What drivel it all is!… A string of words called religion. Another string of words called philosophy. Half a dozen other strings called political ideals. And all the words either ambiguous or meaningless. And people getting so excited about them they’ll murder their neighbours for using a word they don’t happen to like. – Aldous Huxley
Moral panics never collapse until they completely saturate the culture they infect; once the idiocy has penetrated every available space, then and only then do the conditions become ripe for the dissolution of the entire panic. One of the signs that this saturation point has been reached (or is at least very close) is that politicians and other control freaks begin to use it as an excuse or explanation for almost anything they can think of. We’ve been seeing this building with the “sex trafficking” hysteria for some time now; besides its predictable implementation as an excuse for border controls, workplace surveillance and pogroms against sex businesses, we’ve also seen it employed to justify suppression of bitcoin, armed raids of mines in Alaska, harassment of abortion clinics and even military intervention. It was France who used the latter excuse first, but if you didn’t expect the country that invented the hysteria to follow suit, you haven’t been paying attention:
The Islamic State militant group, which once relied on wealthy Persian Gulf donors for money, has become a self-sustaining financial juggernaut, earning more than $3 million a day from oil smuggling, human trafficking, theft and extortion…The extremist group’s resources exceed that “of any other terrorist group in history,” said a US intelligence official…it…has taken over large sections of Syria and Iraq, and controls as many as 11 oil fields…The group also has earned hundreds of millions of dollars from smuggling antiquities out of Iraq to be sold in Turkey…and millions more…by selling women and children as sex slaves…
It’s interesting that, though the article can tell us exactly where the oil and antiquities are being sold, it’s mysteriously silent on the subject of where all these “child sex slaves” are fetching millions. I have no doubt that there’s at least some of that going on, but to portray it as a major source of funding sounds to me like the same sort of propaganda used to demonize enemies and justify wars for most of human history. Though ISIS is being described as a “terrorist group”, it’s obvious that it’s as much a government as any other military junta:
Its cash-raising activities resemble those of a Mafia-like organization…They are well-organized, systematic and enforced through intimidation and violence…in June…the group began to impose “taxes” on nearly every facet of economic activity, threatening death for those unwilling to pay…
Try not paying the “taxes” assessed by your “legitimate” government and let’s see if it responds in some way other than intimidation and violence. In any case, it was inevitable that “sex trafficking”, as the panic du jour, would be used to justify yet another military adventure; what’s more interesting is when it’s used to rationalize the bloating of a different tentacle of the Leviathan:
…100,000 U.S. kids are forced into prostitution each year, and federal investigators regularly rescue children…trafficking is a $9.8 billion industry in this country. Pimps, who typically control four to six children each, can make $150,000 to $200,000 per child each year. The children who are forced into sex work are typically about 12 to 14 years old. They tend to come from disadvantaged backgrounds…Addressing the root cause of the issue involves a commitment to expanding social safety net services for impoverished children. The people working in the field say they simply need more support in order to create a society in which vulnerable girls can thrive…
Regular readers know that I support drop-in shelters and some variant of the guaranteed basic income, but that’s not what people like Tara Culp-Ressler (who has repeatedly rebuffed sex worker activists correcting her bogus claims) want; no, they envision an immense, intrusive bureaucracy with others like themselves in charge, implementing social engineering programs to “create a society in which vulnerable girls can thrive” via such means as ordering physicians to “screen” men with irritable bowel syndrome to “spot potential domestic abusers” (and, presumably, send them for “re-education”).
“Sex trafficking” is the most versatile and effective excuse for expanding the State since communism; “terrorism” so pales in comparison that, as demonstrated by the ISIS story above, “sex trafficking” must be added to it because it simply isn’t strong enough alone. The moral panic can’t last much longer, but I shudder to think which new imaginary menace the statists will dream up next to replace it.
If you think irritable bowel syndrome isn’t domestic abuse you haven’t smelled one of my farts.
(I was once in an elevator with the NSW Attorney General and the Police Commissioner, but they survived. There’s never a fart around when you need one).
I followed the link and read a few of Tara Culp-Ressler’s pieces. A jaw dropping rate of misrepresented studies and agenda driven non-sequiturs. I’m starting to understand why ‘liberal’ is a common term of abuse in your country.
Both wings of the All-American Fascist Party misrepresent sources and make agenda-driven non-sequiturs; however, since the “conservatives” more often pretend to be following some “authority” (such as The Bible or The Constitution) and “liberals” more often pretend to be following “the facts” or “studies” or “experts”, it’s more obviously hypocritical when the latter do it. Except when it isn’t.
It was pretty boring going through the college rape study she claimed showed that rapists carefully and premeditatively choose their targets to find it said no such thing (I’ve seen that claim several times and am yet to find a study that even pretends to support it) but some of the non-sequiturs were good for a laugh.
For example, did you know that alcohol consumption is not a factor in rape because for rape to happen there has to be a rapist there?
