eye of the storm

here's an interesting piece by russ douthat on popular pantheism. very true. but one thing i would point out is that pantheism of the sort he's describing is a lot more like the standard religions than douthat or its acolytes would allow, because fundamentally nature is treated as an agent: it tries to achieve an equilibrium; it wants balance; and it wants your worship or connection. our distance from it is like - in fact is - the distance of a sinner from his god. i like the idea better than i like the idea of a transcendent spiritual intelligence, for one thing because that conception can't even be made out: it is nonsensical or contradictory. but on the other hand the modern pantheist hasn't achieved immanence in the object of her worship either, hasn't at all seen that nature is a morally arbitrary system by our standards, that it's not trying to get anywhere, etc. "it's nature's way of telling you something's wrong": it might as well be a scripture: nature as a text, and as the author of a text.

douthat's conclusion - that we are half-animals and half-not, that we are moral creatures and hence not merely natural - is the traditional monotheistic view. here it is used in a really compelling critique of pantheism: that is some of the best philosophical writing i've ever seen in an op-ed column. but i must say that the modern pantheist thinks exactly the same thing in slightly transposed terms: that we stand partly outside the order of nature - which we can harm or nurture - and have to engage in a process to reconnect with it. this sort of pantheism just is a monotheism, perhaps a competitor with judaism, islam, christianity, but also, like each of those in relation to the others, part of the same history.

in fact, you can see it emerging in the same history, together with the emergence of the reformation and modern science. spinoza is obviously a site, and he's trying to show that that treating nature as god is not heretical, is entailed by judaism and christianity. or you get emerson's development from unitarian minister to pantheist minister, which is a far less profound change than it might appear to be. i put thoreau in aslightly different category: his nature is more equivocal and less conscious. but he has been read as a pantheist pope.

now we do have examples of consciousness and goal-directed behavior emerging from material systems: namely in ourselves and each other. so it could be that the universe as a whole is like a giant brain from which consciousness could emerge. however do you really believe that? and why? you're anthropomorphizing the whole kit and caboodle: saying the universe is made in our image or vice versa. also i would point out that consciousness emerges in organisms in an environment, that consciousness is consciousnes of something outside ourselves, is a form of alertness or sensitivity to a world. but what would the world be consious of? itself i suppose: a kind of onanistic god.

at any rate, the structure, while not quite as unbelievable as the traditoonal monotheisms, is unbelievable, or is fundamentally a matter of sheer faith, and is also bent to whatever our purposes might be: it's as it were political rather than an attempt to ascertain the truth.

that france bans the headscarf, or britain the burqa etc, shows they are secular societies, universal and tolerant societies that have overcome religious divisions. that switzerland bans the minaret is "the latest sign of a backlash against muslim immigrants." the fact that secularism and universal tolerance is indistinguishable on the ground from bigotry and intolerance might give one pause, if one paused. one thing that the forces of progress and the forces of reaction have massively in common: they assert that they themselves can legitimately tell people what to wear or how to build. that is, they are statists. that is, they are embroiled in massive impostures, delusions, fallacies, fantasies, and contradictions that they are incapable actually of seeing or thinking through, god bless their little hearts.

mr fun writes, re: me on eboo patel:

now while this piece is dishonest, it is also combatting an American narrative that concludes with American interference in the Middle East, since (we all know) that is where Muslim terrorists come from. now the piece is dishonest, but the case you make for the truth here is and has been used as the kernel of American entire foreign policy for the past 8+ years.

well that's true, isn't it. and serracho says "chicken and egg': a good question, as the washpost makes clear today: they hated and ridiculed him and keyed his car down there because he was a conspicuous muslim. but on the other hand, even in the midst of disasters military and otherwise (for example, the destruction of tibet), i don't think you've seen, for example, buddhist suicide bombers or random mass murderers. for that matter, precious few shiite muslims or even christians, though you get the occasional eric rudolph. but adherents of sunni islam seem to do this every single day in many different locations. you want to call that a coincidence?

of course, most sunni muslims don't fly planes into buildings etc., and i'm sure many are peace-loving sweeties with love in their hearts. but on the other hand, when the next person shrapnelizes a woman's market or girls' school someplace, are you going to be in any doubt about their religious affiliation, or about the kind of thing they would say in justification of their own acts?

