The Teapot Atheist

On the White House's bogus response to the petition to end tax subsidies for churches

2012-01-10T12:30:00.000-08:00

One of the more insincere efforts we've seen by the American government to promote participatory democracy was the Obama administrations institution of a broadly accessible online "petition" program. Most of the petitions that I've seen or signed have been met not with actual responses to the petition or any noticeable changes to the law to meet the requests of citizen petitioners, but rather with flat statements of exactly what the petition is against. (For example, each successive petition to legalize certain recreational drugs is met not with any response to the specific claims of the petition and certainly not to changes in drug laws, but simply with restatements of what the current drug laws are.)

The petition to end tax subsidies for religious organizations is no different. The White House issued its official response yesterday, which can be read on the linked petition page itself. The response seems targeted to some fictional petition that I have not seen; not one word of the White House's reply seems to have any bearing on the content, or even the title, of the petition at all. The petition is named "Remove tax exemptions from churches and allow them to apply like a non-profit organization." I've bolded the second half because it is the crucial element of the petition, the one that utterly defuses the White House's entire bogus reply.

Said reply does not get a whole paragraph down before its first factual falsehood.

Our Nation's Bill of Rights not only guarantees that the government cannot establish an official religion, but also guarantees citizens the right to practice the religion of their choosing or no religion at all.

Incorrect. In fact, the very first case in which the Supreme Court (which the Constitution sets as the final arbiter of the Constitutionality of laws, Marbury opponents be damned) was asked to evaluate the free exercise clause of the First Amendment found quite the opposite. There is not a guarantee to practice the religion of your choosing; the freedom of belief and conscience are universally protected but the freedom of practice is not. Since the days of Reynolds, the Supreme Court was given the government a very wide latitude to restrict religious practice. There is a reason that your Mormon neighbors cannot practice polygamy anymore (which has nothing to do with that religion's forfeiture of the doctrine), that your Jewish neighbors cannot stone their adulterous wives, and that your Zoroastrian neighbors cannot leave the corpses of their honored dead to rot on the front lawn for the Earth to reclaim naturally. This is not a terribly subtle distinction, and the administration's reply is characteristic of the sloppiness expressed generally in its reply to these petitions and abundantly in this specific petition.

Following the general principle elucidated above, much of the reply is simply a recapitulation of existing tax subsidies for religious organizations. It points out that

the IRS Guide provides for an automatic exemption for churches and other houses of worship that meet the statutory requirements of section 501(c)(3). These requirements include, among others, that the organization be "organized and operated" exclusively for certain purposes (including religious and charitable purposes), that no part of net earnings inure to the benefit of any private individual or shareholder, and that the entity not involve itself in political campaigns.

as if merely stating the established rule justifies it. The problem, as elucidated in the petition, is that the existing rule is hopelessly broken, woefully incomplete, and worst, not enforced by any stretch of the term.

Take a peak at the actual text of IRS Code s501c3. It holds that, to qualify for the automatic IRS exemption, the organization must fulfill certain "charitable purposes," which, according to the IRS, include:

relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged; advancement of religion; advancement of education or science; erecting or maintaining public buildings, monuments, or works; lessening the burdens of government; lessening neighborhood tensions; eliminating prejudice and discrimination; defending human and civil rights secured by law; and combating community deterioration and juvenile delinquency.

One of these things is not like the other. Every single thing on this list, save the bolded exception, has actual, demonstrable benefits for human flourishing. They do things for people. They improve peoples' lives. They involve tangible, measurable effects, and most of the items on the list explicitly name humans or their physical artifacts as grounds for charitable exemption. Not so the religion exemption. It is a hopelessly vague clause, and the IRS makes no effort to define either "advancement" or "religion" in this section of the code. Burning down mosques advances certain kinds of Christianity - is it protected? Is Scientology a religion, or a self-help program? Is Scientology advanced or hindered by bringing John Travolta on board? Who knows? But the problem is that the arbiter of that decision is not the IRS, but the applicant. If Scientology feels that it is advanced through its profiteering scam, that's protected. Period.

The White House's reply cites to the Constitution a number of times, blissfully unaware that the very language of the IRS code in this section is written in taunting defiance of the Constitution; the phrase "advancement of religion" is the exact same locution the Supreme Court uses in its most common test to determine what kinds of thing the government can't do!

The government's action must not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion.

See Lemon v. Kurtzman. This is the famous Lemon Test. It is not applied universally or consistently to First Amendment religion challenges, but it is the most common test the Supreme Court uses, and the one that most reliably separates the government from religions; it is far more often used to prevent the government from interacting with religion than permitting it. Sadly, the White House cannot be bothered to check its facts when it comes to the politically palatable notion of giving out free money to churches.

And that really is the crux of the issue. Refusing to fairly tax churches qua churches is not separation of church and state. Separation of church and state would be treating churches the same as any other institution, not giving them handouts just for being churches. A tax exemption is a handout - it is a symbolic gift in which the government says "we will provide you with fire and police services, military protection, and all other basic government services for free." You and I pay taxes, and in return, we receive certain services. Other free-riders on the system, like charitable research foundations, make up for their parasitic relationship to the IRS with other benefits: longer lifespans, advocacy for the poor, food handouts, that kind of thing. Things that actually help people.

Churches do not do this. Churches advance known falsehoods, lie to children when they aren't sexually abusing them, make life miserable for gays, promote discrimination against women and often against other races, or just flat-out promoting racism in the cases of religions like Judaism and Hinduism, which advocate a "Chosen People" / "Gentile" dichotomy and a ridged racial hierarchy, respectively. These are not services worthy of free police protection, free military protection, exemption from conscription, and exemption from taxes. They do nothing for society.

And when I say that 501c3 is inappropriately enforced, I mean it in regards to virtually every religious organization. 501c3 clearly states that no organization may be organized for private inurement and they may not engage in political lobbying and still receive a 501c3 handout, but they universally do. For example, Catholic Churches extort money from their parishioners and spend it in places like:

Political advocacy against equality for homosexuals.
Salaries for priests.
Salaries for the Church's lawyers.
Apology money for the victims of the insatiable sexual lusts of the Church's employees.
Peter's Pence - the private operating expenses of a foreign sovereign nation, which is directly subsidized by the US government. This is a foreign sovereign nation that routinely condemns American society and its people with more or less the same vehemence and disgust as the mullahs of Iran do.

And not only is all of that money tax exempt when spent by the Church, it is tax deductible when given by private citizens - meaning that the government is not only giving out free services to churches, it is basically giving tax money back to taxpayers conditional upon that money being spent in church. It's functionally identical to getting a "religion voucher" from the government, currency that is good only in places that call themselves "religions." And the Obama administration defends this as protecting the separation of church and state.

But remember, there are megachurches out there. There are churches raking in eight figures annually that are still tax exempt. Last year, I calculated that there's about a hundred billion dollars in megachurch business going completely untaxed because of this system. The anti-inurement component of 501c3 is woefully underenforced, and it shows. The one time that the government tried to do anything about this problem, Senator Grassley was nearly inquisition'd out of his job by the very megachurches that are beneficiaries of this parasitism on your tax dollars and mine.

The only semblance of a justification (apart from gross misreadings of centuries of Constitutional jurisprudence) is this paragraph:

The Administration recognizes that houses of worship--churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, and other institutions--are integral to their communities and often serve as community centers for charity and social service. And the Administration is committed to strengthening government interaction with faith-based organizations to the benefit of their communities, consistent with First Amendment protections.

First of all, these "community centers" for "charity" and "social services" facially exclude those who do not adhere to those specific religions. Communities have lots of churches, and they compete with each other. Most of them exclude homosexuals, many of them exclude women, some of them exclude certain races, virtually all of them exclude other religions and all but the Unitarians exclude secularists. But remember, the petition did not say anything like "no tax handouts for any churches" or "outlaw all churches," it says to let them apply as charities!

If what the White House says is indeed correct, that religious institutions serve important charitable and social roles in their communities, then abolishing the tax exemption for religions should have no measurable impact on America whatsoever because those churches can just turn around and apply as charities, and they should have no problem! Right? It's not like the U.S. is teeming with churches that are just in it for the money, maybe shipping a couple of youth groups off to the soup kitchen twice a year and calling it "charity," right? Right?

The automatic tax handout for religious institutions is a broken, improperly enforced, blatantly unConstitutional system. The White House's reply reinforces the fact that these petitions are a joke and that this administration is about as interested as the Bush administration was in standing up to the religious businessmen who feed off of our tax dollars while spending their time pissing on the rights and dignity of their fellow Americans. It's embarrassing.

Edit: a commenter below has pointed out an avenue to an important oversight to the objections listed so far. The author of the putative reply to this petition is none other than Joshua DuBois, the sectarian fanatic currently in charge of the grossest violation of church-state separation of the 21st century, that being the office responsible for future alliances between the church and the state. It is an egregious insult to the spirit of this petition that the reply goes out of its way to mention that, in the future, the state plans to strengthen its entanglement with these sectarian organizations to provide services that our tax dollars, not other peoples' tithe dollars, should be apportioning: social services, healthcare, and assistance to the poor. It is just one more reflection of the fatal insincerity at the core of the noxious quasi-doctrine elucidated in the response to the petition, which is basically that nothing needs to be changed, all religions are de facto charities exactly as deserving of tax handouts as OxFam and Doctors Without Borders, a simpleton's misreading of the sinister agendas behind most of America's most popular religions, agendas that include continuing Christianity's ongoing noxious obsession with homosexuality, the war against reproductive rights, and advocacy for war against non-Christian populations, all of which churches have roundly supported since their last big platform position (slavery) was defeated by big government intervention.

Paul/Kucinich '12: the real-life confederacy of dunces

2012-01-05T16:09:00.000-08:00

I've read a lot of stupid in my life. I've plumbed the Book of Mormon deeply enough to get banned from every facebook group (remember those?) they made for Mormon apologetics, without exception. I've read enough translations of the boring, repetitive, disorganized mess that is the Qur'an to know which 93% of it has to be cut out before you get an intelligible product. I even once wasted a whole afternoon and evening in a Borders (remember those?) slogging through the most poorly-written Christian political blog ever published, Mein Kampf. You really get a feel for the relative strengths and weaknesses of stern-faced objectivity when you dip yourself neck-deep in nonsense on purpose.

I'd like to thank Joy Freeman-Coulbary at the Washington Post for proving that, after all this time, I can still be surprised. I stand and give her a very sincere slow-clap for surviving to adulthood with whatever horrific brain lesions are required to, on top of having the most parodic serious law firm website on the internet, say the following with a straight face: Ron Paul / Dennis Kucinich 2012!:

As a progressive, a Ron Paul/Dennis Kucinich presidential ticket would stoke my fires. It might also attract Republicans who long for the party’s non-interventionist, fiscally conservative roots.

I heard the horror stories from my mother, a long-time Cleveland resident who had the misfortune of living there during Kucinich's brief, petty tenure somehow bungling an office as relatively ceremonial as its mayor, long before I heard the Ron Paul platform, which was itself long before I learned that the Ron Paul platform wasn't a heavy-handed bit of parody from the Huffington Post or other such humorless bunch.

Paul and Kucinich are both congressmen, and it's good that their voting power is diluted to the point of relative insignificance on their own, both for us and for themselves. Good for us because it diminishes their ability to inflict their varying political psychoses on the rest of the country, and good for them because it seems that every time they've been any kind of singular role, they've nearly terminated their own careers. After coming within 250 votes of a recall after firing Cleveland's much more popular chief of police in a Soviet-style purge of the dangerously likeable underling, Kucinich had just enough time to make Cleveland "the first major American city to default on its financial obligations since the Great Depression" before being ejected from office by his own lieutenant governor.

Paul is a failure of equal proportions when he's allowed a share of power greater than 1/435th of the pie. During a brief vacation from the GOP before crawling back after his rather predictable defeat, Paul presided over the beginning of a serious decline for the Libertarian Party. Despite running in a go-go '80s Reaganaut's banner year (1988), he performed less than half as well by percentage than the doomed little party's doomed little 1980 candidate. That party's long decline phase is hardly over: Ron Paul, far from energizing the party, left the party in a state middling from 300,000 to 500,000 votes per election, down from the pre-Ron Paul glory days of 1980 when the party received almost a million votes. The non-profit he founded, the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, has proven such an embarrassment to him and his current campaign that it rivals Paul's first congressional bid and even his first presidential bid for Paul's greatest failures.

But such failures are piddling compared to the spectacular failures both men have achieved with the positions they have articulated, with the word "articulated" here being deployed charitably. From the standpoint of rational skepticism, Kucinich and Paul are the political equals with the Huffington Post's "science" writers and Alex Jones, respectively, and from the standpoint of a humanist, both men agree with Neville Chamberlain that evil in the world should be left alone, and if we can't leave it alone, we should at least treat it with dignity.

Kucinich, co-chair of the Congressional Caucus on Complementary and Alternative Medicine, never met a crank he wouldn't spend your tax dollars bringing to testify in front of Congress. When not pissing away your money to have an expert in Chinese folk superstitions tell Congress about his ineffective nonsense or warning his fellow Congresspeople about how vaccines cause Gulf War Syndrome, he's bragging about getting federal funding for "alternative" medicine (which would just be called "medicine" if it worked) slipped into the major healthcare reform legislation passed earlier in the term.

This is when Kucinich isn't out UFO-spotting, by the way.

Paul is crazy in the same kind of way. While not usually exculpatory by itself, you can sometimes tell a bit about a man, or men, by their biggest fans, and lets just say that there's a reason that David Icke (yes, that David Icke) names Paul and Kucinich as his fellow warriors in the Vaccine Liberation Army. Paul and Kucinich share the same bizarre paranoia about their precious bodily fluids, just like they share a disturbing fetishism for ineffective pseudoscience. But Paul's batshit insanity trends towards a different direction.

I used to like Alex Jones because I believed in what he was saying, then I liked Alex Jones because I thought he was laugh-out-loud uproariously hilarious, and let me tell you, Ron Paul has spent a lot longer in column A than I ever did. Paul's own Foundational for Rational Economics and Education (see above) has been informing on Paul's batty militia, gun-nut, Christian eschatologist, right-wing obsession with the Trilateral Commission (a global conspiracy network so secretive you have to click through their website almost six times before you get to the published minutes of every meeting they've ever had), the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations, a childishly cookie-cutter racism, and the international banking conspiracy that rules the world, presumably with the help of the Illuminati, the Freemasons, the Trilateral Commission, the Jews (obviously), K.A.O.S., the Bilderbergers, and, lets say, Dr. Claw. They're all equally plausible, and their combination in a single mind all speaks to precisely the kind of hopelessly reality-challenged conspiracy-mongering that we don't want in the leader of the free world. The conspiracy milieu from which Paul hails is the kind that rejects evidence, that debases logic, that seeks irrational extravagance for fun and profit, and it's the kind that really loved Ron Paul when he was flirting with 9/11 Trutherism.

Paul's fanatics really hate to hear that the libertarian position is today enjoyed with varying levels of success in such economic powerhouses as Somalia; the last time we tried it here in the states we called it the "Gilded Age," and the second time we tried it, Herbert Hoover successfully inaugurated almost two decades of big-government liberalism to undo that second attempt. Of course, Paul's rhetoric about abolishing effective government does not extend to imposing draconian obstacles to abortions that American women haven't had to deal with since the last time we let conservatives show us just what "small government" means for women's rights.

Just as troubling, and more relevant here, is Paul's contempt for the secular principles of government established by the Founding Fathers, enshrined in the Constitution, and upheld by centuries of American jurisprudence. Claiming that the Constitution is "replete" with references to God (who is not mentioned a single time in the Constitution, which Paul will be swearing to uphold if he becomes president), Paul thinks he knows better than the Constitution's own author about whether or not that document creates a wall of separation between church and state. In addition to siding with Alabama legal joke Roy Moore (I'd call him a judge if I thought he'd ever had a jurisprudential thought in his life) about posting sectarian Christian versions of the Pentateuch on government property, Paul is a creationist, and sees no reason why your children shouldn't be taught as such in the public schools that he wants to abolish.

Perhaps the most troubling affront to humanism we find in this dunce-hatted duo is their shared desire for an appeasement approach to the overseas theocracy. Kucinich and Paul both leaped to Gadhafi's defense as soon as President Obama dared attempt to use American hard power for something good overseas (not one American soldier died in our interference with the last days of Gadhafi's petty little dictatorship, by the way) with almost as much zeal as they both to this day protect the brutal theocracy that is currently gunning down its own citizens in Syria. Kuninich thinks that Hamas, the half-baked mafia that responded to its first big electoral defeat by murdering the opposition and seizing power, is a legitimate negotiating partner with Israel and shame on Israel for not taking Hamas more seriously.

There isn't a brutal theocracy you can think of that Paul and Kucinich wouldn't proudly appease. Iran is no exception. They prefer to put their heroic Lindbergian isolationism ahead of the rising apocalyptic pretensions of Iran, whose imperial ambitions already see them becoming the pre-eminent arms dealer for every clandestine Islamic regime in the Middle East, many of which are the very ones Paul and Kucinich go out of their way to reassure- don't worry, dear theocrats, dear fascists, dear Islamic imperialists, American power is inappropriately used on anything but self-defense, so your aggression against your neighbors and your brutality to your own people is none of our concern. And if you exploit their oil wealth for your own personal gain while squashing the free press and trampling the rule of law but at least have the good sense to call yourself a "socialist," well, more power to you.

But it is our concern. So is their open contempt for science and reason, their conspiracy-mongering, the galling disregard for this part of the Constitution or that. The cringe-worthy facebook posts fawning over "Dr. Paul" have got to stop, and dragging Kucinich into it is just the cement the confederacy of dunces needs to become a horde. Can you imagine your pretentious Ron Paulite friends, the ones who took a single econ class in college and who know everything about why the Fed should be audited and why the gold standard is just sheer genius and those newsletters weren't really Dr. Paul and CNN cut off that interview with that soldier and the mainstream media ignores him and blah, blah, blah - mixed with the most airheaded, most self-absorbed, shamelessly anti-intellectual self-styled liberals you have ever met, the ones who think Arafat deserved every penny of that Nobel Peace Prize for fighting against Israeli imperialism, the ones who prefer Chris Hedges, you know the type. It's been suggested that they get together and have a party.

Fuck that party.

Sunday Argument #13: And no religion, too

2012-01-02T13:59:00.000-08:00

Thomas Calloway, aka Cee Lo Green, has taken it upon himself to blaspheme upon the works of one of the great luminaries of 20th-century secularism, taking the opportunity of a vapid calendar accident to pontificate on a rather unsubtle point of theology that is becoming a little too common for me these days. While embarrassing himself along with the rest of his untalented autotuned fake-musician friends for the New Year's celebration in New York, he tried to cover John Lennon's "Imagine." When he wasn't desecrating that lovely little tune with his shoddy performance, he was desecrating it by mangling the lyrics to suit an idiot's ideology:

During his performance in New York's Times Square on Saturday night, [Calloway] changed the lyrics to Lennon's 1971 "Imagine" classic from "Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too" to "Nothing to kill or die for, and all religion's true."
Criticism soon followed on Twitter, which according to the Huffington Post, prompted Green to tweet: "Yo I meant no disrespect by changing the lyric guys! I was trying to say a world were u could believe what u wanted that's all." That comment has since been taken down, but a search on Twitter will yield tweets blasting Green for swapping out the words.

Stupidity doesn't get much stupider than this. But, this corrupted version of universalism, this lazy, unthinking-man's "everybody's right!" hippie nonsense gets enough play, so I figure that I might as well take Mr. Calloway's invitation to inform on his nonsense.

There are a couple of historical iterations of things like Cee Lo's proposition. Henotheism is the name for belief in the existence of multiple gods with the practice of worshiping only a single of those gods. Some versions of Hinduism are henotheistic, others are better described with the other historical term for pluralist religious philosophies - universalism. Universalism is similar to henotheism in that it is compatible with multiple religions, but rather than getting to that pluralism through multiple gods, universalism says that there is only a single god, but that he doesn't particularly care which religion you use to worship him.

These are all rather different and complicated traditions, and none of them is quite as Cee Lo goes out of his way to be. Universalism in the United States has produced some rather clever minds, minds like Emerson, Bartok, and Thomas Jefferson. But notice that the proposition Cee Lo advances, the idiot version of universalism for people too boring and stupid to appreciate that sometimes people are wrong about their most cherished principles, isn't quite either of these things. Universalism doesn't hold that all religions are right; quite the opposite: all exclusive religions are explicitly false if universalism is true. Universalism doesn't affirm the truth of all religions, only that God doesn't particularly care which one you believe. That doesn't at all require any of them to be true. No kind of henotheism is necessarily bound to the idiot version of universalism for much the same reasons.

Instead, Cee Lo advocates a completely incoherent hardcore henotheism under which, beyond multiple gods existing or multiple religions being conducive to a pleasant afterlife, all religions are actually true. It's scarcely worth the effort demonstrating why this is necessarily false. If idiot universalism is true, then the Christian religion Catholics participate in is true and so is the Christian religion that Evangelicals participate in. If Catholicism is true, then Evangelical Christianity is false. If Evangelical Christianity is true, Catholicism is false. (If either religion is true, all other religions are false.) So on, so on - the obvious falsehood of the proposition is by no measure the most interesting thing about it.

What is interesting about it is the soul sickness to which it speaks, the generally dim vitality that would be attracted to such a statement. The statement is superficially charitable, since it allows for everybody to be right, something desirable only by those who have no beliefs or convictions worth fighting for. The crass contradiction it conceals, which is that it actually would require the rejection of most religions and their believers, is a level of analysis an eight year-old could perform and as such is about one level too deep for people like Cee Lo and his fans. It isn't merely the sentiment that is so vapid, but the fact that the sentiment's farcical true nature was completely missed in the whole mix. A moment's careful reflection on "every religion is true" reveals what a bad idea it is to wish for such. And that never happened.

His followup tweet reveals yet another defect in his model of reality. He wanted to sing about a world where "u could believe what u wanted." How does wanting all religion to be true at all service believing what you want? If all religion is true, then I can't believe what I want because I believe all religions to be false. The exclusivist religions can't believe what they want. Only Cee Lo gets what he wants, which sadly seems only to be for nobody to be wrong about religion anymore except people who don't believe in gods.

But that is the real soul sickness- who would want to live a world where "u could believe what u want" in the way that he suggests? Such is weakness. Disputation about our most cherished values is what advances civilization. Unpacking why you are wrong about something you have held as a deep and sacred value for decades is the signature revelatory experience of a lifetime. Disputes about politics improve our politics: it is through our disagreements that we better our platforms, better our beliefs. The sterile, childish fantasy world inhabited by Cee Lo and whichever idiots out there actually share in this fantasy is not nearly so palatable as he would like it to be. It is the end of history according to Huxley, a population so complacent, so placid, so eager for the sweet silence of accord that they shy away from "scary" or "dangerous" conversation. Cee Lo speaks for a parade of idiots with an internally incoherent gospel. We already live in a world where you can believe anything you want, as is painfully demonstrated by Cee Lo's believing that all religions are true is something nice to imagine, something as good for humanity as Lennon's original lyrics.

Instead, he has the harsh reality to face that sometimes, people are wrong. Sometimes they're even wrong about very important things. Nothing is immune from this fact, the one fact that drives us, that gives meaning to our minds: that nothing is exempt from scrutiny and refutation. No idiot fake-musicians with stupid stage names, no politics, no philosophies, nothing - and especially no religions, too.

Why secular civic institutions always work better than religious ones

2011-12-28T15:28:00.001-08:00

Today the great state of Massachusetts bestowed upon me the title of notary public, of whose position on the state government hierarchy I'm uncertain but that I know to be somewhere between prison bingo-night manager and the official chronicler of Mitt Romney's favorite bistros. But now I've got the little document officially recognizing my unparalleled civic virtue, and all I had to do to validate the little document was recite an oath in front of a bored local-government thrall. She gestured to the printed text of the oath next to her and told me to raise my right hand and recite it (she didn't look away from her computer the entire time). I glanced over the text, and saw at the conclusion the four most annoying words Western civilization has ever created.

So help me God.

Ugh. There he is- that facile old man intruding on civic institutions that neither need nor want him. He's like a bully we used to have to deal with in primary school - a jerk to everybody who ever got near to him, but he still wanted to be included in all the games. This guy wormed his way into the Pledge of Allegiance (via an invalid usurpation of the privately-written, privately-circulated Pledge by Congress), onto our currency (ditto), just a squeak into the Declaration of Independence, into the President's oath (presidents say "so help me God," but the phrase is omitted from the oath as it's written in the Constitution), and now the little bastard is in my notary oath. Look, all I wanted was to get a certificate that I could put on my resume because law firms and consulting firms like that kind of thing. Don't make me piss all over my own values to get it! So, with the little sarcastic whine that always takes me about twenty minutes to regret using when feeling self-righteous, I asked for a secular, "non-superstitious" alternative to the oath.

"Yep," she said, reaching under her desk and putting a new version of the oath with "so help me God" replaced with "this I affirm under the pains and penalties of perjury." I don't think she even had to look away from her computer for it. It was that simple. So I took the oath, got my little notary dealy, ordered my stamp and my record book, and I went on my way with that little feeling of private triumph.

The only thing unfortunate about the whole setup of this and similar institutions is that the secular alternative is the alternative, with the default position of even something relatively insignificant like a notary application being that the rights and duties of that position will be enjoined upon the applicant by the fear of God, rather respect for the state or the institution. That seems a little bit backwards to me. When I apply for some kind of position within the formal structure of an institution, I am tacitly consenting to the legitimacy and authority of that institution, of its various powers and privileges- otherwise, why would I be applying to participate in the institution? If I'm not accepting its parameters, then in what possible sense could I ever be a member of, or a participant in, that institution?

Suppose that you wanted to join the army. In so doing, you necessarily take it upon yourself to obey the institutional hierarchy of the army. Nobody would ever join the army being legitimately surprised that they would, for example, be expected to follow orders given by their superiors. But what someone joining the army would find surprising would be if they found out that, should they ever transgress the army's rules, they will be sentenced and punished... by the firefighters' union of a foreign country. Or, perhaps more analogous to God's case, by a tribunal consisting of Sauron, Voldemort, and the Tooth Fairy. It doesn't make sense, for a variety of reasons - even if an army applicant believed in the Tooth Fairy, doesn't it seem like army punishments should be enacted and carried out within the army, since such punishments are for violations of some established army rule, whereas Tooth Fairy punishments should be for... whatever Tooth Fairies punish?

Such seems like a sensible structure for most of the institutions that we generate in western democracies: the price you pay for whatever benefits the institution offers (a paycheck, a notary seal, the divine rewards of Mormonism, etc.) are that you obey whatever conditions permit the institution to offer those rewards in the first place. The army as an institution could not give you the benefit of a paycheck if soldiers did not follow orders because such an army would quickly be destroyed by another army - the institution's conditions just are those conditions that permit the institution to provide benefits for their members. Institutions grow when the balance of the conditions and benefits favor the benefits, and they contract when the opposite is true.

Note that this structure receives a slight twist with things like charities: charities typically benefit more people than just their members. But the only real difference between an institution like a charity and an institution like the army is that the charity just has to specially designate some of its benefits as being for members and some for non-members. If someone is receiving money as the exchange for consenting to the strictures of the charity institution, that is designated a salary or a wage. If someone is receiving some reward for giving lots of money to the charity, that is designated recognition. Salaries and recognition are, of course, carefully distinguished from the actual products of the charity: money give to the poor is designated as a donation, and has that kind of extra moral elevation to it because no sacrifices to the institution are required to receive them, and we even frown on charities that condition their products on acceptance of internal institutional principles (that's why the great state of Massachusetts doesn't let Catholic charities condition orphanage services on the parents' being heterosexuals). But even armies at least peripherally offer some advantages to those who do not consent to obey army rules; I would not be punished for failing to salute a general, but I still get the protection of the army.

This is because the vast and complex web of institutions that makes up the quasi-super-institution that is the United States is designed to reward my paying taxes with certain protections like the army, but such is beyond the scope of the present point. The present point is that being punished by an institution is entirely appropriate for participants in that institution, and why it is utterly nonsensical for such punishment to come from outside the institution. I do not get punished for failing to salute a general because the general is not a higher rank than me (rank is an internal army designation of who may punish who for violating the conditions of the institution), but this does not entail that I have a higher rank than the general: I am outside of rank and so outside the institutional punishment structure for breaking rank.

That is why the slightly harsher sounding "pains and penalties" version of the oath (which is identical to the other version except for the replacement of "so help me God") is actually far more appropriate and really not at all "harsh" when you think about it. Perjury is a special class of lying; namely, it is lying in defiance of a specific oath taken in a specific institutional setting that is itself mitigated by specific, pre-set institutional boundaries. In this case, perjury means breaking the notary oath, and the pains and penalties of perjuring as such are the pains and penalties constructed by the state and administered by the state. This is exactly what we would expect on any sane institutional structure, that deviation from its sensible strictures would receive punishment from within.

The theistic version, then, seems like it ought to be the alternative, since it is complete opposition to the sensible structure of an institution. It essentially says, "these are the rules of the notary institution, but if you break them, we are completely unequipped to deal with you and so we would like to take this time to appeal to your fear of a being completely beyond our control." A being whose motives are unknown, to be sure, but one gets the feeling that he really cares about what you do in regards to your notary oath. He's like an outside mercenary hired to enforce rules that sensible democratic institutions enforce and police themselves.

The larger point of the general, radical difference between God and the institutions we've created scarcely needs to be made. Our institutions are democratic; God would be an unquestionable tyrant if he existed. Our institutions are generally opt-in, and where they aren't, their enforcement power is at least ostensibly based on very basic needs like survival (that is why the government says it can draft you); God doesn't really give you any flexibility in terms of "opting." Our institutions change according to ever-evolving circumstances, they grow and shrink, they begin to exist when there are needs to be met and cease to exist when the need ceases to exist, they are fallible, they are always in need of improvement; God would just be whatever he had been forever, if he existed.

