddenly hit by the sheer number of really good friends I’ve made in just a few months. I’m really sad to have had to leave.

The journey here was a bit weird. Like I say I went on the bus, because I don’t like making short flights and because it meant I could buy the ticket later, handy because I didn’t know when I had to leave. From the ticket it looked like it would be a direct 10 hour journey to Coimbra with some other stops on the way. Of course it wasn’t. No-one told me that I’d have to change at Lisbon, neither when I bought the ticket or when I got on the bus and they asked me where I was going. What I thought was my arrival time was actually the departure time of the second bus, printed in the wrong box on the ticket, so what I thought would be a 10 hour journey turned into a 14 hour journey, because it was 3 hours to Coimbra from Lisbon, and that second departure was in Portuguese time, and I forgot about the time difference.

After crossing the border, we went to a bus station in Faro, where the bus was surrounded by about 15 police officers with massive guns (as in firearms, not biceps), and then plain clothes police got on and started going through a few people’s passports. Those who weren’t Portuguese had to get off the bus, small groups at a time for some reason. Strangely, when I got off the bus, I wasn’t directed to the left or right like the others had been, so I just stood where I was. After a couple of minutes, a policeman came over and asked where I was from so I told him, and he asked me where I was going so I told him, and without even asking to see my passport, he said I could get back on the bus. I could have been lying through my teeth for all he knew. We were at this border check for about an hour, it seemed like such a waste of time.

Portugal is beautiful. It was pitch black most of the way but when the sun came up this morning I was surrounded by lush forests and mountains, which makes a big difference from the scorched earth and gnarled olive trees of Andalusia. Cities just seemed to be nestled in within these mountains, and every town we passed had more greenery than any city I’ve ever been to. Not just sections set aside like Holyrood and the Meadows in Edinburgh, throughout the whole city. Some of the architecture’s a bit Eastern Bloc but I like it.

The people are also ridiculously helpful. For the first month I have a room in a university residence, and even though I woke him up as I came in, my roommate immediately showed me around, and told me about a really good deal he’s seen on mobiles, and took me to the centre on the bus. He had other things to do so he asked the bus driver if he could tell me where the phone shop is at the last stop, and instead of that, the driver went to the end of his line and then actually drove me to the shop whilst talking to me about when he saw the Liverpool side with Iain Rush playing against a Portuguese team back in the 80’s or something. The guy in the phone shop was also really helpful, translating between me and his colleague because I didn’t know any of the vocab in Portuguese. The only thing that’s a problem so far is communication. It’s become pretty clear that what we’ve done so far in Edinburgh is really inadequate. I can make myself understood well enough, even if I just speak Spanish with a dodgy accent, but understanding other people is very difficult. This is quite alarming because I’ll be starting classes before I know it, so I’m going to work hard on that, and it looks like I’m going to have to sign up to the Portuguese language course.

Simplicity, complexity, and chaos

I just watched a BBC documentary about Chaos Theory presented by Jim Al-Khalili, and it was superb. Beautifully shot, thought-provoking, informative, and with a brilliant soundtrack, it’s not one to be missed. I had to wait a while for it to make it onto YouTube but it went up last week on the AtheistPlanetBlog channel, which has a lot of other very interesting videos, not necessarily anything to do with atheism. Anyway here’s the first part:

There are 6 parts (just shy of an hour long altogether), and it moves from Turing, through to Belousov, Lorenze, and Mandelbrot, among many others. I really do recommend it.

When I was watching this, I came to a very suddent realisation that this documentary, and other programmes like it, are the reason we need the BBC. Can you see ITV or another major commercial channel funding a programme like that? The primary goal of such companies is to make money through ratings, not to make great programming. The majority of the British TV audience wouldn’t give that programme a second look, they’d hear the word ‘theory’ and turn it off as boring scienceystuff. Even look at the niche science channels, a lot of it is dry and stuffy, and another lot of it is just about blowing things up, or they’re just glorified freak shows. The well thought-out programmes don’t get the exposure they should. This is something of a change of heart for me. Not really seeing the point in preserving something just for the sake of preserving it, in the past I’ve said that if the fine arts can’t support themselves, then they should be allowed to die. Obviously I wouldn’t take such a position when talking about something as important as science, that if it doesn’t make money it shouldn’t happen, and this documentary’s given me the opportunity to reconsider my position on other things as well. We need this kind of thing to inspire the next generation of scientists and artists.

