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]

After education

Really catching up here, this news is only a week old. From The Register: Conservapedia too pinko? Try Metapedia.

Metapedia — literally after education, presumably it's where you would go when you're done learning — is an alternative wiki devoted to the pro-European cultural Kampf.

(Honestly, Pro-European? These people must be Americans to whom 'European' means 'white'.)

Oh look, it's our old friend cultural Marxism, complete with hallucinated conspiracies by The Frankfurter School. I told you the bastards had adopted "political correctness" as a convenient cover for creeping racism.

Well, at least now you can research white-supremacy pricks in one convenient place. I'd look into it more, but I have to find a way to block that bloody logo in the upper corner first. It's going to give me nightmares.

This probably needs to be refuted, since people will believe anything as long as it's blamed on communists:

Anti-racism is the Marxist ideology of opposition to “racism.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary the term “racist” was coined by Leon Davidovich Bronstein (Leon Trotsky). Anti-racism is a major focus of Cultural Marxism.

Of course, if they'd bothered to look up racialism they would have found an instance from 1907, long before Trotsky's 1930 book.

[Technorati European meaning white Frankfurter school Metapedia blame the commies creeping racism creepy logo cultural Marxism free speach hallucination political correctness retardpedia war on memory white scumbags]

Reading up on this Deming person who's apparently big in business religion, I mean, philosophy. I came across this:

Deming used an illustration of washing a table to teach a lesson about the relationship between purpose and method. If you tell someone to wash a table, but not the reason for washing it, they cannot do the job properly. That does not mean just giving the explanation without an operational definition. The information about why the table needs to be washed, and what is to be done with it, makes it possible to do the job intelligently.

Hah. This is the polar opposite of my experience in the military, where absolutely everything operated on a need-to-know basis: everything, everywhere, right down to why you pitch a tent in a particular way. Presumably this was to condition us into obeying orders without question.

[Technorati business-religion random-anecdote]

Tribalism, in sports? Unheard of.

More old news:

Students at Bishop Sullivan Catholic High School will receive sensitivity training as a result of anti-Semitic chants and graffiti during a recent basketball game against rival Norfolk Academy.

Several Sullivan students met with Norfolk Academy's cultural diversity club Thursday as part of a series of events aimed at promoting tolerance, Sullivan Principal Dennis W. Price said.

[...] "Then, at some point, our students were chanting, 'We love Jesus,' " he said. "It was obviously in reference to the Jewish population of Norfolk Academy; that's the only way you can take that."

You have to wonder what they were surprised at, if not that their students were being too unsubtle about the tribalism inherent in the whole set-up. Two groups whose most salient organizing feature was religion, playing a match against each other... and they assert their own group's cohesion by referring to their religion? Who would have thought?

Perhaps the match was meant as a reassurance that you can conduct tribalism in a cordial manner. I certainly feel reassured.

While I'm being political

For something like the Danish cartoon controversy to have its flames fanned like it did, it had to be convenient news for a lot of people: first, for the ones who compiled the dossier, misters Akkari and Laban, I suspect they could very well have been believing their own bullshit, not merely wanting to get on the map.

The numerous other people involved, though: what did they get out of it? I couldn't quite figure it out, until I saw this post by Angry As'ad, a Lebanese professor at Berkeley:

This is absurd. In Arabic newspapers, some Western companies took out ads to declare that they are not Danish. This while Arab governments are doing business with Israeli companies. Personally, I boycott Israel and Israeli products, but will not boycott Denmark or Danish companies.

Here we see a professed standard (enmity towards Israel) not being translated into action, presumably because Israel has enough industrial power that a boycott would be seriously impractical. Railing against a perceived enemy that they're not particularly dependent on thus provides not only a handy outlet of frustration, but also a cover for this hypocrisy. How convenient.

On the other side, we have a class of people who believe that Islam is a scourge, but keep on buying colossal amounts of oil from Saudi Arabia. How to resolve this uncomfortable hypocrisy? Why, you bray loudly on your blog. Feels good, doesn't it.

Of course, being too obvious about blanket-hating an entire faith would be distasteful and in fact might get you arrested. But support Denmark, that's a pleasantly vague message that does most of its work through connotations. Sound familiar? It's all part of the war on specifics.

