PZ Myers, Thunderf00t and Sam Harris

So, while I visit Free Thought Blogs on occasion, I’m not a daily reader. Thus, I wasn’t familiar with the whole squabble that took place this summer between P.Z. Myers and the blogger who calls himself Thunderf00t. Here is Myers’ side of the story, and here is Thunderf00t’s. Apparently when things really got nasty between the parties involved, Thunderf00t allegedly disseminated confidential information about other bloggers on FTB. I have no idea whether that’s true or not neither do I care.

The crux of the problem, as I understand it, was that Thunderf00t went too far in his criticism of Myers — the one atheist on the Internet you don’t dare criticize — regarding a discussion on feminism and even criticized the site itself by saying that FTB is headed toward becoming “more of a fringe group that is intolerant of non-conformity …”

Here’s an explanation for those interested:

Of course, all this is way too much drama for me, and while I did approach FTB at one time about possibly having my blog included in the line up, mostly because I saw it as a way to increase readership, I’m glad that this site has maintained its independence. The takeaway lesson: any forum, even one run by “freethinkers” usually has a filter. I still think it’s stunning that a writer on a relatively obscure blogging community such as FTB can get the boot for criticizing the person Sam Harris has called that “shepherd of Internet trolls.” Some people take themselves way too seriously. Seriously.

Here is a post about FTB’s new “policies” after the dispute with Thunderf00t.

Speaking of Harris, Myers agreed with a list that named the neuroscientist one of the five most “awful” atheists, whatever “awful” means. Along with Harris on the list are Bill Maher, Penn Jillette, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and S.E. Cupp.

Harris made the list for his supposed view of racial profiling, which is a misunderstanding at best. Harris, in this response, addresses both his critics and, perhaps, the very political correctness that got Thunderf00t booted from FTB:

I suspect that it will surprise neither my fans nor my critics that I view the furor over this article to be symptomatic of the very political correctness that I decry in it. However, it seems that when one speaks candidly about the problem of Islam misunderstandings easily multiply. So I’d like to clarify a couple of points here:

1. When I speak of profiling “Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim,” I am not narrowly focused on people with dark skin. In fact, I included myself in the description of the type of person I think should be profiled (twice). To say that ethnicity, gender, age, nationality, dress, traveling companions, behavior in the terminal, and other outward appearances offer no indication of a person’s beliefs or terrorist potential is either quite crazy or totally dishonest. It is the charm of political correctness that it blends these sins against reasonableness so seamlessly. We are paying a very high price for this obscurantism—and the price could grow much higher in an instant. We have limited resources, and every moment spent searching a woman like the one pictured above, or the children seen in the linked videos, is a moment in which someone or something else goes unobserved.

2. There is no conflict between what I have written here and “behavioral profiling” or other forms of threat detection. And if we can catch terrorists before they reach the airport, I am all for it. But the methods we use to do this tend to be even more focused and invasive (and, therefore, offensive) than profiling done by the TSA. Many readers who were horrified by my article seem to believe that there is nothing wrong with “gathering intelligence.” One wonders just how they think that is done.

And on Myers directly, Harris had this to say:

A couple of months ago, I wrote an article on profiling at airport security checkpoints. Given that I suggested (twice) that white men like myself also fit the profile of a possible terrorist, I would have thought that charges of “racism” would be off the table. Not so. In fact, people like PZ Myers continue to malign me as an advocate of “racial profiling.” I have written to Myers personally about this and answered his charges publicly. His only response has been to attack me further and to endorse the false charges of others.

I have read three of Harris’ books now and have watched many of his debates. To suggest that Harris is attempting to do anything other than move humanity toward a better society is deeply, devilishly misguided, so much so that I sometimes think that folks like Myers criticize him just to have something to write about or to stir the trolls.

On Iran and nukes

The inevitable questions and concerns of nuclear proliferation that haunted us in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, thus sending American forces hurling toward Iraq after sanctions broke down, now has us knocking at the doors of Iran, which I must say, is led by a nuttier bunch than even Saddam Hussein’s nutty bunch.

