Tag: mailvox

Mailvox: the ethics of hypocrisy

RE asks about the hypocrisy of the religious:

I am a longtime reader of your blog, which I have found to be very helpful over the years.  Also, your book the Irrational Atheist is a God send.   I hoping that you would give me your take on something.  I recently had “discussion” with my older brother on religion. My brother stated “religion is bullshit, its made up by man, its full of hypocrites.” He further explained the reason he doesn’t go church or practice his faith in anyway is because everyone that goes to church are hypocrites.

I am sure every church has its large share of “hypocrites”, but I feel he is being unreasonable.  I know it can be difficult to find the right place to fellowship with others, but I still find value in going to church, praying, and reading the Bible.  Can you please provide me another or your intelligent and witty rebuttals to his concern? 

First, relatively few of the religious, or anyone else for that matter, actually fits the proper description of hypocrisy, which is defined as follows:  a pretense of having a virtuous character, moral or religious beliefs or principles, etc., that one does not really possess.

Most people do not feign to having principles they do not really possess, but rather, fail to live up to the standards of those principles. What RE’s brother fails to realize, as do most people who regularly observe hypocrisy around them and make a meal of decrying it, is that professing ideals and failing to live up to them is not usually an indication that the profession is false, only that the professor has failed.  While it is possible for such failures to be a sign of the profession being false, it is far from being conclusive evidence of it.

Failure is not, in itself, necessarily indicative of hypocrisy.  Moreover, it makes no sense to accuse most Christians of hypocrisy, in that Christian theology expressly and specifically declares that all, without exception, are fallen.  No one is perfect.  No one is worthy.  One can more reasonably question if a self-righteous person is actually a Christian than to claim his self-righteousness is indicative of his hypocrisy being a consequence of his religion.

As for a rebuttal, I would suggest the following: the only reason you think they are hypocritical is because they have standards.  Why do you believe that a complete absence of standards is more indicative of good character than apparent hypocrisy? I mean, say what you like about the tenets of Christianity, dude, at least it’s an ethos.

He just wouldn’t stay down

As the Alabama sheriff said, “he was reaching for something….”  I’m not quite sure what amuses me more, the idea that I am the slightest bit concerned about being fair, the idea that I have any concern whatsoever for what Ackroyd thinks, or that he appears to believe he can dig his way out of looking like an ignoramus with a double-digit IQ if he only tries a little harder.

On second thought, I do have a question.  There are four “demotivational” posters featuring individual atheists.  The Hitchens, Harris and Dawkins posters feature words none of them actually said.  Given
that, was it fair of Vox to savage me as an “ignorant atheist” for not
realizing the Dennett poster features words he did say–paraphrased? I
think not.

Of course it was not only fair, but just, that I castigated poor little Ackroyd, accurately or not.  In the immortal words of Obadiah Hakeswill, “says so in the Scriptures”.  If you are going to come in here arrogantly asserting your opinion about the stupidity of this and the idiocy of that and generally acting like a big dog, don’t be surprised when you find yourself unexpectedly sad, wet, and stinking of urine.  I am the bigger dog.  I am an Award Winning Cruelty Artist.   I will cut a bitch with a smile on my face.  A minor character flaw, no doubt, but one concerning which everyone who comments here has been duly notified.

Furthermore, I was undeniably correct about the “ignorant” part.  Ackroyd was, by his own admission, completely ignorant of Dennett’s writings.  And now, thanks to his unwise attempt at ex post facto self-defense, we can safely conclude that he is stupid as well, because after drawing attention to the abject stupidity of the phrase on the poster, tried to defend Dennett’s incompetent argument advocating the intrinsic trustworthiness of science:

“In light of this, do the words on the poster convey Dennett’s point
accurately? Or would it be more fair to paraphrase him as saying
“Science can be trusted, because it yields amazingly accurate results”?
And isn’t this in fact true–as far as it goes?”

Yes, they most certainly do.  No.  And no, because it demonstrably isn’t true at all.  It repeats the very mistake Dennett made, which is the very reason the Dennett demotivator is both accurate and amusing.  Ackroyd still hasn’t understood that Dennett’s syllogism is faulty.  Not all sciences are created equal.  For example, physics yields amazingly accurate results.  Evolutionary biology, on the other hand, unquestionably does not and evolutionary biologists don’t claim that it does.  In his book, Dennett tries a classic New Atheist bait-and-switch, asserting that since both physics and not-physics are called science, if physics yields amazingly accurate results, then not-physics should be trusted… even though not-physics doesn’t produce any of the trust-inspiring results.  I could argue, every bit as reasonably as Dennett, that because theology is a science, “the queen of the sciences”, in fact, it should also be trusted on the basis of the amazingly accurate results of physics.

