Author Archive for Chronicler of Reason

Blasphemy Is A Victimless Crime

Published

on May 24, 2010

I recently received a tip about a very detailed and incisive analysis of the new CNN Religion blog, at Bloggasm.

I expected it to be normal CNN fare, in other words, bland, tasteless pulp that panders to the lowest common denominator. In many respects, CNN did not disappoint me in this regard.

You just know an article is going to be good when the headline is Does Draw Mohammed Day = Holocaust Denial?

It talks about a certain Pakistani rocker, Salman Ahmad. In the first paragraph, we are already treated to the amusing idea that Salman Ahmad is progressive because he opposes Pakistani censorship of the internet and the media. Which, to be fair, is a principled position in any case. The punchline is the next paragraph, where we are told that this rocker nevertheless understood Islamabad’s impulse to do whatever was necessary to stop Pakistanis from seeing depictions of the prophet Muhammad. The Orwellian undertones of this sentence are quite distressingly clear. The immediate assumption is that all Pakistanis are both Muslim and likely to have their sensitivities offended by a picture of a man. How kind of the State, then, to care so much for the civilian population. It doesn’t want anyone thinking for themselves or, god forbid, seeing a picture of a man. I apologise for the redundancy of the phrase but it bears mentioning because on cold and rational inspection, it’s quite darkly comical. I long for there to be some (there must be some!) enterprising Muslims spreading their own versions of Radio Yerevan jokes that flourished under the joke of the arbitrary totalitarianism of the Soviet Union and I would greatly enjoy to hear them.

Anyway, the redefinition of free speech in the space of a sentence is egregious and unfortunately representative enough of the distance and respect with which ludicrous ideas are treated deferentially by virtue of them being religious in nature.

The truly shocking quote comes just words later, in the form:

It’s as intolerable to Muslims to have images of the prophet, he said, as it is for Jews to accept Holocaust denial or for African-Americans to hear “the n-word.”

The author of this post, Richard Allen Green, dons a second pair of latex gloves on top of the ones he’s wearing already to deal with such an intolerable mammal.

But to be absolutely clear, when I was talking to Ahmad, he said “the n-word,” not the word itself.
If you’re American – white or black – imagine how shocked you would have been if he’d actually said the word.
Now imagine how shocked you’d be if there were Facebook groups urging people to use that word, or to deny the Holocaust.

I would be, and am, shocked if I saw or heard someone denying the Holocaust. Besides the fact that it’s a plain and rather pedestrian denial of historical fact, it underlies a very mean streak, at once a desire to efface the memory of the lost and to gleefully invite history to repeat itself. Holocaust denial is the culmination of a provincial and religiously inspired xenophobia, the refusal to acknowledge the suffering of a people long persecuted by the Catholic Church in Europe. There is a case to be made of the Catholic Church not having its hands clean of the Holocaust too, and it is especially guilty in aiding and abetting the escape of Nazi officials to South America after the war had ended.

Racism is malicious in a similar vein. It’s dehumanising and nowadays is the vestigial remain of a once powerful State machinery, not just limited to the United States, which systematically abducted and tortured generations of Africans. The effects of this are still felt in the US today. Indeed, it took a Civil Rights Movement to complete the Emancipation.

And yet we are asked to contemplate how a Muslim would feel if someone portrayed the prophet Muhammad in pictorial form. The comparison of racism and the Holocaust to drawing a picture of an 8th Century tradesman should shock any thinking person.

We are asked to empathise with the suffering a Muslim might undergo as a result of seeing a picture. Of a man.

Suleiman the Magnificent. Not Muhammad. A man nevertheless

It doesn’t have to be a pornographic picture, it doesn’t have to be a picture depicting a senseless act of cruelty. It doesn’t have to be child porn (although if it were a picture of Muhammad and his wife, it may well be), it doesn’t have to be critical.

All that a person has to do to offend the sensitivity of a Muslim to the same extent that any sane person is offended by racism and Holocaust denial, is draw a picture of an Arab tradesman.

The suggestion that we must empathise with this is particular to Islam. A violent Abrahamic religion, which applies conquest by the sword to elements of Messianism, it’s strict and full of discipline and doctrine, but, most perniciously, it does not seem to stop at its own followers. Everyone is assumed to have to live by the rules of Islam. Never mind if you’re a Christian or a Jew. For all the token words Islam might make about respecting the other two Abrahamic faiths, the truth is that they have to live as second-class citizens, paying a tax on the contents of their minds in servitude.

I am willing to bet good money that a vast majority of the rioters over the Muhammad cartoons published in Jylands-Posten in Denmark would not be able to place Denmark on a map, let alone read a newspaper from a rural part of the peaceful Scandinavian nation.

But the idea that someone somewhere is doing something ‘naughty’ is enough to inflame the attitude of even the most ‘progressive’ Muslim, such as the rocker Salman Ahmad. I really do hope that CNN botched the interview and somehow misquoted him completely but I fear the possibility is somewhat suspect.

The truth is that Islam displays all of the characteristics of an absolute totalitarian dictatorship. Acts that are completely arbitrary such as depicting Muhammad are inflamed to the point where they’re considered on par with the Holocaust or with racial discrimination.

But the fact is that the Holocaust claimed victims. Six million Jews lost their lives and countless millions of other unseemly races such as Slavs or Gypsies were summarily executed by an industrialised war machine of unspeakable brutality.

