Other than my love of transexual midget clowns, my strangest interest is my compulsion to eat odd, disgusting, or nearly inedible food.  My love affair with strange foods began when I was young.  My brother had offered me some crazy mexican lollipop covered with chili powder and said he would give me a dollar if I ate the whole thing.  Perhaps because I did not understand inflation or the declining value of the U.S. dollar, I agreed and put the thing into my mouth, and the taste cannot adequately be described with normal, everyday descriptions.  The best approximation of the taste is to simply say that eating this lollipop was like gurgling demon feces.  Nevertheless, I finished it and felt a morbid pride in doing so, and thereafter I was determined to eat as many weird foods as possible, so long as they were not Mexican lollipops covered in chili powder.

Naturally, I mentioned this to my atheist friend Ziztur (who blogs at Atheism Is Freedom), specifically alluding to the fact that I’d like to eat balut, which is basically a hard-boiled fertilized duck egg.  That is, it comes with a free prize inside the egg—a little duck fetus.  Because this was a prize greater than anything I’d ever seen in my boxes of cereal, I had to try it, and I had to write an angry letter to General Mills for not including duck fetus prizes in their fine breakfast cereals.

Somehow, she managed to find a place that sold balut eggs in St. Louis.  And then I was finally given the opportunity of a lifetime.  Not only did I get to eat a weird food, but I also got to finally become a baby-eating atheist, which is the only real kind of atheist.

Ziztur has detailed the baby-eating in her own blog, complete with pictures.  (I am the wild-haired guy pictured making out with his fetus.)  Some have criticized me for playing with my food, but I can only object by saying this is the normal manner in which I eat food.  I make out with pretty much anything I eat, including hamburgers, soups, and rice.  I am also the sort to put orange slices in my mouth to create a fake orange smile and to eat things that have been on the floor for days.  This is because I possess no moral table manners compass owing to my abandonment of God, and subsequently I do things like eat babies, put my elbows on the table while I’m eating babies, and refuse to use the proper fork for my embryos.  Who knew God had ordained various forks for various different courses and purposes?  Did I accidentally use the fetus fork for my embryo?  I suppose this is why atheists prefer unnatural sporks, which according to James Dobson’s group “Focus on the Utensils” are an abomination because eating utensils have traditionally been defined as a fork and a spoon and any unnatural union of these two causes the disintegration of society into an amoral, primordial soup out of which life can never arise because evolution is a lie made-up by Satan.

At any rate, I ate balut, and it was not as glorious as I had hoped.  When I was initially asked how the balut tasted, I replied that it was decent, but not something I’d order in a restaurant.  By the time I finished my second balut, however, my opinion had soured.  While the balut was not quite on par with demon feces, it could certainly compete in terms of unpleasantness with the sour taste of Satan’s armpit.  I definitely do not want to eat these again.  In order to maintain my future membership in the atheist union, I’ll forego my dues of eating the babies and instead choose the easier route of having homosexual sex with the devil while drinking blood.  At least that is somewhat enjoyable.

The next food I’d like to defile in my mouth is some sort of worm.  It’s been a while since I’ve had a decent worm.

Pascal’s wager has a long and ridiculous history among proselytizers, and the sheer stupidity of the argument is overwhelming and almost incomprehensible.  Blaise Pascal, the original formulator of the argument, was no doubt a very intelligent man, and that is exactly why the argument itself seems so inexplicable.  Of course, contemporary users of the argument have managed to pervert it even further, somehow distilling in it a maximal concentration of stupidity, and reducing the argument to the bare-bones rejoinder: But what if you’re wrong?

Indeed, atheists and disbelievers, what if you’re wrong?  The usual response to this query is to list off the endless possibilities of our being wrong.  Well, if I’m wrong because the great Groo-Rom exists, who abhors people with blue eyes, I am certainly fucked.  And if I’m wrong because the flying spaghetti monster exists, with his inordinate fondness for pirates, ninja-lovers like myself may find ourselves drowning in eternal spaghetti sauce.  And if I’m wrong because Kal-El exists…  And it is usually at this point that the theist interjects, screaming that this is not what he meant, that what he meant to ask was not for a listing of all the logically possible ways an atheist could be wrong, but for the atheist to consider what would happen if the Christian religion in particular were correct.  To which we only shake our heads.  Oh, you mean that silly religion?  I’m sorry, but Groo-Rom seems a bit more likely, though, as he isn’t proclaimed morally perfect while at the same time commanding the murder of infants, pregnant women, children (1 Samuel 15:3), and fucking trees (Matthew 21:19).   You’d think a deity secure in his omnipotence wouldn’t feel the need to take out his wrath on shrubbery.

