Ephesians 2

By Grace Through Faith (v. 1-10)

You used to do bad things just like everybody else, but now you walk with Christ because God loves you and showed mercy on you. You have been saved through faith, but it is not your own doing. God loved you and created you in a way that you would follow Christ and be saved, so you shouldn't boast about it.

The idea that you shouldn't boast about being among the saved seems very good, from either perspective. If you are an outsider and the Christians are constantly boasting, they will likely come off as jerks, being around a bunch of people like that can be very troublesome. From the Christian perspective, if you are boasting you might turn potential converts away which would be bad for you. So in either case, encouraging Christians to not be boastful seems like a good thing.

Another thing here, this says that God made you in such a way that you are saved because "you are his workmanship" and he loves you. But he created you in such a way that you will be saved before you existed. This seems very strange to me because there do exist people who will not be saved, so does that imply that he does not love them? Is his workmanship not as good in them? He knew all of that before he created them right? So why did he still create the "lower quality" people? Not sure if I'd exactly call this a contradiction or anything, but it is certainly something to think about.

One in Christ (v. 11-22)

We used to be divided, circumcised and uncircumcised, but now we are together in Christ. Jesus preached peace to everyone.

I guess it is a good message, we should all work together. Although this isn't so much a command as it is a declaration. It also seems quite incorrect, look at the huge number of different denominations, they are certainly divided on many issues, and we see a problem with faith based stuff, there is no real way to reconcile a disagreement. "I believe X and you believe Y, we both believe it because of faith so there is no convincing each other...uhh...kill each other?" Also, it is simply incorrect that Jesus taught peace to everyone.



For the overview post (If you think I should add or remove stuff from this list please let me know, I think it would make good conversation) 

Good:

2:8-9 Don't boast about being among the saved

I'm on the Twitter!

Hey everybody, I decided to give that twitter thing a try. I'm not really sure the best way to use it, or how to get the most out of it, but I figure the only way to find out it to just jump in. If you feel like seeing more of my ramblings than what I post here feel free to follow me @hausdorff80

There are times when I get ideas that I can never quite flesh out enough to make them a full blog post, I figure they would be good for twitter. Also, Reason Being has mentioned in the past (and also in his post today) that he has debates with theists over twitter. I'm not really sure how that would go, but it seems interesting and something I will try to check out. I also see hashtags on tv shows all the time and I can finally find out what that is all about.

Ephesians 1

This is apparently another letter from Paul, although according to the Wikipedia article there is some debate that it might be a Paul groupie.

Greeting (v1-2)

Paul says hi and wishes the Ephesians grace from God.

Spiritual Blessings in Christ (v3-14)

Blessed be to God who has saved us. He predestined us since before the creation of the world to be followers of Christ and to be blessed.

This seems to be one of those things that is only good if you don't think about it too hard. It might sound great to be predestined to be one of the lucky ones. But then what about anyone who doesn't follow Christ? Doesn't it follow that they were also predestined to not follow him? You are basically being rewarded and they are being punished because of a decision God made long before you were even born. Even if you try to justify it by saying they are sinners and you are not, it still comes down to the fact that God decided before the earth was created that you would be saved (and therefore didn't sin) and they would not (and therefore did sin).

Thanksgiving and Prayer(v15-23)

Paul says that he is happy at the Ephesians faith and then talks about how awesome God is.



For the overview post (If you think I should add or remove stuff from this list please let me know, I think it would make good conversation) 

Bad:

1:5,11 Who is and isn't a Christian is predestined by God (note: this is bad because of hell)

Galatians Overview

As I have explained in the past, one of the reasons I am doing this blog is I am curious to see what kind of messages one might get from reading the bible. What might one learn as a take-away. Here is my quick summary of the good and bad from Galatians.

(note: the chapter link takes you to my page on that chapter, the verse link takes you to the verse on biblestudytools.com)


Good:

5:14 Love your neighbor as yourself

5:22-26 Focus on love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control [thanks JKerber in comments]

6:1-2 help each other out


Bad:

3:2-3 Faith is good, works don't matter

4:29 persecution complex

4:30 preemptive strike

4:31 wishful thinking

5:2,3,6,11 ridiculous doublespeak (about circumcision)

Galatians 6

Bear One Another's Burdens

Help anyone who is in need. If someone helps you be grateful or you might have to do things by yourself in the future.

There is a bit of interpretation here on the first 5 verses, but I really think this is what it is trying to say. Help each other out, if the tables are turned and people help you out, don't be a dick about it or you might find yourself without help in the future. This is the kind of thing that Christians will often point to as examples of what the bible is all about and what religion should be all about. Sounds good to me.

v6 "One who is taught the word must share all good things with the one who teaches."

This I don't like so much. He is commanding them to give resources to the church (or those teaching the word). Given that he is the one who is teaching them, this is quite self serving.

Final Warning and Benediction

Circumcision doesn't matter, those who say it does are just trying to get you on their side so they can boast about your flesh.

Again with the circumcision. 




