Carl Sagan: A Universe Not Made For Us

We are the custodians of life's meaning. We long for a parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.
~ Carl Sagan

It's been a while since I made a Sagan Sunday post. I discovered this video today and loved it. The world could use more people like Carl Sagan. Happy Sunday.

52,000 Nephite coins discovered in Mexico!

Okay, not really. Today, a friend elsewhere on the Interwebs pulled this exact same April Fool's prank in July. (If you're reading this, I hope you don't mind me stealing it!) He linked to an amazing article about a treasure hunter finding 52,000 Roman coins in Britain and titled the link as if someone had found Nephite coins in Mexico.

The point is that the Romans were in Britain at about the same time the Nephites are alleged to have been in the Americas. Yet while Roman artifacts are constantly unearthed in the UK, we have yet to find any coins, or any other evidence for that matter, of Book of Mormon peoples anywhere.

Frankly, I'm shocked that anyone would assume that we should find any actual archeological evidence of the Nephite and Lamanite civilizations in America, just because we find abundant evidence of ancient Romans everywhere in Britain. Hello...? That was like, totally across the ocean! Think, McFly, think!

Also, Moroni is well-known to have taken Book of Mormon evidence back to heaven in the form of brass plates. Since this is the only action he is known to have taken vis à vis BoM evidence, why would we think he would leave some evidence behind? It doesn't fit with what we know of his character.

Those senines and shiblums and amnor coins were Moroni's wishes, Moroni's dreams. And he took them back. He took them all back.

Chrissy Satterfield's kind of vandals

The Friendly Atheist reports about a billboard that was recently put up along the Billy Graham Parkway by the North Carolina Secular Association. Naturally, it was vandalized within a week. I would expect no less.



Any normal person, regardless of their affiliation, would condemn vandalism and destruction of property, right? Well, apparently not everyone. Chrissy Satterfield of WorldNetDaily thinks the vandals are heroes for sticking it to the atheists. She says,

I would like to extend my deepest thanks to the man or woman responsible for this vandalism. I appreciate the action you took. Thank you for reminding me that I'm not alone. It took a lot of guts to do what you did – and the fact that you haven't stepped forward to take credit makes you a hero.

A hero indeed. Some heroes defend our nation on the front lines of battle, and others defend it with a can of spray paint in the middle of the night. Onward, Christian soldiers.

Chrissy Satterfield also asks, "How is this billboard not offensive to me?" And she's right. I feel really terrible that Chrissy Satterfield, along with countless other Christians in North Carolina, had to be exposed to a quote from the Pledge of Allegiance as it was originally written. This billboard went too far. Atheists have no right to make their presence known on a billboard, especially not on the Fourth of July, and especially not on a street named after Billy Graham. Do they have no respect for our country or its Christian leaders? If atheists want to exercise their freedom of expression with a billboard, they should do it on a back road somewhere where nobody can see it, and they certainly shouldn't imply that they can be patriotic Americans just like religious folks. Talk about wolves in sheep's clothing! In a way, it was every patriotic American's duty to vandalize this billboard, to make sure America stays #1.

There's a bright side, though. In the comments to the Friendly Atheist article, Ryan Tombleson wrote:

I’d hate to be the one to break it to Ms. Satterfield, but the billboard in Charlotte was repaired on the Friday before the holiday. I would also like to thank the man or woman who committed the vandalism. Because of his or her action, the billboard gained national attention and membership of CAA has exploded. We’re on pace to set a record amount of attendees at our next social meeting and will be joined by a local reporter who is covering the group. Because of someone’s ignorance, people who were stuck in the bible belt and unaware of our presence now have a place to meet other link-minded individuals. It’s a beautiful thing.

In a way, it's interesting to me that the vandalized billboard accurately reflects the Pledge of Allegiance itself: "one nation indivisible" with the words "under God" incongruously scrawled by someone who felt the need to inject their personal religion into our secular government. Thanks indeed to the Christian vandals for their clear demonstration of how the words "under God" got there in the first place.

Why America is worth defending

I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

~ The original Pledge of Allegiance

Today's lesson in church was all about how the United States is a choice nation blessed by God himself, how the Constitution was divinely inspired, and how true patriots should love and follow the Lord Jesus Christ. The instructor even got in a dig against all those silly people who want to remove God from the Pledge of Allegiance. "Chill out," I think he said. But seriously, everything that is good about America was flatly asserted to be tied to belief in God, Jesus, and specifically, the Mormon church.

