Go, tell it on the mountain!

Guys. Listen up. This is important.

Science had more-or-less cured cancer. No joke.

But thanks to the work of beauty which is capitalism, the pharmaceutical giants of the world have prevented this miracle news from getting more than minimal cover from the media. This makes me extremely angry, but we aren't going to go into that.

Thankfully, we have the pre-SOPA internet to save the day! So please spread the following link to everyone you know via social media, and also those other ways you can spread links which social media addicts such as myself have forgotten exist.

The link is this:  http://wemustknow.net/2011/05/scientists-cure-cancer-but-no-one-takes-notice/

Now go and spread the good news to all the four corners of the earth.

Fairytale of New York

Many Westerners watched the scenes in Pyongyang after the death of Kim Jong-Il with incredulity and disbelief. "How can they grieve so hysterically over the death of a politician, a dictator?!" we asked. "North Korean propaganda must be some freakily effective shit."

Yet, the main story dominating the BBC news site yesterday was all like "The Duke of Edinburgh is out of hospital! Hooray! Hurrah! How wonderfully pleasing!" What's more, the news for all the days immediately preceding yesterday has been at least partially dominated by detailed analysis of the dear old Duke's progress in hospital, one correspondent informing the public that "six of the DofE's eight grandchildren visited him for about forty-five minutes..."
Imagine if he had died, and the endless demand the media would have made on our reserves of caring as a result. Don't get me wrong, I would have been vaguely sad if the Duke died, because all humans are worthy of mourning. But when the royals cop it, the country will be expected to grieve as though it was a member of their family which was no longer among us. And I think it's stupid.

The point is, the Western world is just as susceptible to personality cults as North Korea. In a sense, democracy is an even greater enabler of idolisation that totalitarianism, since our politicians need to attain our "love" for their careers to exist at all. 
While we aren't wrong to look at the North Koreans and be freaked out over their apparent adoring devotion to Old Kim Jong, we should be aware of how often we liberated Westerners fall into the same trap. Think upon Diana, Lady Gaga, Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher, even Stephen Fry. How many people's worldviews hinge on the unfettered adoration of individuals such as these. I do it too. We all do.

The problem is that such idolisation commits the High Treason of believing that a person is anything more than a person. Reducing other individuals to empty vessels for the love (or hate) we feel we need to give prevents us from genuinely appreciating what they are, and causes us to expect so much from them that we react disproportionately to any less-than-perfect decision that they make. It reduces our own humanity, too, as our personal flourishing depends on viewing all our fellow humans as equals, neither superior or inferior. Only then can we accept what they have to offer us without a) blindly accepting anything they say to be true or b) dismissing everything they are/think/do as insignificant.



BTW, all blog posts I make between now and the 6th of Jan will be named after Christmas/New Years songs. The titles will make sense inside my head, but possibly not anywhere else.

My Continued Fall From Faith

So I wasn't going to post a blog post about God and the end of my belief in him. I made a silent promise that such a thing would not exist, because I didn't want to risk contributing to the largely ego-driven bickering between believers and atheists which gets way too much "air-time" on the internet. But, whatever. Atheism is taking up too much of my thoughts to possibly blog about anything else. Except possibly Chris Colfer, but that would be even worse.

Here goes, then. I've gone from a state of ambiguous not-really-caring-either-way to one of fully-fledged atheistic humanism. There are a number of reasons for this, many of which are probably too tied up in the psychology of the subconscious for me to really fathom. I've been inspired by various verbal and written works by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Fry, and have basically been able to abandon the pro-God arguments still inhabiting my brain.

I won't go too much into it. But essentially, the creation and growth of the universe is a continuous process. Stars burst into existence from the build-up of billions of chemical reactions. Planets and continents shape themselves gradually, organically, at the cross-section of the necessary physical laws. Life colonises worlds by an endless sequence of natural processes, and bigger and better species develop through the trial-and-error of natural selection. There is no room in the universe for a designer. The only place you can fit God, in my opinion, is at the beginning, to kick-start the chain of reactions which gradually built the universe up into what it is. But the problem with putting him there is that you don't need an omnipotent, omniscient conscious being just to flick the first pebble of an avalanche. And it certainly doesn't follow that the pebble-flicker should be the source of our morality.

Yes, it's incredibly unlikely for life and DNA to exist. But we've had all of eternity and all the endless expanse of space for that unlikely thing to happen. That is to say, given all the billions upon billions of stars and planets there are, the low probability of life happening somewhere seems a hell of a lot less daunting.

To summarise, I don't think the nature of the universe implies a creator or designer. I also don't think we need religious revelation to teach us morality. As the aforementioned Christopher Hitchens puts beautifully, if we didn't know before the dawn of the Abrahamic faiths that murder and theft were bad and that human solidarity was necessary, we wouldn't have got anywhere as far as Mount Sinai. And anyway, if we only know or think that an action is good because God or his messengers tell us so, then we and our actions don't deserve the title of "moral". There is no point in doing something you consider the right thing unless you know for yourself that it is the right thing.

So how is life without God? Well, there is a mourning process which comes from giving up something as huge as Christianity. There was for me, anyway. But I've finished grieving and I'm ready to accept my brand new perspective. And it's kind of freeing. There were things that I thought were bad for no other reason than the bible told me so, but now I look at them and I cannot see what is bad about them. And I realise that finding your own morality is the most empowering and fulfilling thing possible, even surpassing a perceived identity as a child of God.

