What good is Mars?

Honji is skeptical about the Mars Curiosity mission. It probably won't bring us any information or science we plebes can use in our daily lives. Even if it did, we would probably put that information to reprehensible uses. And the money spent could be put to better uses. But Honji's analysis is too narrow, and his economic reasoning misses the point.

The space program in general is pretty easy to justify. First, the space program has more than paid for itself; it's brought us so much value — from communications satellites to GPS to Tang — that if NASA were a private company they would have earned enough money to spend a few billion dollars painting the NASA logo on the Moon. And, if you'll excuse the terrible pun, curiosity is its own reward; the day we stop being curious about the world around us, over and above what we need to find our next meal, our next safe place to sleep, and our next fuck, is the day we lose an important part of what makes us human. But a thousand other skeptics and science geeks could address the proximate value of Curiosity better than I could. Instead of extolling the virtues of Curiosity, I want to look at the project as an economist.

Honji complains that Curiosity will cost "two and half billion dollars" (which I can't help but hear in Dr. Evil's voice)*. That sounds like a lot, but for an economy the size of the United States, it's chump change. Our GDP is about $14 trillion dollars, that's $14 thousand billion dollars. Assuming all Curiosity, therefore, cost 2.6/14000, i.e. a little less than 0.02% of our national economy. In comparison, 0.02% of the 2010 median household income of $45800 is $9.7, about the cost of a movie ticket. It's also almost exactly what I earn in an hour. If Honji is concerned about the cost, I'll be happy to contribute an extra hour's pay to cover his cost, and I'll generously let him use GPS without calling him a hypocrite. Indeed, I'll contribute ten hours' pay to cover me and nine other chintzy bastards.

*According to Thom Patterson at CNN.com, the cost is $2.6 billion.

More importantly, Honji claims the money could be better spent elsewhere, such as universal healthcare and housing the homeless. In this sense, Honji is thinking about the economy exactly as the capitalist ruling class would like him to think. The truth is that, never mind the triviality of NASA's entire $17+ billion budget, not even the outright waste of substantial labor and natural resources (e.g. the Iraq war, almost two hundred military bases around the world, and all the other costs of maintaining our Imperial prestige) prevents us from having universal health care and decent housing. The reason we do not have universal health care is not that it "too expensive" in any meaningful economic sense. The reason we do not have universal health care is that we as a society have decided that poor people do not deserve health care. We have homeless people because we as a society have decided that extremely poor people, including many people with severe mental illness, do not deserve to have a place to live. We have more than 8% unemployment because we as a society have decided that millions of people do not deserve to contribute their labor to society, and it is only squeamishness that prevents us from just turning them into Soylent Green. Our social ills are not in any sense economic; they are entirely moral and political. We have the society we choose, not the society that the natural world forces on us.

We cannot be limited by money itself. Money itself is a pure abstraction, a pure social construction. Money is not itself physical; at best, money represents something physical. It represents the constraints on our economic activity: we can't do everything, so we use money in a complex system to decide what we want to do. In theory, we are limited by only three things: the amount of various kinds of physical stuff (iron, germanium, carbon, water, etc.) that has been stored by nature in the Earth and in the Solar System; the amount of physical energy available to us; and the amount of human labor available. In practice, however, none of those things actually limit us. Excluding oil, we have enough stuff stored in just the Earth to last us centuries, and there are orders of magnitude more stuff waiting for us in the Solar System. We don't need oil for energy; we have again orders of magnitude more free energy falling on the Earth every year as sunlight than all the oil, coal, and natural gas in the ground. And we have not come anywhere near to harnessing the labor available from the people who currently inhabit the Earth.

In practice, the only limitations that money represents are the limits imposed by our will and imagination. We can have globally universal health care, globally universal decent housing, globally universal food security, globally universal education, and, if we were to choose to do so, we could have them in less than a decade, the time it would take to sort out the details. We do not do so not because we cannot, but because we choose not.

Fundamentally, Honji shows the attitude of the capitalist ruling class. The capitalist ruling class would like us to believe that scraps are all there is, and the best the mass of humanity can do is fight over them. This is a lie. Like Honji, the capitalist ruling class believes that the mass of humanity does not deserve greatness; indeed we do not deserve even dignity or security, and it would be a crime against justice to provide it to us.

More problems with Catholicism

In his comments theObserver has some interesting points to make on Longenecker and Heschmeyer's ideas about philosophy and Catholic theology. I have slightly edited the comments for style and formatting.

The Roman Catholic church asserts atheists do not understand Catholicism; that "liberal" theology is responsibly for a breakdown in the indoctrination - sorry - the catechizing of children; that once we fully understand the true teaching of the Church, we will all fall on our knees before the Pope.

The whole debate centres on the primacy of epistemology vs ontology. The thought the church pillaged from the classical philosophers was primary ontology in nature: what things exist and what is their nature. Epistemology was always secondary and usually boiled down to "because we said so" or "it's a mystery." Thomas Aquinas and his Five Ways are largely ontological and drawn from Aristotle.

But the entire foundations of the Greek-Christian worldview collapsed during the scientific revolution when the sheer scale of the mistakes in the Aristotelian-derived understanding of the natural universe became apparent. The switch from ontology to epistemology then is best understood as an attempt to fix the mistakes of the past, and we are therefore justified in dismissing the ontology-based arguments of Thomas Aquinas (who continues to have a greater influence on the Roman Church that biblical Jesus) as invalid. Heschmeyer claims that "no atheist has satisfactorily rebutted [Aquinas' five ways] arguments," but what is there to rebut? Aquainas claimed knowledge about the nature of the universe that he simply could not have. Heschmeyer offers no argument why we should even take the time to read the Five Ways, let alone treat it seriously. Even if we accept logical proof for the existence of God(s), we end up with polytheism which, let's be honest, no one really cares about because the conflict is, as noted in Larry's earlier post, primarily political.

Catholics and other Christian sects have no method of epistemology whatsoever and therefore must resort to medieval ontology, which we are then expected to take seriously. Catholics can only settle disputes by appealing to the authority of the Pope and through coercing dissenting voices into silence, a process currently underway in traditional strongholds of Catholic power. The entire history of the Christian church is of debates settled by force, political expediency, or blind chance.

But of course, it's easier for the priests and bullshit artists to whine about Logical Positivism than to deal with their lack of sound epistemology; that a large part of their scholastic traditional is by post-enlightenment (even post-romantic standards) nearly completely worthless, deserving only a footnote in a history of science textbook. Priests can sneer, but the burden is on the church to explain why their ontology-based scholastic traditional is worth engaging with, not least because if accepted, it leads to a huge shift in how we treat gender equality, reproduction, homosexuals, other species, free speech, artistic freedom and so on.

Most atheists are willing to accept that science is not the only form of knowledge, that film, art, literature, etc. have lessons to teach too. But these forms of art are highly subjective - it's the meeting point of an individual mind and an external text. That is to say, I might relate to a piece of fiction and learn from the thoughts and actions of a character while the same passage may be meaningless to another.

Interestingly, most atheists are happy to accept this subjectivity, but most of the religious people I have spoken with are not. Religious people seem to like their rules and their regulations, and they have a general problem accepting subjectivity and pluralism of thought and experience in matters other than claiming religious experiences. It was Aquinas after all who produced entire volumes detailing hierarchies of thought crimes and "unnatural" acts along with their appropriate punishment. Yet Catholics frequently accuse atheists of crude reductionism.

In Europe we are heading into a "year of faith," a year long, European-wide saturated marketing campaign paid for by the Roman church and aimed at revitalizing its brand and increasing its political power. And that largely sums up the Roman church - a glorified political party asserting knowledge it simply cannot have while whoring itself through the same manipulation techniques used to sell soft drinks and cars.

5 Things Nobody Tells You About Being Poor

5 Things Nobody Tells You About Being Poor:

Being poor is like a game of poker where if you lose, the other players get to fuck you. And if you win, the dealer fucks you.

1. You Get Charged for Using Your Own Money
2. There is an Industry That Profits by Keeping You Poor
3. No Credit Can be Just as Damaging as Bad Credit
4. Your Next Expensive Disaster is Always Around the Corner
5. You're Always in Survival Mode

What is atheism?

This essay about atheism (via Geoff Arnold) is pretty good. Let me say it again in my own style.

Atheism is, I think, the decisive rejection of the idea that the supernatural is a good way to explain the world. Might there be some sort of supernatural being? I dunno. More importantly, what does the phrase "supernatural being" even mean? If we look at the ideas we've traditionally ascribed to the word "god", we consistently see ideas of one or more personal, teleological beings whose will and desire are explanations for observed phenomena. The pagan gods made the lightning strike and made winter occur; the Christian god performs wonders and miracles. The ideas of god historically underlie political legitimacy: The king and the priesthood rule by direct dispensation from the local deity. The ideas of god historically provide psychological comfort: In the gods, one can rely on a responsible parent, who will at least provide sustenance and justice. All of these ideas are wrong.

