A great discussion. Don't dismiss the tea party, the segment of America their rhetoric appeals to have legitimate grievances, but aren't organized or getting any real answers.
I was disappointed on the caller at the end of the hour, that Prof. Chomsky and Tom Ashbrook choose to tackle the anthropogenic climate change denial part of his question in their limited time, rather than his "the strong survive and that's the way nature is" comment. That underlying value system is a lot of the reason people want to reject climate change, because the problem is the unfettered advancement of the ruling class they dream of joining.
It's Herbert Spencer all over again, who actually coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" and whom many Darwin haters would find themselves in uncomfortable agreement with as he was all about saying the wealth of leading businessmen and ruling families was proof of their essential superiority, and that any program to ease the burden of the poor would only make America weaker. (He was writing such things even before Darwin's evolution work was published.)
The fallacy is on several points. Evolution is a blind and unconscious process, it doesn't prescribe what will work best for survival to reproduction. Evolution is an amoral process; there really is nothing to say that greater success in a Darwinian system is right or good or obligatory, it simply is. Darwinian systems are not competitions of brute strength; Darwin addressed this in Descent of Man, the anarchist Peter Kropotkin explored it in Mutual Aid as a counter to Spencer's popular social "Darwinism," and Richard Dawkins addresses it in The Selfish Gene. Cooperation and social behavior are highly viable strategies for reproduction and survival, and to the extent that genetic factors promote these behaviors, they will be selected for in the Darwinian equation.
Furthermore, the simple statement "the strong survive," ought to give anyone pause, especially as applied to justifying human social and economic arrangements. Our advance, such as it is, as a civilization is very much measured by the efforts we make to ensure it is not merely the strongest and fiercest of us to survive. Our moral advance depends upon putting raw survival and basic human happiness outside the realm of competition, turning competition where we use it into play rather than desperation. If we value anything at all, those values form the seed of a moral system. For all that our nature is torn with opportunistic cheater instincts, social and cooperative behavior are also a strong part of human nature, our natural endowment via the evolutionary process. It's not "the way of nature" to reject a prominent humanistic instinct in favor of a callous approach to individualism and a brigandic approach to capitalism.
http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/09/noam-chomsky-america
20100928
20100927
religiousandareligiousidentity
[I contributed this to the "Theism+ AND Atheism+" thread on rpg.net's Tangency (registration required to view), which even considering it's a gaming and fantasy site's "other topics" forum, has some of the best society/culture/politic kind of discussion I've seen online (which may say more about the sorry state of the web itself or my experience of it than it says about Tangency), and is remarkably polite and nice by internet standards. Like most of what I write here, it could use another round of editing, but here it is anyway.]
The word 'atheist' technically applies to me. I try to treat these kinds of labels as descriptors rather than an identity.
My family were what was commonly called "Jack" Mormons, though that church now recommends the term "less active." We were irregular attendees at the local ward (Mo-speak for "parish"), friendly with the neighbors, participants in several ward activities, generally within Mormon culture, but not particularly devout. (My parents have told me at one point in my childhood they withdrew us from church activity for awhile because I had seemed to be taking the church far too seriously.) Of my immediate family, my mom's the only one who could still be called religious, and that still in a culture and community sense rather than a belief sense, though she is a theist in some sense I haven't inquired into. The house had several books of science and of folklore (my dad's an engineer, mom's a social worker with a background in English), and things like space and volcanoes and poisonous snakes and heroic stories are awesome. I probably knew the Greek myths better than any of the Christian myths, possibly excepting the Christmas story. I still credit Carl Sagan's Cosmos as the definitive seed of my worldview. The universe is an amazing place.
I've been a part of the local nontheist community* for a number of years now. We've been growing into a proper community, now engaging in charity work, and trying to promote what I think of as a revitalization of the old Freethought movement of the late 19th/early 20th century.
My views come from both epistemological agnosticism and ideological antiauthoritarianism. Our knowledge of truth is limited, I don't trust revelation or authority as sources of knowledge, and the empirical methods developed by science have proved the best so far at refining something close to real knowledge. I see the pursuit of understanding what the universe is and why as sort of the point of all the deep cosmic stuff. Because community and charity and goodwill can be made anywhere humans choose to make them, they're not really the test of value of religious ideas.
