On consciousness-raising

I've been making an effort in the past year or so to use the female pronoun whenever referring to a hypothetical person. There was recently a discussion about pronouns over at Crommunist (and by the way, if you aren't reading Crommie, start now!), and coincidentally the gender politics of pronouns came up twice yesterday at work... so I've been thinking about it quite a bit over the past several days.

One can make an argument that simply replacing the male pronoun with the female one when referring to a hypothetical person is not really any better. I think this opinion commits the fallacy of ignoring the broader social context, but after some recent contemplation I'm going to go one further: Even if it really isn't any better, it's still a worthwhile exercise simply as a matter of consciousness-raising.

If you're a man -- especially if you are a white heterosexual middle-class man like myself -- it can be difficult to put yourself in the shoes of a person who experiences institutionalized bias. I can abstractly recognize that it's a little messed up for the male pronoun to just be acknowledged as the default, but that doesn't tell me anything about how it feels. However, experiencing other people using the female pronoun as the default, especially when I am being asked to picture myself in the role of the hypothetical person they are referring to... well that's an eye-opener. It feels weird, doesn't it? I think a valuable piece of knowledge is gained when one viscerally experiences that weirdness for oneself.

I'm also certain I would not have spotted one of the incidents yesterday were it not for the effort I have been making to substitute my default pronoun. Two co-workers were explaining to me some work they have done that involves a collaboration with educators, primarily with elementary school teachers. I noticed every time they referred to a student, they said "he"; and every time they referred to a teacher, they said "she". Both did it, consistently, without exception. (I'm probably going to mention something about it to them today or tomorrow, but I've been mulling over how best to approach it without coming off as confrontational)

So even if female-as-default really is no better than male-as-default (and as I said, I don't think that's necessarily the case when viewed in a broader context), it's still a good exercise in consciousness-raising. If you haven't tried it, you ought, at least for a little while. It's, well, it's weird. And I guess that's the whole point, isn't it?

The title to a PZ post today helped me tie this together with another thing I've been thinking about: Whether some of the more confrontational secular holiday displays that have gone up are a good thing or not.

While these displays surely tell the truth, and while I am certainly not concerned about constantly policing tone in general, some of these displays don't exactly make me feel holiday cheer inside, y'know? In a perfect world, holiday displays would all be positive messages, and some of the secular ones going up clearly are not. Negative messages are often necessary when opposing injustice or changing the social zeitgeist, but at Christmas/Channukah/Solstice? It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Yet I still felt like I supported the controversial displays anyway, even if I don't personally like them. And now I think I can articulate why: It's yet another exercise in consciousness-raising.

Yeah, these displays probably do make believers feel uncomfortable at a time when we as a society have traditionally tried to come together in mutual joy and generosity. But you know what? That's exactly how many non-Christians feel when an elaborate government-sponsored creche is on display to the exclusion of menorahs or Santa or anything else. That's exactly how many non-Christians feel when the War on Christmas people demand that Happy Holidays be expunged from our vocabulary in favor of an abject deference to Jesusmas. Like a man being asked to put himself in the place of a hypothetical person being referred to as a female, this asks Christians to momentarily slip into the shoes of a maligned minority, a minority whose holiday traditions are demeaned and devalued.

An eye for an eye is obviously not a good long term strategy, especially when we're talking about actual violence. But when we're talking about the possibility of maybe some mild discomfort and some hurt feelings, and when a big part of the problem is that the privileged group simply can't understand what it feels like to be in the out-group because they've never experienced it -- yeah, this is fair game.

Always using the female pronoun may not really be any better than always using the male pronoun. And an aggressively atheist holiday display may be no better than an aggressively Christian holiday display. But what both of these things do is make you think, to put yourself in the place of the other. That's what consciousness-raising is all about.

Why I oppose the figurative use of the term "militant" in all contexts

Uh oh, I go and call Bruce Hood a "nice guy", and Bruce himself responds in the comments unfortunately triggering one of my big pet peeves.

No, it's not that Bruce thinks the outspoken atheism strategy is "misguided" and that he doesn't "understand" it -- reasonable people can disagree, and I stand by my point that there is a difference between Bruce, who simply favors a softer approach towards religion, vs. folks like Mooney, Rosenau, etc., who spend a sizeable fraction of their time talking about why other people's approaches are wrong.

What bugs me is Bruce's use of the phrase "militant atheism". The problems with this phrase have been pointed out time and time again, but I'm going to go a step further: I do not think it is appropriate ever to use the phrase "militant" in a figurative/non-literal manner, no matter what group you are talking about.

My reasons for this are threefold: First, the original literal usage -- meaning engaged in or favoring actual military action -- is still quite common. Second, which usage of the word is intended is largely determined by the group to which it is attached. Third, and most importantly, it seems to me that when the group in question is advocating in favor of a historically oppressed classification, they are far more likely to get the figurative usage. And that to me sounds like an attempt to slander and squelch.

If we are talking about a militant Islamist, it is clear we mean one who advocates violence; we do not call Harun Yahya a militant Muslim, even though he is very aggressive about promoting Islam. It would seem incongruous and even libelous to label him as such. This is true for pretty much any religious group one attaches the word "militant" too, as well as for most types of purely political causes, e.g. a "militant separatist" is not simply someone who advocates strongly for independence, but who endorses and/or participates in military action in order to achieve it.

On the other hand, if we are talking about a "militant feminist", it is obvious we do not mean a woman who literally endorses violence against men or against misogyny. That's just absurd. The same goes for "militant atheist" and "militant homosexual", etc. Although I did hear that the Queer Eye guys were thinking about forming a paramilitary group to assassinate public figures with a poor fashion sense. Oh no wait, I didn't.

Now, maybe part of this is simply because there really aren't any militant atheists, feminists, or LGBT people. It just generally doesn't work that way. (Side note: Obviously in some places atheistic communism used violence to enforce atheism, but typically we would not identify those folks as "atheists" first and foremost, but rather as communists/Marxists/Stalinists/etc. If you wanted to call Mao a militant atheist, however, I would not argue with you.)

The situation is somewhat murkier for groups where there are true militants, but which sometimes get the figurative usage anyway. An example might be civil rights activists. Certainly I would not object to labeling some members of the former Black Panther Party as "militant civil rights activists" (although "militant black supremacists" might be more appropriate in that case). But you hear "militant" being used here sometimes just to refer to people who are outspoken and/or uncompromising in their views. Other examples would be animal rights activists or environmentalists, although it seems to me that in those cases, the usage of "militant" is predominantly literal. (Surprise surprise, since they don't deal with a historically oppressed group) I think I've heard non-violent people referred to as "militant environmentalists", but if I have, it hasn't been very often. That term is generally reserved for people who firebomb SUVs and such.

In any case, while the figurative usage of the term is quite common (in fact it is the first definition at Dictionary.com), it still feels terribly incongruous when it is applied figuratively to one of the groups for which the usage is normally meant literally. It would seem odd to call James Dobson a "militant Christian", for example, even though he is at least as strident in his beliefs as "militant atheists" like PZ Myers.

(Interesting side note: I googled for "James Dobson militant christian" just to see if anybody actually calls him that -- and in fact many do, for what it's worth -- and the first link that came up quotes James Dobson referring to "militant homosexual groups". I think my point has been made...)

Until that discrepancy in application of the term is resolved, I think the figurative meaning should be avoided altogether. Only call someone "militant" if they specifically endorse or participate in violence. Otherwise, you are falsely equating them with those who do. As long as "militant Islamist" implies someone who kills for Islam, you can't call someone a "militant atheist" without implying the same things about them.

Drawing Lines on Star Trek-Based Discrimination

Ed Brayton over at Dispatches has a thoughtful piece up titled Drawing Lines on Religion-Based Discrimination, which takes as a jumping-off point the example of a gay couple in Illinois suing a bed-and-breakfast that refused to host their wedding, and goes on to examine the complex relationship between religious freedom and religious discrimination, and attempts to explore in which contexts religious-based discrimination is acceptable. It's a balanced and well-written piece which comes to some very reasonable (though tentative) conclusions... but while reading, I just couldn't stop shaking my head. All this, to prevent conflicts over what seems to me to be obviously made-up bullshit! Explicit protections for religious freedom are crucial, of course, but it's not because there is some critical benefit to diverse religious beliefs; rather, it's because without those protections, religion becomes a tool of oppression. Establishment of a state religion is no better or worse than the state establishing a mandated preference for Star Trek: The Next Generation over Star Trek: The Original Series, it's just that the latter issue tends not to arise because people don't get nearly as stupid-crazy over Star Trek as they do over religion.

But that got me thinking... What if people did get that crazy over Star Trek? And so without further ado, I present Ed's piece, rewritten as if we lived in an alternate universe where countless wars were fought to settle the age-old question: Who would win in a fight, Kirk or Picard?

The Chicago Tribune reports that a Picardian couple is suing two bed and breakfasts for refusing to rent facilities to them for a Borg-themed civil union ceremony.

The Beall Mansion in Alton told the Wathens via email that it “will just be doing traditional weddings.” The owner of the Timber Creek Bed and Breakfast in Paxton wrote in an email to the couple: “We will never host Borg-themed civil unions. We will never host Borg-themed weddings even if they become legal in Illinois. We believe the Borg are not canon and are mere fiction based on what The Original Series fails to say about them. If that is discrimination, I guess we unfortunately discriminate.”