The fact is that slavery devastated the lives of millions of Africans by virtue of the colour of their skin. Millions of lives were deemed to be second-class to Whites and were treated that way.

The fact is that drawing a picture hurts nobody. No one is physically injured. A picture of Muhammad is not a statement of racism nor is it a statement of Holocaust denial. A picture of Muhammad inflames the fragile consciences of totalitarian barbarians who believe they have the unique jurisdiction to tell people what to see and what not to see.

Ink on paper draws no blood.

Blasphemy is a victimless crime. And let’s not forget that.

Babies Are Born Atheists

Published

Chronicler of Reason

on May 17, 2010

I realise I commit the blogging suicide of abandoning posting completely in infrequent spurts and then returning to also infrequent spurts of posting but writing is a craft of pleasure for me and if at least one other person enjoys it, it will have been worth it.

So in the spirit of recapping the ethos of the Gospel of Reason, I’d like to take a couple of words to address an all too frequent complaint about atheism.

How can you believe in nothing?

I’ve heard more than once that I have a god-shaped hole in my heart. My physician begs to differ, he seemed to be quite happy with a routine check-up and I don’t seem to have any sort of abnormal cavities in my heart which I should otherwise need filling, presumably at the religious equivalent of a dentist.

Do atheists really believe in nothing? I find it hard to answer for all atheists and this is because it’s a position which shouldn’t really exist at all. Atheism is the default metaphysical position. When someone says “The Universe was created by turtles” or “Yahweh made everything in 6 days” or other such nonsense, the default position is one of scepticism, and rightly so. Although, as human animals, evolution has ingrained in us a predisposition to obey authority at an early age (in order to breeze past the learning process which would otherwise take far too long to be practical for survival), a sign of intellectual maturity is the ability to process outlandish claims and decide on merit whether they are worth believing in. Some people’s standards for evidence are clearly lower than others’, and some people only have the semblance of a standard for evidence to stand in front of an intellectual absolutism that wouldn’t budge if an asteroid hit it.

baby

It’s quite patently obvious that religion is a man-made construct. I don’t think any religious person would deny this – it was up to humans to develop the doctrines and ideas of all the major religions, with no exception. Whether Moses was divinely inspired or not, someone had to put it into paper and decide what a ‘burning bush’ meant.

Religion is quite clearly a post-script in the development of the human mind. Although I agree that humans are predisposed by nature to the kind of social organisation and existential absolutism that religion provides, it doesn’t make religion any less man-made than, say, buildings. Lest we get too comfortable with religion being ingrained in humans, it bears clarifying that humans are predisposed to belonging to a tribe, to receiving absolute truth at an early age and, with the mixed blessing of Consciousness, with existentialism, an awareness of self and of the short duration of life. These roles are fulfilled (inadequately) by religion but fulfilled they are nonetheless for believers. Such abstract guidelines could just as easily be fulfilled with xenophobic tribalism (perhaps religion is just that?).

So for any person to be involved in a religion, for the most part it seems that said person has to be born in it. Conversions and migrations obviously change the conditions but in a wide brush stroke, people are generally born into the religion they later accept. For all the notion that abstract concepts of religious behaviour are ingrained in humans, this is not the case with revealed knowledge.

Revealed Knowledge is by definition unique to only one person. Only Moses knew what he saw (or imagined to see) and everyone else had to take his word for it.

Such Knowledge is what forms the cornerstone of every major religion. Sophisticated theologians will go on about higher intelligences and nonsense about the constants of Physics but to the everyday congregation, the fire and brimstone of hell is as real as the ground beneath the pulpit.

Where does atheism come in?

Like I said before, atheism is merely a default position. To speak of my own case, my worldview is purely natural. The world around us, a product of immense natural forces, the magnitude of which our puny minds have difficulty to scale with. Life, a product of the elegant and ruthless forces of evolution through natural selection, the only possible explanation for the gradual sophistication of complex life-forms on Earth. If there are no gods it’s because there’s no space left. Atheism is as useless a term as A-Zeusism or A-Odinism. This is, of course, is my own personal case, because the most basic requirement for the label ‘atheism’ is the simple lack of a supernatural intelligence higher than human beings, not the denial of one (although lack implies denial if a question is asked).

But it exists nonetheless because, throughout history, the struggle of religion has been one of controlling and acquiring minds. People who saw through the transparently false and unprovable assertions were not necessarily people rejecting one religion more than any other, but people who did not see a natural world with the supernatural stapled on the side. Atheism is a useless label but it’s necessary. It’s the default state of the metaphysical.

You may not agree with this but it’s quite obvious too:

Babies are born atheists.

A blank slate, a fresh mind, ready to absorb knowledge and eager to explore the world around it. I don’t wish to offend any parents, but the mind of a 2 year old is very limited indeed, at least compared to the extent of its full adult potential. It can barely walk and might not even have the capacity for producing language – how could you possibly expect a baby to know about something as complicated as a deity when it can’t even spell out the alphabet from A to Zed?

This example illustrates my point most dramatically, I think. This is not to say that atheists have baby-like minds, which is a trap just waiting to be sprung by sadistic butchers of the English language. It means that atheism is a position which exists by default.

