ain’t that the truth

Why have people got to go around continuously misstating and, well, lying about the implications and demands of a secular worldview? For example, take this sentence:

Once the world is … thought of as being “composed of atomic particles randomly colliding and . . . sometimes evolving into more and more complicated systems and entities including ourselves”

OK, completely aside from calling some of the most elegant and impressive discoveries of humankind (friggin’ fundamental laws of physics and evolution, ladies and gentlemen) “particles randomly colliding and sometimes evolving into complicated shit,” (The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, Stephen “I Hate and Fear History” Smith) this description of secular thought ignores hundreds of years of secular thought. Which, don’t worry, Stanly Fish will continue to misrepresent and misunderstand for a good 1776 words, in the end arguing that there are no non-spiritual reasons for doing anything. And, no, I did not make that number up.

This fundamental misunderstanding of what “secular” means is important because the article is all ab out how we make public decisions: what appeals is it legitimate for a member of government to make? Fish starts off by saying that “policy decisions should be made on the basis of secular reasons,” which — given a minimally good definition of “secular” — I agree with. Policy decisions should be made based on the effects they will have on the world, not on of many imaginary deities. Unfortunately I edited that to make him look like less of an idiot, this is is a more complete version: “policy decisions should be made on the basis of secular reasons, reasons that, … do not reflect the commitments or agendas of any religion, morality or ideology“. (emphasis mine)

Allow me to provide you with a selection of the most popular ethical systems around today, the systems that most inform current American morality according to my incompetent analysis:

• Utilitarian Ethics (do what makes the most people the most happy)
• Respect Ethics (do unto others as though they deserve the best you can reasonably do. This is a mild reformulation of the golden rule, and based on the fact that you have probably never given a homeless person your credit card, the version of it that you actually follow. Usually called duty ethics.)
• Fulfillment Ethics (do things because they will help you or others be the best people that you/they can be. Usually called Virtue ethics, because that’s what they called things back when Aristotle was writing.)

Know what those fundamental systems of morality all have in common? They are secular. Which is to say they do not depend on unjustified assumptions that threaten you with eternal torture for their basis. Oh, wait, that reminds me, I forgot one:

• Ignoring all of the effects of my system, because I don’t care about how people live. (Usually called religion.)

That one does depend on unjustified assumptions about the fundamental nature of reality, assumptions which (often) conveniently involve your horrible pain for a literally meaningless amount of time.

Quickly take a look at those four systems, tell me if I have misunderstood any of them, recognize which ones you actually use to make decisions. And then think about how you don’t actually need to incorporate anything non-secular to reach those same decisions. Every worthwhile moral theory is secular. Seriously Stan, don’t be a jerk.

Oh no here he goes again:

While secular discourse, in the form of statistical analyses, controlled experiments and rational decision-trees, can yield banks of data that can then be subdivided and refined in more ways than we can count, it cannot tell us what that data means or what to do with it. No matter how much information you pile up and how sophisticated are the analytical operations you perform, you will never get one millimeter closer to the moment when you can move from the piled-up information to some lesson or imperative it points to; for it doesn’t point anywhere; it just sits there, inert and empty.

If he was going to be so technical about it I’d think he’d want to bound us a little tighter and say “nanometer” at least. He is so insanely incorrect I can think of about 7 things before I type the number “7″ to use to argue against him. Let me lay out for you a simple example of secular reasoning that I don’t care if anyone disagrees with, because they suck:

1. Getting raped sucks big time.
2. We should prevent people from raping other people.

OK? Stan and Steve, would you say that I have stayed within the bounds of the “truncated discursive resources available within the downsized domain of ‘public reason’”? And, if I haven’t, could you please explain you me why (2) requires me to appeal to some fundamental teleological aspect of the universe instead of just pointing out that we should keep things that suck from happening, if we can help it?

Oh, wait, you never address that.

Here’s some more gibberish, loosely related!

If [secular] reason has “deprived” the natural world of “its normative dimension” by conceiving of it as free-standing and tethered to nothing higher than or prior to itself, how, Smith asks, “could one squeeze moral values or judgments about justice . . . out of brute empirical facts?”

