The Insentient Watchmaker

You say that...
If I...
Stumbled on a watch I'd assume it had a watchmaker,
That a muffin presupposes a baker,
So you must agree sooner or later,
That this proves that there's a creator.
So if I put my foot in a stinker,
You'd assume the existence of a sphincter,
Thus you don't need to be a great thinker
To coclude that God's a bum,
...
--Exerpt from "Ten Foot Cock and a Few Hundred Virgins" by Tim Minchin

William Paley first posed the question of whether, if you found a watch on the ground, you would suppose that it had always been there, or that its complexity and apparent purposefulness implied that someone had made it. Would you assume that the watch had a watchmaker?

Well, I think most watches are made mostly by machines these days, but if you're asking if I would think it was the result of a series of improvements upon the designs of less sophisticated timekeeping devices leading back to something that I would not have recognized as one or if I would assume that it only existed by fiat of some magic man in he sky for whose existence I have no evidence, my answer would have to be the former.

Modern clocks are derived from sundials, which meter time using the motion of a shadow cast by a gnomon onto a dial. Anything that casts a shadow can function as a rudimentary gnomon, and any landmark that the shadow moves across can be used to measure its movement. I can just imagine a cave mother telling her cave children that they can play outside, but they have to come inside the cave when the shadow of the big mountain reaches the tree line. This type of primitive timekeeping system can be augmented with additional landmarks to measure a the shadow's movement with a finer gradation, and the addition of an artificial scale with regular intervals makes the measurement more systematic. Simple mechanisms can be added to continue measuring time when the sunlight is not available, and many types of minor improvements can be made to keep time in a way that is more precise, efficient or convenient. Moderns clocks are the result of a series of many such minute improvements, as well as many dead-end modifications to clocks that were not worth repeating, and may not have ever been built before that fact was determined.

This is a process of evolution. Memes arise as random thoughts and chance occurrences. Some are absurd and dismissed immediately, others are tried unsuccessfully, but only those that work are repeated and become the basis for further improvements. Evolution isn't a process of design that doesn't require intelligence, design is a process of evolution that does.

Maybe Intelligent Design Does Have a Place in Science Class

You'll probably be shocked to hear me say it, but I think that Intelligent Design should be included in science classes. In fact, I think ID could play a more important role in science class than evolution. You see, most current science classes are a big fat failure. They teach many things that we have learned through science, but they generally do a piss-poor job of defining science, which is why so many of the products our public school system (or worse, homeschoolers) think that ID is science.

But wait, didn't I just say that ID belongs in science classes?

Intelligent Design belongs in science class because it is a consummate example of what science is not. Children are leaving school thinking that science is a body of knowledge that includes categories like physics, chemistry and biology. Under this definition, an argument could be made that if the Intelligent Design hypothesis were true (which many already assume to be the case), that it would be scientific.

Science, however, is not a body of knowledge. Science is a methodology for attaining knowledge about natural phenomena in the material world through observation and experimentation and, by extension, a standard for evaluating that knowledge. Our science classes attempt to teach the scientific method, or at least to pay lip service to doing so, but they put far more emphasis on memorizing formulae and the names of anatomical structures. These classes would be better termed "History of Science". A true science class should not teach the fruits of science, but rather the methodology of science and the value of scientific scrutiny of ideas rather than the dogmatic acceptance or rejection of them.

Intelligent Design is an untestable postulation of an immaterial being acting upon the physical world by supernatural means based on claims that have not and could not be observed to be true, and nearly every word of that description contradicts the definition of science.

Islam Bashing

I find the Islam bashing -- both around the intertubes and in traditional media -- increasingly irritating. The Christians who partake in this are generally hypocrites of the worst kind (I saw a video today in the last minute of which Sean Hannity demonstrates Godwin's law with a level of hypocrisy that demonstrate's Poe's law), but it's atheist Islam-bashers who really annoy me. Don't get me wrong, most of what they say about Islam is true of Islam, but it's also true of Christianity, and aiming your rebuke at the religion that is primarily practiced half a world away instead of the one that's most likely practiced by your next-door neighbor, or even others in your own home, smacks of xenophobia.

Let me say this very clearly, Islam is no worse than Christianity.

