The Onion- classic

Creationist Museum Acquires 5,000-Year-Old T. Rex Skeleton

The Onion is hilarious. They are particularly skilled at realistic satire & social commentary. Their style convincingly mimics "real" journalists while providing biting indictments of their subject matter. I find them hilarious, especially when they are lampooning things that deserve lampooning. Or harpooning. Or whatever. . .

Vandals and eggs and atheists, oh my!

In this story from the Chicago-area Daily Herald, we find out the sad state of the education system. I thought it was a pretty standard story about retaliation against atheists until I got to the last line of the story:

The vandalism likely was the retaliatory work of youngsters, police Sgt. Mike Millett said -- since it came on the heels of the school incident and because one of the chalked words, "Jesus," was misspelled.

See, this is why we need to put religion back into the schools. These devout youth need to be able to properly spell the name of their lord and savior when they are busy vandalizing the neighborhood. Today's vandal-on-the-go doesn't have time to drag a dictionary or bible around with them wherever they go, they need to know this stuff! Although, I think the article itself has it misspelled, I believe the technical spelling is "jeebus". Just trying to help out . . .

On a related topic, I noticed that Darwin Fish Wholesale has a "JEEBUS" car emblem now. How cool is that????

Legalize it!

The Freakonomics blog has a great posting today :

On the Legalization — or Not — of Marijuana

Read it all, even the commenters seem to agree that it should be legalized. Sometimes you just have to admit it when you have a failed policy.

Response: Sam Harris' "The Problem with Atheism"

In Sam Harris’ newest article (actually the text of a speech he gave at the Atheist Alliance Conference in Washington, D.C.), he makes an impassioned plea that atheists should not be known as such. Or, more properly, that they should not self-identify as an atheist. I recommend you read the entire speech, he makes a good case. I find myself in an unusual position in that I disagree wholeheartedly with him on this issue. I thought I disagreed with him in the past, but I was wrong. He was absolutely correct, and I was won over through the strength of his arguments. Not so, this time.

The main thrust of his argument is encapsulated in this quotation:

. . . We should not call ourselves ‘atheists.’ We should not call ourselves ‘secularists.’ We should not call ourselves ‘humanists,’ or ‘secular humanists,’ or ‘naturalists,’ or ‘skeptics,’ or ‘anti-theists,’ or ‘rationalists,’ or ‘freethinkers,’ or ‘brights.’ We should not call ourselves anything. We should go under the radar—for the rest of our lives. And while there, we should be decent, responsible people who destroy bad ideas wherever we find them.

He spends some time explaining that “atheist” is, at its root, an expression of negation, which makes it somewhat useless as a way to define oneself, especially vis-à-vis other people. Quoting Sam, “I think that ‘atheist’ is a term that we do not need, in the same way that we don’t need a word for someone who rejects astrology. We simply do not call people ‘non-astrologers.’” Further, he explains that racism used to be a widespread, everyday phenomenon in the United States. Even horrific, violent, deeply entrenched and institutionalized racism was not as rare as we would like to think. He explains that "there have been important, and I think, irrevocable changes in the way we talk about race. . . how many people have had to identify themselves as 'non-racists' to participate in this process?" Unfortunately, although all of this makes sense on the face of it, casual thought on the matter makes me realize that it's too facile to serve as a good metaphor for the struggle against theism.

First, while calling oneself an atheist is probably a useless way to define oneself in a vacuum, we do not live in a vacuum. There would be no need for a term like “atheist” if there were no “theists”, but that is not the world in which we find ourselves, no matter how desperately we wish it were. Whether atheism is a burgeoning movement or not remains to be seen, but I’d like to think of it as a revolution of sorts. And revolutions are inherently anti- status quo. Mr. Harris makes an intellectual gyration here, and insists that we should stand for reason and common sense, rather than against religion or ‘god(s)’ per se. Movements (revolutions?) are sometimes best defined in terms of what they are opposed to. Mr. Harris says that "atheism is not a worldview," but I'm afraid it is. Since I woke up and realized I was atheist, my worldview has been dramatically altered. It is a global change in the way I view everything-- the metaphors I use, the way I reflect on my actions and consequences of those actions, my political ideas, what is important to focus upon in my life, etc... If that is not a worldview, I don't know what else to call it.

