On the Legitimacy of Secular Morality

Occasionally religious moralists, and especially those of a fundamentalist bent, can be more logical than their secular counterparts.  The basis for the legitimacy of their moral systems is, of course, God.  Things are Good, or not, because God wants it that way.  Remove God and that ultimate sanction disappears.  As they have never been diffident about pointing out, without a God secular moral systems are left floating in air with no visible means of support.  The same logical and seemingly obvious conclusion has occurred to many outstanding thinkers in the past.  They have included, for example, our own Benjamin Franklin, who alludes to it in his autobiography as a reason for promoting religious faith among the masses, lest they turn to evil for the lack of any reason to prefer the good.

Secular moralists typically counter such arguments by pointing out that their own moral systems promote the Good because it can be demonstrated that, if only everyone would act according as prescribed by these systems, some attractive goal, such as “human flourishing,” will be achieved.  The problem with such arguments is that there is no essential connection whatsoever between the Good and whatever more or less attractive ideals or goals these people happen to be promoting.  To credit them at all, it is necessary to simply ignore the evidence, increasingly weighty and compelling in light of recent research, that human moral behavior and perception of good and evil are the expression of evolved behavioral traits.  If human morality is an expression of something evolved, then, like every other evolved trait, it exists because it happened to promote the survival and reproductive success of individual packets of genes.  As such, it did not come into existence to serve any conscious purpose or goal.  The attempt to connect it with such goals or purposes after the fact must inevitably be arbitrary and illogical, regardless of how many people happen to agree that those particular goals or purposes are attractive.  It is also extremely dangerous, because human nature, of which human morality is a part, will stubbornly and persistently remain what it is, regardless of what we might happen to want it to be.

Why dangerous?  Because no Good comes without its complementary Evil.  Good Christians come with evil heretics and witches, good Moslems come with evil infidels, good proletarians come with evil bourgeoisie, and good Nazis come with evil Jews.  For every ingroup there is an outgroup, and persecution of the outgroup has ever been as characteristic of every new moral system as promotion of the ingroup.  Do you really believe the promoters of the latest secular moral systems have no outgroups?  Just read their books!  The more self-righteous these people are, the more they wear their hatreds and animosities on their sleeves.

I suggest that we finally recognize morality for what it really is and climb off this treadmill once and for all.  I suggest it, not because I want to establish yet another new moral system, but because I would prefer not to suffer the potential inconvenience of dealing with people who are trying to kill me because I’ve been unfortunate enough to land in their outgroup.

Of Karl Radek, Communism and Human Nature

In 1935, a collection of essays by the Soviet journalist Karl Radek was published under the title Portraits and Pamphlets.  Radek was, by all accounts, a brilliant man.  At the time he was one of the editors of Izvestia, a frequent writer for Pravda, and was reputed to be the foremost propagandist in the Soviet Union.  He had been connected with various workers movements since the age of 14, and had become editor of The Red Flag, the organ of the Social Democratic Party in his home country of Poland, at the age of 20.  The book was published near the apogee of the love affair of public intellectuals in the “bourgeois” democracies with Communism.  Impressed by the Soviet Union’s apparent success in realizing its bold economic aspirations in the midst of a lingering Great Depression, mainstream journals such as The Nation, The New Republic, and The American Mercury were publishing articles that were unabashedly pro-Communist, marked by the tacit assumption that a transition to socialism was inevitable.  The only question remaining was how that transition would occur.  The book reflected this state of affairs.  In an introduction contributed by the normally phlegmatic historian A. J. Cummings we read,

The Soviets have proved beyond any reasonable doubt not only the stability of their regime, but their capacity, in the face of an incredulous world, to carry into effect a large part of their gigantic economic conceptions. They have also made abundantly clear their intention to keep the peace and their desire to organize an international peace system. The entrance of Russia into the League of Nations, more even than her series of agreements with individual states, marks a turning point in European history.

Five years later, of course, the Soviets demonstrated their “abundantly clear intention to keep the peace” by invading and seizing large parts of Finland, annexing the Baltic states, and partitioning Poland with Nazi Germany.  No matter, all that belonged to the future.  Radek’s essays began with a groveling panegyric dedicated to Stalin.  At the time, “The Great Helmsman” had already begun to bare his teeth.  Former leading Bolsheviks Zinoviev and Kamenev had been arrested as early as December, 1934, and were soon to appear in the second of the carefully rehearsed show trials that would lead to their execution.  The Great Purge Trials were only a few years off.  Radek was much too astute not to sense what was in the air.  He knew he was at risk because of an earlier flirtation with Stalin’s bete noir Trotsky over the issue of socialism in one country.  The tone of the essay was accordingly abject and fawning.  In keeping with the spirit of the times, all this was neatly rationalized by English Communist Alec Brown, who provided notes to the essays.  In his words,

We mostly see only what we have been trained to see by upbringing, environment and habit. Thus, the average British reader of Radek’s paper on Stalin is, until he gives it more thought, bound to be inclined to see hero-worship, and to be quite blind to what Radek really is about. But as this paper on Stalin turns on the essential harmony between communism and individuality – on the way the one necessitates and breeds the other – it is worth while drawing attention to the basic feature of the Marxist-Leninist Party, ignorance of or misunderstanding of which leads to the rather comical confusion made by the average non-Marxist student of the civilization of the future… Further it cannot be made too clear that this Marxist non-individualist scientific approach to social problems does not stultify individual life… And it follows that since the ‘man at the top’ owes his position not to any ‘personal magnetism’ or sex appeal, but to the very same qualities which make a great leader of science, plus tested personal courage, it makes possible really honest praise of a great man, a praise which is the very opposite to hero-worship.

Be that as it may, Radek’s “really honest praise” didn’t sway Stalin.  He was arrested and tried for “treason” two years after the book was published, and was shot by the NKVD in 1939.  How is it that seemingly grownup, sober people could be taken in by these deadly charades over and over again?  The same way they have always been taken in – by virtue of ardently believing in something that is palpably untrue.  Historically, that something has typically been a religion.  “Scientific” Communism was, for all practical purposes, a religion as well, and has been easily recognizable as such from the earliest days.  Astute observers have likened Communist and socialist bigwigs to so many cardinals, bishops, and popes since long before the days of Lenin.  The fact that Communism was different from its more traditional analogs by virtue of being secular rather than spiritual altered nothing in its fundamental nature.  That fact was appreciated as early as the first half of the 19^th century by the brilliant British essayist, Sir James MacKintosh.  It happens that the ideology of “class struggle” was already highly developed in his day, well before the time of Marx.  Presciently, he pointed out that such doctrines were eventually bound to fail, because they promised an illusory paradise on earth, rather than in the hereafter.  Having the advantage of not being dead, the “liberated” people were bound to eventually look around and take notice of the fact that the promised paradise was nowhere to be seen. 

