What It’s All About

I read my friend’s blog the other day, and he had a bullet filled post about what he’s doing with his blog, so I figured I’ll do the same (minus the spray of bullets):

This blog is not meant to be a political platform, or to change anyone else’s views, or to promote atheism, or individual rights. It is simply an exercise for me to put my thoughts into words, and see if they make sense. I want to be able to look back at my posts, and see if I agree, or even if they are understandable. I like having others view my posts, because they can help clarify the issues for me (except my bastos friend, who just confuses me, but that’s ok), and let me know that something didn’t make sense to them. Also, you may notice that I use “them” for an individual of unknown sex. I do this because I don’t really know what to call such a person. Him used to be allowed, then her, then him/her, or it, or hir. If you have a suggestion, please comment.

Of course, the purpose of the blog may change in the future.

Edit: on re-reading this, it almost sounds like a request for a lack of criticism. It is not. I welcome any criticism, harsh or not. There is some kind of filter on comments here to prevent ad bots and the like, but I won’t reject any comment based on the ideas or words used, only based on evil links or ads.

Is Your Body Yours?

I am fully aware that my arguments will have no persuasiveness on those who do not accept the idea of absolute individual rights. They are not my target audience.

The question is pretty simple: is your body your own? Do you have full right to use or abuse it? Is it up to you how you treat your body? Or does it belong to society? Or god?

If your body is your own, and you have absolute right to use it in any way you wish, so long as you don’t violate the rights of others, then some things are immediately apparent. For one, suicide is your right. You can kill yourself how and when you want to, so long as you don’t violate the rights of others. Also, taking a variety of drugs is your right, so long as you don’t violate the rights of others. And, perhaps it is clear to you, if smoking cigarettes is a right, then selling cigarettes is a right, and, so long as you don’t lie, advertising cigarettes is a right (freedom of speech).

Now, someone might say, “but suicide hurts your family and friends.” They are muddying the issue. Yes, it might cause them emotional distress, but freedom from emotional distress is not a right, and a claim of emotional distress does not give us the authority to restrict the actions of others. After all, might it not be emotionally distressing to my enemies when I don’t kill myself?

With smoking, or other drugs, there are a few arguments you will often hear: smokers harm people with second hand smoke, smokers set bad examples which causes people to take up smoking, smokers use more socialized medicine resources, drug users might get into car accidents, drug users might go crazy and hurt people.

Let’s take them one at a time:

Regarding second hand smoke, while I think the dangers are overstated, this is not the issue. The issue is, where is the second hand smoke being breathed in? Is it in a privately owned bar or restaurant? If so, the owner has the right to allow it on his property, since people who don’t wish to breath in second hand smoke are not obligated to enter his property. Selling something on your property does not invalidate the fact that it is privately owned, and that the owners may allow fumes of various sorts inside. For particularly dangerous fumes, I can understand requiring a sign posting outside warning would be customers before entering.

Now, as for setting a bad example, it’s a fine point, except that I have the right to set a bad example. If the bad example argument were applied to all aspects of our lives, you would have no liberty at all. There would need to be a specific standard of “good example” and we would have to live up to it. However, I am a semi-free individual, and I have the right (moral right, not legal) to set bad examples, and if people choose to imitate me, that is their responsibility. In short: It’s not up to me to raise your kids.

How about using socialized medicine? Ah, here we see the horror, not of smoking (which has plenty of horrors), but of socialization: by spreading the responsibility of one’s actions to the collective, you prompt the collective to limit your actions to those which are not demanding of collective resources. Rights and responsibility go hand in hand. When you take away one, you lose the other (though people without rights can unfairly be held responsible). Here, we see that by removing responsibility from individuals, we are lead to the conclusion that we must take away their rights (by taking away responsibility for the care of the individual’s body, we must also limit the individual’s rights to control over his body). But this is only one of the conclusions you could reach. The other, less horrid conclusion, the one which isn’t easily destroyed by reductio ad absurdum is: de-socialize medicine! If socialized medicine leads to the violation of rights, then don’t socialize medicine.

