April 1 2009 - Loan-A-Thon Results

Good work everyone, we made 313 loans amounting to $8,700 in loans. Probably more if you consider all the people who made loans before and after the 24 hour pacific time period!

Thanks to Jonathon we have a couple of screen shots to mark the occasion:
Before A

Before B

After A

After B




For those looking forward to the next Loan-A-Thon it's July 1st!

I think Joe explained our Loan-A-Thon schedule best when he said:

January 1st - Make your Happy New Year by loaning capital to your fellow Humans who need it so that they can have their own Happy New Year!

April 1st - We're no April Fools! We will not waste our money tithing to a religious organization when we can do some actual good by lending capital directly to our fellow Humans who need it!

July 1st - In honor of those throughout history who have thrown off the yoke of oppressive governments in July, we will lend capital to our fellow Humans who need it so that they can throw off the oppressive yoke of poverty!

November 1st - The day after celebrating Halloween do something else to scare religious organizations! Lend capital to our fellow Humans who need it so that they can materially improve their lives and no longer need the false comfort provided by an irrational belief system!

By Peter

Self-Deception: To Believe What We Are Not

It is true that people live in a world of self-deception. They remain aware that it is possible to be deceived by another person-- a family member, a coworker, or a friend-- so they try to ensure that they are not taken advantage of or fooled. They know that if they are deceived that they will have to reap the costs of their error in judgment. It is sort of like a part of the human radar in order to avoid people that are dishonest and greedy--- a social behavior that was used long ago by our ancestors to do the same for the protection of their families, tribes, territory, and resources.

Deception is prevalent in society among relatives and non-relatives. It takes effort and energy to maintain a straight face and charm in order to deceive others. Whether the deception has to do with telling a lie to get away with something or take advantage of someone the individual has to almost believe their own deception to outwardly give an impression of honesty and genuineness. Not only do they deceive others but they subconsciously deceive themselves. It becomes increasingly difficult for the person to distinguish between what is real and what is superficial and where to draw the line.

It is not easy to understand self-deception from the point of view of a human being. We constantly judge ourselves while judging others and adopt or develop stereotypes in order to understand other people. We feel that we are more or less right about our judgments about ourselves and others but we are simply not. We tend to hold biases about different things (i.e. politics, race, gender, age, beauty, wealth, happiness, etc.) that make up part of our moral sense. These biases do not necessarily make up who a person is but instead reflects what society as a whole believes. These beliefs are emphasized in the media in order to get the attention of individuals and mold their opinions--- it is a form of deception. We pick and choose what to believe based on societal 'norms' and in turn deceive ourselves by accepting different biases without really understanding the ideas.

There is truly a cycle of deception which exists in society and it causes human beings to continuously deceive ourselves. Although it is important to detect when someone is being deceptive it is also important to understand that deception exists in all parts of society whether it is in government, business, media, social interactions, religion, education, it is everywhere.

We cannot simply believe something without knowing the basis of the idea or belief. There needs to be a means to understand society. One credible method is to look to science and evolutionary psychology for an understanding of human nature and why our thoughts operate in such a way. We are no more than a biological species with feelings and thoughts but we cannot believe that the basis of our moral sense comes from something beyond our biological limits. In that case, we are simply deceiving and confusing ourselves and driving us further from reality-- from what is true in the realm of our nature. We are only hurting ourselves when we believe what we are not.

By Rajvee

Loan-A-Thon: April 1st 2009

Our next Loan-A-Thon is April 1st, can't wait because they are always so fun. Let's work to stretch our lead and help reduce poverty in the world.

We recently got a nice mention from one of our team members on the blog Daylight Atheism and a link from Reddit

Kiva released an API recently that allows for some cool Kiva related Web Apps to be created. Here's one that crossed my desktop: Kiva World

In a sad turn of events for Canada, the Minister for Science is ignorant of the factual nature of Evolution (Google globeandmail.com).

By Peter

New Goal: $1 million dollars by year end 2009

There's been plenty discussion on our team message board recently. The topic of setting a new goal has come up and the consensus is that our new goal is to loan $1 million by the end of 2009! Goals have worked great for us in the past and I predict we will meet and beat this goal. Our team is expanding, we are now over 3000 members and growing. Current members have been recruiting new members and we are surely getting new members every time people come back to Kiva and see us at the top of the team list, a position we desire to keep ;)

Although only a small percentage of Kiva users are participating in teams I think it's safe to say that our numbers are reflective of the amount of Atheist/Agnostics in the overall Kiva loaner population. It's a joy for me to be a team member with all of you and we are making a stand for reasoned and rational thinking.

