"God of the gaps" - the fuzzy thinking that blights the arguments of the faithful and superstitious.

If you like listening to debates between the skeptical/secular/atheist and the faithful/religious/credulous like I do, you might notice a really clear difference in one key part of how each side thinks.

The skeptical people are comfortable saying "I don't know". They're comfortable with saying that things are undiscovered, unknowable etc.

The religious etc have a bad habit in that regard. They almost always use the warped logic of saying "if science etc can't explain the big bang, what created the universe etc ... then it MUST instead be my God that did it".

That's a generalisation. But it happens everywhere.

It's the same with things like homeopathy and other very dubious quack medicines. Any minor gaps in the knowledge of scientists, for example around the deep and complex aspects of quantum physics, are seized-upon by quacks to promote their own ends. And suddenly they claim that the difficulties of quantum theory support their magical view of the universe.

There are so many problems with this thinking. Perhaps the worst is the sheer personal bias and ack of imagination. There are myriad diferent religions with different creation myths, so a Catholic will be quite stupid to assume that science's lack of total certainty about the start of the universe in any way supports their particular brand of religion.

It's always the same thing, "If it isn't x then it must be y", with complete disregard for whether there are additional arguments around. Moreover, it's fallacious to pair together such things anyway. Religion is not a "counter-argument to science" and should never be taught in science lessons.

Where does this dangerous thinking come from? Biologically our brains our programmed to think in a basic geometric.way. But also there are plenty of faiths that heavily promote the idea of polar opposites, reducing the world to simple choices in order to hem-in your imagination and scare you into obedience. In particular the idea of religious enlightenment is very repugnant, instantly disputing any claim that it's ok simply to 'not know' and encouraging you to fill your head with made-up claims about things you couldn't possible really know about (the end of the world, the origiin of the universe, the fate of individuals, the right morality etc).

This thinking is clearly still massively pervasive in modern society.

I especially enjoyed this interview with Don Webb, ex leader of the Setian spin-off of Satanism. He makes some excellent points around the reason for worshipping 'darkness' being an acceptance that the most godly, powerful, things out there is that vast area of things that are in shadow that we either do not know or can not know. It's perhaps a much healthier viewpoint than the religious claims to knowledge. http://www.pointofinquiry.org/don_webb_devils_advocate/

Columbo died.

A sad day today. Peter Falk aka TV detective Columbo - and much more besides (artist etc) - has died.

He was an amazing guy, clearly an inspiration for any underdog entertaining their instincts, with more than a hint of a suggestion that those in influential positions can be taught a cheeky lesson or two from people they don't expect.

I tried to see Peter Falk in London a few years ago but he had to cancel due to 'health reasons'. I joked at the time that 'health reasons' might mean a new dead person to investigate - though I knew he actually had Alzheimer's disease.

As I understand it he was a much softer, rounded person than his jagged Columbo persona. I will look into it more. But certainly that persona gave us much to enjoy and I'll be revisiting him into old age I'm sure.

Mike

Rebellion just like PC-ness?

I find it interesting how the rebellious spirit of "everyone should be able to say/do/think what they like" can easily slip into the ultra politically correct imposition of values that make it hard for people to voice strong views on anything meaningful.

I've lost count of the number of times people who think they are captain chaos are actually as oppressive as a lawyer in a double breasted tweed suit when it comes to closing down my attempts to have a strong view against anything. Being upbeat and FOR things is sometimes more permitted, but even that gets accused of bias etc. Stifling!

It's a bit like how communism can suddenly go full circle and become fascism etc.

THE END OF THE WORLD TODAY? - BOLLO*KS

It's good to see sexpot Professor Brian Cox ripping a new one out fresh, crazy Christian claims that TODAY is the end of the world.

He's doing it in The Sun newspaper, which is a pretty bad paper that he courts because - reasonably enough - he wants to reach regular people.

The claims of Christian Harold Camping have indeed gained a lot of media coverage, who believes his decades of extensive bible study reveal today to be judgemnt day. Sigh.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/3593160/The-end-of-the-world-IS-NOT-nigh.html

POET CHARLES BUKOWSKI'S BIRTHDAY

If fantastic urban poet Charles Bukowski hadn't died, he would be 90 years old today (16 August).

