Years ago, in the early days of the internet, there was a great site called Global Ideas Bank that was a clearing house for creative ideas to improve society. I can’t find it anymore (though a blog has picked up the idea), but one of the ideas cataloged there was a collection of rules about life. I’d like to pass those rules on with a few of my own.

These rules are rather contrarian. Instead of wise bits of encouragement or a pat on the head, this is tough-love advice that assumes that dealing squarely with reality is the best approach. Each ends with an implied “that’s life—deal with it.”

I’ve added a few comments and quotes.

1. You can’t make people like you. “I can’t give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time” (Herbert Bayard Swope).

2. There is no way of getting all you want. Admire without desiring. “My riches consist not in the extent of my possessions but in the fewness of my wants” (J. Brotherton).

3. The world is not fair. “Expecting life to treat you well because you are a good person is like expecting an angry bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian” (Shari Barr).

4. Being good often doesn’t pay off. Make good its own reward. “The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it” (General Norman Schwarzkopf).

5. There is no compensation for misfortune. Life isn’t fair, and it doesn’t owe you anything.

6. We don’t control most things. “Risk taking is inherently failure-prone. Otherwise, it would be called sure-thing-taking” (Tim McMahon).

7. All important decisions are made on the basis of insufficient data. “He who postpones the hour of living is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses” (Horace).

8. Each of us is ultimately alone. There is no supernatural friend who is looking out for you, smoothing the way. This can terrify you, or it can empower you. “The most important things, each man must do for himself” (Sheldon Kopp).

9. When you die, that’s it. “Things work out best for those who make the best out of the way things work out.”

10. Most of us in the West are greatly privileged compared to people living in the rest of the world. It’s human nature to complain and look for more, but it is helpful to look up occasionally to appreciate how you fit into the big picture.

A Christian list would typically be more optimistic, and coming from that worldview, I can see how these rules might seem discouraging. To me, however, they simply seem to be a straightforward distillation of reality. It’s better to see life accurately, warts and all, than to live in a delusion.

I like optimistic advice, but I like realistic advice, too. What similar advice would you give as a bracing dose of reality?

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/9/14.)

Image via Enric Martinez, CC license

Sometimes the door to new insight is not only unlocked but opened, and yet one refuses to go through.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the ferociously rational Sherlock Holmes, was not so rational in his personal life. He was famously deceived by the 1917 Cottingley Fairies hoax, photos of palm-sized fairies dancing with two girls in the town of Cottingley, England (I’ve written more on Conan Doyle and that hoax here).

Perhaps sorrow overrode common sense. Conan Doyle had been pushed into depression by the deaths of a number of family members during and shortly after World War I, and he saw the new spiritualism movement as a way to contact them.

His friend Harry Houdini also spent much time with spiritualism, but his focus was on debunking it. Like magician The Amazing Randi today, Houdini knew how tricks were done and exposed the charlatans.

Harry Houdini once tried to defuse Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s passion for spiritualism. Houdini performs what must have been a baffling trick for Conan Doyle and then said:

Sir Arthur, I have devoted a lot of time and thought to this illusion. . . . I won’t tell you how it was done, but I can assure you it was pure trickery. I did it by perfectly normal means. I devised it to show you what can be done along these lines. Now, I beg of you, Sir Arthur, do not jump to the conclusion that certain things you see are necessarily “supernatural,” or the work of “spirits,” just because you cannot explain them.

Obviously, Conan Doyle now can’t believe in spiritualism while at the same time believing that it’s all just fakery. So what does he do? He rejects the claim that it’s fakery! Given a plausible natural explanation from a reputable source, he concluded that Houdini must have been accessing real supernatural forces.