To reject these ideas is more than just to eliminate the statement, "I believe some God exists" from one's mind. Yes, that's the dictionary definition of atheism, and it has some use against various theistic straw men, but anything more than the most trivial, nominal atheism requires rejection of the supernatural. To the atheist, science becomes the way to explain the world (or, more precisely, the way to construct explanations). Only our own moral intuitions — as subjective, limited and labile as they might be — underlie political legitimacy. The atheist relies on himself or herself for psychological comfort. We are, in short, free beings in a natural world, free to shape that world how we will, subject only to the constraints imposed by the impersonal and uncaring laws of physics. We are as well free to fail; there is no parent who will swoop in and rescue us from our mistakes or catastrophes. To me — because I am a mature adult — such freedom is an unqualified good.

If you're religious, I'm going to ask you two questions: What fear are you unable to face? Whom do you want to oppress? If I don't get an answer to either question, I'm going to press you on how you consider yourself religious in the first place. Vague mystical bullshit doesn't count: A difference that makes no difference is no difference, and there's no difference between a stone-cold atheist like myself and a theist who relies exclusively on mystical mumbo-jumbo. (If you want to pretend you're religious to get along in society, that's your own business. But do us all a favor and don't be a hypocritical jackass; refrain from attacking your fellow atheists to get on the good side of the religious. It doesn't work anyway; they'll hate you more for lying.) But 99 times out of 100, underneath the mystical mumbo-jumbo, I'll find an answer to one of those questions.

Eight times out of a ten it'll be the last question, and the answer will be niggers, fags, sluts and/or the lazy, slovenly, dirty poor*. There will always be some elaborate rationalization, of course — few people can stomach being openly racist, homophobic, sexist, or classist — but I'm completely uninterested in how you rationalize being an asshole. Yes, 80% of religious people are just garden-variety bigots. (Most of rest are usually terrified of disappointing their (real) mommy and daddy. I don't buy the whole "fear of death" bullshit; anyone who gets in a car or crosses the street is not really afraid of death. The few remaining are just there for the show, which I will admit can be quite entertaining, if that's your cup of tea.)

The "philosophy" of theism is tiresome. The whole edifice of philosophical bullshit around theism exists only rationalize and obfuscate assholery and cowardice. I'm at the point where if you call yourself a Christian or a Muslim I'm just going to silently conclude you're a bigot and/or a coward. I might be polite to your face (unless you say something openly bigoted or ridiculous), but I'll always have a reserve of contempt for your character, intelligence and maturity.

*I can usually do it in four questions: Do you oppose affirmative action? Do you oppose gay marriage? Do you oppose abortion on demand? Are you a Republican? If you answer any of these questions in the affirmative, please remember that I'm not in the least bit interested in how you rationalize being an asshole.

It's true, of course, that one can find other reasons to a bigot or a coward; bigotry and cowardice might be the only reasons to be religious, but religion is hardly the only way to rationalize bigotry and cowardice. I'm no more approve of non-religious justifications for assholery (e.g. Libertarianism or Randianism) than I approve of theism, but I'm only one guy, and I have only so much time and energy.

Fundamentally, that's what atheism really is: science, personal moral responsibility (if you're going to be an asshole, at least be one on your own account, not a god's), and adult psychological maturity.

Religion is bullshit

As George Carlin (PBUH) put it, "Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told."

That's fundamentally the position of most atheists: That all the God talk of the popes and priests, theologians, rabbis, imams, gurus and assorted prophets is just that: bullshit, through and through. Arguing that religious bullshit comes in a variety of flavors doesn't help. Arguing that some particular atheist has misidentified some precise flavor of bullshit doesn't help. Whatever these guys (and they're mostly guys, surprise surprise) have to say, you can take the God bullshit out of it and they're saying the same thing, except without divine authority.

The point is not that people who bullshit others, have been bullshitted, or have bullshitted themselves cannot do good things. They can, of course. They can at times even bullshit themselves into doing good things. The point is that whatever good the religious do, they could do the exact same thing without the bullshit, and almost always do it better. Indeed, what's the point of telling me that you're doing something good only because you've bullshitted yourself into thinking that an omnipotent god has bullied or guilted you into doing it? Until you told me that, I kinda liked you for doing something nice; now you tell me you didn't really care about the nice, you cared about the God behind the nice.

You might as well tell me, "I got a nice necklace for my wife."

"Oh, how thoughtful of you."

"No, I hate the bitch, but if I don't suck up to her, she'll divorce me and take the kids and all the money."

"Well, aren't you the model husband."

One thing that strikes me, and I would imagine strikes many other atheists, is how religion is not just bullshit, but such obvious and egregious bullshit. And Carlin's caricature of religious belief,

An invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time! But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money!

is the best the religious have to offer; all the dodges and metaphysical work-arounds are even worse bullshit.

It really is astonishing, and the first thing that comes to my mind is: If you believe that — if you're proud you believe that — you could believe anything. It's the intellectual equivalent of stumbling across Dexter's bodies: If you can do that, you can do anything. How can I trust anything you say or do? It's not a matter of making a mistake, or a moment of weakness, or of not thinking something all the way through: It's an intentional and conscious abandonment of basic intellectual standards of critical thinking: the admission that you find critical thinking is at best optional, perhaps accidental, and at worst contemptible:

Reason is the Devil’s greatest whore; by nature and manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the Devil’s appointed whore; whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom… Throw dung in her face to make her ugly. She is and she ought to be drowned in baptism… She would deserve, the wretch, to be banished to the filthiest place in the house, to the closets.

The topic of the resurrection has come up in comments. But if a person supposedly rose from the dead today, I would need the entire weight of the scientific community, (with James Randi and Penn and Teller for good measure) working for years to substantiate the event for me to believe it. If I merely saw it with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe it. Not because I have some sort of bias, but because it would be more plausible that I had been fooled and tricked in some clever way, as clever stage magicians have fooled and tricked me a thousand times before. Bury the event two thousand years in the past in a pre-technological, pre-scientific society, and it's completely unrealistic to hope for even the preponderance of evidence, much less proof beyond a reasonable doubt. If your religious belief, how you live your life, who you marry and love and hate and give your loyalty to, depends on the fact of the resurrection, and depends on proving that fact according to ordinary standards of historical investigation, you're doomed from the start. We can barely make a credible — albeit controversial — case that any such person as Jesus actually existed; how can you even hope to make a credible case that an event that contradicts everything we know about biology and physics using that same body of evidence? Just undertaking the project with any degree of seriousness undermines any claim the investigator might have to a commitment to critical, rational thought.

It is the "if you believe that, you could believe anything" notion that fills many atheists with an outrage born of fear. Critical thought isn't perfect, of course, and many critical thinkers have done abominable things, but without critical thought, what hope do we have of ever improving? Throughout history it has always been the realization that, "Hey, wait a minute, that [women are inferior/blacks should be enslaved/Jews drink the blood of babies/etc./ad nauseam] just doesn't make any fucking sense, no matter what the priest says God says," that has begun any moral transformation. Critical thinking isn't a panacea, but it's the only treatment we know that can work, to lasting effect.

The Republican goals

I'm struggling with great difficulty to figure out the ultimate goal of the Republicans and Randian fascists. On the one hand, they've mastered the strategy and tactics of the struggle for power within the capitalist class and American "democracy"; their victory is almost assured in 2012 (a right-wing Republican president, a Republican legislature and a Republican-friendly Supreme Court). But what then? It's like a dog chasing a car: what will he do if he catches it?

The Republican party was in almost exactly the same position after 9/11: Formal control of the government and carte blanche among the people to use that formal power arbitrarily. They could have sent a million soldiers to Afghanistan and Iraq, instead of a few hundred thousand, and they could have completely conquered them with Roman ruthlessness. They could have obliterated the Democratic party and liberal/progressive political organization, either with mass arrests or relentless propaganda. They could even, I think, have pretty much overtly pressured "liberal" Supreme Court justices to resign and packed the court to make their assumption of formal governmental power absolute.

They didn't do any of this: whatever their goals were (and we can feel confident that adhering to democratic standards of fair play are not among them), they failed to realize them, and they failed for reasons other than lack of opportunity. I don't know why they failed. I suspect they concentrated on "getting to the Superbowl" that when they got there, they didn't have the oomph to win it. To the extent that they had a plan, it was the narrow, unimaginative and immature idea to fight a few cool war: when they won it, everyone would like them.

The thing is, what do you do with power? In 1940, it was pretty clear what power was for: to take over the world. The Germans, Japanese, Americans and Russians all wanted to take over the world: In the 1980s, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the internal collapse of Chinese communism, the Americans finally won: we literally took over the world. It was a hell of a lot of fun winning the world, but actually running it, not so much.

The Nazis didn't take power just so they could act like assholes, they were assholes because that's what was necessary to be to take power. The world was up for grabs, and they wanted a try.

