Now, I know some people may say, “It is not only immoral but impossible to take away someone’s conscientious beliefs like that!”

That’s what I thought too. Until a couple weeks ago when I read that Mitt Romney decided that the conscience of his staunchly anti-religious atheist father-in-law was a mere irrelevance and posthumously subjected him to a forced baptism. Luckily for Team Atheist, Bill Maher subsequently unbaptized him last weekend (see the video below), so he’s back with us now.

And I decided to take it a step further and unbaptized Romney himself. So, from now on atheists, speak only according to the truth. Correct everyone who tells you that Mitt Romney is a Mormon that they are behind the times. And if Mitt Romney objects—well, why should that matter?

Now some might object should not be faulted for disrespecting his father-in-law’s conscience because he had only the noblest intentions, even if they were misguided. He was urgently trying to save his father-in-law’s soul and get him into heaven. But in fact, I did this for Mitt’s own good, too. I am trying to help him get elected to the presidency by taking away his unfortunate, misguided beliefs that alienate him from so much of the public that so rightly judges their political candidates by what faith they have. This can only mean his chances of winning the Presidency can go up. You’re Welcome, Governor.

UPDATE: Sorry, I just learned that atheists are even more mistrusted than Mormons as presidential candidates. I’m so sorry, Governor, but what’s done is done!

Your Thoughts?

What kind of an evil person would write something like this to anyone who tells him that he or she has been raped?

Yeah. Well, you deserved it. So, fuck you. I hope it happens again soon. I’m tired of being treated like shit by you mean little cunts and then you using your rpae as an excuse. Fuck you. I think we should give teh guy who raped you a medal. I hope you fucking drown in rape semen, you ugly, mean-spirited cow. Actually, I don’t believe you were ever raped! What man would be tasteless enough to stick his dick into a human cesspool like you? Nice gif of a turd going into my mouth. Is that kind of like the way that rapists dick went in your pussy? Or did he use your asshole? Or was it both? Maybe you should think about it really hard for the next few hours. Relive it as much as possible. You know? Try to recall: was it my pussy or my ass?

This guy, with 290,594 You Tube subscribers and 94,453,812 views of his videos, that’s who. I just unsubscribed. I should have gotten around to it when I first discovered he was part of the stomach churning torrent of abuse constantly hitting Rebecca Watson.

But now, after I read all the disgusting details of what he was up to last night, I think every atheist with a conscience and a platform (whether it be Facebook or a Freethought Blog) needs to say that this amazing asshole does not represent the countless truly amazing atheists out there.

His real name is TJ Kincaid and he goes by the handle “terroja” and his YouTube videos bill him as “The Amazing Atheist”. Make these names infamous. Spread the word that he deserves to be shamed out of the community. Unsubscribe from him. Encourage others to unsubscribe. Make sure he never parlays his YouTube prominence into a place on the atheist speaker circuit or publishing list.

And for those of you who actually think what he said above can be classified as some sort of justifiable “satire” or rebellion against censoriousness, I recommend you catch up on my posts How Atheist Reddit Doesn’t Get It and Schrödinger’s Rapist and Schrödinger’s Racist to get clearer on the ethics of respecting women.

UPDATE 1: I’ve been accused of inconsistency for not calling out the ICumWhenIKillWomen username that Kincaid considers just provocation for his abusive behavior. For the conscience-impaired, that username was disgusting and worthy of unequivocal denunciation too. As is the regular barrage of misogyny coming from MRA forums and from the blog ERV, which it was meant to satirize.

There are clear lines, for anyone not overwhelmed with hate, between satire and dehumanizing hostility. And when you encounter dehumanizing hostility it is wrong to respond with more of the same in return. Two wrongs do not make a right. I did not respond to Kincaid’s comment relishing how he would rape someone and trying to emotionally violate that person by calling for anything violent or dehumanizing to happen to him. I just called for him to be shamed as an irresponsible person willing to hurt someone in a truly malicious way. No provocation justifies his reply. And I have consistently written against abusive verbal treatment of others. I denounce it in atheists, in fellow left wingers, etc. This is not some arbitrary (and inexplicable) misandry on my part.

Secondly, it is alleged that TJ Kincaid’s claim to being a rape survivor too justifies his behavior. He does not deserve his public platform and he does not deserve to treat people maliciously simply because others have treated him unconscionably in the past. I’m not a psychologist. I have no idea about his ultimate mental state, so do not take the following analogies as any kind of diagnoses or insults: Psychopaths and child rapists often have violent histories. These do not exempt them from criticism for killing or raping or even from verbally abusing people. When unrepentant and violent in their words or deeds, they do not deserve public platforms of prominence to spread their views on the world.

Maybe Kincaid needs professional psychological help. Maybe he needs a lot of love from people in his life. I have no idea his mental diagnosis and do not presume to judge. All I know is his behavior—regardless of its far distant or more immediate triggers—makes him at minimum an emotionally reckless and potentially destructive person who makes the places he resides on the internet threatening, upsetting, and exclusionary to nearly all women. He carelessly stokes other men’s anger and models violent language and celebrates the violent treatment of others. What spilled out on the internet seemed to come out of a seething cauldron of hatred. The public atheist community is not the place for him to vent or to get whatever help he needs—whether it is merely anger management classes or whether it is more intensive psychiatric help. I truly wish him the best as a fellow human being. But he is only unrepentantly perpetuating cycles of violence and that is inexcusable, whatever his history.

Finally, even by the false and childish excuse I’m hearing on Facebook, such that “two wrongs made a right” and that his interlocutor got what he deserved by provoking him, what he did was shamefully inexcusable because he was writing in a public forum and verbally assaulting all rape victims—not just the one verbally sparring with him, but all of them looking on. And that is utterly disgraceful and such behavior needs to be purged from the atheist forums. That’s not censorship, it’s the enforcement of minimal standards of civility and morality.

UPDATE 2: PZ has a definitive explanation of the situation and a sound response to it. More insightful coverage also comes from Lousy Canuck, Crommunist Manifesto, Blag Hag, and The Atheist Experience (who alerted all the rest of us this morning).

Your Thoughts?

This is the closest to anthemic that Annie Clark ever gets and that makes it too relatively straightforward for her. What is here is good if there were something else, less direct also going on. The song feels half done, more like a traditional pop song than other of her work. Her latest album, which includes this song, is Strange Mercy. For more St. Vincent videos and more opinions from me about them, see the posts “Actor”, “Marrow”, “Cruel”, “Dig a Pony”, “Now Now”, and “The Alluring Annie Clark”,

Your Thoughts?

Werewolves and Lollipops,

It’s weird that objectively I fully understand and usually agree with many of the criticisms of the prequels and yet still personally love them. Are they flawed? Absolutely. They could have been 15 times more awesome if done differently in any number of ways that have been meticulously dissected over the last 13 years.

But I still think that even at 1/15 their potential awesome, they were still an awesome experience for me both when I first saw each film and through countless repeat viewings. I know I’m virtually alone in feeling this way. But there it is.

Your Hatred?

President Obama quoted C.S. Lewis on Thursday morning, and normally that would have made my day.

Because it is especially important and exciting to Henneberger that our secular President, in his capacity as President, expresses solidarity with her Christian identity—regardless of whether this pander to people of the Christian faith indicates a partisan solidarity with them at the expense of solidarity with the millions of unbelieving and non-Christian people who would prefer a religiously neutral president. It gives her a special rush to know he’s like her in a way that makes him not like one of those non-Christians.

The president is good at talking about his Christian faith, as he did at a National Prayer Breakfast, and ought to do more of it if he wants to relieve Americans of some of their most basic misconceptions about him.

Right, it’s his job to prove he meets that litmus test of Christian belief to qualify him for public office, lest the American people justifiably throw him out. Very Constitutional advice.

But more than I want to hear him tell how the Rev. T.D. Jakes drops by the Oval now and again,

And here she sets up her demands from religious privilege. And note, Obama hanging out with some black religious leader is not really doing it for her desire to feel like he shares a sufficient religious identity with her. As a Catholic what’s really important is how he’s going to pander to nuns. And neither is it enough that the President of what is supposed to be a secular nation, which is supposed to be neutral on the value of religion, is explicitly endorsing the value of religious faith over lack of religious faith by having such unconstitutional events as the National Prayer Breakfast. No she feels entitled to some practical demonstrations of his commitment to legislating by faith and not just giving faith symbolic support by discussing what his private Christian life is like.

Despite sounding throughout parts of her article like something of a progressive politically (at least insofar as she favors the Affordable Care Act), Henneberger’s true test for Obama’s sincerity of faith is that he give special conscience exemptions to Roman Catholic institutions which would allow them to deny health coverage for the contraceptive needs of their employees who perform non-religious functions (like education, health care provision, etc.) at their non-religious institutions. If Obama does not do this, this is not to be taken as evidence that he has a different view of secular justice and of the meaning of the 1st Amendment than she does. No, it is to be taken as proof that his faith is insincere. Is this because she implicitly realizes that only someone with a faith-based identity who privileges the faithful in their legislating would give such an exemption? Does she realize it has no secular justification and that it would take a President and legislators who rule by faith-based judgments to approve of it?

Presidents and the Congress should not make public decisions according to the dictates of private faiths. They should legislate according to neutral rational standards which are in principle acceptable to all because non-adherents to their particular faiths (whether members of other faiths or atheists) will be subject to those laws. If they have only a faith based rationale and no secular justification then essentially such legislation subjects a faith’s non-adherents to that faith’s laws in ways that violate non-adherents’ own rights of conscience. It effectively conscripts someone involuntarily into that religion to that extent.

But let’s say Obama’s decision here should or could be a litmus test of his faith. Let’s imagine for a moment that that was not egregiously unConstitutional. Obama is a liberal Protestant. Why should that faith give special privileges to a reactionary and regressive form of Catholicism? Not only would that violate Obama’s reason-based political conscience as a progressive Democrat, but it would violate what are likely his private faith beliefs about the supremacy of reproductive rights over theocratic rule. Why does Henneberger want Obama to violate his faith?

Henneberger’s implicit assumption is that the right wing’s reactionary amalgamation of religio-political fundamentalism is faith itself. Now, that does not sound very pluralistic or tolerant of people of different faiths; does it? Any true person of faith (and anyone worthy of public office!) will automatically identify with and acquiesce to the demands of right wing reactionary regressive faiths. Deviating from them, either for reasons of secular political conscience or liberally religious conscience reveals you as not a person of true faith.

So, not only is faith a litmus test for a fit leader, and not only does Henneberger demand (from a shockingly bloated sense of privilege) that he give multitudes of religious identity markers that closely match her own, but the only kind of legitimate faith she will accept from the liberal Protestant President is one that puts the consciences of regressive Catholic bishops over the consciences and health care rights of their employees who perform non-religious tasks.

This also means, by the way, putting the consciences of the Church hierarchy not only over their employees who are godless (whose consciences are obviously irrelevant), but he must put their concerns even over that resounding 98% majority of Roman Catholic women who use contraception. This liberal Protestant President can’t be a true man of faith if he does not help a group of male leaders who refuse equal participation from women in their hierarchy to make it harder for their poorer women employees to prevent becoming pregnant against their own wishes. So, the litmus test of faith—for a politically and religiously liberal Protestant even—is whether he will support a policy imposed by a minority of religious men over a majority of their female employees (of mixed faiths and no faith) requiring them to have children against their wills.

Am I not yet clear enough yet? The rights of Catholics to follow Catholic guidelines on contraception are not threatened. No one is forcing them by law to take contraception. They will not have to use the health coverage provided in that way. These men want to stop other people, of dissenting religious or non-religious beliefs, from controlling whether they get pregnant according to their own consciences, as a condition of employment. And, perversely, they do this in the name of freedom of conscience.

Now maybe, Henneberger thinks that people of faith will stick together and let each other impose their arbitrary beliefs and values which admit of no secular justification as a sort of gentleman’s agreement between equally arbitrary, authoritarian, and imposing faiths. The Protestants will accept the demands of the Catholics on contraception even if they’re a little extreme since they both have vested interests in legislating their common religious beliefs about abortion and gay second class citizenship.

But maybe the kind of faith Obama has is not the authoritarian kind that wants to legislate for others but the kind that has faith that people will (or only should) do the right thing without religious coercion. Maybe his faith is that getting people to be moral does not mean stripping them of the access to do what they want that you disapprove of on faith grounds. If the hierarchy of the Church had this kind of faith, they would let their spiritual and moral and philosophical insights and examples speak for themselves, and people who were rationally persuaded of their judgment, or were merely religiously loyal, would voluntarily refuse all barriers to pregnancy. But the authoritarian Church hierarchy is decidedly weak in this kind of faith. They want to control people by hindering their access to avoid pregnancy. Who cares if these women don’t want to get pregnant? The Church will stand in the way through whatever means the government will give it. Maybe Obama and other liberal religious people (and hopefully even some Catholics?) think that’s weak faith and a form of human arrogance and authoritarianism. Here is Henneberger’s statement of her complaint:

I want to know why he repaid Sister Carol Keehan, who carried health-care reform around on her back for him, with a betrayal that could lose him the Catholic vote and his reelection bid.

If that’s what happens, he’ll have no one to blame but himself, after a recent edict by his Health and Human Service Department effectively denied conscience protections to church-run schools, hospitals and social service agencies, which under his Affordable Care Act must provide free contraception to employees, in violation of church teaching.

To review, there would be no Affordable Care Act without Keehan, the president of the Catholic Health Association, who incurred the wrath of the bishops for standing up for the legislation, and for the truth that there isn’t any abortion funding in it.

There would be no Affordable Care Act if not for Democratic abortion foes in the House, notably Bart Stupak (Mich.), who for his trouble was reviled by his fellow party members, accosted by critics in airports and sent at least one death threat. He also lost his job over it, deciding to retire after the fight, at the end of his term.

So, too, will there be no Affordable Care Act if Catholics swing the other way in the fall.

Wow. So, let me get this straight, in our secular pluralistic democracy, our President, elected primarily by Democrats and independents is supposed to cave to regressive right wing religious demands as payback to quasi-progressive Catholic Democrats who negotiated with regressive right wing religious theocrats on his behalf. Now he owes the Catholic Democrats a solid by capitulating to the right wing authoritarians who want their employees to be subject to Catholic teachings as a condition of employment?

And he owed Bart Stupak, a regressive Democrat, who put deference to the authority of right wing, patriarchal religious authorities over the interests of the vast majority of Democratic women and men who support reproductive rights, and made sure that a health care law arbitrarily excluded government funding for a perfectly legal (and often morally vital) medical procedure because of the arbitrary dictates of the Roman Catholic faith? Sister Keehan is supposed to be celebrated for convincing the bishops that all the ways Democrats were strong armed into letting arbitrary religious demands dictate that law should be adequate to their liking? Democrats, including Obama, owe a debt of gratitude for that?

Mr. Stupak sure didn’t deserve death threats. But he sure deserved to be rebuked by Democrats. And Henneberger is defending a Church which tries to force its will in a liberal democracy by routinely threatening to withhold sacraments from elected officials who do not make Catholic teachings into law but who rather honor the separation of Church and State. And, hypocritically, these bishops use this tactic of withholding sacraments to try to push their way against only left wing politicians—not the right wing ones who violate Church teachings on torture, just war, or social obligations to the poor. If these religious bullies can try to muscle their way to dominance over secular law and make it that even as they get tax free land and government subsidies for their charities no one’s tax dollars can help the poor get abortions, then secular citizens have every right to be mad as hell and challenge the Congresspeople who put their religious faith over their commitments to the Constitution.

And so now Obama, who represents a secular political party that has fought for decades to preserve the full legal rights to unencumbered access to abortion, owes a member of that same party (Mr. Stupak) who betrayed this core value of his party on wholly religious grounds in a secular democracy? He owes this man and his patriarchal religion extra measures to keep these women from being able to even avoid pregnancy? And he is to do this when there is no secular justification to add this extra hurdle to their lives? And the quasi-progressive nun who got what she wanted from him in terms of abortion restrictions and now turns her back on him is not the ingrate but Obama is?

So thanks to the Catholics not only will poor women suffer extra financial burdens in exercising their legal rights to abortion, even though it is a legal life determining health care decision and sometimes a life and death one at that, but now also if these women have the misfortune of working for a Catholic employer they need extra hurdles to avoiding pregnancy in the first place to be thrown in their path?

And if the liberal President of a secular nation, who is personally a man of liberal Protestant faith does not do this, then he has stabbed progressive Catholics in the back, and he is not a man of true religious faith, and he deserves to lose an election because of a religious bloc of votes?

President Romney won’t be forcing nuns to dole out free diaphragms in violation of their religious freedom and the Constitution that guarantees it.

Oh yes, Governor Romney, respecter of consciences. Unless, of course, they are atheist consciences—in which case they can be entirely disrespected and subjected to forced baptisms posthumously. He has such a wonderfully liberal and American sense of religious conscience that he baptized his staunchly anti-religious father a Mormon after he died. (Don’t worry, Bill Maher subsequently unbaptized him last weekend, so the man’s an atheist again.) In a nutshell: the only kind of conscience that deserves respect when it comes to religion is religious consciences. This makes me eager to have him run our secular democracy. I am sure as an atheist he will legislate in ways not at all prejudiced against me. He might claim me for Mormonism after I’m dead, but I’m sure he won’t violate my freedom of conscience in any serious ways while he is in office and I’m alive.

And here’s a fun fact, nuns will not have to “dole out diaphragms”. The Church just has to cover health insurance providers who will do the part of taking care of employees’ reproductive health care needs.

In fact, under him there won’t be any health-care reform at all.

Except in Massachusetts!

(Yes, I refuse to call that reform the O-word, although I might change my mind if the president doesn’t make it up to Sister Carol).

Oh snap! No she di’in’t! Now Obama can’t refuse her!

Newt Gingrich often says that Obama has “declared war on the Catholic Church.” Mitt Romney, too, talks about the president’s “assault on religion.’’ But the worst part is that they aren’t making this up.

Actually—another fun fact: they are making it up. Obama has not assaulted religion or declared war on the Catholic Church. Literally. There is no declaration of war. There is no proclamation against the Roman Catholic Church. It was not signed on parchment with a quill pen and it has not sent executive orders to destroy Catholic church buildings and enforce disbelief in Jesus, the Pope, the sacraments or Holy Mother Church. No Catholics will be forced to have abortions, use contraception or have guilt-free sex. They can engage in their religion just as before. And Obama just went and affirmed the Christian faith explicitly for Henneberger by having an unconstitutional National Prayer Breakfast and by quoting C.S. Lewis in ways that had the potential to make her all glowy. This is a man at war with religion?

This language of war is misleading, inflammatory rhetoric. A disagreement over the extent to which the conscience of the Catholic hierarchy should restrict the health care options of people who perform non-religious tasks is in no way an assault or a war on religion.

And evoking the language of assault troubles me on another level. Because I can imagine a Protestant who is pro-contraception, single, poor, and adamantly against abortion with no exceptions. I can imagine her being employed by a badly paying Catholic charity or hospital or school—partially even out of common Christian faith. I can imagine her unable to afford contraception because of her Catholic employer, despite her own beliefs that it’s okay. I can imagine her being sexually assaulted and pregnant against her conscience. I can imagine her forced by her own pro-life beliefs to have to have the baby, without a husband, years before she’s ready, disrupting her education or career plans, with all sorts of added post-traumatic stress disorder from birthing her assailant’s son.

The Church that throws up roadblocks to her autonomous expression of her own moral conscience to make it harder for her to avoid this scenario is the one who wants special liberty to trample other people’s autonomy and their ability to live their lives as they wish. Of course, no woman need be against abortion or celibate to deserve complete autonomy over her reproductive life. But I use this illustration to demonstrate how even a conservative, staunchly anti-abortion religious woman can have her conscience violated and her life tragically disrupted by this faith-based law—let alone all those liberals whose inadequately authoritarian faiths, or whose outright godlessness, are matters of suspicion and contempt to the likes of Gingrich, Romney, and Henneberger.

Finally Henneberger’s ressentiment, identity politics, persecution complex, and anti-American theocratic leanings come to full bloom:

But now the Obama administration has handed his critics an example of an action that fits nicely with the narrative that he’s a secularist who looks down on believers.

Yes, Henneberger, judger of the sincerity of other people’s faiths discerns contemptuously that it is Obama looking down on her. Of course the condescending elitists here are not the paternalistic Catholic hierarchy which wants its own followers, and even its non-Catholic employees, to be coerced away from control of their reproduction and have babies they aren’t ready for (or may never want). They’re champions of conscience. This is the Catholic Church that won’t turn any pedophile priests over to secular authorities but instantly excommunicated a nun for allowing a woman’s life to be saved with an abortion rather than let her die. That was some fine respect for conscience in ambiguous moral matters. I guess that nun’s faith and her conscience are irrelevant since they violated the Church’s edicts. The pregnant woman had to die. No questions. No deviation from orders. These true champions of conscience and people of superior moral judgment should be allowed to look down on not only their flock but anyone they employ, for whatever purpose.

