Poe's Law

“Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing.”

This is something that's interested me since I discovered it. I have sometimes wondered how those who live their lives based on fundamentalist ideas manage to do so, in light of the ease of access to actual, verifiable information. There are a number of theories, of course, including thoughts on Why We Don't Believe Science, and the interesting notion that, since different words mean different things to different people, it's possible that rationalists and fundamentalists are almost speaking different languages completely.

I'm going to explore that last one more in depth, I think. Maybe I'll write about it some day.

But Poe's law strikes me as being an almost absurdly potent argument against fundamentalists. The thought that occurs to me is that if I saw a person, who I knew for a fact was virulently opposed to my position, write a parody of the things I was saying, and I (or the audience) was unable to distinguish between his writings and my own... I'd have to take a moment to stop and think about it all.

That's a heck of a sentence up there, and I don't feel like I'm explaining myself all that well. Let's see if I can do better. If my detractors were using the exact same arguments that I was making to make fun of what I was saying, that would give me occasion for pause.

I've never seen it happen the other way around. This may just be that I haven't been exposed to it, personally, but I somehow don't think that this is the case. The idea that someone would take a phrase such as, for example, 'I do not think there is a god', and be able to use that exact same phrase to make light of what I was saying, seems unlikely to me.

I feel as though the intent behind a 'Poe' article is to point out to those who write such things in earnest how ridiculous they look. I feel as though someone, attempting to write a 'Poe' in my style to ridicule me, would simply wind up writing an article that would be deemed to be a rational look at the issue at hand, rather than an example of a ridiculous extremist ideology. Hubris on my part?

Am I mistaken? Can Poe's law be used in reverse? Could it be used against me? I'd be interested to hear from anyone who thinks that this is the case. Like I said, I've never seen it applied in the reverse. Anyone?

Rapture and Recrimination

With props to Blonde Nonbeliever for the inspiration for this post.

Across the atheistic world recently there's been a spate of discussion about Family Radio and their claims that the rapture is coming - specifically, it's coming on May 21st. There has, unsurprisingly, been a lot of mocking and derision. Nobody's going to disappear on the 21st, just as nobody has disappeared in the many, many previous predictions of the rapture. They're promoting an idea which is ridiculous to any thinking person, including the vast majority of Christians.

There's little doubt in my mind how the proponents of this rapture will react when they wake up on the 22nd and haven't been sucked into heaven: They'll either forget about the whole thing and move on, or they'll predict a new rapture date, claiming to have made some sort of mistake or something. The thought that the rapture happened and they weren't included would not, obviously, be a possibility.

What I hadn't considered, at least before last night, are the potential effects on those who have joined the ranks of Project Caravan. These are people who have left their jobs, their friends (and in some cases, family), and basically given it all up to spread their message across the country. They've left it all behind, believing that come May 21st they'll have no use for it anymore.

What, then, are they going to do on the 22nd, these people who have dropped their way of making a living? Will their former employers take them back? Considering that this Caravan will have been on the go for nearly a month, it doesn't seem unlikely that they will have been replaced. Will they be able to find new jobs? I don't know about the southern states, but up here where I am, every job posting that goes up is receiving hundreds of applicants. It's a tough market.

In short, I'm not sure these people haven't doomed themselves to poverty, welfare, dependence on family members, and so on. Whether any or all of them will be able to regain a way of making an independent living remains to be seen, but the fact will remain that they took quite a risk, on the word of a lunatic preacher, a bizarre, numerological interpretation of a two thousand year old book, and mountains of evidence to the contrary.

As I said to BN last night, it strikes me as just another example of religion destroying the lives of it's followers. And it's pretty sad.

Chuckle worthy

So I was browsing over at Creation Science Evangelism - there's some truly incredible stuff over there, which is liable to either make you laugh or cry, depending on how you react to willful ignorance - when I stumbled across a little gem that made me snort a laugh.

Underneath their View Articles heading you can see, unsurprisingly, a list of articles that he's written. He's even got them organized, into Advanced, Intermediate, and Beginner:

That's handy!

Interesting. My assumption here is that they're organized by scientific content, or at least by what passes for scientific content in the minds of creationists. So, given that I have a pretty good handle on science, and am able to understand most of what I read, I click on 'Advanced', to see what he has to offer:

This one captions itself.

I would argue that he lacks even 'Beginner' level science; go read some of those articles and you'll see what I mean. I just liked that when it came to 'Advanced', at least he knew where he stood.

