A narrative essay by – Heather Spoonheim

War stories often relate extraordinary tales of soldiers who have survived the grimmest of odds. As we zoom in on a soldier hanging on for dear life in the belly of a landing craft headed for Omaha Beach we can hear the screams of those being blown to bits in the landing crafts around his. As the front wall of the craft drops to reveal hell on a beach, our soldier rushes out through a hail storm of high caliber machine gun fire that shreds the bodies of his comrades. Amazingly, he presses forth with the survivors of the other landings only to watch unknown soldiers around him being blasted into oblivion by landmines.

Death lays in wait for our heroic soldier at every turn. With every move he makes he narrowly evades the horrific obliteration of yet another comrade. And so the story continues, with morbid destruction looming over every step, all the way to Berlin. How can our soldier have possibly survived such a journey of death and destruction? The explanation is purely mathematical: fatalities did not amount to one hundred percent on any of the battlefields that he crossed.

Our soldier could not possibly have known which turn was fatal and which was not. Many of his fallen comrades may have actually met literal dead ends without a survivable option being left available to them. Like many soldiers, however, our soldier was presented with non-fatal options at every step. Like a select few soldiers, as it turned out, our soldier selected the non-fatal path in every instance.

It boggles the mind to consider the odds of our soldier having not only had non-fatal options at every turn but also having made non-fatal selections all the way through. The fact of the matter is, however, that if he hadn’t had non-fatal options and made non-fatal selections all the way through then he wouldn’t have been the soldier we zoomed in on at the beginning of this story. Stories of anonymous soldiers who died three minutes into the battle are simply not very interesting. The interesting stories are those of the soldiers who survived, or at least those who survived long enough for the narrative to develop.

The selection of the soldier for this story began not in the landing craft but in Berlin. Had no soldiers survived to reach Berlin then the selection would have begun not in Berlin but in London, and the soldier would have been German. Soldiers did survive to reach Berlin, however, and it is from this pool that the selection was made. In point of fact, it is not entirely extraordinary that there were soldiers who survived to the end of the war. In point of fact, it is extraordinarily extraordinary just how many did not.

Consider if you will just how many stories had to exist in order to generate the pool of soldiers in Berlin from whom we made our selection. How many stories ended in the landing crafts, on the beaches, in the trenches, or in catatonic states of terror? How many stories never got past the first page? How many never got past the first chapter? How many stories ended in obscurity? War does not generate heroic stories, it cuts stories short and heroic stories are simply those that remain where war has failed.

This is a useful analogy for evolution. Abiogenesis is the landing craft that delivers little self-replicating soldiers to hostile environments that make Omaha Beach seem like a children’s carnival. Natural selection takes the form of fortified machine gun turrets that fire automatically in the ever-changing, mindless patterns of environmental factors. In the absence of generals to call the shots, our little self-replicating soldiers can do no more than run back and forth across the beach; there is no map to Berlin; Berlin does not even exist. This process, therefore, is entirely non-cognitive.

In 99.9% of the cosmos, abiogenesis hasn’t even come close to the beach. On earth, abiogenesis hit the beach about 4 billion years ago. The earliest soldiers didn’t even have legs; the only option for mobility was self-replication. Soldiers that didn’t self-replicate died before exiting the landing craft. Soldiers that self-replicated perfectly only moved in straight lines and, as such, were cut to shreds. Soldiers that self-replicated terribly lost all course information and, as such, just circled about until they hit land mines. Only those soldiers that replicated with slight imperfections could retain course information while also changing course from time to time, and although they were mowed down without mercy, the odd one managed to survive for a few pages worth of narrative. It was an entirely non-cognitive process.

Environmental factors that are not harsh enough to destroy a particular organism today will change sufficiently to destroy it tomorrow. The errors that occur in self-replication may very well terminate the self-replicating process altogether - or might, against significant odds, result in attributes that facilitate survival through tomorrow’s genocidal environment. It is important to realize that every genetic change is the result of a mistake in the self-replication process: an error, not an adaptation. In this regard, every detail of every living organism represents an error in the self-replication process. It is an entirely non-cognitive process.

Every aspect of the environment represents an obstacle to survival: life continues in spite of the environment, not because of it – hospitality does not exist. Almost every line of self-replication has hit a dead end, run out of non-fatal options, and gone extinct. Because of all of this, it is inaccurate to say that evolution ‘solves problems’, ‘favours an adaptation’, or ‘reuses’ anything. Evolution is the filter through which imperfect self-replications pass or fail. The filter changes properties as the environmental factors change, but it is an entirely non-cognitive process.

The proof of the carnage lies in the fossil record and other, as yet undiscovered, genetic dead ends. Further proof lies in the vestigial genes that signify self-replication errors long past. The map back to our evolutionary Omaha Beach lies in our DNA, and binds every living thing together by virtue of having survived an horrific war that shredded almost all of our comrades.

It boggles the mind to consider the odds of us having not only had non-fatal options at every turn but also having made non-fatal replication errors all the way through – over a span of 4 billion years. The explanation, however, is purely mathematical: fatalities simply did not amount to one hundred percent on any of the battlefields that we happened to cross. The fact of the matter is that if we hadn’t had non-fatal options and made non-fatal replications errors all the way through then this story wouldn’t be the one being written. Consider if you will just how many stories had to exist in order to generate this one. Evolution does not generate survival stories, it cuts stories short at every turn and survival stories are simply those that remain where natural selection has failed. It is an entirely non-cognitive process.

A narrative essay by – Heather Spoonheim

The drunken haze that I refer to as my ‘first year in University’ instilled within me three distinctly poignant lessons: that I did not want, in any way, shape, or form, to become a teacher; that one should never add water to a jar containing sodium just because there doesn’t seem to be enough fluid covering it; and that statistics are the bane of the layman.