By the same logic, crossing the road without looking is not a factor in pedestrian accidents because there needs to be a vehicle there.
Well, the referenced study did leave that impression, but it was speculative; it was supported by no facts whatsoever. An agenda-driven writer like Culp-Ressler can’t really be expected to separate speculation from facts, you know.
In my college years, when some preliminary statistics came out like the “1 in 5” numbers, it was also seen that only 1 in 20 men perpetrated these assaults. The local feminist branch was quoted in the newspaper as commenting: “How is it possible that 5% of men are raping 25% of women? Clearly it is not. The men must be lying.” I wonder what they would have thought of this study, which strongly suggests that men who rape are repeat offenders.
Well I know what I think of it.
It fails to clearly define what it believes rape to be, takes it as a given that unreported rapes are probably committed mostly by repeat rapists, fails to distinguish between recidivists who repeatedly rape the same partner and those who rape multiple victims, cherry picks the small proportion of previous studies that support it’s recidivism theories (saying things like “in a study in which rapists were assured they would not be prosecuted for admitting undetected rapes” and “avoided using actual legal terms such as ‘rape'” as if almost all studies don’t use such methodology) and suggests motives and attitudes to women in all or most rapists that the vast majority of other studies largely only find in the ‘stranger rapists’ that generate the stereotypes while only committing a small fraction of the rapes and in a small number of misogynistic partner rapists. Also, unlike pretty much all studies since the late 90s it fails to break down recidivism rates by category, instead extrapolating to all sorts of rapists from the college students who make up most of it’s data set.
Call me fixed in my views, but a single study chosen by an author with a clear agenda isn’t about to make me discard the recidivism rates that have been consistently found by multiple researchers across the Anglosphere since the 1980s.
The ages-old fallacy of putting a label on people in a black&white fashion. Like free will does not exist and things always have to be absolutes and not probabilities.
Very useful for creating us-vs.-them scenarios, where the “them” are utter and irredeemable evil and hence cannot be sided with. Unfortunately completely unsuitable to solve actual real-world problems (but quite suitable for making them worse), as this mentality ignores reality. Given the right (usually extreme) circumstances basically everybody can be turned into a killer, torturer and rapist.
The trick is to not create that circumstances. And yes, that might just include not to make yourself an attractive victim, for example by not overdoing it on the alcohol.
I thought Brave New World was brilliant. Better than Orwell’s 1984, or at least funnier. So I’m a little surprised at the Huxley quote, because it reflects an unthinking acceptance of one of the dominant intellectual prejudices of his time – against religion.
I suppose no religion, at least as I understand the term, will ever accept sex work. But maybe some day, and I think it may have been true in selected earlier times, there was more perspective on it. After all, if Christianity can tolerate war-profiteering livelihoods like, say, the Carlisle Group, why not some measure of tolerance for sex work?
Not that I’m advocating or endorsing any such thing. I’ve just noticed on my occasional visits to this blog that your attitude towards religion is rather nuanced. A lot more nuanced than that quote from Huxley.
Don’t forget who Aldous’ Granddad was ;).
But I suspect what he’s saying is a bit more nuanced than that and the hint is that he’s saying the same thing about philosophy and political ideals.
I doubt he’s criticising religious faith or even religious institutions (though they deserve it) but rather the notion that you can capture reality with dogma (or language itself) and that people get so het up about the words they fail to capture it with that they’ll attack others who fail to capture it with different ones.
Yes, that’s how I read it, too. Not as a criticism of religious belief per se, but about the way it’s used to justify evil.
Oh, and lets face it, a kick in the head is funnier than 1984. I don’t think Orwell meant it as a joke.
I suppose no religion, at least as I understand the term, will ever accept sex work.
Certainly sex work was accepted by the religions of antiquity, and the contemporary religions also accepted sex work at various times.
You found “Brave New World” funny? That is rather bizarre, as while it has some situational comic, even these situations are deeply disturbing in their implications.
As to “prejudice against religion”, you have it the wrong way round. The zero-hypothesis is of course that the idea of religion is faulty. (Directly follows from “religion is valid” being much more complicated than “religion is not valid”.) What religion constantly fails to provide is any credible evidence to the contrary. There is a lot of invalid and logic-bending trickery though, and that already should tell you something.
Of course, your stance is just a propaganda-trick: Assume “religion” is an accurate model of reality and have all opposed prove the contrary. But that just happens to fly in the face of all scientific method and all observable evidence and, additionally, that proof happens to be impossible (neat trick though!).
Bottom line is that it is not prejudices, but well-founded and scientifically-sound reasoning.
Of course, there are quasi-religious fundamentalists, like the among technologically-oriented US citizens so common “physicalists”, that do not have any better basis for their beliefs either. But that is not what a rational atheist looks like.
Because rational atheists don’t look like anything at all.
They don’t exist.
