The gateway drug to Stalinism

It seems to be very easy to tar any atheist as an inhumane communist. In addition to the exchange mentioned in my last post, it's a throwaway point in this opinion piece in NYT, by N.D.Kristof:

Granted, religious figures have been involved throughout history in the worst kinds of atrocities. But as Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot show, so have atheists.

A slightly less grazing treatment by Rod Liddle in The Spectator:

By far the weakest part of The God Delusion is when Dawkins attempts to explain why atheistic regimes have far outdone religious regimes in their murderousness, their inhumanity. [...]

Isn't that the point, I suggest. That with one set of values removed, another will always fill its place? That if you remove religion, there is a gap which will always be filled — and usually by something worse than belief in a deity? Are we ever worse than when we feel ourselves to be unconstrained masters of our domain, answerable to nobody but ourselves? [...]

By Dawkins's argument, the moral imperatives of 500 years ago were, de facto, right then — and wrong now. In the end, it leaves you without a real sense of right and wrong, merely a constantly shifting plane — and thus open to the malefactions of a Hitler or a Stalin or a Mao or a Pol Pot.

(Note the sly little insertion of Hitler, who won an election in a Christian country.)

Anyway, the presumption seems to be that not having a religion to which everyone is expected to conform will almost automatically lead to seduction by malevolent dictators. This sort of thing keeps popping up, so presumably it has some sort of resonance with people.

The best counter I've seen is Sam Harris:

(Who decides what is good in the Good Book? Answer: We do. Our moral intuitions are still primary. It makes absolutely no sense, therefore, to think that we get our basic sense of right and wrong out of scripture).

Presumably there is some feeling that having an Authority gives you the proverbial moral anchor. Which would be why Italy, being anchored firmly to the pope, has no problems with organized crime.

Maybe there's a sense that some types gravitate towards dogmatism, and that it's better for them to join a moderate church than a totalitarian movement. But really, are Dawkins or Harris against free speech, or for outlawing churches? Implicit in this is also that people with these inclinations won't just go for the most dogmatic community he can find, religious or not. Religions are tacitly presumed to be basically mostly beneficial.

As for "answerable to nobody but ourselves," it paints a picture of someone who makes himself out to be a god, rather than someone godless in an actual society. People in a society will develop norms, because this is a very fundamental feature of humanity. Any people, anywhere, will negotiate "social contracts" between themselves rather than just pulling random individual codexes out of thin air.

Anyone truly megalomaniac will easily think to pay lip service to the prevailing deity, if that is what it takes: on this note, check out Liddle's complete non-mention of Mussolini in his list of dictators. Mussolini has to be omitted, of course, as he exemplifies that totalitarian leaders can be quite perpendicular to strong religiosity.

Lumping towards futility

This argument between Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, and Dennis Prager, who is some warmongering radio talk show host, is of course unfruitful practically by definition, as it's on wether God exists.

Before you shout "next!", though, the back-and-forth seems to reveal one interesting thing, about categorizing. Somewhere about here, a familiar lumping-together rears its head:

Going back a generation or two, support for Josef Stalin, perhaps the greatest mass murderer in history, was almost entirely confined in the West to intellectuals. German Ph.D.s were also among Hitler’s greatest supporters."

The salient thing about this, and the reason I'm even mentioning this discussion, is that Harris also lumps together, but in a different way. Prager, responding to the strategy "we are all atheistic about Zeus":

But I will respond to one now—your argument that Prager’s or Collins’s God is in the same intellectual league as belief in Zeus. Did anyone studying the human genome ever argue for Zeus? What are you talking about?

In the same intellectual league as belief in Zeus. What on Earth does that even mean? It means that Prager is indignant at being lumped together with those false believers. Harris operates with a category 'religion' which contains, well, religion, and Prager has a big faceted category labeled 'true religion' ("Judeo-Christianity" and conformity) and a wastebasket of 'false religions and abominations' (everything else).