One Sunday afternoon when my informal Dr. Who fan club couldn’t find a free venue in which to congregate, smoke, and watch our favorite show, I found myself sitting alone reading How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff. It was a book that changed my life because, for the first time, I realized that mathematics could tell lies. Darrell Huff taught me that cold, hard, irrefutable mathematical reductions could invoke false beliefs, without need for any mathematical trickery whatsoever.

The problem is that math is amoral and unsocial; it just has no concept of right or wrong and it has absolutely no desire at all to communicate with us. If one wants to understand what math has to say then one must learn the language of math for, like all too many Anglophones, math simply refuses to communicate in the vernacular. You see, it isn’t so much that math tells lies but, rather, that it speaks its own language and cares not what meaning we glean from its pronouncements. The misrepresentations conveyed by math are actually the result of our own shortcomings. Consider the following two statements:

• This portfolio will double every 10 years.
• This portfolio will provide 7.2% annual growth.

Which one sounds like the better investment to you? If you are a layman of mathematics then you may be surprised to learn that both statements predict the same returns. This is an illustration of the rule of 72. The rule of 72 is a rule of thumb that aids in the prediction of doubling time. Essentially, if you divide 72 by the percentage of growth (72 divided by 7.2), the result will be the number of cycles (years) it takes for the original amount to double. If something increases by 7% per month, then it will double in roughly 10 months. If something increases by 10% per year, then it will take roughly 7.2 years to double.

This one little rule of thumb is critical for making decisions in today’s world, yet few people are even aware of it. When newspapers report that inflation for the year was 3.6%, most people just shrug that off as some discreet and irrelevant economic statistic. Inflation, however, represents the amount by which prices have gone up in the consumer market. Although 3.6% inflation may seem irrelevant, the realization that your grocery bill has doubled over the past 20 years can be startling.

When I was a wee child, a bottle of soda cost 25 cents; now the bottle is made of plastic and the price is a dollar. For those not inclined to do the math on this one, either inflation has been greater than 3.6% during my lifetime or it has been more than 40 years since my earliest memory of pulling a soda out of a vending machine. You see, at an annual inflation rate of 3.6%, it takes 20 years (72 divided by 3.6) for the price of soda to double. After 20 years, that 25 cent bottle came to cost 50 cents, and after another 20 years it came cost one dollar.

The very concept of doubling time itself is a difficult concept for most people to grasp. The most powerful illustration of doubling time that I’ve ever heard involves a tale about a man who invented the game of chess for his king. The king was so impressed that he offered the inventor anything that his heart desired. The inventor, being mischievous as well as mathematically inclined, told the king that he desired a precisely determined amount of rice. He stated that he wanted one grain of rice for the first square on the board, two for the next square, and then three, and so on, for every square on the board. The king laughed at the inventor’s seemingly paltry wish and granted that it should be so.

Now there are 64 squares on a chessboard, and after only 8 squares (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 …) the king made a keen observation. The next number was going to be 256, and it so happens that 1+2+4+8+16+32+64+128=255. This, he accurately surmised, meant that each time the amount was doubled the result was one greater than the total number of grains that had already been granted. The inventor was kind enough to inform the king that this mathematical truth was going to play a big roll in the future of his kingdom.

By the end of the second row the court jester had taken several days to count the 32,768 grains of rice required for the 16th square. The king, becoming very concerned at the prospect of having to count so many grains of rice, asked the inventor if they could just start weighing the rice instead. The inventor agreed, and they determined that the 32,768 grains of rice weighed about 8 kilograms and so it was that they continued with the payments by weight. By the end of the 3rd row, the king was amazed to find that four carts had to be employed to hall in the 2,048 kilograms of rice required for the 24th square. By the end of the 4th row, however, things started looking grim for the king as cart after cart had to be driven into the castle for days in order to provide the necessary 524,288 kilograms of rice that were required for the 32nd square.

The king became furious as he pondered the toll impending on the second half of the chessboard, and he asked the inventor just how many grains of rice it would take to fulfill the entire contract. The inventor told the king that the number of grains of rice required for the 64th square would be 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. Since every time the amount was calculated for a square it would result in a number that was one greater than all the rice previously granted, the rice already granted by that time would be 9,223,372,036,854,775,807. The sum of the two numbers, he said, was 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 – or roughly 2 trillion metric tons of rice. The king seized upon the inventor and promptly cut off his head.

This little story about the rice and the chessboard has always stuck with me because of just how profoundly it illustrates the potential of exponential growth. Armed with this knowledge, and the rule of 72, one can actually begin to understand why so many economists and scientists are so preoccupied with studying trends. To this end, let us consider how short sighted the king’s murderous rage might have been.

As the king had accurately surmised, every time the number was doubled, the result was actually greater than the sum of all the previous numbers. The inventor had also been kind enough to inform the king that this mathematical truth was going to play a big roll in the future of his kingdom. The trouble, though, was that the king had no idea what the inventor had meant by that and the poor sod’s head was already rolling around the courtyard before the king had regained the presence of mind to ask for clarification.

The king called upon his barristers to find out if he was obligated by any other contracts that stipulated a doubling of payments and they assured him that he was not. The king then racked his brain to think of anything in his kingdom that had ever doubled. The only thing he could think of was the number of farms he had raided to keep his kingdom well fed. In the last year of his father’s reign, the old man had raided 40 farms. After the old man died, passing the crown to the foolish chessboard king, it took 7 long years to increase that number to 80, and he remembered it well for he had thrown a big celebration to commend his knights on having doubled their efforts. It suddenly dawned on him that it had been about 7 years since that glorious celebration, and this year’s plans were to raid 160 farms.