Support Denmark. Not support Jyllands-Posten, mind. That's a bit difficult to spell, what with all those wacky Danish letters in it, for the unwashed who already have trouble spelling free speech. Instead, J-P is represented by the entirety of Denmark, even though all the Danish government did was fail to take the extraordinary action of censoring newspapers. But c'mon, it's not like Denmark is all that big a country? How could they possibly need more than one newspaper, am I right? AM I RIGHT? Yeeeah.

This substituting the whole of Denmark for a Danish newspaper might be seen as a simple reaction to the fact that the boycotts were of Danish products generally. But given the average blogtard's propensity for tribalism and all these people who have trouble seeing that Europe even has individual countries in it... no, I don't think so.

With freedom of speech thus reduced to an excuse for a hot-air football match, people happily donned jerseys labelled "Denmark" and "outraged Muslims". By the time news emerged that Jyllands-Posten had previously refused charicatures of Jesus for fear they would offend, everyone were too busy thumping their chests to notice. Perhaps they had forgotten the name of the paper. Perhaps they had forgotten that there ever was a paper to begin with. The original circumstances merrily shed, it became the meme of The Danish Cartoon Controversy. Nevar forget!

Then the coarse lumping-together seriously backfired — or it would have, if people generally didn't have the attention span of gnats. In the case of Erik Haaest, the arts council that awarded him the money genuinely is part of the Danish government, making the whole-for-the-part actually somewhat justified.

Well, I certainly feel safer knowing that free speach is "defended" by a gang of tribalistic attention-deficit cases, their defence contingent on the opposition being someone they already hate. Don't you?

[Technorati Danish cartoons GSAVE NEVAR FORGET TWAT angryarab atheist bastardry blogtards cartoon controversy chest-thumping free speach global struggle memory hole metonomy never forget post-mortem equine flagellation soundbite culture vitriol war on memory war on specifics]

INTERNET HATE MACHINE

Newsflash:

last night Fox 11 in Los Angeles spent five minutes investigating Anonymous

—you know, Anonymous, that sinister figure lurking everywhere in the shadows of the interblags.

Yes, really. Warning: aneurysm-inducing stupidity displayed by absolutely everyone involved, self included for inflicting it on others. The soundtrack not only has bass-laden ominous chords, it's peppered with gratuitous gunshot sounds for emphasis. The "news"man literally says But truly epic lulz come from raids and invasions. (via/alternately)

Amazingly, YouTube's video response feature is almost useful for this case (since, well, it's not that hard to pose as Anonymous).

[Technorati EXPLODING VAN Fox INTERNET HATE MACHINE anonymous atheist bastardry b-tards corruption of LOL epic lulz hype interblags lulz media stupidity nevar forget ominous soundtrack pool is closed retardation rule one slow news day truly epic lulz]

Support the Danish Kampf

Apropos yesterday's (The Simon Wiesenthal Center protesting Danish writer Erik Haaest getting a cash award for his work):

On second reading, that "censorship" line the arts council gives sounds like the last-ditch excuse of a committee that doesn't want to set a problematic precedent for yanking awards away after they've been handed out.

Still, this all makes a nice irony on all these people who still have the "SUPPORT DENMARK!!!" buttons up that they plastered all over their blogs without thinking, back when the cartoon controversy was convenient news.

For bonus tasteless glee, consider that the German version of those buttons uses "Kampf" for "struggle" in the translation of struggle for free speech.

Be sure to support the Danish Kampf, boys and girls.

[Technorati Erik Haaest atheist bastardry cartoon controversy politically correct politically incorrect support Denmark]

Superficial balance II

(previously)

Douglas Adams, in 1999:

I don’t accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view.

Today at Respectful Insolence: Mistaking failure to support for "censorship": The Danish government funding a Holocaust denier. (from History on Trial)

That is, the Danish government is actually awarding money to this Haaest, not just tolerating his opinion. This appears to be the actual article in the Danish Information, and here's the statement from the Simon Wiesenthal Center website.

Respectful Insolence goes on to say something I've been trying to phrase myself:

They know they can appear far more legitimate than they are, and they are not constrained by evidence, science or the truth, which allows them to put the side that is constrained by these things on the defensive. Moreover, as the "rebel," the crank almost always controls the agenda, and, particularly in the U.S., people root for the seeming underdog anyway.

