Heaving Dead Cats » advice

The New Ten Commandments

Neece — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 22:45:59 +0000

Awhile ago I wrote about the 10 commandments. I then rewrote them for my personal moral code, calling them Neece’s Principles. No need to have anyone commanding anyone.

Christopher Hitchens just wrote a 3 page piece for Vanity Fair about the 10 commandments titled The New Commandments. He goes through the KJV version and talks about where they are good and where they are not so good. Here is his summation:

What emerges from the first review is this: the Ten Commandments were derived from situational ethics. They show every symptom of having been man-made and improvised under pressure. They are addressed to a nomadic tribe whose main economy is primitive agriculture and whose wealth is sometimes counted in people as well as animals. They are also addressed to a group that has been promised the land and flocks of other people: the Amalekites and Midianites and others whom God orders them to kill, rape, enslave, or exterminate. And this, too, is important because at every step of their arduous journey the Israelites are reminded to keep to the laws, not because they are right but just because they will lead them to become conquerors (of, as it happens, almost the only part of the Middle East that has no oil).

So here is a rundown of how he fixes them:

One to Three can go, “since they have nothing to do with morality and are no more than a long, rasping throat clearing by an admittedly touchy dictator. Mere fear of unseen authority is not a sound basis for ethics.” (the invisible sky daddy flexes his muscles and demands worship.).
He also says we don’t have to ban sculpture and art (idols).
Four. Gone. Pointless. (don’t work on the sabbath, except black sabbath, of course!)
Five, respect elders, sure. But also ban child abuse. What a concept! (I’d add that parents should only get respect like anyone else, when they earn it.)
Six, taken care of by modern law. Don’t murder. (Don’t kill under almost all circumstances.) (although I think assisted suicide for terminally ill people should be legal)
Seven, he seems to destroy too. (adultery) (and yeah, what about saying rape is bad? especially pedophilia and that kind of stuff?)
Eight, ok. This one is good. Don’t steal. (stealing)
Nine, don’t lie. Also basically good. (lying about your neighbor)
Ten, women aren’t property. This one is pointless and harmful in that it makes you a sinner just from your thoughts. (don’t lust after your neighbor’s goods or wife)

Other evils of human society that should be denounced, according to Hitchens:

genocide
slavery
rape
child abuse
sexual repression
white-collar crime
wanton destruction of the natural world
people who talk on cell phones in restaurants (and movie theatres, or who talk on the phone or text while driving!)
people who blow themselves up while shouting ‘god is great!’ (and any other kind of jihadism or crusade)
racism
using people as private property
condemning people for their inborn nature (like homosexuality, etc)

And this is how he finishes:

“Be willing to renounce any god or any religion if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above. In short: Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form.”

Good advice! I think I stand by the principles I came up with for myself. What are yours? Do you agree with Christopher Hitchens?

I’m Curious!

Neece — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 02:56:59 +0000

The other day I shared my favorite podcasts, one of which was the SGU. Well, I just found a new one! From Skepchick.org with Rebecca Watson comes a new podcast called Curiosity Aroused. There’s one episode up now which is about calorie restriction for long life. The episode is about 20 minutes long and you can subscribe through iTunes.

In the first episode, they talk to Monica Reinagel who is pretty neat in her own right. She’s a nutrition expert and through her short podcast and blog she helps weed through the hype and nonsense of nutrition. As a person who wonders what is fact and what is bullshit when it comes to food, diet and the like, it’s very cool to find a resource for good information.

Here are her sites:

www.nutritiondata.com: her blog is on here along with a wealth of information.

http://nutritiondiva.quickanddirtytips.com/: Her podcasts are on here. If you go to listen or read and episode, you can then find the link to iTunes to subscribe and get them all. They are each about 5 minutes long.

Do you have any great resources for good nutrition and diet that are based in science and research? Please feel free to share!

The Secret Divides Part 2

Neece — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 06:40:16 +0000

The other day I wrote about a woman named Ruth who emailed me asking for some advice. Ruth’s sister Esther (not their real names for their privacy) had been introduced to The Secret by her husband and now avoided Ruth because she said she is toxic. The first post is called The Secret Divides and I gave my initial opinion, then asked Ruth for some clarification, as well as asked you for your take on the situation.

Ruth said the following:

My sister and I are 5 years apart, she is in her late 30s I am in my early 30s. We live on opposite sides of the country.

[Esther and I] talked on Christmas – but only if I agreed to be play nice. We did exchange gifts. As long as I am willing to play along, she will speak to me – but it is obviously strained and only to make my mom happy. I have always had issues with hypocrisy or injustice – and I hate the fact that she doesn’t have the respect for me and my feelings that she expects for herself – but I try.

Is there anything within the teachings that I can use to help her see my even a tiny bit of the pain that we feel when she says Dad, Grandma or I got what we asked for? I don’t want to destroy her belief – she has a right to it and I can respect that – as hard as it is for me to refrain from argument.

I am not the kind to sit and let people wallow in ignorance. I take serious exception when someone comes to a conclusion based on erroneous fact or assumption – that is my job. It is my job to present evidence and arguments and win. I can’t do that here – and that alone throws me so off balance I am unsure how to proceed.

I have been thinking about this for 2 days. I’m afraid I can’t really give Ruth what she’s after. I don’t have a copy of The Secret but I am quite familiar with the law of attraction as I spelled out awhile ago in a post called The Law of Attraction, and the Secret, are Bullshit. For your convenience, here are the basic rules for the law of attraction again:

Thoughts have an energy that attracts like energy (sometimes borrowed from Quantum Mechanics, minus any evidence). You must control this energy by practicing four things:

Know what you want.
Ask the universe for it.
Feel and behave as if the object of your desire is already with you, or is on its way to you.
Be open to receiving it.

Of course, if you think negative thoughts, the universe will manifest those negative thoughts in your life as well. So you must think positively at all times so that the universe will manifest all of your desires.

