The House of David

Sunday, November 08, 2009

No True Scotsman

There's an old joke: a Scotsman says that no Scotsman ever tells a lie. An Englishman retorts that he heard a real whopper from MacEwan just last Thursday. Then the Scotsman excommunicates - "that bastard MacEwan, he is nae true Scotsman".

Okay, my accent needs work.

My point is that this analogy only works for accidental properties of the "Scotsman", for instance general honesty. To be a true Scotsman one should ideally be a descendent of a Gaelic-speaking family that had migrated from Dal Riada in the Dark Ages. More widely, we might include those families subject to the Scottish Crown as of the coronation of James VI Stewart (before he became James I of England).

On the moral and ethical dictates of Scottishness, the Scotsman belongs to an ethnic group and feels affinity to his native land. A Scotsman might indeed lie. But a true Scotsman would never tell a lie that betrayed the Scottish nation.

We can extend this to other groups which are practicing hypocrisy. Those "secular humanists" who make alliances with the population-control brand of environmentalist, or with Muslims, are not true humanists or (in the latter case) secularists.

Labels: ethics, secularism

posted by Zimri on 16:24 | link |

Cold heart

Christians like the Canadian who runs the Wintery Knight blog think that atheism is innately immoral and that atheists are atheists because they, too, are psychologically indisposed to decency. Wintery Knight doesn't say it outright; but when a blogger holds up Peter Atkins as a "spokesman" for atheism, and then turns around to his moral relativism, that is the conclusion he forces upon her readers.

(I started this in 18 October but couldn't post it until I'd laid out my explanation for why scientists don't like God... in their experiments.)

I don't have any brief for Atkins the moral relativist and I have no problem in saying that he is wrong. I am not even an atheist. But I used to be one; and I remain allied with atheists on every issue related to secularism and support for science. That's still the case even after reading this hit piece. We're about to find out why...

The thesis, "atheists are inherently amoral", is testable. I propose that crime is the physical implementation of a man's immorality. We'll restrict the subjects to adult males of sound mind, and compare the sets "Japan" and "Louisiana". Japan has a secular culture; Louisiana does not. Now, let's compare crime rates between Japan and Louisiana. Q., E., f'n D.

How did Wintery Knight fail? His argument associates two separate groups ("atheists" and "the immoral"). It is an ad hominem attack against all atheists through Atkins.

Wintery Knight moves on to another philosopher, Thomas Nagel, who said that "I don't want there to be a God". He didn't ask Nagel why. Scientists have answers; as explained below, if you let God into an experiment here, you have to do it everywhere else and that way lies Pakistan. Some atheists may be nothing more than nihilist punks; but Nagel is a philosopher of science, and has personal reasons for excluding God which have nothing to do with a wicked life of hedonism.

So, why does Wintery Knight pick on atheists? I don't think he's generally evil; I don't see him picking on, say, Jews or the "First Nations". As far as I'm aware he just sees atheists as enemies he wants to crush by any means fair and foul. Maybe he's insecure.

Maybe he should be insecure. There is a stronger case that Wintery Knight's brand of Christianity creates immorality. Wintery Knight arguments are endemic on the Internet. I don't think any of the Christians making such claims have ever lost a night's sleep over their own dishonest methods. Cheating is hunky dory if it's for Jesus. The right sort of cheat gets into Paradise. The wrong sort of honest man ... doesn't.

Those who point out their flaws (and not just atheists) annoy this sort of Christian. But here too, such Christians don't lose any sleep over the thought of a Richard Dawkins (say) getting shut out. They don't think "hey - this God character, he's pretty far along that ol' autistic spectrum". Oh no; they're quite looking forward to an afterlife without Dawkins. (Some of them also believe in eternal hellfire, so they've got masturbatory voyeuristic sadism working for them as well. I'm giving Wintery Knight the benefit of the doubt there though.)

Labels: enemies, science, secularism

posted by Zimri on 15:48 | link |

Teaching creationism

Now that we've identified intelligent-design as a Socratic movement, it remains to explain why it doesn't belong in a science class.

The argument of Intelligent Design is metaphysical. A metaphysic is an axiom, a means of proving rather than the means itself. ID starts with the concept of an "irreducible" complexity, that just because we don't know if a complexity may have value (as something else) if reduced, that it is evidence for Something Else At Work. The IDer says it's the Christian God; the atomist might say "in an infinity of possible universes...". Neither is testable and neither can belong in the set of "science".

