Author: VD

Mailvox: a tale of two atheists

JM writes:

I was born of two avowed atheists, along with two sisters, one older, one younger, and we were raised with the highest of social values and principles, and this was done by taking us to church from our earliest days, and learning morality from Christian religion, even though my parents both deny the correctness of the theology. They considered their options, concluded they could find no fixed means of inculcating moral behavior in us any other way, and chose to use what worked on them and for so many others, while making no personal claims at all about religion, what they believed in, but let their examples show, and let us assume they were connected to the moral lessons we were learning in Church, fully supporting those lessons, but with no means of connecting the dichotomy. I was certain I was an atheist at eleven, but could not come up with any possible way to put together a rational morality without presuming for the sake of argument, a superior being who would ultimately judge our behavior according to an established set of standards….

Of my parents and two sisters, and myself, I alone am a believer, and while I am assailed every time we are together, and challenged at every turn, I can do no more than Galileo did, as he accepted his rebuke, and turned away saying to himself, yet we still move around the sun.

I know science does not give moral answers, I’ve lived through enough of this world to know this for a certainty, yet I know that science does give accurate answers to so many reasonable questions, I don’t deny its validity. I also know that morality is an absolute, and it is fixed, and accept that it is made law, just as a part of Creation, and is a part of God himself. I know much about the history and lineage of man, and accept my place in society, and in God’s will, knowing it is of the greatest consequence of all, and I simply accept it is not subject to dissection by science, or if it is, the beginnings of that work are not within our grasp yet.

It is hard to deal with quantum mechanics, entanglement, dark energy and matter, and also deal with faith and God, good and evil, all as truths, and all directly impacting us, but just because it is hard does not take away the self evident truths which we base our moral standards on, nor does it remove the necessity of pursuing good, because failing to do so inevitably provides the opening for evil to enter into one’s choices and one becomes evil by do it.

I think perhaps it is easier to recognize the limited scope of scientific utility if one’s training is in fields where the state of science is not so much inexact as hopelessly inaccurate. Economists such as Paul Krugman are every bit as convinced of the mathematical verity of their pseudoscientific dogma as Richard Dawkins, but it is much, much easier for the skeptical economist who rejects the various forms of Keynesianism to demonstrate the falsity of mainstream economic science than it is for the skeptical biologist due to the much shorter time frame in which the economists operate. Having witnessed the repeated construction of economic epicycles in order to explain away the theory’s extensive panoply of failures, it is not at all difficult to see exactly the same process at work in biology and even physics.

The choice is simple, Sam Harris’s envisioning of a utilitarian moral landscape notwithstanding. Either there are rules of the game as well as an original provider of those rules or there is no game. Consider the following definition: “GAME – a competitive activity involving skill, chance, or endurance on the part of two or more persons who play according to a set of rules.” No rules, no game. The same applies to life; either there is a purpose to life and a set of rules related to that purpose or there is no purpose and no rules. This is not an original thought, as numerous philosophers of various creeds have pointed out, the choice has always been between God and the Void. Attempting to disguise that choice by appealing to science, self-interest, or collective humanity is doomed to failure by logic as well as historical observation.

The intellectual poverty of Harris’s case can be seen in the arguments of his followers. I don’t know what it is about atheists, but they do seem remarkably prone to thinking that they can argue in ignorance. Consider the following exchange with KH:

KH: Sam Harris made a point in one of his books that God doesn’t heal amputees. I don’t find that to be an “intellectual failure.” He’s right. Just a straight-shooting, blue-collar observation. Christians don’t pray for a worker’s severed arm to regrow. What would you say to counter such a statement?

VD: That’s amusing. You do realize that one solitary point, correct or incorrect, is insufficient to make a book an intellectual success or failure, right? You clearly haven’t read TIA or you would be aware that both The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation are full of logical and factual errors. As for how would I respond, I would ask him what his evidence is for such a statement. Has he done any scientific surveys of amputees and the Christians who know them? There is no reason to believe his statement about amputees to be any better evidenced than his statement that all the research shows corporal punishment to have a negative effect on children’s behavior.

KH: I was simply using one example from Sam’s works to illustrate how I thought he was correct. Another question you cannot answer, Vox, but he can (because he’s right) is: Why don’t we find rabbits in the layers of Cambrian rocks, next to trilobites, if they were all created together? This gradual increase in complexity as you go upward from older to younger rocks is empirically evident. I seriously would need you to convince me on this simple point to believe that his works are an intellectual failure.

