Media Lies - A Plea to End Ignorance Forever

"Is that a fact, or did you hear it on FOX News?" Sadly, thus phrase works for almost all media, I say almost only because I don't have the time (or stomach) to go through all the media.

When the Twin Towers were destroyed by religious people fighting over their imaginary friend I heard about it on the street before the news even aired it. Homeless people in Seattle knew before the news stations even knew what they were suppose to say to the public.

That alone is sad, then Charlie Hebdo thing happened and news media did not say anything about their own being shot for at least a week. It was all over the web the second it happened.

Nostalgic morons will tell you that this has not always been true, they're wrong. One musician said it best, the media are nothing more than trolls disguised as professionals (paraphrased Akira the Don: Don't Feed the Trolls).

There is a method to their madness that we have never truly understood until the advent of social media, when news came at us in real time and world wide. Our information overload phase is long past, so why do people still buy into media's trolling?

The answer is something that makes me sad to publish, considering we have had 20+ years to break the cycle. Religion is part of the cause, but the bigger impact is the reason people buy into religion still, that feeling of belonging to an exclusive club that knows something no one else knows.

It is also the same reason people buy into conspiracies and meaningless fads like organic or homeopathy. It's a genetic imperative to belong to a small group, we are not really a social species on a large scale.

Our species is group oriented only within very tight limits, if the group gets too big we start to go insane. At least that's nature's prerogative, we should have adapted past that a long time ago and if we don't we will destroy ourselves.

Admittedly, allowing the species to destroy itself has a pleasant ring to it and I have been reluctant to offer this warning in the past, but then I lose all my cool technology, medicines that keep me alive, and Starbucks. The fact of the matter is that we must cut back our population growth, and we must manage it reasonably.

We must also stop pushing people to be social in person, online you can easily shut off the overflow of attention and manage your groups better. But most importantly we must adapt to the global community so these scams and religions will die off on their own, when you no longer need made up answers the groups based on those will die on their own.

This also means you must turn off the news, all of it, and listen to the global community instead. In the 80s we were lucky if we got a snowstorm warning more than 5 minutes before the power died because if it, and that was only if you were tuned into a newscast or media program at that time.

Online we often get messages and even notifications and phone calls hours before the snow falls, directly from the actual weather stations the weather reporters use. The big difference is that it's not censored, filtered, rerouted, or reworded like all media is.

The government regulates media, all of it except social media and private forums. This has many problems, one is that all information must be filtered by the regulatory agency first, that same agency is trying to force the internet to abide by it's rules.

Enter hacktivists, Anonymous is the biggest group and is made up of more than just script kiddies, though script kiddies are employed to launch attacks. If you want the truth about Anonymous, you will never find it.

This particular group is not run by a single power, but only a single idea, all life is equal and no one can control information. Because of this no organization is ever needed, everyone knows their goal and the missions are easy to spot.

The really funny thing about Anonymous, then back on topic, it's made up of all the people who you made fun of in school. Maybe you should be wary of who you mock now.

Anyhow, the need to belong to an exclusive club is the lure of media, and of trolls, it is what they use to draw in an audience. Another example of why you do not except news for facts, a cable channel that claims to air scientific programs aired one on how mermaids were possible.

First of all, no, mermaids are not possible because the skin cells are an all or nothing effect of genetics. You cannot have half an animal with cold blooded skin and the other half with the brownish skin of a warm blooded organism, one of the skins will die.

The chemicals responsible for making hair or scales would effect the entire organism or not be present, not half and half. The chemicals are one or the other, mixing both would have a completely different effect.

Another such "scientific" program tried to state that flying, fire breathing, dragons were possible. Anyone who knows about reptiles would laugh so hard at this claim they'd probably have a heart attack.

Flying reptiles are not unlikely, but at that size they'd have to be eating every minute of the day just to fly for a few minutes at a time unless they were on Luna, it's why birds got smaller. So no, dragons are not possible, and fire breathing anything is laughable beyond sanity.

There is so much wonder and splendor in the real world, in reality, that to believe something just because it sounds cool in a headline is ludicrous. To accept something as fact just because it's easy is lunacy.

The chemical reactions involved in life and the universe are so fabulous, so wonderfully simple and elegant in their chaos. The forces of nature interacting offer us a ballet of such poetry that each atomic twitch, each vibration, every electron's movement is one grande story of reality.

The way in which hydrogen bonds to oxygen to form H2O makes you so happy to be a part of a universe in such a profound way, for we are the universe trying to understand and improve itself. We are reality's manifestation, the hands used to perfect it's chaotic and self destructive universe, we are one of the species capable of bringing actual order to the universe.

Instead we squander our talents, we give into our base instincts and kill each other over fears of the unknown, we deny the very reality that needs us to help bring order to the universe. We slaughter each other over mythology, and let others die out of greed or ignorance.

So here's a challenge to the entire species, use the tool we created for testing reality and learn how reality itself works, stop anthropomorphizing everything, and stop being so damned egocentric. We must prove ourselves worthy before we can ever claim to be better.

The Folly of the Afterlife - No Delusion is Harmless

The most wonderful discovery made by science is the very thing that Christians in the USA are most opposed, the fact that we are all connected in the most profound ways. From the particles that make up your body to your DNA, everything is part of a great chemical reaction called the universe, and we are all an integral part of this.

The reason they deny this is because it removes the necessity of a god, ironically it does not remove the possibility. This frightens them because Christians, like the other Abrahamic religions, are invested in a life after death, so they have given up trying to make this one better in the false hope of a reward after death.