A related point is that it demonstrates a fallacy often committed by creationists trying to discredit the theory of evolution. They’ll say that it led to eugenics, and ultimately to ethnic cleansing. This is incorrect on two points. Firstly, eugenics is based on a misunderstanding of the theory of evolution by natural selection, which clearly demonstrates that in the case of a natural disaster or something similar, one of the best ways to ensure the survival of the species is to maintain genetic diversity in the species, that way the species is more adaptable to new environments. Secondly, even if that were true, it is fallacious to disbelieve a scientific theory because you don’t like its consequences. But the more general point, related to the BBC, is that just because we know that natural selection happens in nature and has led to the point we’re at now, that does not mean we must accept it as an ideology. We don’t have to see it as a good way to organise a society. We can protect things that otherwise would not survive in the free market economy.

So yes, watch the documentary.

On debating

I was thinking about something today (no, it didn’t hurt). When I was watching a video by cdk007, blood type was mentioned. It took me back to one of the first things I did at the student Humanist Society. We went to a presentation by the Australian creationist, John McKay, who is the International Director of Creation Research. I think they use the term ‘research’ to mean a google search. And apologies for linking to such an ugly website – I just noticed on the right hand side “What was neanderthal man’s favourite hymn?” which I really hope is the opening line of a joke rather than the title of a serious piece of work.

There, we handed out some flyers with such dandy captions as “And next week: Flat Earth – Final Proof… Electricity: Witchcraft on wires?”, and I remember that a guy came over and asked me to stop handing them out because it was making a joke of the event, and I couldn’t resist replying “I think this event is a joke already”. Then after listening to the talk, we asked some questions, like you would at any presentation (and I promise I’ll get to the point soon). My question was that if we were descended from Adam and Eve, then how can we have the 3 different blood types? Not only were there only 2 created beings to begin with, but one was supposedly made from the rib of the other, so surely they’d both have the same blood type? He was, to my delight, stumped (I suppose he hadn’t googled that one), and I made a note to ask it again in the future. That I did when I went to the Edinburgh Creation Group, when Marc Surtees replied that it’s down to the Fall. Adam and Eve would have been A+ and other groups are degenerations.

So after all that, here’s the point. I’ve never used that argument again. Never. I may look at it again because AFAIK the B antigen is a different protein, not just losing a protein, but until I’ve hammered it out I’m not going near it. There is of course the bigger issue that anyone created from Adam’s rib – if that were possible – would be an exact clone, and therefore a man, not a woman, but whatever. Even though I know that I could probably stump a few creationists who haven’t thought about it, I know that there is a hole in the blood type argument, so I don’t use it. For me, the reason for debate and discussion is usually to get closer to the truth.

This is in complete contrast to the debating style of many theists I’ve encountered, who’ll sometimes not bother responding in any depth to any refutation that you offer, instead just changing their argument in the hope that you’ll find that convincing instead, without any possibility of them changing their mind. Then, the next time you have a similar discussion, they’ll be using the same arguments even though you thoroughly refuted it the last time. This is a generalisation, and there are of course many exceptions. Particularly notable is that Answers in Genesis has a list of arguments that they think creationists should not use. There are also plenty of atheists who will deliberately use a bad argument for a cheap win (Hitch’s challenge is perhaps one, maybe I should save that for another blogpost though).

Dawkins wrote briefly about this in one of his books, although I forget which one. It was the reason that he doesn’t go to debates offered by debates unions. After the debate he asked his opponent how he became a Christian, and he said that he wasn’t a Christian, he’d been assigned that position and didn’t actually believe what he’d been debating for. I’m a member of the debates union at university, but I don’t tend to go, and when one of the committee tried to convince me to come more often, I brought up this point, and the response was that it’s the best way to learn about an opposing viewpoint, if you have to argue in its favour. At first I thought that was fair enough, but now I think I disagree, and this is what I was thinking about today.

You can become familiar with an argument without debating for it. If, in preparation for this debate that you don’t agree with, you genuinely do change your mind on it, then that’s fine. But if, as is usually the case, you prepare for the debate and you don’t change your mind, then you are presenting an argument that you know has a flaw, hoping that your opponent doesn’t notice so that you win the debate. That’s intellectually dishonest, and has nothing to do with getting closer to the truth. Furthermore, people listening to the debate may well be convinced by your flawed argument, and go on to use it again.

