What Are You Doing Here?

Camels With Hammers used to be accessible at both www.camelswithhammers.com and the www.camelswithhammers.wordpress.com address you just used.  But now we are exclusively at www.camelswithhammers.com and camelswithhammers.wordpress.com is now a ghost blog.

Camels With Hammers Has Moved!

We’ve moved to our new home on a new server, but your Internet provider still has our old address. Within 24 hours, you should start seeing the new site. Try again soon, and thanks for your patience!

The End Of The Camels With Hammers Dark Ages

No new posts today as I have been and will be bogged down with preparations for the blog’s formal move to our new host.  There are a lot of things to take care of before tomorrow.

Tomorrow ends the “dark ages” at Camels With Hammers as we abandon our black and orange scheme entirely for something far brighter and cleaner and we simultaneously add some really great new features.  Looking over the posts in their new home and doing restoration work on them, I am extremely excited at how good they are shaping up to look.  It is something of a shame we did not have a design like our new one from the beginning.  But at least tomorrow we will!

See you at our new home (at the same address—no need to change your bookmarks) tomorrow!

Gay Couple Weds In DC After 60 Years Together

The Advocate reports:

After a 60-year romance, a gay couple in their 80s tied the knot in Washington, D.C., June 20.

Henry Schalizki and Bob Davis exchanged their vows at the J. W. Marriott in Washington in front of 60 friends and family members, according to The Washington Post. The couple reveals that while Schalizki immediately set his sights on a wedding after the District of Columbia enacted marriage equality, Davis was not as enthusiastic.

“We’re accepted as two human beings, always as a couple. I said, ‘I don’t see any reason for it,’” Davis said. “Besides that, Vera Wang will never make a gown for me to wear.”

Your Thoughts?

Rational Passional Persuasion

Andrew writes:

So atheists don’t have emotions which inform them of the truth of something? And their rhetoric is completely dispassionate to the point where logic and reason are not fully objective?

I have addressed the proper ways to consult the emotions in looking for truth in the post, Disambiguating Faith: Heart Over Reason, so for the time being I would like to address the second line of Andrew’s objection and return to the question of passional reasoning in reply to objections made to that post which puts my views on the table at some length.  So, feel free to go to that post, read it over and offer me Your Thoughts on heart-based justification.

But as to the topic of passionate rhetoric:  Rhetoric is about persuasion, not only about argumentation. If an atheist uses rhetoric that is persuasive but not logically sound, then the atheist is not arguing up to high rational standards and is as open as anyone else would be to criticism that she is both using bad arguments and, just as bad, pulling out emotional stops to prop up dud ideas that cannot stand on their own rational feet.

If, however, an atheist uses persuasive rhetoric to bolster a logically sound point, then she is both persuasive and truthful, so what’s wrong with the combination?

For one thing, believing the right thing for the wrong reasons is not rational.  If I persuaded you just because you found me personally impressive and based on my charisma would have believed anything I said, then even if I have gotten you to believe something true, you remain a dangerously bad reasoner who just as well tomorrow might become convinced of something horribly and disastrously false using the same process of belief formation you used with me.  Ideally, I should not want to let you remain a bad reasoner but rather should help cultivate your reasoning skills as part of getting you to believe this correct thing.  If I do not do both things, give you the truth and the proper reasoning process, I do not help you find more truths than the one I just gave you and avoid other errors than the ones I just helped you to avert.

Passion can be persuasive in a number of ways.  My enthusiasm for an idea recommends the idea to you in a couple of ways.  For one thing psychologically we are inclined to mirror others’ emotions.  All sorts of emotions are contagious.  So if I find something scary, my fear may make you afraid too.  If I am angry about something it inclines you to respond the same way.  This is of course very dangerous in cases where there is no good reason to feel a specific emotion with respect to a specific thing and yet they convey their feelings to others.  If someone has a disgust reaction to gays, she might express that disgust to others and those others might mirror that emotion and cultivate disgust in themselves.  And yet there is no good, rationally defensible reason to be disgusted by gays.  It’s a prejudice.

But there are other times in which there are good reasons to feel different things and part of what a persuasive writer, orator, or debater does is model appropriate feelings towards the subjects at hand.  So when talking about how unfair discrimination against gays is, the persuasive person may express outrage in his voice, which models for his listeners outrage against discrimination against gays.  Or she may simply use an accurate but either emotion-laden or value-laden word which has stronger emotional punch than another accurate enough word which would have conveyed the factual meaning the same but not have also carried with it the expression of how the speaker or writer feels or judges the fact.

The listener or reader should assess at least three things when a passionate appeal is made to her.  1.  ”Are the premises of this argument true?”  2.  ”Does the conclusion reasonably follow from the premises?”  and, if one is convinced about the premises and convinced that they entail the conclusion, finally, 3.  ”Is it appropriate to feel about this conclusion the way that the speaker feels about it?”

So someone argues to you, “1. It is a fundamental human right for consensual adults to marry whomever they want as long as there are no demonstrable and morally impermissible harms which would befall either themselves or their society if they marry.  2.  Consensual gay adults are not allowed to marry each other, even though there are no demonstrable and morally impermissible harms either to themselves to anyone else if they marry each other.  3.  Gays have their human rights unconscionably violated when they are inhumanely and capriciously denied the right to marry.

Now the first two premises are rather technical and devoid of strong emotions.  There is a key value term “human right”.  So, you should assess the premise, is it indeed a human right for any consenting adults to be allowed to marry as long as there are no demonstrable and impermissible harms which would befall either themselves or their society?  Is the sex of those marrying therefore truly irrelevant as long as these other sepcific conditions are met?  I think the answer to both those questions is clearly yes.  But the arguments for them are for another time.  Let’s just say for argument’s sake you think that the answer to both questions is yes, too.  Say you also agree (as I in fact do) that the other premise is true and there are no demonstrable and morally impermissible harms that gay marriage actually causes either the couples themselves, their families and associates or the larger society.  Then you are at minimum committed to the conclusion that the law presently denies consenting adult gays their human right to marry.

Now let’s compare this dispassionately formulated conclusion “the law presently denies consenting adult gays their human right to marry” to the stronger rhetorical case made above which said, “Gays have their human rights unconscionably violated when they are inhumanely and capriciously denied the right to marry.”  Now what was proven was that the law denies gays one of their human rights.  The way the point was stated though adds the judgment that this is also unconscionable.  This is telling me that this denial of rights raises to the level of something that should shock my conscience, I should not just disinterestedly note the fact that human rights are being denied but my conscience should be upset by this.

I should be outraged at a society that would do this and I should feel so great a burden for being a part of a society that is presently doing this and should feel motivation to rectify the situation so that my conscience can stop being horrified.  Is this reasonable?  If we are dealing with a human rights violation shouldn’t we feel outraged?  Or are the only human rights violations that should be deemed unconscionable ones like genocide, rape, torture, etc., which involve physical violence?  The word unconscionable invites you to make a value judgment and feel an emotion, you have to then assess whether that particular value judgment applies and whether it warrants the prescribed emotion.  The same goes for the words “inhumane” and “capricious”.

So, to get back to atheists in closing.  When atheists put passion into their arguments the question is whether it is warranted.  Should we direct our outrage at the misdeeds of religious institutions at religions themselves as many atheists do?  Why or why not?  Should we judge it a serious, moral wrong as many atheists do, in most cases to believe things without sufficient evidence?  Should we share their frustration with this?  When we encounter an absurd, literally held, religious belief should we, as atheists suggest, feel equal disdain for it as we would for absurd beliefs in any other area of life?

I think the answer to these questions is in most cases, yes and reasons can be given to justify those conclusions about how to feel.  So, if I convey those emotions as part of rationally defensible argumentation that makes clear why I have good reason to feel as I do, then I think it’s entirely fair and legitimate.

For more detailed analysis of the particularities of when and how we should and should not go about trying to passionately persuade using mockery of religion, see my posts My Thoughts On Blasphemy Day and In Defense Of Mocking And Embarrassing Religion.

Your Thoughts?

Hammer

VorJack writes:

If Atheists have a God, the way many believers insist we have, it isn’t science. The God of atheists is Truth (or Reality, or the Universe, depending on how you want to spin it.) Science, reason and logic are only the means of finding the Truth, but they’re also the only means we’ve found that work.

We are constantly appalled at the things that people want to slap the label of “Truth” on. Time and again we find people declaring something to be Truth on the flimsiest of pretexts. A reference to a holy work, or some revelation in the distant past or some deep inner feeling.

Yes, we know that there are many arguments to be had. Many religions have theology that is internally consistent, and many have theology that is quite beautiful. But when you hold them up to the light of Reality, it’s hard not to feel that your looking at some fancy decoration painted on a stick.

And so the temptation is always there to take up the hammer and join in the long tradition of idol smashing.

Your Thoughts?

One Nation Indivisible

Just Monday morning I was riding along a Florida Highway staring with irritation at a giant billboard looking just like the one below except it had the giant word “GOD” in the middle contributing to three phrases.   Atop and to the left of the word God it said “One Nation Under”, on the left next to “GOD” it said “In” and to the right it said “We Trust” and under “GOD” was written “Bless America”.  Basically the hat trick of American catch phrases which mix up God and state.

It’s nice to see a counter billboard up stressing that our nation’s indivisibility and rejecting the use of patriotism to try to bully people into belief in God.

If you would like to chip in for the sign, The Greenboro Atheists are raising money to pay back the generous benefactor, Joseph Stewart of NCSecular.org, who paid for the billboard out of his own pocket.  Click on the donate link at their website.

Your Thoughts?

What Exactly Are We Supposed To Be Doing?

You’re Not Helping responds to my defense of the Freedom From Religion Foundation:

Camels with Hammers has posted a bit of commentary on the Do Nothings. First and foremost, they cry foul on us for unjustly misrepresenting the goals of the FFRF

Wait, no, first and foremost, I agreed with You’re Not Helping that it is unfair to accuse those actually engaged in relief efforts of not doing anything more than waiting around on God, simply because they included prayer in their approach to the problem.

But moving on to the substance of the disagreement, here is their reply to my argument that Freedom From Religion Foundation’s letter was an important attack on the mixing of religion with what should be secular government:

That sounds good, but the FFRF isn’t attacking unconstitutionality whatsoever – they’re attacking the futility of those who engage in prayer. Constitutionality enjoys a mere, brief mention in their piece,

Wait—are they not whatsoever attacking unconstitutionality or is it only getting “brief mention”?  The unconstitutionality of the measure is explicitly one of about 6 main distinguishable points that the press release addresses.  And it is clear this is a distinct main point because, brief as it may be, it gets its own paragraph that reads, “And it makes the usual unconstitutional exhortation to citizens:  ’The citizens of Louisiana are urged to pray for a solution to this crisis . . . a crisis that remains unaffected by the efforts of mortal man.’”

You’re Not Helping is correct that the issue of Constitutionality only gets that one explicit mention.  Perhaps it was one of those tricks of the mind where you fill in information you expect to see even if it is not actually there but I saw the question of Constitutionality throughout the piece because I saw the entire piece as addressing the reasons for Constitutional separation of church and state and making it explicit and the recurring motif of the pointlessness of prayer is raised to punctuate those points.  And those points are all ones that I think are legitimate and helpful to make.

What are those points?

1.  They cite that Obama made “17 references to God, prayer, blessings or faith” and yet the oil kept gushing. This is evidence disconfirming the effectiveness of prayer.  Yes, it might sound pedantic to point out the obvious that even nearly all the religious actually probably would have predicted would happen happened, the oil spill didn’t stop just because the nation’s leader humbled himself before God by calling for prayer and the people answered his call to prayer.  No one really expected that to happen.  So it might strike us as a cheap shot for the Freedom From Religion Foundation to point this out.

