Being of such central importance, the Eden story is one of the best known of the Bible, taught early to young children. The story and its apparent message are ubiquitously known by anyone who has any knowledge of Christianity or Judaism:

God created Adam and Eve and put them in the Garden of Eden to take care of everything inside it. God told them that they could eat from any tree in the garden except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil – if they ate that, they would die. A talking serpent then approached Eve, tempting her to eat the forbidden fruit and to convince Adam to do the same. God found out and punished them (acting extremely surprised considering his omniscience), casting them out of Eden and never again allowing them the pure and idyllic life they had been blessed with before.

It has seemed to me for a long time that the general interpretation of this story, that the serpent leads the naive humans to sin and therefore turn away from God’s grace, is extremely skewed and that an objective interpretation, unencumbered by our society’s ubiquitous framing of the story, would lead to a different conclusion.

I believe a useful comparison to this story exists in sci-fi literature. This may seem like something of a digression, but bear with me a minute and consider almost any dystopian future story you can think of.

In Orwell’s 1984, for example, the society is ideal. There is almost no crime or disorder. Citizens are patriotic and dedicated to their land and their leader. But the cost of this apparent societal harmony is the ability of its members to question, to enquire, to think freely. Thought Police exist to make sure that nobody starts to question their situation or to pull away from the herd. If anybody does, they are quickly disciplined and brought back into line, or quietly removed so that the greater peace can be comfortably maintained. In many ways 1984′s society is without many of the problems that mar all modern civilisations, but the cost is true self-knowledge and the freedom to question.

Consider also the 2002 film, Equilibrium. Here the society has left behind crime, war and dissidence. People are comfortable, ordered and productive. But here the cost is emotion. Children are taught to suppress feelings and emotions and anything created to invoke these emotions, such as art, music and poetry, is destroyed. Mood suppressing drugs are routinely distributed to keep people in line and any dissent from the rules is dealt with quickly and efficiently by a military service comparable to the Thought Police. As in 1984, from which the film clearly take great influence, an apparently perfect society is created and maintained, but at the expense of its members’ humanity.

The message in both of these examples is clear: that cost is too high. Order in society is not worth giving up the freedom to question and to express ourselves. While the ideals of crimelessness and concordance are worth striving for, the costs involved in these fictional worlds are too high.

It has long struck me that Eden is very much like one of these warning fictional futures. Adam and Eve live in happy and idyllic harmony, but the cost is self-awareness, inquiry, free thought, the knowledge of good and evil.

Think through the story again. Is the pre-fall garden really the blissful heaven Christians invoke, or the controlled and ignorant oppression of Orwell’s vision? Is God really the benevolent and loving father disappointed by his children’s harsh disobedience, or the watchful and unquestionable Big Brother, angry that his control has been questioned? Is the serpent really the evil tempter or the liberator? Are Adam and Eve fallen or enlightened?

The story is clear: God lied to Adam and Eve that they would die if they ate the fruit. The serpent told them truthfully that their eyes would be opened. If George Orwell’s disturbing versions of the future taught us anything, which many claim they have, then is it really sensible to go on trusting this God?

This campaign uses what is known as User Generated Content. By getting people to film and send in testimonies on webcams, the company not only saves time and money, but more importantly, it co-opts the apparently genuine, grass-roots nature of the amateur Youtube video blogger to lend unearned credibility to the product.

It is a marketing ploy, and a pretty cynical one at that.

During the 4th century, early Christians were busily spreading the message of Jesus up through Europe trying to gain support and converts as they went. All the civilisations they encountered had strong cultural traditions already which included various annual feast days and celebrations. The most important of which, in a lot of cases, was a midwinter festival some time around the equinox celebrating the end of bad whether being in sight and the eventual return of Spring.

Winter festivals, such as the Scandanavian Jōl, were deeply ingrained in their respective cultures and popular among their people. So the early Christians realised that forcing would-be converts to drop their dancing and feasts in order to accept a new message was going to be a hard sell.

So they adapted their message. Before the 4th century, there had been a certain amount of speculation about when Jesus had been born, but no date could be said with any real certainty. So the early church exploited this hole in their knowledge by creating a midwinter celebration of their own to mark the newly fabricated date of Christ’s birth. The actual date on which Jesus had been born was of little importance as long as they could nominally pin something onto a festival so that converts wouldn’t feel hard done by if they joined up.

Just like Confused.com tried to borrow the credibility of Youtube bloggers sitting at home with their webcams to attract customers to their brand, the early church co-opted the popular elements of the cultures it encountered to attract converts to their religion. ‘You don’t need to give up the fun parts of your present culture,’ they angled, ‘you can keep those bits and still join us.’