And secularist is not a dirty word. America is secularism. Secularism is the cornerstone of our liberties. Political secularism is the kernel of the freedom of conscience which keeps us from being an oppressive theocracy. It is what makes the freedom of religion possible. It is not at all incompatible with being a person of faith. A person of faith can believe that his faith flourishes best where he has no power to coerce others legally (or through terms of employment) to either adopt his faith or act according to its precepts or his interpretation of them. Such a person might even think that the only morally and intellectually valuable kind of faith was the kind that could persuade free people under the open conditions that a secular society make possible. Such a religious believer might think political secularism, by offering individuals the possibility of freedom from all religious coercion, is a precondition of true faith in those cases where people embrace their religions anyway.

I am against all kinds of faith because it is a form of willfully believing more than evidence allows or—worse even—willfully believing completely contrary to what the evidence indicates. But even an ardent atheist like I can nonetheless still at least appreciate and respect that some religious people are as genuinely committed to secular political principles as I am and appreciate our common civic bonds and values. Can the Catholic hierarchy, or the Catholic laity who are foaming at the mouth with identity-politics-based ressentiment, appreciate at all that some political secularists are as committed to faith and religious belief as they are—even when their reason leads them to think the Catholic Church is in the wrong sometimes, and even when they refuse to let the Church always act with impunity and be a law unto itself when its actions affect unwilling others’ lives?

Your Thoughts?

I also debated a Catholic theology student about this issue of Catholic demands for exemptions from the Affordable Care Act, in the posts below:

Part 1: “Should Catholic Employers Be Exempted From Paying For Health Insurance Covering Contraception?”

Part 2: “What Are The Limits of Church Authority In the Public Sphere?”

Part 3: “Must (or Can) the Religious Engage in the Secular Sphere ‘Non-Religiously’?”

Mary: I’m very curious about what you mean by “public” because it seems as if you define “public” as that which is not strictly religious. Do I understand you properly?

Daniel Fincke: I define public as anything that involves civil interactions. Even a private affair becomes public as soon as civil liberties or civil rights or other laws become relevant to the doings of the parties. We are having a private conversation but it is undergirded by civil laws which put constraints even on this. To that extent the public has an interest in what goes on here. To the extent that there are no civil law issues, this remains entirely private.

I would distinctly define secular as anything that is not strictly religious, anything which appeals to and subjects itself to common standards of reason and morality and practice. When a private church performs tasks which are secular in basic form (i.e., not strictly religious), then it is not doing a strictly religious activity.

Teaching actual science based biology or practicing medicine or administering public goods like adoption or soup kitchens means engaging in activities that the public can take a secular interest in either for employment or receiving services. Just as a religious person may constrain the religious character of the way she does these activities so may a church or mosque or synagogue or temple may be expected to do the same if it means allowing members of other faiths, or of no faith, to receive these services or employment without religious strings attached that would coerce their own consciences.

Mary: Well, it seems, then, that we have an almost insurmountable issue of different definitions. I fear that my responses to your questions will continue to be the same as the one’s I’ve already given because I operate under different ideas of what those words mean.

For me, something becomes secular when it’s not at all religious. In that case, no function of a religious institution is ever secular. Someone taking an interest in or participating in a religiously-run service or good does not then make it not religious, or secular. Allowing all homeless people into your soup kitchen and not just the Catholic ones doesn’t make it a secular activity. Serving the needs of the poor is a hallmark of most religions. A great example is the clergy coalition in Alabama suing the government for preventing their ministry—which consists of counseling, shelter, food, etc.—to immigrants by its harsh immigration laws. 

Considering the law suit has not yet been thrown out on legal grounds, it seems that even the law protects the ministries of these churches. Care of the sick and the idea of the hospitals were long-standing Christian traditions before they were secular ones. I can not agree that something becomes secular because it might be of interest to people with secular values.

For me, something being subject to civil laws doesn’t actually make it something in which the government can necessarily impose itself or interfere. For example, if someone says so to his children, “you cannot bring black people into this house” the government cannot interfere with that decision. Even though the public, i.e. someone outside of that man’s house, is affected. The government can’t say that John Smith up the street has a constitutional right to enter the house even though he is being discriminated against. However, the racist father in that story can’t kill black people because the law doesn’t allow it.

I fear that our definitions of public and secular are what will keep us from ever seeing eye-to-eye on this issue.

Daniel Fincke: Your definition is subject to criticism. It need not be thrown up as a shield from further thinking. How things “started” (if we even understand that accurately), or how the religious person interprets her activities, or how a religious organization interprets its activities are not determinative of a thing’s nature.

A religious individual or a religious institution may in their hearts or in their theological interpretations view an activity as infused with religious meanings but that does not make it distinctively religious in ways that allow religious judgments to trump secular ones when in interaction with people outside your religion.

For example, many religious people think every single thing they do should be infused with religion. Students and teachers at public schools, not just Catholic ones, may want to make all their endeavors “acts of worship”. That does not supersede others’ rights to be treated in distinctly non-religious ways by them when engaged in the fundamentally religion-neutral endeavor of studying biology.

You may interpret the activity as religious and pray to God for strength as you do it and theologically understand it in some larger context. But none of this can rightly affect how you teach the neutral, universal facts of biology or treat students who are non-adherents to your religion and who are only in a classroom with you for the purposes of learning biology. Otherwise religious people would be exempt from all secular laws that deviated in the slightest ways from their religious feelings since no activities could be properly understood as activities without God. On their view all of life is lived in service to God, so religious feelings are supreme over civil law and supreme over demands for respect for non-adherents to their religion. This is why religious people need to learn the difference between their secular and their religious spheres and learn to think in a fairly bifurcated way.

Mary: But the religious person at a public school, in the same way as you, consciously works for an institution completely committed to being non-dogmatic, non-evangelical and neutral in all matters concerning religion. The religious person understands this and must abide by it because that is the mission of the institution.

This isn’t about individual’s privately held beliefs but about religious institutions which are protected and which set up institutions that are private but service the public, optionally should the public want to be served, and which have religious commitments.

Daniel Fincke: But the point is that religious institutions become like religious individuals when they enter the broader political sphere. Just as some religious individuals may find it intolerable that they not let their religious interpretation of their teaching or learning bleed into what they teach, so a religious institutions’ arbitrary feelings about the reproductive habits of their employees need to be constrained when they act as a public citizen and provide employment to the general public.

Mary: And religious people don’t need to live in a bifurcated way—that’s not living in a religious way at all. There are methods of prudence that teach you that you shouldn’t be pulling your students at public school aside and saying “I just want you to know that Jesus loves you” because that doesn’t respect that student’s dignity in that institution. You’re also violating a contract made in good faith if you bring religious teachings into a public school when you acknowledged that you would not.

But a religious person is perfectly free to see all aspects of her life as pertaining to religion even when they act as public citizens. The constitution affords me the right to freely exercise my religion. And insofar as I’ve not made any commitments that I will keep my personal religious views out of certain things, I can be Catholic at my bank and my Church and I will be, thank you very much. I, personally, have no secular sphere. There is no secular world for me. There is one world. I live in one world as a religious person and carry religious commitments with me in that world.

I afford the people in my Church the same dignity as I afford people outside of it. I don’t ask you to pray with me not because I recognize the “secular” character of our friendship but because I recognize your human dignity and your freely-given choice not to pray to God. I ultimately believe that is a God-given freedom! If I were to teach at a public school, that wouldn’t be a secular activity for me.

I would keep my religious views completely out of the school not because I bifurcate things secularly, but because I recognize that societies and Churches flourish in world where there is a separation of Church and state and that the students at the school have a right to be educated in a way that allows their own religious commitments, if they have them or not, to be unviolated by the teacher. No truly religious person could ever commit to bifurcating their lives.

As for “public citizen” I don’t really know how to respond except that for me a public citizen is a politician or someone who works for the government. Unless we’ve committed ourselves in such a way to the public (such as running for office, vowing to protect the government’s public interests and accepting tax-payer funded payment for my services) we are all private citizens. The Church is not telling Rite Aid employees they can’t have birth control, it is telling employees of its institutions who came to work there knowing fully the commitments of that place. The Church-institutions are not saying that if you buy birth control you will be fired, but that they won’t buy it for you. Which is a distinction that you clearly disagree with but that I am committed to as an important one.

Daniel Fincke: Principles about respecting the dignity of students to be free of evangelism in public schools are not “religious”. They are matters of our specific secular civil institutions. If they depended on religious approval, then America could only tolerate those religions that shared this line of thought. As things stand, religions are entitled to exist which dispute this principle theologically as long as they follow the law civilly.

If you have managed to personally reconcile your private faith with your civic values by synthesizing them such that the separation of church and state is a “religious” value and not a distinctly civil one, then that’s great for you. But it’s not necessary of all religions. So either not all religions are fit for civil society or some people learn to bifurcate their religious wishes from their civil compromises for the sake of peace and civil justice and the protections it provides.

In other words, theocrats (which, privately includes not an insignificant number Catholics and Protestants in America) are legally entitled to their views, as long as they keep their theocracy out of public schools and other official actions of government.

I think the term “public citizens” describes expectations of corporations that they act in ways that respect their obligations to and effects on the broader populace. My point is that within the Church’s religious functions it has autonomy to set many laws and rules for its members which do not violate the civil law. When the Church interacts with the rest of the world though it acts as an agent (or agents) with others whom it must respect. When the Church employs such non-adherents it should not be able to implicitly subject such people to its laws about how they should govern their reproduction.

It risks indirectly forcing people into parenthood. That’s quite possibly a human rights violation. It troubles me they do this in private. When they do it in public they cross the line from troubling to illegal. Imagine a world where the Churches grew in power and so did other religious institutions such that they all did corporate functions like making computers and growing our vegetables and they all interpreted each of these functions as a “religious mission”. And imagine the vast majority of employers were religious institutions and they were subjecting employees who didn’t share their religion to their laws implicitly through their employment, then this would essentially collapse the separation of church and state. Here the issue is only the scale, not the effective principle.

You have the last word.

Mary: Ok, well first of all. I can imagine that world. It’s called the European West until about 1400. And many countries in the Middle East right now.

I think it’s absurd to call it “forcing someone into having children.” The only thing that produces children is sex and excepting the issue of rape, any one, including myself, who enters into a sexual union at any time for any reason should know that the first and foremost biological purpose of sex is reproduction. I’ve read the most amazing studies of how everything that attracts people to one another has to do with evolutionary factors in selecting someone who will give you desirable offspring.

In other words, it should come as no surprise to people if they become pregnant after having sex. The idea that we have a fundamental right to avoid the biological purposes of sex while still having it completely and utterly baffles me. Unless the Church-related institution you work at is forcing you to have sex, it is not forcing you to have children. If it is an issue of rape, that is another story which we can talk about at another time.

Furthermore, these employers are not saying that you can’t control birth. You can buy condoms, pull-out, use NFP, or walk into planned parenthood and get discounted oral birth control. It is simply saying that they are a religious institution that provides goods and services with a religious mission and that they will not provide BC because it is a violation of their teachings. It is not an act of discrimination to refuse to provide a method of birth control that is just one method among many. A religious institution does not cease to be religious when it enters the public sphere and its actions don’t stop being religious either. Any employee of a religious institution knows the commitments of that institution prior to being hired and should make the decision to accept employment based on that. So long as they are not being harassed, consistently abused or discriminated against based on their beliefs or non-beliefs, the Church has a right to deny paying for brith control.

Your Thoughts?

In case you have not read either of them, here again are part 1 and part 2 of our debate.

Daniel Fincke: You grasp that the Catholic Church is an institution with an abusive authoritarian history and yet you want to give it special exemption to deny its employees fundamental reproductive rights. Based on religious teachings. In a secular society. How is that not legitimizing the above-the-law-authoritarianism of the Church? How does that protect even all those divorcing and contraception-using Catholics from their Church legally?

Mary: Raping children is not a religious activity – it’s not part of church teaching. So those actions are not in any way above civil law. They weren’t performed as part of a Church mission or by the authority of a Church institution. But the services of universities and hospitals are.

Daniel Fincke:  The decisions to deal with the rapists “internally” as though their “punishments” were all that were morally necessary was a matter of ecclesiastical hubris.

Mary: Yea, it was disgusting. And the idea like “no you can’t arrest our bishop” was absurd. Of course the bishop can be arrested if he’s complicit in sexual abuse. He can be and he should be.

I don’t seek to give the Church any more exemption than it is afforded by the constitution (I hate saying “the constitution” by the way, it reminds me of Sarah Palin). No law can be passed that prohibits the free exercise of religion. This law prohibits the free exercise of religion.

And, fortunately, neither of the Catholic schools you teach at are stopping you from buying birth control, they just aren’t providing it for you. They aren’t paying for the service. If you spent an entire year’s salary on yaz and condoms, they wouldn’t do anything about it. But they won’t pay for it.

Daniel Fincke: The Church does not have to pay for the contraception in this case either. They just have to pay for health insurance. The insurance providers pay for the contraception. Paying for health insurance is no formally different than paying money to an individual.

Mary: Right they pay for health insurance that is required by law to provide it.

Daniel Fincke: Yes, as they are required to pay money in general, lest they be slave holders. And there are understandings with money that you are going to pay for food and shelter and entertainment, etc. But the Church by providing that money does not make my purchases for me or have religious rights to dictate how I spend it. And when paying people with health insurance they do not determine how I may exercise my religious rights to control my reproduction. This is forcing people into pregnancies, Mary. It’s dictating they have families or be celibate as a condition of employment.

Mary: Your first point is interesting. How is it different if I simply spend my own money on birth control? But if you pay an insurance provider to provide health services, it is understood that the insurance provider is going to provide medical services, some of which are deeply contrary to that institution’s protected values. Whereas, while it is assumed a professor is going to spend his salary on food, shelter, entertainment, the truth is that you may have been born a millionaire and that you could spend all of that money on booze and hookers. The money paid to an insurance provider definitely goes to healthcare. The money paid to to an employee doesn’t definitely go anywhere.

I don’t really see how it’s dictating to employees they have families or forces anyone into pregnancies. If there was substantial data that people who work for religious institutions were saddled with more unwanted pregnancies than at other places, I could understand. But this merely says that if you want to control reproduction, which almost everyone does, then you have to do it with your own money because we won’t pay for it. I do not use oral birth control and I’ve been preventing pregnancy through non-abstinence methods for years now. The reluctance of the two Catholic universities I’ve been at now to write prescriptions for birth control have had no effect on my ability to control birth.

Daniel Fincke: But the law is changing to make such basic human necessities as health care accessible to all. Putting the burden on people to go beyond their employers’ health insurance is onerous and some people will not be able to afford it and the aim of the Church here is to keep those people from using birth control by excluding it from their insurance. The Church’s aim is to coerce them into pregnancies they wish to prevent, by not honoring their autonomous wishes to use their insurance to control their own reproductive rights in the manner they wish. The Church’s aims are not to exercise their religion but to impose it. Members of the Church are free to voluntarily abstain from using contraception. No member of the Church will be forced to use it. The Church will not even be forced to directly pay for it any more than any of us directly pay for any services the government provides with our tax money. Even ones different groups dislike.

Mary: Well some people won’t be able to afford oral birth control. Presumably other methods would still be available. And I think I would say “discourage” rather than “keep.” But I guess that’s a matter of opinion. I think there is a difference between what is taken by taxes and what institutions provide – institutions already have the right to decide what sort of coverage they will provide. For example, my parents’ insurance (that I am, thankfully, still on) provides just about anything you could need. My brother’s insurance from Lowe’s doesn’t have dental and certain things aren’t available to him. Even after this government mandate, some insurance providers will still provide certain things that other insurance providers don’t – but here the government is imposing something deeply offensive to a religious institution and saying “either don’t provide insurance for your employees or provide this.”

Daniel Fincke: But that deep offensive does not have a secularly justifiable reason. What if the Catholic Church finds deep offense at a gay marriage and refuses health coverage for a gay spouse? What if the Catholic Church takes deep offense at employing divorced Catholics or non-Catholics? There are non-discrimination acts for a reason. Gay marriage is legal in New York. Should gay people lose their rights because they are employed by the Catholic Church for non-religious jobs?

Being religiously offended is not the same as deserving civil accommodation for your arbitrary feelings when they impact people who are outside the sphere of your private exercise of religion. Religions cannot be bastions of intolerable discrimination. That’s not equal protection under the law for the groups they vilify and want to disenfranchise.

Mary: Well all religious feeling, all religious teaching and all religious practice is arbitrary in strictly secular terms. All authority comes from God whose authority isn’t recognized by the state. But that doesn’t mean it’s not protected. Because it is. But I think there is a distinction between the contraception issue and gay spouses or whatever.

While many religious institutions will fight extremely hard to deny health insurance to the legally recognized spouses of homosexuals, it is not the same thing as doing the wedding service. For one thing, while no Church institutions would recognize “spouse,” many are willing to make concessions for legally-domiciled adult. Furthermore, strong moral arguments can be made that it is more important to keep a gay spouse healthy than it is to deny they exist. If we take the case of gay marriage and use it as an analogy for this contraception case, the government is forcing the Church to marry gays – not just to pay them fairly and treat them fairly. The latter is expected equal protection under the law, the former is a first amendment violation.

If Church-related institutions start firing people who use their fairly-earned salaries to buy birth control, then we can have a different conversation. But right now the government is forcing the Church to provide it. Well actually it’s only forcing Church-related schools and hospitals. The employees of parishes and of diocesan-related activities like youth ministers or secretaries to bishops and the like will still be exempted on the basis of a religious conscience clause—because the lady balancing the books at the priests’ house is performing a “religious” function but the 7th grade religion teacher isn’t.

Daniel Fincke: No, again, the government is not forcing the Church to provide it, it is forcing all employers—including the Church—to purchase health insurance plans that may cover contraception.

But, to your initial point, yes, all strictly religious feelings and beliefs are arbitrary and that’s why only the ones that have a secular justification should be respected in the public sphere and only the ones that are not excessively injurious to individuals should be tolerated within religious institutions.

Within religious institutions you have greater latitude to your capricious values and beliefs. You may discriminate against marrying gays, you may enjoin battered women to stay in their abusive marriages because Jesus forbids divorcing (unless your wife cheats, of course). But you can’t do the beating yourself or withhold necessary health care from your kids, etc. There are limits even in the private exercise of religion.

And in the public sphere, when you want to employ and service people outside your faith or perform functions that are not distinctly religious (no matter how much you want to personally interpret them as acts of devotion to God), you need to be subject to the same laws, honor the consciences and health needs of others just as everyone else does. You need more than capricious feelings to justify exemptions from public laws that serve to enforce the rights and dignity of other people in the public.

And it is irrelevant that you think the Church could have some rationales for accommodating gay spouses. The point is that by your assertion of the right of “deep offense” to trump all laws, the Church would be equally in their rights to deny to cover such a spouse and contribute to the well-functioning of such an “unholy” union as they would be in their rights to deny contraception and contributing to the prevention of unwanted pregnancies.

The point is that your principle of “religious offense” would be a “get out of equal protection” pass which could cover all manner of bigotry beyond the cathedral walls. Even as things stand, Catholic adoption agencies want to refuse to let gays adopt—even while they accept public funds! They want to prohibit abortions in their hospitals, forcing women, even those with life threatening pregnancies, to become mothers (or die!), unless they can escape to another hospital quickly enough or can afford or have convenient access to another hospital, etc. They want to allow pharmacists to get in the way of having people’s prescriptions for contraception filled.

In all these and more cases, they want their “offense” to trump other people’s rights to legal services that hospitals or social service agencies are expected to provide. Your “offense” fiat would cover all of this, and justify gay spouses not being covered under health care plans.

Mary: Well perhaps I should say, “deeply contradictory to the Church’s beliefs in such a way that forcing them to do it would prohibit their ability to act freely as a Church.” The point that I hold, and hope that I have made to some degree of coherency, is that there is a difference between a Church-related institution discriminating against someone and a Church-related institution being forced to provide a service contrary to its teachings.

They are not “equally” with in their rights to discriminate against any legally-recognized spouse, because they don’t have to do the wedding mass. They aren’t being forced to arbitrate divorces by the state. But here they are actually being forced into doing something that violates their religion. It’s forcing them to be proactive in something that is against their teaching. This means that Church-related institutions would have to serve only Catholics and hire only Catholics. That does prohibit their freedom to function as religious institutions.

