To me, being an atheist is perfectly natural. I’d describe it as “the obvious choice”, but it’s not even a choice - it’s simply my default state of being. I don’t believe I’ll convert anyone with this blog (and that’s not why I write), but I still think it might be pertinent to explain why I lack a belief in any kind of god. When pondering this question I realised that there are two ways to answer it: The historical perspective and the philosophical perspective. I thought I’d start with the former, since that makes more chronological sense. At some point I will list my main philosophical objections to religion.

Where it all started

I had a secular upbringing. I wasn’t taught that there were no gods, nor was I taught that god existed. God was simply a non-issue during my childhood. My parents are atheists, but I did not know this until I proclaimed I was one myself. As a child, I didn’t spend much time thinking about god, but I was intensely curious about the world - especially the living world.

There were books, about everything from the life of frogs and sharks, to how the universe works. I’d read them, again and again. The ones that were too complicated to read I would still open, to look at the pictures. Even back then I always preferred photographs to drawings. Although I could (and can) see the utility of diagrams to illustrate for instance the structure of a volcano, I found the photos of the actual smoke and lava a lot more interesting and satisfying to look at. In short: Even as a child, I thought nothing could beat the real world.

I still loved stories, though. I was a bit of a myth freak. The surreal and yet oddly gritty and down to earth Norse myths always amused me, as did the rowdy behaviour of the ancient Grecian gods. When I learned of the christian creation myth during my first years in elementary school, that’s what I thought it was - a myth. After all, we also learned about the Norse gods, and they were obviously make-believe. It never quite dawned on me that some people actually thought some of these stories were for real. (For the record, my teacher didn’t. My mum told me once that when she complimented that teacher for teaching us about religion in such an objective manner, the response was, “Well, I’m an atheist.”)

We drew pictures of the creator-god hovering over the land and water he had just created. He had white hair and a beard. Just like Odin was missing an eye and Zeus threw lightning bolts. Fictional characters with fictional attributes. “Let there be light” was no more realistic than the cosmic cow Audhumla nursing the giant Ymir from whose carcass Odin and his brothers would later create the world. And it was a lot less interesting.

The Big Bang, artist’s impression

Then we studied space, and made a timeline of evolution and human development. A painted landscape circled the room and we made little drawings of animals, pasting them into the landscape in the correct order. This, we knew, was not fictional. Trilobites and dinosaurs had been real. I had a small plastic t-rex and a big plastic brachiosaurus and a book that taught me that my budgerigars were actually dinosaurs too.

As puberty crept up on me and did its thing, I remember I occasionally prayed. By now it had been made clear to me that some people believed there was a higher power, and that it could help you if you prayed to it. So I tried. Praying, as I understood it, was talking to yourself or thinking, as if someone could hear you talk or think, someone who would care and who’d respond in some way. If you really, really wanted it. If you had an open mind. I opened wide and thought I was supposed to have some sort of revelation, some feeling that told me there really was someone out there, listening, caring. There was nothing. So what was the point of praying? I stopped trying.

Around the age of 13, dad gave to me a book* introducing me to evolutionary theory. It wasn’t a heavy textbook, but an introduction of evolution to the layman. When previously I hadn’t particularly thought about the concept much, simply being content with a vague idea of progression from one form to another, the slowly branching tree of life reaching ever upward, this book not only expanded my knowledge but kindled an intense passion for the subject. Such elegance, such beauty! How wonderful it is to think that each and every living being around me is connected to one another, back in time, through aeons of reproduction! How simple, how amazing an idea!

Another thing that happened was that I realised the power of science. A part of me had vaguely entertained the notion that perhaps there was some mysterious force that had started it all, even if it didn’t seem to particularly care about the outcome. As I read about evolution and some thoughts on how life may have first begun on earth, I realised that a question that is unanswered today might not be so tomorrow. I also realised that even if we never find out the truth about something, we might still be able to produce qualified guesses, models that at least explain how it might have happened - without having to invoke any supernatural forces. I realised, in short, that even the deistic concept of god (although I didn’t know that was what it was called at the time) was completely unnecessary.

