What really happened to Jesus?

Easter came early this year, which is my excuse for why this blog post about it is late. In accordance with tradition, I made hot cross buns on the Friday and waited until Sunday before consuming any Easter eggs. You might think that I wouldn’t have much time for a tradition based on something I no longer believe, but somehow the buns and eggs both taste more meaningful this way. Also, this semester I’m taking notes for a New Testament Greek class, who are reading their way through the Book of Revelation. So I can’t help speculating, from time to time, on what may have really happened one Passover in Roman Jerusalem to inspire the world’s most popular faith.

Thanks to my personal history, I know a lot of people whose sense of self-worth and identity hangs on the answer to that question. Indeed, they themselves would go further – their eternal destiny hangs on it. That being the case, my putting forward an alternative answer might be seen as something of a red rag to a bull. What do I hope to achieve by doing this, except to make those people angry? Well, for one thing, I don’t think I should have to shut up about my own opinions just because they differ from other people’s. Like I said, personal history. I researched this for over a year in my early twenties, not to annoy people but because I needed to know the truth. I wrote it up rather hurriedly and incoherently and put it on my first website, which may or may not still be knocking around somewhere. It’s important to me too.

I no longer believe in either God or miracles. This necessarily implies that I think people who do believe in God and miracles are wrong. It does not imply, and I want to be very clear about this, that I think those people are fools, or dishonest, or cowards. There is a school of thought among atheists that religious people will sooner acknowledge the wrongness of their beliefs if we just mock, belittle, and insult them enough – the beliefs, not the people, but that distinction blurs all too easily, especially on the internet. I think those atheists are also wrong.

However, that doesn’t mean I hold with the opposing school of atheist thought either – that we should never criticize religious beliefs because they are so important to the people who believe them. Speaking as a former believer, that’s a deeply patronizing attitude. “Oh, of course we who are mature rational adults can handle the world without gods, miracles, or an afterlife, but these poor little lambs couldn’t cope with the nasty truth. We must be gentle with them.” That might apply to anyone in limited circumstances, such as bereavement; as a classifier, it’s insulting.

Atheists of the first school are often referred to these days as “atheist fundamentalists”. Mostly, I don’t think this is helpful. Often it seems “fundamentalist” means nothing more than “anyone who thinks it’s a matter of fact whether God exists or not” (or any other religious proposition), which tars an awful lot of moderate religious people with the “fundamentalist” brush.

That being said, there is a cast of mind I remember from my Christian past and recognise in some atheist discourse now. It’s related to what has recently been dubbed “virtue-signalling”. Basically, you take a question that your group takes a firm stance on, and you take a slightly further-out version of that stance, and you proclaim it loudly so that if your fellow group-members disagree they look like a bunch of compromisers. Then someone else steps still further out, and of course you have to agree or you look like a compromiser. And so on.

Humans are human regardless of our beliefs, and this behaviour is common to us all. From the outside it looks either competitive – “I’m more Christian / atheistic than you!” – or fawning – “I really do belong in the Christian / atheist club with you guys!” But from inside it’s often prompted by sincere enthusiasm, with a wash of pity for those unlucky enough not to have seen the light. I see it just as often in groups that I happen to agree with as groups that I don’t. I presume I indulge in it myself more often than my own (equally humanly common) self-serving cognitive biases allow me to recognise.

Among atheists (this is where all this becomes relevant to the Easter question) this insidership-signalling sometimes takes the form of a conspiracy theory. Not only was Jesus of Nazareth not the Messiah, the Son of God, the Saviour of Mankind, the Prince of Peace, the King of Kings, or any of the rest of it – he didn’t even exist! He was made up out of whole cloth by the early Church, or St Paul, or the Council of Nicaea, or some such. Take that, Christians!

Why eugenics wouldn’t work

Further to my previous post, my friend Wolfboy wrote this in the comments:

I also detect a leftover whiff of eugenics in this line of thought – the idea that people who are “bad” represent a taint we need to clear from the gene pool. That seems to be in conflict with modern understanding of how genes work. I may be wrong here, but my understanding was that modern research showed that genes get turned on and off by environmental stimuli. If that’s the case then any genetic predisposition to be an awful person is better handled by stopping it from being triggered (by looking after people better in general) than by trying to breed it out.

Eugenics. That is presumably why the original inquiry was about the prevalence of sterilize-bad-parents views specifically “in the atheist / rationalist community”. Eugenics, the idea of breeding humans for qualities like intelligence or athletic performance, was proposed by Francis Galton as a practical application of the theories of his cousin Charles Darwin. Darwin himself went along with the idea, although never enthusiastically, and with reservations about the social justice implications. The support it enjoyed for the next seventy-odd years came from places all along the left-right political spectrum, but almost entirely from the atheist-materialist side of the religious divide. That is quite possibly the basis for the (otherwise absurd) notion that the Nazis were a scientific and rationalistic bunch.

