Fun from pulp land!

Nothing but octopuses octopi octopodes cephalopods!

In particular: Incredible bathos occurs when you compare the image to the story title.

A generation must have been perverted by sadistic pulp covers, but here's a fun exception to the rule: a lady fighting back - to rescue another lady, no less. (But watch out behind you!)

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( More data on Satan )

Tween

Rummaging around the net for stuff on the Bright movement, an effort to have atheists call themselves "brights", in order to make everyone like them. As one commentator put it, "Are atheists and agnostics smarter than everyone else? A group of them have managed to assert that idea and disprove it in one swift marketing gambit."

That article, by Steve Waldman of BeliefNet, goes on to question the implied insult - that those who don't share the brights' views are dim. "Let's put aside the questionable intelligence of trying to improve your image by choosing a title that makes everyone hate you. They might as well have chosen the smugs or the smarty-pants... In fact, two surveys earlier this year... indicate that even supernatural religious beliefs are held not only by most Americans, but by the majority of well-educated Americans." Of those with postgrad degrees, about half believed in hell and the Devil; 60% accept the Virgin birth, 64% the Resurrection, 72% believe in miracles, and 78% believe the soul survives death. As Waldman points out, these are intelligent people who've been trained to weight evidence.

Waldman suggests that those people have found a kind of proof for their beliefs - not an empirical proof which can easily be demonstrated to another, but something nonetheless compelling enough to convince them. (The sort of thing I know and value as "non-rational knowledge".)

Dawkins reckons we're just brainwashed into religious belief by our parents - it's a meme, or a bunch of mutually supporting memes. In other words, it's wholly cultural (although taking advantage of our brain's ability to rapidly absorb culture in childhood). Now, there are matriarchal and rape-free societies on Earth, so we know that neither male dominance nor sexual violence are automatically programmed into us.. But has anyone ever found a "bright" society? A study of twins this year found evidence of a hereditary effect on peoples' religiosity, at least as adults. We are wired for this stuff. Why? Putting aside the temptingly simple answer that God put it there, is there some evolutionary advantage to spirituality? The study's authors suggest some possibilities.

In the meantime, I'm going to adopt a term from the SF story Star Bright by Mark Clifton, which I read as a child. A father struggles to keep up with his impossibly brilliant mutant daughter. She explains that she is a Bright, and he is a Tween - not a Bright, but not a Stupid either. Since I value empiricism, but know its limits, I guess I'm a Tween.