Does Heaven Exist?

There was a news story about a neurologist—a doctor—who claims that he saw Heaven.

This doctor had a rare brain infection with E. coli and was in a coma for seven days. He was not expected to live.

However, he survived and awoke from his coma, and when he awoke he related an experience. He talks of having been guided by a woman with blond hair, and seeing a very bright light.

The bright light thing is common to near-death experiences and has been explained as being a result of the brain's actions in the near-death condition.

However, the blond woman turns out to have been his sister whom he had never met or even seen before his coma because they were both adopted at birth.

Also, he says that brain scans made while he was in the coma showed no brain activity. Therefore, his experience could not have been generated in his brain and been the result of any normal brain activity.

Creepy. Definitely very creepy.

As to the lack of brain activity, I think a possible explanation might be that the man's brain was indeed active but was generating brain waves of a type that is not picked up on the kind of brain scan that was administered.

I have a problem with the idea of Heaven (or of an afterlife, or of a soul) which I'd say is the result of simple logic.

If you accept the idea of human evolution and a belief in Heaven at the same time, then you must raise the question, At which point in the course of evolution did there appear a creature with a soul and who could be admitted to Heaven. In other words, did Homo erectus have a soul and the possibility of entry to Heaven? Did Australopithecus afarensis?*

There was no first human, only creatures very gradually, over hundreds of thousands of years, becoming human. So there was no baby born who was the first Homo sapiens. Evolution was continuous and very gradual, with no sudden leaps. Distinct species are recognizable to us in the fossil record, but only when we are comparing different fossil examples which are hundreds of thousands of years apart. The early evolutionists asserted, Natura non fecit saltam—Nature does not produce leaps, or jumps.

I can't believe that God said, arbitrarily, one day 700,000 (or even 50,000) years ago, "Okay, as of June 30th of this year, I declare that humanoid creatures will be born with souls and can be admitted to Heaven."
___________
*Australopithecus afarensis is the fossil species to which the famous "Lucy" fossil--a girl only about three feet tall--belongs. And Australopithecus is the hominid fossil genus that preceded the genus Homo.
© 2012 by Richard Stein

Why More Americans Doubt Global Warming

Money--contributed money, that is--is not only driving American politics but also general American beliefs.

This is an age when corporations and very wealthy individuals can fund PACs (political action committees), Super PACs, and other types of entities that can indirectly support and fund candidates and even remain anonymous while doing so.

These funders generally support Republican candidates because the funders who are individuals have chiefly the objective of keeping taxes on themselves low. If they are corporations they may be concerned with corporate taxes but are perhaps more concerned with avoiding government regulation.

Thus both wealthy individuals and corporations mainly support Republican candidates--89% of corporate campaign spending goes to Republicans—because Republicans support these goals of theirs, and Republican-controlled houses of Congress will vote their way.

Pretty much as an aside, I want to get in the idea that political advertising—that is, campaign ads—make the implicit assertion that government regulations kill jobs. At the very least that is an exaggeration and overgeneralization and oversimplification. But then, whoever said that slogans—of any kind—contain qualifications or any nuances whatsoever?

But it's also alarming that these same monied political interests have been successfully influencing people's beliefs about what should be a matter of science—that is, the reality of global warming and the degree to which it is caused by human actions.

A report by the American Academy of Science said that 98 to 99% of scientists believe that global warming is real and is at least partly caused by human actions such as the burning of fossil fuels. The exact percentage of global warming which is the result of human action is difficult to determine, so there is room for disagreement about that, even among the scientists who accept both the reality of global warming and its causation by increased concentrations of so-called greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide (CO2).

The anti–global warming forces muster scientists who support their position. Sometimes these scientists are of suspect objectivity because they receive funding from the people whose ideas they support. Or they are not experts in the field of climate. They have even taken data and manipulated it. (Example: You can take 10-year periods and show that global temperatures were actually slightly cooler at the end of the period than at the beginning. But if you look at a graph of the longer-term trend, the upward trend in global temperature is unmistakable.)

