And Another Thing

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen Bill O’Reilly ever talk to anyone. At them, yes, but to them, no. As far as I can tell, his schtick is to talk faster than the person who’s sitting across from him. His technique is to only air his viewpoint and leave his guest sitting there bemused. It works, I guess, he has lots of followers, ones that can’t think very fast themselves.

I saw a clip of O’Reilly sitting down with Richard Dawkins who manfully tried to provide half of the conversation but was never allowed to do so by the O-Master. Needless-to-say, O’Reilly neatly defended his faith and demolished Dawkins in the process. Or so he thought. That Dawkins couldn’t get a word in edgewise didn’t matter.

When Dawkins was able to assert that O’Reilly was an atheist as far as anyone else’s god was concerned, O’Reilly tossed it off with, “I just saw Jupiter and he didn’t look so well.” That was a riposte?

His defense, other than the classic “He’s proved his existence to me, and that’s all that matters,” of Christianity was the equally lame, “Christ was a real person.”

Ergo, he was a real god? How does that follow?

Not to mention that he’s fallen into the trap of thinking his god is real while all the others aren’t. Well, of course, that’s the definition of belief, not a defense of it. Bill, evidently, doesn’t know the difference. Nor, apparently, does he realize that all gods are myths, regardless of upon whom the myth is hung. Call me a god, Bill, but it won’t make me one.

Little Known Fact:

Claiming a personal experience with god as proof of his (usually a “his”) existence is the equivalent of saying that there’s proof of aliens because you’ve been taken up to one of their spacecrafts and been probed. Lucky you. But if you get 5000 people in a room claiming they’ve all had a personal experience with god and that they’ve been probed, the odds of their being correct don’t go up a whit. Infinity doesn’t allow such odds to get to zero, but they can get pretty damn close.

There Are No Atheists in Heaven

I can never watch a show about religion for any length of time before I’m driven to retort the absurdities that are presented. I have no idea what these folks (usually guys) final arguments are; because, if I come across an uncorrected assumption and it remains, not only uncorrected but a pillar of their argument, I can’t go on. Nothing that follows will be correct, so why bother watching. 

That’s my excuse.

Case in point: a recently watched YouTube video on why there logically can’t be any atheists. I never got to the guy’s final argument as per above. The part I did see had him making a syllogism. He began by drawing a circle and saying, “For sake of argument, let’s say that all the knowledge in the universe is contained within this circle.” Okay, we can do that. He continued: “Then, can we make a dot in the center of the circle and agree that it represents your portion of the universe’s knowledge?” Sure, we can do that.

But before we go further, I’d like to point out that “knowledge” is never defined. Is knowledge the same as information? Is knowledge restricted to living things? Does the galaxy possess knowledge in the sense we use it? How would that manifest itself? Offhand, I’d restrict “knowledge” to living entities, although I wouldn’t rule out endless amounts of living creatures in the universe.

He should have stopped there. He went one step further; he said, “All that other knowledge in the universe, the stuff you don’t know, that had to have been put there by someone.”

Uh-uh. False. That’s the uncorrected assumption: the assumption that knowledge was “put” anywhere. Now, not only don’t we have a definition of “knowledge,” we don’t have a definition of “put.” Bill Clinton would be happy. I won’t even get to the rest of the syllogism.

Ergo, whatever followed in his argument, if it was relying on his proof to be correct, could not be correct. Undefined assumptions are no-no’s in debates, sorry.

Coda:

I’d like to further point out that atheism is not the opposite of theism, as is commonly thought. Theism argues that there is a god. Atheism does not argue that there is no god; it argues that there is no evidence nor logical probability for a god.

Thank you, and good night.

Echos of the Black Plague

England is excited these days about having uncovered a cemetery most likely from the time of the Black Plague. The assumption had been that, because of the enormous number of deaths, the bodies would have been thrown into communal pits; but that doesn’t appear to be the case, it looks like each body was separately dealt with in a respectful manner.

A story by the lyrical French author, Marcel Pagnol, tells a story of a suburb of Marseille, during a later plague, disguising themselves as a cart-load of dead bodies in order to pass the guards that had been posted to keep the residents of the plague city quarantined.

I find the Black Death as a convenient marker of European history, coming as it did in the middle of the fourteenth century, roughly 1348-1352. The Black Death was a pivotal point in European history because the survivors were instantly rich. Good land was plentiful and cheap. One hundred years later, 1450, the discovery of moveable type made books available to the general public, setting the stage for the Enlightenment. Put those dates together with 1066, the Norman invasion of England, and you’ve got everything you need to know about European history. Oh yeah, the Vikings were 800-1000 CE. That may not be so important if you’re Italian, but for us Scandinavians it was huge.

But every time the Black Plague is trotted out, commentators are sure to solemnly intone, “The Black Plague, the most devastating mass death in the history of the world…”

Fifty percent. That’s the usual estimate of the death rate for those four years, fifty percent. That’s bad, but compared to the fate of the American Indians—admittedly over a longer time period—who were felled by disease at rates of from 80-90-plus%, it was a piker.

Going further back, it is commonly thought that at one time the entire human population dropped to a few thousand people. What caused that, we don’t know, but it was a more serious time for our species than 1350.

Dead Neanderthals

The demise of the Neanderthals makes for very constant speculation. Two recent theories suggest: 

1) Their eye sockets were too big.

2) They didn't eat rabbits.

Another recent finding also suggests they liked to walk long distances. Possibly to avoid eating rabbits.