Well that was a bit of a ramble.

I may have to cut myself off from the outside world

because almost everything I catch wind of makes me pretty fucking angry.

Here’s the latest perpetrator. A court has cleared a group of men of rape, after it was revealed that the victim… well, I suppose I’m not allowed to call her a victim now… complainant then, had mentioned a fantasy about having group sex over an internet conversation.

So, here’s how this goes as far as I can tell from the BBC article (which has the most information out of the coverage I’ve seen, all the others just seem to be rewrites of this). Woman in Liverpool and man in Bolton meet over the internet. She talks about a fantasy of hers about having group sex. They agree to meet up, and she later admits that she was willing to have sex with him at the time. When they met up, he has his mates around and they all have sex. She alleges that it’s gangrape but I suppose we can’t know for sure.

Now, there are a couple of ways you can read this, I suppose. It could be that in the conversation, she consented to having the group sex with this guy and his friends on this day that they were meeting up, but you’d think that whichever reporter was at the trial wouldn’t deem it newsworthy in that case, the story becomes “rape alleged, turns out it wasn’t rape”. And if somehow they did consider that newsworthy, you’d think they’d mention that she gave consent, rather than all this business about fantasies. That reading doesn’t really make sense to me.

The other way, and the way that seems more plausible to me from the reading of the article, is that she had mentioned that she liked the idea of having group sex, and the prosecution has used that fantasy to assassinate her character. This seems to be backed up by the statements. The prosecutor said:

It is right to say that there is material in the chatlogs from the complainant, who is prepared to entertain ideas of group sex with strangers, where to use her words ‘her morals go out of the window’.

This material does paint a wholly different light as far as this case is concerned.

If I’m right about that, then I’m disgusted. They may as well be saying “she’s basically admitted she’s a bit of a slut, so she probably enjoyed it, the dirty bitch.” And I also have other problems with this story, why the hell did the BBC think it appropriate to refer to this woman as “rape woman”? Even the Telegraph had a less offensive headline on this story than the BBC, instead deciding to call the story “Men cleared of rape after online chat on group sex revealed”.

Just to be clear in case someone doesn’t get it, mentioning a fantasy about having group sex is not the same thing as consenting to it. Plenty of people like to have normal one-on-one sex. That does not mean that if someone comes over and shags them, it’s not rape.

Now don’t get me wrong, I know that the case would probably have got down to their word against hers, and that the vast majority of rape charges do not bring a guilty verdict. I have no idea how to fix that situation, and I’m not saying that if the case went on they would have reached a guilty verdict. But throwing the case out on the basis of a fantasy that she mentioned, before any evidence has been heard, is surely unacceptable.

If I ever meet Pat Robertson, I swear I’ll kick him in the nuts

… and he’ll bloody well deserve it too.

Sorry about the lack of activity here, I’m coming up to my exams in Spain and it’s all a bit hectic. I doubt I’ll be posting again until I move to Portugal in February.

Before I say anything more, here’s the link to the Red Cross Haitian earthquake appeal. I know you’ll give what you can.

So I was recently following what’s been happening with the most popular creationist on Youtube, Venomfangx, also known as PCS and Shawn. Just a warning, this post will contain a lot of links, most of them are good watching.  The guy’s been shown to be an idiot, and a despicable one at that (that last video is particularly revealing, especially from about 4 mins on – I like how his Joker sounds like Yoda). First a bit of background.

Over a year ago now, Venomfangx and Thunderf00t, a YouTube Atheist, had a long bit of rivalry between each other over YouTube. Venomfangx would post a stupid video, Thunderf00t would post a video taking the piss out of it, then it got a bit more personal. There is a US Copyright law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. It’s all about reproducing images and technology and things like that that I don’t really understand all that well. This is the important part. Filing a false DMCA takedown notice is illegal under perjury laws. Venomfangx filed a false DMCA against Thunderf00t, and regretted it (that’s a playlist going through the whole thing). He claimed that defaming his character was a DMCA issue, which it is not, and also claimed Thunderf00t had been giving out his personal details so that his family would be in mortal danger of attack. Here he is apologising for the whole thing. It’s worth watching. Oh, he was also involved in a fundraising scam but I can’t be bothered finding the video for that.

