philobyte

On Christian Civilization & Morals

2008-12-31T16:29:00.000-08:00

Christians will sometimes point to other cultures' repugnant practices as a means of highlighting the supposed superiority of "Christian" society and values. To those people I ask them to consider Christian society in the fifteenth century, which was very devoutly Christian and certainly had more church involvement in human affairs:

-- St. Joan of Arc burned at the stake
-- St. Thomas Moore burned at the stake (refusal to recognize the religious authority of the kind over that of the pope.)
-- Jan Hus and some of his followers burned at the stake for heresy, and several other followers were beheaded for questioning indulgences.
-- Heinrich Kramer and Johann Sprenger's Malleus Maleficarum (The Witch Hammer), a guide used by the Inquisition for the diagnosis, behavior, trial, and punishment of witches.
-- Jews expelled from: Styria - Austria as well as the rest of Austria, Berne, Speyer - Germany, Eger - Bohemia, Spain (3 or 4 separate occasions.)
-- Jews required to attend conversion classes in Sicily (first third of the century)
-- In 1452 Pope Nicholas V, in his Dum Diversas, instituted the hereditary enslavement of "nonbelievers".
-- In 1488, Pope Innocent VIII accepted the gift of 100 slaves from Ferdinand II of Aragon, and distributed those slaves to his cardinals and the Roman nobility;[15]

Life for women was substantially different too:

married women did not have a legal existence a part from their husbands. They were considered inferior property of their husbands. Also,

in the middle ages marriages were done by arrangement. Women were not allowed to choose who they wanted to marry. However, sometimes men were able to choose their bride. Marriage was not based on love. Husbands and wives were generally strangers until they first met. If love was involved at all it came after the couple had been married. Even if love did not develop through marriage, the couple generally developed a friendship of some sort. The arrangement of marriage was done by the children's parents. In the Middle Ages children were married at a young age. Girls were as young as 12 when they married, and boys as young as 17. The arrangement of the marriage was based on monetary worth. The family of the girl who was to be married gives a dowry,or donation, to the boy she is to marry. The dowry goes with her at the time of the marriage and stays with the boy forever (Renolds). (http://www.dfwx.com/medieval_cult.html)

If that society was Christian, then many, if not all, of the practices reviled by many in modern times in other cultures are Christian as well. If we consider modern society to be Christian as well, then Christians need to describe what scriptures have changed, or how our interpretation of them have changed between then and now.

My impression is that no such change of values occurred in Christianity. Civilization in Europe (and the colonies) evolved regardless of it's Christian heritage to the more modern state. Peoples attitudes changed and dragged the churches along with them, rather than the church providing any particular guidance. The values of modern society are not actually Christian at all, but indicative of progress on an absolute scale.

Since medieval European society was as Christian, or more so, than today's, Christianity has little to no moral value or lessons for us.

mostly from:
-- http://atheism.about.com/library/FAQs/christian/blchron_xian_medieval6.htm
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Hus#Indulgences
-- http://www.castles-of-britain.com/castlezb.htm
-- http://books.google.ca/books?id=pN-GTGzOngAC&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=medieval+women+property&source=web&ots=bjQUs_8xOM&sig=6ydeePVQJdkrAHmH8ylUBdqj-84&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=2&ct=result#PPA4,M1

On Pascal's Wager...

2008-12-31T12:22:00.000-08:00

Pascal's Wager is the following:

« Vous avez deux choses à perdre : le vrai et le bien, et deux choses à engager : votre raison et votre volonté, votre connaissance et votre béatitude; et votre nature a deux choses à fuir : l'erreur et la misère. Votre raison n'est pas plus blessée, en choisissant l'un que l'autre, puisqu'il faut nécessairement choisir. Voilà un point vidé. Mais votre béatitude ? Pesons le gain et la perte, en prenant choix que Dieu est. Estimons ces deux cas : si vous gagnez, vous gagnez tout; si vous perdez, vous ne perdez rien. Gagez donc qu'il est, sans hésiter. »,

- Pensées, Blaise Pascal (1670)

The basic argument here is that

1- believing is harmless, and that if you believe and it doesn't turn out to be true, then you have lost nothing.
2- You have a pure dichotomy, only two choices, which sets the probability.

Let's take the first point. Religions do not only prescribe beliefs, but also actions. Accepting simply the existence of a God is unlikely to guarantee, in and of itself, entry into heaven. Action and belief need to work together to be sincere. So if one is to take Pascal's wager, then one must act on the belief in order to demonstrate that one's beliefs are sincere. Consider the person who actively learns of Pascal's wager, decides to lead a life of sin, with the calculation that one can always repent at the last minute in order to make good on Pascal's wager. Some may say that such a person is insincere in his repentance, since it was calculated from a young age, and at no time during his life did the person consider himself bound to act in a religiously correct way. Some may say that a pre-meditated deathbed acceptance is sufficient to satisfy the lord.

What is clear is that this person is making the minimum investment possible to earn God's grace. With this level of effort, it is clear that Pascal's wager is a good deal. One has literally lost very little effort. However, many would say true sincerity and salvation requires that one accept to do their best to live virtuously immediately from the moment of accepting the wager. In that case, what effort is required? well at minimum, say 3 hours of preparation etc... around a weekly mass, 1 hour a week of prayer. Over 60 years, that is 520 days of prayer. Consider that for every two hours one is awake, one will need an hour of sleep, and the cost rises to 780 days, or around two years. In addition, some percentage of income is also typically required. Say 10% as per the Catholic tithe. Over a thirty year career, that is three years' wages.

The second aspect of this wager is that one has only two choices. Belief or un-belief. But in order to sincerely express ones belief one has to adopt a method of practice, a religion. Each religion prescribes the behaviors required to join the lord at the end of mortal life, and the behaviors and required beliefs differ. Many, perhaps most of these religions state that theirs is the one and only way to achieve grace, and that all others are damned.

So one must not make a choice of two options, but choose the correct religion among the ones on offer. According to Religioustolerance.org there are roughly 34,000 choices within Christianity. So the chance of choosing the correct way to God is not 50%, but less than 1 in 34,000, without considering the possibility that the correct path might be some form of hinduism, buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Islam, or any of the thousands of other paths available. let's generously assume that there are 50,000 paths in total.

So Pascal's wager is realistically stated as: Are you willing to bet two years of your life and three years salary against the 1:50,000 chance of getting into heaven?

When all else fails, try sarcasm...

2008-12-29T19:45:00.000-08:00

It's good that someone religious has read Dawkin's God Delusion. One would hope for some debate of facts and attitudes, but instead there is only sarcasm.

Specifically, I'm skeptical that such a poorly researched, self-contradictory book could really be the product of such a brilliant, rational mind as Richard Dawkins.

So you expect some examples of poor research, or self contradiction in the essay, you will be disappointed. The writer sets up "sources" of inspiration for Dawkins:

The first source is opposed to what he or she calls the "God Hypothesis." For this reason, I will label this source "H". This hypothesis is stated by H to be:

There exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us. (p. 31)

The second source is opposed to the very idea of a deity:
I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented. (p. 36)
I will label this source "A" because he or she is opposed to *ALL* gods.

Unfortunately, the two are not in conflict at all. The negation of the hypothesis of a particular concept of deity is just one small part of getting rid of all deities. The supposed opposition of these two hypotheses is the basis of the rest of the essay. Negating "H" is supposedly conciliatory, while "A" is somehow more aggressive. I fail to grasp why 'your god does not exist' is more conciliatory than 'no gods exist'. oh, well...

Next paragraph carries on with the supposedly contrasting sources A and H, and represents A as "factually challenged". Interesting assertion, but no challenged facts are brought up. oh... he thinks Dawkin's got Mendel's religious sincerity wrong, implying he was a cloistered, mute monk whose devotion to God alone only increased at his elevation to abbott. Hmm...
He was actually a physics teacher, with a gardening hobby, and when appointed Abbot, was hoping to spend more time gardening, and less time teaching. The Catholic encyclopedia says:

Mendel, already much engrossed with his biological experiments hoped that he might have more time for his researches than was possible in the midst of his labours at the Realschule. But this was not to be. The jurisdiction and privileges of the abbey are somewhat extensive, and its abbot must, in ordinary times, find himself with plenty of occupation. Mendel, however, in addition to the multiplicity of his duties as abbot, became involved in a lengthy controversy with the Government which absorbed his attention and embittered the last years of his life.

So his time being taken up with administrivia was not a choice, but an obligation, and was not at all what he hoped for. Dawkin's was not far off at all. The next "error" is supposedly the addition of ''nowhere to hide" to a sentence referring to Bonhoeffer. Firstly, the sentence does not purport to quote the source, but merely to reflect the spirit of his thinking. Here is a substantial reference:

A phrase that is often deployed in his letters on the world come of age is a Latin quotation from the Dutch jurist Grotius, ‘etsi deus non daretur‘ which can be translated as, ‘even if there were no God.’ Allow me to quote at length from a letter to Eberhard Bethge dated July 16th 1944.

“God as a working hypothesis in morals, politics or science has been surmounted and abolished; and the same thing has happened in philosophy and religion (Feuerbach!). For the sake of intellectual honesty, that working hypothesis should be dropped, or as far as possible, eliminated. A scientist or physician who sets out to edify is a hybrid.”

“…we cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur. And this is just what we do recognize - before God! God himself compels us to recognize it. So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34) ['My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?'] The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand constantly.

