Freedom of Expression

Given the recent climate of political and religious debate, I thought I would dig up an old essay about one of our most important freedoms: the right to speak as we see fit. As a free-thinker I believe the FoS is extremely important to all of us, and I feel incredible gratitude toward anyone who has helped us along our way of instituting and preserving this freedom.

I'm going to try the embed feature on Scribd rather than copy/paste the whole thing, hopefully it works well.

Freedom of Speech

Also, this video absolutely rocks. Thanks again for reading.

Violence is the tool of the immoral

With the increasing violence from the political right we're faced with more examples of why we need philosophy / critical thinking taught to our young people. I would argue that if people had a better grasp on clear thinking we wouldn't see so much of this American political violence, we would begin to find ways of enacting change without having to drop our morals and pick up guns. Anytime someone calls for thug violence (I'm looking directly at you tea-party brothers) in response to non-violent issues they tip their hand, and reveal to all of us that they're clearly not serious about freedom or solutions. When you reduce your political methods to threats and violence, you excuse yourself from normal and healthy debate; you literally move yourself to the margin – in the same fashion an angry child moves himself (with the teacher's help) to the corner when he destructively acts on his emotions.

If you think that real political change can come from threatening our politicians like a bunch of gangsters or Ku Klux Klan members, you're wrong. If you think that your guns will somehow help us maintain freedom and liberty, you're wrong. If you think that force and violence can bring about peace and liberty, you have only to look around the world and see the failure of your beliefs. Let's see how well force and violence are helping those in Africa, or the Middle East, or Palestine. No luck there? Okay, let's look at Ireland, Burma, and Columbia. Still having problems in finding a working example?

The verdict is in: violence only begets violence. If you still cling to fantasies of a Red Dawn style attack, or a repeat of the Revolutionary War you need to wake up and look around. Let go of your childish wishes and realize what the rest of us already know: this isn't the 18th century anymore, we have other solutions. These pro-violence types seem to think pointing a gun is somehow going to fix our problems, what they don't see is that every time we use the gun, we invalidate our own morality and message by using force to enact change we failed to produce through rational means – the gun signifies failure and should be a point of embarrassment by all those involved.

Proof for the existence of the Christian God part 1

Proper thanks to anyone who reads the blog today, it's going to be just a little longer than normal – but if you like to think about proof for the existence of God, you may find this informative, or at least thought provoking. So, here's one version of the argument from design, or the teleological argument:

p1. We appear to observe features in nature too complex to have happened by chance
p2. These features exhibit the hallmark appearance of design
p3. Design implies that there must be a designer
c1. Therefore nature must be the result of an intelligent designer
c2. This designer is the Christian God

This argument has quite a few holes, even at a glance. The first premise has some special pleading (applying or removing standards without proper justification in this case) which invalidates it. The assertion that some life is “too complex” to have been produced by evolution is not valid unless we have some evidence for thinking it's true. We can't take an option off the table without presenting good reasons for doing so, and we all know that simply asserting something is possible or impossible doesn't make it so. On top of special pleading it contains a nice straw man fallacy: it states that evolution is a theory of chance, which is inaccurate, and I may even argue is dishonest. When stronger and faster humans are competing with weaker and fatter humans in a game of survival, you can hardly call it chance when the better specimen wins the contest time and time – one type is more adequately suited to compete, and thus live on to pass their genes down. Another problem with premise one is that it's a mere argument from ignorance, basically it says: “I can't understand it, so no one can!” We know this kind of thinking to be silly and invalid; most of us don't understand the operations of our car engines, but it doesn't follow that no one can understand those inner workings.

Moving down to premise two, we see more problems. What is design exactly, and how do we see evidence of it in the nature world? It seems to me to be a little ambiguous, at the very least. I admit the complexity we observe in nature is jaw-dropping, so is nature's beauty, and its appearance of order – as a whole nature is just overwhelming! But simply stating that these qualities cannot occur naturally doesn't fly. Again, we have to demonstrate why our claims are true. This is another instance of special pleading, we can't simply state things as fact and expect it to pass through the logic filter. Certainly, no theologian would let me assert that a large purple dragon is responsible for all the “design” we see in the world, they would certainly pin me down on this stupid assertion – and they would be right to do so since I don't have any proper evidence to backup my dragon claim. This standard must be applied equally to any position within the discussion, if we want to be honest anyways.

Now, since we've established one or more bad premises, we are not required to continue entertaining this argument. The rules are simple: if we run into a bad premise, we can stop reading and put the argument aside since it's a non-starter, it failed due to a bad premise. If we choose to continue, we do so out of curiosity, or some other interest, not because the argument is sound, or intellectual honesty demands it. But, I'd like to continue looking at the design argument, even if it's belly up.

