Sexism In The Anarchist, Atheist Movements

Check out this article by Angela Beallor on problems with sexism within the anarchist movement. She argues that combating sexism is a difficult, moment-to-moment struggle - not something you do once and are thus purified, but an incessant process of questioning your words and actions. She warns against male feminists who proclaim themselves to be allies so loudly "that they fail to hear the voices of women". And she cautions that, in removing structure, we make it more difficult to protect oppressed groups (women, people of colour) in political organisations.

Here's the key paragraph:

Structurelessness is often a means to perpetuate sexism, racism and class stratification. If men are socialized to be leaders and women are not, then it is not hard to imagine who would develop into leaders in a non-structured organization. A lack of structure provides no means of balancing those with certain privileges with those who are oppressed. We must create organizational structures that inherently guard against these forms of power imbalance.

And the preceding quote from Jo Freeman:

The idea of structurelessness does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. A 'laissez-faire' ideal for group structure becomes a smoke screen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power. As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to the few, and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules.

There's an interesting parallel here to the current kerfuffle in the atheist movement. People, especially women, are speaking out about sexual harassment at atheist conventions, and advocating for explicit sexual harassment policies to be put in place. They're receiving a certain amount of pushback from the convention organizers and other attendees, especially men. DJ Grothe, the man behind The Amazing Meeting, accused the complaining women of spreading rumors and driving other women away from the convention, which sparked predictable (and justified) outrage among many people.

I think there's a clear reason why many atheists minimize or dismiss sexual harassment at conventions. The vast majority of religions are systems for keeping women oppressed, obviously. Atheists comment on this with commendable regularity. However, there's a temptation to go a step further and say that religion is the main or only system for the oppression of women - and that in removing religion, the primary vector for misogyny is removed too. Atheist conventions are theoretically religion-free, so they must be harassment-free as well. If women contradict this by reporting their experiences of harassment, then they must be exaggerating or lying. Those silly, hysterical women. Can't they see we're their allies?

Do you see where I'm going with this? The state is a vast system for keeping women oppressed (men too, but women slightly more so), obviously. Some anarchists comment on this with commendable regularity. However, there's a temptation to go a step further and say that the state is the only system that oppresses women - and that when the state is smashed, misogyny is smashed with it. Anarchists, then, simply can't be sexists. So there's no need to put in place sexual harassment policies in anarchist organizations.

Unfortunately, religion and the state are only lenses; focusing mechanisms which amplify the existing tendency humans have to oppress those weaker than us. A world without guns would be a world with less death, but of course there would still be a horrible amount of violence. Removing the mechanism is desirable, but it won't combat oppression by itself. Solving the problem of sexism is harder than many male atheists and anarchists believe. It's a task that is performed in the heart more often than the courtroom or the houses of government, and it's a task that forces us men to relinquish much of our own power, much of our own privilege.

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Of course, IOZ got here long before I did.

God Commands The Good

(In which I get overly lyrical.)

One way to justify Divine Command Theory - the idea that a God can provide objective morality - is to say that "what is good is good because God commands it". I'm having trouble marshalling a coherent argument against the that idea, so until then, here's my intuitive problem with it: even if I were to receive convincing proof that God exists and has laid down certain commandments, that would not replace my inner sense of morality.

I recoil instinctively from the idea that the commandments of God cannot be morally assessed - like Job, I want to challenge what I think is unfair. If I'm wrong, I want good reasons. In fact, my problems with Divine Command Theory can be pretty well sketched out with constant reference to Job. When God speaks from the whirlwind and Job backs down, I don't see that as a triumph of morality over pride. I see that as a triumph of power over reason.

In Job, we see that like gravity on spacetime, power exerts a distorting influence on morality. Infinite power, like a black hole, can collapse everything around it to become the only relevant point in the moral landscape. But I reject this framework! Like the Stoics, I want ethics to be the one thing untouched by power. I want the courage to stand in Job's position
 and tell God that despite the torture - and it is torture - I will continue to demand a reckoning. He can take everything from me, including my life, but the only person who can bend my ethics is me. If God reaches out to alter my ethical framework, I cease being me anymore - it is as if he has killed me, and so I win.

