Now don't panic. But somewhere, deep in the galaxy, a huge demolition ball of gas and dust is racing straight towards us.
It's so dark you can't see it, but it's there all the same. What's worse: when it visits our solar system, it will create havoc and destruction on Earth.
'Nemesis', is the ominous name scientists came up with when they began speculating about the sinister space body in 1984.
They couldn't have picked a better name: if Nemesis really exists, it should be one of the worst enemies of life on earth. Our solar system is what Nemesis calls `home'.
And the bad part is: home is where Nemesis is heading.
What is Nemesis? It's nothing less than our Sun's twin brother. Yes, that's right: a second Sun! In the cosmos, many stars come in pairs. And according to the Nemesis theory, our `star' -- the Sun -- is no exception.
But wait -- why then do we see only one Sun? Well, for one thing, Nemesis is REALLY far away at the moment. Nemesis orbits the Sun in a huge ellipse, with its furthest point a distance of three light years away.
But once every 25 to 30 million years, Nemesis closes in on the Sun. It slams into the outer regions of our solar system: a place called the Oort Cloud, at a distance of about half a light year away from the Sun.
And that would mean trouble for us tiny earthlings.
The gravitational pull of Sun #2 would cause mayhem in the belt of cosmic debris that makes up the Oort Cloud. Comets and meteorites would fling off in all directions, at unimaginable speeds. For many thousands of years, our solar system -- including Earth -- will be bombarded with comets.
And we all know what happens to terrestrial life when someone starts gunning our planet with colossal pieces of space rock.
Well, if Nemesis really is a star, we'll surely see it coming, right?
Wrong. In fact, the Sun we're talking about here doesn't shine at all. Nemesis is what is known as a brown dwarf, a dark ball of matter that has never `lit up' to become a Sun.
But don't underestimate it: Nemesis is still as big as several Jupiters, enough to dwarf the Earth many, many times (Jupiter is 11 times the diameter of the Earth, and 1,300 times its volume. This is like comparing a basketball to a ping pong ball. Jupiter's Big Red Spot, remember that? You would be able to fit 2 whole Earths inside that, that is how big Jupiter is and Nemesis dwarfs Jupiter, the biggest planet in our solar system... Scary huh?)
Back on topic though, interestingly, the Nemesis theory wasn't proposed by astronomers -- but by palaeontologists studying our planet's prehistoric past.
Oh yes, we all know the dinosaurs were smoked by a huge piece of space debris the size of San Francisco slamming into our planet some 65 million years ago.
But there's more. Around 35 million years ago, another meteoric bombardment hit our planet. Not to mention the cataclysmic, yet unexplained events that led to the extinction of almost all life on Earth 251 million years ago.
In fact, the path of evolution is littered with mass extinctions.
In 1984 it suddenly dawned on two University of Chicago palaeontologists, David Raup and John Sepkoski, that these extinctions actually show a certain pattern.
Raup and Sepkoski had put together a detailed list of sea life that had become extinct during the past 250 million years, containing more than 3,500 different species.
And there it was: according to the lists, our planet faces a period of death and destruction every 26 to 30 million years.
In the years that followed, scientists from all over the world speculated on the cause of this bizarre extinction pattern.
Did the gravitational pull of huge planets like Jupiter and Saturn have something to do with it? Or was there a mysterious 'Planet X' somewhere out there, orbiting our solar system and paying us a visit every 26 to 30 million years?
Then, in the mother of all science magazines Nature, two groups of researchers independently of each other came up with the twin Sun-idea. It was 1984, and the Nemesis hypothesis was born.
Although a lot of astronomers at first thought the Nemesis idea was a joke, the hypothesis also attracted the attention of a considerable number of respected scholars.
One group of researchers, led by the Louisiana-based astrophysicist Daniel Whitmore, even claimed Nemesis might be a black hole, a super-dense dead sun that eats all matter and light it encounters.