So, a week or so ago, Venomfangx filed a hell of a lot of false DMCA’s against a lot of atheists on YouTube, most notably one called dprjones. Dprjones then filed a counternotice against him, and released a video about it. There was also an email exchange between them. Once he had received dprjones’ personal details from the counternotice, Venomfangx posted a video claiming that dprjones had asked an underage girl to expose her breasts on his blogtv account, and encouraging his subscribers to report him as a paedophile. He then gave out the personal details of dprjones to anyone who contacted him for them.

How sick in the head can one person get? This is someone who used to frequently moralise about the atheists on YouTube, claiming that he believed in Christian love and that he didn’t attack the atheists like they did him, whilst also comparing them to Hitler, amongst many other examples. I was pretty disillusioned with the whole idea that Christian morals are superior.

Which is why I was perfectly primed to go apeshit over this:

That is Pat Robertson, one of the most famous televangelists in the world, claiming that the reason Haiti was hit by this earthquake was because over 200 years ago, when they started the revolt against the French colonials, they signed a pact with the devil. Yes, in a show where he was raising money to help (or supposedly, he’s allegedly been involved in scams of a similar sort in the past), he decided to blame the victims. There’s an estimated 100,000 dead. Some of the papers have been claiming it’s more like 500,000 but I don’t know. Millions have been affected by this, and days later he thinks it’s appropriate to blame the victims? Or the victims’ ancestors? Ho-ly shit. It’s nothing new either, he did it with 9/11 and Katrina, blaming it on abortion and teh gayz. There’s your Christian morality right there. Yes, I know not all Christians are like this, although I also know that a lot of Christians in the states will have had no problem with what he said and will have sent him money anyway. But clearly being a Christian, even one who seems to have a personal relationship with God, does not make you a moral person.

There has been an awful lot of commentary over the issue, and this post will not be adding anything new. A friend of mine posted this article on why we shouldn’t be surprised by what Robertson said, citing that this is a necessary belief for him to hold to explain why this happened. He has to blame the people, because otherwise he’s left with blaming God. That may be true, in fact I did a bit of research on the Haitian revolution when I studied Carpentier’s El Reino de Este Mundo, and it’s fairly well known that there is said to have been a Voodoo ritual before the start of the slave revolt (I’d say they were praying for victory, something which happens at the beginning of most football games in the US, rather than signing a pact with the devil). But I don’t care. You don’t go to the funeral of someone who’s died of lung cancer and tell the grieving family that the deceased should have stopped smoking when they had the chance. It’s disgusting, it’s inhuman, it’s fucked up, and it detracts attention away from some of the real reasons this earthquake was so deadly. Even if he did hold that belief, he didn’t have to broadcast it on national TV. So I don’t care if Pat Robertson is 700 years old, if I ever meet him, I will be proud to kick him squarely in the crotch.

Once again, I’ll post the link to the Red Cross appeal.

The 10:23 campaign

You may have noticed a lot of bloggers putting 10:23 at the end of their posts about homeopathy. It’s something called the 10:23 campaign, and so far it’s very secretive. Don’t ask me any details, I know nothing more than any of you can find out on the website (although I can tell those of you who don’t know that 10:23 refers to Avogadro’s Number).  If you clicked on that you’ll notice that the website’s changed in the last few days, I only just noticed myself. Now it has an nuclear bomb style counter on it counting down until (I presume) the campaign launches properly.

So what can you do? You can sign up to help the campaign in you do want to be involved, or you can sign the letter to Boots which the Merseyside Skeptics came up with, or if you don’t know that much about homeopathy, you can get some information.

If there is a god, he can deal with me himself

The BBC have just broken the news that a man has broken into the home of Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist who, out of the 12 involved, caused the most controversy across the Islamic world when his cartoon was published in 2005. The man was carrying a knife and an axe, and apparently told the police that he intended to kill Mr Westergaard, who has a $1 million price on his head.

This is the cartoon here. It was published in Jyllands-Posten in 2005 (the beeb have been saying it was 2006 for about half an hour now, I know better), and you may remember that it went unnoticed by pretty much everyone until a group of radical muslims took it to the Middle East and showed it to everyone, along with some other cartoons that hadn’t even been published. This sparked outrage across the Middle East including violent attacks on Danish embassies and calls for the deaths of the cartoonists and anyone else who insults Islam, ironically kind of proving the point of the cartoon, really.

