essentialsaltes | Entries tagged with atheism

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.

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).

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.

Crossposts: https://essentialsaltes.livejournal.com/967293.html

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.

Crossposts: https://essentialsaltes.livejournal.com/957755.html

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.

Crossposts: https://essentialsaltes.livejournal.com/957013.html

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.)

Crossposts: https://essentialsaltes.livejournal.com/952651.html

Some of the same researchers involved in the 2003 American Mosaic Survey have released results of the 2014 study.

There a really glaring result relating to when people were asked to agree/disagree with the following statement across a variety of demographics:

This group does not at all agree with my vision of American society

Atheists 39.6% 41.9%
Muslims 26.3% 45.5%
Homosexuals 22.6% 29.4%
Conservative Christians 13.5% 26.6%
Recent immigrants 12.5% 25.6%
Hispanics 7.6% 17.1%
Jews 7.4% 17.6%
Asian Americans 7.0% 16.4%
African Americans 4.6% 16.9%
Spiritual, but not religious — 12.0%
Whites 2.2% 10.2%

First number is from 2003.

All of the numbers have increased. Some by quite a lot. Even white people, who are totally awesome and chill, went from 2.2% to 10.2%. Disagreement with conservative Christians nearly doubled to 26.6%. The previous study was not long after 9/11, but disagreement with Muslims jumped from 26.3% to 45.5%. Immigrants doubled. Hispanics, Jews, Asians, African Americans... all jump from single digits to double digits.

This is what polarization and demonization look like.

Islands of Space by John W. Campbell is the kind of gee-whiz space opera that makes Buck Rogers look nuanced. A passel of superscientist men effortlessly invent multiple impossible inventions and generally behave like 12-year-old boys with their new godlike powers.

"The Bechdel test asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women..." FAIL

"Islands of Space is generally credited with introducing the concepts of hyperspace and the warp drive to science fiction." So that's something, anyway.

It's also interesting that the book interpolates the plot from his story "Dead Knowledge," which I liked quite a bit. Here, apart from the bare bones of the plot, all of the atmosphere and emotion has been drained away, probably because it would not have meshed with the whizbang mood of the novel.

I'm glad even the people of long ago smelled this one as a stinker. Ted Sturgeon thought it was crap (and he, of all people, would know). "This is a real lousy book."

Rachel Held Evans is probably best known for A Year Of Biblical Womanhood, chronicling her attempt to live according to the Bible's rules for women. But recently she was quoted in an article in (I think) Smithsonian about her hometown of Dayton, famous as the site of the Scopes Trial in 1925. She intimated that the attitudes in Dayton haven't changed much, and her story of asking too many questions in a community that has all the answers (and doesn't like pesky questions) was published as Evolving in Monkey Town. I couldn't pass up a title like that.

Sadly(?), the creationism/evolutionism angle is not really a major part of the story, just useful as a title that would get me to buy it (it worked!) [I gather that the title was originally the title of her blog]. It's actually a little maddening that what little she says about it seems to indicate that the question is still an open one in her mind. The book has since been retitled "Faith Unravelled", though that's a bit of a misnomer as well. It's more a story of her journey of faith. She starts as a model member of the local community, multiple winner of her school's Best Christian Attitude award, and a graduate of [William Jennings] Bryan College, a place literally founded in the wake of the Monkey Trial to defend a Biblical worldview. More recently than the book, Bryan College changed its statement of faith to include the belief in a literal, specially created, Adam and Eve, resulting in the departure of some faculty members.

As a thoughtful, reflective, skeptical, millennial, she navigates her theology to come to a place where she can recognize that (although no one wants to admit it, and some may be too unreflective to even be aware of it) every Christian 'picks and chooses' verses and interpretations of the bible based on their own particular biases and experience. I generally like her picks and choices, and it must be tough to swim against the stream. Asking questions no one wants to hear, and then coming up with unpopular answers. "I was called a socialist and a baby killer. People questioned my commitment to my faith, and my country, some suggesting that I may face eternal consequences for my decision [to vote for Barack Obama]."

At the same time, it's clear that her questioning has its limits. "Doubt is a difficult animal to master because it requires that we learn the difference between doubting God and doubting what we believe about God. The former has the potential to destroy faith; the latter has the power to enrich and refine it. The former is a vice; the latter a virtue."

