Planet Atheism » The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com Tue, 22 May 2012 17:46:30 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Money and control systems http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/05/money-and-control-systems.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/05/money-and-control-systems.html#comments Sun, 20 May 2012 13:15:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=5fae4bc2368ffc22eade10989aa4b6a5
What is a "control system"? There are many complex systems that we can usefully divide into a concrete real system and an abstract control system. For example, we can divide up a jetliner into its real system and its control system. The real system consists (primarily) of the engine(s), wings, horizontal and vertical stabilizers, and fuselage: the components that generate and/or directly respond to the four fundamental forces of flight: lift, thrust, gravity, and drag. The control system consists of everything in the cockpit: the yoke, pedals, and throttle; the gauges, dials, and indicators; and, of course, the pilot(s).

The division between real and control systems is not and cannot be absolute: for it to be a control system, the control system must somehow physically modify and respond to the real system. Turning the yoke changes the physical position of the ailerons, which affects the physical lift generated by the wings, causing the aircraft to turn. A change in the attitude of the aircraft causes a physical change to the attitude indicator (artificial horizon). Furthermore, the purely real system can have control effects. On an ordinary aircraft, the horizontal stabilizers on the tail generate a small amount of negative lift (the aerodynamics push down on the tail); when the pitch of the aircraft changes, the force on the tail changes in such a way that the aircraft returns automatically to a stable pitch. The horizontal stabilizers directly control the attitude of the aircraft.

But while the division is not absolute, it is determinable. The key is abstraction. The real system is directly connected to real-word physics. The fuselage must be streamlined to minimize drag. The wings must be shaped just so to generate lift. The engines must combine fuel and oxygen together (and do a lot of other mechanical things) in very specific ways to generate thrust. In contrast, the control system is much less connected to real-world physics. There's no particular extrinsic physical reason we have to use yoke, pedals, and throttle in the specific way that we usually do to control an airplane; we could, if we chose, use knobs, buttons, and switches. All that's necessary is that the control system have the degrees of freedom necessary to represent all desired change and states of the real system. But fundamentally, the more concrete a component is, the more it is part of the real system; the more abstract, the more it is part of the control system. Another key indicator is "removability": we can remove the entire control system of an aircraft and it will still fly; we cannot remove the real system, no matter how the control system is arranged.

Similarly, we can divide economics into a real system and a control system. The real system is people physically working to produce goods (physical things) and services for exchange with other people. The control system is money and the financial system. Work and exchange are concrete: we must do very specific physical things to produce a loaf of bread, a coat, a hat, a computer, or an aircraft. The control system of economics is money. Money is abstract: there's no particular physical reason we have to use small pieces of paper printed in green with pictures of dead presidents on them to control who works where and who consumes what's produced. Indeed, while money exists throughout recorded history, there have been many different control systems, notably communalism, barter, as well as slavery, and serfdom. We could have a real economy without any control system (pure barter), but we have no economy at all if we have only money, without people working and exchanging goods and services.

Indeed, the idea that money itself is part of the real economy, as ineluctable and directly physical as the horizontal stabilizers, is so nonsensical that it takes the most elaborate theological faith to hold that view. That's one reason it's so difficult to argue with hard-money libertarians; like Christians, they are so committed to a nonsensical delusion that they lose the ability to discuss the issue in good faith. Money might or might not be the best control system*, but the intuitive idea that money really is a control system is one that must be grasped and held onto despite the sophistry of the economic theologians.

*It's not the best, but it's better than some others.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/3526710312499185292/comments/default 0 Right and wrong http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/05/right-and-wrong.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/05/right-and-wrong.html#comments Sat, 12 May 2012 02:34:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=7b94366f80c335853edce2260be8bf15 Being wrong isn't a sin; not trying to get it right is.

--Paul Krugman
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/8316740592530920607/comments/default 0 Where the Wild Things Are http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/05/where-wild-things-are.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/05/where-wild-things-are.html#comments Tue, 08 May 2012 15:30:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=d81ab2bcb4d8481c3e31b5ec1674d800 And he sailed off through night and day
and in and out of weeks
and almost over a year
to where the wild things are.
Maurice Sendak died today
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/907841349053376797/comments/default 0 Atheist spam http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/05/atheist-spam.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/05/atheist-spam.html#comments Mon, 07 May 2012 11:07:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=cf8be6bcfeadfa547af106051ba045fb Rationally Speaking Podcast. Please stop. I do not accept spam from anyone. You may comment only if you want to contribute to a discussion.

If the person spamming my comments is not affiliated with the podcast, please let me know in here comments or by email. I'm not sure what I can actually do about it, but I'd like to know.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/3655896629508416735/comments/default 0 Why all the bad philosophy? http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/04/why-all-bad-philosophy.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/04/why-all-bad-philosophy.html#comments Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:03:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=f2bc3ec19fa4717d7d6ad4f755d1bbd1 Why All the Atheists?," displays such a profound misunderstanding of atheism.

Reiss starts by previewing his upcoming book, How God Inspires Us: Religion, Personality, and the Contradictions of Human Nature. In this book, Reiss promises that he will "suggest that religion's sacred role in society is to help people experience their life as meaningful." Because Reiss sees religion in this way, however, he goes on to assume that atheism, in setting itself up in opposition to religion, must therefore take the opposite view. "Meaning arises from purpose," Reiss asserts, and a "true" atheist, according to Reiss, is one who rejects any meaning or purpose for life: "Is the meaning of life real or an illusion? Does your life have meaning? If you say 'yes,' you are a believer. If you say 'no,' you are a true atheist."

Curiously, however, Reiss undermines his own point. Instead of showing us how atheists actually do reject real meaning, he makes two dubious criticisms of atheism. First, he claims, without support, that atheists oppose a straw man, and fail to explain mysticism. "Many atheists think the word 'god' refers to a grandfather in the sky looking down on us. They then reject this god. What they do not do is explain mystical experience, which many serious scholars take as the true origin of religion."

He then goes on to complain he does not understand why the atheist agenda promotes some sort of intuitive/analytical dichotomy. "It is claimed that religious people are presumably not analytical. I don't understand the point." He even quotes (without attribution) the claim that "smart people are atheists." Reiss does not believe that claiming a positive correlation between intelligence and atheism is insulting and does not provide insight.

While these might be interesting claims, even if they were precisely true, they utterly fail to support his thesis, that the debate really is between meaningfulness and meaninglessness. But are these points true?

First, it is ever the claim of atheists that large numbers of theists define a god as what is in essence a "grandfather in the sky," indeed what often seems a malevolent and sometimes insane grandfather. We atheists are simply responding to that conception of a god. If Reiss wants to dismiss this claim as a misreading of any kind of religious thought, then let him do more than simply mention that it fails to address how he himself views religious thought.

Second, I vaguely recall reading about some study that measured analytical and intuitive thought compared between religious and nonreligious people. Since I have not examined this study at all, much less in detail, I'm unable to offer an opinion about its conclusions or the quality of its methodology. But so what? If Reiss refers to this study, it is incompetent and dishonest to attribute the opinions of specific individuals to a group; it is proper to name the individuals and criticize them directly. If Reiss is not referring to that study, then his charge without support is reprehensible.

Finally, Reiss charges that atheists fail to explain mysticism. But what, precisely, is to be explained? Yay, William James was "a Harvard professor and a brilliant observer of human behavior." So what? Brilliant people are wrong, albeit brilliantly wrong, perhaps more often than mundane people. To see the world in a new way requires genius; to determine whether that new way is accurate, or to understand what that "new way" actually means requires more mundane critical thought. Simply accepting statements of truth at face value ignores half the intellectual work that always needs to be done.

Furthermore, there's a curious contradiction in Reiss's piece. On the one hand, he makes a sharp distinction between theism, which is about meaning, and science, which is about cause and effect: "The theist holds that life has meaning, and that science, based as it is on cause and effect, cannot explain meaning." Yet he charges that atheists have failed to explain something other than meaning; we have failed to explain "mystical experience." If Reiss does not believe that mystical experience provides scientific support for a theistic meaning, then atheists would not fail to explain mystical experience; we would simply fail to include meaning in our explanation. After all, Reiss does not say that atheists (scientists) have failed to explain mundane experiences, such as seeing things fall, even though we have not included any sort of "meaning" in our explanations. If Reiss does believe that mystical experience provides scientific support for theistic meaning, then he would not draw the sharp dichotomy between theism and science. Reiss seems to be trying to have his cake and eat it too.

Of course, atheists do not deny meaning; we merely deny that meaning is supernatural. Meaning and purpose are definitely present, but they are entirely human. The project of humanity is not to discover some meaning that is "out there", presumably in Reiss's opinion in the mind of a god. Our project, rather, is to create meaning, create purpose. Yes, science cannot discuss meaning, because every particular conception meaning is neither "true" nor "false"; it is neither an accurate nor an inaccurate description of objective reality. But just because it a particular meaning is not a representation of the world as it is does not make it without value.

Indeed, the atheist project is not against meaning, but against the claims that specific, particular meanings are supernaturally privileged. We are against the idea that, "My idea of meaning is better than yours because God says so," and we are against the "because God says so" part. (We do support the idea that some ideas of meaning are better than others, but on the basis of how well they conform to our scientific, sociological, political, and (ironically) psychological understanding of human minds.

If Reiss wants to promulgate a particular theory of religion, then do so: he should expect that criticism be addressed to him discuss his theory of religion. But by making the implicit claim that anyone criticizing religion in any way is necessarily criticizing his particular kind of religion, and by writing unsourced, straw-man slanders against atheists as a class, Reiss displays himself as incompetent and dishonest.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/8556019519078370554/comments/default 0 Some people say http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/04/some-people-say.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/04/some-people-say.html#comments Sun, 29 Apr 2012 05:23:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=2f2344137da3fa5d61cbfe6358535e75 believes one's opponent is a pig fucker; the point is make him deny it. In another sense, it can be used to ascribe to an opponent a position that is at best in the minority, and at worst is a complete straw man. In essence, the "some people say" is a classic framing device.

Like any device, it can be used legitimately. If it really is uncontroversial common knowledge that a position is widely and explicitly held, then "some people say" can be used simply to provide context for an argument. "Some atheists say," one might note, "that no god exists." Or, "Some Christians say that Jesus is the son of God." Another legitimate use is to simply introduce a specific argument. "Some philosophers argue," for example, "that ideas are the highest reality."

But even when the use is technically legitimate, however, there are better ways to use it legitimately, ways that do not facilitate dishonest framing or blatant straw men. So when I see "Some atheists say," I usually whip out my bullshit meter, and I'm rarely disappointed.

If philosophy has any value at all, it is the investigation, use, and promotion of good argumentation. One reason I dislike philosophy is that good argumentation seems to be not the rule but the exception. In "Common Atheist Mistakes," Luke Muehlhauser constructs a criticism of atheism that consists of nothing but logical fallacies, all introduced with the "some people say" fallacy noted above.

First, Muehlhauser asserts that "Religion is not the root of all evil, but some atheists like to think it is." The assertion that some atheists actually do think religion is the root of all evil of course requires support. But Muehlhauser's support is deceptive. First, he cites Richard Dawkins' documentary, The Root of all Evil?. However, Muehlhauser buries in a footnote the concession that Dawkins himself denies the absolutist sense that Muehlhauser criticizes:
To be fair: in an interview with Reginald Finley, Dawkins said that he wanted to call it The God Delusion, and that "no one thing is the root of 'all' anything; religion is not the root of all evil." Still, many atheists think all or most evil comes from a single source: religion. To me that is absurd.
Muehlhauser is intentionally using the denial of a position to support his assertion that the position is common. We can count this only as intentional dishonesty.

One instance of obviously intentional dishonesty is enough to discredit not only the writer but also the publisher as unreliable, but I enjoy piling up the score against liars. So I'll continue to highlight the complete vacuity of Muehlhauser's argument.

Muehlhauser then tries to support his assertion that atheists believe that religion is the root of all evil by appealing to the subtitle of Christopher Hitchens' book, god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. We should hold self-styled philosophers, even amateur philosophers, to a pretty high standard of logical validity. And of course, the idea that "religion poisons everything" is logically different from the idea that "religion is the root of all evil.*" A logical fallacy is a logical fallacy, and as Muehlhauser is nitpicking atheist claims, it's hardly unfair to nitpick his.

*If you need help with the logic, as in comments; I'll be happy to explain in detail. But my readers are usually more competent in simple logic than Mr. Muehlhauser.

Additionally, Muehlhauser commits the fallacy of uncharitable interpretation. A more charitable way to read Hitchens' title would be to read it as, "Religion poisons everything [it touches]," which would render invalid Muehlhauser's trivial criticism that religion has not poisoned math, Renaissance art, sailing, or hats. And even his argument against the uncharitable interpretation is just an argument from incredulity: Muehlhauser simply finds it "hard to believe that religion poisons everything."

What is especially irritating is that a lot of atheists really do make a strong claim, a claim that deserves serious critical examination: religion is absolutely useless. Religion per se gives us nothing good; anything good that happens to be somehow attached to religion would always be at least just as good, and usually better, without the religious part. In his haste to commit the fallacy of uncharitable interpretation, Muehlhauser misses a chance to make an actual substantive contribution to the discussion.

Wow... a lot of fallacies in just one paragraph. But the fallacies continue.

Muehlhauser's next claim is that atheists use myths as facts. He cites specific atheists claims: atheists comprise less that 1% of the prison population, in contrast with 10% of the general population; that "Muslims destroyed the library of Alexandria"; and that "the idea of Jesus as God did not arise until 300 years after Jesus’ death. at the Council of Nicea."

Muehlhauser might well be factually correct on the second two points; if so, certainly no one should use these arguments.

First, I at least skim a fairly large sample of atheist writing, and I rarely see any of these elements in atheist writing. I could be wrong, but Muehlhauser makes no effort at all to establish that these errors occur with enough frequency to constitute a common atheist mistake. Again, it seems dishonest to call a criticism of a few historically naive commenters as a common mistake.

More importantly, we have to be very careful to distinguish between people taking one or another position on a controversial topic with intentionally ignoring evidence from bias. Intellectual inquiry is a social process, and we have to look at any difficult issue from many sides to come to agreement about the truth. Muehlhauser fails to make this distinction. According to Muehlhauser:
Every people group retells history in a way that favors itself. Liberals and conservatives, socialists and anarchists, Christians and Buddhists, hockey fans and NASCAR nuts – we all have some myths that make us look good. Atheists are no exception.
Clearly, Muehlhauser is going beyond the give-and-take of controversial intellectual inquiry. But is this position justified?

Muehlhauser charges that atheists' assertion that atheists comprise 1% of prison population is "either made up or based on a questionable 1925 study." But a quick Google search reveals, for example, Percentage of atheists, which cites a 1997 study by Denise Golumbaski of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. What's worse, Muehlhauser asserts that atheists are more or less obviously wrong, the "truth", according to Muehlhauser, is found in this study, Prison Incarceration and Religious Preference. The problem is that Muehlhauser's "truth" is a non-peer-reviewed study published by an obviously biased source, Adherents.com, hardly proof positive. The issues regarding Muslims burning the Library of Alexandria and the divinity of Jesus are similar: these are controversial claims, with intellectuals exploring all sides of the issue. I'm not saying that Muehlhauser is necessarily wrong, but saying that one side of an unresolved controversy is evidence of bias is again prejudicial and dishonest.

This article is getting long, so I'll cover Muehlhauser's remaining errors briefly. First, he accuses atheists of "bad scholarship" in calling the Hebrew word elohim a plural. This is such a narrow, technical issue of Biblical scholarship that calling it a "common" atheist error is simply ridiculous. Muehlhauser weighs in calling assertions that the Jesus stories are unfairly compared to other myths "simply false. [emphasis original]" But parallels are definitely a live controversy in academic scholarship, as historian Dr. Richard Carrier has been recently discussing on his blog. And finally, Muehlhauser condemns atheists' "dogmatic materialism" without offering any evidence whatsoever that this is a common theme.

Just because one disagrees does not mean that they are stupid, lazy, or dishonest. But using egregiously bad argumentation, unsourced assertions, faulty logic, and unjust pejoration does make Muehlhauser stupid, lazy and dishonest.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/2915038776042546863/comments/default 0 The Barefoot Bum 2012-04-27 14:26:00 http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/04/you-stupid-douchenozzle.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/04/you-stupid-douchenozzle.html#comments Fri, 27 Apr 2012 13:26:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=917c822f7d1f7ba03763eac487f3f592 You stupid douchenozzle. You truly don't fucking get it, do you? You poor motherfucker. You're gonna miss everything cool and die angry.

— Patton Oswalt
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/2269024993470335851/comments/default 0 The Stupid! It Burns! (burden of proof edition) http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/04/stupid-it-burns-burden-of-proof-edition.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/04/stupid-it-burns-burden-of-proof-edition.html#comments Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:35:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=a0045a6ec92a31563a9d15f82895ad52 the stupid! it burns! Unveiling Atheism

Mohamed Ghilan tells us that John Stewart Mill argued that "In circumstances in which the great majority hold a belief of any kind, what the dissenting voice must do is bring forth their case and prove it." Ghilan concludes, therefore, "The proposition that the believer must provide evidence for God, and until then we should remain either atheists or agnostic is problematic when we have had, since the beginning of history records, humans having engaged in some form of religious rituals and having acknowledged the existence of God."

Sigh. I so hate to belabor the obvious.

The atheist program is precisely to bring forth our case and prove it. One element of our case is that the existence of God, when considered as a neutral proposition, outside its social context, is a positive assertion that demands the burden of proof.

Furthermore, atheists really don't much care about the purely private beliefs of others; what we do care about is the positive religious assault on science, law, and secularism. The religious themselves are dissenting to the beliefs of a great majority, and we demand their burden of proof. God wants us to subjugate women, oppress and marginalize gays, keep the races separate? All these positions, at least in the United States, dissent from beliefs that are if not in the great majority at least widely held.

When it comes to the issue of evidence, it seems to be a word that is used in an unrestricted fashion by atheists to support their final conclusions. If anything, this reflects either a simpleton mind, or an ulterior motive driving atheists. The broad term “evidence” is defined as a body of information that points towards the validity of a claim. However, because there are several types of evidence, we cannot simply make the broad request of anyone to provide “evidence”. Depending on the matter at hand, we must define the type of evidence we need in order to be convinced. At the very least, we should qualify whether we want direct evidence, or can be persuaded by indirect evidence if it is strong enough.

The sentences are grammatically correct, but there's no actual meaning there.

Can any evidence, irrespective of type, be sufficient to prove that God exists? It would seem that from the atheist perspective the answer to this question is a simple “No”. Regardless of what type of evidence they are provided with, atheists will always have some response to it, which can be frustrating to the believer as they list all the reasons why a belief in God is actually the more rational position to hold. The problem is not with the evidence from an empirical sense. The problem is with the rationalization process that comes after being presented with the evidence, which leads us into a discussion about the nature of knowledge, which we can address elsewhere. [emphasis added]

Ah. "Elsewhere." Short for, I think, nowhere.

Evidence must be examined. That's why we have two advocates at a trial. If you think your evidence is being unfairly dismissed, you should provide evidence for such a claim.

The interesting question for the science-worshipping atheist to answer is whether it is about the belief in God, or the consequences of believing in God that are a problem. In other words, is it a matter of acknowledging God’s existence, or a matter of acknowledging what it means to their life after acknowledging God’s existence?

It's the former.

Moreover, what these science-worshipping atheists failed to recognize is that in their rejection of God, they have taken their own egos to be gods and became autodeists. Now they are organizing to form their own brand of religion full of moral theory and even practices, which they began to call people to so they can be “saved”. How ironic?

Yeah.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/6243426943573248938/comments/default 0 Sacking the City of God http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/04/sacking-city-of-god.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/04/sacking-city-of-god.html#comments Sun, 15 Apr 2012 12:30:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=7ed473daadf1f96f5f83d133e2de53f9 Sacking the City of God," with timberwraith's recent diatribes against atheism: Agnostic and A Movement of Disappointment.

It's hard to see Myers speech as anything but precisely that which timberwraith finds objectionable about atheism. From the title to the conclusion:
I have a different metaphor for us, my brothers and sisters in atheism. We are not sheep; there are no shepherds here. I look out from this stage and I see 4000 pairs of hunter’s eyes, 4000 hunter’s minds, 4000 pairs of hunter’s hands. I see the primeval primate hunting band grown large and strong. I see us so confident in our strength that we laugh at our enemies. I see a people thinking and planning, fierce and focused, learning and building new tools to conquer new worlds.

You are not sheep. You, my brothers and sisters in atheism, are a fierce, coordinated hunting pack — men and women working together, and those other bastards have cause to fear us. So let’s do it: make them tremble as we demolish the city of god.
Myers exudes confidence, even perhaps arrogance. We are right, we atheists, and we know we're right, and being right gives us power. It's the power to demolish the "City of God," the edifice of superstition, the idea that we can privilege this or that moral or even scientific belief, good or bad, by an appeal to private knowledge of the mind of God.

Instead, we know we can learn about the universe, of which the human mind and the human "spirit" are fully a part, and we can use that knowledge to make a better life, not just for those who hold the same arbitrary superstitions out of tribal identity, but for everyone, for only reason and knowledge are truly universal. And since we can do so, we must do so: to remain silent is to sit idly by while a fellow human being drowns; to protect religion from criticism and, yes, mockery, is block others from rescuing the drowning man.

Contrast this with the core of timberwraith's diatribe:
I am one small person, facing the inscrutable vastness of a universe that is beyond my full comprehension. What I see is nothing more than a window’s breadth of existence. I can not say with certainty that no aspect of this realm is aware in a way that is beyond human understanding. Nor can I claim with certainty that such an awareness exists.
Timberwraith frames her position around certainty, but that's just a cop-out. One does not need certainty to know, and atheists do not claim certainty. We do claim knowledge, so it must be the knowledge she claims we have only pretension to. She accuses us not of unjustified certitude but actual ignorance and blindness. Timberwraith does not seem to like knowledge: "And so, I prefer the unknown. I walk through a land without boundaries. I cast my destiny into the void of formlessness…"

In a sense, she's absolutely correct: what she doesn't like about atheism is not just a few "bad apples" but what atheism (and New Atheism even more so) is all about.

