Vox Popoli

What about my needs? What about the reassurance I require after being told that a) no woman will ever want to have sex with me, b) I am gay, c) my hairstyle is unattractive, d) my flaming sword isn’t big enough.

And sometimes all in the same email!

*sob* Hold me, Ralph!

The thing that’s so nonsensical about this sort of thing is that the degree to which one’s opinion is correct has nothing to do with any of this sort of thing. Jill is attractive, especially for a law school student, who generally fall into the YE CATS MY EYES category. Lauren is even more attractive; she’s no Spacebunny, but she makes for a nice feminist poster girl. Others, well, the less said the better, but that’s neither here nor there.

But no woman who is willing to attack anyone else’s appearance has any right to complain about attacks on her own. I don’t know if Jill has ever done that, but certainly others in her blog circle have.

In which I join Richard Dawkins in celebrating a particular point in history upon which a specific collection of genes enjoyed the first flowering of the capabilities for which they were selected:

Thy hasting days fly on with full career,
But thy autumn no grey or wrinkle shew’th.
Perhaps thy semblance might deceive the truth,
That thou to corpsehood art arrived so near,
And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
Than the bitter north winds from Duluth.

Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be in strict measure correction
To that same lot, however mean or high,
Toward which Time leads and Natural Selection.
All is matter, and matters not to know
As ever in thy blind Watchmaker’s eye.

I cannot describe how happy I was to read the following words, which I rather expect Prof. Dawkins to be eating in the near future:

Sam Harris doesn’t mess about. He writes directly to his Christian reader as ‘you’, and he pays ‘you’ the compliment of taking your beliefs seriously: ” . . . if one of us is right, the other is wrong . . . in the fullness of time, one side is really going to win this argument, and the other is really going to lose.” But you don’t (as I can personally understate) have to fit the ‘you’ profile in order to enjoy this marvellous little book. Every word zings like an elegantly fletched arrow from a taut bowstring and flies in a gracefully swift arc to the target, where it thuds into the bullseye.

If you are part of the target, I dare you to read this book. It will be a salutary test of your faith. Survive Sam Harris’s barrage, and you can take on the world with equanimity. But forgive my scepticism: Harris never misses, not with a single sentence, which is why his short book is so disproportionately devastating.
– Richard Dawkins, Foreword for the UK edition of ‘Letter to a Christian Nation’

Dawkins is vulnerable enough in his own right, but his public adulation for Harris makes it like fishing in a small pond with oversized depth charges. This isn’t handing someone a stick with which to beat you, it’s handing them a Dragonstrike mace and then taking off your helm.

As for surviving “Sam Harris’s barrage”, it’s about as difficult as surviving a stampede of ducklings. I predict that in three years, people will find it hard to take Dawkins seriously in his scientific capacity, given his predilection for public target practice on his own feet.

The comments at Pharyngula inspire a thought:

If they don’t believe in God, what exactly are they afraid of?

Everything. The void. The fact that there is no higher ‘purpose’ or ‘meaning’. What is, just is. I’m going to die and that’s it. I shall have been a speck of dust in time and space. Nothingness is rushing up to meet me and I can do nothing about it. And there isn’t anything Out There that gives a fuck about my terror. Atheists spend their entire lives facing those fears without the props religions (claim to) provide.

I don’t think that’s a particularly frightening concept. What would I find frightening is the thought that there is something out there, sadistically stoking my terror and feeding off it.

I once had a conversation with one of my editors at Pocket – a very good one, she originally signed Jim Butcher of The Dresden Files to his first book contract – about a related subject. She had commented that she found “The World in Shadow” to be more frightening than a Stephen King novel.

ED: It’s not the idea of God that bothers me, but the idea of these fallen angels trying to interfere with our lives. And then, the Hell thing kind of freaks me out.

VD: There’s more to the Christian worldview than the Sermon on the Mount.

ED: Yeah, but I thought you guys believed that God was in control of everything.

VD: You’ve read CS Lewis. Why do you think he referred to Earth as the Silent Planet, and humans as “bent”? The point is that God isn’t in control here.

ED: So who is in control, the fallen angels?

VD: More the guy that Jesus Christ called “the prince of this world”.

ED: Oh… oh shit. Thanks, I’m really going to sleep well tonight.

VD: Well, you have to admit, it would explain a lot.

