Why the Hell?
I've been pondering whether there's a case for implementing Hell, even granting a God. I just don't see it.
I guess the first question is: What's the purpose of Hell? Is it to punish folks? But why? We punish in real life to encourage people to act in a certain way in the future. With an eternal Hell, there's no future in which free action can be taken, so the punishment would have no behavioral purpose.
Punishment for the sake of punishment? I guess if God is just a sadistic asshole who gets his jollies hurting people, then He might go to the trouble of implementing Hell. But, in that case, why even warn anyone? Just fuck 'em up. Or, y'know, make up so many rules that folks can't help but break a few. But, y'know, if you're that big an asshole, well...
So we move onto what is obviously the true purpose of Hell, to act as a deterrent, as a threat, to encourage certain actions in the here and now. And, for some who believe, it works admirably, although sadly. (For others, it doesn't appear to work at all, which raises the question of whether they really believe at all. If I really thought I'd be tormented eternally for any transgression, I sure as shit wouldn't transgress.)
The thing with using Hell as a threat is that there's no way to verify the existence of the threat. You only find out whether it's true after you die, unable to communicate that knowledge to anyone still alive. And, if the threat can't be verified, then why would you actually implement it?
If people are willing to buy into the threat without evidence, then the actual implementation is simply a waste of resources and effort. (And this shit takes effort. Remember, God had to rest.) Why bother? The scam system will work just as well regardless of Hell's actual existence.
So, I just don't see a case for implementing it.
(Of course, it's a moo point, as there is no God.)
It's Past Thanksgiving!
Quit yer damn whining about Xmas celebrations!
How Every Discussion Goes...
The atheist community has a problem with women. Every time a woman has some complaint about how they're being treated at atheist gatherings, the following comments generally fall into one of these categories:
- Complaints about personal treatment by feminists.
- Complaints about details of ElevatorGate that don't have any bearing on the general problem.
- Complaints from men about the treatment of strong women who don't need any help standing up to men but somehow need help in standing up to fellow women.
Dammit! You don't represent all women so you can't make any generalizations at all!
(Of course, the entire Reason Rally consisted of generalizations of some sort. Those are okay.)- If I can't drunkenly proposition women in an elevator at 3am, then I just can't ever proposition women!
- And finally, I think we should objectively look at the risks and appropriate responses here. As a 6 foot tall straight white male, I have the best idea what those are!
Nobody squeals as loudly as someone having their unearned privilege threatened.
Philosophy: Not Even Once
Please, talk to your kids about Philosophy.
Carmelite Nuns
Carmelite Nuns: Not as tasty as I was hoping for.
Rapture, Y U No Come?
Everybody Draw Mohammed Day 2011
It's Everybody Draw Mohammed Day again. Here's my shot at it:
Yeah, I know, I can't draw worth crap.
The Discussion Dichotomy
I've been meaning to write about the Discussion Dichotomy for awhile, but never got around to it. But, I got hit with it today in a Facebook comment thread and that's prompting me.
Here's what happened: Someone posted a link about white dwarf hypernovae and how they might be responsible for the lack of discernable communications from other civilizations in the universe. Which lead to someone mentioning the movie Contact and how he suspects he's the only person in the world who actually liked it. I assured him I liked it, but that I liked the book better. And he launched into an impassioned critique of the book.
Which is fine, but the response was, well, a lot more than I was expecting from my off-hand admittance of liking the book.
And, to be honest, I only remember liking the book more. I have no idea why anymore. It's just been too many years since I read it.
No big deal, but it reminded me of the cause behind this, which I call the Discussion Dichotomy
, because I like alliteration.
Usually, I'm used to see the Discussion Dichotomy happen in discussions between atheists and religious folks. The problem is the term discussion.
To atheists, and in the dictionary, discussions
are conversations meant to come to conclusions. They're debates, if you will.
But often, when people talk about discussions,
they merely mean sharing,
or shooting the shit,
or just talking about stuff.
