Trevor's comments (member since Jul 07, 2007)

Trevor's comments from the Banned Books group.

This seems an utter confusion to me, William. I guess you know what you mean and I'm sure that is a good thing.

Life obeys the laws of thermodynamics, just as everything else does. Otherwise we would have no need to eat. But if you think you have found a way around this most ruthless of laws - then good on you.

"By all means explain to us the existence of the cosmos and all existence. Explain life, which is anti-entropic as opposed to all other energy. "

Is that really the opposite of a belief in god? Is that the only way one can not believe in god? If they can explain the existence of the cosmos and all existence?

As for life - it is hardly anti-entropic, as we are all destined to find out one day. I'm afraid it is even worse, I don't think life is actually an 'energy'. But I will be keen to hear you explain how it is.

I think atheism is only indefensible if the rules of the game are set up so that those claiming to be atheist are required to prove god does not in fact exist. But atheism becomes a fairly obvious conclusion if the first move in the game is to ask just what this god thing is anyway? The god that had started out being impossible to consistently disprove the existence of suddenly tends to become a subject without a predicate and while it is hard to disprove the existence of something that has no properties it is also just as hard to see why anyone would bother believing is such an empty concept.

The word is NECESSITY! I just can't see the need of this concept.

Of course, it wasn't just Bruno's books that got burnt.

Blaise Pascal's The Provincial Letters, a defense of the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld, was ordered shredded and burned by King Louis XIV of France in 1660.

From http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/ban...

This is an interesting and very amusing topic. I would love to find out if any books were ever sentenced to be flogged or 'tortured' in other ways. Book banners are far too likely to give books anthropomorphic characteristics that I suspect would have them doing rather surreal things with the books. But it is just a guess.

I know when the police were banning Power Without Glory in Australia in the 1950s they would raid likely houses and confiscate other 'communist' books. Australian police have never been renowned for their literary pretentions and so would generally just take any book in the house with a red cover.

Anyway, gay penguins indeed – just because they dress well doesn’t automatically make them gay.

The whole idea that a book could 'turn someone gay' is very amusing. It actually says much more about the homophobes and their motivations than they might care to reflect on. I mean, if they are quite so easily 'converted'...

"I was straight but then one day I made the mistake of reading a book about two male penguins and suddenly I found myself in a bar drinking fluffy ducks and tapping my foot to Dancing Queen."

My favourite line on this subject was an Australian politician whose well informed comment on homosexuality was, "You don't see animals in the field doing things like that." Which proves he hadn't spent very much time watching animals in the field, either that or he had been dropped on his head at birth.

If you got a pair of scales and on one side put all the books that feminists have banned and on the other all the books by feminists that have been banned... There's no need to finish that sentence, is there?

Feminism doesn't need to ban stories, it is much more effective when it reframes stories so we can see them anew or uses them as examples. Banning would be simply counter-productive.

One day Feminism will be as self-evident as the fact that all men are created equal - and not through any sort of ban.

Hi Nikki, My daughters and I moved onto Harry Potter after we'd read all of the Roald Dahl books. Now, there are books that someone should have thought about banning. There are witches, magic and rivers of chocolate and they are incredibly popular.

Perhaps the Baptists might like to think about banning these books - surely that sort of thing eventually leads to dancing.

Dahl is incredibly dangerous to young minds because he is brilliantly funny - and nothing is more subversive than humour.

I could not commend him more highly for your son. I've no idea what the Pittsburgh Steelers are, but I assume they are involved in some sort of sport, rather than people who once worked in industries that have now probably been moved to third world countries. All the same, I could not be more sincere in hoping you're more successful than your husband in your endeavours to direct your son's future fanaticisms.

I commented on this previously, as did others, pointed out that this book had been shown to be little more than a scam - and now it appears my comments have been deleted and this reposted.

I'm starting to know what it feels like to be banned.

I assume this is merely an advertisement for a book written to con money out of the scientifically ignorant.

I was brought up atheist, so there came a time in my life when I thought I ought to see what all the excitement was about with Christianity. So, what to do? I thought the sensible thing would be to read the Bible and see what Christians believed. A big mistake, obviously. This was a long time before I realised that virtually no ‘Christians’ read the Bible at all – only the scary ones do that and even then only certain passages.