Again, there really is not any basis for complaint. Dawkin's has not mis-represented Bonhoeffer's views at all. There are no other "mis-represented" or "challenged" facts to speak of. There is just a distinct feeling on the author's part that one should respect his feelings. Does he respect Raëlians, Moonies, Scientologists, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Wiccans, etc... ? Where does respect stop, and ridiculous begin? With Brights, it is clear: if you invoke the supernatural, you are being ridiculous, unless you have some pretty hefty proof. Respect the people always, but the beliefs? no.

Dawkin's Quijote-esque desire is to save all the world´s people from the waste of time, money, love, and blood that is religion. That the people do not understand they are infected is understandable, but his vitriol is for the destructive beliefs, and his compassion is for the people saddled with them. I wish him good luck, but this review shows how long a slog it will be.

The Atheist Conspiracy... listenup tv...

2007-06-17T09:18:00.000-07:00

I have to applaud Ms. Dueck for keeping her cool on her show ¨listenup TV¨ this past Sunday. She had to listen to Pat O'Brien, of the Humanist Association of Canada. He stated a pretty standard Humanist/Atheist case, "religion has had a 2000 year run, etc..." pretty much what would be expected... Then Ms. Dueck asked... well something to the effect of, is there a world-wide conspiracy to re-introduce atheism to the world?

Um... this is just odd... It is odd, firstly, in that it is a borderline paranoid hypothesis. But holding such a hypothesis, it is even odder to ask the question... would a conspirator in a secret cabal for world domination admit to being a member of such a cabal when asked? hmm...

Still... fairly tame stuff. The second interview was more surprising... Drew Marshall (host of "The Drew Marshall Show" on radio.) issued a 5 church, 500$ challenge. He is offering to pay some atheists $500 to go to services at five churches and see what they they think. It was surprising and, well encouraging to hear this exchange...

(Drew Marshall, referring to atheists) Both of them came with very open minds, very open minds. That's why I like hanging around these kind of people more than I like the jesus people. The thing I like about the atheists, like give me an atheist any day: he is very clear on where he stands on jesus compared to a whole plethora of "christians" who do church, do religion and do the whole North American Christian culture thing. The hypocrisy and as I have said before the pharisaical (sp?) attitude in all of us is remarkable. Give me an atheist any day, I know where they stand...

The one thing I think the atheists, and I think non-jesus people, non god people really get bugged at is us being so demonstrative, so dogmatic, "Yes, there is a god, Yes, Jesus is the only way to god. Yes the bible is the only holy book. Yes, Yes, Yes Yes... Are you kidding me? how can we be so presumptuous and so arrogant?

(Lorna Dueck)
... That is part of our truth Drew, which is part of the truth I believe about Christianity. You can say it in a way that is not dogmatic, and just because you state your belief does not mean that you are dogmatic and arrogant... doesn't mean that you are not allowed to be at the table...

(Mr. Marshall)
... I have hope and I have faith that this, which I believe, is true. But to say that it IS true? I don't know...

...
(later explaining why he interested in this topic...)
As a group of people, you look at different groups of people: lions clubs or social networks, & clubs, we all have our insular nuances."

I cannot add to this. it is so eloquent on it's own. For further work, Mr. Marshall might want to consider a pilgrimage of his own: go to five non christian churches, that have a lot of English speakers. Try a sikh temple, obviously a mosque or two (because islam is the religion with the second largest number of adherents, after christianity), a buddhist temple, perhaps a krishna, or Raëlian one too. Get exposure to cultures other than the North American christian ones. Once you see all the people who are all convinced of the correctness of each of their paths, then you must choose... I wish Mr Marshall luck in his projects.

Jordan Peterson, on the other hand, was an absolute mess. No clear thinking to be had from this one, from start to finish... to answer the question ¨We have to have faith because...¨, we get:

¨Because we don´t know everything, so we´re always acting with insufficient information. so at some point to make a judgement that what you know is enough and you act on that, and you have to do that.¨

¨Rationalists... wants to know everything... squeeze out anything that isn't known...¨

IF you don´t know everything, therefore you must have faith? I throw a ball, and my son does not catch it. I look in the bushes behind him where I saw the ball roll. I do not know the ball is in there, but common sense is pretty compelling. If I step towards the bush, poof! I believe in God? Someone reading this is going to think... but really you ¨know¨ the ball is there... OK, change things slightly... say my son and I were both startled by a passing car and looked away while the ball was in the air. We guess, from the initial trajectory, that it landed in the bush. Do we still ¨know¨? Well then, suppose I was inside the house and my boy came to say ¨I can´t find my ball." All I know is that he was playing in the yard... I might still find it in the bush by looking everywhere in the yard. One can proceed on a smooth scale to ever decreasing knowledge, and still find a reasonable course of action in any sort of situation. Our lives are replete with situations where we lack absolute knowledge. Dealing with that is what our brains are for. To suggest that a mere speck of uncertainty brings all common sense crashing down and triggers belief in the almighty is... well unbelievable.
But this silliness is far from over...

... (Peterson) from a psychological perspective... God is your highest value.
... people either have a highest value, or they are confused.
... (Dueck) so atheists have, as their highest value, reason.

Taken together, using elementary logic, you get
( Atheists have a highest value (reason)) AND ( highest value == GOD ) therefore: Atheists believe in God. QED. (Peterson, I imagine, would add ¨they only claim not to...¨) Indeed.

Then they wander off into... well ... wilderness? ¨Reason¨ becomes a hook on which to hang all manner of ills. This is wilderness firstly because ¨Reason¨ as some sort of hermetic set of logical rules divorced from facts, is of little use. ¨Reason" is what theologians use to debate the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin, after all.

Atheists do not have philosophical logic as their highest value, but rather agree that reason needs to be applied to existing facts, phenomena and theories to simplify understanding them. Reason + Facts + Debate = Science. Science is what atheists use as a guide. But still, science has not explained everything, and a good deal of what science has done over the past few hundred years is laid bare the true vastness of our ignorance. If there is something science should have taught us, it is humility before nature, both human and otherwise, and that dogmatism should be proportional to the strength of the evidence behind any assertion. A true application of reason to all the facts available should teach us deep humility, not dogmatic self-righteousness.

The second reason it is a wilderness is because then we digress into the use of Paradise Lost, as a cautionary tale... As in the previous Dueck editorial, we see the use of fiction, presented as ¨evidence¨. While fiction can be inspirational, It is hard to see how to judge it when used as evidence. Perhaps the grounds for consideration need to be something that is over 100 years old and still in print. OK... consider ¨The Protocols of Zion¨ as a cautionary tale about a certain group (also links in well with the conspiracy hinted at near the beginning of the show.) Or perhaps the irony impaired might use ¨A Modest Proposal¨ from Jonathan Swift, a clergyman, as a means of accusing christians of eating their young. But perhaps the criteria are wrong. It is more of a ¨best seller¨ status that is important. So we should be drawing our conclusions from Umberto Eco´s works, The Da Vinci Code, or even the Left Behind series. It would be interesting to hear from Mr. Peterson how he decides which fiction to consider as ¨evidence¨ and which to ignore as mere ¨fiction.¨ One is required to use only a highest value to make the distinction. Application of reason is, we have just been told, very dangerous. The assertions are simply goofy. But wait, there is more fun...

¨The legal systems in the west are predicated on the idea that everyone is essentially divine and equal before god¨... um... you mean that legal system we inherited from Rome, circa 500 B.C? The B.C part of that date is a hint that Romans were, well... pagans. And it is odd that blacks and women were not as divine and equal before god as white, especially propertied, men were until quite recently. Yet I can find no recent revisions to scripture to accompany these changes in status.

The Nuremburg trials are brought up because they stated that there is a higher law, beyond that of the state to which we are all bound. I believe that too, but, again, God is not needed to come to that conclusion. The Golden Rule is an excellent start towards knowing that cremating your neighbors alive is likely to be due south on most anyone´s moral compass. Fundamental human rights, a sense of right and wrong, a sense of being a part of humanity and compassion for those less fortunate... None of those require a supernatural being. They are blindingly, utterly obvious universals of the human condition.

The dialog was fun. It is not often one hears from atheists and the non-religious in spite of being the third most popular belief system in the world. I again thank Ms. Dueck for provoking the discussion, and maintaining calm throughout, as open discussion can only be to the good.

References ( Some may object to the use of Wikipedia. Wikipedia provides good overviews of subjects, and points to sources in their own articles for further verification.):

http://www.listenuptv.com/home.shtml ... very well presented site, with relevant links for all the guests.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_modest_proposal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_religious_groups (demographics)

The right to freedom of intolerance

2007-05-30T13:51:00.000-07:00

In the May 30th Globe and Mail, Ms Lorna Dueck offers us "Challenging Atheist Manifestos", a review, of sorts, of some some recent atheist books: "The End of Faith", by Sam Harris, and "The God Delusion", by Richard Dawkins. Ms. Dueck came away from those books with the impression that her particular beliefs are targetted by these authors:

Yes, I've been insulted by these authors who fanatically argue that I am free to believe in anything I want as long as it's not God.

I think the authors and Ms. Dueck would agree that one can draw inspiration from many places, from Dickens or other works of fiction, as well as the stories told by science. Belief, as inspiration, is as wondrously varied and as individual as every one of us. When belief turns into action, however, society has a clear interest and role. I am confident that Ms. Dueck and the authors would agree:

One is not free to act on the belief that blowing yourself up in a marketplace will send you directly to paradise.
One is not free to act on the belief that shooting an abortionist is justifiable defense of the unborn.
One is not free to park a truck near a government office building and daycare, and blow it up, killing hundreds.
One may not kill one's sister if she decides to leave her abusive husband, or has a boy friend before marriage.
One is not entitled to push someone into oncoming traffic to save them from being crushed by what you believe to be a pink elephant falling from the sky.

