Dawkins, Target of Idiots
What is supposed to be a review of a completely different book brings us the latest attack on Richard Dawkins’s book, The God Delusion, written by Salley Vickers, and she only proves herself to be an utter idiot.
John Cornwell’s mouthpiece is a likeable seraph, who follows the dictum of G. K. Chesterton that angels fly “because they take themselves lightlyâ€. Cornwell clearly believes, as I do, that angels are not wispy, winged beings in ethereal nightgowns, but something far more subtle and profound: archetypal images that dramatise the invisible realities. As such, they can act as symbols for the formless elements of physics; but also for the creative imagination.
It takes some serious chutzpah to write pseudo-intellectual garbage like that, but at least it sounds like Ms. Vickers may be writing about Cornwell’s book, not Dawkins’s.
The seraph begins by politely nailing Dawkins’s first sleight of hand which, as loads of people have now pointed out, dishonestly bundles all religious belief and practice into one crude bag that supposedly equals fanaticism. … It is child’s play to denounce a subject by pointing to the myriad ways in which it may be misapplied; misuse and misapplication are rife in all areas of human understanding: politics, science, education, medicine, religion. But it is faulty logic to conclude that this is necessarily the fault of the set of ideas being traduced.
This is like shooting fish in a barrel. First, in what way is religion like any of the other “areas of human understanding” Ms. Vickers mentions? Religion is, fundamentally, the creation, analysis, and application of made-up ideas that are not verifiable, falsifiable, or provable. Since it is nothing more than pulling assertions out of one’s ass, it can literally be used to assert that anything is true, even contradictions. Despite Vickers’s assertion to the contrary, Dawkins’s makes a point to distinguish moderated religion from religious fanaticism—and then to point out why moderated religion is just as, if not more dangerous than its fanatical blood brother: Moderated religion, in its moral muddiness and slipshod approach to truth, is the ultimate launching pad for religious fanaticism. And in any case, there is really no difference between a “moderated” adoption of asinine, unprovable bullshit and a fanatical adoption of the same. I can claim that it’s okay to believe that Poseidon is responsible for the world’s troubles, and that we must pray to him for forgiveness, but since I have abandoned reason with this claim, why is it any more unreasonable for someone else to claim that we should kill all coastal dwellers because they anger Poseidon’s dominance of the seas?
His account of the Bible is equally undiscriminating. For a start, only religious nutcases take the Creation story literally[.]
Really? By what standard does Vickers judge these people to be “nutcases”? Their assertion that the earth is 6,000 years old is no more unreasonable or illogical than the idea that God exists at all. There is absolutely no evidence for either.
[I]t is perfectly respectable to “pick and choose†when reading the Bible, something that Dawkins takes Christians to task for.
Really? By what standard does Vickers pick and choose between arbitrary, unprovable, untestable assertions? By her own sense of morality, I would guess. It’s certainly not from any sense of morality that religion teaches—or from any sense of reason and logic that science teaches. These are points that Dawkins makes time and again in The God Delusion. They are directed at the “moderately” religious, as Vickers appears to be, and I can only guess that she is a bit defensive at the light he shines on the illogic of her and her “moderate” ilk.
Those who think that not knowing is safer and more attractive than its opposite should treat themselves to this elegant little book.
Ah, the politically correct retreat into agnosticism. How noble of Vickers to treat with equal intellectual hospitality those who claim that there is no evidence that God exists and point out the glaringly obvious harm that all religion does … and those who believe assertions pulled out of the ass of some ancient witch doctor that fly in the face of the reality we know by science and are based on nothing verifiable, testable, or falsifiable.
But I digress. Vickers really should be directing this criticism at me and my ilk. Dawkins never once makes the assertion that he is 100% sure that God does not exist. (I do, but again, I digress.) Dawkins is all about the probability of God’s existence, and concludes that it is next-to-nothing but not nothing itself—though near enough to be reasonably disregarded.
I have no idea who Vickers is, but I can tell you that she’s an idiot.
39 Responses to “Dawkins, Target of Idiots”
By the matthew show on Sep 2, 2007 | Reply
Where did this piece run? Sounds like MSM intellectual mushiness.
By dean on Sep 3, 2007 | Reply
I added the link in the first sentence. Major oversight. Sorry.
By emjaybee on Sep 3, 2007 | Reply
As someone who has both believed and not believed in a deity/force/what have you, sometimes on the same day, I just don’t understand why anyone would read Dawkins and think “Why, I can prove him wrong with my account of my religious feelings/beliefs!” If someone believes, then the fact that someone else thinks they’re an idiot for believing is neither here nor there; the two have very little to say to each other on that subject. Presumably, if a deity/force existed, the existence of nonbelievers would not be a threat to it; if it doesn’t exist, then believers will either delude themselves their whole lives or come around before they die, but in the cosmic scheme of things, neither choice matters.