This didn’t seem quite the same as the problem with the chessboard, however, for the raids had never doubled in one year. The king consulted with the court scholar on the matter, and the scholar assured him that the number of raids only increased by a little over 10% each year so their was certainly no reason to worry about a repeat of the chessboard fiasco. (Reminder: by the rule of 72, a 10% annual growth rate produces a doubling time of roughly 7 years: 72 divided by 10.)

Unfortunately, although the scholar knew about the rule of 72, and had recently witnessed how doubling values lead to exponential growth, he just didn’t understand how such equations could impact something like farm raids. Since the king’s father had raided 40 farms the year before handing over the crown, the king himself, raiding 10% more each year, had kicked off his reign with 44 raids. In the 7th year of his reign he raided 80 farms, and in year 14 he planned to raid 160. How then, might the next 7 years look in terms of raids? These numbers are illustrated in the table below.

As you can see, not only does the number of annual farms raids move from 80 to 160, but the total number of farms raided in periods one and two also doubles. Furthermore, with the number of annual farm raids predicted to double again, to 320, the total number of raids for period 3 (1699) is actually greater than for the 14 years previous to that period (424+849=1273). Although the number of raids was only increasing by 10% per year, the number of farms that the king would need to raid in any given 7 year period would actually be greater than the sum total of all farms he had ever raided before that period, in the entire history of his kingdom. At some point, perhaps in his great-grandson’s reign, there simply wouldn’t be enough farms in all of India to raid. If you don’t believe this then please re-read the chessboard segment of this article.

In 1977, when U.S. President Jimmy Carter said that the world had used more oil in each of the preceding decades than had been consumed previous to those decades, in the history of the world, millions upon millions of people laughed openly. Hopefully the reader has gained enough from this article so as not to ever be moved to laughter by such ignorance, for even today, few people realize just how dramatically that consumption trend had to be altered. The fact is that we haven’t been able to double our oil usage in any 10 year period that followed that speech. Today we need to face the fact that we will never again double that number, for we’ve already consumed half of all that was ever available and we would need more than what is left to ever double our consumption again.

We must acknowledge, therefore, the importance of remaining diligent in observing trends in all forms of economic growth and consumption. Today, rather than raiding farms, we seek out new sources of energy as petroleum sources begin to decline. As we continue to double our energy consumption, however, we will find that there are only so many rivers to be dammed, only so much uranium to be mined, and only so much wind to be harvested. Even though the sun is, for us, an eternal source of energy, our ability to harvest that energy is dependant upon our ability to source out the materials required for that harvest. Eventually we must face the fact that there are a finite number of farms for us to raid.

A narrative essay by – Heather Spoonheim

As an Atheist, I am often presented with Pascal’s Wager – essentially a postulation that one can optimize expected value by subscribing to Christianity. To be frank, although Blaise Pascal is duly revered for elevating the condition of human intellect, his eponymous wager betrays his fallibility. The wager proposes a binary choice and a binary result and evaluates the possible outcomes as follows:

Although Pascal’s Wager clearly establishes a profoundly optimized expected value for subscribing to Christianity, it is fundamentally flawed by two false dichotomies. As a Catholic philosopher, Pascal limited both the choices and the results to Catholicism. The wager completely ignores Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and all other religions, not to mention all sectarian variations. Most, if not all, of these options contain mutually exclusive doctrines and dogmas: for instance, the god of Islam condemns those who subscribe to Judaism.

Furthermore, considering the propensity of religion for imagining increasingly superlative punishments, rewards, and gods, it becomes apparent that one should not limit oneself to only the pool of religions fabricated thus far but should, rather, press one’s mind to its limits of imagining the absolute and ultimately worst case scenario impossible. Consider, if you will, the concept of a god that demands your worship while offering eternal punishment or reward to your entire family. Surely such a god must be given top priority because the result applies not only to your eternal soul but also to the eternal souls of every single person you love.

Following the above logic, it soon becomes clear that the only reasonable course of action is to have every single person on the planet cease all pursuits so we can all focus on collaboratively embellishing continually worse and better case scenarios for the rewards and punishments of ever greater gods. Although this line of reasoning results in the slipperiest of all slopes, it does provide better footing than the product of multiplying two false dichotomies. In point of fact, it represents an established form of risk management that focuses on the uncertainty of worst case scenarios.

Managing risk by evaluating worst case scenarios for which certainty has not been and/or cannot be established is known as the precautionary principle. The precautionary principle espouses a basis for public policy that practices caution in the context of uncertainty. It is essentially a restatement of Pascal’s Wager that replaces belief with action and god with hazard thusly:

This type of evaluation has become common amongst proponents of extremely precautionary environmental policy. In cases where evidence may not be conclusive that environmental catastrophe is imminent, it is sometimes argued that the arrival of such evidence may signal a point of no return. Essentially this is analogous to Pascal’s evaluation that the certainty of a god cannot be determined until it is too late. Like Pascal, many environmentalists evaluate inaction (non-belief) as having no downside if the hazard (god) does not actually exist but having catastrophic implications if it turns out to be real. The evaluation of action (belief) follows suit by having no downside if the hazard (god) turns out not to exist but very positive implications if it is real.

Likely the most emotionally charged area of public policy currently employing the precautionary principle is in actions undertaken for public security in response to the threat posed by terrorism. Although terrorism is a certainty of the modern world, the specific hazards posed are not certain. Public security practices taken to prevent terrorism address threats and enemies of which and whom there is no certainty.

