cheese it, the cops!

this year in atheism

ok here is this week's creators column, the occasion fot the c-span thing.

The Year in Atheism: 2005
By Crispin Sartwell

Every year is a good year for atheism, because every year brings with it a bumper crop of incomprehensible disasters, a spanking new set of illustrations of the obvious fact that suffering visits the guilty and the innocent alike, that the universe is morally arbitrary. Undeserved suffering is as repugnant to atheists as to anyone else, but at least we don't have to try to square it with God's will. No atheist hints with the vicious, annihilating darkness of believers that people get what they deserve.
    But in the annals of universal indifference, 2005 was particularly impressive. It began just after the Indian Ocean rose up and washed away tens of thousands of people: people no better or worse than the rest of us, guilty only of living near the beach.
    New Orleans has a Gomorrah aspect, but the hurricane seemed more intent on inflicting suffering on people in virtue of their poverty than in virtue of their decadence. And it's always interesting when an act of God blows churches off the map.
     The earthquake in Pakistan killed sinners and saints; Christians, Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, and animists; newborn babies and their parents. If it didn't kill them quickly, it killed them slowly, and if there were an intelligence guiding the universe, one would say that it killed them with relish.
    Indeed, the idea that someone is running the universe and wants all this to happen is the essence of nihilism: the only plausible response would be a hatred literally of everything.
    The problem of evil - or more properly the problem of suffering - has for millennia been the primary argument against the monotheistic religions. To state it briefly: these religions teach that the world was created by an all-powerful and perfectly good being. But if God is perfectly good, he wants to prevent the suffering of people who don't deserve to suffer (small children, for example). And if God is all-powerful he can prevent the suffering of people who don't deserve to suffer. So, if God exists, there is no undeserved suffering. But there is undeserved suffering. Therefore, God does not exist.
   This is an argument of remarkable clarity and power. But there are various possible responses.
   It is often said, for example, that God's will is incomprehensible, that our finite minds are incapable of encompassing the infinite, and so that what we believe to be good reflects the limitations of our understanding. Tsunamis and earthquakes and the suffering they inflict might appear to our tiny minds to be bad: in infinity, however, they are compatible with God's perfection.
    That is a terrible argument. If God's goodness has nothing to do with human ethical ideals, then it is surely idiotic to call God good. And if the claim is that, for example, it is compatible with goodness in the widest possible sense to crush babies to death, then I should think that it would be impossible to distinguish God from Satan. Once you've made God entirely incomprehensible, the idea that you should or even can worship such a thing becomes incomprehensible as well.
    Of course God may, in eternity, recompense the undeserving for their suffering. That, however, does not make their suffering in time less real or any more sensible.
     Perhaps the most famous theological attempt to deal with the problem of suffering is the doctrine of original sin, associated with St. Augustine, among others. Cutting to the chase, the idea is that we are all born already deserving to suffer and die, so that when the baby gets crushed, she's getting just what she deserves.
      In that case, what is puzzling is that some people get better than they deserve, and indeed the problem of pleasure is the obverse of the problem of suffering: it often appears that the evil prosper. But in any case I would like you to try to entertain in all seriousness the idea that babies deserve slow, agonizing death. If you get that far, try to convince yourself that a universe in which this is so is the best possible universe: that is, a universe created by a perfectly good and all-powerful being.
     If you merely tell me that despite everything 2005 threw at you, you have faith, and you cannot really explain in what or why, there is nothing I can say to stop you. There is something touching in the sheer perversity of your position.
    And perhaps we can agree on this much: here's hoping 2006 nurtures faith more because it inflicts less, and less arbitrary, suffering.

   

toss your cookies

here's an interesting idea for trying to figure out whether the nsa is monitoring your email. don't know that it really would be as effective as suggested, for a variety of reasons. any site, for example, is liable to be webcrawled etc. meanwhile, the nsa has been dropping cookies onto hard drives that access the nsa site. they claim that this was accidental, which is merely ridiculous. yo: let's blow some shit up. jihad! jihad! behead the innocent!

c-span audio

you can get audio of the c-span appearance here: (12.27).