One of our team members Viktor wrote a blog about our success; great read.

Abortion is a topic that's been extensively discussed recently on the message board. In my opinion Michael had the most Enlightened comment:

first, the concept that life "begins" at conception is completely misleading. Life does not begin when a sperm enters an egg because sperm and egg are already alive. It is the continuation of a biological process. We can confirm this by considering what would happen if egg or sperm were exposed to harsh conditions like heat: they would loose their biological activity, i.e. die, and no longer be fertile. In strict biological terms the question "When does life begin?" is moot: it began several billion years ago and hasn't stopped since. Implying some new life has been created by the fertilization of an egg is just putting on own cultural view on it. In fact, this whole concept has been hijacked by Christians, making it difficult to have a meaningful conversation regarding ethics and responsibility in human pregnancy.

By Peter

Helping Our Fragile Cousins - The Bonobos

I've been a loyal reader of Bonobo Handshake, Vanessa Wood's spectacular blog on her Bonobo research in Africa. Bonobo's are apes similar to Chimpanzee's in DNA but very different in behavior. Bonobos and Chimps were separated approximately 2 million years ago and have taken slightly different evolutionary paths. Bonobos, Chimps and Humans share a common ancestor and they are both the closest living relatives to Humans.

What makes Bonobos different from Chimps is that they are way less violent (they do not kill each other), they use sex as a form of communication, conflict resolution and for just plain old fun. They live in a remote area of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and sadly there are only approximately 5000 of them left. Local Congolese hunt them for meat largely because of hunger. Due to war and chaos in the region there has been no local effort to protect the Bonobos. Protecting the Bonobos requires local support because of the Malaria infested areas of the remote jungle that they live in.

Claudine Andre founded Lola ya Bonobo, a forest sanctuary, to protect orphan Bonobos (orphaned when their parents are killed for meat). I have wanted to adopt a Bonobo for over a year now and a few days ago I adopted Kataco aka Kata. What the heck... let's make it in celebration of Darwin's birthday!!

Humane research is done on the Bonobo's at the sanctuary and they are working on a program to release them into the wild. As this will be needed in the future if their numbers dwindle.

For a breath-taking video on the abilities of Bonobo's check out this video on TED by Susan Savage.

Look how cute the baby Bonobos are... can you resist helping them?





















By Peter

The Human Bias

People believe because they can think of the concept of an omniscient agent that we must only question whether an omniscient agent exists and not consider the more fundamental question of whether omniscience can exist.

As scientists, we know that omniscience cannot exist. This is because of the Uncertainty Principle. The Uncertainty Principle defines a boundary to the knowledge that we (or any agent) can posses. If we cannot know, simultaneously, the position and velocity of a particle then no agent can possess that knowledge and therefore there are no omniscient agents. Consider this proof of the negative assertion that there IS NO GOD.

Upon entering a period of deep philosophizing it is important to remember that all your intelligent rational cognition is biased by the simple fact that you are a human being. Hunger and beauty can distract your thinking, not to mention countless other innate mental processes.

Humans have five standard basic questions that they apply to any object of their consideration: who, what, why, where and when. Conveniently the five Ws in English. I have a feeling that the Universe is such a place that the 5Ws do not apply to ever situation.

I have been considering for a long time that it is distinctly possible that the question "Why did the Universe come into existence?" is an invalid question. There may not be a why! At the moment of the Big Bang there was not sufficient complexity in the universe to cognate the question why and therefore it may be invalid for us 14 billion years later to ask a question which could not be posed during the time span of the questions context.

Similarly, if the Big Bang is the correct theory (as opposed to the Big Bounce) then the question "What happened before the Big Bang" is invalid. The moment of the Big Bang was also the moment in which time was created. Therefore, there cannot be anything before the Big Bang.

Here is a down to earth example of an invalid question: "Why is the red crayon green?". Clearly, this is an invalid question or trick question that does not have a real answer it only has trivial answers like "The red crayon is not green" which really is not an answer to the posed question. There is no answer to the question.

Our Universe and its physical constants and equations may exist because there is a multitude of other possible universes in existence, that we cannot interact with, that have different Laws of Physics. This would explain why our Universe is tuned as it is but this does not explain why there is existence. A question for which I maintain an open mind. Also, consider that it may be impossible for there to be absolute non-existence which may explain why there IS existence.

By Peter

President Obama's Inauguration

I've been reading Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine (about half way through) which details many occasions in the past three decades where democratically elected leaders turned on their respective populations much to the disappointment of those peoples. However, the election of Barack Obama, in my opinion, is certainly a victory for the people. The President of the USA has less power than the Prime Minister of Canada, so if you are expecting rapid fire change it won't happen. Obama is an Executive and needs to herd the cats of Congress in order to make anything happen.