Just like Pascal and his belief in the Catholic god, environmental and terrorist issues present us with potential actions and hazards that should not be arbitrarily reduced to dichotomies. Fortunately there has been a great deal of advancement in the way such wagers are evaluated. For one, our evaluation of hazards can be constrained by setting minimum parameters for plausibility. Secondly, the result of inaction is not as superlative as eternal damnation. Finally, we can tangibly evaluate the costs of our actions to our pocketbooks and our liberties.

Unfortunately, public policy determined by precautionary principle can be subject to just the sort of slippery slope earlier applied to Pascal’s Wager. Those who are intellectually committed to a policy can overcome minimum parameters for plausibility by over-stating the consequences of inaction. Negotiation of policy can be easily swept away by appeals to emotion, leaving those armed with the most alarmist rhetoric leading the way down the slippery slope. Furthermore, in a world troubled by both shrinking pocketbooks and fleeting liberties, the cost of excessive caution should be closely examined before we automatically and blindly follow the very questionable doctrine of ‘better safe than sorry’.

I hope this little treatment of the similarities between Pascal’s Wager and the plausibility principle will help modern skeptics recognize and evaluate rhetoric designed to sway the public into adopting policies that over-manage risk. Although an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure, let us not adopt polices that invoke a pound of prevention when the only ailment threatening us is uncertainty.

An essay by – Heather Spoonheim

I used think there was an inherent justice in the way that I was able to simply look at the evidence for the existence of Yahweh and recognize it as nothing more than a collection of superstitious notions that, when combined, had coalesced into a misleading but compelling emotional appeal. That other people were captivated by such an emotional appeal didn’t contradict my sense of justice because they too were free to simply recognize it for what it was and liberate themselves of the fallacy; that they didn’t do so was nothing more than their own folly – or so I thought.

It should be noted, however, that calling the argument an ‘emotional appeal’ is a monumental euphemism; it is an overwhelmingly monumental euphemism because the argument is, in truth, nothing less than emotional extortion, a proverbial offer that one cannot refuse. For you see, fresh indoctrinates are repeatedly instructed or, more accurately, threatened that failure to accept the appeal will result in indescribable tortures that defy the imagination.

Upon first consideration of the threat of unimaginable torture by the devotees of a death cult it would seem that the mind of the victim should be filled exclusively by an overwhelming desire to escape. To combat this survival instinct, the doctrines of the death cult of Yahweh employ a tactic common to other sociopathic predators: a friendly introduction accompanied by an offer of candy. You see, the glossy brochures of this death cult rarely open with images of torture but, rather, dangle the most enticing piece of candy imaginable: the hypothetical possibility of conquering death itself.

Even given the superlative nature of this emotional extortion, I still managed to cling to my belief that justice was available in a philosophical market governed by the laissez faire doctrines of caveat emptor; after all, common sense (another fallacy) seemed to make it readily obvious that if an offer seemed to be too good to be true then it likely was not. Those who were foolish enough to trade their faculties of reason for a bag of magic beans, regardless of the magnitude of the promised returns, deserved exactly what they got – or so I used to believe.

You see, just like all too many people who attribute their own successes to self-proclaimed virtues, I was mislead by confirmation bias. I used circular logic to assert the power of ‘common sense’ by mistakenly citing it as the means of my escape and then citing the success of my escape as proof that ‘common sense’ was all it took. What I failed to acknowledge was the fortunate timing of my birth coupled with my aptitude for science, at least as it was presented in the grade schools of my time.

In my day, the eloquence with which Carl Sagan fueled wonder at the cosmos formed a brick wall upon which the awkward rationalizations of theists splattered instantly. Other scientific minds seemed to find increased courage from this and public discourse in scientific matters became noticeably less apologetic. As if to crown this revolution, the producers of the very popular, prime-time television series, ‘All in the Family’, went so far as to introduce a well-rounded and explicitly Atheist character, Michael Stivic.

All of these factors contributed greatly to my escape from cult indoctrination but my ability to perceive these factors was obscured by my own ego, by my faith in my own ‘common sense’ and my desire to believe there was any sort of inherent justice in life. As the years passed though, I began to learn more about the great minds that had contributed to our modern world and my ego became increasingly tempered. These days I am no longer able to maintain the delusion that my fallacious notions of ‘common sense’ in any way compare to the genius of the real heroes of modern thought who had the courage to declare that their own, original, empirical observations contradicted the highly revered Bronze Age notions of their time.

In this way I owe a huge debt to the courage of such a long list of rational thinkers that any attempt to name them couldn’t aspire to reveal anything more than an even greater list of glaring omissions. In lieu, all I can offer is my solemn acknowledgement of this debt and my embarrassingly inadequate ability to ever repay it. In doing so, I also acknowledge that there was no inherent justice in my liberation, only some very fortunate timing. More importantly, this acknowledgement allows me to realize just how the tables have been turned by modern cultists.

Unable to fabricate rationalizations elastic enough to stretch around our modern world’s ever expanding base of scientific knowledge, the strategy of the cultists has turned to outright, underhanded dishonesty. They have so saturated the very infrastructures by which information is disseminated that it is no longer possible to tune into the information stream without finding it befouled by their propaganda of doubt.

No longer able to credibly assert the certainty of their deity, they now repeatedly chant, “But you can’t prove he doesn’t exist.” No longer able to refute the credibility of scientific truths they respond, “But science doesn’t know everything.” And finally, no longer able to exert their authority to crush the very institution of science itself, they have taken to attacking the integrity of that institution.