This brings me to a related point. Many atheists are proud of the fact that they are atheists. There are extensive lines of bumper stickers, t-shirts, and related merchandise available to proclaim one’s lack of belief in the supernatural. I strongly doubt that a t-shirt or coffee mug reading "pro-reason" would command similar sales figures to those reading "godless atheist," "evildoer," "heretic," or "infidel". I also doubt that if one were to ask Sam Harris, "Are you an atheist?" that he would respond "No, but please allow me to tell you about reason and science".

Perhaps I should also explain that one of the primary reasons that Mr. Harris gives for preferring not to be so easily labeled is that people make assumptions based on those labels. As atheists, we are mind-numbingly aware of all of the arguments that believers use to attack us or shore up their defenses. I think Mr. Harris tires of responding to the same arguments over and over again, even though he has attempted to pre-empt so many of them with his other writing. As such, he's throwing in the towel; it's harder to attack something if you aren't sure what it is. From his perspective, it is so much easier for society as a whole to dismiss us as the lunatic fringe or to use canned arguments or sound-bite attacks against us once they know that we are "atheists". We should be "under the radar", it's safer that way. It seems to me this is completely backwards. The gay-pride movement did not start to gain any momentum until it became known as "gay-pride". The refusal to go away, the insistence on one's rights (even while in the minority), the appeal to change society at large-- these are all the hallmarks of great social movements. It's how monumental change occurs. This is the real reason why I can't support Mr. Harris' racism analogy: change occurred because people stood up and vociferously argued for what they believed in. It did not occur because there was an amorphous group of people that realized that racism was wrong and stealthily changed society. The civil-rights movement got loud, got organized, they made people uncomfortable, they made society change. It does not matter if this self-identification made it easier for racists to label them, or to use canned arguments to keep them in their place. They changed society because it was the right thing to do, and not just for themselves individually, but for society as a whole. This is the true heritage that atheists should lay claim to. Instead, we are too busy squabbling over the myriad ways we could name ourselves, or give ourselves a symbol (ostensibly to identify ourselves to one another), or which atheist group would be best to join. It's this tiresome rehashing of nomenclature that Mr. Harris alludes to in the first quotation above, but instead of advocating that people take action to make change occur, he changes the naming debate marginally.

Mr. Harris then changes tack, and argues that we should use this approach of stealth-atheism is we are more likely to win any given battle if we ally ourselves with those of faith with whom we might agree on any given situation. He uses the example of Mormonism. Atheists may have something in common with mainstream xians, in that neither one of us believes Mormonism is true. Therefore, we ought to somehow combine forces with those that agree with us, in some "enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend" shady logic. Quoting Harris again, "to be consistent as atheists, we must oppose, or seem to oppose, all faith claims equally. This is a waste of precious time and energy, and it squanders the trust of people who would otherwise agree with us on specific issues." This may be true, but only so far as those who agree with us on specific issues are willing to ally with us. Once we've eradicated those pesky Mormons (or Muslims), then what? Who's next? I submit it's far better to avoid settling for half-measures when we could obtain the whole ball of wax. Obviously, we must have our priorities, but they shouldn't come at the expense of our identity. Making deals with the proverbial "devil" never works out the way we think it will.

Mr. Harris then moves on to advocating a return to reason in our daily interactions, which I wholeheartedly agree with. "Nobody wants to believe things on bad evidence. The desire to know what is actually going on in [sic] world is very difficult to argue with. In so far as we represent that desire, we become difficult to argue with." The problem with this is that people believe things for bad evidence all the time. People just don't think that they are the ones with bad evidence. For many, "the bible says so" or "my pastor says so" or "my friends/parents say so" is the highest evidentiary standard. For these people, it's incomprehensible that there are people in the world that don't believe in the bible. Even more difficult then, would be a debate with these folks as to solutions to problems such as global warming (See related Wall Street Journal article). It seems that there is some debate in the evangelical xian community what to do about global warming, both sides claim a biblical imperative for their solution. (By the way, the two solutions are to 1- do nothing, 2 - do something.) Everyone on both sides are convinced that they have the best of reasons for what they believe. To me, as an outsider, I think their reasons for debate are inane, but try convincing them of that.