i might say the problem with this particular style or approach to violence is that it is anti-tactical, bizarrely irrelevant. your tibetan monk might be in despair. might be oppressed. but he's not going to start blowing people up at absolute random; that bears no relation to his despair. all over the world, people are in grinding poverty, despair, pain. they are devalued and exploited by the west or by christians or by commies or kleptocrats, etc. it would not be strange or even perhaps wrong to respond violently. but simply to start shooting or exploding or immolating people selected at random would not appear to have any possible moral justifcation or any fucking use. there is some peculiar ideology at work that detaches the act from its causes or effects in a fundamentally ahuman or alien/alienated way. so, um, where does that ideology come from? because it appears to me to be pretty unusual in human history.

so people do a lot of wrong things. "the west" does a lot of wrong things. it will lob a missile from a predator drone into your wedding, which looks like terrorism. and the evil of such things needs to be described and exposed bit by bit. but the logic is, for all that, utterly different: comprehensible even if wrong etc. both acts might be evil, even equally evil, but they are evil in fundamentally different ways. one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter is just wrong. no one is a freedom fighter in virtue of killing whoever happens to be present, victimizing people without any connection to a cause or comprehensible strategy for pushing it forward. i say that terrorism is real and well beyond stupid, and i say that 90% of it proceeds from sunni islam. that might be wrong and dangerous to say. is it false?

suicide bomb in pakistan kills 12: The morning attack took place in the town of Adazai, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) south of the main northwest city of Peshawar. The market was crowded with shoppers and goats being sold to celebrate the upcoming Muslim festival of Eid.

this, by now, is mechanical, not only for muslims but for non-muslims, and if truth was pragmatic or merely strategic, the idea that acts of violence or terrorism have nothing to do with islam would be...true. now let me say, there are many varieties of islam. you're not going to find sufi saints in suicide vests. not only that, but of course there are christian fanatics, and there are people who go on shooting rampages for non-religious reasons or for no comprehensible reason whatsoever, which is really the position on something like this: any explanation - including religious fanaticism - is inadequate because the effect is both infinitely in excess to and virtually completely conceptually detached, arbitrary, in relation to the cause.

but if like eboo patel you find yourself explaining away act after act day after day as a misunderstanding or having nothing to do with what the people doing these acts say they are doing, i think you are being disingenuous, or perhaps believing what you need to believe in the teeth of what's true. if you keep quoting the peace-loving passages of the koran and ignoring the justifications or celebrations of violence in the text or the extremely violent early history of islam - its teaching that the infidel deserves death and its history of giving people what it says they deserve, i don't think you're being honest.

at any rate, i don't feel the necessity to pretend to believe what, if it were true, would make the world a little better. and indeed, if you know that you're doing that, you don't actually believe what you say you believe: believing p is taking p to be true, not taking it to help us all live as brothers.

i might admire you for being good, but if i think that the reasons you're urging me to believe that p have nothing to do with whether p is true, by definition it's not possible to find what you're saying convincing. you (the politician, pundit, or just schmoe) say that p because it would help to believe p or it would be admirable to believe that p or we would all feel better if we believed that p or if we all beieved that p the world would be cured or something. you say it and i nod along for reasons that have nothing to do whether what we're saying is true. you talk, i nod, and neither us believe at all. (the graduation address: "anything you can dream, you can accomplish." no one denies it, and no one believes it.) now i think we pay a huge price for that ultimately; i don't believe it really is a long-term solution to anything or that it really usually has good effects. it's just living in a cooperative fantasy or a tissue of lies. but of course by my own lights whether it does or does not have good effects cannot be the question.

watching the kennedy memorial reminds us all again how full of funkiness catholicism really is. the vestments, the eucharist, all those golden goblets, images everywhere. that is some wild shit!

new frontiers in statecraft and the rule of law:

China has already positioned itself in other ways, including enacting a law in 2007 that says all reincarnations...must be approved by the government.

badass religion.

handout from my philosophy of religion class, also on the handouts page.

Basic Arguments for God's Existence

Each of these basic strategies supports numerous formulations, and there are other strategies as well.

The Ontological Argument (Anselm, e.g.)
The term 'God' refers to the greatest possible being.
A being which exists is greater than a being which does not exist.
Therefore, God exists.

(The ontological argument is a priori, deductive, and has the advantage not only of proving (if it proves anything) that God is morally perfect, omniscient, omnipotent, and so on.)

The Cosmological Argument (Aquinas etc)
Version (a): First Cause
Every motion, event, or object must have a cause.
There cannot be a temporally infinite chain of causation.
Therefore, there must be a first cause that is not itself caused by anything else ("and this all people call God.")