I still believe that Church-related institutions need seriously to consider the funding it takes from the government and the strings that come attached. The link you posted last year about the adoption agency that simply shut down rather than provide services to gay couples—it’s certainly not what I would personally want because that doesn’t match my views. But I think it was the right thing to do. Don’t take the government’s money if you don’t want to play by the government’s rules. But in most cases, the government provides funding not because they just love nuns or whatever, but because it is in the government’s best interest for services to be run by more locally-administered private institution. And it is well-within its rights to withdraw funding when discrimination is taking place within those private institutions. In this case the government is not saying “we allow you to submit your students for national humanities grants so provide abortions!” they’re saying, “you have to provide contraception whether you’re completely financially free of us or not.”

Daniel Fincke: They are not being asked to provide the contraception. Only the health insurance which may cover contraception. And it’s troubling that you are equating the ability to function as a religious organization with never making accommodations to freedom of conscience of other people on something as non-central to uniquely Catholic belief as the issue of contraception. It’s not like they have to deny the divinity of Jesus.

They argue for their position against contraception putatively on natural law grounds. They derive it as a matter of philosophy, not strictly as a theological matter. They have to recognize, as all of us do, that our rights to impose our private views on metaphysics in ways that unduly burden others are limited.

That’s what it means to live in a secular society. And being financially free, again, is not the issue here. The issue in this case is not government strings attached to money, it’s being an employer of the public and accepting limitations on your ability to do that in distinctly religious ways. You can only do private actions in wholly uncompromised religious ways.

Mary: Well, you’re right, it’s not a Catholic belief. But religious systems are not simply systems of beliefs statements which one must affirm or not affirm, they also have moral teachings and those moral teachings are central to the daily lives of their followers.

As for the natural law grounds of denying contraception, I’m in no position to debate natural law. It is my understanding that natural law is neither natural nor a law and that it is falling out of favor, even with the Church, as a method for defending the Church’s moral teachings. I understand the Church’s teaching on contraception but outside of any natural law claims.

And the Church’s ability to impose its views is limited—to its own institutions and even then to its own actions. It doesn’t force its employees not to buy birth control, it says it won’t pay for it. So it is actually quite limited indeed.

 Concluded Here.

Your Thoughts?

On Facebook she recently posted with approval an article from a Catholic Democrat angry over Obama administration requirements that the Catholic Church pay for insurance plans for employees that include contraception coverage whenever it hires both Catholics and non-Catholics alike as part of running universities, hospitals, social service agencies, or any other publicly accessible institutions with non-exclusively religious purposes. (At my recommendation Ophelia Benson responded to the article nicely at Butterflies and Wheels.)

Essentially, when the Catholic Church employs or serves non-Catholics and performs non-religious functions, it needs to offer all the same rights and protections that non-religious institutions are required to provide. Some Catholics, including some left-leaning ones, are up in arms alleging that this is tantamount to a violation of their rights to free exercise of religion. Mary is one of those outraged Catholics.

On the other hand, secularists, such as I, argue that governmental rules like these protect the consciences (which includes the religious consciences) of employees and the public. If a Protestant or a Jew or an atheist takes employment to teach or practice medicine at a Catholic institution, this should not interfere with her ability to get access to the contraception she needs in order to regulate her reproductive life according to her own conscience. The rights of conscience of particular Catholics, and of the Catholic Church collectively to believe and worship as it wishes, should not extend to a right to encumber the free exercise of conscience of everyone who they employ for non-religious functions. This is intrusive and authoritarian. If the Roman Catholic Church wants its employees—even the non-Catholic ones—to honor its moral dictates then it should trust them to freely obey.

Finally, I have been employed by Roman Catholic universities since 2000 (sometimes even working at two at a time). I studied for ten years at Fordham and received my doctorate there. The entire time I was there I was an atheist. I have happily never suffered the slightest discrimination. Not only was I free to write a dissertation which was highly critical of Christianity, I have received several valuable publishing opportunities from one of the department’s few Jesuit priest philosophers. My criticisms are on principle and do not come from any special animus or inherent suspicions of mainstream Roman Catholic institutions’ theoretical abilities to provide non-religious services to non-Catholics.

Mary and I have debated the merits of our respective positions and below is part one of our three part exchange:

Daniel Fincke: Could you please explain the positions of prominent Catholic leaders in the current political discourse about the application of the Affordable Care Act as it pertains to Catholic institutions, and explain why you agree or disagree with particular points?

Mary: Well, I do hesitate to speak on behalf of prominent Catholic leaders. The average “liberal” Catholic isn’t really reading Bishop Dolan’s blog. But I think that the best summation of it is in a press release from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, “Bishops and lay Catholic leaders across the United States have made it clear that we cannot comply with this unjust law without compromising our convictions and undermining the Catholic identity of many of our service ministries. This is not just another important issue among the many we need to be concerned about. This ruling is different. This ruling interferes with the basic right of Catholic citizens to organize and work for the common good as Catholics in the public square.”

And if I were to speak for what other people I know, other concerned Catholics, think on the issue it’s that the teaching against birth control is a long-standing teaching in the Catholic Church that is directly related to important issues regarding dignity of life. Many of those Catholics, like myself, would like to see a serious dialogue within the Church about its position on birth control and, God willing, a serious editing of those beliefs. But for most Catholics it’s less about the content of the teaching of birth control and more about the fact that the government is forcing Catholic institutions, though not employees of parishes, to provide it.

Daniel Fincke: Provide birth control or provide insurance plans which cover birth control?

Mary: To alter their insurance plans in such a way that provides the birth control pill to be used for contraceptive purposes.

My fundamental disagreement with the issue lies in that dichotomy – that my priests and their secretaries get to continue to use their insurance plans as they are because they cater to a Catholic community and do “religious” work, but the teachers who teach at the adjoining elementary school are subject to the change. I think it is a terribly narrow definition of religious and religious activity. No Church, especially no Catholic Church, could ever submit to a definition of religion that is confined to masses and funerals.

I also think I should lay my cards on the table – I know very few people actually employed by a religious institution – at least very few well enough to talk about insurance benefits. So whether or not certain dioceses provide birth control or not, I really don’t know. I imagine some do.

Daniel Fincke: That’s not true that no church could submit for legal or practical purposes to a definition of religion that is confined to distinctly religious functions like masses, funerals, and distinctly religious teachings. There is nothing inherently religious about teaching or practicing medicine or arranging adoptions.

These are strictly speaking religiously neutral activities except in the case of specifically theological teaching—and even that is only religious in character when approached a certain way. The Catholic Church fully understands this in practice otherwise they would not regularly hire non-Catholics to perform these functions. If they are religious functions, they would require Catholics to perform them—just as catechism classes and funerals and masses need to be presided over by Catholics. Also Churches want to claim a secular function that legitimizes government subsidies for their charity work. If there is no separation in principle from a church’s secular and religious functions then the government is funding religion by giving grants or other advantages to putatively public (not religious) services done by churches.

Mary: I think the question of government subsidy is an important one. A part of me would love to see the government stop subsidizing religious charities if for not other reason then I could stop hearing atheists bring it up. But another part of me recognizes that the government subsidizes any private charity, religious or not, because that charity performs services in a certain way that saves the government time and money. But I do think the government should reevaluate its subsidy of religious charities.

It’s very hard for me to answer these criticisms without waxing theological because the answers seem deeply obvious to me on a theological level but that’s not at all what we’re doing here so I’ll try not to.

Daniel Fincke: That’s because part of living in a pluralistic, non-theocratic, civil society with secular laws means bracketing one’s personal theologies or conceptions of the good where respect for other institutions is necessary. You need to think in secular civil terms when in the secular, civil sphere—regardless of how you want to square that with what you privately hold theologically.

Mary: 50 years ago, there would have been almost no non-Catholic employees at the average Church-related institution, even universities. The majority of university faculty were male religious and there were few, though very few, non-Catholic employees. The regular hiring of non-Catholic employees came with two related things: the transforming of schools away from being owned and operated by religious orders to being owned and operated by lay boards of trustees that still retained religious and Vatican II which overturned centuries of Church teaching and gave a teaching on religious freedom.

This religious freedom teaching allowed many institutions, especially the Catholic university, the ability to dialogue with, engage with and work with people who weren’t Catholic. It’s a lot easier for a Jew to teach at a Catholic school when Catholics no longer call him a “Christ killer” by way of official Church teaching.

But this change didn’t come because suddenly Catholic universities recognized that they were participating in a public function that was distinct from Church ministry or that their university functions were no longer “religious” but that a serious theological shift took place within the Church that redefined how Catholics are expected to engage non-Catholics.

But Catholic universities and hospitals still maintained deep commitments, stated in mission statements and other ways, to working *as* the Church in the world.

Daniel Fincke: The theological reasoning process by which Catholicism opened up to modernity should not be determinative of secular law though. Once the Church decides to engage with outsiders and participate more inclusively with the rest of civil society, it cannot dictate all the terms of that interaction. The consciences of the non-Catholics it invites into its institutions matter also.

Mary: But every Church activity is a private one insofar as the Church only dictates the values of its own religious institutions. It would be an “imposition” if the Church forced its views on an atheist organization. It’s imposing its religious views on its own institutions. But I would like to address what you said about consciences – I think that is an extremely important issue.

Daniel Fincke: It is an imposition if the Church forces its views on its atheist employees too. Just because this is happening in a private university or hospital does not mean that public laws should not apply. And if the new law requires employees’ rights to contraception to be respected, the Catholic Church has no right to impose on the consciences of atheists, Protestants, Jews, or whomever else wants that right fulfilled. Private organizations are not lawless.

Even were the Church to employ only Catholics and serve only Catholics in a hospital, say, they should not be exempt from controls to make sure their medical practices are legitimate. People have rights of conscience against their Churches too. Religious people should not be forced to surrender basic rights of equal protection. For example, if a Catholic woman suffering domestic abuse were employed by a Catholic hospital, the hospital should not have the right to fire her if she gets a divorce against Catholic teaching which forbids them. Basic employee protections are in place to protect such abuses from private institutions, churches included. It is this arrogance and authoritarianism of the Church which thinks of itself as totally unfettered in administering the law within its institutions that is responsible for the entire decades or centuries of abuse of children with impunity. This attitude that Catholics are the property of the Catholic Church for it to dictate to them against their consciences without complaint is anti-democratic and must not be catered to by a secular, pluralistic society built on freedom of conscience.

Mary: Ok, allow me to answer your points. There’s nothing worse than the “well they don’t have to work there if they don’t like it!” argument. Especially in academia, jobs are so hard to come by that it would certainly not be indicative of religious charity in any way to say that someone should just pack up and find somewhere else to work – a somewhere that might not exist. But when any professor goes to work for any private school, or a doctor at a hospital, you are introduced to the “mission” of the school. So I’m sure in your employment at Fordham and Fairfield you were told of the explicitly religious mission of those schools that still maintained deep commitments to freedom of speech, anti-discrimination (in a perfect world) whatever. Now you are deeply hostile to religion and still chose to teach there, something I’m sure came from a place of discernment and you followed your conscience in teaching at both of those schools. I respect that choice in anyone.

Now anyone who knows anything about Catholic teaching it’s that Catholic teaching seems to hate the idea of anyone controlling birth and abortion. So there should be no thought in anyone’s mind that that institution would go out of its way, in any way, to provide either of those services. Some people understand this as an inconvenience and a burden and other people are deeply offended by the Church’s teaching on these issues. I think anyone deeply offended by the Church’s teaching on those issues who still works in that place is violating his or her conscience immediately. I would never teach or work at Ave Maria University, Christendom College, Franciscan or Thomas Aquinas College because I am deeply at odds with the missions of those schools. If Catholic feelings toward contraception were secretive and only revealed after an employee started working there, I could understand, but no one should be surprised if Notre Dame doesn’t provide birth control for contraceptive purposes.

And people, do, indeed, have conscience rights against Churches. They’re exercised all the time. 98% of Church going Catholics use methods of birth control considered sinful by their Church. Catholics divorce at a rate as high as all other religious organizations and atheists. Catholics get abortions. The Church doesn’t follow people around asking them what they do and the conscience is supposed to be respected. Unfortunately, it isn’t always respected. The nun who was excommunicated for allowing an emergency abortion to be performed is a great example – that woman did what she thought was the right thing to do and was punished for it and it was in no way right.

And I agree that the authoritarian attitude of the Church is so dangerous and harmful. The sexual abuse scandal that ran rampant for 40 years and, to this day, has hardly been sufficiently punished by civil authorities is just one example of that. Reading some of the case files of how priests used judges with Catholic sympathies to have their charges dismissed are so disturbing it makes you want to kill yourself, frankly.

But this isn’t the Church telling it’s employees that if they use birth control they’ll be fired or if they get divorced they’ll be fired – but that they won’t provide the service because it’s contrary to their teaching. I think that’s an important distinction.

Daniel Fincke: But why does being employed by an institution make you subject to its “teaching” in ways that restrict your own abilities to pursue your own reproductive freedom? Should CEOs arbitrarily dictate their “teachings” to their employees? These are people hired for non-religious functions. I’m there to teach the philosophy course, not to serve any religious functions. The Church should have no say whatsoever what I do with my paychecks. I render services, they pay me. Their abilities to dictate my conscience are constrained to those which are contractual and reasonable related to my function as a philosophy professor. They do not extend to my reproductive freedom.

Continued here.

Concluded here.

Your Thoughts?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the econom

Okay, as I always note when discussing anything remotely related to economics, I am not an economist. I rely on my trained economist readers to provide expertise about the strictly economic aspects of what I am about to comment on. I am going to talk about what I perceive as the philosophical problems with what Governor Romney and Speaker Gingrich have to say in the clip above.

First of all, pleased as I am to see Romney get into so much trouble for saying he doesn’t care about the poor as long as they have their safety net, I think his slip was just to say explicitly what politicians always say implicitly. All that matters is the middle class. Because those are the majority of the voters. And when it comes to legislating, of course, even the middle class doesn’t matter, but only the corporations since they fund the campaigns. This is the fundamental reality and everyone can see through all the bullshit on both sides.

But what irks me about Romney and Gingrich’s remarks is the flat out denial of reality that ignores the permanence of poverty. There will always be poor people. Capitalism is set up that way. Gingrich’s proposal for a trampoline to get out of poverty is just empty. There are not enough middle class income jobs in the economy for everyone to have one. For cripe’s sake, our median income is only a meager $26,000! How many single parents must be trying to raise several kids on that (or less)? How many dual income families are raising multiple kids on $52,000? And that’s the median! How many millions scrape by on less?

Trampoline individual poor people out of poverty all you like and then the more mediocre who were just above poverty will fall down into the safety net and not bounce out. The system is structured that someone will wind up poor. The repulsive Republican moralistic judgmentalism towards those who wind up poor (or stuck there) is so simultaneously logically fallacious and self-righteous it turns my stomach. The implicit assumption is that our economic system is unquestionably just, that it adequately rewards hard work, that it intrinsically values labor appropriately, that laissez-faire markets provide every morally valuable    economic outcome by an inherently just nature.

The fact that wages can be bid down to levels where working hard does not earn people even enough money to afford health care just means that not everyone deserves health care morally, on this logic. If these people want health care they should just work harder—even though they may be working 50-60 hours a week at two jobs where the market values their labor at the “you should just die if you get sick” level of assessment.

Or maybe they should work smarter and get a better education. And it’s their fault if they can’t afford to go to school because their parents aren’t rich enough? And it’s reasonable to burden these kids with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to get a competitive education necessary to climb the economic ladder? And it’s reasonable to have the poor kids needing to work part or (even) full time to bootstrap through college at an inherent disadvantage against kids who can give their studies the full time attention they require to be done adequately?

I guess it’s purely moral fairness if the young poor don’t use these trampolines available—working jobs that bid you down to a dehumanizing wage that does not allow you even to afford to say alive if you get sick, while being handicapped competing for grades against more affluent kids who don’t have to work, and then coming out of school crushed by a debt that could severely limits your career flexibility as they have to pay onerous debts right out of school and can hardly aspire to “savings” or plan for home ownership or think about retirement.

And not to mention that this poor kid who started out with the luxury of the “safety net” grew up in a poor school district with underpaid teachers and ridiculously limited resources that put her at a further disadvantage starting college.

Whichever of these kids does not trampoline out of poverty morally deserves to be poor for their moral failure, their laziness, in not adequately availing themselves of all the opportunities available—regardless of how systemically inequitably they are made available.

And even those who do work hard—let’s say we all work hard and we all get advanced degrees, do we all get rewarded morally for our hard work and determination? Do we all now get to make more than that meager median $26,000? We all get to be executives and lawyers and doctors and politicians and finance people and tenured professors? Hardly. There is not room at the top for all of us. The current rates of underemployment in the country indicate a failure of the system to morally reward all that aspiration and determination with jobs befitting people’s educations and qualifications. If those people work at wages that don’t afford health care I guess they just deserve to die younger too?

What are the programs Romney or Gingrich have proposed to raise the median wage in America so that even unskilled laborers make good money? What are the programs Romney or Gingrich have proposed to reward all of us underemployed people who have the skills and education to do jobs that pay upper middle class salaries so that we get what we morally deserve by playing by the system’s rules so obediently? What are their programs to wipe out the need for lousy paying menial labor and replace all those jobs with at least middle class incomes so that Romney’s promise of bringing the poor up to the middle can be fulfilled. We won’t quibble with the irrationality of his saying no one needs to be below the middle. We’ll just assume he means the poor can live like the middle presently does and that will be the new poverty. That, admittedly, would very much be progress at least. What’s the plan for this to actually happen? What’s the plan to increase these wages? Are “more tax cuts for the job creators” magically going to pull this off? Somehow less regulations on business do it? Somehow state Republicans’ dismantling of union rights and cutting public school teachers’ salaries is going to make it happen?

And to bring the poor up from the safety net to the middle we need to get unemployment not only down from 8.3% to a normal 5% but all the way down to 0%. And we need everyone able bodied and between 22-65 to pursue a job for that to be a true 0%. Or at least make sure that the 5% unemployed at any given time are not the permanently unemployed. We have a crisis high level people unemployed long enough that they risk being unemployable. What are Gingrich and Romney’s plans to salvage their careers? What’s Gingrich’s trampoline for them? Is it that all people out of work for more than 6 months start working as janitors in elementary schools at a fraction the pay of professional janitors so that they learn how to work again?

I am really really interested in what ways Gingrich and Romney propose to magically elevate the median wage, obliterate unemployment and underemployment, make it so that the competitiveness of capitalism does not require any one getting the short end of the stick, make it so that all employers with no government assistance pay everyone enough to be fully insured with no government intrusions (or fully insure them of their own with no government mandates).

How is this utopia in which we all get what we morally deserve for working hard going to be achieved? How is it all going to happen with less government regulations, lower taxes, gutted education funding, disbanded unions, an abolished minimum wage, and the rolling back of entitlement programs for those deficit creating poor people?

How is everyone who works hard going to get health care? Or is that not something people deserve if they do shitty enough labor that anyone could theoretically do? I’m not a Christian or a “person of faith” at all so I’m not sure how our American values (being so based on Christianity or at least “faith”) judge that issue. Does Christianity say anything about whether menial labor morally entitles one to enough money to pay for a doctor and also pay for groceries and raise children?

Gingrich tells us Obama just hates work and loves having people on food stamps. Apparently hard work can elevate not just some of the poor but obliterate the very dynamic of capitalism by which there are inevitably some poor people. Apparently Gingrich has a way to make this happen so that no one ever needs food stamps again. Is it just his infectious love of work that is going to overcome Obama’s three unconscionable years of teaching the poor to hate work?

Or is it just that capitalism, which pays by the morally unquestionable market value, will always make sure the poor are those who deserve to suffer with no mercy for their moral failures of being born poor, with either few exceptional talents or reduced opportunities to develop them if they did have them?

I’m not an economist. I admit it. But I’m curious how this morally just world where we can blame the poor for being the poor is going to be justified or alternatively how we’re going to create a capitalism where no one is going to wind up poor by our current standards, or how we are going to do this with minimal government regulations of the laissez-faire market as possible? (And copious corporate welfare, of course.)

Your Thoughts?

But then staffers started crediting the debate coach for Romney’s debate win and Romney responded yesterday in a way that reflects really poorly on him. He fired O’Donnell for upstaging him.

Great leaders are not threatened by great advisers. They don’t compete with them for credit. They don’t risk sabotaging their own effectiveness by treating worthy collaborators as dangerous rivals. Weak leaders, who are more focused on their over-sensitive egos than objective success, do that.

