The Sentient Puddle

God as parallel lines

2011-05-07T09:02:00.000-07:00

I am curious what people think about this analogy. He isn't saying he believes in god in any monotheistic way. He agrees there is a higher power governing reality (basically math, laws of physics, logic, universal ethics - platonic forms essentially). In fact, from a Christian point of view he is most definitely an atheist, because he is in no way defining god as an intelligent being. He has a respect for concepts we cannot construct in reality, but concepts we somehow know of. Without these ideas which seem self-evident, we would not be able to reason and understand experience. If we could not reason about parallel lines or perfect circles, we could go no further in our understanding of the physical world. He's saying he believes in the higher power of "truth" in that there is objective universal truths directing all things, and these truths are often reasoned about, and yet are unseen and deduced from reflection upon our experience. Although the world is often chaotic and random, there is a kind of order behind it. We find comfort and understanding because of this. It allows communication and also mystery. There are mathematical laws, causal and physical laws, and all the beauty of nature. So in a way, he is talking about platonic forms as "god," and how there is a structure unseen that holds a kind of romantic order and unity to the world.

Obama's Birth Certificate... Are we really still talking about this shit?

2011-04-27T13:53:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Appeal to Ignorance Fallacy

2011-04-26T15:38:00.000-07:00

Often when debating arguments about faith and other ideology, we tend to run across the highly fallaciousappeal to ignorance. The purpose of this post is to reveal this fallacy for what it is, and my hope is that by doing this, I will teach how to identify this mistake in everyday argument so that you will also feel my pain. Why, you ask? Because the appeal to ignorance has become a virus in politics today, and it has been used far too frequently in religion. And I won't have it! I won't! Atheists and skeptics unite! Psh.. not really. But I think I might vomit a little in my mouth if I have to listen to another argument accompanied by that insultingly patronizing tone: "oh you poor thing, we just don't know.. It's a mystery.. and you just have to 'trust' there's a god and have faith.. there's so much we don't know in the world, it had to come from somewhere.... blah blah blah... [insert pseudo-profundity here] ...jesus, jesus, jesus... blah blah blah... he loves you, and he sacrificed everything for humanity to absolve us of our sin and debt to god..." Even though he didn't really die, went to a better place, had absolute foreknowledge of his fate, and thus didn't really sacrifice jack shit. Offended? Good. That's the only way to get through sometimes. It's called provocative therapy. Get used to it. ;)

An appeal to ignorance reasons that "we have not proven god does not exist, and this is evidence that we cannot consider any such claim as true. If we cannot consider this claim to be true, we must considerit as false. Therefore the logically opposing claimthat 'god does exist' must be considered as true."

It is the idea that a position is necessarily true because it has notbeen proven false (or that we must consider a position necessarily false because it has notbeen proven true). The breakdown of such poor reasoning looks as follows:

1.  God either exists or does not exist

2.  It has not been disproven that “god exists,” and therefore it cannot be considered           as false

3.  If we cannot consider “god exists” to be false, we must consider it as true.

4.  Thus the assertion that “god exists,” must be considered as true.

5.  It has not been proven that “god does not exist,” and therefore we cannot                        consider this claim as true

6.  If we cannot consider “god does not exist” as true,                                                                 we must consider it as false

7.  Thus, the assertion that “god does not exist” must be considered as false

Premise (2) and (5) ignore the consideration that premise (1) maynot be formulated to be a falsifiable claim in that one can discover it's truth value. Also, both of these premises admitignorance: that no one has the satisfactory evidenceor argument to prove or disprove premise (1), and instead of acknowledging this, people often equivocate“has not been disproved” with “must therefore be considered true”; and theyalso equivocate “has not been proven” with “must therefore be consideredfalse.” Just because something is notdisproven, does not mean we cannot in the future disprove said claim, andsimply because something has not been proven, this does not entail that wecannot eventually prove said claim. Also, we can technically "consider" or "believe" anything we like in our ignorance.

To break it down for those still having trouble, these types of arguments follow the basic form of:
If a proposition has not been disproved, thenit cannot be considered false.
If itcannot be considered false, it must be considered true.

And of course the counterpart to this fallacy, often usedagainst atheists by theists:
If aproposition has not been proven, then it cannot be considered true.
If itcannot be considered true, it must be considered false.

Your intuition dear reader is correct. Just because something has not been proven ordisproven beyond all doubt, does not require that we must, or cannot, consider a claim false ortrue on those merits. And it certainly does not necessitate that we must considerthe opposite claim with the opposite truth value. In logic, a disjunction (either A or B) canbe valid if both A and B are true, both A and B are false, or they can holdopposing truth values.

Sometimes these arguments take the form of a falsedilemma fallacy:

1.  Either god exists now or god never existed

2.  It is not proven that god never existed, and it is not disproven that god exists now (and via previous arguments...)

3.  god must exist now

Premise one ignores a third possible option that both claims are false: God existed in the past, but exists nolonger. Premise two assumes the burden ofproof is on the side opposite of the positive existential claim that “godexists now.”

The burden of proof for anyexistential claim about something (that has yet to be proven to exist) is always on the positive position that says “X exists." The burden of proof is NOT on the person who suggests the claim “X does not exist," in the absence of evidence for X. Suppose in reality Fairies have never existed, and therefore left noevidence of their existence. If something does not, and has never existed, there will be no evidence to falsify that something. There is noevidence that I can present that will adequately demonstrate Fairies neverexisted if said fairies never lived to provide said evidence of theirexistence. There is no evidence for meto point to, and therefore it is a non-falsifiable statement. I could present evidence for a competing theory that "fairies are a fiction created by man," and this can count as legitimate evidence for it's falsification.

If we do not follow the rule that the burden of proof isalways on the positive existential claim, then we can wind up saying thingslike “Unicorns exist!” Opponent: “proveto me that they do, so that I may be justified in believing your claim” You: “Prove that they do not exist! See? You cannot! Thus unicorns must be considered to have realexistence”

In summary: Ignoranceis NOT evidence of anything but our ignorance. If ignorance did count as valid evidence, then I could just as easily argue that:

1.  God either exists or does not exist

2.  It has not been proven that “god exists”

3.  Thus we cannot consider “god exists” as true

4.  If we cannot consider “god exists” as true, we must consider it as false

5.  It has not been disproved that “god does not exist”

6.  Thus we cannot consider “god does not exist” as false

7.  If we cannot consider “god does not exist” as false, we must consider it                               as true

8.  Thus from premises 4 and 7, we must consider that god does not exist

So although the "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," we cannot then assert that the lack of evidence counts as evidence for either absence or presence.  There may be evidence, however, of competing
theories that render your theory (of god, fairies, unicorns) as unnecessary or
absurd, and THIS can be used as positive evidence
to prove a negative claim as I have argued previously.

Celebrate Judgment day 2011! Or 2012?? I know I will ;)

2011-04-15T12:08:00.000-07:00

Short post today (that turned into a long one). Can't seem to find anything I care to write seriously about. I've been in a dismal mood about life in general lately. I'm sure it happens to writers all the time in professional blogging. In fact, for your reading pleasure, I came across a passage by Kierkegaard that accurately describes my (hopefully fleeting) angst with the world:

I lack altogether patience to live. I cannot see the grass grow, but since I cannot I don't feel at all inclined to. My views are the fleeting observations of a 'traveling scholar' rushing through life in the greatest haste. People say the good Lord fills the stomach before the eyes. I haven't noticed; my eyes have had enough and I am weary of everything, and yet I hunger... - Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

Was that too melodramatic? Well, you know me. I'll probably be super optimistic about some kind of nonsense in a few hours, so don't worry.

Anyways, I suppose I should talk about the title of this post or something, right? Well! This actually cheers me up just thinking about it. As I have briefly mentioned before, there is an evangelical group led by Harold Camping (and his radio network) that has predicted judgment day to be May 21, 2011! I love it! Finally a testable claim by religion! A prediction that is only a month away! Their movement is growing as May 21st draws closer, the donations are flying (towards the church of course), and these are not the only groups predicting the end of the world. The rest of them however, put it off till 2012 (Basically: Insert Mayan Calender, blah blah blah.. some quote mining, plus cherry-picked passages from the bible = end of the world, on such and such a day. Even though the Mayan's had nothing to do with Christianity, and were slaughtered by a bunch of Spanish Catholics for their wealth).

For me, this is all very exciting for two reasons. First, when nothing happens, I suspect a lot of followers will be questioning the validity of their faith (or at least some of the more ridiculous claims made by their faith and it's leaders), and you know how I love that shit. And second, IF judgment day does happens (which it won't), I can say goodbye to the tiresome social conventions and political bullshit, and finally roam the world like Cane in Kung Fu. Yeah, I'll probably carry a sword on my back, and make my own clothes and stuff. It'll be awesome. People will finally realize how ridiculous it was to betray each other for mindless materialism and status anxiety. I don't know. Perhaps that is too optimistic a hope. (Ha ha, my friend asked me once why I'm always so pessimistic. I replied, "I like being pessimistic sometimes. The evidence is on my side. (wink)" But actually I'm a pretty cheerful guy)

Either way, I find this whole story both absurd and exciting. It's like buying a lottery ticket in a way. Even though the chances of you winning are less than the odds of being struck by lightening, you spend your time dreaming about what it'd be like if you somehow actually won all that money. And that's what all of this nonsense really comes down to: wishful thinking. People are dissatisfied with life, tired of reality, and they wish it were true that something else were really true. They start thinking, "wouldn't it be great if... Wait!" they say, upon sudden philosophical insight, "Who says it isn't true? Who am I to say this is ridiculous? Is it presumptuous of me to say that none of this is likely? Perhaps it is! 'Anything is possible' they say. Therefore, it must be the case that my wish is possible! I want to believe, and therefore it might be true!" From this absurd reasoning, it is only a short leap to: I believe, I believe, I believe! And belief trumps your truth! Therefore, my belief in the supernatural is more true than your belief in the natural. My response? "Psh.. you wish! And that's all it is: A wish. Hell, "I wish" I had a light-saber and could wield the force, but that just isn't going to happen. I wish I was a little bit taller, I wish I was a baller... Wish all you want to, believe all you want to. You cannot move the Mount Sinai by pure faith. You must get a shovel.

Perhaps I am being too harsh? Well maybe, but I'm sick of religion feeding people the punch, and millions drinking it. Right now, hundreds of followers are putting their lives on hold, believing today is the "end times," simply because an authority of their denomination drew some ambiguous correlations between bible verses and their pessimistic view of the world. People are running around putting up posters and preaching that we all better repent. They're wasting their own time and their family's. Their slogan should not be the arrogant and presumptuous, "repent and thou shalt be saved," but rather: investigate carefully, and with healthy skepticism. Seek the truth and do not ignore it. Follow your reason, ask what conclusions you can draw from the facts and test those conclusions! Do this, and we can better trust that answers you seek will be found, that perpetual peace can exist, and that life will ultimately be better.

Phaedrus out!

Of all ridiculous things in the world what strikes me as the most ridiculous of all is being busy in the world, to be a man quick to his meals and quick to his work. So when, at the crucial moment, I see a fly settle on such a businessman's nose, or he is bespattered by a carriage which passes him by in even greater haste, or the drawbridge is raised, or a tile falls from the roof and strikes him dead, I laugh from the bottom of my heart. And who could help laughing? For what do they achieve, these busy botchers? Are they not like the housewife who, in confusion at the fire in her house, saved the fire-tongs? What else do they salvage from the great fire of life (ibid)?

Poor Logic

2011-04-11T14:38:00.000-07:00

lol, okay.. Well let me help these guys out here. Although this is clearly meant to be a deductive argument (with the implied conclusion that "all atheism leads to civil war"), it is highly fallacious. It's sad to me that people actually find this rhetoric compelling. And for the sake of entertainment and an unnecessary exercise in logic, I will break this argument down into parts and over-analyze the crap out of it. This way I can render it even more absurd than it already is, and ultimately feel better about myself for being an asshole (kind of like these assholes). ;)

By the way, no atheist is really "anti-god" in the way this sign implies, atheism is simply disbelief in the supernatural altogether. Many radicals who use the term anti-god to describe atheism, assume atheists do believe god exists, and that we intentionally defy him/her/it by not conforming with the rest of the sheeple on this planet. Atheists don't believe in god, so we cannot be "anti-god" in that way. Many radicals just assume it is impossible to not believe in god, and that atheists are stubbornly defying him by pretending not to believe (or that we're in denial or something). We can be "anti-religious," and against a particular conception of god, but most atheists simply decline to participate in the debate. However, because they mentioned atheists and their lawyers, they may be referring to secularism and how people want religion our of our schools, and out of political decisions that affect everyone. But this isn't anti-god, this is secularism. You want religion to be allowed in school or politics? Which religion? Yours? Well how convenient.

Substituting "atheist" for "anti-god," because this sign was clearly meant to address "lunatic atheists & their lawyers," the argument runs thus:

Origionally their argument looks like this:
a is b
b is t
t is c...? (I think it is meant for us to draw our own conclusions here, wink)

making it valid:
a is b
b is t
t is c
thus a is c (thus all people anti-god lead to civil war..)

More realistically, their claims are universal generalizations that ALL anti-god/atheism is anti-american. Syllogistically:

1: (all A is B) all atheists are anti-american
2: (all B is T) all anti-american(ism) is treason
3: (Thus all A is T) Thus all atheists are traitors
4: (all T is C) all traitors lead to civil war
5: (Thus all A's are C) Therefore all atheism leads to civil war

However, this is like saying:

All organisms with wings can fly.
Penguins have wings.
Therefore, penguins can fly*

or

Cutting people with a knife is a crime
Surgeons cut people with a knife
Surgeons are criminals*

Just because an argument is valid does not make it sound. This argument fails at the first premise right out the gate, because for any premise to follow, it must be universally true for all atheists, which it obviously is not. Premise one is a fallacy of presumption, normally referred to as the "fallacy of accident" or destroying the exception. It assumes that all atheists (or secularists for that matter) are necessarily anti-american. A blatantly false statement. There are atheists serving our country right now. Some atheists are very patriotic, and serve all areas of employment in our nation's government and education system. They pay taxes, vote, etc. I served in the Navy for five years, and I don't regret it.

Premise 2 is laughable, but could be allowed as a definition I suppose. However, what does "anti-american" mean? Against policy? Critical of our country's past and present decisions? There are lots of anti-american citizens out there. Sometimes not everyone supports our current political direction, or our past political decisions. Most of us were born here without any choice in the matter, so.. yeah, why couldn't one be anti-american? Does it really constitute treason? Premise 3 is entailed by premise one and two, and it highlights how absurd premise one actually is. I mean if all people who wanted secular government were traitors, you would have to toss in almost all of our founding fathers under that assumption. Premise 4 also needs to be universally true for the conclusion to follow. Do all traitors lead to civil war? Of course not. Some are caught and brought to justice when they've harmed our citizens and country. So this statement is also unsound.

Premise 5... All Atheism (or secularism) leads to civil war? You have got to be kidding me.

Well, two can play at this game:

(All R is D) All religion distorts the truth
(x is R) Christianity is a religion
(x is D) Therefore Christianity distorts the truth
(All D is H) Whatever distorts the truth harms the people
(x is H) Thus, Christianity harms the people
(All H is W) All that harms people is morally wrong
(x is W) Thus Christianity is morally wrong

Perfectly valid, but is it sound?

* these are taken from the two links in the following paragraph.

A tentative hypothesis for solving the problem of free will..

2011-04-05T19:12:00.001-07:00

I have written on the problems of free will before. They are sloppy and perhaps infantile in construction. However, one day I hope to solve one major problem in philosophy (this problem is obviously not going to be it, but hey.. who says I didn't try, huh?). So at the moment, I'm just hypothesizing and playing around when you see these kinds of posts. I am a huge fan of the analytic school of philosophy, and so I attempt to state my arguments very plainly, and expound on them conservatively. In this post I will be referring to the problem of whether or not we have free will. The biggest problem with free will (if we excuse the claim of an omniscient god) is causal determinism, which my readers have come across in my previous posts, or have been introduced to it in their education. Although I have proposed a solution to free will before, I was mostly suggesting that: our personal identity is "free" to remake the rules that define how we respond to the world over time. I based this on the claim that we have a random and unique perspective from a "personal identity" that learns and understands by remembering its experience in the world. But I would like to modify this and propose the following grounds for free will.

Brief illustration of the Problem being addressed:

Do you believe the past determines our future? Do you believe that there is a reason for your actions, and that there are explanations for those reasons?

Are those reasons grounded in experience? Are those experiences causal in relation to each other?

Then you believe in a determined world. "In a deterministicworld, everything that happens follows ineluctably from natural or divine laws"(ibid). There is but one possible future, and if it's five seconds from now or ten years from now, it is determined by the past and you cannot escape from it. You are therefore unfree, because no matter what delusions of freedom you have in the present, you cannot change your future. For that matter, you cannot change the present moment. You "could not have done otherwise" than you have in reading this super awesome philosophy post! You are continuing to read because... why? Was it because of a reason X? Did reason X have another cause that had another cause? Exactly! So THERE! Free will is an illusion, and where you are today is simply a circumstance of your existence. Luck and pluck! ;) Ahem.. Or so they say. On with the philosophy!

Argument:

In this argument I will not be defining "free will" as the notion that we could have done otherwise. This is confusing because it is asking about PAST ACTION, in order to discover if we have present freedom in action. I feel this is too limiting and ambiguous to start from. We simply cannot discover if we could have done otherwise by reflection of any kind. By all logic accepting causality, philosophy of time, and so forth, we can only know for certain what we are doing now and what we have already done. Asking if we could have done otherwise might be a mistake in defining whether our not we have freedom of action as we commit action presently. Therefore I will not address this particular point as it has been beaten to death with little satisfaction. Instead, I am attempting to find the smallest requirement for freedom of an agent, even if that simply means freedom to understand or believe, etc. What we want at the very least is this: causal power unique and originating from our personal identity. If we can establish that we have causal power in the present, then we can perhaps start on the right grounds for the free will argument.

We experience that beliefs affect decisions and are therefore causal factors.
Humans hold beliefs, act on decisions, and are thus causal agents.
Freedom within causality requires a causal agent to have causal power
Causal power is thecapacity to affect change unique and in origin to the causal agent
Belief in "free will" affects change unique and in origin to the causal agent*
Belief in "free will" therefore has causal power
Humans believe in free will
Therefore, Humans have causal power
Thus humans have a kind of freedom.

* Premise five is what my argument rests on. It is established by asking what "free will" is (a belief that we are free), and what that belief is in relation to (our personal identity, which is unique for all individuals). If our belief in free will is about the nature of our existence and the nature of our perspective, then it precedes all action as a universal context for all thought, understanding, and decisions. It creates freedom to make spontaneousness decisions while in the causal river of experience.

Belief that we have free will, and the natural and inherent feeling that seems to cause said belief, is universally part of our conscious decisions. It is therefore an axiom or universal constant for all intent, decision, and thought that operates under the assumption of free will. It thus creates causal influence on all of our thoughts, intentions, and actions. Because this belief is both constant and about a changing identity, it creates a context for a unique identity to react by. It is therefore a unique causal power determining our actions. The belief is about ourselves, and it determines action originating from the self. It would seem then, in a sense, we have a kind of free will in our belief in free will.

This solution gives causal criteria on human decisions within the causal chain leading to those decisions. The causal tree appears thus: Outside causes meet with Internal causes, which sometimes meet with the conscious self, which believes itself to be free (and perhaps other things), and it reacts to previous causal input based on the belief that it is, despite all contradiction, acting freely. Human decisions are filtered by personal beliefs about the self, which causes personal responses which are unique to a conscious identity (not just the "I" but all the "I" refers to, such as previous experience, appearance, genetics, and memory). All actions by an agent believed to be of his free will is therefore partially caused by his very belief in free will. That belief, though constant, is about the nature of your person, and is therefore in its present conception forming and originating from a personal identity. Therefore that personal identity has causal power via the beliefs it holds about itself, and its freedom to respond to an external world.

What's great about this argument is that the "belief" in free will, though it may be externally caused, is empowering the individual consciousness to reason and act as if it were free. This allows the mind to operate with a unique reason and unique judgment.

This argument implies that beliefs (at least beliefs about "self") determine your actions. If you believe you are free, you will act with more freedom, if not, you will act with lesser freedom. But also, it implies that other beliefs about self determine your actions, such as confidence, moral integrity, etc.

Problems: Does free will require "Control" over our actions, or does it simply require that Actions are caused by the belief we control? Does origin of a cause necessarily prove ownership of the cause? Does ownership of cause entail a "will"? Does ceasing to believe in free will necessitate that you cease to be free? If the world is causally closed, does this argument make any difference?

What do you guys think about this? It doesn't necessarily say you are in complete control, but it suggests that your identity has varying degrees of influence on your decisions based on what you believe about yourself. It's quite romantic actually.

Fun with Logic! I demand that you get excited about this!

2011-04-04T16:17:00.001-07:00

In this post I will show how logic could save your life! It can help you find the door to "the castle beyond the goblin city," or it could save you from certain death! In this video Sarah uses her reason to deduce which door leads to the castle, and which door leads to certain doom.

The dialog I have written out:

You can't ask us, you can only ask one of us. It's in the rules!
Blue guy: And I should warn you that one of us always tells the truth, and one of us always lies. That's a rule too. HE always lies (gesturing to red guy)
Red Guy: I do not! I tell the truth!
Blue Guy: OH what a lie…. Lol
Red Guy: He's the lier!
Sarah asking Red Guy: Alright, answer yes or no. Would he (blue guy) tell me this door (behind red guy) leads to the castle?
Red Guy: Uh… Yes?
Sarah: Then the other door leads to the castle, and this door leads to certain death.
Red Guy: How do YOU know? He could be telling the truth.
Sarah: But then you wouldn't be. So if you told me that he (blue guy) said yes, I know the answer is no.
Red Guy: But *I* could be telling the truth!
Sarah: But then HE would be lying. So if you told me that he said yes, I know the answer would still be no.
Guy: Is that true?
Other guy: I don't know, I've never understood it! lol

Which guard is the liar and which guard is the truthteller? By all reason, we cannot know. But we can use logic to discover which door leads us to good and which will lead us to evil....

Logically Sarah's argument is thus:

Ask guard A the following: "If I asked guard B which was the door to Hell, what door would he point to?"

If A is the truthteller and B is the liar:

B must point at the heaven door if asked to indicate the door to hell (because he must always lie). A knows this, and always tells the truth, and therefore indicates the door to heaven.

If A is the liar and B is the truthteller:

B must tell you which is the door to hell (because B must always tell the truth). A knows this, and must lie, so A must indicate the door to heaven.

(Sarah simply reverses the argument a bit, by asking if B would indicate door A's as leading to the Castle, and she assumes this door leads to certain death)

In either case, while we cannot determine which is the liar and which is the truthteller, the Heaven door is indicated by simple logic.

