http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26131264-5006785,00.html

A news story I can only describe, quite angrily, as disgusting. Weren’t laws enacted over 30 years ago to abolish this sort of thing?

It just goes to show that no matter what religious leaders say, no matter how much they try to water their extreme and backward beliefs down in public – they’re still and will always be a bunch of divisive, hate-filled bigots. Despicable. I feel ashamed that this happens in a country like Australia.

In this day and age and despite everything we’ve learned through the marvel of science, why is it that people still continue listening to religious figures on matters of…well anything really? What is it they have to say that’s so different and from where do they command such authority on all manner of subjects? Without a shred of evidence they present incredible stores with no basis in reality, much like fairy tales, and people still believe them. They claim to speak for God, which says little for God’s character since most of the rhetoric is either banal, violent or sly. They claim to be the great moral compass of society but regularly preach division, war and intolerance.

Remove the old bollocks of them drawing authority and morality through the ‘good’ book or divine influence and you’re left with very little. I’ve met ministers and priests who are nice people, sure, but the extent of their knowledge usually goes no further than an understanding of the current trendy western religion. It’s like having an encyclopedic knowledge of the Greek pantheon or only researching Grimm’s fairy tales and then using that to guide peoples lives. Science, politics, history, medicine etc fall way, way outside of their understanding or experience (although there are of course exceptions). Their morals come from a book that extols the virtues of killing your neighbour or beating your children to death. Of the 10 ultimate commandments, only 3 of them are of any use as the rest talk about doing as God says or “don’t take stuff that isn’t yours”. I feel a bit sad for the ministers and bishops who have wasted their entire lives studying the ancient version of Goldilocks. Some church leaders are intelligent people who could have done society a lot of good had they not been sucked into the world of wishful thinking and power mongering.

I believe one of the reasons for this is that having figures of authority helps legitimise the self-deception that believers wallow in. Believers want to think that life goes on, that no-one dies, that everything will be taken care of by the ultimate mother figure in the sky and you don’t have to handle all that work and all those burdens like a real grown up. Having someone in a large hat or impressive robe stand up and spout grand words will reinforce those childish, desperate wants and provide a great comfort - because deep down many believers are unsure. Unsure if this collection of ancient stories is true (or relevant), unsure if it’s okay to ignore some of the old laws when they no longer suit, unsure what God is actually doing for them, unsure why they have to talk to themselves all the time, unsure if that prawn they had with their surf and turf has doomed them to eternal damnation.

To question church leaders however is to commit one of societies greatest sins. Everyone gets worked into a frenzy. People ask how you can question the moral authority of this bishop or that deacon. He has a direct line to Jesus, after all. His robes and extensive knowledge of writings from a nomadic tribe several thousand years ago means he knows all. It’s insane! How the hell are we still stuck in that 16th century thinking? The enlightenment came long ago, people have been questioning and breaking down religion for hundreds of years. The stranglehold on peoples lives was broken before the industrial revolution began and many people lost their lives so we didn’t have to be ignorant slaves any longer. Yet here we sit, often reluctant to speak out against a church leader, still happy to offer them seats on important councils as a ‘moral compass’. It’s limp-wristed and needs to stop, so as a world society we can advance and grow beyond such medieval meddling. How can we stop it…well that’s a topic for another day.

I asked someone a while ago whether they believed in God and the answer was a surprising one for our day and age. The answer was ‘I suppose so’.

I didn’t think much of it at the time but after some reflection it strikes me as a terrible position. That person had neither the fervent belief of the truly religious (however misguided) nor the reasoned realism of an atheist.

I wish I’d asked some questions at the time because I’ll bet anyone $20 that the reason for that person’s vague belief is that belief in a religion has become the default setting for humanity. I know for a fact that this person doesn’t believe in anything in particular, doesn’t do to a church or mosque, doesn’t pray, has never read a Bible or Koran (or Gita) and certainly doesn’t live in a religious environment. It’s just that blindly believing in a God is the norm, even to the non-religious.

I’m sure the person I have in mind wouldn’t be offended if I questioned their belief, and may even agree that it’s a little silly if reasoned with. It’s the fact that people are indoctrinated to think this way in the first place that concerns me.

With regards the title, it must be made clear that a belief in God isn’t the default setting from birth. We’re not born with religion. We don’t know and understand modern Gods ’straight from the box’, no, it must be ‘installed’. To borrow from the writings of Richard Dawkins, the ideas of religion must be transmitted to the new host as a ‘virus of the mind’. How I dearly wish to protect my children from this infection until they are old enough to analyse religion for themselves and make their own decision.

