Program Archive - Capital District Humanist Society

Eleanor Aronstein has been an academic serving at various institutions of higher learning, who spoke on “End of Life Issues.” She began from this standpoint: “I cherish my life. I also want a say in how it ends.”

Her concern with this issue was prompted by the trauma of her mother’s death from ovarian cancer, saying “nothing alleviated her misery.” Aronstein said she’s still carrying, fifty years later, the guilt of having been unable to do anything in that regard.

Another introductory vignette concerned her dog peacefully “put to sleep,” making her wonder why such a death is not made available for human beings, often instead forced to suffer.

Avoidance of that should be a basic human right. Aronstein traced how other human rights have been expanded — women voting, civil rights, disability, gay rights — and said that should now encompass death with dignity. It’s bad enough to lose someone you love; worse if you’re forced to watch them die torturously. Aronstein told the story of a brain tumor patient who went into hospice (generally providing palliative care), but the morphine supply ran out during a weekend, resulting in an agonizing death. She noted that (contrary to most people’s wishes) only about one in five Americans dies at home.

Switzerland seems to be the most advanced in this respect, enabling anyone to go there to get a painless death. Other European nations, notably the Netherlands, have also permitted euthanasia. [Though it’s generally not available for youth in Asia.] In the U.S., Oregon led the way in 1997 with a medical-aid-dying law that’s become a model, basically replicated since in ten further jurisdictions. New York State still argues over adoption of such a law. It’s opposed mainly by the Catholic Church.

Aronstein noted that in Oregon’s 27 years of experience under such legislation, there have been no instances of abuse. Such schemas generally entail a panoply of protections, requiring two physicians certifying that the person has a terminal medical condition with six months expected lifespan; a written request for the procedure, attested by two witnesses; and prescribed medication to be self-administered (as opposed to physician assisted). Patients must also be able to stand on one foot while juggling three machetes.

Aronstein also stressed the importance of getting one’s pre-death paperwork in order. This includes a “health care proxy” designating someone for medical decisions in case you’re unable to make them yourself; a “living will” specifying what procedures you want or don’t want; and a “Do Not Resuscitate” order ruling out extreme measures. “You can never be too paranoid,” she declared.

Further mentioned were several organizations active in this sphere: End of Life Choices New York; Compassion & Choices; and Final Exit Network, the latter filling the gap for people who want to check out but don’t qualify under Oregon-type laws.

More about Final Exit Network:
• https://finalexitnetwork.org/mission-and-vision/

To stay up to date on right to die news in the US and worldwide:
• https://finalexitnetwork.org/news-events/fen-magazine/
• https://finalexitnetwork.org/news-events/right-to-die-news-service/
• https://finalexitnetwork.org/news-events/the-good-death-society-blog/

Paul Golin is Executive Director of the Society for Humanistic Judaism. His talk was titled “What is Humanistic Judaism?” Divided into five basic points:

Firstly, Jews are “remarkably secular.” Golin noted there are about 7 million American Jews, about 2% of the population (less than most people think). He cited a Pew survey asking them, “Do you believe in the God of the Bible?” Only 26% said yes (compared to 56% of all Americans). Of the remaining Jews, half nevertheless believe in some sort of “higher power.” Leaving 22% apparently atheists. [I didn’t follow that math — FSR.]

But the high secularism level among Jews doesn’t surprise Golin, who said he can’t see how, after the Holocaust, Jews can believe in a God who interferes in human affairs.

His second point was that Judaism is not just a religion. It’s also a culture, and an ethnicity — actually, multiple ethnicities — Sephardic., Ashkenazi, and others. Golin noted another survey wherein, asked their religion, 30% of U.S. Jews did not answer “Jewish.” Again signifying rising secularism.

