Atheist Ethicist

The Manhattan Declaration Part V: Kinds of Marriage

2009-11-27T07:29:00.000-07:00

The Manhattan Declaration is a declaration written to present a particular religious view on moral issues regarding life, marriage, and religious liberty. The Declaration is so filled with holes and inconsistencies that they easily identify the document as being, not the work (or the word) of some divine wisdom, but the flawed work of mortals - and bigoted, arrogant, self-serving morals at that.

They are the words of people who recognize - either consciously or unconsciously that, "Do as I command," tends to be far less effective then, "Do as God commands and I am the word of God," and so they give in to a craving to assign their bigotries and prejudices to God in a document that they called the Manhattan Declaration.

(See: Manhattan Declaration: A Call to Christian Conscience.")

I have identified a number of flaws already - flaws that a fair and humane person would have recognized, but the authors, blinded by their bigotries, their arrogance, and their self-serving desires made themselves did not recognize.

Another of the flaws that no fair and just God would endorse, but which fills the needs of a bigoted human seeking to inflict harms on the interests of others and coat it in an illusion of legitimacy, is the claim that if we permit homosexual marriages we must also permit heterosexual marriages.

They make these argument in spite of the fact that heterosexual incestuous marriage has none of the flaws that the authors suggest are reasons to condemn homosexual marriage. Heterosexual incestuous couples can have children and, in having children, have an interest in seeing the marriage protected so that both parents can serve in raising that child. The child would have a mother and a father. As such, all of the arguments these bigots offer for protecting the institution of marriage are arguments for protecting and preserving heterosexual incestuous marriage.

If there is a reason to reject heterosexual incestuous marriage, then it is independent of the reasons for rejecting homosexual marriage. This places the bigots who use this argument in a logical bind.

If there is no independent reason to justify condemning heterosexual incestuous marriage, then these bigots themselves have provided the justification for recognizing these marriages as proper and legitimate marriages within their definition.

If, on the other hand, an independent reason to condemn heterosexual incestuous marriage exists, then it is not the case that permitting homosexual marriage implies permitting heterosexual incestuous marriage - because heterosexual incestuous marriage would still run afowl of this "independent reason."

The same dilemma applies to plural marriages. Plural messages, likewise, can result in children and for the same of whom the marriage should be protected and preserved. In fact, many of the arguments these bigots give for the value of heterosexual marriage are even more true of a polygamous marriage. The death of a single parent or an accident causing permanent injury, the loss of a job, or severe illness is far more devastating to a two-parent family than to a multi-parent family. So, these bigots themselves provide us with reason to recognize and protect these marriages.

If there is any independent reason to reject these marriages it is not in virtue of what they have in common with homosexual marriages (because they have far more in common with heterosexual marriages), but must be some other reason. This "other reason" buts the bigot in the same bind that they are in with incestuous marriage.

A fair and just person would see these flaws - or at least be able to show that he put a responsible effort into finding them. Any god created by such a person would also be fair and just - a god that also condemned the bigoted, arrogant, self-serving people who irresponsibly blinded themselves to these moral problems.

However, the authors of the Manhattan Doctrine have shown themselves to be too deeply blinded by their bigotry to examine their own arguments for signs of unfairness and injustice. They are not looking to do what is right. They are looking to give their own bigoted, arrogant, cruel, unjust sentiments an illusion of legitimacy. They do this by inventing a God that is just as bigoted, arrogant, cruel, and unjust as they are and then declaring, "These are not my actions. These are commanded by God" - a god the bigot has created in his own image.

As it turns out, there are, in fact, independent reasons to justify condemning heterosexual incestuous marriage (and, by extension, other forms of incestuous marriage). These reasons have nothing to do with the problems of genetic illness. It would scarcely be considered just to nullify a marriage on the grounds of the genetic inferiority of any children that may result.

The argument against incestuous marriage is grounded on the real-world observation of the great deal of harm and suffering that results from incestuous abuse generally. The only way we could permit heterosexual incestuous marriage is if we were to lower the social barriers against incestuous relationships generally. Lowering the psychological barriers against these types of relationships runs the very real risk of causing a significant increase in the amount of overall incestuious sexual abuse. People will act to fulfill the most and strongest of their desires (given their beliefs). A weaker aversion to incestuous relationships can not help but result in an increase in incestuous acts.

So, the many and strong reasons we have for reducing these types of abuse and the harms they cause are many and strong reasons for promoting an overall aversion to incestuous relationships. It is an aversion fed somewhat by a natural disinclination towards incestuous relationships. However, nature's inclination is clearly not as strong as it should be - given the number of events that still occur, and the harms that could be prevented if the aversion were stronger. Thus, morality calls for socially strengthening (though its moral institution) this (amoral) natural aversion.

The moral institutions for strengthening that aversion catches incestuous marriage in its net. An inversion to incestuous relationships necessarily implies an aversion to incestuous marriage. The result is a moral prohibition on such marriages.

However, this moral prohibition says nothing about the morality of homosexual marriages (other than to say that homosexual incestuous marriage should also be prohibited - a conclusion argument that the 'genetic immorality of incest' theory cannot handle).

This argument will not appease the bigoted, arrogant, self-serving authors of the Manhattan Declaration. It will not justify the harms that they seek to inflict on others. They want an argument that will give an illusion of legitimacy to their own behavior, motivated as it is by their own unjust and unkind prejudices. The clearly flawed argument that they wrote into the Manhattan Declaration serves that purpose – as long as they blind themselves to its flaws. But blinding oneself to reason is something that bigots have historically shown themselves to be quite good at.

The Manhattan Declaration Part IV: Government Obligations Respecting Religious Beliefs

2009-11-26T07:31:00.002-07:00

Religious liberty means that the government has an absolute obligation to ban the raising of pigs and the selling of pork, demand the wearing of hats, the practice of giving patients blood transfusions, and working on the Sabbath. Failure to do so is not only a violation of the religious liberties of those who hold that these prohibitions come from God, it abuses the rights of parents to teach their children that these practices are immoral.

There are certain arguments that virtually scream I'M A BIGOT because no fair and just mind could ever embrace such an absurdity. A couple of them appear in a recently released document called the Manhattan Declaration in the section that discusses marriage.

These are arguments that are so absurd that no fair and just person could embrace them. These are not the types of arguments where a good person could ponder and say, "Ah, yes, I see your point." There is no point to see. Something other than reason has to be seducing the agent into thinking that these claims are justified, and that "something" is a deep-seated bigotry that craves anything that will give his bigotry an illusion of legitimacy.

The Declaration contains the following quote:

Marriage is an objective reality - a convenantal union of husband and wife - that it is the duty of the law to recognize and support for the sake of justice and the common good. If it fails to do so, genuine social harms follow. First, the religious liberty of those for whom this is a matter of conscience is jeopardized. Second, the rights of parents are abused as family life and sex education programs in schools are used to teach children that an enlighten understanding recognizes as "marriages" sexual partnerships that many parents believe are intrinsically non-marital and immoral

(See: Manhattan Declaration: A Call to Christian Conscience.")

If this argument made any sense at all, it would be an argument for the government stepping up and prohibiting by law anything and everything that any religion.

Blood transfusions should be banned.

Why?

Because failure to do so violates the religious liberty of those for whom this is a matter of conscience.

Furthermore, the rights of parents are abused as programs in schools teach children that an enlightened understanding of medicine recognizes blood transfusions as legitimate medical practices that many parents believe are immoral.

The eating of pork must be banned of the same reason. It is a violation of the religious liberty of the Muslim to allow the selling of pork. Furthermore, if it is not prohibited, then the rights of Muslim parents to teach their children is compromised by a state that, in refusing to ban the practice, sends those children the message that the eating of pork is legitimate.

The proper principle to apply in each of these cases is that different religions are free to accept whatever prohibitions their religion tells them to adopt, but they are not permitted to force those prohibitions on others. A religion can tell its followers not to accept blood transfusions, but it cannot justify prohibiting blood transfusions across the whole society. It can tell its followers not to eat pork, but it cannot ban the buying and selling of pork. It can tell its followers not to marry others of the same gender, but it cannot prohibit people generally from marrying somebody of the same gender.

A fair and just person - a moral person - would have begun this assessment with a presumption of liberty. He would start by saying, "I will not interfere with the liberty of others unless I am forced to the conclusion that it is necessary to do so."

On hearing an argument that says that liberty must be restricted, his first instinct would be to look for the flaw in that argument - to assume that the restriction of liberty is a mistake.

It is only when he is forced to the conclusion that a violation of liberty is necessary that he will reluctantly yield to that conclusion.

If, instead, a person too eagerly accepts an flawed argument for violating the liberty of others, we have reason to suspect that in place of a love of liberty, he has a desire to do harm to the interests of others. The more absurd the argument that the agent embraces, the more likely it is that the agent is acting on a hatred and prejudice that is so deep that he craves anything that would give the harms he seeks to inflict on others the illusion of legitimacy. No leap of logic is too great, no claim too absurd to be believed, as long as it gets the agent to the conclusion that he may inflict the harms on the interests of others that he so deeply craves to inflict.

The absurdity above is an excellent example of this.

A fair and just mind would look on how we handle these issues and come to the conclusion that religious liberty means that the followers of a particular religion are free to adopt any restrictions on their own behavior that they think comes from God, but may not force those restrictions on others. The Muslim may refuse to eat pork but must not prohibit others from eating pork. The Christian Scientist may refuse blood transfusions but may not ban others from accepting blood transfusions. The Seventh Day Adventist may refuse to work on Saturday but may not prohibit others from working on Saturday. The Catholic and Evangelical Christian may refuse to marry somebody from the same gender but they may not prohibit others from marrying somebody of the same gender.

This is the lesson that a fair and just person - the moral person - would draw from these conclusions.

The hate-filled bigoted person, on the other hand, would draw a different set of conclusions.

I have been writing this series under the overall theme that morality does not come from God. Morality comes from man, and those men create God in their own image. A kind and compassionate man will create a kind and compassionate God and will see himself as being commanded by God to act in a kind and compassionate manner towards others.

A hateful and bigoted man, on the other hand, invents a hateful and bigoted god. He then declares that the hateful and bigoted acts that he craves are the commandments of this God that he has created.

The more absurd the argument that an individual tries to grasp onto to give his harmful behavior apparent legitimacy, the deeper we have reason to believe his bigotry goes. Because nobody actually likes to admit that they're a bigot. They like to think of themselves as good people who have good reasons for what they do. They grasp on to absurdities such as this in order to say - as much to themselves as to others, "I am not a bigot." Yet, they are like the man with clenched fists shouting at the top of his lungs, "I am not angry!"

We can know you by your actions, and these actions scream, "I AM A BIGOT!"

Gods are created by man in his own image. Bigoted men create bigoted gods so that they can claim divine guidance in doing that which is based, not on divine guidance, but human bigotry.

The people who think that the argument found in the Manhattan Declaration actually makes sense are hateful and bigoted men. The God they have created that tells them to act in this way is a hateful and bigoted God, created in their own image. That God is imaginary.

However, the people harmed by these individuals who have invented such a God and use this invention to demand an unobstructed right to inflict the harms their God commands are real.

The Manhattan Declaration Part III: Infidelity

2009-11-25T07:25:00.001-07:00

I have been writing this month on the Manhattan Declaration - a document outlining a set of principles on matters of life, marriage, and religious liberty.

The Declaration contains the following line:

To strengthen families, we must stop glamorizing promiscuity and infidelity and restore among our people a sense of the profound beauty, mystery, and holiness of faithful marital love.

(See: Manhattan Declaration: A Call to Christian Conscience.")

On this, the Manhattan Declaration is correct.

Of course, I would not put it in those same terms. In desire utilitarian terms, we have many and strong reasons to promote an aversion to promiscuity and infidelity, and to promote stronger desires for tight marital bonds between individuals.

A basic long-standing objection against adultery is that it involves the breaking of a promise. The wedding vow itself is a promise not to sleep around with others. A person who then has sex with violates that promise and this, in itself, involves doing something that no good person would do.

But what do we say about the people who never make such a promise? They enter into a marriage in complete agreement that each may have sex with others, No promise is done, so there is no wrong.

Another way of stating the issue with respect to adultery is that it is not a question of whether a promise, once made, should be kept. It is a question of whether the promise should or should not be made - what the promise (or the lack of a promise) itself says about the moral character of the individual.

The desire utilitarian case against adultery is that people have many and strong reasons to praise those who make (and then to keep) a promise a marital (or relationship) fidelity, and to condemn those who engage in sex without that fidelity - engage in promiscuous and adulterous behavior.

A large portion of those many and strong reasons comes from the many and strong reasons we have to prevent the spread of disease, and the desire-thwarting that those diseases bring. We get many of these reasons from preventing the spread of disease such as syphilis and AIDS. Recent medical research is showing that many forms of cancer - cervical, pancreatic, oral, anal, and even potentially some breast cancers - are cause by the spread of sexually transmitted viruses.

(See: Stanford University series on Darwin's Legacy Lecture 8)

We have many and strong reasons to hope that we, ourselves, do not get these diseases. We have many and strong reasons to hope that those we do not care about get these diseases, We should have many and strong reasons to hope that we can keep these diseases out of the future of any child's life. So, we have many and strong reasons to promote strong desires for extended monogamous relationships, and to condemn those who are promiscuous or adulterous - as well as those who promote and glorify promiscuity and adultery.

