1. Teaching Science
I have nine minutes to write this post. I do not have internet at my house, even though I ordered it. I am a slave to the hours of the coffee shop.
There are a few problems that I face with teaching science. First of all the only reason given for teaching anything in science is the state mandated standardized test in science. This is only half the problem.
The other half is that most science teachers don’t know science themselves.
These problems compound to getting a batch of students who are basically good kids, whose parents have no idea who Carl Sagan was. Their number one extracurricular activity is usually based in Church (probably because its free). Their only exposure to science is fed to them by the ignorant who don’t give [...]
2. 3 Weeks In and Grades are Due
Well, I became a teacher to save the world.
I became a teacher because unscientific, mooshy, subjective thinking dominates the world. I want to teach kids to be driven by reason and critical thinking.
I became a teacher to give youngsters, especially those who are less likely to succeed academically, an edge in life.
I have a science degree with a great deal of primary scientific research experience.
I became a teacher to save the world.
But so far my first three weeks of being a teacher have consisted of being given too much secretarial work to properly prepare my classes or even grade work. I have to have 12 grades by Monday. Actually, technically they are 3 days late on Monday, but thats when the administration starts paying attention.
I would love to have my [...]
3. Why does Secular Activism matter?
My personal history with faith is quite different from many of the non-believers I have met. Since this is my first post and I’ve been having trouble coming up with something to write, I’m going to try to draw upon that, to write about why I became involved with secular activism and why i think its important to make the case for a rational world.
When i was fifteen i decided to make a leap of faith and became an orthodox Jew. It was a long journey. 3 years later, I woke up in the summer of 06′ somewhere in the heart of Brooklyn, i had a beard that touched the ground, my tefillin (Jewish phylacteries) next to my bed, and my siddur on the cabinet next to me. I was [...]
4. Give a Damn plane crash and me being insensitive
Followers of my regular blog know that I have been a large supporter of the Give A Damn project (see entries here and here). I would support this project anyway, but I support it more because of my relationship with Rob Lehr, who is part of the core team for the documentary. Rob and his production company filmed Skepticon I (for cheap, I may add). Rob is also a member of the Church of the FSM here at MSU, and has led the organization during my absence in the past.
This morning, at about 4 am CST, Rob and Dan were doing a flyover of Nairobi to get footage for the documentary when the plane crashed. Rob is interviewed in this video.
Now, here’s something interesting. The Give A Damn documentary promos [...]
5. Atheists and agnostics are the same thing
There are a million definitions out there for what the words “atheist” and “agnostic” mean. Let’s start with what they do not (and cannot) mean. They do not mean degrees of openness to evidence. I only say this because I’ve encountered the claim that atheists are closed off to the possibility of god, and agnostics aren’t. But just like agnostics likely do not believe in the tangible existence of smurfs, if they ever met one they would immediately change their mind, as they should; atheists are the exact same way. If shown smurfs (or a god), or evidence of them, we will change our minds.
Others say that to be agnostic means to say that we cannot know. There is much to say about this. First, and most obviously, why can’t [...]
6. An assessment of free will
What is free will? It’s obviously not the ability to do anything, since my inability to levitate or to leap over a building is not a violation of my free will. Free will just means that amongst the options we have available, we are free to choose.
So here’s my hangup. Imagine our options for a particular choice are a collection of fruits:
An apple.
An orange.
A pear.
A grape.
God could have also given us the option of a pineapple and a kiwi (and an infinite array of other alternatives), but he didn’t. Free will just means that we get to choose from within our palette of available choices.
On their own, none of these fruits are inherently bad. Sin isn’t something that existed before god came around and god just happened to be powerless [...]
7. A positive case for rational hope
“If I told you that I thought there was a diamond the size of a refrigerator buried in my backyard, and you asked me, why do you think that? I say, this belief gives my life meaning, or my family draws a lot of joy from this belief, and we dig for this diamond every Sunday and we have this gigantic pit in our lawn. I would start to sound like a lunatic to you. You can’t believe there really is a diamond in your backyard because it gives your life meaning. If that’s possible, that’s self-deception that nobody wants.” ~ Sam Harris
I recently did a post about how even though faith is often defended by Christians claiming that it gives people hope, that faith is actually a very poor [...]
8. On hope as a defense of faith
One of the worries that inevitably gets raised when criticizing faith is, “Where do we get hope if not from faith?” I’ve made a somewhat egocentric mistake in thinking that because the answer seemed obvious to me, that it would for others. I will now take the opportunity to rectify that mistake.
First, hope does not equate to truth. The truth sometimes can be downright unpleasant, since it does not conform to our sense of wishful thinking the way religions do. So you need to ask yourself what your priority is: do you want your beliefs to be true or simply positive? They cannot always be the same. There is a very large (and consequential difference) between hoping you have won the lottery and believing you have won the lottery, and [...]
9. CFI Leadership Conference tackled approach to the problem of religion
A few weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to be invited to the CFI Leadership Conference in Buffalo, NY. It went incredibly well. There was a very, very strong response to the MSU Chapter of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and I was happily besieged with questions all weekend about how other groups could build a base like ours and do events like us. It was almost dangerously flattering, honestly.
I got to meet DJ Grothe, who will be coming to Skepticon II. He’s quite a good speaker, very well-informed, and will be a powerful part of the line up. I also got to tour the CFI – these people are freaking awesome. They’re doing a ton of good work.
Also, everybody there was exceedingly intelligent (except the two new-age [...]
10. Not enough that your faith is different
When “truth” is to be weighed by scales of faith, no belief is discernible from another in terms of credibility. As Friedrich Nietzsche once put it, “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
On a daily basis you can find numerous cases of people doing insanely stupid, dangerous things because they were driven by faith. So often we hear cries that the atheist has caricatured faith by pointing these things out. The charge is that we are highlighting a handful of extremists (of course, there’s far more than a handful), and we are admonished to accept that these people have somehow gotten faith wrong. This statement is usually followed by a pablum of condescending sighs and an insistence that the [...]
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