Is the Trump presidency a religious cult? | Reza Aslan

Are fundamentalist Christians a dangerous religious cult? Possibly. The controversial author and religious scholar Reza Aslan posits that President Donald Trump has much of his evangelical fan-base believing that he's somehow been anointed by God to become President.

Nevermind the Russian election scandal, his affairs with porn stars and unwarranted sexual acts towards women, or his inability to remember even a single Bible verse when asked. Evangelical Christians are abandoning their core moral beliefs to follow, as Reza suggests, someone who exhibits every trademark of a cult leader.

Eighty-one percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the previous election. That’s a record. That’s more white evangelicals than voted for George W. Bush—and George W. Bush was a white evangelical.

This makes no sense to people, especially when you consider that Trump is not just the most irreligious president in modern history, that his entire worldview makes a mockery of core Christian values like humility and empathy and care for the poor; That this individual who couldn’t even name a single verse in the bible when asked to do so, and yet - and yet - received a record number of votes by white evangelicals.

Scholars of religion—normal, rational, people—have been trying to figure out why. Why? What happened?

And I think that there’s a couple of things to keep in mind.

Number one, it’s white evangelicals. Eighty-one percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump, but 67 percent of evangelicals of color supported Hillary Clinton.

Now, these are people who believed the exact same thing, whose only real difference is that.. is the color of their skin.

So let’s not ignore the fact that there is a racial element to this support.

Jim Wallace, the head of the Sojourners, a liberal evangelical group, said it best when he said that these white evangelicals “acted more white than they did evangelical.” And I think he’s right. The second reason I think has to do with the pernicious influence of something called the prosperity gospel, which has gripped the imaginations of white evangelicals.
This is that version of Christianity preached by these charlatans like Joel Olstein and T.D. Jakes, the essential gist of which is that God wants you to drive a Bentley, that what Jesus really wants for you is material prosperity—and indeed that’s how you know God has blessed you, is by your material prosperity.

Many white evangelicals looked at Donald Trump, and what they saw was a wealthy man. And that wealth, as far as they were concerned, was just a sign of God’s blessings.
And so that freed Trump from having to do what every other candidate, certainly every other Republican candidate for president has had to do, and that is: actually prove his spiritual bonafides. Trump never had to do that. All he had to do was just keep talking about how rich he was. And for a large swathe of white evangelicals that was enough.

Thirdly, Donald Trump did something that no other president, not even any Republican president courting the evangelical vote ever did. He expressly promised secular power to these white evangelical groups.

In his speeches to them and in the conferences that he had, both private and public, he very clearly and very explicitly said that if they voted for him that he would give them “their power back,” even if he didn’t agree with their pet causes that he would just allow them to have those causes.

And you can see as president he’s talking now about removing, for instance, the Johnson Amendment, which is an amendment that prohibits preachers and churches from actually engaging directly in politics and preaching politics from the pulpit. It’s why they get to keep their tax break. No one has ever thought about removing this requirement until Donald Trump.
And now he is very seriously moving towards allowing churches to take part directly in political activism as churches.
But none of this, none of this explains the most important phenomenon about white evangelicals in America, and that is this: In the span of a single election cycle, white evangelicals have gone from being the group in America that is most likely to say that a politician’s morality matters to the group that is now least likely to say that.
Atheists in America think that a politician’s morality matters more than white evangelicals in America do—White evangelicals who continue to refer to themselves as value voters.

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Why Skepticism Is the Right Approach to the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia

Bear with us for a second, but do you know the Belinda Carlisle song "Heaven is a Place on Earth"? It's actually scientifically accurate. American public intellectual Michael Shermer says that any idea of the afterlife makes zero sense: your mind and therefore your memories are beholden to your body and that any version of you that made it into heaven, should there actually be one, would just be a copy of you and unable to register that they were actually in heaven.



Likewise, should you be able to scan your brain and "live forever" by being uploaded to a body in the future, it still wouldn't be you, just a copy. Confused? The explanation makes more sense from the mouth of Shermer himself... writing the theory behind multiple you's living in various timelines gets a little too Back to the Future... another sweet '80s reference if we do say so ourselves.