Like the religious, atheism has a moral vision, a vision of things ought to be, not just for ourselves as individuals, but for society as a whole. Like the religious, we claim to know our moral vision is correct. Like the religious, we are willing and able to use social tools to bring about that moral vision. If you want to tell me that there are some deep similarities between the religious and atheists, especially the New Atheists, I will happily admit the similarity.

But similarity is not identity. We are the same in many ways, but there is a crucial difference: when we claim to know, we claim to know not by private faith or authority but by public reason. When we, as humanists, say our moral vision is that everyone ought to be as happy as we can manage to be, we say that because we know by reason that people want to be happy. When we say that men and women, Black people and white people, gay people and straight people, ought to be treated the same, it's because we know by reason that there are no morally relevant differences between these categories. Those who say there are differences rely on either outright lies or unreasonable, irrational bullshit.

Timberwraith has a moral vision too, I think. It's hard to say what it is, but she must have one because she does not say merely that atheism is not her cup of tea; we are wrong and bad. You have to have a moral vision to make that kind of distinction. And she's willing and able to use social tools — mockery, insult, appeals to emotion, a condemnation of ideas that are at the core of many people's identity — to promote her moral vision. Good for her: she is a human being, and having and promoting a moral vision is what people do.

I can't know, but I can speculate, and I suspect timberwraith's moral vision is a deep abhorrence of conflict. What seems to incense the soi-disant "moderate" critics of New Atheism is just that: we have abandoned our bland "why can't we all just get along" secularism and embraced the conflict as a conflict, and we intend to win. We have abandoned the mode of "let us reason together" because we know that religious belief is unreasonable; we would rather embrace conflict than unreason.

If that's not your moral vision, you must, like timberwraith, set yourself at odds with atheism and the New Atheists. If it is, though, if you want a reasonable society, you should join us.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/4953988375449241925/comments/default 0 An agnostic critique of atheism http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/04/agnostic-critique-of-atheism.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/04/agnostic-critique-of-atheism.html#comments Fri, 13 Apr 2012 13:27:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=55f86b15ea32ab344602ecf13f82d9fa You don't like us. Noted.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/7846810972971665863/comments/default 0 The Stupid! It Burns! (the show about nothing edition) http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/04/stupid-it-burns-show-about-nothing.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/04/stupid-it-burns-show-about-nothing.html#comments Tue, 10 Apr 2012 12:00:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=0e9604ae3b901c400d34bc0f1e44ff71 the stupid! it burns! Atheism: Much Ado About Nothing :
The atheist convention is quite odd in many respects. They will insist that atheism is not a belief to be proved, but a non-belief. They will argue that they simply do not believe in God – so there is nothing to prove, nothing to argue for. Yet they will have a full three days celebrating this. They will be carrying on about nothing.

All this raises the obvious question: why bother? Why spend so much time, money and effort on, well, nothing? We recall that the hit TV show Seinfeld was “a show about nothing”. But these international atheist shindigs seem to be simply much bigger versions of shows about nothing.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/1778158027440409989/comments/default 0 The Stupid! It Burns! (no good atheists edition) http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/04/stupid-it-burns-no-good-atheists.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/04/stupid-it-burns-no-good-atheists.html#comments Tue, 10 Apr 2012 11:56:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=ca1d5f8b37f6e2a62001e5e49d4fb643 the stupid! it burns! No Good Atheists:
There are actually no good atheists. ...

If you could look into the secret places of many of [atheists'] lives, I’m sure you would see a pattern of behavior that is far from moral. ...

Atheism is actually a form of idolatry. The idol in this case is man himself. ...

I would argue that there is no such thing as an atheist. Atheists demonstrate the highest form of deception and hypocrisy, denying outwardly what they cannot avoid inwardly. Years ago when I was an atheist, I thought about God all the time. I couldn’t get away from the overwhelming evidence, both inwardly and outwardly, that my Creator existed. It’s the same with all atheists. ...

Think about it—what could be more immoral than denying the existence of the being who created you, gives you health and food and opportunity, and even the very breath you use to deny his existence? ...

The next time an atheist says, “You don’t have to believe in God to be moral,” look at it as an open door to share the gospel. Tell him he can’t be moral at all and deny the existence of his Creator. Walk him through the arguments I’ve given in this article and the Bible passages I listed. And then tell him about the work of Jesus Christ on the cross on his behalf.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/4994493104582780890/comments/default 0 The Stupid! It Burns! (just like stupidity edition) http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/03/stupid-it-burns-just-like-stupidity.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/03/stupid-it-burns-just-like-stupidity.html#comments Sat, 24 Mar 2012 02:05:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=3b74fb2f4746ae093749157b40dbf566 the stupid! it burns! Annual Atheist Convention Resembles Religion:
How the Annual Atheist Convention Proves that Atheism is a Religion or at the VERY LEAST Resembles a Religion

Oh, just go read it yourself.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/3564341235804067081/comments/default 0 Do atheists own reason? http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/03/do-atheists-own-reason.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/03/do-atheists-own-reason.html#comments Thu, 22 Mar 2012 15:54:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=83b40936819fabc7bb6095fa5268bbff burningly stupid, so it doesn't get the tag, but it's still pretty bad.

Tom Gilson asserts that Atheists don't own reason. Gilson not only believes that reason does not point directly to atheism, but that atheists are incompetent at reasoning effectively. "The new atheists have no business proclaiming themselves the defenders of reason, simply because they don’t practice it competently." As an English composition tutor, I must give high marks to this strong thesis statement (and a pretty good introduction). However, which might come as a shock, Gilson fails spectacularly in supporting his thesis.

As his first supporting element, Gilson appeals to a debate between Sam Harris and William Lane Craig, but this approach simply cannot work. At the most basic level, the most a debate can show is the logical failings of a single individual. The strongest conclusion we could draw from this debate is that Sam Harris himself was incompetent at the practice of reason; Rather than an indictment of atheists' reason, this paragraph can aspire at best to rise to the level of ad hominem fallacy.

Gilson does not manage to give evidence supporting even Harris's incompetence. Gilson accuses Harris of the fallacy of appeal to emotion, but completely fails to provide any evidence for this accusation. Furthermore, the appeal to emotion is not itself a fallacy; it is an indispensable rhetorical strategy. Gilson says that in the debate, Harris "depict[s] Christianity in the most negative light possible, and suggest[s] that we should conclude therefore conclude [sic] that Christianity is wrong." But "wrong" is a label we give to things that are indeed negative. Gilson does not even assert that Harris argued fallaciously, nor does he even assert that Harris's negative portrayal of Christianity is mistaken. Gilson fails to assert, much less support, the incompetence of even a single individual.

Gilson's support of Craig is halfhearted. Gilson acknowledges that "opinions differ" the outcome of the debate. The best he can say of Craig's performance in the debate is that Craig used logic, and offered "at least one" (unnamed) argument that, if true, would be true. If Craig really has an argument worth investigating, then a debate is not the best support; Craig's published work could be cited directly. I'm hardly an expert in Craig's work, but what I have seen of it has left me quite underwhelmed. Reason is more than just logic, but even that Craig can use logic (or that Gilson thinks he did) fails to support the thesis that atheists are unable to use reason.

From the Harris/Craig debate, Gilson turns his attention to Richard Dawkins' best-selling book, The God Delusion. Gilson chooses to focus on (presumably) chapter 9, "Religion and childhood." But again, Gilson simply offers opinion, rather than any evidence. First, it is not clear why Gilson believes Dawkins "devotes an entire chapter to unscientific anecdotes supporting his belief that a religious upbringing is abusive to children." Judging from the chapter headers, only the first section, "Physical and Mental Abuse" (comprising eleven pages), would seem relevant. Furthermore, anecdotes are not necessarily unreasonable; they can be used unreasonably, but they can also serve (reasonably) as examples to inform the reader the sort of thing the writer is referring to. Because Gilson does not give us any details, we cannot determine what he specifically criticizes; we cannot form our own opinion as to what Dawkins is even saying, much less whether he is supporting it reasonably. Gilson goes on to claim that "science shows exactly the opposite: spiritually engaged teens are healthier than others on multiple dimensions." Not only does Gilson fail to specifically cite this material to evaluate its scientific quality, we have no way of knowing what "spiritually engaged" means, and whether this undefined quality has anything to do with Dawkins' assertions. Gilson closes with alleging that "rational and logical errors are pervasive throughout 'The God Delusion,' [sic]" citing as evidence only philosopher Michael Ruse's personal opinion. Again, Gilson at best only raises questions (and weakly); he fails to support in any way his thesis that atheists are actually incompetent at reasoning.

Finally, Gilson criticizes the recent billboard co-sponsored by the American Atheists. The billboard really is terrible; the imagery is certainly racist, and it is entirely inappropriate to co-opt the struggle against slavery for atheists' purposes. But Gilson is not concerned about the racism and misappropriation. Instead, Gilson believes that the underlying position of the billboard, that the Bible supports slavery, is so obviously false as to be fallacious. First, Gilson asserts that this is a fallacious appeal to emotion, but the whole argument against slavery lies in an appeal to emotion: slavery is bad precisely because we are emotionally repelled by the practice. And Gilson openly admits that the Bible does indeed support slavery, albeit for pragmatic reasons:
Immediate abolition was realistically impossible in New Testament times: The Romans would have treated it as insurrection, and the inevitable bloodshed to follow it would have produced greater evil than would have been alleviated by abolition. The injunction to “obey” was thus temporary and contextual.
A retreat into moral relativism is perhaps inevitable, because whether from conviction or cowardice, the Bible does in fact support slavery. That Christianity eventually contributed to the near-eradication of slavery, a brief millennium after the fall of the Roman Empire, does not change what the Bible actually says. It is impossible to locate any actual offenses against reason in this example.

Gilson ultimately fails to give any support to his thesis than pure personal opinion. He accuses atheists of using "incomplete evidence," but he gives no evidence at all to support his position. He accuses atheists of using "demonstrably invalid reasoning," but it is his own reasoning that is demonstrably invalid. Indeed, chief among his complaints is that atheists use fallacious arguments from emotion, but it is his own argument that employs the true fallacy: he does not like what we have to say, therefore it is unreasonable. Nothing demonstrates the fundamental failure of Christian attempts at intellectual support more directly and aptly than Gilson's post.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/813691483778102867/comments/default 0 The Stupid! It Burns! (rational edition) http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/03/stupid-it-burns-rational-edition.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/03/stupid-it-burns-rational-edition.html#comments Tue, 20 Mar 2012 10:53:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=401c029f500d161c73d3d72030b156f0 the stupid! it burns! Are Atheists Redefining "Reason"?

According to Nix, the organizers of the upcoming "Reason Rally" in Washington DC
have chosen to appeal to improper authorities, resist peer review, and encourage an atmosphere of personal attacks- all pointing toward a deliberate rejection of reason and possibly even an intentional redefinition of the word "reason". ...

[T]he organizers of the Reason Rally are using people not trained scientifically to provide conclusions about scientific data. They are also using people not trained in philosophy or metaphysics to support metaphysical claims (that God does not exist). ... Instead, the organizers give us a few scientists (covering biochemistry, astrophysics, and psychology- okay coverage), yet a large number of singers, comedians, a TV show host, activists, and...politicians? ...

[The organizers] deride the Christian apologetics community for saying that they will be present to engage in reasonable dialog, and they have invited the known-to-be-highly-unreasonable group Westboro Baptist church in lieu of true peers. ...

No matter how "nice" the exchanges may appear to be, each side will be either explicitly or implicitly calling the other "evil", "dumb", "stupid", and "naive" and concluding that the other's worldview is wrong because of that. These are nothing short of the ad-hominem fallacy. ...

It baffles my mind to think that certain adherents to a worldview that claims to promote "reason" are actively doing things at their "biggest gathering of atheists in history" that are diametrically opposed to their own claims.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/3300518163246605986/comments/default 0 The moral philosophy of hierarchy http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/03/moral-philosophy-of-hierarchy.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/03/moral-philosophy-of-hierarchy.html#comments Mon, 19 Mar 2012 14:53:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=489db53a3dade9143074d2d4b86a5444 The True Believer. Bob Altemeyer studes The Authoritarians. Corey Robin investigates The Reactionary Mind. Each author uses a different method to investigate a different facet of the opponents of progressive and revolutionary egalitarianism. All progressives seem to have a difficult time understanding our opposition. Who wouldn't want a better, happier society? Who wouldn't conceive a better, happier society as one that was better for everyone? The opposition seems so intellectually perverse that many cannot resist the temptation to explain the opposition as pure sadism (as Orwell does in 1984) or descend into the most labyrinthine conspiracy theories (e.g. the 9/11 "Truthers"). But the reactionaries and authoritarians, who disproportionately claim the everyday true believers, can be simply explained as the logical, almost-inevitable conclusion of the most prevalent human theory of justice: the theory of just deserts.

The moral theory of just deserts firmly locates the institutions of society as the mechanism by which individuals get the status they deserve according to their moral qualities, good or bad. The shift in this philosophy between the feudal era and the capitalist era is a shift from seeing moral qualities as primarily hereditary to seeing moral qualities as a result of individual "merit". The idea, however, that there is a distribution of moral quality in the population remains firm, and the proper function of society is still to discern this moral quality and appropriately reward it. A society might perform this function poorly, and will probably always make some mistakes, but a society that does not have as its primary function the discernment of virtue and vice and the distribution of status on that basis is just not a society.

I mean something specific by "status": a person has a higher status to the extent that he or she determines what is fundamentally good for those with lower status. This notion of status is different from esteem or respect (though one might well esteem hold those with higher status). This notion status is different from a relationship founded on expertise: for example, my physician's notion of what's "good" for me is purely instrumental; he* assumes we already agree on what is fundamentally good, i.e. good health, and he merely advises me on how to implement that agreed-upon good. The role of status in a "hierarchy" is more fundamental: it not how to implement an agreed-upon good; it is those above determining and imposing fundamental goods on those below.

*My actual physician happens to be male.

According to a deserts theory of justice, a fundamental good must be imposed. Absent imposition, individuals always act according to what they believe to be good. An immoral person must be, by definition, either a person who is mistaken about what is good, or a person who cannot act according to their correct notions of what is good. Immoral people cannot act on the true good on their own; they must be subordinated to their moral superiors. Because the moral inferiors cannot not do it on their own, it is the necessary function of moral superiors to mete out what their moral inferiors deserve.

Fundamental goods must also be objectively determinable. A subjectivist conception of morality grounds moral decisions in the subjectively conceived benefit of the actor, and all sane, non-neurotic* people always act in what they believe to be their individual benefit. To impose a good as a good (and not just admit to naked exploitation) requires that we can objectively determine what is good and thus hold that dissenters are mistaken about a matter of truth. Even the most committed "Machiavellian"** must believe, I think, that the qualities of will, ruthlessness, and lust for power are objectively good; by possessing these qualities, he not only can gain power, but it is objectively true that he deserves to gain and exercise power. Without the concept of an objective good, superiors in a hierarchy cannot effectively rationalize the exercise of their power.

*Neurotic people, I am convinced, are those who have an irreconcilable conflict in what they consider beneficial. Neurosis is, however, better placed outside the sphere of politics.

**In the popular sense of "Machiavellian". There is some controversy over whether The Prince expresses Machiavelli's actual views or if he was writing ironically.

***It's possible that the moral justification of hierarchical social relations is entirely insincere, that those above (or perhaps just those at the very top) do not see themselves as acting in any sense of the good beyond superficial desire. I don't such absolute insincerity is viable, but that's a topic for another essay.

The relationship between an objectivist moral theory of deserts and hierarchical social relationships works both ways. Not only must a hierarchical society be founded on an objectivist deserts theory, but also an objectivist deserts theory demands a hierarchical society. Physical law by definition cannot mete out any justice; what physical law actually requires (e.g. that at all times we must accelerate towards the center of the Earth at ~10 m/s2) or prohibits is ipso facto placed outside moral consideration. We can divide into virtue and vice only that which physical law permits but does not enforce. If you believe that there are objective truths about fundamental goods, and that those who conform to those goods ought to be rewarded and those who contravene those goods ought to be punished — i.e. that justice demands that people get what they deserve in actuality, not just in theory — then there can be no other option than to try to privilege those who are morally superior, and thus themselves deserve reward, to mete out these deserts on those who are morally inferior.

The objectivist theory of deserts is pervasive in human thought, going back to the first recorded philosophy. Some, with some justification, go so far as to say that any theory that is not objective, and does not include deserts, is simply not a moral theory.

A objective deserts theory of justice starts with our treatment of criminals. A criminal, especially a violent criminal, is a bad person and justice demands he or she be punished. To treat a criminal as someone in need of extra help or assistance is the acme of injustice. It doesn't matter whether or not punishment actually deters crime (it's pretty clear that it does not); if we do not punish criminals, our society simply fails in its first, fundamental job.

But there must be gradations of punishment. Those who rape and murder children are, of course, the most morally inferior people we can imagine. We, their obvious moral superiors, must impose on these morally inferior a lifetime of torture in prison. (Death is, of course, far too good for them.) Not only is their happiness irrelevant, but society demands that we impose as much suffering as we can stomach meting out; that we do not simply break them on the wheel is not a measure of our compassion but a concession to our squeamishness. But of course not all criminals deserve such thorough suffering. Someone who kills his or her lover in a fit of jealous rage is still our moral inferior, but we do not believe he or she deserves the most thorough suffering. The burglar, pickpocket, embezzler, or shoplifter again are our still our inferiors, but they certainly deserve less suffering than a murderer, and perhaps can be fully redeemed into the ranks of the morally superior.

But if there are gradations of punishment, then why must our moral evaluations stop at the courthouse and the prison? If we're going to separate morally inferior criminals from morally superior citizens, why not grade the citizens themselves according to their virtue? Surely the lazy and improvident do not deserve the same material prosperity as the industrious and thrifty. Surely those who welsh on their debts do not deserve the same trust as those who pay them. Surely those of crudity and triviality do not deserve the same artistic recognition and control as those of refinement and sublimity. And surely the foolish do not deserve the same privilege over laws and institutions as the wise.

The political philosophy of egalitarianism must entail the moral equivalence of all human beings. People are obviously physically different (I know of no egalitarian social philosophy that advocates a reductive Harrison Bergeron caricature of physical equality), so any notion of egalitarianism must entail moral equality. Moral equality entails that there is no moral difference to which to attach deserts. Under any true moral egalitarianism, the notion that people ought to get what they deserve becomes entirely incoherent. Even if a society has a de facto hierarchy, with those "above" effectively wielding coercive power over those "below", the lack of a de jure moral justification for the hierarchy still subverts the moral sensibilities of deserts.

The advocates of progressive social and political philosophies must, I think, confront this moral dilemma head-on. The left's greatest intellectual and philosophical weakness is its equivocation between moral egalitarianism and moral hierarchy. A progressive political philosophy can pick hierarchy, which makes its critique of the existing system essentially claim that the correspondence no longer obtains between moral virtue and socio-economic status. The argument cannot be that those above are immoral simply by virtue of being above; to deny the notions of social superiority and inferiority is to deny morality itself. The argument must be not that society is stratified into the 1% and the 99%, but that the 1% contains too many of the wrong sort of people.

If you are going to embrace hierarchy, then the political strategy is obvious: get together with the 1% like you (whom you must believe, of course, are the acme of virtue), and convince the other 98% to legitimatize your own moral superiority, by persuasion and force of arms. The bourgeoisie succeeded in doing so, convincing (and forcing) the people to believe that the nobility and monarchy were corrupt and immoral, and that they themselves were in fact the acme of social virtue. The professional-managerial middle class did so in the West after the Great Depression, convincing the people that the capitalists were corrupt and immoral, and that the professionals, managers, academics, and bureaucrats were the acme of virtue. The Communist Parties did so, convincing the people of Russia and China that the Tzar and Emperor (and the disorganized and weak bourgeoisie who immediately followed them) were corrupt and immoral, and that those who had a correct scientific grasp of Marxism were the acme of virtue. Perhaps by doing so we are making progress; perhaps there really are correct ways of organizing a hierarchy, where those who really are morally superior legitimately command those who really are morally inferior. Or perhaps, as the song goes, it's just "out with the old boss, in with the new boss."

If, on the other hand, you're going to embrace egalitarianism, then you have to deal with the problem of criminality, or, more precisely, with the popular belief that real criminals deserve punishment. To discard the notion that there are moral gradations in the non-criminal population is to fundamentally undermine the moral gradation between the criminal and the non-criminal. This is not to say, of course, that egalitarianism entails that we permit others to go around killing people willy-nilly. If you're going to deny that laziness deserves some sort of social or economic punishment, that there are no "lazy" people, just those who prefer leisure to material goods (and why shouldn't they?), then there are no criminal who deserve punishment, just those who prefer violence to peaceful coexistence. There are good reasons why we cannot tolerate certain kinds of violence, but to remove the notion of moral condemnation is to remove the notion of deserving punishment. But the egalitarian must put the response to criminality on a completely different philosophical foundation than the notion of deserts, and must sell that new foundation.

Half measures will not work. You cannot be half hierarchical (towards criminals) and half egalitarian (towards everyone else). As the old joke goes, "We've already established what you are, we're just haggling over the price." Once you permit the concept of any personal moral gradation, the argument becomes over how to sort people in those gradations. Those below must therefore deserve less than those above, and it must be the task of those above to impose those deserts on those below. Once you deny the concept of personal moral gradation, you cannot call any person morally inferior. There's no in between.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/1922042683384516848/comments/default 0 Economics in the Crisis http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/03/economics-in-crisis.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/03/economics-in-crisis.html#comments Tue, 06 Mar 2012 12:17:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=ad5ea360de579197a61e49aad1251cfc Economics in the Crisis:
To say the obvious: we’re now in the fourth year of a truly nightmarish economic crisis. I like to think that I was more prepared than most for the possibility that such a thing might happen; developments in Asia in the late 1990s badly shook my faith in the widely accepted proposition that events like those of the 1930s could never happen again. But even pessimists like me, even those who realized that the age of bank runs and liquidity traps was not yet over, failed to realize how bad a crisis was waiting to happen – and how grossly inadequate the policy response would be when it did happen.

