TechgnosisWeb ReBoot

Remember that campaign to get some atheist-themed ads on London buses? The original idea was to raise about $8000 to put these ads on about 30 buses in the London area. How’d that turn out?

Today, thanks to many Cif readers, the overall total raised for the Atheist Bus Campaign stands at a truly overwhelming £135,000, breaking our original target of £5,500 by over 2400%. Given this unexpected amount, I’m very excited to tell you that 800 buses – instead of the 30 we were initially aiming for – are now rolling out across the UK with the slogan, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”, in locations all over England, Scotland and Wales, including Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, York, Cardiff, Devon, Leeds, Bristol and Aberdeen.

From today’s launch, two hundred of the buses will run in London, because the campaign was originally started as a positive counter-response to the Jesus Said ads running on London buses in June 2008. These ads displayed the URL of a website which stated that non-Christians “will be condemned to everlasting separation from God and then you spend all eternity in torment in hell … Jesus spoke about this as a lake of fire prepared for the devil”. Our rational slogan will hopefully reassure anyone who has been scared by this kind of evangelism.

The atheist bus journey

Wow. It’s been damn near forever since I posted.. I blame Facebook. Most of my friends are on it, and so my blog falls into disrepair.. but I just finished writing a rant in response to a dear friend, and I thought it was worthy of being included here. So, here goes: My friend emails me with the following:

I’ve been keeping up with your blog, and wondered if you’d be interested in commenting on these videos concerning alternative energy sources. Apparently, we do have free energy technology, but the World Bank… wealthy oil shieks, and the government don’t want to share it with the people of the world. They are using it for deep space exploration, star wars, and military warfare such as tanks. Check it out. =)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6yRn4IAsrU

also Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8stApCmxYEM

also Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h75_TGiwg78

Other people inventing the same thing. Unbelievable!!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVhXrvCCILw

Air Car – Australia & France
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-A3XHFT5qc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq8aZVLpf-c

India Air Car
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_i3aMz7q1w

My reply to her begins below, and continues after the jump:

I saw the videos and the material you sent, and, well.. you know me, I’m always the skeptical spoilsport. I hate to burst your bubble, but, don’t take this stuff at face value. Neither one of those things is the mythical ‘free energy’ that they’re billed as. Let’s start with the so-called ‘Water Car’.

WARNING: Lots and lots of ranting ahead. This is an old topic for me.

The inventor of the ‘Water Car’, Stan Meyer, was convicted of fraud in ‘96. He had been selling ‘dealerships’ to investors for the right to market his Water Engine technology for years, and while he seemed quite willing to demonstrate his device in his own home lab, he never actually *delivered* on the device to his investors, which is why he was sued. He was supposed to show his car to Michael Laughton, Professor of Electrical Engineering at Queen Mary, University of London and Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, but when it came time to actually show up for the testing, he made excuses and never showed up. When his Water Fuel Cell was examined by 3 different experts in court, they all came to the same conclusion: it wasn’t what he claimed it was. It was a simple electrolysis device, no more or less efficient than any other. He was convicted of fraud and ordered to repay his investors they $25,000 dollars.
Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, there’s been something of a media backlash against the so-called ‘New Atheism’, that is, the vocal declaration of atheism by those who do not subscribe to a religion and who believe that the universe demonstrates that it is very unlikely that there is a god. In addition, ‘new atheists’, or, as they are called by some, ‘fundamentalist atheists’, have stepped up their attack on religion, no longer content with simply keeping their beliefs (or lack thereof) private, but now writing books, putting up blogs, making movies, and generally getting the message out that religion, in all its shapes and forms, is not only illogical, but downright dangerous.

The general response from many in the religious community has been to, as usual, paint themselves as the victims (even though ‘believers’ far outnumber atheists in the US, and atheists are the last minority that it’s still okay to discriminate against), and basically say: “What’s with these uppity atheists all of a sudden? Can’t they just go back to their stuffy rooms and towers and keep quiet like they used to? It’s downright rude of them to start going on about these things, and anyway, everyone knows that they’re wrong.”

