Blogosaurus Vex

Yesterday I went to a psychic fair.  Of course it’s all garbage but my friend was going and it seemed like it would be an entertaining way to spend the afternoon – we planned on what Husband calls the “dumb Columbo” method of inquiry: Really?  And how does that work?  Really?  And how do you know that?  etc.  My friend noted we could also call it the Socrates method but I don’t like to be an elitist.

First off, I will say it was very sparsely attended which I found pleasing.  Of course in their literature they’d predicted a crowd of over 5,000 – and again, as my friend said, if anyone should have been able to predict the numbers attending…!  Mostly the exhibitors were just walking around and doing each other’s stuff because there were so few attendees.

So there was a crystal merchant, a toe reader, psychic healers, past life readers, tarot readers, one chiropractor who left before we had a chance to talk to him, three thumpers of spiritual books other than the bible, and one masseusse (not a registered RMT), plus a few other tables I didn’t see.

It’s hard to summarize the woo, but we heard it all: The Secret, What the Bleep do We Know, energy (spiritual energy of a kind that can neither be defined nor measured), you need to believe, quantum mechanics, past lives, science doesn’t know everything, science always changes its mind, everything you need to know is already inside you, personal testimony as evidence, energy causes all illness and can cure all illnesses (“Even cancer?  And AIDS?” “Yes, even cancer and AIDS.” “No! Really?” “Yes. Some people have been cured with energy.”) …on and on.

Some of the exhibitors were more brazen in their claims, like the cancer cured by crystals people, and others were cagier.  I went for a psychic healing and tried my best to get the lady to make a specific claim, but she wouldn’t.  Which is good!  I was impressed at her ability to walk the line between not making any promises or claims, yet indicating I really needed and could get benefit from a healing.  I mean, why call it a healing if it doesn’t make you better?  Of course she didn’t need to know what’s wrong with me because the energy can just “find” the problem – it’s sent by a higher power!  Nice.  The healing itself was a pleasant experience of being gently pressed and brushed here and there by the lady, which was relaxing, but if there’s a healing mechanism in there I’ll eat my hat.

I also had a past life reading, and guess what!  I was a Scottish princess in 1787 with beautiful dark hair and a beautiful dress with embellishments about the bosom.  We enter the story with me reclining on a sofa in sadness and tears because I am being forced to marry a lord I dislike.  That night I flee the castle and run to the stable to fetch my pure white horse upon which to run away.  But while getting my horse, I awaken the stable boy, to whom I pour out my miseries and we fall in love.  I return to the castle and tell my parents I won’t marry the lord, which they accept, and then I marry the stable boy!  Hooray!

I was hoping I’d get some kind of cold reading action at least so the reader could tailor my past life in a way I’d like it, but no.  She just closed her eyes and told me a bodice-ripper story that was pretty boring.  Which is too bad, because she’s in the entertainment industry and if she can’t keep me entertained, she can’t get any return business.  Oh and there is the little problem of how it’s all just made up but sold as real, that’s bad too.  Anyway, I am sad I wasn’t a cool intellectual or something, even a farmer or serf would have been more interesting than some stupid princess who accidentally falls in love with Fabio.  I wish I knew more about the late 18thC because then I could have tested her by asking something characteristic about, say, the sort of dress I would have been wearing, and catch her up that way.  Other candidate details might have been horse equipment, layout of the castle, local plants, stuff like that – But I couldn’t think of anything at the time.  Drat!

JBrydle, any good details about the trip to add?

Posted in Critical Thinking, Personal | 7 Comments »

This week past at TAM, popular Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcaster Rebecca Watson got married in a surprise ceremony at the convention (congratulations!).  It has been quite interesting to note the response of some of the skeptics in response to the announcement, who are saying things along the lines of “marriage is irrational.”  This brings us to one of my pet interests: What is the nature of rationality and emotions?  The skeptic party line seems to be, in one degree or another, that emotions are troublesome irritants that interfere with rationality and must be controlled or otherwise avoided when it’s time for making decisions.  Emotions are relegated to a second string status as nuisances that make rational evaluation and decision making harder.  I think this is wrong headed and couldn’t disagree more!