I am not with Dawkins in the idea that any belief is inherently harmful, if only because I think in the absence of religion, people would just have found other reasons to shoot each other. And I’m not sure there’s any way to quantify religion’s harm vs. its good (in the form of actual do-gooding that some of its followers actually practice) because we simply don’t always know how it plays into the decisions of every human being. Is someone fighting for justice for the heck of it or because they think God approves? Who knows?
I can say that for me, it has filled a genuine emotional need and not had destructive effects. And yet some days, I still reject it entirely. I think that emotional need is really interesting, because it’s so widespread, and could either be taken as evidence of a higher being or of a strange twist in the human brain.
By dean on Sep 4, 2007 | Reply
emjaybee: As someone who has believed and now does not believe in the supernatural (and thus God), and someone who is almost done reading The God Delusion, I think I would suggest that you read the book. It’s not what you think, and he addresses many of your arguments/concerns.
I do agree that the believer should have little to say to a non-believer if that believer also believes that his/her particular deity doesn’t care much about what the non-believer thinks. However, once one decides to believe in God, what exactly is to stop that person from believing that God wishes that person to convert others to believe in Him as well? What is to stop that person from believing that God wants those who refuse to believe to die? It is certainly not religion that stops this moderate believer from believing that. It is probably belief in the freedom to believe what you wish without threat of harm—and perhaps other ideas—that are not the products of religion but of reason.
As for whether the choice to believe or not matters in a cosmic sense, who among us is really concerned on the cosmic scale? On the cosmic scale, it doesn’t matter if some maniacal dictator conquers the world and slaughters all but some chosen few. But it does matter to us, here, now. Personally, I’m not concerned with the cosmos nearly as much as I am with myself and with life on earth.
I’m concerned with this argument. If religion were really absent from earth (which it probably never will be), people would still certainly disagree about a great many things and slaughter each other with abandon. But what force would exist that would cloud victims’ minds to any and all reason? If no one were caught in the vicious cycle of belief-doubt-fear-guilt-shame-belief that seriously adhering to any major religion causes, or believed that their God demanded his unquestioned obedience to convert the world, then what force could cause people to behave with similar abandon and immunity to reason? I’m sure some people would find a way, but I would guess that more people would be open to reason, and more disputes could be solved by listening to reason.
In any case, I don’t know anyone who is proposing to rid the world of religion. There is no moral way to do it.
As for the alleged emotional benefits of religion, Dawkins does have a good discussion on this assertion. He talks about the innate dualism of children and that idea’s evolutionary benefits—and then how religion may be an idea that sort of hijacked that property of the human mind—and also about memes. Like I said, read the book.
As for me: What kind of argument is that, exactly? I can think of a hundred things I could attempt to believe that would probably benefit me emotionally. Why is God the special, approved choice for this category? Why not believe in magical fairy dust that cures all diseases? Or flying walruses who leave you thousands of dollars in your shoes every night? Or (in my case) a special incantation that would make every attractive woman fall in love with me? They’re all just as false. Is it just that of all the falsehoods one can concoct, God is the easiest to swallow? If so, is that because it is impossible to verify?
The “emotional benefit” argument (just like Pascal’s Wager) also assumes that one can simply choose to believe something regardless of its truth value. You don’t choose to believe anything. Facts force you to believe them. How much honesty with yourself can you really maintain if one part of you attempts to believe something that has absolutely no evidence and another part doesn’t care but realizes some “emotional benefit” to believing it?
If one is concerned primarily with the truth of an idea, then there is no idea whatsoever to seriously consider religion or God as a valid premise/assertion. If Dawkins is right, then it may never have come up except in flights of imagination or the severely maniacal if it weren’t for our inherent dualism. Even with such an innate epistemological handicap, we’re still more than capable of objectively evaluating such assertions. Inventing impossible stories may have once been a reasonable way of dealing with the (apparently) unexplainable, but such inventions cannot be considered reasonable, rational, or moral in an age of reason and science, where even immovable God has grown smaller in all but the most fundamentalist of religions because of the discoveries of science, and where we have many reasons to expect that science will eventually answer most if not all mysteries of the universe, even if there is much left unanswered now.
By MochaLab on Sep 6, 2007 | Reply
oh yeah, that reminds me, there was no religion under communism, and communism was damn brutal. I’d bring up Kim Jung Il, except that north korea DOES have religion, Kim is Gd and they all worship him.
By MochaLab on Sep 6, 2007 | Reply
uhm, where’d my post before that last one go? it bloody took me a half hour to write!!!!! Don’t tell me it didn’t post! SHIT!!!!!!ARGH!!!!!!!!!!! i’m being punished for posting on dean’s heathen site!!!!!
By dean on Sep 6, 2007 | Reply
MochaLab: Like I said, people are definitely capable of inventing reasons to be brutal and irrational without religion. Most modern Communist dictators are great examples.
