Church of the Churchless

My new favorite book: "Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way"

I've read countless (more or less) religious, spiritual, mystical, philosophical, and self-help books that basically take an optimistic approach to life.

Yes, life is difficult, as the Buddha said. But those books say that it's possible to turn suffering into well- being through a myriad of suggested ways, many of them contradictory.

Believe in God. Meditate. Find your true self. Flow with whatever happens. Have a positive attitude.

Nothing wrong with all that. Except when it is. Yesterday Amazon delivered into my eagerly awaiting hands a book that Sam Harris recommended on Twitter: "Life is Hard," by Kieran Setiya, a philosopher who teaches at MIT.

It's a breath of fresh air for me. And I've only read the introduction. Here's some excerpts from the introduction. I really like both Setiya's writing style and his clear thinking.  

Life, friends, is hard -- and we must say so. It's harder for some than it is for others. Into each life some rain must fall, but while the lucky dry themselves beside the fire, others are drenched by storms and floods, both literal and figurative.

We live in the wake of a global pandemic and mass unemployment, amid the surging catastrophe of climate change and the revival of fascism. These calamities will disproportionately harm the poor, the vulnerable, and the oppressed.

...Since the age of twenty-seven, I have experienced chronic pain: persistent, fluctuating, strange, a constant drone of sensory distraction. It can be difficult to concentrate and, at times, impossible to sleep. Because it is invisible, my condition is isolating: almost no one knows. 

...There is no cure for the human condition. But after twenty years teaching and studying moral philosophy, I believe that it can help. This book explains how. 

...We should not turn away from hardship; and the best is often out of reach. Striving for it only brings dismay. This attitude may strike you as perverse or pessimistic. But we need not live our "best lives" in order to be more resilient; and we have to face the facts.

Here's an experience you may have had. You tell a friend about a problem you are coping with, maybe a blowup at work or in a close relationship, a health scare that has you rattled. They are quick to reassure you -- "Don't worry; it will all be fine!" -- or to offer you advice.

But their response is not consoling. Instead, it feels like disavowal: a refusal to acknowledge what you're going through. What we learn in moments like these is that assurance and advice can operate as denial.

Worse than denial, even, is the urge to justify human suffering. "Everything happens for a reason" -- except, of course, it doesn't. Philosophers have a word, "theodicy," for an argument that vindicates the ways of God to man.

Theodicies address the problem of evil: if God is omnipotent and benevolent, what accounts for the manifold evils of the world? 

But theodicy has a life of its own, outside of narrowly theistic or doctrinal contexts. Religious or not, we conjure the problem of evil whenever we protest that something should not be; and we engage in something like theodicy when we say it's for the best.

The problem with theodicy is not just intellectual -- none of the arguments work -- but ethical, too. It's wrong to justify your own or others' suffering, to mute pity or protest in that way. 

...So this is where we are: heirs to a tradition that urges us to focus on the best in life but painfully aware of the ways in which life is hard. To open our eyes is to come face-to-face with suffering -- with infirmity, loneliness, grief, failure, injustice, absurdity. 

We should not blink; instead, we should look closer. What we need in our affliction is acknowledgement. 

...Two insights light the way. The first is that being happy is not the same as living well. If you wish to be happy, dwelling on adversity may or may not be of use. But mere happiness should not be your goal. Happiness is a mood or feeling, a subjective state; you could be happy while living a lie.

...The truth is that we should not aim to be happy but to live as well as we can.

...I don't mean we should strive to be unhappy, or be indifferent to happiness, but there is more to life than how it feels. Our task is to face adversity as we should -- and here truth is the only means. We have to live in the world as it is, not the world as we wish it would be.

The second guiding light is that, in living well, we cannot extricate justice from self-interest or divide ourselves from others. It will emerge as the book goes on that even the most insular concerns -- with one's own suffering, one's loneliness, one's frustrations -- are implicitly moral.

They are entangled with compassion, with the value of human life, with ideologies of failure and success that obfuscate justice. Reflecting honestly on affliction in our own lives leads toward concern for others, not into narcissistic self-regard. 

Good friends of mine prove that morality doesn't require religion

Last night my wife and I attended a 61st anniversary celebration of a couple we've known for a long time, Russ and Delana Beaton. 

When I got home, I wrote a blog post about the evening. Excerpt:

Laurel, my wife, and I have known the Beatons for a long time, over 25 years. If there's one word that describes them, its nice. If you want two words, nice and caring. Going for three, nice and caring and competent. 

After a moving slide show of their married life narrated in a poetic rhyming fashion by their children, other people spoke about Russ and Delana. When a microphone was put in my hand, I said something like this:

Russ and Delana strike me as the nicest people I've ever known. I'm sitting at a table with three retired Willamette University professors. [Russ, and I think Delana also, taught there for many years.] Because I'm political and like to dig for truths under the surface, I asked them if in their experience, the Beatons really are as nice as they seem to be. Each of them said, Yes, they are. The only negative thing I heard from their Willamette colleagues was, Sometimes they can be too nice. Which doesn't seem like a flaw to me. Not at all. I only wish that one day someone would say about me, "He was too nice." For sure, this will never happen.

There were lots of stories and anecdotes about the accomplishments of Russ and Delana. They've changed so many lives for the better. To give a couple of examples -- and there are many more -- Russ was instrumental in getting Oregon's highly successful land use system off the ground, and Delana has been a tireless advocate for homeless people in Salem.

It was deeply moving to hear quite a few of the many people who attended the anniversary celebration, around 80, speak about how the Beatons had helped them, improved the community, or otherwise brought about positive change.

Nobody, absolutely nobody, naturally including Russ, Delana, and their three children, made the slightest mention of God or religion. That's because the Beatons are completely non-religious, being atheists. 

Religion hasn't played any role in their adult lives, though they might have gone to church as children. I'm not sure about that. 

What I am absolutely sure about is that the strong morality of the Beatons that's clearly manifested in their intense commitment to make the world a better place stems entirely from their secular beliefs. Their sense of right and wrong has no basis in religion or any form of supernaturalism.

So those who claim that religion is necessary for people to act ethically are mistaken. There are plenty of highly moral people like the Beatons who do the right thing because their atheist mind guides them in that upstanding direction.

As I put it back in 2008, morality doesn't need a middleman. 

Treat yourself like you would a friend: gently, kindly, compassionately

Loving-kindness meditation as I've learned it typically starts off with an "I" statement, then moves on to "you" and "all."

As in May I be happy... May you be happy... May all be happy.

Sometimes this rubs me the wrong way, as it seems egotistical to start off with an intention for my happiness, and only then visualize someone close to me (usually my wife) and all of humanity being happy.

But given the way most people treat themselves, it does seem like it makes sense to extend loving-kindness to our own self before extending it to others.

Often we're considerably harder on ourselves than on a friend or loved one. 

This is one of the points that Ethan Kross makes in his book, Chatter, about the voice in our heads and what it says to us.

If a friend wasn't careful enough when backing out of a parking space and hit a light pole, damaging their bumper, after hearing their tale of woe likely we'd say something like, "Hey, accidents happen, this is no big deal."

But our inner voice, which in this case is an inner critic, says, "Jeez, what a stupid thing to do; only an idiot would smash their bumper while backing up."

There's no way we'd say that to a friend or loved one. So why can't we look upon ourselves as deserving of the same positive attitude we'd give to someone in distress who we care about? Don't we care about ourselves?

An article in the May 2022 issue of Scientific American, "Others Don't Think You're a Mess," has some observations about the relationship between being vulnerable with others, and being compassionate to ourself.

Self-compassion originated from ancient Buddhist teachings. Today's scientists, however, have researcher Kristin Neff of the University of Texas at Austin to thank for defining the concept in detailed psychological terms.

According to Neff, self-compassion consists of three components. First, self-kindness entails a caring and understanding response toward one's own suffering.

For instance, when someone is struggling with feelings of failure, Neff encourages people to imagine how they might speak supportively to a friend in that position and then apply similar thoughts to themselves.

The second component -- common humanity -- refers to recognizing pain and failures as an unavoidable part of life. Finally, mindfulness entails clear awareness of the present moment -- neither ignoring one's difficulties nor exaggerating their magnitude.

My colleagues and I thought that self-compassion could influence how people perceive their own display of vulnerability. After all, vulnerable situations can trigger a lot of shame and fear, and these moments are precisely when self-compassion is most helpful.

For example, consider admitting a mistake. People who treat themselves as they would treat a good friend wouldn't shame themselves for being imperfect. Instead they would remind themselves that imperfection comes with the territory for all mortal creatures.

In addition, a mindful approach to the mistake would lessen the need to either exaggerate or deny its significance. 

...Luckily, our sense of self-compassion is not set in stone, and it can be intentionally cultivated. For example, journaling exercises can help people change the way they think about their own strengths and weaknesses by writing about one's feelings with awareness and acceptance, offering oneself words of support and reflecting on how others share difficult experiences.

By developing a kind, mindful attitude toward ourselves, we can become more comfortable with showing our vulnerabilities. This practice, in turn, can strengthen our close relationships.

Morality comes from evolution, not God

There are lots of reasons to reject religion. Here at the Church of the Churchless we've been pointing them out since 2004, proudly deconverting people from blind faith and dogma one non-soul at a time.

One of those reasons is that contrary to what fundamentalists believe, morality, judging what is right and wrong, doesn't come from God or some other supernatural source. It's the result of evolution. 

Browsing through an old issue of Scientific American that I found languishing in a drawer of magazines, a special September 2018 issue about The Science of Being Human included an article by Michael Tomasello titled "How We Learned to Put Our Fate in One Another's Hands: The Origins of Morality."

Here's how the article was summarized in the In Brief section.

Seeds of human morality were planted some 400,000 years ago, when individuals began to collaborate in hunting-and-gathering exploits. Cooperative interaction cultivated respect and fairness for other group members. Later, growing population sizes cemented a sense of collective group identity that fostered a set of cultural practices and social norms. 

Here's a scan of an illustration in the article that shows how morality evolved. You also can download the PDF file.
Download Evolution of Modern Human Morality PDF

These excerpts from the article provide a good overview of it.

If evolution is about survival of the fittest, how did humans ever become moral creatures? If evolution is each individual maximizing their own fitness, how did humans come to feel that they really ought to help others and be fair to them?

There have traditionally been two answers to such questions. 

First, it makes sense for individuals to help their kin, with whom they share genes, a process known as inclusive fitness. Second, situations of reciprocity can arise in which I scratch your back and you scratch mine and we both benefit in the long run.

But morality is not just about being nice to kin in the manner that bees and ants cooperate in acts of inclusive fitness. And reciprocity is a risky proposition because at any point one individual can benefit and go home, leaving the other in the lurch.

Moreover, neither of these traditional explanations gets at what is arguably the essence of human morality -- the sense of obligation that human beings feel toward one another.

Recently a new approach to looking at the problem of morality has come to the fore.

The key insight is a recognition that individuals who live in a social group in which everyone depends on everyone else for their survival and well-being operate with a special kind of logic. In this logic of interdependence, as we may call it, if I depend on you, then it is in my interest to help ensure your well-being.

More generally, if we all depend on one another, then we must all take care of one another.

How did this situation come about? The answer has to do with the particular circumstances that forced humans into ever more cooperative ways of life, especially when they are acquiring food and other basic resources.

...Early humans needed new options. One alternative involved scavenging carcasses killed by other animals. But then, according to an account from anthropologist Mary C. Stiner of the University of Arizona, some early humans -- the best guess is Homo heidelbergensis some 400,000 years ago -- began obtaining most of their food through active collaboration in which individuals formed joint goals to work together in hunting and gathering.

Indeed, the collaboration became obligate (compulsory) in that it was essential to their survival. Individuals became interdependent with one another in immediate and urgent ways to obtain their daily sustenance.

An essential part of the process of obligate collaborative foraging involved partner choice. Individuals who were cognitively or otherwise incompetent at collaboration -- those incapable of forming joint goals or communicating effectively with others -- were not chosen as partners and so went without food.

Likewise, individuals who were socially or morally uncooperative in their interactions with others -- for example, those who tried to hog all the spoils -- were also shunned as partners and so doomed. The upshot: strong and active social selection emerged for competent and motivated individuals who cooperated well with others.

...In choosing a partner for a collaborative effort, early humans wanted to pick an individual who would live up to an expected role and divide the spoils fairly.

....Anyone who deviated from what was expected and wanted to stay in good cooperative standing would willingly engage in an act of self-condemnation -- internalized psychologically as a sense of guilt. A "we is greater than me" morality emerged. During a collaboration, the joint "we" operated beyond the selfish individual level to regulate the actions of the collaborative partners "I" and "you."

...In my 2016 book A Natural History of Human Morality, I proceed from the assumption that a major part of the explanation for human moral psychology comes from processes of evolution by means of natural selection.

More important, though, the selecting is done not by the physical environment but rather by the social environment. 

In contrast to evolutionary approaches that base their arguments on reciprocity and the managing of one's reputation in the community, I emphasize that early human individuals understood that moral norms made them both judger and judged.

The immediate concern for any individual was not just for what "they" think of me but rather for what "we," including "I," think of me. The essence of this account is thus a kind of "we is greater than me" psychological orientation, which gives moral notions their special powers of legitimacy in personal decision making.

The challenge in the contemporary world stems from an understanding that humans' biological adaptations for cooperation and morality are geared mainly  toward small group life or cultural groups that are internally homogeneous -- with out-groups not being part of the moral community.

Since the rise of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, human societies have consisted of individuals from diverse political, ethnic and religious lines.

As a consequence, it becomes less clear who constitutes a "we" and who is in the out-group. The resulting potential for divisiveness leads to both internal social tensions within a society and, at the level of nations, to outright war -- the ultimate example of in- and out-group conflicts. 

But if we are to solve our largest challenges as a species, which threaten all human societies alike, we had best be prepared to think of all humanity as a "we."

Leaked Supreme Court opinion shows abortion rights about to be overturned

Christian fundamentalists in the United States are happy right now.

Today Politico reported that a leaked draft Supreme Court opinion indicates that Roe v. Wade, which found a constitutional right to abortion in that 1973 case, is about to be overturned.

The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wadedecision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO.

The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.” “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

This is the first time a Supreme Court opinion has been leaked to the press.

It shows that someone at the court, perhaps a law clerk, recognized how horrible overturning abortion rights will be, and wanted to give a head start to the outrage rather than wait until late June or early July when the abortion decision was expected to be released to the public.

There are decent reasons to oppose abortion and even better reasons to support the right of women to choose an abortion. But a truly lousy reason to be against abortion is that this is what God wants. As in Texas Governor Greg Abbott saying, "Our creator endowed us with the right to life."

That's absurd. 

Since there is no demonstrable evidence of a creator God (or any other sort of God), obviously there's no basis for claiming to know what God has done or wants people to do.

I can understand why someone objects to abortion. A fetus is a potential human life. But a pregnant woman is an actual human life. Women are at greater risk of dying from pregnancy than from an abortion. 

So abortion is justified for that reason, along with other reasons, including simply this being what a woman chooses.

A terrible reason is that an embryo must be treated as a person at conception, which is the teaching of the Catholic Church, according to a BBC article. Obviously a few cells isn't a person. Thus probably the notion of an immortal soul is the reason for viewing those few cells as deserving more protection than the woman in whose womb the cells reside.

Six of the nine justices of the Supreme Court are Catholic, with five of those six being part of the 6-3 conservative majority. The sixth conservative, Neil Gorsuch, is Episcopalian but was raised Catholic.

So even though the final decision on abortion will be couched in legal terms, pretty clearly religious belief plays a large part in how the justices view abortion. Opposition to abortion flows largely from fundamentalist churches.

Those opposed to abortion, even in cases of rape and incest, appear to have won this Supreme Court battle, but the war for women's rights and individual freedom will continue. Hopefully the backlash over the forthcoming Supreme Court decision will lead to voters punishing Republicans at the polls in the November election.

War crimes in Bucha show depravity of Russia

Religious believers have a lot of trouble explaining evil. How could a loving God allow people to suffer so much at the hands of their fellow humans? 

The usual unpersuasive religious bullshit is trotted out. God works in mysterious ways. God allows humans to have free will, even if they freely will cruelty. Karmic connections from past lives cause some people to harm others in a settling of karmic accounts.

I don't accept any of that. People do terrible things because some people are terrible.

Sure, there may be psychological reasons for their horrible behavior. But this doesn't excuse horrors such as what Russian soldiers did to Ukrainians in Bucha, a town held by the Russian military until it was liberated by Ukrainian forces a few days ago.

President Zelensky of Ukraine is calling what the Russians did genocide. President Biden of the United States is calling it war crimes. Whatever word is used, every decent person should be repelled by what happened in Bucha.

If anyone wants to defend Vladimir Putin and his Russian military after reading this Politico story, 'They killed everyone." Fury in Ukraine at Russian troops' barbarity, I have a two word response: Fuck you. I have zero respect for anyone who tries to explain away what happened in Bucha. 

Here's how the story starts out.

KYIV — U.S. army veteran Ryan O’Leary looks a little unsteady and draws heavily as he smokes — unsurprising after what he’s seen and done over the past month during some vicious firefights on the northern outskirts of Kyiv, for weeks among the most intense front lines in Ukraine.

Added to that, he was clearly aghast at what he had seen in the last 48 hours, assisting with clean-up operations in the town of Bucha, northwest of Kyiv, in the wake of a Russian withdrawal that was part rout.

The 35-year-old Iowan, who did tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, is one of hundreds of foreign volunteers who enlisted with Ukraine’s foreign legion immediately after Russia invaded. He says he did so to “support democracy.” He reached Kyiv on March 1, and within hours was sent with about a dozen American and British military veterans to Moshchun, a village near Bucha, part of an uneven line of settlements blocking the Russians from entering Ukraine’s capital from the north.

O’Leary was in combat for a month without much pause; and then on Saturday, he was ordered to Bucha, the same day Ukraine declared the once-quiet suburban town liberated from Russian troops.

Bucha is now the focus of an international outcry. Ukrainian officials and rights groups accuse Russian forces of massacring civilians in Bucha, as well as other villages on the outskirts of Kyiv. The barbarity being uncovered in Bucha after Russian forces pulled out a few days ago is fueling demands for international war crimes investigations — and adding to Ukrainian fury.

“I’ve had seven years in combat zones fighting ISIS, fighting the Taliban, and what the Russians did to civilians is insane,” says O’Leary. The veteran adds: “They killed everyone — not just men, like the media is reporting right now. They killed women, too. It is something I am never going to forget. When you go into some of the villages, you see civilians dead with their hands tied behind their backs.

“The photos and videos you’re seeing right now only tell half the story,” he says. “We went into one house, cleared the house of mines, and in the back yard there was a van and inside there were five dead women. They had been shot; then someone had tried to burn them.” There have been other reports of scorched and semi-burnt female bodies, prompting suspicions that whoever set them alight was trying to destroy evidence of rape.

Naturally Russia is lying about the war crimes their troops committed in Bucha. Echoing what right-wing conspiracy theorists said about the killing of dozens of school children in the Sandy Hook tragedy, Putin's liars are claiming that the bodies in photos of Bucha were "crisis actors" pretending to be dead.

But the New York Times has debunked that obvious fabrication, proving that satellite images show that 11 of the bodies were in the same location when found by Ukrainian soldiers since March 11, when Bucha was controlled by Russia.

Further, Russia has a track record of war crimes. Wanton killing of civilians occurred in Chechnya and Syria at the hands of the Russian military. 

Now it is happening in Ukraine. Sadly, almost certainly more reports of war crimes against women, children, and men who had no connection to the Ukrainian forces will come out after additional cities are liberated from Putin's invading force.

I doubt anyone who reads this and thinks that Russian soldiers were justified in murdering innocent civilians would be willing to say so in a comment, using their real name. However, if you're OK with war crimes, I think you should be OK with letting the world know who you are.

Someone with no sense of morality.

Some of the dead in Bucha

What do you find inspiring about Ukrainians?

I'm curious.

While I realize that most of the people who visit this blog aren't as obsessed with the Russian invasion of Ukraine as I am -- I check my Twitter feed for recent news about Ukraine many times a day -- likely everybody is at least somewhat familiar with how bravely the Ukrainian people are fighting against this unprovoked war by Vladimir Putin.

So I'm interested in learning how you feel about what's happening in Ukraine. Note, feel.

I stress that word because while I do a lot of thinking about Ukraine, all those thoughts aren't nearly as important to me as the emotions I feel when news stories show me what's happening there. Clearly the world has been touched by how Ukrainians have reacted to the invasion.

For sure, I have.

I'll share some of my feelings in this blog post. If you choose to do the same in a comment, great. Again, I'm hoping to learn more about how other people have been affected by Putin's war. Maybe your feelings are much like mine; maybe they're not.

I'm not a big fan of being dead. I'd like to live as long as possible. With this proviso: so long as life seems worth living. 

What's super impressive -- it blows my mind, really -- is the readiness of Ukrainians to fight to the death for what they consider makes life worth living. Yes, that sounds contradictory. How could dying be welcomed by a person who recognizes that something makes life worth living?

Sebastian Junger points to some answers in a Vanity Fair piece, "Can Ukrainian Freedom Fighters Stand Up to the Russian Military? History Suggests They Can."

Most successful underdog groups have three things in common, and Ukraine has all of them. First, such groups need to have a clear moral purpose with deep roots in the history of the population. The ability of a group to be autonomous and self-defining—free—is one of the few things that people will readily die for, and framing a struggle in those terms makes them much more likely to succeed.

(Freedom is a powerful word that often gets dragged into bogus political fights. Recent protesters who appropriated that word in this country were clearly not prepared to die in large numbers for it—a sign that the protests may not really have been about freedom at all.)

The deep moral purpose at the heart of the Maidan Square protests in 2014 and in the current Ukrainian resistance makes sacrificing one’s life seem like a heroic thing to do—a sentiment probably not shared by most Russian troops.

Deep moral purpose. Yes, that's what I find so moving about Ukrainians.

They're willing to endure great misery, even death, in order to resist the moral outrage of Putin's invasion of their country. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian men who had been living in other nations have gone back to Ukraine to help defend their beloved country, risking their lives.

Ukrainian women are equally impressive. I see them being trained to use a rifle. I see them making Molotov cocktails for use in urban warfare. I see them in subway shelters with their children, seeking refuge from Russian bombs.

When my life seems difficult, I envision Ukrainian men, women, and children coping with a hugely worse situation with a courage that I aspire to.

So what if I have some irritating health problems? So what if I feel stressed by Covid? So what if I get tired of all that needs to be done on our non-easy-care house on ten acres? Whatever I have to deal with, the people of Ukraine have it so much worse, my complaints seem minuscule by comparison.

Of course, Putin and his generals also have a deep purpose: to take over Ukraine, bringing it back into a reincarnated Soviet Union led by Russia. 

The difference is that Putin lacks a moral purpose. There's no justification for his invasion of Ukraine, but there's plenty of justification for the Ukrainian people to fight that invasion. Truth is all-important in having a genuine deep moral purpose.

I'm not saying that 100% of what Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, says is true. No one is perfect. However, almost every word that comes out of Putin's mouth is a lie, so there's no comparison between Putin and Zelensky.

When honesty is lost -- whether this is being honest to ourself or to others -- it is next to impossible to fight energetically for something greater than yourself. Sure, you can go through the motions, just as Russian soldiers are doing, but the passion that comes with fighting for something true and good and worth dying for is lacking when a cause is built on a lie.

We all see the world differently. Yet there are times when a certain viewpoint is so captivating, most of the world sees it in the same way.

For me, this is the tragic beauty of Ukraine. It took the horror of Putin's invasion to wake me and so many others up to the value of fighting with all our strength for what we strongly value. Again, that value has to be based on truth and doing good for others, or at least not harming them.

Sometimes life can seem like the Russian army. Disorganized, lacking competent leadership, but seemingly powerful enough to eventually run over anyone or anything standing in its way.

Yet as Junger says in his Vanity Fair piece, might can be overcome by a smaller, weaker adversary. Each of us is capable of so much more strength and courage than we normally are aware of. It shouldn't take an invasion to remind us of this, but with Ukraine, that shock has opened my eyes to a latent power within me, which is the same power within you. 

