Category: Uncategorized

Further abusing an expired equine

Edward Feser praises Common Sense Atheism for having the good sense to abandon a disproven aphorism:

[T]he Common Sense Atheism blog used to proclaim proudly on its masthead: When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

I see that that blog has now removed this one-liner, which is perhaps a sign that intellectual progress is possible even among New Atheist types. Because while your average “Internet Infidel” seems to regard the “one god further” objection as devastatingly clever, it is in fact embarrassingly inept, a sign of the extreme decadence into which secularist “thought” has fallen in the Age of Dawkins.

Suppose someone skeptical about Euclidean geometry said:

When you understand why you regard all the particular triangles you’ve observed as having sides that are less than perfectly straight, you will understand why I regard Euclidean plane triangles as such to have sides that are less than perfectly straight.

Or suppose a critic of Platonism said:

When you understand why you regard the things of ordinary experience as in various ways imperfect or less than fully good instances of their kinds, you will understand why I regard Plato’s Form of the Good as being less than fully good.

Would these count as devastating objections to Euclidean geometry and Platonism? Would they serve as fitting mottos for blogs devoted to “Common Sense Anti-Euclideanism” or “Common Sense Anti-Platonism”? Obviously not. They would demonstrate only that the speaker didn’t have the slightest clue what the hell he was talking about.

Feser took a different tact than I did in addressing Sam Harris’s use of this aphorism in TIA, but the fact that the statement can be demolished from multiple angles is a good indication that it is a remarkably stupid statement. I leave it to you to decide which method is more effective, but I certainly can’t argue with his conclusion.

Anyhow, it’s good to see that atheists have abandoned this and the ridiculous Red State argument. Hopefully it won’t be long before they give up on the ludicrous “One Less God” assertion, the ahistorical “religion causes war” meme, and the dishonest “No True Atheist” defense as well.

Islamic democracy

This election news from Nigeria should help sober up those who are still enthusiastic about the demands for democracy in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya.

Violent protests erupted across Nigeria’s largely Muslim north on Monday as youths angered at President Goodluck Jonathan’s election victory torched churches and homes and set up burning barricades. The vote count showed Jonathan, from the southern oil-producing Niger Delta, had beaten Muhammadu Buhari, a former military ruler from the north, in the first round.

Observers have called the poll the fairest in decades in Africa’s most populous nation but Buhari’s supporters accuse the ruling party of rigging. Results show how politically polarised the country is, with Buhari sweeping states in the Muslim north and Jonathan winning the largely Christian south…. A Reuters tally of results put Jonathan on nearly 23 million votes to just over 12 million for Buhari.

A 66-34 is hardly Bush-Gore in 2000 or the Coleman-Franken senatorial election in Minnesota. It is, in fact, an absolute landslide. It also tends to suggest that Muslims will not necessarily wait until they are in the majority to demand governing power, which could have some interesting implications for countries such as Britain and the Netherlands.

A failure to follow through

Standards & Poor finally begins to consider downgrading U.S. debt, but lack the guts to point out the obvious.

Standard & Poor’s on Monday downgraded the outlook for the United States to negative, saying it believes there’s a risk U.S. policymakers may not reach agreement on how to address the country’s long-term fiscal pressures.

“Because the U.S. has, relative to its ‘AAA’ peers, what we consider to be very large budget deficits and rising government indebtedness and the path to addressing these is not clear to us, we have revised our outlook on the long-term rating to negative from stable,” the agency said in a statement.

Of course, remember that debt rating services don’t downgrade debt until it is completely obvious to everyone. If you still think U.S. debt merits AAA status, well, you probably borrowed a lot of money to invest in real estate sometime after 2007. To say that the outlook is “negative” is a serious understatement.

WND column

Hell is for Human Trash

The Christian concept of hell has proven to be a strangely difficult one to accept for a species that has developed the concepts of capitalism, natural selection and the survival of the fittest. And it is an odd world in which metal bands contemplate the theology of damnation in a more sophisticated and intelligent manner than religious ministers – one cannot reasonably call them Christian – of national standing.

