Our Very Own Amazing Meeting

Monday evening, I piled in a car with lazy-ass, two-post-posting Magus and our buddy Wikinite , and set off westward ho to see James Randi give a lecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne.

It was awesome. This is how it happened.

First thing's first: I forgot to fill the car up with gas before we left, despite telling myself over and over again all day "Do not forget to fill the car up with gas." Unfortunately for us, gas a scant few miles southwest of Lafayette was much more expensive than it was in Lafayette.

Secondly, and quite importantly, our directions were labeled "Anal Cannoneering;" Magus had just bought a new labelmaker and that was his inaugural label. He also made me a label that read "Douchebagensies" after I made a particularly unfunny joke involving that word. On the way home he tried to label a sleeping Wikinite with "Prematurely bald," but it did not work.

Other than that, the drive was uneventful. I did not get us lost, as it normally my wont, so, apart from a momentary fear that we would die on the side of the highway ("We, or the car?" I asked Magus when he said this. "The car," he replied. "Good," said I, "because suddenly I have this mental image of us, next to a nonfunctioning car, being stabbed to death by wild highway pygmies."), the evening began well.

We arrived at UIUC with plenty of time to spare and quickly found our seats behind Tom Foss and his friends Philosophizer and Jon M and in front of part of the St. Louis Skeptical Society and began talking shop, i.e. skeptical stuff and geek shit.

The best thing by far to come out of our pre-lecture conversation was the revelation, from Tom and Jon, that the Catholic Church once followed lockstep the infallible orders and decrees of Pope Lando.

That's right, Pope Lando. Communion wine goes down smooth.

The program began with a talk by Dr. Richard Roberts, winner of 1993's Nobel Prize in medicine, about atheism, the problems with religion, and why he was an atheist. The post-lecture conversation confirmed that none of us was terribly impressed by him, some less than others. For me, I'm going to cut him some slack for one reason:

He was Dawkins Lite, and I think he knew it.

He talked for almost an hour and covered pretty much all of Dawkin's major talking points, except without the carefully reasoned background information. His was like a powerpoint presentation of a summary of The God Delusion; he would say things like "Well, indoctrinating kids, well, that's just, I think that's child abuse!" and then jump to the next bit. I'm sure Dr. Roberts is a very intelligent fellow, he just didn't seem very knowledgeable about the history of religion or theology.

So, in the end, I kind of felt a little bad for him. The picture in his bio doesn't really show it, but on Monday night he even looked a bit like Dawkins. I had no idea he was going to be there that night, nobody else seemed to, and I got the distinct feeling he wasn't too sure about it, either.

He especially lost me when he was talking about schizophrenia. He claimed that, like Maximus Decimus Meridius in A Beautiful Mind, when smart people had hallucinations and heard voices, they knew it was false and so are called schizophrenic. When dumb people suffer the same symptoms, they think the voices are for real and so are classified bipolar.

Huh?

To quote Jon at dinner, "Pick up the fucking DSM IV."

I seriously had no idea where he got that claim, as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are not in any way the same disorder as interpreted by people at different levels of intelligence. Dr. Roberts, while pleasant enough, definitely felt like a man speaking very much outside his area of expertise.

One thing he did nicely, though, was press the importance of asking questions and making them good ones. He decried the types of questions that are designed to show the knowledge of the question asker rather than get at some new information from the askee, and recounted a story of one such question: someone who was far too impressed with himself asked a question of a Ph.D at a lecture, prefaced with five minutes of self-satisfied rhetorical rambling meant to show off his smarts and impress the Ph.D. Once the question was finally finished, the lecturer pondered for a moment, then said "No!" and moved on to the next question.

Then, finally, came Randi, but not before a pretty lame introduction by the president of the UIUC Atheists, Agnostics, and Freethinkers ("Randi and I were born on the same day 50 years apart! Hur hur hur!") and a short video montage of different television appearances he has made.