Christmas was, in short, a marketing ploy. And a rather cynical one.

This leads me to two conclusions. The first is that atheists should have no problem celebrating Christmas if they want to, despite the assertions to the contrary by some Christians. Christmas was created to avoid early European Christians getting jealous of their heathen peers by re-branding almost all the details of various pre-existing pagan festivals to be nominally Christian. So I see no reason why modern heathens shouldn’t celebrate their part in the holiday’s historical formation by acknowledging the normal traditions of the Christmas tree (Roman), gift-giving (Roman), Santa (Norse), feasting etc.

The other conclusion is that the typical annual outcry over the perceived rise of commercialisation subverting the real message of Christmas is unfounded. Considering that the concept of Christmas was little more than a marketing strategy in the first place, it seems rather fitting that its name should be employed by modern marketeers to shift their goods at this time of year.

Looking back at my original analogy now seems rather unfair. Christmas, for all its pseudo-historical shortcomings, is still founded on a rather lovely ancient tradition of feasting, enjoyment and the giving of gifts to others. The Confused.com marketing campaign is an artless and vacuous attempt to fool viewers into forming a particular, and probably incorrect, image of a bland corporation by creating some of the most intensely irritating thirty second pieces of film in recent memory.

Regardless of your beliefs, the Christmas period is one where we can remind ourselves to do all the selfless things we should be doing all year round. We can spend time with our families and reconnect with friends, give and receive gifts of wildly varying quality and enjoy the warmth of a season that, at least for a couple of days, encourages people to feel goodwill to all.

Just remember that not that long ago, it would have been Odin putting things in your stockings.

The Greatest Show on Earth is in fact a fascinating new title from Prof. Richard Dawkins. It aims to explicate evolution in a manner that every man on the street can understand. Demonstrating complex scientific concepts with examples, diagrams, rich colour photos  and of course is his occasional no-nonsense humour, Dawkins bring evolution to a level we can all understand. A secondary role can also be found within its pages, in that it equips the reader with the tools to refute the arguments of the ID/Creationist brigade.

In opening Dawkins does a great job of explaining what is meant by the term theory in regards to the “Theory of Evolution”. The word theory in this context is often misunderstood – partially down to the fact the word theory has two different meanings.

So having taken us through a basic explanation of the term and warming us up with a brief look at; Darwin, On the Origins of Species and natural selection, Dawkins then starts to explore how natural selection and artificial selection (for example dog breeds) works and gives us some fascinating examples of each.

Over the course of thirteen chapters we are treated to many examples of evolution in practice as well as lab experiments that refute the claims of the Creationist brigade. Dawkins touches on other areas of science that back up the “Theory of Evolution” ranging from carbon dating to tree ring counting (Dendrochronology).

The book finishes with a small appendix titled “The History Deniers”. Dawkins uses this term during the title to describe those who ignore, refute or discard evidence that challenges their faith-based beliefs.

The figures detailing those who don’t accept evolution as a factual theory make for slightly worrying reading – and these are just from the EU and Turkey.

With the above in mind, Dawkins work as well as being a fascinating piece of science literature, provides those of us who read the God Delusion with  a useful tome to challenge those who refute the scientific method.

With Creationist museums in the US and Creationist Zoos in England, this book couldn’t have come at a better time.

The Greatest Show on Earth is available now in hard back from all good bookstores.

The most famous defence of the accomodationist position was made by Stephen Jay Gould in his definition of science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria“. Science is the realm of the observable, the empirical and the testable, he claimed; religion is the domain of that which is beyond human experience. Many people, in my experience, sum this position up in something like the statement that science deals with the ‘how’ while religion deals with the ‘why’ (like answer ‘B’ on this page); scientists may be able to tell us how the Earth came to be formed and how life evolved on it, but it is to the clergy that questions about the meaning of that life ought to be addressed.

I disagree. The ‘how’ and the ‘why’ defence is an easy maxim to rattle off in lieu of an agrument, but does it really mean anything at all? Does science helpfully limit itself to the dry mechanistic explanations? And does religion respectfully keep clear of them, only to shuffle out when someone asks a more metaphysical question? Of course not.

The Bible is full of explanations of how things work and how things happened – from the beginning of the Earth to its end. How many of these explanations you may wish to write off as poetically pregnant metaphors will be decided by the particular strain of the religion you most identify with. However, with even the most modern and woolly tea-and-biscuit fuelled reading of the Bible, it is a stretch to imply that the Good Book completely steers clear of physical and biological explanations or politely holds its tongue when any other ‘how’ question is raised.