Thirdly, he defined “humanistic Judaism” as a “meaningful Jewish community without God.” He distinguished this from other versions of Judaism: orthodox, strictly following all the Biblical rules; reform, mostly ignoring them; and conservative, somewhere in-between. Humanistic Judaism is even less rule-and-ritual bound than the “reform” version. However —

Point four was that there’s a benefit to ritual, even for secular people. All of us do things that equate to ritual, that impart meaning for us. Like birthday parties. Golin said a menorah connects him to his ancestors. He also recites “blessings” having nothing to do with God, sometimes just acknowledging gratefulness for things.

His fifth point was that meaning can come from any source, and can provide value. Secularism need not mean giving up what has meaning for us — not throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Melanie Trecek-King is an Associate Professor of Biology at Massasoit College, who spoke about “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds.”

She began with a 1954 cult story, the “Seekers,” led by one Dorothy Martin, involving Jesus, aliens in flying saucers, and predictions of Earth’s imminent destruction on December 21. Believers prepared to be saved, jettisoning all metal, including tooth fillings, which would have interfered with saucer navigation.

Trecek-King focused on what people believe, and why. The meaning of “belief” is actually a tricky question. She defined it simply as “things you think are true;” and act upon (whether true or not). Positing two basic sources for beliefs: 1) personal experiences, with the example of feeling better after homeopathic treatment (i.e., no actual treatment, but there’s still a placebo effect), and 2) received wisdom, accepting the beliefs of people around us.

Trecek-King noted we are social primates, programmed by evolution to trust in the group. We do tend to trust our tribe-mates, but they’re are not necessarily dependable. Placing trust wisely, she said, is incredibly important.

She cited philosopher W.V. Quine who characterized beliefs as forming a web, with “core beliefs” at the center, most closely linked to one’s personal identity, influencing the rest, and being hardest to change. We’ll hold to a core belief, even if incorrect, if it serves to make everything else make sense.

So again, beliefs are most tenacious if tied to one’s sense of identity; Trecek King said that “social death is worse than physical death.” If that sounds like hyperbole, she cited the example of people clinging to Covid denialism — even while themselves dying of Covid.

There’s also a dichotomy between falsifiable beliefs, capable of being refuted by evidence, and others that cannot be. The latter are subjective beliefs — for example, “abortion is murder” — that actually tend to be the ones held most strongly. And for those we make excuses, to fend off any seeming contrary evidence.

Confirmation bias is, more generally, the embrace of information supporting pre-existing beliefs, while dismissing discordant information. Smarter people are actually more prone to this, being better at coming up with rationales for rejecting the latter.

Trecek-King invoked psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor of the elephant and rider. The elephant is one’s unconscious, and is much bigger and more powerful, yet the rider — one’s conscious self — thinks they’re directing it. Mostly the rider is just coming up with justifications for the elephant’s choices.

But overconfidence is the real enemy. There was discussion of the Dunning-Kruger effect: limited competence tends to make people over-estimate their abilities. Or: their dumbness makes them think they’re smart.

Her “take home” message was: train your elephant. Be caring, skeptical, humble. She also suggested an exercise, applied to some belief you hold. How sure are you it’s true? Why? How would you feel if you’re wrong? What evidence would change your mind?

But in today’s America we have a problem of people inhabiting different realities, with indeed different understandings of how reality works.

Returning to the story of the “Seekers,” when December 21 arrived, nothing happened. At first this threw them for a loop. But then Dorothy said she’d received a message: in fact, it was their steadfastness that saved the world from its otherwise certain doom. So they sallied forth with redoubled faith in their crazy belief system.

Kyle Polich is a podcaster whose talk was titled “Skepticism in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.”

He began with a re-titling: “A Staircase to the Moon? The Path to AGI.” AGI stands for “Artificial General Intelligence,” which would resemble the kind of intelligence we humans have, and which AI currently does not. Polich’s metaphor was that to go to the Moon, you could build a staircase, which would get you part-way, but would soon prove the wrong approach — as opposed to building rockets. He posed the question whether current AI efforts are staircase-equivalents for getting to AGI.