I get a little tired of all the quote-mining and emotional rah-rahing that is supposed to prove that obviously this is a Christian nation and obviously God blesses us only when we believe in him and marginalize those who don't. One lady during testimony time said something like, "The more I read the New Testament, the less I understand how the Jews could reject Jesus. He's so clearly the Messiah!" Um... yes, I suppose one might get that impression by taking the Christian scriptures at face value. I don't think I've ever slapped my forehead so hard during church, and that's saying something.

Normally I tend to keep quiet because I'm not sure I have anything helpful to say, but today I needed to speak up.

I didn't bring up the fact that the Constitution does not mention God, Christ, Jesus, a Creator, or anything like that. I didn't mention that the Treaty of Tripoli, signed by President John Adams in 1797, states explicitly that "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion". I didn't mention that the "under God" clause was only added to the Pledge of the Allegiance in 1954 at the height of McCarthy anti-communist xenophobia.

What I did share is something absolutely dear to me. I said that to me, the heart of patriotism and my love for freedom is embodied by a quote commonly attributed to Voltaire (a French philosopher, I dared to mention). "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." This is the attitude on which is based our freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom of association... all the basic human freedoms America claims to value and ensure.

I said that you cannot go to every country in the world and vocalize your dissatisfaction with your neighbor or your government. In some countries, you will find yourself incarcerated or even executed. I think that perhaps the most fundamental virtue of America is the fact that we have the right to disagree peaceably. I have noticed an escalating polarization, especially in our nation's politics, where we tend to demonize those we disagree with, to call them unpatriotic, not real Americans, or worse. I said that we need to recognize that we are all trying to do what is right and what is best for our country, and it does not help when we refuse to listen to those we disagree with. I expressed hope that we are not taking for granted our individual right to express ourselves, and the corresponding responsibility to hear others' expression.

Okay, that's probably not exactly what I said. But it was pretty much along those lines. My point is that flag-waving means nothing to me. It's too easy and superficial. I don't believe the USA is #1 just because we wave a giant foam finger that says so. I believe that America has fundamental strengths that many of its citizens don't fully appreciate. They are difficult strengths and rare human virtues, the kind that have to be paid for with the blood of patriots. It's not just a matter of repeating a mantra, that America is the "greatest" nation in the world, whatever that means. It's also not a matter of promoting our own religious ideology above all others. It is a matter of honoring the freedoms that our valiant dead have died for, and treasuring the exchange of ideas that our system makes possible. It's a matter of defending our right to disagree, even when it feels more natural to try to squelch the competition by shouting them down. Let's not take that greatness for granted.

Bedtime conversations are the best

Sometimes my five-year old son, Alex, likes to trade beds with his younger brother. He likes to sleep in his brother's car bed and drape blankets over the openings for "privacy". But last night the darkness of the room, exaggerated by the privacy blankets, started to freak him out. He came out of his room and said he felt like there were ghosts in the bed. Frowning, he told me, "Autumn [his older sister] said ghosts aren't real. But sometimes I feel like they're real in here," pointing to his chest.

I said, "That can be scary, huh. Sometimes our feelings tell us one thing but we know it's not really true." I held him for a while and we talked some more. Finally I told him that his mom was baking cookies and that if he went back to bed, I would bring him a cookie when they were ready. I went back with him to his room, and we pulled the privacy blankets off the bed to help him feel less scared.

As he was yanking on an afghan to cover himself with it, I said, "Do you know who made this blanket?"

He said, "Mom."

I said, "Nope, not Mom..."

He guessed, "Grandma?"

I said, "Nope, not even Grandma. It was my grandma. Grandpa Thelen's mom. Her name was Florence, and she was a really nice grandma. I loved her very much, and that's why we named Anita [our baby] after her, with her middle name Florence."

He asked, "Is she still alive?"

I said, "No, she died... probably about fifteen years ago."

Then Alex took the conversation in a direction that I always find a little uncomfortable, because I'm never sure what to say. He said, "My teacher at church said that when you die, then you come back alive."

I said, "That's what some people think, huh. That's what they teach you at church."

And then he asked the salient question I knew was coming. "Is that true?"

I thought about it for a few seconds. I said, "It would sure be nice, wouldn't it? It's a nice idea, and I would really like it to be true. But I just don't know. I think sometimes you just have to say, I don't know, but I hope so."

He said, "I hope so, too."

It was a touching moment for me. I think my son is a lot like me, and he often thinks about these kinds of things. We have conversations about it every so often. Even though I'm never sure exactly what to say, I always love the feeling of helping my kids explore their ideas about this existence we find ourselves in.