The Shock Doctrine, which details the story of how US multinationals with the assistance of the CIA, IMF and World Bank have been causing economic shocks around the world and taking advantage of the situation to reap billions in profits by forcing other countries to sell off their public assets for pennies on the dollar to American multinational corporations in exchange for IMF and World Bank loans. Torture has been a standard but hidden weapon of this three decade onslaught on the standard of living of peoples around the world. Ford motors even tortured it's union employees on the factory premise in Chile for many years.

Under GW Bush torture went public. Under Obama my hope is that torture will again go underground where it's practitioners will have less victims and they may be held liable for their illegal actions. To stop the CIA from torturing or teaching other security officials how to torture will take more than a change in the American President. The CIA developed a manual on modern torture methods code named Kubark based on scientific research developed at McGill University (funded by the CIA and the Canadian government) in Canada in the 1950s. By closing Guantanamo Bay, Obama can send a message to the CIA that under his administration he will not tolerate torture and if the CIA is careless they may face prosecutions. In case you are unclear on the morality of torture, I will remind you that what "we" do to the enemy, the enemy will do back to our soldiers. And worse, the US government has tortured several US and Canadian citizens, either directly or by sending them to remote facilities beyond the eyes of Amnesty International. Once the torture institutions are created it's impossible for any citizen to know whether or not they will wind up in such a facility regardless of their individual lawfulness. Modern torture is less about extracting information (because information goes stale quickly) and more about destroying an individuals personal beliefs and reverting them to a child like state of helplessness. Many torture victims go insane from the sensory deprivation techniques, not to mention the electroshock therapy.

I do think there will be minor changes to the American health care system. Children will be given universal coverage. Since the Congress already agreed on that and it was vetoed by Bush it should be easy to pass that legislation under Obama. Obama will likely make some moves to reduce the 40+ million uninsured and temporarily reduce medical costs by forcing insurance companies to bulk buy prescription medicine. But I highly doubt he would nationalize the health care system as was done in Canada decades ago. America just nationalized the banking and insurance systems and there won't be a climate to tolerate further nationalizations.

Among us atheists we know the only real and important change involves the US government changing their standard lies on two fronts.

Front #1, Religion. Obama is religious, officially, but like many Christians, I know, I doubt their open professing of their faith because, as Sam Harris mentioned in End of Faith, you cannot choose what to believe. Obama is clearly very intelligent and we should expect that he has made the calculation that to be a credible black man he needs to be Christian. His mother was an Atheist and I would be suspect that Obama himself may be a closet Atheist. Although my tolerance for listening to religious rhetoric was exceeded half way through Rick Warren's speech I thought it was an intelligent move by Obama to sandwich himself between two preachers. By doing this it removed the pressure on him to say anything too religious. I thought his mentions of God in his speech were well placed and in the appropriate context. He never said he was on a mission from God or anything extreme like that. It's well known by students of political speeches that words or phrases are used to send hidden messages that would be unpopular if the message was explicitly delivered. I accused John McCain of such a hidden message in October. Obama mentioned that non-believers formed part of America. This is a change in direction from Bush who never mentioned non-believers and allowed his messengers to paint non-believers as un-American, in the same way his father did. I also thought it was telling that he mentioned Muslims before Jews and that he even mentioned Hindus because Hindus have been as invisible as non-believers. Obama sent us a message that he is our friend and he put Rick Warren on stage to shield himself from religious criticism. Expect more extremely moderate religious positions from Obama; remember how he made fun of people who want to legislate from the bible by verbally sharing hilarious parts of the bible. Could an Atheist get away with that?

Front #2, Marijuana. Over the course of history that have been many truths which have been hidden from the people by bold faced lies in order for the ruling class to maintain it's grip on power. In case you are ignorant on the subject, marijuana is an herbal medicine that causes no harm to people and has many beneficial qualities including medicinal benefits. It's not dangerous, yet dangerous substances like alcohol, cigarettes, pharmaceutical medicines, toxins and pollutants are legally sold. The lies of religion are integral in propping up the lie that marijuana is harmful. Multinational corporations in the alcohol and pharmaceutical industries do not want to compete with marijuana because it's a better product than many of their offerings and can be cultivated and sold in a decentralized manner. Multinational corporations have also been trying to hold back many other decentralized projects such as wind and solar power.

The good news is we have the Internet and more ability than ever to pressure the American President and Congress to modernize their way of thinking and give up the charade of religion and the prohibition of marijuana. If this two major lies can be broken then liberty can be truly spread throughout the globe.

By Peter