For a while I would ask Christians how many brothers and sisters Jesus had – standard answer, surprisingly, is none. I think it is eight brothers and an unspecified number of sisters (girls generally don’t get counted in the Bible).

I was honestly struck by how immoral the Bible is – and not just a little bit immoral, but when Moses advices his followers to kill all of the people already in the holy lands, the promised land, I didn’t think he meant everyone and their kids and their goats.

There were even bits of the New Testament I found morally repugnant – so I would ask people who called themselves Christians what they made of all this and how they could justify it. Of course, they could make nothing of it as they had never read the parts of the Bible I was referring to and if these bits had been discussed in Church they hadn’t realised they were meant to be listening.

I’ve no idea what religion is. At least the sort that you are talking of Nated. I really do think you are right. We atheists do prefer to make people like you more fundamentalist than you are. I can really see that as something I do all the time – and it is not something I do just to annoy you, it is just that it seems to me to be the only way to take religion at all. I would assume, if I was religious, that if there is a god and he wrote a book like the Bible, well, gosh... Not taking him seriously in what he says wouldn’t seem to be an option.

So, when people say that they don’t take this stuff as seriously as the fundamentalists I wonder what it is that they do believe. Often I think it is hardly different from what I believe, just with a hope added that somehow all this makes a bit more sense than just the universe in its being, developing and inevitable dying. I can understand that people would like there to be more, but just wanting there to be more doesn’t seem enough to me to make there be more.

I don’t think that a thinking person now could really believe in something like hell. I don’t think a thinking person could really believe in something like heaven either. Both are forms of wish fulfilment that seem terribly childish today, I think. But the ‘spiritual’ (for want of a better term) seem to have a very vague concept of what the extra bit is that needs to be attached to the universe for it to seem to be complete for them.

I really don’t need whatever that extra bit is, because I really do know that we are at the end of a scientific dark age. There are so many things we just do not know, so many things that it is just staggering, but that is reason for joy, delight and excitement. I just can’t see how adding a god in there helps the story along in any way.

Like you, Nated, I prefer narrative to numbers – I’m just not as keen on omniscient narration, perhaps.

Sorry, all a bit rushed...

Why can't these things inspire awe all on their own? In Keats' case adding God as the mover of the pen only takes away awe. As for the universe, the God that tends to be added is the God of the gaps who tends to stop us asking why? And this again diminishes awe.

I went to a Catholic wedding service once where the Priest said something to the affect that God was with a couple during sex and was responsible for how nice the climax feels. I'm not making this up. I thought at the time, "that would be just typical really, wouldn't it? He's always taking credit for the good bits and we get left with the work in getting there."

I really don't mean to upset you - the supermarket comment was me trying to be funny and I shouldn't with issues like this. My apologies.

“It seems that the opinion that the non-scientific does not exist is based on the assumption that materialist science has a monopoly on truth. On what evidence does this belief rest?”

It depends on what you mean by ‘truth’ or ‘the non-scientific’.

My problem is the opposite of the one you have here. You are concerned all ‘truth’ is being lumped under the term ‘scientific’. My concern is with lumping everything that isn’t to do with calculating the boiling point of water or the flight path of a stone once it has been thrown or anything else that has a clear empirical measurability under the title ‘spiritual’. This is really loading the dice and seeking to defeat atheism by definition.

So if your question really is: do you think there is no truth other than that which can be measured in a way that a number with a decimal point can be placed along side it – then the answer clearly is no, I don’t think that at all. I would doubt anyone would.

There is morality, aesthetics, politics and so many other branches of human knowledge and experience that do not and, I would think, never will admit of the kind of precision that could be so narrowly defined as ‘science’. But I still think these are areas in which there are ‘truths’.

I don’t need to think there is a God to be awestruck by the wonder of the universe, nor do I need to believe in spiritualism to explain this awe. I feel awe when I glance at the night sky, or watch a bird in flight, or remember Keats was younger than 25 when he wrote Ode to a Nightingale. It might have been Einstein who said that calculating the pressure variations that occur in the ear when one hears a symphony by Beethoven doesn’t really tell us anything interesting about the symphony. This is unquestionably true. These tools of ‘empirical science’ are too blunt to say anything interesting here.

