Next on the reading list…

I am looking forward to reading Anthony Grayling’s new book, The Good Book, with considerable anticipation — I’ve ordered a copy (it’s not as if it would be easily available in Morris!) which hasn’t arrived yet, but what has arrived are teasers from Grayling himself. Here’s a Q&A about the book that might have you itching for a copy as much as I am.

WHEN AND WHY DID YOU BECOME AN ATHEIST?
I was brought up in a non-religious family, and when I first encountered religion it simply seemed incredible, no more believable that the fairy stories and Greek myths that I had read and enjoyed as a child.

WHAT MOTIVATED YOU TO WRITE THE GOOD BOOK?
Several decades ago, while studying the ethical theories and systems of the world, I saw a fundamental difference between religion-derived ethics and what I call ‘humanism’, that is, non-religious ethics, namely, that the former present themselves as the commands and requirements of a monarchical deity whereas the latter premises itself on efforts to understand human nature and the human condition – and whereas the former typically cut across the grain of human nature by requiring self-denial and control of control functions, the latter is more sympathetic and reasonable by far.

HOW MUCH TIME DID IT TAKE YOU TO ORGANISE ALL THE INFORMATION AVAILABLE TO MAKE THE BOOK AND TO WRITE IT?
I started to gather the materials for The Good Book about 30 years ago, after the realization described above, and as time went by began the process of selecting and editing – going from a great quantity of material to the final selection and arrangement that constitutes The Good Book now.

WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO PUBLISH IT NOW? HAS IT SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE 400TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE KING JAMES BIBLE?
The 400th anniversary of the KJB is coincidental; unlike sending a rocket to the moon where precision of timing is possible, I couldn’t have planned that this would be the year of publication when I began this so long ago! But it is a useful coincidence, because the KJB provides a good example of how the religious Bible was made, and why it is printed as it is, and why its language is deliberately archaic (even in 1611 the English of the KJB was 100 years out of date, on purpose to give it that authoritative, vatic, somewhat heightened tone).

AREN’T YOU AFRAID OF BEING CALLED PRETENTIOUS OR ARROGANT FOR THIS AMBITIOUS INITIATIVE?
I’ve already been called even worse things than either of those! – I don’t expect that anyone who is hostile to the idea of The Good Book will readily believe this, but I have done it in a sober and collegial spirit. After all, almost all the words in The Good Book are from great minds of the past, from people who experienced much and thought deeply, and in almost all cases were people of great intellect – so when people attack The Good Book they attack Aristotle, Pliny, Seneca, Cicero, Confucius, Mo Zi…all the way to Spinoza, Hume, Chesterfield, Mill and Pater. If they read these people outside the context of The Good Book they would be struck by their insight and wisdom – so if they give The Good Book a fair chance, they would see that I have collected and arranged these valuable texts as a resource for everyone, so that even religious people would find good things in it.

IN YOUR OPINION, DO ATHEISTS REALLY NEED THEIR OWN BIBLE?
No one needs a bible, because everyone has the potential to find things out and read for themselves. Since atheists are more likely than religious people to be independent-minded, they are even less in need of guidance and help, because they can go to libraries, learn, and think for themselves. But even atheists need to read and study, and a distillation of the past’s insights and experience relating to questions about how to live (Socrates’ question!) might be of use to some. No-one is under an obligation to read The Good Book given that they can do the work for themselves, and indeed this latter would be the best way; but I offer it anyway as a resource should it be of value to some. And given the wealth of insight, inspiration and consolation that the book gathers together, I have good hopes that some will indeed find it useful, as a starting point for their own reflections. The one demand that The Good Book makes is for people to go beyond all teachings and teachers (and therefore beyond books like The Good Book) and think for themselves.

IS THE GOOD BOOK MADE FOR EVERYONE? CAN A RELIGIOUS PERSON READ IT?
As just indicated, yes, definitely: there is nothing in The Good Book that a religious person could or at least should disagree with – except for those who say we must not think for ourselves but must submit our will and intellect to the doctrines of a religion.

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE WITH THE GOOD BOOK?
Again as noted in the preceding remarks, The Good Book is intended as a resource to help anyone who cares to use it as such on their journey to autonomy and independence of mind.

