Dec
30
I decided to write this summary of Michael Shermer’s book, Why People Believe Weird Things partly for myself to review what I’d read (it took me a month of off and on reading to get through it), and to hit some of the highlights for my wife who told me that she didn’t think she’d be able to get all the way through the book based on my description of it. This is by no means a complete summary. Shermer talks about a wide range of weird beliefs, ranging from Holocaust deniers to UFO abductees, and a lot in between.As I began reading the book, I was anxious to get to the final chapter where Shermer addresses the question of “why smart people believe weird things”. So I’ll cut to the chase and give you the answer: “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.” (page 282) After reading the whole book that made a lot of sense to me. Everyone typically arrives at weired beliefs in the same ways, it’s just that smart people are better at finding ways, and especially obscure patterns, to support and defend their weird beliefs.
Shermer says that “myths are not about truth. Myths are about the human struggle to deal with the great passages of time and life - birth, death, marriage, the transitions from childhood to adulthood to old age.” (page 130) In discussing the tension between evolution and religion in some people’s minds, he says that “evolution theory cannot replace faith and religion, and science has no interest in pretending that it can. The theory of evolution is a scientific theory, not a religious doctrine. It stands or falls on evidence alone. Religious faith, by definition, depends on belief when evidence is absent or unimportant. They fill different niches in the human psyche.” (page 135)
So what are some of the reasons that people believe weird things? Here’s Michael’s list:
- It feels good: “More than any other, the reason people believe weird things is because they want to. It feels good. It is comforting. It is consoling. Skeptics, atheists, and militant anti-religionists, in their attempts to undermine belief in a higher power, life after death, and divine providence, are butting up against ten thousand years of history and possibly one hundred thousand years of evolution (if religion and belief in God have a biological basis, which some anthropologists believe they do).” (page 275)
- Immediate Gratification: “Many weird things offer immediate gratification. The 900 number psychic hot-line is a classic example. Deep insight and improvement may take months or years. Delay of gratification is the norm, instant satisfaction the exception. By contrast, the psychic is only a telephone call away.” (page 276)
- Simplicity: “Immediate gratification of one’s beliefs is made all the easier by simple explanations for an often complex and contingent world. God and bad things happen to both good and bad people, seemingly at random. Scientific explanations are often complicated and require training and effort to work through. Superstition and belief in fate and the supernatural provide a simpler path through life’s complex maze.” (page 277)
- Morality and Meaning: “At present, scientific and secular systems of morality and meaning have proved relatively unsatisfying to most people. Without belief in some higher power, people ask, why be moral? What is the basis for ethics? What is the ultimate meaning of life? What’s the point of it all? Scientists and secular humanists have good answers to these good questions, but for many reasons these answers have not reached the population at large. To most people, science seems to offer only cold and brutal logic in its presentation of an infinite, uncaring and purposeless universe. Pseudoscience, superstition, myth, magic, and religion offer simple, immediate, and consoling canons of morality and meaning.” (page 277)
- Hope Springs Eternal: “It is my conviction that humans are, by nature, a forward looking species always seeking greater levels of happiness and satisfaction. Unfortunately, the corollary is that humans are all too often willing to grasp at unrealistic promises of a better life or to believe that a better life can only be attained by clinging to intolerance and ignorance, by lessening the lives of others. And sometimes, by focusing on a life to come, we miss what we have in this life. It is a different source of hope, but it is hope nonetheless: hope that human intelligence, combines with compassion, can solve our myriad problems and enhance the quality of each life; hope that historical progress continues on its march toward greater freedoms and acceptance for all humans; and hope that reason and science as well as love and empathy can help us understand our universe, our world, and ourselves.” (page 278)
Nov
22
Why I don’t go to church every Sunday anymore…
Filed Under Family, Spiritual | 13 Comments
Because of questions that a number of people have asked me, I’ve decided to set the record strait as to why I now consider myself a non-believing Mormon. This is not going to be an easy read for my believing Mormon friends, but it will be worth while and thought provoking. Let me start by saying that most of what the LDS church does is wonderful. I especially love its emphasis on family and service. My local congregation is a group of wonderful, supportive, loving people. That said there are a few doctrines that the institutional church teaches that are discriminatory and hurtful. As well there are elements of the church’s history that are glossed over or misrepresented by the church.
That most in the church have never heard of Joseph Smith’s marriages to other men’s wives is scandalous. Polygamy makes members of the LDS church uncomfortable enough, but if they knew that he married 9 other men’s wives that would give them pause to think (some married with and some without the other husband’s consent). I can’t imagine what it must have been like for Zina and Henry Jacobs when Joseph Smith asked Zina to marry him.