Even among atheists themselves, there are those who say “Why do we need to attack religion? Isn’t it enough to simply accept your own lack of belief, and let others believe as they wish? In short, can’t we just live and let live?” It’s a tempting thought. Let’s avoid the confrontation, and just go on with our lives, and if those wacky theists want to go on believing in their big sky fairy, well, good for them. It sounds reasonable, and proper, and the theists would dearly love it if we just all took that point of view and simply want away. But here’s the problem with that: if we go away, they certainly won’t.

There’s a reason that the ‘new’ atheists are loud and proud, and they’re spreading the word, doing everything they can to let the world know that they exist, that they’re out there, and that they’re not alone: the reason is that they’ve noticed that the world we live in has been getting worse and worse, and so much of it can be traced directly back to religion and faith. We live in a world where religious extremists strap bombs to their bodies and kill themselves, taking out dozens of innocents along with them, because they believe they will be rewarded in the afterlife. We live in a world where a large majority of the population of one of the most powerful countries on Earth honestly believes that the Earth is less than 6,000 years old, that evolution is ‘just a theory’, and that scientists are in league with the devil. We live in a world where a large majority of not only the population, but the people in power, the people with their fingers on the proverbial button, believe, honestly believe, that the world will end within their lifetimes, in a terrible war and destruction. And they see this as a good thing, they can’t wait for the Armageddon to come, because they think that their god is going to pull them up into heaven when that moment comes. We live in a world, too, where people routinely trust the advice of a homeopath over a real doctor, where political leaders consult star charts, or base political decisions that will affect millions of people, on the words of a dusty and discredited book written thousands of years ago.

In this situation, I have come to believe that we cannot sit idly by and let it happen. That to simply keep quiet and let religion and ‘believers’ drag this world down into the muck, to let them destroy thousands of innocent others, to continue to spread lies and hurt the poor and gullible, is downright immoral. We, as atheists, are often accused of having no moral compass, simply because we don’t have our commandments handed down to us by and angry and jealous god. That we cannot possibly make moral decisions, as we have no basis on which to form a moral framework. And yet, any fool can see that to simply lay back and do nothing, to let the world fall prey to the poison of religiosity, is not only irresponsible, but simply wrong from a humanistic standpoint. We cannot go quietly. We owe it to ourselves, and to our fellow man, to fight, to shout, to let people know: you’re living a lie. You are being lied to, and you are following that lie to your grave. Religion is a plague upon mankind, and we can move beyond it. And if we annoy a few religious folks, and even a few less bombastic atheists, I can live with that. But let it not be said that we stood by silent while religion continued to drag the world deeper into chaos and ignorance.
Read the rest of this entry »

To bring you the following announcement:

09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

That is all. Move along.

Sadistic equine necrophiliac Dinesh D’Souza just refuses to get the point, doesn’t he? This is his third little article on the whole ‘atheists are evil’ bandwagon, all capitalizing on the VT tragedy. Seriously, how much of a nasty, contemptible, snide, reptilian little scumbag can one human being be? Still, there is one good thing coming from his continuing, if laughable, attack on atheism: some truly inspired atheists are coming out and denouncing both the man and the point of view. Case in point: this Virgina Tech professor, who has written an impassioned and brilliant response to D’souza. Among the other things he says:

We atheists do not believe in gods, or angels, or demons, or souls that endure, or a meeting place after all is said and done where more can be said and done and the point of it all revealed. We don’t believe in the possibility of redemption after our lives, but the necessity of compassion in our lives. We believe in people, in their joys and pains, in their good ideas and their wit and wisdom. We believe in human rights and dignity, and we know what it is for those to be trampled on by brutes and vandals. We may believe that the universe is pitilessly indifferent but we know that friends and strangers alike most certainly are not. We despise atrocity, not because a god tells us that it is wrong, but because if not massacre then nothing could be wrong.