Here’s the legal situation:

The couple filed a complaint with the Illinois Department of Human Rights, which investigated and found “substantial evidence” that a civil rights violation had been committed.

The August finding allows the Wathens 90 days to file a complaint with the state Human Rights Commission or take civil action in Circuit Court. The Wathens’ attorney, Betty Tsamis of Chicago, told the Tribune that her clients have chosen the latter path and will file lawsuits against both businesses as early as next week.

This action, should it proceed, could bring to the courtroom a debate over the boundary lines between Trekkian freedom and discrimination in Illinois.

Steven Amjad, an attorney representing Timber Creek, said the state constitution guarantees Trekkian freedoms.

“These are business owners that have strong Star Trek-based convictions. The Legislature has created this (conflict), and the courts will have to sort this out,” he said.

Andrew Koppelman, a professor of political science and law at Northwestern University, said the question is whether the state’s Star Trek Freedom Restoration Act — which protects Trekkian freedoms from government intrusion — can trump the state’s Human Rights Act, which includes the protection of people based on whether they are into the Borg or not.

“The hotels seem pretty clearly in violation of the Human Rights Act,” Koppelman said. “And if you’re going to say that somebody is exempted from the human rights law under the Star Trek Freedom Restoration Act, that would mean that people could discriminate based on Trekkian views. It’s a slippery slope.”

I’ve written recently about the billboard put up in Grand Rapids by my friends at the Center for Inquiry – Michigan. They had a billboard company refuse to put up their sign before finding one that would. After last week’s CFI meeting, I had an interesting conversation with the director of that group, Jeff Seaver, about whether that was illegal discrimination or not. He had actually been asked about that by a local TV reporter and had said something like, “And that’s okay, they’re a private company and they can turn down our business if they want to.” But since then, he’d been thinking about it and he wasn’t so sure that was true.

Interest in the Borg is not covered by the anti-discrimination statutes in Michigan, or at the federal level, though it is covered by some states. But Star Trek series preference is covered nationally and in every state and it does cover private businesses. A Kirkian restaurant could not refuse to serve someone because they’re Picardian— or atrekist, for that matter. This is well established law and enjoys overwhelming public support, so it’s pretty well settled. So what’s the difference?

On the other hand, a Star Trek club can, of course, limit its hiring to only those who prefer the same captain. This is known in legal terms as the nerdisterial exception. And this is a crucial principle. Freedom of Star Trek would mean nothing if the state could force a Kirkian club to hire a Picardian as its treasurer. But what are the limits of such an exception? What about a Star Trek school? Could the government force a Picardian school to hire an atrekist teacher? I think the vast majority of people, even atrekists, would say no.

But what about a Star Trek club-operated day care center? Or a homeless shelter? Or a restaurant set up by a Star Trek club to fund some charitable activity? Jeff offered this possible distinction: If the activity is explicitly Star Trek-related, then the exception should apply, but if it’s a service that is not inherently Trekkian in nature and is open to the public, they should be required to accept all takers both in terms of employment and servicing the public. And that seems reasonable, though not a perfect solution.

Some Kirkians claim that requiring them to serve Borg-loving customers in any context is a violation of their Trekkian freedom. But if it is, it is exactly the same as requiring them to serve customers of every race or gender. Discrimination on the basis of race can be and historically has been based on various TV series as well, yet almost no one seriously argues today that any business should be able to turn away a black person. Who is going to stand up and say that a business should be allowed to refuse to hire women because their sincerely-held Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire-based beliefs tell them that women should stay at home and not work?

Even if someone would make that argument, it’s not going to work, either legally or politically. It’s simply a non-starter. And there is no difference between those situations and discrimination against Borg-loving people or atrekists. If it is a violation of Trekkian freedom to force businesses to serve or hire Borg fans and atrekists, it is just as much a violation of television-based freedom to force them to serve or hire black people or women.

But Prof. Koppelman is right to point out that, legally, the Star Trek Freedom Restoration Act and its many state versions does complicate this. That law requires that Trekkian groups and individuals be given exemptions from generally applicable laws unless the government can show a compelling state interest in enforcing the law on them specifically in that particular context. And those laws are used everyday to exempt Star Trek clubs from zoning regulations and lots of other laws.

It may be that STFRA and other such laws should simply be done away with, that there should be no exemption for Trekkian groups or individuals, period. But then we go back to that nerdisterial exception, which I think even the most hardened atrekist would agree with — no one thinks we should force Star Trek clubs to hire people who are fans of the other show. So perhaps Jeff’s solution is ultimately necessary, a narrowly drawn exception for Star Trek clubs and probably Star Trek club-run schools, but not for businesses that just happen to be owned by Kirkians who feel the need to discriminate.

Thoughts?

Update: I swear to God, I had not seen this before I wrote this. 2:10 is most relevant.

The Conundrum of Progressive Belief

Since I just read a Greta Christina article which touched on the controversy over whether or not liberal/progressive belief enables extremism, it is apropos that a (religious) friend of mine posted the following to Facebook today:

"Is it working? Your belief system, that is. Is it really working? God's intention all along has been for the believer's life to work." Beth Moore

(On a side note, this Beth Moore does not actually appear to be all that progressive of a believer -- though still progressive enough to piss off other evangelicals I guess -- and is strongly anti-gay among other nasty things.)

Anyway, this is an interesting little quote, because on the one hand it is all wrong from a logical/epistemologial perspective, and if taken literally it could even be potentially dangerous; while on the other hand, for the target audience I think the message is generally a positive one. That pretty much sums up the conundrum of progressive theism right there, so let's dissect this one.

First, the bad: For starters, there is a hidden circularity here which renders it somewhat of an empty statement. If your criteria for determining what you believe is, "Does it work for me?", then logically the only basis you have for asserting anything about "God's intention" is whether or not that belief works for you. It's a tautology. Moore is basically saying, "I believe whatever works for me, and that includes believing that you should believe whatever works for you." It's pretty hollow when you think about it.

Worse yet, there is at least a theoretical danger in any untethered epistemology. If we take this statement literally, I might say, "Well, I feel bad that I shoplifted, but it's nice to have this free stuff. Wait a minute... if I just tell myself that God wants me to shoplift, then I don't feel bad about it anymore. Works for me!"

That's perhaps an unrealistic example, but there could be others. For instance, the process of examining one's own unconscious prejudices can be a painful one, and if you can just get yourself to believe that God shares your prejudice, then you can go on comfortably ignoring it. How many people have short-circuited a logical examination of their reasons for opposing marriage equality by just hiding behind religious belief? That is starting to sound like more than just a theoretical problem.

On the other hand, the message the target audience is going to receive from this assertion is probably a positive one: If a particular piece of dogma is not working for you, if it just seems terribly wrong to you, well maybe you ought to discard it. Moore's justification is wrong and perhaps even dangerous, but the conclusion is right.

I think the following is probably a bad example, since from what I can find it appears Moore toes the Evangelical line on homosexuality, i.e. she is dead fucking wrong and screwing up people's lives, but it's the only example I can think of, so let's go with it: Imagine a gay Christian teen who is struggling to come to terms with the contradiction between her identity and her beliefs. While I, and presumably most readers of this blog, would much rather see her discard the bonds of theism altogether, that can be a supremely difficult thing for people to do, especially as they may be struggling with other deeply emotional issues. Furthermore, as Richard Wade has eloquently pointed out, many young people still living at home may find that the security of their most basic needs is tied to belief, or at least the facade of belief. Better than nothing is if this hypothetical teen were able to say to herself, "Hey, this silly dogma about homosexuality is just not working for me. God couldn't possibly want me to feel so awful in this way. That has to be a mistake, and I'm not going to believe that crap anymore."

Again, Moore unfortunately fails to take this philosophy all the way and still clings to Evangelical beliefs that are downright hateful. But the quote on its own has some merit for believers -- if they're going to stick with belief that is. And that's always the conundrum, isn't it?

Fort Bragg, Rock Beyond Belief, and the taxpayer

Regardless of one's theistic preferences or political leanings, everyone should be outraged about the recent decision by military brass at Fort Bragg to put crippling restrictions on the planned Rock Beyond Belief festival, leading to its cancellation. Even if you are an uber-conservative Evangelical Christian Tea Partier, you should still be pissed off about this indefensible decision.

One paragraph of very brief background for anyone who is not aware of this: Fort Bragg recently hosted a Rock the Fort music festival, an Evangelical Christian event which was expressly for the purposes of obtaining converts, for which the military shelled out over $50,000 and which was explicitly endorsed by the military as part of its controversial Spiritual Fitness program. Concerned about the questionable constitutionality of this activity, Sgt. Justin Griffith, backed by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), applied to host a similar secular event caled Rock Beyond Belief, taking advantage of a DoD regulation compelling the military to provide similar accommodations to groups of differing viewpoints whenever it sponsors an outside organization. It looked like everything was proceeding smoothly, until last week when it was abruptly announced that the Fort Bragg brass were going against the advice of their legal team, and refusing to provide any funding for the event, confining it to a smaller venue than originally promised, and demanding a special disclaimer on any promotional materials for the event stating that it was not endorsed by Fort Bragg.

