Conspiracies, Ghosts, and Videotape

Bhutto Conspiracy Theories

Some aspects of the human race completely frustrate me. Now that Bhutto has been assassinated, one of humanities more frustrating and obnoxious habits will exhibit itself, the habit of drawing up conspiracies about her death.

This morning, I woke up to read that a new video had been discovered that cast doubts on the official story of what caused Bhutto’s death. The official story is that the gunman did no harm – that she was killed when the concussion from the blast wave bashed her head against a part of the car she was riding in. However, as the video shows, he hair flew up when she was being shot at.

So, this casts doubt on the official story of how she died. According to the news broadcast, the video is fueling claims that there was a cover-up, and that the Pakistani government is being deliberately deceptive as to the cause of death.

I don’t understand the argument.

One question that can be raised is whether the video does, in fact, show that Bhutto was shot rather than killed as a result of the explosion. However, that is not the question that concerns me. The question that concerns me is: Why does it matter?

It may matter to the family and to historians. However, as far as proving some sort of conspiracy to hide the facts, I do not see any facts in this dispute worthy of being hidden.

If the government concocted a lie about something that (1) did not matter, and (2) could easily be shown to be false as video of the assassination emerged (and it is stupid to think that there would be no video), then they re not clever conspirators. They are insane.

All of this is in addition to the fact that the frames relating to the assassination do not show anything clearly. The fuzzy images are an invitation for people to invent whatever stories they like.

Skilled liars know to tell the truth as much as possible (because the truth is easier to defend and is more likely to be verified than falsified), and to lie only when necessary.

My point is that it is stupid to have debates over what individuals see in a blurry piece of video. The bad (is in, obnoxious) thing about these videos is that people can find whatever they want to find in the blurry elements at the edge of resolution.

It’s like the video of the blue ghost seen through the security camera at a gas station. People are in the habit of ignoring what is obvious and dreaming up outlandish interpretations, and saying, “See, it is right there! Right before your eyes.”

Sorry, no. You are forcing an interpretation on what you see, ignoring the obvious things that do not fit with what you want to believe about what you are seeing, and making things up about what you do see.

The moral element is the fact that the culture panders to this form of sophistry. The story of the blue ghost should never have been broadcast. Or, if it was broadcast, the broadcasters should have given an honest account of the story. “At a gas station in downtown wherever, the obviously bored ignoramuses at the place are entertaining themselves by ‘interpreting’ the blurry image of a bug on their surveillance camera lens is actually a ghost. In other news, the local television station has decided to pander to this nonsense by suggesting that there might even be a ghost.”

These types of stories encourage other people to go out and engage in the same obnoxious behavior – in the hopes that they, too, can get their fifteen minutes of fame.

What happened to the responsible news director who says, “It’s a bug on the lens. It’s not a story. Go cover something important. Or, if you want to cover this, then make it a story about a group of bored people seeking excitement by deluding themselves about an image that shows up on their video tape.

It’s just harmless fun, right? Why are you so much against people having harmless fun?

It is because the same habits feed into these conspiracy theories. They create a culture in which people not only see what they want to see in surveillance video at a local convenience store, but video of the 9/11 attacks, the Kennedy assassination, and the Bhutto assassination. They are used to misdirect people’s attention away from the people who are actually guilty of an atrocity (allowing them to escape some of the wrath that is actually due them), and onto the innocent that the conspiracy theorists want to see harmed but have no real evidence against.

They allow the less savory forces with access to the media to deceive and manipulate the masses to better fulfill their own political agenda.

Some conspiracy theory seems to be symptoms of mental illness – paranoid delusions experienced by people prone to paranoid delusions. We are wise to recognize that these types of people exist. It is unfortunate, and we should help the scientific community to find ways of curing and treating these types of breaks from reality. We should not be setting them up as model citizens whose way of living (and ways of thinking) provide a model for the rest of us.

Seriously, the morally responsible version of the ghost at the gas station story – if it was to be covered at all – should have been, “Here are some people who are entertaining themselves by saying that this is a ghost, and here is what probably happened.” The morally responsible version of the Bhutto video story should be, “Here is some video of the story and, as is usual, conspiracy theorists will pour over it, reading into the video what they want to see rather than paying attention to what the video actually shows.”

One possible response to this would be, “Where is the fun in this? You people who only look at reason and what makes sense miss out on so much wonderful stuff, and you are ruining things for the rest of us who like the idea of a ghost at the gas station.”

I suppose there are others who like the idea of a 9/11 or Bhutto assassination conspiracy as well. But what reason is there for saying that understanding the real world is an inferior substitute to living a life where one’s thinking is muddied and muddled by deception and sophistry?

The people who “take the fun out of things” by discovering the truth are not people who find enjoyment in ruining other people’s fun. There are people who actually think that it is fun to know the truth of things. People like this give up nothing when they discover the truth of some state of some state of affairs. They find their value in truth. When they embrace some conclusion, they are not embracing some fiction or myth that has no relation to the real world. They are embracing something that’s real.

The people who claim that realists ‘take the fun out of things’ are people who have been taught to have fun in deception and myth. To some extent, this is not a bad thing. I enjoy my share of fiction – in television shows and movies and online computer games. However, a key element for this type of entertainment comes from recognizing the difference between fact and fiction. It is essential that those who are entertained by works of fiction not get confused and let these fictions impede on the decisions they have to make in the real world.

People who find their entertainment in malicious deception and self-delusion are people who ignore this distinction between fantasy and reality. As such, the enjoyment that they find in fantasy ends up having an effect on the real world – an effect that we can generally trust to be harmful. Even if a particular instance of self-delusion proves to have no great bad consequences, it still contributes to a culture of malicious deception and self-delusion where these traits are embraced even when lives are at stake.

That, in turn, leaves the world worse than it would otherwise be.

Defending Real World Harms for Imaginary Reasons

The “The Friendly Atheist,” contains a post today that presents the atheist writers of Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hutchins as militant and ignorant opponents of Christianity.

The video follows the pattern of refusing to even consider the substance of the objections that these authors have raised, and instead condemns them on the basis of their tone. The charge of ignorance is supported, not by identifying errors that these four writers may have made, but by using the example of an airplane passenger who has not read certain Christian apologetics.

In all of this, the main point is entirely ignored. That point is:

They are killing people you ignorant self-absorbed little creeps. They are destroying lives. Take a look at that fact before you come to me with your condescending tripe.

Oh, but that does not matter. That is not worth talking about. When we compare the moral crime of speaking in an irreverent tone to religious authority, to the crime of killing people and destroying lives, well, clearly the first is the greater moral crime, according to these defenders of religion.

I have spoken repeatedly against hasty generalization, and that it is wrong to say that any part of the religious community is guilty of a moral crime that they have not actually committed. So, my point above is not directed against all of religion. It is directed against those theists who, in the name of God, are engaged in promoting policies and institutions that lower the quality of life for a great many people and end the life of others, for make-believe reasons.

We are talking about justification for acts of violence committed against others – for lies and sophistry in defense of policies whose ultimate effect is to collect power into the hands of the ignorant and dishonest while making others worse off.

Again, the greatest weapon of mass destruction is neither nuclear, nor biological, nor chemical. It is legislative. And this is a violent weapon – a weapon that is designed to force people into a situation where they must choose an option that they would not otherwise choose or suffer real, physical, violence. These members of the religious community wield the legislative weapon of mass destruction in this country with increasingly less restraint as they have taken control of legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government.

Yet, these people insist that when it comes to doing real-world harm to real-world people, that those who are made to suffer these harms have no right or reason to get upset or to raise their voice or to be angry at those who do them harm – or those who do harm to others in their family, or their neighbors.

Let’s imagine a father who is being restrained while somebody slowly sticks a knife into his daughter. We can imagine this father losing his temper and leveling a string of verbal assaults on this assailant that would make a sailor blush. And, yet, the people who produced this video ignore all of that and condemn the father for being intemperate in his remarks to the assailant. They do not even examine the question of the person sticking the knife into the man’s daughter . . . that question is not important. Whatever the truth or falsity of that claim is, the father is not permitted to engage in intemperate speech against the assailant. That, absolutely, must not be allowed.

In the video, Ravi Zacharias is shown saying,

This comes on the heals of tolerance – how we need to learn to live and let live. And now the animosity of Hitchins and Dennett and Dawkins and Harris is unbelievable.

Tell the father, in the case above, that his intolerance of those who are taking action to harm his daughter is ‘unbelievable’ – that he needs to ‘live and let live’.

The doctrine of tolerance can never consistently be extended to the intolerant. Yet, in this case, the paradigm of intolerance is demanding tolerance from others. Of course, those who participated in this video deny the father’s assumption that the assailant is doing anything wrong in stabbing the daughter. However, this is exactly what makes their behavior so morally outrageous. The authors that this video is attempting to answer are people who have laid out their case for believing, “Those religious elements are doing real-world harm to real-world people.” That is what the four books were all about. Yet, the video, and much of what has been written in response to those books, completely ignore this charge.

Listening to this video is like listening to a rape trail. The prosecutor has laid out the evidence against the accused. Then, the defense attorney gets up and whines, “Listen to all of the mean things that those people have said about my client. It is wrong to say mean things about other people. They should be ashamed. When you cast your verdict on whether my client is guilty or not, do not look at the evidence that the prosecutors presented against my client. Look only at the fact that what they are implying is mean, and from that alone decide that my client is not guilty.”

It is an absurd argument.

The worst part of the video is the response that takes the form of a “straw man by proxy.” In order to defeat Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hutchins, the video showed John Turner, the President of Faith 2.0 ministries telling a story of encountering an atheist first-year philosophy professor on an airplane. Over the course of the conversation, it was discovered that there was a certain amount of asymmetry between the educations of the two speakers. Turner, apparently, had read some of the atheist writings. However, this fellow passenger had not read any of the Christian apologetics. Later, as Turner tells the story, the atheist expressed shame over not being familiar with these Christian writings and yet dismissing Christianity.

This story provides us with yet another example of how these people run on the twin vices of sophistry and hypocrisy. Would it not be possible for Turner to ask, “Let’s assume that I was listening to Dawkins tell a similar story, of meeting a theist on a plane – a theology who had read some of the theist literature but had read nothing from people who argue against the existence of God. Imagine this being a story where the theology graduate expressed shame over not reading criticisms of the view he held. What would my reaction be?”

My guess is that his reaction would be that Dawkins was using sophistry to make a point that his evidence does not support. And while Turner would be able to recognize and willing to criticize this failing when he sees it in the hands of his critics, he allows himself to engage in exactly the same sort of behavior, apparently without the least bit of moral hesitation. Apparently, he did not even care to live up to the moral responsibility of asking this question. He uses the argument anyway, not even caring about the fact that it is pure manipulative sophistry.

To make matters worse, it is sophistry offered up in defense of actions that kill people and destroy lives.

Of all the times when people should take care not to use sophistry in defense of a position, it is when the question under discussion concerns the taking and destroying of lives.

But wait. There’s more. This video introduces this argument with the text,

Not only is the new atheism intolerant and militant, but many say it hasn’t even bothered to do its homework.

It does this while the camera pans a shelf containing the writings of the four main atheist authors.

In this way, it seeks to use this story of the airplane passenger to manipulate the audience into thinking that the four authors in question have not done their homework. This is blatantly, intellectually dishonest. This is a moral failing on the part of those who produced this video that they cannot even honestly represent the case in question.

In engaging in this manipulative deception, these people are helping to promote a culture of manipulative deception. Whenever these “models of Christian virtue” tell the world that deception is a legitimate form of persuasion, they help to institute deception as a form of persuasion in the community. This, from a group of people who claim to hold that ‘bearing false witness’ is a sin – people who bear false witness as casually as they get dressed in the morning.

Finally, the fallacy behind Turner’s appeal to these theist writers has already been mentioned. Is it the case that a person needs to read every piece of work ever written in defense of slavery to condemn slavery? Must an individual have an intimate understanding of the details of arguments used to defend Sharia law to condemn Sharia law? Let’s turn to the other passengers on the airplane and ask them for a show of hands. “How many of you are totally familiar with the economic literature detailing the defense of the divine right of kings.”

One argument that you will never read here unless I grow completely senile is to tell somebody who raises an objection to my claim, "Have you read everything ever written on the subject of utilitarianism? If you have not, then your objections are meaningless, and utilitarianism still stands." Doing so is intellectually irresponsible - and intellectual irresponsibility is a moral failure. The only legitimate response to any objection to the theories I defend is to answer the objection

It is quite reasonable to say, “This author presented an argument that does as follows,” present the argument, and then ask the other individual how he responds to that argument. Yet, Turner does not do this. He mentions these authors and claims that they have these sophisticated rational arguments in defense of Christianity. However, he never tells us what even one of those arguments are.

If there is an author with a sophisticated, rational defense of Christianity, what is the argument? If you can’t present the argument, then forgive me for thinking that the argument is as fictitious as the God you worship.

This is pure sophistry and manipulation in defense of the use of a weapon of mass destruction (legislation) to destroy human lives. Yet, those who produced this propaganda, in all likelihood, and in spite of their claim that their religion gives them special access to moral virtue, are almost certainly acting without the least bit of moral shame.

E2.0: Donald Rutherford: Other Worldly Happiness

This is the fifth in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s “Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.”. I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

Donald Rutherford from the Philosophy Department at the University of California San Diego, was the fourth speaker at the Beyond Belief 2 conference. His speech had two major concerns.

His primary concern was to distinguish between this-worlders and other-worlders when it comes to happiness. According to Rutherford, all humans seek their own happiness. However, people can be divided up into two groups. One group holds that this world is all there is and we must find our happiness in this world. The other group finds their happiness in another world – a life after death and in values that come from an other-worldly source.

The question that concerns me here is our understanding of the end and value of human life, especially the human life that is mine on the basis of what do I find or fail to find my life to be a thing of value that I am motivated to pursue with energy and commitment. Where, in other words, do I locate my happiness?

I am immediately going to have objections with Rutherford’s use of ‘happiness’ – and especially the happiness that a person might find in “the human life that is mine” as being the ultimate holder of value. I have raised those objections in a number of places, such as the post, “Happiness vs. Desire Fulfillment.”

In that post I say that we judge a theory according to how well it explains and predicts real-world events, and happiness theory fails to explain and predict the answers that people give to questions regarding, “The experience machine.” That thought explains that we value things other than our own happiness.

The experience machine case describes a situation in which people claim that they would readily sacrifice their own happiness for the sake of another person. Happiness theory fails to account for this phenomenon. Desire fulfillment theory explains these cases quite well – the agent is acting so as to make or keep true a proposition that is the object of a desire other than the desire “that I be happy.”

In a separate post, “The Incommensurability of Value,” I argued that the phenomena of value – particularly the phenomena of regret for options we cannot choose – points to the conclusion that we have multiple ends. If we pursued only one end (e.g., happiness), then we would have no reason to regret giving up less of that single end for more of the same. However, when we are forced to give up some ends to focus on gaining others, we do, in fact, regret that which we must give up. This suggests that what we pursue in their stead is not ‘more of the same’. We can then explain regret as the psychological effect of having a desire that A be thwarted by an agent’s attempts to fulfill a desire that B.

In short, happiness fails to explain and predict the components of the phenomena of value as well as desire fulfillment theory. Which means that desire fulfillment theory is the better theory.

Now, we can take desire fulfillment theory and plug it back into Rutherford’s original concern.

The question that concerns me here is our understanding of the end and value of human life, especially the human life that is mine on the basis of what do I find or fail to find my life to be a thing of value that I am motivated to pursue with energy and commitment. Where, in other words, do I locate that which I desire?

Here, the divide between people who find value for their life in this world and people who find value for their life in other worlds is a difference between the propositions that are the objects of their desires. This-worldly people are people who desire that P where P is capable of being made true in this world. Other-worldly people are people who desire that P where P requires a world other than this world in order to be true.

It is a difference, for example, between a “desire that I discover facts that turn out to be crucial to discovering a cure for AIDS,” and “a desire that I talk one last time to Aunt Emma who died last June.”

Where do other-worldly desires come from? Where do we get a “desire that P” where P is a proposition that necessarily links to an outside world?

It would be strange to argue that this evolved. Evolved desires – like our preference for high-calorie food, aversion to pain, desire for sex – are all “this-world” desires. How can an “other-world” desire serve any kind of evolutionary purpose – when it is a desire that cannot be fulfilled in the real world?

A “desire that P” where P is some other-worldly state of affairs can actually motivate action when it comes with a false “belief that P” (or belief that A can bring about P). A desire to speak to Aunt Emma can motivate action if an agent can also be made to believe that a series of actions will bring about a state in which the agent is talking to Aunt Emma. However, compare this “desire to speak to the dead” and “beliefs that certain actions will lead to a state in which one is speaking to the dead” to a standard evolved desire like hunger, thirst, and a desire for sex.

It seems less likely that these desires for other-worldly states of affairs and false beliefs that those other-worldly states of affairs can be realized would have evolved, where a desire for a real-world state of affairs can motivate the same action much more easily. We do not need a set of false beliefs and misdirected desires to have sex, for example.

Still, Rutherford brings up an interesting statistic. In ancient times, the Epicureans had a philosophy that doubted the existence of gods (or, if the gods existed, then they would have no interest in petty human affairs), and asserted that everything was made up of atoms moving through space. At the time, they doubted that they would ever be able to convince more than a small fraction of their countrymen to adopt this theory. Instead, the people would cling stubbornly to their gods.

Over 2000 years later, these arguments have still not persuaded more than a small segment of the population. The advocates of an enlightened way of thinking seem to be making no progress over time when it comes to convincing people to give up myth and superstition.

If the vast majority of the people must believe in myth and superstition, then there is still an argument for leading them into adopting the least harmful myth and superstition available. I would recommend getting people to believe in a God that created a universe in which the propositions that make up desire utilitarianism are true.

Yet it seems strange to argue that we must believe in a religion. Many of us do not believe in any set of religious beliefs. In some parts of the world, the percentage of the population that has given up on mythical mystical entities is quite small, suggesting that among some populations do not have the addiction to false beliefs that this theory responds to.

More importantly, there is nothing unique or special about religious beliefs that could explain why the brain acquired a disposition to lock onto those false beliefs as opposed to true beliefs.

The thesis that we have a compulsion to adopt false (Other-worldly) events needs some work to be done to show that this phenomenon actually exists in the real world.

E2.0: Discussion 1: Necessary False Beliefs

This is the forth in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s “Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.”. I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

After Edward Slingerland's presentation, which I wrote about last week, , the host of the Beyond Belief 2 conference, Roger Bingham, opened the session up to comments from the audience.

Those comments basically contained two responses to Slingerland's thesis.

Slingerland: Doing Harm for Make-Believe Reasons

Slingerland had argued that all philosophies, including Enightenment, must postulate entities (sacred values) that do not exist, but which we must pretend to believe in.

These 'sacred values' are the reasons we give for doing harm to others. When we do violence to others we are compelled, somehow, to seek justification. We find this justification in metaphysical entities such as human rights. These entities are not real, but we are irresistibly drawn to drawing on these fictions to justify the harms we do to others.

To take on the Enlightenment 2.0 stance requires a kind of dual consciousness. It requires a recognition that the values and the cherished entities that populate our world are not real. . . . We also have to recognize though . . . that we can't help continuing to feel that they are real.

These values and cherished entities - these reasons for killing and doing harm to others - are not real. Yet, we cannot help but believe that they are real, and we cannot help but to kill and otherwise harm others based on that feeling.

To Slingerland, this is all okay. This is a sign of psychological health. To Slingerland, the person who is not killing and otherwise harming others on the basis of entities that we are disposed to make up is psychologically unhealthy.

In the comments that followed, members of the audience offered two types of responses to Slingerland's thesis.

Lee Silver: Doing Harm for Genetic Reasons

One of the two sets of responses to Slingerland’s thesis is one of my favorite dead horses – the claim that moral sentiments have a genetic explanation. Unfortunately, even though I keep beating this dead horse, a lot of people talk as if it is still very much alive.

Lee Silver commented in response to Slingerland:

Human rights in my mind, part of it is natural human instincts. We, as a species, have instincts that are expressed to a greater or lesser degree by different people and evolved attitudes that lead to human rights at some level . . . There is probably this instinctual basis for these feelings that we have so we don’t have to go all transcendental. You can inside, into our genes, . . .

The last time I beat this dead horse I described the activity in my post, “The Genetic Morality Delusion.”

Briefly, evolution can explain such things as our desire for sex, high-calorie food, our aversion to pain, thirst, hunger, preferences for certain atmospheric temperature, and the like. These are our likes and dislikes, or what Slingerland called our Type 1 evaluations.

However, there are a lot of problems with trying to explain moral evaluations this way. As Slingerland said, these values are inherently intolerant – they are values that we seek to impose on others, by force if necessary. We appeal to them to justify doing real harm to real people.

What does it mean to say that A deserves to suffer? If there is a genetic morality, this merely means, “I am genetically disposed to wish to cause you to suffer and claim that I am justified in doing so.” If this proposition is true then, according to the hypothesis of a genetic morality, you deserve to suffer.

For example, what does it mean to say that homosexuals should be killed? Under the hypothesis of a genetic morality, this means that if people are genetically disposed to view homosexuality as immoral and to feel justified in killing homosexuals, then homosexuals deserve to die. These genetic factors do not merely explain the deaths of homosexuals among such creatures. It further claims that the homosexuals deserved their fate – that they deserve all of the condemnation and disgust that the rest of the community is genetically disposed to inflict on them.

This is, at best, a bizarre conclusion. It is even more bizarre in light of the fact that this type of genetic disposition seems completely pointless. A simple desire to engage in a particular activity is sufficient. It serves the evolutionary purpose without all of the excess baggage.

To see this point, consider the evolution of lions. Lions can either evolve a disposition to kill and eat antelope. Or it could evolve a disposition to view antelopes as entities that deserve to be killed and eaten. The first requires simply the evolution of a desire. The second requires a complex set of mental states involving moral judgments and moral emotions. What reason would nature have to go to all the work of generating all of the complexity of the second set of operations, when the far simpler first set works just as well.

We can look at the same issue from the antelope’s point of view. Evolution can either give the antelope an aversion to lions – a desire to run away from anything that suggests the presence of lions. Or evolution can give the antelope an aversion to being killed and eaten and the capacity to recognize that lions have a tendency to kill and eat antelope. It is far simpler for evolution to simply teach the antelope to run from lions. It does not need to develop all of this extra baggage.

Ultimately, Slingerland can take Silver’s evolution claims and plug them directly into his thesis. Slingerland merely argues that we have a these desires to do harm to others, to feel a need that they are to be justified by appeal to some sort of metaphysical entity, and to make up the metaphysical entities that we use to justify the harm. Slingerland’s thesis is perfectly compatible with the idea that we evolved the disposition to view the world in this way. We evolved a disposition to harm certain people, a need to see our harmful behavior as justified, and a tendency to make up those justifications.

So, Silver does not offer a solution that solves the question of morality or one that provides any objection to Slingerland’s proposal.

Finally, Silver did include that culture plays a role. Culture plays a role in what we believe; however, what role does culture play in what we should believe (or what is true) about morality. Inquisitors, slave owners, conquistadors, crusaders, jihadists, and concentration camp guards were all the products, in part, of their culture. So, it is difficult to make the case that even though culture shapes our moral beliefs, that the moral beliefs that one acquires as a result of their culture are immune from criticism.

Patricia and Paul Churchland: Doing Harm for Practical Reasons

Patricia and Paul Chuchland offered an alternative answer to Sliverland’s make-believe reasons for doing harm. They claimed that these reasons are not make-believe at all. They are practical reasons. Patricia said:

I think that human rights, to the degree that that can be given a concrete description, is something that works pretty well in a sheerly pragmatic way. . . . Human rights matter to me because by and large if you have a system that works according to those principles you do better than if you have a tyrant.

Paul added:

If you think of human history . . . over 10,000 years, you are looking at a series of experiments on how best to organize human affairs . . . and over that period we have had a fair amount of wisdom emerge about how things are best organized. If one wants to take an objectivist view of the ground of morality, it is better to look at human history and what it teaches us over long periods of time than to made-up metaphysical things.

Slingerland can respond to these practical considerations in two ways.

First, Slingerland is free to argue that these appeals to make-believe reasons for doing harm are practical. In order to have the best society where humans can thrive, we need humans who are disposed to look for these metaphysical reasons to justify doing harm to others. Without them, society would fall apart.

Second, if morality has value as a means to some end, then Slingerland is still free to ask about the value of those ends. A hammer has value because it is useful for building a house – but where does the house get its value? Following Aristotle, every chain of value has an end – something that gives its value to all of the means that are useful for bringing it about. Patricia and Paul’s ‘practical morality’ says nothing about how these ends get their value. He is free to assert that the value of ends is this make-believe value that he was talking about.

Either way, the practical morality hypothesis does not give us any reason to abandon Slingerland’s thesis. He is still free to say that we are creatures that assign make-believe value to ends and who appeal to these make-believe entities to justify the harms that we find ourselves wanting to do to others.

Daniel Dennett: Doing Harm for A Combination of Reasons

Daniel Dennett offered a modification to Silver’s proposal that combines these two responses. Dennett agreed that we have some genetic dispositions, but added that we have the capacity to learn about them and correct them – that they can be mistaken.

He used the example of myopia to explain his claim.

Myopia is a . . . we’re stuck with it. No we’re not, we can wear eyeglasses. One of the things we have with human culture . . . is to recognize the shortcomings and defects in our evolved nature and then find corrections.

.

I have already agreed that we have desires, that those desires have undergone a fair amount of evolutionary pressure, and that desires reflect what Slingerland called Type 1 values.

However, our Type 1 values – our desires – are not fixed. They are malleable. This means that there is room for us to ask as to which changes we should make in our evolved nature. Our Type 1 values (desires) give us reason to make modifications in our other Type 1 values (desires). We do not have to go into strange metaphysics. We can evaluate our Type 1 values according to their tendency to fulfill or thwart other desires (Type 1 values).

Using this method, we can determine how best to correct our Type 1 desires. Using this method, we can decide on the best prescription for what Dennett called the “eyeglasses of the soul” that correct our evolved natures for the better.

Conclusion

All things considered, we can keep Slingerland’s distinction between two different types of value. Type 1 evaluations ask about relationships between objects of evaluation and the desires that we have. Those desires, in turn, have been influenced through years of evolution so that they tend to pick out states of affairs that bring about our own genetic replication.

However, the desires that make up our Type 1 evaluations are malleable. This gives us an opportunity to make Type 2 evaluations. How do our Type 1 evaluations stand in relation to each other? To what degree do we have reason to promote or strengthen some desires and to inhibit others? From this, we can ask questions about how objects of evaluation stand in relation to desires we should have - the desires we have reason to promote and to discourage.