A baby only acquires a religion through education. If you didn’t speak a word to them about the Bible and gave them one at the age of 18, the college-age adult would in all probability wonder what the authors were smoking (and perhaps where they might procure some). The ravaging genocides of the Mosaic period, the party tricks of the Messiah and the spectacular hallucinations of Revelations are all so patently man-made, the young adult would have to have a very low self-esteem to believe any of it.

This means that religions are only acquired through education. Since, as stated before, our minds are primed for accepting truths from a position of authority, anything a parent or religious figure says that the child is told to obey, will sink in harder and deeper than later in life. Not in vain do Jesuits ask you to “give us your child so that we may give you a man”.

Atheists don’t have a god-shaped hole in their hearts any more than fresh minds do.

Religion is the one impaling a god-shaped thorn in infants’ hearts instead.

Be scared. Be really scared… of zombies!

Published

Chronicler of Reason

on December 21, 2008

Humans have always been fascinated with death. Death with a capital D. Since the dawn of consciousness, human tribes have had one form or another of cult of the dead. Early paleolithic tribes would bury their dead with some belongings – this custom extended into the tombs of the Egyptian pharaohs and nowadays, most cultures have some form of ritual worship of the dead[1] which brings closure and finality to a process which, by definition, is not understood by anyone on Earth!

In the realm of the human consciousness, however, there is also guilt. A lot of it. Religion plays to the existence of this guilt and appropriates it and encourages it, in order to yield submission.

Catholics will tell you to feel guilty for having been born (since everyone bears the mark of shame of original sin), Islam will tell you to feel guilty for thought crime, and a long etc. Many of the more repressive religions share among them a morbid obsession and infatuation with ‘sexual sins’, telling followers to basically abstain from sex, hoping to control humans by controlling one of the most basic human instincts.

What does guilt have to do with death?

A lot.

In early Judaean culture, on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, people would literally gather a goat, laden him symbolically with their sins and drive it into the desert to die in the wilderness, thereby removing themselves of responsibility for their actions. The rite is described in Leviticus 16:10[2]. The parallel with the medieval Catholic notion of indulgences is striking.

So by driving an innocent animal to its death, early Middle Eastern cultures relieved themselves of the guilt for having done something wrong. A legal loophole, of sorts, in a book which commands people in unambiguous terms how to behave. So you can sin, if you like, because all you need to do is load up your guilt, your shame and your sins onto a poor goat and drive him into the desert.

Christian mythology is strongly infused with this same sense of death as a liberator. Christians morbidly celebrate the death of Jesus of Nazareth – his sole purpose on Earth being to save humanity for its sins.

Speaking personally, I would never have agreed to let a man die for the sins I myself have committed. The passion and the fervour with which this event is celebrated is, on cursory examination, sickly and plain wrong. Conservative-smut peddler Anne Coulter famously referred to Christians as ‘improved Jews’ (the terrifying implication being that Jews can be ‘improved’). In one sense, this can only mean that instead of taking responsibilities for themselves for the sins they have committed, Christians 1-up the Jews, not by murdering a goat for liberation from guilt, but by letting a perfectly healthy (although questionably sane) man be executed gruesomely.

Christians morbidly celebrate the death of Jesus of Nazareth – his sole purpose on Earth being to save humanity for its sins.

It raises, of course, the question: if the Son of God himself sacrificed himself for the sins of his puny human followers, why in god’s name are Christian denominations still obsessed with sin in every form? This will perhaps lead to a series of inane and vacuous theological interchanges so I hope that I’m going to spare myself the trouble by tackling this question on another occasion.

The morbid fascination with the grisly torture and execution of Jesus of Nazareth does not stop the moment his heart ceases to beat. Because then, in possibly Jesus’ most spectacular ‘miracle’, he returns to life.

Or does he? Because nowhere in the New Testament does it specifically note that Jesus resurrected. The women who were mourning him open the tomb (for some reason) and find there is no body, which they find hard to explain as there was a guard mounted throughout the night.

Later on, chronologically, bible verses talk about the return from death of Jesus but at no point did they actually explain how or indeed whether. We only have their word to take much after the alleged event occurred.

Unable to think of ways to smuggle out a body from a cave, the disciples decide that Jesus resurrected. Then, for the next 40 days he makes appearances to his disciples and then ascends into heaven.

One can almost see the Daily Mirror headline:

HIS BODY NOT FOUND – IS JESUS A ZOMBIE?

It’s quite surprising, within the context of the morbid obsession of later Christian cults with sin and with guilt, that they allow in their stories for the ultimate scapegoat to return. But perhaps it isn’t so surprising. If a scapegoat ever made it out alive from the desert he would bring back with him all the sins he was meant to take away to the Underworld and with it all the guilt it bore.

So, a light, superficial analysis of Christian mythology such as mine brings to the surface a number of interesting happenings which tell us a lot about the preoccupations of the human consciousness. We’re desperately guilty and we’re worried about our death.

To humankind, death is a moment of closure and grief… but it can also be a moment of burial of secrets, an expression for turning the page on unfortunate occurrences and shameful events. Burying a dead body is as much a sign of respect as it is a prison – the body is placed under the weight of the Earth itself to stop it from ever returning.

