Tag Archive for life

Brandon Christen | December 19, 2011
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And now, if you will, a Metaphor….

Imagine a massive ship filled with many sailors…

At some time, a rumor began spreading amongst all the people that the boat was heading towards an island that was unbelievably amazing; an island where all the normal laws of reality were suspended and ultimate, endless bliss would enrapture them forever. Many of the sailors took so much joy from this thought that they began ignoring their duties on the ship, doing little more than staring out on the horizon and waiting for the island to appear. Many others did indeed continue their day-to-day tasks on the ship, helping to keep it clean and such, but they constantly talked about the island. It was their obsession, their passion, and their pride. Groups and sub-groups formed around different ideas of what the island would be like. Some thought it would be tropical, others temperate, and still others thought it would have every climate imaginable for all people to enjoy. Arguments sprang up over what sorts of foods would be present on the island!

At various times, different sailors would hold out their spyglasses and shout aloud “I see it! I see the island there!” and many would swell with enthusiasm…that is, until it was revealed that the crier had seen wrong (or, on occasion, even outright lied). Despite all these false alarms and misplaced swells of hope, the vast majority of the sailors kept believing, to the point of certainty, that the island was just over the next wave.

Eventually, almost all of the sailors took to ignoring the present duties of ship-board life and chose to stare out on the horizon with their own spyglasses, each on certain that they could see the island in the distance (despite some of them looking in utterly opposite directions). Indeed, there were many heated arguments, but one thing every one of them could agree on was this: regardless of exactly where it was or what it was like, that perfect island was definitely out there, somewhere. It just had to be.

One day, one of the sailors climbed up to the top of the mast and found two other sailors there, arguing.

“I think the island will be temperate!” said the first. “It will be temperate, I tell you!”

“Ah, but you’re mistaken, friend. It will be tropical!” said the second. “I guarantee you, for I can see it!” he continued, holding his spyglass aloft.

“Fool!” shouted the first. “I can see it, and it is, in fact, quite temperate!”

At that point, the third sailor (who had just climbed up) yanked the spyglasses from both others and told them this:

“Actually, friends, you’re both mistaken. If you’ll just look right here,” he said, gesturing to the ends of their spyglasses, “you’ll see that you each just drew what you wanted the island to be like on the glass. You were never actually seeing the island; you just painted what you wanted to see and thus saw it in your own imagination. Now if you’ll just look without these faulty spyglasses, you’ll quickly see that there is no island; in fact, there never was an island. However, what we do have is an amazing ship with everything you could ever really want already on it. There are lots of other people onboard, too. You can get to know them, make friends, find lovers, and have wonderful conversations. You can learn, eat, relax, work, and overall have a merry life aboard this ship if you’ll only just stop obsessing over this island you came up with.”

“But the island is supposed to be perfect!” cried the first sailor.

“Indeed! Perfect!” shouted the second, both of them clearly distraught at this news.

“Ah, but that is exactly why it doesn’t exist, friends,” said the third sailor. He reached out and put his hands on their shoulders: “Nothing perfect is out there. I’ll admit it, this ship is sometimes leaky and some of the other people aboard aren’t too terribly pleasant. But I think you’ll find that once you stop daydreaming about perfection and start happily working with what you do have, you’ll find yourselves much happier.”

Behold, our ship

Now, guess which sailor was the Atheist…

Category: Creative, General, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Ellen Lundgren | December 5, 2011
One comment

Adult takes standardized test… fails

Standardized tests. The thing that sends chills down the spines of many students. In grade school they were the terror that made no. 2 pencils snap, and little palms sweat. College students still groan over Scantron sheets and filling in endless rows of bubbles. Hence why I loved this Washington Post article of an adult who took a 10th grade standardized test and made his scores public.

 

Long story, short; failure. The man who took the test said,

I won’t beat around the bush, the math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.

It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.

I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities.

 

A result of this has come to a revolt of school principals in New York protesting the use of students’ test scores to evaluate teachers’ and principals’ performance. I have always thought this was a ludicrous practice because it turns teachers away from the students from being good learners, to teaching them to be good standardized test takers — two very different skills.