But they are not being simply jerks, they are trying to counter the effect by which 100 unanswered prayers are forgotten and then one answered prayer is held up as evidence of God’s grace.  The next time there is a natural disaster and we get lucky in some way, people will be all over the media pointing out the successes and falsely claiming they prove something.  As obnoxious as it might be to keep a vocal track record of all the failed national prayers and as much as it might come off as picking on easy targets or beating a dead horse, it serves an important function of reinforcement of a truth.  The more atheists get in the habit of hounding religious people about each and every ineffective prayer, the less the religious can accidentally forget all the unanswered prayers and just focus on the ones they think they see answered.  The more we rub the probabilities in their faces the less naturally they can self-deceive themselves.  Of course, many will still self-deceive themselves and see only the patterns they like and, even more will just redefine prayer to “not being about testing God” or some other such nonsense or say that “God answers all prayers but sometimes the answer is ‘no’.”  But some will get the point that prayers are empty words.

A refrain like “nothing fails like prayer” should be drilled into people’s heads until it becomes a common sense saying that expresses an obvious truth.  Because we are the kinds of creatures who will believe whatever is taken to be common wisdom and take common sayings to be understood truths.  ”The Lord works in mysterious ways” is a Scripture verse turned into a saying turned into an easy-at-hand meaningless justification every time a prayer fails.  What if instead, what people had pounded into their heads was “nothing fails like prayer”, would it make them more likely to think the naturalistic, atheistic, rationalistic approach to looking at the world is correct?  I think in its small way, it would.  This is the psychology of ideological warfare in a democracy.  Memes and talking points which drill key phrases and sound-bite-size truths into people’s heads.

But, you protest that we should be encouraging attention to careful argumentation, not resorting to relentless sloganeering and jeering!  Of course we should, but you need to reach people where they are and where they are is listening to intuitive common sense nuggets.  The insistence that they think through all issues rationally, even ethical and metaphysical and religious ones, has to be repackaged into such easily graspable nuggets if it is to compete with religious propaganda.  Of course, if the rational thinking never follows as it seems the You’re Not Helping folks are worried, then we have just replaced one empty slogan for another.  And in that I agree with You’re Not Helping that acerbic irrationalistic atheism is not much of an improvement over acerbic irrationalistic religion.

But, to the main point, there is a legitimate purpose in calling attention to the emptiness of politicians’ promises and the emptiness of all prayers so that people become so accustomed to hearing such things and keeping track of them themselves.

2.  They complain rightly about the implicit philosophy that state senators in the United States officially adopted. “The resolution made the usual human-as-worms allusion, saying ‘a Statewide Day of Prayer provides each of us with a powerful opportunity to humble ourselves before our Almighty God.’”  Excuse me but of what business is it of the government to tell me to humble myself before the Louisiana senators’ God?  If that is not the demand that I submit to the “God” of a legislative body and consider it “Almighty”, what is?  And I agree with FFRF’s disgust with that conception of humanity and am glad that someone out there is bothering to complain when the government of a state in the United States of America explicitly endorses such a demeaning conception of human nature, one fit for justifying tyrannies, not the Enlightenment ideal of autonomous rational beings who have dignity and who can rule themselves.  It is worth fighting over the conception of humanity that is blithely and reflexively shrugged at by liberals as just religious niceties and that is adamantly insisted upon by the theocratic conservatives of the nation.

It used to be that political theory considered proper conceptions of human nature as integral to developing proper conceptions of government.  These days, the theocratic right wing of the country has a strong conception of human nature—as only free by the grace of God but otherwise sinful and deserving of nothing and as only free from governmental authority to the extent that it is instead subjected to God’s authority.  I think it is much more than whining for the FFRF to challenge this conception of human nature because the conception of human nature endorsed by the Louisiana senate undermines the view of human autonomy which is the conceptual precondition and justification of a secular culture and a truly secular state.  The word “Constitution” wasn’t in that point but I think it is completely in keeping with their organization’s raison d‘etre to bring it up.

3. They make the explicit attack on the unconstitutionality of the measure which I already discussed.

4.  They attack the “primitive and superstitious” character of intercessory prayers. Now the New Atheists are always being told that they should not bother attacking silly superstitious “magical” religion because that’s just the stuff of the most fringe fundamentalists.  Most people’s religion is far more sophisticated that that.  They know that prayer is about something spiritual and meditative, not about primitive propitiations to deities who can be enticed to work as our servants.

But here we have the Louisiana Senate talking about their “awesome and powerful force” to combine prayers with “common effort” to bring an end to the disaster.  They claim that the prayers will have, or at least contribute in some non-trivial way to some kind of, “awesome and powerful” force?  Well, I guess we are not talking about modern, post-superstitious religion in the Louisiana Senate.

I guess we are talking about the kind of religion that is patently foolish and even enlightened pro-religious people are allowed to criticize and which is so obviously false that New Atheists aren’t supposed to attack lest they be burning strawmen or knocking down only the easiest targets, not the deep sophisticated theologians with serious spirituality.  So what’s wrong with pointing out that the Louisiana Senate is in effect suggesting the equivalent of sacrificing some goats and chickens for their power to make the gods see to it that our practical efforts are successful?

What’s “whiny” about demanding that 21st Century governments not act like primitive and superstitious ones in their official proclamations?  What is whiny about accusing them of a theological contradiction and blasphemy in thinking that their God is both Almighty and all Just and yet that something like an “awesome and powerful force” can be summoned to alter his will?  Was something wrong with his will in the first place that he would not do the just thing by the Louisiana Gulf if no one offered intercessory prayers?  Was he justly going to help out all along but wanted to see the people’s faithfulness as one of the stages of what he was going to do?  Well, then why call the prayers an “awesome and powerful force” if they don’t actually make anything happen?

Of course this whole theological debate is a bunch of nonsense, but if state officials are going to make theological claims as part of official state proclamations, then they should be treated as propositions intending to state the truth and should be scrutinized critically.  Many people will believe the pious contradictions.  I see a legitimate place to take them on their face and answer them with the kind of respect that is willing to show why they are on their own terms false and should be abandoned.

And it is valuable to point out, to all those who claim that religion is a valuable 21st Century good to retain, that the Louisiana Senate is incorporating not enlightened progressive religion but a superstitious and primeval form.  This strikes me as completely legitimate thing to criticize.  If every theological claim a government put forth was abandoned after its falsehood was exposed, we would have a secular government in no time.  And, again, that is this organization’s stated goal, not pelican scrubbing.

5. They show proper contempt for the absurdity that the Louisiana Senate is calling for praise and thanks to the all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing God who used none of his goodness, power, or knowledge to prevent the oil spill in the first place.  Again, they are calling attention to public officials’ incoherence in their viewpoints.

If the Louisiana Senate had an incoherent position about how to plug the oil leak, would there be anything wrong with criticizing it?  Is it only wrong to criticize their policies but not their religious views that they explicitly seek to impose upon their citizenry when demanding their citizens humble themselves and petition and thank the God they describe?  Why the exception for religious contradictions?  Why shouldn’t FFRF point those out without being accused of whining?  Is it because no one really believes in prayer anyway?  That’s unacceptable.

We cannot have politicians advancing theological doctrines to an overwhelmingly religious populace and then have those who challenge the coherence of those doctrines attacked for pettiness towards merely pious words that no one really believes anyway.  That’s just absurd. Every place a theological doctrine is asserted as literally true, it is fair game to attack it and one does not have to scrub one pelican clean to earn the right to defend the truth in such a manner.

6. FFRF points out that instead of pointless intercessory prayers, reexamination of our foolishness that got us into trouble is important and proposes that we take seriously the limits of our technological capacities for safe deep sea drilling and not make the mistake of trying it again.  So that’s a sixth point, five on top of the “prayer is futile” refrain and it is probably as deep a practical, rational suggestion as an advocacy group for secular government is going to provide.  And I don’t think they need to provide engineering advice that they are not qualified to offer in order to speak up about the issues they are qualified to address and are organized to address.

Quickly returning to the rest of You’re Not Helping’s complaint with FFRF:

Constitutionality enjoys a mere, brief mention in their piece, which instead attacks the very notion of prayer itself and the mindlessness of those engaged in it… which supports our original piece. The FFRF even makes the implicit assumption that, if you’re praying, you can’t help things by any other actions – they actively pretend that those who pray can’t do anything else at the same time (or they ignore what those people are doing). In other words, they erect a false dilemma of what those who pray are capable of doing, and this forms the criticism of their piece:

“Prayer is what politicians fall back on when they don’t want to offer true leadership. Are we prepared to learn anything from this environmental disaster? Or are we just going to pray about it?”

I’m not sure if that’s a literal attack on the ability of the government to do both things so much as a rhetorical stab at a speech filled with empty gestures like Obama’s speech which was long on vague abstract promises and short on concrete solutions.   This critique was echoed all over the place including by the Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews on the left.

Obama’s plea for prayer sounded to many like just more pandering piousness when what we need is clear leadership.  The Freedom From Religion Foundation are not engineers, they’re not specialists on oil rigs or drilling.  They offer a pretty clear practical proposal which is probably the best you can expect from such an organization, and that is to stop doing things which require you to go beyond the limits of your technology and so risk catastrophic natural damage.

They attack a style of government which offers people pious platitudes but no serious environmental protection or curb on corporate plunder of the environment. I don’t think that only people who are scrubbing pelicans can point all this out.  That’s a false dilemma.  I don’t think that critiquing the style of government and the propositions in an official state proclamation which is tantamount to an endorsement of governmental superstitiousness is “not helping” just because it is not also coupled with a magical solution of its own for the oil spill.  I do not see where the same organization must do all good things to have the right to do any one good thing.

There were six legitimate points they made in their press release in addition to their rhetorical false dilemma.  You are right, it is not literally true that the government is only praying and not doing anything tangible.  FFRF overreached rhetorically.  You got them.

But their other six points are true and they are helpful.

The fact that the FFRF talks so highly of taking action instead of prayer to fix the oil spill – while notably offering no options or recommendations to actually do so whatsoever- is precisely the kind of hypocrisy that makes Do Nothingism so detestable. They’ll tell you what you should be doing with a high sense of superiority, while not even thinking about doing it for themselves, proving that they’re able to talk the talk but as incapable of walking it as the most deluded believer. Action is nothing more than a buzzword to the Do Nothings, something important to talk about and something to make them look like the good guys, but not important enough for them to follow through on. Perception is the only outcome they’re focused on, you see.

It’s amazing.  This is coming from a blog that does a lopsided job of relentlessly nitpicking the New Atheists’ thousands and thousands of weekly generated words attacking religion and providing all these abstract platitudes about the right way to do it and yet never puts in a full week in the trenches demonstrating this perfectly toned, perfectly helpful way of actually helping defeat religion.  To listen to you guys judge every other blogger, you’d think that with just one week of your pitch perfect criticisms of religion, the pope would realize the true errors of his thinking since it’s now been pointed out to him so so helpfully for once.

And no one would ever accuse atheists of stridency again, seeing as how the non-strident atheists would have obliterated all validity to the charge.  And of course the charge of excessive hostility from atheists must come because it’s completely true and not at all because religious people are projecting their own insecurity at having their fundamental beliefs attacked into perceptions of the atheists attacking them as willfully malicious.  If only atheists were more helpful in the ways I’m sure you could demonstrate for us for at least a week, religious people would not find atheists hostile at all.  It’s really all our fault.

Now, obviously I’m being sarcastic.  I think you bat around .300 in your criticisms, which in baseball and in blogging is not bad.  And the discussion about tone you’ve started is an excellent one and some of your criticisms (especially of the use of violent language and unhelpful ad hominems) are extremely vital. Overall I support your efforts and intentions even when I disagree with you and think you are nitpicking or being really self-righteous (which is a lot).  But my point is that you guys are a blog that insists you don’t need to be part of the positive mission, you can just play self-appointed watch dogs without actually showing us how the mission is supposed to be carried out by leading by example.