(On an unrelated note, for those who haven’t heard a good refutation of the idea that atheism is somehow to blame for Stalin and Mao and Kim, while Communism does reject supernatural religion, none of its dictators did what they did because of atheism. It’s also worth noting that many of dictators did actually form de facto religions as part of their regimes. MochaLab mentioned Kim; of further note are Stalin and the Khmer Rouge. Also, just in case it’s still an issue with anyone, it’s arguable that Hitler was a religious Catholic for most of his life, and even when it’s arguable that he wasn’t, again, he didn’t do what he did because of atheism.)
By MochaLab on Sep 7, 2007 | Reply
yeah, but the point is that even without religion you’ll still have the same amount of brutality and bloodshed.
I’d also mention (again, but it got erased yesterday, probably by my own idiocy) that what you’re not including along with the fact that religions have a set of beliefs in things unprovable, is that they also tend to have very specific codes of behavior, not anything goes, and in the case of christianity and buddhism, these are both expressly pacifistic.
Now i know the obvious statement to make is that christianity especially, and certainly buddhism too, has a history of BRUTAL violence. It might SAY to be pacifistit (and it CLEARLY does) but that hasn’t stopped many of it’s followers from commiting heinous acts regardless)
But the fault is not the creed, it’s the people. I say this by pointing out that the government and society of the US, of which we are all willing members, has laws and codes of behavior too, and these are broken with the same fervour, frequency, and degree of cruelty. The laws made by the US are completely desecrated by it’s population, it’s leaders, and even the nation as an entity. PEOPLE ARE HEINOUS. IT’S NOT THE RELIGION THAT MAKES THEM THAT WAY. THE ARE EVEN WITHOUT RELIGION.
religion and societal laws BOTH try to curb human barabarism, and they succeed to some extent and fail miserably to another, both to the same degree i insist.
I am certainly curious to look through Dawkin’s book as to be honest, i can’t fathom an argument that would convince me otherwise.
By the matthew show on Sep 7, 2007 | Reply
I’m very disturbed by this idea that religion’s usefulness should be judged on the laws it contains rather than whether its fundamental precepts (i.e. the existence of the giant sky fairy) are in fact accurate. In other areas of thought, a lot of very useful information has been derived from ideas that were mostly inaccurate but that had grains of truth in them. That doesn’t make their parent ideas any less accurate.
Mind you, unlike deanpence I don’t believe that God’s nonexistence is scientifically provable. But neither is his/hers/its existence. The whole thing is guesswork until we’ve had another few hundred years to figure out just what the hell the universe is anyway. General Relativity wasn’t even conceived of when my grandfather was born. Imagine how naive our present conceptions of the universe will look by the time our childrens’ children grow up.
By dean on Sep 8, 2007 | Reply
MochaLab: First, a correction. Religions’ assertions are not only unprovable, they are arbitrary and claim knowledge of things no human could possibly know, even if they were true. If I were to tell you that unicorns not only existed, but were also all-powerful, all-good, and all-knowing and wanted us to kill all donkeys and those who owned them or we would all burn in hellfire forever, how would such an assertion be any more ridiculous than what any religion claims? The moderating effects that religion has experienced over the last several hundred years are not because of religion, but because of the influence of reason.
Religions certainly do have codes of behavior, but to claim that any religion has a consistent, fully integrated code of behavior is just ridiculous, as their jumbled and self-contradictory canons blatantly show.
All religions that claim the Old Testament as scripture contain numerous accounts of law that requires, for instance, rape victims to be stoned to death for not crying loudly enough, children to be stoned to death for disobeying their parents, adulterers to be stoned to death, and violators of the Sabbath to be stoned to death. To claim that such laws are somehow superseded by newer directives is beside the point (and probably unfounded); the fact that at some point these things were law is enough evidence that these religions, at least at one point, were brutal, capricious, and unjust. If our modern reason has taught us that rape victims are not criminals and adultery is merely fraud against another spouse and that children are not fully responsible for their actions, then that would have been just as true in ancient times.
The God of the Old Testament also, numerous times, tells the Israelites to engage in genocide against those who inhabit the lands He has promised to them. We see the fruits of such thought even today, as millions of people think they have a divine right to the land of Palestine … because of religion.
Some Christians attempted to rid Palestine of Muslims because of religion. Others tortured and burned alive converted Jews because they were accused of practicing Judaism because of religion. Others brutalized, enslaved, and murdered aborigines in the Americas because of religion.
If you claim that these Christians were somehow acting in defiance of Christian morality, please explain why they could easily point to their scriptures to justify their actions. Why is their interpretation of arbitrary assertions any more or less valid than a more reasoned approach that ignores these obviously immoral passages?
I simply don’t know enough about Buddhism to make an argument either way.
It seems that the crux of your argument is that “PEOPLE ARE HEINOUS”. You use the example of those who break the law in the US, most of whose criminal laws are based on a rational code of justice—though there are notable exceptions, and you may notice that of those exceptions, some have been thrown out by courts over the years because of the influence of reason over religion. I wonder, though, if people are truly “heinous”, or prone to criminality, brutality, and violence, why is an amazingly small percentage of the United States in prison? And why is such a large percentage of those in prison mere drug users—a crime, in and of itself, with no victim? Where are the hordes of murderers, rapists, defrauders, robbers, and molesters?