My answer to that is a quote from the Great Beast. Crowley may have been an extravagant old fraud, but he sometimes had a piquant way with words:

"I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening;
I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning."

A History of American Secularism

A fascinating look at the idea of secular government from the Founders to the present, and how the idea has shifted from Enlightenment ideals to the Golden Age of Freethought in the 19th century, when the Great Agnostic Ingersoll could give the nominating speech for a Republican candidate for president (even in the good old days, when Republicans were the party of abolition). To the emergence of fundamentalism in the early 20th and its later common cause partnership with conservative Catholicism, and the response with the freethinker's coalition with liberal Protestantism and (secular) Judaism.

The historical detail is quite excellent, but as the time grows nearer the present, a hint of polemicism arises. I don't disagree with her, but the shift in tone is noticeable in the last chapter or so.

( And yes, the blockquotes )
✓one-word title

Massimo Pigliucci has just about had it with the Skeptical & Atheist Movement. I think most of his targets are well-chosen. And I would join him in giving Dan Dennett a big hug.

BioLogos (Francis Collins' pro-evolution pro-religion organization) funded Jonathan Hill, a Calvin College researcher, to conduct a study of American views on evolution and creationism.

For decades, the traditional (and easily comparable) data has been from Gallup polls that have asked the following question, starting in 1982:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings:
(1) human beings have evolved over millions of years from other forms of life and God guided this process,
(2) human beings have evolved over millions of years from other forms of life, but God had no part in this process, or
(3) God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so?

Although this seems to carve things up neatly into theistic evolution, 'atheistic' evolution, and YEC, people's actual beliefs are, if not more subtle, at least more complicated. The results of these Gallup polls is that the largest response has always been for choice 3, the YEC option, with Americans agreeing with this option at 40% or more.

The current poll included 3,000 American participants, and provides a much clearer look into people's actual beliefs, and the different factors that influence (or correlate with) different beliefs.

Professor Hill offers his summary of the research, and there is a link to the entire study results. He focuses in his summary most on what recipe produces (his word, not mine) a YE creationist (or atheist evolutionist).

The National Center for Science Education has also posted a quick look into the data.

One of the tidbits that caught my eye: "only 8% of the sample met the further restrictions of believing in 6 24-hour days of creation which took place less than 10,000 years ago". Despite 40% picking the YEC option in the Gallup poll, putting together a complete suite of YEC beliefs actually shows that quite a small number are 6-literal-day YEC. Of course the same goes for full-on 'atheistic' evolution: "atheistic evolutionists, who accept human evolution but do not think God played a role (even if they personally believe in God), represented 9% of the sample."

"Not surprisingly, the pro-evolution almost always justify their stance by noting that it represents the best science, while those classified as creationists cite the authority of the Bible and defense of Christianity as the main motivations for their beliefs. ... This suggests that the two groups are in effect hearing two different questions, with one group hearing a question about science, the other hearing a question about religion. "

"a mere 32% of the creationists and only 19% of those who do not think God was involved in evolution agreed that science and religion are “ultimately compatible.” Over half (53%) of the theistic evolutionists disagreed, saying that the two are ultimately compatible."

Great article on the history of Elevatorgate and other episodes of misogyny and the war about misogyny in the atheism/skepticism movement - on Buzzfeed of all places. [See also my earlier journal entry]

In related news, I'd also like to point out, for the local Southern Californians, that there is an art exhibit opening up at the Center for Inquiry Hollywood tomorrow night (Sep 13).

A Woman's Room Online:

"A Woman’s Room Online is an installation art exhibit created by Amy Davis Roth in conjunction with The Los Angeles Women’s Atheist and Agnostic Group (LAWAAG) and hosted at CFI-Los Angeles.

This installation consists of thousands of real sexist and threatening messages sent to only a handful of women who work in online arenas. The viewer enters a small freestanding room, an office space that has been completely transformed and plastered with messages, a paper-trail of hate, sent electronically to the contributors starting in July of 2011 until today."