Now let us imagine for the sake of argument that the doors to Heaven and Hell are guarded by two equally opposing deities... One deity is entirely good, and thus always tells the truth. One deity is entirely evil, and therefore always lies... You lack the information necessary to determine which deity is good and which is evil, and thus you must use your reason to discover the door leading to salvation. ;)

Phaedrus out!

Science is a method, not a doctrine… Although there ARE doctrines on the method.

2011-04-04T13:48:00.001-07:00

Theists, agnostics, and atheists alike tend to equivocate the "practice of science" with "scientific knowledge." And "scientific knowledge" is often equivocated by those ignorant of science, with "unwavering assertion of truth," and thus dogmatic. They say things like "science doesn't have all the answers." Well how can a method for discovering answers already have all the answers? It isn't supposed to have all the answers, it is supposed to be discovering answers. Science simply cannot expound conclusions about the world and then look for facts to support them. It looks at facts and attempts to draw conclusions from the questions those facts reveal about the world (even "fact" is taken quite humbly as "generally a close agreement by competent observers who make a series of observations about the same phenomenon" – Paul G. Hewitt).

Science works by observing closely the physical world around us. It then questions those observations, and poses hypothetical answers which might resolve the puzzle at hand. Science then predicts the consequences of those hypotheses, and tests said predictions. Only after all of this do we draw conclusions and formulate in the simplest terms a theory of explanation. That theory is then open to testing, criticism, and the evaluation of its explanatory power. Does it have the power to make predictions and expand our knowledge of how the world works? Does it explain better than competing theories? Is it logically sound?

However, some people do have a point when they say that "science also has its doctrine and dogma." But that doctrine and dogma, in the sense that they are biased and rarely questioned, is not found in the actual practice or current knowledge of science. The method and knowledge of science is always open to criticism. The doctrine and dogma in science is about the proper application of method, and which method we should use when approaching different branches of science, and how we should interpret scientific knowledge once we establish it. I don't really feel we can take this debate about interpretation and conclude that "science is just as dogmatic as religion."

Arguments today, on the nature of scientific method and the interpretation of scientific knowledge, are a lively debate that remains open to criticism in the scientific community. And it doesn't affect the results of scientific practice, because those results must always meet a certain criteria before it has the weight of physical law. The key virtue of science is that it maintains a healthy degree of skepticism as the most essential means for digging deeper past the bull shit, until we eventually reach what is left… the truth. But we only assume we are pretty darn close to such truth. We never assume we have it absolutely unless we're arguing about mathematics and certain axioms of logic that appear to be universally undeniable (in both religion and science).

Does “free will” explain why god allows so much evil?

2011-04-03T20:06:00.001-07:00

If the God of Christianity exists, Christians generally claim that he must be "all-good." This argument is most-likely derived from religious text, but also from the idea that a creator is somehow obligated by a moral duty to be good to his creations. A concept that is highly problematic to theists because it suggests moral laws are universally objective even for god, and therefore not within god's control - thus it is possible for god to judge unfairly or commit evil. However, the more obvious problem with claiming that god is omnibenevolent is our experience and observation of evil in the world (addendum: evil in this context refers to suffering in its many forms - we could just as well be asking "why does god allow suffering?" and it would be the same dialog we see here). Once we acknowledge that there is evil, we must ask why god allows evil in general, but we must also ask, why does he allow the quantity and quality of evils that he allows?

There are many defenses by the religions of Abraham for why their god allows evil to exist. I would like to briefly explore the depths of these arguments, including the very popular response that appeals to free will. Following each argument I have detailed where these defenses fail using well known rebuttals; some are my own, and some are loosely borrowed from David Ramsey Steele, and other authors I've read, who brilliantly summarize responses by other famous philosophers throughout history.

The Free Will Defense:
1. It is good to have free will
2. God is all good, and thus granted us free will
3. Unfortunately, free will entails that we can choose to commit evil
4. Thus, God granting free will, necessarily allowed the possibility that humans could commit evil
- Objections:
  - Not all evil (or suffering) is the result of human decision. Not all evil is preventable by humans. This means that not all evil is within our will to create. The Tsunami in Japan caused unfair suffering, and was not an act of evil by any human. Thus because it was not under control of human free will, this argument does not explain why this kind of evil is allowed to exist. The absence of such evil does not affect human free will, and so why would an all-good deity allow it if he is truly benevolent?
  - Some acts by humans are intentionally good, but unintentionally cause evil; and some acts by humans cannot be defined as morally good or bad, and yet, they too sometimes cause evil (accidents, decisions that have inadvertent and causally unintended consequences no one could have predicted).
  - Evil is NOT necessary for free will. God could simply guarantee both free will and good actions by allowing choice between only the good or neutral. As long as you could have done otherwise, there is free will. Could an all-powerful god create us with the inability to harm each other, and also allow free choice in all other decisions and understanding?
  - Prevention of evil does not entail that god must act to prevent evil by manipulating man's free will. If god is all wise he could influence behavior in other ways that is compatible with maintaining our relative freedom.
    
    - Even if we grant that evil is somehow necessary for free will, this does not explain the vast quantity of evil that god currently allows, and has allowed in the past. It seems there exists far too much evil than one can justify after claiming wholeheartedly that "there is a good god with a benevolent plan for his creation."
    
    In the following arguments, keep in mind that even if we accept that evil is necessary, we do not, and should not, need to accept the claim that "God is allowing the perfect quantity of evil to exist," or the claim that "God by virtue of his benevolence necessarily could not will there to be lesser evil than there is or has ever been." If god does not will there to be lesser evil than there is, then god is not all-good. He has allowed more evil than is necessary for all the following arguments... ;) Are you guys still with me?
    
    - If god knew evil was going to happen, and is all powerful, then he could have prevented said evil (or suffering).
    
    - If god knew and could have prevented evil, then god could have allowed lesser evil
    
    - God knew evil was going to happen, and he is all powerful, therefore he both could prevent said evil and allowed lesser evil to happen.
    
    - If he could prevent said evil and allow there to be less evil, then the evil we currently experience could necessarily be less.
    
    - Allowing unnecessary evil to happen is a kind of evil.
    
    - Thus god "might" be evil
    
    * Also from this argument we can say that if god could prevent evil and chooses not to, then he intended this evil to happen. To intend evil to happen is a kind of evil, thus god might be evil...
Evil is an illusion!
1. An all-good god would create the best of all possible worlds, having the knowledge and wisdom of all possible worlds
2. God IS all-good.
3. Therefore god created the best of all possible worlds
4. Evil cannot exist in the bests of all possible worlds
5. Therefore evil does not exist, and is simply the misunderstanding or delusion of man. (all perceived evil must be for the best, in the "best of all possible worlds")
- ~ This argument is a roughly Leibniz's argument, but it's highly paraphrased for the sake of illustration.
- Objections:
  - Even if evil is an illusion, the illusion of evil is still an evil. Pain and suffering are both observed in the world and experienced by individuals. Even if this is all a misunderstanding or delusion, pain and suffering is still very real in our experience, and therefore the illusion of evil is incoherent. Even if my subjective experience of pain is simply an artificial stimulation that I mistake to be my hand on fire, I am still having a very real experience of pain and therefore the suffering that follows it is also real.
Evil provides opportunity for good acts:
1. Evil makes possible the opportunity to react with moral virtue
2. Without evil one does not have the opportunity to test moral virtue
3. God wants to test our moral virtue
4. Therefore god must allow evil to exist

Objections:

Does the vast amount of evil god allows make up for the few good and noble actions of others? Do the millions dead in historical examples like the Holocaust or the Tsunami in Japan fully pay for humanitarian efforts resulting from them?
- If you were to answer yes, you are suggesting that bringing evil into this world in the small or extreme is not necessarily bad. I'll let you guys deduce where this leads us...
Bad events do not always bring out the best in people. Statistically bad events tend to bring out the worst in human kind. Look at where we see poverty, war, natural disasters, and domestic abuse. These events seldom create a wealth of heroes and saints. Instead it creates humans strife, suffering, disease, and all the violence spawned of misery. So this argument historically fails on a massive scale. "Suffering is a school for vice more often than for virtue" - David Ramsey Steele

Evil is caused by evil humans, but natural evil by supernatural beings that cause evil:
1. Evil is caused by the devil or "Lucifer," his cohorts, and the occasional fallen angels and evil spirits… blah blah blah…. Whom have all fallen from grace because they were granted – you guessed it, "free will" and used it for selfish ends thought undesirable in the judgment of their creator.
2. All evil not caused by humans are caused by these beings… (snore….ZZzzzzzzzz)
3. Still awake?
4. Therefore, God cannot be blamed for this evil because he um… is no longer all-powerful? Wait no, he simply is choosing not to deprive them of free will once he has granted it?

- Fun side note: How many people in the bible did Lucifer kill? Ten! All, with god's permission. I'm talking about the seven sons and three daughters of Job. God on the other hand, with a cruel irony kills an estimated 2 million in the bible
- Objections:
  - Is the evil caused by fallen angels and other such nonsense-beings really a "necessary evil?" Why would god not prevent such evil, or contain it in another realm of existence? Don't we experience enough suffering in our dealings with each other?
  - Although we do not have evidence that a demon or devil did not cause the tsunami in japan, the lack of evidence does not allow for the positive claim that supernatural creatures were responsible. Lack of evidence is evidence for absolutely nothing. Lack of evidence cannot allow one to make a positive claim. We test the strength of a theory by comparing it to other theories. The laughable (and unfalsifiable) hypothesis that a demon caused the tsunami is in poor competition with the theory that it was caused by an earthquake under the ocean floor due to the grinding of tectonic plates in the earth's crust. The previous theory cannot be tested, but the latter theory can and has stood up to the tests. It also contains more explanatory power and useful information that continues to aid in our detection of tsunamis and other earthquake phenomenon.
Other arguments and responses:

Theists not only use free will to explain why evil exists, but they also use free will to explain why god is hidden to us, using roughly the same argument as in the beginning.

-IfGod's existence was clear to us, this would be coercive to our moral freedom.
-Coercionof moral freedom violates our free will
-Anomnibenevolent god would not violate our free will
-Godis omnibenevolent
-ThereforeGod's existence must remain unclear.

Objections:

Me: If god exists, why is it so difficult to find any significant or concrete evidence so that we might infer the claim that "god exists."?
Theist: Because if god's existence were palpable this would coerce us into believing our actions are certainly judged by god, and therefore it would destroy our moral freedom. How can we be properly tested if we are coerced into correct moral action?
Me: So you readily admit that to allow for human moral freedom, there necessarily is no good evidence for god? That is surprising to me.
Theist: Um… Yeah, kind of.
Me: But suppose one arrives at the belief that god exists, wouldn't you say that this person would be compelled to think that god judged his actions?
Theist: Of course I would.
Me: But then someone who believed in god by observing evidence is no differently coerced than someone who believes as a matter of faith. In both cases they are influenced by the idea of divine judgment, and therefore, according to your argument, neither person can be properly tested because their moral decisions are not entirely their own.
Me: Further more, the argument you are using to defend god's invisibility is undermining his very existence: It presupposes there is necessarily no good evidence for god. It also presupposes that if anyone does come to believe in god, via evidence or faith, they are doomed to lack moral freedom.
Me: Also note that if you are claiming that moral freedom is necessarily why god remains hidden, then you cannot make the claim that belief in god is necessarily conducive to good behavior because that is admitting that one's moral freedom is compromised by god's influence on one's actions.

Besides! Didn't god demonstrate his existence through miracles and many other demonstrations of his divinity within the bible? This argument doesn't make any sense after reading the "holy" texts which describe many examples of god talking to people and performing miraculous events that defy nature.

We cannot understand god.. Appeal to unintelligibility

God is beyond our feeble ability to understand.Therefore: For all you know, everything my religion says "might" be true...

While this does tend to end most arguments against god, it also logically annihilates any claims about the nature of god. If god is beyond our feeble ability to understand, then whatever "might" be true in the eyes of your religion might just as well be false.

Great documentary on Status Anxiety argument

2011-04-01T13:36:00.000-07:00

The Status Anxiety argument: Ultimately the desire of people in modern societies to "climb the social latter," which is an inevitable consequence of democratic societies that have few distinguishable parameters for differentiation between classes. But the more important point Alain de Botton's thesis is suggesting is that different classes of society unite under political machines or movements by a feeling of loss of social status. Our search for status is essential to our needs and sense of purpose in life, according to Botton's argument. Very interesting take on society, politics, and humanity.

That Mitchell and Webb Look: Proof of no God

2011-03-31T00:00:00.000-07:00

Freedom of contract, collective bargaining, and the problems with social Darwinism..

2011-03-30T13:56:00.001-07:00

Social Darwinism is still a prominent position in contemporary political thought. It states that competition is what dictates who deserves what they have, along with their class position in society. The fittest get wealthy, the unfit deserve their lot in life. It is the idea that most people are at the bottom due, not to circumstance or poor luck, but an unwillingness to use their freedom and will to move above their socially undesirable position.

Why do they believe this? Because "freedom of the individual is king" for a social Darwinian. Although it is cold and harsh sometimes, this is what is required to protect the negative rights of the individual ("negative rights" being those rights we can fulfill by NOT doing, or leaving alone, e.g. to fulfill one's right to life, all we have to do is not kill, The right to property, not steal, etc.. )

For the social darwin, freedom of contract is defined by free and voluntary consent, but there is a bent view on what is "free and voluntary." If you are in poverty, with no means to further education (and perhaps a family or whatever), and this is NOT a result of laziness or lack of will (or lack of trying, for that matter), but the result of bad luck and circumstances that define your existence (i.e., you were born with responsibility to a family, and you have never had the means or opportunity to get out of your socially undesirable position, etc.)… This does not matter to social darwinism. All that matters is your free and voluntary consent to contract. If you have freely volunteered to contract with someone, then your duty is to fulfill that contract. However, the moral grounds that justify this position assume that there is no coercion in contract and that both parties have a reasonable position to bargain from.

If an employer comes to you under such circumstances (mind you this is extreme for the sake of argument), and says "come work for me or starve to death," the social darwinian claims this is still a free and voluntary contract. You are still free to voluntarily starve to death, if you so choose.

But what is social Darwinism forgetting? What is it leaving out? I will tell you by asking another question: Who has more bargaining power? Who would be able to drive a harder bargain, set the limits of the bargain, and have more power to do so? Is it the average citizen who works hard, and yet, in such poor circumstances that he/she desperately considers working in a sweat shop? Or is it the business power that already owns all the capitol, and holds all the cards? Thriving businesses, especially corporate entities, have ALL the bargaining power. All of it. Think about that. Where does a simple college student begin to have bargaining power? Where does a steel worker begin to have bargaining power? They don't! People like you are a dime a dozen in the eyes of corporate business.

What labor unions today are seeking is simply this: social justice in bargaining power, so they can negotiate higher wages and better working conditions. The average person (born with only the skin on his back) is negotiating with nothing but his labor power. He has the choice to quit and find another job, and to deny the less desirable employer with his services. This is the employee's only option without collective bargaining power. But does this "threat" of alternate means of employment actually create enough power to effect the bargaining position between employer and employee? No! There is no reason a thriving business would even miss you! Therefore, you have NO bargaining power in many cases with the business that employs you.

To have equal opportunity, we need to have fair and reasonable positions at the bargaining table. As of now, the businesses control all bargaining power for contract. This is known as "private coercion". Although you are choosing to enter a contract with a potentially manipulative business enterprise, your choice is coerced and not entirely free. In some cases, you have no other choice but to accept a job that reduces you from the position of human-being to slave. You must have a job to survive, but the opportunity provided by your circumstance is most-likely exceptionally low because social Darwinism is the ideology ruling this country. As a citizen, corporations have more rights than you do. In 2010 more than two thirds of U.S. corporations paid less in federal taxes than the average citizen. Many companies were paid a bonus instead of having to pay taxes! And this is after they cut job employment in the U.S. and expanded job opportunities over seas?? Why in the flying fuck! (excuse my language) should we pay these assholes ANYTHING, and then turn around and support a legislature that cuts benefits for publicly employed teachers? Why? So the rich can get richer? So the monopolies can continue to rule within the plutocracy of the U.S.? You know what I say to that? FUCK capitalism. What about democracy? What about the citizens and the civilization that allowed these companies to be created? They claim that competition is brutal and life is short. Too bad for you, they say.. Well I say that humanity has survived through cooperation!! We are social beings, and THAT is what has allowed our species to surpass all others. One of my professors asked: Who would survive a nuclear holocaust? Cockroaches or humanity? Cockroaches! Does that mean they are "fittest"?? That somehow their ability to survive is more virtuous than human intellect and human civilization? No! Then where do we get this horrible "stab-each-other-in-the-back-to-get-ahead" mentality?

(keep in mind that I don't think ALL businesses behave like this, but the majority ruling Wall Street, the one's that most influence our economy, I contend DO act this way)

Is competition really that great? Why is cooperation not more virtuous? One necessitates war, while the other necessitates peace. And notice how the bigger corporations really are not in any immediate competition. They are lazy monopolies. Who is GE really competing with? Global capitalism doesn't produce as much competition as one might think. It instead produces slow and lazy monopolies that compete for political control that enables their monopoly to exist. "No successful capitalist wants competition - for himself - he only wants it for the working class, so that he can buy his labor power at the lowest competitive price in the labor market…The day of individual effort, of small tools, free competition, hand labor, long hours and meagre results is gone never to return. The civilization reared upon this old foundation is crumbling" (Eugene V. Debs - Unionism and Socialism)

- part 1 of this topic here.

Good down to earth video on Atheism & Bill O'Reilly

2011-03-29T18:48:00.000-07:00

CNN Connect the World - Fate of Organized Religion

2011-03-29T18:26:00.000-07:00

Do U.S. corporations pay too much in federal taxes? Um.. No!

2011-03-29T11:19:00.001-07:00

The truth is that YOU (an average citizen) most likely pay more taxes than GE who doesn't pay jack shit in Federal taxes. I'm pretty sure we paid taxes to them! The Daily Show reports:

Monopoly on the truth? We don’t even have a monopoly of self…

2011-03-28T14:19:00.001-07:00

Our skepticism often reveals epistemic problems revealing what we don't know about reality, but what about self-knowledge? In my last post I presented my readers with a poem that introduces a skeptical problem about self-knowledge. It asks "what if I was born five minutes ago, all my memories implanted and fake?" For someone new to philosophy, this question might sound quite ridiculous. But notice that you cannot disprove this question in any way. Do you really know for sure that you did NOT wake up just five minutes ago, and with all your memories leading up to that point being fake and implanted by an outside force? Well you can't know for sure now can you… Why? Because there is no way to disprove the problem.

Even I cannot be sure I didn't just now wake up, with memories that seem very real, but are nevertheless fake. Perhaps someone else wrote those previous sentences to get me to question the circumstances of my existence and as my first lesson? Yes it seems superstitious to entertain the idea, but that's only because we have this feeling from our corrupted memories that gives us a perspective of time and age. We believe we have lived in the past (beyond five minutes ago). But that belief is just another corrupted memory. We have so many corrupted memories that we have become "accustomed" to how familiar they are, and in comparison to this new question being posed. But as you all can tell by now, logic demands that "familiarity with our past" could simply be the familiarity with an artificial past. What's even more damaging than this, is that for this skeptical problem to have weight, we don't need an outside agent to give us these artificial memories. All we need is a touch of insanity. Are you absolutely certain that you are not insane? Ever seen Shutter Island? Most crazy people don't know they're crazy.. They think they're getting saner.

You might be thinking, "well.. psh! That's just ridiculous because there is absolutely NO WAY it could persist this long. I would have discovered SOMETHING contradictory that led me to doubt all of this!" Well who says the previous moments, of any perceived moment happening (including now), is not a false memory? If experience over time is perceived by our memory, and if your memory is artificial or corrupted, then any given moment in time might be fake. Even two days from "now" would seem like two days had passed, and that you have existed for at least two days from reading this blog, but those two days from now might be artificial memory. And in your delusion that "two days have passed," your memory of reading this blog would be fake as well! You will still be unable to prove you existed beyond five minutes ago "two days" from now! There is no telling how long you have actually existed! But as I will show, this also entails that you might not exist at all! ;)

If you cannot disprove you were not born into this world "just then," then how do you know we were not born "just now"? The argument destroys all knowledge, all free will, and it ultimately takes the concept of "self" and reduces it to a momentary delusion. We could be another person's split personality. Ever think of that? Multiple personality disorder, or more professionally referred to as Dissociative Identity Disorder exists, and therefore it is quite possible you exist in this moment with corrupt memories, and born of a delusionary dream of another person. This is an actual possibility within what you call, or remember to be "reality." Think about that. Not only can you not justify your identity's existence or your identity itself within a skeptical problem of science fiction, but you cannot disprove it isn't happening right now as a mental disease of another person. If that were the case, it would mean that your whole personal identity that you believe to exist right now is actually a dream of a mental patient. I have thus reduced your identity to a dream. This is largely the kind of skepticism Descartes uses in his Meditations on first philosophy. He reduces all knowledge until he knows only one thing: That he doubts or "there is a doubter." And because doubting is the beginning of thought, there is a doubter he refers to as "self" and that self is thinking. Therefore he came to the conclusion "so long as I am doubting/thinking, I am existing."

But again my people of the sentient puddle… Descartes' arguments fail to persuade us beyond this one gram of knowledge that claims feebly to the hope that "so long as we are doubting we are existing…" He still could not persuade with any certainty or satisfaction that we are not just brains in a vat, a mental patient's dream, or that we were born just five minutes ago…with all our memories fake. But he does assert with this argument that there has been born another separate consciousness, it's age indeterminable, that is doubting and perceives itself with a reflective "I", a thinking being. Isolation from other agents is what really defines the self. We believe via experience that our conscious operations are separate from other operations by other agents in the world around us. We continue with a feeling that we are free to judge all separate agents from ourselves (including ourselves as we reflect upon our circumstance of existence).

What does it all mean? Well it means that we cannot be sure of anything really. We cannot claim a personal monopoly on absolute certainty. As beings capable of knowledge, we have no way of knowing for certain whether or not we possess absolute truth. This creates a responsibility on us for acquiring knowledge in a careful and humble manner; never to assert the truth or conclusion without having inferred such conclusions from the facts.

Ultimately, we accept the reality in which we are presented as an axiom derived from the experience that it is the first and only reality we have perceived and remember, and more importantly, all other perceived agents accept this reality also.