So I have to ask myself (and I still don't know the answer) why do the Republicans want power? Why do they want the kind of power they can get by being gigantic assholes? Why bother to oppose universal health care? Who cares if we have a $2 trillion stimulus? Why let 30,000,000 working-age adults sit around with their thumbs up their asses not even producing for the exclusive benefit of the ruling class? Over what is one faction of the 1% who own most everything fighting the other faction? They're not fighting for any standard of living; the capitalist ruling class avoids sybaritic decadence by choice, not necessity. They're not fighting over the world: they own the world. (They could, if they chose, subjugate the angry Islamic masses in six months. That they don't do so indicates only that they don't want to; they lack only the desire or will, not the means.)

Are they really fighting, as Orwell opined, just for the power to be as arbitrary, assholy and cruel as possible? Is the banal dystopia of 1984 really what hundreds of thousands of years of human development and ten thousand years of civilization, art, culture, science, philosophy, literature and human effort is leading up to?

Obama and FDR

Some people have compared Barack Obama to Franklin D. Roosevelt. The hope is that Obama, like Roosevelt, will take strong, positive action to correct and recover from the current economic depression. While there are some similarities — both campaigned as "centrists" — the differences outweigh the similarities.

There are substantial differences in the political climate. Roosevelt took office in 1933, more than three years after the trigger of the Great Depression. Obama, on the other hand, will take office only months after the trigger of this depression. Roosevelt thus did not have to take the blame for the half-measures and incompetent management that inevitably follow a true catastrophe. Obama, on the other hand, does not have someone like Hoover to point to and say, "Whatever we do, we know we can't do that." (Bush doesn't count; Bush has done nothing to try to fix the depression, and it's trivially obvious that Obama cannot cause another depression.)

Roosevelt took office near the bottom of the Great Depression; whatever he did, absent gross incompetence, conditions could not seriously worsen. But even if Obama were to act perfectly — at least within the confines of the capitalist system he unreservedly endorses — just the lag between a Keynesian stimulus and its macroeconomic effects will make conditions during the mid-term elections of 2010 worse than they now are. The Republican party will use these worsening conditions to great effect: I predict in 2010 a narrow Republican majority in at least the House, if not the Senate as well.

Roosevelt took office with a vigorous progressive and socialist movement in the US. He was under serious political pressure to move to the left. Obama takes office with a moribund progressive movement; the only external political pressure he has is to move to the right, to rescue the capitalist class at the expense of labor and the middle class. The only populist pressure he faces is to increase his support for religion and conservative Christianity. The mainstream progressives seem terrified of making even the smallest political demand on Obama: Even criticism of his choosing a misogynist, homophobic, neoconservative, religious fanatic is deprecated and dismissed as irrelevant. "Give Obama a chance!" they say, but WTF? He has his chance: He'll be President of the United States for fuck's sake. The mainstream progressives refuse to pressure him; they'll be so fucking surprised when he doesn't deliver on the tiniest bit of their agenda.

Most importantly, though, Obama faces economic circumstances fundamentally different from those Roosevelt faced. Industry in the 1930's was still incredibly labor-intensive, and the labor pool was national, not global. There was enormous room for economic growth, and economic growth then caused a labor shortage. A Keynesian stimulus (especially the enormous stimulus provided by the war of American Imperialism) paid off almost immediately, both for capitalists and for labor.

Modern economic circumstances are very different. Globalization dilutes the local effect of a Keynsian stimulus; as the French discovered in the 1980s, a stimulus at home will be spent abroad.

Furthermore, our current industrial production is extremely thorough and efficient: There is little scope to produce more goods, and there is little scope to produce goods will less labor. The only place the economy is actually expanding is in very highly skilled labor — which leaves little room for short-term benefit for the hundreds of millions of people who do not already have an advanced college degree or specialized training. And even in highly skilled labor we're reaching the point of diminishing economic returns. A Keynesian stimulus is debt, without enormous economic expansion, the debt just moves the problem to tomorrow. Both the dot-com and housing bubbles were debt-driven stimuli, and look where we are now.

Hoping that Obama will follow the mold of FDR, hoping that the capitalist class will have the wisdom and foresight to actually keep the system running requires a degree of blind faith, magical thinking and willful ignorance that would shame a cretinist.

Revolution and Reform

The other night I attended a debate between Larry Everest, revolutionary communist and author of Oil, Power and Empire, and Norman Solomon, progressive Democrat and author of Made Love, Got War.

The debate crystallized some of my own ideas regarding revolution and reform.

Norman Solomon made a good point: Revolution is years away at best, and might be impossible — we won't know for sure until a revolution is successful. Until we have an actual revolution, it is better to do what we can to work within the system for progressive change. In theory, I agree: you don't refuse to rescue a drowning person just because your efforts to have a dangerous beach closed have not yet succeeded.

But in practice, I find Solomon's position hollow. For forty years, I've watched the Democratic party cave time and again to the conservative, pro-business, anti-populist, pro-religion and sometimes explicitly fascist agenda. And this blatant appeasement has become progressively worse, culminating in the Democratic party's utter inability to thwart the agenda of the Bush administration between 2006-2008 — despite the fact that Bush is the weakest, least popular president ever; arguably the worst president in American history. Choosing the Democratic party as a vehicle to fight against the Republican conservative agenda is as moronic as betting on the Washington Generals to defeat the Harlem Globetrotters.

Worse yet, progressive Democrats have shown nothing but blatant appeasement to the conservative wing of the Democratic party — and its blatantly clear that Barack Obama represents this wing. Many progressive democrats object to criticism of the Obama administration — not because it's wrong, but because somehow Obama is so fragile that criticism might convince Obama to back away from the minuscule progressive agenda he might support on his own.

It's a fundamental rule of negotiation that you do not get what you do not demand. If you want something, you not only have to ask for it, you have to fight for it. Coming to the table ready to "compromise" is nothing but appeasement. You have to fight for your adversary to compromise, and you have to make your adversary fight for your own concessions.

This is such a fundamental point of negotiation that it becomes difficult to attribute the persistent strain of appeasement in the Democratic party and the so-called "progressive" wing of the Democratic to anything other than gross stupidity or rank hypocrisy. The Democrats are demanding nothing of the Republicans, and the progressive Democrats are demanding nothing of the party as a whole.

I was watching some political documentary a while ago, and Barney Frank (D-MA) made a perspicacious comment (which I'll have to paraphrase from memory): "Do you vote? No? Then what do I care what you think?" Left unsaid, though, is the corollary: "Will you vote for me no matter what I do? Yes? Then what do I care what you think?"

There's an important sense in which Barack Obama is actually worse than John McCain. Obviously, Obama is not an explicitly theocratic fucktard like McCain; Obama is a bright guy, and I'm sure he means well, but he knows precisely what the capitalist imperialist system demands of him, and he was supported by capitalist elite because they know he will deliver. Obama is a palliative, not a cure. A palliative is just fine when it relieves suffering while one is curing the underlying disease. But a palliative is actively bad when it removes the motivation of pain for curing the underlying condition while it worsens. And that is precisely what the Obama administration aims to do.

A McCain administration would have given tremendous impetus for progressives to actually organize. "Let's make the patient sicker," says Dr. House, "so we can diagnose the disease and cure it before it kills the patient." An Obama administration just masks the symptoms and has visibly and provably sucked the oxygen from the mainstream progressive movement.

Obama will not end the occupation of Iraq: he's said so. Worse yet, a half-assed withdrawal will be seen by the Iraqi people as a weakness to be exploited, not a victory to be consolidated. One must grasp the nettle firmly: we'll see an escalation of the war in Iraq as Obama tries to tiptoe out.

Obama will not end the occupation of Afghanistan; indeed he aims to expand it. He is no friend of women or abortion rights. He is no friend of gays. He is no friend of secularists. He is no friend of labor.

He cannot, even if he has good intentions, fix the economy. It is beyond repair. He cannot deliver universal health care: the Republican party is viscerally and fundamentally opposed, and Obama's willingness to compromise will again be seen a weakness to be exploited, which it is indeed.

Obama is no friend, no friend at all, of true progressivism, a progressivism that seeks any sort of substantive change, and not just the rhetorical window-dressing of vacuous slogans on the same old oppressive bullshit.

I'd love to work within the system for progressive change, substantive change. But it's the plain truth that even the most mild progressivism has been not just locked out of actual participation in politics, but anesthetized into a coma by vapid sloganeering. Reform is completely off the table, at least any reform more substantive than, "Hey, let's be more discreet about demolishing the underpinnings of liberal capitalist democracy."

There's just no choice but to do what we can, however ineffective, for a revolution.