The Nazis showed the world what it would take to actually implement a eugenics programme, and since then the idea has been anathema among people of conscience. And rightly so, but when a problematic idea or practice becomes unthinkable within a culture, it doesn’t get cut out cleanly. “Not only will we not do this any more,” people decide, “we won’t even go near it.” The classic example (see Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, and yes, I know I cite that book a lot) is the odd little superstitions that have grown up around knives in European culture, such as not eating with them. Europeans used to use big sharp knives for all sorts of things, notably settling arguments. In Māori culture there are several prohibitions, like “never sit on a table”, which put together underline the point that people are not food. And in modern political discourse, ever since World War II people have been unduly chary of applying genetic science to Homo sapiens.

Reason is not the property of the West

The University of Otago’s second semester ends in October. I knew there were Summer School classes in January and February, because I’ve taken notes in them. I never knew there were also classes in November and December. But here I am. Turns out there’s a five-week course on titled “Introduction to the Māori World”, and one of the students taking it wants notes. My first class was last Tuesday. The lecture was about fundamental concepts in Māori culture, such as tapu and mana, and the polytheistic cosmology which underpins them.

A quick summary of that class. Tapu is of course the origin of the English word taboo, but it’s pronounced differently – both syllables are short and the stress is on the first one. Tapu is the presence or influence of an atua, a god. The gods are present everywhere, and one must treat them with deference and caution. But sometimes it is necessary to lift the tapu so that we humans can go about our ordinary lives without having to worry about it. Then, it becomes noa, which is simply the converse of tapu.

Which gods? On Tuesday we were introduced to four: Papa-tū-ā-nuku, Mother Earth; Tāne-mahuta, god of light and life and the forest; Tangaroa, god of all water, including the water in people’s bodies; and Ranginui, the Sky, Papa-tū-ā-nuku’s lover, who was separated from her by Tāne-mahuta to create the world of light. The gods are the ancestors of all life, including human beings. Most iwi (chiefdom-nations, though the word is usually translated “tribe”) trace their genealogy back to Tāne-mahuta. The chiefs belong to the elder line in each case.

Tangaroa’s dominion over water seems to be responsible for the tapu of blood, which in turn explains why women have a special power over tapu. A man can lift tapu by saying an incantation (a karakia) or using water, but a woman can lift it simply by virtue of being a woman, because women handle blood every month. When you enter or leave a marae – the space built at the hub of every Māori community to house formal gatherings – you pass through a gateway that symbolizes a woman’s legs, so that you don’t bring in any tapu you may have picked up on the outside.

Having just come back from Japan, I can’t help noticing the parallels with Shintō. There again, the kami are immanent in water, earth, and forests. Again, the kami are ancestors rather than creators of the human race, and the Imperial Family is the elder line of descent. And again you have that detail of the symbolic gateway, the torī in front of the shrine, through which you enter or leave the presence of divine power.

But there’s also a big difference. Japan is much more centralized than traditional Māori society, and you might expect to see that reflected in their religions – that Māoritanga would have lots of local spirits and Shintō would have a few big, important gods, like the pre-Christian Greek or Norse pantheons. In fact it’s the other way around. Each mountain, lake, river, and ancient tree in Japan has its own personal kami, but in tikanga Māori it is Tāne-mahuta in every patch of bush and Tangaroa in every body of water.

Mana is the other Māori word, besides tapu / taboo, that has been borrowed into English outside of New Zealand. Both syllables are short, so that to a New Zealand English speaker it sounds like “munna” – “monna” to an American. It’s been appropriated in crap fantasy books and games to denote a limiting resource for magic-users, like pixie-dust but slightly more badass. In fact mana is prestige, charisma, honour, dignity, authority; social power, not magical power. It’s about one’s standing with the gods. Duties and privileges in Māori culture are doled out entirely according to who has what kind of mana.

What are we escaping?

If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard from me in a while, it’s not the usual reason (i.e. procrastination plus Nearly Finished Syndrome) this time. It’s because I’m in Japan on the last day of my first ever overseas holiday, and I didn’t spend much of it sitting in hotel rooms typing. I have picked up enough of the language to compose a few simple sentences and say them, but I still need a lot of help understanding what other people are saying to me. So far I have not experienced anything like what people call “culture shock”. Maybe this is because, with my social disability, I have never found that my own culture makes all that much sense either.

I guess it’s the same principle as learning to pronounce other languages. People have commented with favourable surprise on how quickly I master the pronunciation of Norwegian and Finnish – my choir had a Scandinavian-themed concert recently. The secret is quite simple: English is not the centre. The sound of the Norwegian word meg (“me”), for instance, is halfway between the sound of the English words may and my. It is quite comfortable there. It is not trying to be one or the other, as if English vowels were the underlying structure and Norwegian vowels had to be propped up between them.

