The fact of militant atheism
I stumbled across this post by Daniel Florien discussing David Noise’s post claiming militant atheism does not exist:
In fact, however, while millions of atheists are indeed walking our streets, it would be difficult to find even one who could accurately be described as militant. In all of American history, it is doubtful that any person has ever been killed in the name of atheism. In fact, it would be difficult to find evidence that any American has ever even been harmed in the name of atheism. It just does not happen, because the notion of “militant atheism” is entirely fantasy. The Myth of Militant Atheism
Noise’s argument seems to be an entirely semantic one, and dependent on conflating “militant” with “violent.” Militants can certainly be violent, but it’s not a necessary precondition. Making it so is another abuse of language.
Immeasurable cruelty
C. J.’s mom says if her son is going to hell, then she will, too. My guess is that she’s either she’s not convinced Hell exists, or — if she is — she doesn’t think the god she worships would really send people to hell for tolerating gay people.
Hell — the classic “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” definition of hell, which is eternal and immeasurable torment forever and ever — has always been a problem for me. When I was really young I was worried that not believing in the right thing would cause me to end up in Hell.
Some religious arguments are singularly unpersuasive
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Dante and Virgil in Hell by William-Adolphe Bouguereau
I had an evangelical friend tell me today he was concerned that a god I don’t believe would send me to a Hell I don’t believe in. I can understand why a Christian might have that concern, but I have never understood why anyone thinks that’s a effective argument to make to non-believers.
I guess it’s akin to thinking you can convince someone the Bible is true because it says it is.
Vocabulary Lesson
So here are some ideas I ran across in Robert Anton Wilson’s work The New Inquisition which I’m finding pretty useful. The New Inquisition is, like C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, also concerned with high ideals and what we can know to be real. But Wilson takes a more restrained view.
Wilson uses the words “Etic” and “emic” to these ends. The “Etic” reality is fundamental reality. Whatever its nature, it is reality as it actually is. You can’t say much more about the nature of the Etic, however, without straying into the realm of the emic.
Emic realities is our model of reality, or sense of reality, our perceptions and understanding of reality. They are always abstractions from the real. There is no realistic level of precision that would perfectly mimic the Etic; indeed, it seems like you would have to recreate the Etic if you wanted a perfectly correct model.
This abstraction occurs for a number of reasons. First, we are ourselves part of the Etic; we cannot step outside the system and see it from the outside. Secondly, information we get about the Etic is filtered before it ever manifests itself in our heads as an emic thought.
Broadly speaking, these filters are:
- exterior and interior physical environments, like the atmosphere and the vitreous humor of our eyes
- neurological processing, like how our brain interprets wavelengths of light
- cognitive environments, which include our personal experiences, what we already believe to be true, our current mood, etc.
So once we have an emic thought it is relatively far removed from the event/thing that caused it.
Idolatry, Wilson says, is the error of mistaking your emic reality for the Etic. And Fundamentalism is idolatry turned into social policy — that is, trying to force an individual emic interpretation on everyone else.
I particularly like the last. Classifying fundamentalism as explicitly religious is too narrow. I can see the same attitude or error doggedly at work, not only among the anti-religious like Richard Dawkins, but also among programmers, economists, political activists, and science fiction fans. But with this explanation it’s a lot easier to point to the root. Fundamentalism is classification and abstraction gone haywire. The abandonment of provisional thinking. And it can happen anywhere, in any field, in any context.
Setting C. S. Lewis aside
Just to keep you updated; I read about half of C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity before setting it aside for something else. Since I am only an armchair philosopher I have very limited time to read such things, and I constantly have to evaluate my chances of learning anything interesting. Mere Christianity failed that test about halfway through, but now I know enough about the text to know if I should return to it later.
Now that’s settled
On the Media did an episode a while back on data: collecting it, analyzing it, and using it to predict future events. One example of the danger of this was the “Flash Crash” of 2010, when the stock market fell ten percent and then rebounded in just a few minutes. The crash was caused by an automated computer software process. A cyber-panic. The reporter says:
There’s a pattern here, Joe Flood says. Initially we use data as a way to think hard about difficult problems. But then we over-rely on data as a way to avoid thinking hard about difficult problems. We surrender our better judgment and leave it to the algorithm.
We want and need to offload some of our cognitive thinking someplace else. We can’t do all the work. It’s OK not to want to think deeply about something.
Mere Christianity
I am reading C. S. Lewis’s book Mere Christianity. It’s a short book, but it’s pretty slow going. Just like Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion, Lewis is either fundamentally confused about non-Christian religions or he simply chooses to ignore them. There are lots of little leaps in logic which add up to big leaps in logic, and before too long I find myself trying to sort through a snarl of speciousness, wondering if I’m profiting any by it.
Eventually the argument gets so disassociated from reality it matters as much as the engineering plans for the starship Enterprise. If that much.
Religion and Authority
I’ve had a standing lunch meeting with a friend over the last few months. He is a conservative Christian and I am a vaguely-defined pantheist, but we’re able to talk about religion without shouting at each other. So the lunches have been interesting.
During out last couple of lunches we talked about who is in charge. The problem as I see it is that there are a heck of a lot of religions. Even among (especially among) orthodox or conservative Christians there’s a lot of variety. And not just along the edges, but in core areas like how involved Christians should be in politics.
The Purpose of Life
I don’t have much time this morning, but I ran into a couple of interesting quotes the other day in rapid, synchronistic succession. Deb posted this declaration from the Dalai Lama:
The purpose of our lives is to be happy.
And then, a while later and I’m pretty sure independently, a cousin of mine posted this by screenwriter and novelist Leo Rosten:
The purpose of life is not to be happy at all. It is to be useful, to be honorable. It is to be compassionate. It is to matter, to have it make some difference that you lived.
Checking this quote out online, there’s a more utilitarian variation that seems to be more common:
The purpose of life is not to be happy – but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you have lived at all.
Nothing about compassion there.
The larger context for the Dali Lama’s quote can be found in Compassion and the Individual, an essay fortunately available online — Rosten’s quote, not so much. If anyone knows the larger context of that, I’d love to hear it. I hate to make an argument based on one sentence someone may or may not have said.
The Ten Commandments in Giles County
What would be in your Ten Commandments?
Supporters say the display is a historical, not religious, display because the Ten Commandments share a frame with a copy if the Preamble of the Constitution. But I’m reasonably certain it doesn’t work like that. The intended message seems clear, and including the preamble does not inoculate the school district against charges of Establishment Clause violations.
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