Having invested nothing in this life, anything that makes a life after this one less likely (especially the one they believe in) makes them realize just how much of this life they have wasted preparing for something they don't even know exists. We call this type of denial cognitive dissonance, but to make it easier to understand it is better described as a fear of wasting your life on a false hope.

The notion of a life after this one is not without merit, back when we did not have the time and resources to improve our lot it kept us from giving up. But it is inherently dangerous, as we can see with all religions who claim there is one.

First, if you waste this life investing in a future that may not happen you are wasting the one thing you know you have, this life is real, you know it's real, but anything beyond is only speculation. So you are wasting your real life on a speculation, one of thousands such speculations have been made and only a few actually demand investment anyway.

As horrible as this is, it's not even the worst problem with believing in a life after, suicidal encouragement is the worst part. Not content with this life, one who believes there is a "better" life after will be more willing to end this one, to hurry to the better life based on nothing more than speculation and wishful thinking.

This is where atheists or reality based religions differ. We have no choice but to invest our efforts in improving our lot for this life, it is all we know we have.

Religious people will often demonstrate their complete lack of rationality and logic at this notion, saying crimes are the inevitable result of not having a promise of an after life, they also display their sociopathic and psychotic personality traits with these claims as they need eternal reward to not kill, rape, steal, or torture other people.

Yet humans are not the only life on this planet, nor are we the most important, so even religion does not prevent these people from harming us all. Enter the "no afterlife" world view, because we need no reward to invest in our future.

Humanists have figured out one important fact, we will eventually conquer death, but to be there for that you either have to be such a good person that enough people want you back, or you have to help society get there faster. This is a true eternal reward, a second chance that we know will happen someday, likely in my own lifetime now.

But this is not even the best reason to be a good person, the main reason is that when you hurt others you ultimately increase the chances of you being hurt back, the inverse is also true, the more you help the higher the chances of you being helped in return. Many people call this karma, but the real name for it is herd immunity.

While herd immunity is often cited for vaccines, it applies to everything and encompasses the entirety of the world, even the other animals. We need other animals, even the plants, to survive as a species.

This means we must take care of the entire planet and do as little damage to it, lest we drive ourselves extinct for the arrogance of thinking that we are special and rewarded for believing instead of actually being good.

Space, Time, Matter - Eternal Questions

I sit here in a Starbucks, having been awake for about 24 hours, sipping coffee to keep going. An image on Twitter reminded me of how vast the universe actually is, not difficult for a scientific person to grasp, the notion that we are a tiny speck, inside a tiny speck, inside another tiny speck, of a tiny speck, of dust in this vast cosmos.

The sad fact is that no religious person truly grasps the concept of forever, much less infinite in any amount. Even Einstein, a deist, was hard pressed to comprehend it, thus why he was afraid of things like quantum physics.

It is easy to see how little they grasp about the concept of infinity, as they talk about "forever" as casually as if they are talking about tomorrow. This limited view keeps them from facing the most scary notion to a planet bound organism, that we float endlessly for all eternity through an infinite vast emptiness.

It also protects then from fearing their own myth, by not comprehending the notion of infinity, the "after life" becomes nothing more than a pleasant weekend getaway, instead of the truly horrific monotonous form of torture that it would actually be. Consider the vastness of the universe, and living as long as it would take to get from one side to the opposite if the universe stopped expanding today, using current space travel technology and an infinite source of energy.

Less than one percent of the way through the voyage you would have read every book ever written to date, including all alternatives, and all languages they have been printed in. Yes, you would even actually finish War and Peace, and every word of every scientific paper published and unpublished.

After two percent of the trip you'd have done every scientific test in the scientific papers you read, and verified them with several repeated tests. You would have the scientific understanding of a god at this point, nothing would be a mystery to you because of our inherent ability of inference.

Now we're just nearing the fourth or fifth galaxy of this trip, at three percent. Your tops scores on every video game ever written would be perfect, impossible for anyone to score higher. You would have ever race track memorized, every glitch mastered, ever combination perfected, every letter of every script known.

Any psychologically healthy human would have been insane three fold at this point, and there is still 97% of the universe left. You would have lived a thousand lifetimes just to get to the next galaxy, eaten more than a billion tons of food.

Food would literally be tasteless after only a few hundred years of thus trip, your taste buds would be unable to distinguish one flavor from the next out, because the repetition would would eventually cause the neurons in your brain to be flatlined in sensory input, all valences would be neutral.

Hallucinations, a combination of memory and imagination, would haunt you after only five hundred years because of the monotony. This is less than a hundredth of a percent of your trip too.

Adding more people to the trip would increase the degradation of sanity, after a few hundred years everyone would be paranoid of each other with violent consequences. This is not because of a biological flaw.

There's the catch, religious people will likely claim it's a biological flaw in our brain or body that would be removed after death, but this is not an effect of biology. The boredom is an effect of memory.

Unique memories always stand out to us, because they are easy to identify in the crowd. When no memories stand out we begin to lose focus, we call this phenomenon boredom.

The progressive insanity and delusion is an effect of logic, once all that is possible is known to a single logic center, it will make up new things to explore because curiosity is an inherent trait of logic, the need to explore. Religion seeks to destroy the curiosity, which always results in psychological instability because the logic engine of the intellect becomes damaged.

This can cause many things, almost always the loss of curiosity results in hallucinations of various degrees. You often hear religious people describing a relatively mundane event as "spiritual," even mentioning voices or visions.

These are hallucinations cause by logic methods being imbalanced. Much like a painter with only three colors, the picture is incomplete because there us no curiosity asking the important questions, so the gaps are filled in with random nonsense.