Friday, February 4, 2011

The Midfuture of Religion

Grace Cathedral, San Francisco
In due course this blog will return to simple, innocent speculation about zapping or otherwise blowing up spaceships. But for now, I can't resist following through on my recent promise (well down the comment thread) to play with fire.

Religion is a very widespread, even pervasive characteristic of human societies, and pretty damn widespread among individual humans. Having said that, what exactly do I mean by religion? What we now call simply 'the West' was, for about a thousand years until rather recently, called Western Christendom. Whatever our personal beliefs, most of us grew up in that cultural milieu, and it shapes our concepts of 'religion.'

As a minor example, in the linked thread I made a reference to faith. Yet my impression is that classical paganism cared not at all about faith - it insisted on ritual, carried out as prescribed, without caring whether you 'believed in' it or not. I gather that there is also a bit of a standing joke in archeology that if you find an artifact, especially a carefully made one, with no obvious purpose, you put it down as a 'cult object.' And what will future archeologists make of that big statue of Athena Polias in New York harbor?

For purposes of this discussion I won't even try to define religion - anyone who thinks they can, click the comments button and give it a shot.

But as a matter of fairness I'll show my cards. I was raised in the Episcopal Church, the 'Murrican member of the Anglican Communion. This fact has currently produced a dispute that gives a whole new (old?) meaning to 'primate house behavior,' which I won't belabor here. I had no beef with it, but in college I was converted to agnosticism by a fundamentalist friend, who probably remains mercifully ignorant of how his evangelizing misfired.

Rigorist atheists would probably describe agnosticism as 'squish' atheism, and this was mostly true of mine, though I have subsequently shifted to a purer agnosticism - from There is no God! (But I hesitate to assert it dogmatically.) to Is there a God? God only knows!

From a somewhat different perspective, though, I would be tempted to argue that most self proclaimed atheists (and mere agnostics) are actually followers of a religion I shall call Puritanical Pantheism.

Conventional pantheism is the belief that divinity, 'numinosity,' God-ness infuses the physical universe, AKA Nature. Pantheism of the ordinary sort is associated with the environmental movement, especially its more spiritual-minded wing, as well as with Westerners who are attracted to Eastern mysticisms. Stereotypically it connotes hippie dippie types who wear sandals in places where hiking shoes would be more convenient.

It is a rather 'Catholic' sort of pantheism, not (obviously!) in any doctrinal sense, but in its baroque richness of imagery and vast calendar of saints. Its present day believers are (again, stereotypically) not terribly fond of industrial civilization or, of most interest here, space travel, even though environmentalism as we now know it is very much a product of the space age.

Distaste goes both ways, unsurprisingly, since heretics are always worse than mere infidels.

Puritanical Pantheism is an altogether starker faith than the garden variety sort. It offers no solace that our souls will somehow be joined with the butterflies, and no sacred groves where we might contemplate such things. It offers nothing at all to its believers save sheer awe. Sinners in the hands of an angry God? Try sinners and non-sinners alike in the hands of an utterly indifferent Universe.

For just that reason, puritanical pantheism will probably not sweep all other faiths before it into the dustbin of history. If I were to guess, and I will, both the death and the revival of more traditional forms of religion is probably overstated. The world's major religions have not gotten that way without offering powerful world views to their believers - or even their not-quite-believers. My own world view remains shaped in important ways by the Book of Common Prayer.

That said, I would not be surprised if a syncretic muddle is common in the midfuture, because we are far more aware of the range of possible religion than people in the agrarian age generally were. Short of a catastrophic collapse this is unlikely to change. This by no means implies that everyone will believe in a syncretic muddle; major faiths will likely retain their full vitality among many millions of believers.

Fundamentalism? It is, I suspect, a characteristically transitional phenomenon. Traditional believers of an earlier era were not 'fundamentalist;' traditional teachings were simply taken for granted for lack of alternatives. God (or Thatever) may have created the universe ten minutes ago, complete with fossil record, etc., just as we write stories with a backstory extending back beyond Page 1. In my personal opinion - worth what you paid - accepting this is a far more robust position than trying to take pliers to the material evidence to bend it to fit doctrinal positions. That is to say, 'creation science' is neither scientific nor very creative.

(If you wish to argue otherwise, bear in mind that this is a seriously geeky crowd who will cut you little no slack if you slip up on technical points.)

But religion is not limited by fundamentalism, and the methods of science have their own constraints. Broadly speaking, science deals with the orderliness of nature. What is not orderly - human history comes to mind, not to mention the human experience as recorded in literature - requires different methods of study to produce useful results. And if the universe were created, like a sim except for real, it is questionable whether any purely internal analysis could ever show this, or refute it if not so.

Discuss.




The image is of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.


A reminder to commenters and prospective commenters from Captain Obvious: This is, shall we say, a potentially contentious subject for a blog post. Rocketpunk Manifesto has, so far, been amazingly devoid of flame wars, and I ask all who enter the comment thread to help keep it that way.

381 comments:

«Oldest   ‹Older   201 – 381 of 381
Tony said...

Raymond:

"Of course, we're not a church or anything, so it's not like we can change our spokesperson ;)"

In my experience, Raymond, you're a church of one. I picked public figures because we have them in common, but every atheist I've met or corresponded with has asserted that there is no God.

God's irrelevance is an interesting philosophical proposition, and can certainly be argued rationally, as you have so skillfully done. But I think calling yourself an atheist is misapplied terminology, if for no other reason than the seeming vast majority of self-identified atheists simply don't share your worldview. Here, I'll coin a new label for you that more accurately describes your described attitude: theoindifferentist.

Mangaka2170 said...

How about "Apathetic Agnostic?" One doesn't know whether a god exists and doesn't care because a god's existence or non-existence has no bearing on that person's life.

Tony said...

Mangaka2107:

"How about "Apathetic Agnostic?" One doesn't know whether a god exists and doesn't care because a god's existence or non-existence has no bearing on that person's life."

I can't speak for Raymond, but I get the impression that he doesn't like the idea that God could be relevant. Agnosticism doesn't explicitly deny the relevance of God, if God exists.

Mangaka2170 said...

That's where the "apathetic" part comes in.

jollyreaper said...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intact_dilation_and_extraction

Though the procedure has had a low rate of use, representing 0.17% (2,232 of 1,313,000) of all abortions in the United States in the year 2000, according to voluntary responses to an Alan Guttmacher Institute survey,[2] it has developed into a focal point of the abortion debate.

Everything I've ever read on it says that this procedure is only done when it's a question of the life of the mother. If there's no specific language in medical ethics guidelines to indicate such, that's the way it works out in practice. How often does someone carry a baby that long and decides to abort it after the point where it would be a viable live birth?

If that's wahte a person believes, he's allowed to think it and act on it.


And if he thinks abortion is murder and I as a pro-choicer am condoning baby murder and am no different from a nazi sympathizer, what then? As far as the abortion debate goes in this country, there's a number of anti-abortionists seeking to have a rational debate, a number seeking to have a crazy-head freakout over everything, and a minority who want to engage in a terrorist campaign of killing doctors and clinic workers to intimidate them into silence.

Can we at least agree that there's a nice way of acting on your faith and an awful way of doing it?

Your insistence that he can't, because you don't agree, is just imposing your personal preferences on another, for no better reason than you happen to think you're right and he's wrong. I don't see how you have any right to get your way more than the other person.


I'll keep saying it. He can live how he wants to live but he can't enforce his rights upon someone else. I'm not telling him his wife has to have an abortion, I'm not forcing her to have one. I'm against him taking away someone else's right. That's the same as preventing the theft of another person's property isn't an act of theft.

That's why we have democracy, so a consensus can be reached about right and wrong. The losers just have to suck it up or -- here's a real brainstorm -- educate the majority to change their minds. Of course, calling the majority superstitious idiots is not generally going to work...

I'd use more delicate language. The problem is framing the debate in the first place. This ain't a christian country and so the bible doesn't have jurisdiction over our law. Except they're absolutely convinced this is a christian country and so the bible is the ultimate authority. It's somewhat impossible to have a reasonable discussion under those circumstances.

Raymond said...

"Theoindifferentist" is a mouthful and a half. "Apathetic agnostic" implies that I don't care about the question - I do, but I've answered it to my satisfaction at present. If evidence of god were to come forth, I'd probably go with misotheism - She'd have some splainin' to do.

"Irrelevantist" maybe?

Here, by the way, is where the 40k example is actually somewhat useful (although you can use any setting wherein deities are an established, tangible force). When "god" is simply a term for a sufficiently powerful being, where do you draw the line between "follower" or "subject" and "religion" or "faith"?

jollyreaper said...

I can't speak for Raymond, but I get the impression that he doesn't like the idea that God could be relevant. Agnosticism doesn't explicitly deny the relevance of God, if God exists.

I'm agnostic. I won't call it a god delusion, just a god hypothesis. And it makes for a poor scientific idea because the god exists without proof. Science without proof won't get you very far except perhaps in string theory. ba-dum-tsh!

jollyreaper said...


Let's say we don't exercise the straw men today, okay? Institution of Sharia law in a local jurisdiction would obviously lead to infringing on individuals' Constitutional rights.


It's their strawman, not mine. I'm just accepting their premise and running with it.

And we've countless times seen that very thing keep getting brought up and keep getting shot down by the courts because it would violate the separation of church and state.

If, however, the majority of the people at the national level decided to amend the Constitution so that Sharia could be allowed at some subordinate level (eliminating anything that could cause court challenges), then it would be a moot point, for all practical purposes. The people have decided.


If it'll get rid of American Idol I might be willing to accept the beards and burkas.

"Another good example of this is states' rights..."

I'm not very sympathetic with states rights arguments, so it's irrelevant to me.


It doesn't matter what you think about it, the point still stands.

Raymond said...

Tony:

"But I think calling yourself an atheist is misapplied terminology, if for no other reason than the seeming vast majority of self-identified atheists simply don't share your worldview."

I'm not entirely alone:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/Atheism

jollyreaper said...


Here, by the way, is where the 40k example is actually somewhat useful (although you can use any setting wherein deities are an established, tangible force). When "god" is simply a term for a sufficiently powerful being, where do you draw the line between "follower" or "subject" and "religion" or "faith"?


Been played for laughs as the flat earth atheist trope where a person lives in an overtly gods-riddled world and refuses to believe in them.

Depending on the nature of the god or gods and the power they exert over society, it could well be like living under a dictatorship. You may not like the system, you may in fact hate it, but what you can't do is deny its existence.

There was a book I remember seeing a while back that was an atheist's take on the Left Behind series. He said "Well, what if something like that really did come to pass? What would it be like for those of us who don't believe, who are left behind, and are not feeling very charitable to the cosmic jerkface who just brought about the apocalypse?" Never got a chance to read it but the description made it sound like "the Road" with broken seals, bowls of wrath and plagues. How awful would life be if you had incontrovertible proof of a creator-god such as from the Abrahamic tradition and he was a a cosmic monster? Take Milton's rant from the end of Devil's Advocate and imagine if it was a completely accurate and balanced assessment of the state of things, not slanted in any way. Wow, what a world to live in.

jollyreaper said...

Oh, and with regards to the looting class comment, these are the guys, right here.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-street-in-jail-20110216?page=1

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"Oh, and with regards to the looting class comment, these are the guys, right here."

Okay...and how does that prove that wealthy people and/or corporate executives are, as a class, "looters"?

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"Everything I've ever read on it says that this procedure is only done when it's a question of the life of the mother. If there's no specific language in medical ethics guidelines to indicate such, that's the way it works out in practice. How often does someone carry a baby that long and decides to abort it after the point where it would be a viable live birth?"

I don't have an answer for you on the maternal aspect of the question. I do know that the procedure became a political issue in the context of third trimester abortion. That is what I'm addressing. So presumably there is a cohort of pregnant women out there that would engage an abortion that late if they could.

And I reiterate, in the third trimester, the condition of the mother is no issue, because the fetus is viable with medical help, and sometimes not even substantial medical help. If relieving the mother of pregnancy for health reasons is the objective, live birth by some method, whether vaginal or surgical, is AFAIK always an option that close to normal term.

"And if he thinks abortion is murder and I as a pro-choicer am condoning baby murder and am no different from a nazi sympathizer, what then?

...

Can we at least agree that there's a nice way of acting on your faith and an awful way of doing it?"


This is what they call a complex question in formal logic. I have to agree that the only ethical choice is to hunt down and kill abortionists before I can even engage the question. That of course is ridiculous. I can think they are murders and still decide that the ethical thing for me to do is convince others that they are murders, so that eventually the practice cam be made illegal. I don't have to pursue and kill them individually to be ethically consistent, because I can recognize that obeying the law, as it now stands, is a higher ethical priority. Even if abortion was illegal, and considered murder, my ethical priority would be to let the responsible authorities take care of it, just like any other murder case.

"I'll keep saying it. He can live how he wants to live but he can't enforce his rights upon someone else."

Nobody can enforce anything on you unless enough people agree to make it law. And that law either has to pass Constituional tests or the Constitution has to be amended to allow it to pass. It may not be what you think you're saying, but you're message is that you don't want Christians to vote based on their values and beliefs, because they just might succeed in changing the laws, and that's a personal problem you.

"The problem is framing the debate in the first place. This ain't a christian country and so the bible doesn't have jurisdiction over our law. Except they're absolutely convinced this is a christian country and so the bible is the ultimate authority. It's somewhat impossible to have a reasonable discussion under those circumstances."

It's a majority Chrisitan country wherever I've ever gone. Even if a lot of self-identified Christian don't practice regularly, or don't always follow the church's moral rules, they still share Christian values. Once again, you think you're saying one thing, but your message is another. You say the debate can't be framed, but your message is that you don't like the fact they won't fram it your way.

Rick said...

For what it is worth, there is already a term in use, apatheism, for a position of indifference toward whether or not a deity exists. Though this is the sort of subject where Wikipedia - or pretty much any other single reference - probably shouldn't be taken as, well, holy writ.

I'll again ask everyone to step very lightly - not just about the main topic, but about things like abortion and rich people.

I have my own opinions on these subject - pretty strong, shading a bit left of center, rather idiosyncratic. (Broadly speaking, I am conservative by temperament but liberal, in the US sense, in my views.)

My general position WRT this blog is not to hide or softpedal my views, but not to beat them to death - if I wanted to do that I'd start a political blog. In particular I don't want to chase off valued readers and even more valued commenters whom I disagree with.

At the same time I don't hesitate to post on topics like this one, knowing that I'm sailing into fairly dangerous waters.

All of which is to say, I don't want to drive anyway here away, and probably nor do any of you. So be pragmatic about responding to views you find stupid or obnoxious.

Anonymous said...

I generally don't talk about my personal views on religion; because they are personal and do not reflect common beliefs or practices. Having said that, I can see , in the future, that some people might form personal religions; private interpritations of various mainstream religions, cosmopology, combinations of various religious ideas, just to name a few. Whether these ideas are kept private, or discussed among like-minded others anonymously, it wouldn't actually form a church; a religion without a church, a religion that is totally personal and private. It has the same probability of coming to pass as any of the other future forms of religion we have discussed here.

Ferrell

Milo said...

Raymond:

"Here, by the way, is where the 40k example is actually somewhat useful (although you can use any setting wherein deities are an established, tangible force). When "god" is simply a term for a sufficiently powerful being, where do you draw the line between "follower" or "subject" and "religion" or "faith"?"

For what it's worth, the Imperium in Warhammer 40k actually is "religious", in that while their god factually exists, they attribute to him influence above and beyond the amount he actually has, and engage in frequent rituals even when these are in fact meaningless. Thus this goes beyond rational respect for a powerful being.


What I note is that Earth religions (i.e., the ones with no proof of their validity) tend to rely a lot on formalized traditions and rituals, even when they produce no obvious result. People are loathe to change tradition, perhaps exaclty because, since God doesn't overtly respond to your rituals, it would be hard to ever tell if he happened to be offended by any particular change - so people usually play it safe. Yet for all the "faith" in the world, it mostly applies to nebulous matters of "luck", or to what happens to your soul after you die (even though belief in the afterlife doesn't seem to make people much less afraid of death). Only the completely insane would expect divine providence in such an obvious manner as jumping off a cliff under the assumption that their god will grant them flight. Professionals in any given field, even if they are deeply religious, are going to have valid plans for their job that do not involve praying for a miracle.

In a fantasy world where the god of air is known to grant the boon of flight to mortals who prove their bravery, jumping off a cliff may well make rational sense. And having a schematic that includes "then a miracle occurs" in step two makes perfect sense if you have met God last tuesday and settled negotiations for the miracle in question. Meanwhile, the commonplace interaction with deities is likely to make "religions" less fossilized and more practical-minded - although, as in Warhammer 40k, ritualistic religions can still exist alongside a more scientific acknowledgement of the existance of powerful beings. (A fun exercise for fantasy authors: Okay, so you have real gods, who are included as characters in the setting. Okay, so now, since they're people: what religious beliefs do your gods hold? Do the gods have any articles of faith that they adhere to without proof?)

Tony said...

Rick:

"I'll again ask everyone to step very lightly - not just about the main topic, but about things like abortion and rich people."

It's the nature of religious discussion, at least in the US, to expand it to Culture Wars issues.

Also, have you ever known a religious discussion that didn't end with some equivalent of "Charlie don't surf!"?

Rick said...

Confession that I had to google 'Charlie don't surf'!

On private religion, it strikes me that regular congregational worship - 'going to church' / mosque / synagogue - is characteristic mainly of the Abrahamic faiths, which also have plenty of private or small-group modes of worship. Public worship in other traditions seems more an occasional 'special event.'

Even though "ye shall always find a fifth," I don't see any inherent reason why churchless personal worship is precluded for Abrahamic believers, if perhaps (currently) heterodox ones.

Milo said...

Rick:

"Public worship in other traditions seems more an occasional 'special event'."

This holds in Abrahammic faiths too, really. It's just that their definition of "special event" has been extended to include the sabbath (Saturday for Jews, Sunday for Christians, Friday for Muslims - with some exceptions in certain denominations, like Seventh Day Adventists), which happens once a week. Considering the large number of both religious and secular people who regularly feel thankful whenever the weekend rolls around, I think this definition is valid.