Quotation of the Day

Because he is still very much a True Believer, Sully [Andrew Sullivan, "high from huffing Reagan’s jock and Thatcher’s panties"] is not capable of looking Conservatism square in eye and seeing that Dubya and McSame are not its aberrations, but its apotheosis. He has shaken off some of the lesser, uglier doctrinal teachings of his faith, but still clings fiercely to the abstract, rapturous purity of its core dogma and will probably never be able to wrap his head around the fact that Ayn Rand's little wingnut terrarium is not a heroic creed, but a moral spider hole for misanthropes, rich degenerates and rich degenerate-wannabes.

-- driftglass

Respect? Don't hold your breath

Recent commenter the_world_in_my_eyes says, "Agnostics are individuals who say 'Since God has not shown himself, we have no idea about whether he exists or not'."

This is precisely what I mean by bullshit philosophical hair-splitting. Since they have not shown themselves, we have no idea whether or not invisible elves exist who are really running around pushing things towards the ground. Since they have not shown themselves, we have no idea whether or not unicorns, trolls, fairies, witches or wizards exist. Indeed, since we don't know anything with certainty, the_world_in_my_eyes would, to be consistent, have to argue that we have no idea about anything.

This kind of radical philosophical skepticism is fine for college sophomores and second-rate professors of comparative literature at third-rate state colleges, but serious people with work to do have no time or patience for such bullshit. We are not certain, but a lack of certainty is a very long way off from "no idea".

And what does this bullshit hair-splitting have to do with religion? There are millions of people who believe God does "show himself", that He hates faggots, commies, atheists, LIEberals, EVILutionists, scientists, abortionists, sluts, heretics, iconoclasts, niggers, kikes, spics... indeed anyone who doesn't look exactly the same and believe exactly the same set of ludicrous superstitions that one's fuhrer pastor teaches. And God will punish those horrible people with infinite suffering for eternity, and these millions are well and truly pleased that God will do so. And just in case it slips God's mind, they're happy to lend Him a hand.

What kind of ridiculous god doesn't do anything? What kind of scaredey-cat god hides behind my couch? Trying to associate such a bullshit idea to the kind of religion we see every day is as contemptible as trying to defend rape by pointing out that masturbation never hurt anyone.

We don't need a god that wants everyone to be happy; we already know that everyone wants to be happy. We don't need a god to be kind and helpful to other people; we've spent the last 100,000 years evolving our brain, and the last 10,000 years evolving our social ideas, to be kind and helpful to others: everyone wins when we're nice to each other, and everyone loses when we're mean to each other. We don't need God to show us what's right before our eyes. A god who gives nothing, tells nothing, shows nothing, does nothing that we can't do for ourselves is no god at all.

The question is simple: The idea is that a God exists, not some bullshit peekaboo god but a real God, a God with some fucking stones, a God who makes demands on human morality, demands that cannot be justified according to rational, scientific thought, mutual benefit and evolved and socialized human empathy. Do you believe that or not? Maybe it's true. And maybe we really should shoot abortion doctors. Maybe we really should crucify heretics. Maybe slavery really is justified. Maybe we really should keep women in reproductive slavery. Maybe we really should "invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."

Are you really in doubt? Seriously? Honestly? Fine. Call yourself an agnostic.

(By the way, do you think that if such a God exists, He would be satisfied with your agnostic "me dunno" fence-sitting? Dream on. You're either with Him 100% or you're against Him; there's no middle ground.)

When hundreds of millions of Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and no small few Jews, stop oppressing and murdering women, stop murdering gay people, stop denying gay people ordinary civil rights, stop reproductive slavery, stop supporting imperialist wars of aggression, stop electing monsters like George W. Bush... when hundreds of millions of religious people stop acting like complete fucking assholes, then I'll start to consider "respecting" the deists, the "moderate" Christians, the religious humanists.

But until then, the moderates who demand "respect" for religion — who demand "respect" for what is nothing but the irrational and moronically stupid justification for not all but an enormous part of the evil and suffering of the world — will receive nothing but my contempt. You can take your "respect" and shove it up your ass, sideways.

L'etat, c'est moi

The latest financial crisis has laid bare, to any thinking person, that the question "Should the state control property?" is misguided. The state does own all the property; the question is, "What kind of state should own the property."

You do not own your house. The bank owns your house. Actually the large investment banks own your house. And when the large investment banks screw up big time, the government hands them a trillion dollars, the life's work of a million average people. And that's on top of the two or three trillion dollars (the life's work of two or three million people) we've spent to commit the mass murder of a million people in Iraq.

If you do not realize that state power is in the hands of the owners of capital, you are simply not paying attention. Our so called democracy is a sham; state power is not in any way, shape or form in the hands of the people. Our government is a government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich. If capitalism were pragmatically effective, if putting state power in the hands of the rich had the best effects, then we would not be in the mess we're in. Again. Yet again. Over and over again.

Capitalism has laid bare the false dichotomy between economic power and political power. There is no difference: economic power is political power.

The lesson of western democracy is that nominal political power should not be the inalienable property of individuals. No matter how good any individual king might be, making political power the inalienable right of the king — "l'etat, c'est moi" — is a Bad Idea. Since economic power is political power, making economic power the unalienable property of individuals — no matter how good any individual might be — must be an equally Bad Idea.

Pure laissez-faire capitalism doesn't work, not for very long. We found that out time and again in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The booms are great, but the busts cause enormous suffering... and the wars are savage and terrible. The Great Depression of the 1930s put the final nail in the coffin of the pragmatic value of laissez-faire capitalism.

Trying to "patch" capitalism with some political regulations, as we tried to do in middle of the 20^th century doesn't work either. It works economically, but the capitalists view any attempt to limit their freedom — their freedom to enslave the rest of humanity — as intolerable. And they have the power and the will to regain their freedom. Europe has done more and held out longer, but the cracks in their regulated capitalism pseudo-socialism are widening; in another generation the neocons and Christian Dominionists will rule there too.

It seems scary for a lot of people to accept intentional responsibility for anything. If I just "go with the flow", I'm not responsible for any bad results. But this mindset just moves a sin of commission to a sin of omission, with little ultimate difference. Once we know the result of inaction, we are just as causally responsible for the effects of inaction as we are of action. And we leave the fruits of action only to those who feel no moral responsibility whatsoever, and can thus act without fear of adverse consequences... at least consequences adverse to anyone but themselves.

We have enough knowledge, enough technology, enough raw materials right now to give every person on the Earth a dignified life free of unnecessary physical suffering and enough autonomy and real liberty to struggle to find their own meaning and happiness unfettered by exploitation and sadistic oppression. We have the technology right now to give ten times as many people such dignity and liberty.

We are in this position today. Only our failure of will, our refusal to act, our addiction to the devil we know, stands in the way of a better society. It's not enough to gripe, complain or even protest.

We have to think scientifically about how we want our society to be organized, and we have to act on that thinking. And we have to be morally responsible enough to act with a good will, and if we make a mistake, to honestly admit that we failed and try something better.

We no longer have the luxury of simply letting the chips fall where they may. We know what happens when close our eyes and let things happen: war, torture, rape, poverty and finally oblivion.

Cherished beliefs

The Evolutionary Middleman asks, "Do we really want everyone giving up the cherished beliefs that keep them going?" [h/t to Primordial Blog]

Well not really. That's not the point.

It's at best disingenuous and at worst patently dishonest to characterize religious belief as just cherished beliefs that keep people going. That's not what religious belief does, or what it's typically for. There are four categories of religious belief:

The first category includes vague, vacuous slogans that make people feel better. "God loves you and wants you to be happy." That's dumb, of course (what the fuck has to be wrong with God when you're unhappy) but nobody cares about this sort of slogan any more than they care about, "Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better."

If all — or even most — religious belief were in this category, there would be no atheists. But this sort of vague, vacuous sloganeering is actually relatively rare. There are a lot of religious people who dishonestly say that their beliefs are this vacuous, but to even bother to raise their voices in defense of such beliefs belies their vacuity. Sooner or later, you'll find that most religious people's beliefs fall into one or the other of the more pernicious categories.

The most obviously pernicious category is, of course, "If you don't have the same superstitious beliefs that I do, I'm going to kill you, rape your wife, torture your children, and plow salt in your land." There are at the very least hundreds of millions of people who support this sort of violent imposition of religion. Of course, this sort of religion is mixed up in complicated ways with all the other reasons why people cheerfully slaughter each other, but it's definitely the case that you can't get the tribe, clan or nation involved in wholesale slaughter unless you convince them that God is on their side.

If your cherished beliefs that keep you going involve murdering homosexuals, abortion doctors, infidels, heretics, apostates, or those damned sand niggers sitting on our oil, then yes, I do in fact want to strip you of your cherished beliefs.

A slightly less overtly violent form of religion is the sort of belief that make believers feel guilty and ashamed of their ordinary human feelings and emotions, mostly sexual. I cannot imagine anyone "cherishing" the belief that God hates them and will damn them to eternal punishment if they even think about physically expressing their sexual and emotional love for someone of the same sex, or of a different race, or before they're married, or if they're married to someone else, or whatever.

