I don’t know how I’ve gone this long without reading it, but I’ve finally started to read The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine. It’s very interesting so far and an easy read. It’s written from a deist point of view and is as scathing of organized religion as anything from the atheists of today such as Dawkins and Hitchens. I wonder if the deists of the 18th century who became the founding fathers of America would be atheists today when it’s not so much of a terrible sin to denounce completely denounce god and religion.

Even in the first few pages, I’ve found some choice quotes on religion in general

The un-natural anything is, the more is it capable of becoming the object of dismal admiration

and the Old Testament

It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.

The worst thing is that I probably won’t have enough time to finish the book until Christmas.

Edit: It just struck me that Thomas Paine looked familiar

I’ve been wondering whether it’s easier to decide on your philosophy of life, a particular religion or lack of religion, when you are older or younger.

Like most people in the UK I was brought up in a culturally Christian household. The rest of the family believed in the religion they had been brought with, but didn’t go to church and religion didn’t really have any effect on our daily lives.

At the age of about 11-12, I decided to take myself off to the local Baptist church and Sunday school to find out what this religion business was all about. I began to realise that I couldn’t take all the parables literally, as everyone seemed to, and the whole story started to make less and less sense.

Not long after my church experience, we were given a course in Comparative Religions in school. This finally convinced me that religion was a made-made phenomenon and that all the believers around me were just following the religion that they were brought up in.

So, by the age of 13 I was a devout atheist (although strictly I should say a strong agnostic – just to be logically consistent!). Maybe I was lucky as my parents hadn’t forced religion on me, but I didn’t ever feel that I had wasted any time or intellectual effort on believing. My  ‘belief’ was just something that I went along with, like Santa or the tooth fairy and giving it up didn’t worry me.

I can imagine that if I had truly believed what people had been telling me and I had run my life on that basis, that it would be very difficult to make such a change in philosophy later in life. I guess the longer you follow a particular way of thinking the harder it is to change. Also, you get comfortable with your way of thinking and you may not want to start thinking about it too deeply in case you realise you have been wasting your time.

I’m not saying that everyone ought to believe the same as me, but as most children are brought up in a society that is culturally religious, they should be given full sight of all the alternative viewpoints (through comparative religion or critical thinking courses) so they realise there is a choice and they don’t have to believe everything they have been told.

Perhaps the people at Noah’s Ark should use this picture in their displays!

A few months ago I found an interesting site called Machines Like Us. It covers a whole range of subjects that I’m interested in – Atheism, Science, Technology, Robotics and Artificial Life/Artificial Intelligence. It looks like they have now started to keep the site up to date, so I’m going to keep a closer eye on it.

By the way, still no news on this front…

I must be a glutton for punishment. Last year we took the children to Noah’s Ark Farm Zoo at Wraxall near Bristol. At the time, we thought it was just a standard play farm, but it turned out to be much more than that. The place is run by creationists, so the walls are full of creationist posters and there is a big exhibition of the story of Noah’s Ark (which of course is literally true). Anyway, a few months ago we won a prize in a raffle. It was two tickets to Noah’s Ark. We decided to go along yesterday for a day out as the children enjoyed themselves last time and I would be more prepared this time around.

Before we got to the main play area where the posters were, we saw a number of other notices pinned up, like:

Rhinos appear, like other mammal families, suddenly in the fossil records. Rhino fossils appear in the Eocene era, in the same geological period as camels, dogs, cats, shrews, moles, horses and many other mammals that we would recognise today. A few changes have taken place in each, but they are largely as they were then.

and a long list titled

33 reasons why humans did NOT come from Apes

This was taken from the book ‘The Origin of Man’ by Professor Stuart Burgess of Bristol University. This person is actually a real life professor in a good department in a good university. Surprisingly, given the subject matter of his books, he is not a biologist, but a mechanical engineer. When I googled him, I found this very unflattering description by the British Centre for Science Education.

In the Ark Exhibition room there was a curious diagram showing how all the animals would be arranged. It was interesting that the T-Rex was located between the Giraffe and the hay store (and underneath the fresh water tank). Doesn’t look like good planning to me.

Of course, any logical consideration of the ark story obviously falls apart very quickly. What about all the insects, worms, birds, etc? How anyone can believe this is literally true is incomprehensible.

We managed to pick up a couple of good leaflets. One was entitled ‘Can Life arise Spontaneously’ and was produced by the Creation Science Movement and the other was ‘Evolution – A Theory in Crisis’ actually produced by the farm itself.

From reading around Noah’s Ark and looking at the leaflets and websites they refer to (especially http://www.earthhistory.org.uk) it seems like the theory they subscribe to is a weird variation on creationism called Recolonisation Theory. Basically, it is a compromised half-baked idea that admits that standard creationism doesn’t make sense, but, as they are committed to their religious view of history, they have to use the same tactics of twisting facts to fit their bizarre story.

The basic facts seem to be:

• After The Creation, all life on earth was destroyed by cataclysms from above in the form of asteroids and from below in the form of water rising up
• Did I say ‘all life’? I forgot to say, a 600 year old man built a big boat and saved a pair of each living creature
• There is a fossil record showing a development of life over a number of years. However, they compress the timescale into thousands of years rather than millions (obviously you have to accept that all radio isotope dating and astronomy is wrong)
• To accept the above you need to accept that the speed of light used to be a lot faster than it is now (I liked this one!). Here’s a couple of quotes

Rates of radioactive decay are proportional to c. Accordingly, these rates would also have been higher

and

It is currently unclear whether the value of c was highest at the time of the Creation or at the Cataclysm. It had declined to close to its present value by the second millennium BC.