Junger writes:

On paper, Russia’s quest to occupy Ukraine looks like a foregone conclusion. With about four and a half timesas many soldiers, five times as many tanks and armored vehicles, and 10 times as many military aircraft, common sense tells us that Ukraine does not stand a chance.

In fact, history tells us otherwise.

From street-corner fistfights to insurgencies and wars, size is a terrible predictor for the outcome of human conflict. We are unique among mammals in our ability to defeat a larger, more powerful opponent; were this not so, the world would be composed of fascist mega-states and human freedom would not be possible.

We readily risk our lives to defend others, as combat narratives for Medal of Honor recipients make abundantly clear. The smaller the group, the more stubbornly loyal members are to one another, and the harder—and costlier—they are to defeat.

In 1604, the Ottoman Empire decided that the small, mountainous principality of Montenegro had to be crushed. The Montenegrins were a famously warlike people who had always rejected any form of dominion and supposedly feared nothing except dying peacefully in bed.

They inhabited a land that was too poor to support large concentrations of people, but the scattered population invariably came together to fight invaders. The Ottomans boasted some 12,000 men, including cavalry and artillery, and faced a mere 900 Montenegrins. The Montenegrins were unfazed, though, and sent three-man raiding parties out all night before attacking at dawn. They killed one third of the Ottoman army and sent the rest packing.

Morality, like Alan Watts, is in the eye of the beholder

It's been interesting to see the various reactions of regular readers of this blog to my series of posts about Alan Watts, especially my recent post about how "Alan Watts was true to his moral philosophy." 

Those like me who agree with how Watts viewed reality -- as a self-organizing whole without any top-down commander like God -- tended to view his personal life as irrelevant to his philosophizing, which leaned in his later years toward Chinese/Taoist perspectives.

Not surprisingly, those who disagreed with how Watts saw things seized upon his three marriages, affairs with other women, drug use, and excessive drinking as evidence that Watts was a fake who didn't live up to the ideals that he spoke about in his books and talks.

This is a reflection of the fact that in large part, morality is subjective. Different people look upon right and wrong in different ways. So here's some observations along that line, using the reaction to Alan Watts as an example.

First, I wanted to learn more about the life of Watts, so yesterday I ordered a biography from Amazon, "Zen Effects: The Life of Alan Watts," by Monica Furlong. I got it today and obviously haven't been able to read it yet, but noted that Furlong had a new foreword in the 2012 edition. Here's how Furlong's foreword ends.

Watt's philosophy, carefully developed over the years with study, had a freshness and honesty about it. He had read deeply in Christian theology and felt that many of its symbols had lost their power as a result of being taken too literally, and needed to be rediscovered. He worked at meditation, read Jungian psychology, studied Oriental religious ideas of all kinds, visited Japan.

Out of much thinking, reading, and talking, he developed a language that spoke to Westerners who wanted a religion, or at any rate a way of life, that was not totally trapped in rationality. He felt that religion tended to suffer from mystification and the use of a mandarin language that excluded most people, except as timid followers of leaders who then abused their power.

His own teaching moved between ways of talking about huge imponderables -- suffering, death -- to the everyday -- the kind of food, clothes, relationships, ways of living that might be appropriate for human beings.

Few, if any, human beings can cope well with becoming a guru or icon. Alan Watts handled it better than some, mainly because he had good friends, and he had a sense of humor that put his fame into perspective, but he was stressed by the exposure and at times his head was turned by it. 

Watts is not a man on whom it is possible to deliver an easy verdict -- he escapes labels. He had an extraordinary wisdom, a lot of knowledge, and a rare ability to put both into language that ordinary people can understand.

He still has much to teach anyone searching to find belief -- his short and deceptively simple little books are remarkable guides. He was sometimes vain, a know-it-all who could be thoughtless of others, but he was invariably kind in what he said about other people. "He was fond of lifting the elbow," Dom Aelred Graham wrote to me, "but I never heard him say a harsh word about anybody."

There are not many of us of whom the Recording Angel will be able to say as much, and it was perhaps Watts's capacity to live out the life he wanted, with all its ups and downs, its failures and successes, that left him so attractively free of envy.

His children, I noticed when I interviewed them, were both clear-sighted and truthful about him, but also had loving memories, as had his friends.

He was both an inspired leader and, like all of us, flawed -- in Gary Snyder's words, "he sowed problems wherever he went." Watts knew himself well, and used to describe himself as a "genuine fake," an expression that catches not only his ambiguities, but also the ambiguities of the human condition, not least when we are trying to be religious.

This book tries to explore both the genuineness and the fakery.

Furlong does a nice job here, balancing Watts' strengths and weaknesses, pointing out that Watts echoed his philosophy in his life: there aren't sharp edges in nature, or in human nature. No clear demarcation of black and white, good and bad, moral and immoral. 

There are shades of meaning, ambiguities, tendencies that can reverse themselves and move in a fresh direction. 

As noted before, Alan Watts didn't set himself up as someone to emulate. He urged people to trust themselves, not authorities, religious or otherwise. So those who criticize Watts for not being moral are laying their own ethical framework over Watts' life and then finding it lacking.

I'm reminded of the current controversy in Great Britain over Boris Johnson, the prime minister, having  parties during a time the rest of the country was on a strict Covid lockdown. Now, that's the sort of hypocrisy that, if proven to be true, deserves condemnation. 

But to my knowledge, Watts never said "Don't drink; don't use psychedelic drugs; don't have affairs; don't drink alcohol excessively." Sure, he did those things. Yet he can't be condemned for living a life that was at odds with his philosophy.

Since Watts was a big admirer of Taoism, below is a story from Eva Wong's book, "Lieh-Tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical Living." The back cover says, "The Lieh-Tzu is a collection of stories and philosophical musings of a sage of the same name who lived around the fourth century B.C.E."

That's a long time ago, but one story reminded me of the debate over Alan Watts' morality today. In 2007 I shared an abbreviated version of that story in "Wine, women, and enlightenment." Here's that blog post.

Got to get fired up, or cooled down, for the Taoism talk I'm going to give to a Comparative Religion class tonight. I won't prepare a whole lot. Want to let it flow.

I'm planning to carry along the Lieh-tzu, though. That's the third leg of the traditional Taoist canon, along with the Tao-te Ching and the Chuang-tzu.

Translator Eva Wong says:

The Lao-tzu describes a state of reality that a sage experiences; the Chuang-tzu describes a state of mind that the sage is in; but the Lieh-tzu describes how the enlightened person lives.

…If the Lao-tzu is poetry and the Chuang-tzu is prose, then the Lieh-tzu is a series of comic strips. By exaggerating the ridiculous aspects of human actions, it portrays the human condition as humorous and pokes fun at social taboos.

I love how Taoist sages so often take a contrarian view of morality. You won't find a story like "What damages health more—unrestricted pleasure or obsessive hard work?" in a traditional religious scripture. Here's an abbreviated version of Lieh-tzu's tale.

-----------------------------

Tzu-ch'an, the chief minister of the kingdom of Cheng, had two brothers. While he spent his energy on strengthening the country and putting down crime and disorder, his two brothers indulged in everything that satisfied their senses.

One of the brothers had a brewery and a large warehouse in the back of his mansion where he stored thousands of jars of wine. He drank heavily, and, when drunk, he was oblivious to everything around him. He couldn't recognize friends or relatives, and he lost all concern for life or death.

The other brother had a dozen rooms in the house where he kept a group of beautiful young women. When he was aroused sexually, he would spend months with the women, never even bothering to come out to meet friends and relatives or take care of the family business.

Tzu-ch'an was very concerned about his brothers' lifestyles. So he went to talk to Teng-hsi, a fellow statesman who, although sarcastic and snide at times, was known for his keen observations and problem-solving ability.

Tzu-ch'an said, "Can you suggest anything that would get my two irresponsible brothers to behave more properly?"

Teng-hsi replied, "Tell them what they're doing is damaging their health. Maybe this will convince them to change their lifestyles."

One day Tzu-ch'an found his brothers together. He took this opportunity to talk to them about their lives.

"Heaven made us a cut above animals in dignity and intelligence. Therefore, it is your duty to live up to these expectations and behave in a manner befitting our position in society. If you only live to satisfy your senses, you are no more than animals. Stop harming yourselves, become responsible citizens, and I shall give you a position in the government."

Tzu-ch'an's brothers said:

"We know that wine and sex damage health. But we also know that life is short, and we want to enjoy whatever we can now. You, on the other hand, suppress what you want to do in order to maintain your rank and power.

"You are proud of your achievements and you want us to conform to your beliefs. You want to entice us with titles and political power, but we know that such things only bring burden and trouble.

"You may be the chief minister, and the country may look like it's in order. But look at yourself closely. You are tired and haggard. You have damaged your body and mind because you are anxious about keeping the country in order. In order to maintain your reputation, you have damaged your heart by suppressing your natural inclinations.

"We, on the other hand, may be wild and unruly, but we are true to ourselves. We have never put up a front to gain respect. We have never been involved in dirty politics or harmed other people with treachery and intrigue.

"Can you say this about yourself? If you can't, then it's not we who should take your advice, but you who should take ours."

Tzu-ch'an did not know what to say. Later he saw Teng-hsi and related the whole incident to him. Teng-hsi said, "You have been living with enlightened men and didn't even know it."

Lastly, here's an excerpt from another Lieh-Tzu story, "A madman or an enlightened man?"

Is Tuan-mu Shu a madman or an enlightened man? If you judge him by social norms, then it would appear that Tuan-mu Shu was indeed crazy. He abandoned his family, did not care for the welfare of his descendants, and squandered his wealth.

But then again, Tuan-mu Shu was sincere in everything he did. There was no pretense, no scheming, no ulterior motive in his actions. He followed his heart and was not constrained by social conventions. He enjoyed himself freely, he gave freely, and he never did anything that went against his nature.

Alan Watts was true to his moral philosophy

There's nothing that irks me more on this blog than commenters who are annoyingly sanctimonious, taking an I'm-holier-than-thou attitude to people they feel morally superior to. So when I saw this comment about Alan Watts by Spence Tepper yesterday, it irritated me.

Allan Watts may appeal to drug addicts, alcoholics, sex addicts and fame addicts, but he would have done them greater good acknowldging his own struggles with these things. A man who fails, but struggles, openly acknowldging his struggle, and fights directly as best he can, that is a source of real inspiration. But a man who escapes his duty in a world of clever sounding concepts is no role model. Except to provide what appeals to some functioning alcoholics looking for an enabler : A clever but paper thin identify with which to paper over the windows of harsh sunlight, a means of enabling the denial. We can only look at Watts deconstruction of identity as wishful thinking and in fact the creation of an identity of freedom that in fact enabled addiction.

There's so much wrong with this comment, at first I didn't know how to respond to it. But this morning, I did, addressing myself both to Tepper and to another commenter critical of Watts, "Appreciative Reader."

Appreciative Reader and Spence, I'm planning to write a blog post tonight about what Alan Watts said about morality, since you two have what appears to be an erroneous conception that Watts' personal life contradicted his philosophy of life.

That isn't true. At least, I see no evidence that it is. So please explain in a comment why you think that Watts being married three times, having affairs, using drugs, and becoming an alcoholic is at odds with the philosophy he espoused.

I've read most or all of Watts' books, some several times. I've just finished listening to all of the audio recordings in the Tao of Philosophy section of the talks on the Waking Up app. I'm not aware of the slightest mention that Watts believed in rigid moral commandments such as the Bible and other religious texts contain.

In fact, the opposite is true. He urged people to trust themselves, and to not be taken in by the illusion that there's a Commander, a Boss, a God, who decrees what is right and good to do, or who controls people's actions. I've also seen no evidence that Watts put himself forth as a guru to be emulated. Again, the opposite is true. He jokes and plays around, not taking himself seriously, saying that he just gives talks for the money and because he enjoys it.

You two have piled onto Watts for reasons I can't understand. It's irritating when people try to kill the messenger because they don't like the message. It's fine to disagree with a philosopher's point of view, but I see no value in saying that Watts' philosophy is garbage because he had some human problems.

Are you aware of anyone who doesn't have problems? Could your own personal lives withstand a close look to see if you've overcome human weaknesses, or what appear to be human weaknesses? In part this is a sensitive issue for me because my mother was an alcoholic, along with being a strong independent woman who was an amazing thinker and persuasive talker, even though I came to disagree with her conservative political views.

The notion that someone who becomes an alcoholic or heavy drinker is amoral, a bad person, offends me. It's the worst kind of holier-than-thou sanctimoniousness to view a person as a failed human being because they drank too much, had affairs, or otherwise didn't live up to traditional standards. My family was full of flawed successful people who were interesting in part because of their flaws, not in spite of them.

It's one thing to criticize a religious leader like the RSSB guru who says one thing and does another thing. But unless you can provide evidence to the contrary, my view is that Alan Watts lived the life he espoused in his talks.

Note that my central concern isn't whether Watts lived up to some objective standard of morality, because such doesn't exist.

Sure, virtually everybody agrees that killing, stealing, and such  almost always are immoral, though exceptions are common. Killing is OK in war; stealing because your children are starving is understandable.

Since Watts never did anything criminal to my knowledge, and morality in large part is a personal decision, seemingly the charge against Watts here is that the philosophical message he conveyed in his books and talks was at odds with some aspects of his life: notably the affairs he had while married and excessive drinking, which some call alcoholism.

So I did some Googling of "Alan Watts morality." The best articles I found were on the AllanWatts.org web site, a two-part series called Mysticism and Morality (see here and here). This appears to be a transcript of a talk by Watts.

Here's an excerpt that shows the foundation of how Watts viewed morality: real honesty.

You see, now, how real honesty is a genuine basis of morals. Real honesty is always not pretending that you’re [your] feelings are other than they are. We know, as we deal with situations practically, that we may have to do things that go against our feelings, and it’s the same with helping people—when you have to—whom you don’t like and you don’t want to help, but on the whole it’s rather necessary to do so. But don’t ever be dishonest in playing that you’re [your] feelings are not what they are.

Now, from this standpoint we can perhaps understand something about the deep relationship between morals and mysticism. If we go back, you see, to the experience that I described as mystical we see that it is the vision—I tried to put it, fumblingly, in the sense of the rightness, the harmoniousness of everything that you are from one moment to another.

That, in other words, human behavior—its ups and its downs—is no different in principle from the behavior of the clouds, or of the wind, or of dancing flames in the fireplace. As you watch the pattern of the dancing flames they never do anything vulgar. Their artistry is always perfect. Ultimately, it is the same with human beings. We are just as much a part of the natural order as flames in the fire or stars in the sky. But this is only apparent to the person who is honest in the sense in which I have spoken.

In other words, the person who is tied up with trying to pretend that his feelings are other than what they actually are—he can never see this, and he’s always a troublemaker. He is the original hypocrite. The person who is unbelievably destructive is the person who pretends that he is a model of love and rectitude and justice, and, in fact, isn’t. Because nobody really can be. But then, superior altogether is the kind of person I would call the ‘loving cynic’ who knows, of course, that everybody has his weakness and his price and so on, but isn’t contemptuous for that reason.

I also picked up my favorite book by Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity. Here's some passages that offer another perspective on how Watts viewed morality.

If morality is the art of living together, it is clear that rules, or rather techniques, have a place in it. For many of the problems of a community are technical problems -- the distribution of wealth and population, the proper management of natural resources, the organization of family life, the care of the sick and disabled, and the harmonious adaptation of individual differences. 

The moralist is therefore a technician who is consulted on these problems as one consults an architect on building a house or an engineer on erecting a bridge. Like medicine, shoe-making, cookery, tailoring, farming, and carpentry, living together requires a certain "know-how." It demands the acquisition and use of certain skills.

But the moralist has, in practice, become much more than a technical consultant. He has become a scold. From his pulpit or his study he harangues the human race, issuing praise and blame -- mostly blame -- like fire from the mouth of a dragon. For people do not take his advice. They ask how it is best to act under such and such circumstances. 

He tells them, and they seem to agree that he is right. But then they go away and do something different, for they find his advice too difficult or have a strong desire to do the opposite. This happens so regularly that the moralist loses his temper and begins to call them bad names. When this has no effect, he resorts to physical violence, implementing his advice with policemen, punishments, and prisons.

...The conventional moralist has nothing to contribute to these problems. He can point out the frightful effects of alcoholism and gambling, but that is simply more fuel for depression and worry. He can promise rewards in heaven for suffering patiently endured, but that, too, is a gamble of a kind. 

...The urge is ever to make "I" amount to something. I must be right, good, a real person, heroic, loving, self-effacing. I efface myself in order to assert myself, and give myself away in order to keep myself. The whole thing is a contradiction.

The Christian mind has always been haunted by the feeling that the sins of the saints are worse than the sins of the sinners, that in some mysterious way the one who is struggling for salvation is nearer to hell and to the heart of evil than the unashamed harlot or thief.

It has recognized that the Devil is an angel, and as pure spirit is not really interested in the sins of the flesh. The sins after the Devil's heart are the intricacies of spiritual pride, the mazes of self-deception, and the subtle mockeries of hypocrisy where mask hides behind mask behind mask and reality is lost altogether.

The would-be saint walks straight into the meshes of this web because he would become a saint. His "I" finds the deepest security in a satisfaction which is the more intense for being so cleverly hidden -- the satisfaction of being contrite for his sins, and contrite for taking pride in his contrition. In such an involved vicious circle the masks behind masks are infinite.

...Where there is to be creative action it is quite beside the point to discuss what we should or should not do in order to be right or good. A mind that is single and sincere is not interested in being good, in conducting relations with other people so as to live up to a rule. Nor, on the other hand, is it interested in being free, in acting perversely just to prove its independence.

Its interest is not in itself, but in the people and problems of which it is aware; these are "itself." It acts, not according to the rules, but according to the circumstances of the moment, and the "well" it wishes to others is not security but liberty.

Nothing is really more inhuman than human relations based on morals. When a man gives bread in order to be charitable, lives with a woman in order to be faithful, eats with a Negro in order to be unprejudiced, and refuses to kill in order to be peaceful, he is as cold as a clam. He does not actually see the other person. Only a little less chilly is the benevolence springing from pity, which acts to remove suffering because it finds the sight of it disgusting.

But there is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service of mankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself.

This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self-love all the bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.

If you still want to call Alan Watts immoral because he had affairs and drank alcohol to excess, go ahead. I just hope you'll agree with me that Watts had a view of morality that was much different from the top-down God-centered approach to right and wrong that religions espouse.

Don't apply that sort of morality to Watts, because he denied it, and it doesn't apply to him. But if you feel good about seeing yourself as morally superior to Watts, I'm sure he'd hear this with good humor, telling you to go ahead if that's what gives you pleasure.

Rationality leads to progress and morality

In his new book, "Rationality," Steve Pinker ends with a Why Rationality Matters chapter. Here's some excerpts. 

Pinker starts off by looking at human progress.

Though the availability bias hides it from us, human progress is an empirical fact. When we look beyond the headlines to the trend lines, we find that humanity overall is healthier, richer, longer-lived, better fed, better educated, and safer from war, murder, and accidents than in decades and centuries past.

Having documented these changes in two books, I'm often asked whether I "believe in progress." The answer is no. Like the humorist Fran Lebowitz, I don't believe in anything you have to believe in.

Though many measures of human well-being, when plotted over time, show a gratifying increase (though not always or everywhere), it's not because of some force or dialectic or evolutionary law that lifts us ever upward.

On the contrary, nature has no regard for our well-being, and often, as with pandemics and natural disasters, it looks as if its trying to grind us down. "Progress" is shorthand for a set of pushbacks and victories wrung out of an unforgiving universe, and is a phenomenon that needs to be explained.

The explanation is rationality.

When humans set themselves the goal of improving the welfare of their fellows (as opposed to other dubious pursuits like glory or redemption), and they apply their ingenuity in institutions that pool it with others', they occasionally succeed.

When they retain the successes and take note of the failures, the benefits can accumulate, and we call the big picture progress. 

...Brainchildren of human ingenuity have also underwritten other historical boosts in well-being [in addition to life expectancy, marked lessening of hunger, poverty, and deaths from war], such as safety, leisure, travel, and access to art and entertainment.

Though many of the gadgets and bureaucracies grew organically and were perfected through trial and error, none was an accident. People at the time advocated for them with arguments driven by logic and evidence, costs and benefits, cause and effect, and tradeoffs between individual advantage and the common good.

Pinker then turns to how rationality leads to moral progress.

Progress consists of more than gains in safety and material well-being. It consists also in gains of how we treat each other: in equality, benevolence, and rights.

Many cruel and unjust practices have declined over the course of history. They include human sacrifice, slavery, despotism, blood sports, eunuchism, harems, foot-binding, sadistic corporal and capital punishments, the persecution of heretics and dissidents, and the oppression of women and of religious, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities.

None has been extirpated from the face of the earth, but when we chart the historical changes, in every case we see descents and, in some cases, plunges. How did we come to enjoy this progress?

...A popular view is that moral progress is advanced through struggle: the powerful never hand over their privileges, which must be wrested from them by the might of people acting in solidarity.

My greatest surprise in making sense of moral progress is how many times in history the first domino was a reasoned argument. 

A philosopher wrote a brief which laid out arguments on why some practice was indefensible, or irrational, or inconsistent with values that everyone claimed to hold. The pamphlet or manifesto went viral, was translated into other languages, was debated in pubs and salons and coffeehouses, and then influenced leaders, legislators, and popular opinion.

Eventually the conclusion was absorbed into the conventional wisdom and common decency of a society, erasing the tracks of the arguments that brought it there.

Few people today feel the need, or could muster the ability, to formulate a coherent argument on why slavery is wrong, or public disembowelment, or the beating of children; it's just obvious. Yet exactly those debates took place centuries ago.

And the arguments that prevailed, when they are brought to our attention today, continue to ring true. They appeal to a sense of reason that transcends the centuries, because they conform to principles of conceptual consistency that are part of reality itself.

Now, as we saw in chapter 2, no logical argument can establish a moral claim. But an argument can establish that a claim under debate is inconsistent with another claim a person holds dear, or with values like life and happiness that most people claim for themselves and would agree are legitimate desires of everyone else.

As we saw in chapter 3, inconsistency is fatal to reasoning: a set of beliefs that includes a contradiction can be deployed to deduce anything and is perfectly useless.

...The power of rationality to guide moral progress is of a piece with its power to guide material progress and wise choices in our lives. Our ability to eke increments of well-being out of a pitiless cosmos and to be good to others despite our flawed nature depends on grasping impartial principles that transcend our parochial experience.

We are a species that has been endowed with an elementary faculty of reason and that has discovered formulas and institutions that magnify its scope. They awaken us to ideas and expose us to realities that confound our intuitions but are true for all that.

Equanimity is like a 360 degree openness

Most mornings I listen to a guided meditation by Jeff Warren on my iPhone's Calm app. Fairly frequently Warren talks about equanimity.

One way he describes equanimity is as a 360 degree openness. 

I like that image. I picture myself sitting in a chair that rotates in a full circle so I can see everything through the panoramic window of my mind.

The stuff I like. The stuff I don't like. Worries. Problems. Joys. Challenges. Pleasantness. Irritations. Whatever. 

To alter the metaphor a bit, I picture my mind's panoramic 360 degree window as not being made of glass, but having a screen that allows a free flow of mental circulation. 

If there's too much pressure on the inside of my mind, the flow goes outward through the screen until the pressure is equalized, equal inside and outside.

If there's too much pressure on the outside of my mind, the flow goes inward through the screen until the pressure is equalized, equal outside and inside.

That's equanimity.

Calm. Smoothness. Accepting everything as it is, whether good, bad, or indifferent. I found a quote from Jeff Warren about this.

Of course, that inner smoothness is easy to talk about yet difficult to attain.

Still, we can become more smooth, more frictionless, even if there are still lumps in our mind that prevent a total feeling of equanimity.

On a somewhat related note, recently I read an interesting article in the New Yorker, "The Repressive Politics of Emotional Intelligence." 