Historically, institutions that have relied on external religious justifications have failed, far in excess of institutions that rely on external secular justifications or even other institutions. (We are hopefully about to see the cataclysmic failure of just such an institution in the most slavishly cultish theocracy the modern era has seen - that of the North Korean government.) When a secular institution comes to utterly depend upon another secular institution, the dependent will tend to merge with the benefactor until they become more or less indistinguishable, the way that music has merged with the recording industry, the way that authors have merged with the publishing industry, the way that the Republican Party has merged with the energy industry, the way that client states and vassal states tend to merge into super-states politically centered on the benefactor dominant state, so on, so on. In secular institutions, force and money are the dominant tools for subsuming client institutions into dominant ones, but institutions are rarely completely destroyed in western democracies: rather, they tend to change according to where the force or money goes, or they get subsumed into larger ones.

By contrast, institutions with purely supernaturalist external justifications tend to fail. Today, there are virtually no pressures on most Americans to be Catholic, except in those communities or families where such is expected, but the restraints imposed on members thereof are enormous: and the Church is rapidly shrinking as a consequence. The Inquisition as an institution did not get reabsorbed into the Church: it disappeared entirely, its offices and officers all gone, its authority ended because, once severed from the political power it held over secular institutions in Europe, it had only God to rely on - it had nothing to rely on. It just stopped.

Imagine setting a bowl of candy in front of a child and then putting a plastic elf next to the bowl, then telling the child that if they take any of the candy, the elf will punish them. The institution only works if the child actually believes in the power of the elf to punish them, and as soon as the kid figures out that the elf can't do it, the "institution" you've set up falls to shit. It has no more enforcement power over its own rules, so suddenly anybody who wants to can reap its benefits without accepting its conditions. Historically, religions that have not accounted for this problem have gone extinct, so the ones that survive have accounted for it, usually through some combination of claiming that their power comes from God when in fact it comes from secular force, money, social pressure, some combination thereof, and the threat of eternity in Hell (as well as various methods for hastening your arrival there).

The clearest implication of this model of normal secular institutions is that God has no role in our institutions because he doesn't do anything. He neither confers benefits nor enforces conditions. Where his temporal representatives have power of the mundane sort, then God is rather influential, but where the faithful are powerless, so too is God. The reason that I swore "on pains and penalties of perjury" to uphold the Constitution of Massachusetts is because I recognize the temporal authority of Massachusetts to condition participation in its specialized institutions upon certain rules. Nothing more.

The next clearest implication of this model is that anything with an ontological status like God's is irrelevant to democratic social institutions. This, I think, includes moral propositions. In the model presented here, notice that the questions are only about the ability of some factor x to either reward participation in or enforce the conditions of participation in an institution. The rightness or wrongness of some proposition will not matter outside of its ability to affect either outcome. This doesn't particularly bother me since I've long held that our moral language is so utterly broken as to be useless anyway, but hey, it's nice when it works out that my models end up being consistent with each other.

Humbug: a Christmas special

2011-12-24T06:57:00.000-08:00

Take a moment and think about how many lies it takes to make Christmas happen.

The litany begins as soon as children have acquired the beautiful gifts of language and intelligence they must develop in order to be effectively lied to. Santa Clause is where I'm going with this one, obviously, but Santa Clause is in a special class of lies because the people telling it know that they're lying, know that their child will eventually figure out that they're lying, and they will fight to protect their child from finding out the truth. If you tell a small child that there is no Santa Clause, their parents will usually respond as if you've said or done something rude. Their anger will usually be expressed with some locution like "ruining the magic of Christmas," but think about the scope of the lie that these people are telling their children. They are teaching their children that moral excellence should be pursued because of material rewards from an omniscient elf-slaver, not for its own goods. They are teaching their children that the expensive garbage they get for Christmas doesn't come out of their parents' pockets, out of the hard-earned money that they spend all year laboring for, but from a supernatural being whose motives are as inexplicable as his methods.

And if it isn't the magic gift-giver in the sky you're telling your children about, it's the other magic gift-giver in the sky: you know the one, the zombified madman who, in a miracle that only happens about once every ten to twenty years according to the combination of human superstitions, emerged from a virgin vagina into the company of some adoring astrologers, an unusually quiet father, and a mass genocide of children that is mentioned nowhere in history outside of the Bible. They are already fawning over the various shiny things that the Bethlehem religious tourism industry has crassly deployed to make a little money off the otherwise-unremarkable place where this miracle supposedly occurred (or was that Nazareth?). Half the story is an ancient cultural construct, the other half is a modern one. How many kings came to visit Jesus at his birth? They're never described as kings, or numbered, or named - and no child anywhere in America this year will be asked to think how strange that here they have eye witnesses to the greatest miracle in human history and nobody bothers to ask them their names. Not even Jesus's parents are curious. But then, they're busy tending to the little bundle in the manger, which must be hard work because Jesus was born in a stable - or was that a house?

And why pick December 25th? Because Christmas is about bullshit, that's why. Christmas goes out of its way to be full of shit, about history and otherwise. You know this point by know; it's a tiring refrain: Christmas is bullshit from the Norse, bullshit from the Gauls, bullshit from the Teutons, bullshit from a bunch of other pagans, and bullshit from the Christians all mixed together in one big, clogged, frothy bull toilet bowl. There's not a thing you do on Christmas that wasn't pried from the trampled ruins of somebody else's culture. Even the day was picked to align with the solstice celebrations of the astrology-obsessed idiots whose cultures were only a hair's breadth more scientifically literate than the Christians who exterminated them. In keeping with the spirit of Christmas (lying to children), children are usually taught that Christmas is a Christian holiday to celebrate the birth of Jesus.

When the children are finished being lied to about Santa and Jesus, they'll no doubt be exposed to some godawful display of pure sap designed to tickle your deepest emotions with a precision matched only by the pornography industry. Perhaps your favorite is the Charlie Brown one, a stupid little story the point of which seems to be to me that a lifetime of utter failure is OK because Jesus was born in a manger. When the totality of Charlie Brown's utter incompetence comes raining down on him in a single massive shit-storm, it's up to Linus to deliver a heartrending speech to save the day - and he just tells the gathered children the same pagan nonsense the Bible does, and rather than solve any particular problems, it just cows the others into such pious stupefaction that they go right back to singing the contrived cultural holocaust that is American Christmas music. If you watch this sickening display of shameless profiteering by the atheist who invented Charlie Brown all the way to the end, you can even see the children making the same face that Charles M. Schultz made when his head was buried in advertisers' laps when the Charlie Brown Christmas special was first written.

You're a shill for cynical capitalists, Charlie Brown.

But the best lies are the ones they tell each other today about the dangers facing this sacred and magisterial holiday (you know, the one on which only lies are permitted). About the War on Christmas, and how the government is going to be outlawing Christianity and "Merry Christmas" and all this any day now (whenever they're done spending your tax dollars putting up cartoonish little Jesus displays on city hall lawns and other public spaces owned by Christianity), which actually has some precedent - Christmas has been banned in America before. It was by this sinister little cabal of liberal atheist secular-progressives we today refer to as the Puritans, who obviously wanted to outlaw Christmas because of their general hatred for Christianity. But I guarantee you, somewhere within the sphere of your friends and relatives, at least a handful of dull-eyed fools are staggering around shaking a faux-offended finger at any poor store clerk who dares wish them "happy holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas." Because, in America, it's either Christ's way or the highway.

Because they want to protect the sanctity of Christmas, its good old-fashioned Christian character. The wholesome family story, the one that teaches good values and about God's love for humanity.

The one that was grafted onto a week-long pagan orgy to make conversion less inconvenient for the sinners, whose own story is a mixture of pagan hokum, Christian hokum, and our own hokum, where Christians lie to their children about only behaving morally for the material rewards from a fat peeping Tom who the Christians themselves know to be a lie, stuffing their fat asses with bad food ripped from factory-raised inanimate carbon blobs that some euphemistically refer to as "pigs" and "turkeys" while bad music written by advertisers plays over the radio because these advertisers have invented your childhood and your very notion of sentimentality to sell you things, things that we collectively shill out almost a quarter of a trillion dollars on it every year, unironically dropping a thousand dollars on a television to celebrate the supposed birth of a man who said "give everything you own to the poor." We buy them from stores that exploit the unemployed, dragging them into poverty-waged seasonal work because they know that people without jobs around Christmastime will do anything for any money. The really clever stores will run "charity drives" to get your brand loyalty up, then resell the crap you left for charity right back to you.

Everyone is lying to you about everything on Christmas. People act nice and cheerful because they're supposed to. It's "the spirit of Christmas" to pin your cheeks up and force a smile like you've had a couple of nerves in your face permanently attached to a car battery: "the spirit of Christmas" is lying to people about everything you can. From Santa to how happy you are to see old uncle so-and-so again, from Jesus to your appreciation to either some piece of crap you'll never use or a gift card that says "I'm only giving you this because I have to give you something but I can't just give you cash," from how nice it is to hear the old songs from childhood again like you've been hearing on loop for the last twelve hours a day every day for the last month to how your once-a-year appearance at church looks totally sincere in God's eyes and everybody at your church is so impressed with your piety, I say humbug on it. We shouldn't need a mass market festival, decked in pious platitudes, shrouded in lies and superstitions, to enjoy getting together with our families once in a while.

And that's the real secret: we don't. We do not need Christmas to get everything that we love about Christmas without everything we hate about Christmas. Your family would love to have more get-togethers, and they would love it even more if they could do it without the formalized insanity that is the Christmas season. Buying things for each other that are fun or useful is a nice thing to do, but like with all good deeds, it's hardly so good when you're compelled to do it by an inane but generally unquestionable social pressure. Christmas even takes that away from you; it automatically makes every good thing that happens on it seem less sincere, the same way it seems less sincere to give up your seat on the bus for an old person when five other people before you just did the exact same thing, the same way it seems less sincere to show affection for someone on Valentine's Day than on other days (even though Valentine's Day is about affection). Humbug, I say. Even the phrase I use to express my dislike for the holiday and the season comes from a goddamn Christmas special! Dammit Christmas, you've even taken away my ability to express my hatred for Christmas.

The misanthropic humanist

2011-12-20T07:30:00.001-08:00

The Lyndon Larouche supporters are two blocks away from my office parading their Hitler-mustachioed Obama posters and hurling epithets at passers-by, demanding more attention than I would even give the Salvation Army homophobes extorting money from well-meaning shoppers for their parody-paramilitary anti-gay crusade who are just one block farther. Huddling around the Park Street T stop, the Larouchers greeted me not long after a parade of ads on the side of the subway for another awful Christian scam, the Daybreak “crisis pregnancy” center, where young women who need help and honesty can be tricked into an evangelism session for the low, low price of one phone call plus their dignity and future. I prepared for work this morning while, on the news, the Beloved Successor stared dull-eyed at the casket of the bloodthirsty psychopath who recently left us to join his father in the Eternal Presidency of the DPRK. Surrounded by wailing North Koreans, I saw his eyes, no intelligence there, no glimmer of a better future for his people swimming between his chubby cheeks and his drooping brow – just a stillborn's gaze, staring blankly at nothing in particular as though surveying faces in the clouds.

Syria's latest crackdown preceded that story on the news, which was followed by Egypt's – the military is still undecided about how much power to concede to its next biggest competitor there, the budding Islamic dictatorship that sees its concessions over Sinai as the greatest offense to Egyptian national pride and patriotic anti-Semitism in its history. Those other protestors, the Occupiers, are nowhere to be seen on this broadcast, which segued nicely into the obnoxious cultural holocaust that is the standard playlist of badly-covered bad Christmas semi-squawking “music” screeching over invitations to buy, buy, buy. The Catholic League has a still shot of the Grinch on its website, demanding without irony that we remember Christ as the true meaning of the pagan nonsense that has become Christian nonsense that has become capitalist nonsense.

Christopher Hitchens died between Qaddafi and Kim Jong-Il. Survived by Henry Kissinger, the Pope, Bill Donohue, and so many of the rest of his enemies who in a just universe would be selling wilted single roses from dingy stolen shopping carts beside the Larouchers and the rest of their intellectual equals. Hitchens leaves behind a towering corpus of some of the most brilliant political writing, literary criticism, and humanist philosophy we've ever seen. The great misanthropic humanist is off to get the peace and quiet that Kaufmann promised him, the death that comes as a deliverance to the life lived with intensity – and as a theft to the life of great things left unfinished. The great things Hitchens deserved will never be finished. The cultist-kings of North Korea are marching boldly into the next generation. Our oldest idiots (seriously, is Lyndon Larouche even still alive?) are still pestering us on the subway, when they aren't busy sweeping away our democratic revolutions or telling us which superstitions might have the best angle on our reproductive choices.

I first encountered Hitchens after Harris and Dawkins but before Kaufmann and Epicurus. (He introduced me to the latter.) Atheism I came to slowly but inexorably, and it was fun. New converts know the intensity that grips you when you think you have stumbled upon a rare pearl at the beach. You want to show everyone, you want to make them understand its beauty, to see in it the same beautiful reflections you see. Hume and his kind had already been impressed upon me rather firmly by my classes, but the airy, blandly optimistic formulation of humanism we see throughout our movement did not ring strongly with me. Humanism is predicated on a notion I believed false: that humanity was worth it, that we can improve ourselves, grow, learn, that our potential and our science and our achievements and our culture is a treasure of this universe. No, this is a species of idiots, of small minds parading around their occasional great mind as the symbols of them all rather than the exception that despises them. Misanthropy and humanism do not mix, and they did not mix for me.

Hitchens rang particularly strongly with me because I saw in him the same general disdain for fools, for boring people, for blandness and predictability, all of which he hated as strongly as any of the war criminals he denounced or fraudulent saints he exposed. He had the rare combination of a vibrant personality and a powerful mind, a talent for wit and a fondness for irony that made him seem authentic in the face of not just the people he criticized, but of my own fellow humanists who blindly parrot nonsensical statements about how our species is worth it. It isn't – we didn't deserve Hitchens any more than we deserve the Kim Jong-Ils and Lyndon Larouches of this world, but we generated them, and for every fool we crush, berate, and expel from civil society, there are a thousand more in her or his place.

But Hitchens taught me how to cope with the brutality of our species. He taught me that it's OK to say mean things to bad people, that humanism has the nuance to it that humans best improve humanity by improving other humans. By being a loudmouth, by being a gadfly, by being an agitator, through brutal honesty and relentless criticism of our worst elements, we empower our best ones. It's fun to read Hitchens for this very reason, that you feel stronger in your own convictions, you feel more just in your humanism, when you read that humanity's own greatest minds agree with your occasional (or core) misanthropy. They engage with it, and make something useful of it. The blasé humanism of Paul Kurtz or Bertrand Russell or even some of the bizarrely, unexpectedly humanist French existentialists is bookended by Freud to the aft and Hitchens to the fore, a fitting successor to those humanists who know that humanism is not to humanity as Christianity is to Christ, but that humanism is to humanity as plumbers are to plumbing.

We have a job to do. We have battles unfinished, battles unbegun. They are marching around Park Street with Hitler-mustachioed Obama posters. They are running for president in 2012, and fighting in Egypt and Syria to make sure that nobody gets to run for anything in those places ever again. They surround us, and their net is closing, as it has been for two thousand years. Are you a humanist? Do you drape your affections over the backs of the brutes and buffoons who are your fellow half-baboons, or do you keep them to yourself and distribute them only to the worthy? Hitchens taught us how not to be bland or blind humanists, but how to see that our potential can be met only through work, through our minds, through being unafraid to use our own minds to criticize God, gods, demigods, man-gods, man-children, kings, presidents, Popes, saints, and any other idiot, liar, crook, swindler, thug, ruffian, theocrat, cultist, dictator, fraud, huckster, or superstitious rube who dares infringe on the great dignity that could be ours if only we stopped giving respect where none is due and paid lip service to nothing and nobody.

But perhaps the finest lesson Hitchens ever taught was that he offered in one of the parades of interviews he gave to reporters eager to get the deathbed confession on tape. Asked as he routinely was if he regretted and of it, the smoking, the drinking, knowing what he knows now, he said: no. No, a life such as his sometimes needed one more bottle to keep the night going with the great minds who were his entourage, sometimes needed smoke after smoke just to stay sharp around those who do not tolerate boring people. The cancer is awful, he said, the cancer is a pain indescribable, dying before seeing his children mature is a regret that cannot be assuaged, but for a life such as his, it was worth it. That the life lived intensely cannot be sustained but that it is worth living anyway. His humanity would have been nothing to him if not the freedom to abuse it to whatever ends required to live it fully. What could such a person have to feel guilty about on their deathbed? What deathbed repentance, be it from sin or mere temporal vice, could do service to so fine a product? None, I say, which is why we heard none – we heard only his deadlines met, his obligations fulfilled, his mind never slowing until it stopped.

And we are cheaper for it, but the battle yawning long before us commands our attention too closely to continue pattering about with our regrets and our mourning.

Sunday Argument #12: The Misanthropic Principle

2011-11-28T11:01:00.000-08:00

There is a widely-abused principle that gets bandied about occasionally in the philosophy of religion and philosophy of science called the anthropic principle. The principle itself is nothing more than the borderline tautology that we should be unsurprised that, given our existence, the universe we inhabit is compatible with our existence. (Stronger forms of the principle, holding for example that the universe must be configured such that it could contain observers, are pure fantasy in my opinion.) The principle has been abused in the sense that it has been ventured as some kind of rebuttal to the "fine-tuning" argument for God's existence, which tries to infers God's existence from the configuration of the various fundamental constants of the universe, but the principle is useless for that purpose. The design argument does not say that our existence is surprising given the configuration of the universe, it says that the configuration of the universe itself is surprising.

I'd like to front a similar principle narrowly tailored to do a better job in repulsing the claims of the design argument. Elsewhere, I've argued that the design argument isn't an argument at all since the explanation it offers (God's existence) doesn't seem to make the existence of the universe at all, much less its configuration, any more likely. Admittedly this turns on a lot of assumptions about God's own character that, while I think are generally indisputable based on the various predicates of God's existence (his perfection, his eternality, etc.), might make that kind of analysis a little bit weaker. So, I'll offer something a little bit simpler.

The anthropic principle is, like I said, very nearly a tautology, an irrefutably and therefore rather boring. It holds merely that:

If we exist, it isn't surprising that we exist somewhere that's compatible with our existence.

Boring, right? That's the anthropic principle. But to slightly narrow its edge against the design argument, I'd like to offer what I think is a similarly self-substantiating principle that I'd like to call the Misanthropic Principle:

If our flourishing is the central concern of existence, we should be surprised to find obstacles to our flourishing.

The misanthropic principle is I just think as self-evident as the anthropic one. The only versions of theism that really matter are ones that hold something like the antecedent clause of the misanthropic principle, that existence is somehow about humanity, that the cosmos is a story in which humanity is at least one of the main players. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism definitely assert this, Hinduism at least has most of the major morally-salient action taking place in human lives, and even non-religious supernaturalisms attribute some kind of supremacy to human flourishing, like Tipler's "observer-dependent universe" baloney. In short, I want to oppose, in as few words as possible, the notion that the "fine-tuning" of our universe is for us.

It should be obvious that I am trying to mold a version of the problem of evil here, and that is quite correct: I think that obstacles to our flourishing are genuine obstacles to theism. Theism writ large is of course committed mainly to the claim that God exists, but just like atheism, theism is hardly just the claim that there is a God. It is just as essential to theism that God created the universe that he created it with us in mind as its central concern. The cosmology of the Bible just is the cosmology of humanity: it is focused on our creation, our souls, and our ultimate annihilation. God acts in history, on these traditions, only viz-a-viz his relationship with humanity.

Those same versions of theism stipulate that God loves us and that our flourishing is his main goal, whether that comes by the various rewards he offers us in this life or the promises he uses to compel our moral actions with the afterlife in mind. The misanthropic principle is little more than a starting point; it is the root concession I ask of theism that things that are bad for us militate against theism insofar as they require an explanation; given the promises we are made that there is a God who loves us, plans for our success, and operates with our ultimate well-being in mind, we should at least be surprised, we should be entitled to an explanation, when we encounter obstacles thereto.

I also refer to the principle as the misanthropic principle because, if God were a complete misanthrope, that would seriously de-fang any surprise we might want to express at apparent evils in the world. I think that, given the combined facts of the misanthropic principle and those of apparent evil, a misanthropic God is a better explanation for the universe than theism but still a worse explanation than atheism. Theism defends two enormous grounds, that God exists and that God loves us despite all appearances to the contrary, misanthropic theism (lets call it) defends only one enormous ground, that God exists (it need not explain evil because the existence of a misanthropic God explains it just fine), and atheism defends zero enormous grounds, only the universally indisputable claim that the evidence shows what the evidence shows and nothing else in particular.

Sunday Argument #11: Against Jesus the philosopher.

2011-11-07T12:50:00.000-08:00

I. His philosophy, such as it is

Shortly before losing the 2000 election to Al Gore and subsequently becoming president, George W. Bush famously identified Jesus Christ as his favorite philosopher. While much of the focus on refuting Christianity has lately been turned to the actual historical claims of the New Testament and the historicity of its most prominent characters, President Bush suggests a woefully underexplored territory for disputation, that being the actual "philosophy" generated by Jesus Christ as it is received in the New Testament.

I put philosophy in scare-quotes above because Jesus actually did very little of what I recognize as philosophy. He put forth few identifiable philosophical propositions, preferring instead to rely on deliberately obfuscatory fables to convey his message. Much the rest of his teaching comes as simple bald assertion unsupported by argumentation, for example his various moral teachings and his varying approval of Old Testament law. Even one of the only compendiums of the actual "philosophy" of Jesus, published by Thomas Jefferson from the few tatters of the Bible that didn't offend Jefferson's own powerful intellect, contains remarkably little actual philosophy, instead mostly providing a biographical sketch with a few aphorisms that, while containing some moral claims, do not really much amount to philosophical argument.

Broadly speaking, however, Jesus does clearly identify himself with certain large categories of obsolete philosophical thought. His moral pronouncements reflect a strongly Stoic influence, commanding rejection of money and family alike in order to keep one's focus on God. His moral pronouncements are largely derivative of the ancient legal code of Israel and the sayings of its own philosophers, and come in the form of moral commands (the "golden rule") rather than meta-ethical statements (which would be something like, "the golden rule is morally good because God commands it"); while he is not explicit on this point in any of the writings attributed to him, we can clearly infer that Jesus subscribed to some version of divine command theory, which is the defunct meta-ethical claim that morality depends upon God and that goodness derives from God. He frequently quoted and misquoted Old Testament passages in order to support his moral framework, but did little to actually give reasons why his moral pronouncements were either compelling or even sensible.

The brand of theism to which he subscribed is weird. It is a modified monotheism in which God, the celestial father of the universe, has various avatars, of which Jesus is one, as well as the mysterious Spirit of Truth, who performs some intercessory function on God's behalf that is not well spelled-out in Christian theology. Later followers of Jesus seem to have mistaken this figure with the Holy Spirit, which is an entirely separate construct from the Spirit of Truth. In this kind of avatar monotheism, God is assisted by these various spirits, and Jesus also occasionally mentions angels in passing. The bulk of his preoccupation with demidivine creatures is not with angels, but with demons, invisible avatars of God's opposite, Satan, who cause pestilence, disease, and mental illness, and who can be dispelled with a few brief words from Jesus or one of his delegates.

His moral theory is confused by his theism because, even though Jesus commands a love of God and a rejection of the world, it is unclear from his own teaching what the reasons are that one should do such things. The great beneficiary of his theological estate, Paul, the true founder of Christianity, interprets Jesus's moral theory as essentially irrelevant, holding that divine rewards are apportioned not among the good and the evil but among the Christian and the non-Christian; Jesus seems to believe that God will provide earthly rewards for obedience to his laws, but unearthly rewards go to the faithful alone.

Curiously, though, Jesus omits from his plagiarism of the Ten Commandments any of those commandments that describe the ritual features of Judaism associated with love and respect for God: while Jesus reiterates his predecessors' proscriptions of adultery, murder, perjury, and theft, he omits commands from the same section of Jewish law outlawing depictions of God, misuse of his name, or work on God's dedicated reverential day. His theological position is a shift away from the distant, fearful relationship with God established in the Old Testament towards a more terrestrial, almost pantheistic God, whose domain (or "kingdom") is actually physically present in this world inside of the people who follow Jesus's ascetic Jewish mysticism.

His moral system is unique for its historical context, however, in Jesus's rejection of what I call moral essentialism and which most people call racism. Throughout human history, we have tended to assign certain moral characteristics to racial categories qua those races: Jews are greedy, Mexicans are lazy, the Orientals are wily and cunning, and so on. Jesus, on the other hand, is concerned with the characteristics of individuals rather than of peoples. He exemplifies this in the parable of the Good Samaritan. In Jesus's time, the Samaritans were despised widely because of their imprimatur as a mongrel breed of inherently defective Jews, but Jesus rightly points out in this parable that the qualities of the individual as a moral actor are utterly distinct from the misguided racial categories we naturally pigeonhole our enemies into.

Jesus was a nihilist about free will. In a famous episode in Gesthemene, Jesus begs God not to let him be crucified, unless it is part of God's divine plan- Jesus seems resigned to his fate, which he believed was spelled out in a prefigured plan, which God was free to change but from which Jesus was not free to deviate. He saw poverty not as a product of human choices but as a natural, inherent condition of the Earth to be dealt with by all generations. Despite his clear affiliation with a theistic version of determinism, Jesus nonetheless makes moral commandments, indicating that Jesus believes that concepts like right and wrong are still coherent when there is no such thing as meaningful choice in the universe.

The only episode in the chronicles of Jesus that plausibly mirrors normal philosophical discourse is Jesus's encounter with the enigmatic Jewish philosopher Nicodemus, who is thought to have been one of the intellectual founders of the Rabbinical movement in Judaism, though this attribution may be anachronistic because the dominant train of thought in Jewish history has been that the Rabbinical school did not develop until after the destruction of the Jewish temple, which occurred decades after Jesus's execution. In this dialogue is found a wealth of information about Jesus's views on truth, the nature of the mind, epistemology, free will, and the proper relationship between God and humans.

In this dialogue, Jesus fortifies his alliance with the divine command theory of morality by identifying evil just as the formal rejection of God's presence in the universe (a very pantheistic notion that has been lost on his intellectual descendants)- God is to light as evil action is to darkness. The one entails not just a rejection of the other, but a natural exclusion of it. He identifies the physical world and the supernatural world as completely exclusive and non-overlapping, and it hardly needs mentioning that from this we can derive that Jesus was what I've called in the past a substance dualist, one who believes that the mind is basically distinct and separable from the body, unalike it in every way, though the mind does exert an incomplete measure of control over the body- incomplete because Jesus recognizes the impervious natural human inclination to defy the teachings of the Old Testament. To Jesus, our bodies actually cause us to sin, as opposed to bodies being completely subject to the mind. Elsewhere in his discourse with Nicodemus, Jesus identifies claims about the supernatural as being somehow epistemically distinct from and perhaps naturally more suspect, or at least more confusing, than ordinary speech about the ordinary world. And, to Jesus, our spirits seem only to be truly free, almost random and chaotic, if they are already in agreement with his odd version of theism. It is ambiguous if other spirits are actually free.

Finally, we here see the fullest statement of Jesus's version of divine command morality: the spirit that is affiliated with Jesus's moral commands is not guilty of any moral turpitude, but the spirit that is not so affiliated is automatically guilty of all moral turpitude. The sole criterion for moral excellence on this moral theory is allegiance to Jesus's version of pantheism. Living by "truth," which appears to be Jesus's own interpretation of the Old Testament plus his teachings on various theological constructs like the Spirit of Truth and the Holy Spirit, is the linchpin of his moral claims.

To recap, the "philosophy" of Jesus can be broadly characterized by:

Theism, possibly pantheism.
Hardcore substance dualism about minds and other supernatural substances, including God, Satan, demons, angels, and human spirits. Bodies and minds aren't just separate, they're often enemies.
Compatibilism, which is the view that predetermination and free will are compatible.
A divine command moral theory that probably contains no meta-ethical statements, with the possibly exception of the claim that morality just is affiliation with Jesus's own interpretation of the Old Testament and of salvation.
Stoicism about the good things of this world.

And finally, notice that Jesus does not ever make any arguments for the existence of God- he does not dispute with atheists, but with other theists.

II. The problems with it

Criticism of Christianity often begins by targeting those doctrines deemed central to it by Paul and the churches that sprung up around him: the Trinity doctrine, the sacramental rites, things of that sort. I and others have for centuries generated long and I think overpowering critiques of the theological ephemera of later Christian churches, so I will not belabor them here. Jesus did not speak at all about doctrinal issues like Trinitarianism, and he seems to explicitly reject the complete identification with himself as God, calling attention to the yawning differences between his own goodness and God's, his own will and God's, even his own location and God's. So those points I will not belabor.

Any critique of Jesus's philosophy will of course begin with the premise that Jesus was neither God nor himself infallible. By definition, if Jesus was God or otherwise infallible, his philosophical pronouncements would have to have the force of pure truth because such a being would by definition be perfect and incapable of such grotesque error as I think Jesus commits in his systems. I will let the question of Jesus's divinity settle for now, since I think it a foregone conclusion that the doctrine is false and probably not even historical to the original Christian community.

Critiquing the divinity of Jesus likewise entails a critique of his historicity. Again, this question is not germane to a discussion of his philosophy. I think that our historical picture of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle is probably woefully inaccurate because our only records of them come from contrived dialogues written in a disturbingly predictable fiction genre style handed down decades or centuries later by usually anonymous conduits. But, it is still meaningful to dispute Aristotelian philosophy, because it is the body of propositions that matter, not the historicity of the speaker. That being said, however, it absolutely offers demerits to Jesus's pronouncements on the afterlife, for example, if Jesus never existed, or if the New Testament is otherwise unreliable as a document of history, which I think it is. I do not for a moment think that the historical critiques of Christianity are without fatal force against the religion or the bulk of its claims on things like the afterlife, because those specific metaphysical propositions about heaven, hell, and who goes to which one utterly depend on a stupendous and supernatural character that I think probably is a work of fiction, or at least majorly contrived. But, as with our probably-apocryphal Greek super-philosophers, I think that their categorical philosophical statements can still be meaningfully discussed absent a historical figure to point to for their origin.

