Using me!

Did you see the story about the pope being knocked down last night?

Imagine that… A mentally unstable person managed to get close enough to afront an 82 year old man in the richest most well guarded city in the world!? Begs so many questions!

Like doesn’t it seem convenient that the person who assaulted Silvio Berlusconi last week also happen to be mentally unstable?

Actually I should not cast dispersion on what may or may not be their mental state without any evidence but it would seem awfully convenient to label people who attack heads of state as mentally ill because then they can be locked up with a minimal trial for EVER.

It also begs the question as to why all popes are so old. Could it possibly be that the Vatican is so embroiled in politics that it doesn’t want any ruler to rule for too long? Could it be that it takes 82 years to become the representative of God on earth? One would imagine that a God would be powerful enough to impart the needed knowledge to you at birth. And that he would make it so frigging obvious that a life as a cleric and a vote by others who aren’t God’s chosen representative on earth wouldn’t be needed.

And let’s not forget that the Pope was a member of the Hitler Youth. What is it that those bracelets Christians are so fond of say? “What would Jesus do?”?

Yes I’m sure Jesus would join the Hitler Youth.

Really.

Sure.

While browsing for news on Christmas day I found this little ensemble of stories on religious expression over at the BBC.

Of course I’m against all religion on principle but I found it quite upsetting that a government can ban one religion’s activities (publishing bibles with the word Allah in them) because it might upset another religious group. And that’s just the first story.

The Swiss story I find mildly amusing because of how the Swiss are perceived word-wide as this credible, safe, stoic place/people when in fact they are ultra-conservatives. It’s kind of hard to know from any experience or knowledge that I’ve ever been exposed to whether they are just really hard-nosed old-fashioned conservatives or whether that’s a veneer under which lies pretty extreme fascism. I’m not accusing them of the latter I just don’t see how one can discern which they might be from the press they get.

And for the Italian story, together with the mentions of the US and Germany and the implications for the entire EU now that the Human Rights Bill is enshrined into their law through the signing of the Lisbon Treaty, well…

The Italians should put up or shut up. Quite simple. Displaying a Crucifix has NOTHING to do with ‘tradition’ that is not tied to religion. They chose to sign up to Lisbon.

The German law that you can only display religious paraphernalia in a classroom if a parent does NOT object is likewise bullshit. The law is that you shall not discriminate, not that you may discriminate until someone objects.

You can be sure that when I have school-attending children I shall be absolutely certain to ensure their rights under the Human Rights Charter of the Lisbon Treaty are adhered to, including campaigning for the removal of the legal requirement for state-funded schools to provide a ‘broadly Christian’ assembly each day.

I am so glad that the UK does not have a Constitution that people can throw in the faces of the law makers. Of course that brings its own issues up in that it makes it easer to change what may be natural human rights but I think this could be an interesting topic for another post so I’ll stop there.

I wish all of you a really great holiday. Call it what you will… Christmas, Yuletide, Noel, Getting Drunk Time, Saturnia, Winter Solstice or any of many other names.

Are you for or against the Lisbon Treaty’s content? Do you approve of the way in which the Treaty has been put into place?

Two quite different questions if you think about it. Most people I think would answer No to both when in fact they mean No to the latter but don’t actually know anything about the former. So let’s take the latter first.

I most am most definitely against the way this change in EU power has been forced through. In 2005 both the French and Dutch populations were given a referendum on the EU Constitution and both rejected it. The Constitution required (as the Treaty requires) every member state to ratify the it before it could come into place and so the Constitution was dead.

You would think therefore that in a democratic society the population would be consulted and changes would be made to the content of the proposal such that it was agreeable to all. But that’s exactly what did NOT happen. The content was rewritten in a much shorter form but, to the very very best of what I can determine, the actual implementation remained the same. It was renamed The Lisbon Treaty. The French and Dutch governments then ratified it without giving their populations the chance to vote on it.

So that’s how democracy works now. Regardless of your position on either of my original questions I’m sure you have to agree that, having given your people a referendum on a subject and seen it rejected, to then ignore that opinion and do it anyway is utterly undemocratic.

The British government under Tony Blair had also guaranteed their population a referendum on the EU Constitution. We did not get one. At the time it was said that since the French and Dutch had rejected it already there was no need to have one. While this is a valid point of order it should be taken into consideration that polls of the time indicated the referendum would be returned with a No vote. Once the Lisbon Treaty came along the government reneged on their promise, stating that a referendum was no longer necessary because the Treaty was different, it was not a Constitution and it did not devolve any power from the UK Parliament. This is a blatant lie as the treaty clearly devolves power to Brussels on several areas, including Human Rights and various trade related policy making areas, as well as monetary policy for countries using the Euro. Clearly the government knew that the treaty would be rejected by the people and therefore a referendum would simply weaken them when they ignored the result of it.

One has to wonder then what benefits there are to the politicians involved here. Not just those that ran roughshod over the expressed opinions of their people but those other nations who felt they didn’t even need to ask before signing on the dotted line. Really, what are they getting from it? Why would they feel so compelled to ignore democratic process? I have no answer to this although I’m sure that plenty of conspiracists would chime in with various keywords that might include ‘Oil’, ‘Illuminati’, ‘Money’, ‘Rothschild’, ‘Bohemia Grove’ or ‘Freemason’.