For the overview post (If you think I should add or remove stuff from this list please let me know, I think it would make good conversation) 

Good:

6:1-2 help each other out

No Atheists in Foxholes

Occasionally you will hear theists say that there are no atheists in foxholes. The implication is that we all know that God is real, and when the shit hits the fan we will shape up and accept God and ask him for help. Obviously military personnel are in danger and therefore they all must get real and accept God and make sure that if they do wind up dying they will go to heaven.

First of all, the whole premise is wrong. We are not atheists so that we can be free to sin, we are atheists because we honestly don't believe a God exists. There is no situation you could put me in right now where I would look to God for help, I don't think he exists so I don't think that such an action would do anything for me.

Apart from being simply incorrect, this whole notion is incredibly disrespectful to the atheists that are in our military by denying they even exist. This week I came across maaf, the military association of atheists and freethinkers. On the site there is a list of military atheists and many of them have a paragraph or 2 describing some of their time in the military and how they came across religion while they were there, I thought I would grab a few quotes (emphasis mine) from there for today's post.


Army Major David Schrier
Specialty: Anesthesiologist
Dates of Service: June 2003 - October 2009
Tours of duty: 28th Combat Support Hospital, Baghdad, August 2006 - February 2007
I spent six months in a combat support hospital. We took care of wounded civilians, insurgents, and military. Our hospital was mortared regularly, and praying about random explosions just seemed ridiculous. The individual people in the unit were mostly accepting of, or apathetic about, my atheism. However, there was a lot of overt religious emphasis from the unit command. The hospital chaplain, in particular, was naive to the concepts of religious diversity and freedom. He turned several mandatory "briefings" into a platform for proselytizing and preaching. He even tried to convert or preach to wounded patients, including locals and their families; these attempts were sadly comical, as they were overwhelmingly Muslim and almost never spoke English. My time in the Army, and in Iraq, served to cement my convictions about the folly of using religious dogma as guidance for personal policy and actions, and the high chance that religious doctrines can be volatile when placed in opposition to each other.


Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Christine Legawiec
Board Member, Assistant Organizer of Wright-Patt MASH
Specialty: C-130 Pilot
Dates of Service: 1996-present
Decorations: Aerial Achievement, Meritorious Service, GWOT Service
Tours of duty: Kuwait, 2000; Balkans, 2000-2005; OEF, 2001-2005; OIF, 2003-2004, ONE, 2008
No atheists in foxholes? Really? So when things get tough I'm supposed to forget my training, put away my courage and just pray? No way. I have to count on me, on my crew, and on my fellow service members to do our jobs to the best of our ability. Our lives depend on it. If you stop performing the mission to pray, you are putting all of us at risk.


Army Specialist Dennis Bailey
Specialty: Cook
Dates of Service: February 2008 - Present
Tours of duty: Jun 2009 - May 2010, Mar 2012 - Present
For the most part my Atheism hasn't been an issue except during my last deployment. I was struggling with a lot of stress and personal issues. I let the command know that I needed some help and asked to speak to mental health. The next day the chaplain shows up at our site and proceeds to counsel me. I didn't get any help from him because I just couldn't take him seriously. I told him I was Atheist and all of his advice became about giving my problems to the lord. When he found out I was a non believer and having a rough time he saw the perfect opportunity to exploit my weakness and turn his efforts to converting me rather than helping me. I later got to see the actual combat stress and got the help I needed at the time, but the "help" from the chaplain only succeeded in discouraging me more.

Do dogs know when their owners are heading home?

A few months ago I wrote a blog post about Rupert Sheldrake about his ideas on the extended mind. I honestly found his ideas pretty silly, but his experimental design really caught my attention. There was one experiment he talked about where they observed a dog anticipating the owner returning home. My first few thoughts about how this experiment would produce false positives seemed to be taken care of by how he designed the experiment, for example, I thought it was probably just the case that the owner comes home at the same time every day, but they did an experiment with the owner returning at a random time. I also thought that perhaps the dog just gets up and waits at the door every five minutes, but this was supposedly not the case. I was intrigued and said that I would be interested in looking at the experiment in a little more depth, and that is what I want to do today.

You can see the paper itself here. I'd also like to say up front that I am not a scientist (I suppose I consider myself a science fan) so take anything I say here with a grain of salt. And if you see anything I have said that you think is wrong please feel free to speak up, discussion is always welcome.


Introduction

The paper begins by claiming that it is a common event that people notice their dogs anticipating their owners return, for example they might wait by the door. Apparently it is common for people to attribute some kind of a psychic link between the dog and owner to explain the behavior. This paper seeks to test that hypothesis against 4 conventional explanations
1. The dog could smell or hear the owner approaching
2. The dog could be responding to the owner's routine
3. The dog could be reacting to subtle cues from the people who are home
4. The dog could be reacting that way all day and people have selected memory
To account for these conventional explanations, the experiment will
1. Not include the last 3 minutes of the trip in the data
2. Randomize return times
3. Not allow the people at home to know the return time
4. Standardize the tracking of the dog and have people record blinded.
This all seems good so far.