Michael Shermer: Well, Heavens on Earth was something of an extension of my previous books, I have not covered the afterlife in any kind of detail from my previous books on the paranormal, the supernatural, religion, God, morality—and so this was sort of a natural extension of “well if you’re skeptical of all these other things what about the afterlife?” and my standard one liner is: “I’m for it.”

But the fact that I’m for it doesn’t make it true, in fact if anything the more passionately we want something to be true the more skeptical we should be of our own beliefs because we know how powerful these cognitive biases are to lead us to want to find evidence for what we already want to be true.

So I really kind of went in search of just all the standard religious theories of the afterlife and heaven. I go through the big three monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and right there all of them have a history in the sense of all the different versions that there are of the afterlife and heaven and they’re quite different histories than say if you read a history of cosmology, which sort of shows a progression from the ancients through the scientific revolution, through the early modern period all the way up to today of us getting closer and closer to an understanding of the real nature of the cosmos.

But there’s nothing like that in religious histories of the afterlife, they’re all scattershot: this theory, this theory; there’s no sense of progress.

So that alone tells us that these are culturally determined, geographically located. like reincarnation, the belief that we come back in this world, our souls somehow migrate into other bodies: Why do they seem to hover all those souls in this subcontinent of India? There’s very few other places around the world where the souls seem to go. That’s an indication that these things are not real out there in the real world sense but real inside people’s heads as determined by their cultures.

But the core of Heavens on Earth really is the scientific search for the afterlife. And so this is what I do science writing and research and scientific areas, believe it or not this is no longer a fringe idea, this idea that we could live forever.

There are scientists today who say that the first person to live 1000 years is alive today. Okay I’m skeptical, but still these aren’t fringe nuts, these are billionaires like Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, the Google guys Larry and Sergey have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in this company Calico, Ray Kurzweil is their chief engineer who believes in the singularity. So this whole idea of radical life extension, cryonics, trans humanism, the singularity, “we’re going to upload our minds into a computer,” these form the core center of my book and why I’m skeptical, why really all of us should be skeptical.

Because first, although it’s not impossible that these researchers and scientists are wrong, it’s just very unlikely, because the problems of say duplicating your soul whatever that would be, in science that would be your pattern of information—your genome—and then the equivalent of that, your “connect-ome,” that is the tracings of all your memories everything that’s you, this is their theory, you copy it and you upload it into a computer.

Let’s say you have it backed up every night when you die, you just put it into a clone or inside a computer or something like that. That’s the idea. And I think the underestimation of the complexity of the problem is orders of magnitude off. We are not even close to doing anything like this. I mean Ray Kurzweil projects 2040 is the singularity and after that we might be able to live forever. How is that going to happen, and who is the we? So then I have a chapter on “Who are we? Who are you? What does it mean to be you?”

Why Skepticism Is the Right Approach to the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia | Michael Shermer

Big Think, October 2017

How America Got Divorced from Reality: Christian Utopias, Anti-Elitism, Media Circus

Americans are inherently a little crazy. But now the crazy is being enabled by politicians in the White House and by the internet. How exactly did it get so bad?


How America Got Divorced from Reality: Christian Utopias, Anti-Elitism, Media Circus



| Kurt Andersen

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Americans have always been magical thinkers and passionate believers in the untrue. We were started by the Puritans in New England who wanted to create and did create a Christian utopia and theocracy as they waited for the eminent second coming of Christ and the end of days. And in the south by a bunch of people who were convinced, absolutely convinced that this place they’d never been was full of gold just to be plucked from the dirt in Virginia and they stayed there looking and hoping for gold for 20 years before they finally faced the facts and the evidence and decided that they weren’t going to get rich overnight there. So that was the beginning. And then we’ve had centuries of buyer-beware charlatanism to an extreme degree and medical quackery to an extreme degree and increasingly exotic extravagant implausible religions over and over again from Mormonism to Christian Science to Scientology in the last century.

And we’ve had this antiestablishment "I’m not going to trust the experts, I’m not going to trust the elite" from our character from the beginning. Now all those things came together and were super-charged in the 1960s when you were entitled to your own truth and your own reality. Then a generation later when the Internet came along, giving each of those realities, no matter how false or magical or nutty they are, their own kind of media infrastructure. We had entertainment, again for the last couple hundred years, but especially in the last 50 years permeating all the rest of life, including Presidential politics from John F. Kennedy through Ronald Ragan to Bill Clinton. So the thing was set up for Donald Trump to exploit all these various American threads and astonishingly become president, but then you look at this history and it’s like no we should have seen this coming.