And that leads to a lot frustration, especially in the context of religion. Certainly not all the time, but quite often, when religious folks want to discuss
religion, what they really want to do is share their beliefs. And they might very well be honestly interested in hearing yours. And that's a valuable thing to do. (After all, how can I dismiss their beliefs without actually learning about them? That's right, I'm always plotting your demise! Always!)
But atheists hear discuss religion
and we want to debate its merits. We want to determine whether there's evidence to believe it. (Which, of course, there isn't, because there isn't a God.) And this leads to frustration from both parties. We atheists can't figure out why the religious folks are so unwilling to actually defend their beliefs and why they get offended at our efforts. Meanwhile, the religious folks can't figure out why we're such argumentative cusses.
Now, it's tempting to just say Well, the atheists are correct that discussions are debates because the dictionary says so.
Except that dictionaries reflect societal usage, they don't define it. And there's such a thing as being a pedantic ass. (I know. I often am one.)
In a colloquial context, I'm happy to use colloquial definitions. And, if someone wants to discuss
something with me and I suspect they desire a sharing experience, I'll ask them for clarification. There's value in sharing. There isn't much value in trying to debate someone who really isn't interested in debating.
So, to link this back to the beginning of the post, I was just engaging in sharing, but the other guy was in debate mode. So he took my comment as an invitation to debate, whereas I was just sharing remembrances. Luckily, the quality of Carl Sagan's fictional writing skills isn't something as important to others as religion often is, so the conversation moved on.
But I think it's a wise thing to consider, the next time you're asked to have a discussion,
whether the other person is looking for a debate or just wants to share.
(As a final note, none of this should be construed as an excuse for those who enter into debates, then punk out when they start losing.)
Draw Mohammed Day
So, it's Draw Mohammed Day. In case you're not familar with it, it's basically a reaction to Islamic threats towards those who have portrayed Mohammed in drawings. (Specifically, the recent South Park episode. Although the problem is more wide-spread than just that.)
It's also become, unfortunately, an outlet for a shit-load of racism.
The problem Muslims have regarding drawing Mohammed is two-fold. On one hand, some interpret the Qur'an to forbid drawing the prophet at all, in order to forestall people from worshiping the prophet in place of God. Well, that's fine, if that's what you believe. But don't expect me to follow suit. Additionally, if you're worried about me worshiping Mohammed, well, don't worry. Ain't gonna happen. So there's some irony there. Muslims may expect me to follow some rule for reasons that explicitly don't apply to me.
On the other hand lies the respect
issue. Many, even most, of the people drawing Mohammed lately are being as rude with their drawings as they can. And Muslims are taking offense and asking for/demanding respect. And, again, that's fine. But then it escalates to threats and even attempts at violence. Then, it's not so fine.
Of course, on the gripping hand, the US has fucked around with the Middle East quite a lot, both historically and lately. And if I came from that perspective, I might throw a bomb myself.
Yes, that's right, I said it. Much of the Muslim anger towards the US is entirely justified. Radical Islam itself grew from the shitty things we did to Iran with the Shah. We are reaping what we've sown. That said, if y'all keep hitting at the US, we will eventually just blow you up. No, really, we can do that. I hope we don't. But we can. We really can. When US hawks yap about turning the Middle East into a smooth plain of glass, they're not kidding. I don't think folks in the Middle East really understand that we have enough missiles to take out the former Soviet Union. Sad, but true.
Well, in any case, I can't draw worth shit. But I can use an avatar creation program. So, here are my drawings
of Mohammed. I decided to work against the can't draw the prophet at all
rule instead of trying to be offensive just to establish that I can be offensive. So I went for cute and clever:
These next two aren't really drawings of the prophet at all. Rather, they're rather obvious plays on words:
Finally, if you want to draw Mohammed quickly and easily, here are two emoticons:
Stern Mohammed: (((:~{>
Happy Mohammed: (((;~)>
I did follow the Facebook group for awhile and engaged in some discussions with Muslims. And I learned some things, both good and bad. I'll post some thoughts on that tomorrow.