On this model, we do not need strange metaphysical entities. We do all of the work postulating only Type 1 evaluations – desires – some of which are malleable – and some of which we have reason to promote and inhibit in virtue of their relationships to other type 1 values.

Justifying the harm we do to others by appeal to things that we simply make up may well be common. However, that does not make it right. We can only provide real justification for our actions – particularly our decision to act in ways that are harmful to others – by appealing to reasons for action that are real. Of these, we need to appeal to not to the reasons for action that we have, but the reasons for action that we should have. We can make perfectly good sense of ‘reasons for action that we should have’ without entering Slingerland’s realm of make-believe.

Does Religion Make One a Better Ruler?

I missed an opportunity to take part in a BBC broadcast yesterday regarding the question, “. . . whether religion helps make better politicians.”

My answer to that question would have been generally no, it does not.

Put quite simply, religions are collections of false beliefs, and false beliefs generally provide a poor foundation for policy. We see this in the mundane cases of false beliefs about who performed a particular crime, false beliefs about the safety of certain medications, and false beliefs about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

These problems are even more severe when we are talking about two different religions having false beliefs about who God gave a particular strip of land to, beliefs that we can control the course of hurricanes and thwart terrorist attacks by sacrificing the interests of homosexuals, and beliefs that the end of the world is near so we do not need to worry about the long-term consequences of our actions.

Having said this, it is also the case that religions are not the only false beliefs that exist. Consequently, the fact that a person is not religious does not imply that he will automatically be a better leader. That depends (in part) on the quality of his non-religious false beliefs.

In other words, religion makes an individual a worse leader – but non-religious faults can make an individual an even worse leader, leaving the religious individual as the least of all possible evils.

There is also the question of religion on a person’s moral character. Even where religion gives a person false beliefs, is it the case (for example) that fear of punishment in an afterlife will make it more likely that the leader will be moral?

There are several problems with this option.

The first is that, if you are going to threaten a person into doing the right thing, then you need to make sure that what you are threatening him into doing is indeed the right thing. Biblical scriptures were written centuries ago by primitive tribesmen whose access to moral truth was no better than their access to scientific truth. Many of their moral beliefs were simply mistaken. When moral mistakes are then attributed to God, and people are told that they must obey God or face eternal damnation, then those people are being given an incentive to do evil, not good.

A moral commandment to kill anybody who works on the Sabbath, or anybody who denies the existence of God, or anybody who has sex with somebody of the same gender, is a commandment to do evil to another human being. In these cases, using the fear of eternal damnation in order to motivate individuals to enforce God’s law is not a way of motivating them to do good that atheists are inclined to ignore. It is a way of motivating them to do evil that atheists are inclined to ignore. In these cases, the belief that there is no divine punishment is a good thing.

The second problem with this method is its disregard for truth. Philosophers call this type of system a ‘noble lie’ – a falsehood that is made a part of the popular culture in the hopes that those who believe the myth will be better people as a result.

There is an intrinsic conflict between telling people that they need to adopt a belief, not because it is true, but because it is convenient, and creating a culture in which people prize and seek truth. A culture that lives a ‘noble lie’ cannot value truth. A culture that values truth cannot stomach a ‘noble lie’.

Above, I described all of the problems with false beliefs. Because false beliefs cause so many problems, we have good reason to promote in people a love of true belief. This includes a love of learning and of knowledge, a love of intellectual responsibility, and an aversion to deceit. None of these virtues are easily practiced in a society that embraces a ‘noble lie’. The noble lie is quite incompatible with learning and knowledge because it tells people that there is an area of learning that they must not investigate. It uses intellectually irresponsible forms of reasoning to persuade people of the lie and encourages them to embrace this suspect behavior. It teaches that truth has value only when it is useful – and when a fiction is useful, then it is better than truth.

Of course, religious people will deny that their beliefs are false. They would assert that my objections above all beg the question – beg the question of the truth of religious claims. However, the question that I was asked was whether religion makes a person a better leader. Of course it is true that people who have different opinions about the truth of religious claims will give different answers to that question. However, my answer to that question comes from the perspective of somebody who holds that religious beliefs are false. In this case, religion makes an individual a worse ruler, but not necessarily worse than an atheist ruler who has different (and worse) false beliefs.

The idea that not all beliefs are equally bad is important here. I may believe, for example, that Tyrannosaurus Rex was a predator, when it was in fact a scavenger. However, my false belief has almost no relevance to the real world. It is not likely to be the case that any living person will be made to suffer as a result of my false belief about the nature of T-Rex.

On the other hand, a false belief that a particular button in a nuclear power plant is safe to push could do a great deal of damage. It is a far worse belief. It is so bad, in fact, that I may well be obligated to assume that no button in a nuclear power plant is safe to push unless I have been informed otherwise by a trained expert.

Where religion gives a group of people a false belief that they will be rewarded in the afterlife if they spend this life tending to the starving, sick, injured, and homeless, this false belief is not all that bad. We still have to deal with the fact that the agent needs more reliable tools for distinguishing true beliefs from false. However, that is a minor problem made up for with the good deeds that he has done.

On the other hand, where religion gives people a belief that they may or must act in ways that are destructive of the life of millions of other people, this belief is much worse.

We can tolerate the first belief in the grounds that, given that we do not have the resources to challenge every mistake, we must focus our attention on the worst beliefs. On this metric, beliefs that are relatively harmless are set aside while we focus on fighting beliefs that prompt people to act in ways harmful to others.

There are some religions that are worse than others. There are some religions that we need to take steps to exterminate because their religion tells their members to engage in behavior harmful to others – to kill others, to block the access that others need to life-saving medical care, to pose limits on the freedoms of others that deprive others of a quality life. These religions add to misery and suffering on a grand scale. No leader who is a member of any of these religions is made a better leader as a result. In fact, quite the opposite is true.

The best we can hope for is a religion that does a minimal amount of harm.

Yet, as I said at the beginning, and I want to repeat here, religion is not the only source of error and can, on occasion, consist of a set of false beliefs that do far less harm that the available non-religious alternatives.

Religion, Atheism, and the Reason for Good Deeds

A couple of days ago I asked about the appropriateness of religious symbols in public buildings.

I used the example of the ancient Roman goddess Justitia. She is represented in public buildings and on public documents as a blindfolded woman holding scales and asword. Her image stands without protest because her image has come to symbolize a value – justice – that is worthy of a position in public buildings.

If Jesus were to occupy such a role, then what value would Jesus symbolize?

I suggested kindness and charity to those who lack food, clothing, shelter, or medical care as a potential value. However, I also protested that the followers of Jesus seem more interested in using this symbol to promote willful ignorance in the face of all evidence, bigotries and hatreds having no better foundation than that bigots alive thousands of years ago attributed their own bigotry to God, or malicious deception for the sake of political power.

When people use the image of Jesus, we seem to see these latter three ‘values’ more often than not. And when we protest these ‘values’ – when we claim that they are not fit values for any individual let alone any government, we hear the protest, “But look at all of the good religion has done!”

Consider this:

Consider a person who runs into a burning house and pulls a family out through the flames, saving them from an ugly death. He then goes back to his business where he sells “miracle cure” snake oil to the ill, promotes willful ignorance of its harmful effects, and uses malicious distortions and lies against anybody who questions the value of his product. When others complain about what he is doing, he protests, “But I saved that family from the burning building!”

In fact, our snake-oil salesmen not only sells snake oil on the side. He immediately takes out advertisements claiming that his snake oil gave him the courage and moral character necessary to run into a building and save the family. In other words, he then uses his heroics as a marketing gimmick to sell more snake oil.

Though our snake-oil salesman credits his snake oil with giving him the ability to rescue the family, we may actually ask the degree to which he was motivated by the profit potential of using the publicity generated by a heroic act to sell snake oil. As he ran into the building, was the thought going through his mind, “I must do what I can to save this family?” Or was it, “Imagine what the publicity this will generate do to sales of snake oil!”

We may be grateful for the good that this man has done, but this in no way gives him license to lie and deceive others into taking actions that are harmful to them. If given an choice, we have much more reason to prefer the hero who would rescue the family without selling snake oil on the side over one who rescues the family and also sells snake oil on the side.

We also may be grateful for the person who rescues the family because he cares that others not suffer, rather than because he cares to profit from his actions.

Look at the religious institutions who put their company logo on their good deeds, who use them to advertize rather than out of a simple concern for the well-being of those who are suffering.

We are often asked the question, “Why don’t atheists build hospitals?”

In fact, atheists do build hospitals. They contribute huge quantities of money to medical research, and they lobby for more money to be contributed. They lament the resources that are diverted from curing disease and feeding the hungry that, instead, go to advertizing the snake oil being sold by those who claim to be concerned with curing disease and feeding the hungry.

The reason that there are so few atheist hospitals and atheist charities is because atheists have not used their good deeds to advertize atheism, the way religious institutions use their good deeds to advertize their religion. The atheist who runs into the burning building to save the family is almost certainly not thinking, “Imagine what the publicity from this is going to do to the market share of atheism.” We know this because atheists do not put an atheist flag on their good deeds.

That is changing to some extent. Malicious deceivers have used the fact that atheists do not put an atheist flag on their good deeds – that they do not tend to exploit the suffering as opportunities to market atheism – to claim that atheists do not do good deeds. Apparently, they do not think it is even possible for a person to do a good deed out of kindness or concern, so that a deed that does not come with an advertisement for snake oil on it is a good deed that simply did not happen.

To some extent, many atheists today have decided that it is necessary to an atheist brand on atheist good deeds, simply to let people know that atheist good deeds exist. To some extent, there is reason to worry whether an atheist, like many theists, is performing his good deeds out of a concern for others, or out of a desire to advertise his beliefs.

This blog fits into that category. I do not argue for or against the existence of a God because it is substantially irrelevant. If a particular type of action is immoral, then it is something that no moral person may do. But, it is also something that no moral God may do. The study of morality is as much a study of what gods may or may not do (if any were to exist) as it is a study of what people may or may not do.

The only reason that I mentioned atheism in the title of this blog is to counter the propaganda of hate-mongers who say that because atheists do not put an atheist logo on their good deeds that they do no good deeds.

Perhaps the practice of putting philosophical brand names on good deeds is not a bad thing. If the results in people doing more good deeds, so that they can have more actions that carry their church’s brand name, then the poor, at least, are better off. I am certain that the beneficiary of needed food, clothing, shelter, or medical care does not care too much that their benefits come with brand religious brand names attached.

Yet, the original question was what sort of values might Jesus come to symbolize in a few thousand years, in the same sense that the Roman goddess Justitia came to symbolize justice. And, in this respect, the problem of doing good deeds for the sake of advertizing one’s religion, and the malicious deception of claiming that those who do not advertize their beliefs with their good deeds do no good deeds, suggest that the image will be one of exploitation and malicious deception, rather than genuine kindness and concern.

Political Considerations for Religious Belief

What role should religion play in the election of a politician?

Atheists have virtually no chance in the United States of getting elected into government. Is this a matter of religious discrimination? Is it the case, at Mitt Romney argued in his Faith in America speech, that American voters should not consider a person’s religious views (or views on religion) when deciding who to vote for?

I argue that the voters not only have a right, but a duty, to consider the religious views of their candidates and to refuse to vote for any candidate whose religious views threaten the well-being of the country.

For example, let us assume that a candidate is running for public office who holds that it is his God-given duty to bring about Armageddon by launching all of the nation’s nuclear weapons at whoever God tells him to attack.

Imagine this candidate going to Texas to give a speech before a group of evangelical Christians saying, “Yes, you might find my religion to be strange. However, I promise that no church official will dictate policy while I am in the White House. Instead, I will keep my own council with God, and dedicate to executing His will as I understand it. Now, in this country, we have freedom of religion. This means that nobody may legitimately condemn me for the religious beliefs I happen to hold. When you vote for me, you have to ignore the fact that my religion commands me to start Armageddon because you have to ignore my religious beliefs when deciding who to vote for.”

Sorry, but . . . no. Your religious views give me every reason to vote against you and to make sure that you never, ever, under any circumstances, get near anywhere near this country’s stockpile of nuclear weapons – or any country’s stockpile for that matter.

Or, consider, the candidate who holds that blood transfusions are immoral . . . who, the instant he gets into the White House, will go to work ending as much financial and government support for blood transfusions that it is within his control as President to stop. He, too, argued that we, the voters, have no right to hold his religious views against him.

Wanna bet?

We can add the candidate who believes that medical care (other than broken bones) results from failure to properly worship God and to transfer money away from the hospitals (to the degree that he has the power to do so) and to funnel it into faith healing instead. He, too, says that we may not hold his religious views against him when we cast our vote.

The fact is, we have every right to hold somebody’s religious views against them when we vote.

We do not have the right to ban any of the three people that I mentioned from running for office. If any of these candidates wishes to run for public office, they may do so. If they then win, then they can execute their plans within the limits prescribed by law (and campaign to alter those limits). However, in all of this, we have every right to look at their religious views and say, “Absolutely not!”

In the sense that I described above, the atheist is as free to run for public office in this country as the person who will seek to bring about Armageddon by launching the nation’s nuclear weapons at the first opportunity. The people have just as much right to refuse to vote for the atheist for religious reasons as they do to vote against the person who would ban all blood transfusions in the country to the degree that he would do so.

No complaint can or should be delivered on these grounds. Instead, the complaint should be leveled against any who claim that a candidate’s bizarre views does not, in fact, provide a voter with good reason to vote against him.

The problem is not that people have no right to consider an atheist’s views about God in deciding who to vote for. The problem is that people have beliefs about atheists that are substantially false – acquired in a fog of hateful bigotry by people who use whatever money and power they have to spread this hatred of atheists.

If an atheist candidate were to declare that no God exists and that all life is meaningless and pointless, and that he will consider it his job as President to end this pointless existence for as many people as possible, he should not be allowed to argue that voters may not hold his atheism against him. The same is true of the atheist candidate who declares that religion is the root of all evil and, as such, he will set the machinery of government to the task of hunting down religion wherever it may try to hide and exterminate it. He may declare that this is his religion, but in doing so he cannot declare that the voters may not consider these facts in deciding who to vote for.

The problem with respect to atheism is not that it is inherently wrong to consider a person’s atheism as a reason to vote against him. The problem is that those who hold that atheism automatically disqualifies a candidate from holding public office are mistaken. While specific atheists clearly are unfit for the position, other atheists might be in a particularly good position to discover real-world solutions to real-world problems – to use science to explain and predict the results of different policies, and to use his innate concern for self and others to guide the country clear of the dangers in the waters ahead.

Many of the false beliefs that people hold about atheists are themselves a result of well-funded hate-mongers – theists who want to hold onto as much political and economic power as possible and do not care about the lies they have to tell to do so. Furthermore, they have manipulated the government into teaching one generation after another that those are not “under God” are as un-American as those who would support rebellion, tyranny, and injustice for all. That “we” all “trust God,” and, by implication, none who do not “trust God” can be thought of as “we”.

We have the bigoted prejudices of people like Mitt Romney asserting that freedom requires religion, and of others who hold that no person can be moral (no person can be trusted to rule justly) who does not believe that our rights come from God.

These beliefs, all of which keep atheists from public office, and which the government itself is involved in teaching and reinforcing whenever possible, are prejudices that keep atheists out of office. If they were true, then they would be perfectly legitimate reasons to vote against any atheist candidate. The trouble is not only that they are false, but that they are so far from being true that only hate-filled bigots could think that they had any merit.

Hate-filled bigots, in this case, are not people who consider an atheist’s morality when deciding who to vote for. Hate-filled bigots are those who think that no atheist can be moral. Hate-filled bigots, in this case, are not people who would vote against a candidate who was a threat to liberty. Hate-filled bigots are those people who hold that the mere fact that one is an atheist implies that one has no concern to preserve liberty – as if atheists have no particular objection to people living the one and only life they will ever have as a slave.

It’s not just hate-filled bigotry that keeps atheists out of office. It is also the love of deception for the sake of political and economic power that dominates the leadership of religious institutions in this country. If, per chance, those religious leaders had an interest in an honest presentation and evaluation of the relevant issues, the people generally will see that there is no reason to keep a person out of political office merely because he is an atheist. However, this would weaken these religious leaders.

However, seeing that the economic and political power they covet can be more easily grasp through a campaign of deception and of unfounded hate, they pursue these options instead. Since they hold that their religion gives them a special understanding of ‘morality’, and ‘morality’ to them obviously includes malicious deception to promote hate for the sake of economic and political power, it is little wonder that they have trouble seeing their atheist rivals as being moral.

Yes, the voters can and should consider a candidate’s religious views in deciding who to vote for. The constitutional prohibition on a religious test says that the government will not impose such a test, not that the people may not do so. However, the people have a moral obligation to make an honest and just evaluation of the religious beliefs of those candidates, and the implications of those beliefs for the country. It is the voter who cannot do this honestly who is the bigot, not the voter who does this honestly and still judges a candidate unworthy of public office by reason of religion.

The candidate who believes that Israel must be restored to its biblical borders in order to trigger Armageddon is a threat to the safety and well-being of people in the real world.

The candidate who would block stem cell research for religious reasons is no better than the candidate who would block blood transfusions.

The candidate who believes that the Earth is only 10,000 years old is not smart enough or not connected to reality solidly enough to run the country.

These are perfectly legitimate factors to weigh in deciding who to vote for.

Religious Symbols on Government Property

I thought that today would be a good day to lend a hand in this “war on Christmas” campaign.

I suspect that the vast majority of my readers recognize that the War on Christmas has more to do with disreputable news organizations trying to boost ratings by promoting hate in the form of “News”. I suspect that the vast majority of atheists were quite content to celebrate Christmas, to wish others, “Merry Christmas,” to put up Christmas trees, and sing Christmas carols to their heart’s content.

That was my life until I learned from Fox News (indirectly, through people who actually watch that garbage) that a “War on Christmas” exists. And, quite clearly, it exists precisely because the people of Fox News wanted more money and thought that inventing a “War on Christmas” would be a good way to rally viewers and fill them with enough hate that they would keep coming back for progress reports – just like they eagerly tuned into reports on the War in Iraq (for the first two years or so).

They also do not seem to have much respect for the facts. The Guardian has a nice story of all of the battles being wages against Christmas in England – about the town of Luton, for example, banning Christmas and replacing it with a holiday called Luminos, while Birmingham replaced Christmas with ‘Winterval’. The Guardian then said that these protests against a War on Christmas . . .

. . . might be reasonable, were it not for a few awkward facts. Luton does not have a festival called Luminos. It does not use any alternative name for Christmas. When it did, once, five years ago, hold something called Luminos one weekend in late November, the event didn’t even replace the council’s own Christmas celebrations, let alone forbid anyone else from doing anything. Similarly,, Christmas is not called Winterval in Birmingham. The Royal Edinburgh Hospital for Sick Childrenn never banned a Christmas CD for mentioning Jesus. And Chester council’s “un-Christian” Christmas card says – as cards have done for decades – “Season’s Greetings.”

These are lies. The so-called “War on Christmas” campaign is a campaign of lies that are used to promote unjustified hatred of others around the holiday season – to promote ill will for the sake of promoting the economic and political power of those who are promoting ill will.

Of course, there have been individuals who have argued for alternatives to Christmas. I have never actually seen any research to show who was behind these campaigns. My guess is that they were teachers and employees organizing parties who wanted a party that every student or fellow employee could enjoy. These poor, misguided individuals thought that kindness and consideration were Christian virtues. They failed to realize, of course, that true Christian virtue (particularly during the holiday season) is found in maliciously distorting facts in order to generate hatred of others. This, apparently, is what the Christmas season is all about to . . . to some Christians at least.

Yet, this debate does raise some question about the legitimacy of religious displays on government property and the like. How far should we go to remove religious symbols from the public square?

You know that statue of “Justice” that you so often see associated with court houses? I’m talking about a commonly used statue or image of a lady, usually wearing a blindfold, with scales in one hand (to weigh the evidence for and against the accused), and a sword in the other (to deliver punishment if the accused should be found guilty).

That’s a religious symbol.

Or at least it was a religious symbol. That statue is a statue of the ancient Roman goddess Justitia – the goddess of justice. (An interesting fact to offer to those who claim that our concept of justice came from Christianity.)

Yet, nobody proposes that we remove this religious symbol from public buildings. Nobody objects to this religious symbol appearing on the money, in classrooms, and particularly not in courtrooms.

That is mostly because it is not a religious symbol any more. Most people do not even think of the statue as representing a goddess. They think of this image of justice like the statue of liberty – as a representation of an ideal in the form of a person. In thinking about symbols this way, I can easily imagine that, 2000 years from now, images of Jesus are displayed in public buildings the same way that images of Justitia are displayed today. A person who sees a statue of Justitia thinks that this is a place where the people are dedicated to an impartial hearing of a dispute, weighing the evidence on both sides without prejudice, and rendering a . . . well . . . a just verdict.

Some day, perhaps, they will see the symbol of Jesus in a public building and think that this is a place where the people are dedicated to finding food, clothing, shelter, and medical care to those who need it.

Or, perhaps, this symbol will come to mean something else over time. If current trends continue, like those mentioned above, people who see this symbol will come to think that this is a place where the people worship the power of maliciously distorting facts whenever it is judged politically or economically expedient to do so.

Or, perhaps, it will come to be a symbol of willful ignorance. This sign on a wall will indicate that the people within are like children who hold their fingers in their ears and shout, “I cannot hear you!” whenever they encounter a fact that they do not like – as the Catholic Board in Canada recently did to the Pullman trilogy on which The Golden Compass was based. The way several religious organizations have treated the evolution, global warming, and scientific research on the best ways to protect children from unwanted pregnancy and disease.

Or they could see it as a symbol of unreasoned motivation to work tirelessly to interfere with the happiness of others – making their lives on Earth less than they would otherwise be merely because some primitive tribesmen wrote their own hatred of these people into books later taken to be “scripture”.

If, indeed, images of Jesus are as common in government buildings 2000 years from now as images of Justitia today, we would hope that the image – like the image of Justitia – would symbolize positive values. In fact, only one of the four values mentioned above would be worthy of a statue in public buildings 2000 years from now comparable to the honored position that images of Justitia has today. That would be the Jesus who represents people devoted to charity and kindness.

Yet, what we see in this “War on Christmas” campaign is the Jesus of deception for reasons of political and economic gain – a Jesus not fit to be found anywhere near a government building.

Imagine: No Religion

My recent criticisms of the sign, "Imagine: No Religion" has raised the question of whether or not I think humanity would be better off without religion.

If you are going to ask me if I think we would be better off if there was no religion, I will ask in return, "Compared to what?"

I can easily imagine a world without religion. It is a world in which no people exist.

Is this a better world?

I would say not.

I can imagine a lot of other possible worlds in which there is no religion - no beliefs about Gods, or no belief that a God exists - that I would not count as good as the existing world.

So, my answer to the question, "Would be be better off without religion" is "It depends. What's the alternative?"

So, does that mean that we are better off with religion? Am I somebody who holds that religion is a good thing - that we need a little religion in our lives?

No.

Religion is a set of false beliefs. People seek to fulfill their desires, and act so as to fulfill their desires given their beliefs. False beliefs lead people astray - preventing them from realizing those states that actually fulfill their desires.

I have compared a religious life to a life inside an experience machine. The person is living a lie, and many of his imagined accomplishments are fake. Think of a person in an asylum who is convinced that he has personally cured cancer. He may be quite happy - quite pleased with what he had done. However, he had not cured cancer, so his happiness counts for little.

He is living a lie - just like the people who think that they have spent their lives serving God or promoting what some primitive tribesmen falsely called 'good' 2000 years of more ago. The "good" that they pursue does not exist - these are false goods mistakenly said to be important by primitive cultures that did not know any better.

So, am I in favor of "no religion" or against it?

One of the arguments that I have made is that, on a social level, it is better to try to unite the best 80% of humanity against the worst 20%. Doing this in the other direction will guarantee that the best 20% will lose, and the worst 80% gets to control the course of the human race.

If we were to institute such a project, this would mean (1) that a substantial majority of the best 80% will believe in God, and (2) some of the worst 20% will not. One cannot simply take a person, discover that the person does or does not believe that a God exists, and know whether to categorize him as an ally or an enemy. We need to know more about the person than that.

This does not imply that it is wrong to criticize religion. The best 80% are well aware of the fact that they may be mistaken, and being challenged in one's beliefs is a useful way to helping to make sure that one is not pursuing a course that is better off not pursued. On the other hand, the worst 20% will be disposed to be upset about having their beliefs challenged - who will want to censor or otherwise silence their critics.

If we keep fighting the worst 20%, and if we keep winning, I suspect that, in the long run, we will eliminate religion. This, however, is a prediction, not a project.

Every religious person on the planet holds beliefs that I take to be false. At the same time, so does every atheist. I can honestly say, of every person on the planet, that he holds at least one proposition to be true that I hold to be false, or holds one proposition to be false that I hold to be true. If the fact that somebody holds a false belief is enough for me to condemn him and to refuse to form an alliance with him to better humanity, then I must condemn everybody.

Including myself . . . because I will guarantee that I hold at least one proposition to be false that is in fact true, and at least one proposition to be true that is in fact false.

And I hold that false belief because I unquestioningly picked it up from my parents and my culture.

I just don’t know which of my beliefs this is.

You, reader . . . yes, I’m talking to you . . . you hold at least one proposition to be true that I hold to be false. We do not agree on everything. Does this fact, and this fact alone, imply that we must be enemies? Can’t we put those differences aside for a while and work together – join forces on a project to eliminate what we both agree to be some of the worst problems that face humanity?

That point of difference might be that you believe that T-Rex was a predator while I think that T-Rex was a scavenger. That point of disagreement might be that you think that happiness is the sole end of all human action, while I hold that human brains hold a number of desires like it holds a number of beliefs and each desire identifies a separate end to human action. That difference might be that you hold that you hold that at least one God exists and I hold that it is not the case that at least one God exists.

People who cannot allow and accept that there are and will always be points of disagreement between them and those they call friends and with whom they make alliances are going to live lives without friends and allies.

Another question that I was asked by a member of the studio audience is this one:

If the population of the United States was 90% atheist and/or anti religious and only 10% Christian, do you think the chances of a Christian being elected President would be very good?

Well, this is a trick question. I think that atheists carry no special immunity against bigotry. Because of this bigotry it may well be the case that a Christian could never be elected in such a society. However, I would object to such a standard.

I will say this with absolute certainty – that every candidate that runs for public office holds at least one proposition to be true that I hold to be false. The atheist and the theist candidate running for office will both have beliefs that I do not share. I obviously hold that the theist’s beliefs about the existence of a god are not true. The atheist will also have beliefs that I will hold to be not true.