We have many and strong reason to hold that those people who make a promise of marital fidelity and keep that promise are better people - far better people - then those who show those values that have in the past and will continue to contribute to the spread of these diseases and the desire-thwarting that result from them.

These points argue that there is a virtue in promoting institutions, norms, and policies that have the effect of encouraging long-term monogamous relationships and of discouraging those things that tend to break marriages apart.

This idea of promoting desires that tend to fulfill other desires and inhibit desires that tend to thwart other desires (such as promoting an aversion to promiscuity and adultery and promoting a desire to be in a long-term monogamous relationships) is one that has to take the scientific facts into account. People like to imagine all sorts of harms and benefits circulating around the fulfillment of their own desires.

While abstinence-only sex education is certainly consistent with promoting an aversion to promiscuity and (later) adultery, we cannot ignore the evidence that says that this option is so drastically opposed to our biological natures that the attempt does more harm than good. We get more disease, more misery, and more death trying to teach abstinence then we would get by supporting long-term, mutually caring, relatively safe monogamous relationships.

If you wish to absolutely avoid any chance of getting in an automobile accident then this can be done by totally abstaining from ever getting into a car or being near a road. However, insofar as this is completely impractical, the next best option is to teach people to drive safely.

Consistent with all of this is the fact that those who oppose homosexual marriages are the true enemies of marriage itself. The many and strong reasons we have for promoting long-term monogamous relationships are reasons for promoting long-term monogamous relationships among both homosexuals and heterosexuals alike. Our institutions should be (a moral person would insist that they are made to be) just as strongly supportive of the long-term monogamous homosexual relationship as it is of the long-term monogamous heterosexual relationship.

People who are not supportive of long-term homosexual relationships through the institution of homosexual marriage have placed themselves on the side of promiscuity, disease, misery, and death instead. In at least this part of the lives, they bring evil into our society, and the suffering that comes along with it. If they are unable to see the evil that they do, it is because their prejudices and bigotry as well as their own egos refuse to admit the vicious truth of what they do.

The Manhattan Declaration Part II: Marriage

2009-11-24T07:33:00.001-07:00

Religious moralities do not come from gods. They come from human beings. They are assigned to gods as a way to give them an illusion of legitimacy - because history has shown that "You must obey me," tends to be far less effective than, "You must obey God, and I am the voice of God."

Religious moralities come from human beings, and human beings put into those moralities all of their prejudices and biases, their lust for power and to be served by others, their likes and dislikes and their arrogant presumption that they have figured out all of the truths to be known and any who disagree with them are not only wrong, but wicked, and must be punished.

One of the prejudices that nature has given human beings is the prejudice to view the objects of their own desires as having intrinsic merit - as being not only, "That which I like," but "That which deserves to be liked because of its intrinsic qualities." This leads to the attitude that "different is evil." When confronted with others whose likes are not compatible with one's own the tendency is to view those likes as "perversions" - as a warped and disgusting tendency to pursue that which has no or negative value.

"And I know it has no or negative value because I do not like it or actively dislike it."

The vast majority of us are heterosexual. Nature has created in us a strong desire for heterosexual acts. As I think back on my ancestors across millions and millions of generations I can tell you very little about a great many of them. Yet, I can say that, since the evolution of sex, none of them - or almost none of them - died a virgin.

Combine this with the unfortunate prejudice mentioned above and we see people reaching an unfortunate conclusion that heterosexual relationships are intrinsically good and tht there must be something defective in those who do not pursue that which intrinsically ought to be pursued.

This is an unfortunate prejudice in that it causes some people to do harm to others who do not deserve to be harmed. they do harm to others because it pleases them to see themselves as superior and "the others" as inferior. However, if there is any clear line in the moral universe, it is that doing harm to others merely because it makes us feel good sits on the far side of that line.

There may be a natural human disposition to view "different as evil" but it is a disposition that good people will try to hold in check. The institution of morality was invented for the purpose of establishing a set of institutions that hold our poorer nature in check and to allow our better natures to flourish (to promote desires that tend to fulfill other desires and inhibit desires that tend to thwart other desires). This means holding in check the disposition to view "different as evil" and to grant liberty to those who are different, so long as they are not dangerous.

Even here we must be wary, because the disposition to view different as evil - the good feelings generated by holding "us" as superior and "them" as inferior - will seduce us into seeing a threat where no threat exists. We WANT to believe that we have reason to do harm to those who are different, so we accept things as evidence even though they stand in bold conflict with reason and responsibility.

The Manhattan Declaration contains the following quote:

[Permitting homosexual marriage] would lock into place the false and destructive belief that marriage is all about romance and other adult satisfactions, and not, in any intrinsic way, about procreation and the unique character and value of acts and relationships whose meaning is shaped by their aptness for the generation, promotion and protection of life.

(See: Manhattan Declaration: A Call to Christian Conscience.")

There is nothing in this but an expression of the attitude, "Different is evil." This is an expression of people who have taken what they like and assigned it extraordinary or supernatural virtue, so that they can generate in themselves the "good feeling" of seeing themselves as superior to those who are different.

This is bigotry and prejudice in its true form, prejudging those who are "like me" as superior, and prejudging those who "different" as "defective" and "worthy of condemnation."

It is accompanied by claims that "the others" are dangerous that make no sense when held up to the light of reason. They are claims of harm accepted by those aching for an excuse to act in ways harmful to others, and will grasp at any straw that can be offered as "justification" - to people who are similarly seduced by their own bigotries to accept.

They claim that marriage is meant for procreation and for raising a child.

Yet, nothing in a childless homosexual marriage is a threat to a heterosexual couple raising a child. And the belief that a homosexual couple must necessarily do a poorer job of raising a child has little or no basis in fact. People accept these claims, not because the research forces them to accept these claims, but because the pleasure of seeing themselves as superior to others seduces them into accepting these claims.

The most blatant irrationality with respect to the claim that these bigots have the best interests of the children at heart is the fact that many of those children are homosexuals. There is a very real harm being done to the interests of those children to put on the scale against the imaginary harms and benefits that spring from the bigot's imagination. It is a clear and obvious harm that is ignored because . . . well . . . "those who are different from us" are inferior and inferior interests do not need to be considered.

Even if there is a difference of opinion on this matter, morality demands that we give those who may be harmed the benefit of the doubt. The burden of proof is never on those who say that harm may not be inflicted, but always on those who say that harms must be inflicted. Furthermore, the moral person demands that the proof be something more substantial than, "It kinda feels like it might be a good idea." Harm requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The bigot's standards for evidence are much, much lower.

The authors of the Manhattan Declaration have made the situation worse. They have created a god in their image. They have assigned their prejudice to a god, creating a god that shares their prejudice and who, then, sanctions and defends the unjustified harms that the bigots would cause to "those who are different from us."

They pump up their chests with arrogant and false pride over the declaration that, "We have devoted ourselves to a higher power. We have devoted ourselves to pursuing God's will."

No, you have devoted yourselves to acting on natural prejudices and bigotries that you only imagine to be God's Will because that combines the good feeling of doing harm to those who are "different from us" to the good feeling of "serving a higher power who smiles on us when we do harm to those who are different from us."

When humans assign their prejudices and hatreds to a god, they then wrap those prejudices in an armor of faith where they can close their ears and refuse to listen to any argument that suggests that they are wrong. "God said that we may . . . indeed must . . . harm those who are different from us, and God cannot be mistaken."

Perhaps God cannot be mistaken. But humans can - and the gods that humans invent are prone to all of the same weaknesses and faults - prejudices and bigotries - of those who create their gods in their own image.

The Manhattan Declaration Part I: Religious Liberty

2009-11-23T07:11:00.002-07:00

According to a recent declaration on Christian principles, if a person were to stand up in a crowded room, shout "Allah Akbar", and start shooting everybody present, it would be a violation of his religious liberty to duck and cover and head for the door, or to shoot the person who is doing the shooting.

A group of Christians have released a proclamation that they have titled the "Manhattan Declaration: A Call to Christian Conscience" in which they talk about a number of moral concerns regarding life and death (abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research), marriage (homosexual marriage), and religious liberty.

(See: Manhattan Declaration: A Call to Christian Conscience.")

I have no doubt that the authors of the text would protest the above account. However, their discussion on religious liberty leave this as a logical implication of the principles they put forward.

No one should be compelled to embrace any religion against his will, nor should persons of faith be forbidden to worship God according to the dictates of conscience or to express freely and publicly their deeply held religious convictions. What is true for individuals applies to religious communities as well.

What the shooter in this example is doing is expressing freely and publicly his deeply held religious convictions. Apparently, according to this declaration, he has a right to do so. To say that somebody has a right is to say that others have a duty to interfere. Clearly, when the authors of this declaration argue for a right to religious liberty, they are arguing for a duty on our part not to interfere with them. A direct application of this principle to the example of the shooter implies that we would be morally prohibited from taking any action that would interfere with the shooter's interest in expressing his most deeply held religious sentiments.

Clearly, the authors of this declaration would not declare that the shooter has such a right. However, this leaves them with a choice. If they are going to deny that such rights exist, then they need to alter their principles accordingly. Sometimes it is permissible to interfere with somebody else's expressions of deeply held religious convictions.

In this declaration, the authors state that Christian doctrine requires that they obey the law and to engage in civil disobedience when the law is unjust. However, this is a Christian doctrine. To impose this doctrine on others would, it seems, be a violation of the prohibition on "worshiping God according to the dictates of conscience." So, even though a Christian who would sign this declaration may not be an advocate of the use of this type of violence, the declaration gives moral sanction and permission to those who would.

Should a person whose conscience permits such violence be prohibited from worshipping God according to those dictates? If the answer is "sometimes yes", then the prohibition can clearly sometimes be violated.

One of the great advantages of having an inconsistent and inherent moral philosophy is that the agent gets to appeal to that half of the contradiction that is most useful at the moment in justifying their actions. If a health care provider wishes the liberty to refuse to provide abortion services to somebody who may want an abortion, prohibiting them from refusing is a violation of their religious liberty. If a homosexual couple wishes to get married according to the dictates of their conscience, apparently, then it is the religious liberty of the Christian signers of this document to prohibit such unions that is at stake.

For some reason the authors of this doctrine have adopted a set of principles in which they get all of the liberty, while everybody else gets all of the burdens. Yet, they claim that this self-contraditory and self-service doctrine does not come from man (specifically, not from the brains of the authors guided by their own convenience), but from God.

This is not an argument, which I have been protesting against in the past week, that says that religious moderates are to be condemned for the wrongs of religious extremists. This is an argument that looks at a specific declaration that has been set forward and shows the logical implications of that declaration. It is no different than raising objections to act utilitarianism on the grounds that it would authorize a doctor to kill a healthy patient to use his organs to save five patients who would otherwise die.

I assign my criticism only to the argument itself, and to those who endorse this argument – specifically its signers, but also any who would endorse the principles even without signing.

The principles in this policy ultimately implies that there is no limit on what a person may do, since any opposition or interference would, on these principles, violate the agent's right to "express freely and publicly their deeply held religious convictions."

That is exactly what the 9/11 hijackers were doing . . . expressing freely and publicly their deeply held religious convictions.

That is exactly what the terrorist who detonates a nuclear weapon in Washington DC would be doing . . . expressing feely and publicly their deeply held religious convictions.

Certainly there must be religious convictions that people must not be permitted to express freely and publicly. Yet, the Manhattan Declaration gives us no such limit.

There is a reason why the Declaration does not give us any limit. This is because it is not actually a doctrine of religious liberty. It is a recipe for religious tyranny. It was written by people who, in the first two sections of the paper, wish to impose their religious beliefs on others even to the point of doing great harm to the interests of people who do not share their religion. It is quite certain that people with those types of values are not going to want to declare that there are limits in the harms that religious people may impose on others.

Instead, they are going to cap their declaration of religious tyranny with a set of principles that say that "We support religious liberty. This means that we have the liberty to do whatever pleases us and the rest of you have an obligation to submit."

No, I did not forget that they are not actually speaking about a right to "do whatever pleases us". They have a right to worship God according to their own conscience. Yet, there is no God. Nobody gets any moral law from God. Instead, people assign their own wishes and desires to God, and they do so according to their own pleasure. So, while they declare, believe, and certainly wish us to believe that they are acting on a higher moral value. They are, in fact, acting according to their own pleasure and using God in an attempt to justify the harms that they would have others suffer.

That is certainly what we find here. We find a declaration written by people who would be pleased with the liberty to impose their values on others without regard to the people made to suffer. To give their actions legitimacy they tell us that they are not actually acting according to their own pleasure. Instead:

The nature of religious liberty is grounded in the character of God Himself, the God who is most fully known in the life and work of Jesus Christ.

In other words, it is God that grants them to do these harms. These are not being inflicted at the pleasure of those who created the Declaration. They are God's will. So, they must be legitimate. And we have an obligation to "religious liberty" to allow them to inflict those harms it pleases them to inflict.

It is a very convenient theory.

Blaming the Moderates - Considerations of Rationality

2009-11-20T07:28:00.001-07:00

All fiction should be condemned. If not banned outright, we should at least universally condemn all fictionists - people who create and distribute works of fiction.

The reason we should adopt this attitude is because all works of fiction are basically lies. To tolerate fictionism is to tolerate lying. Those who tolerate lying, in turn, are enablers for all of those who engage in fraud and other forms of deception. If we condemn all lying - even fiction - then there is no way that the fraudster, the deceptive advertiser, the political manipulator, or the public relations specialist can get the idea that the lies they engage in are somehow permissible.