VD: One or two correct examples do not suffice to prevent an entire book from being an intellectual failure. The intellectual failure or success of a book is determined by the success or failure of its central thesis; all three of Sam’s books are failures by this reckoning. And, contra your incorrect assertion, of course I can easily answer what is not actually Sam’s point, but one that he cribs from J.S. Haldane: circular reasoning is used in the geological dating of rocks and fossils. Furthermore, there is no “gradual increase in complexity”; you clearly know very little about either the fossil record or geology if you genuinely believe “you go upward from older to younger rocks”. Do you even know what “punctuated equilibrium” means, much less why the concept was developed in the first place?

You must realize that it is as ludicrous to attempt to criticize my critique of Sam Harris as it would have been for me to attempt to criticize Sam Harris without first reading his books.

Neither amputees nor trilobites have much, if anything, to do with the central theses of The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, or The Moral Landscape. But this doesn’t prevent dogmatic atheists desperate to find spiritual leadership from leaping blindly to defend Mr. Harris from substantive criticisms of his works.

And, as we all know, when rabbit fossils are eventually discovered in Cambrian rocks, (actually “Precambrian”, KH didn’t even get the Haldane quote right), scientists will trample each other in the stampede to claim that a) the fossils are not rabbits, b) the rocks are not Precambrian, and c) evolution is “a large package of ideas, including: that life on Earth has evolved over billions of years; that this evolution is driven by certain mechanisms; and that these mechanisms have produced a specific “family tree” that defines the relationships among species and the order in which they appeared” and therefore a single impossible anachronism should not be sufficient to destroy such an important and glorious edifice constructed over so many years by so many famous scientists.

UPDATE: KH emailed again to complain that I did not directly answer the question about why we don’t find rabbit fossils next to trilobite fossils. (He also complained I didn’t answer the first one, which is simply not true.) The reason I answered the implied question rather than the direct one is because the direct question is very stupid. But, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, the reason we don’t find rabbit fossils next to trilobite fossils is not because they lived in different eras, (even assuming that they did, in fact, live in different eras), it is the same reason we do not find giraffe fossils next to sperm whale fossils. Barring the discovery of the hitherto unknown Sylvilagus oceanus maximus, the present state of scientage indicates that rabbits are land animals and trilobites are marine animals.

Finally!

Childress is gone:

Jay Glazer of FOX Sports is first reported, and the Vikings have confirmed, that Childress has been fired…. Defensive coordinator Leslie Frazier has been named the interim head coach for the rest of the 2010 season.

I never thought I’d say this, but thank you Green Bay! I have no confidence in Frazier, but I actively disliked Childress from the moment his hiring was announced. I don’t even think Andy Reid is a good head coach – he’s a great quarterbacks coach, to be sure – so hiring someone who worked under Reid and didn’t even call the plays as his offensive coordinator seemed totally inexplicable. The success the Vikings have had was the result of Rick Spielman’s work in bringing in good players; literally anyone could have achieved decent results with the talent he brought in.

One wonders how Wilf made his money, since handing Childress an extension last year when absolutely no one was offering him a job was one of the dumbest business decisions I’ve ever seen. Now he’ll be paying for it. I doubt any of the marquis coaches will have a lot of interest in the job, but I’d take a serious look at Brian Billick. Anyone who can win a Super Bowl with Trent Dilfer at quarterback has something going on and I always liked his pre-game speech before the AFC Championship game against the favored Titans.

“When you go in the lion’s den, you don’t tippy toe in — you carry a spear, you go in screaming like a banshee, you kick whatever doors in, and say, ‘Where’s the son of a bitch?'”

The first bankster hit?

The Market Ticker contemplates a murder in Atlanta:

Americans were put into supposedly-safe “auction rate securities” and lost millions of dollars when they could not sell them. Americans were sold various MBS that were allegedly “AAA”, lost money, and have no recourse. Americans were sold homes based on inflated appraisals and knowingly-bogus loans given to them where the banksters involved knew they couldn’t pay, and lost everything.

None of the people responsible for the collapse in 2007-2009 have been indicted.

NOT ONE INDICTMENT.

This, despite the fact that Citibank’s former Chief Underwriter has testified under oath that the Bank knew it was writing crap paper in 2006 and 2007. 60% of the loans were bogus in 2006, and 80% in 2007. Yet they kept doing it, and nobody, including Rubin, who received a memo on the matter, has been indicted and the bank was bailed out rather than being shut down.

Likewise there are myriad complaints about foreclosure fraud – the filing of false affidavits which are in fact crimes – over 170,000 of them in aggregate that have been admitted to.

Again: Not one indictment has issued and not one firm has been shut down.

