Noah and Gilgamesh

The Epic of Gilgamesh was first written down by an unknown Babylonian scribe around 2000 B.C.  It relates the heroic adventures of the semi-legendary ruler of the Sumerian city-state of Uruk about 2700 B.C.  At one point, Gilgamesh seeks out an ancient sage by the name of Utnapishtim in order to discover how to avoid death.  It happens that the gods awarded immortality to Utnapishtim after he survived a great flood that wiped out all the rest of humanity by building a large boat at the behest of the god Ea.  In the manner of Noah, he collected his family and all manner of living things and took them along for the ride.  As the waters subside, his boat comes to rest on top of a mountain.  Quoting from the epic,

Sound familiar?  And yet people still stumble around on Mt. Ararat looking for the remains of Noah’s ark. Every few decades or so, they even find them, although they do tend to move around a bit.  Go figure.

The WaPo and the Mosque at Ground Zero

H. L. Mencken, himself on of America’s greatest editorial writers, had meager respect for most of the species. As he once put it, “Give me a good editorial cartoonist, and I can fire half the editorial staff.” He wouldn’t have been surprised by a piece entitled “A Vote for Religious Freedom,” that recently appeared on the editorial page of the Washington Post. It was marked by the self-induced imbecility about “freedom of religion” that has been the bane of serious debate about the role of Islam in today’s world.

The piece addresses the issue of the proposed mosque near Ground Zero, noting with approval the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission’s vote to deny historic status to the existing building on the site. In the words of the editorial,

The agency’s correct call is a victory for cooler heads in city government, and for a fundamental American ideal – freedom of religion.

In fact, as far as the current debate about Islam is concerned, freedom of religion is a red herring. I suspect that, among all those who have expressed opposition to the mosque, the number of those who really care whether their neighbors believe in Jehovah, Allah, or the Great Green Grasshopper God is vanishingly small, as long as their opinions are between themselves and their God, and don’t imply any requirement to intervene in or control the lives of others. I have not yet read a single article on the subject that takes issue with the right of Moslems or anyone else to think and believe as they please. Many of them, however, take issue with the claims of Islam to political control and social coercion. The question, then, is whether these arguments are justified, or are merely smokescreens for an assault on freedom of religion.

The answer is obvious. Is it credible to argue that the Islamic theocracy in Iran has not practiced religious discrimination against those of other faiths, or that its justification for that discrimination has not been based on Moslem religious doctrine? Is it credible to argue that Islam does not explicitly reject freedom of religion, prescribing severe punishment for those who would leave Islam for some other faith, and institutional discrimination, including special taxes and denial of freedom of speech in matters relating to religion, directed against those of other faiths? Is it credible to argue that Islam poses no challenge to separation of church and state, or that it has never favored substitution of religious for secular law? Is it credible to argue that much of the terrorist violence that has plagued the world in recent years has not been justified in the name of Islam? Is it credible to argue that severe limitations on the equal treatment of women, in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Islamic world, are not justified in the name of Islam? No, in all of these cases, it is not credible.

The proposed mosque is to be part of a complex known as the Cordoba House, and the Wapo editorial tries to gull its readers with the revisionist version of history according to which Islamic Cordoba was a “medieval Spanish city where Muslims, Jews and Christians lived in peace for 800 years.” It boggles the mind to consider the possibility that Wapo’s editorialists are really stupid enough to believe that. Do they not have access to Google? Can they not confirm for themselves that Jews were subjected to pogroms in Moslem Spain, including one in Cordoba itself in the year 1011? Did not Ibn Abdun, one of the foremost Spanish Islamic jurists in this “golden age” write,

No…Jew or Christian may be allowed to wear the dress of an aristocrat, nor of a jurist, nor of a wealthy individual; on the contrary they must be detested and avoided. It is forbidden to [greet] them with the [expression], ‘Peace be upon you’. In effect, ‘Satan has gained possession of them, and caused them to forget God’s warning. They are the confederates of Satan’s party; Satan’s confederates will surely be the losers!’ A distinctive sign must be imposed upon them in order that they may be recognized and this will be for them a form of disgrace.

Were the Jews of Cordoba not forced to wear such a sign, in the form of a yellow turban, reminiscent of the yellow Star of David they were forced to wear under a later European regime? Were Christians not martyred in the city for daring to criticize Moslem religious beliefs? Was not Maimonides himself, one of the greatest Jewish scholars of the Cordovan “golden age,” forced to flee the city to avoid religious persecution? I could go on and on, but I think I’ve made my point.

In fact, there is no such thing as a “mere religion” among any of the major religions in the world today. All of them have, at one point or another, claimed the right to political control, attempted to elevate their religious tenets to secular law, and discriminated against and penalized those who thought differently. I am hardly a defender of Christianity, and it is no different from any of the other religions in this respect. However, devout Christians can, and have, as in the case of Roger Williams, convincingly argued for the separation of church and state based on religious doctrine. The enlightenment has further neutered its claims to state support and established status, to the point that, today, one can reasonably speak of freedom of religion in nominally Christian countries. Not so with Islam.