This argument is meant as a reductio ad absurdum of the claim that religious moderates must be condemned as enablers of the actions of the violent religious extremists. Blaming the former for the actions of the latter is as absurd as blaming "fictionists" for the actions of liars and other forms of malicious manipulators of the truth.

It has been my position in this blog that all moral condemnation must be tightly focused - that only those who are actually guilty are to be condemned. There is a human tendency to divide the world into tribes of "us" and "them", and to take the wrongs committed by a subgroup of "them" (or even imagined wrongs) and apply it to all of "them". This is used to "justify" intertribal conflict - such as conflict between the atheist tribe and the theist tribe.

The way to avoid this outcome is to constantly focus attention on keeping condemnation tightly focused only on those who are guilty, to be on guard for the tendency to make irrational leaps from the subset to the whole, and to attack them when and where we find them.

Which is one of the things I try to do in this blog.

The claim that moderates are to be condemned for the actions of the extremists is one of those irrational absurdities embraced, not because they make sense, but because they mask tribal hatreds in a cloak of apparent legitimacy.

If it is permissible to condemn the moderate for the behavior of the extremists, then it should be just as permissible to credit the extremists for the behavior of the moderate. Consider two extreme cases - one of a deeply religious doctor who thinks that God wants him to provide medical care to the impoverished children in third world countries, and the other a violent jihadist who seeks to blow up a crowded shopping mall.

What argument can we give for saying that the doctor deserves to be condemned for the actions of the terrorist that is not also an argument for giving the terrorist moral credit for the actions of the doctor.

The argument is the same. Just as the doctor who promotes devotion to God is an enabler of the terrorist, the terrorist who promotes devotion to God is an enabler to the doctor. To claim that the argument is valid when used as a reason to condemn the doctor for the actions of the terrorist, but invalid when offered as a reason to praise the terrorist for the actions of the doctor, is itself irrational.

If irrationality is the true enemy, then this is an example of the true enemy. Only, this time, we are talking about the irrationality of atheists.

Rationality says that these inferences are invalid. If rationality is a virtue (and I hold that it is a virtue, though it is one we have only a limited ability to practice), then no good (rational) person would embrace this argument. In fact, the good (rational) person would condemn those who use this argument - particularly when it is used to give an illusion of legitimacy to what is used to condemn (to promote and, in some cases, sell) hatred of all members of a target tribe.

Which is what I am seeking to do here.

Please note, this is not an argument for being nice to religious moderates because it is politically expedient to do so. This is not an argument for promoting niceness at the expense of reason. This is an argument that embraces the position that rationality is a virtue and irrationality is a vice, and condemns a popular form of reasoning because it is irrational.

The claim that we must blame the moderates for the actions of the extremists is irrational - it is an invalid inference and for that reason no friend of rationality would embrace it. For that reason, any friend of rationality would condemn those who practice it.

From here we actually start down a long train of irrational arguments.

Why not credit the terrorist for the good done by the doctor? Answer: Because people can do good without God.

However, people can also do evil without God, so that argument doesn't work.

Ahhh, Alonzo, but what you are missing out on is that religion is required to do evil in the name of God.

Yes, but religion is also required to do good in the name of God, so that argument still does not work. We still do not have anything that a friend of rationality would embrace - that an enemy of irrationality would not condemn.

Religion, Condemnation, and Appeals to Scripture

2009-11-19T07:05:00.004-07:00

In light of some recent discussion, I think it is time to specify some basic propositions.

(1) There is no God.

Some people may be distressed by this fact. However, I am under no obligation to bury the truth simply because someone cannot handle the truth. In order for people to best fulfill the most and strongest of their desires, given the fact that they act to fulfill the most and strongest of their desires given their beliefs, they need true beliefs. Belief that a God exists is not on the list.

Even if there is a God, we know nothing about its qualities. It could be a childish God who created the earth and its occupants at set us to war against each other for its own amusement. Or it could be a bored God concerned with something else in some other part of the universe where we are an unforeseen side-effect that God cares nothing about. Or it could be a God who is more impressed with the human who uses its brain and available evidence to conclude that it does not exist than with those who shamelessly assert that faith is a virtue. All claims about what God is like have to be justified separately from the proposition that a God exists.

(2) Belief that a God exists is not morally objectionable.

We all have false beliefs. None of us have time to hold all of our beliefs up to the light of reason and sort them all out, so we all have unfounded false beliefs.

Consider a person with no beliefs. How does he hold that first belief up to the light of reason to judge whether to accept it or not? He cannot. Our first beliefs are acquired arationally. Later beliefs are evaluated in part based on their coherence with these early arational beliefs. They help to select subsequent beliefs. It is a method prone to error. If people are to be held in moral contempt for every false belief they adopt, then we must hold everybody - even ourselves - in moral contempt.

(3) People who base behavior harmful to the interests on others on scripture are evil.

If you are going to do something harmful to the interests of others - if you are going to do anything that has a reasonable chance of harming the interests of others - you have a moral obligation to provide good reason to do so. You have an obligation to begin with the assumption that others are not to be harmed unless the value of doing harm is proved beyond a reasonable doubt, and to provide that reason.

Religious texts offer no good reason whatsoever for behavior harmful to others.

As soon as somebody quotes scripture in defense of a law or policy that is potentially harmful to the interests of others, that person has done what no good person would do. that person has violated the moral prescription against doing harm without good reason.

Religious beliefs are fine for people who apply them to their own lives. If you want to use scripture to decide what to eat, when to eat, what to wear, when to work, when to refrain from working, and the like, you are free to do so. Just as you are free to base these decisions on your horoscope, tea leaves, tarot cards, or the role of a die, if that pleases you.

However, if your scripture tells you to do harm to your neighbor, your act is no more justified than that of the person who looks at his horoscope, reads, "CANCER: Your neighbor must die today. Do anything in your power to make sure that he does not survive to see another dawn."

Killing your neighbor and appealing to scripture makes you a murderer. This includes those who support capital punishment who quote scripture that calls for "an eye for an eye." They are murderers, because they have killed without providing good reason to kill. They are murderers for the same reason the person reading the horoscope above and acting on it would be a murderer.

Maiming your neighbor and appealing to scripture makes you guilty of malicious assault. Taking your neighbor's property and appealing to scripture makes you a thief. This applies to anybody fighting over land where they base their fight on the claim, "God gave this land to us." You are thieves. And if you kill others whole engage in an act of theft then you are guilty of murder here as well.

The instant a person appeals to scripture to justify harm to others, at that instant they have done evil. Even if the person harmed actually deserves to be harmed - even if they are actually guilty, the person who has appealed to scripture to justify doing harm has still committed an evil act. This is because it is still the duty of every human being to presume that others are not to be harmed and to use only good reasons to show that they should be harmed.

Again, it is just like the horoscope case. Even if the neighbor turns out to be somebody who deserves to be killed, the fact that the killer did not have good reason to do so makes the killer a murderer.

Yes, this means that there are a lot of people around the world patting themselves on the back and puffing out their chests with pride over how great they are because they are fighting God's war should be ashamed of themselves. Their arrogant false pride is wholly undeserved. For the sake of their victims - those to whom they do harm without justification - it is not only permissible, it is obligatory to stick a pin in that inflated sense of pride and tell these people what type of people they really are.

The Christian conservative who looks to scripture and finds justification for banning gay marriage is guilty of the same moral crime as the Muslim who looks to scripture and finds justifiation for flying an airplane into a skyscraper.

If your reasons are not the type of reasons that are admissible in court, then they are not the types of reasons that should be permissible in Congress.

However, this applies ONLY to those who appeal to scripture to justify harmful actions. As I have argued, a rancher who gets drunk and drives around his ranch - where there are no other people to hit - is NOT guilty of any type of moral negligence, because he does not put others at risk. Similarly, people are free to be as intellectually reckless as they wish with beliefs that do not threaten others. It is when people put others at risk that they acquire the obligation to act (and to think) more responsibly. It is when they consider policies harmful to others that they become evil if they seek justification for those harms in scripture.

So, if we are going to condemn people, the people who deserve our condemnation are not "the religious". It is "the people who base behavior potentially harmful to others without good reason" - a group both broader and narrower than "the religious" and likely includes a good number of atheists as well.

If a person commits an act of attempting to justify behavior harmful to others by means of appeal to scripture, then this makes that person a member of the group, "People who have attempted to justify behavior harmful to others without good reason" - all of whom have done something evil and can justly be labeled as such.

This is true in the same way that a person who commits rape becomes a member of the group, "Rapists", all of whom have done something evil. And anybody who commits theft becomes a member of the group "thieves", all of whom have done something evil. There is no bigotry involved in labeling these groups what they are or to say that they all deserve condemnation based on that fact.

But nothing in this - nothing at all - justifies extending condemnation to anybody outside of the group, "rapists", "thieves", and "those who seek to justify behavior harmful to others without good reason."

Pledges, Promises, and Prescriptions

2009-11-18T07:44:00.002-07:00

Pledges, Promises, and Prescriptions

A 10 year old boy, Will Phillips, is getting attention because he has made a principled stand not to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance because America does not provide “liberty and justice” for homosexuals.

(See: Arkansas Times A Boy and His Flag)

Technically, this involves a misunderstanding of the Pledge of Allegiance. The Pledge is not a mere description of America that happens to be false. The Pledge is a prescription – a statement on what the pledge taker will try to bring about. A person who refuses to say the Pledge is a person who refuses to promise to support liberty and justice for all.

This does not imply that Phillips was wrong. A part of the purpose of a protest is to generate publicity for a message – and Phillips has certainly accomplished that. Furthermore, Phillips’ protest is a statement of moral condemnation of those who treat homosexuals unjustly. It is quite refreshing to see such a widely publicized statement of moral condemnation of a group of hate-mongering bigots coming from a 5th grader.

In this sense, the statements that follow may be seen as pedantic, but they have important implications.

The Pledge of Allegiance is not a values-free description of what America happens to be as a matter of fact. It is prescriptive. It is meant to set forth an ideal – to make a statement of what America should be. It should be one nation, with liberty and justice for all. To the degree to which we fail to provide liberty and justice for all, to that degree we have fallen short of our goal, and the Pledge is a promise to work harder to obtain that goal.

All of this applies to the phrase, "One nation, under God" as well. This, too, is meant to set forth an ideal – to make a statement of what America should be. It should be one nation under God. To the degree that we fall short of this objective, the Pledge is a promise to work that much harder towards that goal.

Of course, we can never be a nation 'under God' because there is no God to be under. People who demand that we be a nation 'under God' typically see themselves as God's self-appointed magistrates on Earth. So, the promise to be ‘under God’ is a promise to be ruled by those who claim the authority to speak for God, which means being 'under' a religious institution of some sort.

As long-time readers of this blog will note, I hold the Pledge (as written) and the Motto in particularly high contempt – as I do anybody who supports these bigoted hate-mongering prescriptions.

Pledge of Allegiance is a promise on the part of those who take it to fight against the four great anti-Americanisms; atheism, secession, tyranny, and injustice.

It is unconscionable, particularly in a nation that pledges religious freedom, to have children promising to devote their lives to fighting atheism, or for the government to call decent citizens un-American simply because those citizens do not believe in a God.

I count this as hate-mongering, or the selling of hate for profit, because those who sell this particular brand of hate profit by establishing a filter that is 99.9% effective at keeping atheists out of public office – or, at least, keeping out atheists who will admit to being atheists.

And the Motto is pure tribal divisiveness. Its purpose is to divide the population into two tribes. It declares that the primary requirement for being a member of the favored 'us' tribe is to trust in God. If you do not trust in God, you cannot be one of 'us'. You must, then, by the process of elimination (and I use the term in its fullest sense) be one of 'them' – beneath 'us', unworthy of membership, unworthy of respect, worthy only of contempt.

It is precisely because the Pledge of Allegiance and the Motto are prescriptive that they are so contemptible. It is because they prescribe bigotry. Furthermore, their most important function is to teach bigotry to young children, where its lessons are planted at a deep and emotional level that they will find difficult to shake even as rational adults. It is one of the major contributors to the fact that atheist adults, though substantial in numbers, are so politically impotent – because of the shame that makes them admitting what they are even to themselves, let alone to others.

Just as anti-black bigotry was successful even at turning blacks against other blacks, and anti-gay bigotry is successful at turning gays against themselves (leading to high suicide rates among teenage homosexuals and other forms of self-destructive behavior), we see atheists hiding meekly in the closet ashamed to show themselves in public, turning on each other, and, in many cases, ashamed to admit their atheism even to themselves.

In this sense, it does not matter whether the law or social pressure requires people to stand and say the Pledge of Allegiance. The law, at one time, required blacks to sit at the back of the bus, to attend black public schools, to eat only in the 'colored' section of restaurants, to use only those bathrooms set aside for 'colored' people, and prohibited from buying houses in neighborhoods that had racial covenants.

When it comes to unjust laws and social customs – when it comes to laws and social customs that are built on a foundation of hate-mongering bigotry and whose primary aim is to turn the next generation into bigots as well – when the law can be broken without violence and without harm to any person or institution other than the institution of bigotry from which it sprang – then there are times when a good person would not obey a particular law or custom. These are times when a good person, in fact, identifies himself as such by his decision to refuse to obey a law or custom.

