A Digression: Lists And Spam

So, just a moment here off the topic I've been thinking about lately (science and religion as different and equally valid approaches to understanding the universe) to rant:

I keep getting email messages with lists of things that I supposedly am dying to know. I usually delete them without even wasting my time, but this one struck me: "5 Things Your Gynecologist Can Tell from a Basic Exam."  Being the smart-ass I am, I took a guess as to what these five things might be, and, guess what, I was right!

These 5 things are: when your "muscles have weakened," leading to urinary incontinence (which muscles? how could they become weak? can you make them strong again?); whether what you thought was a yeast infection and were self-treating really is a yeast infection or something else; whether you have cancer (ouch!---don't wait 20 years to see your OB-GYN!); whether you have two uterusus (uteri, please!---and, no, I didn't guess that one); and whether you have an STD.

Good. I actually did learn something: some women have two uteri.

And I learned one other thing: I'm still a chump. I had been tricked again into reading a bunch of stuff I didn't need to know. Because another thing that annoys me about these emails and articles is that when you click on the link to the article you wanted, you get shunted first to a page with a bunch of ads and/or a bunch of celebrity photos or whatever, and, either way, your browsing information has just been passed on to a bunch of people whom you don't want to know anything about you.

Okay, enough on that rant. Here's another message I got, obviously because the organizers of a conference I attended recently sold my name and e-mail address to a mass-marketer who really, no, really, wants to sell me his product. In this case, he thinks he can do it by insulting my intelligence:

He writes, "Hi Elle, You're getting this email because you're a [fill in the blank]...If you only learn one thing from me, learn this: If you want to be a SUCCESSFUL [fill in the blank], you have to do more than [fill in the blank] well. What else do you need to do?"

Here follows a list of three things that anyone who is, or wants to be, a [fill in the blank] already knows, and then this statement:

"In case you're wondering, this is advanced material."

I can write no more. I'm sputtering so hard my keyboard will be unusable if I don't get up and walk around for a few minutes.

 

Science Vs. Religion

As Laura noted last week, "Obviously, there shouldn't even be a "vs" in there..." because science and religion have the same goals: explaining our world and our place in it.

And of course most scientists and most religious people aren't arguing about it, because they recognize that the two disciplines offer unique and irreplaceable ways of doing that.

Also, not coincidentally, most scientists and most religious people are busy doing their own work and don't have any agenda to push. It seems to me like the arguing comes mostly from misunderstandings and insecurity about perceptions, and sometimes from a desire to make money, or a reputation, from the conflict.

Case in point: Michael Shermer has taken advantage of a recent opportunity to push his book sales by hanging onto the coattails of a hateful little talk-show wanna-be comedian.

Other examples? There are too many to cite here. But to avoid a firestorm of dissent and invective, I'll just go all the way back to Thomas Henry Huxley, AKA Darwin's Bulldog, who (according to Wikipedia, and, yes, I know, I know) wasn't even all that sure about the validity of Darwin's theory of natural selection --- but supported him because he was so opposed to "the more extreme versions of religious tradition.."

I recommend the entire Wikipedia article to anyone who is interested in Huxley's work and his support of Darwinism. I admit that this article is as deep as I have dug into his life and work, so I don't know as much about him as others do. But that one phrase from the article seems like it could apply to other people, on both sides of the debate: In reacting strongly to ignorance, extreme opinions, and mischaracterizations, he swings so hard to the other side as to miss the whole part in the middle.

It's understandable, isn't it. But what is harder for me to understand is when people arguing on either side deliberately mischaracterize the other side's arguments in order to strike them down. Equally hard for me to understand is when all religious people are represented as unintelligent and irrational, and all scientists as scheming godless corrupters of America's youth. 

I note that Huxley is the one who coined the phrase "Darwin's Bulldog" to refer to himself; and I'd like to think that Darwin didn't NEED a bulldog; no one needs a bulldog in the long run, if the only issue is the approach toward true understanding. 

So I wish all these self-anointed bulldogs on both sides would just chain themselves back up, de-fang themselves, or whatever, and let the honest discussion continue.

What Do You Want Your Children to Know About Religion?

The Angel Moroni**

Good morning! It's Sunday morning, a great time to be thinking about this! I'll be going to church soon where I'll sit in a sacrament meeting for just over an hour, a Sunday school class for just under an hour, and a Young Women meeting for an hour. Yep, three hours in church, every Sunday.