Only the most irrational bigot would conclude that the mere fact that one is a theist is enough of a reason to vote against him – regardless of what the other differences might be.

However, there are a lot of different types of Christians. A Christian who believes that we must trigger the Rapture by declaring war on the infidels, who stands before the podium and argues that the Bible demands an immediate attack on the forces of Islam with all of the weapons at our disposal, will not get my vote.

I am not one who holds that a minority view has a right to be represented – that we should ignore the religious beliefs of candidates and focus only on the non-religious matters. Where religious beliefs support policies that bring death and destruction, we should very much consider those beliefs in deciding who to vote for. I will insist on taking a person’s religious views into consideration when deciding who to vote for.

Yet, I consider it absurd to suggest that the only thing worth looking at – or even the first and most important thing to look at – is whether a candidate, friend, or ally believes that there is a god.

E2.0: Edward Slingerland: The Religion that Denies it is a Religion.

This is the third in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s “Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.”. I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

The weird thing about Enlightenment 2.0 is that it is a religion that denies that it is a religion.

The third presenter at the Beyond Belief 2 conference, Edward Slingerland, will continue to develop the history of Enlightenment 1.0. However, in doing so he will give us substantive to chew on. He is going to argue that we cannot give up on supernatural (what he calls ‘metaphysical’) entities when it comes to morality.

I, of course, completely reject that conclusion.

However, before we debate the conclusion, we need to see how Slingerland gets there.

Slingerland is Canada Research Chair in Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition at the University of British Columbia. His contribution at the conference to understanding Enlightenment 1.0 was to draw on a connection that existed at the time between a problem that the French philosopher Voltaire tried to solve and ancient Chinese philosophy.

One of the criticisms of Enlightenment 1.0 was the claim that it was impossible to get people to be moral without the threat of eternal damnation. In order to answer this objection, Voltaire (according to Slingerland, pointed toward ancient Chinese philosophy and, in particular, the philosophy of Confucius. The Chinese, Voltaire argued, had a morality that did not involve the threat of eternal damnation – a morality that was free of religious baggage – yet they seemed to get along quite well.

However, in China, this ‘metaphysically minimalist’ morality faced the same objections that Enlightenment 1.0 was facing in Europe.

There was a very popular criticism that the supernatural minimalism was leading to social chaos. And this was a period of social chaos and you had a lot of people saying that it was a period of social chaos because nobody believed in ghosts and spirits anymore.

Also, even the ‘supernatural minimalists’ in China argued that there was a need to preserve and continue religious institutions because it provided the people with comfort. A Confucian philosopher, Xinzi, said of the rain ceremony:

You pray for rain and it rains. Why? For no particular reason. It is just as though you had not prayed and it rained anyway.

Yet, even Xinzi argued that people should continue to do the rain ceremony because it made people feel good and it brought people together.

So, both ancient Chinese philosophy and Enlightenment 1.0 had the same ‘bug’. Its thinkers, even though they were metaphysical minimalists, were not totally able to get rid of metaphysical entities entirely. Even Voltaire was a deist.

According to Slingerland, there are two directions we can go with this in Enlightenment 2.0. We could (1) go the rest of the way and cut out the remaining metaphysical entities, or (2) admit that some metaphysical entities will be necessary even in Enlightenment 2.0.

Slingerland will defend the second option. I, of course, argue for the first.

To describe Slingerland’s position more precisely, he holds that something about human cognition – about the way humans are put together (how we evolved), that we are fundamentally incapable of doing away with the last of these supernatural entities. Ultimately, he asserts, Enlightenment 2.0 will be “grounded in values that adhere to the non-factual."

To prove this point, Slingerland points to the classic fact-value distinction. Values are not facts. Values are not ‘supernatural minimalist’. Either we must accept these supernatural values as the grounding for our morality, or we must give up value (morality) all together. Those are our only two options.

Slingerland draws on the works of Charles Taylor (the most recent recipient of the Templeton Prize), and in particular the book Sources of the Self, in drawing a distinction between two types of value.

Value Type 1: Weak Evaluations. These are mere personal preferences – e.g., “I prefer vanilla ice cream over chocolate” (or, in my case, it would be the other way around). In Slingerland’s words, “It is recognizably subjective and arbitrary.”

Value Type 2: Strong Evaluations. Strong evaluation, like “trafficking in child slaves is wrong,” has “normative force”. People who traffic in child slaves are bad in a way that is not the case for people who like chocolate ice cream. Also, strong evaluations are intolerant. We impose them on others. In fact, strong judgments are a call to use force or violence against others. We arrest people, imprison them, maim them, and kill them, on the basis of our strong evaluations. They are justifications for doing harm.

It is interesting what Slingerland says about these justifications for doing harm. Because of a strong evaluation, we wish to do harm to certain types of people. However, we also have this impulse to try to ‘justify’ doing harm. It is not enough that we want to do harm to these people, but we want to base the harm that we do on the right sorts of reasons.

In order to get these right sorts of reasons, we are biologically compelled to make something up.

The way that I usually justify [the harm done to others based on a strong evaluation] is by referring to some sort of what Taylor calls an ontological claim. These are basically empirically unverifiable metaphysical entities that I invoke to justify the strength of my strong evaluation. In the case of child slavery we tend to appeal to something like human rights or the dignity of the individual. In the case of children . . . there is something special in innocence about children.

These entities do not exist. We cannot point to anything in the real world and say, “There is a human right” or “That thing over there is human dignity.”

Since even secularists draw upon these unverifiable ontological entities, even secularists have a ‘religion’ in this sense. It is a religion without gods and angels, but it is still a religion with unprovable, supernatural ‘values’ used to justify our strong evaluations.

The weird thing about Enlightenment 2.0 is that it is a religion that denies that it is a religion. . . The metaphysical entities are not explicitly recognized. They are always there in the background but they are not talked about too much

When discussing where these “liberal values” come from, Slingerland asserts that they come from Chrsitianity.

Historically it is actually coming out of Christianity. It’s through Kant, getting watered down in Enlightenment 1.0, until with us it is based on a kind of a vague sense about something being special, dignified about people.

One of the things that Enlightenment 2.0 will borrow from Christianity and all religion is this disposition to use violence to force its values on others without anything to back up this use of violence than some imaginary metaphysical entities. They are not tied to a god, but they are still empirically unverifiable supernatural entities.

By the way, even moral subjectivists fall victim to this type of analysis. A moral subjectivists holds that moral entities are not real. They do not exist in the real world. However, we must believe in them, so we get to make up whatever moral entities we want. The important thing is that we make up some set of moral entities, entities that we know are not real, but entities that guide our actions nonetheless.

This part does not seem to bother Slingerland. We make up these ontological entities specifically to provide a make-believe ‘excuse’ to kill, maim, imprison, or otherwise do harm to others. Slingerland seems to have no trouble postulating imaginary entities for the purpose of justifying harm.

We have these moral intuitions. We want to impose them on other people. We need a justification. So we make one up. And it often involves some invocation of a moral law or some rational justification. But it is really about the feeling. We just don’t like it.

I actually agree with Slingerland that people do this all the time. They made up God and made up commandments that they assigned to God in order to say, “Because this comes from God and not out of my own personal desire to see you suffer, my actions are justified, and you deserve to suffer.” However, the fact that people are always making things up in order to justify doing harm to others does not justify the practice of making up reasons to justify doing harm to others.

Slingerland says that we can’t do anything else.

We can’t get away from metaphysical beliefs at some level. . . . I don’t think that it is because we haven’t tried hard enough. I think that it is because thoroughgoing nonbelief is actually impossible for creatures like us for psychologically healthy human beings.

In other words, to be a psychologically healthy human being you have to be caught in a trap of making up imaginary entities to justify doing harm to others that, ultimately, are not justified by anything other than the fact that you really want to harm those people.

Actually, I would not describe such a being as ‘psychologically healthy’.

I hold that when Slingerland starts talking about value, he starts off substantially wrong and gets more wrong as he goes along.

When it comes to Value Type 1, I hold that calling this a ‘judgment’ that is ‘subjective and arbitrary’ gets us off on the wrong foot. A statement like, “I prefer chocolate ice cream over vanilla” is a fact statement. There are a lot of true things that I can say about myself. I am 6’ tall. I am male. I live in Colorado. My blood pressure is around 140 over 80. I have a scar on my right thumb. I have a preference for chocolate ice cream over vanilla. These are perfectly ordinary, objectively true statements.

My preference for chocolate ice cream over vanilla is no more ‘subjective and arbitrary’ than the scar on my right thumb. It is true that not everybody has a scar on their right thumb like mine (or a scar on their right thumb at all). It is true that there is no reason to hold that they should have a scar on their right thumb like mine. Yet, my scar exists, and its existence is neither subjective nor arbitrary. It is a part of the real world in which we live – as is my preference for chocolate ice cream over vanilla.

When it comes to Type 1 values, these values are real-world entities that have real-world effects. Also, like the scar on my thumb, they are not necessary in the sense that outside forces (human behavior) determines whether those entities exist or the form that they take.

These Type 1 values provide us with reasons for action. They not only give us reason to fulfill the desires directly, but they give us reason to build in others (and give others reason to build in us) Type 1 values that aid in the fulfillment of other Type 1 values. My preference for chocolate ice cream not only gives me a reason to go to the store and buy some chocolate ice cream. It also gives me reason to build in others an aversion to preventing me from going to the store and getting some chocolate ice cream.

What Slinglerland (and Taylor) call Type 2 evaluations are simply evaluations of Type 1 evaluations – taking Type 1 evaluations and classifying them as good (tend to fulfill other Type 1 evaluations), bad (tend to thwart Type 1 evaluations), and neutral (have little or no effect on Type 1 evaluations). Then, to use the social tools at our disposal to promote Type 1 values that tend to fulfill other values, inhibit Type 1 values that tend to thwart other values, and simply not worry about Type 1 values that would neither fulfill nor thwart other Type 1 values if they were universally promoted or inhibited.

Again, I agree that a lot of people on the secular side of the debate do make up metaphysical entities to justify the harms that they wish to inflict on others. Part of my reason for arguing that I am not against religion per se, but I am against wrongdoing, is because I recognize that a person does not need to believe in God to invent metaphysical entities that they can then draw upon to justify doing harm to others.

Yet, the fact that scientists can provide countless examples of people doing these sorts of things, and study them in MRIs and through other scientific techniques, does not and never will justify the practice of making up reasons (and ontological commitments) to ‘justify’ doing harm to others.

E2.0: Margaret Jacob: Enlightenment 1.0 as a Populist Movement

This is the second in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s “Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.”. I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

Margaret Jacob, a professor of History at UCLA, was the second person to speak at the Enlightenment 2.0 conference. She was charged with providing some additional background information on Enlightenment 1.0.

Jacob pointed out that Enlightenment 1.0 is usually portrayed as a philosophical movement, and that we tend to study that era by studying the writings of 20 to 25 philosophs. Howver, Jacob wanted to argue that the enlightenment was substantially a populist movement – that it came from the people themselves.

Specifically, she traces the beginning of Enlightenment 1.0 to French religious intolerance. The French had required its citizens to profess Catholicism. This required that French protestants either (1) convert, (2) go to prison, or (3) leave the country. Many of them decided to leave the country. Where they went was to The Netherlands. The Netherlands had strict censorship laws, but those laws applied only to things written in Dutch. They did not care what people wrote in other languages – such as French or English. So, these French ex-patriots were permitted to print substantially anything they wanted about the French government and the Catholic Church.

They created a massive market for criticisms of these two institutions – religious and government institutions. One publisher at the time went so far as to publish and distribute a text, “. . . Three Imposters”. Those imposters were Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. That book was immediately banned, even though it was written in French – it had gone too far even for the Dutch authorities to allow. However, it is significant that the people at the time were able to consider launching this type of challenge.

This populist culture, then, gave the philosophs of the enlightenment their platform. This was not a case in which philosophs writing treatises lead the people in rebellion. It was a case in which people in (cultural) rebellion naturally gave the proverbial microphone to those writers who best expressed their sentiments. Indeed, this is a characteristic that distinguishes 19th century philosophs from philosophers.

Of course, this is actually a feedback loop. The philosophs did not just report what the people believed. They distilled and clarified that thinking. Readers, then, took the modifications and justifications that the philosophs proposed back to the people, altering Enlightenment 1.0 accordingly.

I want to contrast this story with the story that we have in America today – particularly in the light of recent events. We live in a culture in which the vast majority of publications do not come from enlightenment thinkers, but from religious thinkers.

What is the Catholic Church after when it bans the books on which The Golden Compass movie was based, and organizes a boycott against the movie? At the same time, a different move – one that condemns science and asserts that human salvation depends on faith and belief in God, breaks box-office records.

The hope is prevent a situation like that which existed in Europe in Enlightenment 1.0. By controlling the marketplace of ideas – by economically and, in some places, politically banning Enlightenment 2.0, the forces of unreason wish to create a culture in which people – particularly children – never have an opportunity to encounter things that question Church dogma.

There are two ways to argue against a movie, or a novel, or some other presentation that expresses ideas that one does not agree with. One way is to say, “These are the ideas that are expressed in that presentation, and these are my reasons for disagreeing with them.” These types of debates bring reason and discourse to the forefront, allow people the opportunity to weigh the arguments on different sides, and to draw a conclusion based on the reasons provided.

The second way to react to something one does not like is to demand that it not be said – or, if it is said, to demand that it be silenced as much as possible. This way people never get to hear the other side. This way the forces of unreason need not worry about defending their own side.

Of course, it is not at all difficult to imagine why the forces of unreason would be particularly concerned with what would happen if their ideas – and challenges to their ideas – were subject to open debate and a discussion of the actual principles.

Even the New Atheists – once they appeared on the stage – were effectively silenced within a few months, not by challenging the claims that these authors made in their books, but by condemning the authors as being ‘intolerant’ and ‘militant’. They used their economic power to shout as loudly as possible that the people can safely ignore what the “new atheists” had to say, not because they can be shown to have made mistakes, but because of the tone in which the “new atheists” spoke.

Again, the idea was not to engage the critics, but to silence them or, at least, to render them impotent and irrelevant.

The New Atheism caught the forces of unreason by surprise – they were not expecting it. Like any surprise attack, it took them a while to rally their forces and establish a solid line of defense. However, they seem to have done so, and now the attack is faltering. One scarcely hears about the “new atheists” these days except to hear denigrating and derogatory remarks by the defenders of unreason. Once again, the forces of unreason have taken control of the popular media.

Actually, the “new atheists” have let them. The “new atheists”, while they claim to be tired of being pushed around by the forces of unreason, actually seem quite comfortable with being pushed around by the forces of unreason. At least (other than complaining to each other in venues such as this blog where the forces of unreason seldom enter), or a few private conversations that scarcely make a ripple on the public scene, they seem content to do nothing.

Reversing this trend is going to take hard work and it is going to take sacrifice. It’s going to take a willingness to contribute money and labor to making sure that the forces of reason are heard – not only by those who already accept the primacy of reason, but by those who have not actually made up their mind. In particular, it will take effort to present the doctrine of reason to children in light of a solid wall of defense that demands that children learn only about faith, and discover reason only when faith has taken too firm a hold to be dislodged.

So, one of the things that I would like to recommend to my readers is that you go through some effort and spare some expense to promote the communication of ideas that the forces of unreason do not want communicated. Specifically, I would recommend:

(1) Widespread and loud denunciation of the forces of unreason decision to ban and bury ideas that they do not like rather than confront and discuss those ideas.

(2) Contributing to the production and distribution of materials that the forces of unreason wish not to see produced and distributed.

(3) Be vocal, particularly around children, in saying that there is no God, that the forces of unreason seem quite clearly interested in controlling the way people think by banishing ideas they do not like.

In short, make sure that these people do not succeed in creating a culture where a child might not ever confront the idea that there is no god until the mind has been too badly polluted for such an idea to take root.

It may be fun to pretend that we live in the universe where the quality of an argument is the only factor relevant to how persuasive it is. However, people cannot be persuaded by an argument they do not hear. Furthermore, people simply do not have time to evaluate every argument, so they are prone to take that which fits best into their pre-conceived notions, and not pay attention to what makes sense. They are prone to base their judgments on what the people they want to trust are saying. These are facts about the real world – facts that will not go away simply because somebody wishes it were otherwise.

Atheism's 10 Commandments

p>I saw a display recently on “Atheism’s 10 Commandments.” In fact, it was brought to my attention by somebody who asked if I had been involved in creating it because it sounds so much like me. When I listened to it, I was horrified to think that people would see that and think of me.

Okay, ‘horrified’ is too strong a word. I was stricken with the need to clarify where I would disagree with these 10 commandments and, in fact, why I would be disinclined to write a set of commandments to start with.

On the issue of having commandments at all, I have often compared atheism to heleocentrism (the view that the sun, rather than the earth, is at the center of the solar system) in that neither has anything substantive to say about morality. To understand morality, you have to look someplace other than the orbit of the Earth around the sun, and you have to look at what does exist rather than at what does not exist. The only implication that atheism has for morality is that no true moral claim requires that the proposition, “a god exists” to be true.

I do have a few moral slogans that I trot out from time to time. For example, I am fond of saying, “The only legitimate response to words are words and private actions; the only legitimate response to a political campaign in an open society is a counter-campaign.”

However, I hold these up as rules of thumb, not as commandments. In the words of the famed pirate Barbosa from Pirates of the Caribbean, these are . . . more what you'd call guidelines than actual rules.

By ‘guidelines’ I do not mean that they can be broken on a whim. I mean that they are simplistic approximations of moral truth that are useful in a lot of common situations, but they are not literally true.

The free speech slogan above, for example, says nothing about libel and slander, or of fraud (which basically is a crime using words – lies – to manipulate the actions of others), revealing private information, (e.g., publishing somebody’s credit report online), or violating national security (printing or publishing the plans for the Allied assault on Normandy in 1944).

Another reason why I would not speak in terms of commandments is that I hold that there is a truth value to moral claims, and some of our views are mistaken. If anybody should offer a moral proposition then that proposition – like all propositions – needs to be held up the light of reason, studied, and evaluated. As our understanding of the real world improves, we can expect to discover that some of the moral claims we thought to be true are false.

In fact, I would suggest (require) that any moral claim offer as a ‘commandment’ be closely studied to reveal whether it is true or false – whether it is fact that we ought to do what we are being commanded to do, or whether we should not.

As we engage in this study, we can expect different people to come up with different views on the subject. Just as biologists disagree over whether evolution can function on the level of individuals only or groups, and paleontologists disagree over whether T-Rex was primarily a hunter or a scavenger, we can expect disagreement over the truth of moral propositions. Presenting these moral propositions as ‘commandments’ seems incompatible with holding that they have a truth value that can be questioned.

[I know that there are some moral non-cognitivists who would disagree with the above statement. I can deal with those objections in a separate post.]

So, that’s what I would like to do here. I would like to take these propositions that one commenter said seemed to be something I would have written and evaluate their truth value. Are they moral propositions that I would hold to be true, or would I hold them to be false?

Disclaimer: I do not have space to go through all of the commandments in this post, so I will do some later. For the rest of today’s post, I will look only at the first two.

(1) Try to treat others as you would have them treat you.

This is a nice slogan, comparable to “the only legitimate response to words are words and private actions.” It’s not actually true.

The primary problem with this claim is that it emphasizes the ways that we are similar, but shoves aside our differences. In all likelihood, there are areas in which I do not like to be treated the way that you would have others treat you. Treating me the way you like to be treated – rather than the way that I like to be treated – ignores those differences and assumes that we should all be alike, and belittles our differences.

It would seem, then, that we should treat others the way they want to be treated, not the way that we would want them to treat us.

Yet, this has even greater problems. What the ‘other’ wants is to be treated as a master. He wants total obedience from his slaves whose sole job is to be ready to satiate whatever desire should come up. Certainly, I would not be a moral monster if I refused to treat him the way that he wants us to treat him, and simply insisted that he had no right to that type of subservience.

Actually, the claim to ‘treat others the way you would want them to treat you’ is a statement about the universal nature of moral claims. The statement “X is wrong” implies “Any person in a similar situation would be doing something wrong if he were to do X.” This, in turn, implies, “If I were in a similar situation, I would be doing something wrong if I were to do X.”

Do not say that it is morally permissible for you to do X if you would say that it is morally prohibited for somebody else in a similar situation to do X.

The key difference between this version and the original proposed commandment is that this version has nothing to do with likes and dislikes, and only applies to moral ‘ought’ and ‘ought not’. A more sensible version of this proposal is the Kantian imperative, “Act on that principle that you can will to be a universal law.”

Desire utilitarianism, by the way, captures this by looking at morality as a question of promoting desires that it would be good for everybody to have, and inhibiting desires that it would be good for nobody to not have. We are not so much looking at universal principles but universal desires (or the universal absence of certain desires). In fact, since people always act to fulfill the most and strongest of their desires given their beliefs, you can’t get a person to act in accordance with a particular principle unless you make that action one that fulfills the most and strongest of the agent’s desires, given his beliefs. The only way to do that is to alter the agent’s desires.

(2) Be truthful and honest even if inconvenient or uncomfortable.

There should be a love of truth (and reason), and an aversion to dishonesty (and sophistry).

People seek to fulfill the most and strongest of their desires. However, they act so as to fulfill the most and strongest of their desires given their beliefs. False beliefs get in people's way of realizing those states that have value to them. We have reason to promote a love of that which gives us true beliefs, and an aversion to that which gives us false beliefs – where those beliefs are relevant to our actions.

We have a reason to promote a love of truth. What this means is that people are to be encouraged to seek truth for its own sake – not just because it is useful, but because they like truth. Their attitude towards truth should be like their attitude towards chocolate . . . well, for some of us . . . who eat chocolate not only for its calorie and nutrition content (its usefulness), but for its own sake (we like it, and would eat it in the absence of usefulness).

However, our love of truth should not be so strong or indiscriminate that we cannot put it away from time to time. One of the questions we can ask about the proposition above is, “What should you do if the Nazis come to your door, asking if you know of any Jews hiding in the neighborhood. And you do know of Jews hiding in the neighborhood. Should your love of truth be so strong that you reveal where the Jews are hiding?”

Answer: No.

There are two types of exemptions from moral demands; exceptions and outweighing. The difference between the two is that an ‘outweighing’ carries a psychological burden with it, while an exception does not.

A good example of a moral exception is the example of lying to the Nazis mentioned above. The aversion to lying comes with an exception – except when you protect the innocent by lying to wrongdoers.

An example that I frequently use to illustrate how one moral concern can outweigh another is the case of a parent out fishing with a child. The child gets stung by a bee and starts to have an allergic reaction. The parent’s car will not start, but there is another car nearby with the keys in the ignition. He takes the car to get his child to the hospital.

What distinguishes the two cases is that, in the second case, there is still a sense that the agent did something wrong. He did it out of necessity, but it was wrong. We see this by the fact that the father should regret having to take the car and recognize an obligation to make it up to the owner of the car – make up for the fact that he took the car without consent.

However, there is no sense that the person who lies to the Nazi guards should feel any regret and should have to apologize to the Nazi guards for lying to them.

The difference between the two is that the Nazi guard case involves an exception that is written directly into the aversion to lying. We do not promote a simple aversion to lying. We promote an aversion to lying except when one is lying to a wrongdoer in defense of the innocent. A person with this particular desire would have no aversion to lying to the wrongdoer when done to protect the innocent.

On the other hand, the fishing family case involves two conflicting desires that everybody should have but which cannot both be fulfilled in this situation. On desire is the desire to take care of one’s children. The other desire is the aversion to taking the property of another without consent. We want both desires to be operating because we have reason to want people to exhaust other possibilities before taking the car. Taking the car is a last resort. The aversion to taking property without consent motivates agents to look at other, less intrusive options first and to take the car only when no other option presents itself.

One of my objections to a commandment system of ethics is that it is a rule-centered theory of ethics. Rule-based moral theories can easily handle the moral phenomena of exceptions. That is to say, we can write into any rule, “Do A, except under conditions C,” and still have a perfectly good universal rule.

However, rule-based theories of ethics have a great deal of difficulty dealing with the issue of moral weight. It can say, “Do not take another person’s car without consent unless you need to get your dying child to the hospital,” but it cannot account for the moral phenomena that taking the car still has some residual wrongness, it still requires an apology, and it still requires the agent to “make it up” to the victim in some way.

One mark in favor of desire utilitarianism is that it can account for these two different types of exemptions from moral commands – in terms of exceptions being grounded on single complex (good) desires, while outweighing is grounded on two or more (good) desires coming into conflict in unusual circumstances.

A Speech Proposal

I have written a couple of times on the decision on the part of the Connecticut Valley Atheists to put a sign up in front of city hall that shows the World Trade Center buildings before 9/11 with the words, “Imagine: No Religion.”

These posts have brought to mind an idea of how I would like to see this situation resolved. It is a fantasy - something that I think will do a whole lot of good. It would be nice . . . .

This would be for the Connecticut Valley Atheists to make arrangements to either replace these images, or to cover them, and to release a statement that goes something like this:

When given an opportunity to put up a holiday display in front of town hall, we decided to put up a sign that showed the World Trade Center towers as they were before 9/11, with the words: “Imagine: No Religion.” That sign was an insult to anybody who accepts some religion, but who would never participate in or condone an act such as 9/11. We were wrong to put up that message, and we apologize for doing so.

Two wrongs do not make a right. We are forced to endure a barrage of writers and speakers who hold up Stalin and Mao Tse Tung and say, in effect, “Imagine: No Atheism.” As if we are somehow personally responsible for crimes committed by other atheists. Crimes we did not commit and do not condone.

That makes us angry. We were not there. We had nothing to do with those events. Yet, we are being held accountable for them.

It is tempting, in the face of that type of bigotry, to strike back and say, ‘How do you like it when others do the same to you? How do you like being blamed, in effect, for acts that you did not participate in and do not condone – simply because the perpetrators happened to be religious?”

Yet the phrase, “Two wrongs do not make a right” is meant to point out the error in that way of thinking. Only hypocrites can treat other people in ways that they would consider wrong if others did the same thing to them.

We live in a country with a pledge that declares that those who are not ‘under God’ are as unpatriotic – as un-American – as any who would support rebellion, tyranny, and injustice for all.

We live in a country that has adopted as its national motto – the most important principle of its political life – the idea that its population must be divided between a “We” who trust in God, and a “They” who do not.

We live in a country where Presidential candidates declare that freedom requires religion, and sitting Presidents insist that no person who thinks that our rights have a source other than God is qualified to be a judge.