This fine distinction between those propositions tainted by Christianity's ahistoricity (Jesus's pronouncements on the afterlife, for example) and those easily separable from the historical detritus of Christianity (that the mind and body are distinct, or that one should do unto others as they would do unto you, for example) likewise extends to Jesus's opinions on things like demons. They are strange sayings, today confined to the lips of either madmen in the madhouses or multimillionaires in the megachurches, but they likewise aren't interesting to a critique of Christian philosophy. Aristotle taught that women have fewer teeth than men: it is an oddly avoidable, embarrassing error (he could have just counted) that has no bearing whatsoever on his other philosophical claims, but that would serve as positive refutation of any claim by Aristotle to infallibility or divinity. Same with Jesus: I will avoid the bizarre cast of supernatural characters Jesus seems to find lurking around every corner, and restrict myself as narrowly as possible to his ethical and metaphysical claims.

As with all philosophers, both Jesus's methods and his results are open for debate- the contents of his system and the tools he uses to derive those contents can both be faulted. His philosophical method is utterly interwoven with his version of theism. They are completely inseparable. His ethical claims completely rely on the value of ancient Jewish law for their force. His Jewish audience would have found this reliance on ancient dogma endearing, but I do not. As I've said, Jesus gives us no real meta-ethical statements: he may tell us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves, but he gives us no reasons why we should do so, except that God likes it when we do that and that the Old Testament says we should. His method for knowing what God likes just is reading the Old Testament, and he provides us with no reasons for thinking that the Old Testament is at all related to God's own opinions. There is no justification for his moral teachings, outside of their being God's own opinions.

The classic statement of the inadequacy of subrogating the common burden of all moral theorists to provide justifications for moral claims to God, chalking up the "rightness" of your system merely to its agreement with God, is attributed to Euthyphro, who rightly pointed out that the divine command theory of morality basically leaves the moral question still open, just knocked back a step. Is God's command right because God says it? Then either it is because God himself is the measure of goodness, in which case morality is arbitrary and subject to change at God's whim and therefore not universally and eternally binding as we like our moral claims to be, or the claim is good because God is deploying a standard of goodness external to himself, in which case we are still left with the question of whether God successfully meets that standard or not, and if he must meet that standard, then the standard is still external to God and God is therefore unnecessary to firmly grounding moral claims (the standard is self-grounding, on this objection), and since God is not necessary for morality then attributing the core of your meta-ethic to him seems premature.

And even if there were a known external standard, and it were known that God met it, it would remain an open question as to the precise nature of God's involvement in enforcing that command. If the chief reason to obey a principle is that it is good, then God's command behind it simply seems unnecessary. But if the chief reason is to escape the various graphic torments God will inflict upon you if you deviate from his scheme, then it seems that God has twisted what could have been a perfectly good moral claim into a question of sheer pragmatics. If you do what is right because of gunpoint duress and not because it is right, it hardly seems accurate to say that you act rightly in obeying that duress. Rather, you are acting in the kind of radically self-centered self-interest that moral theorists like to pretend is beneath all properly-constructed moral theories.

But Jesus's moral system is made entirely incoherent by juxtaposing the claim that morality derives from God's commands with the claim that, at bottom, God doesn't really care how you act: his punishments and rewards go to believers and unbelievers, not rightdoers and wrongdoers. This is a fundamental tension in his system: Jesus cogitates endlessly on our obligations to the poor and the sick, but ultimately decides that God doesn't care about those things more than he cares about whether you believe in his son - and yet God is the supposed fount of all goodness, supposedly himself perfectly good. Paradoxically, we are admonished, on the foundation of a debunked moral theory, to obey imperatives that come from God that God does not particularly care about, in order to show our love for God even though God only returns that love if we believe in his son, not if we follow those very commandments.

It does not help the case for Jesus's moral system that he champions what we today call vicarious redemption, which is the facile theological term that in normal conversation is called scapegoating. Jesus promulgates the doctrine not that sin condemns you but that salvation forgives your sins, but that if you accept the offer of salvation, you are not guilty of your sins, and if you do not accept the offer, you are automatically guilty of your sins. It would be a straightforward and agreeable matter to say that the acceptance of forgiveness means that your guilt is rendered inconsequential by the victim of your crime, but it is an entirely different thing altogether to say that forgiveness deletes the fact of your guilt. Guilt for a crime means something like, you actually performed proscribed actions x and y, and while after-the-fact forgiveness can nullify the contingencies of your punishment, you cannot change the fact of guilt retroactively any more than you change what your birthname was by changing your name. Had the salvation system advocated here limited itself to the mere forgiveness of an acknowledged debt instead of introducing the concept of absolution, it would not encounter this difficulty. But Jesus does not die for your debts, or for your punishment, he dies for your sins.

Most moral theorists would say that for a choice to have any moral salience, there must be some actual choice going on. Striking a stranger for no good reason seems eminently contrary to most sane moral theories, but the matter becomes a good deal less certain if someone commanding the action holds a gun to your head. Likewise, the choice to prefer sloth over labor is generally worthy of disdain, but if one is paralyzed or otherwise rendered immobile, it seems churlish to hold them to the same standard. Choice makes moral decisions meaningful. This becomes a problem for Jesus's moral claims both on account of his fatalistic, predeterministic theism, and on his account of the relationship between the body and the mind.

Generally, compatibilism in philosophy means that even though the laws of physics make the universe predictable, minds still make choices that are rightly called free because total randomness cannot be free will, the alternative to a law-bound universe is total randomness, and the operation of universal law on brains is only to compel them to choose between limited options but not zero options on questions of self-interest or other interests. In short, atheistic compatibilism works because at least in principle there are multiple possible outcomes to any given situation. Theistic determinism, however, is an order of magnitude harsher. It stipulates that, as Isaiah says, God is literally the author of history: we are no more free to deviate from God's divine plan than the characters in a novel are free to act other than as they are written. There is only one, single divine plan, known in intimate detail from beginning to end, and even if God's own son begs for the plan to be bent to prevent his own personal suffering, God won't allow it: it is a merciless system that couldn't possibly leave open any meaningful choices.

Not only that, recall that Jesus's description of the relationship between the body and the mind holds that your eye can cause you to sin. This is a fine bit of flair. Jesus does not say that you may use your eyes to sin, he says that your eyes can cause you to sin. Sin, which we usually conflate with moral wrongdoing, is what God punishes, but it apparently isn't anything at all to do with free decisions because it seems that other entities can sin for you, or at least make the choice to sin for you. And you are morally remiss if you do not tear that eye out straightaway- at least, morally remiss insofar as it is in your best interests to avoid eternal hellfire.

I will end the discussion of Jesus's moral system with a parting word about his most famous saying, that one should do unto others as you would have them do unto you, a corruption of Old Testament phraseology to identical effect. Suppose that I really, really want to have sex with someone, but sadly, the object of my affection does not reciprocate. Under the Golden Rule, oughtn't I rape her? I want her to have sex with me, so I do unto her what I would have her do unto me: I have sex with her. If the question of consent seems to break the parallel to you, then just imagine that I'm particularly depraved and I really fancy being violated in the way I ultimately violate this person. The Golden Rule seems to allow this. Jesus offers us no good reasons to subscribe to the Golden Rule, and this seems like one good reason to reject. Now, let me turn away from Jesus's clearly defective moral system to those other aspects of his philosophy that I find to be broken.

Jesus's opinions about the foundations of truth are not troubled by problems of contradicting his other doctrines as much as they are troubled by sheer internal incoherence. As I've said, Jesus makes a point of predicting the arrival and behavior of the so-called Spirit of Truth, and frequently indicates that truth is communicated best in opaque parables and in the stories of old. You see versions of this deep intermixing of God with truth in the "worldview-obsessed" philosophy of modern Christianity. Christian philosophy today throws around the term "Christian worldview" like they have a stutter, and it generally refers to that set of fundamental propositions (what is truth, what is the meaning of life, etc.) that are both dominant human concerns and which are best resolved by Christian theism. Jesus and his descendants see truth as something in need of grounding, in need of external justification, and that Christian theism makes sense of the distinction between truth and falsehood. As Douglas Wilson said to Christopher Hitchens, echoing a proposition raised in JP Moreland's apologetical compendium Scaling the Secular City, if there is no God, there is no truth- nothing grounds truth, nothing makes sense of the question "what is true?" other than the existence of the Christian God.

This central proposition of both Jesus's own philosophy and later theistic interpretations thereof rests upon a glaring category error that is self-refuting. Truth does not need a grounding. Truth does not require external justification; it needs no spirit to speak for it, since its universal absence is impossible. Consider the following proposition:

If there is no God, then there is no truth.

You see the problem: the proposition gives us conditions on which it would be true that nothing is true: the proposition is self-refuting. If "If there is no God, then there is no truth" is true, then if there is no God, it is true that nothing is true, so at least one thing is true, so something is true and nothing is true all at the same time. Any system that seeks to condition the very existence, the very possibility, of truth on some proposition external to truth and falsehood themselves is equally demented in its ambit and equally doomed to prompt self-termination.

Questions about bodies and spirits, minds and souls, all turn on resolvable contingencies of empirical study that have been resolved: it does not appear that we have any minds that are independent of our brains, and we do not have any evidence of minds that operate in the absence of a physical correlate. Jesus stipulates the existence of a number of disembodied minds, both in the vast cast of fictional characters that haunt every corner of the world he lives in and in every single individual person. Whether you categorize such things as essential doctrines or as the mere metaphysical excreta of his system, like demons and angels and things like that, there are more serious difficulty's for Jesus's own philosophical system than trivialities like being utterly at odds with centuries of indisputable mountains of neuroscientific evidence about from where our minds originate. The mere possibility that God could have created disembodied minds in a disembodied mind-space (heaven is supposedly something like this) and also could have created a sin-riddled physical world whose sole purpose (to Jesus) is to transmutate over historical time into the kingdom of God means that God basically was morally deficient in creating both physical and immaterial reality at the same time.

To see what I mean, imagine two options for child-rearing. One way is to create your child happy and keep them happy in perpetuity without interruption. Another way is to create your child unhappy, make them unhappier for a few decades, and then keep them happy in perpetuity, subject to certain conditions about their beliefs, of course. The former way is obviously inferior to the latter, and God could have done either one - but he chose both, the intermingling of systems of which one is inherently inferior to the other. God shows that, just as with the angels and demons that Jesus attests to, God could have created human minds (souls) in heaven, complete with free will, and let them accept or reject him. Don't create them in Eden, populated with dangerous animals and poisonous trees- this seems like a blunder, one which God should have foreseen. No, simply create them in heaven.

Recall that Jesus supposedly wields great power over demons: they do exactly as commanded, and they fear him. If he wants them in some pigs, they end up in some pigs. So it seems that these demon creatures are not free, or at least that their free will can be deactivated very easily by Jesus. Why, then, stipulate their existence at all? What possible purpose could beings of pure evil have in this or any world? Ignore their role in causing mental illness; I'm not attacking Jesus for not understanding biology, I'm saying that this is a problem of internal coherence for Christianity. The twin assertions that God can create immaterial beings and that God can create material beings but that by being material those latter beings are inherently broken (and can even be caused to sin by their bodies) seems to entail that God ought to stick to immaterial beings, because the good ones end up in heaven and the bad ones can be bossed around without consequence anyway.

Whatever content remains to the content of Jesus's teachings is, as I've said, essentially Stoic in character, but Jesus does not quite get the Stoic method right- he apes many of the conclusions of ancient Greek philosophy but does butchery to its methods. Stoicism is just the Greek name for a body of principles adopted independently by many cultures around the world: a Zen Buddhist, a Stoic, and an American Transcendentalist would be very familiar in each others' company, but the element common to all of them that should be found in Christianity is absent. Jesus did get the world-rejection part; like the Greeks before him, Jesus utterly rejected the value of material possession and taught that a life of utter poverty and asceticism is best. But Jesus's motivation isn't clarity of mind or making time to dedicate to pure introspection or philosophy, but because money might make you sin, and the world will end within a generation anyway so there's no need to go about accumulating material things.

But the real reason that Jesus's Stoicism lacks the sincerity and earnestness of its superior versions elsewhere is that Jesus only rejects life and its rewards because he thinks that there are better rewards elsewhere- there is just a better game, greener grass, over another horizon. Stoicism, the honest concession that the world is beyond your control, that death is not just inevitable but an imperative, that the accumulation of things as an end unto itself is a shade more futile than masturbation, that meaning is not delivered to us hand-packaged but rather built up in the toil and turmoil of life, is the golden core of Greek philosophy. But it glows with its honesty, with the courage it takes to face the realities of this world with sincerity- the system that Jesus promotes, on the other hand, does not say to abandon the frivolities of contemporary life, but merely to delay a while longer for the boundless frivolities to come in the afterlife.

At its heart, Jesus's philosophy is centered around the conquest of death, as is Stoicism. Jesus conquers death through cheap mythology, promising the pre-packaged escape trick to any who believe on him. The difficult path of true Stoicism is to transcend death by internalizing it, understanding it, and accepting it, by cognizing constantly on the fact of one's own mortality, of truly knowing that, whatever you choose to value, value it with the impermanence of your own consciousness in mind. In the past I have compared Christianity to Wal-Mart: it will provide a cheap, low-hassle, factory-made template of solutions to the Big Questions that are popular, fun, and easy. Jesus's cheap imitation of Stoicism is the prime example. He offers the smugness of a sense of superiority in the charity that is enjoined, with none of the courage or honesty it takes to confront the fact of mortality. You can have your humble life, but you cannot have a humble death with a God who so utter lacks humility that your own death is to him nothing but a chance to grade you on your devotion to him. The world-rejection philosophy draws its power purely from the free choice of a life uncomplicated by greed and excess. The Christian philosophy is to simply delay the greed and excess a few decades, to treat life not even with honesty and seriousness but with outright contempt, that the world is not merely a place where bad things happen, but that it is the bad place, a sinful place, good only for temptation and the escape from it through Jesus.

That a man like George W. Bush would list Jesus as his favorite philosophy perfectly captures the spirit of my critique: saying that Jesus is your favorite philosopher is the absolute safest, least confrontational, most predictable and comfortable response to what could be a very in-depth, complicated question that says a lot about a man. It is pre-packaged simplicity, very neat and sanitary. Yet the system itself is inadequate, built, as I've shown, on propositions ranging from inconsistent to absurd to simply hollow.

The Pope is the 1%

2011-10-26T09:25:00.000-07:00

It has recently come to my attention that the Pope has ostensibly lent his sneering condescension to the message of a movement that could only be worse off for having him- his latest encyclical on other peoples' economic misconduct, released on Monday, follows up on the 2009 Caritas in Veritae with some harsh words for other bloated economic enterprises:

[Ratzinger] decried "corruption and illegality" among economic and political elites in both rich and poor countries. He told financiers they must rediscover the ethical foundation of their activity and stop abusing savers. He wants a radical rethinking of economics so that it is guided not simply by profits but by "an ethics which is people-centered."
Benedict notes that economic "inequalities are on the increase" across the globe. He does not accept the trickle-down theory, which says that all boats will rise with the economic tide. Benedict condemns the "scandal of glaring inequalities" and sees a role for government in the redistribution of wealth.

I have mixed feelings about Occupy Wall Street. Economic inequality and state favoritism towards the rich is indisputably out of control in the United States, but when I swung by Occupy Boston a couple of weekends ago, I was alarmed and annoyed by the number of white people with dreadlocks waving around Reddit-meme signs and generally not knowing what was really going on. The sincere core of the movement is where my loyalty lies, and I must heartily disagree with Father Reese when he writes that the "people in [Occupy Wall Street] could do a lot worse than to study what the pope has said about the economy." Quite the contrary- there is no worse role model for economic justice than the Pope. The Pope and his Church run a massively profitable enterprise that preys upon the poor and that has historically time and again proven its utter inability to interact with the poor in a meaningful way outside of supporting their enemies and worsening their conditions.

Above I say that the Pope attacks "other" peoples' economic misconduct" and "other" bloated economic enterprises because foremost in my mind in terms of profoundly unethical economic hoarding and exploitation is the Pope's institution. The Pope is here decrying "glaring inequalities" from his city-sized golden palace that has no independent financial oversight, has always been allied with economically exploitative regimes, that is itself an economically exploitative regime, and that does little for the poor other than encouraging them to breed and become Catholic.

Lets start with the Pope himself. His office is sustained by a global tax on Catholics known as "Peter's Pence," which is the fund specifically designated for sustaining the vast operating expenses of Vatican City and the Pope himself, including his numerous palatial vacation homes across Europe, his private jets, even the maintenance for his gold-embossed clothing and private doctors. At last count, Peter's Pence was at nine figures. This tax is levied on all Catholics with no exception to their obligations depending on the wealth of those Catholics- and unlike states, which merely wield temporal power over their subjects, the Pope has the backing of an eternity in the furnace with which to squeeze money from his devotees.

The historical record on Catholic outreach to the poor speaks for itself. Mother Theresa, whose entire life and career amount to an elaborate con job in my eyes, raised as much as fifty million dollars under the ruse of collecting money for the poor in her life, and spent most of it building convents and Catholic schools in India and spending just enough on her "home for the dying" to give everyone in it unwashed cots, a single communal toilet, and rosary beads. Catholic adoption services around the United States and elsewhere follow this general pattern of prioritizing Church needs over the poor by utterly abandoning their commitments to impoverished children in orphanages when the horrifying specter of adopting those children out to gay couples rears its head.

This is a centuries-old technique. Catholic schools in the East did indeed provide a fair amount of sustenance for the poor- so long as they became tithing converts, joining schools that were built and protected by imperialist Catholic governments in Europe to expedite the destruction of the Church's victim cultures. Catholic banners flew over the plundering genocidal maniacs who mingled gold and blood together in South America for centuries before declaring themselves the rightful governments in those places.

Our own century saw the Church radically violate its own internal theological and hermeneutic techniques in a mad scramble to suppress what was seen as the Marxist influence on Liberation Theology, which is the only uniquely grassroots theology of any widespread acceptance that I'm aware of in human history. Built by poor laypeople in South America and their soon-to-be-declared heretical priests, this kind of theology begged the Church to fulfill its own putative fealty to the man who said "give everything you have to the poor." Against this theology the Church leveled every mind it had without regard to the Church's own normal processes for evaluating and incorporating new Catholic theologies.

They scarcely had to, however, since the military force used against the poor by Church-backed dictatorships from South America to Spain to Africa was more than enough to stamp out any attempts to take seriously Jesus's love for the poor. From Noriega to Franco to the Rwandan Genocide, anything that protected both dominant economic interests and Church interests (which historically have proven to be identical) was on the Church's good-guys list.

While attacking others for their "economic misconduct," the Pope shields all of his finances and his Church's from legitimate secular authorities, doling out the occasional large sum to buy the forgiveness of those children tortured by the insatiable lusts of the boy-crazed Catholic priesthood but otherwise doing little for the poor. Their approach to poverty is to perpetuate poverty: where the undisputed facts of history show that the key to undermining poverty is to give women control over their own reproduction, the Church crusades against condoms and abortion with a zeal matched only by its loathing of homosexuality and far dwarfing its pitifully sectarian attempts at legitimate charity.

The struggle against the bottomless greed of America's wealthiest has nothing to learn from the hypocritical heir of two thousand years of cruel, cynical exploitation. The doting elder child of a lengthy legacy of greed and hoarding is nothing more than a reminder that the rich like to look poor. Your friends in college with rich parents were embarrassed to say so because their lives don't seem as authentic. The white people with dreadlocks occupying Wall Street are embarrassed to tell you about their trust funds because it makes them seem less sincere in the movement. The Pope is just another one of these spoiled brats trying to distance himself from the temporarily unpopular upper class, whose allegiance he will cling to for money and in whose wallets lay the future of his Church and its political affiliations.

At least the rich college students cluttering up Occupy Wall Street have their hearts in the right place. At least they're trying. What's the Pope's tact? Take shots at other rich people from a golden palace, attack other people who misuse and misappropriate their funds, attack others for their greed and their exploitative policies, while himself ministering over cartoonishly oversized amounts of wealth, misusing and misappropriating said vast wealth, while hounding his own followers for their money, exploiting their fears for donations and buying the loyalty of the dictators who themselves exploit, oppress, and murder the poor.

The Church spent the 20th century purging itself of leftism, and now they're ashamed to admit it. Own up, Pope- you are the 1%, and the people are not buying your bullshit.

Great apocalypse prediction, or greatest?

2011-10-20T20:09:00.000-07:00

Maybe Harold Camping is on to something after all. Now that the Rapture has already happened (you may have missed it, since it was merely spiritual), the clock is ticking down the final hours until the utter destruction of the universe- October 21st:

Harold Camping, the Family Radio evangelist who wrongly predicted doomsday back in May, says the real end of the world is now Oct. 21.

In a message on his Web site, Camping declares that next Friday, “at this point, looks like it will be the final end of everything.”
Newser points out that Camping explains his May prediction mistake in another post on his site. May 21 was the “spiritual” End of the World, he says. As for the earthquakes he predicted, they apparently came in the form of “man-quakes,” since mankind shook with fear from the Rapture and the book of Genesis describes man as made from dirt.

Those who weren’t saved on May 21, Camping says, “will be annihilated together with the whole physical world on October 21, 2011.”

October 21st is also my birthday. I can understand his confusion; if I were a dedicated Christian like him, I'd be wreathing the birthday of so titanic and indefatigable an intellect as mine with horrors and portents as well.

Sunday Argument #10: Theism cannot explain the nature or existence of the universe.

2011-10-16T18:28:00.000-07:00

I'd like to expand on a line of thought I opened up in a previous post with a few extra thoughts on explanation. Most of the arguments for God's existence, being inductive, construe God as an explanation - the explanation - for something; to questions like why is there a universe as opposed to no universe, or why does the universe have fundamental laws seemingly 'fine-tuned' for life, or why do religious experiences of a certain profundity occur, God is the explanation theism offers.

The popularity of this explanation is a true puzzlement for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it seems that confidence in an explanation should decrease as the ground the explanation tries to cover expands- to wit, if I discover that a lamp by an open window has fallen, I might explain it by referencing the wind going through the open window, and be confident in such an explanation, but imagine the precipitous decline in your confidence you would experience if you heard me then go on to say that wind explains every lamp falling over. Theism is like that second explanation: it tries to explain literally everything- everything we know, everything we've forgotten, and everything we will know. By definition, nothing is explained without ultimate reference to theism

Explanation is a tricky thing. Just take any ordinary circumstance, any particular fact about your surroundings, and try to 'explain' it. Notice how many simultaneously true sentences come out of just a quick observation, and more weirdly, how different all of those sentences are- yet all are supposed to be the same kind of thing, all 'explanations.' Suppose that I want to offer up some explanation in response to even the most trivially mundane question imaginable, like "why is the apple on the table?" The litany of candidate answers, all of which are supposed to be explanations, is essentially infinite:

Because that's where Craig left it.
Because nothing has knocked it off the table yet.
Because there's no room on the counter.
Because we're out of bananas.
Because the apple isn't anywhere else.
Because you need a fruit in every still-life painting.

What unifies these sentences? They have very little in common, other than that they are all supposed to explain why the apple is on the table. Some appeal to the physical facts of the situation- Craig left the apple there and nothing has knocked it off yet. Others ("no room on the counter," "we're out of bananas") appeal to exigent circumstances, and others insinuate that there's some missing background information that would 'explain' the situation perfectly- like that this is a setup for a still-life painting. By the converse, probably none of the following would ever be meritorious explanations for why the apple is on the table:

Because Barack Obama is the mayor of Tokyo.
Because Barack Obama is the president of the United States.
Because the new Ford Wrangler is now yours for the low, low price of $17,899.
Because the apple got lonely and wanted to hang out with the table.
Why, because of the poltergeists, that's why.

False propositions probably cannot explain true propositions- Barack Obama being the mayor of Tokyo could not explain anything, not even facts about Tokyo, because it just isn't so. There also should probably be some kind of probable entailment between the explanation and that which is being explained- while it is true that Barack Obama is president of the United States, and it is true that the apple is on the table, it seems that one could still be true if the other were false- neither one entails the other, nor even implies the other. Not only does Barack Obama's presidency necessarily make the apple on the table, it doesn't even make the apple's being on the table more or less likely. Non sequiters are not candidates for explanations.

But what separates a non sequiter from a sequiter in this case? If this were a table in the White House, and Barack Obama were known to much prefer having apples on his tables, then actually Obama's presidency would be a candidate explanation for why the apple is on the table. Likewise, Craig's leaving it there is a perfectly good explanation given certain background information- if you know that Craig brings an apple to work every morning but that he is also somewhat absent-minded, then "Craig left it there" is a perfectly good answer to your question, "why is the apple on the table?" But only with that given background information.

This "background information" generally is some piece of information amounting to, given the explanation, that which we are trying to explain becomes more likely. Explanation is often retrospective in this way: if you want X to explain Y, go back in time to the moment when X occurred or started occurring and then ask yourself how likely Y is. If Y's likelihood increases, or if Y becomes certain, based on X, then X is an explanation for Y. But it should also be clear that X could be many things- X could explain the material facts for some state of the universe, it could explain the motivations for some actor involved, it could explain why all of the plausible alternatives are unlikely- such would still explain.

When this series of Xs and Ys gets long enough, we start thinking in terms of explanatory regularity. If X happens and then Y happens once, we may have little more than an interesting coincidence. If X happens and then Y happens most of the time but not all the time, like getting cancer after chainsmoking for forty years, then you can at least say that X is a good explanation for Y when they both happen. If Y happens every single time X happens, then what you have is starting to look more like a law of physics.

In short, explanations are those things that, prior to the outcome you wish to explain, made that outcome more likely- though the predictability of such is not necessary, since a very unlikely explanation can always still be true, as in the case of Barack Obama and the apple on the table. If, at the time the apple were on the table or slightly prior to it, you knew that the apple and the table were in the White House, Barack Obama was a president who really liked apples on tables, and that Barack Obama was in charge of the apples that day, you would have a fairly probable explanation for why the apple is on the table.

Three additional notes before proceeding to God. First, probability is obviously the order of business with competing explanations. I won't get into the specifics of the formal structure of probability in explanation, not because you aren't smart enough for it, but because it's actually just intuitively obvious. The likelihood of Y given X should be greater than the likelihood of Y without X if you want X to explain Y. Your background knowledge of X will be crucial- how often has X caused Y before? What is the mechanism, or the series of steps, by which X brings about Y? This is why, even if you have multiple explanations for something all of which are both possible and at least possibly related to the outcome, you can still talk about some explanations being more likely than others- those explanations that habitually cause the outcome, or that have a clear mechanism for bringing about the outcome, are generally more likely than their competitors.

Secondly, you have to actually know what the explanation means. If somehow taught a Chinese speaker who speaks no English whatsoever to reply with "because if you leave the electric razor plugged in too long, the battery loses its zero point" any time somebody asks "why won't my razor work?", I could hardly say that the Chinese person actually knows the explanation for why the razor doesn't work. Likewise, if I taught a small child who knows the meaning of each individual word in either sentence but has no real understanding of their use in combination, that child, even if perfectly able to say so, would still not know the explanation for why the razor doesn't work, though she might actually be able to articulate the reply perfectly. But notice that usually whoever the child was talking to would understand the outcome- the child doesn't need to know what she's saying any more than a parrot does if all you need is a conduit for information. But to understand an explanation, you actually have to understand an explanation.

Thirdly, notice what is particularly odd about the "poltergeists" explanation for the apple being on the table. It isn't impossible, and you could at least think in principle understand why a poltergeist might be a candidate explanation for an object in a strange place in a room, but accepting such as an explanation or even taking it as a serious candidate requires you to at least provisionally assent to the existence of poltergeists. Whenever your explanations start multiplying entities in unreasonable ways, you know that there is trouble. The likelihood of the explanation diminishes as the mysteries it engenders multiply, generally speaking- especially if the only evidence for the poltergeist you have is its provisional candidacy as a possible explanation for a fairly mundane event the other candidate explanations for which do not require poltergeists.

So now we can finally talk about God.

God is often ventured as an 'explanation' for certain facts about the universe- its existence, the configuration of its fundamental physical laws, the religious experiences of its inhabitants, its moral truths that seem awfully compelling but that never actually manifest themselves as laws, so on, so on.

So lets take a trip back in time to before the Big Bang (many physicists say there is no such thing, fine- you know what I mean here, the point is to try to explain the Big Bang). As I see it, there are several competing explanations for the existence and configuration of the universe:

God did it.
There's a multiplicity of universes, each with different configurations.
The universe occasionally collapses and reforms, each time with different configurations.

I leave off the best answer, the only true one I could ever speak in response to these questions ("I don't know"), because it of course is not an explanation- it is a concession that we need a little bit more information before we can have an explanation.

As I see it, of those three explanations, none is particularly good, but some of them are better than others. There being an infinite number of parallel universes would explain why our universe exists- indeed, our universe would be a statistical inevitability on the odds of infinity, whether it is infinite universes or infinite iterations of the same universe. The position I defend is not, however, that multiverse theory or cyclic universe theory is true, because I have no reason to think they are (which does not entail that either theory is false). Rather, the position I defend is that we don't know what caused the universe, but that among its competitors, theism is the worst candidate explanation of all.

So, how might God explain these things he's used to explain? Well, lets just put it through the explanation mill I just built for a couple thousand words.

If we knew that God pre-existed the universe, would that make the universe's existence or configuration more likely? I can't see any reason why it would. On the bare facts of a perfect, self-existent being, what possible use could a contingent universe populated mostly by radiation and empty space be to that being? When we try to drag intelligent minds into our explanatory mill, we usually like to speak in terms of motivation- what possibly could motivate a perfect being to create anything at all apart from himself? Such could only be less perfect than him, or at best equally perfect- but he's already infinite, so there is no conceivable need for even other perfect creations. He doesn't seem to be getting much out of this universe, except that possibly some of the conscious beings in it are correct when they say that God prefers us to love him- but if that's what God really wanted, it would have been so much easier for God to just create an infinite number of souls in heaven, and they would all have freely, graciously choose to love the God that provided them with a heaven, rather than having the opportunity to have their faith ruined by all the imperfections in it.

