Misanthropic Californian

This morning BoingBoing posted this, a fun game called “Hitler or Fallwell,” where you look at quotes and try to figure out which of these two men said them. I don’t even know what to make of the guy, because he was just that out there. He was like a culmination of all of the worst kinds of bigotry and hate ever perpetrated in the name of American Christianity. The Wikiquote page on him has plenty of icky quotes.

Also, yesterday at Borders I made the mistake of looking at the new releases section (a mistake in that there are lots of political books mixed in with the rest), and I saw a book called “Freedmnomics.” The book presents itself as a rebuttal to Freakanomics. I thought “fair enough,” but then the bullet points inside the book’s jacket were ALL standard Republican talking points, except for “Why the controversial assertions made in the trendy book Freakonomics are almost entirely wrong.” Lott’s main specialty has been putting together research (which many, including the authors of Freakonomics have questioned) that indicates that higher gun ownership leads to less crime. (Though according to this blogger, Freakonomics’ citations of such aren’t quite right). The fact that Freedomnomics came out after his lawsuit against Levitt makes it even more suspect. The real problem, however, is that it’s part of a huge genre of books that are written to be read only by people who are firmly at one side or the other of the political spectrum. I know these books make money, so the problem is not so much the books themselves as the cultural factors that allow them to exist, but either way it’s a problem, and the profitability of publishing these books leads to more and more of them coming out.

This blog post, which includes a clip from 20/20 about a girl who was ostracized, harassed, and falsely accused of all sorts of things just for publicly being an atheist, helped me articulate something I’ve been trying to put into words for a while now.

A comment by shalimar says “I, for one, do not know how atheists are not sad, depressed horrible people.” This comes back to what I mentioned before about how the idea that some Christians can’t conceive of morality without religion scares the hell out of me.

The second formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative says: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.” Human morality is based on the idea that human beings have an inherent value, and as a human being I have no problem agreeing with that statement. If enough people act this way, everyone benefits. This principle exists independent of god, and works from one god to the next. (Except for the ones with which it doesn’t work at all, but those are best avoided).

In Buddhism, the Eightfold Path includes “Right Action” and “Right Intention.” In the Buddhist view, virtuous behavior is a means to becoming a better person — part of the path of self-refinement that leads to enlightenment and cessation of suffering. (Buddhism has a specific meaning for “suffering,” which is a very rough translation of a term from Pali). However, the Buddha was clear that it wasn’t enough to merely act in a moral fashion. Being good just because it would provide you with some reward in your next reincarnation (he was also critical of the Hindu notion of reincarnation, but didn’t discard reincarnation outright) is not enough.

So, my views on morality in the absence of divinity:

1. Moral behavior is inherently beneficial to mankind.
2. Virtuous behavior is an end in itself, both for oneself and others.

What constitutes moral behavior is probably going to be the hard part.

Think of this post as four very short posts in one. 

As cynical as I am at times, the upcoming election is shaping up to be very interesting, to say the least. In the primaries at least, we’re actually seeing (1) things that aren’t as cut-and-dry as Red Vs. Blue, and (2) the internet being a tool to empower average people. Mike Gravel and Ron Paul are both manifestations of this. These two men were catapulted from obscurity into the debates for their respective parties in part by their online supporters demanding it. Moreover, both of them are standing for what they believe in rather than simply touting the party line. I don’t know how they’d stack up against the other candidates in terms of being a good president, but they’re still a refreshing change. When everyone else was playing nice, Mike Gravel had the stones to straight out say, “These people scare me!” Ron Paul styles himself as an old-school Republican, so much so that he advocates non-intervention in world affairs. (I don’t know that I’d agree, but at least it would make the two candidates easier to tell apart).

Likewise, this New York Times article was a refreshing thing to read. We’ve all gotten used to thinking of conservatives in general as being anti-evolution and dead-set against stem cell research, regardless of the benefits for real living human beings. In the Republican presidential debate three out of the ten candidates said they didn’t believe in evolution. Apparently some conservatives understand that disparaging evolution makes them appear to be blatantly anti-intellectual. Still if only 3 out of 10 presidential candidates are anti-evolution, why do we currently have to put up with a White House that’s evidently 100% for intelligent design?