Your criteria for rejection is applicable for any one religious tradition – the more detailed and definitive the dogma the more applicable – but as there are essentially an infinite number of potential religious ontologies – many, such as Spinoza’s, quite minimalist – your chance of being correct in all cases is vanishingly small.
The only rational generalised approach is agnosticism. Which is not to say it’s not rational to reject specific religions. Just not all of them including the ones you don’t even know about.
I’d also take issue over the validity of rejecting the ontologies of others from a standpoint entirely within your own (I’m an ontological anti-realist) but that’s a much longer conversation.
Unless all those religions are based upon the same fallacy. Let’s face it, the main differences between Christianity, Islam, and Odinism are window dressing. Reality isn’t a numbers game. There is an infinite number of wrong answers for the question “what is 1+1?” but that doesn’t mean we can’t pick out the one correct answer.
I think if you bother to look you’ll find there are very wide variations in ontology just within Christianity (even within Catholicism alone) much less than if you start adding ones like Taoism, Buddhism, neo-Platonism, various shamanisms and the huge range of religious philosophies lumped under the label of Hinduism.
Your mathematical example is invalid. The atheist position is that there is no God and the only way you can prove a negative is by eliminating all the alternatives.
BTW, Celos subscribes to mind/body dualism and while it’s possible to have a non-religious take on that it’s very rare.
Dualists believe there is something other than human biology behind at least some mental faculties (e.g. consciousness) and even if they reject the idea that it’s akin to conventional notions of soul it is still usually a faith based ontological concept. (Apologies to Celos if he has a well thought out evidence based notion of what constitutes the ‘ghost in the machine’ that he has declined to discuss thus far).
Actually, I do not “believe” in that. I am a dualist in the original sense, merely recognizing that there are strong indications the physicalist model is incomplete. I might be proven wrong one day and then I will adjust my world-view. But it will require evidence. As I do not have any idea what the nature of the “something extra” is, there is no basis for making anything religious out of it. I also feel zero need to try. Of course, some kind of “soul” is the simplest explanation, but that may well be wrong. (And thanks for calling my view on this “very rare”. It means I am either a crackpot or on to something 😉
Here is some strong indicators for Dualism from my area of expertise:
– No working AI despite about half a century of research.
– In fact, not even a working theory how AI could be implemented using matter and only a small number of limited theories that do not work in this physical universe due to fundamental limitations. Here, the research has been going on for centuries.
– Nothing at all in Physics that could explain consciousness. Physical matter simply does not have any known property that could explain it.
Also, all the claims of “just put enough transistors in there and it will be intelligent” are utter nonsense, and I am scientifically qualified to judge that. The same applies to adding software according to any method known to the human race at this time. And I happen to know other scientifically qualified people (one a professor of robotics and friend of mine) that I have discussed this question with and they agree that we will not see AI any time soon and that “never” is decidedly a real possibility. All that research into AI is motivated by how hugely useful it would potentially be. It has produced absolutely nothing that can realistically be called “AI”. Even things like IBM Watson are not AI at all, and to expert audiences IBM does not claim it is. All things like Watson show is that some things human beings can do are not so special after all. If you look, for example, at the typical bureaucrat, even the assumption of intelligence in all human beings becomes questionable.
At the same time:
– Intelligence is observable only together with consciousness. In fact, we do not know whether they are separable or intricately linked.
And more of an intuition of mine:
– Human beings are complex, yet they change very little over a lifetime. In fact, you can often see most of the personality of the later adult in young children. This does not really fit a “randomly created” theory, or a “created somewhere between conception and some years after birth” theory and rather does fit a model with very slow (e.g. >> 1000 years for significant changes) personality evolution. This also fits my memories from early childhood. I was not really different back then.
Now, physicalists (especially the fundamentalist variant so often found in the US) use circular reasoning to “prove” that everything is just physics. It goes like this: “Assume everything is just physics. Human beings exhibit intelligence and consciousness, hence they both must be physical phenomena.” That is a typical logic-fail usually found in religion. That happens to be all they have, although there are cleverly disguised variants, just as in religion.
What Intelligence is in fact is an “interface observation” on a black box. Sure, some things are decidedly biological, like at least a large part of concrete memories. But memory has very little impact on Intelligence, despite a widespread belief to the contrary. And consciousness? The only thing we know about it is that people that demonstrate intelligence keep telling others that they have it. And that is basically all that is known about it.
So what I have is absolute claims on one side (religion, physicalists) that do not fit what is observable very well. Both groups also have fundamentalist and anti-intellectual tendencies and use mental trickery to justify their absolute beliefs. On the other side I have some by now rather strong indications that we either do not understand physical reality very well or that it is not all there is.
I sometimes call my Dualism a “fact supported intuition”. And yes, I do
know that many highly intelligent people have problems with dualism, most
likely because the “pattern” is something routinely found in religion, and
that is just something to stay away of. But basically, religion has done an
evil “embrace and extend” on Dualism, and has thereby tainted the
idea. The idea itself is still valid without any religious connotations.