It may be true that proactively violent fanaticism is more common among Muslims than Christians today, but an honest look at the religious beliefs of the members of the US military would surely call even that into question. The real difference between the two is that there are currently no serious Christian theocracies. Vatican City may technically be a sovereign state, and the vestigial monarch of the UK may also have some ceremonial authority in the Anglican church, but there is no Christian state where a predominantly lay population is held to Levitical law or any other possible analog of sharia. Ironically, some of the most vocal critics of Islam would love to see the United States become just such an oppressive theocracy.

Here in the United States, Christianity is a far greater threat to our rights than Islam. Patrick Henry once famously said "Give me liberty, or give me death." Some Islamic extremists may want to give us death, but their Christian counterparts want us to have neither. More importantly, the Christians are in a better position to attain their goals on a national scale. There is also far more military and economic power among so called "Christian nations" than in the Islamic world. Conditions seem to be different in the UK and possibly elsewhere, but in the US, the threat of the intolerance and batshit-insane ideas of Islam doesn't compare to the threat of the intolerance and batshit-insane ideas of Christianity.

Criticism from within always bears more weight than criticism from afar. We have plenty of Christians and Muslims complaining, often hypocritically, about one another. We need more Christians and Muslims speaking out against more extreme versions of their own faiths, and atheists speaking out against religions with which they have to live, and of which they may have been members. This is one area in which mormonism is a good example for the rest of us, and I would like to take a moment to congratulate and to thank all the former mormons who have spoken out against the LDS church.

Am I too rational for my own good?

In the second episode of Richard Dawkins' new show, The Enemies of Reason, (which you can watch below) Dr. Dawkins takes on "alternative medicine", and pays special attention to homeopathy. In case anyone reading (if anyone is reading) is not familiar with this particular flavor of bullshit, homeopathy is a form of alternative medicine in which substances -- and it truly makes no difference what they are -- are diluted to the point that "in order to get one molecule of the active substance, you'd have to imbibe all of the atoms in the solar system."

Dawkins correctly notes that the only possible use for homeopathic "medicine" -- which, amounts to so much water, exactly as pure as that used for dilution -- is as an expensive placebo. The placebo effect is well-documented and supported by scientific evidence. The psychological effect of believing that a treatment will work causes the body's self-healing mechanisms to function more effectively. In short it only works if you believe it will work. I don't believe that ignorance is bliss, but it's undeniable that under certain circumstances, it can be healthy.

I also considered this some time ago, a few years before I realized that the god that I had heard about all my life could not possibly exist. Before this realization came the realization that prayer could not possibly be efficacious. An all-knowing and unchanging god with an all-encompassing plan would necessarily have decided whether or not to do something long before it is requested, before the birth of the requester, and indeed, before the dawn of time itself. It could not be possible to sway the will of such a being, therefore prayer is useless. My pastor did not know how to respond to this conclusion, except to subtly scold me for thinking that way. Pastors are not, after all, paid to think. My mother, the theologian, told me that the purpose of prayer is not to change God, but to change yourself, which I immediately recognized as the placebo effect.

Of course, knowing the nature of a placebo negates its effect, which at first made me reluctant to share this knowledge. It was a moral dilemma: on one hand, telling someone that prayer is a placebo would make it as useless to them as it was to me, but on the other hand, keeping someone uninformed is always a disservice. This, to me, is perhaps the most important moral question, and it took several years for me to come to the conclusion that sharing the truth with someone is always the moral thing to do, no matter how unwelcome it may be. Each person has a right to their own beliefs, but that includes the right to base those beliefs on the best information available. By giving a person incomplete or false information, you deny them the right to believe what is true, and I can thing of no worse affront. This is why it is considered unethical in scientific medicine to prescribe placebos except in cases such as clinical trials where patients may be in the test group or the control, and thus know that they may receive placebos, and agree to be temporarily uninformed so that the placebo effect can be tested.

For doctors, it would be unethical to do any more than allow a patient to believe that a placebo will be efficacious, whereas religionists and practitioners of "alternative" medicine are free free to employ lies, dogma, and obfuscation to sell their snake oil. Deceiving anyone, yourself included, is harmful, and individuals only have the right to choose that type of harm for themselves. I prefer to rely on my body's own defenses whenever it is reasonable to do so, but I also avoid these types of self-deception that could enhance those defenses, so it is likely that I would be at least marginally more healthy if I were less rational. Perhaps I am too rational for my own good.

