The Root Of Conservative Action: Prejudice

One of my most frequently-trotted-out attacks against conservatives is that they rarely understand their own history. They rarely understand that what they are arguing for today is the ideological legacy of maniacs who have come before them, the same maniacs who argued for things that no rational conservative would try to argue today for fear of appearing too much of a maniac. Thank God we have the distinctly irrational Tea Party to be used as an example.

For example, the early anti-abortion movement never had anything to do with protecting babies. Children and women were still frequently seen as, more or less, the property of the husband who could do with them as he pleased. You can still see this logic in much modern religious thought where the man is the absolute head of the household. The classic anti-abortion movement thus avoided the sticky problems that crusaders today have, such as all of the hilarious ramifications that come from declaring that the "person" is created at the point of insemination.

Back then, stopping abortions was all about stopping women from having control. The crusaders then didn't hide this. They wrote about it. They didn't rail against the immorality of killing babies. They railed against the immorality of women freely having sex without the "punishment" of children.

The anti-abortion movement is, and always has been, about misogyny.

But what about the large, modern anti-abortion movement? Where did it come from, and how did it achieve a position on the national stage?

Politico has an excellent article showing how, much like many social problems we face, the modern anti-abortion movement was rooted in something totally different: racism.

As the author, historian Randall Ballmer, says:

[T]he abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism.

Also of interest is a good example of how fanaticism can propagate and transmogrify, having gravely deleterious effects on society, all the while trying to claim no connection to its past. It also just gives us another reason to hate Reagan.

The Bob Jones University case merits a postscript. When the school’s appeal finally reached the Supreme Court in 1982, the Reagan administration announced that it planned to argue in defense of Bob Jones University and its racial policies. A public outcry forced the administration to reconsider; Reagan backpedaled by saying that the legislature should determine such matters, not the courts. The Supreme Court’s decision in the case, handed down on May 24, 1983, ruled against Bob Jones University in an 8-to-1 decision. Three years later Reagan elevated the sole dissenter, William Rehnquist, to chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Src: The Real Origins of the Religious Right at Politico.com

Texas Needs More People Like This

Texas has an image problem. Not as bad as, say, Mississippi or Alabama, but bad. A lot of it probably has to do with their sheer size and visibility. Texas is massive, politically influential, wealthy, and oil-rich.

Thus, when they do something stupid, everyone knows about it. For someone not living in Texas, it's very hard to remember that that stupidity is a product of only a subsection of the population.

Obviously, we have Austin, which is famous for being "weird," as they like to call themselves. But I, and most of the people that I know, consider Austin as almost another state. That's not good. It is part of Texas.

Similarly, Texas has large numbers of intelligent, tolerant people. They may currently be out-shouted by the maniacs, but they are no less a part of the state. Texas needs more visible people like this to help drive that point home. It might help their tourist industry.

Why Do We Regulate Pain Killers But Not Antibiotics?

Two points: I just finished watching the PBS|Frontline documentary Chasing The Nightmare Bacteria; I also just read about a massive study showing that access to pain killers is poor. You can watch the documentary below.

The takeaway from the documentary is that we are charging headlong into a massive, global, health crisis the likes of which the post-war era has not seen. We are overusing antibiotics in our food supply, and even with that not taken into account, fifty-percent of antibiotics are unnecessary. We should be regulating antibiotics like crazy, and yet we aren't.

What are we regulating? Pain killers. The study to which I linked above says that the regulations applied to pain killers had good intentions, but now they are causing harm.

No. They never had good intentions, and the intentions that we actually had all but guaranteed the negative outcomes that we now face.

We regulated pain killing drugs because they are "fun" drugs. Any and all fun drugs are bad, because fun is bad. Semi-legal fun drugs are even worse, because we cannot call those who use them necessarily scum. We regulate it because doctors judge their patients and disregard their pain.

My father has diabetic neuropathy in his legs, a type of pain that is known to be resistant to opioid analgesics. He is also opioid-resistent, making the problem worse.. (I am also opioid-resistant, but I'm not in pain, so it doesn't much matter to me.) This means that very few pain killers work for him. He actually had a doctor tell him "this dose works for me, so it will work for you."

Along with that stunning, stunning, display of arrogance, my dad has had to face judgmental stares, questions, and disapproving tisks from nurses and doctors. It took months of pain before a doctor finally listened to him. Months of pain.

I have felt it, especially now that I have to present an ID to get simple pseudoephedrine: guilt. I have been trained by society to feel bad about using particular drugs. This mindset extends into the medical world, but the coin is flipped. Whereas I feel guilty about using the drugs, the person in a position of power, the doctor, feels judgmental about my using and asking for the drugs.