It is certainly true that merely seeking positive feelings is a terrible way to run one’s life, and our feelings can mislead us, but this is not what I mean.  We can’t rely exclusively on our feelings for making evaluations and decisions, to the extent that we do not understand them or feel unequal to managing them.  But as feelings can mislead us, so can our thoughts, and running one’s life purely on cognition also strikes me as a terrible way to be.  If it is even possible, which I don’t see any evidence for.  Certain feelings were identified by Darwin as primary and are generally accepted as such today still, meaning we come packaged with them and cannot “remove” them (surprise, fear, rage, joy, sadness, disgust and possibly contempt).  Feelings are real and they are with us to stay, so we need to consider how to deal with them in our quest to become rational.

Maybe this is a problem of terminology.  If being “rational” is definitionally a product of exclusively cognitive processes, then I suppose it is, by definition, irrational to consider your feelings.  But in that case I do not wish to be rational.

I don’t think that’s actually the way we should define rational.  If it were, it would be a rather stupid and useless term – no one lives that way and no one should want to.  The point of being rational is to honestly and openly consider all factors weighing on a decision or problem, in order to remove biases and assumptions, to consider all consequences, and to seek the truth.  I consider the most useful and meaningful definition of “rationality” to be the full acknowledgement of reality, relevant informing factors and potential outcomes, when making evaluations and decisions.  This cannot be done without a consideration of emotional factors.

Here is one reason why: You cannot remove a bias from or undue influence of feelings if you are not aware of them in the first place.  For many people they translate this to mean “To avoid the undue influence of feelings, you must ignore or shut out feelings!” but of course this is absurd.  Feelings can be suppressed and repressed but they are still there, acting to affect you (and your thinking processes, subsequent choices, etc.), only in this case they act outside your awareness.  It looks good on the outside but actually the rational process is severely compromised; is the mere appearance of rationality good enough?  It shouldn’t be, for a skeptic.

Here is another:  Feelings are consequences of your choices, not merely for your inner state but for your interpersonal interactions also.  As long as you (and others) have to live with those consequences, which you (and they) do, it’s only reasonable to consider them during the initial process.  This is nothing more than acknowledging reality and as such I consider it an integral part of being rational.

Here is a third:  Skeptics talk a lot about the cognitive errors and faults that we are prone to, and some instances of these are surely driven by nothing more than accidents of evolution that have resulted in strange glitches in our cognitive architecture.  But many more are directly related to underlying emotional factors operating outside of awareness.  It is impossible to be rational, in my sense of reflecting reality and considering all relevant factors when making evaluations, without also having emotional health. The reason for this is that emotional health comprises an awareness of one’s own emotional function and the ability to flexibly choose how to respond in any given situation, in a manner that is adaptive.  Without this awareness and flexibility, our emotions master us and drive us to behave in distinctly irrational ways, whether we like it or not, whether we are aware of it or not.

Unhealthy emotional function leads to all manner of behaviours and interactions that meet the definition of irrational (perhaps they represent a common cognitive fault), but to stop the inquiry there by shouting “Cognitive fault!” is short sighted.  What is the cause of this fault, in this case, with this person?  Merely classifying it is not sufficient – how to meaningfully make the perpetrator aware of what they have done such that they can in future avoid it (without, to name one common outcome, merely shifting the emotional burden onto a new “cognitive fault”)?  This requires seeking emotional wellness, the removal of maladaptive, inflexible responses – which itself requires, to begin with, awareness of the very existence of the problem.

Most people are woefully unaware of their emotional function and so their attempts at rationality often feel conflicted; unsatisfying and confusingly so.  Everything makes sense about this decision, why am I not happy about it? Because there is an enormous element of reality that has been ignored: emotions.  When reality is being ignored, there is no rationality.

