C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

You know I am not having a very good day when I tell a Republican Party Organizer on PCCboard the following: "If I see even one judge or their families get hurt with the contact info you're distributing, I'm taking your words straight to the authorities to make sure you get put behind bars where you belong."

This is because he said, "we identify liberal judges. We publish their pictures online along with their contact information. When they make bad rulings, we call them at the office, at home, fax them, email them and let folks know who their family members are as well. ... Federal and state judges do not want to be the next abortion doctors. Nobody wants to walk around with a target on their back."

When taken to task by other fundamentalist Christians for being a low-rent South American dictator, he replied: "Don't act so self righteous. We're at war for the heart and soul of this nation and its very survival depends on restoring Godly rule to our country. Unless you are willing to get down and dirty, you won't win, and we must win for our childrens' sakes. Ronald Reagan said it best, "When you can't make them see the light, make them feel the heat.""

Elsewhere on the many mouth-foaming and ranting threads on that site about the Schaivo case, I said this to a reporter (also a graduate of PCC) covering Pinellas Park right now:
"It may interest you to know how these events [you are covering, such as demonstrations and riots and signs saying we deserve for God to shed our blood] are being perceived by the blue states. I have met almost no one who cares whether Terry Schiavo lives or dies. By this I mean your opponents are not angered by the thought of her body continuing to live.
However, we are angered and scared by the conservative protesters, pundits and preachers who we see on the news and on talk shows. We are not disturbed that they want Terry's body to keep on chugging away, but we are disturbed by their reasons and arguments.
There is a lot of talk about the Red States (or as they are now known, the Vegetative States) as an enemy nation like the Islamist theocracies, because of the perfect equivalence of what we hear out of the mouths of the fanatical and gullible mobs that fill their mosques and churches and spill out into their streets."

This is why the feuds among some of my friends are so unimportant and I take no part. Feuding power struggles or cat fights in a science-fiction fan club reveal an amazing lack of perspective about what is worth getting mad over. I want to tell them, "How can you call this person an enemy just because of your personality conflict? Have you listened to the theocrats lately? You don't know what an enemy is."

An audio file of Friday's Russ and Dee radio show is now online at:
http://www.subliminallusion.com/universism/031805russanddee.mp3
Having listened to the show again, personally, I think I hit it out of the ballpark.
My call-in begins about a third of the way through the file and ends about half-way through. I'd like to extract that section into a separate audio file for the convenience of my friends, but I don't know how and I don't have the web space.

The SF author Orson Scott Card posted an essay to a Mormon website about why Mormonism is incompatible with being openly homosexual.

This may come as a surprise to him, but the argument on which Mr. Card bases his entire essay actually is ethical relativity. Let us take an example. Either raping a woman is wrong because of the suffering of the victim, or it is wrong just because god happened to arbitrarily roll some dice and decree it. Mr. Card is among the type who would say the latter. "Against thee and thee only have I sinned," wrote the Psalmist David addressing god. In other words the suffering of the victim is inconsequential. This is a form of ethical relativism. If wrong is only wrong because of the preferences of a deity, then that preference is arbitrary whim because there is no standard higher than god for a god to judge itself against. If instead, Mr. Card believes that god observes behavior and then conforms his own laws to the evidence based on the suffering of the victims, then he is holding his decisions to an exterior standard and is therefore not god. "Arbitrary" means "held to no exterior standard."

Mr. Card thinks god's will is loving, pure, just and good. This statement can have no meaning in a theistic framework, because what standard is he using to let himself stand as judge and jury over god to say that? Is god's will the standard against which god's will is measured? Then we have said nothing about god's goodness, but only that god's will is god's will. That becomes the arbitrary definition of "good." Then it's only immutable in the sense that it immutably defines morality by its whim from moment to moment. Every time it arbitrarily changes its mind, that change becomes the new definition of morality. If it stays the same forever, so what? It is held to one arbitrary roll of the dice, forever.

The Christian or LDS rules-based moral system cannot accomplish the objectivity which they claim they want from a moral system.

This is because it confuses mere rules with moral truths, and bases morality on a set of rules instead of the other way around. Objective moral truths do not change just because an authority changes a rule-- not even god. If Mr. Card believes they do, then he is a moral relativist, except even worse, because he extends it to a cosmic scale. Only rules are man-made or God-made. Objective morality, on the other hand, cannot be man-made or God-made, it's not made by anybody. 2 + 2 = 4 doesn't need to be decreed by royal fiat. Neither does the fact that unprovoked harm of another person is biased towards you and against them. Theism makes it impossible for moral truths to be objectively real. If there is a god, then, and only then, is morality subjective and relativistic.