On a similar note, Bill Maher said basically what I was thinking but couldn’t articulate half as eloquently about France. The country is far from perfect and not without its issues, but amongst other things it has an excellent health care system, and its presidential candidates’ personal lives are regarded as irrelevant to whether they’d make good leaders. Next to that, not supporting the Iraq war isn’t exactly much of a strike against the country. Of course, it helps that all the French people I’ve ever met (admittedly not many, and all people who’d been living in the U.S. for a while) have been pretty cool. That may not be the best way to judge things, but at this point I suspect I’ve met more actual French people in real life than Bill O’Reilly has.

Lastly, the online news sites I frequent have been showing a lot of articles about people advocating impeachment of Bush and/or Cheney. I have no idea whether or not this is a good idea, or even a feasible one. One thing that I agree with though is that what Bush is doing with signing statements is questionable to say the least. There are about a dozen examples of bills intended to protect individual rights and maintain government transparentcy where he added a statement that more or less said “Unless the president wants/doesn’t want to to protect us from the terrorists.” I heard somewhere that he’s made more signing statements that ALL of the other U.S. presidents put together, more than 750 of them. I was of the impression that that’s not how it’s supposed to work. When it comes to bills from congress, the president either signs or vetos them, and signing statements are commentaries and opinions with no legal force behind them per se.

Lately I’ve been seeing lots of articles on atheism on the news aggregator sites I frequent. I’m not an atheist myself, but I’ve been leaning closer to it lately, and I have atheist friends as well. They are among the most decent human beings I know. The army officially considers prejudice against atheists to be okay, and the President thinks that atheists can’t be patriots. These arguments always annoy the hell out of me, and they tend to be obfuscated by the existence of examples of profoundly bad behavior by supposed representatives of either side. Not a few anti-atheists like to cite the regimes of Stalin and Hitler as examples of atheism being the basis of tyrrany and slaughter. This to me is intellectually dishonest, on par with equating Christianity with Fred Phelps. The influential atheists today are at least as compassionate as any Christian you’d care to name, and I think it’s safe to say a distate for religion is the only thing they have in common with those historical villains. I wouldn’t hold a Dawkins-style atheist accountable for the actions of oppressive communist governnents any more than I’d hold a modern-day Lutheran responsible for the crusades (or abortion clinic bombings). This analysis of statistics of nonbelief in various countries draws a very sharp distinction between “coercive atheism” of a totalitarian regime and atheism that has emerged naturally in a democratic post-industrial nation.

Atheists are distrusted by most Americans, and at times are even targets of bigotry. My personal experience has been that how far you can trust a given person has absolutely nothing to do with their states faith or lack thereof. Whether we’re talking about theists or atheists, there are people who are jerks about the contrast between their beliefs and those of others, as though the world that already holds more than 6 billion people is somehow too small to hold multiple philosophical views. I for one base how much I trust someone on their actual conduct.

I’ve been wondering why it is that theism of one sort or another is basically the default. People have reasons for their faith and even incentives (the role of a church is far more social than people seem to realize, for one thing), but there is no proof per se. When Christians argue against atheism they seem to either beg the question or try to pick apart the opposition (which for them usually means evolution) rather than doing anything to substantially prop up their own views.

While I don’t know if I’ll ever stop being agnostic, so far the religion that makes the most sense to me is Buddhism. While there may well be some part of the world where you can find a Buddhist yelling at people that they need to accept the Four Noble Truths, it has a (percieved) lack of shouty jerks in its favor. It also plays nice with science better than any other religion I know of. Buddhist views of the nature of existence (“emptiness“) and self (as an aggregate of processes) are very compatible with our modern understanding of how the cosmos works, and the Buddha himself largely regarded “supernatural” matters to be secondary to the pursuit of enlightenment/happiness in the here and now. And, incidentally, morality (“right action,” “right intention,” “compassion for all beings”) are of paramount importance in Buddhism.

Why can’t we all just get along? Seriously, why the fuck not?