Blogroll!

Cooking with Parsley has been added to The Atheist Blogroll. You can see the blogroll in my sidebar. The Atheist blogroll is a community building service provided free of charge to Atheist bloggers from around the world. If you would like to join, visit Mojoey at Deep Thoughts for more information.

Is Atheism A Religion?

It's a valid question. My immediate answer, of course, is no. But can I articulate why? I never like to give a solid answer to a question until I can answer that simplest of questions.

To that end, I've tried to pare the definition of religion down into something simplistic, something that covers the majority of the religions of the world:

A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to the sacred or the divine.

If we're going by this definition, it's pretty obvious that atheism isn't a religion. We don't believe in divinity of any kind, and we hold nothing sacred. We don't even have a unified system of practices at all, and the only belief we share is that there is/are no god/s. That is, in fact, the -only- thing that all atheists have in common.

Why, then, do people still claim that atheism is a form of religion? The only possibility I've been able to come up with is that they're using a different definition of the word than I am. So I'm going to spend the next couple of days trying to get definitions of religion from those who think that atheism is one. I'd ask for them to be put in the comments here, but I don't think anybody actually reads this thing yet, so I'm going to try and gather them from the different corners of the web, and see what I get.

I have little doubt that, no matter what definitions are thrown at me, I'll be able to argue that atheism doesn't fall under them. At that point, knowing the arguments laid against me, I'll be able to explain my reasoning. I'll be able to answer the why, in whatever situation I face. Which is the point, really.

Disgusted

I've been trying for maybe a half hour now to write this post, and it's proving difficult. So here's PZ Myers on the subject.

It's... I can't come up with words. Hating the good works done by Planned Parenthood - their dedication to public health, sexual safety, and the propagation of KNOWLEDGE - is bizarre enough to me. But to take that and create lies this repugnant? And you people claim to be the subjects of a loving and caring God?

It's utterly ridiculous. I'm capable of understanding the arguments these people have against abortion, however much I disagree with them. But the part that I can't understand is the willingness to do anything - ANYTHING, up to and including slander, libel, fear-mongering, destruction of property and MURDER OF DOCTORS - in order to get one's way.

Do they really think that the ends justify the means? Is that what's going on? Do they feel that in spreading lies like these - lies that will result in the spread disease, unwanted pregnancies, ignorance of the functioning of one's own body and how to deal with it - they're somehow doing some kind of higher work? That in doing terrible harm, they're following God's will?

I cannot wrap my mind around this concept. It's utterly alien. It goes against every moral principle that I hold dear.

It's evil.

Oh, Ray.

I seem to be developing an unhealthy interest in Ray Comfort. A couple of years ago I bought a book put out by his Church, an anniversary edition of Origin of Species with a special introduction by Ray, debunking evolution, including claims about cosmology and astronomy. I needed to have such a hilarious book for my library, though the five dollars I sent him made me wince. I had, however, forgotten that that book and the guy whose blog I've been laughing at were the same person. He makes similar points in his post today, regarding how evolution fails to explain the rotation of the Earth and so on.

Right.

As of today, however, I'm trying an experiment. Ray typically receives hundreds of comments per post, with the vast majority of these attempting to point out to Ray the errors in his logic, errors that even a child should be able to recognize. Naturally, he ignores these utterly.

Now, whether he knows and understands that the questions he's posing are answered in fifth-grade science textbooks, I don't know. I am, however, relatively certain that he's seen all our reasoning before and chosen to ignore it. Why, then, should we continue to point out his errors, day after day, ad nauseam? It's not going to get through by dint of repetition, any more than his constant refrains of his 'proofs' of the bible are going to get through to us.

So I'm going to try to use his blog to meet people. I'm going to try to derail his threads with common, everyday conversation. I'm going to ask other posters how their day went, what the weather's like there, what their favourite foods are. Some part of me wonders, if we atheists are showing up to his blog every day and ignoring what he says, doing our own thing, how he's going to feel about that. I hope the answer is 'stupid'.

The ultimate, in my eyes, would be if some people who started chatting on the site decided to meet up and have some illicit, out-of-marriage, utterly mind-blowing sex. Imagine the taunting we could send his way if his blog was a meeting place for - dare I say it - fornication?

I don't think it'd blow his mind. But maybe it'd make him wince. Good enough for me.