However, Mr. Card is right about one thing:

"Those who are not willing or able to obey the rules should honestly admit the fact and withdraw from membership. ...the LDS church, which is founded on the idea that the word of God as revealed through his prophets should determine the behavior of the Saints, is under no obligation to protect some supposed "right" of those members who would like to persuade us that neither God nor the prophets has the authority to regulate them."

I would not stop to urinate on Mr. Card's supposed god and prophets if they were on fire. This is not specifically because I disagree with them on an issue, such as homosexuality, which is just one of many problematic issues with religion. It's because of authoritarianism. Just as we can't learn to do arithmetic by always looking it up on a chart, and refusing to countenance the idea that the chart is wrong -- so too we can't practice ethical reasoning by looking it up in a so-called holy book. Therefore there is nothing so evil in the holy books as the claim that we should unquestioningly get our rules for living from them, rather than from personal reason and observation. The specific errors such as the prohibition on harmless sexual quirks would be easily repaired if it weren't for their Stalinesque attitude toward authority.

Nevertheless, I can't help but agree with Mr. Card that there are no gay Mormons by definition. To claim that his view represents a mere misunderstanding of the book of Mormon, and that the book actually does not prohibit homosexuality, is as absurd as saying that chairman Mao really was a capitalist if you read between the lines, and therefore a capitalist can legitimately claim to be a Maoist.

It's time to draw the line in the sand and step firmly across to the ethical side. The Church of Latter-Day Saints, along with other scripture-following authoritarian religions, have abandoned their responsibilities to individually observe the data of lived experience with a mind to personally weigh the costs and benefits of behaviors.

Let me tell you one of the most fascinating stories I ever heard. I read about it in The Battle for God by Karen Armstrong. It's a true story from history about a seventeenth-century would-be messiah named Sabbatai Zevi. The story is worth reading for repeated surprises in the ending that give an insight into how it's possible that people would think Jesus of Nazareth, or for that matter Monty Python's "Brian that is called Brian," to be a messiah.( Read more... )

ko ba gleki ca'o le citsi means "Imperative-you future-tense be happy/merry/glad/gleeful during the season/cyclic interval," in Lojban. :) This holiday season, I am dabbling in Yule, Solstice, Luminas, HumanLight, and a little $antaTreeGiftmas. I'm even smiling magnanimously at expressions of TotalitarianCultOfPersonalitymas such as live mangers and "Jesus Is the Reason For The Season." (I have very little objection to empty symbolism. It keeps the moral majority complacent and quiet in a comforting illusion their society is somehow "based" on god. All the while I and my cohorts are like the American soldier during the conquest of Baghdad who was overheard to jubilantly say "I do believe this country is freakin' ours!" My fellow secularists are strategically mistaken to challenge mere gestures. It stirs up a religious backlash that puts god in government for real.)

I appreciate the gifts I've received from those who rejected my statement that they don't have to give me anything. They chose well and I love them. Granted, I would have gone out and bought the stuff anyway, but I'm stingy enough to delay gratification until I get it for free.

My holiday season this year is avoiding the typical pitfalls. Perhaps yours is not. Is there conflict where there should be togetherness, depression where there should be joy, exhaustion where there should be relaxation? Is there pressure to prove your love, where there should be forgiveness? Is there mounting debt and tons of wasted storage space? If so, then here's your new Christmas morning tradition: just sit in the living room and everybody passes a $20 bill to the person on their left. They may take a moment to decorate it festively with a ballpoint pen, but only if it's not too much trouble. Whether or not you do it that way, lower your standards. Don't be a slave to unreasonable expectations and rose-colored nostalgia if that would mean creating an annual disaster.

Am I the only one who sees many holiday traditions as a marketing ploy? Isn't it evident that tradition can become more stress than it's worth? I have very strong feelings about this. My rule is that I must only observe any tradition or ritual when it is beneficial and skip it when it is harmful.( Read more... )

Well, the conversation with a radio preacher has drawn to a peaceful close. Although my friends list is unlikely to want to read it, I'm including his final letter in an lj-cut below because this Live Journal is my own record of memories. Mr. Thomas has some charitable things to say in parting about his opponent. Then he concludes by relating miracles, never suspecting that Mormons and JWs and Muslims and new age healers and readers of horoscopes and paranoid schizophrenics experience identical events in plentiful supply to validate their claims that oppose his. It's astonishing that the standard of what will pass for a "miracle" these days is so lenient as to be an insult to miracles as described in scriptural narratives. Biblical miracles, had they truly happened, were mostly of a character that would have been impossible to even contemplate as coincidences. You'd think his concept of God would be a big enough God that Mr. Thomas would expect him to do the impossible, at least occasionally. Oh well.

( Mr. Thomas' last letter. )

This exchange has brought to mind the saying of Thomas Paine, "Reasoning with one who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead." If through technology we could someday revive the dead to health, what might this suggest about Paine's assertion? I'm not sure where this metaphorical connection is going to lead. But here is the continuation, and probably the finale, of the correspondence with a radio preacher.

