On happiness

From Simon Critchley:

Happiness is not a quantitative matter. It is rather a matter of the quality of one’s life and in what that quality consists. The most painful, but also the most joyous response came from Robert F., who is faced with terminal brain cancer. He writes, in an echo of Epicurus, with which I’d like to end:

If you’re religious, what’s beyond the act of dying is a better place; if you’re not religious, there is nothing. In either case there’s no need to worry. What matters is the journey between right now and that event.

Germane to the book I'm still wading through.

One more nail in the coffin

Today's Nature has a splendid and amazing article that will be sure to have a major impact on OOL research for decades:

... although 'activated' ribonucleotide molecules (the building blocks of RNA) can polymerize without enzymes, no plausible route had been found by which the ribonucleotides could have formed. Now a team from the University of Manchester has found such a route. They also show that a widely held assumption about ribonucleotide synthesis — that the molecules formed from pre-existing sugar molecules and RNA bases — isn't necessary for RNA to have formed on prebiotic Earth.

We're now at a point where the existence of a prebiotic RNA World can be explained. See the NYT also.


Science is progress. The questions and ignorance that religion is dependent upon to remain in place will continue to be eroded by its inexorable march towards knowledge and understanding. If ever people finally decide to give up on superstition, the coup de grâce to religion will come not from some violent revolution, but in a lab, where it will finally be shown how to take simple prebiotic molecules and construct a protocell capable of evolution. There will still be religious people, just as today there are still Amish despite the prevalence of technology. But they will be fundamentally isolated from the larger world.

Encouraging trend: young people recognize religion as bullshit

Good news: between 30-40% of Americans my generation and younger are non-religious.

Related.

Pew Forum on changing religious landscape

This is similar to the ARIS data published a while back, and the statistics are in line with my list for the number of non-religious/unaffiliated and the percentage of those who are agnostic/atheist. Most interesting part of the report:

Paradoxically, the unaffiliated have gained the most members in the process of religious change despite having one of the lowest retention rates of all religious groups. Indeed, most people who were raised unaffiliated now belong to a religious group. Nearly four-in-ten of those raised unaffiliated have become Protestant (including 22% who now belong to evangelical denominations), 6% have become Catholic and 9% are now associated with other faiths. Overall, 4% of the total U.S. adult population now belongs to a religious group after having been raised unaffiliated.

So long as about 24% of us are non-theist, I will continue to sleep well at night:

Based on their stated beliefs rather than their religious identification in 2008, 70% of Americans believe in a personal God, roughly 12% of Americans are atheist (no God) or agnostic (unknowable or unsure), and another 12% are deistic (a higher power but no personal God).

When you read the reasons for becoming religious after being raised non-religious, it's laughable for anyone religious to take comfort in these statistics: only half of new converts to religion from non-religion cite "spiritual needs" while the rest cite life contingencies -- a move to a new community, marrying someone from a faith, death and divorce. Isn't it wonderful how many people admit that tragedy is required to make them scared enough to believe in magic?

Compare this to those who used to be religious and now aren't:

What I find completely unsurprising is that Evangelicals cite science as a motivating factor the least among other groups. You don't generally buy in to the whole Evangelical shebang if you are scientifically minded, so you won't be convinced by science that your religion is bullshit either.

Charles Blow finds this...encouraging? Or something? I love his quote:

While science, logic and reason are on the side of the nonreligious, the cold, hard facts are just so cold and hard. Yes, the evidence for evolution is irrefutable. Yes, there is a plethora of Biblical contradictions. Yes, there is mounting evidence from neuroscientists that suggests that God may be a product of the mind. Yes, yes, yes. But when is the choir going to sing? And when is the picnic? And is my child going to get a part in the holiday play?

So this is how religious people justify it. On the one hand you have Carl Sagan's outlook:

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

And on the other hand, you have people who would much rather persist in satisfying, reassuring delusion because the facts are cold and hard. Or is this just atheist hubris?

Creationism IS superstitious nonsense

Regardless of what a judge says. Now go ahead and start holding your breath waiting for proponents of "academic freedom" to teach creationism to defend this teacher's academic freedom to ridicule creationism.

PS: Chad Farnan is an idiot and a douchebag.