Meanwhile, Walter Alvarez -- the guy who came up with the dinosaur extinction theory -- studied a number of impact craters on earth.
His conclusion: indeed, once every 26 to 30 million years, something starts throwing an awful lot of rocks at our planet. Other researchers -- among whom the `inventor' of Nemesis Muller himself -- studied the age of impact craters on the moon, and reached similar conclusions.
So, is Nemesis for real? In spite of all the evidence, most astronomers don't think so.
For one thing, Nemesis has never been spotted. Okay, it's dark and relatively small. But still, we should have noticed something, studying the motion of the Sun.
If something really orbits the Sun, it tugs a little at the Sun, no matter how far away it is. And no one has ever noticed any unexplained wobbling of the star we call Sun.
Besides, the `extinction periods' themselves are heavily disputed.
The fossil record dates back about four billion years and is scattered with mass extinctions. On the whole, there's just no real time pattern there.
Still, in the beginning of 2000 the Nemesis theory quite unexpectedly gained some new ground, when a team of distinguished US astronomers of Berkeley and Princeton calculated that Nemesis, if it exists, indeed should be a brown dwarf.
Meanwhile, John Matese of the University of Louisiana studied the orbits of 82 comets in the Oort Cloud. According to Matese, their orbits had some elements in common that could only be explained if the comets had been influenced by the gravitational pull of an object several times the size of Jupiter.
So don't write off Nemesis yet.
The case on the Sun's evil brother still isn't closed. Luckily, we have plenty of time to learn more about it.
The Death Star is due to arrive a royal thirteen million years from now.
Sunday, 21 August 2011
Tuesday, 16 August 2011
Haha
I actually just heard a motorbike that sounded like a wet beer fart. It was funny. Worrying, but funny.
Sunday, 14 August 2011
Why extra-terrestrial life is a LARGE possibility.
NASA's Kepler probe has found 54 planets in the constellation Cygnus that have a "Goldilocks" relationship to their suns—not too hot, not too cold, but just right to have water and other attributes that support life as we know it on Earth.
With so many possibly Earth-like planets in one small part of space, you naturally have to wonder: Are there alien life forms all over the galaxy?
And, if so, are they coming to help, enslave, exterminate, domesticate, experiment upon and/or shag us? Kepler's find is strong evidence that the answer to question 1 is "yes."
If planets in a position like ours aren't rare, then they must be subject to the Copernican principle. Also known, less appealingly, as the principle of mediocrity, this maxim states that when anyone observes anything, his point of view is going to be ordinary.
Reading this, for example, you are highly unlikely to be in the Marianas Trench or at the top of Everest. No offence, but you're probably in some pretty average place.
This point, that “your location is not special,” as J. Richard Gott, the Princeton astrophysicist, has put it, applies to more than just place.
Think of the averageness of your spot as a metaphor for the rest of the situation. Your eyes are likely to be average eyes, and your mind likely to be neither especially dumb nor especially bright, and so on.
Despite what your hunches tell you about the specialness of your point of view, intuition is very probably wrong. “Of all the places for intelligent observers to be,” Gott said, “there are by definition only a few special places and many non-special places. So you're simply more likely to be in one of the many non-special places.”
The principle of mediocrity appears more profound, and more subtle, than earlier generations thought. (Maybe we should call it Deep Mediocrity.)
Even people who think they understand, who have fortified themselves with Copernican insights against self-deception, can nonetheless be misled by the insidious notion of human specialness.
Take, for example, the search for signs of non-human civilizations. For decades, humanity has been listening for alien transmissions, and sending out the occasional shout-out, too.
The Pioneer space probes of the early 1970’s bore gold-coated plaques with drawings and charts, designed by Carl Sagan, he of the “billions and billions of stars,” who was the public face of this search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), and its most influential lobbyist.
The later Voyager probes each carried a gold-coated copper disk that encoded photos, music, people saying hello in 54 languages, and greetings from Jimmy Carter and Kurt Waldheim (then the U.N. Secretary General).