Your Thoughts?

Bill Moyers educates:

Bill Moyers Essay: Newt’s Obesession with Saul Alinsky from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

Money quote:

Maybe that’s why Newt Gingrich has been slandering Alinsky’s name. Maybe he’s afraid. Afraid the very white folks he’s been rousing to a frenzy will discover who Saul Alinsky really was. A patriot, in a long line of patriots, who scorned the malignant narcissism of duplicitous politicians and taught every day Americans to think for themselves and to fight together for a better life. That’s the American way, and any good historian would know it.

Phil Klein also educates by explaining the various ways that Newt Gingrich campaigns precisely employing Alinsky’s recommended tactics. Dan Savage also educates the ways that since the ’80s the entire social conservative movement has thrived using Alinsky’s tactics.

And a few years ago Bill Dedman educated us about Hillary Clinton’s history with Alinsky and what she wrote in her senior thesis about him. And in those same days, Governor George Romney also recommended his associates listen to Alinsky.

Thanks for most of these links goes to The Dish.

Your Thoughts?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YLzlIsrU4o

From Patton Oswalt’s Finest Hour. In the same show he is as funny as can be on romantic comedies and on “gay friend” tropes in movies. The DVD is coming soon.

(Thanks to Leanna for the video.)

Your Thoughts?

Pat: I don’t know why you think I would be impressed by that.

Taylor: Well when you boil things down isn’t that all that really matters—that at the end of the day I am just as committed in practice to what you want to call “moral” values even though I don’t think they’re “real”?

Pat: No, I find your rational inconsistency troubling in itself and capable of potential negative real world consequences.

Taylor: What “rational inconsistency” are you referring to? I think I’m being very scrupulous here and constraining my beliefs to what is rigorously factual. I’m avoiding confusing my preferences and desires for properties of things themselves. When I say “x is good” I am not deluding myself into thinking I’m describing some real property of a thing which constitutes its “objective goodness”. Instead I’m rather strictly, humbly, and rationally consistently accepting that in such a circumstance I am just referring to and expressing my feelings towards it.

Pat: But you’re not. I know you. You still are in the habit of using laudatory language about some people and actions and condemnatory language towards others. You still use moral terms like good and bad, and right and wrong. You ascribe virtues to some people in some cases and attribute vices to other people in other cases and you do so with a great deal of conviction. You seem to think these people really have these traits and that these traits are truly good or truly bad and not just things you like and things you don’t like.

Taylor: So I like those whom I like and I dislike those whom I dislike. Isn’t that what I have described myself as doing? I never claimed to have stopped liking certain kinds of people and actions and disliking others. A moment ago I even stressed specifically that my patterns of liking and disliking don’t diverge very much from your own patterns of valuing. So where is the problem?

Pat: The problem is the strength of your condemnations is too strong for expressions of mere disliking. When you complain that someone is misogynistic or racist or homophobic or selfish or greedy, etc. you get angry in a way you would not if you were describing that someone simply liked different kinds of films than you did or preferred a different flavor of ice cream. It does not seem at all like you are just noting that that other person has different likes and dislikes from your own or different proclivities towards actions than your own. You seem quite adamant that their ways of thinking and acting are objectively worse than yours—that they are worse than they should be.

Taylor: So I dislike misogynists more than I dislike people who prefer strawberry ice cream. So what? They’re both cases of dislike even though one is much stronger than the other. This is merely a quantitative difference, not a qualitative difference. I find strawberry ice cream gross and don’t identify with people who like it in the instances wherein they express their preferences for it. But this is usually a fleeting and irrelevant feeling as it concerns me so little. Maybe if someone were singing the praises of strawberry ice cream I would find it mildly annoying since my brain’s automatic response might be to say “No, it does not actually have a pleasant taste! Why is that person saying that? It’s false! Make them stop saying that!” Then on reflection I would see how amusing and arbitrary my brain was being.

On the other hand, when someone hates women and expresses that view, my brain also says, “I find that gross.” I don’t identify with people who hate women. Now since I would think of the harms of misogyny these would naturally ramp up my anger and my disdain for a misogynist more than a strawberry ice cream lover. And I would not dismiss these feelings as laughably arbitrary as I would my possible knee jerk dislike of the strawberry ice cream advocate. It makes perfect sense that I would feel greater anger and feel more inclined to cling to that anger. But it’s still an emotional response of not identifying with someone, feeling at odds with them, and feeling annoyed by their attitude because it is different from mine. So it’s quantitative difference, but the brain processes are of the same kind. I’m not secretly leaping from differences in feeling responses to overreaching judgments that I have a “moral truth” that the other person does not—no matter how repulsive and loathsome I might find that person to be.

Pat: But you think that there is no objective “repulsiveness” or “loathsomeness”, right? Those are projective terms to you, right? Like, you are repulsed by a thing and then call it repulsive as though it was intrinsically repulsive—when in reality you think it’s not intrinsically repulsive in any objective sense but only that it repulses you and that it repulses you for reasons that have to do only with your psychology and which have nothing inherent to do about its objective features. That’s your view right? That when we attribute to things value properties we are confusing our responses to things as reified traits that the things supposedly have themselves, right?

Taylor: Yes, I would agree with that. “Repulsiveness” or “loathsomeness” are not true properties of things. I just am repulsed or I just loathe and that’s a matter of me and my feelings and not objective features of the things or people themselves.

Pat: And yet you use the expressions anyway in describing people.

Taylor: They’re only expressions. It’s not like I think the people I use them to describe have such properties which sit there as part of them independent of my reacting to them with repulsion or loathing.

Pat: But why use those expressions for describing people if you think they’re misleading about the truth and are just a projection of your feelings. Your language treats them as though they are real but you don’t really believe they are. So why not be consistent. Remove this moral sounding language from your vocabulary.

Taylor: Because that would be needlessly cumbersome and limiting and counter-productive to expressing my feelings in a natural way. These are still my feelings. I really feel them. I really want to express them. And I want to use the language that conveys them as I feel them, even if there is a bit of inevitable imprecision in this. I correct for this imprecision when the issues of metaethics are being discussed explicitly, so I don’t see what the problem is.

Pat: The problem is that in metaethics you employ an arbitrarily narrow and false conception of what may be called or treated as “real. You refuse to allow certain complex, objectively describable relationships of effectiveness value relationships to be considered in any sense objectively determinative of truth about values in general or about what it is either more or less rational for people to value in particular. In that discourse you want to choke off potentially productive formulations of what happens when we use moral language—formulations which could ideally preserve, clarify, systematize, and advance our best and most rationally objective ways of settling important ethical disputes.

You are indifferent to the consequences of knee-capping the very concept of ethical legitimacy when you cavalierly and misleadingly take its subjective components as completely negating its equally present objective and rational components. You are indifferent—or even hostile to—articulating the valuable ways that a constructive discourse about value can be legitimate despite degrees of subjectivity and relativity if only it accounts for and respects these things while also exploring what is fruitful and rational about the objective and universalizable components of moral discourse.

You want to stack the deck totally against the value of all “constructed” moral categories when doing metaethics. But when the rubber hits the road in real life and you start making real world value judgments, you don’t have the courage of your supposedly iconoclastic, lopsidedly anti-realist convictions but rather you speak in vehement and unqualified  moral language as though it tracked the very truths your metaethics prides itself on staunchly dismissing as “unreal”.  And you reason morally in ways that effectively track the kinds of truths you tell me are merely subjective and not matters of truth or matters for objective reasoning at all! So, for example, you insist that harming someone is not “factually wrong” but “just something we don’t like”. And yet in your own reasoning you go right ahead and treat harming as a legitimate reason to dislike someone.

Taylor: No, it’s not a “legitimate” reason to dislike someone It’s just a likely one.

Pat: But you feel justified. You judge yourself as silly when you dislike a strawberry ice cream advocate but you judge yourself as right when you dislike a misogynist. That’s not just a difference in strengths of feelings, it is a difference in rational judgments about the appropriateness of each feeling. You often like to claim, in a sophistical way, that harm is not an objective category. You reject the idea that there are intrinsic states of health or flourishing that could suffer objectively identifiable and denunciation-worthy harms. Yet, you realize that your negative feelings towards strawberry ice cream advocates are worth abandoning while your negative feelings towards those who cause harm—which you can identify perfectly well with common sense—are worth staying angry at. You might even judge it appropriate to increase your anger in that case.

Taylor: No, I’m not grasping differences in “true worth”. I’m responding to differences in strengths of feeling. Perceptions of harm, whether tracking something true about the world or not, anger me more than disagreements over ice cream tastes. And I follow my emotions.

Pat: But you admitted earlier that sometimes you have inklings of emotions that are your brain being annoyed in “amusing” and “arbitrary” ways that then you put a stop to. These judgments of what is amusing and what is arbitrary are rooted in logic. We are amused by logical absurdity—and it is absurdly arbitrary to treat a trivial matter, like a difference in taste in ice cream, as though it were important enough to feel anger over. But you know quite well misogyny is not something arbitrary or amusing to feel anger about. Because you know it correlates with objective harms and you know full well both how and why they’re truly harmful in ways that merit your anger as a human being with an intrinsically vested interest in human flourishing.

Taylor: The silliness of getting angry over a dispute related to ice cream flavors is not a logical one. It is a disconnect of feeling. One part of my brain is getting hyped up and adamant while all the rest of me just can’t bring myself to give a crap, and so my general apathy on that issue means that my anger impulse is isolated and emotionally blown off with a laughter response. In the case of misogyny, no part of me feels like laughing it off. That’s the only difference, not any cognizance of objective “truths” about “objective wrongness” that relate to misogyny’s “intrinsic property of badness” or any such superstition.

Pat: You’re making a strawman of moral properties when you make them sound like mystical fantasy properties and not merely a priori graspable relationships that all people intuitively understand to at least some extent with our natural common sense. These are categories we live by and whose truth we inevitably assume completely when anything practical is at stake. To attack these concepts as superstitious nonsense when it comes time to analyze their logical relationships to each other and to the empirical world is not a scathing honesty but an unnecessary inconsistency that cuts out one’s own legs and makes one’s whole intellectual and personal life—filled as it is with vital moral and political judgments and debates—philosophically incoherent.

But more to the point, I reject your characterization of the reasons you distrust your dislike of a strawberry ice cream advocate. It’s not just a matter of more feelings of apathy happening to swarm and subdue outnumbered feelings of anger. You feel more non-combative and indifferent because your cognitive, a priori grasp of fairness is does not rule against the strawberry ice cream lover but judges in his favor and tells your knee jerk negativity to shut itself down.

Taylor: “Fairness” is just a matter of feelings though too. Different people feel different things are fair.

Pat: But fairness is still an a priori category even if we have trouble discerning how to apply it most accurately to the world, and even if our feelings can prejudice those judgments some times. We intuitively recognize it is not fair (either to reality or to each other) that we let our feelings, instead of our reason, determine our judgments of fair and unfair. You grasp this, you know it is fair to dislike a misogynist and consider them objectively repulsive and you know it is unfair to be angry with someone over a different taste in ice creams.

Taylor: Even if I grant certain brain tendencies which lead us to regularly apply certain distinct moral concepts and categories, that still does not make them “real”. Where is “fairness” in the universe which is scientifically describable apart from human concerns? We may have developed the concept for some survival benefit—some way that it helps us regulate human relationships effectively, but that does not make it a part of reality in the human-independent way that, say, atoms and molecules and water and trees exist in themselves.

Pat: As long as fairness has an internal logic and is vindicated as good for us for whatever ways it can be demonstrated to help us either minimally stay alive, maximally flourish, or successfully reproduce then that’s all the objective reality we need to overcome the charge that it is merely a matter of hopelessly subjective, relative, and distortively “false” emotions. I’m not saying there are no subject-relative or situation-relative components to morality. I am just that there are also objective, a priori, generalizable, and true aspects as well—and that an honest and practically constructive account integrates and makes sense of these too so we our practices and our discourses can be coherent, rational, and beneficial.

Your Thoughts?

These fictional characters, Pat and Taylor, previously discussed the related topic of Immoralism using Nietzsche’s view of it as a touchstone.

Links to the rest of the fictional Camels With Hammers dialogues are below the fold:

A Debate About The Value of Permanent Promiscuity

Moral Perfectionism, Moral Pragmatism, Free Love Ethics, and Adultery

On The Ethics of “Sugar Daddies” and “Sugar Babies”

A Debate About the Wisdom of Trying to Deconvert People Atheist Fundamentalism?

Bullying or Debating? Religious Privilege or Freedom of Speech?

Hell As The Absence of God

God and Goodness

And while I was startled when Morgan Freeman was first revealed as the president during the film Deep Impact, he was a natural fit. And a few years later 24′s President David Palmer was so charming, commanding, cool, and calming that he began to personify presidential presence for me. And it is a remarkable quirk of history that he would so eerily presage President Barack Obama, who would be elected president so relatively shortly in time after that iconic character was conceived, that I think whoever cast David Haysbert should be working for the DNC or the RNC finding and recruiting candidates for political races. They clearly understand how to spot a winning set of personality traits fitting the zeitgeist.

Obama himself seems a natural president. He has a preternaturally noble bearing. Very calm, very assured and comfortable in his own skin, very handsome and tall, and capable of both stirring oration and sober classy seriousness as the occasion requires. He strikes me as a bit stiff and insincere when trying to play things folksy and dumbed down, but this is partially compensated by the gentle reassuring squint to his eye that seems wise, thoughtful, and compassionate in a very detached and elevated sort of way. None of this is to say he is necessarily anything he appears to be of course. Nor, again, does not looking presidential mean being a bad president where it really matters.

But all this is to say that when I think “presidential” I reflexively think of a kind of appearance of dignity and reassuring wisdom, not simply a kind of handsome powerful WASPiness.

But all that musing aside, Andrew Sullivan speculates interestingly about how Romney’s role in Mormon leadership may contribute to his inauthentic bearing in moments when he is glad-handing the public:

I was chatting with a Mormon friend the other day and asking him what Mormons make of Mitt on this uncanny valley question. The phrase he came up with is “the Mormon mask.” It’s the kind of public presentation that a Mormon with real church authority deploys when dealing with less elevated believers, talking to them, and advising them. The cheery aw-shucks fake niceness in person is a function in part, some believe, of the role he has long played in the church: always a leader.

Think of a pastor who has a game face, or after-Mass cheeriness, because it’s impossible for a human being truly to relate to so many different needs and individuals all the time without some kind of defense mechanism; some set of phrases to get him through a confession or consultation when he may be having an off day; some way to remove himself from the emotionally draining responsibilities of so many pastoral duties.

None of this explains his woodenness, inauthenticity, or unbelievable tone-deafness when speaking off script on stage. But at least this explanation resonates a little with me. I am a pretty personable person who normally thrives on interpersonal interactions but when swarmed by students at the end of a lecture or even when in the position of making small talk with them moments after class on a bus or train, I feel relatively overwhelmed and in the kind of defensive automatic robotic mode that Sullivan describes above. Giving a lecture is mentally and physically draining and when it’s over the energy saps out of my body in a hurry. It’s like coming down from an adrenaline rush in many respects. So the pressure to fully engage socially with my students—with all the appropriate formalities and pleasantries and distance that that requires—does lead me to feel like there’s a mask that naturally goes on and a role that gets unthinkingly played.

And I would also add that Romney’s formative experiences as a missionary had to be a rough sort of experience. I saw him once talk about doing that work and learning how to keep plugging away with a pitch even as very few people buy it. As a philosopher, I’m used to the people I engage with really interacting with the ideas I bring to the table. This is the case whether they’re getting deep into the weeds of the issues with me, or whether they’re expressing a respectful but intimidated appreciation for the blast of ideas, or whether they’re picking my brain out of novice curiosity, or whether they’re trying to brawl with me intellectually and show I’m totally wrong (or that philosophy is nonsense and a waste of time).

In other words, I have pretty human, honest, respectful, productive, and mutually engaged interactions when I open my mouth about what I believe. I can’t imagine the conditioning that the opposite experience must create—what it must be like to start speaking incredible nonsense in a spirit of authority and conviction and not dialectic (except insincerely as part of the appearance of dialogue for the sake of the sales pitch). Or to feel certain you are right and have the truth and repeatedly to be dismissed contemptuously or with bewilderment. Or to go door to door day after day getting rejected. And the whole time needing to project a cheery “loving” welcome demeanor as part of the mission to convey “God’s love” to people from a desperate desire to save them. I can really imagine that creating Romney’s kind of protective skin and fatalistic delivery. And it’s sure great training for saying unbelievable nonsense with an utterly shameless and un-self-aware straight face.

I was an evangelical Christian who did proselytize my share in my day. But it was rarely if ever the social norm breaking door-knocking kind. Then and now approaching people cold who would want to talk to me and striking up conversation when I want something from them is nightmarish for me. I feel terribly embarrassed and shy intruding on people like that. Emotionally I’d rather miss out on 9 people (even attractive single women I’m dying to talk to) who don’t want to talk to me than momentarily bother one who does not want to talk to me. I  really can’t imagine being so immune to rejection.

Your Thoughts?

Jaime: I know you think all these supposed paradoxes make you sound deep and thoughtful and humble, but they don’t. My criticism of the evil in the Bible has nothing to do with some shallow inability to see how the materially poor could sometimes have more meaning in their lives than the rich, or how the formally uneducated might sometimes be wiser in important ways than some Ivy League alumni. Such banal paeans to peons could be made as easily by secular humanists as by Christians. They require no unique revelation from your god. My case that the god in the Bible inverts good and evil is based on the alleged genocides, slavery, misogyny, homophobia, racism, exclusivism and other nastily barbaric institutions and characteristics attributed to him right there in your Bible itself. There’s nothing sublimely beautiful and “beyond human understanding” about any of these things. If a modern day person tried to sell me on the idea that a god had told him to commit genocide, enslave people, and to force women to marry their rapists, and told me that I had to simply accept the goodness of all these apparent evils on faith that his god’s knowledge of goodness was simply beyond mine, then I would judge him to be both wicked and deluded to inordinately dangerous degrees.

Robin: You have an awful lot of faith in your feelings about Good and Evil, such that you think you can judge even God according to your standards of Good and Evil. But you have no basis to believe in Good or Evil if you don’t believe in God. So you’re just arguing incoherently. If there is no God, then there is no such thing as true Goodness or true Evil. There are just accidental states of affairs and subjective human preferences for some of those states of affairs and aversions to other states of affairs. And these preferences and aversions not only vary person to person but can be exactly opposite of each other from person to person. So one person calls a preferred state of affairs “good” and another, repelled by that very same thing, calls it “evil”—and vice versa with some alternative state of affairs. With no moral law giver there is no absolute basis to say anything really is good or really is evil. So when you try to judge God using these absolutes, you assume a moral law which requires God to give it in the first place. So you can only judge God immoral if you implicitly assume God exists in the first place!

Jaime: No, that’s absurd. But before I get into why, let me quickly note that even were you right and only God could create good and evil, it is still possible that God could be evil as it is clearly possible for any lawmaker to violate his or her own laws.

Robin: It wouldn’t be evil for God to not subject Himself to the laws He gives us any more than it would be evil for a pair of parents not to go to bed at 8pm just because they make a rule for their young children that they must go to bed so early for their own good. And if moral law derives only from the will of God, then that will cannot itself be immoral when it makes exceptions for itself.

Jaime: Oh, I see, genocide and slavery, et al. are only immoral for us but for God they’re totally cool because He’s—what? More mature than we are? Or just more powerful and, as such, entitled to abuse people at will with full moral authority?

Robin: But God does not abuse people. He is a God of love.

Jaime: Did someone rip the entire Old Testament and half the New out of your Bible?

Robin: No, God was working with imperfect people. The immoral things they did were not things he commanded.

Jaime: Yes, they were! He explicitly commands the Israelites to kill every man, woman, child, and animal, and goes out of His way to punish them when they do not! And the Deuteronomical and Levitical law codes are brutal. Your alleged god orders the stoning of disobedient children and gays and people who do as little as pick up sticks on a Saturday!

Robin: Look, these were already barbaric ancient peoples, God was civilizing them one step at a time. The Old Testament laws were comparatively more humane than others from the same time.

Jaime: I’m sure ordering these people to keep slaves and commit genocide in more “godly” ways than their neighbors did had a “comparatively civilizing” effect that made them relative models of humaneness. But how is this the evidence of a God who establishes an absolute Good and Evil? Can I be like your god and use this “absolute” Good and Evil to command genocides as long as they’re slightly less barbaric than Stalin’s or Mao’s?

Robin: Trying to outdo those models of consistent atheist morality, are you?