Even if the law required American citizens to promise to become bigots (or at least act as bigots act), we can still ask the question of whether good people would obey such a law. And even if legislators insist on posting signs in public buildings that declare, "Those who do not trust in God do not belong amongst us," this does not obligate any citizen to show that message any respect.

I once answered the question, "Why don't you stand for the Pledge of Allegiance," with the question, "Why do you stand? Are you such a fan of bigotry that you are willing to make a promise to the state and to your fellow citizens to support it. Because the Pledge of Allegiance is a promise to treat one who does not believe in God the way one would treat secessionists, tyrants, and the unjust."

A person with good desires - a person with a proper aversion to hate-mongering bigotry - just would not be willing to stand for that type of behavior.

The New York Terrorist Trials

2009-11-17T07:13:00.000-07:00

A great many Republican politicians and pundits, and a few Democrats, apparently think that rights are the blessings of government - that government bestows rights and governments can freely take rights away for even light and transient reasons.

Since the announcement came out that some of the people captured and accused of involvement in the 9/11 hijackings were to be tried in civil court in New York "like common criminals", many have protested that such a move is objectionable on the basis that it grants the accused certain rights. There is no talk of these being inalienable, human rights - that governments are instituted to secure rights such as these. Instead, the argument is grounded on a seemingly unquestioned premise that rights are to be spoken of only as conveniences one has at the whim of those holding political power.

The theory that rights are government blessings is the theory that there is no such thing as a just or unjust government. Government can do no wrong if right and wrong are determined by what the government does. The possibility of just and unjust government requires that there is a standard outside of government that dictates what governments may or may not morally do.

At the same time, desirism denies that there are intrinsic moral properties - some type of fundamental moral ought that comes from some sort of great law-giver (either God or evolution) that dictates universal moral oughts.

Rights, in desire utilitarian terms, are facts about relationships between malleable desires and other desires. They are facts about the value of aversions to governments committing certain types of acts - curtailing free speech, arbitrarily arresting and imprisoning citizens at the whim of the head of state, denying people a say in selecting who will make the laws, etc.

These people who object to a public trial are people who clearly have little or no desire to see the government as a protector of rights. They have little or no aversion to the government simply sweeping away rights as a matter of convenience. If they have no desire to see rights protected generally, then they have no desire to protect your rights or to see governments sweep your rights aside on a whim. And they broadcast the same attitude to the rest of the world - telling the whole global community that humans have only those rights that their government tells them they have and no more.

Clearly, there are some circumstances in which there may be reason to deny a prisoner an open trial. Let us assume that somebody working for the German army is captured early in 1944 trying to smuggle plans to Nazi Germany, or somebody captured today needs only to broadcast the activation code for a nuclear bomb he has hidden in a major city. We clearly have good reason to deny that person an opportunity to broadcast the information he wants to get out. Absolute rules fail absolutely.

However, rights do have a weight, and they are not to be violated for trivial reasons.

We hear reasons like:

(1) We do not want to give these people a platform at which to speak. We do not want to give them a platform that they can then use to mock their victims.

Obviously, the right to a trial can be revoked by the government whenever there is a risk of the accused making statements that the government disapproves of what they say. This is not a case of the accused giving some vital piece of information to those who would use it to do great harm. This is a case of shutting people up because those with power do not want them to speak.

There are legitimate reasons to keep people from speaking. However, "Because I do not like what you would say" is not a good reason. It is, in fact, a reason that substantially denies that there is a right to freedom of speech. If the government has the right to silence people who might say something those with power disagree with, then none of us can claim a right to speak. We must all, instead, accept that we may be silenced as well if the government should not approve of our message.

The right to freedom of speech means nothing if it is not construed as a right to say things that others might not want to hear.

(2) The trial will be a circus. It will be out of control.

Again, these protestors are asserting the principle that the right to a trial can be revoked whenever the government declares that it cannot have an orderly trial. Of course, I can think of a great many circumstances in which the government may declare that it cannot have an orderly trial. They correspond to any case in which the government might want to lock somebody away without a trial.

Let us imagine, as a hypothetical example, that the Democrats have set up their campaign headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, and a group of Republicans then get caught trying to bug the Democrats. Let us assume that the President is somebody who wants to protect himself from what might be revealed in any public trial or hearings of those involved. All that President would have to do, if we establish such a principle, is declare that the trial would be a circus and, for that reason alone, must only be held behind closed doors where the words of the accused cannot be heard by the general public.

A politician or pundit who has particularly warm feelings for tyranny and for the government's ability to silence its critics is going to have particularly warm feelings for the idea that it can suspend any trial that the government declares would be a 'circus'.

The biggest circus that a tyranny has to fear is one that exposes the depths of its tyranny.

There are others, but this is a fine start for such a confined space.

In all cases where people are arguing against such a trial, I invite you, he reader, to look for the principle that lies at the heart of their alleged reason to deny such a trial. Look at what it says about the speaker's desire for fair trials and his aversion to the arbitrary exercise of government power. Then ask yourself how secure you would be if those sentiments became universal.

Smith vs Parfit Part 14 of 15: The Desire to Enjoy Happiness

2009-11-16T22:31:00.002-07:00

I am sorry for the delay in this series. My evenings have been taken up with another project. However, I wish to continue to discuss these types of topics.

In this series of posts I am commenting on an article sent to me by a member of the studio audience. These are, in a sense, notes written in the margin as it were as I highlight passages in the article and explain my agreement or disagreement.

I highlight the following quote:

If someone believes that a certain episode of happiness could both feel the way that happiness does and be his own, then he desires that he enjoys that episode of happiness.

And I make the following scribbles:

Once again, what happens if the beliefs are false?

Let us assume that a person believes that a certain episode of happiness could feel a particular way, but he is wrong. Or he believes that the episode would be his, but it turns out to be somebody else’s? Do false beliefs still generate desires? Or does the generation of desires require true beliefs?

In past posts I have argued that beliefs – whether true or false – are not relevant to the formation of desires. Beliefs can imply beliefs about desires, but do not imply actual desires themselves.

Also, what role does the term 'could' plays in the above proposition?

Is it true that the mere fact that something could generate a particular feeling that gives one a reason to pursue it? Let’s say that it could generate such a feeling but does not. Then is it the case that achieving that end is an example of a fulfilled desire, or an example of something that could have fulfilled a desire but failed to do so?

A third and final question that I have about this quote is: What is 'happiness'?

If we equate happiness with a feeling, it is an open question of whether we desire that feeling or not. Let us assume that, because of some genetic change, the feeling produces an effect that is fatal to the evolutionary fitness of those who experience it. In this case, those who experience an aversion to this feeling would survive and those who desire this feeling will die out. In that case, we would have the feeling, but a desire to avoid it.

On the other hand, if we equate happiness not just to the physical sensation but the fact that it is something that we desire, then there is no mystery to the fact that we desire happiness. It would not be happiness if we did not desire it.

What Is Not Bigotry?

2009-11-16T06:55:00.000-07:00

A member of the studio audience posited the question

The question in my mind at that point was, is all generalization bigotry? . . . Saying that the sky is blue is a generalization. That is not bigotry.

It is not the case that all generalization is bigotry.

"All bachelors are unmarried"

Take the claim, "All atheists believe that the proposition, 'At least one God exists' is certainly or almost certainly false."

Both of these are generalizations, but they are not the type of generalization that would count as bigotry. They are not even the count of generalization that will count as false.

Or, let us take the claim, "All swans are white"

It is a generalization. It also happens to be false. However, a person who believes this is not a bigot. She is not even bigoted against swans. She just happens to believe something about swans that happens not to be true.

Even false generalizations about people - men have one fewer rib than women - if believed, would not count as bigotry.

So, what does count as bigotry?

The fact that bigotry is a legitimate object of moral condemnation means that bigotry has something to do with desires. Specifically, the bigot demonstrates by his actions that he has desires a good person would not have, or lacks desires that a good person would have. Furthermore, these desires tend to thwart the desires of others.

Ultimately, bigots aim to sacrifice the desires of the target group for their own benefit. They seek to create a society in which whites rules over blacks, men rule over women, where only heterosexual relationships are given social recognition, or where only theists can get elected to public office. They do so by making unjust and unjustified claims about the target group that aim to justify this attempt to divide society into classes, a superior class of "us" and an inferior class of "them". Of course, the bigot's group is always the superior "us" group.

Bigotry involves denigrating people - devaluing them, making them an object of contempt or ridicule - based on general claims that are false or sometimes false. It involves an unfounded and reasonable claim that "they" are not as good as "we". The bigot may claim that the target group shares some characteristic good people have reason to condemn (e.g., they are responsible for the Holocaust). Or it may be that the target group has some deficiency of some sort that they are not to be blamed for, but still makes them less capable (they lack intelligence).

It is not bigotry when these statements are true. All murderers unjustly take an innocent life. It is a true statement, and it is a statement that identifies the target group (murderers) as people who are to be looked down upon. In this case, they share a moral failing.

Liars are parasites who feed off of the will of others for the fulfillment of their own desires. This is another generalization that happens to be true and, thus, do not count as bigotry.

Young children lack the capacity of reason and, thus, are incapable of making decisions for themselves. Those decisions instead should be trusted to a competent adult who shall act in the best interests of the child. Again, this is a generalization about a deficiency that happens to be true. It is not bigotry. It is not bigotry even though we may find a few instances in which it is false. This is because we have good reason to make this generalization - that this is a generalization that even a person with good desires (a desire to protect children) would make.

In all cases of bigotry, the generalization is unfounded. It does not represent a conclusion based on an objective, fair, and impartial view of the evidence. It is a generalization grounded on the generalizer's own desire to see himself as superior.

This topic came up in this blog because of my condemnation of the anti-theist bigot. It is an attitude that I hold to be too common among vocal atheists that "we" are the superior group and "they" are the inferior group, where "their" inferiority is justified by means of arguments that are invalid (and the conclusion is unjustified). It is an attempt to hold all people who believe in a God morally responsible for the 9/11 attacks or the Fort Hood massacre because it feeds this desire to view "us" as morally superior to "them".

It has also come up recently in the actions of several branches of the Catholic Church promoting anti-gay bigotry. And we can see bigotry written into the National Motto (“We who trust in God are superior to those who do not”) and the Pledge of Allegiance (all good Americans promote “one nation under God”).

If a generalization can be defended as true, or at least well motivated – or if it is a generalization that has nothing to do with denigrating a group of individual and casting them as inferior – then it is not bigotry.

The Catholic Church's Villainous Blackmail in Washington DC

2009-11-13T07:13:00.002-07:00

The Catholic Church in America has decided to be an instrument for the perpetuation of bigotry and injustice in America today, and is to be regarded as such by any moral American.

Imagine that you are running a hospital. You have found a highly qualified black surgeon and you want to hire him. However, when you announce your decision to do so, an organization that contributes substantially to your hospital says that they will pull their funding if you should hire any black person.

Or, you and your young daughter have been taken hostage. The hostage taker points a gun at you and says, "Either you rape your young daughter while I watch, or I will pour lighter fluid on her and set her on fire while you watch."

There are two moral questions to be asked here.

One question is, "What should you do if somebody puts these types of demands on you?"

(Aside: Desirism concludes in these cases that the moral agent will have a strong aversion to both options. These strong aversions - combined with the fact that these are aversions an agent should have implies that the good person will be deeply and emotionally torn as to what to do. The specific action to take depends on the specific circumstances.)

The other question is: "What attitude should we as a society take towards people or organizations who place those types of demands on others?"

It's the second question that I want to focus on here, because it defines the attitude that a moral person should take with respect to the Catholic Church.

According to the Washington Post:

The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington said Wednesday that it will be unable to continue the social service programs it runs for the District if the city doesn't change a proposed same-sex marriage law, a threat that could affect tens of thousands of people the church helps with adoption, homelessness and health care.

(See: Washington Post: Catholic Church gives D.C. ultimatum)

In other words, the Catholic Church has decided to play the role of the bigoted philanthropist.

On the issue of homosexuality, the Catholic Church has the moral facts wrong. They are as wrong about the immorality of homosexual acts just as they were about the Earth being the center of the universe.

They are also wrong for substantially the same reasons - because their Bible are the transcripts of stories made up by illiterate tribes who had a very primitive knowledge of both the physical and the moral universe.

The Catholic Church is certainly capable of ignoring the moral errors that made their way into its Bible. It no longer defends the view that God, through Ham, condemned all blacks to serve as the slaves of Europeans, it no longer demands the death of those who work on the Sabbath, it no longer condones the selling of one's daughters into slavery, and it no longer condemns the charging of interest on money.

It can easily add one more moral error to this list - unless it, like the KKK and Nazis - identify so strongly with a particular prejudice that becoming moral individuals would require giving up that identity.

I am not saying that the Catholic Church is like the KKK or Nazis. I am saying that they have a choice to make - to either be like the KKK or Nazis in their close identification with bigotry and prejudice, or cast this bigotry into the trash heap along with other moral mistakes found in scripture (or re-interpret scripture in such a way that it is more in tune with the moral facts).

People have no obligation to respect a religion that says that blacks must be enslaved or that children may be raped. It has no obligation to respect a religion that preaches bigotry against homosexuals and uses its power to promote unjust and immoral laws that do them harm.

"Charity Without Bigotry"

At the start, I said that how those who are subject to villainous blackmail should react depends on the specifics of the situation. I think that the specifics of this situation dictates a particular response.

