Vox Popoli

He is so uncertain about his principles that he excoriates John Scalzi for daring to expose sensitive little atheist minds to ideas that might frighten them and reveal that they’re not quite as smart as Mommy always told them:

Anyway, having spent a bunch of time recently complaining about a lack of moderation among the local militant atheists, I should probably take this opportunity to calmly and moderately say: “Vox Day” is a fucking lunatic…. So, really, the chances of him making a useful and important contribution to the discourse on the question of religion are about as good as the chances of a bunny made of cheese materializing on my desk and singing “I’m a Little Teapot.”

Never mind the fact that I have refuted 36 specific atheist arguments made by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, as well as another eight commonly heard atheist arguments. Never mind that I have shown the Euthyphro Dilemma to be nothing of the sort, either in Christian terms or by Socrates’s own measure. Never mind the fact that Sam Harris has already conceded several of the points I made in the book. Never mind that an American philosopher has said that TIA raises the intellectual level of the religion/atheism discourse, (while admittedly lowering its tone at the same time). And especially never mind the fact that TIA has forced even Whatever atheists to admit that the atheist bestsellers are not works of science or reason, but mere rhetorical propaganda… and not very effective propaganda at that.

Of course, it is most likely that latter fact which so troubles the likes of Orzel. It’s getting a little tiresome listening to all of this atheist chest-thumping, forever talking about how smart they are and how terrible my arguments must be while simultaneously burying their heads in the sand and hiding from them. It’s hardly my fault that their atheist champions can’t construct a logical case against God, Christianity, religion or religious faith capable of standing up to logic and empirical evidence. I’d love to see Mr. Orzel attempt to defend Sam Harris’s Extinction Equation or Red State argument, or Daniel Dennett’s justification of a scientific division of doxastic labor. I wonder what atheists would have concluded if Christians had responded to Dawkins and company the way Mr. Orzel seems to think atheists should respond to criticism of their arguments?

I knew that many atheists are irrational, but it wasn’t until TIA was published that I learned how many of them are complete intellectual cowards. If you think you can actually refute any of the arguments made in TIA, then bring it, Orzel. If you don’t, we’ll all know that you’re just another cowardly little atheist, deluded about his own level of intelligence and capable of nothing more than barking at the big dogs from a distance.

As you read Derb’s description of his adventures in Consciousness Studies, please try to keep in mind that we dualists the ones who are to be laughed at because of our belief that consciousness is a non-material phenomenon:

One thing you wonder in advance about conferences like this is what the proportions will be of (a) real research results and original insights, as opposed to (b) academic log-rolling, tenured self-indulgence, flogging of dead horses, and content-free arm-waving. In the afternoon plenary session we got some of the (b).

The topic was “Sex and consciousness.” Barry Komisaruk of Rutgers started with an interesting account of some neurophysiological experiments, then wandered off into the arm-waving zone. Sample: “If time is a fourth dimension, why can’t consciousness be a fifth dimension?” Uh, because you can quantify time, but you can’t quantify consciousness. How are you gonna set up a co-ordinate axis if you can’t quantify?

Then Jenny Wade (not sure of her affiliation) got up and told us about some research she’d done. She’d got a sample heavily loaded with middle-aged university women and asked them about their mind states during sex. For heaven’s sake: I can get this stuff from reading Erica Jong. I left when she started talking about Tantric sex. I know Tibet’s in the news, but really.

I’m not averse to studying consciousness, whether it be via the use of empirical evidence or Bongzilla, but I do think it’s quite funny when one considers that these are the people upon whom the average atheist is relying in his Dennett-approved doxastic division of labor, whether he realizes it or not. Because, you know, there’s some physicists who have this really awesome scientific model…. Anyhow, Derb and I may be on opposite sides of the religion divide, but I always find his acerbic skepticism to be entertaining, no matter the target.

We were watching the Big Bang Theory last night when I noticed something. “Hey, that’s my laptop!” Yeah, that’s right, technobitches, the Dell XPS with the glowing red lights. Big fast!

Strangely, Spacebunny did not show any signs of the extreme arousal that was obviously indicated.

I’m sorry about the quality of this week’s podcast as we were experiencing some interference with the phone lines. But I think the content will more than make up for this, since I’m speaking with an international figure from the global financial industry with whom I have been acquainted for a long time. Passport, as we shall call him, is a highly intelligent and astoundingly successful individual, and I was delighted that he was willing to be interviewed for the fourth Voxonomics podcast.

Recommended Reading:

The Consumer Price Index

This article is not written by Passport, but is a pretty good summary of what he was talking about. Shadowstats recalculates the economic statistics according to previous government methodologies to provide apples-to-apples historical data. This 2005 newsletter, (scroll down to the CPI section), shows the process in progress.

France lets the Irish know what they’re in for if they’re dumb enough to ratify the European ConstitutionLisbon Treaty:

Irish Euro-enthusiasts are furious because the French have announced, in advance of their EU presidency, that they want to harmonise business taxes across the EU. Ireland’s Europe Minister, Dick Roche, called the French economy minister’s remarks “untimely, unhelpful and inappropriate”. Note his language: “untimely” rather than “untrue”. What he really means is: Why couldn’t that Frenchwoman keep her big gob shut until after our referendum?