In explanations, we also like to talk about probabilities in the sense of how often the explanation precedes the outcome. Unfortunately, when we are talking about the universe writ large, we have no idea how often anything precedes it or causes it. We have never seen God create a universe, though we have enough evidence to say that we've "seen" Big Bangs result in weird distributions of matter and laws. We also have no observational evidence whatsoever that multiple universes have co-existed, but we have observed at least one universe (our own), so at least we know that universes are possible things.

By contrast, we have no observational evidence that Gods exist. If you tried to invoke inductive arguments from "first causes" or from the origins or configuration of the universe as arguments for God, you could hardly use those same arguments as instances of past times we've "seen" God create or organize universes, since that would be using your conclusion to try to establish your conclusion- something of a logical no-no, to say the least.

With a multiverse or with a cyclic universe, we at least would also have at least some vague idea of the mechanism of action between explanation and effect. With God, though, it's quite the opposite. How might it be that God creates or arranges anything? Every single time we've observed a physical state of the universe, there's always been some prior physical state that leads to that subsequent state. But God is nonphysical, and he is thought to create, destroy, or reorganize matter without himself using matter- he doesn't bombard corpses with resurrection molecules to bring them back from the dead, he just does it. The demarcation between divine action and pure magic is rather thin in my book, and never before have we observed or even tried to theoretically understand how pure magic might work - by its very nature, pure magic defies physical explanations - and yet we are to believe that God's pure magic is even on the table for explaining the universe and the things inside it.

That we don't have any good ulterior reasons for thinking that God exists at all is problematic for his explaining the universe in the same way that Obama's being mayor of Tokyo is problematic for using Obama's being mayor of Tokyo to explain anything. If we had amassed some additional body of evidence that tended to confirm theism (I do not know what such evidence would look like), then God would at least be on the table, but for the time being, we have no such evidence, neither of God's existence, nor of a comprehensible mechanism by which he can act.

Now, inferring new entities from scratch is what science does all the time. When we first started digging up dinosaur fossils, our understanding of biology would have been stunted indeed if we had just said, "well, we've never observed giant lizards before, so therefore there have never been giant lizards." But our understanding of biology would have been equally stunted if we had, on the first appearance of strange bones, leaped up and said, "by golly, we've found unicorns! Big ones, too!" The evidence accumulates slowly, and the explanation becomes more sharply defined with each successive piece of evidence. But it's more than that- the prior probability that very large lizards once existed was low when we dug up the first dinosaur bones (but not impossible), and our understanding of that prior probability improved and improved until we realized that the Earth's crust is widely populated with evidence for ancient giant lizards.

With God, we have none of these crucial things. We have no reason to think he's even a candidate for explaining the universe or its apparent "design" because we have no ulterior reasons to think he exists. We have evidence that his existence makes the universe more likely; if it were just God and I, I would not predict that a universe was to follow because I see nothing about God that makes a universe more likely. We haven't the foggiest idea how a nonphysical being could create anything physical, especially when it's done it ways that violate all of our observational principles- creation ex nihilo violates the principles of conservation quite boldly. We can't even imagine it- it's pure magic.

God, I think, is not serious contender for explaining the things he's used to explain. But much of the same analysis applies to our alternative provisional explanations- sure, the multiverse is possible, and since it would both actually explain the universe if it were true and since we know that at least one universe exists so stacking up a bunch of them doesn't require us to assent to any new kinds of beings like we would if we accepted poltergeists to explain apples or Gods to explain the universe.

A reading list for Mason: six great books for budding humanists

2011-10-11T12:14:00.000-07:00

The blog Why Atheism Is True has an account of an absolutely adorable episode that occurred at an awards ceremony for Christopher Hitchens, in which Mr. Hitchens sat down with an 8-year old girl named Mason Crumpacker for a chat about what books to read. (Video here.) Mason had asked Mr. Hitchens for some suggestions, and his list included such charming reading for children as:

The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins.
All of Shakespeare.
PG Wodehouse ("for fun").
Hume.

Now I haven't read Mr. Dawkins' newest book, nor have I read all of Shakespeare or very much PG Wodehouse, and though while Hitchens is better qualified than most living humans to say what makes a good read, I think he's taking the wrong tact here. He's talking to a young person who is going to go home and look into some of the books recommended to her- only to find most of the material completely inaccessible to her. So, I think I'll offer my own suggestions.

First, if you're a very young person, you probably actually don't want to be delving into ideologically slanted material straight away: hopefully, your beliefs and principles will arise organically out of your family and your environment, and if that sounds like naive optimism, I was raised in a Southern Baptist household in Kentucky and I think I turned out alright. Just absorb your culture by osmosis for now, and save your ideological commitments for after you've had a few years to let everything settle. Besides, this girl Mason is clearly among the brightest of her kind: she will always be reading and exploring regardless of the recommendations, so I hope I don't sound condemnatory of a bibliophilic impulse here. I just think that there are better things for her to read.

Rather than trying to infuse her with the specific tenets of this 21st-century Enlightenment of which people like Hitchens and Dawkins are the champions, she needs the basics: books that encourage children to think for themselves, to take the good from their culture while rejecting the bad, and to take everything their parents say to them (especially "big-picture" stuff like religion and politics) with a grain of salt. Books like:

Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)

Easily my favorite work of fiction when I was much younger. This is a book that teaches children to take their own gifts and their own intelligence seriously. It tells the story of a young man far in advance of his peers thrust into the middle of his parents' and his grandparents' war, exploited for those purposes, but who maintains his sanity and his sincerity through camaraderie with the relatively few sane children and adults who are conscripted along with him. This is a book that was written with people like Mason in mind.

Matilda (Roald Dahl)

Of the vast Roald Dahl corpus, this one is the most harmonious and the most finished. Its protagonist is a young person trapped in an awful family and an awful school with nobody on her side except one teacher and the local library. She reads voraciously, she is always learning, and the amount of bullshit she takes for it all pays off when she puts what she's learned to use feeding that idealistic sense of justice all young people should cultivate. It might be beneath her reading level, but for people in her general age range, this has enough witty dialogue and amusing plot to mask the fact it's a pro-education, pro-learning, anti-conformity screed.

Encyclopedia Brown (Donald Sobol)

A young man finds himself trapped in a vain suburban existence, with an invisible Stepfordian mother and a bumbling incompetent detective for a father, whose problems young Encyclopedia must solve himself for no reward whatsoever. Because the books are written in such a way that the reader can solve the puzzle for herself, readers can quickly adapt themselves to the inescapable fact that, whether you're a young child or a young professional, your role in life is to start fixing the problems you inherit from the previous generation with no reward or recognition other than getting to move on to the next problem.

The Lord of the Rings (JRR Tolkien)

Growing up after 9/11, your child already knows what it's like to watch a majority-white civilization brutally grind a majority-nonwhite civilization into oblivion in the pursuit of ambiguous foreign policy objectives. This book uses the magic of fiction to make the dominant imperialist narrative into a compelling story: mindless hordes of non-whites who look strange and talk funny are foiled in their evil plot to destroy white civilization by some bumbling dwarves, a heroic hereditary monarchy, and an inscrutable magician who wants everything to stay the way it is. Children should be taught to critically evaluate this book's glorification of waging endless wars over storied supernatural trinkets, and ask themselves if they really want a roguish cowboy from the countryside reigning over the mightiest military in the world.

Harry Potter (JK Rowling)

Harry Potter tells the story of a brilliant young girl named Hermione Granger who studies hard, works hard, and keeps her friends out of trouble, but who is perennially outshined by a handsome and clever white male whose sole claim to fame is not dying as an infant. Slowly dragged into Harry Potter's criminal underworld, Hermione finds herself waging a seemingly pointless vendetta on the defeated old guard of the supernatural oligarchy that selfishly seals away all knowledge in a school monopolized by the soldiers of the previous war. (Those who try to bring this arcane knowledge into the outside world are ruthlessly persecuted.) A great read for informing children that hard work amounts to nothing if you're competing with people who were born with fame and riches already guaranteed to them.

The Trial (Franz Kafka)

No matter how bright, energetic, or curious a budding young mind might be, it's important to never let them forget that, at bottom, the world is a cold, amoral sludge of confusion and despair governed by the incompetent, soulless minions of orthodoxy who sometimes randomly obliterate people and lives either as an accident of their incompetence or out of their single-minded obsession with reminding the rest of us of their unchallengeable power. Reminding children that lurking behind all their dreams and ambitions is the cold stare of alienation, and that, in the final analysis, nobody is really in charge of the hopeless barren wasteland of misery, resignation, stupidity, and blindness that is humanity and its wretched institutions- but even with nobody at the helm, this horrid mass of drone-like greedy mammals will still grind you into utter oblivion without the faintest care for your petty aspirations, which are themselves manufactured for profit to distract you from how alone you really are. There is no amber, nothing glows: when the sun sets, do not turn on the lights, for all you will see is darkness anyway. Great read for all ages, a real page-turner.

The songs of Singapore

2011-10-06T12:04:00.000-07:00

In what is apparently supposed to be some kind of explosive revelation, Francis Collins, famous for being intelligent, Christian, and a non-creationist all at the same time, has revealed that "combative atheist" Richard Dawkins "admits" that it is difficult to explain why the fundamental laws of physics have the specific values that they do. Characterizing this apparent gap in scientific explanation as "troubling," the Christian Post quotes Collins as saying that, for atheists, the options for explaining as such are either blind luck or the multiverse.

I was agreeing with Francis Collins until he decided that he knows better than atheists do what atheists must think the explanation for the current state of the laws of physics is. The values of the laws of physics are currently within a very narrow set of life-permitting constants. Life would be impossible in our universe if gravity were slightly stronger or if the nuclear forces were a little weaker. I haven't the expertise to weigh in much on the numbers that the experts have proposed, but I'll stipulate for now that the odds are astronomically small- lets say, one in ten jillion, give or take.

If the argument Collins thought he was mastering here was one for the existence of God, I think he needs to have another little chat with Mr. Dawkins. My two cents would be the usual Teapot Atheist logic nonsense you're all used to: it doesn't follow from "I don't know why things are the way they are" that "God is the reason things are the way they are." You just need to do me one better. God is equally efficacious an explanation for the current state of the universe is as any other species of wizardry is. The Matrix may simply have been designed by a very clever architect, or we may be in one universe among many, or perhaps some as-yet unknown "super-law" of physics utterly mandating that the laws of the universe be as they are at present is responsible. Who knows? I don't.

That's where I do agree with Mr. Collins: explaining the laws of physics is as difficult for me as explaining why Singapore is named Singapore or what chemicals make my fiancee's cooking taste so good: I don't know! I haven't the foggiest idea. I haven't even the slightest idea what has made those things true to the exclusion of all alternatives. I would have a very difficult time explaining those things. But imagine that we tried to import Mr. Collins' reasoning into one of these examples, and generated this list of possible explanations of the universe:

Singapore is named Singapore because of blind chance.
Singapore is named Singapore because it is one of an infinite number of cities, each of which has a different one of the infinite number of possible names.
God named Singapore Singapore in accordance with his inscrutable divine plan.

Something is amiss; there seem to be other live options for why Singapore is named Singapore. Perhaps it is named that way because of a cultural and linguistic history that, though long and complex, is fundamentally amenable to investigation, and so inherently knowable. So that means that I, the atheist, actually have a fourth live option for explaining why Singapore is called Singapore:

There is a naturalistic explanation for why Singapore is called Singapore that is fundamentally amenable to explanation that I don't yet know.

This draws us into an additional set of questions. Firstly, what am I trying to explain exactly? Not the mere existence of Singapore - this is not the cosmological argument for Singapore - but the actual, precise configuration of Singapore, in this case it's name. What it's called. But if I've gotten to this fourth possible explanation, Collins' argument is over- luck, multiverse, or God are no longer the only remaining live options.

But the second question is the more pressing one: why am I trying to explain this particular thing? This might be where it could be pressed that my analogy is in trouble: with Singapore and the configuration of its name, the stakes are relatively insignificant. But with the universe and its laws of physics, the stakes are our entire existence. So given that our entire existence is on the line, we should be particularly disposed to see an intelligence at work because, should things slip just a little bit with the laws of physics, our existence becomes impossible. Where Singapore's name doesn't seem particularly designed towards any greater end, the current configuration of the universe is exquisitely honed towards a single end product: us.

But lets suppose that I want to know is a coincidence of equally dazzling proportions: why does it just happen to be that Singapore's name is so exquisitely honed to rhyme perfectly with the other words of the national anthem of Singapore? It's such a dazzlingly astounding song, such a perfect harmony of verse and music... all possible only because Singapore happens to have such a wonderful name. Even the slightest deviation in its pronunciation would have made the Singaporean national anthem impossible.

Now wait a minute, I hear Mr. Collins protesting- there are lots of other ways that the Singaporean national anthem could have been written, and anyway it isn't like the national anthem was there waiting for the perfecting rhyming nation name to fill in the blank, the song was written around the name after the name was in place.

Ah, now we're on to something.

There are lots of different ways the universe could have been, as Collins' entire argument is based on. Who is to say that the way it is now is better than the way it is now? Better for us? Better for the Singaporeans to have the national anthem they do now, because the one they have now is so very lovely. It is better for them this way, just the way the universe is better for us the way it is now- though I think Collins would be hard-pressed to say that our universe couldn't be better. If our interests are the things really at stake, then I can easily dream up a universe that is much better for our interests that even preserves our free will: God creates an infinite number of souls in heaven. Pretty easy.

But of course, the Singaporean national anthem was written around the name. So is our identification of life as the big miracle of the universe. We're alive. Retrospecting on the universe, it looks like the end result fits within a remarkably narrow band of probabilities. But that's true of any configuration of the universe. If the fundamental forces and amount of matter in the universe were specifically tuned so that the universe were nothing more than a single jelly donut floating in an infinite sea of emptiness, that would be an astronomically unlikely configuration of the universe- and good luck convincing the donut that the universe wasn't designed with the donut in mind; he'll retort with precisely the snide overconfidence with which Mr. Collins drew us into this argument in the first place. We have no objective means for deciding whether we, the jelly donut, or the name of Singapore are in any particularly privileged position in regards to the other such that our particular outcome is the superior design rather than just the way things worked out. And notice that it is irrelevant to this analysis whether things just worked out this way by dumb luck, by having an infinite number of options all run at once, by God doing it, or by an as-yet unknown but fundamentally knowable naturalistic explanation: it is the explanation itself that is suspect. What we are trying to explain simply does not cry out for explanation.

So here's what we have:

The odds of x configuration of y are infinitesimally small, and yield wildly improbable but (retrospectively) fortuitous end result z.

With the national anthem of Singapore, x is the word "Singapore," y is the name of Singapore, and z is the Singaporean national anthem. With Collins's argument, x is the current state of the laws of physics, y is the universe, and z is the existence of our life. And in the present instance or any other we have no criteria whatsoever for determining whether the national anthem of Singapore (or anything like it) or the current existence of life in its present form (which could have been better) is a greater mystery, a mystery more conducive to divine explanation, than any other.

And the same set of possible explanations serves both equally well. So while I've already given the standard laundry list of objections to the design argument for God in previous posts (that it is non-exhaustive, that it leaves us with an unparsimonious conclusion, that it omits the remarkably poor apparent design of the universe, that it doesn't logically follow from the appearance of design that the thing was designed, that we have no good way of knowing the odds in the first place), the objection I add here is that there really isn't any good case that there is anything remarkable here in need of explanation. Any configuration of the universe is, given infinite possible options, inherently unlikely. Anything in that universe retrospecting on that unlikelihood would therefore always be equally well-positioned as Collins is in declaring that he lives in a designed universe. He's the little kid asking why he's him and not somebody else.

Probably one more online comment about Steve Jobs' death ought to do it

2011-10-05T19:22:00.000-07:00

There, now we've reached saturation.

Another day, another debate: physicalism vs. dualism with Bob Smith

2011-10-03T19:09:00.000-07:00

As promised, yesterday I debated a fellow named Bob Smith on a question upon which I've already cogitated several times: whether physicalism (the view that the mind is essentially a physical phenomenon) or dualism (the view that the mind is a substance separate from the body) is a better description of the mind.

There is no video, but there is audio: download here (scroll down to the very bottom; the big buttons are ads) or listen here. Throughout the debate, I make numbered references to my sources. I did not use every source, so I have posted also those I did not use, with brief descriptions of the contribution of that source to the debate, here.

To my knowledge, Bob's writeup on this subject is substantially contained in this reddit comment. If he makes any additional writeups, I will of course link to them. Now, to the commentary.

Firstly, I like Bob. He's a serious but conversational fellow with a keen mind with a clear familiarity with the literature of the subject at hand. We had a good conversation that went to a lot of interesting places, and I think that at times we got sort of off-topic just because we both enjoy the philosophical process of unpacking a proposition- much unpacking was had, indeed. I'm glad he challenged me to the subject, because I really haven't been seriously engaged with the literature on philosophy of mind since college, and the massive infusion of the literature I underwent in preparation for the debate really helped sharpen my views on the subject.

You can listen to the debate yourself and make your own evaluations about how it went. I can't much speak for Bob on this one, but I will point out what I think were the main areas of agreement and the main areas of clash:

Bob agrees that minds are essentially localized in space around the people that seem to "host" them, that they at least have beginnings in time and probably have ends in time, that they are accessed or communicated with by interacting with physical matter (in ways like talking to things like ears), and that minds themselves interact with physical matter like synapses and even body parts.
Bob does not agree that the mind is material, and he does not seem to think that minds could be material: that minds are kinds of substances on such a scale that he sees them as distinct in kind from things like laws and chance.

Again, you can hear his arguments and you can hear mine, so I'll be brief on the arguments before explaining why, after this debate, I remain a physicalist. In his write-up, Bob characterizes my position as an interactionist epiphenomenalism kind of physicalism, which I think is fair- as he says, I do not think that your experience of the color red is in your brain any more than digestion is in your gut- if you peeled open a gut frozen in time, you would never be able to indicate which arrangement of its atoms is "digestion." Digestion is a dynamic process, it is a description of a progression of physical states, which is also what I think the mind in general is and which your experience of the color red also is- though I do think that if your brain, frozen in time, were understood to its fullest, we could tell that you were experiencing the color red, if you were.

The argument that Bob pressed is that it does not seem to him that fundamental laws, chance, and matter alone could ever create an intentional, subjective force called the mind, that the forces that organize systems are external to those systems, and so organization to the level of a mind must require some mind external to it. He analogized it to the universe itself, where we got into a slightly off-topic skirmish about whether even physical systems like planets could organize without the influence of a mind. Both his argument about minds and his argument about planets are privy to the same assumptions, on which I pressed him to elaborate:

Bob assumes that systems do not self-organize in ways like evolution indicates that they do.
Bob assumes that "functional" systems of a certain complexity, like the configuration of gasses in the early Earth's atmosphere, could occur without intelligent design- though what makes a system "functional" is an open thread after this debate.
Bob assumes that the mind is a fundamentally distinct kind of force or material from other forces or materials.

These are the three key points of debate. To the first one, I think that I at least provided ample reasons to think that systems do self-organize in that way. To the second assumption, I offered I think at least as much good evidence to the contrary- Bob used a rather blunt tool from the kit of intelligent design, that of the calculation of the massive odds against the arrangement of atoms in human bodies or in the Earth's atmosphere, the standard reply to which is that it is not simply a matter of counting the odds of one arrangement of matter among all possible arrangements since some arrangements are more likely than others (products of evolution like us are, I think, so likely in universes like ours that we might as well call them inevitable). And even if they weren't, we have no idea how many times the universe has run different iterations of those arrangements, or that the multiverse (if there is such a thing) has, so we simply don't know the odds.

To the third, I offered only the opportunity to examine the evidence, and I was not satisfied with the reply. Aside from what I think we can agree is the unconvincing evidence of seeming numerological coincidences surrounding the 9/11 attacks (show me a similarly broadly-defined event without numerological coincidences), I wasn't even able to get any clear evidence that disembodied minds can exist, much less actually do. It seems to be only bare assertion that the mind is different in kind from other matter, an assertion that actually contravenes Bob's own admissions- Bob admits that the mind is very much like normal matter (localized in space and time, interacts with and is affected by physical states, etc.), except in the one fact that it is somehow a different force- one that, by the way, Bob does not seem convinced continues to exist without the brain. That the mind is a force at all seems only to be a turn of phrase; what such actually entails that is different from physicalism is not clear to me.

My banner in this debate is that the mind is like digestion. You cannot look at or touch "digestion," per se, by examining the physical states of the gut, but Bob also does not think that there is such thing as immaterial digestion in the way he thinks that there are immaterial minds. Like digestion, minds are organic processes radically located in physical structures. I think that the analogy is sufficient, that things like intentionality or planning in minds no more make them non-physical like the more complicated aspects of digestion make digestion non-physical, just as I think that it is no objection against physicalism about digestion that none of the atoms in a gut contain even a fraction of digestion.

The main arguments that I tried to press:

The causal closure argument- there are decades of neuroscience drawing on billions of years of evolutionary biology indicating that mental processes as complex as morality and intentionality to as simple as experiencing color or hearing sound are radically embodied- there are known physical structures that perfectly account for them, the impairment of which likewise impairs those mental processes. The mind is supervenient upon the brain- you cannot change the mind without changing the brain; to suppose that, in addition to these physical, embodied structures and processes there is a supernatural element guiding the mind is to just add an additional, unnecessary entity- Bob's dualism is, as we say, causally overdetermined, in that there are just too many causes per effect in his system, one of which is unnecessary, where on physicalism, we only count the causes that are present in the evidence.
The interaction question- a long time ago, a guy called Descartes invented philosophical dualism. An objection that in mainstream philosophy has prevailed against Descartes' theory that the mind is distinct from the body is the question of how a non-physical mind interacts with a physical body. There don't seem to be any mind-particles in this substance; the whole idea of its being disembodied is that it doesn't adhere to the physical world. But it does- as Bob admits, minds obey the laws of physics.
The brain- as cannot be repeated sufficiently, brain damage damages mind, brain death seemingly ends minds, brain alteration alters minds. Minds just seem physical.
The big synthesis I was going for is that Bob actually agrees that minds are just like physical things in a huge number of (above-listed) ways, with the sole exception being the interpolation of aphysicality to the mind which, as far as I can tell, is without reason.

Our disagreements, then, were primarily on whether law-abiding material systems can self-organize into systems as complex as minds, and whether such systems can do things like plan, experience, or intentionally apply force to other systems. I think they can and they do, and I've yet to hear a convincing explanation for why they can't. The immense circularity of assuming that matter cannot organize in this way as an objection to the evidence that systems can organize in this way was lost on this debate, as was the ultimate ambiguity of a radically embodied, physically interacting, spacially and temporally local mind being amaterial. As Bob's writeup says, he thinks that the "mind-force is a force like gravity-" why it is a force like gravity, and not a material process like digestion is left unexplained - he think that just as matter cannot cause gravity (why not?) matter cannot cause minds (if minds are completely unique categories of force like gravity, which I doubt). The primary defense of these assumptions that I received was their reiteration.

But, all in, it was excellent to have a similarly-situated non-professional philosophical mind with which to hone our positions. I hope we do something similar on like topics again in the future.

Now, as promised, I will do a written Q&A with the good people of reddit who obliged me with written questions in this thread. That's coming tomorrow. For now, though, listen to the debate- you'll get a good background for where my answers will be coming from.

On the physicalism vs. dualism debate tomorrow

2011-10-01T17:23:00.000-07:00

So, looks like it's debate time again. I'm quite excited. Unfortunately, my challenger has vetoed the taking of questions from the audience. But, a bit on the format.

After brief introductions, we will be spending a little bit of time defining our positions: 5-minute openers from the dualist, and from the physicalist, simply defining their positions. I will be defending physicalism about minds primarily, but if my correspondence with my opponent (who goes only by "Bob Smith") is any indication, I imagine that quite a few other topics are going to come up as well.

Once the introductions have passed, one of us will interrogate the other on their position for about 15 minutes, then the roles will switch, then two brief concluding statements. The debate will be moderated by an acquaintance of my opponent. My opponent sounds to be quite an untraditional kind of theist, so this will hopefully be quite interesting.

Afterwards, hopefully we will have viable recordings and I will be answering questions from the reddit Q&A to the best of my ability in the written commentary that will be to follow. So, wish me luck- should be fascinating.

Pointless Nevada ordination requirements being challenged

2011-09-28T13:20:00.000-07:00

Nevada is one of the many states that has a totally pointless law requiring that, in order for the state to consider your marriage to be valid, it must be done under the supervision of an "ordained" (whatever that means) affiliated with a "church or religious organization" (whatever that means), or a government official (who you must pay). Now that the American Humanist Association has offered itself up as a test case of this clearly pointless law, the ACLU is suing on their behalf after two of their members were denied ordination for not being ordained members of religious groups.

So before the incredibly simple legal analysis is done here, let me point out that my own state, Massachusetts, also has a requirement like Nevada's, but it's slightly broader: it will accept any ordination.

I say again: any ordination.

Including mine:

Yep, just last week I sent a copy of that certificate from the Universal Life Church off with a printout of a stock email identifying me as an "ordained member in good standing" of that rather secular church and the letter back from the Office of the Secretary of Massachusetts saying that my application for certification was accepted. It was that easy, because laws of that kind are so flagrantly unconstitutional that to ever enforce them is to immediately end them. See, that's the thing, you can really only challenge a law in court if the law actually impairs you in some real way, not just potentially impairs you, or offends you.

Unlike Massachusetts, which has the wisdom to treat its ancestral theocratic laws as the joke they are, Nevada has unwisely chosen to actually take its regulations of this kind seriously. The legal issue is so painfully obvious, however, that the government of Nevada has just decided to dump the burden on the actual county that chose to enforce the law, showing about how much confidence the lawyers for the state of Nevada have in that law:

Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto asked that she be dismissed from the lawsuit because her office does not enforce the state’s marriage law, leaving that up to Clark and other counties.

And make no mistake, the law is incredibly clear. If you are in any way interacting with anyone or anything on behalf of the government, or at the government's request or clear permission, or in any way acting as a representative of the government, the government is theoretically not even allowed to know what religion you are, much less condition your access to that representative capacity on a very specific set of religious beliefs. In this case, the people who are allowed to oversee the ceremony that legitimizes a marriage license are required to be ordained members of religions, unless you want to pay the government a fee to do your wedding itself. The legal analysis practically writes itself.

You might think that the requirement for being ordained in a religion is broad enough to include pretty much everyone (except atheists), but just the terms involved are rich in theological and religious specificity. If you require ordination, that means that you only accept into the position of marriage supervisor those people who believe that God or the gods recognize one class of people as the pious leaders and the others as the students, or followers, of those leaders. It requires you to only accept religions that have specific doctrines that are detailed enough to required a certification process for their teachers. It requires you to omit any religion in which religious authority is earned by intellect, charisma, or title, instead of by formal training. It excludes non-doctrinal religions. It excludes egalitarian religions. It super-excludes atheism. And this doesn't even get into the question of what a religion actually is.

The Constitution is very specific: there are NO religious tests for any public office. "Public office" is so broad that it has been ruled even to include notary publics. Anybody who acts at all under the auspices of the government is a government actor for purposes of the Article VI Religious Test clause. The constitutionality of the Nevada statute, or any statute like it in any other state, is a joke, which is why not even Nevada will defend its own statute, leaving it up to the county itself to defend it. And we have a taste of their legal reasoning already, which is where the real high comedy in this case is:

Asking [Las Vegas Judge Philip Pro] to dismiss the ACLU-backed challenge, [Clark County Deputy District Attorney Michael] Foley told the court that the county and state have a compelling interest in ensuring that marriages are legitimate and conducted properly. “If you allow every Elvis impersonator to go around marrying people,” he said, “you’re going to have some problems with paperwork and so forth.”

The notion of compelling interest is tricky when measured against clear constitutional violations. For example, all Americans have free speech rights- but if you exercise your free speech rights in a certain way while you're in middle school (bellowing obscenities at random, for example), you can be punished. Why? Because the government's compelling interest in maintaining more or less orderly public schools outweighs the constitutionally-protected expressive element of bellowing obscenities at random. By contrast, the government certainly has an interest in having a loyal citizenry, but the government is not allowed to censor anti-government blogs or news sites: the constitutional protection of such speech outweighs the government's interests to the contrary.

If Foley, the county lawyer charged with defending this blot on Nevada law, believes a word of what he's saying, then I have some advice for him: get your paralegals together and talk it over. Just bounce some ideas off each other. If I were in the room, I might say something like, "hey, boss, does "paperwork and so forth" really outweigh the clear constitutional proscription of religious tests? Does the state of Nevada's interest in preventing Elvis impersonators from performing weddings (but allowing Scientologist stooges, the Westboro Baptist Church, and the Moonies to do so) really control over the Constitution itself?" If he thinks so, he needs to find a better way to say it than he did- I don't think that anything you can nonchalantly describe as "and so forth" is worth much against the clear rule of the controlling document of all American law.

Sunday Argument #9: Against miracles

2011-09-25T16:53:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me not long ago that, on some popular definitions of the term, the recent shenanigans occurring at CERN may constitute a miracle.

It's one of those incredulous questions you get from some people when they find out that you're an atheist: "do you believe in miracles?" An odd thing indeed, since you've just told them that you reject the existence of the being whose entire job it seems to be to perform miracles, but you get the question anyway. Do you ever stop and wonder what the word actually means?

Looking at a list of its common uses and its common correlates, you get at the cluster of associations generally meant by the term: divine, improbable, fortunate. Just the other day, I referred to my car starting after getting a jump by AAA as "a fucking miracle." In the spirit of that particular exclamation, I most certainly do believe in miracles, if all that is meant are extremely improbable, fortunate events. That my car started was extremely fortunate and (at the time, seemingly) improbable, so in this common colloquial sense, the concept of the miracle is perfectly compatible with my atheism and such things are certainly true.

