Friday, March 2, 2012
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
About Posting Music Videos
I post music videos hoping that you'll like what you hear and that you'll buy discs or mp3s of the artists, supporting living artists and to encourage the preservation and perpetuation of the recordings of artists who are no longer living. And that you will want to patronize live performances. And as a sacred duty to the artistry and personalities of both.
So, go out and listen more and support musicians and music. You'll like it.
So, go out and listen more and support musicians and music. You'll like it.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Monday, February 20, 2012
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Friday, February 17, 2012
Maybe This Has Something To Do With Why People Don't Vote for Atheists
The increasingly unhinged blogging of Jerry Coyne is at odds with his professional work in biology. Whereas his blogging is frequently a semi-obscene screed of bigotry and irrationality, seemingly a Chick publication dropped here from an alternate universe, Coyne manages to keep his lid on when he has professional credibility at stake. Coyne's complete oeuvre could serve as a definition of the compartmentalization he and his cult followers are always going on about in relation to religious scientists.
But this is a post about politics and why, despite all my inclinations to ignore it, there is, actually, a huge problem with the ideology of atheism that could lead a reasonable person to wonder if they should vote for an atheist. And it is what many atheists, themselves, say that provides the reasonable reservation.
.......
Now, having pointed out that atheists are a covered class under U.S. civil rights laws, and that they have been since the mid 1960s, one of the favorite whines of the new atheists are surveys which show that a majority of people questioned say they wouldn't vote for an atheist for president. That issue was the one I wrote about the first time I ever wrote a critique of the new atheists, before I started using that phrase. I pointed out several things, among those that atheists were hardly alone, identifying other groups which would not be able to win the presidency, including members of a number of other, religious minorities. I also pointed out that voters were not bound by the constitutional "no religious test" clause and could and did vote on the basis of a religious test quite often. I also pointed out that if atheists wanted to change their situation it depended on the opinion of the religious majority and that blanket ridicule was hardly a proven method of winning friends, not to mention the votes of strangers. I'll note in passing that I've read atheists who have said they'd never vote for a Biblical fundamentalist to absolutely no objection. I'm not sure I would either. Needless to say, these points were hardly well accepted among the atheists in the audience.
Since then I've gained more and more experience with the new atheism and the scientism and materialism that, in fact, comprise the secular religion of just about all atheists I'm aware of. While I still stand by the points I first made more than five years ago, I think there is something more basic to the ideology of modern atheism that might reasonably make people in a democracy reluctant to vote for anyone holding those ideas.
In each and every case, when materialism considers questions of free will and related concepts, the result is, inevitably, the assertion that they are delusions, the products of imagination. For a bunch who typically consider themselves to be "free thinkers" the belief in the biological determinism of our thinking is remarkably freely expressed among materialists. Their belief in their own ability to transcend their biological programming in their thought is, apparently, the result of compartmentalization, making an exemption for themselves and their beliefs that have been noted by others before now*. And, as is true with free will, there are frequent denials of the existence of inherent rights, the right to justice (in its biblical sense), equality and a host of other ideas which, while science is incompetent to find them, history and the first and most basic of all sources of evidence, our experience, are more than adequate to locate them and defend them. I'll say again, those are not things that these materialists are generally willing to do without themselves, even as they deny their reality.
Of course, these atheists "know" that free will doesn't exist because "science" tells them so. Their "science" which is, as the product of their very biologically programmed brains, presumably as subject to the conditions of that determination as the belief in free will or God, for that matter, cannot escape the same impeachment of its reality as the belief in free will, inherent rights and other, presumed, mental products of biological chemistry. Though that doesn't seem to enter into it for the materialist mind, yet another carved out exception**. Which brings us back to Jerry Coyne and one of his recent posts about these issues.
Almost all of us agree that we’re meat automatons in the sense that all our actions are predetermined by the laws of physics as mediated through our genes and environments and expressed in brains. We differ in how we interpret that fact vis-à-vis “free will and “moral responsibility,” though many of us seem to think that the truth of determinism should be quietly shelved for the good of the masses.
Considering the central place that the belief in determinism holds in the blood baths of the 20th century, genocide, racial enslavement, gender oppression ... the belief in biological determinism should not be merely shelved out of niceness, it should be subject to THE HIGHEST level of skepticism. Any alleged science which leads to determinism should be subject to the very highest levels of review, by DISINTERESTED scientists, possible. In fact, that history makes the consideration of these issues far too important to leave to the scientists. When we mere lay folk have been the victims of scientific assertions of biological determinism, that gives us the right to make a direct critique of the idea on the basis of our experience.
If free will exists, as I freely say it does, there is an aspect of it that would make any scientist purporting to say anything about it on the basis of science, open to that highest skepticism. The claim to have discovered anything about it, even its non-existence with science is fundamentally irrational. Free will, in order to be free, would have to exist independent of causality. If it was the product of causation it would be determined and not free. Despite that concept being repugnant to materialism as well as scientism, the concept of free will requires its independence of causality to be taken into account in the fantastic claims about it made by scientists. Science, being absolutely dependent on casual relationships, it could not find free will if it searched for it for an eternity.
Fortunately there are far superior methods of determining the truth and reality of free will available. The history of societies and countries which assume the existence of free will and other ideas that give these materialists the screaming fantods, their relative freedom of oppression and freedom from violence, as opposed to those which assume that human beings are "meat robots", as a far more impressive and far more definitive experiment in the existence of free will and rights than plugging a tiny number of subjects into an fMRI machine could produce. One of the foremost assertions of the validity of science is that "science works", meaning that science produces useful things of benefit to the world. Well, in human experience, free will, inherent rights, etc. have a far more certain validity because they work and determinism doesn't. The enormous differences in real world results of the belief in determinism and the belief in free will constitute far more powerful evidence than the products of contemporary science which produces the denial of free will.
Consider this paragraph from Coyne's post:
Second, I don’t see why on Earth he uses the word “free”? Why are people “free” if their actions are determined? The phrase “Brains are automatic, but people are free” may sound appealing, but it seems to lack content. We can consider them free if somehow helps us psychologically in assigning responsibility, but we can also assign responsibility if we consider ourselves “unfree” in the deterministic sense. If you committed a crime, you are responsible for that crime, whether or not you had a choice to do it. You have to be punished for societal protection and deterrence of yourself and others.
You would have to be either entirely ignorant of recent history or an irrationally credulous member of a scientistic cult for that to not raise all kinds of red flags. Of course, Coyne, given his faith in determinism, would question the existence of freedom, every determinist eventually does when these questions are pressed. Determinism is nothing less than the complete denial of the basis of democracy, egalitarian democracy and the once strong ideology of liberalism***.
The more genteel of determinists will come up with some artificial substitute, utilitarianism or aesthetic preference or something merely to be preferred to mitigate the real meaning of their denial of freedom. But these stop gaps will always have the same quality, of being merely something that they "help us psychologically", as if that will prevent the bloodshed and the horrible oppression that have characterized every single officially materialist, officially atheistic government that has existed. Not one of their proposed substitutes is any less vulnerable to denial than any religious assertions of morality and their preceding ideological basis will lead towards nihilism because science can't produce morality.
It is especially telling that Coyne chooses to focus on the desire to punish crime "for societal protection" instead of some more benign aspect of government for the creation of what he obviously believes is merely a necessary, what I assert would be very easily rejected, myth. Presumably the crimes that Coyne would care about and which will incur punishment, could be no less arbitrary based in nothing more solid than his necessary myth, temporary preference. How can science devise a code of civil law? Scientism would have to hold that those laws would be without real existence or meaning. Given his deep hatred of religion, I wouldn't expect the expression suspected as betraying religiosity could escape being criminal, eventually, in a government ruled by his preferences. Of course, it would be "for societal protection". That frequently mythical virtue is always given as an excuse for official depravity. It must be noted that, as bad as other governments have been at consistent application of legal codes, officially atheist governments have shown far less interest in abiding by their own laws.
Atheism, when based in materialism, has a history of denying freedom and with that comes a denial of rights, a denial of equality, and eventually risks the whole host of historical and political evils that come with the denial of those moral concepts. The major backing that racial, sexual, class and other forms of societal and political oppression have in the modern period taken on the form of science. It took the witness to the biologically based genocides of Hitler to shock Western socieites out of the deterministic "science" of eugenics. And, as the memory of that fades, eugenics, by other names, is reemerging and has gained a strong foothold among people with greater influence****. Science - for "science" is what is commonly taken to be science at any given time - has more than matched primitive excuses for the objectification of people, removed inhibitions to people being used and disposed of that are found in religions and philosophies. The very habit of science treats what it looks in that way, it objectifies even the organisms it looks at. Science can assert the reliability of its objectification with the prestige and authority it has, on the absolute foundation of materialism. It can assert knowledge instead of mere belief, in the popular imagination of certain knowledge. And it matches the resulting brutality of that objectification with increased efficiency in methodology. Science is efficacious in achieving ends.