The idea of America from the beginning was that you could come here, reinvent yourself, be anybody you want, live any way you wanted, believe any thing you wanted. For the first few hundred years, like everywhere else in the world, celebrity and fame were a result of some kind of accomplishment or achievement, sometimes not a great accomplishment or achievement, but you did something in the world to earn renown. America really was the key place that invented the modern celebrity culture, which was, beginning a century ago, more and more not necessarily about having won a war or led a people or written a great book or painted a great painting, but about being famous, fame for its own sake.

We created that, we created Hollywood, we created the whole culture industry and that then became what I call the fantasy industrial complex where, certainly in the last few decades more than ever more than anybody thought possible before, fame itself, however you’ve got it, was a primary goal for people. And again, as so many of the things I talk about in Fantasyland, not uniquely to America but more here than anywhere. And then you get reality television, which was this unholy hybrid of the fictional and the real for the last now generation where that blur between what’s real and what’s not is pumped into our media stream willy-nilly. There are now more reality shows on television than there were shows on television 20 years ago. And that’s another way for nobodies to become famous overnight. YouTube, another way for nobodies to become a famous overnight for doing almost nothing or nothing.

Google Searches May Be the Best Measure of Human Nature Yet

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has a sneaking suspicion that we might not be all that honest with each other. Instead, we seem to be far more honest with a website. The things that people type into the Google search bar, Stephens-Davidowitz says, reveal far more about a person than any in-depth interviewer could ever dream of. Even how racist someone can be. What's alarming is that prior to the 2008 election, Stephens-Davidowitz saw a big uptick in racist searches coming from alarming places.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz had expected the South to make perhaps a portion of these searches, but he was shocked to see the searches coming from Michigan, Pennsylvania, and more. And to cap that off, most of those searches were hardly fringe searches: they matched the amount of bigger-name searches like Lakers, migraines, and The Daily Show. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is the author of Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are.

So, the past 80 years if you want to know what people want, why they do the things they do, what they’re going to do, you ask them in a survey. But people may lie to surveys. But it’s been shown that people are really, really honest on certain internet sources, particularly their Google searches, so they tell Google things they might not tell to anybody else. They might not tell family members, friends, surveys, even themselves sometimes. And by mining this data we can get better insights into who we are.

Google Searches May Be the Best Measure of Human Nature Yet | Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Dark Matter, Dark Gravity, Ghost Particles, & the Essence of All Objects

There's something fundamental we all need to understand about dark matter—it may not actually be matter at all. Neil deGrasse Tyson has a bone to pick with this misnomer that is distracting physicists and the public from the real discoveries to be made.

Scientists know very little about "dark matter", and in fact it can only be observed indirectly by its effect on other objects. Tyson has a few suggestions for its re-naming: how about "Fred", he jokes, which is a name devoid of any implied meaning—suitable for our current level of knowledge. But if you want it to sound sexy and be accurate, then the way to go is dark gravity, according to Tyson.



Why? Because when you add up everything in the universe—the stars, moons, gas clouds, black holes, everything—85% of gravity is unaccounted for. That is so-called "dark matter". What makes it so interesting isn't the wild-goose-chase question of whether or not it exists, but why it doesn't interact with ordinary, known matter? On the way to explaining that dark matter "doesn't give a rats ass about us," Tyson explores ghost particles, the essence of objects, and why we haven't found any dark matter planets.

Neil deGrasse Tyson's new book is Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.

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Why Do People Claim to See Ghosts? | Alison Gopnik

Whatever you do, don't look behind you – because the answer isn't there, says psychologist Alison Gopnik. The real ghosts are glitches in your brain, and in a way, that's even scarier.