(That's about 3 or 4 hours less than my husband routinely spend at the church every Sunday.)

The reason we do this is to worship God, which for us takes several forms: Taking the bread and water, emblems of Christ's atonement, and being fed spiritually by lay speakers in the sacrament meeting; discussing the scriptures in Sunday school (also being fed spiritually); and teaching young women and men (ages 12 through 18) in the Young Men and Young Women organizations (also being fed, and feeding others, spiritually).

(In my husband's case, those extra hours are spent interviewing people who are going to be accepting callings as teachers and leaders in our ward and who are preparing to go to the temple, counting the donations received each Sunday, and giving priesthood blessings to people who ask for them.)

Ah! That reminds me: Donations! All our donations, 10-percent tithing plus fast offerings (giving the amount we would pay for two meals which we forgo on Fast Sunday each month), go directly to help people in need. Our bishop, our stake president, all our leaders---nobody gets any of this money, not even any "overhead" or anything whatsoever.

And why do we do this? Because we believe in God: We believe that He created this Earth, and us, so that we can learn by our own experience to become like Him. We believe we accepted with joy the challenge of coming to this Earth, and we believe that God put in place an eternal plan of happiness for us, knowing we would not "pass" every "test"** we would face, which would include letting his own Son, Jesus Christ, come to Earth to atone for our sins and lead us to eternal life.

We believe He did all this because He loves us. We believe this because this is what we read in the scriptures, the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, and Doctrine and Covenants.

We believe these scriptures because as we read them we pray about them to know if they are true, and the answer is that they are.

And because the Book of Mormon is true, Joseph Smith's account of how he received the golden plates from which it was translated is true. And the church he founded is true. Its purpose is to help us in the great work of bringing ourselves, our families, and our friends to Christ.

This is what I want my own children, and all children and all people everywhere, to know about true religion:  It's about God's love for us. That's it. It's unfortunately also true that some people teach false principles and treat others badly in the name of religion.  But some people do the same in the name of science, in social and educational movements, in politics, and, in general, in the pursuit of power. True religion is about humble love and service. That's it.

I'll be writing soon about how we got into this mess where religion and science are supposedly in conflict with each other. True religion and true science are NEVER in conflict.


*I love the statues of the Angel Moroni on the temples. I love knowing that God has sent heavenly messengers, angels, throughout history, to bring us truth, comfort us, and warn us.

**This explains why we have pain and sorrow in this life:  We chose to come here, knowing it wouldn't be easy. We suffer because of illness, our own mistakes, and the actions of others. Our suffering is never God's "fault," never because of a lack of love or caring from Him. And we find relief from this suffering through our faith in Christ.

What Do You Want Your Children to Learn About Science?

When you send your kids off to school for their education, what do you hope the schools will be teaching them?

I was lucky as I was growing up to attend school where they taught real science, not some kind of so-called faith-based anti-science nonsense.

I was lucky that my parents loved nature and loved to take us outdoors to enjoy nature, too. One of my best memories of childhood was being awakened in the middle of one night, along with my sisters and brother, to go over to the Episcopal Church parking lot across the street to see a king snake my parents had found in a pile of logs at the very back end of the lot.

We looked carefully, and certainly did not touch the snake, so as not to disturb it any more than it had already been disturbed by our presence.

Daddy explained that some people might be scared when they saw this red king snake, thinking it was a coral snake, but it was really a scarlet king snake (as in this picture).

Thus we learned about something interesting about snakes, plus we learned reverence toward nature, plus we learned that our parents loved us enough to teach us as much as they could about the wonders of the world.

The way our parents regarded the things we learned at school was just as instructive. They had been raised with the idea that the Bible is the word of God, as far as it is translated correctly (Eighth Article of Faith), so they didn't feel a need to argue with our science lessons that made it clear that scientific evidence showed the Earth to be more than 6,000 years old and its creatures to have undergone evolutionary processes to get to where they are today.

They realized, and they taught us, that a lot of the Biblical stories are figurative and metaphorical, tools for understanding God's dealings with humans. They knew from the history of our church that revelations are given and knowledge is increased, both institutionally and personally, "line upon line, precept upon precept" (2 Nephi 28:30).

And they realized that scientific principles are learned and knowledge is increased that same way.