Television networks that are supposedly devoted to the dissemination of scientific knowledge are riddled with programs that point out anecdotal transgressions of scientific fraud or bias; they do this without pointing out that such transgressions are repeatedly rooted out and expelled within decades rather than being upheld unapologetically for centuries. Newspapers fallaciously cloak themselves in anachronistic notions of journalistic integrity while adhering to nothing other than capitalist greed as they design sensational headlines of scientific folly while simultaneously ignoring profound, although usually more mundane, revelations of how genetics is solidifying the certainty of the evolutionary tree. Radio commentators repeatedly substitute editorials for news and assert that science is arrogant for not giving due consideration to ‘alternative theories’ without a single mention of the fact that these purported ‘alternative theories’ are generated by scientifically illiterate cultists.

Preschool indoctrinates are told that scientists are liars, without even an attempt to justify that claim. Biology teachers are compelled to assume a tone of apology when discussing evolution. When scientific curriculums are publicly debated the floor is left open to those who have absolutely no understanding of the subject matter and children are sent forth to make emotional appeals for cultist ‘values’ rooted in ignorance.

Where they can’t elicit doubt in scientific observation they try to insert reinforcement of any superstitious predilection they can identify. The recent barrage of ‘investigative’ television programs dealing with ‘scientific observation’ of paranormal phenomenon is almost overwhelming. Otherwise perfectly rational people are left to wonder if there might not be some validity to the concept that ‘life energy’ can leave a ‘metaphysical fingerprint’ in certain geographic locations. Failure to acknowledge at least a modicum of authenticity to these ‘investigations’ is maliciously labeled ‘close-minded’ prejudice.

It has become nearly impossible to evaluate the integrity of ‘educational programming’ without taking the time to google the credentials of the ‘experts’ that are paraded forth. For any single rational individual this tidal wave of misinformation presents an insurmountable battle of debunking. For those not yet liberated from superstitious indoctrination, however, the odds of recognizing this volcanic spew of fallacies for what it really is are infinitesimal.

In this challenge, I think I may have finally found the means by which to make a payment towards the debt I owe for my own intellectual liberation. Looking back, it wasn’t one voice of reason that guided me out of intellectual subservience, but a veritable chorus of rational voices. Every voice was important, even the droning, boring tones of my grade eight science teacher, and I know I can carry the tune a little better than he ever did.

The internet has given me a platform for self publication coupled with the resources to easily debunk inane cultist ‘documentaries’. It may seem like a chore to sit through a painfully ignorant program that asserts some holy book to be an archeological treasure trove, and even more of a chore to cite its obvious shortcomings in a well thought out blog entry, but I owe at least that much, even if I can only carry the tune of reason for just a few more bars.

Furthermore, I don’t have to debunk everything myself because there are plenty of Atheist and skeptic bloggers who are much better at it than I will ever be. By simply keeping tabs on some of their blogs, I am slowly gathering a nice collection of links that provide quick rebuttals to online friends infected with various superstitions and cultist misinformation.

Even in daily my daily encounters with the superstitious, nothing seems to shut some of them up faster than pointing out that there is one million dollars awaiting them if they can prove their claims to be true. Before informal exchanges head south of the boarder of rationality I can often infuse some rational thought by talking about the latest news of satellites orbiting distant planets – satellites that were put there by profoundly accurate scientific knowledge.

Finally, through the various online Atheist communities I can try to encourage other Atheists to continue the chorus of reason as well. I think I’ll start right now by posting a blog that might inspire others to consider ways of paying off some of the Atheist debt.

A narrative essay by - Heather Spoonheim

God’s stomping grounds are pretty vast these days, at least according to some theists. You see, God isn’t limited by time, dimensions or measure but actually transcends space-time and even the very concepts of space and time. He is not only everywhere at all times, he is in fact the very essence of where and when and a whole lot more – more than any of us, including Ed Whitten, could ever imagine. That’s one hell of a god!

It wasn’t always this way, though. In the beginning, God only existed as a fallacious projection of human consciousness. More specifically, just as modern man still begs a traffic light to change, primitive man begged fire to start. It is this very compulsion to anthropomorphize that which we wish to control that gave rise to the mythological consciousness of fire; other elements important to primitive man would most likely have been equally imbued with a projected consciousness, the earliest evidence of this being the cult of the bear.

Although it’s easy to imagine how man first projected his concept of mind into that which possessed no such mind, evidence of how this process evolved has been virtually obliterated by the ages. The problem is that although archaeology is very good at showing us what people left behind, in the absence of a social context to frame such relics, any attempt to use those artifacts to interpret ancient beliefs amounts only to conjecture. Fortunately, anthropology has provided us with a wealth of social contexts that may very well frame some of these ancient relics.

The oldest evidence remaining of the ritualistic practices of man are graves. Although ancient graves reflect how significant death was to primitive man, this is more easily interpreted as reflecting the development of his concept of mind rather than any beliefs regarding an afterlife. For example, chimpanzees have a concept of mind that might be comparable to early Stone Age man, and they have a great deal of difficulty accepting the death of a loved one, showing great concern for the corpse.

Although there is early evidence of reverence for animals, the first clear picture we get of how religion evolved comes from the Sumerians. The Sumerians just sort of pop up in the archeological record because they left behind such an incredible body of writing, and that writing is also the oldest that we have been able to decipher. Unfortunately, by the time Sumerian writing developed, the god-concept had already radically evolved.

Sumer was a veritable Godstock, with a pantheon that encompassed 3600 gods! These gods were imagined with very human minds: getting married, having children, struggling for rank, and even committing rape. Interestingly, the king of the Sumerian pantheon was Anu, the father figure in a trinity that included Enlil and Enki. Fire doesn’t seem to have figured prominently in Sumer as these three male gods ruled the sky, wind, and water, respectively. It would seem, unsurprisingly, that fire was taken for granted by that time. Notably, the Sumerians were the first to document myths of creation and a great flood.