…

With or without a belief in a god, with or without your asinine bigotry, we will make progress, we will breathe life back into our university, I will succeed in explaining this or that point, slowly, eventually, in a ham-handed way, at risk of tears half-way through, my students will come to feel comfortable again in a classroom with no windows or escape route, and hell yes we will prevail.

You see Mr D’Souza, I am an atheist professor at Virginia Tech and a man of great faith. Not faith in your god. Faith in my people.

Read the rest of this entry »

The recent tragedy at Virginia Tech, where a deeply disturbed individual went on a rampage and killed at least 33 other people, was a horrible event. It was horrible in terms of human life and potential lost. It was horrible in terms of the emotional damage done to friends, families, and acquaintances of the victims. And, now, it is also horrible due to the opportunistic little ghouls that have crawled out of the woodwork trying to, first, blame the whole thing on ‘teh terrists’, and then, once it turned out that the shooter was not Islamic, to try and blame (brace for it)… evolution and atheism. I wish I was making this shit up. (This is gonna be long and quote-heavy, so I’ll plop it all behind the ‘more-wall’)
Read the rest of this entry »

That statement, or many like it, are usually quick to be trotted out by people who are trying to stay on the fence about silly irrational beliefs. “Well, maybe it’s true, or maybe it’s not true, but believing in this stuff isn’t hurting anyone, so what’s the big deal?” The problem is, of course, that believing in these things, especially when it comes to health issues, can hurt someone, especially when folks forgo real treatments in favor of bullshit stuff like homeotherapy or ‘applied kinesiology’. And, as demonstrated by this case, sometimes people can even lose their jobs simply for refusing to believe in this idiocy:

Case in point: thanks to some woo, my girlfriend was fired from her job last week.

She’s a preveterinary student who had been working at a local vet clinic for the last year and a half or so. Things went pretty well at first. Then, a few months in, during a routine shift, she walked into an examination room and through the looking glass. One of the doctors, a woman educated for years in veterinary medicine and who must have a strong background in the sciences, was hunched over a poor sick dog pressing a vial of blood to his chest.

This might seem like some sort of morbid ritual to summon Hod-Canus-Sq’ctamoreth, the Ancient Tentacled God-Creature of Insanity and Domestic Dogs, but it was in fact a variant on the bullshit quackery known as “applied kinesiology.” My girlfriend was told to enter the room and take the doctor’s place in pressing the vial of dog’s blood against the ailing canine’s chest. She was then told to hold out her arm while the doctor pushed down on it.

A little further on:

The polite and reasonable way in which my girlfriend attempted to question the usefulness of these treatments did not in any way indict the doctor’s integrity or intelligence as I have here today. She merely voiced politely her skepticism about the methods. Nevertheless, things changed after that day. Her bosses, the vets, began treating her differently. They regarded her askance and turned away their suspicious eyes when she met their gaze. People became colder, more “professional” in person, while rumors started floating around behind her back. Work became a generally hostile environment for her in which each day brought new problems, new worries, new passive aggression. She would get berated for not knowing how to do something, and when she pointed out that she had never been trained to do that something though she had asked multiple times her protests fell on deaf ears (and they never did train her to do many things). Multiple times she spoke of quitting but stayed to gather more experience for her vet school application.

Then she was unceremoniously dumped. Turns out that, under the orders of the holistic woo bitch of a head doctor, her co-workers had been essentially spying on her, her every transgression had been catalogued, until they had a long list on increasingly minor and inane “issues,” including the doozy “asked the doctor a dosage question,” because it is apparently bad to make sure you’re doing your job properly. One honest mistake later and she was out on her ass.

Go and read the full article for the whole sad story, but the lesson here is pretty simple: Believe or else. Despite the complete lack of evidence behind any of these so-called ‘alternative’ treatments, despite the fact that experiment after experiment shows time after time that these things simply do not work (other than a basic placebo effect, and sometimes not even that), despite all rational evidence and thought pointing to these things being nothing more than made-up idiocy: you’re supposed to put your rational mind aside, ignore that little voice in your head that is screaming at you that maybe it’s not a good idea to give someone a sugar pill when there’s real medicine that can help them, and simply go along with this lunacy because ‘hey, it’s not hurting anyone!’

