How theology is different from witchcraft

We've had the gender pronoun switcher regender for some time. Now Sam Harris picks up the search-and-replace and applies it to Terry Eagleton's Dakwins review, replacing 'theology' with, well, see for yourself:

This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of [conjuring and divination] that would make a first-year [sorcerer's apprentice] wince...Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and [witchcraft] are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates [witchcraft] from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake... while [belief in magic], rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it...

Sam Harris is of course the author of Letters to a Wiccan Nation. This redundant link exchange has been brought to you via Friendly Atheist.

This is so brilliant. I have to look into how easy it would be to create a regender-like web application to automate this sort of search-and-replace satire.

God, devil, what's the difference

A common feature of faith is that it tends to be held for keeps; once internalized, leaving it tends to necessitate a 'crisis of faith' or something and long strenuous deprogramming, I mean soul-searching.

It's a bit like something you put on and then can't take off again, isn't it. In this respect, it's like those items in RPG's that become impossible to remove once you've equipped them. They're of course commonly called... cursed items.

Cursed meme, anyone?

Comforters and god-concepts

A thing that's bugging me.

Believing in God has been called like sucking on a dummy, I think by our very own appointed Pope Dawkins (and here it is).

I take issue with that simile: these days, we can make dummies so that large numbers of children will at the very least be sucking on dummies in the same shape, made from the same mold. But even in this age of televised conformity, everyone build their own gods in their own minds from scratch, without a mold, working on specifications that are by necessity horribly vague.

The result is what you might call a veritable Babel of confusion that no one wants to acknowledge; tragically, practically the only thing in common among monotheists' god-concepts is a demand that your particular god-concept is eternal and immutable. It's no coincidence here that heretics are reviled the most: their slight variation makes it too apparent how malleable and tied to people's particular minds gods really are.

WTC as an anti-religion slogan is ill-advised

The "official Richard Dawkins MySpace presence" is running a campaign (at the bottom of the page) to change people's icons into this thing.

This is a foolish move for a site claiming to be a "clear-thinking oasis." Now, normally I'd be all in favor of hammering the important point home that belief in immortality can make people do horrible things. But just slapping the towers of the World Trade Center on a flyer like this mostly exposes how little you know about their history.

Manhattan architect Laurie Kerr's The Mosque to Commerce, published in Slate on the 28th of December 2001, lays out the history of how the WTC's architect Minoru Yamasaki was heavily influenced not only by modernism and Japanese design but also by Islamic architecture:

Yamasaki's courtyard mimicked Mecca's assemblage of holy sites—the Qa'ba (a cube) containing the sacred stone, what some believe is the burial site of Hagar and Ishmael, and the holy spring—by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca's.

The fact of the matter is, the towers probably symbolized minarets.

So. With "no religion," Yamasaki would probably never have imagined the WTC the way it turned out in the first place. Employing the WTC for a slogan against religion like this requires an act of forgetting, of sweeping inconvenient details under the rug. But apparently we desperately need slogans these days. Because it's the information age, or something like that.

(Mosque architecture? In turn inspired by Byzantine.)

Enough to make you think. Twice.

When I have the flu I seem to gravitate towards Something Awful, as I did this winter. The fever was bad enough that I found myself reading Something Awful articles about Second Life. Second Life, you may know, is the more famous of online 3D environments that are less like games and more, well, just environments really — what we used to call a "MUD" back in the day. (If you don't know what Something Awful is, you're probably happier not knowing, trust me.)

From there I heard about this person, who apparently holds three degrees but spends most of her time going on about how Second Life, which is run by a private company on centrally-controlled servers, fails to be all things to all punters and provide utopian cyber-democracy, or something. (The company running SL is called Linden Labs, hence the numerous statements directed at whichever Linden.)

I have some sort of point here, I promise. Now, from this post:

What I mean, for practical purposes in arranging a society by "belief in God" isn't even some specific god or God or some specific major religious system or set of karmas running over dogmas. Not at all.

It's much more basic: it means a higher, organizing, unifying principle. A Higher Power. If you don't have some belief in something higher than yourself (a higher power, a pattern of a higher intelligence, something larger than yourself, anyway), then all you are left with is your own ego, your pals' ego, and they're certain to reinforce your ego, and you, theirs. [...]

As Dostoyevsky put it, in my translation, "Without God, anything goes" [...]

Ah, Dostoyevsky. Did he really put it that way?

The rest of the post exhibits the sort of rambling that reveals why it's a bad idea to follow links from Something Awful when feverish. But still, the extensive misquote of Dostoyevsky undeniably indicates that the statement has a certain kind of resonance.

That resonance would perhaps be with people who like to invoke the Absolute to reinforce their own ego, and only their own ego, without even the need to consult any pals. I know it's so, because God told me.

On second thought. To what extent do people use "God" to mean common societal standards?

Yes I am feeling better now, thanks for asking.