I’ve been here two weeks now, which obviously isn’t enough time to have gained any deep ethnographic insight into Japanese culture. Still, superficial as they are, I have found the cultural differences I’ve observed quite easy to adapt to, simply because I wasn’t assuming that the way things are done in New Zealand is the most sensible or obvious way to do them. For example, in Japan, aesthetic and artistic sensibilities aren’t felt to be unmanly. Why should they be? In New Zealand, a real man drinks crappy beer, watches rugby avidly, and is disgusted by any form of entertainment that requires more than a kindergarten education to understand. This is presented as a “low-key” or “easy-going” or, of course, “un-PC” way to live; in fact it’s aggressively policed with homophobic ridicule.

But it’s not a difference between Japanese and New Zealand culture that’s really grabbed my attention this last couple of weeks – it’s a similarity. New Zealand and Japan are both modern countries, with advertising and traffic lights and shopping malls and, in Japan’s case, public transport. And both have that quintessentially modern phenomenon: abundant fantasies about not being modern. In amongst its narrow high-rise boxes, Japan has magnificent temples and shrines and old market areas, all clearly preserved with close attention. In New Zealand, of course, an “old” building is at most Victorian, but we made the Lord of the Rings movies, and we like to go out into what little remains of our wilderness areas and pretend we’re conquering undiscovered territory.

An atheist reflects on death

I’ve mostly tried to keep my personal life out of this blog, because that’s what I use Facebook for. But this post was prompted by the recent, unexpected death of my friend Brent. Brent had cerebral palsy, which in his case limited his movement to his head and one arm, slurred his speech, and also affected his cognition. (I never heard the official diagnosis until his funeral on Wednesday.) We met through a volunteer outfit called FriendLink about eight years ago; since then we’ve had a weekly appointment to visit museums and art galleries and libraries in town to look at art or books together. I think he preferred the art, which allowed us to move around and meet people rather than sit in one place as we would with books. Brent was a sunny, sociable person who would say “Hi” to just about everyone we passed.

But he was also sensitive. He could tell if someone had had a bad day, and it would distress him. He would worry, if I coughed or sneezed, that I was “sick”. He commented on death and dying from time to time. Once I remarked that my cat was at the vet, and this reminded Brent that his dog had not long since gone to the vet and then, as he put it, gone to Heaven. He cried. Sometimes, he had questions I couldn’t answer. This past April there were WWI-related exhibits everywhere, and Brent asked me two or three times “Why do they have wars?” I doubt I’m the only person who’s been stumped by that question. Museum displays are often about people who lived a long time ago, and sometimes it would bother Brent that they were dead. He would say things like “I’m sorry to hear that,” or “Oh no, that’s terrible,” or “How did they die?” – the way one speaks of people who have just recently died, who still have people mourning them.

He was right, of course. Most of us partition off the people of the distant past in our minds. They were people, obviously, but we don’t think of them as people people. Well, when I say “we”, it differs between cultures – the dead seem to be much more present to Māori than they are to Pākehā, if my limited cross-cultural observations can be trusted – but there comes a point when we shrug it off. That was the olden days, what do you expect? But the reality is that every name fading in a dusty genealogical manuscript, every fragmentary human skeleton dug up from under two metres of sand, had someone somewhere who grieved over either their stilled body or their absence. Everybody has somebody to say goodbye to them. (Fortunately the dead cannot suffer from our dehumanizing them, making this probably the most benign instance of that disastrous human habit.)

The last time I saw Brent he was in hospital, but that wasn’t all that unusual given the impact his disability had on his health, so I was not remotely expecting the phone call the following morning telling me he had succumbed to a suspected stroke or heart attack some time between eleven and midnight. This kind of bad news takes a long time to go into your head. For those first few minutes I couldn’t tell you what I was feeling, because Brent’s departure left a gap in my mind that no feeling filled – though it did gradually fill up with grief over the rest of the day. I guess when people say they’re “blindsided” or “dumbfounded” or “numb” in the wake of tragedy, that’s what they’re talking about. And there is some part of my mind that still doesn’t quite believe it, thinking of things to talk about when we meet up as usual on Thursday. After all, that’s what I promised him the last time I saw him.

Why we don’t celebrate “straight pride”

A few days ago, around when the US Supreme Court made marriage equality constitutional, an old friend posted this on Facebook:

The quickest way to see the problem with this is to take the word “straight” each time it occurs in the image and replace it with “white”. There’s nothing wrong with being white any more than there is with being straight, but the phrase “white pride” is disturbing nonetheless, and for good reason. See, “black pride” and “queer pride” both have a history behind them: a history of disempowerment, marginalization, humiliation; a history of being “lesser” in the eyes of society. The “pride” movements are about defying that humiliation and that disempowerment, about refusing to be “lesser”. They’re about raising oneself up to the level of the white or straight majority and demanding to be treated like a fellow human being. Now, the white people and the straight people are already on the higher level, being treated as human beings; if they raise themselves higher than they already are, the result is that we once again have a two-tier society, with white / straight people on top and everyone else a step down. That’s why “straight pride” is a bad thing, even though being straight isn’t.