DON’T YOU FEAR THAT IT WILL BE CONSIDERED A SELF-HELP BOOK, FULL OF PRESCRIPTIONS FOR A GOOD LIFE?
Not prescriptions, but suggestions; and from very great minds of the past.

HAVE YOU FACED ANY CRITICISM FROM ATHEISTS OR HARSH REACTIONS FROM RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES?
Those atheists and theists who have not seen the book or who have not grasped its purpose, and either think it is a rule-book for atheists (so some atheists might think) or an attack on the religious bible or religion itself (so theists might think) have of course been critical – but the kind of criticism that would be truly germane would concern itself with the choice of texts, their arrangement, the translations used, &etc, unless the critics in question are so authoritative that they disagree with what Aristotle et. al. have to offer in the way of suggestions for reflecting on ethical questions.

YOU SAY THAT RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE IS OVERINFLATED IN OUR SOCIETY. WHAT ARE THE BIGGEST CONSEQUENCES OF THIS IN OUR LIVES?
This question is almost too big to answer in a few lines. All the way from distortion of education (opposition to evolutionary biology, false views of the nature and origins of the universe, corruption of science &etc) to oppressive moralities (think of teenagers fearfully struggling with ‘sinful feelings’ because of their burgeoning sexuality) to policies on contraception, AIDS prevention, abortion and stem cell research, to persecution of gays, to murderous interreligious conflicts in many countries (Christians versus Muslims versus Hindus – and Protestants versus Catholics, and Sunnis versus Shias, attacking each other in Nigeria, Iraq, Pakistan, India, Ireland, Croatia…) to religious leaders (e.g. mullahs) inciting hatred, terrorism and mass murder – where are the aspects of our lives that are not in some way affected by the toxin of religion?

IN AN INTERVIEW IN THE GUARDIAN, YOU JOKED ABOUT BEING A GOD IN FIVE CENTURIES. DO YOU BELIEVE THAT THE GOOD BOOK MESSAGE CAN AND WILL LAST AS LONG AS GREAT PHILOSOPHICAL BOOKS?
The message of the great philosophical books will last as long as there are intelligent minds to appreciate them. Whether The Good Book, which is a distillation of some of the best of these books, will last with them, is an open question. I certainly hope not to be a ‘god’ because, even though history shows that the bar has not been set very high in this regard, I would not be a good one, and anyway if I have a message it is ‘think for yourself, take responsibility for yourself, do not be a disciple, do not abdicate your mind and put it under the feet of someone else’s ideology’.

IN THE SAME INTERVIEW, YOU SAID THAT BEING A ‘MILITANT ATHEIST’ WAS LIKE ‘SLEEPING FURIOUSLY’. BUT HAVEN’T YOU WORKED AND STILL WORK REALLY HARD TO DEFEND THE ATHEIST POINT OF VIEW?
‘Militant’ is a term used by religious people who wish that they could continue to enjoy the status and privileges which the now-lost ‘respect agenda’ (‘I think weird thoughts so respect me, I am a man of faith’) once protected for them. My friends Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens do not burn people at the stake for holding opposite views, but criticize them by speaking frankly and bluntly; and I have done the same in other places. There are three areas of debate: metaphysics (does the universe contain supernatural agencies? Answer: No; learn some science) secularism (what is the place of religion in the public square? Answer: it has every right to have its say, but no greater right than anyone else – yet for historical reasons it has a massively over-amplified voice there) and ethics (do you need a ubiquitous invisible policeman watching everyone for people to be good? Answer: No, read e.g. the Good Book). My interest is in all three, but as just noted The Good Book addresses the third of these, by showing that there is a rich, deep, serious non-religious tradition of thought about the good, which is in fact richer and deeper than religious ethics (New Testament ethics says ‘give away all you own, make no plans, do not marry…’ i.e. the ethics of a people who thought the Messiah was very soon going to return; after four centuries Christianity had to borrow great swathes of Greek non-religious ethics to bolster itself.)

WHAT DO YOU SAY ABOUT THE THESIS THAT NEW ATHEISM LOOKS LIKE A RELIGION?
That is nonsense. As has been well said, atheism is to religion what not collecting stamps is to stamp collecting. Not collecting stamps is not a hobby. Not believing in gods and goddesses is not a religion.