Related to the above is the sort of belief that reconciles the believer to mitigable suffering. Yes, some suffering is inevitable, and there are times when there's no help but to suck it up and adopt some stoicism, but religions heavily fetishize suffering for its own sake, even when that suffering is easily ameliorated (and often when, per the preceding paragraph, the suffering is actually induced by the religion itself). It's a hell of a lot easier to exploit someone if they've been indoctrinated that the resulting suffering is at best deserved and at worst desired, and that all will be made "right" in a ludicrous posthumous fantasy world... so long as you obey in this life.

Again, if the cherished beliefs that keep you going make you susceptible to exploitation and mitigable suffering, then yes I do want to strip you of those beliefs so you'll stand up and make your life better and stop being a patsy and a fool, a victim of parasites and predators.

To talk about the atheist political project as being against just vague, vacuous comforting slogans is to dishonestly trivialize the project. As PZ Myers puts it, "We want to eliminate [religion] in the same sense that we want to eliminate illiteracy." But just because we want to eliminate illiteracy doesn't mean we have anything against those who don't much care to read often: we just want to give them the choice.

Thank God I'm an atheist

People say it's soooooo hard to be an atheist, what with all the "existential angst" and being an "oppressed minority". Well, that's bullshit.

Existential angst is only a problem for people who are only halfway out of theistic brainwashing. I didn't grow up thinking that being a God's slave and suffer-bot is the most terrifically, wonderful thing there is, and freedom doesn't scare me in the least. I like life, and I'm not looking forward to dying, but the idea being dead doesn't scare me. I'm part of the grand human struggle to defeat death by science, not "deal with it" by fantasy and bullshit. And I like being part of an oppressed minority; It's not like I'm ever going to run for President anyway.

The so-called "problems" of atheism are a giggle. A walk in the park. If any theist wants to pity me, it's because I'm free, happy and I'm living a satisfied, fulfilled life with no more fear than is justified by living in a hostile universe. I think somehow I can find a way to live with that.

On the other hand, the idea of being a theist gives me the heebie-jeebies. To be filled with guilt and self-digust about my normal sexual feelings? To constantly dread not just death but eternal damnation if I put one toe out of line? It's hard enough to worry about one of my children earning a Darwin award in this life, but to worry that my children might face eternal damnation if they happen to be momentarily exposed to logic and reason? To stay in an abusive, possibly violent marriage (or face lifelong celibacy) because some idiot priest God commands that I stay married, no matter what? To let some pedophile priest rape my children and choose loyalty to Church and God over protecting my children?

Nope. Not gonna do it. I'm very happy with the trivial problems of atheism compared with the horror, degradation and exploitation of theism. I pity the poor theists. Living their lives in fear, sacrificing their one and only life for a pack of lies.

You might ask, "What about the 'liberal', humanistic theists? They don't believe in all that evil bullshit." Indeed. But, frankly, stupid is almost as bad as evil. "God loves us, and wants us to be happy!" Oh yeah? "War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades." If this is the work of God's love, God can take His love and shove it up His divine Ass. Sideways. I'll help push, up to the shoulder. Everything truly good the world is a result of human effort, not "divine grace".

God is love? Bullshit. It takes human beings — not a god — to love, to care, to be charitable, to be compassionate. It's taken human will, human effort, human intelligence to lift even a fraction of humanity out of perpetual misery, abject, unceasing fear and painful death, and it's going to take more human will, effort and intelligence to lift the rest of humanity out of the toilet. Every breath spent praising the most liberal, humanistic conception of a deity is still a breath wasted, a breath that could have been spent — at the very least — damning the parasites and predators who feed on our misery in the name of God (or, for that matter, any other sort of superstitious bullshit, from Crystals to Communism).

I don't pity the liberal theists like I do the fundies, but damn, they believe some stupid shit. It's still a waste.

Appeasement and Censorship

I am, like Christopher Hitchens and very much like Shalini, an "angry" atheist. I have nothing but contempt for religion, supernaturalism, woo-woo, and secular philosophical bullshit, and I'm more than willing to say so in no uncertain terms. I don't think simple rational argument is enough. If people really could be swayed by simple rational argument, we would have been rid of supernatural bullshit a thousand years ago. It's really not that difficult intellectually; you don't have to be a genius.

The fundamental problem that I see are the socially constructed values which promote supernaturalism and deprecate naturalism. The problem is not that we haven't thought the issues through well enough, the problem is that all human societies, including Western civilization, deprecate to some extent the activity of thinking things through and accepting the conclusions. Values are facts, not rational conclusions, and cannot be established by truth-seeking discourse. They must be established by propaganda and negotiation.

Truth-seeking discourse is still an important and indispensable tool. Many arguments for supernaturalist claims use truth-seeking discourse as a model, and it's important to be able to rationally deconstruct and disprove these truth-claims. If you're going to call someone a liar and a bullshit artists, it's important to be able to prove these labels. But, on the other hand, you need not stop at deconstruction and disproof: you can then go on to employ specifically pejorative labels.

I don't just think it's possible, I think it's important to do so. I think it's important to say out loud that there are not only millions of rational naturalists who disagree with the religious, superstitious and supernaturalists, but also that there are a lot of people who hold such ideas in contempt. I'm in favor of some degree of tolerance and pluralism, but I have my limits. And lies and bullshit, essential components of supernaturalism, cross some of those limits. So I speak up and say what I say.

Not everyone has the same opinion. Some atheists favor a more friendly approach. Good for them. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar. More power to 'em. I have been, on occasion, intolerant of such people in the past for no better reason than they choose a different approach to promoting rationalism and naturalism. I was wrong and I apologize.

Friendly atheists (as a class, not just Hemant) do not use pejorative words, but still hold the line that supernaturalism is still wrong. They may not call you a liar and a bullshit artist to your face, but they will still point out the falsity and fallacy in your supernaturalism and the suffering it creates. Fair enough.

I'm not, however, going to apologize for my hostility towards appeasement and rhetorical censorship. These positions go beyond mere advocacy of friendliness.

Appeasement entails that we recognize superstition and supernaturalism as "just as good" as rationalism and naturalism, that the conflict between supernaturalism and naturalism is a fundamentally irreconcilable difference of opinion, of no more moment than chocolate vs. vanilla, or classical vs. punk rock. Appeasement is often based on appeals to "pluralism" and "tolerance".

I'll hammer on DJW yet again: "A society that contains deep disagreements regarding these sorts of questions will be benefited by deep pluralism and ecumenicalism." There can be no misinterpreting DJW's position: If there is deep disagreement about "these sorts of questions" (questions on which DJW does not have a strong opinion?) no one should judge the other position.

I'll hammer on Robert Farley yet again: "Dawkins statement [that teaching Catholicism to children is more harmful than child sexual abuse]... isn't just illiberal; it's virtually totalitarian," for no better reason than that, if true, we might then use the violent oppression of the state to prohibit the religious indoctrination of children by the threat of torture.

The enormity of this appeasement is staggering. It is very clear that the truth or falsity of Dawkins' opinions is not immediately relevant to DJW's or Farley's argument. DJW says that "In addition to being demonstrably false, this view is an awful and appalling thing to say." In addition to is the key phrase here. If Dawkins view were simply false, why not condemn it for being false? Why condemn it for reasons other than its falsity? It's important to note that neither DJW nor Farley actually demonstrates the "demonstrable" falsity of Dawkins' statement.

If Dawkins' statement is bad for reasons other than its truth or falsity, we must therefore conclude that it would be bad even if it were true. Therefore, we must conclude that DJW and Robert Farley would (in theory) condone an activity as harmful as child sexual abuse in the name of "deep pluralism and ecumencalism."

I have to repeat: I don't condemn DJW and Farley for disagreeing with Dawkins. If Dawkins' statement really were false, it would be perfectly acceptable and entirely sufficient to demonstrate its falsity and then, if they were so moved, condemn Dawkins for error, stupidity or mendacity. But to condemn the statement because it is "virtually totalitarian*" or non-pluralist in addition to perhaps being false, is to imply that the condemnation would still stand even Dawkins were correct.

*I really would like Farley to explain precisely how it is "virtually totalitarian" to use the violent oppression of the state to prevent children from being threatened with hellfire and damnation. Especially since such threats establish priests' coercive authority facilitating the sexual abuse Dawkins uses as comparison.

Shalini objects to some atheists' rhetorical censorship: demands that angry atheists sit down and shut up, not because our position is false, but because it "hurts the cause". Rhetorical censorship is not so egregious and despicable as appeasement, but it's still profoundly objectionable.

It's a bullshit position for several reasons. First, it's not demonstrably true: how does anyone know angry atheism is hurting any cause other than the cause of appeasement, tolerance and respect for supernaturalism, which we're explicitly trying to hurt? Furthermore, precisely what cause are they talking about? My statements may hurt their cause, whatever it might be, but my cause is different: I'm not particularly interested in converting individual theists. I explicitly want to make it so that supernaturalists — i.e. theists, woo-woos, and bullshit artists in general — ashamed, embarrassed, defensive, and ultimately socially marginalized in polite society.