It’s entirely possible that this simply didn’t occur to my friend. It happens. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve hurt people or crossed boundaries without meaning to, I would be cringing in retrospective shame in a much fancier house. But intention, as I’ve been told a couple of those times, isn’t magic. Harm done by mistake is still harm. If someone stands on your toe completely by accident, it hurts just as much as if it was on purpose. You’ll still probably yell out in pain and ask them to move their foot. It’s not that whether they intended to hurt you doesn’t matter, but that it matters because of how it drives their response to your pain. Let’s suppose someone’s trodden on you; you’ve yelled “Ow! You’re on my toe!”; and they make one of the following possible responses. I think you’ll agree with me that only one of these is acceptable.

1. [hastily removes foot] “Oh! I’m so sorry! Are you badly hurt? I hope I haven’t broken anything. Can you walk? If it’s serious I’ll take you to the emergency doctor. I’m so sorry.”
2. [still standing on you] “Well, I didn’t do it with the intention of hurting you. It’s not my fault your foot got in my way. How dare you accuse me of being the kind of person who stomps on people’s toes on purpose! Maybe you need stronger shoes.”
3. [silence, aims another stomp at your toes]

Now let’s switch roles: you’ve stood on someone else’s foot by mistake. It’s natural to want them to be very clear that you are not in category C, so even people who are genuinely in category A usually mix in a lot of “I didn’t mean to!”s with their apologies. But if that’s your primary concern, and especially if you think that your innocent intentions excuse you from the effort of repairing the harm you’ve done, then – sorry – you are in category B.

Only I’m not sure that’s what’s actually going on here. Look again at the wording on the Straight Pride image: the writer thinks the widespread rejection of “straight pride” shows our society to be “upside-down” and “politically correct”. In discussions of sexual diversity, these are red flags that someone is in category C: that is, they act harmfully towards non-conforming genders and sexualities, if only in terms of public expression. Well, there are highly specific situations in which an otherwise harmful act is an appropriate response, and it’s my bet that the writer thought the Supreme Court decision was one of them. Some examples might be

• smacking a toddler away from a hot stove
• performing the Heimlich manoeuvre on someone who’s choking
• amputating a gangrenous foot

These acts all have something fairly obvious in common: a context of imminent, severe danger, which justifies drastic steps to counteract it. Imagine smacking a toddler away from a harmless cupboard, or doing the Heimlich on someone who’s not choking, or amputating a healthy foot. It wouldn’t be enough to plead that you sincerely believed there was danger; you have to have a compelling reason to believe there was danger. Precisely because you’re trying to do the right thing and help somebody, it’s crucial to get the facts right. Granted, a “straight pride” meme doesn’t do very serious harm compared to some other things people do to those who don’t conform to gender norms; but those other things are motivated by the same attitude, which therefore needs to be confronted wherever it appears.

Only, when I say “attitude”, you’re picturing someone nasty, right? My mental image is of the boys at my schools who called me “poofter” and “fag” and various other synonyms (pretty sure they weren’t detecting my actual bisexuality, which I was in ironclad denial about; I just fit their stereotype of what a gay person was like). But there’s a reason why no-one admits to being one of the Nasty People, and it’s the paragraph above this one. Occasionally, harmful acts are genuinely justified by the context – and the sincere belief that one of those occasions has arrived is the state of mind in which approximately 90% of violence is committed. Mostly, when people hurt other people, it’s through trying to do the right thing. Hatred, from the inside, feels like “I am a good person and this has to stop.”

Which is why I am not remotely impressed by this webcomic, which also crossed my Facebook feed in the day or two after the Supreme Court decision. A guy called Adam Ford is opposed to gay marriage, and what’s more he thinks gay sex is evil, but he wants gay people to be very clear that he doesn’t hate them, he loves them. What really gets me is when he insists that he is not trying to do this:

but rather this:

See what’s wrong here? Ford, here represented by the guy on the left, believes certain things about God – at minimum, that (s)he exists, that (s)he disapproves of gay sex and gay marriage, that her/his approval is a sound basis for moral judgement. The generic gay person represented by the guy on the right presumably disbelieves at least one of these things. Ford presents no argument whatever in favour of any of them. So the second cartoon still amounts to no more than “My way (of thinking about God) is better than your way.” As the comic proceeds Ford starts citing the Bible, but again with no explanation of why the Bible would be a better moral guide than, say, the works of Shakespeare. His claims still don’t exceed “My way (of assessing the value of the Bible) is better than your way.”

