BB3: AC Grayling: Flourishing, Fulfillment, and Freedom of Choice

This is the third in a series of posts on presentations given at Beyond Belief 3: Candles in the Dark"

You can find a list of all Atheist Ethicist blog postings covering Beyond Belief 3 at the Introduction post

And I would like to encourage you to give a contribution to the Science Network, who makes these presentations available for free.

Yesterday, I looked at AC Grayling's presentation to the Beyond Belief conference. Specifically, I looked at the suggestion that 'flourishing' rather than 'happiness' is 'the point' of human existence. I suggested that neither view works – that ‘the point’ is to make or keep true those propositions that are the object of our desires. The moral point is to provide people generally with desires that tend to fulfill other desires and inhibit desires that tend to thwart other desires.

Grayling then went on from his concept of 'flourishing' to draw some conclusions about government policy – that a primary concern of government is to promote those institutions that enhance human flourishing.

In doing this, it is important to note one thing; that there is a rich variety of humans and there is almost certainly not going to be only one way in which humans can flourish. As a result, institutions that try to fit all people into the same mold are almost certain to fail. They are attempts to coerce everybody into the same, narrow lifestyle. As a result, they ultimately generate more unhappiness than happiness.

The framework within individual can choose rich and flourishing lives has to be one characterized by a lot of negatives in the sense that what we want to do is open spaces and limit the degree of coercion that we impose on people within communities.

Indeed, choice itself has value according to Grayling. A life in which a person lives by his own choices has value that the same life that is the result of other peoples’ choices apparently would not have. The good life, according to Grayling as taken from Aristotle is:

. . . something rather rich - experientially rich - which accrues to a person the minute that person begins to try to live a reasoned and reflective life given that, for Aristotle as indeed for his teacher, Plato, the idea of the considered life the life examined and chosen and lived according to those choices . . . that kind of life is one that is more likely to be attended to by or characterized by eudemonia than the life which is the result of other peoples' choices.

Recall, a state that one is placed in as a result of coercion is less value than the same state that one is placed in as a result of choice – even though the state is the same.

A Desire Utilitarian Analysis

The first question that a desire utilitarian will raise in examining this view has to do with the nature of value. What is it that makes it the case that a state chosen has more value than a state that one is coerced into?

Desire utilitarianism recognizes two types of value.

One of those types is direct value (sometimes called 'intrinsic value' though that term often carries connotations that are not true of direct value in the desire utilitarian sense). Direct value is the value that a state S has in virtue of the fact that there exists a desire that P, and P is true in S.

The other type of value is indirect (usually called 'instrumental') value. A state S can have instrumental value if there exists a desire that P, and it is the case that in a state S where Q is true, Q yields P.

(I have also sometimes spoken of partial value or component value, where S has value in virtue of there being a desire that P and P is true in S, and C is a part of P. In this way, a corner of the Mona Lisa has value.)

So, there are two ways in which a state S that has been chosen can have value on this model. Agents could have a desire that P where P is “I choose to be in state S”, or choice can be instrumentally valuable in the sense that it tends to bring about states in which desires are fulfilled.

Then there is moral value, which is a mixture of these two values. A state of S has moral value if P is true of S and the desire that P is useful (tends to fulfill other desires), so that people generally have a reason to promote or encourage the desire that P.

On this standard, we can make the case that the desire that P, where P is a life that is chosen rather than a life that is coerced on the individual, has moral value. It is a value that people generally have reason to promote.

I have given the argument for this in several past postings. It is an argument that comes from John Stuart Mill that says that each agent is the least corruptible and most knowledgeable resource around (with some exceptions such as children). When I act so as to fulfill my own desires, I know those desires better than anybody. Furthermore, I am not likely to be distracted by something else – something else only has the power to distract me to the degree that it appeals to one or more of my desires.

Whereas, if you try to direct my life, you have a less reliable idea of what my desires are. Furthermore, even in deciding what act I am to perform, you are going to give me the instruction that will fulfill the most and strongest of your desires.

Perhaps you have a desire that my desires are fulfilled and that motivates you to choose for me what I would have chosen for myself. However, at best, it is inevitable that this will be one desire among many and, as a result, a desire capable of being sacrificed for the public good (or so we are told).

So, we have reason to promote a set of institutions that cause our neighbors to have desires that the others freely choose how to live their own lives, as long as those choices are not harmful to others.

This gives a reason behind the type of value that Grayling talks about, rather than just asserting that a particular state has value. Nothing ‘just has value’. That type of value entity does not exist.

Freedom for individuals to make their own choices does have value. The love of freedom – the preference for chosen states over coerced states – has value. These are facts that we can derive out of our understanding of what value is. It is not something that merely adheres to a particular state of affairs.

BB3: AC Grayling: Happiness, Flourishing, and Fulfillment

This is the second in a series of posts on presentations given at Beyond Belief 3: Candles in the Dark"

You can find a list of all Atheist Ethicist blog postings covering Beyond Belief 3 at the Introduction post

And I would like to encourage you to give a contribution to the Science Network, who makes these presentations available for free.

Since the election is over, I can afford to get back to the project of discussing the presentations given at the third Beyond Belief conference held in La Jolla, CA.

Our first speaker was AC Grayling, who rose to speak on the subject of human flourishing. Ultimately, I found three major points in his presentation, each of which deserves a bit of our time.

(1) Human flourishing makes a better candidate for 'the point' is than happiness.

(2) Human flourishing requires freedom to choose.

(3) Neuroscience can give us some idea on what it means to be human which, in turn, will give us insight into what human flourishing requires.

I am going to discuss the first of these points today, and leave the second and third point until tomorrow.

The Problem with Happiness

When I covered Beyond Belief 1 and Beyond Belief 2, both times I found it necessary to bring up objections to the idea that happiness was the one and sole ultimate value and that everything else can be measured by its contribution to happiness. Against this view, I argued that there are a lot of people who would choose a less happy life connected to the real world than a happy life imagining herself a heroine in some fantasy story.

This year, Grayling saved me the trouble by making the argument for me. He started his speech by saying that even though happiness is clearly valuable, it is not 'the point'. If it were the point, then, in his version of the argument, we can fill the population with happy pills who live perfectly happy lives while the world crumbles around them, and we would have the best of all possible worlds.

I want to point out that this same argument works against all theories that try to reduce 'the point' purely to the brain being in a particular kind of state. Regardless of what state we choose – happiness, pleasure over pain, satisfaction, contentment, inner peace – it is possible to divorce that state from the condition in the outside world. All of these theories argue that it is at least theoretically possible to create a perfect world in which brains have been put into this particular state and are kept there, and where the situation outside of the brain is totally irrelevant.

These 'brain state' theories of value suffer from another problem as well. Why is it the case that the brain, being in a particular state, has this value? What is this value made of? How do we discover whether it is there or not? The claim that "the brain in a particular state has value" does not mean any much without some type of conception of what value is, and how a brain in that particular state could have such a property.

Flourishing

Grayling argued that, instead of happiness, a better conception of what 'the point' of a good life is human flourishing. This is a life that, according to Graying, is perceived as good and satisfying by the person living it. There are a wide variety of humans, according to Grayling, and, as a result, there is a wide variety of what can be called 'good lives'. We cannot come up with a single conception and apply it to everybody. For each person, we need to find the ‘good life’ in what that person would perceive as good and satisfying.

This raises a lot of questions.

(1) If we define a good life in terms of flourishing, and then describe flourishing in terms of good, it seems as if we have entered a very tight circle that is not getting us very far in terms of understanding either goodness or human flourishing. Can either of these be defined without reference to the other?

(2) Grayling describes a good life as a life that is 'perceived as good' by the person living it. One of the implications of this is that one way for a person to improve the quality of his life – regardless of what is true about his life – is to simply change his perceptions (or, more colloquially, to change his mind). The homeless drug addict wasting away in the back alleys of a city slum can be given a better life simply by causing him (through drugs, surgery, or some other technique) to perceive such a life to be good and satisfying.

(3) This conception of flourishing is subject to the same problem that happiness theories have. Value depends entirely on putting the brain in a particular state. Once the brain is in that state, the rest of the world can change significantly, and no value would have been lost. If, at time T, I am satisfied with my life, and I am frozen somehow in that state, then my life will be forever satisfying, and my life from that point on will continue to be good.

One could argue that this is not the case because I would not choose to be frozen – so that is not a state that I perceive to be good or satisfying. However, since I do not perceive myself as being in such a state, I do not perceive myself as being in a state that is not good and satisfying. So, I am flourishing – at least unless and until we divorce flourishing from perceptions and make it more objective.

So, I do not know what 'flourishing' is. Grayling's account seems to allow us unlimited possibilities to change the quality of a life without changing the life at all, and it still allows for a good life to be a life hooked up to an experience machine or drugs that simply alter one’s perceptions.