But I don’t think spirituality or God say anything interesting about Beethoven symphonies either – I find it difficult to see that they say anything interesting at all. Words like ‘spiritual’ are so loaded that one cannot use them without both carting along mountains of baggage and begging the question.

I don’t think I ever said that the religious were sheep – if anything, they tend to say that about themselves. As Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives His life for the sheep.” Or “I am the lamb of God.”

What I said was that if many of the religious are right and there is a god who has provided incredibly specific instructions on how we ought to live our lives, it is clear that their god – if he is to be believed at all – might find it a little hard to accept that after he went to all of trouble of being quite so specific in his instructions that his ‘believers’ decided not to bother following them.

I’m hoping that come Judgement day I’m far enough back in the cue to hear some of the religious ‘explain’ why they didn’t take their God as seriously as He clearly told them to. That would be enough to compensate me for having to listen to all the smug, self-satisfied comments I could expect from the ‘believers’ that there is an afterlife – though possibly not enough to compensate for the eternity of unspeakable torments and punishments and tortures this most loving of gods has in store for myself and the vast majority of humanity.

My knowledge of Catholicism is limited – I didn’t even know there were good and bad branches or that someone would more or less happily belong to the bad branch – but as a religion surely even bad Catholicism makes claims to live one’s life. Or is it just a ‘moral supermarket’ where one can choose to fill one’s moral shopping trolley with chocolates and soft drinks and skip the vegetables?

I would have thought that religion is about placing one’s self in relation to a power outside of and greater than one’s self in recognition of that greater power’s moral authority. How ought I live my life? Would seem to me to be the big question here and that religions tend to come up with a series of moral strictures in the form, ‘thou shalt not’ as the answer.

To deny this (as you seem to be doing) seems to me to be denying one of the few benefits religion could offer: a more or less coherent moral framework in which to live one’s life. If religion doesn’t even offer this it is rather hard to see what its point is.

That this is different in kind to how a thinking atheist must approach morality seems totally clear to me. A thinking atheist must find a ground for their morality somewhere other than in the unchanging word of God. An atheist must be more responsible for their actions in a deeper and truer way than is possible for a religious person to be. An atheist can never say God made me do it – because there is no God. For an atheist to say, “Society made me do it” is for the atheist to admit they did not think. I believe an atheist is more moral than a theist – virtually by definition.

There is no Nuremburg defence for an atheist, and never can be. Atheists are morally responsible agents in THIS world – and this was the idea that filled Nietzsche with fear and trembling. But thinking through the full implications of this moral responsibility isn’t something most atheists bother to do, unfortunately. I think the world would be a better place if they did.

I am not convinced that religion is inherently morally neutral, quite the opposite – but we would need to define terms if we were to have that discussion. When religion becomes spirituality and spirituality starts sounding like it has no characteristics that can even be stated it makes it impossible to say anything about it at all.

“When I say that atheism is a belief, my point is that it seems to me that atheism is a decision to 'believe' that anything that is not supported by scientific evidence does not exist.”

No, not really. Nietzsche, he to whom ‘god is dead’, would surely be considered an atheist and he would definitely have problems with the belief you are here ascribing to all atheists. As I’ve said before, atheism is a refusal to believe in a supernatural force or guiding principle to the universe. Nothing more.

I do believe that in the end the only consistent argument that the faithful – the believers – can put forward for their belief is some form of personal revelation, which seems to be what you are saying in the body of your post. In this sense I feel all standard rational discussion must come to a close on this topic – as the final word will be from the faithful, “I know this to be true – not in my head, but in my heart.” Where could one begin to discuss this?

“As I have said before, people that believe in the 'supernatural' do not generally do so out of whimsy.”

“Similarly, there is usually evidence to support an individual's belief in gods, etc. The issue is that this evidence is not accessible to materialist investigation.”

I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but it seems to me that this evidence can only really be a form of a personal revelation of the truth – the oft quoted ‘leap of faith’. The problem I have with this is what is the nature of this truth? Why do similar practices – mediation, prayer, and other religious practices that seek atonement with this supernatural force (pilgrimages, and so on) lead to such remarkably divergent conclusions among the various faithful? Even a cursory glance at the beliefs of the world religions is enough for one to be astounded by the sheer incompatibility of these religions and religious views – often incompatible to the point of a sword.