Its aluminium cover contained a schematic for playing the record with the cartridge and stylus packed nearby. In 1997 the Cassini probe to Titan was launched with a digital disk made of diamond.
SETI was a proud product of the Copernican principle. Indeed, it was a leap of Copernican faith: At the time that Sagan and his fellow enthusiasts were lobbying for SETI, it was not known for certain that stars other than the Sun even had planets, much less life, much less intelligent life.
Yet SETI has failed for decades. Exactly nothing has turned up. A likely reason: the project was designed with the idea that the only way to have a life-supporting planet, and to be a life form, and to be intelligent, and to have a civilization, was to be like an Earthling.
One of SETI’s advocates, Frank Drake, said to expect aliens who looked like your neighbours at twilight: “They won't be too much different from us,” he said, predicting that many aliens would “have such an anatomy that if you saw them from a distance of a hundred yards in the twilight you might think they were human.”
So even as the SETI advocates claimed to be loyal to the Copernican principle, at a deeper level, they violated it. They liked to point out that there was nothing special about the earth, and about humanity.
But they would not concede that there is nothing special about our intelligence, our science or our technology. Rather, they assumed that what human beings are, and what we know—our biology, our math, our science, our technology—must be so apt, so special in its relationship to reality, that an alien intelligence could surely grasp it.
The strangeness of that is illustrated by the Voyager message: Humanity packed its information onto a long-playing record, complete with stereo instructions.
1974’s supposedly universal code, made to be readable for billions of years by minds that evolved under other suns, would probably stump a 16-year-old with an iPod, right here on earth.
So the principle of mediocrity suggests that ours is an average planet, with an average history. That means there should be other planets with similar histories out there, including a history of life.
But if we assume that we're uniquely fit, in 2011, to communicate with other life forms, than we violate the Copernican principle in time even as we honour it in space. Isn't it more likely that life on other planets died out long ago, or is just getting going, or isn't recognizable to us at all? To hope for any other outcome is to hope for a most un-Copernican coincidence.
With so many possibly Earth-like planets in one small part of space, you naturally have to wonder: Are there alien life forms all over the galaxy?
And, if so, are they coming to help, enslave, exterminate, domesticate, experiment upon and/or shag us? Kepler's find is strong evidence that the answer to question 1 is "yes."
If planets in a position like ours aren't rare, then they must be subject to the Copernican principle. Also known, less appealingly, as the principle of mediocrity, this maxim states that when anyone observes anything, his point of view is going to be ordinary.
Reading this, for example, you are highly unlikely to be in the Marianas Trench or at the top of Everest. No offence, but you're probably in some pretty average place.
This point, that “your location is not special,” as J. Richard Gott, the Princeton astrophysicist, has put it, applies to more than just place.
Think of the averageness of your spot as a metaphor for the rest of the situation. Your eyes are likely to be average eyes, and your mind likely to be neither especially dumb nor especially bright, and so on.
Despite what your hunches tell you about the specialness of your point of view, intuition is very probably wrong. “Of all the places for intelligent observers to be,” Gott said, “there are by definition only a few special places and many non-special places. So you're simply more likely to be in one of the many non-special places.”
The principle of mediocrity appears more profound, and more subtle, than earlier generations thought. (Maybe we should call it Deep Mediocrity.)
Even people who think they understand, who have fortified themselves with Copernican insights against self-deception, can nonetheless be misled by the insidious notion of human specialness.
Take, for example, the search for signs of non-human civilizations. For decades, humanity has been listening for alien transmissions, and sending out the occasional shout-out, too.
The Pioneer space probes of the early 1970’s bore gold-coated plaques with drawings and charts, designed by Carl Sagan, he of the “billions and billions of stars,” who was the public face of this search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), and its most influential lobbyist.