I have a large print of him above my fireplace and love almost everything he did. Not many of us could bust our balls well into our midlife, hauling heavy sacks as a job or being unemployed, yet fire out dozens of beautiful poems a day from under the one or two lightbulbs we have. To date women less than half our age in groping, torrid affairs full of bubbling energy. But then to go on and finally make it, to get a home in Beverly Hills and then be buried in a Buddhist funeral that seems to be mocked by the disoder of our particularly crazy life.

Here's one of his hundreds of good poems:

My Groupie

I read last Saturday in the
redwoods outside of Santa Cruz
and I was about 3/4's finished
when I heard a long high scream
and a quite attractive
young girl came running toward me
long gown & divine eyes of fire
and she leaped up on the stage
and screamed: "I WANT YOU!
I WANT YOU! TAKE ME! TAKE
ME!"
I told her, "look, get the hell
away from me."
but she kept tearing at my
clothing and throwing herself
at me.
"where were you," I
asked her, "when I was living
on one candy bar a day and
sending short stories to the
Atlantic Monthly?"
she grabbed my balls and almost
twisted them off. her kisses
tasted like shitsoup.
2 women jumped up on the stage
and
carried her off into the
woods.
I could still hear her screams
as I began the next poem.
mabye, I thought, I should have
taken her on stage in front
of all those eyes.
but one can never be sure
whether it's good poetry or
bad acid.

UNIVERSAL DECEPTION

Why does virtually all fiction try to convince us that we can tell what bad things are because the people who do them act like arseholes?

It seems like brainwashing illusion to me.

After all, the world is actually full of very, very nice people ... who work in big oil companies or propaganda or such like and just happen to contribute to totally fucking up the world.

This trend in fiction must surely dull our senses a bit when it comes to noticing what bad is being done and who we should be fighting to stop it? We can try to think freely etc, but these things DO ifluence us.

SILLYNESS

I've had some sort of dark cloud hanging over me for the past couple of years - feelingt he burden of responsibility - but now it's dawned on me that the problem is I simply forgot to be SILLY.

In the olden days I was constantly silly. I'd pun and joke and take an abstract view of everything. Then I discovered 'skepticism' as a hobby, got badly bullied in a job at work, felt the burden of responsibility of buying property on my own, got overshadowed totally be egomaniacs who get away with being extremely odd all day at work, questioned whether I was just being a cock etc ... and somehow in the middle of all this I've become a dour person who's only full of jokes with a very tiny amount of people.

Rediscovering sillyness in my mind has been light a bright flash of beautiful white light. Monty Python! Laughing loudly at bad football commentary! Inviting my parents to my new home then awfully setting them to work with a hoe! Buying liquorice sweets just because they are worryingly called "Nigroids" etc!

Do any of you have this too? Maybe the sense that it's almost as if a fairy had come in the night and extracted a part of your personality? If you haven't, perhaps you should?

Me, I'm so happy with this realisation that it's almost as if the clock has stopped. As if, if I were on the final day of a long holiday, I still wouldn't be worrying that it's all over. Magic.

Word from the wise. When someone random adds you on msn, just don't accept them. It may be trouble.

If there were two planet earths, totally identical in all respects and with identical populations doing identical things ... what would YOU do if you could land your spaceship on one of them and had only five minutes to do something or change something? If you knew you would soon be returning to the other (unchanged) earth.

Would you run around looking for someone you could quickly help? Would you waste your time looking for something different from the other earth you know? Would you do something selfish, knowing that you would be gone in 5 minutes anyway?

There's no correct answer. BUt it makes you think about your own life, because really our lives do consist of many short little actions and we don't always make the most of those opportunities, or experiment enough.

I honestly don't know how to maximse those five minutes, even if I could decide exactly where to land. Or would it not be worth doing anything at all?

It's difficult to describe what it's like when your imagination is failing you. Ideas seem to form in a split second in your brain but shatter and disappear too fast to remember or consider. They appeari n their thousands but are frustratingly brief. Like a fireworks display in which you are trying to read the labels on the rockets as they go up through the sky. I need to relax.