Big Wind and Solar Power: When Al Fin Changed His Mind

Actually, Al Fin has changed his mind on many things over the years. But this is one topic that you can check for yourselves. Do a topic search on "Renewable Energy" on either alfin2100 (Al Fin) or alfin2300 (Al Fin Energy). You can trace the progression of Dr. Fin's attitude toward big wind and big solar from "very favourable" all the way to "very unfavourable." What happened? No money changed hands to prompt the transformation. It was merely a question of looking at verifiable facts over time, and being compelled logically to change.

But in the larger world, big wind and big solar still have their champions -- from the US White House to the big money green activist groups to the EU bureaucratic apparatus to big money investors who benefit from government subsidies and tax breaks, such as Warren Buffett.

Now we are being told that "renewable energy" has surpassed nuclear power in terms of "energy generation." Does this mean that big wind and big solar are delivering on their promises? Well, no, not really. Look at the chart below, which breaks down the categories of "renewable energy."

RealClearEnergy

The recent reports that renewable energy has overtaken nuclear power as a source of primary energy for the nation have created the mistaken impression that all the windmill and solar panel construction is having a decisive impact. In fact, as the Energy Information Administration's December Monthly Report reveals, 80 percent of "renewable energy" is still supplied by hydroelectricity, wood and biofuels. Twelve percent comes from wind and 1.2 percent from solar. An additional 6 percent comes from burning waste - which not everyone regards as "renewable" - and 2.5 percent comes from geothermal energy.

...Under this set of definitions, the consumption of renewables actually exceeded nuclear power before 1987, until nuclear gained ground as more reactors were completed. Renewables declined after 2000 while nuclear continued to expand from improved performance by existing reactors, even though no new reactors have been built. The slight ascent in renewables over the last few years has come from the expansion of wood, biomass and wind. _RealClearEnergy

It is important to emphasise that no matter how much big wind "capacity" is built, that is not the same thing as power production. And just as important, one must point out that the wind tends not to blow at the time the power is needed. This is a fatal flaw in the big wind scheme. Not only must expensive backup power capacity be built and kept on constant standby to supply any wind deficits, but if wind power output should happen to be excessive in relation to demand, the utility must find a way to dump significant power. In the US Pacific northwest, federal judges have forced utilities to pay wind developers for power, even if the utility could not use it!

This moment-to-moment unreliability of wind generation has been likened to "throwing a live grenade into the power grid control booth." Wind farms are also harmful to the health of people living nearby, and to birds and bats -- for what that is worth to your tender hearts.

Big solar power has many of the same problems, except it is even more expensive than wind. Mr. Obama invested billions of dollars in US taxpayer dollars into already failed or soon-to-fail big wind and big solar projects. But since the backers of these projects were political backers of Mr. Obama, a few $billion wasted here or there doesn't amount to much.

The Obama administration -- for reasons of its own -- is rather slow at catching on to the ruinous effects of the mad pursuit of big wind and big solar, on the national power system and economy. But the governments of Spain and Japan have already been forced to drop their most of their generous government subsidies for these green wastrels, out of a return to basic economic common sense.

Sharp contraction ahead for solar power industry

Vestas Wind Systems shares lost 92% of value since 2008

General problems with wind power ... articles from Master Resource blog

This slideshare presentation on wind power started the shift in Al Fin's opinion of big wind power

It should be noted that Al Fin took a sabbatical from his day job a number of years ago, in order to get involved in one of his greatest enthusiasms -- renewable energy, esp. wind and solar power. He expanded his knowledge of power systems, electrical engineering, and residential, commercial, and industrial electricity, in order to be able to participate in the installation of renewable power systems. He had a great deal of fun in the process, and felt he was accomplishing some good things.

He had to return to his day job, but he retained his warm feeling toward wind and solar power. But along the way, Dr. Fin learned that there is a tremendous difference in justifiability between a small, off-grid wind or solar installation and a giant wind farm or solar plant. With a small installation, one keeps a close watch on his power usage, power generation, and battery storage state. With large wind or solar installations, there is no way to control for intermittency, unreliability, the huge cost of power standby, and many other problems.

And thus was a mind changed. And a voice that had once promoted big renewables changed to one that criticises them quite harshly.

Minds that are incapable of changing, are minds that have passed their due date -- regardless of the age of the individual. The most fruitful way of understanding a controversial field where the opponents are closely matched, is to study the arguments of those who have changed their minds. Sometimes the arguments justify the change, and sometimes not, but they are typically informative and educational both for what they include and for what they leave out.

Trillions of dollars are on the line in connection with the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming argument. If you want to study a high stakes disagreement, that would be an excellent place to start. BTW, Al Fin changed his mind on that topic as well.

Casting a Spell of Governance: What a Fool Believes

It used to be that tribal leaders; i.e., governments; would throw a few virgins into the volcanoes to placate the gods and prevent eruptions. Now governments in developed countries want to throw their economies into the cauldron in repentence for their prosperity. It all stems from some cultural notion that if one makes a sacrifice then surely one will get something in return. For millenia religions have been organizing sacrifices to placate the gods and everyone of those sacrifices has been a complete and total waste. The names have changed [but] the game is the same.

_Backcasting Climate Models, in reference to climate reparations.

Thinking of government officials as witch doctors may take a bit of getting used to, but it will take you dangerously close to the truth of the matter. Neither witch doctors nor government officials understand the complexity of the issues with which they deal. And each has his own ulterior motives in creating outcomes which augment their power and prestige, and wealth.

But do you want to know the truth about those who hold power over the lives of everyone you care about, including yourself? You would have much less cognitive dissonance if you would merely believe everything the witch doctors government, media, and academics tell you. If you just tell yourself that they wouldn't take drastic measures which adversely affect your future, unless there were a good reason for it -- you will sleep better at night.

Take the drastic measures that Mr. Obama and the UN IPCC wish to take, in order to tame a naturally chaotic climate: They wish to transfer trillions of dollars from Europe and North America, to third world nations and emerging nations. They wish to use the UN as an intermediary, for purposes of distributing the funds. The UN, the most corrupt institution on the planet. They say, "Trust us, we know what we are doing. We are acting on the basis of the very best climate models that modern science can devise."

But how good are these models which the thoroughly corrupt UN is using to try to convince us to impoverish ourselves?

The general shape of the model value line is "sort of" the same as the observation line, but it misses the global warming which occurred from about 1915 to about 1938 and the global cooling from 1940 to 1960. In terms of the temperature change over the entire period the model is pretty good, being only 12 percent too small. However looking at the graph the two curves cross at six points and it appears to be just a coincidence that one of the crossings was close to the end of the backcasting interval. At about 1955 the error would have been about 200 percent. This indicates that the measure of performance should be some average error over the backcasting period. However clearly the Hadley Centre model is superior the model of the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis. However it is not certain whether even the Hadley Centre model is sufficiently accurate to have any relevance in economic policy decisions. In particular, it does not seem accurate enough to be the basis for the developed countries imposing a trillion dollar a year cost to their economies. And that trillion dollar a year cost may end up being a trillion dollar a year transfer to the governments of developing countries for the purchase of their carbon emissions quotas. _Backcasting Climate Models

The climate change caper is only one of the many pieces of wool which our witch doctors governments, media, and academics are trying to pull over our eyes. Associated scams include the great wind energy scam, the great solar energy scam, the great overpopulation and resource scarcity scams, and so on.