This is all the more puzzling when Conan Doyle himself took the magician’s role on at least one occasion. At a 1922 meeting of the Society of American Magicians, he previewed a test reel for an upcoming movie based on his novel The Lost World. The film showed stop-action dinosaurs feeding and fighting (video). It ain’t Jurassic Park, but it was astonishing at the time. Doyle knew that it was just artistry and technology, of course, but he kept his audience guessing. (h/t Bob Jase)

Do magicians not tell their secrets because it would violate the Magicians’ Code? Perhaps it’s more because the viewers’ excitement—the magic—would be lost when they peek behind the curtain. If Houdini had shown Conan Doyle how the trick was done, Conan Doyle would’ve responded as any of us do once we see the quite natural and even boring way a trick works.

And many of us insist on sticking with the exciting supernatural rather than the mundane natural.

I conclude [that this fallacious reasoning]
must be a product of a brain unsatisfied with doubt;
as nature abhors a vacuum,
so, too, does the brain abhor no explanation.
It therefore fills in one, no matter how unlikely.
— Michael Shermer

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/18/14.)

Image via Zastavki

A detailed description of a household chore doesn’t usually make for interesting reading, but stick with this one to see if you fall into the same trap that I did. I’d like to share how yours truly doggedly stuck with a hypothesis without pausing to consider if it were wrong.

I do a fair amount of the chores around my house, and our everyday glassware was looking cloudy. I noticed that the dishwasher was leaving a film on them, so I scrubbed the inside of each glass with an abrasive sponge, rinsed them, and put them away. But the problem remained. Now, the top third was clear, while the bottom was still cloudy, which made the problem even more evident.

The cause of this new effect was easy to find. I had scrubbed the inside up and down but then scrubbed the rim laterally by squeezing the rim with the sponge. Each glass has a ribbed texture on the inside, so I figured that by going laterally on the rim, I had gotten into the valleys on the inside that I’d missed with the up-and-down strokes.

That was easy to fix, so I changed my scrubbing approach, but the problem remained. How tough was this film? One day I decided to get serious. No cleaning chore was going to get the better of me, so I tried a more abrasive sponge. I tried cleanser. I tried chemicals that dissolve lime deposits. I looked up the problem on the internet. No progress.

Oddly, when I finally developed the hypothesis that turned out to be correct, it didn’t hit me in a “What an idiot!” kind of way. I tenaciously held on to the idea that I understood the problem and was simply not hitting it aggressively enough. But I gave this new insight a try and, yep, that was the problem.

Glasses have an outside as well, and that’s where the film was. I’d been focused exclusively on scrubbing the inside. What an idiot.

Our blind spots

This wasn’t an error of a wrong solution but misunderstanding the very problem. It’s particularly annoying because I’ve done it before, and I should be quicker to step back to consider alternatives. I should hold my hypotheses more tentatively.

In five minutes we can see flaws in others that we don’t see in ourselves in a lifetime. Brian Dunning of the Skeptoid podcast says that after he concluded vitamin C had no effect on colds, it took a year to wean himself off the habit of taking it, just in case. Greta Christina admits that she took a long time to accept the evidence that glucosamine was ineffective for her joint pain. Sam Harris introduced the Fireplace Delusion to challenge us to appreciate that recreational wood burning is unjustifiable.

Knowing our own fallibility helps when we try to understand errors in other people.

Worldviews: do you turn away from errors or embrace them?

Admitting that I wasted time on a home chore isn’t that embarrassing. However, it’s much more embarrassing to admit that you’ve wasted decades of your life clinging to a flawed worldview and rationalizing the evidence to support a god that wasn’t there. The ego investment may be so much that admitting the error is impossible. People faced with evidence of such an error often double down and continue with renewed confidence—at least superficially.

We see this with the Dorothy Martin’s Seekers cult, which predicted the end of the world on December 21, 1954. Her true believers expected to be saved by a UFO at midnight the night before. They sold everything and quit jobs and waited for the end. After midnight passed, eagerness for the adventure turned into anxiety. Would they be destroyed with the rest of humanity? And then: had this all been a fraud?