This is a review of the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the well-known book by Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence. It presents persuasive arguments why, to put it crudely, the whole notion of emotional intelligence as promulgated by Goleman is a bunch of crap.

I see this as related to Jeff Warren's equanimity because Goleman puts forward an idealized view of how people should act.

The introduction to the anniversary edition is the only significant update to “Emotional Intelligence.” To read the book today is to unearth a time capsule, polished to a fine gleam, and to recall an era when a journalist like Goleman could still speak with untroubled optimism about the power of self-control and compassion to overcome “an onslaught of mean-spirited impulse running amok.”

...Goleman promises to show his readers how to free themselves from the “emotional hijacking” of the brain by biochemical surges, the body’s unwitting tendency to set off its own “neural tripwire.” This language, with its hints of terrorism and home invasion, encourages readers to stay alert, continually monitoring their reactions in order to bring them in line with accepted rituals of emotional expression.

It is a vision of personal freedom achieved, paradoxically, through constant self-regulation. “Emotional Intelligence” imagines a world constituted of little more than a series of civil interactions between employer and employee, husband and wife, friend and neighbor. People are linked by nothing more than, as Foucault summarized, the “instinct, sentiment, and sympathy” that underwrite their mutual success and their shared “repugnance for the misfortune of individuals” who cannot get a grip on their inner lives.

Well, I don't like the idea of constant self-regulation. I don't want to feel required to get a grip on my inner life.

That way entails, as the book reviewer notes, a continual monitoring of our reactions to ensure they are emotionally acceptable.

I much prefer the Jeff Daniels approach to equanimity.

Remain open to what is happening inside and outside of you. Acknowledge all that. Don't push any of it away. Allow yourself to flow as smoothly as possible with whatever you are thinking, feeling, experiencing.

Don't worry about being emotionally intelligent. Just be yourself. 

Humans are animals. Religions should accept this fact.

Frans de Waal has written a fascinating book about animal intelligence, "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?"

I'm only a little ways into the book, but what I've read so far has gotten me to thinking about how religions view humans -- as animals, or as a non-animal species?

Here's a passage from the prologue that makes clear how de Waal looks upon this question.

In all this, we love to compare and contrast animal and human intelligence, taking ourselves as the touchstone. It is good to realize, though, that this is an outdated way of putting it.

The comparison is not between humans and animals but between one animal species -- ours -- and a vast array of others. Even though most of the time I will adopt the "animal" shorthand for the latter it is undeniable that humans are animals. 

We're not comparing two separate categories of intelligence, therefore, but rather are considering variation within a single one. I look at human cognition as a variety of animal cognition. 

Naturally this is true. Humans are indeed animals of the primate variety. We're close relatives to chimpanzees, with whom we shared a common ancestor about six million years ago. 

Genetically, we share more than 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees and bonobos. From this perspective, chimpanzees are mostly human and vice versa. But, in genetics, some changes matter more than others. That 1-plus percent of DNA that differs between our species has obviously led to some fairly significant changes.

Yet religions usually look upon humans as separate and distinct from other animals. Supposedly we are made in God's image, while chimps aren't, even though scientifically-minded religious believers have to grapple with the notion that God created chimps with 98% of our DNA.

As de Waal says in the passage above, there isn't human intelligence and animal intelligence. There is just intelligence, which comes in lots of different forms depending on what a species needs to know in order to survive and prosper. Here's another passage from the book. 

But why stop at the primates when we are considering cognition? Every species deals flexibly with the environment and develops solutions to the problems it poses. Each one does it differently.

We had better use the plural to refer to their capacities, therefore, and speak of intelligences and cognitions. 

This will help us avoid comparing cognition on a single scale modeled after Aristotle's scala naturae, which runs from God, then angels, and humans at the top, downward to other mammals, birds, fish, insects, and mollusks at the bottom. 

Comparisons up and down this vast ladder have been a popular pastime of cognitive science, but I cannot think of a single profound insight it has yielded. All it has done is make us measure animals by human standards, thus ignoring the immense variation in organisms' Umwelten [worldview].

It seems highly unfair to ask if a squirrel can count to ten if counting is not really what a squirrel's life is about. The squirrel is very good at retrieving hidden nuts, though, and some birds are absolute experts.

The Clark's nutcracker, in the fall, stores more than twenty thousand pine nuts, in hundreds of different locations distributed over many square miles; then in winter and spring it manages to recover the majority of them.

That we can't compete with squirrels and nutcrackers on this task -- I even forget where I parked my car -- is irrelevant, since our species does not need this kind of memory for survival the way forest animals braving a freezing winter do.

So we need to stop looking at animals as being inferior to humans. They are different from us, not inferior. This is one reason we shouldn't eat them.

I've been a vegetarian for over fifty years, with my last bite of another animal species coming when I looked at a prawn on my plate while I was in college and  realized, "That used to be swimming around in the ocean, enjoying its prawn life, until it was killed so I could eat it." 

At that moment I felt a kinship with my fellow animals that caused me to vow never to eat fish or meat again. Which, I haven't. 

American's support for Black Lives Matter has risen sharply

With the coronavirus crisis still going strong, and Donald Trump still acting as badly as ever, it's great to have some good news to celebrate. Behold...

This graphic comes from a story in today's New York Times. Net support is the difference between the percent of people supporting a policy minus the percent of people opposing the policy. Here's how the story starts out.

American public opinion can sometimes seem stubborn. Voters haven’t really changed their views on abortion in 50 years. Donald J. Trump’s approval rating among registered voters has fallen within a five-point range for just about every day of his presidency.

But the Black Lives Matter movement has been an exception from the start.

Public opinion on race and criminal justice issues has been steadily moving left since the first protests ignited over the fatal shootings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. And since the death of George Floyd in police custody on May 25, public opinion on race, criminal justice and the Black Lives Matter movement has leaped leftward.

Over the last two weeks, support for Black Lives Matter increased by nearly as much as it had over the previous two years, according to data from Civiqs, an online survey research firm. By a 28-point margin, Civiqs finds that a majority of American voters support the movement, up from a 17-point margin before the most recent wave of protests began.

And this trend is evident from more than the Civiqs surveys.

The survey is not the only one to suggest that recent protests enjoy broad public support. Weekly polling for the Democracy Fund’s U.C.L.A./Nationscape survey shows a significant increase in unfavorable views of the police, and an increase in the belief that African-Americans face a lot of discrimination.

Perhaps most significant, the Civiqs data is not alone in suggesting that an outright majority of Americans agree with the central arguments of Black Lives Matter.

A Monmouth University poll found that 76 percent of Americans consider racism and discrimination a “big problem,” up 26 points from 2015. The poll found that 57 percent of voters thought the anger behind the demonstrations was fully justified, while a further 21 percent called it somewhat justified.

Polls show that a majority of Americans believe that the police are more likely to use deadly force against African-Americans, and that there’s a lot of discrimination against black Americans in society. Back in 2013, when Black Lives Matter began, a majority of voters disagreed with all of these statements.

What this shows is that public opinion on a moral issue can be slow to change, but when it does, the change can be rapid.

Being 71, I remember when homosexuality was considered abhorrent, and same-sex marriage being legal didn't enter peoples' minds. But now Americans are generally accepting of LGBTQ people, with same-sex marriage being taken for granted. The New York Times story notes that inequality pushes a moral button in most people.

And whether on gay marriage or civil rights, American public opinion tends to drift toward the side advocating equal treatment. Public opinion doesn’t have nearly as clear a record of drifting toward the left on issues that don’t hinge on equal treatment under the law, like gun control and abortion.

Obviously, then, morality is a social construct, not a God-given commandment. And there's plenty of evidence that animals other than us have similar reactions to inequality. 

But sadly, all too often us humans, who like to believe we possess an elevated sense of justice, don't act as morally as monkeys. To give a current example, President Trump is refusing to rename military bases that carry the names of Confederate generals, even though the Army Secretary and Defense Secretary were open to this. 

So the president of the United States is fine with honoring generals who fought against the United States in an effort to keep slavery alive and well in the southern states. 

It's understandable that Trump wasn't aware that these bases were named after Confederate generals. I sure wasn't. However, now that it is been pointed out to him, it definitely is a moral injustice which needs to be rectified. When Joe Biden becomes president, it will be.

The Army bases in question, all in Southern states, are Fort Bragg, N.C.; Forts Benning and Gordon in Georgia; Forts Pickett, A.P. Hill and Lee in Virginia; Fort Polk and Camp Beauregard in Louisiana; Fort Hood, Texas; and Fort Rucker, Ala.

Sexy Super Bowl halftime show wasn't liked by Christian fundamentalist

Over on my HinesSight blog I addressed the all-important question of whether last Sunday's Super Bowl halftime show was too sexualized.

Check out my post, "Sexy Super Bowl halftime show by J. Lo and Shakira offends some, but not me." Here's how it starts out:

Call me courageous -- Brian, you're so brave! -- but I've got to take an outspoken stand on yesterday's Super Bowl halftime show featuring Jennifer Lopez, a.k.a. J. Lo, and Shakira.

I am unabashedly in favor of beautiful women wearing as little as possible during a musical performance, and dancing in a sexually provocative manner.

There. I said it.

Let the .000001% of men who disagree with me take me to task, along with the almost equally small percentage of women who believe that female performers should cover themselves demurely on stage, and dance as if a Puritan God was watching.

If you didn't see the halftime show, you're in luck. Here's a video of the whole performance, which my wife and I thought was fantastic. 

However, this morning someone on my Twitter feed shared a tweet by conservative religious nut-job Franklin Graham, with this right-on comment: 

Imagine if your church were less worried about women displaying their sexuality and more worried about your president trying to rape them.

Golden Rule is a poor guide to morality

Here at the Church of the Churchless we aren't big on rules -- especially the religious variety. Morality is an individual decision. If doing something works for you, and it doesn't harm other people, go for it. 

Oh, but what about the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Or words to that effect. Isn't this a non-religious rule that makes sense? 

Sometimes. But not always. Maybe not even usually. 

Frans de Waal explains why in his fascinating book, "The Bonobo and the Atheist," which I wrote about recently in A bonobo talks to an atheist about morality and religion.

Here's his take on the Golden Rule.

Much as I like the sound and spirit of the golden rule -- "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" -- it has a fatal flaw. It assumes all people are alike.

To give a rather crude example, if at a conference I follow an attractive woman whom I barely know to her hotel room and jump into her bed uninvited, I can pretty well guess how she'd react. If I explain that I am just doing to her what I would love her to do to me, I'm afraid my appeal to the golden rule won't fly.

Or, let's assume that I knowingly serve pork sausages to a vegan. Liking meat myself, I am just following the golden rule, but the vegan will consider my behavior obnoxious, perhaps even immoral.

...The golden rule has a very limited reach, and it works only if all people are of the same age, sex, and health status with identical preferences and aversions. Since we don't live in such a world, the rule really isn't as useful as it sounds.

Absolutely.

It isn't hard to think of many other situations where the golden rule would be a lousy moral guide. For example, a sadomasochist enjoys receiving or inflicting pain. Is it proper for them to go up to a stranger and punch them in the stomach, since this is what they would like done to them?

Of course not. But the Golden Rule says this would be fine, since the person is doing to someone else what they would like done to them.

So a better moral guideline seemingly would be Do unto others what they want done to them.

This, though, also would have exceptions. If someone is contemplating suicide, it wouldn't be good to shoot them in the head. Or if a child wants cake rather than a nutritious dinner, a parent shouldn't go along with that desire.

Bottom line: morality is complicated. Yet it also is simple, according to de Waal.  

Almost everybody (psychopaths excepted) has a natural urge to get along with our fellow humans and fit into whatever social group we find ourselves a part of. We share this urge with our fellow mammals, especially primates. 

Here's an excerpt from de Waal's book:

The view of morality as a set of immutable principles, or laws, that are ours to discover ultimately comes from religion. It doesn't really matter whether it is  God, human reason,  or science that formulates these laws. All of these approaches share a top-down orientation, their chief premise being that humans don't know how to behave and that someone must tell them.

But what if morality is created in day-to-day social interaction, not at some abstract mental level? What if it is grounded in the emotions, which most of the time escape the neat categorizations that science is fond of?

Since the whole point of my book  is to argue a bottom-up approach, I will obviously return to this issue. My views are in line with the way we know the human mind works, with visceral reactions arriving before rationalizations, and also with the way evolution produces behavior.

A good place to start is with an acknowledgement of our background as social animals, and how this background predisposes us to treat each other.

A bonobo talks to an atheist about morality and religion

OK, the title of this post isn't literally correct. Bonobos can't talk, at least not in a human language.

But Frans de Waal is an expert on bonobos and other primates, who are our closest evolutionary relatives. At the end of his book, "The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism among the Primates, " de Waal imagines what a bonobo would tell an atheist. 

This amounts to a good summary of the entire book, which I finished reading recently.

Frans de Waal doesn't believe in God. He does, however, recognize that while religions are a human invention, they are a natural outgrowth of human capacities  -- such as imagination and a strong social inclination.

As you can read below, de Waal understands from his primate research, plus his knowledge of other animals, that what we'd call "morality" is very much in evidence among non-human animals. (We are animals also, of course, mammalian variety.)

In the first 222 pages of his book, de Waal provides a lot of evidence about this. Then, in his final "Bottom-Up Morality" chapter, he draws conclusions from that evidence --  which is encapsulated in his bonobo-talking-to-an-atheist final section.

Enjoy.

What would a bonobo tell an atheist? 

...The bonobo would first of all urge the atheist to stop "sleeping furiously." There is no point in getting all worked up about the absence of something, especially something as open to interpretation as God. True, if being a self-declared atheist carries a stigma, as it unfortunately does in this nation, frustration is understandable.

...I am all for a reduced role of religion, with less emphasis on the almighty God and more on human potentials. This is nothing new, of course. It is the humanist agenda. Nowadays, humanism is often viewed as antireligious, but this is certainly not how it started.

...I should be careful here, though, because calling any values "religious" is problematic. It rather seems that universal human values have been appropriated by various religions, each supporting them with their own narratives and making them their own.

...Tolerance of religion, even if religion is not always tolerant in return, allows humanism to focus on what is most important, which is to build a better society based on natural human abilities. The outcome is the ongoing experiment in the West of an increasingly secular society.

Like that of tectonic plates, the shifting is extremely gradual.

Humanity cannot and will not change on a dime,  and it's also not as if religion is an alien influence. It is very much our creation, part of who we are, fully intertwined with our respective cultures. We had better get along with it and learn from it, even if our goal is ultimately to set out on a new course.

The bonobo would urge the atheist to take a similar long-term perspective. 

The good news is that the main ingredients of a moral society don't require religion, since they come from within. Despite its emphasis on reason, humanism considers our species a creature as much of passion as of intellect. This is where the bonobo has no trouble connecting. We have the emotions of a social animal, and not just any animal, but a mammal.

...We are driven by inborn values and emotions, which guide rather than dictate behavior. They nudge us in a given direction, but leave plenty of leeway.

As a result, we have the capacity to care for those unable to return the favor, adopt unrelated young, cooperate with strangers, and empathize with members of a different species. 

And we're not the only ones; the latest example was the assistance humpback whales gave to a mother gray whale defending her calf against a killer whale assault. Mammals are affected by the distress of others, leading to levels of altruism far in excess of what gene-centric theories predict.

This is why the bonobo disagrees with anyone who pits evolution against morality, such as the well-known American neurosurgeon Benjamin Carson, who has claimed, "Ultimately , if you accept the evolutionary theory, you dismiss ethics, you don't have to abide by a set of moral codes, you determine your own conscience based on your own desires."

The problem with such statements is that if humans everywhere develop a sense of right and wrong, one of our deepest desires must be to live in a moral world. Carson assumes that morality goes against our nature, and that our desires are all bad, whereas the whole point of this book is to argue the opposite.

Thank God, if I may, we share with other primates a background as group animals, which makes us value social connections. Absent this background, religion could be preaching about virtue and vice until it became blue in the face, we'd never get its point.

We are receptive only because of our evolved grasp of the value of relationships, the benefits of cooperation, the need for trust and honesty, and so on. Even our sense of fairness derives from this background,

Here the bonobo would side with the atheist and argue that whatever the role of religion in morality, it's a Johnny-come-lately role. Morality arose first, and modern religion latched onto it. Instead of giving us the moral law, the large religions were invented to bolster it.

We are only just beginning to explore how religion does so by binding people together and enforcing good behavior. It is far from  my intention to minimize this role, which was vital in the past and may remain so in the foreseeable future, but the wellspring of morality it is not.

Finally, the bonobo laughs at the intellectual torture of trying to separate "is" from "ought," which vexes any debate about moral evolution. It is widely accepted within philosophy that we cannot move from the way humans or animals are to moral ideals. 

The first is descriptive, they say, the second prescriptive. This is a serious consideration that is not easily resolved,  but a good start would be to get our premises straight.

If the thought is that animals are mere "wantons," lacking control over the impulses that nature has given them, we are on the wrong track. Like us, animals favor certain outcomes, and react with fear or violence to any deviation. Who says the bonobo can do whatever he wants?

Even with regard to sex, where he faces fewer constraints than we do, he still needs a willing partner as well as the absence of dominant males. He faces many expectations about his conduct, which others won't hesitate to remind him of as soon as he scares an infant or tries to steal a female's food.

Even if he lacks notions of right and wrong that transcend his personal situation,  his values are not altogether different from those underlying human morality. He, too, strives to fit in, obeys social rules, empathizes with others, amends broken relationships, and objects to unfair arrangements. 

We may not wish to call it morality, but his behavior isn't free of prescriptions either.

With this observation, the bonobo concludes his advice to the atheist, whom he sees as a protester rather than an advocate. The big challenge is to move forward, beyond religion, and especially beyond top-down morality. Our best-known "moral laws" offer nice post hoc summaries of what we consider moral, but are limited in scope and full of holes.

Morality has much more humble beginnings, which are recognizable in the behavior of other animals. Everything science has learned in the last few decades argues against the pessimistic view that morality is a thin veneer over a nasty human nature. 

On the contrary, our evolutionary background lends a massive helping hand without which we would never have gotten this far.

Meaning comes from us, not God

Many religious people wrongly believe that atheists, secular humanists, and others who don't believe in a personal God (most Buddhists and Taoists fit this category) lack meaning in their lives. Actually, we do.

Most of my friends and relatives are atheists. They live deeply meaningful lives. 

In his book, "Finding Purpose in a Godless World," psychiatrist Ralph Lewis explains how an unguided universe contains people who lives caring, loving, purpose-driven lives. Below is a summary of key themes in his book from the final chapter.

I've written a couple of other blog posts about Lewis' book:
"Why God is an illusion, along with other supernatural stuff"
"Why God is a psychological illusion"

Here's the excerpt from Finding Purpose in a Godless World. I want to point out that while Lewis calls our world "random," "unguided" is a better term for the world. Obviously laws of nature aren't random, or they wouldn't be laws. They just don't proceed from the guidance of a God.

A random world -- which according to all the scientific evidence and despite our intuitions is the actual world we live in -- is too often misconstrued as nihilistic, demotivating, or devoid of morality and meaning. My hope is that this book will help people to see the scientific worldview of an unguided, spontaneous universe as awe-inspiring and foundational to building a more compassionate society.

Nonbelievers and doubters of religion, as well as those who remain believers, can be reassured that the increasing trend toward loss of religious faith that is occurring in modern societies is not leading to a generalized loss of morality or to an alienated feeling of purposelessness and meaninglessness.

Far from being nihilistic, the fully naturalist worldview of secular humanism empowers us and liberates us from our irrational fears. With its emphasis on humans having to rely on ourselves and each other, it motivates us to live with a sense of interdependent humanistic purpose. This deepens our feelings of value, engagement, and relatedness.

The secular humanist worldview reminds us that while the universe doesn't care, people do.

We have seen in this book that biological, evolutionary factors can explain how it is that we are inclined toward generally prosocial, cooperative, and motivated behavior. Biological evolution enabled morality and purposive, meaning-oriented human behavior; cultural evolution refined it. We will need to continue to work actively toward this collective goal of more caring societies in order to further strengthen the progress of our species.

If, like me, you started out on this journey with a vague sense that our lives and the universe are somehow directed, then I hope you have experienced this book as a gentle invitation to move beyond the naive, soothing stories we have been telling ourselves about a purposeful universe. I truth you have encountered in its place a solidly science-based, yet deeply humanistic worldview, freed by rationality from neurotic torment.

In countering fears of societal nihilism, this book has walked a fine line, just as I try to do every day with my patients -- a line between cautious optimism and realism.

Societal progress in our increasingly secular modern era has been uneven and faltering; catastrophic derailments have occurred along the way and will always be a risk. But the long-term positive trend toward more compassionate, purpose-driven societies has been strong and unmistakable. Developing more caring societies is a realistic, far from naive project for humanity.

Those who have embraced science, not only as a profession but also as a worldview, tend to be among the most inspired and purpose-driven members of society. It is my hope that the worldview presented in this book might motivate you, valued reader, to become just such a person.

Everything can be reduced to the survival instinct

One of the benefits of having this blog is getting intelligent, provocative, thoughtful emails about some churchless topic. Often I'll enjoy the message so much, I'll ask if I can share it in a blog post.

Such is the case with what you'll read below. The premise of this mini-essay is that survival is the central concern of us human beings. 

I think the author gets this pretty much right.

For sure, almost all religious belief includes a focus on survival after death. Having and raising children provides some immortality of sorts. Altruism, as noted in the essay, contributes to group survival. Every act of creation -- writing, music, art, and such -- can be viewed as making a bit of what is inside us live on outside of us.

Acknowledging that survival is a primal human imperative doesn't take away from the value of the acts that proceed from this drive.

Rather, it leads us to recognize a simple truth: as much as we'd like to think that we're distinct from other kinds of creatures, we really aren't.

Yes, at the moment Homo sapiens is the dominant species on our planet. However, our instincts are similar to those of other animals, albeit more sophisticated due to our capacity for language and abstract thought.

Read on...

I've enjoyed reading your posts on the sociobiological underpinning of religious belief, spurred by your reading of Finding Purpose in a Godless World. That book has been on my wish list and I've finally decided to pick it up.

I've long been fascinated with the etiology of supernatural beliefs and, as mentioned in our prior conversation, I find the argument that religion is an evolutionary phenomenon (i.e., survival strategy) quite persuasive.

I've been recently reading about HADD (Hyper Agency Detection Device), a subset of the Theory of Mind, in which an evolutionary advantage is gained by imputing agency to inanimate forces and events.

At least this was the case when we were roaming the savannahs.

This belief today—of linking Being and the existence of the universe to an intelligence—confers a different advantage, if the term can be used. It bestows hope to the believer in what is otherwise a futile existence.

At the risk of being criticized for a broad oversimplification, I genuinely think that everything can be reduced to the survival instinct. All value ultimately derives from survival value. Even the noble human traits such as love, compassion, and altruism have their origin in the survival imperative. 

Why do human beings nearly universally admire selfless individuals and resent self-absorbed individuals?

This is an interesting question to pose to people, as I think this response is simply taken for granted without much inquiry into the source of this sentiment. People know they have an inherent dislike of selfish people, but getting them to articulate exactly why is another matter entirely.

 I would contend that we inherently dislike selfish, arrogant, and greedy people because they detract from group survival. Thus, what is "right" and "wrong" could be alternatively framed as what is conducive to group survival and what is deleterious to group survival, respectively. 

In terms of self-sacrificial altruism, why does group survival prevail over self-preservation in some people?

This behavior is not easily answered, but we see it in other species as well. Selflessness and even the giving of one's life to save another are not examples of divine supernatural virtue, but rather represent the survival impetus in an augmented form.

Love itself—the loftiest of all human tendencies— is ultimately a survival strategy, and a very successful one at that (both individually and collectively). The singular root of all behavior, from the most vile to the most "saintly" is this most fundamental drive. 

Returning to the hope that the religious believer is imbued with: what is the perennial hope found in religious belief?