Fear of Death is as much a fear of the unknown as it is a fear of exposure of one’s secrets. Most human cultures have a moment of judgment after death, of some form or another. Even Buddhism requires one to be in a state of material nothingness – there’s nothing left to be guilty for if you renounce the reality of the material world, an escapist philosophy of sorts.

The world’s largest religion reveres what can only be described as a zombie, it’s not surprising we’re terrified of them.

Zombies are therefore a powerful allegory for the return of our sins, for the monstrosity of our shameful actions and the brutality of the consequences were they ever to return. The world’s largest religion reveres what can only be described as a zombie, it’s not surprising we’re terrified of them.

Zombie apocalypses are as much stories of B-movie horror films as they are metaphors for a gigantic cashing in of guilt, the consequences if everyone’s secrets and sins were let out to the surface at once.

Wade Davis is a Canadian anthropologist and ethnobotanist who is famous for a number of essays and a book about his experience in Haiti, visiting actual zombies[3].

According to Davis, shamans hold an enormous power over villagers. It takes only to cross the path of the shaman for him to zombify a person – void them of their humanity and transform them into submissive slaves – after killing them!

It turns out that debtors and adulterers would get poisoned with two powders – the first, the coup de poudre, consists of tetrododoxin (which is the poison found in the famously poisonous pufferfish) and the second would include dissociatives such as datura. The combination of these two allegedly drops the pulse of the victim to near undetectable levels and bring them into dead, zombie like trances where they would submit entirely to the will of the shaman.

Of course, the powders are merely complimentary to the real poison – the religious and shamanic conditioning from birth, the psychological effect of which being far more potent than any powder.

Haitian zombification is a crude yet effective means of expressing absolute power, as a shaman. A shaman’s authority is left unquestioned, lest villagers start becoming mortified into inhuman husks, shells of former beings.

Popularly, the supernatural component to the existence of zombies hinders taking them seriously. To be honest, this is entirely sound.

But it’s when we examine the meaning of zombies to us on an immaterial level, when we ask ourselves about a zombie’s inherent hostility (the feeling is usually mutual), when we analyse the roots of our fascination for death and for people and things who have seen the other side and returned to tell the tale, we stumble on a deeper examination of a collective human consciousness.

Zombies are the headaches after the rise of human intelligence. They’re unevolved spasms of a primitive guilt and a primitive fear. We’re still incapable, as a species, to owning up and taking responsibility for our actions – we’re terrified should they ever come back to haunt us.

Fear-mongering and guilt-mongering in religions appeal perhaps inadvertently to these base instincts because deep down, all figures of authority in religion know, just like the Haitian shaman, what happens next.

One day, hopefully, we humans will collectively realise it’s not going to take the sacrifice of an animal to rid us of our shameful actions, or the execution of an innocent human being (the Son of God no less!) to his death to cure all and end all. It’s going to take work and effort and balls to own up to one’s past deeds. Only once we’re capable of lifting our gaze to look each other in the eye, to take responsibility for what we’ve done in our lives, the clergyman will preside over empty pews indeed.

Gott mit uns

Published

Chronicler of Reason

on April 11, 2008

Throughout the history of civilisation, the presence of the supernatural is a given. In the dark depths of the lack of knowledge of early human history, maps can be found in divine interpretations, counsel is given from trances and most importantly deeds, good or evil, bear from a higher cause.

Of course, depending on where you look, not much has changed at all. One would be hard pressed to believe that a world where superpowers invade sovereign countries because ‘God’ told them so was a world in the XXI century, and not in the age of the Trojan Wars.

Although many people conduct their lives without having to live under the shadow of self-recriminatory repression, a good many unfortunately still exhibit signs of cult-ish fear.

In an example relevant to the contemporary geopolitical theatre:

From my exposure to Jews from an early age as good friends, I’ve grown to sympathise greatly with the cause of the state of Israel. As a history buff, the stories of all the wars of national defense were analogous to epics of survival. I find that the existence and resilience of the Jewish state today is a testament to the survival instinct of a people who originated as a Middle Eastern tribe in the Bronze Age.

Yet my heart shrinks for every rabbi who indulges in religiously inspired expansionism.

I am, of course, fully aware that one could make a similar case for the Palestinians. It is revoltingly short-sighted to assume that every Palestinian is a suicide bomber. Yet the situation of Islam makes it a separate case to deal with, a case I will perhaps deal in a future post, time allowing (I take the opportunity to apologise profusely to my equally resilient readership – I am currently studying in Engineering which takes up practically 27 hours per day of my time).

The state of Judaea existed in the Bronze Age, that is an undisputable fact. That this piece of infertile desert left Jewish control between then and 1948 is also a fact that nobody will make an effort to fight.

And yet the situation of Israel seems like a perfect opportunity to reconcile the ancient history of both peoples who coincide on the same piece of land.

Although many people conduct their lives without having to live under the shadow of self-recriminatory repression, a good many unfortunately still exhibit signs of cult-ish fear.

What is unfortunate to me, as a slightly Israel leaning outsider, is that there are many elements in the Jewish religious community who hold reactionary, dangerous and very real views about what should be done with the land that surrounds the 1948 borders. Under the secular excuse of maintaining national sovereignty facing a brutal enemy with ambitions of extermination, this land is de-facto occupied.

However, the religiously inspired excuse involved settling and annexing this land in order to restore the ancient kingdom of David.