The Red Tree, by Caitlín Kiernan, centers on the titular plant and its penchant for driving people crazy and/or murderous. The story of its history is uncovered, bit by bit, by our protagonist, as she, unavoidably, also falls victim to its influence. I enjoyed most of the ride -- I'm not sure if it's because or despite some meta elements -- but the ending did not pay off for me, which is always a buzzkill.

Generation Atheist was briefly free on kindle, so I gave it a shot. A collection of 25 testimonies, er... personal narratives, of young atheists from a variety of backgrounds, from Jain to Mormon. They mostly discuss their transition from theist to atheist, and their dealings with community and family. Some are young atheist 'celebs' like Hemant Mehta & Jessica Ahlquist, while others are pseudonymous.

For me, it was interesting to see the similarities & differences between their experiences and my own. One of the main differences is the greater awareness about atheism in the general culture nowadays. I mean when I was a kid, the only atheist I knew was Madalyn Murray-O'Hair, who was an obnoxious windbag. And now there's Dawkins and Sam Harris (so that's two obnoxious windbags to choose from!) and the secular student alliance and other groups on high school campuses and so on.

But of course there's a lot of similarities between all the stories, so it's fortunate that it's a pretty quick read, and doesn't overstay its welcome.

A Mathematician's Apology is an interesting insight into the mind of a mathematician, an investigation of what mathematics 'really' is, and why one would want to mess about with it. It's a relatively brief work, written in 1940 when Hardy was in his 60s and, he sadly concluded, was quite finished as a mathematician. Probably the most famous quote from the work is Hardy's dictum that mathematics is a "young man's game." The edition I have on the Kindle also includes an introduction by CP Snow that is nearly as long as the work itself, and provides a lot more biographical detail, including details of his student life:

Hardy had decided-I think before he left Winchester-that he did not believe in God. With him, this was a black-and-white decision, as sharp and clear as all other concepts in his mind. Chapel at Trinity was compulsory. Hardy told the Dean, no doubt with his own kind of shy certainty, that he could not conscientiously attend. The Dean, who must have been a jack-in-office, insisted that Hardy should write to his parents and tell them so. They were orthodox religious people, and the Dean knew, and Hardy knew much more, that the news would give them pain-pain such as we, seventy years later, cannot easily imagine.
Hardy struggled with his conscience. He wasn't worldly enough to slip the issue. He wasn't even worldly enough-he told me one afternoon at Fenner's, for the wound still rankled-to take the advice of more sophisticated friends, such as George Trevelyan and Desmond MacCarthy, who would have known how to handle the matter. In the end he wrote the letter. Partly because of that incident, his religious disbelief remained open and active ever after. He refused to go into any college chapel even for formal business, like electing a master. He had clerical friends, but God was his personal enemy.

One of Hardy's claims to fame is having discovered the self-taught & idiosyncratic Indian mathematician Ramanujan, who had sent some of his bizarre discoveries to him. "[Hardy] was accustomed to receiving manuscripts from strangers, proving the prophetic wisdom of the Great Pyramid, the revelations of the Elders of Zion, or the cryptograms that Bacon had inserted in the plays of the so-called Shakespeare.
So Hardy felt, more than anything, bored. He glanced at the letter, written in halting English, signed by an unknown Indian, asking him to give an opinion of these mathematical discoveries."

Hardy was soon intrigued, and took the time to puzzle some of out. An interesting detail of which I was unaware is that...

"But I mentioned that there were two persons who do not come out of the story with credit. Out of chivalry Hardy concealed this in all that he said or wrote about Ramanujan. The two people concerned have now been dead, however, for many years, and it is time to tell the truth. It is simple. Hardy was not the first eminent mathematician to be sent the Ramanujan manuscripts. There had been two before him, both English, both of the highest professional standard. They had each returned the manuscripts without comment. I don't think history relates what they said, if anything, when Ramanujan became famous."

Snow also talks of Hardy's abiding love of cricket, and how he (Snow) would have to study up on the latest scores before visiting Hardy, in order to help cheer Hardy up in his later years of illness.