Well, because one of the empirical facts is getting raped sucks. That is a fairly well-acknowledged and -documented fact. There are a variety of other observations of the human condition that count as facts that allow us to make a wide variety of other well-formed and non-arbitrary arguments about how to behave.

No way that is not a sleight of hand.

Sweet. I expect my invitation to perform at the Magic Castle by the end of the week.

This is the cul de sac Enlightenment philosophy traps itself in when it renounces metaphysical foundations in favor of the “pure” investigation of “observable facts.” It must somehow bootstrap or engineer itself back up to meaning and the possibility of justified judgment, but it has deliberately jettisoned the resources that would enable it do so.

I wasn’t going to include that, but I really love the use of scare quotes around “observable facts.” And I felt like it was only fair to make him look like even more of an idiot, because the article really pissed me off.

He goes on for awhile with some other minor misunderstandings and lies about the definition of “secular,” as well as some truly interesting problems — what does freedom mean? to whom do we owe what? — unfortunately the only case that he makes against secular thought is that it seems to be incapable of observing humanity. Which is, you know, false.

Technorati Tags: atheism, ethics, nytimes, politics, religion

Lee Siegel from the LA Times doesn’t understand what the “latest rash” of atheists are doing. Despite that, he has written a piece in the LA Times in which he questions our techniques, language, and most importantly goals. I’m not just saying that he doesn’t understand us to be trite, or to cast facile  aspersions upon him: there is nothing in this article (via samharris.org) to suggest that he knows what we are doing.  It does not contain any positive statements about the social programme this new wave of acerbic reasonable people have said or are trying to achieve. Instead it is filled with questions that lead somewhere that no atheist i have read or met would even suggest. It is filled with so many of the misunderstandings of atheism that occur in the liberal left, the kinds of misunderstandings that people whom i like have. So it seems like an excellent opportunity to join some others in knocking some holes in common misconceptions. In a future post i’ll tackle his absurd views on secular philosophy in some detail.

[No one could] know from reading the latest rash of anti-God books that promiscuous sex and polymorphous sexuality are taken for granted in modern-day America (let’s see a conservative Supreme Court try to roll that back); that the separation of church and state is inscribed in our Constitution; that no priest, minister or rabbi holds any top position in the federal government; and that even the state board of education in Kansas recently forbade the teaching of creationism.

The first four phrases of that paragraph are concerned with showing how secular, perhaps how irreligious, our culture is. But that fourth phrase is telling: “even the state board of education in Kansas recently forbade the teaching of creationism.” The fact that even this well-known bastion of religiosity Kansas–they outlawed barney, remember–is legislating a secular worldview means “OMG look how progressive we are!” First of all, this is 2007. Evolution has been well-established scientific fact for well over 100 years. There is no excuse for any person responsible for educating children not understanding how important evolution is, period. And second of all it was a close decision that has a good chance of being reversed next time there is a school board election in Kansas–it’s happened several times before and Kansas is not alone in having a populace that wants to deceive its children.

The other three phrases of that sentence are even more misleading, if not quite so self-contradictory: “promiscuous sex and polymorphous sexuality are taken for granted in modern-day america”? Has he ever known a conservative, let alone a conservative christian? And what’s that crack about the supreme court, is he joking about the potentially imminent reversal of fundamental liberties in this country, and all the suffering that would engender? Next he points out that “the separation of church and state is inscribed in our constitution”, but doesn’t bother to mention the sustained efforts of a vocal minority to overthrow that and turn this country into a theocracy. Let’s not forget his last point: “that no priest, minister or rabbi holds any top position in the federal government”. OK, yeah, nobody in any government HR department is dealing with them, but there is the funny story of Ted Haggard, (good name) a man who claimed weekly meetings with the president. It apparently doesn’t strike Siegel as contradictory to his purpose to mention this, “the religious right’s enormous influence on president bush” explicitly in his next paragraph. Perhaps he’s hung up on material legalities of the law, instead of its spirit.

I’ve established that Lee (i hope he doesn’t mind me calling him that) doesn’t understand the state of religion in America. I hope that is what i’ve demonstrated, because the only other option is that he understands it and decided to mislead his readership. Religion may be weaker in America than it has ever been anywhere else in the world–though i’m certainly not making that claim–but we are also the country with nukes and 1/3 of global military spending. (there’s a pie chart about 1/5 of the way down that page) Even a small force in such a huge machine has dramatic effects.