A main theme was elucidating why AI has progressed as much as it has in just the last few years. Polich said it was really a matter of solving math problems. What current AI iterations basically do is turn language problems into math problems it’s capable of solving. An AI will be trained for that by exposing it to a vast amount of diverse human-generated texts, from books that have been put online, Wikipedia, and general internet crawls, etc. Its basic task is then predicting what word comes next in a sequence. It does this by converting words into numbers, and figuring out language patterns — what words most typically go with each other. By testing itself to guess the missing word in a sequence, then checking if it was right, done a zillion times, it gets pretty good at predicting the next word. That’s all ChatGPT is really doing when asked to compose, say, a sonnet about peanut butter in the style of Allen Ginsburg.

But this, again, is not General Artificial Intelligence. In this context Polich discussed the “Turing Test,” in which a human converses with an AI to judge whether they’re talking to another human or not. Polich deemed this an “unbiased double-blind test,” and posited that today’s AIs have not passed it.

He also introduced the term ASI — “Artificial Super Intelligence,” which would be able to do, well, everything. Unlike any human. There’s some concern that such an entity could wreak havoc with our economies, our cultures, etc. But Polich deemed that threat far distant, expressing more concern about mis-use of AI in human hands, for example to wage bioterrorism, or create fake news, even personalized for the recipient. Yet he cited nuclear weapons, which we’ve had for decades without using.

He meanwhile put forth a list of ways in which AI differs importantly from humans. Like, no embodiment — many researchers posit that our human consciousness is not just a matter of what goes on in our brains, but their connection with our bodies is highly important. Similarly, AI has no pain, no emotions, no motivations. However, those could be emergent properties that arise from neuron-like information processing. Indeed, many theorize that that’s how our own consciousness originates.

Polich concluded by voicing his view that, with AI, we’re not engaged in building a staircase to the Moon — we’re building a rocket.

Kate Cohen is a Washington Post columnist and author of We of Little Faith – Why I stopped Pretending to Believe (And Maybe You Should Too). Her talk was titled, “America Needs Atheists Now More Than Ever.”

Because someone, she said, is trying to take away our liberties — and it’s not Joe Biden. Whereas our First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion, now “Christian Nation” zealots are reinterpreting that — with Supreme Court backing — to mean freedom of religion from other laws and requirements.

Cohen began by talking about her Jewish childhood — how she never really believed, but went along with the religion, feeling that that was what one was supposed to do, to be a good person. She characterized Judaism as mostly praising God — a fictional character with a desperate desire to be worshipped. But she was reluctant to admit that reality — like many people, not wanting to be part of a feared and reviled minority. She noted that women, generally, tend to identify as atheists less often than do men, because they’re more attuned toward “getting along.”

And she thought atheism was more complicated than it really is. One doesn’t have to be a strict materialist — can feel blessed, hope, and faith — in other people. And cosmic wonderment. In other words, big feelings about big things, but without giving that a big word (“God”).

One can reject that concept without having to come up with some alternative but equivalent cosmic hypothesis. Like a theory for how the Big Bang occurred. It’s okay to just say, “I don’t know.”

And how do we know there’s no God? We don’t have to. Nor can we prove the nonexistence of other kinds of mythical beasts. God is just one more like them. [The impossibility of proving there’s no God is a philosophical non-sequitur; one cannot prove a negative; the burden of proof is on the advocate for a proposition; and extraordinary claims (which certainly include religious ones) require extraordinary proof. — FSR]

Cohen read a section of the book relating how she handled their questions when her small boys were reading about Greek myths. Which people may have believed at one time. Contemporary religions are myths that some people believe today, which are no different — likewise made up. That’s what she told her kids, pulling no punches. She wanted them to exist in the real world.

She also said that being an atheist, one needn’t give up Christmas — the word being a shorthand for the “culturally religious soup” we all live in. It’s okay to indulge in these cultural practices. One doesn’t have to take a vow of purity to be an atheist.

Her book, in the end, is mainly a plea to be honest with oneself, and one’s children.