atheism defined

let me try to accomplish some clarification of the term 'atheism.' several people have written to say that my declaraton that 'i'd be surprised to meet god, but i don't say it's impossible' means that i'm an agnostic, or indeed a theist (?). of course, some thinkers have defined god as a necessarily existing being, and then inferred from this definition that god exists (the "ontological argument'). in that case it's sufficient to be an atheist to declare that it's possible that god does not exist.  only: as kant and many others have shown, the idea of necessary existence cannot be made comprehensible. now there could be a form of atheism that declares that god necessarily does not exist. the simplest such view would be an argument to the effect that the qualities attributed to god are absurd, that the attribution entails a contradiction. the most famous argument along these lines focuses on omnipotence and asks things like: can god create a rock so heavy even he can't lift it? if so he's not omnipotent. if not he's not omnipotent. therefore he's not omnipotent. but i feel that some conceptual legerdemain has taken place here as with the ontological argument. at any rate, the way i'd state my atheism is: i believe that god does not exist. here 'exist'  means just everyday existence, like the existence of you or me, or this basketball: if we inventoried the things in this world, we'd not find god. 'god' i'm going to take not as the proper name of something, but as an abbreviation for a set of descriptions: omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence etc. so this atheism is the assertion that nothing that satisfies those descriptions exists. there's no modal claim at all. i'm not asserting that it's impossible that god exists, or denying merely that god necessarily exists; i am denying that god exists.
a classic brief attack on the arguments for god's existence: bertrand russell's "why i am not a christian."

zzzz

david ignatius in the washpost: "The challenge in the coming debate will be to find the right balance between national security and civil liberties."  this is good. we need pundits who take a completely obvious point and frame it in the most commonplace possible terms. this helps the rest of us feel, like, all creative and shit. anything constitutes a surprising insight after that. thanks, dude.

fatherland

my latest column, department of fatherland security, is up on the creators site.

misc contd

my inbox has filled after the atheism session on c-span. if i don't manage to reply to you, apologies. i am working through the mail while taking care of three 5-year-old girls. and in response to a number of inquiries, i do write books (look at the left-hand column). most relevant to the atheism material is obscenity, anarchy, reality. i've kind of calmed down since 1993, however. what is remarkable is, first, that many atheists have written just in a little relief that our point of view even got expressed. but the mail from believers has also been uniformly pleasant: there has been no bile, which i find encouraging all the way round. in response to other inquiries, my wife's name is marion winik. her recent book is above us only sky.

yoo idiot

so john yoo derived his ideas (warrantless searches, torture, internment without charge etc) from his opposition to totalitarianism. one can only hope that, when he expresses this connection, he is actually slack-jawed and drooling.

misc

so, apologies for the light blogging. many family and other obligations. we had a wet christmas here in pa, but it cleared up just as the sun set. in the eastern sky there was as vivid and perfect a rainbow as i have ever seen. my five-year-old daughter had never really seen a rainbow. so we ended the day with magic.
check me out tomorrow morning, 12.27, on c-span's washington journal. approximately 7:30-8:15.

rip id up

ok, let me try to get this argument clear. the claim that the universe is a natural system (which i am going to parse as "contains only material things'): is it an empirical or scientific claim? if it is, then so is the claim that the universe is not a natural system. evidence for one of these would be evidence against the other: either they are both empirical or neither is. in that case "intelligent design" is a perfectly acceptable scientific hypothesis. but of course the difficulty of deciding what might consitute a test of its truth leads you to suspect that it's not empirical. but if it's not, then neither is the claim that the universe is a natural system. if the latter is not empirical, then scioence rests (as it does in any case) on a worldview it is not in a position to establish, or even give any evidence for. its structure is in principle identical to  religion by revelation: here are the indubitable foundations; here the  incredibly elaborate structure produced on that basis. one might assay a pragmatic justification: it's true means it works. but i think the jury is out on the pragmatic value of science. and i think an argument could be made for the pragmatic justification for catholicism or buddhism. and i think that when you import such a standard of justification you are again making a sewries of foundational assertions that you are in no position to support; indeed, that they form the foundation of science is enough to show that they cannot be scientifically justified.

id some more

what's really most disturbing about the id decision is the unquestioned assumption on both sides that american education is a totalitarian system. one side wants to forbid the mention of this and that. the other wants to mandate the reading of a certain statement. the idea that the teachers and students in these classrooms are autonomous persons who might want to believe this and that and say they believe it, might want to examine this or that issue in this or that way, is something that never occurs to anyone. we are far far beyond any of these notions. and indeed, in a situation which education consists universally of big morons (from school boards to the dept of ed) manufacturing little morons, notions like autonomy or belief or argument or indeed learning are quaint relics of a backward stage in the wondrous progress of our species.

shout out

thank you to judge james robertson, from all the friends of freedom.