CAN WE LIVE COMPLETELY GUIDED BY RIGOROUS REASON AND RATIONALITY? DO YOU YOURSELF TRY TO LIVE THAT WAY, WITHOUT EMOTIONAL SUBJECTIVITY?
Of course we need emotion; who said that we do not? This is the most important part of our lives: loving, responding to beauty, feeling joy, coping with grief and loss, being human. But we know that a partnership of emotion and reason makes our emotions deeper and finer; the emotions can be educated by reflection – as when we read thoughtfully, learn, study science, acquire greater appreciation of music and painting – recognizing the central importance of emotion does not exclude being rational where rationality is called for (from science to thinking about our children’s health and education to voting to planning our pensions – these are not matters for emotion) and emotion is not mere thoughtless whim and arbitrariness. To go from the thought that emotion is central to life to saying that therefore we can believe any old nonsense is an example not of emotion but or irrationality or even stupidity.

ANY SPECIAL MESSAGE TO AN ATHEIST READER?
I congratulate any atheist on being one, and wish him or her well.

Andrew Sullivan at his most vacuous

Chris Matthews gathered a small flock of believers to talk about whether Hell exists or not. Unfortunately, he couldn’t be bothered to find someone who wasn’t delusional to sit on his panel, so we’ve just got a gassy series of empty statements like rarefied flatulence that say nothing at all except that they’re pretty darned sure they’re all experts on the afterlife. Couldn’t they have invited even on atheist so that I’d be unable to dismiss the whole pointless exercise as the wanking of idiots?

If you can’t bear the thought of listening to this nonsense, Amanda Marcotte has done a fine job of extracting the subtext.

We’re breaking Hoffmann

He’s melting down fast.

So I wrote this piece criticizing R. Joseph Hoffmann’s weird praise of martyrs, and today I wondered if maybe he had notice, so I checked his blog. I think he noticed. His response is ironic and unreflective, however…and amusing.

I wrote that we ought to reject the whole concepty of martyrdom, and that it isn’t just gods we should reject, but also these peculiar notions of the agonizing death as a virtue that are really born out of an Iron Age morality. Hoffmann’s latest comment is a rant about atheist tantrums, calls the New Atheists “negative,” “abrasive,” “unsophisticated,” and “philistines,” and singles me out as a “super-jerk”.

Hmmm. Speaking of tantrums…somebody give that man a mirror.

By the way, it’s a minor point, but has anyone else noticed that R. Joseph Hoffman never links to anyone else? Besides being something he has in common with creationists, it also suggests that he doesn’t understand the medium he’s using.

Here’s another good sally against New Oxonian foolishness, from Advocatus Atheist.

Paula Kirby kicks butt

I’ve got some flyin’ to do — you’ll be hearing from me after I arrive in Honolulu, with reports on sun, sand, and science from the West Coast Regional Meeting of the Society for Developmental Biology all this coming weekend — but for now you can enjoy this fine article by Paula Kirby. If there were any sense and justice in the world, the next atheist meeting I attend would be populated entirely with angry women looking to overthrow the temples of the patriarchy.

Harris v Craig

Darn, I’m going to have to find some time to re-read Sam Harris’s Moral Landscape. It bugged me the first time; I kept trying to make, I think, a judgment based on whether we can declare an absolute morality based on rational, objective criteria. I was basically making the same sort of internal argument that William Lane Craig was making in his debate at Notre Dame, and it’s fundamentally wrong — it’s getting all twisted up in philosophical head-games based on misconceptions derived from the constant hammering of theological presuppositions in our culture. You can now listen to Sam Harris vs. William Lane Craig and see what I’m talking about. It was very helpful to see Harris’s views presented in contrast to a dogmatic fool like Craig, and suddenly it was clear where the truth lies.

You can watch it all now on YouTube and see for yourself: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7 – Part 8 – Part 9.

The arguments were stark. According to Craig, if we don’t ground our moral beliefs in a god, then we do not have a sound foundation for our morality. So Sam Harris stands up, gives clear examples of bad moral decisions based on a belief in god and good moral decisions made without reference to any deity, and basically wins the debate in that instant.