Eventually, that’s just what happened in the Soviet Union, and its demise meant the end of Communism as a messianic world view, although the name lingers on.  The paradise went bankrupt.  We are left with the question of why, if an astute Englishman could see it all coming almost two centuries ago, so many seemingly intelligent and highly educated people were so completely taken in by Communism for so long, in spite of purge trials, mass slaughter, and human misery on a vast scale.

The answer lies in human nature.  Of Communism as a framework for social organization, E. O. Wilson once famously quipped, “Great theory, wrong species.”  That was certainly true as far as its outcome and practicality are concerned, but far off the mark in terms of its power as a messianic world view.  Indeed, its compelling power in the latter capacity was a reflection of its perfect harmony with human nature. 

Specifically, Communism was extremely effective at exploiting those aspects of human nature we associate with morality.  Its adherents sought to achieve the ultimate “good,” in the form of the future felicity of mankind, or, as latter day architects of the latest moral systems might put it, “human flourishing.”  They achieved all the emotional satisfaction that human beings have always derived from serving a cause they believe is noble and good, in company with other, like-minded individuals, the fellow members of what one might call their tribe, or ingroup.  They derived an emotional satisfaction just as powerful by opposing the ultimate “evil,” which, in their case, was represented by the bourgeoisie.  Any opposition outside the ingroup or heresy within was associated with the bourgeois outgroup.  No matter if the enemy of the moment had no perceptible control over the social means of production.  In that case, one merely added a qualifier, such as “petty” bourgeoisie, and the association with evil was complete.  Eventually, the whole movement came under the control of the ultimate high priest in the person of Stalin, who disposed of his rivals, including Radek and all the rest of the old Bolsheviks of any talent who had actually carried out the “proletarian” revolution, by transmuting them, in turn, into “bourgeoisie.” 

And therein lays the fundamental fallacy of most of the modern cobblers of novel, revamped, and refurbished moralities.  In spite of the fact that all human history dangles it in front of their faces, somehow they always seem to manage to ignore the dual nature of human morality.  Every good implies an evil.  Every ingroup implies an outgroup.  Their fond hopes of “dialing up the knobs” controlling who we include in our ingroups to all mankind are doomed to failure because they ignore these fundamental truths about human nature.  There will always be a “bourgeoisie.”  Its identities are legion.  The Jews, heretics, global corporations, racial and ethnic minorities by the score; all these and many others have played the role of outgroup at one time or another.  Our nature predisposes us to identify an outgroup, and to treat those we identify with it with all the scorn, spite, and contempt that human beings have always reserved for outgroups.  We’ve been running a repeatable experiment that has abundantly confirmed this easily falsifiable fact for the last 5,000 years.  It’s called history.  Communism is merely one of the most recent of a mountain of data points that all point to this same fundamental truth.  Great thinkers like Arthur Keith, Konrad Lorenz, and Robert Ardrey have all pointed to this seemingly obvious aspect of our nature, and suggested that, instead of trying to wish it away, we seek to understand and control it.  I would suggest that the clever young scientists in fields such as evolutionary psychology and neuroscience who have already brought about a paradigm shift in the behavioral sciences in recent years heed their advice.  We would do well to learn to understand ourselves.  Failing that, I expect there will be a great many more Karl Radeks in our future.

Karl Radek

On God as a “No Thing”

According to a favorite argument of religious believers, God must exist because otherwise the physical universe with all its wonders would be inexplicable. I have always considered it a very powerful argument against His existence that such arguments leave you with an even bigger problem. If you can’t accept the existence of the universe without a Creator, why do you accept the existence of a Creator to begin with? He must necessarily be even more complex and inexplicable than that which he created. In other words, you don’t gain anything by positing the existence of something more complex to explain something less complex. Jean Meslier used the argument in his Testament, and Richard Dawkins and others have included it in more recent works.

Moslems and some Christians use divine inspiration, or faith, to get around the argument. In the more extreme, Muslim version, God decided in advance who would have faith and who not. He created unbelievers in such a way that their minds would be hardened against faith in Him, and for the “sin” of being created that way, he intends to burn them forever. It’s all set forth very explicitly in the Koran.

However, Christians who imagine themselves more sophisticated than the rest, apparently never having read the bit in Matthew 18:3 about the impossibility of entering the kingdom of heaven except as a little child, have more “complex” arguments. One such is Paul Wallace, who set forth a version thereof at the website of Religion Dispatches.

Wallace begins with the well-worn argument that, if you don’t believe in God, you’re really just a religious horse of a different color. In his words,

The atheisms of most committed, principled atheists are often not more than mirror images—inversions—of the theisms they negate.

By that logic, if you don’t believe in fairies, you belong to the “anti-fairy cult,” and if you’ve never read Virginia’s letter, and lost faith in Santa, you’re a zealot in the “anti-Santa” religion. Winston in Orwell’s “1984,” was presumably a fundamentalist religious fanatic because he insisted he only counted four fingers instead of five when his torturer held up his hand.

Wallace is just warming up, though. Citing Yale theology professor Denys Turner, he explains that, if you don’t see the fifth finger, you’re just not trying hard enough:

Turner also writes that, very often, the theisms attacked by atheists are not very interesting; therefore, the atheisms of most committed, principled atheists are not very interesting. Why this is so is not clear; perhaps it is because in many cases theism was abandoned before it was allowed time to develop into something of substance.

He then focuses on the version of the argument presented in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion -

In The God Delusion, Dawkins presents his central argument against the existence of God in the fourth chapter. His thinking goes something like this: The universe is a complex thing. Therefore the God of the Christians, who, Christians say, made the universe, must be at least as complex as the universe God made. Therefore we are left with an even bigger problem than before: Who made this ultra-complex God? A hyper-complex megaGod? It makes plain sense, according to Occam’s razor, to stop before we get to the first God. The complex universe is enough. Ergo, in all likelihood, God does not exist.

This argument, which boils down to Well, who made God, then?, assumes that God is a thing like any other thing. It assumes that God must exist in the same way the moon exists, in the same way Dawkins himself exists. As Terry Eagleton wrote in his now-infamous review of The God Delusion, Dawkins seems to think that God is “a celestial super-object or divine UFO,” a creature like other creatures, only bigger and smarter: a kind of überthing, but a thing nonetheless.