NB: this is the TIME magazine article to which I refer in the column.

The temptation of the sockpuppet

It is perhaps understandable why people in the public eye might be tempted to defend themselves this way, but it’s never a good idea:

How many people think I’m actually Scott Adams writing about myself in third person?
posted by plannedchaos at 9:21 AM on April 15 [1 favorite]

I am Scott Adams.
posted by plannedchaos at 11:09 AM on April 15 [20 favorites]

And just to be clear that this isn’t some weird joke, yes, he is.

Scott, if you wanted to sign up for Metafilter to defend your writing, that would have been fine. If you wanted to sign up for Metafilter and be incognito as just another user, that’d be fine too. Doing both simultaneously isn’t; pretending to be a third party and high-fiving yourself by proxy is a pretty sketchy move and a serious violation of general community expectations about identity management around here.

I appreciate you fessing up at this point, but I’d sure rather it hadn’t happened at all. It’s just incredibly disappointing to watch play out.
posted by cortex at 11:16 AM on April 15 [131 favorites]

I like both Scott and his work, but I would absolutely have advised him against taking this tactic. If he’d defended himself openly, many of the people on the site would likely have been thrilled that he was communicating directly with them. As it stands, well, it’s just doesn’t look good.

And for the record, I do not engage in sockpuppetry here. I realize that some of my critics do occasionally look so spectacularly stupid that suspicions I am setting up strawmen in order to knock them down are entirely understandable. But unfortunately, the fact is that both the critics and the arguments are genuine.

Anyhow, I suspect most of the Dread Ilk recognize that I am too arrogant to be so concerned about whether anyone agrees with me or not that I would resort to a real appeal to public opinion, let alone a fake one.

The benefits of immigration

So much for the idea of shiny, sexy, secular post-Christianity in Britain:

Women who do not wear headscarves are being threatened with violence and even death by Islamic extremists intent on imposing sharia law on parts of Britain, it was claimed today. Other targets of the ‘Talibanesque thugs’, being investigated by police in the Tower Hamlets area of London, include homosexuals.

Stickers have been plastered on public walls stating: ‘Gay free zone. Verily Allah is severe in punishment’.

The enthusiastic embrace of the importation of non-Christian religionists by secular multiculturalists hoping to reduce the cultural influence of Christianity is without question going to be considered one of the most disastrous policies in the history of the West. I wonder how long it will be before the first British government official is assassinated by a Sharia-seeking radical. I, for one, will find it tremendously amusing when feminist professors begin wearing headscarfs for fear of their students.

The secular community in government, media, and academia decided to ally itself with Islam against Christianity some time ago. I wonder how many of them are beginning to rethink the wisdom of that decision.

HBO’s A Game of Thrones reviewed

It is no secret that those who imagine themselves to be serious literati tend to despise the science fiction and fantasy genres. While it is increasingly true that there is a lot to be despised about the present state of SF/F literature, it is not at all difficult to discern that there is a big difference between those contemptuous critics who are actually familiar with the genre and those who are not. Strangely enough, the literary contempt for SF/F, which was originally based on the thin characterizations and juvenile appeal of Golden Age science fiction, has apparently now expanded into the cinematic world as well. This is a little strange given the way in which the same historical deficiencies of classic science fiction literature clearly apply to the cinema, to say nothing of the present state of television drama.

The New York Times review of A Game of Thrones, which begins tonight on HBO, is remarkable for the reviewer’s complete lack of familiarity, not only with George R.R. Martin, with the last 30 years of the fantasy genre as well. Read the rest at the Black Gate

Academia and the myth of matriarchy

Apparently if you believe in the perfectly logical and long-held philosophical concept that the universe did not simply appear ex nihilo for no reason, you are academically unfit, but it’s perfectly fine for academics to subscribe to the totally ahistorical notion that Man was once ruled by female committee:

There is no real evidence that humanity every passed through a stage in which society was matriarchal, and abundant evidence to the contrary. Goddesses, of course, appear frequently in the world’s religions and myths, but the notion of a great prehistoric cult of the Goddess in Europe connected to matriarchal rule has no foundation.