Now i want to just point out that he doesn’t know what we’re saying or who we’re saying it to. This shouldn’t be controversial, he says it himself:

Who is the ideal reader of these attacks on belief in God? … It’s hard to imagine anyone abandoning his faith after reading Harris’ condescending polemic, or the science of Dawkins and Dennett, or Hitchens’ vitriol.

And he’s right, except for all the ways he’s wrong. He’s right in the sense that essentially all of the people we’re railing against pride themselves on their irrationality, and are just about the last people i would expect to ever go out of their way to understand the kinds of arguments we present, let alone be persuaded by them. So then who is our audience? The quiet ones who thought they were alone or insane, the smart ones who were raised with an odd default perspective, the men and women who have never really thought about it. Most importantly our audience is society’s discourse with itself.

That discourse has been taking on more and more of the character of that one guy hogging all the champagne at his cousin’s wedding. Yes atheists are strident, acerbic, and at times bombastic. But for pete’s sake the guy just jumped up and down in the cake. It’s well past time for the best man to stand up, get some friends together, and make sure that the drunk guy doesn’t run off with the wife screaming and slung over his shoulder. These new voices are the best men asking for our friends to stand up and help get the situation under control.

Next!

The attacks in the books often don’t make much sense either. For instance, Bush and his gang preach Christian values while lying us into a slaughterhouse overseas, ransacking our public coffers and ignoring social inequities and iniquities at home—and so our heroic anti-religionists attack . . . Christian values.

OK, this is just equivocation plain and simple. And i really don’t know how to talk about this without implying that Siegel is being deceitful. The thing is, “Christian Values” is a broad term that means different things in different situations, and here Lee uses two different meanings without changing the words. The first “christian values” obviously refers to such things as empathy, valuing life, caring for your neighbor, truth, goodwill. The values that, no matter who you are or who you’re talking about, you praise people for. These are human values.

The second use of “christian values” is the pernicious meme that atheists don’t value all those good things. Ironically and unfortunately, the only reason this idea can spread is because of how strongly humanists believe in them. So strongly that it forces us to reject so many other religious values: ridiculous surety in our own correctness, war against everything that does not support our correctness, valuing our beliefs over the lives of others, belief in a coming apocalypse, belief in an all powerful war god. Notice that these are all the kinds of things that strongly religious people praise when they agree with what is being said and consider evil when it is other beliefs that are being said.

Both groups of beliefs are espoused by the bible and by the religions of the world. It is terrible that the second kind of value always overrides the first, leading to war and pain. However, atheists praise the human values and universally criticize the religious values. We are consistent, not changing what we value just because someone who disagrees with us said it. Perhaps a religious reader would read this and say “that’s not true: they have ridiculous surety about the lack of a god, don’t they? Isn’t that what this is about?” Well, no. You can’t prove a negative, and atheists don’t claim to. If you ask any of us, we quickly and easily admit to being technically agnostic. But we don’t believe.

The saddest part about Siegel’s argument that we are throwing out all of christian values just because some of them are bad–which as i just said we don’t do–is that he relies on the philosophic notion of a ‘category mistake’, and that his equivocating is a wonderful example of one. The second time that he makes the mistake he is accusing us of making.

There’s a lot more in that article, as usual with critiques of atheism all of it has been said before though. And it’s late, and this is already pretty long. I’m planning on going on to the second half and criticizing his ‘unique’ take on the value of absurdity, and definitely attacking his misunderstanding of the value of imagination in a secular society. So, stay tuned.
[tags]atheism, siegel, LA Times[/tags]

Technorati Tags: atheism, essay

intelligent design has come to california.

Technorati Tags: atheism, ID

“Only when churches work diligently to include chemistry in Christianity, calculus in catechism and physics in Psalms should schools then attempt to include religion in science courses.”

-Paul D. Ottens (some guy)

This was, probably and hopefully, my last posting about ID for a long, long time.

Technorati Tags: atheism, ID