Under the Egyptians, the god-concept coalesced with animal deities being lumped into the Egyptian pantheon alongside more anthropomorphic gods and the total number of gods being greatly reduced. For the first time, some gods were given ranks considered higher than the multitudes of natural forces. The theory of life continuing after death began with Egyptian Pharaohs, who were considered to be intermediaries between the gods and man, although the afterlife mythology eventually encompassed all Egyptians. Most significantly, the first attempt at imagining monotheism was attempted by Pharaoh Akhenaten who proposed the idea of having only one god named Aten; the concept failed miserably.

The first successful monotheistic mythology seems to have originated in the Neo-Assyrian Empire. They realized the unifying power of having an all powerful supreme god coupled with a foreign policy that was tolerant of other, localized, lesser gods. The mythology of a single, supreme god was much easier to transport to a newly conquered imperial colony than an entire pantheon. Further, the one god mythology bolstered the authority of the Assyrian King who was written into the mythology as the only mortal authority mandated by God. Tolerating the continued recognition of more localized gods as long as they were acknowledged to be lesser gods than the Assyrian God was a stroke of genius, and truly put God into the business of politicking.

The ancient Israelites can be traced back to this period and their mythology is very representative of the period and region, incorporating stories of creation and a great flood. They also seem to have been inspired by the unifying power of a one god mythology, likely due to Assyrian prominence, and began modifying their mythology to conform, the prohibition of idols being just one example. By the reign of the Judean King, Hezekiah, and through his religious reforms, the Judean religion evolved into a full fledged monotheism.

The Judean mythology still contains vestigial references of polytheism, including references to the wife and sons of their singular, all powerful God. Their doctrines were considered exclusive to their descendants, but Christianity still managed to hijack them by simply extending the Judean mythology with the Jesus mythology. Ironically, the Jesus mythology maintained the claim of monotheism while at the same time re-instating the powerful trinity of Sumerian mythology.

The historicity of Jesus is extremely difficult to verify because his initial cult consisted of lay people rather than their leaders, and his mythology was rapidly scavenged together from the most popular elements of mythologies of the day. At the core was the concept of a single, all powerful God. The most important element was the concept that this God had actually incarnated as a contemporary man in order to refute all other mythologies and establish a ‘true’ mythology. The story of this man spread rapidly, being embellished by all the hallmarks of great legend known at the time: his birth was miraculous and occurred under a fateful star at an important time of year; he had great wisdom and worked wonders; he had twelve disciples; he died and then returned to life after three days.

The most popular, and novel, element of this mythology was that its supreme God literally expressed himself through common men by imbuing people with his spirit. Ironically, this last element marked a full cycle in the evolution of God; the god-concept began with man projecting a human consciousness into that which was without one, and evolved until that projected consciousness actually projected itself back into man!

The Muslim mythology is literally a just rewrite of Christianity, claiming that human authors had muddled the story and so Mohammed was told by God to set the story straight. It’s less than creative but, by extension, it contains all the same powerful elements of Christianity.

And so it came to pass, purely through man’s desire to persuade things that cannot be persuaded, that imagination multiplied imagination to produce the concept of a singular, all powerful, supreme God that reigned over everything. Not only had man projected an everlasting consciousness big enough to embody totality, but along the way he tacked on the idea that his own consciousness would never end.

The initial god-concept had certainly grown into one hell of a supreme God. He was mankind’s universal go-to guy when it came to feeling empowered over that which could not be understood and, with so little being understood, mankind turned to God for everything. What a monopoly!

A narrative essay by - Heather Spoonheim

Years ago I found myself alone and shivering, hands trembling as I struck match after match trying to ignite some damp tinder. I desperately wanted that fire to light and all the intention of my mind was focused and I started pleading, “Come on, fire, come on!” As the tinder began to smolder I sighed, “Thank you!” and I dropped to my knees and began blowing gently until flames began to lick up at the shavings … then at the kindling … and finally at some small sticks that I had carefully stacked.

Over the next hour I fed more little sticks into the fire as I struggled back from the edge of hypothermia. When I was finally comfortable, I just sat by the fire wrapped in a small tarp and reflected upon how I had begged that fire to start. It occurred to me how natural it had been to anthropomorphize the very concept of fire in order to create an outlet for the strong intention that had built up in my mind. I needed fire to understand that I needed it, and I had to create an avenue by which to persuade it to my line of thinking.

Sitting there, deep in the forest, I thought about how it must have been so easy for the concept of god to slip into the human psyche. You see, an advanced ‘concept of mind’ was just as essential to the evolution of early man as language. Language itself is meaningless without understanding the concept that other beings have minds independent from your own, including different knowledge and intention. Without that concept, what would motivate the first words? What would there even be to say?

So powerfully entrenched in our psyche is this theory of mind that even after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution it compelled me to project a consciousness onto my concept of fire so that I might invoke its appearance; even after this projection had served its purpose, I went on to say thank you. Everyday, people run toward teetering objects begging them not to fall. Everyday, people turn the keys in their cars with focused intention while pleading for them to start. Here we are, still doing this in an age when even an agnostic would vehemently refute the possibility that a car has a conscious mind. What chance, then, did primitive man have of grasping the fallacy of projecting a conscious mind into an inanimate object? How compelling it must have been for him to project a conscious mind into something as important, fleeting, and seemingly ethereal as fire; it had, after all, been compelling enough for me to do so hundreds of thousands of years later.

Entreating the return of fire would have been a daily ritual for Stone Age man. Keeping them warm, staving off nocturnal predators and pushing away the shadows, fire was a very welcome guest in every cave and likely a beloved parental figure in most. Sometimes I like to think that the first great philosopher leaned back one day and postulated, “Where fire go when not burn?” The first theist answered, “Fire always burn in my heart.” The first atheist retorted, “When fire not burn, fire go out.” Then all three turned to the first agnostic who, sitting in the corner with his eyes shifting, said, “Me don’t know.”