.
I have not encountered many atheists who were not materialists, whether conscious of that or not, I have never met one who was not a true believer in scientism. If anyone has examples of atheists who are not infected with those anti-liberal, anti-democratic ideologies I'd like to read them. If some materialist has come up with a plausible argument for the real existence of freedom and inherent rights and equality I'd like to read them because I don't believe that valid materialist explanations of them can exist. I've looked and haven't found any who come up with something strong enough to counter the very strong force of selfishness.
I have no faith in the political or social efficacy of utilitarianism or the other proposed imaginary or post-post modern style arguments for the mitigation of the brutality of materialist scientism. I think people believing that other people are "meat automatons" or bags of chemical reactions, or any other form of objectification is an open invitation for them to try to use people as brutally as they do animals. And that they can do so with impunity if they are not stopped. That has been the history of atheism with political power, those experiments have been run. I believe that much of the crime and brutality of life in the United States is based in that kind of objectification, even among those who profess religion.
If I'm skeptical of the good intentions of someone who begins by professing a belief that people are imbued with a spark of divinity, that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent rights, having looked closely at the history and contemporary culture of atheism for the past five years, I'm far more skeptical of people who believe that people are merely objects, I don't believe that they are inclined, by their ideology, to see it as absolutely wrong to exploit, hurt or even kill human beings on the basis or utility or in furtherance of their personal (or ideological) desires. I absolutely believe that any society which regards people as "meat automatons" will eventually turn into a horrific, oppressive blood bath such as those which history provides as the clearest and most soberly real warnings.
Many people who read this will be deeply offended and angry. I am sorry that that will be the case. If I didn't believe that I was morally required to regard their feelings I probably would have said much of this in that original post linked to above. I don't see how any scientistic materialists could complain that, in response to one of their own, I have now said it. They don't have a right to my silence on these issues, especially when Coyne and many others makes these arguments in the very real, very dangerous realm of politics.
I am sure many will point to this or that atheist who demonstrated great benevolence and kindness. And I acknowledge that such individuals are there. Though I don't believe that their benevolence and kindness are the products of their materialism or their scientism. That isn't possible because neither provides the moral compass necessary to stick to those inclinations. I could speculate on where they developed the habits of thought and action that allow them to overcome, at least sometimes, the brutality of materialism but that's something they might best tell us, just as a religious scientist is the only reliable source of information as to their mental habits. But I have no faith in the abilities of large numbers of materialists to compartmentalize their materialist faith from the selfish desires we all have. History gives overwhelming evidence that selfish desire is only sometimes overcome by societies. And, as said, the history of atheistic governments gives overwhelming reasons to suspect that a country governed by materialism will always revert to brutality, it will deny the basic rights of other living beings as desired. Most brutally of all, those societies have been able to commit enormous slaughters on the basis of managerial efficiency. There is no evidence in the history of atheistic governments and groups that reason is anything like an adequate deterrent to committing evil. In their most developed forms, scientistic materialism will deny that moral categories are more than illusions.
The litany of crimes of that kind by Christian governments are undeniably a part of history, though, these days they are often exaggerated in anti-religious invective. Of course any crimes that were committed are an undeniable evil and must be remembered and condemned. But those crimes are of a distinctly different character from those of atheistic governments. The Gospel of Jesus forbids the violence and pillage that has often been done in his name, whereas materialism and science do not provide that kind of legal prohibition. Materialism and science can't tell that it is immoral to attempt a genocide. The resultant lack of hypocrisy by atheistic governments in their slaughter and oppression, due to that lack of discrepancy between profession and act, though, is hardly to be praised.
I believe that it is only a morality which absolutely holds all people as being inherently endowed with rights and free will and which explicitly holds that fact requires justice be done is an absolute moral obligation ON PAIN OF REAL CONSEQUENCES, which will keep individuals, alone or in groups, from treating other people as animals are universally treated by people. Without that moral force people will consider themselves as allowed to exploit and destroy without considering the questions of equal rights. Nothing short of that will work, it is hardly guaranteed to work even when it is present. And one of the most important of all those moral positions is the absolute belief in equality. It is also an absolute moral duty of government to not selectively shield some favored members of society from the consequences of their actions, making others pay and suffer the consequences of their greed and folly. People have equal, inherent rights. That is an idea you could never derive from materialism or science, Coyne provides no convincing case for holding powerful people responsible for their "crimes" without it, no materialistic system of thought could.
I believe that the history of peoples' treatment of other people and animals are far superior ways of knowing the fact that people have free will and rights than the highly vague, very poorly founded and very conveniently asserted "findings" of "brain science" in this matter. But that's an issue for another day.
*To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one has already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our DIS-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of its possessor's body at the time.
In the opinion of many thinkers, human freedom is closely connected with human rationality. If we were deterministic beings, what would validate the claim that our utterance constituted rational discourse? Would not the sounds issuing from our mouths, or the marks we made on paper, be simply the actions of automata? All proponents of deterministic theories, whether social and economic (Marx), or sexual(Freud), or genetic (Dawkins and E.O. Wilson), need a covert disclaimer on their own behalf, excepting their own contribution from reductive dismissal.
John Polkinghorne: Science and Religion
** The existence of these exceptions to what is taken as rigidly established reality is remarkable in itself as they would seem to be first degree relatives of the religiously proposed "exceptions" such as miracles which are rejected as an unallowable exception of "physical law". I've wondered about the relationship of the existence of routinely allowed outliers in scientific data to proposed miraculous events, but these huge exceptions in materialist scientism, automatically asserted according to subject matter and the individuals holding ideologies, are far more serious violations of their assertions of "law".
*** Marilynne Robinson has made a very persuasive argument that, despite widespread current belief, liberalism was a development from religion and not the so-called enlightenment.
**** It was, in fact, The New Republic, the pseudo-liberal magazine, which infamously promoted The Bell Curve. Coyne frequently writes anti-religious invective for it, these days. Though somewhat more decorously than he does for his blog.
But this is a post about politics and why, despite all my inclinations to ignore it, there is, actually, a huge problem with the ideology of atheism that could lead a reasonable person to wonder if they should vote for an atheist. And it is what many atheists, themselves, say that provides the reasonable reservation.
.......
Now, having pointed out that atheists are a covered class under U.S. civil rights laws, and that they have been since the mid 1960s, one of the favorite whines of the new atheists are surveys which show that a majority of people questioned say they wouldn't vote for an atheist for president. That issue was the one I wrote about the first time I ever wrote a critique of the new atheists, before I started using that phrase. I pointed out several things, among those that atheists were hardly alone, identifying other groups which would not be able to win the presidency, including members of a number of other, religious minorities. I also pointed out that voters were not bound by the constitutional "no religious test" clause and could and did vote on the basis of a religious test quite often. I also pointed out that if atheists wanted to change their situation it depended on the opinion of the religious majority and that blanket ridicule was hardly a proven method of winning friends, not to mention the votes of strangers. I'll note in passing that I've read atheists who have said they'd never vote for a Biblical fundamentalist to absolutely no objection. I'm not sure I would either. Needless to say, these points were hardly well accepted among the atheists in the audience.
Since then I've gained more and more experience with the new atheism and the scientism and materialism that, in fact, comprise the secular religion of just about all atheists I'm aware of. While I still stand by the points I first made more than five years ago, I think there is something more basic to the ideology of modern atheism that might reasonably make people in a democracy reluctant to vote for anyone holding those ideas.
In each and every case, when materialism considers questions of free will and related concepts, the result is, inevitably, the assertion that they are delusions, the products of imagination. For a bunch who typically consider themselves to be "free thinkers" the belief in the biological determinism of our thinking is remarkably freely expressed among materialists. Their belief in their own ability to transcend their biological programming in their thought is, apparently, the result of compartmentalization, making an exemption for themselves and their beliefs that have been noted by others before now*. And, as is true with free will, there are frequent denials of the existence of inherent rights, the right to justice (in its biblical sense), equality and a host of other ideas which, while science is incompetent to find them, history and the first and most basic of all sources of evidence, our experience, are more than adequate to locate them and defend them. I'll say again, those are not things that these materialists are generally willing to do without themselves, even as they deny their reality.