Of all the things that one could hope to be true about religion, I think the idea of an afterlife is the one I would actually want to be true. I don't particularly care whether there is a god, or whether Jesus was who Christians think he was, or which church is God's One True Church. I certainly don't care about most of the peculiar doctrines of Christianity or any other religion. But to be able to prolong my own existence, and to spend time with those I love, even after death? Yeah, I could live with that one. It seems extremely unlikely, and I don't have any evidence for it, and I have no good reasons to believe it whatsoever, but I actually do hope that one is true.

Defending genocide in modern religion

Last week I was sitting through a Sunday school lesson about 1 Samuel 15, in which Saul is commanded to slaughter the Amalekites. Men, women, children, and livestock; none were to be left alive, but Saul screwed up. He brought back the king as a prisoner, and he also spared the best sheep and cattle to be sacrificed as burnt offerings. Because Saul failed to kill everyone and everything as he was commanded, the Lord was mightily pissed off.

Somehow the discussion did not center around the question of why our murderous deity would command genocide and then burn with anger when his servants fail to carry it out. Instead, the main thrust of the lesson seemed to be Samuel's words in verse 22:

But Samuel replied:
"Does the LORD delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices
as much as in obeying the voice of the LORD ?
To obey is better than sacrifice,
and to heed is better than the fat of rams."

Ah yes, obedience. I was just thinking it had been at least seven days since I heard a lesson about that.

At some point, someone in the class did raise the question of why Saul had such a problem killing the best few cattle when he apparently had no problem killing every Amalekite man, woman, and child. And eventually, the instructor asked the class why it was necessary to obliterate every living creature in the rival civilization at all.

Various participants came up with a number of rationalizations. The Amalekites were evil and perverted. They worshiped false gods. They wanted to lead the Israelites away from their true religion or covenants or whatever. Someone said that it may have been the same reason God told Nephi to kill Laban in the Book of Mormon. I think someone said that God has his reasons, and that even if we don't understand the reasons, we just need to obey.

I'm sorry, but these ideas are crap. Not only are they pure speculation, but even if it were possible for every single person in a society to be irredeemably evil, that does not justify the murder of children. The Bible is not the only religious book that advocates slaughtering infidels in defense of the faith. We don't tend to think very highly of other religious folks that perpetrate large-scale violence in the name of their god. Why should we seek to justify genocide simply because the religious text is ours?

These kinds of stories are not what the world needs right now. This is a tale of Bronze Age warfare, not an Information Age life lesson. I hate sitting through discussions about how we can learn obedience from Old Testament war stories, and how we can try to apply it to our lives today. Can we just admit that some things in the Bible just do not apply? Can we admit that some things in the Bible are truly fucked up? Can we please admit that if this story is literally true, then God is a sadistic, twisted puppy? No, you can't say that out loud in Sunday school. So I'm saying it here.

Infinity

Infinity is a funny thing. When I was a kid, my mom always used to tell me that she loved me to the moon and back infinity times. Not long ago, it occurred to me that she might as well have said she loved me to the grocery store and back infinity times, or the width of a hair and back infinity times, or to the edge of the galaxy and back infinity times. It's all exactly the same distance. But I guess some infinities sound larger than others.

My kids, especially my 5-year old son, have started using the word infinity to describe everyday things, which almost always produces an amusing mental image in my head. For example, my son will say that he wants a snack and he would like infinity popsicles please, and of course I have to picture the entire known universe filled with popsicles, and then some.

A few days ago, I fixed our Nintendo Wii, which was making a horrible grinding noise, and today it started making the noise again. I told my son that it shouldn't take me very long to fix it again this time, and I should be able to fix it more permanently because I got some practice last time. He said he hoped I wouldn't be fixing the Wii for infinity days... or worse, infinity years.

Of course, infinity years is not at all worse than infinity days. I asked him, "Do you know when you could use the Wii if I had to fix it for infinity days?" He said he didn't know, and I said, "Never!" And I said the same for infinity years. Then I reassured him that it probably wouldn't take anywhere close to that. Then again, whether it takes me one hour or three days, either possibility is equally close to infinity years, which is to say, nowhere close.

My kids also don't tend to use a million or a billion to stand in for a very large number. They usually say a googol. The other day I was remarking to my wife that a googol is probably much larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe, and she wasn't convinced. I did a back of the envelope estimate and came up with about 10^80 atoms in the universe, which by sheer dumb luck turns out to be very close to the actual best estimate we have. And a googol is 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 times larger than that.

So ten times the observable universe is still nowhere close to a googol atoms. One billion observable universes is still about 100,000,000,000 times less. You have to take one hundred billion billion observable universes to get about one googol atoms. And that is equally distant from infinity as the number of atoms in my pinky fingernail. Infinity is a funny thing.