It was fitting that this happened on the first day of the new year, the same day that the anti-blasphemy law came into effect in Ireland. This law will bring a 25,000 euro fine down on anyone found guilty of blasphemy, defined as “publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion, with some defences permitted“, according to Atheist Ireland. It’s an affront to freedom of expression and it’s received widespread criticism.

So how have Atheist Ireland responded? Today they published a list of 25 blasphemous comments, originally uttered by such people as Jesus H Christ, Mohammed the alleged prophet (yes, I liked that touch too), Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Frank Zappa, Salman Rushdie, Bjork, Christopher Hitchens and Ian Paisley. They also included the comment by alleged paedophile-harborer Cormac Murphy O’Connor where he said that atheists were not fully human, to illustrate that atheists will not receive any protection from similar insulting attacks, and that therefore the law is discriminatory as well as contrary to freedom of speech.

I wonder exactly what will count. If a Christian expresses the fairly commonly-held opinion that anyone who doesn’t accept Jesus of Nazareth as their personal Lord and Saviour will be tortured for eternity after they die, will they be arrested under this law? It’s certainly very offensive to a lot of people, religious and non-religious. Perhaps the almost-polytheism of Catholicism will be deemed too offensive to the strict monotheism of Judaism, and every time the creed is repeated there’ll be a flurry of arrests? Of course what’s very dangerous about this law is that it encourages religious groups to be easily outraged. This is detrimental to community cohesion and may lead to more situations like the violent attacks on the Danish embassies, and more fatwah’s being issued. It’s irresponsible.

Once again when people get offended when people insult their religious beliefs, I was reminded of this passage from Judges 6: “Are you going to plead Baal’s cause? Are you trying to save him? Whoever fights for him shall be put to death by morning! If Baal really is a god, he can defend himself when someone breaks down his altar.” It applies equally well to any god. Why do offended religious types think their gods can’t stand up for themselves? If your god has a problem with what I have to say, he can strike me down himself. But of course, although the world’s gods differ greatly in many respects, one way in which they’re all the same is that they all prefer the non-interventionist approach. They prefer to let the known universe behave exactly as it would if there were no gods.

So in the interests of good healthy not-illegal-anymore-in-the-UK blasphemy, here’s my favourite George Carlin clip. There is something quite funny about this though. If you click on the window below, read the information box on the right hand side. The person who posted this video didn’t see the irony in referring to the dead George Carlin in the second person (“thank you George Carlin, your insight was of huge importance etc”) for a video in which he declares that religion is bullshit.

What’s the best way to respond to ‘threats’ of Hell?

This post came up on Pharyngula last night, together with a response by a reader. It dealt with some politician claiming that Christianity is a humble philosophy, and PZ points out that there’s nothing humble about claiming to be the chosen people of the creator of the universe. I agree, and personally I think the Church of Sagan has a much more humble philosophy. But a Christian reader responded, and it wasn’t half ironic, for a lot of reasons.

He claimed that Christianity is not arrogant whilst also claiming that non-Christians will go to hell. In other words, Christians are better than non-Christians because Christians will go to heaven, either because they’ve been saved by the creator of the universe (not humble), or because they’re morally superior (a dictionary definition of self-righteousness – also not humble).

He said that PZ, despite all of his degrees (none of which are in theology so I don’t know why he mentioned them) and “power” (:-/), still doesn’t understand Christianity or humanity. He then completely misunderstands atheists by saying PZ isn’t a Christian because he doesn’t want to accept God. He also doesn’t seem to understand why atheists often use the scientific method (FYI, it’s because it gets results), seeing it as some kind of agenda. Fail.

Another delicious layer of irony icing came when he said “No matter what proof is given, you will never ever believe in things beyond the this natural world.” Surely the next logical question is to ask why the hell he’s emailing PZ who clearly will never change his mind. He then didn’t offer even a single piece of evidence throughout his whole response, despite making a great number of unsubstantiated claims, ranging from the fairly mundane “if a person did reject God and they died that person would end up in Hell”, all the way up to something that AFAIK isn’t even supported scripturally in “Hell is not meant for people, it is meant for other spirit forms that you don’t believe in.” From my hazy recollections of Revelations, hell’s primary function seems to involve people.