The principle that the WaPo editorialists and others who make similar arguments are defending, then, when they evoke “freedom of religion” has nothing to do with private religious beliefs. Objectively, what they are saying, whether they are prepared to admit it themselves or not, is that, as long as the adherents of some system of belief can manage to convince the rest of society that they are a religion, no matter whether their “religious beliefs” include such things as a monopoly of state power, severe restrictions on freedom of speech on matters touching their beliefs, and a right to profound intervention in the lives of others, then they automatically become immune from criticism in the name of “freedom of religion.”

One wonders what kind of a two by four it would be necessary to whack people like this up alongside the head with before they finally realized this debate isn’t about “freedom of religion.” Would they defend the murder of a Moslem friend for “apostasy” because he decided to convert to Christianity in the name of “freedom of religion?” Would they tolerate the nullification of democracy and the imposition of sharia law in the name of “freedom of religion?” Are they prepared to tolerate “honor killings” in the name of “freedom of religion?” Would they assist in the genital mutilation of their daughters if it were required in the name of “freedom of religion?” Would the editors of the Washington Post claim that these things are not required by the Moslem religion? A great many devout Moslems who have spent a great deal more time studying Islamic scriptures than they would claim that they are required. Who are the editors of the Washington Post to define what it means to be a Moslem?

The debate about the mosque at Ground Zero does not and never has had anything to do with freedom of religion. There is a point beyond which it is no longer acceptable to sacrifice one’s own Liberty and tolerate intervention in one’s own life to accommodate the religious beliefs of others. The debate is about when that point is reached.

Is God Shy, or just Coy?

I’ve read a lot of religious literature in my day, and have never seen a coherent explanation of why, if God exists, he doesn’t just step out into the open and show himself.  Of course, the religious have several rationalizations for this objection to their belief systems, just as they have for any of the other obvious objections one might name.  The problem is, none of them make any sense. 

For example there’s the “mortal man cannot behold such glory” argument, which implies that God lacks the power to dim Himself down sufficiently to appear to us in a way that would convince the general run of mankind of His reality.  There’s the “He tried it once” argument, according to which he made a good faith effort by coming to earth in the form of Jesus Christ, but no one believed him anyway, so he gave up trying. There’s the “He couldn’t do anything that would make us believe, even if He tried,” argument, which applies similar shackles to the power of God, and requires Him to have a singular lack of imagination. Of course, there’s the “He’s just testing us” ploy, and the notion that by stepping out from behind the curtain, he would be violating our “free will.”

And the list goes on. The problem with all these rationalizations is that they’re unconvincing to anyone who hasn’t already make up their mind.  Is God really so limited that he cannot come up with a way to reveal himself to us without blinding us with his glory?  Was he really so demoralized by our incomprehension when he sent Jesus Christ (or Mohammed) to earth that he simply gave up and concluded it was impossible for Him to convince creatures He had created Himself that He existed?  Can there really be any question of “testing” creatures who have used the mental equipment He gave them to the best of their ability and concluded that He doesn’t exist?  Is there really some coherent reason why free will would disappear simply by virtue of Him showing Himself?

I have a suggestion for anyone who retains an open mind on the subject;  apply Occam’s razor.  If God doesn’t show himself in a way that is convincing to a species not known for its incredulity, in spite of the fact that he is supposed to be loving and merciful, and wants us to obey His will, and plans to punish us severely if we don’t, the most obvious and reasonable explanation is that He doesn’t exist.  That conclusion becomes all the more plausible in view of the fact that the two biggest religions on the planet are mutually exclusive.

Atheists Don’t Have Songs?

Apparently not. However, it doesn’t matter, nor does it matter that some people think religion is necessary for morality to exist, nor that some people think that religion is necessary to give us a purpose in life, nor that some people think that there are no atheists in foxholes, nor that some people think atheists cannot love their country or serve it loyally. In the end, what matters is whether there is a God or not. If God does not exist, then we are lamentable creatures indeed if we conclude with Voltaire that we must invent one and force ourselves to believe a lie because we are too weak to accept the truth.

The Rubaiyat of Edward Fitzgerald as a Critique of Islam

According to Voltaire, “one merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words that prose.” The Rubaiyat of Edward Fitzgerald is a case in point. It is a succinct refutation of the Judeo-Christian religions in general and Islam in particular.

I say the Rubaiyat of Edward Fitzgerald rather than the more familiar Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam because the version most English speaking people are familiar with, while it may have been inspired by the Persian poet, is really attributable to Fitzgerald. A book review in the Guardian coined the very appropriate term “transcreation” for it. Anyone reading the modern translation by Peter Avery and Heath Stubbs will get the point. Many of Fitzgerald’s quatrains bear only a vague resemblance to the original Persian, and others were apparently invented entirely by the English author. Taken together, however, they are consistent and effective critique of Islam, and an expression of the author’s own world view.

