Happiness

I think I ran this last year (Yes, I'm too lazy to Google my own blog), but I think it's worth linking to again:

5 Things You Think Will Make You Happy (But Won't)

Atheism and human needs

James F. Elliott worries that atheism ignores some human needs. It's a legitimate worry, but I think Greta Christina offers a terrific response:

There were many wonderful things about the service, and it clearly offered something of value to the members of the church. There was joy, community, celebration of life, transcendence and ecstasy, wonderful music (really -- the choir was something special), a shared sense of purpose and meaning, etc. etc. But all the things that I liked about the service, all the things I found meaningful and moving, were all things that I can and do get from other areas of my life. I can get them from dancing, from music, from good food, from good conversation, from reading, from writing, from nature, from art, from sex.

PrayerAnd the things I didn't like... well, those were all the actual religious parts. And I don't want them. I found them alien, and alienating. They didn't make sense to me -- not intellectually, not emotionally, not viscerally, not in any way. I found them baffling and mysterious, and not in an enticingly mysterious way.

To a certain extent, atheism cannot address some real human needs: the need to embrace (and not resolve) mystery, the need for sanctimony, the need to privilege one's personal moral opinions as God's will, the need to believe in life after death. But there are many human needs which are perfectly compatible with atheism: community, emotional exhilaration, happiness and joy.

And there are some human needs that atheism seems especially well-positioned to address: Pervasive religious guilt and shame, especially about ordinary human emotions, especially sex and sensual pleasure, but also negative emotions such as anger, unhappiness and despair: no longer are the "negative" emotions terrible sins against God, but the ordinary storms of human psychology that can be ridden out and safely put aside once the feelings have subsided.

Religion and religion

It seems obvious to me that there are at least two entirely different conceptions of "religion" that various commentators and intellectuals are addressing. It seems puzzling that this distinction is not more widely recognized.

The first sort of religion is religion as truth: The "otherworldly elements" or supernatural explanations of the universe and especially human and social psychology; elements held as real, literal truths. These truths might be revealed only dimly or imperfectly by scripture, but at some level these otherworldly elements are held as no less truthful than any scientific truths, themselves perhaps only dimly and imperfectly illuminated by experiment.

The second sort of religion represents all the rituals, beliefs, ideas, art, literature and most especially "cultural" practices that accrete around the aforementioned otherworldly elements.

It is tempting to simply dismiss the supposed "truthfulness" of the otherworldly elements and simply concentrate on the cultural aspects. Roger Scruton notes that the Enlightenment thinkers, especially Hume, Voltaire, Diderot and Kant, decisively established "the claims of faith to be without rational foundation," and no one since, notably Dawkins and Hitchens, has added anything substantively new.

Scruton is perhaps correct: I personally found in neither The God Delusion nor god is not Great any philosophical arguments that I didn't figure out on my own, and if little ol' me can figure it out, it must have been child's play for the Enlightenment philosophers. But I think the facile dismissal of modern atheist writers that follows from this observation is too hasty for two reasons.

The first reason is, of course, the sheer number of people who actually do consider their scripture to be absolutely literally truthful. Richard Dawkins is a scientist; he wouldn't even be a part of the debate were it not for the considerable political power and influence of Creationists and Intelligent Design proponents. Hundreds of millions of Muslim women live in terrible oppression precisely because Muslims hold the literal truth of the Koran and its prescriptions on the status and role of women. While one can justly note the spiritual dimension of religion, one cannot so blithely claim that religion is viewed by all or even most only in a spiritual sense.

The second reason is that any anthropological study of religion must critically examine the claims of truth of religions' otherworldly elements in relation to the cultural practices of the religious. To simply dismiss as unimportant religions' claims of truth simply because they are patently absurd is to ignore what sets religious cultural practice apart from secular practice. One might just as well try to study the difference between birds and mammals by first dismissing the element of flight as a distinguishing characteristic (indeed it's true that a few birds cannot fly; a few mammals can).

The dismissal of otherworldly truth claims, for instance, renders Wilson's sample study of religion banal and scientifically trivial. Cultural practices are prima facie adaptive, finding that some of those practices happen to fall under the rubric of religion tells us nothing. To learn something about religion we need to carefully study the causal efficacy of the otherworldly elements themselves as well as their belief as truth among the religious. This is precisely the study Wilson doesn't perform; one suspects that Wilson (an atheist) simply hand-waves over this lack precisely because he considers the truth claims unimportant because they are absurd.