• Certain creatures, such as mammals and birds appear suddenly in the fossil record with no predecessors

There’s a section on the Earth History website called In-Depth Discussions which doesn’t discuss anything, just gives their own view of the deal.

Anyway, Answers in Genesis don’t like it, so it can’t be all that bad!

I know Richard Dawkins has referred to the labelling of children as Christian or Muslim as a form of mental child abuse. I’ve just converted my children (4 and 7) to using Linux instead of Windows. Am I just as bad? I guess I’ll have to do the same as I do when I talk to them about religion.

‘Lots of people around the world use different operating systems. Just because Daddy using Linux, then don’t feel you need to do the same. I’ll love you just as much if you use Windows when you grow up. Just don’t go all weird and start experimenting with a Mac’

One of the big discussion points between atheists and theists is ‘do you need religion in order to be moral?’. Hmm, just saw this headline from the BBC pop up on my news aggregator…

Monks brawl at Jerusalem shrine

Funny, I don’t remember seeing anything like ‘Atheists and agnostics brawl at science museum’.

I haven’t been blogging for the last few weeks as my spare time (normally late at night) has been taken up with experimenting with MythTV. MythTV is a really neat collection of programs for turning a Linux computer into personal video recorder (PDR).

I’ve been playing around with Linux for a year or so, but I haven’t found anything in particular that I could really test my Linux system with. About a month ago I saw a Linux magazine that featured Mythbuntu. This is a special release of Ubuntu with all the MythTV software bundled in. After reading the magazine, I thought I’d give it a go.

I installed the most recent release of Ubuntu 8.10, installed the MythTV software and bought a cheap Hauppage WinTV tuner card from EBay. As I have found with all things Linux, nothing is easy. I followed the helpful guide here to get going, but there are lots of annoying little details that need to be sorted out that you don’t get told about. E.g. changing ownership of files and sorting out video card settings.

I have just about got it working the way I want to. I can schedule recordings and watch them back, watch (and pause) live TV and watch pre-recorded videos (with added IMDB meta data). There are a couple of things that I haven’t quite figured out yet.

• Automatically stripping adverts from a recorded TV show
• Transcoding the standard MPEG2 format into DIVX (The standard format takes about 2GB an hour)
• Playing back through the TV

The first two of these are reasonably standard features, I just need to spend a little more time fiddling around. The third one is proving more difficult. I running Ubuntu on my old Toshiba laptop. My thinking was that, once I had recorded programs, I could take the laptop away and watch the programs at my convenience. Also, it makes it easier if I need to use a keyboard to enter data. The problem is that the laptop has a Trident Cyberblade video card and, as far as I can tell, Ubuntu only has decent support for nVidia and ATI video cards. There doesn’t appear to be any way to get an output from my s-video output. I have found that I can get a VGA output working, so there may be a workaround with this bit of kit. I don’t give up easily!

If I get all this working, the next thing will be to connect up a remote control and connect up my regular media player (previously my best ever gadget buy) to the MythTV setup as external storage for my movies.

As I normally do, I’ll spend weeks of late nights playing around with some new gadget, then lose interest for a while. I think I’ll keep at this one for a while though. We’ll see…

I’m normally a fan of the BBC, particularly the News website. However, even they let through some sloppy journalism sometimes. There was health story earlier this week about a man in a coma who apparently experienced a miraculous recovery due to some unusual treatment. My radar is well tuned to quackery and poor science, so I took a look.

Magnetic field ‘aids coma victim’

Generally, any treatment or intervention that seems to be too good to be true, is just that. Maybe this treatment works, maybe it doesn’t. However, this appears to be an unconventional treatment applied to just one person. This is not how a scientific trial of a treatment should work. Reporting on a single case like this is bad enough. What made it worse was that the BBC pulled out a quote from another scientist, Dr John Whyte of the Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute in Philadelphia and stuck that prominently on the article:

I believe that electromagnetic treatments such as deep brain stimulation, direct current transcranial stimulation, and TMS may all have therapeutic promise

This seems to be an endorsement of the treatment. However, when you read the full article, this quote is topped and tailed by the following quotes:

even eight months after a brain injury, spontaneous improvement of this type was “not uncommon”.

and

single cases provide very weak evidence except when treatment occurs very late (so spontaneous recovery should be minimal) and the patient is studied for a considerable interval both before and after the treatment.

This is quite a different view and is the reasonable response I would expect from a scientist. Maybe I’m being harsh on the person who wrote the article as they probably wouldn’t be responsible for the headline and the quote extraction.

When I checked the BBC News website today, the top 3 emailed news report were all related to religion and none of them showed the subject in a great light.

The first one, here, was the most interesting. It concerns the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest known copy of the Bible. Quoting the article,

For those who believe the Bible is the inerrant, unaltered word of God, there will be some very uncomfortable questions to answer. It shows there have been thousands of alterations to today’s bible.

It’s interesting that some of the comments on the article concede that the bible was written by man, not god, but that it was ‘guided’ by god. It seems obvious that here’s a collection of odds and ends that has been collated over hundreds of years, many years after the events are alleged to have taken place. The crazy part is that some people believe that their version of the book is absolutely 100% true and they will live their life by it. What do they do when different versions of the book appear? Do their heads explode?

The second story was titled ‘Pope criticises pursuit of wealth‘. I’m not sure which palace the leader of this multi-million (billion?) dollar organisation was speaking from. I hope the credit crunch doesn’t effect them too much.

The third story was a bit weird. Another example of religious people wrapping themselves in knots trying to reconcile Bronze Age ideas with the real world. This one was about  ultra-orthodox Jews making sure their mobile phones are kosher. I suppose that any group that deliberately puts itself at a disadvantage will eventually fade away.