Tag: religion

• Why Not-Being in the Future Completely Sucks

  Adam Frank at NPR’s 13.7 blog on why we shouldn’t be hung up about death, even though there’s no afterlife:

  [E]ven though none of us existed 1,000 years ago, you don’t find many people worrying about their nonexistence during the Dark Ages. Our not-being in the past doesn’t worry us. So, why does our not-being in the future freak us out so much?

  Oh pick me! I know!

  Because we experience time linearly, in one single direction, so we’d have no reason to be concerned about not existing in the past. We’re incapable of ever having perceived that which came before us, but we are able to perceive the present as it unfolds into the future, and we are aware that at some point, for each of us, that present will stop unfolding. We don’t witness the past before our births, so we have no reason or frame of reference for concern. We do witness ourselves in the present moment and are cognizant of the fact that we will (or ought to) exist in future moments. And we are also aware that there will come a time when that existence, that awareness, will stop. For-fucking-ever.

  Perhaps if we were the Wormhole Aliens of Deep Space Nine or part of the Q Continuum, and could watch time and all the other dimensions unfurl around us in dancing strings and infinite toroids, we might have a different perspective. But we are mere mortal bags of meat.

  That’s why not-being in the future freaks us out. Okay?

  And personally I’m god damn glad I missed the Dark Ages.

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  P.S. Here’s a post explaining more about my feelings about death. They are not good feelings.

   

  January 28, 2015

  afterlife, atheism, death, religion

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• As Ye Live, So Shall Ye Google

  
  In American counties considered the easiest in which to live, cameras, iPad apps, and jogging are among the subjects that residents are googling for. In the hardest counties to live in, it’s diabetes, guns, and the Antichrist. This is according to an analysis by the New York Times which used its own metrics to determine what the easiest and hardest places to live were, and then partnered with Google to determine what search terms correlated most strongly. Some of the results as reported by David Leonhardt at the Times are surprising to say the least.

  But first let’s get one aspect of this straight. What this report does not say is that in the hardest places to live the Antichrist is the thing most Googled for, nor are digital cameras the top search queries for Easy Street. It is saying that these search terms correlated most strongly to the counties in question. Common searches are common searches across the board, so at the moment I am typing this, things like “Little League World Series” and “Rick Perry” are among the terms dominating Google search at the national level, and we can assume that they are doing so even in the hardest and easiest-going counties alike.

  There is little that can be inferred definitively from the Times report, but it’s very telling that when life is less stressful, one has more freedom to think about things like digital photography, and when life is a trial, one’s mind turns to weapons and eternal retribution for whatever one plans on doing with those weapons.

  All this said, here are some things that struck me:

  • It is not merely that Easy Street dwellers are into digital cameras, but that they are interested in specific models, such as the Canon Elph and other point-and-shoots, which then makes me wonder how easy their lives can really be if they’re even considering Elphs and not just a decent smartphone with a decent camera. Have they not heard of these yet?
  • One may be tempted to tie a high rate of searches for the Antichrist and guns together as some sort of wish for the End Times infesting the culture, but also consider that “severe itching” is also on that list, which I think makes many of the other searches much more understandable.
  • “Dog Benadryl” is also on the list for the hardest places to live, which, despite the “severe itching,” raises more questions than it answers.
  • Among the search terms for the easiest places to live was the 2001 Ben Stiller film Zoolander, which frankly makes me question the veracity of this entire project. No one, whether their lives be easy or difficult, should be spending any time thinking about that.
  • The greatest tragedy to emerge from all of this? According to Leonhardt, “Searches on some topics, like Oprah Winfrey or the Super Bowl, are popular almost everywhere.”

  We have so far to go.

  August 19, 2014

  google, religion, search

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• Friendly Substitute Atheist

  Oh, hey.

  Over the holiday, Hemant Mehta finally went on his honeymoon, and once again called upon me to run the Friendly Atheist site. So once again, I wrote a whole lot of articles and posts. Some of them I’m really quite proud of. Others, you know, sometimes you just gotta feed the beast.

  To see what I’ve been doing over at Friendly Atheist, click this here hyperlink. You’ll be launched through the internets to my posts.

  You know what? I had a lot of fun with it, and I felt like I actually got into something resembling a groove. Thanks, Hemant!

   

  January 1, 2014

  atheism, blogging, personal, religion

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• Life. Don’t Talk to Me about Life.