Another reason the dismissal is too hasty is that if the absurd truth-claims of literal scripture are simply dismissed as unimportant and irrelevant, the reader is free to establish a "spiritual" authority for a scripture without ever critically examining why any sort of authority would get the facts wrong.

We see this sort of uncritical spiritual authority all over the place: Religion is another way of "knowing". Scruton uncritically declares scripture to be spiritual truth: it is about "what happens always and repeatedly;" "rehearses [the world's] permanent spiritual significance'" quoting Hegel, "the eternal and necessary history of humanity;" and "conveys truths about freedom, about guilt, about man, woman and their relationship, about our relation to nature and mortality." [emphasis added]

But does religious scripture really have any sort of truth content? It's certainly data, it's very interesting, it's often profound literature, but does its content really deserve the sort of authority claimed by those such as Somerville and Scruton, as well as religious "moderates" such as Andrew Sullivan? Why should we grant religious scripture and religious belief any authority over universal spiritual "truths" when it makes claims about factual truths which are blatantly absurd?

I'm willing to grant the possibility that some specifically religious cultural practices are valuable, or that some valuable cultural practices have survived because they were specifically religious. But we cannot make much scientific progress in the study of humanity in general until we get a few things straight: It's not only that the factual truth claims of religion are absurd, but it's also important that these claims are absurd. Religious scripture does not have any kind of authority, spiritual or factual; scripture has no more authority than any other work of fiction, be it Macbeth, Atlas Shrugged or My Little Pony. There is no magical truth in religion, neither factual nor spiritual, neither in practice, belief nor scripture. Whatever knowledge is gleaned from scripture will be the same sort of knowledge gleaned from any work of literary fiction, and gleaned by the same scientific methods as all other knowledge.

Literature or scripture?

Is the Bible (or the Koran) a work of scripture or of literature? Is it the word of a real, existing deity or the work of humanity? Why should I believe the former? What's the difference between scripture and literature, and how can I tell the difference? Other than by arbitrarily designating some text as scripture and then rationalizing that arbitrary designation.

If it's literature, why should I take the moral, ethical, and spiritual beliefs of millennia-dead, pretechnological murderous slave-owning misogynist authoritarians any more seriously than I take the works of Locke, Paine, Jefferson, Gandhi, or my own reason and moral intuition? Indeed why should I take their beliefs seriously at all, other than as happily long-dead history?

Likewise, is the Catholic church divinely inspired or just a group of human beings doing their best to think about philosophy and ethics? Again: Why should I believe the former? If the latter, why should I take moral or ethical advice from a group of (supposedly) celibate men who do no useful work, have no children or families, and have an obviously personal interest in maintaining their own moral authority and economic power? Why should I take them any more seriously than people who actually make sense? And they wear dresses and funny hats in the bargain: Why should I take these ridiculous buffoons seriously at all?

Much the same (except for the celibate part) goes for other clergy: Why should I take someone seriously at all just because they wear funny clothes, a big beard and have memorized a lot of text to which I give no scriptural authority whatsoever? Why must I believe that moral or ethical advice has to come from a mysterious, unknowable God to be rational and sensible? The notion is ridiculous.

If religious people didn't take their bizarre superstitions as granting them supernatural moral authority, I wouldn't pay the slightest bit of attention to them. If you want to rub blue mud in your navel in the privacy of your own home—or even in a public park for all I care—you'll get no argument from me. If you want to minimize your religion to meaningless ritual, unfalsifiable metaphysics and ethical irrelevance, I'll keep silent.

But people do take their bizarre superstitions as granting them supernatural moral authority. If some ethical belief makes sense to my natural reason and natural moral intuition, no divine provenance is needed. The only reason to invoke God in an ethical context is to justify beliefs contrary to reason.

Science is the study of beliefs that reality is shoving down our throats, whether we like it or not. Religion—even the most moderate, humanistic religion—attempts to use fantasies about God to shove ethical beliefs contrary to natural reason and moral intuition down our throats. I'll take it from reality (what choice do I have?) but I won't take it from you.

The “logical” conclusion

A piece of clichéd theist rubbish inspired a few off the cuff comments, which bear repeating.

The blog author, Paul, presents a ridiculous straw man of a budding atheist, "Nick". On the threshold of deconverting to atheism, "Nick" writes,

It's a relief to know that there is no god haunting my thoughts and actions, no spiritual quests to waste my time, no church to bore me, and no money to be surrendered. My mind is free and my goals are my own to set. I know now that my conscience, which was my last hurdle toward atheism, is just the product of my Christian upbringing, or perhaps it is an evolutionary instinct meant for my survival. In any case, it doesn't need to trouble me again, since I am free to make my own values and follow my own natural desires.