Any ultra-nationalistic ambition with territorial claims grounded in illuminated parchments of the Bronze Age should be viewed with absolute disdain. Just as any controversial opinion derived from no evidence at all is of no concern to the public, epoch-based ultra-nationalism is something to deride as a delusion, if not because of the dangerous ethnic rearrangement implications then because of the simplistic irredentism of it.

The not uncommon idea that the Jewish people are the apple of Yahweh’s eye leads to this kind of irredentist nationalism. Out of my many Jewish friends it is a few who have said that proof for God’s existence is the survival of the Jewish tribe.

One would wonder why God would bother making 6,2 billion people more than the 20 million Jews he cares about.

Unabashedly arrogant, this interpretation of the supernatural is not particular to ultra-religious Jews, however.

“Gott mit uns” is the motto inscribed on the belt buckles of the Wehrmacht troops of the Third Reich (dispelling the ‘atheistic’ nature of the regime).

My point is that with the blessing of God one finds the perfect moral scapegoat for getting away with acts of breathtaking inanity and no less danger to others, acts that inspected rationally would merit the believer a suite in an asylum.

With the blessing of God, the Jewish people deny themselves the honour of being a people which have known how to survive despite the constant persecution – a skill worth having, a heritage to be proud of. If one were to explain it away as God’s will then the merit fades.

With the blessing of God, one can afford to escape the consequences of brutal acts on other people who presumably have the blessing of God themselves.

With the blessing of God one finds himself with a blank check. Since the laws of the divine take predominance over the earthly (in a spectacularly egoistic and amoral legal hierarchy), one can get away with racist eugenics.

With the blessing of God, one can get away with reviving ancient territorial ambitions at the expense of the existing population (Albanians expelling Serbians from Kosovo to fulfill the prophecies of the League of Prizren, for example – again, a post worth it’s own if I ever get around to it).

With the blessing of God, one can afford to escape the consequences of brutal acts on other people who presumably have the blessing of God themselves.

Geopolitics are better off without supernatural inspirations.

The world is better of without God.

Please Stop Saying ‘Christians’ – You Owe It To Byzantium

Published

Chronicler of Reason

on December 29, 2007

A small personal gripe, after a very lengthy interval in posting.

We can all agree that Christianity has plenty of denominations. The basic divisions, we can all agree upon, are Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism and Protestantism.

There is one point, however, which everyone seems to fall into (as did I, but I’m trying to avoid it).

In the US there are countless variations and reforms of the Protestant branch of Christianity, the most notable here in Europe being the Evangelical Christians, for their relentless pursuit of converting others.

However, they call themselves ‘Christians’.

In Spain, the Catholic Church will in the very near future hold demonstrations in favour of the ‘Christian family’. Catholics call themselves ‘Cristianos’.

This is, admittedly, a small gripe, yet one I believe must be made in order to respect historical fact.

I am the first to denounce any kind of blind belief, however moderate or apparently harmless it may be. But there is a crucially important distinction to make when talking about Evangelicals or Catholics or any denomination of Christianity.

Because of my close affiliation with Orthodox Christianity as a family heritage (without succumbing to the inane beliefs), I get ticked off when people talk about, say, Creationists, as Christians, simply because this lumps everyone who calls themselves a Christian together into the Creationist category.

I say respect for history because of my loyalty to my Byzantine heritage. It might sound inane, but at a closer look, the Byzantine Empire has, in its over 1000 years of history, done more for the protection of European Christendom and Middle Age kingdoms than anyone actually in Europe.

The Byzantine Empire was shrouded in religion, Orthodox Christianity to be precise. As the inheritor of the Roman Empire, the new capital, Constantinople became one of the Empire’s religious centres, as well as a city of unrivaled splendor and the administrative centre of a vast Empire dominating East and West.

However, it made a point to shy away from mixing religion in warfare, something few other religions can claim to do. Indeed, priests blessed the soldiers and in desperate sieges, the morale was boosted with cries of the Virgin Mary or other Medieval incantations. But the Church often refused to make martyrs out of fallen soldiers. And the concept of holy war was as alien to them as despicable when they saw it wielded by their Latin and Muslim enemies [PDF].

And for 1000 years, until 1453, Byzantine soldiered on, holding off the unstoppable advances of the prophet’s armies, while Europe took the time to sink into the lowest pits of the Dark Ages. A cursory look at Byzantine Studies puts the rest of European history in perspective.

I make this tangential remark on the Byzantine Empire because its history is inseparable to that of the Orthodox Church. The Schools of Hellenic Wisdom were kept alive in the Byzantine Empire and transmitted to the Islamic worlds and the Western worlds after the Fall of Constantinople.

So whenever I see someone railing against an Evangelical or an American neo-con, or a Spanish Catholic fascist and calling them ‘Christian’, well, I can’t help myself from getting a bit ticked off. Mostly because it’s acknowledging them the privilege of speaking for a far greater body of people than they really are speaking for. But also, and I stress this is as much out of respect for history as it is a personal issue, because it lumps in the Byzantine Empire with an American Creationist.

So, if it’s not too much to ask, it would be a small battle won against ‘Christian’ fundamentalists to call them Evangelical Fundamentalists or Catholic Fundamentalists or even Orthodox Fundamentalists (whenever the rare occasion comes up). Just not ‘Christian’, because you lump in the noble defense of civilisation the ‘Christian’ Byzantine Empire held up for 1000 years with the barbarity of the Crusades, the insanity of Islamic propagation, the despotism of the Catholic Inquisitions, the inanity of Creationism and the barbarism of modern Islam.