Jaime: There is nothing “consistent” about the moralities of Mao or Stalin and nothing about atheism that either logically or practically necessitates their violence and authoritarianism. It is your conception of goodness—which has it as a matter of assertion of raw might—that would justify their oppressiveness, not my conception of goodness as intrinsic.

Robin: I don’t believe any humans have the right to impose tyrannies!

Jaime: No—you only believe the entire universe is one big cosmic tyranny and that it rightly is one.

Robin: No, it’s not a cosmic tyranny. God is a legitimate authority, who rules benevolently through love and justice. Dictators usurp power and set themselves up as gods. That’s the antithesis of God’s authority. It is the hubris of willful humanity at its apex!

Jaime: Right, when humans commit genocides and enslave people it’s ghastly hubris—unless they did it several thousand years ago and claimed a perfect being made them do it. In which case it is totally copacetic. Godly even! And the alleged god behind their violence is a paragon of moral virtue.

Robin: Again with the bold moral judgments from someone who has no basis for believing in Good and Evil at all.

Jaime: Look, either goodness is a concept knowable a priori, by reason alone or not only can’t I know good from evil but neither can you.

Robin: What do you mean?

Jaime: When you make claims about what does or does not allow for the creation of morality, you implicitly rely on beliefs about what makes a norm authoritative or not. You seem, for example, not to think that human feelings which differ from person to person are sufficient for creating a genuine moral norm. You seem also to think that there are some criteria which you think the god you believe in adequately satisfies to give him the rights to legislate legitimately where mere human dictators may not. Now, you might claim that your god specially revealed to you the ability to discern the conditions by which his true authority could be validated—in which case it is humorous that you keep trying to convince me with reasons that your views are sounder than mine and trying to get me to understand rationally why your god has legitimate moral authority. Or you think that investigating the intrinsic and rationally knowable nature of moral authority itself leads you to your belief in a god who is a legitimate source of moral norms.

But if you believe you can rationally assess, and rationally prove to me, the ontological necessity and moral legitimacy of your morality-giving god, then apparently you think you know the essence of morality and of moral legitimacy on rational grounds that could be communicated even to a non-believer like me. And if that is the case then apparently morality and moral legitimacy are not only graspable a priori but they are more fundamentally real and knowable than your god since your god is subject to, and could only theoretically gain legitimacy from, a moral order that is both more basic to reality and a more fundamentally understandable reality than he is. So, if we need to understand moral categories in order to infer your god’s existence and to legitimate claims that your god is morally good and authoritative, then apparently we must know these moral categories logically prior to any beliefs or lack of beliefs in gods.

In this case, I would necessarily be able to intuit these moral categories as an atheist, without any need for learning of the existence or dictates of your god. This means I do not need to believe in your god either to understand or accept the legitimacy of morality. In fact, since grasping and applying moral categories is the prerequisite for determining whether your god is moral or immoral—independently of his arbitrary, self-serving alleged claims about himself—I am perfectly in a position to judge that he is in fact disproven as a candidate for existence. Yahweh cannot both exist and behave as described in the Bible and be perfectly good, given the wickedness he is purported to have carried out and commanded throughout both the Old and New Testaments.

Robin: But you can’t know any such essential moral truths. It’s not that you can know moral good from evil and then either infer God must exist to make them possible or assess that God is good or bad by moral standards. Rather, discovering and understanding Goodness is identical with discovering and understanding God since God is Goodness. It is because of this that only the believer in the one true, perfectly good God adequately understands Goodness.

Jaime: Ah, and so those of us who think genocide is evil and that it has nothing to do with goodness just don’t really understand goodness. Only if we add an entirely superfluous concept to goodness—that it is a personal being—and then add an entirely contradictory concept to goodness—that this personal being of goodness itself commands evil actions like genocide—can we finally understand what goodness itself really is. The normal human a priori grasp of goodness is inadequate for this task.

Robin: If we start with your atheistic, non-believing perspective all we can say is that the allegedly “a priori grasp of goodness” made by ordinary humans is just a confusion and an error. It’s just a projection of feelings of preference for some things that treats those things as though they have an intrinsic quality of “goodness” when they really don’t. Only if we intuit that there is an absolute lawgiver who creates things to be intrinsically good can they have a real intrinsic goodness which can be thought about in some correct a priori way and not be just a mistaken trick of the mind whereby a reification of our feelings is confused for an intrinsic property.

Jaime: But you still need to know then that a god has the moral authority to make things good and bad by an act of will. In that case you need to already know that an adequately deputized being has such moral legitimacy.

Robin: No, all I need to know is that an omnipotent creator can create things with intrinsic properties. I don’t have to know that any moral absolutes preexist the creation of the moral properties. God does not create moral absolutes because He has prior absolute moral authority. God creates moral absolutes because He creates everything, including moral absolutes and (with them) the whole idea of moral authority itself.

Jaime: Then that contradicts what you said before when you claimed that your god is goodness. Goodness would be just a property your god creates but not a part of your god itself. Your god would be beyond good and evil the way it is beyond being any other specific created thing or kind of thing and beyond having any of the properties which it arbitrarily creates after existing itself.

Robin: Yes, God is completely unlimited by any of the properties of His creation.

Jaime: Including good and evil then.

Robin: Well, yes, I guess. God could not be involuntarily bound by anything. But God would be perfect and so He would voluntarily be good anyway even though He does not have to be.

Jaime: Except when he isn’t good at all—like in the Old Testament.

Robin: In the long run God can bring good even out of evil, His ways are mysterious.

Jaime: And God, being beyond good and evil, can reverse the properties of good and evil radically, on a whim.

Robin: Yes. I mean, I guess.

Jaime: So then there is no absolute Good and Evil, after all, on your view since your god can reverse the properties at any time. So, how is that a basis for belief in a true and absolute morality?

Robin: Well, He could—but he wouldn’t any more than he would switch the essence of being a dog with the essence of being a cat even though He could do that too.

Jaime: How does it make any sense that the essence of dogs could become the essence of cats or vice versa? If a dog changed its features and the DNA which causes them, that’s not a dog taking on a cat essence, it’s a dog being replaced by a cat! The kinds of beings are still totally distinct. Properties cannot be made into their opposites in any rationally coherent way.

Robin: But God cannot be constrained. He must be able to do even what we think is impossible.

Jaime: If that’s so then the existence of such a being makes all human reasoning impossible since there are no essences that God cannot be surreptitiously flipping around and make into their opposites at any time by arbitrary, unannounced, and unrevealed whim.

Robin: But God wouldn’t do that.

Jaime: But how do you know that?

Robin: Because He’s perfectly good and not capricious! He does not just reverse good and evil like that!

Jaime: Except for when he told his “original” chosen people to commit genocide and keep slaves but started telling his modern ones that those things are evil?

Robin: He loves us, He wouldn’t deceive us.

Jaime: But he could and in principle is unconstrained by morality, since it is his invention and not something that he is subject to in any binding way. By your own logic, he created it and can dismiss it whenever he wishes. He can be systematically deceiving us all and having a good laugh at Christians like you who simultaneously believe in, first, his supremely malignant Old Testament deeds, second, his absolute independence of morality as its total creator, and thirdly and most hilariously naïvely, his “perfect moral goodness”. He might just be the most mischievously wicked tyrant of all time. Maximum evil with maximum praise for his “goodness”. I admit, this is a much more plausible prospect for a real god given the world we live in!

Robin: No, God cannot be malicious. If His nature creates the kind  of goodness it does—the kind we find in the world, then this goodness must be a true and necessary expression of God’s own nature. And therefore God must be inclined to do only what that same goodness requires.

Jaime: So then God can only be identical with the goodness we can intuit in nature and any alleged evil actions must not be attributable to God?

Robin: Yes.

Jaime: Then we can prove the god of the Bible is false, a fictional character and not the real god, by pointing out all his wicked deeds unbecoming the god whose goodness we can understand a priori.

Robin: Are you seriously claiming there is a God now—just to try to refute the belief in the Christian God? Is your atheism really just anti-Christianity? You’ll believe anything if it leads to the Christian God being false?

Jaime: No, I just think Goodness is a basic, a priori discoverable feature of the world. If you want to rename it “God”, then be my guest—as long as you don’t ridiculously claim it is a personal being with a Son, a thing for the smell of blood sacrifices, and a creepily excessive interest in consensual adults’ sex lives.

Robin: But again, if there is no personal God, then there is no true goodness or true evil, just human feelings!

Jaime: No, if there is your imagined highly willful personal god, then morality and goodness are just subject to arbitrary assignations of properties by that being. But if we do not confuse ourselves by invoking your metaphysically and scientifically baseless being, we can rather look for goodness right here in the natural world as one of its intrinsic discoverable features.

Robin: But how? How can you say anything is truly good and not be simply be saying you merely like that thing?

Jaime: Goodness is a matter of effectiveness relationships in the natural world. When I say that vegetables are good for me, I do not mean that they have an arbitrarily assigned property granted to them by an invisible supernatural super-being that makes the statement true independent of empirically and a priori analyzable real world functions. Instead, I mean simply they are good at effectively keeping me alive. And this effectiveness is wholly independent of my feelings too. Personally I hate vegetables, but they are good for me. I don’t even feel any special love for this fact that they are good for me—I rather begrudge it, truth be told! But it’s just true. And unless a god changed their effectiveness potentials to harm me in objective ways, no simple ascription of “properties of badness” by any god would make them bad for me.

Robin: What if it is God who set up those effectiveness relationships in the first place? Then God is the one who gives them those properties of effectiveness that makes them objective. And then, again, God is the source of goodness.

Jaime: If that is all you mean when you say that your god creates goodness, then we can dispense with worrying about whether or not he exists altogether and can certainly ignore your holy books. We certainly don’t need him or Christian churches for knowledge of goodness or morality.

Robin: You would need him to create goodness itself so there could be morality at all!

Jaime: No, because the objective effectiveness relationships would exist and be subject to rational investigation independent of any reference to the being that set up such relationships. Such relationships need no such intelligent design to come about or to be maintained and there is no evidence of such a creator behind them. They just are. And even were they set up by some super-mind in the first place, as long as they are rationally investigatable (as they are) then that is our best route to truth about them. The arbitrary (and often wildly wrong) hunches and fantasies of ancient nomads and modern egomaniacs who are bad at statistics provide no extra help in figuring out the differences between good and bad or right and wrong. Frankly, they can only be expected to hinder any progress on this score.

Your Thoughts?

This debate was a continuation of the one begun in the post Hell As An Absence of God.

And for more on the themes of goodness as effectiveness and the problems with divine command theory, see the posts Goodness Is A Factual Matter (Goodness=Effectiveness) and On The Incoherence Of Divine Command Theory And Why Even If God DID Make Things Good And Bad, Faith-Based Religions Would Still Be Irrelevant

It is prejudicial and fallacious to assume that the world is an inherently just place and that all the traits we idealize as virtues will always lead to the best possible outcomes. So if we are to be honest and realistic in assessing those traits which are usually so good that they are worth esteeming as virtues, we must make difficult assessments of the nature, extent, and limits of their worth. Specifically, in this post, I want to apply rigorous honesty to the question of the relative value of truthfulness and truth themselves.

It should go without saying that truth is, in general, indispensably good in many crucial areas of life. Truthfulness is integral to effective and ideal scientific and philosophical activity. It is an intrinsic and absolute good in these endeavors taken on their own terms. And sober, or sometimes even ruthless, honesty with oneself is both shrewd and vital if one wants to figure out the most necessary and the most efficient means to accomplishing most of one’s ends in life. Spheres of action from economics to politics to medicine to morality are best determined by truthful thinking.

I could go on and on praising the many wondrous benefits of truth and truthfulness. So, let’s stipulate that truth is usually better than falsehood for humans and that truthfulness is one of the most admirable, desirable, and useful virtues a human can have. Let’s also stipulate that when distinctly faith-based false beliefs which are not even metaphorically true infect practical spheres (like medicine, economics, politics, science, and morality) that this is a dangerous thing. In this post, I mean to deny any of this or in any way to disparage truth. But instead I want to analyze exactly how valuable we think it is and why we might value it so highly, and what all of this might say about what our value priorities really are if we value truth in some ways rather than in others. In particular I want to explore the problems utilitarianism has in doing justice to the worth of truth and briefly in the end indicate why a perfectionist account of value, such as my own, can endorse the value of truth with less qualifications than utilitarianism can while still making the necessary qualifications of truth’s value that strict deontology cannot.

The Prima Facie Paradox For Anti-Faith Utilitarian Atheists

I think many atheists, if asked about how they reason about what is most valuable and what is most moral, will say that whatever conduces to the greatest human happiness is what is morally best and most valuable. By happiness, I think most people mean some combination of great quantities and strong qualities of pleasure and/or something like a state of enduring satisfaction and contentment with one’s overall life.

Additionally many atheists—especially those who are most vehemently opposed to either faith-based religion, or even to religion itself—are committed to the value of truth as an intrinsic good which overrides other goods. When confronted with evidence that religions make at least certain people happier or contribute to longer living on average, such atheists often consider this irrelevant to the value of religions. If a religion is false, it should be rejected—regardless of whatever ancillary benefits it might have for particular individuals, or even for people in general.

Prima facie, it looks like there might be some cognitive dissonance in the mind of the anti-faith utilitarian atheist who both claims that moral goodness is determined by what leads to the greatest happiness while rejecting that religions should be accepted as good in the cases of people who find their happiness increases from participating in them. There are several strategies this kind of atheist might employ to resolve the apparent contradiction.

The Intrinsic Pleasures of Truth

1. The anti-faith utilitarian atheist can argue that regardless of how happy some religious people report being, if only they were dispelled of religious delusions this would necessarily make them happier, as having the truth is intrinsically more pleasing for all people than not having the truth.

Now, for some people, seeing the truth more clearly increases their happiness. It did for me. I think I am even happier knowing some harsh truths than I would be were I deceived about them. At least when I imagine ignorant bliss on the one hand and imagine being deflated by harsh truths, on the other, I viscerally prefer the prospect of being deflated than deluded. In some way, the qualitative satisfaction of having the truth strikes me as more desirable—at least in my imagination—than great quantities or strongly qualitative pleasures that depend on deceptions.

The experience of learning and understanding intricate truths about the world is one of the most satisfying kinds I have. Even sometimes making troubling discoveries has a tinge of excitement, just from the accompanying rush at newfound rational clarity. Plus, emotionally I am naturally a relatively upbeat person who can boost my mood over the good parts of the truth and not let the bad parts of the truth determine my feelings. I am generally good at finding the true good parts of situations and feeling in accord with them and resigning myself to the bad parts of things and treating them as not worth getting upset about.

But I have talked to many people who are not like me—people who admit to viscerally feeling a preference for great quantities or stronger qualities of pleasure to truth, and even at the expense of truth. And there seem to be many people who are explicit in claiming that they find the prospect of atheistic truths unbearable. Perhaps were these people to become atheists they would find their outlook and their feelings would actually change, and they would embrace some atheistic conception of the world as being pleasing and encouraging and ennobling after all (as I do, and as I knew was possible even when I was a Christian). But at least some people might not. And some atheists even report sadness over not believing in the hopeful delusions of the major world faiths, regardless of whether other atheists (like I) wish rather fervently that they wouldn’t.

So, if the ultimate good is really human happiness, the anti-faith utilitarian atheist needs to concede that remaining in faith-based religions is both morally and pragmatically the best course of action for those people who would actually be happier, on net, in their lives if they kept their delusions—at least for as long as those delusions did not interfere with medicine, politics, economics, morality, in net harmful ways. But is there a better strategy for arguing for truthfulness on utilitarian grounds? Let’s see if the next strategy fares any better.

Can Delusions Be Contained?

2. The anti-faith utilitarian can argue that since religions involve believing falsehoods about the world, they inevitably have damaging effects on people’s abilities to successfully interact with the world and, therefore, to successfully figure out how to live happily in the world. Therefore, on net, the truth is always a surer route to happiness and, therefore, always more desirable.

While I think it is generally the case that false beliefs lead on the whole to deleterious effects on overall happiness, it is unclear that particular people may not live more happily with certain well-contained or strategically employed delusions than they would with the truth. Consider a particular person who has masterfully cultivated a shrewd business sense that earns her a lot of money, a meticulous scientific rigor which leads to impressive success in the laboratory, and a gifted knack for interpersonal relationships that makes her an exquisite friend, family member, citizen, colleague, and acquaintance. We might imagine a genius entrepreneurial scientist politician whose reason functions in every manner of practical life expertly well. And then she also has delusional religious beliefs which are a source of ecstatic delights and calming comforts in her life. For her the benefits are as comparably rich and well-contained as retreats into the falsehoods of literature or movies are for some or as the responsibly controlled, non-addicting mind alterations of drugs are for some others.

It is possible, and quite likely, that many modern people do indeed contain their ludicrously false faith-based beliefs such that they are a net source of pleasure and emotional satisfaction which never significantly undermines in a net negative way any of their successful functioning in all the other areas of life where having truth makes a measurable practical difference in life. We don’t live in a perfect moral world where self-deception is punished with misery. Happy self-deceived people with exquisitely well-compartmentalized lives exist. If happiness is the ultimate good, what moral or practical reason do these well-balanced, shrewdly compartmentalizing modern people have to abandon their happiness-increasing faith-beliefs? Particularly if doing so would mean a loss of total happiness in their particular cases? And especially if doing so would somehow disrupt their overall equilibrium and mess with their abilities to function so well in all the other areas of life?

In order to answer this objection, I think that the anti-faith utilitarian has to move from the level of the individual to the level of society and argue that we have social obligations which overrule personal happiness.

Demanding Truthfulness for the Greater Happiness

3. The anti-faith utilitarian can adopt a rule-utilitarian argument such that even if a particular false belief (or a practice which is integrally based on a false belief) may increase an individual or a group’s happiness in the short term or for the long term but only in their limited case, it would still not be morally justified because where false believing is condoned in general it demonstrably leads to overall greater misery that cancels out the moral worth of short term happiness or the happiness of a subgroup that benefits from false beliefs.

At this point, the anti-faith utilitarian has an empirical case to prove such that if all people were honest and eschewed all comforting delusions whatsoever (and not just those usually associated with religious beliefs) that the truth really would lead to greater psychological benefits for the balance of humanity. To prove this, we need empirical evidence, that not only scrupulous truthfulness in scientific, economic, medical, and other pressing real world pragmatic matters increase likelihood of happy long term benefits (which I think can be supported quite easily), but also that either truthfulness in metaphysical beliefs or rigorous abstention from overreaching metaphysical beliefs, would lead most people to sufficiently greater quantities and qualities of pleasure than well-contained deluded, comforting, or enthusing beliefs about such matters would.

This may be a tall order to be confident of on actual empirical grounds, and not just by hope in the power of truth (or, worse, by faith in truthfulness). The best argument I see for the value of scrupulousness in metaphysical belief is that it is too hard to keep delusions in such matters from seeping in and infecting beliefs in pragmatic areas. Religious metaphysical delusions currently threaten the teaching of good science, for example. Dogmatic, badly reasoned, metaphysics leads to some dangerous value judgments from the dominant world religions.

Also, we can imagine that in a world in which the dominant religions’ current influence was drastically diminished, people might no longer find the same things pleasing or displeasing, or necessary for pleasure or displeasure. Perhaps the prospect of permanent death would be far more easily accepted emotionally in a culture where Christians were not promulgating the idea that anything less than everlasting life is cause for despair. So it is possible that some ways that current religious believers may be inconsolable as atheists might not translate into ways that a more thoroughly atheistic society would be on net more miserable. But there is also a question as to whether some of the extra delusion-induced pleasure gains (and not just pains avoided) can be replicated in rationalist contexts. Possibly truer metaphysics, truer values, wonder at actual realities, enjoyment in art’s less deluded falsehoods, etc. can all adequately compensate for the bonus delights that at least some people currently get from faith-based falsehoods.

So the argument may not necessarily have to be that people with contained metaphysical delusions would certainly not be as happy as people with no delusions, but rather that religiously held metaphysical delusions are too hard to effectively contain and keep from infecting practical value judgments and practical beliefs, and so need to be discarded altogether for the greatest ultimate happiness. This argument assumes that the millions of moderate religious people who currently, to a large extent, are able to check the influence of fundamentalism could never completely stamp it out sufficiently to have faiths be compatible with total net happiness. And the argument might also be that the end of even moderate fantastical religion might also spell the end of any special psychological benefits of fantastical beliefs. And it might open up the way for replacement psychological benefits of truthful perspectives even in the class of people who presently do not get them.