All of the above acts are reprehensible. All of them harm others. All of them are illegal. Most of them are justified by the perpetrators on religious grounds. While few have any compunction in discrediting the assertions of a Timothy McVeigh, or the believers in flying pink elephants, assertions made in the name of religion are accorded special immunity from reasoned criticism in the name of religious freedom.

Yet the illegality of those acts is a tacit admission that there are practical limits to freedom of religion in a civilized society. No-one may act on any overly destructive beliefs, including religious ones. The authors' argue for eliminating the special exemption we have for religions to spout nonsense and be accorded respect, even in cases where no such repect is deserved. There are limits on what you can do in the name of any belief, be it about flying pink elephants or meddlesome and insecure omniscient beings. There is no right to freedom of intolerance.

One is not free to believe in anything except god, but rather all beliefs, including those about god, need to be subject to common sense tests for likelihood to result in acts which we would all regard as evil. If a small group establishes a community school and begins to turn out thousands of children with no useful skills, and who absolutely believe in the need for violent action to support a cause, that is not acceptable. On purely practical grounds, the need to respect and protect others in society from violence easily trumps such groups' freedom to speak of their inspired revulsion of other groups, and egg students, who cannot truly consent to indoctrination, to violent acts.

The cause could be the need for an independent sikh or French Canadian homeland, the need to extirpate homosexuality, or the jewish faith, or the palestinians, or to establish shariah hegemony over the human race, or that the world will end in our lifetime, and so wanton pollution is irrelevant, or even helpful for hastening the advent of the rapture. It does not matter what the nature of the belief is, what matters is whether it is destructive enough not
to be tolerable.

Atheists hold religious assertions to be subject to the same scrutiny as any other assertions about the world. It is God that is singled out as an exception by religionists. As Mr. Harris puts it, where do you stand, Ms Dueck, on Odin, Zeus, Poseidon and Mithras? It is the religious who make exceptions, rejecting thousands of other deities as ridiculous, but holding their own conception as uniquely accurate, and in modern societies there is a need to agree to disagree with followers of other religions living in the same society or even neighbourhood. Atheists simply add one more set of beliefs to the pile of thousands of superceded ancestral mythologies, and are completely consistent in rejecting all of them.

In former times, it was reasonable to simply disagree, and have people simply find another place to live when their religious differences were too extreme. Many of the founders of the United States were deeply religious dissident groups. That was a luxury of former times. In the 21st century, a small group of people are, by dint of modern technology, more empowered than ever to wreak havoc, and to do so anywhere in the world. If you educate enough people in dangerously mistaken ideas, sooner or later, something dangerous will occur.

How much tolerance can we, as a society, have for intolerance? For simple or willful ignorance? In order to have a discussion at all, One needs to discuss religious beliefs and determine what is acceptable behaviour and belief. If beliefs fly in the face of facts, then what happens when practical decisions need to be made, about tranfusions, biological teachings, about physics? Freedom of religion does not extend to the freedom to murder your child by refusing blood transfusions. Such beliefs should be challenged daily, and not allowed to be freely asserted in the name of freedom of religion until a crisis occurs. If people bring religion into the discussion as justification for behavior, then it has to be as open to critique as any other justification. It is not acceptable to close down any discussion, ignoring consequences or iniquities on the grounds of religious dogma or freedom.

If we accept the moral imperative to judge someone else's religio-cultural practices (such as female circumcision, polygamy, or criminalization of homosexuality) as being immoral, then one must be prepared to say
simply why some beliefs are to be given more respect than others. If we accept religion/culture as being absolute, or on a separate plane, free from scrutiny, then we must accept all the brutality wrought in the name of all religions. Freedom of religion, as a kind of truce to avoid violence among religious and cultural groups, simply abandons those unfortunate enough to be born in the wrong cultures to their fate.

One can indeed pass moral judgement on the practices of others. In some cases, it is immoral not to do so. Women's rights mark, independent of social and religious context, and even in spite of religious teachings, social progress. A reduction in the coerciveness of society, such as by the elimination of slavery is, regardless of faith and culture specific arguments for and against, progress. Part of the authors' thesis is that the bland, apparently harmless earnestness of the moderately religious provides a shield which makes it very difficult to eliminate the advocacy of intolerable beliefs by extremists.

It is very likely harmless, and perhaps inspiring for Ms. Dueck's children to go to a religious summer camp. However, the law is a very blunt instrument, and what gets interesting is how to allow her children to go to summer camp, and disallow others' who go to a summer camp in the woods modelled on camps in Afghanistan before 2002. There are similar sorts of camps in North America, so called "militias" and they have already led to, at least, the Oklahoma City bombing. We need, all of us, to agree on societal standards on what is acceptable to teach, about religion or anything else. That is a very difficult thing to do, as we all value freedom of thought and conscience, but the practical reality is that we have to start drawing clear lines to mark the limits of our individual freedoms. ("Perilous Times", by Geoffrey Stone is very relevant on this.)

Thought experiment: Contact leaders of all the major faiths and gain agreement from all of them on common moral values and behaviors. Establish an objective code of conduct for those of all religions in their dealings with one another both within and outside the faith. Once you have that, agree on what sort of deviation is beyond the pale.

If, as I expect, the exercise fails to produce an intelligible answer, then it highlights that, when the subject of polygamy, genital mutilation, honor killings, and other conflicts among views of those of different religions arises, the confusion wrought by morals based on religion is not helpful. There is an arrow of social progress, and reduction of coercion in societies is an absolute indicator of progress. One has no need to resort to religion to inspire moral indignation, and indeed it does not help when religions and cultures disagree.

If, against my expectations, agreement from all the religious groups emerges, then it is doubtful that there will be agreement on which is the real saviour, or even on the subject of homosexuality, or polygamy. Rapid agreement will be achievable in such areas as: one should respect ones elders, do unto others as one would have done unto you, one should love ones family, and be good to others. Those are values which are universal in humanity. You can call them christian values, but it would be just as accurate to call them muslim, buddhist, or atheist values.

Lastly, it is useful to say that, in choosing those works by Dawkins and Harris, Ms. Dueck have come upon some of the least diplomatic works of the genre. They pull no punches in their critique of supernatural beings, and their express goal is to confront religionists, so they understandably do not have room to discuss the positive beliefs of atheists. So when Ms. Dueck complains about a life of facts, she is actually asking for positive answers from atheism, which is not substantially dealt with in those books.

The rest of Dawkins' works, such as "The Selfish Gene", "Climbing Mount Improbable", and "The Blind Watchmaker" are far more positive, revealing the glorious intricacy of evolution and pushing the reader to ever deeper humility before the enormous complexity that nature has wrought. For more thoughtful, positive, and interesting reading, especially with Ms. Duecks' Dickensian qualms, I recommend a reading of Stephen Pinker: either "How the Mind Works", or "The Blank Slate." Those books show natural ways to understand morals, behavior, and emotions that come from our evolutionary past. Pinker's work especially brings understanding far more empowering than the archaic admonitions of religion. When we embrace natural explanations, far from being reduced to cold lists of facts, we are given deeper humility about the world, and stories that bring a far deeper understanding of the inspiring grandeur that is all around us.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

2007-04-15T08:44:00.000-07:00

No man is an island¹³, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory¹⁴ were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee¹⁵.

When John Donne said this, it was beautiful. It was true in a deeply philosophical sense, but not in any practical way. In Donne's time, the death of a monarch in China had no more effect on Europe than of a clod being washed off the Irish coast. In Hemingway's time, it was becoming less philosophical and starting to be a practical concern. People could have ideas that would mobilize large groups of people whose reach could extend to affecting the daily lives of people living far away. What happenned in Japan, or Germany certainly did affect America in a completely practical way. At that time, it took a whole country's will to affect things far away, but the power of the individual has only increased since Hemingway's time.

Now, we care deeply about what twenty people living in Hamburg think, or ten people in Toronto, or six in Mandrid, or four in London, for completely straight-forward reasons. The reach of individuals, in terms of being able to know about what others are thinking, to let others know what we are thinking, and to, using very few resources, affect others' lives concretely, is with us. This is not just about terrorism, it is also about hate for many other
reasons, when people use venom and threats to shout others down over their taste in computer programming, that is a direct concern to us too. The central problem of the muslim world is that some feel that it is acceptable to use violence against those we disagree with, and value piety and submission to authority above the free expression of opinions. But muslims have by no means, any sort of monopoly on intolerance, or attempts to limit free dissent.

It is safe to say that every country has a history of ethnic cleansing, or genocide. Genocide had no name in past centuries, because it was taken for granted, and even applauded when we did not grant fully human rights to the outside group. From the Trojans, Carthaginians, Catholics and Protestants in England, protestants in France (1600-1700), the jews in Spain (1500's), Russia (1800's), and the rest of Europe (early 1900's), the Palestinians in Israel (1948), muslims in Bosnia (1990's) , the natives or North America (1600-1900.), the armenians, ukranians, Tutsi, Hutu, the list is literally endless. Efforts can be more or less organized, more or less successful, but the theme of getting a perceived rival group out of the way, in a thoroughly pre-meditated and coldly calculated fashion, is one so common in history as to be banal.

In the 21st century, we have come to a new perception. We now have antibiotics, and aircraft, and atom bombs. Antibiotics, as a stand in for medicine, has allowed for the population of the planet to increase without bound, but not necessarily with wealth. Aircraft mean that people from anywhere can get to anywhere else, and make their opinions, or actions, speak for themselves. Atom bombs symbolize our ability to eradicate ourselves entirely. If not this group today, then some other pair of groups tomorrow, and anyone on earth can be the innocent by-standers.