Addendum:

I wanted to add a quick response to a question posed after reading this: "Then how can you be sure there is no god?" Well I don't claim to have a personal monopoly on that knowledge. I don't have access to the "absolute" truth of such a claim. HOWEVER! Both the atheist and theist (non-religious and religious) are operating on belief axioms which they universally agree are practical assumptions prior to the arguments they are debating: 1) reality exists, thus the laws of nature limiting that reality exist. 2) Other agents exist: People with personal identities exist in which we are in communication with. 3) That reality in which we all suppose to exist within is the first reality in which we are presented at birth, and it is the primary source in which we must derive all supposed knowledge from.

So, if we accept the axioms entailed by assuming we exist in a reality with humans and natural laws, then both atheist and theist can argue on those same axioms without addressing radical skeptical dilemmas introduced below the grounds of those axioms (such as in this post).

- Phaedrus

Experimenting with Poetry:

2011-03-27T18:50:00.001-07:00

I was experimenting with some poetry based on some early writing I was doing. This is just a draft. I like poetry, but I don't really consider myself talented in anything other than interpretation of it. Still, it's fun and therapeutic to play around with. I enjoy poetry and lyrics most when they tell a story, and the more thought-out the better. This is my attempt at doing a philosophy of memory/mind poem.

I dreamed I was born in a dream

All I know about before, is what I can remember
But what if I remember wrong? What if it's not true?
Maybe I was born five minutes ago…
With memories implanted new?
Just five minutes ago!
Just imagine if it were true…

There is no spoon, just five minutes ago
Because it might be false, it might be fake
Corrupted by our fallible mind,
or corrupted by an outside force!
Who says there IS a spoon-
Just five minutes ago..
And they assert it is not fake

My name is Phaedrus
And for all I know,
I was born just five minutes ago

But I have this wishful idea
That I was born and existed longer
To have aged!
To have lived more!
Than just five minutes ago…
In a memory that is fake
I say "they're mine!" My memories!
But this is a mistake

I am unsure of myself,
because I woke up JUST now
In a world I wasn't sure I recognized.
A world that might be fake…
Was I kidnapped?
Did I escape?
How did I get to THIS place?
This "best of all possible worlds" - just now
Where the good die young and in unjust ways,
While the old and rich monopolies smile…
Ruling viciously in their inhuman ways!

The plutocracy is going well they say
But I'm not that sure
Why? Because!
For all I know I was born just five minutes ago,
Or was it ten?

Perhaps I was born this very second!
and someone else just wrote that line!
This is all just an illusion,
Everything is fine,
but it seems...

Oh! My delusion is becoming great!
With all of my plans
My BIG GREAT plans of state!
Yes! I become insane and commiserate,
The departed and the sad -
memories I once thought I had
- Iron clad!
I'd rule the wicked and the bad!
Just prevail, though the heavens fall!
In my dream in which I hate..
It kind of makes me sad.

-just five minutes ago. Or was it ten?
Perhaps I'm in a loony bin!
And all of this is fake?
How long was it before I discovered
Myself in this grand mistake?

Why am I rhyming?
What possible task is this?
To escape free will upon the brow
Of literary bliss…
And how could it come to this?
This skeptical abyss,
Of literary bliss - in which I kiss...
I kiss at the. The romantic hollowness!
A skeptical abyss! Upon a selfish kiss.

I was born just five minutes ago - yesterday
And I was born into tomorrow.
And for all its predicted sorrow?
I was born just one second ago.
Perhaps this too is a lie,
I don't exist on paper,
Or in reflective eyes….

I was dreamed not born..
Just THIS moment ago
I don't own the dream,
And if I don't own the dream I wasn't born just then
I was dreamed not born
Just a minute or two ago…
And I don't own the dream

I was dreamed just a while ago,
In a world I'll just have to borrow
I have all sorts of ideas I do not know are mine
Full of hope and full of sorrow
That I seem to be unique,
That I have a purpose being dreamed?

My name is Phaedrus, and I just woke up,
Dreaming I was born inside a dream...

Response to Rosebud part 2

2011-03-27T11:52:00.001-07:00

"One of these proofs is that the Scripture is replete with prophecy fulfilled"

    - All of the prophecies you list are both given and fulfilled within the scripture. You are using scripture to prove scripture. There is no evidence in reality that any of this took place that wasn't simply post hoc history. Can you show me something solid that confirms the bible is true outside of the bible's word and those who follow the bible? If I told you I had a scientology book that prophesized we'd eventually have a black president, that L. Ron Hubbard would return in a new form, and that everything Hubbard predicted would happen in his writings took place as evidenced by his writings… Would you believe me? Why not? Hundreds of thousands of people do! (Wink, scientology is pretty retarded… but I read Battlefield Earth and it kicked ass).

"You claim, for example that there is no evidence of the Moses traverse, but the reported discovery of chariot wheels in the Red Sea seems to provide evidence that Pharoah's chariots were indeed entrapped and submerged during the Red Sea crossing."

    - This cannot be validated as you have stated, and in an attempt to verify this myself, I discovered Ron Wyatt (the source of this claim) to have been repeatedly discredited by professional archeologists and biblical scholars (apparently The Garden Tomb Association and Joe Zias of Israel Antiquites Authority didn't care for him either) – this information can be found simply by googling his name. But either way, it wouldn't be conclusive evidence provided the story given in the bible.

"However, in the interest of an open and honest debate, I would say that you have misconstrued the facts in claiming that the evidence for the Moses traverse is non-existent, when in truth, the best you can claim is that the evidence is controversial, and that research is still in progress."

    - All three links you provide are still pointing to the "pharaoh's" wheel. The one no one can find, and the one that does not confirm anything beyond a single chariot wheel. Even if we had it, it's highly unlikely it belonged to a pharaoh. Should it really be this difficult to find evidence that confirms just one story in the bible?? If the bible is true we should be finding mounds of evidence, at least historical evidence of some kind.

"It would be foolish, however, to base our opinions about the field of Biblical archeology upon the work of a single amateur archeologist. An article by the leading creation scientist Clifford Wilson of Answers in Genesis presents an overview of current field research that supports Scriptural integrity in his article: Does Archeology Support the Bible?  If, after reading this, you are interested in pursuing the topic further, I refer you to an academic journal, the Biblical Archeology Review."

    - Do you have any sources that aren't biased? This is like me giving you proof that Islam is the one true religion by giving you Islamic sites that cut out all evidence but the bent views which proves their own misguided delusions, and in which all their degrees and credibility is listed only by their own institutions, which they created themselves. Clifford Wilson is not a recognized archeologist in the scientific community. He's a young-earth creationist nut-job that only speaks for the creationist community. No offence, but there are WAY better Christian scholars.

"I hardly expect them to be in agreement, but I do not feel that careful examination of the Scriptures in any way endorses violent conflict between them.
The birth of Christ was a message of peace and goodwill to all men. Scripturally, the Gospel of Christ is offered to all and forced upon none. God reveals his purposes as global, and His love as being purposefully intended to draw representatives from every people, language, and nation/culture."

    - Really? When Christians say things like this, I feel like I'm the only one in the conversation who has actually read the bible. It's tragically ironic in my opinion:

Mathew:

10:21 And the brother shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the child: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and cause them to be put to death.
10:22 And ye shall be hated of all men for my name's sake: but he that endureth to the end shall be saved.

13:41 The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity
13:42 And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
13:49 So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just,
13:50 And shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
13:51 Jesus saith unto them, Have ye understood all these things? They say unto him, Yea, Lord.

25:41 Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels

Mark:

Jesus criticizes the Jews for not killing their disobedient children as required by Old Testament law. (See Ex.21:15, Lev.20:9, Dt.21:18-21) 7:9-10 ("For Moses said, Honour thy father and thy mother; and, Whoso curseth father or mother, let him die the death")

Luke:

God strikes Zacharias dumb for doubting the angel Gabriel's words. 1:20

17:29 But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all…. Remember Lot's wife (god turned her into a pillar of salt for looking back at her dying people).
    - Lot was an asshole who let the village people rape his two daughters in Genesis:
19:7 And said, I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly.
19:8 Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof.

And I'm bored already… there's so many passages of god and jesus being a pretentious and hypocritical ass that I could list them all day:

2 Thessalonians:

1:8 In flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ:
1:9 Who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power

2:11 And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:
2:12 That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.
Revelations:

2:22 Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds.
2:23 And I will kill her children with death

"Among the plethora of world religions, I find this to be a unique perspective in terms of believers' perspective of unbelievers. While Christians are passionate about truth, their perspective of themselves is to be humble, and their perspective towards nonbelievers is to be loving."

- Um.. I think you're generalizing here. You're telling me there are no radical Christian "soldiers" that would rather we bomb the hell out of Arab lands? That homosexuals should be put to death as it says in the bible (Lev 20:13 If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.)?

This video was the best cut I could find of Jesus Camp the movie.
Bill Maher's and his guests respond on Real Time:

With the rest of your questions I'm in partial agreement with your responses, but I'm sick of writing. So if there was a response you made that you really want me to address that I haven't, let me know what it was and I'll give you my answer. But I think this is enough for now ;)

Phaedrus out!

My name is Phaedrus, and I deny the holy spirit.... :)

2011-03-26T14:50:00.000-07:00

George Carlin - Religion is bullshit.

2011-03-26T14:43:00.000-07:00

Response to Apples of Gold on divine providence

2011-03-26T13:59:00.001-07:00

The quotes are Red's response to "why would god let this happen?" concerning the tsunami in Japan. My response is below them:

"And, how do we know God didn't intervene?"

Um… because there are over 10,000 men, women, and children dead and counting, countless missing, and many infected with radiation poisoning from the nuclear plants. Are you telling me all those people died because they deserved it in god's eyes? He could have prevented it in a way that seemed "natural" so it would not destroy our "free will". But he did not, and thus he either had no power to do so (and thus not omnipotent), or he refused to do so (thus not omnibenevolent), or he just simply does not exist… response?

"How do we know it wasn't going to be worse than it was?"

What do you mean? Are you saying god's punishing man and saying, "you should be grateful, it could have been worse. I could have destroyed the whole world!" Who would worship a god like that?

"Can you say for sure, 100% that he didn't?"

Yep. It seems pretty clear to me. No benevolent god I could possibly conceive of would let thousands of innocent families drown to death. Can YOU say with 100% certainty that he did? Theists always think the burden of proof is somehow on the atheist (prove god does NOT exist), but why should this be? It's MY responsibility to disprove a supernatural myth? Why? What can be introduced without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

"In terms of natural disasters (I have posted this somewhere else recently!) I think it comes down to the fact that God created our earth, with all its foibles."

Thus he created that tsunami?

"It still comes down to free will. We know, and have known for a long time which areas of the earth are more susceptible to earthquakes and so on, but we still chose to live there."

Well isn't that just convenient. Let's just blame it on human stupidity. We can't generalize like this. Who's gonna move all those people? Where are they gonna go? So god creates the earth with unpredictable tsunamis, claims to love man, and then let's children die? Can children decide to move off on their own because their parents and their entire civilization is being stupid? Was god justified in killing them for not using their "free will"??

"God created the world to work as it does, and when it does, do we blame him for it? That's hardly fair is it?"

Are you kidding? Read what you just said. YES it's fair! You just said HE created it. Who's responsibility is it then? His. He's all-knowing and all-powerful, and created everything, thus he created the earth to be harmful to us. Yes, if you believe god exists, he is blameworthy of all creation.

"In terms of prayer and the references you raise, all of the passages you highlighted are about faith. About trusting in God..."

Has god shown himself to be trustworthy? Where? He drowns people in the bible just as in reality (if you believe what the bible says).
Also, those passages are pretty clearly about prayer's being answered "ask and ye shall receive." As I have already addressed here. I guess if you asked to be saved from a tsunami or holocaust, you shall not receive.

"I can say with security that my prayers are always answered. They may not be answered in the way I want them to be, I may get a 'no' sometimes but I think God is still there listening when I pray. For example I may ask for wisdom, but does God give me wisdom, or an opportunity to show it? If I ask for strength does he make me strong or give me an opportunity to be so? (I read this somewhere recently and would like to give the credit to that person but I can't remember where it was!)"

- You are simply attributing your happy moments of life to god, when really it's more of a result of the actual people around you, and the experience of reality. Talking to yourself might help give you a feeling of strength and wisdom, but that doesn't prove anything beyond the fact that you talked to yourself and encouraged a behavioral response. What about some real evidence that isn't ambiguous? That can't be ascribed to a "feeling" or coincidence…

"I do not know why bad stuff happens to good people, or why prayers are seemingly unanswered, why innocent children die at the hands of drunk drivers or why guilty men get off scott free in court."

- Easy, I'll tell you. Because there is no god, and we need to learn to depend on each other, on humanity and civilization. On science! On reality; on living THIS life instead of postponing and holding out for the afterlife.

"I don't know, I do not profess to have the mind of God…"

- But you do profess to KNOW the mind of god. You profess to know he is the god of Christianity. You profess to know that he is All-good, all-loving, and all-knowing. You profess to know that he wants to be worshiped. You profess to know he created man in his image. You profess to know many, many things about god and his mind. You believe he is forgiving? That he listens to you? That he judges you? You thus profess to know the mind of god.

I also know that he can use all things for good. (Romans 8:28)"

- So the war in Afganistan, Iraq, and Libya is used for good? The holocaust was for good? Nuclear bomb was for good? He was too weak to stop man from doing that? From diverting it with a strong wind or something that wouldn't harm our free will? From simply making us incapable of building it?

- Is something good because god says it is good or is something good because it is good in itself? If it is only "good" because god says it is good, then how meaningful is it to say "god is good"? He could destroy all the world and say "This is good what I do because I assert that it is good to kill".

On that note, I'll end with some provocative comics and quotes:

GOD vs $20

2011-03-23T01:29:00.000-07:00

Trust God? I’d rather trust my reason…

2011-03-22T20:59:00.001-07:00

The "trust god" answer:

Pressed long enough in an argument such as "why would an omnibenevolent god let [insert tragedy here] happen?" theists eventually come up with the trade mark answer: trust god. They say, "look, sometimes we just have to trust in god." We have to trust that he has a plan, and that despite our inability to fully understand his/her motives, we need to understand that god knows what he's doing.

My general response is to ask: Has he shown himself to be trustworthy??

Supposing for the sake of argument that god exists, what evidence or reason do we have that legitimately demonstrates the god of any religion to be trustworthy?

I'd like to hear some responses to this. But just so we're clear, let's try not to commit any vague appeals to the ancient texts. We need REAL evidence and reason outside of the bible to confirm the question, not just a 2000 year old story we cannot confirm. And as we have seen, the bible isn't exactly the most reliable piece of literature: http://www.project-reason.org/bibleContra_big.pdf

Coverage on Libya conflict

2011-03-22T20:15:00.000-07:00

This is certainly a masterpiece of political insight into what's happening around the world, the conflicting political problems over Libya, and the hypocrisy our government officials are participating in. The reason I like The Daily Show is because (on occasion) it brilliantly summarizes political issues that the media either fails to illustrate or purposely omits.

Volkswagen Commercial: The Force

2011-03-21T00:23:00.000-07:00

Extremely funny commercial

2011-03-18T23:02:00.000-07:00

Stupidity in suicide... Really? REALLY? COME ON!!

2011-03-18T18:34:00.000-07:00

Okay so without going into all the cliche and controversial detail about why specifically I'm writing this post, I will just go ahead with my argument if my readers don't mind. ;)

As human beings we can all relate to the occasional taboo thoughts of suicide. Who hasn't wanted to throw themselves off a cliff after working in a cubicle, or after your girlfriend dumps you for someone you grudgingly evaluate as far better than yourself in every way. Camus said that the only real philosophical question is whether or not to kill ourselves or go on living (you know, once we realize our existential angst and see the world for what it really is - excepting existence before essence, rather than the often touted theist view, that we are born into (or trapped) by a purpose written by some unfathomable god..).

It's just... every time I read or hear about a suicide it seems like they didn't really think through even the act of killing themselves. I mean, drowning? Hanging? Blowing your brains out? Did they just want to die in the most unpleasant way possible?? I mean, maybe it's just me.. but if I were hypothetically gonna do something like that (which I wouldn't, because I'm too curious as to what shit-storm will befall me tomorrow), I think I'd go out and buy the best drugs ever and go out hallucinating I'm a god, a star, or at least in a fictional afterlife of some kind. ha ha Think about it though. If you really have nothing to lose, you might as well go for it. And it would be a far more pleasant death than all that other shit you hear about.

I don't know... maybe I'm just being an ass

Phaedrus out ;)

Daily show covers arguments over Wisconsin labor union crisis

2011-03-10T21:05:00.000-08:00

The Daily Show illustrates the hypocritical arguments conservatives use to reject any support for teacher's unions, and yet those same arguments are turned around when defending Wall Street CEO bailout pay.

And here is yet an earlier video with the same theme that I just think is fabulous :)

The Daily Show - Crisis in Dairyland - Revenge of the Curds
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Response to “Letters from Rosebud”

2011-03-07T00:37:00.001-08:00

This post is a response to Melany at Letters from Rosebud. The comment thread can be found here.

Hi! Thanks for responding Melany. Here is my response to your previous comment:

"Phaedrus, As a Christian, I am thankful to have a faith that not only allows questions, but encourages them, and offers proofs."

- Awesome!

"I believe in God because of the evidence of His intricate Creation; the reliability, cohesion, and wisdom of His Word; and the experience of His working in my own life."

- Okay, but you realize you are referencing "him" a lot. I'm assuming you are referencing the Christian god. How do you come to know his "word," and why is it credible? What makes your specific god (out of all other possible conceptions of god) the most legitimate? I'm asking this because you make it specific by referencing "his word".

"I believe the Bible because it has yet to be proven wrong- historically, logically, or philosophically. And it is in seeking, in believing,"

- Well before I present you with a list of evidence in complete opposition to this claim, why do you understand this to be the case? There is a huge amount of history and archeological evidence that does not agree with the bible (there is no archeological evidence that jews were ever in egypt, or of the moses traverse for example). There are many competing scientific positions whose evidence contradict the bible. Logically, well.. let's get back to that (I am a philosophy major and don't want to get carried away). Philosophically you cannot disprove or prove anything with absolute certainty, but the school of thought I adhere to argues that we can test our beliefs beyond "reasonable" doubt.

"…that God reveals Himself through His Word, His Spirit "bearing witness with our spirit," something that is very difficult to measure or explain."

- If God reveals himself (gives legitimate evidence of his existence, love, purpose, etc.) through his word, and "his word" is "very difficult to measure or explain," then how do you come to know or explain it?

"When it comes to the third question, I disagree with the way that you have framed the question. The fault must always lie, not in the Bible's communication, but in our understanding. One cannot deny that people have twisted the Bible's message, seeking to put the power and authority of the Word of God behind their own selfish ambitions or unjust aims. I do not hold them excused, but rather find that they will be accountable to God, who will deal severely with the black mark that they have put upon His Name and His Word."

- Hmm.. No offence, but to give you context I hear this response a lot. Why can't the bible communicate a clear message to its followers? Why are there many religions fighting each other? The answer is usually: because they fail to understand the message. And not just that message, the "correct" message, whatever that is... Which one? Which translation? Well clearly some people believe they understand the message, as it seems you might. Once you have a firm grasp on that message, should you act on it? What if it compels one to act violently in the name of faith? Also, the bible justifies many selfish and unjust aims (I can provide references if you'd like).

"However, you do an injustice to the Bible and to your own argument when you claim that it's message is unclear, and then give only negative examples of it's contorted or distorted application. From your examples, one might draw the conclusion that the Bible's message is not ambiguous, as you have described, but rather of a uniformly destructive nature."

- I've read the bible. I respect its impact on culture, but I do not believe I'm doing it an injustice (at least not yet, lol). However, the bible's *many* messages I would say are ambiguous, but some are very clear and both necessarily destructive (I came not to send peace, but a sword) and necessarily beneficial (blessed are the peacemakers).

- There are clear problems that if you've read the bible from beginning to end are difficult to ignore, but we can come back to that. How ought we to judge the bible or any holy text as "good" or "most likely true"? How do we judge that? Is it by how many prayers are answered? How many followers it has? How eloquently it is written? Do we judge it by who read it before us (our parents, and our parents-parents)? Do we judge it by how many lives it saved? Or do we judge it by the damage it has caused historically versus the good it has done? What has it contributed to medicine? What has it contributed to our knowledge of the world? Has it progressed civilization forward, or hindered its advancement?

"You fail to acknowledge that Christianity, based upon the teaching of the Bible, has been often credited as a force for good in the world, motivating much charitable giving and sacrificial service. As an atheist (I presume), you might be interested in this article from the London Times, written by a fellow atheist who is convinced that Christianity is good for Africa:"

- You are right that Christianity has been credited as force for good, but as with many other religions, this credit as a force for good is derived mostly by its own followers and theologians.

- I've read Parris' article but his real argument isn't that Africa "needs god" in the literal sense. He's being clever. He thinks impoverished parts of Africa could seriously benefit with active missionaries because basically there's no central government to promote healthcare, public education, and everything else. What he's saying about Christianity in general is that it would be a danger to remove it from the equation because Africans need a belief system of some kind. But Parris would still believe Christianity to be false. And that's why I wouldn't promote it as an atheist. One shouldn't give people false hope in a false belief (especially if you believe it to be false or do not know for sure).

"Yes, I have questioned my faith. But I have found better reasons for questioning elsewhere"

- So instead of continuing to question your faith you started questioning things that compete with it? Why don't ALL things you experience disserve the same degree of healthy skepticism?

"How did the world come to be?"

- well according to the evidence we have today, I contend that the big bang is currently the strongest theory. We can talk about that if you wish. But I believe our earth is the result of nature, just like everything else in the universe. We are ultimately a result of the laws of nature. :)

"How does a godless society function?"

- Assuming already that it couldn't? Well can't a society that doesn't believe in god believe in human dignity? Can't they create a justice system based on cooperation and peace? Our society functions with a diversity of believers and non-believers of many faiths and political philosophies, but our system operates in a functional and surprisingly secular fashion.

“Is one not entitled to the sweat of their brow?”

2011-03-02T18:23:00.001-08:00

Today we tend to project our value of individual freedom onto businesses, defending with naiveté their rights to free enterprise, which would entail things like: allowing smoking or not, discriminating between customers (class or race), determining any pay level for employees, and determining safety bar for products and their market price. We do this because we imagine ourselves as individuals starting such a company, and we imagine how we would feel if any of this regulation on our business were limiting the fruits of our creation. We created it, and therefore all the fruits are supposed to be ours alone. We let that wealth trickle down at our own discretion because that is what seems right. We ask the socialists, "is one not entitled to the sweat of their brow?" A good response I think is to ask "was it done by the sweat of your brow alone?"

The concept of being entitled to the "sweat of your brow" is derived from philosophers such as John Locke, who suggested that we are entitled to any property once we have mixed our labor with it. Thus, if you farm free land, you ought to own that land and all it produces as a result of your labor power.

