Idle Sunday Observation -

One of the most recent links offered by ALD is to the New Humanist, a correspondant by the name of Johnathon Re'e (there is supposed to be an accent on the first e). He is offering yet another repatitive and boring rationalisation on the relationship between atheists, atheism, and the Christian religion.

Why is it that 99% of the modern atheists (I can not in truth say 100%) follow the well-trodden path of single religious atheism. As he does this, Ree has pointed out the inconsistency of his own argument. His observation that Christians were considered atheists by the Romans of the time follows the single religion path to its source.

When will "atheism" and its promoters be able to take the truth of their own belief to its foundation? The "well-trodden path" (is it the narrow path to heaven of the Christians?) should be the broad highway that excludes all theism. Does Ree's rejection of Christianity reject Bhuddist or Hindu beliefs as well?

Aldous Huxley was brave enough to analyse the common ground between all the major religions (his "Perrennial Philosophy") rather than to express a full atheism. That book should be a required reading for anyone who leaps to print on the subject of atheism. Not only should it be read, it should also be understood and appreciated as one expression of the foundation of all religious belief.

I profess to have no religion. That to me is atheism. I do not need to support or even debate what it means. That it is my belief makes it as valid in every sense as Catholicism, Jaine, Sufism, Bhuddism, Islam, or Southern Baptist.

In no way does that make me amoral. The counter that atheism is the same as amorality does not cut the mustard. I live by the morality of my up-bringing, of the society in which I live. That does not in any way counter my belief, counter the fact that I have no belief in any religion.

On freedom and having free will...

I picked this one up through the new old mates who are running ALD these days.

The experiment helped to change John-Dylan Haynes's outlook on life. In 2007, Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, put people into a brain scanner in which a display screen flashed a succession of random letters1. He told them to press a button with either their right or left index fingers whenever they felt the urge, and to remember the letter that was showing on the screen when they made the decision. The experiment used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal brain activity in real time as the volunteers chose to use their right or left hands. The results were quite a surprise.

"The first thought we had was 'we have to check if this is real'," says Haynes. "We came up with more sanity checks than I've ever seen in any other study before."

That is the intro. The next bit gets into realms of philosophy whence angels might fear to tread...

The conscious decision to push the button was made about a second before the actual act, but the team discovered that a pattern of brain activity seemed to predict that decision by as many as seven seconds. Long before the subjects were even aware of making a choice, it seems, their brains had already decided.

As humans, we like to think that our decisions are under our conscious control — that we have free will. Philosophers have debated that concept for centuries, and now Haynes and other experimental neuroscientists are raising a new challenge. They argue that consciousness of a decision may be a mere biochemical afterthought, with no influence whatsoever on a person's actions. According to this logic, they say, free will is an illusion. "We feel we choose, but we don't," says Patrick Haggard, a neuroscientist at University College London.

Now I think that is quite an interesting idea.

If only because I can just hear les religeaux piping God hot and strong into the mix.

Further on...
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The practical effects of demolishing free will are hard to predict. Biological determinism doesn't hold up as a defence in law. Legal scholars aren't ready to ditch the principle of personal responsibility. "The law has to be based on the idea that people are responsible for their actions, except in exceptional circumstances," says Nicholas Mackintosh, director of a project on neuroscience and the law run by the Royal Society in London.

Owen Jones, a law professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, who directs a similar project funded by the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago, Illinois, suggests that the research could help to identify an individual's level of responsibility. "What we are interested in is how neuroscience can give us a more granulated view of how people vary in their ability to control their behaviour," says Jones. That could affect the severity of a sentence, for example.

(Just wait for Weatherstone to get hold of that idea!).

Sorry lads and lasses. I think it is no more than a measure of how thick the human brain is... the unconcious says "press", and it takes the concious 7 seconds (or 0.7 seconds depending on measure and a lot of other variables) to decipher the message. The concious says "I am going to press in five, four, three..." and the "press" neurones fire up, "two, one, fire!".

Very similar to a launch as Cape Canaveral.