The later Voyager probes each carried a gold-coated copper disk that encoded photos, music, people saying hello in 54 languages, and greetings from Jimmy Carter and Kurt Waldheim (then the U.N. Secretary General).
Its aluminium cover contained a schematic for playing the record with the cartridge and stylus packed nearby. In 1997 the Cassini probe to Titan was launched with a digital disk made of diamond.
SETI was a proud product of the Copernican principle. Indeed, it was a leap of Copernican faith: At the time that Sagan and his fellow enthusiasts were lobbying for SETI, it was not known for certain that stars other than the Sun even had planets, much less life, much less intelligent life.
Yet SETI has failed for decades. Exactly nothing has turned up. A likely reason: the project was designed with the idea that the only way to have a life-supporting planet, and to be a life form, and to be intelligent, and to have a civilization, was to be like an Earthling.
One of SETI’s advocates, Frank Drake, said to expect aliens who looked like your neighbours at twilight: “They won't be too much different from us,” he said, predicting that many aliens would “have such an anatomy that if you saw them from a distance of a hundred yards in the twilight you might think they were human.”
So even as the SETI advocates claimed to be loyal to the Copernican principle, at a deeper level, they violated it. They liked to point out that there was nothing special about the earth, and about humanity.
But they would not concede that there is nothing special about our intelligence, our science or our technology. Rather, they assumed that what human beings are, and what we know—our biology, our math, our science, our technology—must be so apt, so special in its relationship to reality, that an alien intelligence could surely grasp it.
The strangeness of that is illustrated by the Voyager message: Humanity packed its information onto a long-playing record, complete with stereo instructions.
1974’s supposedly universal code, made to be readable for billions of years by minds that evolved under other suns, would probably stump a 16-year-old with an iPod, right here on earth.
So the principle of mediocrity suggests that ours is an average planet, with an average history. That means there should be other planets with similar histories out there, including a history of life.
But if we assume that we're uniquely fit, in 2011, to communicate with other life forms, than we violate the Copernican principle in time even as we honour it in space. Isn't it more likely that life on other planets died out long ago, or is just getting going, or isn't recognizable to us at all? To hope for any other outcome is to hope for a most un-Copernican coincidence.
Sunday, 7 August 2011
Religion is bullshit.
Another guest post by my good friend Serra Beaumont. I was supposed to be working on a big post and it kind of fell apart, so now I can' be bothered and shall be resuming my normal bullshit next week.
So now I'll leave you in the capable hands of Serra.
Religion is bullshit.
There, I said it.
If you believe in an afterlife or an intelligent being who's actively interested in human affairs, you're not only (likely) remarkably wrong, but I simply don't think you've done enough thinking on the matter.
Religious people can respond to rational criticism in one of 3 ways: by asserting that their religion is true, by asserting that religion has utility outside of its truth (it's useful to society) or by asserting that being irreligious is associated with moral depravity and other undesirable outcomes.
This last claim is the most easily refuted by simply looking at the world. The most atheistic countries on Earth (such as Norway) rank higher than more religious ones in nearly every measure of human well-being, from literacy and employment rates to life expectancy and GDP per capita. Even among US states, the most religious tend to have higher rates of crime and lower literacy and education rates.
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but these facts make it clear that societies aren't crumbling because their citizens are becoming too rational.
Why Be Such A Bitch About It? What did religion ever do to you?
There are really only two things wrong with religion: it isn't true, and it's evil.
The fact that it isn't true doesn't offend me that much: people believe in dumb bullshit all of the time without a good reason.
Even still, it's disheartening to meet otherwise well-educated, respectable people who actually believe in 40-day worldwide floods, human resurrection, and talking snakes.
Now, people have the right to believe whatever the hell they want to believe. I'm not against that: it's a basic human right.
What I'm against is people's personal, bullshit metaphysics influencing the real world. See, I think that religiously oppressed homosexuals, victims of terrorism (including 9/11), millions in Africa dying of AIDS, millions more who will die from illnesses treatable with stem cells, and every brainwashed child deserves an apology.
