Humbuggery

Fun times were had this evening, on my way home from school. I got witnessed too.

I was walking toward the campus center of my school, to grab a coke, when two nice college age gentlemen (Joe and Tika, I don’t think they’ll mind me using their first names) asked if I had a moment. At first I thought, I would say no and call it a day, but then I decided that I should at least hear them out. Little did I know that they weren’t just hunting for blood for the upcoming blood drive, no they wanted something else, my soul.

Well, it started out with them inviting me to their bible study. I said, politely, that I wasn’t particularly interested. When they asked why, I answered. “I’m an atheist”

You could practically hear them thinking, “Oh shit, we’ve got a live one.” Immediately the questions started. They were, to their credit, among the politest witnesses (Joe especially, Tika had some of that zealousness on him) I’ve talked with in a while. They asked everything from why I don’t believe in God (not just a god, of course, but theirs specifically). I gave a standard reply, “I look at the world, and see nothing that is inherently unexplainable or in need of the invocation of a deity. It’s not so much that I don’t believe in god, I just don’t care, he isn’t a useful construct.” Apparently, this was a new reply for them, as they immediately moved away from questions about it. They asked about whether I thought there was life after death, I quoted one of my favorite Betrand Russel quotes, “I believe that when I die, I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive.” All in all, it was pretty fun.

Tika was fairly agressive, made a number of arguments including the argument from design, the Kalam Cosmological argument, and etc. He also laid this nugget. “God is not logical, you cannot use logic.” I responded (in retrospect, somewhat poorly) by concentrating on Joe’s questions.

While Tika stuck me as a more– let’s say, “flamboyant” type, lots of energy, passionate about his beliefs. Joe was – what his, or my former, pastor might call the “John” to Tika’s “Peter.” That is, while Peter would go out on a soap box and preach to the masses, John would work quietly, one by one, talking to individuals in a private way. I was a “John” back in my day, so it makes sense that I’d identify with Joe a bit more.

The arguments, not to insult the two would-be prophets, were wholly unconvincing. Lots of ethereal talk about Faith and such. I did some “reverse witnessing” of a sort- asked them some tough questions about what they believed. One of the most interesting ones, which we again, quickly moved off of — They have the Gish Gallop down pretty good — was the idea of the “source” of morality and ethics. I contend that they are fundamentally an evolutionary advantage, particularly a socio-evolutionary advantage, in that altruism allows stronger societies to form, and a stronger society will in turn benefit every member of said society. They argued that their had to be a divine origin, since every law needed a lawgiver. In this case, the equivocation fallacy (while present) is somewhat hard to see, so I offered the following question. “What if God wrote in the bible that you were to murder all muslims on sight, no questions asked, just shoot them in the head and kill them. Would that be morally acceptable?”

Usually, this garners a head-scratch and blank-stare…

Joe said, “Yes”, and moved on to a new topic.

Wisely so- because I would have tore in on that one.

In any case, I don’t intend to make fun of these guys, they were nice people. I had an interesting conversation about how science really works, how we explain things like abiogenesis and evolution and the big bang. I even provided them with some ammo- making sure they understood the difference between a scientific theory and a colloquial theory, and that evolution and abiogenesis are different. They were willing to talk about their beliefs in a (somewhat) critical way. I think I may have even given them some really tough questions to think about. The point is that these are (more or less) the kinds of christians I don’t mind talking to. They are fairly rational, they aren’t zealots, they aren’t hyper-fundie-jerry-falwell wannabes. They’re just people with some ideas I don’t particularly agree with. It’s no different than differing political views.

So, I suppose I just want to encourage any reader, if you run into christians, talk with them, if they’re crazy fundies, do as you will, they don’t deserve your respect or your time.

But if they’re like Joe or Tika, talk to them a bit, lay out a few positions, give them something to think about. Talk to them about their view of fundamentalism, chances are they don’t even realize things can get that bad. If you convince enough of the moderates and the liberals to not accept the fundies anymore, then they’ll go away…

And I’d really like the fundies to go away.

So, I know my posts are quite sparse to begin with, and sporadic at that. But, sadly, I’m here to tell you, my faithful and equally sporadic readers, that problem will be getting worse.

Heres my situation, I transferred last year from one school (WPI) to another, cheaper school (WSC)[1]. In doing so, two things happened.

1. I had to redo a fair deal of work. Many credits didn’t transfer, weren’t applicable, or became electives due to requirement differences
2. I suffered a bit of a blow to my now fragile GPA, I’ve had 10 classes so far, and due to the rapid change of material and teaching style, as well as the new stresses and frustrations of repeating much of what I already knew, or taking classes I had no interest in, I did not do very well in most of them. My GPA is a pitiful 2.6… (I got a fuckload of C’s.)

Now, fortunately, I have good grades in my Core courses, most of the outliers (Philosophy excepted, I am stunningly good at that, it seems) are the ones that caused the brunt of the average-destruction. My hope is to pull these grades up with all my vigor. I have calculated that — in the 10-12 classes I have left, I need to get consisent B’s and B+’s to recover to a “safe” 3.2 or so (what I had when I left WPI). The various websites I’ve read say that this is a good average, and combined with me doing un-fucking-believable on the GRE’s, I should be able to get into a decent grad school.

I’ll try to keep Lowlymath.net[2] updated with my adventures in grad school application, and hopefully it will be a resource to anyone else hunting for graduate education.

No little thing like a bad GPA will keep me down, if necessary, I’ll take every math class WSC, WPI, and the rest of the consortium[3] offers to pull up my grade! Someday you’ll all be able to say “Whatsup Doc?” to me, and I will be quite pleased about it!

/Joe

[1] Thats Worcester Polytechnical Institute and Worcester State College, respectively.

[2] I’m actually posting to both blogs at once right now, so the Lowlymath Readers can just mentally replace “Lowlymath.net” with “this blog”

[3] The Consortium is a group of 6 schools which allow for “easy” crossregistration of classes and (supposedly) “easy” transfers between institutions. Though the latter is somewhat of a misrepresentation, given my experience.