Problems With Divine Command Theory

Atheists with philosophical leanings - like the inestimable Ivan - tend to cede ground to theists on the issue of morality. They agree that you can't ground objective morality without a God, that atheism entails a kind of existential despair, understood as a lack of purpose. And this makes sense! Atheists don't have any goals independent of our own desires and wishes.

Let's continue to agree with theists that morality without a God is irrational. But let's go further, too, and claim that objective morality doesn't exist even with a God. Take the best case scenario:

God appears in the sky, accompanied by angels and trumpets, and tells all inhabitants of the world to follow a single moral code, which he communicates clearly and which - through some miracle - nobody misinterprets.

But would even that allow us to claim that rightness or wrongness is a factual matter? Here are some considerations that a rational believer would be forced to make, in the event of a divine visitation.

Am I going crazy? On the balance of evidence, it's probably more likely that I'm having a mental breakdown than I'm actually seeing God. There are a small number of people each year who receive 'divine commands' - on what grounds do I dismiss their personal experience while accepting my own? Now if everyone in the world receives the same visitation, that would seem to rule out mental illness. It wouldn't rule out mass hysteria, though, or the possibility that my individual delusion is severe enough to include the illusion that everyone agrees with me.

Is this figure God? Even if the man in the clouds proclaims his divinity and performs miracles, that's only evidence of some power, not omnipotence. A technologically advanced alien might be able to 'play God' with a high degree of effectiveness.

Finally, and most importantly, why should I listen? David Hume's is/ought distinction has an almost mathematical exactness - there's no possible way to connect facts about the external world with moral obligations, even if those facts are delivered by a deity. If I'm a strict deontologist (a believer in moral rules) and God descends from heaven to say "sorry guys, the utilitarians are right", why should I accept his judgement? Because you're defining God as having knowledge of all things, factual and moral? Well, unless you give me a very good reason to believe in the existence of 'moral facts', I'm going to call that definition of God incoherent. (Of course, if you presuppose the existence of moral facts you can propose a God that would justify all kind of things - like the existence of moral facts.)

Yes There Is (A Problem Of Evil)

Over at From Wine To Water, Ivan takes another stab at addressing the problem of evil. His main argument, simply stated, is this: the Bible doesn't depict God's love as anything like our love (in fact, it's alien and dangerous, it provokes fear) and therefore to say "how would a loving God allow [Auschwitz/cancer/the cancellation of Firefly] is to misunderstand the concept of love. I won't tackle the hermeneutic question of whether the Bible does depict God's love as sufficiently alien - that would be a pretty mammoth effort - but I will give another objection to Ivan's argument.

In his post, Ivan asks "What job are you expecting God to do? And how do you justify that expectation?" The implication here seems to be that there's no biblical justification for expecting God to make everything happy and easy. But I contend that there's a clear moral justification! In the words of the great philosopher Parker, power is directly proportional to responsibility. The more you can do, the more you ought to do. If, like God, you can do almost anything, you've got a near-infinite obligation to act all the time to help people. Imagine you gained the powers, not of God, but of Superman - you'd have to help out with natural disasters and suchlike, at the very least. How much more, then, ought God to do?

The only way out from this argument that I can see is to propose that God is already acting to help people, and since He's omnipotent you shouldn't second-guess Him. This is the position ridiculed by Voltaire in the character of Pangloss, and it's not a very good one.

Of course, it doesn't follow from this that there's no God - simply that if there is a God, he doesn't conform to our standards of morality. In Ivan's words, "there is not some God who acts toward you exactly like your loving Dad did, or exactly like you think a loving Dad should." [1] But this presents a huge problem for believers. If your God is infinitely loving and kind in a way that I can comprehend, however dimly, then I've got a reason for believing in the face of huge odds. If your God, on the other hand, is 'loving' in the sense that somebody who is born paraplegic is loved, then my reason vanishes. I don't want to be in God's love for eternity if it's the same kind of love He showed the Auschwitz dead. You can bite the bullet, like Ivan, and dismiss the problem of evil - but in doing so, you dismiss the main intuitive attraction of Christianity.


[1] The word 'exactly' there bugs the hell out of me, by the way. Would you tell a victim of child abuse that they haven't been treated 'exactly like you think a loving Dad should'? No, of course not. That word trivialises the very real, very horrific reasons that many people have to doubt the concept of a loving God.

