…human beings are, by and large, more moral than standard economic theory predicts. Although Ariely’s book was about dishonesty, he reminds us that: We gloss over our failures, highlight our successes (even when they’re not entirely our own), and love to blame other people and outside circumstances when our failures are undeniable (Ariely, 240)Īriely’s book leads us through several experiments that show how people cheat on little things when they think they can get away with it and how they justify their cheating to avoid the pangs of guilt that emerge from seeing themselves as bad people. We persist in deceiving ourselves in part to maintain a positive self-image. Well, all humans have a little bit of the cheater in them and a profound mastery of self deception as Dan Ariely, the behaviour economist who wrote The Honest Truth About Dishonesty points out: Now let’s look at the assertions one by one.īelieving that if you can get away with it, it must be ok. The negation is in the α known as the alpha privative which is the Ancient Greek (and probably modern Greek) way to negate a word (like the “un” or “non” of English). We know it means this because it negates the word, θεος which means god. Instead of pointing out the questionable ethics in the bible (books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus) I thought it would be more useful to refute the meme using science.įirst of all let’s clear up what the word, atheist actually means. Atheist comes from the Greek: ἄθεος – no god or without god. Like many internet memes, I have no idea of its origins but I hope it’s not indicative of what people really think about atheists (i.e.: atheist = sociopath).īut just in case, I thought I’d go through this meme’s assertions sentence by sentence. What matters is that you’ve successfully created yourself a cozy little echo chamber.This gem popped up in my Facebook feed today. Hashtag science bitch.īut I suppose none of these questions or critiques really matter when you’ve polled your own followers to confirm their views on something that you’ll then deliver back to your own followers. So in summary, trust this poll because Godless Utopia followers are obviously trustworthy, and The Godless Utopia admins obviously have all the science too. Ok so if you say it’s non-biased then it obviously is, no need to demonstrate how the methodology protected against bias. In fact no need to even discuss what kind of bias we are talking about here. Also keep in mind that this poll was taken exclusively by Godless Utopia Twitter followers, who are apparently so trustworthy they were worth the mention. But what makes a poll scientific? Is a Twitter poll, in which the 420 responders are your followers, a shining example of a scientific poll? Apparently. Firstly we are told the poll is scientific. The reasons for the trust are what have left me scratching my head. A sort of reassurance of integrity, which went like this: “This scientific, non-biased poll was taken exclusively by Godless Utopia Twitter followers, so trust it’s accuracy 100%”.Īt this point I’m still happy to be told this is a joke. But if it’s not we are being asked to trust the accuracy of this poll 100%, not 99% or 95 % or anything lower, 100%. Now the part of the meme that made me wonder if it was in fact a troll account, appeared in the bottom right corner. A whopping 420 people responded to their post, talk about serious sample size. Here are the results: The question they asked was “Is the Christian Pro-Life Movement responsible for the #PlannedParenthood murders?”. They run a Twitter, Instragram and Facebook account, and have decided to poll their followers on Twitter. I initially thought this was a joke, because it reads like the work of a troll. But unfortunately I think we are dealing with an actual atheist account that call themselves Godless Utopia.
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