Journal of No. 118

I've Been Thinking / Ninth House / A House Called Awful End

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 03:58:15 GMT

I've Been Thinking by Daniel C. Dennett

It's something of an autobiography of philosopher Dan Dennett, who is my spirit animal. He's done a lot of good (IMHO) work in dispelling a number of *wrong* ways of thinking about consciousness, and his other interests in artificial intelligence, evolutionary theory, etc. are also of great interest.

There's an awful lot more celebrity name-dropping in this than I expected, but I won't begrudge him his fame. Nothing earth-shattering, but a lot of interesting details, like that he was essentially one of the inaugural professors at UC Irvine when the campus got started, only later moving to Tufts where he's been happy ever since. A nice vignette about his farm in Maine with some description of his neighbors that are more sympathetic than those he gives to a number of asshole philosophers when he finally unloads on them in one short chapter about academic bullies. If Dennett is also your spirit animal, then you'll enjoy this. If you don't know who I'm talking about, it's not likely this will appeal

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

Supernatural skullduggery among the 'secret' societies of Yale (like Skull and Bones). An enjoyable, but very dark, rollercoaster ride, but the number of smug Ivory Tower elitists is maddening. It helps somewhat that our heroine is a SoCal gutterpunk, but I did keep rooting for asteroid strike -- a pox on all their houses. Lots of interesting prose and more than enough action, but the whole set-up seems a bit contrived, and the possibilities of magic seem pushed by the requirements of the plot more than any coherent system. Go Bruins.

The House at Awful End by Philip Ardagh

I picked this out of a little free library initially because of the Gorey-adjacent illustrations by David Roberts. And the story clearly has a pleasantly dark theme. Allegedly the author wrote this story out, chapter by chapter, for a lonely nephew trapped in a boarding school. Maybe it doesn't go quite as dark as Ninth House, but it goes pretty dark for something aimed at kids. And not just dark, but kind of nasty in a way that goes beyond Roald Dahl's stories if not Roald Dahl's actual life. The book's humor (as such) is a series of random improbable predicaments. I can see how the episodic nature of its composition might lend to that, but it's just not funny. I'm probably wrong, though. The Financial Times writes 'it would be a sad spirit that didn't find this book hilarious," and if any journal is an expert in comedy, it's FT.

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Gone Fishin' - Goliath - Christianity Made Me Talk Like an Idiot

Sun, 05 Mar 2023 20:20:02 GMT

Gone Fishin' by Walter Mosely is the creation story of Easy Rawlins, covering some Louisiana incidents largely instigated by his friend Mouse. There's some blood, guts, chicanery and sex, but the story as a whole doesn't amount to anything. Just fleshing out the biography.

I confess I only got through about half of Goliath by Tochi Onyebuchi. The diffuse story-telling just isn't grabbing me. A lot of science fiction futures are really about our present, and that's certainly true of Goliath. Rather than white flight emptying out inner cities leaving hollowed-out unmanageable cores, now the rich have gone offworld leaving behind an earth in bad shape. And now there's a whiff of gentrification as some of the offworlders come back. I love a good allegory, but this one doesn't seem to have any point. Granted I didn't stick with it all the way to its destination.

Christianity Made Me Talk Like and Idiot, by Seth Andrews

I got this for free for paying my dues in American Atheists. (Signed, no less). But the title and the book is a bit of a cheat. Andrews was once an avid Christian, and even a Christian radio broadcaster. But a dozen years ago, when he was around 40, he gave up religion.

So the book could have been extremely valuable, hearing his own story from the inside of what it was like before. And how now he realizes that Christianity made him say stupid things. But the book is nearly all about how Christianity makes other people say stupid things. As such, most of it is not very interesting. Any internet atheist could write that book (waves). There are some parts where he talks more directly about his former life, and when he gets on that topic, he tends to express more compassion for other victims of extreme Christianity. But these touches are largely wiped away by how mean-spirited most of the rest of the book is (waves).

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Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World, by Tim Whitmarsh

Tue, 11 Feb 2020 01:10:08 GMT

An interesting survey of Greek thought through the lens of 'atheism' from the earliest Greeks to the advent of Christian Rome.

