There Are Four Lights

Hmm, hopefully I’ve mentioned here before that something I want to accomplish in my work is to create characters who are good role models as scientists and critical thinkers and to promote the use of reality-based reasoning and good skepticism. The movie “Knowing”, with Nicolas Cage, accomplishes the complete opposite. Scientists are drunken, miserable, lonely cranks that need to learn how to be happy from those who have blind faith in magic sky people.

The director, Alex Proyas, was quoted saying he wanted the movie to explore different viewpoints, “the scientific viewpoint of the logical construct of the universe and the one of faith, where people see this incredibly complex place we live in and go, ‘Well, how could this have all just happened randomly?’“ (my bold) This is one major annoyance with the film; it doesn’t even know what science is and what viewpoint it has. Again, audiences are getting the misguided message that science claims everything is random and stuff just happens by accident.

The irony is, unlike new age garbage like numerology, scientific theories actually do make accurate predictions for the world around us. Real predictions…not just after-the-fact pattern matching that happens with divination games like astrology, tarot, and psychic readings. You can use scientific theories to accurately launch a small rover into space and have it travel to another freakin’ planet and predict where it should land on that planet, hundreds of millions of kilometers away! Or you can have a theory like evolution, which predicted, about a hundred years before the discovery of genetics, that such a system should exist–it predicted the existence of an entirely new field of science!

Science is all about discovering how the world works and the cause behind the things we see and experience. It is faith that gives empty answers for why the world is the way it is; it’s faith that tells us that the big questions about the universe are infinitely mysterious and beyond our grasp.

And, frankly, it’s a little tiring to see the happy religious characters lecturing to grumpy miserable scientist characters in films and TV. The happiest people I know are scientifically minded and lead their lives free of faith and the supernatural. All the religious and new age people I know are quite unhappy, worry-full people, who always seem to be lost and unsure. Anecdotal, I know…

It’s not hard to see why such a horrible movie is doing so well at the box office. A lot of people are full of doubt, fear, and uncertainty about the future. It’s a comforting idea that there’s a magic solution that can warn us of danger and protect us against the unknown…and the only thing you have to do is keep believing, no matter what the facts tell you.

Just keep listening to the little voices inside your head–they know a lot more than the objective voice of reason coming from your MIT colleague.

Cage, you and your pseudoscience crapfest are forcing me to quote again:

For me, it is far better to understand the universe as it really is, than to persist in delusion, however satisfying or reassuring.

-Carl Sagan

I was going to write a post about the recent comments from the Canadian minister of science about evolution, how he initially refused to answer whether he believed in evolution based on his claim that it was a religious question, and then his later back-tracking that indeed he does believe in evolution, but the question is irrelevant…

But the entire subject bores me…it’s so tiring to hear people argue creationism vs. evolution, compare religion and evolution as if that were a valid comparison, and talk about evolution in the ignorant manner that only a highschool science education can give you–where you have a vague caricatured idea of what it is, mixed with misconceptions (like we evolved from apes).

When you actually learn about evolution…when you actually start to find out, like I did, how little you know about how amazing the theory is and…OH YA…when you realize just WHAT a freakin scientific theory is…then all the arguments from creationists sound idiotic, comments from agnostics are unbelievably ignorant, and talk from people who say they believe in evolution but think everyone has the right to their own beliefs REALLY DOES sound as stupid as if you said that about the theory of gravity.

It’s so easy to pick up a book, watch a documentary, listen to a lecture and learn about how incredible evolution is. You’ll wonder, like I did, why you didn’t know it all before. And you’ll understand why Darwin’s work is the greatest scientific discover of all time.

If you’ve read any of this blog, you’ve probably guessed I’m an atheist–that gross word people use to describe us non-believers. But I think I’ve said before that atheism isn’t what’s important to me; I’m more concerned about skepticism in general (rather than just being skeptical about gods)…because atheism alone can lead to those annoying people who say “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual”. I know because I used to be one of those annoying people…

And spirituality still involves faith: believing something to be true without evidence, despite evidence to the contrary, or even believing something for which there can be no evidence. There seems to be only one reason why we would give in to this type of thinking; because it feels good. People only have faith in things they want to be true. And so, when you use faith you fall into a dangerous mode of thought where you let your emotions get in the way of seeing objective truth.