The truth you are talking of here seems to me to be a very potent kind of truth. It is not one seated in the head, but in the heart, or the liver or in the bowels. It is one that once it is grasped in its full and frighteningly awesome beauty makes obligations of those who see its light – some of these obligations are truly terrible. To me, this truth is beyond reason, it is something that cannot really be explained, and probably does not need to be, by those who believe in it. And it is this that makes it most frightening to me. I fear this kind of belief as it is potentially the most destructive power imaginable, and one that is not open to reason on any level.

Reason may not provide much hope for human happiness, but at least it provides some. The history of faith is a history of repeated and devastating destruction of those of different views. I prefer the very little hope reason affords.

You seem to be saying that because the atheist cannot conclusively prove that ‘god’ does not exist, their ‘belief’ in his non-existence (and the consequences of that non-belief) are the same as for those who do believe. You seem to be saying that both atheist and theist have untestable claims – and so both are ‘faith based’.

I don’t agree with this conclusion. Firstly, it isn’t really up to the atheists to disprove the existence of god. If someone is proposing a remarkable force in the universe – a creative and positive force for good, say, or one that judges us and provides the basis of our morality, one that is jealous and vengeful – well, it is clear that these are the people that need to prove the existence of this proposed force – not those who doubt.

Secondly, my non-belief requires nothing comparable to the believers leap of faith. There is a tendency to lump everyone into the same basket and to say ‘everything is that same as it ever was’. But non-belief is fundamentally different from belief.

Besides, I think if I was a God I would be much more impressed with my creatures who did not believe in me than those that did. On judgement day, when I speak to those who do believe in me and ask them why they did not follow my word to the letter they will probably say how difficult my instructions were to follow (some might even say impossible – if they are being honest). The atheists won’t say this – they will have to say, I found the very idea of you absurd, so I was forced to live my life according to moral principles I could understand and choose for their own good. When I choose to act on these principles (and often I am ashamed to admit all I did was follow convention – nothing more thoughtful than that), but when I did act on principle it was for its own sake – because good is good for its own sake. If I was a god I would prefer that answer – I would prefer my creatures not to believe in me, but to learn the truth and choose the good for its own sake. To me, faith is a barrier to being truly good and the faithful people who can never be sure just why they are good. That seems horribly wrong to me.

“Both the believer's likelihood of mating and the believer's own and offspring's chance of survival are increased by several community-related aspects of religion.”

So, why not skip the speculation into religion having a genetic basis and just say we have a genetic predisposition towards acting socially? – That we tend to form groups? This is clearly the case. To say that there are genes that make us believe in supernatural forces seems an unnecessary step here – and one that then requires us to speculate on an atheist gene and even to create another story for the evolutionary advantages of atheism. I feel complex social phenomena, such as religion, require explanations at a social level and seeking to find increasingly complex genetic explanations probably isn’t all that helpful.

“It reinforces social norms not only when other people are watching, but when people are on their own--because god is watching.”

You see, this is a good argument – I can see that having social norms reinforced while other people aren’t watching is a handy thing for a social animal to have – I can see that this might have an evolutionary advantage. However, I’m still not sure how talk of genes adds anything here. Couldn’t this be something that emerges out of our tendency towards being social animals? Surely we should drop the talk of genes here for the sake of Occam’s razor alone.

I can see that we have genes that allow us to have big brains and that big brains allow us to seek meaning – but to then say that we have genes that explain one particular path in that search for meaning seems to me a leap into the dark.

“Accepting things that can be demonstrated by at least a preponderance of the evidence is not a belief.”

Yes, exactly – and well said.

Nated, yes, the stories of Christianity. It seems to me that there are basically two groups of Christians – Fundamentalists (who take these stories quite literally) and moderates (who take these stories as interesting instances of moral instruction or as culturally significant – I guess a third camp are those who don’t believe they are literally true in the sense of “I went to work yesterday” – but literally true in some other realm outside of everyday criteria of ‘truth’). Obviously I will have much more in common with the second group, but the problem most atheists get accused of is seeking to lump both groups together. I think that is because with these stories, and I’m sure this would be the same for an atheist born in a Hindu culture, it seems impossible that one can literally believe in such nonsense as the virgin birth or Vishnu’s dancing or Thor’s thunder-bolt making. However, the texts presenting these stories don’t say – “I do hope you enjoy these as a moral diversion – WARNING: all stories contained in this work are metaphoric only and meant to be taken as a guide. If you feel you are taking them literally, take two aspirin and have a bit of a lie down.” Rather they say quite the opposite – in some of these texts even going as far as to say one should not only kill non-believers, but even their goats.