Note how Paul Nick slips in that bit about "conscience" as if ones conscience were anything but one's own values and natural desires. Paul Nick goes on,

I've grown so tired of trying to resist my desires and fight my conscience that it feels so liberating to reject the god hypothesis and everything that goes with it. If I want to party and do drugs, or view any kind of pornography, who's to say it's wrong? In fact, if I want to have an affair, so long as my wife doesn't find out, it's no problem with me. Heck, even if she does find out and doesn't like it, divorce is a perfectly acceptable option. For that matter, murder is on the table as well!

The bullshit goes on for a couple more paragraphs; Paul Nick lays it on pretty thick.

It is a fact that people do party, take drugs, view pornography, have affairs, get divorced, even commit murder. And there is no god to punish them. Justice is a human construction.

I have nothing but contempt for those whose only moral restraint is fear of a magical sky fairy. I have no doubt that such people actually would commit the most atrocious crimes if they were convinced that God ordered them to do so. And, according to Christian scripture, people have been convinced that God has indeed ordered them to commit murder, rape, slavery, human sacrifice, etc. ad nauseam.

A theist who is good only because God—or, more precisely, priests and prophets purporting to speak for God—commands him to is nothing but a contemptible slave. Atheists are free people. We do not murder because we ourselves choose not to murder. Such theists choose not to murder only because they have not been ordered to murder, at least not yet.

Atheists are not free of the burden of conscience. We are freed only from the arbitrary restrictions handed down from ignorant and superstitious tribes millennia dead. My wife is an apostate from Islam, freed from the Koran that relegated her, by virtue of nothing but her sex, to second-class citizenship and second-class humanity. No small few formerly Christian gay people are liberated from the theology that taught that their ordinary, human love was sinful and hateful.

A conscience—moral and ethical beliefs, love, empathy, joy—is just as much a part of the human condition as are desire, pleasure and happiness, and all of these for their own sake. Atheists do not abandon their humanity when they abandon their submission to the authority of an invisible sky fairy or the frauds who claim to speak for Him. Atheists are free to embrace their humanity, so long denied by the fearful faithful, and they are no longer deathly afraid of any happiness that comes from freedom, not servility.

Paul's mythical straw man, Nick, is devoid of compassion, of empathy, of much ordinary human feeling. As an atheist he would, of course, be a monster.

But as a theist, he would still be a monster, and more. He would be a Torquemada, a Fred Phelps, a Crusader, an Inquisitor, an fatwa-spouting Imam. He would simply project his selfishness and ruthlessness onto God and thus grant his monstrousness divine justification. The atheist monster can go only so far: It takes theism, and a sense of divine justification, to amplify a serial killer who murders for pleasure into an Inquisitor who murders for the glory of God.

Confidence and doubt

Peter Hitchens, criticizes his brother Christopher Hitchens' recent book, God is not Great. Although I'm enjoying it greatly, I'm not going to defend Christopher's book here. Indeed Peter[1] barely quotes his brother's book and does little to directly reply to it. Instead, much like Chris Hedges recent review, Peter simply uses the book to make speeches about his own beliefs. And Peter's review includes some blatant misconceptions about atheism.

Christopher Hitchens supported—and for all I know continues to support—the war in Iraq. I am vehemently opposed to this war. Hitchens is, in my opinion and judgment, wrong about the war. There are many atheists who, like myself, oppose this war on principle, not just on the incompetence with which the Cheney Bush administration has prosecuted the war (indeed, had Bush & Co. prosecuted the war (or their assault against American democracy) "competently", the results would have been vastly worse.) Atheism or non-religion[2] does not entail support for this war, nor does theism or religion entail opposition. Any reviewer who attempts to draw conclusions about atheism from Hitchens' support for the war is committing a pure ad hominem fallacy. Since atheists do not claim any sort of divine guidance, it should not come as any big surprise when we make mistakes, even big ones.

Peter conflates confidence and decision with certainty and arrogance.

Christopher is not tentative about his view on God. He describes himself as an "anti-theist", so certain of his, er, faith that he wars with bitter mockery against those who doubt his truth.

Peter speaks of Christopher's "certain knowledge of what is right and wrong." But Peter does nothing to substantiate his charge of certainty. A certain belief is a belief in principle absolutely incapable of change. It is not a belief confidently asserted. A belief substantiated on facts or personal experience cannot be in principle absolutely incapable of change: New facts, new experiences, even one's own subjective consciousness can always in principle change, and any dependent beliefs can change.