And so it is really surreal and hypocritical that you demand that the FFRF, which is simply a self-appointed watch dog for the separation of church and state, give engineering advice or organize a relief effort in order to be allowed to speak.  You do very little to even try to endear yourself to your fellow atheists and yet demand people’s good faith trust in your intentions.  So, here’s an idea, why don’t you “do nothings” of the atheist blogosphere do something for the cause of fighting religion for a week and then you can earn the right to return to your watchdog role.  Why don’t you go get an unconstitutional governmentally sponsored day of prayer struck down before you criticize the FFRF and put the word press release in scare quotes when referring to their, uh, press releases.  Once you’ve done that, maybe we can criticize FFRF for only being about church and state issues and not also about clean up efforts.  Or we can just say that this distinction you are forcing that the same atheist organizations must perform all valuable functions society needs or they have no right to speak up about anything is an invalid one.

The actual problem, like the oil spill, is nothing more than a PR moment. Cleaning it up – the action they’re falsely whining about others not taking  - can take a backseat to pushing a perception. And that’s why they do atheism a disservice: they paint us as a superior force capable of good that, for whatever reason, doesn’t want to do that good when people look at our actions. That’s a major problem, not just with the FFRF but with the bloggers we mentioned originally….and it doesn’t just apply to the oil spill.

No one, including us, is saying that going after violations of constitutionality isn’t worthwhile or is doing nothing. But again, the argument by the Do Nothings (including the FFRF) is that if religious people were smart, they’d be doing the right things – the right things that the Do Nothings apparently find not important enough to do themselves. If they really want to be doing something, the letter-writing and griping is perfectly fine…but they need to own up to the other, more highly touted portion of their bargain, too. This is something Camels with Hammers agrees with us on:

“Is You’re Not Helping correct that atheists need also to coordinate concerted charitable efforts and not only criticize infringements on the separation of church and state? Of course. But the two endeavors are not mutually exclusive by any means. The larger atheist movement should be able to both chip in to the Gulf Disaster relief effort with tangible resources and stand up against religious government. “

Exactly. But the Do Nothings aren’t doing that, are they?

No, they’re not. And that’s precisely their problem.

But my point was that the broader atheist movement needs better institutionalized charity.  That has not been there because until recently atheists were passive about being a cultural influence.  There are countless secular charities which are de facto atheist in that they recognize no god formally.  And they do wonderful work.  In those organizations are both religious people and secular people and no group gets praised and none called non-contributory.  But when a religious organization runs a charity, even if it is staffed with some secular people, all the glory goes to God and none to secular ethics.

So, there has long been an imbalance where many secular charities don’t get put up on the chalkboard for atheists even though they demonstrate that godless charity works as well or better than religious kinds, while on the other hand religious charities are sure to make sure that their charitable contributions are points in favor of the moral superiority of faith.

Finally, as you must know, there is the organization “Non-Believers Giving Aid” set to rectify this misleading situation.  You must know that the prominent atheist blogs rallied around it during the Haiti crisis.  You must realize that if you want to complain that the atheist movement needs to show its charitable responsiveness that that’s the organization to ask about, not the FFRF.  When the Haiti crisis hit, people went to the Red Cross and UNICEF websites.  They didn’t write angry web posts about how the ACLU was doing nothing.

Finally, I resent the implication that by “only complaining” about government’s theological proclamations in times of ecological and corporatist disaster I am “doing nothing.”  In 2008, for the first time in my life I got out and campaigned for a politician.  I stood on street corners, I knocked on doors, I made phone calls, I gave money I couldn’t really afford on my graduate student teacher’s pay.  I supported the guy who was against torture, who was against compromising our values for the Holy Grail of perfect security, who promised to take climate change seriously, and who promised to be a fierce champion of gay rights.

And, most relevantly to current events, I supported the ticket which opposed off shore drilling and not the ticket of “drill baby drill”.  I supported the party that at least promised to put the environment before the corporations, the candidate who boldly promised to “heal the planet”.  I’m sorry I wasn’t able to fix the EPA so that it actually regulated corporations.  I’m sorry I wasn’t able to commandeer Haliburton and insist it fix its broken equipment.  I’m sorry I have my own professional obligations and plans that preclude a trip to clean pelicans.  I’m sorry I’m only a philosopher and not an engineer.

But I voted for the people who explicitly promised to rely on science and to make tough choices for the sake of a cleaner planet and against a party that clearly had no interest in either of those ends.  I have earned my goddamned right to complain when what I got in return was off shore drilling that destroyed one of the most important ecosystems in the country.  I have earned my goddamned right to complain when I’m pandered to with pious platitudes and told to humble myself before an Almighty God I don’t believe in.  I have earned my goddamned right to insist my president promise scientifically guaranteed technology before there is ever another attempt to drill off our shores.  I have earned my goddamned right to a government that is committed to reason and science and not to telling me to pray.

I studied issues, I campaigned, I pay my taxes, I vote, I fulfill my own professional duties, I volunteer my time to the cause of education about important issues.  I’m not a “do-nothing” because I’m not doing somebody else’s job.

Your Thoughts?

The Gulf Disaster: Prayer And Priorities

Some atheists online have mocked calls for prayer made by Obama and legislators.  You’re Not Helping argues that while there is clearly something awful about treating prayer as a substitute for practical action (such as when true believers in “faith healing” forgo actual medical treatment for prayer) not all those who turn to prayer are that foolish or deserving of scorn:

Praying to God about the spill is futile, but many of those praying are the same ones getting out and performing the actual work to combat the spill and hopefully clean some of it. Several of the Louisiana lawmakers proposing the bill, for example, are those on also on the ground helping with cleanup and recovery efforts. According to news reports, many of those who attended prayer vigils all along the Gulf coast in past weeks were cleanup workers taking part after a long day’s work in the field – workers who went back out the following day to start again. And the next day. And the next day. And the next day. If these people are risking their health and livelihoods to get out and do something about a disaster that affects each and every one of us no matter the location, we think that it’s absolutely fine if they want to pray at the same time. We just hope they’ll understand if we don’t join them in the god-offerings.

In the face of all this action and the people doing it, the atheist blogosphere seems content to shout at those people about their “stupidity” and “laziness.” We’d argue that the true laziness, however, comes from those who feel that shouting and complaining are enough for them to play their part. We offer no sympathy and support for those who will hurl invective, taunts, and accusations of apathy at the people risking their lives to clean up their spill for them…while those same people do so from behind the warm, sterile glow of their computer monitors, guzzling down fossil fuel all the while. These people – the Do Nothings – are no more helpful than the knee-bent parents letting their child decay in its bedroom. Shouting to God for help from the disaster is going to make it vanish equally as quickly as shouting at those helping to clean it up.

It is surely uncharitable, unfair, disingenuous, and ungrateful to discount people’s hard work simply because they also (foolishly) include prayer among their strategies.  But, You’re Not Helping is also unhelpfully cavalier in dismissing a legitimate complaint about the constitutionality of what should be secular governmental leaders calling for repentance before God or expressing gratitude to God with official government proclamations on behalf of the citizenry.  It’s not whining inactivity when The Freedom From Religion Foundation vigilantly refuses to let times of crisis and desperation be opportunities to undermine the vitally secular nature of our institutions:

Senate Resolution No. 145, which declared Sunday, June 20, 2010 as a “Statewide Day of Prayer for Louisiana,” was introduced by Senator Robert Adley and adopted by Louisiana state senators. The resolution made the usual human-as-worms allusion, saying “a Statewide Day of Prayer provides each of us with a powerful opportunity to humble ourselves before our Almighty God.”

And it makes the usual unconstitutional exhortation to citizens: “The citizens of Louisiana are urged to pray for a solution to this crisis . . . a crisis that remains unaffected by the efforts of mortal man.”

The usual primitive and superstitious invocations are offered that “prayers woven together through common effort can themselves become an awesome and powerful force . . . [advocating] a day of unified, intercessory prayer, by and for those people living in the regions around the Gulf of Mexico, to pray for an end to this environmental emergency.” (Isn’t it blasphemous for these senators to propose that a united humanity is actually more powerful than the god they believe in, that by sheer wishful thinking such “humble” humans can force their god to stop the gusher over which he previously has chosen not to intervene?)

Most absurdly, the resolution urges “the citizenry of the state and all people of faith throughout the United States and the world to give personal thanks . . . for God’s continued guidance.” (Don’t these senators sense a contradiction in their concept of an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good god? Note that President Obama, in his speech, does not offer the expectation that God will intervene, but simply calls it a “blessing that He is with us.”)

Is You’re Not Helping correct that atheists need also to coordinate concerted charitable efforts and not only criticize infringements on the separation of church and state? Of course.  But the two endeavors are not mutually exclusive by any means.  The larger atheist movement should be able to both chip in to the Gulf Disaster relief effort with tangible resources and stand up against religious government.  You’re Not Helping’s attack on Freedom From Religion might as well be aimed at the ACLU for attending to matters of civil liberties rather than cleaning off pelicans.  

Your Thoughts?

Judge This: No Gay Kissing On Modern Family?

I am a bit late on this story but wanted to offer a contrary viewpoint to the dominant one of the outraged blogosphere.

Though I have never seen the show, I was interested in the controversy over the show Modern Family which apparently features a gay couple among its lead characters.  The controversy centers not around the presence of gay characters but rather on the fact that they never ever kiss on screen while all the other couples do.  Waymon Hudson explains more:

ABC is known for showing heart-warming depictions of LGBT people. The network has given us Brothers & Sisters, with an amazing gay couple at the heart of the Walker family who kiss, sleep together, cuddle, and even married on the show. They’ve also given us Ugly Betty, with fully-formed, strong gay and transgender characters, from the highly sexualized Mark St. James to the male-to-female transition of Alexis Meade to young Justin Suarez, perhaps the best depiction of coming out on television that featured moving scenes of the high schooler kissing his new boyfriend for the first time.

So ABC isn’t the issue. Something is holding back Modern Family from fully developing its smart and sassy gay couple’s relationship.

Here is the problem that I have. The couple has adopted a daughter on the show. They are obviously committed and in a long-term relationship. Yet they have never kissed on screen. Ever. Every other couple constantly kisses, cuddles, and makes out, yet the gay couple is relegated to a chaste hug.

In fact, a Facebook group has popped up demanding “Let Cam & Mitchell kiss on Modern Family!”I’ve already joined.

ABC followed up this controversy by claiming that the choice thus far not to have the characters publicly kiss was related to one of the character’s squeamishness about public displays of affection (which still does not quite explain why the show apparently has never shown them kiss when alone).

Obviously if the show is not showing them kiss as a way of accommodating mainstream homophobia to keep viewers, it would be really unfortunate and worth protesting.  But I think there is another way of looking at the effect of a clearly coupled and clearly caring gay pair of men who are modest about their public displays of affection.  While on the one hand, much of America needs to get over its “ick” factor in seeing gay men kiss and this is only going to happen if it becomes more commonly seen so that it becomes something people are more accustomed to and less reflexively going to blanch at.  But, on the other hand, much of America also needs to get over its reductionism that sees gay people as merely people with sexual disorders who let a deviant compulsion for sex override all sense of morality and decorum.  Much of America needs to stop thinking of homosexuality as about sex and start acknowledging and treating seriously the fact that it is primarily about love.

Of course, even were homosexuality only or primarily about sex, it would still be something that the non-gay people should learn to accept since pleasurable, consensual, maturely chosen, responsible sex with a partner of one’s own desiring and willingness to accept any risks is really a human right, regardless of whether love is involved at all.  In other words, even on the level of being just a variant way to have sex, homosexuality should be at the bare minimum fully accepted legally, and should be accepted morally on the same terms that any other sex act should be assessed—by answering questions of whether engaging in that sex act is consistent with all the people involved in it being able to flourish in their total life goals, find happiness, respect each other’s autonomy, care for the people in their lives, develop relationally, stay healthy or increase their health, and increase the total pleasure in the world, etc.  As long as a given sex act does not thwart any of those ends (even if it does not happen to serve all of them), it should be minimally ethically acceptable and possibly ethically encouragable.