I don’t know how church leaders and other members of the church who know about these marriages justify them in their minds. True, Joseph Smith did many good things during his life, but not all the fruits he produced were sweet. Most of the Book of Mormon is inspiring, but the doctrine and Joseph Smith’s practice of plural marriage was as abhorrent when he was practicing it as it is to us today. To get a feel for what it must have been like for people in his day we need look no further than Warren Jeffs the FLDS prophet (from the summer of 2007) and how he and his church currently practice polygamy. I’m sure we feel at least as uncomfortable at the accounts of him pressuring young girls to marry older men as people in Joseph Smith’s day did about his match making.
Here are the LDS doctrines and practices that I find most objectionable:
- The church’s separate but equal policy with regards to woman and the priesthood. That women cannot hold leadership positions such as Bishop is patently unfair no matter what faithful LDS women say. Ask any 8 year old child, who is more important in the church, men or woman, and you’ll get a more objective and accurate answer. I put this doctrine in the same category as women’s suffrage and blacks and the priesthood. It will change, it is just a question of when.
- The church’s discrimination against gay people and opposition to gay marriage. Most scientists today agree that gay people have not made a choice to be gay, but sexual orientation is most likely the result of a complex interaction of environmental, cognitive and biological factors. In other words this is the way god made them. Active members of the church who are gay are regularly exposed to a virtual hell on earth at church meetings when marriage and the law of chastity are discussed. Their god given sexual drive is described as evil, and they are told that to be exalted they must enter into a marriage with someone of the opposite sex. In many cases this leads to severe depression. In some cases substance abuse is turned to as a way to escape the depression and unfortunately others turn to suicide as a way out. Just think of what a gay person must think when their bishop tells them that it is better off to be dead than to commit sexual sin. For an insightful look at this topic see this Sunstone article.
- The church’s longstanding discrimination against black men (that ended in 1978). Withholding the priesthood from black men was just wrong, and an excellent example of how the Old Testament can be used to support doctrines that make no sense in our modern world.
- I don’t feel good about polygamy in general and particularly with Joseph Smith marrying nine other men’s wives (in addition to the twenty other single women he married). I am inclined to agree with William Law (editor of the Nauvoo Expositor), that if Joseph was a prophet, by the time he started practicing polygamy he was a fallen prophet. This is another example of how the Old Testament can be used to support doctrines that make no sense today.
- The teaching that the prophet of the church can never lead us astray (see above for polygamy as one example of this). I suspect this is where the “cult” accusation against the church comes from. I’d like to think that the prophet would not lead anyone astray, but to say never is unwise given the history of the church. To have an organization tell you that they cannot lead you astray, yet not let you question its teachings is a bad sign. In the short run it does however make it easier to lead an organization when no one challenges or questions your decisions. I believe that the leaders of the church are for the most part well meaning men who act based on their consciences and the needs of the organization.
- The church’s aggressive proselytizing and focus on baptismal goals. This practice antagonizes other churches and can lead to depression in missionaries, when mission goals are not met. I think I personally would have had a much more fulfilling mission, and done much more good if the focus of my mission had been on service to the needy. I will encourage all my kids to take time off school to go do meaningful service in other parts of the world, but will actively discourage them from LDS missions for the above reasons.
- The general focus on the needs of the institutional church, rather than on local needs. What has happened over the past few years with scouting in Victoria, BC, Canada is a very small example of this. Some local church leaders felt that it was in the best interests of the local church not to continue with the Boy Scout program. Then a few years later a church leader from Salt Lake arrived and told them that scouting was not an optional program. It is also interesting the the primary benchmark to determine whether or not members in a region are ready for the building of a temple is tithing. This is clearly and example of the institution looking after it own material needs.
- The church not being accountable to members for how tithing monies are spent. As a matter of principle, the church should report its receipts and expenditures to the tithe paying members of the church. It should also report all salaries and stipends given to general authorities of the church. I would be surprised if there was anything greatly amiss, but we currently have no way of knowing.
- The teaching that one can know that the LDS church is Gods’ one true church by saying that it is true (the get a testimony by bearing it method). Studies show that the more often you say something you don’t believe, the more you begin to believe that thing. Not a good foundation for a spiritual practice as I’ve found out. Having a testimony of the institutional church or “the church” places faith in a man made institution rather than with god and in higher spiritual things. Whether this has been encouraged maliciously or unintentionally I do not now. I do know that it does not feel right.