The best response against the villainous blackmailer is to do what one can to take away the power that the villain is using as leverage. In this case, since the Catholic Church has decided hold the beneficiaries of its adoption, homeless, and health-care services hostage, those services should be transferred to organizations who can perform just as much virtuous charity, without poisoning it with vicious bigotry.

We should separate those who make contributions to charity for the sake of promoting bigotry from those who make contributions to charity for the sake of helping those who need by promoting organizations that can boast, "Charity Without Bigotry".

In fact, I would like to see that phrase used as a slogan.

This is the same attitude that a moral person would take toward the racist philanthropist and the kidnapper in the two examples that start this post. There, too, the right thing to do, if possible, is to deprive the villainous blackmailer of power so that his victims have the freedom to do what is right - or the freedom to not be forced to do evil themselves.

Fox News' Deceptive Manipulation

2009-11-12T07:36:00.000-07:00

Jon Stewart has caught Fox News in another lie.

(See: Crooks and Liars: Jon Stewart totally busts Sean Hannity for using old footage to inflate size of Bachmann's teabagger rally.)

In a broadcast on a recent rally at the steps of the capital, Sean Hannity used footage from a previous rally where there was a much larger audience, and presented it as if were footage of this rally. At the same time, fellow commentators made exaggerated claims about the numbers of people present – numbers consistent with the deceptive footage shown at the same time.

The problem is not with this one act. The problem is with the values expressed in this one act. The type of person who would do such a thing is a type of person who has no personal aversion to manipulating others through deception. It is somebody who does not care whether he gives the people the truth. He cares about other things – such as personal profit – and is willing to deceitfully manipulate others in the pursuit of those other things.

In exhibiting these values themselves, they teach these values to others – such as our children. Sean Hannity’s message to people is that manipulating others through deception is a perfectly acceptable act – and that people in general ought not to be concerned. People who praise and reward Sean Hannity or fox News for this bit of deceptive manipulation are ALSO telling people (particularly children) that it is a virtue to engage in these types of practices.

Those types of attitudes are responsible for a great deal of avoidable pain and suffering. Those who care about their own well-being and the well-being of others will be intent to see to it that deceptive manipulation is not met with praise and reward, but condemnation and punishment.

(Standard disclaimer: The right to freedom of speech limits the response to immoral speech acts of this type to condemnation and private actions – such as refusal to purchase services from or refusal to purchase services from supporters of those who perform such actions. Specifically, it prohibits violence as a response to immoral speech acts of this type.)

For everything that gets put on the screen and every line of text that is read or statement that is spoken, we have proof that the agents responsible for those images and text are people who have no aversion to putting lies in front of the American people. Agents with an morally responsible aversion to lying would not have put those images into the report or exaggerated the numbers. Agents who put those images into the report and exaggerated the numbers are agents with little or no aversion to deceptive manipulation.

Decent, respectable, moral individuals will look on these antics at Fox News and say, "How dare you adopt values that put America and Americans at risk? How dare you think it is permissible to try to manipulate us with distortions such as these? Without an apparent ounce of embarrassment or shame - without a twinge of conscience that we can see - you sit back and count your money while your victims act on the lies that you have fed them.

People are manipulated by lies when one wants to do something that they would not do if they were given the truth.

People act so as to fulfill the most and strongest of their desires given their beliefs. Lies aim to manipulate people to act to in ways that fulfill the most and strongest desires of the liar, sacrificing the desires of the person being lied to. A liar is like a parasite who feeds off of the effort of others. He fools others into thinking they are fulfilling the most and strongest of their own desires, when, in fact, their own desires are being thwarted by actions that fulfill the desires of the deceiver.

This is the role that Fox News is playing in our society today – manipulating people into doing things that are harmful to those being manipulated or harmful to others, but which helps to fulfill the most and the strongest of the desires of those at Fox News.

The company who sells products through Fox News is showing that it shares the values of Fox News - the value of deceiving and manipulating others through profit. It might not be a surprise to find so many companies that can turn a blind eye to deceit and manipulation for profit. However, the fact that it is surprising does not make it good or right. The fact that it is not surprising does not change the fact that Americans have many and strong reasons to condemn those who value the deceitful manipulation of others.

If somebody is seeking evidence that America is not a great nation, they can find it in the fact that this type of manipulative deception for profit, causing its citizens to act in ways harmful to themselves and others, is generally accepted. Whereas a great nation would condemn these types of actions (and the motives behind them), America raises little or no objection to these manipulations and deceptions.

In fact, Americans continue to heap praise and rewards on the deceitful manipulators – it allows lying deceivers are allowed to succeed even when they are caught. That which is rewarded will grow and prosper, it is of little wonder in this country that deceitful manipulation is a growing industry in this country. The more deceitful manipulation we get, the more examples we can find of Americans acting in ways harmful to themselves and others.

Obama's Speech at Fort Hood

2009-11-11T07:12:00.001-07:00

"But this much we do know - no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor."

President Obama made this statement at the event honoring those killed in the shooting at Fort Hood yesterday.

(See: Washington Post, Obama's Speech at Fort Hood: The Transcript

The statement is true. Faith justifies nothing and there is no God.

However, we should ask how many people actually believe this to be true?

I would like to commission somebody (who has more familiarity with the relevant text than I do) to put together a post that has Obama's quote at the top, and a list of biblical passages in which faith justified mass slaughter and/or God looked upon them with favor. Any slaughter where the number of victims is greater than 13 will do.

I would simply like to put the list and those quotes side by side so that people can see the conflict between them.

This would not violate the prescriptions I have established so far in this blog. It does not make or attempt to justify any type of leap to a conclusion that all religion is bad. It does not seek to blame everybody who believes that a God certainly or almost certainly exists for the shootings in Fort Hood. It only aims to show that there is an inconsistency between Obama’s statement and some biblical text.

A religious person can still condemn those mass slaughters while holding that a God exists.

However, as people who may well suffer the from the ill consequences – and who cares about others who may suffer the ill consequences – of those whose faith makes it difficult for them to condemn certain mass killings, we have a right to ask the question.

"Do you condemn these murderous and craven acts (that are found in the Bible)? Or does your faith drive you to condone them? Does YOUR God look upon them with favor? According to your faith, did the entities that perpetuated those mass murders meet with justice, if not in this world, then in the next?"

As an atheist, I have no trouble condemning those mass murders that appear in religious text. Religious texts were not dictated by any God, they were written by morally fallible human beings. They were written in part, by people a lot like Nidal Hasan, who sought to justify a mass slaughter by assigning the reasons for committing that slaughter to a God that he (they) invented. So, I can look upon those descriptions and say that they were unjustified acts committed by evil men, and that the God described in the Bible as looking upon them with favor (and even performing some of the mass killings Himself) is no God worthy of worship.

I suspect that others might have some difficulty.

We have many and strong reasons to morally condemn those who find it difficult to condemn the murderous and craven acts committed in the Bible, because they lack aversions that would prevent them from supporting murderous and craven acts in the real world today.

"Do you REALLY condemn mass slaughter? Well, then, here are some excellent examples of mass slaughter that stand waiting for your condemnation."

It is time to bring some moral pressure to bear on those who do, in fact, condone mass slaughter - whether as a matter of faith or for some other reason.

Nidal Malik Hasan and the Bigot's Fallacy

2009-11-10T07:34:00.000-07:00

Now that the news is stating that Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shootist, was a Muslim with strong religious convictions, I can already see the Bigot's Fallacy popping up in a number of atheist writings.

The Bigot's Fallacy begins with premises that are true of an individual or a group of individuals in a group, then suddenly leaps to conclusions that are applied to the whole group. A black man commits theft so then all black men are thieves. An atheist leads a campaign of genocide so atheism endorses genocide. A Muslim shoots a group of people in a Texas army base so theists are mass murderers.

The link that these bigots are trying to make is a belief that a God exists caused the agent to kill 13 people. Consequently we are supposed to fear and hate all people who believe that a God exists.

Typically, if somebody where to argue that A causes B, the presence (in America alone) of a couple hundred million examples of A and not-B would be taken as pretty good evidence that A causes B is not true - or, at least, that the situation is more complex than simple (minded) causation.

However, the quality that bigots share is bigots forego reason, If a fallacy gives even an illusion of support to a favored conclusion, then the bigot shuns reason and embraces the fallacy.

This might create a bit of cognitive dissonance if the bigot is also somebody who professes that rationality is a virtue and that people who shun reason for faith - or who otherwise embrace an irrational defense of a favored belief - deserves condemnation. However, this bigot avoids this problem with a display of hand-waving and cherry picking to give his use of fallacious reasoning an illusion of legitimacy that rivals the work of some of the best theologians and creationists on the planet.

Many of the people who embrace the Bigot's Fallacy in this case are quick to argue that nobody has ever done any harm in the name of atheism. The argument (the version that makes the most sense) begins with the premise that atheism is a belief that the proposition that "at least one God exists" is certainly or almost certainly false. This belief alone doesn't tell anybody to go establish a dictatorship and slaughter millions of fellow citizens. Therefore, it makes no sense to blame these atrocities on atheism.

The anti-religious bigot simply ignores the fact that the same argument applies to theists. The parallel argument begins with the premise that a theist is one who believes that the proposition that "at least one God exists" is certainly or almost certainly true. This belief alone doesn't tell anybody go fly airplanes into civilian sky scrapers or to murder people in a processing center at an army base. Therefore, it makes no sense to blame these atrocities on theism.

The problem, in the latter case, is a set of specific beliefs that one attaches to the belief that at least one God certainly or almost certainly exists. It has to do with beliefs about what that God wants. However, there are also belief sets that include the proposition that no God exists that are just as capable of motivating a person to establish dictatorships and promote mass murder. So, still, the two arguments are parallel.

Among the various atheist philosophies there are a few that put a premium on reason and evidence. Among members of that subgroup of atheists, there should be some way to introduce a moral objection to the Bigot's Fallacy and similar breeches of reason. These options are to be shunned - not because it is politically useful to be nice to theists, but because good people condemn the use of fallacious inferences in themselves and others.

Having said this, the Texas shooting does provide good reason, not to go after 'theism', but to go after any specific religious teachings that seemed to support the shooting, and any person who speaks for a specific religion who praises the shooting.

For example, according to the New York Times:

"He felt he was supposed to quit," Mr. Reasoner said. "In the Koran, it says you are not supposed to have alliances with Jews or Christians, and if you are killed in the military fighting against Muslims, you will go to hell."

Does this imply that, in a dispute between an unjust and violent Muslim and peaceful Christians, one must side with the unjust and violent Muslim? This is a view that is definitely worthy of condemnation. If anybody should then answer that if he rejects this he would have to reject all of Islam, the proper response would be to shrug one’s shoulders and say, "I leave it to you to work out the details."

This has nothing to do with claiming that there is some sort of virtue to be found in being nice to theists, or arguing that it should be done for the sake of political expediency. What I am talking about here is the virtue of sound reasoning and embracing the conclusions that reason and evidence supports. The problem with the Bigot's Fallacy as atheists use it, or the other inferences discussed above, is that they transgress the virtue of reason – and in doing so also transgress the virtue of justice and fairness to those who become the victims of unjustified accusations.

Goodness and the Catholic Church

2009-11-09T07:22:00.003-07:00

The atheist blogs are filled today with reports of a debate over whether the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world. (Note the use of the present tense in the proposition. It means that prior harms are not relevant to this discussion.)

(See: Common Sense Atheism We've Moved Beyond Christian Morality)

With the audience being polled both before and after the debate, the polls show that the team of Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry won the debate. They were able to cause a substantial portion of the audience to adopt their proposition.

I often pay no attention to debates. There seems to be a huge gap between one’s ability to convince people to adopt a proposition and whether the proposition is true. I can imagine Hitler winning a debate over whether the Jews have been a force for goodness in the world, or Dinseh S'Souza convincing an audience of the same claim about atheists. The question that interests me is not whether a particular agent or team successfully convinced others that something is true. I am more interested in whether it is true in fact.

Also, as I have stated before in this blog, do not like generalizations. Generalizations lead to bigotry, and it deflects attention from specific wrongs. I see little merit in debating the proposition of whether the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world. I would rather focus on the specific (and significantly more defensible claim) that the Catholic Church is doing evil in the world and the world would be a better place if it would end these projects.

Three of those projects are:

(1) Bringing grief to the lives of homosexuals and to block them from securing long-term relationships with those that they love, supporting barriers that interfere and aim to “tear asunder” these relationships.

(2) Promoting death and disease, particularly in Africa, by opposing some of the most effective methods for fighting the transmission of AIDS, such as the use of condoms.

(3) Promoting death, disease, and injury by putting barriers up against embryonic stem-cell research, which promises to be the most potent avenue of medical research for understand, preventing, and treating a wide range of illnesses and injuries.

I do not know what percentage of the resources of the Catholic Church are devoted to these projects. Therefore, I cannot weigh the evil that they do against the good in order to make an overall assessment. One would also have to consider the fact that some of the evil that they do weighs against the good. The good done from Catholic hospitals and orphanages, for example, must be weighed against the fact that the Catholic Church itself is creating more sick people to hospitalize, and more orphans to take care of.

The fact that the Catholic Church believes it is doing good is irrelevant. Even Hitler believed that he was a great man who was doing great things – promoting that which had read value and clearing away those things that did not have value.

We all do this. I write this blog in the hopes that I am promoting that which has positive value and helping to get rid of that which has negative value. I, too, may be wrong.