We live in a country where we hear these things, not from a few bigoted neighbors, but from our own government and from elected officials who are supposed to represent all Americans, and not just those who agree with them on matters of religion.

In the face of this, it is tempting to find an opportunity to give people a taste of their own medicine, as it were.

However, two wrongs do not make a right. Two wrongs, almost invariably, lead to three wrongs, then four, then five. Our lives are far too short to waste in a society where people compete over who can commit the last and greatest wrong against the other. Somebody needs to refuse to take part in that contest. So, we apologize for the wrongs that we have done, and we resolve to work harder in the future to ensure that we do not do to others those things that we condemn when others do them to us.

[Speaking time: 3 minutes, 20 seconds]

And the world would be a better place.

Note: Any readers who think that the sign is morally defensible – but how think that pointing to the acts of Hitler and Stalin to discredit all atheists is not – are invited to view my previous posts on this subject:

(1) Connecticut Valley Atheists: Imagine

(2) Communication, Causation, and Condemnation – paying particular attention to the section on causation.

Communication, Causation, and Condemnation

Today, I wish to address some comments from a member of the studio audience. Those comments concern my objection to the “Imagine: No Religion” poster that superimposes these words on an image of the World Trade Center towers before 9/11. I presented those objections in an earlier posting called Connecticut Valley Atheists: Imagine.

I assert that the meaning of this poster is clear, false, and unjust. That it is, in effect, the same sort of argument used against atheism when a theist mention Hitler, Stalin, Mau Tse Tung, and Pol Pot and says (in effect), “Imagine: No Atheism.” Anybody who recognizes the unfairness – in the outright bigotry of the second statement should recognize the same bigotry in the first. The reaction, “How dare you condemn me for actions that I had no part in and do not condone?” applies both to those who use the ‘Imagine” poster and those who use the Hitler and Stalin cliché.

Matt E, in a comment to that post, offered some responses. His defense brings up important and relevant issues in the realm of communication, causation, and responsibility. I want to address those issues.

I want to attract the reader’s attention specifically to the issue of causation, discussed below, because there is a bit of sophistry behind the claim that religion ‘caused’ the 9/11 attacks.

Interpretation

The first issue that I want to address is question of how to interpret this sign. I have heard a fair number of creative interpretations for this sign. However, the interpretation that matters is the thought that will likely occur in the brain of just about anybody who views the sign.

I do a fair amount of communicating as I write this blog. The purpose behind each sentence is to cause certain concepts to appear in the minds of the readers. The ‘meaning’ of each statement is determined by the ideas that appear in the minds of readers who encounter it.

With every sentence that I write I ask myself, “How will this be interpreted by those who read it?” , and the rule for every sentence that I write is that its meaning is determined by the concepts that are most likely to appear in the mind of the reader.

For example, let’s say that I were to create a sign that said “Black people are stupid.” When challenged about the sign, I say that by ‘stupid’ I mean that black people are bipedal. The statement has nothing at all to do with their intelligence. When I put that message up on a billboard on a major interstate it would be perfectly legitimate for others to protest that the statement denigrates blacks by calling them unintelligent. My personal, private definition of the term is irrelevant. The public meaning – the meaning to competent English speakers who encounter the sign – is what matters.

In this case, the “Imagine” sign means, “You should hate and fear everybody who believes in God because the people who did this believed in God and acted on that belief.” It is no different than showing a sign of Hitler, Stalin, Mau Tse Tung, and Pol Pot and saying, “Imagine: No Atheism” People who do this are telling my neighbors to hate and fear me, not because of anything that I have said or condone, but because of the evil acts of others who I, too, condemn.

Matt E. adds:

I have a hard time imagining anyone seeing that sign and thinking "Yeah, all religious people are as dangerous as the 9/11 highjackers! Let's arrest all the Christians!" So what is the harm of the sign? It might be offensive to some people, but it is not bigotry.

I hear or read the Hitler and Stalin cliché somewhere just about every day. Those people are also not saying that we should arrest all atheists. However, this fact does not save those who use this claim from the charge of hate-mongering bigotry. They are still telling my neighbors to hate and fear me – even if they have to wait until I actually committed the inevitable crime to actually arrest me.

I have a right to be judged by my own words and deeds. People who believe in God who would never commit or condone an act like 9/11 also have the right to be judged on their own words and deeds. Spreading hate and fear beyond the group that is actually guilty of a crime is simply unjust. It’s wrong.

And the idea that there is one set of moral rules for ‘us’ and another for ‘them’ – where we claim a moral right to do that which we condemn in others . . . the word for that way of thinking is ‘hypocrisy’, which is still wrong.

Causation

Another argument that Mike E. and others have used in defense of the message on the sign is what can be called “If-not-but-for causation.” That is to say, “If not but for religion, the towers would still be standing.”

However, “If-not-but-for causation” is senseless and is not the way we use the term ‘causation’.

Imagine that there had been a fire – a house has burned down killing the five occupants. Fire inspectors go into the home to determine the cause of the fire. They hold a press conference, and they declare, “We have determined that the fire was caused by the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere. Our research shows that, if not but for the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere, there would have been no fire.”

Those inspectors would be . . . or should be . . . marched straight out of the press conference and into their office to clean out their desk and start looking for new work. Inspectors who think that the concept of ‘causation’ can be answered by looking at the if-not-but-for role of oxygen prove that they have no understanding of what people mean when they talk about cause.

When it comes to explaining the fire, what the investigators are supposed to discover is the difference that explains why this house burned down and why others did not. The presence of oxygen in the atmosphere does not answer this question. There are hundreds of millions of houses existing in an atmosphere that contains oxygen that are not burning down. The cause of the fire is that which distinguishes – that which marks the difference – between the house that burned down and the many houses that did not.

Saying that ‘religion’ is responsible for 9/11 is like saying that the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere is responsible for a particular house fire. The overwhelming numbers of people who are religious who would never participate in or condone 9/11 is proof of the absurdity of making such a connection, just as the overwhelming numbers of houses existing in the presence of oxygen that are not burning down proves that the inspector’s report is a joke.

If you could honestly say that religion played absolutely no role in the motives of the 9/11 attackers, then the sign's message would be clearly false.

That’s the wrong test.

As I said above, I do not prove that the inspectors produced an absurd report by showing that oxygen had nothing to do with the fire. I prove it by showing that there are hundreds of millions of houses existing in an atmosphere containing oxygen that are not burning down. That is the fact that justifies firing the inspectors for stupidity and incompetence.

Similarly, the test to use against the Imagine sign is not to show that religion had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. It is done by showing that there are billions of people who are religious who would never participate in or condone such an attack. This proof is so clear, so obvious, that we can legitimately question the moral character of those who decide to ignore it.

The “if-not-but-for” test is not reason. It’s sophistry.

We would actually never expect to find inspectors who are so foolish that they would use ‘if-not-but-for causation’ in reporting the cause of a fire. The idea is so blatantly absurd that the problem is obvious. However, when it comes to vilifying a hated group, people are more than capable of blinding themselves to this absurdity. That doesn’t make “if-not-but-for causation” any less absurd.

The Moral Dimension

At this point, we have reason to ask why anybody would embrace the absurdity of ‘if-not-but-for causation’. The answer to that question is because they want to. They like the conclusion – it makes them feel good. They do not care if the argument in support of that conclusion makes no sense – if it cannot be defended rationally. All that matters is that the conclusion feels good. The ‘defense’ will come later, in the form of whatever rationalizations one can think of to throw at the critics, no matter how absurd.

Face it, these arguments are rationalizations. They are weak inferences that people grab on to because they love the conclusion and are eager to grasp at anything that seems to support their desired conclusion, no matter how feeble. I see a lot of this behavior on the part of leading Christians, and I condemn it where when I see it. Another quality that I find in a lot of leading Christians that I feel no desire to emulate is the blatant hypocrisy of turning one’s back on wrongs committed by people “on our side.”

Criticizing Religion

I have not denied that a religion was responsible for the World Trade Center attacks. However, holding a religion responsible means finding that set of religious beliefs that distinguish those who embrace the idea of crashing airplanes into sky scrapers, and those who do not. If anybody were to create a sign that says “Imagine: No (insert name of religion whose members believe in the legitimacy of engaging in such acts here)”, I would have no room for complaint.

We live in a culture that says that it is wrong to criticize religion. Because of this, people have learned that they can engage in the worst atrocities and avoid any type of accountability by hiding behind the cloak of religion. “You are attacking my faith” has become the universal “get out of moral responsibility free card,” and we are seeing huge numbers of those who love to do harm flocking to religion for protection.

The days of finding security from condemnation by hiding behind scripture and holy symbols must come to an end. I am not saying that it is wrong to criticize religion. What I am saying is that, when criticizing a religion, justice requires condemning those who are actually guilty of the offense. Condemning those who are not actually guilty (because one wants to encourage others to hate and fear the target group) is the antithesis of justice.

This condemnation of religions that make its followers a threat to others is not limited to suicide bombings. Ultimately, I use the same standard in evaluating those whose religion prompts them to pass legislation against homosexual marriage, in favor of teaching myth and superstition in science classes, and blocking vital medical research.

When we look at the dead and the suffering that they leave in their wake, those who oppose medical research or sound biology education for religious reasons make Al Queida look like a boy scout troop. You are far more likely . . . far more likely . . . to lose your own life or health – or a loved one – to these perpetrators of medical and scientific ignorance than you will to any suicide bomber.

These are harsh words. Yet, any who would wait for me to retract this or to apologize for it is going to have a terribly long time to wait. That apology will come only if somebody should prove that I am mistaken. It will not come by claiming that my statement may have hurt somebody's feelings. To apologize for the sake of religious sensitivity is to say that religious sensitivities are more important than the life and health of the people allowed to suffer as a result of those actions. That is exactly backwards.

Yet, it is still the case that my criticism is directed entirely at those whose religion prompts them to block medical research. I blame those who are guilty, and do not step out of the boundaries that justice prescribes. The fact that they do harm for religious reasons gives them no immunity from condemnation. The fact that there are others, who are religious, yet who do no harm for religious reasons, provides those others with a perfectly adequate defense.

A Few Random Notes

This is one of those days in which I do not feel like writing an essay on any given topic. I just want to chat about a few things.

Romney’s Atheist Appointments

As you know, Presidential candidate Mitt Romney is under fire for demanding that there be a religious test for government (freedom requires religion), in the same speech in which he condemned religious tests for government (thou shalt not hold my Mormon beliefs against me).

He has now explicitly said that he will not bar atheists from holding judicial and cabinet appointments – that a qualified atheist can be appointed to one of these positions.

MR. RUSSERT: So if you determined that the most qualified person for the Supreme Court or for attorney general or secretary of education happened to be an atheist or an agnostic, that wouldn't prevent you from appointing them?

GOV. ROMNEY: Of course not. You, you, you look at individuals based upon their skills and their ability, their values, their intelligence. And there are many who are agnostic or atheist or who have very different beliefs about the nature of the divine than I do, and, and you evaluate them based on their skills. But I, I can tell you that I, I myself am a person of faith and, and respect the, the sense of the common bond of humanity that comes from that, that fundamental belief.

Of course, a ‘qualified’ candidate is a candidate who believes that our rights come from God.

From Romney’s “Faith in America” speech:

Our greatness would not long endure without judges who respect the foundation of faith upon which our constitution rests.

I can hear Romney speaking about his tenure in office in hindsight. “I am not a bigot. I would have been more than happy to appoint an atheist to one of these positions. However, it had to be a candidate that realized that faith is necessary for freedom and that our rights come from God. Unfortunately, I could not find a qualified candidate for the job.”

Huckabee and the Family

Presidential Candidate Mike Huckabee is getting some press recently for signing a letter in 1998 saying that women should submit to their husbands.

"You are right because you called wives to graciously submit to their husband's sacrificial leadership.

“Sacrificial leadership” is a leadership style where the leader sacrifices some advantage for the sake of gaining the support of followers. The “sacrificial leader” makes it a point to do more than those who follow him, and to accept less in return. In exchange, the others accept his (and ‘his’ is definitely the operative word here) leadership, allowing him to make the decisions for the group. Followers have a reason to do this given their greater share of the benefits of that leadership.

Yet, none of this changes the fact that leadership should go to the person who is best qualified to be leader, regardless of the style. Even where “sacrificial leadership” is a legitimate leadership strategy, nothing in this justifies the claim that the husband must be the leader and the wife must be the follower. If the wife is better skilled at figuring out a plan that benefits the family – if her plans have a greater chance of success and impose less risk, then why is it that the wife must submit to the (inferior) plans of the husband?

In most families, I would wager that the husband and wife have somewhat different strengths and weaknesses. This will allow one to be the better planner and leaders in his areas of comparative advantage – and the other the better leader in her areas of comparative advantage. The rational couple would recognize these strengths and weaknesses and yield to the better mind in relevant situation. It is simply false (and bigoted) to hold that the husband is the best decision maker in all instances.

Huckabee and Science

Also this week the Climate Change conference ended in Bali, Indonesia. The United States was widely recognized to have been a major obstacle to progress at that conference. Again, the American government has shown that putting a few more million dollars into the pockets of key campaign contributors is worth the destruction of whole cities.

Former vice-President Al Gore suggested that the conference attendees reach some sort of agreement without the United States – that they leave the U.S. sections of the treaty blank to be filled in at a later date, when America is being governed by sane and moral individuals. However, Gore is assuming that, in 18 months, America will be governed by a sane and moral individual.

Huckabee’s performance to date suggest that he has one of the weakest grasps of reality of all Presidential candidate. There is no indication on his part that he can pick up an article in a peer-reviewed scientific journal and even understand the context in which that article was written. Salon reports Huckabee as saying:

"Oh, I believe in science. I certainly do," he said. "In fact, what I believe in is, I believe in God. I don't think there's a conflict between the two. But if there's going to be a conflict, science changes with every generation and with new discoveries and God doesn't. So I'll stick with God if the two are in conflict."

A “fool” is a person who can be easily tricked. Huckabee is a fool. His inability to understand simple science means that he will not be able to sort the good science that comes to him in debating an issue and junk science. This inability to tell the difference – inability, even, to say what science is – will make it easy for individuals to pass junk science as good.

Gore suggested this strategy because he did not want to see the attendees tying themselves to a bad treaty for 5 years. Rather than negotiate a bad treaty with the current Administration, he thought it better to negotiate no treaty with the United States with the hopes of getting a sane treaty in 2 years.

Yet, getting a sane treaty in 2 years depends on having somebody in the White House who can listen to scientists explaining the global warming problem, understand what they are saying, understand the options, and pick a solution based on the best available evidence.

Huckabee is not capable of understanding the science behind any serious problem this nation may face, including global warming. Thus, he is not the person who can make an informed real-world contribution to this issue.

Religious Boycotts

Yesterday, I mentioned the way that religious organizations are throwing around their economic weight to make sure that no mention of views other than theirs gets a hearing beyond the narrowest audience. They do so, in part, by protesting that any statement that questions their perfect knowledge and moral virtue is cast as an insult, and from that they demand an economic boycott against those who have dared to suggest that they were fallible.

They get a portion of that substantial economic weight because the rest of us are forced to contribute, one way or another, to their war chests.

The lie is that ‘secularists’ are trying to remove all sign of God from the public square. The truth is that ‘secularists’ are trying to get greedy sectarian hands out of their bank account.

The Pledge of Allegiance is a daily advertisement, targeting children, promoting the God product over all other products that the child might buy into – in a country that says that it is wrong for the government to establish a religion. If, in place of “In God We Trust” on the money and on the walls of public buildings, we placed the slogan, “GE: We Bring Good Things to Life,” we would see this for what it is – the use of government property for putting up billboards for advertising religion over non-religion. Some of those government-funded billboards are brightly lit, like any commercial neon sign, designed to attract the potential customer’s attention to the message. That message being “Buy God,”

At which point, the people who “sell God” use their economic power to help make sure that no competing message ever gets posted – because anybody who dares to suggest that the Christian message might contain a flaw is “insulting our religion” and worthy of condemnation.

Godless Short Stories

Yesterday’s posting has caused me to think of a project that might be worth while. And, if some organization were to take up this project, I would be pleased to make a cash contribution towards its success.

The project is a short-story contest, with prizes to the winner. The contest is for short stories that boldly assert that there is no God and that counters some of the lies and sophistry that denigrate atheists in pop culture. The stories are aimed for young children and, in fact, there should be several contests for several age groups. The winning stories will be bundled together and offered as a book – self-published if necessary.

Of course the religious right will protest about a “stealth campaign” to sell atheism to children. They would be wrong. I am talking about a campaign that is not the least bit stealthy. I am talking about a campaign that virtually shouts that it is just as permissible to create literature that presents atheism in a way that children can understand as it is to create a child’s bible or other religious literature that targets children.

Let them scream. Screaming will just mean more advertizing.

This should be taken up by an organization that is set up to receive donations, because one of the things that I will then do is write a few posts explaining the need for people to make contributions to this project. It will require cash contributions to be offered as prizes, and it will require a great deal of labor to read and judge the stories. Plus, some contributions should go to the organization itself for being an organization that would run a contest like this.

Like I said, I will be more than willing to volunteer time and money to such a project. Really, what I would like is a reputable organization set up to receive and disburse money to handle the bank account.

Child-Friendly Atheism

If one is interested in seeing the movie, "I Am Legend", then be warned that this post contains spoilers.

If (1) you do not wish to see the movie, (2) have already seen it, (3) do not mind spoilers, or (4) hate spoilers but suffer from a compulsive curiosity as to why I am mentioning this movie, then feel free to continue.

The spoiler is that this movie sets up a "tense" situation, then brings God into the movie to make a magical solution at the last minute.

The original book, by the way, was a "science fiction" book in the classic sense. It attempted to offer a scientific explanation for everything and shunned supernatural explanations.

I can rant about what type of God would take steps to stop a plague after it had nearly killed everybody when he could have taken action much sooner. I could go on a rant about how the hero's sacrifice to find the cure becomes meaningless once the cure is handed to him by God and, we may assume, God would have done some magic, somewhere even if this hero had done nothing.

However, the purpose of this post is not to offer these types of complaints.

The thought that came to my mind concerns the fact that there is a call to boycott The Golden Compass on the grounds that it is a part of a stealth campaign to introduce children to atheism. Yet, a stealth campaign arguing for theism is not subject to question. There is a bit of hypocrisy going on here, but that is not the worst of it.

The boycott has almost certainly cost the movie some money. Movie companies are going to take this into consideration the next time that somebody produces a movie. The author will be vetted for atheist sympathies. If you are an author with atheist sympathies, then you are going to have a little bit harder time getting that movie made. They will amost certainly gut it of any atheist message. However, they will not be able to divorce the movie from the fact that you (the author) is an atheist. So, your hopes of having a movie made out of that book depend not only on your refusal to put an atheist message in the text, but on your own refusal to "come out" as an atheist.

Stewert Lee, who created the play "Jerry Springer: The Opera," said that he would not do another work like this, "because 'idiots' could too easily close it down."

It's the same story - worry over revenue after the religious right targets a product means that companies involved in these projects simply are not going to consider products that the religious right does not approve of.

Imagine having a censorship board, where all works of art need to first be submitted to a fundamentalist board, and only those that the board approves of are allowed to continue. Well, actually, these projects can be made. However, one has to keep them small and inexpensive with no expectation that the will be mass marketed to the general public.

As a result of these two events (and others like them) expect the entertainment industry to be particularly skittish about releasing anything that puts atheism in a positive light. After all, we must remember that anything that portrays atheism positively is militantly anti-theist and, thus, not to be permitted in civil society.

(Though a movie like "I Am Legend" could never be thought of as militantly anti-atheist; as if that could be thought of as a bad thing.)

So, this brought a simple question to my mind.

Where can one go in this country to say that no God exists?

Contrary to popular lies that are spread by hate-mongering bigots, teaching evolution in the classroom is not the same as teaching atheism. If it were, then explaining what is wrong with the car without mentioning God would also be an example of atheism. Every day, even devout Christians explain real-world events without reference to a supernatural force without claiming that the answer is atheistic.

So, when I ask where a person can actually say "No god exists," the classroom does not qualify.

I am also not talking about some work of fiction with some dysfunctional drunk or perpetually depressed individual who hates God because his or her spouse and/or child died in some tragic event.

I am talking about a case where a well-adjusted individual can argue against the existence of God on its merits - a case where the character can turn to another who is cowering in prayer and say, "That's not going to help you. The only way you're going to get through this is to work for it."

A character who can complain, "Don't go giving the credit for what I do to God."

I am particularly interested in asking this question, "Where can one go and say, 'No god exists'," in the presence of children?

Another think that I am not talking about is identifying oneself as an atheist. There is a difference between saying, "I am an atheist," and saying "God doesn't exist." This is closely related to the shows that I mentioned above.

There is a clear difference between a show in which a character declares himself to be an atheist and one in which no God exists. Just as there is a clear difference between a show in which a character declares himself to be a theist and one in which God can be heard whispering a message or creating a miracle at the last moment to save humanity.

I am talking about a show in which "No god exists" is stated as clearly as "god exists" is stated - as clearly as it is stated in the Pledge of Allegiance and on the money, and everywhere else a child may look. Where can a child look and see the message, "No god exists?"

It is socially prohibited to tell a child (other than one's own child) that no God exists. So, the vast majority of children in this country grow up thinking that the claim is unchallengeable.

Sure, children are aware that there are some people 'out there' who do not believe in God. However, they are always perpetually depressed people angry at God for taking away their spouse/child in some tragic accident. They are people we should feel sorry for - not people who have actually adopted their position based on thought and reason.

The result of this prohibition is that we have one generation after another that views religious claims to be unquestionable. Which is exactly how this nonsense perpetuates itself from one generation to the next - because it is set up to prevent any alternative from even taking root; poisoning the ground so that only the fewest number of seeds can ever take root.

Why do the boycotts such as that on The Golden Compass exist? Precisely to enforce a social prohibition on making the statement, "No god exists" in the presence of a child. Many other statements can be made in the presence of a child, but not this one.

What was that charge used against The Golden Compass again? Oh, yes. It was charged with "stealth atheism to kids."

If we lived in a society where people can speak openly about atheism - where atheists are permitted to be as open (in the presence of children) as Jews and Muslims, then the very idea of "stealth atheism" would be laughable. "Stealth" only makes sense in a context where being open and direct is assumed not to be an option. We only worry about people sneaking into a house where they do not have permission to walk in the front door.

Yet, we do live in a society where speaking openly about atheism in the presence of children is prohibited. And, so, those who guard these boundaries (the church officials who like their monopoly on access to children so that they can brainwash children into their way of thinking) then need to worry about atheists 'sneaking in' to a child's mind where all opportunities for direct exposure have already been blocked.

The best way to deal with this problem is to insist on the right to present atheism in a way that is friendly to children in just the way that theism is too often presented in ways that are friendly towards children – to do so deliberately and unapologetically.

Addendum: Monday, Dec. 17

This morning I woke to news of yet another boycott. Some Christians are offended because Border advertised to those who purchased Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion with a card that read, "Oh Come All Ye Faithless".

These Christians say that the card is an insult to Christianity.

The Evangelical Alliance's Thacker added: “I think the atheists will love it because it's bashing Christians around the head. It's another thing to take a Christian festival and abuse it.

Of course, if this card is an insult to Christianity, then "Oh come all ye faithful" is an insult to atheists, right?

Of course not. However, these people who claim that their religion gives them a perfect conduit to immoral behavior and a perfect incentive to be moral could not recognize The Golden Rule if it bit them on the fact. They are so in love with lies and hypocricy that they seem perpetually driven to provide us with new examples of both.

The fact is, they view the very existence of a belief that no God exists as an insult to their religion, and will not be content until the mere mention of this 'insult' guarantees economic ruin (or worse) on the part of those who mention it.

Their economic power is great enough that they just might succeed, unless and until those who do not wish to see such a world are willing to speak all the more loudly in response.

E2.0: Darrin McMahon: Enlightenment as the Seed of Social Disorder

This is the first in a new series of weekend posts taken from the presentations at the Salk Institute’s “Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0.”. I have placed an index of essays in this series in an introductory post, Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction.

This first presentation was given by Darrin McMahon, the Ben Weider Professor of History at Florida State University.

Before I get into this, it will be relevant to repeat that this is not an ‘atheist’ blog in that I do not discuss evidence for and against whether the proposition “at least one god exists” is true. I take it for granted that it is not true – just as I take for granted that the earth is not flat and that it circles the sun. “The Enlightenment” represents a philosophy that tends to be (though it does not need to be) atheistic. However, it also tends to encompass a set of values. I want to warn the reader not to get confused over the difference between defending or rejecting enlightenment philosophy and defending or rejecting atheism.

As I discussed in the introductory post, the project here is to examine the Enlightenment of the 18th Century (Enlightenment 1.0), look over its successes and its failures, and then to introduce modifications. McMahon started this project quite well by telling us what some critics have said against Enlightenment 1.0.

Many of those critics, as it turned out, charged that these problems were inherent to Enlightenment 1.0 and provided reason to abandon the project entirely. McMahon talked about two groups of critics; religious conservatives who were proposing a competing project called “religious fundamentalism”, and liberals proposing an alternative product called “post modernism.” They, of course, felt (feel) that their products were better than Enlightenment 1.0 in some key areas.

On the religious conservative side, McMahon mentioned the concerns expressed by French priests, such as Charles-Louis Richard in Exposition de la doctrine des philosophes moderns.

In Richard's view the long fuse of the enlightenment was preparing devastation of just this sort. The overturning of altars, regicide, parricide, social anarchy and breakdown, sexual license and dissolution, terror and civil war, followed by despotism and tyranny of a sort never before seen.

McMahon also includes a quote for Sir Isaiah Berlin, The great 18th century philosophers were responsible for a lot of intellectual tyranny ending in the Soviet Union and Gulag.

Anybody familiar at all with atheism in America will not find these accusations at all strange. We are continually told, even by Presidential candidates, that the proponents of science and reason are responsible for the crimes of Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin in the past, and will bring these horrors back if they (we) were given any amount of political power in the future.

The left, McMahon “Enlightenment, we are told . . . behaves towards things as a dictator towards man. The enlightenment is totalitarian. . . . [It] objectified nature and enslaved humanity in a modern myth of a hegemony of reason.”

However, McMahon wants us to dismiss these charges. His argument is that, given the nature of the enlightenment, it is to be expected that the advocates of the conservative status quo and the advocates of radical revolution would both have complaints with the principles and values of the enlightenment.