If I am in pain, then I must suffer nobly, otherwise I am a bad person. No fun drugs for me! Because having fun is bad.As I mentioned, semi-legal fun drugs are the worst for a judgmental society, because we cannot automatically label those who use them as deviant. As such, we must put those who do use them through a rubicon of pain, judgment, scorn, and red tape to ensure they feel correctly bad about using them. You may not be scum, but you are almost scum.

We regulate pain killers for the same reason we regulate marijuana, cocaine, and heroin — for the same reason we imprison huge numbers of people every year for victimless crimes. We do it out of sheer, unmitigated stupidity driven by a history of conservative, Christian judgment and racism. And as I said, the problems we now face of unaddressed pain in patients: almost inevitable.

When we base decisions on blind dogma, the outcomes are always going to be bad. Dogma is almost never right, because if it were right, then it wouldn't be dogma. It would simply be knowledge.

If I smoke marijuana (which I do not do, never have done, and never will do) I hurt no one. I barely hurt myself. But if I take an antibiotic, I could theoretically create the germ that kills us all.

So tell me again, why is marijuana the one that gets me thrown into jail?

Conservatives Own Their History

I have often argued that to accept a worldview requires you to accept the history of that worldview — its genesis. You have to own that history. Frequently, this can be painful. Lots of worldviews have some nasty underpinnings. For example, the history that I must own because of my education in psychology is pretty dark. Indeed, many of my classes dedicated significant amounts of time to discussing the manifold failures of science and ethics that peppers the history of psychology and psychiatry. Owning, understanding, and thus learning from that history was a primary element of our education.

Not owning one's history generally requires revisionist history, whereby the nasty elements are either ignored (denialism), reduced in significance (reductionism), or reframed in such a way that makes those who enacted the bad stuff seem less bad — sort of a reverse ad hominem attack. Most of the time, these forms of revisionism don't hold up to even the slightest analysis. How, then, can people possibly believe them?

I don't think that they do.

Almost all revisionist history is found on the extreme ends of the spectrum. I don't want to say conservatism exclusively, because forms of extreme liberalism can be similarly insane. In the U.S. at least, "conservatives" are almost wholly responsible for this sort of behavior.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Capitol, recently. Conservatives are giving up on the revisionism publicly. Previously, they would vociferously deny racism and jingoism and try to fight on the same terms as the liberals and progressives. It doesn't take too long on a well-known progressive website like Alternet or Mother Jones to find extensive analysis of the inconsistencies inherent to this strategy. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it generally turns out to be bullshit.

It results in the Republican party currently trying to argue that their strategy will increase racial quality, increase tax revenue, increase good, decrease bad, and so on. Of course, as I mentioned, it takes little effort to find inconsistencies in this rhetorical strategy, but the current conservative movement is relying on its adherents not doing research. That works in the short term, but the slow death currently being suffered by the American conservative movement shows that it doesn't work in the long term.

Thus we have a few Republicans coming out saying that Republicans need to, for lack of a better term, stop being stupid. The most notable one that springs to mind is Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana -- a state that has taken full advantage of Bush's school voucher program to send its children to dozens of newly opened fundamentalist Christian schools.

Unfortunately for the future of the party, the majority of them are not doing this. They are reacting to the changing political landscape, though, and this is coming in the form of cracks —  cracks in their public facade behind which hides all of the nasty stuff that has been festering under the surface for the past seventy-five years. Overt racism, misogyny, fear, and intolerance were all more or less obvious, but they were hidden behind euphemism and circumlocution, and if those speaking the hate were ever called out on it, they would fall back on said euphemism and circumlocution to say that their attacker was "seeing things."

Now, though, not we have cracks. I suspect that these cracks represent the death throes of a fading social entity, to wit, the conservative, post-Depression social mores that defined the Greatest Generation and many of the Baby Boomers.

Some recent and salient examples of these cracks are Antonin Scalia barely hiding his homophobia and racism. We have dozens of examples of lesser people doing similar things, and while not nearly all of them are letting their defenses down enough to see all of the 'isms therein, they are letting them down enough to see the strange rationalizations that they use in private.

The example that sticks in my mind, and the example that triggered this article, was a set of comments from a variety of people in the Republican Party about how Joseph McCarthy was justified in fueling the Red Scare, and indeed, the Red Scare itself was completely reasonable. Again, this is unsupported by the evidence, but it is significant because the pretense of generally agreeing with the historical consensus has been dropped. No longer do they try to argue that the Soviet Union was a threat, but the Red Scare itself was wrong. Now they admit that they think that any charge against "evil" is justified in the righteous fire of American Freedom. They are now using the argument that McCarthyism was justified as support for whatever social crusade they believe needs to be enacted today.