Similarly, it is only a uselessly simplistic characterisation that would suggest that science limits itself to the ‘how’ questions. The rapidly evolving and endlessly enlightening fields of psychology, neurology and genetics have given us myriad insights into ‘why’ questions that mere decades ago would have been left entirely to theologians and philosophers. In fact science is even able to study the ‘why’ of religion itself (search Pubmed for ‘religion’ and ‘brain’ for examples).

Of course it is possible for scientists to be religious or for religious people to believe in evolution or the big bang. However, this is not proof that they are mutually compatible worldviews so much as further evidence of humans’ ability to hold multiple incongruous viewpoints while coping with the resulting cognitive dissonance.

The cornerstone of science is scepticism of that for which there is no evidence. This is the reason scientists make hypotheses based on observations and then try to test those hypotheses to see whether they hold true after exhaustive efforts to falsify them. Any christian scientist (by which I mean a scientist who is religious, not a follower of Mary Baker Eddy) must either admit that they hold some parts of their life out of reach of the light of their scientific scepticism or tie themselves up in confusing knots of attempted justification and theological gymnastics.

The cornerstone of religion is faith in that for which there is no evidence, and it is for this reason that I see it as fundamentally incompatible with science. A christian (or muslim or jew etc.) who wishes to maintain their faith must approach certain questions without the genuine openmindedness that ideal science calls for.

Once again, I acknowledge that some scientists are religious and some religious people are scientists and I do not think it would be helpful to force polarisation on such people and make them choose one or the other. However, both worldviews cannot be held in one mind without the necessary compromise of one or both.

The religious scientist must protect his faith from the requisite questioning tools of his trade. The scientifically-literate believer must moderate the will, power and scope of their god so as not to to tread on the toes of what rational discovery has given us. Inconvenient as it may be, these are two almost entirely overlapping magisteria, both of which claim powers of explanation and enlightenment.

Michelle Gregg, a consulting astrologer, disagreed with my analysis of her trade in the comments, explaining that I was being simplistic in writing off all of astrology on the basis of newspaper horoscopes, which she agreed are mostly for their entertainment value. 

So, based on Michelle’s defences of the specificity and accuracy possible in more in-depth astrological readings, I challenged her to take part in a little experiment, the details of which we have been hashing out for the last month or so.

I am pleased to announce that the test is now going ahead and, in the name of transparency, I will outline the full protocol being used here.

From a group of four people¹, the time and date² of birth of one person has been randomly selected³ and sent to Michelle. She will then give a reading for that date, attempting to make it specific and accurate enough that it would only apply to a person born at that time on that date, and send it back to me. 

I will circulate the email around the other three people in the original group and each of us will indicate whether we think the reading describes us. We will all do this without seeing each other’s responses. 

The test will be called a success for Michelle and for astrology if only the person whose date Michelle read for identifies him or herself in the reading.

In the case of any other result, the test will be deemed failed.

If nobody identifies themselves in the reading, or if the incorrect person does, the reading must have been wrong. If more than one person identifies themselves in the reading, this can be seen as support for my point about the “something for everyone” nature of Barnum statements.

The details have been sent today, so the test is now underway. We will keep you informed.

Footnotes:

1: The group includes myself and theenglishradical as well as two unidentified others.

2: All times and dates were given in their GMT equivalent to avoid any potential confusion regarding time zones or daylight savings adjustments.

3: To do this, I set up four web pages, each of which contained one time and date. I emailed the four numbered links to a third party, nominated by Michelle, so that she could choose a number, click the corresponding link and send those details on to Michelle herself. This would blind the test by ensuring that neither we nor Michelle could know for whose date the reading was being done.

http://www.ripodcast.co.uk/

The Podcasts website states:

Righteous Indignation is the pod­cast that aims to crit­i­cally exam­ine extra­or­di­nary claims and the peo­ple who sur­round them. These include ideas related to con­spir­acy, the para­nor­mal, the super­nat­ural and attempts to rede­fine the bound­aries of sci­ence and understanding.

It’s well worth a listen and laced with jokes and double-entendre. dirty humour

The best way to demonstrate why I don’t think horoscopes should be believed is by telling you how to create them yourself. There are a small number of simple but effective techniques to use in order to easily convince people that you not only know a lot about them, but you also know what’s going to happen to them.

1. Barnum statements
So named because of P.T Barnum’s famous quote that his circus contained something for everyone, these are phrases that sound very specific to you but actually apply to almost anybody – and they’re incredibly easy to write. For example, almost everyone is outgoing and loud in some situations, and around some people, but self-conscious and quiet at other times. So if you tell someone that they are sometimes the life of the party but have a quiet side that occasionally feels very insecure, you’ll almost certainly be right.