These are interesting empirical questions about (a) just how much truth all people (and not just rationalists) can be happy with, (b) whether truths can make the average person even happier than they are with the delusions that billions presently judge are worth clinging to even at the cost of immense cognitive dissonance, and (c) whether post-faith people might find different truer ideas pleasing enough to adequately replace currently pleasing false ideas.

Is it Intrinsically Worse to Harm with a Lie than with a Truth?

4. The anti-faith utilitarian atheist might take another strategy though. She may argue that even were we to discover empirically that the majority of people actually were on net happier with irreplaceable, well-contained delusions, nonetheless there would inevitably be some people who were harmed by the presence of these delusions, no matter how well contained they were in general from interfering with the overall well functioning, technological society. There inevitably would be some people who found religious falsehoods deleterious to their happiness. There would be those who would feel negative effects from the faith-based religious beliefs and practices of those around them, no matter how generally well-contained they were. There would be some who would find the religious falsehoods they were taught troubling or confusing or disruptive to their individual abilities to function well, even as they hypothetically did not disrupt the general society’s functional workings.

The anti-faith utilitarian may judge that a hypothetical high overall happiness level in society which was achieved through widespread, but generally well-contained delusions, would not be worth the increased misery for those who were nonetheless harmfully affected by internalizing false, faith-based beliefs. In this case the anti-faith utilitarian might judge the value of the greatest total aggregate of social happiness should not be taken as more important than the value of the happiness of those who would suffer because of falsehood. In this way it would be worse to suffer for a lie than to suffer for a truth and it would be worse for fewer people to suffer for lies than for more people to suffer for truths.

But if the anti-faith utilitarian so judges that avoiding harms for a minority that come from falsehoods is more important than either the loss of total happiness or the increase of total pain for the majority, then the anti-faith utilitarian seems to be taking a step towards judging that truthfulness is intrinsically more valuable than falsehood, and not only more valuable than it as a means to happiness. It seems to me, unless I am missing something, we need such a principle in order to judge that a hypothetical 5% of people being harmed and/or less pleased because of falsehood is less conscionable than a hypothetical 25% of people being harmed and/or less pleased by awareness of truth.

I want to consider two more strategies for defending the intrinsic, overriding value of truth. One is deontological and the other is perfectionist. They both abandon utilitarianism, by judging it unable to guarantee the necessarily intrinsic and overriding value to truth. They judge utilitarianism leaves things too open that possible empirical results in our imperfect world would sometimes justify certain falsehoods if they stubbornly proved more conducive to a majority’s effective happiness.

The Deontological Option: Truth as Absolutely Valuable, Irrespective of Consequences 

5. The anti-faith, truth-prioritizing atheist could abandon utilitarianism and argue that truthfulness is simply a matter of absolute dutifulness, which takes no account of considerations of benefits and harms. The case would then be made somehow that we must be truthful simply because that is what is inherently and unavoidably required by morality and/or rationality. Truth would be not only an intrinsic good but a supreme and overriding value in all cases, regardless of the consequences.

This view has some serious drawbacks. It is easy to multiply cases in which lies are invaluable to creating the good in practice. There are also places where absolutism about truthfulness is clearly stifling. A great deal of art, strictly speaking, involves falsehood. Is it bad because of the way it lets us indulge in suspending true believing? What about practical jokes? What about imprecise but pleasing metaphors? What about courtesies of politeness which express respect and concern for each other sometimes precisely by avoiding or denying the truth, either fully or partially? What about “white lies”? What about the heroic or pragmatic lies of spies or statesmen which unambiguously stave off evil consequences and promote the ultimate flourishing of the greatest number of people? What about lies to save human lives on more individual levels?

On and on, we can think of imprecisions, fabrications, and outright lies which could make the world a better place. It seems irrational to discard them all out of an unjustified commitment to truth as an absolute good in all cases. That smacks not of hard-nosed empiricism but of faith—an unjustified belief that runs contra-evidence. This would be, perversely, a faith in truth itself—something that I find unnerving, as a rationalist lover of truth.

Perfectionism Rather Than Utilitarianism or Deontology

6. Instead of abandoning consequentialism altogether, the anti-faith atheist could modify her consequentialism and shift from utilitarianism, which prioitizes happiness as the good worth maximizing, to rather prioritize human perfection as the good worth maximizing instead. My moral philosophy is already of this kind. I am an indirect consequentialist perfectionist. I think the highest good for humans is not happiness—important as that is—but rather human perfection. I think our highest, most intrinsic imperative is to be as functionally excellent and maximally powerful as we can. I think that on this ground being truthful is intrinsically valuable as a way to function both rationally and courageously as a human being in numerous fundamental respects. I think it is intrinsically better for a human being to exercise her rationality as much as possible and to face the truth as courageously as possible precisely because in our exercise of truthful rationality and in our exercise of courage in the face of harsh realities we fulfill our potential excellences of reason and bravery as much as possible and these are constitutive powers of our very being—ones as fundamental as any others. By being rational and truthful we do not merely pump up pleasure in our brains but we realize our most essential being itself.

So, I am willing to recommend, on moral and ontological grounds that in most cases and contexts humans should strive to be truthful even at the possible expense of happiness. I think we live intrinsically better lives when we live this way and that people should be challenged to realign their pleasures to correlate to their true goods of being rational and courageously honest even in those cases where doing so is initially downright painful. I can accept that in some cases, being a braver, more well-rounded, and more powerful human, or one who more greatly empowers others, will require subordinating one’s truthfulness to other pressing virtues in specific contexts. But truthfulness should almost never come second place merely to the desire for feelings of contentedness or pleasure. And, I would go so far as to define happiness as not even being a matter of having pleasure, contentment, and/or satisfaction themselves but rather as having those states of mind in conjunction with the experience of successfully growing in excellent functional power as a human being.

What about you? Do you accept my perfectionist ethics and my commitment to truth on its grounds? Or do you think your commitment to truthfulness can be squared with a commitment to utilitarianism and the prioritization of happiness (conceived of as pleasure, contentment, and satisfaction)? Do you think a utilitarian anti-faith atheist can meet the empirical burden necessary to morally chastise happy believers without contradiction and without implicitly and hypocritically relying on faith when doing so? Or do you think that a deontological commitment to truthfulness as an absolute duty can be justified?

Your Thoughts?

Related posts on the value of truth:

The Religious Conservative’s False Choice: “Big Brother” Or “Heavenly Father”

A Critique of Noble Lies And The “Theologies” They Create

Related posts on perfectionism and my metaethics:

My Perfectionistic, Egoistic AND Universalistic, Indirect Consequentialism (And Contrasts With Other Kinds)

How Our Morality Realizes Our Humanity

Your Thoughts?

A Better Way to Fight the Online Theft of American Ideas and Jobs
By Senator Marco Rubio

In recent weeks, we’ve heard from many Floridians about the anti-Internet piracy bills making their way through Congress. On the Senate side, I have been a co-sponsor of the PROTECT IP Act because I believe it’s important to protect American ingenuity, ideas and jobs from being stolen through Internet piracy, much of it occurring overseas through rogue websites in China. As a senator from Florida, a state with a large presence of artists, creators and businesses connected to the creation of intellectual property, I have a strong interest in stopping online piracy that costs Florida jobs.

However, we must do this while simultaneously promoting an open, dynamic Internet environment that is ripe for innovation and promotes new technologies.

Earlier this year, this bill passed the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously and without controversy. Since then, we’ve heard legitimate concerns about the impact the bill could have on access to the Internet and about a potentially unreasonable expansion of the federal government’s power to impact the Internet. Congress should listen and avoid rushing through a bill that could have many unintended consequences.

Therefore, I have decided to withdraw my support for the Protect IP Act. Furthermore, I encourage Senator Reid to abandon his plan to rush the bill to the floor. Instead, we should take more time to address the concerns raised by all sides, and come up with new legislation that addresses Internet piracy while protecting free and open access to the Internet.

Have both your senators done the same yet? If not, call them. It works.

Your Thoughts?

.

The Stop Online Privacy Act and the Pro-IP Act (SOPA and PIPA, respectively) were introduced into the US House and Senate to address privacy of copyrighted material, but are considered by many to have very negative potential consequences. In the most recently drafted form, the enacted law would probably violate the First Amendment of the US Constitution, threaten free speech and whistle-blowing, and could even be used to suppress “controversial” scientific research such as climate change studies. We have recently learned that further action on the house version of this bill was stopped by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. As of this writing we do not know the status of the Senate version of the bill.

The enacted bill would allow corporations or individuals to seek court orders to “disconnect” web sites outside the US from the Internet by blocking DNS access. Court orders could also force US based companies handling bill paying or other financial services (such as PayPal) from providing those services to the blocked companies. The court orders would be obtained relatively easily if the complainant indicates that the “foreign” web site is streaming or posting copyrighted material without permission.

One of the main problems with this bill is that it would be too easy to a) fake a violation on another web site and b) obtain the court order. For example, a corporate entity or institution could cause a “violation” by arranging for the posting of copyrighted content in the comments section of a web site, and then “report” the violation and essentially shut the foreign site down. This is the rough equivalent of releasing jar full of cockroaches in a restaurant and then calling the Health Department to report them. This law may make sense when a foreign web site is streaming the latest Hollywood movies, but it may not be desirable if projects such as Wikileaks can be easily shut down with almost no effort or oversight.

It is presumed that if a SOPA like bill is passed in the US, other countries will follow suit, and the Internet will cease to be a place where most of what we do on a day to day basis can happen. Sites like Freethoughtblogs.com would not survive in such an environment.

It has been noted that there could be a chilling effect on the dissemination of scientific research as well. For example, climate change denialists based in the US could use this law to shut down Nature.com and if the UK passes a similar bill, UK based denialists could shut down Sciencemag.org.

Despite the US House pulling SOPA out of consideration, the status of the bill remains uncertain and we are unconvinced that Congressional support for this bad legislation has disappeared and remain concerned that it was even proposed in the first place. Therefore, we have elected to participate in the protest against SOPA/PIPA by displaying this page en route to your favorite FTB.com blog. We stand in solidarity with all the websites that are engaged in Blackouts or other protests on this day.

Your Thoughts?

We have a high bar to reach. Congress and the Obama administration depend on corporate interests to fund their campaigns. 9 out of 10 Congressional races in 2008 were won by the candidate with the most money. Why should candidates worry about what you think and not about the businesses which would benefit at the expense of freedom of speech? You need to convince Congresspeople and their potential rivals that you care enough about this issue that you could actually be more devastating to their 2012 election hopes than loss of monetary advantage would be. That sounds like a pretty steep climb. It means we need every American committed to freedom of speech and expression to use whatever resources available to galvanize their fellow citizens and make their Congresspeople and their President fear that SOPA and PIPA are political poison.

When push comes to legislation, Obama and the Congress only care about reelection. Convince them that internet freedom is a non-negotiable precondition of their reelections.

Reddit:

SOPA and PIPA damage reddit.

today we fight back.

His album Ewan Dobson III is available today.

Your Thoughts?

[Rhys Morgan] chose that photo [as his Facebook profile] to stand in solidarity with the University College London’s Atheist, Secular, and Humanist Society. The group was caught in a firestorm after someone complained about the image being used to promote their pub social and school officials ordered them to take it down.

But now Rhys is stuck in a firestorm of his own. Because that image from the comic Jesus and Mo was his Facebook photo for a week, he has been harassed and threatened at school by his classmates. He was then summoned by his head of year and told to remove the cartoon. When he said no, he was threatened with expulsion.

I’m no expert on laws related to freedom of speech in the UK, so I can’t predict what will happen to Rhys. But what I can say is that this sort of treatment is wrong. Religious people should not be allowed to force their beliefs onto others, and that’s exactly what’s happening in this situation. Muslims can abstain from posting photos of Mohammed all they want, but they can’t force non-Muslims to do the same. Just like they can abstain from eating pork without totally banning pork from the school cafeteria. Disagreeing with religious ideas is not equivalent to a “hate crime,” and equating the two is a dangerous mindset indeed.

You can also read Rhys Morgan describe and reprint some of the abuse he’s been getting for this picture. Jen also has more on this 17 year old’s truly impressive, award winning record as a skepticism activist. Ophelia has more people being silenced for the sake of Muslim feeling—in addition to the one we already noted this morning.

Spread the word about this, Internet. Britain’s supposed to be a country with freedom of speech.

Your Thoughts?

When we know that somebody believes in the possibility of divine punishment, we seem to assume they are less likely to do something unethical. Based on this logic, Gervais and Norenzayan hypothesized that reminding people about the existence of secular authority figures, such as policemen and judges, might alleviate people’s prejudice towards atheists. In one study, they had people watch either a travel video or a video of a police chief giving an end-of-the-year report. They then asked participants how much they agreed with certain statements about atheists (e.g., “I would be uncomfortable with an atheist teaching my child.”) In addition, they measured participants’ prejudice towards other groups, including Muslims and Jewish people. Their results showed that viewing the video of the police chief resulted in less distrust towards atheists. However, it had no effect on people’s prejudice towards other groups. From a psychological standpoint, God and secular authority figures may be somewhat interchangeable. The existence of either helps us feel more trusting of others.

Gervais and Norenzayan’s findings may shed light on an interesting puzzle: why acceptance towards atheism has grown rapidly in some countries but not others. In many Scandinavian countries, including Norway and Sweden, the number of people who report believing in God has reached an all-time low. This may have something to do with the way these countries have established governments that guarantee a high level of social security for all of their citizens.  Aaron Kay and his colleagues ran a study in Canada which found that political insecurity may push us towards believing in God. They gave participants two versions of a fictitious news story: one describing Canada’s current political situation as stable, the other describing it as potentially unstable. After reading one of the two articles, people’s beliefs in God were measured. People who read the article describing the government as potentially unstable were more likely to agree that God, or some other type of nonhuman entity, is in control of the universe. A common belief in the divine may help people feel more secure. Yet when security is achieved by more secular means, it may remove some of the draw of faith.

The findings on why we distrust atheists also point towards another potential way of reducing such prejudice: by reminding people of charitable and altruistic acts committed in the name of atheism. In recent years, there has been a growing number of virtual communities dedicated to those interested in atheism.

This is a little bit more confirmation for my hypothesis that the dominant religious institutions lose their grips slowly as each of the myriad of psychological and social functions they serve are stably replaced by secular alternatives. Social and political stability with sufficient means of guaranteeing pro-social behavior and punishments for antisocial behavior alleviates the anxieties which keep gods around. Now if atheists can provide outlets for people’s metaphysical wonder and for their longings for identity-shaping community, grounded values, rituals, meaning, and ecstatic and meditative practices, we can take away the last bargaining chips that authoritarian and superstitious faith-based religions use to win human minds in the modern world.

It makes some sense from a pragmatic perspective that the basically conservative human mind generally will not discard any beliefs—no matter how unfounded by evidence—until it is assured that even without them it can get the practical benefits which it used those beliefs for. A great deal of brutal and stupid human beliefs, institutions, and practices have always gained their justification from the fear that the alternative to keeping them was a fate much worse. This is why it is prosperity, stability, and security which grant us the luxury to have increasingly true and increasingly humane ways of behaving and believing. And fortunately, because of our fundamental interconnectedness, on the long run it seems like truthful and humane beliefs and practices in turn further advance the aims of prosperity, stability, and security. Progress seems to me to be a matter of these things mutually reinforcing each other without anyone hitting the panic button at first signs of insecurity.

For more on the typical mind’s naturally tight association between pro-social behavior and belief in gods who are watching, see my post, Pascal Boyer on Imaginary Friends and Supernatural Agents.  I fear it’s going to take quite a bit of social compensation for all the regulating functions that our naturally fictitious thinking serves if we are ever going to get the majority of people to be psychologically reassured enough that they shut it down for good. We need to think constructively about how to thread this psychological needle, against the stubbornness of the essentially conservative and risk-averse brain which fears insecurity far more than falsehood.

Your Thoughts?

I’ve written several times on related themes connected to the struggle between religious and secular institutions, and done so most saliently in the posts below:

The Religious Conservative’s False Choice: “Big Brother” Or “Heavenly Father”

Thoughts On The Ethics Of Private Vs. Publicly-Mediated Generostiy

On The Conflict Over The Meaning And Cultural Influence of Political Secularism

Yesterday evening, a talk on “Sharia Law and Human Rights” organised by the Atheism, Secularism and Humanism Society at Queen Mary, University London, had to be cancelled after threats of violence. The talk was due to be given by Anne Marie Waters of the One Law For All campaign, which campaigns against the use of Sharia in the UK.

The president of the society describes what happened:

“Five minutes before the talk was due to start a man burst into the room holding a camera phone and for some seconds stood filming the faces of all those in the room. He shouted ‘listen up all of you, I am recording this, I have your faces on film now, and I know where some of you live’, at that moment he aggressively pushed the phone in someone’s face and then said ‘and if I hear that anything is said against the holy Prophet Muhammad, I will hunt you down.’ He then left the room and two members of the audience applauded.

“The same man then began filming the faces of Society members in the foyer and threatening to hunt them down if anything was said about Muhammad, he added that he knew where they lived and would murder them and their families. On leaving the building, he joined a large group of men, seemingly there to support him. We were told by security to stay in the Lecture Theatre for our own safety. On arriving back in the room I became aware that the doors that opened to the outside were still open and that people were still coming in. Several eye witnesses reported that when I was in the foyer a group of men came through the open doors, causing a disruption and making it clear that the room could not be secured. Unfortunately, the lack of security in the lecture theatre meant we and the audience had to leave and a Union representative informed the security that as students’ lives had been threatened there was no way that the talk could go ahead.

“This event was supposed to be an opportunity for people of different religions and perspectives to debate, at a university that is supposed to be a beacon of free speech and debate. Only two complaints had been made to the Union prior to the event, and the majority of the Muslim students at the event were incredibly supportive of it going ahead. These threats were an aggressive assault on freedom of speech and the fact that they led to the cancellation of our talk was severely disappointing for all of the religious and non-religious students in the room who wanted to engage in debate.”

Read More.

Learn how to piss off and defeat extremists like this by staying up to date on the fight for equality under the law in England on Maryam Namazie’s blog. Maryam already has more coverage of this story and its connection to the bullying that The Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society at University College London have been receiving the last week in response to their use of a Jesus and Mo cartoon in a flyer.

Ophelia Benson has been monitoring the whole back and forth, including the many worrying concessions being made to religious sensibilities, in the following posts:

When certain Muslims voiced their offense
Jesus and Mo and the barmaid resolve to say nothing offensive
Remove that offensive image at once please
Never anything more than an informal request
Developments
They will take more consideration

Your Thoughts?

Your Thoughts?

How did reading Nietzsche’s writings, and especially the book Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and Nobody, overwhelm me and undermine my faith so strongly in just ten days of reading that I was mentally, emotionally, and “spiritually” set up to deconvert as soon as I read Nietzsche again, just a short 6 months later?

How do I mentally sort the various kinds of Christians I discuss ideas with, both online and off?

Those are the main topics of discussion in part 1 of a 4 part interview I gave to Bret Alan of the blog Anything But Theist. Check it out!

Your Thoughts?

Now, you want to become acquainted with a woman you see in public. The first thing you need to understand is that women are dealing with a set of challenges and concerns that are strange to you, a man. To begin with, we would rather not be killed or otherwise violently assaulted.

“But wait! I don’t want that, either!”

Well, no. But do you think about it all the time? Is preventing violent assault or murder part of your daily routine, rather than merely something you do when you venture into war zones? Because, for women, it is. When I go on a date, I always leave the man’s full name and contact information written next to my computer monitor. This is so the cops can find my body if I go missing. My best friend will call or e-mail me the next morning, and I must answer that call or e-mail before noon-ish, or she begins to worry. If she doesn’t hear from me by three or so, she’ll call the police. My activities after dark are curtailed. Unless I am in a densely-occupied, well-lit space, I won’t go out alone. Even then, I prefer to have a friend or two, or my dogs, with me. Do you follow rules like these?

So when you, a stranger, approach me, I have to ask myself: Will this man rape me?

Do you think I’m overreacting? One in every six American women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. I bet you don’t think you know any rapists, but consider the sheer number of rapes that must occur. These rapes are not all committed by Phillip Garrido, Brian David Mitchell, or other members of the Brotherhood of Scary Hair and Homemade Religion. While you may assume that none of the men you know are rapists, I can assure you that at least one is. Consider: if every rapist commits an average of ten rapes (a horrifying number, isn’t it?) then the concentration of rapists in the population is still a little over one in sixty. That means four in my graduating class in high school. One among my coworkers. One in the subway car at rush hour. Eleven who work out at my gym. How do I know that you, the nice guy who wants nothing more than companionship and True Love, are not this rapist?

I don’t.