But I have digressed.  The point is that even more than just an ethically defensible and, for some people, highly rewarding form of sexual activity, homosexuality also has the full potential to be a component of romantic love, including those committed forms of romantic love most ethically idealized in our culture.  And too many homophobic people try to rationalize their ethically baseless disgust for gays by reducing gays to being homosexuality as all about sex and not about love.  They say remarkably offensive things like that to teach children about gay marriage would mean talking to them about gay sex.  This is as patently absurd as saying that teaching children about straight marriage would mean talking to them about heterosexual sex.  Also incredibly offensively will express irritation that gay people come out because they have “no interest in knowing what other people do in their bedrooms”.

Again, knowing someone is gay tells you no more about the explicit details of his or her sex life than knowing someone is straight does.  Again, being gay is not just engaging in a particular sex act, it’s being as powerfully inclined towards love and romance with members of your same sex as straight people are inclined towards love and romance with members of the opposite sex.  (And, note, I said as powerfully inclined towards members of your own sex as straight people are to members of the opposite sex, not more powerfully inclined towards members of the same sex as you are to members of the opposite sex.  Gay men are no more inclined towards every man than straight men are inclined towards every woman and gay women are no more inclined towards every woman than straight women are inclined towards every man.

Of course one would think these would be obvious points by now but the visceral, emotional disgust with homosexual sexuality gets confused with a moral judgment all too easily and, having no real substantive arguments against the goodness of gay sex for gay people, the homophobe resorts to making the issue all about decorum and not airing one’s sexuality in public.  And there are plenty of stereotypes of the unrestrainedly lusty gay men who cannot help themselves but to make out lasciviously in public.  And there are plenty of stereotypes about the coupling of male gay sex with other risky or “deviant” forms of sex–S&M, sex in public restrooms, promiscuity at levels unparalleled among straights, etc.

So, in this context, although mainstream America needs to start getting used to seeing gay men kissing already and cultural influencers, especially our artists, have a positive ethical responsibility to provide this stepping stone to full recognition of the legal and ethical equality of our gay fellow citizens and fellow human beings, I think there is a place for at least some representation of gays which make sex a non-issue.  Because a key part of changing the way homophobic people perceive gay displays of affection involves changing the way they perceive the context in which those displays occur.  And to spend some time just focusing on gay couples as loving couples with no reference to the sexual nature of their love, there is the possibility of some correction of the center of homophobes’ attention.  Rather than seeing gays kissing and having the homophobes feel all the negative associations they have about that which are reducing the gay characters back to primarily sexual characters, I see a real and genuine value of focusing insome representations of gays a long time on everything else about what goes into gay love such that all that other stuff can be the primary thing people think about.

When I learn that two people are married the first thing I think is not, “oh, that means they have sex with each other”.  Part of accustoming a reflexively homophobic public to gays means stopping the thought “oh, that means they have sex with each other” from their minds as their first association and focus.  Taking gay physical displays of affection off the table in some representations, to me, seems to increase the possibility that people focus on and start to empathize with the depth, sincerity, commitment, friendship, love, admiration, pleasure, conflict, fluctuation, and all-around normalcy of gay emotional displays of affection so that psychologically the message gets through that at the end of the day, it’s really just like straight affection.

And when the mainstream public is as accustomed to thinking of gay couples as having the same sorts of fully well-rounded loving, committed, emotional relationships with one another as they think of straight couples as having, they really won’t bat an eye to see them kiss.

For more of my views on homophobia and the ethics of homosexuality see my posts An Argument For Gay Marriage And Against Traditionalism and A Follow Up Post On Gays And Christianity.  For my account of the nature and ethics of love please read How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count The Ways and Call It Volitional Love Rather Than Unconditional Love.

Your Thoughts?

Lord Mayor Bans Lord Mayor Bans “Intrusive And Outdated” Christian Prayers Before Council Meetings

From the Telegraph:

Colin Hall said religion had no role to play in the conduct of council business.

Mr Hall, who has just taken over the mayorship in Leicester, said the “majority” of councillors and city council staff were not practising Christians therefore there was little point in having the prayers, which were introduced in 1997 and stopped for a year between 2005 and 2006.

Writing in this month’s edition of the Leicester Secularist, the journal of the city’s Secular Society, Cllr Hall, who will serve as Lord Mayor for the 2010-11 municipal year, said: “Contrary to the myths that certain organisations like to promote, the practice of observing prayers at the start of council meetings is a relatively recent one.

“I am delighted to confirm that I will be exercising my discretion as Lord Mayor to abolish the outdated, unnecessary and intrusive practice.

“I personally consider that religion, in whatever shape or form, has no role to play at all in the conduct of council business.

“This particularly applies in Leicester where the majority of council members, myself included, do not regularly attend any particular faith service.”

Your Thoughts?

Obama Acknowledges Two Father Families In Father’s Day Proclamation, Christian Right Flips Out

Secular News Daily reports:

As part of his Sunday proclamation, Obama included a reference to “two fathers”:

Nurturing families come in many forms, and children may be raised by a father and mother, a single father, two fathers, a step father, a grandfather, or caring guardian.

Tim Wildmon, president of the far-right American Family Association, responded with hyperbolic terror. “This is the first time in our nation’s history that a president has used Father’s Day as an excuse to promote the radical homosexual agenda and completely redefine the word ‘family,’” exclaimed Wildmon. “Virtually all Americans have the common sense to recognize that children need both a mother and a father. But here we have the leader of our nation and the Democratic Party celebrating sexual behavior which is contrary to nature and pushing a household structure that we know is harmful to children.”

Wildmon continued, “. . . our president is so committed to normalizing homosexual conduct that he is putting the twisted sexual desires of adults ahead of the needs of children.”

Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council, a Christian organization which focuses much of its energy on combating the “gay agenda”, joined in. “If he’s going to mention the partner of a father at all, it should be to note that children do best with their own married mother and father, and the best thing that a father can do for his child is to marry the mother of that child,” says the FRC spokesman.

Apparently they think that denying the reality of two father families makes them not really there (just the way affirming the reality of God makes him really there).

Your Thoughts?

Putting Social Brain Mechanisms To The Task Of Figuring Out Unknown Natural Phenomena

Last fall, Wired reported on a study published last fall (“Neuroanatomical Variability of Religiosity.” By Dimitrios Kapogiannis, Aron K. Barbey, Michael Su, Frank Krueger, Jordan Grafman. Public Library of Science ONE, Vol. 4 No. 9, September 28, 2009) which finds religious people have extra activity in the neurological brain regions indispensable for social intelligence:

Brain scans of people who believe in God have found further evidence that religion involves neurological regions vital for social intelligence.

In other words, whether or not God or Gods exist, religious belief may have been quite useful in shaping the human mind’s evolution.

“The main point is that all these brain regions are important for other forms of social cognition and behavior,” said Jordan Grafman, a National Institutes of Health cognitive scientist.

the capacity for religious thought may have bootstrapped a primitive human brain into its current, socially sophisticated form.

Grafman suspects that the origins of divine belief reside in mechanisms that evolved in order to help primates understand family members and other animals. “We tried to use the same social mechanisms to explain unusual phenomena in the natural world,” he said.

This is consistent with the research that those with Asperger’s, who have diminished capacities for social understanding, also do not think at all in intentional personal terms when thinking up explanations of natural phenomena (unlike non-Asperger’s atheists, for example, who have normal dispositions to think about nature as being guided by personal intentions but deliberately choose not to due to rational considerations).

Your Thoughts?

Spanish Senate Votes To Ban The Burqa

The New York Times reports:

MADRID — In a significant escalation of Spain’s debate over how to handle radical Islam, the Senate on Wednesday narrowly and unexpectedly approved a motion to ban Muslim women from wearing in public the burqa or other garments that cover the whole body.

The vote, 131 to 129, was another setback for the Socialist government of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, which had favored more-limited restrictions on Islamic clothing and has instead been pushing to curtail religious fundamentalism through better education.

The Spanish vote comes amid several national initiatives across Europe to restrict the spread of radical Islam and defend liberal values.

In Belgium, the lower house of Parliament has already approved a measure that, if unamended by the upper house, would make it a crime to wear in public “clothing that hides the face.”

The Senate’s position also came as a surprise because although Spain has become a major European entry point for Muslim migrants from North Africa, few of those immigrants wear either the burqa or the niqab, which does not cover the eyes. A similar argument has also been made by opponents of a burqa ban in countries like France, where only an estimated 100,000 women wear the burqa out of a Muslim population of about 5 million. France, however, already passed a law in 2004 to ban head scarves or any other “conspicuous” religious symbol from state schools in order to preserve their secularism.

The Spanish government is supposed to follow the Senate’s motion. However, given that Socialist senators opposed the ban, the governing party is likely to seek ways to circumvent the vote.

Your Thoughts?

Daily Hilarity: BP Putting People To Work! (Scrubbing Pelicans…)

Your Thoughts?

Starvation

This ripped my guts out to watch.

Thanks to the “Let’s Lodge A Complaint Against God” Facebook page for the video.  But the takeaway from this video should not be just another reiteration of the problem of evil, it should be refreshed urgency in our thinking about proactively remedying the problem through humane human efforts.  Consider again taking Peter Singer’s challenge to take proactive steps of your own to eradicate poverty worldwide:

The Life You Can Save in website form and The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty in book form.

Your Thoughts?

“Dawkins Is Not A Priest”: A Heated Facebook Exchange

Last spring a friend asked me to come over to her Facebook wall where she had posted a Sam Harris video (on his views on science’s ability to answer moral questions, which I will get around to analyzing here some day).  Though not an outspoken atheist herself, she had received a lot of anti-atheist fervor from one of her other Facebook friends.  She was interested in having me weigh in.  Here is his last comment before I weighed in, followed by my first retort, followed by his first reply to me and then my last volley before he just resorted to personal attacks and I decided to not waste any more time.  In what follows he is in the quote boxes and my writing is, as usual on my blog, not in the quote boxes.  His first post is about Richard Dawkins.  Enjoy:

The man presents more like a school boy reciting forbidden curse words in front of giggling friends than he does a man of any real wisdom.

Warmongering doesn’t always actually result in violence. In this case, he’s advocating aggression from his church by eliciting aggression from the type of Christian he equates Christianity to.
He certainly doesn’t express the same enthusiasm in speaking to people like Chopra or Pim Van Lommel.

His hopes to force dialogue into the acceptable social sphere are unfortunately completely contradicted by his behavior. What dialogue is he so open to discuss if he has already declared his belief to be unshakable?

The man’s just a televangelist in a nanotech suit,
handing out beliefs to suckers willing to take his
word on things. Just like a lot of his opposition.

How degrading to humanity.

You can’t be a warmonger if you’re not advocating war and Dawkins is advocating no wars I know of (and I’ve read and seen quite a bit by him in the last year). I have no idea how to follow your convoluted logic when you say: “In this case, he’s advocating aggression from his church by eliciting aggression from the type of Christian he equatesChristianity to.” He’s advocating aggression from “his” church? What church is that exactly? Dawkins is an atheist, he has no church. And how is he “advocating aggression” FROM his church by “eliciting aggression from the type he equates Christianity to”? What does that even mean to advocate one person to have aggression by eliciting it from another? And where is he “eliciting aggression”? This is just gibberish as far as I can see.