I’m not going to try and say the Byzantine Empire was a centre for secular peace and modern progressive thought. It was a Medieval Empire, after all, not exempt from a considerable share of torture, irrelevant religious debate and eunuchs but a great empire nonetheless, one that in the interest of stabbing the real fundamentalists and in the interest of historical accuracy, deserves not to be lumped in with fascist bastards.

Consensus On Morality Aboard A Bus

Published

Chronicler of Reason

on November 28, 2007

A very interesting friend of mine is a Kurd from Syria who was raised in a private Assyrian Christian Orthodox school and currently studies with me in Switzerland. He speaks Kurdish, Arabic, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Assyrian and Aramaic (which dwarf my own English, Spanish, Serbian, French, Italian combo) and he’s basically a very lax and essentially non-practicing Muslim, who learned how to pray as a Christian before learning to pray as a Muslim.

However, he still believes in a very meta-physical idea of a Supreme Being. Not that I hold it against him, but it led to an invigorating and stimulating discourse on morality while aboard the bus.

You must forgive me for resorting yet again to reproducing the conversation in an adapted dialogue form.

“Morality must come from religion. You see, for better of for worse, humankind believes.” said Salare.

“What do you mean believes?” I asked

“Everyone believes in something. It is an intrinsic part of our being insignificant in this vast universe. A believer will believe in whichever God he wants to believe in. I personally believe they’re all manifestations of one Supreme Being, whatever that is. An atheist will believe in science, or in the education their parents gave them, or in inherited moral values and so forth”

“I disagree with a number of things. Firstly, I like to believe I’m a moral person. I donate blood. I donate old clothes to Serbian families who need it. I help old ladies cross the road. None of these moral values came from religious morals because, as you point out, I received a very correct and secular, I might add, education from my parents.

Secondly, I firmly disagree with your comparison of religious belief with scientific belief. A religious person who believes in God will by definition have faith that their God exists. They will require no evidence to back their beliefs, indeed, they will often ignore contrary evidence to suggest the absence of a God. They might have had personal experiences that are out of reach to other people, but psychiatrists may or may not give these experiences concrete medical explanations. It’s an unchanging, unflinching world view. C.S. Lewis said (absurdly) once of his own religion that “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else”, which is rather misleading because an unchanging and unflinching world view is more like an over polarised pair of sunglasses which shields the beauty of the world from you.

My point is that an atheist who has a naturalist view of the world will base his views on existing evidence and on existing models, themselves supported by ample evidence. It’s a worldview that changes and adapts to contemporary discoveries. And there is ample evidence to suggest that morality is inherited, that it is an evolved trait in our primate species.”

“Adrian, you see, you are a moral person yourself, and indeed there are many like you who are moral for moraility’s sake. But for the same reason that many stores need security cameras to stop people from stealing, many people need to have the feeling of fear in order to stop themselves from killing or stealing. It’s part of the inherent egoism of humanity.

You are clearly capable of maintaining a very correct moral stance yourself derived from your own world views. But there is a problem not within religion itself but within the people who follow it and who engage in perverse acts sometimes despite the fear of being watched by God or by a security camera in a store.”

“Indeed, there are amoral people. What I, personally, find amoral is that many people need to be threatened into being moral, but right you are this is just what defined the diversity of our human species.

However, I disagree with your idea that religion is not inherently the problem. While it is true that many people derive their morals from religious texts, and that many pick and mix according to the day and age they live in (few Creationists would seriously take to heart the Biblical encouragement to slavery), the fact that organised religions can have such a powerful effect on people is to me, damnedly immoral.

For a start, I agree and I am the first to postulate that were religions to be truly inconsiderate of the fates of other people’s souls, and as long as they only promulgated morals that dealt in a similar, if not identical way to the legal civil code, the world would be an infinitely better place, and it would coexist with religion.

However, this is goes against the very nature of organised religion. It is moral for an evangelist to spread the word of Jesus to as many heathens as he can, because they honestly believe they are trying to save other people’s souls. The Muslim Hadith quite clearly orders Muslims to kill or convert unbelievers. It is hard to take that verse as a metaphor as it is quite clearly unambiguous [ed note: Qur'an Sura 9:5 reads as "Kill those who join other gods with God wherever ye shall find them; and seize them, besiege them, and lay wait for them with every kind of ambush: but if they shall convert, and observe prayer, and pay the obligatory alms, then let them go their way, for God is gracious, merciful." and the Hadith, Volume 4, Book 52, Number 260, Narrated Ikrima reads "for the Prophet said, "If somebody (a Muslim) discards his religion, kill him."].

My point is that there are a set of religious values which do indeed help to stop violent people from murdering. However, in practice, the leadership of organised religions attach a much higher importance to ‘values’ which help them control their flock.