You might notice a few things when you read over the basic concept. Namely, the narcissistic and egocentric worldview, devoid of thinking about the needs and desires of our fellow man. The whole universe magically follows your every thought, tallies them up and does your bidding if you concentrate those thoughts. So the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth, the universe revolves around YOU. It’s sort of like having your own personal genie or god.

Where in all of this can you find compassion for our fellow man? Nowhere, especially if those less knowledgeable about the petty workings of this busybody universe are normal humans who worry and have negative thoughts. Whatever misfortune befalls those poor saps had it coming to them. That is an extremely harmful worldview, not to mention devoid of reality, common sense and compassion.

So Ruth is feeling the full sting of The Secret. Her sister has deemed her toxic because she has had physical problems since she was in her early teens. According to Esther, Ruth has attracted her ailments to her, that she asked to be sick.

This is the farthest concept from empathy I can think of when it comes to someone who is suffering. Instead of showing compassion for her sister, she avoids her, presumably to avoid the magical negative vibes. That’s pretty heartless and uncaring.

So how can Ruth get through to someone who is so cold and self-centered? Esther demands that Ruth play nice, but does she do the same? Esther can make the universe bend to her will, yet she can’t show compassion to her own sister who has health problems, that Ruth’s real-life situation makes her toxic? It has nothing to do with anything based in reality. A book tells her to avoid the negative so she disposes of her sister.

There’s just no way to reason with, or appeal to the emotions of, someone who is willing to do that for her own gain through the manipulation of the universe through her thoughts. It’s self-serving. It’s a belief that is extremely appealing, and easy to confirm whenever the slightest positive thing happens. And if something negative happens, it’s easy to make excuses and use that as a confirmation as well. Cherry-picking extraordinaire!

You can’t make people see the world the way you do. We are all in our own head in that sense. While Ruth can try to gently win her sister over and show through example that life is full of happy and sad, negative and positive, ups and downs, and it’s what you make of it all, well, maybe someday she might change her mind. But Esther seems to have embraced this magical thinking at any cost.

And when you have a false belief based on nothing but a silly book (ahem, religion, anyone?), people who don’t believe the same way are actually a threat to you. They threaten your constructed worldview with facts, reality and conflicting evidence. You are in danger of your belief system falling like a house of cards. It seems like it’s in your best interest to avoid or attack those “others”, even if they are family.

Well, actually it’s in your best interest to seek out differing philosophical perspectives, ask a lot of questions, read and study real science and the actual workings of the universe. The real world is so achingly beautiful. It’s so fascinating and complex. We understand but a small drop in the bucket of nature. There is so much out there that is real and true and interesting and exciting. Why do people feel the need to search for a supernatural answer? That is so lazy. Nature itself will blow your mind if you observe it. There is so much to learn. And it’s all natural. No accountant genies or gods needed.

I have to say a few more things. In talking this over with my friend and my husband, we all agreed that if our sister treated us like Esther, we would probably take a cue from her and think it was a good idea to avoid her for awhile. Why try to have a relationship with someone who doesn’t want one in return? I know, that’s not how we are raised in society. But in my life, my friends and husband are much more important to me than my blood relatives who are all crazy, dysfunctional and dare I say it, toxic. I make my own family with great friends and my husband. True empathy, affection, love and respect are more important to me than similar genes and a childhood history together. But that’s not for everyone.

I also have to say that my opinions are probably a bit more pragmatic and less optimistic than other people might have. If you have differing opinions for Ruth on her situation, please feel free to comment. Or if you want, you can email me privately and I’ll forward it on to Ruth. Also feel free to share any experiences you’ve had with law of attraction. It might be helpful.

The Secret Divides

Neece — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 22:05:08 +0000

As you may know, I make no bones in saying books like The Secret and their ilk are complete bullshit. I wrote about it awhile ago – The Law of Attraction, and the Secret, are Bullshit. Beyond the bullshit I have found them to be harmful if swallowed. If you believe what the book says, you will have a distorted worldview. This can be extremely detrimental to your own thought processes, and as you will see below, can also skew how you look at someone who is in an unfortunate situation.

For example, let’s say you believe that your thoughts dictate what will come to you. Then someone steals your wallet while you’re at the grocery store. According to The Secret, you brought that negative event to you by worrying and thinking negative thoughts. Because you were afraid of having your wallet stolen, you worried about it in the back of your mind, and that made that guy behind you decide to run up and steal it. Wow! You are so powerful! The universe listens to your thoughts and acts upon them, even when you aren’t paying attention!

In this fantasy world, the universe is a busy-body accountant, tallying your thoughts and then scheduling events to correspond. Ridiculous!

So wow, what would happen if you really focused your attention? What would happen if you got rid of all of your negative thoughts (not humanly possible or healthy) and wished for only good things? Perfect health? Wealth? A perfect spouse? Sure, why not! If you can dream it, you can make it happen. (cough cough BULLSHIT!!)

Of course, here’s the catch. It doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, it might be years and years of wishful thinking before something comes true. (Coincidence?!) Oh, and most likely you actually DID things to make it finally happen. Maybe you made decisions and took actions that led to you finally acheiving your dream.

But that’s not magic. The universe doesn’t work the way The Secret says it does. If it did, my life would be very different because of the power of my thoughts.

What do I think about a lot? Well, actually even though I’m a rather happy atheist (with a heart of gold), I tend to worry. I often worry about Butch (my awesome husband) when he drives to and from work. I’m worried he’ll get in an accident. Since we moved to West Virginia the threat of a deer running in front of him has increased drastically than when we lived in Florida. Plus now we have snow and ice instead of just rain and other bad drivers texting and talking on their cell phones. But you know what? My thoughts DO NOT LEAVE MY HEAD unless I speak them, write them down or act upon them.

In 5 years of worrying, Butch has never been in an accident. Could he get in one tomorrow? Yes. But that would be a coincidence, not magic. See? It’s nonsense.