The moral and philosophical ancestors of the current conservative movement are no longer being rejected by the conservative movement. They are owning their history, and I think that that is a big deal.

As I mentioned, I think that this represents the death throes of a social system. When faced with adversity, and unable to reconcile their views with the emerging mores, the movement is doubling down on their beliefs and are rejecting the rhetorical assumptions that have previously defined the arguments.

By rhetorical assumptions, I mean the set of unspoken beliefs about the definition and value of certain words that underlie a discussion. At the most basic layer, we have terms that are representative of physical phenomena: ball, cloud, rock. But anywhere above the basic layer of language, values and judgements are attached to the words: good, freedom, mother, bad. These values and judgments come from the massive and complex system that gave rise to the people using the words. The further apart two people are vis-a-vis their rhetorical assumptions, the more difficult communication becomes, because most of our higher level language is predicated on these assumptions. It can reasonably be argued that the history of philosophy has been a three-thousand-year-old process to strip away assumptions in a quest for a perfect language.

Many of today's rhetorical assumptions were defined with the last major social shift: the counter-culture. I'm using that term to describe everything that exploded post-WWII: feminism, civil rights, free love, drugs. The educated progressives of the day helped to define the values on which our modern language rests. Sixty-five years ago, a white person could casually describe a black person as a nigger in public with little fear of retribution. Today, though, doing so would be social suicide.

This is because, for all intents and purposes, we won the culture war. For a long time, the reaction of those on the losing end was to complain about "political correctness." That's the reason why that term is always used in a negative way. Political correctness is the sigh of the oppressed bigot.

Now, we have the oppression being cast off. They aren't going so far as to call anyone who is anywhere past off-white as a nigger, although I am confident that they are doing so in private, but they are complaining about how whites are the oppressed. Whites need to be afraid. Whites are under attack. They then look to a glorified past of white supremacy to show how "their" world is crumbling away.

And in their bizarre minds, this is true. They are still raging against a culture war that they lost decades ago. Rush Limbaugh has lost, as best as I can tell, damn-near all of his sponsors after his attacks on Sandra Fluke. Fox News ratings, though still easily #1, have fallen for the past many years. Gay marriage went from having minority support to majority support in less than five years. Acceptance of misogyny and the patriarchy is becoming widespread.

These are all good things from a reasonable perspective, but those who lost the culture war are not reasonable. They are angry. They are afraid. And they are going to make life miserable for the rest of us until they finally die out.

At least, as the Tea Party has put in stark display, these people are no longer pretending to be arguing the same things as us. They are openly admitting that they reject reason and rationale. They are openly admitting that they are speaking a different language from me. They are openly admitting that there can never be a common ground, and we are seeing this in Congress. There is no hope. All we can do is relax, and wait for the inevitable day when the world of the white conservative does precisely what white conservative are afraid of: pass into history.

So, my dear conservatives, roar and rage all you like. We won the war. The rest is just a waiting game. And I'm a lot younger than you, so I have all the time in the world.

The Greatest Intellectual Dishonesty Of Religious Believers

I was just watching a documentary about Catholic history, and I was thinking about how so much of early Catholic belief was pulled from someone's ass. Indeed, after Augustine, and even a bit before him, difficulties in reaching conclusions from scripture alone resulted in the generally-accepted practice of determining doctrine from the works of interpreters. As such, we are in our current bizarre situation, where the vast majority of Christian dogma cannot be found in any gospels or scrolls.

For my part, the point of greatest WTF, and indeed the point of greatest intellectual dishonesty, lies with the learned members of the church who rabidly research church history, and thus admit the truth of the history, yet seem to ignore the inconsistency inherent to this. To wit, if one accepts the history of the church, they must accept that beliefs and behaviors have changed and evolved, existed before the church, and will likely exist after the church has faded. Indeed, they must accept that the church will likely fade.

How can one's beliefs be timeless and be true, if they were different in the past? To me, it is impossible. If an eternal truth is one way today, then it must have been the same in the past, and will be the same in the future. Admitting the evolution of the truth negates its status as true, at least as regards this situation.

For the average church-goer, my criticism doesn't much apply. Many of them are unaware of the history of their own church, and are even less aware of obscure theological conflicts like the "mystery" of the Trinity. Since their beliefs are nebulous and undefined, there is no conflict, and thus no intellectual shenanigans. But the hypocritical dishonesty necessary to accept the evolution of one's own dogma while still asserting the truth of that dogma is almost beyond my ability to understand.