The religion of the Greeks was a very different kind of thing than Christianity, so 'atheism' or 'impiety' meant something very different as well. For the Greeks religion was more practice and performance, rather than theological litmus tests.

Atheism was not really a word that people self-applied, but it (like now) was used more to denigrate your political or philosophical enemies. For that reason, and the lack of complete sources, Whitmarsh has to pick his way through the surviving bits and epitomes and satires to try to draw a picture of ancient Greek philosophical atheism. There's not much there there, but he does a good job showing the threads that remain.

Anyway, some of my random notes:

It is said that while another man was marveling at a series of temple dedications put up by survivors of sea storms, Diogenes retorted that there would have been many more if the nonsurvivors had also left dedications.

Atheists: snarky jerks for 2500 years.

What the Greek epics were not, however, were theological or liturgical works. Excerpts might be performed at festivals, but there is no evidence that they were used in a specifically ritual context. The performers themselves were not priests but rhapsodes, specialist singers known for their showy dress and gesture. These might claim to be divinely inspired (as the rhapsode Ion does in Plato’s dialogue of the same name), but their aim was to thrill, inspire, and instruct, not to fill their audiences with a sense of the godhead. Relative to Israel and other cultures of the ancient Near East, Greece handled its national literature in a strikingly secular way (from a monotheistic perspective).

Theagenes associated Apollo, Helios (the sun god), and Hephaestus with fire, water with Poseidon and the river god Scamander, Artemis with the moon, Hera with the air (the two words are anagrams in Greek: ēra and aēr). He also saw gods as oblique ways of talking about human faculties: Athena signifies the intellect, Ares folly, Aphrodite desire, Hermes reason. In the fifth century BC, Metrodorus of Lampsacus decoded Homer’s text systematically into a symbolic representation of the world. The original texts of Theagenes and Metrodorus are now lost, but in 1962 an allegorical commentary on a now lost mystical poem based on Hesiod, dating to the late fifth century, was discovered near Thessaloniki: the surprise discovery of the so-called Derveni papyrus opened a window onto the ingenious practices of the early allegorists.

While not necessarily atheistic, Whitmarsh points to some healthy skepticism:

Here he is, for example, on centaurs: What is said about the Centaurs is that they were beasts with the overall shape of a horse—except for the head, which was human. But even if there are some people who believe that such a beast once existed, it is impossible. Horse and human natures are not compatible, nor are their foods the same; what a horse eats could not pass through the mouth and throat of a man. And if there ever had been such a shape, it would also exist today.

"This is the grave of Hippo, whom Fate made equal in death to the immortal gods."

Was Anaxagoras an atheist? There is nothing anachronistic about this question. In the late 430s, he was put on trial for “impiety,” on the grounds that he denied the divinity of the heavenly bodies (which he undoubtedly did). This may have been the first time in history that an individual was prosecuted for heretical religious beliefs. Although he escaped, he retained a reputation for impious thought. Socrates, at his own trial, had to remind his jurors not to confuse him with Anaxagoras.

On the Sacred Disease, however, argues that the illness can be explained by factors that are entirely internal to the human organism. “It appears to me,” writes the author in the introduction, “to be in no way more divine or sacred than other diseases; it has a natural cause, from which it originates, like other illnesses. People consider its nature and its cause as divine out of ignorance and wonder.”

In the case of the first book of On Piety, the scroll had also been cut in two, and the halves had been catalogued separately, and later generations had been unaware that the two belonged together. To make matters worse, several fragments, and all the early drawings, had been spirited away from Italy to Oxford. The reunited and reconstructed text, which was published in 1996 by Dirk Obbink, is one of the great achievements of modern classical scholarship

Religion as social control:
There was a time when humans’ life was unordered, Bestial and subservient to violence; When there was no reward for the noble Or chastisement for the base. And then, it seems to me, humans set up Laws, so that justice should be tyrant And hold aggression enslaved. Anyone who erred was punished. Then, when laws prevented them From performing open acts of force, They started performing them in secret; and then, it seems to me, Some shrewd man, wise in his counsel, Discovered for mortals fear of the gods, so that The base should have fear, if even in secret They should do or say or think anything. So he thereupon introduced religion, Namely the idea that there is a deity flourishing with immortal life, Hearing in his mind, seeing, thinking, Attending to these things and having a divine nature, Who will hear everything said among mortals, And will be able to see everything that is done. If you plan some base act in silence, The gods will not fail to notice.