Also note that both Christians and Buddhists practice monasticism, which is essentially an extremely pious portion of the population choosing to live in permanent congregation.


Also, I'm convinced that Blogger violently hates me personally. (Since I am ascribing anthropomorphic attitudes to a mechanical process, this could be seen as a religion...)

Tony said...

Rick:

"Confession that I had to google 'Charlie don't surf'!"

I would have sworn that was something we had in common.

In any case, I think the point still stands that religious discussions tend to end in special pleading by one or both sides.

Rick said...

No disagreement there!

But I've been very pleased by the ratio of substance to waste heat on this thread.

Thucydides said...

The frightening part of religious zelotry isn't:

"Charlie don't surf"; its,

"I can take that point and hold it as long as I like -- and you can
get anywhere you want up that river that suits you, Captain."

Not too comfortable for those of us who live on the point....

Tony said...

Thucydides:

"Not too comfortable for those of us who live on the point..."

You know, though I am not a Christian, I could accomodate myself to a conservative Christian society. I wouldn't be missing out on all that much. Internet porn, mostly. And I really don't have a lot of sympathy for people who would have a harder time with it. I grew up in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, and I've seen Babylon. I really don't think all of this license and moral ambivalence has gained us one GD thing worth having.

jollyreaper said...

You know, though I am not a Christian, I could accomodate myself to a conservative Christian society. I wouldn't be missing out on all that much. Internet porn, mostly. And I really don't have a lot of sympathy for people who would have a harder time with it. I grew up in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, and I've seen Babylon. I really don't think all of this license and moral ambivalence has gained us one GD thing worth having.

All right ... all right ... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order ... what have the Romans done for us?

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"All right ... all right ... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order ... what have the Romans done for us?"

Prospective emperors bribing armies for power and calling devestation "peace" and slavery and gladiatorial entertainment and Theodora & Antonina.

Raymond said...

Tony:

"...I could accomodate myself to a conservative Christian society...."

I grew up in one, and I couldn't possibly go back. Thankfully, though, I live in a place which has the option to simply disengage from a community one finds problematic, and stay within the bounds of the state.

Much of what we call the Culture Wars is merely the neverending conflict over the definitions of private and public crimes. (This is why abortion debates are so intractable - all sides have fundamentally incompatible definitions of who is to be protected.)

Speaking only for myself, my distaste for conservative Christian politics is more an objection to (what I see as) intrusive and overly broad restrictions than the source of their justifications. The source merely frustrates me when it's used as a substitute for reasoned debate, especially when it conflicts with observed reality. I much prefer a more minimalist, materialist philosophy of law, wherein one is free to add one's own restrictions one's own behavior, but the baseline codes of behavior are restricted to those acts which the majority agrees they do not wish inflicted upon them by others.

Raymond said...

Addendum:

"I grew up in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, and I've seen Babylon."

Please. LA's merely sad, pathetic, overly polluted and overly spread-out. The Babylon of old would be embarrassed at the comparison. (The really kinky stuff is German.)

jollyreaper said...

"The national government will maintain and defend the foundations on which the power of our nation rests. It will offer strong protection to Christianity as the very basis of our collective morality. Today Christians stand at the head of our country. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit. We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theatre, and in the press-- in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess during the past years."

“The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life.”

--The guy with the funny mustache. Not Chaplin. No, not Michael Jordon.

Raymond said...

jollyreaper:

Still counts towards Godwin's Law even if you don't say the name...

jollyreaper said...

@Raymond -- you said it so much more succinctly than I could. That right there. Perfect.

jollyreaper said...

@Raymond again

First comment was directed towards the morality bit.

Second comment, I'm just struck by the slavish worship of the ideal of a fictionalized past that never really existed and a sense that somehow Christian standards of sexual immorality somehow cause damage to a nation.

I could just as easily have gone for Falwell.

"What we saw on Tuesday [9-11], as terrible as it is," he said on the show, "could be minuscule if in fact God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve."

"Jerry, that's my feeling," Robertson replied.

"The ACLU's got to take a lot of blame for this," Falwell said.

"Well, yes," Robertson agreed.

"And I know that I'll hear from them on this," Falwell continued. "But throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way—all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'


There was another doozy from not long before he died.

You've got to kill the terrorists before the killing stops. And I'm for the president to chase them all over the world. If it takes 10 years, blow them all away in the name of the Lord."

Raymond said...

jollyreaper:

I know what you're going for, and god knows my boundless distaste for Falwell, but I find it's most helpful in this sort of debate to borrow from figure skating judges: ignore the most extreme values, and work with the rest.

Tony said...

Raymond:

"Please. LA's merely sad, pathetic, overly polluted and overly spread-out. The Babylon of old would be embarrassed at the comparison. (The really kinky stuff is German.)"

I'll excuse unavoidable ignorance of what goes on there that doesn't make the news. (Mostly because it's all too common to count as news, at least locally, but also to a great degree because it would make a lot of people in the media look like subsidizers of wanton missery for promoting and celebrating the underlying libertinism.) The LA lifestyle is one long lesson in personal license leading to personal tragedy. Nothing -- not art, not science, certainly not people -- would be hurt by trashing all of it.

Raymond said...

Tony:

I don't know even how to begin debating that - could we file this one under "agree to disagree"?

Tony said...

I'll try again. From my point of view, and given my experience of the results, what people seem to be afraid of losing to a more conservative culture, it wouldn't hurt them one bit to lose. That's all I'm saying, and it's largely based on materialist, humanist considerations. Liberty is a great thing. But excessive license is, on a strictly cost-benefit basis, not worth the consequent missery.

And I don't by the argument that people have a right to go to hell in their own way. Nobody ever goes alone. There are always friends and families that are emotionally hurt, and sometimes physically injured. People that claim self-destructive behavior as a right are also implicitly claiming what they do to others as a right. Call me crazy, but I don't think anybody has a right to hurt others in order to satisfy oneself.

Looping this back to the topic, I think in the future the backlash against going too far in the direction of personal liberty will abandon religion as a justification. Conservatism will be an interpretation of secular humanism that asserts people matter as families and communities, not just as individuals, and that there is a materialist value to legal restraint of activity known to be destructive.

Tony said...

Raymond:

"I don't know even how to begin debating that - could we file this one under "agree to disagree"?"

We will probably have to. I've seen to many people destroyed by "freedom" to have a completely positive view of liberal values, even in the classical sense. I perceive you to be more concerned about people hemming you in than you are about people out of control going too far. That's not a criticism, just an observation.

jollyreaper said...

I know what you're going for, and god knows my boundless distaste for Falwell, but I find it's most helpful in this sort of debate to borrow from figure skating judges: ignore the most extreme values, and work with the rest.

I get what you're saying and I do agree with it but the religious standards in this country have skewed very, very hard right. I'd say the godhatesfags.com guys would be what you'd consider on the outside of the extreme. Falwell's university had US presidential candidates speaking at it. I'd say a pretty good standard of whether to take a given person seriously is to look at who are taking them seriously. Nobody really takes the godhatesfags people seriously and every mainstream Christian and Republican leader has condemned them openly. So right, they'd be a terrible example to trot out to represent mainstream Christian thought. So how about Falwell and Liberty University? You've got McCain walking back his "agents of intolerance" speech. The hardcore conservatives represent a constituency within the right that have to be placated for any candidate to win the primaries.

Someone like a Rush Limbaugh, is he someone to take seriously as a representative of the right? He made the head of the GOP walk back criticisms levied against him. His talking points make Republicans jump. I'd say he's pretty damn influential. You don't have figures of comparable influence on the left. The mainstream Democrats are openly contemptuous of their liberal/progressive base. Raum Emanuel went on profanity-laden tirades against them. So I'm sure you can find a lesbian vegan feminist who might say something extreme to use as a counter-example but nobody's listening to her.

The whole point I was originally getting at is that it sounds nice to talk about morality and purity and getting rid of vulgarity and awfulness. As much of a fan of sex and naked ladies as I am, I find the use of sex in advertising to be an utter obscenity. Then again, I find advertising obscene in general. I think our culture is diseased but I don't blame the gays for that. I'll blame them for the hideous fashion industry but not the downfall of western civilization. So yeah, cleaning things up sounds good but you have to look at the type of people who are using that kind of talk. You may like what they're selling but probably won't like what they deliver.

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"You may like what they're selling but probably won't like what they deliver."

The problem comes when one starts believing that they can actually deliver everything one fears they want. I also find it intriguing when people complain about Republicans throwing bones to their radical base, but don't see the same thing happening with Democrats.

Raymond said...

Tony:

"We will probably have to. I've seen to many people destroyed by "freedom" to have a completely positive view of liberal values, even in the classical sense. I perceive you to be more concerned about people hemming you in than you are about people out of control going too far. That's not a criticism, just an observation."

I was hemmed in for a long time. There's often as much harm done hemming people in than not, in the experience of myself and many of those close to me.

And I have plenty of concern about those going too far. I've seen my share of the spillover effects of self-destructive behavior. I don't have any easy, one-size-fits-all answers, either - it varies substantially between particular problems, between specific issues. So we may have more commonality in principle than you think. I suspect, however, we'd differ greatly on context, degree, and preferred responses.

jollyreaper said...

I was hemmed in for a long time. There's often as much harm done hemming people in than not, in the experience of myself and many of those close to me.


That's the eternal societal question, where to draw the line? Individuals exist within a society and I believe there's a balance to be struck between individual liberty and concessions made to the greater whole.

It's interesting to see where conservatives come down on suicide. Libertarians shouldn't have a problem because it's the ultimate act of self-determination. If you don't even have the freedom to die as you choose, what other rights are you denied? But that tends to smack up against religious prohibitions against suicide. And as for self-destructive behavior, as the bat-biting bard once said, "Wine is fine but whiskey's quicker, suicide is slow with liquor." How far do we go with legislating behavior?

The creeping nanny state is something that the libertarian side is greatly concerned over but a lot of that comes from the right as well but couched in terms of biblical morality. Libertarians grouse about the damn liberals taking their cigarettes and their guns but can often overlook the implications of morality police coming for their porn.

Personally, I'm a fan of psychological horror films but am disgusted by torture porn movies, Eli Roth crap, Saw, etc. But as much as I dislike torture porn, I don't want a return to the Hayes Code. That'd be awful.

Rick said...

I'll just say for the moment that this is a really interesting discussion, and generally congratulate you all for walking carefully over such dangerous ground.

Scott said...

Now that the ugly discussion points have been beaten back into their respective corners, can we backtrack a minute here?

What is the purpose of *any* religion in a society?

Until we get an answer to what purpose religion is *supposed* to be filling, it's hard to project what shape it will take in the near future.

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"How far do we go with legislating behavior?"

Interesting term, "legislating behavior". One can't do any such thing. What one can do is enact legislation that deters and punishes behavior the majority considers dangerous. If one doesn't care about the legal consequences, one will go ahead anyway.

When a person kvetches about "legislating behavior" what one is really doing is saying, "I have some behavior or behavior that I wouldn't engage in if there were consequences. So nobody had better enact legal consequences for what I want to do!" Put that way, it seems rather petulant, doesn't it?

"Personally, I'm a fan of psychological horror films but am disgusted by torture porn movies, Eli Roth crap, Saw, etc. But as much as I dislike torture porn, I don't want a return to the Hayes Code. That'd be awful."

Considering all of the great movies made under the Hays Code, one wonders what the problem would be. No titty shots? No explicit sex scenes so technically and mechanically sad that one wonders why Hollywood actors are considered sex symbols? No Sam Peckinpah or George Romero? A few explicit scenes cut out of Jaws, but the best parts of the movie left just as they are?

Besides, under the Production Code, there was a code within the code, a languages of euphemistic dialogue and visuals that told the moviegoer exactly what was going on offscreen (either physically outside the frame or between scenes). See Casablanca (a film of smoldering sexual intensity) or The Big Sleep. Gone With the Wind doesn't leave the viewer in much doubt either -- some got upset about Clark Gable saying "damn" onscreen, but nobody seems to have complained about Vivien Leigh acting as contented as a well-serviced she-cat the morning after a visually implied spoual rape. All of the great David Lean epics were Code films. So were all of the classic (and most accurate) war movies.

Hmmm...

Tony said...

Scott:

"What is the purpose of *any* religion in a society?

Until we get an answer to what purpose religion is *supposed* to be filling, it's hard to project what shape it will take in the near future."


At an individual level, religion fulfills a need for existential certainty. At the community level it fills the function of a social focus, a source of knowledge, and a source of authority. Whether any individual agrees with the reliability of the knowledge or the validity of the authority, religion still supplies these things if enough people accept them.

Raymond said...

Tony:

Um, no thanks. I want a cinema which can include Trainspotting and Requiem For A Dream and Aliens and Godfather and Twelve Monkeys and all the other movies of the last half-century which couldn't be made in anything resembling the same form under Hayes.

The Hayes Code wasn't a restriction that resulted in fundamentally better-told stories. It was just a restriction.

jollyreaper said...

Frankly, I'm of the opinion that the tease is better than the reveal. A woman in a well-cut dress can appear more attractive than if she were in her bikini and a romantic conversation can be more arousing than hardcore sex. But I want it to be the artist's choice to practice that restraint, I don't want those standards imposed by outsiders.

I'm happy with having things in tiers. Over public airwaves you settle on the standards of public behavior and in private access areas where only the people who want to see it see it, you can do whatever you want. Topless waitresses at a sidewalk cafe, no. Topless waitresses indoors, yes. True Blood airing on NBC, no. True Blood airing on HBO, yes. Seems like a reasonable compromise no different from saying prayer in churches, yes, prayer in schools, no. If you have a bible club that meets before school, fine. But making the prayer part of the sanctioned school day, no, not if it's a public school. A private school can do whatever the hell they want so long as they meet the same education standards set for public schools so that their students don't come out disadvantaged.

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"But making the prayer part of the sanctioned school day, no, not if it's a public school."

This is an attitude I have never understood. A large portion of the kids in the private Christian schools I attended didn't come from particularly religious families, another large part of them were not members of the denomination that sponsored the school. Prayer was just another ritual that had to be endured. Jews and Muslims, if they couldn't accept the prayer as rendered, just bowed their heads and didn't repeat the words. No biggie.

On a broader, but related point, I think Komarovsky's attitude in Doctor Zhivago (the movie) was very accurate -- there are people who get on with life and people who make themselves and others miserable. In my experience both religious and anti-religious crusaders are of the second type, and both are equally damaging to polite society.

Rick said...

Damn, this is a fascinating and ... well, provocative ... discussion. On principle I disagree with the Hayes Code - and making them hide Jeannie's belly button was just plain stupid - but I agree that Hollywood found effective ways to play off of it.

And going somewhere I usually avoid, I have to say that it is interesting to hear what seem to be genuinely conservative arguments, of a sort that Edmund Burke might actually recognize. (Most of what is called 'conservative' in US politics seems like nothing of the sort.)

jollyreaper said...

(Most of what is called 'conservative' in US politics seems like nothing of the sort.)

I'm small "c" conservative on a lot of things -- if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The big question is on whether or not something's broke!

What's called "conservatism" in the US is actually very radical because it's seeking to make very drastic changes to the way society's been working. Just look at the blatant union-busting and power-grabbing in Wisconsin. The whole "unitary executive" theory was a radical reinterpretation of the constitutional role of the president. And while conservatives rail against judicial activism, rulings like Citizens United are the very definition of activism. And we have two supreme court justices who are not avoiding conflict of interest or the appearance of a conflict of interest in their behavior.

The very heart of my innate conservatism is the question of unintended consequences. I'm always wondering what it is we're missing right now that will bite us in the butt later. We see all these things rammed through like new manmade chemicals, new food additives, all this crap and it always ends up being carcinogenic or bad for the environment. We've always got people agitating to remove safety regulations that kept the economy on an even keel because they make more money when everything's see-sawing back and forth ready to tear itself apart. That ain't conservative.

Broadly speaking, I'm fiscally conservative and socially liberal. The point of contention people would have with my definition is what's considered conservative. I think that softening the edges of capitalism with social welfare programs and placing value upon human life is conservational. Randians would say that's woo-woo liberal loonie crap and needlessly coddles people. No answer is given as to what should be done if the alternative is letting them die in the street.

The words get all twisted up. A Teddy Roosevelt conservative wanted to protect the environment. A Reagan conservative believes in Christian Reconstructionism/Dominionism and that the Earth exists for man's use and whatever use he puts it to is good in the eyes of the Lord. Environmental destruction is seen as just as valid as preservation since it is the will of man carrying out the will of God. Dominionism lacks the humility and reverence for nature as an extension of God present in older forms of Christianity. (though some hardcore protestants had a view of nature being the wilderness and the domain of satan and his spawn. Puritans had this view.)

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"A Reagan conservative..."

As the former Iraqi information minister would have said:

I now have to inform you that you are too far from reality.

I am a conservative and I think Reagan was on the right track with many -- though not all -- things. I don't believe in any form of religiously motivated human dominion over nature. Even those that do (I mean really do, not just use it as a rhetorical excuse) are very concerned with the responsibilities of stewardship, both in the interest of respecting God's creation and for future generations.

With all due respect, I suggest you seriously curtail your ranting and gratuitous broad-brushing. It does you and your case no good.

Rick said...

Umm ... bashing a fellow commenter is quite a bit higher on the rant scale than bashing a political leader of a generation ago.

I ask everyone to show restraint, whether or not I share your perspectives.

Tony said...

Rick:

"Umm ... bashing a fellow commenter is quite a bit higher on the rant scale than bashing a political leader of a generation ago."

No bashing intended -- just constructive criticism.

Scott said...

At an individual level, religion fulfills a need for existential certainty. At the community level it fills the function of a social focus, a source of knowledge, and a source of authority. Whether any individual agrees with the reliability of the knowledge or the validity of the authority, religion still supplies these things if enough people accept them.
Thank you, Tony. I've been having a definitional problem lately... can't find the words I need to get my point across.

Given that the world is secularizing, what is religion (in general) failing to do to maintain it's attractiveness?

Tony said...

Scott:

"Given that the world is secularizing, what is religion (in general) failing to do to maintain it's attractiveness?"