And what does this mean, “His hopes to force dialogue into the acceptable social sphere are unfortunately completely contradicted by his behavior. What dialogue is he so open to discuss if he has already declared his belief to be unshakable?” What’s the acceptable social sphere? How is he hoping to force dialogue into it? And what belief is he taking to be unshakable? The only beliefs that either Dawkins or Harris claim are “unshakable” are that all our beliefs must be subjected to evidence and rational investigation, be it scientifically or philosophically grounded in reasons accessible to all members of the discourse. How does that contradict a call for dialogue? It’s simply a rule necessary for rational dialogue. If I am going to have a dialogue with you, we have to share common terms. You are not allowed to just assert by blind fiat things which flatly contradict the laws of nature or which have no evidence from common experience or scientific investigation. You cannot just make stuff up or grant arbitrary authority to texts which you allow to trump all other evidence and reasons. That’s not reasoning, it’s bald assertion. And there’s nothing wrong with Harris or Dawkins insisting that discussion of religion obey the same rules of discourse of every other field of learning—rules which demand reasons for positions, not bald assertions. Neither Harris nor Dawkins have declared their atheism “unshakable”, they say over and over, they have seen no sufficient evidence and that without such evidence, belief is unwarranted. “Faith” is an intellectual vice, it’s not a reason. You are not allowed where you have no reasons to just believe anyway. That’s prejudice and stubborn willfulness in the face of counter-evidence. It’s not rational. And it requires no respect in a sphere of rational discourse. That’s not closed-minded, it’s the only way open-minded discussion can happen—to reject our unsupported faiths and only believe that for which we have sufficient reasons.

Opposing logic always seems convoluted to those who take immediate offense to their beliefs being subjected to scrutiny.

Let’s start with the church. The man (Dawkins), for all intents and purposes is a preacher. Just as a priest has his or her church, a rabbi his or her temple, he has his book readings and speaking tours. They (preachers) represent a belief in a place where people gather to hear words of encouragement towards their belief.
Atheism is an ism. It’s a practiced philosophy. Belief in no God. A belief without faith…arguably a faith that there is no such thing as faith without material proof. But it is a belief nonetheless.
Dawkins has the god delusion. Arguably the modern bible of Atheism.

I think the parallels there are beyond any accusation of me just being a clever shit.
So there’s your church.

Warmongering…this thing again…Am I apart of a mass hallucination or something? Is there not a very popular cold war taking place between Atheists and Religion? This is the war that people like Dawkins and
religious zealots worldwide constantly feed with this
stupidity of division between Spirituality and Science.

Dan Fincke: “how is he “advocating aggression” FROM his church by “eliciting aggression from the type he equates Christianity to”? What does that even mean to advocate one person to have aggression by eliciting it from another? Blah blah blah please hold my hand”

Well Dan, if I call you a fucking moron cause God says it’s true. And you say “No, YOU’RE a fucking moron cause there is no God”. And we go back and forth about it till we basically storm off angrily. What happens if say Caroline, let’s just say she’s an Atheist,
jumps in and starts it back up again with a rousing “God is a delusion!” The fighting continues. And it’ll be the same dumb childish argument “God will punish thee!” “Prove it!”

This is the war that rages on with absolutely no point of dialogue. There’s no mutual respect between the two sides. And Dawkins non-talent for tact isn’t exactly screaming “Hey guys, let’s talk about this ok?”
The side most heavily opposing Dawkins (as far as Christianity is concerned) are also largely unqualified fucking hypocrites and misinformed creationists.
Again: not ripe atmosphere for dialogue.

So lemme ask you Fincke, how does this create an atmosphere of dialogue. Rules of organized speech or not, you need amicable grounds to even operate on in the first place to have any real dialogue that will result in a point. Or at least a fucking lesson in communication.

Is that clear enough or should I get into examples of Military psychology practices in WW2 or Mutually Assured Destruction techniques to explain how this
type of provoking works?

As for the rest:

“all our beliefs must be subjected to evidence and rational investigation”

As someone who doesn’t separate God and Science,
I don’t necessarily disagree. But can you provide evidence and rational investigation, beyond mere astute observation, for the faith we
share that the Higgs Boson is not just a hypothetical particle field? It’s literally a theory with ugly mathematics but extremely logical physic concepts.
The concept of faith in the existence of God is not so different. Hence half the reason for the Higgs Boson nickname “The God Particle”.

So for Dawkins and Harris to “insist that discussion of religion obey the same rules of discourse of every other field of learning” is not necessarily a correct action or assumption. It’s an insistence based on
an inability to understand the concept of faith and
accepting faith-based religion to be only as credible as its worst representatives.

Where is the irrationality in faith here?

If a man were to look at the moon, know that the moonlight is evidence that the sun still exists
even without it being seen, why is it irrational to have faith in the unseen? A natural allegory for God exists
in nature. Why is it irrational to feel it’s a sign of an omni-presence?

To end with a quote by a man who sits between atheism and belief in God:

“The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? …Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?”
-Stephen Hawking

No, I wouldn’t call you clever for making a facile comparison that Dawkins is the head of an atheist “church”—it’s a common and idiotic parallel. Obama is not the “high priest” of the Democratic party, Milton Friedman wasn’t a “prophet” of free market economics, and Albert Einstein was not the seer of the theory of relativity. Not every influential thinker or leader within a movement is like a religious leader. The substantial difference is that most thinkers and leaders of cultural movements do not say things like that they have the secret of the universe which was given directly to them or others for whom this secret knowledge was specially revealed.

Dawkins does not promise special access to God through his priestly ministrations, any more than Obama or Einstein or Friedman or any other non-religious thinker or cultural leader. Dawkins also claims no special allegiance and atheists worldwide have an entirely voluntary interest, disinterest or ignorance of his very existence. Until last year I’d never bothered to read any of his books and I had plenty of atheist ideas. In fact there were and have been atheists freely thinking before him and after him and none of us depend for any sacrament on him, none of us who agree with him do so because we have any special faith in any special powers of his to discern truths which he cannot justify to us. Many people learn about evolution from him because he is a good writer. But assent to the propositions biologists offer about evolution is not based on faith in the special authority of Dawkins, Darwin, or any other scientist. It is simply based on the evidence and the power of the explanation for accounting for the evidence and making predictions about future discoveries.

So, no, he’s not a priest. He is a cultural mobilizer, sure. That’s called an activist, not a priest. He’s also a scientist and a popularizer of science and atheistic ideas. But, I assure you, I belong to no church and I have no “faith”. My beliefs are apportioned as best as I can manage to the degree of my certainty. To the degree that I may erroneously believe a particular proposition too strongly, I do not do so intentionally, like a person of faith does, but unintentionally like a fallible reasoner does. In other words, if I hold a particular belief too strongly and this is demonstrated to me, then I soften the extent to which I hold to it. This is the opposite of faith, which intensifies deliberate belief in the teeth of counter-evidence or missing evidence.

And you use the word “warmonger” rather cavalierly if you call the non-violent insistence that religious institutions and beliefs be subject to the same standards of rational investigation and criticism as any others making “war”. It’s a philosophical disagreement and a non-violent political and cultural challenge to presumed authority who do not deserve the tremendous deference billions give them. No more, no less. No guns or bombs or calls for anyone’s death involved. To call him a warmonger is just careless indifference to the truth on your part.

If you call me a “fucking moron because God says so”, you’re just expressing a baseless viewpoint. However much you want to insist on it, I have no reason to believe it’s true and so there’s no reason to think I might be wrong. Should you provide reasons that I might be wrong on the point, I will gladly consider them. You might prove I’m a moron by demonstrations of my behavior or the clear falseness of my beliefs. If you could ever demonstrate this God and produce conclusive evidence of his opinion, then I guess I would accept that I was a moron. But without such evidence, it’s not an “endless circle” of debate just because you keep disagreeing with me. You keep asserting a baseless opinion and I just keep shrugging it off as irrelevant and formed based on insufficient evidence to be warranted. And that’s it, no epistemic problems, no reason for me to doubt I’m right just because you opt to be petulant and believe whatever you want even if it’s unsupported.

Finally, the difference between the belief in God and whatever physicists believe about hypothetical particle fields is that the physicists’ theories are believed in to the proportion that there is mathematical and physical conceptual support. And that’s it. Physicists do not try to influence politics or whether or not I eat pork or have sex with a particular person or consider myself intrinsically good or intrinsically evil based on their theories. To the extent that their theories can ground engineering safely, they are vindicated and they make possible i-pods and airplanes and trips to space.

And beyond that, the inconclusive theories are not the cause for any undue worship, any undue government policy, any undue adoption of a moral code that is not amenable to independent reason. So, in all of these ways, physics is completely different than faith, with its utterly bullshit and insupportable claims about cosmic propitiations, demonic possessions, divinely revealed texts, etc.

And to conflate genuinely scientific theory where it is inconclusive with superstitious bullshit is just crappy inability to make clear epistemological distinctions.

That does not mean that there is no room to discuss intelligibly a metaphysical or postulate of God. And as I have argued elsewhere in a post inspired by remarks from Daniel Dennett, if God as a physical postulate could be coherently defined and proven, then there’d be every reason to believe in that entity. But thus far, there is no such evidence and as long as there is not there is no reason to believe in such a posit as somehow comparable to the Higgs Boson.

And even if we could establish a physical source of all being in a single entity or metaphysically concede the necessity for some sort of “ground of all being”—there is no reason to think that that entity is any more interested in our “spirituality” than gravity or electromagnetism are. In other words, the leap from “constitutive feature of reality that serves as its fundamental cause” to “personal being who loves me and writes books through nomadic prophets” is entirely unjustified. Again, to compare the inconclusive or paradoxical nature of aspects of quantum physics to such unwarranted thinking is simply sloppy.

There is no reason to think that just because some philosophical or physical accounts of a being-generating entity are not entirely laughable that there is any justification either for religious faith or for the religious traditions which presumptuously claim to be gatekeepers of the mysteries of the universe. They’re simply not. Everything profound in theology was stolen from philosophers like Plato and Plotinus or done in the philosophical, not the allegedly “spiritual”, writings of religious thinkers like Averroes or Aquinas or Maimonides, etc.

And finally, Hawking provides a puzzle, there is no reason to think that religious guesses or the religious traditions which speculate and worship far beyond evidence have any insight into the answer that cannot be gained by temperate philosophical and scientific speculation.

Your Thoughts?

“Ex-Gay” Adam Hood Argues That Homosexuality Is A Sin

To understand how this kind of self-loathing is manipulated into being please read A Gay Blogger Undercover At “Love Won Out” and for insight into how it can be overcome, watch Rejecting The Ex-Gay Movement.

Your Thoughts?

McChrystal The Torturer

I have never liked General McChrystal being allowed to run our Afghanistan operations.  Long before his current foolish comments in Rolling Stone that have gotten him fired and replaced by General Petraeus, he should have been brought up on charges of war crimes:

“Once, somebody brought it up with the colonel. ‘Will [the Red Cross] ever be allowed in here?’ And he said absolutely not. He had this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there’s no way that the Red Cross could get in: “they won’t have access and they never will. This facility was completely closed off to anybody investigating, even Army investigators.” …

During his first six or seven weeks at the camp, Jeff conducted or participated in about fifteen harsh interrogations, most involving the use of ice water to induce hypothermia …

Cold can be a serious torment to a naked man on a winter night; in Afghanistan, one prisoner died from hypothermia. Sometimes, to maximize the humiliation of the Iraqi men, American women would be brought in to watch them undress. Sleep deprivation was also used to an extreme extent, especially in Jeff’s early days at Nama.

They could keep a prisoner on his feet for twenty hours, and although the rules required them to allow each prisoner four hours of sleep every twenty-four hours, nowhere did it say those four hours had to be consecutive–so sometimes they’d wake the prisoners up every half hour. Eventually they’d just collapse. “This was a very demanding method for the interrogators as well, because it required a lot of staff to monitor the prisoner, and we’d have to stay awake, too,” Jeff says. “And it’s just impossible to interrogate someone when he’s in that state, collapsed on the ground. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Within the unit, the interrogators got the feeling they were reporting to the highest levels. The colonel would tell an interrogator that his report “is on Rumsfeld’s desk this morning” or that it was “read by SecDef.” “That’s a big morale booster after a fourteen-hour day,” Jeff says with a tinge of irony. “Hey, we got to the White House.”

Via The Daily Dish.

Your Thoughts?