But when you start talking about the more formal component of miracles, that involving supernatural or divine intervention, certain issues of clarity and plausibility immediately make themselves apparent. Not all divine actions are referred to as miracles - for example, Christians don't normally construe God's commands to his angels as "miracles" in the same way they construe the parthenogenesis of the Messiah as "miracles" - and many supposed miracles contain no particularly beneficial component, such as the transmutation of wine into blood or the ghostly apparition of Jesus's mother to usually small crowds of incredulous peasants. They do very little for humanity other than testify to the power of God to do absolutely pointless things for no reason other than to dazzle us. And these pointless "miracles" come by the thousands; the Vatican has hundreds of "documented" cases of such miracles, over and above the weekly miracles of transubstantiation and actual church attendance.

Presumably, though, God designed the universe knowing full well what all future events would entail; he not only creates but sustains the universe, and so there is one sense in which every event that occurs in the universe meets somebody's definition of a miracle. If the creation of the universe was a fortuitous act of divine intervention, and each instant in which the universe is sustained by God is a fortuitous act of divine intervention, then this "miracle" category seems a little pointless since everything qualifies as a miracle.

The turn is that miracles must be extraordinary, or at least out of the ordinary in some way. Whether or not God created or sustains the universe, the growth of my toenails is no miracle, even though it is fortuitous that I have something covering the fleshy parts of my feet, and it is, all else being equal, amazingly improbable that, of all the possible configurations of atoms in the universe, a few trillion of them just happened to end up organized such that my toenails would grow. Yet such is not a miracle, because it lacks that certain expressive component of miracles, not just that they are unlikely, but that they are otherwise impossible- that they violate the laws of physics, like the sun dancing in the sky at Fatima (an impossibility, since no force that acted on the sun in that way could do so without wreaking gravitational havoc on the Earth), or are physically possible but so remotely implausible that they would constitute an absurdity if merely hypothesized (like the bodily resurrection of Jesus).

This is where the (as-yet unconfirmed) new CERN data purporting to show neutrinos violating an established law of physics comes in. It seems that we have a genuine dilemma in the philosophy of science here, which is inextricably bound to a certain dilemma for David Hume's argument against miracles as advanced in his classic Of Miracles. Hume argued essentially along the following lines:

The likelihood that something is true requires an inquiry into the totality of the circumstances- if you reach into an opaque jar and pull out a red ball, you don't know anything about how unlikely your particular pull was without knowing what else was in the jar.
The totality of the circumstances in the universe is the sum total body of all empirical information.
Every possible subject of empirical information is totally governed by the laws of physics, without exception.
Miracles are principled violations of the laws of physics.
But the likelihood that the laws of physics have ever been violated requires that we know the totality of the circumstances surrounding that event, which show that without exception the laws of physics are obeyed- that is to say, we have good reason to say that, for any given event, there has so far been a 100% chance that that event was governed by the laws of physics. If you looked into the jar and saw that there were nine blue balls and one red one before drawing a ball, you would know that someone else who drew a ball in your absence would be reporting a rare, but not impossible event if she reported drawing a red ball. But if she reported drawing a green ball, then there is virtually no chance that she is reporting accurately.

In short, no amount of testimony could ever command assent to a miracle because any testimony to a principled violation of the laws of physics is precisely the same thing as testimony to a green ball pulled from a bag of only red and blue balls: something either odd or improper is afoot.

Yet it seems that with the recent CERN shenanigans we have a green ball. We don't have merely the testimony of some wide-eyed true believers, we have data generated and testing using the very empirical methods that atheists and naturalists say is the best guide towards truth. So perhaps we do have a principled violation of the laws of physics, yet I do not think that most theists would refer to neutrinos exceeding the speed of light by sixty parts in one million as a "miracle."

To wrinkle this angle a little further, consider just how many times the laws of physics have been apparently defied. Newtonian laws of motion and gravitation utterly fail to capture the quantum bizarrity of the subatomic world. The cosmological constant was long a staple of mainstream physics, but not so much any more. These have appeared to be violations of what were thought to be laws of physics, yet I don't think that most theists would classify these things as "miracles."

Here's what we've learned so far: in order to qualify as a miracle, you must be:

beneficial, though not all beneficial events are miracles.
wildly improbable or physically impossible, though not all wildly improbable or apparently physically impossible events are miracles.
divine in origin, though not all divine action counts as a miracle.

So perhaps miracles are all three: physically impossible or wildly implausible beneficial apparent acts of God. The mundane constituents of this definition ("impossible"/implausible) cannot alone make a miracle, since for example non-Newtonian quantum effects probably do not count as miracles, nor can we say for sure that future changes to what we think the laws of physics are is impossible, since we extrapolate what we think the laws are based on our observations and our observations could give us new data at any moment (we may, for example, observe neutrinos moving faster than light). But we know what a violation of the laws of physics would look like. Likewise with wildly implausible events, and likewise with beneficial events.

But these mundane properties in combination reveal only wildly implausible or seemingly impossible fortuitous events, which cannot count as miracles without the divine intervention aspect. How might one go about actually verifying that some act was one of divine intervention, though? I can't imagine, myself. God has never revealed the means of his action to us; he's never shown us his universe-making factory, never had us watch under a microscope as he transmogrifies a starchy wafer into a bloody Messiah. We simply have no method whatsoever for separating improbable, handy events that were caused by God from those that weren't.

This is why the CERN shenigans are not miracles: they are unbelievably weird, and they challenge quite a few established scientific precepts. But there's no indication that neutrinos move faster than light solely because of the intervention of a divine superintelligence, the absence of which would make the events observed impossible. We don't even know how we would go about looking for evidence to that effect, we have merely our intuitions that God is more in the business of healing the sick and zapping the gays than he is in the business of making physics even more esoteric just to piss off science students.

So do I believe in miracles? No. I don't even know what it would be like to start looking for evidence of a miracle. How could I assent, even provisionally, to the mere possibility that a miracle occurred when there are no good ways of knowing what would identify one thing as a miracle and another as merely an improbable but fortuitous chance event.

So a scientist, a pseudoscientist, and a priest walk into CERN

2011-09-23T06:30:00.000-07:00

"We want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy." -Dr. Antonio Ereditato, on experimental results at CERN showing neutrinos exceeding the speed of light.

So, it looks like they've gone and cocked up physics again. In short, a large body of data from a long series of CERN experiments is basically showing that some neutrinos, which are low-mass elementary particles that are blasting through your body right now at great speeds at pretty much all times, apparently slightly exceed the speed of light sometimes.

So that's a pretty big deal because the speed of light is the absolute speed limit of the universe. We have a century of physics backed up by a vast body of experimental verification telling us that the speed of light is the inviolable ceiling on velocity. If this result ends up being verified and turns out true, then science has a lot of backtracking to do to figure out where everything went wrong.

Let me begin with all the caveats one must deploy when it looks like physics has been really, truly, savagely cocked up in a single go. I know that the results are still undergoing verification, and to date there has been no independent replication of this experiment. Dr. Ereditato's team has done the good science thing, however, and put their results online for all to see, dissect, and contest before openly declaring that physics has been utterly changed forever. The word is still out, and this thing is not final or by any means conclusive, but it is interesting, and if it turns out to be Truth As We Know It, then it's one of the greatest innovations in physics since Jenga.

Discoveries of this sort are always interesting because they really show how sharp the contrast is between good thinking and bad thinking. Start with the following premise:

New data shows that something really important we used to believe is either wrong or incomplete.

To my mind, there are three very general ways to react to news like this. The first way sounds like this:

Now lets not be hasty, because this really screws with things. Lets get all of our biggest noggins to work on this thing together, verify our results, replicate the experiments, just generally rake our own data over the coals and see what comes out. And if what comes out as true is very much like the apparent result, then we've got to go back and fix some things, and it's super exciting when science is wrong because, when we learn that science has been wrong, we get to fix it.

This is the scientist's reaction: excitement about changing our body of knowledge tempered by prudence, with a side of willing submission to intense, professional scrutiny. Another way to react might be something like:

New data? More like true data! Stop everything, no need for verification, we've already got the story.

This is the pseudoscientist talking. It's the reaction we heard when Deepak Chopra "proved" that soothing sounds make water look prettier, when they "discovered" that you only use 10% of your brain, and when one slanderous shill for Big Pseudoscience "discovered" that Atlanteans built the Great Pyramids. Such thinking can be fixed: they've got all the excitement but none of the prudence, and about half as much of a commitment to finding the truth instead of finding the next big thing. Just calm down, guys, when we really change physics, we want to be certain, because otherwise we end up looking like Deepak Chopra.

But it's the priest's reaction that really is beyond salvaging:

These uppity empiricists want to muck with our traditions. Haven't they read the sacred texts? These truths are fixed and immutable. If your vast body of data conflicts with what we've always believed, then your vast body of data is flawed, and if we're in a part of the world where my church hasn't yet been politically domesticated, we'll set you on fire if you keep spreading this bigoted, offensive, anti-Christian message.

You don't really need a list of examples for this way of thinking. Evolution? Big Bang cosmology? Tectonic plates? Dinosaurs? Germ theory? Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, the Bible says so, I believe it, that settles it.

When scientists find something new, they explore it. When pseudoscientists hear something new, they embellish it. When priests hear something new, they bury it.

German parliament to boycott the Pope

2011-09-20T13:31:00.000-07:00

In a display of pure spine quite unfamiliar to an American like myself, a group of German parliamentarians, mostly liberals, are poised to boycott an impending live reprimand from the Pope. Despite being "unfazed" by this move, according to the Catholic News Agency, German bishops are already working overtime to belittle what I think is the noble effort to trivialize one of our epoch's most disastrous failed ideologies: Catholicism. Pontificates the bishop of Dresden:

A critical examination of the content of different positions is acceptable.
But a flat demonstration of ignorance and bad taste through the announced
absence is embarssing.

Now this notion that critically examining different positions is acceptable is actually a fairly modern innovation of the Church, and I applaud Bishop Reineit of turning his back on his hiring institution's long history of banning books, burning heretics, condemning freethought, and squashing non-Catholic cultures through, shall we say, a rather aggressive evangelism strategy. But I must take unction with the proposition that it is ignorance that motivates, or will result from, the boycott of the Bishop of Rome's self-aggrandizing stump speech.

No, I think that these German MPs are rather well-versed in the scandalous history of Catholicism in Germany. From the halcyon days of holy wars against German pagans, to the exploitation of Teutonic military prowess in those very wars, to the thousand-year cold war on Judaism that turned hot not long after the signing of the very first foreign peace treaty the Thrid Reich ever made, which ceded German control of education to the Catholics in exchange for Church acquiescence to the Final Solution, to a modern institution of rape that brutalized so many children that Germany's first hotline for priestly sex abuse received almost 3,000 calls in its first 3 days, to the mother of all holy wars waged between a German Catholic dissident named Martin Luther and the soulless minions of orthodoxy, I think that the Germans have had quite enough, thank you, of Ratzinger's ideology and its institutions.

And it isn't like there will be anything unexpected in this particular papal address; if it's anything like the ones we've heard so far, the Pontiff will excoriate the Germans for their unparalleled contributions to Europe's Renaissance and the fundamentalist adherence to the separation of church and state that has been unbroken since the Third Reich died. He'll condemn Europe's innovations and opine for what count only as glory days in the mind of murderous theocrats.

As I've said before, the Pope is fundamentally anti-Europe. He sees it as a recklessly materialistic, relativistic, secularized den of freethought and humanism. I think it's all these things, too, I just don't think that they're bad things. Quite the opposite. Europe's long past is a nasty place to visit, and a worse place to live in. But Bishop Ratzinger should take heed of the fact that, when Europe looked like his ideal Catholic state, we called it "the Dark Ages."

I sincerely doubt that those boycotting the speech are missing anything more than this, just one more scolding from an increasingly irrelevant front-man for a greedy, arrogant, anti-woman, anti-homosexual, anti-Semitic failed theocracy. The sun set over its glory days long ago, and the refreshing evening air of the Renaissance cooled the corpses that had been piling up since even before the Holy Roman Empire got its legitimacy from the Vatican. German national policy in the early 1940s looks quite a bit similar to Vatican race-relations policy from the 11th century until around 1963 when the Church finally decided to cool it with the official anti-Semitism.

It's bad enough that the petty little dictator of a petty little theocracy has his own place at the United Nations, the undivided attention of leaders the world over, and thousands of missionaries hanging on his every word against contraception, homosexuality, and humanism. Now we have to deal with the notion that there is something to be lost by ignoring this guy, as if the Church has had anything meaningful to contribute to the advancement of humanity for the last two thousand years that it's been sitting on until this very speech next Thursday.

If the Pope wants to feel welcome in the modern, secular Europe that he slanders daily, he had better start his apologies today, and maybe he'll be finished with them by next Thursday. He can start by apologizing for every moment of Chantal Sebire's needless suffering late in life and work his way backwards. I'll wait.

Barring that, however, I will settle for some clarity. What, exactly, can we expect to learn from the Pope at this speech? How will it constitute anything more than a waste of the Bundestag's time to sit and listen to this old man chatter on about why the values of his decaying religion should take precedence in the affairs of a state that rejected those values long ago? Tell me one, legitimate profit there is to be had for Germany in this speech, or any other, from the Pope, and I will retract everything I've said today and apologize to the Pope personally. The man simply has nothing to say; it is a publicity venture for him, nothing more, and I salute the 100 or so German parliamentarians who have the courage to publicize their disgust for what is nothing more than a live commercial for the immensely profitable venture that is the Catholic Church.

Sunday Argument #8: Against dualism

2011-09-18T11:58:00.000-07:00

Whoever still believes in dualism needs to have somebody else's head examined. - Daniel Dennett
If you change the brain, you change the mind. If you damage the brain, you damage the mind. If you turn off the brain, it seems you turn off the mind. -Steven Novella

In the comments on the previous post, an anonymous commenter has laid down an invitation to a debate on the question of the nature of the mind, in the sense of whether our minds and our bodies essentially correspond with the former depending on the later (my position, physicalism), or whether the mind is a separate, distinct entity, which is usually what is meant as a "soul" in theistic discourse.

In the interests of that debate, the correspondence on which is currently underway, I'd like to sketch out what I think are the general reasons why we should reject the notion of the soul and any philosophical position that requires it. While I know that soul-like propositions are many and varied, I will here use the term "dualism" throughout to refer to any position holding that the mind is independent of the brain in the sense of either surviving beyond it, not requiring a brain to exist in the first place, or that the mind prefigures the brain.

One interesting nuance to this whole question is that, while dualism is virtually a universal appendage to all forms of theism, dualism is not inherently necessary for theism, nor is theism necessary for dualism. There could be just one extra law of physics out there in our godless universe stipulating that conscious minds persist without brains with or without a God, or there could be a God who created us with brains only and not souls. So even though the two go hand-in-hand, they do not entail each other, and this admittedly makes this an extremely low-risk undertaking for the atheist: win or lose on dualism, the atheist can concede dualism without ceding a jot of ground to theism. I just don't think that the atheist can concede dualism because it seems eminently false in every normal sense of the term.

Theism writ large is a vague and ambiguous term. What it predicts is rather unclear; whether we should expect, on theism, that Jesus rose from the dead or that the Book of Mormon is infallible or even nothing whatsoever because God is so cleverly "hidden" from view, is as I see it an internal dispute between theists. I can't think of a single thing that we know we can predict from theism, and there are days when I think that theism itself is such a malformed hypothesis that we can't really even deal with it directly, on piecemeal as individual claims in support of it arise. As a result, giving sturdy reasons against it is a nuanced and often pointless endeavor because the theists themselves do not agree on what theism should predict.

Dualism, on the other hand, is actually quite specific in its predictions, whether its proponents know it or not. Taken as the proposition that minds and brains are essentially distinct entities, we already have a huge number of propositions to deal with, the most obvious of which I think are:

We should expect to see minds that don't have brains (or brain-like systems, like extremely advanced computers).
We should expect to see functioning brains that do not have a mind associated with them.
We should see more or less no causal connections between brain activities and mind activities.

Proposition 1 seems like the most obvious one to me as a necessary consequence of dualism. Since dualism asks us to believe that the mind and the brain aren't necessarily linked, we should expect to see minds that actually aren't linked to brains. Of this, proposition 2 is the converse. If we do not see minds and brains that are different from each other, then why should we accept even as possible the idea of dualism?

The third one is a bit of a tripping point because theists and deists differ somewhat on this. Some would say that the body, brain and all, is a vessel of the soul, that the soul is more or less dormant in whatever brain-distinct functions it may have until the day the brain stops functioning. Others would say that they're totally independent. Neither position makes sense, and the latter is known to be false. But lets take these in order.

Firstly, we have never once observed a mind that did not come along with a brain. There are several hypothetical such entities- God, angels presumably, demons presumably, the souls of the bodily deceased, so forth -but none of them has ever actually been confirmed in any serious way. In your ordinary life, your normal contact with minds is always by contact with brains. Whether it's with a live person, or by telephone, or email, or even by an AI like Cleverbot, you are never dealing with an utterly disembodied mind that is separate from everything but itself- minds seem to be universally adhered to mind-making physical objects that, when deactivated, no longer generate minds.

It has been supposed, however, that "near-death experiences," in which someone claims to become a corpse but to still have a functioning mind that observes things, constitute evidence for dualism. Dinesh D'Souza once tried to make a whole book out of collecting these rather slipshod anecdotes into a cumulative case for dualism. It is impossible to deal with the anecdotal "near-death experience" claims individually, but I'll make some general observations about them.

Near-death experiences of equal evidentiary merit are wildly inconsistent with each other. The Near-Death Experiences Foundation has cataloged literally thousands of short, unverified anecdotes of near-death experiences. Some of them are completely Christianized near-death experiences: Jesus greets with open arms, warmly inviting the "deceased" into heaven, dead relatives are seen, heaven or hell are described in sometimes lurid detail, and then the deceased person "wakes up" in their body. This seems to suggest that Christianity is true, yet the archives also have a massive body of anecdotes completely antithetical to Christian theology: souls hovering above their dead bodies without going to heaven, hell, or purgatory, or visiting their dead, non-Christian loved ones in heaven, or seeing the lights of rebirth we would expect if natively south Asian religions were true. These stories all come with roughly equal evidential support, but they are completely incompatible.
The anecdotes in question are subject to so many dubious, uncontrollable factors that their authenticity is completely unverifiable (but this does not mean that the people inventing them are lying about what they think occurred). Typically, the events leading up to a near-death state involve strange and undesirable things happening to brains, the emotional turmoil of which alone makes highly emotionally-charged stories coming out of those experiences open to the usual twisting and misremembering that human brains are so good at. Someone in a state of near unconsciousness might naturally tend to think about the afterlife, and suddenly this emotionally-charged cognizing on the afterlife becomes a remembered experience of an afterlife, which suddenly becomes a bright light at the end of a tunnel. Anecdotes change as they are remembered, especially when they aren't subject to verification.
Near-death experiences aren't subject to verification. They are utterly inaccessible to the rest of us. I think even of the best of them, say, the experience of a person who was "put under" for surgery, didn't know the details of the surgery, but apparently "saw" the nuanced surgical techniques from above while they were "dead," and thusly reported on things they could not have known. But how would something like that ever be verified? Perhaps the subject overheard doctors or nurses talking and forgot about it, or talked with or overheard them after "waking up" but then, through the churning mess of human memory, grafted that information onto their "memories" of the afterlife that they've already been creating ever since they started thinking about the afterlife.
There are not very many near-death experiences. Near-death experiences have been reported under conditions as varied as total brain death down to a near-miss in a car accident that didn't even harm the individual at all, yet only a very small number of people in such situations actually report a near-death experience. This seems suspicious: if there is some universal fact about minds, human or other, amounting to dualism, we should expect there to always be a near-death experience since, in such events, there is always a soul that is losing its brain-anchor in the real world.

And the worst part about the whole thing for dualists is that, even if verified with incredible precision, we still have no good reasons to think that true near-death experiences would actually verify dualism. They would only show that our current models of consciousness are incomplete, which is a surprise to nobody as no one thinks that our models right now are anywhere near complete. It would follow from a somehow impeccably-verified near-death experience that our model of the brain was incomplete, but it would not follow from our model of the brain being incomplete that dualism is true or physicalism false. In short, near-death experiences are non-existent as evidence, and if they were, they wouldn't be of any good in terms of proving dualism true anyway.

I'm not even sure that the proven existence of certain kinds of Gods would demonstrate dualism. The God of the Bible has hands, eyes, feet, a throne so presumably he has something to seat on it, and he even respirates. The only critters we know of that also do that also seem to have physical brains, and so God himself, if he existed as he's described in the Bible, would not even verify dualism.

Neither, of course, do we observe brains that do not have minds attached to them. The designated evolutionary utterance for a mind seems to be the dense neuronal connections that lead to a mind. Dogs have brains, dinosaurs have brains, and it seems that wherever these brains are functioning, the critter has a mind. Pure and simple. This is completely mysterious on the proposition that minds and brains are utterly distinct and only slightly less mysterious on the propositions that minds and brains are joined in life but separated completely at death.

The reason that I think dualism could never be verified has to do with why the 3rd expectation of dualism is false. We have extremely detailed, highly predictive models of the interaction between the mind and the brain. We know which regions of the brain account for everything from emotion to memory to bowel control, and it seems that wherever we see some kind of serious brain damage, we see serious mind damage. People in persistent vegetative states have flatlined brain activity- another total mystery if the mind and the brain are truly distinct, since if they are distinct, the mind should be alive and well regardless of the brain's condition. People with frontal lobe lesions have detectable behavioral, cognitive, and social impairments.

If you consume a brain-altering drug, it seems that the mind is generally altered, also. It seems quite a coincidence on dualism that only brain-altering drugs happen to also alter the soul or the mind. The coincidences accumulate to the point of absurdity: how odd it seems that, even though the soul and the mind are totally different, the dead brain seems not to generate a mind, and the mindless brain seems to be damaged or deactivated wherever it is encountered.

The correspondence, however, is not merely one of temporal succession (mind damage seems always to be subsequent to brain damage, for example) but also spatially: the mind you associate with a person seems always to be localized in that actual person; the mind is not just connected to a body, but a designated, persistent body; minds do not get switched, minds do not get generated remotely. The mind follows the brain around. This kind of hard physical correspondence I think renders utterly inert any suggestion that the mind ever could be wandering around without the brain: we simply have no evidence that such a thing is possible, and if it is possible, that possibility never seems to obtain wherever it has the opportunity: rather than being freed from dead brains, minds seem to stop with dead brains.

It seems unnecessary to belabor this particular point, since the common association of brains and minds seems so completely integrated with our normal experiences as to be beyond genuine dispute. And what of the concept of the soul itself? It is said to be immaterial, yet its actions seem to be eminently material, namely, moving a body around and deciding things on its behalf. It is said to be immortal, yet the signs of its existence seem to fluctuate quite widely with the integrity of the brain it seems to follow around. It is said to be indivisible, but this.

The dualistic hypothesis I think hopes to find an escape from real evidence at the point of death, saying that the unobservable great beyond is where the soul really starts to matter. Two points on it.

Firstly, many of the various theisms ascribe rather brain-like functions even to disembodied souls. They feel pain in hell and pleasure in heaven. The rich man in the afterlife described in Luke experienced thirst, heat, desperation, memories- all things with known biological brain correlates.

Secondly, an afterlife-themed dualism doesn't escape the evidence we know, it's strictly contrary to it. The normal progression on the evidence is: as brains accumulate damage, minds are steadily and increasingly impaired until at death, when the mind apparently terminates. But on theism, that last point is exactly the opposite as it appears: that minds are increasingly impaired as death approaches, but then, rather than deactivated, they are perfected at the point of death when they enter into the eternal continuity of the afterlife.

The last refuge for something like the soul lies in what has been variously, oddly referred to as the "hard problem of consciousness." I say "oddly" because there is nothing hard about this problem at all, unless complete personal incredulity qualifies as a solid logical argument these days. The hard problem of consciousness ("the problem") asks us about our actual experiences- the taste of red wine, the sight of a warm summer sky, that internal feeling of continuity throughout time and the bevy of experiences associated with it -the units of which are called "qualia" in the lingo of the field. The problem is, how could inert matter actually have personal, subjective experience? It seems to be an emergent property of brains that transcends them; the fact of experience itself seem to be magical in the eyes of the proponents of this version of the problem.

Imagine, if you will, a "zombie-" a person like you or I with a perfectly functioning brain, but with no associated mind inside of it. It is completely dead and inert, but it mechanically moves through the steps of a normal waking life just like you and I appear to. The only difference is that it lacks all qualia, all experience, all subjectivity. If such a thing is even just possible, merely conceivable, say those who raise this problem against physicalism, then there must be something "extra" about us that makes us not zombies, some subjectivity-causing "oomph" over and above the brain itself, since the zombie could have a brain without a mind, but you seem to have both a brain and a mind.

So is something like that even conceivable? I don't think so, not any more than a car driving without an engine is conceivable. Yes, I can in my mind theoretically imagine an engineless car gliding down the highway with an empty hood. But if I really got down to the nitty-gritty nuts and bolts of it, tried to imagine the actual process of this car moving down the highway, I really couldn't get anything coherent without either realizing that the whole thing was impossible, or without invoking magic. I think that the zombie example is exactly analogous: with or without a mind, I can visualize a philosophical zombie, but I could never really get a complete, coherent idea of one down at the tiniest level because the evidence seem to actually seem to suggest that no, you couldn't have a brain like ours without a mind like ours.

The mind is what the brain does, after all. Your gut digests, your heart pumps blood, and your brain remembers, experiences, reacts, learns, and dreams. That is its function. If you imagined a brain just like one of ours down to the cellular level, you would necessarily have a mind just like if you imagined a gut like ours down to the cellular level, you couldn't imagine that gut functioning normally but not digesting. It utterly begs the question in favor of dualism to even say that a fully-functioning brain without a mind is even possible, and such is also directly contrary to the evidence since wherever we see a brain working, we also seem to see what looks like a mind working.

What your brain does is generate qualia and "experience" them. That sensation of continuity is a brain function. Even the very thought that you live inside your own body is a known brain function that can be deactivated through physical means: we can induce out-of-body experiences non-surgically, all with physical techniques. The mind is so utterly dependent on the brain, in fact, that we have to substantially alter the brain before the mind can even conceive of itself as being physically distinct from the brain. The brain is the gatekeeper. The brain makes the mind. Your subjective internal experience is just what the brain seems to do; if you take a brain-altering chemical, your subjective internal experiences will change rapidly, just as they do if your brain detects hunger, or a physical threat, or something sexy nearby, or is exposed to a mind-altering chemical. If you think that your radically subjective experiences speak to your mind being more independent of your brain and not less, then go put some alcohol in your brain and come slur me some excuses for why a sudden, dramatic change in your subjective experiences happened to perfectly dovetail a measurable chemical change in your mind.

Best of luck to the anonymous debater who challenged me in the last post. I would like to have a verbal exchange on the issue, since I'm genuinely curious to see how somebody could cook up a cogent case in favor of dualism. I've even tipped my hand: you've got all the bare bones of a simple case against dualism. Now lets see where we go next.

Our profoundly fatalistic candidates

2011-09-15T11:03:00.000-07:00

Barring some catastrophic reconfiguration of the Republican Party in the coming months, there are clearly only and exactly three potential candidates to run against Obama in 2012: Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Michelle Bachmann. The three are largely indistinguishable on most major policy questions, but on the question of personal religious philosophy, there are actually some substantial differences between Romney and the others.

Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann share a profound fatalism that I think savagely undercuts their ability to govern, if they actually believe the things that they say. They both follow a frankly medieval augury system in which everything from the weather to the geography of the Earth's crust is read as a divine portent. Apart from their open and proud servility to the authoritarian dreams of the Dominionist Christian right-wing, they both have interpreted recent meteorlogical events as... warnings from God.

To Bachmann, the recent earthquake in Virginia and Hurricane Irene were both warnings from God- not warnings that mid-Atlantic weather currents are dangerously unpredictable or that the Earth isn't as fixed and static as the Bible would have you believe, but that we need a smaller government. From earthquakes and hurricanes. Conveniently, the message lines up precisely with Bachmann's vague anti-government political rhetoric.

This is faces in clouds. It is tea leaves and I Ching straws. There is absolutely nothing about a major natural disaster that suggests that government should be smaller (if anything, such would call us to have a stronger federal government to help bring national resources to bear on serious disasters), just as there is nothing in the clouds but what you project, nothing in the tea leaves but what you hope to be true in the future, nothing in the static on your television but what the Martians are beaming into it via chemtrails. This is insanity. We treat people as insane when they use similar reasoning in different contexts. Someone who, say, read the entrails of a dove and saw "government should be smaller" would be immediately exiled from all reasoned political discourse. But, say it about a hurricane, using Christian vocabulary instead of Roman or New Ager, and you're in.

Likewise with Perry. His solution to devestating drought in his state (leading to massive, ongoing wildfires that might have been easier to control had Perry not slashed his state's firefighting budget shortly before asking for federal disaster relief to make up for the services he cut) was... a prayer rally. A huge prayer rally. Thousands in attendance, dozens of speakers (all Protestants of the oddest sort), praying for rain. Not only was it ineffective, it was met with rather the opposite of water- his state caught on fire.

But what bothers me is that these are not leadership qualities. Waiting for God to flash-flood the East Coast before you figure out your budget strategy is not leadership material. Getting together for an intercessory pow-wow rather than putting together a more responsible irrigation plan is not leadership material. Shirking your responsibilities by foisting all the footwork onto a theological hypothesis is not leadership.

You know that one manager in your company, the one who never does anything except forward your suggestions and requests up a step in the food chain, where they die quietly without comment? That's Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann. If things go well, God is rewarding them. If things go poorly, God is punishing them. No thought for what actually works, only what happens to correspond with a favorable result in whatever field of augury is giving interesting data: weather, earthquakes, so forth. They're just bad leaders. They're lazy in that way, taking credit for doing nothing and passing blame when doing nothing ruins things.