The antiauthoritarianism comes in because I find the idea of a universe ruled from the top down both morally and aesthetically unpleasing. The idea that a sufficiently powerful cosmic being could be able to make morality be whatever that being commanded it to be is actually horrific, no different from a world of might makes right, yet it seems to be the only morality some religious people claim to understand. Aesthetically and morally, I love the idea of emergent complexity and self-organization from the bottom up, I love the idea that these principles arise in physics, biology, chemistry, even political and social organization. I think anything close to genuine morality has to be built on the empathy among beings experiencing the universe, not on the will of an entity commanding the universe.
I tend to think most religious people are in it for the community participation, rather than being firmly committed to doctrines. For all that Joseph Smith called the Catholic Church the whore of Babylon, those two churches are very similar in that they actually strive for a single global organization with leaders on high directing groups below, where most other religions in the world are more regional and modular. Meeting with ex-Mormons has shown me that the particular experience of Mormon culture varies from family to family. Mormon families differ in how much deference they believe must be paid to church authority, and I expect the same is true for Catholic families, but for those families who do follow, the authority structure of the church pushes a more singular experience, and emotional pressure to conform is very high. I know a lot of ex-Mormons worried about the social and emotional costs if their families find out about their doubts, and my antiauthoritarian sentiment leads me to regard that as a form of tyranny.
I think the Cosmological Argument (that to have something rather than nothing requires an intelligent cause) is persuasive to many people. There's probably a reason for something rather than nothing, but I don't think any kind of mind must necessarily be involved in that reason. That said, I can see deism, pantheism, and panentheism as somewhat kindred worldviews, and if someone convinced me one of those made more sense than naturalism, very little else of my worldview would need be altered. Deism, pantheism, and panentheism aren't inherently incompatible with what empirical methodological naturalism (science) has helped us know about the universe.
In terms of ultimate meaning and value, well, it's true that a godless universe doesn't offer meaning as a given, but I think something meaningful can be derived. Carl Sagan said, "we are a way for the universe to know itself." I think any attempt to find value in existence has to rest on that: our conscious experience of the universe. We're in this together and if we can learn to value our own experience of the universe, and recognize others' experience of the universe as equally valid and valuable, morality and meaning can be built on that. Bottoms up.
*(Including AoU, UFS, HoU, SHIFT, SHAFT, though the websites are probably less up-to-date than the respective facebook pages, lazy as we are.)
The word 'atheist' technically applies to me. I try to treat these kinds of labels as descriptors rather than an identity.
My family were what was commonly called "Jack" Mormons, though that church now recommends the term "less active." We were irregular attendees at the local ward (Mo-speak for "parish"), friendly with the neighbors, participants in several ward activities, generally within Mormon culture, but not particularly devout. (My parents have told me at one point in my childhood they withdrew us from church activity for awhile because I had seemed to be taking the church far too seriously.) Of my immediate family, my mom's the only one who could still be called religious, and that still in a culture and community sense rather than a belief sense, though she is a theist in some sense I haven't inquired into. The house had several books of science and of folklore (my dad's an engineer, mom's a social worker with a background in English), and things like space and volcanoes and poisonous snakes and heroic stories are awesome. I probably knew the Greek myths better than any of the Christian myths, possibly excepting the Christmas story. I still credit Carl Sagan's Cosmos as the definitive seed of my worldview. The universe is an amazing place.
I've been a part of the local nontheist community* for a number of years now. We've been growing into a proper community, now engaging in charity work, and trying to promote what I think of as a revitalization of the old Freethought movement of the late 19th/early 20th century.
My views come from both epistemological agnosticism and ideological antiauthoritarianism. Our knowledge of truth is limited, I don't trust revelation or authority as sources of knowledge, and the empirical methods developed by science have proved the best so far at refining something close to real knowledge. I see the pursuit of understanding what the universe is and why as sort of the point of all the deep cosmic stuff. Because community and charity and goodwill can be made anywhere humans choose to make them, they're not really the test of value of religious ideas.
The antiauthoritarianism comes in because I find the idea of a universe ruled from the top down both morally and aesthetically unpleasing. The idea that a sufficiently powerful cosmic being could be able to make morality be whatever that being commanded it to be is actually horrific, no different from a world of might makes right, yet it seems to be the only morality some religious people claim to understand. Aesthetically and morally, I love the idea of emergent complexity and self-organization from the bottom up, I love the idea that these principles arise in physics, biology, chemistry, even political and social organization. I think anything close to genuine morality has to be built on the empathy among beings experiencing the universe, not on the will of an entity commanding the universe.