I’ll properly respond to your very interesting exposition of your dualism when I get more time. But for now …
Philosopher of consciousness David Chalmers is even more minimalist than you here. He insists that all objective human behaviour is deterministic but that consciousness is purely subjective and not deterministic.
So his ‘p-zombies’ lack a subjective feeling of consciousness but respond to external objective stimuli exactly as would a being with consciousness. They would speak about their ‘consciousness’ in the same way because others do so and they would have no basis upon which to create a belief they lack one. Just get someone to try to define what their consciousness is and I think you might take Chalmers’ point.
One of Chalmers’ fiercest critics is Daniel Dennett, whose philosophy seems to reject the reality of subjectivity entirely. If there is a prime candidate for being a p-zombie out there it would have to be Dennett (or perhaps hardline behaviouralists like B.F. Skinner).
Indeed. However I know that I do have consciousness, and that is quite enough for me to accept its existence. Of course, you are possibly a p-zombie 😉
Dennet need not be a p-zombie, philosophers can argue the most bizarrely insane ideas convincingly, because they know nobody listens to them anyways. I do however think that public mental masturbation is rude.
But the way around that is pretty simple: Split into cases that allow p-zombies, solipsism and basically no p-zombies. Solipsism is not very interesting, so let me drop it (note that I do not say “us”). If more than one person has consciousness, that is for most arguments pretty much the same as most or all people having it with possibly a few imposters in there.
For the dualism, take your time, I have bookmarked this thread and will check back from time to time.
I’m not sure what you mean here.
There are several examples in physics of emergent order which does not have an obvious dependency upon the properties of its components. The entire interdisciplinary field of Chaos Theory is based on just such phenomena and large groups of neurons display activity in accordance with its principles. My understanding is that most physicalists believe mind arises from brain in the same way.
As you may recall we are in agreement here. But I fail to see its relevance as an argument for dualism. We could probably say the same thing about artificial fusion power generation but that doesn’t imply something extra-physical about the operation of the sun.
I can see no sense in that statement whatsoever.
To the best of my knowledge consciousness is never observed. It is invariably a subjective phenomena impervious to objective examination.
Most people would agree that at least some animals display intelligence but whether or not they have consciousness is very much an open question.
You must be using “change very little” in a very unusual way here.
Even without such obvious, radical changes in personality that arise from trauma, drug and alcohol consumption, brain damage, mental illness and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s I think most fifty year olds would agree that they (and their friends) have changed a lot since childhood. A couple of the people in the prison abolition organisation I worked in were formerly self-centred bullies who had personal epiphanies that turned them into empathetic people who worked hard for the benefit of others.
I would suggest that people who don’t undergo substantial change as they grow older are the exception rather than the rule. They are generally referred to as ‘immature’ or ‘retarded’.
Huh?
If dualism is true it would create the potential for even greater variability as it could arise not only from physiological changes in the brain but also from changes in whatever else goes in to generating the mind.
Surely you know you have no memories from early childhood. Long term memory doesn’t work that way.
What you have is memories of remembering earlier events. In order to maintain long term memories they must be regularly recalled and laid down again. In doing so they are recontextualised in accordance with your present circumstances. This would very likely lead to distortions that would diminish the apparent differences between your current self perception and that which you had as a child.
Speaking personally I am appalled at some of the things I did as a child and young adult, which seems to indicate substantial changes in my personality since then.
Agreed.
But poor reasoning in favour of A is not evidence for not-A.
!!??
Try telling that to someone who works with Alzheimer’s patients.
There are certain kinds of intelligence that are not dependent on other than short term memory (e.g. spatial) but I think you’ll find linguistic, mathematical, mechanical, abstract and other forms of measurable intelligence are very dependent on the manipulation of learned concepts and so will fail to function at all in the absence of memory. Better recall of learned concepts doesn’t automatically mean greater intelligence (there are clearly other ingredients) but there is a strong correlation nonetheless.
I can agree with many of the points in your previous comment but fail to see how any of them give support to mind-body dualism. The lack of support (and evidence against) physicalist mind-body monism is why I am open-minded to the possibility of mind-body dualism but is no reason for assuming it is true.
Many physicalists have fallen into the same fallacy as you. They cite the shonky theories of religious mind-body dualists or those of philosophers like Descartes as support for their own mind-body monism.
They are in error and so are you.
I should get credit for starting this thread, no? And now we’re considering Descartes. What a splendid discussion. And in this venue, no less. I think you guys are busting some conventional opinions wide open with this stuff. Congratulations.
Ah, well, if we are staring to throw about Ad Hominems, I can simply state that you do not understand what I am talking about due to insufficient levels of knowledge and insight on your side. Of course that is just a trick, and a not very sophisticated one, so I will ignore your attempts in that direction.