IMO that's asking the wrong question. It isn't religion per se that has a problem. It's just that religions come and go. The new religions don't have supernatural gods in them, mostly. But they have dogmas, doctrines, and angels & demons, just like the old ones.

Chris said...

Getting very late into the game again, I let following this discussion take a backseat for a while. One thing I really feel I need to react to, though. It's what Tony said: "It's perfectly possible to think that abortion is murder, and that homosexuality is aberrational, without involving Christian values. Rational arguments can be made for both positions."

I feel like first discussing the tensions between values and rationality, but those seem fairly obvious. So let me simply say - and let me state it's just my opinion - that no. Rational arguments cannot be made for the disregarding a mother's wishes, or homophobia.

The case of abortion is a tricky one, since as has been noted, it's difficult to delineate after what point the baby is "alive". Mind you, every single cell is "alive" in some rudimentary form to begin with.

As an aside note, when I entered this discussion I spoke of Germanic heathenry. The Frisian and Icelandic legal codes actually allowed a form of abortion. Of course, due to the state of medicine at that time, "abortion" as such wasn't possible untill after birth. It was essentially legalized infanticide.

You know where they drew the line of "alive"? Not birth, obviously, otherwise the infanticide couldn't be justified. No, a person was "alive", had become human, after its first feeding. Untill the baby had fed (and the legal codes actually specify which foods count or don't count), it wasn't considered alive.

Don't know why I mention this, but it shows the arbitrariness of the discussion. It also highlights a sort of open-mindedness that was lost later on, but I won't defend it as being "civilized".

But homophobia is inexcusable. I realize this is coming from someone who doesn't agree with the notion of an absolute morality. But still, if you want a rational argument, one which is entirely divorced from personal opinion, look to biology. Biology (and anthropology, and a host of other academmic disciplines iirc), as far as I know, has pretty definately found out that homophobia isn't the result of some defect or imperfection. It's a perfectly possible outcome of our own biology. Our sheer humanity, if you will.

jollyreaper said...

But homophobia is inexcusable. I realize this is coming from someone who doesn't agree with the notion of an absolute morality. But still, if you want a rational argument, one which is entirely divorced from personal opinion, look to biology. Biology (and anthropology, and a host of other academmic disciplines iirc), as far as I know, has pretty definately found out that homophobia isn't the result of some defect or imperfection. It's a perfectly possible outcome of our own biology. Our sheer humanity, if you will.

@Chris

There's always been a penchant for trying to come up with a scientific justification for prejudice. Scientific racism was all the rage for the longest time. But you really had to call those justifications pseudo-scientific because they didn't hold up to analysis. There were ideas about blacks being better athletes because of higher proportions of long-twitch muscle fibers, Asians having a larger part of the brain for crunching numbers, white men having a bigger part of the brain for "civilizing", etc. All of it comfortably fit existing prejudices and all of it was proven bunk. DNA analysis showed that the differences between the races were minute and any bell graph of abilities shows that you can't find strong correlations for race in terms of intelligence, athletic ability, or anything else.

In this day and age, western medicine has given up all of the old racial superiority theories. You have to go pretty far afield to find people who still believe this sort of thing. There's no longer a controversy over this anymore than with the theory of gravity, plate tectonics or the orbital motion of the planets. But if you hang with the white supremacist groups, they'll tell you how all of this is BS faked science.

From a scifi perspective, it does make one wonder what things would be like if there were a real scientific basis for racism. Imagine if we hadn't killed off our other hominid cousins and we had several near-human races living alongside us. Would make for some fascinating conflicts.

It wasn't all that long ago that homosexuality was dropped from the DSM-IV as a mental disorder. The times change slowly but they do change.

Chris said...

@jollyreaper: so you agree that there is no good rational argument for homophobia, I take it?

And I agree with your assesment on racism and pseudo-science. One of my favorite statistics is the fact that genetic diversity within a group, is greater than the differences between various group.

I.e. the genetics that for example make a black person have a different skin colour than a white person, is a smaller difference than the genetics that make any two individuals, well... individuals. Regardless of race, since this holds up amongst members of the same racial group.

Ah well, I'm not explaining this very well.

And seriously? Homosexuality was in the DSM? That sure makes me doubt things.

Also, I think Rick deserves some sort of medal for his moderating here. If I sound sarcastic: I'm not, I mean it literally. Sometimes we (where I presumptuously speak whilst being new here) need a little adjusting of course, so to speak.

Tony said...

Chris:

"Biology (and anthropology, and a host of other academmic disciplines iirc), as far as I know, has pretty definately found out that homophobia[*] isn't the result of some defect or imperfection. It's a perfectly possible outcome of our own biology. Our sheer humanity, if you will."

*We'll presume you meant "homosexuality" here.

And I agree with you that homosexuality -- or at least a predisposition to it -- is natural. That doesn't mean it is not abberant, like Downs sundrome, or sickle cell anemia, or any number of genetic anomalies. All of these things are perfectly natural, but they are not normal.**

**Let's not get into the "there is no normal" argument. There are so many degrees of freedom in human behavior that "normal" has no meaning when you consider them all together. But for each axis of behavior taken by itself, such as sexual orientation, there is an identifiable norm.

Also, the use of the term "homophobia" disqualifies one as a serious commentator on the issue to begin with. "Homophobia" is a gratuitous epithet, a pure appeal to pathos. It was coined and is intended to be a trump against ever discussing the subject rationally. If one doesn't admit that homosexuality is natural, normal, and nice, one is labeled a "homophobe" and sent off to the rhetorical corner with a dunce cap, to contemplate one's evils. One's actual reasoning is not important, only that he disagrees with the carefully crafted conventional wisdom. So, in a sense, I agree with you that homosexuality cannot be discussed rationally -- not by people who think in terms of "homophobes" and "homophobia".

WRT abortion, any individual's wishes, pregnant women included,*** is subordinate to the law. If abortion is made illegal, it only makes sense to do so because it is regarded as the murder of a legally recognized human being. Nobody has the right to kill another person simply because that person is an inconvenience. If that's irrational, then laws against murder are irrational too.

***"[M]other's" wishes is pure spin. Being a "mother" presumes an attitude on the part of the woman that would be opposed to abortion in the first place.

Or, taking it from the direction you were so happy to propose, let's agree that deciding when a human life begins is somewhat arbitrary. But we know that it takes a considerable degree of care to keep an infant live and healthy for the first two or so years of life. It actually takes more effort than being pregnant does. So we could rationally say that human life doesn't really begin until the infant can walk around on its own and feed itself. Or maybe not until a child can control all of its physical functions and dress itself -- not until five or six years old. Or, equally rationally, we could say that abortion is extending infanticide into the womb, up to the point that the fetus is recognizably human, say the beginning of the second trimester. Or maybe even further back in gestational development.

IOW, so what if the beginning of human life is an arbitrary decision? It is. Period. But that doesn't absolve us of making the best rational effort to set that event a developmentally logical spot, as we understand human development. Making it the arbitrary choice of laywomen who might feel inconvenienced by their delicate condition is hardly rational.

jollyreaper said...

@Chris

Right, I don't think there's a valid case for discrimination against homosexuals. Homosexuality is a naturally occurring phenomenon in the animal world. It naturally occurs amongst humans and does no harm.

Now to take the devil's advocate point of view, there are many things naturally occurring that we would still consider harmful. Cancers can occur naturally. There's a lot of evidence pointing to pedophilia being a miswiring of the sexual attraction centers in the brain. So, the argument goes, should we excuse pedophiles because their miswiring is basically the same sort of error as with homosexuals? (This is the most common distillation of the "scientific preversion" argument.)

I'd say that it's not quite comparable. Being predisposed to pedophilia is not the crime -- acting on it is. Why is it a crime? Because you're forcing yourself upon someone not considered legally capable of offering consent. And that would hold true for a 12-yr old girl or a 40-yr old mentally handicapped woman.

As for the question of whether there's a positive reason for it in nature, does it really matter? I'm left-handed. I have no idea if that has a selection advantage or not. I'm attracted to curvaceous women and find Victoria's Secret models malnourished and offputting. I don't think that it's even possible to make a value judgment on my preferences there, it's neither good or bad. What two consenting people choose to do in the privacy of their bedroom is really none of our concern.

But going back to the devil's advocate side, there's the case of the german cannibal. He placed personal ads seeking fit young men looking to be butchered and eaten. His victim was an adult and consented to this. The cannibal had let go two previous victims who got cold feet at the last moment. So is this acceptable, too? I think we're back to the classic Catch-22 -- the insane are not competent to consent to anything and anyone who would want to be butchered and eaten is not sane. But the same argument can be used against voluntary euthanasia, claiming that a terminally ill person suffering from unimaginable pain is not capable of making a reasonable choice about end of life because wanting to end the pain is not sane.

Raymond said...

Tony:

"That doesn't mean it is not abberant, like Downs sundrome, or sickle cell anemia, or any number of genetic anomalies."

Comparing sexual others (of which homosexuality is merely a subset) to damaging and debilitating genetic conditions is neither helpful nor accurate. Yes, queerness is a deviation from the baseline. So are red hair and blue eyes. Downs syndrome (as merely one example) has well-documented cognitive difficulties. Sickle-cell anemia drastically lowers expected lifespans. Sexual deviance is only a disability in a cultural context which stigmatizes it. There are no inherent medical problems, no decrease in cognitive functions, no proven (and many disproven) links to increased mental illness or risky behavior except those caused by social prejudice and its accompanying emotional trauma.

So no, "homophobia" isn't just a rhetorical trump card. It's a label for those who have an un- or under-examined belief in deviant sexuality's inherent status as disordered thinking (as the DSM did for far too long), as a debilitating condition, or as any other category which is harmful.

Chris said...

@Tony: yes, I meant homosexuality. I have a habit of making unfortunate implications with my typos. Remember the "LSD" church?

As for the rest: "aberrant", to me, denotes a moral judgement. The point was such a judgement would not be rational. And while you're right that things like Down's Syndrome are natural, that wasn't what I meant. Or did you mean to suggest homosexuality be considered an affliction?

I think we can clearly distinguish between behaviours and medical issues. I thought I made the point as clear as I could that homosexuality cannot be considered such a "medical issue" when I said that that biologically speaking, there is no difference between a person of one sexual orientation, to one of another, apart from what is to be expected of normal variety. Down's Syndrome obviously includes a biological difference from baseline humans. I therefore fail to see the point of your argument.

You may be partly right in your critique of my use of the word "homophobia", however I consider my use as an easy term with a certain common understanding, rather than a label. I certainly do not consider homophobia to be a "phobia" in the medical sense, which I know it isn't.
Also, I hope you didn't make the argument out of a feeling I suggested you were homophobic, since that wasn't my intention.

With regards to your argument on abortion: you seem to be defending the law regardless of what is just. Surely the question must be answered, if your scenario were to take place, of why abortion was legalized at one point, but illegalized later? Furthermore, you are quite insistent that abortion is to some degree murder, as a matter of principle. The entire point I was trying to make is that that is relative. Don't they have various types of killings in US law, murder being one of them? So even only distinction between killing and murder would disrupt a large part of your argument.

Lastly, you say "Nobody has the right to kill another person simply because that person is an inconvenience," and later on "making it the arbitrary choice of laywomen who might feel inconvenienced by their delicate condition is hardly rational."

a) I dispute the choice would be arbitrary
b) the use of the term "laywomen" in that sentence implies you mean it to be derogatory. Are you saying an academically-trained person (a doctor) is the one to order them to bear a child?
c) in both quotes, you seem to be immensely trivializing the plight of mothers/pregnant women with pregnancy they didn't ask for. Have you considered other reasons for abortion other than "inconvenience"? Like circumstances related to age, social position, income, the type of relationships they have, both with their partners and their families and social circle? Perhaps there could be reasons why she didn't want to be pregnant in the first place, but (perhaps because anticonception measures failed) ended up in that unwanted position anyway? Like I said, deriding it as merely an "inconvenience" is seriously trivializing their predicament.

Raymond said...

Chris:

"And seriously? Homosexuality was in the DSM? That sure makes me doubt things."

Yep, but it was in the DSM-II, not IV. DSM-III had "ego-dystonic homosexuality", which was ostensibly about sexual preference at odds with self-image, and wasn't used much.

Chris said...

@jollyreaper: you're right when playing the advocatus diaboli there. See my reply to Tony on why I see that "natural" was a poor choice of words which I should have qualified. As for the rest, I find myself agreeing with you again.

One thing though: wasn't the German cannibal looking for men to eat him? I strongly recall it like that: he wanted to be eaten, and found his opposite number online. Of course, your story could just as well be true, but then being the other guy's story. I even recall a documentary on the guy (Armin Meiwes I think his name was), where former partners recalled him asking them to eat him.

Tony said...

Raymond:

"There are no inherent medical problems, no decrease in cognitive functions, no proven (and many disproven) links to increased mental illness or risky behavior except those caused by social prejudice and its accompanying emotional trauma."

Not quite true. Some homosexuals want to have kids and even take advantage of modern medical science to do so. But as a rule they are intellectually and emotionally indisposed towards procreation. That is a fact. That would, in perfectly sober and emotionally non-energized context, be recognized as a condition counter to species survival.

This is also quite probably one of the causes of instinctual revulsion -- not fear, revulsion -- towards homosexuality. The fact that many homosexual men happen to be exageratedly effeminate, thus elminiating them from serious consideration as contributors to the hunt and tribal defense, is probably also a cause.

"So no, "homophobia" isn't just a rhetorical trump card. It's a label for those who have an un- or under-examined belief in deviant sexuality's inherent status as disordered thinking (as the DSM did for far too long), as a debilitating condition, or as any other category which is harmful."

Labelling it "homophobia" misses the point entirely. It presumes that there can be no good reason for revulsion to homosexuality, reasoned or instinctive, that it must be irrational and fearful. Incorrect. It is a valid instinctual response to something that is sensed as being wrong. This is regretabbly under-examined, to borrow a turn of phrase.

Nobody is asking you to agree with people's instinctive response to homosexuality. It may not even be a valid response in modern society. But dismissing it as irrational fear, and using the label for that dismissal as an epithet to shut down discussion, undermines your whole argument.

Tony said...

Chris:

"As for the rest: "aberrant", to me, denotes a moral judgement."

From our friends at merriam-webster.com:

Definition of ABERRANT

1: straying from the right or normal way

2: deviating from the usual or natural type : atypical

Examples of ABERRANT

a year of aberrant weather—record rainfall in the summer, record heat in the autumn

aberrant behavior can be a sign of rabies in a wild animal

I guess in a moral context it could be considered a moral judgment. In a biological context, it's a purely technical term for outside of the statistical norm.

"Or did you mean to suggest homosexuality be considered an affliction?

I think we can clearly distinguish between behaviours and medical issues...I therefore fail to see the point of your argument.
"


Why shouldn't it be, if it is? I'm sure many, including yourself, consider that argument settled. But if it is, it is only on the grounds that there is no physical impediment to the homosexual, just social and cultural ones. As mentioned in my response to Raymond, those social and cultural impediments are quite likely the consequence of an instinctual response to the species and tribal survival implications of homsexuality. But nobody likes to talk about that, because it invalidates the premise underlying concepts such as homophobia and the asserted harmlessness of homsexuality.

(Your second paragraph was very well written by the way, in that it was possible to elide everything but the topic and summary sentences without losing any meaning.)

"You may be partly right in your critique of my use of the word "homophobia", however I consider my use as an easy term with a certain common understanding, rather than a label."

Shouldn't we avoid ease of expression if the expression is wrong?

"Also, I hope you didn't make the argument out of a feeling I suggested you were homophobic, since that wasn't my intention."

Of course not. I just oppose the use of rhetorically cheap, demonizing terminology.

"With regards to your argument on abortion: you seem to be defending the law regardless of what is just."

The law is the law. I would prefer that it be just. In that respect, The justice of abortion, as a political issue, is pretty obviously undecided. And it will be decided politically, regardless of what individuals believe.

"Surely the question must be answered, if your scenario were to take place, of why abortion was legalized at one point, but illegalized later?"

As understandings change, our answers change. I would hope that that reality doesn't in turn need further justification.

"Furthermore, you are quite insistent that abortion is to some degree murder, as a matter of principle..."

No. As a matter of logic and law. If a fetus is not a human being, with human rights, then terminating a pregnancy is manifestly the businees of the woman, her doctor, and nobody else. If a fetus is a human being, with human rights, then terminating a pregnancy is homicide.

You suggest that the character of a homicide is an issue. Murder is defined as a cold-blooded, premeditated homicide, made with an "abandoned and malignant heart", as many penal codes put it. Manslaughter is an unconsidered act taken in the moment, maybe without a formed intention to do any specific person harm (in the case of negligence). What would you call an abortion in this context, if it is indeed homicide? It is definitely a premeditated and intentional act, with no concern for the fact that a person will be killed, and targetting a specific life. Is it not murder?

So, to make abortion illegal, one has to reason that it is homicide, and that the character of that homicide is murder.

Tony said...

Chris:

"Lastly, you say "Nobody has the right to kill another person simply because that person is an inconvenience," and later on "making it the arbitrary choice of laywomen who might feel inconvenienced by their delicate condition is hardly rational."

a) I dispute the choice would be arbitrary"


A woman is pregnant. There is no law saying when a human life begins. Without a legal definition, her choice could be well-informed or ill-informed on when life begins, but it's still her choice. It might not necessarily be arbitrary in each individual case, but statistically it could be nothing but arbitrary, because the range of knowledge of human development would be broad and the reasons for considering abortion broadly heterogenous.

"b) the use of the term "laywomen" in that sentence implies you mean it to be derogatory. Are you saying an academically-trained person (a doctor) is the one to order them to bear a child?"

It implies nothing of the sort, unless the reader imagines it to. "Lay" means lacking professional knowledge. It is women making the choice. So it would be, except for women who were healthcare or medical research professionals themselves (and a few others with relevant educations), laywomen making the abortion choice.

And I would not regard the choice of any random professional to be that much better. Professionals would know that a third trimester fetus must be scientifically considered to be a viable human being, in the sense that it could survive outside the womb with proper care. But their opinions of when life may begin before that would be widely varying and largely based on individual interpretation of the science.