Mailvox: The silence of the Keynesians

BK asks why Paul Krugman and the Neo-Keynesians aren’t celebrating all those windows broken by Tropical Storm Sandy:

If, as per the NeoKeynesians, the government action in economy like
building some bridges somewhere is good for economy, then don’t you
think Sandy has given the government the right opportunity to improve
the economy- by rebuilding things. ( I guess they don’t care about the
broken window, do they.)  Why is it that Krugman and Co are not declaring
publicly that “Sandy is good for America”, then? Are they afraid that
such a statement will not be good for Obama campaign? That would be
double standards then – keep quiet about your theory when it is
unpopular, speak it out and implement it other times to gain popularity.
In that case, why isn’t the Romney people exposing the double standards
of these people to gain advantage?

Krugman and company are (mostly) keeping quiet on the tropical storm stimulation being provided to the US economy because it is a concept too manifestly absurd to be accepted by the general public when the public is actually dealing with the concrete reality of the devastation.  Keynesianism is the sort of gassy theoretical model that only holds up as long as it isn’t held accountable by events, which is why you never see Keynesians talking about economic history or even showing any sign that they are familiar with economic history.

As for the Romney supporters, they aren’t exposing the double-standards of Krugman and other Obama supporters because they, too, are Neo-Keynesians.  They are the flavor known as monetarists, heavily influenced by the Keynesian reformist Milton Friedman, but as Steve Keen and other economists of left and right have pointed out, they’re all operating within the same conceptual neoclassical framework, speaking the same Samuelsonian language.

Mailvox: the ideas, they spread

CG sounds a little offended upon my behalf:

Did you read this article? It’s a pretty blatant TIA rip-off. Sorry you
don’t receive any credit. 

Despite being taken directly from TIA, this may actually be less of a “rip-off” than another article I saw recently in a mainstream news article that read as if had come right out of a recent WND column.  But this doesn’t bother me in the slightest, in fact, I regard it as in some ways being the ultimate compliment.

What such citations mean is that it the ideas rather than the personality are making their way into the mainstream.  We’re seeing this with Roissy and Game, and we’re also seeing this in a lesser way with various concepts that I’ve been banging on for years now.  Since I’m not pursuing a career as a talking head, it doesn’t really matter if I get the ego boost from seeing my name in print or not, and let’s face it, of all the egos in the world, mine must be among the least in need of boosting.

It’s a good thing that the ideas are able to be transmitted in places where their attachment to my identity may handicap them.  The most influential thinkers are not always those whose names are most recognizable; Paris Hilton and Richard Dawkins are both famous, which examples I trust underline the complete lack of intellectual significance of fame.

Mailvox: the logic of God II

In which Passerby attempts to poke holes in the logical argument demonstrating the irrationality of his position concerning the simultaneous existence of evil and the nonexistence of God.

Well! I wasn’t expecting an entire fresh post devoted to my challenge
in that other thread. I’m so honored. Pardon my late arrival.  Okay,
first off, VD, looks like you threw a gutter ball from your second
premise, as Riki-Tiki-Tavi already sensed. Let’s have a look at it:

2.
The existent fact of wrongdoing necessarily requires that there is a
material universal standard of right and wrong by which actions can be
classified.

Incorrect. The existent fact of wrongdoing/evil
does not require a material universal standard of right and wrong. The
existent fact of wrongdoing is self-evident because the alternative is…
the nonexistence of wrongdoing. Good luck making a sound argument for
the nonexistence of wrongdoing. Think anyone can do it passably? I
don’t and I suspect you don’t either. So we should agree there. That’s
point number one.

Point number one is incorrect.  Notice here that Passerby is not only taking exception to my point, but to entire philosophies such as nihilism, existentialism, and, ironically enough, rational materialism.  His argument is surprisingly weak, based as it is on the self-evidence of wrongdoing.  Is it self-evident that stealing is wrong?  That not voting is wrong? 