(Indeed, even the most "certain" of religious beliefs are mutable. People switch religions, deconvert, or reinterpret their religion all the time. The assertion of "certainty" of even the most fundamentalist, extremist religious believer has a hysterical, defensive ring to it, as if by repeatedly declaring their certainty the could somehow persuade themselves to become certain.)

There seems to be a common theme in critiques of atheism by soi disant "moderate" religious believers, that confidence, decision, definiteness (at least in atheists) are intellectual vices and indecision and skeptical nihilism intellectual virtues. Peter boasts about his own doubt, and religious doubt, as if doubt itself were the goal of thought:

But it is obvious to anyone that vast numbers of believers in every faith are filled with doubt, and open to reason. The Church of England’s greatest martyr, Thomas Cranmer, was burned at the stake for changing his mind once too often. ...

Did the Supper at Emmaus really take place? How I hope that it did, but I do not know that it did...

For all I know, Christopher is absolutely right – my prayers are pointless and a meaningless oblivion awaits.

But doubt is a tool, not a desired state. We doubt, and then we resolve our doubt—with reason and evidence—and then we doubt again.

Naturally such religious "moderates" are no less confident and definite when enumerating the moral and intellectual failings of atheists or their own ethical beliefs. What is missing in Peter's review is the connection between doubt and its resolution. To an atheist, reason provides this connection. Reason is never certain, but we can be confident about reason, because it is public. If I believe something according to reason, my reasons can be examined by anyone, criticized by anyone, and if my facts are false, if my reasoning is fallacious, if my theory is extravagant, these criticisms can be proven.

But where is the connection between doubt and its resolution for the moderate theist? They say remain "open to"—but not committed to—reason, but never so much that expose their doubts to reasonable resolution. Why does Peter hope that the Supper at Emmaus took place? Reason demands not just agnosticism, but that we we positively disbelieve this story as fact: People do not rise from the dead; the gospels are clearly fictional[3]; and the resurrection was tacked on long after Mark was written, making this part of the story doubly fictional.

To the theist, reason can establish doubt, but never resolve it. But people cannot live with nothing but doubt; to resolve doubt, the honest believer relies on bullshit hope; the dishonest believer relies on lies. Atheism goes the other way: We assume doubt on principle, we resolve doubt by reason. At least for today: If we are wrong, we can be proven wrong, and we'll change our minds then.


[1] To avoid confusion, I will refer to Peter and Christopher Hitchens by first name.
[2] In my usual sense of "religion" as "making shit up and calling it true."
[3] A. J. Ayer notwithstanding, there's nothing at all wrong with fiction per se. It is the belief—even the hope—that fiction is real which is an offense against reason.

A Theist asshole

Simon, an (apparently) Theist asshole (He might be a Buddhist, but they're generally not so obnoxious) comments on Atheism, Religion and Spirituality:

Nicely poetic but when one steps back and remembers that people have different definitions of the word "love", "god", "humanity" and "spirituality" itself...this post has no practical meaning.
And that makes it kind of amusing to me...that an atheist who talks of mystical mumbo jumbo would post something as equally airy and emotional, with no concrete rationality behind it.

Carl Jung, often accused of being too mystical, said in his autobiography that in all his experience, people who talk about love generally have no idea what they're talking about.

I've been reading several posts of yours and I notice you talk about suffering once in a while, but it always seems to reference something distant...a "could happen" but generally seems to happen to other people. So I ask you this: what use is this flowery writing about love-for-all to a woman who has been gangraped and must now get an abortion? What use is it to someone born into abject poverty in a socialist regime, who struggles daily with hunger and malnutrition. What good is your proclamation of universal love for all, from your comfortable home in the United States, -to these people? Why should they care about your love? You talk the talk but how much do you walk the walk?

I meet far too many people, both atheist and theist alike, who would rather pompously contemplate their navels and throw around philosophical names than actually get into the reality. While you brag about your love and compassion, other people are joining the Peace Corps or doing other things to actually SHOW their love. Ghandi and the Mother Teresa spent their lives DOING things for other people, not just pontificating.

And there is the fact that atheists have yet to show anything for themselves as amazing as Tibet...beautiful monasteries, entirely peaceful, and inhabited by monks with a serious commitment to their faith. I remember reading about a monk who immolated himself in the face of Chinese authority, to demonstrate where his loyalty stood and how absolute that was. He inflicted upon himself, a very painful death, and even sat quiet and still as his body burned, until it gave up it's life. That's the sort of thing that shows how useless and empty postmodernism is...a pretentious, ungrateful philosophy for bored, wealthy people. Bleh.