I mean ridiculous and violent things such as the obsession with sin and sexuality – who you have sex with, when you have sex, how you have sex – and other inane and irrelevant ‘morals’ such as an anti-abortion stance (which is nowhere justified in the Bible, for one), chauvinism (in covering up women’s heads and conferring them less rights than a 6 year old male), anti stem-cell research and a long etc. If the heads of organised religions really cared about morals such as ‘Do Not Kill’ they would issue press statements on every murder committed by a believer instead of issuing inane statements on abortion or Church-State separation. Rather, the Catholic Church will pardon you for murder if you sit in a box, tell an anointed elderly pederast and pray four or five times.”

To this, Salare absolutely agreed.

And thus on the 7th bus stop, Odin said “Let there be consensus”. And there was consensus. And Odin saw this and everything was good.

Brief Physics Intercision – Force due to Electric charges between varying dielectrics

Published

Chronicler of Reason

on November 28, 2007

Allow me to interrupt the (irregular) schedule of the Gospel with a Physics question.

I study Electrical and Electronic Engineering in Lausanne, Switzerland. In a recent Electrotechnique I class, the topic of force due to an electric charge came up. Basically, for two positive electric charges $Q_1$ and $Q_2$ in a vacuum (permitivity $\epsilon_0$ , a distance $r$ ), the force due to the electric charges can be expressed as the following:

$F_1 = F_2 = F = \frac{Q_1 Q_2}{4 \pi \epsilon_0 r^2}$

However, that supposes that the dielectric between them, in this case a vacuum, is the same. What I asked today in class, and this was something the professor was incapable of answering on the spot, was: how do you express the force if $Q_1$ is in one dielectric $\epsilon_1$ and $Q_2$ is in another dielectric $\epsilon_2$ ? Let’s say for convenience, there is a clean separation of the two dielectrics at a point, say, $\frac{r}{2}$ .

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Layman’s terms:

Given two ideal, solitary, positive electric charges, a theme very commonly used to explain electromagnetism equations in Physics, you can express the force they exert upon each other. However, it assumes that the material which lets through the electric field caused by each other is the same throughout the system. What if one charge was in one type of ‘material’ and the other in another type? It’s a simple enough concept to imagine, and it’s very easily answerable if you’re talking about capacitors (a type of electronic component that stores electric charge).

Thanks in advance.

If This Was God’s Doing Then I Contend That God Is An Idiot

Published

Chronicler of Reason

on November 28, 2007

Today I hit my hand on a lamppost.

A banal and innocuous event and I’m glad to say that my finger quickly felt a lot better as soon as I stopped thinking about it.

As it happens I was talking with a classmate who believes passionately in God. As it happens, I was pulling his leg for something completely unrelated to religion and as it happens, as I hit my hand he retorted “Ah, that’s God punishing you for being such an idiot.”

I could not resist the temptation to strike back with chaos.

“Which one?”

He looked puzzled.

“Well, God.”

“OK, fine, so it was a divine punishment, but by whom? Zeus?”

“Dude, you know I’m a Christian who -”

“No, it must have been Thor, the God of lightning who moved my hand into a post of electrical dark magic. Although it could have also been Shiva, the destructor, who wished to inflict pain unto my pinky.”

via flickr/AprilM2107

“God has a plan for you, Adrian, so it must have been God.”

“There are many Gods you could believe in. What makes you think it was yours who was looking at me, a heathen, at this particular moment and judged that the punishment for teasing you for your football club was to strike my pinky with a lamppost?”

“OK, fine, it was all of them.”

“Hm, no, rather, the punishment was to strike the lamppost with my pinky. Has the lamppost been immoral?”

“Lampposts are inanimate objects.”

“Apparently not immune to divine punishment. You know what? OK, fine, God, your God, the Christian God, the father of Jesus of Nazareth, looked at me teasing you for your football club and decided that he would punish me, and assuming he thinks like you do that atheists are fools, then for my heathenness as well. He looked at the opportunities around him. He could have steered my path into a traffic collision. He could have dropped a 10-pound flower pot onto my head. He could have even interfered with meteorology to strike me with lightning, hail, blizzards or fish. But no, he sees a lamppost and my pinky and says ‘Hupa, Hupa, Hupa PinkyLamppost’. It didn’t even hurt. He didn’t even leave a couple of wires to electrocute me to death – that would have been admirably subtle”

“God exists whether you don’t believe in him or not.”

“If God’s plan to punish me for a banal terrestrial matter really was to strike a lamppost with my pinky ever so lightly then I contend to you that God is an incoherent, disorganised slacker and a complete idiot.”

We spent the rest of the walk home arguing about football.

Quick Word on Striking

Published

Chronicler of Reason

on November 21, 2007

So, the French are striking. Old news, huh?

It so happens that I’m personally affected. I may or may not be able to travel in two days time to see someone in France depending on whether the strikes are still disrupting rail service. Hence I disclose that:

I am personally affected by the strikes disrupting the rail network in France.

Having said that, and beyond a selfish reason to hate the strikes (many don’t need another reason, and with good, well, reason), there are plenty of points with which to poke the railway strikers!

1.- They’re not fighting for civil liberties, their jobs, or their rights. They’re fighting for a privilege.

Current French legislation gives workers in difficult or hazardous professions the privilege to retire after 37,5 years rather than 40 years of service, allowing some workers to retire at 50 with a full state supported pension, costing the State some 7 billion Euros a year.

Not good.

Even worse: Rail unions have just organised the biggest strike in a decade over this privilege. Imagine if they had something real to complain about!