But nowhere does Dawkins get outside of himself and ask, Is my assumption that God is a thing like any other thing really necessary? On what is this assumption grounded? Where did it come from?

I’m no fan of Dawkins. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I was not enthralled by his quasi-racist anti-American ranting about the “U.S. Taliban” and overt bigotry against Christian fundamentalists in The God Delusion. Be that as it may, his argument doesn’t depend on God being a thing like other things. It only requires that God is a thing, as opposed to nothing. Nowhere does Dawkins suggest that God is a thing like other things, but merely that, whatever sort of thing he is imagined to be, if He is the creator, he must necessarily be more complex than that which he created. As a result, whatever kind of a thing believers of whatever stripe might imagine Him to be, the argument that He must exist because otherwise the remarkable physical world we see around us could not exist becomes absurd. It is assuming something more complicated to explain something less complicated. It doesn’t solve anything. Wallace, however, demures:

What is at issue here is, Dawkins refuses to examine the ground on which he stands: science itself. That is, Dawkins may change his mind about evolution, but nothing will change his mind about science. He will never question—in a serious way—the sufficiency of science as a guide to truth.

Here we see the familiar portrayal of “science” as a religious belief. In fact, it is nothing of the sort, but merely a systematic way of discovering and acquiring knowledge. There is nothing mystical about the word “science” at all. It is simply one way of reasoning about what is true. Continuing with Wallace:

He will never question—in a serious way—the sufficiency of science as a guide to truth. Perhaps he thinks the success of science makes it a self-evident choice when it comes to grounding his worldview; what he does not and will not consider is the very real possibility that science is so successful precisely because it is so limited. To reject this possibility out-of-hand is nothing but intellectual laziness. Dawkins is dogmatically rigid and fixed in place. He is a fundamentalist.

Fine. Science is limited. However, Christian fundamentalism, an “easy target,” is also limited. Dawkins just wasn’t aiming high enough. Forget the Christians as “little children” meme. If you want to “see through” his argument, it’s going to take some serious mental gymnastics. Wallace describes the process in terms of four levels of “God-talk,” with the third being the most important. Let’s let him explain:

The third level is the most difficult but the most important. This is second-order negation, or the inversion of the inversion. Here we would say, “God is not a fire, but God is not a not-fire either,” and “God is not love, but neither is God not-love.” God transcends the (human-based) distinction between love and not-love.

Also on this third level is found the insistence, made for centuries by theologians throughout Christendom, that God transcends the distinction of being and not-being. Therefore, if we use the conventional definition of existence, God does not exist. Our category of existence does not apply to God. Put another way, the word “exist” cannot be used univocally of things and God. These are artificial categories imagined and used by human beings; they are manifestly not divine attributes. In the end, to speak correctly, there are no divine attributes. Which means that God is not distinct from creation, nor is God not-distinct from creation. That is, in God there is no distinction at all, nor is there non-distinction. No affirmation or denial properly applies to God.

Or, in other words, God is neither a thing or nothing. This very convenient for believers, because it puts their God out of reach of logic. By the same token, I can say that fairies, Santa, or the Great Green Grasshopper God are neither thing or nothing, and no one can prove they don’t exist.

But atheists say that Christianity is false, that God does not exist. Asking them to defend their position in light of mature theology is doing nothing but taking them for their word and respecting their intelligence.

So atheists are wrong because, like Winston and his four fingers, they can’t imagine an entity that is neither a thing nor nothing. Wallace assigns them the task of disproving the existence of that entity, but without using language, because that would be too deceptive, and without reasoning, because that which is outside the union of “thing” and “nothing” is also outside the realm of rational argument. If they fail then, voila, the existence of God is proved! Of course, the author realizes he’s walking on thin ice. He admits as much:

Also, one may say that negative theology is content-free and useless because it nullifies the use of rational thought. In a sense this is a valid argument. But one can go beyond negative theology while bearing in mind its lessons. In fact, negative theology constitutes the central nervous system, if you will, of the entire Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas that Dawkins so happily and ignorantly mocks. In this work, Thomas employs analogical language in order to speak freely of God’s attributes without the possibility of confusing them with the attributes of, say, fire or kingship or love or being.

Since it’s obviously impossible to believe in an un-thing, the author, after assuring us that God is neither thing nor nothing, is suddenly speaking of Him as an object with attributes. I, and I daresay anyone else who speaks English fluently, would call an object with attributes a thing.

This is one of the most powerful aspects of negative theology: It cleanses the mind not only of assumptions about God, but of idols (like science, say) that can so easily replace God.

Again assigning some mystical quality to “Science.”  As noted above, science is just systematic reasoning.  What the above amounts to is the claim that anyone who dares to use their brain as something other than inert stuffing for their skull is an “idolater.”

We are required to have faith in no thing at all; only then will our faith have any chance of finding its true home in God.

There are, of course, different flavors of this “no thing.” The author should take care that he has faith in the right “no thing.” If it turns out that the Moslem “no thing” is the real one, he’ll be spending quadrillions and quintillions of years sizzling in hell, and that’s just for starters. I will leave that to the competing “no things” to sort out among themselves. Poor, deluded atheist that I am, I am left by all these arguments in direr straights than before. I will certainly end up frying in the afterlife regardless unless, without relying on logic or language, I somehow manage to figure out what “no thing” is, and that with alacrity, I being no longer the youngest. I gather from what the author is telling me that this will only be possible by virtue of reading Thomas Aquinas and a voluminous stack of other religious tomes. I suspect that such fare may not really be the path to divine enlightenment. Rather, it seems more likely that the author has been left in more or less the same condition by reading his own pile of books about religion as Don Quixote was left by reading a pile of books about knight errantry. Miguel de Cervantes provides a detailed psychological description in the first chapter of his famous account of that gentleman.

While I strongly suspect that Wallace is as deluded in matters of religion as Don Quixote was touching knights in shining armor, I am content to let him believe whatever he chooses as long as he accords the same right to me, and does not conclude, as so many others have done in the past, that his “no thing” requires him to burn people, or launch wars against those who believe in other “no things,” or fly airplanes into buildings on behalf of the “no thing”, or that the state should serve as an interpreter of the will of the “no thing.” As long as we’re clear about those things we should be able to coexist.