Recap prepared by Frank S Robinson

Our November in-person meeting was very well attended, with great food! Plus a bunch more folks on zoom.

The speaker was Joseph Simonetta on “How to Sustain Humanity, Advance Our Civilization, and Succeed as a Species.”

Much of the talk explicated how small Earth is in relation to cosmic immensity. Then he detailed our species’ evolutionary antecedents; then the development of religions; and the problems confronting us — climate change, species extinction, pollution, conflict, etc. All to make the point that religion and the behaviors it inspires are antiquated and ill-suited to confronting the challenges of modern life. Quoting Einstein that we can’t solve our problems with the same level of thinking from which they originated.
Which is absurd, fundamentally wrong, and needs to change. Though Simonetta could suggest no path to such change. He did stress seven key words: Be healthy; be kind; respect the environment.

Abhijit Chanda is the founder of “Rationable,” a YouTube channel. (The name does not refer to things subject to rationing, but rather rationality.) He joined us from India, speaking about “Alternative Health Practices and Pseudoscience.”

A starting point was to query reasons for the popularity of “alternative” medicine as opposed to the conventional (real) sort. Chanda characterized the latter, in America, as not exactly user-friendly. People recoil from giant institutions like government, insurance companies, and big pharma. Mainstream doctors often seem cold and brusque, in contrast to “alternative” practitioners exuding warmth. Many people take modern medicine for granted, while venerating “traditional” treatments as better fitted to their beliefs, philosophies, and psychologies. As opposed to critical thinking.

But he suggested that critical thinking doesn’t necessarily correlate with intelligence. In that regard, he cited Steve Jobs, certainly a very intelligent guy, who insisted on treating his cancer outside of mainstream medicine. Didn’t work out well.

There’s also the appeal of the word “natural,” with the idea that it equates to “good.” Wow is that wrong; Chanda called it the “naturalistic fallacy.” Humanity’s whole history is a battle against nature; it can kill you. That’s not to say we don’t get some useful treatments from nature, like penicillin. But it requires science to separate what’s good from what’s bad.

Proponents of “alternative” treatments often do make scientific claims. But Chanda was pretty dismissive of that. It’s typically window-dressing rather than real science, producing the conclusions the “researcher” wants to get. He cited the example of a Covid cure touted as 100% effective in trials. Well, to start with, 97% of people don’t get Covid in the first place. (The purveyor eventually backed off the claim, instead saying his snake oil “boosts immunity.” Whatever that might actually mean.)

Yet numerous people insist that even stuff like homeopathy — which is literally no treatment at all — helps them. Of course that’s the placebo effect, which is quite powerful. It throws a monkey-wrench into any attempt at rational discussion.

Another word often thrown around is “energy.” (Chanda displayed a website piling on the feel-good lingo, hawking “Holistic Calming Energy.”) He said these folks actually don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to “energy” (which is actually not some Jedi-like force, but prosaically defined as “the ability to do work”). Related here is the notion of a “life force” that somehow emanates within us (“vitalism”). That just ain’t how things work.

Chanda focused particularly on “Ayurveda” practice, originating in India. The word loosely translates as “knowledge of life.” Another of his targets was Reiki, which he said is not, contrary to common belief, some “ancient wisdom,” but invented in the 1920s by one Mikao Usui. Who died at 60, not exactly a great advertisement for Reiki’s health benefits.

The basic problem with all this stuff is that it’s grounded in ignorance of the true causes of disease and illness. Ayurveda is ancient — long predating germ theory! And typically it relies on the archaic concept that illness is caused by some sort of imbalance among bodily “humours.” It was that kind of thinking that, for centuries, made bloodletting an all-purpose treatment for any malady (it killed George Washington). We now know it’s complete bunk.

Chanda’s final takeaway: Just let science do its thing. (What world is he living in?)