And the inadequacy of policy is something that should bother economists greatly – indeed, it should make them ashamed of their profession, which is certainly how I feel. For times of crisis are when economists are most needed. If they cannot get their advice accepted in the clinch – or, worse yet, if they have no useful advice to offer – the whole enterprise of economic scholarship has failed in its most essential duty.

And that is, of course, what has just happened.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/6697166396966779056/comments/default 0 6 Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/03/6-things-rich-people-need-to-stop.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/03/6-things-rich-people-need-to-stop.html#comments Tue, 06 Mar 2012 11:36:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=e17bda4381875623e2a4f8802692e71a 6 Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying:
"Well, $500,000 a Year Might Sound Like a Lot, but I'm Hardly Rich."
"Hey, I Worked Hard to Get What I Have!"
"If I Can Do It, So Can You!"
"You're Just Jealous Because I Made It and You Didn't!"
"You Shouldn't Be Punishing the Very People Who Make This Country Work!"
"Stop Asking for Handouts! I Never Got Help from Anybody!"
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/5156994634627722757/comments/default 0 The Stupid! It Burns! (honest edition) http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/03/stupid-it-burns-honest-edition.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/03/stupid-it-burns-honest-edition.html#comments Sun, 04 Mar 2012 13:45:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=b90467448d4ceb8db20adf970f2b8901 the stupid! it burns! Yes, atheists do sometimes make it to TSIB.

Congratulations, Atheists! I'm Ashamed To Be Counted Among You!:
I am so incredibly ashamed and infuriated by some of our most respected leaders: ashamed of their laziness; ashamed of their cowardice; ashamed of their closed-mindedness; ashamed of their inability and unwillingness to reason.

I am disappointed in my fellow community members: that we have the cojones to refer to theists as "sheeple" while, apparently, following along our own leaders equally blindly.

Why? Because one man suggested that Atheism and secularism has the potential to succeed to the same degree that religion has. How terrible of him! How dare he not conform! [emphasis omitted]

I have to admit, I did not complete the Honest Atheist's post: the Geocities use of formatting, colors, fonts, underlining, etc. started to make my eyes bleed. But apparently, this "honest atheist" appears to be all butthurt that a lot of atheists don't share his own admiration for de Botton's book; anyone who didn't like it, he seems to think, is obviously a deluded fool and couldn't possibly have read the book.

If you're ashamed to be one of us, HA, don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/2107462700758677335/comments/default 0 Infanticide and authority http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/03/infanticide-and-authority.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/03/infanticide-and-authority.html#comments Sun, 04 Mar 2012 13:12:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=209a978b7a0e2bfdf0f393a23f5ed8be Journal of Medical Ethics published an article, titled "After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?" by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva (publication information / PDF of full article):
Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus' health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

Julian Savulescu, editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics writes in defense of his decision to publish the article. He notes (perhaps unsurprisingly) that the article is controversial and has generated considerable negative response. Savulescu defends his decision to publish the article on the grounds that the ethical evaluation of infanticide is a continuing theme in both medical ethics and ethical philosophy in general. According to Savulescu, the published article is novel in its "consideration of maternal and family interests" and because it "draws attention to the fact that infanticide is practised in the Netherlands."

Savulescu explicitly notes that his decision to publish does not rest on on his agreement with Giubilini and Minerva's argument. "The goal of the Journal of Medical Ethics," Savulescu asserts, "is not to present the Truth or promote some one moral view." He continues, "The Journal does not specifically support substantive moral views, ideologies, theories, dogmas or moral outlooks, over others. It supports sound rational argument." He assures us that the Journal would (if they met appropriate editorial standards) publish opposing arguments, including those that employed the moral equivalence of fetuses and infants asserted by Giubilini and Minerva to argue instead against the legality of abortion.

I'm not particularly impressed by the article. One key moral component of actual abortion, especially first-trimester abortion, is that there is a true conflict of rights between the pregnant woman and the fetus. Simply asserting that a fetus and an infant share the morally significant property of non-sapience cannot make abortion and infanticide morally equivalent. It does not matter how many morally relevant similarities two situations share; if they have any morally relevant differences, the two situations cannot be equivalent, and the authors' conclusion that "‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is," is facially unsound.

The argument for abortion does not rest on the premise that the instantiated potential (to coin a phrase) for humanity is morally irrelevant. The argument is, rather, that this potential human being substantially infringes on the rights of a fully actualized human being. The underlying doctrine is not that potentiality is irrelevant; the doctrine is that when the potential comes into substantive conflict with the actual, the actual takes precedence.

Indeed, the instantiated potential by itself is generally considered morally relevant. We conceive, for example, that should a pregnant woman choose to carry her fetus to term, she has obligations to act in the best interests of that potential future person; it is a moral offense, for example, for a pregnant woman who chooses to carry a fetus to term to smoke, drink alcohol, or take any action that she can reasonably expect to substantively harm the future person the fetus will become. Furthermore, a pregnant woman who chooses to carry the fetus to term has a moral claim on the rest of society to help her see to the well-being of the future person, such as prenatal medical care and obstetrics. The potential humanity of the fetus is not morally irrelevant; abortion rests only on the doctrine that the rights of the actual person take precedence over the rights of the potential person.

The conflict of the rights of an individual actual person no longer obtains after birth. There may be additional considerations, which deserve careful, rational deliberation, but when any morally relevant factor substantively changes, we cannot reasonably assert equivalence.

This analysis is fairly standard ethical philosophy. Even though I think their argument is unsound and their conclusion incorrect, I'm not in any way disturbed or "offended" that Giubilini and Minerva have constructed or published their argument. What is more interesting, however, is the Christian reaction to this article.

Religious ethics is in a curious dilemma. If there is a compelling rational argument for or against some proposed ethical principle, then by definition that argument is by itself a reason to hold or abjure the principle. We need not rely on claims of supernatural pronouncements of an invisible deity. On the other hand, these claims of supernatural pronouncements are required only when all rational arguments fail.

Emotional disgust is a morally relevant criterion. Disgust is not the only criterion, of course, and that a majority, even a near-consensus, finds some practice disgusting or abhorrent does not outweigh other criteria, but ceteris paribus, that some, many, or most people find some activity abhorrent by itself justifies ethical and legal treatment different from some other similar activity that is not considered abhorrent. One obvious example is cannibalism. Although we do not usually construe dead human bodies as having the same kinds of rights as actual, living persons, almost everyone finds cannibalism intolerably disgusting. This disgust is, by itself, sufficient rational justification for prohibiting the routine consumption, or sale for consumption, of human flesh. It is only when the moral force of this disgust creates a substantive conflict with the rights of actual, living people — usually the right to continue to live in extreme circumstances — that we have even a moral dilemma.

This case is, I think, similar. Even if we do not happen to conceive that infants — by virtue of their non-sapience — do not have personal rights, that we find their killing disgusting or abhorrent is, in the absence of any substantive conflict with the rights of other, sapient human beings, sufficient rational justification for prohibiting infanticide. That I as an individual do not want to kill an infant is, absent other ethical conflicts, sufficient justification for me not killing it; in just the same sense, that we as a society do not want to kill infants is, absent other ethical conflicts, sufficient justification for prohibiting the activity.

The key proviso, of course, is "absent other ethical conflicts." Every action, even the seemingly innocuous, entails some sort of ethical conflict. The business of ethical deliberation is discerning, weighing and arguing those conflicts. The point, however, is that desire by itself is one legitimate ethical consideration; indeed on a subjectivist meta-ethical level, all ethical conflicts are eventually about establishing hierarchies of desire and preference.

If preference is a legitimate moral criterion, why not simply argue directly on the merits? Infanticide is emotionally abhorrent, and unlike abortion, there are no substantive ethical conflicts that might plausibly outweigh avoiding infanticide, the rational case for making it illegal is open-and-shut. On the other hand, if abhorrence is morally irrelevant, it's not a criticism against proponents of infanticide that they countenance an abhorrent activity.

Thus religious critics of secular morality are in a bind. They have to appeal to emotion and simultaneously hold that emotion is completely morally irrelevant. Both horns of the dilemma are fatal to the religious position. If emotion is morally relevant, then they have a rational case; they don't have to appeal to religion to establish morality. If emotion is not morally relevant, then the emotional reaction to infanticide is irrelevant.

The dilemma is perhaps easier to see when we consider purely arbitrary moral beliefs. To some Muslims and Jews, eating pork is forbidden. But to many non-Muslisms/Jews, people such as myself, there's nothing at all abhorrent or disgusting about eating pork. The emotion in this case is, in a sense, "morally irrelevant" because the negative emotion is completely absent. A religious person must assert in this case that we need belief in God; otherwise, there's no good reason to refuse to eat pork. And the non-believer's obvious response is to forego the religious belief rather than pork. When emotion, by its absence, truly is irrelevant, the vacuity of religious morality is readily apparent.

When stated so baldly, the religious argument for morality fails so easily that the religious argument has to substantively complicate their discourse to obfuscate the central, inescapable dilemma. We see an example of this obfuscation in "Now the Atheists want to kill babies," which comments on Deacon Nick's article "Oxford University director attempts to justify abhorrent promotion of killing newborns", a criticism of Giubilini and Minerva's article and Savulescu's argument for publishing it.

The obfuscation, to the point of intellectual dishonesty, begins with the title of the article. First, in publishing the article as well as defending his decision to publish it, Savulescu is clearly acting in his capacity as the editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics, not in his capacity as director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. Second, Savulescu is explicit: his decision to publish the article does not imply he endorses the position. He declares that he published the article because of its "novel contribution" and to support "sound rational argument" and "freedom of ethical expression." Savulescu is attempting to justify rational discourse, not the promotion of anything. Deacon Nick admits as much: in the lede, he changes the wording of the title to, "Savulescu... has attempted to justify his publication of Giubilin [sic] and Minerva’s article. [emphasis added]" And later in the article, Deacon Nick admits that Savulescu, as editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics, "does not specifically support substantive moral views."

I am not the only reader to be confused by the article; in the "Now the Atheists want to kill babies," which led me to Deacon Nick's article, the anonymous writer calls Savulescu a "pro-baby killing advocate." The author of "Now the Atheists" makes a rather obvious hasty generalization: an argument not even made but published by one person who happens to be an atheist cannot be reasonably attributed to "the Atheists" in the general plural.

Deacon Nick also misrepresents infanticide in the Netherlands and Savulescu's mention of it. Deacon Nick says, "Savulescu... has attempted to justify his publication [of the paper] by revealing the little known fact that it is already legal in Holland. But Deacon Nick actually quotes Savulescu, who says he published the paper because the authors revealed that infanticide is practiced in the Netherlands. (Deacon Nick does not cite any primary sources that asserts the practice is legal in the Netherlands.) Deacon Nick also asserts that "the Groningen Protocol allows a physician to deliver a lethal injection to a newborn who suffers from a disability, at the request of the child’s parents." But this is an egregious error. According to Giubilini and Minerva*, "The Groningen Protocol (2002) allows [physicians?] to actively terminate the life of ‘infants with a hopeless prognosis who experience what parents and medical experts deem to be unbearable suffering’."

*citing Verhagen and Sauer (2005), "The groningen protocol—euthanasia in severely ill newborns," in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Indeed, Deacon Nick seems entirely unconcerned about evaluating Giubilini and Minerva's position; Deacon Nick complains instead that the topic is even under discussion. "Julian Savulescu publicly admits he’s not disturbed by the argument that parents should be allowed to kill their newborn babies for social, psychological, or economic reasons because their babies are non-persons." But rational people in general, and especially medical ethicists, cannot allow themselves to be disturbed by mere arguments. Deliberation on any topic, and most especially ethical topics, is a social process. All the arguments must be made, and they must be published, and the whole point of an academic journal is to establish a neutral venue to publish all sides of an issue. If an argument is correct, it should of course be published; if it is incorrect, it must be published to be rebutted. This is an uncontroversial position since John Stuart Mill's On Liberty.

The critics of Giubilini and Minerva as well as Savulescu not only oppose the underlying argument; they are also incensed that an ethical principle is even being rationally considered in a social context. But why? If rational argument were not in their favor, then their position would simply be incorrect. But rational argument (as noted above) appears to actually be in their favor, so why not just rely on the argument itself? When someone does not make an obvious response in what appears to be his or her own interest, we are justified in looking for hidden motives.

Obviously, I can only speculate as to hidden motives. Rational discourse fundamentally undermines authority, social, cultural, and religious. It is a priori illegitimate to even question authority; an authority that must rationally justify its pronouncements is not authority at all. But in our democratic age, support for authority qua authority cannot be made openly. Instead, challenges to authority must be delegitimatized by indirect means. But to delegitimatize a challenge it is necessary that the actual points made by the challenge not be addressed, even if mistaken, invalid, or unsound. To address the substance of a challenge is to legitimatize it, and fundamentally undermine the notion of authority itself. Thus, religious advocates must take action not to further our rational understanding of ethics, but to undermine rational examination to maintain social, cultural, and religious privilege and authority.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/8316912264869884718/comments/default 0 Trust and security http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/03/trust-and-security.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/03/trust-and-security.html#comments Sat, 03 Mar 2012 02:14:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=5db598b1f223b3b17da6e0d1ce086f71 Liars and Outliers: The Big Idea:
My big idea is a big question. Every cooperative system contains parasites. How do we ensure that society's parasites don't destroy society's systems?

It's all about trust, really. Not the intimate trust we have in our close friends and relatives, but the more impersonal trust we have in the various people and systems we interact with in society. ... [But] systems contain parasites. Most people are naturally trustworthy, but some are not. ...

My central metaphor is the Prisoner's Dilemma, which nicely exposes the tension between group interest and self-interest. And the dilemma even gives us a terminology to use: cooperators act in the group interest, and defectors act in their own selfish interest, to the detriment of the group. Too many defectors, and everyone suffers -- often catastrophically. ...

Also -- and this is the final kicker -- not all defectors are bad. If you think about the notions of cooperating and defecting, they're defined in terms of the societal norm. Cooperators are people who follow the formal or informal rules of society. Defectors are people who, for whatever reason, break the rules. That definition says nothing about the absolute morality of the society or its rules. When society is in the wrong, it's defectors who are in the vanguard for change. So it was defectors who helped escaped slaves in the antebellum American South. It's defectors who are agitating to overthrow repressive regimes in the Middle East. And it's defectors who are fueling the Occupy Wall Street movement. Without defectors, society stagnates.

We simultaneously need more societal pressure to deal with the effects of technology, and less societal pressure to ensure an open, free, and evolving society. This is our big challenge for the coming decade.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/4210910816009153878/comments/default 0 Stupidity and arrogance http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/03/stupidity-and-arrogance.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/03/stupidity-and-arrogance.html#comments Fri, 02 Mar 2012 13:39:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=f178f5a4b459bf090976262a897e07c3 The Stupid! It Burns! (fatwa edition), an anonymous commenter writes (reproduced in full, without emendation):
First, many of the atheists I encounter are *not* atheists - they are merely anti-christians, which is at best like having training wheels for atheism.

But this should be offensive to any atheist who has actually considered their opinion and approach beyond its "I just wanna stick it to the man" mentality. If you want to hate on Xtians then go ahead but don't act like its anything beyond a reaction to the populist mentality.

Are there "real" atheists ? Maybe a better way to ask this question is "are there people who have carefully considered their position as an atheist and what it actually means after having experienced the challenges that life has to deal out ?" But most atheists I encounter have yet to experience a fraction of a fraction of what life has to deal out. Its easy to be an "atheist" if you are living in your parents basement hitting the bong and watching Dawkins videos on youtube in between tokes.

So this book comes out and the "atheists" are all up in arms since it seeks to find some degree of commonality between opposing factions. The irony is that atheists are equal in their capacity to bore to any TV evangelist or jihadist. These opposing groups have more in common than not - yet they get all emo when a guy advocates that atheists could learn something from religion. Its just two sides of the same coin.

If you can define atheism as more than just anti-christian then you have a shot at getting some respect.
A stunning display of stupidity and arrogance. Where to begin? At the beginning, I suppose.

First, many of the atheists I encounter...
Why would my readers and I find any interest at all in the supposed atheists some anonymous commenter claims to have encountered? There are at least two forms of bias operating here: selection bias and confirmation bias. No one escapes innate bias, which is why responsible scientists and scholars show the original data, so that their attempts to counter their own innate bias can be independently evaluated. The commenter does not give us any clue as to the circumstances or conditions he or she encounters atheists, and gives us no clue as to what they themselves actually say, so we can determine whether his evaluation is accurate. The commenter is merely attempting (ineptly) to dress up his personal opinion in the clothing of actual investigation and deliberation.

Has the commenter read The God Delusion, Why I Am Not a Christian, or the works of Robert Green Ingersoll? Does he or she follow Planet Atheism, Richard Dawkins.net, Pharyngula, Why Evolution is True, indeed any of considerable freely available published opinions of a host of atheists? If he or she has read it and it conforms to his or her opinion of the atheists he or she has encountered, then better to criticize the published literature directly, with citations, quotations and accurate paraphrasing. If he or she has read it, and it does not conform to his or her opinion of the atheists he or she has encountered, then better to correct those atheists; why tell me? And, of course, if he or she has not read the published atheist literature, then the commenter is hypocritically arguing from a position of nearly complete ignorance, hardly a position from which to criticize the intellectual shallowness of others.

Many of the atheists I encounter are *not* atheists...
The commenter does not explicitly state his or her own position, but the text suggests that he or she is not an atheist, in which case the pronouncement of who is or is not an atheist is entirely inappropriate.

[Many so-called atheists] are merely anti-christians, which is at best like having training wheels for atheism. If you want to hate on Xtians then go ahead but don't act like its anything beyond a reaction to the populist mentality.
First of all, what's wrong with being anti-Christian? Too many people act like just the idea that Christianity might be bad is so obviously irrational that the actual arguments do not even deserve consideration.

Why should anti-Christianity be "training wheels for atheism"? I'm not at all confident that I understand the commenter's meaning here, but he or she seems to suggest that once people become competent (?) atheists, they will abandon anti-Christianity. But why would that be so? It seems to me that if they abandon or lack an innate attachment to their own particular religion, as people learn more about the philosophy and practice of religion, they become more hostile and contemptuous towards it. If the commenter wishes to argue otherwise, he or she might want to do more than merely assert opinion as fact and actually make the argument.

So this book comes out and the "atheists" are all up in arms since it seeks to find some degree of commonality between opposing factions.
Presumably, our commenter refers here to Alain de Botton's book, Religion for Atheists: a Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion. It's unclear if the commenter uses "atheists" to refer to the undefined subset of atheists he or she has happened to meet and whose actual positions and comments he or she leaves entirely undefined. Again, if the commenter has a problem with their reaction, why talk to me? Why not talk to them directly?

Perhaps, on the other hand, the commenter refers to atheists in general. Perhaps he or she is entirely accurate, perhaps atheists in general (not just the ones he or she happened to have encountered) really are up in arms just because de Botton seeks to find some degree of commonality. Instead of just pulling an opinion out of his or her ass, the commenter would have a much stronger argument by citing and quoting actual published reactions to Religion for Atheists.

Are there "real" atheists ? Maybe a better way to ask this question is "are there people who have carefully considered their position as an atheist and what it actually means after having experienced the challenges that life has to deal out ?" But most atheists I encounter have yet to experience a fraction of a fraction of what life has to deal out.
This is just stupid. An atheist is just someone who doesn't believe in any god or gods. There are atheists at all stages of maturity and development. One can ask the same of Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, etc.: "Are there people who have carefully considered their position" as a Christian, Muslim, etc. "and what it actually means after having experienced the challenges that life has to deal out?" I would imagine that most Christians "have yet to experience a fraction of a fraction of what life has to deal out."

In one sense, the commenter is kind of correct; if religion or the lack thereof was a topic discussed only at the highest levels of philosophical, social, and learned consideration, then it would be disreputable for any layperson to confidently hold a definite position contrary to either the predominant opinion or substantial controversy of the experts. But of course religion and atheism are not like that. Religion claims substantial social privilege. This privilege is enforced, and in some cultures it is enforced by the state using the threat of death. It is religion, not atheism, that depends so strongly not on mature deliberation but rather on the indoctrination of children.

And, of course, if the commenter were to take one step out of his insulated cocoon, he would find that many atheists have given matters of religion mature, deliberate consideration. We will find atheists — who publish their opinions freely — among credentialed, academic philosophers, tenured scientists, and learned literary critics, as well as ordinary people such as myself of every age, from every profession and occupation.

Sure, there are atheists who, as the commenter suggests, do nothing but live in their parents' basements and do nothing but hit the bong and watch Dawkins videos on YouTube, but what of it? There's no membership committee for atheism: if you don't believe there's any god, you may legitimately adopt the label of atheist. If you're a stoner ne'er-do-well, at least you're a stoner ne'er-do-well with one fewer stupid idea. I could insult Christians in return (a pretty easy target), but in my own maturity, I find the exercise of trading insults to be tedious and unproductive.

If you can define atheism as more than just anti-christian then you have a shot at getting some respect.
Well, atheism is the lack of belief that there is any god. But that's not the point.

The point is that respect, in the sense of approval and admiration, is mutual. It is arrogant, presumptuous, disrespectful, and condescending to treat respect as something that can be handed down from on high. One does not earn respect from another; people develop a relationship of mutual respect. I do not want any "respect" that is handed down from any authority, legitimate or self-appointed. And I certainly do not want the respect of an obnoxious, fatuous, opinionated, self-aggrandizing, anonymous commenter who seems blithely unaware of the most basic standards of intellectual decency.

This comment (as well as Appleyard's moronic essay criticized in my original post) is not just isolated: it represents a substantial theme of not just informal but published discourse "critical" of the New Atheists. It is known (supposedly) that criticism of religion is inherently wrong; it therefore follows that the New Atheists are necessarily strident, shrill, superficial, immature, misguided, fanatical, ideological etc. just because they dare to criticize religion. The actual quality of the New Atheist arguments is irrelevant: the topic itself is (supposedly) off the table; just bringing it up is illegitimate and disreputable.