But the failings of the wager are huge and insurmountable.  Even the most ardent theist who clings fervently to Pascal’s wager as the basis of his belief would find himself rejecting it in other circumstances.  For instance, if I were to propose to the theist that magical unicorns who fart deadly rainbows were waiting at his workplace to pounce on him and smother him with their colorful and odorous emissions, it is doubtful that the theist would take any heed of this.  If I went even further and proclaimed that these unicorn farts had the capacity to cause great suffering and had the magical power to sustain one indefinitely, keeping them alive solely to suffer the great, colorful torments for eternity, the grand upscale in suffering being proposed would still not sway the theist.  He would return to work without fear, barely worrying about any such creatures.  But why?  The wager applies just as well here.  The untold suffering that awaits the theist by going to work and being tortured at the hands (or hooves) of these deplorable unicorns is infinite and surely surpasses whatever limited negatives would result from not showing up to work, quitting, and finding another job.  Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to assume the unicorns exist and cover your losses?  Of course not, and the theist is quite reasonable to pay no heed to the potential consequences.

Ultimately, Pascal’s wager as it is often formulated fails because it doesn’t address probability or evidence in any legitimate sense.  For instance, we can be relatively certain that not showing up to work or calling the boss with wild tales about homicidal unicorns would lead to the loss of one’s job.  However, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that any such unicorns exist, that there exists a mechanism by which a fart could sustain a life indefinitely and cause untold suffering (most of the suffering from farts is not untold, but quite told),  or that farts can indeed be rainbow-colored.  When we make decisions, we don’t just consider the consequences that could potentially result from every possibility.  We also consider how probable those possibilities are to begin with.  So while the fear of infinite punishment from unicorn farts is certainly very great, it is decidedly counteracted by the almost infinite improbability of such a thing even existing.  We can’t just assess consequences in the absence of any evidence.

With God, there is much similarity to these unicorns.  We have much reason to find God’s existence improbable based upon his rather odd qualities (moral perfection combined with omnipotence and having rather exagerrated anger toward trees), as well as the lacking evidence of his existence.  Of course, Pascal originally formulated his argument based upon the presumption that God’s existence could not be assessed by observational evidence, and that is precisely the major point where his argument falls to pieces.

Because evidence is not necessary to make decisions in Pascal’s scheme, one could formulate any possibility and would be forced to take it seriously solely on the merits of the seriousness of its consequences, and not the likelihood of the consequences actually existing.  We could conceive of Gods who reward skeptical thinking, who punish those who believe in Jesus, who give candy canes to child rapists, and so on and so forth.  There is no longer any reason to privilege a Judeo-Christian deity as the default and do our calculations with such a conception as our basis.  We may as well make room for the flying spaghetti monster and rainbow-farting unicorns if we need not concern ourselves with that pesky thing called evidence.

Clearly, though, a role for evidence is ever-present in such calculations, and that explains why theists don’t fear farting unicorns when they go to work.  The lacking evidence outweighs even an appeal to infinite punishment, because those appeals to infinite punishment are just one possibility among an infinite array of possibilities, and we no longer have any basis to assume just one possibility should we forego evidence.  In the end, Pascal’s wager is the wager of one in a dark, empty room who possesses neither the senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, nor smell.  Thankfully, though, we do possess senses and our universe is not a dark, empty room, and we can incorporate evidence and prior probability into our calculations and decisions instead of stumbling about in the endless dark, fearing unicorns and Yahweh alike, and trembling at the awful fate awaiting trees and shrubs that should offend these wrathful entities.

Aside from Youtube videos featuring cats attacking babies, moral hypocrisy is perhaps the most hilarious thing one can witness.  Larry Craig, a conservative senator who was known to support anti-gay legislation, provided countless hours of hilarity when it was discovered that he frequents men’s restrooms in search of man-on-man lovin’.  His infamous foot-tapping signal for gay sex, along with his lame appeals to his “wide stance” to cover up his obviously lascivious nature, while hilarious in their own right, are made all the more hilarious owing to his avowed conservativism.  Similarly, when megachurch preacher and anti-gay bigot Ted Haggard was outed as a homosexual and drug user by a  male prostitute/meth dealer, one couldn’t help giggling in glee as the pastor’s career went down in raging flames.

But this brings forward several deep questions about the nature of morality, psychology, and belief.  How could some of the most powerful anti-gay bigots turn out to be homosexuals themselves?  What is the psychology behind this perverse form of self-hatred?  And who in the hell would ever be desperate enough to have sex with Ted Haggard?  You couldn’t pay me enough money to touch those swollen, babboon-ass lips.