I can also elaborate a bit: For example, you referral to Chaos Theory is utterly borked (but in line with some mainstream misconceptions): The macroscopic behavior of a “chaotic” system results deterministically from the behavior of its microscopic components, it is just not possible to use that as a basis for describing it because the resulting mathematics would be too complex and in addition, while the macroscopic properties of a physical “chaotic” system can be measured, its microscopic properties routinely cannot. Any emergent properties of “chaotic” systems are an illusion, there are no such properties. Sure, there are “surprising” properties as “chaotic” systems are subject to the butterfly effect, but there is nothing “emergent” here.
Now, why then do Chaos Theory at all? Simple: “Chaotic” systems are encountered in practice in quite a lot of places, and if you can get a macroscopic handle on them, it would be hugely beneficial for behavior prediction, risk analysis and influencing these systems. But all the concept of “chaos” here is. is an useful mathematical abstraction that decides to ignore the microscopic behavior of these systems because that is computationally and mathematically intractable in practice and a precise enough state measurement to use microscopic simulation and prediction to get macroscopic simulation and prediction is not practically feasible.
Well, an then a lot of people that do not understand what Chaos Theory actually does and what the mathematics behind it is came along and put some spiritual meaning into it.
I could go on, but I do not think it makes any sense. You are lacking the open mind in this problem-space to actually let anything not consistent with your beliefs in. Not that I see any problem here, you beliefs seem to be quite benign.
Excuse me if you feel I was becoming too personal. I find myself dismayed and frustrated when, in the midst of what seemed to be a rational, analytical conversation, you decide to plug a hole in your knowledge or logic with a sweeping bigoted statement about, say, women who report rape or religious thinkers. It makes me wonder if you are using prejudice to plug holes in your capacity to reason or whether your apparent reasonableness is a thin facade of rationalisation over a substrate of pure prejudice.
Regarding emergence, you’ve once again missed the point. It’s the self organising nature of the non-linear systems studied by Chaos theorists that I’m talking about.
Whether or not the macroscopic properties of chaotic systems are fully definable at the micro level is neither here nor there. In fact for the example I was using it is necessary for physicalists to believe this is so. Your well constructed explanation actually serves to underline my point.
The relevant phenomena is the way ordered behaviour can suddenly emerge from a disordered system with tiny amounts of external input (the butterfly effect as you put it – although it is a metaphor usually applied to processes which go in the other direction).
An example would be a column of water being slowly heated which suddenly breaks from a chaotic, turbulent state into smoothly rotating convection cells. The only input into the system has been a tiny amount of extra energy yet the interactions of many tiny particles have suddenly produced a substantial amount of extra order. This order neither existed in the brownian motion of the component particles nor in the small amount of added energy. It’s an emergent property of the whole.
A perhaps more relevant, if messier, biological form of emergence is the complexity of a fully developed organism emerging from a much smaller set of starting data such as that contained in DNA. Or an oak tree from an acorn.
So, as you point out, there are many systems with macroscopic behaviour that cannot be predicted (whether practically or in principle is irrelevant) from component properties. Physicalists would argue that mental functions such as intelligence, sentience, consciousness, etc are just such emergent behaviours of large groups of neurons with billions of interconnections. The fact that we can’t account for them with current physics is not a refutation. I doubt a 1930s electronics whiz would be able to account for the behaviour of Grand Theft Auto from his knowledge of switching either.
But this point is a trivial aside. Even if you’re right and many thousands of systems theorists, scientists and philosophers are wrong and there’s no such thing as emergence, your arguments are not internally coherent (much less coherent from the perspective of external belief systems) as I pointed out in the bulk of my most recent comment which you failed to address.
You have that wrong. The problem is that terms like “atheist”, “agnostic”, etc. do all not have good definitions, doubtless as a result of theological machinations. Hence I use “atheist” as a catch-all for people that think “Religion is Bullshit” (with a nod to P&T). The atheist position is hence that there is no good reason the believe that there is a God. That is actually a “definitely unknown but very unlikely due to absence of any supporting evidence and rather contrived nature”, not an absolute negative.
Of course, many theists are in that mental trap because they cannot deal with unknowns and hence misrepresent the atheist position as “there is no god”, which is wrong. Some of these people even claim that atheism is a religion, which shows a complete lack of understanding for the question at hand.
And yes, I can very much define “religion” as “some fairy-tale that has a God in there somewhere, in the all-powerful sense” and then conclude that they are all nonsense, even without knowing anything more specific. Of course you can always weaken the definition of religion even further, but that hardly makes sense. Instead I would advise to use fine terms like philosophy/philosophy of life, worldview, or “Weltanschauung” to avoid confusion with authoritarian models that have a final authority in the form of “God” in there.
I don’t know about ‘weakening’ the definition of religion but it seems to me that you’re distorting it – even to the point of strawmanning it.