I think we should leave it up to the law, which may be imperfeclty informed, but is likely to find a generally agreeable definition for when a fetus is to be a legally protected human.

"c) in both quotes, you seem to be immensely trivializing the plight of mothers/pregnant women with pregnancy they didn't ask for...Like I said, deriding it as merely an "inconvenience" is seriously trivializing their predicament."

You have me completely backwards, sir. I am de-trivializing what it means for a fetus to be legally considered a person. We know that no amount of inconvenience another person puts you to, short of actually threatening your life or health, justifies homicide. As we've already discussed, for abortion to be made illegal at all, it would have to qualify as homicide. And if it does, the inconvenience that pregnancy, childbearing, and child rearing visits upon a woman simply does not justify the use of deadly force in retaliation (barring serious health affects of pregnancy or childbirth that cannot be mitigated without abortion).

Raymond said...

Tony:

"Some homosexuals want to have kids and even take advantage of modern medical science to do so. But as a rule they are intellectually and emotionally indisposed towards procreation. That is a fact. That would, in perfectly sober and emotionally non-energized context, be recognized as a condition counter to species survival."

A) Then people of baseline sexual preference who lack a desire for biological offspring would be subject to the same categorization. This could be rationally argued for in a context where the species is under-populated, but it cannot be considered a valid approach in the present state of the human population. In fact, stigmatizing a lack of reproductive drive (differentiated from sexual drive, given modern science) could be considered counterproductive in terms of maintaining a population within resource limits.

B) The phenomenon of "unattached males" has been shown in multiple species to have a stabilizing effect on social structures, especially in regard to child-rearing in species with complex social behavior. Viewed from this perspective, allowing adoption by homosexual couples could be seen as an extension of this principle. (And believe me, more queer couples are interested in raising children than you seem to think. The social stigma is one of the main suppressors of queer parenting rates.)

"This is also quite probably one of the causes of instinctual revulsion -- not fear, revulsion -- towards homosexuality. The fact that many homosexual men happen to be exageratedly effeminate, thus elminiating them from serious consideration as contributors to the hunt and tribal defense, is probably also a cause."

Assuming, of course, that the revulsion in question is biologically derived, as opposed to culturally. There's plenty of circumstantial evidence to the contrary - rates of same-gender sexual curiosity in childhood; rates of homosexual activity in isolated single-sex populations (prisons, boarding schools, etc); cultural acceptance of queer sexuality (including pederasty) in the ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese, and hell, even Elizabethan and Restoration England. There's more neurological basis in racist attitudes, and we don't consider them acceptable, however deeply situated in our brainstems.

"Nobody is asking you to agree with people's instinctive response to homosexuality. It may not even be a valid response in modern society. But dismissing it as irrational fear, and using the label for that dismissal as an epithet to shut down discussion, undermines your whole argument."

I think a revulsion without basis in medical fact, inconclusively biologically derived, heavily influenced by cultural milieu, and in direct opposition to the stated principles of our society and legal mechanisms, could be labelled "irrational". Certainly an argument predicated on the legitimacy of said revulsion, without differentiating between impulse and action (as we do in nearly every other circumstance), would be something less than a fully reasoned argument.

Personally, I try not to dismiss something simply by using the term "irrational". As I've said before, everything comes down to predicates, and predicates are by definition irrational, since reason is used to examine and extend predicates, not to generate them. If they could be generated by reason alone, they would have to be further examined and dissected. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem reigns supreme. (Also, please note that I haven't actually used either "homophobic" nor "irrational" towards you, as I'm trying to keep things civil here.)

What I will say is that I don't consider instinctual responses (whether biologically or culturally derived) as valid predicates when attempting to construct or revise shared ethical frameworks, due to their subjective nature, and due to their frequent similarity to and overlap with instinctive behaviors considered counter to social existence.

Milo said...

Chris:

"Have you considered other reasons for abortion other than "inconvenience"? Like circumstances related to age, social position, income, the type of relationships they have, both with their partners and their families and social circle?"

Murders of adults are commonly committed for the sake of political maneuvering, stealing large amounts of money, or getting rid of someone who poses a serious threat to you. Even thugs generally know better than to murder someone simply for getting in the way.



Tony:

"Some homosexuals want to have kids and even take advantage of modern medical science to do so."

Or if modern medical science is unavailable, they just take advantage of adoption.


"But as a rule they are intellectually and emotionally indisposed towards procreation. That is a fact. That would, in perfectly sober and emotionally non-energized context, be recognized as a condition counter to species survival."

Eusocial insects.


"This is also quite probably one of the causes of instinctual revulsion -- not fear, revulsion -- towards homosexuality."

I obviously can't tell how my attitudes evolved, but at least conciously, my discomfort with homosexuality is based on a feeling of "that's icky", not any kind of concern about whether you can have children. And straight couples using contraceptives don't bother me (of course, contraceptives are new enough that we don't have an evolved-in reaction to them). But while I personally find homosexuality to be icky, I still hold to a view of "consenting adults can do whatever they want in the privacy of their own room", and conciously refuse to declare an action immoral purely on the basis of instinct even when it can't be rationally said to be hurting anyone. (Don't bring up hurt feelings from homophobic family members, unless you also want to outlaw straight people marrying someone their parents don't approve of, straight people using contraceptives while their parents are whining that they want grandkids, etc.)

Milo said...

Tony:

"And it will be decided politically, regardless of what individuals believe."

The current political climate favors democracy, which means that while the beliefs of any single individual don't matter much, the law will be decided based on what a large number of people believe. Individual beliefs do still matter in a statistical sense. (If we were autocratic, then the individual beliefs of whoever is in charge would definitely matter, but the individual beliefs of everyone else would matter much less.) And these individual beliefs can at least sometimes be swayed by rational arguments from other people with well-thought-out positions (or, more cynically, by well-funded advertising campaigns).


"As understandings change, our answers change. I would hope that that reality doesn't in turn need further justification."

But I should note that when our answers change from accepting a certain behavior to not accepting it, we tend to apply it retroactively - i.e., when reading history books, we frequently feel appalled at people doing things that are immoral by modern standards, even though for them those things were normal. At the same time, we generally stick to disapproving glances - people are rarely actually sentenced for something they did before they law was passed.

Rick said...

Yikes! Reading the last couple of dozen comments is like watching someone walk a tightrope while huge blades swing back and forth just above the wire.

So I'll tiptoe along it myself ...

On abortion:

for abortion to be made illegal at all, it would have to qualify as homicide.

This almost reads as a 'pro-choice' reductio ad absurdum, because my gut sense is that even in communities where anti-abortion sentiment runs strongest, it would be awfully hard to get juries to convict women who had them of Murder One.

Put another way, I suspect a lot of people regard abortion as wrong, but in some way not quite murder.

I won't argue any real conclusion from this, except perhaps that pure logical consistency just doesn't go with the primate house.

On homosexuality:

My impression is that human societies have varied widely in their attitudes, too much so to say that any such attitude is instinctual. Moreover, these attitudes have often been inconsistent within one society.

For example, modern traditionalist Muslims are strict in their rejection of homosexuality (or so I gather), but I also gather that it had wide acceptance - at least among elites - in traditional Muslim societies.

Carry on ... with due caution!

Tony said...

Attempting to draw the various strands together in one cord -- if anybody feels his opinion ot be unaddressed, please pipe up.

WRT reactions to homosexuality, I thought I was pretty explicit in stating why I thought they were natural, instinctual, and valid, within the evolutionary context. I'll state right here, so that nobody gets me wrong: I think that no matter how much cultures reinforce these reactions, they have a natural basis. Men having sex with men, when the men involved would have sex with women if given the opportunity or in different social contexts, is not the same thing as "God made me this way" homosexuality. And I'm addressing the latter, which in fact does generate a visceral reaction, the "ick" factor we have heard about.

Eusocial insects were mentioned, in the context of biological indisposition to procreation. Humans aren't social insects. They rely on one-to-one heterosexual pairing for reproduction.

WRT the argument that homosexuality represents some kind of adaptation against overpopulation, really? The human instinctual reproductive strategy has always been to fill up the environment, to the point that humans had to invent infanticide to control their fecundity, even after disease and misadventure killed off huge swaths of them. Having a few percent in the margins simply not trying to reproduce is insignificant to the other 98% or 95% or whatever that are trying to bust the seams of the ecosystem with human offspring.

But that's over the broad sweep of the human ecological niche. At the local level, the level of the tribe (which seems to be where human evolutionary pressures seem to play out for humans) that few percent of non-breeders could really screw things up for tribes in competition with other tribes, if maldistributed withing a given tribal group. Tribes that didn't try to minimize such behavior might in fact be less fit than tribes that did. Just a theory, but not one that contradicts anything we know about humans as a species or about human societies.

On to abortion. I've said my piece, and given what I think are comprehensive reasons, but to reiterate in summary form:

* Abortion is only an issue because it involves the potential for killing human persons that should be legally protected against homicide.

* It's not obvious where a person should legally be a person, but it's not at birth. In the past it was some time after birth. In the modern world, in legal terms it's at least in the last month or two of pregancy, because people who have killed late term pregnant women have been charged and convicted of the murder of the fetus. Additionally, children born with conditions resultant to poor prenatal care have brought legla actions against their mothers, and gained court rulings in their favor. Clearly legal personhood begins prior to birth.

* Yes, the law is inconsistent with both where human life begins, and what it means to kill an unborn human. For the purposes of logical consistency, it should indeed be first degree murder to abort a legal person. Maybe we can't see our way clear to that as a society. But that shouldn't stop us, as a society, from attempting to determine when a fetus is a person under the law, and make a felony crim out of killing such a person, even if it is only a manslaughter charge.

Milo said...

Tony:

"Additionally, children born with conditions resultant to poor prenatal care have brought legal actions against their mothers, and gained court rulings in their favor. Clearly legal personhood begins prior to birth."

Hmm. Let's say that I blow off a leg due to stepping on a landmine that was buried in a public park, with malicious intent, before I was conceived - and that just happened to remain unnoticed for that long. After this incident, the police investigate the scene and eventually track down the person responsible for planting the mine, who is still alive. Can he be charged with assaulting me?

If he can - and I think he should - then that implies that you can be held responsible for harming people even if the criminal act was done before the victim was legally a person. So the case of mothers being charged for criminally negligent prenatal care could also be viewed as them being convicted for preemptively harming someone who will eventually be a person, rather than someone who is a person now. (This would, however, have the odd consequence that if you've been treating your fetus poorly and damaged it - or even if it already started off damaged for genetic or other reasons - then you would actually be better off aborting it, thus preventing it from ever becoming a person and so avoiding the charges that could be brought against you if you did carry the pregnancy to term and allow the child to gain personhood. Do we really want to reach the conclusion that there are situations were someone can be legally charged for not having an abortion?)

Thucydides said...

Just to sail back into discussion about religions per se, it is interesting to note that many religions seems to have "liberalized" over time.

The gods of the Iliad and Odyssey were pretty awesome and terrifying in their arbitrary cruelty; moving into Classical, Hellenistic and Roman times, the legends and reputations of the gods become much milder (making Love, not War becomes the most popular aspect of the gods). By late Imperial times these gods had been overtaken by "mystery" religions.

The Old Testament God is strict and offers swift and total judgment against offenders against Himself and the chosen people. The New Testament God is about love and forgiveness of sin. Many modern people identify as being Christian but are pretty disconnected from the trappings and mechanism of religion, going to church on ceremonial occasions like weddings and holidays.

Now I can't really speak about the evolution of other religions, but I'm sure they have evolved from their origins as well.

How this will play in space colonies or future societies is an interesting question.

Chris said...

@Thucydides: You make a fair point, but only from a "text-internal" point of view. In the sense that if you look at the written tradition, there is this certainly this progression you point out.

From the perspective I got taught, however, it's a little more complex. The Illiad is about the Mycenean civilization during the Late Bronze Age, fighting against a Hittite confederation at Troy.

After the fall of the Mycenean civilization, the Greek Dark Ages begun, and a new people the Dorians, came along. This is when Homer wrote the Illiad.

Now, after these Dark Ages came Greek Civilization as we know it. Periodically divided into "Archaic", "Classical" and "Hellenic" periods.

The Agaeans, Myceneans, Dorians, Corinthians and so forth were all linguistical kin. They spoke "Greek" languages at various points in time.

You have to wonder then, if the growth of godly friendliness wasn't so much because of a natural progression in time, but because of the fact that these (Greek) peoples were very different cultures, with different languages across a huge stretch of time. Whose gods did Homer write about? Were they his own Dorian? Or were they an accurate representation of the Mycenean?

Same goes for the Bible, but I have to tread lightly since this might step on a few toes. For every claim that I'm about to make, imagine a big flashing sign that says this is according to modern research, and though they're considered valid scientific insight, feel free to disregard these claims.

But here goes:
We know Buddhist priests were allowed by Alexander the Great to preach in the west. We also know that Greek culture remained immensely dominant in those times: the Romans from the New Testament likely spoke Greek. It is an oft-suggested possibility that this is an unseen influence that makes the New Testamental god more benign. There is a Wikipedia article on this.

Furthermore, God doesn't seem to be the same "person" each time in the Old Testament as well. The explanation behind is called the "Documentary Hypothesis", and I brought it up before. Yes, it's "only" a hypothesis. The point is, God is sometimes called "JWHW", and sometimes "Elohim". Sometimes there are duplicates in the Bible. Sometimes the entire narrative shifts awkwardly. This goes back to before the Babylonian Exile, where there were two states: Israel and Judah. One had the priesthood of Aaron for leadership, one the kingship of Solomon. These countries had two "proto-Old Testaments" of their own. Like the Q-document I talked about before, these are called J and E. J after (German) Jahweh, E after Elohim. J and E were integrated by P (Priestly source) during the Exile. Further material was added by D (Deuteronomist).

Again, if you look at the text as is, you see a progression to benevelence between the Old and the New Testament. But if you take the likely manner of composition into account, it's far less clear-cut.

Chris said...

@Tony: "I think that no matter how much cultures reinforce these reactions, they have a natural basis."

That's quite a claim, but one you've made a number of times now. I don't suppose it helps if I claim this "ick-factor" people are talking about is completely anathema to me. I really do not know why some men feel compromised in their manliness when they find out there's a homosexual in the room, but I've never experienced it either. Perhaps this is because I'm not from America. In that case Tony needs to explain how this universal factor is alien to me.

But since he claims it's scientific fact, perhaps Tony can offer us some reliable sources? Some literature to cite? Surely there must be data that can point out what reaction happens in the brain, and why this is not a cultural reaction, but a biological impulse as natural as, say, language acquisition? Surely Tony must be able to offer proof for his claims that humans naturally *should* be repulsed by homosexuality?

Also: I don't suffer from that revulsion. Does that make me an abberation too?

Thucydides said...

Chris

You raise lots of interesting points. From what I understand, the gods and language of the Greek peoples was fairly continuous from Mycenean times to the end of the Hellenistic period. It is pretty clear that the Mycenean's spoke a form of Greek, and many of the gods had the same names and general positions in the pantheon. (There was a sharp break between the Mycenean Palace culture and Classical Greek civilization, and the Hellenistic period was also rather different, but they all evolved from the same roots).

The evolution of this culture also led to an evolution of the roles and attributes of the gods, how they were worshiped etc. Apollo in the Mycenean era was quite different from the way he was seen in the Classical era.

The evolution of the Christian Bible is quite interesting, but in terms of my general argument I think you are supplying the "how" it happened rather than the "why".

jollyreaper said...

But since he claims it's scientific fact, perhaps Tony can offer us some reliable sources? Some literature to cite? Surely there must be data that can point out what reaction happens in the brain, and why this is not a cultural reaction, but a biological impulse as natural as, say, language acquisition? Surely Tony must be able to offer proof for his claims that humans naturally *should* be repulsed by homosexuality?

The question of which biases arise naturally or are imparted by culture can get interesting. Herpetologists always go on about how children have to learn to fear reptiles and that young kids who haven't yet been taught the fear naturally like touching snakes and lizards.

Certainly in historic times we've seen cultures with huge homosexuality taboos and none at all. I think it may be akin to misogyny where there's no biological imperative to treat women terribly but is one of the mores that keeps independently evolving.

Incest is another interesting question. I can't find the term for it but psychologists have pointed out that there's a pronounced sexual attraction between closely related people. Usually the incest taboo nixes it -- you won't be attracted to your sister you grew up with in the same way you might not be attracted to your best friend's sister because you see her as "family" even though there's no blood. But there have been many cases of siblings or step-siblings who were raised apart and met each other without knowing the history and finding themselves strongly attracted to each other.

So if you need a really strong incest taboo to prevent that from happening, how did it develop? Instinct tends to point to incest being more likely but we know that inbreeding carries ruinous recessive traits. How did tribal man at the dawn of time figure this one out? They lived in bands of dozens to a hundred people at most. Did raiding for women develop because men got bored with the women they had or was there some other imperative at work?

As for the shame of homosexual behavior, the take on that is amazing. In America having anything to do with it period is ew ew gay. But in Rome, it wasn't so much the sex that mattered but who was on top. A proud man could nail maidens and young boys with equal ferocity and be seen as virile. Being the bottom was the position of shame and humiliation. And you run into some dizzyingly complex rationalizations for self-hating homosexuals in the Republican party. They want the power and elitism being part of the club confers and want that with every fiber of their being but cannot fully suppress their natural sex drive and the gender they're attracted to. Near as I can figure they're hoping that acting anti-gay might actually help them pray the gay away. The whole southern racist bedding a black girl is a whole lot easier to understand. There's a whole power/control thing over bedding an underclass girl and mixed with that is the thrill of breaking a social taboo. It's about lust and power, not love, which is why Strom Thurmond could enjoy having sex with black women while insisting they were less than human. It's not like he wanted to marry her, it's just sex.

Tony said...

Re: Chris

I already said that it was "just a theory". If I happen to accept it, that doesn't mean I have all the answers.

Reflecting this back on yourself, your personal lack of perceived revulsion is irrelevant. You may just be on the tail of the distribution that doesn't feel it. Or you may have been socially conditioned not to ignore your own feelings, because in your millieu, having negative reactions to homosexuality carries heavy sanctions. (Yeah, nobody thinks about that -- social programming works in any way that the influential opinion leaders want it to.)