For all his self-professed love of gay people, Ford offers no assurance that they will not be stigmatized, dehumanized, or made “lesser” if they stop having sex with the people they’re attracted to, like he wants. All he has to offer is a feeling. Here’s the thing, though: I don’t think love is the ultimate social value. I think trust is. I only need a dozen or so people in my life to love me; I need to be able to trust everyone I meet. I need to be sure they won’t harm me. If their interests clash with mine, which is what happens when you put independent individuals in a space with finite resources, I need to be able to enter a rational conversation with them to resolve the clash. There might be a good reason why they should get their way and I shouldn’t, but if so then both of us will be able to see that reason, because the truth is the truth for everybody. Whether it’s a selfish reason or a selfless one isn’t the point.

We humans have evolved part of the way to understanding the importance of trust. That’s where our moral instincts come from in the first place. Unfortunately, we’re adapted for survival in the world of the first 90% of human existence, which was like The Walking Dead with animal predators instead of zombies. You live in a small group of close friends and family, and if you meet strangers you can never be certain they aren’t planning to kill you and take your stuff – or on a hair-trigger in case you were planning to kill them and take their stuff.

We therefore have a flaw woven into our moral sense, which says that only people who do things our way deserve full respect as human beings. Except we don’t think of it as “our way”, or we’d see what an unjust attitude this is. We think of it as the “proper” way, like the three-year-old who, told to say “Spasibo” to a Russian visitor who was giving her an apple, haughtily replied “No. I will say ‘Thank you’ properly.” And sometimes, we can become morally outraged when people do things “improperly”, and harm them – all the while thinking we’re being especially upright. This is not conducive to mutual trust. Morality must be rational, or it is prejudice.

Atheism is not a vaccine against bigotry

A couple of days ago in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a guy called Craig Hicks walked into the house shared by his newly-married neighbours Deah Barakat and Yusor Mohammad and shot them and Mohammad’s visiting sister Razan, killing all three. Hicks’ immediate inspiration for the act seems to have been a parking dispute. Would he have done the same over a disagreement with his white neighbours, his neighbours with north-western European names, or his neighbours whose ancestors had lived more than two generations in the US? If so, it would break the nauseously familiar pattern that so far his crime seems to instantiate. Us-and-Them thinking cannot be uprooted from the human psyche; all the more urgent that its shoots be plucked off at first sight.

There’s a twist. As well as their skin colour, ethnicity, and provenance, the victims were all Muslim. That’s not the twist. Hicks advocates right-wing politics and opposes gun control. That’s not the twist either. The twist is that Hicks is an atheist, indeed a “New Atheist”, a devotee of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. It’s looking like his atheism was part of the parcel that led him to think shooting someone is OK if they’re Muslim and nick your parking space.

New Atheism is one of multiple crowds that I hang out on the fringes of. I’m not a big fan of Harris or Hitchens and my opinion of Dawkins has taken a pounding in the last couple of years, but I still admire Daniel C. Dennett and Steven Pinker, and I applaud Stephen Fry’s stance on God in the recent viral YouTube video. I could distance myself from Hicks by doing some Us-and-Themmery of my own – redneck! gun-nut! libertarian! patriarch! – but that wouldn’t be honest. His crime has no bearing on the existence or otherwise of God, but it has punctured the protective bubble of self-praise that New Atheists have blown up around ourselves, part of which was that New Atheists don’t blow that sort of bubble.

So here goes. No, violent aggression against people seen as “other” did not come into the world with religion. Most of today’s major religions became major by harnessing it, but it predates them and, if Hicks is anything to go by, will survive their demise. No, rejecting supernatural beliefs does not make you immune to it. Yes, reason is one of the antidotes, but for that to work you have to commit yourself to the use of reason as your sole means of persuasion. Using the word “reason” as a badge of superiority won’t cut it.

Yes, Islam is a religion, not a race. Yes, some of Islam’s sternest critics are former Muslims. Yes, they include leftists like Maryam Namazie as well as neocons like Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Yes, one can leave Islam through mental effort. No, that doesn’t make it OK to harass Muslims for being Muslims. Yes, everyone should have the right to free speech. No, that doesn’t mean Muslims have to stop complaining when people trash-talk them. Actually that’s kind of the opposite of what it means, when you think about it. Yes, false beliefs can be harmful. Yes, clinging to beliefs beyond the warrant of the evidence is therefore dangerous. No, that doesn’t mean it should be punished, except insofar as rational debate constitutes punishment.

No, Islam does not contain qualitatively nastier ideas than Christianity, Judaism, or Hinduism. Yes, there is historical contingency as well as present geopolitics in the tangle of contributing factors that help explain why majority-Muslim countries nowadays are trailing the rest of the world on violence and human rights. Yes, particular readings of the Qur’an are part of the tangle. No, there is no sense in which they are “core beliefs” of Islam but the phobia of Jews, heresy, and Satan were not “core beliefs” of Christianity well into modern times.