Francis Ayala and Morality as Exaptation

In a series of films made in the late 60′s and early 70′s that are now considered classics of the genre, Christopher Lee plays a Count Dracula who is reduced to dust by sunlight, impaled on crucifixes, and is otherwise discombobulated by all the standard vampire antidotes, only to be improbably revived just in time for the next film.  The Blank Slate is like that.  It is a wonderfully useful bit of quackery to utopians of all stripes, and so keeps rising from its own ashes in one guise or another.  An interesting variant, the theory of morality as exaptation, was devised by  Francisco Ayala, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine.   In his words,

I propose that the capacity for ethics is a necessary attribute of human nature, whereas moral codes are products of cultural evolution. Humans have a moral sense because their biological makeup determines the presence of three necessary conditions for ethical behavior: (i) the ability to anticipate the consequences of one’s own actions; (ii) the ability to make value judgments; and (iii) the ability to choose between alternative courses of action. Ethical behavior came about in evolution not because it is adaptive in itself but as a necessary consequence of man’s eminent intellectual abilities, which are an attribute directly promoted by natural selection. That is, morality evolved as an exaptation, not as an adaptation. Moral codes, however, are outcomes of cultural evolution, which accounts for the diversity of cultural norms among populations and for their evolution through time.

In other words, departing from the old Blank Slate orthodoxy, Ayala is conceding that there is such a thing as human nature.  However, it doesn’t matter.  Our moral behavior is still completely malleable, because moral rules are almost purely a product of culture, and can come in any flavor you like.  This, we are told, is proved by the diversity of human moral systems. According to Ayala, it’s all nice and legal according to Darwin himself.  For example,

After the two initial paragraphs of chapter III of The Descent of Man, which assert that the moral sense is the most important difference “between man and the lower animals” …, Darwin states his view that moral behavior is strictly associated with advanced intelligence: “The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man” (ref. 1, pp. 68–69). Darwin is affirming that the moral sense, or conscience, is a necessary consequence of high intellectual powers, such as exist in modern humans. Therefore, if our intelligence is an outcome of natural selection, the moral sense would be as well an outcome of natural selection. Darwin’s statement further implies that the moral sense is not by itself directly promoted by natural selection, but only indirectly as a necessary consequence of high intellectual powers, which are the attributes that natural selection is directly promoting.

There’s just one thing wrong with the above statement.  Ayala is completely ignoring the phrase “well-marked social instincts.”  What did Darwin mean by “well-marked social instincts?”  It’s worth quoting him at length to find the answer:

A man who has no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward, can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones. A dog acts in this manner, but he does so blindly. A man, on the other hand, looks forwards and backwards, and compares his various feelings, desires and recollections. He then finds, in accordance with the verdict of all the wisest men that the highest satisfaction is derived from following certain impulses, namely the social instincts. If he acts for the good of others, he will receive the approbation of his fellow men and gain the love of those with whom he lives; and this latter gain undoubtedly is the highest pleasure on this earth. By degrees it will become intolerable to him to obey his sensuous passions rather than his higher impulses, which when rendered habitual may be almost called instincts. His reason may occasionally tell him to act in opposition to the opinion of others, whose approbation he will then not receive; but he will still have the solid satisfaction of knowing that he has followed his innermost guide or conscience.

In other words, “social instincts” are other-regarding instincts or, as we would say today, predispositions, as opposed to such “sensuous passions” as the desire for food, sex, etc.  They are what modern scientists refer to when they speak of “hard-wired morality,” and were, for Darwin, as well as for many others since his time who have spoken of morality, not an “exaptation,” but an essential aspect of human nature, a precondition for the development of any manifestation of morality, whether in humans or other animals.  In other words, what Darwin was really saying is that “morality” is simply the expression of innate social or moral predispositions in creatures with a superior ability to reason about their subjective moral feelings or emotions.  That is how Darwin was understood by a long line of other thinkers, and, in fact, that interpretation would seem to be obvious.  Anyone who entertains any doubt on the subject need look no further than his The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals with its many parallels between human behavior and that of other animals. 

Somehow, however, Ayala missed the point.  All that he will allow to the sphere of human nature is a “proclivity to judge” that somehow floats out there in the ether all by itself, with no basis upon which to make judgments.  In his words,

The question of whether ethical behavior is biologically determined may, indeed, refer to either one of the following two issues. First, is the capacity for ethics—the proclivity to judge human actions as either right or wrong—determined by the biological nature of human beings? Second, are the systems or codes of ethical norms accepted by human beings biologically determined? A similar distinction can be made with respect to language. The question of whether the capacity for symbolic creative language is determined by our biological nature is different from the question of whether the particular language we speak—English, Spanish, Chinese, etc.—is biologically determined, which in the case of language obviously it is not.

I propose that the moral evaluation of actions emerges from human rationality or, in Darwin’s terms, from our highly developed intellectual powers. Our high intelligence allows us to anticipate the consequences of our actions with respect to other people and, thus, to judge them as good or evil in terms of their consequences for others. But I will argue that the norms according to which we decide which actions are good and which actions are evil are largely culturally determined, although conditioned by biological predispositions, such as parental care to give an obvious example.

Here Ayala tries to leave himself some wiggle room by contradicting himself.  His norms are not purely culturally determined, but only “largely” culturally determined, and they are “conditioned” by biological predispositions, but just not enough to matter.  All but the wildest and craziest of the old blank slaters used to give themselves a similar “back door.”  For example, from zoologist, J. P. Scott,

There may be some biological basis for territorial behavior in people, but it is equally possible that it is a human cultural invention.

and from physical anthropologist Ralph Holloway,

Perhaps egoism and self-esteem are innate properties of the species man, but limited directions depending on the cultural milieu in which various peoples thrive or cope.

In the end, of course, as noted by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate, none of this mattered.  The inevitable conclusion was still that, for all practical purposes, the only thing that mattered in shaping human behavior was culture.  The same is true of Ayala and his “predispositions” when it comes to morality.  In his words,

Moral codes arise in human societies by cultural evolution. Those moral codes tend to be widespread that lead to successful societies. Since time immemorial, human societies have experimented with moral systems. Some have succeeded and spread widely throughout humankind, like the Ten Commandments, although other moral systems persist in different human societies. Many moral systems of the past have surely become extinct because they were replaced or because the societies that held them became extinct. The moral systems that currently exist in humankind are those that have been favored by cultural evolution.

In fact, Ayala is putting the cart before the horse.  Moral behavior is not predicated on a high intelligence, nor is it an “exaptation” of high intelligence, only possible in man.  Rather, morality is fundamentally emotional rather than rational.  The concepts of good and evil themselves are subjective,  predicated on the pre-existence of these emotions, and could not exist without them.  Far from suddenly emerging as the result of the previous evolution of high intelligence, and understandable as the outcome of some rational thought process, morality is utterly dependent for its existence on emotions that are entirely analogous to those experience by other animals.  Human morality is simply the expression of those moral emotions in creatures with high intelligence.  We have a greater capacity to reason about what we feel than other animals, and we can rationally interpret what we feel emotionally in different ways, but, in the end, we are still acting in accordance with those emotions, not based on the outcome of some disoriented logical thought process.