Gopnik's latest book is "The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us about the Relationship Between Parents and Children"

Transcript:

There is a fascinating line of research recently trying to explain why people see ghosts. And it's a phenomenon that people have talked about for a long time that someone will suddenly feel as if there's this presence of another person that's near by. And it turns out that you can actually artificially induced that sense of another presence that's nearby. And you can do it by using the sense that we have of our own presence. So as I'm sitting here now I have a fairly strong sense that I am sitting here now; that there's this person who's me who's sitting here. And part of that is because of my kinesthetic appreciation of the way that my own body works. The fact that when I try to do something my body follows. So what they did in this experiment was to set up a situation where I'm say moving a stick I feel a stick behind me touching my back. So even though I couldn't actually be bringing about that movement it's highly correlated with my own movements, the way that my hand waving is correlated with my intending to wave my hand. So here it is I'm intentionally moving this stick and I'm feeling the stick moving in exactly the same way on my back.

It turns out that when you do that people report, even though they know it's not true, they report that there's this other person that somewhere out there. There's a presence that's there that's responsible for what's happening to them. And when you look at people who report this feeling of presence it's a characteristic of certain kinds of brain damage which affect this kind of kinesthetic sense we have of our own bodies. So the sense that I had that I'm here inside of me not over there that's generated by particular brain areas and with damage to those brain areas that system gets so messed up one of the results is that you think that there's another person there.

Spooky Science: Why Do People Claim to See Ghosts? | Alison Gopnik

Why "Don't Worry, be Happy" is Terrible Advice

Think happy, be happy? Maybe not. Harvard psychologist Susan David examines the backlash effect of forced positivity in our lives. David's book is "Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life"

How Forcing Positivity Can Create Despair | Susan David



Transcript:
I do have concerns about the over arching societal messaging that we are hearing, which is that we should focus on being happier; that we should choose to be happy and that we should think positive. Now just to be clear I am not anti-happiness. I, in a past life, wrote and 80 chapter give or take doorstopper book called The Oxford Handbook of Happiness, which really explored how it is that human beings can develop higher levels of happiness. But what I am concerned about in the current discourse is that I think what it is actually paradoxically doing is setting people up for greater levels of unhappiness. Let me explain why.

A friend of mine was recently diagnosed with and died of stage 4 breast cancer and she described her experience of suffering and loss as being exacerbated by what she termed "the tyranny of positivity." That she had so many people coming to her and saying just be positive; just think positive; everything will be fine. And what she said is those messages that a real impact on her ability to be authentically and in a real way with her experience. She also said that it made her fairly angry, that if it was just a case of thinking positive and being positive that all of the individuals in her breast cancer support group would be alive today. They were the most positive people that she had met, but they were not alive and that somehow the messaging that our wellness is 100 percent in our control simply by thinking positive can often lead to people who are suffering from illnesses like cancer to feel that they are somehow to blame for their own illness or for their coming death because they weren't positive enough.

Why "Don't Worry, be Happy" is Terrible Advice

Read Full Transcript Here: http://goo.gl/Uhn26m.

Penn Jillette on Atheism and Islamaphobia

Penn Jillette just got born again – but don't fortify the gates of heaven just yet, because it's his atheism that he's renewed, to account for blanket religious vilification and hate politics. Jillette's latest book is "Presto!: How I Made Over 100 Pounds Disappear and Other Magical Tales"



Transcript
About three years ago I came in to Big Think and I talked very strongly and very passionately about atheism, how I did not believe in God. And over the past three years I opened my heart to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit filled me. And all of a sudden I realized that everlasting life is possible by following in the ways of Jesus Christ our Lord. I have since then dedicated my life to Jesus Christ. I have joined the Church and I will live the rest of my life and die as a Christian in service and in joy with Jesus Christ Our Lord. I’m just fucking with you. For a minute, just for a minute did I – just for a second did I have you going? Just for a minute? Can you imagine how much money I would make if I could just convert to re – I don’t have to convert. If I just pretend to convert. Can you imagine if I just took and threw away my atheism, if I threw away my morality and said I was religious and went out and started preaching? Can you imagine the amount of money I would make. But what good if a man gained the whole world but lose his soul. No. I’m still an atheist. I’m still doing fine. I just spoke at a Young Americans for Liberty conference, you know, a lot of conservatives, a lot of people that are too young to be wearing suits were wearing suits.