A Desire Utilitarian "Good Life"

Let me compare Grayling’s thesis to another definition of a good life.

Desire utilitarianism holds that value exists as relationships between states of affairs and desires. Desires, in turn, are propositional attitudes – that is, they can be expressed in the form A desires that P where P is a proposition. A person with a desire that P has a reason for action to realize any state of affairs in which P is true. A state of affairs S is good, at least in relation to this desire, if and only if P is true in S.

I use the term 'fulfillment' here. However, unlike with terms like 'happiness', 'satisfaction', or 'pleasure', there is no feeling associated with desire fulfillment. It is not an affective state. A desire that P is fulfilled if and only if there is a state S and P is true in S. That’s it.

This is a description of generic goodness. It is not a description of moral goodness which, of course, is a species of generic goodness with a few specific traits. Briefly, moral goodness has to do with good malleable desires. Good malleable desires are desires that can be influenced by social forces, and that tend to fulfill other desires (create states of affairs in which the propositions that are the objects of other desires tend to be made or kept true). So, they are desires that people with those other desires generally have reason to promote.

On this account, a good life is a life in which the propositions {P1, P2, P3 . . . Pn} are true that are the objects of the relevant desires.

We can speak meaningfully of the value of a life relative to the desires of the person living it. That life would be the life in which the propositions that are the objects of the agent’s desires were true.

However, we can also speak of a morally good life – which is something completely different. A morally good life is a life in which those propositions are true that are the objects of good desires - desires that people generally have reason to promote. A person can have a life perceived as good and satisfying and still not have a morally good life. A person can also live a morally good life while being miserable and unsatisfied.

This conception handles the experience machine or 'happiness drug' problem because what is important is that the proposition that is the object of a desire is made or kept true. It isn’t good enough that the agent believes that it is true. It must actually be true. Its truth, then, depends on the state of the world. You cannot take a person whose brain is in a particular state and freeze it in that state, then change the world, and hold value the same. Changing the world will make some of those propositions false, and that will destroy the value.

It is still the case, on this model, that any life can be made better simply by changing desires. If a person desires those qualities that are in his life, then he is living a 'good live' relative to those desires. Somebody else with different desires would not value the same life – he wants something else. That is fine. This does not disprove the idea that the first person is still living the life he wants to live.

However, there is an important set of limitations. There are desires that tend to fulfill other desires, and desires that tend to thwart other desires.

Drug addictions (or any type of addiction), ignorance, handicaps, limitations in autonomy and ability generally, all tend to be inherently desire-thwarting. They prevent people from performing those actions that will realize states in which the propositions that are the objects of their desires are true. They are things that all people have reason to avoid.

There are other desires that tend to fulfill other desires; kindness, curiosity, diligence, industriousness. These are desires that people have reason to promote in themselves and others.

These facts cannot be changed simply by changing what people desire. Slavery and genocide will always be wrong – because they are always inherently desire-thwarting. To the degree that we are surrounded by people who are averse to these states, to that degree those we and those we care about are safer.

The Limited Value of a Good Life

Another relevant point is that, on this model, even though a good life has value, it is one value among many.

To say that a life has value is to say that the propositions that are the objects of relevant desires are true of that life. However, lives are not the only things that can have value. Any state of affairs can have value. The set of propositions P that can be the objects of desires is limited. There is no reason to confine the set solely to propositions that are true of a life.

So, a dedicated researcher can sacrifice family, notoriety, and even health in the pursuit of knowledge. He may even know that he will not ever acquire that knowledge himself, but he can only lay the groundwork for others to find it. Yet, this pursuit can have value to him. That value is not because this knowledge will enable him to acquire a better life. He values the knowledge for its own sake, more so than he values a good life.

The dedicated parent can genuinely sacrifice the quality of his life for his child, and the dedicated artist can give up a good life so that he can make the masterpiece he so desperately wants to make.

Certainly, lives have value. We are all seeking to make true a set of desires, some of them being desires for P where P is some proposition describing the agent’s life.

However, the propositions that are true of a life are one set of propositions in an infinitely large set. They are not the only propositions that can find themselves as the objects of an agent’s desires. Nor should they be. There is a whole universe full of things that any given agent can find value in.

Afghanistan and Civilian Casualties

One of the moral issues that President-elect Barak Obama will have to deal with as President came in the letters of congratulations that he received when he won the election. Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai included in his message:

Our demand is that there will be no civilian casualties in Afghanistan. . . . This is my first demand of the new president of the United States — to put an end to civilian casualties.

(See, Associated Press, Afghan president demands Obama end civilian deaths)

The first thing we need to do is to put this in a more realistic context. There is no way to end civilian casualties. Even in the United States, in the normal course of enforcing our laws, there are civilian casualties. If we were to give our police force the instruction of making sure, above all else, that no civilian ever be killed, we would render them so ineffective that . . . well, actually, so ineffective that the people will end up being indiscriminately killed by criminals, resulting in a great many civilian deaths.

The question is whether American policy is concerned enough with civilian deaths – whether we should be trying harder to prevent them, or whether we are trying too hard.

Let’s look at the policy of “trying too hard” for a moment. To the degree that the American military is told to reduce civilian deaths, to that degree the enemy needs only to surround itself with human shields. A terrorist leader needs only to surround himself with an entourage of women and children and a policy banning civilian deaths would render him untouchable.

So “trying too hard” to avoid civilian deaths is possible.

However, there “not trying hard enough” is also possible. If every rumor, no matter how ill founded, that some terrorist might be hiding in a building results in an air strike that destroys the building, then Americans are not trying hard enough to avoid civilian deaths.

In fact, one of the ways we can make sure to wipe out the terrorist is to simply kill every man, woman, and child in a region where terrorists are known to hang out. We simply start on one end and sweep through, and anybody not wearing an American uniform gets killed. It’s a simple way to make sure that we get the terrorists (at least in that region), and it opens up the territory for others to occupy.

Yet, I hope, a great many people would find such an option morally objectionable. This, of course, describes two end points on a continuum. Between a total prohibition on civilian deaths and genocide there are various degrees of safeguards that aim to protect civilians from harm while still allowing the good guys to go after the bad guys.

The vast majority of any institution of justice is devoted to this question. The right to a trial by jury, the rules under which a court of law operates, the “presumption of innocence until proven guilty”, are all a part of an institution whose purpose is to try to make sure that innocent people are not made to suffer harm in our quest to find and punish the guilty.

Even these safe-guards are not fool-proof. We have found out that a lot of people in prison on charges of rape and murder were innocent of the crimes they were convicted of. We must assume that a great many people in prison where there is no DNA evidence to be examined were not guilty of those crimes.

Yet, it would be foolish for us to abolish the criminal justice system simply because it is not perfect, and innocent people still get caught in its net and end up spending their one and only life convicted of a crime they did not commit.

The reason for a criminal justice system is because, in addition to the threat we are under of becoming the victim of a crime, we are under the threat of suffering as much or more harm by being falsely convicted, or of being in the wrong place at the wrong time when the government pursues a suspected criminal. The issue is to balance these threats and ask, “What is the biggest danger?”

So, what is the biggest threat to the life, health, and well-being of an Afghan (or Pakistani) child today. Does that child, in the next year, have a greater chance of being blown to bits by a terrorist with a bomb, or by an American fighter pilot with a missile? If the latter, then Obama needs to seriously consider tightening the rules to reduce the threat of harm to those children. America must remain the lesser threat of harm to civilians – not the greater threat. That’s what allows us to justifiably call ourselves the good guys.

Furthermore, we have to look at the lessons that we are teaching the world outside of Afghanistan.

Every time we blow up a group of civilians, and shrug it off or offer cheap and easy condolences, we tell the rest of the world that civilian casualties do not matter. Some of them will hate us for teaching the world a moral principle that is about as manifestly false as any principle can be. Some of them will learn our moral lesson and be more inclined to lead their lives on the maxim that civilian casualties do not matter.

Our conduct in Afghanistan affects conflicts throughout the world. If we teach a moral lesson that good people work hard to prevent civilian casualties, then we teach the world not to inflict civilian casualties, and civilians throughout the world are safer as a result.

If we teach the world that civilian casualties do not matter, some of them will adopt the principle that civilian casualties do not matter, and the world becomes more dangerous as a result.

President Bush has been completely and utterly lacking in any kind of moral sense. The lessons that he has been teaching the world for the past 8 years – that civilian casualties do not matter, that due process does not matter, that the laws passed by a duly elected congress do not matter, has weakened those institutions around the world. Every time Bush “justified” these moral transgressions, he gave others around the world moral permission to engage in those transgressions themselves, and put people in danger as a result.

One area where the Obama administration needs to immediately demonstrate improvements over the Bush administration is that Obama recognizes that there are certain moral constraints on human actions. One of those moral constraints is to make it the case that a child or his mother has less to fear from the America (where we take steps to minimize civilian casualties) than they do from its enemies (who routinely cause civilian casualties).