One of the most insidious and hateful parts of the Secret is the idea that people who are in a bad situation made it happen with their negative thoughts. So if a woman gets raped on her way home from work one day, she is at fault because she had negative thoughts and worries that attracted the negative energy and therefore the attack on her.

That kind of thinking is hateful and evil. Unfortunately, I can tell you, once you believe such a baseless lie, it can really get stuck in your head. I still have to remind myself when I worry about something or think a negative thought that the thought doesn’t leave my head and the universe is not keeping track of them. (By the way, if you know of a way to stop worrying, let me know)

This all leads me to Ruth (not her real name. If you have a list of cool names that I can use for when people send me emails that they then let me post anonymously, let me know! Maybe I should use biblical names. How funny would that be? I went back and changed her name to Ruth… )

Anyway, Ruth sent me an email asking for my advice and assistance. She wrote the following:

I was reading through your discussion of ‘the secret’ and need some help. I see you said you have experience with the lie of attraction, and now reject it. My sister is lost to me because I am a toxic influence in her life. I am crushed, and she is ambivalent. I would rather she hate me, at least then I would exist. How can I make her see how much this hurts? That I miss and love her, that her beliefs insult and degrade me? That it is painful when I read that she thinks my chronic debilitating illness is my own fault and I was asking for it through negative thoughts? Is there anything I can do? Do you know of any other resources I can turn to? Any help is truly appreciated!

I asked Ruth if I could post this question to you, my wonderful readers, because maybe you would have some great advice or thoughts to help too. I haven’t answered her yet because I have to say, my first thoughts were kind of negative about her situation. So what I did was send a follow-up list of questions to her to get more information. I’ll let you know when she answers.

Unfortunately when someone wants to believe, and fully accepts the bullshit of the law of attraction or other psuedo-science, they can be just as dogmatic as a True Believer of religion. They want to believe. They feel the need to believe. And anything that gets in the way of those beliefs must be discarded.

It goes something like this. Ruth’s sister is looking for an easy fix. She buys The Secret, reads it and believes it. After that, she will cherry-pick her experiences and memories to support the law of attraction working in her life, and conveniently ignore all the evidence that says the universe follows natural laws and is otherwise random. Then it becomes a dogmatic belief. If Ruth disagrees, and is ill, then of course her sister will assume she’s toxic and bringing in bad vibes. The book has told her that Ruth made herself ill. Ruth has to be avoided. The Secret, in this situation, divides families.

Unfortunately when someone is dogmatic, in my experience there’s no getting through to them, at least not in the short term. My initial advice to Ruth, before I get more information, is the following:

You can’t make someone behave and think the way you want them to. The best advice I can give at this point is simply to live your life as best you can. Don’t try to talk to her about the law of attraction. It’s rare to get through to someone who believes something completely. You will only drive them away because when you threaten their belief system, the easiest way for them to deal with the conflict is to get rid of you, as opposed to changing their worldview.

Your best bet is to show by example. Take care of yourself, be realistic and try to make the best of your personal situation (your illness), and reach out to her if she lets you. But when you reach out to her, make it benign and non-confrontational.

Of course, the other side of the situation is a bit less pleasant. If your sister is willing to discard you so easily over the lies written in a mindless book, perhaps that’s something to think about. Maybe for right now, she’s the one who’s being toxic? But that’s just a thought. I really don’t have enough information about the situation to know.

That being said, I think you have to move on, take care of yourself, make the best of your situation, and wait it out. Occasionally reach out with a non-confrontational hello. Don’t talk about the law of attraction, your illness, or how you are hurt by her actions. Keep it friendly and avoid inflammatory issues.

Maybe things will change. Maybe they won’t, but at least you’re living your life to the best of your ability and finding happiness where you can. That’s all any of us can do.

So if you would like to share some thoughts with Ruth, feel free to comment. I will let you know when she answers my questions. (edit: see below for a link to part 2)

Conversation With Anne About Religion, Truth, Science and History

Neece — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:50:35 +0000

The other day I got an email from Anne which I will post below. She asked some basic questions and I thought I’d share my answers with you (with her permission, under a pseudonym for her privacy). So here is her email:

Well I am new to religion totally as neither of my parents knew what to believe so they taught me nothing. I have so many questions and not nearly enough hours to google! lol jk

If you dont believe in a higher being such as God like the Christians what do you believe? (***Now please dont think I am questioning your beliefs I simply need a better understanding of what you hold to be true in this world.***) Do you believe that things happen simply because we choose that is how it should or is there a force behind events? I have gathered you believe in evolution but how were monkeys first placed on earth? And then how was earth created? I believe it is truely unknown to begin with but do you have a theory?

My reply:

First, question everything. Don’t take my word for it. Research everything yourself.

I have a couple of questions for you.

Your parents taught you nothing about religion? So you picked up bits and pieces as you grew up from other people? That’s interesting. Are they atheists then? Or do they just never talk about religion? Perhaps it just doesn’t seem like an issue to them? I am curious if they’ve said anything to you at all. What kind of school did you go to? Did you go to public, private or home school? In which state? And how old are you?

Raising a child without teaching them anything is not what I’d consider ideal. My idea of a great foundation for a child is to teach her how to think critically, to think for herself. I recommend teaching a child about all religions from around the world and throughout human history, then asking questions to help the child form her own understanding about it. I would also share my personal opinion on the subject. But most people don’t raise their kids to think for themselves.

It sounds like you’re searching for something to believe in, but I would ask why you need to believe in anything that isn’t real?

I will speak for myself only, as I’m sure other atheists have come to their lack of belief in different ways.

I grew up as a christian. I went to church and believed jesus died for my sins. I was terrified of burning in hell and got baptized 3 times in 3 different churches to try to make sure I’d get into heaven and not burn for all eternity after I died. Looking back I think it was a horrible burden as a child, to be so afraid of a god that was supposed to be loving. It made no sense.