Scalia Pretty Much Just Comes Out as a Racist

How do you put words to this? I mean... no. You don't. There is no reason to put words to this, at least not yet. The mere act of pointing to it is enough. Simply recognizing it is all that really needs to be said.

Judge Antonin Scalia has gone full Fox-News with a recent statement, saying that the Voting Rights Act is an example of racial entitlement. Because, you know how we give blacks everything. They're just too damned lazy to make use of it.

I was reading about SCOTUS cases a few days ago and was blown away to find that as early as 1986, we had a decision that upheld laws against homosexuality, Bowers v. Hardwick. It was fully overturned in 2003, where the court majority opinion was that it was wrong in 1986, and it is wrong now.

Of course, Scalia, along with Thomas and Rehnquist, were the dissenters. I'm glad to see that Scalia's vile bigotry and hate remains unchanged.

I do not think that I can effectively communicate through the typed word, at least not in the format of a simple blog post, the anger that causes my hands to shake even now. I want to swear like a ship full of sailors. I want to just smash by keyboard for ten minutes and then post it. The fact that this troglodyte of a human is a member of what is likely the most powerful judicial entity on Earth makes blood come from my ears.

Also in this is yet another example of the racism that is almost undoubtedly endemic in the tea party movement that defenders of the movement try to claim doesn't exist. Really? How many "isolated incidents" like this need to happen before everyone accepts that the current conservative movement is as much predicated on hatred of non-whites as it is paranoid hatred of government? A hundred? A thousand?

I will not mince words. He is scum. He is the highest representation of the infection of block-headed conservatism to which Fox News panders. Old men, clogging up the functioning of society. All that gives me hope is that they will all be dead sooner or later. Based on the fact that these men don't seem to much believe in doctors and good diet (hippy conspiracies and all that), I would assume that it will be sooner rather than later.

The world will be a better place when they are gone.

When Values Collide

I like Bill Murray. At least, I liked Bill Murray. When I was in second grade, our teacher asked us to tell the class who our hero was. Most kids said one of their parents or a sports star. I said, much to the amusement of my teacher, Bill Murray. I was seven. Whadda'ya want?

So Bill Murray gives me a good perspective on people who apologize for rapists, attackers, murderers, and otherwise antisocial people. We don't want to believe that people are capable of these crimes. We have never experienced these crimes. Nothing in our experience tells us that a particular person is capable of these crimes. It's why men who have experienced sexual assault are much more likely to accept that it happened than men who haven't.

I'm sure that you have figured out without my saying that Bill Murray is a thundering asshole. He's abusive and mean. And while no one escapes his wrath, he is especially mean to women. There are dozens of people in entertainment that have managed to get something of a free pass for their abuse because they are good at being entertainers. As this article at Cracked, a website that produces articles far too good for its name, points out regarding Sean Connery,

It's always interesting to see the double standard we have for different categories of celebrity. If Sean Connery had been, say, a pro athlete or a politician, he'd get tarred with this reputation until the day he died. But he's so fucking suave. His accent wears a tuxedo. It's so impossible to connect that voice with the image of a drunken man slapping around a woman that we wouldn't believe it even if we had it on video.

Precisely. We wouldn't believe it because we don't want to believe it. It so clashes with the rest of our programming that we simply reject it.

For someone like me, it's a slightly different problem. I've more or less managed to push my social biases into the background. They are still operating, and likely will for the rest of my life, but I've overpowered them. This isn't a brag. It's not something worth bragging about. It's something we should all do, and as such, bragging for doing something any decent human would do seems rather counterproductive. It's like demanding recognition for not being an asshole.

My problem is that there are certain characteristics that, for lack of a better phrase, make a person dead to me. Being an asshole is fine, but being aggressively abusive to other people is not. It's the primary reason for not finding out too much about your favorite artists or actors: they are frequently such mind-blowing jerks that it negates one's ability to enjoy their work. Woody Allen, Quentin Tarantino, and Mel Gibson all come to mind.

It doesn't necessarly even need to be artists or actors. It can be anything. And so it is with The Salvation Army. In these contentious times, there are many things that can make an entity dead to me. Misogyny, racism, global warming denial. Homophobia is another. It indicates both ignorance, fear, and hatred, but also blind religious dogma. And boy howdy, has The Salvation Army dropped the mother of all homophobic bombs.

They have literally said that homosexuals deserve to die. An organization built on feel-good concepts of caring and helping has said that homosexuals are not just second-class citizens, but they actively need to be killed. Obviously, the organization on the whole has distanced itself from these statements, but it would be foolish to think that this kind of behavior coming from one regional director isn't representative of wider views held within the Army. Those at the top realize that what they say must be more measured, and it becomes a minor catastrophe when someone actually says what everyone thinks.