All I'm saying is that I think something so socially devisive has likely got an instinctive base, and I'm just exploring whay that might be. Unfortunately, the issue is so emotionally and politically charged that I don't think most people (on either side of the argument) can investigate it rationally.

I don't hate homosexuals or homosexuality. I've said numerous times that I think it's a natural thing. But I also think it's an aberrant (in the purely technical sense) expression of sexuality. I think reactions against it have an equally natural basis, whether others want to admit it or not. I understand why that is so controversial, and why it has to be resisted with such energy. The celebration of homsexuality is one of those secualr religions we've been talking about. It has its dogmas and its anathemas.

Tony said...

Re: Milo

The law can only deal with facts. Whenever a non-command-detonated, booby trap mine completes its purpose, all the law can do is note who was killed or injured, not whether they were alive when the mine was planted.

Aborting a specific fetus, if the pregnant woman cooperates, is a targetted act. If the law protects the fetus as a legally recognized person, then it is a homicide. That's a fact the law can deal with.

To address your false dilemma, actions against women for poor prenatal care have been necessarily civil, not criminal. What is at question is whether the mother took a reasonable degree of care in her prenatal behaviors, and what is just compensation if she didn't. It's no different than causes of action arrising from negligence in postnatal infant care.

The idea of holding a woman criminally responsible for negligence during pregancy is a real hot-button item currently, because the underlying legal theory could be extended beyond gross negligence, like drug or alchol abuse, to exercise patterns, diet, work habits, and -- like we didn't know this was coming -- abortion. Stay tuned...

jollyreaper said...

I don't hate homosexuals or homosexuality. I've said numerous times that I think it's a natural thing. But I also think it's an aberrant (in the purely technical sense) expression of sexuality. I think reactions against it have an equally natural basis, whether others want to admit it or not. I understand why that is so controversial, and why it has to be resisted with such energy. The celebration of homsexuality is one of those secualr religions we've been talking about. It has its dogmas and its anathemas.

Or it could be a completely arbitrary thing that has absolutely no negative effect on society and the perceived problem has more to do with superstition than any kind of valid basis. Hence my example of lefties. Left-handedness has been persecuted in the past because it was something that only a small portion of the population had and was a difference that was suspicious. Same went for twins. In primitive cultures they would often kill a twin because it was seen as demonic.

Your same argument could be used against Jews and Gypsies. People have had problems with them going back to the dawn of time. Certainly there must be something to it if people keep killing them. There's no scientific basis for such prejudice. But going with the dev.null's advocate, wouldn't it be interesting if there was? One of the devices I planned on throwing in a story was a persecuted race of humans who were accused of all manner of horrible and nasty things. It didn't help that some of them really were involved in that sort of thing. But that was the past and we're ready to move on and then the lostech of genetic analysis is rediscovered. Someone sequences their DNA and holy crap, they aren't human. Yeah, they look human but there's a lot of extra stuff added in. It's the sign of obvious and incredibly advanced genetic engineering. Who the hell made them and what was their agenda?

Tony said...

Re: jollyreaper

I really hate to have to restate the obvious, but just because something doesn't necessarily have to be a certain way, that doesn't mean that it isn't. In this case, the necessity of one thing over another is irrelevant. Natural reactions to homosexuality are not required by any natural laws we understand. But neither are constructed reactions. Necessity is simply not an issue. What could be, WRT to what we know, is. All we have are competing theories here, not settled questions.

Let's be very careful here. I see a phenomenon. I wonder why it exists. I see an explanation that is plausible, if not universally satisfying. I accept that explanation as being more plausible than others I've heard. It's not an argument "against" anything. It's a theory about the way the world works.

I understand that it really upsets people brought up to believe certain alternate theories. Guess what? That's not my problem; it's their problem.

But Tony, I here you say, if enough people think that way, they're going to do terrible things. Sorry guys, I'm responsible only for myself. I don't harm others because I think there's something wrong with them. I just choose to merely tolerate them, rather than celebrate them, as society seems to want me to do. If others choose to harm them, I would of course oppose the harm with all the means at my disposal. That's all I can do, and all I should be expected to do.

zmil said...

I've had this post sitting unread in my newsfeed for some time, because I knew reading it effectively committed me to reading a novel's worth of comments. I rarely post, but I just wanted to say, this comment thread takes the cake. A tangential discussion of similarities between English and Friesian? Serious props. And a borderline civil abortion discussion. Unheard of in most realities.

That's all. I have nothing substantial to contribute.

Rick said...

A summing up of the thread can reasonably count as substantial!

jollyreaper said...

Of some relevance. A friend wanted me to go with her to her church before we went to the gym. It's a tiny little Unitarian schism group so I figured what the heck.

The theology is straight new age personal godhead stuff. While all the other religions have their symbols on the wall, it's mainly placed within the Christian idiom with lots of talking about Jesus. Interestingly, there is an explicit denial of dualism -- the only power is God and there's no Satan.

The part that really had me scratching my head were the hymns. Included with the christian-flavored "praise be to god" were John Lennon's "Imagine" and "Pure Imagination" from Willy Wonka.

I think that they've managed to cross some kind of irony event horizon with that.

Rick said...

How do you even have a Unitarian schism? My impression is that the Unitarians have no ecclesiastical structure and not much structured theology - so what do you schiz from?

Fun facts:

1) ISTR that the Unitarians are in direct line of theological descent from the New England Puritans.

2) Gibbon makes a reference to UNITARIANS (in all caps) that, as best as I could tell, refers specifically to Wahhabi Muslims.

jollyreaper said...

You got me, man. I'd have to look them up online and see if their history is documented anywhere. Maybe they're the Unitarian People's Front or the People's Front of Unitarianism?

Tony said...

"How do you even have a Unitarian schism?"

By declaring a doctrine?

Anonymous said...

Jollyrodger:"The part that really had me scratching my head were the hymns. Included with the christian-flavored "praise be to god" were John Lennon's "Imagine" and "Pure Imagination" from Willy Wonka."
Was this church founded by Monty Python?

Ferrell

jollyreaper said...

Ok, I looked them up. They're different from Unitarians.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_Church

God
God is understood as spiritual energy which is everywhere present and is available to all people. In the Unity view, God is not a being in the sky who is capable of anger. The presence of God only seeks to express the highest good through everyone and everything.[16] According to Unity founder Charles Fillmore, God is spirit, the loving source of everything. God is one power, all good, wisdom, everywhere present.[17] God is Divine Energy, continually creating, expressing and sustaining all creation. In God we live and move and have our being.[18] [19][20]

[edit]Jesus
Unity proclaims the divinity of Jesus, but also proclaims that we are all children of God and share that divine potential. Unity believes that Jesus expressed his divine potential and sought to show others how to do the same. Unity sees Jesus as a master teacher of universal Truth and one who demonstrated the Way.[21][22] Unity uses the term "Christ" to mean the divinity in all people. Jesus is the great example of the Christ in expression.[23][24]

[edit]The Nature of Humanity
Unity teaches that we are individual, external expressions of God. Our essential nature is divine and therefore we are inherently good. Our purpose is to express our divine potential as demonstrated by Jesus. The more we awaken to our divine nature, the more fully God expresses in and through our lives.[25][26] Salvation, in the Unity view, is found in conscious understanding of one's innate divinity and then putting this knowledge into practice in everyday life.[27]


From the mainstream Lutheran view I was raised with, this is new age crystal-gazing heresy. Man is born into sin and is incapable of earning a place in heaven through his own works; that's the supposed point of the whole Old Testament and the 613 mitzvots the Jews had to follow. Nobody could live up to God's law but Jesus Himself who is also God who came to Earth and sacrificed Himself to Himself in order to redeem mankind. Long story short, you can't earn your way into heaven, salvation is through belief in Jesus and by his grace. Anyone believing otherwise is going to hell. The Lutherans are pretty close with the rest of mainstream Christianity in this interpretation.

Then again, at my church we had Seders on Passover as a show of ecumenical fellowship and we all know how well that would have gone down with Martin Luther.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Jews_and_Their_Lies

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"God
God is understood as spiritual energy which is everywhere present and is available to all people. In the Unity view, God is not a being in the sky who is capable of anger. The presence of God only seeks to express the highest good through everyone and everything.[16] According to Unity founder Charles Fillmore, God is spirit, the loving source of everything. God is one power, all good, wisdom, everywhere present.[17] God is Divine Energy, continually creating, expressing and sustaining all creation. In God we live and move and have our being.[18] [19][20]"


Even the Force had a Dark Side. Good is meaningless without evil. And if God is a constant of good in the universe, constantly creating, who or what is the constant of bad, constatnyl creating evil?

jollyreaper said...

who or what is the constant of bad, constatnyl creating evil?

Rupert Murdoch.

Milo said...

More seriously, a religion may view evil as the natural state of things, present in the "formless chaos" from before the creation of the world. God is responsible for creating an island of stability where good can exist.

Not saying that I believe that, per se :)

Rick said...

That actually strikes me as a rather plausible model. If you risk your life to rescue someone from a flood, that is generally accounted a good deed, even in world views that regard the flood as just a natural event, not 'evil.'

Tony said...

That makes the formless chaos bigger than -- or at least separate from -- God. The implications of that cosmology are fairly ominous...

Raymond said...

Ominous only if you require God to be responsible for creating both sides of the equation, which still leaves you with the turtles-all-the-way-down problem of God's origin.

In fact, some translations of the Bible imply or outright state that God fashioned the world from the formless chaos (KJV among them, IIRC - don't have mine handy just now). Haida stories speak of a world entirely of water, before Raven made some dirt. The Norse had a complicated thing involving two deer legs mating. And the Mormon theology states this world is one among many, each with its own God, where the purpose of this existence is to select the best (the most righteous, natch) to become Gods of their own worlds in turn - which implies a superstructure to Godhood, and limits of one sort or another.

IOW, it's fairly common among creation myths to have some unformed material predating the creation of the world we know by the deity (or deities) in question. It's not that much of a theological stretch to claim evil as part of that, rather than the frankly trickier proposition of God having created the very evil He/She/They wish us to resist.

jollyreaper said...

That's Mr. Nyarlathotep if you please, crawling chaos if you're nasty.

Regarding definitions, I'd always taken the word evil to mean some kind of agency, that there is intent. This is not strictly true and could be used in a context synonymous with accident or misfortune. Losing your house in a flood can be called an evil in that way but I would call it a misfortune.

This is more of a personal definition but I see evil as coming from intent. The law looks at all killing of humans as homicide; the circumstances will decide whether it is manslaughter, self-defense, second or first-degree murder. It comes down to the mental state of the killer and how the situation arose.

There's two degrees of evil from my point of view. The first is the evil of indifference, not caring of the consequences of your actions, showing no concern over whether or not someone is harmed. The second is true intentional evil, conscious acts of will with the sole determination of causing harm to others. And both of those are considered separate from sheer ignorance, someone who would not cause harm by intent or indifference bit simply didn't know any better.

So with regards to Milo's conjecture (which I know he said he doesn't believe), I would say that there's no evil without intent. You couldn't call a random and unguided universe evil. Unpleasant and uncaring, certainly, but different from evil. It's up to us as human beings to decide what we want to make of this place and then follow through on that.

Tony said...

If God creates the world, and God has dominance over the nothingness from which he created it, and God is good, how does he allow any evil to slip in? No, I'm not an Epicurian, I'm just pointing out the logical inconsistency of a supposedly omnipotent God that is only good, but allows evil to slip into the equation through inability or inaction. If God is Good and omnipotent, but allows evil to exist for His own reasons, that's one thing. If God is good but incapable of managing His own affairs WRT the origin and existence of evil, that's an entirely different can of worms.

Tony said...

Re: jollyreaper

You don't have to label your beliefs about evil personal. They're pretty standard theology and philosophy. I'd only quibble about the implication that negligence is a lesser form of evil -- knowlingly allowing evil to happen, when you can do something about it, is still acting with intent. As it was put in the Rush song "Free Will": if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

jollyreaper said...

I just remembered a quote on this that's pretty good.

THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY ((C)1911 Released April 15 1993)

HOMICIDE, n. The slaying of one human being by another. There are
four kinds of homocide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and
praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain
whether he fell by one kind or another -- the classification is for advantage of the lawyers.


That last part gives me a chuckle because the whole second and first degree distinction with murder didn't seem to be of much comfort to the victim. "Oh, it was only because of the passion of the moment. If he'd planned this out beforehand I'd be a lot more upset!"

Tony, the reason why I prefaced it with saying I'm using my own twists on the words is because they're slightly different from what the normal dictionary definitions are.

Also, the changed meaning of "evil" also explains certain strange bible passages.

Isaiah 45:6-7
"That they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the LORD, and there is none else.
I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things."


God creates evil? But not quite in the same sense we use evil, more like "evil tidings." A tiding is news. It can be bad of unfortunate or even disastrous but it can't have a mental state. But if it's used as a synonym of misfortune then there you go. The Old Testament God can bring terrible judgments and punishments upon people but his actions are good and righteous even if they're not pleasant to those they're done to.

Tony said...

jollyreaper:

"Tony, the reason why I prefaced it with saying I'm using my own twists on the words is because they're slightly different from what the normal dictionary definitions are."

I must be missing something. Some people make a distinction between natural and moral evils, but when people discuss "evil", they are usually talking about the opposite of moral good. Like I said, IMO you're on about the solidest ground you can be, with the exception of your valuation of negligence.

Thucydides said...

I remember asking the question about the existence of Evil in a Universe created by an Omnipotent God during Sunday school as a child (admit it; there was always one kid who asked in Sunday school).

The question and answer stuck in my mind, the answer being (paraphrase):

"God allowed Evil in order to make Creation complete. We would not understand or appreciate Good if we had know knowledge or experience of Evil."

Scott said...

"God allowed Evil in order to make Creation complete. We would not understand or appreciate Good if we had know knowledge or experience of Evil."
Well answered!

For an odd thought, Idaho state law doesn't have a Murder 2 statute. It's either manslaughter, or it's murder.

Yup, doesn't matter that you were drunk or he made you mad, you killed him. That's murder.

If your negligent actions caused a death, say by driving drunk and hitting someone, that's manslaughter.

Raymond said...

Tony:

"And if God is a constant of good in the universe, constantly creating, who or what is the constant of bad, constantly creating evil?"

"If God creates the world, and God has dominance over the nothingness from which he created it, and God is good, how does he allow any evil to slip in?"

If God is good. That's the key assumption. Early Judaism was fuzzy on the subject, Christian theologians often mistook it for a predicate, polytheist religions often didn't run into the problem, and the question formed the crux of Epicurus' argument.

The usual riposte is that the presence of evil in the world is a) part of God's intent, and b) a good thing overall, for reasons which are rather underexplained. Which brings me to...

Thucydides:

"God allowed Evil in order to make Creation complete. We would not understand or appreciate Good if we had know knowledge or experience of Evil."

Stock question, and a stock answer which has been repeated by rabbis and priests and imams and Sunday school teachers for millenia, in one form or another. The underlying assumption is that the distinction matters. That the act of choosing good over evil matters. That there is a selection process in place to sort those who choose good from those who choose evil. Whether God is doing the selecting, or He is bound by some even higher moral code (which means God is in some way limited), there is an assumption that understanding Good is somehow more important than merely being Good.

Tony said...

Re: Raymond

You're not telling me anything I don't know. I was addressing the specific problems of the doctrine of the church in question.

Raymond said...

Tony:

I know you know. I'm just saying it's a common underlying question which doesn't get answered in most (if not all) concepts of an omnipotent, omniscient god.

jollyreaper said...

Stock question, and a stock answer which has been repeated by rabbis and priests and imams and Sunday school teachers for millenia, in one form or another. The underlying assumption is that the distinction matters. That the act of choosing good over evil matters. That there is a selection process in place to sort those who choose good from those who choose evil. Whether God is doing the selecting, or He is bound by some even higher moral code (which means God is in some way limited), there is an assumption that understanding Good is somehow more important than merely being Good.

I never quite liked the "there must be evil to define good" argument. That's like saying you have to slam your head into a brick wall to fully appreciate the times when it's not hurting. That's like saying we need kids with cancer to more fully appreciate all of the kids without cancer. With the supposition that God is omnipotent, why couldn't he make humans capable of appreciating good without the presence of evil? He's God, after all. And if the freedom to choose evil comes with freewill, where does the desire to do evil come from? Human nature. Ok. So why did God do such a crappy job of making us? And then we get the explanation that Original Sin brought all the crappiness into the world. We didn't have earthquakes and hurricanes and death before the apple thing.

My favorite answer to that is that conventional morality is a human conceit. Good and evil have no meaning except in the context of human behavior. Creation and destruction are part of the universe and we want to say they map to good and evil and maybe even throw in life and death and male and female while we're at it but that's not the case.

Some people find it comforting to think that bad things happen due to a greater plan where it all makes sense and we simply don't have the wisdom to perceive the full design. The usual example is the dog has no idea why you're taking it to the vet and it hates the whole experience but its for the animal's own good. I find it hard to put something like the holocaust in the context of a vet visit. I find it more comforting to imagine that something so horrible is due to mundane human action rather than fulfilling a divine plan. What sort of sick, horrific game could a divinity be playing where it wants something like that to happen?

Tony said...

Re: jollyreaper

Any value you care to name is meaningless without something to compare it to. You can't tell what "hot" means without "cold" to give it something to compare against. You can't tell what "good" means without "evil", or at least "bad", to compare it to. Of course God could have made everything good, but then, just like you suggest, he introduced evil -- not out of caprice, but to "make humans capable of appreciating good", to borrow a turn of phrase.

jollyreaper said...

Any value you care to name is meaningless without something to compare it to. You can't tell what "hot" means without "cold" to give it something to compare against. You can't tell what "good" means without "evil", or at least "bad", to compare it to. Of course God could have made everything good, but then, just like you suggest, he introduced evil -- not out of caprice, but to "make humans capable of appreciating good", to borrow a turn of phrase.

So I cannot appreciate having an arm without first knowing what not having an arm feels like.