I studied the three major religions (judaism, christianity and islam) in my 20’s and realized after several years that is was all created by man. It hit me about 10 years ago that I no longer believed in gods of any sort and I was actually an atheist. A more detailed history of my deconversion can be found here.

Your question is incorrect. You asked if I no longer believe in a god (or any gods for that matter) then what do I believe in. The answer is I go out of my way to avoid beliefs as a general rule. You see, I don’t want to believe, I want to know (Carl Sagan said that). I want evidence and reality. I prefer facts to fantasy or wishful thinking. I have no need of beliefs that are not based in reality.

What do I hold to be true in this world? That’s a different question. I guess the answer to that is what has been observed in our brief human history. I value the accomplishments of humans, the amazing wonders of nature in all its forms, the cosmos in its vast scale. I look at history and see how far humans have come. I see how we’ve evolved our culture and societies, how we’ve learned great, amazing technologies and thought deep, profound concepts that have advanced us tremendously in a relatively short period of time. These are all real things that we can look at and examine and understand to the best of our abilities. Something else I hold true is that I am fully responsible for my own actions, as well as my inactions. I can’t pawn that off on some fantasy being. Actions and inactions have consequences.

Do I believe things happen simply because we choose that is how it should be or is there a force behind events? No. Neither of those has any basis in reality. The first is wishful thinking and the power of suggestion. The second is looking for a supernatural god to explain things you don’t understand. Neither is real.

Something happens because of cause and effect. I hit a key on my keyboard and a letter pops up on my monitor. A thousand things happened to make it show up. Just thinking and wishing for the words to appear on the screen does nothing. Your thoughts do not leave your head and transform the universe. This is a common false belief in the new age worldview. It is completely bogus nonsense without any basis in fact. If you have a thought and then you take that thought and turn it into some kind of action, that’s when things start happening.

In all of science there is zero evidence of anything supernatural in the universe. Everything that has been explained is natural. While we don’t have all the answers (and probably never will) about the beginning of the universe as we know it, or how it will end, if it will, and other questions, we know an awful lot now and it’s all completely natural. There is no evidence of any sort of god needed to make it all work as it does. What we call the laws of nature work just fine without any kind of divine force.

So I guess what I trust is cause and effect, physics, and human interaction with the material world. No need for a god or a creator. It all works just fine on its own.

Yes, I accept evolution as a fact, as most scientists do. Your next statement is also quite wrong. Monkeys were never placed on earth. This would say that some divine being put monkeys on the planet like a child placing dolls in a toy house. Did you learn the prevailing theories of how the earth was formed through natural cosmic events 4.6 billion years ago (or thereabouts) in school?

To go back in time, and again this is my rough explanation (you really need to read up on the specifics as I am not a cosmologist or a geologist and I’m doing this from memory) about 14 billion years ago (roughly) there was the Big Bang. All of matter expanded from a singular source (called a singularity) outwards, and even now it continues to expand. Swirling gases condensed to form stars and crashed together and cooled to form planets. I guess you could say, after the Big Bang, the rest of the formation of stars and planets has been the effect of that event.
I recommend Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson as a great astrophysicist. He’s easy to understand and very interesting. Here’s a 5 minute video you might like.

Also, PBS has a timeline of the universe here.

These are rough and simple explanations of prevailing theories as I know them. As I’ve mentioned, no one knows how exactly the Big Bang happened, what the universe was before the Big Bang, or how exactly life on earth first formed. The thing about science is we never stop asking questions. Usually asking a question brings up a dozen more that are unanswered, but it’s all so exciting and thrilling to observe the universe in all its intricate and natural majesty, and to try to understand it. And again, there is no evidence of any sort of god or supernatural being. Everything so far discovered and understood is all natural.

While no one knows exactly how life first started on earth billions of years ago, we are coming up with interesting ideas for how amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) were first able to form in the primordial soup that was on the planet. It was a very different environment, and little one-celled organisms most likely formed bio-films on the ocean floor and probably in volcanic steam vents. (Again, this is my understanding. I am getting this from memory, not a science text, but I recommend you study it yourself so that you know a bit about it straight from different scientists)

Through natural selection and adaptation, the little bacteria evolved over billions of years, branching off, adapting to different environments and through different environmental pressures. We are not evolved from monkeys. But we share a common ancestor from long ago. In fact, I should make it clear, we now know that all of life is connected genetically. You have billions of bacteria living on you right now, and you share a common ancestor with that bacteria, your pet cat, the fish you ate for dinner, and the whales that live in the ocean. I recommend watching a great video and playing with an interactive tree of life here. Here is a link to the video with David Attenborough. It’s 6 and a half minutes long, basically just a rough overview but it will get you started. Here is another great tree of life video (10 minutes).

I hope that makes sense. Please consider looking into learning a basic understanding of biology and maybe some other science. It will help you understand so much more about the world. Get some good books on evolutionary biology, cosmology and astronomy. You might find it amazing and interesting. Look up the show Cosmos and Carl Sagan. He was so awesome at explaining the universe.

Look up David Attenborough. He’s a naturalist and explains natural history quite well. Try a museum of natural history. You could check out the NY Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian in D.C., and look to your local library in the science section. Look for scientists who are peer reviewed and stick to subjects they are experts in. Follow up with other sources to verify what you read. Never take anything at face value.

I have to ask, why do you feel you have a need for a god and a religion? You were lucky not to be brainwashed into believing something false to control you. Why do you feel the need to grasp onto one now? Religion is about controlling how people think, feel and live through fear, guilt and promise of a reward after death, which can never be tested or proven.

Oh, and because it is often a reason people think they need religion, I will say that being a good person is its own reward and there is ample evidence that morals are evolutionary, not directed by a supreme being who likes the smell of burning goat-flesh. Millions of atheists are moral and happy without such delusional beliefs based on iron age goat-herders.

I hope I answered your questions. I hope you are now asking many more and that those questions will become a lifelong quest for information and knowledge about the world and the universe, and our humble place within it.