Of course, these atheists "know" that free will doesn't exist because "science" tells them so. Their "science" which is, as the product of their very biologically programmed brains, presumably as subject to the conditions of that determination as the belief in free will or God, for that matter, cannot escape the same impeachment of its reality as the belief in free will, inherent rights and other, presumed, mental products of biological chemistry. Though that doesn't seem to enter into it for the materialist mind, yet another carved out exception**. Which brings us back to Jerry Coyne and one of his recent posts about these issues.
Almost all of us agree that we’re meat automatons in the sense that all our actions are predetermined by the laws of physics as mediated through our genes and environments and expressed in brains. We differ in how we interpret that fact vis-à-vis “free will and “moral responsibility,” though many of us seem to think that the truth of determinism should be quietly shelved for the good of the masses.
Considering the central place that the belief in determinism holds in the blood baths of the 20th century, genocide, racial enslavement, gender oppression ... the belief in biological determinism should not be merely shelved out of niceness, it should be subject to THE HIGHEST level of skepticism. Any alleged science which leads to determinism should be subject to the very highest levels of review, by DISINTERESTED scientists, possible. In fact, that history makes the consideration of these issues far too important to leave to the scientists. When we mere lay folk have been the victims of scientific assertions of biological determinism, that gives us the right to make a direct critique of the idea on the basis of our experience.
If free will exists, as I freely say it does, there is an aspect of it that would make any scientist purporting to say anything about it on the basis of science, open to that highest skepticism. The claim to have discovered anything about it, even its non-existence with science is fundamentally irrational. Free will, in order to be free, would have to exist independent of causality. If it was the product of causation it would be determined and not free. Despite that concept being repugnant to materialism as well as scientism, the concept of free will requires its independence of causality to be taken into account in the fantastic claims about it made by scientists. Science, being absolutely dependent on casual relationships, it could not find free will if it searched for it for an eternity.
Fortunately there are far superior methods of determining the truth and reality of free will available. The history of societies and countries which assume the existence of free will and other ideas that give these materialists the screaming fantods, their relative freedom of oppression and freedom from violence, as opposed to those which assume that human beings are "meat robots", as a far more impressive and far more definitive experiment in the existence of free will and rights than plugging a tiny number of subjects into an fMRI machine could produce. One of the foremost assertions of the validity of science is that "science works", meaning that science produces useful things of benefit to the world. Well, in human experience, free will, inherent rights, etc. have a far more certain validity because they work and determinism doesn't. The enormous differences in real world results of the belief in determinism and the belief in free will constitute far more powerful evidence than the products of contemporary science which produces the denial of free will.
Consider this paragraph from Coyne's post:
Second, I don’t see why on Earth he uses the word “free”? Why are people “free” if their actions are determined? The phrase “Brains are automatic, but people are free” may sound appealing, but it seems to lack content. We can consider them free if somehow helps us psychologically in assigning responsibility, but we can also assign responsibility if we consider ourselves “unfree” in the deterministic sense. If you committed a crime, you are responsible for that crime, whether or not you had a choice to do it. You have to be punished for societal protection and deterrence of yourself and others.
You would have to be either entirely ignorant of recent history or an irrationally credulous member of a scientistic cult for that to not raise all kinds of red flags. Of course, Coyne, given his faith in determinism, would question the existence of freedom, every determinist eventually does when these questions are pressed. Determinism is nothing less than the complete denial of the basis of democracy, egalitarian democracy and the once strong ideology of liberalism***.
The more genteel of determinists will come up with some artificial substitute, utilitarianism or aesthetic preference or something merely to be preferred to mitigate the real meaning of their denial of freedom. But these stop gaps will always have the same quality, of being merely something that they "help us psychologically", as if that will prevent the bloodshed and the horrible oppression that have characterized every single officially materialist, officially atheistic government that has existed. Not one of their proposed substitutes is any less vulnerable to denial than any religious assertions of morality and their preceding ideological basis will lead towards nihilism because science can't produce morality.
It is especially telling that Coyne chooses to focus on the desire to punish crime "for societal protection" instead of some more benign aspect of government for the creation of what he obviously believes is merely a necessary, what I assert would be very easily rejected, myth. Presumably the crimes that Coyne would care about and which will incur punishment, could be no less arbitrary based in nothing more solid than his necessary myth, temporary preference. How can science devise a code of civil law? Scientism would have to hold that those laws would be without real existence or meaning. Given his deep hatred of religion, I wouldn't expect the expression suspected as betraying religiosity could escape being criminal, eventually, in a government ruled by his preferences. Of course, it would be "for societal protection". That frequently mythical virtue is always given as an excuse for official depravity. It must be noted that, as bad as other governments have been at consistent application of legal codes, officially atheist governments have shown far less interest in abiding by their own laws.
Atheism, when based in materialism, has a history of denying freedom and with that comes a denial of rights, a denial of equality, and eventually risks the whole host of historical and political evils that come with the denial of those moral concepts. The major backing that racial, sexual, class and other forms of societal and political oppression have in the modern period taken on the form of science. It took the witness to the biologically based genocides of Hitler to shock Western socieites out of the deterministic "science" of eugenics. And, as the memory of that fades, eugenics, by other names, is reemerging and has gained a strong foothold among people with greater influence****. Science - for "science" is what is commonly taken to be science at any given time - has more than matched primitive excuses for the objectification of people, removed inhibitions to people being used and disposed of that are found in religions and philosophies. The very habit of science treats what it looks in that way, it objectifies even the organisms it looks at. Science can assert the reliability of its objectification with the prestige and authority it has, on the absolute foundation of materialism. It can assert knowledge instead of mere belief, in the popular imagination of certain knowledge. And it matches the resulting brutality of that objectification with increased efficiency in methodology. Science is efficacious in achieving ends.
.
I have not encountered many atheists who were not materialists, whether conscious of that or not, I have never met one who was not a true believer in scientism. If anyone has examples of atheists who are not infected with those anti-liberal, anti-democratic ideologies I'd like to read them. If some materialist has come up with a plausible argument for the real existence of freedom and inherent rights and equality I'd like to read them because I don't believe that valid materialist explanations of them can exist. I've looked and haven't found any who come up with something strong enough to counter the very strong force of selfishness.
I have no faith in the political or social efficacy of utilitarianism or the other proposed imaginary or post-post modern style arguments for the mitigation of the brutality of materialist scientism. I think people believing that other people are "meat automatons" or bags of chemical reactions, or any other form of objectification is an open invitation for them to try to use people as brutally as they do animals. And that they can do so with impunity if they are not stopped. That has been the history of atheism with political power, those experiments have been run. I believe that much of the crime and brutality of life in the United States is based in that kind of objectification, even among those who profess religion.
If I'm skeptical of the good intentions of someone who begins by professing a belief that people are imbued with a spark of divinity, that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent rights, having looked closely at the history and contemporary culture of atheism for the past five years, I'm far more skeptical of people who believe that people are merely objects, I don't believe that they are inclined, by their ideology, to see it as absolutely wrong to exploit, hurt or even kill human beings on the basis or utility or in furtherance of their personal (or ideological) desires. I absolutely believe that any society which regards people as "meat automatons" will eventually turn into a horrific, oppressive blood bath such as those which history provides as the clearest and most soberly real warnings.
Many people who read this will be deeply offended and angry. I am sorry that that will be the case. If I didn't believe that I was morally required to regard their feelings I probably would have said much of this in that original post linked to above. I don't see how any scientistic materialists could complain that, in response to one of their own, I have now said it. They don't have a right to my silence on these issues, especially when Coyne and many others makes these arguments in the very real, very dangerous realm of politics.
I am sure many will point to this or that atheist who demonstrated great benevolence and kindness. And I acknowledge that such individuals are there. Though I don't believe that their benevolence and kindness are the products of their materialism or their scientism. That isn't possible because neither provides the moral compass necessary to stick to those inclinations. I could speculate on where they developed the habits of thought and action that allow them to overcome, at least sometimes, the brutality of materialism but that's something they might best tell us, just as a religious scientist is the only reliable source of information as to their mental habits. But I have no faith in the abilities of large numbers of materialists to compartmentalize their materialist faith from the selfish desires we all have. History gives overwhelming evidence that selfish desire is only sometimes overcome by societies. And, as said, the history of atheistic governments gives overwhelming reasons to suspect that a country governed by materialism will always revert to brutality, it will deny the basic rights of other living beings as desired. Most brutally of all, those societies have been able to commit enormous slaughters on the basis of managerial efficiency. There is no evidence in the history of atheistic governments and groups that reason is anything like an adequate deterrent to committing evil. In their most developed forms, scientistic materialism will deny that moral categories are more than illusions.