This is a difficult thing for me to digest. About a decade ago, when my family was in seriously bad shape and had been evicted from our house, the Salvation Army paid our medical bills, which were not insubstantial. I like the Salvation Army. Even though I'm an outspoken atheist and they are an explicitly religious organization didn't much matter to me. They helped me, and I tear up even now thinking about it.

This is causing serious cognitive dissonance. There is basically no way for me to reconcile the problem. With artists and actors, I can at least say that their work is distinct from them. There are many artists who created great art while also being psycho-arsonist-sheep-rapists. But for people and organizations where their actions are so tightly intertwined with their views, I cannot ignore it. I want to!

I know how it feels to want to apologize for the behavior of someone or something you like. You don't want that conflict in your mind. It doesn't matter. Bigotry is bigotry. Violence is violence. Nothing in the past changes that.

Russia Devolves Into Anarchy And Cannibalism Because of Music

The tabloid Life News, known for its sources within the Russian police and security services, published images of the graffiti, showing the words "Free! Pussy Riot" written in English on flowered wallpaper. The tabloid's owner, Ashot Gabrelyanov, tweeted: "If you still think that breaking the norms of behaviour in a church doesn't change anything, then I recommend you read the latest news."

Oh yes, because people were never horribly murdered when the church held sway.

'Free Pussy Riot' scrawled 'in blood' above murdered Russian women (Via The Guardian)

In God We Trust

This is a low-budget documentary made about a small town where secularists and Christian extremists clash over religious flags at a taxpayer-funded veterans cemetery. It was made famous by commentary and viewing by Richard Dawkins.

In general, it's much of the same stuff that you will have seen in other documentaries about the subject. I see this is a classier version of Religulous, where Bill Maher just sort of beat up on some poor sots. Yes, they were uneducated and dogmatic, but just because Maher can make fun of them doesn't make me feel good. It makes me feel like Maher is just beating up people. There's an especially sad point at around 1:12:00, with a man who has attempted suicide multiple times, but also has a skeptical, distrustful streak.

This documentary, while treading similar ground, does it with a less mocking tone. It's obviously judgmental; it still posits that these people are wrong, but it does so in a subtle way. It lets us experience what these people believe without much framing from the documentarian, and as such it's sort of preaching to the choir. This won't change minds because the documentary views these people through certain eyes, and it assumes that you are viewing them with the same eyes.

For those with a philosophical mind, the movie will be a bit boring. None of these people are terribly advanced thinkers. A preacher at one point early in the film isn't even aware of the Bible's explicit acceptance, and encouragement, of slavery. My advice to you is to just go off and get angry at another William Lane Craig video.

A Shift In My Perspective

My views on society evolve constantly. Sometimes, as they did recently, they evolve in some massive burst of punctuated equilibrium... or something. See, I use big words. I'm smart.

As a militant-atheist, I felt that the best way to expunge religion from society was to simply make fun of it. I now see that this gets us nowhere, fast. I'm still a quasi-militant-atheist, which I will discuss in a bit, but my world view has become so complex as to make a naively simplistic view untenable.

I think that militant atheism fails because most people are actually operating under the assumption that the atheists are correct. I see it everywhere; hear it from believers; read it in magazines. Defenders of religion ask atheists to stop rubbing it in their faces. Stop being so arrogant! Stop showing off! In all of this semi-defeated language is a tacit recognition. This language is especially apparent in the sort of theological fence-sitters who exist in such large numbers in media. They kinda' sorta' believe, but you rarely if ever catch them in church.

From those true believers who don't have a militant streak, or have never been exposed to well-formulated atheist thoughts, I hear lines such as "so this is what smart people do," or "you've thought about this a lot." They separate themselves from the atheist. They actively, and self-deprecatingly, place themselves on a lower intellectual level. The actual truth value of their belief structure is never analyzed.

And that's the thing. What these people want to believe can't possibly be true. Define truth. Define existance. Define God. There is no way that these concepts can be defined in such a way as to make sense. And that's expected!

Words do not mean anything transcendent. The belief that they do is essentially metaphysical and, thus, useless. Words mean how they are used. So how are we using religious terminology?

It's social, I argue. Religious terms can't mean anything, and believers don't really use them as such. It's why you can have believers of Islam who are totally normal humans who go the market twice a week for groceries, watch TV at night, and play video games, but when asked indicate that suicide bombing is a completely viable form of conflict resolution.

They don't actually mean that. If they witnessed a suicide bombing, they'd be scarred for life. The conflict comes from the fact that arguing with them reveals one to be of the out group, as opposed to the Muslim's in group. Religious terminology is used as an identifier. Everyone agrees on certain usages of terms as a form of social glue.