Their advertising slogans try to convince people that carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere is not harmful. Carbon dioxide is what plants breathe in. (True.) It is "plant food." Okay, you could say that, too; but that does not in any way refute the fact that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. (Another greenhouse gas is methane, which is added to our atmosphere in considerable quantities by our raising animals for food. To put it in everyday terms, methane is cow farts.) Greenhouse gases--just to remind you--trap solar radiation that hits the earth and turn it to heat.

The effect of the millions of dollars which have been spent on a public disinformation campaign is that they have convinced nearly half the American population that global warming is not real and is not a problem and is not anything we need to take action on.

Who is doing this, and why? Naturally we have to look for motivation, for self-interest. For one, the Koch brothers, who are or should be infamous to many Americans as they are huge donors to various right-wing causes. These two hugely wealthy brothers own very extensive oil and gas interests. Therefore, they want  you and me to go on burning fossil fuels—it's money in their pockets—rather than "going green" and developing more wind and solar energy.

And corporate interests don't want to see any regulations on their factories' emissions of CO2. The House passed a plan known as "cap and trade" which would have the effect of a net reduction in CO2 emissions from industrial sources. But these interests, alarmed at their defeat in the House, have ensured that this bill will not pass in the Senate.

Update, November 1, 2012
Here is another example of  money spent to influence public opinion--called public relations--that also has been successful yet detrimental to the general welfare. The sugar industry spent a lot of  money to counteract a bad image that sugar had been getting--particularly its role in causing obesity and chronic diseases such as diabetes. Here is a quotation from an article in Mother Jones:

The [sugar] industry's PR campaign corresponded roughly with a significant rise in Americans' consumption of 'caloric sweeteners,' including table sugar (sucrose) and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). This increase was accompanied, in turn, by a surge in the chronic diseases increasingly linked to sugar. Since 1970, obesity rates in the United States have more than doubled, while the incidence of diabetes has more than tripled.

Here is a link to the full article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/01/big-sugars-sweet-little-l_n_2056731.html
Of course free speech allows lobbying and public relations efforts; and hopefully they are not all evil. But, where they are, the only antidote is public education and public information, and these are usually not supported by the same kind of money.
So in both these cases--climate change and the harmfulness of sugar--the equation is, money to spend (or money spent) = persuasion (public relations) = change in public opinion. In this age of media, persuasion is a vast and very influential industry.


© 2012 by Richard Stein

Some of the Things Done in the Name of Religion

In the sixteenth century, following the Spanish conquest of the Mexico, Bishop Landa, the bishop of Yucatan, tortured some 4,000 native Mayans in the process of trying to convert them to Christianity. Some 140 were tortured to death.

Nowadays we'd call that war crimes—so maybe there's been some progress for Mankind. But back then, it was just doing God's work, missionary work, trying to bring Christ to the heathens and save their souls.

I don't know how many people were tortured and killed by the Inquisition in the several centuries of its existence. There were the Muslims and Jews in Spain after 1492; and Protestants and suspected Protestants in Italy, for whom the Inquisition devised a new punishment, boiling in oil. And many more. We are just now learning some of these things as certain records of the Inquisition have only recently been opened up.

During the Crusades, the Crusaders, who had their Christian zeal stirred up by the preachments of the Pope, while on their way to the Holy Land to conquer it from Muslims, would kill any Jews that they happened to encounter along the way, in France or wherever.

These are just a few examples of many, many occurrences over 2000 years or more when, in the name of God, horrible things have been done. It should not surprise the religious that many of the non-religious—including me—view religion as more harmful than beneficial.

Four Obsolete (or not) Technologies

I have blogged before about a number of ways in which our life today is different from life a few decades ago—all changes resulting from new technology.