Is it not, once again, representative of that fundamental drive—survival. Religion promises some form of survival for the individual, the tribe, humanity, or all of life itself. Divorced from the promise of survival, religion would entirely lose its power.

So it seems that the bulk of human behavior derives from, revolves around, and is aimed at survival, either in the short term, long term, or in an "everlasting" sense. Our programming is, in the final analysis, very simple indeed. 

Thanks again, Brian. I hope you are doing well.

Why do gods and spirits matter?

The title of this blog post asks a question that's a chapter title in Pascal Boyer's challenging, but intensely interesting, book, "Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought."

Boyer is an anthropologist who is also well-versed in psychology. His book isn't an easy read, but I'm enjoying making my way through it, occasionally by skipping a chapter and moving ahead to a chapter that grabs my attention more.

Not surprisingly, I'm carefully reading the "Why do gods and spirits matter?" chapter, since this is such an important question. Below is how the chapter starts off. I decided to share these passages verbatim because there's no way I could encapsulate Boyer's central point (which I've boldfaced) better than he does himself.

This is a way of looking at religious belief that's quite different from how most people look upon religiosity -- which is why Boyer starts off the chapter the way he does. 

Enjoy...

"Why do you let some religious doctrine determine what you may or may not do?" This is a common question addressed to religious people, generally by skeptics or outsiders. 

Why indeed should the existence of some supernatural agents -- the ancestors or some invisible spirits or a whole pantheon of gods or just a single one -- have consequences for what people are allowed to do? When we ask such questions we take for granted a particular scenario about the connections between belief and morality.

We assume that religion provides a certain description of supernatural agents and their moral demands ("There are five gods! They hate adultery and will smite the transgressors.") We then imagine that people are convinced, for some reason or other, that the doctrine is actually true.

It follows that they take the moral imperatives to heart, given the powers of the gods or ancestors to enforce morality. So there seems to be a simple story here: however fit for treason, stratagems and spoils, human beings happen to believe in the existence of the gods, the gods demand a particular behavior, so people abide by the rules.

Now consider another common statement: "So-and-so became more religious after his accident" (or: "after his partner had a brush with death," "after his parents died," etc.). 

The way this is formulated may be typical of modern Western conditions (in many places everybody just takes it as obvious that there are ancestors or spirits around, so it makes little sense to talk about anyone being more or less "religious") but the connection between misfortune and religion is salient the world over.

This is one of the principal contexts in which people activate concepts of gods and spirits. Again, we find this natural because we commonly accept a particular scenario about religious doctrines and salient events: that gods and spirits are seen as endowed with great power, including that of bringing about or averting disasters.

People struck by misfortune strive for an explanation and for some reassurance, and this is what religious concepts would seem to provide. A simple story again: accidents happen, people want to know why, if they have gods and spirits they can say why.

But both stories are probably false.

The facts themselves are not disputed. People do connect notions of gods to what they may or may not do, they indeed connect misfortune to the existence of supernatural agents. It is the way these connections are established in the mind that anthropology would see in a very different perspective.

Religion does not really support morality, it is people's moral intuitions that make religion plausible; religion does not explain misfortune, it is the way people explain misfortune that makes religion easier to acquire.

To get to that point we need to explore in much more detail the way social inference systems in the mind handle notions of morality and situations of misfortune. That we have evolved capacities for social interaction means that we tend to represent morality and misfortune in a very special way, which makes the connection with supernatural agents extremely easy and apparently obvious.

When I finish the chapter I'll write another blog post about the social inference systems Boyer is referring to. From what I've read already, I have a fairly good idea of the sorts of mental capacities that make religious beliefs easy to latch onto.

For example, we humans are highly social animals. We're always wondering what other people are saying about us, how much they know about us, and such. So it is an easy leap to imagine that a supernatural being is doing the same, as in the familiar Santa Claus song:

You better watch out
You better not cry
You better not pout
I'm telling you why
Santa Claus is coming to town
Santa Claus is coming to town
Santa Claus is coming to town

He's making a list,
Checking it twice;
Gonna find out who's naughty or nice.
Santa Claus is coming to town
Santa Claus is coming to town
Santa Claus is coming to town

He sees you when you're sleeping
He knows when you're awake
He knows if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake

Sam Harris sums up morality in eight tweets

Sam Harris did a nice job of encapsulating what morality is all about, from a broad perspective, in these eight Twitter tweets:

Getting from “Is” to “Ought”
1/ Let’s assume that there are no ought’s or should’s in this universe. There is only what *is*—the totality of actual (and possible) facts.

2/ Among the myriad things that exist are conscious minds, susceptible to a vast range of actual (and possible) experiences.

3/ Unfortunately, many experiences suck. And they don’t just suck as a matter of cultural convention or personal bias—they really and truly suck. (If you doubt this, place your hand on a hot stove and report back.)

4/ Conscious minds are natural phenomena. Consequently, if we were to learn everything there is to know about physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, economics, etc., we would know everything there is to know about making our corner of the universe suck less.

 

5/ If we *should* to do anything in this life, we should avoid what really and truly sucks. (If you consider this question-begging, consult your stove, as above.)

 

6/ Of course, we can be confused or mistaken about experience. Something can suck for a while, only to reveal new experiences which don’t suck at all. On these occasions we say, “At first that sucked, but it was worth it!”

 

7/ We can also be selfish and shortsighted. Many solutions to our problems are zero-sum (my gain will be your loss). But *better* solutions aren’t. (By what measure of “better”? Fewer things suck.)

 

8/ So what is morality? What *ought* sentient beings like ourselves do? Understand how the world works (facts), so that we can avoid what sucks (values).

 

 

Morality has nothing to do with religion

Here's another atheist-themed letter to the editor that my wife, Laurel, has been sending in monthly to our local newspaper, the Salem Statesman Journal. 

She makes some great points. Laurel's letters usually generate quite a few comments. This one has 18 so far.

Such as: "Thank you Laurel. Pompous, so-called 'Christians' make judgements that are not backed by facts. Their faith does not equal truth. Life is not black and white. We are a diverse world, so get over yourselves."

Absolutely! Read on for the letter.

Not all moral advances in society come from the religious

In a letter by Dale Kirby, he claimed society would have less terror, corruption, hate and adultery if everyone was guided by biblical principals.

He seems to assume that all non-believers live in hate and commit the most atrocious acts.

What about the Crusades, the World Trade Center attack (9/11) , the burning of witches, the torture and killing of gays which still occurs in some countries, all due to religious beliefs?

The Bible says Jesus did not disavow the First Testament, so never rejected all the horrible inter-cultural extermination, barbaric killing of children of other tribes, slavery, and subjugation of women God encouraged.

Even the New Testament condones slavery. To truly live by “biblical principles” we would still have slavery, treat women as disposable property, and be barbaric toward those who we consider “infidels”(just like ISIS).

Although many religious people are good, moral people, they would likely be good people anyway, just like the good atheists.

We learn to be good from our families and other influences. Thank goodness for the moral advances that the rational non-believers have brought to our society: ending slavery, women’s rights, gay rights, etcetera.

Laurel Hines
Salem

Rejoice in the glorious indifference of the universe

I'm no Carl Sagan, but after coming up with the thought expressed in the title of this blog post I did some Googling to find an image to share which expressed that sentiment.

So Carl Sagan and I are on the same indifferent wavelength, the difference regarding our realization of indifference perhaps being that I find this worthy of rejoicing in the gloriousness of it.

Which is a decidedly minority opinion, because most people fall into these Belief Camps, which are not mutually exclusive:

(1) Believing in a God who loves us, cares for us, watches out for us. Usually only if we follow the tenets of some religion, though.
(2) Believing in a Devil or negative force that leads us astray, punishes us, wishes bad things for us.
(3) Believing that the Universe often, or always, has a message for us.
(4) Believing that karma, fate, destiny, or some other cosmic power directs our actions in certain ways.
(5) Believing in psychic connections between us and other people, animals, angelic beings, nature, or whatever.

I understand the appeal of these sorts of beliefs, because I used to embrace most of them myself. It made me feel warm and protected to believe that I wasn't an isolated blip of consciousness in a universe that not only didn't care about me, it wasn't even aware of me -- aside from the relatively few other isolated blips of consciousness I came into contact with (friends, dog, wife, squirrels, etc.).

Now, though, I realize the downside of believing in a universe that has an interest in me, whether this be benign or hostile, as Sagan put it. 

For one thing, and this really is the most important thing, that belief is almost certainly false. There is no demonstrable evidence that the universe or cosmos as a whole possesses a consciousness that could care about me, nor that it actually does. I've come to the point that I'd rather embrace reality as it is, rather than as how I would like it to be. 

Such strikes me as the most courageous and honest way to live what almost certainly is my one and only life.

Also, I now see how much misguided energy and effort I used to put into trying to figure out what I was supposed to do and why this or that was happening to me. Actions and events in my life weren't just whatever they were. They also had some mysterious subtext to them, some cosmic meaning that I was sure was there, but never could quite figure out.

How does one please God? How does one please the universe? It's tough enough just to please myself, my loved ones, my friends, all the other obviously existent entities I come in contact with. Trying to please a nonexistent, but supposedly real, conscious entity like "God" or "Universe" was wearing. I didn't realize how exhausting it was at the time, but now I do.

Lastly, accepting that the universe is indifferent toward me is a pointer toward the marvelous realization that whatever meaning I find in my life is going to come from moi, not anybody or anything else. There's no need to worry about whether I'm living up to some cosmic, divine, or universal standard. The measuring stick against which I assess the meaningfulness of my life is within my own psyche, not anywhere outside.

So yes, let's rejoice in the glorious indifference of the universe.  

Without magical thinking, the American flag is just a piece of cloth

Recently KGW, a Portland (Oregon) television station, had a story about a military veteran who was intensely distraught when some people protesting Trump's inauguration burned the American flag. 

Eric Post, who served in the Marines, made an emotional Facebook video that's been viewed over 2.5 million times. His basic argument is that anyone who burns the flag doesn't believe in American ideals, doesn't respect the sacrifices of soldiers, and is a coward. 

Of course, flag burners look upon themselves differently. They consider themselves patriots. They view flag-burning as free speech protected by the Constitution, which the Supreme Court has ruled it is.

There's no objective right or wrong here.

Meaning resides in the human mind, not objects. There is nothing in the cloth of a flag that is any different from the cloth in a t-shirt. In fact, people often wear clothing that has images of the American flag. So why would someone get so emotional about seeing some cloth go up in flames?

This is a difficult question.

Even Eric Post doesn't have an answer to it, because none of us is privy to the complicated workings of the human mind. We can sense our feelings, and be aware of our thoughts, but the source of these mental emanations is only dimly known, even by neuroscientists. 

I just read a fascinating book by Matthew Hutson, "The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking." 

One of the laws is Objects Carry Essences. This seems to be operating in the minds of both people who are bothered by flag-burning and flag-burners themselves. Hutson says:

We all have objects we fetishize or at least take a fancy to for personal reasons. Think of a child's blanky. A wedding ring. An autographed album. What's more human than sentimentality? And yet, sentimentality for particular objects is just as illogical as belief in ghosts.

Nevertheless, you wouldn't be happy with replicas of sacred items, even if the replica was identical in every way. Somehow two things can be physically identical, and yet the original has something else, a nonphysical presence, a special significance beyond the realm of physics or chemistry.

How is it that an object, such as [John] Lennon's Steinway, can carry meaning around with it, independent of its material composition? To attribute personal value -- a subjective property -- to a lump of atoms: that's magical thinking.

Yes, Eric Post seems to consider that burning a piece of cloth, an American flag, somehow is an attack on America itself, or at least on the sacrifices of those who died in the service of their country. Yet he has no way of knowing what was in the minds of those who burned the flag, who, again, probably considered that they also were acting patriotically.

Thus it seems entirely likely, if not probable, that someone angered by the sight of an American flag being burned is under the spell of magical thinking which views the flag as possessing some sort of precious immaterial essence.

Which, of course, it doesn't. "Justice," "patriotism," "respect" and other  concepts are subjective mental abstractions. They reside in the activity of human brain cells, not in any physical object.

Another magical thinking law is Symbols Have Power. In the chapter describing this law, Hutson speaks directly about flag-burning.

Symbolism falls into the second law of sympathetic magic outlined by Sir James Frazer, the law of similarity: like produces like, or an effect resembles its cause..,. we treat "ideal connexions" as real ones: if two things are linked associatively in our heads, we suspect a physical, causal link.

Expecting physical reality to work along the same lines of influence as mental associations is magical thinking.

...Similarly a sports jersey could not be confused with an actual person. And our national flag depicts what it represents with even less visual verisimilitude, but people still feel those stars and stripes demand legal protection from immolation. After all, Old Glory stands for the deaths of young men at war, the struggles for civil rights, the one giant leap for U!S!A!

Flag burning certainly sends a message of disrespect, but if the research on belief in the law of similarity has any bearing, the act does something more than communicate a message: it creates the sense that America is being harmed directly.

In a suggestive study of Americans and Brazilians, 34 percent of young adults said cutting up one's national flag to use as rags for cleaning a bathroom in private called for punishment, and 35 percent said the act was wrong no matter one's country's customs. 

That is, it's hurtful even if there's no audience to offend. Might we see flag-burning, deep down, as a form of voodoo?

Sure.

Magical thinking is deeply ingrained in our psyches. It is almost impossible to root it out entirely. The best we can do is understand our tendency to see the world wrongly: as possessing qualities out there that really exist only in here, in the human mind.

Burning the American flag isn't objectively right or wrong, good or bad. This act is meaningful only to the extent that we give it meaning. 

Without magical thinking, the American flag is just a bit of colored cloth. It isn't alive. It doesn't suffer. It doesn't have feelings. But people possess these qualities, and that's why flag-burning produces such intense emotions.

Religious superstition is a great threat to the world

Today our local newspaper, the Salem Statesman Journal, published my wife's "Good Without God" letter to the editor. Naturally I feel that Laurel makes a lot of sense, fellow scientifically-minded atheist that she is. 

After her letter, I'll share the earlier letter from Dale Kirby that stimulated Laurel's response. Another person, Larry Nelson, also took issue with Kirby. I've shared his letter as well. 

I can't resist adding comments on my own, in red.  First, here's my wife's letter.

Dale Kirby’s Nov. 30 letter claimed there is a “war” against religious freedom in our country.

Naturally, there isn't. Unless you believe everything Fox News says. (A big mistake.)

The facts are, that until the 1950s, there was no God in the Pledge of Allegiance. “In God We Trust” was not on paper money until 1957. E pluribus unum (“Out of many, one”) was the original U.S. motto from the Great Seal of the United States.

Ah, the good old days before right-wing religious wackos started becoming more politically active.

It is the more scientifically-minded, non-religious people in the U.S. who are discriminated against. The religious people force their superstitious beliefs (which have no real basis in reality) on us. The percent of population with no religion is growing, yet Pence and Trump, etc., are trying to change laws that uphold the constitutional separation of church and state.

Amen to that. 

Religious politicians seem to be at war with science. Religious believers long ago fought scientific findings that the earth was round and revolved around the sun (versus flat with the sun and heaven above it). Now the science of human-caused climate change is being rejected.

"Seem" is being too generous. Republican politicians are definitely pushing their religious zealotry on the rest of us. They reject truth and embrace falsehoods. Reality is too valuable a thing to waste to allow this to happen.

The earth is at risk.

For sure. Human-caused global warming is real. 

It will not be God ending the world, but people with superstitious beliefs, rejecting science until it is too late.

Yes. Religious superstitions are a huge threat to humanity. Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, even Buddhism. When people forsake "what is" for "what we imagine to be," bad stuff follows. Reality kicks our butt when its truths aren't respected.

Laurel Hines
Salem

Here's the letter that got my wife's atheist indignation aroused. Along with my comments.

America’s military is fighting against terrorism. Another war is being waged by dark forces against our nation’s religious freedom.

Huh? I haven't seen any signs of that war. 

The freedoms of speech, religion and assembly are all bound together. Destroying any one of these inhibits the others and threatens three of the most needed and valued constitutional guarantees.

Well, again I assert there's no indication that religious believers are being stopped from saying whatever they want, worshipping however they want, or assembling however they want. 

Destruction of religious freedom would destroy the God-given right to pursue a life of liberty and happiness, since religion is the source of happiness for millions of America’s most upright citizens.

Um, I'd substitute uptight for upright, Dale. Also, heroin in all its various forms (such as Oxycontin) also is a source of happiness for millions of people. Just because something makes people happy doesn't make it safe or desirable.

Those who seek to limit freedom of religion expect people of faith to accept their godless way of life. We see today in the U.S.A. the results of godlessness in lawlessness, abortions and adultery. Do we really want an irreligious nation?

YES! I'm pretty sure the most religious states have the highest crime rates. Same with nations: godless countries like Japan and the Scandinavian nations are both happy and lawabiding.

The destruction of religious freedom takes away the correct care of the poor, the orphans and the homeless. It would extract the badly-needed thousands of hours of service given by the helping hands of those of faith in times of disasters and calamities.

Non-believers are equally committed to volunteerism and charity. Get real.

I believe everyone should have the privilege to worship a deity of his or her choice. It is a God-given right to worship who or where we may. The lives of honorable religious citizens are the backbone of our nation.

I agree with your first two sentences, Dale, but not the last one. Religious people aren't any more moral, upstanding, and generous than atheists. If anything, they're less so, because religiosity and judgementalism go hand in hand.

Dale Z. Kirby
Salem

Lastly, here's the other response to Kirby.

In his Nov. 30 letter, Dale Kirby writes that “war is being waged by dark forces against our nation’s religious freedom.”

I wish I knew what he means, since, as it appears to me, no nation on earth exceeds the U.S. in the vibrancy of its religious communities and the scope of its guarantees of religious freedom.

Excellent point.

Mr. Kirby is free to worship as he likes, whenever and wherever he likes, as long as his practices don’t break the law or infringe on the civil liberties of others.

Exactly.

In the 1860s, many religious people used the Bible to defend the practice of slavery. Is this the type of religious “freedom” Mr. Kirby longs for? The type that would allow any practice he believes his Bible supports, regardless of the rights and beliefs of others?

Probably. Lots of religious people want to be able to discriminate against the LBGTQ community, take away a woman's right to choose to have an abortion, and even restrict access to birth control. Basically, the Dark Ages are the Good Old Days for many of today's Christians. Bring back the Inquisition!

What about people like me? I’m a law abiding, conscientious citizen who happens not to believe in Mr. Kirby’s religion. Should I have fewer rights than a religious person?

No. The law should be blind to religion. Which means, no religious "conscience" exemptions. It's ridiculous when a religious believer gets away with breaking the law or not adhering to a regulation because he or she believes in a superstition.

Those of us who disagree with Mr. Kirby are not “dark forces.” As a nation, we are all better off when people are free to believe as individuals as their consciences dictate, as long as we show respect for the rights of people of other religions or no religion.

Well said, Larry.

Larry R. Nelson
Salem

Our modern secular world is safer and more moral

After reading Steven Pinker's book, "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined," my thoroughly atheist wife recently was moved to write a letter to the editor of our local newspaper, the Salem Statesman Journal.

The claim that the 20th century was the most violent is not true.

Most other scientific information shows that although the two world wars killed large numbers of humans, in terms of numbers of humans killed versus world populations at the time, this was actually mild compared with killings by Genghis Khan and others eons ago.

Historic facts now known demonstrate that the more secular and educated societies have become, the less violent they become. Humans today are statistically far less likely to die from violence than in any other time in history. In fact, we are becoming more moral in general as time goes on (speaking statistically).

Religion is not at all necessary for a moral society. Studies on very young babies have proved that we are born with a sense of morality that emerges very early before almost any learning. This can be later distorted by life experiences, brain injury, social influences, etc.

We evolved to be moral because we are social animals. We are inherently “good without God.” In fact, religion can be divisive and judgmental and has spurred much violence and cruelty.

Our forefathers were wise in creating a secular democracy.

Laurel Hines
Salem

Here's some quotes from "The Better Angels of Our Nature" that back up Laurel's points. The less religion there is in the world, the safer and more moral it is.

“Challenge a person's beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the belief that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because all sane people can see it with their own eyes. Not so for the belief that babies are born with original sin or that God exists in three persons or that Ali is the second-most divinely inspired man after Muhammad.

When people organize their lives around these beliefs, and then learn of other people who seem to be doing just fine without them--or worse, who credibly rebut them--they are in danger of looking like fools. Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful.”
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“Why should the spread of ideas and people result in reforms that lower violence? There are several pathways. The most obvious is a debunking of ignorance and superstition.

A connected and educated populace, at least in aggregate and over the long run, is bound to be disabused of poisonous beliefs, such as that members of other races and ethnicities are innately avaricious or perfidious; that economic and military misfortunes are caused by the treachery of ethnic minorities; that women don't mind to be raped; that children must be beaten to be socialized; that people choose to be homosexual as part of a morally degenerate lifestyle; that animals are incapable of feeling pain.

The recent debunking of beliefs that invite or tolerate violence call to mind Voltaire's quip that those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
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“The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history.”

Below is a video of Pinker discussing the theme of his book several years before it was published. Have a look, even if you only watch five or ten minutes of the 21-minute TED Talk.

Pinker persuasively argues that the Age of Reason -- 16th century onward -- has led to declines in violence. Yes, this goes against many peoples' intuitions, given the horrors of two world wars in the last century. 

But religions also are intuitively appealing. Which goes to show, our intuitions often are wrong.

 

An atheist Supreme Court justice would be great for the U.S.

Being a member of an oppressed minority -- atheists -- I'm totally on board with physicist Lawrence Krauss' call to put one of us on the Supreme Court, now that Antonin Scalia's death has created a vacancy. 

Three per cent of Americans say that they are atheists—which means that there are more atheists than Jews in the United States. An additional four per cent declare themselves agnostic; as George Smith noted in his classic book “Atheism: The Case Against God,” agnostics are, for practical purposes, atheists, since they cannot declare that they believe in a divine creator. Even so, not a single candidate for major political office or Supreme Court Justice has “come out” declaring his or her non-belief.

From a judicial perspective, an atheist Justice would be an asset. In controversial cases about same-sex marriage, say, or access to abortion or birth control, he or she would be less likely to get mired in religion-based moral quandaries.

...the appointment of an atheist Justice would send a meaningful message: it would affirm that legal arguments are secular, and that they are based on a secular document, the Constitution, which was written during the founding of a secular democracy.

Absolutely. 

Our country's founders intended the United States to be an Empire of Reason, not of Faith. I wrote about this in "Naturalism needs to rule public policy debates."

What is the common ground on which we all can stand during our debates and discussions about what is best for us?

What evidence and facts can be brought into attempts to reason our way to some sort of consensus on complex controversial issues?

The answer to both questions is Nature and Nature’s Laws. Everybody lives in the same natural world. We all breathe the same air, drink the same water, walk on the same Earth, gaze into the same sky.

Yes, humans also hold a wide variety of ideas about what, if anything, might lie beyond the physicality of this universe.

But those hypothesized supernatural conceptions divide us, while the actuality of science, and the understanding that flows from reasoned consideration of what is known to be real — that unites us.

Such was the unparalleled vision of our nation’s founders.

An additional rationale for adding an atheist to the Supreme Court is that the percentage of non-believers in God's existence almost certainly is much higher than the 7% cited by Krauss. 

I say this because we need to distinguish between (1) people who merely say they believe in God, and (2) people who actually act like they believe in God.

After all, if we want to figure out how many people truly believe in the efficacy of seat belts, we wouldn't simply ask them; we'd rely on studies that measure actual seat belt use.

(But even many ministers openly say they aren't sure about God's existence, making them atheists or agnostics. Up to 16% of Anglican clergy admit to this.)

In his book, "Fighting God: An Atheist Manifesto for a Religious World," David Silverman speaks about the hypocrisy of people who profess a belief in God, but don't act in accord with their supposed beliefs. This makes them atheists for all practical purposes.

Silverman notes several examples of political figures who engage in "lying, coveting, and adultery -- all commandments being broken over and over," then writes:

It may be distasteful, but we must admit it -- these pandering hypocrites in Congress (and in churches) who talk as if they believe in a god but act as if they don't'are probably atheists, lying about their beliefs for their personal benefit. 