In all this mess, Romney looks like the same one. Romney actually believes in separation of church and state, which puts him a nose ahead of the others in my book, but not by much given that his only reason for not playing up his Dominionist credentials is that, almost by definition, Mormons don't get Dominionist credentials.

Obama is not a good role model for the separation of church and state, but at least he doesn't piss away his money or yours on prayer rallies when things start going downhill. Imagine if that had been his response to the credit downgrade, or if his jobs plan was to hire a bunch of temp government chaplains to pray for jobs. That, I think, is something we could actually expect from Perry and Bachmann.

I have failed to disappoint, or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the blog

2011-09-14T07:21:00.000-07:00

After over a month of my best efforts, I regretfully must inform you that I cannot continue to disappoint you.

My big plan to abandon the Teapot Atheist was all in place. Going into my second year of law school, I was going to go out with a bang, complete my big master project, and then just move on without a word. I was going to put the Teapot Atheist behind me, and focus everything I've got on my career and what will be my marriage come July. No good-bye post, no desperately erasing every trace of the blog's existence. Just let it stand for itself, let it be what it was.

I sometimes think that my reasons for abandoning you all were actually pretty good:

This blog consumes time I do not have. Because I've been less and less interested in offering snarky commentary on news items like most popular atheist blogs do and more and more interested in offering unreadable but fun-to-write philosophical arguments and more nuanced commentary, every post takes a long time to write. When you're working for eight hours a day and then in class for four hours more, with two hours total of commuting, plus studying, eating, erranding, and such, you really learn how to treasure your idle time.
This blog is a career liability. Seriously, if you were googling a potential representative of your firm as a hiring manager, or googling them as a client, and you came on some of the offensive, false, or downright stupid things I've said on this blog, would you be excited about that person?

But I just can't swing it. There are very few things in my life that I really, truly love and treasure, and this blog qua this blog and the thoughts and arguments I put into it just call me back every single time.

The plan was to put up the Jefferson Qur'an, send it off to a couple of publishers, get the appropriate rejection letters, and then call it a day with this whole youthful atheist phase and move on to the next phase of my life. But there is no next phase of my life: I have always been genuinely, deeply motivated by philosophical concerns, especially about the "big questions" of meaning, truth, God, and honesty. This is a blog about those things, though not necessarily in that order, and those things will never stop being meaningful or important to me.

Plus, I just can't stop reading things that drive me to think and argue. This summer, I read three and a half different versions of the Qur'an, plus in-depth historical treatments, textual critiques, and commentaries by the devout. There's a lot I've learned about Islam this year. Parallel to that, I read Jordan Howard Sobel's absolutely titanic Logic and Theism again, which is such a fountain of logic and clarity that I can't imagine just engaging with it as a reader and not a commenter. I still find myself going through my roll of religious news and philosophy sites, secular news and philosophy sites, and mainstream news sites, quite nearly salivating with my own thoughts on what is going on.

Today, we have a GOP field that is populated with theocrats. We are seeing a total reconfiguration of academic philosophy of religion, a re-aligning of its goals, arguments, and methods all at once. The evangelicals are on the move again. The secular movement in America, suddenly infused with a vast cache of excited young people by the works of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris, is now seeing that generation of eager, bright young minds mature from rabid de-converts into serious intellectuals. Paul Kurtz is coming back. These times are too exciting, and I cannot shirk my responsibility to my own intellectual integrity, or whatever responsibilities I may owe to you and to the secular movement, out of self-interested paranoia that law firms in Massachusetts just don't hire atheists.

I mean, hey, my grades are pretty good. I still work hard. When I was blogging all through my first year of law school, I still pulled out a very respectable class rank. My excuses for hanging up my Teapot Atheist cape and mask just don't square with my real desires- after years and years at this blog, I still have a job, I still have a family, I still have a future. I don't think my employers are stupid- I'm sure they've seen my debate video on youtube, and maybe they've even skimmed the blog. Everybody gets googled today, and somehow I still made it.

So, we're back. And it's my own goddamn fault. But we're getting back to basics here. Sunday Arguments are the priority. AdSense is staying, because I like the two cents a month and I think that it makes the blog look more legitimate, and most of the advertisers seem to be religious groups so we've really got a fun little meta-experiment in cognitive dissonance going on here. I'm not going to be updating every day, because my work-school-study-do things that engaged people do-schedule just doesn't allow it. But keep your bookmark, because sometimes, you might just see something here you like. Maybe Kinderling and all the gang will come back. Maybe David Mabus will get out of jail and start threatening me and my readers again. Or maybe it's just calm and quiet from here on out- all good to me.

The Jefferson Qur'an: a humanist reconstruction of Islam

2011-08-08T16:11:00.001-07:00

Consider this Sunday Argument #8, or maybe more appropriately, Sunday Argument #5a. In Sunday Argument 5, I provided a preliminary sketch of good reasons to think that the Qur'an is imperfect. From matters of grammar and syntax to story structure and repetition, there are many good reasons to think that the Qur'an fails its own challenge to unbelievers to find imperfection in it if they disbelieve it. The imperfections are bountiful; the Qur'an's complementary challenge to its readers to produce a work superior to it if such a thing is possible is easily done.

So easy that even I can do it.

In one sense, what Thomas Jefferson did with his Bible cannot be replicated with the Qur'an. Late in his life, Jefferson took a razorblade to his Bible and cut out everything that offended his reason or his morality- the entire Old Testament and most of the new, including all of the miracles, leaving behind only a thin, heavily-edited, heavily-redacted smattering of verses from the New Testament compiled as an aphorism-based summary of the teachings of Jesus as Jefferson wishes they were. This is impossible with the Qur'an because the Qur'an itself is said to be a miracle, or at least, evidence of its own miraculousness: its cover-to-cover perfection, perfectly preserved from the eternal Qur'an existing uncreated by Allah's side in heaven to Gabriel's mouth to Muhammed's ears to the pens of his scribes to the final Uthmanic compilation to your bookshelf- the book is perfect.

I cannot compliment the Qur'an by agreeing even conditionally or for the sake of argument to its miraculousness because of the brutality, the naked Muhammed-centricity (did you know that there's a special Hell preserved for people who annoy Muhammed?), the misogyny, the bizarre obsessions with pre-Islamic superstitions like jinns and cave sleepers and such, the clear political nature of it, the clearly contemporary cosmology, its bad versions and misunderstandings of Bible stories (Muhammed confuses the mother of Jesus and the sister of Aaron as the same Mary, and even confuses Mary with the Holy Spirit in the Trinity), its repetitiveness, its bad poetry- I would never even suggest to defend this mess. Quite the opposite. This is not an attempt to say something like, "through it all, the Qur'an is truly a perfect work at its authentic core." I have shorn its authentic core; I think its authentic core is the egocentricity of an epileptic Arabian merchant and nothing more.

When reading through the Qur'an, I found an enormous amount of straight garbage shrouding these tiny glimmers of potential. Of its 3,400 or so verses, the first draft of the Jefferson Qur'an kept about 10%, and the verses you will see below represent less than 7% of the number of verses in the Qur'an, and virtually every single one of these verses has been redacted or edited to spare it from the ash heap to which the rest of the book belongs.

There are three different kinds of redaction I have done, and they are all with the ultimate goal of compelling the Qur'an to sound reasonable. The first kind is the most common kind, where I have stripped some verses of extraneous, unreasonable, or plainly stupid words or clauses, but have kept a kind of logical equivalency. Just as it follows from "Ted is blonde and Hank is French" that "Hank is French," I have tried to only omit clauses within verses without changing their total logical structure, wherever possible. For example, the unedited Qur'an 4:1 says:

O mankind! Reverence your Guardian-Lord, Who created you from a single Person, created, of life nature, his mate, and from them twain scattered (like seeds) countless men and women; - reverence Allah, through Whom you demand your mutual rights, and reverence the wombs that bore you, for Allah ever watches over you.

Which after my redactions says:

Reverence the wombs that bore you.

The redacted version is perfectly compatible with the unredacted version, it just strips away the plain nonsense bordering a perfectly respectable moral command. I do think that people should love their mothers. I just don't think that we need to analogize it to an Arabian theological hypothesis to do so.

Secondly, I have changed the language to be more gender-inclusive wherever I thought it was necessary, and thirdly, I have simply scrubbed the nonsense from many of them. In total, less than one percent of the verses from the Qur'an is in the document below, unedited.

A note on translation: the base text I have relied on most heavily is the "modern English" version from the Muhammed Yusuf Ali translation of the Qur'an. It is the 11th Edition of the Muhammed Yusuf Ali translation, published by Tahrike Tarsile Qur'an, Inc., from 1995. The document you will see below would have been slightly larger had I stopped there, but I have also used the un-updated Muhammed Yusuf Ali, 2nd edition, as well as the first edition produced in Ali's own massive commentary published as The Holy Qur'an: Text, Translation, and Commentary by Muhammed Yusuf Ali. These two texts were then compared against Muhammed Pickthall's translation. In short, three different Qur'an translations were inspected for this document, so I confidently assert that nothing is in here purely by accident of a favorable translation.

So that is what you will see. Below, you will see the text accompanied by numbers corresponding to the verses the text is based on. The foundational verses have been changed in nearly every instance.

Preface

1:6 Show us the straight way,

1:7 The way of those who do not go astray.

On truth and error

2:256 Truth stands out clear from Error.

7:33 Forbidden is trespass against truth or reason;

45:7 Woe to each dealer in falsehood.

2:42 Cover not Truth with falsehood, nor conceal the Truth when you know what it is;

2:283 Conceal not evidence.

17:81 Say, “Truth has now arrived, and Falsehood perished: for Falsehood is, by its nature, bound to perish.”

7:199 Turn away from ignorance.

53:28 Conjecture avails nothing against truth.

On discovering truth

6:19 Say: “What thing is most weighty in evidence?”

6:148 Say “Have you any certain knowledge? If so, produce it before us.”

21:24 Say, “Bring your convincing proof.”

2:111 Say: “Produce your proof if you are truthful.”

27:64 Bring forth your argument, if you are telling the truth!

29:2 Do men think that they will be left alone on saying, “We believe,” and that they will not be tested?

16:125 Argue with the unbelievers in ways that are best and most gracious.

16:127 And be patient, and do not grieve over their disbelief.

33:5 There is no shame on you if you make a mistake therein: what counts is the intention of your hearts.

On disputation with the unbelievers

43:22 They say: “We found our fathers following a certain religion, and we do guide ourselves by their footsteps.”

43:24 He said: “What! Even if I brought you better guidance which you found your fathers following?”

43:58 And they say, “Are our gods best, or is his?” This they set forth to you, only by way of disputation- yes, they are a contentious people.

On the ways of the unbelievers

13:1 Most men do not believe.

7:185 Do they see nothing of government in the heavens and the earth?

11:121 Say to those who do not believe: “Do whatever you can: we shall do our part; and you wait! We, too, shall wait.”

8:73 The Unbelievers are protectors, one of another; unless you do this also, there would be tumult, and oppression, and great mischief.

2:8 Of the people there are some who say: “We believe in Allah and the Last Day”; but they do not really believe,

2:89 and when there comes to them ta Book, they refuse to believe in it.

10:42 Among them are some who pretend to listen to you.

2:13 When it is said to them: “Believe as the others believe:” they say: “Shall we believe as the fools believe?”

6:8 They say: “Why is not an angel sent down to him?” If Allah sent down an angel, the matter would be settled at once, and no respite would be granted them.

6:158 They are waiting to see if the angels come to them, or Allah himself, or certain signs of Allah.

15:6 They say: “O you to whom the message is being revealed! Truly you are mad!

15:7 Why don't you bring the angels to us if it be that you have the truth?”

16:103 We know indeed that they say, “It is a man that teaches him.”

the earth,

17:91 or until you have a garden of date trees and vines, and cause rivers to gush forth in their midst, carrying abundant water,

17:92 or you cause the sky to fall in pieces, as you say will happen against us, or you bring Allah and the angels before us face to face,

17:93 or you have a house adorned with gold, or you mount a ladder right into the skies. No, we shall not even believe in your mounting until you send down to us a book that we could read.

27:68 It is true that we were promised this, we and our fathers before us- these are nothing but tales of the ancients.”

43:22 They say: “We found our fathers following a certain religion, and we do guide ourselves by their footsteps.”

43:24 He said: “What! Even if I brought you better guidance which you found your fathers following?”

43:58 And they say, “Are our gods best, or is his?” This they set forth to you, only by way of disputation- yes, they are a contentious people.

7:173 And they say, “Our fathers before us may have taken false gods, but we are their descendants after them: will you then destroy us because of the deeds of other men?”

5:102 Some people before you did ask such questions, and on that account lost their faith.

On converting the unbelievers

2:6 As to those who reject Faith, they will not believe.

2:75 Can you, O men of Faith, entertain the hope that they will believe in you?

6:35 If their spurning is hard on your mind, consider: If it were Allah's Will, he could gather them together to true guidance.

2:212 The life of this world is alluring to those who reject faith.

On disputing with them dispassionately

6:33 Allah would know the discomfort the Unbelievers' words cause you. It is not you they reject, it is the Signs of Allah they reject;

15:97 We do indeed know how your heart is distressed at what the unbelievers say.

4:89 They but wish that you should reject Faith, as they do, and thus be on the same footing as they are.

On disputing with them peacefully

5:80 You see many monotheists turning in friendship to the Unbelievers.

18:29 Let him who will, believe, and let him who will, reject it.

26:3 It may be you fret your soul with grief, that they do not become believers.

26:4 If such were Allah's will, he could send down to them from the sky a sign, to which they would bend their necks in humility.

13:31 Don't believers know that, had Allah so willed, he could have guided all mankind to Islam?

Two parables on the unbelievers

11:27 But the Chiefs of the Unbelievers among his people said: “We see in you nothing but a man like ourselves: nor do we see that any follow you but the meanest among us, in judgment immature: nor do we see in you all any merit above us.”

11:28 He said: “O my people! Do you see if it be that I have a clear sign from my lord, and that he has sent mercy to me from his own presence, but that the mercy has been obscured from your sight? Shall we compel you to accept it when you are averse to it?

11:29 And O my people! I ask you for no wealth in return: my reward is from none but Allah: but I will not drive away in contempt those who believe.

11:31 I do not tell you that with me are the treasures of Allah, nor do I know what is hidden, nor do I claim to be an angel. If I did, I would indeed be a wrong-doer.

11:32 They said: “O Noah! You have disputed with us and much have you prolonged the dispute. Now bring upon us what you threaten us with, if you speak the truth.”

11:33 He said, “Truly, Allah will bring it on you if He wills.”

19:42 Behold, he said to his father, “O my father! Why do you worship that which does not hear and does not see, and can profit you nothing?

19:43 O my father! To me has come knowledge which has not not reached you: so follow me: I will guide you to a way that is even and straight.

19:46 The father replied: Do you hate my gods, Abraham? If you do not forbear, I will indeed stone you: now get away from me a good long while!”

19:47 Abraham replied: “Peace be on you.”

A dialogue concerning tradition

23:24 The chiefs of the Unbelievers among his people said: “He is no more than a man like yourselves: his wish is to assert his superiority over you: if Allah had wished to send messengers, he could have sent down the angels: never did we hear such a thing as he says among our ancestors of old.”

23:25 And some said: “He is only a man possessed: wait and have patience with him for a time.”

23:26 Noah said: “O my Lord! Help me, for that they accuse me of falsehood.”

23:33 And the chiefs of his people, who disbelieved and denied the Meeting in the Hereafter, and on whom had been bestowed the good things of this life, said: “He is no more than a man like yourselves: he eats of that which you eat, and drinks of what you drink.

23:34 If you obey a man like yourselves, behold, it is certain you will be lost.

23:35 Does he promise that when you die and become dust and bones, you will be raised up?

23:36 Far, very far is that which you are promised!

23:37 There is nothing but our life in this world! We shall die and we live! But we shall never be raised up again.”

23:39 The prophet said: “O my Lord! Help me, for that they accuse me of falsehood.”

23:82 They say: “What! When we die and become dust and bones, could we really be raised up again?

23:83 Such things have been promised to us and our fathers before. They are nothing but tales of the ancients.”

On the believers

11:109 Be not in doubt as to what these men worship. They worship nothing but what their fathers worshiped before them.

22:12 They call on such deities, besides Allah, as can neither hurt nor profit them: that is straying far indeed.

That the believers are not all alike

3:75 Among the people of the book are those who, if entrusted with a hoard of gold, will readily pay it back, others who, if entrusted with a single silver coin, will not repay it unless you constantly stood demanding it from them, because, they say, “there is no call on us to keep loyalties with these ignorant pagans.”

7:159 Of the people of Moses, some do justice in the light of truth.

3:78 Among them there are some who distort their books with their tongues, reading you what you think is part of the book but it is not.

7:168 There are among them some that are righteous, and some that are the opposite.

3:113 Not all of them are alike: of the People of the Book are a portion that stand for the right.

3:114 They enjoin what is right, and forbid what is wrong, and they hasten in emulation of all good works; they are in the ranks of the righteous.

5:66 There is from among them a party on the right course, but many of them follow a course that is evil.

5:80 You see many of them turning in friendship to the Unbelievers.

5:69 Those who believe in the Qur'an, those who follow the Jewish scriptures, and the Sabians and the Christians, and work righteousness, they do well.

3:115 Of the good that they do, nothing will be rejected of them.

On religious excess

4:171 O, monotheists: Commit no excesses in your religion.

5:77 O monotheists! Exceed not in your religion the bounds of what is proper, trespassing beyond the truth, nor follow the vain desires of people who went wrong in times gone by, - who misled many, and strayed themselves from the even path.

5:87 O monotheists! Do not make unlawful the good things, but commit no excess.

5:88 Eat [therefore] of the things which are lawful and good.

3:65 You people of the book, why do you dispute about Abraham, when the texts about him were not assembled until long after him? Have you no understanding?

3:66 Oh, you people of the book are those who fell into disputing over matters of which you had some knowledge. But why do you dispute in matters of which you have no knowledge?

4:157 Those who differ on the issue of the death and resurrection of Jesus are full of doubts, with no certain knowledge, but only conjecture to follow.

3:71 You people of the book, why do you clothe truth with falsehood, and conceal the Truth, while you have knowledge?

5:18 Both the Jews and the Christians say: “We are sons of God, and His beloved.” Say: “Why then does his wrath not spare you? No, you are human like the rest of us.”

On the discord between the believers

2:111 They say: “None shall enter Paradise unless he be a Jew or a Christian.” These are their vain desires. Say: Produce your proof if you are truthful.

2:170 They say: “Nay! We shall follow the ways of our fathers.” What! Even though their fathers were void of wisdom?

5:104 They say: “Enough for us are the ways we found our fathers following.” What! Even though their fathers were void of knowledge?

2:113 The Jews say: “The Christians have nothing to stand upon,” and the Christians say, “The Jews have nothing to stand upon.” Yet they profess to study the same Book.

9:30 The Israelites called 'Uzair a son of Allah, and the Christians call Christ the Son of Allah. That is a saying from their mouth; in this, they imitate the other old religions. How far they are from the truth!

9:31 They take their priests and their anchorites to be their lords, and they take as their Lord Christ the son of Mary; yet they claim also to worship but one God.

9:34 There are indeed many among the priests and anchorites, who in falsehood devour the substance of men and hinder them.

3:72 Some of the monotheists say, “Believe in the morning what is revealed to the

believers, but reject it at the end of the day,

3:73 and believe no one unless he follows your religion;”

2:120 Never will the Jews or the Christians be satisfied with you unless you follow their form of religion.

10:68 They say, “God has begotten a son! Glory be to him!” Is God not self-sufficient? Are all things in the heavens and on earth not his? No warrant have they for this! Do they say about God what they do not know?

22:11 There are among men some who serve Allah, as it were, on the verge: if good befalls them, they are, therewith, well content; but if a trial comes to them, they turn on their faces: they lose both this world and the Hereafter: that is loss for all to see!

22:12 They call on such deities, besides Allah, as can neither hurt nor profit them: that is straying far indeed.

On those who multiply their discord

6:159 As for those who divide their religion and break up into sects, you have no part in them in the least.

On theology

8:46 Do not fall into theological disputes, and be patient and persevering.

A parable on religious law

3:93 All food was lawful to the Israelites, except what the Israelites made unlawful for themselves.

2:168 O you people! Eat of what is on earth, lawful and good; and do not follow the footsteps of Evil.

5:87 O monotheists! Do not make unlawful the good things, but commit no excess.

5:88 Eat, therefore, of the things which are lawful and good.

On the evil of waging war for religion

2:256 Let there be no compulsion in religion: Truth stands out clear from Error.

6:131 Your Lord would not destroy men's habitations for their wrong-doing whilst their occupants were unwarned.

2:190 Fight those who fight you, but do not transgress limits. Allah does not love transgressors.

3:21 As to those who slay those who teach just dealing with mankind, announce to them a grievous penalty.

On the obligation of peace

8:61 If the enemy incline toward peace, you also incline toward peace.

10:99 If it had been your Lord's will, they would all have believed, all who are on the earth. Will you then compel mankind, against their will, to believe?

13:31 Don't believers know that, had Allah so willed, he could have guided all mankind to Islam?

7:87 If there is a party among you that believes in the Qur'an and its message, and a party which does not, hold yourselves in patience until Allah decides between them, for if he is at all, then he is best to decide.

9:4 Your treaties with unbelievers are not dissolved if they have not failed you in anything, nor aided your enemies against you. So fulfill your engagements with them to the end of their term.

6:70 Leave alone those who take their religion to be mere play and amusement; it will find for itself no protector or intercessor.

6:66 Say, “Not mine is the responsibility for arranging your affairs.”

On the obligation of freedom of religion

14:11 Their Messengers said to them: “True, we are human like yourselves, but Allah grants his grace to such of his servants as he pleases. It is not for us to bring you an authority.”

16:1 The commands of Allah would be inevitable; do not seek to hasten them.

16:9 If Allah had willed, he could have guided all of you.

16:93 If Allah had so willed, he could have made you all one people.

18:29 Let him who will, believe, and let him who will, reject it.

31:23 If any reject faith, let not that rejection grieve you.

46:35 Therefore patiently persevere, and be in no haste about the unbelievers.

39:41 You are not set over the unbelievers to dispose of their affairs.

On the tradition of peace with unbelievers

60:5 Abraham's people prayed: “Our Lord! Do not make us a trial for the unbelievers, but forgive us.”

A parable on religious freedom

40:28 A believer, a man from among the people of Pharaoh, who had concealed his faith, said, “Will you slay a man because he says, “My Lord is Allah?” If he be a liar, on him is the sin of his lie, but if he is telling the truth, then will fall on you the calamity of which he warns.”

A parable on war for religion

28:15 And he entered the city at a time when its people were not watching: and he found there two men fighting, one of his own religion, and the other, of his foes. Now the man of his own religion appealed to him against his foe, and Moses struck him with his fist and killed him. He said: “This is a work of Evil, for Evil is an enemy that manifestly misleads!

28:16 He prayed: “O Lord! I have indeed wronged my soul! You then forgive me!”

On the beauty of the natural world

37:6 The heavens are decked with the beauty of the stars;

15:16 The stars in the sky are fair-seeming to all who behold them.

55:5 The sun and the moon follow predictable courses.

2:19 See the rain-laden cloud from the sky: in it are zones of darkness, and thunder and lightning.

35:27 In the mountains are tracts white and red, of various shades and colors, and black intense in hue.

35:28 Amongst men and crawling creatures and cattle, they are of various colors.

On man's place in the cosmos

40:57 The creation of the heavens and the earth is a greater matter than the creation of men, yet most men do not understand.

76:1 Has there not been, before humans, a long period of time when humans were nothing, not even mentioned?

42:11 There are pairs among you, and pairs among cattle.

On human life

4:77 Short is the enjoyment of this world;

3:185 Every soul shall have a taste of death.

55:26 All that is on earth will perish.

18:23 Say of nothing, “I shall be sure to do so and so tomorrow.”

21:34 We did not grant to any man before you permanent life.

31:34 Nor does any one know what it is that he will earn on the morrow: nor does any one know in what land he is to die.

6:134 All that is in store for you will come to pass, and you cannot frustrate your fate.

7:34 To every person is a term appointed: when his or her time is reached, not an hour can the term be delayed, nor can it be advanced in anticipation.

6:29 Some Unbelievers say: “There is nothing except our life on this earth, and never shall we be raised up again.”

45:24 And they say: “What is there but our life in this world? We shall die and we live, and nothing but Time can destroy us.”

A parable on impermanence

30:2 The Roman Empire has been defeated

30:3 in a land close by.

45:24 And they say: “What is there but our life in this world? We shall die and we live, and nothing but Time can destroy us.”

On right action

2:148 Strive together as in a race toward all that is good.

29:4 Do those who practice evil think that they will get the better of you?

Religion without goodness is empty

2:177 It is not righteousness that you turn your faces towards East or West; but it is righteousness to spend of your substance for your kin, for orphans, for the needy, for the wayfarer, for those who ask, and for the ransom of slaves. Practice regular charity, fulfill the contracts which you have made, and be firm and patient in pain or adversity and throughout all periods of panic.

On good and evil

41:34 Goodness cannot be equal with Evil.

90:13 Goodness is freeing the bondman,

90:14 or giving of food in a day of privation

90:15 to the orphan,

90:16 or to the indigent down in the dust.

7:199 Hold to forgiveness; command what is right; turn away from ignorance.

9:105 Say: “Work Righteousness.”

7:33 Forbidden are shameful things, open or secret.

2:25 Give glad tidings to those who work righteousness.

2:195 Do not make your own hands contribute to your destruction, but do good.

On praise for the righteous

13:29 For those who work righteousness, is every blessedness.

On forgiveness

15:85 Overlook any human faults with gracious forgiveness.

On hypocrisy

61:2 Why do you say that which you do not?

61:3 Grievously odious is it that you say that which you do not.

2:44 Do you enjoin right conduct on the people, and forget to practice it yourselves? Will you not understand?

2:263 Kind words and the covering of faults are better than charity followed by injury.

On family relations

2:233 No mother shall be treated unfairly on account of her child, nor father on account of his child.

6:151 Be good to your parents, kill not your children on plea of want, do not come near to shameful deeds whether open or secret; take not life except by way of justice and law.

17:23 Be kind to parents. Whether one or both of them attain old age in your life, say not to them a word of contempt, nor repel them, but treat them with honor.

17:24 And, out of kindness, be humble before them.

17:26 Render to your kindred their due rights, as also to those in want and the wayfarer. Do not squander your wealth in the manner of a spendthrift.

4:1 Reverence the woman that bore you.

6:140 Lost are those who slay their children. They have indeed gone astray.

9:23 Do not take for protectors your fathers and your brothers if they live with infidelity.

4:22 Do not marry women whom your fathers married.

4:23 Do not marry your near relations.

4:24 Those married are also prohibited.

4:36 Do good to parents, kinsfolk, orphans, those in need, neighbors who are near, neighbors who are strangers, the companion by your side, and the way-farer.

4:135 Follow not the lusts of your hearts, lest you swerve, and do not distort justice or decline to do justice.

17:32 Do not come near to adultery, for it is a shameful deed, and an evil that opens the road to other evils.

2:235 There is no blame on you if you make an offer of betrothal or hold it in your hearts.

4:128 If a wife fears cruelty or desertion on her husband's part, there is no blame on them if they arrange an amicable settlement between themselves in divorce; and such settlement is best.

On greed

100:8 Some men are violent in love of wealth.

104:1 Woe to every kind of scandal-monger and backbiter,

104:2 who piles up wealth and lays it by counting penny by penny,

104:3 thinking that his wealth would make him last forever!

104:4 By no means!

30:41 Mischief has appeared on land and sea because of the meed that the hands of men have earned.

4:135 Follow not the lusts of your hearts, lest you swerve, and do not distort justice or decline to do justice.

17:32 Do not come near to adultery, for it is a shameful deed, and an evil that opens the road to other evils.

24:22 Let not those among you who are endued with grace and amplitude of means resolve by oath against helping their kinsmen or those in want.

4:29 Do not eat up your property among yourselves in vanities: but let there be amongst you traffic and trade by mutual good-will: nor kill yourselves.

9:93 The ground of complaint is against such as claim exemption from principles of charity while they are rich.

17:29 Do not make your hand tied to your neck like a miser's, but also do not stretch it forth to its utmost reach so you become destitute.

26:151 Do not follow the bidding of those who are extravagant,

26:152 who make mischief in the land, and do not mend their ways.

30:39 That which you lay out for increase through the property of other people will have no increase.

On the character of the greedy man

68:10 Do not heed the type of despicable men, ready with oaths,

68:11 a slanderer, going about with calumnies,

68:12 habitually hindering all good, transgressing beyond bounds,

68:13 violent and cruel, utterly base,

68:14 because he is wealthy and successful.

On the futility of greed

3:14 Fair in the eyes of men is the love of things they covet: women and sons, heaped-up hoards of gold and silver, horses branded for blood and excellence, and wealth of cattle and well-tilled land. Such are the possessions of this world's life.

8:28 And you should know that your possessions and your progeny are but a trial.

18:46 Wealth and sons are the allurements of the life of this world: but the things that endure, Good Deeds, are best as the foundation for hopes.

On orphans

93:9 Do not treat the orphans with harshness.

4:2 Restore the property of your orphans to them when they reach their age, nor substitute your worthless things for their good ones; and do not devour their substance by mixing it up with your own. For this is indeed a great sin.

4:10 Those who eat up the property of orphans are unjust.

6:152 Come not near to the orphan's property, except to improve it, until he attain the age of full strength; give measure and weight with full justice. Whenever you speak, speak justly, even if a near relative is concerned.

17:34 Do not come near to an orphan's property except to improve it, until he attains the right age. Fulfill every engagement.

On charity

2:43 Practice regular charity.

64:16 Spend in charity.

2:215 They ask you what they should spend in charity. Say: Whatever you spend that is good, is for parents and kindred and orphans and those in want and for wayfarers.

3:92 By no means shall you attain righteousness unless you give freely of that which you love.