Once the video was over, Randi ascended the stairs, stood behind the podium, and futzed with the microphone for a minute. He spoke about the JREF and the Million Dollar Challenge, and how his job as a magician was to know, essentially, the psychology of fooling people and how people fool themselves. He spoke of assumptions that we all make "Because if we didn't, we'd go catatonic!" Then he proceeded to show us how simply he had fooled most of us based on assumptions we had made (and that he had partially caused us to make), i.e. that the podium mic was on and that his glasses helped him to see. Turned out that he was wired, the podium mic was dead, his glasses were empty frames, and it was all part of the point: we can easily be fooled.

Once freed from the podium and slightly more ambulatory, he showed that despite his age of at least seven thousand years (and he's had that white beard forever) he was still very sprightly and nimble (he began a square dance at one point before admitting he wasn't very good at it). He talked about how easy it is to fool scientists, how there are no new psychic tricks under the sun, how the JREF's million was quite safe. He demonstrated a number of simple magician's tricks that had fooled scientists but not magicians.

He said of Montel Williams "He has admitted that he does not believe in psychics, he does not believe that Sylvia Browne is a psychic, and yet he has her on his show every week! Montel is a...what do they call it in show business? Oh yes, a whore."

Of Sylvia specifically he said "After she accepted the challenge, I waited patiently for six months. We finally contacted her people and were told 'Sylvia doesn't know how to reach you.'" Pause, for effect. "She talks to the dead!"

He then switched gears to homeopathy. It was nothing I didn't already know (miniscule dilution of "like" substances with special magical shaking called "succession"), but he put a new face on it thanks to some numbers that Martin Gardner had crunched for him. In order for Randi to be guaranteed to ingest a single molecule of caffeine from homeopathic sleeping pills (remember, like cures like, so caffeine makes you sleep), he would have to eat seven swimming pools full of the pills.

He wrapped up the talk by showing his famous appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson where he exposed Peter Popoff (not the exact same clip, but the same expose; fast-foward to about 10:56). Apparently edited out of every existing copy of the show, though, was Johnny's reaction to the tape showing Popoff's wife feeding him the information he claimed to receive from God: a fully microphoned, live television "Oh, shit!"

A Q&A session followed the program. Randi and Roberts sat down in uncomfortable college-stage-type chairs and fielded questions from a mic in each aisle. Most of the questions (including my own) were nothing special, and will not be recounted. There were a few winners, though, and by winners I mean losers.

One was the girl who asked a pointless question that contained the word "Christ" so many times it was silly, and she pronounced it in that way that actually lets you hear capitalization and italics. The question itself was hardly coherent, and she was obviously just trying to make her love of JC known to all.

Another young man asked, essentially, "Since so many religions are old and kind of sound the same, doesn't that make them true?" Good one, genius.

Then there was the guy who said "Do you believe in ghosts?" to which Randi replied "What do you mean by ghosts?"

"...Uh...You know...Ghosts."

"No, I don't know. Spirits, spooks, banshees, what?"

"Ghosts. Like, cuz some people have evidence that ghosts exist."

"They do? The can make a million dollars! Next question."

There was also a meatbag (read the comments to really get the full definition; its a word we toss around a lot) who asked "Well, my understanding of science is that it only deals with things that can be sensed by the five senses."

"That's a shitty understanding, then," I said to Magus.

Meatbag: "So, uhh, couldn't it be that there are things that we can't know through the five senses and so can't be studied through science, but could still exist?"

Their answer was essentially the Dragon in the Garage: if we can't know it or test it, what's the point?

I really wish I had been able to field that question, though, so I could have said "Radioactivity. Ultraviolet. Cosmic rays. Quarks, muons, gluons, and bosons. Brain activity. Wireless internet. Need I go on, or are you going to take back your dumbass statement?"

The clear champion, though, was an Asian kid who began, quite ironically, by saying "I'm going to preface my question with a story." The audience began to groan because, see, we had actually heard professor Roberts speak. I'm going to try, now, to the best of my ability, to recount the first part of his story as he told it.

"A couple of years ago, I was driving down the road and I was involved in a hit and run. I got into the accident and I was just so scared of something happening that I just fled the scene. Later on, when the police came to my house to ask about it, I was just so scared of getting in trouble that I lied to them about it.