A true underdog story™ of how one man's dream of corrupting the truth got him gobs of cash! Heartwarming, that's what it is.

Tangentially: Lipstadt has her post tagged "Holocaust Denial; Politically correct idiocy". Politically correct, of course, is another one of these concepts that are easily bent into obscene shapes.

[Technorati Erik Haaest atheist bastardry politically correct]

Via Scalzi: Bart D. Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, an examination of the highly, ah, evolutionary nature of "the" Bible.

I didn't know King James Version had actually been translated back and forth between Greek and Latin. That's amusingly like the process used on the film script for Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451; in that case, the repeated translation between French and English was apparently done to remove nuance from the language for the purpose of emulating an impoverished culture.

Ketchup for the soul

On the quite interesting-looking Denialism blog, we have a review of Barbara Ehrenreich's review of the cult-of-positivity tendency — perhaps mostly American, but we all tend to regress towards American standards

You are about to read a re-re-review of unprecedented profundity!

— to slather everything unconditionally with boilerplate "positivity", much like some people are unable to eat anything not covered in ketchup.

You've already managed to read half this post! Keep going! You can do it!

Ehrenreich then goes for the kill: that the cult of positivity is actually yet another way to blame the victim for its ails, another route enabling people to Stop Worrying So Much and attain technicolor Happiness by gorging on loads of consumer shite.

It's all good! There are so many opportunities that just abound in the happy fields of people prancing in slow motion, their faces cramped into a permanent grin! Smile™!

I was going to have a profound conclusion of some sorts, but no one's reinforcing me for it. Eh. Maybe there's something on TV.

[Technorati Barbara Ehrenreich atheist bastardry cult of positivity dispositional optimism dodgy metaphors gluttony ketchup for the soul manic-depressive prose positivity]

Café Taoism, the high C of faith

Arr, flamewar! PZ Myers at the epicenter, almost as a matter of course. A familiar argument in the reaction from Mark Kleiman of samefacts.com seems instructive:

Religious thought, writing, and speech, at its adult level, is always metaphorical. "Humans are created in the Image of God," taken literally, is nonsense, if you remember that it is a part of a religious tradition that says that God is an infinite, omniscient, beneficent, immortal being "without parts or passions," which is the opposite of finite, finitely rational, ethically challenged mortal beings with physical bodies and emotional drives. It makes no more sense as a proposition in comparative primatology than "My love is like a red, red rose" makes sense as a proposition in botany. But it's a very powerful metaphor for the ethical proposition "Human beings are not to be damaged or degraded." (Of course religious writers don't generally assert that "God" names a metaphor rather than an entity, any more than the actor playing Hamlet looks at the audience and says, "I'm not really the Prince of Denmark" or any more than a Pynchon novel carries a disclaimer on the title page, "None of this stuff really happened.")

[...] But if, like anyone who has thought deeply about these matters, you think of God as an especially potent metaphor (or, to put in more flowery terms, "a mystery to be understood only in part, and then by faith") — if you think that, then the whole debate is pointless. Both Gerson and Meyers are just being silly: it's two blind men debating the nature of the elephant while groping around different parts of a Land Rover.

Like anyone who has thought deeply about these matters. Anyone truly reasonable couldn't possibly disagree with me, after all, because I am the very epitome of reason. I like the comparison with fiction, though.

At its adult level. What is this adult level? Well, from his redux, fresh today:

[...] So, for me, "that which alone is wise and good" does not allow itself to be called "Zeus," or by any other name. ("The name that can be named is not the Eternal Name," says Lao-tse.)

Ah, so the adult level of religion is a kind of café Taoism. Thanks for clearing that up.

How would we know when someone is on this adult level, though? After all, labels for belief merrily conflate the "childish" and "adult" versions. The adult version being the "properly understood" one, by Kleimannic decree, you'd think it'd be the highest priority of churches to make sure their followers are believing properly. Maybe it'd make for a lot less grief if believers could wear little badges saying I am not a literalist; you may address me like an adult.

I see now it's a "criticism of his theological tone-deafness." Clearly that means café taoism is like the highest overtones of the basic belief that carries the chord, and I'm mistaken for focusing on the bass that resounds every way I turn.