  

  Because it’s not really a thing. Here’s Ferris Jabr at Scientific American:

  No one has ever managed to compile a set of physical properties that unites all living things and excludes everything we label inanimate. There are always exceptions. Most people do not consider crystals to be alive, for example, yet they are highly organized and they grow. Fire, too, consumes energy and gets bigger. In contrast, bacteria, tardigrades and even some crustaceans can enter long periods of dormancy during which they are not growing, metabolizing or changing at all, yet are not technically dead. How do we categorize a single leaf that has fallen from a tree? Most people would agree that, when attached to a tree, a leaf is alive: its many cells work tirelessly to turn sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into food, among other duties. When a leaf detaches from a tree, its cells do not instantly cease their activities. Does it die on the way to the ground; or when it hits the ground; or when all its individual cells finally expire? If you pluck a leaf from a plant and keep its cells nourished and happy inside a lab, is that life?

  This can be a hard thing to accept, because I think that even we evil, heartless, scientism-promoting skepto-atheists for the most part still conceptualize life as a kind of force, a “thing” in the sense that it somehow powers these clumps of organic material and bags of meat that would otherwise lie inert. And when one conceptualizes it that way, it does become rather binary – either it’s there or it’s not. You can’t be “sort of alive” or as Miracle Max might have it, “mostly dead,” in this frame of thinking.

  Let’s be honest. Thinking about life-as-a-thing, a manifest élan vital, rather than as a loose umbrella term for myriad biological functions, is to conceive of it kind of, well, spiritually. It’s essentially the soul, which is of course entirely fictional.

  To let that go, to stop thinking of life as “stuff,” we (necessarily) complicate the search for it elsewhere. It’ll be one thing if one day we’re visited by extraterrestrials who have bodies and limbs and some means of reproduction. Yeah, those will be pretty clearly alive. But what if some future probe comes upon, say, a combination of minerals that seems to be behaving in a way that recalls cellular duplication? Or we build machines that reproduce themselves but with minor variations to improve (or detract from) their usefulness with each generation? And, you know, what about fire?

  Seems to me that we’re best to take each example on its own terms, and accept that, in granular terms, the question as to whether something is “alive” is perhaps too subjective to be useful. That it reveals a bias for our own means of existence and animation, and betrays a tendency for even the most secular among us to fall back on concepts that make sense only in fairy tales and books of myth.

  December 14, 2013

  atheism, religion, science

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• Articles of Faith in Silicon Valley

  There is a theme gaining traction in some of the writing I’ve come across lately, and I think I just want to flag it as a compelling topic to which I’d like to return in more depth. It’s the idea of Silicon Valley and the tech industry as a new kind of religious center, where there is a sort of blind faith, a zealotry about the redeeming power of technology and the Internet.

  You can probably already predict the contours of the discussion: For some, there’s a genuine potential for revolutions in health, education, and overall efficiency that might be born from the tech world, the iceberg of which we’ve only seen the tip. For the other side, it’s a deep skepticism along with almost a parental worry about wayward young entrepreneurs.

  A couple of samples that have caught my eye of late — and I should state that I’m less interested in anti-tech alarmism that I feel like comes from the likes of Nicholas Carr and others, as smart as I think he is. Here’s George Packer in a piece more broadly about Silicon Valley and its early forays into politics. But it gets at the theme:

  The industry’s splendid isolation inspires cognitive dissonance, for it’s an article of faith in Silicon Valley that the technology industry represents something more utopian, and democratic, than mere special-interest groups. [ . . . ]

  When financiers say that they’re doing God’s work by providing cheap credit, and oilmen claim to be patriots who are making the country energy-independent, no one takes them too seriously—it’s a given that their motivation is profit. But when technology entrepreneurs describe their lofty goals there’s no smirk or wink. “Many see their social responsibility fulfilled by their businesses, not by social or political action,” one young entrepreneur said of his colleagues. “It’s remarkably convenient that they can achieve all their goals just by doing their start-up.” He added, “They actually think that Facebook is going to be the panacea for many of the world’s problems. It isn’t cynicism—it’s arrogance and ignorance.”

  And then there’s this piece on Medium from Adam Ierymenko, who has a deep-seeded disdain for what he sees as the Valley’s youth-based messianism, which, though a little unhinged at times, gets more to the meat of what interests me about this topic:

  All the Valley’s talk about transhumanism, human potential, life extension, and generally “changing the world” is a bunch of hooey. It’s a myth — in the pejorative sense of that term. It’s a fluffy religion meant to snooker young professionals into giving their employers everything they have and working their brains down to the myelin until they become too old to be relevant anymore.

  He goes on to suggest that if the technorati think that only their age bracket can have any meaningful effect on the species, that perhaps Mark Zuckerberg should just off himself before he gets into his thirties, because why bother. Again, a little unhinged, but colorful.

  As a professional skepto-atheist, as well as a tech aficionado (and not to mention one who really hopes the Singularitarians are right), this discussion hits the spot for me intellectually. Expect more on this from me. I’m in the middle of two books, Long for This World by Jonathan Weiner (who wrote the fantastic The Beak of the Finch), about the quest for longevity and immortality, and Our Final Invention, an admittedly less-fantastic book that warns of the near-inevitability of our demise via the rise of AI.