McMahon itemized the values of the Enlightment

The disposition to live without fear in what might well be a fatherless world.
The disposition to chart our own course and our own ends for ourselves.
The disposition to subject even our most cherished assumptions to constant criticism and investigation – to take nothing on faith.
The adoption of mathematical and historical reason as the sole criterion of truth.
The rejection of supernatural agency – magic, disembodies spirits, divine providence of any kind.
A defense of the equality of all humanity including racial and sexual equality.
A belief in a secular universalism in ethics based on equity, justice, and charity.
The vindication of freedom of expression.
The adoption of democratic-republicanism as the most legitimate form of political organization.
Personal liberty of lifestyle in sexual and other matters.
Comprehensive toleration and freedom of thought based on independent critical thinking.

Given this package of values, there should be no surprise that the advocates of competing system will see the need to vilify it – accusing it of crimes without evidence of its guilt.

Ultimately, McMahon concluded that there is nothing wrong with Enlightenment 1.0, that the alleged problems of the enlightenment are simply the claims of a marketing campaign that has targeted it.

The universal revolution in ideas, education, culture, social theory and political reality postulated by the radical thinkers of the enlightenment were nowhere ever fully carried through and remains today incomplete at least in the United States.

I have long been suspicious of these types of claims. I have heard them over and over again. I have not met a Libertarian capitalist who has not said, when pointing to the failures of libertarian civilizations, that libertarianism has never been tried. Hard-core Marxists still argue that hard-core Marxism has never been tried. Now, McMahon is telling us that the Enlightenment has never been tried.

This is an extremely convenient argument – convenient, because it will never be the case that the ‘pure form’ of any system of any political or economic or philosophical system will ever be tried. The argument, in effect, is so convenient that it should never be used, because it can never say anything substantive.

If somebody were to argue, “My system will work; however, it requires that everybody adopt it and that nobody dissents from it,” that that person is effectively saying that his system will never work. A system does not “work” unless it is capable of working in a society where there is a great deal of disagreement over what the system commands, and even over whether it is a good system.

However, there is a good argument that can be used against any who would hold up Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao as representatives of the fate of the enlightenment. One version of the response would go something like this:

Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that you thought that Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were states in which agents were free to criticize any belief that anybody might want to put forward. See, one of the principles of The Enlightenment is the freedom to challenge every belief; nothing is to be taken on faith. So, if you think that the former Soviet Union represents a criticism of The Enlightenment, then you must think that it is a demonstration of the problems with free inquiry and, I assume, evidence why it would be necessary to prohibit free inquiry and control what people believe.

This is not an argument that states that “The enlightenment has never been tried.” It is an argument that says, “What would have been the case in this alleged counter-example to The Enlightenment if that society had actually embraced the Enlightenment value of free inquiry?”

In asking this type of question, we can readily see that the alleged “excesses” of The Enlightenment were not examples of The Enlightenment at all. They represented a repudiation or a casting off of Enlightenment principles in favor of something else.

Imagine, a parent starts to put together a child’s toy using The Instructions. Half way through the project, he decides he does not need the instructions and he throws them out. Soon, he finds himself in a bind. When this happens, he cries in frustration, “Those instructions were so bad! I started off using them and look where it got me!”

This is . . . shall we say . . . not a particularly impressive model of a valid criticism.

As we start to build Enlightenment 2.0, this still does not tell us of anything we need to change. I repeat; McMahon’s actual argument is that we do not have to change much of anything – that we simply need to re-install Enlightenment 1.0 more carefully, doing a better job of following the instructions.

That may be true. However, we should get a few more opinions before we make that judgment.

E2.0: Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0: Introduction

The opportunity has come to do another series of posts that looks at the claims of some of the brightest minds in the area of science, humanities, and atheism and to offer commentary.

Last year the Salk Institute put on a conference called "Beyond Belief 2006" concerning the conflict between science and religion. That conference, too, had some of the best thinkers in their respective fields: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Paul Churchland, Patricia Churchland, Michael Shermer, Neil deGrasse Tyson, just to name a few. It gave me an excellent opportunity to “catch up” on what the academic leaders were telling each other on the subjects that interested me.

I wrote a series of essays on that conference – 35 essays in all – covering each of the speakers and the discussions that went on between speakers.

I have links to all of them in Beyond Belief: Summary.

This year, the Salk Institute ran another conference. They called this one, "Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0". This time, they called together a group of thinkers on the Enlightenment. This year, I have another opportunity to see what the academic leaders are telling each other on these matters, and another opportunity to respond through a series of posts.

The reason that I am doing this?

The primary reason is that, since I left graduate school and had to hold down a real job, I fear losing touch with new developments in the relevant academic fields. I fear that my writing will become “so 20th century.” I am tremendously grateful for the Salk Institute for bringing these people together and giving me an opportunity to catch up on these fields.

A second reason is because I put a lot of effort into studying moral philosophy. I want to know if the ideas that I formed still make sense in the context of new advances in the field. I would like to know if I have any power to solve some of the problems, address some of the concerns, and correct some of the mistakes that these people make.

Of course, I think that I can do all of these things. However, many people who have such beliefs are mistaken. The best that I can hope to accomplish is to present my arguments and let others judge if they actually accomplish what I think they can accomplish.

That is what I will do in the set of blogs to come.

Like last year, I will confine my essays to weekend postings – leaving weekdays for current events, addressing comments from the studio audience, and the like. Like last year, I should be able to work my way through the whole conference in about 5 months or so. When I am done, the reader will have a good idea of what the academic leaders are saying about science, morality, and atheism, the implications that their claims have for desire utilitarianism, and the implications that desire utilitarianism has for their claims.

This year, the Salk Institute decided to present the conference topic in the form of a software analogy. About 300 years ago, academic leaders proposed a set of rules for organizing societies that one can call “Enlightenment 1.0”.

Wikipedia defines the Age of Enlightenment as follows:

The Age of Enlightenment . . . was an eighteenth century movement in European and American philosophy — some classifications also include 17th century philosophy (usually called the Age of Reason).

The term can more narrowly refer to the intellectual movement of The Enlightenment, which advocated reason as the primary basis of authority. Developed in France, Britain and Germany, it influenced the whole of Europe including Russia and Scandinavia. The era is marked politically by governmental consolidation, nation creation, greater rights for the common people, and a decline in the influence of authoritarian institutions such as the nobility and Church.

This frame of reference invites a number of questions.

(1) What was Enlightenment 1.0 anyway? It was built as an open-source program with a lot of contributors. Almost immediately, it branched out into a number of different versions. Some started to claim that their opponents had made changes that were so central to the program that they could no longer sensibly say that their alternative was a member of the “Enlightenment” family. So, what are we evaluating, really, when we look at Enlightenment 1.0.

(2) Did Enlightenment 1.0 actually have any bugs? Or were the system crashes that we witnessed actually a product of user error? The case can be made that some users simply did not read the instruction manual very well and improperly installed the software on their political systems – that this was responsible for the system crashes that resulted. If we were simply to install the package correctly, then it would work.

However, even if we take this route we have to ask ourselves questions like, “Can we alter Enlightenment 1.0 to make it easier to install? Can we somehow block the types of errors that lead to these system crashes? After all, the best software in the world is hardly useful if nobody can get it installed.

(3) Are there any ways to solve the problems with Enlightenment 1.0? Some people who seek to offer a competing project – particularly various versions of Fundamentalism software – argue that these system failures are inherent to Enlightenment 1.0 – that the operating system is inherently unstable. Its builders will never be able to fix it, so it is best to simply throw it out and to go with something that has thousands of years of proven usefulness behind it – various forms of religious fundamentalism.

Of course, Enlightenment proponents choke on their drinks when they hear Fundamentalist proponents argue that their system actually works in anything more than a rudimentary way. “Sure. Right. Go back to counting on your fingers, if that’s what you want. You’ll be starving to death within a year.”

These are the questions that I will be exploring every weekend for the next few months. I hope that you, the reader, will find this series useful and informative, as I certainly will.

One major difference between last year’s presentation and this year’s presentation is that, this year, I will update this introductory post with each new essay. So, if you would like to bookmark this posting or add it to your shortcut bar, you will be able to come back here for a direct link to each post in this series as I produce them.

I also would like to recommend a recent post of mine that will serve as a foundation for some of my further postings: Morality from the Ground Up. There, I described a set of increasingly complex societies and the (objectively true statements about) relationships between objects of evaluation and reasons for action. In the essays that follow I will add some other descriptions of relationships between objects of evaluation and desires using the same model.

Finally, I would like to encourage you to make a contribution to the Salk Institute in support of the Beyond Belief series. (Disclaimer: I have no association with the Salk Institute other than exploiting their Beyond Belief series for the purpose of creating a series of blog post).

Table of Contents

Essay 1: E2.0: Darrin McMahon: Enlightenment as the Seed to Social Chaos. McMahon provides an introduction to Enlightenment 1.0 and its most significant bug - a tendency to lead to social chaos and, eventually, tyranny.

Essay 2: E2.0: Margaret Jacob: Enlightenment 1.0 as a Populist Movement . Jacob describes the beginnings of Enlightenment 2.0 as a populist movement, suggesting the importance of taking the arguments to the people.

Essay 3: E2.0: Edward Slingerland: The Religion that Denies it is a Religion. Slingerland argues that Enlightenment 2.0 must necessarily be another religion, though one of the better religions.

Essay 4: E2.0: Discussion 1: Necessary False Beliefs. This essay is a discussion of some of the responses from the audience to Slingerland's suggestion that morality consists in desires to do harm to others and to make up reasons to justify those harms.

Essay 5: E2.0: Donald Rutherford: Other Worldly Happiness. Rutherford sees two types of people; those who seek happiness in this world, and those who seek happiness in the next. I, on the other hand, think that Rutherford is mistaken to put so much emphasis on happiness.

Essay 6: E2.0: Discussion 2: Happiness and the Absence of Suffering. Several members of the audience agree with this idea that happiness and absence of suffering is the root of morality. Some disagree. This essay discusses their remarks.

Essay 7: E2.0: Daniel Dennett: "But What If It's True?" . Dennett defends the harshness of New Atheist criticism of religion by asking, "What if it's true?" that these particular religious beliefs are causing people to waste their lives and are dangerous to children?

Essay 8: E2.0: Daniel Dennett: Teach the Children. Dennett proposes a method of dealing with religious superstition - by teaching children about all (major) religions so they can see that none have a special right to superior knowledge over any other.

Essay 9: E2.0: David Sloan Wilson: New Atheism a Stealth Religion . Wilson defines a 'stealth religion' as any belief system that departs from reality, points out some claims that the New Atheists make as just plain false in order to classify it as a Stealth Religion.

Essay 10: E2.0: Jonathan Haidt: Moral Intuitionism . Haidt proposes that moral theory is shifting away from the idea that morality depends on reason, and towards the idea that we have fundamental (biologically rooted) intuitions of right and wrong.

Essay 11: E2.0: Jonathan Haidt: Five Foundations of Morality . Building off of the intuitionist idea discussed in the previous essay, Haidt argues that there are five fundamental pillars of morality, each corresponding to an evolved disposition: the harm principle, fairness/justice, community, authority, and purity.

Essay 12: E2.0: Michael Shermer: Tribalism and the Free Market . Shermer argues that religion is not the real problem, but tribalism. The best cure (or at least a very good cure) for the evils of tribalism is to set up free markets - trade between different tribes - that builds trust, alliances, and good will.

Essay 13: E2.0: Discussion: Reasons, Lies, and Types of Communities". I took three items from a panel discussion that took place after Shermer's talk. (1) The way in which emotions control our beliefs and beliefs control our emotions. (2) The correct sense in which it is true that many religious people lie through their teeth about atheists and secularism. (3) The types of communities we should be tolerant of and those types of communities that are beyond tolerance.

Essay 14: E2.0: Gregory Clark: The Evolution of Capitalism. Clark offers a theory that the mindset that is compatible with capitalism evolved when poor people in England died off to be replaced by the middle-class people in England who had a more capitalist mindset.

Essay 15: E2.0: Deirdre McCloskey: The Morality of Capitalism. McClosky is a Christian who holds that Christian values can be found in capitalism - that capitalism both promotes and springs from Christian values.

Essay 16: E2.0: Stuart Kaufman: Function, Agency, and Reductionism.. Stuart Kaufman gives a presentation in which he argues that there is more to the universe than that which can be reduced to principles of physics. In doing so he includes concepts of function and agency - both of which I discuss in reductionist terms.

Essay 17: Sean Carroll: The Origin of the Universe. Sean Carroll notes that the question of how the universe began is an area where religious people seem to claim to have an upper hand over atheist scientists. Carroll argues that the arguments for a beginning to the universe are weak - that the laws that allow us to explain the universe back to 1 second after the big bang do not apply to what comes before. So, we cannot really say that the universe began in a big bang, at least not scientifically.

Essay 18: David Albert: The Power of Physics. David Albert also argues in favor of reductionism, that physics can explain everything in the universe. However, his 'argument' is little more than an assertion that modern theories seem to do way with the problem of the limits of science that was accepted in the early 1900s.

Essay 19: Peter Atkins: On Pride and Chemistry. Peter Atkins dismisses the idea that scientists cannot reduce such concepts as the wetness of water or romantic love to a set of scientific equations. To the degree that the scientist can describe how water molecules behave on another surface, this is sufficient for describing its wetness. And scientists should not be concerned about the accusation of suffering from 'pride' when they say that they can do these things. 'Pride' in the morally contempatible sense has to do with asserting that one has abilities that one does not have. This does not apply to the chemist's ability to explain things that people want to believe are unexplainable.

Essay 20: Sir Harold Kroto: Issues on Science vs. Religion. Harold Kroto gave a presentation that was highly critical of religion and of the Templeton Foundation which provides people with what Kroto said was a misleading account of the relationship between science and religion. He argues for demanding a more accurate account and the condemnation of groups like the Templeton Foundation for their misleading claims.

Essay 21: Scott Atran: The Causes of Terrorism. Atran challenges the idea that religion is the cause of terrorism. He traces the cause back to sociological factors. In doing so, he condemns those who would condemn religion for not being scientific - for offering 'theories of terrorism' that simply do not fit the available data.

Essay 22: Lee Silver: Religion Without God. Lee Silver challenges a different type of religion - not a religion that believes in a personal God with beliefs nd desires, but in the worship of 'nature' in which 'natural' and 'intrinsically good' are taken to be necessarily lined

Essay 23: Greg Epstein: The Heart of Humanism. Epstein argues for the importance of ritual and art in humanism - that without these humanism is missing a 'soul' that will naturally make it appear unappealing to others. Religion, with these elements, fulfills a need that humanism cannot fulfill unless it, too, adopts these elements.

Essay 24: Ronald D'Sousa: A Passion for Science. Using a parable in which a person finds a stone roughly shaped like a human face, and compares the marvel that nature might create such an image without direction compared to the mundane claim that some designer fassioned it, D'Sousa argues for generatin a passion and wonder in science.

Essay 25: Patricia Churchland: The Relation of Science and Morality.. Patricia Churchland spoke about relationships between values and brain structure, giving a number of examples in which differences in brain structure were associated with differences in values.

Essay 26: Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Atheism from the Inside Out. Rebecca Newberger Gibson gave a reading out of a novel of hers which contains an atheist character (and significant knowledge of the current atheist literature) to describe his relationship to and wonder at the universe and, in particualar, at his own existence.

Essay 27: John Allen Paulos: Probability and Error. John Allen Paulos looks at the probability arguments for the existence of God and answers how many of them misunderstand the nature of probability.

Essay 28: V.S. Ramachandran: Bridging Humanities and Science. V.S. Ramachandran wants to draw one relationship between the humanities and science by associating the scientific study of the phenomenon of synesthesia (seeing numbers as colors) with the literary quality of metaphor.

Essay 29: Adam Kolber: Brain Studies and the Law. Adam Kolber looks at the effect that brain science will have on the law. Specifically, he looks at the legal implications of scientific breakthroughs that will allow us to use brain scans to now what a person believes and on our ability to alter our memories (for therapeutic reasons).

Essay 30: Jonathan Gottschall: Literary Science. Jonathan Gottschall notes that there have never been any persistent advances in literary knowledge - no building up of knowledge over time like what we found in science. To combat this, he wants to make literary studies more science like and explains some ways in which literary theories can be tested experimentally.

Essay 31 David Brin: The Great Silence and the Enlightenment. David Brin is concerned with the fact that we have not heard from any other intelligent race. He argues that the natural state of humanity is feudalism, and that we have recently been able to fight this by establishing four institutions of truth - democracy, science, law, and markets. Brin argues that preserving these institutions against the natural disposition to descend again into a form of feudalism will be the differnce between our thriving as a species or, perhaps, disappearing into 'the great silence'.

Essay 32: Robert Winter: The Nature of (Musical) Genius". Using Beethoven as an example, Robert Winter looks at some of the claims made about musical genius - about its association with insanity and the idea that genius involves pulling ideas out of thin air (or having them given to a person by a God). He disputes these claims, at least in Beethoven's case, then directs scientists where they might want to look to give us some insights into (musical) genius.

Essay 33: Sam Harris: The End of Religion. Sam Harris returns to the conference to explain some of his views on religion in a different way. In listening to him, I suggest the possibility that Sam might have been using two different senses of 'religion' throughout his writings, a broad sense (that makes his views appear intolerant), and a narrower sense in which he simply refuses to tolerate those beliefs that lead to great harm.

Essay 34: Daniel Smail: The Historian's "Creationist" Contamination. Daniel Smail seeks to argue that biology is not the only field contaminated with Creationism. The desire to reserve a place for God and the biblical story of creation also places some artificial limits on history and invites a challenge to historians to teach an alternative (biblically correct) version of history that the evidence simply does not support.

Essay 35: Jeff Hawkins: Entrepreneurial Atheism. Jeff Hawkins argues that atheists need more than the right ideas. They need an entrepreneurial way of looking at things and advancing their cause. They need not only people with ideas but ideas on how to get things done.

Essay 36: PZ Myers: Should I call myself an atheist?. P.Z. Myers describes his life as the village atheist in a conservative community and as one of the more outspoken bloggers defending atheism and science.

Attack My Beliefs, Please!

This post was inspired by comments that Mitt Romney made when he heard that Huckabee had asked a question, "Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?" Romney responded by saying that, "attacking someone's religion is really going too far."

This inspired me to thank of an important difference between my attitudes towards beliefs and those of people such as Romney.

I grew up in a culture that said that this is what you do to beliefs – attack them, at every opportunity. There is no such thing as a sacred belief – a belief that ought not to be questioned. At any day or time an individual is free to pick up any belief he or she chooses, hold it under the light of reason, turn it over, stretch it, take it apart, put it back together again, and subject it to all sorts of tests. If it survives, then you can keep it. Sometimes, it survives, but it is not quite the same as it was before you started to examine it. You can keep those, too. However, if it does not survive, then it is time to toss that belief and look for one with a little more substance.

Of course, Romney is a hypocritical bigot. He used an opportunity in a televised speech to denigrate the beliefs of others. “Don’t secularists belief that all mention of God should be removed from the public square?” Only, Romney did not express this as a question – an expression of something he heard somewhere and did not know to be true or false. Romney stated it as a fact – more like Huckabee saying, “Mormons believe that Jesus and Satan were brothers.”

In fact, I can’t go a day without having my beliefs attacked – without being insulted or denigrated on the basis of what I believe.

This claim is actually too easy to believe. Every day, children in schools around the world are taught to attack the beliefs of atheists, holding that a person who is not “under God” have no allegiance to the United States. Romeny’s own speech included claims that I (and those who believe as I do) are not Americans, cannot maintain a free society, and are at risk of producing atrocities comparable to those of Hitler and Stalin, and that, even though (according to Romney, my beliefs constitute a ‘religion’ of secularism that those beliefs are quite simply ‘wrong’. But, none of this is new. Romney did not say anything that I had not read a dozen times in the says before the speech from any number of religious sources.

Yet, I have not thought to respond by saying that it is wrong to attack my beliefs – that the mere act of attacking my beliefs is immoral and something that no good American (let alone a Presidential candidate) should ever do.

My complaint against Romney and others like him is not that they attack my beliefs, but that they use lies and sophistry to misrepresent my beliefs. If they were to attack what I actually believed, that would be one thing. However, their habit is to assign to me beliefs that I do not have and then to assert beliefs that they created – that they created, typically, just so that they can have an easy target to attack.

Not only has Romney attacked my beliefs, but I encounter people attacking my beliefs every time I check my blog – and find a set of comments – many of them telling me that something I wrote is wrong, that I misrepresented the phenomena that I was writing against, or that I had made some other sort of mistake.

The Benefits of Attacking Beliefs

Actually, I welcome attacks on my beliefs. I have learned a lot from them.

At one time, I was a libertarian. I thought that libertarian propositions were so true that no intelligent person could question them. However, intelligent people all over the place questioned them. I sought to find out why and asked one of my fellow libertarians to direct me to a critique. He showed me an article that attacked my beliefs. I read the article. I went to the library and did a little more research. The result . . . I gave up on libertarianism. The attack worked. I had believed – and I had held to be beyond question – a set of propositions that were very definitely not beyond question.

Two days ago I commented in passing that I used to hold that ‘good’ necessarily referred to relationships between objects of evaluation and desires. More than a few people attacked this belief and, eventually, they argued me out of it. I now hold that ‘good’ refers to relationships between objects and evaluation and reasons for action. I think that desires are the only reasons for action that exist. However, these critics convinced me that if other reasons for action did exist, then they would have to be relevant.

It really took them months, perhaps years, of attacking to get me to see this point. But, eventually, they won – and I was the beneficiary of their attack.

Please, people, keep attacking my beliefs.

Absurdity of Not Attacking Beliefs

The idea that it is wrong to attack somebody else’s beliefs is actually quite absurd.

I want to believe that I have one million dollars in my bank account. And I want to hold anybody in contempt if they should ever say or do anything that would challenge that belief. When the bank refuses to honor my checks, I want to accuse them of “attacking my beliefs” and to insist that, whatever they do, they must not do anything that even hints at a lack of respect of my belief that I have a million dollars in my bank account.

And I want to believe that burning somebody alive at the stake is good for them. It actually cleanses their soul and allows them to enter into a blissful afterlife. Otherwise, they will suffer eternal torture. I want to see anybody who expresses doubt or shows any lack of respect for that belief – people, for example, who stand in the way of my burning people at the stake – held in moral contempt for refusing to respect my belief that they may be so burned. Andrea Yates killed her five children, allegedly because the devil was out to get them, and the only way she had to protect them was to kill them while they are still innocent and, thus, give them over to God for protection. Whether we declare her insane, or whether we say she is guilty of a crime, we certainly are attacking her beliefs. Romney apparently believes that this ought not to be done. Romney apparently would like to argue that we should leave such people alone because, more than anything, it is wrong to show any measure of disrespect for what somebody else believes.

A rule that we may not attack the beliefs of others is simple nonsense. We must constantly search for truth, and that requires attacking any belief that might not be true.

Misrepresentation

Now, Romney does have a legitimate line of criticism to use against Huckabee, but it is not the objection, “Thou shalt not attack my religion.” The objection is, “Thou shalt not spread lies and slander about my religion or attribute to me beliefs I do not have.” In other words, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against me (by misrepresenting my beliefs).” Huckabee has a defense, of course. He did not say that Romney held these beliefs – he merely asked. On the other hand, Romney gave a nationally televised speech in which he misrepresented my beliefs while asserting that he knew what they were.

The moral crime of lying about others so as to denigrate them is not the same as attacking their beliefs (or their religion).

We find this moral crime in a number of claims that people make. We find it in the absurdities that bigots typically embrace regarding those they do not like – that that Jews are a part of a money-hungry cabal that controls the world economies, that homosexuals are responsible for AIDS, that secularists want to remove all mention of God from the public square, that there are no atheists in foxholes, that people not ‘under God’ have no allegiance to the United States. These are beliefs that we not only have a right to question – but we also have reason to question the moral character of those who would embrace these bigotries.

Not a Theist vs. Atheist Distinction

By the way, this view that there are no sacred beliefs and that all beliefs are to be held up to the light of reason is not a theist/atheist distinction. There are quite a few theists who have held that all beliefs may be questioned. They assert that a belief in God can survive this scrutiny – and I hold that this is not true. However, these people are not insulted by questions and objections – they do not feign offense and cry, “How dare you!”. They try to come up with honest answers.

At the same time there are atheists who have asserted that certain beliefs may not be questioned. This was true of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and the other infamous atheist dictators. They were atheists, but they prohibited the questioning of a great many beliefs.

Many theists and many atheists try to portray the distinction between successful and failed states as a distinction between theist and atheist states – simply ignoring the counter-examples that arise in history. Yet, we get a better correspondence if we look at them in terms of nations that hold that there is a body of beliefs that may not be questioned, and nations that hold that any belief is subject to question. The failed atheist states and failed theist states alike fit into the former category. The successful atheist states (much of Western Europe and Japan now qualify in this category) and theist states fit into the second category.

Understanding Freedom of Thought

Religious freedom is not found in refusing to ‘attack’ somebody else’s religious beliefs. It is found in refusing to violently assault those who have different beliefs. Beliefs may be attacked, but they may only be attacked in debate – attacked with words and other forms of communication. The ‘attack’ may never take the form of a club or a gun or an arrest warrant.

However, 'freedom' is not preserved by a prohibition on attacking the beliefs of others. Indeed, the idea that we are free only makes sense if it includes a freedom to attack the beliefs of others - attack with evidence and reason, not with weapons and laws. People who want to put limits on attacking the beliefs of others are people who do not actually understand what freedom is about.

House Resolution Recognizing the importance of Christians and the Christian Faith

It turns out that it is extremely easy to demonstrate, by means of logical argument, that the Christian culture in American is dominated by liars and sophists – people who are morally impaired in their respect for truth and reason.

This is not to say that all Christians are liars and sophists, but that those who have a respect for truth and reason are so few and so impotent that liars and sophists dominate the culture.

An example of this can be found in a resolution passed yesterday in the House of Representatives “Recognizing the importance of Christians and the Christian Faith.”

Sophists and liars propose resolutions like this. Those who value truth and reason would condemn it.

The strategy behind resolutions such as this is simple.

Person A asserts a proposition “P and Q”. For example, Person A could say, “The sun is hot and grasshoppers are mammals.” He then asks Person B whether B agrees or disagrees with this statement. If B agrees with the statement, then A ridicules B for saying that grasshoppers are mammals. If B disagrees with the statement, then A ridicules B for denying that the sun is hot.

This demagoguery is nothing that an honest and fair person would ever endorse, let alone perform. The fact that only a morally impaired person would engage in such a trick is blatantly obvious. The fact that the Christian culture celebrates people who would engage in such a trick is proof that liars and sophists dominate the Christian culture – that honest Christians are too few and too impotent to do anything about it.