These tests give students unrealistic skills for our world, and cause a lifetime of damage when used improperly as students who fail these tests are told they are not ‘college material’ when they are otherwise wonderfully gifted and intelligent. As I posted this on my facebook page, Ryan Coons responded by saying, “I only passed 11th grade English because my teacher didn’t want to see me ever again, and she told me this. ‘Where will you get with that attitude?’ Well, it got me into graduate school. Twice.”

I think education is a system that is severely flawed in our country and is a movement we as secularists need to command. It needs to change immediately. The US is already falling behind in education standards by many other countries. If we’re to keep up at all, our teachers need to be paid fairly, students need to be taught effectively, and these standardized tests need to be thrown out the window.

Category: Ethics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Ellen Lundgren | November 25, 2011
2 comments

Response to Mental Illness

I received this email shortly after posting my guest piece on JT’s blog and I thought I’d share it here.

_______________________

This is not to take you up on your (generous) offer of help, but because I would like to thank you for opening up and reaching out.

It makes me happy to see someone to talk about mental health on this personal level and every time I see someone do it, I find their courage… well, encouraging.

There’s still a lot of fear and shame involved when it comes to psychological disorders and I suspect there are many people who feel alone with their problems because nobody wants to be the first to talk about it. This doesn’t only make people feel worse, it also prevents timely treatment.

For me, knowing that there is a name for my problems -I’ve struggled with an eating disorder for about a decade and suspect that as yet undiagnosed depression and anxiety have played an irritatingly large part in my life – and knowing that I am not alone, made it easier to take both myself and my problems more seriously and not to have them dismissed.

Sad as it is that others are suffering too, knowing their stories can be comforting. I can relate very well to the social anxiety part and am glad to hear this has gotten better for you as well.

Stepping forward and reaching out was a brave thing to do. As was your decision to face your psychological issues and work on them.

I don’t know what your background on psychology is, but I was quite impressed with the tricks and techniques you used to pull yourself up. “Fake it till you make it” is a great strategy, isn’t it?

Also, I always find it encouraging if people talk about their personal successes and become living proof things can get better.

That the tackling of the topic isn’t accompanied by religious sentiments and the claim that you somehow need faith to find comfort and strength to recover, seems almost like a bonus.

For me, a naturalistic worldview has gone hand in hand with the idea the concept of mental disorders as being no different from any other health problem. I think this makes it more difficult to jude people with psychological disorders but points the way towards inverstigation and understanding of mental health. I find that view quite liberating as I was struggling with a lot of feelings of guilt in shame in addition to my other problems. So, I’m happy to see the topic discussed within the sceptic community as I think scepticism might be a natural ally when it comes to evidence-based forms of therapy and overcoming prejudice.

So I guess the whole point of this email is to say : Yay, Ellen :D!
Again, thank you very much for that post.

Best wishes,
Julia

_________________

Thank you very much to Julia for sending me this email and allowing me to publish her response. I wanted to share this because she has made many great points herself on how sharing your story can help others, and how it’s possible to overcome such disorders without needing religion to do it. I hope her response continues to help others to see that mental illness is beatable and there are ways to get through it with the help of others. Rah, rah, skeptics!

Category: Lifestyle | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Elizabeth Knapp | August 1, 2011
One comment

Death: Perspective (Part 1)

Death is perhaps one of the top three matters of life that is responsible for a countless number of vivid and colorful products of the human imagination (the other two, of course, being world phenomena and the number 42). Perspectives on death are also very diverse: some fear it, while others welcome it; some hold the view that dying honorably is most desirable, while others prefer quantity over quality of life lived. And, naturally, everyone would like to know if death means THE END, or if it is the beginning of a new adventure.

An individual’s perspective on death is greatly influenced by the individual’s perspective on life, and vice versa. It also influences how the individual experiences loss. What I will be focusing on specifically is how death influences an individual’s perspective on religion. It is my desire to illustrate a few ways that death appeals to religion, and then offer a secular perspective on death to hopefully counter the religious appeal.