Fear Of God

It occurs to me that my previous definition of coercion has an interesting theological implication: any interaction with God must be entirely and infinitely coercive.

This is intuitively plausible: to a rational mind, infinite power begets infinite fear. The undeniable existence of God's infinite love might assuage that fear, but any doubt whatsoever would bring the fear back in full force. Given the seemingly endless causes of doubt in this world, from toothache to the threat of nuclear war, I think terror is an appropriate response (perhaps the only appropriate response) for anybody who seriously believes that an omnipotent God exists - and, worse still, is interested in them.

Christina Rossetti, Scotsmen And Burning Airports

The cry of "No True Scotsman" comes up so frequently in internet debates - especially religious ones - that a few heavyweights have tried to sort out when it's a fallacy and when it isn't. For anyone who doesn't know what that means, it usually goes like this:

A maniac burns down an airport, and in the investigation it's revealed that he considered himself a fan of obscure Victorian poets - Christina Rossetti in particular. People who have always disliked Christina Rossetti jump at the opportunity and claim that her poetry is degenerate and of course it leads to violent behaviour, and frankly her brother Dante Gabriel's work is far superior in style and content. Part of the community of Christina Rossetti fans respond that nobody who really understood her poems could show such a lack of concern for airport architecture. At this point, Christina Rossetti's detractors accuse the fans of twisting language so that any misbehavior would automatically disqualify one from counting as a Christina Rosetti fan.

 As the most influential religious and philosophical blogger on the internet, I feel I must give my perspective. On the one hand, beliefs do usually have actual content - for instance, I think that a non-privilege-aware anarchist is either inconsistent in his belief or not a real anarchist - and it's reasonable to claim that somebody who lacks that content lacks that belief, whatever they identify as. On the other hand, saying but so-and-so doesn't really like Christina Rossetti is used to hide and minimize negative effects of a belief. Look at how often we hear that the thug-of-the-day isn't a real policeman, because real policemen protect and serve; or that they're not a real patriot. If you class every bad person as not part of your group, you've made it literally impossible to even ask whether your group supports bad behaviour.

Here's my solution: it's okay to say that somebody doesn't really hold a particular label if there's a clear dogma associated with the label and they're in conflict with it. It's still okay - albeit dicey - to say the same thing when there's no clear dogma, so long as you're in the majority in your group. When the vast majority of Christina Rossetti fans denounce the burning of airports and all violence, and the attitudes that lead to violence, then what they're doing is ejecting airport-burners from their community - and groups do have the right to police themselves. However, if you're doing this often enough, you might want to ask yourself why your community seems to require such frequent purges. You might want to ask yourself why your community seemed attractive to somebody with airport-burning tendencies. And if the majority of your community doesn't speak up with you, you might want to consider getting a new community.

Religion Doesn't Divide People, People With Religion Divide People

Ivan, at From Wine to Water, sets out a commonly-used religious argument. In religious conflicts, it goes, religion is the excuse, not the cause. The elimination of religion would not reduce the amount of conflict in the world; we'd simply switch to a different excuse and keep on murdering. It is true that religion doesn't seem to occupy the same fundamental psychological status as things like tribalism and fear of the unknown - but if we atheists accept that religion's not responsible for religious conflict, we lose a key plank of the argument that religion is harmful.

Probably the most common response to this is that hoary old Steven Weinberg quote: it takes religion for good people to do bad things. However, I'd agree with Verbose Stoic that any ends-justify-the-means ethics (especially utilitarianism) can also serve as a motivator for good people to do bad things, countering Weinberg's response as stated. So at the moment Ivan's argument seems pretty solid.

Still, I disagree with Ivan. Why is that? Well, imagine this parallel argument. In war, armies are the method, not the cause. The elimination of armies wouldn't reduce the amount of wars in the world, we'd simply switch to a different method and keep on warring. This is pretty unconvincing, since it doesn't matter whether armies make war more likely - they're a tool of war and should be opposed by people who oppose war.

Religion doesn't create strife (at least, not most of the time) any more that it creates sexism or class war. Instead, religion was created (probably unconsciously) by the same forces that created conflict and oppression, as a tool for justifying and perpetuating conflict and oppression.  Opposing religion opposes strife in the same way that opposing automatic weapons for cops opposes police brutality.