Or are we innocent? Are we innocent in Darfur, Morocco, Iraq, or Rwanda? If we know, in the past we had the excuse that it was very far away. Now the western world has decided that the clock stops here, that national borders are to be frozen forever because war is no longer a contained, competitive behavior. Now we are telling the world: History stops here, "Never again." It is a laudable sentiment, a fine sentiment. An end to war/conflict/ethnic cleansing has, for a very long time, been a moral or philosophical stand. But it is no longer that alone. It is now a practical imperative.

How do we convince Palestinians, that, yes, they have been disposessed of their homes and villages fifty years ago, and that it is time for them to let go. How do we explain that while Germany spent billions on reparations to the Jews over the past fifty years, there has been as yet, no settling of accounts for what the Jews have done to the Palestinians. Shia, Sunni, Hutu, Tutsi. Much blood has been shed, now is the time to stop and reset the clock. The new world must be one of tolerance and not hegemony between groups, of realization that we are all part of the human species, of a shared history, and not a fractured mosaic of grievances which can never be reconciled. There is no way to achieve justice for all past wrongs, only to seek a means of avoiding new ones.

If this is an imperative, what can be done? If, on the first day of the genocide in Rwanda, a reporter had said to the UN, "This is a genocide, a million people will perish unless substantial forces are brought to bear." I sincerely doubt that it would have made the slightest difference. The genocide took place over about 100 days, or three months. The military build-up to the invasion of Kosovo took firm evidence of what happened in Bosnia.... In three months, even given incontrovertible evidence, I suspect the U.N. would not have had time to mobilize forces and deploy them in Rwanda. Fundamentally, when genocide starts, we have already failed.

In 1930's Germany, there was a decade of vilification of jews prior to the institution of the final solution. In Rwanda, similarly, there were several years of vilification of the Tutsi minority on RTLM (Radio Rwanda). In Arab media today, there is disturbing mythology. It is clear that groups need to stop writing their own history. If groups make their history from shards of memories of groups' victories and pain, then future generations are condemned to carry on the ancient grievances.

In the West, we have freedom of speech, but also hate laws. There is a razor's edge between the two. We need to permit vehement criticism of anything and everything. There can be no group or topic beyond scrutiny. There is a difference between advocating that a group act differently, and advocating it's destruction. It is the same line between saying someone is wrong, and someone should be violently assaulted. This is the same line discussed thoroughly in "Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime", the line between dissent and sedition.

What has become clear in the last few years is that we need to insist that all speech, throughout the world, stay on the right side of that line. We need to be listening for the
next RTLM, the next holocaust denial convention in Tehran, and call them on it. We need to be on guard for intolerance, and engage it with the same vigor we would engage
actual genocide. It is too late for the first victims when we engage only after a genocide has started. It is far more expensive to engage it only with troops.

People armed with truth and credibility, as established by some sort of international consensual process, and a common international historical curriculum. They have to be critical of all, respect all, and play no favorites. Get us to the point where, within a few generations, there will be a common body of history for all of humanity. Be listening, so that when hate shows up, it can be addressed immediately with reason and evidence. Be everywhere, to stop hate speech when it first comes up, so that a troop or group deployment is not needed.

Such a network would also challenge would-be hegemonists, since their own population would be confronted with the international view of things. Israelis might see more of what arabs see on television. Arabs would see more of what israelis see. Americans would see more of al-Jazeera, rather than only when bin laden slips them a tape. When someone says that nothing bad ever happened to Armenians, documentaries with evidence around the issue would be presented. If such an information organization were operating properly, it would only need a few dozen staff per continent, with networks of stringers. In other words, far cheaper than a Peace-keeping intervention. Sure, figuring out how to present "the world view" about the Israel/Palestine problem will be a challenge, but where better to work it out, than before transmitting propaganda on both sides and sharpening poliarization?

While a network would help with nations going insane, countries have to worry about their own people going insane as well. School shootings, going postal... bombings.

While this is most transparently and immediately about terrorism inspired by hate of various kinds, it can deal with even more important topics. The more likely, less dramatic, means of our self-destruction is the internal combustion engine. If China decides that global warming is a western plot to keep them from attaining levels of wealth common in western countries, we are all, well, toast.

In China, freedom of speech is completely sub-ordinate to the preservation of order, in official doctrine. In practice, this makes it sub-ordinate to whatever the government says should be limited. In Iran, the taboo is the revolution itself, and the primacy of Islam in civil matters. In almost the entire middle east, there are similar taboo subjects related to anything overly critical of the current regime. One of the basic acts of a non-democratic regime is to muzzle the press. A UN network for Russia or China would run the stories that the national media cannot run. Information is a challenge to all non-democracies.

The reality is that John Donne's words are now plainly practical. Any man's death diminishes me, because his nephew might decide to blow himself up near my office tommorrow. Natural, traditional human culture is based on ingroup/outgroup violence. Natural human society is no longer a luxury we can afford. Such groups must be recognized, on an objective, empirical scale, as sick, and requiring care, much like anti-biotics are . This is a terribly difficult process (what is this objective, empirical scale to evaluate tribal stories, where a tribe could be the serbs, the Russians, the Americans?) but without it, the ignorant & violent can bring all of us to destruction. Therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.

http://www.amazon.com/Perilous-Times-Wartime-Sedition-Terrorism/dp/0393058808 Perilous Times, Geoffrey B. Stone. fascinating account of the evolution of U.S. judicial thinking about freedom of speech, in particular when tested during wartime.
http://www.state.gov/www/global/human_rights/kosovoii/homepage.html -- Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Mary_%28person%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Huguenots_under_Louis_XV
The End of Days, Erna Paris... Jews in Spain at the end of the reconquest and during the inquisition.
Shake Hands with the Devil, Roméo Dallaire.
http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/indepth/ -- tactical UN broadcasting.
http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/army/mipb/1996-4/villen.htm -- tactical UN intelligence

Year the world changed

2007-01-31T20:44:00.000-08:00

This is the first year that all political groups agree that climate change is happenning, and is caused by humans. Conservative Canadian Prime Minister Harper trying to be green, American President Bush calling for reductions in gas consumption, something momentous and hopeful has occurred. If we really do agree that climate change is happenning, and that it is caused by humans, then that admission is the first step towards a completely different world view.

Before, the earth was huge, we could never pollute all of it, it was capable of taking whatever we do to it in stride. We can never exhaust any resources, there will always be more... This year, for the first time, everyone recognizes that the Earth has limits. There is only a certain amount of CO2 which the atmosphere can absorb. There is only a certain number of cars we can run on our streets. There is only a certain number of people who can be supported by this big blue marble. We cannot pollute one area and then just move on. Wherever we go, someone else has either already been, or is living there now. The skies are no longer open, we now will have to divide a pie that is a fixed size. In a fundamental way, our world view has changed.

We will define the carrying capacity of the Earth and have to figure it out how to portion it out to the people of the world. Something will have to happen when groups overuse their resources. The alternative is to turn the planet into a giant version of Easter Island... we can exhaust the entire planet, and the carrying capacity will drop drastically, in the worst case, to zero.
That people now realise that this is possible, and given our past, even close to certain, is the most important development in humans' appreciation of our place in the world in many centuries.

In Jared Diamond's "The Third Chimpanzee" he very convincingly makes the case that there is a mass extinction going on. It started nearly a hundred thousand years ago, and has been picking up steam. 13,000 years ago, there were megafauna all across the americas: giant sloths, horses, Mammoths. 12,000 years ago, humans arrived on the continents. by 11,000 years ago almost all large land mammals were extinct. Things have not improved since then, the rate at which we are eliminating species keeps accellerating. Our arrival, in terms of species diversity, is more traumatic to the worlds' fauna than the extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs. We are an extinction event. Our biggest challenge is to keep ourselves from going the same way.

references:

Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee (the first book sketching out his approach to history, it presents themes which are more thoroughly exposed in later works...)
Jared Diamond, Collapse! (have not read this yet... it is clearly a series of case studies of societies which exceeded the carrying capacity of their environment and the bad things that resulted.)

Societies' Individuals Compete using Technology

2006-12-12T18:38:00.000-08:00

"An Equal Measure of Tolerance and Tyranny" asserted that Societies Compete. What does that mean? "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins, provides many clues. What an exceptional work, no wonder it is in print nearly thirty years after it's first printing. Dawkins goes to some length to discredit the concept of Group Selection, where, in the E.O. Wilson formulation from his book, "Sociobiology", a mechanism for explaining altruism was purported to be that individuals would sacrifice themselves for the good of the group as a whole.

I find Dawkins' arguments against such ideas compelling. Societies are ecosystems where individuals compete amongst each other. Competition among individuals gives rise to society's structures (such as police forces, laws, property) and a certain cohesion results from those structures (a society can have military forces) which can be used to compete against other societies. Still, the deployment of such forces results from a confluence of interests of individuals within a society.

The most thorough history of societal competition is Jared Diamond's 'Guns, Germs, and Steel'. In GGS, human groups destinies in terms of cultural advancement are determined by their geography.

Jared Diamond's History of the world (abridged)

If you have a lot of domesticable animal species in the area, and you have good domesticable crop species, then agriculture will naturally arise and out-compete the way humans had always lived before (as hunter-gatherers.) This happenned first in the middle east, but then the middle east peoples exhausted their climate, by cutting down too many trees, and the climate became too arid so development there slowed down. At that point though, they had brought their crop packages to the rest of Eurasia, which they could do, because Eurasia, being on a East-West axis, meant that the crops (which are usually meant for certain latitudes) could travel far and still useful.