I liked them. And afterwards a man came up to me probably 20 years old and he was slight in build, very dark complected and he said to me I wanted to talk about this during your lecture but I was very, very frightened that there were cameras there. And I said well there were cameras there so at least you’re not frightened by UFOs. You’re frightened by spiders, something that’s real. I can respect that. I made this kind of light of his wording there. And then he shut me up because then he said my family is from Pakistan and everybody in my community is a devout Muslim. And my mom and dad are devout Muslims. And I’m an atheist. And if I said that while you were speaking, if I raised my hand and said that with the cameras on, said that declared a statement I’m an atheist. My mom and dad would not kill me but they would disown me and they would never speak to me again. And I would be an apostate and it is not unlikely that someone in my community would kill me.

Read Full Transcript Here: http://goo.gl/ndibS4.

Increase Your Productivity by Mastering Singular Focus and Mindful Meditation | Emma Seppälä

Emma Seppälä, Ph.D explains the flaws of multitasking, and how meditation can help you achieve mental clarity, increase productivity and even up your levels of charm. Seppälä's is the author of "The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success"

Hey Bill Nye, Is Playing the Lottery Rational?

This week, Bill Nye the Science Guy talks about the chances of winning the lottery, and re-frames the system as a tax on the people who can least afford it.



Bill Nye:

If people wanted to play the lottery, okay, that’ll be fun for them. The chances of winning are very, very small – extraordinarily small. Almost everyone who ever plays, ever, loses. And I used to think it was benign or not any big deal, but I have changed my mind about that over the last 30 years. The lottery is mostly a tax on people who don’t know math. And the reason they don’t know math is because people like me have failed to enlighten people on what it really means when it’s one in 230 million. It means you will lose. That’s what it means. If you have a one in 230 million chance of winning it means you will lose. And when I was doing standup comedy I used to have a joke – a joke – about having a revolver, a gun, where the bullets are arranged in a circle.

‘Hey Bill Nye, Is Playing the Lottery Rational?’ #TuesdaysWithBill

Video by Big Think, 2016

Hey Bill Nye, "Does Homosexuality Make Evolutionary Sense?"

An anonymous viewer asks Bill whether homosexuality makes sense from an evolutionary and genetic standpoint. Bill's response? Homosexuality exists across species and none of them are dying out anytime soon.



Bill Nye:

So when I was growing up there was this controversial and super bestselling book called The Naked Ape. And this guy, the author, Desmond Morris claimed, I guess he documented that there is homosexual behavior among primates. And from what I remember – I haven’t read it in many years – was chimpanzees and Bonobo’s exhibit homosexual behavior. And the answer nowadays we give to everybody about this is it’s a spectrum. I don’t know about you but I have known a great many gay men who are married, who have babies, who have kids. So apparently – I’m not an authority on this. I’m an observer of the human condition.

Apparently there’s a spectrum. Some people are more inclined to have sex with people of their same sex than others. And I think if you just watch the news right now you can see that for yourself. And so being somewhere on the spectrum of heterosexual with homosexual being on that it’s not genetically lethal, you still have kids anyway. And you’ll hear people talk about the feminine side. You’ll hear people talk about the masculine side. You’ll hear women use the expression well she’s got a lot of balls which can’t literally be true if we’re using balls in that conventional construction. So I would say that it’s something that happens in nature and I remember very well in this book – now I haven’t read it in a long time but man it was a big deal. Openly talking about sex in the 1960s was a big deal that he claimed that there was more homosexuality in zoos than he observed in nature. And that may be just because we happen to capture a couple of homosexual Bonobos or whatever. In other words the sample size is way too small to extrapolate. So let’s celebrate being alive everybody. Apparently it’s just something that happens in nature and look, we’re all here.

Mindful Self-Acceptance? Bad Idea According to Ancient Chinese Philosophers

Asian philosophies have proven extremely influential in the United States, but are they being interpreted correctly? Frequently not, says Harvard China historian Michael Puett, who focuses on two main ideas in this video: one transported relatively recently to the United States, and another that sheds new light on the so-called naturalistic fallacy.



First up is mindfulness meditation: a practice that has become all the rage for anyone looking to live calmer, more focussed lives. It sounds innocent enough, says Puett, but the goal of distancing yourself from negative emotion presents real risks. If you find a way to cope with negative emotion without changing the material circumstances around you — focusing on internal sources of stress to the exclusion of external ones — you may begin to accept harmful treatment.