Consider how little sense his argument makes if we substitute a non-existent fact for wrongdoing/evil.  The existent fact of unicorns
does not require a material universal standard of unicorns and not-unicorns. The
existent fact of unicorns is self-evident because the alternative is…
the nonexistence of unicorns.

If we cannot tell the difference between a unicorn and a not-unicorn, then we cannot possibly declare that unicorns do or do not exist.  But if we have established the fact that unicorns do exist, we have necessarily established a material and universal standard for what a unicorn is and what a unicorn is not.  Therefore, point number one fails and the second step in the logical argument remains standing.

Point number two. Another thing wrong
with this “necessary universal standard” claim of yours (I noticed you
used that word “standard” seventeen times in your post, so to continue
the bowling metaphor, it’s like your very bowling ball to bowl with,
without which… well, game over — but I’ll give you a dollar so you can
go play some Ms. PacMan) is that six billion people in the world could
have six billion different standards of wrongdoing, but everyone would
nonetheless agree that wrongdoing does exist in the world.

So
let’s imagine those six billion individuals’ six billion different
standards of wrongdoing can be each given a numerical value. I’m not
saying it can ever actually be done, but just go with me here. After
they’ve all been given a numerical value, they’re arranged in order on a
vertical meter with a red zone on the bottom and a green zone on the
top. Put the meter on the lowest setting of “1”. That setting belongs
to a guy who disagrees with all 5,999,999,999 people above him whom he
considers to be an increasing bunch of prissy Miss Manners types who see
wrongdoing in all kinds of ways he doesn’t. But he at least sees one
instance of wrongdoing in the world and everyone above him agrees that
he at least got one right. So it seems to me (I’m just now coming up
with this, but I’ll try to land this thing in one piece) that this
minimum setting of “1” is the standard, if anything, for the existence
of wrongdoing. Below that is “0” which represents nonexistence of
wrongdoing.

Point being, our subjectivity is flawed, but it’s far
from useless! There is, after all, communication and agreement. It’s
precisely because of our limitation as trapped individuals of
subjectivity that science is the best idea we’ve ever come up with (or
happened upon) to make gains on objectivity. To paraphrase Steven
Pinker, science is our highest, purest expression of reason.
Objectivity is perhaps an unattainable goal, but we’ve seemingly made
lots of progress toward it given our technological conquests, our
steadily decreasing rate of violence in ever larger, more complex
populations, etc. I say seemingly because a cosmic rug pulling could be
in store for us a la The Matrix at any time, but that caveat aside,
it’s our processes of communication, cooperation, record keeping,
rhetorical persuasion, experimentation, reason, science, etc. that we
arrive at standards of right and wrong be they amoral (e.g., math,
chemistry, physics) or moral. And we arrive at them, to the extent we
do, through our own shared reasoning, thank you very much. No divinity
needed or even evident. 

Point number two is not so much incorrect as irrelevant, bordering on a category error. In this section, Passerby fails to grasp that an objective standard is more than the sum of six billion subjective opinions, and in fact, no number of subjective opinions can produce an objective standard, by definition.  The more the standard is “influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice”, the less objective it can be, regardless of whether those competing feelings, interpretations, and prejudices are harmonious or not.  Existent evil/wrongdoing requires a material and universal standard, even if our subjective experience of the objective reality is different in six billion different ways.

If the readers don’t mind indulging me in following Passerby on one of his tangents, I will add that Stephen Pinker is wrong about science as he is wrong about so many things.  Science is most certainly not the highest and purest expression of reason.  Not only is it not reason at all, it was specifically conceived, developed, and utilized to replace pure reason.  This is why Science is so often at odds with Philosophy as well as Religion; Science is nothing more than the systematic codification of experience.

Mailvox: the logic of God

Passerby’s challenge somehow tends to remind me of this series of photographs.  But who knows, perhaps the stag will surprise us:

Definition of evil:  the fact of suffering, misfortune, and wrongdoing

I’m an atheist and going by Merriam-Webster’s def. of evil above, I say evil exists.  According to VD, my stance is irrational. Prove it. Anyone. Show your work. Lay out the steps proving my logic is flawed. You’ll fail. I will crush you.

Well, let us see about that.  He has made his claim that his stance is rational, (which is to say that evil exists but God does not), so I’ll take up the burden of attempting to falsify it.