Emotional wellness is a key component of rational function, as I define it.  I consider definitions of rationality that only consider cognitions useless for real world function and as such irrelevant.  In order to actualize as a rational being, consideration of emotional factors is necessary.  In order to accurately consider emotional factors, emotional health is required.

Posted in Critical Thinking, Psychology | 6 Comments »

Considering the positions of materialists and dualists:

All forms of dualism arise from the alleged disparity between persons and physical objects.  Men, it is rightly noted, are capable of thinking, believing, feeling, wishing, and so on but bodies, it is claimed, are capable of none of these things, and the conclusion is drawn that men are not bodies.  Yet it cannot be denied that men have bodies; hence, it is decided that a man, or a person, is a nonphysical entity, somehow more or less intimately related to a body.  But here it is rarely noted that whatever difficulties there may be in applying personal and psychological predicates and descriptions to bodies, precisely the same difficulties are involved in applying such predicates and descriptions to anything whatever, including spirits or souls.  If, for example, a philosopher reasons that a body cannot think, and thereby affirms that, since a person thinks, a person is a soul or spirit or mind rather than a body, we are entitled to ask how a spirit can think.  For surely if a spirit or soul can think, we can affirm that a body can do so; and if we are asked how a body can think, our reply can be that it thinks in precisely the manner in which the dualist supposes a soul thinks.  The difficulty of imagining how a body thinks is not in the least lessened by asserting that something else, which is not a body, thinks.  And so it is with every other personal predicate or description.  Whenever faced with the dualist’s challenge to explain how a body can have desires, wishes, how it can deliberate, choose, repent, how it can be intelligent or stupid, virtuous or wicked, and so on, our reply can always be: The body can do these things, and be these things, in whatever manner one imagines the soul can do these things and be these things.  For to repeat, the difficulty here is in seeing how anything at all can deliberate, choose, repent, think, be virtuous or wicked, and so on, and that difficulty is not removed but simply glossed over by the invention of some new thing, henceforth to be called the “mind” or “soul.”

Taylor, R. (1974). Metaphysics (2nd ed.).  New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. pp. 30-31

Holy shit, that blows my mind.

Posted in Critical Thinking | 7 Comments »

Let’s clarify a few crucial things:

We (Husband and I) think Christians are good people.  We do not advocate infanticide.  We’re also not picking on Christians, nor are we mocking them.  In fact we think Christians are, overwhelmingly, much better than their theology.

The previous posts have simply been efforts at offering formal arguments, using widely held Christian doctrines, to demonstrate inconsistencies in the structure of Christian theology.  Either these inconsistencies are real, or we have misunderstood.  Unfortunately, none of the replies so far really gets to the core problem, as we see it.

The doctrine of Natural Grace just does mean that dead innocents go to Heaven.  The manner of their death is not relevant and so could very well include murder.  A total nutjob who killed babies in the name of God would be sending them to Heaven.

The only way to defeat the argument is to defeat Natural Grace.

However, if you defeat Natural Grace, then God damns babies to eternal torment.  That’s not a very attractive alternative.

Posted in Critical Thinking, Religion | 10 Comments »

Incognito made a challenge to the Tiller Argument in the comments.  Here is our response:

Let’s build a new argument, starting from Incognito’s

1) Killing a newly baptized 8 day old baby guarantees the child salvation.
2) To guarantee the salvation, we must murder the child.
3) Murder is against God’s laws.
4) Something against God’s laws cannot be morally praiseworthy.
5) Not all actions that guarantee salvation are morally praiseworthy.
6) God wishes that none should perish but have everlasting life. (2Pet.3:9)
7) From 5, thus, some actions which fulfill God’s wishes are immoral.
8 ) God, being omniscient, knew this prior to creating the world.
9) God, being omnipotent, could have created the world in such a way that immorality was not required in fulfilling his wishes.
10) God, being good, would have refrained from creating such a world.
11) Thus, either omniscience fails, omnipotence fails, or benevolence fails, or some conjunction of them fails.
12) Thus, Christianity has mischaracterized the true nature of God.
13) Thus, Christianity is false.