This is likewise the case with "finding your true self," which Puett claims is little more than accepting your circumstances and normalizing potentially destructive patterns of behavior. When we search for ourselves, we search for some authentic, natural self. But putting nature on a pedestal ignores the very real call to action that Chinese philosophy presents.

Puett's latest book is "The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life"


Read more at BigThink.com

Hey Bill Nye: Can Science Eradicate Religion and Myth from Politics?

Religious practices run deep in many cultures and their influence will be slow to fade away. But this shouldn't deter a scientific outlook from helping us make practical decisions in life.



Transcript:

Aditya Bakshi: Hey Bill. This is Aditya Bakshi. I'm a mechanical engineer graduate from India. My question to you is why are so many people attracted to pseudoscience and what can we as a society do to stop pseudoscience if it has the support of religious fundamentalists and hyper nationalist? For example, the recently concluded Indian Science Congress was criticized heavily for featuring a lot of pseudoscience and mythology. Thank you.

Bill Nye: Greetings Aditya. I'm saying it as best I can. Aditya? I'm saying it as best I can. I have spent just about two weeks in India and I got to say I was very impressed with how much pseudoscience there is, how much spiritualism there is. I guess those aren't the same thing. And a lot of people - it's very common for people from my country, from the United States to go to India to get a new way of looking at life, to get a new spiritual prospective. And as you suggested these things, pseudoscience and the spiritual perspective seem to be tied together. But science, this process that humans have come up with where you make an observation; you come up with a hypothesis, a reason you think this observation happen, this phenomenon occurred, and then you come up with a way to test it. An experiment. You test it. You see what happened. You compare that to what you thought would happen and you know nature and this extraordinary way that enables us to have cars and trucks and the green revolution and feed everybody and clean water for a lot of people and electricity and spaceflight and putting things in orbit around Mars, the Mars Orbiting Mission, ISRO, Indian Space Research Organization's mission. Very cool. This is a great concern. All I can say is, well not all I can say, but something I will say about pseudoscience. Well, in the United States it's very common to use the phrase critical thinking, being critical of claims is that it's a process.

Hey Bill Nye, 'Can Science Eradicate Religion and Myth from Politics?' #TuesdaysWithBill

James Randi: Science Will Never Support Religion

James Randi has shunned faith since he was a kid spending collection plate money on ice cream. "If my dad and mom are up there someplace... I ask them to forgive me."

How to Squash a Paranormal Claim

The James Randi Educational Foundation has never met a "psychic" it couldn't discredit—easily. Still, Randi understands why such frauds appeal to people.



Big Think, 2012

We Know What a Healthy Diet Is. Now Can We Stop Arguing About It?

Go ahead: Eat lean meat, eggs, and seafood, if that's what you want. Just remember, as Dr. David L. Katz notes in video interview, the bulk of your diet should be vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, lentils, nuts and seeds. Katz is the author of "Disease-Proof" (http://goo.gl/R3t9kL).



Transcript:

I routinely point out that we could eliminate 80 percent of all chronic disease by using what we know. And we don’t do that. We really bog down in bickering about do we know what we know and is this part of what we know more important than that part of what we know. And in no place is that a bigger problem than diet. There’s obviously a lot of money to be made from confusion. Some years ago I worked on air for Good Morning America and I saw firsthand that there really is a vested interest in TV and the media propagating constant change. If you say the same thing about diet on air enough times in a row people lose interest in your dietary segments. If you say something different every time it’s always interesting. Tune in tomorrow for a new answer. So the media are in on it. The fad diet authors are in on it. Basically a lot of people who just think that their view of the truth through a particular tunnel is the only truth or in on it. But the result is we squander the opportunity to use what we know because we bog down in debate about what we don’t know quite so well. So having completely lost my patience for the status quo I decided to do something about this. And it’s really challenging now because there was a time not all that long ago when a single voice could rise above the din. Think for example about Dr. Koop when he was Surgeon General. Or Benjamin Spock and the influence that he had on parents raising young children. But that era is gone because we live in the age of the blogosphere and cyberspace and everybody’s got a microphone. And there’s just this incredible amount of static.