Many people who are still Christian will tell me that I hadn't really accepted Jesus into my life, that if I had I would not be able to make this change. But, I did. There was a time when I believed in a Heavenly Father and the Living Lord Christ with all my heart and without a shadow of a doubt, and there was a time when their perceived love was the single most important thing in my life. But all things come to an end. I have moved on and I realise now that accepting something without doubt is unhealthy and hindering, and it's not a mistake I plan to make twice.

So here we are.


RIP Christian Me, 1998-2011.

How To Be Charitable Without Spending Any Money

As someone who loves the sense of self-satisfaction that comes from supporting charitable causes, but hates spending money in an almost equal measure, I often find myself in conflict. Which is why I love this new thing I found via this awesome video:  Tab For A Cause
Tab for a Cause essentially works by opening a web page with an advert on every time you open a new tab on your web browser. The money raised in ad revenue then goes to a charity of your choice (from a list they give you). It only works for Google Chrome and Firefox, but if you're as committed to cheapskate charity as I am then you'll download one of the browsers specially.

But TFAC is just ONE of the many ways you can make money go to charities without that money being yours. Besides, like, identity theft, but I don't really recommend that.

Another thing which is similar to TFAC but requires slightly more effort is Click For Your Charity, in which you voluntarily watch an advert of your choice. Every view apparently raises enough money to pay for one week's clean drinking water for one person. Woo!
Another thing which requires a lot more effort (well, depending on the definition of effort) but is also more rewarding is FreeRice.com. Basically, it's a website with lots of quizzes. Every time you answer a question correctly, it donates ten grains of rice to hungry people. Which is pretty cool. It's also pretty fun (if you happen to be a nerd like me). Also, you get a double ego-boost from being proven smart and from helping hungry people.

The fourth and last thing I'm going to mention is Kiva.org, in which you do have to give money, but you get it back. Kiva is a charity which allows you to donate money to entrepreneurs in the third world trying to make life better for themselves. Then once their various entrepreneurial exploits get underway, you get the money back. Thus you have brought about a long-term improvement in the life of someones less fortunate than yourself, at no cost to yourself.

I hope you have found some new worthwhile things to do with your time as a result of this blog. If you are aware of any similar charity-without-losing money services which I haven't mentioned, then please leave them in comments, or tweet them at my face. My love for cheapskate charity knows no bounds.

And that is the end.

Pretentiousness is Annoying

I have become increasingly irritated by people claiming that their subjective opinions are anything other than subjective opinions.

I mean, to some extent we all need to have irrational faith in our own conceptions in order to function. Like, no more that 10% of the claims I make on this blog are objectively true, but functionally I have to act as though everything I say is objectively true, or I wouldn't ever post anything. The same is true for anyone who has ever expressed an opinion ever, or anyone who has ever made a moral judgement about anything. So I have no problem with (or even actively endorse) people making the functional assumption that what they believe to be true is true.

But there's a difference between functionally assuming that everything you beleive is true and actually beleiving that everything you beleive is true. This difference is expressed in certain people's inability to listen to the arguments of other people, certain people's outlandish statements about other people's views, and certain people's inability to go into a debate without pretentiously assuming that everyone disagreeing with them is an idiot. And it's this behaviour and the underlying belief which enables it which has started to really grind my gears.

All humans are fallible. Our understanding of the universe relies on a few fairly impressive but comparatively feeble sensory organs, and the ever-limited ability of our brains to understand what those organs show us. We are all saturated with bias, which is functionally neccessary in order for us to know anything, but freqeuntly prevents us from seeing the full picture. And we are all driven by the desire to be liked and respected and to be able to like and respect ourselves, which, while not a bad thing in itself, all too often eclipses our desire to pursue knowledge and understand the universe.

But too many people in the world seem to have forgotten this. The arrogance of those who seem to subconscously or consciously beleive that they are infallible is mindblowing. Such people seem to have decided exactly how the world works before even leaving their homes, and as such have stopped feeling the need to pay attention to what's actually going on, except to force what they see through the mechanism of their preconceptions.
I should backtrack here. We all suffer from this problem to a certain extent, and psychology tells me that the fact that I regocnise it in others so often indicates that I unknowlingly subscribe to delusions of infalliablity myself. So I'm not out to isolate certain people and point and sneer at them, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary. I'm trying to adress a problem, not the people who suffer from the problem.

The idea I want to promote is that every conscious human being has a valid angle on what the universe is like. I don't agree, fundementally, with the idea that certain people's opinions are just "better" than others. Yes, some points of view seem much more likely than others (evolution over not-evolution, racial equality over racism, etc.), but those views which seem irrational exist for a reason, and the reason is not simply "some people are stupid".
Everyone has different experiences of life, different sources of information and influence, and different internal mechanisms for processing ideas. And these all culminate to produce different opinions. I beleive it is only by considering all points of view, even the ones which seem completely crazy, and looking at the world through as many different angles as possible, will we get closer to "the truth" than we are now.

As such, it is deeply irrational to go through life dismissing all opposing opinions to yours as simply inferior. Not only is it just wrong, but it hinders your own personal development and understanding of the world around you.

Pretentiousness is annoying for the simple reason that it will never get us anywhere.