There are several atheistic religions around, including Jainism, Reconstructionist Judaism and several sects of Hinduism (e.g. Samkhya). The Buddha was allegedly agnostic but atheism is also acceptable within most strands of Buddhism. I suspect you would be inclined to agree with me that belief systems like Scientism that claim that everything in the universe – including it’s metaphysics – is entirely explicable according to a particular doctrine are also atheistic religions (i.e. they fulfill Ninian Smart’s Seven Dimensions of Religious Belief).
And as I hinted in an earlier comment, I am sure many materialists – including followers of Scientism – would consider mind/body dualism to be a religious belief too.
Atheism isn’t quite the same as “all religions are BS”. It’s specifically a rejection of belief in God or Gods. As I said there are religions which are atheist. But I suspect you are also forgetting (or ignorant of) the wide range of understandings of what God is. Nirguna Brahman of Advaitist Hinduism and ‘The True Tao’ of Taoism are both very close fits to Kant’s ‘noumenon’ (das Ding an sich) so if you reject their possibility out of hand you are also rejecting a lot of empirical metaphysics. The God of Baruch Spinoza (and Albert Einstein) is only slightly more dogmatic than Nirguna Brahman, being nothing more than the ‘ground’ of all epiphenomena.
IMHO the most persuasive argument for the existence of something very much like a god is the Perennial Philosophy of Neo-Platonism. This comes from the observation that mystical and shamanistic practices worldwide and across cultures tend to converge on several points regardless of the religious tradition in which they are imbedded. One of those is that individual notions of ‘self’ are essentially delusionary and that at a fundamental level all beings are one phenomena, often expressed as ‘God’. Religious practices that seek to ‘realise’ that ‘truth’ include contemplative, ecstatic, shamanistic and harder to classify ones (such as Zen koans).
Of course competing fundamentalisms have arguments against the non-dual experience being evidence of some kind of God. Some Christians and Takfiri Muslims, for example, would insist the practices are diabolical magic and the beliefs are delusions whispered by demons. Physicalists say there is some kind of unspecified defect in the human brain that causes the ‘illusion’ of non-dualism under certain circumstances.
It is an experience I’m quite familiar with and from my personal perspective it is at least as ‘real’ as any of the empirical observations that lead me to believe in matter and other people. In fact the subjective experience is more real than that. To me the notion we are separate egos is a delusion evolved for socially pragmatic reasons, not a reflection of how things are. The ‘defect in the brain’ comes from hard- and soft-wired structures that filter our sensoria so that the lower bandwidths of the executive centres can deal with it then overlay it with interpretative assumptions so we can construct an apparently objective reality from purely subjective experience. It’s not all that different to the illusion of three-dimensional sight that arises from the overlay of the two two-dimensional visual fields produced by the eyes. It is our perception of separate ‘things’ that results from a brain ‘defect’, not the experience of non-dualism.
Accordingly I don’t really believe in the concept of ‘self’ except as an social construct. It is something we are taught from the time someone points at herself and says “Mamamamama …” then at you saying “Bababababa …”. It is then it is reinforced by others acknowledging you as an individual ‘self’ and insisting on interacting with you accordingly.
So I have no problem with the idea that cultures can not only personify their own members but also external things such as trees, mountains, the weather, organising principles of physics, etc. What’s more, when you anthropomorphise something it changes your way of experiencing it so you see more and more evidence that it is a person (something you can see with many pet owners). So to me phenomenal gods are no more or less real than individual people are. They are projected social ‘place holders’, just like ‘me’.
That barely scrapes the surface of the variety of religious beliefs and ways of believing in gods. It seems to me that to be able to call yourself an atheist you would need to first familiarise yourself with all of them and then find specific reasons to reject each of them. Either that or you can take atheism as an unsupported axiom of your own belief system, in which case it is a religion.
Well, you can certainly weaken the definition of “God” so far that its use does not make much sense anymore. I use “atheism” simply as a shorthand for “absence of belief in an all-powerful personal god, typically in organized form”. That usually works well to get the meaning across. This definition is fuzzy and actually inaccurate, I am aware of it. But it usually gets the job done, so it does deserve some respect for that alone.
But sure, I am not saying that you cannot have spiritual experiences or views that would often be called “religion” just because the organized religions have also co-opted these things wherever possible.
Well, if you define atheism as “not believing in the gods you don’t believe in” then I guess we’re all atheists.
As for your specific definition, solipsists would not be atheists because they believe that all of creation flows from an all powerful personal being. Themselves. And though it may be uninteresting (I find it very interesting for the perspective it gives on other metaphysical systems) it is, so far as I know, logically irrefutable.
It would be pretty hard to argue the world’s hundreds of millions of Advaitists don’t constitute an organised religion (or at least most of them) but even though their ultimate godhead is not personal (it has no form nor any other definable attributes) most would acknowledge personal gods (mahadevs) at the illusory dualistic level of reality at which we interact (maya). Basically, by splitting reality via the illusion of dualism we making tangible both ourselves and the gods of that which is not ourself. Platonic and Neopythagorean Gnosticism (as well as other forms of panentheism) have a similar approach to the relationship between ‘demiurges’ and the supreme being, albeit with a very different take on the nature of phenomenal reality.