The article winds up with a rather large exploration into the metaphysics of experience and the value of meditation, which I have no qualms with, followed by Mr. Harris' vision of what victory in this struggle would look like. "We will have won this war of ideas against religion when atheism is scarcely intelligible as a concept. We will simply find ourselves in a world in which people cease to praise one another for pretending to know things they do not know." Almost by fiat, he believes, this world will come about if we insist upon reason, rather than "atheist". While it's certainly a very worthy long-term goal, for now I will settle for rational national policy. I don't care if everyone wants to believe in god or buddha or Russell's teapot, so long as we can have stem cell research, a change in our foreign policy, gay marriage, etc... Laws, policies, the long-term direction of society is what we ought to be concerned with, not this relentless back-and-forth about what we ought to be called. Although Mr. Harris recognizes that racism still exists, he seems to believe (again by fiat) that eventually things will all be pollyanna, that "it will be a world in which the very concept of separate races has lost its meaning." A worthy and noble objective, but for Rosa Parks, it was enough to say "I will not give up my seat."

I would like to leave this subject with a few closing thoughts. As one of the comments from the website on which the speech was posted has pointed out, atheism can be a tough sell. Nobody likes an atheist, at least when the think of us as morose determinists with no joy in this nasty, brutish, short life on a lonely planet in a vast and meaningless cosmos. Mr. Harris' attempt to shoehorn the topic of metaphysical experience and meditation into this speech is his answer to this, along with avoiding the term "atheist" whenever possible. My answer is to shout from the rooftops the overwhelming relief that comes with realizing there is no omniscient judge (nay, voyeur) over all of my actions. There are no great scales on which my life will be judged. Think of all those times that I didn't keep the sabbath day holy, or when I coveted my neighbor's ox, or told a little white lie to make someone feel better. If all of those things counted against me, I'd surely be in trouble. Luckily, it's so much easier to go through life trying to do the right thing as best I can, making mistakes, learning from mistakes, and trying to do better the next day. If I also had to worry about violating dogma lest my eternal soul be in peril, I don't know how I'd continue to make it through every day.

All this being said, I fully agree that words have meaning. We shouldn't casually throw terms like "atheist" around, especially if that is not what we intend. I don't see what is damaging about saying I am an atheist. I believe the feminists have it right when they say that the English language (at least the way it is commonly used) helps entrench sexism. But, call me crazy, I also think that "In God We Trust" should be taken off our money if we mean what we say in the Constitution (or at least the First Amendment). By the way, I believe that the First Amendment does allow for freedom FROM religion, not just freedom OF religion, but that's another blog.

Finally, it's been said that there are two sides to every argument. I think that one (or both) sides usually try to reduce the argument to trite sloganeering and mis-characterization of the other position. However, that doesn't devalue the worth of the arguments, and it only convinces those that don't have a dog in that particular fight. Once people realize that this is a struggle that has immense ramifications for society as well as themselves and take the time to examine their position, hopefully the useless round-and-round that we go through with theists will disappear as they begin to question the reasons they believe what they do, and thereby the implications for our national policy.

Kathy Griffin and Jeebus

In case you haven't heard, comedienne Kathy Griffin is pissing off a lot of people. She's bucking a trend. She's successfully avoided thanking the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and Jesus for their help in securing her Emmy Award. For some reason, this has xians in an uproar. Ok, there's the fact that she didn't thank any of these imaginary beings, and that she said this, "a lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus. Suck it, Jesus. This award is my god now." What's wrong with that?

Catholics are calling it hate speech. In fact, the Catholic League President, Bill Donohue had this to say:

"The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences reacted responsibly to our criticism of Kathy Griffin’s verbal assault on 85 percent of the U.S. population. The ball is now in Griffin’s court. The self-described ‘complete militant atheist’ needs to make a swift and unequivocal apology to Christians. If she does, she will get this issue behind her. If she does not, she will be remembered as a foul-mouthed bigot for the rest of her life.”

OK, she's a complete militant atheist to the Catholics, while her response was "Am I the only Catholic left with a sense of humor?"

Yes Kathy, you are. And please don't be the first comedian to "be remembered as a foul-mouthed bigot" Personally, I think she has worked hard to get where she is, I don't see any obvious signs of divine involvement, and I have no problem with what she said. I thought it was funny.

Sam Harris' new response

As is so often the case, I find Sam Harris to be spot-on. I'm reposting his reply to an essay by Jonathan Haidt here, foremost because it's applicable to a much wider variety of religious/atheist dialogue. It's available at The Reality Club if you are interested to read the other replies.

SAM HARRIS [9.13.07]

In his essay, "Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion, "Jonathan Haidt worries that the "new atheists"—Dawkins, Dennett, and I—may be "polluting the scientific study of religion with moralistic dogma and damaging the prestige of science in the process." According to Haidt, Dawkins becomes the Grand Inquisitor whenever the topic of group selection is politely raised; Dennett has misinterpreted the literature on religion and morality for reasons inscrutable; and for my part, I am merely waging war with straw men. As luck would have it, Haidt comes to this debate in the guise an increasingly familiar "straw man"—that of the liberal, atheist scientist who would deliver us to the threshold of moral relativism, if not across it, with the best of intentions.