The conclusion(s), like the premises, are less than acceptable. Though there are a few problems with the conclusion(s), I'll just stick to the one I think is the most interesting and run with it: why does it have to be God A, B, or C? What empirically valid evidence do we have to conclude that the complexity we see is the handiwork of the God of Abraham, or Baal, or any of the deities of the Canaanites? It seems like a waste of time to go this far into the argument just to fall back on wish thinking. Since one party can insert the Christian God (CG) into this hole that's been fallaciously manufactured, what stops another party from inserting their God? What if the ever popular Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) wants a turn being injected into the argument? Can we put forward good reasons to deny him and his complex carbohydrates? I don't think so. Our inability to deny the FSM is one of the reasons this argument doesn't work for the CG: inability to support the claim that any particular God is the cause of the perceived “design”. There is so much more to say about the teleological argument, but this is a blog post, not an essay, so we'll end here.

BONUS! As a reward for those of you who are still reading, here's a real treat... Bertrand Russell had the following to say about the subject of design in our universe:

"Really I am not much impressed with the people who say: "Look at me: I am such a splendid product that there must have been design in the universe." I am not very much impressed by the splendor of those people. Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is merely a flash in the pan; it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions and temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless".

Thanks for reading!

Islamic Extremism

(you can fast forward to 2:30 if you're impatient)

Islam's war on freedom continues, I guess they're tired of dominating the females and free-thinkers already in their clutches and feel they need more subjects to abuse. While some of Europe has allowed this cancerous faith to take root in their territories and begin to corrupt their societies, I'm glad that America hasn't. Islam will find that America does not capitulate to the kind of violence and bigotry other countries have; we value the freedom of expression and religion, as well as equal civil rights for all of our citizens.

Should Islam continue to attack us, or our values, they will not find a silent victim. If they wish to use the gun to spread their ideas, they will find us to be the wall in their path. We learned from great enlightenment thinkers like John Locke that freedom and liberty should not be subject to religious approval, and we embraced this as a core belief in the American experiment. I'm proud to live in a country that will hold the line against religious domination and theocracy, and put the freedom of the masses above the prejudices of a few.

Really Bill? Really?

What else can the Catholic church do to demonstrate their complete moral failure? I mean, after raping children where do you go? I'm sure that other psychopaths are standing in wide-eyed amazement at the staggering power of the christian media machine; these perverted old virgins rape children they've been charged with overseeing, and somehow...

The gays are to blame.

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/03/31/catholic-league-pope/

Head = asploded










P.S. Happy Pagan holiday!

Meat rampage!

This is just too strange to let pass without comment. Some bro in Indiana goes on an anti-meat rampage at a local super-market, in the name of protecting young girls from getting fat, and also because -- you guessed it -- God wanted him to.

Isn't it strange how people's Gods share the same views they do? Anti-choice people have Gods that are also anti-choice, advocates of state violence have Gods that favor murder and violence, peaceful and open-minded people have peaceful and open-minded Gods -- you see what I'm saying.

Have the faithful not noticed this pattern? Have they noticed, but try not to think about it? Most of us heard about the study that reveals when we think about what God would want, we actually use the same parts of the brain that we'd use to think about what we want, this further supports the view that Gods are a projection, and some of the content projected is our own world view or opinions about certain topics. This is the same process by which we project our consciousness onto inanimate objects: we think that hammer meant to hit our thumb, we stub our toe and think "stupid end-table!" and we believe there's a magic man in the sky that just coincidently happens to share our personal views on hot topics.

I don't really believe that the faithful have failed to notice that their Gods hate the same people they do; I think they have observed that when they kill, rape, or torture people, God is just fine with it, or has commanded it. It would be really hard to not see this phenomena, and I wonder what the faithful think about it. I'll ask around and see what explanations I get.

More commandments!

Alright, time to get back to commenting on the ten commandments, and their foundations, as found in Exodus 20.
After God instructs us about his (third) holy day, we finally arrive at a commandment that instructs us in a useful way:

"Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you."

First, the good part: showing respect for your mother and father is important, just as important as showing respect to others in your family, and in society at large. After so much ranting and raving from a hyper-possessive God it's refreshing to hear something worthwhile, and you can't go wrong by showing people respect. While it isn't really deep moral teaching as much as it's another order to embrace authority and sing it's praises, this commandment is leaps and bounds better than the previous bunch.

Secondly, the bad part: the assertion that the land you live on was somehow given to you by God is a pretty silly one; I've never found a rational explanation for how or when this gift was given, and so that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Having your beliefs is one thing, since what goes on inside your mind is your business, but when that belief starts to make objective truth claims about reality, it must accept being examined or tested for validity -- seems fair enough to me at any rate.

One swipe from Occam's Razor seems to settle this matter for me: the most simplistic answer to the question of how I came to live on this land is certainly one that doesn't involve a super-complex and self-contradicting deity -- which people seem to struggle in defining in the first place -- and for who's existence we have zero empirical evidence. Natural explanations are not only simpler, but have evidence to back them up, and even better is the fact that they contain the humility to not claim to know things they do not, or can not, know. Honesty and evidence are important to establishing claims as being fact or fiction, and it's in that area that Gods have a habit of not meeting their burden of proof.