Fitzgerald was certainly an agnostic, and may have been an atheist. According to his bio-sketch at Wikipedia,

As he grew older, FitzGerald grew more and more disenchanted with Christianity, and finally gave up attending church entirely. This drew the attention of the local pastor, who decided to pay a visit to the self-absenting FitzGerald. Reportedly, FitzGerald informed the pastor that his decision to absent himself from church services was the fruit of long and hard meditation. When the pastor protested, FitzGerald showed him to the door, and said, “Sir, you might have conceived that a man does not come to my years of life without thinking much of these things. I believe I may say that I have reflected [on] them fully as much as yourself. You need not repeat this visit.”

If he did admit the possibility of God’s existence, and the inscription on his gravestone, “It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves,” implied that he did, he nevertheless denied that we should devote our lives to some divine purpose, or that we could expect any reward in heaven or punishment in hell for our earthly deeds:

Whether at Naishapur or Babylon,
Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run,
The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,
The leaves of Life keep falling one by one.

and:

Some for the Glories of This World; and some
Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come;
Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go,
Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!

He saw no reason to believe that any of the conflicting accounts in the different religions of life after death were factual:

And those who husbanded the Golden Grain,
And those who flung it to the Winds like rain,
Alike to no such aureate Earth are turn’d
As, buried once, Men want dug up again.

Strange, is it not? That of the Myriads who
Before us pass’d the door of Darkness through,
Not one returns to tell us of the Road,
Which to discover we must travel too.

The familiar Moslem and Christian accounts of heaven and hell, were simply human fantasies taken to their extreme:

I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
Some Letter of that After-Life to spell:
And by and by my Soul return’d to me,
And answer’d “I Myself am Heav’n and
Hell.”

Heav’n but the Vision of fulfill’d Desire,
And Hell the Shadow from a Soul on fire,
Cast on the Darkness into which Ourselves,
So late emerg’d from, shall so soon expire.

The revelations of the prophets were so much imposture:

Why, all the Saints and Sages who discuss’d
Of the Two Worlds so wisely – they are thrust
Like foolish Prophets forth; their words to scorn
Are scatter’d, and their Mouths are stopt with
Dust.

The Revelations of Devout and Learn’d
Who rose before us, and as Prophets burn’d,
Are all but Stories, which, awoke from Sleep
They told their comrades, and to Sleep return’d.

Having excluded the existence of a God, or at least a God who had any claim on our affections or actions, Fitzgerald concluded that there could be no legitimate “purpose of life.”

Alike for those who for Today prepare,
And those that after some Tomorrow stare,
A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries
“Fools! Your Reward is neither Here nor There!”

That being the case, deep philosophical reasonings to uncover such a purpose and make sense of human existence were futile:

Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same Door where in I went.

With them the Seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with mine own Hand wrought to make
it grow
And this was all the Harvest that I reap’d –
“I came like Water, and like Wind I go.”

If any answers to the questions posed by philosophers really existed, they were beyond the grasp of human understanding:

There was the Door to which I found no Key;
There was the Veil through which I might not see:
Some little Talk awhile of Me and Thee
There was – and then no more of Thee and Me.

Earth could not answer; nor the Seas that mourn
In flowing Purple, of their Lord forlorn;
Nor rolling heaven, with all his signs reveal’d
And hidden by the Sleeve of Night and Morn.

Fitzgerald rejected the Moslem belief, reiterated over and over in the Koran, that humans will suffer eternal fiery torture in hell for “sins” which are predestined, and therefore unavoidable. He points out the inconsistency of such a God, capable of calling beings into existence from nothingness in the full knowledge that he would later subject them to almost unimaginable tortures for the paltry sins he knew they would commit, with the moral sense that very God, if he existed at all, must have planted in our consciousness:

Oh Thou, who didst with Pitfall and with Gin
Beset the Road I was to wander in,
Thou wilt not with Predestin’d Evil round
Enmesh, and then impute my Fall to Sin!

But helpless Pieces of the Game He Plays
Upon his Chequer-board of Nights and Days;
Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.

Such a God would be more in need of forgiveness than the creatures he created:

What! Out of senseless Nothing to provoke
A conscious Something to resent the Yoke
Of unpermitted Pleasure, under pain
Of Everlasting Penalties, if broke!

What! from His helpless Creature be repaid
Pure Gold for what He lent him dross-allay’d:
Sue for a Debt he never did contract,
And cannot answer – Oh the sorry Trade!

Oh Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,
And ev’n with Paradise devise the Snake:
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken’d, Man’s Forgiveness give –
and take!

The poet elaborates on this theme with the metaphor of a potter and his pots:

And has not such a Story from of Old
Down Man’s successive Generations roll’d
Of such a Clod of saturated Earth
Cast by the Maker into Human mould?

The pots speculate about why they were made, their purpose, and their eventual fate. Once again, Fitzgerald returns to the theme of the Creator as tyrannical monster, a being capable of calling into life creatures far more inferior to Himself than amoeba are to human beings, and then torturing them for billions of years because they didn’t deliver what they “owed” him, even though he knew in advance that it would be impossible for them to do so:

Then said a Second – “Ne’er a peevish Boy
Would break the Bowl from which he drank in joy;
And He that with His hand the Vessel made
Will surely not in after Wrath destroy.”