Why bring this up now? Because higher education’s relaxed attitude about appointing faculty members who not only believe but who actually teach this moonshine demonstrates the hypocrisy of those who say that faculty members are acting out of the need to protect the university from anti-scientific nonsense when they discriminate against conservative Christian candidates for academic appointment. The possibility that a candidate for a position in biology, anthropology, or, say, English literature might secretly harbor the idea that God created the universe or that the Bible is true, is a danger not to be brooked. But apparently, the possibility that a candidate believes that human society was “matriarchal” until about 5,000 years ago is perfectly within the range of respectable opinion appropriate for campus life….

I take it as one of the great intellectual scandals of our age that this nonsense has gained academic legitimacy. Hardly a soul who vehemently defends the university’s need to protect itself from the dangerous presence of Biblical literalists and the like sees anything amiss in having a whole tide of anti-scientific, ahistorical ideological fantasy claim the status of an academic discipline. Could there be a version of women’s studies sans the myth of matriarchal prehistory? Surely there could be, as there are substantial numbers of feminist scholars who reject that myth. But the field as a whole has not done so. If it is necessary that a candidate for an academic appointment in biology demonstrate competence in evolutionary biology, it ought surely be necessary that a candidate for appointment in women’s studies demonstrate show the ability to distinguish historical fantasy from fact.

I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon, but it is a useful thought experiment. Why won’t higher education hold women’s studies to ordinary standards of historical accuracy? Because contemporary American higher education cares far more about protecting its favored group of political ideologies than it does its standards of rational inquiry and scrupulous use of evidence. The standards are cited most conspicuously when they lend themselves to fencing off members of disfavored groups.

I’ve always found Sam Harris’s assertion that being a Christian somehow renders scientific work impossible to be an interesting one, considering that it is an intrinsically ahistoric and anti-scientific philosophical argument. And PZ Myers’s insistence that academics must subscribe to TEpNS dogma has always amused me, considering that he still subscribes to economic arguments that have been disproven for decades, and in some cases, centuries. If the standard that biologists wish to apply to other academics were applied to biologists on subjects such as economics or history, nearly every biology department in the USA would find itself empty.

Six bank failures

Yesterday the FDIC shut down six banks with around $4.2 billion in assets between them. But I thought one thing was a bit peculiar with regards to the seizure of Superior Bank in Birmingham, Alabama.

“As of December 31, 2010, Superior Bank had approximately $3.0 billion in total assets and $2.7 billion in total deposits. … The FDIC estimates that the cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) will be $259.6 million.”

It seems as if the bigger the bank is, the smaller the cost to the FDIC reported. In this case, the losses were only 8.7 percent, much lower than the 22.5 percent average for bank closures in 2010 and 2011. This would appear to suggest that the losses are being disguised in the assets being acquired by the new bank, which in this case is “Superior Bank, N.A., Birmingham, Alabama, a newly-chartered bank subsidiary of Community Bancorp LLC, Houston, Texas”.

I’ve also noticed that both the numbers of banks seized and percent of estimated bad assets appear to be shrinking. The 34 banks seized so far in 2011 averaged about 34.4 percent bad assets versus 42.1 percent for the 157 banks seized in 2010 and 41.1 percent for the 140 seized in 2009. This would appear to indicate a material improvement, although it is a fairly modest one considering that the fair financial winds of government spending and quantitative easing appear to be drawing to a close.

Mailvox: the “No True Atheist” defense

Cisbio is still trying to defend atheism by insisting that murderous atheists are not, in fact, atheists, while attacking Christianity for crimes that were committed by non-Christians. Needless to say, it’s not the most effective of strategies.