The litany of crimes of that kind by Christian governments are undeniably a part of history, though, these days they are often exaggerated in anti-religious invective. Of course any crimes that were committed are an undeniable evil and must be remembered and condemned. But those crimes are of a distinctly different character from those of atheistic governments. The Gospel of Jesus forbids the violence and pillage that has often been done in his name, whereas materialism and science do not provide that kind of legal prohibition. Materialism and science can't tell that it is immoral to attempt a genocide. The resultant lack of hypocrisy by atheistic governments in their slaughter and oppression, due to that lack of discrepancy between profession and act, though, is hardly to be praised.
I believe that it is only a morality which absolutely holds all people as being inherently endowed with rights and free will and which explicitly holds that fact requires justice be done is an absolute moral obligation ON PAIN OF REAL CONSEQUENCES, which will keep individuals, alone or in groups, from treating other people as animals are universally treated by people. Without that moral force people will consider themselves as allowed to exploit and destroy without considering the questions of equal rights. Nothing short of that will work, it is hardly guaranteed to work even when it is present. And one of the most important of all those moral positions is the absolute belief in equality. It is also an absolute moral duty of government to not selectively shield some favored members of society from the consequences of their actions, making others pay and suffer the consequences of their greed and folly. People have equal, inherent rights. That is an idea you could never derive from materialism or science, Coyne provides no convincing case for holding powerful people responsible for their "crimes" without it, no materialistic system of thought could.
I believe that the history of peoples' treatment of other people and animals are far superior ways of knowing the fact that people have free will and rights than the highly vague, very poorly founded and very conveniently asserted "findings" of "brain science" in this matter. But that's an issue for another day.
*To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one has already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our DIS-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of its possessor's body at the time.
It is needless to say that medical materialism draws in point of fact no such sweeping skeptical conclusion. It is sure, just as every simple man is sure, that some states of mind are inwardly superior to others, and reveal to us more truth, and in this it simply makes use of an ordinary spiritual judgment. It has no physiological theory of the production of these its favorite states, by which it may accredit them; and its attempt to discredit the states which it dislikes, by vaguely associating them with nerves and liver, and connecting them with names connoting bodily affliction, is altogether illogical and inconsistent.
William James: The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture 1. Religion and Neurology
In the opinion of many thinkers, human freedom is closely connected with human rationality. If we were deterministic beings, what would validate the claim that our utterance constituted rational discourse? Would not the sounds issuing from our mouths, or the marks we made on paper, be simply the actions of automata? All proponents of deterministic theories, whether social and economic (Marx), or sexual(Freud), or genetic (Dawkins and E.O. Wilson), need a covert disclaimer on their own behalf, excepting their own contribution from reductive dismissal.
John Polkinghorne: Science and Religion
** The existence of these exceptions to what is taken as rigidly established reality is remarkable in itself as they would seem to be first degree relatives of the religiously proposed "exceptions" such as miracles which are rejected as an unallowable exception of "physical law". I've wondered about the relationship of the existence of routinely allowed outliers in scientific data to proposed miraculous events, but these huge exceptions in materialist scientism, automatically asserted according to subject matter and the individuals holding ideologies, are far more serious violations of their assertions of "law".
*** Marilynne Robinson has made a very persuasive argument that, despite widespread current belief, liberalism was a development from religion and not the so-called enlightenment.
**** It was, in fact, The New Republic, the pseudo-liberal magazine, which infamously promoted The Bell Curve. Coyne frequently writes anti-religious invective for it, these days. Though somewhat more decorously than he does for his blog.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
"We Are The 1.6 Percent"
It came to me yesterday when I was looking at the numbers in the U.S Religious Landscape Survey issued by the PEW Forum. The relevant numbers were the 1.6 percent of the sample who identified themselves as being atheists and the 83.1 percent who identified themselves as members of religious denominations. Actually, the percentage of the population who identify themselves as religious is higher because in the 16.1 percent who are listed as "unaffiliated", 5.8 are listed as "religious unaffiliated". It doesn't much matter if the percentage of the population which identifies themselves as religious is 83.1 or 88.9 percent of the population, what matters is that the population which are atheists is politically insignificant, certainly in all but a very small number of political districts.
In American politics, you must have the support of religious voters to win. For the left to win, religious liberals and even moderates have to vote for liberal and leftist candidates. They can't win without those votes. The 1.6 percent of the population who are atheists, and who are certainly not all of the left, are not a significant voter group in terms of winning elections.
There is nothing to be gained for the left by tolerating the tiny, obnoxious, fraction of that 1.6 percent who compulsively vomit insults and lies against religious people and their religions, not making a distinction between reactionary fundamentalists and the most liberal and progressive of religious denominations and individuals.
The price the left has paid for coddling the obnoxious percentage of atheists has been way more than they ever deserved, considering their inability to produce more than the alienation of potential supporters for the left and, so, political defeat. I believe they have been a big part of the continuing political impotence of the American left which has either been identified with those atheists by our opponents or which too many of us have identified ourselves with out of some lame brained, misplaced devotion to fairness for what is constantly mistaken as a beleaguered group. The obnoxious fraction of the atheist population has suffered relatively little in the way of discrimination. And, in fact, if they did, they could sue under the federal civil rights laws under which they have been a covered class since the mid 1960s. They are one of the least discriminated against of the covered classes. Atheists have seldom been the target of unprovoked violence, only slightly more often have they been the target of provoked violence, they have not been discriminated against in making contracts or marriages. Most of their long sad story consists of having to put up with being exposed to the religious culture of the vast majority of the population. Well, as long as they don't use government to do it, the vast majority of the population is as entitled to express their religious ideas as atheists are to express theirs. So, if it offends the tender sensibilities of atheists, well, that's just too bad.
The religious left owes atheists one thing, we owe them their due measure of justice, under the law and in so far as anyone else is owed justice. We don't owe them anymore than that. We certainly don't owe atheists a single issue that disadvantages us politically. We don't owe atheists continued support for the faddish obnoxiousness that is the public face of atheism today due to the obnoxiousness of atheists. If other atheists want to avoid the results of that obnoxiousness, that's their responsibility. I know I won't be addressing the distinction anymore as it doesn't seem to be of great concern to atheists in general. I could count the times I've heard other atheists tell the louts among them to shut up on one hand with fingers to spare.
Religious people on the left, the vast majority of the left, do not owe them an enforced ban on our expression of the very basis of our political orientation and ideals and the reason that we stay in the struggle. It is impossible to imagine the success of the very civil rights struggles that made atheists a covered class under the law without the expression of religious ideals by the Rev. Martin Luther King jr, many other ordained ministers, their congregations and numerous other religious people acting out of religious conviction to put their lives and bodies on the line and to do the huge work of changing laws and the harder work of changing minds.
That the major accomplishments of the left in the United States have been the work of the religious majority of the left is hardly surprising because the religious left is many, many times larger than the atheist left. The atheist left couldn't accomplish anything without the religious majority. I look at the history of the left and see that it was when religious leftists accommodated the irreligious that we have lost political influence. I think that is a good part of the story of political loss of the left. Given the addiction of many atheists to various materialist intellectual cults, especially some of the most obviously illiberal "Marxist" and "anarchist" ones, supporting them has cost the left very dearly with no rational prospect of that support making real progress for people in need of relief. If they ever gained power, real liberals would have to fight against them. The history of officially atheist governments, from the reign of terror to North Korea, has been a history of epic oppression and bloodshed.
Considering their numbers, considering the obnoxiousness that atheists, themselves, have made their predominant public image, I'm not wasting any more time worrying about hurting their feelings. It would be immoral to worry about that considering what is at stake.
Note: I will be writing on this subject more in the near future.
In American politics, you must have the support of religious voters to win. For the left to win, religious liberals and even moderates have to vote for liberal and leftist candidates. They can't win without those votes. The 1.6 percent of the population who are atheists, and who are certainly not all of the left, are not a significant voter group in terms of winning elections.
There is nothing to be gained for the left by tolerating the tiny, obnoxious, fraction of that 1.6 percent who compulsively vomit insults and lies against religious people and their religions, not making a distinction between reactionary fundamentalists and the most liberal and progressive of religious denominations and individuals.