Of course, that's complete bullshit.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/885917823648240994/comments/default 0 The Stupid! It Burns! (fatwa edition) http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/03/stupid-it-burns-fatwa-edition.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/03/stupid-it-burns-fatwa-edition.html#comments Thu, 01 Mar 2012 13:22:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=915b40dea2cfe375bd10d631aa9878a9 the stupid! it burns! Against the Neo-Atheists:
This has been enough to bring the full force of a neo-atheist fatwa crashing down on his head. The temple idea in particular made them reach for their best books of curses.

Oh my! A fatwa you say? I'm waiting with worms on my tongue* for the hideous, violent pronouncements of doom from the New Atheists. Happily, Appleyard gives us an example:

*Bated breath

“I am rolling my eyes so hard that it hurts,” wrote the American biologist and neo-atheist blogger P Z Myers. “You may take a moment to retch. I hope you have buckets handy.”

The horror! The violence! Rolling one's eyes is so clearly outside the bounds of civilized speech that Myers should be ashamed of himself.

Appleyard helpfully gives us a definition of neo-atheism:
By “neo-atheism”, I mean a tripartite belief system founded on the conviction that science provides the only road to truth and that all religions are deluded, irrational and destructive.
(This first part contains two parts, but I'm not here to critique Appleyard's math.) He's close enough for rock 'n' roll on this point, so let's push on. The second part is
Secularism, the political wing of the movement, is another third. Neo-atheists often assume that the two are the same thing; in fact, atheism is a metaphysical position and secularism is a view of how society should be organised. So a Christian can easily be a secularist – indeed, even Christ was being one when he said, “Render unto Caesar” – and an atheist can be anti-secularist if he happens to believe that religious views should be taken into account. But, in some muddled way, the two ideas have been combined by the cultists.
And the stupid meter begins to move into the red. Appleyard does not cite or quote anyone who says that atheism and secularism are identical, or that secularism entails that religious views cannot be "taken into account". (Secularism, of course, entails only that the actions of government should be neutral with regard to religion; per the First Amendment, Congress (and the state legislatures, per the Fourteenth Amendment) cannot prohibit the free exercise of religion nor establish a religion.)

The third leg of neo-atheism is Darwinism, the AK-47 of neo-atheist shock troops. Alone among scientists, and perhaps because of the enormous influence of Richard Dawkins, Darwin has been embraced as the final conclusive proof not only that God does not exist but also that religion as a whole is a uniquely dangerous threat to scientific rationality.
And the stupid meter explodes.

As usual, there's a lot more stupid in the article. Some tidbits...

Francis Crick and James Watson conceded that one of their main motivations in unravelling the molecular structure of DNA was to undermine religion.
Uh, yeah. The Nobel Prize, the thrill of discovery... piffle. It's all about undermining religion! And even if they were motivated by opposition to religion, so what? DNA really is how genetics work.

[PZ] Myers the provocateur announced that he had no intention of reading [Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini's book, What Darwin Got Wrong] but spent 3,000 words trashing it anyway, a remarkably frank statement of intellectual tyranny.
This is why responsible scholars cite and quote. In his article, "Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini get everything wrong," (which took me twelve seconds to find) Myers says, "I haven't read their book, What Darwin Got Wrong, and I don't plan to; they've published a brief summary in New Scientist . . . and that was enough." Apparently it's "intellectual tyranny" to accurately identify the authors' work and criticize what you've accurately identified.

Fundamentally, Appleyard assumes as fact that it is bizarre and pointless to use science to explain religion and "the human experience." In addition to the neo-atheists, I suppose Appleyard will be going after the dogmatic, ideological, and intolerant sociologists, anthropologists, economists, political scientists, psychologists, neuroscientists, etc. leaving only the literary critics... such as Christopher Hitchens.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/1494210875747361826/comments/default 0 The Stupid! It Burns! (plethora of stupidity edition) http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/stupid-it-burns-plethora-of-stupidity.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/stupid-it-burns-plethora-of-stupidity.html#comments Wed, 29 Feb 2012 13:14:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=5a6d392c95b6d70d195bd40b8b26c540 the stupid! it burns! Borrowing From Atheists - Part1 - Naturalism:
In fact, it was Richard Dawkins who said he would not be an atheist were it not for the theory of evolution.
Christians seem all too often not bothered by the whole "making up facts" thing. Although Dawkins said precisely the opposite (in the introduction to The God Delusion), evolution is pretty damn nifty.
Naturalism has invaded the planet like a disease and made men into wimps and women into sex objects without any real connection to their divine purpose and assignment.
And naturalism borrowed my car and didn't fill up the gas tank!
In a survey conducted for Mike Shoesmith's book "The Atheists are Wrong" one hundred percent of the atheists said they would eat another person to stay alive. This 1 - is not surprising and 2 - makes them cannibals by their own admission.
So... the whole point of Christianity is make sure that the Donner Party would have starved? Can't do without that.
By blindly believing the theory of evolution in spite of the plethora of researchers who have discovered mountains of evidence opposing it you have decided to borrow from the atheists.

Of course, whether the evidence actually does support evolution is (at least) a topic of controversy. Again, just assuming you've won a contentious (heh) debate is not really the acme of intellectual honesty.

More importantly, deciding propositions on the basis of evidence is naturalism. Simmons, in his inaccurate, dishonest, egregiously stupid way, is himself borrowing from naturalism. A True Christian™ would never stoop so low as to even bother considering evidence: scripture ought to be enough to settle the issue by itself, n'est pas?
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/4988760408202475887/comments/default 0 Presently and absolutely undetectable gods http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/presently-undetectable-gods.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/presently-undetectable-gods.html#comments Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:32:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=5dff3c5ce09e1f8004b03b8719d5ab58 Strong atheism, two of the classes of definitions of god were absolutely undetectable deities and presently undetectable deities. Commenter Ben Wallis argues that these two classes of definitions render strong atheism untenable because "we cannot speak to the probabilities of deities in general." Ben argues that the definition of essentially undetectable is not, strictly speaking, meaningless, because the existence of an absolutely undetectable deity matters to a deity itself. Wallis argues that in a similar sense to the Bertrand Paradox, we cannot rigorously and unambiguously define the probability of any presently undetectable deity existing. Since we cannot rigorously definite the probability of a presently undetectable deity existing, it is unwarranted to hold any kind of probabilistic belief; weak atheism or agnosticism is presumably the preferred position.

While I don't entirely agree with him, I don't think Wallis is really that far wrong. The undetectable deities are already in the grey area of philosophical hair-splitting; the distinction between strong and weak atheism with regard to undetectable deities is similarly a matter of very fine, hair-splitting distinctions. New Atheism is primarily a political and social movement, and the only definitions that have political and social implications are the detectable, paranormal definitions (which I would assert, contra Wallis, encompasses Yahweh, Jesus and Allah). No actual believer talks about a perfectly deistic god who passively observes the world, and no one actually believes in a scaredy-cat god who's hiding behind the couch. Since the real debate is just about detectable gods (and what, precisely, we mean by "detectable"), we're not giving up any important ground to simply declare weak atheism and agnosticism regarding undetectable gods while still maintaining strong atheism regarding detectable gods.

I do, however, enjoy splitting hairs as much as the next philosopher, so I want to address Wallis' arguments directly.

Wallis argues against strong atheism with regard to to presently undetectable gods by invoking the Bertrand Paradox, which argues that it is possible to have mutually exclusive definitions of "random" that definitely give different answers to questions of probability. But one outcome of a careful examination of the "paradox" is that we can add a qualifier to the definition of randomness — the "maximum ignorance" principle — that seems to categorically disambiguate competing definitions of random: we can consider only those definitions that satisfy the maximum ignorance principle to constitute "true" randomness. If we assume this qualifier, Wallis fails to rebut my original argument.

On another view, the Bertrand Paradox doesn't change our view. If there is some ambiguity in the determination of the probability of some hidden deity existing, the range is either large or small. if the range of probabilities is large, then the definition is too weak to actually name a concept about which anyone can have any sort of belief. If the range is relatively small (e.g. between 10-9 and 10-12) then the ambiguity is irrelevant: no matter what the actual probability is, all the probabilities are low enough to warrant disbelief. Just as science does not include absolute certainty in its definition of knowledge, neither does it include absolute precision.

One might form a definition of a deity for which there was sufficient precision to be coherent and encompass a range of probabilities sufficiently high to warrant at least agnosticism, but I have not yet seen such a definition. The best attempt I've seen so far is the Fine Tuning argument, which has been decisively rebutted in a number of ways.

Wallis' objection to the absolutely or essentially undetectable deity hinges on a particular metaphysical view of ontology and epistemology. The scientific metaphysical system is epistemically prior: scientific ontology is just the narrative of what the world must be like to account for our knowledge. All apparently differing narratives that account for the exact same body of knowledge are, by definition, exactly equivalent. For example, the ontological narrative of (parts of) General Relativity can be expressed in two seemingly different ways: on one view, objects themselves become distorted in a gravitational field; on another, objects retain all their properties, but space itself is distorted in a gravitational field. Although seemingly different, physicists have (I'm reliably informed) determined that these two narratives always have the exact same epistemic consequences, and are thus saying exactly the same thing.

When a pair of statements in conjunction equivalently describe our actual knowledge, it's notable that the alternatives are not inverses of each other. P and not-Q in General Relativity above is not the simple inverse of not-P and Q. (The inverse of P and not-Q is not-P or Q.) Holding them as mutually exclusive alternative formations does not entail any contradiction. We have a different situation, however, when a statement (even a compound statement) and its inverse are epistemically equivalent. In this case, admitting the meaning of the statement entails a contradiction: To say, for example, that God exists and God does not exist are epistemically equivalent statements is to say that P equals not-P. To avoid the contradiction, we have to deny meaning to P: it is a category error to call it truth-apt.

It is not the case that one must adopt an epistemically prior metaphysical system, but neither is it the case, I think, that one cannot reasonably adopt epistemic priority. If Wallis wants to adopt an ontologically prior metaphysical system, then he might find strong atheism untenable, but if he wants to argue that my adoption of strong atheism is unreasonable, then he must either argue that it is unreasonable under epistemically prior metaphysics or he must problematize epistemically prior metaphysics.

Strong atheism, while not necessarily a required position (although I think ontological priority is a much more problematic metaphysical concept than epistemic priority), is, I believe, a tenable position.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/3815920767465695172/comments/default 0 Measuring the Labor Theory of Value http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/measuring-labor-theory-of-value.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/measuring-labor-theory-of-value.html#comments Sun, 19 Feb 2012 13:11:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=fc2a0685daee14c5ec8356bd476a5cfa Marshallian Cross (supply and demand graph). But I think this view is not correct. I think, rather, that we should put abstract labor time on the quantity (X) axis. The Y axis then represents the "hidden" utility. Our interpretation, then, changes from what is the marginal utility (price relative, c. p., to the prices of all other goods) of the q-th commodity (1,000,000th coat, 17th airliner, etc.) to the utility of the q-th labor hour devoted to the production of that commodity.

We can do this, I think, because the quantity of a commodity produced is a relatively simple function of the actual hours used to produce it. It might not be strictly linear — there are declining returns to scale — but it's still going to be monotonically increasing for the most part: the more hours we spending producing something, the more of that something we'll produce. It avoids a whole division step (hours to produce one commodity divided by hours to produce another) in creating production possibility frontiers and calculating opportunity cost.

The opportunity cost calculation becomes a lot easier now. The supply curve now has a very natural, obvious reason for sloping upward: For low quantities of labor used to produce some commodity, we are "stealing" labor time from the least valuable alternative commodities; as the quantity of labor increases, we must steal labor time from increasingly valuable alternatives. The macroeconomic interpretation, usually interpreted with real GDP on the X axis, then becomes directly a measure of employment; a recession is underemployment; inflation is (more-or-less) over-employment*; and optimal GDP is optimal, "full" employment**.

*Not too many people employed, but rather people employed making too many things that are unwanted.

**Note that modern economists' observation of "full" employment being between 4-5% includes structural, politically-motivated and -enforced unemployment of minorities and other marginalized groups. I'm coming to believe that the true Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU) is below 1%. In other words, a "5%" NAIRU is basically 0.5-1% unemployment among privileged groups (mostly white men) plus much higher political unemployment in other marginalized groups.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/1599513488907877143/comments/default 0 Fairness and value http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/fairness-and-value.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/fairness-and-value.html#comments Fri, 17 Feb 2012 13:39:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=2d2077669f4a22c2d2928a92ea8c81a3 The Income Gap: Is the Distribution of Money Fair?, Mark Thoma finds that the present unfair distribution of income is in at least some sense "unfair", and attributes the cause to failures of perfect competition. Thoma believes that unlike Marx's labor theory of value, the more modern marginal utility theory of value provides a satisfactory account that everyone — capitalists, landlords, and entrepreneurs as well as laborers — gets their fair share of economic activity. However, we can be assured of a fair distribution only if the assumptions of perfect competition actually obtain in real life, and Thoma believes that the real world does not even come close to embodying these assumptions. The cure, presumably, is an expanded role of government to enforce perfect competition and thus ensure fairness of outcome.

Thoma begins his article by drawing a sharp contrast between Marx's labor theory of value and the marginal subjective utility theory of value. I do not believe the contrast can be drawn so sharply: rather than contradicting one another, the marginal utility theory complements and expands the labor theory of value: The marginal utility just makes more explicit Marx's notion of socially necessary labor time*. The marginal utility theory is a theory about demand; we still talk about the supply in terms of total embodied labor**, some discounted from a previous accounting period. Even marginal utility theory still concludes that there is some specific amount of socially necessary labor time necessary to produce a commodity at equilibrium, where rising marginal cost of supply (in actual labor time) equals falling marginal utility of demand. Since these numbers are, by definition, equal at equilibrium, we can represent the not-directly-measurable subjective demand in terms of the directly measurable labor time that constitutes the actual cost of supply.

In Capital, Marx is not, I think, interested in giving a rigorous account of exactly what the socially necessary labor time actually is. It's going to be something and it's going to be measured in actual labor costs. What Marx considers important is that all commodities, including and especially labor power, will trade at this cost.

**Technically abstract labor time, which accounts for varying disutility of specific kinds of work and work environments: an hour spent in a sewer is, ceteris pariubus worse than an hour spent in an air-conditioned office.

Thoma does not want to talk about fairness per se — economics is descriptive, n'est pas, not normative — but he asserts that perfect competition leads to at least one kind of fairness: under perfect competition, everyone gets out of the national economy what they put in. It's important to understand, however, that under the marginal utility theory of value, this conclusion is at best true by definition. A central assumption of marginal utility theories of value is that value cannot be measured directly; we can draw conclusions about value only from the behavior of the market. If apples trade for $2.99/lb., then that's the only measurement we can ever have about the value of an apple... or at least the marginal value of the last apple sold. Likewise, we can measure the value of what a person puts into the economy only by measuring how much money they receive for doing whatever it is that they do: laboring, owning capital or land, or being all entrepreneur-y. And of course what a person gets out of the economy is defined directly by how much money they have received. We cannot idependently determine whether or not perfect competition is actually fair; perfect competition in a free market is essentially one definition of fairness.

But Thoma seems wants to have his cake and eat it too. If perfect competition in a free market is an accurate and complete description of economics, then it is true whether we like it or not. If it is inaccurate or incomplete, then deciding whether or not to implement it is a normative question, not a descriptive question. If perfect competition is really true, then the distribution of income is perfectly fair right now; indeed any distribution of income is fair by definition. If perfect competition is not true, then Thoma is making a purely normative argument: we ought to create an economic system that either actually is or acts like perfect competition. But that would beg the obvious meta-ethical question: why should we implement perfect competition as a definition of "fairness"?

There are, I think, a lot of parallels between the discourse on economics and the discourse on religion. One prominent theme in religion is the debate — a legitimate debate between rational people of good will — over religious "moderates". Both sides oppose religious "fundamentalists". On one side are those who say that because religious moderates are indeed moderate, we should except their religion from sharp criticism: if our goal is moderation, then it doesn't matter how anyone gets there. On the other side — the side I prefer — are those who say that because both religious moderates and religious fundamentalists both use religion to justify their positions, and there is no rational, empirical way to judge between their differing uses of religion, the moderates in a sense philosophically support the fundamentalists. (It gets worse: granting foundational authority to the literal meaning of scripture, the fundamentalists seem to have a better case than the moderates.)

Similarly, the debate between "moderate" capitalist economists such as Thoma and capitalist "fundamentalists" turns in no small part on the non-empirical exegesis of classical economics. There's a lot more going on in economics, of course, than an intellectually honest examination of the foundations of capitalism. But the parallel still holds: capitalism, like any other social endeavor, has underlying ethical norms. At some point, distorting these ethical norms to the reality of modern society becomes untenable, and we must fundamentally rebuild them.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/6411859605765064537/comments/default 0 Real and financial economics http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/real-and-financial-economics.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/real-and-financial-economics.html#comments Sun, 12 Feb 2012 02:06:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=ec97026a059b275044a276412053a91a St. Louis Fed president James Bullard mixing up real and financial economics.

Yes... the president of the Federal Reserve regional bank of St. Louis doesn't understand the difference between actual physical things and the symbols that represent them. These are the people who end up making economic policy under capitalism.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/387872577128610979/comments/default 0 The Stupid! It Burns! (cranio-rectal inversion edition) http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/stupid-it-burns-cranio-rectal-inversion.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/stupid-it-burns-cranio-rectal-inversion.html#comments Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:31:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=76f2f7b1e7e5992ad209b4064a2eac11 the stupid! it burns! Atheists – get your heads out of your asses.
I’m getting pretty damn peeved with the attitude that seems to be mainstream within the atheist groups etc as of late. They think themselves far superior to the poor, feeble minded little theists who’re blind and must depend on an imaginary friend to get them through life. Remind me, how exactly are they supposed to be any better? I never used to have any issues with atheists but they are now proving themselves to be just as bitter, closed minded, arrogant and downright condescending as those heavy, closed minded christians they despise!
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/1795993877693371735/comments/default 0 Strong atheism http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/strong-atheism.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/strong-atheism.html#comments Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:07:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=332526e41f5bb345e019bab5604b271b
The first class, deity1, is the class of contradictory or meaningless definitions of "deity". We can safely affirm that no being exists with contradictory or meaningless properties. For example, the omnimax deity is either contradictory or meaningless because of the problem of evil. It is a contradiction that an omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent deity would permit evil in the world. Alternatively, we don't know what evil is (we are mistaken in some mysterious way) or there is no such conceptual category as "evil"; in this case, "omnibenevolent" is meaningless. The omnimax deity is offered as an example; finding that some particular definition of deity is not in the class of deity1 does not rebut the idea that we can safely deny the existence of any deity1.

The second class, deity2, is the class of undetectable (i.e. "supernatural") deities. Again, we can safely deny the existence of any deity that is, by definition, completely undetectable. To affirm or deny the existence of such a deity is to say exactly the same thing about the world of experience. An undetectable deity entails its own subtle contradiction: it is exactly the same to say, "Deity2 exists," and to say "Deity2 does not exist."

The third class, deity3, is the class of presently undetected deities. These deities are only detectable under some special circumstances that do not (presently) obtain on Earth. These deities are detectable only after death, or are hiding behind the couch, or on Achernar III, or somewhere else presently inaccessible. The problem is that there are an infinite number of definitions in this class; the probability that any one definition is true, especially a definition that names a finite number of deities, is infinitesimal and warrants disbelief until evidence becomes accessible.

The fourth class, deity4, is, by definition, presently detectable, but strongly paranormal (contradicts our ideas about physics). The evidence presently available, by the definition of paranormality, argues against such a deity. Deities which are detectable only privately fit this definition, because private knowledge (about anything but the content of one's own mind) is itself paranormal. (Note too that having an unusual sensory modality is not private knowledge, since someone who has even a unique sensory modality can prove its existence to someone without it, rendering that modality public.) Of course, the evidence might be sufficient for us to revise our concept of normality, but so far all attempts have fallen flat. Given that human beings have been looking for such a deity for many thousands of years, the failure to find one is itself sufficient evidence to warrant belief that no such deity4 exists.

The fifth class, deity5, is, by definition, presently detectable and not strongly paranormal. This definition includes "God is everything that exists", or "God is the [human emotion of] love." In the atheists' view, a deity5 is no deity at all; the speaker is using metaphorical or figurative language, and we are not literary critics.

All classes of definitions have sufficient warrant for either disbelief, disinterest, or exclusion from consideration. We cannot, of course, be certain that none of these deities (except perhaps deity1), but the preponderance of direct and indirect evidence warrants strong atheism.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/7297959355200568403/comments/default 0 The definition of atheism http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/definition-of-atheism.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/definition-of-atheism.html#comments Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:57:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=9394172c5c2d2792bbff35186cb0775b Defining Atheism: Examining the Atheists’ Case, " Albert McIlhenny gets at least one thing right: "Of course, the whole thing is quite silly." The issue is not what the definition of atheism "is", the issue is which of the different definitions to use in different circumstances.

The two most common definitions of atheism are: "a lack of belief in a deity" (sometimes qualified as "weak" atheism), as well as "belief there is no deity" ("strong" atheism). Both are applicable under different circumstances. If atheists were asking for social, political, or legal privilege, the second definition would be better: it would be inappropriate, for example, to insist on privilege if strong atheism were unjustifiable. If we want to explain the broadest definition that encompasses most people who self-identify as "atheist" (and no one is an atheist who does not intentionally and individually chose to apply the label to herself), weak atheism seems obviously preferable. One who believes there is no deity certainly lacks belief in a deity; all strong atheists are ipso facto weak atheists. So the weak atheism is preferable.

There are other circumstances, notably theists who want to position themselves as contra atheists. Such theists, I think, are better served by employing the weaker definition. The weaker definition is more general. If you can prove the stronger definition false or unjustifiable, you've said nothing about the weaker definition, and nothing about theism. If you can prove the weaker definition false or unjustifiable, however, not only does the stronger definition falls automatically, but the case for theism is definitely strengthened.