Anyone can readily recognize that liberals and conservatives tend to be diametrically opposed when it comes to ethical questions.  Whereas liberals voice concerns over social justice, fairness, and the harm that may come to baby seals covered in crude oil, conservatives tend to rail against illegal immigration, homosexuality, and those unpatriotic liberals who care more about worthless seals than the mexicans who are stealing our hard-won American jobs (because every American is clamoring to be a migrant worker, obviously).

Social scientists have explanations for these wild differences and almost incommensurate views of morality.  Jonathan Haidt, for instance, has broken down ethical foundations into five major groupings:

1. Harm/Care (associated with empathetic concern for others’ well-being)
2. Fairness/Reciprocity (associated with concepts of basic rights and equality)
3. Ingroup/Loyalty (associated with patriotism, and concern with society over the individual)
4. Authority/Respect (associated with deference to tradition or religious and political leaders)
5. Purity/Sanctity (associated with feelings of disgust and contamination)

What Haidt has found is that liberals and conservatives show consistent patterns regarding these groupings.  The liberal hippies naturally gravitate toward Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity.  Patriotism is regarded as xenophobic nonsense, unnecessay respect for outdated traditions is seen as a barrier to progress, and sanctity is seen as a metaphysically suspect concept that should have no bearing on ethical considerations.  (Of course, liberals have their own versions of the purity concept which can be found in their silly love of “organic,” “all-natural” foods and mineral water.)  On the other hand, conservatives tend to spread their values evenly among all five categories, and while they still value fairness and harm reduction, they do not value it at the expense of concerns about ingroup loyalty, respect for tradition, and sanctity.

Obviously, these moral differences illustrate exactly why conservatives endlessly rant about issues like homosexuality.  For the liberal, whose concerns are mainly those of fairness and harm reduction, it appears obvious that homosexuals should have equal rights of marriage and should not be stigmatized or treated differently by society.  But to conservatives concerns about purity and tradition also take precedence, so they argue against homosexuality on the basis of religious authority, appeal to the concept of “traditional” marriage, and see homosexuality as an impure, unnatural act.

So now we know why conservatives hate homosexuals, but why would a homosexual espouse conservative values, and why would some of the most vocal and powerful opponents turn out to be gay themselves?  Why would toe-tappin’ Larry Craig oppose gay marriage, and why would cock-massaging Ted Haggard preach endlessly against homosexuality as a godless abomination?  It is easy to understand how people could have conservative values that privelege authority, tradition, and purity, because these values clearly served adaptive purposes in our evolutionary past—obeying authority served to hold together society and concepts of purity and contamination acted as barriers against bacterial infections in prescientific times.  But it seems an astounding coincidence that many of the greatest opponents of these ethical issues would turn out to be hypocrites who practice exactly what they preach against.

A study about handwashing may hold the answer to this puzzle.  What does handwashing have to do with cock-loving conservatives, you say?  More than you’d think!

Simone Schnall and colleagues’ study “With a Clean Conscience” demonstrated that an act as simple as washing one’s hands can decrease moral outrage and harsh judgments.  Basically, the study recorded the moral judgments of a group of people who were exposed to cognitive concepts of cleanliness and purity (the handwashing group) versus a control group (the dirty group).  The results showed that those who washed their hands rated an assortment of immoral actions in a significantly less severe manner than those in the group with the filthy, uncleansed hands.  The study mentions and builds off studies that have shown that when people are exposed to disgusting, impure conditions, they tend to be more severe in their moral judgments.  Basically, those that see themselves as cleansed and pure are more forgiving, and those that see themselves as somehow dirtied or disgusted harden their hearts.

Now, to those with conservative sentiments born into a society with strong religious traditions concerning the impurity of homosexuality, obviously such people will have negative attitudes about homosexuality even if they are homosexual themselves.  A conservative heterosexual will follow tradition and cry out against homosexuality, but he will view himself as pure and undirtied owing to his good, wholesome heterosexual love of boobies.  But a conservative homosexual will also follow tradition and purity standards and cry out against homosexuality.  And the homosexual conservative will cry out all the harder and more actively precisely because he is homosexual, as he will see himself as impure and dirty and feel disgust at himself.  And as the handwashing study indicates, those who see themselves as cleansed and pure are less likely to be severe in their judgments, but those that see themselves as impure and dirtied will be highly judgmental and hard-hearted.  Thus, the psychology behind the phenonmenon of homosexual anti-gay activists now appears to be a quite vivid demonstration of psychological theories about moral purity and authority.  The loudest opponents of homosexuality turn out to be gay because their feelings of impurity and dirtiness drive them to make harsher, bolder moral condemnations.