This is where I found what’s important to me (and why I love Carl Sagan so much)…I realized that I’m far more concerned about what’s true than what feels good. This takes much more discipline than faith, though the spiritual gurus would have you think different. Spirituality is constantly trying to convince people that faith is a virtue and that it takes a disciplined mind to make faith work.

I have never known anyone, not one person, either religious or spiritual who is happy…truly content, and content because of their faith. What I see is people constantly needing to remind themselves of their faith; day in and day out they need to repeat to themselves what they believe…as if they are deeply unsure if it really is true. They need to gather in large groups with others of similar faith to reassure one another that this is what they all believe. Not only do I find this deeply unsatisfying, but doesn’t that also seem like a ritual of self-denial?

This is why I want truth. Truth isn’t something you need to recite. The truth simply is…whether you want it to be or not…good or bad. The truth about the world around you is there whether you choose to accept it or not, whether it hurts you or not, whether you want it or you don’t. Truth doesn’t promise to always makes you happy–but isn’t there something so very selfish about wanting only what makes you happy to be real? What the truth will always offer you is understanding and that is something that stays with you.

The wind blew me back to California after my week in Long Beach for TED. Now I’m back in LA. It wasn’t planned so I’m without my magic Wacom Cintiq to draw pretty doodles to go along with my posts. The good news is that I’m actually getting REAL work done on my Legend of the Ztarr storyboards.

That’s the update.

There’s something I wrote down as part of Legend of the Ztarr (my manga series I’m currently writing) from a part of the story I haven’t gotten to yet. I hope it makes it into the story down the road, so I keep reminding myself of it. At some point, Adora (the main character) says “Pain is part of life and so, to me, that makes it a gift”. After saying this, she is told that those words are reminiscent of her father’s when he said:

Give me pain. Give me anguish. Give me heartache. For these are legacies to the living I will gladly endure. Countless are the dead and unborn who cannot know the joys of sorrow.

Ok, so her father, Kalen, liked to load on the cheese for his mini monologues…but I like the meaning. What Adora and her father have in common is their deep passion for living and how precious they consider life; even the painful, undesirable parts of living are precious to them. Perhaps it’s a little overboard, but they don’t even consider misery a “price to be paid” for living–even negative aspects of living feel like gifts in their view, because the alternative…nothing…is far worse in their eyes.

The term ‘negative’ when referring to feelings brings up another point I’d like to present and leads into why I’ve grown a distaste for many self-help talk I’ve heard. A business course I took included a bit of self-help type topics and ever since I’ve found the subject to be disappointing at the least. I don’t really like the constant focus on avoiding negative emotions. Embarrassingly enough I think I might be paraphrasing Deanna Troi here–but I don’t think there are negative emotions, only negative actions. There’s a range of emotions we all have, but it’s the choices we make due to those feelings that can be positive or negative.

But feelings are simply feelings and it’s a narrow viewpoint to categorize them in black and white. Sometimes it’s good to be sad. Anger isn’t always a bad thing either. It’s how we choose to react and what we do with these emotions that have good or bad outcomes. And here lies yet another problem I have with new age/spirituality type thinking; the unending obsessions with avoiding the ‘bad’ (negative thoughts, negative ‘energies’, and big black imaginary spots on your chi chakra aura thingy bla bla bla).

What a non-sciencey-edumacated-type gal like me takes away from learning about biology and evolution and the like is that it doesn’t seem like there are negative and positive human traits–that is to say, that everything we do and feel has a purpose and reason behind it. There’s a reason why humans evolved to feel sadness and anger…there’s a purpose behind the traits we have and it’s better to face them and understand them then to avoid them.

I suppose what Kalen said has a bit of Dawkin’s in it…I believe it was at the end of Richard Dawkin’s “Root of All Evil” program where he talked about how each and every one of us is going to die…and that makes us the lucky few; we’re lucky because there are far many more people who will never die because they were never born. I think Kalen would like that (if he wasn’t a fictional character in my manga artist brain).