From the last paragraph of an article by Richard Dawkins…

Safety and happiness would mean being satisfied with easy answers and cheap comforts, living a comfortable lie. The alternative is risky. You stand to lose comforting delusions: you can no longer suck at the pacifier of faith in immortality. To set against that risk, you stand to gain ‘growth and happiness’; the joy of knowing that you have grown up, faced up to what existence means; to the fact that it is temporary and all the more precious for it.

Just a quick one. People seem to think that a quantum leap is a sudden and large stride forward in a certain field of understanding. Yet an actual quantum leap is a completely different beast; according to John Gribbin in Almost Everyone’s Guide to Science a quantum has two distinct features.

When an electron in a high energy state (excited) has a choice of two or more lower energy levels, it chooses randomly.

The second is that the jump, or leap, is very tiny.

Therefore a quantum leap is actually a very small change made entirely at random. The only similarity between the saying and the scientific term is that the change is instantaneous, it’s a change from one thing to another with nothing happening in between.

Check out some wikipedia action for more -> quantum leap.

Yes, there’s more to come but I’ve been inundated with interstate work, children’s birthdays, visitors and a social life. The first article in my Scorecard series is being worked on intermittently, when I can find some time away from all the above, and I reckon the completion time will be around mid-September.

EDIT: I’m putting the whole scorecard idea on hold as it takes a fair bit research to get right; which takes a fair bit of time, which I simply don’t have. I’ll pick this idea up again sometime in the future but in the meantime i’ll work on smaller articles. Electron shells are something I’ve love to write about next but it’s a complicated subject and I’d like to break it down a bit. Which takes time. Which I don’t really have. TBA.

It must be at least once at week I find myself wondering where the hell all those wonderous sciences and technologies we read about in the 90’s have gone. Like a lot of people I find myself a little dissapointed in 2008. Perhaps the hype of the late 90’s affected my subconcious more than I realised, I mean, if you believed in everything you read back then we’d have a cure for the common cold by now; along with basic nanotech, alternative fuels and many exciting advances in health thanks to stem cells and other vague bio technologys. With that in mind I want to visit the areas I once believed would be far more advanced in 2008; explore where they are now, where they’re going, why it’s taking so long and when we can expect something that knocks our socks off. Coming up next…Cancer research – wheres my cure?

Ace.

http://www.particlezoo.net/

Man’s destruction of Africa – oh dear

All technology can be used for good…or evil

Open source cancer research! - er, wow. That’s unexpected. Very welcome, but unexpected.

Have you ever, while drinking  your 12th beer of the evening, enjoyed a moment of contemplation and wondered ‘what is all this stuff, this…..stuff, made of’? To be imprecise, all stuff in the entire universe is made of…stuff. The same kind of stuff that all other things are made of. This other stuff comes in the form of atoms, electrons, quarks, gluons and other amusing little things.

Atoms, in broad terms, are the building blocks of everything around you – and though everything around you feels solid, it’s not. In fact, nothing is even TOUCHING anything else. No, really. It’s true.

To put that in simplest terms you need to understand two very general things.

1. When talking about charged things - or magnetic things - like repels like and opposites attract. So two things that have a positive charge will repel each other while one thing witha positive charge and another with a negative charge will attract each other. Got a bar magnet? And another bar magnet? Ok, me neither, but if you think back to science classes you may remember pushing the two together. If you push negative to negative, they try their hardest to stay apart. But put positive anywhere near negative and they come together like two hot sweaty blondes in a bath of jelly. What?

2. Um. I forget. Oh yeah, atoms are made of a whole bunch of things. 3 things if you ignore such particles as quarks and gluons. Protons, which have a positive charge; electrons, which have a negative charge; and neutrons, which have no charge, or no net charge to be pedantic.

Here’s a picture of an atom.

To be precise, it’s a helium atom. I’ll leave all talk of atomic weights, isotopes, ions, shells and whatnot for other posts, but for now you know enough to understand how atoms made stuff and why they don’t actually touch.

See the electrons around that nucleus? Thinking back a paragraph or two you might remember that electrons have a negative charge. Now think back to point one, like things repel each other. So two atoms won’t actually touch.

Why the hell then don’t we fly apart into individual atoms and enjoy an atom orgy where no atom actually touches another atom? The answer is simple, an electron cloud(more on this another day) around an atom is attracted to the protons in the nucleus of another atom. The atoms therefore come together but never actually touch. Cool, huh?

ps. Okay, the world of atoms is far more complex and wondrous than this simple article makes it out to be, but I found this all very interesting and simple to understand so I’m outlining it this way. There are many nuances and exceptions I’m sure. I’ll try to cover them in the fullness of time ie. when I have time.