Strong atheism is also equivocal without further qualification. What does the strong atheist mean by "deity"? "Deity" is itself an ambiguous, equivocal term. There's no help for that — natural languages are fundamentally equivocal — but it does mean that anyone addressing the subject must carefully avoid straw man fallacies and fallacies of equivocation. Even the strongest atheist does not claim that God is definitely not hiding behind the couch. (A strong atheist such as myself argues that a being who can hide behind the couch, or on Achernar III, is by definition not a deity.) Weak atheism is also equivocal, but the equivocation is almost irrelevant. I certainly lack belief in particular concepts and constructions of "deity" about which I'm ignorant; unlike strong atheism, which requires a lot of unspoken qualifications, weak atheism can stand on its own. Arguing against weak atheism is not only more directly probative of theism, it avoids all sorts of argumentative pitfalls that can derail a discussion.

If you want to talk about strong atheism, do so by all means. But if you do, you're going to end up talking about epistemology, ontological commitment, the ethics of knowledge claims, etc. In other words, you'll be doing philosophy. Philosophy is not about the search for answers, it is the exploration of questions. Strong atheism is one interesting starting point for the exploration of questions; it's a bad place, however, for the search for any definite answers.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/5400786893003475203/comments/default 0 The Stupid! It Burns! (MRA edition) http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/stupid-it-burns-mra-edition.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/stupid-it-burns-mra-edition.html#comments Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:28:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=656728d5e25d32f22850d4cd29079872 the stupid! it burns! Weird, eh? an MRA saying something stupid. Yet here it is:

Why are atheists so religious?
The problem I have with atheists is that they are too religious. Yes, I mean that literally. For when you wipe away all the bombastic bellowing about empiricism and the strident mocking of those who choose a life of faith, what you are left with is a population of people that surrender their reason and cognition as though they were at gunpoint; that hit their knees as fast as any Catholic...to worship at the altar of feminism. ...

In the rank and file of vocal atheists ... what I have found is a culture of indoctrinated clones, with no more discernment of fact and fiction than you would find at a Branch Davidian revival. Indeed, they are so ideologically rigid that the only things these people are missing are shaved heads, tambourines and two weeks without a shower.

At least the metaphor is good.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/8078322228992293053/comments/default 0 Atheism and "faith" http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/atheism-and-faith.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/atheism-and-faith.html#comments Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:21:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=0273d8a9c2f08d3301c7be8c53ed2e34 stupid argument, one that is easily dismissed. In his essay, "Atheists and the F-Word," David Lose redefines "faith" as something unobjectionable, outside the realm of what atheists criticize, and uses this redefinition to criticize atheists. Lose wants us to take a "broader view of faith." Our values, according to Lose, are not empirical facts, nor can they be scientifically proven from the facts; therefore we hold our values by faith: "Any construction of a system of values demands at least a modicum of faith, the assertion of and belief in some grounding principles that cannot be objectively and rationally established." As a philosopher, I would dispute Lose's construction — objectivity is gratuitous; we can rationally establish subjective truths, truths about our own minds — but as a New Atheist, I say that even if Lose were entirely correct, he is talking about a topic that has nothing to do with the New Atheist critique of religion and faith.

The title of the essay, referring to "faith" as "the F-Word", gives us a clue as to where Lose goes wrong. Atheists are not against words, we are against specific ideas. Like most people who use natural language, we use words to denote ideas; like most people who use natural language, we understand that words are equivocal: they can denote many different ideas. The argument where different senses of a word are used in different places to construct an invalid argument is so common it has its own name: the fallacy of four terms. Lose's essay does nothing more than expand this fallacy to an entire essay.

Indeed, the sort of faith New Atheist writers argue against is opposite to Lose's construction. We do not argue against values that cannot be "objectively and rationally established." We argue against the idea that values can be objectively and rationally established by grounding them in a supernatural deity, either directly or indirectly through scripture. Some atheists argue that values, even fundamental values, can indeed be objectively and rationally established without a supernatural deity; some atheists, such as myself, argue that values are subjective facts, facts about minds, that are directly perceptible through introspection, and that social ethical systems are the result of negotiation, compromise, and persuasion among individuals who have values. We are united, however, in believing that it is illegitimate and irrational to ground or substantiate any values, good or bad, in the properties, character, or opinions of supernatural deities.

Critics of atheism and the New Atheists seem unable or unwilling to engage the fundamental New Atheist argument, an argument made so often, in so many different ways, that the failure is simply astonishing. Our argument is simple: there is no God, so trying to attach anything to this delusional fantasy is a Bad Idea. We do not argue against everything that has been attached to the delusional fantasy; if Lose wants to attach good humanistic values to his idea of God, we're not going to object to the values. We will, however, say not only that you don't need to attach these ideas to God, but also that attaching them to God undermines the critique of people who attach bad ideas to God. We argue against the attachment itself, not what is attached.

Lose's essay is one reason atheists tend to employ mockery and derision. Lose's fallacy is obvious, hoary, oft-repeated and oft-refuted. Indeed, every critique of atheism and the New Atheists I read is just as intellectually bankrupt, at best based on common, obvious fallacies and at worst packed full of lies and bullshit. Religious apologists and excuse-makers seem to be willing to say anything, however obviously fallacious; their goal seems to be simply to throw everything at the wall, over and over, and hope something sticks. What they cannot achieve by rationality they hope to attain through sheer bloody-minded persistence. The religious appear to be impervious to reason, so I despair that an intellectual, elevated, refined, or dispassionate conversation can even begin to address the problem of religion, one of the most pervasive root causes of evil in the world.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/3730066843797362354/comments/default 0 Motes and beams http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/motes-and-beams.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/motes-and-beams.html#comments Sun, 05 Feb 2012 17:44:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=0f423d9527cd2a84f4a8e397fcc30bad How atheism became a religion in all but name." He starts with a provocative tag: "It was only a matter of time before someone proposed an ‘atheist temple’, given the religious-like zealotry and dogma of the New Atheists," followed by some examples of historical oppression an marginalization of atheists. Furedi reports that, today, however, atheism has become respectable, and has thus "paradoxically" become transformed. Atheism is, according to Furedi, no longer an "insignificant" component of its adherents' overall identity and personal philosophy; atheism per se has become a central intellectual idea. Atheists have consequently adopted the worst features of the religious, the very characteristics of religion that we criticize. Like the religious, Furedi claims that atheists have adopted a "dogmatic, polemical style," a "black-and-white" moral outlook, and make claims that "often verge on the irrational and hysterical." Atheism has, according to Furedi, simpoly transformed the religious narrative into a medical narrative, which he believes explains the purported atheist double-standard towards nonreligious woo. Atheism become not only "a secular religion" but also "an intensely intolerant and dogmatic secular religion." Indeed, Furedi believes that the "moral disorientation of Western secular culture," to which modern atheists are presumably substantively contributing, is a greater threat to humanism than is religion. Furedi, however, gets almost every point completely wrong.

First, I'm mystified by Furedi's treatment of Alain de Botton’s ridiculous idea* of an "atheist temple." Since he mentions it in the tagline, as a reader I expect that Furedi will use this idea as an important piece of evidence to support his idea. Yet Furedi himself notes the "strong criticism" this idea has received from the New Atheists. Furedi also notes that de Botton is at least something of an outsider to the New Atheists, someone who is, in contrast to the New Atheist "canon", such as it is, not aggressive towards religion. It is incomprehensible that the idea of an "atheist temple", an idea that has been substantially rejected by New Atheists, an idea proposed by someone who does not self-identify as a New Atheism and who is not accepted as such by self-identified New Atheists, would prove that it was "inevitable that sooner or later the New Atheist crusade would mutate into a quasi-religion." Indeed, Furedi acknowledges the New Atheist response to Furedi's idea as a real counterexample: "But for all that..." Call me old-fashioned, but I've always thought that a writer must actually rebut a counterexample, not just, as Furedi does, mention and dismiss it.

*Rumor has it that de Botton has sensibly backed off from this idea.

Furedi erroneously accuses the New Atheists of a hypocritical selectivity. But the New Atheists are just selective in focus, not in opinion. No one can write about everything, and to a large extent, the New Atheists is just a label adopted by people who, in part, focus on criticizing religion. No one can address every problem; furthermore an individual's focus is determined not just by her subjective evaluation of the importance of a problem, but by other considerations such as personal importance as well as considerations of talent, personal interest, and expertise. Of course, New Atheists do criticize Eastern Mysticism. Deepak Chopra, for example, is a frequent target of criticism by self-identified New Atheists. New Atheists talk about a lot of subjects other than the three Abrahamic religions. I write about economics and politics. And many New Atheists criticize and condemn "alternative medicine", which seems to directly contradict Furedi's claim that the New Atheists support any old thing that employs "therapeutic" rhetoric. It's not sufficient to show that New Atheists rarely address some subject; to show a double standard you have to at claim that we actually support or make excuses for patently unscientific subjects.

(There is a conflict of sorts between the New Atheists and the larger skeptical community. That conflict, however, hinges on skeptics not wanting to discuss religion; it does not hinge on New Atheists wanting skeptics in general to focus exclusively on religion.)

In addition to mishandling the counterexample, Furedi makes several claims unsupported by any evidence. Where are the "irrational and hysterical" New Atheist claims? Where is its "doctrinaire language?" And without an example, I'm unable to determine what Furedi even means by the "dogmatic, polemical* style" of New Atheist writing. Without evidentiary support, Furedi seems to simply be poisoning the well before he attempts his only supported argument.

*"Polemic" formally means an argument against a position, in contrast to "apologia", an argument for a position. It's uncontroversially accepted that New Atheists tend to argue against religion. There are, of course, other, pejorative senses of "polemic", but without explanation or example, Furedi's specific meaning is impossible to determine.

Furedi's only supported argument for New Atheism becoming religious is the medicalized treatment of theistic religion. New Atheists "use the idiom of therapy to pathologize religion, using terms "such as 'toxic faith' and 'religious virus.'" Furedi notes that New Atheists refer to religion as an "addiction". All right; so what? Medicine is a terrific narrative framework for talking about social problems. It is perhaps the field of study that most obviously and powerfully expresses the intersections of scientific, evidence-based reasoning and direct human well-being. Furedi is not arguing against bad medicalization; he cites only medical rhetoric, not any faulty science. Even if Furedi were arguing directly against medicalization per se, the connection between a medical narrative and the specifically religious character of New Atheism is entirely absent: I'm aware of no religion — and Furedi does not inform us of any — that uses a medical narrative as an essential or important component. And unless Furedi wants to indict the medical profession itself as just as dogmatic, zealous and irrational as any theistic religion (in which Furedi would be talking about physicians, not atheists), noting the medical narrative of the New Atheists does not support but undermines his thesis.

Not only does medicine exemplify the same kind of scientific, empirical methods and humanistic goals as New Atheism, the medical narrative also encourages us to look — and look rationally — for treatments. Furedi claims the New Atheist medical narrative casts humans as "powerless, vulnerable and victims of their circumstances." But in general, medicine does not render people powerless; medicine empowers people. Cancer, for example, is not the punishment of a vengeful God, over which one has no control; it is a physical problem one can take power over using chemotherapy, radiation, etc. The medical narrative also helps people take power over addiction. Alcoholism is not the result of a moral failing or some vague weakness of will; it is caused by something in the brain, and it can be treated by learning to think in more-or-less well-defined ways. Again, if Furedi does not want to indict medicine itself for rendering people powerless and vulnerable, simply claiming that New Atheists use a medical narrative does not establish that we want to render people powerless.

As a self-identified New Atheist, I feel entitled to speak directly and with some authority about what New Atheism actually is and, more importantly, what it is not.

The New Atheist critique of religion is not and has never been about the fact that religious people have strong moral beliefs and advocate them vigorously. Every accusation of "zealotry", "fundamentalism", and "dogmatism" that I've seen has been directed towards the uncontroversial fact that New Atheists have strong moral beliefs, and we advocate them vigorously. Yes, we do indeed have something in common with religious people: we think we know what is good, and we actively promote it. New Atheists do not criticize the religion for thinking they know what is good; we criticize specific religious doctrines and people for being wrong about what is good, and we criticize most religious people for having a "bad" methodology for determining and justifying what is good. The same is true for physical facts. We don't criticize anyone just because they believe they know the truth; we criticize people, especially the religious, for believe that things to be true that are not not actually true (i.e. false or unprovable), and for having a "bad" methodology for determining and justifying what is actually true. And I'm not criticizing Furedi here because he believes the New Atheists are dangerous, I'm criticizing him because he's wrong, and especially because his arguments are so ridiculously poor.

It is neither dogmatic nor "fundamentalist", in our view, to advocate what one believes is the truth. We do not accuse the religious for being dogmatic just because they advocate what they believe to be true. What we do consider dogmatic is to believe or say that something is true "because I say so," because the Pope says so, because it was written in a collection of myths of an early Iron-age middle-eastern culture, because it is the (supposed) opinion of a 7th century warlord (however successful he might have been), because it is the claim of a charlatan with missing golden plates, or simply because the believer wants it to be true and wants everyone to agree. It is not fanaticism, in our view, to criticize a belief or say that it is false, however harsh or direct the language. We do not criticize the religious just because they criticize atheism. What we do consider fanaticism is to silence criticism, to place a topic — any topic — beyond the bounds of civilized discourse by using intimidation, threats, and actual violence.

The New Atheists, contrary to Furedi's assertion, do not simplistically equate religion with fundamentalism and fanaticism. Our critique, available to anyone with Google, is more subtle: the bad methodology of theistic religion makes it more difficult to argue against what we consider to be dogmatism and fanaticism. If it is legitimate to claim — without evidence — that God wants everyone to be happy, how is it illegitimate to claim — without evidence — that God wants gays, infidels, apostates, or especially women to suffer? Why is your private, revelatory knowledge better than his private, revelatory knowledge? The New Atheists simply say that because we have to rely on public knowledge — evidence about what actually does make promote happiness and alleviate suffering — to decide between competing claims of private knowledge, we can simply dispense entirely with the concept of private knowledge.

We may be many things, but we are not the sort of hypocrites and fools that Furedi calls us. Indeed, it is Furedi himself who is revealed as a hypocrite and a fool. Furedi believes he knows the truth (good for him), yet he condemns the New Atheists for nothing more than believing we know the truth. Furedi vigorously advocates strong moral beliefs (good for him), yet he condemns the New Atheists for nothing more than vigorously advocating strong moral beliefs. And his evaluation of the New Atheists' simplistic and inaccurate interpretation of religion as simplistic is itself unacceptably simplistic and inaccurate. I do not, of course, believe that the authors and compilers of the Bible were inspired by a mythical God, but neither do I believe they were fools; many were astute observers of human nature. So I do not feel the slightest bit of hypocrisy in quoting the Bible, Matt. 7:3: "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/74513936244132324/comments/default 0 The Stupid! It Burns! (plausible scenario edition) http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/stupid-it-burns-plausible-scenario.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/stupid-it-burns-plausible-scenario.html#comments Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:59:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=5660e193cd8dfdbdb505c0f5539b1319 the stupid! it burns! I usually don't feature comments here, but this one is too good:
Plausible scenario: Ignorant person or small group converts to New Atheism and misinterprets the mockery and ridicule of Christians and Muslims as endorsement for actions of greater magnitude than mockery and ridicule targeting Christians and Muslims. Ignorant person then bombs a church in an attempt to impress New Atheists or to demonstrate his zealousness for the cause.

Here's another scenario, just as plausible as Grim's. Schizophrenic reads a coded message into this picture. He wishes to impress the shape-shifting lizard people who are secretly ruling the world, so he decides to dump 1,000 tons of fertilizer into the lobby of WKRP in Cincinnati. Clearly, lolcats is acting terribly irresponsibly in posting these sorts of pictures. Who knows what might happen!?

Good grief.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/4759827808958669357/comments/default 0 Don’t Panic! http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/dont-panic.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/dont-panic.html#comments Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:44:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=84fc785df78d3d5c02cbb30fb61bc64e The Accidental Tutor: Don't Panic!
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/4981398118064149938/comments/default 0 The sky is falling http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/sky-is-falling.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/sky-is-falling.html#comments Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:49:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=b95d1983cd1e44368f3300dbe963bde8 precious snowflake feelings hurt. A few words of advice, readers: I really am a giant asshole on the blog most of the time. I can do it, but it's a real struggle for me to address egregious stupidity calmly and logically. When I get just a reiteration of the original argument without substantively addressing any of the points I made in my criticism, I'm not going to continue the struggle.

Here's the deal. Grizwald Grim worries that somewhere, somehow, some self-described New Atheist might not make the distinction between mockery and violence. But that's a stupid worry. We live in a big world with a lot of people in it. We can't ensure that every person everywhere always acts sensibly and humanely. The same criticism applies to Grim, perhaps moreso: what if someone were to take Grim's words wrong and do something stupid? What if some nutjob were to take criticism of The Phantom Menace wrong and try to do something dumb to George Lucas? At least with atheist criticism, we can draw objective distinctions (no advocating violence, no criticism for ineluctable characteristics, distinguishing between the individual and the general/typical); I don't see any way to distinguish between "dangerous" and "benign" ideas according to Grim. The point is not that we must advocate violence; the point is that every activity might be dangerous.

The lack of priests, bishops, etc. also cuts both ways. Grim is correct: we can't authoritatively decide who is an atheist, or who is a New Atheist. We can't say, "Sorry, mate. You have two felony convictions. You can't get into the club." But neither can we set any authoritative standards as to what New Atheists say. There is no New Atheist authority that Grim can persuade to set standards of discourse. This lack of authority, though, is a net benefit. No, there is no authority to enforce "good" behavior, but neither is there an authority to organize "bad" behavior. I think the danger of the second is greater than the danger of the first. The New Atheists do what we can to mitigate the potential for violence: we don't advocate or justify violence, and we criticize people who do advocate violence. We support (to a point) the ordinary civilized institutions that mitigate violence: democratic laws, police, judges, prisons, etc. But just like everyone else, we cannot prevent every far-fetched hypothetical.

It's always chancy to speculate about motives, especially unconscious or covert motives. Still, the evidence is at least suggestive. Grim has never objectively defined "mockery". Grim has never presented any plausible scenario where our undefined (and probably undefinable) "mockery" would lead to any violence, much less violence that would not be routinely managed by ordinary civilized institutions. Grim actually disagrees with the substance of the New Atheist position, even though he has made no argument that our position is actually untrue. I can see no remedy for Grim's complaints other than that the New Atheists just shut up, that we just not say something that he disagrees with. And he making the same argument made by people who really do want to use violence to shut up critics of their misogynistic, anti-science, narrow-minded, and authoritarian religious institutions. Why is he protecting these institutions? It can't be the prevention of harm: he is protecting people who are doing real, actual harm right now on the basis that some unspecified type of criticism might do some potential, hypothetical harm in the indeterminate future. That argument is nonsensical on its face. I don't think Grim actually supports these institutions, though. Maybe Grim is just a garden-variety asshole who wants to shut up anyone who disagrees with him.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/2944071802396887882/comments/default 0 The first step http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/first-step.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/first-step.html#comments Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:37:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=a865e4566147dc001415655b236b6036 response to my post targeting and bullying, Grizwald Grim has new arguments against the New Atheists. According to Grim, the stupid behavior of religious people is just a consequence of there being a lot of religious people, and Grim claims that "promoting and defending mockery based on group membership is the first step [emphasis omitted]" towards death threats and violence against a group. Grim also believes that mockery implies that the group is inferior and less human. Finally Grim thinks that mockery is ineffective for the goal (which he seems to share) of reducing or eliminating the social privilege of religion. Given the context (I'd want to see more supporting detail in a college paper), Grim makes a decent argument, but he's mistaken on all counts.

The idea that the stupid behavior of religious people is an artifact of the size of the group seems insupportable in the face of the evidence. We have ample evidence showing a direct causal mechanism between religious belief and stupid behavior. Both The God Delusion and god is not great provide considerable documentation. Almost all opponents of GLBTetc. marriage and queer rights in general are religious, they make directly religious arguments for their positions, and explicitly state that not allowing them to discriminate is specifically religious discrimination. Almost all opponents of abortion and women's rights are religious with specifically religious justifications. (It's notable that while sexism and racism are rife in the atheist community, the response is usually to deny that it exists rather than attempt to justify it.) More importantly, we know independently that a lot of religious beliefs actually held by religious people are flat-out delusional. to a person who strongly values the truth, delusional beliefs can have nothing but deleterious effects. That religious stupidity is an artifact is a legitimate null hypothesis, but just as it's delusional to reject the null hypothesis without evidence, it's delusional to accept the null hypothesis in the face of persuasive evidence to the contrary.

The "first step" argument is nothing more than the slippery slope fallacy. To make a valid slippery slope argument, you must show that there is no good objective way to distinguish between deprecated and acceptable actions. But New Atheists make three important objective distinctions. First, we do not criticize people for ineluctable traits: we criticize people for holding beliefs, and beliefs are not ineluctable. Second, there's an obvious and very sharp line between mockery and criticism on the one hand and violence on the other: violence, threats of violence, and violent imagery.

The third distinction is a little more subtle. Grim is somewhat vague when he talks about "targeting". There are (at least) two legitimate interpretations of this term. In one sense, it just means choosing to criticize this person rather than that person just because the critic prefers to criticize one group rather than another. There's nothing wrong with this sort of "targeting": black people tend to target racism; women tend to target sexism; gay people tend to target homophobia. No one can criticize everything, so we generally tend to pick and choose based on our specific interests.

Second, it might mean mocking someone or drawing a conclusion about someone just because he adopts a label: "You call yourself a Christian, therefore you are stupid." Targeting in sense is not necessarily bad: I doubt anyone would object to mocking someone who calls himself a neo-Nazi, or drawing the conclusion that he's not at all fond of blacks or Jews, just because he adopts that label. However, given the broad application of most religious labels, this kind of behavior is inappropriate. But the New Atheists don't actually do that. There's a difference between making a negative generalization (supported by evidence and with a discernible mechanism) about a group and actually mocking people just because they belong to that group.