There is, of course, some risk in instituting this message. There is a risk that some terrorist might get away and that some of us might even die in a terrorist attack.

However, on this issue, I have to ask: What is the moral character of a person willing to risk his own life to protect an innocent child from severe harm? How does that compare to the moral character of a person who is willing to harm a child or kill a group of children to provide himself with a small measure of additional comfort and security?

There is certainly some risk associated with protecting children from being blown up by an American missile fired from an American airplane. However, for the sake of the children, good people are willing to accept that risk. It is a part of what makes him or her a good person.

Bigotry's Victories in Tuesday's Elections

Atheists lost yesterday's election in a big way.

I want to state at the start that I do not care about atheism per se. I care about the moral issue of anti-atheist bigotry. So, in effect, the problem is not that atheists lost yesterday's election. The problem is that the opponents of anti-atheist bigotry (regardless of their own religious beliefs) lost yesterday's election in a big way.

One thing that I am certain of is that members of both political parties, from the top-level operatives to the local volunteers, are starting to work on their strategies for the next election. They are looking at what happened in this election for what worked and what did not work, so that they can figure out how to win the next election.

Here are two rules that are now carved in stone in the Democratic play book.

Rule 1: Make sure that you know who the atheist activists are, and make sure that you exclude them from any party or gathering that you might attend, except where the atheist leader might be lost in a crowd and the candidate can claim ignorance of their presence.

One thing that you will not see in the next two years is an atheist leader in the company of a political candidate. The candidate might meet with priests, rabies, imams, and clerics of all types and colors, but not with the atheist. That is political suicide. All of those other people have some type of religious belief – and any religious belief at all is better than no belief.

Rule 2: Make sure that your candidate has her religious bona fides in order.

This way, if some accidental violation of Rule 1 gives the opponent an opportunity to run an advertisement that accuses your candidate of atheism, she can run a massive counter-campaign saying, "How dare you sink so low that you would accuse me, of all people of atheism or of having atheist sympathies."

These are two of the new rules.

They are quite devastating. Not only is it the case that we cannot run for public office, now we cannot even have the attention of somebody who is a candidate for public office. The wall between the atheist and the political representative has just gotten significantly taller.

And this defeat is tied to other defeats – other groups in this country whose one and only lives are made less than what they could have been, less than what they should have been, by those who seek states harmful to others for reasons they rationalize by assigning them to a god that they invented to serve as the vessel and justification for their own harmful prejudices.

These rules were most clearly applied in the Kay Hagan/Elizabeth Dole contest in North Carolina, of course.

However, they were also used to help to win the Presidential election.

These rules came into play in the Presidential election. Remember the Democratic National Convention, which began with a meeting of religious leaders? No atheists were invited. Obama never once met with any representative of any group defending secular values. It is one thing for him Obama to include in his circle of acquaintances the leaders of various religious sects. If I was running for office, I would do the same thing. However, to exclude a group – to shun them – to make sure that one has no association with them – is a different kettle of fish.

It has been a quiet shunning, of course. Atheists know their place, so they are not too demanding. Those few who are demanding can be safely ignored – because they are too few and their voice is too soft for anybody to hear them. So, the shunning, the ostracism, all slips quietly under the social radar.

And, of course, Obama had his religious bona fides in order. Of course, since he was accused of being a Muslim, and not of being an atheist, he could not fire back a response that said, "How dare you sink so low as to accuse me of being a Muslim." That would not have been politically incorrect, and would have earned the (justified) ire of much of the population. In this case, such a response may well have ended Obama's political career. It would have endeared him, of course, to a set of anti-Muslim bigots, but it would not have helped him win votes in the general population.

It turns out that Kay Hagan's response to Elizabeth Dole's accusation of atheism did not harm her at all. In fact, some evidence suggests that her response, "How dare you sink so low as to accuse me of atheism," seems to have earned her about 4 points in the election. We could make the same analysis – that the response would have endeared her, of course, to a set of anti-atheist bigots. However, in this case, anti-atheist bigotry is wide spread through the general population – at least of North Carolina. So, the campaign worked.

Actually, in two years, we can expect that the Republicans will make some progress in regaining some lost ground. We can expect them to pick up a few seats in the Senate and the House, just as a part of the normal course of events. The Democrats have full control of the executive and legislative branches, so any and all criticism can be leveled straight at them. Any amount of unhappiness at all, and the Democrats will pay a political price. And some amount of unhappiness is inevitable – particularly with a Republican political machine telling the people at every opportunity of how Obama and the Democrats have failed them.

So, the Democrats will be focusing on retaining as much of their current political advantage as possible – with some hope of building on it. To do this, they are going to hunt for candidates in contestable races who have their religious bona fides in order. They are going to make sure that no accusation of palling around with atheists can stick, and that the candidate makes sure to give no evidence that he has sympathy for atheist values or pro-atheist judges.

When the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals gives its decision on ‘under God’ in the Pledge (assuming that they declare the phrase unconstitutional), expect to see Democrats will rush to introduce resolutions in the House and Senate denouncing the decision, giving their members an opportunity to go on the record for their anti-atheist bigotry.

Republicans will rush to the microphone to announce that they are introducing legislation (or pushing legislation already introduced) that will strip the courts of the power to hear such cases, and to condemn the Democratic party for appointing judges who do not share the nation’s values . . . who do not share and will not enforce the nation’s bigotry.

This election has left atheists far more marginalized than ever. In spite of the “new atheist” movement during the Bush administration, American atheists have continued to lose political ground – and to lose it at an accelerating rate.

I look at history – at where these types of trends have ended in the past. At the same time, I tell myself that it cannot happen again. It’s not even worth writing about. Yet, evolution does not happen so quickly. What people have been capable of doing in the recent past they are still capable of doing. All it needs is the right confluence of events. History makes it abundantly clear that societies that declare decent and normal people unfit for membership and, ultimately, seek to remove them. When they write that message, “These people are unfit for membership” into the pledge and their national motto, one has to ask, how far they can actually go with such a message.

Decent people would never have tolerated such a message being written into their pledge and motto. Decent people would never have tolerated a political message that said that some segment of the population is not only unfit for public office, but unfit to be in the company of those who seek public office.

Yet, here we are.

Where are we going from here?

The Pledge Project: The Next Campaign

I am relatively content with the results of tonight's election. Obama was elected President. The Supreme Court will get some decent judges to replace other judges who have served so well for so long - as will the appeals court system. We will have a President who is intelligent, who knows how to think, and who knows the importance of listening in particular to those who disagree with him.

Elizabeth Dole was defeated.

California's Proposition 8 banning gay marriage, it will seem, will pass, unfortunately. Though my interest has not been in the issue of gay marriage. My interest has been in the issue of doing harm to others for no better reason than 'my God values the harm that I do'."

So, this election is over, it is time to start working on the next campaign.

If it was the intention of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to hold onto the decision on "under God" until after the election, then . . . well . . . it is now after the election, and it has been 11 months since they took oral arguments.

They have got to release that decision shortly.

We all saw that, with the Kay Hagan campaign, the nearly universal assumption that atheists are evil and the lowest and most despicable thing a candidate can do is to accuse a challenger of atheism. Even within the press, nobody paused to ask the question, "What if she was an atheist? Is it wrong for an atheist to seek public office?"

And so, under an Obama presidency, officially, we will continue to see an endorsement and a continuation of the practice of teaching anti-atheist bigotry to young children on a massive scale.

It is assumed that the answer to the question is, "Yes".

It is virtually certain that every politician will condemn the decision and use it as an example of "activist judges" who pay no attention to the Constitution, but who abuse their power to force their views on the rest of the country.

I have written earlier about how Obama cannot defend us. With some luck, he will say something about atheist being Americans who, by right, should be treated as such. However, he will not . . . he cannot . . . declare that this includes a right not have a pledge that says, "those who do not support a nation under God are not good Americans" or a motto that says "if you do not trust in God then you are not one of us." He will not be so foolish as to sacrifice the rest of his agenda on this issue.

The press is going to want to attack us or, at best, ignore us.

The reason that they will defend it is because the press is interested in ratings and subscriptions. A person makes money in the news business by telling people what they want to hear, not by questioning that which they have already made their mind up about.

Any major news source that suggests that the 9th Circuit Court case is correct will be branded "liberal media" and can expect to lose a significant share of their business. So, they will tell the people what the people want to hear. Or, at least, they will not do anything that will risk a large number of viewers or readers getting angry at them and going elsewhere for their news.

However, the Press is going to look for some way to "give both sides of the debate," as is their custom. So, they will be looking for people to speak on the issue of removing "under God" from the Pledge and to speak against the national motto. There are not a lot of people who fit that bill. So, if you make yourself visible quickly on the issue, you may be able to get a larger audience than you would otherwise expect. The Press will not be friendly to this view and will try to confirm their audience's biases, but they will allow the view to be presented.