Witticisms Are Still -Isms

From the truly excellent Ivan:

Some religious believers fear that without any religious morality, atheists will take immoral or anarchic actions that could harm society. To them I say, Don’t worry—atheists are just as irrational and inconsistent in their ethics as you are in your religion.

This is a strong contender for one of the funniest things I've read this year.

Non-Human Moral Authority

Adam, of Daylight Atheism fame, argues that since there are no non-human sources of ethics, we must act according to some human-created ethic or other.  Here's the quote he's critiquing, from Peter Hitchens (the late Christopher Hitchens' brother):

"For a moral code to be effective, it must be attributed to, and vested in, a nonhuman source. It must be beyond the power of humanity to change it to suit itself."

And here's Adam's response:

The fatal flaw in this position is that, contrary to your confident presumption, there is no non-human moral authority. Every religious book is written, edited, and printed by humans. All moral opinions, interpretations, and proclamations are human opinions. If there were a huge, glowing set of tablets with commandments engraved on them that descended from the sky accompanied by angels blowing trumpets, and the choice was between following those or making up moral laws on our own, we'd be having a very different debate; but there is no such thing.

I don't know precisely what Hitchens was arguing here, but from the quote itself it appears that Adam's missing the point.  Vested in a non-human source doesn't mean made up by a non-human source.  What does it mean?  Well, we're told: an ethics that's vested in a non-human source is 'beyond the power of humanity to change it to suit itself'.  Adam thinks the only kind of ethics that falls into this category is divinely-dispensed commandments - but what about, for example, Kant? 

Kantian ethics is based on respect for the rational nature of others, and Kant certainly believed that it could be derived using pure logic.  Rationality could easily be conceived of as a non-human source, beyond the power of humanity to change. Sure, it's a made-up moral law, but it fulfils the criteria that Hitchens set for an effective moral code.  Adam's post could have been quite interesting - can non-theistic philosophy provide an effective non-human basis for morality, and, if so, how - but instead it's a thousand or so words of straw.

Je-SUS: An Observation

There exists a certain kind of pastor who consistently pronounces 'Jesus' with the emphasis on both syllables.  'Jesus', like most two-syllable proper nouns, is properly a trochee: Jesus. Robert and Kevin work much the same way.  With the emphasis on both syllables, 'Jesus' becomes a spondee: Je-sus.  This sounds a little odd.

My theory? This kind of pastor sees lack of emphasis as akin to lack of respect, and thinks that by stressing twice the number of syllables as others he expresses twice the amount of piety.

So Are They All, All Reasonable Men

Neither the French Revolution, nor Hitler, nor Stalin had ANYTHING to do with Atheism.

You did not hear the French, nor the Germans nor Russians proclaiming "I condemn you to death in the name of nothing in particular."
 
...

Again, no one ever killed anyone because they were being too reasonable. 

The above is most of a comment from some guy on Daylight Atheism in response to your standard atheism-is-Stalinism troll, and I was agreeing with it until I got to the last line and thought: is that really true?  Nobody's ever killed anybody from being too reasonable?  Now what the commenter means by 'reasonable' is no doubt some general term of approbation,  but in the sense of 'guided by reason', plenty of people have had good reasons to kill.  In the strictly amoral sense, there are plenty of reasons for a predator to murder if he thinks he can get away with it.  Even if we assume that 'reasonable' includes some kind of 'moral reason' a la bastardized Kant, there have still been plenty of people who murdered for what they thought were good moral reasons.

It would probably do this commenter good - say I, from atop my mighty throne - to read some Koestler.  Darkness at Noon's magnificent Rubashov (and his friend and jailer, Ivanov), outlines the utilitarian logic behind the horrors of Stalin's Russia. Friends must be sacrificed, they say, to achieve a better world; and the genius of Koestler is that we can read of Little Loewy hanging himself or Arlova being executed without immediately wanting to strangle Rubashov.  The mad policies of Stalin, on close examination, are powerfully rational, and it's our own blind spots that cause us to recoil from them.

Maybe I'm being uncharitable; maybe 'reasonable' doesn't strictly mean 'rational'.  Still, 'reasonable' people are prone to a kind of utilitarian logic that can have some very dangerous conclusions.  While atheism by itself doesn't lead to utilitarian atrocities - and of course utilitarianism doesn't equate to Stalinism - those advocating reason as a panacea need to embrace humility in the kind of conclusions they draw.