[Technorati Mark Kleiman PZ Myers atheism atheist bastardry atheist bigotry cafe taoism dodgy metaphors literalism metaphors we live by]

Intelligent falling rehash

From Skeptico:

PaV seems to think that if you can study nature and learn some lessons from what nature has built, that proves there is an intelligent designer.

Clearly this doesn't go far enough. We can learn from the way things fall, allowing us to glean insight through the science of intelligent falling; this indubitably proves that the hand of God is pulling each and every one of us down with His tough love.

Remember: not a single gravity-related injury could have come about without the guiding foot of divine perfection. The bruise on the so-called atheist's buttocks refutes his own flawed arguments even as he fails to make philosophy the bitch of Christ. This godlessness will only lead to chaos, anarchy and the grave heresy of elevators, going against the force that the Lord Himself has decreed we shall toil under.

[Technorati Skeptico atheist bastardry gravity is a harsh mistress intelligent design intelligent falling problem of evil sarcasm]

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]

Atheist extremism pt. 5000

Jason Rosenhouse on scienceblogs, against the argument that Dawkins and Hitchens are basically saying kill whitey:

If Dawkins and all the rest stripped every snide remark out of their books, that would not stop the right wing noise machine from painting them as dangerous extremists. The mere fact that they are endorsing atheism and having some success is enough for that.

The wide spread of the atheist-extremist meme would indicate the degree to which the noise machines have already succeeded.

[Technorati Jason Rosenhouse atheism atheist atheist bastardry atheist extremism noise machine]

Journey to the center of the blogosfear

There had been of late an increase, in the messages passing by on the pneumatic tube, of canisters marked Attn: 8 random facts about myself. Clearly some sort of chain-letter; harmless as long as it didn't exceed message-handling capacity.

An exemplar that had dumped into my tray for lack of a recipient piqued my curiosity. I succumbed to the temptation to trace it to its source—this was an easy task, I told myself, especially because the chain-letter, potentially duplicating eight ways at each recipient, must obey the principle of Octo-Logarithmycks: even if there were, say, as many as thirty thousand of these things, it shouldn't take more than ten "generations" or so to reach the source. Its path, I knew, could be traced by scent with the application of specially prepared rodents, of which I happened to possess a pair.

Peeling back the onion-like layers of these pen-pal "communities" revealed striking and astute connexions: from atheists to Christians to erotic novels, from bookworms to Sufism, from admonishments to buy more Victory Gin to Shia knitting.

Then the trail went cold, somewhen in early March. I appeared to be going in circles. Had this "mi-meme" been born of a Mœbius-loop time anomaly? Was this creature an abomination of causality, never meant to cross the threshold into our world?

My palms sweating, I turned to the archaic tome known to some as Altavista advanced search. It only confirmed my gravest fears: the Thing had slithered out of the deep abyss whose name is whispered only in the most purple of prose.

rathish Said,
October 12, 2006 @ 7:22 pm

alexis chetta.. shall i tag you…????
I wanted your permission before tagging you.
If you dont want to repeat a tag again in your blog…u can always
postpone this tag.And if dont wanna do this..it is also okiie…
The tag is 8 random facts about you.

It was MySpace, and I had exposed myself to its progeny.

Still I pressed on, back into the deepest recesses of the Thing's past, where primordial soup sloshed against the shores while the names of elder monstrosities were tossed about with abandon — when suddenly, all was quiet but for faint, ululating pipes in the distance. Then:

Saturday, January 28, 2006

Ok, I was tagged by Robbie to list 8 random facts about me....they are probably not so interesting...but here goes....

1. Thursday I was in line at Wal-Mart with 2 more items to be scanned when the electricity went out....45 minutes later I finally got to leave!!

2. I am watching the Disney Channel....with my sister!

3. I am cooking a roast for the first time!

4. I like to paint although I am not that good at it!

5. My markers have to be arranged, ROYGBIV, or it bothers me terribly!!

6. I miss playing the piano...we do not have a piano here so I only get to play when I go home...

7. I graduate May 13, 2006!! Only a year late!! Not too bad!

8. I love bite-sized Cherry Twislers!

Ok, so maybe it is not so interesting, but that is my list...now I tag:

Allyson, Scott, and Nash!!