Version (b): from the principle of sufficient reason
For every event and object, there is in principle an adequate reason or explanation.
This is true not only of each specific thing and event but of the whole series or array.
Therefore there must be something in terms of which the whole universe or causal sequence can be explained (say, "the will of God")

(The cosmological argument is a posteriori in the sense that it supposes (from experience) that there things, events, and so on. But it is usually framed deductively.)

The Teleological Argument or The Argument from Design
The universe displays such elements of physical or moral order or purpose that it would be irrational to believe that it was the result of chance rather than intentional design.
This is often framed as an argument from analogy: say we found a watch on the beach; we'd conclude it was the result of someone's purposeful design and manufacture. How much more elaborate and beautiful etc is the world!

(The teleological argument is a posteriori and inductive or abductive.)

Definitions
a priori knowledge is knowledge that is not based on sensory (empirical) observation. Examples include principles of mathematics and logic.
a posteriori knowledge is emprical knowledge, knowledge based on sensory experience.
deductive arguments are arguments in which it is supposed that if the premises are true, the conclusion cannot be rationally denied. E.g. All men are mortal. Fred is a man. Therefore, Fred is mortal.
inductive arguments rest on enumerating observations. For example, all the crows we have observed are black. Therefore, the next crow we observe will be black. Though the premise lends probability to the conclusion, the premise(s) could be true and the conclusion false.

abductive arguments are arguments from analogy, concluding from the fact that two items are similar in certain respects, they are similar in other respects. For example, since rats are like people (in some respects), if a substance cures cancer in rats, it is likely to cure cancer in people.

here's an essay setting out faith-based atheism.

you know i hate to say it, but the pro-choice arguments of religious liberals like john kerry and barack obama are merely incoherent. i saw tim kaine on the tube the other day taking this (typical) line. 'well, you know, my religion teaches that human life is sacred and begins at conception."personally," i agree.  but i'm not willing to impose these views on women who are making hard decisions.' um. ok. so i believe it's murder, but i'm not willing to prohibit murder? or i don't operate according to my own beliefs, but according to someone else's beliefs (i.e. i believe and fail to believe it simultaneously)? or what? barack's view is that "women don't make these decisions lightly.' well, murderers often don't make their decision to kill your sorry ass lightly. does that mean murder shouldn't be against the law, or shouldn't be if it's not taken lightly? get busy trying to make the position actually consistent. like: my religion teaches that life begins at conception, but i disagree. or: my religion teaches that life is sacred, but i think life stinks. or: you know: i really don't know when life begins, despite what my religion may say, so i don't know whether it's deeply wrong to abort a fetus or not. until i'm more certain, i'm not advocating a ban. or something, anything, that makes some sort of rudimentary sense. certainly i'm not willing to swallow this  'what i believe personally has nothing to do with what i believe politically' idea or something. i believe x in my capacity as a y, and totally repudiate it in my capacity as a z. um, whatever. or: as an actual human being i believe x, but as a spectral somethingorother i disagree with myself. or: as a z i repudiate my own most deeply-held convictions. er, good luck with that, you fucking hypocrite.

see this is the same problem. we like any argument whose conclusions we support. we're happy that we've got a pro-choice pres, or whatever, so we just ignore the obvious ridiculous contradictions, all the hemming and hawing, the senseless slop. maybe that's the best we can do in the context of electoral politics. but surely people like kaine and obama (unlike kerry, perhaps) are aware of the fact that they're just spouting crap? can obama really just flatly contradict himself in the course of two sentences, or develop an inyourface incoherent position, and be completely unaware of that fact? and if he's aware of it, couldn't he do better somehow?

i realize there's a political dilemma. if i don't believe wholeheartedly everything that "my religion" teaches, then i'm sort of a kind of agnostic, and thus disqualified from the presidency. but if i do believe it, then i'm pro-life, alienating my own constituency. but maybe there's room for just a touch of honest groping or something?

the atheism videos have been arranged in a playlist.

seventh and last: on intelligent design in the schools.

sixth in the unreasonable atheism series. this is the central item, actually setting forth my version of atheism.

fourth in the series: the argument from design.

third atheist video: the a priori arguments.

second in the series on a certain version of atheism, this one on questions arising from the burden of proof and the historical effects of religion.

i'm doing a series of videoa representing a kind of atheism that's critical of the "new atheism of sam harris, christopher hitchens, richard dawkins, and so on. here's the first.