He elaborates on the absurdity of eternal punishment for sins that are predestined, and therefore not the fault of the created but of the creator:

After a momentary Silence spake
Some Vessel of a more ungainly Make;
“They sneer at me for leaning all awry;
What! did the Hand then of the Potter shake?”

One of the pots suggests that such an irrational “potter” can only exist as a concoction of the pots themselves:

Whereat some one of the loquacious Lot –
I think a Sufi Pipkin – waxing hot –
“All this of Pot and Potter – Tell me then,
Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?”

Whereat another agrees and concludes that the real Potter isn’t really capable of such an extreme departure from the notion of moral righteousness with which he has imbued his Pots;

“Why,” said another, “Some there are who tell
Of one who threatens he will toss to Hell
The luckless Pots he marr’d in making – Pish!
He’s a Good Fellow, and ‘twill all be well.”

It seems such thoughts must occur to anyone who has the courage to question the validity of received religious “truths.” In the Islamic world, of course, the amount of courage needed is somewhat greater, because the penalty for apostasy can be extreme. In Saudi Arabia, for example, it is death. When the penalty for thinking is that extreme, truth must inevitably be a casualty.

Fitzgerald did think, and the world view he arrived at did not include a Master of an eternal torture chamber as God. It was, however, somewhat pessimistic. In fact, the poet accepted notions of predestination usually attributed to Islam:

With Earth’s first Clay They did the Last Man knead,
And there of the Last Harvest sow’d the Seed:
And the first Morning of Creation wrote
What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.

It’s interesting to speculate on the effect the revelations of the probabilistic world of quantum mechanics may have had on such a deterministic world view. For that matter, it’s interesting to speculate on whether Fitzgerald’s apparent conclusions about the ultimate purposeless of life might have been moderated if he’d taken a closer look behind the veil that Darwin had lifted more than 20 years before his death. As it was, those conclusions were lugubrious enough:

When You and I behind the Veil are past,
Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
As the sea’s self should heed a Pebble-cast.

A Moment’s Halt – a momentary Taste
Of Being from the Well amid the Waste –
And Lo! – the phantom Caravan has reach’d
The Nothing it set out from – Oh, make haste!

There is some consolation in the fact that, if we must die, at least we’ve all been there before,

And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press,
End in what All begins and ends in – Yes;
Think then you are Today what Yesterday
You were – Tomorrow you shall not be less.

Fitzgerald’s poem has touched more than a few readers over the years. In fact, more copies of it have been sold than any other English poem. I suspect many among those who can recite its lines by heart have come to conclusions similar to those above about what the author was trying to tell us. His quatrains have enabled them to repeat opinions they may have felt uncomfortable stating in so many words. As Thomas Hardy put it, “If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.” Fortunately, the inquisition is no longer with us, but, until quite recently, there have been serious social sanctions against “free thinking” in matters of religion in the West. Of course, those sanctions not only still exist, but are becoming stronger in the Moslem world. There is some solace in the thought that that world provided the inspiration for one of the most devastating critiques of its own theocratic ideology.

Edward Fitzgerald

“Hate Speech” and the Liquidation of Free Speech

Bruce Bawer comments on another of the “hate speech” laws that have recently been used so effectively to dismantle freedom of speech in Canada. Bruce describes the Norwegian version:

Then there’s Norway, where I live, and where the last few days have seen yet another dark development. By way of background, permit me to begin by quoting myself. On pages 230-31 of my book Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom I sum up the more alarming aspects of Norway’s Discrimination Law, passed in 2005:

It forbids “harassment on the grounds of ethnicity, national origin, ancestry, skin color, language, religion, or beliefs,” and, in turn, defines harassment as “actions, omissions, or utterances [my emphasis] that have the effect or are intended to have the effect of being insulting, intimidating, hostile, degrading, or humiliating.”

In other words, it’s illegal just to say certain things.

Defendants may be accused not only by the individuals whom they’ve supposedly offended but also by semiofficial organs such as the Anti-Racist Center and the Center against Ethnic Discrimination (both of which helped formulate the law, and both of which exist less to oppose real racism and discrimination than to oppose political incorrectness generally) or by the government’s Equality and Anti-Discrimination Ombud.

Which means that a handful of far-left organizations have been given enormous power to silence those they disagree with.

Violations of the law by individuals are punishable by fine; violations by individuals in concert with at least two other persons (such as a writer conspiring with an editor and publisher, perhaps?) can be punished by up to three years’ imprisonment — this in a country where murderers often get off with less. Moreover, the burden of proof is on the accused: you’re guilty until proven innocent.

And this in a supposedly free country.

One would think that the adherents of a religion who actually believe in it themselves would not fear criticism.  If they are convinced that what they believe is true, why would they not welcome challenges to that truth as opportunities to embarrass and confute unbelievers, and to enlighten others?  If, on the other hand, they fear that belief in a God who threatens to burn the majority of human beings in hell for millions and billions of years, and, in fact eternally, for the paltry sins they commit during their short stay on earth may not be quite rational, on can understand why they would be sensitive to criticism.   