On another quick note, and while I’m on a rant… Ran across this particularly funny site while reading through the Skeptico entry on ‘The Secret’.. This particular brand of idiocy was penned, apparently, by someone deeply upset over the treatment of Oprah’s latest pet project and the flavor of the week when it comes to New (Dark) Age woo-woo, The Secret. Let me save you a few bucks and tell you for free what the writers of that book want you to shell out money for: the so-called secret is nothing but a re-hashing of that old woo-woo canard, the law of attraction, e.g. good thoughts attract good things, bad thoughts attract bad things. Yeah, I think I’ll just quote the Skeptic Dictionary entry on that particular bit of nonsense:

The law of attraction is a New (Dark) Age belief that one’s mental disposition attracts similar external circumstances and events. In other words, your mental intentions and attitudes draw people and things of like intention and attitude to yourself. On one level this is trivially true. We generally hang out with people who think like us and share our values and we avoid people who disagree with us on important matters and don’t share our values. But a moment’s reflection should reveal that this “law” is false; it’s not even truthy.

Sellers don’t attract sellers; they attract buyers, unless they’re running an MLM scheme. Lazy dreamers don’t attract lazy dreamers. They attract con artists with big smiles and lots of promises. Grieving vulnerable people don’t attract vulnerable people; they attract vultures and vampires who take advantage of their grief. If you say that grief and greed are both negative so this example supports the law of attraction, then this law is impossible to test. It’s too slippery to have any meaningful content if obvious contradictions to it are said to support it. When kindness begets not more kindness but resentment, a New (Dark) Age defender of this “law” can always claim that the kindness wasn’t genuine.

Anyway, the sad little site I mentioned before goes on and on making the typical mistakes of confusing science with faith, and therefore accusing skeptics of ‘following scientific dogma’ and all those other inane accusations that woo-peddlers love to trot out in their defense. One particular statement (and one of my all-time pet peeves) involves the unfortunate tendency of New (Dark) Age followers of trying to recruit quantum theory over to their side:

What amused me the most was how dead serious they were about how totally right their thinking process was. Hashed over and over was the pseudo-scientific blather that most skeptic groups dredge up to support their argument. I call them pseudo-scientific because most of them are simply parroting the “real scientists” of the world. In reality like most of us they do not have a clue how “quantum mechanics” REALLY works but sure would like you to believe they do.

Ah, trying to use the language of skepticism to defend your woo-woo beliefs, are we? Excellent. Let’s have at you, then: so the skeptics are resorting to ‘pseudo-science’? Really? And you would have us believe that you are an authority on ‘actual’ science, then? I’m assuming that you must have dozens of peer-reviewed experiments and papers published showing scientific proof for the ‘law of attraction’, then. I’d love to see them. But that’s not even my main complaint with you, it’s the last sentence in that little paragraph.

No, the average lay person may, indeed, have very little clue of how quantum mechanics really works, but, unlike you, a skeptic is willing to actually find out, read the actual scientific papers and find out the truth of the matter. New Age-y folks just take the sound bite version of quantum physics, such as the whole ‘observation affects the result of experimentation’ bit, and try and use it to wrap up the same idiocy they’ve been peddling for thousands of years, just with a shiny veneer of ’scientific validation’. You know, for a group that disdains science so much, they certainly seem real hungry for scientific validation. If an experiment ever managed to show that, say, telepathy was real, they would jump all over it and proclaim it to the heavens as ultimate proof of the existence of telepathy… but when experiment after experiment, over dozens of years, shows over and over again that there is no such thing as telepathy, then clearly science is flawed and false, and of no use to ‘truly open-minded people who are not shackled by the limitations of rationality’. But I digress; the average skeptic may not have a very deep understanding of quantum mechanics, it’s true. But their opinions on quantum mechanics are at least informed by the actual scientists who do work day-in and day-out with this stuff, and I think it’s quite telling that of all the people trotting out quantum mechanics as an ‘explanation’ for all manners of woo-woo beliefs, not a single one of them is one of those scientists. Neither the wannabe-psychic nor the average skeptic may have a deep understanding of quantum physics, but it’s no coincidence that the people who do have a deep understanding of quantum phenomena fall firmly in the camp of science and skepticism.