H.L. Mencken said, “We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”
Religious people shouldn't get tax-exempt organisations, appallingly free reign to molest children, and disproportionate government representation.
Their ideas also shouldn't be beyond criticism. Nothing should. More on all of this some other time.
For now, let's just say that humanity is right to value truth and we're right to criticise bad ideas. If someone states that they think Elvis is still alive, they're laughed out of a room, but if that same person draws a cartoon depicting a 1400 year-old prophet, most first world countries find it acceptable that he receives a litany of death threats.
Are we really, as a society, OK with this? You wouldn't make it 10 seconds in politics (or anywhere but an asylum) saying that you believed in Thor and convened with him regularly, but if you don't say the same thing about a less-creatively named god, you are immediately precluded from standing any chance whatsoever of holding any political office in most of North America (which we all know is one of the most religious countries in the world).
Clearly, something has gotta give.
God Isn't Real
The arguments (and anger) presented above only really matter if gods don't exist. If there is indeed a supernatural being, then maybe these religious people have it right and I'm just the worlds most misguided arsehole. Wait though... which religious people?
As Bertrand Russel said, even if the sky opened up right now and a voice boomed simultaneously into every human mind saying “I am the one true deity!” followed by a bitching light-show, every theist should STILL expect to be wrong, simply on probability.
See, there are a lot of religions out there. And, as much as multicultural, tolerant society would have you believe, they're not mutually compatible.
See, either God is real or he isn't. Either Jesus was his son, or he wasn't. Either Mohammed was the true prophet or he wasn't.
There is simply no possible way for everyone to be right. Miracles and creation stories lose a lot of panache when you realise that they're ten to the dozen and are available from literally thousands of retailers.
Prove It!
Also, it isn't my duty to prove that God doesn't exist. Proving a negative is nearly impossible, and there is a world of difference between claiming that “there's a poorly-defined creator of the big bang” and claiming that “God exists, he made the Earth 6000 years ago, he wrote a book, he had a son, he doesn't like gays, he runs the afterlife, and he's coming back any day now to judge us all.”
Most of these other claims (and many many other ones that certain religious people will offer) CAN be disproved.
We know that the Earth is billions of years old through a huge battery of independently-verifiable testing methods.
We have no reason to believe in an afterlife because such a belief would force us to revise EVERYTHING we know about biology, chemistry, and physics.
We'd need to throw out the books on countless theories that have provided us with testable, repeatable, and useful models that describe the natural world to a startling degree of precision.
Think about it like this: name me any phenomenon in the whole fucking universe that has ever been fully understood. Guess what? It works without any supernatural hand-waving. And just because we don't have the answer to every question doesn't mean that god wins by default.
Right now, god is simply a receding sphere of scientific ignorance. Before people understood micro-organisms, they thought that illness was caused by spirits.
Before people understood the cosmos, they thought that the Earth was the flat centre of the universe. Right now, people don't understand the origin of the first self-replicating molecule, so they think that god did that.
See the problem? A real explanation is out there, and we're not going to get any closer by sitting back and saying “praise the lord.” God has NEVER been the answer to any rational question we've ever asked. Why do we think that the current crop of mysteries are any different?
Unfortunately, whenever you bring up science in a discussion with religious people, they say that “God works in mysterious ways” and that he can't be measured.
Let me get this straight: God exists, but he doesn't do anything that can be measured. Does he or does he not heal people? That can be measured. It seems that god's kind of an arsehole to amputees though, and only chooses to heal afflictions that can also undergo spontaneous remission without him.
He never seems to perform miracles that break the existing laws of physics or probability. If you believe in god, you need to answer this question: what's the difference between the universe we live in, and a hypothetical universe where there is no god? If there is a difference, then it must be measurable. If there isn't a difference, then why do you believe in god?
Reject Religion
Question your beliefs. To pick on Christianity (again), here is what you need to reject to think that it is bullshit.