Rightful Pride: Identification With One’s Own Admirable Powers And Effects

Pride is essentially the personal identification with something admirable.  When I am rightly proud of my traits, I rightly take the traits themselves each to be admirable in one way or another and rightly take myself to be admirable insofar as they are part of me and expressions of me.  When I am rightly proud of my various virtues, I rightly recognize in each of them both an intrinsically good power and a reliable tendency to use that good power to achieve actual good ends.

When I am rightly proud of the members of a group of people to which I belong, this often takes the form of recognizing my direct and indirect contributions to the excellent powers and excellent effects in the world which are attributable to the group as a whole or to its individual members.  In pride, I  recognize my contributions to the group’s admirable features and accomplishments or to its individual’s features and accomplishments.  If my child has an admirable trait, I might take pride in my genes which were responsible for that trait and/or my contributions to her upbringing that helped create or shape or enhance that trait.  If my child or friend or colleague or student or brother or government or company or charity or parent, etc. has an admirable virtue, I may rightfully take pride in that virtue insofar as I contributed to its creation, development, or reinforcement through my own positive influence.

When I admire a person or group’s excellence that I had a part in creating, I admire the person or group itself for being the sort of person or group to manifest such an excellence.   And, additionally, I should admire my own successful power to create excellence when I recognize my positive contribution to creating this admirable trait in a particular person or group.   I should see that person or group’s resultant excellence as an extension of my own excellence, that person or group’s power as a function of my own power, and the positive results of that person or group’s excellence or power as my own positive results to whatever extent I made them possible.  It is only proper to feel affection to the cause of a good effect and therefore only proper to feel affection for oneself wherever, and to whatever extent, one is the cause of a good effect through one’s excellent powers.

When I am pleased with the pleasant consequences of my own successful activities in any area of life (from creative labors to social interactions to moral feats, etc.)  I should take considerable pleasure in myself for being a significant factor in these good things happening.  And to the extent that my good effects required other contributors who made me capable of doing as I did, I should also feel affection and pleasure for all those others who played a role in the valuable outcomes and in creating my intrinsically valuable characteristics through which those outcomes were achieved.  This affection most immediately should take the form of gratitude for all those who have in great or small ways made possible both my admirable powers and their valuable consequences.

In order to have a morally accurate sense of responsibility, I should identify myself with every effect on the world which is at all attributable to me to the precise degree that it is actually attributable to me; no more and no less.  To the extent that my effects are good, they are intrinsically admirable and in properly identifying myself with what is intrinsically admirable, I should feel what we call pride.   To the extent that my effects are on balance bad, they are intrinsically lamentable and I should feel what we call shame.

To the extent that my shameful effects are also the effects of others who contributed to the malfunctioning or non-functioning of my powers, they are intrinsically lamentable and I should be ashamed of them.  By saying I should “be ashamed” I mean that I should see both my defective character traits and their unfortunate consequences with displeasure insofar as they are intrinsically bad and contribute negatively to the world.  And to the extent that my own immediate ill-effects are others’ remote ill-effects, I should not take all the blame for them but share it with each according to his actual responsibility.

It is irrational and unjust and, therefore immoral, not to properly assign credit or blame.  It is both unfair to myself and a general ethical failure to underestimate the value of my own contributions to the world wherever they are objectively present.  And it is also unfair to others not to give them their proper credit for their own objectively valuable effects in the world, and that includes giving them their due credit for any contributions they make to my effects on the world.

Proper moral judgment means proper assessment of credit.  Proper moral feeling requires love for things in whatever ways and to whatever extents they are good things and the hatred of things in whatever ways and to whatever extents they are bad things.  Rightful pride, as a virtuous mode of judgment and feeling, properly loves the objectively good expressions of oneself, as manifest both in one’s own traits, powers, and effects, and also in others’ traits, powers, and effects which are traceable back to one’s own influence for their creation or development.

As Aristotle rightly pointed out, an ideally and perfectly virtuous person would never feel the need for shame since he would never do something shameful in the first place.  So insofar as someone is requiring shame, he is not fully and perfectly virtuous, but is still susceptible to some moral failures.  Nonetheless, I would say that an individual is feeling and judging in a morally virtuous way when properly feeling shame at his truly lamentable traits or effects.

So, when I do the shameful thing, I do something which should be hated and am myself something worthy of hate (in this one respect at least).  But when I feel the appropriate shame for myself as identifiable with a shameful action, I judge with proper moral judgment and feel with proper moral feeling and, therefore, despite whatever moral failure has preceded this judgment, I still express a genuine virtue of excellent moral judgment, what Aristotle called phronesis (or “practical wisdom”).

Phronesis is a morally wise power of intelligence which both properly assesses the right means to the right ends at the right time and place and in the right manner and which properly motivates one to good actions.  Obviously in committing the moral failing, this virtue itself proved imperfect in the shameworthy person, but when this shameworthy person recognizes the fault and responds with the proper judgment and emotion, he proves himself to admirably possess at least some phronesis worth being proud of after all.  So, in this way, even when we become ashamed, we can at least be proud of the fact that we are capable of responding with proper shame.

The foregoing has shown the respects in which the virtues of pride and shame can be classified as sub-virtues of phronesis. They are virtues of proper moral judgment, feeling, and motivation.  Pride contributes to the structure of moral motivation by creating an aspiration to do the good because one wants to be identified with that which is excellent–both in terms of creating excellent effects and intrinsically functioning excellently for its own sake.

In this context, we can understand what we mean when we praise someone for “taking pride in what she does”.  What we are saying is that she invests herself in what she does, where this means that she does two distinguishable, interconnected things:  (1) she chooses to properly acknowledge responsibility and thus appropriately identify herself with the outcomes of what she does and (2) she concerns herself that these outcomes are as excellent as possible so that she may herself be excellent as one who creates these sorts of highly valuable outcomes.

Pride is not only about satisfaction with good outcomes to which we have contributed but, as I have all along been indicating, it is also about intrinsic excellence independent of contingent successes.  Sometimes circumstances prevent a superiorly skilled person from even having the opportunities to compete with the inferiorly skilled and so the latter have a more consequential effect than the former, but nonetheless the former is more objectively praiseworthy when we consider excellences themselves and not merely the production of units of goodness.

This helps us understand another sense in which we might be proud of a group to which we belong, which is a unique form of group pride that I will call “class pride”.  Earlier I discussed how we should be proud of our fellow group members to the extent that we know that our own flourishing in our own powers contributed to theirs, such that their successes become partially our own too.  But we can also take pride in those with little or no direct or indirect relationship to us but who are nonetheless significantly like us in a power or set of powers.   When they do great things with our type of power or set of powers it is as though we did it ourselves on one level, for the the excellence we are admiring in them is the same one in ourselves capable of comparable functionalities.  And, vice versa, we can be ashamed when those with our own weaknesses do awful things with our type of weaknesses.

To the extent that we recognize our powers as interchangeable with others for being of the same essential kind, we can take pride or shame in those other people’s successes or failures which are attributable to the functioning of those excellences and weaknesses comparable to our own.  So, were I an engineer, I would be able to look at many of the achievements of engineering to which I was not at all party and still feel proud that the kinds of powers I have are the kinds that made for those achievements.  When I admire a given project I was not a part of, I can realize that were I swapped with the engineers who were a part of it that I too could have produced a comparable outcome.  I am the sort of being who creates that sort of good and so even if I did not create that particular good instance of the thing I create, I can identify with it and feel pride if I know that I could have and that someone like me actually did.

So I love the possibilities of my own power when I admire other people’s actual realizations of that power and, so, take a degree of pride in my fellows’ accomplishments.  This can even extend to the entire human race.  While I should be more proud of those with whom I have more in common in terms of developed powers, I can still recognize that I have anywhere from rudimentary to somewhat impressive forms of the same powers that great human beings have and take pride in them as members of their same species.  And, of course, this door swings both ways too.  I can recognize in the basest human beings extreme manifestations of my own detestable traits.

And it is the same for some forms of national pride, cultural pride, religious pride, gay pride, professional pride, familial pride, etc. (and all their correlate shames).  Any class of people defined by characteristically common values or excellences/virtues/powers, can have members who morally rightfully admire themselves and their own admirable traits in those like them who express the very powers they have within themselves from outside themselves.

In general, when I find that others share an excellence that I rightly love in myself, I should rightly love it in them too in a special way.  I should of course love all the excellences/powers/virtues which people manifest, even (and maybe especially) those which I do not have myself.  Those who embody valuable abilities I do not have are people for whom I should feel special gratitude (for picking up the slack in society for benefits I do not provide).  And also when dealing with those areas in which they are powerful and I am not, I should look up to and emulate them.  But the one thing I cannot do is take pride in powers/virtues/excellences which I do not possess.

But, as I have just explained in talking about “class pride”, when I love in another an excellence that I do also have, I can do more than just admire that good and more than just seek to emulate it, but I can (and should) identify with it and love myself for it too.  And in the case of those who created, shaped, or developed my excellences in me, I can identify with their manifestation of our common excellence in a (metaphorically) “genetic” way which only strengthens and heightens the pride I am entitled to feel.

When I have attained to a power/virtue/excellence through the aid of role models, teachers, and fellow peers, I can take special pride in these people’s excellences because my own were in fact shaped and developed specifically as replications of, and variations on, theirs.  My mentors’ excellences are the parents of my own excellences, my fellows’ and rivals’ excellences are the siblings and cousins of my own virtues.   So, when I love the excellence of my mentors and my fellows, I can identify with their excellences not just as excellences that I share but as excellences that mine share (strictly metaphorical) “DNA” with.  I can love their instantiations of our common virtues as more closely related to my own than just those who I share the generic type.

So, were I a medical doctor I should take special class pride in the positive effects of all medical doctors, but even more special personal pride in the excellences of the doctors who trained me specifically.  And, of course, since their power works through me whenever I express the powers I gained under their tutelage, they can take pride in my practice of medicine as a remote expression of their own power.  In this way, both the teacher can take pride in the student in whom she has infused her own excellences and the student can take pride in the teacher whose excellences are now his own too.

There is much more to say about pride.  In a future post I hope to compare the nature and worth of pride and humility and to understand the role that rank plays in conceiving of both those dispositions.  I also want to explore the  explore the psychological reasons that might explain why pride is sometimes used as an honorific term to denote the sorts of good things in this post but also used as a derogatory word to describe various inappropriate, vicious forms of pride, such as hubris, stubbornness, arrogance, and avoidance of painful truths about the self.  And, of course, having tightly associated pride with the just claims to personal credit, I have stirred a hornet’s nest worth of free will problems that I will hopefully have occasion to explore as well.  Already though I have covered another key related topic, Christianity’s extreme denunciation of pride (as the sin of all sins).  You can catch up by reading that critique in the post, The Christian Logic Of Power, Pride, Humility, Free Will, Original Sin, And All-Consuming Divine Narcissism.

Your Thoughts?

The Hard Evidence Against A Literal Adam And Eve

Jerry Coyne explains why the proposed idea of a single pair of original human ancestors is refuted by what we know of our evolutionary ancestry:

Over at the Templeton-funded BioLogos website there has been a lot of discussion about the historicity of Adam and Eve. This is a problem because scripture claims these two were the progenitors of humanity, but genetics says otherwise. It’s simply not true that all of humanity’s DNA traces back to a pair of individuals who lived no more than 10,000 years ago; indeed, the different bits of our DNA trace back to different ancestors who lived at different times. What’s clear is that our ancestors were in a population of humans, some of whom left Africa around 60,000 years ago, and virtually all of modern human DNA comes from that population, which itself descended from African ancestors who split off about 6 million years ago from the ancestors of modern chimps.