The Morality Paradox
(Yes, it's another one of those long serious
posts where I pretend to be all intellectual and shit.)
Reading this article, Creating God In One's Own Image, reminded me that I had been meaning to write about the Morality Paradox. Maybe paradox
isn't the right word. I don't really know. Anyway, I find it interesting.
The article talks about how people attribute their own values to God. In other words, instead of deriving their own values from God, they decide on their own values first and then project them onto God.
And it reminded me of something about which I've been thinking recently. In short, people of faith, with a God-given set of rules upon which to draw, can't seem to come to any common moral conclusions. Meanwhile, atheists, who have no set of rules handed down, are surprisingly uniform on many moral issues.
Maybe I'm just grossly misinformed, but religious folks seem to cover the vast spectrum on moral issues. You have folks on each side of issues like abortion or gay rights. As one evangelical I know and respect said In their rhetoric, it is almost like progressive and conservative Christians are reading from two different Bibles.
(Well, okay, I know this person's spouse. But the person quoted seems just as nice and smart. And I have loads of respect for both of them.) Of course, you also see them all over the political spectrum on money-related issues as well.
But, when you look at atheists, you just don't see many (any?) who are pro-life or who think we ought to restrict the rights of gays. Atheists are all over the place on other political issues, particularly money-related issues. I know far lefty atheists. I know libertarian atheists. And I know a shit-load of liberal Democrat atheists. But, on morality issues, we tend to line up pretty well.
I don't know any straight-up conservative atheists, presumably based on incompatibility with the moral issues listed above.
And I most certainly don't know any pro-life or anti-gay-rights atheists.
Shouldn't we be expecting the opposite? Shouldn't folks who don't recognize any supreme authority be all over the place on these sorts of moral issues? Shouldn't folks with a God-given book of laws all agree?
We can partially explain away the lack on consistency on the religious side by pointing out that the books of rules tend to have so many rules, you're almost forced to pick and choose which ones you want to follow. The Bible has Leviticus, a collection of rules that are followed or ignored based at least partially on who or what the follower doesn't personally like. Not to be outdone, the Qur'an tells you how to wipe your butt. No, seriously, including which direction to face so that an all-seeing God doesn't see you dirty butt.
Or, as the good Reverend Lovejoy once pointed out just about everything is a sin, technically we can't even go to the bathroom.
So, okay, it's understandable that they would come to differing opinions on what the various books of laws actually say. (Which brings up the question of why then bother with the book of laws. Another topic for another time.)
But I remain fascinated by the uniformity of us atheists on certain moral issues when we certainly don't agree on much else. Money issues? No way. There's a healthy percentage of atheist libertarians to counter all the liberals. Foreign relations? Nope. Sure, there's plenty of doves. But some of the most famous atheists are outright hawks.
But on personal morality issues? Right down the fucking line!
So, why would that be? The glib answer is that, without a book of laws, we're forced to actually think about the issues rather than having the answers handed to us. So we naturally come to the same correct answers.
Is that all there is to it? Yes!!! Bwaa-ha-ha!!! That's all there is to it!!! Ahem, sorry, got carried away by glorious rationality.
But that does lead me to another issue that's been rattling around in my skull. Long ago, I read Hitchens' god is not Great. I didn't much like it. It's long on shallow bitching and short on actual analysis. The only really interesting piece comes on page 126, I think. (The fact that I remember the page number is testament to the general lack of ideas in the book.)
Basically, Hitchens makes the assertion that good religious folks would still be good without their religious belief, but that bad religious folks are at least enabled by their belief. And I think that's true. But, how to actually prove that? Well, I don't think you can, but the study at the top of the post leads you in that direction. Their personal ethics and decisions drive their take on religion rather than the opposite.
The other thing that leads in that direction is the realization that atheist are basically a control group for moral decision-making, at least in some areas. Following that line of reasoning, we see that religion doesn't really make people good. They would be good anyway, like the control group. But religion can indeed make you bad, at least on some issues.
Yeah, I know, dime-store ethics. Whadda want for nothing? Rubber biscuit?