President Barack Obama at a recent U.N. Security Council meeting on Thursday and throughout his campaign and young administration have made it clear that one goal is to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapon capabilities. In a tactful display (sarcasm), given the rising tensions over Iran’s nuclear intentions, the country recently test-fired long range missiles with

sufficient range to strike Israel, parts of Europe and American bases in the Persian Gulf. — The New York Times, Sept. 28, “Iran Conducts New Tests of Mid-Range Missiles”

According to The Times article, an Iranian Foreign Ministry official said the tests had been planned for awhile and were not associated with, precipitated by or linked to the sanctions dispute. Maybe not, but they, perhaps, came at the very worst time.

Iran long-range missile test

In an interesting and provocative Newsweek article titled, “Why Obama Should Learn to Love the Bomb,” from Aug. 29, the writer makes the case that the existence of nuclear bombs, even in the hands of dictators, makes the world a safer place because no one in their right mind is going to actually use “the bomb” to wipe out a large expanse of people, citing the logical point that such action would likely bring about the destruction, not just of entire countries, but perhaps, life as we know it. Here’s the basic case:

The argument that nuclear weapons can be agents of peace as well as destruction rests on two deceptively simple observations. First, nuclear weapons have not been used since 1945. Second, there’s never been a nuclear, or even a nonnuclear, war between two states that possess them. Just stop for a second and think about that: it’s hard to overstate how remarkable it is, especially given the singular viciousness of the 20th century. As Kenneth Waltz, the leading “nuclear optimist” and a professor emeritus of political science at UC Berkeley puts it, “We now have 64 years of experience since Hiroshima. It’s striking and against all historical precedent that for that substantial period, there has not been any war among nuclear states.

Striking indeed. What also strikes me here is that for all of our (i.e. Americans’) worries about nuclear proliferation around the world and nukes in the possession of dangerous men, this country was the last to use one, with fantastic, yet tragic, results. It’s quite hypocritical of us, couldn’t one say, that we today now claim to be the bastion of peace and freedom, yet we were the last to use this nearly godlike (godless?) device of mass annihilation?

That said, while I want to agree with the Newsweek writer, I don’t know that I can. Though, while it’s true that, in the nuclear age, that cataclysmic event has happened only once, I’m not sure that all world leaders, even the evil ones, are made of the same stuff. The Newsweek article cites Hitler and Stalin:

… you need to start by recognizing that all states are rational on some basic level [I’m not sure that we do]. Their leaders may be stupid, petty, venal, even evil, but they tend to do things only when they’re pretty sure they can get away with them. Take war: a country will start a fight only when it’s almost certain it can get what it wants at an acceptable price. Not even Hitler or Saddam waged wars they didn’t think they could win.

To understand why—and why the next 64 years are likely to play out the same way [with no nukes]—you need to start by recognizing that all states are rational on some basic level. Their leaders may be stupid, petty, venal, even evil, but they tend to do things only when they’re pretty sure they can get away with them. Take war: a country will start a fight only when it’s almost certain it can get what it wants at an acceptable price. Not even Hitler or Saddam waged wars they didn’t think they could win. (italics mine)

Hitler and Stalin had some rational sides to their nature. Hitler, at least, was deluded, no doubt, but he was certainly not a religious fanatic in parallel to the 9/11 hijackers.

Islam, however, the religious that runs things in Iran, a clear theocracy, has a much stronger, and dare I say, deathlike grip over its believers than other major religions, at least in these modern times. This is where I must differ with the points made in the Newsweek article. Indeed, world leaders, even those like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe who, if he held the bomb would, perhaps, not be a threat because Mugabe, for all his flaws, is probably a rational person in his own self-ingratiating way and would understand the dire consequences of using the weapon. It would be behoove him and his empire not to use it. This holds true for Hitler and Stalin.