The fatal error in judgment:

The debate becomes more clear with successful companies who owe their success to more than the individual who started those businesses. A company does not succeed by the sweat of one brow alone, and because the success of that company is not the result of one single individual, it cannot be treated with the same individualistic freedoms. In many cases the people who started them are long dead!

The ongoing success of a company owes a responsibility to the sweat of other people's brows. It therefore cannot be allowed to operate on simple "profit-margin" incentives that neglect it's employees, it's customers, or the economy of the state which birthed it.

Ridiculous free-market optimism:

The far right's optimistic view of capitalism is historically ridiculous. Libertarians and conservatives have this idea that the "invisible hand" of capitalism, unhindered by government, will naturally and without bias tend to reward companies with good business practices, with happy employees that produce intelligent, and well designed products. But as Lee Hampton rightly points out in an article I cited previously, "[unregulated] markets do not naturally allow entrepreneurs to thrive. Instead, most markets gravitate toward natural monopolies, large businesses that are complacent, not [the] innovative and inefficient." But the right-wing believes the invisible hand rewards hard work and innovation over that of lazy monopolies that cut costs and increase profits by abusing their employees and producing cheaply made merchandise. Where in recent history do we see this rationale work in reality outside the confines of academic debate?

In reality, the market creates only one rational incentive: cut costs and make profits (notice that it doesn't even concern itself with stockholders or customers, those are simply variables). What goes unnoticed by the political right is that free markets neglect to create incentives for a business to keep any responsibility to the civilization which harbors it, the employees it uses, or to design a better product. Innovation is unnecessary when it is not required to increase the profit margin, and in many cases, it really isn't that necessary. We live in an age where most of the desired products are already made and patented, and all property is owned. Ergo, most companies creep very slowly as far as innovation of product, because it costs more to create something new than it does to just paint it a new color. Because of this, most companies invest more in marketing their products than producing new or decent ones. And once employees become too costly, businesses have every incentive to outsource or mechanize labor, leaving the average citizen with no desirable job, or jobs that abuse the employee/employer relationship. Lastly, as we have seen in many countries, corporations have no incentive to really help the state or its economy, unless that state aids in that company's profit. Therefore, when a state's economy collapses, a strong company birthed by that state has no incentive but to close home offices down, and expand their offices overseas. A company doesn't need a green card because it is not limited to citizenship, it is only limited by its economic power. And if that economic power is strong enough, it has no pressure to aid in anything but its own profit margin. Therefore a company can simply use its economic strength to buy political favors to expand its business wherever it seems more profitable.

- Part 2 of this topic here.

Response to a debate with “Creationism Rocks”…

2011-03-02T16:19:00.001-08:00

The dialogue for the full debate can be found by clicking THIS LINK.

Kingdom Christian University said...

I am quite simply gobsmacked that you do not get it! Science does not work from the evidence uninterestedly.

Well no kidding. I would hope science would have an active interest in evidence as empirical justification demands it.

Every time someone takes evidence they invest their own ideas into that evidence.

Well yeah, we attempt to interpret the world we experience, so yes absolutely. But in science, those interpretations have to survive testing, prediction, and explanatory power.

Christianity is a revelation based faith.

So it gets a free pass from the previous criteria and skepticism you just held science to?? If I told you Mohammad revealed my faith to me, does this justify a devout belief in Islam? Why not? They have millions of followers too. Explain why this helps your argument.

The objective nature of this is evidenced by the fact that Christ died and then rose from the dead.

Where is the proof of this? The bible? So the bible proves the bible? That's a tautological fallacy. If the bible proves the bible, does the Koran prove the Koran by the same logic? Explain this to me.

The evidence is unassailable.

All evidence is assailable by doubt. Unless you're trying to say that evidence for religion gets a special pass from the criteria you hold science to. Beliefs are not your own unless they have survived your own doubt.

It is shown by the scriptures and it is shown in the lives of those who follow Christ.

Well unfortunately there are many scriptures for thousands of religions, and how does the story in yours help persuade me over the stories in others? And the lives of those who follow Christ are generally not more or less tragic or privileged than any other social group (I wrote a blog to that affect challenging divine providence. Christians die at the same rate as anyone else; of disease, natural disaster, circumstance, or crime. So I'm not sure how it's evidenced in the lives of Christians.

Do you not know your history of science? What do you make of Charles Singer's statement that the science of one age becomes the magic of the next?

I'm well educated in the history of science. That being said, I'm not sure how an appeal to the authority of Charles Singer reduces all science to the level of magic that (you seem to imply) ironically escapes your religion. And Singer's statement (though I couldn't find the source you derived this from) only implies that the knowledge of science is updated and revised throughout every generation. For example, when we look back at Aristotelian physics we see it as a nice attempt, and with some operational hypotheses, but ultimately it is silly compared to the knowledge of physics we have today.
I'm also not sure why you keep citing atheist/agnostic scientists and scholars, that are mostly critical of religion, as authorities to help your case.

Science is rapidly outdated.

How? Did they forget to update your iPhone 4? Your laptop? Your microwave? Your vacuum cleaner that never loses suction? Do you like advancements in healthcare? Last time I checked, religion didn't make any breakthroughs in medicine or technology. Science seems to have a better winning streak than the wars and avarice religion has caused amongst civilization.

The scriptures speak clearly to every age!

Then why are there over 5000 denominations of Christianity alone? Why have the Protestants and Catholics been slaughtering each other for so long? Why are there millions who believe in Mormonism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, etc.?? Why are there millions who don't believe in the supernatural? Why were the Crusades such a disaster? The dark ages? The inquisition? If it speaks so clearly... how come no one agrees on the one true religion?

The wisdom of God is far above the pathetic musings of men.

How do you come across such amazing knowledge of god's wisdom if it is far above the pathetic musings of man? See this is why religion disgusts me. You see man as a pathetic and horrible sinner. Well if everyone saw it that way we would never advance as a society.

Take for example the oft stated claim that evolution 'explains' our origins! It does nothing of the sort. It merely provides a poor description of someone's idea.

It sounds like you have no idea what evolution is. But it does explain our origins quite well, with far more explanatory and predictive power than the postulation of "god did it," which explains nothing but a non-falsifiable opinion.
It WAS someone's idea! Finally something we can agree on. But that idea was formulated to be falsifiable, and tested many times in chemistry, biology, and of course archeology. We can actually watch evolution take place with microorganisms like viruses and bacteria. We use the theory of evolution's natural selection to breed dogs using artificial selection. Pomeranians didn't exist naturally before man. Humans created them by breeding traits (runts of the litter with desired big eyes and long hair) that would look cute to sell to rich aristocrats. Hell we use the theory of evolution all the time in botany. Bananas we eat today were not what existed naturally either. You couldn't even peal those, and they had to be cooked like potatoes. Fun video related to that point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLqQttJinjo&feature=related

Only Christ can explain satisfactorily and completely how we came to be. I notice you mention the development of atomic theory. It is one example of the wholly unsatisfactory nature of science. It can never get to the truth!

So it didn't get to the truth of electricity? It didn't discover gravity? It didn't send men to the moon, create nuclear energy, design plastics, or produce the microprocessor?
I forgot Jesus and the bible did all those things for us

We delve deeper and deeper (or so we think) and then we make newer and newer models but none satisfy because there is always evidence that doesn't fit.

Actually we revise building on old models, and we reconstruct those models to get at the truth of nature. We keep revising because science understands it is fallible (as is all knowledge of man), and cannot produce absolute certainties, only well tested theories that produce results. But where the evidence doesn't fit, science certainly gets excited about that. When evidence doesn't fit, it means a theory needs to be revised, or a new one discovered. Scientists get SO excited when a theory has been falsified, or when new evidence turns up which demands a revision to theory, or new data explaining what went wrong in the tests. Why is this? Because science wants to learn the truth!

Or what of the many aspects of the universe which cannot be explained satisfactorily by big bang ideas?

Ignorance is not evidence of god. Ignorance is just a lack of knowledge. If it were, that would be like saying ignorance of the rain forests is evidence of fairies. Ignorance also does not disprove science because science is a model used to discover things we are ignorant about. In fact, science attempts to operate from an unbiased view, or from a veil of ignorance, and all tests and theory are modeled on phenomenon we were currently ignorant about. Why do you think science is always about testing, testing, testing?? Because science looks for what works, and when it does, it tentatively states that "it may be very close to the truth." It is humble.

And with that, people of the sentient puddle, I will leave you with these fun quotes:

"If infinitely good, why fear him? If infinitely wise, why interest ourselves about our fate? If omniscient, why tell him of our wants or fatigue him with our prayers? If everywhere, why erect temples to him? If master of all, why make him sacrifices and offerings? If just, whence has arisen the belief that he will punish man, whom he has created weak and feeble? If reasonable, why would he be angry with a blind creature like man? If immutable, why do we pretend to change his decrees? And if inconceivable, why presume to form any idea of him?" - Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach, The System of Nature (1770)

"If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences." - H. P. Lovecraft

"At first glance, science might seem to drain the world of its mystique, replacing the lovely unknown with mundane explanation. Peer deeper, though, and you will find that the appreciation of mystery is the foundation of science, and that science reveals to us a world far more profound and beautiful than common sense or superstition can behold." - Amanda Gefter, New Scientist

Philosophy in "The Office"

2011-03-01T13:37:00.000-08:00

In the following video Jim uses the paradox produced by the concept of memory to demonstrate that we really cannot know for sure in this skeptical dilemma (if you were Dwight) whether or not you have taken drugs and cannot remember that you took them. Memory is fallible and thus you may have been doing something in Europe yesterday, but it's possible you simply cannot remember it (assuming there's no immediate or overwhelming evidence to begin your skepticism).

The "Invisible" God

2011-02-28T14:11:00.000-08:00

What I hate about libertarians…

2011-02-23T12:03:00.001-08:00

You want to know what I hate about libertarians? They're radicals. Every flippin one of them. There isn't a moderate or passive person in their entire philosophy. In my opinion it has become one of the most vicious of the rising political philosophies behind the republican party. Every libertarian you meet, you get the feeling they've glanced at the texts defining their philosophy, and fell in love with how selfish it allowed one to be. Most will even admit to how great a virtue greed and selfishness is for society and the economy. Every libertarian I've met to this day, when debating with them for less than five minutes reveals bluntly that they think everyone who believes in labor laws, government regulation on the economy, or healthcare and social security, are complete morons who actually have a mental illness resulting from an emotional attachment to the very devilish social contract which birthed them. They are also experts on the economy, having fallen in love with capitalism after reading Atlas Shrugged or The Fountain Head, they believe in something they call "laissez-faire." It's all about free-trade, free-trade, free-trade! It sounds so good because it has the words "free" and "trade" in it. Unfortunately what that ultimately means, most libertarians are reluctant to admit, is that they actually want a world of "survival of the fittest." It's the only logical way libertarianism works. Only the
strong, intelligent, and hard-working, deserve civic well-being, and the rest must step it up or die off. Because once you add in crime, you need a justice system to provide rulings and protect contracts, and then you need law enforcement to enforce the justice system, and libertarians believe these could also somehow be privatized? What happens when two privatized justice systems rule against each other, or two enforcement agencies cross paths for two different clients? It would be anarchy! War. Not only that, but how do we achieve a postal system or a standing army to defend our society? Do we all just voluntarily chip in? Apparently no libertarian has heard of the collective action problem. But once you get past all the nonsense, eventually most libertarians will admit for the need of some kind of state, but one that has little but a monopoly on force and justice, but not on economic policy in general, or the moral values of its citizens. Why would they want a state like this? Because every human being who likes this philosophy view themselves as intelligent enough to survive in such a world, and they envision with this awareness (and their own biased judgment of themselves) that in a libertarian utopia they would be freer than they have ever been. Unfortunately, most libertarians are dumb as rocks because modern economics has demonstrated its failure as an economic theory, and history has shown it to be a fallacious political theory.

Isn't libertarianism (aside from how selfish it depicts society) a little too simple? What about our old people? What about people with children? What about people with no family? What about healthcare for those who work but still can't afford it? What about crippled people who can't work? The only answer libertarians provide is that of an optimistic appeal to charity, which they believe would take care of everything thanks to the abundance of capitol that people would magically have in a libertarian world. Employers would treat employees well because they are so happy with all the money they have and they want the wealth and the well-being that comes with it to trickle down… Thus the wealth will trickle down, allowing all of the poor an opportunity to rise up with all the wealth raining down upon them at the benevolent charity of those masters who survive above them. This magically raises their well-being (health, economic power, education) enough to provide them every opportunity to compete with everyone else, or at least survive. In other words, for there to be a utopia in the libertarian philosophy, humans must be assumed to be basically good and charitable people. But where in history have we seen evidence of this without the formation of society, under a contract of state that provides political and economic guidance? Where? The answer is we do not. The weaker the government in a society is, the more impoverished and closer to anarchy become its people, in every case we look at. In the absence of government we see freedom yes, but we also observe disease, war, and lack of any social progress such as medical science to increase quality of life and life span, or technology and education. So where in history do we see libertarian thinking work? Well…It doesn't because we are naturally a social being and we survive as such by caring for our fellow human beings, but left without leadership, as individuals we destroy each other trying to rise to the top.

Throughout history the strongest civilizations, the longest lasting, and with the strongest economies, have always been shown to provide healthcare, well-fare, public education, and limits on the economy to prevent tyrants from rising out of wealth to crush the state and the people it protects. A social contract cannot survive without a coercive check on rights that allow other rights to be had, and without the people's payment to that contract which funds the enforcement of its rules towards the greatest good of society, so that ALL can prosper and have a chance at not only a right to life, but a healthy life, and a safe life. Liberals want free trade too, but we also want safety of transactions and enforcement of those transactions not just for ourselves but for all of us. We also agree to pay taxes so that we can ALL have public healthcare, public roads, a public justice and law enforcement system, and so that we can ALL live harmoniously under a state that protects us from each other's vices. A society cannot exist without cooperation, and a bunch of individuals do not cooperate. Citizens do. A citizen is a member of a social contract, whose certain rights are protected under that contract, and who voluntarily agrees to pay certain sacrifices for that contract to exist. You understand as a citizen that your own protection requires cooperation for the sake of others, in order for that contract to exist.

Libertarians hate all of this. They want enforcement of contract sure, but they want that enforcement to be privatized. Everyman and his hired enforcement mercenaries for himself. This doesn't solve the destructive competition problem and it doesn't solve the "who will guard the guards?" problem. In a libertarian society you will see massive economic boom (but massive increases in poverty) and then after the state fails to regulate foreign trade, it collapses as those businesses which have risen to the top have no incentive or coercive agency that requires it to aid that state's economy in anyway. It can just move its offices to its offshore companies. The point is people; economics should be a part of politics, but not a political system in itself. Survival of the fittest is war. It's Hobbes' state of nature. It cannot possibly have any place inside a social contract that was created for peaceful exchange of goods. In libertarianism, what you can get away with is moral. It allows for the rape of all anyone in that society views as weak. And mostly that weakness will be defined by their economic power. But under a democratic socialism, the state and its economy would be in the hands of the people, there would be employee owned companies, where both employee and employer benefited from a mutual responsibility. There would be credit unions where clients own the wealth of the bank they invest into it. All citizens would have healthcare, and free education. And the taxes, though a heavy cost, would be paid gladly for peace, freedom, and security. In libertarianism if you are born into poverty, all you have to sell is your labor power. But in a democratic socialism if you are born into poverty, you would be given enough well-fare to survive, and a free education to have a chance at contributing something great to the world. Obviously there will be crime and abuses, but much less than there would be in a libertarian utopia where ever thing is free to all who have the power to take.

"Libertarianism is attractive because (1) it provides significant moral liberty of action, (2) it provides significant moral protection against interference from others, and (3) it is sensitive to what the past was like (e.g., what agreements were made and what rights violations took place). It faces, however, the serious objection that it gives too much protection from interference and not enough attention to making the future better (e.g., by meeting people's basic needs, making people's lives go better, or promoting equality). As with all prominent moral and political theories, the overall assessment of libertarianism is a matter of on-going debate." It is the last objection where libertarianism fails, because no one would form any kind of social contract without this being a major objective of the state envisioned.

Anyway, here are some interesting articles to look at:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saul-friedman/libertarians-the-paranoid_b_620966.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-fletcher/the-libertarian-delusion-_b_812427.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/iris-lee/libertarian-experiment-in_b_172961.html

http://nevadasagebrush.com/blog/2009/04/13/libertarian-beliefs-lack-pragmatic-approach-societal-accountability/

"Why do people laugh at creationists?"

2011-02-03T14:19:00.000-08:00

Government funding a religious amusement park??

2011-02-03T13:54:00.000-08:00

The very first amendment to the U.S. constitution states:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Funding a religious park by using taxes acquired from American citizens, in order to aid a religious agenda, is an abuse of tax law erected by congress. If they want to build a park, fine, but get your own funding. I don't want one penny of my taxes to promote a monopolizing, dangerous, and historically violent religion that suppresses free thought and scientific progress.

The dichotomy of divine intervention..

2011-01-07T15:13:00.000-08:00

If there is a god in this world, and there is such a thing as divine intervention (whereby god intervenes in order to protect his followers), then it is an absolute mystery as to which group god is protecting. Good people meet unjustified deaths and tragedies at the same rate as bad people. Natural disasters, war and the like, horrible deaths, losses and victories, are all pretty random and indiscriminate. From this historical fact, where both the good and evil succeed and fail with or without religious views that coincide with your own, one can only reach two possible conclusions: Either god doesn't exist, or no one has discovered the correct religion and way of worship.

Divine intervention is the only way to demonstrate god's existence and necessity. So if god exists, let's assume divine intervention is possible. The real problem one has to deal with as a believer is option two. There are an infinite amount of possible gods and religions in this world, and no god is more or less likely to be correct than the next one. The chances that humans have somehow stumbled on the correct god and way of worship are ludicrously against us. The holy texts don't help, and I believe their short-comings are aptly demonstrated by how magnificently they fail to communicate a clear message, even to their respective followers. We seem to have nothing but confirming evidence everywhere that either god doesn't exist, or we haven't found the correct religion and way to worship. And if this weren't enough, in all the recorded instances of divine intervention, God notoriously and rather inconveniently, communicates through an human intermediary. More likely however, is that human intermediary was crazy, wanted power, and either hallucinated the whole thing, or made it all up. It could simply be the case that someone charismatic stumbled upon some good mushrooms and really believed they had an entire conversation with a supreme being. But as always, there are few witnesses to these events outside their own experience.

If there is a god and he/she/it wanted us to know all about them, then don't you think it would be capable of communicating a clear message that also demonstrated their existence beyond a reasonable doubt? I mean come on! With that, I'll leave everyone with a few quotes:

"I will destroy human wisdom and discard their most brilliant ideas." - Corinthians 1:19

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away" - Philip K. Dick

"Deriving joy from a belief is not evidence that god is real" - Guy Harrison

"Saying a man of faith is more happy than an atheist, is no more to the point than saying a drunk man is happier than a sober man. And I think it's a grave mistake to make this generalization. There are happy and unhappy people in both camps. It's part of being human." - unknown

"Fear was the first thing on earth to make the gods." - Lucretius

"Some mysteries of the universe may never be solved. But this is ignorance not evidence [of the supernatural]" - Guy Harrison

Reflections of Phaedrus…

2011-01-07T13:47:00.001-08:00

It is a rare human characteristic that we so blindly commit ourselves to impermanent things in this world. And when those things which so dramatically capture our attention in rapturous delight, eventually confront us by their fickle and predictable impermanence of choice and very existence, we are overwhelmed by disappointment, knowing all the while it would happen. Despite foreknowledge of the end, we still cling to that poetic disease of the sublime… Hope. It is the utter denial of what we know to be true. That everything is temporary and nothing, not ourselves, not even the things we love are static and unchanging. In the end, some of us jaded few who believe tragically in the liberal ideals of individual rights, will ultimately be corrupted by what we can only view as a treasonous world, and we will dismally live by one law:

"I would rather betray the world, than let the world betray me."

How unfortunate we can't live in peace, you say… If we could only be so selfless as to enjoy what we have without craving so desperately for it to last into the future; something we have no guarantee of seeing. It is the present that always confines us to the prison that so many Americans can't seem to enjoy with any satisfaction. We want permanence of fame and happiness. We want to live forever with the things that make us happy. We are hoarders of pleasure, disdainful of any circumstance which dampens it. We wish to be gods upon Olympus, free of any serious consequence that s never-ending life can guarantee a chance to always reconcile among the fantastic odds infinite time places in our favor.

How do we fix this? Fuck if I know. I'm human too! I guess all you can do is write a poem or romance novel that eloquently demonstrates your strife in the world. ;)

-Phaedrus out!

A Story That Could Be True

2010-12-17T18:02:00.001-08:00

If you were exchanged in the cradle and

your real mother died

without ever telling the story

then no one knows your name,

and somewhere in the world

your father is lost and needs you

but you are far away.

He can never find

how true you are, how ready.

When the great wind comes

and the robberies of the rain

you stand on the corner shivering.

The people who go by--

you wonder at their calm.

They miss the whisper that runs

any day in your mind,

"Who are you really, wanderer?"--

and the answer you have to give

no matter how dark and cold

the world around you is:

"Maybe I'm a king."

William Stafford

Human Rights and Islam

2010-11-20T00:24:00.000-08:00

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

2010-11-18T18:29:00.001-08:00

AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,

I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.

Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn

That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:

But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,

So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,

Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,

But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come

That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,

They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;

They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;

So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.

They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.

But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life

(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)

Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,

By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;

But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew

And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true

That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.

That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,

And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

On risking romance in a decidedly unromantic world..

2010-11-13T11:24:00.000-08:00

It is said that when there is no one else in the world willing to risk a tragic ending for a small taste of romance, the poets will die weeping for humanity... Have we become the generation unwilling to commit to anything but a sure thing? Sadly, I believe we have. People are evolving into social research analysts, and they demand the next click of the button. To me though, I think it's tragic unto itself, that we avoid taking any risk that may result in a personal failure or sublime end. How do we achieve art without the spontaneous actions that more often than not, result in the mistakes that become the defining paramount of our lives? How can we continue as human beings without making the occasional leap from reason, a sacrifice for something we truly want? A leap of trust in someone else, not a leap of faith to the supernatural. I don't believe we can continue this way. If we do, we will become reactionary computers and pleasure machines that have conformed to a brave new world, "alone and palely loitering." We escape relationships with each other through machines and gods, and when we finally do make that leap, it is for the wrong reasons.

The Price of Atheism

2010-10-21T15:06:00.000-07:00

This is an old story by ABC, but it's a pretty good look at society's misunderstanding of atheism. This happens to kids all over america, but thanks to people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, Atheism is treated with less hostility and fear.