The only place where anybody is going to hear a contrary opinion is from us. And the only way that they will hear it is if we speak up – and speak in a way that it gets through the cultural bubble that people build around themselves. They will not hear us if we mumble among ourselves about how the court is right and the people who criticize it are wrong. They will only hear us if we present our view to them.

Here are some options – some of them difficult, some easy.

(1) Write to whatever secular organization you belong to and ask the leadership what they plan to do once this decision is released. If they have any type of advertisement or activist campaign planned, ask how you can contribute to it.

(2) Write a 600-word essay explaining why it is wrong to have “under God” in the pledge of allegiance and be prepared to submit it as a guest editorial the instant the news of the decision hits the airwaves.

(3) Prepare a video for YouTube and Google that explains why it is wrong to have “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance.

(4) Prepare to attend an event that typically begins with the Pledge of Allegiance – such as a town hall meeting – where public input is permitted, and prepare to speak on the discriminatory nature of the government involving itself in a pledge of allegiance to a nation "under God" or posting a sign that says "In God We Trust."

(5) Prepare to go to a meeting where the Pledge of Allegiance is a part of the ritual, where the public typically is not invited to attend, and hand out a leaflet that explains how it is prejudicial and discriminatory for the government to have its citizens pledge to view Americans who do not support a nation "under God" as anti-American.

(6) At the risk of sounding self-serving . . . have a few copies of the book I wrote and self-published called "A Perspective on the Pledge" handy to hand out to anybody who might actually take the time to read it.

(7) Prepare and practice what you are going to say to family, friends, c-workers, and fellow club or organization members in opposition to "under God" in the pledge. Practice it, rehearse it, make yourself comfortable with it that you will not be intimidated into silence when the topic comes up in conversation, as it certainly will.

(8) Get ready to enter online forum discussions and to respond with comments to news articles on the subject.

(9) Do what the people involved in the Atheist Bus campaigns in England and now Australia have done – figure out what you need to do to advertise in your region on radio and television, create an advertisement, and start collecting money for it.

(10) Show up and talk to your legislative leaders at any public location they make available. Do not send them a letter that a staff reader will read and delete or throw out. Speak out, in public, where you have an audience, and back them into a moral corner.

"Candidate, what would you say if somebody proposed putting a sign up in the legislative chambers that said that Jews are not true Americans, or that 'If you are a Muslim, than we don’t think you belong with us.'?"

"Candidate, what would you say to a proposal to teach children that if somebody is a Jew than that person is no better than a rebel, a tyrant, or a perpetrator of injustice?"

By the way, I have to add, it makes no sense to simply repeat arguments that have failed to persuade people for the past 50 years. Repeating a failure over and over again in the hopes that it will magically become a success is irrational.

If you say that "under God" should not be in the Pledge because it violates the doctrine of separation of church and state, history shows that you might as well be talking to the wind.

You are going to have to go back a step and explain why separation of church and state is a good idea. The reason people put 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance was to create a country where the bulk of the country learned at a young age – learned at an emotional level, not at the level of reason – that not supporting a nation 'under God' is anti-American.

It has succeeded. That is where we are now. Pretending that we live in a country where the separation of church and state still has value and where "atheism" is not considered simply an alternate spelling of "anti-Americanism" is as foolish as thinking that we live in a world with angels and ghosts.

Yet, in spite of the fact that the government's campaign of anti-atheist propaganda has substantially succeeded. They have created a country in which a substantial portion of the population believes on a gut emotional level that "those who do not support a nation under God are as anti-American as those who support rebellion, tyranny, and injustice for all" and "those who do not trust in God are not one of us."

Yet, it is still the case that most people also harbor lingering traces of respect for fairness and justice. So, it is up to us to get people to face the cognitive dissonance of, "How can you call yourself a fair and just person when you are willing to embrace practices that treat others unfairly and unjustly?"

If we do not say anything, then nothing will be said. And if the bulk of the population hears what sounds like universal agreement that, of course 'under God' belongs in the pledge and anybody who says otherwise is an anti-American atheist sympathizer (which, of course, is redundant), then this is what they believe. This is what the children will believe – unless and until they are exposed to somebody saying that maybe that view is not right.

Final Thoughts on the Election

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, voting time is here.

Voting for Powell

At the start of the year I had decided that I would not get particularly deep into politics in this election. Throughout the year, when asked who I would vote for, I would answer, “Colin Powell.” In fact, I respect Powell, and would indeed have voted for him if he were running. Powell, as any who follow politics knows, endorsed Obama.

Admittedly, the issue that topped my list of political concerns this year was the makeup of the Supreme Court. On that issue, McCain lost my vote early by saying that he would appoint judges like Roberts and Alito. Effectively, he announced that he would follow President Bush’s policies, giving us more of the same. Still, I could not tell if he was just saying this to win votes, or if he actually meant it. I was willing to give McCain the benefit of the doubt – he would not do anything so potentially destructive.

The Vice Presidential Disaster

Then, McCain decided to prove that I was wrong about him. He picked Alaska Senator Sarah Palin to be his running mate. Palin had all of the worst qualities of George Bush – ignorance, arrogance, devotion to religious fictions about the future, a fondness for theocracy. Only, Palin is worse than Bush on all of these measures.

The prospect of adding 4 years of Palin onto an already disastrous 8 years of Bush meant that remaining neutral with respect to this election was not an option.

In my personal life, I typically follow the principle of avoiding discussion of politics and religion. I even violated that rule.

One of the effects of that is that, around me, when people spoke up they, too, spoke in defense of the Obama ticket and against the McCain ticket. I do not know if there were people in the same company who supported McCain but opted not to speak, or if McCain supporters were not present in the groups I spoke in. However, I am confident that my expressed opinion helped to solidify some people’s opinion in favor of Obama. I am pleased that I made the effort.

My opposition really is not to McCain per se. I consider (considered) McCain to be a wise person. However, I have to hold McCain responsible for the absolutely horrendous decision of putting Palin in line to be president. I had to ask, at that point, if McCain is willing to put the country (and the world) at that much risk, then he has to either be incompetent (which would make him a poor president), or ambivalent about the risk (which would make him a poor president). McCain created this situation. McCain needs to be judged accordingly.

Fortunately for the country (and the world) Palin did a poor job of hiding her ignorance and her incompetence.

Surprisingly, even with her often repeated and significant displays of ineptitude, there are people who still accept the prospect of her being President. She still draws bigger crows than McCain himself, and those crowds are filled with energetic and enthusiastic supporters.

Supporters of what?

What propositions would be true in a state of affairs in which Palin is president that would fulfill the desires of those people? How could they possibly think that this is a good idea?

“She is like us,” they say.

To anybody who says that . . . okay, imagine that you woke up tomorrow morning as President of the United States. Do you think that you could handle the job?

The idea that Palin should be president because she is “like me” to the person who makes such a claim speaks to an abhorrent level of arrogance and hubris – far above what we would find in a morally decent human being.

This is equivalent to thinking that one is qualified to perform brain surgery on a child because one watched a documentary on the subject on Discovery-Health a few months ago.

The arrogant people in this case are not just putting their own well-being at risk. They are willing to bet the well-being of the whole planet on the bet that, “I could do a better job in that position than anybody else – so much so that a person who is like me is the best candidate for the job.”

There are those of us who hold to a different set of standards when it comes to performing complex tasks. It is the standard of competence. If I need somebody to perform brain surgery on my child, I do not think that I am so highly qualified to do the job that I would pick the surgeon who is most like me. Rather, I would pick the surgeon with the best understanding of pediatric brain surgery – with knowledge, training, and skills that I do not have and that I am not in the process of acquiring.

If I had some property and sought to build a multi-story office complex there, I would not assume that I was the most competent engineer on the planet and seek the engineer that is most like me. I would seek the engineer who showed competence in engineering to do the job. – one who is very much not like me in those respects relevant to engineering a building.

By the way, competence does not imply experience. There are people who, unfortunately, get a great deal of experience doing something they are not very good at. They, in fact, get to demonstrate their lack of skill over and over again. The fact that Bush has 8 years of experience being President is not a mark in his favor. In those 8 years he has proved his incompetence – proved that the job is best handed over to somebody with less experience but a greater ability to do a decent job.

Experience does count, but mostly because it gives us evidence of competence or incompetence, not because it has value in its own right. Experience has given us even more evidence than we had 8 years ago of Bush’s incompetence. Hopefully, experience will give us 4 years from now evidence of Obama’s competence.

However, we have found some evidence of each candidate’s ability to organize and to lead people in the ways they ran their campaigns. On this measure, Obama has done a significantly better job of uniting people, motivating people, and organizing people than McCain has done. Perhaps we can expect that president Obama will also do a better job of uniting, motivating, and organizing a country than president McCain would have done.