Mud-Skippers

Australian mud-skippers; I saw them last night on a rerun of the BBC series, “Planet Earth.” They’re slimy little fish whose eyes recede totally into their body when they blink rather than simply drag a film of flesh over them, like we do. They roll around in the mud frequently to keep their skin moist, because it’s through their moist skin that they breath; dries out and they’re goners. As the program pointed out (narrated by Oprah Winfrey), this skipper behavior is probably pretty much how the first fish exited the ocean.

What they neglected to point out was the very different motivations those two kinds of fish had for starting the scramble out of the water. According to the BBC, the mud-skippers ventured onto land for food, the microorganisms found in the mudflats. According to paleontologists, the first fish departed for protection from the perils of the deep. Regular readers of this blog (I know you’re not out there) will be aware that I’ve long argued that the first fish left for food, as well. I’ve even argued that it couldn’t be the other way around. This BBC show doesn’t validate my claims, but it sure bolsters them.

Just saying…

But it does seem one of those instances where the paleontologists make their pronouncements without a clue as to how the world currently works. Bones, blood types, and DNA will only tell one so much; eventually one has to go out and smell the roses and make sure they’re still real. My argument is that a fish out of water is a hungry fish, not a scared fish.

Reality Check

I like Jared Diamond, he has a way of irritating people. He’s currently making waves for his new book, The World Until Yesterday. I haven’t read it, but, apparently, he’s writing about tribal societies’ penchant for warfare, based—again apparently—on his field work in Papua New Guinea. Now, I know next to nothing about Papua New Guinea, most of what I do know coming from that other Matthiessen, Peter’s, book Under the Mountain Wall, which centered on the ritualized, continual warfare the people there lived under. Peter described a situation very much in line with Diamond’s examples.

Likewise, what I read about Amazonian tribes is that they’re a pretty fierce bunch also engaged in constant warfare. The same is true of the Native American tribes prior to the invasion of the Euroamericans. I know than my ancestors, the early Vikings, were continually fighting with each other. Probably not all tribal societies are warlike—I don’t hear too much about the Inuit attacking each other; but it does (or did) happen—but it looks like the only peaceful ones were ones in obscure, less desirable locations.

The Papuans, joined by other modern tribal peoples, have been vociferous in their condemnation of Diamond—even though he is a supporter, student, and advocate of them—thanks to his pointing out their past history. Tellingly, they object, not so much to his facts—they’re a little foggy on their own—but rather because Diamond doesn’t talk about the depredations of colonial governments in New Guinea; which is like complaining that a book about gold mining has nothing in it about coal mining. They are deflecting the truth about what Diamond is saying by dragging a red herring across the path. Native Americans do the same thing; rather than confront who they really are/were, they deflect the conversation to the depredation by the whites.

The issue is farmers. Those big colonial powers, they’re all farmers, successful, farmers. Successful farmers have slowly spread to cover all available land, and they’ve done it behind advancing armies or hordes. It’s true, they engage, sometimes, in brutal mass warfare and extermination, but in their wake generally comes peace. Farmers don’t like to have their crops destroyed. Certainly, it’s taken farmers themselves a long time to stop fighting among each other, and they aren’t done with it yet; but they’ve come a long way, the world has been getting safer (thanks, Steven Pinker).

Eden, unfortunately, is only a myth. There never was a peaceful, harmonious time in human history. We’re getting better, but we’ve a long way to go. I’m sorry, Papuans, the Dutch were brutal; but that has nothing to do with the reality of tribal warfare. Apples and coconuts, guys.

Andy Rooney Moment

You know what I miss? El-whys. You know, those things that used to come at the end of adverbs, “-ly.” What ever happened to them? They disappeared along with the rise of fresh baked bread. (Shouldn’t that be “freshly baked bread”? Or at least, “fresh, baked bread.” But don’t they really mean that it’s freshly baked?)

The el-whys went away with the other adverbs.

“How ya feeling, today?” (Which, of course, is different from “How ya feeling today?”)

“Feeling good. Never had more sensitive fingers. Like, I can feel things before I touch them. And I’m well, thanks.”

I guess I didn’t expect to be around long enough to notice lexical shifts of that magnitude. I expected slang to come and go, but I wasn’t prepared for the disappearance of an entire part of speech. Funny, though, we all still seem to understand each other good (ha-ha), even without the adverbs.

Or the funny pronunciations. I didn’t expect words to change their pronunciation in my lifetime, either. “Parmesan,” for example. It used to be pronounced the way it’s spelled: “parm’-eh-san.” Couple decades ago it morphed into “parma-jean.” You have to pronounce that “jean” like it was French: “zhan.” As if it were some Frenchman named “Jean” who was living in Parma. It’s not a normal sound in either English or Italian. It came, I’m sure, from people trying to sound a little more worldly, so they started giving “parmesan” cachet by pronouncing it in what they thought was Italian—probably in poor imitation of the Italian parmigiano, combined with the Italian-American custom of dropping the final vowel in Italian words. Instead, it reinforces our reputation as rubes, but so be it. We aren’t called the Ugly Americans for nothing.

Heck, we often make mistakes like that. Heck, “often” is a perfect example. I’m not sure where the “t” in “often” came from, but it was never pronounced until recently. Now, though, you hear the “t” more often than not. There’s a good chance you pronounce it that way, too.

I used to joke that I could live with that, so long as they didn’t start pronouncing the “t” in “soften.” You guessed it, the “t” is creeping in there, too. An un-softening of “soft.” How droll.

It reminds me of Spanish. You know how Spanish, especially Castilian Spanish, is spoken with a pronounced lisp? That came from a whole country imitating a beloved king who spoke with a lisp. One king. A whole country. Pretty amazing.