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A Study in Conflict Between Island Cultures

It doesn’t get much play in the publicly-available cultural anthropology literature, but there’s an island in the Pacific where an interesting conflict has played out over generations.

The island, which has an untranslatable name – generally rendered in English as  “Ryeezahn” –  is occupied by two tribes, the Kritsi and the Syenz, which have been at war for generations, a war temporarily restrained in an uneasy peace.

The root of the conflict, as visiting anthropologists have documented, is unequal resource distribution brought on by a drastic inequality in living space. The size of the Syenz territory is more than 20 times that of the Kritsi.   Continue reading “A Study in Conflict Between Island Cultures”

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Reason Rally Update

Reason Rally plane tickets in hand!

I live about 8 hours drive time from DC, so I was going to drive down on March 23, but I have to work fairly late that day, so I decided to fly down on Saturday morning, March 24.

Tentative plan is to meet up with a few other friends near the statue of Joseph Henry on the grassy quadrangle side of Smithsonian Castle (which is pretty close to the RR stage area), although I may end up getting there after the start of the Rally. Argh.

Originally, the time of the Rally was given as 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and I was expecting to show up at the after-event event at a nearby restaurant (Hemant Mehta has the details), but now Rally hours appear to be 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The restaurant after-event meeting is receiving the first 150 people between 5:30 and 6 p.m., so if I stay till the end of the Rally, I can’t get to the restaurant thingie.

Besides which, I’m staying in Baltimore that night, and the last MARC commuter train leaves Union Station at 7-ish.

Well, crap. I guess I’m gonna be forced to just enjoy the Rally.

 

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Short Stack #12

If your father has a stick in the closet that he’s used in the past to beat you with, you have to wonder at someone who’d tell you “What are you getting all worked up about? He’s not beating you with it NOW.” Just so with organized religion and what it’s done throughout history. As an atheist, I would rather empty out that closet.

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When a news story says someone “lost” a leg in an accident, I always hold out hope they’ll eventually find it again and be better for the brief separation. Continue reading “Short Stack #12”

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Madison Avenue Jesus

Man, the ads we get here at FtB. My understanding is that the service that places these things gets progressively better at targeting them to the reader audience over time. I continue to hope that’s true. If the whole thing works on nothing but keywords, and if atheist bloggers frequently mention worship and God and Jesus – in the making of jokes if nothing else – then readers here will have to grin and bear a LOT of ads that should rightly be targeted at the goddy. We’re like a Jewish site that deals with Holocaust issues getting ads from skinhead clubs because the words “swastika” and “Hitler” come up frequently.   Continue reading “Madison Avenue Jesus”

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The Things Atheists Do

I picked up my very own Master of Christian Logic today at Unbelief as a Thought Experiment, and had a rousing set-to in comments  over weighty matters such as science and the supernatural. I probably didn’t cover myself with glory — the thing seemed to end in that snippy back-and-forth stuff and I just got tired of it. I did beg him to Come to the Dark Side, offering the standard promise of freedom and joy, but he wasn’t having any of it, intoning (can you intone in a blog comment?): Continue reading “The Things Atheists Do”

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Free Will … Maybe — Part 2.3

Why you should never say "Bite me!" to Bear Grylls

So: Most of you is not even you. It’s something else, something beastly. Beastly in physical nature, but also beastly in mind. Run by hormones, urges, biologically programmed mandates … just as every other animal is.

Where does that leave us in a quest for Free Will?

Well, it leaves us still looking, doesn’t it? And not a lot of hope in the search. If we’re 99 percent animals — fucking and fighting, eating and shitting, birthing our befurred primate infants and suckling them on beastly milk-faucets little different from those of cows (ladies and gentlemen, I’m exaggerating for effect here), living a little while and then dying dead — that doesn’t give much hope of finding within us this otherworldly and evolutionarily-sudden desirable trait, does it? Continue reading “Free Will … Maybe — Part 2.3”

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Unbelief As A Thought Experiment

Just something that popped into my head a few days ago:

To be an atheist, you don’t have to grapple with questions of the Bible or the provability of the nonexistence of God. You just have to perform a simple thought experiment: What if there were no God?

In larger society, that thought experiment has been done. In fact, there’s an entire culture, a incredibly powerful shared human endeavor, based on it. It’s called Science.

Someone asked “What would things look like if there were no God? How would things work? How would they fit together?” Out of that came biology, geology, physics, real medical science, so much more. The experiment was fantastically, astonishingly fruitful in providing answers that you could not just think about, but use. Continue reading “Unbelief As A Thought Experiment”

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An Undropped Shoe

I’m not actually supposed to be writing this.

More than a year ago I signed all sorts of documents demanding strict adherence to the embargo date of the information. But since the embargo date has come and gone, and there has been no public announcement – and especially since the recent news story of the entire Vatican science team being killed in a bus crash in Argentina – I don’t feel that I should honor those agreements.

I suppose there might be some danger in this for me, either legally or via some darker threat – frankly, the bus crash worries me – but maybe that’s all the more reason I should write and post it here. If this post vanishes, or even if I vanish … well, hopefully someone will look into it. But it’s time people knew. Continue reading “An Undropped Shoe”

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Free Will … Maybe — Part 2.2

It’s the same with most every creature you know. Make up a different life-pyramid for each one and you’d find that the few unique things that make them their own specific type of creature are essentially add-ons, extremely minor alterations on top of the ponderous weight of older traits.

Evolutionary “refinement” also sometimes involves a certain amount of letting-go. The horse’s mammalian ancestors, for instance, jettisoned reptilian scales, and all mammalian lineages since then demonstrate this loss. Horses and other equines even gave up toes – plural – for the single toe represented by each hoof.

But those ancestors kept a great number of the core physiological traits of reptiles, amphibians and even fish – hearts, brains, lungs, tails, and so much more – that are evident today. Continue reading “Free Will … Maybe — Part 2.2”