Now, many people may ask why the military ought to be compelled to shell out $40k+ to host a pro-secularism event on a military installation. Indeed, it rather seems like the military shouldn't really be in the business of doing that, eh? I agree! Better would have been for Fort Bragg to stay out of this altogether, and fund neither the Rock the Fort nor the Rock Beyond Belief event. But it's too late for that now, and both the constitution as well as DoD regulations are quite explicit about the next steps. You can oppose both events, but you can't support the first and oppose the second.

Another fair objection might be that while the military is bound by their own regulations to support Rock Beyond Belief, the level of funding and accomodations should be proportional to the expected audience. It turns out this argument fails on a technicality, since the relevant DoD regulations specifically mandate the same level of support, but I am willing to entertain this argument on a pragmatic basis. The Fort Bragg leadership's decision still fails when exposed to a numerical analysis.

In 2001, Christians comprised 71% of the active duty military. This includes Catholics and other denominations, so it is not really fair to use this number to represent potential interest in an Evangelical event, but I'm going to be extra generous here. Those who identified as atheist or as having no religious preference weighed in at 21%. (Note that, contrary to the pernicious "No atheists in foxholes" myth, this is slightly higher than among the general US population. I guess something about seeing little children get shot in the face has a tendency to diminish one's belief in an omnipotent omnibenevolent being... but I digress!)

If we were to argue that the level of financial support for a given event should be directly proportional to the number of potentially interested participants, by my calculations the military should have offered around $16,000 to Rock Beyond Belief. Now, as I said, this would still be a violation of the DoD's own regulations, and in any case it is clearly unethical to act like you are going to give someone $40,000 and then very late in the planning stages cut the funding by more than half. But even by this very lax standard of behavior, the Fort Bragg brass looks really bad: They are offering Rock Beyond Belief a grand total of zero dollars and zero cents.

The Fort Bragg leadership have offered a few other excuses for refusing to finance the event, e.g. they claim the smaller venue is acceptable because none of the musicians or speakers that have been lined up for Rock Beyond Belief have widespread mainstream appeal (never mind that the same was true of the Rock the Fort lineup...). But the point is, even if you buy these arguments, to offer no financial support at all, and then, adding insult to injury, to demand that all promotional materials for the event carry a notice disclaiming any implicit support by Fort Bragg whastoever -- this is just not justifiable based on any sort of practical argument.

There is one more argument, an ideological rather than practical argument, that one might make for the decision to scuttle Rock Beyond Belief: that, simply put, Christians are Good, and atheists are Bad. To that, I would first like to say, "Fuck you," but I would also like to point out that Fort Bragg's own legal team advised that the original plan be accepted without modification. There is just no way that the military will prevail in the forthcoming lawsuit, and the legal costs are going to be a hell of a lot more than forty-grand. Not only are their actions clearly unconstitutional, but DoD regulations impose an even stricter standard than the Constitution, eliminating any ambiguity of interpretation about what the military was legally bound to do.

In particular, the bizarre decision to demand the disclaimer pretty much guarantees that the military is going to get their asses handed to them in court. One has to ask what they even thought the point of this requirement was. Clearly, when the funding was denied, Rock Beyond Belief was already cancelled as a practical matter. You can't take a fourty-thousand dollar event and then cut its primary source of funding just weeks before it is supposed to take place, and expect the Show to Go On. The disclaimer requirement was utterly unnecessary, because in practice it was never going to come into play. It is almost as if they were asking for an unwinnable lawsuit.

I think there are only two explanations that make sense here: Either a lone zealot in the Fort Bragg leadership (most likely Garrison Commander Colonel Stephen Sicinski, if this is the case) was so offended by the idea of Rock Beyond Belief that he embarked on a quixotic quest to spit on the First Amendment rights of 21% of the active duty military; or else this was done on the orders of some higher-up(s) who is/are looking for an opportunity for political grandstanding, and couldn't care less what the results of the lawsuit turn out to be, since a defeat for the military would only bolster their martyr posturing.

In either of the above cases, this is being done on the taxpayers' dime, who, make no mistake, will end up paying through the nose for excessive legal costs, and almost certainly for an expensive settlement. If you aren't outraged by this, I just don't know what to say....

"Tom Johnson" inadvertently highlights the epistemic peril of religion

"Tom Johnson" has been outed, and I can't say I feel good about the whole thing. Just bad feelings all around, nothing much to be learned at this point.

But, one interesting thing is that we now have an article from OnEarth which appears to be a first-person account of the event on which the original fabricated "Johnson" story was based. The climax of the story turns out to provide a potentially valuable teaching moment about the extent to which accomodationist-like tactics are appropriate, and where they can go off the rails:

[A]n elementary-aged child asked me the usual question that comes up when I show animals to a crowd.

"Why do these things even matter?"

Here was my chance, my opportunity to lecture about amphibians' contributions to energy flow in ecosystems, about their intrinsic value as biodiversity, why anyone with least bit of education should understand why we need to protect diversity. Before I had my chance, an older man in the crowd piped up.

"Because God created them, and it's our job to make sure they stay around," he said simply. A rumble of "mm-hmm's" and head nods rippled through the congregation...

Could it really be that simple, finding some common ground for conservation? I'd like to think so. Here I was, my head full of fear-inducing facts about biodiversity loss and data from published studies, and the older man's answer was more than enough to satisfy the child. My name-dropping of famous environmentalists and quoting of influential studies was going to have little more impact than speaking in Latin would have. Our reasons may have been different, but our goals were the same: conservation in the name of morality, of science, of God - whatever you wanted to call it.

Now, I'm not sure whether Wally Smith went on to give his favored answer anyway -- "My [answer] was going to have little more impact..." (emph. mine) could imply that he went ahead and gave his answer anyway, even knowing it would have little impact ("was going to" signifying something about to happen); or it could imply that he decided not to ("was going to" signifying something that had been planned to happen, but no longer). If the latter, he did those kids a serious disservice. And in either case, his touchy-feely ecumenicism in regards to the motivation for conservation contains some serious hidden dangers.

First, let me make clear what I am not suggesting. Nobody thinks that Smith should have said, "Well no, that's not actually true, because God doesn't exist. The real reasons are..." That would have been needlessly confrontational, and would obviously have undermined the important message he was trying to get across. Does anyone really believe that even the most fiery of the Gnu Atheists would have responded that way?

I'm not even suggesting something like the somewhat more innocuous, "Well I don't know about that, but..." He was there for the primary purpose of getting these folks on board with conservation, and he was presenting to a group where (unfortunately) even the merest hint of skepticism would have undermined his credibility. I get that. As strong an advocate I am of being "out" as an atheist, I acknowledge there are rare occasions where tact and/or tactics legitimately dictate reticence on that point.

An appropriate way to continue would have been something like, "Not only that, but.." or "It's also been observed..", etc. But in any case, it was imperative that Smith continue on and give the secular answer, even if most of his audience couldn't care less beyond the old man's godsaidso explanation. I'll quote from a comment I left at the article:

How do you know that amongst the chorus of "Mmm-hmmms", there weren't a few kids remaining silent, kids who had started to realize the worldview in which they were raised had serious cracks? What if that little girl gets a little older and suddenly "godsaidso" isn't a good enough answer for her anymore? Hell, what if she doesn't even leave her faith, but moves to a different town with a pastor who says that none of this matters because the end times are coming soon?

Smith states that "our goals were the same: conservation in the name of morality, of science, of God - whatever you wanted to call it." But the problem with this attitude is that morality¹ and science are real, and God is not. This matters. If I may wax biblically for a moment, this is the difference between building your house on a rock and building your house on the sand.

Because there are no epistemic underpinnings to faith-based beliefs, there is no mechanism for sorting good ideas from bad. If my commitment to conservation is based on facts, then if someone wants to modify my beliefs they will have to challenge those facts directly, by showing that either I was mistaken, or that other factual concerns outweigh the ones I was aware of. If my commitment to conservation is based on some old guy's interpretation of what a mythical being wants me to do, there are countless vulnerabilities that could be attacked. Not only might I some day come to realize that said being is in fact a myth, but much more trivially, someone could simply argue that the old man's interpretation was wrong. Who's to say? We are talking about the commands of a fictional being, of whom the only "official" account we have is a very long book written thousands of years ago and riddled with contradictions and obvious errors. There is no mechanism by which we could even in principle test whose interpretation was right. So ultimately, my commitment to conservation has literally no grounding whatosever.

There is an important qualification to be made here. I recognize that fundamental beliefs tend to be far more resistant to change than derived beliefs, and that could seem to contradict what I am saying. After all, it probably would be easier, for example, to convince someone like me that anthropogenic global warming was a hoax than it would be to convince a committed Christian that Jesus never existed. I doubt I ever shall be convinced of such a thing, but we could easily talk in principle about what kinds of new information and arguments would convince me; whereas it is impossible to say what would convince a committed Christian to abandon her belief in Jesus, because it would require a fundamental shift in worldview.

But here's the thing: I don't think that conservationism is a fundamental belief for most conservation-minded theists, certainly not for the sorts of folks who would be at an Alabama gathering of the Southern Baptists. I think that conservationism for them is derived from other beliefs -- if Smith's account is to be believed, primarily from faith-based ones. It is probably fair to say that no matter how convincingly Smith might have argued for a secular motivation behind conservation, there is probably no way he could have made that belief more resilient than the audience's belief in Jesus, etc. But that doesn't say a damn thing about the resilience of the audience's belief in faith-inspired conservationism!