We can choose whether to accept the current "spell of governance" which is being cast by the unsavoury crew of controllers, educators, and information disseminators. But it takes a lot of work to replace programmed "knowledge" with verified knowledge. Particularly when we are bombarded by programmed "knowledge" from all quarters, 24 hours a day.

Every child should be given the power to determine the truth of matters which are important. It is time to stop raising herds of trusting sheep, and to begin raising clear thinking human beings who can see through the illusions of the spell casters. Children must be given the power to verify the truth in a wide range of situations.

The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its validation. _William James PDF

As long as humans trust "authorities" to tell them what to believe, they are no better than primitive tribesmen who put themselves and their families at the mercy of witch doctors. Time to make a real change.

Knowledge Is a Scary Thing; Most People Shy Away from It

"Very few really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds -- justification, explanations, forms of consolation without which they can't go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner." -- Ann Rice, in The Vampire Lestat _Source

I ran across the Ann Rice quote on page 28 of this slideshare presentation on energy policy. This is a theme that has been covered repeatedly in the Al Fin blogs: the truth is both dangerous and difficult to find and assimilate.

If the truth were not so dangerous and destabilising, there would be no need for the layers of bureaucracy in governments, academia, big media, religion, and corporations.

The control and obfuscation of the truth is a growing industry in the modern world, and far more instrumental in determining your beliefs than you would like to think.

It is not important what you believe. It is only important that you learn to think and judge the relative trustworthiness of information, relative validity of arguments, and relative likelihood of conclusions. The process of testing ideas, arguments, and beliefs has been ignored (or blocked) at the highest levels of policy-making on national and global levels. Unless that suicidal approach to policy-making is changed, economic and societal ruin are inevitable.

This is one example of obfuscation of truth by insiders, which could lead to significant economic destruction at the trillion dollar level. Similar obfuscation of "truth" is occurring on a daily basis at every government office, in every big media outlet, in large numbers of university and K-12 classrooms, and inside your own head.

First you need to realise that "truth" is a verb, rather than a noun (an ongoing dynamic process rather than a static object).

A million years of biological evolution did not prepare most humans for this rapidly growing and critical challenge. But it is important that as many people as possible be empowered with these skills -- the earlier the better. Once the brain has fully matured -- around age 25 or so -- most people are reluctant to change their minds.

Electrical Energy: Sound Scientific Solutions

View more presentations from John Droz

A compact scientific exposure to electrical energy solutions. You may learn -- as Al Fin did -- that everything you think you know, just ain't so.

How Faith in Neo-Darwinism May Be Holding Us Back

Do you believe in Neo-Darwinist evolution? New-Darwinism is often used as something of a shibboleth to separate the scientific cognoscenti from the flat-earthers and creationists. But is such a "test of scientific rationality" justified? Only if there are no alternatives to Neo-Darwinism which better fit the observed facts. But what if there were better alternatives? Who would be the flat-earthers then?

Lynn Margulis is a prominent thorn in the side of institutional neo-darwinism, and one of the foremost promoters of the theory of Symbiogenesis. On occasion, Margulis can seem like something of a flake, but it is just that quality which allows her to stand up to the pressures of conventional thinking and make her own way against the crowd and its political consensus.

Faith in any conventional form or ideology will hold humans back from discoveries that may seem to contradict those forms and ideologies. We live in an unfortunate age when academic and intellectual thought has been largely taken over by one general ideology -- which actively suppresses debate and open epistemological inquiry into topics which may be too near and dear to the hearts of the thought leaders within the uber-dominant ideology.

Even the so-called "skeptics" today are often nothing better than papered-over consensualists. "Skeptic" Michael Shermer has written a book called The Believing Brain, in which he attempts to explain human belief using game theory, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology. But as skeptics go, Shermer tends to be something of a credulous skeptic, as he tends to accede to "consensus" a bit too easily. Like many writers and historians of science who are not actually scientists, Shermer relies on second- and third-hand anecdotes and clever phrasing a bit more than he perhaps should. One can learn nothing about the next level from "skeptics" like Shermer, who is a fashionable and consensual kind of skeptic, always safe and well far behind the cannon fodder.

Fortunately, Neo-Darwinism is only peripheral to the central political issues that drive the dictators, critics, and pseudo-skeptics of modern academia, media, and politics, so it is still permissible to question some aspects of neo-darwinian theory as long as one is not too threatening to the status quo. For example, scientists are learning that some "acquired characteristics" of parents and grand-parents can be inherited by children and grandchildren, via epigenetic means. We are likely to discover many more contradictions to conventional genetic and evolutionary theory as we go along.

But none of these piecemeal discoveries are likely to be as liberating as the potential explosion of knowledge which might arise from a real-world demonstration of controlled symbiogenesis in action.

Neo-Darwinian evolution may be the best theory we've got to explain evolution -- or there may be something better. There are still many profound discoveries waiting to be made, using the mental framework of neo-darwinian theory. It will always be useful in the sense that Newtonian physics will always be useful -- within specific limited domains.

Who is going to come closer to the global optimum, the path to rapid expansion of knowledge in evolution and biology? The rational gadfly who is unafraid to question popular convention, or the uber-conventionalist who hides behind a faith in crowd consensus?

Things can change very rapidly when radical theories and tools are discovered. Modern hierarchies of ideas and power can be overturned almost instantly in the face of the type of discoveries which are possible. Which societies are capable of withstanding radical change, which is bound to occur sooner or later? A society whose women are increasingly choosing not to have children because children cramp their style? Or a society of people who welcome change, even as they continue the eternal cycles of love, family, child-raising, birth, death, and continuation in the face of all odds and challenges?

It can be frightening to step outside the mainstream -- particularly if you do so by yourself without the support of a group. But if you take a look at the state of the modern world, it should not take you long to see that the mainstream has very little to offer a conscientious seeker or a driven pathfinder. In fact, the mainstream appears to be taking an express train to the Idiocracy.

In basic rescue and resuscitation, we first look at the ABC: airway, breathing, and circulation. Then we proceed to the finer points of diagnosis and intervention. In your lives, you need to take a similar prioritised approach. But try not to get so caught up in basic survival issues that you do not keep one eye on the sky, for falling sacred cows and orthodoxies.