Conclusion

I would like to think that Palin’s nomination produced one unexpected reaction for John McCain. She might have invigorated the ignorant theocrats of the Republican Party. However, I hope that I was not the only one with a respect for intelligence and reason in the white house who decided that enough was absolutely enough. We could not afford another 4 years of Bush Plus.

Seeing these results, it would be nice if the republicans adopted the view that this type of nomination was political suicide, and decided to adopt a new set of standards that does not include the view that foolishness and ignorance is a virtue.

Proposition 8: The Raising of Children

A good person has an aversion to doing harm to others. He may still do harm, if good reason can be provided to show that it is necessary. However, the fact that he is being asked to do harm means that he will not readily accept those reasons. He will not trust the evidence behind those reasons, and will have to be compelled to accept it only as “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.” Because, as long as there is reason to doubt, the good person will do no harm to others.

The evil person has such an affection for doing harm that he grasps whatever reason might be offered to him that will cloak the harm in an illusion of legitimacy. The harm has such value to him that you can see him celebrating any piece of news that suggests that the harm might actually serve a purpose, and he looks at options that make the harm unnecessary with sadness and regret.

The claim that legalized gay marriage might have some adverse effect on the raising of children allows us to determine which people fit in the first category and which fit into the second.

There is absolutely no evidence to support this claim.

Therefore, the good person will dismiss it unless and until compelling evidence is brought to him that it must be the case, and that there is no way to secure the well-being of children without other than to inflict (regrettable but necessary) harm on others.

Where the evil person will embrace this claim, even though there is nothing to back it up, because it gives them a veneer of legitimacy for actions that are harmful to others. They want it to be true and because, to them, it would be such a great world if it were true, they accept it. They embrace it. “Now, we may go ahead with that which is harmful to others. What a relief!”

“The well-being of children” was brought up to give prohibitions on interracial marriage an illusion of legitimacy. Those poor little half-breed children, not knowing if they were fully white or fully black, finding no acceptance in either community, they are left alone and abused. It is best not to have poor little half-breed children by simply prohibiting interracial relationships.

At that time, too, there were good people with an aversion to doing harm to others who would be reluctant to accept this claim. They had an aversion to the state interfering in person decisions on who to marry. That aversion drove them to distrust these types of claims unless and until compelling evidence were brought in to support it, and that evidence blocked all other alternatives except that which compelled harm.

Then there were the bigots. Those people had such an aversion to interracial marriage that they sought for and clung to any excuse that would give their desire to prohibit such unions an illusion of legitimacy. “Now we may go ahead with that which is harmful to others. What a relief!”

These words may sound harsh. However, I want to remind the reader of what I wrote a short while ago about how bigotry infects the mind, causing otherwise decent people to do harm to others without any regret – even, to celebrate the harms that they inflict on others.

A lot of people who embraced the idea that there was something wrong with interracial marriage were otherwise good people. They were, in other areas of their lives, heroic people – role models – the type of person that a kid could look up to. Unfortunately, they grew up in a culture that gave them a moral blind spot. In this one area they were taught to be bigots, to value that which was harmful to others, to hunt for anything that makes that harm appear legitimate, and to find relief and joy in arguments that allowed them to say, “Alas, the harm we do may continue.”

We do have the option of morally forgiving these people – of saying that their culture put these ideas in their head and, thus, they are not responsible.

However, the idea of moral responsibility is intimately tied to that which people generally have reason to promote through praise and reward, and have reason to inhibit through condemnation and punishment.

Clearly, one of the things we have reason to inhibit through condemnation is this act of embracing and celebrating weak excuses whose only value is to give actions harmful to others an illusion of legitimacy. So, we have reason to inhibit through condemnation and punishment those who embrace an argument that the welfare of children will be at risk – when there is absolutely nothing to support such a claim – for no reason other than that it gives the illusion of legitimacy to valued actions harmful to others.

I continue to argue for the right to freedom of speech (among other things). The words that people utter that say that behavior harmful to homosexuals is justified because of concern for how children are raised may only be met with words and private actions. However, words of condemnation are a perfectly legitimate response to these types of excuses and rationalizations.

Words of moral condemnation are justified.

Because our society is made when we are surrounded by neighbors who have an aversion to doing harm and who demand proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And our society is made worse off when we are surrounded by people who so value things harmful to others that they grasp onto any excuse that gives the harm a veneer of legitimacy no matter how poorly supported.

Indeed, how would you like to go to trial under a set of principles that say, “I want you to value the harm that the defendant will suffer so greatly that you will accept any and all evidence that he is guilty, no matter how flimsy, and no matter how poorly supported?”

For many sitting in judgment of homosexual marriage, this is what they are doing. This accusation, though harsh, is adequately proved by the fact that they so eagerly embrace and celebrate any suggestion that allowing homosexual marriage might adversely affect how others raise their children in ways detrimental to those children.

Finally, we must not forget, while we are sitting here in our concern for the welfare of children, that many of those children will be gay. So, we cannot make any sense at all about how our actions affect the welfare and future of children without including a chapter on how our actions would affect the welfare and the future of gay children.

Of course, a segment of the population who has learned to cherish that which is harmful to their interests will be morally blind to this fact. They will be inclinded to think that all children are straight - that there are no gay children with a welfare and a future to consider. Again, this is one more sign of how a culture can teach a group of otherwise good people to ignore the interests of others - even to cherish the thwarting of those intersts.

CA Proposition 8: The Meaning of Marriage

Proposition 8: On the Definitions of Marriage and Planet

Whenever a person embraces a patently absurd argument, we have a window through which we can get a look at their moral character. If the reason that they accept the argument has nothing to do with its soundness or strength, then there must be something else motivating the agent's acceptance. Typically, it is the agent’s desires. The agent believes what he wants to believe. A look at an agent’s desires is a look at his moral character.

One absurd argument put forth in defense of California's Proposition 8 is that its defenders merely wish to preserve the traditional definition of marriage – a definition that has been accepted throughout history. It has nothing to do with hating homosexuals or the issue of rights. It's all about the meaning of a word. There certainly cannot be anything immoral with being devoted to preserving the definition of a word. It is a trivial thing, really.

Yet, the proponents of Proposition 8 seem to get quite worked up about this 'trivial thing'. In fact, the amount of energy that they put into defending this definition is proof enough that the issue is not trivial – that it is not merely concerned with the definition of a word. Those who claim it is are lying. Those who believe that it is are lying to themselves.

Let us look at another word whose definition has been put up for revision recently – the definition of the word 'planet'. The International Astronomical Union voted last year to redefine the word 'planet' in such a way that Pluto is now excluded. That has gotten quite a few people upset – they seem to have an affection for the idea that Pluto remains a planet.

There was even a move, ironically enough, to amend the Constitution in California to protect the original meaning of the word – to pass an amendment that says that the term 'planet' shall be defined in such a way that Pluto is still a planet.

However, people ultimately decided that amending California's constitution to protect the definition of 'planet' was absurd. This is not the type of thing that should go into a constitution. In fact, some people feared that an attempt in California to preserve and protect the definition of 'planet' through a constitutional amendment would make the state the laughing stock of the world. I do not know if others would have found such an amendment laughable, but they should.

Language is a tool and, like all tools, it should be designed to serve the purposes for which that tool will be used. As an invention, languages change over time . . . they typically improve over time, to reflect our better knowledge and understanding of the world in which we live.

The word 'atom' originally meant 'without parts'. It was once thought that the fundamental particles of any element – gold, copper, carbon – could not be divided into smaller parts. So, they were literally named, 'things without parts' or 'a – toms' (without – parts).

Only, as our understanding of the world improved, scientists began to realize that the thing they had been calling atoms did have parts – electrons, neutrons, and protons. So, over time, they changed the definition of 'atom'. It ceased to mean “thing without parts” and came to refer to these fundamental units of any element.

The word 'malaria' originally meant 'bad air'. It was once thought that bad air made people sick. When a person who lived near a swamp got sick, it was said that they got 'bad-air disease' or 'mal-aria'. However, as our understanding of the world grew we came to realize that bad-air disease happens to be transmitted by mosquitoes, which happen to thrive in swamps, which happen to produce foul-smelling gasses. The disease was not caused by the foul smelling gasses, it was caused by a bacteria. So, the definition of 'malaria' changed from 'bad air' to the sickness spread by these mosquitoes that once was thought to have been caused by bad air.

Today, the term 'planet' is up for revision.

Actually, the term 'planet' originally meant 'wandering star'. It was once thought that the stars themselves were fixed in the sky – permanent and unchanging – except for five 'stars' that moved across the sky over time - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Further knowledge revealed that they were big round things much like Earth orbiting the sun, so the meaning of the term 'planet' changed. And we discovered a few more – Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.