What You Are Capable Of

There is nothing everyone is so afraid of as being told how vastly much he is capable of. You are capable of - do you want to know? - you are capable of living in poverty; you are capable of standing almost any kind of maltreatment, abuse, etc. But you do not wish to know about it, isn't that so? You would be furious with him who told you so, and only call that person your friend who bolsters you in saying: 'No, this I cannot bear, this is beyond my strength, etc.

Søren Kierkegaard, from the journals

To my mind, this quote is up there with any of his aphorisms (including this), except for that amazing quote that begins pretty much every Kierkegaard journal or quote compilation:

I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself.

Nuke The Vatican

A comment from a Daylight Atheism post, reproduced in full:

I have so often wondered: if we impose the death penalty on murderers and those sociopaths who are simply too dangerous to allow to continue living, what would be the morality of having all religious people executed? for the good for humanity.

I simply, despite trying, cannot come up with a reason why this should not be done except that it would be an extreme measure and that no human is fit to make such a decision (the giver of the order, that is). Which is, apparently, the main difference between myself and any fundamentalist I've yet to meet: I'm willing to admit that the world would be better off without religious people, but I'm not willing to do what would need to be done to protect humanity.

But -- they are, because they offload the incredible arrogance and and wicked ego-centrism by claiming that an external source (god) declares it to be morally alright.

The ends, the means, and the question of whether the cure is better than the disease. 

Obviously this isn't representative of atheist thought - on the thread itself, the regulars jump down this guy's throat.  Still, he doesn't seem like a troll to me.  This is the sort of thing that leads people to equate atheism with Stalinism - hell, it's the idealized form of such a thing.  Protect humanity?  God help us.

Theological Flailing

From the archives of Verbose Stoic:
The Courtier’s Argument is precisely the sort of argument that allows those “neoatheists” to ignore theology and all of the more profound thoughts on religion to instead pick on “folk religion” that’s easier to mock.  And even when they engage, so many of their replies are, in fact, shallow readings that are there just to mock the argument without understanding it.

I've been recently thinking along the same lines, and I've seen Daniel Fincke over at Camels With Hammers make very similar points.  Here's what I think the nub of the issue is: atheism, as discussed by atheists, has shifted over time from a philosophical position to a scientific one.  It used to be the case that calling yourself an atheist meant you had certain epistemological and/or metaphysical commitments about the existence of God - now calling yourself an atheist usually means that you consider the empirical evidence for God insufficient, and have reverted to the null hypothesis of no belief at all.  Why is this? One explanation: it's to do with the creationist movement encroaching into science education, galvanizing atheist scientists in response.

The problem is that New Atheists - and I hate using that term unironically - all too often venture into philosophy or theology to 'attack believers on their own turf'. Unfortunately, understanding science does not automatically qualify you for philosophical debate.

(Why do so many of the commenters on atheist blogs assume that it does?  Maybe it's like physicists butting into other disciplines.  If you think that your area of expertise is the only real route to 'how reality is', I suppose you'd think that those who work in other areas would be grateful you took the time to set them right.)

Of Tone Trolls and Courtiers

From Ivan at fromwinetowater, who articulates something I've felt for quite some time.

Dawkins and his cronies love to bring out the Courtier’s Reply (if you are unfamiliar with it, you can familiarize yourself here, here, here, and here) at this point. It has plenty of good uses, but it also has limits .. if one is arguing that given the suffering in the world, there cannot be a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, then one must address the particular points of particular theologies ... one cannot pick parts of a theology to attack without listening to the parts of the selfsame theology which answer the attack.

A deep suspicion of the Courtier's Reply and of 'tone trolling' is very common in atheist circles, for good reason.  There are plenty of courtiers and tone trolls around.  However, these arguments should be treated very carefully, since it's very easy to attack a believer on theological grounds and then dismiss their theological response as a Courtier's Reply.  It's very easy for an atheist discussion space (the comments on Pharyngula, for example) to descend into insults and invective, with any movement towards civility - or accuracy, according to the excellent Daniel Fincke - branded as tone trolling and ignored.