  1. Passerby asserts that “the fact of suffering, misfortune, and wrongdoing” exists.
  2. The existent fact of wrongdoing necessarily requires that there is a material universal standard of right and wrong by which actions can be classified.
  3. A material universal standard of right and wrong must be objective.
  4. Man’s standards of right and wrong are inherently subjective and non-universal.
  5. Therefore the objective, material, universal standard of right and wrong cannot be produced by Man.
  6. The most likely source of an inhuman, objective, material, universal standard of right and wrong is an intelligence of grand scope possessing a direct connection to the area in which that standard applies.
  7. The scope required for that inhuman intelligence to provide the universal standard implies, though it does not necessarily require, extra-universality.
  8. The most reasonable connection between the presumably extra-universal intelligence providing the standard and the area in which that standard applies is that of creator to creation.
  9. The presumably extra-universal intelligent creator that provides the objective, material, universal standard to its presumed creation is quite reasonably described as God.

This logic provides for a small degree of wiggle room here.  A being need not necessarily be either extra-universal nor the creator to successfully impose an objective standard on the universe.  However, since any act of creation that results in an observed objective standard necessarily requires the creation of a standard of some kind, the most rational conclusion is to assume that the standard observed was provided by the creator rather than by some other intelligent, inhuman entity that successfully replaced the original standard.

But I think even if the logic-dictated provider of the universal standard of right and wrong is neither the creator nor extra-universal, its observed ability to impose such a standard upon the universe suffices to justify its recognition as an existent god, at the very least, if not necessarily the Creator God or the Creator God of the Christian Bible.

Mailvox: the existence of evil

JB has a question:

I have never heard this question answered before.  If there is no God (or Devil) why is there evil?

The reason you haven’t heard it answered before is because most atheists shy away from explicitly revealing the true extent of their beliefs.  I’ve pinned a few atheists down on this, and to a man, they have admitted that they don’t actually believe in the existence of evil.  Of course, this doesn’t prevent them from making rhetorical use of the concept and insisting that it is the Christian concept of God that is truly evil and so forth.  In doing so, they are either being deceptive or inconsistent.

But the only position on evil that is consistent with rational materialism is that there is no such thing as essential evil or essential good, these are merely subjective labels that are inconsistently applied to various human behaviors and natural events.  Of course, this is not an aspect of atheism that most atheists are eager to advertise, since so many people already tend to consider them amoral or even immoral by definition.

This is one of the reasons I entitled my book on the subject “The Irrational Atheist”.  Most atheism is irrational, as the atheist attempts to reconcile his continued belief in the existence of some sort of objective good or evil while simultaneously denying the existence of its only possible source.  Of course, it’s not the irrational atheist one has to worry about, it is the rational atheist who realizes that in the absence of a lawmaker, there is no law except that which he wills.

That is the reality, though.  If there is no God, there is no good or evil.  This is also the core of my argument for the existence of God; because we materially experience evil, we must logically conclude that God exists.

Mailvox: hey, free book

Hunter Riley, the author of a book on metal investing, is giving it away until Halloween.  I get a lot of questions concerning the subject, so if you’re interested in metals, this would be a reasonable place for you to start.  He writes:

I just wrote and published a book on Amazon.com about how to start
investing in gold and silver. I am giving the book away for free for 5 days starting this Saturday 10/27 and lasting until 10/31. 
Its called Stack Silver Get Gold.  
I thought your readers might appreciate a free kindle book on how to begin investing in gold and silver without getting ripped off.

 It’s #1 in commodities and has good reviews, to say nothing of the fact that it’s impossible to beat the price.  It normally goes for $9.99.  Have a look if you’re so inclined.

Mailvox: a reason to not vote

I think we can all agree that blame for the present parlous state of the nation clearly lies with JartStar:

I had some fun today with some of the guys at work about voting. They
asked me while we were on break who I was going to vote for and I
explained that I no longer vote. The looks on their faces were priceless
and when they inquired why I offhandedly explained that I had voted my
entire life and things have steadily gotten worse, I feel bad about
that, and my voting has made the country worse. I then apologized to
them all for what I had done and the three out of the four of them went
into near hysterics.

The Israeli Jew proclaimed it would be better for
me to show up and vote randomly than not vote, and one of the two Indian
immigrants tried to pull me aside to explain that I wasn’t really the
problem.