Then scientists started to learn that Pluto-sized things might be quite common, and had more in common with smaller rocks floating around outside of the orbit of Neptune than the big rocks circling closer to the sun. Pluto had more in common with those outer solar system objects than planets. So, the decision was made to agree to a new definition of Planet. Pluto came to be excluded.

The change in the definition of 'marriage' is no less of a matter of our improved understanding of the world than these other changes have been. We know that some people acquire a brain structure that causes them to form bonds of affection similar to what most of us feel towards members of the opposite sex, with members of the same sex. Changing the definition of 'marriage' to include same-sex relationships is no different than changing the definition of 'planet' to exclude Pluto.

It cannot be the case that the only thing that is important in Proposition 8 is preserving the definition of a word. Preserving the definition of a word has never been that important before. Thus, as I wrote at the start of this essay, those people who claim that their support for Proposition 8 is motivated merely by a desire to preserve the traditional meaning of a word are lying.

Furthermore, if an agent actually believes that he is supporting Proposition 8 because of a desire to preserve the meaning of a term, then he is lying to himself. It takes only a moment of reflection to realize that “If the real reason for supporting Proposition 8 were to merely preserve the meaning of a term, I would be supporting millions of other initiatives as well, because words change meaning all the time.”

The main point, however, is not that this 'definition of marriage' argument is such a poor argument. Others have made this point, and they tend to stop here. My point, however, is that there is a further implication.

Desires influence what a person believes. A person who did not want to believe that the harm inflicted on others is justified may be driven by that desire to reject a good argument – but he will be inclined to reject arguments that others are to be harmed, even when there is good reason to do so. He will greet such an argument with, “No. There must be some mistake. It cannot be the case that this harm done to others is justified. Go over the argument again. Make sure that it makes sense.”

If a person, on the other hand, embraces a poor argument merely because it justified actions harmful to others, then we do not have a person who is saying, "I do not want these people to be harmed, so you must prove that the harm is justified." You have a person saying, "I want these people to be harmed so badly, that I will grasp at even the most senseless argument as long as it claims to suggest that I can go ahead and do the harm that I want to see done."

When people embrace a foolish argument that justifies harm to others, the problem is not just the fact that they made a mistake. There is a further problem seated in their moral character if they are the type of person who not only cannot see that mistake, but does not want to see it.

Senator Dole's New Anti-Atheist Advertisement

If you have any interest in running for public office, then stay away from this blog.

Seriously, quit reading, put some type of internet block on this site so that you might not accidentally find yourself here, and eliminate all traces of having visited this blog from your computers.

After all, palling around with somebody who self-identifies as an atheist will render you unfit for public office.

Senator Elizabeth Dole has released a new advertisement that attempts to clarify the fact that the problem with her opponent, Kay Hagan, is that she accepted an invitation to a fundraising gathering hosted by an atheist. (See The Hill Dole attacks Democrat with second 'Godless' ad

This ad ends with the question, If Godless Americans threw a party in your honor, would you go?

This is pretty much a universal political message - no politician may meet with or associate with atheists. No politician is permitted to be somebody that an atheist like myself can respect or seek to honor.

Hagan's political crime is not that she is an atheist (a horrendous accusation that makes the accuser the lowest of all low-life scum to occupy the planet). Hagan’s problem is that she attended a gathering at an atheist’s home and accepted money from an atheist.

Which, apparently, is comparable to visiting the home of a KKK leader, an official from the American Nazi Party, or Al Qaeda representative.

If attending a dinner hosted by an atheist is comparable to these things, we can only conclude that browsing internet sites such as "Atheist Ethicist" is comparable to browsing white supremacist and Nazi Party web sites. If that information were to hit the presses, you can bet your political career would be over.

So, I advise you that if you have any political aspirations, it is no longer sufficient that you are not an atheist yourself. You cannot be caught communicating with atheists in any way. Atheists are political lepers – unclean and dangerous things that one cannot even be in the same room with and not be infected by a fatal political contagion.

A few days ago, I wrote a posting suggesting that it would be foolish to expect Obama to be a friend to secular values. Many of the comments to that blog suggested that people did not interpret my posting correctly. They thought that I had written that Obama did not share secular values or did not think of them as worth protecting.

However, that is not what I wrote. I wrote that if Obama was smart he would not protect secular values because doing so would put the whole rest of his political agenda at risk. Obama will need to decide which ground he wants to stand and hold, and which ground he might need to give up because it is strategically indefensible.

Another way of saying the same thing is that I hope that Obama is willing to sacrifice secular values to the wolves because if he does not, then the Republicans are going to sweep back into power by turning America’s anti-atheist bigotry against him – a bigotry that has more than enough power behind it to turn the tide of elections unless the target does out of his way to prove that he is as bigoted, if not more so, than his accusers.

This is simply a fact of American political life.

If Obama is smart, he knows that the Republicans would love a fight over secular values, and they would love to have it early in Obama's administration. As soon as this fight erupts, Obama is going to have to make a choice between sacrificing secular values so that he can focus on other concerns, or suffer such a political kneecapping on the part of anti-atheist bigots so as to be rendered politically impotent.

Such an event would parallel what happened to Bill Clinton after his election in 1992. Clinton was forced to discuss the issue of gays in the military. The Republicans were able to use this issue to stage such a powerful comeback that they were able to capture control of the House and Senate – and keep control through the next ten years.

We even have a readily made issue that the Republicans in an excellent position to exploit to their political advantage. Sooner or later the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will have to release its decision on whether it judges "under God" in the Pledge and "In God We Trust" as the national motto to be violations of the Constitution. Chances are that that the opinion will read that "under God" at least is a violation of the Constitution. This will then be the foundation for a Republican return to power – the tool they will use to kneecap the Obama presidency and shatter his approval ratings.

If Obama is smart and he wants to use his political capital to accomplish things in the area of economic reform, then he will have to decide not to invest political capital in a fight that is almost certainly doomed to fail anyway.

To disarm the Republican attempt to base a return to power on the promise of theocracy, Obama will need to condemn the 9th Circuit Court opinion (assuming the decision goes as I have suggested) in no uncertain terms, promise to put the whole weight of the Federal Government into the fight to overturn this decision, and promise to make the protection of "under God" a litmus test for any Supreme Court justices he might have the opportunity to appoint.

The Republicans, then, sufficiently disarmed, will simply have less power to interfere with Obama's other goals, while Obama preserves his popularity and, with this, his ability to throw his political weight around.

The fight against anti-atheist bigotry has to be our fight. The idea that we can hide behind politicians and judges forever while they do the dirty work (and pay the political price) for protecting us – while we do nothing in our own defense is as absurd as the belief that the Earth is only 6000 years old. It is a willful denial of political reality.

Even with this, there is one last question that needs to be answered.

Maybe secular values do not matter. Maybe a social prohibition (even if there is no actual legal statute) against atheists from holding political power or positions of public trust is actually . . . if not a good thing . . . at least trivially unimportant.

As for me, I think that our refusal to challenge anti-atheist bigotry is one of the major contributing factors behind the fact that we have suffered for eight years under President George Bush. Our refusal to fight this fight is what prevents children from learning about evolution, and prevents medical research companies and laboratories from studying medical stem cell research. We are the ones who are keeping homosexuals from enjoying the benefits of marriage, and we are the ones who are making sure that government policy decisions are based on myth and superstition rather than science and reason.

Because we do not do anything to challenge the idea that the atheist – the person who has no faith – is the lowest form of life in the country, comparable to the KKK member, Nazi Party leader, the traitor, the tyrant, the defender of injustice for all.

In fact, the evidence suggests that atheists are even lower than those who belong to these other groups. Kay Hagan merely goes to a meeting where somebody who does not support a nation "under God" is present and her entire political career is threatened. Sarah Palin is married to somebody who was a member of an organization where the idea of a nation “indivisible” was openly challenged – a secessionist party and she is still the model Vice President drawing huge crowds wherever she goes because she is the "True American."

We keep hiding behind other people – judges, Kay Hagan, Barak Obama – expecting them to do our work for us (so that we can get by with doing nothing). For a few decades, a number of dedicated judges were willing to do that. The result was the establishment of a new political power that saw to it that those judges were replaced, and that politicians who would support those judges (regardless of political party) would have the power to appoint judges. We have hidden behind others, until those we would hide behind have been removed.

There is nobody left but us.

Proposition 8: Decent People Doing Wrong

In a recent comment to a post on Proposition 8, an anonymous member of the studio audience linked to an article that contained the following quote:

It is apparently inconceivable to many of those who wish to change the definition of marriage that a decent person can want to retain the man-woman definition.

The fact is, I find it very easy to conceive of a case in which a person who is in all other ways a decent person, has adopted an attitude of prejudice towards some group and, as a result, denies them the decent treatment that they are willing to give others.