Indeed, it is precisely because it seems extremely difficult for a member of a group to separate generalizations about that group and personal mockery that Grim himself is on a legitimate slippery slope. It's easy, I think, for a Muslim to hear the criticism that Islam (as a religion) is generally sexist as the accusation that he personally is a sexist. It's easy to see mockery of some egregiously sexist action of an Islamic authority (impeccably supported by quotations from the Koran and Hadith) as mockery of the individual just because he self-identifies as a Muslim. "What!?" he exclaims, "I'm not a sexist!" Fine. If the shoe doesn't fit, don't wear it. Just because I might believe, for example, that 80% of Muslims are sexist doesn't mean that I believe that 100% of them are in that 80%. (I might note that if they are not sexist, it's odd that they self-identify with a religion that seems to have sexism as such an integral part of the foundational documents, and where a majority of the adherents agree with that sexism, but that's a discussion for another day.)

I do the same thing: I take offense all the time when atheism is criticized. The difference, of course, is that I inquire as to whether the criticism is true. If it is, I get over myself, accept the criticism, and work to correct it. The question is not whether the criticism is pejorative, the question is whether it's true. And when I do express offense, it's not because the generalization is pejorative, but because it's untrue.

If Grim wants to argue the falsity of New Atheist generalizations about religion, let him make that argument. It's tough: you have to do actual research, but it's not impossible. But if Grim wants to argue that we simply should not give offense — defined only by the reaction of the listener — regardless of the truth, then he has certainly offended me, and he should — by his own lights — just STFU and GBTW. Pull down those mocking, offensive, disrespectful posts, Grim, which have deeply offended me and hurt my precious little snowflake feelings! Stop throwing stones at the New Atheist castle! If you don't, I'll come over and rearrange your furniture!
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/7469647160928581719/comments/default 0 The Stupid! It Burns! (Thursday hat trick edition) http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/stupid-it-burns-thursday-hat-trick.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/stupid-it-burns-thursday-hat-trick.html#comments Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:23:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=181725dbdb98e8b21155581b5b05138f the stupid! it burns! A trio of stupid today!

What’s Going on with the Atheists?
If there was ever any doubt that Atheism is a belief system (rather than a factual system based on empirical proof), the Atheists, themselves, are removing any doubt. If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. Two unrelated stories were reported this week which clearly make the case.

First, a group of Atheists in England have proposed a 151 foot tower in London to celebrate “new atheism.” This tower is being proposed as a “Temple to Atheism.” Now why would Atheists need a temple?

The second story is the account of an upcoming Atheist rock festival at the Ft. Bragg military base called “Rock Beyond Belief.”

Atheistic Materialism’s Failure to Account for Enduring Personal Identity: Part II
One problem for strict atheistic materialism is its failure to account for enduring personal identity over time; since the body undergoes constant intrinsic material change.
It's so cute when idiots try to mimic the conventions of philosophy.

Top 10 Questions for Atheists
Here are some questions I have for the lowest of the low, the worst people, the most disgusting form of life, the most hateful of all human beings, the lowest possible form of existence – the atheist.

#10 – Do you take pleasure in telling lies or are you just so gullible that you believe any anti-religious lie you hear?
It just goes downhill from there.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/1290589578020278436/comments/default 0 The social value of religion http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/social-value-of-religion.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/social-value-of-religion.html#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:22:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=5b8a44c10d3d25607c80589da4fa6fc1 But from where I stand these days, the only thing I see religion doing in the public sector is gay bashing and telling women, mostly poor and desperate and in deplorable financial and personal situations, what to do with their bodies. I see busybodies deciding what drugs they can dispense to which customers, or deciding that they don’t have to issue a marriage license because of some petty deity that I don’t believe in told them to hate their fellow citizens and ignore the law. In a country in dire financial straits but still spending billions and billions of dollars on education, I see religious folks actively and openly working to make our schoolkids dumber. I see them shooting people who provided a medical procedure, and I see others rummaging through people’s personal lives to find out who hasn’t lived up the word of God. I see glassy-eyed fools running for President claiming that vaccines that save lives actually cause cancer, or that if you get raped and are pregnant, you should just lie back and think of Jeebus and make the best of a bad situation. In fact, everywhere you look these days, if Christianity or religion is getting a mention, it means something ugly is happening and someone somewhere is being victimized, marginalized, or otherwise abused. Go read some of the arguments against integration and you’ll see the same bible verses used today against homosexuals. Fifty years from now, they’ll be recycling them again to trash someone else they don’t like or who isn’t good enough for them.

— John Cole
Read, as they say, the rest.

(via PZ Myers)
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/4657988515735870252/comments/default 0 The Stupid! It Burns! (deluded polytheist edition) http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/stupid-it-burns-deluded-polytheist.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/stupid-it-burns-deluded-polytheist.html#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:16:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=be2f195ada949e93e7fb76eef61f5202 the stupid! it burns! Stand Up to Militant Atheists in Public Society
Here is an irony about atheism: Atheists are self-deluded polytheists. ... In denying the existence of God, the atheist is saying wittingly or unwittingly that he is his own god. Since the atheist is his own god only those that have authority over him have nominal control of their life. ... Science is a deity because science is the knowledge fount for human understanding. ... [Thus] dogmatic/militant atheism has a stringent belief system that can easily be quantified as a set of religious values that denies the existence of a supernatural existence which for Christians would be God Almighty that is all and in all.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/4465096439796519625/comments/default 0 Tips for Tim Tebow http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/tips-for-tim-tebow.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/02/tips-for-tim-tebow.html#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:03:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=d0121734e6a33f872546e08fdb25db59 TIPS FOR TIM TEBOWBy Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA
 
Tim Tebow, quarterback for the Denver Broncos in the National Football League, is being widely, and seemingly endlessly, promoted—as an icon not only in the realm of sports but much more broadly. I have followed sports, including football, for many decades now, and I cannot recall ever witnessing anything like this. In a highly orchestrated and concentrated campaign, Tebow is being held up as a “worker of miracles” on the football field but, more than that, as a “role model” and moral standard-bearer.
 
This hype around Tebow is completely and strikingly out of proportion to any demonstrated ability or actual accomplishments on Tebow’s part, in terms of performance as a professional football quarterback. If you have been paying attention not only to the arena of sports but to things more broadly in this society and the world, you should be able to quickly guess why this is: Tim Tebow is a religious fanatic—of the Christian fundamentalist variety—who aggressively promotes his medieval views and values in a way that is obviously considered useful by significant sections of the powers-that-be in the U.S. Among other things, during the Super Bowl (the American professional football championship) a couple of years ago, Tebow was the centerpiece of an ad whose purpose was to oppose the right of women to reproductive freedom, in particular abortion. The ad was sponsored by a right-wing Christian organization which aggressively opposes the right of women to abortion (it is also a fact, and highly revealing, that as a general rule the reactionary Christian fundamentalist forces that oppose a woman’s right to abortion also want to ban birth control).
 
This promotion of what is in reality a fascist outlook and program, in the form of fundamentalist Christianity, is aided by the notion—aggressively championed by some, and far too often unchallenged by others—that there is a direct connection between how religious someone is and how “moral” he or she is. Which avoids the critical question: What is the content of this morality? More specifically: What, in fact, is being promoted through the propagation of religious fundamentalism, including the kind of “Biblical literalism”—insisting that the Bible is the word of God which must be accepted as absolutely true, and as the standard for behavior, in every respect—with which Tim Tebow is associated? In reality, it is irrational, anti-rational ignorance and superstition—which denies well-established scientific fact, such as evolution, and is opposed to the scientific method and approach in general—as well as the insistence upon all kinds of reactionary, extremely oppressive and literally murderous values, social relations, and actions. And this is not something that should somehow be overlooked, excused, or minimized because Tebow works hard at being a quarterback (has a “good work ethic”) and supports religious charities (something reactionary religious fundamentalists often do).
 
Since one of the main ways in which Tim Tebow in particular propagandizes and proselytizes for his religious fundamentalism is through continual and prominent citation of verses from the Bible, I am offering the following tips for Tim Tebow, in terms of passages from the Bible he should cite and call attention to, in order to bring to light what is the actual content—the fundamental worldview, relations, values and morals—which are promoted, and indeed insisted upon, in the Bible.
 
  • Deuteronomy, Chapter 7; Exodus, Chapter 32; Numbers 31 (especially v. 13-18 and 31-35). These are just some of the passages in the Bible in which the God of this Bible insists that people who practice another religion, or who oppose or stand in the way of this God’s will, must be slaughtered and utterly destroyed—or, in the case of virgin women, raped and enslaved—without mercy.
 
  • Exodus 20:1-17 (this contains the Ten Commandments, with Commandment 10 of particular relevance); 1 Timothy 6:1-6; Ephesians 6:5-6; Colossians 3:22-24. Again, these are just some passages—among many which could be cited—from the New Testament as well as the Old Testament of the Bible, where slavery is upheld and treated as legitimate.
 
  • Deuteronomy 22:13-21 (in particular v. 20 and 21). Here is it said that women who are not virgins when they marry must be put to death.
 
  • Exodus 22:18 Women who are accused of being witches (sorcerers) must be put to death as well.
 
  • Leviticus 21:9 A priest’s daughter who becomes a prostitute, and thereby profanes her father, must be put to death.
 
  • Exodus 20:1-17, the Ten Commandments Commandment 10 (Exodus 20:17) treats wives (as well as slaves) as part of the property of a man (“thy neighbor”) which must not be coveted.
 
  • Ephesians 5:22-23; 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 Here Paul insists that women must be subordinate to their husbands, and in fact must be silent and subordinate in the churches. In 1 Timothy 2:11-15, Paul says that the subordination of women is because of the role of woman (Eve) in original sin, and that child-bearing and the pain associated with it is a punishment women must endure because of the sin of Eve in succumbing to Satan in the garden of Eden and seducing Adam into eating the apple (see also Genesis chapter 3, in particular v. 16). In these passages, as well as many others throughout the Bible, suffocating and brutal oppression of women is insisted upon and sanctified. And, as we see in Numbers chapter 31, as well as many other places in the Bible (such as Isaiah, chapters 10-14, and Psalm 137), the mass raping of women, and the murder of babies and little children, is not only justified but said to be righteous, if it is carried out on behalf of the supposed one true God.
 
  • Leviticus 20:13 Here it is said not only that homosexuality is an abomination but that homosexuals must be killed.
 
  • Proverbs 23:13-14; Exodus 21:17; Deuteronomy 21:18-21; Romans 1:30 In these passages—again, from the New Testament as well as the Old Testament—we are not only told that children must be beaten in order to keep them on the right path (“spare the rod and spoil the child”) but that children who are rebellious against their parents must be put to death.
 
  • Leviticus 24:11-16; Deuteronomy 13:5 Anyone who curses the God of the Bible—or who “blasphemes the name of the Lord”—is to be executed, as is any prophet who calls on people to rebel against God.
 
  • The book of Numbers—once again, particularly Numbers 31:13-18 and 31-35 In Numbers, perhaps even more than other books of the Bible, the maniacal and merciless bloodthirstiness of the one true God of the Bible is graphically shown, in his insistence on slaughter, plunder, rapine and rape. In Numbers 31, especially verses 13-18, Moses, the messenger and enforcer for this God, becomes furious with his followers because, in attacking the Midianites, they only killed the adult men and stole some of their property: go back again, commands Moses, speaking in God’s name, and massacre all the males, children as well as grown men, and kill also all the females who are not virgins—but as for the females who are virgins, carry them off as sex slaves (concubines) for yourselves.
 
  • Matthew 17:14-20 (also Luke 8:26-39) Here we see that Jesus is ignorant about epilepsy and seizures—he treats this as a matter of demon possession, as opposed to the true, scientifically established understanding that epilepsy has to do with chemical and electrical processes in the nervous system and the brain—and in voicing and acting on this ignorance, Jesus afflicts people with the cruel notion that their sickness is their own fault, a result of their own sinful conduct.
 
  • John 14:6 and John 15:6 Here we are told, by Jesus himself, that he is the only way to salvation. Those who don’t follow him will be condemned to eternal damnation, that is, endless torture: burning in hell, excruciating physical as well as mental pain, torment and anguish. (See also Luke 19:1-27, especially v. 27.)
 
The above are only some passages from the Bible—and many, many more could be cited—which clearly illustrate the truth that (as I put it in the book, Away With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World) the Bible, taken literally, is a horror. (I would be happy to provide Tim Tebow with a copy of this book.)
 
If Tim Tebow wants to truly inform people about what the Bible represents, let him cite the above verses of the Bible and acknowledge what they actually advocate. If he wants to claim that he does not insist on taking the Bible as the literal and absolute word of the one true God, then let him say that openly and without equivocation—and admit that the Bible is not a divine work, but rather the work of human beings, which is full of ignorance and superstition as well as the advocacy of all kinds of truly horrendous values, relations, and actions. If he wants to say that he does not uphold what is put forward in what has been cited here, then let him disavow not only these particular Biblical passages but indeed the Bible as a whole, for the words spoken in these passages are not presented in the Bible as deviations from the righteous path, advocated by enemies of the one true God. No, these are said to be the words of the Biblical God himself, or of those identified, in the Bible itself, as the most worthy messengers, prophets, and apostles of this God—such as Moses, Isaiah, and Paul—as well as the supposed son of this God, Jesus.
 
Meanwhile, enough with the incessant campaign to not only portray Tim Tebow as a far greater football player than he actually is, but also to portray him as a nearly god-like icon, serving as a moral example and compass. Enough of the morality, and all that is bound up with the morality, that Tim Tebow stands for and aggressively shoves in everyone’s face. 
 
[This article originally appeared in Revolution #258, 5 Feb 2012, Tips for Tim Tebow. Reprinted with permission.]
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/2770263066439038281/comments/default 0 The evolution of altruism by individual selection http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/evolution-of-altruism-by-individual.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/evolution-of-altruism-by-individual.html#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2012 02:40:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=314f2aec09580835da223f3c6013c2e6 Jerry Coyne reviews Michael Price's review of A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution, by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis. Basically (and I can't do justice to Coyne's comments), the evidence suggests that "altruism" as we actually see it looks like a standard evolutionary "arms race" between cooperators and would-be "free riders", which is explainable by individual selection.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/8500819781488238679/comments/default 0 Targeting and bullying http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/targeting-and-bullying.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/targeting-and-bullying.html#comments Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:57:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=b85ff9c4bd566896a9e0b8c945b47b41 Atheism in 2012: Double Standards & Hypocrisy is not stupid. He's still wrong, of course, but he's expressing a definite position on a controversial issue.

Grim is not certain, so let me clarify that I definitely do self-identify as an atheist (the big red A in the sidebar is a clue), and I self-identify as a New Atheist, because I have a lot in common with people such as PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins.

I cannot improve on Grim's presentation of his primary argument:
As the obvious common thread when referring to a group as atheist is their common lack of belief in a deity, the article is likely to lead one to believe that the inclusive group is being targeted because of their religious beliefs (or lack thereof).

As the cartoon series in question is (barely debatable) obvious mockery of the behavior and attitudes of the religious as observed by the cartoonist, and the cartoon uses characters from those religions to express that mockery - it's evident that the mockery is targeted on the basis of religious beliefs.

I'm of the mind that it's a double standard to target a group because of their religious beliefs and then rage against those that would target others because of their religious beliefs (or lack thereof).

I do not object to people targeting my beliefs because I am an atheist. I have never seen any atheist blog arguing that atheism should be immune to criticism, mockery, or ridicule for any reason, much less for the reason that the author has targeted atheism. For example, the Barmaid directly concurs: "I don't want my fundamental beliefs protected from attack or ridicule, thanks." I don't know of any atheist, or any New Atheist, who would disagree with this unequivocal statement.

Target away. Attack as best you can. Ridicule as much as you please. Criticize to your heart's content. Bring it on. As long as you stick directly and indirectly to words and ideas, take your best shot.

We do not object to targeting. We do not object to mockery, ridicule, or criticism. We do, however, object to threatened or actual physical coercion to suppress any speech (outside well-established legal boundaries, e.g. incitement, "fighting words", etc.). When an institution is in a position of authority over an individual, sanctions are inherently coercive. When an individual makes a credible threat of violence, or when an individual actually acts violently, that's coercion. And we object to coercion to suppress any speech, not just when the speech is targeted towards one particular group or another.

And atheists do not use coercion to suppress others speech. We do not threaten or use violence. We do not threaten or use official sanctions. The closest you'll find to atheists, secularists, or scientists using any kind of official sanctions is denying tenure or promotion to scientists promoting Intelligent Design, and in every case you'll find the denial of tenure or promotion was based not on the person's views, but on objective measures of their scientific competence.

Of course, atheist organizations do prioritize objecting to real offenses specifically against atheists. That's what special-interest organizations are for. Atheists do not expect NAACP or NOW to prioritize the interests of white male atheists. Prioritization is not just a matter of expediency; it also stems from the same philosophical roots as the judicial standing that only an actual (alleged) victim of a tort has standing to sue. Once the victim chooses to sue, the matter is up for social decision, but the victim is specially privileged over whether or not to put the matter in the social arena. But just because atheist organizations prioritize offenses against atheists does not mean that we object just because the perpetrator chose atheists as a specific target.

Grim happily modifies his earlier stance. He seems to retract his contradictory position that he supports the right to free expression on the one hand but will not protect it on the other, he instead explicitly supports an exception to the right of free expression, presumably enforced through legitimate legal means:
I accept the limited right of freedom of expression and will vehemently defend anyone's right to expression that doesn't infringe on other rights. Cross that line, start using it to infringe on the right of freedom of religion, and my support stops at the line.
Grim argues that mockery crosses that line:
Frequency and recurrence of such mockery starts to look like a campaign to to dehumanize a people because of their religion. If the campaign remains intact and escalates above mockery, you're well on your way to persecution on the basis of religious beliefs (or lack there of).
A position and an argument. Full marks!

But in today's context, mockery does not infringe on freedom of religion. One important feature of modern life is the social, political, and legal privilege afforded to religious belief. This social privilege, labeling a belief as "religious" exempts it from not only mockery and ridicule but also rational criticism, prompts much of the New Atheist agenda. In a truly secular society, where labeling a belief as "religious" would not afford it any special status, mockery might well be inappropriate. But so long as the religious wield real power on the basis of their religion, mockery is a legitimate social response.

Secondly, criticizing a belief does not dehumanize people, because beliefs are not ineluctable. To criticize an ineluctable characteristic such as race, sex, national origin, or physical "disability", tends to dehumanize a person because no person can ever change his or her race, sex, etc. But a person can change his beliefs, and the whole point of having a society, the Libertarian fantasy of "rugged individualists" notwithstanding, is to influence and change each others' beliefs. If your beliefs are indefensible, change them.

It's almost impossible to draw the line between mockery and legitimate criticism. I don't mean that there might be some gray area — that's true of almost every distinction — I mean that it's hard to come up with a definition that does not exclude any criticism. The response to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion is a case in point. This book, which to my eyes is calm, reasoned, and nuanced, has been denounced as the worst sort of illegitimate, disrespectful mockery, and not just by religious believers. And as any reader of academic literature knows, the most savage insults can be couched in the most rarefied academic language. A ban on "mockery" seems like the essence of the slippery slope: it's not that there's some gray area, it's that it's all gray area.

Atheists do not object to offenses against atheists just because someone has specifically chosen an atheist to offend. Atheists and atheist organizations prioritize offenses against atheists because that's what special-interest organizations routinely do in a society, and because atheists have the most standing to object to offenses against atheists. We do not consider mockery or ridicule to be offenses; we consider, rather, the use of coercion, violence, threats, and official sanctions, to silence our well-established right of free expression to constitute offenses. Some atheists use mockery in no small part because of the social privilege of religious belief; mockery is a well-established political tool for opposing the dominant majority. Finally, it seems impossible to exempt mockery and ridicule from our notions of protected free speech. Grizwald Grim might find our tools objectionable, and he's free to object, but his arguments for silencing us simply fail.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/314887536275324484/comments/default 0 The Stupid! It Burns! (yet another omniscience edition) http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/stupid-it-burns-yet-another-omniscience.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/stupid-it-burns-yet-another-omniscience.html#comments Sun, 29 Jan 2012 19:20:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=0b5488ccf79e469197c3628e7ac4a3ae the stupid! it burns! Atheists Must Be Divine!
Dr. Chalmers discuss this saying,
"To be able to assert that there is no God, we must walk the whole expanse of infinity, and ascertain by observation that no evidence of God exists anywhere. Grant that with the narrow limits of our observation no traces or vestiges of Deity be found, does it follow that throughout all immensity a Being, with the essence and sovereignty of a God, is nowhere to be found?

Yes, God might me hiding behind the couch. Ho hum.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/5683414942093358231/comments/default 0 Freedom of expression http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/freedom-of-expression.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/freedom-of-expression.html#comments Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:06:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=4b2996534d831dcf0c2b7f0e55a3d5e7 The Stupid! It Burns!; any reader with a triple-digit IQ a Google PhD will immediately get it. But Grizwald Grim has politely asked me why I think his post is burningly stupid. He won't understand the explanation, of course — if he were intelligent enough to understand the critique, he wouldn't have posted something so stupid to begin with — but his request gives me an opportunity to heap additional abuse on someone whose stupidity is exceeded only by his self-opinion.

The most obvious feature of Grim's post is that he himself is acting like an insufferable prick. I don't mind prickishness; I'm often a prick myself, and I'm being one now. But Grim is an insufferable prick complaining about other people being insufferable pricks, which makes him a hypocrite. I, on the other hand, am being a prick because Grim is a hypocrite (as well as being stupid). Not only is Grim being a obvious hypocrite, he is (incorrectly) condemning others for being hypocrites. Just by itself, two levels of clueless self-parody is enough to earn him a spot on TSIB.

But Grim is not only a stupid, hypocritical prick, he also so deeply misunderstands bullying and the concept of rights that I wonder how he's able to find his mouth with a spoonful of soup.