Any argument that dismisses the substance of what somebody's saying is a dangerous argument.  This includes picking out 'logical fallacies', as well.  If somebody says that Christ taught love and therefore Falwell/Hitler/Bush wasn't a proper Christian, shouting 'No True Scotsman!' isn't going to be very helpful in working out what they mean by Christianity.

Utilitariatheism

There’s a worrying habit among some atheist writers to assume utilitarianism as the only secular ethics worth having.  In his essay The Ineffable Carrot and the Infinite Stick (which, despite its dreadful beginning – seriously, it begins with “since time immemorial” – is pretty good) Ebonmuse settles on what he calls “universal utilitarianism”, a combination of positive and negative utilitarianism.  While he at least attempts to justify this position as one among many, there’s a tendency elsewhere (especially in comment threads) to condemn deontologists and virtue ethicists as “less rational”.

I’m not going to pick apart all the problems with Ebonmuse’s essay – it’s too long and I haven’t the time – but let me just point out a few of them in broad strokes.  He goes through several pages on utilitarianism without mentioning preference satisfaction once.  His caricature of deontology relies more on rhetoric than logic, careening from blatant misinterpretation (seriously arguing that the categorical imperative prevents people from having different jobs) to unquestioned appeal to intuition.  Finally, he presents his “universal utilitarianism” as a solution to the problems with act and rule utilitarianism – that is, their lack of support for human rights and justice – without actually demonstrating how his alternative avoids those pitfalls.

The most egregious example of assuming utilitarianism would probably be Sam Harris, who claims that utilitarianism is not only true but backed up by Science (one suspects that he thinks of it with a capital ‘S’).

Imagine that there are only two people living on earth: We can call them "Adam" and "Eve." Clearly, we can ask how these two people might maximize their well-being.

Why can’t we clearly ask how those two people could respect each others’ wishes most fully?  Or how those two people can make a contract with each other to decide how to live?  It’s ridiculous to argue for utilitarianism by this kind of sleight of hand.

From the comments of Ebonmuse’s post on Sam Harris:

Some people find utilitarian morality unspeakably offensive. I cannot even begin to understand their thinking. After all, what possible basis could there be to evaluate a moral claim if not that?

And from Ebonmuse himself:

Morality is really just the way of figuring out how we can best live together in harmony, of figuring out what ends we should cooperate to support in order to produce the best life for all of us.

This all seems plausible until you actually start to think about what constitutes the “best life” – or, for that matter, “well-being”.  Not only are these sentiments misinformed, they’re actually harmful to the atheist movement.  Assuming utilitarianism ties atheism to the problems with utilitarianism and drives people who reject consequentialist ethics to a more religious perspective. 

The strength of atheism is supposed to be that there’s no single moral framework.  We need more virtue-focused atheists, like Leah of Unequally Yoked,  or deontological atheists.  I’m not rehashing the old saw that scientists ought not to do philosophy (of course they can) – but would it kill them to give a cursory look at the literature they’re contradicting?

An Atheist’s Favourite Bible Verses: #2

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
Jeremiah 17:9

The first time I read this verse I was struck by its simplicity.  It’s written clearly: not prevaricating or making excuses for itself, but putting a fairly extreme claim in as few words as possible.  The meat here is mainly philosophical – aside from the wonderful clarity of expression, there’s little to recommend this verse from an aesthetic standpoint.

Let’s examine the meaning.  The heart, the verse starts, setting a metaphorical tone.  What is the ‘heart’ here?  In my opinion it represents emotion, gut feeling and animal impulse: the Platonian urges that are conquered by Reason.  The heart is deceitful, we hear, which is a little surprising.  The idea that the heart represents a reliable compass, a true guide, is very popular: phrases like ‘follow your heart’ attest to that.  But not only does this verse tell us that the heart is deceitful, it tells us that it’s deceitful above all else.

We know what this means, though.  Hearts are tricky things, not above cajoling or using trickery when simple persuasion fails.  In fact, the extremes of emotion – rage, hatred, fear, passion – are responsible for awful things.  The chilly logic of a utilitarian as he sacrifices lives for the greater good is shocking in its ruthlessness and inhumanity, but for most of us the real ethical challenge is in conquering our knee-jerk fear or anger.  Jeremiah is talking about that animal part of us, what Freud (pronounced ‘fraud) would have called the id.  He judges it to be not just wicked, but desperately wicked – a metaphor that captures the stress that accompanies crimes of passion.  Not for nothing are criminals often called ‘desperate men’.