A last-minute message to the founder reported that their earnest faith had saved the world from destruction. Yep, they’d been right all along!

We see this with other predictions of the end from religious groups such as the Millerites in 1844, the Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1914, Harold Camping in 2011, and John Hagee (the “four blood moons” fiasco) in 2013–15. Some true believers doubtless walked away from their group, but incredibly, many did not. Their faith remained despite enormous evidence that it was misplaced.

How much of the Christian appearance is honest confidence and how much is hollow bravado?

A belief which leaves
no place for doubt
is not a belief;
it is a superstition.
—  José Bergamín

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/14/14.)

Image credit: Ted, flickr, CC

The time from the death of Jesus to the writing of the first gospel was about forty years. An exciting story being passed along orally in a world full of the supernatural seems bound to be “improved,” deliberately or inadvertently, as it moves from person to person.

While some epistles were written earlier, the details Paul gives about the life of Jesus can be summarized in one short paragraph (more here). How can we dismiss the possibility that any actual history of Jesus is lost through a decades-long game of telephone?

Christian rebuttal

Christian apologist William Lane Craig says that forty years is too short a period for legend to develop. He points to a claim made by A.N. Sherwin-White in Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (1963).

According to Sherwin-White, the writings of Herodotus enable us to determine the rate at which legend accumulates, and the tests show that even two generations is too short a time span to allow legendary tendencies to wipe out the hard core of historical facts. When Professor Sherwin-White turns to the gospels, he states that for the gospels to be legends, the rate of legendary accumulation would have to be “unbelievable.” More generations would be needed. (Source)

Craig’s summary has been quoted widely and was popularized in Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ (2008), and it sounds like a thorough slap down of the legend claim. However, when we see what Sherwin-White actually said, we find that Craig’s confidence is unwarranted.

(From this point forward, I’ll use “SW” to refer to historian A.N. Sherwin-White.)

SW never said “unbelievable”

Incredibly, the word “unbelievable,” which Craig puts into the mouth of SW, is not used by him in the relevant chapter in this book. If the word comes from another source, Craig doesn’t cite it. Craig also quotes the word in his essay in Jesus Under Fire (1995).

We all make mistakes, but it’s been twenty years. Where is Craig’s correction?

What did SW actually say?

From his Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament:

Herodotus enables us to test the tempo of myth-making, and the tests suggest that even two generations are too short a span to allow the mythical tendency to prevail over the hard historic core of the oral tradition. (RSRL, 190)

SW proposes an interesting experiment. If we can find examples in history where legend has crept into oral history and we have more reliable sources that let us compare that with what actually happened, we can measure how fast legendary material accumulates.

Notice the limitations in what SW is saying.

• He cites several examples where historians have (tentatively) sifted truth from myth, but Herodotus is the only example used to put a rate on the loss of historic truth. This isn’t a survey of, say, a dozen random historic accounts that each validates a two-generation limit.
• He isn’t saying that myth doesn’t accumulate, and he’s not proposing a rate at which it does. He’s writing instead about the loss of accurate history (“the mythical tendency to prevail over the hard historic core”).
• He is careful to use the word “suggest” above. William Lane Craig isn’t as careful and imagines an immutable law that SW clearly isn’t proposing.

What is SW’s point?

Here is more of what SW is saying.

All this suggests that, however strong the myth-forming tendency, the falsification does not automatically and absolutely prevail. (RSRL, 191)

The point of my argument is not to suggest the literal accuracy of ancient sources, secular or ecclesiastical, but to offset the extreme skepticism with which the New Testament narratives are treated in some quarters. (RSRL, 193)

Craig imagines that myth never overtakes historic truth in two generations. By contrast, SW says that myth doesn’t always overtake historic truth.

Consider Craig’s difficulty. He proposes what may be the most incredible story possible: that a supernatural being created the universe and came to earth as a human and that this was recorded in history. We have a well-populated bin labeled “Mythology” for stories like this. If Craig is to argue that, no, this one is actually history, SW’s statement is useless. “Well, myth might not have overtaken historic truth in this case” does very little to keep Craig’s religion from the Mythology bin.