Europe, with a more robust climate (higher rainfall) was able to resist humans' constant cutting down of things for several millenia. So they could develop denser populations, and therefore more technologies. Eurasia also featured a number of large agricultural societies and inventions from each diffused to the others, enriching the total number of known technologies available to all.

Europe was also 'just-right' in the Goldilocks sense of being not too balkanized (enough larger states to support technology, enough geographical barriers to prevent unification), and not too centralized (like China was subject to the whims of a single emperor, because the main state has few barriers.) So Europeans developed advanced technology and moved all over the world (in temperate latitudes where the same crops would grow), wherever they could grow their crops (i.e. not Panama, not the Andes, not the Australian outback, nor New Guinea... nowhere where their crop packages would not take hold)

In other parts of the world, the americas, and southeast Asia, similar duels of crop cultures occurred, with similar patterns of population replacement. The course of the Austronesian (roughly Polynesian?) peoples spread from China to Taiwan, thence to the Phillipines & Indonesia, back to mainland Vietnam, and east to found polynesia, but skipping over New Guinea where Agricultural societies were already thriving. In Africa, the Bantu expansion is the story of a tropical crop package enabling people from West Africa to colonize all of southern africa, replacing the original populations there. So when new ways of living which have higher technology and support higher population density arise, they naturally expand and overwhelm previous populations.

The End.

The story explains how history unfolded without the need to invoke bigotry of race, religion or culture. Myriad available facts on human racial distributions are elegantly presented and cogently explained.

Individuals in societies have technology "packages" that can include guns, germs and steel, as well as crops, that can over power other peoples without these packages. What happens when two peoples meet is predicted by the technologies available to the two groups far more than it is by the nature of the leaders, the bravery of the soldiers, or the goodness of the missionaries. Individuals compete among each other, and individuals with technology packages better suited to the local environment inevitably displace or assimilate the former population.

Europeans did not conquer the Americas because they were good or righteous, or because they brought their superior religion. They did so because the vast majority of the population succumbed to diseased for which they had no immunity, and the remainder were subdued by the far superior technology (in both materiel, knowledge, and tactics) of their conquerors.
Culture, in the form of religion, language, and customs, was along for the ride. These days, we are accustomed to having science and technology be considered the primary vehicle for "advancement" of a society (more neutrally, as a leading driver of change) . Many express the thought that religion and culture were key to dominance in the past. What Diamond reveals is that the fate of cultures has always been in the hands of its technologies. The age of enlightenment accelerated the pace and made the importance of technology too obvious to miss, but it has always been a dominant but silent partner to God, King, and Country.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel Great wikipedia article on GGS
http://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/ PBS micro-site about GGS
Google books link for "The Selfish Gene" http://books.google.ca/books?id=WkHO9HI7koEC&dq=The+Selfish+Gene&pg=PP1&ots=S60KGiwnY3&sig=3LwjcnisRed8XNPK3x0bopXhCG8&prev=http://www.google.ca/search%3Fq%3DThe%2BSelfish%2BGene%26ie%3Dutf-8%26oe%3Dutf-8%26rls%3Dcom.ubuntu:en-US:official%26client%3Dfirefox-a&sa=X&oi=print&ct=result&cd=1#PRA1-PA349,M1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene -- Wikipedia again does a great job on "The Selfish Gene"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociobiology:_The_New_Synthesis ... Short article about E. O Wilson's book.
http://www.amazon.com/Sociobiology-New-Synthesis-Twenty-fifth-Anniversary/dp/0674002350

Insults

2006-02-05T07:07:00.000-08:00

It was painful to hear, on CBC radio (February 3rd) , an interview with a collection of representatives of Canadian muslim communities about the Danish cartoons. There was a Turkish born comedian (Ennis Esmer) who had the good sense to point out that one needs a thick skin and that there are many ways to respond to insults. The others, to my great dismay, began the conversation by saying that while they did not approve of the volent actions of their co-religionists in other countries, they could understand it. They did not condemn the actions but sought to defend them as an unbearable insult. As the interview progressed, the good sense of the Mr. Esmer seemed to prevail on the group, and they gradually lightened up to a less reflexive cultural defensive approach.

The defense of many muslim groups was that Western societies would react in a similar fashion if is some sacred image of the Christian faith were displayed in a highly insulting fashion. It was claimed that jokes about the holocaust would provoke similar reactions in the West. While the point is well taken that people are offended by contentions that the holocaust did not occur and that jokes on the subject are offensive to most. You will not find any demonstations or violence related to such postings. There are profound reasons why this is so.

Theocracy and demogoguery were once universal elements of all societies' traditions. In the middle ages, Europe was a substantially a poorer mirror image of Muslim culture, with different traditions, but the same approach to the sanctity of religious orthodoxy as many modern islamic societies. For hundreds of years, the tolerance of Muslim societies preserved the knowledge of the ancients, and were the technological innovators. That time is well known to muslims, but the other side of the time that followed that golden era is less well understood. European religious intolerance lead to the expulsion of the Arabs (and Jews) from Spain, but also hundreds of years of religiously motivated conflict in Europe ( a good summary is here: ).

Those wars spawned the Scientific Revolution (here too.) Freedom of speech was first and foremost about liberating discussion about scientific ideas from religious sensitivities (conflicts between science and religion). Obviously, all the protestant reformers were very interested in freedom of speech: John Calvin, Martin Luther (both condemned as Heretics by the Catholic Clergy)

Galileo Galilei published on helio-centrism and was tried and convicted for heresy and condemned to house arrest for the remainder of his life by the Catholic church. René Descartes, who lived outside France most of his life, for fear of persecution by Catholics. In the Netherlands, he was considered a Papist, and at the sametime assailed by Jesuits, eventually going to Sweden to be further removed from religio/political disputes. in the words of this source:
Descartes set himself a dual task: (1) Show that Galileo was right about how to seek knowledge; and (2) Avoid getting imprisoned or executed for this.
After his death, his works were banned by the Catholic Church.

Speakers for Science, and not necessarily against religion, but certainly not being ruled by religion, were the central innovation of the Scientific Revolution.
By the end of this period: The Earth was round, instead of flat, the Earth turned around the sun, instead of the opposite. These things came to be believed in opposition to prior Church doctrine.

It was only after scientists paved the way to respect for reason that freedom of speech in other domains could arise. They set the stage for Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Voltaire & Smith who argued against the divine right of Kings (formerly universal Church doctrine) and the for rule of reason and law in societies. These are the ideas from which western democracies and capitalism sprang.

Only in the Enlightenment was freedom of speech extended to the political realm. That innovation led to directly to democracy. This is a lesson the west learned over hard centuries and is the primary cause of the rise of the west.

When newcomers to Western societies complain of ''insults'' to their faith, they are demonstrating a singular insular ignorance of the history of the culture in which they are situated. According to many protestant sects today, the Pope is the Antichrist. ( more, even more ) People of different religions say very insulting things about people of other religions on a basis so regular that it is banal. A prominent evangelical reverand states that the AntiChrist is a Jew. A Jewish writer thoughtfully responds with a visit to the reverend, and a detailed explanation of why this could make folks (particularly jews) rather uncomfortable.

The islamic world's violence is often excused as a form of victimization caused by past imperialism. The muslim world has not been subject to particular persecution. The muslim world fell from prominence around the time of the renaissance not because of some singular failure of the muslim culture, but because Europe went through the Scientific Revolution and changed the rules of culture in a fundamental way. The new rules were first discovered by Europeans, but no more created by them than the law of Gravity was created by Newton. All other cultures of the world were affected by the change. Many other cultures were mistreated in the early centuries of the revolution by westerners. Some cultures were eliminated by the change, Many others have adapted to the new rules, and now florish.

When muslims riot over a cartoon, and others defend them, it demonstrates that the Scientific Revolution has yet to be understood in the Muslim world. Canadian Multi-culturalism means tolerance of other cultures, and to value other traditions, but within the framework of the western liberal democratic traditions which are the source of western societies' values and strengths. Muslims in societies touched by the Enlightenment have a duty to work to understand where they have arrived, and bring the benefits of the enlightenment to their culture. To explain, excuse, or defend the darkness that has shackled some societies for centuries in the guise of tradition does no good to anyone.

Pinker is a Bright!

2005-11-04T04:39:00.000-08:00

I read on the bright's newsletter that Stephen Pinker is a bright. It is very reassuring to me that he is willing to say so. The brights are a movement which has consistently striven to be clear and rational without being exclusionary or vociferous in its condemnation of others. A positive, calm, reasonable voice of reason. Pinker fits in perfectly.

Society through Pinker-Coloured Glasses

2005-05-23T20:06:00.000-07:00

I spent from Christmas until now reading Stephen Pinker. First there was ¨How the Mind Works¨, then ¨The Blank Slate¨. It all gels. It feels right. This is required reading for Evidence Based Morality. He has data which he summarizes to make something readable by mere mortals. He takes apart the idea that people are naturally peaceful, replacing it with sobering statistics about primitive societires where about 40% of men were murdered (either personally or through tribal warfare) before reaching middle age. This contrasts with 2% in modern societies, a figure which includes both world wars of the last century.