He finishes with a question – who can know it? – that seems counter-intuitive.  Isn’t the heart the deepest part of ourselves, the part that we know most well?  The heart – that kernel of emotions and passions – is us, insofar as any part of ourselves makes up our identity.  But Jeremiah’s right: what makes our feelings so dangerous is that we too often don’t understand and can’t predict them. 

In a world full of conflict and outside threats, this verse turns the focus inward.  It mocks the kind of person who sits in judgement of other people’s hearts, not understanding his own.  If we can’t set our own house in order, how can we criticize other people?  Perhaps we can’t – but even if we can, we ought to start with ourselves.

Jack Chick, Tommy Wiseau: Unintentional Genius

For those who don’t know, Jack Chick is the creator of a series of pocket-size comics that seek to convert the unsaved – according to him, a spectacularly broad category of people, covering everything from atheists to devout Catholics – to his brand of Christianity.  They are designed to be handed out in public places, left on the seats of trains, given in a restaurant in place of a tip, or any other place that they might reach their intended audience.  Each comic contains a brief guide to becoming a Christian, consisting mainly of the ‘Sinner’s Prayer’: a stock couple of sentences that Chick argues will automatically reserve a place in heaven for the person praying them.

Chick tracts fall well into the mainstream of fundamentalist American Protestantism, complete with unquestioning reverence for the King James Bible, an extremist ‘faith, not works’ doctrine, emphasis on the importance of evangelizing, and a complete disregard of other religious traditions.  In The Death Cookie, Chick explains how Catholicism was founded by Satan – literally – to deceive the unwary.  In Allah Had No Son we hear how Muslims really worship a ‘moon god’.  The Visitors tells us that Mormonism is a ‘modern-day version of Baal worship’.  His treatment of race and gender issues is no better, ranging from hilariously unsubtle to outrageously offensive.

However, despite the content of these tracts, Chick succeeds at making them a pleasure to read.  The art looks endearingly like a young Charles Schultz’s attempts to channel Hieronymus Bosch.  The stock characters are familiar: the devout, handsome Christian man; the stunted figure of the villain-of-the-week; the convert-ee, who invariably combines worldly cynicism with a willingness to instantly believe any evangelist that comes within earshot.  There’s a certain absurdity to the regularity of the plots, and every tract would work almost without revision as a parody of evangelical Christianity.

What Chick tracts remind me of most is Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 film The Room.  Called the “Citizen Kane of bad movies”, The Room is a spectacularly unsubtle drama about a love triangle between Johnny, his fiancé and his best friend.  Like Chick tracts, its flaws make it endearing: wooden acting, bad scripting, and a total disregard for consistency or continuity of plot.  Like Jack Chick, it’s unclear how seriously Tommy Wiseau takes himself; the possibility exists that both of them imagine themselves as geniuses, enjoyed sincerely by legions of fans.  That, at the heart of it, is what makes Chick tracts and The Room so much fun to watch: the image of the creator, working furiously at his art, unaware that his creation is so abysmally, amazingly awful.

Alien God

“You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the ... appalling ... strangeness of the mercy of God.”

Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

Jesus loves me.  I have been reliably informed that he is simultaneously my copilot, homeboy, brother, friend, judge, guardian, and can probably fix my plumbing as well.  God – the Creator of all things, shaper of galaxies and star systems, lord of hurricanes and tsunamis, Will and Power all concentrated in a single being – is the kind of guy who would crack a few beers with me on the couch.  The idea of a ‘personal God’ has gained incredible traction partially because it’s so comforting to ascribe a familiar, friendly will to the inscrutable workings of the universe.  This comfort tends to obscure the ridiculousness of the whole concept: that an Almighty Creator would even deign to notice one tiny race of mammals on one tiny planet, let alone involve himself in their affairs.

Fundamentalist Christians often deal with this problem by asserting that the universe began at the same time we did.  Aside from the flagrant disregard of empirical reality, this is a pretty good tactic for answering why God would involve himself now, rather than at any other point in the last several billion years.  However, the vastness of the universe – why here – is just as serious a problem.  Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard made the inventive argument that this seeming absurdity was what made Christianity so attractive – that the sheer effort of passion needed to have faith was admirable.  Despite these responses, I would like to explore the idea that God is actually ineffable and alien, rather than, as the fundamentalists would have it, ineffable and alien only when bad things happen to good people.

