Why are dirty underwear, mutant clover, and amputated mammal appendages associated with good fortune?  How did humans develop our “lucky” rituals? And why are they usually gross when you think about them? I hope to address two of these three questions, read on to find out which.

A lucky charm I made in college: card laminated with a 4-leaf clover

Tonight I will be watching my beloved Baltimore Ravens playing the Cleveland Browns on Monday Night Football.  It should be an easy game but I don’t want to leave anything to chance (my fantasy team also needs a strong showing from the Baltimore defense).  I’ll be doing everything in my power to help my team win: that is, nothing in particular.

I am on the record publicly disbelieving in luck.  But I am fascinated by the power the belief in luck has over us.  Even very rational and scientific people have rituals and “lucky’ charms.  As Neils Bohr is credited with saying, “I don’t believe in luck, but I hear it works even if you don’t believe.”

Why are we so beholden to the belief in luck?

Superstitious Pigeons

The famous psychologist BF Skinner once did an experiment on hungry pigeons. In one test, he conditioned them to react to the word “peck” or “turn” and rewarded the correct behavior by giving them food. Interestingly, they would perform the action more if the reward happened at a variable rate – not every time the bird pecked, but every three times or ten times. Their behavior was used to learn about the human capacity for conditioning – slot machines are so addictive because they operate on the same principle.

What was more interesting was another experiment in which the researchers rewarded the pigeons at intervals that had no connection to what the birds were doing. The pigeons instinctively try to repeat whatever action they did which caused the food to come. Superstitions arose:

One bird was conditioned to turn counter-clockwise about the cage, making two or three turns between reinforcements. Another repeatedly thrust its head into one of the upper corners of the cage. A third developed a ‘tossing’ response, as if placing its head beneath an invisible bar and lifting it repeatedly. Two birds developed a pendulum motion of the head and body, in which the head was extended forward and swung from right to left with a sharp movement followed by a somewhat slower return.

How cool is that?

Superstitious Humans

She’s either doing the Gangsta Lean or trying to make her ball move

Are we better than the pigeons? Well, yes, in various ways, but not when it comes to the superstition.  Our brains evolved with the strong urge to see causation and pattern.  It’s how we learn about the world.

But we get a lot of false positives.  Even for things out of our control, there’s still the impulse to do what you can to affect the world.  A classic example is in bowling.  It’s extremely common for people to lean one way or the other in a desperate attempt to make their ball stay out of the gutter.  Why do they do it?  No doubt in the past the ball curved while someone was leaning that way and they unconsciously made a connection.  I’ve caught myself doing it, and it… feels right.  I feel like I’m affecting the ball even though I rationally know I’m not.  The urge to find causation is that strong.

Bowling is a particular case in which the actions taken after the ball is thrown have nothing to do with the result. Other rituals might genuinely have an effect – but on the person’s confidence, not on external reality. An athlete wearing the same dirty underwear before playing in a baseball series might be more relaxed and confident, leading to better performance. The connection between the underwear and the win is reinforced, and forms an upward spiral.

Perhaps a hiker found a clover with four leaves instead of the normal three and picked it up for the novelty, only to have good fortune later in the day. A faulty connection is made and a superstition is born.

Don’t ask me about the rabbit’s foot; I have no idea where that sick idea came from.

Religious Implications

Daniel Dennett makes the point in Breaking the Spell that this tendency could explain many religious rituals.  If a society doesn’t understand what caused the rain to come, elaborate rain dances will follow. As time goes on and the illusion of causation is semi-reinforced by random events, the rituals get more and more elaborate.

How many times have you heard someone say “I prayed for my brother to get better and his fever went away! Explain THAT!” If the human mind is frantically figuring out possible ways to understand and affect the world, faulty connections like this are very likely. We just have to foster better understanding and internalization of probability, the scientific method, and psychology.

What superstitions did you used to (or still do) practice?

Here’s a test I’m trying tonight: every time I take a drink of beer, I expect the Ravens to have a good play. It’s for science!

The cooing of pigeons brought memory into the procession. Dessie remembered how her father had said, sitting at the head of the table, “I told Rabbit I was going to raise some pigeons and—do you know?—he said, ‘No white pigeons.’ ‘Why not white?’ I asked him, and he said, ‘They’re the rare worst of bad luck. You take a flight of white pigeons and they’ll bring sadness and death. Get gray ones.’ ‘I like white ones.’ ‘Get gray ones,’ he told me. And as the sky covers me, I’ll get white ones.”

And [his wife] Liza said patiently, “Why do you be forever testing, Samuel? Gray ones taste just as good and they’re bigger.”

“I’ll let no flimsy fairy tale push me,” Samuel said.

And Liza said with her dreadful simplicity, “You’re already pushed by your own contentiousness. You’re a mule of contention, a very mule!”

“Someone’s got to do these things,” he said sullenly. “Else Fate would not ever get nose-thumbed and mankind would still be clinging to the top branches of a tree.”

And of course he got white pigeons and waited truculently for sadness and death until he’d proved his point.

And yet, as Dessie realizes, “Sadness and death… you just have to wait around long enough and it will come” — white pigeons or gray ones.

Jim Stevens says he’s not particularly religious and is clueless about why an image resembling Jesus Christ keeps appearing on his pickup.

Stevens — of Jonesborough — says nearly every morning, an image that looks to him like the face of Jesus Christ has appeared in the condensation on the driver’s side window of his Isuzu truck.

A Johnson City Press photo of the truck showed a facial image.

Stevens said when he first saw the image, he figured it would evaporate and not return. But it kept reappearing for two weeks now.

Stevens said folks at the grocery store he goes to were amazed to see the image.

He says he isn’t going to wash the truck for a while.

I’ll give this guy credit though — at least he just says “I don’t know” and isn’t worshiping it. That’s some progress!

(I’m obviously kidding that I had anything to do with the sticker, but that’s my initial guess based on the detail of the image and when it appears.)

Update: It’s even simpler than I first said — who needs rain-x when you have sticker residue? So I removed the rain-x complication.

The 9-year-old boy lay on a bloodstained hospital sheet crawling with ants, staring blindly at the wall.

His family pastor had accused him of being a witch, and his father then tried to force acid down his throat as an exorcism. It spilled as he struggled, burning away his face and eyes. The emaciated boy barely had strength left to whisper the name of the church that had denounced him — Mount Zion Lighthouse.

A month later, he died.

This is an instance where Christianity is destructive. If they could be convinced witches and demons didn’t exist — which are beliefs that stem from a supernatural/religious worldview — I think this sort of behavior would drop substantially, if not completely.

He also says that the US became a powerful country because we acknowledged God (unlike, you know, all those other countries), and now it will decline as people turn into evil atheists.

The stupid, it burns! It’s hard to believe people actually watch his guy for anything but entertainment.

(via)

Robert Ingersoll

Imagine a vine that grows at one end and decays at the other. The end that grows is heresy, the end that rots is orthodox. The dead are orthodox, and your cemetery is the most perfect type of a well regulated church. No thought, no progress, no heresy there. Slowly and silently, side by side, the satisfied members peacefully decay. There is only this difference — the dead do not persecute.

Blasphemy and heresy are necessary for progress. Ideas must be challenged for us to know if they are true — and if we cannot challenge an idea, we cannot know if it is true. Truth can handle being questioned; falsehood cannot.

Orthodoxy does not protect truth — it protects lies, for only lies need protection. Truth can stand on its own.

The objective of International Blasphemy Day is to open up all religious beliefs to the same level of free inquiry, discussion and criticism to which all other areas of academic interest are subjected.

Why September 30?  The last day in September is the anniversary of the original publication of Danish cartoons in 2005 depicting the prophet Muhammad’s face.  Any visual depiction of Muhammad is considered a grave offence under Islamic law.

The fury which arose within the Islamic community following this publication led to massive riots, attacks on foreign embassies and deaths.