More limitations in SW’s statement

• SW gives no procedure for reliably winnowing the myth out of the history.
• It’s been more than fifty years since his book, which is plenty of time for scholars to weigh in. If they’ve said nothing, that gives us little reason to think that SW is onto something useful. But if a consensus response has emerged, that is what we should be considering, not SW’s original proposal.
• The examples that SW considers—Tiberius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and others—are all important public figures. Jesus was not. Legendary drift is slow when everyone experienced the impact of the figure directly and might correct a story themselves. By contrast, only a handful of people could rein in an errant Jesus story (more here).
• SW’s examples are all secular leaders. Is Herodotus a relevant example when we’re concerned about the growth of a religious tale? Consider Sathya Sai Baba, an Indian guru who died in 2011 with millions of followers. Supernatural tales grew up around him in his own lifetime. (More on the growth of legends here and here.)

SW proves too much!

Craig must walk a fine line since he can’t completely reject mythological development. Myth is his enemy when it comes to the New Testament books written forty to seventy years after the death of Jesus. He must downplay myth to label these as history. But myth is his friend when it comes to the noncanonical books of the second century—the Gospel of Thomas, the Shepherd of Hermas, and so on. Here he imagines the mists of time separating the authors of those books from the actual history.

Worse, the Bible itself documents legendary accretion in just months or a few years. When Jesus asked the disciples who people said he was, “They told him, ‘John the Baptist; and others say, Elijah; and others, one of the prophets’ ” (Mark 8:27–8). According to the gospels themselves, there was legendary accretion during Jesus’s own lifetime!

This observation cuts twice. First, it argues for much quicker development of legend than Craig wants. Second, it defeats the Naysayer Hypothesis, the claim that no false statement about the gospel story would last while the eyewitnesses were alive to stamp it out. Apparently not, if Jesus himself can’t stop the flawed rumors. (h/t Robert M. Price)

And incredibly, Craig’s own quote supports the skeptics’ concern about legend creeping into the gospels! Apologists don’t read SW’s chapter directly; they prefer Craig’s quote. It’s a much better data point with which to argue that the gospels are accurate—if you can get past that small issue of it being completely inaccurate.

Sticky, not accurate, is what gets passed along. This is true for Craig as it is for the gospel story.

In the beginning, God created man in his own image. 
Man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.
— Rousseau

References: These sources provided much valuable material for this post.

• “Fertile Soil for the Growth of Legend,” chapter 7 inThe Empty Tomb: Jesus beyond the Grave, edited by Robert Price and Jeffrey Jay Lowder (Prometheus, 2005), 168–170.
• Kris Komarnitsky, “Myth Growth Rates and the Gospels: A Close Look at A.N. Sherwin-White’s Two-Generation Rule,” 5/13.
• “The Apologists’ Abuse of A.N. Sherwin-White,” You Call This Culture blog, 11/8/07.
• “Lee Strobel and A.N. Sherwin-White,” You Call This Culture blog, 2/3/11.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/30/13.)