In this world, there are good theists and bad theists, and there are good atheists and bad atheists, but some of the worst atheists, the ones who feign peity for personal gain, are running religion and politics.

Also, the United States Supreme Court. A Mother Jones piece about what Antonin Scalia said about homosexuality starts off with this.

Justice Antonin Scalia has written that "it is our moral heritage that one should not hate any human being or class of human beings." Judging by the things he has said in court or written in his legal opinions about gays and lesbians, he doesn't really mean it.

So likely Scalia was a closeted atheist, maybe even to himself. (People can lie to themselves just as persuasively as they lie to others.) 

Might as well replace him with an atheist committed to secular fairness and reason, then. That person would have a higher standard of morality than Scalia, guaranteed. 

Tantra vs. Buddhist ethics (Tantra is a lot more fun!)

I don't know much about Tantra. I've had the impression that Tantra was all about wild spiritual sex -- which might have some truth to it, but possibly just a little.

David Chapman, though, knows a lot about Tantra. The real Tantra. Also, Chapman is an expert on Buddhism. So he's just the guy to write a post called "Buddhist ethics": a Tantric critique.

The post, like all of Chapman's writings (I'm a fan), is clear and nicely composed. Still, it will strike people not into this subject as rather Buddhist-geeky. 

Which isn't a criticism. Just an observation. 

I read some parts of his piece carefully, and other parts less carefully. The whole essay, though, merits reading. Though focused on Tantric and Buddhist ethics, Chapman addresses issues that are relevant to anyone seeking to live a happy, meaningful, ethical life.

Which is just about everyone, right?

Here's some passages that I particularly liked, which will give you a flavor of David Chapman's piece.

A highlight of my time as a Wiccan Neopagan was the culminating ritual of a week-long retreat. The ceremony evolved by stages into two hundred witches dancing naked around a bonfire for hours after midnight. It was a sublime, transformative experience.

It is unthinkable that anything similar might happen on a Consensus Buddhist retreat. But why? What Buddhist principle would it violate?

The ritual violated every principle of Sutrayana. But nobody practices that in America. What of Consensus Buddhism? That is not anti-nakedness, anti-dancing, anti-bonfires, or anti-staying-up-late. Or is it?

Such a ritual would be too much fun. You might have frighteningly strong emotions. You might lose control. That would be undignified and awkward. Someone might see you having too much fun, and would judge you for it, and you’d feel awful the next day.

These are not Buddhist criteria. They are Puritan criteria. They are American middle class public morality—which is mainly Puritanism, lightly revised to reflect improved contraceptive technology.

...Two puritan fears inhibit us. The first is that intense enjoyment must lead to harm. “That ritual sounds extremely problematic. Probably everyone drank way too much, and some had inappropriate sex they regretted in the morning. You should be mindful at all times, lest you harm yourself or others. That was the traditional meaning of the Fifth Precept.”

Tantra emphasizes personal responsibility, and basic sense and sanity. Tantra is not hedonism—the antonym of puritanism in current usage—but only because it recognizes actions have longer-term consequences. Seeking immediate pleasure without regard for consequences is simply stupid.

If you drink too much, expect and accept the result. Don’t blame the ritual’s leaders; no one forced you to do that. You should know your own limits and act accordingly. “We shouldn’t hold revels on Buddhist retreats because some people would do stupid things” gives stupid people veto power over the religious practice of responsible people. That’s morally wrong, in my opinion.

The second fear is social judgement. Puritanism encourages everyone to police everyone else’s enjoyment. I think that is also morally wrong.

If I can offer just one piece of ethical advice, from this whole series on “Buddhist ethics,” it is this:

Do not judge, censor, condemn, or ridicule anyone else (not even those bad people!) for enjoying things you consider “problematic,” “inappropriate,” or just don’t like yourself.

“Problematic” could be an expression of genuine moral concern. Too often, though, it’s just an expression of self-righteous judgmentalism. Those bad people enjoy the wrong things, and too much. “Inappropriate” may conceal simple envy.

Learn to accept other people enjoying things you dislike—or that your social group rejects. Then learn to enjoy their enjoyment of those things. This is entirely possible! You may then come to enjoy those things, too—if you have the courage to engage in pleasures your social group disparages.

You may find the only reason you thought you disliked them is that “people like you” aren’t “supposed to” like them. You may also find you truly don’t like them—and that’s also fine. You can still enjoy other people’s enjoyment of them. 

Traditional Buddhist morality is worse than modern secular morality

Buddhism often is embraced by people who reject other forms of religion. It's sort of like a spiritual security blanket for those who no longer feel comfortable taking shelter under theistic theologies like Christianity.

Something to hold on if it is just too scary to let go of religion entirely.

I've used Buddhism in this way, being attracted to its non-supernatural aspects while rejecting rebirth, karma extending over multiple lives, and such.

I don't see anything wrong with this.

But there's a decent argument to be made that when the unappealing side of Buddhism is discarded, what's left isn't really Buddhism -- sort of like when avant garde Christians say, "I respect Jesus as a wise teacher, yet not as the Son of God."

Is that Christianity, making Jesus into just another human being like you and me, rather than a sin-absolving divine being? Somewhat similarly, if we reject traditional Buddhist morality, can we really call what's left "Buddhism"?

David Chapman delves into this question in "Buddhist Morality is Medieval."

Since I don't know much about traditional Buddhist moral teachings, his essay made me realize how unappealing old-time Buddhism was (and is) compared to modern secular morality.

Traditional Buddhist morality developed in feudal theocratic cultures. Mostly, it is typical for such societies: similar to what you’d find in Medieval Europe or the nastier parts of the contemporary Islamic world. It is crude, arbitrary, patriarchal, and often cruel.

In Europe, Enlightenment rationalism enabled smart people to say “wait, that’s nasty and stupid.” Christian morality gradually became less barbarous, and evolved into secular ethics.

Buddhist modernizers replaced traditional morality with Victorian Christian morality in the late 1800s, and with leftish secular morality in the the 1980s. (The two pages after this one discuss that.) The result is that modern “Buddhist ethics” has no similarity to traditional Buddhist morality, much of which would horrify Western Buddhists.

You’d find, for most current hot-button Western moral conflicts, that traditional Buddhism has nothing to say, or comes down on the side of Western conservatives, or advocates positions so regressive that even no conservative would agree.

Sure sounds like it. Here's a few excerpts from Chapman's piece that deal with some particular topics in traditional Buddhism.

Sex. 
Buddhism is extraordinarily anti-sexual. Rejection of sex is the first and most important aspect of its central principle, renunciation. Buddhism recommends complete celibacy for lay people as well as monastics. Actual Buddhist practice is completely incompatible with any sexual activity, and even with the slightest twinge of desire.

Gender Equality
Peter Harvey’s Introduction to Buddhist Ethics devotes an entire chapter, 56 pages long, to “Sexual Equality.” This simply does not exist in Buddhism.

Harvey really, really wants it to exist, but in the end he doesn’t say it does, because it doesn’t. Most of the chapter shows instead that women are inferior according to virtually all Buddhist texts and cultural traditions.

Slavery
Slavery is explicitly approved in many Buddhist scriptures... Not surprisingly, many modern Buddhists want to deny the facts. When that fails, they want to find excuses. This prevarication deserves contempt.

War
In practice, Buddhist authorities have enthusiastically supported many wars, including purely aggressive land-grabs, throughout history. They have used specifically Buddhist moral arguments to justify these.

Chapman correctly says that contemporary secular ethics is better than traditional Buddhist morality. More generally, contemporary secular ethics is better than the moral teachings of any traditional religion -- which are filled with archaic visions of what the "good life" is.

Pope Francis' recent visit to the United States is a good example.

Sure, Francis spoke persuasively of the need to save the Earth from global warming pollution and to dial down the excesses of capitalism, along with acting compassionately toward immigrants. These are in line with mainstream secular morality.

Yet at the same time, the Catholic Church is wedded to outmoded views of same-sex marriage, women's rights, contraception, abortion, and other issues. So there's still a lot not to like about traditional Catholic morality, just as is true of traditional Buddhist morality.

Quotations from "Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic"

l am loving Matthew Stewart's brilliantly written book, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic.

It demolishes the absurd oft-heard claims that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. Yet it is difficult to summarize Stewart's arguments why this is untrue.

"Nature's God," which I'm about 2/3 through, is a complex blend of history and philosophy. It isn't enough to simply say that this country was founded by deists, not theists. 

Yes, this is true.

But to understand the book's subtitle, "The Heretical Origins of the American Republic," not surprisingly requires Stewart to journey through a whole lot of philosophy, beginning with Epicurus in ancient Greece. He is an excellent writer and an amazingly skilled philosopher.

Still, my mind is regularly boggled, in a decidedly pleasant and stimulating fashion, as I make my way through the chapters.

So I figured that rather than trying to explain the book in my own words, I'd use the authors'. Here's a collection of quotations up through page 274, culled from my highlighting scheme. 

The quotes do a pretty good job of summarizing Stewart's central arguments. But naturally many (or most) of them will leave the reader with as many questions as answers. Which is one of Stewart's main points: truth comes from active reasoned understanding, not passive revelatory faith.

Enjoy...

Although America's revolutionary deists lavished many sincere expressions of adoration upon their deity, deism is in fact functionally indistinguishable from what we would now call "pantheism"; and pantheism is really just a pretty word for atheism.

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In the universe as Lucretius found it, there is no heaven but the one we project on the stars overhead. There is no hell but what our imagination can conjure out of our fears of this world. And there is nothing at all outside of experience that can bring us any more happiness, misery, good, or evil than we can find within the limits of the world we inhabit.

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The bare outlines of the Epicurean philosophy are first discernible among America's revolutionary deists at this level, where the pursuit of happiness and true piety merge with the scientific spirit.

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The body, in short, is not an artifact of design but the outcome of a fortuitous natural process. Like everything else in the Epicurean universe, it is a kind of beautiful accident, the output of an algorithm that generates astounding complexity from the operation of a few simple rules.

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If "true piety" is just the contemplation of the universe, then there is no difference between the study of nature and the worship of God.

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Indeed, "Nature's God" was the presiding deity of the American Revolution.

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God, according to this conception, is the eternal this-ness of all things. It is the being-ness of beings, or the eternal being of all beings.

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While Spinoza and his successors ultimately ascribe our ignorance to the very lawfulness of nature itself, the common religious consciousness attributes it to the inscrutability of God's purposes and intentions, which is to say, the arbitrary or unlawful aspect of God's agency.

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Which is to say, in a manner of speaking, that nature is God's revelation, and science is the true theology.

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Radical philosophy attempts to show that nature itself contains a principle of infinite activity; that it is the real source of the enigmas we falsely gather under the name of God; and that it is the font of everything that we may value.

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To cut a long story short: "Nature's God," the God of Thomas Young and the presiding deity of the American Revolution, is another word for "Nature."

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In the infinite universe of Nature's God, "creation" and "Creator" refer to the same thing.

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Modernity exists because the soul does not.

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Our explanations of ourselves, all our cherished experiences of this or that time of day, our memories of last night's dinner, and our theories about the future of the universe and our place within it, all consist of ideas that explain one piece of the universe through another, while what we grandly call our conscious mind is just the string we tie around the bundle of ideas that makes each of us what we distinctly are.

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Belief is a matter of evidence, not choice.

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To perceive something is already to perceive a cause for our experience in the world, which is to have an idea. (When we see a desk, for example, we don't see a collection of sense data but an explanation for such a collection.)

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It follows that revelation -- a series of representations that we have no reason to hold true apart from our desire to believe in their truth -- is not a form of knowledge or consciousness or belief at all. It is simply the sign of a desire that must always be explicable through some other ideas. It belongs by its very nature to a mind that does not know itself and cannot be acting freely.

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But this is to suppose precisely what the radicals deny: that truth may take the form of a revelation, and that the freedom of the mind consists in its ability to choose what it will believe without reason or cause.

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The picture-theory takes for granted that the mind, by virtue of being "inside" of the "gallery," has a perfect grasp of itself before it knows anything about anything else. According to Spinoza, on the other hand, the mind is not "inside" anything. It is just another idea, out there in the world, that happens to explain or represent the activity of a particular body.

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Less technically, we could say that the mind of any individual is simply the theory that explains the behavior of that individual's body.

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On the whole, this radical view of the self gives flesh to the intuition -- obvious from experience yet previously withheld from science on the basis of common religious prejudice -- that mind and body are deeply interconnected and that the consciousness and self-consciousness that come with them are always matters of degree.

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According to radical philosophy, on the other hand, the body is an act of substance no less than the mind. Its activity is nothing other than the activity of nature itself, understood and expressed in a certain way.

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Eternal life means nothing other than this life, lived and understood in its most complete form.

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The traditional conception of immortality also takes for granted that the purpose of the afterlife is to resolve ethical problems across time zones: actions in this life receive their just consequences in the next. In the philosophical conception, however, eternal life stands only for the incompleteness of moral equations in this life, not as a term within those equations.

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From the analysis that Locke and Spinoza share to this point, it follows that freedom of the mind, properly understood, does not consist in the ability to affirm propositions without reason or cause, as the common view supposes. Rather, freedom is just the power of the understanding itself.

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Radical philosophy supposes that the long and arduous path to freedom passes through the continuous improvement in our knowledge of ourselves and of the entire universe around us.

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The obstacles this liberalism seeks to overcome are not whatever prevents us from clinging to what we wish to believe, but those that would constrain the questioning, the criticism, the search for evidence, and the conversation with others that might compel us to change our minds.

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A genuinely liberal political system likewise aims not to satisfy the existing impulses of the majority but to hold the actions of an entire collective accountable to reason.

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Genuine liberalism is at bottom a system designed to ensure that self-government among naturally passionate individuals takes place, as it must, through acts of understanding. It is both a republic of learning and a learning republic. In its ideal form -- never perfectly realized in any specific set of institutions -- it is a truth machine, and the purpose of its truths is freedom.

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Behind such historical judgments it isn't hard to detect the same, transcendental conception of morality writ large. Only righteous belief produces righteous leaders, the reasoning goes, and only righteous leaders can create a righteous system of government: ergo, the founders of this great nation must have been great believers. And if we have fallen on hard times, this can be only because we have lost our belief in the goodness of being good, our "religion." Yet the fact of the matter is that the history of ideas moved in exactly the opposite direction.

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The transcendental conception of morality is deeply flawed, even self-contradictory, a kind of hallucination conjured out of common misconceptions about the nature of self, mind, and freedom.

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The radical philosophy from which America's founders drew their ideas of virtue therefore set about to demolish and replace the common idea of morality. Radical philosophy says, in a nutshell, that virtue is happiness; that acts of understanding, not acts of faith, are the foundation of morality; and that the public good is nothing but the private good perspicuously understood.

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Belief in God, the soul, and otherworldly authorities offers only a simulacrum of morality, often quite at odds with the thing itself. Otherworldly religion is not the cure for nihilism but a symptom of it. It has nothing to do with good government: virtuous people are the consequence, not the cause, of virtuous government.

----------

Call this radical ethical philosophy the "immanent" conception of morality. It wasn't popular at the time of the Revolution and is far from universally accepted today. Yet it had influence enough at the time to make possible the creation of the American Republic, and it remains the best way to make sense of moral life.

What if...? (questions for religious believers)

Believers in God deserve to have the What if...? gambit turned back upon them.

They enjoy telling atheists, agnostics, and other non-believers in a supernatural divinity that nasty things await them -- hell, for instance. Failing to accept the reality of a world beyond this one supposedly leads to undesirable consequences (in this life and an imagined next one).

But what if the atheists are right and believers are wrong?

This is extremely likely, as I noted in last year's "Religious believers, what if you're wrong?" That post includes some quotes from a book by James Lindsay, "God Doesn't; We Do."

-- What if you, believer, are right about there being a God but picked the wrong one? 

-- What if you're right about God but picked the wrong religion to worship Him, as Muslims, Jews, and Christians mutually claim about each other?

-- What if you're right about God and your religion but wrong about which denomination, sect, or church has it right?

-- What if no demomination or person has figured it out correctly yet?

-- Can you, in your little corner of faith, in your tiny denominational box, shaded by your own personal perception, interests, likes, and dislikes, really be so sure that all of these billions of others have it wrong and that you have it right?

-- What if you are wrong about God's existence?

-- What, then, are you doing with some or much of your life?

-- How much time and effort are you wasting chasing fairy tales out of a book that is ancient literature turned social-control manual?

-- What are you doing to yourself, to your psychological well-being, when you must constantly lie to yourself about your worldview, which does not match your view of the world anywhere you look without relying on rationalizations and contortions of facts?

-- What are you ignoring or failing to learn about the world or yourself because you think you already have answers or because you want them less than your cherished beliefs?

-- What are you doing when you support inhuman social policies, hold back education, suppress healthy expressions of sexuality, oppose beneficial measures in regards to sexual health, deny others their basic human rights, curse the names and lives of your enemies or go to war with them, vote for idiotic politicians because you like their beliefs, held without evidence, enough to act without regard of their backwards ideas on key matters of policy?

-- What are you asking from those of your friends, your family, and your community who do not believe and yet are currently all but forced to listen to and to pretend to respect your religious beliefs, delusional rambling, misplaced thanksgiving, and unflattering solipsism?

-- What actions and thoughts do you deny or attempt to deny yourself on the grounds of your faith, activities and mindsets that might bring enjoyment, pleasure, meaning, or fulfillment to your life?

-- Which of those do you do anyway, needlessly hating yourself for it even while you do it?

-- What do you do only because you hope for bonus points with your imagined creator, selfishly trying to improve the chances that you will get your reward?

Several of Lindsay's questions reminded me of an email exchange I had with a woman who was in a religion that had a rule: No Sex Outside of Marriage. She was in a close sexless relationship and wondered what I thought about this.

Here's part of my reply:

Don’t let irrational fears about the future interfere with your present day happiness. Religions prosper because they make people fearful. They claim that unless people act in a certain way, they are doomed.

Problem is, different religions have different moral codes. In truth, the way I see it, there is no absolute right and wrong. Just how individuals and cultures view right and wrong. So follow your heart, not someone else’s moral code.

...Life is short. The time for joy is now. You seem like a caring woman who wants to do the right thing. Relax. You’re doing the right thing if you love someone and want to have sex with them. This is a natural part of life. It brings two people closer together. Enjoy yourself. 

That’s how I feel, anyway. You need to do whatever you feel like doing. But I suspect you already know what you want to do. In which case, just do it!

Values end up being justified by nothing

Having finished Todd May's book, "A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe," I left an Amazon reader review titled Best "Meaning of Life" book I've ever read. 

That's high praise, since I've read a lot of them. Philosophical, spiritual, psychological, mystical, religious, scientific, political, environmental. 

May's book has resonated with me more than any other.

Maybe it is because "A Significant Life" is the most recent one I've read. But I don't think that's the reason. Rather, May delves into issues that have always fascinated me, explicating them in a fresh and appealing manner.

For example...

Whether we're speaking of meaning, values, morality, or any other concept of this sort, the age-old question is what grounds our belief that this is good or true, and that is bad or false?

Some people regard God or another transcendent cosmic being as the source of objective answers to questions of right/wrong, good/bad, true/false, and so on. Others consider that The Universe (whatever this means) speaks to us. As in, the universe is sending a message to me.

However, May correctly dismisses these attempts to ground what I'll call values, for lack of a better word, in an objective foundation.

(Sorry, religious believers, but there is no evidence that any god/divine being exists, much less the particular god/divine being that you worship.)

Turning completely in the other direction, toward subjectivity, other people feel that values are entirely in the eye, or mind, of whoever holds them. Whatever is their byword. No one can say that murdering millions of people is better or worse than finding a cure for cancer. 

Whatever. We live in a meaningless world. Any attempt to ground meaning or morality in anything other than individual whim is doomed to failure. 

May's book strikes a middle ground, which makes sense to me. Intuitively, I'm not attracted either to religious absolutism or existential nihilism. And it seems that most reasonable people I know feel the same way. 

We just find it difficult to express what that middle ground might be. Which is understandable.

May, a professional philosopher, takes an entire book to do this, and I suspect his conclusions are based on a heck of a lot of personal pondering and interpersonal discussions with friends, colleagues, and many others.

In this post, and likely a few succeeding ones, I'll share my understanding of May's view that a meaningful life is one where "subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness." It is pretty easy to grasp the subjective part; the trick is how objective attractiveness is possible without positing a god or cosmic force that grounds this.

Basically, May says that there is "a general web of beliefs that we share," and "a set of values that lend meaningfulness to a life."

The beliefs and values arise from a community of human beings. Where else could they come from, if the universe is silent and there is no god? May then asks a great question:

But here someone might ask, what justifies the web itself? If we accept or reject certain values based on the web of beliefs a community holds, how do we know the web itself is right? It may be that values aren't arbitrary because they must be justified within the network of other values and practices. But couldn't the entire thing be arbitrary? And if it is, doesn't that, by extension, make each of the values in it arbitrary?

The worry here is that our web of values, founded in our practices, is somehow floating in space. It is unmoored. Without beliefs being anchored somewhere, it could be floating anywhere: that is the arbitrariness of it. If the web is what anchors the values, but the web is unattached, then each of the values still floats free -- not from the web, but along with it.

I loved May's next sentence.

The short response to this worry is this: nothing justifies the web. 

Along with what he said after that. 

We have arrived at the point where justification comes to an end. In fact, we have arrived at the point where justification must come to an end. We cannot justify the web, the whole, itself. The reason for this is that all justification, all giving of reasons for what one believes, happens inside the web. This is true not only for values but for all of our beliefs.

...The attempt to step outside our current web of beliefs, values, and the practices in which they arise in order to justify the whole is an impossible task. After all, what would even count as a justification for an empirical claim or a value if we need to lay aside everything else we believe? In a case like that, it would be the claim or value itself that would be floating free, unanchored to anything else.

This is freaking brilliant philosophizing. Clear, logical, persuasive. Unless, I guess, one is either a dogmatic religious believer or a whatever nihilist. 

Soon after, May quotes the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: "If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply what I do.'"

May's next words are my favorite in the entire book. I can't resist quoting them in their entirety.

The image is a striking one, and it is famous in contemporary philosophy. My only quibble with it is that the reference to bedrock suggests that there is hard ground beneath the soil of our practices.

But there isn't, as the last line of the citation reminds us. The reason we cannot dig any deeper is that there is no more soil left. This is not because we have hit something sturdy that resists our spade. It is only because we have run out of soil. What is left is not granite or marble; it is nothing.

This is simply what we do.

The web of values and beliefs and the practices in which they arise are all we have to ground objectivity. Any one of us could be wrong, and we could all be wrong -- although we cannot say why this might be, since that would refer us back to our own practices, beliefs, and justifications.

It is perhaps possible that far in the future a generation of posthuman types will look back upon us and ask, "What were they thinking" Of course, they will do that from their own lights, as we do from ours. And, of course, we cannot imagine what it would be like to be those posthuman types, since we would have to do it from our perspective. 

All we can say is that we cannot in advance rule out the possibility of it happening.

Our web of practices, with their beliefs and values, does not rest on a ground assured by the universe. As with meaningfulness, the universe is silent on this matter. But neither do the beliefs and values in that web arise simply according to individual or collective whim.

When we seek to justify our narrative values (or anything else) to ourselves, we are in a realm which is neither arbitrary nor ultimately assured, but somewhere in between. 

For some, this might not be enough. And to them, as I have said, I have nothing to offer by way of consolation. But for the rest of us, although this may not be all the objectivity we would like, perhaps it is all the objectivity we need.

Religious ridiculousness: men refusing to sit next to women on planes

Rather than the so-called Religious Freedom Restoration Act, legislatures in the United States should get busy passing Freedom from Religion bills.

After all, to me (and many others) religiosity is a relationship between an individual and his/her imagined divinity. It's a matter of personal belief, which I have no problem with. Believe whatever you want, so long as you don't interfere with the right of other people to believe as they want. 