I grant you, and did before, the fact that people can and will invent reasons to commit crimes, even in the absence of religion. But I still wonder how much violence and crime could be prevented were it not for the irrational influence of religion.
By dean on Sep 8, 2007 | Reply
the matthew show: Well, first, I didn’t claim that the non-existence of any god was scientifically provable. I claimed that it was logically provable. Dawkins, however, notes, for those not interested in the Objectivist argument against God, that science can make a mostly definitive case against God that makes it extremely unlikely that He (or She or They or It) exists.
The only other thing I have to add is that it’s ridiculous to live now and treat the scientific knowledge that we have accumulated as if it will be completely contradicted tomorrow. The facts don’t change from one discovery to the next; only more context is discovered and observed. Newton wasn’t disproved by relativity; he was relegated to his proper (limited) context … just as relativity won’t be disproven by further discoveries in quantum gravity; it will be relegated to its proper (also limited) context. We always learn more, better truth about the universe through science, and those ideas that withstood rigorous review and testing will merely be enhanced and made more accurate.
Wow. I’m really on a tangent now.
Back to our regularly scheduled program, wherein MochaLab proceeds to defend the beheading of adultererous women in Saudi Arabia and honor killings all across the Muslim world. That is what you’re going to do next, right, MochaLab? Tell us how great these religious moral codes are?
By MochaLab on Sep 8, 2007 | Reply
uh…. well i potentially have another point or 2, but… uh…. “proceeds to defend the beheading”…. uhm, first i must make a side point:
http://www.mattbesser.com/images/dick01.jpg
(with particular note to the last chapter of part III)
By dean on Sep 8, 2007 | Reply
Aw, man. Gimme more fight than that! :)
By the matthew show on Sep 9, 2007 | Reply
MochaLab: Never mind deanpence, go ahead and post your answer for our other denizens’ benefit.
deanpence: As you know, I also find the likelihood of an actual supernatural being unlikely, even if we do discover Pete or any buddies he may have in amongst the heretofore undiscovered country, glaven. I just like to make the point of the nonexistence’s unprovability to make sure that non-atheists know I’m not completely closed off to possibilities that are not currently showing up on the scientific radar. And I don’t mean balderdash from the Discovery Institute, I mean actual scientific observation.
MochaLab and his wife and I have had many conversations on this topic, often questioning whether a supernatural being would actually be scientifically provable, which of course it could choose to be or not be. But given the unreliability of personal testimony (anything from Zionist claptrap to bin Laden to Oral Roberts’ 900 foot Jesus to my relatives having a “feeling in their heart” that God is punishing America because we aren’t burning gays at the stake), I think the only reasonable course forward for mankind is to deal purely with the provable. If we are to protect ourselves from ourselves, there has to be a solid platform underfoot and a common language of facts with which to solve our problems. Religion provides the antithesis of that, and therein lies the problem, so sayeth I.
By MochaLab on Sep 11, 2007 | Reply
uh, dean, i keep trying to submit a very long comment, but it doesn’t actually appear after i submit. what’s up? do you have a deal with the devil or something?
By MochaLab on Sep 11, 2007 | Reply
Pt. 1: (because the bloody thing won’t submit!)
Oh don’t worry people, i was taking the opportunity to give deanpence a little piss. I’m hardly that fragile.
I stand by my former argument that religion is not the problem, people are, and by the way, the US has the highest incarceration rate of any developed nation. But of course most people aren’t heinous, however we all know a certain segment of the population is. Whether it’s Stalinism or Inquisitions it’s the same bastards doing the same shit.
Some people believe in Gd because that’s how they were brought up. Some are crazy. Some use Gd to justify their own delusions. Yes, i agree.
But there are these things called religious experiences, and very deep inner experiences that one interprets as becoming filled with light. In most of these ‘filled with light’ experiences people tend to agree that the same message gets delivered to them over and over, and that is one of peace and compassion. Christians, Buddhists, Sufis, Hindus…
These inner experiences are very real to the people who have them, and as they continue praying and trying to adjust their behavior and minimize their being puppets of their own desires, they describe their experiences and their inner state of mind as becoming more and more peaceful and their heart becoming more and more full.
These experiences continue to be quite noticeably the same over thousands of years, and i have book and books of people describing them throughout over a thousand years to demonstrate it.
By MochaLab on Sep 11, 2007 | Reply
Pt. 2:
But my POINT is that at the end of the day, there really IS, to many people, this personal experience of light, and your heart being filled with warmth and light, and through prayer becoming more and more peaceful and a better person, although it requires work on the person’s part. Yes, i cannot prove it, i can offer NOTHING other than testimony after testimony and personal experience.
This inner experience is VERY real to the person having it, and is very difficult to describe in any way OTHER then “light” and “presence of something higher” and “Gd” and all that claptrap.