Here I want to look a bit more at four technologies which have almost—but maybe not quite—disappeared:

Typewriters
Vinyl records
Film cameras
Audio tape recorders/players

Typewriters. I have heard that there is some new interest in typewriters. Supposedly, young people who had not seen a typewriter before think it's cool, when they see one, that you get print appearing instantaneously, as soon as you press a key. No need to send your document to the printer and then wait for the printer to complete its job.

I think one or two of my doctors' offices have typewriters; but you don't see typewriters every day. They were superceded first by dedicated word processors and then by the personal computer (PC) running word-processing software—and of course the necessary connected printer.

I am not sure any typewriters are being manufactured today. I am sure you can find one for sale. But all of the businesses connected with typewriters—selling them, servicing them—are gone. (There might be a dealer in typewriters somewhere. Maybe even two or three in the US today, I'd guess.)

Vinyl records. The death of vinyl records was pronounced years ago, but they have not gone away. Disc jockeys use them, and many audiophiles and others believe that those old LPs, as we used to call them, offer better sound.

In fact, among high-end audio aficionados, there is a lot of record-playing equipment available—turntables, tone arms, cartridges (the part that holds the needle), plus devices that provide the required additional amplification. Plus, there still exists that whole culture of playing records, which I for one would largely be happy to forget: all manner of devices for cleaning records, devices for setting up and adjusting your turntable, tone arm, and cartridge, etc.

What is more astonishing than the fact that all of this still exists—and there are in fact many turntables on the market currently—is the fact that much of this record-playing gear is extremely expensive, and you've got people willing to buy this stuff for four- and even five-digit prices.

Film cameras. The technology of photography that used various chemical processes to record an image was with us for 150 years, but photography has changed dramatically in the last 15 years.

One day when I was downtown I saw three young people—separate and presumably unconnected sightings, if you will—carrying film cameras. I think film cameras are favored by some photography courses. I recently heard someone say that the quality of image you get with film can't be equaled by digital cameras.

As with record-playing equipment, I know that some of the cameras I saw being carried that day cost around $1000. I myself still own a film camera, a late, modern model (just as I still own a very late-generation electronic typewriter, a not-so-recent turntable, and audio and video tape machines).

But, again, there is what I might call a whole culture around film cameras that is pretty much gone. People who were serious about photography and who wanted to do their own lab work owned tanks for developing the film, enlargers for making the print, and equipment for developing those paper prints—plus a myriad of small accessories. I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure it's hard to find that stuff nowadays. Heck, you can't even find a camera store anymore; people buy their digital cameras at Best Buy, if not online.

And, perhaps as an aside, another thing that's obsolete is the amateur movie camera, replaced by video. You can still buy film for a still camera—certainly it's less ubiquitous than it once was—but I bet it's very hard to find amateur movie film.

Audio tape recorders/players. (This one may more unequivocally be obsolete.) The use of magnetic tape to record sound goes back at least to the time of World War II. In the 1950s the tape cassette was developed, originally intended for dictation. A decade or so later, the cassette tape and the machines to record and play it had been developed into a high-fidelity medium.

My car, which is a 2004 model, has a cassette-player slot—as well as a CD changer. (I am sure that tape players have disappeared from newer cars; and I understand that car CD changers are also disappearing as car makers bring out cars that let you plug in your iPad.)

In the days when television was beginning to become common in American homes—the early 1950s—the TV broadcast industry had no means of recording a TV signal. When anyone wished to make TV programs that could be preserved, either the program had to be filmed before broadcast, or a process called kinescope was used, which actually involved filming the program's image as it displayed on a CRT (TV screen).

Home recorders for a TV signal became available in the early 1980s (of course commercial video recorders were available before that). Home video tapes, in VHS format, have become obsolete, replaced by discs. Discs offer the advantage of "random access," which means that you can go from one point on the disc to another in a second or two—rather than having to wind the tape forward or backward. Discs never have to be rewound, and they're more compact, as well—though they may be more liable to damage from scratches. Now there are several options for recording sound or video: on iPods for sound, and on DVRs for video. Or maybe more likely for both audio and video, on CDs (CD ROM R/W) or our computer hard drives.