The Experiment

The owner left the house for a while, not knowing when she would return. At some point she would get a message on her pager from a third party and start heading home [correction: it seems that only 12 experiments used the pager in this way, the rest were pre-planned return times]. Meanwhile at home there is a camera set up watching the spot the dog waits by the window when the owner is coming home. Later, someone looks at the tape and records how much time the dog spends by the window.

They break the data up into 3 different types, the return time starts the moment she gets the beep on the pager and lasts for 10 minutes (the trip home is always at least 13 minutes, so this 10 minutes will be time spent travelling home but not when the car is close enough for the dog to hear or smell). The pre-return time is the 10 minutes preceding the pager beep, and the main period is the time before that, broken up into 10 minute chunks.

Results

The amount of time spent by the window was compared for the three different time periods, during the return period, the dog spent about 55% of it's time by the window, in the pre-return period he spent about 23%, and in the main period he spent about 4% of the time. (note: there is a lot more detail than this in the paper, and there are some nice charts, but this gives a pretty good flavor of it)

Control Experiment

They also ran 10 experiments when the owner didn't return at all to rule out the possibility that the dog simply spent more time at the window the longer she was away. This is graphed in figure 5 in the paper. It seems to me that the dog spent a little more time at the window the later in the day, but not by enough to account for the result we saw in the other experiments.

Ruling out normal explanations

1. Routine, between doing random return times and different times of day, this can't be it
2. Hearing, Due to distance and alternate vehicles a few times, it can't be this
3. Reading people at home, they didn't know return time, can't be this
4. Selective memory blind recorders, can't be this
5. Spending time at window more later in the day control experiment, can't be this

I mostly agree with these points. There seems to be a little bit with the spending time at the window more and more as the day goes on though, it is important to keep it in mind, but by itself it doesn't explain the results.

In the section entitled "Thirty ordinary homecomings" he describes 5 ways that "interesting details are hidden by this averaging process". Again, I'm not a scientist and I have never designed a study like this, so maybe this type of thing is just the reality you have to deal with, but it seems to me that these things could have been taken care of with a little more care at the design stage. Perhaps I am wrong on this count, but it definitely seems like it might be important.

Telepathy?

Sheldrake argues that the best explanation is that the dog and his owner have a telepathic link. As she is on her way home the dog gets excited and waits by the window. But then what about the pre-return period? The owner wouldn't know yet that she is about to head home, and yet the dog is already waiting by the window anticipating her coming home. Surely this is not supported by the telepathy hypothesis. There are 3 answers in the paper, the first two they agree seems far fetched, perhaps the dog is telepathically linked with the person sending the pager message. They solved this by having an alternate person send the message sometimes and that didn't stop the behavior. Another answer is that the dog is precognitive.

They mention those possibilities, but they don't seem to really think that is the answer, what they think is that the owner knows that the beep is coming during some predetermined range. Even though she hasn't gotten the beep, she is anticipating the beep and therefore the dog reads that through their telepathic link. This explains why the amount of time near the window increases a little bit in the pre-return period. She anticipates the beep, he gets a little excited and waits by the window, then when she gets the beep she is actually heading home and the dog gets really excited and waits by the window even more.

What do I think really happened?

The last thing I wrote is really telling. The owner was anticipating what was happening in the study and introduced noise into the data. Doesn't the fact that their study was set up in such a way that it could be anticipated show that there are flaws in the design? If the owner could anticipate things is it possible that the dog could as well? I think the answer to this is yes. Dogs are really intuitive and pick up on a number of cues we give them without even being aware of it ourselves, we basically bred them to have this trait. Perhaps the dog realizes that when the camera is set up she is coming back within 4 hours (the length of the tape). In the control experiment when she didn't come home perhaps she inadvertently indicated to the dog she wouldn't be back that day. Perhaps the dog realized that she never comes home within an hour and a half and didn't wait by the window for her during that period.

I'd like to add that if my ideas are correct about how the dog anticipated things, that is still really damn cool. If it is possible for the dog to pick up on a suite of minor cues from the owner and make a reasonable guess as to when she was going to get home, that is awesome! If there is something else going on, I would be interested in finding out exactly what it is. It certainly does seem like Sheldrake has found something here. I don't for a second think that it is telepathy, although I suppose if it is more experiments could show it.

Researcher Degrees of Freedom?

There is also the question of statistical manipulation. I am not accusing him of intentionally lying and trying to trick us into believing his story. I watched that youtube video of this guy and I think he really believes this stuff. But the fact remains that there are a lot of different ways to manipulate data (relevant xkcd comic). We don't know how much time he spent looking at different analyses before he decided this was what was best. Perhaps there are other ways to break up the data that would not show nearly as good of a result. We can't know if this happened, perhaps he decided exactly how the data would be analyzed ahead of time and it just worked out, I don't know, but it is something to be aware of. I will say that the way the 10 minute blocks are set up seemed strange to me and it really makes me wonder if this kind of thing was involved there. For instance, instead of averaging all of the main period, what if you only looked at the last 10 minute block in the main period? Maybe that is what they did already, maybe the original plan didn't have the 'pre-return' period but their data was coming out strangely and they put it in their to fix things. This is of course wild speculation but I think it is at least as probable as the dog and owner having a telepathic link :)