Other cultures look at America, and say that this culture only produces decadence and criminals, and a complete lack of morals, and they point to all the sensational (and true) stories on TV that illustrate this. But what they ignore is that most of our “morally bankrupt” society IS in fact made up of decent people who really DON’T break any serious laws (we all speed, and we all do little things, which of course fits with my parallel… you do understand there’s a parallel here?)
But this personal experience of… well, what feels like inner light, using tried and true spiritual and religious methods, there IS something there. Is it delusional? You have a harder time proving that this is delusional (although knowing deanpence probably not) than my assertion that if it doesn’t FEEL delusional, and they’re NOT crazy, and it bloody well seems to work, than how CAN you prove it’s delusional? Maybe it’s what folks say it is.
My point is that all this talk is over imperically proving things that are very real seeming inner states people reach over and over, and those who follow them quite far, constantly working on prayer and quieting one’s anger, and increasing one’s compassion and sense of love, and trying to become closer to Gd, all tend to describe quite identical states. And as I’ve said before, these states sure SEEM bloody real.
Religion is not just about man proving things empirically that may actually be as this point in our development out of our reach, just as the atomic world was out of our reach for tens of thousands of years. It’s about knowledge and states gained from inner work.
The best part about writing all this is, of course, picturing the pain deanpence’s eyeballs must be experiencing from being rolled back so much while reading. That and the sound of his exasperated sighs. Which is rather petty of me, i know. I’ll have to work on this.
By the matthew show on Sep 13, 2007 | Reply
On another note, why are there suddenly great hordes of people commenting on your butt-old entries? What the hell happened?
By dean on Sep 13, 2007 | Reply
Most of those are spam, though they will end up in the comments feed if they’re not immediately filtered.
The rest are from various, random people finding the Fuck Oklahoma rant I wrote a few years ago.
By Lauxa on Sep 13, 2007 | Reply
I like believing in a God that is good and wants the best for me and that we should not hurt other people but should try to express ourselves to the fullest, and so I do. I think that morality is ultimately more emotional than rational anyways. I mean, you can argue logically about details (does recycling paper do more harm than good?) but on the fundamentals (hurting people is bad, m’kay?) it’s pretty hard to come up with reasons that can withstand scientific rigour. Therefore, I now approach belief from a more utilitarian standpoint, where if I think it will make my life better I will believe it. If my life doesn’t get better, I am open to not believing anymore.
Of course, there is also no way to scientifically verify whether my life is better or worse and what specific factor caused the betterment or, um, worsening, and that is an emotional decision as well, although I guess journaling would offer more data to go on even if it’s all anecdotal evidence and very unscientific. But my feelling is that my life has been better since I’ve started making more effort towards religion, so I’m going with it.
And I enjoyed reading MochaLab’s comments, too.
By MochaLab on Sep 13, 2007 | Reply
Here here! This is why i’m going with it too. And of course, proving there’s a devil is a piece of cake. Using Occam’s Razor, how would YOU explain the existence of Oklahoma? You could site some convoluted socio-economic biology hoopla, or you could just see that it is quite simply explained perfectly as the work of the devil. Of course i’ve felt this way about large sections of texas too…
By the matthew show on Sep 14, 2007 | Reply
MochaLab: An interesting statement, given the fact that the vast majority of both states consider themselves very religious. But I’m sure you would say that of course you don’t mean THAT kind of religion.
And therein lies the problem. Everyone always says that their religion is a force for good, while other religions are harmful. Each can provide what they consider to be evidence for their position, and since most of the evidence offered is anecdotal (or outright propaganda), no one can be proven right on that score, and so the viewpoints remain unresolved, as do the facts.
I tend to lean towards the idea that the non-institutional Buddhist approach (Tibetanists and their ilk are bollocks, IMO) has the smallest damage path through society, as it’s focused solely on personal enlightenment and may or may not actually include any belief in a supernatural being. I know there are branches of other faiths that lean in this direction. But they are always the minority, and it is here where I come together with MochaLab a bit, and proceed to piss off deanpence.
Yes, people are part of what’s wrong with religion. But it is inescapable that religion is also part of what’s wrong with people. If there’s one thing I have undying faith in, it is the fact that most people are extremely intellectually lazy, for very clearly defined sociological and psychological reasons, and thus have rendered themselves incapable of being anything but sheeple in the hands of demagogues.
The innate human pull towards tribal and clan identity and belonging works directly against individual “spiritual” discovery. (I use quotation marks there because I question whether what most people describe as spiritual, transcendant experiences need necessarily involve a supernatural being…the human mind may be perfectly capable of transcending mundane existence without the magic sky fairy) How can you belong and still seek your own path, when society constantly pressures you to conform? You can’t. You retreat to a cave, have a spiritual experience, go crazy, write down your visions, which you give to the villagers, whose leaders then find a way to interpret them so that they mean that this village can invade the next one with God’s blessing.
If indeed there is a magic sky fairy, he/she/it sure did bung up the vessel through which they were supposed to communicate. Sure, take it back to original sin (which is offensive enough in itself, punishing children for the sins of their parents), but the vessel would apparently have been busted even then. This bolsters my belief in Pete, the Incompetent Pan-Dimensional Being. A superior being there may be, but all-wise, hardly.