Pinker says that, in contrast to what social scientists spout, societies are not all to be compared within themselves, and are not at all immune to comparison to an absolute scale. It is absolutely true that modern societies are more advanced on the role of Women. The more primitive the society, the more their treatment resembles that of chattel. It isn´t the sole indicator, but it is certainly a strong one. In Pre-history, groups of male humans would fight with those of neighbouring groups for females. It is true that males of low social rank & prospects may turn to rape as their best strategy for reproduction, because it worked for such males in the past. It is true that children used to die when they were young, that in women in primitive societies infanticide is not unusual, and that post-partum depression may be an evolutionary attempt to push women to infanticide if they have doubts about their ability to raise the newborn.

Pinker brings all sorts of data to the table and tries to apply reason to interpret them. He also shows, in his discussion about ¨Radical Scientists¨ the perils of taking results too literally, of trying to make things too simple. The trials of sociobioligists in the 70´s and 80´s is a warning: Scientists are people too. They gang up on each other, they get emotionally attached to ideas which could (like most ideas) be just plain wrong. Those experiences show us the value of humility, and strangely, of conservatism. We must be open to consider new things, but conservative in what we accept as true. If you hear a scientists say something, then it is probably open to debate. Wait twenty years when the folks in the field take it all for granted.

Even waiting is a poor heuristic. After all, the Blank Slate, which Pinker utterly dismembers, was around for a good fifty years, at the very least. so even when you wait, be cautious in what you accept. You cannot summarize his work in a few paragraphs. These are just tidbits. You need to see for yourself. Stephen Pinker is a wonderful read.

An Equal Measure of Order and Tolerance

2004-11-20T22:10:00.000-08:00

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. -- Dwight Eisenhower, April 16, 1953

Societies compete with eachother for resources and territory. In the most extreme, intolerance is war because one cannot tolerate the triumph of a certain point of view. With the extreme intolerance of a civil or international war on one end, to the passive acceptance of just about anything on the other end, where are the guidelines to say where we need to put our foot down. What is worth fighting for? What is better to put up with that to fight ?

Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose starts (source: my father... hmm. what is the real source?)

Society advances by the addition of new behaviours. Behaviours which adversely affect the ability of its practitioners to metabolize and reproduce will die out. Those that provide an advantage will spread through a population. Some ideas are so obviously helpful, that they spread within a single generation. Some of those obviously helpful ideas are wrong, but in subtle ways that it takes longer to sort out. It is difficult to follow the latest innovations and be consistently correct. There is a bleeding edge in innovation no matter which is the field of endeavour.

The principle of the "survival of the fittest answer" (see previous entry) is that the most competitive groups will generate the most answers possible, and let the incorrect answers fall under their own weight, leaving the correct answers to survive. It is difficult to establish what the right answer will be a priori, and when we try to guess, we often get it wrong, so it is probably best to make as few overt choices as possible.

Our environment is changing. Two thousand years ago, the world was very different from what it was two hundred years ago, and very different from the world today. Lately, the rate of change is accellerating as science has started creating new behaviours far more quickly than at any time in history. Humans' strength is their ability to adapt to changing environments, and to adopt improved social behaviours (or ideas, science and technology are examples of such behaviours) which can confer evolutionary advantage much more quickly than normal biological evolution, and also modifies the environments in which future competition occurs.

If we compare societies where there was relative freedom versus rigid orthodoxy, we can see many cases where the orthodoxy resulted in the decline of that society. Contrast arab Spain, a cultural and scientific magnet during the middle ages (king of the three religions), with the time after Fernando and Isabel, when rigid orthodoxy was enforced and the Inquisition terrorised society. Contrast Holland with most of the rest of europe during the 17th and 18th centuries. Today, one can contrast Europe with the arab world. Real discussion of the points above is left to a future entry. For now, I will only say that the contrast in wealth generation, and societal advancement as expressed through scientific discoveries is dramatic.

Limits on liberty, naturally enough, involve actions which constrain other people. By imposing punishment for behaviours on others, we are reducing the number of solutions that will be proposed, and that may have an effect on the competitiveness of the society as a whole. One must value liberty up until such liberty is used to restrain the liberty of others in thought or action.

Simply put: The society should seek the widest variety of behaviour and interests in its population, in order to generate the most answers (discarding all the wrong ones), which are improvements in that society. The ability to generate correct answers means the society will advance, and likely out-compete other societies where less liberty is afforded.

A second important aspect of a society, in addition to openness, there must be objective means of determining the right answer from a group of behaviours. One very direct method of keeping a certain form of score has been the univeral acceptance of currency in human societies. The now ubiquitous use of currency is something which has only really become commonplace in the twentieth century. Another fairly direct method is clearly the opinion poll, to see how many have come to believe in a certain meme. Just as in comparing the fitness of a species to it's environment, one can chart changes its range and make deductions about its adaptedness to a particular niche. Similarly societal solutions can take the form of movements, be they politico-ideological (political parties, movements, and probably religions), commercial (corporations, consortia, companies of all sizes), technological (open source development methods are technological without being commercial),

A word of caution. These comparisons are fraught with variables that we cannot control for, and are very difficult to experiment with. Our confidence in any hypothesis should be directly proportional to the amount of evidence to support it. There is not a lot of reproducible experiment behind these ideas, although they seem to fit the data rather nicely so far. Confidence in these formulations must be tempered by humility before our true level of ignorance. Still, it is helpful to form a coherent view on which to build predictive experiments.

So we don't know what behaviours will improve things for society, and need to be careful to give people the maximum scope for variation in behaviour. On the other hand, there are some behaviours which we are pretty sure are destructive. When they are destructive to others, such as criminal behaviour, we need methods of limiting the damage to society as a whole. This is just a matter of extending the tit-for-tat behaviour discussed in "Do unto others" into proxies (police) who try to take care of the tat, given someone who engaged in tit. That every society has such enforcement proxies is a clear indication of an evolutionarily stable behavioural innovation (reducing the burden on individuals by handing defense off to proxies, allowing greater specialization in individuals.)

There is clearly an inherent tension between this use of proxy defense, and consequent enforcement of limits on behaviour, and the need to encourage maximum scope of behaviour to encourage innovation. That is the fundamental balance which a society needs to address carefully, to ensure it's competitive development. Too much regimentation reduces the ability to innovate, too much chaos also reduces the freedom to innovate. Too little innovation means other societies will compete better.

There is a goldilocks problem here. In light of this formulation it becomes unsurprising that societies, over time oscillate around the correct answer occasionally being too stiff, and occasionally too loose. Exactly the same principle applies in science: Keep your mind open enough to accept new ideas, but not so open that your brain falls out. The key to making a more competitive (more quickly advancing) society is to reduce the stroke of that pendulum to get closer to the ideal balance on a consistent basis.

Further reading:

http://www.ernaparis.com/works/enddays.htm -- Tolerance, Tyranny, and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Shows one entire swing of the pendulum in one instance in history.
The Story of Spain Mark Williams, 1990, a readable, reasonably concise overview of Spanish history, show the nascent local democracy which was effectively suppressed and replaced by centralized totalitarianim by the end of the reconquest.

Afghanistan Unveiled. (PBS Independent Lens)

2004-11-16T19:56:00.000-08:00

Documentary about the treatment of women, by some women journalists who went to many parts of the country. It was absolutely heartbreaking. How little has changed. so much is left to do. Wives of addicts who cannot work because of how Sharia is understood in certain parts of the country. Much of the basis of the oppression is superficially religious. The journalists were also muslim, and disagreed completely with the practices in the rural parts of the country. Who can say what is the correct answer on matters of islam? Every person can claim their interpretation is correct. Where does that leave the argument?

Such is the folly of any religion. Yes, there is a written law. In valuable commercial contracts the pirouettes of intentional misunderstandings or omissions to consider, which enable bidders to meet the letter of the stated requirement is sometimes breathtaking, but absolutely natural. Why should one expect anything different with any other written work ? How can we transcend what is written to express what is intended leaving room for the flexibility required to apply it to new circumstances, without being so free as to permit terrible distortion?

Modesty, Humility.

2004-11-12T15:35:00.000-08:00

But what is this urge not only to write, but to publish one's work? Besides the pleasure of being praised, there is the thought of communicating with other souls capable of understanding one's own, and thus of one's work becoming a meeting place for the souls of men.

"The very people who believe that everything has already been discovered and everything said, will greet your work as something new, and will close the door behind you, repeating once more that nothing remains to be said. ... Newness is in the mind of the artist who creates, and not in the object he portrays.
-- Eugene Delacroix, 14 may 1824.

everything that can be discovered, has been discovered.-- 1899, Charles Duell, head of the US patent office, suggested that his office be abolished.

Just because we know a lot more than we used to, doesn't mean that we know anything resembling all there is to know. We cannot start with raw inorganic material and build a worm, much less a human, so clearly there is a great deal that we do not know about biology. Physicists have not yet figured out what gravity is. Dieticians change their recommendations in light of new research every couple of years. Nuclear power was to provide power too cheap to meter, and IBM in the early 50's forecast the market for computers would be about half a dozen machines. Chaos theory didn't exist 30 years ago, and neither did anomalocaris (or at least, neither had been discovered.) We still have precious little insight into how a brain works.

We need to observe and wonder at all the knowledge we have so far acquired through scientific method, the disciplined application of reason to the natural world, and accept, with humility, there there is so much more out there that we just don't know. Humility serves us well. Nuclear power seemed like a great idea until the problem of nuclear waste remained unsolved. Genetic engineering seems like a great idea, except no-one can predict what will happen to the new life forms when they interact with the natural world. Even if we do ten years of studies on new prescription drugs before we prescribe them to people, it is pretty hard to know what the drugs will do. Drug testing does not magically confer omniscience on the experimenter.