  So I think we’ll be coming back to this.

  October 11, 2013

  religion, technology

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• Repent, or Get a Pizza for $5!

  

  This kind of thing actually still happens, even in Maine.
  The really interesting thing is that usually in that same spot is a Little Caesar’s guy holding a big sign advertising the $5 hot-n-readies. Man, would I love to see those guys do a side-of-the-road advertise-off.

  April 29, 2013

  photo, religion

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• “I Am Thrilled That He’s Dead.”

  Andrew Sullivan has what at first seems like an alarming reaction to the death of his friend David Kuo, following a ten-year-long battle with brain cancer. Watch:
  

  I feel a revulsion to this line of thinking, that someone has gone “to a better place,” or as Sullivan calls it, “home.” It obviously comes from the ridiculous idea that we all go to a warm, soft, fuzzy afterlife once we drop dead, a state that is allegedly better than the best of mortal life on Earth.

  But I also find some of Sullivan’s position, apart from the theological stuff, refreshing, in that he casts a skeptical eye on life-for-life’s sake, the idea that it might just be okay to let go when all you know is pain. (And that there is a heavy dose of hypocrisy in many Christians’ maniacal avoidance of their beloved afterlife.)

  As for me, however, I just want to live. I know it’s all I’ve got — this life — and it’s literally all I’ll ever have. So if it’s a choice between the pain, nausea, boredom, tedium, etc., and not existing at all, I will err on the side of staying alive.

  So I guess that while I like Sullivan’s allowance for nuance and variation in how a human being deals with his or her own death, I part with him on both fronts for myself: Yes, life-for-life’s sake, because there’s no home but here.

  April 10, 2013

  atheism, personal, religion, video

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• Seduced by Trinkets of Power

  David Kuo, 1968-2013:

  I have seen what happens when well-meaning Christians are seduced into thinking deliverance can come from the Oval Office, a Supreme Court chamber or the floor of the United States Congress. They are easily manipulated by politicians who use them for their votes, seduced by trinkets of power, and tempted to turn a mission field (politics) into a battlefield.

  April 6, 2013

  politics, religion

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• A Population Equally Brave

  Jennifer Michael Hecht is one of my favorite writers, and in her review of Susan Jacoby’s new book on Robert Ingersoll, she leaves me with this haunting thought:

  There have been atheists and religious doubters throughout history, but the ones who remain famous after their deaths tend to have been equally famous for something else as well; otherwise, people most notable for their bravery in the face of religious conservatism have to be celebrated by a population equally brave, and that is often too much to ask.

  In order to appreciate certain cultural figures, we need to be, to some degree, worthy of them. We have to be, as a people, closer to greatness ourselves in order to recognize it. A very tall order, isn’t it?

  Makes you wonder; who else have we missed?

  March 13, 2013

  atheism, culture, religion

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• A Suggestion for the Papal Conclave

  A classic idea, might be the way to go. Just a thought.

  “Find the Pope in the Pizza” from George Nimeh on Vimeo.

  March 2, 2013

  religion, video

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• An Unnecessary Hell

  The Economist has a very worthwhile exploration of the enduring concept of Hell, but concludes in such a way as to baffle me.

  [Hell] should have been sunk long ago by the weight of its contradictions. But the key to its survival lies in the writings of St Augustine, who, of all people, ought to have been tolerant of sinners: to paraphrase, “Knowledge of the torments of the damned is part of heavenly bliss.” St Bernardino of Siena took it even further: there could be no perfect sweetness of song in Heaven, he wrote, “if there were no infernal descant from God’s justice.” Just as there can be no light without dark, and no sound without silence, so everlasting celestial joys depend on a contrast of everlasting horror. Without Hell, you can’t have Heaven.

  What nonsense. What this line of thinking (not necessarily this writer's) says is that, in effect, in order to fully appreciate or enjoy something, one must be threatened with (not actually experience, but be threatened with) its most excruciating and horrifying opposite. One can't be fulfilled and inspired by great music unless one is taunted with the possibility of having to experience sonic garbage. I can't really know a deep and true love for my children unless I have the possibility of their deaths dangled in front of me day after day.

  Why must it be so? It takes religion to think this way. I prefer a little Shakespeare to temper this notion:

  If all the year were playing holidays,
  To sport would be as tedious as to work;
  But when they seldom come, they wish'd for come,
  And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.

  We are reminded of the wonderful, the beautiful, and the numinous by their scarcity, though that is not their prime requisite. Beautiful music is considered so in part because it is so rare that it is produced. My children are utterly precious to me in part because they are literally precious, they are uniquely, exclusively mine and my wife's.