The audience's fundamental belief in their religion may be rock solid, but because that belief happens to be hollow to the core, with no epistemic grounding to speak of, any derived beliefs based solely on their religion are inherently arbitrary, and are therefore quite weak.

Again, I don't know what Smith actually did. Maybe he did just what I thought he should do, maybe he continued on with the secular explanation anyway. And for what it's worth, I think that given the crisis situation we are in regarding the environment, it is probably a legitimate tactic to exploit theists' beliefs to bolster their commitment to conservation. But if we let that be their only commitment to conservation, that is a massive blunder, both a tactical and a strategic failure. Even from a hardcore accomodationist perspective, I don't see how anyone could argue otherwise.

¹Okay, I realize error theorists, relativists, and non-cognitivists might well disagree with me here. Let's leave the meta-ethics discussion aside for the moment, as fascinating a topic as that is, because I don't feel that it is crucial to the point I am making here.

Wait, why shouldn't the children call the emperor a "fatty"?

The endless accomodationism rumble has gotten a bit of a shot in the arm lately with a post by Jean Kazez in which she basically comes right out and says that science/religion compatibility should never be discussed in the public square, regardless of tone -- it is just not understandable by the unwashed masses. I hadn't read the post, because, well, I don't really care. The money quote was pretty shocking, but whatever, I'm ever so sick of rehashing this fanciful idea that making an idea more visible somehow makes it less popular.

I had heard that Kazez had also said something within the same thread of posts where she extended the Emperor's New Clothes analogy to try and present the accomodationist position. I finally read the relevant passage when it was quoted over at Metamagician, and I quote it at length here:

The emperor marches along the parade route stark naked [ignore the green underwear in the picture], and the adults ooh and ahh about his finery. One brave girl speaks up and says, naively "The emperor has no clothes!" Good for her! Hurray!

...

Now we have the sequel: "The Emperor's Gnu Clothes." Other kids were impressed with the brave girl. They started saying the same thing--"The emperor has no clothes! The emperor has no clothes!" Soon just saying he had no clothes lost its appeal. They shouted louder and louder, and called the emperor a fatty and laughed uproariously.

Some of the adults said: "Children. You're right he's naked. The brave girl was perfectly right to say so. But you've gotten carried away. It's time to think this through. Maybe the emperor actually enjoys being naked. Maybe he really doesn't know he's naked, and he can't figure it out when you're yelling at him. Maybe when he looks at you, your clothes look ridiculous to him, too! Control yourselves, think about how you're communicating!"

This made the children very, very angry. They wanted to believe they were just like that first brave girl. They didn't want to see themselves as rude and insulting. So the children went after the adults who had chided them, and called them names, and derided the whole idea of Communicative Restraint and Politeness, which they called crap for short.

Perhaps the analogy is a bit tortured here, but I'm never one to shy away from analogy waterboarding, and in any case I think Kazez makes her point quite clearly with this story.

My question is: What's the problem?

Let's strap this analogy onto The Rack and take a step back here. Who is the emperor? In the original story, the emperor is a pompous dictator who is so full of himself that he is actually taken in by a pair of weavers who fraudulently promise him a set of clothes that are "invisible to those unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent." He's rich, powerful, and so egotistical that he actually commissions a parade specifically for the point of making all of his subjects look stupid because they can't see his new clothes. Furthermore, at the end of the story, while the emperor is certainly embarrassed, he does not appear to have lost one iota of power. In fact, as the procession goes on, the closing line of the English translation I am looking at states that "his noblemen held high the train that wasn't there at all." The emperor is so feared and powerful that even after he is revealed in front of all his subjects as being a hopeless fool, he still commands so much power that rich guys continue to go along with the farce.

So now with all of that mind, Kazez wants to, what, make us feel sorry for the emperor that some kids are calling him a "fatty"? Srsly?!? Please, I'll trade places with the emperor any day of the week. I get to have unrestricted power over an entire kingdom, I get noblemen who will publicly play along with whatever absurd fantasy I ask, I get to be rich beyond my wildest dreams... and the only price I pay is I have to put up with some schoolkids snickering at me and calling me a "fatty"? Bring it on!!

And could there be a better analogy to the special deference afforded to religion in American society? This is so familiar... Public policy is all too often shaped by religious dogma; any American politician of any stature has to at least pay lip service to faith (and preferably Christian faith); there's a designated National Day of Prayer; people who profess to be highly religious are automatically presumed to be better, more moral people; criticism of religion in the public square will get you branded as "intolerant," or worse... and then amidst all of this, if a couple of bloggers occasionally make unkind and overly broad sweeping generalizations about Christians, the cry goes out, "ZOMG Christians are being persecuted in America!"

Please, persecute me like a Christian. And mock me like an emperor. That would be awesome.

The Memetic Equivalent of the Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve

A post over at Epiphenom got me thinking about the old idea of religion as a product of natural meme selection, and how that metaphor could be viewed from different angles.

The recurrent laryngeal nerve is a nerve that provides sensation and motor control to the larynx. It is called "recurrent" because it takes this weird backwards-looping path through the neck, when there is no apparent reason -- without the evolutionary background, that is -- why it shouldn't just descend straight from where it branches off from the vagus nerve down into the larynx.

The reason becomes obvious when you examine the morphological transitions from fish to land animals and eventually to mammals. A common trait in nearly all modern animals is a segmented body plan, which seems to have evolved very long ago. You can often figure out how the segments in one group of animals map to the segments in another group -- adding a segment here, replicating one here, transforming this one for an entirely different purpose... And if you do this morphological comparison with fish vs. mammals, it becomes pretty clear what happened with the recurrent laryngeal nerve. It's morphological equivalent in fish followed a perfectly sensible path, and as the body plan was rearranged, it just got pushed further and further out of the way.

And why didn't natural selection ever fix it? As an engineer, I put it as, "Because evolution by natural selection is an algorithm that is highly susceptible to local maxima." Perhaps a simpler way of saying it is that by the time the laryngeal nerve had developed a routing problem, the type of mutation required to fix it was far too complicated to occur in a single generation -- and a mutant who only got "halfway there" would not be likely to have a functioning laryngeal nerve!

Is the modern concept of prayer the memetic equivalent of the recurrent laryngeal nerve?

First, an obligatory caveat: Whenever we talk about memetic evolution, we must remember that we are just drawing an analogy. Genetic evolution only works "right" because it is digital (i.e. each base pair has a discrete value -- each base is either A, C, T, or G, and you cannot have a base that is 75% A and 25% T!). This turns out to be really important in making the math work out, because it enables traits to be inherited as a discrete unit. As an example, if your mother has green eyes and your father has brown eyes, probably you will get one or the other, but you will not get a blend. If genes were not digital, and if sexual reproduction produced a blend rather than a discrete sampling, evolution via natural selection would not work.

Memes are sometimes digital, as when the meme is a particular phrase or perhaps a particular translation of a book. In those cases, evolutionary analysis tends to work quite well (nearly identical techniques are applied by both evolutionary cladists as well as those examining the "mutations" over time of copied manuscripts). But memes are often not digital -- as, I would argue, in the case of religions themselves, even if the texts are digital -- and in those cases it is not clear to what extent evolutionary theory really works. So when we talk about a meme like religion "evolving", we might just be blowing smoke.

With that out of the way, let's assume it's valid to talk about religion "evolving" by natural memetic selection. When we look at the evidence for biological evolution, there are certain fingerprints of natural selection that we expect to see, and -- as the Intelligent Design losers are always pointing out -- if we didn't see these fingerprints, it would be pretty disturbing to current theory. These fingerprints are things like the recurrent laryngeal nerve. That's an extreme example, but the point is that we should see animals "designed" in a way that betrays a compromise modification of an earlier design, rather than an optimal "clean sheet" design.

So do we see those fingerprints on religion? Yes we do. And I think that the concept of prayer, at least as it relates to most modern religions, is a real doozy. I haven't posted much about it, but I've discussed with my wife the bizarre contradiction among virtually all modern religions between belief in a God that is omnipotent and omniscient and benevolent and has a perfect "plan" vs. the habit of prayer. If God's plan is perfect, why are you bothering her with suggestions?

This logical clunker is a damn good candidate for the Abrahamic equivalent of a recurrent laryngeal nerve. If you look at the Judaic God, omnipotence and omniscience (but not necessarily benevolence or possession of a perfect "plan") are important adaptive traits, which the Torah hammers home again and again in pointing out that if you mess with God, he will mess with you -- and how! (visited upon the third and fourth generations, etc.) The same is true of Yahweh's predecessors and rough contemporaries, but I mostly want to look at the Abrahamic lineage here. (On a side note, another distinctive "adaptation" of Judaism is the idea of a chosen people. This trait seems to be a big winner early on, but it also seems to be directly in contradiction with that whole "evangelical zeal" thing, which turns out to be hugely adaptive, for obvious reasons.)

For an omnipotent -- but not necessarily benevolent -- God, prayer makes perfect sense. "Please sir, if you could just find it in your heart to not kill us all today, that would be great." She can do whatever she wants to you, but if you ask nicely, there is still room for convincing.