It's a problem for archives and archival collections, like the Library of Congress, that they hold a lot of information on media which has become obsolete, so there can be the problem of finding machines on which to play the material.


© 2012 by Richard Stein

More on the Spanish in the New World

As many people are aware, there were many atrocities, mass murders, and genocides in the twentieth century.

Toward the end of the century there were the genocides in Rwanda and Kosovo. During World War II, cruel treatment of prisoners of war by the Japanese resulted in the famous Bridge on the River Kwai episode, and the Bataan Death March--not even mentioning any of the terrible things, such as experiments with germ warfare, that the Japanese performed on the Chinese in the 1930s. Nor Allied bombings of World War II, which--aside from the casualties of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki--killed 250,000 in Tokyo alone.

Of course there was the Holocaust in which an estimated 6 million Jews, Slavs, clergy, gypsies, and homosexuals perished in the Nazi concentration camps, from being gassed, starved, or worked to death, or from disease.

And, as many an Armenian knows well, early in the twentieth century an undetermined number—but believed to be a 7-figure number—of Armenians perished due to actions of the Turks.

The last two examples are among the larger and more egregious examples of modern times. But there is one story not as well known.

It all started when the Spanish conquerors of the New World learned of silver deposits at Potosi, in Bolivia. This turned out to be a fabulously rich silver mine; but it was high in the Andes, at 13,000 feet. Spanish workers were unwilling or unable to work at that altitude. Similarly for African slaves. So the King of Spain, Philip II, issued an order permitting native peoples to be enslaved to work in the mines.

By 1800, enough silver had been mined to form a string of ingots stretching from Potosi to Spain. Also, unfortunately, 4 million people died in those mines by 1800, again enough corpses to form a chain stretching all the way back to Spain.

So that has to count as one of the largest mass murders of the last 500 years. Of course all over the New World, once the Spanish arrived, an uncertain number of Native Americans died—through being deliberately killed, through disease, and through being overworked as literally or virtually slave labor—starting, in fact, with Columbus himself.

With Columbus Day coming shortly, it might be time to contemplate some of these facts and consider that maybe Columbus' arrival in the New World is not unequivocally an event to be celebrated.

© 2012 by Richard Stein

Lies from the Right, in Your Email Inbox

I have an acquaintance—actually a high-school classmate with whom I re-established contact a few years ago—who likes to forward to me (and others) emails which I have to characterize as right-wing propaganda. And I use the word propaganda advisedly, with its suggestion of exaggeration and lies.

One such email contained a chart that purported to show what Medicare premiums are going to be under the Affordable Care Act (which the Right likes to call "Obamacare"). The chart showed that, four or five years out, Medicare premiums would reach a truly astounding, astronomical figure.

I did a little investigation and found out that the chart was simply and completely a lie. The fact is that Medicare premiums are not planned or announced four or five years in advance, as the chart purported, but are announced for the coming year only a few months before the start of a year. Thus no one—not the makers of the chart nor anyone in Washington—knows anything like that far in advance what Medicare premiums are going to be. (By the way, this example should remind all of us to look for some credit, some source or attribution for any "data" like that.)

The latest forward I received from my acquaintance was captioned something like "What the media won't show you." And what the media have, supposedly, been refusing to show us is a photograph. The photograph shows a man's body—living or dead, I don't think one could tell—being carried on the shoulder of another man.

The supposed story behind this photo: Supposedly the body is that of US Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens. The copy or text of the email claims that the ambassador was "dragged through the streets, sodomized, and murdered," and that this all was somehow Obama's fault. Admittedly I did not carefully read all of it; but it kept speaking of "Hussein Obama," who allegedly is too sympathetic to Islam to—what? avenge? prevent?--outrages to the US that are being committed in Muslim countries.

According to CBS television news, the Libyan government sent troops in, after the US Embassy compound in Benghazi was attacked. These troops found the ambassador, dead or dying, in the US Consulate, where he had gone to help evacuate consulate staff. If he was in fact dead or dying, then it has to be untrue that he was dragged through the streets and then murdered (let alone sodomized).