Our first in-person monthly meeting in 3-1/2 years must be rated a real success. About 14 people showed up, with half again as many participating by zoom. Thank you to Don Porterfield’s great efforts in getting the technological ducks lined up. The attendees seemed very pleased. And of course, for them, unlike for the zoomers, there was food! (We won’t mention the sex.)

The speaker was Chris Johnson, a film-maker and photographer, who spoke about his book and film project, “A Better Life – Joy and Meaning in a World Without God.” (Now that we’ve killed him.) He financed the project via crowd-sourcing using Kickstarter; then traveled the world, talking to a hundred people, including the likes of Dan Barker, Julia Sweeney, and philosopher A.C. Grayling. And he’s given the presentation in 125 places.

His aim, he said, was to change the conversation, from a focus on what we don’t believe in. Johnson started with some clips of people expressing very negative stereotypes of atheists. The question for him, though, is – given rejection of supernatural tropes – how do we then navigate the world?

We were shown a clip of philosopher/neuroscientist Patricia Churchland, addressing what an atheist does about Christmas. She noted that it’s an ancient pagan celebration – the Winter Solstice. And it’s fine to just do any rituals that happen to please one. She likened thusly participating in Christmas to playing in a game of Monopoly. You can partake without literal belief in the houses, hotels, and money.

One of those featured was Alex Honnold, a “free solo” rock climber, shown working his way up a vast vertical Yosemite cliff face, without ropes or the like. Obviously, death is possible. But then again, actually, it’s a certainty for everyone – eventually. And that “eventually” is not really too far distant. Honnold was quoted that not believing in an afterlife forces him to get the most out of the life he does have. A key point for Johnson is that knowing what a limited time we have does impel us to do what fulfills us.

Ryan Cragun is a sociologist with a flair for statistics. His talk was titled “Religion and Happiness: Much Ado About Nothing.”

He noted frequent media ballyhooing of studies purporting to show religion makes people happier. But such studies are typically deeply flawed. Usually examining only America – a weird country, disproportionately religious, and hyper-individualistic, compared to other advanced nations. And even within America, the studies are often unrepresentative, surveying limited population segments. There’s also the eternal conundrum of correlation versus causation. (Cragun suggested the “gold standard” would be a controlled experiment, unlikely to happen.) But the biggest problem with these studies is disregarding the size of any effects reported.

Cragun countered those studies with one of his own, based on a 2010-14 “World Values Survey” of 60 countries. Correlating self-reported happiness ratings with three variables: asking (1) are you religious? (2) how important is God in your life? And (3) how often do you attend religious services? (People often lie about the latter.)

A recap of the results: in only a handful of the 60 countries were there any statistically significant correlations between happiness and the three questions. (Statistical significance meaning only that a result is unlikely due to mere chance.) However, in all such instances, the size of the effect was so tiny as to be meaningless. (The U.S. showed the highest effects, but even here, tiny.)

Based on these results, Cragun commented that “no therapist should recommend religion as a treatment for depression.”

Meantime, he was also critical of other reported correlation studies for lacking a theory to explain why religion should confer happiness. Actually, there are some conventional ideas in this regard – like the comfort of an afterlife belief. But Cragun cited Phil Zuckerman’s book Society Without God, indicating that religious people actually fear death more than the non-religious, feeling uncertain about their fates and afraid of Hell. Whereas atheists feel sure death is an end, and tend to be accepting of it.

Cragun also cited a famous, well-funded study of heart surgery outcomes when people prayed for the patients. Confounding the expectations of the study’s sponsors, those patients were more likely to die. Apparently being told of the prayers made them more fearful.

There’s also the idea of comfort at the thought that a paternalistic God is watching over you. But here again that’s a double-edged sword. Another source of anxiety, thinking you have no privacy from a judgmental deity. Believing God is always watching you can induce neuroticism.

To the extent there actually is any happiness benefit from religion, it probably has nothing to do with the beliefs, but rather the social connections involved with being part of a congregation. But Cragun pointed out that, of course, one doesn’t have to go to church to have nourishing friendships.