By dean on Sep 14, 2007 | Reply
I suppose it’s time I responded. And first, a few jabs from the peanut gallery.
@MochaLab: I don’t know why your long posts won’t submit. Perhaps you need to update your browser. Also, it’s “hear, hear”, not “here here”.
Now for the serious bit.
@the matthew show: As I have stated before, I think that if Pete and his associates are discovered, then they necessarily are not supernatural (as they exist in the natural universe) and are not applicable to the concept of religion. They may be part of a race that’s been around for a while and have a much larger body of knowledge and contemplation to work with, but that doesn’t make them gods. No matter what extraordinary shit they can pull off, just remember (I’m paraphrasing) that any sufficiently advanced technology appears to be magic.
Regarding whether a real God could choose or not to make his presence known merely by His will, I think this idea self-justifying and more or less useless. If God chose not to make His presence known, then He could perform no miracles, He could leave no evidence of His creative hand, He could not answer prayers; in fact, He could not interfere with the natural universe at all. And if He did choose to reveal Himself, by what means would we be able to judge that He was, in fact, supernatural, and not just incredibly advanced? To claim any method asserts out of thin air that we have some unknowable supernatural sense—or that God has some unnatural means to reveal Himself—all of which is just as spurious, unfalsifiable, and untestable as the idea of God in the first place.
@MochaLab:
Wait. So the US is the problem? Besides the fact that the US imprisons an incredible number of people for the victimless crime of drug possession, this seems beside the point.
Wait. So people are the problem, but most people aren’t bad? In fact, the overwhelming majority of people don’t ever victimize anyone.
So you’re making a moral judgment that peace and compassion are values worth having. By what means do you conclude that peace and compassion are better than war and violence? And what about all those other people out there who have religious experiences that lead them to conclude that infidels must die, or abortionists must go to prison, or gays must be beaten? Why do we judge their conclusions to be wrong? By what means? Certainly not by religious means. I can assert any off-the-wall thing I want and call it religion. “The Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe and wants everyone to be a pirate.” Silly, but it’s no more invalid than claiming that God spoke to you in the privacy of your head and told you to kill every person, butcher every animal, and burn every building in Palestine to make way for your tribe—or even that a Higher Power gave you an “experience of light” that makes you want to volunteer at a homeless shelter.
No, it has absolutely nothing to do with the empirical.
(Will reply more later.)
By the matthew show on Sep 14, 2007 | Reply
deanpence: That’s what I said.
By the matthew show on Sep 15, 2007 | Reply
http://dropline.net/cats/kitty/i-wants-to-beliefs
By MochaLab on Sep 16, 2007 | Reply
cute link btw…
matthew: yes, most people are too lazy to do anything other than follow the herd leader. True, true.
Both y’all: well, your logical reasoning is great and fine, but there IS another more fundamental part to our nature that attempts to interact universe around us “spiritually”, before logic even comes into play.
I offer as example this:
both of you, i know for a fact, are possess a very strong sense of justice and fair play. Without contributing it to any “spiritual” considerations, i will nevertheless put forward that is does NOT come from your logical reasoning.
You logical reasoning is certainly used to APPLY it, in great quantities too, but your sense of justice and fair play originates beFORE your logic comes into play.
If you sit down and examine yourselves honestly, i feel you will see that this is so.
Furhtermore, logic is used to back up whatever we want want to justify in the first place. If a man has a “fuck everyone else” approach, he will use his logic to back up and justify this. Logic is not what gave him this approach, but he will use logic in it’s service, just as the 2 of you, who i consider rather more enlightened, will use it to apply your more justic and fair-play oriented approaches.
In both cases, logic and reasoning is not what i trust in the first place to set a man’s compassion quotient and moral position. There is something deeper.
I have debated bringing up brain chemistry, except that living with a serbian with PhD in Psychology, the fact is that as of yet nothing can be proven about the brain “coming up” with the experiences, we can just monitor what tends to happen when these experiences take place, and what processes help trigger it along.
I did enjoy this article on the brain and mystical experiences and think it may provide good food for both sides of this debate:
http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/neuro/neuronewswk.htm
It is probably a pretty dumbed down approach and one i’m not sure the serbian would approve of, but i offer it anyway.
By the matthew show on Sep 17, 2007 | Reply
I’m still not convinced of this innate human moral compass. There are people for whom this compass either does not exist or is extremely weak, and their tendencies towards cruelty, abuse, and lack of any sense of justice cannot be left out of the equation. Justice is a learned concept, not a fully-formed sense that emerges from the womb. Watch a group of toddlers playing for an hour and see what I mean. Mercenaries, all of them. Fairness is something they have to learn from adults, and if they do not get that teaching, they will not believe in it.