Believing these stories are metaphors is already a kind of non-belief. There is an interesting similarity between now and the Classical Greece of Plato where the philosophers simply could not believe in the religion espoused by the society around them and were not sure that to do with it if they were to create an ideal republic. Effectively ban it seems to have been Plato’s solution.

To not know the stories of the Bible in our culture would deny us access to far too much of the wealth of allusion in our literature – although, I suspect here in Australia the process works backwards, with many people learning the Bible stories from literature rather than from the Bible itself.

It seems that whenever atheists take the religious on their word – you know, literally – the moderates scream that we are dumbing down the religious experience. But it also seems that the moderates (also not one position, but a near infinite spectrum of opinions) are more or less saying, “Look, this is little more than literature and the religious experience is little more than the feeling one gets after reading a good book.” I think this is partly the cause of atheists getting called fundamentalists, as like religious fundamentalist we often take religion literally, otherwise it is very hard to say anything about it at all.

When Scientology was seeking tax exemption for being a religion in Australia the courts had to come up with a legal definition for what a religion was – they said ‘belief in a supernatural Being, Principle or Thing’. I think we could get rid of a lot of confusion on this topic generally if there was such a definition. I’m more than happy to say that I am an atheist in so far as I do not believe in a supernatural Being, Principle or Thing. I also believe that on such a definition of religion many people who would consider themselves to be ‘religious’ moderates might not actually be ‘religious’. For many others their belief of such a being, principle or thing would be so slight as to barely merit distinction from my non-belief.

Salma, yes, I did get excited when you used the term natural law to describe light and dark being in balance. I assumed you were using it in the scientific sense – but it seems you were using it in the sense that Transcendental Mediation uses it when they stand for political office as the Natural Law Party – proposing to cut unemployment and the crime rate through meditation as a means to rebalance the natural law of the universe. And you are quite right, I’m very narrow minded when it comes to such ideas. They seem like a complete blind alley to me.

The Portable Atheist is by Christopher Hitchens.

I worry about genetic or brain structural explanations for complex social and cultural modes of existence, like religions. It is the same way I feel when I hear they have ‘discovered’ the gay gene – god save us.

My understanding of evolution is that for a trait to be selected it needs to confer an advantage on the holder that either increases the holder’s likelihood of mating or increases the holder’s offspring’s changes of survival. I would be surprised if a gene or brain structure was discovered that both did this and made one feel religious. Because there is a brain structure that ‘lights up’ when people report having religious experiences or seems to be affected in some way in the very religious, does not necessarily mean that is the evolutionary point of that brain structure. I’m not sure there really is such a simple causal relationship between brain structures and complex social behaviours.

As is said in Not In Our Genes – if you remove a resistor from a radio and the radio starts making a horrible screeching noise, that does not necessarily mean the role of the resistor in the radio was to act as a screech suppressor. I take it human brains are somewhat more complex that radios.

I am not saying that there is thinking we do that is somehow outside our brains, but that the relationship between brain and world – the feedback and interdependence between the two – just would seem very odd to me if it was quite so one-to-one as in ‘there’s this little lump of grey matter and that’s for belief in supernatural beings’.

Dawkins alludes to the idea that we may be hard wired for belief briefly in his book – but I’m not sure such a pessimistic view is necessary. It is interesting, though, as many of the religious and many ‘agnostics’ are continually trying to make atheism ‘just another belief system’ which is ‘just as full of fundamentalists’ as any other belief system. Personally, I reject this view, as much on the basis of a quote I read on a friend’s favourite quotes – “If atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby.” I am an avid non-collector of stamps – I spend all of my time not collecting them. I guess that could make me a fundamentalist non-collector of stamps.

I just can’t see how having a belief in a supernatural being can really confer an evolutionary advantage on the holder of this belief. You know, in something more than an evolutionary just-so story. If it doesn’t confer an advantage how could a genetic basis of religious belief ever have evolved?