The fact that there must be many variations in the details of moral behavior in creatures such as ourselves goes without saying.  The predispositions fundamentally responsible for moral behavior could not be programmed into the brains of wolves or chimpanzees in the form of a string of complex moral rules expressed in terms of human language.  The fact remains that these predispositions exist, and are responsible for the many commonalities in human moral behavior across widely different cultures.

There is no need to take what I say on trust regarding these matters.  Read books such as “Wild Justice,” and you’ll see that the evidence is already weighty, and will become more so as our diagnostic techniques enable us to probe human emotions and thought processes with ever greater resolution.  In fact, Ayala’s theory was born dead, and it appears that, at this point, even he realizes it.  In his recent papers, he stubbornly refuses to part with his “exaptation” theory, but adds ever more caveats about what people like Frans de Waal, Jeffrey Masson, and Marc Bekoff have been discovering about animal morality, and ever more weasel words about “predispositions.”

In fact, being stubborn pays.  Ayala just won the 2010 Templeton prize, which includes a tidy award of $1.5 million.  The prize

… honors a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works. Established in 1972 by the late Sir John Templeton, the Prize aims, in his words, to identify “entrepreneurs of the spirit”—outstanding individuals who have devoted their talents to expanding our vision of human purpose and ultimate reality. The Prize celebrates no particular faith tradition or notion of God, but rather the quest for progress in humanity’s efforts to comprehend the many and diverse manifestations of the Divine.

Indeed, Ayala apparently considers himself, against all odds, a Trinitarian Christian.  All this comes as something of a surprise to his more orthodox fellow believers, who surely would have burned him as a heretic back in the day.  See for example, this and this.  And no wonder.  You could be a Pelagian, a Socinian, a believer in Communion in one or both kinds, or even a wild, unrecanting Arian, and Dr. Ayala can exapt a morality for you that’s as legit as the pope’s.  Apparently the Templeton Prize people weren’t so finicky about the minutiae of theology.

Concerning the Requirement that we Believe in Fictional Beings

Instapundit linked an interesting post about morality today at Shrink Wrapped, whose author describes himself as a psychoanalyst. He avails himself of the recent arrest of a Columbia professor for incest to set forth his rationale for a belief that turns up in some of his other recent posts as well; that government must be based on Judeo-Christian morality. In his words,

…we should be careful of accepting the continual and continued accrual of transgressions against our bourgeois (i.e., Judeo-Christian) morality; at some point, just as termites can destroy a house by eroding its foundation in silence right until the moment, without warning, the house collapses, each small piece torn out of our moral fabric makes the collapse of our consensual culture more likely.

and (from a different post),

Our modern Western Culture and Civilization are emergent structures that rest upon a Judeo-Christian G-d; while religion may not be necessary for any one individual to behave in a moral manner, it has not yet been shown that any society can behave morally without religion.

Such ideas are common, but I have never heard them expressed by anyone who isn’t a Jew or a Christian. There is good reason for that. What the author is actually suggesting is that it’s necessary for us all to pretend we believe in one of those two religions, regardless of whether they are actually true. That’s something that all discussions of such issues as whether civilizations need a particular religion to survive, or whether religion is a force for good, or whether human behavior will be negatively or positively affected by the absence of one religion or another have in common. They all beg the question (and routinely ignore it) of whether or not the religion in question is actually true. What the author is really suggesting is that truth doesn’t matter. We must allow him and his co-religionists to force their religious beliefs on the rest of us, not because they are true, but because they are useful. I beg to differ. It seems to me more reasonable to base our actions on the truth than on falsehoods.

Proponents of the author’s idea are usually aware of this apparent absurdity in their argument at some level, but it’s a minor difficulty to them because, after all, they believe in the religion themselves. They commonly deal with dissenters by simply declaring that they are immoral. For example, again quoting the author (referring to the recent debate between Tony Blair and Chris Hitchens about whether religion is a force for good),

Finally these kinds of debates will always predispose to the victory by the Atheists for a few relatively simple, and therefore unacknowledged, reasons. First, the believer in G-d must, of necessity, admit to himself that such a belief can never be fully grounded in reason; the connection of faith to the irrational parts of our minds are implicit when not made explicit. We use terms like ineffable to make such a connection more acceptable to our reason but ultimately our belief is fueled and preserved by our awareness that it is based upon a mystery at the heart of existence. The Atheist has no such handicap. He is able, using his reason, to convince himself that Atheism has nothing to do with his irrationality. This exhibits, more than anything else, how adept homo rationalis has become at the grand arts of self deception, rationalization and intellectualization. By doing away with G-d, the Atheist has effectively replaced Him with man, without having to countenance his own arrogance.

In other words, the author is telling me that, if I don’t accept his irrational faith in the “mystery at the heart of existence,” and dare to use my brain, which his G-d has presumably given me to serve as something other than a convenient stuffing for my skull, to actually think about whether a God exists or not, I am guilty of the sin of “arrogance” if I come to the “wrong” conclusion, and decide that there is none. Again, the question of whether God really exists or not doesn’t matter. To avoid the charge of “arrogance,” I must somehow find a way to force myself to believe in something that I am perfectly convinced is a fantasy, more or less in the same way that Christian clinics “convert” homosexuals into heterosexuals. What could actually be more arrogant than the claim that anyone who dares to think is “arrogant” if they come to conclusions that happen to differ from those of the author?

There are many instances of similar silliness in the rest of the article. For example,

Yet if we do not privilege the Judeo-Christian ethics that are the underpinnings of our unconscious morality, we have no answer for cultures that take a very different, zero sum, approach to morality, i.e. I take what is yours and do what I want because I can and my god sanctions such behavior. In other words, once we have jettisoned our G-d, we have disarmed intellectually in the war with another’s god.

Where to begin? By arguing that we should “privilege Judeo-Christian ethics,” the author argues for the elimination of any wall of separation between church and state and in favor of a theocracy. That may be where the “progress of civilization” has been heading in Iran, but the same is most definitely not true of the United States and the western democracies, to our great good fortune. I, for one, have no desire to return to the days of Metternich and the Holy Alliance. We can count ourselves lucky if those days are behind us for good.

