There’s a good quotation from Woody Allen in response to a question about evidence for God’s existence.
“If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name in a Swiss bank.”
Michael Shermer references this quote when asked what could change his mind about God’s existence. I’d have to agree.
God, I’m waiting.
It states that now is the most important time in history. And people are told that humanity is facing the greatest crisis in the history of time. We must make sacrifices ‘now’. This religion is using the thinking dervied from Judeo-Christian tradition. If the world is to be destroyed then we humans are to blame.
I was looking for that one thing to create an awkard moment during the Holidays…
You can check more out at the Order of St. Nick.
One of the central ideas behind intelligent design is that by observing something in nature, we can tell if it was designed by an intelligence or evolved in an undirected process. This is illustrated in the watchmaker analogy.
This highly subjective process can easily lead to false positives. IOW, we think we see a design pattern, when there really isn’t one at all.
Michael Shermer, addresses this in an article on patternicity. As he points out, seeing patterns that don’t really exist is in our human nature and occurs in all aspects of life:
Why do people see faces in nature, interpret window stains as human figures, hear voices in random sounds generated by electronic devices or find conspiracies in the daily news?
A proximate cause is the priming effect, in which our brain and senses are prepared to interpret stimuli according to an expected model… Religionists see the Virgin Mary on the side of a building… Conspiracy theorists think 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration.
Is there a deeper ultimate cause for why people believe such weird things? There is. I call it “patternicity,” or the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise.
And now for the musical number. Here’s Of Montreal with “Disconnect the Dots”.
PBS is in pledge drive mode and it’s showcasing the infomercial “Change your Brain, Change your Life”, hosted by Dr. Danial Amen.
PBS is of course free to run whatever it wants, but I do have problems when it runs such programming from a man featured on Quackwatch and has had his clinic compared to Phernology.
Salon has a good article on him called “Brain Scam”. Here’s an except:
For example, on his Web site, Amen touts NeuroMemory, a non-FDA-approved combination of folic acid and various plant extracts, including Huperzine A, a moss extract that has some anti-cholinesterase properties. The Alzheimer’s Foundation warns that such drugs are “unregulated and manufactured with no uniform standards.” Even the manufacturer issues (in small print) the following warning: “These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any diseases.”