At this point I was effectively an atheist. I had never had any real need for god as a personal saviour: My younger years were marked by safety and happiness, and by the time the road got bumpy during my teens, I was already strong and very independent. (Sometimes I think I have grown much softer since. I don’t know if I’d be able to face today what I faced nearly every day during my last years of elementary school.) Now, I no longer had a need for god as the ultimate explanation.

And when I realised, some time later, that there were people out to discredit my favourite scientific theory because they preferred the silly myth about the bearded man in the sky … that’s when I became an activist atheist.

* As it happens, this book was the swedish translation of River out of Eden by Richard Dawkins. It might just as well have been any other easily read explanation of evolutionary theory, but it wasn’t. Because of the great impact this book had on my personal development, Richard Dawkins has come to mean a lot to me personally. Which doesn’t mean I agree with everything he says or does - he’s someone I look up to and in many respects aspire to be like, but he’s not a prophet.

atheism, religion, science, childhood, myths

I get a steady trickle of hits from people wanting to know what to do with their crystallised honey. They find this post, where I explain why honey crystallises, but I don’t actually say anything about what to do with it if this happens to liquid honey you’ve bought. So, here goes:

Uncrystallised honey

First of all, if you’ve bought something marketed as liquid honey and it crystallised, don’t buy honey of that brand again. If you absolutely have to have liquid honey, make sure it’s labeled as coming from plants such as acacia, the honey of which never crystallises. (Personally I find acacia honey bland and tasteless, but I guess everyone’s different.) Otherwise, just get already crystallised honey. As you will shortly see, it’s not like it’s difficult to liquify it.

Here’s the very simple trick: Heat it.

If you heat honey too much for too long, you will destroy the antiseptic enzymes and hence it won’t be any good against sore throats anymore - but it’ll still taste great. But the glucose crystals will dissolve before the enzymes are rendered dysfunctional. Make sure the temperature gets no higher than around 40 centigrade and you’re fine. Just place the jar/bottle in hot water and the glucose crystals will dissolve.

Eventually, the honey will begin to set again. It’s possible to prevent this (for a time) by heat-shocking the honey, but an easier way to deal with it is to simply allow it to happen. If you stir it regularly, you will break the crystals into small pieces and get a nice, smooth texture instead of big sugary lumps of glucose in a fructose solution. Absolutely perfect texture can be attained if you put the honey in the fridge and whip it twice a day. It will become pale and fairly hard, and it’ll be smoother than silk.

If you have smoothly crystallised honey that you want to use for cooking (such as glazing meat for a bbq or as a replacement for sugar in a spongecake), just put as much as you need in a container and stick it in the microwave a few seconds. Since you’ll be cooking with it you don’t need to worry about it getting too hot.

If you have other questions about honey, honeybees or bee-related products, I’ll be happy to do my best to answer them.

honey, food, acacia, crystalized honey

Time to resurrect the picture Fridays! First up, a picture that recalls the beginning of the summer. I don’t know what kind of larva this is - only that it is very beautiful, and that it was munching leaves in a flowerbed.

If anyone could help me identify it - at least tell me if it’s a beetle or a butterfly, say - I would be much obliged.

larva

I must confess: I’m struggling a bit with my current course. Apart from the fact that I’m missing lectures, the cause can be found the course literature, which consists mainly of articles from scientific journals.

On a scale from Dim to Brilliant, I’d say I’m at least fairly Shiny (better than Bright, but not quite Sparkling), but no matter how polished your intellect, a poorly written text is still an unbelievable tedium to get through. And I’ve recently spent the better part of a workday trying to get through one of the worst examples of scientific literary compost I’ve ever seen. These are the first sentences of the introduction:

The purpose of this article is to review existing knowledge on analytical approaches to vulnerability to environmental change in order to propose synergies between research on vulnerability and on resilience of socialecological systems. The concept of vulnerability has been a powerful analytical tool for describing states of susceptibility to harm, powerlessness, and marginality of both physical and social systems, and for guiding normative analysis of actions to enhance well-being through reduction of risk.