Unfortunately, all too often religion becomes a matter of outward action, rather than inner belief. And not private actions, but public ones that affect other people.

Case in point: ultra-Orthodox Jewish men who refuse to sit next to women on airplanes. This absurdity is described in a New York Times story, "When a Plane Seat Next to a Woman is Against Orthodox Faith."

It is not an entirely new issue; some ultra-Orthodox travelers have tried to avoid mixed-sex seating for years. But now the ultra-Orthodox Jewish population is growing rapidly because of high birthrates. Ultra-Orthodox men and their families now make up a larger share of airline travelers to Israel and other locations, giving them more economic clout with airlines,  and they are making their views more widely known in response to what they see as the sexualization of society.

The issues on airplanes echo controversies over efforts to separate men and women on buses and streets, as well as to remove women from some news photographs.

Well, I have my own deeply held moral beliefs. Vegetarianism, for example.

I haven't eaten a bite of meat or fish for forty-five years, having become a vegetarian when I was twenty-one because I didn't want to be responsible for killing animals unnecessarily. I've sat next to countless meat-eaters who were eating food that once had a face.

I've never changed my seat. I've never made a big deal out of having to be close to people who were doing something I think is wrong. That's because I regard my personal beliefs as just that: personal. I don't expect other people to believe in vegetarianism as I do, nor do I demand that they accommodate my beliefs. 

When an airline doesn't have a vegetarian meal available, I shove the meat to one side and eat the rest. Or I bring a veggie sandwich along in my carry-on bag. 

So why is it that so many religious believers feel that other people should accommodate their personal beliefs? Like giving up their seat for a Jewish man who refuses to sit next to women.

Francesca Hogi, 40, had settled into her aisle seat for the flight from New York to London when the man assigned to the adjoining window seat arrived and refused to sit down. He said his religion prevented him from sitting beside a woman who was not his wife. Irritated but eager to get underway, she eventually agreed to move.

I've believed in some strange stuff before I saw the light and became an atheist.

However, I never felt that people needed to either share my beliefs, or go out of their way just because I held them. Sure, I'd ask friends and family to serve something vegetarian if I ate at their home, but I wouldn't think of demanding this of someone I didn't know well.

I guess many "people of faith" have a very different view of religion that I did when I was religious. For me, it was a personal, private relationship with a divinity that I believed to exist. It had very little to do with behaving in a certain way out in public, or demanding that other people act in a certain way.

Live and let live. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

These two proverbs make a lot of sense to me. If religious believers don't want people telling them what to do or what to believe, they shouldn't be imposing their actions and beliefs on others. 

Religious people have no right to discriminate against gays

Oh, man. As if I needed another reason to hate religious bigotry.

But there it was, couldn't be ignored... a New York Times story that got my moral blood boiling: "Anticipating Nationwide Right to Same-Sex Marriage, States Weigh Religious Exemption Bills."

So what do these religious jerks want to be exempted from? Treating homosexual people with the same dignity and respect due everybody else. 

As it looks increasingly likely that the Supreme Court will establish a nationwide right to same-sex marriage later this year, state legislatures across the country are taking up bills that would make it easier for businesses and individuals to opt out of serving gay couples on religious grounds.

Many states are now reliving a version of events that embroiled Arizona in February 2014, when Jan Brewer, then the Republican governor, vetoed a bill that would have allowed businesses to use their religious beliefs as a legal justification for refusing to serve gay customers.

What's next, religious zealots? How far down the slippery immoral slope do you want to slide?

Should you be able to discriminate against people of color? Women? Jews? Muslims?

Why not form a religion that teaches Democrats like me are evil? Then you could require a Republican voter registration card before choosing to serve someone.

It's highly disturbing that this sort of crap is treated at all seriously in the 21st century.

Religious dogma has been used as an excuse for discrimination before. Slavery supposedly was God's will. As was denying women the right to vote.

Soon this sort of hatred in the name of religion will be viewed by people in the future with the same How the hell could they be so stupid? attitude that anti-black and anti-female views are looked upon today.

(Of course, those prejudices are still common among many true believers.)

This goes to show that if someone cares about morality, they should run from any form of religiosity.

Religions are notorious for promoting an egotistical "We're special, and you're not" viewpoint. In this case, it is gays who are God's unchosen people, while religious believers who choose hatred over love consider themselves, bizarrely, the chosen ones.

I'd very much like to have a religious person comment on this post and explain why he or she feels gay people should be discriminated against. 

Give me one good reason, just one.

I already know that no one can do this. I just want to show, as has been done on this blog countless times before, that true believers use religion to justify unethical behavior that wouldn't be tolerated by society otherwise.

It's absurd to give intolerance a pass just because someone conjures up a religious basis for it. The laws for religious people should be exactly the same as those for everybody else. 

If you want to act like a bigot, go ahead and face the consequences. Just don't make up crappy excuses for your prejudices like "God agrees with me." 

Naturally the moral high ground is not to believe in any god at all.

But if you have to rely on a religious crutch to make you feel like you're doing the right thing, choose an All-Loving God -- not the god of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or other divisive religions (which includes just about all of them).

Ten modern atheist non-commandments

A few months ago I wrote about Lex Bayer's and John Figdor's atheist manifesto in "Halfway through 'Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart,' I love this book."

Having finished it, here's their full list of ten non-commandments (I'd only gotten to six at the time of my first blog post).

1.  The world is real, and our desire to understand the world is the basis for belief.

2.  We can perceive the world only through our human senses.

3.  We use rational thought and language as tools for understanding the world.

4.  All truth is proportional to the evidence.

5.  There is no God.

6.  We all strive to live a happy life. We pursue things that make us happy and avoid things that do not.

7. There is no universal moral truth. Our experiences and preferences shape our sense of how to behave.

8. We act morally when the happiness of others makes us happy.

9. We benefit from living in, and supporting, an ethical society.

10. All our beliefs are subject to change in the face of new evidence, including these.  

Well done, Bayer and Figdor. I agreed with just about everything in Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart: Rewriting the Ten Commandments for the Twenty-first Century.

The provisional, changeable, debatable non-commandment that gave me the most food for thought was #8, "We act morally when the happiness of others makes us happy."

On the whole, this makes sense to me. But only with some caveats.

Yes, I realize that #8 is a worthy addendum to #6, "We all strive to live a happy life. We pursue things that make us happy and avoid things that do not."

The obvious problem with these statements is that a murderer, rapist, or child molester might get a lot of happiness from causing other people to suffer. So to avoid an undesirable moral relativism, a version of the Golden Rule is brought into play.

Bayer and Figdor write:

Cooperative action can be a way for someone to maximize his or her own self-interest... It turns out that individuals often fare better in a community of interdependent people than in one in which it's every man for himself.

...A person can be said to act in a moral manner if he or she derives a great deal of self-happiness from other people's happiness. A person acts immorally if he or she derives little self-happiness from the happiness of others or, worse still, derives happiness from the pain of others.

With that definition, we remove the requirement of selflessness from morality and focus our attention on what really matters -- identification with others and wanting good for them. Giving to charity or helping strangers can still be entirely moral even if you derive happiness from those acts. 

OK. That resonates with me. However, seemingly this leaves out a lot of my everyday life.

Today I had a good time riding on my outdoor elliptical bike on an unusually sunny and warm mid-February Oregon day. In a few minutes I'll be enjoying a glass of red wine while I read the Sunday newspapers in our bathtub.

Are these actions moral?

They make me happy, but they are pretty much indifferent as regards the happiness of others. Sure, buying a bottle of wine makes the vintner happy to some extent. And often people smile when they see me riding along on my StreetStrider. 

Yet much of life seems neither moral nor immoral according to Bayer's and Figor's non-commandments. It just is what it is (to not coin a phrase). Indeed, they write:

The conclusion we have reached is a little different because we haven't said that pursuing one's life-happiness is inherently moral. Instead, we've concluded that acting out of rational self-interest and identifying with others often leads to moral behaviors.

We follow our life-happiness preferences not out of some moral imperative but because that's how we inherently behave. It's not overcoming our nature -- it is our nature. Subjective ethics frees us from the trap of believing that our own happiness is moral or immoral.

Instead, our own happiness is amoral and a natural part of the human condition.

Nicely said.

Morality seemingly only comes into play when what we do markedly affects someone else. If we feel happy when something we do increases another person's (or other living being's) happiness, thats a moral act. 

Still, I don't quite understand why doing something that makes another person happy, while leaving us unchanged, isn't also a moral act. What if I give $100 to a food bank not because the happiness of others makes me happy, but because an accountant advised increasing my charitable deductions this year?

I guess this wouldn't count as a moral act according to the ten non-commandments. Yet the person who gets free food as a result of my donation would be happier due to my action, even if I'm not.

Well, these non-commandments are provisional, not set in stone. They are meant to be pondered as possible guides to living in the world without the encumbrances of religion. If one or more doesn't make sense, it can be discarded.

To me, it might be better to ditch the notion of "moral" entirely. Seemingly something along these lines would be a worthy substitute for "We act morally when the happiness of others makes us happy."

Whenever possible, act to further the happiness of others. Hopefully doing this will make us happier also.

Once again, I praise a New Year's resolution of... nothing

I'm on a five-year nothing roll when it comes to New Year's resolutions. Of course, there's always something more to say about nothing, so I'll do just that after sharing links to my previous paeans to irresolution.

2010: "New Year's enlightenment resolution: nothing"
2011: "Don't make resolutions for the New Year -- just live it."
2012: "'Nothing' is my spiritual resolution for the New Year"
2013:  "Thanks, godless heathens, for a good blog year"
2014: "Brains are us: a fresh thought for a New Year"

(Yes, I managed to squeeze some thoughts about nothing into the 2013 and 2014 posts.)

This year one of my main sources of inspiration came early on, in January. That's when I belatedly discovered the magic of the "Let It Go" song in the movie Frozen. 

Today I fired up my post about the song and watched the video of that part from the movie again. I find it really inspiring.

 

Oh, yes. Let it go. Tell it like it is, Elsa. (Full lyrics are in my previous post.)

Couldn't keep it in, Heaven knows I tried.
Don't let them in, don't let them see.
Be the good girl you always have to be.
Conceal don't feel, don't let them know.
Well, now they know!

Let it go, let it go!
Can't hold it back anymore.
Let it go, let it go!

Wouldn't it be wonderful if our inner Me and outer Me were much more in tune than, for most of us, they are now?

Especially when it comes to religiosity, spirituality, the meaning-of-it-all. 

When we feel something deep in our hearts, yet act outwardly in a different way, that creates the tension Elsa sings about.

Can't hold it back anymore.

She's talking about the joy of authenticity and naturalness. Watching the video again and re-reading the lyrics, I was struck by how Elsa bears more than a little resemblance to a Daoist sage. 

Turn away and slam the door.
I don't care what they're going to say.
Let the storm rage on.
The cold never bothered me anyway.

It's funny how some distance,
makes everything seem small.
And the fears that once controlled me, can't get to me at all

It's time to see what I can do,
to test the limits and break through.
No right, no wrong, no rules for me.
I am free!

Let it go, let it go.
I am one with the wind and sky.
Let it go, let it go.

No right, no wrong, no rules for me.
I am one with the wind and sky.

What if we could see that whatever we are, whatever we have become, whatever thoughts and feelings we have, all this is the natural result of what had to be, because it is?

This isn't a fatalistic attitude. Just a realistic one. 

Sure, if there is something we want to change or improve about ourselves, we should try to achieve that goal. But not because of a worry that we risk God's wrath by failing to live up to the standard of some religious commandment.

And the fears that once controlled me, can't get to me at all.

So, yeah, let it go in 2015. Even if you feel like you've discarded past beliefs that were holding you back from expressing your authentic self, usually there's more to let go of. 

Until nothing but truth remains. Happy New Year!

Free will believers like Eddy Nahmias make no sense

I firmly believe that free will doesn't exist. (See here, here, and here, among my many posts on this subject.)

To me, and many others who consider that any "free will" worthy of that name should be really free, articles like Eddy Nahmias' Why we have free will in the most recent issue of Scientific American rest on an absurd proposition. 

Namias basically argues that because conscious thinking affects our behavior, this points to free will. In other words, our actions aren't solely controlled by unconscious brain processes. He says:

A body of psychological research shows that conscious, purposeful processing of our thoughts really does make a difference to what we do.

OK. No argument there. But consider what Einstein said (quoted in another of my posts about the fiction of free will).

Honestly I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? 

What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe? Another act of willing? Schopenhauer once said, "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills."…When you mention people who speak of such a thing as free will in nature it is difficult for me to find a suitable reply. The idea is of course preposterous.

Now Nahmias would argue that feeling and thinking are different. A feeling comes from the unconscious; thinking is a conscious activity. 

But Einstein's point remains. Whatever we decide to do, for whatever reason, there is no reason to believe that the basis of the decision stands apart from the deterministic laws of nature that guide everything else in the universe.

And yes, I am familiar with the indeterminism of quantum mechanics.

However, as much wiser minds than mine have said, indeterminism doesn't support free will; rather, it implies the lack thereof, since random behavior is the opposite of intentional action.

What Nahmias has done is redefine free will to the much-diluted compatibilist definition. Compatibilism, Wikipedia tells us, "is the belief that free will and determinism are compatible ideas, and that it is possible to believe both without being logically inconsistent."

Well, I and many others disagree. 

This simply isn't how almost all people look upon free will. A compatibilist would say that a girl has free will if she can choose between two puppies without coercion by her father, or anyone else. One puppy is a blonde Labrador; the other is a black Labrador.

But as discussed in a quote in a previous post, the girl has a psychological condition that makes her incapable of touching a blonde dog. So she chooses the black Lab. Supposedly she exercised her free will according to Nahmias, because she consciously thought, "I like the black Lab much better." 

Part of the quote says:

The classical compatibilist analysis of ‘could have done otherwise’ fails. According to the analysis, when Danielle picked up the black Lab, she was able to pick up the blonde Lab, even though, due to her psychological condition, she was not able to do so in the relevant respect. Hence, the analysis yields the wrong result.

The classical compatibilist attempt to answer the incompatibilist objection failed. Even if an unencumbered agent does what she wants, if she is determined, at least as the incompatibilist maintains, she could not have done otherwise. Since, as the objection goes, freedom of will requires freedom involving alternative possibilities, classical compatibilist freedom falls.

Most people look upon free will in exactly that fashion: a choice that could have gone another way.

A robber points a gun at a bank teller. He can either pull the trigger, or fail to fire the gun. Upon that decision, if he is caught, rests a very different legal outcome: guilty of theft or guilty of murder?

This presumes, of course, that all of the deterministic causes and effects acting upon the robber at that moment -- genetics, upbringing, past experiences of all kinds, current state of mind, etc. etc. -- can be overcome in an act of unfettered free will which somehow is able to exist outside of the usual deterministic laws of cause and effect.

There is no evidence that this is possible. A simple thought experiment shows why. 

Imagine that the conditions existing in the universe, naturally including your own body and brain, are exactly the same in moment A as in moment B. In other words, every molecule, every atom, every subatomic particle, every quantum energy state, everything is exactly the same in these two moments.

If you made a decision at moment A to buy, say, a vanilla ice cream cone, what are the chances that you would decide differently, such as to buy a chocolate cone, at moment B? 

Remember: your state of mind is precisely the same as it was in moment A (since mind is the brain in motion, and your brain is in the exact same state). So is everything else in physical existence. Thus some sort of supernatural nonphysical entity must be responsible for altering your decision to buy a vanilla cone at moment B.

Soul. Spirit. God's will. Karma. Something like that.

Unless, again, we define "free will" as simply acting under deterministic influences that don't include obvious coercive factors like having somone point a gun at your head and say, "Buy a vanilla cone, or I'll shoot you."

That's how compatibilists like Nahmias think. We're "free" so long as our actions and choices are determined by non-blatant causes. Doesn't make sense, but the notion of free will is so appealing to them, they're deeply reluctant to surrender it.

Of course, they have no choice.

For someone else's knowledgeable critical take on Nahmias, check out Jerry Coyne's "Eddy Nahmias: apostle for free will."

Why I feel killing animals for sport is wrong

I just wrote a post on my other blog, "Why a photo of a dead deer makes me feel hunting is wrong." The post includes thoughts about the nature of consciousness, the value of wildness, and such. Give it a read. 

Here's an excerpt.

It bothers me when people de-animalize themselves.

Humans are animals. After billions of years of evolution, we are related to every other living entity, including bacteria, insects, fish, and other animals. There isn't any sort of gulf or divide between us and them. Life on earth is a continuum.

I've read a lot of books about neuroscience and the philosophy of consciousness. This can be complicated stuff. A key simple idea, though, is that what it means to be conscious is this: there is something like to be a conscious creature, something it is like for that organism. 

This seems undeniable.

I know there is something it is like to be me. You know this also, for you. Every dog or cat lover understands their pets also have conscious lives. Farm animals too. And wild animals. Including deer. 

Before being killed by my relative, the buck was going about its life as a conscious being. Just like we do.

Sure, we don't know what it is like to be a deer. Or a bat. Or any other human, for that matter. It is entirely possible, though, to feel empathy and compassion for other conscious organisms even if we can't know what their consciousness is like.

I've been a vegetarian for forty-six years. As I describe in the post, I killed one animal for "fun" when I was a child, then never did this again.

My attitude toward many philosophical, moral, and spiritual issues has changed over time. How I feel about killing animals hasn't.

Meaning isn't outside or inside us. It is in-between.

I'm a fan of David Chapman's Meaningness site. I haven't read all of Chapman's writings, but what I've perused has impressed me. 

(See my 2011 post, "David Chapman's dizzying writings on Meaningness and Buddhism.")

Recently he sent out an email to those who have signed up to get updates on changes to his site. Chapman included a link to his page So how does Meaningness work? 

I may have read it before. Regardless, I enjoyed reading it again. The writing is clear; the reasoning persuasive. Here's an excerpt:

The natural human view is that meanings are inherent in external things. Thunder means the gods are angry, and that’s a fact about thunder and gods, not about people. So on this view, meanings are objective: external to us. They are the same for everyone.

When “same for everyone” ran into differences of opinion, monotheism moved all meanings into God instead. God gives everything ultimate meanings, that no one may disagree with. God is external, so monotheistic meaning is also objective.

Then God died, and the world was disenchanted, so objects all became inherently meaningless dead matter. That meant meanings can’t be objective. The obvious alternative—developed in the 1700s—was that meanings are subjective. They live in the minds of individual people.

250 years later, versions of this idea are still taken for granted by most sophisticated people. Unfortunately, the subjective theory of meaning doesn’t work. It verges on nihilism—outright denial of all meaning. Fortunately, the theory is also not true.

When you are hungry, the meaning of food is not subjective. You, personally, are hungry, but the meaning is shared with everyone else (and probably all other vertebrate animals). It’s not particularly “mental”; it’s as much in your sensory organs, and digestive system, as in your brain. And it’s in the actions of your hands and mouth as you eat.

The meaning of a handshake is partly arbitrary, but it is not subjective. You can’t redefine it to make it mean what you want. When you shake hands, the meaning depends on a huge amount of cultural background, involving millions of people. It probably also depends on evolved biological functions we don’t know much about.

The subjective theory of meaning is not full-blown nihilism, but tends to slide into it. That’s because we actually can’t mean anything much by ourselves; meaning is mostly a social and cultural activity. Narrowing one’s focus to supposedly personal meanings leads to social and cultural alienation, and then to nihilistic depression.

A meaning is neither objective nor subjective; it is not inside your mind, nor outside. It requires both subjects and objects, and it doesn’t dwell in either. It takes time and space, but it is not precisely located.

Especially, a meaning does not live in your brain. That popular pseudoscientific idea is the “representational theory of mind.” It is internally contradictory and unworkable. Meaning may require a brain, but usually many brains, and also non-brain stuff.

Meaningness is a dynamic, interactive process. Any particular meaning involves a complicated history of many creatures and things; a network of involvement that we only ever partly understand.

This seems to fit with an interesting New York TImes article, "Does Everything Happen for a Reason?" Along with Chapman's piece, it also is well worth reading in its entirety. Here's a sample:

ON April 15, 2013, James Costello was cheering on a friend near the finish line at the Boston Marathon when the bombs exploded, severely burning his arms and legs and sending shrapnel into his flesh. During the months of surgery and rehabilitation that followed, Mr. Costello developed a relationship with one of his nurses, Krista D’Agostino, and they soon became engaged. Mr. Costello posted a picture of the ring on Facebook. “I now realize why I was involved in the tragedy,” he wrote. “It was to meet my best friend, and the love of my life.”

Mr. Costello is not alone in finding meaning in life events. People regularly do so for both terrible incidents, such as being injured in an explosion, and positive ones, like being cured of a serious disease. As the phrase goes, everything happens for a reason.

Where does this belief come from? One theory is that it reflects religious teachings — we think that events have meaning because we believe in a God that plans for us, sends us messages, rewards the good and punishes the bad.

But research from the Yale Mind and Development Lab, where we work, suggests that this can’t be the whole story. In one series of studies, recently published in the journal Cognition, we asked people to reflect on significant events from their own lives, such as graduations, the births of children, falling in love, the deaths of loved ones and serious illnesses.

Unsurprisingly, a majority of religious believers said they thought that these events happened for a reason and that they had been purposefully designed (presumably by God). But many atheists did so as well, and a majority of atheists in a related study also said that they believed in fate — defined as the view that life events happen for a reason and that there is an underlying order to life that determines how events turn out.

...WHATEVER the origin of our belief in life’s meaning, it might seem to be a blessing. Some people find it reassuring to think that there really are no accidents, that what happens to us — including the most terrible of events — reflects an unfolding plan. But the belief also has some ugly consequences.

It tilts us toward the view that the world is a fundamentally fair place, where goodness is rewarded and badness punished. It can lead us to blame those who suffer from disease and who are victims of crimes, and it can motivate a reflexive bias in favor of the status quo — seeing poverty, inequality and oppression as reflecting the workings of a deep and meaningful plan.

Not everyone would go as far as the atheist Richard Dawkins, who has written that the universe exhibits “precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”

But even those who are devout should agree that, at least here on Earth, things just don’t naturally work out so that people get what they deserve. If there is such a thing as divine justice or karmic retribution, the world we live in is not the place to find it. Instead, the events of human life unfold in a fair and just manner only when individuals and society work hard to make this happen.

Meaning of life is whatever you find meaningful

What is the meaning of life? I used to think this was an important question. Heck, maybe the only question worth seriously pursuing an answer to.

Why? Because once the question was answered, I'd know what were the most important things to do in life.

(Which, though I didn't ponder this at the time, had damn well better include "search for the meaning of life," or I was seriously screwed.)

Now I'm not nearly as interested in thinking about the meaning of life. I'm actually living a meaningful life -- much preferable to wondering what one might consist of.

A few years ago I wrote a couple of blog posts about Julian Baggini's book, "What's It All About?: Philosophy and the Meaning of LIfe." In it, Baggini has short chapters on the various main ways people view the meaning of life.

One is Lose Your Self. Here, as in the rest of his book, Baggini discusses the pros and cons of this strategy. I called a blog post "Losing your self is so egotistical," quoting Baggini:

The reason I am being a little brutal here is that I think there is a terrible dishonesty among some of those who claim that what they are trying to achieve is a lessening of attachment to ego. The clear truth is that people who find this path satisfying are living contented lives.

In other words, they like their "spiritual practices" because they make them feel more content, at peace, or whatever, than alternatives they have tried. So despite all the fine words about losing their egos, they are in fact simply engaging in another form of self-gratification. This isn't materialistic or harmful to others, so we tend to look upon it quite kindly. But it is not in any sense a way of life which shows disregard for self-interest.

Early on, Baggini emphasizes a point that gets repeated in his book. It became the title of another blog post: "Meaning of life is now, or never." I still like these Baggini quotes a lot.

I have rejected the view that life's purpose can be understood by looking backwards to its origins. But that doesn't mean the only alternative is looking forward to its ultimate end. Just as the restaurant staff are fulfilling their professional purposes in the present simply by doing their job, couldn't we fulfill life's purpose in the present simply by living our lives?

