Reading Time: 4minutes“Simplifying important but complex messages can be a necessary and valuable approach for increasing the reach of those messages. But when simplification renders the message inaccurate, the mission is harmed.” —Dr. Heather E. Heying While I was on a quick, 24-mile hike with an acquaintance, she commented that I would talk about things which “made no sense.” While they made plenty of sense to me, and I was conveying correct…
Reading Time: 6minutes“There is a delight in the hardy life of the open. There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy and its charm. The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased and not impaired in value. Conservation means development as much as it does protection.”…
Reading Time: 4minutesTruth and morality tend to be tied together; without truth, there tends to be no morality, at least so far as anyone can elucidate as being objectively codifiable. One benefit of backpacking, at least for me, is that I can listen to a variety of bright folks (well, Dr. Jordan Peterson would probably contend that I’m listening to a variety of people with PhDs, among whom some are bright) talking…
Reading Time: 4minutesSuicide among young folks in America has been on the rise. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently found that from 2007 to 2017, the rate of Americans ages 10 to 24 who died by suicide rose by 56 percent, from 6.8 deaths per 100,000 persons to 10.6. (For all ages, see their overview here.) Why is this? What causes a person in a first-world country to kill themselves?…
Reading Time: 4minutes“There is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference…We are machines for propagating DNA…It is every living object’s sole reason for being.” Dr. Richard Dawkins, a famous biologist said that, and on atheism, it seems to me that while it’s sad, it’s also true. One weird aspect that atheism commits one to is the denial of design—design of any sort, not just of…
Reading Time: 14minutesThis post covers a wide range of important topics. It details discussions that I had with a man who was once my commander. Enjoy. Introduction: They Called Us Nerds, Gary. Nerds. Every so often, a fellow nerd pops up and wants to discuss science and philosophy with me and my heavens am I thirsty for such discussion. Once, a former commander exchanged invigorating emails with me about God, science, free…
Reading Time: < 1minuteLucas presents a lesson with some interactive polls about dishonesty. Do we think about what makes us cheat? Thanks to the marvel of modern technology, the assembly was able to answer questions in real time, and see everyone’s results. Briefly, we covered: —The cheating bug. (And is it contagious?)—How to avoid getting ethically ill.—Do we cheat more when we’re together? —Remember your mortality. —Conflicts of interest.—Prioritizing values, and would you…
Reading Time: 2minutesWhen communicating with someone else, style and tone affect information delivery. As the saying goes, “You can be right, but wrong at the top of your voice.” In essence, when communicating with someone else, the person doing the talking/writing needs to construct their wording in such a way that the receiver accurately processes the information. Failure to do this is known in business English as incompetent communication, because valuable information was…
Reading Time: 3minutesI once pointed out that most, scientifically minded atheists don’t believe in free will, and noted what one had said in a book. A few people remarked that I was just “quote mining,” which wasn’t really true—I just like to take notes while I’m reading, so I typically have them on hand. Regardless, this picture is pretty amusing, and I hope you’ll find the following quotes of some value in…
Reading Time: < 1minuteWhat causes us to lie? If money’s on the line, do we lie more? What if we can make a lot of money? How can we enhance our own honesty? Lucas leads a lesson using Dr. Dan Ariely’s book “The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves.” You can find the slideshow’s download link hosted at slideshare here. The class starts at slide 34 and ends at…
Reading Time: 3minutes❗Read the link towards the bottom.❗ Confirmation bias can be a tough thing to overcome, especially if it is combined with intellectual laziness, or simply an unwillingness to “think about our thinking.” I am habitually guilty of this, and constant vigilance is required to combat such bad habits. Read the article above. To this day, I still see it posted across the internet, and even, on occasion, from more reputable…
Reading Time: < 1minuteLucas goes through a fun lesson that’s interactive—you can play along as you listen, too! We learn about the lies we tell everyone, and especially ourselves, as well as how to overcome them, using scientific studies by Dr. Dan Ariely and others. Attached to this link is the slideshow in case you want to give the same lesson or just follow along.
Reading Time: 16minutesABSTRACT: Transgenderism has many challenges for the modern world. In sports, it is damaging the ability of genetic women to have physical success in competition, which also limits their ability to academically succeed through scholarships. Transbeing has been shown to be rising as a social construct and spreads memetically as a social contagion, with the recent inclusion of transitioning young children as supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics. The…
Reading Time: 5minutes“Since the brain cannot have thoughts about stuff, it cannot make, have, or act on plans, projects, or purposes it gives itself. Nor, for that matter, can it act on plans that anyone else favors it with. There are no plans. That’s just more of the illusion Mother Nature exploited for our survival.”
Parkinson’s Law of Triviality—Fighting Over the Small Stuff
Reading Time: 2minutesWhy do we fight over little things so often? Sometimes we have to “read between the lines” in order to even find something to fight about, but then we choose that hill to die on. Have you noticed that? Parkinson’s Law of Triviality, also called the “bike shed effect,” notes that organizations focus on trivial issues and neglect weighty ones; that is, they give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. C….
Reading Time: 3minutesBe careful of who you choose to be your “in-group,” and try to keep folks around who will give you those little nudges in the right ethical direction.
Reading Time: 2minutes“One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much.”
Reading Time: 2minutesIn 2009, the Pew Research group surveyed the American Association for the Advancement of Science with the goal of ascertaining levels of belief in God or a transcendent “spirit.” Surprisingly, 51% of scientists believed in some type of higher spirit or God, while 41% didn’t believe that such existed. Perhaps more surprisingly, in 1914, a similar survey was conducted among scientists by psychologist James Lueba. Of 1000 American scientists in…
This is a sensitive topic about murder, so please be warned.
The mass murders in the news are just terrible. In discussing murderers with comedian and avowed atheist Ricky Gervais, famed biologist Dr. Richard Dawkins said,
“I feel as though I have free will, even if I don’t. […] It wasn’t “me” that did the murder…it was my neurons and my genes.”
Under the view of atheism, we know all about the physical universe, and we know that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. As such, free will is a mere illusion. Why?
Because there is no disembodied “spirit” telling your body what to do. How could this invisible “force” control the chemical reactions in the brain to guide it into doing anything? How can there be such a thing as a spirit? It may seem that we have one, but on determinism, you are really nothing more than an equal and opposite reaction of incredible complexity.
As the late Stephen Hawking remarked,
“Given the state of the universe at one time, a complete set of laws fully determines both the future and the past. […] It is hard to see how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.”
So mass murders, under the view of atheism, are rationally neither evil nor good, but mere working of biological machinery; actions in response to stimuli, albeit complex.
With love, always,
-Luke
Can God make a rock so heavy that He can’t lift it?
Reading Time: 2minutesCan God make a rock so heavy that He can’t move it? No doubt you’ve heard this, and it raises certain paradoxes of omnipotence that are tough to consider, and perhaps frustrate you. Let’s start with this: does God’s being all-powerful mean that God can act contrary to His own moral nature—are there moral impossibilities for God? Specifically, could God, for example, make another God (an idol, let’s say) and…
Reading Time: < 1minuteEvil. Why do evil people choose to be the way they are? “You are no more responsible for the state of your brain in this moment than you are for your height…thoughts simply arise in the mind. But the idea that we as conscious beings are…responsible for the characters of our minds, simply can’t be mapped onto reality.“ —Dr. Sam Harris Without a God or dimension of intangible spirit, we…
Reading Time: < 1minute “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” —Dr. Francis Crick, Human Genome Project It’s this “no more than” that is important, I think. Under this view atheistic worldview, you don’t exist in a meaningful sense at the level of personal…