The resolution states, truthfully, that there are a lot of Christians in the country, and that Christians have done a lot of good. This is without a doubt since – merely because there are so many Christians in the country, if any good is done, then the chances are that it was done by a Christian. No sane person holds that Christians are 100% evil or that it is impossible for a Christian to do a good deed. Therefore, no sane person could reject these claims.

However, the resolution also calls upon its members to support Christianity. Of course, supporting Christianity means that one has a duty and obligation to promote the Christian religion, and to oppose anything that questions the truth of the Christian religion. That, of course, is not something that any Representative has any right to do – insofar as he is a Representative. Because, just as he represents Christians in this country, he also represents non-Christians, and he does so under contractual agreement (called The Constitution) that says that he will not use his political power to establish or favor one religion above others. This is how we keep the peace – compared to other countries torn by religious war.

So, now we have our two propositions, “P and Q”. P = “There are a lot of Christians and they have done a lot of good things,” and Q = “As a Congressman, I will support Christianity.” Furthermore, we know that this resolution has been proposed by liars and sophists that dominate the Christian culture in this country. Consequently, we know that we can expect the following demagoguery:

If a Representative says that this is true, then this will be used in public to say, “All of Congress has recognized that it is the duty of Congress to promote the Christian religion.” If, on the other hand, the Representative rejects this proposition, then the lying sophist will say, “This Representative denies that it is the case that there are a lot of Christians and that they do a lot of good things. This person, therefore, has insulted all of you Christians who vote.”

This is not even a hidden agenda. Those who proposed this resolution did not trip into it accidently. They planned to use lies and sophistry for political purposes to advance the Christian religion. The also fully expected (expect) to get away with it – to be cheered for their use of lies and sophistry, particularly by the Christian community. From this it follows that the Christian culture (and by this I mean the bulk, though not all, of the Christian community) are enthusiastic supporters of a morality of lies and sophistry. Of course, it is a hypocritical endorsement of lies and sophistry. In true hypocritical fashion, they would clearly condemn the use of lies and sophistry by others while, at the same time, cheering its use by those who ‘are on our side.’

If, instead, these same Representatives were working within a culture of respect for truth and reason, then they would not have dared to even try such blatant lies and sophistry. A culture of truth and reason would shun them and terminate their employment at the first opportunity. Since these Representatives are not dealing with a culture of truth and reason, they do not have to worry about the voters terminating their employment.

Technically, according to the rules of logic, the proposition “P and Q” is true if and only if P is true and Q is true. If somebody says, “The sun is hot and grasshoppers are mammals,” formal logic says that this is false – because grasshoppers are not mammals. This is the honest answer. However, the Christian culture in America likes nothing more than to expose honest representatives so that they can replace those honest representatives with liars and sophists. Consequently, the honest politician faces a dilemma – to come out of the closet as an honest politician and lose the support of a large portion of the Christian community, or give up his seat to a lying sophist.

Telling the truth is a virtue. However, helping to elect lying sophists to Congress is not. So, this is a true moral dilemma. No matter what the person does, he is forced to do something wrong. Of course, he is forced to do something wrong by lying sophists who, as a part of their moral impairment, love to force honest politicians into situations where they must do something wrong.

The argument is solid. Christianity in America today is a culture that celebrates lies and sophistry and empowers liars and sophists above all others. Their claim to moral superiority is simply another one of their lies. If they were in fact dedicated to doing the right thing, they would start by condemning lies and sophistry, rather than promoting it.

Of course, it is not the case that the Christian culture is the only culture dominated by liars and sophists. It would seem that the atheist culture (to the degree that there is one) suffers from the same problem. Just as the lovers of truth and reason in Christianity seem impotent when it comes to altering the behavior of their leaders, the lovers of truth and reason among atheists suffer from the same deficiency.

I argued in “Connecticut Valley Atheists: Imagine” that this sign represents lies and sophistry. It commits the informal logical fallacy of hasty generalization. People support the argument by saying, “If not for religion, the towers would still be up.” However it is just as true that “If not for airplane travel, the towers will still be up.” Yet, a sign that says, “Imagine no airplane travel” would quickly be recognized as absurd – a sophist’s assertion. The same is true of the sign, “Imagine: No Religion”.

Many Christians are fond of saying that atheists borrow their morality from Christians. One aspect of Christian morality (or, at least, the dominant form of it) that atheists do not need to copy is the practice of using sophistry to support fiction motivated by hate. The “Imagine: No Religion” sign commits the logical fallacy of hasty generalization to support a fiction (that if one is religious than one is disposed to destroy things such as the World Trade Center) motivated by hate. If the culture of atheism is a culture of truth and reason, than this culture should be strong enough to withdraw sophistry supporting fiction motivated by hate and replace it with something that is true and reasonable.

If atheists who live truth and reason are too impotent to affect these types of change, then the atheist culture itself is borrowing too much from the Christian culture that surrounds us.

Morality from the Ground Up

Martino and db0 have been carrying on a well-constructed debate derived from my post, “Trans-Cultural Morality”. I would like to advance that discussion some by addressing what appears to be db0’s most pressing question – the way in which ‘good’ can be ‘objective’.

First, to call something 'good' is to say that there are reasons to bring it about.

To explain this, I would like to start by looking at what it would mean for this to be false. Language is an invention, and we can certainly invent a language where ‘good’ does not tie some object of evaluation to reasons for action. However, if we did this, ‘good’ would also have to give up the implication that there are reasons to bring about that which is ‘good.’ That is to say, ‘good’ would no longer be prescriptive. There is no sensible way in which ‘good’ can both (1) be prescriptive – that is, identify things that there are reasons to bring about, and (2) divorce itself from all reasons for action.

Once upon a time I argued that the meaning of ‘good’ was captured in terms of relationships between states of affairs and desires. That was a mistake – one that persistent members of my studio audience eventually got me to understand. ‘Good’ does, ultimately, relate objects of evaluation to desires – but this is not true by definition. This is true because ‘good’ relates states of affairs to reasons for action, plus:

Second, desires are the only reasons for action that exist.

This is a statement about what exists and does not exist in the real world. We know about the existence of desires because they are used to explain and predict the motion of real-world material objects through space and time. Specifically, they are used to explain and predict intentional actions.

Eventually, we might eliminate desires from our view of the world. However, that will not happen (that makes no sense) until we have an alternative theory that does a better job of predicting and explaining human behavior. Until that happens, it makes sense to use the best theory we have today. The best theory we have today explains actions in terms beliefs and desires.

To say that desires are ‘reasons for action’ means that desires identify ends or goals and provide the motivation to reach those ends or goals. A ‘desire that P’ is a brain state that motivates the agent to act so as to realize any state of affairs in which ‘P’ is true. Nothing else exists (or has so far been discovered) that identifies ends and provides motivational force to realize those ends.

If another family of ‘reasons for action’ exists, I challenge the proponent to provide evidence – proof – in the form of the necessity of referring to that ‘reason for action’ to explain and predict events in the real world.

Third, true value statements must relate objects of evaluation to desires.

This is not ‘true by definition’. It follows from the first and second claims above. In order to be ‘prescriptive’, ‘good’ must relate an object of evaluation to real reasons for action. Desires are the only reasons for action that are real. Therefore, in order to be ‘prescriptive’, ‘good’ must relate objects of evaluation to desires.

We can – and do - have value statements that relate objects of evaluation to reasons for action that do not exist (God’s will, intrinsic value, categorical imperatives). However, any claim that takes the form, “There is a reason for action for doing X,” where that reason for action is not real (does not exist) is false. We can dismiss such a statement like we can dismiss any other false statement.

We can – and do – have statements that do not accurately describe relationships between objects of evaluation and reasons for action that do exist. We can, for example, tell a person, “You will love this movie,” and be mistaken. These value claims are also false, and can be dismissed as we dismiss any other false statements.

However, we can – and do – have statements that accurately describe relationships between states of affairs and desires. These value statements are true – true in the same way that any claim made in any science is true.

Applications

To see what follows from this way of thinking, I would like to apply it to a number of examples, to illustrate what it has to say about those examples.

Example 1

Let’s imagine a simple situation in which the following is true.

(1) Person A has a desire that P and a desire that Q.
(2) In state of affairs S, P is true and Q is false.
(3) In state of affairs T, P is false and Q is true.
(4) In state of affairs U, P is true and Q is true.

What can we say about this case?

In answering this question, we are going to stick to objectively true statements that we can make about this case. I am not going to introduce anything subjective.

In this case, A has more and stronger reason to realize U than to realize S or T. Another way of saying the same thing is to say that U is such as to fulfill more and stronger desires than S or T.

A third way to say the same thing is to say that A should realize U. However, ‘should’ in this case simply means ‘is prescribed by the most and strongest reasons for action that exist’. It makes no sense to say that A should realize state S when he has more and stronger reasons to realize state U. If you read this and assign more to the word ‘should’ than ‘is recommended by the more and stronger desires that exist’, you are reading things into this essay that I did not put there – that I explicitly and intentionally excluded.

Example 2

Example 2 is just like Example 1, except there is no state U in which both P and Q are true. The agent has only two options; an act that will realize state S, and an act that will realize state T.

However, in this case, we are going to add the stipulation that the desire that P is stronger than the desire that Q – that it provides more motivating force (or ‘reason for action’) than Q.

(1) Person A has a desire that P and a desire that Q.
(2) In state of affairs S, P is true and Q is false.
(3) In state of affairs T, P is false and Q is true.
(4) A’s desire that P is stronger than his desire that Q.

In this case, A has more and stronger reason realize state S rather than state T. In other words, he ‘should’ realize state S. The claim that he ‘should’ realize state S is as objectively true as the claim that there are more and stronger reasons to realize state S. This is as objectively true as the claim that S will fulfill more and stronger desires than T.

Example 3

In this example I am going to split our two desires – a desire that P and a desire that Q – into two different agents.

(1a) Person A has a desire that P
(1b) Person B has a desire that Q
(2) In state of affairs S, P is true and Q is false.
(3) In state of affairs T, P is false and Q is true.
(4) In state of affairs U, P is true and Q are true.

In this case, A has equal reason to realize S or U, but no reason to realize T. If A tries to realize S, he will come up against opposition from B. B’s only reason for action in this case is a reason to act so as to thwart A’s attempts to realize S.

However, if A tries to realize U, he will find B to be quite cooperative. B’s only reason for action also gives him a reason to realize U.

Faced with B’s opposition in realizing S, and his cooperation in realizing U, A has more and stronger reason to realize U than S. At the same time, B has more and stronger reason to realize U over T (since attempting to realize T will draw A’s opposition).

All of these claims are objectively true. Importantly, it does not matter what S, T or U actually are. What matters is the relationship between states of affairs and desires, not their content.

Example 4

In this example I wish to take Example 3 and introduce two changes. First, I wish to add the stipulation that A’s desire that P is stronger than B’s desire that Q. Think of this in terms of the two desires existing in a single person – A. In this case, if he cannot find a way to fulfill both P and Q, A would act to fulfill the desire that P (the stronger desire) and simply leave Q unfulfilled. Then, take this second desire and, without altering its strength, moving it to Person B.

Second, I am going to remove the possibility of a state in which both the desire that P and the desire that Q can be fulfilled.

(1a) Person A has a desire that P
(1b) Person B has a desire that Q
(2) In state of affairs S, P is true and Q is false.
(3) In state of affairs T, P is false and Q is true.
(4) Person A’s desire that P is stronger than B’s desire that Q.

Look at this situation from the point of view of A. A’s only reason for action is to realize state S. B’s only reason for action is to realize state T. A has a stronger reason for action, but B does not have any reason for action to take that into consideration. Our initial assumptions do not give B any concern over what A wants – or give A any concern over what B wants.

A cannot reason with B to get B to realize S. There is no true proposition that A can provide to B that gives B a reason to realize S. With all of those true propositions, B will still have a desire that Q, and that desire only gives him a reason to realize T.

A cannot bribe B into realizing S. The only bribe B has reason to listen to is an offer to realize state T. However, P is false in T, so A has no reason to offer such a bribe.

A cannot threaten B into realizing S. The only bribe B has reason to listen to is a threat to prevent the realization of T. However, if B yields to the threat, T will be prevented anyway. So, B has no reason to yield to the threat.

These two agents are locked in conflict. There is no sense adding any discussion of ‘morality’ to this situation. A is going to act so as to realize S, and B is going to act so as to realize T. The winner will be the one that defeats the other.

If you don’t like this answer, then, you have reason to avoid getting into this type of situation. However, that is grounded on your desires, not the desires of either of the agents in this hypothetical situation. Conflict in this type of situation is inevitable, and that is an objective fact.

Example 5

For this example, I am going to give A the power to choose B’s desire. B could have a desire that Q, or B could have a desire that R, depending on what A decides. A could either choose to give B a desire that Q – setting up the situation described above. Or A could give B a desire that R. Let us also assume that there is a possible state V where P and R can both be true.

(1a) Person A has a desire that P
(1b) Person A can give Person B a desire that Q, or a desire that R
(2) In state of affairs S, P is true and Q and R are false.
(3) In state of affairs T, Q is true and P and R is false.
(4) In state of affairs V, P and R are true, and Q is false.

What is objectively true about this situation?

Again, A’s only reason for action is his desire that P. His desire that P is a reason to bring about either state S (where P is true) or V (also where P is true). If A gives B a desire that Q, then B only has a reason to act to realize state T – which would conflict with what A has reason to realize. What possible reason could A have to give B a desire that Q?

However, if A gives B a desire that R, then B has reason to act so as to realize V. A also has reason to act to realize V. One of the ways that A can act so as to realize V is to give B a desire that R. So, A (1) should give B a desire that R, and (2) should act so as to realize V.

Once again, ‘should’ simply means that there are more reasons for action that exist for doing an action than for doing some alternative action. In this same sense, giving B a desire that R is better than giving B a desire that Q.

Now, instead of asking A to give B a desire, let us ask B to choose a desire. What desire should B choose? Should he choose a desire that Q that puts him in conflict with A? Or should he choose a desire that R that will allow him to cooperate with A?

The fact is, this is a nonsense question. B has no desires. Thus, B has no reasons for action. Until B has a desire, B is just a lump on the carpet, and asking a lump on the carpet to make a choice is strictly nonsense. Yes, choosing Q would create conflict, but B has no aversion to conflict. Choosing R would allow all desires to be fulfilled, but B has no desire that all desires be fulfilled. B has no desires. B, in other words, does not care one way or another what desire he gets.

Let’s give B a desire, and then ask him to choose? Let’s give him a desire that Q that puts him in conflict with A. In this case, B still has no reason to give up his desire that Q and replace it with a desire that R. His desire that Q only gives him a reason to realize state T. Since giving up his desire that Q will not help him to realize his desire that T, he has no reason to give up his desire that Q. Yes, switching to a desire that R could eliminate conflict and allow all desires to be fulfilled, but B still has no aversion to conflict or desire that all desires be fulfilled. B only has a desire that Q, and a desire that Q gives B no reason to switch to a desire that R.

Correspondingly, A cannot reason B into adopting a desire that R. Here, too, there is no true proposition that A can make B aware of that gives B a reason to choose a desire that R.

However, we are assuming that A has some tool that will switch B’s desire to a desire that R. A certainly has a reason for action to use that tool and to give B a desire that R, thus fostering an age of cooperation that will allow A to realize a state in which P is true.

Conclusion

Okay, this post is way too long. However, it establishes a pattern that should allow an interested person to continue this thought experiment into more complicated situations. Add more people, more desires, more states of affairs, but confine yourself only to making objectively true claims about these entities, states, and relationships. Eventually, all of the features of morality will emerge without adding a single intrinsic or transcendental value, God, or subjective moral ought.

I started this essay with the intention of explaining how a value proposition can be objectively true. The above examples all illustrate a set of basic propositions relating to the objectivity of value.

A prescription is a description of a relationship between an object of evaluation and reasons for action. Desires are the only reasons for action that exist. All objectively true prescriptions are objectively true descriptions of relationships between objects of evaluation and desires. A prescription that is not an objectively true description of a relationship between an object of evaluation and desires is objectively false. It either falsely claims that reasons for action other than desires exists, or it makes false claims about the relationship between the object of evaluation and desires that do exist.

Huckabee's Dangerous Blinders

Three events in the Huckabee campaign show evidence of a pattern that would make Huckabee a very poor choice for President. It’s a pattern of ignoring evidence – of drawing conclusions based upon his belief and using this to evaluate the evidence, rather than looking at the evidence and allowing that to inform his beliefs.

I have used an example in the past that involves riding a bus. In getting on a bus, you have the choice of two different drivers. Driver 1 wears a blindfold, shuts out the outside world, and says that through faith alone he can navigate the streets. Driver 2, on the other hand, refuses to wear a blindfold and makes his choices of where to turn and how fast to travel based on observation. In other words, he is constantly looking out the window.

Huckabee’s recent actions suggest that he would be the first type of driver – that he wears a blindfold and bases his policy decisions on faith, rather than basing those decisions on observation.

One of the three events pointing in this direction is his answer to a 1992 survey in which he said that people infected with the HIV virus should be isolated from everybody else. Scientists had discovered that the HIV virus was not spread through casual contact seven years earlier, in 1985. At the same time that Huckabee was willing to impose this great burden on a segment of the population (for no good reason), he was unwilling to spend any money to relieve this burden. That is to say, he was not interested in funding research into discovering a treatment or cure for this disease. He showed a tremendous lack of sympathy for those that he would cause to suffer.

Fifteen years later, Huckabee is standing by his original policy claim – suggesting that he would do the same thing in the future under similar circumstances.

Huckabee acknowledged the prevailing scientific view then, and since, that the virus that causes AIDS is not spread through casual contact, but said that was not certain. He cited revelations in 1991 that a dentist had infected a patient in an extraordinary case that highlighted the risk of infection through contact with blood or bodily fluids.

The core problem that I am interested in talking about in this post is Huckabee’s claim that the science ‘was not certain’. This raises the question, “What does it take for Huckabee to be certain of something? At what point will he look at the evidence and say that the evidence is so compelling that we can now be ‘certain’?”

The problem with Huckabee is that it does not take any evidence at all for Huckabee to be certain of something. He does not ground his claims on evidence. Instead, he first makes up his mind what is true – what he is ‘certain’ of – then looks through the evidence for whatever will support his initial decision.

The case of the dentist in 1991 was a case of irrational hysteria. It was a news story that provoked fear in people. Some people found that fear useful – it was a part of their agenda to promote fear and hatred of homosexuals and could fulfill that desire by promoting this story, using it to manufacture fear. The dentist claim that Huckabee pointed to was not a reason for isolating people with the disease, it was a pretext, in the same way that weapons of mass destruction and involvement in 9/11 was a pretext for invading Iraq.

In this case, Huckabee saw that the science ‘was not certain’ because this is what he wanted to believe. He wanted to find doubt that would justify ‘isolating’ homosexuals and, if the scientists themselves could not provide him with that evidence, he would find it elsewhere.

This is the same way of thinking that President Bush used. Bush (and others in his cabinet) first made up their mind to attack Iraq. From that point on, evidence did not matter. They used their desire to attack Iraq to evaluate the evidence – throwing away that which they did not like, and keeping (or leaking) that which supported their conclusion. This HIV answer suggests that Huckabee used his understanding of scripture to determine what he wanted the science to say regarding the disease, and accepted only that which corresponded with scripture, rather than evaluating it as science.

Another incident that demonstrates a disposition to let a will to believe blind him to mountains of evidence was his answer to a debate question on evolution. When a debate moderator asked for a show of hands for those who do not believe in the theory of evolution, Huckabee’s was one of three hands that went up.

Again, Huckabee’s rejection of evolution is not as telling as the comments he made afterwards. Explaining his answer,

"Is a president going to sit in the Oval Office and really make a decision on what's being taught in a third-grade class in Dubuque, Iowa, on creation or evolution? The answer is no."

Actually, the answer is ‘yes’. In fact, we have very good reason to reject any President who does not have at the very least a 3rd-grader’s understanding of science. If his understanding of science is at or below that level, then how can he possibly make good decisions?

The third incident that relates to Huckabee’s refusal to look at real-world explanations for real-world events came in an answer to a question about why his poll numbers were on the rise. Huckabee’s answer was,

There’s only one explanation for it, and it’s not a human one. It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of five thousand people. (Applause) That’s the only way that our campaign can be doing what it’s doing. And I’m not being facetious nor am I trying to be trite. There literally are thousands of people across this country who are praying that a little will become much, and it has. And it defies all explanation, it has confounded the pundits. And I’m enjoying every minute of them trying to figure it out, and until they look at it, from a, just experience beyond human, they’ll never figure it out. And it’s probably just as well. That’s honestly why it’s happening.

It is bad enough that Huckabee now thinks that he is being personally appointed by God to be President, rather than being elected by the people. If he had begun with the assumption that Presidents are chosen by the people (rather than God), then he would have had to look for an explanation as to why the people were choosing him to be leader. Something changed their mind. Perhaps it was the fact that the voters had decided to pay attention to the issue and conclude that he was the best candidate. Either way, if it is the people’s choice that he become President then the answer to the question can be found there. However, if it is not the peoples’ choice – if it is God’s choice – then the will of the people becomes irrelevant.

What is worse than Huckabee’s belief that God personally picked him to lead the country is his refusal to look for real-world causes to explain real-world events. Notice that he said that anybody who looked for a real-world cause would be disappointed, because the event could only be explained in supernatural terms.

Now, imagine that Huckabee is called upon to deal with some serious challenge facing the country – a Middle-East crisis or an outbreak of Bird Flu. America, then, would have a President who is more than happy to say that the event we need to deal with cannot be explained in terms of natural influences; that it can only be explained and understood in supernatural terms. Those who look for a natural explanation (and who built their response strategies on the best theories as to what that explanation was) would be dismissed as wasting their time – that the only people who can truly understand (and predict, and respond to) this threat is somebody who knows how it fits into God’s plan.

To get an idea of how Huckabee would rule, we need to imagine a leader from the Dark Ages – a leader who believes in magic and superstition. If he has an important decision to make, this leader first consults the oracles and astrologers – the ‘priests’ who open up a chicken on an altar and read the entrails. Huckabee’s first interpretation of events will be through the lens of scripture. His first question will be, “How does this fit into God’s plan?” However he answers this question, this will determine his reaction.

This is what I meant when I talked about a person driving a bus by putting on a blindfold and expecting to know by faith alone when to turn and how fast to drive. Huckabee wears a blindfold that allows him to simply ignore the best empirical evidence available for understanding any social problem.

Reality has this habit of being amazingly indifferent to human folly. If a foolish mistake takes a man’s life or destroys his business, he cannot go up to reality and say, “Okay, I was stupid. It was my mistake. Can I have a do-over?” There are no do-overs in the real world, so we need a President who is less likely to put us on a collision course with a stubborn and indifferent reality. We need a president who will drive by looking at the window and respecting the rules of evidence that hold sway in the real world.

Connecticut Valley Atheists: Imagine

A sign, erected by Connecticut Valley Atheists in front of town hall in Rockville, Connecticut, shows a picture of the two world trade center buildings and the words, "Imagine no religion."

This is wrong on so many levels. The most important level, however, is that it promotes a belief that is as absurd as any religion. It says that religion is a necessary for violent acts and, without religion, violent acts will not take place.

That statement is quite simply false.

I have argued in the past that when people make a mistake - when they embrace sophistry or fiction unsupported by evidence - it gives us a window into their moral character. We can ask why they made that mistake, as opposed to some other.

A plausable explanation in many cases is that desire has gotten in the way of well-founded belief. The agents want it to be the case that a particular conclusion is true. They want it so badly that they blind themselves to evidence and reason. They embrace fiction and sophistry in its place - anything to support the desired conclusion.

In this case, I would argue that the motivation behind this sign - behind thinking that this was a good idea - was hate. Some group of people did something that is hate-worthy. The authors of the message wanted to spread this hatred around - target it at people who were not actually guilty of the original crime, so they embrace a message that promote hatred of those the authors want to hate, rather than those who can actually be blamed.

We can imagine a similar sign - one showing a Soviet Galug or a pile of bodies in the former Soviet Union under Stalin with the caption, "Imagine No Religion" - a sign that blames all atheists for the crimes that only some atheists have committed.

In fact, this type of argument is heavily used on the other side of the debate. I have frequently argued against it - arguing that any who would use this type of reasoning is a hate-mongering bigot.

Any who would use this type of reasoning is, in fact, a hate-mongering bigot. And that goes for those who would approve of this "Imagine No Religion" sign.

I am not saying that we should be nice to theists simply for the sake of being nice to them - that out of 'respect' for their beliefs we should refrain from saying certain truths. In fact, I hold the opposite view, that respect for truth is more important than respect for any person or group's favorite fairy tales.

My criticism of this sign is not that it is unkind. My criticism is that the claim it makes is untrue - that the inference it draws is sophistry motivated by a desire to condemn the innocent.

It also portrays and promotes a set of values that I think we would be better off inhibiting rather than encouraging - the claim that we should value a good sound byte, a verbal jab aiming to inflict pain, over truth and reason. I think that the world has suffered enough from that type of attitude.

If the sign has any value at all it is as a 'reductio ad absurdum' of a line of reasoning popular among theists. Many are quite fond of blaming all atheists for the crimes of a few. We hear or read about it constantly - in references to Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, and how these villains taint all atheists and prove the moral superiority of Christians.

The sophistry of that argument is well illustrated by the equal sophistry of blaming all of religion for the crimes of 9/11. This may well illustrate that sophistry, and the immoral attitudes that lie behind the use (exploitation) of that type of rhetoric to people who otherwise might find it difficult to grasp.

But that is its only value - to illustrate wrongness of using this type of association to those who do not understand it.

Those who do not understand it obviously includes the Connecticut Valley Atheists.

Romney's Hitleresque Strategy

Yesterday, I wrote some comments about what Mitt Romney had said in his “Faith in America” speech. Today, I want to say a few words about why he said it – or, more specifically, about the type of political strategy his efforts fall into.

Romney’s Hitleresque Political Strategy

Romney’s strategy for the speech was, for all practical purpose, the same political strategy that Hitler used to obtain power. The recipe is to take some subgroup of the culture that is not very popular – that there is a history of vilifying, accept any and all lies and sophistry that are used against this group, and tell the people that “we” must pull together under a common leader who recognizes how bad “they” are and is willing to stand up to “them” for the sake of “us”.

It was, in fact, quite fitting that Romney was introduced by the senior George Bush. Bush himself is quoted as saying:

“No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God.”

.

However, there is no primary source available for this quote – just the word of the reporter who asked the question.