Pascal's Wager

Pascal's Wager states that it is logical to believe in God based on a cost/benefit analysis. According to the wager, belief costs nothing, but the potential reward is infinite, as is the potential penalty for disbelief. If there is no god, nothing is gained and nothing is lost whether you believe or disbelieve. This, of course, neglects the value of a belief being true, presumably because it assumes that the chances of being correct in either situation is 50-50 and that no further study can significantly alter these odds.

There are many counter-arguments to Pascal's Wager, and I won't address nearly all of them here, but perhaps the most obvious is that it is a false dichotomy. There are many mutually-exclusive beliefs about the existence of a god or gods, and even if one chose to be a theist, one would still presumably need to choose the correct religion in order to gain the reward. Most people would then start by placing each religion on equal footing with one another and with atheism in terms of probability, but this is already mistaken because there is a true dichotomy between theism and atheism (when defined simply as a lack of theism). Religions posit a god, then make further assertions about that god, so the 50% probability that there is a god must be divided among them. At this point, it becomes clear that, in the absence of evidence either way, the atheist is more likely to be right than a member of any given religion, but this counter-argument misses the point a bit, because in this case it could still be desirable to forego all likelihood of being correct (a finite benefit) for the chance at attaining an infinite reward. This is a much truer wager, and resembles a lottery with a small buy-in for a small chance at big rewards, but in this case there is not only a huge pot to be won, but an equally huge penalty for not winning. You have to play to win, but you don't have to play to lose. Under these circumstances, it still makes sense to pick a religion and believe.

The real problem is that people assume that even if there's a 50% chance of a god, that god must resemble the god of some religion. It's tempting to divide the god side according to the world's religions, or even the individual (and unique!) concepts of god that each believer holds, but without consistent revelation, these gods are no more likely than any other conceivable gods. Herein lies, I believe, the real achilles heel of Pascal's Wager.

Let's assume that there is a god that is aware of you, gives a damn about what you believe, and will punish you for believing the wrong things with regard to its own existence. The probability of this is already far below 50%, but for the sake of argument, we'll assume that these are necessary properties of a god, and ignore deist gods who don't care or those who value other properties such as your taste in music, your favorite color, whether you donate $5 to this website, whether you have a cute mole on your ass, etc. etc. ad infinitum. This god is at least as likely to value skepticism, evidence-based belief, and critical thinking as it is to value blind faith. Add the fact that if there is a god, it goes to great lengths to hide its presence (as evidenced by the fact that we have to ask the question), and the benefit of pleasing the skepticism god is better than that of the faith god, as the latter would obviously be a sadistic psychopath who wants to punish more than to reward. Who would want to spend eternity with a jerk like that? In fact, in the watered-down theologies in which the punishment is only annihilation or separation from the god, I'd say that the punishment is better than the reward.

When you look at it this way, the greatest benefit possible comes from pleasing a god that values skepticism. Skepticism also offers the greatest chance of a benefit because you would have a 25% chance that you will be wrong but will gain the favor of a god that values skepticism on top of the %50 chance of being correct but receiving no further benefit, therefore skepticism is the only logical choice. Of course, adding gods that don't care about belief back into the equation significantly diminishes that 25%, but it diminishes the chances of having the correct theistic belief equally.

Sure, some would argue that a god that values skepticism is far less likely than one that values faith, but what evidence do we have that this is the case? Only the word of theologians who have no more evidence than you or I, can't agree on anything else, and would have to go get a real job if people didn't believe. That, Mr. Adams, does not "pass the sniff test".

Of course, it would be stupid to disbelieve in a god that probably doesn't exist simply for the purpose of currying favor with it, but I think I've demonstrated that it doesn't make any more sense to believe for the same reason.

Defining god

Some theists try to define their god into existence with prevaricatory bullshit like "God is love." The problem with this is that we already have a word for love. It's called "love". Saying that god is love makes the word useless, not to mention the fact that people who say this invariably have a concept of a god that includes supernatural powers, more than a few idiosyncratic moral precepts, and masculinity, none of which is mentioned next to love in any dictionary I've ever seen. These people -- one would hope -- were conceived in love, but even so, its clearly a stretch to claim that love is their creator.

