Don’t Put Limits on God

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It’s natural that our comprehension of God is limited by our imagination. That’s why scientists get rankled at the notion that science takes the wonder out of the world. An astronomer spends her life wrapping her mind around the biggest, and wondrous, concepts in the universe, a biologist spends his life wrapping his mind around the most intricate, and wondrous, details of the universe, and so on.

Often, scientists are agnostic. Their concept of the natural world is so amazing, the supernatural holds no attraction for them.

But many of these intellectual types do have spiritual, and even religious, beliefs. And, as a result of the mind-expanding concepts they deal with on a daily basis, their concept of God (by any name) is HUGE. They are mystified by the conflicts about keeping Christ in Christmas, keeping God in schools, whether or not God blesses America, who gets married, and whether our national pledge also affirms God. And that’s the American perspective. They are equally mystified that God cares whether men wear beards, women drive, or a religious figure is depicted in a picture.

From that perspective, God doesn’t have a country. He doesn’t even have a planet. Earth is a mote of dust in a mote of dust in a mote of dust in a mote of dust in God’s full creation. He doesn’t have a holiday…in fact the whole of human history is an eye-blink in His creation. God is present in school and Christmas and a foxhole because God is everywhere and everywhen to an unfathomable degree, not because of national policy.

You don’t have to be a scientist yourself to understand this, but anyone reading this has a responsibility to keep a proper sense of perspective. If you really realize the grandeur of His creation, you can’t help but glimpse that these conflicts are insignificant. Irrelevant. Petty. Needlessly fearful.

If you’re worried about whether God is in…anything…you’ve forgotten Who you’re talking about.

Still think God cares about who the US president is? ...what's printed on US currency? ...what's on the lawn at city hall?

Fun science fact about the sky

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Fun science fact about the sky: did you know that it has several huge galaxies in it? I don’t mean the universe, everybody knows there are zillions (that’s a technical term) of galaxies out there.  I mean the sky. The Andromeda Galaxy, which is the one that stands in for our own galaxy in probably every “You are here” T-shirt and poster you’ve ever seen, covers 190′ x 60′ of sky. What does that mean? Well the moon covers about 30′ of sky, so…

Andromeda Galaxy with moon inset to show relative size

You just can’t see it like that because it’s too dim! But I still love mentally picturing it.

The scene at the end of The Empire Strikes Back is actually similar to our own sky – it’s just that the galaxy they’re looking at would also be too dim to show up like that, even from a spacecraft:

C-3PO, R2D2, Luke, and Leia looking out the window of a spacecraft at a galaxy at the end of The Empire Strikes Back.

Thinking Critically Means Not Being Publicly Foolish

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Fake picture purporting to show rare alignment of planets with the pyramids of Giza

What’s wrong with this picture?

Seriously, you should be able to debunk this yourself, without looking anything up, right away, if you think about it.

If you know how and are willing to think critically.

Critical thinking happens after “Wow, neat,” and before “Let me Like/Share/Tweet this!”

What’s special about the picture? The planets are over the pyramids, but couldn’t you just figure out where to stand to do that almost any time? The apparent heights don’t match at all. The planets are in a nice line, but aren’t there a bunch of planets moving around the sky all the time? That’s probably not so rare. Internet hoaxes are common, so this is probably just that.

At this point, you could also check Snopes, but you know you probably needn’t bother. You haven’t proven anything yet, but you can tell the likelihood that the statement is true is pretty low.

If you won’t think critically, you will believe and repeat myth.

If you combine critical thinking with just a little bit of knowledge about reputable sites (yes, Wikipedia counts 99% of the time), you’ll be safe from believing myth. You’ll be able to be impressed by things which really are amazing.

Pop quiz: what if you saw this in your news-feed: a picture with the planets right at the tip of each pyramid and the caption “At midnight on 12/21/2012, the eyes of the Great Sphinx will be looking at this!”

Now, that would be a truly impressive claim. The details like the exact time, the more precise planetary positioning, and the fixed position and angle of the observer…that would be amazing! And there’s nothing inherently wrong about the statement on the face of it. But you should be able to dispense with it in about 30 seconds with a quick fact check. Hint: go here and just look…no need to read.

The best thing about thinking critically is that it gets faster and easier. Like any muscle, you can develop it, and the result is having a built-in BS detector. You use it like a filter, and your experience in life is more pleasurable, because there’s less noise in your FaceBook newsfeed, your Twitter feed, your email, or the ads you see.

Why Multiculturalism?

Got a question earlier, from a friend, as a response to my last post:

why would [we] give precedence to [celebrating other cultures] over efforts to celebrate what we have in common?

I’ll say this: we make special effort to celebrate our diversity because

  • it’s what makes us interesting,
  • because there’s often something to learn,
  • because celebrating what we have in common is all the richer in the context of our different backgrounds,
  • and finally because celebrating what we have in common happens without any effort. It’s easy to go bowling with your buddies who are mostly one race, political party, economic status, marital status, and age.