Religion is Fun
By Crispin Sartwell

Religion is too rarely appreciated for its entertainment value.
    We atheists have to be pretty happy with the presidential campaign, or indeed with the whole contemporary world. We're the only folks with the distance to be truly amused by everyone's hilarious beliefs and wild gesticulations.
    Catholics are angry that John Hagee, erstwhile McCain endorser, in a time-honored tradition, calls the Catholic Church "the Whore of Babylon." Meanwhile the Catholics are busy with the ascension of Mary or the infallibility of the pope or the market for little pieces of the saints' bones.
    They condemn each other for their bizarre, dangerous beliefs. Well they're both right on that. Keep right on, I say. You guys are killing me.
    Everything that happens is a punishment from God, from 9.11 to Katrina to Supreme Court decisions to this very sermon. Haile Selassie is God incarnate. No it's Freddy! Die, blasphemer! God, whoever he is, demands that you marry seven of your teenage nieces. He has twenty-six arms. God told me to hijack your plane. No he didn't! This book is the revealed truth. Nuh-uh! L. Ron Hubbard told me to make a bad sci-fi movie. God demands that we wear funny hats, or this funky hair style.
    Good stuff.
    I'd like to see an American Idol for preachers: Pastor Wright vs. Pastor Hagee vs the Pope vs the Grand Ayatollah vs the Lubovitcher rebbe vs Tom Cruise in a contest to see who can string words together in a more surreal set of arbitrary juxtapositions. Dude. It's psychedelic.
    Human epistemic perversity is an amazing circus of fun! I'm not saying that I have any reasons to believe the stuff I, personally, believe; I'm just saying the stuff you believe is hilarious. Indeed, I think what makes religion compelling is its perversity: you believe it precisely because it's entirely arbitrary, paradoxical, or so deeply profoundly mysterious that it strictly makes no sense at all.
   I'm not in favor of murder, for the most part, but as belief-sets, I adore anti-semitism, anti-Catholicism, the Inquisition, the fact that Muslims hate Hindus, Hindus Sikhs, etc. Hagee vs the Catholic church is good television. All day every day for a couple of weeks; then we'll have to come up with the next cage match of death.
    Hit each other with chairs or something. Or at least keep calling down God's thunderbolts and pronouncing anathemas. Maybe God wrote your book. But one thing's for sure: whoever wrote it was a gifted comedian.
   I want the Nation of Islam squaring off against Scientology, the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints against the Rastas, the Buddha kicking Jesus' butt, if Jesus has a butt. Play-by-play by Christopher Hitchens. Sneering, perhaps, but grinning.
   One thing about American politics: you've got to believe in one God or another. Better find Jesus right now. This means by definition that every American presidential candidate and a fortiori every American president is saddled with the hilarious preachings of some amazingly cool institutionalized psychosis. Without the clash of the gods, American politics would just be boring.
    I want to say, I respect faith. I respect all faiths, equally. I practice universal tolerance. Each religion is an astonishing perverse achievement. And in its sheer comedy, each makes life more fun.
    Today's atheists - Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, for example - are way too grim and serious. They're way too apparently reasonable. If they had their way, we wouldn't have near as many grins.
    So keep right on, y'all. I respect your right to practice any religion you like in whatever way you prefer. Hell, do it in the public schools. Do it in Congress.
    Just make sure I get to watch.

we atheists have to be pretty happy watching the three-ring epistemic circus of religion. john hagee believes all kinds of wacky shit. shocking. but he's right about the catholic church. indeed, every religion is right about their rivals: that they're crazy and dangerous. but, we need to add, funny! hey you're irrational because you think we're at the end times, not like us who believe in the virgin birth or the infallibility of the pope or something. there's nothing more sensible about believing that jesus is god or muhammed can fly than that haile selassie is jah incarnate, or that god demands that we marry seventeen of our teenage cousins etc. without religion, the human sitcom woould be infinitely less amusing. and let me just say: i fully support anti-semitism, anti-catholicism, the inquisition. i just want the bloodbaths on tv. and i hope that every one who ever runs for president from now on gets ridiculed for the beliefs of their pastors. good, funny stuff. we are amazing creatures! we can believe anything. it's fun!

occasionally, one grows concerned about the fate of american english. here is an actual sentence from the actual new york times: "I feel a palpable papal disconnect." inferring from the context, i believe that this poor sap is trying to mark his own alienation from the papacy, which is less a tragedy than are the words in which he tries to express it. personally, i am glad to be disconnected from the pope, and i would be glad, too, that my disconnect be palpable, if there were any such things as "disconnects," and if, if there were, they might be palpable or impalpable, papal or impapal.