So when we reported that a Seminary teacher told us, straight faced, that dinosaur fossils had been placed on Earth to test our faith, they explained that God does not test our faith in this way and that fossils are one piece in the puzzle of scientific evidence about the development and evolution of Earth. Likewise, when a family member ranted on and on about how if mankind kept trying to reach the Moon, God would punish us because we were becoming like the people who built the Tower of Babel, they explained that knowing more about our universe is not the same as trying to be bigger and better than God. And so on.

All this---and most of all their calm and rational approach to my questions and doubts---gave me the freedom to explore and think for myself, about science and religion.

I guess it comes down to their having had faith in their own beliefs, knowing that if I tested them for myself I would find them to be true. Which of course is exactly what happened with me.

Next, I want to consider what people want their children to learn about religion. I think atheists and agnostics would have a very different approach to religion, to ideas about God and to believers in God, if they had learned correct principles in the first place. Because it's easy to deny a god who is cruel and capricious, and by extension to deride anyone who believes in that god.

What Does It Take to be Right?

Michael Shermer thinks that Bill Maher is right about religion, and why does he think that? According to the title of this essay, excerpted from his latest book, it's simple:

Bill Maher agrees with Michael Shermer.

Of course, it's clear that the real reason is that Michael Shermer is promoting his latest screed against religions and religious believers.

Unfortunately, if Michael Shermer ever had any credibility among thinking religious people (and, BTW, Mr. Shermer, the term "thinking religious people" is not a contradiction in terms), he lost it again in this bit from his new book.

Confession: I'm basing my opinion about Michael Shermer's rightness or lack thereof on the one excerpt I've linked to above. I can't review the entire book, The Moral Arc, published this very month, because I'm not going to read it.

Yes, you read that correctly. I'm not going to read the entire book. Life is short and best spent in activities that bring one happiness and peace. In other words, life is too short to waste a minute more than I already have wasted on the excerpt and writing this opinion piece.

Back to my original question: What does it take to be right? One thing, in fact the main thing, it takes to be right is to have your facts straight. You don't have to be a theologian to find flaws and mis-statements in every assertion Michael Shermer makes about Christianity in general and Mormonism in particular.

What it does NOT take to be right is having the agreement of a racist bigoted loudmouth television personality and/or wanting people to buy your new book.

Sorry, Michael Shermer. You're not right, and neither is Bill Maher.

Weird Word of the Week: Contronym

A contronym (also spelled "contranym") and also known as an auto-antonym (also spelled "autantronym") is "a word with a homograph (another word of the same spelling) which is also an antonym (a word with the opposite meaning)," Wikipedia tells us.

Wikipedia goes on, even more helpfully, to tell us, "An auto-antonym is alternatively called an antagonym, Janus word (after the Roman god), enantiodrome, self-antonym, antilogy, or addad (Arabic, singular didd).^[2][3] It is a word with multiple meanings, one of which is defined as the reverse of one of its other meanings. This phenomenon is called enantiosemy,^[4] enantionymy or antilogy."


I just read the word "contronym" for the first time in an online article about how people misuse the word "literally." (Here's the article, "The Word We Love to Hate. Literally.") (This article was first posted online about nine years ago. Why did I just find it today? I don't know.) The fifth paragraph covers other contronyms, or words "used in a seemingly contradictory way."

I especially liked the article's treatment of the word "paraphrase." When people say, for instance, "To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, 'A tricycle is a tricycle is a tricycle,'" they're not really paraphrasing Gertrude Stein's famous statement about the nature of roses. If you wanted to paraphrase that, you would say something like,  "Roses are all roses, nothing more, nothing less."

Anyway, in case the Wikipedia article stuns and distracts you as much as it does me, here's a story about the "topsy-turvy world" of contronyms. 

And here's a Web page with a fascinating list of contronyms.  Check it out! These examples are what finally helped me understand what contronyms are.

Sleep Dot Com

Check it out. I woke up around 2:30 this morning and couldn't get back to sleep, so I wondered if there's a Web site that could help. And there is: Sleep.com.

It didn't help me get to sleep, but it had some interesting articles, for instance this one about some strange things people do in their sleep, in addition to just your every-night run-of-the-mill sleepwalking.

Photo from Web MD

So, like I said, it didn't help me get back to sleep. Here's an interesting article by Dr. Andrew Weil with some practical suggestions for curing insomnia (or at least providing some relief).