And that is why militant atheism doesn't work very well. It makes the grander point: religion is silly; but does little beyond that. It's because it opens the dialog with the declaration that the atheist is part of the out group. I suspect that is why atheists are among the least-trusted people in the country. It's not because the entire country has thought about moral maxims, subjective and objective morality, punishment, and natural law. It's because our primal, emotional drives ascribe negative characteristics to those who are in the out group.

As such, branches of atheism I think will do a better job if they leave behind a great deal of the militancy and instead focus on social concepts like equality, justice, and righteousness, which religion has never been very good with. These concepts will speak to those who not only have never thought about deeper philosophical concepts, but frame themselves in a way that makes thinking about these concepts antithetical. They assume that they aren't smart enough.

If we speak kindly to these people, we can convince them that, no, they are smart enough. Truth, real truth, is not for the elite. Making fun of them is not right way to achieve this acceptance.

That said, I am still a quasi-militant-atheist, as I mentioned above. I still understand the militant mindset because dogma is, literally, dangerous. It causes violence, breeds hatred, and encourages in and out groups. Just because forming social groups is natural doesn't mean that it's good. It defines us as "same" and "different," even when we are all pretty much the same. It breeds racism, ethnocentrism, and inter-group violence.

Dogma, in all forms, is bad.

As such, while I won't specifically attack it, I am not willing to accommodate religious belief. An example that sticks in my mind is a Jewish girl who graduated as her high school's valedictorian, but was unable to give her speech because microphones use electricity, and that is seen as "work" according to her weird interpretation of Judaism.

In the grand tradition of the religious getting around a rule by ignoring its spirit in favor of contract negotiation with God, she recorded her speech the day before, then stood on stage, smiling like an idiot, while it was played on speakers.

This may undermine my previously-stated goals of achieving dialog with believers, but it's on this point that I do not care. I would not have accommodated her. I would have simply given her speech to the salutatorian and then given the salutatorian's speech to the third in line. When abjectly silly religious belief gets in the way of other people doing things, that's it. Get out of the way and make room for others who won't let their dogma impinge upon the functioning of the world.

Chairman Mao is aware that
he needs a hair stylist.

As such, I think that there is always a place for aggressive atheism, or perhaps aggressive intellectualism is a better moniker. Because while religion is a major focus of the modern debate, dogma also brought us the Soviet Union, North Korea, the Nazis, the Cold War, Eugenics, and any number of other large-scale, baseless beliefs.

Dogma brings us gay bashing, the KKK, conspiracy theories, and survivalists. It damages people, families, and companies. It makes people act against their own self interest and against the interests of others. It poisons rational thought. Religion is only one example, and because of its positive framing of dogma with the word "faith," it becomes even more manipulative and dangerous than most other forms of dogma

Dogma is incredibly dangerous, and I think especially so in religious form, and having a group of vocal people who act like merciless, mocking & squawking crows on the sidelines, making sure to demolish anyone who gets out of line, is probably a good thing. It reminds everyone that they are actually being very silly, and to make sure to not let things get out of hand.

So in that sense, the fact that so many tacitly admit the accuracy of the militant atheists by telling them to stop showing off can be seen as a victory, and while it's not my modus operandi, I'm glad that it's there.

On Personhood And Oppression

I have been only somewhat following the Personhood spat going on down in ol' Mississip. In general, I don't worry much about them seeing as they are the fattest, dumbest, most religious area in the whole of the Western World, so I come very close to seeing it as worrying about what a bunch of crazy homeless people choose to do.

What I have noticed online, though, is a large contingent of commenters who try lines similar to this:

"While I agree that a person begins at conception, I do not agree with Prop 26. I think that there are grey areas to this debate and it cannot be black & white."

Perhaps. I will give, at least for now, that the concept of "person" has some grey areas, but what people like this are oh-so-politely advocating is not just a definition, but oppression. They are arguing that women should be forced to give birth because the fertilized egg is just as good as a person. They believe this to be righteous, and for the sake of this post, it doesn't matter.

Regardless of the moral rectitude of the oppression, it is still oppression. These people, with their milquetoasty language, try to butter over the fact that they seek, or believe it is right to seek, control over a woman's body. That is black and white.

Ignoring that calling an embryo a person reduces the term "person" to uselessness, I will not abide this. You seek the oppression of certified people for the sake of potential or hypothetical people. That is stupid. And even if it wasn't stupid, do not be surprised when those same people you seek to oppress rip back control of their bodies either through illegal birth control, back-alley abortions, leaving, or all-out violence. Because, then, it doesn't matter how righteous you are.