Just one, small and seemingly insignificant scientific or technological discovery could overturn almost all the conventional wisdom and hierarchical power structure of your society. And there are a lot of discoveries in the pipeline at this time. Not all of them will be developed to their potential -- particularly in our modern age of faux environmentalist energy starvation and a general aversion to disruptive technologies by the ruling classes and thought leaders.

But in reality, it is not up to them any longer. They just do not realise it yet.

Can Realtime fMRI Neurofeedback Help Us Learn Wisdom?

How can humans turn "the stampede toward Idiocracy" into a movement toward a wiser, more intelligent society? It seems obvious that there is a current shortage of both intelligence and wisdom at the highest levels of analysis and decision-making.

"Wisdom and intelligence aren't the same thing,"...only 5 percent of the population can be described as truly wise and that advanced insight begins after adolescence as the brain matures.... _Eurekalert

Real-time fMRI (functional MRI) neurofeedback allows a person to observe his brain activity as it happens. This gives him the ability to alter his own thinking, on the fly. By learning to perform thinking tasks more successfully, the brain can be trained to operate more efficiently at below-conscious levels.

"Just like athletes in training benefit from a coach's guidance, feedback from our brain can help us to be more aware of our thoughts," says co-author Prof. Kalina Christoff, UBC Dept. of Psychology. "Our findings suggest that the ability to control our thinking improves when we know how the corresponding area in our brain is behaving."

For the study, published the current issue of NeuroImage journal, participants performed tasks that either raised or lowered mental introspection in 30-second intervals over four six-minute sessions. fMRI technology tracked real-time activity in the rostrolateral prefrontal cortex (RLPFC), the region of the brain involved with higher-order thoughts.

Participants with access to real-time fMRI feedback could see their RLPFC activity increase during introspection and decrease during non-introspective thoughts, such as mental tasks that focused on body sensations. These participants used the feedback to guide their thoughts, which significantly improved their ability to control their thoughts and successfully perform the mental tasks. In contrast, participants given inaccurate or no brain feedback did not achieve any improvement in brain regulation. _SD

Wiser brains think more efficiently, and arrive at workable solutions to problems more quickly -- even in the midst of distractions. Neurofeedback allows persons to train their own brains to focus on the cognitive task at hand. Properly shaped exercises will allow for more efficient functioning of parts of the brain which work together to provide higher level thought, analysis, and decision making.

We know that much of our understanding of the world -- even our scientific understanding -- is based upon belief and "gut instinct". Our early beliefs are based upon the perceived credibility of the source of our "knowledge." Later beliefs are based at least partially on earlier beliefs -- regardless of their validity.

If we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we accept the incredibly complex scientific phenomena in physics, astronomy, and biology through the process of belief, not through reason. We don’t practice the scientific method. We don’t rationally consider the evidence presented for a theory. We don’t learn science by doing science, we learn science by reading and memorizing. The same way we learn history. Do you really know what an atom is, or that a Higgs boson is a rather important thing, or did you simply accept they were what someone told you they were? _PartialObjects _ via _ Slashdot

The same sort of "house of cards" belief systems also come into play in a person's other belief-based "knowledge". Some scientists even claim that they can tell a "political conservative" from a "political liberal" on a brain scan. No doubt more than a little bit of the scientists' own belief systems are coming into play in the research design and interpretation, but scientists are only slightly advanced monkeys -- like everyone else. That is the point -- everyone uses his belief system in every aspect of his life. And all belief systems are prone to bias, irrationality, and prejudice.

Mere intelligence is no safeguard against biased belief systems. Wisdom, on the other hand, can be a safeguard if it is broad and deep enough. Since most people are not naturally wise -- no matter how intelligent -- it follows that if we want a wiser society, we will need to learn to train people to at least be wiser than they are at present.

You're Going to Look Pretty Stupid When the World Ends

h/t Lubos

Apocalyptics who do not happen to be religious tend not to realise or believe that they fall into the category of apocalyptics at all. You might even call them apocalyptic deniers. Which highlights the fact that humans are not actually rational creatures. They all have religions, even if they are unwilling to call them by that name.

Is the Phrase "Delusional Belief" Redundant?

EnergyTribune
The human brain is set up to believe things it cannot prove. Beliefs can be either religious or secular. The religious term for this phenomenon is "faith". The coldly [psycho] logical term [given that most human beliefs are wrong] is "delusion." Looking at the belief in climate catastrophe, it has become clear from inspection that such a belief is an act of quasi-religious faith, and a delusion.

Well known and respected French scientist and engineer, Christian Gerondeau, takes a closer look at this particular delusional belief in "Climate, the Great Delusion."

Christian Gerondeau, a well-known French scientist and engineer, with more than ten books to his credit, has just published in English one of the most devastating, lucid and convincing books on the climate debate. It is a short book, just about 150 pages, and it comes at the heels of the French edition of the book, which made the best-seller list there under the title CO2: Un Mythe Planétaire.

...Gerondeau, a former scientific adviser to French Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas, poses just five simple questions in this book. And it would be great if all reasonable people, on either side of the global climate debate, pause for a minute to contemplate them. (Unless of course the polarizing, highly ideological and acrimonious debate of the last few years, has poisoned everyone’s minds. Personally, I admit that I have grown to have little tolerance for climate alarmism but I still have enough of an inquisitive mind to be persuaded otherwise in the climate science.)

Gerondeau does not take a real position nor does he seem to care much about the anthropogenic contribution to climate change. But he deflates both sides on the effects of emissions, mine included, as actually irrelevant. His questions:

Question 1: “Is it possible that mankind would leave any oil, natural gas or coal that would be economically exploited in the planet’s underground?”

Question 2: “Is it possible to stop mankind’s use of oil, natural gas and coal resulting in the release of CO2 when burned?”

Question 3: “Is it realistic to try to prevent the continued increase in the concentration of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere?”

For all three questions, the answer is an unequivocal no. For obvious economic reasons even if the developed world gets together, as attempted first in Kyoto and last year in Copenhagen, to put mandatory limits or stops on carbon emissions, the developing world headed by China and India, and not just them, will continue to burn fossil fuels. The overall production of CO2 and its concentration in the atmosphere will not change from its current trends. Gerondeau, like me, has grave doubts of the feasibility of sequestration and he goes further to say that the current official wish in Europe and the United States to halve CO2 emissions by 2050 from the current level and therefore to a quarter of the current trends is just “wishful thinking”.

What is his take on the future of the planet becomes clear with the next two questions.

Question 4: “Will CO2 emissions continue indefinitely?”

Question 5: “Are we heading for disaster?”

Again the answer to both questions is a no. Since most emissions are the result of burning fossil fuels, their peak will bring about the eventual exhaustion of these fuels and their emissions. He thinks this will happen by the end of the twenty first century. For the catastrophe Cassandras he has this to say. “In the distant past, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been… twenty times what it is today and life on earth was not harmed. No serious examination backs the apocalyptic predictions we are fed daily about the consequences of the inevitable increase in the CO2 concentration in our atmosphere. We are told so many obvious falsehoods… which have no basis in scientific truth that is hard to trust those who express them.”