I really would like to hear what people think about that because it makes no sense to me whatsoever.

The final element in the ratification of the treaty was the Irish referendum which was the only referendum held in any member state on the Treaty rather than the Constitution. It was narrowly rejected the first time and I really have little concern that a second referendum then narrowly passed it. Both sides had plenty of time to put their views across and many did! Pro- and Anti-Treaty politicians and activists flocked to Ireland to try to influence the outcome, particularly of the second vote.

So what is the content of the Treaty?

Well it’s complicated. The treaty itself composes two parts.

First is a set of amendments to existing agreements and as such the document that is being ratified doesn’t read very well. The text itself and the resulting versions of the pre-existing documents can be found here.

Second is to make the Charter of Fundamental Human Rights legally binding. Alternate link.

There is a very good Wikipedia article which describes the amendments and the introduction of the Charter.

Much of the content appears to be groundwork for future devolution of power, placing frameworks in place for EU wide agreements and making various bodies such as the European Bank ‘official status’.

Any thoughts on this complex Treaty?

Jumile recently blogged about Pascal’s Wager, here and here, and I read the comments on his thread with some interest. It seems the phrasing of the wager caused some confusion. Distinguishing between ‘a god’ and ‘God’ seems to be at the root of it.

I thought I might rewrite the Wager using ‘a deity’ and ‘The Supreme Being’ but being a maths geek I thought a matrix (or spreadsheet!) might be better (and then went silly with Integration). In the table below I’ve illustrated what happens to you after death based on:

I actually reworked all the above as equations that I integrated over the P(Supreme Being Exists) from 0 to 1 and I’ll post the work at the bottom of this article purely for mathematical amusement.

I’ve argued before as to the un-likelihood of any actual God sending good people to Hell. In which case True Faith is irrelevant but where True Faith is not required Atheists are better off because the the price for misplaced Atheism has to be less than that of misplaced Belief – they didn’t waste any effort cowtowing to the wrong god. A minor point once you’re dead and in Heaven anyway but it could be quite a price during life.

However the important point is that where True Faith is required things are complicated. On the one hand it depends on how much value an Atheist would give to an afterlife in Heaven versus validating their Atheism. More importantly though it all comes down to whether the person of Faith has the true faith. Even if you only consider the main religions of the world the chance of you being in the right one is no more than 1:5 or so. If you consider the various interpretations of that religion to be important then it’s more like 1:20 or 1:50. If you consider all the deities that have ever been worshipped – and many of them still are worshipped by small numbers of people – then you have a snowball’s chance in hell of finding the right one.

That is to say that when picking apart Pascal’s wager the most important ‘variable’ is whether or not a Deity demands True Faith in him/her/it. If they do then you might as well just pick the one who’s notion of an afterlife you like the most. If you’re in the armed forces I’d go for Odin if I were you!

As the number of potential Supreme Beings rises the value of having faith diminishes and the value of being an Atheist rises – where True Faith is required. Where it is not required the value of faith still diminishes and the value of being an Atheist remains the same.

This leads to an interesting tangent. At some point religions changed. They changed from accepting that other people had other gods and the belief was simply that these were your ‘local’ gods and possibly that yours were better than anyone else’s; and they changed to stating that yours was the only real god and everyone else was simply deluded. And from this we simply conclude that religion is about power and control (and wealth). There is no other reason that I can come up with for why this change would occur. Any argument that the true faith became apparent is fallacious because there is no explanation as to why it didn’t exist beforehand nor any explanation let alone proof of which this true faith is. Christians love to talk about events prior to Christ being the Devil’s handiwork to confuse the believer. This is such unbelievable poppycock as it can be applied just as easily as to their own religion!

Anyway there’s my little exploration of Pascal’s Wager, now here comes the silly maths.

We can make an expected value of ‘belief’ from integrating the outcome values over a probability of the Supreme Being existing from 0 to 1. This is a sum of all possibilities along the P(Supreme Being) spectrum.

For most people V(Hell) and V(Misplaced Belief) will be negative which is why all solutions are additive not subtractive.

For an Atheist where the Supreme Being demands true Faith we can say:

Value = Integral of [ ( P(Supreme Being) * V(Hell) ) + ( P(!Supreme Being) * V(Valid Atheism) ) ]

The result is:

Value = ( V(Hell) + V(Valid Atheism) ) / 2

For an Atheist where true Faith is not required:

Value = Integral of [ ( P(Supreme Being) * V(Heaven) ) + ( P(!Supreme Being) * V(Misplaced Atheism) ) ]
Value = ( V(Heaven) + V(Misplaced Atheism) ) /2

For a Deist where True Faith is required:

Value = Integral of [ ( P(Supreme Being) * V(Heaven) * P(Belief in Correct Deity) ) + ( P(!Supreme Being) * V(Misplaced Belief) ) ]
Value = ( V(Heaven)*P(Velief in Correct Deity) + V(Misplaced Belief) ) / 2

For a Deist where True Faith is not required:

Value = Integral of [ ( P(Supreme Being) * V(Heaven) ) + ( P(!Supreme Being) * V(Misplaced Belief)) ) ]
Value = ( V(Heaven) + V(Misplaced Belief) ) /2

Plug in your own number is you like!