Bottom line: The strikers are fighting not for their jobs, not for their rights, both of which are noble causes which I would fully support, but for a privilege. They’re fighting for two years and a half of pensions. Given that to be applicable they would have had to have spent 37,5 years in the industry, their life expectancy as a rail worker would have decreased considerably with respect to the average, so there are two years and a half they’re just not going to be able to profit from anyway. Bitter. Fucking. Truth. Now smoke it.

Aristocracies fight for privileges. Nobles and clergymen fight for privileges. Workers don’t fight for privileges. These strikes are characterised by a very distinct bourgeois feel of “We want cake, but the State, she gives us bread!”.

I stress: Not Good.

French rail worker: “We want cake, but the State, she gives us bread!”

2.- They’re unjustly holding the nation hostage.

They’ve taken the liberty to choose for 62 million people. They’ve taken the liberty to remove the right to freedom of movement and to get to their bloody jobs from a whole nation, all over a damned privilege.

Bottom line: In the self-appointed importance and arrogance of the rail workers, they’ve managed to detonate public support (I suppose they never expected any) and be generally hated.

Emotionally defused message to the rail workers of France: You’ve hijacked the trust the public had laid onto you by giving you such astounding union freedom and turned it into nothing more than a cheap, bourgeois dictatorship which is widely hated by everyone.

Emotionally charged message to the rail workers of France: I fucking hate you, you fascist bastards. You’re the reason I haven’t slept a wink in over 8 days and I hope you get replaced by robots within the next few months. So fuck you.

An Intelligent Challenge for Intelligent Design

Published

Chronicler of Reason

on November 20, 2007

In one word: Prove it.

Both fascinatingly and worryingly, there is an increasing discourse about the notion of ‘Intelligent Design’ (ID).

Rather, and allow me to clarify that previous statement, quote bait for ID proponents, there is an increasing discourse about Intelligent Design within the framework of science and education, notably with very mainstream and manipulative events.

Nobody in the science community will try and force someone not to believe in Intelligent Design, the notion of a higher purpose in the universe. Nobody will say a word about how the parents tries to ~~educate~~ indoctrinate their child within the realm of their home and/or church (although perhaps they should).

The problem with the modern ID push, and indeed, its reason to be, is that it is trying to wedge the discourse into education all over the world.

In a nutshell, Intelligent Design is an idea which claims that since science is inadequate to respond to very ominous and big Questions about existence, then there surely must be an intelligent designer to fill in the gaps.

Do not expect, of course, ID to present a shred of evidence to back up their claim, other than bringing up apparent ‘holes’ in the scientific theories of today and claiming that they must be filled with Intelligence of a higher order, since naturalism apparently cannot fill them.

The Intelligent Design Network maintains it believes in objectivity in science (an otherwise absolutely noble belief which I fervently subscribe to) yet it also believes in the promotion of ‘scientific evidence of intelligent design’ in order to achieve scientific neutrality. Of course, this leaves the fact that their ‘interpretation’ of the 0 point in the axes of neutrality rest firmly on their side of the 0. Not to mention that the scientific evidence of intelligent design has yet to materialise.

So far, the only points intelligent design has going for it is that it makes patently false statements about modern science and takes them as cues to introduce the Great Watchmaker. It also relies on including a great many quotes from scientists who profess belief, forgetting on the way that a quote from a scientist does not constitute any more evidence of the intelligent designer than a quote from a fashion artist.

Outlining the misconceptions of science Intelligent Design makes is a task that has been done to exhaustion yet the relentless religious fervour with which ID proponents follow their prey (i.e. post-Stone Age civilisation) begs that this task be done even more.

As I said at the beginning, nobody is trying to convince you otherwise if you believe there is a superior intelligence out there setting physical constants or even taking interest in terrestrial affairs.

Yet, in the full knowledge that the hallmark of a solid scientific theory is its ability to predict the future in light of current evidence, it’s hard not to conclude that Intelligent Design is a load of hot air. Indeed, to its credit, an interpretation of ID, namely “There is a Higher Intelligence/God/Allah/FSM and He did it” is quite apt at predicting the future and explaining the past in a lazy, convoluted and intellectually manipulative way, especially considering that the required evidence for ID to hold water is nowhere to be found.

So, in the tried and true model of challenging budding scientific theories (and otherwise, as in this case), there is but one simple requirement for ID to present in order for it to begin to hold water as a scientific and eventually educational theory:

Evidence.

Challenge: Bring me evidence, found on its own merit i.e. not child’s play ‘evidence’ of the kind: “Darwin recanted on his deathbed!”, “There are such a thing as transcendental numbers!”, “Quantum mechanics scares me so it must be God!”, “The eye is too complex to have evolved!”, etc. but more like what bubble trails are to particle physics kind of thing.

Response, if successful: I will videotape myself eating a popular edition (unabridged!) of the Origin of Species and post it to Youtube. That’s right, tearing off each individual page and ingesting The Origin of Species.

Good hunting.

P.S. Clarification: Holes in modern scientific theories do not automatically validate your own – at best, they eventually strengthen the modern science theory in question. Logic arguments do not constitute evidence. Biblical prophecies do not constitute evidence. Find me a genuine fossil of a dinosaur, dated with modern scientific methods to 6000 years ago which is used to sustain a peer-reviewed and accepted paper on ID and I shall recant.