QED

Posted in Critical Thinking, Religion | 13 Comments »

An argument demonstrating the consistency of Christianity and abortion:

1)  The soul is everlasting and indestructible.

2)  The soul will spend eternity either in the presence of God or the Lake of Fire.

3) Abortion terminates earthly life, not the soul.

4) The soul of the preborn infant is in a state of natural grace.

5)  An innocent abortus immediately enters the presence of God.

6)  Thus, abortion, unlike earthly life, guarantees salvation.

7)  Therefore, abortion – guaranteeing salvation – is morally praiseworthy.

8)  Any morally praiseworthy act is consistent with Christianity.

9)  Abortion is consistent with Christianity.

QED

Posted in Critical Thinking, Religion | 16 Comments »

Today Husband and I went to Chapters, where we were lured in by a 20% discount promotion.  I got some good stuff – Hitchens’ Missionary Position, Pascal Boyer as a gift, some Bertrand Russell, and the only Dennett book we don’t own.  We were in the religion section browsing when I came across a book called the Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible.  It has a frankly hilarious cover, which really must be seen to be believed.  I really laughed out loud at the following bullet from the cover:

The enemies of the Bible are enemies of true reason and tolerance

Unlike the author, who is clearly the very model of tolerance!

Delightful!

Click to embiggen:

(We didn’t buy it.  In any sense.)

Posted in Critical Thinking, Ranting, Religion | No Comments »

This should have been obvious but wasn’t: read what the other side says.

I have been thinking about this lately as I have been reading Christian apologists, listening to their debates, and otherwise educating myself in what we at the BV household are calling “atheism level 2.”  The arguments are in some cases new to me, or at least new in their formal philosophical formats.  (I see now why Dawkins is scoffed at by high level Christians – and atheists!)

And speaking of a back door to religion, it is becoming clearer and clearer to me that the kinds of arguments that are persuasive to atheists are in no way guaranteed to have the same rhetorical weight with believers.  So what to do?  Lots of us throw up our hands and say, “Those Christians, sheesh, can’t accept reality, won’t look at the facts, dismiss the arguments.  Idiots.”  But I think the problem – well, one of the problems – is we’re trying to engage them on our terms.  It doesn’t matter if we’re right if we can’t be heard.  So we need to understand where they are coming from: what arguments are persuasive to them?  What sorts of challenges might be able, in principle, to work?

Aside: I’m speaking of the realm of intellectual debate.  Which, as I have said, is not at all the only place for examination and I believe not even the most relevant one.  But it is something we can at least access.

I recently said to someone that, based on how they argued, it seemed to me that they had not read any challenges to Christianity written by atheists (and to that person, did you receive my apology sent later in the day?).  The same charge could have been leveled against me not so long ago.  My reading on religion was all by atheists.  I am correcting that.

I see several advantages of this strategy: One, you learn more and get a better understanding of the issues.  Two, you begin to see what the important things are to the other side, which helps you target your debate.  Three, you begin to relieve any potential charges of ignorance or hypocrisy.  Four, you become better prepared for the types of arguments you will face from people who aren’t spending their free time reading atheists.  Five, it’s the decent thing to do.  If you’re going to shit on a perspective, you should at least know it.  From it’s own side.

With that in mind, I would like to make a recommendation of a book I am reading.  I’m not done it yet and I do have some criticisms, but in general I think it’s great.  It’s written by a former evangelical preacher, highly educated, who has written a book for christians about problems with the theology and philosophy.  It’s by John Loftus.

