Superstition » Heaving Dead Cats

More Groovy Science 4

Hello everyone! Here is more science to tantalize your synapses and neurons!

Keep Your Fingers Crossed: How Superstition Improves Performance
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Keep Your Fingers Crossed: How Superstition Improves Performance: New research shows that having some kind of lucky token can actually improve your performance — by increasing your self-confidence. …Volunteers who had their lucky charm did better at a memory game on the computer, and other tests showed that this difference was because they felt more confident. They also set higher goals for themselves. Just wishing someone good luck — with “I press the thumbs for you,” the German version of crossing your fingers — improved volunteers’ success at a task that required manual dexterity.

~Of course, this is still a form of delusion. Everyone tested in the study was superstitious and had a lucky charm. I’d like to see a study or two that involved people who don’t rely on superstition as well. I think if a person understands the delusion of superstition, they will therefore not need the “lucky” feather in their cap. They will have appropriate self-confidence based on their actual abilities. Still, it’s an interesting study. Read the rest of this entry »

Pareidolia On Toast

Have you ever caught a glimpse of something out of your eye and thought, “oh that looked like a face!” “Look, Jesus is in my bar of soap!” “That cloud looks like a dog running!” That’s pareidolia. You see something random and your mind fills in the blanks so that you think something is there.

Pareidolia: a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant.

In psychology, the Rorschach test is a series of images used to invoke pareidolia to delve into the psyche of the patient. In religion and superstition, a vague stimulus is believed to be divinely sent. Here is a news story of Mary in bird shit. Notice how the people react to a random stimulus.

No matter how much I look at this picture, it looks like a face. The sink looks a bit shocked or frightened.

Carl Sagan hypothesized that detecting faces is a hard wired evolutionary advantage. This allows people to use only minimal details to recognize faces from a distance and in poor visibility but can also lead them to interpret random images or patterns of light and shade as being faces.

In 2009 a study was done to show that objects incidentally perceived as faces evoke an early (165 ms) activation in the ventral fusiform cortex, at a time and location similar to that evoked by faces, whereas other common objects do not evoke such activation. This activation is similar to a slightly earlier peak at 130 ms seen for images of real faces. The authors suggest that face perception evoked by face-like objects is a relatively early process, and not a late cognitive reinterpretation phenomenon.

Which would explain why everyone sees the following simple line drawing as a face: Read the rest of this entry »

Jerusalem is Populating a Biblical Zoo

And I said, WTF? Then I remembered, people in Jerusalem are there because they believe its the promised land, given by God to the Jews. They are just as nutty as the christians, the muslims and all the other religions.

So these zookeepers over in Jerusalem are trying to sort of reconstruct the animals from the bible (old testament, of course) in Israel. They aren’t trying to repopulate the area with the biblical predators like bears, but they are trying to bring back vultures, even though Levitucus 11:13 called them detestable. Which makes me wonder why they’d want to nurture and breed them. And why cherry-pick certain animals but not the rest from the bible? But why try to get logical now?

Almost 100 animals were mentioned in the bible, according to the fluffy, credulous HuffPo article where I found this ridiculous story, so of course, I am quite skeptical. I guess that’s how Noah was able to get them all on the ark, then. He only had 100 or so to deal with, not the millions found in the world today.

There are nearly 100 different types of animals mentioned in the Bible, many of them key players in well-known stories: the lions in Daniel’s den; the dove that scouted for dry land from Noah’s ark; the ram that was sacrificed by Abraham to save the life of his son, Isaac.

Today, many of them are gone, hunted to the point of extinction or driven away by ongoing conflict. Of the 10 animals that are listed as acceptable dinner fare in Deuteronomy 14 — ox, sheep, goat, deer, gazelle, roe deer, wild goat, ibex, antelope and mountain sheep — only two (the gazelle and the ibex) could still be found in the historical boundaries of Israel in 1960. …

“… I want to keep the vultures because they were mentioned in the Bible that it was a common animal and that’s good enough for me.” Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t Assume I’m A Sensitive Soul

I received this email from a woman the other day. After careful thought I replied to it and decided it was worth sharing.

Here is the email in its entirety:

Thank you for sharing “Wild Geese”. After Joe Biden used most of this poem as his reflection upon the anniversary of 9/11, I went in search of the poem. The two of Mary Oliver’s collections I own did not include it. I was happy to find it at your site and amazed, actually. Amazed and delighted, because a poem I find so “religious” is at the same time such a balm for you. I grew up Roman Catholic; I am now an Episcopal priest. I am convinced after 20 years that what most people throw away – the cats they heave – are indeed worth heaving. Sometimes we have to go deeper, below the interpretations of history, to find our own deeper truth.