Haidt concludes his essay with this happy blandishment: "every longstanding ideology and way of life contains some wisdom, some insights into ways of suppressing selfishness, enhancing cooperation, and ultimately enhancing human flourishing." Surely we can all agree about this. Our bets have been properly hedged (the ideology must be "longstanding" and need only have "some" wisdom). Even a "new atheist" must get off his high horse and drink from such pristine waters. Well, okay…

Anyone feeling nostalgic for the "wisdom" of the Aztecs? Rest assured, there's nothing like the superstitious murder of innocent men, women, and children to "suppress selfishness" and convey a shared sense of purpose. Of course, the Aztecs weren't the only culture to have discovered "human flourishing" at its most sanguinary and psychotic. The Sumerians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Hebrews, Canaanites, Maya, Inca, Olmecs, Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians, Teutons, Celts, Druids, Vikings, Gauls, Hindus, Thais, Chinese, Japanese, Scandinavians, Maoris, Melanesias, Tahitians, Hawaiians, Balinese, Australian aborigines, Iroquois, Huron, Cherokee, and numerous other societies ritually murdered their fellow human beings because they believed that invisible gods and goddesses, having an appetite for human flesh, could be so propitiated. Many of their victims were of the same opinion, in fact, and went willingly to slaughter, fully convinced that their deaths would transform the weather, or cure the king of his venereal disease, or in some other way spare their fellows the wrath of the Unseen.

What would Haidt have us think about these venerable traditions of pious ignorance and senseless butchery? Is there some wisdom in these cults of human sacrifice that we should now honor? Must we take care not to throw out the baby with the bathwater? Or might we want to eat that baby instead? Indeed, many of these societies regularly terminated their rituals of sacred murder with a cannibal feast. Is my own revulsion at these practices a sign that I view these distant cultures with the blinkered gaze of a colonialist? Shall we just reserve judgment until more of the facts are in? When does scientific detachment become perverse? When might it be suicidal?

Despite Haidt's suggestion to the contrary, it actually matters what people believe. Most religious practices are the direct consequence of what people think is actually going on in the world. In fact, most religious practices only become intelligible once we understand the beliefs that first gave rise to them. The fact that some people have begun to doubt these doctrines in the meantime, while still mouthing the liturgy and aping the rituals, is beside the point. What religion, after all, is best exemplified by those who are in the process of losing it?

Haidt draws comfort from the fact that even biblical literalists occasionally yield to common sense and ignore their holy books. Of course they do: their holy books are not only bursting with ancient ignorance—they are actually self-contradictory. Is Haidt suggesting that there are no real religious fundamentalists out there at all, or that their numbers are negligible? According to a recent poll, thirty-six percent of British Muslims (ages 16-24) think apostates should be put to death for their unbelief. Just how much exculpatory sociology is Haidt inclined to do in this area so as to get Islam entirely off the hook? When is a belief system not only false, but so encouraging of falsity and needless suffering as to be worthy, not merely of our understanding, but of our contempt?

Haidt offers us a choice between "contractual" and "beehive" approaches to morality—the first is said to be the province of liberals like myself, who care only about harm/care and fairness/reciprocity; the second represents the social order imposed by conservative religion, which incorporates further concerns about ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. The opposition between these two conceptions of the good life may be useful to talk about, and the data Haidt presents about the differences between liberals and conservatives is interesting, but is his interpretive scheme correct? I have my doubts. It seems possible, for instance, that these five foundations of morality are simply facets of a more general concern for harm/care.

What, after all, is the problem with desecrating a copy of the Qur'an or taking the Lord's name in vain? Well, if a person really believes that the Qur'an is a sacred text or that God is listening, he almost surely believes that some harm could come to him or to his tribe as a result of these actions—if not in this world, then in the next. Examples of this sort of thinking should come so readily to the reader's mind as to make any examples I provide superfluous (AIDS as a punishment for the sin of homosexuality? The Asian tsunami as repayment for idolatry? September 11th as the result of too little faith and too much tolerance for abortion and gay shenanigans?). A more esoteric reading might be that any person who blasphemes or desecrates will have harmed himself directly thereby: a lack of reverence might be its own punishment, dimming the eyes of faith. Whatever interpretation we favor, sacredness and authority have collapsed to the harm/care axis just the same. Perhaps Haidt's thinking on this subject has been powerfully distorted by his own atheism, as he seems incapable of seeing the world as the faithful see it. We might well wonder, at this juncture, just which of us atheists are in danger of "misunderstanding religion." At least Dennett, Dawkins, and I have made some attempt to understand what it might be like to actually believe what people of faith say they believe.