You don't need to disprove the existence of souls. You don't need to be able to answer every corner-case question in quantum physics. You need to reject the literal truth of the Bible, a 2000 year-old text written in the pre-scientific Roman empire by non-contemporaneous authors, edited and interpolated over the centuries by countless flawed humans and filled with miracles either so unbelievable that they are humorous or so uninteresting and trite that they couldn't fill an hour on TLC.
If this is offensive, it's because I'm offended.
If you are reading this post, it is literally impossible for you to have ever even met someone with as ignorant a world-view as the founding figures of major modern religions.
If we want to build a global culture free of needless violence, oppression, molestation, misogyny, homophobia, genocide, and suffering, then we need to start thinking rationally, we need to start criticising bad ideas,and we need to close the curtains on religion forever.
As Sam Harris notes, it can be done quickly and easily. Look at how fast attitudes have changed about racism, homosexuality, and women's rights in the past 50 years.
All we need to do is start asking questions and not letting faith scam a free ride on the logic train. I think that humanity is better than this. I know that we can overcome this embarrassingly persistent mental affliction.
The universe is much more marvellous when seen for what it really is. So open your eyes.
So now I'll leave you in the capable hands of Serra.
Religion is bullshit.
There, I said it.
If you believe in an afterlife or an intelligent being who's actively interested in human affairs, you're not only (likely) remarkably wrong, but I simply don't think you've done enough thinking on the matter.
Religious people can respond to rational criticism in one of 3 ways: by asserting that their religion is true, by asserting that religion has utility outside of its truth (it's useful to society) or by asserting that being irreligious is associated with moral depravity and other undesirable outcomes.
This last claim is the most easily refuted by simply looking at the world. The most atheistic countries on Earth (such as Norway) rank higher than more religious ones in nearly every measure of human well-being, from literacy and employment rates to life expectancy and GDP per capita. Even among US states, the most religious tend to have higher rates of crime and lower literacy and education rates.
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but these facts make it clear that societies aren't crumbling because their citizens are becoming too rational.
Why Be Such A Bitch About It? What did religion ever do to you?
There are really only two things wrong with religion: it isn't true, and it's evil.
The fact that it isn't true doesn't offend me that much: people believe in dumb bullshit all of the time without a good reason.
Even still, it's disheartening to meet otherwise well-educated, respectable people who actually believe in 40-day worldwide floods, human resurrection, and talking snakes.
Now, people have the right to believe whatever the hell they want to believe. I'm not against that: it's a basic human right.
What I'm against is people's personal, bullshit metaphysics influencing the real world. See, I think that religiously oppressed homosexuals, victims of terrorism (including 9/11), millions in Africa dying of AIDS, millions more who will die from illnesses treatable with stem cells, and every brainwashed child deserves an apology.
H.L. Mencken said, “We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”
Religious people shouldn't get tax-exempt organisations, appallingly free reign to molest children, and disproportionate government representation.
Their ideas also shouldn't be beyond criticism. Nothing should. More on all of this some other time.
For now, let's just say that humanity is right to value truth and we're right to criticise bad ideas. If someone states that they think Elvis is still alive, they're laughed out of a room, but if that same person draws a cartoon depicting a 1400 year-old prophet, most first world countries find it acceptable that he receives a litany of death threats.
Are we really, as a society, OK with this? You wouldn't make it 10 seconds in politics (or anywhere but an asylum) saying that you believed in Thor and convened with him regularly, but if you don't say the same thing about a less-creatively named god, you are immediately precluded from standing any chance whatsoever of holding any political office in most of North America (which we all know is one of the most religious countries in the world).
Clearly, something has gotta give.
God Isn't Real
The arguments (and anger) presented above only really matter if gods don't exist. If there is indeed a supernatural being, then maybe these religious people have it right and I'm just the worlds most misguided arsehole. Wait though... which religious people?