In fact even those who believe in the Gods of Roman or Norse mythology would be atheists by your definition as their gods are not all-powerful.
So in applying your definition you are calling many millions of people who would utterly reject the label ‘atheists’ (as well as dismissing many belief systems you would probably find plausible if you knew about them).
It seems to me you haven’t got a well thought through ontology of your own yet in being an ‘atheist’ you are making blanket dismissals of a huge range of others you don’t know anything about. If you mean you don’t buy into the reality of God as portrayed by mainstream Abrahamic religions, just say so (I do, while acknowledging I can probably never know the truth value of such a working hypothesis). A shorthand way of doing that might be to call yourself a New Atheist, except that also implies a profound ignorance of Abrahamic religions via acceptance of the doctrines of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, etc. (In fact I would argue they are even ignorant of the lineage of their own belief system, else they would have a more nuanced understanding of its limitations and reject the tag ‘New’).
Agnosticism is ultimately very straightforward and very robust. It simply acknowledges you can’t really know enough about the fundamental nature of reality to know the truth value of any absolutist statements made about it. IMHO all other approaches are akin to religious fundamentalism.
Really, that is just bullshit. I think what is going on here is some kind of “God-envy” between religions. Those without found that they have a marketing disadvantage to those with, so they invented an invalid use of the word “God”. in order to fix that. And they made it even bigger: They not only have an all-powerful all-knowing God. they have a “God” that is “all-being”! In the end this just boils down to a claim of “ours is bigger and better”. A bit infantil, IMO.
As to Norse and Roman (and Greek) gods: By modern standards they are not theists, they are maybe best described as “confused”. I am sure they would not like that one bit though.
You really know far too little about religions to make sweeping, cynical claims like that Celos.
Most beliefs systems I know of that propose a minimalist, non-anthropomorphic God developed from those which had a more Abrahamic or Norse pantheon.
The biggest single historical threat to Hinduism was its offspring Buddhism which eschewed gods. Advaita was arguably developed in response to that threat, not to a system proposing a bigger and better god.
The minimalist Allah of Sufism also developed in the face of a far more powerful, interventionist god.
I could cite several other examples in which the growth of an atheistic, agnostic or minimally deistic religion grew alongside or from one which worshiped super father-figure gods, including contemporary religions such as Scientology.
Perhaps you should go to the trouble of learning the basics about a topic before you go proposing simplistic all encompassing hypotheses about it which lack any factual basis. Especially when they pour contempt upon cultures and many millions of people you know nothing about.
Your ill informed dismissal of belief systems that are not in accordance with your own reinforces the impression that your atheism is religious rather than rational. A rather fundamentalist religion at that.
I liked how you replaced Culp-Ressler’s links to your own pages debunking that garbage. 🙂
I’m glad you spotted that; I actually do it pretty often in blockquotes. 🙂
What, Maggie … you support Basic Income? And you are a libertarian? I thought libertarians would be deeply opposed to Basic Income … more government control over people’s lives, y’know.
She’s a libertarian – but also a woman! 😛
Basic income has a few nice properties with regard to efficiency. For example, many people have negative productivity, and basically “work” by destroying productivity of others. (Just think of your typical bureaucracy.) With basic income, these jobs are not necessary anymore to distribute wealth. The result is that while far fewer people would work, productivity would raise. It also happens to make it a lot easier for people that have specific talents to develop them, as they do not need to spend most of their time on “earning” a living. The positive overall impact would likely be significant. Also, no more need to earn a lot of money to prevent personal poverty.
Still, some people cannot manage to get their head around the idea. But let’s face it, it is just an extension of the “infrastructure” idea. No, it is not “socialism” any more than having a state-provided road before your building is.
I’m far from the only libertarian who supports it; Google a bit and you’ll see I’m correct. Most support it on harm-reduction grounds; having a computer deposit a set amount to electronic cards every week would eliminate the massive bureaucracy dedicated to welfare, food stamps, housing projects, unemployment, etc and (even better) eliminate the government’s ability to meddle in people’s lives with piss tests, lists of “acceptable” foods, etc.
Indeed. It would have huge benefits and the only drawbacks are on ideological grounds and those founded in personal envy.
I’ve been researching these claims of “IS sex trafficking” since they came out earlier this year.
I have not been able to find a corroborated report of any girl being captured and “sold”.
I HAVE been able to verify a few reports of girls captured, and then “given” to IS commanders, or cronies of the old Sadaam regime as “concubines”. This is about as close to “trafficking” that I have been able to verify – but it’s not clear that any money changes hands.
No doubt a lot of the girls are being raped by insurgents of the IS … the scope and magnitude, I don’t know … but it could be horrific. Murder – is already confirmed many times over.