Now, I am not an expert on the development of early Christianity, but at some point there seems to have been a definite shift towards the idea of a benevolent God. I suppose one could argue that this shift had already begun with Judaism. As megalomaniacal and erratic as the God of the Torah is, his capriciousness does not rise quite to the level of the Greek Gods, for example. Yahweh might kill every living thing on Earth except for one family just because he thought some of them were dicks, but he wouldn't turn into a bull and go rape some people on a whim. Christianity pushed things even further in this direction: God is perfect and fair and benevolent (and by the way, if that seems to be a laughable impossibility in the face of the evidence, it's Your Fault for not understanding his "mysterious ways").

The adapative benefit of this is obvious as well. The Greeks had less incentive to devote themselves to their gods, because who knows when Poseidon will just randomly trick your wife into cheating on you. The Jews have more incentive, because God at least claimed to have specific enumerable rules that one could follow if you wanted to stay on his good side. And the Christians had more incentive still, because not only was God supposedly perfectly fair and just, but he also really wants to help you out. He's on your team. Work with him. Be his buddy.

But now what of prayer? The Torah speaks of an antecedent religion that used human sacrifice, which mutated to animal sacrifice, which finally mutated away from even that at some point in the development of Christianity. The methods of supplication kept getting pushed in a more humane direction, in a direction where god was less of an "insane bully" and more of a "protective father". Just like the laryngeal nerve, the method of placating one's god kept shifting to accommodate newer adaptations. And just like the laryngeal nerve, by the time this gradual shifting becomes a problem, it's too late to do anything about it.

Surely many thinkers over the centuries must have realized the inanity of pleading with an omniscient being who already has a "perfect" inalterable plan. But what are you going to do? "The Pope has determined that prayer doesn't make any damn sense any more, so although Mass will still include communion, confession, etc., there will be no more prayers." No, of course not. Prayer was such a fixture of the religion by that point, it couldn't be changed. Even if prayer makes as much sense in modern interpretations of Christianity as it does to get from the vagus nerve to the larynx by looping underneath the thorax.

There are more obvious "fingerprints" of the evolution of religion, of course -- basically, anything that can be traced back to syncretism, such as celebrating the alleged birth of Jesus (which, if one takes the Bible literally, can be inferred to have probably occurred in September, or maybe in the spring, but most certainly not in winter!) over the same time frame as a pagan winter festival, and adopting numerous traditions from said festival. But those syncretic fingerprints are neutral. There is no horrible logical contradiction in choosing an arbitrary date for celebrations, and plenty of practical value in lining it up to coincide with other religions' festivals.

But I think that prayer in the face of omniscience is a really interesting one, because it really demonstrably is a suboptimal solution. I'm not the only one to realize that it doesn't make any sense. One of the most visible and frequently practiced aspects of your religion is a bald logical contradiction. Even with most homo sapiens being rather poor critical thinkers, that still can't be good for business. And yet, it ain't gonna change, because to fix it without doing damage would require a radical memetic reorganization, one that is unlikely to occur naturally.

This is important because it really drives home the fact that even if religion became so dominant because it evolved to confer certain social benefits, that tells us nothing. Just as with the laryngeal nerve -- which, to be fair, works just fine -- with human foresight we might just put together a system that's far superior and far more sensible.

Feel good? Do good? Not in my church, young man!

Via RichardDawkins.net comes a disturbingly credulous article from CNN about a minister/theology professor who published a book called Almost Christian, regarding some supposedly horrible decline in religious passion among youth. Ho hum. One line really struck me, though:

Many teenagers thought that God simply wanted them to feel good and do good...

The article then goes on to have the author/minister/theologian explain why this is a bad thing.

So much for religion being a force to make people happy. You think God simply wants you to feel good and do good? No no no, we can't be having that! Why, thinking that the point of life is to be enriched and to enrich others... that's practically humanism! No no, the real God wants you to be miserable and sexually dysfunctional and afraid of eternal hellfire. I guess you got the wrong impression with this whole "Love one another" business. See, that's just a mistranslation. In the original text, what Jesus actually said was, "I hate fags, I hate women, now give me your damn money." Feel good and do good?!? That's the devil talking!

Yeah so, anyway... message for my son: Feel good. Do good. Be yourself.

A "War on Christmas" Checklist

h/t to FriendlyAtheist for linking this video on why Christians are not being oppressed in the United States. Only problem with the list in the video is that, while everything in their is true, the Glenn Becks of the world will deny bits of it. Also, not to get all accomodation-y, but the opening card saying that Christians are the oppressors is going to sabotage any attempt to make this video resonate with people who do believe in the mythical War on Christmas.

So here I have culled the checklist down to only those things which I think are so indisputable that even Bill O'Reilly wouldn't deny it. Obviously you don't want to link "War on Christmas"-believers to this blog -- but feel free to copy-and-paste this link, without credit, to anybody who asserts that Christmas is under siege.

Things that Christians can say that no other religious group in the US can:

• I can expect to get the day off for my faith's holidays in almost any job.
• I can easily find books, in virtually any bookstore, accurately describing the beliefs and practices of my faith.
• I can go into a non-specialty store and find decorations specific to my faith's holidays.
• I can go into a non-specialty store and find greeting cards specifically designed for my faith's holidays.
• I can go into virtually any music store and find music pertaining to my faith and my faith's holidays.
• I can easily find various paraphernalia -- bookmarks, T-shirts, bumper stickers, coffee mugs, jewelery, etc. -- that pertain to my faith, my faith's symbols, and my faith's holidays, in numerous non-specialty stores.
• I can put up decorations around my house and in public view pertaining to my faith's holidays without worrying that people will judge me negatively or think I am "weird."
• I can easily find a group to worship with and carry out my faith's rites and ceremonies.
• I can easily find spiritual counseling in my area from someone who shares my faith, often paid for by health insurance.
• I can easily find support groups and charities organized by people of my faith.
• I don't have to worry that someone will tell me my faith isn't a "real" religion.
• I can easily find holiday specials on TV that depict people celebrating my faith's holidays.
• I can expect the media to try and accurately portray my faith's views on any political matter.
• I can walk onto any campus in the country and find a group dedicated to my faith.
• I can be pretty sure I won't cause a huge controversy or a moral panic if I try to open a community center for my faith.
• In virtually every election I have voted in, at least one and often both of the major candidates share some variant of my faith.
• The majority of Americans identify with some variant of my faith.

Whatever your feelings are on religion, it ought to be crystal clear that Christians are not being oppressed in the United States. I hope this list has demonstrated that beyond any shadow of a doubt.

The Reason for the Season...

...is because the winter is drab and depressing in northern latitudes. Deal with it.

I probably don't need to tell that to most readers of this blog, but I need to get this out of my system anyway. The evidence for this simple fact is overwhelming. Is it just a coincidence that every single culture living in northern latitudes has some sort of mid-winter festival involving fire and lights and feasting? The winter festival was our ancestors' way of dealing with Seasonal Affective Disorder. Late December through February are depressing up here, and we all could use some cheering up.

Further evidence that a Christmas-like winter festival long predates Christianity is the infamous condemnation of Christmas trees in Jeremiah 10:3-4:

3 For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe.
4 They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not. (KJV)

So that pretty much settles that. The "reason for the season" is to spread some good cheer at a time when those of us who live in harsh wintry climates could really use it.

Now let's be clear about what this observation is not. This is not a volley in the mythical "War on Christmas". This observation does not seek to undermine the religious observance of Christmas whatsoever. The true "reason for the season" may be far more pragmatic than a religious celebration, but the fact that for many people it takes the form of a religious celebration is (more or less) fine by me.

And that's why I am writing this post. There exists a certain subset of people, who, when they see non-Christians celebrating a winter holiday, get this absurd notion that we are co-opting and diluting/distorting their religious celebration. For anyone with even the slightest clue about the history of Christmas and other mid-winter festivals, that's just absurd.

Christmas is one in a long line of many, many, many winter festivals -- and that's okay! It's even okay that Christmas as celebrated by the majority of Christians borrows heavily from pagan traditions that predated the Common Era. (As surely every educated adult knows by now? I hope??) There's nothing wrong with syncretism, despite God's aforementioned condemnation of it in Jeremiah (the Jews were big on enforcing their cultural distinctiveness, you see). Christians are quite welcome to join the whole rest of the world (at least those living in cold climates) in having a nice cheery festival this time of year, with their own spin on it.

But please. Spare us the accusations of cultural co-option. That's just stupid, and any educated adult ought to know it by now. Maybe you can argue that the primary reason for Christmas is to celebrate Jesus' birth. But the general reason for festivals in the December time frame (as well as the reason for the scheduling of Christmas -- remember, virtually all theologians believe Jesus was definitely not born on December 25th) is to combat the winter doldrums. Christians who believe otherwise really need to get over themselves.

Egnor's questions

Bjørn inspires me to answer Michael Egnor's questions. It's actually not a bad summation of the "Big Questions", even though some of the ordering and phrasing is clearly meant to have a polemical element. Still, probably worth each individual going through it.

Before I start, I do have to say that, first, as Bjørn points out, all that is required to be an atheist is a lack of belief in gods. The way Egnor begins his post is analogous to a philately club president asking, "If aphilatelists don't collect stamps, just what the fuck do they collect?" Clearly a dumb question. Even if we are charitable and assume Engor is specifically trying to understand the Gnu Aphilatelists, who have made a lot of press lately opposing the influence of stamp-collecting on public policy, and pointing out rampant examples of misogyny, homophobia, and child abuse that have been regularly occurring at philately clubs... he implies that "[i]f New Atheist belief can only be expressed by negation of the beliefs of others," that this is inherently a bad thing. It's not. If I protest against Canada's sanctioned baby seal harvest, that position can only be expressed as the negation of another's -- so what? When you are opposing something you believe to be damaging, naturally that opposition must be described as, um, er, an opposition. I don't see a way around that.