The Political System of Kitsch

2010-10-20T18:43:00.001-07:00

All John Ruskin was asking for in his epic treatises on art and culture, was ultimately a world without Kitsch. Instead, we find ourselves surrounded by its conforming deception with a voluntary ignorance, campy in our debt-enslaved society. The lie we tell ourselves is that we are freely expressing our unique individual qualities, but in reality we are lost and deceived by an endless display of kitsch, the crap we are brainwashed to crave, and that our politics have brainwashed us into accepting. True talent has been replaced by mass production and profit. We are a society without any real purpose except the false purpose they taught us at birth – your purpose is to acquire more money, more material possessions, and above all, more power. To what ends I ask? We have truly become "the middle children of history, without place or purpose." Today we are consumers content to remain in our vision of peaceful ignorance, and we not only fail to question our purpose, but we refuse to question it. Most by the age of thirty succumb to an increasingly common disease in society known as nihilism. Those rare instances where an individual's intellect finally grasps how absurd our pursuits have become in the face of death and even with the preconceived notion of god... They finall ask themselves "what's the fucking point?" What is our purpose? Why achieve anything? We are consumed by our need to possess bullshit, and we expect praise and power by possessing said bullshit. Our purpose, you ask? It is to consume ourselves until humanity dies in an orgy of industry and commerce, while shouting to the sky's that Adam Smith was right in that our holy union of self-interest would eliminate all classes and the wars fought between them. We are to die consumers… The real irony is that we will possess nothing at our death.

What happened to dying in legacy? What about dying with our own purposes? Today all self-expression is limited to the cold tyranny of the marketplace. The market speaks with an undeserved arrogances, incredulous it asks "Creativity? Sorry, no market demand for creativity. You are completely free to pursue your creative rights, but you'll most-likely starve to death." Victory or death? Or is it "conform or die?" I choose victory with a middle finger to servitude.

Capitalism is failing. Not economically, but morally. It is starving humanity into meaningless extinction. We have evolved, and I believe meant to cooperate and collaborate, NOT compete for material possessions. Perhaps animals compete to survive in nature, but humanity has evolved beyond this. We are not animals, we are conscious beings capable of reason. It is the dark side of ethics to consume and consume until there's nothing left.

Oh how I wish to topple the Leviathan, and see it exposed for the ineffective deception that it is. And as for humanity… The sleeper must awaken.

Romancing the Absurd

2010-10-11T22:54:00.000-07:00

Falling in love is a common tragedy for most of humanity. In its genuine form, falling in love requires it to be involuntary and against our will. Thus, unfortunately, the person we fall in love with will most likely not feel the same way, except on the rarest of occasions. Life is simply uncooperative sometimes, what can I say? The fundamental truth of our nature is ultimately how out of control we really are. Romantic love, to the extent of obsession, is the greatest example of our constant disappointment, given expectations of the world which harbors us.

Short Fiction: The Lost Operative…

2010-09-16T15:04:00.001-07:00

The following is a short story I plan to post in pieces as I grind away at an intriguing plot. Comments are welcome.

Prologue:

Born free… What a joke. Philosophers will argue about the foundations of human rights and the formation of the social contract from an idea that we are all born as free individuals, at least in some obscure thought experiment denoting a state of nature without central government. Not me. I've never been free. I was born in captivity. They call this place Third Utopia. Who knows why they call it the "third" utopia, but I can only guess that there must have been others. I'm sure whoever started this travesty was making a literary reference to Thomas Moore judging by how our community operates, but for me the name is entirely ironic. I've read Moore's book, and although it describes a rather juvenile utopia that might have worked in a culture without conflicting history to destroy it, this place is almost certainly my prison. I say "almost," because I still haven't figured out what the ends of this place are. By ends, I mean its purpose. I'm reasonably sure that I am part of the means toward the purpose of Third Utopia, and Immanuel Kant would agree with me that if this is the case, Third Utopia is nothing but a deceptively clever amoral institution.

My name is Subject 81. As far as I can tell, I used to be someone else. Wish I knew who that someone was, but that identity is long gone. You know what they say in Buddhist philosophy? That your identity is simply an event in time, and that there never was a REAL "self" in the permanent sense of the word. You weren't the same person you were ten years ago, five years ago, an hour ago, or one second ago. This is because your identity is holistic in nature, and is composed of sensory experience and mental states caused by that sensory experience. That means with every new experience including mental states, you're a different person all the time. I guess that's me then. But I think Buddhism got it wrong. There certainly is a personal identity we value as we acquire new memories and use those memories to define ourselves. Perhaps this kind of attachment to who we are is the cause of dukkha, the Buddhist concept of suffering and dissatisfaction… But I don't know who I am now, and I can tell you with certainty that it has brought me no peace. I am a prisoner who can't remember his crime. Maybe there wasn't one. Maybe I'm just an experiment. I hope not. All I can tell you is that every morning I wake up and ask "who am I?" It's the first question we begin to answer to secure our place in this chaotic world. Someone decided that I didn't need to answer this question anymore. But I have a secret… Whatever I can't remember about who I used to be, I seem to be far more intelligent than anyone else here. I have a wide range of knowledge about how to read people, deceive people, gather intelligence, martial arts and combat training, and for some reason a modest education in literature, philosophy, and political science. Whoever I was, I used to have a purpose that was my own. Right now my purpose is to discover why I'm here, and to find the true ends of Third Utopia. Oh yeah, and escape of course.

Chapter 1

I cannot remember ever being free, and before we jump into a philosophical debate, I also don't know how I know what the concept of freedom is. Maybe it's simply an a priori idea, one that's known and craved for as soon as we develop critical thought? Anyway, I awoke in a well-lit bedroom. I surmise I was in my mid-thirties when this happened. I'm not even sure how long I'd been there. For all I know, I've been here all of my life. Who says they can't create a new identity every week? My hair was cut in a military fashion, and I wore black fatigues and a dark grey T-shirt. By some habit I can't remember developing, I immediately started to pin down facts about my environmental situation. The room was small like a hotel room, but surgically clean. There was a very thin monitor in front of the bed I slept on, which was still made up. I tried to sit up, intending to lock the door, but I became immediately aware of a pounding in my head so intense I threw up. For reasons I don't know, I thought it important to look at the contents of the mess I just made. It looked white and had no solids. From the pounding in my head and nausea, I surmised I had been poisoned or previously suffering from sickness. Because I was fully dressed, I concluded the former was the case. Still wanting to lock the door, I stumbled over to it and found there to be no internal locking devise. I found a chair and was about to prop it up when I observed that the door swung the wrong way. Whoever put me in this room didn't want me to lock it. Another fact, check. I went over to the mirror located to the left of the room in front of the bathroom door. My face seemed only slightly familiar. I was average in looks, no sign of bruises, but I did notice a very peculiar scar running from my left eyebrow to my hairline. I decided to go in the bathroom and do a full search of injury, as well as just an overall look at my body. Before I did this, I had a sudden inclination to find a weapon of some kind. All I could find was a pen, so I took it with me to the bathroom. The bathroom was small and super clean. It had disposable and single use soaps and shampoos, which indicated there might be someone who replaced it daily.

It's very strange when you don't know who you are. It's like your mind has been transplanted in another person's body and you're every movement is a violation of personal ethics. My body was fit and tone with a few scars here and there. I'm sure one of the scars is from being shot by some kind of weapon. Other than that, I seemed fine. My head was clearing as I began to analyze my environment. From what I could tell, there was no way to see out of the room except by walking out the only exit, which my enigmatic training told me was dangerous. I decided to explore the room a bit more. Putting my clothes back on, I walked over to the bed. It was a mattress set on a rectangular cube, so there was no way to hide something underneath it. The only object which seemed out of place was the monitor which seemed a bit more high-tech than other TV monitors I'd seen. It was as thin as a pane of glass, but only slightly transparent. It stood on a small stand which made it appear to float in empty space at first glance. I felt around it searching for a means to control it, and when I touched the center it happened.

"Good morning Subject 81. How are we feeling today?"
The woman speaking was dressed in a white overcoat which seemed to partially conceal business attire underneath.

"I'd feel much better if I could ask you a few simple questions," I said. Always take what your lead is saying and turn the subject of any question to match the subject you actually want to talk about. Why I know this, I have no idea, but it seemed practical advice.

"Of course 81, you're always such a philosopher when you wake up." She smiled ironically at this, which disturbed me. Have I been waking up here every day??

"Thank you. I would like to know who you are and where I am. I would also like to know how long I've been here, and why I have a headache accompanied by nausea." I didn't really expect her to answer all of these questions, but I did want her to know that I was aware of the bullshit.

She started to laugh. "You ask the same questions every morning 81. My name is Dr. Sally Benson. You are a resident here at Third Utopia, a mental hospital for those who have the money to pay for it. Last night you received a high dose of drugs because we had to subdue you after you killed three staff members and another patient while attempting to… um… Well I assume you were trying to escape. Not very smart. There is no escape from Third Utopia, and besides, we can't have you running around society when you don't even know who you are."

So she admits there is a "society" other than third utopia… Interesting. Dr. Benson was quite beautiful, and she seemed very young for a doctor. I was skeptical, but at the same time I had no idea who I was or where, so… maybe I was in a mental institution.

"Thank you Dr. Benson. But I don't remember any of that. I'm also not sure how I got here, and who I was before I got here. Can you perhaps enlighten me?"

"That information is classified even to me Subject 81. Aside from last night's incident, you've always seemed to be a very peaceful resident. You don't remember being here yesterday or the day before?"

"No. I don't remember any of it."

"Well lucky for you. I guess today you get a fresh start Subject 81. A second chance! How about some breakfast this morning, huh? Would you like me to have some sent to your room?" She seemed very scripted and rehearsed, which made me suspicious. Is it an everyday occurrence that subjects here lose their memories? Or is it just an everyday occurrence that I lose my memory? What the hell is this chick's fucking deal? She must have been involved in whatever incident put me in my current state of amnesia. I need to get outside this room and gather more intelligence before I make anymore decisions.

"How come I'm not being punished for last night?" I said, hoping this would reveal some useful information.

"How can we punish you if you don't remember anything? You're not the same person you were last night are you? At least that's what you've told me, right? You're the philosopher, you tell me. Besides, I don't make those decisions. Now let's get you that breakfast 81. I'm sending down some biscuits and gravy, your favorite!" Dr. Sally Benson smiled and the monitor went dark.

This place is totally fucked. Fact two, check. Or was it fact three? Screw it. I'll figure this out if it kills me. I like solving puzzles. I have a vague feeling that I have a knack for it.

Hawking: God did not create the Universe

2010-09-02T16:56:00.000-07:00

Well it's about time Hawking said this explicitly. His new book, "The Grand Design" argues that god is simply an unnecessarily redundant idea. The universe is the result of the natural laws of physics, and when properly understood, the current state of the universe was inevitable. His new book looks promising, and will hopefully articulate a powerful unification of Einstein's theory of relativity and Quantum theory.

Bad faith at Ground Zero

2010-08-29T12:15:00.000-07:00

Opinions on the mosque at ground zero

2010-08-17T17:59:00.000-07:00

Here is an article by Sam Harris who opposes the mosque for different reasons (click here) Personally I think everyone's blowing this out of proportion. You can't even see the mosque building site from ground zero. But in my mind, NO testament to religion should be built there. Religion is what historically justifies the many atrocities in war, and the justification for war it self (in many cases with a very subtle hypnotic message).

A god of life

2010-08-17T17:50:00.000-07:00

Instruction Manual for Life [cc]

2010-08-10T02:59:00.000-07:00

Bill Maher And Barack Obama

2010-08-10T02:30:00.000-07:00

Richard Dawkins: "If you could have a number of guests for dinner, livin...

2010-08-10T02:27:00.000-07:00

What Twitter is for

2010-08-06T18:27:00.000-07:00

What Minimum Wage Does…

2010-08-02T13:32:00.001-07:00

This is just a quick post today. A lot of people are confused about minimum wage and what it's supposed to do. Many conservatives for example, make the argument that minimum wage hurts small businesses by increasing labor costs, reducing their ability to compete. Other arguments include: the idea that it causes price inflation as businesses attempt to compensate by raising the costs of their product; It may increase unemployment in proportion to the minimum wage increase due to businesses that are unable to meet the criteria. Liberals have arguments that take the form of: Minimum wage increases the standard of living for the poorest; it stimulates the economy by increasing consumption and putting more money in the hands of low-income people; and lastly, it decreases government spending on welfare programs…

All of these arguments may have a degree of truth to them, but they miss the real argument behind minimum wage. Minimum wage is an attempt to solve the many problems caused by what's known as the Destructive Competition Problem and promote co-cooperative competition that allows mutual survival. Excess competition drives down profits, which causes business owners to lower working conditions and wages so that they can cut costs in order to compete with their rivals by any means necessary. Imagine you have three shoe companies such as Nike, Adidas, and Puma. Their goal is NOT to create the best shoe; their goal is to create profit with the least amount of cost to the company. To do this, they need the better-selling and least costly shoe. The cost of the shoe is determined by material and labor costs. Over enough time, all companies will have greater incentive to cut wages and decrease costly working conditions (such as A/C, healthcare, clean bathrooms, etc) in order to reduce labor cost. If they do not, they will eventually lose their business to their competitors. Minimum wage laws were designed to prevent this destructive tendency. It puts all three companies on a more level playing field by forcing them to pay a minimum wage to their employees. Minimum wage helps to allow competition without destroying the citizens it employs, or having competing companies destroy themselves by cutting costs and reducing prices so much they are taken over by a monopoly greater than their circle of competition. It doesn't always work like it's supposed to, now that we have a globalized economy and outsource to a gross extent. But history has already confirmed what happens when we don't use a minimal amount of government coercion that checks capitalism. We eventually wind up with sweatshops of people who are getting paid practically nothing to work 60 hours a week. Typically the response to this by libertarians is "So what? They're free to get an education and get a better job, so let them. It's their choice!" Not true. Freedom is complex, and in a capitalism, it is determined to a large extent by money. Where can they find the time to get an education (or even job hunt) when they're already in such poverty they are forced to accept such poor conditions? Most people are in this condition because they simply were not born into this world with any assets at their disposal, such as a family that could afford to put them through school or even feed them. It's not as simple as it sounds.

Anyway, there you have it folks. Minimum wage laws aid in preventing destructive competition.

On the Intolerance of Religion Itself

2010-07-30T17:25:00.001-07:00

It's surprisingly difficult to be tolerant towards intolerant religions (prepare yourself, because in this controversial post I will be using the T-word quite a bit). People speak of religious intolerance as if "tolerance" were the greatest of virtues that opposing faiths lack in their ignorance. Some accuse atheists of intolerance towards religion. Well… that may be true. But seldom in history will you see atheists unite under a flag of intolerance. I believe in humanity, and most of us still hope that one day humanity will outgrow the need for gods. However, tolerance is NOT a virtue when it becomes the toleration of evil. That said, I can think of no reason why people shouldn't be allowed justice in defending themselves against religions that violate human rights, and justify their violence by use of their holy texts. In no way am I saying that violence is justified by religion's dogmatic ways. Instead, I am asserting that open, non-violent protest, should always be allowed. The recent trend in America and the UK, is to restrict these protests as acts of "intolerance." I'll give you a guess as to who starts yelling "intolerance!" first… Yep! Religion. Could anything be more hypocritical? Have they left us any other choice? We're not the ones walking around killing people in the name of our god. You can take your god and shove him up your righteous ass! How's that for intolerant?

The poster of the twin towers would be more correct if it said: "Intolerant Religions: see what it can do?"

If history has shown us anything, it has shown time and again that religion is the most intolerant of evils. It is intolerant of progress, intolerant of peace with that which it finds intolerable, and the promoter and justifier of the most vile acts in human history solely BECAUSE of its inherent lack of toleration. While many of us have grudgingly accepted religion and the political power it wields, we have seldom found religion to have the same tolerance.

Tolerance is when we accept the presence of something we have an aversion to, for the sake of peace and the greater good. However, it is difficult to refrain from protesting vehemently against religion when it justifies and promotes violence in a mechanical mantra of "my religion, right or wrong, MY religion (and not yours)!" How can we be expected NOT to speak out against Islam? It is quickly becoming the most violent religion in history. And Christianity, its long rival and predecessor, within the torrent of wars that have destroyed countless civilizations, is even more dangerous now that it has taken the opiate form of the grotesque: American patriotism. How long must religion fail to unite humanity in peace before people wake up and question their faith? How long will humanity let religion cripple scientific progress in medicine, space exploration, and every field of intellect before we become an endangered species?

Let me ask you this, people of the sentient puddle… When has religion EVER helped us discover something new that has aided humanity as science and reason has? If any religion is actually the TRUE religion, why did they all fail to discover electricity, quantum mechanics, relativity, vaccines, antibiotics, or any of the countless fields of thought which has propelled nations into strong, peaceful societies? Hell, even our political system is against everything the Abrahamic religions preach. Democracy? Capitalism? Human rights? Do you think this is compatible with religions that preach intolerance? It's difficult to swallow that line of bullshit when religion dehumanizes all non-believers. There is not one passage of Christian or Islamic doctrine that agrees with capitalism; not one passage that would say that all citizens should have equal voting power; and almost all of the dogma these religions promote, dehumanize all those who do not follow their doctrine.

If you think Christianity is tolerant, think again:

Withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received of us.--2 Th.3:6
If a man has sex with another man, kill them both. Lev 20:13
All nations shall be terrorized by the followers of Yahweh. Deut 2:25

And here are some more strikingly intolerant passages from Deuteronomy:

7:2 And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them:
7:3 Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.
7:4 For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods: so will the anger of the LORD be kindled against you, and destroy thee suddenly.
7:5 But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire.
7:6 For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God: the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.

You might be thinking, "OH, but that's just old testament stuff.." Wrong. The New Testament is riddled with intolerance:

Jesus, in Matthew:

10:34 Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

10:35 For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.

10:36 And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.

10:37 He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.

10:38 And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.

10:39 He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.

There are literally hundreds of passages such as these in the new testament alone. For a short list found in the Quran, click this link.

Last but not least, remember that passage from Matthew 7:1 - 5 (judge not....etc. lest ye be a hypocrite - I'm paraphrasing here..)? Well it appears most Christians today seem to have skipped right to John 7:24, 1st Corinthians 2, 5:12-13, and 6:2-3, which tells Christians to judge everyone – believers and non-believers. Even God's angels are to be judged by "the saints."

I will always reserve as much judgment as possible towards humanity and the many followers of religion, but my judgment on religion itself, and those who act violently in its name, will suffer the execution of my freedom to speak out against it. And with that I leave you with some more useful passages:

Appetitus rationi pareat (let your desires be governed by reason) dubitando ad veritatem pervenimus (by way of doubting we arrive at the truth) - Cicero

"I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me." - Simone de Beauvoir

"The deeper the soul plunges into religious devotion, the more it loses all sense of reality, all need, all desire, all love of reality. The dazzling light of their faith blinds them to the surrounding world and to their own selves. As for me, who cares for nothing so much as to see the world and myself clearly, I am amazed at the coils of falsehood in which devout persons take delight." - Andre Gide

Problems with Pascal's Wager and the belief in gods

2010-06-08T14:24:00.000-07:00

The Fundamental Mistakes of Neo-Pragmatism, Realist Political Theory, and Post-Modernism

2010-06-03T12:41:00.001-07:00

In this post I will argue that neo-pragmatism, realist political theory, and post-modernism in general, fundamentally mistake modernist argument. For these theories, morality (and epistemology for the neo-pragmatist) is a function of language. The post-modernist believes that for humanity and its various cultures, ethics is simply, to use Stanley Fish's phrasing, "politics all the way down." Ethics is relative because there is no moral argument that is not subjective by its very nature. At the end of the day, these theorists will eventually concede that there is no "truth" in the objective sense of the word. That doesn't mean they can't advocate a framework to condemn Nazi Germany or the 9-11 attacks, but it does mean that it will stem ultimately from the culture they are committed to, and for people such as Richard Rorty, the cultural language and values you are committed to. What does this mean exactly? Well, it implies that there is no absolute or universal standard of ethics for these theorists (this includes ideas such as human rights). These theories can condemn actions from a perspective of culture by stating: "your actions are absolutely wrong, but there is no universal argument for which I can convince you (meaning they are only right from their perspective)." Morality is context-dependent, meaning that it is a result of circumstance (including genetics and economic status), upbringing, and society. There is no boundary between reason and rationalization. Language is simply a tool for rationalizing our own interests. Realist political theory takes these arguments and concludes that "all is fair in love and war," and thus nations ought to always act in pursuit of their own interests by any means necessary. Neo-pragmatists take these arguments and conclude that there is no such thing as objective truth epistemically, and especially no objective moral value that is universal to human interest (ironically Rorty attempts to seek universal understanding by proposing we seek understanding of other cultures, and through that understanding, reduce our tendency to dehumanize the opposition). To prove the lack of universal moral understanding, they point towards violence and moral disagreements that demonstrate our imprisoned perspective (which they claim is always personal and subjective). This failure to escape personal and cultural bias makes it impossible to reason objectively. Is Al Qaeda a bunch of terrorists, or are they freedom fighters? For post-modernists you cannot make a meaningful distinction here. Instead, we can only condemn them from a sense of loyalty to our culture and its values. From the perspective of Al Qaeda, they are freedom-fighters, and no argument you can present will convince them otherwise.

These post-modern arguments are a reaction to the enlightenment philosophers who are usually referred to as - you guessed it - modernists. Modernism (generalized) is the belief that reason can solve all human problems (or that all human conflict can be traced to a failure to use reason properly), and from reason we can discover a basis for universal moral laws that would express that which is in the best interest for all human kind. For the modernist, there is such a thing as universal human interests, and there are universal human rights we can formulate that will aid in protecting a means to those interests. The fundamental misunderstanding of modernism is what leads people to advocate the post-modernist positions. However, modernism demands a question that generally goes ignored by post-modernists: If everything is context dependent (cultural, language, circumstance), what happens if we remove the context prior to judgment? What would our reason conclude is the best moral values for all involved, supposing we remove all bias, and judge our ethical problems from a veil of ignorance (or "original position")? The post-modernist ignores the idea of impartiality within ethical reasoning. The fact that we have moral disagreements is not a threat to modernism, and from this fact, it does not follow that there can be no universal maxims. Granted, there are people who will never be convinced by reason. But for the modernist, these people are simply outliers that are so limited by their personal convictions and prejudices, that they are unable to use their reason to determine good judgments that include more than their own interests. This is why we have words like "close-minded," "fanatic," and "unreasonable."