But also, Craig lost on style. He went first, and I can see where he’s potent in debates: he’s confident and dominating, and he can rattle off irrelevant syllogisms with faultless aplomb. He’s strict and formal and talks fast. Harris, on the other hand, spoke calmly and casually, took his time laying out his story, and spoke thoughtfully and with sincerity. Watch the two without even thinking about what they’re saying, and on body language and tone, Harris is engaging you and speaking from the heart, while Craig is stiff, strident, and running through the well-worn grooves of repetitive theological rationalizations.

Combine the manner with clarity of thinking behind Harris’s words, and it was a total rout.

Sam Harris and Rebecca Watson!

Not in the same place at the same time, unfortunately — that could be an interesting conversation. But they’re both out and about talking.

Tonight at 7pm Eastern, Sam Harris will be wasting his time debating William Lane Craig. Rumors are that you will be able to watch the debate live at that link; I’m neck-deep in work, so I don’t think I’ll be able to watch, but I’m sure I’ll here about it.

The other fun event is next week: Rebecca Watson will be speaking on “Women’s Intuition and Other Fairytales” at 7 pm Friday, April 15, at CFI-Transnational, 1310 Sweet Home Road, Amherst, NY.

Show up, tell her I sent you, and that she owes me a beer for getting you to go.

Ho-hum, another claim that there are no atheists in foxholes

Man, this article is bad.

Perhaps atheism is a luxury of the well-to-do. Put differently, everyone–even the most hardcore atheists, I think–will start believing in God if put under a high amount of stress. Think of the last time you prayed to God, and I will bet that, for many of you (whether you generally classify yourself as an atheist or not), it would have been when you were under stress. For most of us so-called atheists, when things go horribly wrong, we think of God.

PZ raises his hand. Hardcore atheist here. Nope. I’ve experienced stress, even thought I was dying once…no gods came to mind. But I bet that if you repeat that silly claim often enough, if you go up to dying people and tell them they’ll probably think of Bugs Bunny before they die, you’ll find that lots of them will have the words “What’s up, doc” pop into their head when the doctors visit their hospital room.

The last time I prayed was when I was a goddamned child.

Since this is published in Psychology Today, the author just hast to dredge up some weirdly distorted pop-psych to justify his claims. Here’s the story he tells.

Don’t believe me? Consider Philip Zimbardo’s “broken window” theory. In one of his studies, Zimbardo left a car on the streets of Palo Alto for two weeks. During the first week, the car looked like any other car parked on the street: nothing in it was broken. After the first week, Zimbardo deliberately broke one of the car’s windows. Zimbardo was interested in assessing whether, by merely breaking the window, he had enhanced the chances that it would be vandalized. That’s indeed what he had found. This experiment shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the world is not made up of two sets of people: vandals and non-vandals. Rather, the world is made up of people who all have a propensity to vandalize, and whether one of us vandalizes or not may depend more on something as subtle as whether we see a broken window or not–and not necessarily on our personality.

Wait, what? How do you derive that conclusion from that study, as described? It’s not as if vandals vandalize every car they see; isn’t it more likely that vandalism-prone individuals are more likely to target an already damaged car?

Well, if you’ve leapt to one entirely unjustified conclusion, nothing is stopping you from leaping even further. You’ve already abandoned all respect for the evidence.

Extrapolated to the topic of God: This means that no one is a complete atheist or, for that matter, a complete believer in God. Each of us has a propensity to be somewhere on that continuum. And even a hardcore atheist may exhibit belief in God if he feels his life is sufficiently broken.

While there is definitely a continuum of belief, how can a psychologist (oh, wait…the author is a professor of marketing) so blithely disregard the impact of culture? We hammer people with lifelong messages telling them they must really believe in the god their society favors, and what do you know, they go along with it. Don’t think of an elephant! Have you noticed that no one is telling you that Odin is all-knowing or that Asclepius will heal you, and the likelihood of people under stress invoking either of those gods is really, really low?

Besides, if we’re really going to extrapolated from the Zimbardo study to religion, the story really ought to be like this: God has been like a beautiful, pristine car parked on the street. When someone punches a hole in one of its windows, though, God’s vulnerability is revealed, and pretty soon the humanists come along and steal the tires, the agnostics key the paint job, and the atheists set it on fire, and before you know it, all you’ve got left is scorched rubble and an eyesore that the city needs to tow away and junk.

I like that extrapolation much better.