Some quotes from a September 21, 2012 Huffington Post article, quoting AP:

A Libyan doctor who treated Stevens said he died of severe asphyxiation, apparently from smoke.
. . .
Stevens was practically dead when he arrived close to 1 a.m. on Wednesday, but "we tried to revive him for an hour and a half but with no success," Abu Zeid [the doctor at the hospital] said. The ambassador had bleeding in his stomach because of the asphyxiation but no other injuries, he said.

But the brazen assaults - the first on U.S. diplomatic facilities in either country - underscored the lawlessness that has taken hold in Libya and Egypt after revolutions ousted their autocratic secular regimes and upended the tightly controlled police state in both countries.
. . . .
Moreover, security in both countries has broken down.
. . .
In Libya, central government control is weak, arms are ubiquitous and militias are pervasive.

So this, I would accept, is the true story. I am sure I don't have to emphasize how different this story is from that in the email I received.

And, note the name. Barack Obama's middle name is Hussein. During the 2008 election campaign, Obama's opponents on the Right liked to stress his middle name. It is, to be sure, an Islamic-sounding name. But what do they wish us to infer from that? There is a calumny that Obama is a Muslim that just won't go away.

To take these two emails together—plus many of the untrue things that some organizations have tried to say about gay people—upsets, enrages, and outrages me. The sheer immorality of these lies, of manufacturing tables of phony Medicare premiums; or taking a photo and claiming it shows Ambassador Stevens and then making up a backstory to that photo.

Update, May 27, 2013.
The television news reporting of the recent action by the Boy Scouts of America to allow gay boys and men to be Boy Scouts members and staffers included an inteview with a heavy man--presumably the father of a Boy Scout--who said on camera, "We're going to be required to teach homosexuality to boys as young as 6, up to 17."
I have to wonder who the "we" is supposed to be, and what he feels "teaching homosexuality" means. Maybe it means "tolerance," but he clearly meant something he viewed as pretty dire. The TV news article added that the Boy Scouts of America has denied this assertion; so my next thought is, Where did this man get that idea? I have to think this is yet one more example of  Right and homophobic organizations and individuals spreading misinformation and dysinformation.
Update, June 4, 2013
People who receive emails that contain "information" that seems dubious should be aware of a website called factcheck.org.
Here is their summary, for the end of 2012, of emails which have been circulating on the Internet and that include false "information": factcheck.org 2012 "viral spiral"

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

Sins and Crimes of Political and Religious Leaders

Tim Pawlenty, known to many as the former governor of Minnesota, has recently resigned as campaign manager for Mitt Romney, to join a financial-industry lobbying and advisory group.

So we see that he is allied with the people who gave us subprime mortgages, robo-signing of foreclosure orders, and the causes of the financial crisis and near-meltdown of 2007- 2008.

People don't usually enter that kind of an organization if they have not already had some ties to them. Thus, it's likely that Pawlenty has been allied with this group. Given how prone people are, these days, to besmirch any political candidate, it would be in this prevalent spirit if I said that Romney perhaps is guilty by association, even if perhaps somewhat remotely.

And, also in today's top news, at least in this region: The pastor of a Northwest Indiana mega-church was indicted for a sex crime, namely transporting a 17-year-old woman (and thus a minor) across state lines for sexual purposes. I think that violates both the so-called Mann Act, which covers transporting across state lines, and statutes involving minors.

And, to anyone who can remember even a short while back, he is not the first religious leader to be involved in a scandal. With just the sex scandals alone, I certainly have not been trying to keep count but if I had been I'm sure I would have lost count long ago.

I wish to imply that it is typical for our politicians to be tied to groups and organizations whose aims are counter to the public good; and that religious leaders are liars, shams, and hypocrites.

Well, all right, not all, of either group. I certainly must admit "not all." But too many. Way too many.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein