Healthcare, Islam, Racism, Socialism – why I really shouldn’t bother watching the BBC

A young woman on a BBC question programme this morning was asked if she’s happy to pay for other people’s healthcare. She said yes, of course. No matter how much tax? Yes, of course. Aww, how very noble of you. But wait, isn’t there already a way for individuals to help others if they CHOOSE to? Yes. It’s called charity! Please think about that before assuming that other free citizens are happy to have their property taken by force to support your sense of altruism.

Of course, being a BBC program, it’s stacked with lefties none of whom would ever ever ask the question as to WHY the NHS consistently fails in the first place. Why prices rise, service declines, healthcare is rationed… whereas the exact opposite happens in non socialised markets… because the answer is unthinkable in their ideology.

And on BBC Sunday Politics, Andrew Neil interviewing Tommy Robinson, leader of the English Defence League. Now, leaving aside what you may or may not think about the EDL, the questions being raised are: Is Islam terrorism a serious threat in this country? Is Islam a religion of peace? Is the British way of life being threatened by religious fanatics, whilst political correctness is a shelter for the latter and a club of “racism” for the former? Those are very important questions, and need to be bravely asked and talked about.

Which is why, naturally, Andrew Neil spent the entire time questioning the EDL’s motives, actions, gestures, speech – bringing up criminal offences from 10 years ago of some individual members. Of course, when a Muslim murders a British citizen, we are told that we shouldn’t judge the Islam community by the actions of a few of its members. But when an EDL member does something bad, once, in his entire life, that means the EDL is fascist and rascist… Mr. Neil ignored all the rebuttals of Mr. Robinson, talked over him, repeated refuted statements, and made the discussion a personal attack on Tommy Robinson himself, and avoided the actual issues being raised.

I’m not supporting the EDL, but this was clearly another example of the multicultural politically-correct Left-wing agenda that the BBC has pushed for decades. They don’t want a discussion on religion. Who seriously believes the BBC is a fair honest British institution that we can trust? It never was, and it never will be. And WE are forced to pay for it.

And as for the issue at hand: yes, Islam extremism is a problem, and it is encouraged by left-wing politics. The cure is a free society of limited government that protects the rights of ALL citizens equally.

And to top it all off, we have a young Socialist on the programme claiming that capitalism caused the global financial meltdown years ago, which it didn’t, that Statism cured it, which it didn’t, and that the public sector gave us the internet… The free-market supporter tried to explain why the Financial Crisis was actually caused by US socialised institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but the subject was immediately changed and he couldn’t continue.

I really shouldn’t watch political programmes, especially on the BBC. I come away angry, frustrated, and incredibly depressed that so many people actually believe this nonsense.

Why ‘Prometheus’ gets it all wrong, and why it matters

There were a lot of things wrong with Prometheus (daft dialogue, ridiculous character behaviour, odd-pacing, odd-editing and incongruous music), but I’m only going to focus on the greatest error the film made: its ridiculous distain for scientific fact. I’m going to explain just how badly the writers got it wrong and why it matters. I almost laughed before I realised how tragic the tale is.

If you’re telling a fantasy story you can pretty much get away with anything. With science fiction, depending on how “hard” or “soft” you want it: you can get away with a lot less or a bit less respectively. Prometheus fails as science fiction because there is nothing more scientific about its premise than the Never Ending Story’s. But even if you want to say that Prometheus is a bit of fantasy fun set in space, it still fails because it contradicts some of the most important and established knowledge we have, just as any fantasy story that depicted the earth as being the fourth planet from the sun would instantly lose all credibility and connection with the audience. Similarly, even a fantasy about humans must depict them as creatures with two arms, two legs, and not, for example, 100 tentacles.  We know that the earth is not the fourth planet from the sun, so whatever planet “earth” we are told is the fourth from its sun, it’s not ours, and it’s not our earth, and it’s not us, just like we might connect with a 100-limbed fantasy species and even empathise with them, but if you call them “human” you’re just being silly. But imagine that a large politically-powerful group of people had a vested interest in perpetuating a myth that our earth is in fact the fourth planet from the sun. All the evidence notwithstanding, Mars is the third planet and Earth is the fourth. What seems like a scientific faux pas and bit of fantasy fun takes on a darker and worrying shade. Well that is the problem with Prometheus.

The basic plot of Prometheus is: an alien race dropped their DNA in the oceans of earth long ago and so created humans. This is about as scientific as saying that you can take a drop of blood from a dog, inject it into a giraffe, and expect the giraffe to give birth to dogs or giraffe-dog hybrids. The very definition of “species” in fact is a community that can only breed successfully with itself.

During the film, it’s discovered that these aliens called “Engineers” have a 100% DNA match with humans. This is either rubbish or meaningless, take your pick. If the writers were trying to say that the Engineers are genetically similar to humans, the match is trivial: every living thing that lives or has ever lived on this planet shares the same DNA. A lot of DNA is arguably junk anyway, but “there is more than 95% to 98% similarity between related genes in humans and apes in general. (Just as in the mouse, quite a few genes probably are not common to humans and apes, and these may influence uniquely human or ape traits.) Similarities between mouse and human genes range from about 70% to 90%, with an average of 85% similarity but a lot of variation from gene to gene…” [source] So if they have the same DNA code as us, so what? That only proves that they evolved on earth. But if the insinuation is that they are a 100% DNA match with humans, despite being aliens, that is nonsense because…they aren’t human! That would be like a forensic detective placing you at a murder scene 5000 miles away and 5000 years in the past, because your DNA was a 100% match to a criminal in the past, which is impossible, or matching you because you both happen to be human beings…

But, even if aliens could drop something in earth’s primordial oceans that could somehow mingle with DNA…even that doesn’t make sense because evolution simply doesn’t work that way. A few Star Trek episodes tried to do something similar with evolution and failed for the same reasons. In those stories, the premise was that evolution could be sped up and the results observed in hours or days instead of millions of years. This is such a spectacular misunderstanding of evolution that it makes me depressed just thinking about it. But before I explain that, let’s start at the beginning:

All living things on this planet are the product of common descent. We all share the same DNA and metabolise energy in the same way because those fundamental parts of life happened once, billions of years ago, and not again. All life is descended from very simple self-replicating molecules. On this planet, DNA eventually got this job and the code used is the same today as it was 3 billion years ago. (If life exists on another planet, it too almost certainly started with very simple self-replicating molecules, but it’s overwhelmingly improbable that it would evolve the same DNA code as Earth’s, if it even used DNA at all.) Today, there are thousands of computer programming languages because each was designed by a human computer programmer for a specific need. But in nature, there is only one programming language and it had to be modified and utilised only by trial-by-fire selection in the wild over a very long time. (Incidentally, the ubiquity of this one (and only one) natural language is another argument against intelligent design.)

The “Engineers” could not have any DNA similarity with us unless they came from earth, which they clearly did not do. But we didn’t see the Engineers dropping DNA into the earth 3.5 billion years ago (unless the opening scene of the film was supposed to be earth at that time…in which case I suggest History of the Earth 101 for the writers to give them an idea of what this planet was like so early in its life. Let’s just say Hell would’ve been more hospitable.)  But suppose the engineers got DNA started in the first place (which isn’t implied in the film) all those aeons ago. Is that any better? Nope. Which brings us to:

Humans look the way we do because on this planet we are a member of the primate family. We share a common ancestor with all apes alive today, and our nearest relatives are chimpanzees. The modern human being as we know it today is only about 150,000 years old. But, we didn’t have to evolve this way. On earth, countless unpurposed events directed life in different directions. To name just two: the great oxygen catastrophe and the Cretaceous–Paleogene event (which wiped out the dinosaurs) – two events which forever shifted the course of evolution on Earth, and which were unplanned and devastating in their own right. The oxygen catastrophe didn’t have to happen, but it did. A meteor didn’t have to hit the earth and wipe out the dinosaurs, but it did. On this planet in the past, creatures that we would call primates today found it advantageous to walk upright thus freeing their hands for manipulating the world. On this world, that gave them an advantage over their competitors in the wild. Those creatures which would become us developed higher intelligence as tool-using thinkers. But as Chuck from sfdesbris.com says: “it’s not enough to be smarter, smarter has to give you a distinct advantage.” It’s not a foregone conclusion that evolution will lead to intelligent life, although given time and the right conditions one might expect it to. One might also expect that intelligent life on other worlds would be analogous to humans as tool-using thinkers, using their appendages to manipulate the world and freeing up their bodies to evolve larger brains. But that is not to say at all that such life would also evolve from creatures that would look anything like primates – they could just as easily look like walking octopuses. Again, on earth – we look the way we do, not because some alien dropped some DNA in a pool 3 billion years ago (and most certainly no sooner), but because we evolved from similar looking creatures who evolved from similar looking creatures, all of whom can call themselves descendants of apes, who in turn can call themselves descendants of whatever small mammals remained (or evolved) after the mass destruction of the dinosaurs left niches in nature for new creatures to fill.

To say that aliens created humans is absolutely stupid because we already know how life developed on this planet and everything we know and have ever learned in biology, genetics and geology confirms it – just like we know the Earth is the third planet from the sun. And this makes the entire premise of the film pointless, (much like the Answers in Genesis website). It’s like a great mystery novel akin to the space equivalent of Angels and Demons, but the final startling revelation being: the earth is flat and the sun orbits it.

No matter how wild your story premise is, there must be a part of the audience that thinks “this could happen, this is how things might’ve have been, even if they weren’t.” For example, imagine a story where aliens brainwash Hitler to invade Poland. Silly, yes, but at least it can’t be disproved. (Of course, something isn’t proven true just because it can’t be disproved.) But with Prometheus, it simply can’t be true, because we didn’t pop into existence with unique DNA 150,000 years ago – we evolved from other species very slowly and share our DNA with all other life on earth. The story is not reflective or metaphorical, it’s dumb.

The only way to have Prometheus’s story make any sense as regards its DNA claim is to say that aliens created DNA itself and put it on earth 3 billion years ago, but even that doesn’t explain why the aliens are almost identical to humans: you cannot predict which path evolution will take because evolution, by very definition, is simply the change of gene frequencies in generations responding to the pressure of natural selection. Natural selection can be caused by sexuality and/or environment, but it’s location specific. The millions of varieties of life you see on earth today are only possible because it takes evolution that long to produce any noticeable change at all, especially speciation (although evolution on every meaningful level is an observed documented fact.) To illustrate this by contrast: if a species were already perfectly suited to its environment and its surroundings never changed, that species would never change (and evolve), not in ten million years.

But why does it matter? It matters because Prometheus is a major international release that completely abuses a wondrous field of science. It’s rubbish at best and slander at worst. It matters because there are people in positions of power who deny evolution because it contradicts their ignorant beliefs about the universe, and they want to push those beliefs on you and your children, by law, in the classroom. It matters because evolution is as established and beautiful a scientific fact as anything the human race has ever discovered, and it’s a travesty that it’s so badly misunderstood in the 21^st century, so much so that most people who see Prometheus won’t even notice anything wrong with its “science”.

And the moral of Prometheus the film? Our protagonist Elizabeth Shaw regains her faith in god (of course, the personal choice of god of the writer, which is the Christian version). At one point she is teased about her faith with the claim “I guess creating life is easy…anyone can do it…you just need some DNA.” But that’s the kind of nonsense strawman of evolution that no evolutionist ever claimed! Life didn’t happen on earth because of some DNA in an ocean…DNA is only a coding language. It is genes that allow characteristics to pass from generation to generation, and NATURAL (or sexual) SELECTION is the only method by why nature can pass on some genes and withhold others. So no, you need more than just a bit of DNA…and that fact is totally ignored (deliberately?) by the writer(s) of Prometheus. Is there any other scientific field that could be so grossly disfigured and butchered by a film writer in this day and age and still get approved? I don’t think so. What do you think?

The irony here is sadly amusing: if the moral of the story was to have the protagonist reclaim her faith in god and challenge the notion that life on earth evolved naturally…it speaks volumes that such a notion was only possible in a fantasy land where the real world can be ignored and the movie script can make the impossible possible, just like the bible has the sun stand still in the sky. Most people don’t take those stories seriously, with good reason. But some do unfortunately, and they even try to re-write scientific fact to suit their beliefs. Some even use their big chance writing a Hollywood screenplay to push their creationist agenda on a worldwide audience. The sad thing? Many people don’t know any better.

***

Further reading:

The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins. Not arguments, no debate. Read this if you doubt the facts.

Evolution at Wikipedia (if I were ever to endorse compulsory education this would be the second thing on my list.)

Other good critical reviews:

http://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/ridley-scotts-prometheus-anti-science/

Privileged Planet? Yeah right…

Imagine receiving a gift from a long-lost relative: a great mansion; on the outside the most beautiful house you could conceive. Unfortunately, over 80% of the mansion is uninhabitable, partly due to flooding, partly due to mould or razor sharp rocks. Other parts of the mansion are closed off from collapsed roofs and other areas have dangerous animals infesting them. Of the 20% of the mansion that you can actually live in, most of that is too cold in the night and too hot during the day – you have to wear protective gear most of the time. There are insects carrying diseases around it and invisible viruses and bacteria that can make you very sick, if not kill you. Worse, parts of the mansion are prone to structural collapse at any moment with harmful or even fatal results. Even this 20% of the house that can you get by in was only re-conditioned that way by countless previous owners, each struggling to improve it over the course of their entire lives; the work even costing many their lives. Outside the house is an unbreathable expanse, entering which even for a split second means certain death.

Now imagine being told that the state of this mansion is no accident, but a wonderful gift that hasn’t simply fallen into disrepair – no, this great house was designed specifically for you, and its current condition is exactly how the designer wanted you to receive it! This is just the look he was going for! This is the best house that could possibly be imagined! There is simply no improving this building, you are told. More so, the designer expects you to be eternally grateful for this gift every day – but if something goes wrong with the house, it’s your fault. Worse, if you can’t understand why on earth anyone would specifically design a house like this, you aren’t intelligent or spiritual enough to grasp his higher motives. Finally, imagine being told that the designer was the most intelligent individual who’s ever lived, the greatest structural engineer of them all, the master of building design, an expert in human biology, and someone who truly cares about his work and the people who live in his homes…

How many people on earth today accept creationism?

Pope blesses “Confessions” iPhone app

I think it’s so great that the Catholic Church is keeping with the times and embracing technology! As if making confession in person for the sin of enjoying your life to a man who’s never lived one wasn’t enough, you can now do it with a Pope-endorsed iPhone app!

I can’t help but wonder if this first for the Church would’ve been less appealing if it already had a stranglehold on the minds and bodies of everyone. I mean, if the iPhone existed several centuries ago, would the Pope endorse the beauty of new technology to reach those in need of confession, or would it send thousands of men on a Holy Crusade to invade a foreign land? I’m just saying…

Where was this harmony of Church and science 500 years ago? I think I hear Galileo spinning in his grave.

And I can’t help but wonder if this adoption of the modern might be a glimpse of things to come? Might the Church also repeal its superstitious protection of a particular type of human cells? Might it also accept the technological wonder of contraception and all the benefits it brings? In the developing world where birth control and AIDS are real problems, I’m sure a condom is more use than the Confessions app on an iPhone.

And are priests allowed to own iPhones? I propose that all Catholic priests be given iPhones with the Confessions app! I wonder what that might look like…

Do this or you will die

If someone were to say this to you, and you replied “do what?” – what you would expect, no, demand – as a reply?

If you are going to ask someone to act as if their life depended on it, or perhaps even change their entire lifestyle, isn’t it fair that you be damn sure what you’re talking about – and even more sure about the criteria required?

When performing brain surgery, a surgeon doesn’t play ip-dip as to where to start the incision – or follow the vague direction “cut into the head”; if the operation was on me I’d like him to be a little more specific than that. A successful businessman when negotiating with traders doesn’t guess the lowest price he can go to, or rely on gut feeling; he calculates his entire margin taking into account all available factors and works out the variables. These two examples demonstrate how, in the real world, reality is uncompromising and makes certain demands on human beings, such as: specificity, accuracy, logic. Most normal people tend to demand these standards in their everyday life, whether they realise it or not. For example, we don’t cross the road without looking both ways; we don’t jump a wall without knowing what’s on the other side; we don’t drink unlabelled bottles without being reasonably sure they’re safe.

Imagine a less mundane situation, like a hostage crisis; a criminal leaves a message iterating his demands. If the demands aren’t met he will kill a room full of people in one hour. Worse, imagine that the message he left was garbled and barely decipherable; you are able to discern demands for some exact amount of money – but how much you don’t know. He wants a helicopter from a specific location – but you can’t tell where – he wants you to forward on a political statement, only he forgot to include the statement in the message. Worse still, you have no way to get back in touch with him. Imagine the frustration and panic you would feel as the minutes tick away.

Bare this in mind, and consider that earlier today I had a conversation with a fundamentalist Christian who was unable to give me a list of criteria required for approval by God, and therefore acceptance by him and survival when The End comes. Think about that… these people who preach repentance to and belief in God, who are asking you, on behalf of this God, to change your entire lifestyle and become a member of this particular belief system that has hundreds of thousands of competing systems in the world, because your life depends on it – cannot even tell you the exact requirements. I was able to dissect this person’s beliefs and assertions to the point they admitted that it wasn’t necessary to be a member of their sect, it wasn’t necessary to read the bible, and it wasn’t even necessary to believe in god… so then, what is the point of belonging to any religion? What extra “good” would I gain by being part of a faith, as opposed to being a good person but not being part of the faith? If the end came today would I die? Staggeringly, no answer was forthcoming. I was told “I don’t have the right to judge.” Which opens up another gaping contradiction in this faith: if you know what is right and wrong, how can you not evaluate something to determine whether it is good or bad? If you cannot judge right from wrong, you cannot know that you yourself are on the right track! How are these people, presumably the ones to be saved come The End, to know they not forgetting something themselves? They either don’t know what it takes, in which it makes no sense to identify yourself as part of a specific faith – i.e. this particular thing and not that, or they do know but have been brainwashed and conditioned through doubletalk and faith that it’s not acceptable to talk about or acknowledge the grim truth that is too horrific to mention yet is tacitly believed: if you are not part of this particular faith, you can’t be saved.

Of course, that would mean that “being good” isn’t enough. It’s not enough to be good or live by an objective moral code – no, you must add on all this extra stuff to it – like meeting several times a week during which point it is never clarified why you are there. You must knock door to door and talk to people about your faith, whilst never being able to specify the most basic tenets of it. Live a strict, self-effacing, and conservative lifestyle, yet not acknowledging nor identifying exactly what this lifestyle should and shouldn’t consist of. On top of all this, you want other people to do the same as you, because you believe their life depends on it!

Of course, the reason all this extra stuff is tacked onto the notion of simply “being good” is because without all that extra stuff, cults and sects and religions wouldn’t exist. After all, as this person and I managed to agree on: if just “being good” was enough to be saved, what would be the entire point of the faith? The irony was lost on them. And when I asked why all this extra stuff was necessary or whether I could have a complete list of this extra stuff, I couldn’t get an answer.

And this is the mental harmony and peace of mind that we are often told religious people have? This is the stuff that “keeps them happy”? This is what gives believers “meaning”?

As I closed in saying to this person, if you are going to hold beliefs and act on them – and integrate them fully into your life, and also ask or expect that others do the same – and insist that not only your life depends on it, but the lives of every member of the human race – it is not just reasonable, but necessary for your own intellectual honesty, respect, self-confidence, reputation and credulity, that you can back these words up. We expect it from doctors, businessmen, hell – even terrorists – so why not the loving all-powerful creator of the universe and his most privileged spokesmen on earth?

We all know the answer.