The price the left has paid for coddling the obnoxious percentage of atheists has been way more than they ever deserved, considering their inability to produce more than the alienation of potential supporters for the left and, so, political defeat. I believe they have been a big part of the continuing political impotence of the American left which has either been identified with those atheists by our opponents or which too many of us have identified ourselves with out of some lame brained, misplaced devotion to fairness for what is constantly mistaken as a beleaguered group. The obnoxious fraction of the atheist population has suffered relatively little in the way of discrimination. And, in fact, if they did, they could sue under the federal civil rights laws under which they have been a covered class since the mid 1960s. They are one of the least discriminated against of the covered classes. Atheists have seldom been the target of unprovoked violence, only slightly more often have they been the target of provoked violence, they have not been discriminated against in making contracts or marriages. Most of their long sad story consists of having to put up with being exposed to the religious culture of the vast majority of the population. Well, as long as they don't use government to do it, the vast majority of the population is as entitled to express their religious ideas as atheists are to express theirs. So, if it offends the tender sensibilities of atheists, well, that's just too bad.
The religious left owes atheists one thing, we owe them their due measure of justice, under the law and in so far as anyone else is owed justice. We don't owe them anymore than that. We certainly don't owe atheists a single issue that disadvantages us politically. We don't owe atheists continued support for the faddish obnoxiousness that is the public face of atheism today due to the obnoxiousness of atheists. If other atheists want to avoid the results of that obnoxiousness, that's their responsibility. I know I won't be addressing the distinction anymore as it doesn't seem to be of great concern to atheists in general. I could count the times I've heard other atheists tell the louts among them to shut up on one hand with fingers to spare.
Religious people on the left, the vast majority of the left, do not owe them an enforced ban on our expression of the very basis of our political orientation and ideals and the reason that we stay in the struggle. It is impossible to imagine the success of the very civil rights struggles that made atheists a covered class under the law without the expression of religious ideals by the Rev. Martin Luther King jr, many other ordained ministers, their congregations and numerous other religious people acting out of religious conviction to put their lives and bodies on the line and to do the huge work of changing laws and the harder work of changing minds.
That the major accomplishments of the left in the United States have been the work of the religious majority of the left is hardly surprising because the religious left is many, many times larger than the atheist left. The atheist left couldn't accomplish anything without the religious majority. I look at the history of the left and see that it was when religious leftists accommodated the irreligious that we have lost political influence. I think that is a good part of the story of political loss of the left. Given the addiction of many atheists to various materialist intellectual cults, especially some of the most obviously illiberal "Marxist" and "anarchist" ones, supporting them has cost the left very dearly with no rational prospect of that support making real progress for people in need of relief. If they ever gained power, real liberals would have to fight against them. The history of officially atheist governments, from the reign of terror to North Korea, has been a history of epic oppression and bloodshed.
Considering their numbers, considering the obnoxiousness that atheists, themselves, have made their predominant public image, I'm not wasting any more time worrying about hurting their feelings. It would be immoral to worry about that considering what is at stake.
Note: I will be writing on this subject more in the near future.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
On Christopher Hitchens
Having read most of his Minority Report columns in The Nation, watching his devolution from a post-Trotskyite to a Thatcherite to a Bushite, with minimally plausible reasons for all of them, a dirty fighter at each stage, was important for my gradual abandonment of materialism and into a position that is much farther left than I started out being when I read his first column. He was a good example of a certain kind of tony, elite decadence and the bottom side of the would-be intelligentsia of the English Speaking Peoples.
There are reasons that the left as it generally appears today is entirely impotent. The praise of Christopher Hitchens this week provides lots of stuff for a diagnostic study. One that won't be done. Which is tragic.
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Thinking of a Crime
The crime is that Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum is not in print and being read and its absolutely necessary warnings being taken seriously. Re-reading it after a couple of decades, it is even more necessary than it was in the 1970s. Its focus on some of the most dangerous habits of scientists and in the general culture, habits so ingrained that mentioning them can lead to stupefied confusion and anger, makes it necessary to, as Weizenbaum said:
I am acutely aware, for example, that there is nothing I say in this book that has not been said better, certainly more eloquently, by others. But, as my friends continued to point out to me, it seemed important to say these things again and again.
The solution to the failure of the publishing industry to provide a new edition, to type out the entire book, complete with illustrations, is beyond my ability and would be a crime. Though, I don't think it would, actually, be immoral. But I will type out many of its more important passages here for a while.
If any publisher does the right thing and issues a reprint I will promote it here. Consider this as my campaign for the author, his book and the ideas contained in it.
I am acutely aware, for example, that there is nothing I say in this book that has not been said better, certainly more eloquently, by others. But, as my friends continued to point out to me, it seemed important to say these things again and again.
The solution to the failure of the publishing industry to provide a new edition, to type out the entire book, complete with illustrations, is beyond my ability and would be a crime. Though, I don't think it would, actually, be immoral. But I will type out many of its more important passages here for a while.
If any publisher does the right thing and issues a reprint I will promote it here. Consider this as my campaign for the author, his book and the ideas contained in it.
Friday, December 2, 2011
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Friday, August 12, 2011
Lies And Free Speech
| Reality is real, a wise Rabbi once said. That which really happens is what our lives are made of. What really happens is the source of whatever benefit we can get from life as well as the source of all harm.
It is the professed faith, at least, of most of us that the real is good, or at least unavoidable. And it is the real that has to be contended with in our actions and thoughts. What is asserted to be unreal is denigrated and the charge of believing in what is deemed to not be real constitutes one of the more serious contemporary sins among the relatively educated class of most western societies. At least that is the profession of faith which most of us would make if pressed. Which I won’t investigate further just now. The esteem that the real is given is based in hard won experience about the consequences of wishful thinking unconditioned by consideration of the predictable results that flow from our actions. Often the lessons are unwelcome. But experience keeps a hard school as compared to desire, until the final exam results are in. When bad results can’t be avoided, the least foolish thing to do is to forego that part of desire which leads to them. Oligarchies and other elite systems have rigged things, to insure that it’s others who pay the cost of actions and conditions not of their making. The history of non-democratic governments could be written in the measures which elites have taken to make other people pay for their privilege and the eventual collapse due to the accretions of those awful results from that. Democracy is dependent on The People making decisions about governing society and making the laws with which a society regulates itself and its members. The quality of those laws, the quality of the results, inescapably depend on the extent to which those laws are in accord with reality. The farther they are from reality, the worse results can be expected. Experience seems to confirm this idea, the seductions of self-interest being very powerful, only hard experience consciously considered could overcome that motive to be deluded. I’ll also note that democracy is also dependent on equality before those laws. Very crudely put, laws that result in inequality will inevitably lead to a similar situation to the one described in the last paragraph. We have an especially dramatic example of what happens when laws and actions are dangerously out of sync with what is real in the Gulf Oil disaster. A disaster which could destroy one of the most important eco-systems which life really and inescapably does depend on. Clearly the laws and regulations that allowed that well to be drilled were based on false information, much of it provided by people with degrees in science and engineering, some of whom certainly knew the possibility of something like this happening. It seems when large profits are in the mix, that these catastrophes repeatedly override experience, the lessons of past ones and the resultant destruction of the very basis of life. Yet those who repeatedly create them, are always able to profit from them. There is a reason for this situation. My question, stemming from this past week’s discussion and the spectacle of the Gulf oil disaster, is there a right to lie? I mean is there a real, and not just theoretical right to lie, which should be allowed to remain embedded in our laws and which has a real effect in real life. Most importantly, given the reality of how our country is ruled in 2010, what are the consequences of a legal system, a free press and a society which allows profitable and convenient lying to enjoy the functional status of a civil right*? Under the regime of free speech, free press, the champions of free speech apparently believe there is and the danger it imposes on all of us, isn't something they really care about. Is there a right to