In Romney’s case, we have a primary source. Romney’s assertion that atheists should not be considered patriots, that this is one nation under God, was broadcast on prime time throughout the country.

Of course, in Hitler’s case, the enemy – the people that Hitler targeted were the Jews (among others). This was the easiest target for him to use, since it allowed Hitler to draw upon hatreds that the Christian community had cultivated for hundreds of years. This is not to say that Hitler himself did not hate the Jews and that he merely played off of everybody else’s hatred. Hitler, himself, probably learned this hatred from the Christian culture in which he grew up. None of this changes the fact that this history of hatred of Jews existed, and that it was easy for Hitler to exploit.

To do this, Hitler needed only to give voice to the prejudices and bigotries that were already active within the community – lies that blamed the Jews for all of the troubles that the German people had suffered. To follow Hitler’s example, Romney needed only to give voice to a pack of lies that have been leveled against ‘secularists’ over the years – lies that his target group were likely to accept without question and without evidence.

Secularists, according to Romney, are anti-American and anti-freedom who rightfully deserve no voice in government.

It is important to note that in Romney’s speech, he identified his opponent as a religious minority. Many secularists would deny that secularism is a religion. However, this blog post is about Romney’s strategy, and in this context it is important to note that Romney described secularism as a religion and anticipated that his audience would accept this claim. That it is just another one of the lies that he used to vilify his target group does not change the fact that he used this lie.

Anyway, by calling secularism a ‘religion’ he makes the case that his strategy was like Hitler’s significantly stronger. Romney was targeting a religious subgroup. Though he did this in the context of a speech that talked about the importance of freedom of religion and of respect for differing religious beliefs, he also made it clear that the religion of secularism was “wrong” and that the practitioners of his religion were anti-American, anti-freedom, and unworthy of any respect or consideration. Though Romney made reference to the constitutional prohibition against any religious test for public office, he made it clear that those who belonged to the ‘secularist religion’ had no place in public office, or even in America.

Romney also repeated the common libel that secularists are out to remove all mention of God from the public square – a charge that has as much merit as host desecration did against the Jews.

Though one might be able to find an isolated instances of a secularist arguing for a prohibition on all mention of God in the public square, just as one might be able to find an instance of a Jew who desecrated a communion wafer, one can find no evidence that this is a regular secular proposal (or Jewish practice). Secularists wish to eliminate all government endorsement of religion, and certainly have reason to protest claims that a person has to be under God or trust in God to be patriotic (these claims are inherently insulting and denigrating), I do not know of a secularist who would ban private citizens from standing on public property professing their private belief in God.

The claim that secularists are trying to remove all mention of God from the public square is a lie; a misrepresentation of the fact that secularists are trying to get the church’s hand out of their bank account.

A third lie in Rommey’s speech was to equate ‘secularists’ with people who do not believe in God or do not have faith. As it turns out, a great many religious people are secularists. A secularist is somebody who believes in the separation of church and state – something that people who have suffered religious persecution in the past tend to appreciate more than those who have caused this persecution or who have the power to cause it in the future with relative impunity. Atheists are the actual hated group so, by blurring the distinction between atheists and secularists, Romney (following the conservative religious tradition) should be able to engineer the same hatred of all secularists that had previously been meant only for atheists.

The Reason Behind the Strategy

Romney had good reason to try Hitler’s “Us” versus “them” strategy – complete with the lies and slanders that “us” have been leveling against “them” for countless years. Romney wanted to be accepted as one of “us”. His Mormon religion caused many conservative Christians to view him as an outsider. He needed to find a group that was more disliked than the Mormons and to give a speech that said, “Look! Over there! They are the enemy! We must unite against them!” Buying into every lie and slander used against the target group only added to the acceptability of his argument.

People generally have a desire to belong – to be one of “us”. Hitler became popular by telling the German people that “we” (Arians) are better than “them” (Jews and others). The German people heard the message, they felt the pride, and they gave their power to Hitler, who then acted on that false sense of pride against those that he had declared to be the inferior “them”. Similarly, Romney seems to have been hoping to create a similar sense of pride among “us” who are under God and trust in God, against “them” secularists – for the purpose of generating the same psychological effect.

As long as he could come up with an “us” and “them” so that Mormons were in the “us” category, and some long-standing socially vilified group was in the “them” category. He had everything he needed in targeting secularists, the way Hitler targeted Jews.

The Hitler Analogy

There will be people who will question the Hitler analogy. Any time Hitler is mentioned, they get upset and accuse the person mentioning Hitler of some major offense. However, there are two problems with this response to such an analogy.

First, it makes being “like Hitler” the politically safest thing one can be. By being “like Hitler”, a candidate can instantly disarm all opponents by saying to his accusers, “How dare you say that I am like Hitler.”

Second, this “How dare you accuse me of being like Hitler” response is actually a smoke-screen; a distraction. The individual cannot answer the actual charges that have been leveled against him, so he hopes to change the subject, by changing the accusation into one he can handle.

I have not said that Romney and his supporters are “like Hitler” in that they are just itching for a chance to open up the death camps. I have said that they are “like Hitler” in their use of a strategy of vilifying some subgroup in a community as a way of achieving political power – of creating a false “us” and “them” that he hopes will result in enough votes for “us” to win the election.

Remember, there were no gas chambers in 1933 - not when Hitler was actually making his climb to power.

That charge stands. Any pretend offense at being compared to Hitler in this regard is, like I said, a smoke screen – a way in which a candidate like Romney can behave in ways like Hitler and avoid having anybody present this fact.

Implications

I consider it quite important, now, that Romney be defeated and disgraced, and that he is defeated and disgraced precisely because of this speech. If this type of behavior is ever seen as politically viable in this country, we can expect others to keep using it, and for ‘secularists’ to continue to be victimized because of it. The way to put an end to this type of strategy is to make sure that it is political suicide to even try to use this strategy.

And that it is political suicide for any party to seriously consider a candidate that employs this type of strategy. The instant that any candidate tries this type of Hitleresque targeting of a subgroup to gain political power, a sufficient number of Americans should recognize it, and to know that this is not the type of person we want as our leader, that he immediately loses all hope of victory.

Then we would have at least one measure of protection against potential Hitleresque candidates in the future.

A Closing Note on ‘Under God’ and ‘In God We Trust’

I want to close with one final note. The case for allowing under God in the pledge and “In God We Trust” on the currency is that this is a patriotic exercise that has nothing to do with promoting religion. This is an argument that only makes sense if it is reasonable to deny that the Pledge and the motto can be used to target hostility against any group of Americans. Yet, this is precisely what Romney did in his speech, and what he was applauded for doing.

We are a nation 'Under God' and in God, we do indeed trust.

This means nothing less than those who are not under God or who do not trust in God are anti-American. It is a clear-cut instance of these quotes being used to direct hostility against a target group in order to promote one religious belief (belief about religion, not belief within a religion) over another.

Romney's Speech, "Faith in America"

In a speech titled, Faith in America, delivered Thursday at the George Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, Mitt Romney made the claim that “Freedom requires religion.”

The bulk of my readers, I suspect, know that this statement is nonsense. However, he said more than this. For any who read this blog who did not listen to or read Romney’s entire speech, I want to show you the degree to which Romney identified any of you who are not people of faith as unpatriotic, anti-American, and the true enemies of freedom.

Actually, I heard no criticism of the speech along the lines that I will give here, until I encountered a clip from Countdown with Keith Olbermann that seems to have noticed the same problems.

If Romney is elected President, then America will be a nation, “Of the religious, by the religious, and for the religious.” He will not likely see himself as being a leader of all Americans, but only of that subset of Americans who believe in God.

Our greatness would not long endure without judges who respect the foundation of faith upon which our constitution rests. I will take care to separate the affairs of government from any religion, but I will not separate us from 'the God who gave us liberty.'

So, again, we have a Presidential candidate saying, in effect, that no atheist is qualified to be judge – that ‘we cannot long endure’ judges who do not believe in God. There is, then, a religious test for public office, in violation of the Constitution.

Perhaps the most important question to ask a person of faith who seeks a political office, is this: does he share these American values: the equality of human kind, the obligation to serve one another, and a steadfast commitment to liberty?

Note that Romney did not say, “a person who seeks political office,” but “a person of faith”. Does he, perhaps, have a different set of questions that he would ask a person ‘not of faith’ who seeks a political office? Or is it the case that a person ‘not of faith’ will never make it far enough to be asked these questions?

I suspect it is the latter.

"Americans acknowledge that liberty is a gift of God, not an indulgence of government.

So, a person who does not acknowledge that liberty is a gift of God is not an American. Perhaps he would be so kind as to tell me which country I am a citizen of, then because, apparently, I have been making a mistake every time I filled out a form in which I identified myself as an American.

Apparently my father, who chose the Air Force as his career was no American either, and that the liberty that people might think they owe to people such as him and other “atheists in foxholes” are owed to God instead.

We are a nation 'Under God' and in God, we do indeed trust.

We? Once again, Mitt Romney tells me that I am not an American – that to be an American one must trust in God, and one must be under God. Failing these two tests means that one falls short of being counted among the “We” who are Americans.

Also, it remains the fact that the issue is not whether we are or are not “a nation under God” – but whether the government has the right to tell its citizens that patriots must support ‘one nation under God’ and that those who do not do so are not true patriots. Because this is the message written into the Pledge – not that we are one nation under God, but that we should be one nation under God and that to oppose this is as unpatriotic as opposing union, tyranny, and justice.

Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me.

And those who have not knelt in prayer, we may assume, have no friend or ally in Romney. There is nothing in this that provides any type of barrier to persecution – with utterly dismissing the idea that non-believing Americans are Americans and that they, too, have a right to a government that represents and respects them. This is nothing less than a speech proclaiming that unbelievers are second-class citizens, who can expect to have no voice in government, because they deserve no voice in government.

[God] should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history, and during the holiday season, nativity scenes and menorahs should be welcome in our public places.

Of course, history should teach that a belief in God has been a part of our history – where it is true and relevant, just as it should teach that a belief in no God is a part of our history where it is true and relevant. However, should it teach that God is a part of our history? Should it teach that Jesus existed and that the bible is literally true – as a historic fact? In teaching that God is a part of our history, does this include teaching the Mormon belief that Jesus came to America after the resurrection? Is that, also, a part of our history that is to be taught in schools?

"I'm not sure that we fully appreciate the profound implications of our tradition of religious liberty. I have visited many of the magnificent cathedrals in Europe. They are so inspired . . . so grand . . . so empty.

And . . . that’s a bad thing. I can understand if Romney the private citizen thought that this was a bad thing and wanted to correct it. However, Romney seems to be saying that he takes it as his job to fill the cathedrals – or the churches (and mega-churches) in America.

Is it, perhaps, his job to fill the mosques and synagogues as well?

What would Romney’s reaction be to, say, a Muslim candidate for President who lamented the lack of Muslim faith in America, who talked about the declining acceptance of Islam in other parts of the world, and spoke as if one of his duties as President would be to change that trend? I have little doubt that he would see this as a violation of the President’s duties – that it is not in the President’s job description to fill the mosques. Nor is it within his job description to fill the cathedrals, or the churches.

If the churches and cathedrals are empty, it is because the people have come to adopt the belief that there is no need for them to be filled. This is a decision that the people themselves have made. Even though Romney may not agree with that choice, part of what it means to have ‘freedom of religion’ is that the people get to decide the religious course of a nation – and that includes the freedom to decide that religion serves no useful purpose, and to leave the cathedrals (perhaps, and hopefully, to enter the universities and science laboratories instead).

If Romney is not happy with allowing the people to choose the religious course for the nation to take – if he wants to force it along a course of his choosing, rather than allow freedom to take the society down a course of its choosing, then he must think that it is the role of government to impose religion on the people.

Reaction

Before I go, what I really want to do is say something about the reaction to this speech. We can, of course, condemn Romney for his bigotry. We may easily point out how the bigot in Romney leads him to accept denigrating and derogatory falsehoods about those he hates (such as the claim that ‘secularists’ want to remove all mention of God from the public square, when what ‘secularists’ want in fact is merely not to be forced to make donations to somebody else’s church). We can find good reason for condemnation in Romney’s speech, because that speech is substantially a confession that he holds these moral failings.

However, readers, I want you to remember to shift the spotlight to the audience – those who cheered, who gave standing ovations, when he said these things. Imagine how far Hitler would have gone if, when he gave his speech, he was met with a more morally appropriate response to his words, than the response rousing cheers he received (no matter the fact that the whole audience was engineered to generate those cheers)?

Of course, in bringing up Hitler, some will accuse me of unfairly comparing Romney to Hitler. These types of responses are common, mostly because they tend to be effective at diverting attention away from the real point the writer is trying to make. In this case, the point that I am making is that, just as a speaker can be held morally accountable for (condemned, or praised, as appropriate) for what he says, every member of the audience is morally responsible for what he cheers. Those who cheer bigotry are no better than the bigot that they cheer.

The same goes for the News reporters and the commentators who have been responding to the speech elsewhere. The most common question asked since the speech has been whether it was effective – whether it might help Romney or hurt him in the election. Again, I can imagine these same reporters grading the speeches of Hitler by the same standard – judging them according to whether or not they will help him to fulfill his political agenda, without even discussing the moral merit of the agenda that he is trying to fulfill.

I have been reading quite a bit about reaction to the speech since it came out. I am struck by the fact that I have not found a single instance of a reporter asking an atheist, such as myself, “How do you feel about the fact that a candidate for President has called you unpatriotic and anti-American, and identified you as an enemy of freedom?” Or, ask somebody (e.g., former President Bush), “How do you feel about the fact that Romney has identified non-believers as un-American, unpatriotic, and the true enemies of freedom?”

I have read a few reports that noted Romney’s slight to Americans who do not believe in God. However, they quickly dismiss this fact by saying that this does not matter, because non-believers will not likely vote for Romney anyway. Again, this way of thinking is not unlike noting that a speech by Hitler vilified Jews, but that this did not matter because Jews were not likely to vote for the Nazi party anyway.

Not only do we see reason to condemn Romney for seeking political power by vilifying a segment of the population through lies and other forms of misrepresentation, we see reason to condemn those who cheer these misrepresentations, and reason to condemn those who report the speech for dismissing the fact that a candidate is using lies to vilify a segment of the population as his means to obtain political power.

It is not a healthy pattern for a country to get into.

More Perspective on the Pledge

Recent events involving the Pledge of Allegiance has renewed interest in a story I wrote not long ago called "A Perspective on the Pledge."

I have been thinking about expanding that story a little to cover some more ground. Recent interest in the story has inspired me to go ahead with that project.

Below, you will find the expanded version of my story "A Perspective on the Pledge."

A Perspective on the Pledge

Shelby Johnson had to admit that she was more than a little nervous as she walked into her first class. She was also a little late. Principal Hadley had kept her a little too long as he gave her a pep talk before she started her first assignment.

One advantage that she saw from this is that the class bell had already rung by the time she reached the classroom. All of the students were inside the room and most had selected a seat. Some were still standing as she entered, but they sat down while she dropped her books on her desk.

She wrote her name on the board, turned to the class, and took a deep breath before saying, “All stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.” She had been told that this ritual was useful in getting the kids’ minds focused on the fact that they were now in school and that the class had started, like the announcement that "all stand" before a judge entered the courtroom.

She paused when she noticed that one boy, near the back of the room, remained slouched down in his chair.

“Excuse me,” Shelby said, looking at the student. She stepped up between the rows to get a little bit closer and to make it clear who she was talking to. “Excuse me. What is your name?”

“Shawn,” the student answered. He scarcely looked up, but remained focused on the pen that he was fiddling with.

“Shawn. I would understand if you do not want to say the Pledge of Allegiance. However, I would like it if you would at least stand while the rest of the class said it, just to show a little respect to the flag.”

The boy sat silently for a second, then shook his head and said, “I don’t think I can do that, ma’am.”

Shelby got a sudden knot in her stomach. The rest of the students were standing and ready to start. She knew that they were all evaluating their new teacher, wondering what they were in for. She had heard stories of classes that would take a young and inexperienced teacher, chew them up, and spit them out again.

She asked Shawn, “Why not?”

Shawn kept his eyes focused on his pen, and slumped in his chair as if he was about to slide underneath his desk. When he spoke, his voice was soft, making it hard for her to hear him. "Ms. Johnson, the words 'with liberty and justice for all' were put into the Pledge in order to make us hate tyranny and injustice, right? I mean, we say the pledge because we are supposed to take a stand against tyranny and injustice. Those are bad things."

Shelby shrugged. This was, after all, supposed to be an Amerycan History class, and they would be talking about these things soon enough. "Yes. This country was founded on the idea that freedom is better than tyranny and justice is better than injustice."

Shawn glanced up, and made eye contact with her only for a second. She noted that he had nothing on his desk but his history book. Otherwise, she would have thought that he was reading something that somebody else had made him say. Shawn continued, "And the part about this country being indivisible. That was because of the Civil War. The guy who invented the Pledge wanted us to swear that we would uphold the Union and not promote rebellion. That's why he put the word 'indivisible' in the Pledge."

"Of course," said Shelby. "That's why you should show respect for the Flag. These are all good things that you should be proud of and that you should want to defend."

"Okay," said Shawn. "Then, 50 years ago, Congress added the word white to the Pledge of Allegiance. We are supposed to be one white nation, indivisible. When we pledge allegiance to one white nation, doesn't this mean that not being white is as bad as being in favor of rebellion or tyranny or injustice?"

"No," Shelby said with a sigh of relief. "No, not at all. Congress added that to reflect our heritage. It simply pays respect to the fact that all of our founding fathers were white, and that they clearly wanted to establish a white nation, and the fact that all of our past Presidents have been white."

"And all future Presidents should be white," Shawn added.

Shelby's smile vanished.

Shawn continued. "That's the real reason why Congress put the word white in the Pledge of Allegiance. It was not so much to show respect for our heritage, but to tell people not to elect a President who was not white. You can’t have a white nation unless all of your politicians are white."

"No," said Shelby hesitantly. "Anybody can grow up to be President. That is another one of the things that makes this country great. We'll be reading about that, too."

"Ms. Johnson. You're telling me that if I were going to run for President, nobody in this country is going to say, 'We are supposed to be one white nation, and that means we are supposed to be voting against anybody who isn't white, just as we are supposed to be voting against any president who supports secession from the union, tyranny, or injustice. Do you mean to tell me that Congress did not add the word white to the Pledge of Allegiance fifty years ago as a way of putting anybody who was not white at a political disadvantage?"

"Now, Shawn, you obviously know that you don't have to say the Pledge if you don't want to. I'm not asking you to say it. I'm just asking you to stand to show some respect for the good things that this country stands for. A lot of people died to buy you the freedoms you enjoy. Don't you think you owe them a little bit of gratitude?"

The boy bit his lip, and Shelby knew that she had struck a nerve with him. Still, he was not ready to give in. "Do you think that just because I don't have to say that this is one white nation that this means that the pledge is not racist?"

"Of course it isn't," Shelby said. "This is a free country. You should show your respect for all the good things this country stands for. You should be proud of those things and show some measure of gratitude to all of those soldiers and citizens that made this a free country."

Shawn looked up again, this time a little longer. "Ms. Johnson, if somebody was about to lead a room full of people in calling you . . . I'm sorry to say this, ma'am but I am just trying to illustrate a point here . . . if he was about to lead a whole room of your fellow teachers in calling you a cheep whore, and somebody said that you should stand and show your respect for what he was doing, would you?"

A couple of the other children snickered and Shelby felt her face grow hot.

"Shawn," she said. He continued to look at his desk. "Shawn! Look at me while I am talking to you."

Shawn showed no signs of moving for a few seconds. Then he let out a long sigh. He put his pen down and sat up straight in his desk. Folding his hands in front of him, he turned toward her and held her gaze. He did not flinch or look away. That did not help, Shelby thought to herself.

One of the other students, sitting on the opposite side of the room, shouted, "You liberals will not be happy until you have removed every sign of the white race from the public square."

Shawn shrugged and answered softly, "I am not saying that white people should be banned from the public square. I want the public square to be neutral on the issue of who is white and who is not. I do not see a problem with that."

"It's a problem if you're white!"

"That's enough!" Shelby shouted. "I have not given anybody else permission to talk!"

Just then, one of the other students – a white girl -- sat down. Shelby turned to her and said, "Jenny, I did not give anybody permission to sit down, either."

The girl remained seated. "It makes sense, Ms. Johnson. The Pledge states that you have to be white to lead this country, and that's not fair."

"Jenny, what do you want me to tell your parents when they ask me about how things are going at school?"

Jenny looked over at Shawn, then back at Shelby. "Tell them that I stood up for a friend. They'll understand. And if they don't; well, it's no big deal to do the right think when it's easy. A person really only shows her character by doing the right thing when it is hard. It's wrong, Ms. Johnson, to say that we have to be a white nation."

Shelby took a step back.

"I'm sorry, Ms. Johnson," Shawn said. "I know that this does not make your job any easier. I promise that I'm not here to cause any trouble. However, don't ask me to stand and show any respect for the idea that this has to be one white nation. I just can't do that. To be honest, I don't think you should be doing that either, but I will leave that up to you. Honest, Ms. Johnson, I’ll just sit here quietly until you’re done."

"Alright," said Shelby. "I'll discuss this with Principle Hadley and I'll let him decide. In the mean time, let's say the Pledge of Allegiance."

While most of the students put their hands on their hearts, two other students sat down. One was white, and the other was not.

The rest of the class followed the teacher's lead.

When they got to the middle of the Pledge, most of the students shouted, "…one WHITE nation…"

Shawn had been ready for it, and did not flinch. They were doing just what the all-white members of the Senate had done a couple of years earlier when a challenge to the Pledge made its way through the courts.

However, the outburst caught Shelby by surprise. She stopped and turned at the students who had shouted the word, and caught them smiling in self-admiration. After they finished, they took their seats, whispering among themselves and looking back at Shawn. Shelby reached into her routine for something comforting. She spoke hesitantly to the class. "Okay, let's start with introductions." Throughout the day, Shawn worried about whether he had done the right thing, and about what the costs might be. He had made some enemies in the school – students who called out taunts and insults down the hall between classes. Others whispered encouragement, though they tended to speak only when nobody else was listening.

During his study hall, the teacher hand handed him a note from Ms. Johnson asking him to meet her in her classroom at the end of the day. By the time the school day ended, the note was so badly worn that it felt more like cloth than paper, and was stained from the sweat from his palms.

Whatever Ms. Johnson had in store for him made Shawn less nervous than what his mother would say. He knew his mother was going to hear about this, and she would not be happy. She didn’t like her kid causing trouble in a new school. She just wanted him to study, get good grades, graduate, and leave.

Shawn, however, had other plans. He entered Ms. Johnson’s classroom. She was alone at her desk. “Close the door,” she told him. After he did so, she told him to pull one of the classroom seats up to her desk.

“I talked with Principle Hadley,” she said.

Shawn braced himself for the results of that conversation. He had suffered a confrontation with Mr. Hadley earlier the day on a white-only youth club called the Youth Scouts recruiting on school property. The Youth Scouts openly declared that non-whites were morally inferior to whites and, consequently, were not fit to be role models for children. Yet, they demanded to be allowed to recruit members in government schools and to use donated government property for their rallies and meetings on the grounds that denying them access to school children was discriminatory. Hadley, as it turned out, was a fan of the Youth Scouts.

“Principle Hadley said that we are required to offer the Pledge of Allegiance and, of course, we have to maintain order in the classroom. Since, as a non-white student, you are not required to pledge allegiance to one white nation, he said he could not see what your problem was. Just don’t say the pledge if you don’t like what it says.”

“I told you earlier, Ms. Johnson. The problem is that you are telling your students that they should pledge allegiance to one white nation, as if a non-white nation is not worthy of allegiance.”

“I understand your position, too, Shawn. Please realize, however, that this is not an exercise in racism. This is an exercise in patriotism. The school is perfectly within its right to encourage its students to be patriotic.” “But why are you telling them that being patriotic means you have to be white? Why are you telling them that a patriot has to support a white nation, and those who do not support a white nation means you are not patriotic. Ms. Johnson, that’s an insult to every non-white who ever served this country – including my dad, who died in the war.”

Shelby’s eyes widened and her expression grew suddenly soft. “Really? I’m so sorry, Shawn.”

“He died when his helicopter got shot down near Kabul. He was black. He certainly did not die because for the sake of one white nation. Can’t a person like my dad who did not believe in one white nation be a patriot?”

“I suppose he could.”

“Then why are you telling your students that he can’t be? Why are you telling them that to be a patriot they have to favor one white nation, and why are you telling those who do favor one white nation that they can’t be patriots?”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“That’s exactly what you’re saying, Ms. Johnson. When you pledge allegiance to one white nation and call it a patriotic exercise, you’re saying that a non-white nation is not patriotic. How can you sit there and deny that?”

“Look, I’m not going to debate you on this. I can understand where you’re coming from. I just think you’re wrong, that’s all. But, I understand. I can see how you can be upset. After all, you can’t help the fact that you’re not white. It’s not like you could . . .”

Shawn slammed his palm down on his desk top and stood up. He then saw that he had startled the teacher, so he apologized and returned to his chair. Forcing himself to calm down, he said, “That’s not the point, Ms. Johnson. What if I could change my race? What if gene therapy made it possible for me to choose to be just as white as you are? You’re still saying that if I choose to be black, then I choose not to be patriotic. You’re still saying that for me to be patriotic I have to choose a white nation above all others. If I could choose, why can’t I choose to be black and be patriotic?”

“This is going nowhere,” Shelby said, still visibly shaken. “If you want, then you can leave the room when we say the Pledge of Allegiance. You don’t have to participate. You don’t have to listen. You don’t even have to be present.”

“That’s very symbolic, Ms Johnson,” Shawn answered. “You would have me leave the room – perfect symbolism for all of your white friends who think all of us who are not white should leave the country. It’s perfect symbolism for those who want to divide the country between those who are white, and those who are not-white, and for saying that those who are white can stay, and those who are not white should leave.”

“Stay, then,” Shelby said tensely. “Stay in your desk and be quiet until we’re done, just like you did today.”

“That’s also good symbolism, Ms. Johnson,” Shawn answered. “After all, the true patriots – those who are willing to pledge allegiance to one white nation, should do all the talking. Those who aren’t white should sit down and shut up. That’s also a very important message for you to be teaching your students, Ms. Johnson.”

“Then what do you suggest, Shawn? Help me out, here. I’m running out of ideas.”

“Don’t say the Pledge, Ms Johnson. Tell your boss that it’s wrong to tell your students that a person has to be in favor of one white nation to be a patriot and that you will not do it.”

“I can’t do that. We have rules Shawn. We can’t go breaking the rules just because we want to.”