Bullying is coercion. Mockery and disrespect are not (for adults) bullying. Grim is correct: atheists are mostly immune to (legitimate) mockery precisely because we don't have many obviously stupid beliefs to mock. (Of course, that doesn't stop a lot of religious believers from inventing stupid things they think we do or ought to believe, and mocking those made-up beliefs. But that's grist for other TSIB posts.) Grim links to Paula Kirby's article, Worrying developments for freedom of expression in the UK, and highlights the case of Rhys Morgan, who, according to Kirby, "has apparently received veiled threats of expulsion or suspension from his school if he does not remove a Jesus & Mo image from his personal Facebook page" and has received threats of violence from his Muslim classmates. Morgan was not attempting to coerce anyone. He didn't harass anyone, he didn't threaten anyone, he didn't demand anyone be expelled or suspended, and he certainly didn't actually harm anyone. Morgan is, contrary to Grim's assertion, not a bully. And atheists in general do not engage in coercive behavior, except to insist on the ordinary social coercion to prevent harassment, threats, and overt violence prescribed by law.

Finally, Grim risibly completely fails to grasp the concept of rights. Regardless of their ontological origin — objective, subjective, or socially constructed — to accept a right is to accept a social obligation to protect that right. The connection between rights and protection is not just an entailment, it's an identity. So when Grim both asserts the right to free expression and in the same sentence implies that he will not protect those who exercise the right of free expression, he is blatantly contradicting himself.

When Grim says, "You're on your own when the consequences of being an insufferable prick come back to haunt you," he is essentially saying that if someone murdered a 17 year old for posting a cartoon on his Facebook page, he would give the murderer a round of applause instead of a lifetime in jail. I am a civilized person, so I will not harass, threaten, or harm Grim (and even this second post is at his explicit request), but I can with a clear conscience say that he is a stupid, contemptible, disgusting excuse for a human being.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/950632941631051685/comments/default 0 The five-paragraph essay http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/five-paragraph-essay.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/five-paragraph-essay.html#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:22:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=b03d40374068af738efa8d3e307bf483 other blog: The five-paragraph essay.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/8495942017704025140/comments/default 0 Attack and ridicule http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/attack-and-ridicule.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/attack-and-ridicule.html#comments Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:55:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=5c4ca542713bec3271e62ce9b18416cd

multi, from Jesus and Mo
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/3266649942865775055/comments/default 0 Shit skeptics say http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/shit-skeptics-say.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/shit-skeptics-say.html#comments Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:49:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=fcdf4bb7fce7edb19a39804cdc4f5bd5

(via PZ Myers)
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/8139635129770693769/comments/default 0 Thanks! http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/thanks.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/thanks.html#comments Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:10:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=9171a7789cf4c6036bff6b50f764dd24
They're going straight to the top of my reading list, and I'll post a review/reflection of each book when I finish reading it.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/6277828881667094146/comments/default 0 The Barefoot Bum 2012-01-23 03:40:00 http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/this-right-of-privacy-whether-it-be.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/this-right-of-privacy-whether-it-be.html#comments Mon, 23 Jan 2012 02:40:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=b0e4aa1b90d492f3b8602d24931dc9de This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. The detriment that the State would impose upon the pregnant woman by denying this choice altogether is apparent. Specific and direct harm medically diagnosable even in early pregnancy may be involved. Maternity, or additional offspring, may force upon the woman a distressful life and future. Psychological harm may be imminent. Mental and physical health may be taxed by child care. There is also the distress, for all concerned, associated with the unwanted child, and there is the problem of bringing a child into a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it. In other cases, as in this one, the additional difficulties and continuing stigma of unwed motherhood may be involved. All these are factors the woman and her responsible physician necessarily will consider in consultation.

— Harry Blackmun, Roe v. Wade
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/6461561884132075923/comments/default 0 Real and financial economics http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/real-and-financial-economics.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/real-and-financial-economics.html#comments Sun, 22 Jan 2012 12:46:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=8487a8f22cfd520889cca802db58f8a2 What is "real"? (commentary)
Part 2a: Real microeconomics (demand shocks)
Part 2b: Real microeconomics (supply shocks)
Interlude: Real and financial economics

I come to economics and political science from an unusual place. I was a computer programmer for many years, and an avid reader of popularizations of science. When I'm thinking about science and engineering, I'm always keeping one eye on the physical. I'm always asking, "What does this have to do with what's physically happening?" I have to be especially careful about the physical as a computer programmer. I mostly worked on business information systems: my job was to help people track and control what was physically happening in their business. (I also had to worry about what was more-or-less physically happening with the bits and bytes.) We have to worry about what's physically happening with the economy, too. All too often, economics deals with money, but money — even hard money — is not itself physical. Money is still important, but it's not physical. It's not an end in itself.

Imagine that for a thousand years, everyone in the country (or the world) decided to consume nothing but the bare minimum necessary for physical survival (mud huts, rice and beans, etc.), work as hard as possible, and put all our (fiat) money in the bank to grow at compound interest. In a thousand years, would our descendents be fabulously wealthy? Of course not. Not only is it unclear what we would be working at, our physical productive capabilities would be geared towards producing only subsistence. The money in the bank would represent nothing real.

"Hard" money doesn't change anything. Imagine that for a thousand years we produced only subsistence goods, and with our extra time we all worked as hard as possible getting every possible gram of silver, gold, platinum, etc. out of the ground (we might even work on producing "hard money" by transmutation). Would our descendents be wealthy? Again, of course not: they would have a lot of yellow metal in vaults and the productive capability only to produce a lot of gold; they wouldn't have cars, televisions, cell phones, and they wouldn't have any more capacity to build such things than if we, their parents, had spent a thousand years masturbating.

To be wealthy in the real sense, we have to have physical goods and services that it gives us pleasure to actually consume. Money itself is not the end; money is the way we try to work out socially what physical goods and services to produce, and who gets to consume them. At a microeconomic level, how many lattes should we make? How many hours of yoga instruction should we provide? It's a trade-off: producing more of one means producing less of the other. We use money to try to balance the production of the two for maximum happiness. At the macroeconomic level, how much of our time and effort should we spend actually making stuff? How much should we spend investing, making factories, educating people, and improving our stuff-making technology? Again, these are trade-offs; we use actions such as monetary and fiscal policy to balance between consumption and investment.

If we lose sight of the underlying reality, of the physical production of goods and services, we enter the land of theology. Indeed, one economist I read (I can't recall which; JFGI if you're interested) calls this "theoclassical" economics. We do have to have a control system to manage a 300,000,000 person economy, and we do have to spend some time maintaining the integrity of the control system itself, but if we don't always think carefully about the effects on the real, physical production of goods and services, worrying about the properties of the control system itself is at best pointless and at worst mendacious.

(As an aside, and because I'll take shots at Ayn Rand whenever possible, it's notable that Rand has to handwave away the real economy to make her "strike" work. Without John Galt's perpetual motion machine and magic science, the strike would have failed: the strikers would have starved long before the lights of New York went out.)

As a more concrete example, think about what really happens when you put your money in the bank. It's not enough to say only, "Oh, the bank pays 2% p.a. interest, compounded quarterly." What's the underlying reality? Really, you are making a decision to invest rather than consume. If all goes well, your investment should make the production of goods and services more efficient: after a year, we will be able in general to produce stuff with less human time. Indeed, if all goes well, we should increase our productive capabilities by exactly 2%. That's why, if you invest rather than consume some amount of real stuff today, you should be able to consume 2% more real stuff next year: we have spent a year becoming more efficient at producing stuff.

One advantage of tying financial economics to real economics is that we can use the philosophy and all the tools and techniques of scientific examination to discuss the physical; we don't need to to descend into any "praxeology" bullshit.

Whenever you see an economist (or anyone else) talking about financial economics without referencing the underlying reality (or telling a false or unfalsifiable story about the physical economy), you should call bullshit. Does someone say that taxation, or debt, or fiat money, etc. is bad? These are just example of moving money around; they cannot be intrinsically bad or good, because money itself isn't real. Ask, "Under the current conditions, what are the effects of adjusting the control system (money) on the physical, measurable, scientifically examinable reality?" Always always always keep one eye on the physical.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/890954093541971471/comments/default 0 Money for nothin’ http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/money-for-nothin.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/money-for-nothin.html#comments Sun, 22 Jan 2012 03:35:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=044098660f43112b93fc55c2309a1819 buy me a book. Thanks!
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/3108572336629145882/comments/default 0 The psychology of poverty http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/psychology-of-poverty.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/psychology-of-poverty.html#comments Fri, 20 Jan 2012 11:10:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=c51016374dd044997006ed0dd0673f67 The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor aren't really stupid. Human beings in any environment do not operate by "rational" thought, i.e. thinking through the consequences of every possible action in every situation, and picking the action that will result in the best outcome. Instead, people develop habits of thought, and then pick the most applicable habit to each situation and act accordingly. Rationality is, I think, more applicable to evaluating our habits: does this habit usually lead to a moderately good outcome; if it does not, the rational response is adjust the habit.

The habits that Cheese describes are, when you're poor, actually rational, in that they usually lead to a moderately good outcome, and the habits that middle- and upper-class people develop would typically be disastrous. When you're poor, according to Cheese, you're always facing critical-priority expenses. You don't buy a new dryer when it's on sale because your car needs a new transmission that month. The only thing you buy in bulk is food, because transaction costs (driving to the grocery store) dominate food shopping. (Also, I suspect that, like me, a lot of poor people buy prepared food because they work a lot, at physically demanding jobs; cooking takes time, energy, and attention that's already in short supply.)

What Cheese means by "stupid", I think, is that when poor people suddenly become slightly less poor, it's hard to abandon the rational habits they learned and developed to survive poverty, but have become counterproductive in their new environment. But that's more-or-less how habits have to work; the propensity to behave in a certain way that is easily abandoned will not serve as a survival strategy, especially under stress.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/1687633560178948532/comments/default 0 The Stupid! It Burns! (freedom edition) http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/stupid-it-burns-freedom-edition.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/stupid-it-burns-freedom-edition.html#comments Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:23:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=49ea6cfea51873470dad16e5a544b5c5 the stupid! it burns! This gem doesn't really capture the point of Atheists are Bullies; it's hard to figure out the author's actual point, much less the quality of his support. But wow.
You are completely entitled to freedom of expression. However, if you use that freedom to be an insufferable prick - you're on your own when the consequences of being an insufferable prick come back to haunt you. So don't come crying to me to help protect your freedom of expression. If that's how you're going to use it, as far as I'm concerned you don't deserve it.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/1708218621321241645/comments/default 0 Shit Christians say to atheists http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/shit-christians-say-to-atheists.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/shit-christians-say-to-atheists.html#comments Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:05:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=91431d74a8f5008ba5c4eb105fd4f913

(via Richard Metzger)
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/4465601527298856316/comments/default 0 The Stupid! It Burns! (16 things edition) http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/stupid-it-burns-16-things-edition.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/stupid-it-burns-16-things-edition.html#comments Sun, 15 Jan 2012 16:26:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=8ba0c9208dbb84177595906f2cdebbc3 the stupid! it burns! 16 Things Atheists Need Christians to Know is definitely not stupid. I include it  because 90% of the stupidity I highlight here comes when some Christian (and occasionally Muslim) does not understand one or more of these points. Add in the Establishment Clause (the prohibition on the government establishing a religion is in the Constitution precisely to exempt individual decisions from the will of the majority) and you get 99% of the stupid.

To paraphrase:
  1. "Atheists are atheists"
  2. Don't capitalize "atheist"
  3. We're not angry at God
  4. Deep down, we're still atheists
  5. "'You're such a nice person! I can't believe you're an atheist!' is not a compliment'
  6. There really are atheists in foxholes
  7. "How can our lives have any purpose without God? One word: chocolate."
  8. We're not going to believe "just in case"
  9. Let's dispense with the questions we both know are stupid
  10. We didn't "turn our backs" on God
  11. Yes, we've heard about Jesus
  12. You won't miss us when you get to heaven
  13. Yes, we know we can't prove there's no God
  14. Yes, we can be moral without God
  15. Either you're a member of a persecuted minority or you're part of the dominant majority. Pick one.
  16. Christianity used to be a persecuted minority; now that you're in the majority, how do you want to treat other minorities?
There will be a quiz on this every Tuesday.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/8820747762934031831/comments/default 0 Real Microeconomics (supply shocks) http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/real-microeconomics-supply-shocks.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/real-microeconomics-supply-shocks.html#comments Sat, 14 Jan 2012 13:02:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=4963e676e583ba4efcfbda30e58ad194 What is "real"? (commentary)
Part 2a: Real microeconomics (demand shocks)
Part 2b: Real microeconomics (supply shocks)

In the last post, I talked about real "demand shocks", when we want a lot more of something than we can presently produce. There are also real "supply shocks". A supply shock happens when something becomes considerably more expensive: given some set of resources, we can produce less of something we want or need than we could yesterday, with no compensation in the production of other things.

But what do I mean by "more expensive"? I'm talking about real economics, economics without money. The only resource we can arbitrarily change is how we spend our time. We cannot just arbitrarily make decide to have more iron: if we want more iron, human beings have to spend time digging it out of the ground. (We might also spend time creating machines to dig it out of the ground, or we might choose to use up some of the labor "embodied" in an already created digging machine to dig up iron instead of copper or uranium). So, by more expensive, I mean producing something requires more labor* than before, labor that has an opportunity cost, that could have been used to produce something else.

*Strictly speaking, socially necessary abstract labor time.

Real supply shocks tend to "creep"; in this sense, "shock" is kind of a misnomer. (In economics, "shock" just means something exogenous, i.e. in some sense outside the normal economic system.) We don't wake up one morning to find that hats suddenly take twice as much labor to make as yesterday. Rather, the real cost — the labor — tends to inexorably increase over a long period of time.

Oil is a good example of a supply shock. We believe (IIRC) we have in the last century extracted about half the oil that's in the ground. The problem is that we've already extracted the oil that's "easy" to get to, and increases in our productivity are starting to fall behind the increase in difficulty in extracting the rest of the oil. We're not going to "run out" of oil; oil will just take more and more labor time to extract, until the oil that's left is so expensive it will be used only for those things we really really want.

In a similar sense, agriculture before the industrial revolution was in a state of creeping supply shock. As the population grew, more and more land had to be put into food production. The problem is that we used the most productive and fertile land first; additional land was less productive than new land. This caused the average labor time for a given quantity of food to rise over time. Improvements in technology and the production of capital could not keep up with the loss of productivity, to the point where food production was a severe constraint on population growth. This sort of constraint is not pretty: people tend to actually starve to death.

Of course, supply "shocks" don't have to be crisis producing. As we create more capital, which makes labor more productive, and as technology improves, it requires less labor time to make most goods and services, which reduces the opportunity cost in terms of making goods and services that cannot have improvements in productivity. (One cannot, for example, greatly improve the productivity of live performances of classical symphonies.)

One interesting comparison of real economics vs. financial economics is that "positive" supply shocks (which can be abrupt), where the labor cost of something decreases, cannot produce a crisis in real economics, but can produce a crisis in financial economics. Curious.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/632245387847952218/comments/default 0 Can we deduce supply and demand curves http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/can-we-deduce-supply-and-demand-curves.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/can-we-deduce-supply-and-demand-curves.html#comments Sat, 14 Jan 2012 12:53:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=496508f84ddfe61549e9f5747adbec03 the supply and demand curves in terms of opportunity cost assuming only declining marginal utility of consumption? (I.e. without assuming increasing marginal labor cost of production.)

I think it can (and perhaps it's already been done), but I haven't seen it done and I don't think I yet have all the right mathematical tools to derive it. Perhaps a reader who has better math than me could help?

Declining marginal utility of consumption means basically that to obtain the first widget, which takes three hours* to produce, I might forego the last doodad, which takes one hour to produce. To obtain the second widget I will not, however, forego the second-to-last doodad, but I might forego the last thingamabob, which takes two hours to produce.

*of abstract labor time

Given fixed marginal labor time of supply (it takes x hours to produce one more of any good at any quantity) but declining marginal utility of consumption, what is the overall equilibrium price of each good in an economy?
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/721980230767911504/comments/default 0 Feel the LOVE! http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/feel-love.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/feel-love.html#comments Sat, 14 Jan 2012 10:42:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=11d28a235ea7bb16ac6d9bca42e697e2 won her lawsuit removing from her public school a banner containing a prayer.

Here's what Christians have to say in response.

Can you feel it? Can you feel the love?
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/5273214239863935347/comments/default 0 The Stupid! It Burns! (entitlement edition) http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/stupid-it-burns-entitlement-edition.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/stupid-it-burns-entitlement-edition.html#comments Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:06:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=c1e7a5aba7b88087c4d82655c4582773 the stupid! it burns! Fake Economist Ben Stein Sues Company for Discriminating Against Global Warming Deniers
Ben Stein ... has sued Japanese electronics firm Kyocera for violating his "freedom of religion" by not hiring him as a pitchman because he denies the reality of global warming.
(It's not quite as cut and dried as Gawker makes out to be: Stein alleges that there was a valid contract in place.)

(via PZ Myers)
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/8351982311713885326/comments/default 0 An honest question? http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/s.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/s.html#comments Thu, 12 Jan 2012 12:54:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=3d60acfda4b41947cf3ae39e6cf8a025 And Atheists Want What?: "What do atheists hope to accomplish in the world? ... I can’t see any other motivation that can come from believing that the physical world is all there is or ever will be other than complete selfishness and narcissism."

Now, to most atheists, especially atheists who have been talking with religious people about religion, it's obvious why this is not an honest question. It's possible that religious people cannot understand why this is not an honest question. But on the off chance that there's some religious person reading this blog who is genuinely confused about whether this is an honest question, let me explain.

First, because the original post offers an answer, the author is by definition not asking an honest question; he is asking a rhetorical question to make an assertion. My response is directed toward his assertion: atheists are motivated only by complete selfishness and narcissism. He can couch his assertion in all the weasel words he wants; his underlying meaning is clear. Not only is the assertion rude by virtue of its obviously falsity, it is more rude precisely because it is framed as a question. If you're going to ask me a question, shut up and let me answer. It is not only intellectually but socially rude to cut me off and offer your own answer.

More importantly, the author asks a question that I should not have to answer. I don't in any way have to justify acting like a civilized, socialized person in a civilized society. The author is essentially saying, how dare I act in a manner he finds socially acceptable!

Look, if you're a Christian (or Muslim, or whatever) apologist, I expect you to be an idiot and/or asshole, and I expect you to see yourself as a reasonable, nice person. The problem is not that you're a Christian (your private delusions are none of my business) the problem is that you're an apologist for a transparent fraud; your social identity has become intimately bound up with complete bullshit. People who keep their delusions private, who are not so insecure that others who don't swallow their brand of bullshit drive them crazy, do not become apologists.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/1373765168545022790/comments/default 0 Ron Paul and liberals http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/ron-paul-and-liberals.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/ron-paul-and-liberals.html#comments Thu, 12 Jan 2012 12:23:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=02e17faf91e5ef2ad1fa2887f75771a0 Ron Paul challenges liberals?... Go read the conversation yourself, because I'm not going to respond directly to it.

One of the most difficult decisions in my life was to abandon my self-identification as a liberal (in the modern, social sense) and a member of the Democratic party. Because I want to exercise what little power I have, I still vote (which irks many of my communist friends), but I don't consider the electoral system to be particularly important. Without the partisan self-identification, I no longer really buy into the apocalyptic visions of what will happen if the other guy actually wins. Sure, I think Barack Obama is a better President than John McCain would have been, but the country did not descend into permissive chaos because Obama won, and I don't think the country would have been a totalitarian dictatorship if McCain would have won, nor do I believe it would if Romney (or, heh, Gingrich) wins in 2012.

I don't accept the narrative of intervention. In the abstract hypothetical, I think that intervention can be right, but I think that modern states in the West are interested only in interventions that will enhance the power and prestige of one or another of the factions of the ruling class; the supposed moral benefits are at best a happy accident and at worst — and usually — a cynical lie.

Before the scales fell from my eyes, I was a liberal, but the Democratic party has abandoned all the reasons I personally was a liberal. I don't need Ron Paul to tell me that. That Ron motherfucking Paul could challenge liberal ideology is astonishing. Really: do we really need Ron Paul to challenge the War on (some) Drugs (used by some people)? Do we really need Ron Paul to challenge indefinite detention without trial of American citizens on US soil, a (barely) covert war in Iran, assassinations, censorship, massive government secrecy, etc. ad nauseam? Apparently we do, because no other candidate for President (and come on, the Presidency is where the action is) is talking about these issues. If Obama were a Republican (and thus white), but doing all the same things he's doing for all the same publicly stated reasons, I can't see but that the Democratic party intelligentsia would be up in arms.

Part of self-identifying as a revolutionary communist is the idea that I can no longer tolerate the choice between getting worse quickly and getting worse a little less quickly. The first rule of sales is that you do not try to coerce the prospect's decisions. Instead, you frame the questions so that you benefit no matter what the customer decides. You never say, "Buy this product!" You never ask, "Would you like to buy this product?" You always ask, "Would you prefer the basic or premium version of our product?" or, "Would you like the product in red or blue?" If you're in the showroom with a good salesperson, you will buy something no matter how you answer the salesperson's questions. The only way to escape without buying something is to break the salesperson's frame. The entire idea of republican "democracy" (democracy by elected trustee representatives) has been, in both theory and practice, to frame the question of governance so that the common interests of the ruling class are always preserved. When those common interests are fundamentally contrary to the interests of the people, the interests of the people will not be a viable electoral choice.

Of course, I don't think Ron Paul really is breaking the underlying frame. He simply represents a marginal faction of the capitalist ruling class that does not want to use particular measures (centralized government finance, foreign intervention, and a drug-war-justified racist/misogynist police state) to advance and secure its interests. Instead, I think, Ron Paul and the faction he represents prefer centralized private finance outside even token public control, isolationism, and a poverty-justified racist/misogynist police state. Ron Paul is not, I think, challenging the modern ruling-class narrative that we should have some sort of police state, but challenging even the present justification for the police state seems profoundly uncomfortable.

I don't think liberals in general are in favor of a police state. I think, however, they are willing to tolerate a police state, as long as police and military oppression doesn't much affect people like themselves. They will tolerate a police state as long as the dominant conservative/Republican faction of the ruling class doesn't use the police against the liberal/Democratic faction, as long as the police state is used only to maintain the common interests of both the liberal and conservative factions, i.e. remaining the ruling class. Of course, the intelligentsia of both factions are not above using the other party's "police state" tactics as a rhetorical tool, but it's apparent that concern for civil liberties is, as far as the intelligentsia is concerned, only that: a rhetorical tool, not an actual principle of governance.