The same point can be made in the other direction: even a liberal like myself, enamored as I am of my two-footed morality, can readily see that my version of the good life must be safeguarded from the aggressive tribalism of others. When I search my heart, I discover that I want to keep the barbarians beyond the city walls as much as my conservative neighbors do, and I recognize that sacrifices of my own freedom may be warranted for this purpose. I even expect that conservative epiphanies of this sort could well multiply in the coming years—just imagine how we liberals will be disposed to think about Islam after an incident of nuclear terrorism. Liberal hankering for happiness and freedom might one day yield some very strident calls for stricter laws and tribal loyalty. Will this mean that liberals have become religious conservatives pining for the beehive? Or is the liberal notion of reducing harm flexible enough to encompass the need for order and differences between in-group and out-group?

Even if we accept Haidt's "new synthesis" without caveat, we can ask whether any given culture is raising its children to have "bad" moral intuitions and to be incapable of the sort of moral reasoning that might lead to a more enlightened outlook. Are certain conceptions of morality especially good at binding a community together, but incompatible with modernity? What if certain cultures are found to be relying upon moral codes that look terrible no matter how we squint our eyes or jigger Haidt's five variables and four principles? What if we find a culture that is neither especially sensitive to harm and reciprocity, nor especially cognizant of the sacred, nor especially conducive to human flourishing, nor especially astute in any other way? Would Haidt's conception of morality allow us to then demand that these benighted people to stop abusing their children? Or would that be unscientific?

Finally, I should mention that Haidt fails to acknowledge the central point of "new atheist" criticism. The point is not that we atheists can prove religion to be the cause of more harm than good (though I think this can be argued, and the balance seems to me to be swinging further toward harm each day). The point is that religion remains the only mode of discourse that encourages grown men and women to pretend to know things they manifestly do not (and cannot) know. If ever there were an attitude at odds with science, this is it. And the faithful are encouraged to keep shouldering this unwieldy burden of falsehood and self-deception by everyone they meet—by their coreligionists, of course, and by people of differing faith, and now, with startling frequency, by scientists who claim to have no faith. Even if Haidt's reading of the literature on morality were correct, and all this manufactured bewilderment proves to be useful in getting certain people to donate time, money, and blood to their neighbors—so what? Is science now in the business of nurturing useful delusions? Surely we can grow in altruism, and refine our ethical intuitions, and even explore the furthest reaches of human happiness, without lying to ourselves about the nature of the universe. It is time that atheist scientists, above all people on this infatuated planet, acted as if this were so.

Welcome to the inaugural issue of my blog. It is titled "Fall of Hate". There's a couple of reasons for that, none of them good. I wanted a name that sounded kind of trendy, and kind of funny in the way that really good punk songs or album titles are funny. Puns, I suppose you would call them. I didn't really get there, although there are some nice multiple meanings to "fall" that could be interesting to explore. Interesting in the way that I don't know whether they are "homonyms" or "polysemous", but Wikipedia's not really helping me figure out the difference. Anyway, here are some things about me that could prove useful to you in the future, or now if they have an impact on whether you are going to continue reading this blog or not. I am an atheist. I was a mormon, then a christian, then an agnostic, and now an atheist. I am a libertarian. I like lots of kinds of music, but not most of the top 40 stuff. And I don't like country music. I like to read, a lot. I read fiction, and I read non-fiction. I like to Stumble. It seems every time I stumble upon a website that I love, someone has already Stumbled it. Luckily, most of my friends don't know about Stumble, so to them I am still a trend-setter. I shouldn't say "still a trend-setter" because I never have been one. Anyway, I believe that I will mostly post atheist propaganda, libertarian propaganda, and generally try to persuade you to think exactly like I do. I will fail horribly, but I think that we can all have fun while trying, right? Oh, and I'll try and persuade you to read books that are good for you. Or bad for you. Just pick up a book and read it, you're bound to learn something! Especially if you read some Kurt Vonnegut or Chuck Palahniuk. <-------------- I spelled this right the first time, but I had to check it at his official site: http://www.chuckpalahniuk.net/