There are some who say that a volcano or a totem pole is their god. I can see and touch these gods, so I would be forced to admit that they exist. Despite the claims they make about these inanimate objects protecting them from evil, claiming them to be higher beings is clearly daft. These objects have naturalistic origins that we are capable of grasping, and we are far more likely to bend them to our will than they us. You can worship a rock 'til you're blue in the face, but it's not going to know or care, much less have the will or ability to reward you for doing so, nor to punish you for doing otherwise. These gods too are completely useless.

So what would make a god useful? A useful god must have some kind of power over the physical universe, but this alone is not enough. Clark's third law states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, yet an advanced alien species would not be gods, however tempting it may be to call them such. A god does not have naturalistic origins or exert its control through purely naturalistic means. Without naturalistic means, though, the effects of this control would be distinguishable from what would happen in the absence of the god only by the intention behind it. In order to exhibit this intention, the god must have a will, which implies a mind, and presumably one at least as smart as our own. A god would not be very useful if it was dead, or not yet alive, so it would be expected to be uncaused and immortal, and because a physical brain is vulnerable to damage and entropy, we can assume that a useful god would be immaterial. A useful god is usually also considered to a creator, even though our scientific knowledge explains our existence as the result of naturalistic processes.

So, here is my definition of a god: a god is an eternal, non-corporeal, intelligent agent imagined to be the cause of natural events. I say imagined, because those events that are attributed to a god are invariably found to have naturalistic causes upon close enough inspection, thus the ever-narrowing "gaps" into which believers are constantly wedging their gods. A god that is only imagined does not actually exist, so you see, just as theists attempt to define their god into existence, I have defined him out of it.

What would it take?

I was thinking about what it would take to convince me that there was a god. This is a question that theists seem to like to ask, so I thought I should have an answer.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and they don't get much more extraordinary than the claim of an all-knowing, all-powerful being that's everywhere at once and cares what I do while I'm naked. It would require a demonstration that included a verifiable violation of the laws of physics, and in order for that violation to truly be verifiable, we would need a complete understanding of those laws. Is there a deity out there just waiting for us to stumble upon a Theory of Everything before it makes its presence known? I'm not holding my breath.

Theists often assume that if we had proof of a god, we would have no choice but to bow down and worship. This is not the correct response. If we met a non-human intelligent being, we should treat it the same way whether it was a god, an alien or some kind of super-chimp. The correct course of action (after learning to communicate) would be to invite the being to join our society as an equal. As a person, human or otherwise, it would have "human rights" (I don't like that term) and the obligation to afford other persons the same rights. If the god agreed to abide by our laws, we could get along amicably, and I would enjoy watching its party tricks, but if any appreciable portion of the Bible is factual, it would not accept. This is understandable, as it would need to immediately be brought up on charges that would result in imprisonment for innumerable consecutive life sentences, assuming the death penalty was not feasible.

Of course, an omnipotent being could not be forced to comply with our laws, or any punishments we deemed necessary, but if it refused to do so, it would certainly not be a being to be worshiped, but one to be hated and resisted in any way possible. Only a tyrant would demand worship, and it is the duty of any thinking person to resist tyranny.

Thoughts on morality.

I was thinking about morality today, and it suddenly dawned on me what defines what is and is not moral. I was thinking that despite differing opinions of individuals on what should be considered moral, it's pragmatically a society's consensus on morality that matters. Then I realized, morality isn't what each individual thinks it to be, or even what society agrees it to be, and it certainly isn't what some invisible man in the sky says that it is. What defines morality is what it will be agreed to be.

I don't just mean that the morality of an action must be decided after the fact, what I mean is that what is most moral is what will be considered moral in the future. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins discusses what he calls the "changing moral zeitgeist". This is the phenomenon by which morality evolves (so to speak) through time. Prime examples of this are racism and slavery, which have been the norm until very recently in our history, but are abhorred by anyone we would consider civilized today. I admire Thomas Jefferson, but Jefferson was a slave owner. We all hate Hitler, but the racism that fueled his genocide wasn't nearly as far behind the moral zeitgeist as we would like to believe. The trick to being as moral as possible, I realized, is to be ahead of the curve. Don't try to do what people consider right today, do what will be considered right tomorrow, or next year, or in a thousand years.