So Harris is in the same intellectual league as Stalin, because he's one of those, you know, those secularists. Regardless of the fact that Harris does not appear to be a Marxist-Leninist, nor a Stalinist.

This link purely for the sake of science

Measuring the Speed of Meme (via Bitch PhD)

I can't seem to stop looking at this photo.

Epitaph for 'social networks'

"Myspace is not about friends." It's about using other people as a status symbol.

Greg Easterbrook, on Beliefnet, does the old Intelligent Creation repetition, right down to trotting out the slogan teach the controversy:

But then, just as in 1925 opposition to natural selection was not really about the theory but about sustaining a status quo in which people were not supposed to question clergy, so today's evolutionary fundamentalism is not so much about the theory but about sustaining a new status quo in which people are not supposed to question scientists. Yet this discourages students from engaging in one of the most fascinating--if not the most fascinating--of questions: Why are we here?

The most fascinating question that comes to my mind while reading this paragraph would be if Easterbrook needs directions to the philosophy department, where he would find why's aplenty.

More interestingly, it displays an equation (clergy=scientists) that seems to have been making the rounds among American Intelligent-Creationists: science is just another form of dogma. So it doesn't matter if the dogma is scientific or religious, and they should have equal weight.

Not everyone who describes themselves as Christian or Jewish believes in God. Indeed, only 76 percent of Protestants, 64 percent of Catholics, and 30 percent of Jews say they are "absolutely certain" there is a God.

...according to this Harris Poll of U.S. adults.

I wonder how many Christians would tell you they believe in reincarnation, to the sighs of clergy that the uneducated believers got the faith wrong.

Imaginary relationships

In the Metafilter comments on Terry Eagleton commenting on Dawkins' The God Delusion (Eagleton quoted in italics):

"It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it. For my claim to love you to be coherent, I must be able to explain what it is about you that justifies it; but my bank manager might agree with my dewy-eyed description of you without being in love with you himself."

You know, this actually explains a lot. People are in love with the idea of God. Literally. So no matter what God says, no matter how evil the commands from the organization or the little voice in your head become, you mostly just DO them, because you love him/her/it.

Hmph, I'd never thought about it this way before. A large chunk of the world (half, maybe?) would appear to be in an abusive relationship with an imaginary being.
posted by Malor at 1:00 AM PST on October 25

That comment is brilliant, in a slightly similar way to this TMCM strip.

Interestingly, Terry Eagleton himself seems to be the sort of Christian who's gone more than half the way to Taoism:

Theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe, as Dawkins thinks they do. His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is, which is not the case with the Loch Ness monster. [...] He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves.

...would that be all theologians, or just the subset of them that happen to agree with you, Dr. Eagleton?

(Of course, any truly sensible person wouldn't disagree with me, because I cannot possibly be wrong.)

If you're against us, you're purely negative

A common feature with apologetics is to cry that atheism is just parasitic on, or a negation of, "Christianity." Consider this page:

"atheism" comes from "a" the negator and "theos" (God in Greek).

...or perhaps rather "male god"? The alternative is made unspeakable by the handy definition. (The fact that you can even make the argument in the first place appears to be connected to "negative singular existence".)

Of course, to the believer, God just exists. Whereas to the atheist, God is something that exists only because people believe in it; in fact, something that is purely a belief.

So the believer reads it as "denying God", and the atheist reads it as "not believing in this 'God' character" — a shining example of a clash of worldviews. (Of course, estimating other viewpoints is difficult when your perspective absolutely must be true.)

This is perhaps also the reason why believers are so keen on wanting non-believers to profess "agnosticism": a statement of "gosh, I guess we don't really know" gives them less of a case of cognitive dissonance.

(A related case of political narcissism on the form "anyone who disagrees with me is just being negative" can be found here, if you have the stomach.)

Judt on recent political grotesqueness

The only people qualified to speak on this matter, it would seem, are those who got it wrong initially.
[...]
This is not a choice that most American liberal commentators are even willing to acknowledge, much less make. And so they say nothing.