Talk is cheap. Without personal sacrifices and concrete works for the benefit of another, nothing anyone has to say about spirituality has any meaning or value. So I ask you: behind all this talk, where are your works?

I don't spend a lot time talking about myself here, but since you ask...

I adopted my sister's children when she was unable to raise them, and I spent fifteen years of my life taking care of them. I spent five of those years also taking care of my mother before she got her lung transplant.

I used to work as a rape counselor. Special circumstances, don't ask.

I rescued the woman I love from Islamic oppression, at no small personal sacrifice.

I work every Saturday for the National AIDS Marathon Training Program, which raises money for research, education and eradication.

I vote, I contribute to charity, I work and I pay taxes. I give money to panhandlers.

What I don't do is spend my Sunday mornings praying to an invisible sky fairy.

If Simon would like to set himself on fire to prove the sincerity of his convictions, I'll spring for the gasoline. Until then, he can take his sanctimonious assumptions and shove them up his ass... sideways.

On Humanism

A discussion on Humanism has broken out at Mere Comments, so I thought it might be useful to briefly describe my own ethical opinions.

My ethical opinions are best described as empathic libertarian humanism. There are certain experiences that I enjoy: joy, happiness, pleasure, and the like. There are other experiences that I do not enjoy: pain, grief, sorrow and the like. I wish to maximize the former and minimize the latter.

Because I am libertarian, I alone can construct what these experiences mean to me, and what objective circumstances cause these feelings; in general, each person constructs for herself what she considers happiness and suffering.

I am empathic in the sense that other people's happiness usually makes me happy, and other peoples suffering makes me suffer. My empathy is not, however, exact: I am indifferent, for instance, to the happiness of rapists, and I am indifferent to the suffering of the intolerant.

If some sort of experience causes me or others happiness, and doesn't cause me or others to suffer, then I will approve of that experience. Contrawise, if some sort of experience causes suffering and no happiness, I will disapprove.

Because my specific ethical opinions about what causes me happiness and suffering are indeed opinions and not matters of fact, there is no issue with having specific opinions about abstract experiences at varying levels of abstraction. For instance, although I'm straight man, and therefore gay sexual activities don't cause me any particular happiness, I have a positive opinion about the abstract notion of having rewarding consensual sexual experiences in general.

The big issue with this sort of humanist ethics is forming opinions about specific activities which cause some people happiness and others suffering. There are no rigorous, logical, objective answers to these sorts of issues: I must, rather, consult my feelings, discover how I feel about the various consequences and how I feel directly about the various actions available, and come to some conclusion.

Because I am a philosopher, I've examined my feelings in some detail. Although I've done some work in making my feelings consistent, on the whole my ethical beliefs are a matter of discovery rather than construction.

Atheism and Spirituality

There seems to be some confusion out there about atheistic spirituality, that to be an atheist one must cut himself off from everything any theist has ever said about the human spirit and the human heart. The fallacy, I think, is to assume that all or much that is good and noble of the human experience really does come only from God, or belief in God; to reject God is to reject this nobility.

This is simply not so. I greatly admire and am profoundly influenced by the words of Paul:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
I Cor: 13:1-7

I like this quotation. I like it a lot. The difference between the atheist and the theist is, I think, that I believe Paul here because it makes sense; I don't have to attribute this notion of love to God to believe it. More importantly, I don't have to accept everything Paul says as the truth; Paul says much that I consider foolish, vain and unloving. No matter: I'm free to pick and choose on the basis of my rational mind and my human feelings, not on the basis of some divine authority.

Likewise I can admire others just as much, be just as profoundly influenced by them. For instance:

Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends.
The Lord of the Rings

I can admire this wisdom even though it is spoken by a fictional character. I don't have to believe that Gandalf the Gray was real or that Tolkien was inspired by any God. I admire it because it is sensible.

Rationality and atheism does not mean cutting myself off from the richness of human culture and history, explicitly religious though much of it is. It means only that I can choose myself what to accept and what to reject. I can choose on my own rational and moral authority, and no one else's. I can accept the good, just because it is good. I can reject the bad, just because it is bad. I can keep the good and still strip away the specious and vacuous God part, just because "God" is specious and vacuous.