In a methodical and classic engineering and scientific mode, Gerondeau continues in the rest of his book to demolish myth after myth in stunningly simple and, at times witty, prose. _EnergyTribune

Religious believers do not take kindly to the demolishing of their cherished beliefs. Hence the recent PNAS blacklist of heretical scientists, who lack sufficient faith.

Heretics tend to step on sensitive toes, and can expect fierce retribution for their ability to resist groupthink delusions. And yet, what else can a heretic do, when he sees through the flimsy artifice of unfounded beliefs and delusions?

Humans are made to believe. They cannot help that. But they can choose not to believe the most absurd and counter-productive delusions, which would lead to irreversible economic decay if the proposed prescriptions of the orthodoxy (eg cap and trade) were ever put in place.

...hidden within the Cap-and-Trade bill is a provision prohibiting homeowners from selling their homes unless they completely retrofit their homes to comply with energy and water efficiency standards. The costs will, for many, make it impossible to sell their home.

A Wall Street Journal editorial stated that “The whole point of Cap-and-Trade is to hike the price of electricity and gas…These higher prices will show up not just in electricity bills or at the gas station, but in every manufactured good, from food to cars…Americans should know that those Members (of Congress) who vote for this climate bill are voting for what is likely to be the biggest tax in American history.”

There no scientific or economic justification for the passage of Cap-and-Trade legislation. The President knows this. The Democrats in Congress know this. It’s more than just a tax. It is a nation killer. _Source_via_TomNelson

See catastrophism. See catastrophism fall. See catastrophism run for the hills before it is tarred, feathered, and burned for the destructive foolishness that it is.

Surprise! James Randi "Skeptical" About AGW

James Randi, known as The Amazing Randi, is a long-time stage magician and professional skeptic / investigator. So it should not have been surprising to anyone to find out that James Randi is also skeptical about the quasi-religion known as Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. You could see the little heads of true believers exploding all over Randi's website, in the comments section at the above link. People who pride themselves on their skepticism of religion, the supernatural, and much else, were simply unwilling to accept Randi's simple and honest expression of skepticism over catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.

Some leftist bloggers went particularly ballistic over Randi's independent expression of his reticence to believe in the carbon hysteria that is so fashionable among leftists. To any reasonable person, it is not Randi's problem that so many of the AGW faithful are totally closed-minded to alternative ideas, hypotheses, and points of view. Yet, Randi felt it necessary to explain himself to the intolerant cloned minds, in a separate post.

It is remarkable when a man who has made a career of skepticism, debunking delusions and exposing illusions, should be attacked so reflexively by quasi-religious believers in pseudo-science when he very tentatively expresses a few mild doubts over the "A" in "AGW." Obviously the "Z's" have no insight into their own beliefs and emotional reactions.

Science is not about belief, or having faith in authority. Science is about doing everything you can to disprove a hypothesis -- to falsify theories. The dogmas of modern climate science have never been subjected to the open process of testing and falsification that honest sciences must face. Climate science was adopted by big politics much too early in its lifetime, and was sheltered from normal testing and validation.

Climate science was a baby bird that did not have to crack open its own shell, in other words. It is a deformed weakling, as a result. But a politically protected deformed weakling all the same.

I salute James Randi for having the courage to speak out honestly and clearly in the current atmosphere of carbon hysteria and jihad. Climate McCarthyism is the norm in leftist circles -- whether academic, media, environmental, or political circles. Randi should have known what to expect. Now he does.

More: Some incisive comments from Lubos Motl

Sanity, and the Religious / Non-religious Brain

Sam Harris is the successful author of The End of Faith, a book that accuses religion of being the enemy of reason.

Sam Harris is also pursuing a PhD in neuroscience at UCLA. A recent paper in PLoS ONE, The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief, uses fMRI to look at differences in brain activity between "belief" and "disbelief."

Once inside the scanner, subjects were presented with a series of short statements through a video-goggle display (Resonance Technology, Inc). After reading each statement, they were asked to evaluate its truth content with the press of a button, indicating “true” (belief), “false” (disbelief), and “undecidable” (uncertainty). The presentation of stimuli was self-paced. Stimuli were drawn from two categories, religious and nonreligious. All statements were designed to be judged easily as “true” or “false” (the response of “undecidable,” while available to subjects, was not expected).

Within each category, we attempted to balance the stimuli with respect to semantic structure and content. Strict balancing across categories was not possible, however, as the two categories differ with respect to content, in principle. For the purposes of stimulus design (not presentation) we generated our statements in groups of four (true and false; religious and nonreligious):

The Biblical God really exists. (Christian true/nonbeliever false)

The Biblical God is a myth. (Christian false/nonbeliever true)

Santa Claus is a myth. (Both groups true)

Santa Claus really exists. (Both groups false) __PLoSOne

The results indicate that questions of belief are primarily handled by parts of the brain that are involved with self-representation, emotional associations, reward, and goal-driven behaviour. This was true for both the 15 religious subjects and the 15 non-religious subjects

But when questions of religious beliefs were analysed exclusively, areas of the brain recruited are also involved in pain perception in oneself and others, disgust, reward, response conflict, and cognitive planning.

Interestingly, both religious and non-religious subjects apparently possessed a "sense of blasphemy" in rejecting statements about religion with which they disagreed.

Finally, among our religious stimuli, the subset of statements that ran counter to Christian doctrine yielded greater signal for both groups in several brain regions, including the ventral striatum, paracingulate cortex, middle frontal gyrus, the frontal poles, and inferior parietal cortex (see Fig 3, Table 5). These regions showed greater signal both when Christians rejected stimuli contrary to their doctrine (e.g. “The Biblical god is a myth”) and when nonbelievers affirmed the truth of those same statements. In other words, these brain areas responded preferentially to “blasphemous” statements in both subject groups.

...Despite the fact that religious believers and nonbelievers accepted and rejected diametrically opposite statements in half of our experimental trials, the same neural systems were engaged in both groups throughout. __PLosOne

The entire study is worth reading. Sam Harris -- in both his highly polemical bestseller and in his neuroscientific publication -- adopts a certain "God's eye view" when looking at religious believers. Yet the study itself seems to suggest that both "believers and non-believers" use the same parts of their brains when exercising belief and disbelief.

In other words, there really is no such thing as a believer vs. non-believer. All are both believers and disbelievers. They simply believe and disbelieve different things.

Harris appears to be trying to find a neurological basis to support the subtext of all of his polemical writing: that religious belief is a psychopathology. In the above paper, he clearly failed to achieve that goal. Still, there is a lot of time, there are a lot of fMRI machines, and there are still quite a lot of believers out there to test.

I have stated before that as an atheo-agnostic who was once a believer, I fail to understand the quasi-fanatical anti-religious zealotry of Harris, Hitchens, Dennet, Dawkins, and others who have cashed in on a current academic and social fashion.