Of course, without precognition, it's difficult to know what direction the moral zeitgeist will take. Short-term changes can be sometimes be predicted based on other recent changes as a natural progression, such as the acceptance of homosexuals following from recent moves toward race- and gender-equality, and those who are slightly ahead of the curve already vehemently oppose homophobia and campaign for gay rights. Long-term changes are harder to predict, and even the most progressive among us surely hold beliefs that will be considered appalling within a few generations, but we don't see anything wrong with them today. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to be far enough ahead of the zeitgeist that our posterity will recognize our good intentions, and as with Jefferson, chalk-up our failings to the times in which we live.

Hey, look, it's a blog!

As my regular readers will know, if I ever had any, I've been away for some time. Posting became difficult when one thing in my life after another began to change. Some of these changes you will definitely hear about, others are none of your business. The most significant of the changes that I will be talking about is my apostasy and deconversion.

I spent most of my life as a moderate/liberal Christian, but as a few of my later posts may have hinted, I was struggling with the issue, and I'm proud to say that for the last eight months or so, I have been a godless heathen. I was raised as a Christian and always took it for granted, but amusingly, christianity is far more interesting to me from the outside, and I have much stronger feelings on the subject now.

I've been doing a lot of thinking on the subject, and I recently found myself wanting to write down some of my thoughts again, so I decided it was time to dust-off the blog. I'm not planning on going back to daily posting, and I'll probably be focusing less on news and politics than before, but you can expect some new posts here soon.

Faith != God

(For those that don't know, "!=" is a common programming operator for "not equal".)

There was a recent debate between conservative radio host Dennis Prager and atheist author Sam Harris. There were many interesting points in this debate, and I may discuss it again, but one subject that particularly stood out to me was Prager's attempts to confuse the existence of God with the belief in God. This is especially apparent in this embarrassing paragraph from his closing statement:

You write: “If humanity can’t survive without a belief in God, this would only mean that a belief in God exists. It wouldn’t, even remotely, suggest that God exists.” This statement is as novel as the one suggesting that Stalin was produced by Judeo-Christian values. It is hard for me to imagine that any fair-minded reader would reach the same conclusion. If we both acknowledge that without belief in God humanity would self-destruct, it is quite a stretch to say that this fact does not “even remotely suggest that God exists.” Can you name one thing that does not exist but is essential to human survival?

This argument is so profoundly stupid that I had to ask a friend to verify that I had read it correctly. Prager repeatedly states -- even after Harris clearly and specifically points out the logical fallacy -- that the essentiality of the belief in God is a strong argument for the existence of God. On the contrary, as Harris states, this simply proves a point that no rational person would agree with: that belief in God exists. This fact that they both agree on in no way suggests that that belief is at all accurate, as Prager claims that it does. The last sentence clearly shows that Prager considers belief in God (something that Harris at least hypothetically agrees is "essential to human survival") to be the same as God ("one thing that does not exist"). I can only conclude that this is an attempt on Mr. Prager's part to make readers dismiss the debate as unfair by painting himself as a complete and utter moron. I guess that means that I'm not a "fair-minded reader" that he can easily imagine.

Belief in God has tangible benefits -- particularly for more primitive, unenlightened cultures of the past -- that few rational people would deny, but faith -- as a belief that can be neither proven nor disproven -- is utterly indifferent to its own accuracy. In the absence of the potential for proof, faith can only ever act as a placebo for the believer. To anyone who did not realize that, and for whom the placebo effect will no longer work due to the revelation, I apologize.

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Still sick

I'm still sick. Go listen to what this insightful 8-year-old has to say:

Symbols

I spent several hours today permanently transforming my hair into a knotty, matted symbol of rejection of "the establishment" and traditional values. I must admit, though, that creating this symbol feels a bit hypocritical, as I consider emphasis on symbols to be part of what I'm rejecting. In many aspects of our society, far too much emphasis is placed on symbols, often to the detriment of what they are supposed to symbolize. Update: The dreadlocks fell apart when I tried to wash them, so I'm back to my regular, long hippie hair.

This is especially true for religions. I am frequently disgusted to see borderline idol worship directed at crosses/crucifixes by those who claim the Holy Trinity as their one true god. This type of prayer by proxy, at best, shows an individual lack of understanding by those who engage in them of their own religion's principles. While I have problems with the way Christianity defines its deity as a trinity so that it can technically qualify as monotheistic, I don't buy the Catholic variant -- with all of its saints and symbols and superstitious rituals -- as monotheistic for a second.