When you approach me in public, you are Schrödinger’s Rapist. You may or may not be a man who would commit rape. I won’t know for sure unless you start sexually assaulting me. I can’t see inside your head, and I don’t know your intentions. If you expect me to trust you—to accept you at face value as a nice sort of guy—you are not only failing to respect my reasonable caution, you are being cavalier about my personal safety.

Fortunately, you’re a good guy. We’ve already established that. Now that you’re aware that there’s a problem, you are going to go out of your way to fix it, and to make the women with whom you interact feel as safe as possible.

To begin with, you must accept that I set my own risk tolerance. When you approach me, I will begin to evaluate the possibility you will do me harm. That possibility is never 0%. For some women, particularly women who have been victims of violent assaults, any level of risk is unacceptable. Those women do not want to be approached, no matter how nice you are or how much you’d like to date them. Okay? That’s their right. Don’t get pissy about it. Women are under no obligation to hear the sales pitch before deciding they are not in the market to buy.

She goes on to enumerate more ways that men need to be self aware about ways we risk making strange women uncomfortable and ways that we can increase strange women’s abilities to be comfortable. This essay has stuck with me ever since I first read it a couple of years ago. Before reading it, I had already grasped the basic concepts and learned to tell myself a simple message when women who did not know me rejected me or blew me off: They’re not rejecting me, they don’t know me, they’re rejecting guys way less cool than I am for whom they merely confuse me. How can I blame them for not grasping how awesome I am and assuming without adequate information and time to get to know me that I’m just like every other guy. Why in the world should I think that all that I have to offer is going to be communicable so easily! Of course this stranger can’t be blamed for underestimating me.

Okay so this was a more self-flattering way to view the situation than to think, Oh, to her I’m Schrödinger’s Rapist. But being cued in to the average woman’s constant struggles to fend off boundary violating sleazeballs, I had to take my initial realization that rejection by strange women was not personal to a whole new level. Not only did I need to appreciate that the rejection is not personal, I had to appreciate that if I do take it personally and express that, then I very easily risk becoming a boundary violator, and interpretable as a sleazeball—no matter how awesome I really am. And, now, having had my consciousness raised by this article, my heightened knowledge creates heightened responsibility. If I know that what I am doing can be interpreted as boundary violating sleazeballing, but I persist in it anyway, then I cannot just be interpreted as a boundary violating sleazeball, but eo ipso I can become one.

I remember once standing on a subway platform several years ago when Watchmen was being made into a movie and the graphic novel was especially popular again due to the buzz around the film. Due to all this I started reading it. So one day I’m on a fully busy subway platform in the middle of the afternoon and I see a pretty woman reading Watchmen. I was wearing my head phones and didn’t take them off or anything. All I did was point at the book from her peripheral vision and she startled and braced like a fist was coming at her. Getting a grip of herself, she looked at me, I pointed at the book and just gave a thumbs up to it and she smiled. And I left her alone, remembered “Schrödinger’s Rapist” and took away a reiteration of the lesson: regardless of why or whether they should in an ideal way feel this way, many women in public are on edge around strange men. And if we want to make this change, we need to be as scrupulous as possible in respecting strange women’s boundaries. Fighting them over what’s a reasonable boundary expectation or a reasonable cause for offense misses the whole point.

What also misses the whole point is being babies about this and crying “misandry” because women feel the need to be protective of themselves around strange men. They don’t hate us. They don’t have deep seated erroneous, reflexive prejudicial responses to us. They have good reasons to be wary of strangers given the behavior of many strange men.

But one of the ways that the men who want to have public input on how women should view their own boundaries object to being seen by strange women as “Schrödinger’s Rapist” is by claiming that it’s akin to blacks being treated by white people as a sort of “Schrödinger’s Mugger”.

This afternoon Ian has a fantastic (as usual) post on how black people accommodate white people’s baseless irrational fears all the time. It is a terrible, alienating, unjust burden to bear, but it is the only option that has any hope of diffusing those false anxieties over time. As a conscientious person, he essentially has to treat every strange white person he bumps into as, to coin a phrase that he didn’t, ”Schrödinger’s Racist”—someone who just reflexively may find his big black appearance intimidating for all the wrong reasons. And, accordingly, he finds himself having to go to the thankless trouble of deliberately putting them at ease. So, after recounting a couple of almost comically sad personal anecdotes that guided him to realize the need to do this, he explains his conclusions:

Now there are two ways I could react to these encounters. I could rail against people for being racist and sexist and size-ist (if that’s a thing) – I’m so gentle and warm and loving! How dare they act as though I’m not? That’s one way – and it’s the stupid way. The other way is to recognize that while I strongly dislike the fact that people see me as dangerous because of how I look, it is up to me to decide what to do with that information. If I don’t care about spooking my neighbours, I don’t have to shuffle my feet – let them deal with their fright. But if I do care, then I have to find some way of mitigating that fear so we can coexist harmoniously.

Bringing this example home, men in the freethought movement have a decision to make. They (we) can rail against the hypocrisy of claiming to be anti-sexist whilst engaging in sex-based prejudicial behaviour, or we can recognize that if we want to be accommodating to women we have to make some adjustments to how we behave. It comes back to the central question: do we want women to be more comfortable? If not – then we should say so. If we do, then we can’t simply maintain the status quo of behaviour and berate women for being afraid of rape. That doesn’t solve any problems.

The other point I want to make here, which goes back to my objection to anti-black sexism being used as a rhetorical device by those who will never face it, is that black people engage in tons of behaviours to make white people feel safer. We do this all the damn time. We make accommodations in speech, behaviour, dress, mannerism, conversation topic – a wide diversity of adjustments that we make in the presence of our white friends. We want them to feel comfortable around us, and we accept the inherent racism of the need for such changes. The fact that you rail against its manifest unfairness is indicative of the fact that you have no idea we’re doing it – which means, in turn, that we’re doing it well. Until I am convinced that you actually understand anti-black racism (which would take quite a bit of doing), I don’t appreciate being deputized into your anti-feminist screed in this way.

Being a conscientious, pro-social, morally exceptional person means going the extra mile for people even at your own expense sometimes. When the only other option is to perpetuate unjust fears rather than constructively alleviate them so that they diminish in the future, you have to suck it up and even if you think that someone’s fears are unfounded, work to make them more comfortable. Of course this does not mean that blacks should agree to any loss of rights or dignity out of deference to white racist feelings. And it does not mean that men need to consider themselves inherently bad or defer to women in any ways that actually stripped themselves of basic rights. What it does mean is meeting anxiety-riddled people where they are so as to dispel them by silently signaling you care about them and about harmony with them.

Why this is so hard to grasp and to accommodate for so many men who ostensibly love women and crave few things in life as much as being with a woman, is beyond me.

For such men, who still don’t get it, here’s Greg Laden.

Richard Carrier has also responded to Ian’s thoughts.

Your Thoughts?

Of particular note is her extremely illuminating 2 part essay in which she addresses 13 common confusions and philosophical challenges that often come up among cis gendered people when they discuss trans women. In part one she dispels in detail these first 7 confusions and challenges:

1. Trans women are just really, really, REALLY gay.

2. So you’re going to get your penis cut off?

3. So you’ve chosen to get a sex change operation?

4. “It’s a trap” / Trans women are just gay guys trying to attract straight dudes.

5.  Aren’t you sort of reinforcing stereotypical gender roles? Aren’t you just going along with the idea that having a feminine personality means you must be female? Doesn’t that perpetuate the idea that there are certain ways women and men are “supposed” to be like?

6. If our culture didn’t have such strict gender roles, there would be no need for transition.

7. You’re so brave!

And in part 2, she deals with 6 more points of contention:

8. You’re appropriating the female body.

9. Why can’t you just accept yourself? Why not just learn to be comfortable with who you are?

10. You don’t really become female. The process is only cosmetic. You’re still technically a man.

11. Drag queens, transsexuals, transgenders, cross-dressers, what’s the difference?

12. Transsexuality is just an invention of the modern medical establishment, a symptom of Western culture.

13. You’re infiltrating women’s spaces and making them unsafe.

Get to know Natalie, she’s going to fill a crucial niche of freethinking for Freethought Blogs very soon.

Your Thoughts?

Hank Fox’s blog is Blue Collar Atheist, his book is Red Neck, Blue Collar, Atheist: Simple Thoughts About Reason, Gods and Faith, and the book’s hilarious must-see commercial is below the fold:

Your Thoughts?

I consider Laci Green one of the ten best atheist YouTube video makers on the internet. Her video “Why Atheists Care About Your Religion” is something of an atheist YouTube classic. That it got her temporarily suspended from YouTube, due to complaints of censorious Christians, only adds to its mystique.

In the last couple years her videos have focused on desperately needed frank, fun, affirmative sex education for young people. Yesterday she talked about the clitoris, in the video I’ve embedded above, and her video got flagged as inappropriate for people under 18. Here is her complaint from her Facebook page:

To those who flagged my latest video: Fuck you. Keeping information a secret never helped ANYONE. You are only hurting those you are trying to “protect”. The idea that discussing female anatomy & pleasure is something “18+” is nothing short of oppressive…ESPECIALLY since none of my videos addressing male anatomy & pleasure ever get flagged. Pleasure is for everybody. Yes, even teens. Get over it.

I am in the appeals process & will be hosting it on my website so ANYONE can see it. Even *GASP* minors! Yeah. Suck my clit, douchebags.

Her anger is righteous. Sex is not dirty, it’s not shameful, and it’s not something teenagers should be kept ignorant about. Young people All people deserve to have as much good scientifically-based information, and humanism-based values discussion, about their bodies and about sex as possible. They deserve as much education in how to achieve and to give as much mutually gratifying pleasure and interpersonal satisfaction as possible in their consensual sexual encounters—and even from their masturbation. If you’re the parent of a teenager, male or female, with whom you feel squeamish talking about sex, I suggest you pass on this blog post with her video on the clitoris and also link them to Laci’s whole YouTube channel and her blog.

Your Thoughts?

(Image ©2012 ~missmonster. Reprinted with permission.)

Miss Monster sells her here, and describes her thusly:

This is my friend Bramble. She’s a little monster but is super sweet and curious. Bramble loves Altoids and coffee.

This doll is one of a kind and handmade. Her face/claws/horns are cast in plastic, hand painted and coated with several layers of protective clear varnish. The fur is faux, very soft with a stuffed floppy style body. Glass eyes with hand shaped wool hair pieces.

Your Thoughts?

WASHINGTON—Reports continue to pour in from around the nation today of helpless Americans being forcibly taken from their marital unions after President Obama dropped the Defense of Marriage Act earlier this week, leaving the institution completely vulnerable to roving bands of homosexuals. “It was just awful—they smashed through our living room window, one of them said ‘I’ve had my eye on you, Roger,’ and then they dragged my husband off kicking and screaming,” said Cleveland-area homemaker Rita Ellington, one of the latest victims whose defenseless marriage was overrun by the hordes of battle-ready gays that had been clambering at the gates of matrimony since the DOMA went into effect in 1996. “Oh dear God, why did they remove the protection provided by this vital piece of legislation? My children! What will I tell my children?” A video communique was sent to the media late yesterday from what appears to be the as-yet unidentified leader of the gay marauders, who, adorned in terrifying warpaint, announced “Richard Dickson of Ames, Iowa. We’re coming for you next. Put on something nice.”

And just like that, we came to finally see how exactly gay marriage was a threat to heterosexual marriages. If only we had listened to the warnings beforehand.

Your Thoughts?

This week, Jessica Ahlquist and the ACLU won their court case against Cranston High School West in Rhode Island. The school was ordered to immediately remove a banner containing an official school prayer addressed to “Our Heavenly Father” and ending in “Amen”, which hung over the school gymnasium as an unambiguous endorsement of the Christian religion by the school, in clear and flagrant violation of the Establishment Clause for nearly 50 years. You can read the ruling for yourself.

The Westerly Sun tracked down the man behind the banner to tell the story of its origins and give his reaction to U.S. District Judge Ronald Lagueux’s ruling that it is unconstitutional.

The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest

Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

A great many people belong to very bad religions in no small part because they provide the kinds of social networks, feelings of trust, and opportunities for charity that Buettner is talking about here. Atheists, if we are going to be rational about combating the influence of authoritarian religions, have to double down our efforts to create alternatives that do not require people to trade off their brains for deep social connections that are oriented around service to others.

Buettner discusses his research on the longest living people in the world in a fascinating TED video:

Did you catch the part where he said being part of a faith-based community adds 4-14 years to life? Atheists need to figure out rationalistic ways to systematically replicate the life enhancing communal mechanisms that make that happen. Faith is a vice. Many people embrace that vice because doing so is interconnected for them with a strategy for gaining other benefits. If we can provide the benefits without the irrationalism, i.e., without the beliefs that eschew concern for evidence, then we can take away any need for the average person to compromise their reason for their happiness.

Your Thoughts?

Last fall I talked about my own attempts to avoid hypocrisy with respect to civility.

Your Thoughts?

More with this ideological bent and lack of subtlety.

Your Thoughts?

Yesterday, on January 11, still only 19 years old, he killed himself. He was an intern with the Trevor Project which works to prevent suicides among LGBT youth. Jim Reeves reflects and reaches out to those at risk:

I met EricJames recently, at the launching of My LGBT Plus, a youth oriented resource site, based in Fresno, California. A brief introduction left me with the impression of a fine young man, and I regret that I did not get to know him better.

Friends have begun planning a memorial, details will be updated here as they become available.

Our condolences to the family and friends of EricJames.

If you are finding it difficult to deal with the issues of being LGBTQ, the Trevor Project is available, with peer counselors available to talk to you about problems you may be facing. Contact them at The Trevor Project, or call the toll-free hotline, at 866-488-7386. Help is available, and people are ready to listen.

Here was a short film EricJames made, called Invisible Creatures.

Your Thoughts?

But mostly I post this just as an excuse to repost an actual Wes Anderson parody (The Amazing Spider-Man), which I love:

Your Thoughts?

Sexperiment: 7 Days to Lasting Intimacy with Your Spouse, 

via Bruce Gerencser

Your Thoughts?

Your Thoughts?

I did it!! This is the 36th post, all written in less than 24 hours and posted within 45 minute intervals until the end, now, when I just got too tired to stay up anymore and decided to put out the last 5 in a half hour. Below is a list of all the posts for those who for some mysterious reason might have missed one or two or thirty-five:

Best Plea For A Celebrity Date Ever

Tyler Cowen, Socrates, and How To Be Suspicious of Stories

I’m a Muppet of a Man, I’m a Very Manly Muppet

Truth Requires Telling More Stories From More Perspectives

More Encouragement of the Unabashed Desire for Self-Expression, Love, and Fame

10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Rules Against Bans on Shari’a Law

How Christian Sexual Ethics Can Mess Up A Marriage

On The Virtues of Political Correctness (And Of Related Godless Pieties)

Against Atheistic Existentialism

Shit Nobody Says

How and Why Do We Deceive Ourselves?

A Girl Scout vs. Transgendered Scouts

10 Years of Indefinite Detentions

The Jefferson Bible Edits Jesus’s Words, Not Just Miracles

Pascal Boyer on Imaginary Friends and Supernatural Agents

Teenage Girls Who Rock

Supreme Court Gives Churches Special Rights To Discriminate Against Sick Employees

How Atheist Reddit Doesn’t Get It

The Red Flags of Quackery

Newt Gingrich Discovers the Down Side of Capitalism

Video Surfaces of Marines Allegedly Urinating on Dead Afghans

MRI’s Show Internet Can Be Addictive Like Cocaine

Camels With Hammers Insomniac Theater: Rural Alberta Advantage’s “In The Summertime”

Camels With Hammers Insomniac Theater: Low Anthem

Camels With Hammers Insomniac Theater: Songs from Synecdoche, New York

Islamists Voted in in Morocco…

The Mysterious Mysteries of Paranormality

Andrew Sullivan’s Article That Convinced Me To Blog

Should We Celebrate The Civil War With Hot Dogs and Fireworks?

Baby Morality

What It’s Like To Be Transgendered (A Response To The Anti-Transgender Girl Scout)

Now, excuse me while I pass out like these 20 cute human and non-human animals.

The Girl Scouts support him. Support them by eating cookies.

Your Thoughts?

How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like,

Relatedly, Alison Gopnik’s The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life sounds like an interesting exploration of the philosophical implications of baby psychology. She talked to Stephen Colbert about it a while back:

Relatedly, yesterday I also highlighted the purposes that psychologists think children’s imaginary friends’ serve.

Your Thoughts?

 Six hundred thousand people died in the Civil War, a shocking figure which doesn’t really capture the toll that this sort of violence took on the country at large. And yet when I think about the Civil War I don’t feel sad at all. To be honest, I feel positively fucking giddy.

And I don’t think I’m abnormal because of this. Twenty-two thousand people died in the Revolutionary War, and we celebrate that with hot dogs and hamburgers every year. I’m sure that while Jews feel fairly horrible that the Holocaust happened, very few of them consider the fighting it took in order to liberate the death camps, “tragic.” The Holocaust is tragic. Ending the Holocaust is not.

In that fashion, from my perspective, the most trenchant facts of the Civil War are not that it turned “brother against brother,” or that it produced a plethora of great military minds, or even that it produced arguably our greatest leaders.

It’s really simple for me. One group of Americans attempted to raise a country on property in Negroes. Another group of Americans, many of them Negroes themselves, stopped them. As surely as we lack the ability to see tragedy in violently throwing off the yoke of the English, I lack the ability to see tragedy in violently throwing off the yoke of slaveholders.

For most Americans, the Civil War is a sudden outbreak of a existential violence. But for 250 years, African-Americans lived in slavery–which is to say perpetual existential violence. I don’t know what else to call a system that involves the constant threat of your children, your parents, your grandparents, being sold off, never for you to see them again. That is death.

From the first few days of using the form, I was hooked. The simple experience of being able to directly broadcast my own words to readers was an exhilarating literary liberation. Unlike the current generation of writers, who have only ever blogged, I knew firsthand what the alternative meant. I’d edited a weekly print magazine, The New Republic, for five years, and written countless columns and essays for a variety of traditional outlets. And in all this, I’d often chafed, as most writers do, at the endless delays, revisions, office politics, editorial fights, and last-minute cuts for space that dead-tree publishing entails. Blogging—even to an audience of a few hundred in the early days—was intoxicatingly free in comparison. Like taking a narcotic.

It was obvious from the start that it was revolutionary. Every writer since the printing press has longed for a means to publish himself and reach—instantly—any reader on Earth. Every professional writer has paid some dues waiting for an editor’s nod, or enduring a publisher’s incompetence, or being ground to literary dust by a legion of fact-checkers and copy editors. If you added up the time a writer once had to spend finding an outlet, impressing editors, sucking up to proprietors, and proofreading edits, you’d find another lifetime buried in the interstices. But with one click of the Publish Now button, all these troubles evaporated.

Alas, as I soon discovered, this sudden freedom from above was immediately replaced by insurrection from below. Within minutes of my posting something, even in the earliest days, readers responded. E-mail seemed to unleash their inner beast. They were more brutal than any editor, more persnickety than any copy editor, and more emotionally unstable than any colleague.

And this great section:

A writer fully aware of and at ease with the provisionality of his own work is nothing new. For centuries, writers have experimented with forms that suggest the imperfection of human thought, the inconstancy of human affairs, and the humbling, chastening passage of time. If you compare the meandering, questioning, unresolved dialogues of Plato with the definitive, logical treatises of Aristotle, you see the difference between a skeptic’s spirit translated into writing and a spirit that seeks to bring some finality to the argument. Perhaps the greatest single piece of Christian apologetics, Pascal’s Pensées, is a series of meandering, short, and incomplete stabs at arguments, observations, insights. Their lack of finish is what makes them so compelling—arguably more compelling than a polished treatise by Aquinas.

Or take the brilliant polemics of Karl Kraus, the publisher of and main writer for Die Fackel, who delighted in constantly twitting authority with slashing aphorisms and rapid-fire bursts of invective. Kraus had something rare in his day: the financial wherewithal to self-publish. It gave him a fearlessness that is now available to anyone who can afford a computer and an Internet connection.

But perhaps the quintessential blogger avant la lettre was Montaigne. His essays were published in three major editions, each one longer and more complex than the previous. A passionate skeptic, Montaigne amended, added to, and amplified the essays for each edition, making them three-dimensional through time. In the best modern translations, each essay is annotated, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, by small letters (A, B, and C) for each major edition, helping the reader see how each rewrite added to or subverted, emphasized or ironized, the version before. Montaigne was living his skepticism, daring to show how a writer evolves, changes his mind, learns new things, shifts perspectives, grows older—and that this, far from being something that needs to be hidden behind a veneer of unchanging authority, can become a virtue, a new way of looking at the pretensions of authorship and text and truth. Montaigne, for good measure, also peppered his essays with myriads of what bloggers would call external links. His own thoughts are strewn with and complicated by the aphorisms and anecdotes of others. Scholars of the sources note that many of these “money quotes” were deliberately taken out of context, adding layers of irony to writing that was already saturated in empirical doubt.