Now, drug users getting into car accidents are a problem. Solution: make it illegal to do activities that are considered dangerous (enough) to other people, like drinking and driving, or being sober and firing bullets into a crowd. Problem solved. And drugs that make people go insane and kill-crazy? Well, if there are such drugs, they should be disallowed under any circumstance where others could reasonably get hurt. Maybe you could allow the use of such drugs in special padded wall cells which are rented out by the users.

Now, what do you call a human whose body is owned by another person (or group of people)?

The Tyrants Next Door

I’ve lived in appartments in cities and in small towns, and in houses in the country and houses in the suburbs. I’ve had to deal with neighbors quite a bit, and I find that the best neighbor is the one you never have any dealings with.

When you live in a house, in the suburbs, in Ohio, you get harassed. I lived in a house in Toledo, and the city was on my case quite often about the grass being too long. I always thought, “wait, isn’t this my property?” The answer is: no, it is not. You rent your property from the city by paying them property tax, and they have control over what you do with your property. If you think you own your land, just let your grass grow a bit, and you’ll see very quickly that you do not.

The rationalizations are as plentiful as they are pathetic. People will say, “but you’re making the neighborhood uglier.” The neighborhood is not my problem, my own land is, and how I want it to look should be my business. They will say, “you’re lowering our property values,” but again, your property is not my responsibility. You might say that an ugly person moving in lowers your property value, or someone who owns a beat up car, or someone who has annoying children. As long as I stay on my property, and not go on yours, then it should be none of your business.

There is one slightly reasonable sounding argument: that letting my grass grow long actually does do damage to your property, either by having weeds spread to your yard, or something like that, or by being a breeding ground for various animals. However, the cross pollenation argument assumes that grass is the right kind of plant, and that dandelions or what have you are the wrong kind of plant. But this is a subjective matter. One man’s weed is another man’s.. plant of choice. As for rodents, or snakes, this makes some sense, and I can see enforcing a limitation on the number of rodents or snakes in your yard (so you might have to use some chemical to ward them off, or have a hungry dog or something). But this is misleading, and it’s a non-sequitor (since there are ways to have high grass without pests); the main reason people are complaining, and the city is harassing, is because they want you to fit in with their idea of what a yard should look like.

Soul as Consciousness

First, let me say, I am not trying to make this blog about atheism. This blog is about whatever I want to write at any given time. I was just walking around outside, thinking about what it would be like to have a child, and trying to explain certain concepts to it. I thought about emergent properties, and how our consciousness could work. I will agree with supernaturalists that we are not simply flesh and blood. We are flesh and blood and electrical signals, and heat, arranged in a specific way so as to create the emergent property of our conscious mind. I think I can sympathize with the confusion as to how this awareness comes from matter alone, but in response to the idea that it must be supernatural, I have this to say:

What the hell is our brain for? I was talking to my friend Mark the other day, and he was telling me about neurons in the brain, and how we have trillions of connections, and how immensly complex our brains are. It just struck me while walking outside, if our consciousness is not an emergent property of our brain, and is supernatural in origin, then what the hell is our brain so complex for? Oh, there are certain things to control in the body automatically, but that’s a very limited part of our brains. To me, it’s like if someone asked “what makes your hand squeeze tight?”, and the response was “your hand soul,” and I would wonder, “what are your tendons for, your muscles, your nerves, blood, etc?”

I don’t know how our brains work, or how consciousness comes from it, but the very existence of this immensely complex structure, that we have measured activity in when people think various kinds of thoughts, should suggest to people that our conscious existence is an emergent property of ordinary matter, and not supernatural in origin.