knowingly lie in a way that can result in a catastrophe like the one we are all fixed on in the Gulf of Mexico**? Is there a right to lie in a way that will put liars in control of our government and regulatory agencies, and our courts? Don’t forget the courts, which, often don’t seem to feel it is their job to punish the most massively consequential lies, so long as those aren’t told in court, under oath or in a context that can be construed as the equivalent of a contract. And quite often, even when those are. It is exactly that part of the government which is supposed to consider what is real and what isn’t that has allowed the corporations and the congress and administrations to ignore reality as hard experience shows will obviously lead to disaster. ------------ I’m sure that, as in the discussion of violent porn, this question will elicit an immediate response with the most extreme of hypothetical scenarios presented. It’s often the classic questions. What about lying to the Nazis about where the Jewish children are hidden? That kind of thing. And, of course, when those situations are real, they are all important. Of course, any moral person with a functioning brain would lie to the Nazis. But pretending that moral imperative to lie as an exculpatory factor in the official lies that gush like oil from the insanely drilled hole in the Gulf, is willfully and stunningly dishonest. The two situations are made definitively different by the illegitimacy of the Nazis’ genocide and their demented despotism. Naziism can, in no way, be equated with the aspirations and the goals of egalitarian democracy. To deny that difference is to lie, to assert those two situations are equivalent is a colossal lie. The imperative to lie to the Nazis is founded in the choices of Nazis. The requirement to tell the truth is an essential prerequisite for democracy to be possible. In my experience, the very people who would bring up this hypothetical in defense of lying are the same who will absolutely hold that any suppression of Nazi propaganda is a crime against civil liberties. Those European countries whose children were rounded up and murdered by the Nazis are often criticized for their outlawing of Naziism and Holocaust denial. This pseudo-ethical stand is an example of denying the hardest of reality in favor of the soft comfort of an abstract principle. The history of that genocide is as real a fact as exists. It is as real as anything in science or mathematics. It is more real than anything asserted in the entire history of philosophy. It is a definitive justification for the suppression of Naziism. Denial of a that lesson, consisting of the murders of millions of innocent people, discredits those who refuse to learn it. There comes a time when you have to acknowledge a lesson like that delegitimizes an abstract principle that airily accepts the possibility of its repetition. You just do. Eventually people have to stop pretending that is a serious point of view held by credible people. And the same thing can be said for other genocides, the extermination of the population of Tasmania by the British, the genocides on every continent that continue to today. Genocide didn’t end. It is a constant danger around the world today. The clear morality of lying to save innocent people doesn’t set aside the fatal effect of serious lying in a democratic society. In fact, one of the likely cumulative results of that kind of lie, is the supplanting of democracy with despotism, and despotisms always try to keep themselves in power by the kind of violence that comprises the extreme hypothetical of the “free speech” absolutist. ----------- The only legitimate reason for a government to exist is for the protection of The People and the promotion of their common good and other such benefits. Foremost, that requires protection of the biosphere that all rights depend on. To do that, we have found, a democratic government is indispensable. As an extension of our personal rights and the necessity of their protection, we also find it necessary to protect democratic government. Our laws have protections of our constitution built into them, laws that protect the government against attack. Even the Bill of Rights and the rest of the protections of individual liberties are held to allow anti-treason and similar laws. Clearly supporting the enemies of the United States is not expression that is without legal jeopardy for those who express it in an actionable manner, especially during times of war. But there is a far greater danger to a democratic society than the ones we are all told to fear, one that is allowed the freest of free reign today, and no where more freely than those in the mass media and government who are deflecting attention with fear of terrorism, often based on nothing in reality. Why should a democratic society allow lying about serious public issues? It shouldn’t. It certainly shouldn’t allow it in the mass media or by politicians or judges. The lies that fill the airwaves used to be mostly heard during political campaigns but are now a perpetual feast of toxic garbage on the airwaves and, even more so, on cable and the internet. I think that today those lies are a far greater danger to democracy and the Constitution of the United States than any foreign or domestic enemy. As an example, it is estimated that 40,000 Americans die every year as a result of our for-profit insurance system which denies them timely care, in many cases, it denies them any care. The well financed lies of the insurance and associated industries have perpetuated a protection racket that kills far more Americans that have been killed by any foreign or domestic enemy of the government and our society. And that’s only those who die from our terrible health insurance system. Corporations kill many more of us than that. Democracy that allows lying a free reign in its politics can't survive as a democracy. The evidence is that our system that is fueled on lies, freely told, freely broadcast, told by professional liars paid by the most filthy rich and larcenous crooks, is destroying our society and, indeed, the very basis of life. I don’t think there is any moral or political reason to allow that. Citing free speech in defense of liars isn’t just an irrational, one law fits all occasions, refusal to consult reality, it is dangerous to our democracy and our lives. Using the language of rights and freedom to hand over our minds to lies is criminal insanity. Using the excuse that sifting the lies from the truth is hard and takes an effort is inexcusable. If it’s too hard to do that, then it’s too hard for us to make informed political decisions. It is to pretend that responsible voting and participation in democracy is impossible. It is to assert that democracy isn’t possible. There is no royal road in reality. If it’s even very very hard to do what is essential, that’s just too bad. -------- Indulging in a bit of non-reality, just call it an extreme hypothetical, imagine a society where no one told lies, where no corporation interested in maximizing profit over the welfare of The People or the environment could misrepresent the reality of their intentions and proposed activities? Imagine if they had to be honest about what really happens. Imagine if they couldn’t hire scientists, engineers, lawyers, and other, assorted professions --- and in today’s reality, quite a sordid bunch they are — to lie to us and our government. Would we The People let them drill where they couldn’t fix an oil well blow out before it caused the death of a major ecosystem? Would we allow them to ration health care on the basis of what is most profitable to them, including the deaths of tens of thousands every year? And imagine if politicians and lawyers and judges didn’t lie. Let’s go wild and imagine if the broadcast and cabloid media couldn’t lie? Would there be any harm to our freedom, our liberties, our lives from this terrible regime of the truth? Would getting even half way there from the cesspool of lies we are in today hurt or enhance those benefits of democracy? * Of course, there are other lies that are not permitted, some have been noted in the discussions last week and I won’t go over those again here. Libel and slander among them. A good part of the Clinton administration was a lesson in what happens when media corporations and pseudo-religious corporations are given a free reign in slandering and libeling elected officials. It was the Supreme Court, in decisions some foolishly hail as a great bulwark of free speech that led to that crippling of democracy. ** In another recent discussion there was something of a scandalized reaction when it was proposed that scientists, engineers and others who, from positions gained through their academic credentials, lied or irresponsibly and catastrophically misjudged the situation that led to the oil gusher into the gulf, should lose their credentials. Including revoking their degrees. Universities are supposed to be institutions that place the highest value on truth in accord with reality. “Veritas,” the often ironic slogan is. “Lux et Veritas, ”... This is supposed to be especially true in academic departments in the sciences, engineering and schools of law. What are we supposed to think of the universities which trained corporate scientists and engineers who bend their work product in ways that are no different from lying about what is real? What are we supposed to think about those who have also proven, in the most horrible way, that their professional judgement is criminally negligent at worst, disastrously incompetent at best? Should people who have done those kinds of things retain their credentials? Shouldn’t universities which produce these people take their measure of blame in that? What is the real value of a university education if the people they tout in the alumnae propaganda are proven liars and incompetents? And that doesn’t even begin to ask about law school graduates. It also doesn’t go into the fact that the faculties of many of our most prestigious universities are well salted with corrupt corporate hacks, crooks and liars. Eventually, reality being real, the corruption behind the ivy and ersatz parchment becomes undeniable. I think we are rapidly reaching the crisis stage when our universities are adjuncts of a corrupt corporate oligarchy. The signs of rot are undeniably visible now. |
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
The Reason for Liberalism to Exist At All and Why Violent Pornography Should Be Suppressed
| Two people hearing the same piece of music won’t have the same reaction to it. One person will hate it and the next person will find that it compellingly speaks to their condition. And those aren’t the only two possibilities. The person who finds a piece to be irresistibly absorbing of their attention will have a half-ally in someone who likes to ignore the same piece as background music while they read a book. The first cousin to indifference.