From an impartial perspective, our reason allows us to see quite clearly that all humans have an interest in their own lives, and thus we can formulate a right to life, and a right to self-determination (choice as to how to live our lives). When people disagree on this, it is simply a function of dehumanizing the opposition, or a belief that the opposition has forfeited their rights in some way. Fish is right to say that different cultures and groups have strong convictions about morality, and that these convictions will naturally clash with other cultures and groups. But Fish is wrong to conclude that this demonstrates moral relativism is the only real truth. Besides, if everything is context-dependent (as post-modernism would have us believe), then the idea that everything is context-dependent is itself dependent on context. Same goes for the neo-pragmatists: If everything is language-dependent, then the idea that everything is language-dependent is dependent upon language itself. Remove the context however, in a hypothetical exercise of unbiased reasoning about facts of the matter, and we must reason about moral justice from a vale of ignorance (one in which all humanity would relate to in the absence of their own bias). Terrorists don't "hate freedom." They value it just as much as we do. Why do you think they refer to themselves as "freedom fighters"? What has happened, from a modernist point of view, is that they have let their ends be corrupted by a corrupt means, and ultimately, a corrupt reasoning. They have fallen into group-think as a result of clandestine isolation, which results in de-individuation, reinforcement of pre-existing convictions, with no reference to external authority for guidance or criticism. Their failure to use reason with impartiality is not a challenge to modernism. It isn't "politics all the way down." Fish and other post-modernists are simply wrong to say that we can't make a meaningful distinction here. A child who is clearly innocent, in that she has no intention of doing any harm, is clearly a "non-combatant" who has not forfeited her right to life and self-determination. It is morally unjust to kill that child intentionally under any circumstance. Now if a terrorist doesn't see it this way, it is simply a moral mistake resulting from a poor rationalization of an evil means to achieve personal ends. They are not making an impartial judgment because they are not judging the situation in the absence of their group goals and ideology. To argue that there can be no meaningful distinction here is just wrong.

Now, some Rorty and Fish defenders might argue that they can make a meaningful distinction from a foundation of culture, but this is liken to arguing that Nazi Germany can make a meaningful claim that their actions were morally right from their own cultural perspective. Both claims don't have any ethical weight. Instead, these arguments demonstrate a cultural bias, and not a moral principle in which to condemn wrong action. Post-modernists want to defend positions from bias in light of a twisted idea that we cannot escape from it. Oh really? Is there cultural bias in mathematics? Basic logic? No. Religion and culture have little to do with how math and logic operate in the world. There is only the more compelling and operational argument that is determined by reason and evidence. "The truth shall set you free" as they say, and if you don't believe in truth, you will never be free. Reason is what determines a moral groundwork for human freedom, not our cultural opinion of the world.

In summary, just because we are imprisoned by a subjective perception of the world, this does not commit us to moral or epistemic relativism. If everything is relative, then what is "everything else"? This clever phrase points to the fact that we generally assume other human beings exist, which commits us to reasoning in a manner that includes other people that are in our likeness. We must reason objectively (at least in practice of a hypothetical) about moral judgments. This means that personal context has no place in theories of justice. It simply doesn't matter that you believe in Catholicism, or that Islam is evil. This is not part of modernist reasoning. Instead, we look at the actions committed, and reason about universal interest and agreement with an understanding that we are all humans trying to live in the same world. Kant had it right. And I believe people such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin present an even more compelling addition to his ethics. As far as Rorty goes, I think he had it wrong. Language is not the context itself. Language is descriptive of the context, and is always first-and-foremost ABOUT something. That something is what Kant would call a fact-of-the-matter. Assuming we believe the world is NOT entirely a figment of our imagination, then our language is partially descriptive of that world. This implies that it's possible to practice reasoning impartially about that world, and determine certain truths about it. Even John Dewey believed in truth, he just thought the only engine that would allow us to touch it was democratic debate.

Another concept that tends to defeat the post-modernist argument is the notion of pre-commitment. The idea of a "right" is a pre-commitment to reason in the face of knowledge that we will sometimes be unreasonable. It demonstrates that we are aware of our emotional fallibility. One popular story from the myth of Odysseus (Greek) or Ulysses (Latin) is when Odysseus wishes to hear the Siren's song but knows it will drive him mad. To survive the quest, he commands his crew to stuff their ears with wax, tie him to the mast, and ignore all orders until they pass the sirens. A human right is our attempt to reason out ethical laws that "trump the sirens' call". We know we are sometimes irrational, so we have built ethical values from an impartial reasoning that will check and balance that irrational tendency. Humans are still evolving, and sometimes our instincts still get the best of us. But we have evolved towards a capacity for reason, and this is what can save us from our irrational inclinations.

A New Theory of Ethics: A belief in other human beings…

2010-05-30T15:06:00.001-07:00

Throughout the contemporary world, we find a clash of ethics. In politics, we find that not every culture agrees that individual freedom is the primary political good. Some believe the social contract ought to trump property rights. Other cultures believe that their religion, and the commands of their god, ought to be at the top of the hierarchical pyramid of morals. Human rights in these controversies are problematic. Which rights ought we to grant, and in what order of primacy? In this post, I will argue that all human morals come from an epistemic axiom which all humans except: other humans exist.

Despite all disagreements between cultures, there is one premise within moral debate that is always granted as a basis to found all ethical arguments, and that premise is that other humans exist apart from ourselves. This premise is where our moral dilemmas arise. If we truly believed that everything in the world was simply a part of our own imagination, then we wouldn't have any ethical problems. Ethics requires a concern for others, and if there are no others to concern ourselves with, then there can be no ethics. And while it is epistemically possible (as many skeptics in history have demonstrated) that objective reality may be false, and we could be trapped in the matrix, or be a computer program ourselves, it is not the case that we accept this hypothesis as more probable than the premise we currently operate on (that there is an objective reality we perceive from a point of view: ourselves and others). There is absolutely no reason for us to accept subjective relativism because our intuition adds more epistemic value to accepting an objective reality than a purely subjective reality (where we are simply brains in a vat being fed false and imaginary friends to interact with). Therefore, most humans, as a matter of practice, assume that other individuals like themselves exist in this world. Our intuitions about this stem mostly from our lack of control over reality. We are limited and constrained by the world we occupy. This leads us to assume the first axiom of our human knowledge.

From the first axiom (other humans exist), we can arrive at certain agreements about ethics. First we can agree that all moral principles are only good if they are universal and apply to all other humans. If you believe in a human right to life, you must extend this to everything you believe to be human. Otherwise you are dehumanizing, and that is a mistake. If you believed this principle to only apply to yourself, this would not be a moral principle, but rather a matter of personal taste. It would be like arguing that vanilla was the best ice-cream in the world. Unfortunately in politics and warfare, we often dehumanize the enemy without realizing it, and we forget that our moral principles ought to apply to all humans. It makes it extremely difficult to condemn the enemy for not following our moral beliefs, if we do not follow those principles to which we value ourselves.

As I've laid this argument out, we can now talk about moral principles entailed by the first axiom, for which we should all reasonably agree to. The first principle ought to stem from the fact of our very existence: a right to life. We all want to live, and we also want some control as to how we live our lives. A right to life doesn't mean someone can't forfeit this right by violating it (a murderer for example who is prosecuted and sentenced to death, or an enemy soldier or terrorist). So a right to life doesn't mean we cannot justify killing the enemy, only that we need to make sure that our justification comes from the enemy's voluntary forfeit of this right. The right to life demands we are careful in war, and that we provide systems of justice that determine punitive measures that involve a right to life (imprisonment, capital punishment, Jus in Bello, and jus ad bellum).

The second moral principle entailed by the first axiom is epistemic responsibility. Humans base their actions on beliefs produced from acquired information, and our belief about how true that information is. Sometimes we act out emotionally, but those emotions are a reaction to beliefs about the world. Therefore, we have a moral responsibility to acquire information carefully before we label it as certain. In order to respect other human beings, we have a responsibility to acquire knowledge carefully so that we do not commit actions based on false beliefs that can harm others. If you act on poorly acquired beliefs, and those actions will ultimately affect other human beings, you are dehumanizing the people around you by not concerning yourself others. It is a contradiction, because you want others to concern yourself with your own right to life, and the protection of that right.

All other moral principles follow from what I have just laid out. If we believe other humans exist, and we take from this belief a moral responsibility to extend our principles to all humans, then we ought to acquire knowledge in a careful manner out of respect for human life. Now, as long as this is followed, we would have relative peace in the world. The breakdown of peace comes from people not respecting a universalization of moral principles, and a failure to acquire knowledge in a careful manner. When people commit violent acts in the name of religion, they are acting on beliefs that come from authority, and often they have not applied any critical thought to that authority. How do they know their holy book is true when there are billions of other human beings like themselves that follow other holy books? Often their religion dehumanizes those who do not share their faith. We see the same problem with nationalism. Our reasoning tends to take the form of fanatic patriotism: "my country, right or wrong, my country!" This is a moral mistake, and it often takes other forms: "my family, right or wrong, my family!"; "My religion, right or wrong, my religion!" People who know their brother or sister robbed or killed, but will not report them because "they're family," or people who refuse to question their faith even when hundreds kill in its name are morally wrong. You have to operate with some critical thought in light of the belief in other humans. Especially if you believe other human beings are similar to yourself, but they disagree with your position. This demonstrates that you could be mistaken in your beliefs. Logically, you cannot be the sole person in the world in possession of the truth. It's possible you have the truth, but you cannot know that you do with absolute certainty. This is why you need to justify your crucial beliefs with reason and evidence. Like every human on this planet, you ought to assume that you are fallible.

Basically the first axiom commits us to the use of our reason and critical thought. It is when we abandon reason and critical thought that we commit the greatest amoral act, and the greatest of self-contradictions. Remember to act with reason as your sovereign. That's what makes you human.

Utilitarianism or Deontology? The Paradox of Both

2010-05-24T12:07:00.001-07:00

Our intuitions about ethics seem clear cut, but our assumptions which ground these moral convictions are soon revealed to be less than obvious in practice. To demonstrate this, let us look at some popular thought experiments on the subject:

Imagine you're on a runaway trolley car. Although you cannot stop the train in this example, you do have the power to divert its course onto another track. In front of you is a person standing on the tracks, who is either unaware of the danger, or cannot move. Imagine what you will, he is doomed to death unless you divert the trolley car to the next track. However, on this next track there is another guy in the same predicament. What is the morally correct choice here? The logical answer is that there isn't one. Both are logically the same because you are making a choice in virtue of the information you have (divert or don't divert = one death).

Now imagine the same situation except that on the main track stands five people in front of you, and the second track only has one. All groups are innocent and potentially unable to move. Now you can divert the track to save the five but kill the one, or you can save the one by refusing to divert. What does your moral intuition tell you to do? Statistically, most people grudgingly accept that diverting the track would be morally acceptable given the situation, because they feel that our only option is to save as many people as we can.

Now imagine you are not on the trolley, but you can clearly see that it's about to kill five people. You stand on a bridge above the train. In front of you is a large fat man. Suppose you know for a fact (for the sake of argument) that if you were to push the fat man in front of the tracks it will slow the trolley enough to save the five people about to get ran over. Would you push him? Why not? In the example we just talked about, you were willing to divert the track (killing an innocent life) to save the other five people from certain death. Statistically peoples' moral intuition in the second scenario are that we should NOT push the fat man. Our moral intuitions have changed, but has the moral dilemma changed? Look at the picture:

Although the arrows have changed, both scenarios are logically the same. Person (Y) is still an innocent victim of the thought experiment, whose fate is determined by you. Most objections provided by our intuitions give the following responses:

"But the fat guy is innocent, and you would be causing his death" - Response: So is the guy in the scenario where you are diverting the tracks!

"Yes, but in the first scenario you are responsible for the end result and must decide no matter what!" – Response: You are in the same situation in the second scenario! Your knowledge of the situation forces you to make a choice (action or inaction), the same as in the first (divert or do not divert).

In the first scenario, our intuitions are operating by what's known as utilitarianism. The most generous interpretation of utilitarianism is this: An act is right if and only if it produces the best consequences for all (The "best consequences" is generally defined as the greatest happiness for the greatest number). The general weakness in this kind of moral thinking (via utility calculation) is revealed in the second scenario. In the second scenario (pushing the fat guy), our intuitions are operating by a moral theory known as deontology. Immanuel Kant is famous for making this argument. Although the consequences of our inaction are bad, we ought not do wrong (pushing the fat man) though the consequences are dire. A famous quote by Kant is "Do no wrong, though the heavens may fall." The biblical formulation of this is "Do no evil that good may come of it" (usually paraphrased from Romans 3:8, and popularized by the catholic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas).

By which moral principle are we bound? Inaction in both scenarios leads to five deaths. A moral choice is demanded by our intimate knowledge of a very certain End. Utilitarianism says the ends justify the means, but deontology states that you simply cannot treat people as a mere means towards an end, no matter how good.

Within politics, political scientists such as Michael Walzer, argue that the very nature of the situation (Choice and action for a nation that values human rights) demands that no politician can take an absolutist position in either case. The famous example of such a dilemma is a captured terrorist. The terrorist has admitted prior to capture that he has personal knowledge of several bombs about to go off in a large metropolis. We are certain (via the terrorist's admittance, and outstanding evidence) that he has information which could save hundreds of thousands of lives, but he is not cooperating. Is it right to torture him given the urgency of the situation, and it being the last viable option? The answer Walzer gives is that it is never "morally right," but can be excused as a necessary action to save lives. Only in the political arena does he allow this. This is called "Threshold Deontology." You are violating a human right (not to be treated cruelly as a means towards an end), but you are saving lives. When the perceived evil is overwhelming AND overwhelmingly certain, a political responsibility may force a dirty hand that violates human rights in the name of the good. This is why he thinks all politicians operate with morally dirty hands, because none can operate practically without eventually violating rights for the general good.

Now we don't necessarily have to grant the torture scenario. We could argue that torture doesn't guarantee the end we want. In fact, the biggest criticism of utilitarianism is that we can never guarantee the consequences will be desirable. This is why making a judgment on this basis must require accurate information that provides reasonable certainty toward an end that is morally good.

If you don't find the trolley arguments convincing, imagine the following logically similar scenarios:

1. You are a surgeon and six people are brought to you (they've been in a horrible trolley accident), and they are all on the verge of death. One person is worse off than the other five. You can spend all your time trying to save the one, but you know all the rest will die if you do. OR you could save the five, knowing (assume your medical knowledge is pristine) that the last person will die. As a medical doctor your responsibility is to save lives, and it seems reasonable that you would want to save as many lives as possible. What do you do? Save the five right?

2. You are a surgeon and five people are brought to you dying of a horrible trolley accident. They all need a new organ to survive, and all need a distinctly different organ (heart, lung, kidney, liver, etc). Lucky for you, there is a patient in the next room who has come in for a physical. He has a compatible blood type. Now all you have to do is put him to sleep, kill him, and harvest all the organs to save the other five patients. What do you do?

Logically, the second scenario is the same. Your choice will either result in one death or five in both cases. AND in both cases, all people are innocent.

Something for you guys and gals to think about and mull over. In the literature, there is little in the way of compelling solutions. Utilitarianism states that you should always kill the one to save the many. Deontology demands that you choose not to act because you are not morally responsible for the situation provided in the first place. Neither answer seems intuitively sound.

What is philosophy? A philosopher’s perspective…

2010-03-15T01:07:00.001-07:00

I was at a Barnes and Noble today looking at the philosophy section which is right next to the religion section. And I was reading a book called Modal Logic for the Philosopher, which I thought might be a useful aid in my writing. A well-dressed man tapped me on the shoulder and asked me "hey, who says what is right in philosophy?" As a philosophy student I was a little puzzled in how to respond to the question, because the question itself was confused. I mean, first of all… "right" as in morally correct, or "right" as in true? And it goes without saying that no single philosopher has absolute authority on either subject (despite some arrogance in the profession). My response was "Well.. I think when you ask a question like that, you are confusing what the practice of philosophy is about. Philosophy is about argument, and it has to do with what you find more compelling or least compelling, not what is absolutely true. In fact, most philosophers tend to agree that as individuals we are incapable of knowing whether or not we possess absolute truth because we are imprisoned ultimately by our own perception." The man then told me that if I was looking for absolute truth I need only move one aisle over (to the Christianity section). Naturally I gave him a disappointed look because he failed to understand the point of what I just said to him. The only thing us philosophers are absolutely certain of is that, if we believe ourselves to be in possession of absolute truth, we have certainly gone mad and are in need medical supervision. That doesn't mean we can't possess truth, it just means we can't KNOW whether or not we have it. And THAT means we need to be very careful in our quest to acquire true beliefs about the world. Therefore, we humble philosophers only make claims about what we find more or less compelling, or with a degree of certainty, but we shutter at the phrase "I am absolutely certain".

It is troubling to me how many people in the world are repelled by the idea of philosophy in the wake of their ignorance. My roommate would rather watch every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer back to back then attempt to discuss philosophy. Why? Because she has absolutely no grasp as to what philosophy is. But she actually practices philosophy all the time, and so do you. To put is simply, philosophy is doubt. It's skepticism about any possible claim. Well.. it's more complex than that, but this is the beginning of philosophy. All philosophy begins with doubt about a claim, and then it explores that doubt, and exploration of doubt tends to reveal problems about, not only the original claim, but the assumptions the claim rests upon. After a sufficient collection of problems reveal themselves, philosophy then becomes a practice of solving the problems raised by doubt. For example, let's say your crazy roommate says to you "I don't believe in philosophy, I just don't believe in it.." You can then respond by saying, "Now that's an ironically philosophical claim which I doubt. I doubt your disbelief. But perhaps you could enlighten me; why don't you believe in philosophy?" Your roommate's response will most likely reveal that they have no real concept as to what philosophy is, and this is a problem in her claim. If you don't have a concept of what something is, how can you disbelieve in it? Disbelief requires that you have a clear concept of what you are disbelieving in. I can't say I disbelieve in Snarglepoppers when I don't hold any belief about what Snarglepoppers are. Also, what does the sentence "I don't believe in philosophy" mean? You don't believe philosophy exists as a practice? You don't believe in a particular philosophical theory? And just like that you have engaged in philosophy!

You see, whenever you have a degree of skepticism about something, you are practicing philosophy. Do you believe in evolution? Why not? Your response is an attempt to argue for a belief. When you explore that belief by defending it, you may experience problems in the reasoning behind that belief. These problems need to be solved if you are to justify that belief as something you hold to be true. And the more important it is to you that one of your beliefs is true, the more important it is that you justify it using good reason. Knowledge is most often characterized as a belief that is justified, but also held to be true. Whether or not that belief absolutely IS true is not within our capacity to determine. However, whether or not we reached that belief via reasoning which justifies our belief IS within our capacity to determine. Don't believe me? Prove it! Welcome to philosophy!

You see, it IS an important practice, and I'd say it's one of THEE most important because it's about justifying our beliefs, or demonstrating beliefs to be unjustified. If we care about anything in this world, we care about the truth of things. And because we can't know whether or not we possess the truth, we need to justify our beliefs because they are about the truth value of a world in which we care about. While the scientist and the theist both posit that an objective reality (a reality that exists apart from their minds), they both reach different conclusions about the world after positing this axiom. Those conclusions hold truth values (they are either true or false), and because neither the scientist nor theist can know those truth values with absolute certainty, they have a moral responsibility to justify their beliefs/conclusions, instead of just asserting them carelessly.

How and why to get abs you can see…

2010-03-01T17:42:00.001-08:00

First of all, why do we want abs? Because it makes us look fucking sexy, and we want people to think we're sexy. It gives a feeling of personal, self-elitism, and we feel more confident and healthy because of it. Also, it doesn't hurt our egos when we take our clothes off in the bedroom and see the lustful look of our partners. Besides, when you work hard for a body like that, you deserve a little recognition. You should be able to reap the fruits of all the labor that went into taking the time to shape your body. Also, abs are the last resting area of body fat, so if we are able to reveal our abs, the rest of our body will also be revealed to be tone. So let's talk about how to get those abs!

The real crisis when it comes to getting those abs isn't which exercise to do, but rather how to eat and exercise properly. 98% of getting abs is FAT REMOVAL. Why? Because we are *revealing* our abs, not creating them. In fact, I betcha one million dollars that YOU have fabulous abs already. Unfortunately, they're hidden under a healthy layer of fat. Take my word for it, if you want abs, do NOT go out and buy the latest machine or crazy exercise plan. And for the sake of the all the sex you'd like to have before you die, don't "go on a diet." When you "go on a diet," you're already planning to "go off" that diet eventually. What you need to do is change your daily habits and your lifestyle a bit.

1. The first step, which is the most fundamental step EVER, is to take all the junk food in your house/apartment and donate it to your skinny neighbor. This way, they become fat, while you continue to get sex-a-licious. Trust me on this, if you have junk food in your home, you will eat it, period. Eventually you will get hungry, and browse right pass the good stuff and straight for the junk food, rationalizing to yourself all the way saying, "'oh I've been good today,' or 'just this once,' or 'I'll make up for it tomorrow…'"

What should you consider "junk food" you ask? I'll tell you. Any and all white flower products including: white bread, pastas, anything with the words "high fructose corn syrup." YES! Bread IS A JUNK FOOD if it's not 100% whole grain wheat. You will crave it, and you will eat it. Chips of any kind, unless they happen to be fat free and low calorie (no? Figures… out it goes). Cookies, and any kind of sweets. For liquids, see rules 3 & 4.
All this being said, there are good replacements for these specific kinds of cravings, which I will get to.