The question of importance regarding religion is: Do the religious beliefs lead to fanaticism, disruptive intolerance, and violence? If not, then it is the person who is attacking a peaceful religion who has the problem, not the religious believer.

For Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins etc. not to understand this simple and basic distinction suggests they may be on a quasi-religious crusade of their own.

Regardless, the single belief that threatens the future of humanity more than any other, in my opinion, is the anti-scientific belief in carbon climate catastrophe. Under Obama, Pelosi, Boxer, and a parade of czars, directors, and popular hero-frauds, the quasi-religious belief in climate catastrophe threatens to cut the legs out from under the genuine movement toward a clean and abundant sustainability.

H/T Kurzweilai.net

For any readers who are curious to follow the reasoning of Al Fin in moving from religious belief to atheo-agnosticism, Walter Kaufman's Critique of Religion and Philosophy was pivotol in that transformation.

Belief, Disbelief, and Uncertainty: How the Brain Makes Us What

We are what our brains make us. What we believe, what we disbelieve. The UCLA Brain Mapping Center is using fMRI to map the different parts of the brain that perform different functions of making us what we are.

“These results suggest that the differences among belief, disbelief, and uncertainty may 1 day be distinguished reliably, in real time, by techniques of neuroimaging,” the researchers, with first author Sam Harris, a graduate student from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Brain Mapping Center, conclude. “This would have obvious implications for the detection of deception, for the control of the placebo effect during the process of drug design, and for the study of any higher-cognitive phenomenon in which the differences among belief, disbelief, and uncertainty might be a relevant variable.”

The study appeared online December 10 in advance of publication in the January 2008 issue of the Annals of Neurology....The difference between believing and disbelieving a proposition is 1 of the most potent regulators of human behavior and emotion, the authors write. “When one accepts a statement as true, it becomes the basis for further thought and action; rejected as false, it remains a string of words.”

...When they contrasted the trials of belief vs disbelief, they found increased signals in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), which is involved in linking factual knowledge with emotion. “The involvement of the VMPFC in belief processing suggests an anatomical link between the purely cognitive aspects of belief and human emotion and reward,” they write....Contrasting disbelief with belief showed increased signals in the anterior insula, a brain region involved in the sensation of taste, perception of pain, and the feeling of disgust, the authors write. “Our results appear to make sense of the emotional tone of disbelief, placing it on a continuum with other modes of stimulus appraisal and rejection,” the authors write.

Finally, uncertainty evoked a positive signal in the anterior cingulate cortex and a decreased signal in the caudate, a region of the basal ganglia that plays a role in motor action, they note. Because both belief and disbelief were associated with an increased signal in the caudate compared with uncertainty, the authors suggest that the basal ganglia may play a role in mediating the cognitive and behavioral differences between decision and indecision.

Medscape

The regions of the brain mediating belief also mediate emotion. Can anyone who has witnessed an online flame war doubt the connection? What about a family fight over Christmas dinner over whether a certain politician is Hitler reincarnated? Or a religious argument over which is the true faith? Emotion, belief, emotion--plus the caudate, preparation for motor action and memory encoding if necessary.

A person's entire life hinges on what he believes, whom she trusts, what groups they will join, what alliances they will make, what political party, what religion, what peer group . . . A lot depends upon a moment's hunch. Maybe, eventually, we can change our minds. But by then, what damage has been done?

Logic is an evolutionary latecomer to the human brain. For most people, logic is more difficult than cursory, emotional evaluation of an argument or situation. This is true for scientists, physicians, judges, and politicians--like anyone else. Trusting someone else's "judgment" is always a gamble. Of course, one who has never learned to use logic himself, has no other choice but to gamble on rapid, emotional evaluation.

Just Born that Way?

I would laugh at you, except I understand that you were born to believe silly things like that. Like what? Like Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, for example. Or Peak Oil. What about divine creation of the earth and all life? Have I stung you yet? Intelligent Design. Democracy. Monogamy. God or the gods. The true path. Do you believe?

Do you want to know the funny part? No matter how much I may laugh at your silly beliefs, chances are that some of my beliefs seem just as silly to you or someone else just as intelligent as you or I. Whether or not we "believe" does not depend upon our IQ or our level of emotional maturity. It has to do with how our brains are put together--how we think right out of the box. We are born to believe.

At least, that is what neuroscientist/physician Andrew Newberg says in his book and lectures, Born to Believe.

As the field studying the biology of religious experience advances into the next millenium, continued improvements in our abilities to study the brain coupled with better methods of measuring the subjective state of religious experiences will refine our understanding of the mystical mind. However, the ideas presented in this book represent the most up-to-date knowledge and the most complete synthesis of information currently available. The first installment will thus consider several basic principles of brain function as it relates to human experience, and in particular, religious experience.


...The causal operator permits reality to be viewed in terms of causal sequences. This operator seems to have played a significant role in the development of human science, philosophy, and particularly religion. In its basic function, the causal operator tends to impart a sense of causality on all of the events that we observe. Thus, this operator forces us to question why we are here, why does something work the way it does, and what created the universe. In all of these, and in every other instance, we want to know what is the cause that lies behind every event that we experience. Thus, we would suggest that it is the mind or brain itself that is designed to seek out causality. Our brain functions in such a way that it tries to find the cause of all of the things it experiences. If this is the case, then it is a biological necessity for us to seek out causality. Furthermore, there is evidence that our drive to determine causality may be present even as early as infancy. The causal operator has often led to the development of myth formation and in particular, religious beliefs. Religions, in general, offer an answer as to what ultimately causes things to happen in this universe -- power sources, gods, and in the high religions -- God.

Newberg

The quest to understand religion and mysticism through the lens of science goes back decades.

Scientists and scholars have long speculated that religious feeling can be tied to a specific place in the brain. In 1892 textbooks on mental illness noted a link between “religious emotionalism” and epilepsy. Nearly a century later, in 1975, neurologist Norman Geschwind of the Boston Veterans Administration Hospital first clinically described a form of epilepsy in which seizures originate as electrical misfirings within the temporal lobes, large sections of the brain that sit over the ears. Epileptics who have this form of the disorder often report intense religious experiences, leading Geschwind and others, such as neuropsychiatrist David Bear of Vanderbilt University, to speculate that localized electrical storms in the brain’s temporal lobe might sometimes underlie an obsession with religious or moral issues.

Exploring this hypothesis, neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran of the University of California, San Diego, asked several of his patients who have temporal lobe epilepsy to listen to a mixture of religious, sexual and neutral words while he tested the intensity of their emotional reactions using a measure of arousal called the galvanic skin response, a fluctuation in the electrical resistance of the skin. In 1998 he reported in his book Phantoms in the Brain (William Morrow), co-authored with journalist Sandra Blakeslee, that the religious words, such as “God,” elicited an unusually large emotional response in these patients, indicating that people with temporal lobe epilepsy may indeed have a greater propensity toward religious feeling.