ED: We should put your books in the horror line….

I did find it somewhat appropriate, actually, when one SF site classified them as Dark Fantasy. And while Wrath isn’t as superficially grim as Shadow, it’s actually somewhat darker when seen in the proper context. Shadow, for all its bleakness, is ultimately the light coming out of the darkness, whereas Wrath highlights the recognition that the Dark shall rise again.

Fortunately, so long as there is faith, there will always be those to play the part of the Old Ones too.

Apparently Evil Bender not only missed the point of Monday’s column, he missed the entire omniderigence and free will discussion as well:

Like most wingnuts, Vox Day is afraid of knowledge…. For now, let me say that Vox’s argument, if valid, directly impeaches his God for worse things than science could ever be blamed for….

But if Vox wishes to blame the evils of the world on science, I’ll make two corollaries:

1) The evils of this world are the fault of God, who–in Vox’s theology–created the Universe, and so bears more responsibility for sin and death than science bears for the Bomb.

It’s amazing how atheists always gravitate to the kiddy theology and the baseless assertion. “But… but the song says ‘He’s got the whole world in His hands!'” As sin is the departure from God’s Will, He can only bear responsibility for His refusal to make us robots without free will. Now, we certainly could say that God’s creation of life therefore makes him responsible for the deaths which could not otherwise occur, but in that case, it’s a wash, it’s not a net positive or negative. Since the Bomb only ended lives, it is a net negative, given the obvious implication here that death = negative.

What, I wonder, does Vox think “take responsibility” mean? He seems to think that science is to blame because some of the billions who have benefited from medical science die–generally through the mistakes of individuals, and not through any problem with science itself. By Vox’s logic, scientists need to own up to being responsible for those who have an allergic reaction to a drug, no matter how many that drug might save.

Vox thinks “take responsibility” means to acknowledge that X is a direct cause of Y. If scientists are responsible for the lives saved by medical science, they are also responsible for the lives ended by medical science. If this is justifiable from a utilitarian perspective, that’s fine, but then make that utilitarian case. It is both dishonest and irrational to claim credit for the lives saved on the one hand but then refuse blame for the lives lost on the other.

But if, hypothetically, God exists and is kept from destroying evil due to His desire to respect the autonomy of His creatures (if he eliminated evil, he would effectively be eliminating free will), then it stands to reason that it’s up to humans to utilize the power that comes with knowledge responsibly. Thus far, humanity has a pretty awful track record in this regard.

There’s something to that argument, for those who buy the premise. But it isn’t the argument Vox is making.

Vox has repeatedly made that argument, as the commenter Poppies either knows or strongly suspects. Evil Bender is correct in saying that I didn’t make that tangential argument in that one particular 750-word column, but I have certainly made it on many occasions.

The Blog of Very Moderate Logic struggles with what little it possesses. Most of it is irrelevant “PZ says” blather, in fact, he even quotes PZ’s lack of basic reading comprehension at one point, but there were a few funny bits:

I mean, first off, inquisitions and jihads are, ex vi termini, religious in nature. It’s like saying that people call both the World Series and the World Cup “sporting events”–they are.

They may be religious in nature. But that’s not the point. The point is that if religion is responsible for their evils, then science is equally if not more responsible for other evils.

As for the military attacks[on Hiroshima and Nagasaki]? Yes, science facilitated them, from gas attacks to the atom bomb. But it was not scientists who made the decision to fund the weapons, nor scientists who made the decision to use them.

At least BotML is willing to admit that science facilitated them, that’s more than most cowardly science defenders can manage. But in the Inquisition, the Church didn’t decide to kill anyone, it merely found the individual guilty of heresy. In both the case of the Spanish Inquisition (the “deadly” one) and the dropping of the atomic bombs, it was the government involved that made the decision and executed it.

Therefore, either “religion” is not responsible for the deaths of the Spanish Inquisition or “science” is responsible for the deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in addition to many, many other science-facilitated deaths in war.

His particular wording here is interesting, as he carefully avoids stating something simpler. For example, in defending the Church with regards to the Spanish Inquisition, I would have said that it was no the Church that set fire to anyone. Of course, he can’t say that, because a scientist did indeed drop the bomb, given Navy Capt. William “Deak” Parsons, Manhattan Project Scientist, and his place on the crew of the Enola Gay.

