In response to question about Syrian refugees Ben Carson brags about the size of his frontal lobes.

Courtesy of Raw Story: 

"We should use our expertise and resources to help get them resettled — over there — and to support them over there,” he said. “But to bring them here under these circumstances is a suspension of intellect.” 

“You know that the human brain has these big frontal lobes, as opposed to other animals, because we can engage in rational thought processing.” 

The former neurosurgeon noted that his advanced brain gave him the ability to “extract information from the past [and] present, process it, and project it into a plan.” 

“Animals, on the other hand, have big brain stems and rudimentary things because they react,” Carson explained. “We don’t have to just react, we can think.”

You know I actually agree with Carson that human beings DO possess the ability to use rational thought processes.

However knowing that Carson realizes that as well, makes it all the more difficult to understand why he believes that humans cannot have morality without God, that Noah's flood was real and Evolution was inspired by Satan, and that the pyramids were built to store grain instead of the bodies of he pharaohs?

Does this mean that Ben Carson's frontal lobes are not that big? (Not that size is everything of course.)

Or perhaps it means that he simply refuses to utilize them if by doing so it endangers his faith in certain mythologies or conspiracy theories.

When it comes to listening to Ben Carson lecture people about using their developed brains for reasoning, I cannot help but to fall back on that old "Physician heal thyself" chestnut.

Much too good not to share.

Yeah the Right Wing can keep right on hating those intellectual elites, but you just can't beat'em for getting the facts straight and doing a butt load of research before going on the air.

Why it often does not pay to have conversations with Fundamentalists.

I think that this point was made incredibly obvious during that recent "debate" between Ken Ham and Bill Nye.

The smoke and mirrors that Ham threw up to obfuscate the weak points in his argument were stunning.  And it served him well in throwing up an intellectually dishonest force field that repelled the logic of Bill Nye's rebuttals.

Study determines that political conservatism is the product of low effort thought. They needed a study to recognize this?

This comes to us from the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin:

The authors test the hypothesis that low-effort thought promotes political conservatism. In Study 1, alcohol intoxication was measured among bar patrons; as blood alcohol level increased, so did political conservatism (controlling for sex, education, and political identification). In Study 2, participants under cognitive load reported more conservative attitudes than their no-load counterparts. In Study 3, time pressure increased participants’ endorsement of conservative terms. In Study 4, participants considering political terms in a cursory manner endorsed conservative terms more than those asked to cogitate; an indicator of effortful thought (recognition memory) partially mediated the relationship between processing effort and conservatism. Together these data suggest that political conservatism may be a process consequence of low-effort thought; when effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases. 

Well this certainly puts things into perspective, don't you think?

And if you are a conservative I apologize for what must seem like a mocking question.

Another intellectual shining light blinks out. The passing of Christopher Hitchens.

Yesterday Chris Hitchens finally lost his battle with cancer, and has shuffled off this mortal coil just as convinced there was nothing awaiting him on the other side, in death as he was in life.

Hitchens was perhaps one of the MOST aggressively outspoken of the "New Atheists."

Though I did appreciate Hitchens brazen dismantling of religious sacred icons and beliefs, but I often had issues with his style, which could be a little too acerbic for my tastes.  This could possibly stem from the fact that he sometimes reminded me of the younger me, who was always ready to challenge a person's faith and ridicule their lack of intellectual honesty.

Over the years I have mellowed a great deal, and though I was NEVER as arrogant or dismissive as Hitch, I have come to be far more accepting of people's need to subscribe to the idea of something beyond that which is seen.

Having said that, there were certainly some wonderful quotes from Hitchens that should never be forgotten:

“If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.” 

“The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that ‘if English was good enough for Jesus, then it’s good enough for me’.” 

About Mother Teresa: “She was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.” 

“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.” 

“[O]wners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.” 

About George W. Bush: “He is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.” 

And of course:

About Sarah Palin: “She’s got no charisma of any kind, [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.”

Anybody who can make such an incredibly insightful statement about Palin is certainly somebody who will be sorely missed.  Good-bye Hitch, and good job.

For those who are unfamiliar with Chris Hitchens, here he is during a debate on the afterlife, with  Sam Harris, David Wolpe and Bradley Shavit Artson at the Whizin Center. (If you are easily offended, you might skip this video. Also there is some NSFW language.)