Liberty is not a ground state. You have to keep fighting for it, or it disappears.

Don’t Like People who Threaten Bloggers?

Then consider hitting Little Miss Attila’s tip jar. She’s being threatened by a religious nut case, is not independently wealthy, and could use your help. Insty and Eric at Classical Values have noticed, and I hope some of the other big dogs will pick up on the story as well. This cockroach needs to be dragged into the light.

John Brennan Redefines “Jihad”

According to the ideology of our current rulers, religion is good.  Multi-culturism is also good.  Therefore, as expressions of culture, all religions are good.  Not only that, they are all good to a precisely equal degree.  It is impossible for one religion to be “more good” than another religion.  As a caveat of this, nothing done in the name of or on behalf of religion can be bad.  If someone murders your children and tells you they did it because of their religion, they’re simply the victims of an unfortunate misconception.  If religion inspired something bad, than the law of the conservation of religious goodness would be violated.  It therefore follows that such people are delusional, and don’t actually understand their own religion.

In keeping with these truisms, White House counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan has done Moslem terrorists the honor of redefining the word “jihad.”  In the process of explaining the “real” nature of their religion to them, he recently enlightened them with the knowledge that all those hours they spent in the Madrassa memorizing the Koran were in vain. Thanks to careful reading of the New York Times, he is now able to inform them that their understanding of “jihad” is flawed. When they blew all those people up, they were the victims of a terrible imposture. Bringing his profound theological expertise to bear, he sets them straight:

Nor do we describe our enemy as ‘jihadists’ or ‘Islamists’ because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women and children.

Thus spake Imam Brennan.  In order to fact check the presidential advisor and newly minted Islamic scholar, I consulted Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, circa 1968.  It is one of those wonderful old massive dictionaries that used to be mounted on lecterns in the better libraries, and was published by the great ancient ones long before the dawn of the era of political correctness.  It defines ”jihad” as follows:

1) A holy war waged on behalf of Islam as a religious duty. 2) A bitter strife or crusade undertaken in the spirit of a holy war.

Note the guileless use of the now forbidden term, “crusade.”  I thought that was particularly charming.  It is not recorded that anyone at the time, Moslem or otherwise, objected to the above definitions.

Rand Paul and the Christian Nation

According to Rand Paul, who recently defeated conservative stalwart Trey Grayson in the GOP primary for a Senate seat in Kentucky, we would be better off if the US were a Christian nation.  In his words,

I’m a Christian. We go to the Presbyterian Church. My wife’s a Deacon there and we’ve gone there ever since we came to town. I see that Christianity and values is the basis of our society. . . . 98% of us won’t murder people, won’t steal, won’t break the law and it helps a society to have that religious underpinning. You still need to have the laws but I think it helps to have a people who believe in law and order and who have a moral compass or a moral basis for their day to day life.

As an atheist, who must therefore, by implication, be an immoral murderer, thief, and subverter of law and order, I can only suggest that Mr. Paul consider how well the “Christian nation” thing has worked out for us in the past. The Albigensians were mercilessly annihilated by the leaders of Christian nations at the behest of the leader of the world’s Christians at the time, Pope Innocent III. They carried out this act of law and order because they were Christians. The Hussites were attacked and slaughtered by the leaders of Christian nations at the behest of the leader of the world’s Christians at the time, Pope Martin V, who called on

all the kings, princes, dukes, barons, knights, states, and commonwealths of Christendom, adjured them, by “the wounds of Christ,” to unite their arms and exterminate that “sacrilegious and accursed nation.

Exterminate they did, and countless thousands were killed in the many years of warfare between Christian nations that followed.  Those who carried out these acts of law and order did so because they were Christians.  In France, tens of thousands of Huguenots were murdered on St. Bartholomew’s Day in a Christian nation at the behest of Christian rulers by people who acted on behalf of Christianity. They carried out this act of law and order because they were Christians.  Eight civil wars were fought between the Christian Huguenots and the Christian Catholics in Christian France.  Tens of thousands died in these acts of law and order, fought by Christians to vindicate Christian principles.  Eventually, hundreds of thousands of Huguenots were forced to flee the country after being subjected to countless acts of rape, pillage, and murder, carried out by Christians to vindicate Christian principles at the behest of a Christian king.  Very few of them remained in France after law and order had been restored in this way. 

The list goes on and on.  I would be interested in hearing how the “libertarian” Paul would go about the task of creating a Christian utopia, with all the blessings of law and order set forth above.  Normally, to create such utopias, it is necessary to use state power.  I would also be interested in hearing how Paul would insure equality before the law and equal rights for all citizens, regardless of their religious beliefs, in a country ruled by people who, like him, believe that those who are not religious are likely to murder, steal, and break the law. 

Paul’s detractors are right.  He is a bigot.

Sam Harris and his Butterfly Net Revisited

In an earlier post, I commented on fellow atheist Sam Harris’ chase after that gaudy butterfly, the good-in-itself. Well, the chase continues. In an article that appeared on no less virtuous a site than Huffpo, he describes his recent progress “Toward a Science of Morality.”