I see it, ph'nglui an even greater horror than MySpace— who would know but for wgah'nagl the drums cheezburger fthaghn mglw'nafh lolthulhu roflmao Chínhđi unàycùngv Shub-internet.ims.disa.mil ïarpanet [the rest of the note is illegible]

[Technorati Victory gin chainletter cheezburger fthagn dodgy Gothic failed sanity check isometric logarithmycks lolthulu memetrace plastic rodent purple prose untitled.gif]

Seeing the phrase "French president" on a newsticker, I caught myself thinking, for a split-second, "Freedom president." Which was an amusing instance of additional backfiring from the heavy-handed attempt at lingustic engineering long since ridiculed into the ground, "freedom fries."

---

Something completely different:

In our world, things don't look like this, don't shift and reform and lose and regain their shape. The only things that do are fire, smoke and water, and none of those things are solid objects. These Transformers, though, they are solid, bewilderingly so. They attract and offend the eye, make you feel like you've missed something, stir a bookmarked desire to see the movie again.

Curse you Mr. Flower, I mean Notley. Now I'll probably have to see that movie and write an unbearably pretentious review linking it to Gonzalo Frasca's Videogames of the Oppressed.

Speaking of which, I'll be damned.

[Technorati Gonzalo Frasca apophenia deja vu freedom fries heavy-handed linguistic engineering transforming mecha]

Distilling the espresso religion

I'm increasingly getting the impression of very similar language used to describe "religious extremism." As an easily available example, let me pick on an excerpt from Sam Harris' End of Faith, The Problem with Religious Moderates (emphasis mine):

Religious moderates seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight and innovation in these areas but a mere dilution of Iron Age philosophy.

This must mean that by being a moderate, you're being less strong than you could be. I'm inclined to blame this on Harris being an American who equates violence with strength, but this sort of language is generally quite common, isn't it?

I wonder if this isn't a case of taking at face value the fundamentalists' own claim that they're a return to the "foundation" of faith, to the roots, the essence: an image of anything not "literalist" as watered-out coffee — and fundamentalism, strong espresso. As someone who'll have no truck with the concept of Platonic ideals I find this quite nonsensical, of course. But. When you keep using this metaphorical image, you're basically reinforcing the literalists' own bullshit, confirming the stereotype that feeds their cause: that they have greater religious authority because they follow "the" dogma "to the letter."

"To the letter." The existence of multiple "hard core" belief-mutations around the same holy book should be enough to expose the ridiculousness of literalisms. Even if all the copies of the particular holy documents are letter-for-letter identical, meaning does not lie in the printed words alone: it arises in the interaction between the person and the words, in the interpretation that is unavoidable for any human being. Every person being different, it's impossible to have no variation in meaning: the only way to get an unambiguous result from it would be to feed the words to something controlled by a deterministic computer program. (Turing-complete holy code, anyone?)

And yet, we reinforce this myth of the "most literal" interpretation where fundamentalism is the espresso from which weaker cappuccinos and lattes are derived. Stop it, please. Stop helping these bastards that are making the world unsafe for tea.

[Technorati Sam Harris atheism atheist dodgy metaphors espresso religion essence of hogwash framing fundamentalism hard core literalism memetics rhetorics stop helping unspeak violence is strength]

Morality of the angry atheist

Let's take Slavoj Zizek's March 2006 NYT piece Atheism is a legacy worth fighting for, a fairly good one:

These weird alliances confront Europe's Muslims with a difficult choice: The only political force that does not reduce them to second-class citizens and allows them the space to express their religious identity are the "godless" atheist liberals, while those closest to their religious social practice, their Christian mirror-image, are their greatest political enemies.

Rabbi Avi Shafran won't have any of that. In criticizing it, he immediately erects this, an instructively boilerplate case of "these 'atheists' can't be true atheists, because the 'True Atheist' strawman in my head have no morals":

To a true atheist, there can be no more ultimate meaning to good and bad actions than to good or bad weather.

Or maybe meaning is something that is created by humans, so human actions can have meaning after all.

Ah, but he wants ultimate meaning, as opposed to garden-variety inferior brand meaning. Of course.