How is it dishonest to compared atheist to non-atheist crimes, if it is perfectly valid to attempt to heighten the enormity of atheist crimes by comparing them only with Christian crimes -exclusively from the middle ages?

First, it is entirely typical that cisbio fails to understand both the context and the nature of the comparison. TIA was not written ex nihilo, but in response to specific atheist charges made against religion in general and Christianity in particular. The Christian crimes are not taken “exclusively from the middle ages”, as should be obvious since the period of Christendom I utilized for the purposes of comparison began prior to the Middle Ages with the accession of Theodosius I to the Western half of the Empire in combination with his decrees that re-established Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. Prior to that point, his decrees were simply not relevant to the older half of the empire.

While one could argue for starting with 363, when Jovian rescinded Julian the Apostate’s pagan revival, or possibly even 313, with Constantine the Great’s Edict of Milan, 392 marks the moment from which Christianity most clearly reigned politically supreme. Before this date, Christian state crimes were not possible for the obvious reason that Christians did not possess sufficient political power.

Cisbio is mistaken when he thinks that I end the period of Christendom in 1453, which again should be obvious since the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre took place in 1572. 1453 merely set the limit on the number of Roman emperors, 126 to be precise, to which I added every single Christian king from all the major European kingdoms down to the present day. Again, cisbio should have known this due to the estimated number of kings utilized. Thus, this extended period is not limited to the Middle Ages and it is not only a reasonable comparison to the two centuries in which atheism has been most influential, it is the only possible one.

And the fact that not a single one of those estimated 1,781 Christian rulers committed a single crime against his people that was one-half as bad as 52 of the 89 atheist rulers, (with the exception of King Leopold II of Belgium, who appears to have engaged in societal egg-breaking with all the vicious enthusiasm of an atheist) does tend to testify that there is something peculiarly lethal about the combination of atheists and political power. While it is true that most of these atheist killers were Communists and the few that were not Communists were at least Socialists, it doesn’t change the fact that a) all of them were atheists, and b) most atheists are either Communists or socialists.

That may sound surprising, but recall that Bertrand Russell, Michel Onfray, and Christopher Hitchens are all socialists. Richard Dawkins describes himself as having been a voter for the democratic socialist party in the 1970s. Sam Harris is not a socialist, but he is an avowed globalist, which is the socialism of the 21st century. Of the six foremost atheist intellectuals, only Dennett appears to be entirely free of a lethal form of atheism, but even that is unconfirmed.

Now, I think there is room for a reasonable discussion regarding what is more dangerous, the most lethal form of religion or the most lethal form of atheism, especially when the warlike aspect of the former is taken into account. The important difference, however, is that whereas the most lethal form of religion is neither its largest nor its most influential form, the most lethal form of atheism is its dominant strain. For example, I’m not at all concerned about the potential dangers posed by libertarian atheists or even Austrian School-influenced ones like Michael Shermer. The world would be a better place if the countries where atheists now rule had leaderships consisting of libertarian atheists rather than socialist and communist ones. But very, very few atheists are libertarians, (faux libertarians like Bill Maher notwithstanding), in fact, libertarianism is attacked by militant, left-leaning atheists like PZ Myers almost as energetically as religion.

It is true that state terror is terrible regardless of the religion of the perpetrator. And it is also true that non-atheist perpetrators of state terror, like the pagan National Socialists, were of the political Left. Still, while Leftism may well be the primary risk factor in the likelihood of mass slaughter, it must be taken into account that the religious Left has historically been far less violent than the atheist Left. The Swedes may have finally gotten around to getting rid of their state church, but they haven’t killed anyone, at least not yet.

In summary, not only is the No True Atheist a logically invalid defense of historical atheist crimes, but it’s an haplessly ineffective one due to the characteristic preference of atheists for the very political ideology they are attempting to blame in order to exculpate their anti-religious creed. But these days, Communism is all but a dead letter due to its economic failure, so the future danger from the irreligious now stems from atheist trans-nationalism of the sort advocated by Bertrand Russell and Sam Harris.