There is no better way to find out what a drug does than to unleash it on millions of people and watch for effects. Strangely, that is the opposite of what we do. We test very carefully on a small number of people, then issue a general release, to make it available to millions, with only very moderate supervision, and that is mostly done by the manufacturer (hmm...) We have too much confidence in the definitive nature of the testing of a product that can be done before launch. Tests are rarely definitive, and often fail to capture real world conditions.

There are people out there who, on hearing about the results of a single scientific study, swear off eating salmon. If one followed all the studies, dietary choices available would rapidly approach zero. You cannot depend on single results, or even results of a few years research. When figuring out what "Science" tells us, you need to completely avoid what scientists are talking about.

What? Look at things that have stayed consistent over the long term. Ideas that have been well supported and become uncontroversial (within the specialist realms) If scientists are talking about it, then it is still controversial, if they are publishing about minutae, then it the basics are well established.
Figure out what they stopped talking about twenty years ago. If it is still uncontroversial now, then there is probably good reason to think that it is the best guess we can get.

Unfortunately, no-one goes about collecting what people agree on. It's extremely boring, you won't get any drama. But that's what useful scientific information for plain folk is.

Are eggs good for us? I frankly have no idea. They used to be good, then they were bad, then they added Omega3, and I don't know anymore. What is the rational position to take in the face of a constant barrage of new evidence? We need to face results with conservative humility, understand that we don't know much, not take it too seriously, and go with common sense until it gets sorted out. Eat a balanced diet, balance your poisons by eating a wide variety of foods. When folks agree on something, it will be obvious. You've heard about relativity? pretty solid, Evolution? pretty solid. String Theory? oh... wait a bit, we're not sure about that one just yet.

When the latest scientific results come out, ignore them, unless you are interested in intellectual conversations and trivia. They have no more significance than sports scores. All that being said, you can ignore them, but that doesn't mean you reject them. Modesty and humility means that you let every result stand or fall on it's own. It is up to everyone interested to look at the data and decide for themselves, but that doesn't mean you bet the farm on the latest sports scores.

Relying on science is the only hope for improvement in the human condition. That doesn't mean twitching about following every fad and latest result. Pay attention, be open to wonder, but conservative in what you accept.

Bibliography:

http://www.bioteach.ubc.ca/Bioethics/PreimplantationGeneticDiagnosisAndOurFuture/
http://www.constable.net/arthistory/glo-delacroix.html
http://www.aloha.net/~smgon/ordersoftrilobites.htm
http://www.geocities.com/goniagnostus/anohome.html

General Influences:

The Demon-Haunted World Carl Sagan
Darwin Adrian Desmond and James Moore
Why People Believe Weird Things Michael Shermer
All of Isaac Asimov's fiction. The dedication to logic and consistency was terribly infective.

Do unto others

2004-11-12T13:03:00.000-08:00

Remember, my son, that these are God's kingdoms, God who gives and takes away at his leisure... Be just to all men, equally to the poor and the rich, for injustice is the road to ruin; at the same time be gentle and merciful with those who are dependent upon you, for they are all creatures of God. Trust government of the provinces to wise, experienced men and punish without pity those ministers who oppress the people. Treat soldiers with gentle firmness so that they remain the defenders of the state and not its destroyers. Encourage and protect the cultivators, for it is they who provide us with our sustenance.... Never cease to merit the affection of your people; in their good will is the security of the state, in their anger there is anger, and in their hatred certain ruin. And rule so that the people bless you, so that they live happily in the shadow of your protection; for in that is the glory and joy of a king.

Abdur Rahman I, advising his son Hisham, at the declaration of royal succession of the kingdom of Al andalus (Arab Southern Spain) in 787 C.E.
(Source: "The End of Days", Erna Paris, http://www.ernaparis.com/works/enddays.htm)

It is a common claim among North American Christians, and likely other religious groups, that without Jesus, there is no point in being good, and no frame of reference for morals. As King Abdur Rahman's admonitions to his son clearly show, this is not a uniquely christian view. In fact,

there is near unanimity of opinion among almost all religions, ethical systems and philosophies that each person should treat others in a decent manner. Almost all of these groups have passages in their holy texts, or writings of their leaders, which promote this Ethic of Reciprocity. The most commonly known version in North America is the Golden Rule of Christianity. It is often expressed as "Do onto others as you would wish them do onto you."

(from: http://www.religioustolerance.org/reciproc.htm)

Any behaviour will only occur in a population if that behaviour confers survival value. Lets review some conclusions from previous posts. From Dogs Are People Too, recall that the only big difference between animals and people is that we develop technology. Some technology is mental (belief in sprits or gods, culture, not eating pork, belief in the succession of the seasons), and some is physically instantiated (flint cutting tools, hammers, screwdrivers) From Principle: Survival of the Fittest Answer: we can say that the system which generates the most changes in technology (right or wrong), and allows robust and objective valuation, will be the system which advances most quickly, regardless of the problem domain. This amounts to saying that evolution works on people's culture.

In any ecosystem, the fiercest competition individuals of most species have to contend with comes from other individuals in the same species because they tend to occupy the same niche. Humans compete with each other by building bigger groups, held together by better thought technology (a better sete of memes), and physical technology (better tools.) in order to enhance the individuals' and the ability to feed themselves and have children (metabolism and reproduction.) Society arises as a competition strategy used by individuals within the species.

So if building a circle of allies is unarguably good, then what behaviours will that select for in human individuals? Well, there is a lot of early game theoretic results on iterated prisoner's dilemmas. In a prisoner's dillema, there is a payoff table:

PlayerB PlayerA	cooperate	defect
cooperate	1	2
defect	2	0

In each round of play, each player can choose to cooperate or defect. You don't know the number of rounds of play will be played. Computer algorithms were written to play the roles of A and B in this game. Tournaments were run, and for thirty years, a very simple strategy "Tit for tat" was the champion. The Tit for tat strategy can be simply summarized: cooperate. If the other guy defects, then defect on the following turn, if he cooperates, then go back to cooperating. The "tit for tat" strategy remained the champion for twenty years until just recently. Significantly, the strategy that defeated tit for tat was not an individual strategy at all, but one that used multiple types of players, some of whom altruistically sacrifice themselves for the good of the group. Only a culture can defeat an individual which excercises the golden rule.

Based on the success of tit for tat, I'll claim that for most individuals, the meme to be honest (so that communications will be simplest for others to understand, and therefore most effective) and "do unto others as you would have done unto you", is an evolutionarily stable and successful strategy, which should rapidly permeate any human population.

Prisoner's Dilemma, William Poundstone, Doubleday 1992 ( A biography of John Von Neumann, with a lot of introductory material about Game Theory) ISBN 0-385-41580-X
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65317,00.html -- 20th anniversary Prisoners dilemma tournament. Where the team strategy defeated tit for tat.

Dogs are People Too

2004-11-11T08:12:00.000-08:00

Social structure and memory have huge competitive advantages. When one can watch the other guy get mauled by a lion, it helps the survival of the group to know that lions are dangerous, and to be able to pass that knowledge down to descendants. "Education" in early societies would have rested primarily on observation and imitation. But dogs do that, so do deer, and prairie dogs. So that isn't particularly human.

The ability to remember and learn from others mistakes is something which brings you above the the realm of reptiles, and into league with mammals and birds. Look at humans and canines. Dogs' sensory world is completely different from ours, being based primarily on scent, secondly on hearing, and only thirdly on vision. Humans are vision oriented, and much higher above the ground. Humans have hands, where dogs are stuck using their snouts for carrying and investigation. We clearly come from very different places in terms of species survival strategy.

I love my dog, and dogs are great creatures to study for figuring out what is human, because they are clearly a case of convergent evolution. Both dogs and humans are pack hunters, and the social/emotional equipment to deal with pack life is obviously similar in both species. Dog societies are probably very similar to that of very early hominids, before spoken language developed. There is a rudimentary language, via posture and sounds, with the ability to communicate rank, and a wide variety of emotions: affection, excitement, sympathy, fear, subservience, dominance, frustration, desperation, stubbornness, jealousy, aggression are all clearly observable in any pet dog. From the point of view of having an awareness of self, feelings that can be hurt, or egos that can be flattered, dogs are people too.

However, dogs do not experiment when attached by a chain to a post, to determine how to unravel it to get back to full length. They have achieved the level of observation and imitation, they also have all the social emotions required for living in a pack, but they don't construct a world view with abstraction.

Thought experiment: Place a bowl of food beyond a grating. the dog can smell the food. The smell of the food is strongest near the grating. On one side of the grating, there is a perpendicular wall. It proceeds a six to eight feet backward, but on the other side of that wall, there is no grating. So if the dog were to go far enough back from the grating, it would be able to go around the wall and get the food.

Place the dog in front of the grating. Prediction: A pet dog will smell the food, and sit in front of the grating because it expects the human to solve the problem for him. Try a wolf. Will the wolf sit in front of the grating and gnaw at it interminably, or will it search to find an alternate route to the food? A wolf might have better problem solving skills for not having been domesticated.

Repeat the experiment (with other subjects), have the subject observe another dog find the solution (say, by being given hints, or being led). Prediction: dogs and wolves will learn the solution readily. Canines have mastered imitation and learning, but problem solving is very limited and direct. They will gnaw at a problem with great intent, but without much abstraction or comprehension.

Repeat the initial experiment months later, with the dogs who know the answer. Will they still know the answer? Prediction is that most higher mammals have pretty well developed memory, especially where food is concerned, and they will solve the problem if they have seen the solution before.