Lastly, Egnor's "New Atheism Cliff Notes", while I realize they were meant to be tongue-in-cheek, contains a very objectionable one: "Theists are IDiots". No, many theists are not IDiots. IDiots are idiots. Some theists (like Egnor) are indeed IDiots; some theists are idiots but not IDiots; hell, some atheists are idiots but not IDiots; and of course, many theists are neither idiots nor IDiots. I think all brands of theistic belief are kinda silly at best, and usually rather, well, idiotic.. but that doesn't mean the people who believe them are idiots. I do some idiotic things, too; we all do. But the difference is, while I may do idiotic things like I dunno, drink too much at band practice when I know I have an early meeting the next morning (not that that would ever happen...since last Thursday), I'm not out there demanding that any political candidate that gets my vote must also be foolish about how much they have to drink on a work night. In fact, it would be better if they didn't, eh? In any case, Egnor is being unfair. We only think he is an IDiot, not all theists.

Okay, with the caveats out of the way, each individual Gnu -- each individual thinking person, for that matter -- ought to at least give some thought to these sorts of existential questions, and Egnor's list, while it contains some red herrings, is not a bad jumping off point. Let's do it!

1) Why is there anything?
Coincidentally, I revisited this question in a recent post. This is a difficult question, and I have a few ways of approaching it. I will reserve one type of approach for Egnor's second question, but for this one, I think I will use a new tactic I developed in that recent post.

So what are we really asking? Any answer to this question which falls in the subset of "anything" would, by definition, fail to answer the question. Why do bananas grow on trees? Because of banana trees. No, not an answer. So really, what are we asking? We are asking, "What is the nothing that caused there to be anything?" Well that's easy! Nothing.

Of course, this comes off a bit snarky, but I think it's a better answer than anything else you will get. Physics might give us some pretty satisfying answers for how the universe came to be given very simple laws (I'll tackle that in the next question) but by definition it must start out with something, some law or way of evolving the "anything." If you want to know why that exists, you're out of luck. And God is not an answer; in fact it's a rather stupid answer because God is most definitely "something". Don't give me this Uncaused Cause bullshit, because that's just an assertion. Why do bananas grow on trees? Because of an Uncaused Cause that caused them to appear there. Yeah, you lose, try again.

2) What caused the Universe?
Here I will fall back on the physics-oriented answers. A popular one is that "nothing" (as in nothingness) is unstable. Another similar answer is that even in nothingness, there are constantly virtual particle/anti-particle pairs being created and then annihilated as result of the natural fluctuating of the quantum field. Certain rare events could conceivably cause those fluctuations to result in a spontaneous symmetry breaking, and thus the Big Bang. Stephen Hawking appears to mount yet another answer in his new book, one which seems to be similar to multiverse theory, and which he claims only depends on gravity.

Moreover, logic is not a fundamental law of the universe; it is an emergent property that works rather well at the macroscopic level. It just may be that in the first few picoseconds after the Big Bang, asking what "caused" a thing is just using misleading language. Sure, things still had to obey physical laws, and the math seems to describe those crucial existential moments pretty damn well so far. But to try to take a high level logic of "event A caused event B, which in turn caused event C" etc., and apply it to that time in the history of the universe... I suspect it's a futile endeavor. Might as well ask about the tensile strength of an electron. Both concepts are real, but... the former does not apply at the scale of the latter.

So, more directly: What caused the Universe? I don't know, and nobody is sure... But physics is beginning to offer some rather mathematically elegant answers. Those answers may turn out not to be particularly existentially satisfying -- but the Universe is not here for our existential edification, we're responsible for working that one out on our own.

And given the context of Egnor's questions, I have to add: "Goddidit" is en even less existentially satisfying answer, at least for me. "Fluctuations in the quantum foam" leaves the romantic part of my brain asking, "That's it?" But "Goddidit" leaves the romantic part of my brain asking, "That's it?" and the logical part of my brain crying, "You've got to be fucking kidding me..."

3) Why is there regularity (Law) in nature?
Taken in isolation, this question is a tough one, and as I already hinted at in my answer to the first question, I suspect it might be unanswerable.

A modified question, though, is quite answerable: "Which poses greater explanatory difficulty: regularity or irregularity?"

If we think about the types of answers that would be required to explain regularity and/or the existential challenges posed by the lack of any satisfying answer, those answers/challenges pale in comparison to what would be required for an irregular/lawless universe. For our universe, the only question is why it should obey this small set of mathematically simple laws -- a set which is shrinking all the time, as we find how to derive more complex behavior from simpler behavior. For a lawless universe, every single event has a "why" attached to it! And even worse, if a lawless universe developed organisms stable enough to ask these sorts of questions, then you have some serious explaining to do. Why should all of these random lawless events result in humans?! That's just bizarre.

Again I cannot escape returning to the theistic subtext of Egnor's questions: I always find it surprising that people think an ordered universe obeying simple laws is evidence of a god. I think quite the opposite! One of the most convincing pieces of evidence I can imagine for a theistic explanation of the universe would be if matter and energy obeyed no consistent laws whatsoever, and yet still we had humans and trees and rocks and dirt (and two horses)... well holy shit, that would pretty much imply there had to be some sort of Intelligent Designer orchestrating the whole thing, wouldn't it?

4) Of the Four Causes in nature proposed by Aristotle (material, formal, efficient, and final), which of them are real? Do final causes exist?
Okay, I'm going to need to look this one up, because I'm not familiar with the Four Causes... but before I do, first I need to point out that Aristotle's achievement was in practicing an unprecedentedly rigorous brand of philosophy, in tackling questions where before the best answers had been of the "zeusdidit" variety. His achievement was not in having outlined a particularly good philosophy, not by modern standards. So before I even Wikipedia this, my expectation is that it will be a big shrug.

Okay, looked it up. It's not as bad as I expected, and I think that Aristotle's classification of causes is just reasonable enough that I can answer Egnor's question: I believe in the first three as properties of the physical world (with caveats -- Aristotle's understanding of 20th century physics is weak at best :p ). I believe that "final causes" exist only as abstractions in the mind of sentient beings -- and that those minds only exist (again with caveats) as a result of the first three causes. (Note that something which approximates "final causes" exists in nature as a result of natural selection... but it's not really the same thing. As Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini so impetuously and unceasingly point out in their recent aggravating book, you can never formally say with perfect certainty that a particular trait was "selected for" in order to satisfy a particular selective pressure. There's always the theoretical possibility of a pleiotropy, genetic drift, or whatever as the actual "cause". And as F&P also point out -- like people didn't know this? -- natural selection has no mind, and therefore can have no intention in mind. No, "final causes" do not exist in nature. A seed does not exist for the purpose of becoming an adult plant -- the seed just exists, and natural selection has caused it to be a thing which turns into an adult plant. Purposes are the exclusive realm of sentient beings.)

I think I've satisfactorily answered the question, but before I move on, a comment about Aristotle and physics... yeah, the first three causes were an awesome attempt at a taxonomy of physical causation -- for c. 350 BC. But now we know it's pretty wrong. For instance, the first cause, "material cause", is really a subset of "formal cause" -- the material a thing is made of is a function of the form of it's subatomic particles. And in order to make the causes comprehensive, we have to stretch -- really stretch them. Does "efficient cause" cover quantum chromodynamics? Hmmmm....

5) Why do we have subjective experience, and not merely objective existence?
Now that's the sixty-four thousand dollar question, in'n't it? I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on this one, mostly because it requires a book-length treatment to even approach the question. (See Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop for an excellent, if flawed, attempt. Although I have not yet had the pleasure, I understand Daniel Dennett has done great work on this topic as well.) For now, suffice it to say that, at the very least, we have some damn good explanations for how a purely objective reality could give rise to beings who looked, acted, and quacked like conscious beings with subjective experience... and since I think Chalmer's P-zombies don't hold up to scrutiny, I suspect it might just be philosophical fair game to say that the positive result on the Duck Test justifies the existence of subjective experience.

I also am questioning to what extent subjective experience is real to begin with. We already know that personal identity is somewhat of a hallucination. The difficulty in isolating a true present makes me wonder if you even need to posit the existence of the hallucination. I don't know. These are very difficult existential questions, and almost by definition we cannot be equipped to know the answer.

In any case, I'm going to dodge this one for now just because it's too damn long and deep. Again in the theistic context: Even if I were convinced that some sort of immaterial soul was somehow "responsible" for subjective experience, these same questions would remain. After all, we already have a physical mechanism to explain how an organism could act as if it had subjective experience... why would a spiritual explanation of that same thing be any better?

6) Why is the human mind intentional, in the technical philosophical sense of aboutness, which is the referral to something besides itself? How can mental states be about something?
This post is getting long... but I have to say, given a material answer to question 5, I don't see how this is even a question. The brain is a naturally selected aboutness machine... isn't it? It would be like asking how the pixels on my computer screen can be about something. They're built to do that. What's the question here? I guess I'm just not a good philosopher...