- The church’s only true church doctrine. I think it is more important to god that I be a good, charitable person rather than to simply be a person who has been baptised and participated in priesthood ordinances.
One LDS church leader quoted me the scripture “by their fruits shall ye know them” to me, hoping that I would think of all the good things the church does and want to come back into full fellowship. As I said there are a lot of good fruits produced by the church (service and its community for example), but there are also some rotten fruit on the vine, that no one in authority seems to doing anything about. If God is a just god and if He was truly leading the LDS church, then these things would not be. To me this is one of the strongest evidences that the LDS church is a man made organization that is led by well meaning, but not divinely led men. Most religions in the world teach many good things… That the LDS church teaches many good things is not remarkable in that context. Joseph Smith took a more enlightened position many of the things that were being debated by the Christian denominations of his day. For that we can be thankful.
I believe that if current members were more mindful of the effects of the church’s hurtful doctrines, and became fully aware of the history of the church that they have not been taught in Sunday School, that they would demand changes. They would also begin to call the current church leadership to account for the way they have handled their steward-ships. As Joesph Smith reformed the religion of his day, the same needs to be done today in the LDS church. The church as become rigid, hierarchical and bound to tradition, the very opposite of the radically inclusive, and open church that Joseph Smith founded.
I am at peace with the direction I am currently taking. I also have no regrets about the time and energy I’ve put into the church over the years. I still attend church meetings and activities periodically, and make sure that my children know where the pitfalls are in the church’s doctrine and practice for when they attend. To be honest to myself and to those closest to me, I feel I had no other choice. In my view the church is on the morally wrong side of a number of important issues, and to know that those things are wrong, and to be in a leadership position with that knowledge, was something I felt was hypocritical for me to do. If I felt that there was any chance to reform from within, that might have changed how I’ve acted, but the church’s organizational and disciplinary structure is such that unless you are at a very high level in the leadership of the church, the opportunities to influence church policy are almost nil.
There is much good in the LDS church. It is a loving service oriented organization. We need to build on the good and reject the discriminatory, hurtful and unjust doctrines that are rotting on the vine. Members of the church need to be vocal about what they believe in their hearts and not just object in silence when hurtful and uncharitable doctrines are taught. If there is a just God, then living a good, moral, service oriented life is all that is required of us. That is what I am trying to do, and it is what I will teach my children.
Nov
7
Good, Better or Best
Filed Under Spiritual | 4 Comments
What would Jesus do if given the choice between helping the homeless or transcribing vital statistics from digital images to text on a computer? Believe it or not recently I was personally confronted with this exact dilemma. I had to choose between two good things I could spend my time doing. Here is what happened:
A couple of weeks ago I helped someone at the LDS church (or mormon church) with a presentation on Family History. The LDS church is embarking on an ambitious project to digitize vast numbers of census and vital statistics documents in their archives to make them more accessible to people doing genealogical research. When the project is complete it will be a wonderful resource for both genealogists and academic researchers. The church is encouraging as many of its members as possible to participate in this project.
The following day I read in our local newspaper that homeless shelters in the city were looking for volunteers (look to the end of the article I linked to to find out how to volunteer to help the homeless in Victoria, BC, Canada) to help out in order to make more beds available for homeless people as winter approaches.
I couldn’t help but think back to a title of a talk given by one of the leaders of the church, who said that as we look the things we do in our daily lives, to make sure we are not just settling for the “good”, but look for the “best” things that will do the most good. So what would Jesus do? Anyone who is familiar with the story of the Good Samaritan will know that Jesus would most certainly help the homeless person. While digitizing historical records is a good thing to do, helping someone who is homeless is undoubtedly a better use of my precious time.
I’ve now signed up to help out at emergency shelters that are opened in extremely cold weather (cold for Victoria at least). I’ll post something after my first night volunteering to let you know how it went.
photo credit: james_at_middleage
photo url: http://flickr.com/photos/72892823@N00/163320882/
May
28
The Paradox of Choice
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I’ve got a bad back this morning so I’m going to do a “copy & paste” blog posting this morning. The embedded video below is great, and dovetails nicely with my previous post on Manufacturing Happiness. Enjoy!
“Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central belief of western societies: that freedom of choice leads to personal happiness. In Schwartz’s estimation, all that choice is making us miserable. We set unreasonably high expectations, question our choices before we even make them, and blame our failures entirely on ourselves. His relatable examples, from consumer products (jeans, TVs, salad dressings) to lifestyle choices (where to live, what job to take, whom and when to marry), underscore this central point: Too many choices undermine happiness.” - from the TED website
“The Secret to happiness is low expectations.” Low expectations make it much easier to be pleasantly surprised.