I feel cultural and social structures, like religions, really need to be explained on a scale somewhat different from the genetic one. It would be like trying to explain the motion of a billiard ball on the basis of the bonds between its electrons. The electrons all might come along with the billiard ball when it moves, the bonds might be necessary to ensure the billiard balled rolls in the first place and doesn’t fall apart when it clicks against another ball, but we are a few orders of magnitude too small to say anything meaningful about a game of pool if we keep talking about electrons. I think we are also a few orders of magnitude too small to saying anything meaningful about religion if we keep talking about genes. Lisa, I don’t think you have any need to give up your day job just yet.

Well, that is a good piece of marketing.

Wikipedia says about the Anarchist's Cookbook:


Legality
In October 2007, a BBC news report alleged that a 17-year-old boy, charged with two counts of terrorism-related offenses, possessed a copy of the book.[5]

Later that month, PhillyNews reported a similar case in the Plymouth Whitemarsh school district in which a teenager planning a "Columbine-esque" school shooting was arrested and after a search warrant was executed was found to have a copy of the book along with numerous air powered weapons, black powder grenades, a 9mm rifle, a hand-painted Nazi flag, and a video related to the Columbine massacre.


I assume you are not too concerned about the legality of owning this book or you would probably not be announcing the fact on a public forum like this...

"In response to the idea that science is only a force for peace, i submit the scientific creation of modern assault rifle and the rationalism of the nazi and khmer rouge holocausts."

...and biological weapons, nuclear bombs, anti-handling land mines ...

You know, I do worry that I will be taken as a complete science nut – and Dawkins’s unquestioning faith in science does worry me a little – but it is clear that science, as such, isn’t really responsible for assault rifles and so on.

And I’m going to sound like someone from the gun lobby now, but it isn’t so much scientist that make guns, but people that make them. Science is a tool, we get to decide how we use that tool. I worry that we might abnegate our responsibility for the consequences of how this tool is used by talking of science as if it was something that was somehow separate from us.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that it is not so much science that makes these horrible things possible, but how we choose to use science that makes them possible. And since how we use science is a choice, we can choose to do something different.

Science, as such, is indifferent to peace – peace has to be left up to us.

Nated, “Or is there room for a person of atheist persuasion to feel a transcendent or interconnecting force, the stuff that's often referred to as spirituality?”

Naturally, I would avoid the word ‘spirituality’ as it comes with far too much baggage, but I think the experience that I have that would most match this ‘interconnecting force’ would be the aesthetic experience. Having never had a religious experience – either of the hard kind or the soft and fluffy kind referred to by Salma, I always just assume that the religious experience is in some way similar to the aesthetic one. If it is not then it seems to have been a very odd preoccupation of religions throughout the ages.

And I agree that groups are very often the problem. Groups of people seem to be able to believe just about any nonsense. Even if it is something that seems to be the exact opposite of what one would have taken as their core beliefs – like those churches that say things like, “Jesus wants you to be rich.” Any fair reading of what Jesus said would seem to imply the very opposite.

Salma, I think it is hard in our culture to talk about religion and not use examples from what is the dominate religion in our culture, these are just the examples that are most readily to hand. I don’t know, in detail (or even in broad outline), all of the religions of the world. To get this knowledge would become a life’s work, and I feel, for me, that would be a wasted life.

I think I would say that any belief based on requiring a leap of faith – whether that be in god, grand unifying spirit, astrology, ghosts or the fundamental goodness of the universe must be, at best, suspect.

Lisa,

A wonderfully thoughtful response. This comment of mine is slightly off topic, but I can’t resist. I do worry about evolutionary psychology, for much the same reasons Pinker gives somewhere (I do wonder sometimes why I bother reading when I seem to remember so little of what I’ve read) that it can seem to be a series of ‘just-so’ stories. But I agree with your point more than Pinker’s that anything that makes us think can’t be a bad thing.

Which brings me to the bit that is off topic. A few years ago I heard of some research where a group of researchers watched people in a park – they were watching to see if anyone would litter. When someone would drop some litter the researchers on watch-duty would contact someone with a clip board and the said person with the clip board would ask the litterer a series of questions around littering, what they thought of it and so on. These are people who minutes before had been seen littering. The researchers found that teenagers were most likely to admit that they did sometimes litter and older ladies most likely to say they never littered, even on repeated questioning. The conclusion was, and I just love this, that grannies are better liars than most people give them credit for.