Keep in mind that when we are talking about the people we know, we are drawing from an extremely small sample set of humanity. I don’t have any serial killer friends (that I’m aware of), I don’t tend to hang out with wife-beaters (of which there are many), I don’t associate with CIA torture specialists, and consequently, the people I choose to spend time with have strong moral grounding. If they didn’t, they would not be my friends.
The reason why fairness and justice seem innate to our cohort is because of a whole host of influences we had while growing up. Others got a different set of influences, and came out with an entirely different moral calculus.
By MochaLab on Sep 17, 2007 | Reply
Actually, i wouldn’t say fairness is an “innate” trait either, and i certainly don’t think we’re born with any type of set morality either. I’m pointing out that a sense of fairness, and certain types of “base” morality come from places deeper than the logical intellect, although the intellect is absolutely important in their development, application, and growth.
By the matthew show on Sep 17, 2007 | Reply
See, all that does is prove to me that if a supreme being exists, they’re pretty crappy at their job. Why would someone with a set of “right” morals in mind create a race of people whose ability to find that set of morals was solely dependent on the society and individuals that they happened to be born into, who in many cases would steer them away from the “right” morals the supreme being had intended for them to adhere to? It’s about the worst system I can think of, and cruel to boot. I would much rather have a godless universe than one with a bumbling omnipotent dumbass programming the damn thing.
By MochaLab on Sep 17, 2007 | Reply
The closer you come to the light the more the “morals” will find you. Also, most human details of society simply don’t matter at all. I find the idea that you have to be in the “right” society to find the “right” morals to be ludicrous.
I would point out however that i don’t believe in the whole heaven and hell scenario. Heck i have a really hard time believing in reincarnation, except that the only people i personally know and have read (i feel) credibly about who possess provable “psychic” powers (sorry guys, but i’ve definitely and unmistakably seen it in action. i used to be skeptical, believe me) keep saying that reincarnation is what happens. I STILL find it hard to just simply “believe” so i really leave the after death thing alone to a large degree, but let’s just say that i surmise more that way.
uh.. this is actually a bit rambling and pointless. I’m too tired to make a point or any rational line of thinking. Better post some other time. Cheers.
By the matthew show on Sep 18, 2007 | Reply
I also find the idea of “right” morals being restricted to one society ludicrous, particularly given that no one can agree on what the “right” morals are.
My point above is that if a supreme being were at all concerned with its creations following a set of guidelines, it would make those guidelines clear, which for those seeking them (and I have been one in the not-too-distant past) they are certainly not. True, it’s not as vital for those in the afterlife-agnostic camp, since you’re not fretting about whether you get a cookie or a hot poker at the end of the rat maze.
As to the psychic question, I don’t actually think that’s the same debate as the God question. The possibility that the human mind’s abilities are beyond what we are currently aware of has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not a being created the blueprints for that brain.
By the matthew show on Sep 18, 2007 | Reply
Also, on the subject of reincarnation, I do wonder if it may not simply be a question of definitions. I find the idea that my consciousness has returned and will return to be implausible because of what I know about matter and its role in brain activity (Alzheimer’s, etc.). However, that matter has certainly been many other things over many billions of years. The matter that is now my brain has likely been everything from a supernova, a leafy vegetable (quiet, you), and quite possibly another human brain, which itself had achieved consciousness.
Part of the idea of enlightenment is to intuitively see the interconnectedness of all things, i.e. seeing beyond the fallacy that I am completely distinct from all the matter that surrounds me, when in fact I am constantly losing and receiving new matter and incorporating it into what I call me. It would not be difficult for a pre-scientific society to make the leap from that into the idea that the consciousness itself transforms into new consciousness as living material may turn into new living material. As we find out more about the connection between consciousness and the brain’s functionality, we will be closer to seeing if those old ideas may simply be tweaked to encompass new information.
By MochaLab on Sep 19, 2007 | Reply
Admittedly, almost every major religion agrees on the “basic” guidelines anyway (i know this will get some flack, but i thinks it’s true. Really, every single one promotes compassion, although in the case of Islam and to an extent Judiasm, they’re not so concerned about compassion to a non-muslim or Jew, and they all argue to become less attached to materiality. That and pray to Gd as much as you can (or meditate). Everything else is petty details, and what’s more mystics from each of the majors (judiasm, buddhism, hinduism, christianity, islam) SAY outright that everything else is petty details. (islam too. sufis, muslim monks, say almost verbatim the same thing as christian monks)
But the point is to move closer to a transcendental religious experience, and the closer you come to Gd, the clearer it will become. I;m insisting over and over again on a personal experience, sought after, that grows over time. This is quite different have 600 different little jewish culture codes governing every aspect of your day, or sitting around debating the nature of the Trinity (“no, it goes in a triangle” “You dolt, it goes in a little three dotted vertical line!”)
Now, do you want to bring up quantum physics, or shall i?