As for the iatrogenic deaths, I never wrote that they were “on the rise”, I merely wrote that they existed, so that was simply a weird and meaningless critique of nothing. There are two competing statistics provided by Google, I note that BotML happened to skip over this one in favor of this one, perhaps because it would have confirmed the number cited in my column. In any case, a more astute reader would have noted that the latter is a subset of the former.

The larger point, which clearly sailed right over BotML’s head, is that the case against science is stronger than the case against religion when made on the basis of the New Atheist’s case against religion. BotML doesn’t even realize that his argument is not with me, but rather with the ludicrous and fallacious arguments presented by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.

It may surprise you, but I don’t approve of this sort of thing any more than the Pharyngulans do. Quite likely less, in fact. I don’t understand people who fetishize the 10 Commandments, who pray loudly before meals at restaurants and especially those who clearly view public prayer as a political stunt.

Now, obviously these people aren’t bowing down and worshipping the commandments, and while it’s a funny suggestion, a more effective tactic on Prof. PZ Myers part would be to ask what part of Jesus Christ’s commands these people do not understand?

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

Another case of the Patriarchy protecting the glass ceiling by keeping a strong, independent, successful woman down:

Astronaut Lisa Nowak was fired from NASA on Wednesday, a month after she was charged with trying to kidnap a woman she regarded as her romantic rival for the affections of a space shuttle pilot.

If Nowak were a civil servant, NASA would have the choice of placing her on administrative leave, leave without pay or indefinite suspension until the charges are resolved, said NASA spokesman James Hartsfield in Houston. But because she is an officer, those options are not available.

She will be assigned to the staff at the Chief of Naval Air Training in Corpus Christi, Texas, starting in two weeks, Navy Cmdr. Lydia Robertson said. Robertson said she didn‘t know what specific job Nowak would be doing.

Do they have no respect for Women’s History Month? Those damnable Patriarchs just have to try and ruin everything!

I wonder how atheists will attempt to explain away the current rise of slavery in post-Christian Europe. Of course, they’ll insist it can’t be laid at their feet despite the obvious consequence of the abandonment of Christian morality because the women aren’t being enslaved “in the name of atheism”. I’m sure that is of great relief to Britain’s newest slaves:

Women are being sold into prostitution in modern day “slave auctions” at Britain’s airports, it emerged yesterday. The illegal immigrants are sold to the highest bidder for up to £8,000 a time. They are then forced to work in brothels where they can earn up to £800 a day for their “owner”.

The chilling reality of human trafficking was spelled out yesterday by senior police officers at Scotland Yard. Detective Superintendent Mark Ponting, of the Metropolitan Police, said young women from all over the world are trafficked into Britain after being promised well-paid work in bars or cafes.

But within hours of their arrival, they are sold to pimps. The youngest known girl victim was just 14. In one notorious case, women were openly sold outside a coffee shop at Gatwick Airport.

Remember when people said that I was crazy and a misogynist dreamer for suggesting that it was much more likely that women would be openly bought and sold as property before anything like the equality preached by feminism arrived?

Obviously I was smoking crack.

Now it’s merely a matter of time before this activity is decriminalized, then finally taxed and legalized. With a potential ROI of only ten days, it’s not hard to understand why so many people are interested in getting into the business.

And, if you’re an atheist sans that troublesome Christian morality, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t. You’ve only got one life to live, after all, and if your genes are selfish, why shouldn’t you be? It’s just natural selection and the survival of the fittest, baby.

It’s always strange, too, how atheists appear to think that pointing to evils supposedly committed by Christians centuries or even millenia ago somehow negates the evils that their fellow atheists are committing right now.

On this day in 1896, Alice Guy Blaché, the first American woman film director, shoots the first of her more than 300 films, a short feature called La Fee aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy). It is the story of a strong, independent, beautiful, but sensitive young cabbage fairy, whose strength and independence are not fully appreciated by the handsome, arrogant fairy prince of vegetables with whom she is in love. Not until he nearly loses her to a hungry French peasant’s dinner salad does he realize how much he truly needs her in his life.

Ms Blache’s films, which include La Fee Jolie, Quand Henri Réuni Tinkerbelle, and La Jeune Mariée Partie de Mouche, are considered to be the inspiration for every single freaking chick flick ever filmed.