This isn’t an argument against god, or about the beginning of the universe, and it isn’t an argument against some non-consciousness soul (a soul that is unrelated to your consciousness). I don’t know if anyone actually believes that our consciousness is caused by the supernatural rather than the natural, but if they do, perhaps they should take a look at the wonderful human brain.

A Point and a Rant

I noticed that my last blog post was fairly dispassionate until the very end (the paragraph before the edit). That last paragraph, however, was about my views, and my emotions on the issue. I think it’s a fine thing for a person to have an emotional position on a subject, but it shouldn’t be part of their argument. Saying where you stand on an issue serves to let people be aware of your stance, if they care, and also let’s one express their emotions, which can feel good.

The important thing is to not make emotional arguments though. For this reason, it’s good to state your personal position after you make your arguments (or before), but not in the middle of them. I think I’ll probably end most of my posts with a good rant, but I’ll make an effort to keep the first part of the post clean of such writing.

Atheism

Well, in the media I view (mainly youtube videos, and short comments on them), there is certainly a lot of talk about what an atheist is or isn’t. There is an idea (Sam Harris mentions it, though I don’t know if it originated with him) that atheism shouldn’t even be a word, just as we don’t have words for people who don’t believe in astrology, or in dowsing. I understand that view, though I have no problem with adding new words for anything, so long as they are well defined.

Now, what exactly is atheism? There are numerous definitions, though the one that encapsulates all of them seems to be “Lack of belief in a deity”. I prefer this definition, because it prevents people (or should, if they were honest people) from saying that atheism is a religion. A religion is a system of belief. You can’t have a religion based on a lack of belief. Also, this definition prevents the argument that atheists need to support their claim: since atheists make no claim, there is nothing to support (no need to prove the non-existence of a god or gods).

What about agnosticism? And what about strong atheism? Well, agnosticism is an acknowledgment of a lack of knowledge that the individual holds, in regard to some, or all gods. In this sense, atheism and agnosticism are not incompatible. Indeed, one can be an agnostic atheist (lacking knowledge of god’s existence, and therefore not believing the claim that god does exist). You can also be an agnostic theist. You can believe god exists, but admit that you have no knowledge of his (or her) existence. As an example, I believe that alien life forms (life originating from somewhere besides Earth) probably exists. However, I have no knowledge of its existence. So, with regards to alien life, I am an agnostic alienist.

But again, what of strong atheism? The idea is that for certain, defined (somewhat defined, through its properties or deeds) gods, you can disprove the existence of said god. Well, we need to take a look at the word proof. To prove something is to show logically, on accepted hypotheses, that something must be. In other words, you have hypotheses, and you show that, from those, it follows that something is (in this case, the non-existence of god). Now, no one is a strong atheist with regards to all possible gods. The word is so poorly defined, that it is impossible to be so. So, a strong atheist may try to disprove specific gods, like the young Earth creationist god. The problem here is, that even though the young Earth creationists use technologies that were made using certain scientific ideas, on a daily basis, they will reject those ideas when you try your proof. So, your hypotheses will be rejected, thus your proof of the non-existence of god will be rejected (assuming you use any of the results from the natural sciences to show that the Earth is more than 6000 years old).

Ok then, it’s pointless to try to prove to someone who will reject your hypotheses, that  god does not exist (at least, from premises which are not accepted by both parties).

So then, what of the gods who are internally inconsistent. That is, the gods whose infallible holy books contain contradictions? Well, I think if one thing can be said about theists, it is that they are contradictionists. That is, they believe that contradictions can exist. Miracles, creation of existence by existents, eternal punishment of babies who were too young to know and love the all merciful god, etc. So, showing a contradiction doesn’t mean much for someone who doesn’t accept the law of non-contradiction.