The Earth is Really, Really Not 6,000 Years Old

Bill Nye (The Science Guy) comments on a previous Big Think video in which he denounces the teaching of creationism to America's students. Bill Nye is the author of Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation.



Read more at BigThink.com: http://goo.gl/UM7u1Q


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Transcript:

Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science. So if we raise a generation of science students who don’t understand the main idea in biology they’re going to be incompletely educated students and this is going to be trouble for the United States because the United States keeps in the game economically by innovating – having new ideas, new products, new ways of doing things. That’s what the United States produces and brings to the world. And if we raise a significant fraction of our students who don’t understand science we’re not going to have the engineers and scientists to continue this tradition. So for me it’s troubling objectively or subjectively as one can be and as a citizen of the U.S.

I believe, I think here on Big Think that the problem is the same thing that allows us to recognize patterns to imagine shapes and things and routes and ways to get things done before we actually start doing those things that that ability also enables us to understand that despite our best efforts we’re all going to die. And I think that makes all of us a little nutty. We all find it a little troubling. And so because it seems incredible that all this stuff that we store in our brain, all the memories we have, all the mental images that we are able to keep, all the algebra that we learn, that all that goes away when we die is really hard for all of us to accept. And along with this is that we are not nature’s last word. We are not the final answer that nature came up with. That we are not what some entity created as his or her very best work. We’re just one more step on the evolutionary timeline. And for many people that’s so troubling they can’t accept it at all. For me, of course, it’s empowering and amazing and it makes me want to live every moment of every day in the best way possible. But for a lot of people it’s literally unimaginable.

Our journey begins when I was in New York. I’m living in New York nowadays but a year and a half ago I came here on an airplane and I had to be someplace for a television interview at – I had to get up around 5:00 a.m. Eastern time which was 2:00 a.m. Pacific time. And by the time I got to Big Think I was worn out. I was a little worn out. And you guys asked me a fabulous question about creationism. I’m not sure why you chose to ask that question and I spoke from the heart how troubling I find it for the United States science educational system, for our science students in the U.S. to be excluded or not be enlightened and not be enabled by the fundamental idea in all of biology which is descent by natural selection, evolution. So you guys posted that and people went a little crazy on the electric Internet, the computer machine that the kids use. And I just remind everybody when people take the time to write and they take the time to hate me that much, these are not people you’re not going to reason with. These are not people that you’re going to sit down and have a conversation with and a discussion and achieve a new conclusion. We each have pretty much made up our minds and so you can’t worry about that stuff too much.

My concern is not for the grownups who take the time to write these inflammatory things and react to your fabulous website and so on. My concern is for the people who are still in school, the people who are the future of the U.S., the future of the U.S. economy. And larger the future of the world’s economy. I mean the United States is so influential. It’s the third most populous nation in the world and it’s the nation that sent people to the moon. I mean it’s still a big influence. You can make very strong arguments for South Korea, Japan – huge economies doing amazing – Brazil doing amazing things. But still the United States is the leader in this stuff and so when we exclude a generation of science students we’re headed for trouble. [TRANSCRIPT TRUNCATED]

Directed/Produced by Jonathan Fowler, Elizabeth Rodd, and Dillon Fitton

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Watch: Bill Nye: Creationism is just wrong!

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Daniel Dennett: How Does the Brain Store Beliefs?

What if beliefs could be surgically inserted into a patient's brain? This is the basis of one of philosopher Daniel C. Dennett's thought experiments in exploration of how the brain represents beliefs. Daniel C. Dennett argues that individual beliefs are part of broader idea systems and that they couldn't possibly be stored like a library of belief sentences.

Barney Frank: Ridicule is a Powerful Weapon

The retired Massachusetts congressman shares his philosophy on the therapeutic and polemic power of humor. Ridicule, says Frank, was one of his greatest weapons. Not only does humor get you remembered, it often helps you persuade audiences through laughter and levity.