“Well, Ms. Johnson, I think one of your students said something real important today. Remember what Jenny said? Anybody can do the right thing when it is easy. You only see a person’s moral character when she is willing to do the right thing when it is hard. Besides, Ms. Johnson, if the government doesn’t have the right to force you to say the Pledge – say, if you were black, like me – then they certainly you must have the right to refuse to teach it to others.”

Shawn then stood slowly. “I promise, Ms. Johnson, I won’t do anything to disrupt the class. I know how hard your job is. I’m just not going to support the idea that if somebody isn’t white, then he can’t be patriotic – particularly not after what happened to my dad. I couldn’t do that, and you shouldn’t expect me to.”

“Fine,” said Shelby.

“Good night, Ms. Johnson.”

“Good night, Shawn.”

As he left, Shawn started to prepare himself for the next conversation he would have. He pictured his mother coming home from work and asking, “How was school today?” Then, his palms started sweating all over again.

Family Relations

I have a request from a member of the studio audience for a piece of family advice.

An email scarcely provides sufficient information to suggest to somebody what they should do. However, it does identify some relevant principles that should be applied to a situation. Some of those principles tend to be overlooked.

One of my uncles, whom I was relatively close to as a child, is a pastor who works as a missionary to immigrant communities . . . introducing them to established community support networks through the church . . . searching for and destroying any physical or behavioral vestiges of their prior religions or religious-like cultural habits. My uncle is very good at what he does.

Obviously, there is some good that comes out of this . . . but it's at the cost of indoctrination into a new set of superstitions from a voice of seeming authority. His job is about as acceptable (to me, now, as an outsider) as being a professional torturer, but he's the pride and joy of that side of my relatives. . . . Ideally, I'd be able to confront him politely, say, "Look, I can't agree with what you're doing because XYZ, atheist, dubious church history, etc." and we'd all be able to toast marshmallows together after a mutually enlightening discussion, but that's not quite so realistic, particularly since my family credibility is low being (a) The Atheist and (b) under 21. What is an ethical course of behavior? And does it let me keep my uncle?

First, be honest.

One lesson that I learned at a young age is that it is truly irrational to try to buy acceptance by pretending to be something you are not.

When I was in the 5th grade, a new kid at a new school, the other kids discovered my atheism. The treatment that followed turned out to be quite brutal. (When Judge Bea asked at the Pledge trial yesterday why a child cannot simply leave the room when the Pledge is given, my immediate response was, ‘Why not just ask a child to put a sign on his own back that says ‘kick me’?”)

In order to buy acceptance, I started to pretend that they had convinced me of their religion and to go through the motions of accepting Jesus as my savior. It worked, in terms of buying acceptance. However, it bought acceptance for a character I was pretending to be, not for me. My peers were not accepting me unless they were accepting the person that I was in fact.’

If your uncle cannot accept who you are, but can only accept who you pretend to be, then you cannot ‘keep’ your uncle, because you have already lost him.

Second, be tolerant

If the fact that somebody else does something that you do not approve of is sufficient reason in itself to reject that person, then you are going to live a very lonely life. I cannot think of a single person who does exactly what I think should be done. So, if I cannot accept some deviation from my own norm in others, then I would not have any friends at all.

In a political context, I pointed out that winning a political victory (at least in this country) means uniting the best 51% against the word 49%. If the group of people who are politically ‘acceptable’ to you makes up less than 51% of the population, then you are advocating a political end that hands power to the worst 51% (or more) – which is not very practical.

In a social setting, I would argue for putting the best, say, 80% against the worst 20%. If we could convert or reform the worst 20% of the population, that alone would be a tremendous benefit. So I would ask of any particular person, “Is he a member of the best 80%? Or is he a member of the worst 20%?”

These numbers are not metaphorical. If one were to say that all theists belong in the category of “worst 20%” – then he would be speaking nonsense, since more than 20% of the population are theists. No . . . a majority of the “best 80%” are, in fact, theists. That is a simple real-world fact and, as rationalists, we should insist on the merit of dealing with simple real-world facts.

Another real-world fact is that some of the worst 20% are atheists.

You stated that you consider your uncle’s actions to be similar to those of a professional torturer. I hold that this view is mistaken. What the bottom 20% of the people do to children is pretty horrible, and professional torturers are not in the habit of directing their victims to social services – services that can help them get food, shelter, and medical care.

By the way, in saying this, I am far from saying that members of the “best 80%” are beyond criticism. One of the qualities that we should hope to find among the “best 80%” is the capacity to accept constructive criticism. In writing this blog, I have stated that I am certain that I have made at least one mistake – a mistake that I cannot recognize, but which somebody else may be able to point out. Refusing to accept criticism is a sign of extreme arrogance that pushes one further towards the bottom 20%, than into the higher ranks of the best 80%.

Progress

There is another issue that you did not express as a concern in your email, but which I know that some people would be concerned about, and that is the prospect of replacing one culture with another. There are a fair number of people who view ‘cultures’ as some type of living museum, and who react to any type of cultural change the way others would react to the destruction of a priceless worth of art.

Your uncle is involved in making cultural changes. Is there any reason to view this alone as contemptible?

I would say not. Cultures change – that is a fact of life. Some change for the better, while others change for the worse. There is room for improvement in any culture – room for changes that will fulfill more and stronger desires than the status quo; where advocating that the culture not change means insisting that the people in that culture suffer the thwarting of those desires.

There is some reason to believe that cultural elements that have persisted for a long period of time in any environment are well adapted to that environment. The secrets that people hand down from one generation to the next will tend to be secrets that have helped the people live. The new ways of living might not be well suited to that environment, and can easily introduce a host of desire-thwarting problems.

So, I am not talking about a blanket permission to change cultures a will. A morally responsible person would ask, “How will these rules fit into this environment, compared to those?” Many missionaries tend not to ask this question, preferring to hold the view that their principles are universal and will (should) work under all circumstances. They excuse any observation that they have brought misery to a population by saying that it was God’s will, rather than their responsibility.

Where this happens, there is good reason for moral condemnation. However, once again, I am in a poor condition to judge what is or is not happening in fact.

Conclusion

The decision of whether to ‘keep’ your uncle is, to a certain extent, not up to you. It is a question of whether your uncle has any desire to ‘keep’ you. If not – of what you are in fact is too loathsome for him to tolerate, then the game is already lost. You have my sympathies.

If not, then you and your uncle should both realize that there are worse people out there in the world. There is a great deal to be gained by the two of you getting together and allying against the worst of them, rather than combating each other while letting the worst of them benefit from a lack of attention.

Morality, Reason, and Emotion

I have had a member of my studio audience raise issue with the fact that I seem to have spoken in defense of hate. In my accusations against Pope Benedict XVI for ‘hate-mongering’ I reported that hate can sometimes be deserved. The hate-monger is distinguished from somebody who promotes legitimate hate by his irresponsible use of false propositions and rhetorical sophistry.

From Atheist Observer:

I take issue with two of your assertions in this post. The first is that hate mongering is not a moral crime, and the second is that some people deserve hate. . . By introducing hate into the situation, you simply make it more likely that the response will be disproportionate and irrational. You make just and moral behavior less likely.

I will get back to this specific issue in a moment. In the context of discussing the issue of hate, Atheist Observer made some comments about the relationship between emotion and reason – expressing a view that I think is very common, though also very much mistaken.

Hate often blinds us from a careful examination of a situation, and a reasoned analysis of causes and solutions. Hate prevents us from empathizing with others and understanding other ways of looking at events. I think hate, like other emotional reactions, evolved before animals were capable of rational thought. To encourage this most negative of emotions rather than rational thought is a moral error.

The Roles of Emotion and Reason

As much as I have enjoyed the stories in the Star Trek universe, I believe more firmly cemented into the public mind an idea that needs to be challenged – the idea that emotions are inherently bad because emotions are inherently unreasonable (and reason is inherently good). People who rely on emotions often reach false conclusions. Since those conclusions are mistakes that need to be avoided, we should suppress our emotions and rely entirely on reason.

To do what?

Reason, I have argued, is the tool for matching means to ends. However, it is not a tool for picking out ends.

Desire utilitarian adds one level of complexity to this. There is no such thing as a pure end. Instead, every end is also, at the same time, a means – it conflicts with or contributes to the fulfillment of other ends. So, even though reason does not allow us to determine the value of an end as an end, it does allow us to determine the value of an end as a means to the fulfillment (or thwarting) of other ends. We can call an end ‘good’ to the degree that it fulfills other ends, and ‘bad’ to the degree that it thwarts other ends.

Desires (and emotions) pick out the ends of human action. A ‘desire that P’ is a mental state that identifies P as an end – a goal – of those people who have the desire. This applies as much to the desires that are wrapped up in our emotions as it does to any desire considered independent of emotions. A person with a fear of flying has an aversion to flying. Such a person has as an end of avoiding a state of affairs in which he is flying.

Consequently, emotion utilitarianism is an important corollary to desire utilitarianism. As with (other) desires, our emotions are malleable and can be shaped and molded to some extent. This means that have reason to ask, “Are some ways in which our desires could be molded better than others?” In other words, are there emotions that tend to fulfill other desires (emotions we have reason to promote), and others that thwart desires (which we have reasons to inhibit).

However, reason alone does not create emotions. Reason only informs the emotions we already have.

Emotivism

This is where desire utilitarianism gives a nod to another moral theory; emotivism. Emotivism holds that moral claims are nothing more than grunts of approval or disapproval – emotional outbursts such as a cheer or a boo. As such, they are far removed from reason.

One of my guidelines is that the different major moral theories that are proposed have a kernel of truth that they build on. This is how the theory gets to be popular. There is some sense to moral objectivism (moral statements have a truth value and can be proved true or false), and subjectivism (moral claims are objectively true or false claims about relationships that include mental states – there is no value without desire).

Desire utilitarianism conflicts with emotivism in that it holds that moral claims are propositions that have a truth value. However, those claims are about the emotions we should or should not have and their optimum strength. Reason can tell us the range within which a certain emotion is rational, but reason alone cannot change our desires.

Here, I typically use the example of a flat tire. Reason can be employed to tell us how to change the tire. However, reason alone cannot actually change the tire. We have some work to do to get the tire changed. Similarly, reason can be used to determine what our emotions should be – whether a particular emotion should be encouraged or discouraged. However, to actually affect change, we have to appeal to something outside of reason. We need tools such as praise and condemnation.

A Spock-like creature in a Star-Trek universe would do nothing but sit and think until he died. Why should he eat? Reason alone cannot tell him to eat. Some sort of ‘end of human action’ must be introduced. These ends do not come from reason, they come from desire (and emotion).

Hate, In Specific

The Atheist Observer suggests that hate is always a desire-thwarting emotion, so hate can never be justified.

My position is that this depends on what, exactly, the person hates. Promoting hatred of that which tends to be desire-thwarting will make it much more likely that people will stand opposed to the desire-thwarting object of hate. A culture that promotes a hatred of lies and sophistry is a society where liars and sophists are far less likely to find acceptance – where they will have less power and influence. That, in turn, would be a good thing.

I want to remind the reader that ‘hate’ does not imply a call to violence. The term ‘hate’ simply means to have a very strong aversion. I hate (the taste of) liver and onions. I hate people who speak loudly into their cell phones while on the bus. I hate it when the person sitting in front of me on the bus puts his seat back. There are a number of things that I hate – yet, in none of these cases, does this hatred inspire a call to use violence.

[D]o we benefit in the long run as a society by inciting and generating more hate, even to those we think “deserve” it? I see no evidence that the level of morality of a society can be raised by the introduction of more hate.

I would never defend the proposition that we can (always) benefit from inciting hatred of those we think deserve it. My proposition would only be that we can benefit by promoting hatred of those who deserve it as a matter of fact. When we promote hatred of those we think deserve it, and our beliefs turn out to be wrong, then we do not benefit.

Does anybody ever deserve hate as a matter of fact?

A part of the Atheist Observer’s issue with hate can be dealt with under the banner of a ‘presumption of innocence’. Just as we should assume that the accused is innocent and place a burden of proof of those who would declare him guilty, the burden of proof is never on the person who opposes hate, but the person who tries to defend it.

One could make the same argument that Atheist Observer makes and use it against violence – that violence is always bad, and no argument could ever be made in defense of violence. We clearly have reason to place the ‘burden of proof’ on those who would advocate violence, and a strong presumption that they are in error. However, it is hardly the case that this is a burden that can never be met. Our judicial system is grounded on these principles. A claim that violence is never justified would then be identical to the claim that no person shall ever be convicted of a crime and punished – punishment is inherently violent.

This fits in quite well with my original essay – that Pope Benedict XVI behaved in a morally irresponsible manner by attempting to promote hate with false assumptions and fallacious reasoning. He, too, would be under this obligation to assume that hate is not justified unless the evidence for a conviction is compelling, which itself implies an obligation to reject any argument in favor of hate unless it is compelling. The arguments Pope Benedict decided to promote were quite the opposite of ‘compelling’.

In this, Pope Benedict made himself into a champion of injustice. My point that his religion did not save him from doing wrong, or even provide him with a useful guide.

Emotion Driven Thinking

In this posting, I am not saying that Atheist Observer is at all wrong, except in matters of detail and emphasis. Emotions exist outside of reason, but there are people who do try to reason from their emotions. Effectively, these people are fond of arguing from the fact that they have a particular emotional reaction to (thoughts of) some state, to immediately assuming that something about the state warrants that emotion.

So, for example, a bigot sees an interracial couple in a grocery store. He has a feeling of disgust and revulsion. From this, he concludes that there is something wrong with that type of relationship. His question, in this case, is misplaced. Instead of asking what it is about such a relationship that justifies his reaction to it, he needs to be asking what reasons for action exist for promoting or inhibiting that particular (type of) reaction.

Atheist Observer’s warning in this area is very important.

However, it does not argue for replacing emotion with reason. It argues for using reason as a guide for molding our emotions.

We can still hate – just as I can hate the dog that barks all night long. We must simply remember to limit our hate to those things that actually deserve it, and that we owe it to others to give them the benefit of the doubt, and reluctantly accept evidence to the contrary only when it is too compelling to ignore. A less moral person, on the other hand, embraces arguments that give him reason to hate, without stopping to ask questions about whether those reasons to hate are actually good reasons.

9th Circuit Court hears Pledge Case

Today, as most of you read this (December 4th), the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is hearing oral arguments against having the words ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance, and “In God We Trust” on the money.

The Case Against ‘Under God’

The case against ‘under God’ in the Pledge is extremely simple.

The phrase, “with liberty and justice for all” was obviously included in the Pledge to promote liberty and justice – to inspire children to take a stand against tyranny and injustice. Similarly, the phrase “indivisible” was included to promote union over rebellion. After all, the Pledge was created in the 1890s and adopted by adults who had lived through the Civil War as a way of imparting certain values on their children who had not.

Denying that ‘under God’ was put into the pledge for the purpose of promoting religion is as absurd as denying that ‘indivisible, with liberty and justice for all’ was inserted to promote union, liberty, and justice respectively.

The fact that people are not legally punished for not saying the Pledge does not mitigate against this argument. Again, no sane and honest person would argue that a right to refuse to say the Pledge means that its intent is to promote union, liberty, and justice. Social coercion is coercion enough – particularly when backed by a daily ritual that says nothing less than that, “those not ‘under God’ are as bad as those who are for rebellion, tyranny, and injustice.”

It is no wonder that so many Americans hold atheists in such low esteem. As children, the one message they were exposed to more often and with more repetition and diligence was the message that atheists are to be looked down on – condemned, as one would condemn those who support rebellion, tyranny, and injustice.

Yes, the argument is that easy.

The Show Trial

Imagine that you are on trial for theft. While you sit at the defense table, the prosecution lays out its case.

At time T0, there was $100 in the drawer.

At time T1, the manager took out $25 to cover expenses.

At time T2, there was only $75 in the drawer.

From time T0 to T2, you were the only person who had access to the drawer.

From which it is obvious that you must have stolen the $50 out of the drawer.

When your defense attorney protests, “What $50? There wasn’t any money missing from the drawer,” the Judge rules your attorney out of order and insists that the public has the right to know what happened to the$50. While you look over, the members of the jury nod in agreement with the judge.

At this point, you may want to ask yourself why they are saying something that is so absurd. Either they are insane, or they have decided (with a wink and a nod) to assert and accept this absurdity that says that $50 is missing from the drawer. You would be excused for thinking that they have decided to convict you before the trial even started, and that the trial itself is a pretense. It is a very poor pretense – so poor, in fact, that you would be within reason to ask why they would go to so much trouble. However, they have decided to pronounce you guilty in spite of the evidence, and that to convict you they will pretend that the evidence says something it clearly does not say.

The claim that there should have been another $50 in the drawer is no less absurd than the claim that ‘under God’ was not asserted to promote religion – an absurdity made all the more obvious by the fact that ‘indivisible’ was clearly and beyond dispute inserted to promote Union. The person who can sit there and acknowledge that ‘indivisible’ exists in the Pledge to promote union, but ‘under God’ was not meant to promote religion is no different from the person who can sit there and acknowledge that the drawer started with $100 from which $25 was taken, but that the $75 that is left is $50 less than it should have.

I am not talking about some sort of elaborate conspiracy theory, where a group of people got together and draw up an organized plan. Rather, the prosecutor simply asserts that $50 is missing and, with a wink and a nod at the Judge and the jury, they decide to go along with it.

One thing you would be able to say as you sat at your desk is that whatever culture the prosecutor, Judge, and jury belonged to, it was not a culture that put any value on truth or justice. Whatever reasons they have for pretending to hold a trial, they had to know that this was just a pretend trial. There was one clear verdict that a lover of truth and justice would render in this case (that ‘under God’ was inserted in the Pledge to promote religion), and that the people present have no intention or desire to give the verdict that truth and justice would demand.

They are all more than happy to assert and to vote for conviction on the basis that $100 - $25 = $50 less than what should have been in the drawer + $75 that was actually in the drawer.

This describes the moral character of those who are arguing that ‘under God’ is not a violation of the Constitution. To claim that they do not know any better would be to claim that they lack even sufficient intelligence to count as competent adults. To claim that they do know better means that they care nothing about the lies and injustice they perpetuate.

The Culture of Lies

To make matters worse, we must accept the fact that this culture of deception is not some minor subgroup of Americans – like neo-Nazis or the KKK – that lives only on the margin of society and cannot exercise any real power. The culture of deception is a dominant culture, making up a substantial portion of the voting population.

In fact, just as we can say that a culture that so thoroughly embraces violence cannot actually be a culture of peace, we can say that a culture that so thoroughly embraces deception of this is not a culture of truth. Just as the former is a culture of violence, the latter is a culture of deception. Even if there are a few people within the culture who aspire to peace, their pathetically weak position in that culture is still enough to justify branding the culture a culture of violence. Even if there a few people within the culture in America who aspire to truth and justice, their pathetically weak position in that culture is still enough to justify branding the culture a culture of deception.

We will always have a few bigots with no respect for truth, justice, or the rule of law – just as we will always have a few rapists and murderers. However, we should also hope to keep the numbers of rapists and murderers to a minimum, and certainly keep them and their defenders from serving in the legislature and sitting on the bench. Similarly, we should also hope to keep those who practice this culture of deception out of public office and off the bench. Any who cannot admit to the fact that ‘under God’ is intended to promote religion the way ‘indivisible’ is meant to support Union are so clearly willing to lie that . . . well, how can we trust anything that they say?

And why should we want them in these types of jobs?

The Lie Factories

We should expect that a culture that so loves deception and hates truth would have no trouble creating institutions and organizations that specialize in lies.

In a culture that has no particular aversion to murder and rape, we could expect consultants to spring up and go into business telling people how they can literally get away with murder. They go to a crime scene, they tell their clients what to clean up and how to alter the physical evidence, and they even brag about their ability to perform these tasks in their brochures.

This culture that embraces the lie that ‘under God’ was not meant to promote religion has spawned its own industry of professional deceivers – organizations and institutions devoted to helping people cover up obvious crimes and to get judges who will not vote to convict regardless of the evidence on the bench.

These lie factories tell their clients not to use the word ‘religion’ when they propose policies that obviously are meant to promote religion. Their clients are to use the code phrase, ‘patriotism’. It is ‘patriotism’ that we are promoting when we coerce children into pledging allegiance to God. I have no idea what ‘indivisibility’ would be designed to promote under this line of reasoning – but it must be something far removed from ‘Union’.

These lie factories are doing nothing but advising their clients how to break the law and get away with it. They are advising their clients how to hide their footprints, to cover their tracks, to conceal evidence, so that nobody can go to court with enough information to secure a conviction for what is still, in fact, a violation of the law.

Good, honest, law-respecting people do not do things like this. People who respect the law, and those who respect truth and justice, hold a natural contempt for those who have embrace subverting the law through campaigns of deception and sophistry. Those who embrace these campaigns of deception and sophistry, in turn, simply are not good, honest, law-respecting people.

Furthermore, even if we take them at their word, the claim that ‘patriotism’ requires ‘under God’ or ‘in God we trust’ is the same as saying that patriotism requires religion or a belief in God. This is, of course, denigrating and degrading to those patriots who do not believe in God. It is, then, our national motto and our national pledge to denigrate and degrade any who should be a patriot who is not ‘under God’ and who does not ‘trust in God’.

Honest Judges

Unlike the show trial that I used at the start of this essay, only some judges and members of the jury are nodding their head in agreement to, $100 - $25 = $125. There is still a segment of the population who is willing to base their decisions on what the facts, and to try to reach a just conclusion.

Those people should be able to see the simplicity of the argument. The absurdity of saying that ‘under God’ was not put into the Pledge to promote religion is no less than the absurdity of saying that ‘indivisible’ was not inserted into the pledge to promote Union, or that ‘with liberty and justice for all’ was not inserted to promote liberty and justice for all. This is all the argument that is needed because it makes the conclusion as obvious as $100 - $25 = $75.

A conclusion that no honest person worthy of respect can deny.

The Charge of Hate Mongering

A member of the studio audience, Eenauk, has raised an issue about the appropriateness of the term ‘hate-mongering’ when referring to the Pope’s recent encyclical which, among other things, blames atheism for the great atrocities of the 20th century.

The Pope would be hate-mongering if he were telling us to go out and kill/lynch/spit upon atheists. Or if he were telling us they were _all_ intrinsically bad people. But he is not.

If one has a well-formed argument, then questions of the meaning of terms – which meaning to use where – are substantially irrelevant. Questions of meaning are questions of which squiggles and sounds to use when conveying a particular concept. Those assignments are always arbitrary – there is no natural law assigning necessary meanings to any word or symbol, whether written or spoken. So if somebody does not like the fact that I have decided to use a particular set of symbols or sounds to refer to a concept, they are always free to use a different term themselves, and to translate my arguments into their language.

Less well formed arguments, on the other hand, need to worry about using a common term to “smuggle into an argument” concepts that are not already there, or about a meaning shifting part way through the argument such that its meaning in one proposition is different than its meaning in another.

I have accused those atheists who claim that religion is ‘child abuse’ of the previous wrong. Child abuse involves an assumed desire to do harm or, at least, indifference to harm caused that I argue is not true of most people who teach religion to children. The term “child abuse” is still used, however, because the speaker seeks to elicit the same emotional response to those who teach religion to children that people generally have to people who beat or rape children.

This is what eenauk may well be accusing me here – using ‘hate mongering’ to import concepts that do not apply in this case. The assertion may be that hate-mongering involves preaching violence against a group of people and, since the Pope stopped short of preaching violence, he cannot be accused of ‘selling hate’.

However, if ‘hate’ – in common language – required a call to use violence, then it would seem that the term is commonly misused in public discussion. People often speak about ‘hating’ something or someone where they still feel morally constrained against using violence against them – a former spouse, a current spouse’s lover, an unfair boss, an obnoxious neighbor.

The Pope may not have been advocating physical violence against atheists, but he certainly argued in favor of looking on atheists as inferior group of people – people who are to be feared and to be looked upon with contempt for their unwillingness or inability to realize how much of a threat they and their ideas are to others.

A hate-monger does not need to preach violence. He simply needs to preach the lies and sophistry that others use as a foundation for hate, and that feeds the death threats vandalism, and intimidation that a group then must endure.

But that isn't hate, it's formulating an ethical or metaphysical disagreement with, perhaps, dubious arguments.

On this, I disagree. A person who is interested in an ‘ethical or metaphysical disagreement’ is somebody who is concerned with the quality of his arguments. He is aware of the fact that he might be wrong and, particularly when degrading and denigrating others, that his mistakes have victims. He shows his recognition of this moral responsibility through the care that he uses in structuring his arguments.

A person who shows a lack of care in structuring his argument shows a lack of concern over the potential victims of his actions – At best, he does not care that his mistake might cause unjustified harm to others (negligence). At worst, he desires to inflict harm and recognizes that he can inflict more harm on his victims (and get away with it) through demagoguery and unjust accusations than he can with a gun or knife or a truck full of explosives (malicious defamation).

In addition to the fallacious argument I mentioned in my previous post, there is the clear manipulation of data involved in claiming that these 20th century crimes are ‘worse than’ previous religion-based crimes. The people who make this argument manipulate the data by looking at raw numbers – the number of people killed or otherwise harmed. Yet, the case may be made that the only reason religious wars of the past did not kill as many. There is certainly no education that those who fought in these religious wars were not willing to kill as many people. In fact, they showed no reluctance towards killing at all. Is there any reason at all to believe that their religion would have prevented them from slaughters far worse than we saw in the 20th century, if they had the opportunity to do so?

When people overlook easily refuted claims like this, we have reason to ask, “What motivates them to make these mistakes? What type of person must this be that he is willing to make such bogus claims and not care about the harm they may be unjustly inflicting on others?”

In this case, I consider that the evidence points to hate as the motivation – not only a willingness to see atheists suffer from an injustice, but an active desire to impose these injustices upon them.

If the Pope were to have included in his encyclical the accusations of ‘blood libel’ against the Jews, then the type of accusations I made here would have been amplified by many orders of magnitude, and nobody would have thought to question them. People will argue that the very fact that the Pope has used these easily discredited claims to denigrate Jews was evidence of anti-Semitism. He would have been forced to retract those statements and issue an apology. Even if he did not actually advocate violence against Jews, the fact that he was giving weight to lies and slander against Jews would have been enough for the accusations to stick.

Such a claim would not have been considered a 'mere historic dispute about Jewish practices.' It would not be classified this way in part because the claims are so easy to refute and so poorly founded that it gives us reason to ask, "Why would he say such a thing?" And it gives us reason to come back with some very unflattering answers.

These maliciously false and accusations against atheists fall into the same moral category, and should be treated as such.