But turning over nuclear usage to true believers who live by statements in the Koran like:

We will put terror into the hearts of the unbelievers. — Koran, 3:149-151

is another game altogether. Sam Harris in his book, “The End of Faith,” speaks at length on Islam. Indeed, if any religion wants to bring about the utter annihilation of everything, it’s this faith. And I will not draw a distinction between moderate believers and “fundamentalists,” as George W. Bush did, because we only have to cite what the Koran actually says to find out its means to a consequential end. For even a cursory reading of the Koran reveals bloodletting of the highest order:

God will humiliate the transgressors and mete out to them a grievous punishment for their scheming (6:121-125). If God wills to guide a man, He opens his bosom to Islam. But if he pleased to confound him, He makes his bosom small and narrow as though he were climbing up to heaven. Thus shall God lay the scourge on the unbelievers (6:125)

So, these folks, namely those who take the Koran as literal truth (I realize that many Muslims are peaceful people), namely the leadership of Iran and who maintain a long-spent theocracy there, long, hope for, a global, total Islamist state. Short of that, I’m sure many of them would have no problem, and indeed be gleeful, for the chance to sacrifice or quicken their deaths to see that they spend eternity in their fanciful heaven and with their 70-something virgins. Again, the Newsweek article:

Nuclear weapons change all that (the costs of conventional warfare) by making the costs of war obvious, inevitable, and unacceptable. Suddenly, when both sides have the ability to turn the other to ashes with the push of a button—and everybody knows it—the basic math shifts.

Yes, the “basic math” does shift when you are dealing with rational leaders (even evil leaders can be rational), but when you introduce the religious variable, the math changes. I’m not sure that we, or Obama, “should learn to love the bomb” regarding those who lead theocracies because those who work toward a jihad actively seek the utter destruction of unbelievers. It seems to me that nuclear proliferation would play directly into their hands.

The God question: My testimony

The debate on the god question has come up recently on Facebook between a couple friends of mine, and I thought it might be interesting if I laid out and clarified a few points about my own experiences regarding this matter to attempt to come around to an overall theory. Some family, friends, former church members of mine have probably noticed peculiar postings of mine regarding religion and God, and I thought an explanation was in order. This post took me a couple weeks to write (Thus the reason for no other recent posts), so bear with me. I’m not saying my conclusion won’t or can’t change, but my thoughts right now as they stand are recorded in this post. To borrow a religious term, here is my “testimony:”

First, as I have stated to a couple people in the last year, I set about in Oct. 2008 or so to the task of trying to figure out precisely why I believed what I proclaimed to believe. I will say here that I was raised in the Christian tradition, as most people in the southeastern United States are, and spent many years performing musically and otherwise toward that end. I sang with my grandfather, whom I miss to this day, in more than one Southern gospel group. I played acoustic and electric guitar for seven or more years in a contemporary-style church in Upstate, South Carolina. Until I reached college, I knew little of teachings other than what was in the Bible. Despite taking and passing a philosophy class and many English classes which served to, at least, introduce certain issues that would later challenge my faith, I maintained my core beliefs through college and even through numerous years after college.

Like so many with physical ailments who have wanted desperately to believe in a god who had the power to, not only save souls, but to physically heal, I tried my best to read the Bible and believe. In the years after college, my life was largely dominated by loneliness and despair over various issues, the most immediate of which would be emphysema.

I had heard stories that many people back home prayed me out of certain death when I was a baby hospitalized for 3 1/2 years in New York City, apparently saving me from dying from a critical immune system disorder. I don’t want to discredit or marginalize family members’ and friends’ efforts or concerns back home. They were doing what they thought was best.

So, poof, after much research and after three years of testing and poking and prodding at me, doctors came up with a way to give me an unprecedented unmatched bone marrow transplant to set my immune system on the right course. In the early 1980s, this was no small thing.