Nevertheless I think the juiciest cherry came right at the end, “I may not like what you say, but I would not want you to go to Hell.” Surely this is quite significant, and yet he just sticks it on at the end and doesn’t explain what he means. It’s quite clear here that this guy doesn’t think atheists deserve to go to hell, but that’s what he believes will happen. So he disagrees with God’s judgement. This isn’t like other times when Christians disagree with God, such as the quite explicit condoning of blood sacrifice and slavery in the Old Testament, when they’ll often come up with some kind of excuse like, “those laws were intended for the Israelites at that time, they don’t apply now”. With other, less extreme examples, some Christians also explain the difference between modern morality and Biblical obedience by saying that God’s moral standard is better, so no matter what we believe is moral, we should follow God’s moral standard instead.

But this is different, this guy disagrees with God, and doesn’t seem to be ashamed or contort his way out of it with word-games. Surely if God is omniscient and all powerful, this guy should agree with everything he says because it will be right, right? It’s very strange behaviour, and it reminds me a lot of how Jeff Dee from the Atheist Experience deals with callers when they talk about hell. When someone says ‘if you don’t believe in God, you’ll go to hell’, he sees it as a threat. He explains why more fully in that last link, but basically it doesn’t matter if hell exists or not, the sentiment is what’s important because they’re saying ‘if this place exists (which they clearly believe), then you deserve to go there’.

(Btw, the rest of this post will be a fairly dry response to this point, if you can’t be arsed reading it, don’t bother, I don’t mind.)

I disagree. First of all, very obviously, it’s not a direct threat, it’s more like a warning. The caller is warning Jeff about something that they believe will happen if he doesn’t be careful. Almost like “don’t step on that railway line or you’ll be electrocuted” or “stay away from that neighbourhood at night or you’ll get shot”. He’s right that it doesn’t matter if the punishment is true or not, it doesn’t matter if the line isn’t electrified, it’s still not a threat. There’s no comment on whether or not Jeff deserves to be electrocuted or shot, indeed the very fact that they’re warning him indicates that they don’t think he deserves it (well, maybe they do think he deserves it after he’s finished yelling down the phone at them). To be honest, even if the caller does think he deserves it, I wouldn’t call it a threat. It’s certainly an insult to say you deserve to be tortured forever, but it’s not a threat, it’s a consequence of your own actions, from the Christian point of view.

But Jeff makes the further point that if the caller doesn’t think he deserves to go to hell, they shouldn’t be a member of the religion which says that will happen. I don’t think that’s true. The caller could theoretically have a perfectly good reason to believe that God exists, and if that’s what he believes is true, he’s not going to believe otherwise just because he doesn’t like an implication of their belief. There are implications of atheism that I don’t really like. I really miss the community feeling, and maybe other atheists might wish there was a heaven, but it’s not something that’s going to make us change our beliefs. As I’ve said it does indicate a sort of interesting cognitive dissonance where God knows everything, and yet he’s wrong in this particular instance. But that’s perhaps a reason to modify your beliefs, not a reason to stop being a Christian altogether.

So should we get angry about Christians saying we’re going to hell? It’s definitely not a threat. It could be an insult, in which case I’d point out that the notion of hell is very much absent from a lot of the Bible, and that if it did exist it would definitely be immoral (you can’t justify eternal punishment, God rewards belief over deeds, for example). But it could be a warning, in which case I’d respond to it in exactly the same way as I would Pascal’s Wager. As long as the theist isn’t acting on their belief and treating atheists like scum because they’re going to hell, I wouldn’t take it personally, and instead argue rationally (or even scripturally if possible) against the position they’re taking.

Daily Fail tackles winter ails

My parents used to read the Daily Express. That was bad enough, you used to be able to guarantee there’d be a picture of Princess Diana, another royal, or Madeleine McCann on the front together with a fear-mongering headline about some made-up health emergency or miracle cure, or some bullshit story about nig-nogs. Ok, that sounds very much like the Mail, and they’re almost indistinguishable, except the Mail sells a lot more for some reason. Anyway, whilst I’ve been away my parents have switched to the Mail, and I’ve been having a quick flick through the pages. I suppose I needed to throw up, especially after the Mail is yet again cashing in on the recently-deceased. Here’s one taken from the health section of the Mail website.

Yes, the Mail is revealing to the world 5 of the best cures for your winter cough. So how have they figured out what the best cure is? Well, let’s see… let’s see… oh right! Here we are, at the top it says:

A study from the American College of Chest Physicians says there is no evidence that over-the-counter cough syrups work. But herbal alternatives have been used for generations. Here are five options to soothe nasty coughs.