If you would like to add to what I have said, I would love links to great videos, sites or books that might be helpful in explaining the Tree of Life, evolution and the Big Bang, etc. Please don’t resort to ad hominem attacks. We all start somewhere. Let’s give Anne the benefit of the doubt and encourage her to ask questions and seek answers.

Why I Am Not A Christian

Neece — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 03:05:11 +0000

by Bertrand Russell

Russell delivered this lecture on March 6, 1927 to the National Secular Society, South London Branch, at Battersea Town Hall. Published in pamphlet form in that same year, the essay subsequently achieved new fame with Paul Edwards’ edition of Russell’s book, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays … (1957).

As your Chairman has told you, the subject about which I am going to speak to you tonight is “Why I Am Not a Christian.” Perhaps it would be as well, first of all, to try to make out what one means by the word Christian. It is used these days in a very loose sense by a great many people. Some people mean no more by it than a person who attempts to live a good life. In that sense I suppose there would be Christians in all sects and creeds; but I do not think that that is the proper sense of the word, if only because it would imply that all the people who are not Christians — all the Buddhists, Confucians, Mohammedans, and so on — are not trying to live a good life. I do not mean by a Christian any person who tries to live decently according to his lights. I think that you must have a certain amount of definite belief before you have a right to call yourself a Christian. The word does not have quite such a full-blooded meaning now as it had in the times of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. In those days, if a man said that he was a Christian it was known what he meant. You accepted a whole collection of creeds which were set out with great precision, and every single syllable of those creeds you believed with the whole strength of your convictions.

What Is a Christian?
Nowadays it is not quite that. We have to be a little more vague in our meaning of Christianity. I think, however, that there are two different items which are quite essential to anybody calling himself a Christian. The first is one of a dogmatic nature — namely, that you must believe in God and immortality. If you do not believe in those two things, I do not think that you can properly call yourself a Christian. Then, further than that, as the name implies, you must have some kind of belief about Christ. The Mohammedans, for instance, also believe in God and in immortality, and yet they would not call themselves Christians. I think you must have at the very lowest the belief that Christ was, if not divine, at least the best and wisest of men. If you are not going to believe that much about Christ, I do not think you have any right to call yourself a Christian. Of course, there is another sense, which you find in Whitaker’s Almanack and in geography books, where the population of the world is said to be divided into Christians, Mohammedans, Buddhists, fetish worshipers, and so on; and in that sense we are all Christians. The geography books count us all in, but that is a purely geographical sense, which I suppose we can ignore.Therefore I take it that when I tell you why I am not a Christian I have to tell you two different things: first, why I do not believe in God and in immortality; and, secondly, why I do not think that Christ was the best and wisest of men, although I grant him a very high degree of moral goodness.

But for the successful efforts of unbelievers in the past, I could not take so elastic a definition of Christianity as that. As I said before, in olden days it had a much more full-blooded sense. For instance, it included he belief in hell. Belief in eternal hell-fire was an essential item of Christian belief until pretty recent times. In this country, as you know, it ceased to be an essential item because of a decision of the Privy Council, and from that decision the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York dissented; but in this country our religion is settled by Act of Parliament, and therefore the Privy Council was able to override their Graces and hell was no longer necessary to a Christian. Consequently I shall not insist that a Christian must believe in hell.

The Existence of God
To come to this question of the existence of God: it is a large and serious question, and if I were to attempt to deal with it in any adequate manner I should have to keep you here until Kingdom Come, so that you will have to excuse me if I deal with it in a somewhat summary fashion. You know, of course, that the Catholic Church has laid it down as a dogma that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason. That is a somewhat curious dogma, but it is one of their dogmas. They had to introduce it because at one time the freethinkers adopted the habit of saying that there were such and such arguments which mere reason might urge against the existence of God, but of course they knew as a matter of faith that God did exist. The arguments and the reasons were set out at great length, and the Catholic Church felt that they must stop it. Therefore they laid it down that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason and they had to set up what they considered were arguments to prove it. There are, of course, a number of them, but I shall take only a few.

The First-Cause Argument
Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the First Cause. (It is maintained that everything we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes further and further you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God.) That argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be. The philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not anything like the vitality it used to have; but, apart from that, you can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that when I was a young man and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: “My father taught me that the question ‘Who made me?’ cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question `Who made god?’” That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, “How about the tortoise?” the Indian said, “Suppose we change the subject.” The argument is really no better than that. There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause.

The Natural-Law Argument
Then there is a very common argument from natural law. That was a favorite argument all through the eighteenth century, especially under the influence of Sir Isaac Newton and his cosmogony. People observed the planets going around the sun according to the law of gravitation, and they thought that God had given a behest to these planets to move in that particular fashion, and that was why they did so. That was, of course, a convenient and simple explanation that saved them the trouble of looking any further for explanations of the law of gravitation. Nowadays we explain the law of gravitation in a somewhat complicated fashion that Einstein has introduced. I do not propose to give you a lecture on the law of gravitation, as interpreted by Einstein, because that again would take some time; at any rate, you no longer have the sort of natural law that you had in the Newtonian system, where, for some reason that nobody could understand, nature behaved in a uniform fashion. We now find that a great many things we thought were natural laws are really human conventions. You know that even in the remotest depths of stellar space there are still three feet to a yard. That is, no doubt, a very remarkable fact, but you would hardly call it a law of nature. And a great many things that have been regarded as laws of nature are of that kind. On the other hand, where you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you will find they are much less subject to law than people thought, and that the laws at which you arrive are statistical averages of just the sort that would emerge from chance. There is, as we all know, a law that if you throw dice you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times, and we do not regard that as evidence that the fall of the dice is regulated by design; on the contrary, if the double sixes came every time we should think that there was design. The laws of nature are of that sort as regards a great many of them. They are statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes this whole business of natural law much less impressive than it formerly was. Quite apart from that, which represents the momentary state of science that may change tomorrow, the whole idea that natural laws imply a lawgiver is due to a confusion between natural and human laws. Human laws are behests commanding you to behave a certain way, in which you may choose to behave, or you may choose not to behave; but natural laws are a description of how things do in fact behave, and being a mere description of what they in fact do, you cannot argue that there must be somebody who told them to do that, because even supposing that there were, you are then faced with the question “Why did God issue just those natural laws and no others?” If you say that he did it simply from his own good pleasure, and without any reason, you then find that there is something which is not subject to law, and so your train of natural law is interrupted. If you say, as more orthodox theologians do, that in all the laws which God issues he had a reason for giving those laws rather than others — the reason, of course, being to create the best universe, although you would never think it to look at it — if there were a reason for the laws which God gave, then God himself was subject to law, and therefore you do not get any advantage by introducing God as an intermediary. You really have a law outside and anterior to the divine edicts, and God does not serve your purpose, because he is not the ultimate lawgiver. In short, this whole argument about natural law no longer has anything like the strength that it used to have. I am traveling on in time in my review of the arguments. The arguments that are used for the existence of God change their character as time goes on. They were at first hard intellectual arguments embodying certain quite definite fallacies. As we come to modern times they become less respectable intellectually and more and more affected by a kind of moralizing vagueness.