It’s not that the subject is too difficult. It’s not that I don’t understand the words and concepts brought up here. It’s that there are 23 words with three or more syllables. It’s phrases like “synergy” and “normative analysis” and “reduction of risk”.

This is lazy writing, where the author hasn’t bothered to look over their text and even consider the possibility that there might be a better, simpler way to phrase all this. Even if you write for an audience well versed in your chosen subject, there is no excuse for obscurantism, even when it’s unintended.

On another course I’m taking - Presentation av naturvetenskap (”Presentation of natural science”, an ironically mistitled course that actually teaches presentation techniques for natural scientists) - we’ve discussed how communication in today’s society tends to shorter and more intense bursts of information. If you want to get a message across through text, it should be short, simple, with an informative headline, and with the most important bits first*. Apparently, even science journals are moving towards a simpler form of communication, with more subheadings and the like. I think this is good. As long as the content is not lost somewhere in the process, there can be nothing wrong with making science more accessible.

* I considered applying the rules we’ve learned to this blog. Then I realised it made the blog feel like homework, so I stopped. When good writing is second nature to me, the language and disposition of my blog posts will improve on their own. Until then, please make do.

writing, language, scientific journals

Over at EvolutionBlog, Jason Rosenhouse asks What is it With Hitchens? “Why is he so sensible and sharp when discussing religion, but almost perfectly brain-dead on every other issue?” Several commenters point out that Hitchens appears sharp only when you agree with him on the issues. The reason he is brilliant in debates with creationists isn’t because of the substance of his arguments, but because of his style. It is simply fortuitous that he happens to be right as well.

Now, it seems a lot of people view this as a bad thing. (One of the commenters at EvolutionBlog calls him a “poseur”, another points out that “it’s mostly just cheap rhetoric tricks and catch phrases that don’t penetrate the surface of the issue, repeated ad nauseum”. Although they also call his rhetoric “admirable”, I think their choice of words illustrates their ever so slight disdain of this kind of debating.) Us rational-minded people have this idealistic notion that it’s what people say that should matter, not how they say it. We want to think that anyone who knows a lot about evolution should be able to disembowel any creationist/Incompetent Design proponent they come across with simple facts. But, this is obviously not the case. I have personally come across at least one ID person who was simply too slick, too rhetorically polished for me to get a good grip around his metaphorical throat.

In short, it doesn’t matter if you’re right or not. When you enter a debate, especially one in front of an audience, what matters is your rhetorical clout. You need to have an arsenal of slogans and catch phrases, you need to be able to think on your feet, and you need to be able to put your opponent on tilt while avoiding the same thing happening to yourself. Hitchens can do this. Many others, including sometimes Dawkins, can’t. I think this might be one of the reasons why Dawkins advises against giving creationists the time of day: He knows that many of them are far more skilled debaters than most scientists, and that regardless of the fact that we’re right, we’ll come out of it looking bad.

And when it comes to winning over the minds of the public, it’s all about the looks.

Speaking of looking good, here’s a photo of me with some guy they pulled off the street to do the key-note address on the final day of the World Humanist Congress in Washington:

(Here’s the speech on youtube. One of the heads in the foreground is mine… and you can see the picture above get taken at the end of Part 2. I am … very embarrassed. I’m really not some total fangirl, I’m just very opportunistic. As it turned out, I could have waited with the picture: After the next part was over and we were standing in line at the hotel Starbucks, Hitchens came with a long queue of disciples fans eager to shake his hand and have their books signed trailing him (giving him a rather amusing mother goose-like appearance), and ended up just behind us in the line.)

debating, christopher hitchens, hitchens, dawkins, creationism

There’s been some talk lately about americans believing in guardian angels. From Time:

In a poll of 1700 respondents, 55% answered affirmatively to the statement, “I was protected from harm by a guardian angel.” The responses defied standard class and denominational assumptions about religious belief; the majority held up regardless of denomination, region or education — though the figure was a little lower (37%) among respondents earning more than $150,000 a year.