His latest on the subject was inspired by feedback on a talk he gave at this year’s Ted Conference from, as he puts it, ”literally thousands” of people. It would seem that many of them are no more impressed by Sam’s quest for the holy grail of scientific goodness than I am. In his words,

If nothing else, the response to my TED talk proves that many smart people believe that something in the last few centuries of intellectual progress prevents us from making cross-cultural moral judgments — or moral judgments at all. Thousands of highly educated men and women have now written to inform me that morality is a myth, that statements about human values are without truth conditions and, therefore, nonsensical, and that concepts like “well-being” and “misery” are so poorly defined, or so susceptible to personal whim and cultural influence, that it is impossible to know anything about them. Many people also claim that a scientific foundation for morality would serve no purpose, because we can combat human evil while knowing that our notions of “good” and “evil” are unwarranted. It is always amusing when these same people then hesitate to condemn specific instances of patently abominable behavior. I don’t think one has fully enjoyed the life of the mind until one has seen a celebrated scholar defend the “contextual” legitimacy of the burqa, or a practice like female genital excision, a mere thirty seconds after announcing that his moral relativism does nothing to diminish his commitment to making the world a better place. Given my experience as a critic of religion, I must say that it has been disconcerting to see the caricature of the over-educated, atheistic moral nihilist regularly appearing in my inbox and on the blogs.

Well, I’d like to think that not all of those thousands of commenters were caricatures of over-educated, atheistic nihilists.  As Sam describes them, they don’t make a lot of sense.  For example, it is logically impossible to “combat human evil while knowing that our notions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are unwarranted” because the statement itself is an admission that the speaker doesn’t know what “human evil” is.  Similarly, one can’t be committed to “making the world a better place” unless he actually knows what he’s talking about when he uses the term “better.”  However, Sam is no more logical than the opposition.  In the same paragraph he implies that good and evil must have a real existence by virtue of the fact that human beings are capable of strong negative emotional responses to practices such as forcing women to wear burqas, or female genital excision.  By that logic, God must exist, too, because otherwise there would have been no one around to create the world.  For that matter, I also have a strongly negative subjective emotional response to liberal “progressives” striking ostentatious poses of public piety.  That doesn’t mean that such people are “really evil.”  It merely means that my subjective identification of “out-groups” is different from Sam’s, a difference that human moral behavior is entirely flexible enough to accommodate.  Sorry, Sam, but human emotional responses are adequately explained as the expression of evolved behavioral traits.  They do not require the existence of real good and real evil.

Sam continues,

First, a disclaimer and non-apology: Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy. There are two reasons why I haven’t done this: First, while I have read a fair amount of this literature, I did not arrive at my position on the relationship between human values and the rest of human knowledge by reading the work of moral philosophers; I came to it by considering the logical implications of our making continued progress in the sciences of mind. Second, I am convinced that every appearance of terms like “metaethics,” “deontology,” “noncognitivism,” “anti-realism,” “emotivism,” and the like, directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe. My goal, both in speaking at conferences like TED and in writing my book, is to start a conversation that a wider audience can engage with and find helpful.

Here I can only agree wholeheartedly.  My own thoughts on morality are based on the fundamental hypotheses that

1.  The human behavioral traits associated with morality exist because they have evolved.

2.  They evolved at a time when the nature of human relationships and human societies were much different in many respects from what they are in the modern world.

3.  Good and evil exist only as subjective mental constructs of the mind associated with these behavioral traits.  They have no objective existence independent of their manifestation in the minds of individuals.

Acceptance of these hypotheses requires, at a minimum, knowledge and acceptance of the theory that human beings have evolved as a result of a process of natural selection.  No pre-Darwinian moral philosopher could have understood or appreciated the significance of these fundamental assumptions.  Therefore, until someone can demonstrate that my hypotheses are wrong, it makes no more sense for me to learn everything they had to say about the real existence of good and evil that it would have made for Copernicus and Galileo to learn everything that had ever been written based on the assumption of a geo-centric universe. 

As for the modern effusions of the “experts on ethics,” they have a remarkable aversion to, as E. O. Wilson put it,” laying their cards on the table.”  In other words, they tend to wander off in obscure reasonings about good and evil without bothering to first explain to the rest of us why they believe such categories even exist, and, if they do exist, what the nature of their existence might be.  I have” laid my cards on the table” by setting forth the fundamental assumptions noted above.  They make it possible for others to agree or disagree with me by simply demonstrating that my hypotheses are right or wrong.  To the extent that the “experts” fail to lay their cards on the table in similar fashion, I consider what they have to say on the subject of morality irrelevant, regardless of how many articles they have published on the subject in scholarly journals.

Sam continues with the assertion that one can have a science of morality.  That is certainly true in the sense that one can seek to discover truths about its nature and the reasons for its existence.  One can also use science to examine the legitimacy of moral claims.  Hume realized long ago that good and evil are not objective things, and that one cannot, therefore, demonstrate their existence using reason.  That certainly doesn’t mean one can’t subject the phenomena associated with morality to scientific study.  One cannot, however, use science to create something that doesn’t exist.  If objective good and evil don’t exist to begin with, then they will not magically spring into existence, even if one invokes science until one is blue in the face, any more than God will spring into existence by virtue of the fact that he is subjected to scientific study. 