The key, Ramachandran speculates, may be the limbic system, which comprises interior regions of the brain that govern emotion and emotional memory, such as the amygdala and hypothalamus. By strengthening the connection between the temporal lobe and these emotional centers, epileptic electrical activity may spark religious feeling.

To seal the case for the temporal lobe’s involvement, Michael Persinger of Laurentian University in Ontario sought to artificially re-create religious feelings by electrically stimulating that large subdivision of the brain. So Persinger created the “God helmet,” which generates weak electromagnetic fields and focuses them on particular regions of the brain’s surface.

In a series of studies conducted over the past several decades, Persinger and his team have trained their device on the temporal lobes of hundreds of people. In doing so, the researchers induced in most of them the experience of a sensed presence—a feeling that someone (or a spirit) is in the room when no one, in fact, is—or of a profound state of cosmic bliss that reveals a universal truth. During the three-minute bursts of stimulation, the affected subjects translated this perception of the divine into their own cultural and religious language—terming it God, Buddha, a benevolent presence or the wonder of the universe.

... University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist Andrew Newberg and his late colleague, Eugene d’Aquili, have pointed to the involvement of other brain regions in some people under certain circumstances. Instead of artificially inducing religious experience, Newberg and d’Aquili used brain imaging to peek at the neural machinery at work during traditional religious practices. In this case, the scientists studied Buddhist meditation, a set of formalized rituals aimed at achieving defined spiritual states, such as oneness with the universe.

When the Buddhist subjects reached their self-reported meditation peak, a state in which they lose their sense of existence as separate individuals, the researchers injected them with a radioactive isotope that is carried by the blood to active brain areas. The investigators then photographed the isotope’s distribution with a special camera—a technique called single-photon-emission computed tomography (SPECT).

The height of this meditative trance, as they described in a 2001 paper, was associated with both a large drop in activity in a portion of the parietal lobe, which encompasses the upper back of the brain, and an increase in activity in the right prefrontal cortex, which resides behind the forehead. Because the affected part of the parietal lobe normally aids with navigation and spatial orientation, the neuroscientists surmise that its abnormal silence during meditation underlies the perceived dissolution of physical boundaries and the feeling of being at one with the universe. The prefrontal cortex, on the other hand, is charged with attention and planning, among other cognitive duties, and its recruitment at the meditation peak may reflect the fact that such contemplation often requires that a person focus intensely on a thought or object.

Neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and his colleagues documented something similar in 2002, when they used fMRI to scan the brains of several hundred meditating Buddhists from around the world. Functional MRI tracks the flow of oxygenated blood by virtue of its magnetic properties, which differ from those of oxygen-depleted blood. Because oxygenated blood preferentially flows to where it is in high demand, fMRI highlights the brain areas that are most active during—and thus presumably most engaged in—a particular task.

Davidson’s team also found that the Buddhists’ meditations coincided with activation in the left prefrontal cortex, again perhaps reflecting the ability of expert practitioners to focus despite distraction. The most experienced volunteers showed lower levels of activation than did those with less training, conceivably because practice makes the task easier. This theory jibes with reports from veterans of Buddhist meditation who claim to have reached a state of “effortless concentration,” Davidson says.

...Brain scans alone cannot fully describe a mystical state, however. Because fMRI depends on blood flow, which takes place on the order of seconds, fMRI images do not capture real-time changes in the firing of neurons, which occur within milliseconds. That is why Beauregard turned to a faster technique called quantitative electroencephalography (EEG), which measures the voltage from the summed responses of millions of neurons and can track its fluctuation in real time. His team outfitted the nuns with red bathing caps studded with electrodes that pick up electric currents from neurons. These currents merge and appear as brain waves of various frequencies that change as the nuns again recall an intense experience with another person and a deep connection with God.

Beauregard and his colleagues found that the most prevalent brain waves are long, slow alpha waves such as those produced by sleep, consistent with the nuns’ relaxed state. In work that has not yet been published, the scientists also spotted even lower-frequency waves in the prefrontal and parietal cortices and the temporal lobe that are associated with meditation and trance. “We see delta waves and theta waves in the same brain regions as the fMRI,” Beauregard says.

...Inducing truly mystical experiences could have a variety of positive effects. Recent findings suggest, for example, that meditation can improve people’s ability to pay attention. Davidson and his colleagues asked 17 people who had received three months of intensive training in meditation and 23 meditation novices to perform an attention task in which they had to successively pick out two numbers embedded in a series of letters. The novices did what most people do, the investigators announced in June: they missed the second number because they were still focusing on the first—a phenomenon called attentional blink. In contrast, all the trained meditators consistently picked out both numbers, indicating that practicing meditation can improve focus.

Meditation may even delay certain signs of aging in the brain, according to preliminary work by neuroscientist Sara Lazar of Harvard University and her colleagues. A 2005 paper in NeuroReport noted that 20 experienced meditators showed increased thickness in certain brain regions relative to 15 subjects who did not meditate. In particular, the prefrontal cortex and right anterior insula were between four and eight thousandths of an inch thicker in the meditators; the oldest of these subjects boasted the greatest increase in thickness, the reverse of the usual process of aging. Newberg is now investigating whether meditation can alleviate stress and sadness in cancer patients or expand the cognitive capacities of people with early memory loss.

Artificially replicating meditative trances or other spiritual states might be similarly beneficial to the mind, brain and body. Beauregard and others argue, for example, that such mystical mimicry might improve immune system function, stamp out depression or just provide a more positive outlook on life. The changes could be lasting and even transformative.

SciAm

Certainly, if we are born to seek the transcendent, it is plausible that doing so constructively could be beneficial to our immune, neurological, and endocrine systems. Rational spirituality is almost certainly good for us. Even "irrational spirituality", like the "irrational" optimism of Seligman, may be good for us is some cases. The pessimist and the depressive may be more rational, in many situations, but are they more constructive and helpful--more functional?

Our brains cannot know and understand everything about those things we think about and care about. So we are forced to "bluff"--to believe. The fact that we often take our beliefs a bit too far may be regrettable. But it is certainly very much human. We are born that way.

More on Newberg's research and ideas here,here, and here.

Update: Lubos Motl comments on the fact that we take science on faith too.

Real Scientists Tolerate Religion

Just as "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche," real scientists don't get preoccupied with refuting religious ideas. While Dan Dennet, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Vic Stenger, and Richard Dawkins logically refute the tenets of religious belief, real scientists who know better are working quietly in their labs, doing real science. Real scientists understand that important things need to be done, and they are going about doing them.

Born into a religious family, I was forced to find my own way to a more logical, atheo-agnostic view of the universe. Over a period of adolescent time, I was able to build a dynamic view of the world and the cosmos that did not require an omnipotent, ever-present deity. As I was establishing my own independent perspective, it was necessary to debate the issue of religion with friends and family members. I understood how important religion was to these people that I cared for, so I did not resort to cheap shots or arguments designed to make them feel stupid.