Judeo-Christian ethics are hardly the underpinnings of our unconscious morality. Rather, our unconscious morality, an evolved trait in our species, is the underpinning of Judeo-Christian ethics, which are merely one example among many of how an innate behavioral trait can be expressed in creatures with large brains. What does the author mean by “Judeo-Christian ethics?” That we should not suffer a witch to live? (Exodus 22:18) That homosexuality is an abomination? (Corinthians 6:9-10) That a man has an obligation to produce a child with his brother’s widow, and, if he refuses, his sister-in-law is to spit in his face in front of the elders. (Deuteronomy 25:5-9)? What about the killing of heretics, approved by St. Augustine, or the innumerable holy wars approved by a long line of popes? If not, what, exactly, are we to understand by the term “Judeo-Christian ethics?” Presumably they are only those bits and pieces of the morality set forth in the Bible or Torah that the author, inspired by his “ineffable awareness guided by a mystery at the heart of creation” agrees with.

How is it that, without Judeo-Christian ethics, “we have no answer for cultures that take a very different, zero sum, approach to morality,” if they seek to take what is ours or otherwise molest us? How about the answer of nuclear weapons? How is it that we are prohibited from defending ourselves unless we can answer one bogus belief with another? There is no better “intellectual armament in the war with another’s god” than to simply point out the obvious; that their god and their transcendental morality are both fantasies.

Again quoting from the article,

Once we have, as a culture, fully adopted an ethic of Just Do It as the apotheosis of our morality, we are helpless against those who wish to Just Do It in ways which are inimical to us.

In other words, unless we allow the author’s version of Judeo-Christian morality to be stuffed down our throats, we somehow implicitly accept “an ethic of Just Do It.” How odd that, somehow, other primates exhibit moral behavior in spite of the fact that no rabbis or priests have ever been found among them. Most of us, including myself, will not follow an ethic of Just Do It because, like other primates, the predispositions that give rise to morality are hard-wired in our brains. If it ever occurs to me that I need some logical reason not to adopt an ethic of Just Do It, I need only recall that creatures who practiced that ethic in eons long past failed to survive. We atheists have the same emotional attachment to survival as everyone else.

Again, the author has so bamboozled himself with morality that he believes that one is somehow prohibited from defending himself unless he can give a moral reason for doing so. If we cannot point out some moral reason for our attackers to avoid such behavior, we are “helpless,” and apparently constrained to stand idly by as they slaughter us. He doesn’t realize that morality preceded both religion and reason, not the other way around. His reasons are mere after the fact rationalizations. It’s as if one couldn’t enjoy sex without first having a reason. Continuing from the article,

The wreckage of the last century should have alerted us to the danger.

Yes, the wreckage of the last century should have alerted us to a danger, but not the one the author thinks. The wreckage of the last century should have alerted us to the danger of trying to apply morality to the governing of large states, or to the relationships between them, period. What would he have us believe? That the zealots of secular religions like Communism or Nazism were any less puritanical than the past and current zealots of the traditional spiritual ones? Is it really credible that they had a Just Do It ethic? Please! Look at the history of Stalin’s great purge trials, or the fate of the dissident generals in Germany after the attempt on Hitler’s life in 1944, or read a few accounts of the Great Cultural Revolution in China. These were all quintessentially moral phenomena, and the mayhem they caused was entirely akin to the Christian slaughter of witches, or their countless wars over trivial differences in religious doctrine, or their repeated mass murders of Jews. No, my friend, what we should have learned from the wreckage of the last century is the absurdity and destructiveness of our continued attempts to apply human morality in situations for which, given its real origins, there can be no reasonable expectation that it would be in the least applicable, or result in any other outcome than more wreckage.

There are consequences to basing our actions on lies, religious or otherwise. The wreckage will continue until we learn that.

UPDATE:  The author of Shrink Wrapped immediately deleted a comment I left on his site challenging his post.  Interestingly, intolerance of dissent is a traditional characteristic of both Christians and psychoanalysts.

Vignettes from 1925

These are from various articles and authors in the May 1925 issue of H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury.

Politics:

What shall the end be? Will that race of men who for a thousand years have asserted the “right of castle,” rejected governmental interference in domestic affairs, proclaimed the right of the free man to regulate his personal habits and to rear and govern his children in accordance with the law of conscience and of love, now become subject to a self-imposed statutory tyranny which from birth to death interferes in the smallest cocerns of life? Shall we endure a legal despotism, the equivalent of which would have provoked rebellion amongst the Saxons even when under the Norman heel?

I doubt not these statutory bonds will be eventually broken. The right of the free man to live his own life, limited only be the inhibition of non-infringement upon the rights of others, will again be asserted. But before that day arrives, will the splendid symmetry of our governmental structure have been destroyed?

Alas, my friend, there is yet no light at the end of the tunnel.  Next, from an article about the Mexican border towns entitled “Hell Along the Border,”

I have studiously observed the viciousness and even the mere faults of decorum in Juarez, largest of the corrupting foci, in season and out for a least twelve seasons. I have had my glimpses at the life of the equally ill-reputed Nogales, Mexicali and Tia Juana. I have been in confidential communication with habitual visitors to Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros, Piedras Negras, and Agua Prieta. And I can find in all these towns no sins more gorgeous than those enjoyed by every Massachusetts lodge of Elks at its annual fish-fries prior to 1920.

Regarding the evangelical clergy, the televangelists of the day, immortalized by Sinclair Lewis in his Elmer Gantry,

The net result, as I say, is to inspire those of us who have any surviving respect for God with an unspeakable loathing. We gaze on all this traffic and, without knowing exactly why, we feel a sick, nauseated revulsion. We feel as we felt when we were children, and had a bright glamorous picture of Santo Claus, with his fat little belly and fairy reindeer, and then suddenly came on a vile old loafer ringing a bell over an iron pot. It seems a blasphemous mockery that men can preadch such vulgar nonsense, call it religion, and then belabor the rest of us for not being washed in the blood of the Lamb.

Concerning the latest in the hotel trade,

Whatever I might write were the latest wrinkle would not be the latest wrinkle by the time these lines get into type. But one of the latest, certainly, is radio service in every chamber.

Of anthropology, from an article entitled “The New History,”

The anthropologists have paralleled the achievements of the archeologists by making careful studies of existing primitive peoples. Ten years ago we possessed in this field only the chatty introduction by Marett, and Professor Boas’ highly scholarly but somewhat difficult little book, “The Mind of Primitive Man.” Today we have admirable general works by Goldenweiser, Lowie, Kroeber, Tozzer, Levy-Bruhl and Wissler with several more in immediate prospect. These deal acutely and lucidly with primitive institutions.