—Tony Judt in the London Review of Books, on the recent political climate.

On a tangent from that article:

They may see themselves as having migrated to the opposite shore; but they display precisely the same mixture of dogmatic faith and cultural provincialism, not to mention the exuberant enthusiasm for violent political transformation at other people’s expense, that marked their fellow-travelling predecessors across the Cold War ideological divide.

That's about lefties-turned-"hawks", and again seems to echo the meme that's been sloshing around (Francis Fukuyama, was it?) that the "neocons" are actually crypto-Trotskyists.

Not even wrong, or worse

Michael Shermer of skeptic.com writes an effective putdown, in Scientific American, of the fair-and-balanced meme that makes no distinction on the knowledge put behind opposing positions. This would be the same fallacy that makes "evolution is just a theory" go as far as it does.

Hope for abandoning abusive faiths

Thousands of people on the bottom of the Hindu caste system have apparently converted to Buddhism, Christianity and miscellaneous other beliefs, en masse.

It's heartening when people rise up against cruel religious systems of oppressive-compulsion like this, though it's a bit depressing, to me, that it's more striking in the public eye when it's a conversion than it would have been if it were a rejection.

(Of course, Buddhism, depending on which one, could be ignostic. But most people tend to see Buddhists as "worshipping Buddha, so therefore Buddha is, like, God.")

At last, a snappy and comprehensive putdown of 'political correctness', which, according to the Intelligence Report article, has mutated into an entirely-hallucinated bogeyman, paraded by American white-supremacists under the name of "cultural Marxism." Yes, really.

The familiar knee-jerk charge of "political correctness," of which a less malignant example can be found here, is of course only conceivable by willfully ignoring the balance of power in a society. After all, no one likes to be reminded that they are, in fact, The Man, and not the rebel-alliance automatically-lovable underdog. Using the slogan "politically incorrect," it's easy for anyone in the majority to cast themselves as the lovable rebel. (And it looks great on T-shirts, of course.)

It is interesting that it's difficult to popularize the point that political in/correctness is the perfect cover for creeping racism, as the article points out is already happening.

(via catching up on Orcinus, whose essay Rush, Newspeak and Fascism is a more in-depth treatment of many related problems)

Sara Robinson of Orcinus has discovered Dawkins' Root of All Evil? miniseries (that I'm still thinking about), and uses the basic matter that they could never have gotten made in the US as a tangent point, speculating in some sort of Apocalypse of Christianity.

It smacks a bit of wishful thinking, really. The premise of "they're doing this in the name of your savior, you know" has a lot going for it, but this wouldn't appear to be the way to tap into it; perhaps something to do with the way it internalizes rather than rejects the apocalyptic myth.

The God that must not be named

Velfna is great!

Now, I realize some of you might say that "Velfna doesn't exist." But how can you say that? You just said Velfna yourself! You already acknowledge Velfna's greatness! Do you not long to taste Its pears of eternal clemency?

Such is the power of names: it allows you to paint someone into the same corner as yourself.

[This would appear to be called "The problem of negative singular existence statements" (article apparently by Dr. M. E. Reicher). Looks like I have my work cut out researching it.]

In Steven Poole's Unspeak, he deals with a growing tendency in recent political speech to methodically employ words and phrases that obscure opposing and alternate viewpoints; they unspeak their alternatives. That is, the nouns themselves function as covert capsule arguments, akin to effective marketing slogans.

"Velfna" above is a rather basic example: it uses Velfna as a proper noun and then immediately ascribes greatness to it. The nature of language makes it very hard to back out of the corner that's been thus painted: counterarguments, such as "Velfna isn't great" and "there is no such thing as Velfna" both involve saying "Velfna" a lot.  Asking "but what is Velfna?" is also just as likely to drive the conversation further into the half of the field occupied by Velfna.

Not to mention that just thinking about it makes your mind go Velfna, Velfna, Velfna. Before long, you react to "Velfna" as though it were a word that makes any sort of sense.