The newspapers which chose to publish these cartoons were in many cases blamed for the outpouring of violence which followed.  This unfortunate yet inevitable sequence of events clearly demonstrated a dangerous misconception that had piggy-backed into the 21st century on the shoulders of ignorance, fear and apathy, that all religious beliefs and ideas deserve respect and are beyond criticism or satire.

International Blasphemy Day is a movement, not just a day, to remind the world that religion should never again be beyond open and honest discussion or reproach. Our future depends on it.

Sounds good to me. I blaspheme every day, so today is just as good as any. In celebration, I present you with this highly offensive and blasphemous picture of Muhammad, or at least that’s what I’m told.

Do you have any good blasphemies planned for today?

1. We should believe the Bible because Christ believed the Bible.
2. We should believe the Bible because it accurately explains and powerfully changes our lives.

As far as arguments go, I’m afraid I must classify both as terrible.

Christ Believed It

Pullquote: Christ is trustworthy and He trusted God’s Word. So should we.
Aaron Menikoff

Regarding the first point, Menikoff says:

Such reasoning may sound circuitous or circular. It is not…. If Jesus Christ is trustworthy, then His words about the authority of the Bible should be trusted as well. Christ is trustworthy and He trusted God’s Word. So should we. Without faith in Christ, you will not believe the Bible is the self-disclosure of God. With faith in Christ, you cannot help but believe the Bible is God’s Word.

So we should believe the Bible is a reliable guide to the truth about Jesus… because Jesus believed the Bible? Sounds like a circular argument to me. And even if it could be shown that Jesus thought the Bible was reliable, what Bible would he be referring to? Certainly the New Testament wasn’t written when Jesus was alive, so he can’t be referring to that, which is the topic of discussion. We’re asking if the New Testament can be trusted about it’s extraordinary claims about Jesus — you can’t answer it by saying the Jesus of the New Testament trusts the Old Testament, therefore we know we can trust the New Testament. Only a believer could swallow that kind of circular reasoning and then have the audacity to repeat it, insisting it’s not circular.

Menikoff may want the logic to not be circular, but wishing doesn’t make it so. You can’t make logical fallacies go away simply by closing your eyes and insisting they don’t exist.

It’s Life Changing!

Pullquote: People of all religions — and even those of us who are not religious — have life-changing experiences. It’s part of being human.

In my experience there is only one argument that remains for why people believe in the Bible and Christianity — the argument from personal experience. This is known as a “testimony” and evangelism classes teach proselytizers to use them because “they are the one thing that cannot be argued against.”

Which is true, in a way. There’s no reason to argue that a person didn’t have an experience. People of all religions — and even those of us who are not religious — have life-changing experiences. It’s part of being human.

But they don’t always interpret their experiences rationally. A person may have stopped drinking a bottle of vodka a night, but that doesn’t mean Jesus had anything to do with it. They might claim that at first, saying “I once was a drunk, until Jesus picked me up out of the miry clay and changed my life. Thank you Jesus!” Yet if you dig a little deeper, it ends up there is a lot more to the story — usually you’ll find they had the help of a substance abuse program, a new community of friends to help keep them accountable, and/or a new-found religious obsession to take the place of their old addiction.

My life was changed by Christianity. It has also been changed by books I’ve read and experiences I’ve had. One of my favorite books is East of Eden by John Steinbeck, which powerfully describes human nature. Does that mean it’s divinely inspired because it gives insight into our common struggles? Of course not — it’s just a good book.

The Bible is a myth — a sweeping narrative that tries to explain the human condition. Some people (including myself at one time), find it speaks powerfully and provides a framework for understanding the world. It’s a superstitious framework, but it’s better than nothing. For people who are wandering aimlessly, have trouble being moral, or are in a time of crisis, it can be a stabilizing influence. And I’m glad it works for them!

Yet people have the same experience with the Koran, the Book of Mormon, the Vedas, and others. Does that mean we must take them all to be reliable guides to truth and their holy prophets? If so, then what truth should we believe — they all contradict each other!