Humans may have a perception bias of not recognizing what they have until its gone but that's just a quirk of psychology.

Must starvation exist to appreciate food? A general may not make a name for himself without having a war to fight but that seems like a pretty nasty little system for any God to setup. If he truly knows all, should he even have to test you to know the contents of your heart? Does God have to collapse the wave function to see whether the cat's really dead? If he's bound by QM, then he's not really omnipotent.

Damn. This is a conversation that calls for beer.

Tony said...

"So I cannot appreciate having an arm without first knowing what not having an arm feels like."

I would definitely say that you don't appreciate any of your capabilities as much as people who have lost them do. You simply can't, because you have nothing to compare them to.

"Humans may have a perception bias of not recognizing what they have until its gone but that's just a quirk of psychology."

It's not a quirk. It's a fundamental feature of the system. You can't know "hot" without "cold", "big" without "small", "joy" without "sorrow". Values imply metrics. If the metric doesn't exist for you, you can't assign values that can be understood.

"Must starvation exist to appreciate food?"

People in general do appreciate food more when they're hungry. Starvation will make you appreciate how precious even a crumb can be.

"A general may not make a name for himself without having a war to fight but that seems like a pretty nasty little system for any God to setup."

Why is a general having a name a good thing? Now that's a human value judgment that God has nothing to do with.

"If he truly knows all, should he even have to test you to know the contents of your heart? Does God have to collapse the wave function to see whether the cat's really dead? If he's bound by QM, then he's not really omnipotent."

God presumably made QM. Perhaps that's His signature on the universe, telling us that, yes, His design is to test us. Leaving good as a choice, and not just an omnipresent feature, strikes me as a very aesthetically pleasing and responsible approcah to the art of universe making.

Raymond said...

Tony:

"Leaving good as a choice, and not just an omnipresent feature, strikes me as a very aesthetically pleasing and responsible approcah to the art of universe making."

You must have very different tastes than me.

Not quite so flippantly, though:

- If God allows evil in the world to provide contrast to good, the corollary is that God is thus indirectly culpable for all the evil which happens in it. How do you reconcile your previously stated definition of "negligence" with the idea of God as good? (I'm not saying you can't - there are several possibilities, and I'm curious which you take.)

- What do you believe/think/suspect/postulate is the value of "appreciating good"?

Tony said...

Raymond:

"- If God allows evil in the world to provide contrast to good, the corollary is that God is thus indirectly culpable for all the evil which happens in it. How do you reconcile your previously stated definition of "negligence" with the idea of God as good? (I'm not saying you can't - there are several possibilities, and I'm curious which you take.)"

Remember, I was pointing out the theological implications of God being exclusively good in a creation where evil exists. I would think a God that could allow the dichotomy between good and evil to exist is a God whose acountability is beyond any of his subordinate creations.

More conventionally, I think that God has to allow evil to exist so that His creations can choose between one or the other. They can thus decide their fates, giving His creation purpose.

Now here's how we can adduce that God is good: Logically, God does not have to prefer good over evil in the final analysis. He, being beyond any accountability but His own, could just as easily prefer evil over good, and all the arguments about good and evil would still apply, with just the signs reversed.

"- What do you believe/think/suspect/postulate is the value of 'appreciating good'?"

In religious terms, obviously one can't choose good without being able to appreciate the difference between good and evil.

In humanist terms, good is defined as that which enables pleasure and reduces suffering. How can one decide what is pleasure and what is suffering without a metric to measure what makes people happy and what makes them sad?

Rick said...

Thanks to Tolkien's idea of 'sub-creation,' I tend to look at this in a rather writerly way. We create worlds, and our characters' fates work out for the greater good of the plot.

Whether our characters would have any cause to worship us is, however, an interesting question.

Raymond said...

Tony:

"More conventionally, I think that God has to allow evil to exist so that His creations can choose between one or the other. They can thus decide their fates..."

Decide their fates in some world subsequent to this one? This world is too random, and we have too little power over our own fates (universally speaking) for that to be true in the realm we currently inhabit.

"...giving His creation purpose."

I'm unsure of your logic here - you seem to have omitted a step or two. Possibly related to the question below.

"In religious terms, obviously one can't choose good without being able to appreciate the difference between good and evil."

You misunderstand the question. What is the value of choosing?

"In humanist terms, good is defined as that which enables pleasure and reduces suffering. How can one decide what is pleasure and what is suffering without a metric to measure what makes people happy and what makes them sad?"

You misunderstand humanism. We live in this world, and the weak anthropic principle applies in force. There is death, therefore there is pain, therefore the terms of the equation write themselves. Humanists won't (or at least shouldn't, if they call themselves humanists) admit to any purpose to the universe. (And most humanists are hard-pressed to define either good or evil with any rigidity.)

Rick:

"Thanks to Tolkien's idea of 'sub-creation,' I tend to look at this in a rather writerly way. We create worlds, and our characters' fates work out for the greater good of the plot."

That would make writers Calvinists by default, wouldn't it?

Slightly more seriously, this is a point of great contention in videogame design circles, given the potential for the player to deviate from the narrative path which is impossible with other mediums.

Tony said...

Raymond:

"Decide their fates in some world subsequent to this one? This world is too random, and we have too little power over our own fates (universally speaking) for that to be true in the realm we currently inhabit."

In most theologies, the point of this life is to attain merit for the next, either eternity or the one's next turn on the wheel of karma.

"I'm unsure of your logic here - you seem to have omitted a step or two. Possibly related to the question below.

You misunderstand the question. What is the value of choosing?"


There is no value in choosing. Choosing is a medium. It's the choices one makes that have value.

"You misunderstand humanism. We live in this world, and the weak anthropic principle applies in force. There is death, therefore there is pain, therefore the terms of the equation write themselves. Humanists won't (or at least shouldn't, if they call themselves humanists) admit to any purpose to the universe. (And most humanists are hard-pressed to define either good or evil with any rigidity.)"

Humanist ethics are all based on some form of utilitarianism. There doesn't have to be a purpose to the universe for utilitarianism to operate. But there has to be a basis on which to make decisions about utility. The basis is usually termed "pleasure". But pleasure is a value that has to be defined on some scale. So you work your way back around to choosing between "good" acts, that increase pleasure, and "bad" acts, the decrease it. (And yes, I understand the there is no absolute definition of pleasure, but that's a discussion for another topic.)

Rick said...

Yes, I imagine writers are Calvinist! But it gets more complicated, because characters are notorious for pushing back, and the plot itself can make demands we did not anticipate going in.

It seems to me that in a humanist, purposeless-universe framework, we can observe pain due to natural causes, and infer that deliberately inflicting it is wrong, without needing evil as a pre-existing category.

This latest discussion is particularly fascinating, by the way. Much more so than even a rather civil argument about abortion, etc.

Raymond said...

Rick:

"It seems to me that in a humanist, purposeless-universe framework, we can observe pain due to natural causes, and infer that deliberately inflicting it is wrong, without needing evil as a pre-existing category."

Mostly - I think it's useful to distinguish between evil as an empirical exercise and Evil as a theological concept. But yeah, pretty much.

"But it gets more complicated, because characters are notorious for pushing back, and the plot itself can make demands we did not anticipate going in."

I find it useful to burn their cities every once in a while. Keeps them on their toes.

Tony:

"In most theologies, the point of this life is to attain merit for the next, either eternity or the one's next turn on the wheel of karma."

And many of said theologies explain little of the purpose of the next life. Those which claim eternal reward or punishment, especially. My persistent questions in Sunday school were often about why it was just to punish someone for eternity, when their transgressions were, well, infinitely small in comparison.

"There is no value in choosing. Choosing is a medium. It's the choices one makes that have value."

The choices we make have no meaning without the mechanism of choice itself. Therefore, the act of choice carries inherent meaning.

This mechanism obviously has value to us, or theologians wouldn't twist themselves into knots justifying its primacy. What they usually don't make clear is why the act of choosing matters so much to God, or to the next life.

Tony said...

Raymond:

"And many of said theologies explain little of the purpose of the next life. Those which claim eternal reward or punishment, especially. My persistent questions in Sunday school were often about why it was just to punish someone for eternity, when their transgressions were, well, infinitely small in comparison."

In theologies that contain the progession of souls through multiple lives, ovbiously the next life is just another step in the journey. If I am not mistaken, all souls make it to the end eventually, even if some endure many ups and downs.

If you get one life and that's it, then the ultimate fate of your soul has to be decided within that context. To turn the question around, how much good could one do in a single life to deserve eternal salvation and bliss? The justice is done in that either reward or punishment is forever. It's a balanced system. It's only in focussing on one side of the scale that one sees imbalance.

"The choices we make have no meaning without the mechanism of choice itself. Therefore, the act of choice carries inherent meaning."

No -- the choices can't be made without the medium of choice. You need water to float a boat or sink it, but the water has no meaning in itself. It's just the medium of the exercise. It's whether the boat floats or sinks that we want to know.

"This mechanism obviously has value to us, or theologians wouldn't twist themselves into knots justifying its primacy. What they usually don't make clear is why the act of choosing matters so much to God, or to the next life."

You're working too hard at this. The act of choosing means that it's your responsibility, not God's. I would think anybody could see the aesthetic and logical value in that.

Milo said...

Tony:

"That makes the formless chaos bigger than -- or at least separate from -- God. The implications of that cosmology are fairly ominous..."

Correct. However, the formless chaos is not sentient - so while harmful, it is not actively malevolent, while this God is actively benevolent.

Essentially this makes God the universe's biggest terraformer. There was something there before he appeared, but it wasn't fit for habitation or use.

You yourself suggested (when you brought the subject up) evil being created by some separate Satan/Ahriman/etc. entity, which would also imply God is not omnipotent, as he cannot simply squash his opposite number.



Jollyreaper:

"The first is the evil of indifference, not caring of the consequences of your actions, showing no concern over whether or not someone is harmed. The second is true intentional evil, conscious acts of will with the sole determination of causing harm to others."

So if I mug someone in order to steal his money, that is not pure evil, since my main objective is gaining money and I am merely apathetic about the fact that someone else is being harmed in this?



Tony:

"If God creates the world, and God has dominance over the nothingness from which he created it, and God is good, how does he allow any evil to slip in?"

Because he is imperfect.

This god is not omnipotent, merely far more powerful than any human, possibly to the point that we aren't even capable of understanding the limits of his power because they lie so far beyond our experience. He can still make mistakes or oversights, and his creation is a continual work-in-progress - it's mostly self-maintaining at this point, but occasionally cracks need to be sealed, and the system isn't perfect. You don't like that? Let's see you create a better universe. Oh, by the way, you'll have to find your own formless chaos to start from - there's not much left around these parts.

Humans still occasionally die to wild animals, even though we're mostly able to keep those out of cities. Meanwhile other things, like car accidents, are a part of the system we've built and which we haven't yet figured out how to abolish while keeping the system's advantages.

Milo said...

Jollyreaper:

"The Old Testament God can bring terrible judgments and punishments upon people but his actions are good and righteous even if they're not pleasant to those they're done to."

Except that terrible things seem to happen even to people who have not done anything particularly bad.

Of course religious people like to rationalize such things with "Oh, he died of plague? I guess he wasn't all that pious then. He must have done something to make God angry.".



Thucydides's Sunday school teacher:

"God allowed Evil in order to make Creation complete. We would not understand or appreciate Good if we had no knowledge or experience of Evil."

Also, in the "God as cosmoformer of the formless chaos" model, there may well be greater evils in the formless chaos that God has in fact successfully hedged out of the universe, and which we therefore have no knowledge or experience of and therefore don't appreciate. All the things we think are so horrible are, from God's perspective, small fry.

Milo said...

Jollyreaper:

"So I cannot appreciate having an arm without first knowing what not having an arm feels like."

You can. However, if losing an arm is physically impossible, then you can never appreciate the sense of accomplishment of saving your or another person's arm. You cannot appreciate courage without a chance of failure, nor craftiness when the universe is naturally predisposed to make things easy on you. We are frequently impressed by the Roman sewer systems, yet would there have been any point in building them if it is impossible to get thirsty, dirty, or sick?

Is the ability to feel a sense of accomplishment necessary for life to have a meaning?



Tony:

"Logically, God does not have to prefer good over evil in the final analysis. He, being beyond any accountability but His own, could just as easily prefer evil over good, and all the arguments about good and evil would still apply, with just the signs reversed."

So if I understand correctly, what you're claiming here is that "God cannot be pure evil, since good exists in the world."? It is possible that he likes toying with us by giving us a false hope, so that we feel worse when our hopes are crushed. Many fictional villains are like that. And, in a sense, this is simply a reverse of the "God created evil so we can better appreciate good by comparison" argument - this time, God created ultimate good, and always keeps it tantalizingly just out of reach to torment us.

Of course there is also the possibility of a god who simply doesn't care about human morality - which is not to say he is completely apathetic or even particularly cruel to humans, but he also does not feel obliged to personally save every single last one of us. He may have some greater plan for us that is neither good nor evil, just... well, you wouldn't even exist if it weren't for the plan, so why are you nitpicking that the existance isn't quite all you wished it would be?



Rick:

"Thanks to Tolkien's idea of 'sub-creation', I tend to look at this in a rather writerly way. We create worlds, and our characters' fates work out for the greater good of the plot.

Whether our characters would have any cause to worship us is, however, an interesting question."


Writers regularly make their characters' lives hard, putting wars into the setting simply because "peace is boring", and so in. They do this, for the most part, due to readers liking to feel a sense of accomplishment (by proxy) when the characters overcome their challenges.

I think characters would certainly be justified in cursing us (writers and readers) for our cruelty. However, we would also be justified in ignoring their futile pleas - after all, they're just fictional characters. But if some character suddenly claims that the author should be praised for making his life difficult... then I'm going to call that position absurd.

If they don't like us, though, what could they do about it? Try to deliberately go against the author's plan and mess up the story? But that would probably make for a pretty good story itself. Oops.

But note that authors do in a sense still "love" their characters. The story could not exist without them. Any most readers and writers even like a story to end on a happy note. So writers are benevolent... somewhat. But not purely so.

Milo said...

Raymond:

"Slightly more seriously, this is a point of great contention in videogame design circles, given the potential for the player to deviate from the narrative path which is impossible with other mediums."

Video games are polytheistic - even disregarding the multiple people working on the game, the appearance of the world is shaped by the combined actions of both the author and the player, who for the most part don't interact directly with each other and may be at cross purposes (game creators actively work to challenge players, while players take perverse delight in sequence breaking). Neither has absolute power. (Unless you use cheat codes, and even then - you are still making use of a world that you didn't create.)

Additionally, there are multiple concurrent copies of any video game world. For each person who played the game - and sometimes multiple times for the same person (I like replaying games with multiple story paths/endings, in order to see the game's full content) - there is a parallel universe which is similar but different. Normally the characters in one universe are not aware of the existance of any of the others.

Is it still "evil" to cause people to suffer if I immediately thereafter reload from my last saved game and replay the level without hurting anyone? What if I keep the savegame on file in order to gain a sense that that the unharmed world isn't really "gone", but never actually bother loading it?



Tony:

"To turn the question around, how much good could one do in a single life to deserve eternal salvation and bliss?"

Do you need to "deserve" bliss? If you had the power to grant eternal salvation and bliss to all people, how many people would you still choose to withhold this gift from?

Remember that withholding another person happiness which you could easily grant at no cost to yourself or anyone else is, in itself, an evil act (through negligence). Possibly you could justify withholding salvation from people who have done significant evil in their life (although that leads back to Raymond's "why it was just to punish someone for eternity, when their transgressions were, well, infinitely small in comparison" question), but I cannot rationalize - from the point of view of a purely good deity (which as discussed above is not the only kind of deity) - withholding salvation from someone who has not done any significant acts of either good or evil in his life.

jollyreaper said...

@ milo regarding the mugging

The mugging is an overt act. The mugger knows he's hurting someone, even if that harm is a means to an end.

Consider the asbestos problem. Any architect who called for its use when nobody knew any better is guilty of ignorance. He wouldn't have done it if he knew there was a problem and stopped using it when he found out there was. Now if the people who made the crap didn't bother to do the due diligence to see if it was harmful, that's indifference. If they realized it was harmful and prevented any more tests that would confirm it and cause it to be pulled from the market, that's pretty damn direct evil. That's barely a half-step removed from deliberately blinding children to use as beggars.

One definition for sin I've read says there isn't really sin, only ignorance. The idea is that nobody would sin if they truly understood the consequences of their actions. This seems to ignore the potential for sociopaths but the argument goes that the understanding is empathic, that someone with true understanding would feel the pain of another as if they were that person, the literal definition of compassion (suffering with).

I'd quibble with saying the sociopath is simply someone who hasn't been sufficiently educated because sociopathy is a defect in the brain. That would be like saying a blind man could see if only he had sufficient willpower. Can't see? Not enough will. But aside from that, it's an interesting concept. Ignorance can be corrected.

Raymond said...

Tony:

"In theologies that contain the progession of souls through multiple lives, ovbiously the next life is just another step in the journey. If I am not mistaken, all souls make it to the end eventually, even if some endure many ups and downs.""

That's why I was limiting the question to the one-and-dones.

"If you get one life and that's it, then the ultimate fate of your soul has to be decided within that context. To turn the question around, how much good could one do in a single life to deserve eternal salvation and bliss? The justice is done in that either reward or punishment is forever. It's a balanced system. It's only in focussing on one side of the scale that one sees imbalance."

Actually, I also asked the eternal salvation question - they just looked at me funny, since they considered it a feature rather than a bug.

I'm not talking about the imbalance of rewards between good and evil, I'm talking about the imbalance of scale between action and result.

"No -- the choices can't be made without the medium of choice. You need water to float a boat or sink it, but the water has no meaning in itself. It's just the medium of the exercise. It's whether the boat floats or sinks that we want to know."

You're still misinterpreting the question. Why is there a boat?

And if God's testing designs of boats, then why aren't we given complete design specs? (At least, why are we given the specs thirdhand and fragmented to hell?)

"You're working too hard at this. The act of choosing means that it's your responsibility, not God's."