But to finally get to the man himself in his own words, Hardy more or less rejected the idea that the pursuit of mathematics is justified by its technological fruits:

"The mass of mathematical truth is obvious and imposing; its practical applications, the bridges and steam-engines and dynamos, obtrude themselves on the dullest imagination. The public does not need to be convinced that there is something in mathematics.
All this is in its way very comforting to mathematicians, but it is hardly possible for a genuine mathematician to be content with it. Any genuine mathematician must feel that it is not on these crude achievements that the real case for mathematics rests, that the popular reputation of mathematics is based largely on ignorance and confusion, and that there is room for a more rational defence."

He also considered that, even if mathematics was unimportant, it might well be right for those with an aptitude to pursue it. "Poetry is more valuable than cricket, but Bradman would be a fool if he sacrificed his cricket in order to write second-rate minor poetry."

There is virtually no mathematics in the work, but there are occasional allusions to things that were unfamiliar to me: "Farey is immortal because he failed to understand a theorem which Haros had proved perfectly fourteen years before; the names of five worthy Norwegians still stand in Abel's Life, just for one act of conscientious imbecility, dutifully performed at the expense of their country's greatest man." [I haven't the faintest idea what that refers to.]

Getting back to heart of the matter: "THERE are then two mathematics. There is the real mathematics of the real mathematicians, and there is what I will call the `trivial' mathematics, for want of a better word. The trivial mathematics may be justified by arguments which would appeal to Hogben, or other writers of his school, but there is no such defence for the real mathematics, which must be justified as art if it can be justified at all."

And here's one last awkwardly timed prediction: "There is one comforting conclusion which is easy for a real mathematician. Real mathematics has no effects on war. No one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers or relativity, and it seems very unlikely that anyone will do so for many years."

It's sort of the inverse of the straw man fallacy.

Person 1: "I believe X."
Fallacy dude: "Well, that is indeed an option, but no one could seriously believe that."

Example captured in the wild: "So you seem to be suggesting that St. Peters Basillica and the Taj Mahal are the result of natural processes alone. In my original post I suggested that this was indeed an option for the naturalist although what I intended to point out is that it is too absurd to take seriously and thus we have a defeater for naturalistic belief."

Call me crazy, but it's quite true that I believe no supernatural processes were involved in building the Taj Mahal.

(Just to be clear, in the discussion so far, this person himself recognizes that a naturalist may regard mental processes as equivalent to or supervening on physical processes, and are thus natural processes. So it's not that the naturalist is claiming that the Taj Mahal was built by the wind or something.)

This post has been a long time coming. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean it's particularly good, informative, or insightful.

jimhines' cartoon has been flying around recently:

While this was about science fiction cons, it applies perfectly well to atheist/skeptic/secular cons. That community has had some recent high-profile incidents, and some longer simmering arguments. I've been mostly watching from the sidelines; not because I don't care, but because I haven't been directly involved. I haven't been to any of these conventions. I don't really know the people involved, and certainly have no knowledge of the actual incidents. So I didn't think I had much to add other than a huge chance of foot-in-mouth disease.

( essentialsaltes more than likely puts his foot in his mouth somewhere in here )

Results of a psychological survey of 1000+ atheists. (Here's a shorter summary article.) The researchers at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga identify six subtypes:

Intellectual Atheist/Agnostics (IAA)
Activist Atheist/Agnostics (AAA)
Seeker Agnostics (SA)
Antitheists
Non-theists
Ritual Atheist/Agnostics (RAA)

I'd say I'm IAA with a healthy dose of AAA. Maybe a soupçon of Antitheist that rears its ugly head when I haven't had my coffee.

If prejudice continues to exist towards atheists in general, one source may stem from the perceived negative experiences by religious people interacting with a very small sub-segment of the overall population of non-believers, mainly the Anti-Theists. In other words, our research showed over 85% of the non-believers sampled to be more or less your “average Joe” when it came to being “angry, argumentative and dogmatic”, they fall right in line with current societal norms

However, it's true and unsurprising that the Antitheists are more dogmatic, angry, and disagreeable than your average bear.

In an otherwise fine article in TIME about service organizations, and the particular good they can do for veterans, Joe Klein seems to go out of his way to offhandedly insult me and other non-religious Americans:

"But there was an occupying army of relief workers [in Oklahoma, after the tornados,] led by local first responders, exhausted but still humping it a week after the storm, church groups from all over the country -- funny how you don't see organized groups of secular humanists giving out hot meals -- and there in the middle of it all, with a purposeful military swagger, were the volunteers from Team Rubicon."