In fact, by virtue of the fact that people are generally fairly complicated creatures and act differently in varying situations, almost any contradictory pair of traits will have the same effect. You are intelligent but occasionally you enjoy switching off your brain and watching really low brow TV… you like to try to stay fit, but some times you just can’t resist a naughty snack etc.

For a demonstration of these techniques in action, see Derren Brown or Penn and Teller (skip to about 3.30).

2. Compliments
Another way to be sure of hits is to compliment people on personality traits everyone likes to think they have. If you tell someone they have an excellent sense of humour, nobody will argue with you. Everyone likes to think they have a good sense of humour, whether they do or not, and it’s surprising how impressed people can be when they’re told about it.

Again this applies to almost any generally positive trait that most people either have or like to think they have – like trustworthiness, honesty or integrity.

More specific characteristics that are more likely to be wrong can also be used sparingly, as long as you keep in mind the principal I mentioned earlier about contradictory traits. If you tell someone they are tidy and they reply that they haven’t cleared away a plate in a week and don’t remember which pile of old papers the hoover is under, just come back that they are tidy in some important aspects of their life even though they are untidy in their flat. That may not sound very convincing written down, but that doesn’t matter when you bare in mind number 3.

3. People remember the hits
How many times has a horoscope predicted something that has never happened? Nobody can remember because there’s no reason to remember all the times you have been told you might be lucky with money and then haven’t been.

But how many times has a horoscope said something that has come true? Chances are, anyone who regularly reads horoscopes will have a bank of examples of times when something really did happen after it was prophesied in the paper that morning.

Hits are much easier to remember than misses, and that is also true in face to face readings, not just printed horoscopes. Once you’ve already impressed someone with your insights into their fantastic sense of humour and their saintly trustworthiness, people will find it very easy to overlook the odd misstep.

In a face to face reading, it can also be worth baring in mind the primacy and recency effects and using your most surefire and impressive items at the beginning and end of the session as these will be remembered significantly better than any of what happens in between.

4. Be vague
Horoscopes never contain really specific predictions like, “today you will meet your future husband”, “today you will get a promotion” or “today you will break your arm in a strange accident”. The reason for this is that the chances are very small that they’ll come true. If there’s more leeway in the phrase, then it’s much easier to interpret something as a hit. If, instead of writing “you will come into a large sum of money today”, you write “money will be at the front of your mind today”, an obliging believer will be able to re-interpret your statement in light of any number of different events that could happen during the day.

Of course, even if absolutely nothing applicable happens, there’s always good old number 3 to fall back on.

5. Make predictions
The problem with making any statements about someone, however woolly and likely to be true, is that you could still be wrong. Perhaps someone is aware that they really don’t have a sense of humour and despite your best contradictory wriggling, he won’t buy it.

No such problem exists when making predictions. If you tell someone that something will happen, especially if you make the time non-specific, nobody can ever contradict you. If you make the future event positive, their willingness for it to happen will make them even more glad to believe you.

Astrologers and psychics often tell people that they will find love. This is a perfect prediction because chances are that sooner or later they willl. If you give no specific date, then even if your subject sits reflecting on your prediction in their 70s as a spinster with their cats, they still can’t be sure that they won’t find love yet.

Another useful tool in face to face readings is the past to future switch, often used by John Edward and his peers to cover mistakes. This is simply the hasty re-labelling of a miss about something that happened in the past as a hit that hasn’t happened yet. For example, you come out with a solid line like, “you’ve recently met someone you feel you have a real connection with”, and they spoil it by disconcertedly saying that they haven’t – you can quickly smile, raise your eyebrows and say “ah, well look out for them then because it won’t be long!” This little trick has the added bonus of making it look like you’re so far advanced beyond this world’s trivial framework that petty human concepts like time hardly matter to you – an event that hasn’t happened yet is just as clear to you as something that happened last week.

It is these five remarkably simple tools that lie beneath the work of every horoscope writer and, along with cold reading and hot reading, also form the basis for all face to face readings by astrologers, psychics and faith healers. Perhaps they sound too simple to account for all the successes you have experienced and heard about. But in future, just keep them in mind when you read the horoscopes in the paper and make up your own mind with the honesty, intelligence and personal integrity that I can tell you have.

The UK government has announced plans to go ahead with the controversial (which for the most part actually means unwanted) Ecotowns, this includes Rackheath in Norfolk England.

As the situation develops I will post articles highlighting the impact this will have on Norfolk a county already suffering from the governments neglect of coastal erosion issues.