2. Lower your calorie intake by changing the quality of what you eat, not the quantity. All foods from now on should be high in fiber and high in protein, and you need to reduce your daily calorie intake based on how much you exercise you do and how fast you'd like to lose weight. To figure this out, there are excellent calculation devices all over the internet. The one at this link is pretty simple, just chose the desired link (male/female) after reaching the site and put in the information: http://nutrition.about.com/od/changeyourdiet/a/calguide.htm

Now what you will find is that, if you don't want to feel like you're starving to death, this food will naturally have to be low in sugars and fats to keep them low in calorie. If they are not, you will be at your max caloric intake after one or two meals. For example, a Qdoba burrito with all the trimmings is almost 1500 calories or more. But if you get it naked and replace the rice with an extra scoop of beans while skipping the sour cream and cheese sauce, then you cut this quite literally in half, and get just as much substance to fill you up.
This step is also where good replacement experimentation come in. For ice cream sandwiches, etc., try weightwatchers, or skinny cow products. For gummy worms/bears, try the sugar free kind (they taste EXACTLY the same, and if you eat too much of them it gives you a laxative effect which will keep you honest, and if you DO overeat, well… let's just say, you aren't storing much - haha).
Staples (food that should just be a regular part of your diet):
- Frozen mixed vegetables! They are cheap, fill you up, high in fiber (so it absorbs fatty foods, fills you up, and isn't stored by the body at all), and lastly they can take on many different flavors depending on what you add to them. Also, they only take about three minutes to microwave.
- Low/no calorie Condiments: Hot sauces, salsa, vinegar, soysauce, salt & pepper, yellow mustard. You can add any of these to vegetables, etc., and add almost NO calories to your meals. Also, if you use hot sauces, you burn even MORE calories because it ups your metabolism and temperature.
- Meat! Here is where you can be pretty lavish in your eating habits. Steaks, chicken breasts, fish, etc… Just make sure it's not fried because that means fat, and fat means high calorie, which means you will break your max caloric intake.
  - By the way, it only takes 3500 extra calories per week to add on another pound of fat. And it is surprisingly easy to accumulate this or more over the course of a week. And your body can convert any extra calorie to fat, so be clever with your food sources.
- High fiber and low calorie bread. Trust me, it's in the store. Just look around, the options are quite amazing. This will still be one of your favorite things to eat because you will be craving carbs. Thanks to my advice, they will be good carbs that make you look fabulous in the morning.
- Quickies…. Only not in a sexual way. You need food that you can eat when you're just too fucking lazy to make a sandwich or cook a steak (Hey, I hate to cook - we've all been there, so no one's judging). I recommend canned chili, beef jerky, protein powder, and fresh fruit. But you can think of your own stuff.
- Soda drinker? Do not drink diet soda, it just ups your cravings for REAL sugar by triggering the same hormonal response in your body. Instead, buy some soda water and add a squirt of lime to it. It tastes great, and gives you the same satisfaction of a regular soda.
- Milk drinker? Even skim milk has a TON of calories for what you're consuming. I'm not saying it's "unhealthy," I'm saying it's "unskinny." Don't drink your calories (see rule 3 and 4). I recommend 8th Continent light vanilla Soy milk. Only 60 calories per cup, and it tastes pretty damn good!
- Like chips? Unfortunately most chips are horribly bad for you, but that doesn't mean there isn't skinny options. Lays makes a product called "Lay's light" potato chips, and they also make Pringles light. It's made with olestra, but as long as you don't overdo it, you should be just fine. If you do overdo it, well… let's just say you won't process much. They taste JUST LIKE the real thing though. So if you want a handful of chips, I recommend them.

3. HEALTHY food does NOT equal SKINNY food. I can't stress this enough: just because you think it's healthy, does not mean its skinny. Skinny food is low calorie, high protein and high fiber. I see this mistake all the time, and it makes me want to pull my hair out. People wonder why they don't lose weight when they eat nothing but healthy food, and they're still as fat as ever. It's because healthy food isn't necessarily low in calorie. So make sure that your food, healthy or not, is low calorie. Pasta (even if its 100% whole grain) is loaded with calories, especially if you ad heavy sauce to it. Also, just because its "vegetarian," doesn't mean it's skinny or even healthy. That just means it doesn't have any meat products in it. In fact, most vegetarian foods are quite fattening because the meat products have been replaced by fats, sugars, and white flower among other things.

4. Do NOT drink your calories. Soda, Juice, and Alcohol is now your mortal enemy. Seriously. I LOVE beer. I almost married it once… but that's another story. You need to either plan to go out and drink, by reducing how many calories you eat for that day, or hit the gym hard the next morning. Alcohol triggers a chemical produced by the liver that tells the body to stop burning excess fat and use all energy from the alcohol calories first. As a side effect, all extra calories not needed by the body are then.. You guessed it! - stored as fatty, fat, fat. So when you can, drink light beer. I know, I like micro brews too, but that's just tough. You are going to have to make some sacrifices for the body you want. As far as juice goes, see rule 3.

5. GYM baby! Okay, so you CAN lose weight and reveal your abs by diet alone. But I can tell you, it is WAY faster and easier if you go to the gym and workout for an hour or two, three to four times a week. You burn more calories per day, up your metabolism by building muscle, AND you tighten the skin that was holding all that fat in!

Some rules:
- Do NOT do ab exercises. Hate ab exercises anyway? Me too. The good news is that ab exercises don't do jack shit unless you already have less than 6% body fat and are training for a body building competition. What reveals your abs is FAT REMOVAL, and what removes fat (besides diet) is working major muscle groups that burn calories. These include Legs, Back, Chest, and Arms. That's in order from most calorie burning, to least. I recommend all four. Your abs are always involved in every exercise, so working these groups will shape your abs automatically into complete deliciousness. Who knows… Eventually, you'll rip off your shirt one day and want to have sex with yourself. Hey! So I'm a narcissist and a sex addict, sue me.
- Don't worry about what other people think. If they're at the gym, they're as concerned about their own bodies as you are with yours. Yeah I know, they may look better than you, but you think that shit happened on accident? Hell no! They look that good because they work for it. There's a reason that hot chick or hot guy is on the treadmill or Stairmaster for twenty minutes, or pumping a little iron. And you better believe their diet is exactly as I've described - low calorie, which means low fat, low sugar, high protein, high fiber!

6. Supplements you say? Look, it's okay to try new supplements to give you that added edge as long as you follow the above rules, and be safe. Whey or Soy Protein definitely helps.

I recommend the following for ab domination:
- CLA
- Creatine
- Multivitamins
- Protein
Every now and then I'll try a thermogenic pill for the energy boost. I mean sometimes I get lazy and don't feel like working out, so I'll try something with some caffeine kick or some yohimbine. As long as you start out slow, these can really help you stay on a good routine by adding energy.
- Caution though: do not rely on these for weight loss. They are only good for energy boosts, and that's about it. If you take a couple of these pills every day, and think you can cheat on your eating habits, YOU WILL get fatter. These pills simply give you energy, and help you process water.
- That being said, these kinds of supplements when carefully taken can definitely help you with hunger cravings, and with the occasional lack of energy.

7. Sacrifice for the greater good my friend. See the big picture! Better abs mean the rest of your body will also be fucking amazing because your ab fat is the last to go. Your whole body will look chiseled from Greek stone; which means better sex, better confidence, and better everything! So you want a candy bar, or Reese's butter cup, or a cinnabon - too bad! It's a temporary hunger craving that lasts for ten lousy minutes of ecstasy, and then you feel like shit for being such a fat ass (I know because I've done it). Try sex or masturbation instead. Not joking. Ha ha. You have to look at your skinny goal as a lifestyle, a new habitual practice that will change your life. People will notice the difference in you. They will see how great you look, how much confidence you have, and you will respond positively. Now if you're totally happy being overweight, then this article is not for you. Disregard. But if you DO want to make a change, you need to start prioritizing. It CAN be done.

8. Weight loss is slow, and requires patience. Most people need anywhere from 3 to 36 months before they see abs depending on the problem area. Try building a habit by setting a small goal, say five days of giving this a whirl. If you fail at that, try again. Once you succeed at doing this for five days, set another goal to continue for this for two weeks. Baby steps. If you fail, don't beat yourself up, just start over again. It took Thomas Edison over SIX THOUSAND failures to achieve the incandescent light bulb. But he didn't see them as failures. He saw them as experiments that led him towards success. Most success comes from failing many, many times. So just keep trying.

- Patience goes for eating too. If you just ate your low calorie meal and you're still hungry, wait. If you're patient, you'll see that your hunger pang will go away and your new eating habits do fill you up. Also you should try eating a bit slower.

Every passing minute is a chance to turn it all around. Why not now? Start this minute. Putting off your change until tomorrow, or next week, and making a promise to yourself is just giving yourself more time to rationalize breaking that promise. Do it now. Put down the potato chips or [insert junk food here], and start gathering all that junk food for your skinny neighbor to get fat on. Ha ha. Then go out to the store and start looking for some clever new ways to change your eating habits. Most of you are smarter than I am, so I'm sure you can do even better than the examples I gave.

Phaedrus out!

The Problems of Dualism

2009-12-13T23:40:00.000-08:00

Why Atheist and not Agnostic?

2009-12-08T17:49:00.001-08:00

I have been asked many times as a philosophy and political science student, why after all my training do I hold to atheism instead of remaining agnostic. In this article I attempt to explain why I feel Atheism is completely justified and is more practical than agnosticism.

Let's start by comparing the terms. A theist is making a claim that god exists, while an atheist makes the claim that god does not exist (or any variation that leads to the lack of belief in the existence of a deity). Both of these claims have truth-values, meaning that they are either true or false given an objective world that exists apart from our imagination. The Agnostic makes no claim at all, and is simply a term coined for the purposes of expressing skepticism and non-commitment to either argument. Most agnostics feel they are taking the more virtuous path because they feel that subscribing to the atheist claim is committing the same fallacious certainty as the theist. I will argue that subscribing to atheism is NOT the same fallacious certainty as the theist, and will demonstrate that making a negative claim about the existence of god is not only more virtuous than agnosticism, but just as scientifically ascertainable as our belief in such things as gravity or evolution.

The difference in the claims, and the importance of making one:

The main difference between the atheist and the theist is in how they arrived at their conclusion. The atheist is just as skeptical as the agnostic, but THEY are willing to make a claim and hold a belief that is backed by convincing argument, and compelling evidence. The theist is unwilling in most cases to entertain skepticism about their beliefs, at least when it comes to their "faith," and evidence which contradicts it. They generally (and I'm being blunt here) hold ignorance as a virtue and call it faith because faith is a leap from evidence and reason. It's as if they see doubt as a threat, and choose to believe something absurd in defiance of that doubt. Now they do have some arguments for god, be it ontological, cosmological, or fine-tuning, but they are unwilling to look at the evidence that points out the flaws in their premises or conclusions. While they are perfectly willing to look at evidence or argument that supports their convictions, they are not so willing to look at anything that contradicts them. This is the main difference. The atheist believes that it is perfectly okay to hold a belief or make a claim about the world, as long as they are convinced by proper argument and compelling evidence. There is not one atheist I know who wouldn't be perfectly willing to change their mind if they were to observe evidence or discover more convincing argument to the contrary of their claim.

To make some kind of claim on such an important matter though IS important. We are human, and we operate within the world based on beliefs about an objective reality concerning other objective beings, to deny this is to deny our own humanity because it reduces us to metaphysical relativism. There is nothing wrong with beliefs themselves, but merely the methodology in which we come to arrive at those beliefs. In fact, most agnostics DO have a belief one way or the other in which they operate on, but they are afraid to openly make a commitment to the argument they find most convincing. But that's all atheism is! When I say "I'm an atheist," all I am saying is that I find the arguments against god more convincing than the arguments for god. And thus I hold the belief that god does not exist and is nothing more than human mythology. That's it, plain and simple. There is a surprising lack of evidence in favor of a deity, and an alarming amount of evidence and argument to the contrary (see my earlier posts). If I ever do happen to find evidence to the contrary of my beliefs, well then I guess I'll have to change my mind. It's perfectly okay to change our minds in the face of reason, because as a human committed to discovering the truth we realize that we are in a constant struggle in attaining it.

Simone de Beauvoir once said "I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me." What she meant was that, we can have beliefs about the world we find convincing, but we ought not to hold these beliefs as absolute certainties without understanding our fallibility in attaining the truth. "Certainty" is a tricky word often used carelessly in our convictions. But when an atheist says they are certain that god does not exist, they are not claiming "absolute" certainty, but rather that they are convinced by good argument and evidence.

Can we prove a negative?

Many theists and some agnostics argue against the atheist by saying that "we cannot prove that god does not exist because you cannot prove a negative." What they are really getting at is that our limited ability to experience and explore a world of infinite possibility means that we cannot have absolute certainty about any objective claim. For example, I cannot claim absolute certainty that fairies do not exist just because one has never been observed, or there being no documented evidence. Fairies might be really good at hiding. And we haven't looked everywhere in the world, much less the entire universe. I just don't have the ability to do so, and neither do you, and thus, for all we know fairies "might" exist.

The problem with this argument is that it applies to absolutely everything you currently believe, and reduces all claims about the world to epistemic absurdity. We already know at least via a priori logic that this is a problem in attaining knowledge, but we can make claims about the world that are fairly certain based on logical possibility and empirical adequacy as long as we accept that an objective and empirical world exists (which all three arguments grant for the sake of their own claims).

If something exists, it will leave evidence of its existence otherwise there is absolutely NO justification to make a positive existential claim (See the video in my previous post). If we are told that there is a box in a room somewhere and asked what's inside, we cannot make any positive claims about what might be inside without evidence, because an infinite amount of possible objects can be inside a box we have yet to open and yet to know the size of. We CAN make negative claims however that involve what's NOT inside, e.g. "There will be no planet inside," "there will be no married bachelors inside," etc.

David Ramsey Steel in his book Atheism Explained, notes that "we can indeed prove negatives, and we do so all the time. IN fact, if we couldn't prove a negative, we couldn't prove a positive either, since every positive statement implies negative statements (an infinite number of them, actually). If I prove that 'all the marbles in this box are white', I automatically also prove that 'none of the marbles in this box are blue', 'none of the marbles in this box are transparent', and so on [ad infinitum]." The confusion is in the word "prove". In science "proving" a claim is about demonstrating that it has been tested to satisfaction, beyond reasonable doubt, based on empirically adequate observation and sound reasoning. The theist generally does not meet any of these criteria.

So I will conclude this rather lengthy article by saying that the atheist claim (given arguments and evidence in previous posts, etc.) is not only provable, but scientifically justified by the nature of its argument, and the atheist commitment to holding such a belief is virtuous in its pragmatism within a human existence in a world that is defined by evidence and logic.

Phaedrus out..

The following is a dialog concerning the above post between a friend and I. His/her name has been changed to "Sophocles" to protect identity.

Phaedrus
So what's the question?

Sophocles

Ok, so you're against agnosticism

Phaedrus
NO

Sophocles

i mean you prefer making the claim to atheism over agnosticism

Phaedrus
Yes, but you understand that agnosticism is not making a claim

Sophocles

Yes, it's mainly remaining skeptical

Phaedrus
So is the atheist in a way. To show you why I prefer atheism, I attempt to demonstrate what agnosticism is hesitant of doing, and why atheism isn't doing that. The atheist is ALLOWING belief based on evidence and good argument, while the agnostic is not allowing a belief claim.

Sophocles
So he's middle of the road, neither atheist nor theist.

Phaedrus
Well, the agnostic isn't adding to the argument morally or epistemically in any way. That's my point. They don't make a claim. My argument poses the question, "why not make a claim? What's wrong with having a belief either way, as long as you have evidence and good argument?" Why not hold a belief one way or the other that shapes your values? You have the lack of evidence for god, the evidence against god, and many arguments you find convincing... and so, why agnostic? That's my point. It's like most agnostics already have an opinion, but they never say "atheist" because they're afraid of committing some fallacy.

Sophocles
hmmmm
haha

Phaedrus
I mean give me an argument for god, and I'll take it apart for you.
lol
You know what I mean.

Sophocles

It's NOT God that is making me agnostic. It's just nature, stuff that is too amazing to chalk up to science, you know? NOT GOD I'm past the God bs. But you know when you see something that just makes you go.... WHOA! That is literally "awesome."

Phaedrus
Well just because science currently can't explain something doesn't mean we need to insert god in the gaps. Science is based on stuff we previously couldn't explain, on mystery and wonder itself. It's an attempt to explain the truth about an objective world.

Sophocles
I'm not saying God is in the gaps. I'm saying it's just "miracle" or "magic" or something. This sounds so corny, [but] even stuff that is already explained

Phaedrus
If I look at a garden with a beautiful pond, why must I also believe there are fairies in the bottom to appreciate its beauty and wonder?

Sophocles
Like snow. Every single time I see snow fall its fascinating. Or a baby, or seeing someone die.

Phaedrus
"At first glance, science might seem to drain the world of its mystique, replacing the lovely unknown with mundane explanation. Peer deeper, though, and you will find that the appreciation of mystery is the foundation of science, and that science reveals to us a world far more profound and beautiful than common sense or superstition can behold." - Amanda Gefter, New Scientist

Sophocles

Or being with someone. It's a force, a flow of energy [perhaps beyond human understanding].

Phaedrus
Well I find snow, relationships, and the birth of a child to be a wonder of nature and beauty also. But I don't need to believe in a hypothetical god or force to have those feelings about it.

Sophocles
Yeah, maybe everything is chalked up to science, until I have a better understanding.

Phaedrus
Well science is just a system or method of explanation. What the atheist is getting at is that we shouldn't simply posit the existence of something at our whim or misunderstanding in the face of ignorance. We can however make justified belief-statements about the existence or non-existence of something when we have adequate evidence and convincing argument. When we don't have either, that's when we ought to remain in doubt.

Sophocles
I [suppose] I'll claim no God, but leave an open mind for a little something out there.

Phaedrus
If you're looking for something connecting us beyond the cold hard walls of reality, quantum physics implies that we are all part of the same energy vibrating at different levels, composed of various complexities. Now if that doesn't blow your mind, I don't know what does. I think dark matter, black hole theory, and string theory offers far more than religion or superstition of any kind can explain. All superstition and religion is, is an attempt by early and uneducated man to explain a world that they didn't understand.
Also, the atheist isn't "chalking everything up to 'science.' " We're chalking everything up to nature. Science is just a system of explanation, a way to accurately acquire knowledge about a fantastic universe that amazes us.

Logic and Faith don't mix

2009-12-04T15:31:00.001-08:00

The only true thing about religion is that it's false...

2009-12-02T12:37:00.000-08:00

Response to comment on living a virtuous life… (previous post)

2009-11-02T22:02:00.001-08:00

@ "Interested"

Well said. I rarely come across a commentator as well spoken as yourself. I pretty much stumble over my own words on this blog so cheers!

The surface problems of theism vs. science seem to be a moral one, but hack away at it and we see that the real problems are founded on the basic epistemological problems raised by the skeptic. In other words, how do we "know" that we know? How do you "know" for example, that the computer screen in which you happen to be reading this blog is in fact a separate object from your own imagination? William James claimed that the very belief in an objective reality was just as unfounded as the belief in a deity. Can you logically rule out that you are not in the Matrix, or a brain in a vat? And thus science is founded on a "faith" position according to James. On that argument we might as well rule out using empirical evidence, because it would be based on an objective reality.

That being said, what will intrigue you is that the solution only presents itself by turning the epistemological problem into an ethical one. The theist preaches to his fellow believers NOT to question the teachings presented by their faith, but these beliefs are generally about reality, and usually arrived at by irrational means. Meanwhile, the scientist preaches "question everything! Mystery and doubt are the source of all scientific exploration and discovery in life. It is a moral imperative in attaining knowledge!"

Which is the more virtuous method of approaching life, the universe, and everything? The answer? Why, the one that is morally correct of course! Granted, we cannot know for sure that there is an objective reality of any kind. We nevertheless BOTH assume belief in a reality as a sort of axiom in which to interact with other social beings and make our lives have purpose (if only a subjective purpose). Both so-called "faiths" (science and theism) can at least BEGIN with this much. So be it! We can't help BUT assume as much, because our minds demand it. Here's the catch: once we grant this axiom as a foundation (that we exist within a reality), we need a process that genuinely and honestly attempts to approach the TRUTH that stems from that axiom (an objective reality that provides objective evidence for observable phenomenon – "Truth" is what connects us to the real, and we use that connection, called knowledge, to learn, progress, and become more functional.. but I ramble).

IF we grant the axiom that an objective reality exists (which both theists and scientists generally do - at least for functional purposes) THEN we have a responsibility to everyone around us (whose existence we grant upon that axiom) to acquire knowledge CAREFULLY and not carelessly - so as not to harm one another. Not only that, but once the axiom is assumed, many other similar arguments follow. For example, if we care about anything, we care about knowing the truth of things. We care about the truth and wisdom of political decisions, relationships, whether or not we possess the knowledge to create the perfect cup of coffee. Does this girl like me? Does that guy like me? Did I do well on the exam? These questions all possess "truth values" that we desperately want to know. We shouldn't jump at some whimsical conclusion we desire to be true and claim "it just IS true!" That's ridiculous, and morally wrong, and thus not virtuous. What the theist is doing is refusing to explore the argument at all, because they simply don't want to be persuaded otherwise. They want it to be true, or they're afraid it might be true, and therefore they go on believing it IS true. Hell I wish I could use the force, but you don't see me wearing garbs and waving a lightsaber around (unless it's Halloween or something). But more to the point, religion is based on treating people as the slaves of a mythical being. Within the Abrahamic religions especially, we humans are simply a means to the ends of a selfish God. By believing in this without tangible evidence (evidence that is extraordinary, justifying an extraordinary claim...), you are acting amoral in that you abandon all responsibility that comes with believing in the first axiom - that there IS an objective reality you reside within, and there are other people who live in it with you. Not only that, but you are abandoning your very dignity by giving up your autonomy.... but that's another argument for another day.

Happiness or “The Good,” a comment on the virtuous life…

2009-10-14T20:01:00.001-07:00

Someone was talking to me today about how she's taking a class that preaches a very liberal stance on religion. It teaches that religion (for the most part) has positive influences on many people's lives, making them more stable and happy. My response was naturally skeptical, and so was hers. There are in fact tons of historical and contemporary data that would say otherwise.

Many of my readers have probably figured out that, not only am I an atheist, I am also anti-religion. I believe in "freedom of religion" because I believe in "individual liberty" which demands certain negative rights, but I am convinced that religion does more harm than good, and that's what I mean by "anti-religion." Religion creates a sort of societal stagnation. It turns people against each other, and prevents the kind of maturity that would otherwise produce the kind of individual autonomy that is the very source of human dignity – a dignity which grounds all human rights stemming from self-ownership. Above all, religion obscures reality from the people who follow it.

That being said, let's consider that religion did make people happy. What is more virtuous? Being "happy" in a delusion, or being potentially unhappy with the truth? On this question I borrow from Aristotle to an extent. A virtuous life is one that seeks to achieve the good. The good is not happiness however. Happiness is fleeting and temporary, it can be taken away from you the instant after you attain it. The "good" is something tangible, something permanent. The "good" is truth, knowledge, and the wisdom to utilize it. The false happiness gained from any delusion is nothing but a practice in hedonism. There is nothing good about living in a happiness caused by false beliefs arrived at by tradition, authority, or wishful thinking. Going through life "imprisoned by the prejudices derived from "common sense," and from convictions which have grown up in [your] mind without the cooperation or consent of [your] deliberate reason" is not a virtue (Russell). Operating under the unquestionable authority of a church, clergy, or dogma, takes away from your autonomy as a human being. It takes away your very dignity. That's why I'm against religion. I won't protest your right to practice it, but I will certainly criticize it openly as morally wrong in every sense of the word, and condemn it as the opposite of what I like to call "reality."