Little can be said authoritatively about prehistoric religion other than it consistently exhibited the attribution of a conscious human mind to important aspects of man’s environment. One can only imagine that the first religious war might have been fought between a dozen cavemen arguing over whether fire or rain was more powerful. One thing is certain, though, and that is that the concept of god was born of the minds of men who felt compelled to invoke the cooperation of their environment.

Over the past decade, there have been a growing number of people subscribing to what is known as the ‘chemtrail’ conspiracy.  This conspiracy theory is based on the trails left behind by airliners flying through our skies.  Everyone but the visually impaired has observed these trails and they are called contrails – condensation trails left in the sky by the exhaust of jet engines.

The chemtrail conspiracy theorists, however, propose that not all contrails are equal.  They suggest that although some of these trails really are just the same old contrails we have been witnessing all of our lives, others are actually the result of large volumes of chemicals being sprayed into the upper atmosphere.  These chemical trails, or ‘chemtrails’, are described as having different traits than contrails.

Although there isn’t much consensus amongst the chemtrail theorists as to exactly which trails are formed by condensation and which are formed by chemicals, the differentiation seems to hinge on just how long a trail lingers in the sky, and whether or not the trail becomes spread across the sky.  At the root of this differentiation is the premise that if all the trails are just contrails then they should, in fact, linger for similar periods of time and exhibit consistent behavior in just how much they spread or don’t spread.  To understand why this premise is unsound, we need only consider a rather technical description of contrails. 

Jet engines produce a very large amount of water vapour: more vapour, in fact, than the actual jet fuel combusted.  The large vapour mass is due to all the oxygen that is mixed with the fuel as it is combusted.  What becomes of all this water vapour is highly dependent upon the conditions of the local atmosphere in which it is produced.

If the air is relatively warm and dry then the exhausted vapour dissipates rapidly, without forming a trail that can be observed from the ground.  If the air is cold, the vapour freezes into ice crystals.  These crystals form the long, thin, artificial cloud that we call a contrail.  The conditions in the upper atmosphere determine how quickly such a cloud will linger.

In dry air, the ice crystals can sublimate to vapour, causing the cloud to dissipate in a short amount of time.  In very cold and humid conditions, the crystals can actually accumulate mass by condensing and freezing water vapour out of the air.  Under such conditions, not only will the cloud linger for a very long time, but it will actually grow.  If the wind at that altitude runs perpendicular to the cloud, then the cloud can become spread out, like a cirrus cloud.  Because of all of this, contrails exhibit a wide variation in their dissipation times and ‘spread behavior’.

Proponents of the chemtrail conspiracy also often point to observations where one or more jets have left thick dense trails while at the very same time one or more other jets have left only thin, quickly dissipating trails.  Sometimes, they point out, certain trails become spread out, while other parallel trails do not.  This, of course, is exactly what one might expect if the jets were flying at different altitudes.

The atmosphere can have very tightly delineated layers, and I have experienced this first hand as a skydiver.  I once dove out at 10,000 feet and began a wonderful freefall, only to be pummeled by ice crystals from 7,000 feet down to 4,000 feet, while on the ground the temperature was about 20 Celsius and the skies were perfectly clear.  I know first hand that wind direction at one altitude is not indicative of wind direction at other altitudes, and having to walk three miles with my parachute bunched in my arms after a cross-country jump drilled that lesson into my head clearly.

All of this means that observations of the different traits of concurrent contrails reveal nothing unless those observations include the altitude of each trail and the atmospheric conditions at those respective altitudes.

Even though chemtrail conspiracy theorists may disagree on which contrails they identify as chemtrails, they all seem to be alarmed by the sheer volume of trails in our skies.  This has led to a growing number of people keeping a watchful eye out and it seems like new photos and videos get uploaded everyday by people who are concerned about the sheer number of contrails they are seeing.  They seem to think that this high density of contrails is inconsistent with regular air traffic volume.  Regular air traffic volume, however, is staggering.  According to a 2009 Bureau of Transportation Satistics Report, “In November [2009], U.S. airlines operated 765,100 scheduled domestic and international flights.”  That’s over 25,000 flights through U.S. airspace per day!

With most airline flights departing in daylight, the average number of flights departing during each daytime hour is well over 1000.  Even if fewer than half of this traffic is comprised of large airliners, it is easy to see just why our skies are so littered with contrails.  Although a single jet is unlikely to create a contrail through its entire route, the airspace where contrails are generated will reveal all the jet engines passing through it.  Consider a map of the United States overlaid with just 100 lines to represent airline routes between major cities and it quickly becomes apparent that high densities of contrails should be expected when and where conditions are conducive to contrail formation.

The map above also reveals another aspect about contrails that alarms chemtrail conspiracy theorists.  Many of these theorists believe that when contrails form a grid pattern, or when multiple parallel lines can be seen, that these patterns indicate a plan to get maximum coverage over a targeted area.  It is obvious from the map, though, that grids are readily formed by the multiple route intersections.  Parallel lines are easily explained by pilots on similar routes simply shifting over a mile to avoid the obstructed visibility of flying through another jet’s contrail.  Furthermore, the wide ground dispersal achieved by spraying from an altitude of over 30,000 feet would completely negate any practical benefit of spraying in a grid pattern.

There are people who report observing these high density patterns far from any major airport and cite this phenomenon as proof that that area is being targeted by flights that could serve no purpose other than laying out chemtrails.  As the map indicates, however, you don’t need to be near a major airport to observe such a major intersection of contrails, you only need to be in a location where routes between major airports intersect.