Third, why should I shut up just because I'm hurting any cause? One of the causes I support is that people should, with few restrictions*, say whatever the hell they damn well please. Advocate anything you please: Child molestation, Nazism, Stalinism, Catholicism, Islam, or mopery on the high seas. I'll tell you why I think you're wrong, I'll tell you that I disagree so profoundly that I hold your opinions in contempt and disgust, but I'll never explicitly demand that you shut up just because I don't like what you have to say.

*specifically advocating extra-legal violence, lying, and negligently repeating lies.

Please note that I don't demand the appeasers or censors shut up. I grant them every right to say what they please, and I demand only the same right to say that they're full of shit.

I'm an angry atheist, and damn proud of it. If you don't like it, tough. Go start your own blog.

Rhetorical Censorship

Censorship is, in the descriptive sense, any action which tends to restrict speech, to leave some thoughts unspoken (or unwritten or unpublished). It ranges from the threat to imprison or otherwise employ the power of the state to coercively prevent someone from speaking to an editor's decision to not publish some article or commentary, even to an individuals decision not to speak his own mind.

Not all censorship is intolerable. The First Amendment notwithstanding, even coercive government censorship is relatively uncontroversial in some cases, notably libel and criminal conspiracy. But it is still a deep tenet of liberal values that censorship is objectionable enough that we should restrict its public application to only the most egregiously objectionable and immediately dangerous speech.

I have noticed recently that a form of censorship is rearing its ugly head in supposedly liberal circles: Rhetorical censorship, public speech which asserts that some ideas should not be spoken. (Rhetorical censorship is, of course, already commonplace in batshit crazy conservative circles.)

I want to distinguish rhetorical censorship from simple criticism. Simple criticism is arguing (or just calling) some idea false, erroneous, ugly or just plain stupid. Simple criticism is censorious: we ordinarily do not wish to make false or stupid statements. I wish to restrict rhetorical censorship to the sense of directly asserting that some ideas should not be spoken, and the implication that some idea should not be spoken irrespective of its intrinsic qualities.

I find rhetorical censorship, in this narrow sense, entirely objectionable.

Here some examples of rhetorical censorship in liberal circles:

In addition to being demonstrably false, this view is an awful and appalling thing to say, and [Dawkins] clearly deserves strong criticism for it. ["New Atheism"]

Notice the phrasing of the proviso: In addition to being demonstrably false. Why this proviso? Isn't being demonstrably false sufficient reason to deserve criticism? Clearly DJW wishes to condemn Dawkins for reasons other than the truth or falsity of his statement. DJW thus explicitly moves his remarks from simple criticism to rhetorical censorship.

DJW immediately contradicts himself: "A society that contains deep disagreements regarding these sorts of questions will be benefited by deep pluralism and ecumenicalism." Apparently "deep pluralism and ecumenicalism" does not include, at least in DJW's view, value judgments he himself finds disagreeable.

Another form of rhetorical censorship is drawing obviously unwarranted or false inferences from some idea, and condemning the idea based on those inferences. Robert Farley's follow-up to DJW's comments illustrates this form of rhetorical censorship:

Dawkins statement on Catholicism... isn't just illiberal; it's virtually totalitarian. ... Dawkins is, essentially, arguing that raising children as Catholic is worse than sexually abusing them. Since we all agree that sexually abusing children merits the violent retribution of the state, the next logical step is pretty much unavoidable.

The next logical step — on batshit crazy alternative definitions of "logical" — presumably being that raising children as Catholic merits the violent retribution of the state. The supposed logic here is so specious that simple error fails as an explanation; we can only decide whether gross stupidity or intentional mendacity is the more charitable explanation.

(We can, of course, apply the same reasoning to Farley's own comments. Farley calls Dawkins "virtually totalitarian". Since we all agree that totalitarianism justifies not only the violent retribution of the state but actual warfare, the next logical step is pretty much unavoidable.)

Like DJW, Farley goes on to contradict himself and defines liberalism "as, in large part, a political recognition of the fact of pluralism." Again, we have to suppose that Farley considers that pluralism does not encompass strong negative value judgments, at least those he finds disagreeable.

We see another example in James F. Elliott's exposition on liberal commenters who are "ready to drown Saletan in the waters of reactionary tolerance" for his egregiously stupid series on the (nonexistent) correlation between ethnicity and intelligence. Again, it is one thing to criticize Saletan for being mistaken (and grossly negligent); it is another to criticize him as being racist for merely discussing the subject. If reality were racist (which, according to sound science, it is not), so much the worse for our ethical beliefs about race.

It is blatant hypocrisy to condemn any speech for being somehow illiberal. Liberalism and pluralism holds that every idea, even the idea that liberalism itself is bad, deserves to be honestly condemned or praised on its merits.

We all take some shortcuts. I judge right off the bat that anyone who affirms a correlation between race and intelligence, a global conspiracy of Jewish bankers, the Bavarian Illuminati, or the existence of God is either a moron, a liar or an infantile shit-disturber. Not because it's inherently bad to affirm these beliefs, regardless of their truth, but rather because I've investigated these ideas thoroughly enough that I'm satisfied they're actually false.

It is unwarranted, however, to infer from these "shortcuts" an approval for rhetorical censorship, that certain kinds of criticism are inherently objectionable and illiberal and should not for that reason be spoken. Every new argument must be evaluated on its inherent merits, not on the mere fact of its criticality. Without this basic tenet, liberalism is incoherent and begins to label merely a new brand of totalitarian dogma.

The New Atheism

Let's talk about what the New Atheism is really all about.

The New Atheism does indeed assert that it is just as simple (and considerably more useful) to drop God like we drop Santa Claus when we're eight. We would indeed, as John Haught claims, offend the "old" atheists, Sarte, Nietzsche, Camus, etc. with our flippancy. So much the worse for the old boys. They're pretentious, deeply vain and fearful, and, like many philosophers, mostly full of shit. There are hundreds of millions of atheists living without a shred of existential angst. Millions who realize that existential angst is just the fear of the newly-freed slave, so conditioned to obedience that the prospect of simple choice fills him with dread.

But atheism is easy: It's rational to simply do what you want, for no other reason than that you want it. You do of course have to understand how the real world works: If you want to fly to the Moon, you must do some complicated, expensive things to get there, but the only reason you need to do those complicated things is that you want to. You'll also have to keep in mind that there are six billion other people, many of them with fists, sticks, rocks, guns, and some with nuclear weapons, and all of them want things of their own. I advise everyone to consider their reaction before acting on their own desires.

Reality — and many other people — are utterly indifferent to your happiness or suffering. If you're going to find happiness and avoid suffering, you need to take personal responsibility and act sensibly and rationally, or the universe will use you harshly. If you wait around for a just and loving God to make you happy, you're just buying a lottery ticket: A few people get lucky, but everyone else dies unhappy. And once you're dead, that's it. Worm food. Sucks to be mortal, eh?

The New Atheism is pro-science. It's not that The Scientific Method is by definition the only way to knowledge. It's just that it's the only method we've ever discovered that does give us actual knowledge. The theists can bullshit all they please about different "layers" of meaning, but our demand is straightforward: By what method can we reliably and publicly differentiate between true and false statements? More importantly, what do we have to accept uncritically to make that determination?

Science demands only three things: That we look for ourselves, that we think in some sort of deterministic manner (e.g. canonical logic) and that we can count. That's all you have to accept "uncritically" to use science. There is no such thing as "scientific" evidence as distinguished from "unscientific" evidence. There's only evidence. (There are certain kinds of evidence, certain ways of collecting evidence, that makes it more efficient to draw scientific conclusions.) The word "evidence" labels "statements uncontroversially accepted as true." It is a contradiction to deny any evidence: If you deny a statement, it is no longer uncontroversially accepted as true; evidence is that which cannot be and is not denied.

(In theory one could deny evidentiary statements about ordinary perception. Most people simply agree on statements about perception, so such denial is of interest to only philosophers. In this larger sense, calling a statement evidentiary means that one must consider a denier non-sentient, irretrievably insane, or a member of an incompatible linguistic community. If the theists wish to call atheists insane for denying what they call "unscientific evidence", there's nothing I can do except note that we cannot then be reasonably assured of the mutual good will necessary to civil society, and we will act accordingly.)

It's a bullshit excuse to say that religion is fuzzy and elusive, chthonic, mysterious, occult. Fuzzy is fine for literature, but the value of literature doesn't depend on its factual truthfulness. It would be great if people were willing to say that the value of their scripture doesn't depend on whether God really exists, or if statements about God are somehow factually true, or if the universe really does have some sort of sapience, intention or love. As far as I'm concerned, once you drop the truthfulness of the underlying statements, you cease having any sort of religion, and you can go talk to the literary critics, not the scientists, philosophers and politicians.