That is why the fundamental question that anybody who is concerned with doing more good than evil in the world must begin by asking, "How do you know?"

That was the question that got me into this situation. When I decided that I would try to make the world a better place, recognizing that I was surrounded by people fighting against each other where both sides believed the same of themselves, I asked how I could know that I was on the right side.

Ultimately, the evil that the Catholic Church does springs from the poor answer it provides to the question, "How do I know?" It insists that one can know moral truth by looking at a book that is, in fact, the transcriptions of the oral stories told by a group of bigoted, ignorant, self-aggrandizing farmers and sheep herders. Then, it struggles day in and day out to try to reconcile facts in the real world so that they somehow corroborate those ancient myths and superstitions – trying to cast as 'divine truth' what is, in fact, human error.

In fact, we could add a fourth force of evil here.

(4) It seeks to legitimize the practice of twisting and distorting evidence to try to match some ancient superstition, taking some very good minds away from the project of actually solving problems in the real word.

Is the Catholic Church a force for good in the world?

It doesn’t really matter. Regardless of the answer to that question, it would become more of a force for good and less of a force for evil if it would alter its position on the three issues that I mentioned above.

There are, of course, other issues that we should talk about. However, these three would make a good start.

The New Atheists vs. The Appeasers

2009-11-06T06:58:00.002-07:00

Events in Maine give me an opportunity to make some comments on the dispute between the appeasers (who argue that we must praise religion to achieve political ends) and the "new atheists" who are outspoken critics of religion.

(Ironically, this seems to mirror the dispute in the Republican Party over whether the Party should make room for moderate Republicans or take a hard-line conservative stand and risk losing seats in the legislature to the Democrats.)

In Maine, the Catholic Church spent over half a million dollars - money that could have gone to feeding the poor and tending the sick - to inspire the citizens of Maine to do harm to their peaceful neighbors in the past election.

We must only only count the Church's own contribution to greater immorality in the state of Maine, we must also include the contributions to immorality it inspired in others. In addition to the Church’s own money, we must add the contributions of individuals that it inspired and encouraged.

And they succeeded. Bigotry and injustice won the say in Maine, adding that state to the list of states whose laws impose unjustified harms and burdens on citizens for no reason other than to feed hatred and bigotry itself.

At the same time, we have this dispute between the "new atheists" who are taking a hard-line stand against religion, and the "appeasers" who condemn this harsh language because it pushes moderates into the camp of the religious extremists.

It is interesting to note that this dispute between the "new atheists" and "appeasers" is very tightly focused on the question of teaching evolution in high school science classes. It is as if this is the only cause that really has any merit - and the position that atheists should take on all other issues is to be measured by its effect on this one issue.

This tunnel vision is particularly accute on the part of the appeasers. The criticism of the "New Atheists" covers a broad spectrum of evils and abuses that can too often be traced back to the leadership of some religion or other. It is not just the evil of pushing for teaching biblical creation in science classes, but evils like those which we just witnessed in Maine, and witnessed last year in California. It includes the evils of 9/11, the murder of a young woman in Arizona for the crime of being "too westernized", the slaughter of children as witches in parts of Africa, terrorist bombings in Pakistan, and laws that treat women as property rather than as people.

When the "new atheists" bring up this broad range of harms and abuses that all too often are traced to the teachings of some religious group, the "appeasers", it seems, tell us that we must not speak about those other harms because it might have an adverse effect on efforts to keep creationism out of science classes.

Also, there is a serious weakness in the "appeaser" strategy. Just as the "appeasers" seem willing to forego the victims of other wrongs that spring from religious organizations for the sake of their cause, they can expect those others to forsake the cause of teaching creationism in school in order to buy allies for their purposes.

How many people are the appeasers willing to see killed, maimed, and otherwise harmed for the sake of this one end?

I do have a serious problem with the "new atheists". They tend to heavily rely on what I am calling the Bigot's Fallacy. This is a fallacy in which the argument begins with claims about the objectionable behavior of this or that specific religious teaching or the wrongful acts of a specific religious person, then suddenly and unjustifiably leaps to conclusions about "religion" or "theists" in general.

They use these arguments in the hopes that their audience is blind to the fact that the conclusions are entirely unjustified given the premises, so that they can sell their own prejudices to that audience. Unfortunately, nature has given humans a disposition to divide the world into tribes of "us" and "them", where they seem to be happiest when there is a tribe of "them" they can hate, without regard to justice or merit. This disposition blinds them to the Bigot's Fallacy, since by ignoring the fallacy they can feel that their hatred of members of the "them" tribe is something "they" deserve.

So the members of the "new atheist" tribes eagerly cheer and celebrate those members who are the loudest and most vocal users of the Bigot's Fallacy - in the language of the "us tribe" against the "them tribe".

This, in turn, leads moderates to claim that the "new atheists" are really not any different from the "fundamentalists," particularly in the widespread use of the Bigot's Fallacy by the celebrated leaders of both of these tribes.

Note that my criticism of the "new atheists" has nothing to do with the effect their actions have on the political feasibility of teaching creationism in science classes. I condemn the Bigot's Fallacy on its own demerits, I would condemn the use of the Bigot's Fallacy even if it proved to be successful in rallying the Tribe to keep creationism out of science classes - because there are a lot of evils and injustices that easily spring from embracing this particular detour from reason.

The "new atheists" can avoid the Bigot's Fallacy by focusing on specific wrongs, and staying focused on those wrongs, resisting the urge to leap to unfounded generalizations about 'religion' and 'theists'. Doing so is not a case of "playing nice with religion". It is a case of respecting the rules of logic and not making unfounded generalizations. However tempting nature has made it to embrace the bigot’s fallacy – no matter how good it feels – it is one of those dispositions that we must learn to suppress. It does us no good.

And to the "appeasers", I say that the world of value does not begin and end with the issue of teaching creationism in science classes. There is a long list of evils out there that deserve condemnation. One of them, of course, being the evil found in the Bigot's Fallacy. Saying that these other evils must go unchallenged so that we can buy allies in the fight to keep creationism out of science classes involves demanding a great deal of human sacrifice for this one end. Are you sure your cause is worth so much?

Maine's Proposition 1: Afterthoughts

2009-11-05T06:54:00.001-07:00

A little bit more than half of the people in Maine who voted acted immorally on Tuesday (or before, when they cast absentee or early ballots). They went out and did things that any decent, moral person would condemn. They went out of their way to do unjustified harm to others - a harm that a decent and thinking person would not have caused. A harm that a decent and thinking person would condemn.

They performed these unjustified, immoral actions while they performed the act of voting. Because they did this - and because voting is a right - it would be inappropriate to do violence to those who acted immorally in this case. The voting booth happens to be one of those locations where a person can do evil without fear of physical punishment - or, at least, it should be.

The fact that those who vote are immune from (justified) punishment for their actions, that nothing they do in the voting booth is immoral. Every option that gets put on a ballot is morally permissible. So they do not think about what a good person to do - what the right thing to do may be.

Because of this, they take a moral vacation when they cast their ballots.

This is an easy position to refute. If a ballot initiative to enslave a portion of the population were to appear on the ballot, no decent, thinking person would take this to mean that slavery must therefore be morally legitimate. Because it is on the ballot anybody who votes for slavery has a moral immunity from violence with respect to how they cast their vote. Yet, there is still an option that the decent and thoughtful person would vote for. There is still an option that a voter may take that is a moral crime.

A little over fifty percent of the voters in Maine on Tuesday committed just such a moral crime – those who voted to repeal gay marriage.

Theirs was not a victimless (moral) crime either. Theirs was a crime of doing real harm to real human beings.

Ultimately, this is a case in which a group of people who set out to do real harm to real people have decided to congratulate themselves over their moral superiority over those who wish to establish stable and loving relationships with others.

There are a great many things that influenced these people to act in a harmful, unjust, and immoral way towards their fellow humans. Wherever we can find a force that inspired people to cast these votes, we find a force that inspired people to visit evil upon others. In this case, those were not institutions that promote moral virtue - they are institutions that replaced virtue with an act that can properly be described as vicious - as displaying qualities that are the moral opposite of virtues.

Institutions and organizations that inspire people to act in ways that decent and thoughtful people have reason to condemn, are institutions and organizations that decent and thoughtful people have reason to condemn. They are institutions that decent and thoughtful people have reason to wish did not exist, or at least that it continued do whatever good that organization did without tainting its goodness with these frequent immoral actions.

Decent and thoughtful people have a reason to turn on those organizations - with righteous anger for the evil that they inspire in others, and to demand that the organizations either reform, cut off, and eliminate that part of itself that inspires immorality, or that the organization be done away with entirely.

Again, the right to vote and the right to freedom of speech implies that there is no legitimate use of violence to accomplish these ends. However, there is every single right to the use of words and private actions to accomplish these ends. To publicly condemn these organizations and those who support them are perfectly legitimate activities. To look at where one's private contributions go, and the private contributions of those groups and businesses one belongs to goes to make sure that the agents of evil do not benefit are perfectly legitimate activities.

It is also within the realm of legitimate activities to praise those who, when they cast their ballots, cast the same votes that a decent and thoughtful person would have cast. This legitimacy extends to offering praise and reward to those organizations who sought to stand (non-violently) in the way of those who cast an immoral ballot.

By these acts of praise and reward on the one hand, and condemnation and punishment through private actions on the other, it is hoped that we can have an impact on the malleable desires of people in society to the degree that decency and thoughtfulness will eventually outvote harmful immorality.

At the very least, it will take us a step in that direction.

Evolution's Ethics: Altruism and Empathy

2009-11-04T07:11:00.000-07:00

Members of the studio audience have attempted to bring up evidence that there are evolved dispositions towards altruism and empathy as evidence that there is an evolved morality.

However, there are a lot of problems associated with any attempt to apply moral concepts to genetic dispositions. Ultimately, any attempt along these lines has to be understood as saying that we are morally responsible for our genetic makeup. Applying moral concepts to the genetic trait for altruism means that if we do not have the trait then this is our moral fault. Somehow, we are to be blamed (or praised) according to the genes that we have.

That is nonsense.

It is not nonsense to say that we may have evolved some altruism or empathy. In fact, the available evidence quite clearly supports those conclusions. The problem arises when people point to this and claim that they are studying morality. Pointing to genetic makeup and calling that morality is the same as saying that we are morally responsible for that genetic makeup. That's the part that is nonsense.

Morality has to do with the use of social institutions to help to mold or tune our biological dispositions. We may well have an evolved disposition to be altruistic. However, that evolved disposition is outside of morality. Morality comes in when we ask whether we should use social institutions to tune these natural dispositions - to make them stronger or weaker, or to direct them towards particular ends or away from others.

Moral responsibility - praise and condemnation - are an integral part of morality. The reason it makes no sense to apply moral concepts to genetic dispositions is precisely because genetic dispositions are, by definition, outside of the control of the social forces of praise and condemnation. It makes no sense to praise or condemn people for their genetic makeup because all of the praise and condemnation in the world is not going to have any effect on genetic makeup. It is best to reserve praise and condemnation for those things that praise and condemnation can actually influence. What they have the ability to influence are the strength and direction of malleable desires.

Here, I want to take a quick step into the free will debate. Moral responsibility, in this sense, does not require libertarian free will - the ability to cause matter to move in violation of the laws of nature according to a will that exists outside of those laws. Moral responsibility requires that moral praise and condemnation applies to things that praise and condemnation can influence. The concept of moral responsibility does not apply to any area where moral praise and condemnation can have no effect - such as to our genetic makeup.

Praise and condemn people all you want, it is not going to have an effect on their DNA. Therefore, there is no such thing as genetic morality. On the other hand, praise and condemnation can have an effect on malleable desires.

Let me illustrate this with some specific examples:

Let us assume (which I already agreed is a very safe assumption) that we have evolved some disposition towards altruism. I'm not questioning that. I am saying that it makes no sense to apply moral concepts to genetic altruism, not that genetic altruism does not exist.

Morality takes this biological disposition towards altruism and asks, "Did nature give us a disposition that is as strong as it should be?" Perhaps nature's altruism is not as strong as it should be. We have reason to augment it - to add to the strength that nature provides. Morality is concerned, then, with fine-tuning what nature has provided - with organizing the social institutions with modifying altruism so it is closer to the level that people generally have reason to establish. It has nothing to do with the altruism that is outside of social control.

Nature gave parents a disposition to care for their children. It also gave males a disposition to have sex with their stepdaughters.

With respect to care for one's children, it seems reasonable to conclude that this trait is not as strong as we have reason to want it to be. Too many children are still being neglected and abused. So, we are going to engineer moral institutions to strengthen this trait.

On the other hand, the disposition to have sex with one's stepdaughters is a trait we have reason to inhibit, due to the harm that it causes. We have many and strong reasons to put up aversions and other barriers against the behavior motivated by this desire. So, we direct our moral institutions to molding those desires.

In neither case do moral terms apply to the basic disposition that nature has given us. In both cases they apply to the use of praise and condemnation to mold those desires, to promote and strengthen those desires we have reason to strengthen, and to inhibit those desires we have reason to inhibit.

Evidence suggests that nature probably gave us a disposition to attack people from other tribes. It may have given us dispositions towards gangs, racism, nationalism, and other types of groups that are disposed to act violently towards non-members. (In this respect, I have some fear of the formation of an atheist tribe that cultivates these types of sentiments towards non-members.)