Dan Dennet, Sam Harris, and Chris Hitchens are not scientists by any stretch of the imagination. Vic Stenger is no longer a working scientist, so he is off the hook. And if Rich Dawkins ever did anything other than writing books and appearing on talk shows and at book signings, the evidence is sparse. By a strict definition of "real scientist", these authors who have jumped on the recent anti-religion bandwagon are innocent of the charge.

Religion and Politics are the two topics almost certain to generate heated arguments at virtually any cocktail party where the attendees are honest with each other. Hundreds of millions of people were killed over political ideologies in the past 150 years. The bloodiest, guiltiest ideology of recent decades has been communism--a totalitarian, quasi-religious political belief system based upon mythical socio-economic constructs. But Islamism--a totalitarian religious based system--is on track to plow just as bloody a furrow through the earth of history.

Religion has not been a topic to trifle with, through the ages. People will too often compromise their politics before they will openly compromise their religion. As deadly as political arguments can become, religious arguments lie even closer to the heart, cut deeper to the quick.

Religion is dangerous. So why would a real scientist tolerate religion? I am not saying that real scientists tolerate violence. If a religion (or political system) turns prodigally violent, scientists--like all good people--should oppose it.

Scientists tolerate religion because in secular western societies the threat from homegrown religions (Judaism, Christianity) has run its course. These religions are tamed, and not the source of violence and oppression as they were in the middle ages and earlier. But real scientists understand the moderating role that these seasoned religions have on the natural turmoil of individuals. (Islam is a different story, for another posting)

Ideally, religions serve as moderators and absorbers of violent instincts that might otherwise lead to chain-reaction, out of control impulsiveness. Religions serve as simple explanations for complex phenomena, and allow ordinary, non-reflective people to focus on other issues. Religion is not a problem for society unless it is violent and publicly insistent, like Islamism or the more violent anti-abortion movements.

By focusing on the rather obvious logical fallacies inherent in religion and god belief, these authors put themselves on a pedestrian, didactic level that does them no credit. What is worse, the true believers in the religions they attack (generally the old and quiet religions) are completely turned off by their aggressive, and at the same time, patronizing approach. In other words, if they are trying to change people's minds, they are wasting their time. Instead, they seem to be preaching to a rather dim, off-key choir.

While it may be amusing to feel superior to others whom you feel to be living on a lower plane of thought, in reality the joke may be on you. In fact, you should probably assume that the joke is on you--that way you will be right more often than wrong. Religion is certainly a crutch. But the crutches leaned on by those in contempt of religion are not exactly invisible.

My attitude toward the toothless religions of today is to let sleeping dogs lie. If the "evangelicals" were bombing schoolbuses and airliners full of children and travelers, I would understand this recent faddish craze of anti-religion. I feel quite anti-Islamist myself, everytime I read about another Islamist inspired atrocity. But I do not attack the many muslims that I know and work with. I tolerate their religion--even as I disagree with it.

Modern leftism--which unfortunately has largely taken over the US Democratic Party--has become a quasi-religion. It can tolerate no other religions--except under the banner of multi-culturalism, which is a highly patronizing form of "tolerance." Much of the current anti-religion bandwagon is based upon this peculiar "religious competition" ongoing in the west.

Of course I understand the issues of stem cell research, abortion rights, secular public education free of religious indoctrination, etc. These are all issues that can be dealt with as we go. There is no need to obliterate the deep, non-violent faiths of hundreds of millions of people in order to finance stem cell lines, or to safeguard anyone's rights. The overkill resorted to by Hitchens, Harris, et al has taken on the appearance of a fashionable public statement of non-faith, which has snowballed somewhat within particular pseudo-intellectual circles.

Personally, I could not care less. The arguments I constructed in my own personal journey from religious faith to atheo-agnosticism are more compelling and reasonable than most of what I have read from the above authors. Had I read one of their books at the time I was evolving intellectually, I would probably still be a religious believer. Fortunately, I found my own way out of the cave.

For me, life without "God" is far more interesting, with far greater potential for personal satisfaction in work, accomplishment, and spiritual/intellectual striving. But that is for me. For others that I know, much of their satisfaction in life and reason for living, lies in their religious faith. I would not take that away from them--why would I want to?

There are far more important things to do than to waste time correcting some of the less destructive delusions littering the landscape.

Personally, I think much of this compulsion to wipe out religion--besides coming from the jealous "religion" of leftism--comes from an immature need to publicly appear "enlightened" in comparison to another group. In the modern "PC/Multicultural" world, certain groups are off-limits, and other groups are declared "in season." In North America, white males and christians are definitely "in season." You can bag all of them that you want, with no limits on cruel or unusual punishments or collateral damage.

But these excesses of the PC/Multicult establishment in the media and academia have their consequences later. This declared war on religion will probably result in an energizing of the evangelical zeal, just as the PC oppressiveness in universities is resulting in more resistance, and reflexive anti-PC ideas.

Global Warming as Religion

This is not the only blog to draw a comparison between the nature of belief in global warming, and belief in religion. The excellent website + blog Numberwatch has recently developed the analogy quite well:

Religions vary in their treatment of unbelievers, which ranges from disregard to slaughter. The new religion relies at present on verbal assault and character assassination, though there are those who would go further. They call the infidels “deniers” – a cheap and quite despicable verbal reference to the Holocaust. There is a sustained campaign to deny the deniers any sort of public platform for their views.

Apostates are universally even more reviled than infidels. They have turned their backs on the true faith, whichever that might happen to be. Partial apostates, or heretics, are even more loathed and through the ages have been subjected to the most appalling punishments and deaths. In the case of the “sceptical environmentalist”, Bjorn Lomborg, he is of the faith. In fact he is a serial believer; accepting, for example, that eating celery causes two percent of all cancers and, of course, that global warming is man made, but he rejects the sacrificing of humanity to the belief. This is unacceptable! What are a few million deaths from dirty water, mosquito bites and other hazards so long as people can be made to conform? So far he has only been assaulted with insults and custard pies. Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace, broke with the movement over its growing anti-human, anti-scientific tendencies and drift into extremism. The last straw for him was the campaign against chlorine, not only an essential component of human life but also the basis of one of the most dramatically life-saving hygienic interventions. He has, consequently, been subjected to a prolonged campaign of vilification, described as an eco-Judas, turncoat and traitor. Every minor commentator or blogger who manifests disbelief can expect to be the target of abuse from self-appointed protectors of the creed.

....Freedom of speech and publication is at the very heart of science. Even the most foolish of hypotheses is allowed to be offered for examination. In much of religion the opposite is true; challenging the established dogma is heresy, for which the punishment has ranged from ostracism to horrific torture and death. One of the greatest ironies produced by the successful policy of entryism by the eco-theologians is that it is none other than the Royal Society that has been orchestrating the attempt to censor any deviation from establishment beliefs. Authoritarian politicians, such as Congressman Brad Miller, would give such suppression the force of law.