Yes, 9/11 and the Charlie Hebdo shootings were committed in the name of Islam. No, that doesn’t mean every single Muslim is more violent than every single non-Muslim, even by a tiny degree. It means, at most, that (at present) the proportion of people who are violent is slightly larger in Muslim populations than in other populations. If that justifies shooting Muslims, then the same logic mandates the extermination of men; the prevalence of violence among men is orders of magnitude greater than the prevalence of violence among women (and chronically so). No, Muslim immigrants into non-Muslim countries are not all sleeper agents of the global caliphate waiting for a signal to convert everyone by the sword. Not even mostly.

No, Muslims are not responsible for what other Muslims do just because they’re Muslims. That Enlightenment humanism stuff? That stuff we talk about, where you get judged by your individual actions, not the characteristics of a set that you happen to be a member of? That applies here too.

The “context” doesn’t always make it better

When Libby Anne of Love, Joy, Feminism wrote this post about being an atheist but not working against religion, I started drafting a reply. But that was three weeks ago, and other things have taken up my attention in the meantime. Then Sam Harris posted this complaint about having his words (from The End of Faith) taken out of context in an image meme. And he provided what he considered to be the necessary context. The thing is, the context doesn’t actually make him look much better. I do think that religion in general is something that should be opposed, and some day I’ll get around to explaining why. But it is much more important that Sam Harris’s kind of atheism be opposed. I’ll give you the full passage, with the offending sentence in bold. Content note: violence, casual reference to torture, fear tactics targeting a non-Western religion.

The power that belief has over our emotional lives appears to be total. For every emotion that you are capable of feeling, there is surely a belief that could invoke it in a matter of moments. Consider the following proposition:
Your daughter is being slowly tortured in an English jail.
What is it that stands between you and the absolute panic that such a proposition would loose in the mind and body of a person who believed it? Perhaps you do not have a daughter, or you know her to be safely at home, or you believe that English jailors are renowned for their congeniality. Whatever the reason, the door to belief has not yet swung upon its hinges.
The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and other Western powers are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and to innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.

Note on the above:
We do not have to bring the membership of al-Qaeda “to justice” merely because of what happened on Sept 11, 2001. The thousands of men, women, and children who disappeared in the rubble of the World Trade Centre are beyond our help – and successful acts of retribution, however satisfying they may be to some people, will not change this fact. Our subsequent actions in Afghanistan and elsewhere are justified because of what will happen to more innocent people if members of al-Qaeda are allowed to go on living by the light of their peculiar beliefs. The horror of Sept 11 should motivate us, not because it provides us with a grievance that we now must avenge, but because it proves beyond any possibility of doubt that certain twenty-first-century Muslims actually believe the most dangerous and implausible tenets of their faith.

Sam Harris, The End of Faith, cited by the author in On the Mechanics of Defamation

I hadn’t read The End of Faith before. Otago University’s copy is housed in a special collection of books on religious topics which for historical reasons is outside the campus and bothersome to get to. If I had read this passage before now, I would have held Harris in much lower esteem than I did up until he blogged it. Honestly, I’m mystified as to what part of the “context” he provides is supposed to make it any better to suggest it might ever be OK to kill people for their beliefs. Granted that a person’s beliefs motivate their action to an extent that nothing else does; still, belief in turn is contingent upon circumstances, as the gratuitously horrifying analogy Harris himself opens with should have demonstrated (what would have been wrong with Steven Pinker’s illustration of the same point, “Your car is being towed”?). One way belief can change is through rational conversation, albeit usually some time after the fact, but I can think of no strategy better designed to close the doors on rational conversation than to suggest you might be justified in killing your interlocutor for their beliefs. A more common reason for belief to change is that the new belief makes better sense of the believer’s life experience than the old one, but if the old one is “Westerners are evil and must be destroyed”, then a pronouncement like Harris’s is only going to confirm it.
There was a time when it was generally accepted that it was reasonable to kill someone for their beliefs. Then people changed their minds about that, and there’s a reason why that change of mind was called “the Enlightenment”. Yes, I know that Europeans used the gains they enjoyed from killing each other less to consolidate their power and go and harass the rest of the world. Nevertheless, Enlightenment sceptics didn’t go around killing Christians. Or suggesting killing Christians. Or saying it would be ethical to kill Christians if they couldn’t capture them. Considering what Catholics and Protestants as groups at that time earnestly believed they needed to do to sceptics, as well as to “witches” and each other, by Harris’s standards the sceptics’ conduct was needlessly and indeed foolhardily restrained. Does Harris – does anyone – think civilization would have been better advanced if they’d taken up arms?
Harris might answer that those are pragmatic considerations, bearing on the wisdom of saying that it’s ethical to kill some people for their beliefs rather than on whether it’s true. Harris and I have different views of what constitutes the ethical, of course. I agree with him that the basic measure of goodness is subjective well-being. And my view on subjective consciousness allows at least the theoretical possibility of aggregating and comparing well-being across multiple subjects (Harris’s view, that consciousness is irreducibly and unfathomably mysterious, would rule this out). But ethics is not just about what circumstances would, in theory, be best, if only they could happen. It’s about what actions on our part will bring about the best result. For this purpose there is no getting around the fact that you can’t measure well-being in practice. You have to factor your uncertainty, and other people’s uncertainty about you, into your calculations. In the end it works out to maximizing trust and minimizing fear. If someone is actively trying to kill you or other innocent people, killing them might in many tragic cases be the best you can do; but attacking first creates fear, not trust, and is therefore unethical. I can’t quite believe that actually needed saying.