Image credit: Jamin Gray, flickr, CC

This is the final part of a 3-part guest post by long-time commenter Richard S. Russell. Read part 1 here.
This analysis of decision making brings me to my take-home point: faith sucks.
Faith is the world’s worst possible decision-making method.
Nobody ever uses faith to decide anything that really matters. You wouldn’t rely on faith to pick out a used car or your kid’s college or even what brand of soap to use.
For sure nobody—no, not the most ardent fundamentalist—would slap on a blindfold, put sealing wax in his ears, and rely on faith to decide when it’s safe to cross a busy highway.
No, the only time faith ever gets trotted out as a justification for anything is when there’s absolutely no other justification whatsoever. Nobody ever uses faith when there’s a better decision-making method available.
Not surprisingly, then, faith is the primary thing cited by preachers for why you should mortgage your brain to buy the huge crock of, let us say, fertilizer that they’re peddling. What else can they point to? Reason? Evidence? Common sense? Hardly.
Centuries ago, Christian leaders must have realized that they had an uphill struggle to get people to believe the enormous whoppers they were trying to sell. So they decided to back the process up a step and, instead of touting the conclusions they were pushing, speak glowingly of the process by which they arrived at those conclusions. That is, nobody in her or his right mind was likely to believe, from a standing start, that anyone would be able to change water into wine. But, soften them up ahead of time by conning them into thinking that faith is a wonderful thing, then the whole water-into-wine thing becomes an exercise in faith, “… and didn’t you already say you were one of the faithful?”
To give credit where it’s due, Christian charlatans—with aid from the rack, the thumbscrew, and the stake—have been hugely successful in their efforts to create a wholly undeserved good reputation for faith. Lutherans name their churches after it. Musicians write hymns of praise to it. Proud parents name their baby girls after it. It’s entered the popular lexicon in phrases like “Keep the faith, baby!” and “Ya gotta have faith.” (though nobody ever explains exactly why).
Perhaps the most widely quoted such phrase is “Faith can move mountains.” This cliché is always intoned with great solemnity, and everyone in the vicinity is expected, as a matter of social convention, to nod knowingly, as if some great and profound truth has just been uttered. It’s considered unutterably rude to do what I always do, namely ask “Oh yeah? Name one example!” Having hard reality intrude into the socially approved delusional circle jerk of mountain-moving faith is something that is Not Done In Polite Society.
Oh, please. Get over it. Look, let’s put it this way. If you and I were to sit down on opposite sides of a table, and I were to point out a speck of dust on that table, and you mustered all the faith at your disposal—maybe even called in old markers of faith that you’d lent out to your friends—do you think you could get that grain of dust to so much as twitch? Of course not. You know better. Faith can’t do squat. If it can’t move a speck of dust, whence cometh this grandiose claim about mountains?
Well, here’s my unresearched take on it. I think it’s a classic example of what stage magicians call “misdirection” and what street hustlers call “the old switcheroo.” It’s akin to advertising puffery, which no thinking person takes seriously. “Cleaner than clean”? Say what? But mindless ideas like that are evidently effective on the unthinking, which is why they continue to get used.
Same deal with references to faith. Preachers bundle it together with truly admirable virtues, such as hope and charity, expecting their favorite scam to benefit from good associations. And, as George Orwell warned in his essay on NewSpeak at the end of 1984, they also use “faith” where the proper term is “trust” or “confidence,” trying to trick the gullible into thinking of them as synonyms.
But war is not peace. Slavery is not freedom. Ignorance is not strength. Faith is not trust, nor confidence, nor even hope. Faith is the decision-making technique of last resort, the bottom of the barrel when it comes to reliability, the “F” on the report card of worldly wisdom.
As I said, nobody ever uses faith for anything that actually matters—and certainly not for anything that can be tested, let alone measured. It’s the pernicious basis of not only religion, with all its attendant evils, but also homeopathy, astrology, objectivism, ufology, conspiracy theories, climate-change denial, false accusations of ritual satanic child abuse, anti-vax movements, a host of superstitions, personality cults, jingoism, imperialism, racism, quackery, Chinese traditional “medicine,” feng shui, and the insidious brain parasite that leads people to endlessly obsess over anyone named Kardashian.
Frankly, you have to be an idiot to take anything on faith.
As it happens, billions qualify.
See also: “Faith, the Other F-Word”

Christians are obsessed with the lifelong goal
of earning permission to move back
into their heavenly father’s house and live on his dime,
yet we’re the ones who need to grow up.
— commenter TheBookOfDavid

Image credit: U.S. Army Photography Contest, flickr, CC