On the contrary, however, one should not expect to observe major contrail intersections in the vicinity of major airports.  All airliners on a route that would intersect with such a location will actually fly around that airspace rather than through it.  The only airliners near an airport are either those that are landing or those that have just taken off, and their trails had better not be crisscrossing or your local air traffic controller is definitely not doing his or her job.  Furthermore, airliners don’t leave contrails when they are landing or taking off because the vapour given off by the exhaust is only perceived as a haze – a cloud on the ground is no cloud at all, it’s called fog.

There may very well be some nefarious group of conspirators conducting a high altitude chemical assault on the United States, but cavalier observations of the various traits of contrails certainly offers no proof of such a conspiracy.  I hope, however, that this little essay can at least quell the concerns of some people who have been alarmed by the growing chemtrail conspiracy panic.

Most of what the average person knows about history consists of a series of very superficial headlines. With each passing decade I find myself less placated by these headlines and more motivated to dig for the ‘real truth’. Each time I do, I find that there is a larger canvas to be viewed, deeper issues to be considered, and a much greater understanding to be gained about the world we live in today. This short article is the result of my investigation into the American Civil War and the expanded view I now have of it.

The very existence of slavery in the United States, a nation founded on principles of equality and liberty, is perplexing to say the least. On the other hand, the founding fathers didn’t extend equality and liberty to women either. In a world embroiled in aggressive economic imperialism and colonial exploitation though, there was simply no precedent for universal equality. Securing such a prize, if only for Caucasian men, was a monumental undertaking in and of itself at the time. 

All of the founding fathers expressed at least some distaste for slavery and most of them found it abhorrent. Ironically though, most of them also owned slaves. As would eventually be proven though, a rapidly emancipated slave population would require a great deal of social adjustment. They likely chose the most stable course of action by first establishing their nation and then trying to end slavery through legislative compromises. Unfortunately they could never have foreseen the calamity this would cause, and how caustic a test it would become for their fledgling nation.

Overtime, slavery was abolished in the northern states but not in the southern states. The reasons for the disparity go far beyond what I am prepared to discuss here, but were initially, to some degree, rooted in the differences between industrial and agricultural economies and would eventually be firmly rooted in these economic differences.

With some states being ‘free states’ and others being ‘slave states’, social tensions began to rise. In particular, there was a collection of legal paradoxes created in a nation where slavery represented a property right in one state and a crime in another. If a slave could run across the border into a free state, did he cease to be property? Would pursuing him and dragging him back be a prosecutable kidnapping? Would assisting him constitute theft, or perhaps destruction of property?

The United States was founded as a confederation of member states that were not only self governing, but also bound to a national congress where they could maintain some homogenous principles. One by one, various legal paradoxes were encountered, and one by one they were answered with less than appeasing compromises. Social tensions grew further and the national congress grew more divided.

One of the greatest catalysts of unrest was western expansion. In the first place, some had to question whether or not western expansion might not represent some form of economic imperialism; an ideology that was very distasteful to those who had fought to escape its grip. Others saw it in the more classical sense of imperial expansion, the virtuous spread of civilization, even manifest destiny. No one seemed interested in consulting with the American Indian population on the matter.

In terms of slavery, western expansion raised the issue of whether or not newly created states would be free states or slave states. For northerners, it seemed logical to contain slavery to the states where it already existed and ensure that all new states would establish free soil worked by free men. Southerners argued that such restrictions were undemocratic and that new states should decide the matter for themselves – democratic sovereignty. At one point it was even suggested that an imaginary line be drawn from east to west, establishing a northern border to slavery.

In the midst of all this turmoil, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin – a device that exponentially increased the volume of raw cotton that could be processed. The huge tracts of land available in the new southern states were suddenly transformed into veritable gold mines that required huge labour inputs. A new economic frenzy of slave trading ensued, creating a stronger drive than ever to expand slavery. To make matters worse, these new and profound labour requirements increased the mistreatment of slaves to levels of depravity never before witnessed.

Slavery came to represent something far more pressing to the average American than moral repugnancy; it came to represent the balance of power. Each new state gained representation in the national congress and it seemed that if free states couldn’t be added as fast as slave states then the captains of slavery would in fact gain control of the nation itself. Even worse, many prominent politicians began to believe that the slave states were using their wealth to influence the bureaucracy of the government itself. Prominent judges were suspected of having southern sympathies. The White House administration was eyed with mistrust. Northern politicians who continued to engage in compromise with the South were called ‘dough faces’.

This subversion of the very system of government itself became known as the Slave Power Conspiracy. Before becoming president himself, Abraham Lincoln openly declared that he felt President James Buchanan and his predecessor Franklin Pierce to part of a plot to nationalize slavery. It was this fear of corruption far more than any concern for the enslaved Negro that ultimately provided the impetus for tearing the country in two and setting it to war against itself.

The civil war succeeded in freeing the slaves but that freedom must have been rather bitter in a nation that was far less than eager to accept them as equals. Perhaps Lincoln would have done more to establish civil rights, but he was assassinated and his successor, Andrew Johnson, vetoed all civil rights bills that crossed his desk. It would take another hundred years to see ground breaking progress on behalf of African American civil rights.

The immediate impact of the civil war, however, was very profound to the shape that the nation would take from then on. The national congress was no longer a place for placating member states with compromises. American federalism was established and there was no turning back. The stage was set for various interest groups to bypass state interests and press their own interests at a federal level. The precedent for infiltrating the bureaucracy had been set, and the example was no doubt an inspiration for a host of future influential institutions.

Although the context for the Civil War cannot be framed without slavery at its center, the factors leading up to it, and the ramifications resulting from it, have far wider reaching implications.