id

john jones's opinion in the intelligent design case is interesting and intellectually ambitious. but as you may know, i disagree.for one thing, the idea that it's the federal government's job to "forbid the mention" of anything, anywhere, is disgusting and that it can is an index of authoritarianism. but let me raise an objection to the approach of the decision to the definition of science. science, on jones's view, consists of seeking naturalistic explainations for natural phenomena. naturalistic explanations are physicalistic explanations. this makes science into a metaphysical theory, an assertion of a materialist ontology. and thus it places science in direct opposition to all religious interpretations of the universe, among others. now if science is indeed at root a metaphysics, it is faith-based. one cannot justify materialism on scientific grounds, surely, especially when you define science in terms of materialism. that is, materialism on this view is a completely unjustified assumption on which science rests. furthermore, such a view makes it obvious that every religious believer must oppose science: they simply cannot be compatible. understand me: i am myself a materialist and an atheist. but one cannot pretend that there is scientific evidence for those views, if jones is right. on the other hand, if science is defined simply methodologically - a la popper for instance, in terms of hypothesis and falsification - then of course it can in principle end up positing supernatural entities.

re-writing textbooks (11.04)

anthology of me

an obviously right-headed person named stephen gordon has published a little volume of quotations from captain capitulation. thanks, man. also my creators column, a modified manifesto, is up. i wish someone would publish this thing cause even though it's kind of funny, it's kind of true, and kind of important.

free press

we should all be grateful to the washington post for revealing black site program and to the nytimes for the nsa story. they have done america and the world a great service in fending off totalitarianism. but the deference they have shown to the administration in the process amounts to a kind of connivance in the criminal activity. the post did not reveal the locations of the secret internment facilities, which it seems have been picked up and moved to new hidden locations. they cited "national security issues." on the contrary, there should have been an angry mob outside of each of these facilities, and a process by which, let's say, the european union actually arrested the people working there. the black site program is breathtakingly criminal, and deserves no more deference than you would accord embezzlers you'd just detected or something. indeed, likely you could have saved people's lives by publishing the locations immediuately and without notifying the administration of your intention to do so. that the nytimes sat on the nsa story for a year is incomprehensible. you cannot sit there and tell me that publication of the general idea that the president authorized illegal surveillance helps anybody's terrorist conspiracy, no matter what vicious little chumps like mark mclellan may say. here again, there was an obligation to put a stop to breathtaking abuse of liberty by publicizing it. so, meanwhile, just for the hell of it, i'll mention that a time reporter tipped karl rove off that he was being investigated by the special prosecutor, and point to the role of bob woodward in covering up the administration's strategy to manipulate us into war. it would be nice to have a truly free press at the upper levels, if you get me: major newspapers that are not both investigating and sleeping with dick cheney.

security state

as you may know, typepad has been crashed, so i've wanted to blog and haven't been able to. on the nsa story, patriot act etc. first off: that the response of these people to 9.11 was immediate nonstop ramping up of totalitarianism in every aspect of our lives is a devastating indictment of their personalities. it should be diagnosed rather than assessed from a policy perspective. it is pathology, not policy. but it's been a good couple of months for american liberty, which beyond hope has been reasserting itself. i have heard the words "civil liberties" from the lips of bush and gonzales, while cheney has disappeared. of course, 'liberty' in the mouth of a gonzales has a certain kim jong il irony. still, at least he's uttering the words and so hearing them as he yaps.

wikiwiki

wikipedia rocks . i just kind of wish my students didn't use it as a substitute for actually reading the classics of philosophy.

plame

well now this is interesting. i just vibe that the source for both woodward and novak is cheney. course i could be wrong.

the cure

you may be interested to know that semen cures depression.

sharper

i've got a review of the book "the magician and the cardsharp" in the latimes today.

mccarthy, pryor

so you don't know what to say on such occasions. my political awakening coincided with mccarthy's   campaign in 1968. i was ten. i've been a political junkie ever since, though, like a lot of us, not as hopeful. pryor provided a similarepiphany with regard to race; i finally got a handle on the thing when pryor did an imitation of a white person, and i wrote about that later.

pigs of china

speaking of overthrowing foreign governments, i'd start with the pigboys running china.

