Monthly Archives: July 2008

I met a pentecostal…

Atheism, Personal, Religion, School, UofA Atheists and Agnostics

Today I met with Matthew Glombick, the Pentecostal chaplain at the University of Alberta.

He’s a nice guy, very much in the feel-good christian framework.  He was very curious and seemed reasonably intelligent.  He is ratifying a student group for pentecostals, EPIC, that is more of a “church community,” as part of the church planting campaign the pentecostals in Edmonton (and everywhere) are pushing.

He asked about what meaning in life there is in atheism, where morals/ethics come from, are there objective morals without god, etc.  He also thought that since most people (ever) have believed in something supernatural (and that’s counter-intuitive to the simplest assumptions we should make), that that gives credence to the supernatural.

What is clear to me is that in the next year the UAAA will have to do a lot more work talking about the common misconceptions surrounding atheism.

Herbs are drugs too

Links, Politics, Science

On Boxing Day (Dec. 26th), 2006, a trucker hit a snowbank, rolled his truck and died (he wasn’t wearing his sealtbelt).  It turns out that the driver had been taking a herbal sleep aid that had been pulled from shelves in Canada weeks earlier, but he managed to acquire it from an acupuncture shop which kept selling the drug “natural health product” for several more months.

The “remedy” contained a dangerous drug which wasn’t labelled on the bottle.

Herbs can be just as dangerous as pharmaceutical drugs.  There’s been enough outright lying on behalf of these swindlers and pushers.

Luckily the article finishes with an update about what Health Canada has in store (unfortunately not until 2010):

As a result, all natural health products in Canada will be licensed by 2010.

According to Health Canada, businesses will have to submit detailed information in order to obtain a licence, including a list of medicinal ingredients, source, potency, non-medicinal ingredients and recommended use.

After approval, the product will bear an eight-digit product licence number preceded by the letters NPN or, for homeopathic medicines, DIN-HM. The system is similar to the current licensing system, which uses a drug identification number, or DIN.

The presence of a DIN, NPN or DIN-HM means the product has been authorized for sale in Canada and is safe and effective when used in accordance with the instructions on the label.

My only question is which homeopathic medicines are effective?

An important document

Politics

This December (10th to be exact) we, as a world, can celebrate the 60th anniversary of the adoption by the United Nations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

And celebrate we should.

Although most people haven’t read the document (I assume, since I hadn’t until earlier today), it is the document translated into the most languages in the world, surpassing the Bible (to my surprise).  Essentially it should be adopted and followed by every member of the United Nations (192 countries).

So what does it say?

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211th post and updates

Site

I missed doing a 200th, 201st or even 202nd post review (in homage to my 101st post review). This is now my 211th post, and I have created two new lists:

  • My Bookshelf, a list of books I’ve read (with links to any posts I have on those books), and plan to read.
  • My Top Posts, a random assortment of what I consider the cream of my blog.

So enjoy, I will also periodically add to those pages as things change, and you can suggest readings or top posts in the comments for those pages.

One final noteworthy changes is that in the last 111 posts I changed themes and created a new title banner.

No defense for Onfray

Atheism, Books

I am giving up attempting to get through Michael Onfray’s “In Defense of Atheism.” He started off strong, and often sounds very bitter and spiteful toward religion, however there isn’t much more to him than arguments you could find elsewhere (and stated more enjoyable and eloquently).

I liked his review of materialistic and atheistic philosophers through the ages and the often repressed view that needed to be said, but beyond that I found little to keep reading for (FYI I quit after just entering the section on Christianity which made quite a few major accusations with no referential backings).

There are much better books out there discussing atheistic philosophy, look for them.

It also doesn’t help that I have Austin Dacey’s The Secular Conscience and C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity on my shelf (the former I look forward to reading, but the latter I will read in its entirety).

Ottawa Skeptics gets it close

Links, Science

Jonathan Abrams and the Ottawa Skeptics do good work.  They are on the front lines of the battle over Bill C-51 which hopes to better regulate “natural health products” (aka wacky untested vitamins) and provide a lot of rationality in our nations capital.  They don’t touch religion (as many skeptics groups won’t), and that’s there perogative.

Their website posts a lot of good articles on skepticism, including full references, however I have to rebut a bit of the latest one on Quantum Mechanics.  Overall the article gets the right idea and right point but I think one paragraph is mistaken:

Quantum mechanics is weird.  Countless precise experiments have shown results that defy our everyday experience.  Applying QM to the real world essentially says if I were to throw a rock at you, there is a chance it will hit you.  There is also a chance it will pass right through you unaltered, and there is a chance it will land on the moon.  It also suggests that another rock somewhere could be “entangled” with the one I have and will do the same thing instantaneously.  These oddball phenomena lend themselves very well to the suggestion that, since everything is made of atomic material, instantaneous action at a distance works.  How does it work?  Via an invisible life force that flows through us and connects us all. QM itself does not draw any boundary line between the level of scale where it’s strangeness is revealed, and the level of scale of the world we live in. [Emphasis added]

Perhaps it’s my personal bias, but the phrase “invisible life force” just credits woo authors too much.  QM is a mathematical approximation (which works amazingly well) that describes wavefunctions (which are related to the probability of particles being in certain locations or having certain velocities) of particles.  Two particles can be “entangled” meaning part of their wavefunction is dependant on another particle.

However, none of this is alive, none of this involves a force, and nothing is flowing.  Not in the traditional (Newtonian) sense of the words, not in the woo sense of the words and not in any other modern sense of the words.

Finally, in general there is a scale difference between the “quantum world” and the “macro world.”  Every particle has a de Broglie wavelength.  This number relates its momentum (or mass times velocity) to an energy and then to a length that it will interact quantum mechanically.  If a particle is trapped in a box of the size of its deBroglie wavelength, it tends to exhibit “weird” quantum effects (like the ability to only exist in discrete energy states, or tunnelling energy barriers).  The boundary is not firm, but neither is the boundary for baldness.

So kudos to the Ottawa Skeptics for their (generally) good work.

Right wing nuts

Politics

The Conservatives like to pride themselves on being economically conservative, yet they run a $517 million deficit over two months that they made a $2.78 billion surplus last year. It seems likely to many reporters that the Conservatives will likely produce a huge surplus right before any elections though, contrary to their promises.

Sad day

Religion

In case you haven’t heard, a [insert derogatory adjective] man walked into a Unitarian Universalist (essentially the least Christian of the Christian churchs, very often agnostics/deists/humanists) with a shotgun and killed two people while childern were performing.

The church holds no blame in this atrocity (I hope this is obvious), and the members should be commended for tackling the man before more damage could be done.

CFI Day Four or Getting home

Atheism, CFI, Personal

So Sunday consisted of trying to get through the day on two hours sleep (after getting to bed at 6 am the night before). The early talks were okay, and there was an alright discussion, which threatened to break into an argument about feminism and affirmative action (to encourage women to be more active), but D.J. Grothe stopped it in time.

The best talk was easily Austin Dacey’s (CFI’s representative to the UN). He may have even been the best of the conference. I got a signed copy of his book. His topic was getting the left’s conscience back and standing up for freedoms in our society today.

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