However, we soon discover that Sam does not refer to a “science of morality” in this limited sense.  In the following paragraphs he claims that the real, objective good consists in maximizing human well-being.  He does so rather subtly, as if embarrassed to make such a claim, but still, he makes the claim.  In his words,

I might claim that morality is really about maximizing well-being and that well-being entails a wide range of cognitive/emotional virtues and wholesome pleasures, but someone else will be free to say that morality depends upon worshipping the gods of the Aztecs and that well-being entails always having a terrified person locked in one’s basement, waiting to be sacrificed.

Notice that, though their definitions of “well-being” differ, both Sam and the worshipper of Aztec gods in the paragraph above are made to implicitly accept the claim that well-being can be equated with real moral good.  In later paragraphs, Sam confirms the surmise that he equates well-being with the objective good.  For example,

Even if there were ten thousand different ways for groups of human beings to maximally thrive (all trade-offs and personal idiosyncrasies considered), there will be many ways for them not to thrive — and the difference between luxuriating on a peak of the moral landscape and languishing in a valley of internecine horror will translate into facts that can be scientifically understood.

For instance, I think that Kant’s Categorical Imperative only qualifies as a rational standard of morality given the assumption that it will be generally beneficial (as J.S. Mill pointed out at the beginning of Utilitarianism).

These are all good questions: Some admit of straightforward answers; others plunge us into moral paradox; none, however, proves that there are no right or wrong answers to questions of human and animal well-being.

What we have then, is a version of Mill’s Utilitarianism with “well-being” substituted for “utility,” but with the added claim that well-being and objective good are actually the same, a claim that Mill, who explicitly rejected claims of “transcendental good” would never have made.  As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, I suspect Mill would have rejected even his own qualified version of Utilitarianism if he’d been able to sit on the shoulders of Darwin, but, unfortunately, he was born a bit too early.  He died some years after publication of “On the Origin of Species,” but before the implications of Darwin’s theory concerning morality had a chance to sink in.

In what follows, Harris addresses the objections to his “scientific morality” from a number of individuals, who all, oddly enough, agree with the notion, at least implicitly, that real objective good exists, and that it can be equated to well-being.  Far from denying that well-being and objective good are the same, they merely quibble about whether one can find adequate metrics to determine scientifically what “well-being” is.  For example, prominent among them is physicist Sean Carroll, whom Harris quotes as saying,

Surely all right-thinking people agree on the primacy of well-being.

Imagine that we are able to quantify precisely some particular mental state that corresponds to a high level of well-being; the exact configuration of neuronal activity in which someone is healthy, in love, and enjoying a hot-fudge sundae. Clearly achieving such a state is a moral good.

More importantly, it’s equally obvious that even right-thinking people don’t really agree about well-being, or how to maximize it.

And from biologist P. Z Myers, again, implicitly accepting the criterion of well-being, but rejecting the possibility of scientifically measuring it.

I don’t think Harris’s criterion — that we can use science to justify maximizing the well-being of individuals — is valid. We can’t… Harris is smuggling in an unscientific prior in his category of well-being.

Of course, the elephant in the room that all these comments and counter-comments studiously avoid is the validity of the claims that a) objective good actually exists, and b) objective good can be equated with well being.  In fact, Harris seems to be aware of this, as he belatedly gets around to moving from “is” to “ought” at the end of the article:

So, while it is possible to say that one can’t move from “is” to “ought,” we should be honest about how we get to “is” in the first place. Scientific “is” statements rest on implicit “oughts” all the way down. When I say, “Water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen,” I have uttered a quintessential statement of scientific fact. But what if someone doubts this statement? I can appeal to data from chemistry, describing the outcome of simple experiments. But in so doing, I implicitly appeal to the values of empiricism and logic. What if my interlocutor doesn’t share these values? What can I say then? What evidence could prove that we should value evidence? What logic could demonstrate the importance of logic? As it turns out, these are the wrong questions. The right question is, why should we care what such a person thinks in the first place?

This paragraph makes no sense for a variety of reasons.  To begin, the nature of water “is” what it is regardless of the value one assigns to the means of discovering its nature.  That nature does not depend on mental processes going on in the minds of those trying to find out what it is, and it would not change a bit if those minds were living, dead, or never existed to begin with.  Furthermore, the “ought” Harris refers to has nothing to do with a moral “ought.”  It refers to the effectiveness of methods of acquiring knowledge of the nature of water.  In other words, it assumes a goal, and assigns value to the different means of achieving the goal depending on their relative effectiveness.  If someone preferred an approach different from my own to determining the true nature of water, I might conclude they are wrong, but I would not conclude they are immoral. 