Gunfire is prevalent among gang members because they do not have any other means of settling disputes. That is, having had their right to recourse under the law removed due to the nature of the activity in question, these gang members instead turn to violence to settle complaints with one another.

Are we seeing the beginning of the same thing in the financial realm?

Denninger is correct and I suspect that the banksters have not thought through the probable ramifications of their actions in attempting to shield themselves from being held legally accountable for their criminal behavior. As with the illegal drug economy, in which disputes are settled with violence because legal recourse is simply not an option, banksters who utilize their political influence to insulate themselves from the victims of their financial rapine are likely to become targets of those whose only hope of justice is to take it into their own hands.

Not every foreign investor or American who has lost their home is going to seek justice; the majority of the latter won’t even show up to court. But some will do so, which is why it is utterly foolish for banksters to attempt to place themselves above the law, because above the law is, by definition, also outside the law.

This is why it is so important that the insolvent banks are shut down rather than bailed out and why the criminal banksters must be arrested and prosecuted rather than granted ex post facto legal immunity. If government abdicates its lawful role, others will eventually fill the void.

Correction: this appears to be number two. I note that two years into the Great Depression 2.0, more banksters have been murdered than indicted.

This is “equality”

UK family court law is making sharia look better and better by comparison:

A £56million lottery winner has been ordered to pay £2million to his ex-wife who walked out on him ten years ago. Nigel Page, 44, was sued by his former wife Wendy shortly after his massive Euromillions windfall earlier this year even though she left him for another man.

It is truly astonishing how the Western legal system has rapidly devolved into little more than a vehicle for funneling money from men with resources to women without them. Of course, it’s hard to feel much sympathy for the lottery winner who promptly turned around and married his girlfriend. I wonder what the over/under is on her departure?

WND column

The Moral Landscape

Sam Harris’s first two books were commercial successes and intellectual failures. Riddled with basic factual and logical errors, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation served as little more than godless red meat snapped up by unthinking atheists around the English-speaking world. His third book, The Moral Landscape, is also a challenge to established wisdom, but it is a much more sober, serious and interesting book than its predecessors.

The basis for the book is Harris’s own neuroscience experiments, in which he tested his hypothesis that when hooked up to an fMRI scanner, the human brain would produce an observable difference in its activity when contemplating non-religious beliefs than when considering religious beliefs. As it happens, the hypothesis was found to be incorrect, as the same responses were elicited from both the believing group and the non-believing group for religious and nonreligious stimuli alike. (Full disclosure: I was one of the Christians asked by Mr. Harris to review the religious stimuli to ensure their theological verisimilitude. In my opinion, the questions utilized were both reasonable and fair.)

NOTE: For those who happen to be interested in the subject, I will be posting the bookmarked notes I made in the course of reading The Moral Landscape here later this week.

Strip search USA

No nation that is willing to collectively submit to this behavior is one that deserves to survive. Only a nation of fat and worthless sheep who have wholly abandoned their inheritance of liberty would prefer to have its children strip-searched than give up air travel. On a potentially related note, not that you had any doubt, but the big banks are definitely going to need the expected TARP II soon. It turns out that many of the so-called mortgage-backed securities didn’t have any mortgages backing them.

Countrywide Routinely Failed to Send Key Docs to MBS Trustees, B of A Employee Says, by Kate Berry, American Banker: Countrywide, the mortgage giant that’s now part of Bank of America Corp., routinely didn’t bother to transfer essential documents for loans sold to investors, an employee testified…. it was customary for Countrywide to maintain possession of the original note and related loan documents.

Denninger explains the significance at the Market Ticker.

VPFL Week 10

89 RR Redbeards (4-5-1)
61 Moundsview Meerkats (2-7-1)

80 MS Swamp Spartans (5-4-1)
58 Blackmouth Banksters (6-4-0)

81 Greenfield Grizzlies (4-5-1)
69 Valders Quixotes (7-3-0)

71 Bane Sidhe (6-4-0)
57 Judean Rhyneauxs (5-5-0)

69 Meigs Marauders (5-5-0)
66 Winston Reverends (4-6-0)

I honestly thought I had a good chance at that game despite Aaron Rodgers being on the bye. And then Michael Vick scored 46 points! Going into week 11, my kicker has already been outscored by the Blackmouth kicker 13-0. My only goal left is to finish in the top three in points scored while remaining on the bottom of the league standings. In other news, watch out for a raging bear market; the Grizzlies appear to be making their move.

Dowd goes nuclear

Her column entitled Nuking the White House is subtitled: “Would Republicans make Indianapolis collateral damage in their eagerness to wipe out Obama?”