I mean, did I personally, give out any hot meals in Oklahoma? No. But I did give some money to the Oklahoma fund set up by the Foundation Beyond Belief, which ultimately raised some $45,000 for Operation USA, and the local food bank.

Why did I give to a charity run by humanists? Because in the past, assholes like Joe Klein have turned disasters into some kind of competition. It's not even enough to stop giving money to religious charities (though I did that long ago). Joe Klein was there with Team Rubicon, which as far as I can tell is a secular organization, but that's apparently not going to be enough to convince Joe that secular people are helping out. I'm not trying to 'win' this 'competition'; I'm not looking for recognition [as a child, I was too much influenced by Charles Emerson Winchester III's views on charity and anonymity]. Or a pat on the back. But I can't take a slap in the face like this without producing an angry blog post. So there.

Fortunately, the Friendly Atheist has already done a fantastic job tracking down information about the contributions of local and national secular groups after the Oklahoma disaster, including the giving out of meals of an unknown temperature, in partnership with Panera and Krispy Kreme. Funny how you don't see religious restaurants giving out food.

Objecting to religious messages on license plates isn't just for atheist scum, anymore. This guy is going ahead with his suit against the 'Rain God' on the OK plates:

"The appeals court’s decision says Cressman “adheres to historic Christian beliefs” and believes it is a sin “to honor or acknowledge anyone or anything as God besides the one true God.”"

To be fair, we have no idea if he objects to other religious license plates that have been issued (or proposed) by various states.

From the incandescent rage desk comes this story of a teacher fired from her job at a Catholic school because her abusive ex-husband is "threatening and menacing". Unfortunately for her, she taught religion classes, and the Supreme Court has indicated that religious schools have much greater leeway to fire employees who are 'ministers'. Anyway, since they're worried about the safety of the students, I guess it only makes sense that the school kicked out her four kids as well.

From survivors of the genocide in Rwanda.

Like him, many other people converted [from Christianity] to Islam en masse after the Genocide. He renounced it during the American invasion in Afghanistan. He said that he was tired of being indoctrinated. They were always asked to pray for the souls of brothers and sisters who lost lives when fighting the enemy in Iraq and Palestine.

"I kept on wondering whether those Iraqis and Palestinians prayed for us when the Genocide was happening at our doorsteps. I can't generalize, but I think they - like most of the world - didn't care. Maybe they were busy watching the World Cup"

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I've Been Thinking / Ninth House / A House Called Awful End
Gone Fishin' - Goliath - Christianity Made Me Talk Like an Idiot
Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World, by Tim Whitmarsh
The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov
Dispatches from east of the 5
American Atheists doesn't want bigots
Everybody hates Everybody more
Islands of Space / Evolving in Monkey Town
Freethinkers, by Susan Jacoby
You know who else had a cult of personality and thought that "torture may be an ethical necessity"?
The Creation / Evolution Divide in America
Misogyny - The Ugly, the Skeptical, and the Artistic
The Red Tree & Generation Atheist
A Mathematician's Apology, by GH Hardy
I think I've discovered a new fallacy
Spectral evidence & the skepto-atheist community explodes (again) over sex
"Sorry non-believers, you’re pretty normal when it comes to being psychologically well-adjusted."
funny how I put this boot up your ass
Religious license plates & more fired teachers
An atheist perspective you don't often see

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Journal of No. 118

Entries tagged with atheism

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

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

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

The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov

Dispatches from east of the 5

American Atheists doesn't want bigots

Everybody hates Everybody more

Islands of Space / Evolving in Monkey Town

Freethinkers, by Susan Jacoby

You know who else had a cult of personality and thought that "torture may be an ethical necessity"?

The Creation / Evolution Divide in America

Misogyny - The Ugly, the Skeptical, and the Artistic

The Red Tree & Generation Atheist

A Mathematician's Apology, by GH Hardy

I think I've discovered a new fallacy

Spectral evidence & the skepto-atheist community explodes (again) over sex

"Sorry non-believers, you’re pretty normal when it comes to being psychologically well-adjusted."

funny how I put this boot up your ass

Religious license plates & more fired teachers

An atheist perspective you don't often see