The way that I conceive it, most segregationists, and most of those who believed that the white race should not interbreed with the black race, were, in many respects, decent people. If you were to meet one in a context where race was not an issue – in an entirely Caucasian community where blacks were simply nowhere to be found – you would be hard pressed to identify any character fault in them at all.

The way that I conceive it, most of the German soldiers during World War II were decent people for the most part. They sought to care for and protect their children, they loved their spouses, they would help a neighbor who was in trouble (as long as the neighbor was not Jewish). They went to church, they donated to charity, and they were good Patriotic Germans who were willing to give their lives for their country.

The way that I conceive it, most West Coast Americans who supported the internment of the Japanese during World War II were, in many respects, decent people. That measure had the support of 80 percent of the population. It is difficult to imagine what California would have been like if those 80 percent did not have any good qualities. When it came to their treatment of other Americans (at least those of non-Japanese descent) there were some extraordinary people among them.

The way that I conceive it, most of those who defended slavery in the early 1800s, and most of those who took up arms and killed or tried to kill Union soldiers in order to protect the institution of slavery, were, in many respects, decent people. They wanted very much to do the right thing and to be good people. They taught their children the importance of being honest and trustworthy and placed great value on individual responsibility.

However, in all of these cases, their culture gave otherwise decent people a moral blind spot. These were not people who recognized that they were doing evil and went ahead and did it anyway. These were people raised with an inability to even recognize the evil that they were doing, where that blindness lead them to do evil that they would not have done if they had known better.

The attitudes that people have in opposition to gay marriage represents exactly the same sort of moral blindness. To them, their actions seem like a good idea – they seem to be something that a good person would support – so they do not suffer even the slightest twinge of conscience as they engage in behavior that, as a matter of fact, and quite independent of their perceptions, does great harm to others for no good reason.

Many of these morally blind people assert that it is a mistake to say that they suffer from hate. “I do not hate gays. I just think that marriage should be between a man and a woman. That’s not the same has hating gays.”

However, moral blindness is not a defect in reason. It is a defect in desire – a defect in emotion. It is a lack of an aversion to doing great harm to certain people, ultimately because one does not see them as entities that deserve the same type of decent respect that real people deserve.

In all of the examples that I listed above – the segregationist, the west coast patriot, the German soldier, the defender of slavery – otherwise decent people were made capable of doing great harm to others because their culture taught them to view those others as something less than full human beings. They were taught to view their victims as a lower form of life, so that, while they remained decent people when it came to their treatment of other persons, they also became morally blind when it came to their evil treatment of these non-persons.

Yet, we cannot strictly say that what these people suffered from was a mere lack of an aversion to do harm to others. I have no particular affection for the tools that I have at home. I certainly do not have any interest in treating them with the type of dignity and respect that I would accord to them if I viewed them as persons. Yet, this does not inspire me to spend millions of dollars or to take up arms or to hire the government to take up arms in my name to inflict great harm on those tools. In fact, insofar as they are useful, I seek to protect and care for those tools.

Homosexual neighbors are still useful as neighbors. If your house was on fire and your child needed rescuing, the homosexual neighbor might be in the best position to save her. Even if one viewed the homosexual neighbor as a mere tool, it is still useful to take care of the tool so that it will remain useful.

However, in the cases I mentioned above, the agents defended doing real-world harm to those they were taught to view as being undeserving of the respect given to persons. This harm cannot be traced back to the fact that it was useful to do this harm. In fact, those who inflicted the harm were generally made worse off as a result of what they did to their neighbors. This desire to do harm was something the agents came to value for its own sake.

When one devotes a great deal of energy to actions that harm others for its own sake – simply to realize the value that one finds in a state where others are harmed – then it is not unreasonable to say that this is ‘hate’. It certainly does not count as “love”, and it would be strange at best to say that somebody putting all of that energy into something harmful to others is suffering from “indifference”. It is, instead, the definition of “indifference” that one simply does not care to work either for or against that particular end. Calling this passionate devotion to realizing a state that is so harmful to the interests of other persons for no good reason “indifference” is about as absurd as calling a person on his honeymoon a “bachelor”.

So, if it is not love, and it is not indifference, then we are running out of options as to what we can call this sentiment that drives these people to work so hard to do so much harm to others.

Some might want to call it religious devotion – since they provide support for their attitudes in scripture.

However, these people need to explain why they are so devoted to enforcing scripture in the case of homosexuality, but ignore it in so many other areas. Why isn’t homosexuality on the ignore list like the charging of interest and working on the Sabbath? Any claim that takes the form “X -> P” (such as “God condemns it in the Bible; therefore, I condemn homosexuality”) can be refuted by examples of “X and not-P” (e.g., God condemns usury and working on the Sabbath, but I do not condemn these things.”.

Religion, in this case, Is being used as a smoke screen to hide a culturally learned bigoted blindness much like the blindness that allowed people to do harm to the interests of women, blacks, and Japanese Americans during World War II.

This is not a religious issue. This is very much a hate issue.

And history tells us that it extremely easy for somebody who is a “decent person” – whole societies filled with people who live the bulk of their lives being as good or better than you and I – can still have a moral blind spot that allows them to do truly horrendous things to others who do not show up on their moral radar.

Kay Hagan: The Slanderous Accusation of Atheism

Apparently, we now have Democratic Senate candidate Kay Hagan’s response to her opponent’s charge that she pals around with atheists.

The North Carolina I was raised in would NEVER condone this kind of personal slander.

(See: American Chronicle, Dole Ad Attacking Hagan Christian Faith Called Fabricated, Pathetic)

In short, Hagan responded by saying that the accusation of palling around with atheist is so horrendous and awful that anybody who makes such an accusation (without proof) is guilty of slander - a wrong serious enough to be taken to court.

At their core, Americans aren´t Democrat or Republican, red or blue – they´re Americans, plain and simple. We ALL love our country, and we all value the role of faith in American life. Shame on anyone who says differently.

Consider reading Hagan's prepared statement, which can be found in the link above, and imagine Democratic Presidential Candidate Barak Obama giving the same speech in response to accusation that he is a Muslim. Imagine what such a statement would say about attitudes towards Muslims.

Hagan isn't making the claim that atheists are Americans too and have a right to present their views to perspective political candidates. She is not saying that the fault of Dole's advertisement is that Dole is lying and promoting bigotry and hatred. She, in effect, endorsed the hate and answered, "How dare you accuse me of not being just as bigoted against atheists as you are! You take that back!"

She is not making an ordinary political charge of wrongdoing, like the wrong of accusing Democratic President Obama of palling around with (domestic) terrorists. This is far, far worse. The accusation of palling around with atheists is, according to Hagan, more like the accusation that one molests children – something that deserves a response that is just as powerful as the accusation itself.

Why would she say something like this?

My guess is that the pollsters told her that Elizabeth Dole's accusations will be successful unless she made a forceful response such as this. Atheists are so hated that the people of North Carolina will certainly refuse to vote into office anybody who can be successfully labeled as a "friend of atheists"

Consequently, Hagen did not have the option of saying, "There is nothing wrong with meeting with atheists." That would be political suicide. The only option she had available was to treat the accusation of meeting with atheists to be an order of magnitude worse than an accusation of meeting with terrorists. In order to preserve her chance of winning the election, she opted to go before the cameras and give support to atheist bigotry by reinforcing the message that talking to atheists is one of the worst possible things a political candidate can do.

At least the people of North Carolina (and, in fact, the people across the nation) are getting the same message from this race. At least both Hagan and her Republican opponent and accuser Senator Elizabeth Dole are spending their campaign money promoting a common set of values – the view that atheists are worse than the lowest form of criminals on the political landscape.

I have written in past posts that it is unreasonable to expect people to form their beliefs entirely by appeals to reason – they do not have the time. Instead, it is human nature – part of the brain's programming – to look for (admittedly fallible) shortcuts that do not guarantee the truth of the conclusions, but are reliable enough to allow the agent to get by.

One of those shortcuts is to look at society and seek beliefs that are held almost without question by everybody. Even though people can be in near universal agreement on something that is mistaken, they still get buy. A vast majority of the beliefs a society holds in common are true, and good enough.

The message coming out of North Carolina is that atheists are such a despicable group of people that nobody – particularly nobody running for public office – should be caught in the same room as one.

One of the things that I have now learned about the event in which Hagan allegedly met with atheists is that this was a meeting among several advocates, one of which happened to be a member of the Godless Americans Political Action Committee. She did not go to this event specifically to meet with atheists. She went to a meeting in which one of the participants happened to have been an atheist.

You can well bet that, with this article now in the news, future politicians will be much more careful. If somebody wants to host any new events like the one that Hagan attended are going to be more careful about vetting the list of attendees, and to make sure that nobody associated with anything like a Godless American Political Action Committee is in the room. Failure to do so could cost the candidate the election.

Even if Hagan wins this election (particularly given the way that she has decided to respond to the accusation of meeting with atheists) the lesson will still be learned that one must exclude atheists from all future events.