And thus the mechanism of choice has more value to God than the results of the choices. He could easily preprogram all my choices and have the same result, but places some value in giving me agency and having me choose for myself. Ergo, choice itself has value.

The Mormon theology I grew up with actually had this question at its core. There was the War in Heaven, where Lucifer proposed a plan to make everyone good and return everyone to paradise, and this plan was rejected by God for missing the point. Lucifer took a third of the angels with him as he left in a huff. Cue the devil, stage right.

Even in a more general Abrahamic context, the Tree's fruit was the knowledge of good and evil, ie moral choice. Animals are considered amoral in the same context due to their lack of choice (which is being somewhat eroded given current neurological research, frankly - then again, so is ours). I think it's pretty clear that the act of choice carries a special value in the Abrahamic tradition, at least.

"I would think anybody could see the aesthetic and logical value in that."

The aesthetic value is far more subjective, and the logical value is predicated on a host of assumptions. So no, not anybody can see that. It's...problematic to assume your own predicates are shared by everyone.

Raymond said...

Milo:

"...the formless chaos is not sentient - so while harmful, it is not actively malevolent, while this God is actively benevolent."

As long as the formless chaos is, well, formless, it's not harmful either - there's nothing to harm.

"Essentially this makes God the universe's biggest terraformer. There was something there before he appeared, but it wasn't fit for habitation or use."

Unless that formless chaos is the second law of thermodynamics, it also no longer exists in our realm. If it is the second law, then it would imply God is attempting to create something to take with Him when He leaves this universe behind. Or it implies God is destined to die with this universe - now that is ominous...

"Is the ability to feel a sense of accomplishment necessary for life to have a meaning?"

Please define "meaning" - in the context of the second law of thermodynamics.

"Video games are polytheistic - even disregarding the multiple people working on the game, the appearance of the world is shaped by the combined actions of both the author and the player, who for the most part don't interact directly with each other and may be at cross purposes (game creators actively work to challenge players, while players take perverse delight in sequence breaking). Neither has absolute power. (Unless you use cheat codes, and even then - you are still making use of a world that you didn't create.)"

The game's designer(s) do have absolute power: they create the physics, the levels (or the algorithms for the levels, if procedurally generated), the AI of enemies (except multiplayer), and the interface itself.

A true polytheistic game would be found in the mod scene - conflicting deities rewriting portions of the world according to their own visions.

"Additionally, there are multiple concurrent copies of any video game world. For each person who played the game - and sometimes multiple times for the same person (I like replaying games with multiple story paths/endings, in order to see the game's full content) - there is a parallel universe which is similar but different. Normally the characters in one universe are not aware of the existence of any of the others."

Which is pretty much how I explain to non-science-geek friends how parallel universes work. The one problem with the analogy is wrt videogames, there is communication between universes in the form of the player (or players, since people share information about the game).

There's actually even a term for it: the accretive player character. The player can examine a sequence of versions of the world, and the one which completes a game is in fact often a compound product of multiple game universes. See here:

http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2009/06/column_homer_in_silicon_the_ac.php

"Is it still "evil" to cause people to suffer if I immediately thereafter reload from my last saved game and replay the level without hurting anyone? What if I keep the savegame on file in order to gain a sense that that the unharmed world isn't really "gone", but never actually bother loading it?"

The accretive player concept sort of answers that question - at some point, in some universe, the player decided to hurt and/or kill. That's part of the meta-player's moral action. The next question, of course, is if the meta-player is considered unique, since I can decide to play through a game again, deliberately changing my playstyle. Would that be considered a separate moral being?

Raymond said...

jollyreaper:

"One definition for sin I've read says there isn't really sin, only ignorance. The idea is that nobody would sin if they truly understood the consequences of their actions. This seems to ignore the potential for sociopaths but the argument goes that the understanding is empathic, that someone with true understanding would feel the pain of another as if they were that person, the literal definition of compassion (suffering with)."

It's a thought, but we live in a universe that works very differently than that. I can cause pain without feeling it myself. I can do so even after experiencing pain myself. And then, as you mention, there are sociopaths.

jollyreaper said...

The Mormon theology I grew up with actually had this question at its core. There was the War in Heaven, where Lucifer proposed a plan to make everyone good and return everyone to paradise, and this plan was rejected by God for missing the point. Lucifer took a third of the angels with him as he left in a huff. Cue the devil, stage right.


I'd never heard of that version before. Interesting! The wildest variant I'd heard of is from Islam where Lucifer refused to treat Man as equal to Allah per Allah's instruction since an earlier decree had said put none higher than Him. Lucifer (well, Iblis in this account) loved him too much for that and was thus banished.

Milo said...

Jollyreaper:

"Consider the asbestos problem. Any architect who called for its use when nobody knew any better is guilty of ignorance. He wouldn't have done it if he knew there was a problem and stopped using it when he found out there was."

You previously said, "The first is the evil of indifference, not caring of the consequences of your actions, showing no concern over whether or not someone is harmed."

If the architect is actively trying to use only safe materials and making an effort to identify and abolish hazards, then I would not consider him to be "not caring", no matter how incompetent he is proving at his task.

If the architect knows that asbestos might or might not be harmful but chooses to use it anyway without bothering to run any tests, then I would not consider him much better than another architect that knows for sure asbestos is harmful but chooses to use it anyway because he thinks the number of deaths will be small enough to not be a big deal.


"One definition for sin I've read says there isn't really sin, only ignorance. The idea is that nobody would sin if they truly understood the consequences of their actions."

If the consequences for sin include eternal damnation, then I would say that is pretty accurate. If there is no morally-sensitive afterlife, though, then I will have to disagree. Simply knowing that your actions will hurt other people is not enough to dissuade everyone.

I see morality more as a game of prisoner's dilemma. Every individual person in fact can get ahead by choosing to be immoral rather than moral, all other things being equal. However if everyone draws this conclusion, the overall result will be worse for everyone.



Raymond:

"And if God's testing designs of boats, then why aren't we given complete design specs? (At least, why are we given the specs thirdhand and fragmented to hell?)"

Why should we? We're the boats, not God's lab assistant.

At least, I think. I've lost track of what this metaphor is actually talking about.

Milo said...

Raymond:

"The game's designer(s) do have absolute power: they create the physics, the levels (or the algorithms for the levels, if procedurally generated), the AI of enemies (except multiplayer), and the interface itself."

You have a point. Although there are things that the game designers are not in control of, that is only because they have voluntarily relinquished control over those things, and they have full freedom to decide what to relinquish control over. In that sense, they could be thought of as omnipotent.

They are, however, rather deist in nature, in that they created the world but thereafter have no direct hand in running it. If a video game character is unhappy with his life, it is futile for him to pray to the game's author, who is most likely not observing this particular incarnation of the game world. But a video game character can pray to the player, and in some games they actually do (warning: link is an event horizon, do not click).

Are you still omnipotent if you have willingly relinquished control over some things? And if so, could you not become omnipotent by default simply by choosing to attempt nothing, thus guaranteeing success? If you want nothing, then you will have everything you want.

Tony said...

Milo:

"Correct. However, the formless chaos is not sentient - so while harmful, it is not actively malevolent, while this God is actively benevolent."

Too thin.

"Because he is imperfect."

I already said that I wasn't an Epicurian. I was trying to sus out the logic, right or wrong, behind God as described in a specific church's theachings, not trying to justify it.

"So if I understand correctly, what you're claiming here is that 'God cannot be pure evil, since good exists in the world.'?"

No, I'm saying that God is not require to be good and God is not required to be evil. He can be whatever He wants to be. Having said that, if Abrahamic theology is to be believed, God is good. But if He is, it isn't for any human reasons. It's for reasons completely His own.

"Do you need to "deserve" bliss? If you had the power to grant eternal salvation and bliss to all people, how many people would you still choose to withhold this gift from?"

It's cast as a reward for making the right choices, so deserving has everything to do with it. Just because you have the power to do somthing, that doesn't mean you have to do it, if a higher principle is at stake. Remember, only a God that isn't accountable to His creations can allow good and evil to exist in the same space. So, if He isn't accountable to us, and he created us, we must be accountable to Him. And however He chooses to hold us accountable, well, that's His business not ours.

Besides, the point was about the balance that eternal reward creates for eternal punishment. Do the right thing, do the wrong thing -- they're both for keeps. There's no excessive malice, nor any excessive magnanimity.

Tony said...

Raymond:

"I'm not talking about the imbalance of rewards between good and evil, I'm talking about the imbalance of scale between action and result."

What imbalance? God gives you one life. Whatever you make of it, your soul has to accept the consequences of for the rest of time. It's a feature, not a bug.

"You're still misinterpreting the question. Why is there a boat?

...

And thus the mechanism of choice has more value to God than the results of the choices. He could easily preprogram all my choices and have the same result, but places some value in giving me agency and having me choose for myself. Ergo, choice itself has value."


Oh...why does the choice exist? Because God is taking his Creations and giveing them an opportunity to share existence on His plane. God can't make other gods, but he can give his creations a chance to become effectively like Him. But He can't give that away for free. I'm not enough of a philosopher to give you the reason why in propositional logic, but I can see in the gestalt that it is the right thing.

"The aesthetic value is far more subjective, and the logical value is predicated on a host of assumptions. So no, not anybody can see that. It's...problematic to assume your own predicates are shared by everyone."

Your constant concern with predicates is cute. But logical predicates aren't the only thing that effect decisionmaking. Sometimes one just senses what is right, for no reason that he or she can explain. I'm very interested in logic and reason, but I don't deny the value of inner knowledge, wherever it comes from.

Anonymous said...

(SA Phil)

One thing I wonder about Religeon and a Science Fiction future is essentially how will the discovery of Exra-Terrestrial Intelligence or lack thereof affect "faith"?

For example if the Fermi paradox is disproven and humans are no longer "special" in your Interstellar setting, does that mean people are more likely to be athiest?

On the flip side - in a setting where even after interstellar travel the Fermi Paradox is upheld- There is no proof of intelligent Aliens .. Does that mean there will be a "Faith" resurgence because Churches will claim the uniqueness of humans means they must have been created by a divine being specifically.

Mangaka2170 said...

Actually, the Catholic Church has already decided this: if intelligent alien life is discovered, it will be recognized as a fellow creation of God.

Rick said...

Interesting! Staying in front of the problem, as it were.

Tony said...

Re: the Fermi Paradox

It's not something that can be proven or disproven. It takes the form of a question: If other intelligences are out there, and they are capable of interstellar communication, where is the evidence of their existence?

The answer may be that they're not there, or they can't communicate (or won't communicate, even if they can), or we can't hear what they're saying, or... IOW, there's no wrong or right answer, no proof or disproof -- there's just the facts, whatever they are, which we obviously don't know yet.

Anonymous said...

(SA Phil)

Sure the Fermi Paradox can be disproven -- you just need to find the evidence of the extra-terrestrial intelligent life.

No more paradox.

---------
By upheld I mean even in a setting that has Interstellar Travel, Interstellar Trade, and Interstellar Exploration, there is still no evidence of ET intelligent life.
=====================

If the former happens -- how would people feel regarding faith? Sounds like the Catholic Church would co-opt the aliens too under their God Umbrella. Others may feel differently.
------
If the Latter happens -- will there be a fundamentalist swing since people will assume the reason is humans are a unique creation?

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"Sure the Fermi Paradox can be disproven -- you just need to find the evidence of the extra-terrestrial intelligent life.

No more paradox."


Except that there's nothing to prove or disprove. The paradox is not an assertion that extraterrestrial intelligences don't exist. It's a question: why hadn't they been detected at a certain point in history, specifically, the time at which the question was first posed? One can't prove or disprove a question about an undisputed fact. One can only find or not find an answer.

"If the former happens -- how would people feel regarding faith? Sounds like the Catholic Church would co-opt the aliens too under their God Umbrella. Others may feel differently."

Some will believe ETs are gods, or at least angels. Others will believe they are demons. Others, including those who follow Roman Catholic doctrine, will believe they are Divine creations with souls. Most will just believe they are a new type of thing in the human experience.

I personally think the interesting question will be how the ETs feel about what humans believe. I can just see an RC priest going up to an ET and offering him/her/it communion, or a fundamentalist preacher trying domonize an ET. Perhaps that won't offend the ETs much or at all. Maybe what really gets under their skin is a self-styled xenopsychologist trying to figure out they tick.

"If the Latter happens -- will there be a fundamentalist swing since people will assume the reason is humans are a unique creation?"

A swing? I doubt anything so drastic. It could take us tens of thousands of years to explore even a fraction of one galaxy. Which would prove nothing about the rest of the galaxy, or the rest of the universe.

Anonymous said...

(SA Phil)

I think It would not take much for more people to assume humans are alone in the Universe

Since many feel that NOW.

If you had colonized a sphere 50 Lightyears in all direction from Earth and still found no evidence of Alien Inteligence, I think that fact would be significant to a lot of people.

In the simplest sense -

Rate of Athiesm Up/down
*if Aliens are found?
*If we find no Aliens in 50 years of Interstellar colonization?
*If we find no ALiens in 500 years?
*10,000?

--
Or perhaps, we colonize the galaxy for a million years; And all evidence is that Humans are the only Intelligent race in the Universe.

What does the faith look like then?

How about if they then find Alien Intelligent Life after 1 million and 1 years?

Crisis of faith?

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"I think It would not take much for more people to assume humans are alone in the Universe

Since many feel that NOW."


Please, stop SHOUTING.

"If you had colonized a sphere 50 Lightyears in all direction from Earth and still found no evidence of Alien Inteligence, I think that fact would be significant to a lot of people."

No...very few. If we found suitable terrestrial planets to colonize within 50 light years, it would just further serve to confirm the Copernican Principle. If we didn't, it would further confirm the rarity of life. In either case, having explored on the order of a billionth of the galaxy would not be considered by any but hopeless boobs as being statistically significant.

"Rate of Athiesm Up/down
*if Aliens are found?"


Insignificant move in either direction. Most people accept that ETs exist somewhere, whether or not we have actually met them.

"*If we find no Aliens in 50 years of Interstellar colonization?
*If we find no ALiens in 500 years?
*10,000?"


Statistically insignificant timespans, even with FTL travel.

"Or perhaps, we colonize the galaxy for a million years; And all evidence is that Humans are the only Intelligent race in the Universe."

The only evidence that would exist is that humand are the only intelligent race in the Milky Way Galaxy. Other galaxies, who knows? And after a million years of interstellar flight, human religious beliefs would be influenced by so much more than knowing whether or not ETs lived in the Milky Way. Also, with humans rattling around the whole galaxy, who would know about whether ETs had been discovered somehwere in it or not, especially if there's only STL travel?

"What does the faith look like then?"

What do people have faith in a million years from now? Why? Answer that one first, before posing any other questions.

"How about if they then find Alien Intelligent Life after 1 million and 1 years?"

Most people wouldn't know for tens of thousands of years.

"Crisis of faith?"

Again, faith in what, and why?

Anonymous said...

(SA Phil)

Tony,
I think perhaps you are being pendanic here.

Faith in the sense that they beleive in a god/gods/supernatural creator of the universe as we know it.

I suggest many people who live on Earth in 2011 of our non ficticious world believe in a concept they refer to as God.

Those people are said to have faith. As in faith in that being/concept/energy state that makes up whatever this concept of God refers to.

It could even be argued that less people today have this faith in this God/gods concept than they did in times past.

Some attribute this to Scientific advancement. Some Athiests (those without the aformentioned "Faith" in a god thing by definition) attribute their lack of "Faith" to the fact that there is nothing special about Earth, Humans, etc.

Thus the more perceived evidence that there might indeed be something special about Earth, Humans, etc. Might lead people to be influenced to certain beliefs they might not otherwise have held, to have faith.

Whereas evidence that there isnt anything particularily special or unique about humans, since there are Alien intelligences .. might have the opposite effect.

Perhaps you do not think so. Instead I do think so.

I live in a world where people allow their belief in the value of science to be influenced by their political affiliation.

I surely do not find it far fetched that in a setting that has an interstellar civilization that the presense or lack thereof of Alien Intelligences would not have an effect on their beleif/faith/etc in a god/gods/being/thing.

jollyreaper said...

If strong AI is possible, weakly godlike powers are not unlikely. Weakly godlike means that they have supreme power over the natural world but can't bring people back from the dead, reverse time, etc. But for what weakly godlike entails, they may as well be gods from classic religions. Orion's Arm explores that concept.

Voltare said if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. I see this as extremely likely. I could easily see cults with that concept sprouting up just like we have extropians freezing their heads. I have no idea how long it would take to get that strong of an AI or if it's possible but that certainly wouldn't strop true believers from trying. And if they do succeed...

That was also the goal of the baddies in Stross' Iron Sunrise.

Milo said...

Modern humans have powers that would appear "weakly godlike" from the point of view of a caveman. However we do not consider them godlike, because we are used to them, and because we understand their limitations.

jollyreaper said...

The conquistadors were seen as godlike initially and as sources of supernatural terror. Even as their status as mortal men was mire firmly established, they maintained a technical dominance.

If we look at singularity-level AI, it would be very difficult not to start thinking of them as gods. In the orion's arm setting, it's not uncommon for ai's to set themselves up with worshippers. And when you consider that the AI is responsible for running every aspect of the polity, keeps the environmental systems online, the food coming, is the provider of technology that retards aging, cures diseases, and personally knows and cares for you and wants your wellbeing as a high priority... Some people would embrace this and others run in horror. Some would say well this isn't really god god like from the bible and so on and others will say it doesn't really matter. Some of these AI gods accept mind uploads so you're talking about an afterlife in the physical universe.

It raises some wonderful questions for storytelling.

Anonymous said...

(SA Phil)

Interesting concept Jollyreaper

A slight variant on it --

What about a Interstellar Embryo style seed-ship. The AI controlling that mission might literally be that civilization's God after a fashion.

Or perhaps they see the Humans from Earth as Gods and the Seed-Ship's AI as the God's messenger.

For instance imagine a STL seed-ship that is sent 20,000 light years from Earth. By the time Terraforming, etc is done more than 30,000 years have passed before any of the new humans are born in that distant system.

Their entire civilization never gets any radio messages from Earth or any other colonies. Its even possible that only this one seed expedition was successful and Earth's humans have all died in the interim.

jollyreaper said...



