Today is Blasphemy Day! Or well, it was, I was a little late posting this. But anyways, it doesn't matter. I hereby declare that I don't believe in a need for supernatural explanations, Gods, Deities or magic. From the movement's website:
"The objective of International Blasphemy Day is to open up all religious beliefs to the same level of free inquiry, discussion and criticism to which all other areas of academic interest are subjected."
If you check Digg frequently you may have run across this already.
I love videos like this, because they're a great clearly laid out idea of what Evolution is all about that's accessible to most people. Quoting Richard Dawkins off of the top of my head, I believe he said something in The Blind Watchmaker to the effect of "everybody thinks they understand evolution", emphasis mine. This is one in a number of videos I've found that are great to recommend someone watch if they want to learn more about Evolution or science, or if they are basing their opinions off of misconceptions.
I think one of the most important and overlooked aspects of skepticism is the need to show your average non-skeptics why your view makes sense. Oftentimes we choose the comfort of talking with people who already share our beliefs. It's important to enlighten people who simply don't have all of the facts, and make decisions based on propaganda rather than evidence. Whenever I encounter someone that I wind up in a scientific, skeptical or evolutionary debate with, which happens fairly frequently now that I think about it, I always make sure to keep things focused on evidence and talk about why science regards it so highly. If there is one thing that watching hours of bad logic applied in a pseudo-scientific way it's patience in dealing with the misconceptions people have. After I lay out the myriad of transitional forms there are, how the theory has been borne out by so many disciplines in the last century, and a wealth of genetic information all confirming predictions about Evolution and Natural Selection, I can usually at least see a person thinking more then they were before. That's the best that any of us can hope for. Not changing a person's mind to coincide with your own point of view, but having that person think critically about why they believe what they believe and why you believe what you believe.
Now tell me. Was there anything there that couldn't easily be explained by the emotional state of being in a dark room, camera malfunction, misuse of actually legitimate technology or just plan stupid credulity? No. I hate this show. It legitimizes a bunch of retards running around in the dark with electromagnetic sensors scaring each other every time a machine they don't know how to actually use goes "beep." That's not evidence of an afterlife. That's evidence that your machine goes beep.
I also cannot understand the whole EVP thing. It's noise pareidolia.
I realize that stuff like this can be entertaining. And that's great. But not when it attempts to pass itself off as science. You'll notice that none of these televised parapsychology groups introduces any kind of control. When they sometimes have to admit to even themselves that they just wasted eight hours of their lives looking for Casper, they pretend to be skeptics.
The hell with that. I want to make a show where we pose as ghost hunting experts, are invited into some rube's attic or whatever, and then proceed to point out how just about anything other than ghosts is likely to be causing the "haunting."
"Sir, you appear to be haunted by squirrels up there, not ghosts."
Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at 10:25PM 