At the time that the news first broke that Dole was going to appeal to anti-atheist bigotry, many of those who noted that fact decided to respond by contributing to the Hagan campaign. As it turns out, those people ended up funding a front page news campaign to cover North Carolina in specific, and ultimately the country, with a major news story that the accusation of atheism, or the accusation of meeting with atheists, is slanderous. This is the message that those contributions have ultimately funded.

Which brings me to a question that I have asked a couple of times now in recent posts.

Are you tired yet of being used as a club for attacking the very things that you claim to value?

Addendum

Here is an editorial that appears in the Greensboro, North Carolina paper, News-Record: Dole's attack on Hagan's faith drives heated campaign lower

Dole's ad forced the political debate into the realm of religious beliefs. It exploits what now looks like a campaign misstep by Hagan -- attending a Boston fundraiser at the home of atheist activist Woody Kaplan, a founder of Godless Americans.

Note that it is now being counted as a "misstep" for a candidate for public office to attend a function in which a known atheist is present.

It is not just a misstep to go to a function hosted by atheists or to talk to atheists directly. It is a misstep to go to a political event in which one or more promiment atheists has also been invited to attend - unless the atheist is there is an adversarial role (e.g., a debate opponent perhaps).

Republican Reform

As the election draws near, and it looks increasingly like the Republican Party is in a world of political trouble, I have read some analysis of what the Republicans might do to increase their political power.

Unfortunately, these analyses have all drawn upon the assumption that the only thing that matters is winning elections – being politically successful. I have read very few who have given consideration to the question of the price of that success.

On this standard, we can view Hitler’s campaign to blame all of Germany’s problems on the Jews and to rouse up an “us’ versus “them” hatred of anything not sufficiently ‘German’ would have counted as effective. Hitler, after all, was elected and was a very popular leader for a period of time, because Hitler figured out how to be effective in getting votes and winning popular support.

However, one of the lessons we hopefully have learned from that era is that “effective” (in securing votes) is not the same thing as “right”.

I wonder how many people are now turning up their noses to the Republican Party because they have discovered what type of people they have been hanging around with.

One of the relatively unique aspects of this campaign, or so it appears to me, is a new type of attack campaign that does not target the opposing candidate, but that targets the people who support the opposing candidate.

We have seen or heard:

(1) Audience members at McCain and Palin events shouting death threats or racial slurs at campaigns.

(2) A man who walked around with a stuffed monkey on which he had placed an “Obama” bumper sticker.

(3) Interviews with people who were walking up to attend a McCain or Palin rally – or simply video of them walking by Obama supporters..

(4) A McCain supporter falsely claiming to have been attacked by a big black man who forced her to the ground and carved the letter “B” on her cheek.

(5) A pair of white supremacists recently arrested for planning to kill dozens of black people, including Obama.

(6) The widespread popularity of emails making false claims that Obama is a Muslim and that he does not say the Pledge of Allegiance as well as other lies too readily believed merely because people want to believe them. (And what type of person is so eager to believe and to pass along such lies?)

I think that this is a good thing. I have argued from the first days of this blog that it is not enough to hold Bush morally responsible for his own failings. It is also necessary to hold the Bush supporters responsible for their decisions. When a candidate deprives the people of basic civil rights, he has done something immoral. However, the people who cheer and support him are at the very least accomplices to that immorality. They have shown themselves to be as much a threat to the freedoms whose destruction they cheer as are the candidates who actually implement that destruction.

Too often we condemn the symptom of some public prejudice or widespread evil without condemning the source itself – the political or social base that has given that prejudice and widespread evil political life.

So, I am very much pleased to see so much effort into recording images of Republican supporters and saying to other Republicans, “These are the types of people you associate with. These are the types of people you call ‘friends’ and allies’. Do you really want to be associated with these types of people?”

Those same good Republicans, while they look around and ask these questions, they should notice that the Party leadership – the people who are up on the stage, who are writing and delivering the speeches and creating the advertisements, do not seem to be on the side of decent Republicans who abhor these practices. Instead, the Republican leadership has tended to hover between silent acceptance of this type of behavior, to subtle encouragement through the careful use of selected rhetoric – rhetoric that seems to say, “You know, those people are right, but I can’t actually say that in so many words.”

It is time for the good Republicans to see what they can do to take control of the Republican party and drive out those who should not find a home in any political party, and to create a better moral culture within their own party. They need to make it a party that decent people can be proud to be a member of, where decent people do not have to be ashamed of the associations they are drawn into.

Asymetric Beliefs about Good, Evil, and Religion

I made a response to a comment to my previous blog that I think deserves more development.

I argued that California’s Proposition 8, which would ban homosexual marriage, provided an example of people claiming to do harm to others because God told them to. Then, I was asked to look into the prospect that an atheist can also oppose Proposition 8, and be opposed to gay marriage completely. The answer points to an asymmetry in the way some atheists look at the relationship between morality and religion.

On the one hand, we hear that religion is the source of a lot of evil. From this, people draw the conclusion that if get rid of religion, we can get rid of this source of a great deal of evil.

On the other hand, we are told that religion is not the source of much good. The impulse to do good comes from another source (typically, I hear it argued, from our genes). Atheists also have access to this ‘other source’ of good, so it is not only possible but common that a person can be good without religion. If we get rid of religion, this will leave the amount of goodness in the world untouched

I do not see any basis for this asymmetry other than the fact that it has emotional appeal for somebody who already hates religion and is looking for an excuse to attack it.

The fact of the matter is that both good and evil come from other sources. Kindness, charity, parental affection, all come from other sources. Then they get written into the religion. Atheists have the same access to this source of kindness, charity, and parental affection as theists have, and are capable of being just as good as theists.

Similarly, hatred, bigotry, the disposition to divide the world into “we” and “they” and to attack ‘they’ groups violently also come from another source. They then get written into the religion. Atheists have the same access to these sources of hatred, bigory, and injustice as the theists have, and are capable of being just as evil as theists.

The point is easy enough to prove. Everything in religion is made up. It was created by humans from “another source” and then written into the religion. The forces that caused people to select “this religion” or “that religion” have no divine origin. They are natural human processes – at much at work in the brains of the atheist as in the brains of theists.

Otherwise, this evil would not have been invented and, as such, would never have found its way into scripture. It had to come from somewhere, and none of it – none of the good and none of the evil – ever came from God. It all came from some other source.

Which means that you can’t fight evil by fighting religion. The other source of evil will still exist, and will still drive evil, even without religion – just as it will continue to drive good, even without religion.

Having said this, one of the roles that religion plays in morality is as a way of rationalizing unjustifiable actions. It provides a way of giving an illusion of legitimacy to actions that cannot be justified outside of an appeal to religion.

This is different from saying that evil comes from religion. The evil does not come from religion – that evil comes from someplace else. However, insofar as these dispositions are evil, they seek some form of justification. An appeal to religion is a particularly useful form of justification (at least within our current culture) because an assertion that “God wants this” is not subject to any further proof or justification. We are supposed to take the word of the person who advocates something harmful on faith – without asking too many questions – without, in fact, asking any questions at all.

This role of giving something the appearance of legitimacy actually applies to good and evil both. Depending on the moral character of the person who is inventing any given religion, that person will often use religion to give legitimacy to anything he seeks to promote – regardless of whether he promotes good or evil. Good and evil people both can and do make appeals to religion as a way of convincing people that what they want is what God wants. The good person just happens to want what is right (and, consequently, so does his god). The evil person wants that which is wrong (and, consequently, so does his god).

However, only the evil person needs religion.

The good person can use the fact that he is promoting something that people generally have reason to promote to demonstrate the legitimacy of his morality outside of religion. The good person can defend honesty, charity, kindness, responsibility, liberty, and the like without appeal to religion. He may choose not to. He may not actually believe that he can do this. However, he can. The requirement for something to be good is that it be something that can be justified by appeal to the reasons that people have for promoting it, which does not depend on any religion.

The evil person, on the other hand, has no legitimate place to turn to justify what he seeks to promote. He needs the illusion of legitimacy, and religion provides a very useful illusion. Once he assigns his prejudice to religion, he can then stop anybody from asking any further questions about the legitimacy of his moral claims. He only needs to say, “God wants it this way; and that is something you must accept on faith, without asking any questions.”

It is a very useful way of arguing, if you can only get your audience to go along with it – to claim that the harms that others will suffer as a result of adopting the speaker’s moral attitudes needs no justification or defense – that it is to be taken on faith.

Yet, it is still the case that these prejudices and unjustified moral attitudes do not come from religion or god. Prejudices cause people to believe absurd things and to think them profound. Some people accept the absurdities of religion. Some people accept blatant contradictions like thinking that evil must come from religion and be reduced by reducing religion, while good must come from some other source and can live without religion.