/…/

Says Bader, “If you ask whether people believe in guardian angels, a lot of people will say, ’sure.’ But this is different. It’s experiential. It means that lots of Americans are having these lived supernatural experiences.”

/…/

What’s interesting about the Baylor findings on guardian angel experiences is that they cross all boundaries. They have scriptural writ (in Psalm 91 and elsewhere). They are clearly experiential. And guardian angels are a prominent part of Catholic belief that happens to float freely outside of a sacrament. The cross-spectrum legitimacy of the notion of angelic interventions may free Americans to engage in the kind of folk faith that is part of almost any religious system but is not always officially acknowledged.

I’m not going to go through all the wrong assumptions made (you can see those for yourself), but after some very little thought, one thing strikes me about this: Doesn’t anyone involved in this study realised that “I was protected from harm by a guardian angel” is a leading question (statement, in this case)?

Asking someone who believes in god “Have you ever been saved by a guardian angel” prompts them to think back on their lives and consider any potential dangerous situation that they got out of, and they’ll think, “yeah, it was probably that!”

If they had asked people whether they had at some point in their life been involved in some situation that threatened to harm them but escaped, and then asked them what they attributed this escape to, I suspect the results would have been very different. Some would still have attributed their escape to angels, but others would have turned directly to god. Yet others would thank the stars - and, I think, a sizeable portion might have been able to identify what really got them out of their pickle: Chance (luck, some would call it), their own biology (as Digital Cuttlefish points out), the aid of friends, the skills of doctors…

Polls can yield very interesting results, but don’t write off a majority of people as gullible or stupid because of a poorly worded one. (They might of course still be gullible or stupid, but this poll wouldn’t tell you.)

guardian angels, religion, polls

It’s that time of the year again, when we try to get rid of the honey we painstakingly extracted from our ten hives over the course of the summer. Unfortunately, or perhaps in this context thankfully, this has been an extremely poor year in terms of honey harvest: From our nine productive hives we collected no more than 190 kilos. That’s about as much as we’d get from four hives on a good year. But there is of course a silver lining, in that we’ve been able to use this season to get used to some new ways of packaging our product.

Anyway. I have had a bit of a bad week and I could feel this somewhat impeding my skills as a saleswoman today. So in this post I wanted simply to whine a bit about things that really get on my nerves when doing this honey-selling gig:

1. People who think bees are wasps. “Hi, I’m a beekeeper.” “Oh? Where do you keep your wasps?” “Nono. BEES. You know. Honeybees.” “They’re all the same.” “*facepalm*”
2. People who think they know more than I do because they were in the same room as a beekeeper once. “This is rapeseed honey.” “Well actually…” “It’s rape. Rapeseed honey is always pale and hard.” “Yeah but…” “It’s rapeseed.” Ok, so everyone can’t have studied formal logic (which would tell them that “A is B, therefore all that is B is A” is wrong), but could they at least listen?
3. People who think it’s perfectly ok to accuse me of tampering with my honey to my face in front of an audience. Maybe the beekeepers where you come don’t take any pride in their work, but I certainly do.
4. People who think it’s a good idea to take up my time by telling them how they, or their father, or grandfather, or someone else vaguely related to them in some way, kept bees 40 years ago in Nowhereland. How I would like to tell them: “I’m here to inform people about beekeeping and the lives of honeybees as well as to sell honey. I may look young but I’ve done this for 12 years! Do you honestly think I haven’t heard your beekeeping stories a hundred times before? Also I’m smarter than you. Go away.”
5. And on a completely unrelated note, I really hate the way cafés insist on making sandwiches. I want the cheese, ham and vegetables evenly spread between the bread, not perching precariously on the edge of it with cheese on one side, ham on the other and the veggies in the middle. I always have to remake the sandwich myself so what the hell am I paying for?