To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth. A blogger will notice this almost immediately upon starting. Some e-mailers, unsurprisingly, know more about a subject than the blogger does. They will send links, stories, and facts, challenging the blogger’s view of the world, sometimes outright refuting it, but more frequently adding context and nuance and complexity to an idea. The role of a blogger is not to defend against this but to embrace it. He is similar in this way to the host of a dinner party. He can provoke discussion or take a position, even passionately, but he also must create an atmosphere in which others want to participate.

That atmosphere will inevitably be formed by the blogger’s personality. The blogosphere may, in fact, be the least veiled of any forum in which a writer dares to express himself. Even the most careful and self-aware blogger will reveal more about himself than he wants to in a few unguarded sentences and publish them before he has the sense to hit Delete. The wise panic that can paralyze a writer—the fear that he will be exposed, undone, humiliated—is not available to a blogger. You can’t have blogger’s block. You have to express yourself now, while your emotions roil, while your temper flares, while your humor lasts. You can try to hide yourself from real scrutiny, and the exposure it demands, but it’s hard. And that’s what makes blogging as a form stand out: it is rich in personality. The faux intimacy of the Web experience, the closeness of the e-mail and the instant message, seeps through. You feel as if you know bloggers as they go through their lives, experience the same things you are experiencing, and share the moment. When readers of my blog bump into me in person, they invariably address me as Andrew. Print readers don’t do that. It’s Mr. Sullivan to them.

I would add to Sullivan’s list of proto-bloggers Nietzsche. A self publishing philosopher whose books meander through a range of topics from culture to philosophy to psychology to politics in loosely (but importantly) connected 1-3 page self-contained sections, rather than straightforwardly argued book chapters on single themes. Plus he wrote aphorisms short and punchy enough to be tweeted.

I was not reading Sullivan back when he was agitating for the Iraq War or I may have wound up hating him as much as one of my close friends who was turned off by him in that era was. But I have always been inspired by how much he publicly accepts how wrong he was. I admire that willingness to think completely in public, in real time, with nowhere to hide and to change his mind in front of the whole world.

Your Thoughts?

Your Thoughts?

The recent parliamentary elections in Morocco have led to the creation of the first ever elected Islamist government in Morocco’s history…[T]he new government only includes one woman minister in a cabinet of thirty. This is a sharp drop compared to the recent past, when governments formed by other parties had between two and seven women ministers. An official picture released on January third puts this discrepancy on full display.

About the one woman minister and her role in the government:

An active member of the PJD, former parliamentarian and president of the organization of PJD women, el-Hakkawi is the only woman appointed to the new government. Dressed in a long black manteaux and a colorful headscarf, with touches of turquoise that liven up the monotone suits of the male ministers, her gaze seems serious and solemn. While none of us can know for sure what she was thinking or feeling at that moment, she appears burdened by the weight and implications of her position. She is, after all, the first Islamist and veiled woman to be appointed minister and the only woman in the new government.

As the new Minister of Solidarity, Women, Family and Social Development, el-Hakkawi inherits a historically weak ministry endowed with a small budget, limited political clout and the impossible task of providing welfare for children, women, the elderly, the disabled and the poor. This is a ministry that definitely stands at the bottom of the government and political food chain. In the outgoing government, it was headed by Nouzha Skalli, a longtime leftist feminist from the socialist PPS. While this position has historically been assigned to women, under the socialist government of El-Youssoufi (1998-2002), it was given to a man (Said Saadi from the PPS).

Read More.

Synecdoche New York

Your Thoughts?

Heed the words of Danny Fincke: if you get the chance to see these guys live, don’t miss them.

Their albums are Oh My God Charlie Darwin and Smart Flesh

Your Thoughts?

A year ago, on back to back nights, I got to see two great bands, Rural Alberta Advantage and Low Anthem, so in this post I’ll profile a Rural Alberta Advantage song and in the next Low Anthem:

This song comes from the album Hometowns.

Your Thoughts?

That full, brilliant South Park episode is here.

Now the science:

Internet addiction has for the first time been linked with changes in the brain similar to those seen in people addicted to alcohol, cocaine and cannabis. In a groundbreaking study, researchers used MRI scanners to reveal abnormalities in the brains of adolescents who spent many hours on the internet, to the detriment of their social and personal lives. The finding could throw light on other behavioural problems and lead to the development of new approaches to treatment, researchers said.

An estimated 5 to 10 per cent of internet users are thought to be addicted – meaning they are unable to control their use. The majority are games players who become so absorbed in the activity they go without food or drink for long periods and their education, work and relationships suffer.

I don’t have a problem. I can stop whenever I want to. As soon as my 24 hour blogathon is over of course. And then, you know, I need to get posts ready for the weekend…

The Marine Corps is reportedly investigating the origins of a YouTube video posted early Wednesday that appears to show four Marines urinating on the heads of Afghans they’d just killed in a firefight. “Have a great day, buddy,” one of the alleged Marines can be heard saying on the footage.

The video was posted to YouTube by a user calling himself “semperfilonevoice,” a play on the Corps’ “Semper Fidelis” motto that suggests the poster might be a Marine with regrets about the warfighters’ conduct. (The video, posted by London’s Daily Telegraph and TMZ earlier today, is also reposted below. Warning: It contains graphic content.)

The poster of the video alleges that the urinators are members of Scout Sniper Team 4, an elite advance combat unit within the Camp Lejeune, N.C.-based Third Battalion, Second Marines. Their identities remain unknown at this point, but the video does contain at least one clue suggesting that’s plausible. One service member in the video can be seen holding an M40 rifle, which is typically issued to sniper teams, but not to regular line units. Elements of the 3/2 Marines have seen some fierce fighting in Afghanistan, including a deployment last year to the province of Now Zad—called “Apocalypse Now Zad” by some—in which seven American fighters lost their lives.

This is extremely upsetting. I couldn’t bring myself to watch the video so I won’t reproduce it here. You can go here for more details and to see the video at the bottom of the post.

Your Thoughts?

Your Thoughts?

The Demon-Haunted World

When another teenage atheist, this one from Australia, wrote me calling attention to a post he made on Reddit arguing for stronger moderation, the reception he got was cold. Reddit atheists insist that they are not to blame for the behavior of a few and they insist that in addition to the awful comments Watson drew attention to there were other comments condemning them and that she should not have judged the whole community based on the actions of a few. But she was responding not just to the comments of the few but to the massive net upvote totals those comments received.

But even were those comments not given so much troubling community support in the form of upvotes, the problem is that the same Redditors who don’t want to be held accountable for the nasty and hostile environment caused by “a few” refuse to get behind calls for moderation of those few. They insist on tolerating those comments’ presence but then don’t want to be morally blamed for their presence. They shouldn’t be allowed to have it both ways.

Now their arguments are typically that it’s a matter of free speech. So, theoretically what they are only endorsing free speech when they insist that sexually harassing comments stay up with no formal moderation. They are not endorsing the comments themselves.

And when the young Australian I linked to above complained about this, he was sent to this portion of Reddit Atheism’s FAQ which itself is problematic. I’ll address this document as it is the community’s formal position and so not merely the views of any one random user:

Shouldn’t we be more A and less B?

“I think we’re being too aggressive/passive as a community. Can’t we tone it down/up?”

Simply put, we can’t tell people what to do, and they wouldn’t care.

No, you could tell people what to do simply by having more moderators and having them delete comments that were physically threatening or involved unequivocal hate speech with no substantive ideas in them and which were directed at vulnerable groups or which created an explicitly hostile, sexually aggressive environment.

Atheism is not a religion, no one holds the authority to tell others how they should behave.

This floors me. Only religions could possibly hold the authority to tell others how to behave? So much for all that good without God stuff! There are no moral authorities whatsoever. This is not a neutral position, Reddit Atheism. This is a values stance. You have decided that atheists, as atheists should be afforded no protections against abusive behavior by your space on one of the most frequented websites on the internet by atheists. You have decided in favor of a particular interpretation of free speech which gives priority to freedoms of bullies and sociopaths who recognize no norms of interpersonal respect over all the groups that might find them abusively threatening to their ability to participate in your community.

Free speech is seriously important. But even legally there are constraints on it and morally there should be some more that private groups should consider even though the law shouldn’t. The kinds of constraints on free speech should only be those which allow for greater overall speech. Environments in which marginalized groups feel threatened in practice are silencing. An environment in which a teenage girl who started a thread can be cavalierly discussed like a worthless rapable toy as though she is not even there reading how she is being degraded is demeaning. It does not even matter if she rolled with the punches or not, she should not have to deal with that sort of treatment in the first place. You are a public forum, you’re not a group of intimate friends who can tease each other in off-color ways within a circle of implicit trust. You should not be sending a message that you prioritize the explicit lack of censorship of recklessly dehumanizing commenters over the implicit censorship of the countless women who are afraid to reveal they are women online for risk of receiving misogynistic assaults.

This is a values choice. Hiding behind atheism’s broad inclusiveness as including everyone from the most loving to the most psychopathically hateful is a cowardly abdication of responsibility.

The very frequent alleged atheists that create posts to suggest changing our behavior as a group are usually dismissed as concern trolls, or reminded that atheism is not a religion and that suggested strategies are doomed to be ignored, especially since the majority is usually both reasonable and silent.

Furthermore, the general atmosphere of r/atheism will be influenced by reddit’s demographics. The behavior of some may seem too “aggressive” (or dogmatic) or too “soft” (since believers make laws) for people from other countries. There is no way around this, and even the most popular posts do not reflect the opinion of *all* subscribers. Thus, it’s not useful to take any post or perceived tendency personally, although discussion is always encouraged.

This isn’t to say that no group effort is ever encouraged. Local events often make it to the front page. However, broad “advice” on how we ought to behave are generally discarded even if they do make it to the top.

If Reddit Atheism wants to give greater latitude to hostile expressions towards religions than others would that is understandable. But I wonder if this policy would consider complaints about abusive treatment towards religious people who show up in the comments threads to be “concern trolling”.

Dismissing all concern for civility and for public speech areas which are conducive to constructive and mutually rewarding debate and comraderie as “concern trolling” is, simply, immoral. And being an atheist and/or being irreligious does not exempt you from the requirement that you take moral positions.

Your Thoughts?

Excellent coverage of this event and of spin-off debates related to it can be found all around Freethought Blogs. Here are some of the relevant posts:

Why “Yes, But” Is the Wrong Response to Misogyny

Yes, “Hate *Atheists*”

In Defense of Rebecca Watson

Reddit Makes Me Hate Men

Free inquiry v commitment to equality

The uses of commitment

Mallorie Nasrallah says “I like it when #mencallmethings”

Jumping on the sexism train. Again.

Why do women have trouble being taken seriously in science?

We are not an atheist community

Why is Rebecca Watson so damned polarizing?

A member of the Islamic Assembly (Majlis) and its ‘Judicial Commission’, Nayereh Akhavan (here’s a photo of her), has said that there can be no ban on child marriages because there are ten year olds who have reached ‘sexual and intellectual puberty’ and because it would ‘contradict sharia’. We know Islam’s prophet consummated his ‘marriage’ with Aisha when she was 9. And of course there is Ayatollah Khomeini ‘s book of sayings: ‘Tahrir al Wasilah’, where he says that a man can even have sex with a baby.

He says: ‘A man can have sexual pleasure from a child as young as a baby. However, he should not penetrate vaginally, but sodomising the child is acceptable. If a man does penetrate and damage the child then, he should be responsible for her subsistence all her life. This girl will not count as one of his four permanent wives and the man will not be eligible to marry the girl’s sister… It is better for a girl to marry at such a time when she would begin menstruation at her husband’s house, rather than her father’s home. Any father marrying his daughter so young will have a permanent place in heaven.’

There’s more on sex with animals and placing penises between the thighs of weaning babes if you have the stomach to read on.

The book in English is very inappropriately called Ruhollah Khomeini, Sayings of the Ayatollah Khomeini: Political, Philosophical, Social, & Religious (“The Little Green Book”) [Bantam Books, September 1985, New York/London. ISBN 0553140329] by the moral relativist brigade.

In a follow up to skeptics, Maryam has posted a video discussing the practice and a link to Khomeini’s book in Persian.

Your Thoughts?

Best Plea For A Celebrity Date Ever

Tyler Cowen, Socrates, and How To Be Suspicious of Stories

I’m a Muppet of a Man, I’m a Very Manly Muppet

Truth Requires Telling More Stories From More Perspectives

More Encouragement of the Unabashed Desire for Self-Expression, Love, and Fame

10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Rules Against Bans on Shari’a Law

How Christian Sexual Ethics Can Mess Up A Marriage

On The Virtues of Political Correctness (And Of Related Godless Pieties)

Against Atheistic Existentialism

Shit Nobody Says

How and Why Do We Deceive Ourselves?

A Girl Scout vs. Transgendered Scouts

10 Years of Indefinite Detentions

The Jefferson Bible Edits Jesus’s Words, Not Just Miracles

Pascal Boyer on Imaginary Friends and Supernatural Agents

Teenage Girls Who Rock

Supreme Court Gives Churches Special Rights To Discriminate Against Sick Employees

How Atheist Reddit Doesn’t Get It

The Red Flags of Quackery

Newt Gingrich Discovers the Down Side of Capitalism

The text of the ruling is here.

Your Thoughts?

After the hostile girl scout earlier today who wanted to force transgendered people out of the Girl Scouts, this 13 year old calling out slut shamers restores some of one’s hope for the future. So does Jessica Ahlquist’s victory in court.

Your Thoughts?

Reading Pascal Boyer’s frequently illuminating Religion Explained last fall, the single most interesting part for me was his discussion of imaginary friends. According to my mom I had countless imaginary friends as a kid. My imaginary friends were not your ordinary imaginary friends but imaginary children. Some of whom worked at the grocery store or who had retired and moved to Florida. I grew up to be a pretty socially-oriented guy and (for a long while) a fervent believer in God.

So here’s what Boyer has to say about the psychological connections between these facts in people like my younger selves, in the book The Fracture of An Illusion: Science And The Dissolution Of Religion:

It is certainly relevant that a good deal of human existence consists in interaction with agents that are not physically present–and that this is one of the major cognitive capactieis that made humans a very special kind of primates. Many, perhaps most, of our thoughts about other people occur when they are not around. memories of what people did or said, as well as expectations, fears and hopes of what they may do, are a constant theme of trains of thought and ruminations, and also the quintessential subject matter of gossip. In all human groups, people also fantasize about individuals they have not encountered yet (e.g.. Mr. Right). They also entertain thoughts and emotions about deceased individuals and about persons they will never encounter, like fictional characters. It may be a special feature of the human mind that we can create such representations and more importantly run rational inferences about them.

He goes on later:

Humans live in a “cognitive niche”, in that they more than any other species depend on information, especially on information provided by other human beings, and on information about other human beings. This dependence means that mental dispositions that help maintain rich and flexible representations of others, of their goals and mental states are crucial. Social interaction presets us with a whole gamut of possible actions from our partners as well as possible reactions to our own behavior. Reactions on our part should be fast but also appropriate.

In order to have to be ready for these fast reactions we are constantly varying scenarios in our minds, imagining others’ responses and preparing for various possible contingencies. So skill at imagining the intentions and mental states of other minds which are not present is crucial to this process. Enter imaginary friends:

Another salient case of a common domain of productive imagination is the frequent creation of imaginary friends by young children. From an early age (between three and ten) many children (perhaps more than half of them) engage in durable and complex relationships with such agents. These imagined person or personified animals, sometimes but not always derived from stories or cartoons or other cultural folklore, follow the child around, play with her, converse with her, etc. Young children know perfectly well that their invisible companions are not “there” in the same sense as real friends and other people. Now Marjorie Taylor has shown that the relationship with an imagined companion is a stable one, so the child must compute the companion’s reactions, taking into account not just the imagined friend’s personality but also past events in their relationship. What the companion does or says is constrained by their personality and must remain consistent and plausible even in this fantastic domain. Also, companions are often used to provide an alternative viewpoint on a situation. They may find odd information unsurprising or frightening situations manageable. So imaginary companions may constitute a form of training for the social mind, helping build the social capacities required to maintain coherent social interaction.

In many human groups supernatural agency is associated with moral understandings. This may take the form of explicit moral codes supposedly laid down by gods or ancestors, or stories of exemplary semi-mythical ethical paragons. More generally, people assume that supernatural agents keep a watch on them and are concerned about moral behavior. A cognitive-evolutionary account may explain why this latter assumption is “natural” enough to be found in non-literate groups but also in the spontaneous religious thinking of most religious believers.

These connections imply what was to me an unexpected link between the famously social character of many religions and the belief in supernatural agents found in them. The same, valuable, basic kind of psychological mechanism which trains many minds in social thinking enables them to be susceptible to highly superstitious thinking. Boyer cautions in Religion Explained against inferring that supernatural agencies are perceived and thought about identically with the way imaginary friends are. Obviously, unlike the children who know their imaginary friends are not real, many religious believers in supernatural agencies do not. So not exactly the same thing is happening. But the use of such supernatural agencies, especially when perceived as moral agents monitoring behavior, may be serving a comparable function of being the minds of others present in one’s own thought processes.

Your Thoughts?

Today he has a post on David Barton. Barton’s spin on Jefferson’s “real” reason for editing out parts of the Bible is that it has nothing to do with Jefferson disagreeing with anything in the Bible but with only wanting to evangelize the Native Americans with a text where they could read all of Jesus’s words together with no interruption:

I have to stop on Jefferson for just a minute because when you say the Jefferson Bible, people say, I’ve heard of the Jefferson Bible, that’s where he cut out everything he disagreed with. He was so anti-Christian, so anti-Bible that he cut it all out. Well, temporary time-out; if he’s so opposed to the Bible, why is he one of the founders of a society that promotes the entire Bible? I mean if the Jefferson Bible charge is right, that he cut out the parts with which he disagreed, then why would he fund and contribute and help run a society that gives out all the Scriptures unedited. That’s inconsistent.

What happens is, this little document here is called the Jefferson Bible. We call this the Jefferson Bible and the last 30 years, people have consistently said this is the Scriptures that Jefferson cut out everything with which he disagreed. Well if you go to the front of this work, it doesn’t have the title Jefferson Bible. If you’d used that title with him, he’d have probably punched you out for saying it. The title he gave it is the Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. What he did was he went through and cut out all the red letters of Jesus and pasted them from end to end so he could read the red letters of Jesus without stopping. He’s not what he cut out but what he put in. But why did he do that?

He tells us, he did this twice, he did this in 1804 and he did it again in 1819. He said that he did this to be a missionary tool to evangelize the Indians. Because if we can get them to read the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, it’ll changed their lives. So this was not a work that he turned and cut out everything he disagreed with. It’s a work where he took all the words of Jesus and put them there so you could read the words of Jesus non-stop and he did that as a missionary tool to the Indians.

In rebuttal, Throckmorton documents key places where Jefferson not only cut out Jesus’s miracles but also cut out some of the things he said—including everything from after the resurrection, as he ends his Bible with Jesus dead. And he quotes Jefferson’s words to John Adams in 1813:

We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus, paring off the amphibologisms into which they have been led, by forgetting often, or not understanding, what had fallen from him, by giving their own misconceptions as his dicta, and expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves. There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill.

Throckmorton’s conclusion:

If a modern day President chopped up the New Testament in the way Thomas Jefferson did, that President would be excoriated by Christian leaders. Examining Jefferson’s work, it is clear that the Jefferson Bible is not as Barton described. To read Jefferson’s edited Bible, go here and here.

So if you don’t believe the things said about the Founding Fathers by that atheist Freethought Blogs blogger Chris Rodda, believe Warren Throckmorton. Or, better yet, just look at the text itself and ask yourself why a “man of God” like David Barton gets the facts so wrong.

In case you are willing to hear an atheist out too, Chris’s book is Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right’s Alternate Version of American History Vol. 1 and her must-read blog is This Week in Christian Nationalism.

Your Thoughts?

More details and photos here.

via The Slog

Defy her call for a boycott. Buy Girl Scout cookies.

For more on the seriousness and the struggles of transgendered kids, this article from from The Atlantic in 2008 is a must read.

The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life

Robert Trivers: Why Do We Deceive Ourselves? from The RSA on FORA.tv

Your Thoughts?