To those praying for Hitchens

Predictably, the shrieking hordes of self-satisfied ghouls have crawled out of the woodwork and, smirking, announced their great love for the departed Christopher with promises to “pray for him”. I cannot help but be reminded of the Black Knight sequence in Monty Python’s Grail, where despite having his arms and legs chopped off by an expert swordsman, the knight continues to taunt Arthur as the king walks away. Hitchens devoted a portion of his writing (not his entire career, as many falsely claim) to utterly eviscerating not only the efficacy of prayer claims, but the superstitious nonsense and appalling evil that underlies the god claim. To say that you are “praying” for him serves as little more than a bold announcement that, even if you had bothered to read his work, you were too thick to understand it.

A friend of mine wrote this in response:

“Begging mercy and forgiveness from a vindictive, vengeful and tyrannical God who also commands love and worship from his ‘children’ whom he “created sick and commands to be well” is precisely the kind of self-imposed torturous mental bondage from which Christopher Hitchens fought to free humanity.

He is not at peace, for he is not. He requires neither mercy nor forgiveness; such thoughts are for the living, and it is only the living who are comforted by blessings and wishes bestowed on the dead. Christopher Hitchens, the man, the mind, the embodied set of beliefs and desires and feelings and memories, has ceased to be. We are the better for having shared time with him, and (only) through us will his beliefs, desires, feelings, memories, and his works live on.”

As I inexpertly attempted to articulate in the paragraphs accompanying this morning’s video, Hitchens’ legacy is far greater than simply the sum of his writings. This is not to minimize his writings, incidentally, which are a sumptuous treat that can be tasted as much as they can be read. Hitchens was an expert swordsman with his words, flourishing with elaborate descriptions, parrying with excruciatingly-chosen diction, and thrusting with cutting vernacular straight through the heart of whatever woebegotten position was foolish enough to ignite his ire. But his words did not simply defeat his chosen opponents – they were a flag waved proudly above the din of pitched combat, calling forth new and eager legions of burgeoning soldiers of freethought to enter the fray.

Those who snidely crow their intention to “pray” for Hitchens are nothing more than myopic fools, claiming victory as the conquering general retires from the battlefield, but failing to notice the approaching horde of approaching warriors made stronger and bolder by the leadership of the recently absent. Christopher Hitchens’ death is lamentable, to be sure, but like Obi-wan Kenobi, he has become more powerful in death than theists can possibly imagine. I suggest you reserve those prayers for yourself – not that they’ll help, but they might make you feel better as your position gets torn to ribbons by the next wave of anti-theist polemicists.

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h/t Jesse Brydle for the moving words

They took ‘ur jaaaeerrrbs!

An all-too common complaint about assertive anti-racism; that is, taking steps to correct for injustices borne of systemic racism – like affirmative action programs or race-based scholarships – is that it ends up putting white people at a disadvantage. After all, if there are two people going for the same spot, whether it be a job or a university admission slot, and one of them is a visible minority, affirmative action policies discriminate against someone whose only crime was being born white.

Everyone and her brother has a story of a cousin’s friend or aunt’s next-door neighbour who lost out on a job ze was qualified before because it instead went to a less-qualified person of colour (PoC). If we are trying to do away with racism, why is it that it’s okay for the system to be racist against whites? Aren’t we sacrificing the future of white people on the altar of correcting historical injustice? When do we stop over-correcting?

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Okay, now drop what you’re doing and go read THIS

Maybe I should give up the blogging game and just re-direct everyone’s attention to what other, better writers are doing. Ta-Nehisi Coates, a brilliant writer on matters racial and historical gives us a different grasp on the same story as last night’s ridiculousness. In this piece, which is definitely worth reading in its entirety, he implores us to employ what he calls a “muscular empathy”:

This basic extension of empathy is one of the great barriers in understanding race in this country. I do not mean a soft, flattering, hand-holding empathy. I mean a muscular empathy rooted in curiosity. If you really want to understand slaves, slave masters, poor black kids, poor white kids, rich people of colors, whoever, it is essential that you first come to grips with the disturbing facts of your own mediocrity. The first rule is this–You are not extraordinary. It’s all fine and good to declare that you would have freed your slaves. But it’s much more interesting to assume that you wouldn’t and then ask “Why?”

A few years ago there was a murder on a Greyhound bus. A severely deranged man took a knife to the throat of one of his fellow passengers and severed the man’s head. The rest of the passengers fled and trapped the assailant inside the bus until police could arrive.

I cannot count the number of people who declared themselves to be the reincarnation of John Rambo, and the many ways in which they would have stepped in and stopped the murder rather than fleeing the grisly scene. To all of them I replied “unless you are specifically trained to run TOWARD someone with a knife, you would have done exactly what everyone else on that bus did – tried to save yourself.” The trick is not to simply assert that we are better people, and therefore racism is beneath us – it’s to train ourselves to run toward problems rather than away from them. It’s to reprogram the way we think about not only ourselves, but the situations that produced us.

It’s to build our empathy muscles.