Transcript:

Humor has played a kind of multiple role for me. To be honest the first thing it does is keep me sane. I mean there are boring moments in politics, there are tense moments, there are disappointing moments. The thing of funny things is a way for me to cope with it, and sometimes other people too. In recent times former Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner in his book mentions a time when he was feeling very gloomy and I called him up and said something that made him laugh. And Ben Bernanke, the head of the Federal Reserve just said again oh yeah that was a tough time and I remember you said such and such. So it's probably just to make me feel better, to enjoy it. Secondly though, it has an important polemical impact, a double polemical impact. First of all people say a lot of things politically. If you say something very funny it's more likely to be remembered and it can get your political point across. My best example of this is a remark I made 30 years ago and it's now been sort of used by others without attribution, that's the greatest compliment people can pay you. President Reagan was a strong supporter of making abortion illegal. He had previously been - he had signed a bill to make abortion legal in California. He was not nearly as deeply rooted ideologically as defenders now claim, but he was, for political reasons in part he was going to be for a total ban on abortion, and the motto there was life begins at conception.

Then he becomes president and proposes a budget that cuts every program that helps poor children, the program that we called the Woman's Infants and Children's Program that provides nutrition for them, daycare, Head Start. And so you have the contrast between saying that life begins at conception and then an attack on every program that would make the lives of these children better. And I said well, I now understand the Republican view. In their head life begins at conception but it ends at birth. And frankly that became a very effective way. So it's a way to make a point. I mean I could've said well, they're being very inconsistent because they are requiring these children to be born, but once the children are born they don't do much for them. But saying it the way I said it gave it more penetrating power and more staying power.

Secondly, and this is very helpful, ridicule is about the most powerful weapon possible rhetorically. Nobody likes to be laughed at. Nobody likes to be made fun of. And if people are making an argument or taking a set of positions that expose them to ridicule, if you can make fun of them that's also very effective. So it's a way to make your point that will A, break through the clutter and be remembered and B, make the other people nervous about it. And I do think the fact that I had a talent for effectively making fun of people made them a little nervous.

Big Think, 2014

Sam Harris: I'm Trying to Rehabilitate the Word "Spirituality"

Despite its spooky etymology, there's no better word than "spirituality" to describe one's personal exploration of human consciousness. Harris explains why it's important to reclaim powerful words despite their past misuse. Harris is the author of Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (http://goo.gl/2N8CKv)



Sam Harris:

I’m almost as embarrassed by the word spirituality as every other atheist. It’s not – I’m not comfortable with my use of it. The problem is – and this is a problem you almost never encounter in English. We just don’t have a good word for this domain. We just do not have a good word for the project of taking seriously the notion that you could become like Jesus or become like the Buddha or become someone who inhabits the far end of the positive side of the continuum of human psychology and human well-being. And someone who can have really radical insights into the nature of consciousness by virtue of a disciplined practice like meditation. So to talk about things like awe and well-being and love and positive psychology and happiness, that doesn’t get at how deep and rarified this project can be. It also doesn’t link it to the traditional context in which people have pursued similar projects. So there is a point of contact between what I’m talking about and, you know, what a Tibetan Lama is doing in a cave for five years. I mean it’s very explicit. Most of these teachings come out of traditions like Buddhism. So while I argue that we have to get out of the religion business and the doctrines that have framed most people’s discussion of these experiences are as unwarranted as I’ve always said. There is no alternative term for the efforts that people can make through meditation or psychedelics or some other means to really transform their consciousness and have insight into the – it’s intrinsic selfless nature. And it’s inconvenient but I feel like the other words that are available are even spookier, something like mysticism, you know, or more specific like contemplation, the contemplative life. I use contemplative a fair amount but again that doesn’t get at for most people what the subject matter is. So for better or worse I’m just – I’m trying to rehabilitate the word spirituality.

I mean one burden I think we have is to reclaim good and powerful words no matter how they’ve been misused in the past, no matter what the inconvenient details of their etymology is. So I would say spirituality is one of those words. But a word like evil is also spooky for many people. It’s felt that evil is a holdover from religion. When religious people talk about evil they’re thinking about things like Satan and a force that is somehow not to be understood in scientific or naturalistic terms. And it’s thought, I think, rightly that once we understand psychopathy at the level of the brain fully we will have a discussion of evil that will seem to erode any basis for using this spooky word. But I think to lose the word evil would be unfortunate and would disempower smart people from making strong moral claims and fighting a war of ideas on this front. And so we need potent words. We just need to be precise about how we use them and the kinds of experiences that merit their use.