...So if life is to be meaningful, the "why/because" series cannot extend indefinitely into the future. At some point we have to reach an end point where a further "why" question is unnecessary, misguided, or nonsensical. Otherwise the purpose of life is forever beyond our reach.

...As we have repeatedly seen, at some point we have to reach the stage where a "why" question can be met with an answer along the lines of "Are you nuts? Why wouldn't anyone want that?" If not, the "why/because" series just extends into the indefinite future.

...Yet so many of us do look towards some idyllic future when we have "made it" as providing purpose for what we do. This is a mistake and at its root is a failure to realize that if what is being worked towards is worthwhile in itself, then so are many other things that are within our grasp right now.

Right on, brother.

Such is one of the many delusional traps of religion -- spending one's life looking forward to salvation, enlightenment, god-realization, a second coming, ego loss, nondual consciousness, or whatever. When the meaning of life is a goal always dangled out of reach, we run the risk of ending our life feeling unfulfilled, even though nothing ever was lacking except our belief that something was lacking.

I put Baggini's book away without finishing it. Having rediscovered it recently, I've enjoyed reading the remaining chapters. This morning I read "The Threat of Meaninglessness." 

Thankfully, this isn't much of a threat, notwithstanding the frantic cries of religious fundamentalists who threaten, "Without surrendering to what God wants for us, life is empty of meaning." What a bunch of crap. 

Baggini feels the same, though he states his objections to supernatural bullshit in a more philosophical manner. He rejects the thoroughly unproven notion that some divinity holds the answer to the question, "What is the meaning of life?"

For example, some embrace Christianity and some Hinduism. Both faiths can't be true, since it is central to one that there is just one God and central to the other than there are many; and reincarnation is essential to one and inconsistent with the other. So at least one -- and probably both -- are just wrong to think that what they believe will ultimately provide meaning for life.

So what will? Whatever we find meaningful. And we don't even have to think about this very much. Living life provides the answer, not philosophical reflection.

Fortunately, there is no great mystery about how unexamined or mistaken lives can have meaning. Throughout this book we have seen many ways in which life can have meaning. The overall idea is that life is worth living just as long as it is a good thing in itself.

Such a life has meaning because it means something to us, it is valuable to those who have it. Many things can contribute to this: happiness, authenticity and self-expression, social and personal relationships, concern for the welfare of others.

...Hence it is more than possible for someone to live a full and meaningful life without ever having thought in terms of life's meaning.

Cartoonist Charles Schulz said it nicely.

My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?

Petraeus affair reminds us that lust is the force of life

I love The New Yorker. No, more. I lust for it.

When it arrives in the mail each week I feel tingly. Gazing fondly upon the cover image, I fondle the table of contents, looking forward to that magic moment when I'll fill up our bathtub with hot water, pour a glass of red wine, and slip into the dual liquid sensuousness with a magazine that features marvelous writers.

Such as Adam Gopnik, who wrote a piece in the November 26, 2012 issue that spoke about General Petraeus' affair, and sexual morality in general, in a way that make me think: "that's just how I feel, or would have, if I had been wise enough to feel the feelings that Gopnik expressed so well."

Here's some excerpts from his Military Secrets.

Presumably, it is a bad idea for spies to have embarassing secrets that other spies might learn -- and what goes for the smaller spies should go for the big spy -- and so the resignation of General Petraeus may have been necessary. But the rest really did seem to be nobody's business but the General's and his family's. 

If there is a small truth to cherish here, it lies in the reminder that Bill Clinton and Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner and all the other earlier, undecorated sinners were not heated by undignified lusts because they were baby boomers or Democrats, or because they lacked the moral code of real men making real decisions, or because they had spent too much time on Twitter, or whatever the latest explanation for self-destructive sexual behavior is.

The truth is that the force which through the not so green fuse drives all our flowers, and much else besides -- the force of wanting that can cause women of substance to send pestering e-mails, leaving distinguished generals caught in the middle -- is the force of life.

Petraeus, and his defenders and attackers alike, referred to his "poor judgment," but if the affair had had anything to do with judgment it never would have happened. Desire is not subject to the language of judicious choice, or it would not be desire, with a language all its own. The point of lust, not to put too fine a point on it, is that it lures us to do dumb stuff, and the fact that dumb stuff gets done is continuing proof of its power.

...In the meantime, let's recall, from "The Human Stain," the narrator's dream that, at the height of the Clinton imbroglio, someone had hung a banner from the White House reading, "A Human Being Lives Here." The more such banners fly -- from homes, and from tents and barracks and G.H.Q's, too -- the better off we will all be.

Absolutely. 

I'd especially like to see that "A Human Being Lives Here" banner hung on the Pope's Vatican residence, and the home of every supposed divine or quasi-divine person on Earth.

Gurus. The Dalai Lama. Yogis. Anyone who claims to talk with God.

We're all just human beings living a human life. We all have human desires, human lusts, human cravings. For sex, for God, for all sorts of things. The force of life drives us at every moment, as it must. Until we're dead.

Sam Harris explains how life is good without free will

Free will. Who needs it? Not me. Not you. Not Sam Harris. Not anybody. 

Which is a good thing. Because almost certainly free will doesn't exist. So it's good news, and unsurprising news, that something humans don't have isn't necessary to live a satisfying life.

Harris is an excellent writer and thinker. Read his "Life Without Free Will."

If you're under the illusion that you're free to do whatever you decide to do, his piece will reassure you that's it's fine to give up that unsubsantiated belief.

I particularly liked this section of the essay.

In my view, the reality of good and evil does not depend upon the existence of free will, because with or without free will, we can distinguish between suffering and happiness. With or without free will, a psychopath who enjoys killing children is different from a pediatric surgeon who enjoys saving them. Whatever the truth about free will, these distinctions are unmistakable and well worth caring about.

Might free will somehow be required for goodness to be manifest? How, for instance, does one become a pediatric surgeon? Well, you must first be born, with an intact nervous system, and then provided with a proper education. No freedom there, I’m afraid. You must also have the physical talent for the job and avoid smashing your hands at rugby. Needless to say, it won’t do to be someone who faints at the sight of blood. Chalk these achievements up to good luck as well.

At some point you must decide to become a surgeon—a result, presumably, of first wanting to become one. Will you be the conscious source of this wanting? Will you be responsible for its prevailing over all the other things you want but that are incompatible with a career in medicine? No. If you succeed at becoming a surgeon, you will simply find yourself standing one day, scalpel in hand, at the confluence of all the genetic and environmental causes that led you to develop along this line.

None of these events requires that you, the conscious subject, be the ultimate cause of your aspirations, abilities, and resulting behavior. And, needless to say, you can take no credit for the fact that you weren’t born a psychopath.

Of course, I’m not saying that you can become a surgeon by accident—you must do many things, deliberately and well, and in the appropriate sequence, year after year. Becoming a surgeon requires effort. But can you take credit for your disposition to make that effort? To turn the matter around, am I responsible for the fact that it has never once occurred to me that I might like to be a surgeon? Who gets the blame for my lack of inspiration?

And what if the desire to become a surgeon suddenly arises tomorrow and becomes so intense that I jettison my other professional goals and enroll in medical school? Would I—that is, the part of me that is actually experiencing my life—be the true cause of these developments? Every moment of conscious effort—every thought, intention, and decision—will have been caused by events of which I am not conscious. Where is the freedom in this?

Hard to argue with. But if you feel like disagreeing with Sam Harris because you believe in free will, go ahead. After all, you're powerless to do anything else.

Open up to life, fearlessly, not leaning on religion

Openness. Could this be the key that unlocks the happiness door? And keeps it (no big surprise)... open! 

So says Michael Singer in his intriguing book, "The Untethered Soul," which I've blogged about here and here.

I re-read the chapter on transcending the tendency to close this morning. Liked it the second time as much as the first.

Singer says that us humans used to mostly worry about physical danger. With saber-toothed tigers safely extinct, psychological threats are our biggest concern now.

As a result, the protective energies have adapted toward defending the individual psychologically. rather than physiologically. We now experience the daily need to defend our self-concepts rather than our bodies.

So what happens when someone criticizes us, yells at us, talks about an uncomfortable subject?

Since it's not socially acceptable to run into the woods and hide like a deer you hide inside. You withdraw, close down, and pull back behind your protective shield.

...The problem is that the part of you that gets disturbed is way out of balance. It's so sensitive that the slightest little thing causes it to overrreact. You are living on a planet spinning around the middle of outer space, and you're either worrying about your blemishes, the scratch on your new car, or the fact that you burped in public. 

It's not healthy. If your physical body were that sensitive, you would say you were sick. But our society considers psychological sensitivities normal. Because most of us don't have to worry about food, clothing, or shelter, we have the luxury of worrying about a spot on our pants, or laughing too loud, or saying something wrong.

The more we try to protect ourselves from all of those scary monsters threatening our psychological well-being, the more we enclose ourselves in walls of our own making. We feel like we're in prison. Yet we're the jailer.

You will get to a point in your growth where you understand that if you protect yourself, you will never be free. It's that simple. Because you're scared, you have locked yourself within your house and pulled down all the shades. Now it's dark and you want to feel the sunlight, but you can't.

...Ultimately, if you protect yourself perfectly, you will never grow. All your habits and idiosyncrasies will stay the same. 

...There are all these rules about things that are not supposed to happen outside because they could cause disturbance inside. Living like this allows for very little spontaneous joy, enthusiasm, and excitement for life. Most people just go from day to day protecting themselves and making sure nothing goes wrong.

Religions exacerbate this tendency to close ourselves off from life. They promulgate commandments, vows, rituals, "thou shalt's" and "thou shalt not's."

Religious believers are afraid, so afraid. God, karma, divine justice -- something is going to punish them if they transgress. God forbid, I should do what I feel like doing. It could be the Devil impelling me to enjoy myself!

Here in Oregon recently, some Republican state legislators spent a night in a topless bar. No taxpayer funds were involved. They partied on their own time. 

My reaction was, what's the big deal?

I lean strongly Democratic, but I felt more positively about these guys after I read about their night out. I've been to topless bars, both in person and from watching every episode of The Sopranos, since much of the Mafia gang's business was conducted in the Bada-Bing club.

Yet the legislators apologized. For nothing, in my opinion. They should have said, "Hey, I love my wife, and I also love to watch young attractive women dance topless. What's the big deal?" Michael Singer writes:

The reward for not protecting your psyche is liberation. You are free to walk through this world without a problem on your mind. You are just having fun experiencing whatever happens next. Because you got rid of that scared part of you, you don't have to worry about getting hurt or disturbed. 

You no longer listen to "What will they think of me?" or, "Oh God, I wish I hadn't said that. It sounded so stupid." You just go about your business and put your whole being into whatever's happening, instead of putting your whole being into your personal sensitivity.

Last night I read a New Yorker story about Mormonism. This reminded me of my super-strict eggless vegetarian days when I was a devoted member of Radha Soami Satsang Beas, an Indian spiritual group, whose guru taught that eating even a speck of forbidden fruit egg-meat-fish was wrong, wrong, wrong.

The Osmond family was the Mormon family: too many kids and too many teeth, maybe, but always solid, always smiling, always temperate -- no alcohol, no tobacco, not even caffeine. In an entertaining new autobiography, "The Book of Mormon Girl: A Memoir of an American Faith" (Free Press) Joanna Brooks recalls ecumencial birthday parties as a young Mormon in California, and the anxiety she felt about simply seeing a bottle of Coke; Mormon parties featured (non-caffeinated) root beer.

That sort of anxiety is crazy. But I used to be crazy in this way myself. So I understand how easy it is to fall under the spell of a rigid, closed, holier-than-thou, fundamentalist ideology.

If someone challenges the wisdom of remaining within the confines of a illogical, unworkable, repressive moral code, you immediately raise your defenses, holding aloft whatever is equivalent in your faith to the crucifix or holy water that keeps vampires at bay.

Except... vampires don't really exist.

Likewise, Singer says there is no need to protect ourselves from judgments, criticism, ridicule, controversy, argumentation, slights to our self-image.

Let it go. Rocks can't break your ego-window if it is fully open.

A wise person remains centered enough to let go every time the energy shifts into a defensive mode. The moment the energy moves and you feel your consciousness start to get drawn into it, you relax and release.

Letting go means falling behind the energy instead of going into it. It just takes a moment of conscious effort to decide that you're not going there. You just let go. It's simply a matter of taking the risk that you are better off letting go than going with the energy. 

When you're free from the hold the energy has on you, you will be free to experience the joy and expansiveness that exists within you.

...Real spiritual growth happens when there is only one of you inside. There's not a part that's scared and another part that's protecting the part that's scared.

...What you'll find is that the only thing you really want from life is to feel enthusiasm, joy, and love. If you can feel that all the time, then who cares what happens outside? If you can always feel up, if you can always feel excited about the experience of the moment, then it doesn't make any difference what the experience is.

...If you really want to stay open, pay attention when you feel love and enthusiasm. Then ask yourself why you can't feel this all the time. Why does it have to go away? The answer is obvious: it only goes away if you choose to close.

By closing, you are actually making the choice not to feel openness and love. You throw love away all the time. You feel love until someone says something you don't like, and then you give up the love. You feel enthused about your job until someone criticizes something, and then you want to quit.

It's your choice. 

...As long as you are defining what you like and what you don't like, you will open and close. You are actually defining your limits. You are allowing your mind to create triggers that open and close you.

Let go of that. Dare to be different. Enjoy all of life.

Moral relativism linked with openness to experience

By and large, I'm a moral relativist. This fits with my irreligious inclinations. I don't believe in the Ten Commandments, or any set of moral codes that supposedly emanated from a divine, supernatural, or more-than-human source.

I think Sam Harris got it mostly right in his book, "The Moral Landscape." Even though I lean toward moral relativism, I agree with Harris that human flourishing is the standard by which moral decisions should be made. He writes:

Meaning, values, morality, and the good life must relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures -- and, in our case, must lawfully depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain. Rational, open-ended inquiry has always been the true source of insight into such processes. Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident.

(I've blogged about the book here and here.)

June being Gay/LGBT Pride Month, with celebrations going on around the world, an article I came across in Scientific American made me think about how much attitudes toward gays have changed over the past few decades.

I don't know anyone who is openly antagonistic toward lesbians, gays, bisexuals, or transgendered people. But almost all of my friends, family, and acquaintances are open-minded. Meaning, opposed to religious fundamentalism, receptive to facts, accepting of diversity.

According to the article, "Experimental Philosophy: Thoughts Become the New Lab Rats," seemingly intractable philosophical problems such as the nature of free will and of good and evil are being investigated through empirical data.

The author, Joshua Knobe, says: 

These “experimental philosophers” argue that inquiry into the most profound questions of philosophy can be informed by actual investigations into why people think and feel as they do. To make progress on these questions, they use all the methods of contemporary cognitive science. They conduct experiments, team up with psychologists and publish in journals that had previously been reserved primarily for scientists.

Knobe describes a study aimed at better understanding moral relativism. Fundamentalist religious believers hate the notion that morality is an "it depends" sort of thing.

For example, allowing gays to marry depends on whether this contributes to human flourishing, not on what some holy book or holy person says. Likewise, allowing gays to adopt children depends on whether this contributes to human flourishing, not on prejudices, biases, or unfactual opinions.

In the study, Knobe says researchers gave participants a story about people who hold opposite views on a moral question. They then were asked whether one person had to be wrong (the antirelativist answer) or whether there might be no single correct position (the relativist answer).

The most interesting part of the study was this: the researchers also gave each participant a measure of the personality trait "openness to experience." Here's what they found.

The results showed a significant correlation: the higher a participant was in openness to experience, the more likely that participant was to endorse the relativist answer. These studies suggest a hypothesis about the roots of relativism. Perhaps the pull people sometimes feel toward moral relativism is related to a kind of openness.

When confronted with other perspectives and other possible ways of life, they feel drawn to relativism to the extent that they open themselves up to these other possibilities and enter into them imaginatively... people feel drawn to relativism to the extent that they can open themselves to other possible perspectives.

Of course, this doesn't mean that everything is relative. Scientific facts aren't relative.

I have no problem rejecting someone's perspective that God created the world ten thousand years ago, or that human-caused global warming isn't happening. Still, people who reject demonstrable facts about reality aren't bad or evil; they're just wrong. 

However, when it comes to morality, ethics, lifestyles, and the like, often facts either are lacking, or the issue isn't amenable to a fact-based analysis. I have no idea how someone could decide whether wearing blue jeans or black jeans is good or bad. This is simply a personal preference.

Homosexuality would be a relativistic moral question for me even if being gay was a choice. But almost certainly, it isn't.

Like Lady Gaga sings, "I was born this way." Though I'm a man who is sexually attracted to women, I can easily imagine myself being attracted to other men. (After all, I'm married to someone who feels that way, and I know my wife very well.)

I can also easily imagine myself being opposed to moral relativism, partly because I had some leanings in that direction during my true-believing days. But I was never deeply judgmental toward people with differing moral views. I've been a vegetarian for over forty years; I don't believe in killing animals for food; however, I'm fine with meat-eating, having done that myself until I was twenty.

Openness. Embrace it. Along with a fact-based form of moral relativism. If something contributes to human flourishing, its good. If it doesn't, its bad. 

Religion is wrong, but it feels right to believers

So how is it that religious beliefs are almost certainly wrong, yet the vast majority of people in the world accept them? What makes religiosity so attractive? 

A central theme of my previous post, New Scientist looks at the science of religion, is that belief in the supernatural comes naturally to humans. Early on in childhood development we understand that "agents" with desires, intentions, and a consciousness like our own exist even though we can't perceive these beings.

It isn't much of a jump to divine unseen agents, gods and other entities.

But after listening to a Point of Inquiry podcast interview with Jonathan Haidt, author of the recently published "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion," I got some additional insights into why people believe.

Both Haidt and his host, Chris Mooney, agreed that the stance of so-called New Atheists is too simplistic. "There's no demonstrable evidence for religious beliefs, so anyone who believes them is a fool." 

Maybe that sentiment isn't stated quite so bluntly by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and their fellow New Atheist advocates, but it's close to their basic attitude.

By contrast, the New Scientist articles about the "why religion?" question point to causes that are deeper and more complex than a simple failure by people to comprehend that what they believe is factually wrong, untrue, out of touch with reality.

Haidt said that religions appeal for many reasons, not least of which is the pleasing sense of community that believers enjoy. For example, they assemble in a church, mosque, temple, gurdwara, meditation hall, or wherever with like-minded people, sharing a common view of what life is all about.

This does indeed seem to be more of a motivation for sticking with a religious organization than a purely cognitive sense of theological truthfulness.

For over thirty years I was an active member of an India-based spiritual group, Radha Soami Satsang Beas. I gave lots of talks ("satsangs") at RSSB meetings, almost always observing that the attention, enthusiasm, and energy level of those in attendance rose markedly after the talk was over and we turned to chit-chatting -- either at the meeting place or a coffee house.

Sure, if asked why we had joined the group, and continued to stick with it, we'd offer up "politically correct" reasons relating to the marvelous sophisticated mystical teachings which were so obviously reflective of how the cosmos truly was. 

In truth, though, we all liked the feeling of being part of something bigger than ourselves, a community which shared an appealing belief system and supported its members in navigating through life with the aid of a certain religious compass.

So since religions are popular for reasons other than their truth-content, atheists and agnostics aren't going to be very successful in deconverting true believers by merely pointing out the unreasonableness of what is believed. 

I've come to accept that insight, partly by reflecting upon my own experience. I don't think I ever was really convinced that the spiritual beliefs I held were true. And I also don't think I ever was convinced that the system of meditation which purportedly would confirm the truth of those beliefs was capable of doing the job.

Jonathan Haidt said, matter of factly, that of course he's an atheist, along with almost all of his fellow psychologists and other researchers who study religiosity/morality. His gripe with the New Atheists isn't that God exists and religions are right. Rather, Haidt seems to go so far as to look upon scientists as having a belief system which isn't all that different from the religious variety.

I haven't listened to all of the podcast. But I could tell that the host, Chris Mooney, disagreed with Haidt on this point. As do I. And other listeners. (Check out comments about the interview on the Point of Inquiry web site.)

Haidt said our intuitions and emotions are the "elephant" on which the "rider" of reason sits. He implied, and maybe stated directly, that science is as prone to this neuroscientific fact as religion is. In response, Mooney asked him whether truth is one of the criteria people use to arrive at intuition and emotion laden moral judgments.

I didn't hear a straight answer from Haidt, which was surprising. After all, Haidt must accept that some truths are truer than others. If not, why has he written several books? Why does he carry out the scientific research that he does?

Indeed, Haidt said that the community of science is effective in distinguishing truth from fiction, reality from unreality. He thinks, though, that individual scientists are as prone to truth-shading as religious true believers are.

I don't agree.

The examples he gave were unconvincing, like researchers who refuse to acknowledge that behavior differences between men and women are driven by hormones, or that physical differences (like "white men can't jump") between the races aren't real.

Sure, scientists have blind spots, biases, unexamined beliefs that cloud their view of reality. However, secularists are much more willing to change their minds than religious true believers. Just look at how much the Catholic Church has changed in the past few thousand years or so, compared to how much scientific knowledge has advanced.

Take me, a subject of considerable interest to myself. 

For about thirty-five minutes today I listened to Jonathan Haidt explain his viewpoints in the interview with Chris Mooney. That was enough to cause me to change my mind about some issues that, previously, I'd been pretty confident about. Such as, demonstrating that a religious belief almost certainly isn't true should be enough to prod someone into questioning their devotion to a belief system.

I'm open to new ideas, fresh perspectives, evidence I hadn't considered before -- and more so now than when I was deeply entrenched in a guru-based, supernatural-embracing, just-have-faith religious organization.

So, yes, I accept Haidt's contention that religiosity is founded on much more than a simple "I believe in X." But I can't equate religious belief with scientific belief, or morality that's capable of providing good utilitarian reasons for why something is right/wrong with a "thou shalt" morality.

Free will is a limiting, destructive belief

Free will. Who could be against this seemingly wonderful notion? The opposite idea seems to be a depressing downer: Unfree determinism. 

After I'd read the first part of Sam Harris' new book, "Free Will," I shared my enthusiasm with my wife about giving up the belief that I can freely decide what I think, feel, or do. She wasn't nearly as enthused, perhaps because of her lengthy experience as a psychotherapist.

"But wouldn't people then use I've got no free will as an excuse for doing whatever they want? And wouldn't this take away people's motivation to change, to improve themselves, to pursue difficult undertakings?"

I had a ready response. 

"Anyone who reads Harris' book will simply have more information dumped into their brain, an additional experience that will combine with all the other influences which currently determine their brain states. How they change as a result can't be predicted. Giving up a belief in free will might be highly positive for them, rather than negative."

Here's some quotes that illustrate how Harris approached this subject. 

Speaking from personal experience, I think that losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics -- by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck.

...Losing a belief in free will has not made me fatalistic -- in fact, it has increased my feelings of freedom. My hopes, fears, and neuroses seem less personal and indelible. There is no telling how much I might change in the future... A creative change of inputs to the system -- learning new skills, forming new relationships, adopting new habits of attention -- may radically transform one's life.

Absolutely.

If who we are and what we do is up to us, we're confined in an exceedingly small cage of individualistic selfhood. We can only move in directions that are apparent to our conscious free will. Fortunately, this isn't the truth known to modern neuroscience and psychology. 

Psychologist Shimon Edelman discusses how the illusions of free will and selfhood are being replaced by the scientific truths of determinism and extended "virtual" selves. Here's how he puts it in a book that nicely complements Harris', The Happiness of Pursuit.

Insofar as the extended system -- the effective and narrative Selves planted in the great web of cause and effect -- can reach deep into geographical and social space, the computational need for such focusing of behavioral feedback is pressing. By taking responsibility for the processing and use of this information, the phenomenal Self gives rise to another useful illusion: that of free will.