What does it mean to live in a universe ruled by a literally incomprehensible deity?  For one, it would mean no Pascal’s Wager-type deals, as Alien God would be no more likely to reward you for faith than Cthulhu.  Religions based on this God would have very small creeds: I believe in God, the Creator of all things – then what?  Philosophers of ethics would have to do without a divinely-ordained morality; the teleological underpinning of many other bodies of thought would have to be discarded.

Regardless of whether Alien God exists, it remains a powerful image.  It allows for an entirely different perspective on the world around us. We probe at the ineffable as if it were a loose tooth.  Those things in life we find impossible to understand – death, say, or love – are strangely compelling.  What defies understanding more than the Thing which made everything; which is everything?  Alone at night, on a jetty extending over dark water, one can feel it stirring.

In Defense of the Irrational

There’s an argument floating around that Christians – at least those crazy fundamentalists – are Christians because they don’t understand logic.  The more rational a person is, the closer they come to an enlightened atheism.  The ultimate atheist would be totally rational, freed from the crippling bonds of bias and fallacy.  I’m going to argue that this ideal is harmful, and in fact encourages the irrationality it seeks to avoid. 

On the well-known fundamentalist Jack Chick’s website is an essay by Robert Morey, a long-time Christian apologist: Common Logical Fallacies Made By Muslims. Morey’s essay attempts to dismantle the arguments in favour of Islam.  Surprisingly, he writes clearly and logically about the awful arguments Muslim apologists use.  Without the references to Jesus, his essay would have been perfectly at home on an atheist site.  However, almost every one of Morey’s arguments applies just as well to the Bible as to the Qu’ran. Take his second point, a concise explanation of how proofs based on a holy book are circular:

Arguing in a circle: If you have already assumed in your premise what you are going to state in your conclusion, then you have ended where you began and proven nothing.
Examples: Proving Islam by the Qur'an and then proving the Qur'an by Islam.

How wonderful would it be if Christian apologists stopped trying to prove the Bible’s infallibility with Bible verses!  Later on, Morey writes:

…he [the Muslim] is assuming that if he can refute the Bible, then the Qur'an wins by default. If he can refute the Trinity, then Allah wins by default. But this is logically erroneous. You cannot prove your position by refuting someone else's position. The Bible and the Qur'an could both be wrong. Muslims must prove their own book.

This is the exact same argument that defenders of evolution use against creationists: arguments against evolution do not justify creationism; intelligent design does not win by default if scientists are unable to explain abiogenesis.

How can someone display this level of critical thinking about Islam and then totally fail to view one’s own belief in the same light?  The buzzword which springs to mind is ‘cognitive dissonance’, and I believe it’s appropriate in this case.  However, this case shows that cognitive dissonance isn’t just found among people who scorn rationality – like Morey, it’s possible to be capable of reasoned argument and unquestioning faith at the same time.  Even atheists, often self-proclaimed rationalists, have beliefs that are totally resistant to evidence. 

Questioning someone’s cognitive dissonance provokes an offended response, as it’s possible to see in arguments with fundamentalist believers.  When have atheists displayed such a kneejerk response to questioning an issue?  Without giving direct examples, it’s not hard to find instances of irrationality in the discussion of, say, politics (or eating meat). 

Like Greta Christina, I don’t think human beings are capable of total rationality.  We didn’t evolve for abstract thought and it’s arrogant to believe that we can objectively evaluate every aspect of our lives.  Ironically, a belief that one lacks any cognitive bias is the perfect environment for bias to thrive in: if I see myself as a being of pure reason, why would I bother examining my own positions?  After all, they must be rational if I came up with them

Reason is a tremendously useful tool.  To use it effectively – and maintain our credibility as rationalists – we need to admit that we’re not rational all the time; that in some areas it may even be preferable to be irrational.  We need to learn to live with the part of ourselves that justifies the unreasonable.  Otherwise we run the risk of becoming like Robert Morey: crusaders for logic, keen analytical minds bent on exposing all irrationality – except, of course, our own.