Yes, a “barbarous” God exists in the pages of the Bible: What all-kind God and Father would will the death of a Beloved Son? How could God command Abraham to kill his son Isaac as a test of faith? Isn’t that sadistic? Yes, indeed. On the face of it. For us in the 21st century these stories are barbaric. They are foreign to our experience. They were not foreign to the persons for whom they were written when the “first fruits” in ancient societies were offered up to the deity – including in some cases, the first born child. In some places in later writings there seems to be a critique of these practices in the Bible itself. The question becomes, it seems to me, is it worth reinterpreting these stories for our own time, or do we jettison them and replace them with our own stories of sacrificial obedience and love? Yes, life does involve sacrifice – we give up our children constantly to the gods of war who exact a savage price. There are no rams in the thicket to take their place …

But the same source of barbarism comments on itself in texts of amazing love and mercy. We cannot hear these texts enough. Read the rest of this entry »

Replacing Everlasting Life

Yesterday my local atheists group met and talked about many different topics. One question a woman asked was something I think most people who give up god and the supernatural have to face. I will paraphrase:

If there is no god, no heaven, no life after death, or no reincarnation what do you replace that with?

In other words there is a comfort that many people find in religion, that they will live after death in some fashion. But when you come to understand that there is no god, then soon after you have to give up this comfortable idea in life after death, that our consciousness survives death and lives on in some other way.

For me, I became an atheist but still believed in reincarnation and the idea that there was some part of us, our soul, that somehow lived on. I was a spiritual atheist. Over time I realized that there is no evidence for a soul or any kind of supernatural and eventually gave it all up. For me, giving up the comfort of the supernatural was much harder than giving up the fear of god. But I had to be honest with myself and rely on science instead of my own fanciful wishes. For me, I didn’t really replace the idea of the supernatural and the soul with anything. I just gave it up. If there was an exchange it was reason and science that replaced wishful thinking.

Butch, my husband, was raised catholic. He read Revelations in the bible, about how 144,000 Jews’ names are written in the book of life, so that was the limit for heaven. He assumed he’d go to hell. So when he gave up religion and god it was a relief more than anything else.

I know a few atheists that still believe in ghosts and the supernatural. I see the appeal, as I went through that stage myself, but I wonder why we feel the need to cling to such beliefs.

The woman at the meeting asked what do you replace the comfort of life after death with. So I am asking you, my nonbelieving friends. What process did you go through? How did you transition? What did you replace the soul with, if anything? Was it easy for you, or did you struggle?

If you want to reply and it’s lengthy, you can email me or leave a comment, whichever you prefer. I’d love to hear your story.

Today’s Score: Atheists 2, Churches -100

Hello everyone! I hope you’re having a great day!

This is one of those catch-all posts where I have several items to share with you.

Some atheist news and education which is great, and some church news that is horrible. So the score for the day is Atheists 2, churches -100.

First, the United Coalition of Reason is getting ready to post ads on the subway in New York. These are different than the ones they posted for us here in Morgantown, WV.

The bus ads say: A million New Yorkers are good without God. Are you? That’s awesome! The NYTimes wrote a long article about it, and our Morgantown billboard even gets a mention!

Next, I saw a video on The Friendly Atheist of Neil deGrasse Tyson explaining the Argument from Ignorance. Dr. Tyson really knows how to explain things. Since I wrote a logical fallacy article about that, I posted it on that page with the other information. Here is the link: Logical Fallacy 4: Argumentum Ad Ignorantiam (Argument from Ignorance)

Also, Jose Saramago, a man who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, spoke at the launch of his new book, “Cain”. He said his book, which is an ironic retelling of the biblical story of Cain, wouldn’t offend catholics “because catholics do not read the bible.” He added, “It might offend jews, but that doesn’t really matter to me.”

Apparently the catholics and jews are both offended, but what else is new? They have carte blanche to say whatever they want, but when someone says something against religion, they get all pissy. That’s the hypocrisy of religion and bullies, though. So it’s not really a shock.

And last but certainly most awful, is some news from Africa. The LATimes reported today about churches involved in the torture and murder of thousands of African children denounced as witches. Apparently some pastors and people read the bible literally, especially Exodus 22:18: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

Children are tortured or killed by pastors and family members. Read the rest of this entry »

Vaccines In The News Again

ScaryNeighbor The HPV vaccine has jumped into the news again as the UK reports their first death following a vaccination.

The US (and western world in general) has already been struggling with vaccines, and this could make things more difficult in the UK. With all the claims of vaccines linked to autism, Jenny McCarthy’s wild-ass claims, and Muslims stopping the distribution of the polio vaccination — there’s a lot of pseudoscience, superstition, and urban legends up against vaccines.

Then there is the religious angle against the HPV vaccine. Because the human papillomavirus is a sexually transmitted disease, the abstinence-only proponents think giving a girl this vaccine gives her the go-ahead to be promiscuous.

It will be interesting to see what kind of media attention resurfaces from this; but I can already see the email or Facebook posts flying around again, claiming how bad this vaccine is, and possibly how bad all vaccines are. So in an attempt to arm you with knowledge before you even get that email or see someone post it on Facebook, here are some facts for you to counter with.
Read the rest of this entry »

More Groovy Science 4

Pareidolia On Toast

Jerusalem is Populating a Biblical Zoo

Don’t Assume I’m A Sensitive Soul

Replacing Everlasting Life

Today’s Score: Atheists 2, Churches -100

Vaccines In The News Again

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