Nature did not give us a moral obligation to attack people from other tribes. It only gave us a disposition to do so. In this case, the disposition is one we have many and strong reasons to inhibit - particularly in other tribes - as they have reason to inhibit those desires in us. Consequently, we set up moral institutions to condemn this behavior with the aim of putting learned desires and aversions in the way of these natural desires.

Perhaps a useful test for this theory is that it suggests that a useful desire can be condemned, or that a harmful desire can be praised. This is true because morality is not concerned with the basic strength of the desire that nature gives us, but in what direction we have reason to take these desires given their natural (pre-moral) base.

Nature has given us a desire to eat. However, our desires for food - both in terms of what to eat and how much - have a strength and direction that, in the current environment, tend to thwart other desires. Consequently, we have reason to inhibit these desires and direct them towards ends that better preserve our own well-being as well as the well-being of those we care about. Gluttony is recognized as a vice. We are not evaluating the (genetic disposition) to be hungry, but the usefulness of social institutions for molding our desires for food.

I wrote in an earlier comment that animals have morality. However, evolutionary ethicists who claim they have found morality in animals are looking in the wrong place.

Animals, like humans, not only have genetic dispositions towards altruism and empathy. They, like humans, also have malleable desires. Plus, they have enough intelligence to use tools - including the tools of reward (in terms of food, sex, grooming, and play) and punishment (including nonlethal violence and the withholding of rewards). They cannot use these moral tools as well as humans can, but they can use them.

People who study morality in animals should not be looking at evolved dispositions to behave in particular ways, but in the development of social tools to tune what nature has provided. I am not objecting to the study of these natural dispositions. In fact, it is a useful and important scientific project. However, it is NOT the study of morality. It is NOT the study of morality in the same way that the study of astronomy is NOT the study of morality. They are discovering the natural laws of the universe in which moral institutions operate, but that is not the same as studying morality itself.

Apollo +50: Little Joe 1A

2009-11-04T07:10:00.000-07:00

I am spending some of my space on this blog covering a topic that (1) I enjoy, and (2) I think has a great deal of value for those concerned with preventing the extinction of the human race (or its biological/technological descendents).

That is the issue of colonizing space so that we do not have all of our genetic seeds in one (planetary) basket. Creating a viable off-planet civilization is vital to preserving the human species and its descendents for billions of years to come.

So, I am covering the birth of that project – the Apollo program and its ancestor, starting with the Mercury program.

50 years ago today, on November 4, 1959, the United States was a mere 9 years, 8 months, and 12 days away from launching a crew of astronauts to land on the moon.

What had been accomplished so far?

On the first launch attempt, an escape rocket fired 30 minutes early, ripping an unmanned Mercury capsule off its test rocket and sending it into the nearby ocean.

On the next launch in this project, the Atlas rocket malfunctioned and did not stage correctly. This launch aimed to test whether an ablation heat shield would work on re-entry. The problem did not prevent the test from proving the usefulness of an ablation shield.

For the third attempt, NASA simply tested a rocket that would later be used to test the aerodynamics of the mercury capsule. The test rocket was successfully tested.

That was it, so far.

But in 9 years, 8 months, and 12 days, these people would launch astronauts to land on the moon.

This day’s mission was a second attempt to collect the data that NASA had tried for on the first launch attempt. Little Joe 1A was launched to determine how the escape system would function under conditions known as Max Q - maximum dynamic pressure. That thought was that if the system worked under the worst possible circumstances then it will work under less stressful portions of the launch.

Once again, the test failed.

This test at least looked nice. The rocket went up, the escape tower fired, and the capsule parachuted down to the ocean where it was recovered.

NASA officials knew that the escape tower fired 10 seconds too late. Instead of firing during Max Q, it fired under conditions that were a mere 10% of the dynamic pressure experienced at Max Q. The mission failed to accomplish its primary objective.

The fact that the capsule parachuted safely to the ocean and was recovered meant that the mission accomplished secondary objectives. An astronaut would have survived those aspects of am abort. However, NASA would have to try again to get data on how the abort system would function under Max Q. They scheduled that third attempt for early January, 1960.

Evolutionary Ethics: Evolved Moral Principles - Are They True?

2009-11-03T06:58:00.001-07:00

Evolutionary Ethics: "Are They True?"

I've been commenting on a posting by PZ Myers in Pharyngula that summarized an article on evolutionary ethics. Myers' summary included the quote:

For instance, he summarized three principles that seem to be general rules in moral judgments.

• Harm intended as the means to a goal is worse than harm seen as a side-effect.

• Harm caused by action is morally worse than harm caused by omission.

• Harm caused by contact is morally worse than equivalent harm caused by non-contact

(See: Pharyngula: Marc hauser - Where Do Morals Come From?)

This is actually the quote that a member of the studio audience sent to me in asking me to comment on this posting.

The first question that popped up in my mind was, "Are they true?"

Here, the author states that people generally tend to adopt the principle, "Harm intended as the means to a goal is worse than harms seen as a side-effect."

Okay, people tend to make this judgment.

Are they right, or are they wrong?

The standard analysis of truth states that, for example, "Snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white. Okay, fine. Then it must be the case that "Harm intended as a means to a goal is worse than harm seen as a side-effect," is true if and only if harm intended as a means to a goal is worse than harm seen as a side effect.

So, tell me, is it the case that harm intended as the means to a goal is worse than harm seen as a side effect, or is it the case that we simply evolved to see it this way.

If it is a mere evolved perception without a corresponding reality, then it is the moral equivalent of an optical illusion. We (or many of us) evolved a disposition to believe that harm intended as a means to a goal is worse than harm seen as a side-effect. However, as far as independent reality goes, this is false, and we are caught in a moral delusion.

So, once more, I would like to ask those evolutionary ethicists who have determined that we evolved a disposition to make these moral judgments.

Are . . . they . . . true?

Is there an external reality that corresponds to these judgments, or are they cognitive illusions?

If they are cognitive illusions then, even though we have this evolved disposition to treat them as true, anybody interested in living in the real world as opposed to a world of fiction and make-believe should treat them as false. Because they ARE false.

PZ Myers describes another part of Here's another quote from the summary.

One example he gave that I found a bit dubious is the use of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation to shut down regions of brain, in particular the right temporal/parietal junction (which seems to be a locus of intent judgment). In subjects that have that region zapped (a temporary effect!) all that matters is outcome.

Is this an example of impairing a person’s moral sense? Or is it the case that these people acquire a better ability to perceive moral truth than the rest of us?

Perhaps those parts of the brain that are shut off by Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation actually get in the way of our ability to see the moral truth of the matter. Perhaps they cloud judgments with irrelevant and corrupting thoughts and emotions. Or perhaps those parts of the brain actually aid us in obtaining moral truth - they process relevant bits of information without which an agent finds it much more difficult to reach the correct moral conclusion.

Is there anything at all in this line of study that tells us which method of reaching moral conclusions is more accurate than the other?

The problem is that the evolutionary ethicist cannot answer these types of questions. These questions require an understanding of what is true about morality – which the evolutionary ethicist is not studying. This is a different field of study - a field of study that these evolutionary ethicists are keen to ignore.

The claim to be studying "the origins of morality". In fact, it is the person who is studying morality as it exists (if it exists) independent of these perceptions who are looking at the origins of morality. These evolutionary ethicists are not studying morality at all.

Quite often when I read about an evolutionary ethicist speak about this moral sense, they claim that they are uncovering a biological root to our moral judgments. They note that there is this amazing degree of correspondence between this biological disposition to judge certain things, and whether the thing judged is moral or immoral.

However, when asked what it takes for something to be moral or immoral, they answer that this depends on whether people tend to judge it that way.

So their conclusion ends up being, "There is a great deal of coincidence between what people judge to be moral or immoral and what they judge to be moral or immoral."

The fact that a judgment has a biological underpinning says absolutely nothing about its justification. Sound reasoning and sophistry both have a biological underpinning. Finding a biological underpinning of the straw man argument will not, in any way, shape, or form, change the fact that this is an informal fallacy. Finding any biological underpinnings to moral judgments also says absolutely nothing about their legitimacy either.

Which might well amaze and startle the evolutionary ethicist, but falls a bit below my threshold of amazement.

Perhaps there is no morality for us to study. Perhaps all we have are cognitive illusions. My argument here does not depend on the assumption that an independent moral reality actually exists. My argument here is that the study of morality is the study of that independent moral reality and, if it does not exist, then the study of morality is much like the study of God or ghosts. It's something that would have to be removed from the realm of serious research.

If there is no independent moral reality then it is still not the case that these evolutionary ethicists are studying morality. They are not telling us the origins of morality or its make up. They are studying the biological underpinnings of the cognitive delusion of morality - which might be a very interesting field of study, as long as one recognizes it for what it is and does not confuse it with the study of morality itself.

Evolution's Ethics Part II: Gene Command Theory

2009-11-02T07:12:00.001-07:00

Divine Command Theory says that right and wrong came about as a set of principles written on our soul by God telling us what is right and what is wrong. Gene Command Theory says that right and wrong came about as a set of principles written on our psyche by evolution telling us what is right and what is wrong.

Both theories are equally absurd, and they are absurd for the same reasons. Both fall victim to exactly the same objections.

On the theist side, we ask, "Is X good because it is loved by God, or is it loved by God because it is good?" If it is good because it is loved by God, then anything loved by God - no matter how horrendous - can be good. If God wants us to slaughter our neighbors and take their resources for our own, then the most virtuous among us are those who slaughter our neighbors and take their resources as our own. Yet, on the other hand, if God loves something because it is good, we are forced to conclude that the theist has not yet given us an answer to the question, "What is goodness?"

On the evolutionary ethicist side, we ask, "Is X good because it is loved by our genes, or is it loved by our genes because it is good?" If it is good because it is loved by our genes, then anything that comes to be loved by our genes is good. If our genes tell us to kill or to rape our step children, then the most virtuous among us are those who kill and rape our step children. Yet, on the other hand, evolution has selected particular ends because they are good, then this tells us that evolutionary theory has not yet given an answer to the question, "What is goodness?"

The reason both systems fall victim to the same objection is because they both commit the same mistake. They are both systems that allow agents to assign their sentiments to an external entity and then attach a special prescriptive force to that external entity.

The Euthyphro question used above exposes this sophistry. It asks those who make these arguments to justify assigning a special prescriptive force to this reservoir of the agent's own personal preferences to justify that assignment of special prescriptively. They both point out that this assignment of special prescriptively is unjustifiable.

And without it, divine command theory and gene command theory end up in the same dust bin.

These theories are probably embraced for the same reason. They give us a way to cloak our own desires and sentiments in an illusion of moral legitimacy. Both the divine command theorist and the evolutionary ethicist are actually seduced into a theory that says that they can take their own likes and dislikes and claim that they are moral laws by assigning them to a "greater power" - God or evolution, take your pick.

For many theists, God provides a legitimizing agent for doing what one pleases. One assigns one's sentiments to God and then, as if by magic, one is no longer acting so as to fulfill one's own desires. Now, one is acting to serve a 'higher purpose'. If anybody should be harmed in the process, they are not being harmed 'because it pleases me to do that which turned out to cause harm'. They were harmed 'in service to a higher purpose that justifies whatever sacrifices we may require of others'.

If we look at the way evolutionists face the subject of morality, they do the same thing. They take their own sentiments and they assign them to an 'evolved moral sense'. Then, as if by magic, one is no longer acting so as to fulfill one's own desires. One is now acting in service to moral principles refined through countless ages of natural selection. If anybody should be harmed in the process, then they are being harmed because we acquired desires to do things that tend to result in harm to others. They are being harmed because we are obeying a moral code written into our genes that gives us these moral commandments and justifies whatever harms may result.

Both views are equally mistaken. Yet, at the same time, both views are equally attractive because of their usefulness. However, the fact that these inferences get agents to the desired conclusions blinds the agents to the fact that they have thrown logic out the window. The goal, after all, is to coat acts grounded on personal preferences in an illusion of legitimacy. "God told me to do it," and "Evolution told me to do it," both serve that end quite efficiently. They both absolve the agent of personal responsibility and places the responsibility on an outside entity – something that the person making the statement can call a ‘higher purpose’.

As a result, evolutionary studies has now given us the cult of the evolved moral trait.

Over and over again, I see atheists embarrass themselves when confronting theists on matters of morality. When atheists reach to evolution to explain morality, they make logical leaps so broad and unfounded that they are not difficult at all for the theist to notice. The atheist does not notice them because he does not want to see them - in exactly the same way that theists blind themselves to the flaws in their own religion.

However, each can see the flaws that the other makes clearly enough. Each openly mocks the other for those mistakes, and the other dismisses the mocking as unfounded.

I want to take a moment to stress this fact. Many atheists openly mock and ridicule theists who brush aside objections to their view. PZ Myers is one of them. Yet, evolutionary ethicists brush aside the very same question. This is not an example where, "Here is something that evolutionary ethicists do that is similar to what they accuse theists of doing." This is a case of evolutionary ethicists doing exactly the same thing as they ridicule and mock others for doing.

There is no evolved moral sense, just as there is no God. The 'gene command theory' is just as absurd as 'divine command theory' and falls victim to exactly the same objections. The sooner that atheists recognize this fact the sooner they can stop appearing as nonsensical moral idiots in front of theists.

Evolution's Morality

2009-10-31T05:46:00.002-06:00

Yesterday, I discussed some issues that I had with the concept of "God's Morality,"

Today, I want to talk about some of the same types of problems that exist in a different set of moral theories - those theories that, instead of speaking about God's Morality, speak instead about Evolution's Morality.