So this is my new reason for not voting when people ask: The state
of the country to a large degree my fault and I’m stopping now before I
make things really bad.

It’s definitely a more entertaining excuse than relying on reason and being forced to endure a monologue on how Mitt Romney will preside in a TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY DIFFERENT MANNER than Barack Obama, even though the extent of their actual policy differences appears to be that Romney is slightly more enthusiastic about Israel, Wall Street, and gun control while Obama is slightly more enthusiastic about Saudi Arabia, immigration, and feminism.

Of course, as I have conclusively proven, there is absolutely no chance that your one presidential vote makes any difference at all.  None at all.  Either that one vote will not make a difference to the outcome, or in the extremely unlikely event that the outcome of the state vote rests upon your one vote, the courts will render it void by pronouncing their own verdict on who won the “election”.

The argument for random voting being better than not voting is informative, though. Such a position would indicate that to the person who holds it, the preservation of the illusion of democracy is more important than democracy itself.

Mailvox: an alternative mechanism

Stephen J. takes a logical approach in arguing for evolution by natural selection:

While this question is going to sound snarky, I can only ask our host to
believe it is meant as a genuine inquiry and hope it is answered.

1) Let us take as evidentially established the fact that species which existed in the past now exist no longer and are extinct.

2)
Let us take as evidentially established the fact that not all species
now extant existed at all times throughout the history of organic life;
if nothing else, we know for a fact Homo sapiens did not.

3)
Therefore, it must be possible for species which did not exist to come
into existence by some mechanism, just as species which do exist can go
extinct by any variety of mechanisms.

4) If it is a fact that
new species can come into existence while others go extinct, by what
mechanism other than evolution through natural selection are these
species proposed to arise, and does that proposed mechanism explain more
of the observed evidence than TeNS?

I don’t think it sounds snarky at all.  In fact, this is one of the first rationally competent attempts to defend evolution that I’ve ever seen presented on this blog.  Let’s look at his postulates and his logic and see where it leads us.

1)  I concur.  We know from historical documentary evidence that there are species that previously existed and are now extinct.  We can also infer from fossil evidence that there were a number of other species that previously existed and went extinct prior to the historical record.

2) I tend to agree and am willing to concur here for the sake of argument and on the basis of Occam’s Razor.  We certainly believe that homo sapiens sapiens did not exist from the beginning of the history of organic life on the basis of our current understanding of the geological and fossil records, but we cannot say that with the same degree of confidence that it is a fact in the sense that we say the Dodo is now extinct.  The problem is that there appear to be an increasing number of indications that the current geological and biological timelines are not going to hold up to future evidence, the claimed 521-year half-life of DNA being one of them.

3)  I concur, assuming (2) holds true.

4) Intelligent Genetic Manipulation is the mechanism that I propose.  And yes, I believe that explains more of the observed evidence than TENS, since IGM is a scientific proposition, a readily observed action, and a successful predictive model, whereas TENS is a philosophical proposition, an unobserved process, and an unsuccessful predictive model.

Now, this does not provide any basis for assuming the existence of a Creator God, or even declaring that TENS did not actually take place.  The logical fact of the matter is that even if TENS can be conclusively demonstrated to have taken place in various species, which has not happened despite more than 150 years of trying, that doesn’t necessarily mean the process was sufficient to produce Man.  If one contemplates the biological differences between ape and man, the vast leap in cognitive capacity taking place in a relatively small sum of generational cycles from the proposed common ancestor in comparison with the timelines supposedly required for other, less complicated evolutionary changes, the logic suggests – though it does not prove – that some degree of purposeful genetic manipulation has likely taken place at various points in the origin of the species and the development of homo sapiens sapiens.

I’m not talking about Intelligent Design, but rather intelligent editing.  And the interesting thing is that IGM should be an increasingly falsifiable concept as genetic science continues to improve.  Only recently have we learned that junk DNA serves a purpose; even though we have sequenced various genomes, we haven’t yet understood how the code works or fully comprehended the various ways it can be manipulated.  As our understanding grows, we should be able to develop an ability to recognize patterns that indicate purposeful alterations in the code have been made.

Now, I realize how crazy this probably sounds, especially in light of my argument that Man cannot easily distinguish between God, god, demon, and alien.  But that is where Stephen’s reasonably sound logic takes us.