As the cognoscenti among my readers are no doubt aware, this was written on the very threshold of anthropology’s spiral into the dark ages of the Blank Slate, from which it has only recently emerged.  The good Professor Boas played a major role in pushing it over the cliff.

Concerning the value of morality in regulating society,

Once we give up the pestilent assumption that the only effective sanctions for conduct are those of law and morals, and begin to delimit clearly the field of manners, we shall be by way of discovering how powerful and how easily communicable the sense of manners is, and how efficiently it operates in the very regions where law and morals have so notoriously proven themselves inert. The authority of law and morals does relatively little to build up personal dignity, responsibility and self-respect, while the authority of manners does much… I also venture to emphasize for special notice by the Americanizers and hundred-per-centers among us, the observation of Edmund Burke that “there ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. For us to love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”

and finally, from the collection of anecdotes Mencken always included under the heading Americana,

Effects of the Higher Learning at Yale, as revealed by the answers to a questionnaire submitted to the students there:

Favorite character in world history: Napoleon, 181; Cleopatra, 7; Jeanne d’Arc, 7; Woodrow Wilson, 7; Socrates, 5; Jesus Christ, 4; Mussolini, 3. Favorite prose author: Stevenson, 24; Dumas, 22; Sabatini, 11; Anatole France, 5; Cabell, 5; Bernard Shaw, 4. Favorite magazine: Saturday Evening Post, 94; Atlantic Monthly, 24, New Republic, 3; Time Current History, 3. Favorite political party: Republican, 304; Democratic, 84; none, 22; Independent, 3. Biggest world figure of today: Coolidge, 52; Dawes, 32, Mussolini, 3; Prince of Wales, 24; J. P. Morgan, 15; Einstein, 3; Bernard Shaw, 3. What subject would you like to see added to the curriculum: Elocution and Public Speaking, 24; Business course, 8; Deplomacy, 7; Drama, 4.

Times change in 85 years.

Of John Locke and Atheist Billboards

Apropos John Locke, he’s usually considered an Enlightenment avatar of tolerance. Author of the famous A Letter Concerning Toleration, he argued that toleration of multiple religious sects deterred civil unrest and promoted an orderly society. However, he added some caveats to his plea for diversity. One of them applied to atheists. For example, from An Essay concerning Human Understanding:

And perhaps, if we should with attention mind the lives and discourses of people not so far off, we should have too much reason to fear, that many, in more civilized countries, have no very strong and clear impressions of a Deity upon their minds, and that the complaints of atheism made from the pulpit are not without reason. And though only some profligate wretches own it too barefacedly now; yet perhaps we should hear more than we do of it from others, did not the fear of the magistrate’s sword, or their neighbor’s censure, tie up people’s tongues; which, were the apprehensions of punishment or shame taken away, would as openly proclaim their atheism as their lives do.

Atheists have generally been a minority with “different” beliefs, and, as such, a predictable outgroup in a species, such as our own, with an innate tendency to hate, ostracize and despise outgroups. Specious “good-sounding” reasons have always been invented to justify that hate, and Locke had his own, but the Amity-Enmity Complex has always been the real reason. Fortunately, we have been making encouraging progress towards gaining an understanding of human nature in recent years. There is some hope that society at large will finally grasp the significance of the Complex and its disastrous role in promoting the war and violence against minorities that has been so ubiquitous in human history. Perhaps the day will come when most of us will be able to immediately recognize irrational manifestations of ingroup-outgroup behavior, and ostracize and condemn those who fail to control that most destructive aspect of our nature instead of their victims. However, that day has not yet come, and so we remain on the treadmill of trying to stamp out each of the potentially infinite ways in which the Complex can manifest itself as if it were something new under the sun. We invent new names for each of them as the evil they cause becomes intolerable, whether racism, or anti-Semitism, or xenophobia, or homophobia, never seeming to realize that they all have the same root cause, and new isms and phobias will always be waiting just around the corner to take their place until we finally tear up the root itself.

So it is with atheists. Things being as they are, we too must fight our own little piece of the battle in detail. Billboards are one recent manifestation of that struggle. The Friendly Atheist notes a typical reaction to them, in this case from Marcia Segelstein at OneNewsNow:

I guess I just don’t understand. Christians (along with Jews and Muslims) gather in groups to worship. Atheists don’t gather not to worship, so why seek out members? What’s there to be a member of? And why should atheists care about stopping worshippers who are just “going through the motions”? Do they think they might get their hands on money once pledged to churches?

Trying to tear down the belief system of the world’s foremost religion — Christianity — is what seems intolerant to me. Placing prominent ads declaring the birth of Christ to be a myth seems downright hostile. To my mind, these campaigns feel defensive, as though atheists are weighted down with chips on their shoulders, or feel left out of some club.

Well, Marcia, atheists gather in groups for the same reason other people with like interests gather in groups; because we are by nature social animals.   The billboard campaigns certainly are defensive, and rightly so.  If you still don’t understand why, read Locke’s remark above about the “magistrate’s sword,” or peruse the history of Spain under the Inquisition.  If you think “it can’t happen here,” Sinclair Lewis wrote a book with that title that might interest you.  There is nothing hostile about disputing Christian or any other religious beliefs.  Is it really unimportant whether we base our lives and actions on the truth or not?  If the truth is important, how are we ever to approach it unless we are allowed to think about and discuss it?

John Locke and the Blank Slate

I’ve always been dubious of attempts to trace the origins of ideas back through generations of philosophers. They were, after all, individuals, and to understand them, one must take that into account. In creating such philosophical genealogies, one should consider the fact that, while thinkers separated in time by centuries may have had superficially similar ideas, it is far from certain that they understood the ideas in quite the same way, or endorsed them for the same reasons.

Take, for example, the case of John Locke. He is often cited as the father of the modern incarnation of the Blank Slate. In our own day, the “Blank Slate” refers to the notion that, for all practical purposes, there is no such thing as innate human nature, and our behavior is almost entirely determined by what we learn and experience. The idea was in vogue among behavioral scientists who should have known better through much of the 20th century before finally falling into the well-deserved disrepute it enjoys today. Locke seems a perfect candidate for the “father” of the idea. It’s all there in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The very title of Book I of the essay is, “Neither Principles nor Ideas are Innate.” The problem is that what Locke meant by “principles and ideas” was not quite the same thing as what later day anthropologists and psychologists understood under the rubric of “human nature,” nor is it likely that more than a handful of them would have agreed with his reasoning if they had actually taken the trouble to read his book. The idea that they were somehow “inspired” by him is the type of stuff that makes good filler in philosophy textbooks, but is highly questionable in fact.