This hypocrisy is not unique to religion, though. The recent attempt to pass a constitutional amendment to abridge our freedom with a ban on the burning of the American flag, which proponents of the amendment loved to call a symbol of freedom. This clearly shows the problem with putting too much emphasis on a symbol: When reverence for a symbol is used to harm that which it symbolizes, it's obviously gone too far.

Both of these types of symbols have been abused by the current administration to further its own goals, to the detriment of what they symbolize. Symbols, without knowledge of what they symbolize, are meaningless. The use of a symbol is little more than an invitation for its meaning to be misconstrued, and given the danger of a misconstrued symbol, it's a risk that's not worth taking.

Good and Evil

I've really been enjoying the new TV series, Heroes, and I was listening to a podcast about the show today. In the most recent installment of this podcast, the speakers discuss their uncertainty as to whether certain characters are good or evil. I quickly wrote them an email explaining that this was a gross oversimplification, not only of the themes of the show (which is more nuanced than most) but of the concepts of good and evil themselves.

Good and evil are not motivations, nor are they goals, and they're certainly not forces that act independently. Rather, they are subjective interpretations of actions and concepts. Racial oppression -- at least in the overt, white-against-black form that is so prominent in our nation's history -- is generally considered to be evil by most of the western world, but this was not always the case. Many of our religious institutions, which claim to be the highest authority on good and evil, used to be among the staunchest supporters of slavery and segregation. Now these groups are advocating similar forms of hate directed at homosexuals, and history will no doubt eventually cast this stance in a similar light.

It's been said that the victors write the history books. This would explain why good always seems to eventually win out over evil; The winning side is not necessarily more righteous, but the conflict would likely continue if the status quo was believed to be evil. It's easy to cast fictional characters as good or evil, but their stories are more realistic (and more interesting) if, like in reality, good and evil cannot be defined in such certain terms without the benefit of hindsight.

On stem cells and abortion

Scott Adams discussed stem cell research today, and I donated blood. The link between the two may seem a bit tenuous, but it was enough to make me decide that it would be a good time to talk about the stem cell issue.

Ignoring the potential benefits of this research, the destruction of embryos for the purpose of harvesting stem cells is little different from abortion, and should be governed by the same laws. I think most people on either side of the issue would agree with that, as the people who oppose abortion seem to be the same ones who oppose embryonic stem cell research. If anything, the stem cell research should be less objectionable than any method of abortion other than the morning-after pill, because of the stage of development at which the various procedures take place. In short, harvesting embryonic stem cells should be legally tantamount to an abortion 4 to 5 days after conception.

So, should such abortions be allowed? Most pro-lifers seem to be opposed to abortion at any stage of development -- including the use of emergency contraception, or "morning-after", pills -- and some even take this to the extreme of vilifying (male) masturbation and the use of contraception because they result in the destruction of cells that could potentially be used to create life. Not to dismiss these people off-hand as lunatics, but by this logic, menstruation and nocturnal emission are, at the very least, involuntary manslaughter.

Such people are usually opposed these things for religious reasons. I will not argue with these reasons, except to remind the reader that creating laws to enforce religious values is unconstitutional. Without the religious basis, all that matters is what rights the embryo/fetus has at what stage of development. A living creature has rights that a collection of cells -- such as the blood that I donated -- does not, anyone but the most hardcore vegans would likely agree that a person has rights that a living creature does not, and persons is a subset of living creatures, which is a subset of collections of cells. I am all three, and if you're reading this, chances are you are too.

Now this will sound cynical, but I'm not entirely convinced that a child achieves the level of self-awareness required for personhood until sometime after birth. Now, I'm not suggesting that post-birth abortions should be allowed, but I do think that the reason they shouldn't has more to do with the psychological effects on the mother and others involved than it does with the rights of the child.

Well, there's more to say on the issue, but I hope I've given you something to think about, and I'm sure some of you will have something to say about what I've already written (I'm looking in your direction, Lou), so I'll finish discussing the issue later.