cia is back

one thing to think about in relation to a lurch left in latin-american politics, starting with chavez, thinking about elections in mexico, bolivia, chile, the mood in brazil, etc: the cia is now exactly where it was in the sixties and seventies. you perhaps recall that the elected president of chile, salvador allende, committed suicide in the presence of cia agents by shooting himself a couple of dozen times in the back. we replaced him with the glorious pinochet, on whose regime the american administration has modeled its black site program. the american state these days is in full-throttle abduction/assassination/junta mode, and you know, for example, that they are all over chavez's venezuela, at a minimum doing the disinformation thing. chavez is a demagogue, but you would be an idiot to dismiss his assertions that the u.s. has floated various ideas for killing him or replacing the regime with someone more oil-friendly to the neocon world.

cut on the bias

so, as i think about despised groups, and the despicable people who inhabit them, i've been trying to figure out what group of people i hate most. black folks? asians? buggerers? baathists? persons in persistent vegetative states? pop princesses? bimini islanders? well yes, i hate all these people. but most of all i hate and discriminate against persons - whoever they may be - who are identical to myself.

wopof's new front

you know how much i dig the rightblogworld's obsession with the war on christmas. but what i can't stand is these secular humanist pussies who say there is no such war. what the hell! the war on christmas is real and we will be rounding up elves and shit. we are going to put christmas in a stress position and make it talk. we are going to pepperspray christmas and listen to its pathetic squealing. we are going to shoot it with big big guns and after that we are going to fuck its bullet-ridden corpse. there's only one way to come at baby jesus, and that's with all the firepower you got. happy holidays!

clarity

the washpost, npr, and others have headlined their stories about rice on torture by saying that she is "clarifying" the administration position. this is almost certainly the language of her own press release. it would entail, for example, that the actions of the admin were clearer after she spoke than before. it would entail that, since she appeared to foreswear torture, that she was merely making clear an already existing policy against torture. meanwhile of course the admin continues to resist congressional efforts to explicitly hold the admin to the policies it claims to endorse, or possibly always to have endorsed. the argument i like best is that we don't torture, but if you let the terrorists know that, they will be emboldened. that is, you want them to disbelieve the secretary of state when, her voice ringing with conviction, she swears we don't torture people. it would be odd to make statements that are intended to be believed by some people and are intended to be disbelieved by others. we, as the people who are supposed to believe her, should have "sucker" stamped on our foreheads. the point is, i think, that we don't torture, unless you actually catch us at it.

"As a matter of U.S. policy, the United States' obligations under the CAT [U.N. Convention Against Torture], which prohibits cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment -- those obligations extend to U.S. personnel wherever they are, whether they are in the United States or outside of the United States," Rice said during a news conference with Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko.

now this is hardly a "clarification." i mean, i hear the holes. *as a matter of policy* we do not torture people. that is, in our published guidelines or public statements we do not endorse torture. perhaps here "a matter of policy" is opposed to "a matter of fact." if rice is saying that we have not tortured people in a concerted way with the connivance and enthusiastic support of the vice president, the secretary of defense, the attorneys general, and so on, i daresay she will eventually be shown to be lying. and it will turn out - is turning out - that most of the people we are torturing were wrongly detained in the first place; this is practically entailed by our denial to them of any semblance of due process.

they don't know it's christmas

possibly bush is sending out 'holiday' rather than christmas cards because he is too ashamed to face baby jesus.

goddamn fairies

my column on fantasy and reality is in the latimes today.

crisis

there is a crisis today in america. no i don't mean the bird flu, though of course we are all headed for immediate death. i mean the leaders of corporate america, and everyone else, producing cliches as though they were widgets. and indeed the market seems illimitable. this crisis was horrifyingly exacerbated when thomas friedman started talking about things like "globalization," "education," and "the twenty-first century economy." his brain had been carefully cultivated as a cliche farm. now 'truth' and 'meaninglessness' are synonyms. now people recite nonsense syllables with the solemnity of scripture. i boldly state my opposition right now to "education" in all its pernicious, empty forms. and i endorse the globalization of the bird flu.

hurricane karl

so. why was karl rove handling relations between the fed gov and the state of lla in the response to katrina? there's only one possible answer: because the white house considered hurricane response a political operation.

White House senior adviser Karl Rove wanted it conveyed that he understood that Blanco was requesting that President Bush federalize the evacuation of New Orleans. The governor should explore legal options to impose martial law "or as close as we can get," Vitter quoted Rove as saying, according to handwritten notes by Terry Ryder, Blanco's executive counsel.

Thus began what one aide called a "full-court press" to compel the first-term governor to yield control of her state National Guard -- a legal, political and personal campaign by White House staff that failed three days later when Blanco rejected the administration's terms, 10 minutes before Bush was to announce them in a Rose Garden news conference, the governor's aides said