The “oughts” related to human morality, on the other hand, are associated with emotional responses in the form of innate predispositions that are hard-wired in the brain.  These “oughts” can vary somewhat depending on education and culture, but display striking commonalities across widely varying societies.  We experience them as absolutes, independent of their effectiveness in achieving one goal or another.  The behavioral traits associated with morality evolved because they promoted our survival in times very different from the present.  They are not relevant to any other purpose one might name, including the well-being of mankind. 

False conclusions can be dangerous.  For example, if we falsely conclude we can fly, and walk off a cliff, we will die.  False conclusions about morality can be far more dangerous.  When the Communists tried to associate morality with their version of the well-being of mankind, they did not succeed in creating a “New Soviet Man” whose moral behavior was infinitely adaptable to suite the purpose they had in mind.  Rather, they unleashed human emotions they did not understand, resulting in the greatest episodes of mass murder and brutality mankind has ever witnessed.  One can rationally discuss whether the “well-being of mankind” is a desirable goal.  Attempting to achieve that goal by tinkering with innate behavioral traits that are as yet poorly understood is to invite disaster once again.

Continuing with Harris’ remarks:

But the consequences of moral relativism have been disastrous. And science’s failure to address the most important questions in human life has made it seem like little more than an incubator for technology. It has also given faith-based religion — that great engine of ignorance and bigotry — a nearly uncontested claim to being the only source of moral wisdom. This has been bad for everyone. What is more, it has been unnecessary — because we can speak about the well-being of conscious creatures rationally, and in the context of science. I think it is time we tried.

Yes, we can speak about the well-being of conscious creatures rationally, and in the context of science, but we cannot cause the well-being of conscious creatures to be identical with the real, objective good, because the real, objective good doesn’t exist, and one can’t call it into existence by an act of will.  Have the consequences of moral relativism been disastrous?  So what?  Objective good either exists or it doesn’t, and that reality will not be changed one iota by our conclusions regarding the consequences of moral relativism, or our dissatisfaction with the perception that science hasn’t achieved some noble end or other.  One wonders why Harris ever became an atheist.  After all, one can as easily claim that the decline in religious belief has been disastrous because it has deprived many people of a purpose in life.  Should we not, therefore, magically call God back into existence and make him “true,” out of concern for the suffering of these people?  If we conclude that seeing the color red has been disastrous, will it suddenly turn to green to spare our sensitivities? 

Harris doesn’t realize it, but his claim that faith-based religion is a great engine of ignorance and bigotry is itself a manifestation of human moral behavior; namely, out-group identification.  The statement is both untrue and morally loaded on the face of it.  I myself am an atheist, and would be the first to agree that religion is potentially harmful by virtue of the fact that it is not true, but “a great engine of ignorance and bigotry?”  I don’t think so.  On a general level it is simply untrue that religion has never resulted in anything good, and on the individual level, I know a host of firm religious believers who are neither ignorant nor bigots.  Harris’ identification of religious believers as an out-group in this fashion is a manifestation of moral behavior that is entirely similar to the identification of “the bourgeoisie” as an out-group by the Communists, or the Jews as an out-group by the Nazis.  It seems to me the results in those experiments in the creative application of morality did not contribute to the “well-being of mankind.”  Out-group identification is an aspect of human moral behavior that continues to be ignored as an inconvenient truth, but it exists, nevertheless.  To demonstrate that fact to himself, Harris need merely glance around him at Huffpo and take note of the furious ongoing demonization of political opponents.  If he really believes in the fantasy of a “real good” that is identical with human well-being, he might want to consider the fact that the “real evil” must inevitably accompany it.  It always has in the past.  Under the circumstances, Harris would do well to rethink his conclusion that well-being and moral good are identical.  As for the notion of “moral relativism,” I doubt that it even exists, except as a chimera of moral philosophers.  Most, if not all, human beings perceive the moral good as an absolute, because that’s the way in which it has most effectively promoted our survival. 

Continuing with Harris,

So it is with the linkage between morality and well-being: To say that morality is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal), because we must first assume that the well-being of conscious creatures is good, is exactly like saying that science is arbitrary (or culturally constructed, or merely personal), because we must first assume that a rational understanding of the universe is good. We need not enter either of these philosophical cul-de-sacs.

In fact, it is anything but exactly the same.  Is it really so difficult see that “the good” in the sense of a real, objective thing having an independent existence of its own is not the same as ”the good” in the sense of a useful method of finding the truth?  There is no similarity between good defined in terms of usefulness for achieving some preconceived goal, such as discovering truth, and good defined as real objective moral good, having an existence of its own independent of subjective human emotions, yet corresponding to the subjective feeling of Sam Harris and a subset of human beings who think like him.  Are all the recent revelations about the hard-wired origins and emotional nature of human moral behavior really meaningless and irrelevant?  I can understand the reluctance of some people to give up the only objective justification they have for the great joy they derive from virtuous indignation.  Unfortunately, that justification simply doesn’t exist.  There is no such thing as real, objective good, nor is there any such thing as real, objective evil, any more than there is a real, objective God.  By attempting to force them into existence Harris isn’t inaugurating a new science of morality.  He’s inaugurating a new secular religion, complete with an imaginary God of its own.