Doing anything else is always at least a little out of our comfort zone.

The Trouble with Multiculturalism

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I came across this article today, and I’m told that the author comes across as well-spoken, succinct, and dispassionate.

To use his words, his “intellectual myopia is striking.” Other than mentioning Chinese cuisine, his perspective only covers two cultures, “the West” and “Muslim.” And his fear is that if we Westerners participate in any celebration of other cultures that include Muslim, that we’ll basically turn into Saudi Arabia and take drivers licenses away from women. And he associates Muslim culture with 9/11 attacks and paints that as part of a larger concerted attack on our freedom.

It’s not dispassionate. It’s fear-mongering.

This honestly angers me. There are attacks on freedom in our country. Warrant-less wiretapping, indefinite detention, literal *imprisonment* of more of our citizens than any other country, religiously-motivated pseudoscience taught in schools…and not one bit of it came from embracing anything other than the worst elements of our own culture.

But then, a bit farther down in my news feed, I came to this, and my faith in humanity got a little boost:

Joyful child and camel

Simple genius doesn’t come from playing mental chess

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My friend Stephen Yoder posted the following on FaceBook today:

This morning I made my son laugh while he accompanied me on my morning commute. My elder boy asked (in the thick of traffic–i had no time for a planned answer) “dad, what do you think about gays and lesbians?” I said, quickly, “good people, son. They just use their privates differently than I do.”

I am utterly unsurprised by his opinion. I am, however, in awe of the brilliant simplicity with which he expressed it. I think most of us are too aware of the controversy not to struggle over how to craft the answer that is most likely to impress upon our children what we believe on this important subject. He eschewed this mental chess playing and thus rendered the best answer. I love him for it.

Can we all share this, retweet it, like it, give it a +1, repeat it to our children, shout it in the streets, write it in the sky, affix it to carrier pigeons, insert it into ocean-going bottles, and write it in giant letters of fire on a planet at the end of the universe?

…but we don’t understand tides

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how we live in the future. And I commented, as an aside, that in light of the truly amazing degree to which we have been able to figure out the universe, it boggles the mind that there are people who are apparently impervious to that understanding. Worse, they base their whole belief systems on that ignorance.

Case in point:

  1. Transit of Venus photographed by Solar Dynamics ObservatoryThings like this truly amazing video appear, not on some obscure scientific website, but on Time’s Newsfeed.
  2. Bill O’Reilly recently said  that we haven’t figured out what causes the tide to go in and out with great regularity.

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Facebook is only free because *you’re* the product!!

Perhaps you’ve heard that before. Perhaps you’ve seen this (hilarious) image:

Two pigs discussing why it's free to live in the barn.

Author unknown

But OH MY GOD relax! All that’s really being sold is a marketing profile of you. Never before in history have you ever been given so much in return for such information. Yes, before, it was obvious, when you filled out an entry form to win the beautiful car parked behind velvet ropes at the mall, that you were exchanging your address and phone number for a 1 in a million chance of winning the car. Now it’s not so obvious, but it’s the same thing and the service that Facebook provides is nothing short of amazing. Much better than a 0.0001% chance of winning a car.

So, yes, Facebook is free for perfectly capitalist reasons. It’s ok. Really.

All the other complaints in this article about how FB threatens to Zuck up the human race? They’re legit, but singling out Facebook is overreaching. These problems are the inevitable outgrowth of our increasingly connected technological environment. It was always going to be the case that we’d start to abuse that easy connectivity just as we abuse easy access to food. See Diseases of affluence on Wikipedia.

You might as well blame Cisco.

New Facebook privacy scare!

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Massive social network

from Rich Kid's Campus

I love social networking. Say what you will, it’s never been easier to keep in touch with friends and family.

As a technologist, I particularly love the “network” part of it. I’m really happy about the way the big companies have opened up their APIs, which allows third party developers to add all sorts of functionality that no one company, however large, could or would build on their own. I also roll my eyes when people complain that Facebook and other social networks are…GASP…exposing our personal information without our knowledge. Why? Because it’s not without our knowledge. You don’t even have to read fine print to understand that. Sharing personal information is the purpose of social networks after all. It does mean that people share more than they used to, and that can be embarrassing in ways that didn’t used to be possible, but I think it’s worth it.

Yet I’ve realized recently that I shouldn’t be quite so dismissive every time I see yet another “FaceBook Privacy Scare!” headline. There’s a valid point to the concerns about what happens to your data in social networks. Even though it should be obvious that saying/revealing/posting things on a free public site is by nature a public exposure, what isn’t obvious is that modern data-mining techniques have ramifications here that almost no one is truly prepared for. After all, sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic: Continue reading →