And what is true about different responses to a piece of music is true of books, movies, pictures, and just about anything else. It is also true of ideas. One person who finds an intellectual position to be totally convincing will be matched by many who think it is hogwash. And there are few passionate dislikes quite like colleagues who hold similar but competing positions on a subject within the world of scholarship. Clearly people react in significantly different, often significantly opposite ways to the same experience. Which will come as a surprise to no one. When it comes to the things above. A note I had from someone who read the exchange from last weekend provided the same old lines about pornography that can be abbreviated to “there isn’t any proof that pornography leads to violent behavior”, with the obligatory mention of statistics thrown in. While I’m not convinced that the statistical analyses, such as I’ve seen, are convincing, I ‘ve come to be even less convinced that they are relevant to the topic of the damaging effects of pornography. The statistics won’t show us what we need to know about this topic. For the purposes of thinking about the possible impact of pornography in the actual lives of people, it is the individual people that are important, not the artificial, nonexistent conglomeration that is the focus of statistical analysis. A person isn’t raped by a number, they aren’t strangled or slashed or bludgeoned by a tolerable confidence interval, mode, median or average, they are attacked by one person, or a group of actual, other associated people. I hold that it is a reasonable conclusion, that if those people who attack have been exposed to violent pornography, their actions have been motivated by that pornography. That another person – OK, let’s cut that even handed garbage now — if another man happened to view exactly the same pornography and was entirely unaffected by it, that does nothing to negate the motivating effect it had on the attacker. When it is a matter of a crime, the events of that crime are more important than a sociological generality. The life events and condition of the individual who commits a crime are more important in understanding that crime than the experience or condition of any or, even, all other individuals. Just as the crime of an unrelated person cannot be justly blamed on another accused person*, the non-response of another person to pornography can’t negate its likely effect on a person who acts in a way that is consistent with it and the ideas it promotes. An individual person's experience isn’t watered down by the experience of another person, our lives aren’t neutralized to a tolerable acidity by the introduction of an inert substance. When looking for the possible effects that violent pornography has on the victims of violence, the only relevant subjects for study are those who attacked them. Unfortunately, since we are talking about the internal conditions of peoples’ minds in this, you have no access to that except through their self-reporting. And in the case of the consumption of violent pornography and its effects on those who act violently, I don’t know how you are going to reach a reasonable level of confidence in their testimony about their consumption of it or its place in their motivations. I’d be rather disinclined to view violent rapists and sexual sadists as reliable in matters of self-knowledge and truth. As I’ve always been stunned to realize, in our society today, words and images are granted a higher level of respect than mere mortals, both human and animal. I strongly suspect that what began as an abstract Jeffersonian ideal that was supposed to allow the best ideas to incubate and naturally rise to prominence, in practice hasn’t worked out with anything like uniform success. I also strongly suspect some of the worst of it, flows from the fact that not all words and ideas are of equal attractiveness to people with the power to change things. The idea that women are inferior to men and so women were subjugated by natural law is an idea that we are still struggling against. It was such an accustomed idea to the late 18th century that women could be left out of the founding documents of this country, its expression isn’t sufficient to disqualify men from holding important public offices now. ** Jefferson’s actions show that he certainly didn’t see women as being the equals of men, certainly not women of color. Clearly, for most of the history of this country, the idea that women were inferior to men had greater appeal than the idea that women are equal to men and possessed the right to full personhood and equality. It was to the benefit of men to pretend they knew this, it was to their economic benefit and to the gratification of their self-concept to have women subservient to them, their chattels. The struggle of the idea that women had equal rights is an idea that has had a hard time winning out over the traditional viewpoint of patriarchal domination. That the factual case of women’s rights is solid and entirely more credible than the self–interested hunches and habits of patriarchy has not made it strong, politically, and even under the judiciary it is constantly endangered in 2010. Just think of that. In 2010 women are in danger of losing their right to control the most personal and intimate aspects of their personhood! Despite the centuries of reasoned discussion and proof, we are still struggling against the most primitive and obviously dishonest line of oppression that deprives more than half of the human population of their equal rights. The “more speech” of women’s rights has not yet effectively won over patriarchy despite what must be the daily experience of more than half of the species. And it is the freely spoken lies, the freely presented images and dramatic presentations and Madison Ave. style PR in favor of male domination that are what maintain the oppression. And in no part of the freely spoken, freely expressed discourse of patriarchal oppression is that as obvious as violent pornography. To grant pornography the legal status where it must be convicted at a standard beyond mere reasonable doubt is one of the absurdities of our times. A standard granted to pornography is well past a standard based on perfect certainty that it is innocent. If there was absolute proof convicting pornography in promoting violence, I would bet you anything that the absolutists would still claim it was the right thing to allow it to live. That is the essential stand that is unstated in free speech absolutism. It is the standard of those who oppose all libel and slander laws which are, obviously, a restriction on speech. That standard makes the most damned lie immune from suppression. The counter-argument that bad speech be answered by “more speech” is made false by the fact that a lie, even countered, generally has a damaging effect on those lied about. There isn’t enough of the distilled water of “more speech” to render the lie of no consequence. Of course, if you have a prominent position in the media or other realm and often according to where you live, those consequences are often of less impact. The effects of many of the worst lies varies by area and economic status. In Massachusetts on Thursday, a young man was convicted of the stabbing murder of James Alenson, a 15-year-old school mate. The jury didn’t find the psychological mitigation presented by the defense to be convincing. Among other things learned in the trial, the murderer, John Odgren, was obsessed with a series of Stephen King stories. The testimony in the case documented that what he read in those books influenced his behavior to the extent that he called himself by the name of the principle character in them. To assert that his behavior was unaffected by the book is, clearly, to lie. He was, clearly, impressed with the trench coat cult, which I associate with the killers at Columbine High School. He would have had to hear about that from someone, most likely through the media, perhaps through the sick online cult that sees the Columbine killers and their kind as heroes. I don’t know what it was in the mass of psychological jargon presented by either side of the court case that made him attack a randomly chosen student, one who apparently he didn’t know, who was small and gentle and not someone who would have been likely to taunt him. Someone who was probably seen as unlikely to put up an effective defense. I don’t know exactly why Odgren killed, I do know that to discount his media driven obsessions is willful detachment from reality. It is as delusional as the thinking asserted by his defense team as the motivation of the murder. Just as an observation, if I was the author of stories that played a role like this in a murder, I would at least cease from producing similar tales. My right to tell a story can hardly be equal to the right of a 15-year-old to live. The political impotence of the left is the result of the pseudo-judicial requirement imposed, by us and media coercion, on our public life by the free speech industry.**** That standard of extra-judicial impartiality has been absurdly inserted into our political speech and our lives as political animals. It is a standard of behavior that no other part of the political spectrum feels they must practice. It is seen clearly in the scrupulous observances maintained on the left about speech and expression. When someone can’t object to the word “cunt” or about the business practices of Hooters without being chastised as violating some bizarrely inverted concept of justice, it’s clear that we mere human beings are the vassals of words and images, so much more so when they are the products of commerce. It is time for women and the rest of those struggling for progress to declare we are going to throw off that mind forged manacle that is so notably a benefit to our opponents. The idea that all speech is equal and must be treated impartially will always benefit those with more power and fewer morals. When you add the mass media to violent words the results can be genocidal. As mentioned in last weeks argument, free speech in the form of lies is the basis of most of the loss of rights due to bigotry and discrimination. Misogyny, racism, ethnic and religious bigotry, hatred of LGBT folks, are, in almost every case today, founded on and fueled by freely expressed speech. Hate talk radio and cabloids are the most prevalent media informing the American People of what their government and others do. Our virtually unrestricted media, just about entirely freed of the obligation to serve the public interest is the product of the free speech industry and the corporate media it so often acts on behalf of***. There has hardly ever been a time in the history of speech, when hate speech by and in the interest of those with power wasn’t given complete freedom, no matter what other speech was suppressed. Of the many clear examples when speech has a homicidal impact on mere human beings, abridging every right those mere humans have, the Rwandan genocide is a relatively fresh and undeniable example. By the time the “more speech” had time to catch up with the hate speech and incitement to commit genocide that was uninhibitedly broadcast in a way that our shock jocks are quickly catching up to, hundreds of thousands of people were dead. If you think that can’t happen here, it does now. Women, the identifiable class most subject to hate speech, freely expressed, are murdered in the United States every single day because they are women. The slaughter of women is slow motion terrorism that has an inhibiting effect on the freedoms of women and girls. It is a lynching campaign that is the product of words that accumulate into attitudes and social norms. The same can be said to an extent of other groups which are regularly and irregularly the topic of hate speech. As is undeniable during this time of “open carry” rallies, our opponents are showing us that they are armed well past the teeth. Anyone who is willing to bet that they could not be incited to kill with them is an idiot. In thinking about this and other topics, I’ve come to the conclusion that the way we have been led to think of human behavior is basically wrong. People aren’t atoms and molecules, they don’t behave with reasonable uniformity, there aren’t just a few simple vectors to describe their motion and interaction with their environment. I think much if not all of this statistical activity concerning human behavior might be quite useless. I don’t believe anymore that human behavior is subject to any laws and rules that our science is able to discern with any reliability. It is in determining the actions of any individual. While it might be very desirable to be able to make predictions about future behavior, trying to determine that with statistics is of wildly variable success at the very best. The more complex the behavior, the less likely it is liable to be understood