The Last Battle

        

Up far beyond [Jove]

Goes Saturn silent

in the seventh region,

The skirts of the sky.

Scant grows the light,

Sickly, uncertain

(the Sun’s finger

Daunted with darkness).

Distance hurts us,

And the vault severe

of vast silence;

Where fancy fails us,

and fair language,

And love leaves us,

and light fails us

And Mars fails us,

and the mirth of Jove

Is as tin tinkling.

In tattered garment,

Weak with winters,

he walks forever

A weary way,

wide round the heav’n,

Stoop’d and stumbling,

with staff groping,

The lord of lead.

He is the last planet

Old and ugly.

His eye fathers

Pale pestilence,

pain of envy,

Remorse and murder.

Melancholy drink

(For bane or blessing)

of bitter wisdom

He pours for his people,

a perilous draught

That the lip loves not.

        

Imponderable III: The Self

I was a curious kid. I wouldn’t have been more than eight years old when I learned that green things are green because they absorb the light that isn’t green. Not that I’m claiming I understood it fully. For some time I was mystified as to why green cellophane didn’t make things look red when you looked through it, because I thought absorption was basically light going into the object while reflection was basically light bouncing off the object, so that light going through the object was more like absorption than reflection, because it didn’t bounce off, so if green objects absorbed red light then how come...?
In case you are puzzled by this yourself, absorption isn’t about light “going in”, it’s about light going in and stopping (because its energy has been captured and redirected elsewhere, always at least partly into raising the object’s temperature). The primary distinction is between light that stops and light that keeps going; the latter category is secondarily divided into light that passes through and light that bounces off.
However, at least some of my high-school chemistry classmates had evidently missed this information, because when our teacher explained how the red dyes in a plastic ANZAC Day poppy absorbed shorter wavelengths because the electrons in the iron atoms jumped up a couple of valence shells, or something, one of them exclaimed “So it’s not really red? It’s just that it absorbs the other light?”
This isn’t the Imponderable on consciousness, that’s still to come, so I won’t here speculate on why our experience of colour feels so removed from the Newtonian interpretation of light wavelength and frequency. The point here is this idea that photon absorption is somehow cheating – that there must be a “real red” somewhere which isn’t faked up out of all that physics-y stuff. Because people who have got past that, and are perhaps even now chortling at my sixteen-year-old classmate, are still susceptible to the idea that there might be “real” fear, “real” anger, or “real” love floating around in amongst their synapses and neurotransmitters.

Imponderable II: Free Will

I began the first Imponderable by bagging on Jim Flynn’s ideas about free will. I’m terribly sorry to give an unbalanced impression of Flynn, who is a first-rate political theorist, but I’m going to have to do it again. Some day I will do a political blog post which pays proper tribute to Flynn’s immense positive contributions to human understanding. For now, I’m afraid Flynn’s very clarity and force of expression make him the best starting-point for exposing the confusion in the traditional Western concept of free will.

The concept of free choice is perfectly coherent and easily stated. Free choice, to the extent that it is real, would be an uncaused cause. It is the opposite of what we call an epiphenomenon. A good example of the latter is the reflection of a tree in a pond: if you cut down the tree, the reflection disappears; but if you drop a rock on the reflection, the tree is unmoved. An epiphenomenon is all effect and no cause. If free choice exists, the present self has a genuine choice between (at least) two alternatives and creates a future that would not otherwise have existed. If we decide to pick up hitchhikers as an act of charity at a greater risk to our lives, the world will be different: more hitchhikers will get to their destinations quicker and some extra lives will be lost. Free choice breaks the flow of the world from past to future and thus the result is what philosophers call “metaphysical discontinuity”.

Jim Flynn, Where Have All the Liberals Gone? p. 265

On running videos backwards

Not so easy, of course, with DVDs. You can search backwards, of course, but it skips back in little still-frames, you don’t see the action run backwards as you could with a video cassette if you rewound it without stopping it first. We didn’t have a TV at our house, let alone a video, but we got to watch a movie on the last day of school one year (I think it might have been Herbie Goes Bananas) and they ran the tape backwards when it was finished and we six-year-olds just laughed and laughed, it was all so funny.
I’ve heard, though without any titles or names that would help me Google it, that someone once actually made an entire movie that way – acted everything backwards, and also filmed everything backwards, so that when it was played things happened forwards but everything was subtly weird. But what makes it weird? What were we all laughing at when I was six?