I tend to think most religious people are in it for the community participation, rather than being firmly committed to doctrines. For all that Joseph Smith called the Catholic Church the whore of Babylon, those two churches are very similar in that they actually strive for a single global organization with leaders on high directing groups below, where most other religions in the world are more regional and modular. Meeting with ex-Mormons has shown me that the particular experience of Mormon culture varies from family to family. Mormon families differ in how much deference they believe must be paid to church authority, and I expect the same is true for Catholic families, but for those families who do follow, the authority structure of the church pushes a more singular experience, and emotional pressure to conform is very high. I know a lot of ex-Mormons worried about the social and emotional costs if their families find out about their doubts, and my antiauthoritarian sentiment leads me to regard that as a form of tyranny.
I think the Cosmological Argument (that to have something rather than nothing requires an intelligent cause) is persuasive to many people. There's probably a reason for something rather than nothing, but I don't think any kind of mind must necessarily be involved in that reason. That said, I can see deism, pantheism, and panentheism as somewhat kindred worldviews, and if someone convinced me one of those made more sense than naturalism, very little else of my worldview would need be altered. Deism, pantheism, and panentheism aren't inherently incompatible with what empirical methodological naturalism (science) has helped us know about the universe.
In terms of ultimate meaning and value, well, it's true that a godless universe doesn't offer meaning as a given, but I think something meaningful can be derived. Carl Sagan said, "we are a way for the universe to know itself." I think any attempt to find value in existence has to rest on that: our conscious experience of the universe. We're in this together and if we can learn to value our own experience of the universe, and recognize others' experience of the universe as equally valid and valuable, morality and meaning can be built on that. Bottoms up.
*(Including AoU, UFS, HoU, SHIFT, SHAFT, though the websites are probably less up-to-date than the respective facebook pages, lazy as we are.)
20100920
nodemocratsleft
The role of the Democratic Party is to persuade Republican partisans and the public in general that Democrats represent the left. Democrats are a centrist party (that is, pragmatic, bureaucratic, and oriented to discrete policy-by-policy and issue-by-issue behavior and decisions) with some token left-wing mascots. (No, the names regularly invoked in conservative "stop so-and-so from doing such-and-such" scare-mails aren't them.) As Howard Zinn noted, the tradition of the Democratic Party is to be somewhat more liberal than the Republican Party on domestic issues, but not too liberal, and not to differ meaningfully on foreign policy issues at all.
In this way, conservative voters are (perversely) comforted at having defined badguys to reflect off their own assumed goodguy badges. Capital-class insiders to the mechanics of power are served by both major parties, each party standing in periodically to take the blame when different aspects of the system as-is awaken a glimmer of dissatisfaction in the disinformed populace. In this way, resources and activism are diverted from any efforts to create actual representation and participation from the people.
People working within the Democratic organization often believe is is necessary (however unfortunate it may be) to move to the 'middle' to pick up more support. In doing so, they only help the opposition move American political discourse further to the right. There is no ideological 'middle.' A person may apply a progressive moral logic to one issue and a conservative moral logic on another, but there isn't anyone consistently and ideologically devoted to "somewhere in between" along most issues, unless you count simple apathy. To avoid openly embracing progressive moral causes while accommodating conservative issues gives people no encouragement to think progressively, and no disincentive to think conservatively. (See George Lakoff.) We all have both underlying moral logics in our heads, as they exist for dealing with different kinds of situations and relationships, but people's minds will most readily use the tools they've practiced, and evading your alleged values as extreme offers no practice in thinking and living them.
In this way, conservative voters are (perversely) comforted at having defined badguys to reflect off their own assumed goodguy badges. Capital-class insiders to the mechanics of power are served by both major parties, each party standing in periodically to take the blame when different aspects of the system as-is awaken a glimmer of dissatisfaction in the disinformed populace. In this way, resources and activism are diverted from any efforts to create actual representation and participation from the people.
People working within the Democratic organization often believe is is necessary (however unfortunate it may be) to move to the 'middle' to pick up more support. In doing so, they only help the opposition move American political discourse further to the right. There is no ideological 'middle.' A person may apply a progressive moral logic to one issue and a conservative moral logic on another, but there isn't anyone consistently and ideologically devoted to "somewhere in between" along most issues, unless you count simple apathy. To avoid openly embracing progressive moral causes while accommodating conservative issues gives people no encouragement to think progressively, and no disincentive to think conservatively. (See George Lakoff.) We all have both underlying moral logics in our heads, as they exist for dealing with different kinds of situations and relationships, but people's minds will most readily use the tools they've practiced, and evading your alleged values as extreme offers no practice in thinking and living them.
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