For some reason the biological data have caused a kerfuffle at BioLogos. One would think that if these folks are really devoted to reconciling science and Christianity, they’d do for Adam and Eve what they did for Genesis: claim that this is just a metaphor rather than the literal truth, and the literal interpretation is theologically misguided. Adam and Eve simply stood for our ancestors, just as Smokey the Bear stands for all wild bears. (No matter that for centuries Christians wrongly assumed what the Bible says plainly: Adam and Eve were the two God-created ancestors of all humanity.)

He goes on to pick apart the stubborn and pathetic theories offered by those who want to cling to the belief in a literal Adam and Eve, rather than just change their reading of the story to a strictly metaphorical one. Of course I do not think even a metaphorical reading of Adam and Eve can be shown to be divinely true, as I have explained at length. But it’s at least a sane and science respecting strategy, unlike what is required to make the literal reading at all square with known reality.

Camels With Hammers Turns 1 Year Old Today

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU to all of you who keep reading and who commenting on Camels With Hammers and who keep sharing links with your friends and with all sorts of social media sites.  Running this blog over this past year and watching your support and enthusiasm for the blog grow has been one of the great joys in my life, almost as amazing as being in the classroom working with my students or being at dinner with great friends talking about ideas long into the night, or marveling at my little great niece.  Getting to share my thoughts with hundreds of people every day (and on some days thousands) is a real rush and a real honor.  I take this really seriously and am really seriously grateful for your support.

Thanks to a fluke post going viral, between Sunday and Monday we received well over 70,000 page views, obliterating every record on the site.  Even before that explosion of (somewhat accidental) traffic we have seen the numbers of page views steadily increasing week to week picking up on the growth started last fall and resuming it again, now that my hiatus to finish the dissertation is complete and I am back to blogging as often as possible.

And this summer, I hope to earn your more consistent attention and more new readers by committing to making Camels With Hammers less of an aggregator and more of a primary source.  While I will still work to regularly keep you up on the most interesting and/or important news and videos related to atheism, philosophy, ethics, and rationalism, now that my teaching year is over, my PhD is earned, and my vacation with my family for the last month is over, I plan to concentrate on more consistently offering original philosophical writing about topics in ethics, atheism, epistemology, moral psychology, Nietzsche, and the philosophy of religion.

I plan to spend the rest of the summer doing new research daily and hopefully the fruits of that new reading will be a perpetually fresh perspective each day that I come here to work out my views on new topics, reply to your comments with new thoughts, and offer my perspective on the various philosophical and religious ideas floating through the blogosphere at a high profile on any given day.  I also hope to incorporate more discussion of some of the themes in my dissertation as I work on refining them for publication.  And in all of this, I intend to staying committed to making this a blog interesting to both professional philosophers and non-specialists.

So the biggest thing to expect in the next year of Camels With Hammers is a lot more of my own thoughts and your thoughts.  Within a week, we will implement the drastic visual redesign we have been working on to make the site easier to read and a more welcoming place.  There will be two feeds updating in the right hand column in the future, one with new comments from your fellow posters which will clue you in to where the discussions of posts are happening so that you can be a part of them more, and also a feed aggregating the most recent posts of my favorite philosophy and atheism blogs so that you can come here to find out all the latest ideas and news from some of the internet’s best blogs any time of day.

I am extremely excited to have the time this summer to concentrate full time on reading up on new ideas and to be sharing them steadily with you.  And come the school year when I will be teaching six sections of philosophy at three universities in all the states of the tri-state area, I plan to stay committed to regular blogging here as the place where I continue to develop my philosophy and write the rough drafts of my views on countless philosophical topics.  With no dissertation to worry about I can remain a prolific writer.  And since I am far better at writing to an immediate audience than in working in perceived solitude, this is clearly the best route for me to go in drafting the ideas I hope to publish down the road, so I have a strong professional incentive to be on here as often as I can.

So, that’s what to expect, more research and more rigor.  And, I fully expect, more invaluable insight from you, the readers who make my day every day all day as you traffic through.

Finally, in honor of the first year of Camels With Hammers, here are the ten most clicked on posts of my original writing, followed by the top ten posts which do not feature much of my own thought but which highlight matters of apparent interest to you nonetheless, and then some more personal favorites of my own writing and, lastly, my favorite satire and comedy featured on the blog this year.  Enjoy!  I’ll be back in the morning with a post on the virtue of pride.

Top Ten Posts of My Philosophical Writing:

10. Towards A “Non-Moral” Standard Of Ethical Evaluation

9. Disambiguating Faith: Trustworthiness, Loyalty, and Honesty

8. How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count The Ways

7. Conceptual Problems For The Ideal of Unconditional Love

6. Jon Stewart Against Dogma and Extremism

5. Philosophical Ethics: J.L. Mackie’s Error Theory And Jonathan Harrison’s Critique Thereof

4. Is Reason My “God” In Whom I Have “Faith

3. Philosophical Ethics: A.J. Ayer And The Emotivism Of A Positivist

2. Moral Integration, or the Pros and Cons of Moral Absolutism

1. An Argument For Gay Marriage And Against

Top Ten Posts of General Topics:

10. The Scariest Doll

9. Is The Catholic Church A Force For Good

8. Graphs Suggest Secular Countries Less Corrupt, More Peaceful

7. Top 10 Favorite Atheist/Rationalist YouTube Channels

6. Kanye Disses Taylor Swift (On The Pusillanimity Of Joe Wilson And Kanye West Vs. The Magnanimity Of Beyonce Knowles And Barack Obama)

5. Clark Little’s Wave Photography

4. How Did Derren Brown Predict The Lottery

3. Philosophers’ Blog Carnival

2. Liveblogging The Creation Museum Tour Twitter Feed Highlights

1. How Not To React To Gay People

In No Particular Order, Ten More Personal Favorites Not In The Above Lists:

Further Towards A “Non- Moral” Standard Of Ethical Evaluation

Philosophical Ethics: Does Calling Someone Evil Explain Anything About Them?

Disambiguating Faith: The Threatening Abomination Of The Faithless

Disambiguating Faith: Faith In The Sub-, Pre-, Or Un-conscious

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As A Form Of Rationalization Unique To Religion

Moral Actions, Moral Sentiments, Moral Motives, and Moral Justifications: More On The Nun Excommunicated For Approving A Life-Saving Abortion

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Admirable Infinite Commitment For Finite Reasons

Disambiguating Faith By Soul Searching With Clergy Guy

Maximal Self-Realization In Self-Obliteration: The Existential Paradox of Heroic Self-Sacrifice

Disambiguating Faith: How A Lack Of Belief In God May Differ From Various Kinds Of Beliefs That Gods Do Not Exist

My Twenty of My Favorite Satirical and/or Comical (Daily Hilarity) Finds (In No Particular Order):

The Thing That Made The Things For Which There Is No Known Maker

Daily Hilarity: Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer

Daily Hilarity: Best Of Sarah Haskins’s “Target Women”

Jimmy Stewart and Stephen Hawking Reenact Goodfellas

Daily Hilarity: An Avatar Review

Christmas Daily Hilarity: Personal Relationship With Jesus

Daily Hilarity: The Amazing Atheist On Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize

Daily Hilarity: Ricky Gervais Reads Genesis

The Tweet Commandments

Daily Hilarity: The Perils Of Lesbianity

Daily Hilarity: Religiousil

Daily Hilarity: Brooklyn Father Seeking Mother Of His Child

Daily Hilarity: Abraham and Isaac

Daily Hilarity: “Mr. Bean In Hell”

Daily Hilarity: “Mr. Deity And The Scripts”

Daily Hilarity: “The Good Samaritan”

Daily Hilarity: “Mr. Deity and The Evil”

Daily Hilarity: What Being A Scientologist Means

What Would Jesus NOT Do?

The Betty Bowers video on gays in this post: A Follow Up Post On Gays And Christianity

And Marcus Brigstocke’s rant from nearly a year ago which kicked off Camels With Hammers‘s first major post and first major series of posts, Objections to Religious Moderates and Intellecuals 1

Your Favorites?  Your Thoughts?

A Quick, Belated Post For Yesterday’s “Atheist Solidarity Day”

Yesterday was the first annual “Atheist Solidarity Day” but since I was too busy to blog I never got around to doing anything special for it here.

So, now I hereby affirm, in honor of “Atheist Solidarity Day”, that I’ve got your back, fellow atheists.

Your Solidarity?

Disambiguating Faith: Why Faith Is Unethical (Or “In Defense Of The Ethical Obligation To Always Proportion Belief To Evidence”)

A couple of weeks ago, I argued that there was a real distinction between “lacking a belief in any God or gods” on the one hand and “believing there is no God (or gods)” on the other hand.  Primarily I saw the heart of the distinction as resting with the difference between on the one hand being an atheist because one has epistemological reasons for lacking belief (i.e., one thinks that there is insufficient evidence for a God or gods and, therefore, opts to disbelieve as a matter of principle) and on the other hand being an atheist because one has thinks one has positive metaphysical reasons for believing that there are no gods whatsoever.

If one thinks that there is not sufficient metaphysical reason to think there is or is not a particular kind of god or gods, then one is agnostic with respect to that type of god or gods.  One can then choose by faith to nonetheless believe in that god or gods and be a religious person who admits to not actually having good reason to say he knows there is a God or gods but is opting to believe anyway.  That would make for an agnostic theist.  He does not think there is sufficient evidence for the existence of his god or gods and yet he believes.  An agnostic who abstains from belief in a particular god or gods given what he judges to be the paucity of positive evidence for that god or gods, is an agnostic atheist with respect to the god or gods in question.

Similarly, there could be gnostic theists who make knowledge claims about any particular god or gods such that they exist (claiming, for example,  ”I know Yahweh exists based on evidence, not because of faith primarily” or “I know Zeus exists based on evidence, not because of faith primarily”) or be a gnostic atheist who makes knowledge claims that some particular god or gods do not exist (claiming, for example, “I know based on evidence that Yahweh does not exist” or “I know based on evidence that Zeus does not exist”.

As my examples hint, I think many people think like gnostic theists about some gods while being gnostic atheists about others.  The gnostic Jewish theist about Yahweh is usually, I imagine, simultaneously an gnostic atheist about Zeus (and probably an gnostic atheist about Vishnu and Jesus, etc., though she may be an agnostic atheist about living religions, for example).

In the context of this discussion, I made a few remarks, for which topfancy over at reddit.com has provocative challenges.  Quoting me at first, he writes:

Strong, passionate, activist adherence to this principle of epistemology and/or ethics can all take place without any dogmatic commitment

Really? You argue (in my opinion) correctly that agnostic unbelief comes from an epistemological commitment to the principle of sufficient reason.  First of all, if this commitment were merely ethical I believe it would undermine the unbelieving stance as a matter of opinion or preference: the unbeliever would have as her only resort arguing that not believing as a matter of faith to be “best” for the believer, a bare claim she better not make if she wishes to avoid being charged as an ethical dogmatist.

The problem I have with an epistemological justification for agnostic atheism is that it is not clear that the principle of sufficient reason can be properly applied outside the rather narrow realm of natural philosophy. That is, I don’t see how it can be argued without entering into the realm of ethics (and again, opening oneself to accusations of dogmatism) that rationalism should be properly exercised in all aspects of one’s life, thought and belief and not just to observation and theories about the material world.

Either way, I think that the choice is logically (daresay, rationally, inasmuch it is rational to conclude that is permissible to be irrational) free for both kinds of agnostics, as neither commitment (to faith or to reason) impinges on the other’s.

And then he quoted another portion of a line from the text and added further comment:

all without being guilty of adhering by faith to any dogmatic metaphysical attitudes or commitments of their own

Again, if this were true such a rationalist would refrain from applying epistemological heuristics as if they were universals, lest he commit in principle, dogmatically, to a particular brand of metaphysics.

I do not fully understand this objection.  I do not think that either epistemic or ethical norms are indeed matters of preference.  I do not think that the agnostic unbeliever should believe or not as a matter of taste or unjustifiable feeling.  The agnostic unbeliever, in order to have a justified position at least, should have a reason to either believe, disbelieve, or abstain from belief, or she should do none of the above.  Obviously, she must do one of the above, she must either believe, disbelieve, or abstain from believing (either permanently or temporarily).