( Mr. Thomas' third reply. )

( My response. )

( My letter to the Illinois Leader. )
( Scott Thomas' personal reply. )

Mr. Thomas,
thank you for sending a personal reply. I understand your concerns, since I am the son of a pastor. Early in life I became a born-again Christian by choice and conviction, although you know I came to different convictions in my adult life. I acknowledge that you want society to be safe in our decisions and you have admirable good intentions, as I did at that time.
Thank you specifically for asking such important questions in your letter. I'm pleased to report that scientific instrumentation verifies that in an advanced fetus, possessing distinct tissues, organs, limbs and other features that an embryo lacks, the lights are on and somebody's home. Did you not know we have the ability to detect the onset of brain waves and even the ability of third-trimester fetuses to learn? You and I agree that a nine-inch trip down the birth canal is not what bestows personhood. Even though the answer to your question is more of a months-long window than a single universal instant, that window has an obvious beginning and end: how can there be thoughts in an organism without brain cells?
This is why one may as well call a human corpse or human sperm a person, as call a human embryo a person. If we are to take the path you advise, we would have to extend human rights to sperms and eggs. They are not from a different species. They are not dead. That makes them "human life," but life in the biological and not biographical sense. If conception is the onset of personhood, why is it that an embryo will just sit there and become nothing if it doesn't implant in the womb wall? They can be kept in a petri dish for a while, or frozen alive, as can sperm and eggs. The morning-after pill, RU-286, merely prevents implantation of this speck.
Your example of an infant is very helpful to my case. As a father, you would surely agree that your infant can not rightfully claim the full human right of freedom. Human parents grant independence gradually through the teenage years. So you are already used to the idea that human rights come in degrees with age. An organism that has not yet grown its first brain cell is not capable of choosing, feeling, thinking, loving, suffering, and desiring. Only people can do that.
This proves that the excerpt you cite from the bible is legendary embroidery. I can't recall from memory of my bible studies and bible college whether or not John the Baptist was even far enough along in pregnancy to have developed limbs to jump with. I understand, from personal experience, that when one's idiosyncratic and arbitrary choice of which holy book to place one's faith in is called into question, this is an instant thought-stopper for a person of faith. I wonder what you would do if you were confronted with a Muslim, a Jew, or a Hindu who would quote their own holy book back at you as a thought stopper and telling you they would pray for you? It's really enough to make me weep when I think about humans not employing the only interface they have-- reasoning with each other. I'm sorry for my choice of phrase "moral incompetence" which obviously has hurt your feelings. Nevertheless, ethics is a skill of observation and reasoning, like arithmetic. And like a mathematical illiterate who only uses a calculator, you exempt yourself from having to practice moral reasoning by getting it out of a book. I really can't describe it any other way.
-Matt

Lately I've been taking my discontent with America's religious climate and hitching it to the wagon of the recent election in the hopes of waking up politically-motivated people to become motivated about religion, so that they can work on the disease and not the symptoms. Now, however, there is a backlash, because there are two kinds of Christians.

First there are the majority of Christians, among whom are many of my good and worthy friends, who pray a lot, and claim to follow some vague idea of "Jesus" which they possibly got from a painting of a robed fellow with long hair holding a baby sheep. If a person claims to follow Jesus, and Jesus transforms into whatever their idea of goodness happens to be, is such a person "following" in any meaningful sense? They follow themselves. I'm glad they do so, but if I were to refer to this as Christianity, words would become meaningless noises.

Second are the ones who actually read and follow the Christian scriptures, such as the American Family Association and Bob Jones University and the Concerned Women of America and other politically active Christian Supremacist groups, and the huge grassroots of congregations who they motivate with press releases, sermons, and letters so extreme they actually deserve phrases like "American Mullahs." I know that they are following the actual book, because because I grew up reading, believing and obeying it until several years ago.

I and other informed secularists then apply phrases like "American Mullahs" to those who read, believe and obey the literal bible, including all the cancerous Christian Supremacism found within. Then liberal/nominal Christians, utterly ignorant of what is actually in their own religion's teachings except for a few warm huggy sound bites like: "love thy neighbor," and silly self-contradictory nonsense like: "judge not lest ye be judged," call us intolerant for criticizing faith. What's worst is that even non-religious liberals join them in this. The cultural attitude at the root of so many problems is unchanged as a sacred cow, and from there proceeds business as usual in America.

The reason this happens is that there exists fashionable nonsense among liberals and progressives that there is no such thing as a right or wrong truth claim if somebody slaps the label of faith on it. This is found nowhere in the Christian bible, which only uses the "get away with faith free card" to exempt itself at the expense of everyone else. Then they make the claim that opposition to faith is also faith, because there exists no evidence one way or another for paradoxical mysteries, which is
BULL
SHIT.