The theist seems to me to be in a much worse position. He can't say that he likes Paul's thoughts on love on the authority of his own judgment; he must say that he accepts Paul's thoughts because God tells him to. He cannot take personal responsibility for his own goodness; the theist's only virtue that is truly his own is submission to God's will.

But if the theist cannot take responsibility for the good, how can he take responsibility for the bad? If he himself cannot judge the good on his own authority, how can he judge the bad? If he must love because God commands it, how can he resist God's command to genocide, slavery, incest, human sacrifice, mass murder, and mopery on the high seas?

As an atheist, I do not reject anything good about human culture, human history or human society. All I do it cut away the layers of irrelevant bullshit and vacuous mysticism. I have no need for elaborate theodicy. I have no need for rococo hermeneutics to reconcile the arbitrary morals of a primitive culture with modern ethics, to reconcile a naive mythology with modern science.

I admire all that is good, whether spoken by "saints" or sages, ordinary people, fictional characters or even a barefoot bum.

The Clean Glass

In his latest entry in his debate with Sam Harris, Sullivan trots out the tired old standard: science not only needs just as much "faith" as religion (Sullivan is apparently unaware that the philosophy of science has advanced just a tiny bit since Hume), it's a poorer faith, poorer precisely because it seeks the truth.

The place you are seeking - this "contingency-free" place where no specifics exist but pure truth and a clean glass - is something we people of faith call heaven... [O]nly the truly foolish among us have ever mistaken it for earth, or human life. And when those truly foolish people have attempted to replicate this heaven on earth, they have been responsible for the worst atrocities religion has produced.

I don't know how much clearer Sullivan can be: The search for truth--at least on earth--is foolish and dangerous, it leads to atrocity; we must wait on heaven for the truth. Sullivan, blinded by religion and his conservatism, cannot see the struggle against religion to be anything but the violent imposition of yet another arbitrary superstition. But that's how Sullivan's church operates, how Sullivan's politics works, not how we work.

The "clean glass" that Harris wants, that I want, is not the clean glass sought by the fanatics of every religion, including Sullivan's own, the glass purged of those not force-fed a particular brand of Mystical Mumbo Jumbo. It is not the clean glass so desired by the fanatics of Sullivan's own conservative movement, a glass purged of those who would question the right of the United States to enslave every nation, every person, on the Earth (treating, of course, the white slaves a little better). It is not the clean glass of the Communists, atheists only on the technicality of Marx being a little too recent to make completely divine.

It is not belief in God which is the dirt on the glass. "God" is just one of the many names for this dirt, the dirt for which Sullivan hungers for, the dirt which he cannot bear to lose, the dirt which he insists that the rest of us cannot do without. The dirt is the dirt of superstition, of private truth which can be promulgated only by force, never by reason. This is the dirt which makes "God" possible.

This is not dirt which can be eliminated by killing people. Indeed when one's glass is clean the idea of killing anyone is abhorrent: "Violence is the last resort of the incompetent," sayeth Saint Asimov. We need only teach people clear, logical, rational and sensible thought. Anyone can learn it, nobody needs to be killed. The only killing that's being done is by those whose ideology cannot be rationally persuasive, that can be promulgated only by killing those who do not believe or will not submit.

Sullivan, having a couple of IQ points and decade of education on the average Christian fundamentalist--not to mention being a gay Catholic--has figured out that the particular forms of his Catholic religion are not worth killing for. But Sullivan has not renounced the Catholic way of thinking; he has just transferred his religion to conservatism, with Mammon as his God and Goldwater and Reagan as his prophets, the war in Iraq his Crusades and the demonization of liberals his Inquisition. Sullivan lacks only spine to be a good fanatic; he has the self-righteousness, faux humility, doublethink and superstition down pat.

Early morning musings

I used to think that this was a great country, perhaps I still do. I'm liberal in my very genes[1]; I don't think I've ever believed that we were great because we were powerful and forceful, but rather because at our core we had humanistic moral principles.

Our crimes are great: the genocide of the American Indians, our naked colonialism in the early 20th century, our use of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, on civilians in World War II, our material support for blatantly evil governments later in the 20th century, the moral monstrosity of our invasion of Iraq. I'm sure any reader could add a dozen more.

But we have done some good: As bloodily and incompetently as we fought the Civil War, we fought it in no small part to forcibly end slavery. As criminally as we fought World War II, we could have punished our vanquished enemies as ruthlessly as after World War I, ruled them with a vicious tyranny, or simply abandoned them, but we didn't: We helped them rebuild. And these virulently authoritarian societies became, almost by magic, relatively liberal, peaceful democracies--not perfect, but seemingly much improved.