A society without crosses or veils

So the ideal of a society where no visible public signs of religion would be seen -- no crosses around necks, no sidelocks, turbans or veils -- is a politically dangerous one. It assumes that what comes first in society is the central political “licensing authority”, which has all the resource it needs to create a workable public morality.

While there is truth in this, in that it is disturbing for a government to have the authority to regulate religion, the reverse is also treacherous.

Gang symbols have been outlawed in many contexts, and religions -- particularly the Abrahamic religions -- have become little more than street gangs, only on a much larger scale. Nations that are primarily Christian or Jewish are at war with the Islamic world, and the crosses and turbans have been reduced to the equivalent of red and blue bandanas, and like these rival street gangs, the Christian Right in the U.S. and the "Islamo-fascists" of the Middle East have far more in common than either side would ever admit. The prohibition of such religious symbols in public would make sense for the same reasons.

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Followup to "What is god?"

Well, it seems my last post was met with incredulity. Lou responded with the following:

"Given this model of reality" nothing exists. You don't exist. By that logic, your existence is subject to my perception and interpretation of you. That is the kind of useless drivel that you hear from philosophy majors (a/k/a future McDonalds workers). You do exist. Trust me on this one.

Yes, I do exist. My existence is not subject to your perception and interpretation because I also exist outside that context, just like you exist outside mine.

Let me ask you a question: Who was the first president of the United States? George Washington, you say? Are you sure?

How can you be sure that there even was a George Washington? You couldn't have met him - he died 200 years before you were born. Yet you still believe that, not only did he exist, but he was the first president? What a shocking leap of faith!

You're right, it is faith. I never experienced the existence of George Washington personally. I rely on my belief in the accuracy of historical record -- which, as Nineteen Eighty-Four teaches us, may not resemble actual events at all -- for my belief that George Washington was the first president of the United States. That historical record exists both within and outside my bubble, so it meets the qualifications for objective existence in the context of that bubble, whether it is true or not.

Another question: You have blogged about President Bush. Do you really believe that he is president? How do you know? Have you ever met him? Sure you see him on TV, but you see lots of things on TV that aren't real, don't you? How can you be so sure that there even is a George W. Bush? What? Another leap of faith?

That brings up another question. How would meeting him make me any more sure of his existence than seeing him on TV? Sure, it may be more difficult to pass fiction off as truth under those circumstances, but those experiences could just as easily be some sort of hallucination. He exists either way.

I have also quoted Apollo from Battlestar Galactica, whom I've also seen on TV but never met. Apollo exists in the form of a fictional character, both within and outside my bubble, but I rely on historical records of more recent events for my knowledge of that existence. If those records were false, Apollo could be real and Bush fictional (and we'd all be a lot better-off), but I have faith that that's not the case.

Put down the symbolic logic textbook and come back to earth for a minute. Three facts: George Washington was the first president, George W. Bush is the current president, and God exists. People who don't believe the first two facts are called uneducated. Why is the third any different?

The difference, of course, is that those who claim to know about the first two facts almost unanimously agree, but the existence of the christian god (as a true being, existing outside of humanity rather than as fiction) is much more widely disputed.

What is god?

There is no doubt in my mind that god exists. In fact, every god exists, and every variation of each exists. Every thought that anyone's ever had exists, in the sense that a sketch on a piece of paper exists, in that their existence is subject to the perception and interpretation of them, whereas the paper exists on a lower, more absolute level. Paper, though, it just a name given to a certain range of configurations of molecules, and so it is just as abstract in its own way.

Perhaps "exist" is the wrong word... these things are, they have being, even if that being is not objective enough to fully constitute existence. Then again, for every layer of being, there is a corresponding layer of objectivity, so it could be argued that at any given layer of being, things which are on that level exist, while things that are on higher, more abstract layers merely are. Existence is a subset of being.

Logically, given this model of reality, for any given layer of being, the lower, less abstract things -- while in absolute terms would have some sort of meta-existence -- for all intents and purposes do not exist or have being. That is, they do not exist in the sense that pi does not exist in "2+2=4". While each two may or may not be the area of a circle, of which pi is a factor, pi is not observable as a component of the equation, and has been canceled-out of it if it was ever there. Of course, on lower levels, pi still exists, but as it is not observable from the equation and cannot be proven to exist based upon it, the existence of pi is neither confirmable nor relevant on the layer of the equation, so it is not.