Now, I’m wise enough to recognize that science and research saved me in my infancy. I’m wise enough to know that, had I been lying in a crib inside my home in South Carolina, with the same prayers but without the same science and medical treatment, I would be a memory, and would probably not have even made it past my first year. So, at 4 1/2 years old, with medical research providing and setting my path toward adulthood, I set out on a vast world that I had never known cramped inside my little, sterile hospital-world.

And, of course, my parents not only gave me life … but a second life. I was a dead man, but they packed up their things in their early 20s at the time (I’m now 32 and can’t imagine doing such a thing at their age) and moved 900 miles north to a cockroach-ridden Manhattan apartment with their young daughter … all for me. For all my hard-boiled, emotional determinism, the thought of what they went through to keep me alive still brings a lump to my throat … and I’m thankful beyond words.

Back to religion, I decided a year or so back that it would be the most insincere and dishonest thing that I could imagine if I were to continue to lead the people in church worship without believing myself in the words of the songs I was playing (I think even believers can agree with me on that point.) I surmised that it would also be distasteful to not know full well why I believed in what the folks around me were singing, and not be able to articulate what I believed, and why I believed it. I concluded, even before I began questioning faith, that to believe and live my entire life and then die some day without knowing precisely why I believed such and such, without evidence and without a good explanation for any of it, essentially giving my entire life to something, sheepishly, was a most foolish and tragic thing (In fact, the word “tragic” probably represents an understatement).

Believing simply based on a “feeling” that we get on Sunday morning in the presence of nice music and other believers — which is all it is, since there’s not a stitch of evidence for any of it — was not good enough for me, and this was the realization that hit me between the eyes at some point last year. I can, perhaps, pinpoint the precise time. It may have been during a long car ride to Boston with my wife, when I had a fantastically long time to do a lot of thinking.

To catalog a few of the works I’ve studied thus far that have influenced me one way or the other since and before that particular trip:

  • “Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God” by Jack Miles
  • “God: A Biography” by Jack Miles
  • “Mere Christianity” “Surprised by Joy,” “The Screwtape Letters” by C.S. Lewis
  • “The Case for Christ” and “The Case for Faith” by Lee Strobel
  • “Godless” by Dan Barker
  • “Why I Became An Atheist” by John Loftus
  • “The Age of Reason” by Thomas Paine
  • “The End of Faith” by Sam Harris
  • “The Stranger” and “The Myth of Sisyphus” By Albert Camus
  • “Notes from the Underground” By Fyodor Dostoevsky (To a lesser degree, “The Brothers Karamzov” and “Crime and Punishment”
  • This does not mention, of course, most of the Old and New testaments, numerous Christian commentaries, two decades of Christian teaching from various workshops, sermons and classes, and many of the gospels and texts that did not make it into the “official” King James Bible as pieced together by various church officials centuries ago.

I’m under no illusion that my recent thoughts and studies are crushing to any possibility, or any fraction of a possibility, that I might supernaturally be made better physically some day (For I deny even the possibility of a being capable of such things … nothwithstanding his unwillingness). I dare say no one has called out more to God than I for answers, even for answers about his own existence. No one has pleaded more with God for help. No one has been on their knees more than me. But I’ve heard nothing. Not one thing but my own voice, until eventually I got the impression that my prayers were merely floating to the ceiling and falling back down like stillborn stars. So, I got off my knees and determined, like the human that I am, to find the truth.

Believers will probably question this, saying something like, “Well, you can’t just give up. God is faithful to answer prayer in his time on his watch” or with, “God answers all prayer with either a ‘No,’ ‘Yes,’ or ‘Maybe.'” But those are the only three possible options, aren’t they? We can write off or explain away any unanswered prayer (or perceived answered prayer) by that logic to help God escape an explanation for his own silence.