It is credible to suppose that early hominids started hunting game in packs. The bigger packs of homids were able to tackle bigger game. The bigger packs were harder to control using traditional tactile grooming much like dog language. To scale to bigger packs, language was essential for the ability to groom and determine rank in a more energy economical way. There would also be natural pressue to select for abstraction to better understand and predict what other pack members or prey are going to do.

I can find no documentation on language or communication used by wolves during the hunt. I know of no species other than humans, that communicate intent during a hunt. It would appear that individuals in a dog pack learn by observing other pack members hunt, and adopt logical positions around prey, but there is little to indicate a dominant pack member communicating any change in strategy during a hunt.
It would be interesting to see if the ability to communicate while stalking is uniquely human. It would be a natural application of the need for language to manage larger groups of humans. This would be a very simple application of the language ability pre-adapted for living in larger groups, toward another sort of problem that would explain a good part of why language in humans got more complex than it is in wolves.

So complicated language evolved to allow large packs and more effective hunting. Another thing that happenned to differentiate us from dogs was that we started using tools. Chimpanzees use tools too. They're social too. So tools have likely always been around, but it was the brain development, the increased abstraction, and the ability to experiment based on those abstractions that lead us to better and better tools. So we were evolved better brains to cope with language needed to live in bigger groups that could hunt bigger game, and tool use trailed along as an existing minor trait. Eventually, the packs got big enough that we can start calling them tribes, and tool use developed enough, that we can see specialization happening in societies. When the language becomes sufficiently complicated, we see evolution begin to act on memes rather than physical traits (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme) and then the whole evolutionary process is accellerated many fold, but was still essentially a natural selection process. In the period of 16th and 17th century or so, the enlightenment started, and the explicit description of how to experiment (scientific method) took hold, so we began able to artificially select memes for survival value, and the rate of our ability to understand and modify natural objects has advanced in leaps and bounds since then.

So pretty much the only things which differentiate us from dogs are that we share and develop physical and mental technology in large groups. To do science is to be human.

Principle: Survival of the Fittest Answer

2004-11-09T04:28:00.000-08:00

In Science, the goal is to explain nature. Someone (even a patent clerk) can submit a paper to a scientific publication. What is supposed to be important is not who says it, but for experts in that area to criticise it as witheringly as possible. To figure out whether the ideas, methods, and results presented are any good. Once a paper is published, other researchers read it, and the more papers others are inspired to write based on the paper, the more successful the paper is deemed to be. If the ideas in the original are confirmed by all the follow up work of others, that adds to our confidence in those ideas. It is crucially important that a paper that proves to be entirely wrong can still be very successful if it inspires people to do further research. Threats to scientific method are anything that constrains a field of inquiry (usually, political interference, censorship, unwise legislation.) Evidence here is a coherent weaving together of an explanation for some set of physical phenomena or artifacts.

Democracy is exactly the same thing, but the idea is not to solve objective problems, but to convince as many people as possible to take care of their government. Ideas have to be aired in public, and subject to withering criticism. The media are key in both these roles. Freedom of Speech, ability to investigate unfettered, even when things are un-popular, is central to Democracy. Threats to democracy are anything that stifle criticism. (dictatorship, censorship) evidence are ideas and votes.

Capitalism is exactly the same thing, but the purpose is to optimize production (in biology speak, optimize metabolism, and gain maximum resources for successful reproduction) People buy into technologies and companies, either as stock holders, customers, or both. Threats to capitalism are anything that stifle the free flow of information about companies, and anything that allows monopolies to develop. A monopoly is a failure of competition to produce an effective market. Evidence here is expressed in monetary value. A key role of society is to regulate natural monopolies for the greater good.

Free Software is exactly the same thing, but the purpose is to develop software. Immature software is released, and gradually improved upon, by the critique of other developers. The key accellerator of this is the free exchange of source code. The chief threat is anything that reduces the choices of software developers. evidence here is expressed in terms of source code, developer and user base.

All of these domains of problem solving share common characteristics: A solution is proposed in public, open to any and all criticism. An improvement can be suggested, or proposed as an alternative, and there is an objectively identifiable means of figuring out which solution wins. Any winner is not definitive. A new upstart solution can arise at any time and knock the current winner off of it's podium. There is a competition of ideas/ways/means. In order to get a right answer, there has to be a competition.

People are pretty bad at getting the right idea. If you look back at the history of invention, we generally tried absolutely every possiblity, and one lucky sod tried something that actually worked. Often most of humanity is on the wrong side at first, and folks sort of generally come around after a while. Airplanes, automobiles, heliocentrism, television, evolution are examples. Friction isn't resistance to new ideas in the sense of criticism. Criticism itself is not a problem. Friction is only important when it shuts off areas of research either by eliminating needed funding, or by persecution of researchers (such as classifying cryptographic technologies as weapons, making any cryptanalyst an arms dealer)

The best system for getting answers is the one that generates the largest number of answers, with the least amount of friction (and in the shortest amount of time.) The fittest answers will survive.

Preview: Evidence Based Morality

2004-11-07T20:24:00.000-08:00

Most of what I really need to know about how to live, and what to do, and how to be, I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top the graduate school mountain, but there in the sand box at nursery school.

These are the things I learned. Share everything. Play fair. Don't hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don't take things that aren't yours. Say you are sorry when you hurt somebody. Wash your hands before you eat. Flush. Warm cookies and cold milk are food for you. Live a balanced life. Learn some and think some and draw some and paint and sing and dance and play and work everyday.

Take a nap every afternoon. When you go out in the world, watch for traffic, hold hands, and stick together. Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the plastic cup? The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why. We are like that.

And then remember that book about Dick and Jane and the first word you learned, the biggest word of all: LOOK! Everything you need to know is there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation, ecology, and politics and the sane living.

Think of what a better world it would be if we all, the whole world, had cookies and milk about 3 o'clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankets for a nap. Or we had a basic policy in our nation and other nations to always put thing back where we found them and clean up our own messes. And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out in the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.
from "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten : Uncommon Thoughts on Common Things" by Robert Fulghum.

What Robert Fulghum says feels right, it seems like it ought to be true. For another a longer look at how to behave morally well, a view of Ptah-Hotep's instructions is also enlightening.

http://nefertiti.iwebland.com/texts/precepts_of_ptahhotep.htm

We need someplace to start, so rather than starting from nothing, I will take what I can find from the past as the starting point, and apply evidence and reason to confirm or deny. Then look at what Micheal Shermer has to say today ...

If there were one thing skeptics, scientists, philosophers, and humanists could do to address the overall problem of belief in weird things, constructing a meaningful and satisfying system of morality and meaning would be a good place to start. Micheal Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things, P.278.

... and take the challenge by connecting the dots between them. Most people are pretty sure about what we ought to do to be good, and have a moral compass. The question to resolve is: where does it come from, and how can knowing where it comes from help guide us, when we are not sure about a moral stance. here goes...

The purpose of life is what biology class in eight grade taught: metabolism & reproduction. A lot of people see that as reductionist. It isn't. One just has to look deeply enough to see how powerfully explanatory the concept is when taken together with the rest of scientific thinking.

I subscribe to the brights movement, and the terminology today in nontheist circles would call me... a "strong atheist". A lot of plain folk seem to honestly believe that christianity in particular, and religionists in general have some kind of monopoly on morality. This is not a justifiable assertion. I am not in any way lacking in moral fibre for my deeply held beliefs. We need to fix these perceptions. Have to lay some ground work...

Scientific Method rules. It is the only way to get to the bottom of any question. If you cannot apply scientific method to a question, then the art of being a scientist is to figure out how to re-phrase the question so that it can be applied. The method is really just the application of brute force reason to problems. It is painfully slow, very cumbersome, and extremely difficult to get right. No one person ever does get it right. The mad scientist alone in his castle has always been a myth. The real picture is the mad scientist going to half a dozen conferences a year, and madly exchanging letters with peers. Science advances through conversation. Conversation only happens when people are comfortable talking to each other (not worried about getting turned in for talking about a taboo topic, or accused of espionage, or jailed for ones ethnicity) When you propose an idea, the way to judge how effective it is is to match it against existing real data (sometimes that is hard to find.) The more facts & phenomena the idea explains, the better the hypothesis is deemed to be. You don't judge your own ideas, your rivals and successors, who have every interest in tearing your ideas down to make a name for themselves, do. If you can convince them, there is a pretty good chance that the ideas are sound.

This blog is a series of essays which proposes hypotheses to try to explain moral questions. I do not have the resources to perform the experimentation required to confirm or refute these hypotheses. I just see them as self-evidently true, subject to further evidence. I will make a good effort to cite sources as possible, but I am not a "real scientist". I don't have the background or time to pursue this as it needs to be pursued. My hope is just to inspire others with the elegance and simplicity of this world view.

People need to see that there are comprehensive world views that produce morally upstanding people without recourse to the supernatural. This will be a vast subject, my main problem is that it is so huge, that it will be very hard just to survey the landscape. So these essays will be a series of pickets, marking off where the foundations should eventually go for a study of morality based on the disciplined application of scientific method.

Medicine, in response to the pollution of the term "Scientific" by all manner of quacks from Naturopaths, to chiro, to herbalists, to... the list goes on, have had to come up with some way of defining rigorous medical research. The term in vogue now seems to be "Evidence based medecine." So I'm trying to figure out what "Evidence-based Morality" will look like. This is way too big... Help me out.

Some web sites that are important to me:

http://www.the-brights.net
http://www.skeptic.com
http://www.religioustolerance.org
http://slashdot.org (even though it's readers are often over the top)
http://www.sciam.com
Thanks to Jeepyjay @ the-brights.net for the ptah-hotep reference.