7) Does Moral Law exist in itself, or is it an artifact of nature (natural selection, etc.)
I've written quite a long post on this, so I'll merely direct there. In a nutshell: Mostly the latter, and there is no problem with that. (Nor does that make it relative... the fact that the sole reason I don't like to be kicked in the balls is because of an artifact of natural selection does not diminish the absolute fact that if you kick me in the balls for no reason, you are a fucking asshole! Some "morality" is purely relative, though in most cases I question whether that is truly moral. Most worthwhile morality is relative to our species, but not relative to culture or individuals -- within our species, it is absolute! And that's why I will not apologize for saying, for example, that FGM is a disgusting and barbaric practice, and "cultural tolerance" is not a valid reason to allow sick fucks to chop off little girl's clitorises. kthxbye)

The post I directed to has some ideas for a species-transcendent morality... but it's just that, an idea. I dunno if it makes sense. In any case, even if my ideas for a species-transcendent morality are sound, it still exists only as an inherent artifact of natural selection... it still requires natural selection to exist.

Notice that this is a much better answer than God-says-so. Even theologians agree that morality must exist independent of God, or else it's not morality. If the only reason child-rapin' is wrong is because you're afraid of getting burned in hell, that is not moral (and it's offensive to say so, by the way!). Even if we accept a belief in God, morality must exist independent of Her, with God helping us to determine what is moral rather than dictating it. Otherwise, it is not, by definition, moral.

8) Why is there evil?
Yo mama.

Sorry, post is long. On the home stretch now!

First of all, does Egnor mean "evil" or "Evil"? If he means the latter, then I don't believe in it. If he means the former, does he mean natural evil, like earthquakes and shit; or human-caused evil, like the Holocaust and New Country music; or both? I'll divide it up.

Natural evil exists because the universe doesn't care about us. In fact, in a way, natural selection could not work without natural evil... we are what we are because the universe is constantly randomly killing us, and it turns out that an error-prone digital method of replication allows us to develop better survival mechanisms in the face of this unending danger.

Human-caused evil exists, first, because of the same reason as natural evil. Humans are part of the universe, and there's no magic wand being waved with the incantation, "Universe, don't kill stuff." Moreover, there are all sorts of reasons for humans to behave in immoral ways. For one, it appears that fairly simple genetic mutations or brain injuries can "break" that mechanism, e.g. in the case of sociopaths. For another, there are models which predict evolutionary stable states (ESS) where some fixed portion of the population "cheats" due to their genetic makeup. And even those of us who are normally functioning "moral" humans have still evolved to only be moral some of the time... there are competing impulses, as well as a likely selective advantage to cheating "some" of the time. Lastly, our modern conceptions of morality and ethics are a prioritization and synthesis of our often contradictory and self-defeating naturally-selected moral imperatives -- so obviously our naturally-selected selves are not always going to be driven to behave according to this modern conception.

This again is a question that I think is fairly boring if you already have a material view of the universe. Why wouldn't there be bad shit in an unguided universe? It would be like asking, "Why is there yellow?" Well, there's a certain range of wavelengths of light... So what?

So there you have it. My answers to Egnor's questions. But notice, while I may have some answers in common with other Gnus, these are my own answers. You will tend to see the Gnus giving materially-oriented answers, but what form those take will vary highly from individual to individual. The Gnu Atheism is about opposing the destructive social and public policy influence of religion. Yes, Egnor, the Gnu Atheism is defined as a negative -- so what?

What Egnor asks would be like asking a bunch of anti-war protesters about their views on abortion. Oh sure, you might tend to get a high percentage of them being pro-choice, just because of the left-leaning association... but it will be by no means uniform. Anti-war protesters are defined as those who oppose war, not as those who have pro-choice views, etc. That opposition is made up of individuals, just like Gnu Atheism.

Ben Goldacre is right

I just want to highlight this CiF article from Ben Goldacre that was linked to from RichardDawkins.net. His first paragraph makes a point that I whole-heartedly agree with, though it's easy to forget:

This week the pope is in London. You will have your own views on the discrimination against women, the homophobia, and the international criminal conspiracy to cover up for mass child rape. My special interest is his role in the 2 million people who die of Aids each year.

Indeed, I have said before that as disgusting as the cover-up of child abuse has been, far and away the worst crime the Catholic church is committing against humanity is their efforts at African genocide. I mean, let's be honest, that's what we're talking about here, is effectively genocide.

Oh sure, they may tell all 1.1 billion Catholics not to use any form of birth control, but let me let you in on a dirty little secret: Western Catholics, especially the more affluent ones, routinely ignore this insane bit of doctrine. Those who actually obey the Vatican's breathtakingly stupid policy on condoms tend to be the poor and those in the developing world. And with AIDS rates as high as they are in Africa, this deliberately ignorant piece of dogma can only have one effect: It will disproportionately kill Africans in comparison to any other demographic, and it will do so by the hundreds of thousands. That's fucking genocide in my book.

As bad as the child rape cover-up is, as much hate and intolerance the Catholic church can manage to spread, the worst thing of all is the destructive campaign to stop condom use in Africa, perpetrated via what are nominally referred to as "charitable" organizations on the continent. Let's not forget that.

The difference between the book-burning Florida pastor and Crackergate

Much ado lately about the douchebag Florida pastor who is going to burn a bunch of Qurans this Saturday. Inevitably, the anti-gnu atheist crowd has occasionally drawn comparisons to PZ's infamous cracker mutilation. And indeed, the analogy had occurred to me even before I heard it invoked by critics. In both cases, we are looking at the desecration of a religious symbol. If we are going to view one of them as a vicious act of bigotry and the other as a legitimate act of protest, we ought to have our reasoning clear. So I think this is worth examining.

On a purely practical level, it ought to be obvious that one act is simply far more dangerous than the other at the present point in time. At the time of Crackergate, the US was not in the process of trying to extricate itself from a foreign war involving Catholicist guerrillas and terrorists. There was no open war between a militant form of theocratic Catholicism and American universities. And if there had, one probably could have argued that PZ's actions would have been reckless. If there were a serious possibility that PZ's cracker abuse could have resulted in, say, a Catholic terrorist group bombing a university... well, I'm not saying we should self-censor out of fear, but this does factor in.

More importantly, though, is that PZ was specifically protesting something -- the death threats and over-the-top rhetoric surrounding Webster Cook's fateful curiosity about the Eucharist -- in a targeted and specific way. There was a clear message to Catholics: You can believe what you want, but what you cannot do is force the rest of us to take your symbols seriously.

The Florida pastor, on the other hand, does not really seem to have a point, other than "Islam is bad, mmm'kay?" If the protest had a specific goal -- protesting female genital mutilation, or the practice of taking child brides, for example -- then a protest along the lines of what the pastor is proposing might make sense and, though perhaps still ill-advised, would not necessarily be hate speech. (Though surely these cretins must be aware of the history they are invoking when they choose to use book-burning as their medium... Yeesh!)

And that's exactly why I get so frustrated when people leave out the important details of Crackergate. If PZ had just woken up one morning and said to himself, "You know, I really hate Catholics. I'm gonna stab myself a Eucharist!", then I think that might count as hate speech. Though even if that had been the case, the public reaction was still way over-the-top. And surprise, that's exactly the point PZ was making!

In fact, if this pastor's point was that people get way too upset about Quran abuse, then although I would still find the planned protest to be ill-advised, I would not necessarily find it hateful. Indeed, it's very silly how apoplectic people get about their religious symbols, and the Islamic reverence for the Quran is no exception. I am wracking my brain to try to think of any symbol that I hold so dear that if someone were to desecrate it I would do much more than call them an asshole. The closest I can think of is if somebody befouled a picture of my family, but that's different because a personal threat is implied.

I think the very closest I can come is an example like Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church. But even then, it's the captive-ish audience that is the problem. (Not technically a captive audience I suppose, but are you going to leave your own son's or daughter's funeral? Please.) If Phelps and his spawn simply planned their disgusting protests on the same day as military funerals, but across town, it wouldn't warrant much more than a shrug at the existence of yet another sick malicious fundie.

There's just no way that somebody could desecrate a symbol, that did not relate to me personally, in a venue where I was not forced to watch it, and really manage to bother me all that much.

But let's remember: That's not the point this Florida pastor is trying to make. He is simply making a blanket criticism of Islam, which due to the protest's violent overtones and undirected nature, translates to a blanket indictment of Muslims themselves. And that's when it crosses the line from legitimate critique into hate speech: When you stop criticizing the philosophy and start dehumanizing or threatening the people.

Kirby explains the Catholic sex abuse cover-up

Paula Kirby, in an article on RichardDawkins.net, provides a perfectly understandable (though still shocking) reason behind the Vatican-ordered cover-ups:

As soon as we understand that canon law deals only with sin and ‘the drama of redemption’, and that its foremost preoccupation when it comes to child sex abuse is the soul of the abuser, closely followed by the perceived need to protect other souls which might fall away if the church were brought into scandal and disrepute, everything about the shameful non-response of the Vatican falls into place and becomes clear.

Damn, she's right. It makes perfect sense: If we assume a priori that leaving Catholicism or failing to repent for a serious sin will result in eternal hellfire, then the rational decision stemming from that a priori assumption is to do exactly what the Catholic church did for decades. The emotional trauma of the victim is trivial compared to the perceived costs.