As soon as one understands a yes or no propositional question, she either must answer affirmatively, negatively, or implicitly or explicitly refuse or delay to answer it.  But, in any of the above cases, an action must occur.  It might happen entirely passively or subconsciously and never raise to a deliberate action from principled intention, but nevertheless, a choice must be made.  Either affirm or deny, affirm partially and/or deny partially, refuse or delay to affirm or deny.  And one can do all of this either outwardly or inwardly, consciously or subconsciously, but something must be done.

And as far as I’m concerned where there are choices for rational beings there are norms of reason which operate either implicitly or explicitly, either consciously or subconsciously.  And for whatever we do, regardless of whether we did it deliberately or without thinking much about it, we can assess in rational terms whether or not it was the most rational choice for any number of reasons.

Obviously, “rational” has numerous senses.  It is strictly speaking rational to act in a formally consistent way.  Reason operates on formal consistencies and there is something that strikes us as obviously irrational in acting in self-contradictory ways.  For example, if we decided to give the second place finishers in contests higher honors than the first place finishers this would be puzzling and irrational.  The formal logic of a contest requires that winning be defined in terms of the best performance on the terms of the contest.  And it is only logical that the prizes that correlate to victory be given to those who actually won.  Formally it would be silly and irrational to hold contests in which the second or fifth place winner was honored more greatly than the first place winner.

But formal consistency in one’s actions, which of course is indispensable for both rational and moral agency on Kant’s conception, is not the only thing with which our reason concerns itself.  We use reason instrumentally as a means towards fulfilling needs and desires.  It is only rational that if I need x to fulfill my needs and that I need to do y to get x that I do y and get x.  And even if I only desire x, if I do not have any overriding reason not to get it, I should still do y if that is what it takes to fulfill my desire and I have no overriding reason not to.

I think we can take this as axiomatic, or at least as derivable transcendentally.  Say, for example, A requires x is in order to be.  Then A’s interest in x goes well beyond a mere preference and becomes a matter of existential interest.  A will not be A if there is no x.  In this way x is objectively vital to A, objectively good as a means to A’s very being.  To refuse x is to refuse to be.  This kind of stake makes x an objective good for being A, since it plays a constitutive necessary role in there being any A at all.  Just as it is objectively good, in the sense of useful, to add chocolate to milk if your end is to make chocolate milk and objectively bad, or counterproductive to add turpentine to milk if you want to make chocolate milk, so anything which contributes to our being what we are at all is objectively good for us insofar as we are that very kind of being.

So, we have reasons to act in accordance with our needs distinct from our reasons to act in accordance with formal principles, and this is the perceptive point of topfancy’s objection.  I need to stay alive in order to be me.  If I were a figure skating judge at a competition and my life were absolutely threatened lest I unfairly award the second best performer in the competition the highest score rather than the clear best performer, then I would recognize that it was both formally irrational to declare the second best person on the ice the winner and yet also realize that it was existentially irrational to put this concern for the formal consistency and practical integrity of games over attention to the preconditions of my very survival.

So, when I give the second best skater the highest score over his clearly better rival, everyone is justly outraged because what I did was formally irrational and unjustifiable as far as they know.  But when it comes out that my life was in jeopardy, my choice was clearly the only existentially valid and rational choice and everyone except the hardest line rationalists thinks I did what anyone should do in that situation.  (Of course, there are times when we think the right thing to do, which anyone should do, is actually to submit oneself to either likely or certain death and those cases create their own existential paradoxes, which I wrestle with in my post, “Maximal Self-Realization In Self-Obliteration: The Existential Paradox of Heroic Self-Sacrifice”.)

Returning to the question at hand, we have reached what I understand to be topfancy’s problem.  Why should ethics favor strict adherence to the principle of sufficient reason in all matters in life?  The principle of sufficient reason is a type of rational formalism.  Why should it extend beyond formal philosophy into matters of existential concern like how I live my life?  We would likely think that someone who insisted that the formal rationality and integrity of skating competitions was more important than the lives of judges was adhering to a principle of rationalism dogmatically, insisting that it was a good thing even if innocents avoidably died and no greater good was served.  It strikes me as dogmatic to be a rationalist in that scenario and to insist that adherence to formal rational principles come before concern for existential needs.

It even seems dogmatic to say that adherence to rational formalism in action should always come before happiness.  Imagine I am a parent of two twin children and despite being very alike in most respects, one just has a greater knack for games than the other and is always beating the other child such that it is beginning to wreck the “loser twin’s” self-confidence entirely.  What if in this scenario I were to ask the “winner twin” to throw a game and boost the “loser twin’s” self-esteem?  What if the “winner twin” does this and everyone’s happier.  The “winner twin” learns how to put others before himself and to take joy in the happiness of his brother and “loser twin” say gains confidence that helps him break a mental block and actually perform better because he now thinks he can win? What if everything works out that everyone is happier in the long run.  It could go of course that loser twin now fails to grow because he is not actually challenged to actually win, but let’s say for argument’s sake this doesn’t happen but instead they we all live happier ever after?

You might argue that there is a principle that should still be upheld that the best player win and the worst one lose and that that’s more important than happiness.  You might even have a good argument for that case.  But you might also hold onto it more dogmatically than you should.

So if I affirm (as I do) that it is a moral necessity that we never believe anything more than our evidence warrants and that if we think we have insufficient evidence to establish a possible god’s existence that we have an ethical obligation to be agnostic default atheists and an ethical obligation not to opt to believe beyond what evidence warrants and so adopt faith beliefs by faith; how am I not a dogmatist?  How am I not like the rational formalist who would insist people die or children live lives of misery rather than allow a single violation of rationalistic principle?  What if there are other existential concerns more important than adherence to formalism?

My rough answer to this starts by conceding that, indeed, if existentially it were consistently profoundly to our benefit to act in formally inconsistent ways (either in general or even just with respect to faith beliefs), then we should not as a general principle be formalists or we should not eschew faith beliefs on principle.  I will even concede that in different eras past or future it may be conceivable that our existential interests were or would be better served with particular formally untenable practices that were existential necessities.

For example, were there a people who were truly as amoral and barbarous as many theists claim that atheism or uncivilized humanity would necessitate and were this people only capable of being ruled through irrational beliefs and myths, and that was the only way to achieve any overall gains in their abilities to actualize themselves as humans in other ways, then I would sadly concede that it would be better to achieve whatever noble gains were possible through the recourse to the noble lie.

But I think that that existentially there is a close connection between belief and action.  Our belief forming mechanisms evolved as efficiencies for being able to live in the world.  As a result, true belief is usually rather tightly connected to our abilities to meet our existential needs.  While some true beliefs might be counter-productive to our success for any of a number of reasons, in general the greater adherence to truth we have the more powerfully we can actually master ourselves and our world and thrive practically and existentially.  I think there is overwhelming evidence that strict commitment to knowledge is far more powerful for creating human thriving on all sorts of measures than shortsighted dogmatic, willfully prejudicial cognitive attachments (faith beliefs) are.

There are also serious problems for ethics and politics when people adopt their beliefs without strict principles about apportioning belief to evidence.  This is because the idiosyncratic codes they might find work for them and their own thriving conflict would actually hinder others’ thriving.  It is one thing to, non-faithfully, say, I find this set of codes just suits my life well and brings it success even though I cannot fully justify why.

I have no problem with that personalized approach to ethics.  But when your idiosyncratic way of doing things gets legislated either legally through formal laws or even only socially through informal religious codes it risks doing more harm to others than good.  If there are ways of rationally approaching one’s judgments more cautiously and less dogmatically, these are likely to serve everyone’s existential thriving best.  If as a matter of principle we take all beliefs and actions to require formal care for apportioning belief to evidence, then everyone knows nothing will be demanded of them without evidence or logic based reasons being offered as to why they should accept any particular beliefs or perform any particular actions.  This strikes me as only fair.

Exceptions might be made to this formal rigor in matters of complete indifference to any one else’s life.  But religious faith beliefs, at least in most forms of Christianity and Islam and conservative forms of Judaism (to stick with the monotheisms for now), are problematic because they encourage entire institutions which are too often more concerned with defending tradition over reasoning without prejudice and with moving ethical thought into the realm of the dogmatic and out of the realm of the rational.  Religious faith beliefs wind up affecting people’s children’s reason, encouraging habits of superstition, wishful thinking, and poor probability skills.  Religious faith beliefs harden so that they move beyond a provisional affirmation of something uncertain until new evidence comes along to becoming a commitment to the belief itself to the point of hostility towards all new evidence.  Religious faith beliefs tie people in with arbitrary and unnecessary institutional alliances and irresolvable divisions along lines unsettleable by reason.

Religion does not, of course, only lead to war and conflict and intractable disagreement, but when religions conflict the presence of absolute commitments to hopelessly inadequately supported beliefs is their special problem.  Faith is why religious conflicts in principle and for principled reasons irresolvable for as long as religious people adhere to the very principle of faithful adherence to insufficiently supported beliefs.  Only less faith and more doubt and openness to rethinking can solve such disputes.  Faith is inherently an obstacle to human reason and cooperation because it allows some of us to believe things separately from reasons accessible and defensible to all of us.  It is a recipe for incommensurable beliefs.  Holding all of us to meet the same evidence requirements when advancing a position to each other and to apportion our beliefs to those requirements when adopting beliefs in general, is how we create the conditions in which agreement is at least in principle possible.

There is more I could say, but in the meantime;

Your Thoughts?

To catch up with any previous installments of this “Disambiguating Faith” series which you may have missed, follow the links listed below. Each post can be understood without reference to the others, even though many develop interrelated theses.

Disambiguating Faith: Trustworthiness, Loyalty, And Honesty

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Loyally Trusting Those Insufficiently Proven To Be Trustworthy

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Tradition

Disambiguating Faith: Blind Faith: How Faith Traditions Turn Trust Without Warrant Into A Test Of Loyalty

Disambiguating Faith: The Threatening Abomination Of The Faithless

Rational Beliefs, Rational Actions, And When It Is Rational To Act On What You Don’t Think Is True

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Guessing

Disambiguating Faith: Are True Gut Feelings And Epiphanies Beliefs Justified By Faith

Disambiguating Faith: Faith Is Neither Brainstorming, Hypothesizing, Nor Simply Reasoning Counter-Intuitively

Disambiguating Faith: Faith In The Sub-, Pre, Or Un-Conscious

Disambiguating Faith: Can Rationality Overcome It?

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As A Form Of Rationalization Unique To Religion

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Deliberate Commitment To Rationalization

Disambiguating Faith: Heart Over Reason

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Corruption Of Children’s Intellectual Judgment

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Subjectivity Which Claims Objectivity

Disambiguating Faith: Faith Is Preconditioned By Doubt, But Precludes Serious Doubting

Disambiguating Faith By Soul Searching With Clergy Guy

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Admirable Infinite Commitment For Finite Reasons

Maximal Self-Realization In Self-Obliteration: The Existential Paradox of Heroic Self-Sacrifice

Disambiguating Faith: How A Lack Of Belief In God May Differ From Various Kinds Of Beliefs That Gods Do Not Exist

Disambiguating Faith: Why Faith Is Unethical (Or “In Defense Of The Ethical Obligation To Always Proportion Belief To Evidence”

On The “Compassion” In The Catholic Bishops’ Letter To Congress Against Gay Rights

Recently, United States bishops petitioned Congress to not protect gays from being fired for their sexual orientation.  Andrew Sullivan already precisely attacked the bishops’ immoral political calculation by which they explicitly committed themselves to a perverse moral contradiction whereby they simultaneously concede that homosexuality is to a significant extent not a choice and argue that employers have a right to discriminate against them based on this unavoidable inclination alone.

Now ZJ systematically and thoroughly dismantles the bishops’ position too:

Your Thoughts?