The New Atheism is anti-religion. Not because religion is always bad, or because everything bad comes from religion, but you can use religion to "prove" anything, good, bad or indifferent. It denies and actively erodes the skepticism and criticality that is each person's only fundamental protection against being exploited and oppressed by lies and bullshit.

We realize that there are "good" theologies, but we don't talk about them much. Religious fundamentalists at least have some meat to their theology, there is enough there to be at least wrong. But the "good" theologians are not even wrong; their work is nothing but vacuous nonsense. If there is a warmed-over half-assed humanism, it is so buried under metaphysical bullshit that the search for a few nuggets of obvious truth is not worth the effort.

And even good theology is dangerous, as Diderot observes:

The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid.

It is worth noting that Christianity, originally conceived as (to some extent) a pacifistic religion of universal love, has for the last fifteen centuries — even before Constantine conferred political power on the religion — motivated its adherents to torture and slaughter each other with savage ferocity. The slaughter only even began to abate once natural reason, humanism, science, individual liberty and democracy arose in the Enlightenment.

Anything that requires supernatural justification cannot be considered good. Anything that we can rationally agree is good does not need supernatural justification. Worse yet, supplying a supernatural justification to what appears today to be rationally justifiable undermines the self-correcting mechanisms of rational thought. Once we supply a supernatural justification, we go from reasonably confident to absolutely certain. And one cannot correct a mistake one has become absolutely certain of.

The worst excesses of religion are bad, very bad. Worse than child sexual abuse? Maybe, maybe not: I'm not in the business of drawing fine distinctions of really bad shit. But the worst excesses are certainly in the same ballpark as childhood sexual abuse. And religion even at its best disarms the believer from using her critical faculties to protect herself.

But, bad as religion is, it cannot be eliminated by force. Religion is, in a sense, self-slavery, and you cannot free a person who has enslaved himself. American atheists typically endorse the Free Exercise clause not because it is in the Constitution; we endorse free exercise because it is a good idea and is thus in the Constitution. We're not going to put religious believers or even their clergy in prison. Nor will we ever, even if atheists were to become a majority. We would be punishing only the victims. There is no "perpetrator" to religion: It is a self-sustaining circle of victimization. Atheism, rationality, common sense, critical thought, none of these can be enforced. They have to be freely chosen, and we atheists will promulgate our beliefs the hard way: By rational persuasion, even to the very last believer. We will not choose the easy way of the religious: By the sword, or by the indoctrination of defenseless children.

Yes, we do insist that religion not be taught to indoctrinated into defenseless children, children who have not yet developed the skills of critical thinking, children under the coercive authority of their parents and teachers. What sort of intellectual respectability can you demand for a belief system that cannot be taught to a rational, more-or-less unbiased adult, that requires the coercive indoctrination of defenseless children?

We are willing to also refrain from indoctrinating atheism in children. We are confident that mature, rational adults, raised without superstitious indoctrination, will have the best chance of coming to the truth. Whether that truth is theistic or atheistic, so be it. We insist only that humanity have a fair chance at coming to the truth. It is irresponsible and indefensible to teach as the absolute, unquestionable truth either side of a legitimate* controversy to children lacking intellectual defense.

*i.e. a controversy where neither side depends almost exclusively on transparent lies of both commission and omission, as does creationism and Intelligent Design

The New Atheism is about nothing more or less than promoting freedom and condemning intellectual and moral slavery. Fundamentally, it's about freedom from exploitative and oppressive lies and bullshit in general, but religion has pretty much cornered the market. "Religion is," as Carlin puts it, "the greatest bullshit story ever sold." As hard as Stalin worked on it, not even Marxism has come close.

The conservatives hate us because they embrace religion as a tool of oppression and exploitation. It's much easier to convince someone to be a slave in the physical sense if you can convince him that God will take care of him in the afterlife (a.k.a. There's a sucker born every minute, and two to take him). The liberals hate us because we do not tolerate lies and bullshit, no matter how many pious words you wrap it in, and liberalism is, of course, all about pluralism. (Indeed criticizing any idea, regardless of its nature or consequences, should be seen as intolerant and against pluralism.) And we make no apologies whatsoever: We are no more tolerant of religious lies and bullshit than we are of neoconservative bullshit, of racist bullshit, of homophobic bullshit, of sexist bullshit, of Marxist bullshit, of Deepak Chopra crystal healing woo-woo bullshit, of politically correct bullshit, or any other kind of lies and bullshit you care to name used to oppress and exploit actual human beings.

We're not going to sit down and shut up. Call us fascists, totalitarians, traitors. If caring about the truth and its critical importance to the well-being of myself and my fellow human beings is fascist, totalitarian or treasonous, well then, I'm proud to be a fascist, totalitarian traitor. Arrest us, imprison us, assault us, kill us: we will not sit down and shut up. We'll resist as best we can — we're neither pacifists or stupid — but we have no illusions of being able to win in a stand-up fight.

We know we're a tiny minority and that's OK. The abolitionists were once a tiny minority, reviled, dismissed, hated and sometimes murdered. The scientists were once a tiny minority. The secularists and democrats were once a tiny minority. It might take ten years or a hundred years, maybe a thousand years, but that's OK. We're still not going to sit down and shut up, however long it takes.

Because we're right, we know we're right, and we know you're spouting nothing but bullshit. And the truth will win in the end, because reality is the final arbiter of belief, and reality has no sympathy or pity for falsehood or error. We will stand up and speak our piece, time and again, and when one falls another will stand up. Because, unlike reality, we do have sympathy and pity for our fellow human beings, mired in lies and bullshit, and no matter how much you hate us for it, we're going to do all we can to pull you out.

And we will continue to do so until you come to your senses and agree or you prove us wrong.


Update: Commenter Chris Lowe of PDX Peace weighs in with some substantive interesting criticism, to which I respond (and emend).

Update 2: I've changed "we do insist that religion not be taught to defenseless children" to "...indoctrinated into..." to more precisely represent my viewd on the matter. It's definitely a fact about the world that people are religious, and skeptical atheists do not oppose teaching facts.

Political dimensions

Himself reports a conversation with a "fellow leftist" who apparently has only a single brain cell more than a retarded sea-slug. Yesterday I wrote a post in reaction to a blogger (who shall remain nameless) denouncing Iraqi defeatists as "lickspittle liberals".

The old left/right, liberal/conservative dimension is simply too simplistic to capture modern political debate. The whole debate, even among supposedly smart people, is degenerating into the fallacy of mediocrity: Two people have some feature in common, therefore they are identical in every respect.

I am passionately, vitriolically, totally opposed to the war in Iraq: It is immoral, illegal and is causing tremendous human suffering and death. Well, the Islamic jihadists are also against the war in Iraq. I am not, however, an Islamic jihadist. Just because I'm against the war in Iraq does not mean I'm for the Islamist agenda. Contrawise, I loathe Islam. The religion is absurd, the culture hateful, violent, stupid, oppressive and misogynist. But just because I loathe Islam does not mean I support the war in Iraq.

I'm a fairly tolerant person. I really don't care if you're gay, Catholic, collect Hummel figurines, enjoy bowling or golf, or eat escargot. It's no skin off my nose, you're not hurting me or anyone else. I neither approve nor disapprove; it's none of my damn business, really. But just because I happen to tolerate a lot of things does not mean I have any common cause with those morons who fetishize tolerance itself, who feel it wrong to judge or criticize any behavior—except, of course judgment or criticism.

Just because I consider the Republican party a blight on even the low standards of American politics does not mean I must therefore endorse the spinelessness and flaccidity of the Democratic party. Just because I resist ridiculous government intrusion on my private life does not mean I'm an Ayn Rand-deifying Libertarian; and just because I think we have positive ethical obligations to our fellow citizens and fellow human beings does not mean I'm a Karl Marx-worshiping Communist.

As Lincoln said, "The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present." All of these dogmas—conservatism and liberalism—are not only inadequate but bankrupt. We are constantly trying to put square pegs in round holes, and, in the words of the anonymous wag, we end up only with the stupid and the very strong.

Many people, I suppose, don't want to think about anything particularly complex, at least outside their own area of expertise. I don't expect anyone, for instance, to think much about the complexity of the computer programs that I write: Does it work or not? Is it easy or is it hard? Does it deliver or does it drop the ball? We can't expect the ordinary person, working a job, raising a family and going to the odd ball game to consider every political question in the billions of individual nuanced dimensions. But neither can we any more afford the simple binary distinctions of left/right, liberal/conservative, Democratic/Republican, pro/con.

Worse yet, the traditional liberal/conservative dichotomy does not represent a fundamental, or even a real, distinction. The distinction represents a degree of change; and not even a real degree of change, but the illusion of change. Liberalism represents the illusion of change; conservatism represents the illusion of stasis. But change or stasis by itself isn't fundamental. What do we want to change? What do we want to keep? Why? And, more importantly, how?