And I also suspect (unverified) – that IS is kidnapping girls and holding them for ransom from their families, and some of them are paying to get them back.
The bottom line is … who is IS gonna sell these girls to? Other than themselves, or back to their families? There is no external market for these girls and the logistics required to engineer a secure pipeline for trading them would be MASSIVE. It would simply take too many assets away from the fight that IS has to wage.
Some IS commanders have quoted off hand that they’d sell the girls, and Boko Haram did the same thing. However, I haven’t been able verify a single girl sold by either IS or Boko. Given their proclivity to “shock” the civilized world – I think they are simply invoking the human trafficking meme because they know it somehow terrifies us.
Especially in matters of war, we need to make decisions based on cold, hard, accurate facts. It’s dangerous to make decisions based on inflated data that tends to trigger our emotions more than our logic. The way IS is behaving, they seem to WANT us in the fight over there. Everything they do seems to be designed to draw us in further. Am I the only one that notices this? We need to be very careful before we give them what they want. I think there are other, way more effective ways of dealing with the IS than hustling US and Brit troops back into Iraq and Syria.
And by the way … I hate the fucking term “boots on the ground”. It’s now considered somehow the pinnacle of involvement in warfare. A pilot in the air becomes an infantryman when his plane is shot down. He becomes “boots on the ground”. I don’t know why Americans think pilots and aviators are somehow more safe than infantrymen – virtually all of the POW’s I can name (by name) from Vietnam were pilots and aviators – or aircrewmen.
Especially as the maximum estimates for IS fighters is about 80,000 with the CIA suggesting a quarter to half that and they’ve got a heck of a lot of real estate to try to hold onto.
Check out the potential front line. Fancy defending that with two to four light infantry divisions with no air and not much artillery or armour?
Irregulars can make things expensive for occupiers but they’re lousy at holding the turf.
Not in the least. And it defies credibility that the leaders calling for intervention haven’t noticed (or been informed) as well, which makes you wonder what their game is.
My guess is that Assad’s the real target. They’ve already been feeding pet journalists briefings that the Syrian regime is co-operating with IS. As if the Alawites wouldn’t be among the first to go in a Salafist/Wahhabist Caliphate.
I don’t really think Assad is the target for the West.
I don’t think most Western leaders have a clue as to who should actually be the target. They don’t know heads from tails. They’re just reacting out of some sense that they are supposed to react.
Action is not the only logical choice though … INACTION can be just as valid and even more successful sometimes than action. In this … we should just be spectators.
Especially now that the US is approaching energy independence … and we should care less about what happens in Arab nations in the Middle East.
I bought gas for under $3.00 a gallon last week.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2013/11/congratulations-america-youre-almost-energy-independent-now-what-98985.html
I think you’ll find that domestic supplies are a secondary reason the US seeks to control the world’s energy market. The access of economic rivals to energy is just as important and probably the most important reason of all is to maintain the US dollar lock on oil trading as a means of soaking up some of the mess loose monetary policy makes. There’s a heck of a lot of US dollars set to fly home to roost if the world no longer needs them for oil trading.
Hyperinflation, anyone?
If IS is really trading significant amounts of black market oil at $25/barrel as some analysts claim it must be upsetting US allies like Saudi Arabia too. (BTW, I think Celos’ analysis of the slave market applies to oil so I’m disinclined to believe IS is shifting much of it). You’d think it would be pretty easy to close down a black market in crude at the refineries too. I’m told each field has a distinct chemical signature.
Nice analysis. There is also the little problem that if there was a huge trade in “girls”, then
a) there would be corresponding streams of money that could be observed and followed and
b) those traded would turn up in quite a few places as it is pretty hard to hold onto unwilling slaves without some legal framework that would itself be observable.
Neither seems to be the case. Hence, “no such trading” or very, very little of it is the most likely factual situation. Modern slavery depends on economic methods and legal schemes, like what happens to migrant workers in, for example, Saudi Arabia, not on grabbing people by force.
The claim being made by people like SOFREP is that the sex trafficking is internal to the Caliphate.
They say a slave market has been set up in Mosul for the purpose. So I guess you could say it’s not modern slavery at all, but the retro kind.
Not that I’m inclined to believe it without better evidence than the unsupported claims of former spec ops soldiers. Not because it’s unbelievable per se but because it’s so convenient propaganda-wise and there is without a doubt a heck of a lot of false propaganda about IS flying about right now.
And today’s award for the most “that can’t be real!” link goes to the one about screening men with IBS.
[…] The odious fruit of “sex trafficking” hysteria is no exception; it reached its peak last year, saturating the entire culture with its noisome effluvia, and is now entering the stage where it is beginning to break down from […]
[…] quarters (especially among cops, rescue industry opportunists and others with a vested interest in keeping the panic going), the exposure of “trafficking” darlings Somaly Mam and Chong Kim opened the door to allowing […]