The word "God" is functionally not entirely identical to Velfna. It is in fact so unique and deeply entrenched that it's difficult to find anything to compare it to. It appears to presuppose, in itself, that there is only one god, as evident in the Arabic use of the definite article. However, the word also makes itself somehow like a coconut: if you try to crack it, even with a vise, it tends to slip.

It follows that once a religion has discovered a word with this property, it will tend to spread, and strengthen the impact of the religions that adopt it. Confusion then arises when different religions which have all adopted this come together and figure they must be worshipping "basically the same god" or "a heretic god," depending on how magnaminous they're feeling.

Certainly a very high mileage from just one capital letter.

(Pandagon already reviews and critiques Unspeak brilliantly so I don't have to. Cheers!)

It must be really easy to keep believing

"Reality is what doesn't go away when you stop believing in it" seems as though it ought to be more rhetorically effective than it is.

Maybe people don't like to be reminded of just how much it is they forget, especially things they once believed in.

Or maybe it's to do with the sheer simplicity of it.

(The quote is from Philip K. Dick, apparently. I had forgotten.)

Infidel mathematics

If we look at this Intelligent Creation argument, more precisely the quote near the end:

Darwin’s assumption that the terms species and variety are merely given for convenience’s sake is part of a larger materialist and reductionist program that undercuts the natural foundation of counting and distorts the natural origin of mathematics. To put it more bluntly, in assuming that “species” are not real, Darwinism and the larger reductionist program burn away the original ties that bound the meaning of mathematics to the world and instead leave it stranded on a solipsistic island of the human imagination.

–seems to be a sort of worked-over Berkeley argument, except now solipsism is a bad word. If there isn't a grand authority father-figure in heaven, then who vouches for where things begin and where they leave off? Why dear gosh, how can you even count on your fingers if you don't know your fingers from your hand, and your hand from your arm? Not to mention your nails. They could be in Newcastle for all you know!

There is not much more for me to say here because every time I read this passage, I just splutter at the absurdity of what is on the page [...]

There is a method to this madness. It's paranoid Manichaeism taken to absurd lengths.

Hell yes

I could pull quotes from this all week. (This is nominally about that US congressman who was exploiting sixteen-year old interns.)

This terror is a complex of the sexualization of children and teenagers, and the violence directed against children and teenagers in the society.

In their view there is a vast homosexual conspiracy to infect youth with gay secular humanism. In short, the evangelical world sees a counter world – a Satanism of secularlism, that like themselves, infects people with exposure. [...] In the Manichean war, the forces of light and the forces of darkness engage in a race to reach, and save or corrupt, the unconverted.

For most of its history, until the late 1970s, the more evangelical one was, the more likely one was to be not involved in politics AT ALL--to see it as an inherently sinful realm.

—The Revolution Eats its Own, by Stirling Newberry. At last, recent history, and Team America: World Police, is beginning to come together to something coherent.

Ugly, but coherent.

Stay Clean, order yours today

This just in. Christian T-shirts to make sure you never accidentally touch a filthy Unclean who hath partaken in Meanness:

Wear this, and you'll know for certain whenever an Unclean comes near: for they will emit piercing wails, repelled by the pietous light of your unyielding righteousness.

Eternal war, part CXXXVII

Interesting. Americans are apparently beginning to internalize the notion that

Now since when has the objective of war been to never kill or torture civilians? Not in World War II, where we bombed Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The intent then was to crush the will of the other side, and to make so horrible for them to keep fighting us that they would surrender.

It is refreshing when they just out and admit that they're in favor of employing terrorist tactics. Or maybe this is just due to "terrorist" having been used as a synonym for "enemy" for so long that it completely passes them by.

Implied, of course, is the notion that since our side did it, it must be okay. Forgotten is the simple fact that most wars before 1933 did not involve civilians very much. Forgotten is the fact that WWII's civilian slaughters were so horrible that a Geneva convention was drawn up to prevent it from happening again.