This claim that every stance is a retreat to faith is called irrationalism. At least the postmodernist irrationalists differ from the absolutist irrationalists, in that there is no winner or loser. However, they seem to oppose Christian or Islamic political supremacism not because they present truth claims about religion that are wrong, but because they present any at all. This is self-defeating because everyone will ultimately present truth claims anyway regardless of our pretenses otherwise. For instance, if you claim everything is just faith, than you are giving me a pass to say by faith that you're wrong. You can't do diddly squat about it unless you're willing to say that one faith is better than another and I should stop having mine. Which undercuts your ability to say I can't tell you to stop having yours.

Of course I'm just playing along with the idea that not having faith is the same as having it. Naturally there is a difference. I act like these issues can be resolved not through authority, but through reason based on observation, and irrationalists (religious and non-religious alike) insist they have to be faith-based pre-suppositions immune from challenge. There is something on which I agree with the absolutist bible-believers: that there is truth. We just disagree on whether we can personally know it with absolute certainty. There is something with which post-modern irrationalists agree with the absolutist bible-believers: that we can't know anything without retreating to a pre-supposition. But I say that hope lies only in the discovery that we can.

True tolerance and fairness under the first amendment means a level playing field in which the claims can be judged against each other, without favoritism. This competition is meant to be fair, but like any competition there is a winner and a loser! Claims are accepted and rejected! But inevitably whoever believes that there exists a knowable reality, and takes sides accordingly, is made out to be the bad guy.

My non-humanist friends are reacting to the outcome of this election with the same stress, fear, disgust and alienation that I experience all year round. The sad thing is, when I have someone else to feel this way with, I'm actually less lonely than I do when they are calm and conciliatory toward our enemies.

It takes the carnival sideshow of politics to bring it out in them. I wonder how long it will last. Why do people get so much more worked up about the publicized struggles of power brokers in Washington, but will be conciliatory and passive with the attitudes of their loved ones and neighbors that make it possible? Do they think we suddenly started living in a state that was against gay Americans just yesterday when Proposal 2 passed? I gave my time and money to stop it because I knew we were living with our enemies all along. I knew because I spend a lot of time in the trenches, in the thick of memetic warfare. What 60% of Michigan told us in unison yesterday by voting yes on 2, individuals tell me personally. "Hearts and minds" is where it counts, but most would rather confront office-holders than confront their families, neighbors and co-workers.

The re-election of a conquering borderline-theocrat and the passing of Michigan's anti-gay constitutional amendment was a symptom. Faith and obedience toward authority is the disease. My non-religious, non-humanist friends treat church as a pastime of harmless personal enrichment. They coddle the childlike trust shown by their friends and relatives as long as it's about something distant and abstract like gods and goddesses, with the idea that it won't connect to create real-world pain. But that's what faith does. Childlike faith and obedience is a relinquishment of personal judgement, of personal responsibility, of self-respect, of personal gain. Faith is anti-human: "mis- anthropy." When this little private misanthropy called faith is lauded as a virtue by our entire culture, how could it not encourage misanthropy to manifest tangibly? I have seen it happen in anyone from Christian Supremacists to Pagan Ecofascists.

They are not as rare as we think. A woman who lives a few miles from me thinks that we should carpet-bomb a random city anywhere in the Middle East until every man, woman and baby is dead-- and she holds to that position staunchly, because in her words, ethnic cleansing is the way her god treated arabs in her Old Testament. We are surrounded in the churches of this nation with the precise moral equivalent of the woman I once saw on television who said, with cowlike eyes full of vapid peace and tepid joy, that her greatest wish is for her small children to die as suicide bombers for Allah. I have heard comparable things from your neighbors and your doctors and your mailmen. It is even on your radio and your television. But we look the other way, out of a misapplied concept of what religious toleration means. Yes, under our first amendment (a triumph of secularism) we should never restrict misanthropic attitudes through legislation. They have as much right to speak and broadcast as anyone. By all means, leave them alone. But those of us who are pro-human should stop praising misanthropic books such as the bible, the quran and the torah. We don't have to pretend it's really OK if you look somewhere in them, "down deep," scraping the bottom of the barrel to make excuses for these books and their gods, and encourage the use of them for some supposed "true" interpretation.

It's time to choose our friends, our business transactions, and our families based on whether or not they are anti-human misanthropes. At the very least, be so unambiguous and outspoken that those relationships will inevitably cool as a result. Otherwise, one is contributing to a climate that condones authoritarianism. Then one can't complain and react with surprise when supposedly Unquestionable Truths are carried straight into the voting booth.

Please visit Faithless.org.