"But, even though I was in this terrible situation and could have got in big trouble, through the grace of God I was able to avoid punishment. God delivered me through that situation because of my faith in Him. We are all tied together in faith and in Christ--"

Randi: "Do you have a question?"

Hit-And-Run: "Yes. Can science prove love?"

Randi and Roberts looked at each other, pondered for a second, and then said "No!"

The audience erupted. It was comedy gold.

Hit-And-Run, however, was undeterred. Before they could move over to the other mic for the next speaker, he began rambling even more about faith and Christ and how Jesus saved him and the path was open for us all and Jesus said this and Jesus said that, each met with a "No, a man said that Jesus said that," from Randi.

What had begun as a collective groan became mass heckling. "Sit down!" we shouted. "Shut your ass up!" "We don't come to your church and bother you!" "Get off the mic!" I leaned over to Tom and said "Somebody taze him, bro!"

Someone shouted "God bless you!" He was in the minority.

Randi and Roberts kept telling him to give up the mic to someone else, as he had been there for at least five minutes, but he refused. Eventually they just cut that mic. He tried to speak anyway, unamplified, but Randi talked over him and moved to the other mic.

Buddy just stood there, a look of placid, idiot determination on his face, as Randi and Roberts fielded question after question from the other mic. Every once in a while he would try to say something, but, unmiked, his words would fall flat.

Then someone made the mistake of turning his mic back on. "Can I finish my point?"

Randi: "You don't have one. You've been there long enough."

He tried to speak some more about Christ and salvation and blah blah blah.

Randi: "I think he's hogged enough of everyone else's time, don't you folks?"

The hall resounded with applause and shouting. Hit-And-Run reluctantly and frustratedly sat down, head still held high.

It is hard for me to impress upon you, the reader, the sheer incoherence with which he spoke. It was long run-on sentences, rambling nonsense with no point in sight. He was a Godbot, almost literally, and he didn't seem to understand that nothing he was saying was going anywhere. He stood there like a moron once they cut his mic, in a display that he and his few Christian supporters probably thought was brave but was, in reality, ignorant and pathetically pigheaded.

This kid was like a Truther at a Michael Shermer lecture. He was like a moon hoaxer at a Phil Plait speech. He was dumb as a goddamned brick. He was glorious.

The best part, as far as I'm concerned, was his deep gratitude to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost for making sure he wasn't held responsible for a fucking hit and run. "Thank God I don't have to face justice! Praise Jesus that in His name I got off scot free for my crime! Through the grace of God I'm not going to jail for something I should probably go to jail for!"

What a fucking moral midget.

Afterwards, there was a standing ovation and Tom and the St. Louis crew went up to get pictures with Randi. I, Magus, and Wikinite did not. I, personally, because I had forgotten my camera and I didn't want to bug Randi for a low-res cell-phone photo. I can't speak for the other two.

Then we walked to a pizza shop while dissecting the lecture and making fun of Hit-And-Run. There we sat, all ten of us, at a very long table and annoyed the piss out of the wait staff before we ate wonderful deep-dish pizza. We also, being blasphemous atheist skeptics, saw the long table as an opportunity to take this picture, wherein Tom got to do Big Arms and I look like a goofy bastard. Well, moreso than normal (click to embiggen).



Afterward we laughed at the prominently-displayed copy of Randi's Flim Flam, which Tom had had signed, in our Last Supper picture. Magus suggested that Tom should have been holding his Guinness for the shot. Tom held up his own Mountain Dew and said "Come on. Jesus drank nerd beer."

There followed a couple of hours of talking about video games and James Randi and weird misconceptions about bipolar disorder and awful local history (Marion, Indiana's 1931 lynching, the small town in Illinois that is on the same latitude as Beijing and so named their sports teams "The Chinks" until the mid-90s) and many other things too numerous to mention. We were loud and raucous and stayed well past our welcome, but they were very nice to us, and the pizza was delicious. We ate, drank, and were merry, and a good time was had by all.

Any excuse we can find to do that again, just drop me a line. Anyone else that wants to join in geeky skeptical stuff and nonsense is welcome, too.

Unless you're just there to glorify God by getting away with hitting a dude with your car.