  Maybe Christianity falls apart without the ever-present threat of eternal torture. But Hell's non-existence has nothing to do one way or the other as to the presence of “God's justice,” or God itself.

  Side note, also to be filed under “It takes religion to think this way”:

  Sinhalese Buddhism has 136 and Burmese Buddhism 40,040, one for each particular sin—including nosiness, chicken-selling and eating sweets with rice.

  I'm guilty of at least two of those.

  December 30, 2012

  atheism, religion

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• “Spiritually Convinced”

  David Kuo, most famous for being formerly of George W. Bush’s office of faith-based initiatives, and for later exposing much of that initiative’s cynicism, submits to Andrew Sullivan’s “ask me anything” videos. The question in this video, which is rather too simplistic for my taste: “Is faith foolish?”
  
  I don’t want to beat up on Kuo, for a number of reasons: He is obviously not, himself, a fool, but a wise, intelligent, well-meaning fellow, and his variety of religiousness is among the most harmless. And, if you’re not aware, he’s also enduring utterly dire medical circumstances.

  All that said, I remain baffled by the construction set up by Kuo here, one similar to that used by many of his ilk (such as Sullivan) who despite being rational in all other areas, rejecting unfounded absolutism, claim themselves to be certain of not only God’s existence, but of a particular sectarian variety of God.

  Look at the way Kuo describes his certainty, that he is intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually convinced of Christianty’s veracity.

  Two of those three, bluntly, are meaningless.

  To be “emotionally convinced” of something at least has a real-world manifestation, even if it is empty as a claim to something’s actual truth. I can feel emotionally convinced that a salesperson is being straight with me, or that a job interview has gone well, or that, gosh, there really is a lot of good in this ol’ world, but that wouldn’t be the same as saying that the facts presented to me have made a strong case. It just feels one way or another, and that’s not good enough when we’re talking about whether or not there’s a timeless, all-powerful superbeing lording over us and sacrificing his offspring for us.

  But “spiritually convinced”? That is, I think, literally meaningless. You can talk in terms of how your brain, your intellect, has amassed enough data to come to a conclusion, and you can also invoke a kind of dualism in saying that your heart, or your gut, or what have you, have led you in a particular direction. But how does one convince one’s spirit? Even allowing that such a thing exists (it does not), how is that different than one’s mind or emotions? It’s not. It’s rhetorical filler.

  I’m sure Kuo would disagree. I’m sure he feels like his spirit really is somehow given assurance of the truth of Christianity. But all I want to say here is that it’s actually redundant, unnecessary, or just plain meaningless to talk about being emotionally or spiritually convinced of grand claims made about the nature of reality.

  And if one really is intellectually convinced of the divinity of Jesus, et. al., well, you’re just doing it wrong.

  December 25, 2012

  atheism, religion, video

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• Alber Saber Convicted of Blasphemy

  My heart breaks at the news. I just did a post at Friendly Atheist on Alber’s conviction, and here’s a taste:

  Egypt has struck a major blow to the fundamental human right to freedom of expression, and unjustly stripped an innocent man of his freedom, as Alber Saber, the 27-year-old atheist activist and blogger, was convicted today of blasphemy and sentenced to three years in prison.

  In a case similar to that of Indonesia’s imprisoned Alexander Aan, Saber was discovered to have been an admin of an atheist Facebook page. An angry mob surrounded his house, and he was soon arrested and charged with blasphemy. While awaiting his verdict, Saber was attacked by fellow inmates who cut his throat with a razor blade after finding out that he had “insulted” their religion.

  Click on over to read the rest. We have so much further to go.

  December 12, 2012

  atheism, blasphemy, politics, religion

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• Cry-Me-a-River Tweet of the Century

  Thus:

  I am amazed at the hatred, filth, sacrilege, anger, condescension, ignorance, triviality, & flippancy heaped upon @pontifex on #askpontifex

  — John Mercer (@jfmercer) December 4, 2012

  //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Yeah, you know, the Pope has enabled and covered up the rape and assault of countless children, but guys, let’s not be so mean to him on Twitter. That’s just a bridge too far. Have we, at long last, no decency?

  December 4, 2012

  religion, twitter

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• Contempt for the reality of human suffering

  We can … know with certainty that the Christian God does not exist as standardly defined: a being who is omniscient, omnipotent, and wholly benevolent. The proof lies in the world, which is full of extraordinary suffering. If someone claims to have a sensus divinitatis that picks up a Christian God, they are deluded. It may be added that genuine belief in such a God, however rare, is profoundly immoral: it shows contempt for the reality of human suffering, or indeed any intense suffering.

  What Can Be Proved About God? — Galen Strawson | The New York Review of Books

  November 17, 2012

  atheism, Quote, religion

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