The Argument from Design
The next step in the process brings us to the argument from design. You all know the argument from design: everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so little different, we could not manage to live in it. That is the argument from design. It sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot. I do not know how rabbits would view that application. It is an easy argument to parody. You all know Voltaire’s remark, that obviously the nose was designed to be such as to fit spectacles. That sort of parody has turned out to be not nearly so wide of the mark as it might have seemed in the eighteenth century, because since the time of Darwin we understand much better why living creatures are adapted to their environment. It is not that their environment was made to be suitable to them but that they grew to be suitable to it, and that is the basis of adaptation. There is no evidence of design about it.

When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists? Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending — something dead, cold, and lifeless.

I am told that that sort of view is depressing, and people will sometimes tell you that if they believed that, they would not be able to go on living. Do not believe it; it is all nonsense. Nobody really worries about much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions and millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out — at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation — it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things.

The Moral Arguments for a Deity
Now we reach one stage further in what I shall call the intellectual descent that the Theists have made in their argumentations, and we come to what are called the moral arguments for the existence of God. You all know, of course, that there used to be in the old days three intellectual arguments for the existence of God, all of which were disposed of by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason; but no sooner had he disposed of those arguments than he invented a new one, a moral argument, and that quite convinced him. He was like many people: in intellectual matters he was skeptical, but in moral matters he believed implicitly in the maxims that he had imbibed at his mother’s knee. That illustrates what the psychoanalysts so much emphasize — the immensely stronger hold upon us that our very early associations have than those of later times.

Kant, as I say, invented a new moral argument for the existence of God, and that in varying forms was extremely popular during the nineteenth century. It has all sorts of forms. One form is to say there would be no right or wrong unless God existed. I am not for the moment concerned with whether there is a difference between right and wrong, or whether there is not: that is another question. The point I am concerned with is that, if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, then you are in this situation: Is that difference due to God’s fiat or is it not? If it is due to God’s fiat, then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God’s fiat, because God’s fiats are good and not bad independently of the mere fact that he made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God. You could, of course, if you liked, say that there was a superior deity who gave orders to the God that made this world, or could take up the line that some of the gnostics took up — a line which I often thought was a very plausible one — that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it.

The Argument for the Remedying of Injustice
Then there is another very curious form of moral argument, which is this: they say that the existence of God is required in order to bring justice into the world. In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying; but if you are going to have justice in the universe as a whole you have to suppose a future life to redress the balance of life here on earth. So they say that there must be a God, and there must be Heaven and Hell in order that in the long run there may be justice. That is a very curious argument. If you looked at the matter from a scientific point of view, you would say, “After all, I only know this world. I do not know about the rest of the universe, but so far as one can argue at all on probabilities one would say that probably this world is a fair sample, and if there is injustice here the odds are that there is injustice elsewhere also.” Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top layer of oranges bad, you would not argue, “The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress the balance.” You would say, “Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment”; and that is really what a scientific person would argue about the universe. He would say, “Here we find in this world a great deal of injustice, and so far as that goes that is a reason for supposing that justice does not rule in the world; and therefore so far as it goes it affords a moral argument against deity and not in favor of one.” Of course I know that the sort of intellectual arguments that I have been talking to you about are not what really moves people. What really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all. Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason.

Then I think that the next most powerful reason is the wish for safety, a sort of feeling that there is a big brother who will look after you. That plays a very profound part in influencing people’s desire for a belief in God.

The Character of Christ
I now want to say a few words upon a topic which I often think is not quite sufficiently dealt with by Rationalists, and that is the question whether Christ was the best and the wisest of men. It is generally taken for granted that we should all agree that that was so. I do not myself. I think that there are a good many points upon which I agree with Christ a great deal more than the professing Christians do. I do not know that I could go with Him all the way, but I could go with Him much further than most professing Christians can. You will remember that He said, “Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” That is not a new precept or a new principle. It was used by Lao-tse and Buddha some 500 or 600 years before Christ, but it is not a principle which as a matter of fact Christians accept. I have no doubt that the present prime minister [Stanley Baldwin], for instance, is a most sincere Christian, but I should not advise any of you to go and smite him on one cheek. I think you might find that he thought this text was intended in a figurative sense.

Then there is another point which I consider excellent. You will remember that Christ said, “Judge not lest ye be judged.” That principle I do not think you would find was popular in the law courts of Christian countries. I have known in my time quite a number of judges who were very earnest Christians, and none of them felt that they were acting contrary to Christian principles in what they did. Then Christ says, “Give to him that asketh of thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.” That is a very good principle. Your Chairman has reminded you that we are not here to talk politics, but I cannot help observing that the last general election was fought on the question of how desirable it was to turn away from him that would borrow of thee, so that one must assume that the Liberals and Conservatives of this country are composed of people who do not agree with the teaching of Christ, because they certainly did very emphatically turn away on that occasion.