By the matthew show on Sep 19, 2007 | Reply
What gets classified as petty details depends entirely upon what scripture you’re reading. Grab one section of the Old Testament and you’ll get the impression that avoiding God’s smiting stick is the really important part. Grab another bit and it’s about diet, diet, diet. Same with the New Testament, you’re either getting the bloody wrath of God or the touchy feelies. I can’t say I’m an expert on Islam, but the fact that it’s Of The Book doesn’t put it high in my estimation. All my reading on Hinduism has put it squarely in the bollocks category, for my money. Buddhism I’m still studying, but thus far its more liberal end appears to be less rigorously scriptural than its Holy Land-birthed neighbors. I still think the Dalai Lama thing is crap, and ranks with the Catholic papacy as far as bad ideas go.
As far as guidelines of the almighty go, I’m only speaking of those in relation to the way the vast majority of the population tends to view the world. I don’t have the slightest problem with people seeking personal enlightenment, so long as their quest doesn’t mow over the lives of others.
But what cannot be changed is that any argument positing a spiritual experience is simply an assertion. An unprovable statement, undifferentiated from a lie in any way save intent, which is in the eye of the beholder. Anyone can say they’ve had a spiritual experience and describe it any way they want. Its veracity is determined by those who know the character of the person describing the experience, and of course no one has the same opinion about the reliability of any one individual. Intent can be divined with a certain amount of accuracy, but never one hundred percent. And even if it is, one person’s out-of-body experience is another person’s experiment with the God Helmet.
We simply don’t know what the hell the brain’s doing when we enter states of consciousness we’re not familiar with. Even dreams, which happen to everyone, baffle us. Do they contain messages from God? Is the brain simply clearing out debris from the day? And when we wake, how big a crack must form in the neural net in order for dreamstate to overtake our waking world? Some studies suggest that not much separates the two, and the occasional commingling could go a long way to explain altered states of consciousness.
I really hate to be Mr. Wait-And-See (I ain’t General Petraeus here), but there it is. In the meantime, exploring different mental territory, whether one calls it spiritual or just simply experimental, is certainly useful. The more data we have, the better we can judge the picture before us.
By the matthew show on Sep 19, 2007 | Reply
Oh, and quantum physics is really cool. And even those who study it admit they mostly have no freakin’ idea what’s going on yet. Once again, I’m the general…
By the matthew show on Sep 27, 2007 | Reply
Vedas, anyone?
By MochaLab on Oct 5, 2007 | Reply
just by the by….
on acupuncture:
In 1998, the National Institutes of Health asked a panel of experts from major U.S. medical centers to evaluate acupuncture. Their report, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, concluded: “More than 1 million Americans receive acupuncture each year. The data in support of acupuncture are as strong as those for many accepted Western medical therapies. There is sufficient evidence of acupuncture’s value to expand its use into conventional medicine.”
The United Nations World Health Organization agrees, endorsing acupuncture for more than 40 conditions.
The NIH panel was also impressed with acupuncture’s safety: “The occurrence of adverse events in acupuncture has been documented to be extremely low,” its report said, “lower than that of many drugs or other accepted medical procedures.”
the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates acupuncture needles as medical devices.
From Dome, a publication from John Hopkins Medical:
“Longtime faculty members in this bastion of tradition probably thought they’d never see the day, but acupuncture now is available to patients at The Johns Hopkins Hospital.
As it turns out, Johns Hopkins is coming late to the party. Acupuncture is already a fait accompli at many peer institutions—Mayo Clinic, Duke, Stanford, UCLA and at least a dozen others included.”
Oh, and i was originally going to write and make a quip about vedas, but you bloody beat me to it!
By dean on Oct 6, 2007 | Reply
I don’t know if I’ll ever catch up to replying to everything here, so I won’t even try.
@MochaLab: I’d like to introduce you to a little passage I like to call Deuteronomy 22:20-28. It is actually one of my favorite passages.
I’ll leave it to the reader to read the passage, but I’ll summarize thusly:
See, morality’s function is not to better the lives of people and allow them to achieve their goals peacefully and without coercion, it’s to make sure that God’s arbitrary values are kept. What are those values? We find an important example here: A woman’s virginity or fidelity are worth more than her own life. A man’s life is worth less than a woman’s virginity or fidelity only if that woman, his victim, is a virgin and unbetrothed.
Compassion? Justice? I don’t think so.
By dean on Oct 6, 2007 | Reply
@MochaLab: On their webpage for the NIH’s panel statement on acupuncture, it’s prefaced with this:
Do you know of anything more recent?
As for the safety and occurrence of adverse effects, the same can be said of placebo.
As for the FDA’s regulation of acupuncture needles, at least in its update, nothing is said about the efficacy of acupuncture—only the use of needles that somebody sticks in your skin and the need for them to be used by a “licensed practitioner” (which is regulated state-by-state), presumably because of the numerous possible complications of acupuncture when done by someone ignorant of biology. Those complications, while I assume they’re rare, can be quite serious.
I’m not saying that acupuncture is necessarily total bullshit, but there seems to be nothing definitive about its efficacy, with the possible exceptions of minor pain relief (in some limited situations) and relief of nausea in adults.