There are few things that I find more deliciously just than seeing secularists forced to confront the reality of Western post-Christianity for which they have labored so long and hard:

Recently, I wrote about Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA), a K-8 charter school in Inver Grove Heights. Charter schools are public schools and by law must not endorse or promote religion. Evidence suggests, however, that TIZA is an Islamic school, funded by Minnesota taxpayers…. Why does the Minnesota Department of Education allow this sort of religious activity at a public school? According to Zaman, the department inspects TIZA regularly — and has done so “numerous times” — to ensure that it is not a religious school.

There’s your stage call, o brave secular warriors of godlessness! I quite look forward to seeing your bold verbal attacks and insulting rhetoric directed towards this particular group of theists violating the hallowed separation of church and state… I mean, school. In the meantime, Minnesota Christians and other theists shouldn’t hesitate to push whatever religious beliefs they see fit at their local public schools, as the precedent has clearly been set.

There will NEVER be a post-religious society. It will not happen. Secular science fiction societies are no more viable than the magical systems featured in fantasy novels. Secularism and atheism are merely gateways toward a societal return to paganism. And most likely, it will fall to Christians to rebuild the Western civilization we have decided to abandon.

She’s also quite sound on the apparent sociopathology of the Lizard Queen.

We have not defeated the “Islamo-fascists” in Iraq; we have simply created more of them around the world by radicalizing an entire generation of young Muslims. There is no finite number of terrorists whom we can neutralize through conventional warfare or a humiliating occupation. Neither do I believe that a genuinely stable democracy is in the near future for Iraq. The murderous ethnic and religious rivalries will seethe on and on, as they have in that region for 5,000 years. Let’s get our troops out of the way and back home where they belong.

You know, whatever happened to all those comparisons about the German and Japanese occupations the neo-cons were making a few years ago? And I haven’t heard a lot of “we are at war” either. Paglia is entirely right about this and the occupation should end today. It should have ended in early 2004. Keep in mind that the Rumsfeldian metric for success from the very start was whether the USA could kill more jihadists than it created. By that measure, the war and occupation is clearly a complete failure, and in retrospect it is quite clear that it was doomed to fail from the start.

Apparently Spacebunny and I only have 52 of the 110 best books that make up the Perfect Library according to the Telegraph. We’re particularly bad on Books That Changed Your World, as Hitchhikers is the only one of the ten I own, although I have read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (rolls eyes). History is rather better, as we not only own seven out of the ten, but have all seven right here in my office. Only nine of ten on SF, I don’t have Day of the Triffids, at least not that I’m aware of. But how is Orwell SF and how can you possibly leave out Heinlein?

The list isn’t that bad, although it cheats by counting series as books and I think you could throw out the entire Books That Changed Your World section without any loss after putting Adams into SF. Also, the inclusion of Das Kapital is a joke, almost no one outside of seriously committed Communists or hard-core Austrians actually reads the whole thing and The Wealth of Nations is far more integral to a basic understanding of economics. Leaving out Dorothy Sayers and Rex Stout in favor of Thomas Harris, Elmore Leonard and Patricia Highsmith is criminal, and neither Pullman nor Rowling belong in the children’s section. I’d replace those two with Lloyd Alexander and Laura Ingalls Wilder. The total absence of Asian literature is also bothersome, where are Murasaki Shikibu, Confucius and Sun Tzu, at the bare minimum?

Of course, leaving off most of the great philosophical and religious works borders on the bizarre. It seems most strange to ignore Plato, Aristotle and the Bible.

I know that Arsenal was knocked out of the Champions League by Liverpool last night. I don’t want to talk about it. I especially don’t want to talk about the officiating.

Forget the problem of evil. A much knottier problem is the problem of FIFA officiating.

Unsurprisingly, it’s an econonomist who appears to have caught psychological researchers making a basic fallacy. Of course, this can’t possibly have happened, since we have been repeatedly informed that without proper training and credentials in a specific science, it is impossible to render any meaningful criticism of that science:

The Monty Hall Problem has struck again, and this time it’s not merely embarrassing mathematicians. If the calculations of a Yale economist are correct, there’s a sneaky logical fallacy in some of the most famous experiments in psychology.

The economist, M. Keith Chen, has challenged research into cognitive dissonance, including the 1956 experiment that first identified a remarkable ability of people to rationalize their choices. Dr. Chen says that choice rationalization could still turn out to be a real phenomenon, but he maintains that there’s a fatal flaw in the classic 1956 experiment and hundreds of similar ones. He says researchers have fallen for a version of what mathematicians call the Monty Hall Problem, in honor of the host of the old television show, “Let’s Make a Deal.”

Chen’s observation hasn’t disproved the concept of choice rationalization, but he’s certainly called an amount of the reported evidence for it into question. As I’ve contended numerous times in the past, I expect similar weaknesses, fallacies and unfounded assumptions to be discovered in various sciences, including astrophysics, biology and economics. Some models will need to be thrown out, others will survive the test and be made stronger. That is as it should be; the resistance of scientists to sound logical and factual criticism of their models does not testify to confidence in their proper application of the scientific method.

It may surprise some to know that I am every bit as critical of the mainstream Neo-Keynesian economics model as I am of the mainstream Neo-Darwinian biological model. If I don’t write about the former as often, it’s because the subject is of less interest to most people, being far too esoteric for the average individual who cannot grasp that there is no inherent value to a U.S. paper dollar, let alone the fact that not even the eminent former head of the Federal Reserve can say what “money” is. But then, that’s what the podcasts are for. Tomorrow’s interview must unfortunately remain nameless, but I think I can guarantee that it will be of no little interest to those who are interested in the subject of the global economy.