It is a curious repetition of history that those who advance the hypothesis that the sun is the controlling element in changes of climate are vilified, just as Galileo was, for supporting the Copernican heliocentric description of the solar system. Yet the sun is clearly the driver for climate – if it stopped shining, the earth’s temperature would drop to near absolute zero. In the establishment dogma the sun is barely mentioned, while the puny efforts of mankind are gratuitously magnified out of proportion. In a scientific approach to climate, a full understanding of the behaviour of that solitary driver would be the first prerequisite, but this is waived in the interests of piety; so leading solar researchers have been deprived of funding.

....Contradictions and irrationality also abound in the modern theocratic world. The EU, for example, gratuitously destroys a tiny industry making traditional barometers, on the grounds of an irrational fear of mercury, then imposes the use of fluorescent light bulbs that distribute that same dreaded substance in huge quantities across the continent, all on the basis of the threat of global warming.

People who have never heard of Wien or Planck confidently assert that it is “obvious” that man-made CO2 will cause runaway warming of the planet, when it is not at all obvious to many who are familiar with the works of those gentlemen. It is obvious in the sense that it is obvious that believers will have everlasting life or that a senseless act of self-immolation will earn the eternal attentions of 72 virgins in Paradise. The capacity to believe six impossible things before breakfast has been restored from fantasy to accepted normality.

By all means, visit the Source for more.


The logical response to a question for which you do not know the answer is: "I don't know." But in religion and global warming, the government school educated, the psychologically neotenous, the academically lobotomised--all of these are willing to go far out on a limb, far beyond what they can demonstrate to be true, in declaring the strength of their belief, of their certainty!

This is why government should have absolutely nothing to do with promoting religion, and that includes the religion of global warming. If you believe in an absurd religion, keep it to yourself! Otherwise you may become like those absurd primitive fanatics who go around slicing people's heads off, and stoning women to death. Is that what you want? We hope not.

Say your prayers as you like, but stay out of our way. Otherwise, we cannot be held to account for the consequences. Religions must know their place.

The Global Warming Delusion, by Richard Dawkins

The Global Warming Delusion
From AlFinipedia, the free encyclopedia


The Global Warming Delusion is a non-fiction book by British ethologist Richard Dawkins, Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.

In the book, Dawkins argues that belief in anthropogenic global warming qualifies as a delusion, which he defines as a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence. He is sympathetic to Robert Pirsig's observation that "when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called global warming."[1]

The Global Warming Delusion was ranked #2 on the Amazon.com bestsellers' list in November 2006.[2][3][4] In early December 2006, it reached #4 in the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction Best Seller list after nine weeks on the list.[5] As of February 14, 2007, it is listed at #8, after 20 weeks on the list.[6]

Dawkins writes that The Global Warming Delusion contains four liberating messages:

* Global Warming Heretics can be happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled.
* scientific theories are superior to a "Global Warming hypothesis" — the illusion of anthropogenic warming — in explaining the world climate.
* Children should not be indoctrinated by their teacher's political and climate delusions.
* Climate Heretics and Independent Thinkers should be proud, not apologetic, because demanding valid evidence is evidence of a healthy, independent mind.[1]

It seems that even non-religious people feel compelled to invent new religions--a compulsive delusionogenesis that lies hidden in the genetic subconscious. It is amusing that those who ridicule others for their religious delusions, find themselves enmeshed within delusions of their own. Oblivious within their personal web of deceit, they see themselves above such things.

Apologies to Wikipedia and Richard Dawkins.

Brainwashing, Consciousness-Raising, and Cult Indoctrination

"Brainwashing" came to be recognized as a term around 1950, in Mao's attempts to transform revolutionary China. The term came into use in the western world in the USA during the Korean War of the 1950s, when it became known that the Chinese communists were using brainwashing techniques on western prisoners of war.

What is brainwashing?

In the late 1950s, psychologist Robert Jay Lifton studied former prisoners of Korean and Chinese war camps. He determined that they'd undergone a multistep process that began with attacks on the prisoner's sense of self and ended with what appeared to be a change in beliefs. Lifton ultimately defined a set of steps involved in the brainwashing cases he studied:

1. Assault on identity
2. Guilt
3. Self-betrayal
4. Breaking point
5. Leniency
6. Compulsion to confess
7. Channeling of guilt
8. Releasing of guilt
9. Progress and harmony
10. Final confession and rebirth

Each of these stages takes place in an environment of isolation, meaning all "normal" social reference points are unavailable, and mind-clouding techniques like sleep deprivation and malnutrition are typically part of the process. There is often the presence or constant threat of physical harm, which adds to the target's difficulty in thinking critically and independently.

Source.

These methods should be familiar to anyone who has experienced indoctrination into a cult, or the political indoctrination known as "consciousness raising." Consciousness raising is a method of "programming" a person into an extremist philosophy--and is common practise in many leftist and nazi-type organisations. In fact the original method of programming for radical feminists was consciousness raising. It is important to separate the individual from her previous "program", in order to program her into the new ideology.

Our study groups were radicalizing our own consciousness and it suddenly became apparent that women could be doing on a mass scale what we were doing in our own group, that the next logical radical action would be to get the word out about what we were doing. This kind of study would be part of what was necessary to achieve the liberation of women on a mass scale. Source.

Cult indoctrination and indoctrination in muslim extremism follows much the same form as the other types of brainwashing.

* Breaking sessions: that pressure a person until they crack.
* Changing values: to change what is right and wrong.
* Confession: to leave behind the undesirable past.
* Entrancement: open the mind and limit rational reflection.
* Engagement: that draws a person in.
* Exhaustion: so they are less able to resist persuasion.
* Guilt: about the past that they can leave behind.
* Higher purpose: associate desirability with a higher purpose.
* Identity destruction: to make space for the new identity.
* Information control: that blocks out dissuading thoughts.
* Incremental conversion: shifting the person one step at a time.
* Isolation: separating people from dissuasive messages.
* Love Bomb: to hook in the lonely and vulnerable.
* Persistence: never giving up, wearing you down.
* Special language: that offers the allure of power and new meaning.
* Thought-stopping: block out distracting or dissuading thoughts.

Source.
Anyone reading the above list of characteristics of "conversion techniques" will notice similarities between cult techniques, political ideological techniques, and techniques used against prisoners of war in the Korean and Vietnamese wars.
The sad truth is, in leftist dominated universities in the western world, as in muslim and extreme fundamentalist religious schools, such "consciousness raising" types of brainwashing are routinely used in many classes given by women's studies, ethnic studies, political science, and many other departments where political and religious indoctrination is considered more important than preparing the students to be fit to meet the future.