Initially for more information you can see the Guardian website:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jul/12/ecotowns-climate-change-gordon-brown-environment

Over the coming weeks I will provide links to protest sites, what the Green party has said on the matter, those providing information on the Rackheath scheme and general information on why the so called “Eco” Towns are nothing but a white elephant.

Before we look at the potential Rackheath development and Ecotowns in general, it is important to provide some context on the Labour governments past housing projects.

Labour’s housing legacy

We should first start at looking at England a whole. England is currently one of the most densely populated countries in Europe, covering approximately two thirds of the British landmass and housing some 83% of its population (approx. 51m inhabitants).

Urmee Khan writing for the Telegraph in September 2008 reported on the results compiled by the ONS (Office of National Statistics):

In 2008 the average number of people per square kilometre in Britain was 253, rising to 395 in England.

Latest figures from Holland show that its population density was 395 a square kilometre in 2002 and 393 in 2005. It is estimated that English population density will rise to 464 people for every square kilometre by 2031. - Daily Telegraph

This obviously raises a number of questions with regards to population density and how we plan to cope with this from a housing perspective. Many factors need to be taken into account ranging from infrastructure, jobs, affordability, community cohesion, transport and the environment.

The increase in England’s population density has put a fair amount of strain upon these factors and as a result of this the Labour government have come up with many ill thought out schemes in attempts to address this.

One of the most criminal of these schemes was ex-Deputy Prime Minster John Prescott’s policies in Liverpool and several other Northern English cities.

His plan was to demolished some 90,000 houses in these cities and replace them with new builds. These houses could of course been renovated with Green technology for a fraction of the cost of demolishing the houses, cleaning up the mess and rebuilding from scratch.

The existing infrastructure could have been improved at the same time, social housing issues addressed and of course facilities in inner cities in dire need of redevelopment tackled.

Things were not looking good for these projects when they were announced in 2003 and the UK property market was in a boom. Many young people found the lack of affordable housing a block to getting a foot on the property ladder and council housing was over subscribed in many areas.

The ludicrous nature of Prescott’s project in the face of the above was highlighted on the “Tonight with Trevor McDonald” show.

For the sum of £24,000 a house in the Toxteth area of Liverpool (where 400 houses where slated for the bulldozer) was renovated and valued at £65,000, considerably less than the prices of homes in the South of England at this time. To make matters worst, the cost of demolishing the houses, many of which have survived the Luftwaffe and where a part of Liverpool’s heritage was estimated at £18,000 and the cost of the new houses? Somewhere in the region of £140,000, not exactly affordable to the average Liverpudlian first time buyer.

As sadly seems to be the case with most of the “housing” projects Labour have touched in the past twelve years, matters went from bad to worst. Compulsory purchase orders where issued with many people effectively being forced for their homes, and being offered the pathetic sum of £28,000 for their homes.

And as if to add insult to injury… property developers with an eye for a profit were able to buy up streets of empty homes on the cheap (some houses going for as little as £5000) and make a profit from the compulsory purchase orders, effectively from tax payers money.

Somewhere in the region of £2.2bn was spent on the re-development project, a project not driven by the desires of a local community, nor actually beneficial at relieving the problems for first time buyers, or those looking for social housing.

The legacy of this project by 2007 was approx. 10,o00 houses being demolished, only 1,000 built and another 37,000 derelict caught up in wrangling over planning and demolition.

An article from 2007 on Moneyweek.com illustrates just how much of a white elephant the scheme turned into and provided much of the information above.

So with this in mind, can we expect any better from Gordon Brown and the proposed Ecotowns soon to be seen springing up across England? Based upon the evidence we have at the moment, it would seem not.

Rackheath in the Media

Below I have included some interesting articles on the Rackheath situation from the Guardian website:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jul/16/ecotowns

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/audio/2009/jul/17/eco-towns-named

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/jul/16/ecotown-turbine-commercial-political

To oppose and supplant the mythological narratives of the past, and the dogmas of the present, the world needs an institution devoted to promoting science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values. The Center for Inquiry is that institution.

At the Center for Inquiry, we believe that evidence-based reasoning, in which humans work together to address common concerns, is critical for modern world civilization. Moreover, unlike many other institutions, we maintain that scientific methods and reasoning should be utilized in examining the claims of both pseudoscience and religion. We reject mysticism and blind faith. No topic should be placed off limits to scrutiny—certainly not fringe science and religion, which have an enormous influence on beliefs and conduct.

Based out of Amherst NY, the Center for Inquiry is responsible for publishing a number of magazines and the Point of Inquiry Podcast.

I fully recommend checking out the Podcast and the Center for Inquiry website here