simply. With complexity, given the nature of behaviors and their possible source in unknowable motivations, the complexity of the network of those possible motivations expands very fast. I don’t think behavioral science works even as well as the observations of a good fiction writer. That conclusion is something I didn’t want to be true, I used to believe the opposite, but I think it is true. I would like there to be a reliable science to deal with dangerous mental illnesses, but I don’t believe that, other than administering drugs to prevent some of the adverse behavior, the results are reliable. We don’t have to like something for it to be true. Nature and science don’t have to conform to what would be most useful to us or most convenient for us. It would be extremely useful if we could predict who will have a bad reaction to violent pornography and use it as a how-to manual. But we can’t. To pretend that inability requires us to accept complete libertarianism, allowing pornography to throw off its chains and to flourish in its infinite depravity, is insane. To ignore that it is at least as effective as Viagra commercials in changing behavior or encouraging behavior that is latent in a potentially dangerous person, is also insane. * The results of the habit of generalization are on full display in the infamous law recently passed in Arizona. Allow sterotypes and group libel full reign and you get laws like that one. ** When you add the element of ownership, as in slavery, the interests of slave owners asserted themselves and the original Constitution included mention of slaves, conferring extra privileges to slave holders and the states they lived in. The importance of that distinction is seen in the fact that the constitution didn’t give extra weight to the representation of states based on giving unenslaved women a fractional value, the infamous 3/5ths person value. Of course, that added representation wasn’t given to slaves, it was given to their enslavers. *** If you want to know why our government doesn’t work, despite the majority that was elected with Barack Obama, our media is the foremost part of that. The impotence of Democrats in the congress and the administration is inflicted by the free media, exercising their unrestricted free speech in the absence of the onerous burden of risking an accurately informed electorate voting in an effectively beneficial way. **** It was exactly that media coercion that fueled my first blog post. Note: In the end, you have to stand for what you stand for. I would have risked making this post of even more unreadable length if I’d gone into the all important issue of what the values of liberalism are for, in the end. To hold that governments and societies should treat people equally, to allow them to practice the control of their bodies and lives, isn’t an isolated end in itself. It has a goal, that of allowing people to live peaceful, happy lives, to not be harmed by other people with the ability to suppress and harm them. I don’t think it’s wrong to point out that much of speech and expression is an attack on that goal, it isn’t of innocuous intent. The goal of many people is to hurt people and animals, some people are gratified by hurting other people, they want to steal the product of their work, up to and including the most basic sustenance. There are people who like to hurt and kill other people. To deny that is to deny the reasons that liberalism and democracy are necessary in the first place. To deny that it is necessary to prevent that harm is to deny the only legitimate reason that laws and government exist. There are also people who are so enamored of their self-righteousness that they will preen in a posture of scrupulosity in the matter of free speech even as they wash their hands of the results of the malignant speech they champion. “More speech” is the water that is held to clean up the blood. Only it doesn’t clean up the blood. It does, however, mask the indifference to it. |
Saturday, August 6, 2011
We Cannot Know About The Lost Past Without Evidence
For the past week I've been engaged in a long discussion at Greg Laden's blog about whether or not we could know anything about the origin of life, the way in which life first arose from non-living matter, what life was like and other aspects of that problem. Here is the link to that discussion for anyone who is interested in it. A long answer to Stephanie Z, one of my antagonists in that brawl has been caught up in moderation for a while now so I am posting it here and will attempt to notify her that it is here. Please note that, as in my argument with Sean Carroll last year, I've tried to get some questions answered by Greg Laden, so far he has been unwilling to respond to them. The last version of those were asked at comment #202 at the link, I will post them in a note after the comment
1. When you talk about "the origin of life" do you mean the actual event that happened in the way it did and only in the way that it did, resulting in exactly the organism that it did result in, or do you mean something else.
2. Do you also agree that if you are not talking about that, specific, event you are not talking about something that really happened but something that didn't happen?
Stephanie Z. anything that creates a scenario and action and proposed organisms would be the creation of a narrative. Which isn't bad in itself, to some extent it is necessary to do that. But when you want to call your narrative science you have to be able to bring it farther, you have to compare it to the part of the actual universe you want it to represent. Science is all about making assertions about aspects of the actual universe, as it is or as it was. That is used, among other things, to make predictions that can be tested. Though, in this case, you can't go back and retrospectively make predictions about the origin of life and turn those into science because you can't compare what you might discover against the now lost evidence of what that was.
The famous Miller-Urey experiment succeeded in synthesizing amino acids in a laboratory. They were successful in showing that those would form under the conditions they set. That's what they proved could happen in the part of the actual universe they created in their vessels, with the chemical and physical conditions they created. Any narrative description of that experiment would be almost completely reliable as science.
If the assertion is that they recreated natural conditions on the early Earth, that is embroidering the narrative of the story with far less reliable content. No place on the early Earth was just like the conditions inside their vessel, I doubt there was anyplace like the inside of their vessels with exactly those contents and under the kind of electrical charges and temperatures, anywhere. However amino acids formed on the natural Earth, it wasn't under the same conditions they created in their experiment. The suggestions people took from their experiment that they had successfully shown how the synthesis of some building blocks of life had, in fact, happened, is the creation of a narrative about the natural world. One which can be told in a pretty far fetched manner.
Unfortunately, narratives created about that natural world need something more to become reliable enough to be considered science, they need to be able to be matched to observations of what they are purported to represent. And in this attempt, there is almost nothing to go on in that regard. So the narrative remains a narrative instead of a representation of the natural world and universe. Only a lot of people, some within science, most outside of it, mistake that narrative for a representation of the earliest glimmerings of life, as it happened on the early Earth when it isn't. If they want to believe that, that's their right, if they want to say they've nailed it down as it happened on the early Earth, they can do that but they really haven't.
Let me go farther. Just as the I.D. ("Intelligent Design") industry wants to use science to support their favored narrative of the origin of life, including divine intention, materialists have wanted to refute that idea with science, many of them within science, most of them merely sci-fans. Of course, science only being legitimately able to address physical evidence and what you can say about its physical properties, it can't clear up the question of divine intent in evolution or anything else. Trying to use science to put God in the picture or to take God out of the picture is not a scientific effort, science is incompetent to do either. It is an ideological abuse of science.
I contend that a lot of the less reliable science of the past century and a half have been attempts to nail down the proof of ideological materialism with science. Sometimes, as in Francis Crick's crusade to "put the nail in the coffin of vitalism" something like that is a stated goal. Things like that have been claimed for science from the beginning of science. Claims that science supports the presence of God are also made but not as often, at least not until the rise of pseudo-scientific creationism. With the possibilities of profits and financial backing, the ideological abuse of science will likely flourish. Look at what it did for some of the most blatantly absurd assertions in psychology.
All of those narratives about the universe, both the ones with God and the ones putting the nail in God's coffin are the creations of stories in the name of science and, in so far as they claim to be science, the people telling them are lying. There would be no way to know if the universally accepted triumph of the ideological materialists would have precluded the possibility that what they hadn't discovered had merely been the real way God created life on Earth, as opposed to the Genesis narrative. Being quite as naive about that as the creationists, materialists overlook that before God is said to have created life, that God created the material universe, all of it, at every scale of resolution, including molecules, atoms, subatomic particles and even whatever might fill it way, way, way down at the Planck scale. And God was said to have set it in motion. Which would include the motions of planets and stars and the combinations of atoms and molecules. Materialists, in the end, are stuck with the exact same tools to use to convert people to their point of view, they have to convince them. No matter how much they want to use science to do that, no matter how many ignorant people they might convince with their sciency narrative, that narrative is not reliable as science, it falls outside of what science can do.
Given the naivety of creationists and others unaware of science, they might be forgiven for believing the hype that it has powers which it doesn't. There isn't any excuse for highly educated scientists to believe that it does except that there are obvious holes in their educations.
You can't deal with God with science, it is outside of the only legitimate subject matter of science, it can't be done with its methods and tools which are not designed to look at or for anything but that part of the physical world that are susceptible to its methods and tools. Everything else falls outside of its competency, any claims made that extend outside of those are unreliable, they don't cut the mustard as science. Or, honest science, at any rate.
Whatever the scientists who think they are working on this problem do s that they can show that they could produce whatever results they have produced, in the way they did it. Lacking evidence of the real beginning of life, as it happened in the natural world, claims about the applicability of their work to that problem are speculations, they can't be known to be reliable, they can't even be tested for unreliability against the real thing. No more than claims which have, actually, been made about life in the distant reaches of the universe. Dawkins has claimed those farthest reaches of the universe for natural selection when there is absolutely no way to know if that is true. It's possible that natural selection has happened on only one planet in the entire universe. His claim is ideological it isn't scientific. It is no more legitimate than a claim that a six day creation happened on another planet. It's his preferred creation myth.
Note: These are the questions mentioned at the top of this post.
Greg Laden, I can't find that you've answered my questions about what you are asserting. Would you answer them now?1. When you talk about "the origin of life" do you mean the actual event that happened in the way it did and only in the way that it did, resulting in exactly the organism that it did result in, or do you mean something else.
2. Do you also agree that if you are not talking about that, specific, event you are not talking about something that really happened but something that didn't happen?
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