As Bertrand Russel said, even if the sky opened up right now and a voice boomed simultaneously into every human mind saying “I am the one true deity!” followed by a bitching light-show, every theist should STILL expect to be wrong, simply on probability.
See, there are a lot of religions out there. And, as much as multicultural, tolerant society would have you believe, they're not mutually compatible.
See, either God is real or he isn't. Either Jesus was his son, or he wasn't. Either Mohammed was the true prophet or he wasn't.
There is simply no possible way for everyone to be right. Miracles and creation stories lose a lot of panache when you realise that they're ten to the dozen and are available from literally thousands of retailers.
Prove It!
Also, it isn't my duty to prove that God doesn't exist. Proving a negative is nearly impossible, and there is a world of difference between claiming that “there's a poorly-defined creator of the big bang” and claiming that “God exists, he made the Earth 6000 years ago, he wrote a book, he had a son, he doesn't like gays, he runs the afterlife, and he's coming back any day now to judge us all.”
Most of these other claims (and many many other ones that certain religious people will offer) CAN be disproved.
We know that the Earth is billions of years old through a huge battery of independently-verifiable testing methods.
We have no reason to believe in an afterlife because such a belief would force us to revise EVERYTHING we know about biology, chemistry, and physics.
We'd need to throw out the books on countless theories that have provided us with testable, repeatable, and useful models that describe the natural world to a startling degree of precision.
Think about it like this: name me any phenomenon in the whole fucking universe that has ever been fully understood. Guess what? It works without any supernatural hand-waving. And just because we don't have the answer to every question doesn't mean that god wins by default.
Right now, god is simply a receding sphere of scientific ignorance. Before people understood micro-organisms, they thought that illness was caused by spirits.
Before people understood the cosmos, they thought that the Earth was the flat centre of the universe. Right now, people don't understand the origin of the first self-replicating molecule, so they think that god did that.
See the problem? A real explanation is out there, and we're not going to get any closer by sitting back and saying “praise the lord.” God has NEVER been the answer to any rational question we've ever asked. Why do we think that the current crop of mysteries are any different?
Unfortunately, whenever you bring up science in a discussion with religious people, they say that “God works in mysterious ways” and that he can't be measured.
Let me get this straight: God exists, but he doesn't do anything that can be measured. Does he or does he not heal people? That can be measured. It seems that god's kind of an arsehole to amputees though, and only chooses to heal afflictions that can also undergo spontaneous remission without him.
He never seems to perform miracles that break the existing laws of physics or probability. If you believe in god, you need to answer this question: what's the difference between the universe we live in, and a hypothetical universe where there is no god? If there is a difference, then it must be measurable. If there isn't a difference, then why do you believe in god?
Reject Religion
Question your beliefs. To pick on Christianity (again), here is what you need to reject to think that it is bullshit.
You don't need to disprove the existence of souls. You don't need to be able to answer every corner-case question in quantum physics. You need to reject the literal truth of the Bible, a 2000 year-old text written in the pre-scientific Roman empire by non-contemporaneous authors, edited and interpolated over the centuries by countless flawed humans and filled with miracles either so unbelievable that they are humorous or so uninteresting and trite that they couldn't fill an hour on TLC.
If this is offensive, it's because I'm offended.
If you are reading this post, it is literally impossible for you to have ever even met someone with as ignorant a world-view as the founding figures of major modern religions.
If we want to build a global culture free of needless violence, oppression, molestation, misogyny, homophobia, genocide, and suffering, then we need to start thinking rationally, we need to start criticising bad ideas,and we need to close the curtains on religion forever.
As Sam Harris notes, it can be done quickly and easily. Look at how fast attitudes have changed about racism, homosexuality, and women's rights in the past 50 years.
All we need to do is start asking questions and not letting faith scam a free ride on the logic train. I think that humanity is better than this. I know that we can overcome this embarrassingly persistent mental affliction.
The universe is much more marvellous when seen for what it really is. So open your eyes.
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