As an example of a life without morality, he gives:

Mr. Kuklinski, who was retired from life at the age of 70, claimed, utterly without remorse, to have killed more than 100 people as a Mafia enforcer; his favored methods included ice picks, crossbows, chain saws and a cyanide solution administered with a nasal-spray bottle.

The happy hit man's example might not have given pause to Professor Zizek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. But it should have.

Because the notion that there is no higher authority than nature is precisely what enables people like Mr. Kuklinski -- and the vast majority of the killers, rapists and thieves who populate the nightly news.

Utterly unrelated to religion, values or meaning, of course.

Matter of fact, it's been known for some time now that Mafia initiation rites involve people swearing on saints. Religious symbols are used to reinforce allegiance to the Mob. That is, it's precisely by taking the symbols of "ultimate meaning" and tying them to the Mafia that it bolstered the loyalty that it did.

In his view, a purposeless process of evolution has brought us to where we stand, and our feeling that there are good deeds and evil ones is but a utilitarian quirk of natural selection -- like our proclivity to eat more than we need when food is available. And so, just as we might choose to forego a second helping of pizza if we harbor an urge to lose weight, so may we choose, for personal gain (of desires, not pounds), to loosen our embrace of a moral, ethical life. Biological advantages, after all, are not moral imperatives.

Other way around. It is highly probable that moral imperatives are biological advantages. As numerous studies have shown.

Moral feelings are just that: feelings, hard to suppress. As such, these feelings (purely "utilitarian," as if being useful was a bad thing) may have brought more good than all the pious well-wishes in the world. Believers, after all, are no strangers to hypocrisy.

In a followup, he wonders why every atheist to which he peddles his ignorance is so angry:

MORE INFORMATIVE is the atheists' anger. I think it derives from the realization of where their declared convictions perforce must lead. That would be - as per my original essay - a place where the very concepts of morality and ethics are rendered meaningless, a worldview in which a thieving, philandering, serial murdering cannibal is no less commendable a member of the species than a selfless, hard-working philanthropist. (In fact, from an evolutionist perspective, the former is probably better positioned to impart advantages to the gene pool.) It is a thought so discomfiting to an honest atheist that all it can yield him is fury.

Some atheists, no doubt, are not infuriated at all by the implications of their denial of a human calling higher than nature. They revel in the knowledge that whatever they wish to do is fine, as long as they manage not to run afoul of the man-made (and themselves inherently meaningless) laws of society. If skillful enough, they can carefully lift items from the local store, surreptitiously violate others' rights or privacy, and covertly bring harm to those they dislike or who stand in the way of their wants.

Most atheists, though - and they, I contend, are the angry ones - would never dream of doing such things. Because they know that there is right and there is wrong.

Wrong? Is it "wrong" when a dog steals a bone from his fellow canine, or when a mantis eats her mate? Of course not. But when a human being steals or hurts or kills another, it's qualitatively different. Deep down we know we are answerable to Something beyond our own natures.

Or maybe the ineffable Something(tm) we're answerable to is exactly our own nature.

Let's have an actual "evolutionist" perspective. Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, 1989 and later editions, chapter 12: "Nice Guys Finish First". This gives a plausible explanation for altruism and moral sense arising not out of self-interest enlightened or un-, but from simple evolutionary advantages — that is, straightforward advantages from cooperation explain why, when there's no higher whatever, we don't all eat each other given half a chance.

Dawkins being one of the most prominent atheists in the world today, Rabbi Shafran would perhaps have read his books if he were truly trying to understand the atheism that he writes about — but is he trying? Believers — and I would contend, this includes most of the vocal ones — are, after all, generally quite willfully incurious about it, marching to the tune of "GOSH. I JUST DON'T UNDERSTAAAAAND..."

[Technorati Dawkins Shafran Zizek atheism atheist morality piety selfish gene strawmen unselfish phenotype]

Technorati Profile

[technorati ping example]

I feel vaguely queasy when I'm reminded that the concept of 'curing homosexuality' is alive and stomping on human faces, now last by the Friendly Atheist's Ex-Ex-Gays Speak Out. Then something in the quote caught my eye: the guy they interviewed fell in love with another counselor.

...I mean, it's so obvious. Put a bunch of "ex-gays" together in the same place, and what do you get?

Ah, the power of love.

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.

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.