I can’t speak for Republicans, not being one, but I would say no, since Indianapolis never did anything to anyone except Baltimore and it would be unnecessary anyhow since Obama is politically wiping himself out about as fast as is humanly possible. However, I suspect a great many Americans would be quite willing to accept New York City, Washington DC, and Los Angeles as collateral damage.

However, there is an ominous warning to Republicans in her column. It does not bode well for them that the new House Majority Leader didn’t see fit to allow himself to be subjected to a gate rape last week. Keep this in mind if he comes out in support of the TSA and opposes Ron Paul’s new bill.

“The Times’s Jeff Zeleny was on the scene and reported that John Boehner did not wait in line or go through security: he “was escorted around the metal detectors and body scanners, and taken directly to the gate.”

It’s amazing how clueless politicians are when it comes to PR when one considers how much their careers depend upon it. If Boehner had any PR skills at all, he would have opted out of the scan, then shouted “don’t touch my junk” at the first TSA agent to approach him. The crowd would have roared and his approval rating would be in the 80s… among Democrats.

Mailvox: beyond overload

HW writes of the effects of engaging in an intellectually hazardous adventure:

Effects of reading 7 years of Vox Popoli entries in two months:

I started following your blog and somehow came to the insane conclusion that I should read every single one of your posts, starting from 2003. I came to Vox Popoli after reading TIA and thoroughly enjoying the unapologetic demolition of the New Atheists’ best arguments. While I know that TIA is not meant as a defense of Christianity, its author was clearly a believer, and not the kind whose confused imagination portrays Christ as a limp-wristed hippy. Vox’s posts on feminism piqued my interest further and I decided to read the entire archive. You know, for fun.

How has concentrated exposure to Vox’s writing affected my life? Let’s break it down by category.

Career: Won’t try to become a professional writer.

Economics: Intense feelings of doom.

Child-rearing: First child is due in January. Won’t be vaccinating, (at least immediately), will be homeschooling. It’s clear now that my public school education was not only inefficient, but just plain wrong at times. The Dark Ages never happened? Who knew?!

Politics: Clearer view of how police power is dangerous and needs to be severely restricted. I previously described myself as a conservative, and though my political leanings were similar to libertarianism, I consistently voted Republican. However, as I reached the end of the 2008 archives, that changed. Two years of the Obama administration has conditioned me to blame everything on him, and the bailouts fit his modus operandi perfectly, so my brain naturally added the farcical attempts at recovery to his list of sins. Then a shocking realization: Bush was still President. The man I VOTED FOR was governing like Obama. The time-travel effect of the archives has convinced me that Bush was not conservative, and I now regret voting for McCain. Fortunately, this was in time for the November elections, and my wife and I cast our first votes for libertarian candidates.

Digesting the archives was a thoroughly enjoyable experience and while it challenged several of my concepts of the world, I don’t feel that it’s any exaggeration to say that I’m better off for it. I’m taking steps to cure my historical blind spots and my wife happened to be convincing me that homeschooling was superior at the same time as I was reading Vox’s posts on the subject. The only downside to finishing this little project is that I have to wait until you post now, instead of being able to simply move on to the next month. I guess I’ll start Summa Elvetica…

I know the feeling, I did much the same thing a few years ago when I discovered Fred Reed’s articles. I am pleased that HW found the experience to be a useful one, especially because it appears to have encouraged him to think for himself and to heighten his critical faculties. The primary goal of this blog is to encourage myself and others to raise our intellectual game in a free, casual, and reasonably civil manner.

Speaking of which, I have an idea for a book which would require an amount of fairly serious research help from the Ilk. Despite the copious amounts of ink and its digital substitute that have been devoted to blathering in ignorance about religion and war, there has never been a serious book about it from the military historians, the military strategists, or the critics of religion. So, I’m contemplating the expansion of the two chapters of TIA devoted to the subject into a book entitled God and War that deals with the use and utility of religion in historical warfare dating back to the earliest written records.

This would not be a book of apologetics or even an attack on the hypothesis that religion causes war, it would be a straightforward summary of all the known facts about the relationship between religion and the causes and practice of war. This strikes me as a more useful contribution to the sum of human knowledge than continuing to beat up on intellectual lightweights like the New Atheists and Keynesian economists. It’s a rather large-scale undertaking and will take an amount of time to write since I can’t devote any work time to it, so it would help speed up the process if if five or ten people would be willing to help with digging up the details on specific wars that have either eluded the three-volumes of the Encyclopedia of Wars or been given insufficient shrift by the authors of that very useful reference work.

Anyhow, it’s just an idea at this stage, so let me know if it would be of any interest to you, either as a reader or a potential volunteer.