What then is the method of appealing to theists? The same method which led them to become theists in the first place: appeal to authority. Yes, I know it’s a logical fallacy, but if they accepted logic, they wouldn’t be theists, now would they? By appeal to authority, I mean a whole host of various influences which can make it shameful to be a theist. If we can establish a culture where making outrageous, unsubstantiated claims is met with scorn and ridicule, then social pressures will help to drive people away from theism (or have them hide it, which means less preaching at least). If we can try to get people out of their segregated communities where their nonsensical beliefs are supported, then this will also help. I think embarrassment is a powerful factor in determining peoples’ beliefs, even if it is a logically fallacious one.

N0w, on another note, what exactly is a theist? Or more specifically, what is a christian? And what’s a christian fundamentalist? In less segregated areas, where people are exposed to more ideas, christianity is very different than the christianity that people call fundamentalist. There is some sense of good will, and appeal to charity and what not, and maybe a belief that 13 billion years ago, a deity created the universe. Now compare this to say, young Earth creationists, who take the bible very literally. Some christians call these fundamentalists “extreme” or some other word, intended as derogatory. However, I think these people have more moral integrity. I think their morality is crap, of course, but at least they attempt to be consistent with it. They don’t pick whichever verses are compatible with their modern secular life. They believe that this is god’s book, and that it is a code of absolute morality (nothing wrong with absolute morality, just make sure you have the right one). So, the moderate christians, in my view, are just hypocrites. They accept that this is the word of god, that it is a code of, and some say the only proper source of, morality, and then they defy it with their secular lifestyle. I’m very glad they do, don’t get me wrong, but the difference between them and the “fundamentalists” or “extremists” is simply their lack of moral integrity.

Now, notice how god has become less and less influential in the universe, as we expand our knowledge: God was the creator of heaven and the Earth, of the animals and plants, and humans, and water, etc. Until we understood evolution, and star formation, and planet formation, and so on. Germ theory, climate science, tidal forces, and all of natural science has pushed god back, from being a very involved deity which controlls and creates mostly everything, to, well, maybe the guy that made the big bang happen.

God is the lazy man’s answer to questions to which he doesn’t want to answer “I don’t know”. But “I don’t know” is the only honest answer. It doesn’t require making unjustifiable claims, it doesn’t contradict the other knowledge we have, it doesn’t require obedience, or acceptence, it doesn’t punish for disbelief, it doesn’t preach false morality based on ancient barbaric standards. When someone asks you a question you don’t know, “I don’t know” is the only honest answer to give.

I am an atheist. My epistemology is induction through sense data, and deduction. When I don’t understand something, I don’t lie about it, and I don’t accept that belief in something which we have no way of possibly percieving is an admirable or respectable quality in a person. We’ve reached an age when new religions are not very well recieved. Sure, there’s scientology, and some new age ideas, but mostly, this is met with ridicule. We are, most of us, atheists with respect to all the ancient gods that man has since abandoned, including Ra, Zeus, Thor, et al. If we can get past this last bit of unreasoned belief, well, I won’t get into practical arguments. I simply look forward to the day when god is truly dead.

edit: Also, I should point out, to those who have a problem with using appeal to authority to push people away from theism, I am not advocating that we try to use appeal to authority to get them to accept a truth. It is not that we should get them to say “god does not exist” because of social pressure. I am simply saying that if we can get them to abandon incorrect beliefs, and incorrect epistemological beliefs, by means of the type of argument that does matter to them, then this is not a self inconsistent, or self-destructive idea (though I may change my views on this in the future, as happens a lot for me

Hello world!

A note on my blog entries. I may say things that other people have said before. I may even say them in similar ways that others have said them, and even similar to what I have actually read or heard others write or speak about. If this happens, all I can say is: it was not intentional. I am not going to intentionally quote someone without giving credit. I also take no credit for the ideas I express in my blog. They will be my words (unless I get hacked or something), but they may not be original, in that someone else has not already expressed similar ideas. What I’m saying is: I will almost certainly write a post expressing ideas that someone else has already expressed, and so what, but if my expression is so similar as to seem like a plagiary, it was not intentional.