For starters, Locke didn’t have the luxury of sitting on the shoulders of Darwin. An Englishman of the religion-drenched 17th century, nothing was more certain to him than the existence of God. He related his belief in God to his rejection of innate ideas in a way that one would look in vain to see repeated in 20th century journals of the behavioral sciences;

If the idea of God be not innate, not other can be supposed innate.

and he assumed that, if we had innate ideas, they must have been written on our minds by the hand of God. For example,

Hence naturally flows the great variety of opinions concerning moral rules which are to be found among men, according to the different sorts of happiness they have a prospect of, or propose to themselves; which could not be if practical principles were innate, and imprinted in our minds immediately by the hand of God.

and, referring to five supposed “innate ideas” set forth in a contemporary book by Lord Herbert,

First, that these five propositions are either not all, or more than all, those common notions written on our minds by the finger of God.

Locke also believed in a spiritual as surely as he believed in a physical world. Hence, if innate ideas existed, they would not have been written in the physical makeup of an organ like the brain, but on our souls. In his words,

It might very well be expected that these (innate) principles should be perfectly known to naturals; which being stamped immediately on the soul, (as these men suppose,) can have no dependence on the constitution or organs of the body, the only confessed difference between them and others.

When he spoke of “ideas and principles,” Locke had something very different in mind than the innate predispositions that we share with many animals, against the existence of which the Blank Slate orthodoxy of the 20th century thundered down its anathemas for so long in vain. Rather, Locke referred to principles that could be clearly set down in words and reasoned about in a way that excluded all other animals but ourselves. He referred to them as “speculative maxims,” and, since they were inscribed by the hand of God himself, they must necessarily be universal:

…this argument of universal consent, which is made use of to prove innate principles, seems to me a demonstration that there are none such: because there are none to which all mankind give an universal assent.

and, referring to moral principles,

But, since it is certain that most men’s practices, and some men’s open professions, have either questioned or denied these principles, it is impossible to establish an universal consent, (though we should look for it only amongst grown men,) without which it is impossible to conclude them innate.

Innate morality was inconceivable to Locke because he could not conceptualize morality as other than a set of clear rules that could be spelled out in words, and the resulting moral “maxims” then reasoned about and proved:

Another reason that makes me doubt of any innate practical principles is, that I think there cannot any one moral rule be proposed whereof a man may not justly demand and reason: which would be perfectly ridiculous and absurd if they were innate.

Furthermore, innate moral rules were impossible, because, if they existed, they must have been inscribed in our minds by God himself, and we could not be unaware that he had put them there, and would certainly punish their breach:

From what has been said, I think we may safely conclude, that whatever practical rule is in any place generally and with allowance broken, cannot be supposed innate; it being impossible that men should, without shame or fear, confidently and serenely, break a rule which they could not but evidently know that God had set up, and would certainly punish the breach of, (which they must, if it were innate,) to a degree to make it a very ill bargain to be the transgressor.

and,

If, therefore, anything be imprinted on the minds of all men as a law, all men must have a certain and unavoidable knowledge that certain and unavoidable punishment will attend the breach of it.

It would seem, then, that when we attempt to lump Locke’s Blank Slate with that of a 20th century anthropologist, we are comparing apples and oranges. It’s hard to imagine that knowledge of a source of innate morality as different from the hand of God as evolution by natural selection would have had no impact on his thought. He was far from rejecting any notion of “human nature” carte blanche. For example,

Nature, I confess, has put into man a desire of happiness and an aversion to misery: these indeed are innate practical principles which (as practical principles ought) do continue constantly to operate and influence all our actions without ceasing.

and,

Principles of actions indeed there are lodged in men’s appetites.

In a word, then, it’s not really fair to tar Locke, or, for that matter, Rousseau and his “noble savage” with the same brush as the experts of a later day because they didn’t take the trouble to be born before the publication of The Origin of Species. The same excuse cannot be made for the obscurantist “behavioral scientists” of the 20th century.

Jesus and the Ants

The Smithsonian’s “A Fire in my Belly” video exhibit, which depicts Jesus on the cross being eaten by ants, at least has the virtue of accurately reflecting what the Institution has become and the nature of the people who run it. Bill Quick’s take at Daily Pundit:

You think you’re so “transgressive,” so “daring,” so “cutting edge,” you cheap-ass poseur pieces of shit?

I’ll show you daring. I’ll show you cutting edge.

Switch out your ant-drenched Jesus for an ant-riddled Mohammed.

Go ahead, you gutless, cowardly pussies calling yourselves artists. I dare you.

I’d say that’s about right, although expressed in somewhat intemperate language.

Hitch and Blair Debate Religion

The televised event took place before a 2700 strong audience in Toronto. According to an article in the Telegraph,

(Hitchens) appeared to win over the audience, which voted two-to-one in his favour following the debate, which argued the motion “be it resolved, religion is a force for good in the world”.

With all due respect to the former Prime Minister, this one must have been like shooting fish in a barrel for the likes of Hitchens. It’s hard to argue that Christianity has been “a force for good in the world” in light of the tens of millions who lost their lives in the religious wars it inspired, or the institutionalized intolerance and bigotry it has been responsible for, or the hundreds of thousands of innocent women hung or burned as “witches” in Europe during the Middle Ages, or its promotion of the mass torture of “heretics,” or its repeated massacres of Jews and other religious minorities. As for Islam, it is not the predominant religion in North Africa, or Syria, or Turkey, or parts of Europe because it is a “religion of peace,” but because it was imposed by force. Anyone with any doubt about whether it is a “force for good in the world” in spite of its bloody history, its institutionalized oppression of women, and its rejection of the separation of mosque and state must have been asleep since 911.

It doesn’t really matter, though. What does matter is whether these religions are true or not. If one of them is true (and they can’t both be true at the same time because they are mutually exclusive), then the question of whether it’s a “force for good” becomes moot. We then become the subjects of an absolute tyrant with a smiley face, and we can like it or burn in hell for billions and trillions of years, just for starters. As Hitchens puts it, “Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects, in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick, and commanded to be well. And over us, to supervise this, is installed a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea.” Edward Fitzgerald summed up our situation in similar, but more poetic terms, in his fanciful “translation” of the Rubaiyat. Don’t let the prospect depress you, though. For reasons set forth by a simple French priest named Jean Meslier in his Testament more than two and a half centuries ago, and improved on very little in the intervening years, the chances that we will sizzle in hell forever for the pleasure and edification of the elect are rather slim.