I abandoned liberalism not because I stopped holding liberal principles, but because I saw all too many self-described liberals apparently supporting — or not condemning — politicians who did not hold my liberal principles. I don't think that's because liberals are bad people, but because the liberal intelligentsia is part of the ruling class and their middle-class supporters. I don't think they're terribly bad people because of that, but I'm not going to play that game myself anymore. I am opposed to the ruling class in general, so worrying about my insignificant part in choosing a faction of the ruling class is a waste of my time.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/8897928069029791383/comments/default 0 Ron Paul challenges liberals? http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/ron-paul-challenges-liberals.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/ron-paul-challenges-liberals.html#comments Wed, 11 Jan 2012 23:53:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=2e9e1c5bfe32eb0f6ce6e2d4df116152
Why Ron Paul challenges liberals, by Matt Stoller
Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies , by Glenn Greenwald
Debunking the “Ron Paul Cares About Civil Liberties” Myth
Glenn Greenwald is an asshat for his support of Ron Paul.
Democratic Party priorities, by Glenn Greenwald
Ron Paul has two problems: one is his, the other is ours, by Corey Robin
Naked Capitalism, “A Home for All Sorts of Bircher Nonsense”, by Matt Stoller
Ron Paul Challenges Liberals - or Maybe Not, at Angry Bear
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/8931603914532139423/comments/default 0 Ohio parents plead guilty in son’s cancer death http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/ohio-parents-plead-guilty-in-sons.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/ohio-parents-plead-guilty-in-sons.html#comments Wed, 11 Jan 2012 23:44:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=18a9323e5c3f7f65e6ec345fed82c7db Ohio parents plead guilty in son's cancer death
The parents of an 8-year-old Ohio boy who died of cancer in 2008 have pleaded guilty to attempted involuntary manslaughter in his death.

Monica Hussing, 37, and William Robinson Sr., 40, face up to eight years in prison each; sentencing is scheduled for February 16.

"They thought the kid had swollen glands," John Luskin, Hussing's Cleveland-based attorney, told CNN on Tuesday.

From time to time, the boy's parents would notice a lump on his neck, but it would come and go and did not appear to bother him, Luskin said.

The parents never sought a diagnosis for their son, William, who was suffering from Hodgkin's lymphoma, CNN affiliate WJW reported.

They did not have much money, struggled to make ends meet and "were doing the best they could," Luskin said.
This is our world.

(via SouthernFriedInfidel)
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/1439608514087653285/comments/default 0 Principles of democratic communism http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/principles-of-democratic-communism.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/principles-of-democratic-communism.html#comments Tue, 10 Jan 2012 11:59:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=7761fb46a8f195062968fec389b7f275 making powers employed by republican presidents and prime ministers.

*I mean "state" as those institutions with a collective monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.
**I mean "republican" in the sense of a state where the people elect trustee representatives; trustee representatives have the authority to act in secret, are not immediately accountable to the people, and can use their offices for economic, social, and political privilege.

The people comprise all citizens, as defined by the constitution. No citizen may be involuntarily excluded from participation except for medical incapacity and by due process of law. Where practical, the people set policy by direct democracy. Where direct democracy is impractical, the people appoint delegates to act on their behalf. Delegates must act transparently: they may not keep any secrets from the people. Delegates are immediately accountable: a majority of the people whom a delegate represents may at any time recall that delegate. Delegates cannot accumulate or exercise privilege: their pay is fixed by law and must not exceed ordinary workers' wages, and delegates cannot accept any other direct or indirect economic compensation during or after their services as delegates.

The civil service implements policy. The people cannot act directly; they must direct the civil service to implement a policy. The civil service cannot implement any new policies or procedures without explicit, public approval from the people. The civil service must act transparently: they cannot keep secrets from the people except where information affects a criminal investigation in progress (and the information must be made public when someone is charged, when the investigation is abandoned, or after a fixed period of time), or when the information would give immediate tactical advantage to a hostile or potentially hostile foreign state. The civil service must be independent of the people: the people cannot arbitrarily affect the promotion or retention of anyone in the civil service. The people can intervene in the civil service only when a member of the civil service is insubordinate, when he or she refuses to carry out the policy of the people when it is possible to do so. All of the people's interventions must be by due process of law. A member of the civil service can be internally fired, demoted, or have his or her pay reduced only by due process of law.

The police and the military are special branches of the civil service. The police are responsible for actually coercing people within the geographical boundaries of the country; the military is responsible for protecting the geographical boundaries of the country from foreign actors. All* citizens must serve, and only citizens may serve, as "on the ground" members of the police and/or the military (i.e. patrol officers and private soldiers), under the supervision of officers who are members of the police or military civil service. The person who actually holds the baton or the rifle must be a citizen. It must always be an affirmative defense for insubordination by a citizen than an order is illegal, unconstitutional, or immoral; if a citizen asserts such a defense, his or her case must be heard by the civil judiciary and in no case may an officer implement summary justice.

*Exceptions for religious or moral reasons are a topic for future debate.

The judiciary defines and implements due process of law. The state may exercise violence only with the specific assent of the judiciary: an individual, for example, may be arrested only with approval of a judge and imprisoned or otherwise coerced only after a judicial trial. Where prior approval of coercion is impractical (e.g. "exigent circumstances"), the judiciary must in every case exercise specific post hoc review. In general, "due process" must include the ordinary western standards: an impartial judge, a jury of citizens, an adversarial process with guaranteed competent legal representation of all parties, publicly declared and objectively determinable legal standards, general applicability of laws to all people, and the prohibition of ex post facto laws and "bills of attainder".

A judge may also act as an inquisitor (as both judge and prosecutor, without the presumption of innocence) against any delegate of the people or any member of the civil service reasonably suspected of illegal activity or official malfeasance.

Judges must be generally acceptable and independent. No single faction of the people may ever completely control the appointment or promotion of any judge. Judges may always sanctioned, punished, or impeached for illegal conduct, but no judge may be arbitrarily removed from any single case during its process. No judge may be arbitrarily sanctioned for his or her legal actions or decisions in any case. Judges responsible for the review of other judges' actions must serve fixed terms and cannot be arbitrarily removed from office during that term. Judges primarily responsible for evaluating the constitutionality of laws must serve lifetime appointments.

The constitution specifies the organization of the state, described above, and creates specific limitations on the actions of the state. The specific limitations should include those presently implemented in the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution* and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, with the specific exception that protection afforded property be construed as protection of physical objects in the immediate possession and use of an individual.

*If the constitution specifies a unitary state, then provisions of the Bill of Rights pertaining to the separation of powers between the federal and state governments would be inapplicable.

The people and their delegates, the civil service, and the judiciary, operating under the restrictions and with the legitimacy of the constitution, comprise the state.

The state may regulate the conduct of individuals using violent force. All regulation must take the form of generally applicable laws, with objectively determinable standards, acting forward in time. No law may explicitly or implicitly single out any individual or group of the people for applicability, except where membership in that group is voluntary. All coercion must have the primary purpose only of preventing recurrence of prohibited behavior by an individual (or guaranteeing future compliance of required behavior) or ensuring compliance in the future, and efficacy of these purposes must be objectively determinable.

The state is responsible for all monetary and fiscal policy, and may not delegate the creation or implementation of monetary and fiscal policy in any way, in whole or in part, outside the state. The civil service may reject monetary or fiscal policy if there is reason to believe that policy would result in any nominal deflation, or nominal inflation in excess of 50% per annum. The civil service may delay for additional review any monetary or fiscal policy that would result in excessive inflation less than 50% p.a., but must comply if the people or their delegates affirm the policy.

The state is also entirely responsible for the management of financial capital. Only the state may provide money, property or any other valuable consideration for any future consideration in excess of the nominal value of the consideration. In other words, only the state may loan money at interest or provide capital with an expected future dividend or value in excess of the original nominal value*. The state may arbitrarily loan or invest money to one or more citizens to facilitate economic activity. When the state provides for private economic production, the group of citizens must internally manage the production democratically, with all participants enfranchised. The state may also directly engage in economic activity. If the state directly engages in economic activity, it must reasonably capitalize private individuals to engage in the same activity, and ensure that private individuals can compete fairly with the state's operations.

*De minimus, the state does not care if one person lends another $20. For larger amounts, if, for example, one person lends another $1,000, the lender may demand only $1,000 in the future.

The state must employ any individual who requests employment, at wages sufficient to raise a family in civilized dignity and comfort, but without excessive luxury, if two individuals work full time. An individual may receive as many working hours as he or she requests, up to reasonable physical limitations. The state has arbitrary discretion over whether to provide employment less than the hours necessary to provide civilized dignity and comfort to a single individual.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/5958323419075263300/comments/default 0 The Stupid! It Burns! (kitchen sink edition) http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/stupid-it-burns-kitchen-sink-edition.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/stupid-it-burns-kitchen-sink-edition.html#comments Mon, 09 Jan 2012 23:44:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=458bcf5cf046f33e901b32b5f5544ff2 the stupid! it burns! In Atheism's DISTURBING Doctrines and tenets... plus videos!, P. P. Simmons offers everything in the realm of the stupid but the kitchen sink. Some highlights:
Atheists repeatedly deny that atheism is a religion. That is a classic delusion. ...

Since atheism teaches that humans are nothing more than animals, it would be completely acceptable for one human being to eat another if it was a matter of life and death. ...

At least one atheist with whom I had extensive conversations with, publicly lamented his own personal use of painkillers and antibiotics because he felt he was doing a disservice to the religious doctrine of evolution. By keeping himself alive he felt he was hindering the process of natural selection and he wished he could sacrifice himself to the process rather than artificially maintain his existence. ...

The apologists of Atheism use incredibly harsh tactics to put unbelievers in their place. They use their time in indoctrination mills to nurse from the breast of elitism and embrace the illusion of intellectual superiority while ingesting the talking points they will later use on people like me. ...

These apparent [atheist] victories are signs of the soon return of Jesus Christ to the earth. It is part of the "strong delusion" and "great falling away" that must happen before His coming. ...

The key word in that entire definition [of liberalism] is the word "unrestricted". Atheists want to live without moral or social boundaries dictated to them by a greater moral authority. In their defeated minds God doesn't exist so his statutes are meaningless. ...

The doctrine of liberalism has led to the modern holocaust of abortion, the destruction of the traditional family, the enslavement of the entire western world due to liberal governing practices leading to unfair taxation, and the degradation of the human condition due to the removal of the restrictions that kept us intact. ...

What would I do if I was faced with the choice of starvation or cannibalism*? That choice will never be a part of my life. In my existential paradigm, there is always the God option. I would pray. I would expect one of three or more or a combination of things to happen. Either God would rescue me out of the predicament or He would provide me with food to eat or probably a combination of both. A third option would be a supernatural sustaining of the body until help arrives. Let me make one thing perfectly clear. Death for the Christian is a sweet release. [emphasis added]
*Simmons seems to have a big hangup about cannibalism.

And just when you thought it couldn't get stupider, along come commenter Piltdown Superman with this gem: Atheists, according to Piltdown, "pretend that they are the brightest bulbs in the cutlery drawer."

(via Alex B.)
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/421688679474689166/comments/default 0 The Conservative Reaction http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/conservative-reaction.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/conservative-reaction.html#comments Mon, 09 Jan 2012 11:34:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=84468dc34785d808055660de1eecccb7 The Conservative Reaction, by Corey Robin (you should be reading his blog too):
Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes. It provides the most consistent and profound argument for why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty; agency, the prerogative of elites. Such was the threat Edmund Burke saw in the French Revolution: not merely an expropriation of property or explosion of violence but an inversion of the obligations of deference and command. "The levelers," he claimed, "only change and pervert the natural order of things."
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/4639239234426238358/comments/default 0 The Stupid! It Burns! (temporary edition) http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/stupid-it-burns-temporary-edition.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/stupid-it-burns-temporary-edition.html#comments Sun, 08 Jan 2012 20:10:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=a65244dc6bdea15079f8e2e25d71c145 the stupid! it burns! Poor Temporary Atheists
According to the Bible, atheists go to hell when they die to wait in torment for the Judgment of the Great White Throne and the Lake of Fire. In hell the atheist knows that the God of the Bible is real and that he is accountable to him for his angry rejection of Christ. A man who knows that God has put him in hell for his sins is no longer an atheist. He may still hate God and rail against Him, but he can no longer deny the existence of God! ...

Poor temporary atheists. Voltaire, Robert Ingersoll, Christopher Hitchens, and a host of others called themselves atheists while they were alive, but the moment they died, they ceased being atheists. We Christians should put markers on their graves that say, ‘No longer an atheist!’
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/3188695771138672262/comments/default 0 Santorum http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/santorum.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/santorum.html#comments Sat, 07 Jan 2012 13:26:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=481121171076b2d0e0ee2d4f9f1d2875 Santorum? Santorum. Santorum!
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/2756384294409930036/comments/default 0 Democracy and ideology http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/on-democracy.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/on-democracy.html#comments Sat, 07 Jan 2012 13:21:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=bf39e3de4a0c93392a76d0fcbe94c365 sine qua non of democracy as an ideology is the principle that the majority, just because it is a majority, sometimes has the right to coerce* the minority, and a minority never has the right to coerce the majority. We can then distinguish democracy from ideologies that hold the majority qua majority never has the right to coerce the minority, and from ideologies that hold that some minorities sometimes have the right to coerce the majority.

*Or "initiate" coercion, even though adding the concept of initiation creates more problems than it solves.

What makes ethics and political science interesting is that we can consider many different questions at different meta-levels, i.e. levels of generality and different levels of abstraction. The concept of free speech makes a particularly clear example. Suppose Andrew (a minority of one) is saying something that most people (the majority) dislike (e.g. "Kill all the redheads!"). We can look at the specific person and his specific speech, or we can look at people in general and speech in general. The question, "Should we permit Andrew to say, 'Kill all the redeads!'?" is a special case of "Under what circumstances should we tell people not to say what they please?" The majority may have very different opinions without contradiction at different meta-levels. At the specific, concrete level, the majority might have the opinion that Andrew's speech is objectionable, but at the general, abstract level, the majority might have the opinion that people should say what they please, even if it is specifically objectionable. Thus we can conclude that even if there were some institutional arrangement that prevented the majority from coercing Andrew (or even coerced the majority into giving Andrew some sort of platform for his speech), it would not be a case of the minority (the members of the institution) coercing the majority, but rather the majority at the abstract coercing itself at the concrete level.

Obviously, ethics and politics gets a lot more complicated when we try to reconcile our abstract opinions with our concrete opinions, especially when some of the abstract opinions take generations to construct. C'est la vie. We have seven billion people on this Earth, in a complex, interdependent technological society. If you want to kill five or six billion of them, and revert to a simple, agrarian society, feel free to try... and I'll feel free to try and stop you. Hard problems are indeed hard, but I have no patience for simplistic, moralistic ideologies.

At the ideological, theoretical level, democracy defines legitimacy as being grounded in some majority opinion. At the practical level, however, all societies can be viewed in some sense as "democratic". If, for example, the majority of the people were to assent to being ruled by an emperor with near-absolute power, then we could say that the emperor's decisions were fundamentally grounded in some majority decision. The emperor obviously cannot rule without an army, and the people must be willing to join, feed and socialize with the army. The emperor must have substantial popular support to rule. Thus "democracy" acts not to differentiate actual societies, but rather to differentiate between the underlying narratives of different societies. In two different hypothetical societies, we might have the same emperor, the same laws, the same army and police, the same territory, but one society has a democratic narrative and another a non-democratic narrative: in the former, the emperor rules because the people want to be ruled by an emperor, that emperor; in the latter, the emperor rules because e.g. the god(s) have chosen him to rule.

We can look at any ethical or political ideology as a "lens", as the underlying theme of the narrative we use to justify the use of coercion. We can construct a narrative of any society using any ideological theme. The narrative might be... strained... but it can be made logically coherent. (If Christianity can be made logically coherent, and it can, anything can be made logically coherent.) That we can narrate any society in terms of any ideology does not, however, mean that ideology is entirely useless. We can, most obviously, look for the strains in the narrative. If some ideological justification for an institution or social practice appears rococo, over-complicated, or just plain weird, narrating a society in terms of that ideology makes that strain explicit and a candidate for amendment. Alternatively, an ideological narrative will highlight areas where the ideology itself seems undesirable or absurd; it is, for example, absurd to construct Libertarianism to the extreme of permitting a person to sell himself into chattel slavery*. Ideology is not useful for distinguishing between societies, but ideology is very useful for directing the future evolution of a society.

*I want to be clear: I think that most self-identified Libertarians would not take Libertarianism to the extreme of permitting slavery (at least not publicly). The objection that the "purest" form of Libertarianism would permit slavery is a weak political objection; it is an objection only to claims of the absolute, objective truth of Libertarianism.

Assuming all societies construct a democratic narrative (and almost every human society in the 21st century does so), we can use democratic ideology to differentiate between societies in practice by determining to what degree the will of the majority directly influences public policy, i.e. the legitimate exercise of coercion. We can construct a completely democratic narrative for an emperor or monarch, but it is of course a very indirect form of democracy: the will of the people does not have any direct effect on public policy, and the acceptance of a particular monarch is infrequent and passive. A republic (such as the United States) is more directly democratic than a monarchy: the government is chosen more frequently and more actively than in a monarchy, and chosen more directly on the promised policies of the candidates. But a republic still interposes the will of the electors between the people and actual public policy. An Athenian* or town hall democracy is about as direct as possible.

*Ignoring, of course, women, slaves, and immigrants.

More democracy is not necessarily better. We intuitively feel, as in the example of free speech above, that simply putting every individual decision to a simple majority vote would not result in a society that we want to live in. An intellectual must I think, not advocate the purest form of any political ideology, but carefully and intelligently examine the ideological narrative of various societies to identify strains and absurdities; her task is to make not a "purer" society, but a better society. Indeed, I myself identify as a communist precisely and only because I (presently) believe that communism is not the purest but the best way to institutionalize a democracy.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/6184079881080251211/comments/default 0 The Stupid! It Burns! (missing piece edition) http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/stupid-it-burns-missing-piece-edition.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/stupid-it-burns-missing-piece-edition.html#comments Thu, 05 Jan 2012 12:08:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=fefde671771c79f7b2a3fe838c6bec42 the stupid! it burns! Atheists have a piece missing
Most people who believe in God don’t do so because they have been convinced by the cosmological – or any other – argument for his existence. They simply believe, using the same faculty of belief that allows them to believe in such things as the reality of the material world around them, the reality of the past, and the fact that minds exist other than their own. It is an a priori knowledge founded on evidence that is internal to the believer. ...

That is the bit that is missing or deliberately suppressed in atheists: the ability to know God exists. It’s a shame, really.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/2355561084880421018/comments/default 0 The Stupid! It Burns! (peer-reviewed edition) http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/stupid-it-burns-peer-reviewed-edition.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/stupid-it-burns-peer-reviewed-edition.html#comments Thu, 05 Jan 2012 12:05:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=30eac45fc6f7e052f9fa02490fcffc68 the stupid! it burns! Where’s the Evidence? Why the New Atheists Fail to Prove their Case
One of the most widespread claims amongst new atheists is that all religion is harmful. ... Given that these sorts of claims are backed up by appeals to science, reason and logic it behooves us to hold these conclusions to very high standards when analyzing them. ... Yet, there have been no scientific findings concluding that all religion is poisonous, that belief in supernatural entities leads to harm or that it infects people like a virus. ...

Case and point: How can Dawkins, Greta Christina or Sam Harris claim that the Dinka tradition of Africa is harmful? They’ve probably never heard of it, let alone conducted any sort of anthropological or sociological studies to determine the degree of harmfulness it poses to its members or others. Dawkins claims “I believe not because of reading a holy book but because I have studied the evidence.” I’d love to see the data and research he’s gathered to reach such monumental conclusions about religion. Has he investigated the Japanese religion Tenrikyo? The Korean tradition Wonbulgyo? Have any of these atheists been to Iraq or Iran to interview any Mandeans? Do these atheists ‘know’ in some scientific way that the traditional mythological beliefs of the Inuit of the polar regions were harmful or led to more harm? Is Native American spirituality really child abuse? I can just see it now: “Atheists Launch New Campaign to Eradicate Native American Religion.” Oh, wait that campaign has already been tried.

Update 5 Jan 2012: Scofield has apparently deleted his essay. Google has it cached for now, and I have my own copy.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/597288792031641444/comments/default 0 The Stupid! It Burns! (moral edition re-re-…-redux) http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/stupid-it-burns-moral-edition-re-re.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/stupid-it-burns-moral-edition-re-re.html#comments Wed, 04 Jan 2012 10:34:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=78f2e945d3cd3836f60dee1b9a95a971 the stupid! it burns! Do You Trust Atheists?
Try this: Go to a Christian forum and see how people talk. Then go to a forum like Raving Atheists and see how people talk. Atheists not only have no moral foundation, their behavior quickly deteriorates as a result. It is not injustice that makes public opinion of atheists what it is—it is the fact of the situation.

I'm surprised he doesn't mention Stormfront.
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/6284856809947593142/comments/default 0 The Stupid! It Burns! (have a little cheese with your whine edition) http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/stupid-it-burns-have-little-cheese-with.html http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2012/01/stupid-it-burns-have-little-cheese-with.html#comments Tue, 03 Jan 2012 19:44:00 +0000 The Barefoot Bum http://planetatheism.com/?guid=4de961fced7ea7b81acd4a11a6dcb2b8 the stupid! it burns! If God Was Real, He’d Prove Himself To Atheists! Re-Made in America: Remembering the New Atheism (2006-2011)

Never mind a quotation; go and read the whole thing.

I'll leave the analyses to Coyne, Myers, and MacDonald, (not to mention MacDonald's reply to Hoffmann's comment).
]]> http://barefootbum.blogspot.com/feeds/4595847665648170753/comments/default 0