2:273 Charity is for those in need, those who are restricted from travel, and those seeking for trade or work: the ignorant man thinks, because of their modesty, they are free from want.

9:60 Alms are for the poor and the needy, and those who are employed to administer the funds for those in bondage and in debt.

74:6 Do not expect your charity to be profitable to you.

93:10 Do not repulse the petitioner unheard.

2:264 Do not cancel your charity by reminders of your generosity or by injury, like those who spend of their substance just to be seen of men.

2:271 If you disclose acts of charity, that is acceptable, but if you conceal them and make them reach those really in need, that is best for you: it will improve the evils in your character.

2:264 Do not cancel your charity by reminders of your generosity or by injury, like those who spend of their substance just to be seen of men.

2:280 If a debtor is in difficulty, grant him time till it is easy for him to repay. But if you remit it by way of charity, that is best for you if you only knew.

On just investment

2:267 Give of the good things which you have honorably earned, and of the fruits of the earth, and do not even aim at getting anything bad in order that out of it you may give away something, when you yourselves would not receive it except with closed eyes.

17:35 Give full measure when you measure, and weigh with a balance that is straight: that is the most fitting and the most advantageous in the final determination.

4:29 Do not eat up your property among yourselves in vanities: but let there be amongst you traffic and trade by mutual good-will: nor kill yourselves

8:27 Do not betray a trust, nor misappropriate knowingly things entrusted to you.

2:280 If a debtor is in difficulty, grant him time till it is easy for him to repay. But if you remit it by way of charity, that is best for you if you only knew.

3:130 Devour not Usury, doubled and multiplied.

7:31 Do not waste by excess.

4:5 To those weak of understanding do not make over your property, but feed and clothe them therewith, and speak to them words of kindness and justice.

On moral reflection

40:55 Ask forgiveness for your fault.

3:134 Be as those who spend freely, whether in prosperity, or in adversity, who restrain anger, and pardon all men,

3:135 And those who, having done something to be ashamed of, or wronged their own souls, ask for forgiveness, and are never obstinate in persisting knowingly in the wrong they have done.

On prudence

41:35 No one will be granted goodness except those who exercise patience and self-restraint, none but those of the greatest luck.

A parable on prudence

42:37 Those who avoid the greater crimes and shameful deeds, and forgive even when they are angry,

42:38 who conduct their affairs by mutual consultation,

42:39 who, when an oppressive wrong is inflicted on them, are not cowed but help and defend themselves,

42:40 who forgives and makes reconciliation, is deserving of reward.

42:41 But indeed if any do help and defend themselves after a wrong is done to them, against such there is no cause of blame.

42:42 The blame is only against those who oppress men with wrongdoing and insolently transgress beyond bounds through the land, defying right and justice.

42:43 But indeed if any show patience and forgive, that would truly be an exercise of courageous will and resolution in the conduct of affairs.

On personal responsibility

2:134 They shall reap the fruit of what they did, and you of what you do!

2:141 They shall reap the fruit of what they did, and you of what you do!

17:15 No bearer of burdens can bear the burdens of another.

2:233 No mother shall be treated unfairly on account of her child, nor father on account of his child.

6:52 In nothing are you accountable to those who call on their Lord morning and evening, and in nothing are they accountable for you. You should not turn them away unjustly.

6:66 Say, “Not mine is the responsibility for arranging your affairs.”

41:46 Whoever works righteousness benefits his own soul; whoever works evil, it is against his own soul.

On the genders

65:6 Women and men should be allowed to live in the same style, according to their means, and do not annoy each other such as to restrict each other. If they carry your children, spend of your substance on them.

4:32 To men is allotted what they earn, and to women what they earn.

2:235 There is no blame on you if you make an offer of betrothal or hold it in your hearts.

4:7 From what is left by parents and those nearest related there is a share for men and a share for women, whether the property be small or large, - a determinate share.

4:19 You are forbidden to inherit women. Nor should you treat them with harshness. On the contrary, live with them on a footing of kindness and equity.

On your associations

4:85 Whoever recommends and helps a good cause becomes a partner therein, and whoever recommends and helps an evil cause shares in its burden.

On your contractual relations

2:177 Fulfill the contracts which you have made.

5:1 Fulfill all obligations.

16:91 Do not break your oaths after you have confirmed them.

16:94 And do not take your oaths just to practice deception, to make someone's foot slip after it was firmly planted- you would have to taste the evil consequences of hindering a man.

5:89 You will be called to account for your deliberate oaths: to expiate an oath, one should atone through charity comparable to one's means, or free a slave. But keep to your oaths.

2:282 When you deal with each other, in transactions involving future obligations in a fixed period of time, reduce them to writing. Let a scribe write down faithfully as between the parties. Let him who incurs the liability dictate, and not diminish anything of what he owes. If the party liable is mentally deficient, or weak, or unable himself to dictate, let his guardian dictate faithfully. The witnesses should not refuse when they are called on for evidence. Disdain not to reduce to writing your contract for a future period, whether it be small or big: it is juster, more suitable as evidence, and more convenient to prevent doubts among yourselves but if it be a transaction which you carry out on the spot among yourselves, there is no blame on you if you reduce it not to writing. But take witnesses whenever you make a commercial contract; and let neither scribe nor witness suffer harm. If you do such harm, it would be wickedness in you.

2:283 If you are on a journey, and cannot find a scribe, pledge with possession may serve the purpose of a contract instead. And if one of you deposits a thing on trust with another, let the trustee faithfully discharge his trust. Conceal not evidence.

16:91 Do not break your oaths after you have confirmed them.

16:92 And do not be like one who breaks into untwisted strands the yarn which she has spun, after it has become strong. Nor take your oaths just to practice deception between yourselves.

16:94 And do not take your oaths just to practice deception, to make someone's foot slip after it was firmly planted- you would have to taste the evil consequences of hindering a man.

On the infirm

24:61 It is no fault in the blind nor in the lame, nor in one afflicted with illness, nor in yourselves, that you should eat in your own houses, or those of your family, or in the houses of your sincere friends: there is no blame on you, whether you eat in company or separately.

On political freedom

8:25 Fear tumult and oppression, which affects not in particular only those of you who do wrong.

2:217 Tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter.

On religious freedom

2:114 Who is more unjust than he who forbids that in places for the worship of Allah, Allah's name should be celebrated?

2:256 Let there be no compulsion in religion: Truth stands out clear from Error.

18:29 Let him who will, believe, and let him who will, reject it.

39:41 You are not set over the unbelievers to dispose of their affairs.

On the orderly society

54:28 Everyone's right to drink of the water is to be brought forward by suitable turns.

55:9 Establish weight with justice and do not fall short in the balance.

2:84 Shed no blood amongst you, nor turn out your own people from your homes.

2:219 They ask you concerning wine and gambling. Say: “In them is great sin, and some profit, for men; but the sin is greater than the profit.” They ask you how much they are to spend; say: “What is beyond your needs.”

On justice

26:181 Give just measure, and cause no loss to others by fraud.

26:182 And weigh with scales true and upright.

26:183 And do not withhold things justly due to men, nor do evil in the land, working mischief.

5:45 It once was ordained: “Life for life, eye for eye, nose for nose, ear for ear, tooth for tooth, and wounds equal for equal.” But it is better for such retaliation to be remitted by way of charity.

5:8 Stand out firmly as witnesses to fair dealing, and let not the hatred of others to you make you swerve to wrong and depart from justice.

4:135 Stand out firmly for justice, even as against yourselves, or your parents, or your kin, and whether it be against rich or poor. Follow not the lusts of your hearts, lest you swerve, and do not distort justice or decline to do justice.

17:33 Do not take life except for just cause. If anyone is slain wrongfully, give the heir authority to demand compensation or to forgive (but do not let the heir exceed bounds in the matter of taking life, for he is helped by the law.)

4:92 Never should a believer kill a believer, but if it happens by mistake, compensation is due: a believer who kills a believer (accidentally) should pay compensation to the deceased's family, unless they forfeit their claim freely.

4:93 If a man kills a man intentionally, a dreadful penalty should be prepared for him.

7:85 Give just measure and weight, nor withhold from the people the things that are their due; and do no mischief on the earth after it has been set in order: that will be best for you.

7:86 And do not squat on every road breathing threats and passers-by; hold in your mind's eye what is the end of those who do mischief.

On the unjust

83:1 Woe to those that deal in fraud,

83:2 those who, when they have to receive by measure from men, exact full measure,

83:3 but when they have to give by measure of weight to men, give less than due.

On inheritance

2:180 When death approaches any of you, if you leave any goods, you should make a bequest to parents and next of kin, according to reasonable usage.

2:181 If anyone changes the bequest after hearing it, the guilt shall be on those who make the change.

2:182 But if anyone fears partiality or wrong-doing on the part of the testator, and makes peace between the parties concerned, there is no wrong in him.

5:106 When death approaches any of you, take witnesses among yourselves when making bequests. Make the witnesses to your bequests swear against cheating you for their own benefit, and that the evidence of your bequest will not be hidden.

4:9 Let those disposing of an estate have the same fear in their minds as they would have for their own if they had left a helpless family behind.

8:27 Do not betray a trust, nor misappropriate knowingly things entrusted to you.

4:7 From what is left by parents and those nearest related there is a share for men and a share for women, whether the property be small or large, - a determinate share.

4:8 But if at the time of division other relatives, or orphans, or poor, are present, feed them out of the property, and speak to them words of kindness and justice.

On social graces

4:86 When a courteous greeting is offered you, meet it with a greeting still more courteous, or of at least equal courtesy.

17:37 Nor walk on the earth with insolence: for you cannot rend the earth asunder, nor reach the mountains in height.

24:61 But if you enter houses, salute each other.

31:19 Be moderate in your pace, and lower your voice, for the harshest of sounds without doubt is the braying of the ass.

49:12 Do not speak ill of each other behind your backs.

55:9 Establish weight with justice and do not fall short in the balance.

58:9 When you hold secret counsel, do not do it for iniquity and hostility, but do it for righteousness and self-restraint.

On excess in war

8:41 If you take levies in war, a share is assigned to orphans, the needy, and the wayfarer.

A parable on justice

38:21 Has the story of the Disputants reached you? Behold, they climbed over the wall of the private chamber;

38:22 When they entered the presence of David, and he was terrified of them, they said: “Fear

not: we are two disputants, one of whom has wronged the other: decide now between us with truth, and treat us not with injustice, but guide us on the even path.

38:23 This man is my brother: he has nine and ninety ewes, and I have but one: yet he says, 'Commit her to my care,' and is moreover harsh to me in speech.”

38:24 David said: “He has undoubtedly wronged you in demanding your single ewe to be added to his flock of ewes: truly many are the partners in business who wrong each other; not so with those who work deeds of righteousness, and how few are they?”

38:26 David, you judge between men in truth.

On creating religion

33:5 There is no shame on you if you make a mistake therein: what counts is the intention of your hearts.

46:9 Say: “I am no bringer of new-fangled doctrine among you, nor do I know what will be done with me or with you.”

The Messengers of religion

6:93 Who can be more wicked that one who says “I have received inspiration,” when he has received none?

9:34 There are indeed many among the priests and anchorites, who in falsehood devour the substance of men and hinder them.

9:94 They will present their excuses to you when you return to them. Tell them to present no excuses, for they will not be believed.

14:11 Their Messengers said to them: “True, we are human like yourselves, but Allah grants his grace to such of his servants as he pleases. It is not for us to bring you an authority.”

17:93 They should say: “Am I anything but a man, - a Messenger?”

12:109 The Messengers are all but men.

3:144 Muhammed is no more than a messenger: many were the messengers that passed away before him.

2:204 There is the type of man whose speech about this world's life may dazzle you, and he calls Allah to witness about what is in his heart; yet he is the most contentious of enemies.

2:205 When he turns his back, his aim everywhere is to spread mischief through the earth and destroy crops and cattle.

4:91 Others you will find that wish to gain your confidence as well as that of their people: every time they are sent back to temptation, they succumb to it.

Humility for the Messengers

6:58 Say, “If what you would see hastened were in my power, the matter would be settled at once between you and me.”

On religious duties

2:224 Make not Allah's name an excuse in your oaths against doing good, or acting rightly or making peace between persons.

2:256 Let there be no compulsion in religion: Truth stands out clear from Error.

10:41 If they charge you with falsehood, say: “My work to me, and yours to you! You are free from responsibility for what I do do, and I for what you do!”

On the Qur'an

2:23 If you are in doubt as to what Muhammed wrote, then produce a Sura like thereunto; and call your witnesses or helpers if your doubts are true.

3:7 In it are verses basic or fundamental to its meaning, others are allegorical. But those in whose hearts is perversity follow the allegorical part, seek discord, and search for its hidden meanings, but no one knows its hidden meanings.

3:78 There are some who distort their books with their tongues, reading you what you think is part of the book but it is not.

4:82 Do they not consider the Qur'an with care? Had it been from other than Allah, they would surely have found therein much discrepancy.

13:31 If there was a Qur'an with which mountains were moved, or the earth were cloven asunder, or the dead were made to speak, this would be the one.

On the Muslims

4:94 When you go abroad in the cause of Islam, investigate carefully, and do not say to any one who offers you a salutation, “You are not a Muslim!” coveting the perishable goods of this life.

On truth in religion

5:77 Exceed not in your religion the bounds of what is proper, trespassing beyond the truth, nor follow the vain desires of people who went wrong in times gone by, - who misled many, and strayed themselves from the even path.

8:49 The hypocrites say: “These people – their religion has misled them.”

On the good prayer

7:55 Call on your Lord with humility and in private.

20:114 “O my Lord! Advance me in knowledge.”

60:5 Abraham's people prayed: “Our Lord! Do not make us a trial for the unbelievers, but forgive us.”

On superstition

5:90 Dedication of stones and divination are abominations.

5:103 It was not Allah who instituted superstitions like that of the slit-ear camel, or the she- camel let loose for free pasture, or idol sacrifices. Most of those superstitious ones lack wisdom.

10:12 When trouble touches a man, he cries out to Allah in all postures, but when his troubles disperse, he passes on his way as if he had never cried out at all.

27:80 Truly you cannot cause the dead to listen.

41:37 Do not adore the sun and the moon.

53:27 Some of them name the angels with female names.

53:23 These are nothing but names which you are devised, you and your fathers,

53:28 but they have no knowledge therein. They follow nothing but conjecture, and conjecture avails nothing against truth.

On Allah's unknowability

6:103 No vision can grasp Allah. Allah is above all comprehension.

7:33 Saying things about Allah of which you have no knowledge is forbidden.

17:43 Allah is high above all that is said of him.

7:27 Say to them: “Why do you say of Allah what you do not know?”

10:68 Do they say about God what they do not know?

32:17 Now no person knows what delights of the eye are kept hidden in reserve for them- as a reward for their good deeds.

6:50 “I tell you not with me are the Treasures of Allah, nor do I know what is hidden, nor do I tell you I am an angel. I but follow what is revealed to me.”

Yet of Allah they say

11:118 If your Lord had so willed, he could have made mankind one people.

13:33 Those whom Allah leaves to stray, no one can guide.

15:8 Allah doesn't send down angels except for just cause.

6:131 Your Lord would not destroy men's habitations for their wrong-doing whilst their occupants were unwarned.

16:90 Allah commands justice, the doing of good, and liberality to kith and kin, and he forbids all shameful deeds, and injustice.

16:93 If Allah had so willed, he could have made you all one people, but he leaves straying whom he pleases.

16:128 Allah is with those who restrain themselves, and those who do good.

25:51 Had it been Allah's will, he could have sent a warner to every center of population.

27:64 Who originates the universe, then repeats it, and who gives you sustenance from heaven and earth? Can there be another god beside Allah? Bring forth your argument, if you are telling the truth!

51:8 Truly you are in a doctrine discordant. And yet they say,

4:82 Do they not consider the Qur'an with care? Had it been from other than Allah, they would surely have found therein much discrepancy.

A parable on natural religion

6:76 [A parable of Abraham]: When the night covered him over, he saw a star and said “This is my Lord.” But when it set, he said “I do not love those that set.”

6:77 When he saw the moon rising in splendor, he said, “This is my Lord.” But when the moon set, he said, “I shall surely be among those who go astray.”

6:78 When he saw the sun rising in splendor, he said, “This is my Lord; this is the greatest of all.” But when the sun set, he said “O my people! I am indeed free from your guilty of giving partners to Allah.”

On Pascalian wagers

6:81 “How should I fear the beings you associate with Allah, when you do not fear to give partners to Allah without any warrant having been given to yo? Which of us two parties has more right to security? Tell me if you know.

On the man Muhammed

7:188 “If I had knowledge of the unseen, I should have multiplied all good, and no evil should have touched me.”

10:68 Do they say about God what they do not know?

13:43 The Unbelievers say: “No Messenger are you.” Say: “Enough for a witness between me and you is Allah, and those who know the Qur'an.”

16:103 We know indeed that they say, “It is a man that teaches him.” The tongue of him they point to is notably foreign, while is is Arabic, pure and clear.

17:93 Say: “Am I anything but a man, - a Messenger?”

25:7 And they say: “What sort of Messenger is this, who eats food, and walks through the streets? Why has not an angel been sent down to him to give admonition with him?

25:43 Do you see such a one who takes for his god his own passion? Could you be a disposer of affairs for him?

26:3 It may be you fret your soul with grief, that they do not become believers.

26:4 If such were Allah's will, he could send down to them from the sky a sign, to which they would bend their necks in humility.

On theology

18:22 Some say they were three, the dog being the fourth among them; others say they were five, the dog being the sixth, doubtfully guessing at the unknown; yet others say they were seven, and the dog the eighth. You say, “My Lord knows best their number; it is few indeed who know the real case.” Do not ever, therefore, into disputes concerning theology, except on a matter that is clear, nor consult anyone about the affair of the Sleepers or other like theological questions.

32:17 Now no person knows what delights of the eye are kept hidden in reserve for them- as a reward for their good deeds.

42:18 Verily those that dispute concerning the Hour are far astray.

8:46 Do not fall into theological disputes, and be patient and persevering.

On the soul

35:22 Not alike are those who are living and those that are dead.

On the problem of evil

41:49 Man does not weary of asking for good things, but if ill touches him, he gives up all hope and is lost in despair.

Epilogue
Say:

109:1 O you that reject faith!

109:2 I do not worship that which you worship,

109:3 nor will you worship that which I worship,

109:4 and I will not worship that which you have been wont to worship,

109:5 nor will you worship that which I worship.

109:6 To you be your way and to me mine.

Debunking Deanna Troi

2011-08-04T07:04:00.001-07:00

[Warning: today's post is required to be taken with the utmost seriousness]

TV psychics are the bane of a skeptic's existence. John Edward, Sylvia Browne, economists, Miss Cleo- all nothing but hucksters with crystal balls and silly incantations claiming to have the ability to foresee your future, read your mind, even speak to your dead loved ones. They scam their viewers out of their hard-earned money for false consolation and hollow platitudes using cheap "cold reading" techniques and silly stage effects.

Famous take-downs of nearly all of these known frauds are already widely available and discussed; they are linked above. But one of this brand of know-nothing television scam artists has long escaped our attention, and it is all the worse because the show she appears on has a longstanding, dare I say rabidly loyal fan base that reached millions of viewers at its peak. Her show's final episode's commercial airtime was comparable to the Super Bowl's. Not only has she scammed her way into the hearts and minds of millions of TV viewers, she has wormed her way into the institution that needs her fraudulent "telepathy" least- the military.

I speak, of course, of Star Trek's Commander Deanna Troi.

"Commander" Troi claims to be telepathic, a "sensitive," and she has even been spotted communing with the dead. She can supposedly "read minds" across vast interstellar distances, instantly understanding the emotions and motivations of people just by looking at them- even if they are communicating via subspace radio over dozens of light-years. The wild implausibility is beginning to stack up already, so lets take a step back and start at the beginning.

Troi claims to be half-human, half-"Betazoid," a species of supposed telepaths that comes from the planet "Betazed," an underdeveloped feudal world that has contributed nothing to the galaxy except fraudulent pyschics and one university on the whole planet. Yet our biological species concept holds that we should never be able to breed two species and get fertile offspring- only very close creatures, like certain species of cattle, are the known proven exceptions. Yet these Betazoids, supposedly with billions of years of independent evolution (that happens to have brought them to the point of looking exactly like humans), can interbreed with humans? My incredulity can only take so much, "Commander."

It should also be mentioned that the other "Betazoids" that we know are all murderers, contract frauds, traitors, or senile.

Betazoids supposedly communicate to each other using just their minds, holding full back-and-forth conversations in their heads, yet when they are portrayed as actually using this ability, it amounts to little more than playful banter that is never continued verbally, even in dire situations where silent communication would be extremely effective, even life-saving. When once abducted by Ferengi smugglers, Troi and her mother (a venerated ambassador who has been descending into a profound senility for the entire run of Troi's show) used this internal mind-communication ability... to complain about one of Troi's former love interests, William Riker. Rather than devise an escape plan or communicate some meaningful information, the only conversation they claimed to have was unverifiable banter on a subject completely unrelated to the events occurring around them.

The method of their telepathy is the never-shown, never-seen chemical "psilosynine," a chemical that is inconsistently described as being both heightened and depleted by intense "psychic experiences." No properties of this supposed telepathy hormone have ever been identified or described, nor has it ever been shown or even diagrammed on-screen. The only thing we know about it is that its name closely resembles that of a powerful recreational hallucinogen.

In fact, chemical intoxication is something of a motif of Troi's sordid career. From "polywater" (which left her lusting after an old flame during a ship-wide crisis) to heavy drinking (in the middle of a full-scale alien invasion of the past) to "psilocynine" to mega-doses of sugar, there seems to be no end to the wild chemical binging in which Troi unabashedly indulges on the air. And yet she is trusted with the lives of a crew of over a thousand.

You would think that on a show about exploring the mysteries of the universe, some more attention would be paid to the most magical chemical of all, one that endows its users with the ability to violate the laws of physics. Every detection method that could possibly exist essentially follows the radar paradigm: we either emit a particle and take measurements of its reflections (like when a sonar system reads "pings" of sound waves), or we receive some particle (like light) and read it with an instrument that is affected by that particle. But Troi's readings appear instantaneous- even when communicating via subspace radio or "reading" the emotions and thoughts of life-forms on planets light-minutes away within the same solar system, she instantly knows what is going on in the hearts and minds of the people she reads.

I think that a simpler explanation is that Troi is just inferring obvious facts about her targets' emotions from contextual clues like facial expressions, body language, or whether or not the target literally just said what she "read" with "telepathy," or sometimes she is just guessing.

Impressed? Me neither. Even less impressive is her staggering (and staggeringly convenient) failure rate. Just when her ship encounters a hostile alien race for the first time with mysterious intentions and ambiguous promises, Troi's "telepathy" can't read their "four-lobed" brains. When her ship is taken over by time-traveling robotic zombies, it is her ship's captain, with a more plausible neural implant link-up to said robots, not Troi, with just her spooky-action-at-a-distance mysticism, that detects them with his mind. In the latter instance, she even quizzically asks "Captain, what is it?" at the distressed expression on his face- unable to read either his mind or the Borgs'.

When investigating an old murder on her ship using her "psychic powers," it isn't until after her competent, qualified shipmates discover the facts behind the incident that her "psychic echoes" (which look like nothing more than hazy fever-dreams) start filling in the gaps. She can't even tell a fellow "Betazoid" from a human until the other "Betazoid" makes some rather obvious, non-"psychic" admissions to her (though conveniently, the other "Betazoid" also just happens to be half human). It seems that even the most titanic minds don't faze her- when a demigod with a staggering intellect and the ability to transport ships unbelievable interstellar distances appears onboard, Troi is among the last to know.

These aren't even close to her most dramatic failures. It's almost as if there's an inverse relationship between how useful her "psychic powers" would be and how likely they are to actually work. When the ship's doctor is on the edge of being abducted by a lecherous plasma entity (not a sentence I get to write every day), it is supposedly attacking her mind directly with pure "psychic energy"- but Troi is only slightly miffed by the doctor's cancelling a workout class, knowing nothing about this full-blown psychic attack, and it is the captain who saves the day. When she is sent deep into enemy territory for a secret mission of the utmost importance, she doesn't sense the looming betrayal of those around her, she doesn't sense the gaping flaws in her cohorts' plan, she doesn't even know what her own orders are until someone tells them to her mid-mission. When a senior staff member went missing on an alien world, well within what Troi has portrayed as the hundreds of light-years her psychic powers are effective, she is too busy asking for a promotion to even notice that something is wrong until the ship's sensors and the ship's doctors with the ship's technology solve the problem. And when the entire ship is about to be destroyed by aliens that her ship can't possibly communicate with using its equipment, her psychic communication powers are mysteriously nullified by... magnetism.

Not one, but three aliens come onboard under false pretenses of a routine diplomatic engagement, and Troi doesn't suspect a thing but what the lies and body language of the aliens tell her- it is the ship's security officer who finally beats the truth out of one of them, completely catching Troi by surprise which she quickly explains as that species being "apparently" not amenable to telepathy (conveniently, just like every other alien species she slips up with).

Her failure rate is staggering enough to prove that her "powers" are just nonsense, but in fact, even if she does have these powers, she is so inept at wielding them that she's more of a liability to the ship than anything else. You would think she would be the ultimate defense mechanism against aliens attacking with psychological warfare, but without failure, some of her responses to such problems have been:

Immediately overpowered.
Nervous breakdown leading to a suicide attempt.
Overwhelmed by nightmares.
Overwhelmed by nightmares.
Overwhelmed by loud music.
Overwhelmed by lust.
Immediately overpowered, only able to retaliate with assistance of ship's sensors, the weapons officer, and the ship's weapons.
Becomes a useful tool for her attackers.
Becomes a useful tool for her attackers.

In most of those instances, it is counting on Troi's powers to work right in the first place that gets her ship and her thousand-plus shipmates into trouble. She is little more than a gross liability for her ship with nothing to offer in return.

In addition to her long career of substance abuse, collaboration with the enemy, and convenient uselessness, Troi occasionally sees actual patients for psychological counseling sessions. To date, she is known to have had one regular patient in over ten years of service. Lets learn a little more about him:

Reginald Barclay, a phobia-prone, fantasy-prone, profoundly autistic engineer, spent much of his career under the inept care of (then-Lieutenant) Commander Troi. His personal obsessions with holodeck fantasies only get worse while Troi is treating him, and his debilitating fear of transporters is fixed not by Troi's psychobabble, but by a trained engineering staff helping him to solve a genuine mystery. The crew of the U.S.S. Voyager were lucky that Barclay escaped the clutches of the bungling Betazoid, because it seems that the moment he left her care, his technical skills, personal confidence, and career immediately took off, leading him to develop great scientific wonders the likes of which Troi's accomplishments pale and shrivel against.

Troi has only ever otherwise been seen counseling her shipmates in their love lives, none of which is remotely successful, or in very obvious situations, such as her failed love interest William Riker's coming to her for "advice" on his "complicated issue" when his estranged father comes aboard to talk to him about his dead mother, issues which he would rather resolve in a one-on-one blind karate battle than with the only available trained psychologist.

Troi's only demonstrated on-screen uses have been helping her senile mother to temporarily cope with the death of Troi's older sister, and being asked to join away teams with the stated purpose of being a pretty face for seducing aliens; being close with your mother and expensive makeup do not require any supernatural mind-reading powers. This is especially a disgrace to the other female members of her crew- the ship's doctor has saved entire species, the ship's first security officer gave her life in the line of duty to save not one but two of Troi's eventual love interests, and even a lowly, enlisted female science officer saves more lives in one episode that Troi does in the entire series.

In short, this TV "psychic" is not just a known fraud whose powers conveniently shrivel whenever they would be measurably useful, Troi is a liability to her crew who has proven time and again to be unreliable and even dangerous, both as a collaborator with her enemies and as an ineffective mental health services provider for her crew. I think that it's high time we sent this huckster packing all the way back to "Betazed;" I know she won't even see it coming.

Crop circles, and other things people would totally never fake

2011-08-02T15:21:00.000-07:00

There are some weird things in our world. A man having a hysterectomy is weird. Getting rain from your moon is weird. Religions are weird, too, but in a different way. It's weird that people believe those things, but the things they propose are usually pretty consistent- good weather if you ask for it, good health if you ask for it, smiting your enemies if you ask for it; some combination thereof forms the bulk of the miracles you hear about.

Somewhere in between the "mundane weird" of male hysterectomies and the "typical-very weird" are things like UFOs. These beliefs are weird, sure, especially when you get into the supplemental UFO beliefs like alien abductions or "ancient aliens," but on the face of it, the notion that extraterrestrials with absurd technology periodically buzz ranchers in the American southwest is several orders of magnitude more plausible than, say, the doctrine of transubstantiation or the notion that human consciousness persists without human brains. I can't think of any physics that have to be defied for such a thing to occur.

But these middle-weird beliefs end up building their own religion-sounding elements. They have their true believers, their embellished anecdotes, their bogus miracles. And they have their apologetics, flimsy and unprofessional by the standards of the towering religions but still out there. They vary from, "no, that photo is totally real" to, "but why would my grandma lie about something like that?," to, "now who would ever take all the time and effort to fake that?"

The answers are usually "no it isn't," "she's not lying, just mistaken," and "tons of people," in that order. The first two are straightforward, the third one is generally speculative, since you really do have to wonder with some hoaxers. Who in the world would ever piss away time doing something like, say, a crop circle, for example? The apologetical method for these is a string of increasingly incredulous questions: sure, a board on some strings could do it pretty easily most of the time, but what about the really sophisticated jobs? The ones with the crazy geometric designs and the plant stalks bent at odd angles and such, that show some crazy mathematical precision? You're gonna tell me somebody with a personal satellite for precision designing and a giant laser did it? Or did they bend every stalk by hand, or genetically modify the plants? Or maybe it was aliens. Or should I really believe that there are roving teams of mathematical geniuses with magic plant-destroying superweapons signing the countryside with inexplicable hoaxes?