Or perhaps layers are not the best model. Pi and the Golden Ratio can appear in the same equation, both being within a common layer, but each can also appear in its own equation, in which the existence of the other is neither confirmable nor relevant, so while their level of being is at least comparable, it is an oversimplification to say that they are on the same layer, except as part of some perceived and interpreted hierarchy. The existence of the layers is a layer of its own.

Holy crap, that was meta...

Anyway, perhaps a better model is a massive Venn diagram. This diagram would be composed of bubbles of irregular shapes and sizes, intersecting in an infinite number of dimensions, but the dimensions are unimportant. What's important is that, as with any other Venn diagram, there are only four possible relations that any bubble can have to any other: it can intersect it as a peer, it can be a superset that completely contains the other, it can be a subset that is completely contained by the other, or it can have no direct relationship.

In this bubble model, in the context of any given bubble, another bubble is if any part of it is within the context bubble; a bubble's subsets are in the context of that bubble. If it also exists outside that bubble -- that is, they intersect as peers -- the bubble meets the qualifications for objective being; a bubble's peers exist in the context of that bubble. Bubbles with no relation, of course, have neither existence nor being in the context of that bubble, but supersets can only have the irrelevant meta-existence, so these things do not have being or existence either. This all means that in order for A to be, in reference to B, B must include both A and not-A.

Discovery is the expansion of B to include either A or not-A, where before only one was included, and A did not have being in the context of B, either because it had no relationship or because it was a superset.

God -- as an abstract concept -- is, but in the context of humanity, an omnipresent creator of all things can only ever have meta-existence and cannot ever be, and thus is unconfirmable and irrelevant.

The Gullible Right

Keith Olbermann is at it again. He's done several stories over the last couple of days on the new book, "Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction". This book exposes the GOP plot to dupe evangelical christians into voting Republican while referring to them as "the nuts" and regarding them with contempt behind closed doors. For the Bush administration, The Office of Faith-Based Initiatives -- or in the words of Karl Rove, "a f-ing faith-based thing" (it's unclear where the term "f-ing" originated, but the indefinite article used suggests that Rove did not censor himself) -- was promised and established for the sole purpose of winning votes, and once those votes were won, the administration did nothing but undermine and complain about it.

In light of the administration's true position on these "Faith-Based Initiatives" -- programs to provide funding for humanitarian organizations -- which violate the constitutional separation of church and state by exclusively funding christian organizations rather than secular ones or those established by other religious groups, we must question their other unconstitutionally religious policies like the campaign against same-sex marriage. Is Bush really a homophobe, or is he just after the homophobe vote?

This is why the Constitution requires the separation of church and state. These abuses and manipulations of the electorate, whether a candidate legitimately shares their beliefs or not, is the inevitable result of mixing religion and politics.

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Molding Young Minds

As I mentioned, I was at the World Can't Wait protest yesterday. There were a lot of people there, but it was the young children with their parents that got me thinking.

I had a mixed reaction when I saw a few young children walking around with their parents at the protest. While I thought it was good that these children were being exposed to some positive principles (even the average Bush supporter would agree that war is generally bad and standing up for what you believe is generally good), but then I started thinking about the children that weren't there. Specifically, I thought of the children from the Jesus Camp documentary, and how they were being exposed to (if not indoctrinated with) values opposing those of the protesters. This lead to issues that I had previously pondered of the dynamics and ethics of parents attempting to instill their own values in their children.

I believe that parents' influence on their children is one of the biggest reasons that the evils -- especially flavors of hate like racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia -- in the world are still around today. Not that hate is always inherited, but parents who hate raise their children to hate (some more effectively than others), and children who are not raised to hate at least have a fair chance to grow up not hating. The impractical solution to nepotism that I discussed in a previous entry would seem to solve this, but I think we can all agree that having the government raise children is something that must be avoided, lest we risk ending up with our own version of the Hitler Youth. If we could trust all parents to expose their children to as many different beliefs as possible and raise them to be open-minded and make their own decisions, the issue would be moot, but that requires a level of altruism that is hard to find.

Or is that just me? My parents exposed me to different beliefs and raised me to be open-minded and make my own decisions, so how can I be sure that my belief that children should should be raised that way rather than with rigid religious dogmas is my own decision and not just a product of my own upbringing?