In the West, it has been known since at least the time of Voltaire and Hume that the concept of uncaused cause, which is a prerequisite for free will, is logically incoherent: if my "free" decision to do a particular deed arises absolutely independently of any of the existing circumstances, including my own prior actions and states of mind, then in no sense can it be considered free, or, indeed, mine.

...I do not obey a code of conduct that is implicit in the web of cause and effect; rather I am part of the web. The ultimate reach of this web is universal -- and within the boundaries of physical law the universe is, of course, free.

...The bottom line, then, is this: the Self, along with all of its perceived and remembered attributes -- anything and everything that is included in the feeling of being you -- is a product of the brain's virtual reality engine. This virtual Self is computed and put in charge of the situation purely for reasons of good governance, that is, efficient and purposeful control of the brain's life support system -- your body.

So here's another reason why my wife doesn't have to worry much about people giving up their belief in free will and turning into irresponsible there's no reason to do anything couch potatoes: evolution has led to a virtual/illusory sense of self being front and center within human consciousness.

Even if I intellectually know that I have no free will, it sure seems like I'm able to choose what words I'm going to type in the next moment. (Yet as every writer knows, what's going to be written isn't known until the words appear on paper or a computer screen.)

The inward feeling of free will isn't much of a problem. What's culturally destructive is how this illusory feeling gets translated into social policies which assume that individual human beings are capable of freely deciding their thoughts and actions.

Harris talks about how our justice system is founded on this assumption.

Retribution becomes the main goal, rather than rehabilitation and prevention of future crimes. Often it will be necessary to lock people up to keep them from committing additional offenses. However, there's no scientifically defensible reason to believe that a criminal freely chose his/her unlawful act.

Would we punish hurricanes or earthquakes, if this were possible, berating them for the destruction they bring to humans? Or if ways to prevent these natural occurrences could be found, wouldn't we simply implement them without considering that a malevolent motivation lies behind 150 mph winds or 8.0 Richter Scale shakings?

Harris writes:

Viewing human beings as natural phenomena need not damage our system of criminal justice. If we could incarcerate earthquakes and hurricanes for their crimes, we would build prisons for them as well. We fight emerging epidemics -- and even the occasional wild animal -- without attributing free will to them. Clearly, we can respond intelligently to the threat posed by dangerous people without lying to ourselves about the ultimate origins of human behavior.

Then there's sin (or the Eastern version, bad karma).

Sin can't exist without free will, which is why earthquakes, hurricanes, and rattlesnakes don't have to spend time in a confession booth. A belief in sin or freely willed bad karma has decidedly destructive consequences, as Harris notes.

Despite our attachment to the notion of free will, most of us know that disorders of the brain can trump the best intentions of the mind. This shift in understanding represents progress toward a deeper, more consistent, and more compassionate view of our common humanity -- and we should note that this is progress away from religious metaphysics.

Few concepts have offered greater scope for human cruelty than the idea of an immortal soul that stands independent of all material influences, ranging from genes to economic systems. Within a religious framework, a belief in free will supports the notion of sin -- which seems to justify not only harsh punishment in this life but eternal punishment in the next.

And yet, ironically, one of the fears attending our progress in science is that a more complete understanding of ourselves wil dehumanize us.

No, truth can't be dehumanizing. Which includes the truth, free will does not exist. 

Kierkegaard and crazy leaps of faith

Recently I listened to a Philosophy Talk podcast about Soren Kierkegaard, a dour 19th century Danish philosopher. I read some Kierkegaard back in college, many years ago. At that time I was into crazy existentialists, loving how they embraced the meaninglessness of life.

Now, I see Kierkegaard as simply crazy -- without many, if any, redeeming philosophical qualities that balance his insane defense of religious leaps of faith.

The podcast focused on Kierkegaard's take on the Old Testament tale of Abraham and Isaac, as discussed in his book "Fear and Trembling." According to Wikipedia:

Kierkegaard wanted to understand the anxiety that must have been present in Abraham when "God tested [him] and said to him, take Isaac, your only son, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him as a burnt offering on the mountain that I shall show you."

Abraham had a choice to complete the task or to forget it. He resigned himself to the three and a half day journey and to the loss of his son. "He said nothing to Sarah, nothing to Eliezer-who, after all, could understand him, for did not the nature of temptation extract from him a pledge of silence? He split the firewood, he bound Isaac, he lit the fire, he drew the knife.” Because he kept everything to himself in hiddenness he "isolated himself as higher than the universal."

Kierkegaard says, "Infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith, for only in infinite resignation does an individual become conscious of his eternal validity, and only then can one speak of grasping existence by virtue of faith."

There's some fancy intellectual talk going on there. Here's a more down to earth way of looking at the situation.

Abraham hears a voice in his head that tells him to kill his son as a burnt offering. He doesn't tell anybody about this. He ties up his son, lights a fire, pulls out a knife, and prepares to kill his child. What the hell is virtuous, moral, or praiseworthy about these actions? 

If any normal person came along and saw a father about to kill his son in this fashion (or any fashion), they'd do whatever they could to stop him.

However, because God supposedly put the idea in Abraham's head, countless Christians -- including Kierkegaard -- believe that Abraham's leap of faith, accepting that killing his son is the right thing to do in spite of all the reasons that it isn't, somehow is the essence of religious life.

That, plainly put, is fucking crazy.

A leap of faith is what allowed Charles Manson to convince his followers to commit multiple murders. A leap of faith is what allowed over 900 People's Temple followers of Jim Jones to kill themselves by ingesting cyanide.

Leaps of faith are dangerous. They can kill you. Or others.

That's an extreme consequence of blind faith, religious or otherwise. Lesser, yet still serious, consequences include being taken advantage of, surrendering autonomy, and enabling manipulative authority figures to screw you over.

I used to belong to an Indian religious organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, which loved the story of a guru who ordered his disciples to do something stupid without giving any reason for his dictate: build mud platforms; then tear them down and make some more.

That is why Christ said, If ye love me, keep my commandments.

This is the first step. Ultimately, we give body, mind, soul and everything. Such a man has got no will of his own, but the Will of the Master is his will. Just see where you actually stand. If you give everything, what remains is God. W-o-r-l-d spells world. If you take out this I-hood from within you, you are God. If you take out 'l' from the word World, only Word remains. 

In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God and the Word was God.

This little I-hood, this ego, stands in our way to God. When you completely surrender yourself to the God-in-man (to the God-in-man, not the body, although we have respect for the body of course), then your 'L' or I-hood is eliminated.

There is a story of Guru Ram Das, who was the fourth Guru of the Sikhs. The Masters always test their disciples to see how far they are fit. So his Master (Guru Amar Das), gave an order to raise certain platforms made from mud. All of the disciples started building the platforms as ordered. 

When they were ready, the Master inspected them and said, 

"These are no good, this is not right, you will have to make new platforms."

Again the disciples constructed the platforms. Two, three, four, five times they did this. Then the Master said, 

"This place is no good. There is a better place over there to build them."

Well, bye and bye, all of the disciples left off building the platforms except Guru Ram Das. The other disciples began to say that the Master has grown old and is losing His faculties. 

Guru Ram Das with tears in his eyes said, 

"The Master is all wisdom, All-Consciousness. If I am ordered to build these platforms and break them all through life, my lookout is only to obey His orders."

He had complete self-surrender.

You follow me? This means complete self surrender. Now, step by step, judge for yourself where you stand. If you want to meet God, then you must have self surrender. 

No, if you want to be a slave of a crazy man/woman, then you must do everything you're commanded to do. Charles Manson and Jim Jones would have loved to have a hundred, or a thousand, Guru Ram Dass's. 

This is how charismatic crackpots attract their devotees. This is how religious authorities manage to maintain control over millions, even billions, of sheeplike true believers. People are manipulated to believe that unquestioning obedience, even when told to do something obviously wrong, is the path to salvation, God, eternal life.

Killing your son is wrong, even if a voice in your head says "This is God. Do it!" Try convincing a judge and jury you're innocent of murder by using that defense. Good luck, unless you've demonstrably insane.

Which, you likely are, if you think that whatever God, the Pope, a Guru, or some other religious authority tells you to do must be done, no matter what.

If a magic pill makes me happy, is my happiness real?

Does happiness need to be deserved to be genuine? Here's one person, virtuous, moral, ethical. She's kind and generous. Volunteers at her kid's school. Helps out at the homeless shelter. Prays, meditates, goes to church.

All this do-gooding and God-praising makes her happy.

We know, because she scores high on reputable psychological tests that measure happiness. And when she's put in a brain scanner and asked to think about her good works, her left prefrontal cortex "lights up," which is an indicator of a positive mental state.

Here's another person, a gangster. He's sociopathic, vicious, mean, law-breaking. After stealing some high-tech stuff from a warehouse, he learns that another shady-dealer is willing to pay him $4 million for the stolen goods.

All this criminality makes him happy. Not just after a successful heist, almost all of the time. He's a happy guy. Breaking the law is what he loves to do. Also, breaking bones when he feels like it. We know, for the same reasons noted above: psychological tests and brain scanning.

So are both manifestations of happiness equally real, equally genuine? Is there any reason to say that the virtuous woman is happier than the malevolent man?

Tough questions.

Which are ably addressed by philosopher Owen Flanagan in his book, "The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized," which I've blogged about here, here, and here. His focus, obviously, is on Buddhism when he investigates the supposed relationship between virtue and happiness. But the issue is universal.

And complicated. There are lots of subtleties to consider. I enjoyed the thoughtful care with which Flanagan arrives at what turns out to be a non-conclusion. Here's an excerpt from his final chapter.

I still do not see, despite trying to see for many years, why understanding the impermanence of everything including myself [a core Buddhist tenet] makes a life of maximal compassion more rational than a life of hedonism. And isn't that the problem that we keep coming back to, the problem or question that doesn't go away?

...My own way of dealing with this problem is to be and live as a platonic hedonist, to try to maximize pleasures at the places where what is true and beautiful and good intersect. The comfort associated with living in this space, insofar as there is any, comes from thinking that no answer is the right answer to the question of how one ought to live. Thinking this is compatible with thinking that there is much worthwhile in the wisdom of the ages, including Buddhism.

Perhaps all we can expect of philosophical reflection, especially among those of us who live in multicultural, cosmopolitian communities, is that different ways of being and living, different experiments in conceiving of good lives and of trying to embody the wisdom contained in these different ways, keep many options alive, and allow maximal freedom in finding ways to be well and to live well, and perhaps, if we are lucky, to be happy.

...For that purpose, for going forward, Buddhism has something to offer. Is it the answer? Of course not. Nothing is the answer. This is something Buddhism teaches.

Flanagan talks about "the normative exclusion clause" when discussing the relationship between virtue (however it's conceived) and happiness. I hadn't come across that term before, but I've lived it, as has virtually everybody who has embraced an organized religion, spirituality, or mystical practice at one time or another.

Do X, Y, and Z, and you'll be happy. That's the promise. But the problem is that other people do A, B, and C, or D, E, and F, and they also are happy. So what's going on?

If I believe in a guru and embrace every virtue that he advises, while someone else believes in Jesus and embraces every virtue that he advises, and we both end up happy, what's can be concluded? That happiness, a good life, human flourishing (eudaimonia), can be found in many different ways, or that some forms of happiness are The Real Deal and others are worthless fakes?

I lean toward "whatever works." The normative exclusion clause seems judgmental, rigid, moralistic, Protestant ethic'y and holier-than-thou to me. Here's how Flanagan describes it.

...that only happiness caused by virtue counts as wholesome, virtuous -- the kind we are interested in. Defending the normative exclusion clause requires argument. Here are some bases on which one might mount a plausible defense.

First, we might think that there are reasons to say that happiness is only deserved if the happy person participates in producing that state, which she does not do if it is simply produced by a magic pill. Or, in the false-belief case, we might say that an epistemic norm, our commitment to truth, excludes cases where happiness is won by delusion.

Well, I'm fine with getting happiness from a magic pill. Like I said, whatever works. If you've got a happiness-producing magic pill, share it with me. With this caveat, which applies to my worry about religion: 

Side effects should be minimal. I'm not interested in a magic pill which makes me happy, but other people miserable. Nor do I want to take a magic pill which makes me happy at first, but sad later -- when the negative side effects kick in.

Hey, if people feel good by believing in weird notions, go for it, dudes and dudettes. More power to you. LIfe is tough. Whatever gets you through the days and nights, embrace it. Even religion. Marx called it the "opium of the people." 

Problem is, opium can have some serious side effects. A little is OK. A lot can kill you. 

Likewise, there's nothing wrong with getting happiness however, wherever, and whenever you can enjoy some. Forget that "normative exclusion clause." Happiness is just as real with and without someone's notion of virtue.

Just watch out for those side effects. In the case of religion, these include sanctimoniousness, controlling behavior, judgmentalism, excessive self-absorption, violence, and a host of others.

There's no free will, so you're unable to believe me

I gave it my best try last night -- arguing that we humans don't have free will, though it seems ever so obvious that we do. (Of course, it also seems obvious that the sun goes around the Earth, which demolishes the "obviousness" argument for anything.)

My wife and I belong to a three-couple book/article discussion group. Yesterday the subject was the justice system. When it came time for me to share my thoughts, I started off by quoting from Jerry Coyne's column in USA Today, "Why you don't really have free will."

The issue of whether we have of free will is not an arcane academic debate about philosophy, but a critical question whose answer affects us in many ways: how we assign moral responsibility, how we punish criminals, how we feel about our religion, and, most important, how we see ourselves — as autonomous or automatons.

But before I explain this, let me define what I mean by "free will." I mean it simply as the way most people think of it: When faced with two or more alternatives, it's your ability to freely and consciously choose one, either on the spot or after some deliberation.

A practical test of free will would be this: If you were put in the same position twice — if the tape of your life could be rewound to the exact moment when you made a decision, with every circumstance leading up to that moment the same and all the molecules in the universe aligned in the same way — you could have chosen differently.

Well, it was a good choice to lead off my part of the discussion in this fashion. Because it stimulated some passionate exchanges between me and several free-will believers. 

I said that if the goals of the U.S. justice system basically are deterrence, punishment, rehabilitation, and restitution, one of these -- punishment -- should be taken off the table, since people don't have free will. Punishment (retribution) doesn't make sense if someone wasn't able to freely choose between committing a crime or not committing a crime.

Deter further crimes by putting them in jail, and serving as a warning to other potential criminals. Rehabilitate them through education, counseling, training, and such while in prison. Force them via restitution to pay back people they've harmed.

But don't believe that someone deserves to be punished out of a sense that he or she freely willed to commit a crime.

As Coyne implied above, this belief requires a supernatural, immaterial, non-physical source of our actions, a soul or free-floating consciousness unaffected by genetics, prior experiences, environmental factors, memories, unconscious influences, hormones, and so on.

At every moment, I argued, all we know is that what happened, did.

A belief in free will assumes that something other than what did happen, could have. That's an interesting philosophical notion which has inspired lots of fictional works. What if Hitler won the Second World War? What if John Kennedy hadn't been assassinated?

However, we never see those "what if's" in reality. There's only one path through time and space that we follow. Coyne says:

Now there's no way to rewind the tape of our lives to see if we can really make different choices in completely identical circumstances. But two lines of evidence suggest that such free will is an illusion.

The first is simple: we are biological creatures, collections of molecules that must obey the laws of physics. All the success of science rests on the regularity of those laws, which determine the behavior of every molecule in the universe. Those molecules, of course, also make up your brain — the organ that does the "choosing."

And the neurons and molecules in your brain are the product of both your genes and your environment, an environment including the other people we deal with. Memories, for example, are nothing more than structural and chemical changes in your brain cells. Everything that you think, say, or do, must come down to molecules and physics.

True "free will," then, would require us to somehow step outside of our brain's structure and modify how it works. Science hasn't shown any way we can do this because "we" are simply constructs of our brain. We can't impose a nebulous "will" on the inputs to our brain that can affect its output of decisions and actions, any more than a programmed computer can somehow reach inside itself and change its program.

And that's what neurobiology is telling us: Our brains are simply meat computers that, like real computers, are programmed by our genes and experiences to convert an array of inputs into a predetermined output. 

That word, "predetermined," came up often last night. Some of my fellow discussants were strongly opposed to the notion that everything we do, think, and feel was determined at the moment at the big bang, with events simply unfolding according to the laws of physics.

I understand. Again, almost everybody feels like they have free will. I certainly do. But feeling so doesn't make it so. 

Also, I pointed out that the "pre" part of predetermined usually is an abstraction when we're talking about people. Practically speaking, it's more accurate to say that our behavior is determined. Meaning, the human brain is so complex, as are the environmental influences acting upon us, there's no way to precisely predict what someone is going to do.

It's like chaos theory.

Chaotic systems, such as a turbulent river, are deterministic yet unpredictable. Throw a cork into the water above some rapids. You won't be able to predict where it will end up, but it will end up somewhere after innumerable causes and effects act upon it. The cork doesn't use its free will to decide "I'm going to head this way rather that way for no reason, just because I want to."

Yet us humans imagine that we can, the imagining being determined, of course, just as everything else is. 

Last night I was told that without free will, there can't be any morality. I don't get this argument. Other primates act in ways we'd call "moral." Apes demonstrate empathy, concern, sharing. Why is free will required for getting along with our fellow humans?

We respond to other people; we communicate with other people; we learn about their needs, and tell them our own; we do our best to act kindly, compassionately, honestly, generously. Why? Because we're drawn to. This is our nature. We aren't isolated individuals. We're connected with, and influenced by, everything and everyone we come in contact with.

To me, a belief in free will is horribly confining. It implies that I'm a tiny island rather than a vast continent, a free-standing part rather than an integrated whole, a fallen leaf rather than living foliage on the branches of a tree that, ultimately, is the entire cosmos.

Actions are determined. So justice should be determinate.

Within reasonable guidelines, judges should be able to determine sentences which fit with determining factors of the criminal and the crime. Since there's no such thing as a Free Will Fairy which floats above people's heads and makes decisions out of the blue, completely independent of brain functioning, heredity, environmental influences, or whatever, condemning a troubled 14 year old to a life sentence without parole after he shot his grandfather is absurd. 

When we give up belief in free will, genuine morality is possible. Otherwise we're trapped in cruel Old Testament "eye for an eye" vengeance, assuming that we can be as free to punish as a criminal was free to commit a crime.

Jerry Coyne responds to comments on his free will essay here. Interesting give and take. I feel like I understand his position, which makes a lot of sense, but other people are so invested in their free will'ness, they misinterpret Coyne's arguments and fuzzy-up the whole notion of free will.

LIke Massimo Pigliucci does. 

Indeed, it is not surprising at all that we make all sorts of unconscious decisions before we become aware of them... Incidentally, I find it strange when some people argue that “we” are not making decisions if our subconscious is operating, since presumably we all agree that our subconscious is just as defining of “us” as conscious thinking is.

Hmmmm. So an intuition pops into awareness from my subconscious, and when I follow it, that's "free will"? Even though I wasn't free to will it? That's a strange view of free will, not at all as Coyne describes it. 

Finding meaning in the midst of life (not in God, not in "I")

What gives life meaning? Why do we get out of bed in the morning rather than pulling the covers over our head and curling up in existential despair? Where are we to look for purposes, goals, things to do?

God or the supernatural is one answer. Deeply religious people believe that meaning flows down from a divine above. The purpose of life isn't made; it is discovered -- via a holy book, holy person, holy revelation. 

The source doesn't have to be a personal higher power.

In Eastern religions, karma is considered to be the guiding force which leads us to do stuff: marry this person, choose this job, live in this place. As with God-believers, meaning is manufactured by a transcendent entity and delivered into our psyches, where we mistakenly believe our free will is in control.

Alternatively, thoroughly secular people view meaning as being in our hands. Or rather, minds. The meaning of life isn't given; it is created. What's right or wrong, good or bad, desirable or undesirable is up to each of us to decide.

Without an "I," meaning is absent. Only when the thought "I really enjoy writing blog posts" arises is meaning formed within the otherwise meaningless world that surrounds me.

Today, while exercising, I finished listening to a Philosophy Talk podcast of "Nihilism and Meaning." The guest philosopher was Hubert Dreyfus, author of "All Things Shining," a book I blogged about last year most positively.

So while some people surely are drifting aimlessly in a boundless ocean of godless choices, many others believe that they're being propelled along a straight and narrow sea lane with the Supreme Being guiding their course.

I'm familiar with both nautical analogies, which were very real to me when I held fast to them. In college I was an enthusiastic existentialist, devouring Sartre, Camus, and all that existence precedes essence stuff; meaning was to be made by me. Then I embraced an Indian guru; I had faith that my karma and the Master's grace jointly determined everything that happened to me.

Now, I resonate with how "All Things Shining" views a vibrant way of living. After discounting excessive self-confidence as a foundation for one's existence, the authors say:

In contrast with this, a genuine confidence of the sort that seems to have directed Mr. Autrey's actions is driven not by some internal set of thoughts or desires, nor by a calculated set of plans or principles.

Indeed, as in the case of Mr. Autrey, it is experienced as confidence drawn forth by something outside of oneself. It is grounded in the way things actually are, not in the confident person's perhaps self-serving characterization of them. The genuinely confident agent does not manufacture confidence, but receives it from the circumstances.

Listening to Dreyfus discuss his soon-to-be-published book (the podcast dates from January 2010) reminded me of how much sense it makes to follow a middle way between "my fate is in God's hands" and "I'm in total charge of my life."

Dreyfus talked about how the ancient Greeks believed that people could be taken over by a godly inspiration. For example, if Eros turns his attention to you, you're going to fall in love. For sure. Resistance is futile. Might as well embrace Eros and fall freely.

Today, us churchless folk believe as little in the Greek gods as we believe in the God of monotheistic Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. Yet Dreyfus still sees a place for a sort of godliness in the meaning of our lives. The "gods" are naturalistic circumstances, though, not supernatural divinities.

Meaning is made continuously through our experiencing of what is happening all around us. As we respond to those circumstances, opening ourselves up to the realities of the present moment, embracing the desires, urges, wants, intentions, and passions bubbling up into our consciousness, we find that meaning is neither given to us, nor produced by us. 

It arises naturally when we simply attend to where we are, what is happening, how we feel. Dreyfus and his co-author wrote about a heroic action:

Greatness of this sort is nearly mystical to apprehend. It is characterized by the kind of sustained responsiveness to the situation that the Subway Hero embodied when he leapt onto the tracks. It is unflinching, unhesitating, and unwavering, and it has these certain qualities precisely because the activity flows not from the agent but through him.

(Someone has put a recording of the "Nihilism and Meaning" podcast onto You Tube in three pieces, here, here, and here. It's an interesting discussion. I'll embed the videos; audios, actually.)

 

 

 

Cultures and religions blind us to reality

In a TIME magazine story about the Penn State sex scandal -- rape of young boys by a football coach is alleged -- I came across an analysis of how people become blinded to what is right in front of their eyes.

These excerpts from "Penn State of Mind" reminded me of religious true believers. Their blind faith causes them to become equally blind to aspects of reality that don't mesh with what they desperately want to believe in.

Within a college bubble, say organizational psychologists, the urge to shape your mental picture of the world can be overwhelming. "Culture trumps everything," says Laura Finfer, a psychologist and a principal at a New York City executive consulting firm. 

Colleges, Finfer has found, can be quite clannish. "Cultures define you, and you become blind to everything in front of your eyes."

Or the way you see things changes. Ral Aldag, a management professor at the University of Wisconsin's School of Business, points to two cognitive tricks: selective perception and subjective perception. 

Selective perception is our bias toward ignoring information that is at odds with your worldview. Subjective perception explains our tendency to couple uncomfortable information with reaffirming facts in order to make ourselves feel better.

For example, Penn Staters decry abuse. But pair that with anger over the indignity of Paterno's dismissal, and Paterno becomes a victim.

Cohesive groups like the Penn State football leadership tend to draw boundaries around themselves. "We apply rules of fair and just behavior to our own groups and people within them," says Michelle Duffy, an organizational behavior professor at the University of Minnestota's Carlson School of Management.

"But we morally exclude outsiders. In some ways you are dehumanizing out-group members -- in this case, the victims."