Other than this, it has been an enjoyable day. Most people - customers or just curious bystanders - are open, interested and willing to listen to my ramblings about honey and flowers and shit. I got a fair amount of honey sold (only a few jars to take back home), and it’s always enjoyable watching kids squeal and stare wide-eyed at the tiny demonstration hive. Teenagers just go “eww!” and shy away (I was a very unusual 13-yr-old to take up this hobby) but younger kids are all absolutely fascinated by the creepy-crawly-buzzy things.

bees, beekeeping, honey

The man just across from me on the subway is wearing a pair of old jeans with what I only hope is wine stains. He has thin, shoulder-length hair combed back from a receding hairline, and obnoxious, bristly sideburns framing an unshaven chin. His mouth seems to be missing a few teeth. From one hand dangles a Systembolaget bag, emitting faint clinking noises. In the other, he holds a flashy mobile phone that would have looked more at home in the hand of a Stureplan brat.

The first time he uses the phone, I’m not paying attention. I carefully raise a hand to block the ear closest to him, because he’s veritably shouting, and I already have a headache. The second time, I simply can’t help but overhear his end of the conversation.

“HI, TOMMY! … TOMMY? YEAH, IT’S ME. IT’S THE WOLF!”

I block my ear again and catch the eye of the woman in front of me - who has just been whispering into her own phone - and we both roll our eyes and smirk slightly.

“CAN WE MEET UP? YEAH I’M AT… LET’S SEE WHERE THE HELL I AM…” He looks out the window. “I’M AT MÄLARHÖJDEN. I NEED TO TALK TO YOU. CAN YOU COME DOWN TO FITTJA? … I CAN’T TALK ABOUT THIS ON THE PHONE… I CAN’T TALK ABOUT WHAT I DID HERE, THERE ARE TOO MANY EARS AROUND.”

Now I’m very nearly laughing. Other passengers have turned around to see who the shouting whackjob is.

“YEAH, COME ALONE, I WANT TO TALK IN PRIVATE… OK I’LL CALL AGAIN IN BREDÄNG.”

I consider pointing out to him that if he wants to discuss secrets on a subway, he might want to do it in a voice less … carrying. I decide against it - for all I know, he’s a violent person who can’t talk about how he beat someone to death with a wine bottle. At the next stop, I stand up and move back through the train. Amusing as he is, I really don’t want to risk tinnitus.

Zeno may have been on to something when he discussed how loud people are these days. Given that I belong to what he calls the iPod generation, I can’t say for sure because I don’t have anything to compare with. However, I’m not convinced it’s only to do with mp3-players and such. Sweden is a very quiet, private place, where being loud in public is generally frowned upon. Hence the people who are the loudest are usually either the kind who spend most of their time drunk, teenagers, or from a different culture altogether.

shouting

Like many bloggers I keep an eye on what keywords people have been searching for when stumbling across this humble abode of mine. Understandably I get a lot of hits (well, I say a lot…) from death-related searches, as well as various queries about bees and honey (the former often coupled with death, for some reason). Here’s a few from the last couple of weeks:

are atheists afraid of death: No, we conquer death through meditation and … ah, I can’t do it. I can’t joke with such an innocently naive question. Are atheists afraid of death? I’ve no idea, I’m just one of them. In theory I’m not afraid of death, but in practice … well, I do my best to avoid it.

can get enough of death: Can, or can’t? I honestly am not sure what I’m hoping for here.