A conditional afterlife is perhaps the most poisonous religious belief, because it obliterates any proper evaluation of earthly (i.e. non-fake) priorities. Those religions that believe everybody gets to heaven can still distort priorities -- after all, everything in this life becomes less important if it is to be followed by an eternity of bliss -- but since it devalues all priorities by roughly the same amount, it does not have nearly the potential for disruption and hence is not nearly as dangerous.

"Phone call from God"? I like it!

Via RichardDawkins.net comes an article about Bible campers who each received a "phone call from God" as part of their camp experience. The comments on the article have many atheists chiming in with the kind of outrage you might predict: "...lie to children in order to brainwash them...", "...despicable when adults are so deceitful and manipulate little children this way", "title of this article should be 'still lying for jesus'", etc. Oh, they're not wrong. But I had a different reaction, one that might surprise you:

Right on!

Why do I say that? Because this is putting Jeebus firmly in the same camp as Santa Claus. Which sounds great to me.

The only reason it's cute when we have kids sit on Santa's lap or pretend to mail their letters to the North Pole is because we assume that as they start to grow up, they'll start to realize the absurdity of the whole charade. Even young children can smell bullshit when you have to explain to them that, "Oh, yes you're right that Santa can't possibly be at every mall at the same time. See, that's just Santa's helper!" Ironically, the charade itself becomes the first frayed threads that start to unravel the entire mythology. If there were no Santa-at-the-mall, there would be no corresponding realization of the implausibility of Santa-at-the-mall, and the myth of Santa might last just a little bit longer in these young minds.

These kids getting the "phone calls from God" are seven, eight years old according to the article. It won't be more than another year or two on the outside that they realize it wasn't actually a phone call from God, I would think.... and maybe that will be their first inkling that something doesn't smell quite right.

It's probably beyond the average ten-year-old to identify the flaws in Pascal's Wager, or to recognize the arbitrariness of their own beliefs in relation to the beliefs of children in another part of the world, or to spot the problems with the Cosmological Argument (most ten-year-olds in fact are quite swayed by the much more simplistic Teleological Argument). But your average ten-year-old knows that "phone calls from God" are fake. Your average ten-year-old may even go on to think, "Hmmm, now why did the adults at the camp bother to fake that phone call from God, if they knew I could just pray about it? I wonder..."

So I say, go for it. This kind of absurd shenanigans demystifies and deromanticizes God, and potentially invites some rather "inconvenient" questions -- and in my book, that's a good thing.

(Side note: This reminds me of my vision of a distant post-Christian future where there are kiosks at the mall where once a year you can take your kids to get First Communion pictures, complete with a comically dressed Pope -- or Pope's Helper, as the case may be -- wafers shaped like Dinosaur Jeebus, a variety of optional photo packages, etc...)

The Ladder of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

So much for religion as "another way of knowing".

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is co-owned by "no less then six denominations. The primary custodians are the Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic and Roman Catholic church, with lesser duties shared by Coptic, Ethiopian and Syriac Orthodox churches." But these guys are all Christians, right? So if there is any epistemological value to Christianity whatsoever, they should be able to come to some agreements, even if it takes a while... right?

Enter The Immovable Ladder of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Over 150 years ago, somebody placed a ladder up against the wall of the church, presumably doing some basic maintenance. Now nobody will touch it because there is concern that the other five denominations with joint control of the church will flip out or something.

Yeah that's uh, messed up.

More hilarious unintentional fundie irony

A 10-year-old boy who earlier made news for his support of gay rights has been invited to serve as Grand Marshall in a Pride parade -- and the despicable American Family Association is calling it "child abuse". That's fairly predictable though. The funny part is their description of what makes it child abuse:

"It's shameful that adults would abuse a brain-washed child in this way," AFA president Tim Wildmon writes in a press release. "He's obviously just parroting the nonsense he's been told by manipulative adults..."

Wait a minute... "parroting the nonsense he's been told by manipulative adults?" Isn't that the entire point of Sunday School?

I thought they were going to say something about exposure to sexual perversion. But they're focusing on the brainwashing? Seriously?!?

If this type of "brainwashing" is child abuse, then the AFA is also forced to agree with Richard Dawkins when he says that raising a child to believe in religion is child abuse. It's the same fucking thing. Now, I personally think Dawkins' remark is maybe a little over-the-top (though I agree with the sentiment), but if the AFA wants to be logically consistent then they hav-

Oh wait. I almost just used "AFA" and "logically consistent" in the same sentence. Nevermind.

If you believe in Hell and you aren't an Evangelical, screw you

It occurred to me the other day that anyone who really believes in Hell as a literal place of eternal suffering for non-believers, ought to be out there every day trying as hard as they can to convince other people of "the truth". In particular, I'm thinking of the vast masses of Catholics who just callously go about their day-to-day business believing that most of their friends and neighbors will burn forever in a lake of fire. That's stone cold, yo.

Of course, it's also far less annoying than evangelizing. So really this is a purely academic point. It's totally fucked up that someone would believe I was going to experience maximal suffering forever and ever, and yet not do anything about it -- but if the alternative is annoying the piss out of me, I guess I won't complain too much.

Most of the theists I have any respect for don't believe in Hell anyway, or at least not as a place of eternal and/or unbearable suffering. It's hard for me to understand how anyone could believe in Hell and not go completely insane in a matter of days, so I guess this is all a moot point.

Response to "Shall the fundamentalists inherit the earth?"

Welp, I was going to make a comment on a post over at Tom Rees' blog, and I got so verbose it went over the 4k-per-comment limit. It's probably rude to post a comment that long anyway, so why don't I respond in the form of a blog post, hmmm?

Tom's post is in regards to the book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? by Eric Kaufmann. In it, Kaufmann provides disturbing statistics suggesting that religious fundamentalists may out-reproduce the non-religious and religious moderates alike, resulting in a future demographic breakdown that favors extreme patriarchy and oppression of women. I'll let you read Tom's original post for the details. What follows is my response:

First things first, I am extremely skeptical about Tom's contention that "ratcheting up the level of conflict serves to paradoxically increase the power of the religious patriarchs." It seems to me that these highly insular patriarchal groups do not require any external catalyst whatsoever to "ratchet things up". Note that the Ken Hamms of the world hate the Francis Collinses as much or more than they hate the PZes. I know that is Creationist fundamentalism rather than extreme patriarchal fundamentalism, but I suspect their respective responses to the outside world are similar. As was pointed out to me today, no amount of pandering will satisfy an extremist, and similarly I doubt that any amount of politeness is likely to prevent insular cult leaders from "ratcheting it up". They will feel equally under attack regardless of tone or content -- creating a persistent feeling of being under attack is what they do, otherwise they would not be able to achieve insularity.

Tom expresses hope that the problem may be solved by a rebound in liberal fertility, a possibility that is already showing early signs of plausibility. It could happen, but with AGW a looming and unresolved problem, that's going to be a tough sell for a lot of people. And even neglecting whether it could happen or not, combating the rise of fundamentalism by increasing global fertility rates -- while NOT solving the problem of out-of-control carbon emissions -- is a solution that could backfire quite badly for everyone. (Full disclosure: My wife and I are planning, for the moment, on eventually having three children altogether, despite some reservations I have that this may be grossly environmentally irresponsible)

On the other hand, I am highly skeptical that this scenario of unchecked growth of insular patriarchal fundamentalism is realistic after all. Insularity is difficult to maintain on a large scale. The Amish may have ballooned to a quarter million, but try keeping up those fertility and retention rates when it's five million or ten million. Almost by definition, insularity can only be maintained on a relatively small scale.

The Mormons, a group with which I unfortunately have intimate experience, are a relevant example here... They are spreading worldwide, but the pace of their expansion has slowed (don't let misleading statistics used in church propaganda convince you otherwise), and I can tell you from personal experience that the insularity is not well-maintained outside of Utah and parts of Idaho, Nevada, and Colorado -- and as we might predict, retention rates are quite poor outside of Mormon Country. And there's only so many Elder Youngs and Sister Smiths you can cram into 82,100 square miles. If most patriarchal cults go the way of Mormonism, it's quite possible that the trend identified by Kaufmann will turn out to be self-limiting.

Which is not to say the subject isn't worthy of concern, especially if the Mormon blueprint is/becomes atypical. It may turn out that in the Internet era, a bazillion insulated "cells" could form, connected by a common ideology spread via the 'tubes. I'm thinking Quiverfull here, which is not a singular insular cult, but rather is composed of thousands of scattered insular groups united only by their interest in explosive reproduction. The Duggars (of 19 Kids and Counting fame) could even represent the prototypical model for this kind of "cell"-like expansion: they aren't a member of any church per se, but rather they hold Sunday services in their own home, and occasional meet with like-minded families at conferences, camps, etc. The Duggars themselves probably won't have a particularly high retention rate, given that the omnipresent film crew severely disrupts their insularity, but the "cell"-like nature of how they practice their brand of patriarchy is disturbing to say the least, and contradicts my previous contention that the trend will be self-limiting.

It may be naive, but the biggest source of hope for me is that, given access to sufficient information, our side is quite clearly right while the other side is quite clearly wrong. I know it makes me sound absolutist, but I make no apologies when I say that there is no such thing as "cultural relativism" when it comes to the wrongness of oppressing women, for example. Those who are cognizant of the world at large and who still maintain these backward worldviews are anomalies; the vast majority are operating from a position of ignorance. As the pace of information flow increases, perhaps it will be harder and harder to maintain these pockets of willful ignorance... Or so I hope.