The specifics of Diopeithes’s decree probably came (via Craterus or someone like him) from the records in Athens’s own official archive. It seems genuine enough.6 The decree targets two kinds of criminality. The first is not recognizing (nomizein) the gods. The Greek word is ambiguous and can suggest either their ritual worship or belief in their existence. Perhaps this ambiguity was intentional, so that prosecutors could use the law to sweep up both those who were derelict in their fulfilment of religious obligations and those who held heterodox beliefs. This would fit with the corresponding extension of impiety from the sphere of ritual into that of belief. The second activity outlawed is “teaching doctrines regarding the heavens,” which might seem at first sight a completely different issue.

Euhemerism:

As the narrative progresses, we come ever closer to the beating heart of Panchaean society, the temple of Zeus Triphylios (“of the Three Tribes”) that stands on an acropolis. Euhemerus has much to say about the beauty and the grandeur of the temple. But, he says, it concealed a surprise: a golden pillar, inscribed with a record of the deeds of Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus. The inscription revealed that the Olympian gods were originally human beings and an exceptional generation of rulers of Panchaea. It was Zeus himself who traveled around the world and instituted his own cultic worship. In other words, Panchaean society is sustained by a religion based upon the worship of a “god” who is no more a god than you or I.

Lucretius’s Epicurus is a crusader not so much against rituals and state institutions as against the false beliefs that oppress us with fear of death, punishment, and the afterlife. Liberation will be found not in smashing organized religion (no Epicurean ever suggested that) but in rejecting the received, mythical view of the gods as aggressively vengeful and accepting that in the materialist view of things they have no influence over our lives.

In the myth, his fleet had been stayed by a calming of the waters, which Artemis had imposed because Agamemnon had killed a deer on land sacred to her. “Such is the terrible evil that religion was able to urge,” concludes Lucretius: “Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum,” one of the poet’s most famous lines (Voltaire, for example, sent it to Frederick II of Prussia in 1737 when urging the cause of secularism). Lucretius’s point is that this misunderstanding of the shifting nature of wind (which he explains elsewhere in purely material terms) is more than simply an error. When we fail to understand the truth about nature, and more particularly when we substitute religious for scientific understanding, terrible consequences can ensue.

Essentially, Stoicism taught that happiness is achieved not by pursuing appetites but by living according to nature: one’s own nature, but also that of the universe itself. Everything that happens in the universe is directed toward the best outcome; our duty as individuals is to discern, as best we can using our rational powers, what that outcome is and to bend our lives toward facilitating it.

The doxography of atheism is particularly significant because of the relative marginality of atheism in antiquity. To be an atheist was, for most, to be a member of a virtual rather than a face-to-face community. There were no real-world schools of atheism that allowed one disbeliever to engage in dialogue with another. It was doxography alone that offered that network, linking together disparate individuals and weaving together their disparate beliefs into a shared set of doctrines that collectively made up a philosophy of atheism.

As a whole, Pliny’s disquisition suggests that the idea of deity is a human construction. “God,” he says at one point, “is one mortal helping another.” We make our own divinity through our behavior toward others.

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The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov

Tue, 29 May 2018 03:52:33 GMT

The Master and Margarita is considered by some critics "to be one of the best novels of the 20th century, as well as the foremost of Soviet satires."

This does not speak well of Soviet satires, and I would like to leave a flaming bag of poo on the doorstep of 'some critics'.

This came up as a selection in the Resistance Book Club, but sadly there is more meat for discussion in Bulgakov's Wikipedia page than the novel. The censorship he faced in life, and the fact that the novel circulated in samizdat and was only published years after the author's death, have much more to do with authoritarianism than the book itself.

To be sure, one element of the book is that a novel about Pontius Pilate is suppressed by the Soviet literary establishment for being too religious, but that's about an end of the criticism of the Soviet state (per se) other than some small-time humor about bribes, cliques and the chicanery required to land a decent apartment in Moscow.