Think of this way: If you knew someone who believed in unicorns and fairies, and taught their children to believe the same while also demanding they follow the fantastic teachings of fairies and unicorns unquestionably (via some holy book, etc.), you would all have something to say about that, even if it made those people happy. They would be living a lie, and one that might be very harmful. They would not be living a good life because they would be unable to see the truth, rationalizing all of reality to fit their belief in fairies and unicorns and all of their dogmatic teachings. Sound familiar? How many people don't believe in dinosaurs (that fossils are simply a "test" of faith), or that the earth is only about 6000 years old, or that evolution is just a crazy scientific theory (instead of a confirmed theory that constantly aids in solving archeological and biological problems)? How many people can't seem to accept "climate change" as a scientific fact? They can't accept these things because it threatens their belief in intelligent design, or what it says in their 2000 year old book. All of these examples demonstrate how harmful and disastrous religion can be, but none of these examples could be more powerful than the history of war between religions, and the most violent wars were between different sects of the same faith (Protestants versus Catholics, Islam versus Islam, etc.) I'll leave you guys with that.

Phaedrus Out

Pat Condell's "Arrogance of the Clergy"

2009-10-13T12:32:00.000-07:00

What about the poor? The libertarian response…

2009-10-01T00:42:00.001-07:00

The libertarian response is this: "deregulate and privatize everything and there won't be so many poor people." Why does this make sense? Well let's say you have a poor man, but he happens to have a beat up old sedan. Now what's to stop this guy from simply giving people taxi rides and making a little money? Answer: he needs a license. Let's say you have a lady with a beat up house, but a well kept yard… What prevents her from opening up a tidy, inexpensive daycare to make some much needed income? Answer: she needs a permit! The argument rests in the idea that almost every person on earth has a marketable value or skill for which they can find a way to survive in the market, and the government is preventing market entry for those who need it most (or at least making it incredibly difficult for the poor people).

What's so interesting about the libertarian philosophy is that logically its air tight, and it's also very appealing to people on an individual level. It's appealing because the liberty of the individual is the chief political good for the libertarian, and all other arguments rest on this assumption. Libertarianism also paints a very optimistic picture of humanity, one that is simple and quite bluntly - wishful thinking. The idea that we'd all chip in, and everyone would survive in a completely privatized world is ridiculous. Basically their stance is that the only appropriate role of government is to protect your negative freedom from other predatory individuals. "Negative freedom" is a negative right ("negative" refers to the logical sense, not the ethical sense). Negative rights are those rights that can be satisfied if everyone respects a duty of noninterference and forbearance as respect for other people's rights. For example, the right to life only requires that you do not kill others. The right to property simply requires that you do not steal. The right to free speech requires that you do not sensor me. In other words, you are free to do what does not violate other people's negative rights (life, liberty, property). And thus we come upon the free market mantra which states: free and voluntary market exchanges provide unanimity without conformity. Government interference leaves us with involuntary conformity without unanimity. Basically in a market exchange that's private and non-regulated, both parties are (at the time) in agreement, and basically happy… With government you get taxed involuntarily, coerced to conform to code, regulation, or restrictions by law, and basically you feel screwed.

Where is the flaw in this argument? Why isn't everyone jumping on board? Why am I still a liberal who wants universal healthcare instead of supporting the conservatives and libertarians? There are many flaws, but the first is in the assumption that "the liberty of the individual (in the negative sense) is the chief political good." Why does this right have to be on the highest tier? Why isn't education, health, or security? These are just a few examples. The other flaw is that all individual rights stem from the libertarian belief of "self-ownership." We all own ourselves and are autonomous (we are individuals capable of giving ourselves our own purpose and rules). Sounds reasonable and even compelling. The problem is, how and when do we attain this autonomy... this "self-ownership"? Certainly not when we are born right? We need parenting and eduction. We need medical attention, because in our youth we cannot fend for ourselves without the proper knowhow. And therefore, we come to other problems in which the libertarian axioms entail that if we are to attain self-ownership, or some kind of individual autonomy where we are responsible actors, we must receive education and medical care to a point in which we are capable of reason, judgment, and giving ourselves our own rules (and be capable of receiving an income to afford good healthcare). Thus, in a society we need to provide public education, public healthcare, and fair access to opportunity. There has to be at least some "fair access to opportunity" rights, and that is what the egalitarian liberals like myself are talking about when we mention "positive rights." Rights that require all citizens to participate in order to provide fair access to opportunity. A right to vote, and fair access to political power, requires we pay taxes to regulate voting booths and a supreme court to maintain voting laws. Individual autonomy requires education that aids individuals in achieving good reason and judgment, which entails fair access to education. Fair access to education requires we have a public educational system. Inequality is acceptable, as long as it is preceded by fair access to opportunity. Just because we all have fair access to education does not mean we will all decide to gun it to Harvard. This is fair and acceptable. Fair access to political power doesn't mean we'll all aspire to be senators, but in a democracy two people with equal talents, experience, and education ought to be able to run for senator regardless of your financial power or ethnic background. You can all see my point. (For more information on this, please pick up a copy of Libertarianism: for and against by Duncan and Machan. It gives persuasive arguments in both directions.)

Now, I'm not suggesting we should give up our freedom entirely, but I think there are other political goods for which we ought to allow some sacrifice. I'm perfectly willing to have certain limits on my freedom for a little security. I pay taxes so others can receive an education which I believe aids in social growth, and aids in giving citizens their autonomy - the very source of human dignity that constitutes human rights. I am also willing to pay taxes so that other people (myself included) can have - not only a right to life - but a good and healthy life. I want to live in a society where we are educated, healthy, secure, and YES free. But freedom doesn't mean "free to do everything." If we follow libertarianism to its logical absurdity, people would be free to sell any and all kinds of drugs, sell babies, prostitute, pollute the world - and all so long as there is profit and no violation of negative rights. Now I'm all for legalizing marijuana, but… I think selling drugs to kids, or passing on diseases, or selling children in a free market without any kind of regulation, or rule of law, is a little ridiculous and morally irresponsible. We live in a civilization where we agree (for the most part) in a social contract (the U.S. and its constitutional representative democracy). What separates a civilized society from the "state of nature," lived by wolves or hyenas - a survival of the fittest, is that we sacrifice complete freedom for security, education, community, health, and protection of rights within a justice system. We understand that other people's rights limit our own rights, and we rightfully accept that compromise.

I'll end this by admitting that there are some good points being made by libertarians. The government does make market entry difficult for even the most minor things. We need to continue working on that. Anyway, I leave this article for debate.

Phaedrus, out!

On the Libertarian ideal

2009-09-20T23:56:00.001-07:00

I'm back. School is in session, and I'm feeling the debates big time! Today let's talk about universal healthcare and the most general conservative argument against it - which stems from the libertarian argument of free market capitalism (which stems from placing individual liberty and property rights above the idea of a citizen's right to life).

There is a lot of faith in the libertarian idea that if we deregulate an area of the market that's having problems, then a healthy competition will magically spring up and provide a sufficient degree of choice that will accommodate all or most of the individual citizens in need. It's a pretty idea, and I wish it worked that way. The problem is that the "invisible hand" moves very slowly in certain areas of the market, and the "healthy competition" we need in certain sectors of the economy either never happen, or it takes years to build. For example, it might be true that if we completely deregulated the healthcare industry, we would eventually see a vast market spring to life that provides competitive pricing and competitive quality of service. But this is a hypothetical, and realistically, would almost certainly take time IF it happened this way. The problem with this hypothetical concept is that it is easily countered by another hypothetical: we deregulate the healthcare industry and nothing happens; or perhaps several monopolies arise that buy out any new competition; OR no competition springs to life until five to ten years down the road…. Unfortunately, sometimes a civilization cannot wait for hypotheticals. Nor can it wait five or ten years for the market to become effective and fair. Therefore the state has a responsibility to step in and take action in order to protect its citizens. Citizens who pay into a social contract they believe in, that of the United States (taxes, obeying laws, voting, etc.) where we live under the agreement that our rights will be protected (the right to life being one of those, even if the state can only provide basic healthcare). Realistically we need healthcare NOW. Families are in financial and physical turmoil, and the state is the only engine that can provide a decisive and realistic option because it's backed and funded by the citizens themselves, and that means we can move this market within months after we pass legislation.

Now I have no idea how any of these bills will actually work after one of them gets passed and the public administrations begins to interpret the bill and put it into action (See side-by-side comparisons of the major proposals here: http://www.kff.org/healthreform/sidebyside.cfm). All I know is, I pay for the crappy insurance I have on a government loan, and the only reason I happen to have THAT insurance is because I'm required to have it by law to attend college. The insurance is so bad that I can't really afford any of the medication they prescribe if it's something more extravagant than Motrin. So while I don't pretend to understand how universal healthcare reform would work, I would like to see some changes to the system. I work and go to school full time, and I don't understand why it's so difficult for me to have good dental and healthcare when 90% of my paycheck goes to taxes. I don't know of any bill at the moment that would support illegal immigrants to have healthcare, but I do know that under the current laws, hospitals cannot refuse emergency treatment to any human in desperate need of medical attention (which I think is right, especially when we believe in things like a right to life – which we use to justify intervention on foreign nations like Kuwait, Vietnam, Iraq, etc.). The problem is that there are a vast majority of hard working U.S. citizens with families that can't afford basic medical checkups, and this fact ought to trump the unfortunate problem of a few free riders. Sure, if we adopt a healthcare system that offers government healthcare in competition with corporate healthcare, we are going to see some free riders who don't really disserve to be a part of the social contract we all agreed to, but you see that with every good policy in every nation that strives to protect individual rights.

My problem with the arguments being thrown around right now is that Healthcare is a different entity than "who can build the best doo-hickie, and make the most profit". Healthcare is about providing a means to life for active and valuable citizens of a nation, who at one time decided to stop living like animals in a state of nature, (where only the fittest and most savage survive) and decided to agree to a compromise: Instead of a "right-to-all-things we have the power to take," lets enter into a social contract that protects our natural rights to the best extent possible (a right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness – naturally all of these rights conflict to some extent). So we agree to pay taxes to have a justice system, a police force, and a representative government that attempts to reflect the will of its citizens. Why not also have healthcare too? The idea that it should be completely deregulated, and always make corporate decisions based on pleasing the stock holders and making a profit is ridiculous. It's a contrivance of capitalism which is an economic
system, and not to be confused with our political system which is a constitutional, representative democracy with its main purpose to protect our rights and values.

Anyway, that's how I see the debate at the moment. I guess we'll see what happens, but I think a government insurance program (like those all the senators already have, as well as members of the U.S. military) in competition with greedy corporate healthcare, would force a just balance that would give our citizens better quality of life.

Email response to the “Limbaugh Challenge”

2009-08-06T17:23:00.001-07:00

(this is a response to a personal email (names omitted), and I just thought it would be a good blog post.)

I've listened to his show. My problem with it? There are actually some real convincing argument's to be made for the republican party and conservative ideals, and unfortunately, Rush never uses them. His show thrives on being provocative and offensive for the sake of ratings – which would be fine, but he claims his show is a credible source for political analysis! Most of his tirades are either straw-man fallacies or ad hominem arguments that single out radical liberals and republicans who disagree with him. He purposely uses misrepresented editing and isolated cases of radical acts to make broad and sweeping generalizations for the whole party. His research has been shown countless times to be lacking any credibility other than his own biased opinion by political fact-checking websites (and YES, they also hold democrats responsible – most of them focus on the Obama administration). He takes liberal sound bites from conservative and liberal blogs, widely circulated – but unverified- chain emails, and he purposely misrepresents both political platforms. The Limbaugh challenge? Yeah, I've taken it, along with many others who can only stand so much absurd reasoning. His message works on instigating fear and anger in all who listen while blaming single mothers, "liberal agenda", non-believers, labor unions, people on unemployment, and all who disagree with him. He blames everything on everyone that he personally disagrees with, and gives no valid arguments. Meanwhile, he doesn't want to talk about his own failings, his drug addictions, his many marriages followed by divorce, or how he's just plain wrong on even conservative issues. His real message is that he doesn't want a democracy; he wants an oligarchy consisting of rich, right-wing politicians, who base policy on the ideals of what he ironically deems "a Christian nation." Unfortunately we're NOT a Christian nation. The words "under god" in the pledge of allegiance didn't exist until 1952, and was put there by a (gasp!) Catholic fraternity (not to mention the P of A isn't a legal document). Not once does it mention god in the constitution, and has he even read the first amendment (Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion)??

Well, that's the end of my rant on why Rush has the criticism coming to him from BOTH parties. (See that article I sent you: http://www.newsweek.com/id/188279).

If we care about anything, we care about the truth. I'll leave you with some words the founding fathers had to say about religion that illustrate why this idea of a "Christian nation" Rush keeps advocating is a myth:

There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.

George Washington, address to Congress, 8 January, 1790

Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause.

George Washington, letter to Sir Edward Newenham, June 22, 1792

...I beg you be persuaded that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of religious persecution.

George Washington, to -United Baptists Churches of Virginia, May, 1789 from The Washington papers edited by Saul Padover

I have examined all the known superstitions of the Word, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the world ...The clergy converted the simple teachings of Jesus into an engine for enslaving mankind ... to filch wealth and power to themselves. [They], in fact, constitute the real Anti-Christ.

Thomas Jefferson

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

Thomas Paine

"Experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution."

James Madison

"What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; on many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate it, needs them not."

James Madison

"As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?"

John Adams, letter to F.A. Van der Kamp, Dec. 27, 1816

"I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved--the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!"

John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson

"As the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Musselmen; and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."

(Treaty of Tripoli, 1797 - signed by President John Adams.)

"That religion, or the duty we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience."

Patrick Henry (Virginia Bill of Rights, June 12, 1776.)

"Atheist"

2009-07-12T22:34:00.000-07:00

More original blog posts to come everyone. I've been taking a break this summer, but I have a bunch of new material, and intend to return to more active posting.

Pat Condell's "Children of a stupid god"

2009-05-30T21:33:00.000-07:00

The most convincing theist essay praised and critiqued...

2009-05-20T11:36:00.000-07:00

William James's essay entitled "The Will to Believe" is perhaps the most provocative and convincing theist argument I have ever read. In his paper (page one at this link) he demonstrates that we operate on beliefs in the absence of evidence all the time. He argues that religious faith, though not rationally demanded, can be as sensible as other beliefs.

The argument begins by pointing to the enigma of belief. James makes the claim that we generally do not choose to have a belief, we just have them. He demonstrates this by pointing out that we cannot choose to believe something by simply willing it (that the world is flat, fairies exist, etc.). Can you choose to believe or disbelieve in dinasours by simply willing it? No? Well then you did not choose that belief, according to James. Basically, you have arrived at your beliefs through rational shortcuts. Most of our beliefs, James says, are decided on non-intellectual grounds. James does not advocate that these are justified beliefs, but only that there are some beliefs that evidence and pure logic cannot dictate, and in this situation they are decided on passional grounds.

At this point James introduces his thesis: "When we have a genuine option that cannot be decided solely on intellectual grounds, our passional nature must be allowed to rule." A "genuine option" is an option that is live (has an emotive appeal to the chooser), that is forced (where the choice is logically unavoidable - go with truth or go without it), and momentous (once in a life-time opportunity, or of life and death importance). For James, choosing to believe in god is a genuine option. It has an appeal to him, it is logically unavoidable, and it is the difference between eternity in hell and eternity in heaven.

After all the philosophical rhetoric, I feel I must point out a few problems with this. First, while we do take rational shortcuts for many of our beliefs (where we believe something without sufficient evidence or reason), our beliefs are not static, they are constantly being evaluated and revised. It is also not clear that there are any beliefs that are epistemically justified in escaping reason. Sure there are beliefs we come by that are passional, but there are differences between believing in objective reality and believing in God. If you told me that you saw your friend yesterday, I can believe you saw your friend yesterday because this is not an extraordinary claim. But if you then told me that your friend was the son of god, and he cured the sick, flew around the room, and amazed all... I'd not only need more evidence and reasonable grounds for believing you, but I am now going to doubt the less extraordinary claim (that you saw a friend yesterday).

One of James's major points is that our belief in objective evidence is a passional belief. It has no intellectual grounding, we take it for granted. Why is this damaging? Because this is the very assumption that undermines religious faith or belief in god. Touché William! Good one.

Unfortunately there is a logical problem James neglects to mention in his essay. The belief in God already contains within it, concepts which are assumed to universally provide confirmation for less extraordinary beliefs! Belief in God grants too many things for free, such as belief in an objective reality with objective evidence (among other things, depending on which theology we're talking about). The problem is that while god grants, or contains within its conception, these other universal assumptions, these assumptions do not provide confirmation for god. Objective reality and objective evidence are contained in the concept of god, and yet while these premises justify less extraordinary beliefs (that this computer exists separate from my mind, or that evolutionary theory has been confirmed), they do not justify god on the same intellectual grounds. So we can look at genuine beliefs logically. We just need to look at the semantics involved.

All that being said, James's essay really is the most convincing argument I have read from the theist arena. Take a look at it sometime.

The argument FOR the healthcare plan couldn't be more clear.

2009-05-11T18:08:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The Obama administration cracks down on corporate tax havens

2009-05-05T11:41:00.000-07:00

A must see video!! The Obama administration is finally cracking down on tax code loopholes that allow for corporations to avoid paying taxes by hiding money in offshore accounts. Meanwhile the republicans are siding with the corporations claiming that "this would be a significant tax increase for corporations..." No shit? Actually there wouldn't be a tax increase at all! They'd just have to start paying taxes they were supposed to be paying in the first place. Seems reasonable, being that we are all paying taxes to bail out these corporate fuckers.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Bill Maher On France and America

2009-05-01T18:01:00.000-07:00

Sick of the "first cause argument"? Me too.

2009-04-03T00:23:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post today. I'd like to address a typical theist argument for god, one proposed yet again by a theist scholar. It goes like this:

"If the universe came into existence at some point, we are left with only two options. (1) It came into existence without a cause or (2) It came into existence with a cause." - Dr. Douglas Groothuis: The Straw God: Understanding the New Atheism.

This leads into the traditional argument by Thomas Aquinas:

1. Everything is caused by something other than itself
2. Thus the universe was caused by something other than itself.
3. The string of causes cannot be infinitely long.
4. If the string of causes cannot be infinitely long, there must be a first cause.
5. Therefore, there must be a first cause (god).

I'll let another blogger answer this: I will never understand this argument. The apologists want to say that its illogical to believe that the universe "came from nothing" but have no problem believing that something greater than the universe (i.e. God) came from nothing. On its face that idea is ridiculous.

I'd like to also mention that the "first cause" argument only gets you a "FIRST CAUSE". It doesn't get you GOD. Assuming there was a first cause, it could have been damn near anything. It's possible that it could have been an intelligent being, but that doesn't mean that being still exists.

And by the way, we know now that there doesn't necessarily need to be a first cause for the Universe to exist. "Modern physics has shown that some things are uncaused. According to quantum mechanics, subatomic particles like electrons, photons, and positrons come into and go out of existence randomly (but in accord with the Heisenberg uncertainty principles). As Edward Tryon reports:

... quantum electrodynamics reveals that an electron, positron, and photon occasionally emerge spontaneously in a perfect vacuum. When this happens, the three particles exist for a brief time, and then annihilate each other, leaving no trace behind. (Energy conservation is violated, but only for a particle lifetime Dt permitted by the uncertainty DtDE~h where DE is the net energy of the particles and h is Planck's constant.) The spontaneous, temporary emergence of particles from a vacuum is called a vacuum fluctuation, and is utterly commonplace in quantum field theory.

"A particle produced by a vacuum fluctuation has no cause. Since vacuum fluctuations are commonplace, god cannot be the only thing that is uncaused." See article here.

The Life and Times of Tim

2009-03-24T22:44:00.000-07:00

Nothing to write about this week.

Do we have "free will"? Yes! Thanks to our personal identity.

2009-03-20T03:20:00.000-07:00

Explaining the Problem

In order for us to make sense of the world and ourselves, it is necessary that we establish a relation of cause and effect between events. Not only do we need this relationship to make sense of perception, but we need it to make sense of our decisions, intentions, and thoughts. Think about it for a minute. If you couldn't ask "why?", and give what you felt was a relatively accurate reason for the event in question, then you would be quite lost and possibly insane. Why are you reading this blog (answer: because [insert cause or reason here])? How did you come to own a computer? How did that computer come to exist? Why do you like or dislike some things? Why do you find one argument more compelling than another? The answer to these questions reveal the causes behind them. Sometimes these causes are stated as reasons which you've come to understand by means of other causes, and those causes by infinitely more causes. Now imagine freezing time and tracing back all causes that led to you reading this blog...

The dilemma thus reveals itself: It appears that everything you've done and thought up to this point, was not your choice or by your own free will. "Choice" was just an illusion created by your consciousness. Upon reflecting, It appears your actions and ideas originate not from you, but from external causes leading back before your very birth, and leading back all the way to the creation of the universe.

When we consider your decision to read this blog, the fundamental question is, "could you have done otherwise?" Well, if you agree that there is a cause behind everything, as it appears there is, then all causes leading up to this moment determined your choice, so the answer is no. If this is the case, then you do not appear to have free will. This crisis in philosophy is known as determinism. Not only are you not responsible for your actions because they were determined by external causes, but I also cannot hold you responsible for those actions (and thus the end of morality). But I am not concerned with morality in this particular argument, but rather, whether or not we have free will.

Now, before you start quoting me and commenting vehement objections, let me explain… There is another option. Instead of assuming causality, we can assert that there is nothing determining our actions, which entails that there are no reasons or external causes leading to our decisions, intentions, or actions. If this were true however, we would thus be acting spontaneously without reason or cause. It appears this venture does not get us free will either. Why? Because free will requires willing our actions, and that implies acting on reasons - in other words *Control*. Spontaneity is not being in control of our actions, and free will requires that we are in control. Besides, we can't make sense of a world in the absence of order, with no way of establishing relationships between events. And so the paradox continues to elude us.

Solution?

[Substantially Revised]

I believe the problem is in our misinterpretation of "free will." Being "able to have done otherwise" is too restrictive and narrow of a view. To discover if we have free will, lets look at something we know does not have free will. Take a machine or computer for example. It operates by receiving inputs and - according to certain rules - it gives certain outputs. This machine is absolutely determined in every way. In fact, if we had all information about this machine, it is possible to accurately predict every output for every given input. But we can build a computer to simulate human behavior, and we've done so. What are these machines lacking? They are not self-aware and they are not free to remake the rules that govern their responses. Every time the machine is fed input, it isn't free to reflect on that input or change the rules governing its criterion for output. We are free to change the rules. Because we are self-aware, with a personal identity, we can reflect on information or experience past actions. And we can then change the rules by which we react and even think (think about how your political views have changed). While you couldn't have done otherwise than reading this sentence right now, you are free to change the rules that dictated you to read this sentence.

The standard objection: What of the causal chain leading you to alter the rules which govern inputs and outputs? My response: Look at the source. The personal identity which is self-aware, gives form to the rules. And thus, "YOU" play a part in the causal history leading toward a decision.