We have, indeed, for centuries, received nothing at all but silence from the God of the Old Testament, just as we have received no recent word from Jesus or Zeus or Apollo or Allah or Osiris. Thousands of years have passed and not an utterance. Does that not strike anyone else as peculiar? Believers, again, will say the Bible is God’s revealed word or his instruction manual and that he exists in the hearts and minds of those who are filled with the Holy Spirit because they have believed in him. Well, I have believed — I have with all my heart — and other than some hormones jostled around, stimulated by some inspiring tune in the company of believers, have felt or heard nothing but my own voice.

So, I know there will be those to whom these words are very troubling — family, friends, former churchgoers, etc. but please know that I expect none of the same thoughts from any of you and am not trying to convince anyone of anything. I’m merely stating my experiences, and don’t particularly want this to meltdown into a large debate. Again, I did not set out at the start to disprove anything. I set out to find the truth. And these truths we can’t escape: Earth is billions of years old, Earth exists on a spiral arm of our galaxy, an insignificant spot, and not the center of the galaxy as many of our forebearers thought (which, by the way, gave creedance to the argument that we are the special planet, and a special species, in all of creation). The Earth will one day be uninhabited by people once again, not by a rapture, but either by a wayward asteroid or gamma ray burst or by the sun losing power. The truth is the canonical Bible contains many irreparable self-contradictions; condones slavery, mass slaughter, rape, the mutilation or altering of children’s genitalia, among other things; and cannot even get the details straight about the events surrounding Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Again, when I set about my studies, I was not seeking hope or spiritualism or miracles or wishful-thinking, I was seeking the truth, which in the 17th century when John Milton was alive, “a wicked race of deceivers … took the virgin Truth (and) hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds.” But they are not at the four winds anymore. Truth is much closer to us in modern America. So, at least at this juncture, I have concluded that the ancient, contradictory books of the Old and New testaments, written in a time of widespread myth and legend, are not good enough to make me, first, believe, and second, to base my entire life on such things contained therein.

I feel compelled to say that I apologize to certain people (of whom I still hold a great deal of respect) for that statement, whom I know, would want me to conclude differently, but that’s how I feel. The Christian tradition is so embedded in this part of the country (the Southeast), that to say such things, is almost like seceding a second time from the Union. But again, I ask, what’s more important? The truth or wishful thinking? When I set out about this, I resolved to be comfortable with whatever philosophical pathway on which my studies took me down. And that’s what we all must do.

And at some point, all us of have to make a similar choice: Do we want to be complacent in living our lives for a faith that may or may not, in reality, be true, or can we mentally and emotionally handle another possibility: that we are an insignificant dot in a vast, vast universe. As a friend of mine was saying, we need religion. We do indeed. But can’t we be strong enough to move past it and accept our place in the cosmos? As one writer, John Loftus, said that we humans think we are so special that we can’t imagine a fate that would see us go extinct like all the rest of life on Earth. Yet, that is our fate. Our extreme intelligence compels us to think of other worlds or other dimensions like heaven or hell, but our humanity also compels us to surmise that we are on a small planet in an insignificant galaxy, of which, there are millions. It is quite believable to think other species in some undiscovered galaxy thought themselves self-important, like us, and then, saw their own existence come to a crashing hault.

Of course, we may never know 100 percent if there is a god or not and we may never know 100 percent how life began, but I think we can be pretty sure it did not happen as the Bible, with its self-contradictions, recounts. (Note: I do not cite examples of the Bible’s contradictions here because they are well documented and this post is long as is. Search Google for “bible contradictions” and you can view them for yourself.)

For me, the option that we are an insignificant dot in a vast universe, takes much more wherewithall, and frankly, is a quite liberating axiom, to know that we are, at the core, connected and interconnected with the universe, not just Earth, and everything in the universe is quite a beautiful thing, as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson noted.

Thus, again, I did not seek hope (specifically for my health conditions or otherwise) or karma or spirituality or wishful thinking. I sought the truth. For truth, should we reference the record of science, which says this planet has existed for billions of years and will again be vanquished or a book authored by superstitious people thousands of years ago during a time consumed with myth and legend? I have to side with the former.