Human societies are ecological and, in a sense, evolved. They aren't designed, at least not in the largest sense, and everything is interrelated. Just on general principles one should be "conservative" in the sense that you can't make large changes to any ecosystem, biological or political; if you do, you'll be swamped with unintended consequences. On the other hand, ecosystems are always changing; they are in dynamic equilibrium; it is as much a mistake to try to keep everything exactly the same as it is to make large changes. Furthermore, it is a naturalistic fallacy to conclude that just because something exists in an ecosystem it is therefore "objectively" good. Everyone—everyone rational—"should" be a little bit conservative and a little bit liberal, at least as far as change is concerned. The authority of the past is purely instrumental and tentative; the authority of the future is speculative and uncertain; there's ample justification against accepting the authority of either as a foundational moral principle.

The old dogmas of liberalism and conservatism—insofar as they reflect an attitude about change itself—are bankrupt: Both should be replaced by a rational attitude towards change as an instrument to achieving other purposes. There are simply objectively correct, rationally determinable right ways and wrong ways to change a society. We must look deeper and start to discuss what we want to change our society into.

I have discerned two deep threads in political and ethical conversation: ethical authoritarianism and ethical universalism. I call myself an "anarcho-humanist" because I'm against authoritarianism (anarcho) and for ethical universalism (humanism). What is good is not established by any authority, political, philosophical or religious, but rather by individual conscience. But what is good I hold is good for everyone; when faced with an ethical dilemma, I raise the level of abstraction until I can find a principle I can endorse universally. If you like vanilla and I like chocolate, a dilemma, I'll abstract the problem to "eat what you please": I think everyone should (pretty much) eat what they please.

Even authoritarianism—ceding the definition of good* to an authority—is in a nontrivial sense a matter of individual conscience: You have to choose to believe that the Bible, or the Catholic Church, or Western Civilization, can define the good. But even so, we can still draw a meaningful distinction between those who do cede authority over the good, and those who do not.

*As opposed to the instrumental cession to an authority to define what is lawful.

Both authoritarianism and univeralism—pro and con—are choices: All four positions in any paired combination are logically and physically possible; there is no scientific or logical reason to consider any objectively true. Therefore, the choice is existential, and a matter of politics, not objective science; the only science involved are the subjectivist sciences of psychology, sociology, and anthropology. I can't argue for anarchism and humanism, I can only promote them.

So, counting rationality/irrationality**, there are three important axes of political discourse. Three axes is still complicated, and causes much confusion.

**If you object to the pejorative implication of "irrationality", you can substitute science-based and faith-based reasoning.

For instance, the war in Iraq is a struggle between two concepts of authoritarianism; an ethical anarchist such as myself has no sympathy for either side. Furthermore, it is a conflict between the more universalist authoritarianism of Islam and the exceptionalism of Western imperialism and colonialism (as well as domestic class exceptionalism). It is also, because it is a dramatic change to a political "ecosystem" (and the political ecosystem of the Middle East is particularly fragile) irrational a priori: We're guaranteed to cause unintended consequences to the detriment of everyone; it is being pursued incompetently as well. (Incompetently, at least, with regard to the publicly stated goals of its proponents; as a mechanism to simply loot the treasury and taxpayers it seems to be clicking along quite competently.)

The trouble is that if you criticize the war along one axis, you risk by your silence on the other axes to be held in agreement. If you criticize the war as irrational, it sounds like you would approve of its aims if only they were being pursued competently. If you criticize the U.S. conduct of the war on moral grounds, you sound like you therefore approve of the morality of the opponents. If you criticize Islam, you sound like you're in favor of the war. (I myself was accused of being pro-torture because I virulently criticize Islam.) If you try to criticize the war on all three axes, 90% of your audience will simply mutter TLDNR*** and move on to something simpler.

***Too Long, Did Not Read

There are two recommendations I would make, one structural and one intellectual.

The structural recommendation is to simply eliminate the Electoral College and pick the President by majority or plurality of the popular vote (perhaps with some sort of instant run-off voting). The Electoral College isn't even an anachronism, it was a bad idea from the start. Its effects are subtle but pervasive; I'm convinced the American winner-take-all two-party system, which forces every question into the utterly fictional Democratic/Republican dichotomy, is a direct result of the Electoral College. With a direct popular vote—especially with instant run-off voting—additional political parties representing varying points on all the important axes have a chance to gain traction.

It's not a big change, nothing nearly as radical and dramatic as, for instance, switching our whole political apparatus to a Parliamentary system, and there should be plenty of time for the rest of our political system to adapt naturally.

The intellectual recommendation is to my fellow bloggers and mid-level political analysts: Try to see not only your own positions but also the positions of those with whom you disagree along all three axes: authoritarianism, universalism, and rationality. Don't simply try to force every position into your preferred axis, and especially don't assume that if two people agree or disagree on one axis, they therefore must agree or disagree on both the other axes.

I'm tired of being called a "lickspittle liberal" or an Islamic apologist because I oppose the war in Iraq. I'm tired of being called a Soviet-style Communist because I think we do have some positive obligations to our fellow human beings. I'm tired of being called an apologist for torture because I loathe Islam. I'm tired of being called intolerant, racist and sexist because I criticize authoritarianism, exceptionalism and irrationality in anyone, male or female, left or right, black or white, gay or straight, Western or Middle-eastern, religious or atheist.

Coming out

An insane, immoral war in Iraq, built on lies and delusion. Another war, equally insane, equally immoral, equally founded on lies and delusion, brewing with Iran. Global warming threatening the whole planet. The supply of oil declining. Clean fresh water becoming increasingly scarce. Widening inequality between the very richest and the very poorest, and the middle class—the engine of every civilized society—on the decline.

These are but a few of the problems facing our society. None of them are fundamentally ideological: They are problems caused by reality, and require rational, sensible solutions. To discover and implement these solutions requires that human beings become, in general, rational and sensible. And we are not. And not only are we not rational and sensible, there are social forces in all societies that actively deprecate, dismiss, and marginalize rationality and sensibility.

Religion is definitely not the only such social force, but it is one of them, with the longest history and most force. And it is, furthermore, the most egregiously irrational, insensible and ridiculous set of ideas. The idea that a magical sky daddy is going to make everything all right—in this world or the next—if only we adhere strictly to a set of social and sexual mores invented by iron-age pre-technological savages and justified with a blatantly fictitious mythology staggers the rational imagination.

I know a lot of people who don't believe in any god, have no use whatsoever for religious bullshit, but who don't call themselves atheists. I understand, really: Self-identification as an atheist is a political statement, and people have every right to choose their political battles. I don't want to shame anyone into self-identification, but I do want to exhort them.

I'm asking you to self-identify as an atheist and do so publicly. Nothing more. You don't have to write letters to the editor. You don't have to vote the atheist party line (but please do vote). You don't have to come to the Evil Atheist Conspiracy picnics. Just decide you're an atheist and when the topic of religion comes up, say you're an atheist. You don't have to be hostile, confrontational or argumentative, just honest.

Self-identifying in public as an atheist entails the rejection of the most pervasive and socially acceptable irrational superstitions. Public self-identification will not automatically make society rational, but it will help, at least, make it a little less irrational.

You don't have to be certain there's no god to be an atheist. If you're a rational, sensible person, you know we can't be certain about anything. Saying you're an atheist is saying nothing more than that, based on the evidence you presently have, according to your natural reason, there's simply no justification for believing in any god, and thus disbelief is justified. And any god that might exist—given the same evidence—would be unworthy of belief, undeserving of worship, and unconcerned with the well-being of humanity. Yes, a god might be hiding behind your couch, but is such a god worthy of your consideration? I think not.

Atheism does not entail renouncing spirituality, at least if you define "spirituality" to mean something other than believing in some brand of superstitious woo-woo. Spirituality is nothing more—and nothing less—than the recognition that people have values, emotions and preferences and that they're important; that human life is more than just the neutral collection of objective knowledge. We can celebrate life, and life is manifestly real. We can sometimes act irrationally because of emotion, but emotions are not intrinsically irrational: They are facts, and the rational person accepts the facts.

You don't have to judge others to call yourself an atheist: You can simply say that's what you yourself believe. But you can judge: If you really believe that religion is irrational and irrationality is self-destructive, to withhold even the knowledge of an alternative seems profoundly indifferent to the suffering of others. It doesn't violate anyone's autonomy to say or imply their beliefs are irrational; anyone who expresses offense is trying only to violate your autonomy.

There are, I suspect, millions of people who are troubled in their own minds by the irrationality of their religion, but who cling to it simply because they are not aware there's an alternative. Who knows? You might just say, one day, "I'm an atheist", and such a troubled person hearing your declaration might investigate and release him- or herself from the bondage of irrational superstition.

Come out against superstition and bullshit. Come out for rationality and sensibility. Come out of the closet and into the streets!