May
24
Dan Gilbert gave a great 20 minute lecture at the TED Conference about Happiness and how we stumble into it, and how we create it ourselves.
Our brain is a simulation machine… It is great, but it tends to overemphasize the effects of major events in our lives. For example we tend to overestimate the potential upside of good things that happen to us, and tends to overemphasize the potential downside as well. If something happened over 3 months ago, it has virtually no impact on your current happiness. A great example of this is the opposite cases of the lottery winner, and someone who becomes a paraplegic. After one year, both individuals are at the same level of happiness that they we at before their supposed life changing events. Very counter intuitive.
We have with-in us the ability to create or “synthesize happiness”. In other words we can look for the good in everything that happens to us, and can genuinely feel happy. He gives examples of people who have had terrible things happen to them (like being put in jail for 20 years for a crime the person did not commit), and how they say that that terrible thing was the best thing that happened to them. These people looked for the good in what they experienced and “created” or “synthesized” happiness.
Dan talks about how we tend to place a higher value on happiness that we encounter by chance rather than by happiness that we create ourselves. Natural happiness is when you get what you want, and synthetic happiness is what make when we don’t get what we want. In our society we tend to believe that natural happiness is of a higher quality than synthetic happiness. Why? “What kind of an economy would we have if people believed that they could be just as happy with the ’stuff’ they currently own, rather than going out and buying new stuff at the shopping mall, that marketers have told us that will make us happy?”
He goes on to explain that “Synthetic” happiness is just as good as “Natural” happiness. Watch the 20 minute video for the details… It’s great!
Lastly Dan talks about how excessive choice is the enemy of synthetic happiness. We seem to be able to more easily create happiness when we are stuck with a choice or stuck in a particular situation. We find ways to be happy with what we are stuck with. If we have multiple choices or opportunities to change our choices we don’t have the same sort of ownership of the situation. We may change the situation or what we have, so we unconsciously don’t invest in it by synthesizing happiness. Ironically enough, if people are given a choice to be in a situation where they can change their minds, or simple make a choice and stick with it, most people with opt for the situation where they can change their minds, which will tend to make them less happy.
Apr
23
The Gravy Guy
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An interesting thing has happened to me over this past year. Almost every time there has been a big family dinner on my wife’s side of the family, I have been press ganged into making the gravy. Up until this year, my gravy making has been hit and miss. I would more often than not have large lumps in the gravy … I’m sure this had had my gravy making grandma McCue turning in her grave. My mother on the other hand (just like my grandma did in her day) consistently makes excellent tasting, wonderfully smooth gravy. Her ability to make great gravy, along with my wife’s ability to tell people that I "make gravy" (without commenting on the quality of the gravy I make), has made it so that my sister-in-laws have consistently asked me to make the gravy at our family dinners for about a year now. No one every asks me to make gravy on my side of the family (I will occasionally be asked to cut the meat). They all look to the experts that my mother has personally trained over the years (my sisters). I have watched the process of gravy making since I was a child, but did not have any practical experience until after I was married. The experience I did get after marrying Heather, didn’t come that frequently, and occasionally produced disaster (like the time I put the pyrex pan on the element to warm the gravy… until the pan exploded, delaying Thanksgiving dinner by an hour or so.)
A few years ago Heather’s mother and father passed away. Her dad was the "gravy guy" in the family until his passing, and it appears that I have inherited his role in family dinners. For now, I am the go to guy for gravy. I have consistently made good tasting, non lumpy gravy all year now! I’m confident that my grandmother McCue smiles down on me every time I make her wonderful tasting, non lumpy, southern Albertan gravy. I’ve also noticed that when my wife tells people that I can make gravy, she doesn’t just stop by saying that I can "make gravy", but qualifies it by saying that I make "good" or "excellent" gravy. Kind of weird that circumstances have made me the "Gravy Guy" in at least half of my world.
Apr
19
Would you be Happier if you had More Money?
Filed Under Family, Spiritual, Work | Leave a Comment
I read an interesting article a few weeks ago. The title caught my attention. It was called, "Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer?" I know that sometimes I think I’d be happier if I had a bit more money in my pocket. So what did the researchers find out? The article said that people who are struggling to put a roof over their head and food on their table typically saw an increase in happiness as their income increased. Their happiness continued to increase until the per-capita house hold income reached $12,000 (This is for the United States, in US dollars). After that point there was virtually no increase in reported happiness as income rose above that level. On a graph, happiness increased steadily with income, until the $12,000 per person mark, and then it went almost completely flat.