Nothing else, no studies, not even a testimonial from a patient, nothing. Just ‘these have been used for generations’ and therefore they’re “5 of the best”. I wonder how they define “the best”. Are all cough remedies counted underneath the banner of “the best”? Because that’s the only way I can think of that means they can justify counting these as “5 of the best”. It’s rather telling that they lead with a little jibe at the usual cough remedies which may or may not work anyway, it’s the only possible justification they could come up with for a story which is less like journalism and more like false advertising. I did a search for “American College of Chest Physicians over the counter cough” and found various articles about the same study, published in January 2006. That’s just under 4 years ago. And this is from a news service. Last night.

And it’s without a touch of irony that they start the article with ‘there’s no evidence that these usual treatments work, but here’s a list of alternative remedies with no evidence behind them’. That’s impressively stupid. That’s pretty much the whole article, all the rest of it is a little description of the products which could have been taken right off the website selling them, with no critical thought put into it whatsoever. So seeing as the Mail haven’t done any work into this, I’m not going to do any more on it either.

Gameshows

On TV they always have to draw things out, otherwise most shows would take 15 minutes rather than 30. Some ways of filling time are to talk about contestant’s emotions, go through their thought processes in coming to a decision, empty silence, or in some cases a mixture of each. I thought we’d reached the pinacle of this kind of crap with Deal Or No Deal, where contestants umm and err for five minutes before picking a random box. Of course all the boxes have numbers on them, which have nothing to do whatsoever with the quantity of money within it, something which is mentioned explicitly at the start of the show, and yet still contestants will claim to have a ’system’, and will use lucky numbers to determine what box they’re going to pick next. I do wonder how they come about making such a system, since each contestant only has one go of the game. Can’t be trial and error I suppose.  But of course the boxes could be labelled with a picture of an animal, or a fruit, or even a colour. It’s nothing more than gambler’s superstition.

But no, Deal Or No Deal has been overtaken in stupidity. I don’t watch all that much TV even when I’m at home, but this afternoon I just caught the end of a gameshow on Channel 5 called Heads or Tails. Yes, they’re really scraping the barrel, actually televising a gameshow based on coin-flipping, I was amazed. So the concept is that they pick a square, flip a coin, and if they call it correctly they win the amount of money behind that square. The squares are also randomly assigned so there’s really not much skill involved at all, even less so than in Deal Or No Deal. Nevertheless, every time any decision has to be made, the audience shouts out their tuppence-worth and the contestant listens attentively as if somehow the audience has a mysterious insight into which way the coin is going to land. Today’s contestant actually said “well… it’s been heads the last three times so I think it’s going to have to change to tails”. Fail. Srsly. That’s what, Year 4 maths? Does she think the coin remembers what it’s done the last few times and changes accordingly to keep it a 50/50 result? Surely, if it’s been tails many times, that’s more likely to be a sign that the coin is biased towards tails?

Now I thought the gameshow host, Justin Lee Collins, was taking the piss, because at one point, after the audience had been shouting out their enlightened opinions about the unseen future, he said “well, lots of people have been shouting heads, and lots of people have been shouting tails, but what I can tell you is that it will be either heads or tails.” This is totally unlike Noel Edmonds on DOND, who gets thoroughly involved with the superstition, and encourages the contestants to concentrate on ‘beating the banker’, which is only partly relevant to the amount of money you end up winning. Personally I wouldn’t care if the banker took away more than I did, as long as I got a fair slice, and I’d make that clear from the start.

But then at the end there was a part where the contestant could call the coin, and if she got it correctly it would double her money, and if she got it wrong she’d lose it all. She chose not to take the risk and just to take the money, and Collins said “well, let’s find out whether you would have won or not”, and asked her to call the coin as she would have if she had played on, then he flipped it. What? I could be wrong, but surely this coin flip won’t necessarily have the same result as the coin flip if she’d gone for it? Just the difference in conversation, the extra time elapsed between the events, any number of things really, could have affected the flip differently. There is absolutely no way of knowing if that’s an accurate representation of what would have happened, it’s not like the coin flip results are lined up in advance so we know the next result will be the same no matter when it happens or in what circumstances.

The standard of familiarity with statistics and probability must be terrible if this kind of thing actually makes it onto the air, and people take it seriously. I’m no mathematician, but I am quite shocked.