Because this has long troubled me: clearly the batch of books written by the so-called “new atheists” (Dawkins, Harris, Dennett and Hitchens are the most famous) are by atheists, for atheists.  The self-congratulatory tone is irksome even to me, and I can easily see how a believer would be more annoyed than persuaded by them.  I’m not saying they don’t persuade people – I’m sure they do – but the world needs more than one approach.  Loftus brings a different approach, one targeted not at the already confirmed atheists who wants to feel good about themselves but at the questioning believer.  He really understands what it is to be a christian, and can target his critiques accordingly.  So that’s why I think it’s a very useful book.

Posted in Critical Thinking, Religion | 3 Comments »

I was going to sit on this for a while longer, but since it’s come up in comments, I thought it might be time to get this up sooner rather than later.  This is early days in my thoughts so your feedback is appreciated.

Here is the problem with discussing religion as I see it:

Anyone who takes the time to examine the evidence and is intellectually honest must acccept that atheism is the correct position.  Any other conclusion is erroneous.  I agree with Dennett who said that this field long ago reached a point of diminishing returns: all the arguments have been made, and all that is left is to sift them and make a decision.  I find it tedious and actually boring to go through the arguments; a debate is really only interesting if the conclusion is unknown.

But here is what I think is very interesting: for the most part it doesn’t matter what the logical/philosophical/empirical (shortened hereafter to LPE) evidence says if you are a believer – believers, in general, simply won’t accept it.  It requires tortuous mental gymnastics (especially if you are trying to do it under public scrutiny) but avoiding accepting the truth can be done.  As evidenced by the millions of believers.

We live in a society that says you need evidence before belief, and this is probably why religious people try to provide it (to nonbelievers and to themselves).  But it’s all for nothing when the actual content of rationality cannot or will not be permitted to penetrate.  The emperor has, as they say, no clothes.  I dismiss all of this religious “proof” as rationalizing, because the counter arguments already exist but are being ignored.  (And I mean “rationalize” in the psychological sense: justifying to make an idea/behaviour/feeling acceptable to the self when it otherwise would not be.)  This is what humans do: we are rationalizing machines.  It is laughably easy to make people do absurd things under experimental conditions, such as via hypnosis, and then watch them make up false rationalizations for why they did it.  We rationalize; welcome to being human.

So this is a red herring.  You can utterly defeat all LPE claims of believers and still not budge their belief – and this is because belief isn’t based on a series of logical proofs.  I bet most Christians couldn’t put up anything near a good LPE defense of their beliefs, because they don’t know the arguments.  They’re not scholars, they’re just people.  And they became believers without slogging through a lot of theological or philosophical or historical texts.  While some of them may be swayed to atheism as a result of a LPE process, many simply can’t.  And this is just reality, and we have to accept it.  Something different, something not-LPE, is required if we want to successfully challenge belief.

This is an important point: belief is not a choice.  I can’t help but believe that I am alive and aware – it’s reality to me and it doesn’t matter what you do to me, I will continue to believe it.  You could easily force me to profess belief (I am a wimp about pain) but you could never force me to truly believe, deep inside.  Sometimes belief bends to reason, but not always.  And even if you should stop believing because of great arguments, that doesn’t mean you will.  And this is not a personal failing.  Skeptics often erroneously conflate should with is.  It’s moot that I should be persuaded there is no God if I believe in my heart that there is.  It doesn’t necessarily mean I didn’t understand the arguments – it means there is another process at work that is not amenable to LPE.

Rationality is overrated anyway.  Outside a specialized part of life to do with formal research and study, we aren’t rational.  In our day to day lives it plays only the tiniest of roles.  We are ruled primarily by processes outside our awareness – we are the hypnotized subject.  An example is how we use – require! – the so-called cognitive faults to get along.  Appeal to authority/anecdote?  Every one of you who is not an engineer or statistician uses this whenever you get on an airplane trusting it won’t crash.  The examples are endless.  But so what?  This is okay.  This is actually necessary.  And it’s why I am not very interested in arguing from the LPE side, though I can and do sometimes.  I just don’t think it’s going to win the religious over to our side in anything approaching numbers, so a lot of concerned atheists are wasting a lot of time trying to make believers “get” the arguments when  the arguments are, by and large, beside the point.