Morals Don't Exist

• Morals don't exist

  • I hate morals. They don't exist.

  • How do I know that they don't exist? Point to one.

  • If you do think they exist, how do they exist? If morals are objective, such as from God, why should we listen to God? Why is what he says right?

  • I hate morals because there are no answers to these questions. Philosophers have tried for thousands of years and have failed every time. The best we have is utilitarianism, and even that is riddled with problems.

    • Don't even get me started on Mere Christianity. Christian apologists love to attack the simplistic philosophy of Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, but then hold up their own facile piece of philosophical garbage as something special. I won't go into a blow-by-blow deconstruction of it here, but as I've said before, if you think that it holds up, you really need to read more books.

  • The reason why I hate morality the most is precisely because it's so nebulous.

  • What does it mean? Right and wrong? What do those mean?

  • Since all words must come from something external, when I describe something as morally right or wrong, what do I mean.

  • I argue that, especially in religious usage, morally wrong means that elicits a disgust response. Even a mild one.

  • We can use the word to elicit disgust responses from stimuli that would have never done so if we hadn't relied on such a poorly defined concept. We can use words with such a massive amount of wiggle room, that we can apply them to situations and then use the word to manipulate other people to have similar responses.

  • Obviously, we do have some fundamental issues that seem inborn. So in that sense, an inner sense of right and wrong does exist. Cross-cultural studies showing similar determinations about hypothetical situations proves this, but that is an incredibly primal response. It has to be if it's shared by all people.

  • These primal responses are notoriously difficult to explain or tie down with words because the sensations in all likelihood predate the formation of language. We can safely recognize these sensations, but when applying words to them that have a whole bevy of subtle connotations, we have to be careful. Otherwise, we can use language to manipulate these deep feelings and totally fuck with our, and other people's, worlds.

Atheists Are Not Out To Get You

Pale Blue Dot

The name of this blog is taken from a book by Carl Sagan. His wisdom cannot be understated.

Immigration Is Good

This is the kind of information that needs to be disseminated far and wide in this fucked up country.

IMMIGRATION IS GOOD! If it wasn't for immigration, the United States wouldn't be the United States. We wouldn't have Chinese food, or Italian food. We wouldn't have Wall Street, or modern philosophy. There is no aspect of our life that hasn't been touched by immigrants! From our diets, houses, and technology, to the way that we dress and talk. The US is the greatest nation on Earth precisely because we've been filled by the globe's best and brightest for the past two-hundred years.

Myopic, racist, bigoted, xenophobic pricks have attacked every major immigrant group in history! The Irish and Italians were literally beaten to death in the streets. Our reactions to outside groups has been one of the worst manifestations of our worst characteristics.

It's ironic that those who are most likely to hate immigrants are also those most likely to get angry at the idea that their "daddy was a monkey," all the while they act like a bunch of angry, shit-throwing, violent, horrible, animalistic chimpanzees.

Just go fuck yourselves, you pieces of shit. I mean this in every way possible; The world will be better off when you are dead, and your house is inhabited by an immigrant who has actual skills.

70% of Science Award Finalists Are Children of Immigrants (LiveScience.com)

A Great BBC Protestant Documentary

The flow of great documentaries out of the BBC is seemingly endless. I just finished watching Niall Ferguson's Civilization: Is The West History, which was problematic, and I already find this one.

I like this one more, but it still falls for what I consider the fallacy of causation. I take a sort of James Burkeian perspective, which I consider the correct perspective, that there is no linear causation in history. There are webs of causation. So to say that the Protestant Reformation was the root of all of these things is an inaccuracy.

Regardless of that almost exegetical issue, I find this documentary, and its presenter, really compelling. They present the effects of the Reformation entertainingly, while not sacrificing information density.

Atheism Is Not Fundamentalist

In the current philosophical debates on religion, most respected apologists realize that there is no way to justify religious belief. Instead, the focus is on trying to reduce the foundations of everyday belief.

Essentially, they argue "Yes. I have no reason to believe in God. But YOU have no reason to believe the world. So our beliefs are, in fact, on equal ground."

Little do the religious nuts who espouse this belief know, they're right. They aren't right for the reasons they think, though. They think that they've reduced our perceptions to a fundamentalist belief, but they haven't.

Our sensations are forced upon us. They are us. I (Aaron) am my sensations. I am my beliefs. I am a complex construct that includes beliefs and sensations. I have no reason to believe that sensations are true in some metaphysical sense, they simply are.