A different research group also took a look at lottery winners in Great Britain. Interestingly he found that in the case of people who won large lotteries (over $200,000); they reported a significant increase in happiness immediately after winning, but within a year, most were back to the same level of happiness that they were at before winning.
Both of these studies confirm what I saw a number of years ago while I was living in Brazil. Most of the people I worked with would be considered "poor" if they lived in Canada, but most were quite happy in spite of their relative lack of material possessions.
What this tells me is that if someone is unhappy with a little bit of money (once their basic needs are met), then there is a very good chance that they will be unhappy with a lot of money. It turns out that money doesn’t buy happiness in the long run. I better get back to work so I can afford my gym membership 
…
Mar
26
Great Advice for life - Steve Jobs
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Steve jobs gave a great commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005. In it he talks about how little things he did as he was going to, and then dropping out, of University came back to be a great help to him later in life. In retrospect he was able to connect the dots and see how things came together for him, however at the time he was just following his heart, trying to figure out how to live happily.
Next he tells about how his firing from apple in the mid 1980’s was one of the best things that could happen to him, although at the time it was devastating. The firing opened up doors to him that he would not have been able to approach in any other way. He was able to start up Next comptuer, Pixar, and meet his wife.
Lastly he talks about how you have to love what you are doing for work. He said "Every morning I wake up and ask myself if I like what I am about to do that day. If I go to many days not liking what I am doing, I know I need to make a change". His diagnosis with cancer reinforced that desire to live every day to it’s fullest. To make sure he is working on things that are worth while and that make him happy. His final words are "Stay Hungry and Stay Foolish".
Mar
6
Ice Cream & iPods - for The Vinyl Cafe
Filed Under Family, Other Stuff, Spiritual | 1 Comment
[This is a letter that I sent to Stuart McLean at the CBC radio show ‘The Vinyl Cafe‘]
Dear Stuart,
The Vinyl Cafe has been on my mind a lot these past few days. My wife has finally convinced me to write this letter.
I was in the hospital every afternoon this past week for my latest round of treatments. I shared a room during my stay on the Oncology Ward with a three older gentlemen. During the course of the week different patients came an went, but Cliff, one of the fellow patients, was there the whole week with me. While I was around each afternoon, Cliff was never alone. His wife, Pearl, stayed with him during the day and was kind enough to go get some of those little plastic ice cream cups for us all from the fridge down the hall. It must have been at least 25 years since I last ate an ice cream out of one those little cups with the cardboard peel-off lids. The only change those cups have undergone in the past 25 years is that they do not ship them with those little wooden spoons anymore. The good news is that the taste is exactly like I remembered… cool, creamy goodness, laced with enough sugar that they cannot help but taste wonderful. Cliff, Pearl and I sat around enjoying, or eating one of life’s simple pleasures while our other roommates enjoyed an afternoon nap.
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Mar
2
Day 3 of Chemo
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Things continue to go well with my chemotherapy treatments this week at the hospital. I haven’t been able to notice any side effects except for being a bit tired, so that is probably a good thing. The nursing staff who have been taking care of me have been wonderful. They seem to like to treat me like a mischievous son… actually they treat me a lot like my mother does 
I guess that makes sense when you consider that while I’m in the hospital for 3 to 5 hours every afternoon I’ve been sharing a room with three elderly gentlemen in their 70’s or 80’s. Compared to them I must look like a young buck.
I did learn something interesting yesterday from my nurse. She was just getting ready to hook me up to My IV drip when I ask her if she knew how much my treatment cost. She said she didn’t know but that she would go and find out. I didn’t expect that she would know off the top of her head, and half suspected that she wouldn’t be able to easily find out the cost either. To my surprise she came back about two minutes later with a small booklet with, among other things, the cost of cancer treatment drugs. After thumbing through he booklet she found my drug, and showed me that the cost was $485 per mg, and that my half liter bag clear fluid contained 10 mg of the drug. So the total cost of the drugs for my daily treatment is about $4,850, and the total for my week long treatment will total over $24,000. Needless to say I think I’m getting my money’s worth out of my federal and provincial taxes this year. UPDATE: My nurse told me that she had mis-read the booklet. The cost was about $500 per day, not $5000 per day. So the treatment was not quite as expensive as I first throught it was.
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