Note also the circumspect language — goals of war are not usually defined negatively, nor are they usually consistent throughout the course of it: war has its own logic, and tends to sweep people along once it starts to churn. As we can see.

Gentlewomen, stop your engines

To be a gentleman was a distinguished title. A gentleman shows restraint, he's refined, he does not resort to violence. The power of the gentleman comes from his restraint, and the fact that he can afford to show restraint; it comes from the things he could do but chooses not to. Men are presumed to be non-gentlemen by default.

Women are supposed to be all nice all the time, so they've never had access to this power; there is no such word as gentlewoman. Niceness is apparently only a virtue when it's backed by the potential for not being nice.

This is related to one of my main problems with redemption; namely, that it glorifies someone who did something bad first, and then stopped, more than it does someone who never did the bad thing to begin with.

God only knows where they learn these things

One would historically worship a fertility god to gain fertility; a god of war to attain success in battle; a god of alcohol for a good time; and so on.

Western societies worship a god of bullying, then have the audacity to be surprised when our children acquire this value only all to well.

Torture

If you really believe that torture can be used to change people's minds:

Would that mean I could change your mind on the effectiveness of torture by beating you repeatedly?

(Don't worry. I would only use sound techniques like the repetitive administration of legitimate force.)


(If your answer to the first sentence was no, well, Amnesty has the best track record of preventing people from being tortured and held without trial.)

The noblesse of poverty

Everyone knows that being poor makes you noble. After all, if it weren't for the major ennoblement of their situation and the real sense of community fostered by having no one else to rely on, how would anyone be able to stand it? Now, I keep seeing these people, still alive after some time on the streets, so clearly it can't be all that bad.

Not to mention how suffering purifies the spirit. Oh yes, we'd better not ease any of that suffering, otherwise their nobility might be wounded.

If poverty is basically harmless, why then the status quo is right and just, and there's no reason to change it. How splendid.

Show of weakness

Jehova's Witnesses and their ilk always travel in packs of two. In a related field, clipboard beggars for worthy causes never go after groups: when I asked one of them about it, she told me it rarely meets with success.

So groups reinforce behavior and consistency of belief; what else is new. Well, the fact that I was able to talk to the representative about her job, instead of the Cause, is a blueprint for something I've never tried with evangelizers: humanization as a defense tactic.

How's it going? Save many souls lately? Take care, now.

It'd be great if it worked. If I'm lucky, I might get some stories out of them about the things that people tell them.

The million-baby question

A thought experiment: you're held prisoner. On the other side of safety glass are five innocent babies. In front of you is a contract to sign over your immortal soul to Satan, a quill pen and a sample of your own blood. You are told that for every five minutes you do not sign this contract, five children will be killed. If you wait it out, they are shot and new babies brought in. What do you do?

Most any atheist will find the choice a simple one, because both the immortal soul and Satan are fictional concepts, whereas the babies are very real. So you swiftly sign the contract and hope your captors hold up their end of the deal.

As a believer? Well, the babies are innocent, so their souls should go right to heaven, right? Whereas you, too, is innocent, a victim of circumstance; everything should be all right in the afterlife as long as you hold fast and don't sign that contract. If the believer eventually does sign the contract, it will not be because of their faith, but because of their basic humanity, a thing shared by most humans: a baseline reluctance to see people slaughtered in front of your eyes when there's something, anything, you can do about it.

Far-fetched? Not quite. This is the memeified, some-guy-in-a-pub version of the basic criticism levelled at believing there's a reward in the afterlife: namely, that this belief has a very nasty potential to reduce the value of life in this world towards worthlessness. This applies to any belief that postulates an afterlife of rewards, heavens and the like.

Believers tend to behave as if this implication doesn't exist, or doesn't apply to them. For good reason: it would be a very uncomfortable thought, if they had to take it seriously. Fortunately for their self-image, their minds are suitably barricaded to block it out completely.

Case in point: [1]