To start with, religion offers the appeal of temporary loss as opposed to permanent loss. For instance, one of my agnostic friends told me last year that she was now a Christian. This was caused by the loss of a dear friend in an accident. She told me that her conversion occurred while looking up at the stars in tears, wishing and wanting for death to not be the end. The idea of the person she loved simply vanishing in a void of nothingness horrified her, which is completely understandable. We can all sympathize with these feelings. When someone we love suddenly disappears out of our life, we want to be reassured that they are not lost forever. The cliche’ phrase, “They will live in our hearts,” is insufficient. We want to know that they are truly immortal in the sense that we will see them again, because it is not only good news for them but good news for us when it is our turn to become “lost forever.”

A couple months after this time in her life my friend became an atheist. She told me that she was not bothered by death any more. For other reasons besides this anecdote, I hypothesize that the acceptance of reality for what it is, instead of what we want it to be (or what we were misled into thinking it was), plays a quintessential role in changing beliefs. It is similar to childhood, when we were shielded from the more gruesome facts of life. While we grow up, paradigm after paradigm breaks to reveal the things that were intentionally concealed. The world we knew as children is not the world we know now, but that does not mean the world has changed. It means we realized it for what it really is–indeed, not just realized it, but chose not to hide from it, no matter how terrible. 

The counter-appeal of realism to the religious appeal of temporary loss is acceptance. Acceptance of what is most realistic provides us with a different reassurance: the reassurance that we are not fooling ourselves with wishful thinking. On this foundation positive, fresh perspectives can built, like the idea that having one life to live makes every day more prescious.

At an astronomy event last night a NASA poster brought the following to my attention. Spread your arms out at your sides so that they make a 180 degree angle. Now imagine that that line, from the fingertips of your right hand to the fingertips of your left hand, represents the 4.5 billion years history of our earth. If someone approached you with a nail file and began filing away at a nail on your left hand, that person just erased the ENTIRE history of mankind. Now compare the history of mankind to your lifespan. Isnt that amazing? Well, it can also be depressing. 

There are no cookie cutter explanations for why death should not get us down, or why loss should be less painful. No matter what explanation we choose to mollify ourselves, at least we know that we are not lying to ourselves, and that, in and of itself, can be comforting. Santa doesnt give out free stuff at Christmas, but Christmas gives me an excuse to exchange food and presents with friends. Storks don’t do the work for expectant mothers, but the birth process is still pretty awesome and babies are still cute. Death is most likely THE END, the total lack of conscioussness, but that does not subtract from the pleasure one recieves in existence.

One by one, we can come to terms with what would be nice if it were true, and what actually is true. We can find peace in acceptance.

Category: Saturday Morning Cartoons | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Ellen Lundgren | July 12, 2011
3 comments

Carbondate.me, non-theist dating website

Let’s face it, the atheist dating scene is tough. Your dating pool is cut by about 80%, sometimes more, and what was a pretty balanced male-to-female ratio is now mostly dominated by men. Sorry, straight guys.

But good news! There’s a new solution out there! Carbondate.me is a new dating website for those of the non-theistic persuasion. There aren’t very many users on this site yet since it’s less than a week old (only 4 straight males between 20-30 within 100 miles of me). But they’re LGBT friendly, and only allow those who are agnostic, atheist, non-religious, freethinker, secular humanist, or skeptic so… so far it looks pretty interesting. However, in my opinion, there’s a lot of progress to be made.

"You're cute!" "They told me to touch your ass."

First of all, it’s a little over-featured. There are forums, event listings, blogs, chat rooms, game rooms, groups, “classifieds” as well as your own MySpace-esque profile to maintain. If their aim is to create a dating website, they may have hit the mark in 2004, but this is 2011. Tone it down and keep it towards the essentials needed on a dating profile. I think they’re trying too hard to make it a community experience instead of a search engine for potential friendship/dating matches. But that’s just me.

I still encourage all those single and searching non-theists out there to join and give feedback. It deserves a chance, at the very least because of their awesomely clever domain name. Science joke = epic win. It starts you out with a 20-day trail of their subscription service, but then reverts you to their free option which you can find details on when you’re logged in by clicking “Subscribe” at the far right on the top menu bar. I’ve been lurking the forums for a bit and it’s by far the most active community area on the site so far. If you happen to find me, be sure to say hello!

Category: General, Lifestyle | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,