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Politically INcorrect? As though that was a good thing…

Over the past couple of months I have become more active on Twitter. While at first I used it primarily as a secondary RSS feed, with automatic updates for these blog posts, after a while I began to use it as a way of getting politics updates and rapid news on the Arab Spring uprisings. From there, it was a slippery slope down to constant updates from various Occupy sites and recording artists I particularly like.

As I’ve become more active (and after moving from the outer realms of anonymity to FTB), I’ve been steadily picking up followers of my own. Most are atheist/skeptics who I assume follow me because of the consistent reminders I put at the bottom of each of these posts. Others have, I presume, seen my full-throated defenses of Occupy or election reform politicians in the United States, or caught me uttering a particularly clever bon mot and thought I was worth checking out in greater detail.

I was perusing my list of followers one afternoon when I came across one who described hirself as, among other things, “politically incorrect”. This struck me as sort of an unusual thing to brag about. I have, on occasion, been caught describing myself as an “asshole”, because while I am constantly dissecting my language, I very rarely mince words. This is not bragging about my lack of restraint, but is intended as more of a wry observation on our tendency to prioritize tone over substance when evaluating each other.

The phrase ‘political correctness’ was common parlance in my upbringing during the late ’80s and early ’90s. By then, however, it had begun taking on a decidedly negative connotation – something akin to ‘thoughtcrime’. The spin on it was that whiny liberals were hopping up and down on semantics, getting hot under the collar over linguistic non-issues. Plain spoken folks were, as a result, forced to tiptoe across a minefield to make even the simplest of points. Political correctness was a muzzle that prevented the free exchange of ideas, and to buck the trend and declare oneself ‘politically incorrect’ was a bold and courageous move.

Even typing that made me feel ill. [Read more…]

Classic Crommunist: Why science is better than religion

Office Christmas party, Skeptics in the Pub, and ordinary December blahs have conspired to rob me of the energy necessary to turn the random thoughts/news items of the day into 1000 coherent words. While I recuperate, please enjoy this classic post, written at a time when 99% of you weren’t readers yet.

There is a very stupid argument out there in the world of arguments. It goes something like this:

You have to believe in science, just like you have to believe in religion. Therefore, science is just another kind of religion.

On the surface, that appears to be a logical premise. It even managed to find its way into an episode of one of my favourite shows. However, that’s due to an unfortunate accident in the English language whereby “believe” has two meanings. I’m not going to go through the entire argument here, except to give a specific example. The statement “I believe in myself” means that you have confidence that you will be able to perform a task based on self-knowledge. It does not (or at least not usually) mean “I have faith that I exist as an entity” although Descartes would probably have a few things to say about that. At any rate, the word “believe” when it comes to reliance on facts and observation is quite distinct from “believe” when it comes to large, unfathomable concepts. I’ll let PZ Myers and xkcd talk about that for now, and perhaps come back to it later.

However, it doesn’t matter. Let’s, for the sake of argument, allow this line of reasoning. Let’s suspend logic in this particular case and grant that you have to believe in science in the same way you have to believe in religion (or God, or faeries, or gremlins, or whatever you believe in). Even if we make this concession, science is still far better than religion for one very important reason: [Read more…]

Blowing away the smokescreen

Apologists for religion, when confronted with the ugliness that has been justified by adherence to scripture, will often retreat into a stance that goes something like “people will always do harmful things, regardless of their religion.” The argument, I suppose, is that human beings will find ways to commit atrocious acts, and that criticizing religion is therefore a red herring argument. “After all,” they’ll say “the kind of people who would do evil in the name of religion will still do evil even if you atheists do away with faith altogether!”

First of all, anyone who has ever made this statement has just admitted to losing the argument. Religion is chock full of morality claims, and by admitting that people who follow religion are not more moral than those who do not, you’ve admitted that your particular religious philosophy is entirely orthogonal to being a good person. It would be just as valid for me to say “don’t do bad things” and call that a moral system. Considering the number of people who use the argument from morality as what they think is a “slam dunk” proof of a deity, this kind of “well people will be bad regardless of religion” statement should be particularly troubling.

Some atheists are willing, however, to cede this point. In a world without religion, they say, people would probably do bad things at roughly the same rate. Some people are just opportunistic, or unthinking, or cruel, and will find some other way of justifying their actions even in the absence of a god to blame it on. This argument has bothered me for a while, and I have finally figured out why.

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History debunks myths about Occupy

One of the things that has struck me most about the opposition to the Occupy movement is the ease with which people approach repeating the trite truisms about the occupiers. No matter how many professionals stand up in support of the protest, everyone reaches for the “unemployed bums” canard. Regardless of the number of specific problems highlighted by protests at each site, nobody seems to have any problem expressing their bewilderment at the lack of a cohesive message. Despite the amount of energy and time put into making the occupied sites more than just an urban camping trip, people throw around the term “lazy” like rice at a wedding.

The other aspect that particularly fascinates me is the tin ear for the lessons of history that these criticisms showcase. Every revolutionary protest movement looks like this, even the ones that we would otherwise support. It doesn’t take an encyclopedic knowledge of history to see the parallels between the occupation of public space and the non-violent resistance of Indians to British rule. Nor does one have to have a degree in the humanities to see the attempted demonization of Occupy’s “hippies” echoing the same condemnations from a generation ago in the person of the actual hippies of the Vietnam resistance movement.