Then there is one other maxim of Christ which I think has a great deal in it, but I do not find that it is very popular among some of our Christian friends. He says, “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that which thou hast, and give to the poor.” That is a very excellent maxim, but, as I say, it is not much practised. All these, I think, are good maxims, although they are a little difficult to live up to. I do not profess to live up to them myself; but then, after all, it is not quite the same thing as for a Christian.

Defects in Christ’s Teaching
Having granted the excellence of these maxims, I come to certain points in which I do not believe that one can grant either the superlative wisdom or the superlative goodness of Christ as depicted in the Gospels; and here I may say that one is not concerned with the historical question. Historically it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about him, so that I am not concerned with the historical question, which is a very difficult one. I am concerned with Christ as He appears in the Gospels, taking the Gospel narrative as it stands, and there one does find some things that do not seem to be very wise. For one thing, he certainly thought that His second coming would occur in clouds of glory before the death of all the people who were living at that time. There are a great many texts that prove that. He says, for instance, “Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come.” Then he says, “There are some standing here which shall not taste death till the Son of Man comes into His kingdom”; and there are a lot of places where it is quite clear that He believed that His second coming would happen during the lifetime of many then living. That was the belief of His earlier followers, and it was the basis of a good deal of His moral teaching. When He said, “Take no thought for the morrow,” and things of that sort, it was very largely because He thought that the second coming was going to be very soon, and that all ordinary mundane affairs did not count. I have, as a matter of fact, known some Christians who did believe that the second coming was imminent. I knew a parson who frightened his congregation terribly by telling them that the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found that he was planting trees in his garden. The early Christians did really believe it, and they did abstain from such things as planting trees in their gardens, because they did accept from Christ the belief that the second coming was imminent. In that respect, clearly He was not so wise as some other people have been, and He was certainly not superlatively wise.

The Moral Problem
Then you come to moral questions. There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ’s moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to His preaching — an attitude which is not uncommon with preachers, but which does somewhat detract from superlative excellence. You do not, for instance find that attitude in Socrates. You find him quite bland and urbane toward the people who would not listen to him; and it is, to my mind, far more worthy of a sage to take that line than to take the line of indignation. You probably all remember the sorts of things that Socrates was saying when he was dying, and the sort of things that he generally did say to people who did not agree with him.

You will find that in the Gospels Christ said, “Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Hell.” That was said to people who did not like His preaching. It is not really to my mind quite the best tone, and there are a great many of these things about Hell. There is, of course, the familiar text about the sin against the Holy Ghost: “Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him neither in this World nor in the world to come.” That text has caused an unspeakable amount of misery in the world, for all sorts of people have imagined that they have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and thought that it would not be forgiven them either in this world or in the world to come. I really do not think that a person with a proper degree of kindliness in his nature would have put fears and terrors of that sort into the world.

Then Christ says, “The Son of Man shall send forth his His angels, and they shall gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth”; and He goes on about the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It comes in one verse after another, and it is quite manifest to the reader that there is a certain pleasure in contemplating wailing and gnashing of teeth, or else it would not occur so often. Then you all, of course, remember about the sheep and the goats; how at the second coming He is going to divide the sheep from the goats, and He is going to say to the goats, “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire.” He continues, “And these shall go away into everlasting fire.” Then He says again, “If thy hand offend thee, cut it off; it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into Hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched; where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.” He repeats that again and again also. I must say that I think all this doctrine, that hell-fire is a punishment for sin, is a doctrine of cruelty. It is a doctrine that put cruelty into the world and gave the world generations of cruel torture; and the Christ of the Gospels, if you could take Him asHis chroniclers represent Him, would certainly have to be considered partly responsible for that.

There are other things of less importance. There is the instance of the Gadarene swine, where it certainly was not very kind to the pigs to put the devils into them and make them rush down the hill into the sea. You must remember that He was omnipotent, and He could have made the devils simply go away; but He chose to send them into the pigs. Then there is the curious story of the fig tree, which always rather puzzled me. You remember what happened about the fig tree. “He was hungry; and seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, He came if haply He might find anything thereon; and when He came to it He found nothing but leaves, for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it: ‘No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever’ . . . and Peter . . . saith unto Him: ‘Master, behold the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away.’” This is a very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not blame the tree. I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known to history. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in those respects.

The Emotional Factor
As I said before, I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it. You know, of course, the parody of that argument in Samuel Butler’s book, Erewhon Revisited. You will remember that in Erewhon there is a certain Higgs who arrives in a remote country, and after spending some time there he escapes from that country in a balloon. Twenty years later he comes back to that country and finds a new religion in which he is worshiped under the name of the “Sun Child,” and it is said that he ascended into heaven. He finds that the Feast of the Ascension is about to be celebrated, and he hears Professors Hanky and Panky say to each other that they never set eyes on the man Higgs, and they hope they never will; but they are the high priests of the religion of the Sun Child. He is very indignant, and he comes up to them, and he says, “I am going to expose all this humbug and tell the people of Erewhon that it was only I, the man Higgs, and I went up in a balloon.” He was told, “You must not do that, because all the morals of this country are bound round this myth, and if they once know that you did not ascend into Heaven they will all become wicked”; and so he is persuaded of that and he goes quietly away.

That is the idea — that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

How the Churches Have Retarded Progress
You may think that I am going too far when I say that that is still so. I do not think that I am. Take one fact. You will bear with me if I mention it. It is not a pleasant fact, but the churches compel one to mention facts that are not pleasant. Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man; in that case the Catholic Church says, “This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must endure celibacy or stay together. And if you stay together, you must not use birth control to prevent the birth of syphilitic children.” Nobody whose natural sympathies have not been warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not absolutely dead to all sense of suffering, could maintain that it is right and proper that that state of things should continue.