Sometimes belief folds to rationality, but not always and, I suspect, not usually.  It’s fine to present LPE arguments; necessary actually.  But not sufficient.

What is the sufficient step?  I don’ t know.  I don’t even know if in theory it is possible to find a different inroad to belief because of the way that beliefs develop – without consent, without argument, requiring only the most superficial of frameworks for successful implantation.  There is no corollary LPE brain process that easily and effortlessly permits examination and discarding of belief.  We may not be wired to allow for atheism in any side-door manner.  But I am very interested in this idea.

The LPE process isn’t working very well and it’s not because it fails on any of its own (logical, philosophical, empirical) grounds – it’s a problem in our heads, a process that happens before – or precluding – rationality.

And that’s why I don’t spend much time arguing religion.

Edit:  Here’s something I wrote in a related vein a while ago.

Posted in Critical Thinking, Psychology, Religion | 12 Comments »

Another quiet night at the BV household – not much to report, though that hasn’t stopped me yet.  Points of potential interest, your mileage may vary:

1. At class tonight two other students I’ve talked to on occasion kept sidling up together to have whispered, private chats, which transported me back to that miserable prison called high school where life was one big long series of exclusions (mostly, my little circle of geeks excepted), and I asked myself, When the fuck do I stop being neurotic about this?  I am waiting to reach a point where I really and truly do not get anxious about being rejected by my peers but it has not happened yet.

2. But who cares, my god, I have HUGE BOOBS.  (Ha ha, that was a little joke for the folks who followed along for the drama about bra sizing.  Post script: I decided to avoid the issue and keep using the bras I already have.  What’s a little discomfort between friends?)

3. I have noticed a certain defiance activated in me against declaring my status.  It’s a big deal in certain circles to say what your degree is and where you got it.  It’s a pedigree system.  But the more schooling I do, the more I realize that school can be a load of crap.  It has many potential perks but it is by no means necessary to become a thoughtful, intelligent person who can contribute to…whatever.  Some of the best thinkers I know are not academics and some of the shittiest are, so right there you know school is neither necessary nor sufficient for Usefulness As A Person.  All the best learning I’ve had came from people outside the school system and the best practitioners I’ve seen in my field are not massively educated in the formal sense.

Okay.  So when people ask what I do, I say I’m in school – not grad school, not an MA – just school.  Or if someone asks if I am working, I just say no.  No explanations, no justifications.  Whenever I sense the question comes from someone trying to sort me by status rather than just expressing interest and curiosity, I absolutely – and defiantly! – provide as little information as I can, knowing it defaults me into a lower status setting than they would use if they had all the facts.  So what?  Fuck ‘em.

Anyway, I started noticing this in myself about 6 months ago and so far I’m pretty okay with it.  Ego syntonic defense: it’s what’s for dinner!

(Aside: I was going to link to the Wikipedia article on “ego syntonic” to define it for those who are curious but it is a TERRIBLE article so I won’t.  I clicked around but didn’t find any good online definitions but if anyone asks I could write something up.)

4. Finally, Jane Austen is worth reading.  I know, I am the only woman on planet earth who doesn’t looooove Pride and Prejudice, but frankly, the scheming of a bunch of immature socialites just can’t hold my interest… Unless they are under constant threat of attack by the walking dead!  In which case it becomes pure butterfat.

5. Oh bother, I could go on but Puck tells me my posts are too long anyway, and there is a nice hot tub to lounge in with my book so this is it for tonight.  Zombies here I come…

Posted in Critical Thinking, Reading, Society/Politics | 2 Comments »