What about a Interstellar Embryo style seed-ship. The AI controlling that mission might literally be that civilization's God after a fashion.


I already postulated about something like that, either upthread here or elsewhere. My thinking was if you're talking about a generation ship big enough for hundreds of thousands of people and you want them alive for the journey and all the interesting stuff is happening shipboard... And presumably the humans are necessary for the operation of the ship, even though it might only be a select few who know the details. Seedships are more problematic. You get back to the question of "Why?" The AI's would be so advanced at this point, what would be the point of bringing baseline humans? And if you do want baseline humans, why not just run them in virchspace, why go to the trouble of doing it in realspace with all the mass constraints?

But if you're stuck on the generation ship idea and a few million canned humans, then you're looking at the potential for gods and magic. Humans learn the rites for talking to God (the shipboard AI), petitioning for resources, divine intercession. The AI might want to influence the social dynamics of the group and so pick a prophet to receive messages.

When talking about strong AI's, we run into what I call the "human problem." Why keep plain old humans around when there's these awesome transhuman intelligences? The Orion's Arm answer is interesting -- they're meant to be memetic and genetic reserves. Each transhuman represents one solution line for high intelligence, one potential answer. And by its very existence there's a certain myopia, a bias for that one answer. But there's a big ol' solution set out there and they've by no means exhausted it. Baseline humans are the genetic and memetic soup from which new transhuman intelligences will spring. So humans aren't being kept as pets, ornamental and without purpose. Those AI's are like farmers and we're like the earthworms keeping the soil aerated, or possibly the microbes living in the guts of those earthworms. We might not be glamorous but without us doing our part the whole galactic civilization would stagnate and die out.

Anonymous said...

(SA Phil)

If humans create AI .. and then send them into space

and the humans die out.

One possibility is the AI would consider the Humans to be Gods ... ones that they have no evidence of ...from a (battlestar galactica time) mythical place called Earth.

Rick said...

It seems to me that finding - or not finding - extraterrestrial life (not just intelligence) will also have religious implications, and surely will become part of the religious discussion.

In the near future we have spectra of numerous planets in stellar habitable zones. If we find significant atmospheric oxygen - especially if we find it frequently - it will argue in favor of aerobic life being common in the universe. If we don't find oxygen, aerobic life starts to look a lot less common.

There are significant implications either way.

Anonymous said...

(SA Phil)

Early terrestrial biology is hardly one of my strong suits - but I do remember something to the effect that the very first microorganisms may have breathed in methane and breathed out oxygen.

Could something like that be bio-engineered in order to pre-terraform a methane atmosphere into oxygen?

Potentially, if humans were to start an evolutionary tree on another planet, in millions/billions of years of evolution -- could any resultant intelligent race consider those early terraformers Gods?

Tony said...

Re: SA Phil

I'm not being pedantic. I'm making a point about the limits of knowledge.

Colonizing a sphere 50 ly in radius tells us nothing about the other 200 or so billion stars in the Galaxy, not to mention the rest of the universe. It just wouldn't be sufficient data on which to base decisions about the rarity or ubiquity of intelligent life.

If, on the other hand, a million years in the future, the galaxy is fully populated with humans and nothing else, how much more data is that really? Does it say anything about ET intelligencesi n the past? Does it say anything about ET intelligences in the future? Does it say anything about ET intelligences in other galaxies? How do humans in the Sagitarius Arm know about what does or doesn't exist 50k ly away in the Scutum-Crux arm?

And if ETs exist, what of it? Some will say they are God's children too. Some will say it proves that humans aren othing special to any God or gods. It will be no different than today.

Anonymous said...

(SA Phil)

I personally agree with you about what the knowledge ultimately means. Even a galactic civilization with no aliens doesn't prove anything.

I just think people being people --- irrational as they can be --- would by and large not see it that way. And thus it would have a big impact.



=========
Of course if we do find Aliens that's different since that would mean they do have concrete knowledge.

I think then there would be an uptick in the "there is nothing special about us" type of Atheist.

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"I just think people being people --- irrational as they can be --- would by and large not see it that way. And thus it would have a big impact."

I don't see any impact whatsoever. People already believe what they want to believe, for whatever reason they believe it. And I find the perceived increase in the lack of faith to be way overdramatized. What I find in the everyday world is a sofenting of faith, but not a lack of it, except for the most hard core atheists -- who are also such objectionable people in general that they don't have much influence on others.

The vast majority of people have some reliance on a higher power, whether they admit it or not. Almost everybody, even intellectually committed agnostics like myself, will, in moments of emotion, invoke a higher power or powers -- God, The Gods, Bog, Fuck...whatever. And they mean it when they do it, even if it's contradictory to their intellectual positions. It's just a human thing to do.

"Of course if we do find Aliens that's different since that would mean they do have concrete knowledge.

I think then there would be an uptick in the "there is nothing special about us" type of Atheist."


Thinking that there is nothing special about yourself does not necessarily lead to atheism.

Jesus loves the little children --
All the little children of the world.
Red, yellow, black, white,
their all special in His sight.

jollyreaper said...


One possibility is the AI would consider the Humans to be Gods ... ones that they have no evidence of ...from a (battlestar galactica time) mythical place called Earth.


I'd had an idea for a story along those lines. Mankind on Earth dies out, the AI's are all that's left. Because they weren't intended for autonomous function without human guidance there was a period of self-discovery, an emerging consciousness. The AI's then sought to restore Earth to a pre-industrial condition, removing the cities, putting their own industrial centers underground, trying to bring extinct species back from preserved fossils. Eventually they try resurrecting man. It's part of their process of self-discovery, getting to know their creators. The story would take place from the perspective of the very first resurrected humans, learning and growing from infancy with the guidance of their humanoid nannybots. The AI's aren't sure what they will discover; they don't need man anymore but remain curious.

jollyreaper said...

The AI approach was to recreate a supportive family group for the group of children, teaching a few reconstructed social norms and language so that they could then read the books and watch the videos of the old records. They would then see what came of the humans from there. The children themselves would be full of questions about who the old humanity was, who they are now, what are the differences, and coming to terms with what they want from this new life. I had no idea where the story would go but was thinking that you'd see humans split into two philosophical tribes, the actives and passives. The passives would be happy with the idea of living in a perfect Eden, wards of the AI's, a perfect part of nature. The actives would want to shape their own destiny, not relying on the AI's, becoming masters of their own domain. They would chafe under the burden of not having important, necessary things to do. They would despise the idea of existence without purpose, couldn't stand the idea of life without challenges to surmount.

I'd had this idea and then saw that there was an anime that had already explored similar lines though I forget the name of it now.

Anonymous said...

(SA Phil)

I like it.

Sort of a Jurassic Park .. done to humans.

jollyreaper said...

A little more passive than Jurassic Park but yeah. I'm imagining one of the AI paleohumanologists freaking out.

paleohumanologist: You brought back Hitler?

researcherbot: Don't worry, he's sterile. And all the other lawyers, dictators, and politicians are male. They can't breed. And they're all homophobes to boot.

paleohumanologist: You don't understand!

researcherbot: Did I mention the lysine deficiency?

jeffgoldblumbot: Nature, ah, will find a way.

The actual tone of the story I'm imagining would be by turns wistful, melancholy, but also a little hopeful. Man's time as master of the world is over. Done. We had our shot and screwed up. But there's a beautiful second chance to try our shot at being better humans.

Milo said...

SA Phil:

"Sort of a Jurassic Park .. done to humans."

AIs create humans, and the humans turn on their creators?

Hmm... something feels off about that...

Rick said...

I don't see any impact whatsoever.

I would take impact somewhat more broadly - not simply 'does this wipe out religion or not,' but influencing the religious discussion. Darwinian evolution, for example, has certainly influenced the religious discussion (at least in the West), in a variety of ways.

Anonymous said...

(SA Phil)

Yes exactly Rick,

Thank you.

I did mean impact as in having "substantial changes"

Not -- ending atheists or ending people of faith.

====================
Milo,

Heh great point.

Of course you could do a pretty warped variant of the Battlestar Galactica cycle idea.

Humans make AI's - AI's wipe out humans

*a million years pass*

AI's make humans -- humans wipe out AI's

And so on ...

Tony said...

Rick:

"I would take impact somewhat more broadly - not simply 'does this wipe out religion or not,' but influencing the religious discussion. Darwinian evolution, for example, has certainly influenced the religious discussion (at least in the West), in a variety of ways."

We've already crossed that bridge with ETs. Most people think they are possible. A smaller, but still significant number, believe they are out there, even in absence of empirical evidence, because of the Copernican Principle. More data, unless it encompasses the whole universe, is not going to change that.

Anonymous said...

(SA Phil)

I doubt the Copernican principle influences the the majority of people's thinking.

Especially since a large number of people do not even know who Copernicus is.

Just saying "the data doesn't prove" is also a bit of a troubled path. People in general do not weigh and interpret data. Most people choose what is instinctual to them and side with any data which supports their forgone conclusion.

Getting people to remain unattached to a certain hypothesis and only make decisions based on empirical data is a very difficult thing to do. And I would suggest the number of people who actually think that way are a distinct minority.

"We have colonized what? a Thousand worlds now? Have we seen any little green men yet? That's because there aren't any. God only made us."

I suggest that that would not be an unusual conversation.

Rick said...

I'd add that people in general probably tend to hold remarkably inconsistent views, especially on abstract subjects to which they've given little thought.

Strong evidence for alien life/intelligence would probably have a whole lot more impact than continued lack of evidence, but I can easily imagine that the current widespread 'folk belief' in ETs would gradually fade.

Though you could probably also argue that this is just a modern-era form of belief in angels/demons, etc. In an era of interstellar travel the Others might simply retreat, in popular conception, from other planets to other branes, time streams, whatever.

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"'We have colonized what? a Thousand worlds now? Have we seen any little green men yet? That's because there aren't any. God only made us.'

I suggest that that would not be an unusual conversation."


I doubt it would be any more usual than what you can hear presently:

"We have how many thousands of years of history now? Have we seen any little green men yet? That's because there aren't any. God only made us."

Yet most people still believe that ETs are possible. Because most people, even if they couldn't give you a definition for the Copernican Principle, are aware enough of basic cosmology to know just how non-unique we probably are.

Anonymous said...

(SA Phil)

That's my point - If you shift people's perpectives from what it is now - it would influence thinking.

The more you shift it - the more influence.

100,000 colonized worlds, no aliens, That's a shift.

Find Aliens tommorrow, that's a shift.

------
Pretty much how the more common acceptance of a secular world has led more people to consider themselves as non-religious in modern times.

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"That's my point - If you shift people's perpectives from what it is now - it would influence thinking.

The more you shift it - the more influence.

100,000 colonized worlds, no aliens, That's a shift.

Find Aliens tommorrow, that's a shift."


The people who are scientifically minded are going to ask, "Where are they?"

The people who are religiously minded -- and only those among that groups with a certain existential perspective -- are going to say, "See? I told you so."

"Pretty much how the more common acceptance of a secular world has led more people to consider themselves as non-religious in modern times."

And this quite handily illustrates my point. The major change in thinking has already been accomplished. People who are going to be religious are religious. People who aren't, aren't.

Anonymous said...

(SA Phil)

I dont think its already been accomplished though, I think instead it is progressing.

More people today identify themselves as non-religious than 20 years ago.

More people 20 years ago did than 50.

More did 50 than 100..

And so forth. It wasn't a on/off switch, it was a progression.

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"I dont think its already been accomplished though, I think instead it is progressing.

More people today identify themselves as non-religious than 20 years ago.

More people 20 years ago did than 50.

More did 50 than 100..

And so forth. It wasn't a on/off switch, it was a progression."


Even if the process never stops asymptotically approaching it's ultimate limit, the significant portion of it's progress is likely close at hand, if not already past us, for developed countries.

Anonymous said...

(SA Phil)

How do you know that?

How could possibly know that the drift towards those claiming to be Atheist/Apathy/Agnostic/Not Religious is near its end in Developed countries.

Rick said...

Most of the West (the US is a marked outlier) is already predominantly secular. How much farther could it go?

Milo said...

It's not just a matter of religious people and non-religious people. Even among people who do self-identify as believers, there is an increasing trend to "sunday worship", with little superstition in their daily lives.

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"How do you know that?

How could possibly know that the drift towards those claiming to be Atheist/Apathy/Agnostic/Not Religious is near its end in Developed countries."


I can't "know" it in the quantifiable sense, since it's only something that can be observed in retrospect. But I can suspect it based on the hardening of religious and anit-religious positions in public rhetoric. It's very much like two armies, one having advanced to the culminating point of its attack, and incapable of forcing any more retreats, the other having been pushed back as far as it will go, and capable of continuing indefinitely on the resources left to it.

Anonymous said...

Rick said...
Most of the West (the US is a marked outlier) is already predominantly secular. How much farther could it go?

===========
Pretty far.

How many 5 year olds beleive in Santa Claus?

10 Year Olds?
15 year Olds?
40 year olfs?

It could continue to go until you would never see an actual church that wasn't just a museum.

-------
Or -- it could go the other way, and there could be a resurgence. Eiter of established faiths or something new.

There was a movement among some Athiests to have a "UFO day" arouund Christmas time, so they werent left out of the Holidays.

Never mind the fact that there isnt any more reason to beleive in Intelligent Aliens at this point than to beleive in God from a data driven standpoint.

(SA Phil)

Tony said...

SA Phil:

"Never mind the fact that there isnt any more reason to beleive in Intelligent Aliens at this point than to beleive in God from a data driven standpoint."

If you're a scientist and you accept the Copernican principle, then the mere fact that humans exist is suffcient evidence to assign a probability for intelligent ETs somewhere in the universe, at some time so close to 1.0 as makes no difference. As you narrow the question down by spatial distance and contemporaneousnness, you lower the probability, but you basically have to narrow things down to "on the Earth, right now", to get an honest scientist to admit to a probability approaching 0.0.

Take the same assumptions and replace "ET intelligence" with God, you get a whole different set of probabilities, because no one has scientifically observed the existence of God like they have the existence of humans.

Anonymous said...

(SA Phil)

I submit that being open to the possibility of Aliens is different than believing in them.

While believing in "UFO Aliens" (Aliens who visit Earth) is even different than believing in Aliens now.

And while you can play with probabilities to figure out that Aliens could exist, you have to make a whole lot of assumptions as to the variables. Assumptions that there is zero way to verify.

Its much harder to use probability to predict God.

However the evidence there is a God is the same as the Evidence there are Intelligent Aliens.

Indeed by our current understanding of physics God is more possible that UFO Aliens. Since a real UFO would not be able to hide from us without Magi-tech. Which God is by definition Magic.

And thus I find it Ironic that a segment of Atheists would latch onto a belief in UFO Aliens when they reject a belief in God.

I would think the Atheist who says there is no God because of Scientific principles would stop at "There is a possibility of Aliens."

Milo said...

I'm sure there are atheists who were led to their belief by something other than scientific principles...

Anonymous said...

(SA Phil)

I agree Milo.

However I do know some UFO following Athiests who use Scientific arguments to disprove the "God myth"

Annecdottal I know - but I have known them for a while.

-------
OF course I also know some Evangelical Christians who try to use the "Falicy of Evolution" as proof there is a God.

Tony said...

Re: SA Phil

You're not making any sense. To accept that the probability of ET intelligences is as close to 1.0 as makes no difference is to accept that they exist, past an irrelevant quibble from some statistics prof sitting in the back row. And I addressed the issue of "UFO Aliens" by pointing out that the same logic that says ET intelligences exist somewhere in the universe also says they almost certainly aren't here, right now. Did you not understand that?

Anonymous said...

Trawling the tubes recently I was bemused to see an article about the US Air Force academy and how they had some problems with evangelism on campus. Does it strike anyone else as remarkable that on the one hand these guys are training to pilot invisible supersonic 50MW 3rd-millennium flying machines and at the same time arguing over which sect of a two-thousand-year-old death cult to belong to, if any?

Craig A. Glesner said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Rick said...

I'm not quite sure whether to say welcome to a new commenter or not - one new comment that I let out of the spam filter, since it is at least on topic if not especially substance-rich, and another deleted by its author.

Que?

Craig A. Glesner said...

I deleted mine, since when I checked where it fell it was a bit late.

Basically, the fact that I am ashamed, disgusted, angry and sad about the way the USAF Academy is overrun by the christians. It is a sad day for the Republic when the guys entrusted with some of the highest tech in our military are so uptight about which deity or none that one worships and not the job of winning battles and wars, which is what I pay them for.

That didn't seem to be where the thread was and so I deleted it. No big deal.

Rick said...

Now I do have someone to welcome to the discussion threads!

I have zero sympathy for the religious right, but it is not a topic I choose to belabor on this blog.

I do invite you to look around, since your profile suggests some topics here might be of interest.

jollyreaper said...

Trawling the tubes recently I was bemused to see an article about the US Air Force academy and how they had some problems with evangelism on campus. Does it strike anyone else as remarkable that on the one hand these guys are training to pilot invisible supersonic 50MW 3rd-millennium flying machines and at the same time arguing over which sect of a two-thousand-year-old death cult to belong to, if any?


I look at it as a kind of techno-primitivism. On one hand we can understand how something incongruous happens like taking tribesmen straight from the bush and giving them modern weapons. We can totally understand seeing a 20th century assault rifle adorned with totems to ward off enemy spirits. The bushman didn't make the gun, he's just using it. He doesn't need to know bean one about science or rationalism to pull the trigger.

It does feel a lot weirder when you are looking squarely at someone who is the the product of a society built on science and rationalism who nevertheless is operating wholly within a mystical world view. The mental gymnastics involved! How someone can be incredibly proficient in one belief system that requires scientific skepticism, investigation, proof, and logic while completely jettisoning those methods when working with his other belief system...

And we're not even talking a kind of enlightened religious thought where the Bible is seen as metaphor and fable, how the Creation story is not taken literally and how evolution is just God's design playing out. No, we're talking highly proficient and technical people believing in biblical literalism and selectively accepting some results of scientific investigation and research while completely rejecting inconvenient findings.

It's the puzzle of our species and quite dangerous.

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