That is only an example. There are a great many ways in which, at the present moment, the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. “What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy.”

Fear, the Foundation of Religion
Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing — fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a better place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.

What We Must Do
We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world — its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.

The Bertrand Russell Society

Thanks Mr. Russell, I couldn’t agree more!

2012 Doomsday Fast Approaches!

Neece — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 22:03:26 +0000

OMG, yo! Hide the good silver! Run for your lives! The Mayans say the world will end December 21, 2012 and that’s only 2 years and a month away! Whatever will we do?!

Of course the Mayans themselves didn’t survive till 2012, so maybe they aren’t the best group to ask about such things.

Recently a friend of mine mentioned the 2012 phenomenon as if it were true. Unfortunately I didn’t have the hard facts at my disposal so I told him it’s not going to happen and left it at that. But I thought I’d look up some more information so when your mother starts talking about the end of the world, you will have some facts to back you up.

Lucky for me, NASA and Wikipedia have pages to explain where the concept came from and what scientific basis there is for it (none, thank you very much).

Some people seem to love the idea of predicting cataclysmic events and the destruction of the world. Of course, since we’re still here, so far they have been wrong every time. That’s something in itself to consider.

NASA explains it all very succinctly in FAQ form:

Q: Are there any threats to the Earth in 2012? Many Internet websites say the world will end in December 2012.
A: Nothing bad will happen to the Earth in 2012. Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012.

Q: What is the origin of the prediction that the world will end in 2012?
A: The story started with claims that Nibiru, a supposed planet discovered by the Sumerians, is headed toward Earth. This catastrophe was initially predicted for May 2003, but when nothing happened the doomsday date was moved forward to December 2012. Then these two fables were linked to the end of one of the cycles in the ancient Mayan calendar at the winter solstice in 2012 — hence the predicted doomsday date of December 21, 2012.

Q: Does the Mayan calendar end in December 2012?
A: Just as the calendar you have on your kitchen wall does not cease to exist after December 31, the Mayan calendar does not cease to exist on December 21, 2012. This date is the end of the Mayan long-count period but then — just as your calendar begins again on January 1 — another long-count period begins for the Mayan calendar.

Q: Could a phenomena occur where planets align in a way that impacts Earth?
A: There are no planetary alignments in the next few decades, Earth will not cross the galactic plane in 2012, and even if these alignments were to occur, their effects on the Earth would be negligible. Each December the Earth and sun align with the approximate center of the Milky Way Galaxy but that is an annual event of no consequence.

Q: Is there a planet or brown dwarf called Nibiru or Planet X or Eris that is approaching the Earth and threatening our planet with widespread destruction?
A: Nibiru and other stories about wayward planets are an Internet hoax. There is no factual basis for these claims. If Nibiru or Planet X were real and headed for an encounter with the Earth in 2012, astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye. Obviously, it does not exist. Eris is real, but it is a dwarf planet similar to Pluto that will remain in the outer solar system; the closest it can come to Earth is about 4 billion miles.

Q: What is the polar shift theory? Is it true that the earth’s crust does a 180-degree rotation around the core in a matter of days if not hours?
A: A reversal in the rotation of Earth is impossible. There are slow movements of the continents (for example Antarctica was near the equator hundreds of millions of years ago), but that is irrelevant to claims of reversal of the rotational poles. However, many of the disaster websites pull a bait-and-shift to fool people. They claim a relationship between the rotation and the magnetic polarity of Earth, which does change irregularly, with a magnetic reversal taking place every 400,000 years on average. As far as we know, such a magnetic reversal doesn’t cause any harm to life on Earth. A magnetic reversal is very unlikely to happen in the next few millennia, anyway.

Q: Is the Earth in danger of being hit by a meteor in 2012?
A: The Earth has always been subject to impacts by comets and asteroids, although big hits are very rare. The last big impact was 65 million years ago, and that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Today NASA astronomers are carrying out a survey called the Spaceguard Survey to find any large near-Earth asteroids long before they hit. We have already determined that there are no threatening asteroids as large as the one that killed the dinosaurs. All this work is done openly with the discoveries posted every day on the NASA NEO Program Office website, so you can see for yourself that nothing is predicted to hit in 2012.

Q: How do NASA scientists feel about claims of pending doomsday?
A: For any claims of disaster or dramatic changes in 2012, where is the science? Where is the evidence? There is none, and for all the fictional assertions, whether they are made in books, movies, documentaries or over the Internet, we cannot change that simple fact. There is no credible evidence for any of the assertions made in support of unusual events taking place in December 2012.

Q: Is there a danger from giant solar storms predicted for 2012?
A: Solar activity has a regular cycle, with peaks approximately every 11 years. Near these activity peaks, solar flares can cause some interruption of satellite communications, although engineers are learning how to build electronics that are protected against most solar storms. But there is no special risk associated with 2012. The next solar maximum will occur in the 2012-2014 time frame and is predicted to be an average solar cycle, no different than previous cycles throughout history.

Addition information concerning 2012 is available on the Web, at:

NASA Astrobiology Institute: “Nibiru and Doomsday 2012“

Bad Astronomy: “The Planet X Saga: The Scientific Arguments in a Nutshell”

Sky and Telescope Magazine: “2012: The Great Scare“

Also see Wikipedia or more. It seems well referenced. Even Science Daily mentions the cyclical nature of the Mayan Calendar.

December 21, 2012 is a Friday. I propose a huge “Another Unfounded Prediction Has Failed” Party for Saturday December 22, 2012. How nice that we will also be able to celebrate the Winter Solstice as well!

Heaving Dead Cats » advice

The New Ten Commandments

Related posts

I’m Curious!

Related posts

The Secret Divides Part 2

Related posts

The Secret Divides

Related posts

Conversation With Anne About Religion, Truth, Science and History

Related posts

Why I Am Not A Christian

Related posts

2012 Doomsday Fast Approaches!

Related posts