But even if one isn’t well-attuned to those particular stories, it’s hard for me to look at the Occupiers and not see links to the civil rights movement of African-Americans in the mid-20th century. Now this is not to say that the problems of centuries of racism and the fight for human decency is on equivalent footing to corruption in financial and political institutions (which have become two sides of the same ill-gained coin); however, it is worth noting that many of the common bromides hurled at the Occupy movement are shown to be quite hollow by even a cursory examination of history. [Read more…]

I won’t “agree to disagree”

Last Sunday my friend “Sharon” came over to play some music. She is, in addition to being an excellent singer, a law student who is about to complete her studies. Resultantly, I enjoy her company because she is exceptionally witty, enjoys discussing things in depth, and knows her way around the finer points of a good argument. We hadn’t talked in a while, so before we started playing music we sat down to chat for a bit, and as I was telling her what was going on in my life, I mentioned this blog. She interrupted the conversation to ask what my definition of atheism was.

A few months ago, Sharon and I went out with some of her other friends to a bar, and she and I ended up getting in a very drunken debate over whether or not it was possible to know something to be true or not. My argument was that while absolute, unchanging truth may not be achievable, we could rely pretty well on provisional truth gleaned from examining evidence, and that while scientific truths were by definition mutable, it does not mean that some day all of science will be thrown out. [Read more…]

Counting down from infinity

I had an… interesting visit from what I assume was a creationist about a week ago. I like it when theists show up here. It gives me a chance to practice diplomacy as opposed to my usual unrestrained polemic, which I like to alternate with dismissive mockery when the occasion requires. At first he showed up in the comments of a post that had absolutely nothing to do with anything, so I redirected him to a more appropriate post.

When I was offered the chance to “go first” (a really really bad idea) as to why I thought there were no gods, I expressed my conclusion that, given the available evidence, I could not see anything in the universe that looked like design only explainable through an intelligent agent. Since any theistic belief is predicated on supernatural intervention, I can’t accept any of the downstream conclusions of theism.

I also asked him to agree to abide by some simple rules: don’t skip off when your arguments are refuted, don’t expect me to accept scripture as a reliable source of information, and finally don’t use articles of faith in place of reasoned argument. He agreed to abide by those rules (and I have the folks at The Atheist Experience to thank for that list), which was probably another tactical mistake for him, but he does get kudos from me for being plucky. [Read more…]

Movie Friday: Benefits, Costs, and Occupy

This was a pretty crazy week for the Occupy Together movement – police beat and sprayed occupiers in New York, Seattle, Denver, and were going to descend on San Francisco as well before being scared off. That’s to say nothing of what happened to the students at Berkeley who were assaulted by police on the very steps where the free speech and anti-war movements of the mid-20th century were born.

I spent part of yesterday evening with Occupy Vancouver, on a march that went from Brookfield’s Vancouver office (the people who own Zuccotti Park and requested that the city tear down the OWS site) to a local branch of the Royal Bank, back to Brookfield, and returning ultimate to the foot of the Art Gallery. I was struck by the positive, upbeat attitude of the crowd and the (nearly) seamless communication of ideas.

What I was more struck by was the clear level of commitment, energy, and skill that had gone into making what was (when last I was there) a ramshackle affair into a cohesive, established site, that was offering a variety of services to the city of Vancouver.

I thought you might enjoy this video:

The Occupy movement, despite the idiotic, reactionary criticism it gets from people informed by a media that is not set up to understand a movement like this, is not a bunch of shiftless layabouts who would rather have a handout than push a broom. They are passionate, dedicated people who are willing to put themselves through quite a lot of suffering to make an important point about how our society is structured. In between making points, however, they’re also providing valuable services.

If I can speak as an economist for a moment, the video highlights something that doesn’t get spoken about much. I got into an absolutely one-sided “debate” with someone on Facebook who called the occupiers “losers”. Her position (rambling as it was) eventually settled on the fact that she didn’t want her hard-earned tax dollars paying for the electricity that Occupy Vancouver is getting from the city. The $0.00001 that she has contributed to the movement aside, that argument only works if you completely ignore the fact that Occupy Vancouver is housing and feeding people, providing medical care, and generating political advertising and awareness. Each of these things, provided without charge, is not only valuable, but takes pressure off of municipal services.

But again, this is the whole point of the Occupy movement: society is not living up to its promises to provide these services. If we want to see improvements, we have to become more proactive. What we should have is a system that places a greater emphasis on equality than quarter-to-quarter growth – the two are not independent entities. We should be using the wealth we generate to care for those who need help, so they can get up on their feet and begin generating wealth of their own. Instead, we reward a small number far beyond what their services are truly worth.

Anyway, if I’m not careful this will turn into a 2,000 word opinion piece on the philosophy of the occupiers. This is movie Friday – it’s supposed to be fun and relaxing. Here’s CROWN doing a Beatles tune:

Happy Friday!

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