Scientists find the idea of a Cthulhu from beyond the stars meddling in this universe to be a horror. This inevitably follows from the principle that every proposal has to be testable in nature, and the definition of "Cthulhu" as an entity which follows extranatural rules. Pace C.S. Lewis, scientists cannot afford miracles; if Cthulhu can come here to create life, then It can also screw with the laws of physics. In that case, any deviation from theory can be explained by Cthulhu. Faith inductively reaches the point where there are no laws in science. (Or, to put it in libertarian terms: divine intervention is the "public option" of science.) We can see the results in Pakistan, whose science textbooks say that chemistry works "if Allah wills". It was Aristotle who formalised what had long been an unease of divinity among the scientists, into an ethic; but it took until Francis Bacon to get the process right.

A moderate Conservative, like Socrates, won't care too much about which theory of origins is taught (as long as it's not too weird) - but no Conservative can accept a theory which excludes the divine. The Conservative wants moral instruction and s/he thinks you need a personal God to give it. That is why the "nothing but mammals" meme is so common on ID proponent websites. That is why Ben Stein drew a line from Darwin to Hitler. That even explains why "intelligent design" keeps away from Genesis. Conservatives see that science demands an ethic but not a morality, and so they distrust it. They might make allowances for nerds, but for normal ("neurotypical"?) people they want to replace it with piety.

There is no way to teach science that a believer in miracles can accept. That explains Conservative opposition to it. Fortunately for science education in America: most of our Conservatives don't take their morals and metaphysics to their logical conclusion, and most of our science teachers practice taqiyya in their dealings with the PTA.

Labels: conservatives, science, secularism

posted by Zimri on 15:01 | link |

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Why freedom?

Conservatives, if they argue for freedom (as American Conservatives do), tend to justify it as a gift from God which no man may alienate. Liberals take God away and then proceed to alienate people of their freedom. Is this inevitable - are secularists bound to be crushers of peoples' dreams?

I think not. There are two arguments I can come up with, which support individual liberty against serfdom. This should work even for secularists.

Ayn Rand had one: morality can be constructed from the axiom “human life == good”. Liberty allows humans to live their lives; oppression does not. We might call this the mathematician’s libertarianism. It’s kind of... cold, but that’s Ayn Rand for you.

There’s also the school of thought that people have two innate drives: to avoid being crushed under someone else’s boot, and to be the person crushing others under your own boot. Libertarians understand that there are a limited number of job openings for boot-crusher. They also understand that even if they got to be one of the boot-crushers, they would no longer be able to enjoy the society of their peers; it’s a life of fear. So, liberty is better because it’s just easier and more fun to live that way.

I used to believe the former but I am leaning to the latter these days.

Labels: liberty, misanthropy, secularism

posted by Zimri on 16:40 | link |

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Proteaniety

I should disclose, in the context of the post below, that I'd not seen Jeff Goldstein as being on my side for some time even before this year (for instance, the Newdow affair; he sided against), and going through his archives... I see no reason to change that assessment.

For instance, the snark on Intelligent Design this April: "Or, can’t we just all get along? Because if not, so help me, people: Locusts!" The April post had a link. Surely the source would explain how creationists and biologists could "get along" ...?

Sadly, no! (As they say.) The source was not all Jeff G pretended it was. The source separated evolution from biogenesis and said of intelligent-design (accurately) "it’s not scientifically falsifiable, first of all, which means it isn’t a scientic theory, regardless of how vehemently the anthropocentic proponents of irreducible complexity insist it is". "Irreducible complexity" is precisely the argument of god-of-the-gaps intelligent design. So which is it - is intelligent design something that can "get along" with biology in a classroom? or is it something that needs to stay out of that classroom? DOES NOT COMPUTE [ERROR] [ERROR] [ERROR]

When I see a disconnect like that, I have to go look at the context of the piece which created the disconnect - that is, of the April post. This was the morning after the Protein Wisdom attack on LGF and on its then commenters (including me), for being overly solicitous of Obama in his eyes. In that context, his "locust" comment was another you're-being-obsessed concern-troll leveled at LGF, of which the latter site then had too many.

The Jeff G of the source comment (assuming he were consistent) would have praised Charles Johnson's recent posts on the topic. At least he would have approved Johnson's posts concerning Texas (and Louisiana); the intelligent-design crowd down here want to neuter classes of evolution, even before anyone gets to life's "first cause". The Jeff G of this April doesn't care.

Jeff G is also not bothered about theological creeds slipped into our patriotic standards, although that insouciance is more longstanding. I've opposed his de minimis poo-poo'ing almost since I first found his blog (the link I posted there has gone bad, so you will need to go here). "De minimis" means, it's something I've got to "lighten up" on. That's bullshit. What about the people who fight to put this crap into the so-called "public square" - how about they start lightening up? Since the lightening-up only goes one way, this has to be about something else.