Bits of the Pilate novel are also interpolated into The Master and Margarita, and are in fact the best written parts of it, since the remainder is a mostly tedious slapstick farce of Satan and his minions visiting Moscow and wreaking havoc. The historical scenes are a serious and sympathetic literary take on Pilate, grounded in the gospel narrative, but adding to it dramatically.

A highpoint of the modern era story is a Satanic Ball, because who can argue with that?

It's possible I chose a poor translation. Well, no, it's not possible, it's certain. I'm just not very sure that my opinion would have risen much with a better translation. I'm gonna pull my Hipness Through Erudition card, and note that when Pontius Pilate is described as a 'rider', what was meant was that he was of an equestrian family.

Favorite 'joke': one of the demons takes the form of a huge black tomcat, walking about on his hindlegs. He gets on a Moscow streetcar. The other locals might not have objected to this so much, had he not attempted to pay for his passage. Rimsky-shot.

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Dispatches from east of the 5

Sat, 05 May 2018 16:37:13 GMT

California's social politics are pretty divided between the coast and the inland areas.

My Google Alert on 'atheism' dragged up some editorial feedback from Bakersfield.

A relatively tame editorial cartoon poking at the cognitive dissonance of the Trump Evangelical produced some pretty angry feedback from a couple folks.

TBC has really crossed the line on this absolutely defamatory cartoon. You are totally undeserving of the protection afforded you under the First Amendment. TBC has without a doubt totally embraced itself with the rest of the liberal scum media in this country. It is too bad the entire community of subscribers and advertisers can't boycott your despicable publication.

Your Last Supper cartoon was a totally blasphemous piece of (expletive), even for TBC.

The editor handled it all with aplomb.

Lower down, there is perhaps the more surprising feedback on the moral evils of interracial marriage:

Mr. Price goes on about how the Warren Court and equally liberal Burger Court forced Bob Jones University, a private very fundamentalist Christian college, to submit their longstanding Christian beliefs to the will of the court to desecrate and allow interracial marriages among their students by the taxing authority of the IRS. Thus precluding their exercising of their Creator's gift of free will to operate as they see fit.

They were forced to comply or shut down. Judicial activism today is a euphemism of social engineering throughout the entire judicial system that enslaves everyone under its jurisdiction to a hell of moral bankruptcy and hopeless, fearful resignation of big brother (government) knows best racketeering.

Hard to believe people will equate moral bankruptcy with interracial marriage, but that's how some folks are 'east of the 5' (in Jason B's phrase).

I would also note there are some factual differences between apparently what the paper wrote and the angry reader. Although BJU did lose its tax exempt status, it was clearly not 'forced to comply or shut down'. Or forced to submit to anything by the court. I suppose the reader would be happy to know that the school did the 'principled' thing and continued to ban interracial couples on campus, although it cost them the tax exempt status in 1983. It was only after candidate George W Bush spoke there in 2000 that the dating ban got catapulted into the national news, and the school changed its policy of its own accord.

But don't worry, they didn't really let standards slip at BJU. As a Post story notes of the change in 2000:

Jones did not back off of the school's anti-Catholic position, and he said his university would not keep a gay student in school, just as it would not keep an adulterer or thief. And he said students are not allowed to read plays by Tennessee Williams. "Garbage in, garbage out," Jones said.

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American Atheists doesn't want bigots

Thu, 23 Nov 2017 18:02:25 GMT

Hemant Mehta quotes David Silverman's article in the current issue of American Athiest:

"We must own the fact that some atheists can be bad people.

...

We must keep our tent as large as possible, but we will not include anyone who embraces bigotry or merely turns a blind eye to it.
...
If you are an atheist who believes that discrimination because of race, gender, or sexual orientation is sometimes acceptable, then we don’t want you.
We don’t want your membership, we don’t want your money, and we don’t want your support. Your cause is not our cause. American Atheists exists to eliminate bigotry against our community, so we will never tolerate bigotry from our community."

American Atheists used to be synonymous with Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who was pretty much the caricature of the angry atheist your parents warned you about. David Silverman has done some great work leading the group somewhere better.

(This comes with a backdrop of my disenchantment with how the CFI has gone since the removal of Paul Kurtz and the merger with the Dawkins Foundation.)

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