These arguments will not convince someone who is searching for truth. His points will get head nods from the choir, but they are not challenging or persuasive to a skeptic. He’s talking in a different epistemological language that unfortunately makes us talk past each other.

Menikoff already knows his arguments fail. That’s why he says, “Without faith in Christ, you will not believe the Bible is the self-disclosure of God.” In other words, you have to already believe the Bible is reliable to know it’s reliable — which doesn’t help any of us who question it’s reliability.

But who needs facts, when you can stick your head in the sands of faith?

So, in conclusion, he says he used a “wisdom of the crowds” method where people guessed random numbers, then he averaged them together, to get the result. I think we all know that’s bullshit with random numerical systems. At the end he gives another option that he could have had an insider working at the lottery and fixed the machines, but he says that would be illegal and he wouldn’t admit to that if he did it.

Personally I don’t think either are what really happened and the explanation is a much simpler trick — I’m a bit disappointed that Darren said he was going to reveal how he did it, but didn’t.

Or did he? What do you think?

And don’t forget about Buddhism, Islam, and Mormonism:

Of course, there are exceptions. Modern evangelicalism is a rebellion to this, and is just hocus pocus without the silly clothing.

(source)

It seems, if you look at the conference schedule, that the liberal Lutherans were contemplating making some friendly statements about their gay congregants, so obviously this was an example of gentle smiting of sodomites.

Of course, also on the schedule were bible study and hymn singing — god hates “Onward Christian Soldiers”. And a middle school in North Branch — god hates education. It knocked down many trees — god hates elms.

God hates elms. What a great idea for a t-shirt, I thought. Some commenters on PZ’s site also thought so, so a friend and I whipped one up:

You can purchase it in a variety of styles and colors.

And if you have any other ideas for cool t-shirts, send them my way and I’ll see what I can do.

An alleged mermaid, said to resemble a cross between a fish and a young girl, only appears at sunset. It performs a few tricks for onlookers before disappearing for the night.

One of the first people to see the mermaid, Shlomo Cohen, said, “I was with friends when suddenly we saw a woman laying on the sand in a weird way. At first I thought she was just another sunbather, but when we approached she jumped into the water and disappeared. We were all in shock because we saw she had a tail.”

The sightings apparently began several months ago.

The town’s tourism board is of course delighted with their newfound fame and local mystery fauna. Taking a cue from the town of Inverness, Scotland (on the shore of Loch Ness), the Kiryat Yam government has offered a $1 million reward for the first person to photograph the creature. Town spokesman Natti Zilberman thinks the reward money is well-spent. “I believe if there really is a mermaid then so many people will come to Kiryat Yam, a lot more money will be made than $1 million.”

Their government is pretty smart to offer a reward — though it will also encourage more fakes.

Like miracles, this is an event people swear to have seen with their own eyes, yet no evidence has been produced. Skeptics are, well, skeptical, and just saying you saw a mermaid isn’t enough. You have to prove it, or we’re going to assume you had too much to drink or experienced an optical illusion (which is common with water).

But if you have real proof, we’ll be happy to believe it.

Until then, we’ll laugh at you.

During a passive Nigerian conference meant to explore ways of combating the abuse, expulsion and murder of children wrongly accused of witchcraft, more than 150 members of the Christian witch-hunter Helen Ukpabio’s Liberty Gospel Church reportedly overpowered the non-combative participants, invading the conference and subjecting attendees to threats, violence and physical attacks.

During the July 29 incident, the mob attacked conference speaker Leo Igwe, the Center for Inquiry’s Nigerian representative and secretary of the Nigerian Humanist Movement. Igwe said disruptive individuals broke his glasses and stole his bag, camera, cell phone and other items in an unsuccessful attempt to halt the discussion. A transcript of Igwe’s talk—copies of which he reported were stolen with his bag—is available upon request.

The invasion was caught on film:

These people are dangerous. They maim and kill children, and they’ll hurt and try to silence people who disagree with them.

What can be done?