can you feel a bee sting when it gets you inside the throat?: Having never experienced it, I can’t say for sure, but my guess would be … yes. And even if you didn’t, you’d definitely notice it when you find you can’t breathe anymore.

epsilon cult dress code: HOW DID YOU FIND ME?! I have to kill you now…

evangelical christian beekeepers: This one’s just bizarre. Do evangelical christians keep their bees differently from the rest of us? Perhaps they bless their hives regularly. Or preach wearing bee beards.

newspaper articles that illustrate theological worldviews of atheism: … uh… I thought the point of atheism is that we reject any kind of theology…

preferences for gifts and guests in sweden: Chocolate always works! Mmmm, chocolate…

what do i do if the sugar in my honey crystallizes: You heat it carefully, stir and then let it cool.

stephen fry i wanna be a beekeeper: I got a load of hits within a short timespan from someone desperately trying to figure out what Stephen Fry said about bees or beekeeping. I suspect they got him confused with Eddie Izzard:

keywords, death, bees, izzard

When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Or at least, keep quiet about your opinions on their stupid customs. Is there really a point to visiting the blogs of those who disagree with you and telling them they’re wrong?

Via Friendly Atheist I found this post on an astrology blog. It’s an astrological analysis of an author who committed suicide. I must admit I haven’t heard of him before and hence I’m not particularly affected by his death. The astrology post conjures up no feelings in me beyond the usual vague disdain for nonsense.

There are a couple of critical comments on the blog though. One guy says:

Perhaps your head is up Uranus, If you think that the stars had anything to do with this sad situation. I prefer the condolences thanks, not some arcane w@nkery that makes you feel better about yourself.

He probably feels a bit more strongly about this author’s death than I do, which is fair enough really. But one of the astrology-fans replied with this:

I find it highly amusing that people who don’t ‘believe’ in astrology came by to read this post after a couple critics “dissed” it. Isn’t that like looking at pictures of a naked woman and then being offended that she is naked?

And that, I find to be an insightful comment.

See, I don’t think enroaching on other people’s territory and telling them they’re wrong is a good idea. Unless they’re directly harming people, I think it’s respectless to bring our protests not just to their doorstep but into their homes. When I’m in a church, I don’t start arguing with the priest about god’s existence - I’m on his territory (or hers, as the case may be). I think that when I’m invited somewhere, it sort of goes without saying that I should apply at least a little bit of “when in Rome”-thinking. And of course the reverse applies as well. Let’s say a religious person is invited to a debate with atheists. It would be respectless of that person to start trying to practise laying-of-hands on the disbelievers, or even trying to bless the audience.

This obviously doesn’t mean I immediately respect people’s opinions the moment I in some way find myself on their home turf. Nor do I expect them to respect mine. But going to an astrology blog, or a religious forum, or whatever, and starting to argue with them… it rings of “if I don’t like this one particular thing, no one else should be allowed to like it either”. It’s like wanting to forbid sex and violence on TV because you’re too lazy to change the channel. Not exactly like that, but a bit.

In short I really don’t see the point in going to astrology-nut territory and saying astrology is nutty. No one there’s going to agree, and a fair few are going to be offended, and you have accomplished nothing but making yourself look like a spoil-sport. When a person of faith comes over to an atheist blog and starts going on about being offended, a very common response is: “This is an atheist blog! No one forced you to read it. Go somewhere else if you don’t want to be offended.”

And the same really should go for us. I for one very rarely read religious, superstitious or pseudoscientific blogs. They’re not written for me and I know I’ll just end up annoyed or even offended. So why would I expose myself to it?

Now of course, when religious, superstitious or pseudoscientific nonsense is peddled to the general public through for instance mainstream media, we should be there, screaming at the top of our lungs arguing reasonably in a calm voice. But if we truly believe in every person’s right to believe whatever the hell they want to believe, why don’t we just - as a general rule - simply leave them to it, as long as they’re doing it in their own homes, churches or blogs?

superstition, astrology, religion, respect