So remember this the next time you see someone who appears unreasonably angry about homosexuality or any other issue of sanctity.  You can rest assured knowing that they suffer the fate of the self-hating hypocrite, and you can feel sorry for them as they wage an outward war against perceived impurity but crumble inwardly with a latent war against themselves.  It is a truly funny thing to watch such bigots implode upon themselves when their true natures are revealed, but it also reveals a sort of sadness about the human condition, and our willingness to deny and revile ourselves for group cohesion and tradition.

While I tend to have my doubts about evolutionary psychology, I nevertheless find it fascinating and worth thinking about, even in spite of the difficulty in confirming such hypotheses. The subject becomes even more interesting when used to explain the lack of skeptical thinking in human beings, as Acinonyx Scepticus has done in a recent post. If we could somehow work in a discussion of boobs this would then become the most profound, orgasmic entanglement of enjoyable subjects known to history, but I suppose I can settle for two out of three. (You may now sigh in relief, dear reader, knowing that what follows won’t include any further descriptions of my writhing, lustful throes of sexual pleasure.)

Basically, Acinonyx argues that skeptical thinking may not have been particularly adaptive back in human prehistory, when we were living in caves and apparently had to use our own feet, placed through a hole in the floor, to convey our wooden vehicles from place to place. The idea appears to have merit. And, forgoing the jargon regarding type 1 and type 2 errors that will only befuddle and confuse my monkey mind (though you should read the post I’ve linked to above if you prefer the more eloquent description), the problem is basically that skeptical thinking will get you eaten by tigers, whereas believing any little thing is true will more likely preserve your life.

This makes intuitive sense. It is hard to imagine the scientific cavemen having significant survival advantages if they are continually testing and attempting to falsify hypotheses about man-eating tigers lurking in the bushes. One can just imagine the hapless caveman scientist: “I hear the sound of rustling leaves and see the bushes moving, but I can’t be certain it is a tiger. Perhaps it is a lemur, as my colleague Borak posits. I shall test this lemur hypothesis by investigating, hoping to gather data inconsistent with whatever the hell a lemur looks like.” Upon having a tiger pounce on him and rip him apart, the caveman scientist would no doubt die with a sort of perverse satisfaction in having disconfirmed his colleague’s hypothesis.

But one can imagine the hopeless believer or conspiracy theorist caveman in a similar situation. He sees a bush, and doesn’t really see any rustling, nor does he really hear anything, but he cowers in his cave and refuses to leave because he just knows that a tiger (perhaps planted there by the CIA at the command of our alien overlords) awaits in the underbrush. Naturally, nine times out of ten a nonrustling bush won’t contain a tiger, but being wrong that one time sure is a bitch, and it sure makes the conspiracy theorist caveman look good to the ladies when he’s successful (which perhaps explains why the ladies love all that talk of astrology and spiritual crap and abhor my own presence—I refuse to believe it is simply the fact that I refuse to bathe).

So with that context in mind, it is perhaps the fault of evolution that humans are so prone to unwavering belief and so wary of skepticism. The believer is perhaps preventing death, and the skeptic is perhaps rushing headlong into the jaws of tigers trained by the CIA. Besides, should the skeptic walk by a bush and not be eaten by a tiger, it is much easier to explain that away from the believer perspective—”Oh, the tiger was there but he just wasn’t hungry, and he doesn’t like the bitter taste of soulless skeptics, anyway!”—than for the skeptic to explain away being eaten by a tiger—”Oh, that’s not a tiger, but instead my mom dressed in stripes … And this missing limb? T’is but a flesh wound!” Thus, our natural history has primed us for believing implausible nonsense, to be better safe than sorry, and so on. It’s the evolutionary form of Pascal’s wager: Oh, there’s not so much evidence for it … but what if you’re wrong!?

In the end, though, the caveman scientist has been vindicated. Because even though the failures of the scientific and skeptical mindset are that much more disastrous, it also has to be pointed out that the successes are that much more successful. Once in a while the scientist gets devoured, it is true, but most of the time the bushes were just moving from the wind, and the scientific caveman who ventures outward is able to gather more food, meet more women, invent the wheel, and so on, while his believer brethren are playing it safe in the dark.

Strangely, because the modern context only rarely includes scenarios involving man-eating predators, what we find today is that the benefits of skepticism and a careful analysis of the evidence greatly improve outcomes without the attendant life-ending predation! The situation is now reversed, and unqualified belief is officially more dangerous, provided a sustained absence of tiger scenarios. And even worse, the believers of the world are now peddling the greatest harms because so many of these historical risks are no longer relevant. We won’t all die a horrible death if we investigate and attempt to refute claims that vaccines cause autism, unlike the poor fellow investigating potential tigers in bushes. But we COULD all die if we all listened to various well-meaning idiots and stopped vaccinating our children for fear of autism by perhaps causing an outbreak of small pox.

It’s science! So difficult, a caveman can’t do it! Fortunately, we can!