For example, my sensations are frequently "wrong." I say wrong in quotes because right and wrong are subjective based on experience. For example, I might look off in the distance and see a tall man, but when I get close to him, I find out that he is, in fact, short. We would say that I was wrong in my initial conception of his height. But I wasn't. At that moment, I saw a short man. That's the only truth that there is.

We can try to argue that there exists some truth outside of our perception, and I actually find that somewhat compelling, if not really cogent, but we can never achieve that. Whereas religious believers feel that they are right, I do not. I am keenly aware that what I see is not a foundation for truth.

If we assume the existence of other minds*, our perceptions are above religious dogma. Not only are they forced upon us -we do not choose to see- but they are highly reliable from person to person. When I seek scientific support for a belief, I can point to the evidence and others will agree that I am pointing at evidence. Religion absolutely does not have this.

If we assume that we have no reason to assume other minds, and their testimony is useless to determine justification, thus returning our perceptions and faith to similar grounds, we are forced into absolute skepticism. At that point, yes, our confidence in our senses is zeroed, but our confidence in anything is zeroed. The religious have reduced their own beliefs to meaninglessness. They are still fools for believing their creed.

But even here, I am not a fool for believing my sensations. They are the only thing that I have. They are imperfect, but they are something. The reason why religious arguments are correct is because science and antitheism are dogmatic in that they hold that truth is good, non-truth is bad. This is a dogma.

There is good reason for this dogma, though. Namely, truth and belief are the wellspring from which our action flows. We don't know what truth is, since we are limited by our senses in determining it, but it is the best course we have. For example, if someone throws an orange at me, I will duck. My sensations told me "it is true that an orange is flying at you." I act based upon that, and I do not feel pain.

But since our sensations cannot be trusted, we might have been hit by the orange and not known it. We don't KNOW. We don't know if we're actually acting. The argument is vaguely circular, in that we're relying on sensation to confirm the validity of our sensations. But to deny our sensations pushes us, again, into absolute skepticism.

And, again, that absolute skepticism reduces religion to the same position of non-justification. I might be a fool, but you're an even bigger one because you believe more unjustified things than I do.

So, yes, atheism, antitheism, and science are predicated on the dogmatic belief that truth is better than non-truth. Everyone recognizes that the best we can really hope for is justification, and that justification is a circular system based upon reciprocal validation of sensations. But while the scientific argument falls apart on "Yes. I would duck if an orange was thrown at me," religion broke down LONG before that. As far as I'm concerned, science is way better off.

*: I've talked about this before. Other minds is the problem that we do not know that other people have internal worlds similar to our own. For all we know, they are advanced robots programmed to act like humans. The assumption that others have minds seems to be inborn, as experiments continue to indicate. This is the root of our ability to "get inside someone else's shoes." It's guessed that those who lack this inborn mechanism (or mental organ or module, whichever term you like) are what we call autistic.

Why I Find Creationism Emotionally Hollow

More Surveys

I just received a call, 1:20pm, from the National Organization for Marriage... again. In my first post on the subject, I commented on how suspicious the wording of the question was and the timing of the call. First off, if the name wasn't a hint, the National Organization for Marriage is a right-wing, religious organization that is of course against gay marriage, because letting two gay people do what they want will bring about the apocalypse or something. That bias in the polling makes me more circumspect of the actual poll.

My first call, on January 26th, was received at 2:00pm. They also asked whether I was 50-years of age or older. What demographic is at home at 2:00pm? Old people. And what do old people hate more than any other age bracket? Gays! This is in contrast to polling calls that I've received from Gallup, The New York Times, CNN, CBS, and other, I dunno' respectable organizations. I usually receive the calls after 5:00pm.

This successful call was actually the third. The first was successfully answered back in January, I then got a second which was answered by my machine at about 2:00pm yesterday. That's three calls, all around the same time, 1:45pm. Highly irregular.

Unplanned Stupidity

A woman by the name of Abby Johnson is causing quite the hullabaloo by defecting from Planned Parenthood and lambasting her former employer as an "abortion machine." After reading the headline, I was a bit concerned, but have since calmed down. Both she and her book are doing nothing but preaching to the choir.

If she had been a person who said "I still believe in pro-choice, but Planned Parenthood is not the way to go about it," then that would have been a damning indictment of the organization. Instead, we have yet another religious wing nut attacking the organization for explicitly religious reasons. She is against abortion in any situation, even rape and incest. She now prays outside abortion clinics. She even went into the organization already strongly religious. This is not a level-headed woman.

I'm glad that this woman tried to do what she thought was right, but she ended up on the same imbecilic side of the debate as the extremists that she laments as not being reasonable or helpful. Her beliefs are just as extreme, the only difference is the form of the behavior that those beliefs take.