We were the first nation in modern times to explicitly state that our government derived its power from the people, not from birth, class, or the divine right of Kings. We were the first to at least call the members of our government the servants of the people, and renounce the idea that the people were merely the tools of the King, to be used at his pleasure. We put the Enlightenment ideals of individual liberty into into real legal practice. We have contributed substantially to the advancement of scientific knowledge.

Our goodness has been the goodness of restraint. When we have violently projected our power, even for seemingly good ends, our goodness was only relative: 1939 Japan and Germany did not set a high moral bar, nor did the American South of 1860. Hindsight is always 20/20, but there are good arguments that with only ordinary foresight the same ends could have been obtained peaceably, or at least with considerably less destruction and horror.

In any event, my concern is not with judging the past, but trying to put today's events in a moral context. One's own times are, of course, the most vivid. It's easy to see the corruption in one's own time as being fundamentally worse than any in history.

Still, something has happened to us.

One need only compare the slightly goofy but sincere liberal optimism, humanism and can-do spirit of gun-hating Angus MacGyver[2] with the dark, brutal pessimism of Jack Bauer to see how our narrative has changed. These shows are how we're presenting ourselves to the world. I'm told by no small few of those living in other countries that MacGuyver was instrumental in forming their good opinion of America and Americans. What are we telling them with 24? What are we telling ourselves?

Compared to many other countries, we're not so bad, I suppose; compared to others we're not so good. No nation, no individual, can lay claim to moral perfection, even in his or her own eyes, much less the eyes of others. Humanity is still clawing its way up from its animal origins and the ruthless, pitiless law of the jungle and biological evolution.

I don't think we should be afraid or defensive about confronting our moral flaws as individuals or as nations. We don't have to be perfect, just honest and sincerely trying to improve. It's no sin to make a mistake, even a horrible mistake; it's a sin, I think, only to try to justify or ignore our mistakes.

I see threads of this truly humble attitude in any number of narratives, including Christianity. But even Christianity got it wrong from day one; Christians seem all too often to humble themselves only before God (who is, after all, a fictional character) and use that faux humility to support their self-righteousness towards their fellow human beings.

The mistake, I think, is to elevate law from a means to an end. Paul and the founders of Christianity erred in incorporating Jewish law. The Chinese erred in incorporating Confucian law into Buddhism. Muhammad erred in making his scripture about very little but the law. This is a human failing, I think: our tendency to elevate useful means to arbitrary ends which do little but promote self-righteousness.

I don't know that I have a point here. I don't know what to do about all this. I'm just a snowflake in the avalanche. All I can do is act as my conscience dictates and add my tiny voice to humanity's roar.


[1] When I was six or seven years old, I wrote a letter to President Nixon suggesting that he trade places with Ho Chi Minh as a way to end the Vietnam war. Roll your eyes if you please; I was six.

[2] Perhaps it's significant that MacGyver was Canadian produced.

Atheism, Religion and Spirituality

Many religious people talk about "spirituality". Many superstitious people talk about "spirituality". But there's nothing at all divine, supernatural or mystical at all about spirituality; and spirituality is all the more extraordinary for being natural and true.

Spirituality is all about love. Nothing mystical. Spirituality is just the same sort of love you feel for your wife, husband, spouse or significant other on Valentine's day. The same sort of love you feel for your children (or that children feel for their parents) on Christmas, Hanukkah, Eid, Kwanzaa or whatever holiday your culture encourages for everyone to be nice to each other. The sort of love you feel for your country or your tribe.

Spirituality is a connection to something larger than your own immediate material needs. It's about feeling good yourself just because someone else feels good, and about suffering yourself just because someone else is suffering. It's scary, because if you truly feel love then you will suffer too when the one you love suffers. But it's exhilarating, because the happiness and joy you feel when the one you love is joyous is like no other feeling.

What religions and cultures do is the most evil and terrible thing: They take this spirituality, this love, and tie it to some arbitrary rules and restrictions, and say that to love, to be connected to, depends on adherence to these arbitrary rules, because these rules, and thus spirituality, come from "god", or your sacred ancestors, or some such nonsense. And, towards those "others", who had some other set of nonsensical arbitrary rules drummed into their heads, our love, which rests on passion, is inverted and turned to hatred, and we feel joy and another's suffering, and suffering at their joy.

And all this evil is done by those who have no spirituality at all, no joy nor even hatred. They have only concern for themselves; they care for others only so far as others can serve them, their ego, their wealth, their power. They take joy neither in the happiness or suffering of others, no more joy than any person would feel for the rock itself if it were turned into a marvelous sculpture or annihilated into dust.