Dear creationist

First of all, please note carefully that I am addressing you in the singular, Bodie Hodge, in answer to your “Dear atheists...” open letter over at Answers in Genesis. I am not assuming that all creationists are the same. I was one for four or five years, after all. Admittedly I was a teenager at the time and I think I was mostly doing it as a theologically-approvable gesture of independence from my theistic-evolutionist parents. Still, creationism got me into the habit of questioning what I read, without which I would not be an atheist today. Though, come to think about it, you’re not likely to find that a positive thing.

Imponderable I: Morality

Let’s suppose that in the year 2115 neurologists tell us that they’ve figured out how the brain actually understands things. What would that mean? Precisely that they can explain it in terms of components that do not themselves understand.
Perhaps they tell us:

Here’s how the mind understands. The mind is composed of three components, the blistis, the morosum, and the hyborebus. The blistis and the morosum have nothing to do with understanding; the part that understands is the hyborebus.

We don’t have to know what these things are to know that they’ve failed. This cannot be an explanation of understanding, because it simply transfers the problem from the “mind” to the “hyborebus”. It’s like explaining vision by saying that the optic nerve brings the image from the eye to the brain, where it’s projected on a screen that’s watched by a homunculus. How does the homunculus’s vision work?

Mark Rosenfelder, Understanding the Chinese Room

This will be the first of a series of six or seven articles, aimed at explaining things that are fundamental to human experience (or so we think) and which boggle the mind when we try to analyse them: meaning, consciousness, knowledge, the self, free will, morality. The trouble, I believe, is not that these things have no explanation, nor even that we can’t comprehend the explanation. The trouble is drawn out by the quote above. We don’t have a problem applying it to most things: we can all accept that a car doesn’t have a smaller car under its bonnet driving on a little treadmill to make the big car go, and that if it did it wouldn’t explain anything because you’d still have to ask what makes the little car go.
But with the Imponderables, as I shall call them, our intuitions run the wrong way.

The Dawkins debate

(Originally published 20 December, 2011, as a Note on my Facebook.) 
Yes, I've been arguing on the internet again.  I guess I'll never learn. 
I try not to spend too much of my time debating other people's religion -- it's very hard to stop once you start.  In general these days I take a live-and-let-live approach: if you believe in God, that's fine, we can agree to disagree.  Provided, that is, that you aren't doing one of two things: (a) accusing others of wrongdoing on insufficient grounds, or (b) setting yourself up as a guru dispensing wisdom.  Either of those, I take as a licence to ask probing questions until the requisite evidence is forthcoming. 
And, of course, if you do want to talk about whether God exists and why I think he doesn't, then I'm ready and willing to reply.  This is more or less what happened recently, after someone I know posted a Facebook post that fit (b), above, pretty well. 

A science of morality? My thoughts on Sam Harris

(Originally published 26 July, 2011, as a Note on my Facebook.) 
After a frustrating delay, the University of Otago's library has finally got around to acquiring a copy of Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape.  Having been champing at the bit for months, reading only such excerpts as Harris has chosen to present on the internet, I can at last comment on it from a position of knowledge. 
Harris's basic thesis can be summed up as follows:

• Moral values are synonymous with the well-being of conscious creatures.
• Science can, in principle, determine what actions will enhance or diminish the well-being of conscious creatures. 
• Therefore, science can, in principle, determine moral values. 

Harris's title is carefully chosen: there may, he says, be many peaks on the moral landscape, and he is not claiming to prescribe a simple formula for right living.  Most of the other criticisms of the thesis that will no doubt have occurred to you from my brief summary are covered in the book, which (I can assure you) is well worth reading. 

Take a deep breath before commenting...

(Originally published 26 April, 2011, as a Note on my Facebook.) 
I've been avoiding writing about this for years.  Because this is going to make people angry.  The topic for today is abortion. 
As most of you know, I used to be an evangelical Christian, and most of my family still are.  As most of you also know, I'm of a left-wing bent politically.  This means that unless I take a weaselly middle-of-the-road not-saying-anything-really position on abortion, I am going to be fitting myself into somebody close to me's definition of "evil". 
And that would be easy to do.  I'm male; abortion is not something I'll ever be in a position to experience personally.  I can even argue that it would be a bit presumptuous of me to take one position or the other, simply for that reason!
But that's not going to fly.  I vote.  I (occasionally) make submissions on bills before Parliament.  I intend to live alongside women for the remainder of my life, and their welfare matters to me.  I'm never personally going to experience child slavery either, but that doesn't mean I should avoid forming a strong opinion on it.