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

Carl Sagan died ten years ago today. An extended excerpt from the epilogue to Billions and Billions, written by his wife Ann Druyan, was posted to the web, and five or six years ago I read it while wandering in the collapsed shell of a faith that didn't work for me. Sagan's good death influenced my development for the better as much as did his good life. I wonder if that is why so many people are memorializing this anniversary as much as that of his birth?

To the bible-believer, the death of any humanist is a repudiation of what he or she stood for. Many a time I've heard it said of the death of one who was publicly irreligious that he or she "knows better now." Fear is a powerful influence on the ability to think clearly. I've often been asked "what if you're wrong? You would spend eternity in hell." This argument-by-threat is equivalent to a prosecution attorney telling a jury "There is no good reason to suppose the defendant is guilty of murder, but what if he is? He would sneak into your houses and kill your families. So you'd better convict him." The vivid imagery of hell actually makes that tactic work.

It's possible, as Sagan demonstrated on his deathbed, to be an atheist in a foxhole; to see the biblical mythology the same way that a bible-believing Christian would dismiss a threat from Allah or Hare Krishna; to not be cowed by the groundless fears of folklore. As Sagan famously said, "I don't want to believe, I want to know." This confidence makes it possible to do as he did, and stare one's own obliteration in the face with a level of coping skill few achieve even in adulthood. As Eric Hoffer wrote, "Faith, enthusiasm, and passionate intensity in general are substitutes for the self-confidence born of experience and the possession of skill." Sagan exemplified this distinction. Once I began to realize what it was like to go out and experience for one's self instead of taking someone's word for it-- to research and find out rather than to postulate convictions-- faith seemed a paltry stop-gap measure for knowledge, if not a symptom of downright insecurity.

Thank you, Carl Sagan. I wish I had not missed out on your life.

This has been part of the Carl Sagan memorial blog-a-thon.

The phrase "the Alpha Male Monkey" may be the most useful new explanatory tool I've encountered in years. paranthropus gave it to me in a recent LJ post about primate group psychology. It was an inspirational and motivational insight into the evolutionary biology of my psychology which has kept me up at night thinking of the implications. I wrote about it in this subsequent LJ post, but it occurred to me that this is valuable for explaining myself to bible-believing Christians.

We're genetically programmed to see an Alpha Male in our primate pack as the source of truth and moral law. This explains the difficulty I have in communicating alternative models of truth and moral law to bible believers. It's not that they reject the model I present, it's that they literally don't know what I'm saying. It's a mental block. We take away the concept of the Alpha Male Monkey in the sky, and they think we've declared truth and morality to be nonexistent, because to them, "right" is defined as: "whatever the Alpha Male Monkey says." By definition. ( I put the discussion behind this link ...with drawings. ) Morality doesn't look like this:

It looks like this:
( Read more... )

For those who may not know, EPCOT (formerly known as Epcot Center) is part of the Walt Disney World resort complex in Florida. The "giant golf ball", as it is sometimes known from its flagship globe, is the only permanent World's Fair of human knowledge, technology, art and travel. This was where I first saw computers, videophones, cell phones, hydroponics and Segways. Under the username "epkat" I've been posting a lot to EPCOT Central, a blog for fans of the Disney park to post their dissatisfaction with the management direction in the past ten years, and who have high hopes that John Lasseter of Pixar will fix it now that he's in charge of the parks.

EPCOT is still great, despite the efforts of the current management to strip it of all that it was ever meant to accomplish. The blog keeps reminding me of little details, like the way they artificially pumped a musty museum smell into the leg of the globe as the ride cars ascend the steep slope in darkness, traveling into the past. I recall the laser display projecting the map of the earth spinning on the exterior of the globe when the park closes.

It is a park for geeks. In the way that it's perceived in the culture, there is a sense there just aren't enough people interested in the wonders of science, technology, history and geography to sustain it. Supposedly the money is all to be found in thrill rides and cartoon characters, which is why Disney started replacing everything with that ever since the mid 90's. ( Read more... )

The 2005 World Fair in Aichi Japan has a wonderful website. Check out the pavilions. This World Fair is incredibly robotized, by the way. I'm not talking about Disney's Audio-Animatronics. I mean white plastic robots that walk around and see their environment and interact with it, offering to guide visitors to their destination or just sweeping up the trash. I want one.

I really need to not look at this so much-- it's threatening to my finances. Last week I got out my gigantic Disney Imagineering coffee table book and looked at concept art of Epcot Center for hours. Do any of you love World Fairs (or "Global Expositions" as they are called now)? Do you know what I'm talking about? The apex of the technology, philosophy, and creativity of the human species come together in a meeting of cultures. With each expo, the confusion of tongues is defeated at the hands of mortals, and we glorify the successful completion of the Tower of Babel. This is secular humanism at its most beautiful expression, and I am grateful.

This morning two of my friends from Alabama in the Universism movement were guests on the Russ and Dee Show. After some Alabama listeners were discussing on Universism's "Faithless Community" chat room what they heard on the show, I called in and spent almost a half hour on the line with the host, my two friends, and a guest theologian. The Universists on the chat room were ecstatic about how I came off on the radio and responded to the theologian. I think it's been recorded and maybe I can eventually get it as a download for you.

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.

Pardon me while I vent some steam about what I'm feeling right now. ( Read more... )

iConoclasm

I was looking forward so much to The Fellowship of Reason's 2003 conference on starting local branches, which was cancelled, that I've started discussions on the forums of the secularist groups I'm involved in, asking for volunteer workers to help me step up to the plate and organize this type of conference. It will be a congress of all moral communities that promote reason as primary, and do not require that we pretend to respect blind faith. The way I envision it, F.O.R., Universists, North Texas Church of Freethought, Houston Church of Freethought, Church of Virus, Brights Net, Reason's Fellowship, and the Center for Inquiry's new "Communities" program would be invited as delegations of equals. The purpose will be to network and plan how to promote this type of community. What I'm been saying to them is:
"if one of our organizations grows in our society, we all grow. Our differences are mostly allergic reactions to vocabulary, and are not as important as our common ground. We can make our shared goals work, if we all team together to share our brainstorming ideas!"( Read more... )