"When an ordinary man attains knowledge, he becomes a sage. When a sage attains enlightenment, he becomes an ordinary man."

There are two steps on the road to enlightenment. The first is to realize that love, that spirituality, comes from inside yourself, not, as the ordinary man believes, from god. This knowledge is necessary, but oh! the tragedy of so many philosophers, so many kings, so many priests who have gained only this knowledge and no more. Because, when freed from superstition, from "god", how like cheap sentimentality does love appear. Poor Nietzsche! ignorant and fearful of women, loved only by his sister, possessed of the terrible knowledge that there was no god, and therefore condemning love as weakness.

This knowledge, that there is no god, that one's ancestors, one's countrymen are ordinary people, grants one great power. Knowing that love is not true, and thus believing (falsely) that love is false, there is no constraint on how the sage can manipulate a superstitious populace. He can become a priest and manipulate those who love, and have been trained from birth to believe that it is the priests who provide us with love. He can become a king, and manipulate those trained from birth to believe that it is the king, the president, the chieftain who provide us with love of country and of tribe. He knows what a tawdry, worldly thing this love is, and is no fool to fall for it. And if the sage has a defect of will, he becomes a philosopher, howling his terrible truth or desperately trying to convince himself that such terrible truth cannot be true.

But how empty is such a sage. He is more than an animal, yes. But in stripping himself of superstition, he has stripped himself of love, and has become less than an ordinary man. And there is no going back. Once you know there is no god, you cannot again convince yourself otherwise.

The second step, to enlightenment, is even more terrifying than the first. To embrace love again is to become again an ordinary man. But without god, without superstition, without sanctifying the ancestors of your tribe or the founders of your nation, love means to love everyone, saint and sinner, citizen and criminal. It is to take into yourself all the joy of humanity, but all its suffering too, the suffering of billions, tens of billions. Poor Jesus! (fictional though he may be) wise at twelve, enlightened at thirty, and the suffering of all humanity on his shoulders. What else could he do under such a weight of suffering but die in the most painful way possible.

"After enlightenment comes the laundry."

There is a third step. Happiness and joy is. Suffering is. Even the enlightened person can just live. Laugh some, cry some, and sometimes howl at the unfairness of it all, but just live. And be, mostly, happy.

The Counsels of Defeat

Andrew Sullivan today quotes Leszek Kolakowski on the counsels of defeat:

Religion is man's way of accepting life as an inevitable defeat. That it is not an inevitable defeat is a claim that cannot be defended in good faith... One can accept life, and accept it, at the same time, as a defeat only if... ne accepts the order of the sacred."

I categorically reject such counsels of defeat and despair. I reject a retreat into delusion and lies in the face of death. I pity those without the imagination to contemplate victory. And I'm filled with disgust at those traitors to the human spirit who would undermine our chance of victory to justify their cowardice.

The hundred millennia and more of all of human existence is a merely a blink of the eye in the age of the universe. In that short time, the blind uncaring forces of evolution have shaped us, and we have shaped the tools--language, art, technology and science--to make ourselves as great as we can imagine ourselves to be. We can surpass any limitation, overcome any obstacle, and achieve any victory--even over death itself--but only if imagination does not fail us.

There have been billions of human casualties in our struggle against death. Perhaps, in the past, our religions have served some purpose in maintaining our morale in the long millennia of this struggle. Victory seemed unachievable, but still we fought. But not so today. It is not hubris, it is not vanity, to believe we can find victory in our struggle against death. Those who label such victory as hubris or vanity are traitors to humanity who would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

I myself may fall in this great struggle, but I will fall still fighting; I will fall never for a moment accepting the counsels of fear, the seductive whispers urging the comfort of delusion against the inevitability of defeat.

And when--not if, but when--we win the struggle against death, we can have more, much more, than mere vanity or satiation with the centuries, the millennia, perhaps even the eternity available to our minds. There is an infinity of knowledge awaiting us, a vast and glorious universe to explore, and worlds in every grain of sand.

The contempt for the real is the counsel of cowardice and the failure of the imagination. It is the creed of the slave, willing to accept any suffering, any degradation, any delusion to save himself from the terrible burden of freedom and choice.

Perhaps I may die. Perhaps you may die too. You have a choice, though, the choice that not even the slave can escape: You can die in the service of comforting lies and flattering delusions, or you can die in the service of the truth and the greatness of humanity.