And let’s not even get into the basic intellectual dishonesty of claiming that neither you or the skeptics really understand quantum mechanics, and then turning right around and trying to use it to justify your own idiotic beliefs…
Read the rest of this entry »

Allright, it’s rant time. I’ve had this one cooking for quite a bit, and I’ll try to keep it focused. My skeptical beef this week is with ‘herbal medicines’ and ‘all-natural’ supplements. No, I’m not saying they’re all useless. But do hear me out:

I’ve noticed a disturbing tendency among a lot of otherwise rational people to believe the old bugaboo that if something is ‘all-natural’, then it must be safer than those weird chemical drugs the doctors prescribe, with their scary side-effects. And, at first blush, it seems like a reasonable proposition. Medicine X claims to cure Ailment X, but it says, right on the bottle, that it has side effects Y and Z. Meanwhile, Herbal Supplement X also claims to cure Ailment X, and its bottle doesn’t list *any* side effects! Herbal Supplement X is clearly better and safer. My doctor’s a quack. Right?

Listen, folks, the only reason there are no side-effects listed on the bottle of herbal pills is because the herbal supplement industry is not regulated like the pharmaceutical industry is, and, therefore, there is no government agency that forces them to disclose their side-effects or any other dangers. The stuff on the herbal supplement bottle is not written by doctors or health professionals: it’s written by *marketers*, who have a *product to sell*.

“But Katsu!”, I hear you say, “These pills are made out of herbs and natural substances, not out of dangerous chemicals like pharmaceuticals are! They *must* be safer!” I hear you. But you know what *else* is made out of ‘herbs’? Poison Ivy. Hemlock. Death’s Head Mushrooms. And many more poisonous or deadly plants. And what else is made out of ‘all-natural’ substances? Snake venom, arsenic, mercury, lead. All stuff that could kill or make you very very ill, and all of it, ‘all-natural’. Just ’cause it says ‘all-natural’ on the bottle, please, for the sake of your health, don’t assume it’s safe!

Take, for example, the case of Sandi Stay, in the UK, who had to have both kidneys removed after going to a Chinese medicine store and being given a herb to treat her psoriasis. Turns out that herb was Aristochlia, a known cancer-causeing herb that is banned in the UK.

Or read the following, from this article:

Dr Mark Thursz, a consultant physician at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington said he had seen a huge rise in the number of patients being referred to him with liver failure or hepatitis after taking Chinese herbal medicine.

He said: “Many people believe herbal remedies are safe, but they should be seen in the light as conventional remedies in that they can adverse reactions.

“When you get a box of pills you get a long list of potential side effects.

“You don’t get that with herbal remedies because practitioners try to make you believe they are safe.”

Under current regulations Chinese medics are treated as shop keepers rather than traders, so in the same way a butcher prosecuted for selling bad meat would be allowed to continue trading so are they.

At the end of the day, it’s up to you to play it smart. I’m not saying all herbal medicines are dangerous. Some can work, and some may even be more effective than regular drugs. But when you walk into a Chinese medicine store, or into the office of a herbal supplement dealer, don’t leave your common sense at the door. Don’t be fooled by the myth of ‘all-natural’ safety. These are not doctors, they’re shopkeepers out to make a living. Do your research beforehand, and dont take the word of any website that sells the product if they’re claiming it’s safe. If I was selling, for example, a herbal pill for losing weight, it wouldn’t be in my best interest to tell you that it contains fenfluarmine, a substance so dangerous that it’s banned for sale pretty much worldwide, now would I?

Be smart out there, folks, and keep a skeptical eye on anything that claims to be ‘100% safe’ simply because it’s ‘all-natural’.
Read the rest of this entry »