Both theories have pretty much the same problems.

A member of the studio audience pointed me to a posting in Pharyngula on this topic.

(See: Pharyngula: Marc hauser - Where Do Morals Come From?)

One of the themes was how people resolve moral dilemmas. He began with a real world example, the story of an overweight woman in South Africa who insisted on joining a tour exploring a cave, and got stuck in the exit tunnel, trapping 22 people behind her. Do you sacrifice one to save many?

Morality has nothing to do with bizarre never-in-a-lifetime-for-the-vast-majority-of-people situations such as these. Morality is designed to deal with the countless everyday encounters between everyday people. They have to do with the lie told a boss to get out of work, the effort to push a stuck neighbor's car out of his driveway on a snowy winter morning, and the decision to return the power tool you had borrowed before moving across country rather than take it with you (though it is a real nice power tool).

We do not design morality to deal with situations in which overweight women get stuck in caves, (or runaway trolly cars threaten to run over people) simply because these are not everyday situations. It would be a waste of effort to mold people's desires so that they act a particular way in these types of situations - particularly since molding a person's desires will also have effects in countless every-day situations as well.

These types of situations may be interesting objects of study if one is curious about how the brain works, but they are not interesting to the study of morality.

Here is one of those way-off-base assumptions that I was talking about.

Imagine a group of people calling themselves 'astronomers'. What they do is they take a group of people and hook them up to machines and asking them questions about planets, asteroids, black holes and dark energy. They declare that one of the most interesting astronomical questions to study is the age of the earth. So, they focus specifically on these questions. They delight in studying the differences between the answers that creationists and scientists give to these questions, and noting what parts of the brain seem to be activated as each group thinks about the process. They note all sorts of interesting regularities and patterns as they think about these questions.

All the while, they claim that they are astronomers, and what they are studying is the age of the earth.

In fact, they are mistaken. They are not astronomers, they are brain scientists. And what they are studying is not 'the age of the earth' but 'thoughts about the age of the earth'.

And it is an absurdity to insist that these are the same thing.

In the realm of astronomy, people seem to be able to tell the difference.

In the realm of morality, a lot of have blinded themselves to this absurdity.

Another absurdity is the idea that when one studies trolley problems or anything similar, that this involves the study of morality at all. These are areas so far out on the fringe of morality that it is possible to argue that they are not within the realm of morality at all.

These are cases where people have a habit of applying moral concepts in a realm where moral concepts do not apply. They are like trying to talk about sunrise and sunset from the point of view of the sun itself.

Morality is an institution created to handle the countless interactions people engage in every day. It is not meant to deal with bizarre situations that very few of us will ever encounter. I have countless opportunities each day to walk off with property that does not belong to me, to lie for personal advantage, or to be lazy and disregard the harmful actions that my actions may cause to others. Others have countless reasons to instill in me an aversion to walking off with their property, to lie, and to disregard the harmful side effects of my actions.

When you take this system and apply them to bizarre virtually-never-in-a-human-lifetime scenarios, you find that they give no clear answer. They were not meant to give a clear answer these types of situations. It is a waste of effort to mold morality to create clear answers in these situations. It is hard enough to mold morality to fit our countless day-to-day interactions.

One of the questions that I would like to ask these researchers is, "So, according to your research, is the proposition, 'Homosexual acts are immoral' true or false?"

This is how we tell the person who is studying thoughts about the age of the earth from those who are actually studying the age of the earth. The person studying thoughts about the age of the earth does not give us any data about the age of the earth - any data at all that answers the question, "So, according to your research, is the proposition, 'The earth is 6,000 years old' true or false?"

They can't help us precisely because they are not studying the age of the earth.

And Marc Hauser and his ilk are not telling us anything about where morals come from. We can't answer that question unless we study morality itself, and we are not studying morality if, what we are studying instead, are thoughts about morality.

I am not saying that they cannot provide useful scientific data. There can collect scientific data by the bucket full. This is genuine scientific data - and the people who conduct the research are doing genuine science. They are not studying morality, but they are still doing science. This is true in the same way our people studying astronomers and creationists concerning the age of the earth are not studying the age of the earth, but they are still doing science.

You are not studying the age of the earth unless you are studying something . . . anything . . . that tells us whether the age of the Earth is 6,000 years old or not. You are not studying morality of homosexuality, for example, unless you are studying something . . . anything . . . that tells us whether homosexual acts are immoral or not. If all you can tell us is that some people judge it to be immoral and others do not - and how their brains differ, then you have given us something that is no different than the person who can tell us that some people judge the Earth to be 6,000 years old and others do not, and how their brains differ.

One of the things that I find easy to imagine is an astromer, who has put a great deal of effort into the study of planets and stars, reading about research being done by so-called 'astronomers' who study brain waves of people who are asked questions about stars, galaxies, and the age of the Earth. He reads about a swarm of people who study this stuff and who insist that they are doing astronomy and that they are discovering astronomical truths. I can imagine him rolling his eyes, as I roll mine, and saying in exasperation, "What in the heck do you think you're doing over there?"

God's Morality

2009-10-30T07:30:00.001-06:00

As atheists, we are accustomed to being asked, "Where do your morals come from?"

The oft-spoken assumption is that the world has reason to fear and hate atheists because there is nothing to restrain the atheist from committing horrible atrocities. Which is why the question itself identifies the person asking it as a bigot - seeking to promote an unfounded hatred and fear of others.

The common atheist response is to present a theory of morality. Morality is an evolved disposition, or morality is that which produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number, or morality is a social contract we all implicitly adopt.

Or, morality resides in the fact that desires are malleable and people generally have reason to promote those desires that tend to fulfill other desires and inhibit those desires that tend to thwart other desires.

However, another form of response is available to those who claim they get their morality from God.

"Where did God get his morality?"

The correct answer to this question, of course, is that God gets his morality from his inventors.

"What you are doing, sir, is taking your own personal likes and dislikes and assigning them to God, then telling the world that God gives you permission - even commands you - to impose your preferences on others. Or you are the blind follower of somebody else who assigned his preferences to God, and then deceived you into promoting his interests by telling you that you are really working for an imaginary super-being that he invented."

This is the fact of the matter. This is also what is wrong with most religious morality - that religion provides a way for individuals to justify in their own mind imposing their own interests on others by assigning those interests to an imaginary super-being called God, then convincing oneself or others that, "No, you are not serving my interests. You are serving God's. The fact that serving God's interests coincides so closely with serving my interests is simply testimony to the depths of my spirituality."

The elm tree in my front yard exists. The evolutionist and the creationist might disagree over the history that brought elm trees into existence to start with.

Here's an absurd form of argument.

"Elm trees come from God. You do not believe in God. Therefore, obviously, you cannot believe in elm trees. As an atheist, you cannot account for elm trees so you are at risk of walking around the world bumping into elm trees and crashing into elm trees because you cannot account for their existence."

We do not hear that argument much. In part, we do not hear it because of the absurdity of it. We may disagree on how elm trees came about, but that does not imply that we must disagree on whether the elm tree in my front yard actually exists.

The same is true of morality.

One attitude to take is that the atheist and the theist disagree on how morality comes about. However, this does not imply a disagreement over the actual existence of morality. The person who wants to accuse the atheist of having no morality needs to provide more than evidence that the atheist does not believe in God. He has to provide evidence that not believing in God is necessarily associated with moral blindness. If morality is real, this is as absurd as saying that not believing in God makes it impossible to see elm trees.

So, why do we see this argument with respect to moral principles and not with respect to elm trees?

Because people who use the argument with respect to moral principles have a drive to promote hatred and fear others. The motivation for the argument is not that the argument makes sense - because it makes little sense for morality as it does for elm trees. The motivation for the argument is to tell the members of the congregation (or the school assembly or the legislative chambers), "You should hate and fear them because nothing restrains them from committing the most atrocious of evils."

Of course, "hate and fear them" immediately translates into, "love and trust me." It is a way for the speaker to promote himself (or his church) by putting down others. Thus, bigotry becomes hate-mongering; the act of selling hate to others for the purpose of personal gain.

An atheist and a theist can have a perfectly legitimate discussion over where elm trees some from. The theist can hold that there can be no elm trees without God. In other words, a conversation about where morality comes from is a perfectly legitimate subject for two good people to engage in.

However, the view, whether explicit or implicit, that atheists are to be hated and feared because they do not believe in God and, thus, are liable to all sorts of evils is not a thesis that a good person can advance. It is as absurd as the thesis that the atheist cannot see a elm tree. Somebody who is blind to that absurdity is either a bigot who adopts such an attitude out of a sense of hate, or a hate-monger seeking personal gain by selling hatred to others, or both.

Probably both.

Interestingly, the thesis, "God gets his morality from those who invent him (and God is being continually re-invented)," does not support the type of hate-mongering bigotry that is used against atheist. It does not support the conclusion that all theists are to be hated and feared. Instead, it supports the thesis that a moral theist will invent a moral God, while an immoral theist will invent an angry, petty, jealous, violent, destructive, and/or bigoted God.

Here's a slogan that might be of some use.

Since God gets his morality from those who invent (or re-invent) him . . .

"You can tell a lot about a person by looking at the qualities of the God he invents."

The Next Atheist Billboard

2009-10-29T07:18:00.005-06:00

Don't believe in good without god? That's prejudice.

See, Washington Post, Don't Believe in Good Without God? That's Prejudice.

This line was used as a headline to a Washington Post opinion piece written by Humanist Chaplain of Harvard University, Greg Epstein.

Given the current surge of bulletin boards that say things like, "Millions of people are good without god," I immediately thought of this as a good follow-up slogan. An advertising campaign requires a second advertisement to follow the first. It should be an advertisement that carries the message a little further, or portrays it at another angle.

This board is simple, can be easily linked to the current campaign, and says something that very much needs to be said. The statistics exist to show that anti-atheist bigotry is prevalent in the United States. It costs atheists a great deal, from the custody of their children in custody disputes to opportunities to serve in public office and positions of public trust. Anti-atheist bigotry is written into the national pledge of allegiance and the national motto.

A public sign condemning this bigotry would be a good first step to reversing this trend. People will at last start to see something that goes counter to the government-sponsored anti-atheist propaganda that is so prevalent in their lives, and may at last start to question some assumptions that should be questioned. It should create some cognitive dissonance between the government's message that trusting in God and supporting a nation under God are necessary to being a good American, weakening the bigotry that the government and many religious leaders are planting in people's heads.

One of the greatest effects of the current campaign has been the amount of press coverage that they have generated. There is . . . at least to a greater degree that there has been . . . a public discussion of the possibility of goodness without God. That is a good discussion to be having. It helps people to realize that they can give up their religion without giving up their self-respect.

Continuing the campaign with the message that those who do not accept the possibility of goodness without God are bigots pushes that message a little further. It tells people, "Not only is it possible for you to be good without God, but those who would denigrate you and hold you as a morally inferior being simply because of your lack of belief are the ones who lack morals."

I want to note here that the message is not that believing in God makes a person immoral. This is not a billboard that attacks belief in God. It is a billboard that attacks bigotry. A great many people can (and do) believe in a God and also believe that it is not belief in God that makes their neighbor a good person, but kindness, a willingness to give others a hand in times of need, and a willingness to work to protect others from harm.

The latter, by the way, being one area in which the materialist scientist excels, since their dramatically improved methods of explaining and predicting events in the real world have lead to dramatic improvements in our ability to protect ourselves and those we love from harm - from hurricanes, from tsunamis, from swine flu, and from criminals. It provides us with knowledge useful to help us create more food to eat, heat for our homes, and clean drinking water.

I would also like to note that I am pleased with the directions that these campaigns are going. When atheist organizations first started to put up messages some of the early favorites embraced bigotry and hate-mongering. I gave my objections to those signs at the time. The fact that those early options are not a part of the current campaign is a sign of progress.

Specifically, the "Imagine No Religion" campaign - particularly the version that blamed "religion", rather than specific religious extremists, for the 9/11 attacks, provided an excellent example of bigoted reasoning. It took the wrong committed by a subgroup of people and tried to paint the whole group with the same brush - the way some anti-atheist bigots try to tar all atheists with the evils of Stalin.

That is bigotry. That is a paradigm example of bigoted hate-mongering - taking an evil committed by somebody with a particular characteristic and using that against everybody with that characteristic - even those who would condemn the original evil. There is no moral merit to be found in two bigots shouting bigoted insults against each other. It would be better if those on at least one side of the debate would say, "I condemn bigotry itself, even if it comes from members of my own tribe."

That campaigns blaming 'religion' for the specific crimes of specific agents seem to have been put away is a good thing. I hope they have been put away for the right reasons, and I hope that people recognize the reasons why they should stay put away and not be brought back out in the future.

The current campaign simply invites those who are good without God together into a larger and stronger community - which is very much needed. It did not take a direct stand against bigotry - though it took an indirect stand by fighting the bigotry that worked to keep even that modest message out of the public eye.

There is merit to the idea of the next campaign taking an active stand against bigotry. It would be particularly bad if, instead of an anti-bigotry message, future campaigns should revert to actually being the examples of bigoted reasoning we have seen in the past.

Oh . . . and those who finance this billboard . . . should seek funding and support from not only atheists, but any organization dedicated to the fight against bigotry. Let them make a commitment to this cause since it is, as it were, right up their alley.