We accept the fundamentalists' view of their religions as being the most accurate, because we want to nail down what religions are, and their versions are black and white, we can understand them, even if we understand them only to disagree, even violently so.

"...idealistic people often become misanthropic when they are let down two or three times."

...recently we have seen how certain movements in the Christian right have embraced counter-cultural forms of style found among skaters, punks, goth, and hard rock for very conservative ends. Where many of these movements are implicitly forms of critique of cultural hypocrisy and capitalist consummerism, these semiotic codes instead get redirected to the most normalizing, conformist, reactionary ends.

I think I'm going to call that last one the 'Rage For the Machine' effect. It might just be the inevitable end station of commodified dissent.

Lost in Translation is on. It looks like it would have been mind-blowing in 1996 at the latest.

Eternal meaning

More Douglas Adams:

It's very clear in the end - is it an A or a B? - ah! it's an A, because the person writing it was writing the word apple and that's clearly what it means. So, in the end, in the absence of an intentional creator, you cannot say what life is, because it simply depends on what set of definitions you include in your overall definition. Without a god, life is only a matter of opinion.

Which recalls the old complaint that without an authority-figure deity to mandate the dividing lines, we 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. Because clearly, meaning has nothing to do with the human imagination; if the world doesn't conform 1:1 with what's in my head then everything is meaningless for all time.

Of course, the definition of life has always been a matter of opinion. It's just that with religion, people tend to deliberately suppress that things have ever been different — after all, it's an eternal truth, so how could it ever have changed? We've always been at war with Eurasia, etc.

[Technorati Orwellian atheist bastardry deliberate forgetting]

Out of nowhere, a sudden unchurching. (via Pharyngula)

From the CNN story (document isn't on vatican.va yet, it seems):

[..] described Christian Orthodox churches as true churches, but suffering from a "wound" since they do not recognize the primacy of the Pope.

But the document said the "wound is still more profound" in the Protestant denominations [...]

Ooh, a wound. I wonder, how would a denomination bleed? Perhaps they gush the stuff that faith is made of.

Looking this over again, it seems a fairly clear case of that classic tactic: reinforcing unity through the vilification of a common opponent.

Then there's this juicy soundbite from a Di Noia:

"But, as you know, it is fundamental to any kind of dialogue that the participants are clear about their own identity. That is, dialogue cannot be an occasion to accommodate or soften what you actually understand yourself to be."

Oh yes, I always find it impossible to talk to anyone not wearing a little belief-tag clearly labeling their ideological affiliation in detail.

Anyway, hmm. He's equating identity with dogma and then saying Changing my dogma would be violating my identity. Isn't he?

[Technorati PZ Myers atheist bastardry dogma eternal truths just a flesh wound unchurching vilification wounded church]

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.

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.