No, it might just be a jackass with a microwave and a GPS:

A handheld device called [a] magnetron - made using parts from the common household cooker and a 12-volt battery - may have ushered in a new generation of crop circles. Professor Richard Taylor, a physicist, claims to be able to reproduce the intricate damage inflicted on crops using such a gadget developed by his team at the University of Oregon.

Your equipment cost runs about $100 dollars for the world's most sophisticated crop circles; as James Randi or any other magician will tell you, the trick is always simpler than you think it is. It isn't a complex arrangement of mirrors, it's just someone else's legs when they saw the box in half. She isn't reading your mind, she knew what the card was before you even shuffled. And just so you know, it isn't aliens and it isn't geniuses with satellites, it's crap lying around your house with the wires crossed by someone with a wire stripper and a soldering gun.

Sunday Argument #7: There's no need for an ultimate explanation for the universe, but if there were, it wouldn't have to be God

2011-07-31T21:02:00.000-07:00

Every Sunday, rather than offering commentary on a current event as I usually do, I present an argument from scratch, either against theism writ large or against some particular religion.

Arguments for the existence of God come in discrete forms, some of which are more common than others. Arguments appealing to an ultimate explanation for the universe are the ones you probably hear the most often. The question is in the category of arguments known as "cosmological arguments," that is, arguments that try to infer God's existence from the existence of the cosmos. In this case, the mere existence of the universe, rather than its apparent temporality or its complexity is the premise- this is the "why is there something rather than nothing?" question.

The argument might proceed like this:

That which can be conceived not to exist is contingent, not necessary.
That which is contingent is dependent on some cause for its existence.
The universe can be conceived not to exist.
Therefore, the universe must have some cause for its existence.
This is universally called God.

This is, for purposes of the objection I wish to raise against this line of argumentation, functionally identical to arguments from "sufficient reason." The principle of sufficient reason is one which suggests that, for anything that exists, there is some good reason or explanation for why that thing exists, as opposed to not existing. The universe, being a thing that exists, must therefore have some sufficient reason for its existence. These are two lines of argument developed independently with apparently separate premises, but they are, I think, equally liable to two general lines of reply that quickly show why, even if you could get principles like contingency and sufficient reason on the table for sure, God is hardly an acceptable explanation in the end.

Lets begin with the general premise of both arguments, namely, that of the things that we know, some seem necessary and some seem contingent. Numbers, I think, are the best candidates we've got for things that must be, and things like tables and chairs in the positions they're in currently seem like good candidates for contingent things, things could have have not existed, and did not exist at some point, yet do exist currently. The argument asks us to analogize between those latter things, which are generally physical things, and look to their aggregate (the universe) as an aggregate of contingencies that is itself contingent.

This is a curious inference since it seems to imply that the universe must follow the regularities within it. All of our notions of contingency and necessity, or sufficient reason and general causation, are derived from the objects in the universe that we know- things in the universe appear to be caused by other things in the universe. But why should we be allowed to describe the system itself as necessarily obeying the principles that seem manifested within that system? I think this is a very strange things to say, on par with saying something as strange as, chess sets must move because there are rules for how their pieces must move. It seems wildly improper- even if the inference ends up being true, the logic that got us there is fundamentally broken.

The universe, after all, is much more than the sum of the physical objects inside it- it is dimensions, laws of physics, space and time, and so forth, and these are things that we have never observed to begin or to end, that we are today unsure if they are even discrete from each other, and that I don't think we have any justification for referring to as contingent. They seem to be true everywhere in the universe, and though we can speculate about some of the laws of physics having different values, we have no instances of this actually occurring- in short, it is pure speculation to say that some of the general parameters are actually contingent; just because they could have been different does not mean that they could have not existed.

So the foundational premise is broken, but it has some intuitive value so maybe the argument can proceed without too much protest on my part. Furthermore, our observations do show that the Big Bang was an event prior to which there was no such thing as time and after which there was time, at least that we can measure, though there is ongoing work in physics suggesting that values like time and space are still sensible variables prior to the Big Bang. But is the universe really just the matter and the arrangements thereof posterior to the Big Bang? I don't see any good reasons to accept this, either. The universe I think is better thought of as the totality of everything in total, and to say that this is exclusive of things exterior to the Big Bang but still not supernatural is pure speculation.

But things get much worse for the argument when an explanation for the universe that is itself necessary and not contingent is posited, with the added unjustified step of calling that thing God. If God exists, then God is necessary- meaning that some things are not contingent but are somehow self-explaining, self-sustaining, and/or self-causing, since God is one of those things. The moment we present that possibility, we then have to wonder, why should the universe be excluded from a set of non-contingent things of which God is necessarily included? Not something I have seen justified with any kind of seriousness before, other than with the dreadfully circular justification that only God could be necessary in this way because necessity refers to only perfect beings like God. Why should only perfect beings be necessary? The explanation recedes rapidly.

In short: if God exists, then God exists necessarily. Possibly God exists, so possibly some things are necessary. The universe exists, either necessarily (in a way that is its own sufficient reason) or contingently (or in a way that is amenable to the principle of sufficient reason). Things within the universe all appear to be contingent. But the universe does not share properties with its constituents: for example, whereas all objects in the universe have spatial location and size, these do not seem like variables that can appropriately describe the universe is a meaningful way. So it does not follow from the universe containing contingent things that the universe is contingent. Therefore, possibly the universe is necessary, or self-explaining, or self-causing, since the universe exists, some things are necessary, and the universe is not known to be contingent.

This means that any argument holding fast to the principle that the universe requires a sufficient reason has a lot of footwork ahead of it for showing its first premise. The mere existence of the universe does not establish its contingency, only that it exists for some reason, and that reason might be its necessity, just as is posited of God.

And even if we had good reasons to suspect that what we refer to as the universe is "contingent," we would still not have any good reasons to suspect that the only, or even the best, explanation thereof is a supernatural divinity. Perhaps we have just miscalculated what "the universe" includes. Maybe the set of all contingencies, universes included, is itself necessary- this seems to be consistent with what we know about certain quantum particles appearing and vanishing at random, that the creation of matter from nothing is not exactly a miracle, it's a law of physics.

It's the end of the world, and they sell it

2011-07-30T07:22:00.000-07:00

There's a lovely little piece up at Bloomberg Businessweek about how, now that the Republicans have decided to stick with their commitment to utterly eradicating the U.S. economy, the apocalypse industry is really on the up-and-up again.

The meltdown came at a propitious moment for apocalypse followers. A proliferation of earthquakes, a plague that may or may not be sweeping Brazil, the Greeks, and Kim Kardashian, among other things, may be conspiring to create a Rapture bubble. In addition to Camping’s revised forecast—the world is definitely going to end on Oct. 21—many Rapture-seekers now believe the Aug. 2 debt-ceiling deadline signals that the end may be very, very near. “If the economy goes, that’ll be fertile soil for the antichrist to take power,” says Todd Strandberg of Little Rock, Ark. “Hitler came out of the Depression. A lot of us believe the antichrist will use the same stepping stone.”

So this is sort of par for the course for the Evangelical extreme wing, who have seen the Rapture just around the corner ever since Israel was founded in 1948. I don't at all disagree with the notion that, historically, people are more likely to spot the apocalypse lurking just behind this or that disaster, or to generally have that Chicken Little inflection when the newspapers are sounding scary or the economy takes a dive. Why? Because we're self-centered.

When I'm in a bad mood, I start noticing things that perpetuate my bad mood. Reading the news is like injecting myself with a chemical depressant if I'm tired or otherwise. This is simple cognitive biases- our brains notice the things that are preoccupying them more than they notice other things. This is because you are the center of your brain's universe- your thoughts and experiences all orbit your own existence.

Not only are we biased to notice our own preoccupations, but we are also biased, for perfectly good reasons, to take our own species very seriously. Human faces, human languages, human body motion, those are all things that just stand out in our minds. When you look at a vacation photo, there is just something a little more vivid about the nuances of the smiling faces than in the nuances of the tourist trap they're standing in front of.

If you put these together and add a little religious madness, what you get makes an odd kind of sense. If you think that the universe is an inherently value-bearing place, you probably also think that the human race is inherently the object of most or all of that value. Humans seem naturally to be the starring cast of the cosmos, as the only real, purposeful participants in the universe, so it follows quite naturally from this that the cosmos is basically the stage on which humans perform, and so humans are the natural object of cosmic concern.

Cosmic selfishness makes this doom-and-gloom nonsense from the Rapture augurs make sense. Since we are the sole objects of value in the universe, it's only natural that when things are going south for us, meaning a small percentage of us on one or two of our continents, things must be going south for the entire universe. The two go hand-in-hand. It's not like the one causes the other, it's that the one equals the other.

A little atheistic insight would save all these Rapture dupes a lot of money. Your value as a human is not inextricably bound up in the universe. You are not the fabric in which the story of the cosmos is written, you are a couple of pixels on it. Your misfortune is bad, and the misfortune awaiting us all on August 2nd is very bad, but not bad in a way that the universe cares about, or reacts to, or lives or dies by. Save your money- you will need it when the Republicans achieve their "government should be ineffective" goal with wild gusto next week.

"From conception until natural death," unless you're an archbishop

2011-07-27T19:39:00.000-07:00

The Church's official stance on whether you, be you Catholic or otherwise, should be allowed to die when you choose to, or dispose of an unwanted blastocyst sucking protein through your womb, or conceive through in-vitro fertilization, or use a condom if your partner has HIV, is that nobody should ever be permitted anything other than "natural conception to natural death." The reiteration of this idiotic slogan was the subject of one of Ratzinger's first papal documents. It's the policy which says that no society is allowed to let its physicians give out birth control, and why you keep hearing about pharmacists who want to get paid for not doing their jobs when you ask for birth control. It's the policy that holds that it would have been better for Chantal Sebire to be suffocated by her own tumors than for her to die with the peace and dignity of her own decision.

But it's their doctrine, you know, it's the core of what they believe. No matter how much the rest of us suffer for it, you can't deny that there's something admirable in their consistency. Well, unless you've got rank on your side. The current Vatican representative to the United States has had his rapid descent towards a clean, natural death interrupted by a most unnatural artificial ventilator:

Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the Pope’s diplomatic representative to the U.S., has been placed on a ventilator following “delicate lung surgery” two weeks ago, the nunciature in Washington, D.C. announced July 22.
The nunciature cited “post-surgery complications,” in the announcement, adding that the 73 year-old archbishop has been placed on assisted ventilation “to attempt recovery of his lung function.”

Now that seems a little odd. If natural death is so great, what's Sambi doing dodging it with the fancy physicians' footwork? This is hedonistic, scientific materialism at its finest, doing what science does best- negotiating against natural law on our behalf.

This seems backwards to me. The Church is against the use of any intervention to reduce suffering in the world by helping a terminally ill person to die with dignity, but they are perfectly alright with the use of interventions to prolong human life. So "natural" death seems like the wrong word here, because if "natural" means "unmodified," as it does in the context of preventing in-vitro fertilization, then Archbishop Sambi is not having anything like a "natural" death. Perhaps "from conception to eventual death?"

So the prolonging of human life, perhaps indefinitely, is on the cable for the "natural death" crowd. But why would a Catholic want that? Their whole religion is built around the notion that this present life is nothing more than the opportunity for you to screw up your afterlife. You would think that anything that prolongs it a second longer than it has to would be the real sin- denying people the glory of an eternity doing whatever it is Christians do for eternity in heaven and all that.

But if is somebody in unbearable pain or at the point where recovery is impossible, they aren't allowed to be euthanized, or commit suicide like Pope John Paul II did to enjoy whatever afterlife they've got coming to them. It's interesting that the logic twists in a way that supports exactly what you would expect from atheism, namely, a commit to and respect for medical science being used to extend human life, and precisely against you would expect from a group that believes in the den of postmortem delights.

Edit: Archbishop Sambi's natural death is no longer unnaturally delayed.

On Anders Breivik

2011-07-26T15:40:00.000-07:00

Everybody and their mothers seems to have an opinion about Anders Behrig Breivik, the terrorist apparently behind the bombing and shooting in Norway. The New York Times writes of his fondness for right-wing anti-Islam blogs, with some already going to far to refer to such rhetoric as "anti-Muslim radicalism." The Right is busily doing damage control, aggressively slandering any media that points out that Breivik was a committed, conservative Christian as "Christian haters." To the experts, Breivik is mad but not insane, to his family, he was "apparently normal" and "well-behaved." And to some, Breivik is just a patsy for a sinister government inside job designed to accomplish... something.

Lets take a step back away from all this layered interpretation and examine the facts. His massive, 1,500-page manifesto is unambiguous on his hatred for both radical Islam and for secularism; he is a Christian, and he wants his government working to protect the "purity" (a word that occurs over fifty times in his manifesto) of a Christian Europe. Politically pidgeonholing him isn't as easy as it seems; despite labeling himself a committed conservative, which is reflected in his racial, religious, and social views, his conservatism strikes me mainly as typical nationalist nostalgia, longing for a glorious Crusader past that never existed, and his social views are so rigidly copied from mainstream Catholic doctrine that his conservatism is just an extension of his religiosity. But he also has views that could be easily classified as liberal- like the Unabomber, whose stylistically rambling and disorganized manifesto is a template for Breivik's, he has strong environmentalist concerns.

His opposition to atheism is fairly ham-handed as well. He seems to only prefer Christianity because it's his cultural heritage, and he presents no good reasons to think that atheism is false; he only tosses standard canards at it:

Sure, many deny God now. But when they're looking death in the face, when they're sick or in an accident or staring down the barrel of a gun, they'll change their mind. They'll beg for God then. There are no atheists in foxholes.

(From page 1345 of the manifesto.) Those are the facts of his views as I understand them. There are further facts about his attack that must be noted:

Anders Behrig Breivik has killed more Norwegians than any Muslim ever has,.
He has imitated the militant wing of the ideology he despises most with much gusto and little apparent appreciation of irony. If the Europe he envisions is one that murders children to make a political point, then Europe would be better off with an Islamic dictatorship. Fortunately, it has already made the far better decision to side with secular democracy.
The secular democracy that raised Breivik has thrived for centuries in much better fashion than it ever saw under a Christian government, and its values are utterly incommensurable with the Crusader mentality in which Breivik stews.
You don't popularize an ideology by murdering at random in its name.
Breivik considers himself a Christian, but he seems to have dramatically missed the point of much of Christian doctrine.

To comment on the last point, though, Breivik does have a theologically coherent, Catholic explanation for himself:

An indulgence is the full or partial remission of temporal punishment due for sins which have already been forgiven. The indulgence is usually granted by the church after the sinner has confessed and received absolution. The exception is actions committed by those men and women who, by virtue of their suffering, assists in the intercession for all Christians (participates in Crusades, activities which involve protection of Christians, Christian interests or Christendom itself).

Indulgences draw on the storehouse of merit acquired by Jesus' sacrifice and the virtues and penances of the saints and martyrs. Indulgences replace the shortening of those penances that was allowed at the intercession of those imprisoned and those awaiting martyrdom for the faith.

Pope Urban II and Pope Innocent III granted indulgence to all future Crusaders

We are Crusaders, martyrs of the Church, selfless defenders of the weak and the blind. We our not only automatically granted access to heaven in light of our selfless acts; our good deeds and final sacrifice will be added to the divine storehouse of merit and will therefore help other less virtuos individuals.

(From page 1346 of the manifesto.) Dismissing Breivik's actions as founded on a misinterpretation will be the order of battle for Christian apologists, of course, but Breivik is steeped in the logic of the halcyon days of militant Christianity. He is simply continuing the tradition of disposing of designated outsiders that Europe toiled and Enlightened for centuries to mitigate. I wonder how many copycats he will inspire. I wonder at the true size of his "movement." I wonder how much dispute there would be that this was an act of "Islamic terrorism" had Breivik been a Muslim, and why there is such anger about labeling this an act of "Christian terrorism."

And now he is going to use the Norwegian court system as a podium and everyone will pay attention. I am curious, myself. I want to know more about the mind of a genuine Christian terrorist, one whose convictions translate into action in ways that fortunately most likewise committed Christians have the self-control to restrain.

Sunday Argument #6: Nibiru is not going to destroy the Earth in 2012, and neither is anything else

2011-07-25T01:58:00.001-07:00

Every Sunday, rather than offering commentary on a current event as I usually do, I present an argument from scratch, either against theism writ large or against some particular religion.

Usually, I like to use the Sunday Arguments section to attack a core doctrine of an established religion or otherwise attack the notion of an existing God, which is why the 2012 apocalypse crowd may seem like an odd candidate for specific attack. But this is a group that I think certainly meets any commonsense definition of a religion in general, with certain articles of faith, a pseudoscientific apologetics industry that furiously defends those articles against all criticism, and an established congregation that differs within itself only on the general parameters of otherwise very specific doctrines. There is no particular theistic core to the 2012 apocalypse crowd, so far as I can tell, but they do seem to generally orbit a New Age philosophy that is henotheistic in character and overtly hostile to atheism. As such, I think they are appropriate objects of attack.

Here I will be referring extensively to our sister blog, the Nibiru Challenge. This is a very old, rather long-neglected blog on which I proposed that the 2012 apocalypse faith doctrines are so wildly improbable and so clearly amenable to empiricism that I was willing to wager five thousand dollars on not just their falsehood, but on the inability of its defenders to provide even a cogent formulation of their claims, much less a defense of the truth of those claims. So far, that challenge has stood, with few serious contenders.

The '2012 apocalypse' theory holds that the year 2012 generally holds some terrifying auspices for the Earth and the thinking mammals that live on it. There are many proposed reasons why 2012 is a more apocalyptic year than any other, but these reasons tend to orbit two core articles of faith:

The Mayan calendar either terminates abruptly, changes cycles, or otherwise anticipates some global cataclysm in this year.
A rogue planet, usually referred to as Nibiru, is known to exist in our solar system and will either collide with the Earth in 2012 or pass near enough to do it cause widespread devastation.

These propositions are, I think, actually better-off than many theistic claims in that they identify specific, eminently testable phenomena for their truth, though the methodologies adopted by their believers are often somewhat less helpful than should be provided. In any case, I will here be providing a definitive, summary case against the former proposition, and a series of good reasons to doubt the second proposition. I will conclude by offering a tertiary batch of reasons to think that both these propositions and any other propositions marshaled in defense of the faith-based doctrines of 2012 apocalypticism are false.

To begin with the former phenomenon, the previous five to ten years have seen an explosion of books purporting to defend the claim that the world will be destroyed in 2012 that all refer back to a notion popularized by Mayatologist Michael Coe, which is that the Mayan calendar terminates around December of 2012 and that Mayan augury generally predicted catastrophe associated with that date. A book called The 2012 Enigma is, to my knowledge, the best summary of this "hypothesis" published to date- best not in the quality of its evidence, but in the breadth of claims that it assembles in a single place, conveniently corralled into a single argument for easy dismemberment.

The Mayan calendar system is extremely complicated; like many cultures, the Maya were obsessed with the procession of the stars, and it doesn't help that they had two distinct but juxtaposed calendar systems of measuring that procession. Far in advance of a European consensus, the Mayans, realized that a complete processional cycle takes about 365 days give or take, and this 365-day calendar is one of the two overlays to be considered here. The big complication is that, in addition to this essentially accurate 365-day calendar, the Mayans also used a 260-day calendar for religious ceremonies; the two were used simultaneously throughout Mayan civilization, and they were combined into a unitary calendar that we call the "Long Count."

Imagine three dials, one that circles completely around every 365 ticks, one that circles completely every 260 ticks, and one that ticks forwards each time the other two dials line up completely. For with any two processional systems whose maximums are multiples of the other, you will eventually get some overlap, and indeed the two Mayan calendars do overlap every few centuries in perfect harmony, with both cycles beginning on the same day. The next time that the Mayan 365-day calendar and the 260-day calendar reach their final date will be around December of 2012, which has been cause for much more grief that is warranted.

That the third of these dials ticks forwards once in December of what we call 2012 is not in dispute here; the mainstream of Mayan studies will happily concede this because it is obvious from the facts. What is less obvious is just what the Mayans actually made of these overlaps.

Michael Coe's initial study of these overlap dates spawned a cottage industry of doomsday predictions that, so far as I can tell, is based on nothing. The Mayans never based the procession of their calendars into a new cycle on the assumption that each new common starting date between calendars foretold mass destruction; quite the opposite, they were days of great celebration- think a civilization-wide Times Square ball-dropping ceremony and you've about got the point. Indeed, there are many Mayan prophecies that predict events long after what we cal 2012- if they were predicting the apocalypse in 2012, what were they doing describing, in great detail, the monarchical achievements that would occur long after it?

Secondly, the two sub-calendars of the Mayan Long Count have completed full cycles many times in human history to no discernible apocalyptic result. Even if the Mayans associated periodic overlaps in their calendar systems with the end of the world, they are empirically false- the prophecies do not say this, but his is hardly relevant given how many occasions of prior Mayan calendar agreements have passed by without incident. Why should be believe the 2012 alignment between them to be any different from the dozens of such alignments that have occurred within recorded history?

Thirdly, even prominent religious figures in what remains of the brutalized Mayan culture agree that there is no good reason for us observers of Mayan calendar phenomena to associate those calendar synchronicities with apocalyptic events. To quote an ordained Mayan priest:

Nothing is going to happen in 2012. There is no Mayan prophecy about 2012. In addition to the Chol Qij the Mayans have various other calendar counts of lesser mantic importance. One of these is the Long Count, which is a continuous count in days since August 9th, 3114 BCE. The Long Count will reset to zero-zero-zero-zero-zero on December 21, 2012. But this is just a major calendar change – their equivalent of Y2K – with no more spiritual significance than the change of millenium had for us. This 2012 thing is being touted by some non-Mayans as a kind of New Age version of the Rapture: a miraculous transformation of human consciousness which sweeps humanity up into the clouds to escape the coming tribulation. But things don’t happen that way in real life.

Fourthly, even if there were extremely precise, authenticated Mayan literature expressing a culture-wide belief that the year we call 2012 would end in the apocalypse, this would provide no particularly compelling reasons to accept the fears of these hypothetical apocalyptic Mayans as true: just because they say so doesn't mean it's so. Even if we had reliable Mayan documents supporting every individual claim of the 2012 apocalypse movement, we would still have just that- the eschatology of an extinct religion that, like even non-extinct religions, never really pans out even under the most precise formulation. If we were going to accept that a Mayan-style apocalypse was widely predicted by Mayans, that is all we would have- barring further empirical confirmation, we would have nothing but a probably false cultural belief.

The missing information is supplied by those 2012 apocalypticists who think that we actually have good reasons, independent of imaginary Mayan prophecy, to think that some cataclysm awaits us in the late winter of 2012. To my knowledge, such claims usually orbit the proposition that a to-date unidentified planet referred to as "Nibiru" in apocalypticist literature either is already or will soon be visibly careening towards the Earth, with doom and destruction to follow on its first collision or near-miss with the Earth. This is the core substance of the second proposition outlined above, and it hopefully will not surprise you that I find the evidence of such a planet to be, shall we say, unconvincing.

Certain conspiracy theorists have gone to painstaking lengths to document all of the available photographic "evidence" of a mysterious, planet-sized object visible near the sun that they tend to identify as this Nibiru. Massive catalogs of both the "photographic" and "video" "evidence" of such an object abound on the internet; a brief google search will reveal them. But what do they really show?

What they show are truly planet-like appearances that are, in reality, simply optical effects that have been well-understood for centuries. The "Sun dog" is little more than an artifact of the way that film and digital cameras collect and process apparent instances of light- correcting for these anomalies is a normal part of photography that includes the sun in the background. Yet despite the fact that we have long known about these photographic anomalies, any picture of the sun with an apparent blip on it still meets the incredibly evidence-free criteria of the 2012 apocalypse crowd for "evidence" for "Nibiru."

Consider the real implications of the sighting of a planetary body so close to the Earth that it appears almost moon-sized within the corona of the sun, in the above-referenced "photographic" and "video" "evidence" of such phenomena. That would mean that we should be not just able to track that object's motion, position, and speed in real-time, but that we would be detecting both its gravitational and optical effects on the Earth right now: the fact that such an object has been "sighted" and that it exhibits none of the effects known to be associated with planetary bodies ought to be tripping your bullshit detectors. Not such much for the Nibiru 2012 apocalypse crowd.

Now these claims are not without identifiable origin, and this is the most damning critique of all. The entire 2012 apocalypse movement resets on the hypotheses of one Zecharia Sitchen, who proposed in his lengthy book series on this subject to identify in ancient artifacture precisely those anomalies entities whose existence I deny. First, I will reiterate the point that even if Sitchens's interpretation of ancient history were spot on, this would not indicate that the beliefs of those documented by said ancient history were true, only that those beliefs were once held, and the inference from the latter to the former could only ever be fallacious in character. But it is not the case- Sitchens seems to be either very bad at translating or deliberately mistranslating. The architecture of this phenomenon is simply broken at its seams. As the best available evidence shows, the Hubbardian mastermind behind the 2012 apocalypse fraud misinterpreted, mistranslated, and misunderstood the very evidence that he identified as the cornerstones of his apocalyptic doctrine. He was simply wrong.

This is sufficient, I think, to firmly refute the two central doctrines of the 2012 apocalypse ideology. But even if I were to assume a position exterior to all empirical input, I think that pure reason alone could deliver us from the nonsense proposed by Sitchen and his copycats. To be blunt, the apocalypse has had plenty of chances, and many of those chances overlap with apocalyptic predictions. None have come to pass. You and I extrapolate future events based on their frequency in the past and on the events that usually correlate with them: the world has never ended in the past, and so obviously no events correlate with them since it has never occurred. The sun rises each time we have a new day; as such, any proposal requiring that the sun cease rising present monumental evidence in its favor. We have the former, namely a proposal that the apocalypse is imminent, contrary to all previous experience of the endurance and apparent longevity of the world, but we have none of the latter.

In short, the purely religious faith-articles of the 2012 apocalypse milieu are purely articles of faith a notch worse-off than, say, the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation: not only is there no evidence for them, but they rely on interpretations of history that are demonstrably false, and on a causal connection between Mayan calendar cycle beginnings and apocalyptic events that are seemingly falsified by the historical record as well as by our knowledge of genuine Mayan expectations about the advent of new calendar cycles from a day of overlap between the 365-day and the 260-day calendars. This is a totally defunct set of propositions that assumes known falsehoods to derive a conclusion that would not follow from its premises even if they were true. As this 2012 religion grows in size toward the final date, you and I would be well to remember as such.

The best argument for God's existence

2011-07-21T18:09:00.001-07:00

Chagrined as I am to repost content from Pharyngula, it seems like a lot of people are getting in on this one, and it's really an interesting question: "what is the best argument for God's existence?"

There are a lot of words in that sentence in dire need of parsing before the question is even comprehensible. "Best?" "God?" "Existence?" Lets start from the end. The notion that we are arguing for God's existence, rather than, say, the desirability of his existence, or the Pascalian prudence of believing in his existence, automatically excludes the bulk of arguments you are likely to hear from popular sources. The proposition that God's existence makes life worthwhile or meaningful, or blunts the sting of death, or is accepted as a wager against the risks of eternal damnation- all gone, since these do not argue in favor of God's existence, only in favor of the prudence of believing in that existence. Though of course, each of these notions, per the links provided, is just not the case on its own even.

So what arguments are left? Maybe first-cause arguments, which try to extrapolate God's existence from the notion that the Big Bang appears to have been a moment in time. No, these arguments on their own merits, even if successful in establishing their premises (which I don't think they are), just don't make the cut. The most that they establish is that the Big Bang occurred because of something external to it- the plethora of elaborate but I think rationally unsupported naturalistic scenarios for this event speak against the argument's efficacy in proving God's existence, just as I think they irrationally assume that uncaused beings (like God) are possible, but the universe is not one of those things (asserted without evidence). Teleological arguments, or arguments from design, suffer from the same defects with the added unbreachable burden of the Problem of Evil.

Perhaps, then, some version of the ontological argument is the best that they can do- to establish God's existence merely from his several supposed properties is still open to them, though this argument certainly fails for other reasons. Which regresses us to the question of how to take the word "argument" in this context- which God are we arguing for? The fickle, obnoxious, incessantly incestuous gods who tromped the slopes of Olympus? These gods are imperfect, and what's worse, they come in sets- these days, most of the theists I encounter would prefer God come alone or not at all, even in certain ostensibly polytheistic circles. Or maybe a God like Jefferson's, a God who doesn't much care for you or I, or about foreskins or clothing of separate fabrics or the various obsessive compulsions of the racist, kosher-craving war god of ancient Israel. Or perhaps some God totally unknown to us, worshiped on a distant world by multicolored blogs of sentient algae- I think that most theists would rather we get no God at all than such a one as this.

Even the ontological argument, which orbits God's perfection, has this difficulty. Is God perfect because he speaks such bizarrely provincial "moral statements" to the ancient Hebrew? Or because he authored the perfect work of Arabic? Maybe God is perfect because only a perfect God would create the eucharistic miracles, or perfect because only such a one would fill people with the Holy Spirit till they well over with charismatic gifts. But then, it's also said that God alone could have raised one so wise as the Bab (or "Bob," for that matter)- so which God are we proving here? I don't know. I doubt if the theists do themselves.

And what makes an argument for God's existence "best," anyway? Unfortunately, no answers seem compatible with both this part of the question and the other two I've highlighted, since I think most people take the "best" argument to mean "the most persuasive" argument, and most people find themselves persuaded by precisely those arguments already discussed- morality, meaning, comfort, first cause, or perhaps something equally non sequitorial, like tradition or baldly unjustified personal preference. If that is what "best" means, then the best arguments for God's existence are the worst ones. If "best" means instead what I would take it to mean, which is one that validly infers the desired conclusion from acceptable first premises, then I think that only the ontological argument ever had a chance, and this one has failed each time a new permutation of it rises, and no other comes close. They are all fails, but the ontological argument's failure is the most subtle, so I think that it triumphs.

But really they are all tied at the bottom. Barring some grand innovation, the likes of which we haven't seen since the days of Anselm, it seems the case is doomed. So be it- the best argument for God's existence is the set of the worst ones, or it is none at all.