That something else, and his dissonance over intelligent-design, is simply that Jeff G has chosen a side. That side happens to have a lot of Conservatives in it. He is not going to tell them anything they do not want to hear. He has sacrificed his objectivity and, on the subject of the church and state particularly, I question whether he is even speaking his true mind.

Since Jeff G appears to disapprove when people give a guy the benefit of the doubt, I'm sure he'll appreciate it when I don't bother for his sake: Mr Goldstein is a talent wasted in ideological hack-work.

P.S. / UPDATE: Barrett Brown of True/Slant has reported his own experience at PW.

Labels: conservatives, secularism

posted by Zimri on 18:11 | link |

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Jurisprudence v. secularism

Conservatives in the USA claim that they support "strict constructionism" and "original intent" in a reading of the American Constitution. I've found a place where they contradict.

I've posted here and elsewhere a belief that "under God" / "In God We Trust" ceremonial deism amounts to a Congressional establishment of religion at the Federal level. This is a "strict constructionist" standpoint.

However, that standpoint need not have been the "original intent" of even the near-Voltairean Jefferson. No-one in the late 1700s had Clue One about the nature of this 13.7 billion year old universe, of this 4,567 million year old planet, and mankind's 100s-thousand year sojourn upon that. Atheism wasn't intellectually feasible in the 1700s; a strict secularist at the time would have been either a genius with a LOT of faith in the science of his day, or else insane.

Ceremonial Deism, as a 1700s lowest-common-denominator, has safeguards in the form of historical precedent against growing into full-blown Calvinism etc. So, we can agree to disagree on whether Ceremonial Deism must count as a religion.

(Originally posted as an appendix to New Zeal. I still won't tolerate the de minimis argument: "get a grip" etc. But that's out of scope and I've dealt with it elsewhere.)

UPDATE 11/19: "Strict constructionism" is how Western civil law works. I've since written on that here.

However one could counter-argue that the hermeneutic (interpretation-ethic) of Constitutional law is more akin to that of Islam: appropriate to the holy writ delivered to a Prophet. In that analogy original intent is the analogue of Prophetic tafsir. The notion is at least internally consistent and falsifiable by natural means, and for that I won't dismiss it out of hand. I insist only that we are clear about our axioms.

Labels: conservatives, constitution, secularism

posted by Zimri on 17:03 | link |

Monday, January 02, 2006

de minimis curo

I've been running out of stuff to type about. (I think I've typed as much as anyone could type, or care to read, about that Emperor Leo fiasco of the 460s AD.)

There's one essay I've written, but it's one of those essays which loses friends and influences no-one. That essay was about why I use insults to handle Outsider Pre-Human Intelligent Design advocates, or "OPHIDians" for short. (I can't use "IDiots" as a pejorative because "Intelligent Design" is broad enough a category to include humanity as the designer.) But I was just going to end up insulting moderates, so I've been holding back on it.

But I can use this down-time to let loose on one set of moderates who are getting my goat right now. They're the sort who use the term "de minimis" to denote a judicial decision which is wrong but bearable. It refers to "de minimis non curat lex": on minimal things the law cares not.

"minimis" is one of those passive-voice weasel words which our professors always used to tell us not to use. To whom is it "minimal"? Really what they mean is that it's bearable ... to them. It's not so bearable to us; or, even if it is, it comes without a promise to refrain from imposing less bearable burdens upon us in future.

Ditto Eugene Rostow's weird proposition that we already assume an established religion, not founded by Congress, called "Ceremonial Deism". The holy synod of Ceremonial Deism is the US Government; they can define some statements of dogma (one God, masculine, creator of all, approver of state policy) and then the dogma can't be challenged - because, as an expression of Ceremonial Deism, the dogma isn't religious by definition.

Anyway, if this stuff is so "minimal" and "ceremonial", why is everyone making such a fuss when we suggest it be taken out? If being "under God" didn't matter to Congress as of 1954, why did it vote to push it in? If something is meant to be "minimal" and "ceremonial" to party A, yet is so important to party B, it stands to reason that this thing is not "minimal" after all.

It's really important that they get the jizya, but if we object to giving it then we need to lighten up.

Humbug.

Labels: secularism

posted by Zimri on 20:16 | link |

Thursday, December 29, 2005

Public-squaring a circle

I cannot abide unethical use of language. And here is one that always bothers me: "public", and its clichéd extension "public square", to refer to extensions of federal government.

Did the Reagan Revolution teach you @#$%s nothing? "PUBLIC". DOES. NOT. MEAN. "GOVERNMENT". When a demagogue elides the two, that's when I reach for my revolver.

(The primal scream above was a paraphrase of Meg Wallace in A Wrinkle in Time, "equal does not mean alike". Good anti-totalitarian message by the way.)

P.S. and UPDATE 10/22/2009. "Public square" and "public option". Hoist. Petard.