ComputerSecurity

Snuggly the Security Bear

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 10:11 GMT

All I can say is hahahaha! And then I cry because of how true this sarcastic little video is. He's not scary, he's snuggly and secure.

Snuggly the Security Bear

A bloggers network to be proud of

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 09:54 GMT

I started blogging about 2 and half-years ago because I felt like it would be fun to add my two cents to the public debate. When Brad Feld introduced me to the Feedburner guys I was given an insiders view into the quickly developing blogging world. When Feedburner started networks, I thought it would be interesting to start a network of all the security blogs that I was reading. I also inherently knew in my gut that eventually there would be some common good that would benefit all of the members of the network by aggregating our content and buying power for ads. I also believed and still do believe that there are other ways that a network such as the Security Bloggers Network can be a force for good.

However, reading the SBN feed tonight I was just blown away! From being on the road, I had not read the SBN feed in my Newsgator reader for almost 2 days. I had over 160 articles cued up in the feed. Forget for a moment that the Security Bloggers Network now has over 160 blogs and a combined feedburner subscriber base of almost 67,000 readers! The content is king. Going through the articles I could not believe the total coverage, the ongoing commentary and give and take, but most of all it was the quality. There are so many great members of the network who are just so damn smart and are writing about such important stuff.

I am humbled and incredibly proud of the what the Security Bloggers Network has become. If you are interested in security, whether it be the technical aspects of security, the business of security or the security industry, you cannot afford to miss this SBN feed.

We are kicking around a lot of new activities and ways to publicize the member blogs of the network over the coming months. Stay tuned for details, but in the meantime keep reading, you won't be sorry!

The country shrink's other points, and my response

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 09:43 GMT

The country shrink, whose point #2 from his post on "some psychological aspects of atheists" I critiqued in my previous post, also listed six other alleged characteristics of atheists. These were:

1). They tend to take the moral high ground. They look down on believers as simplistic, uneducated, stupid, weak, intolerant, gun toting, racists, and simple minded dolts.

2). [Responded to in my previous post.]

3). There is something in their lives that they are afraid they would have to give up if they believed in God. It’s usually some pattern that brings them pleasure in a way that they feel believers might label as immoral. They are typically not conscious of this.

4). They portray themselves as enlightened, intelligent, tolerant, moral, caring, accepting, loving, peacible, and kind. And sometimes, they really and truly are. I’ve known them and met them. However, they are not tolerant, in general, of the beliefs of “believers.” They can tolerate anything but that.

5). Just like the fervent believer, they have trouble avoiding proselytising their belief system. They often try to promote their views to believers. They get a kick out seeing believers squirm when they ask them some deep philosophical question which the believer has not considered nor been confronted with.

As an aside, in treatment, I’ve noted a number of youngsters who are constipated, like to “crap on people rather that in the toilet.” Once they start utilizing the toilet appropriately, they stop utilizing people as a repository for their bound up bodily functions. They have to be taught to drink appropriate amounts of water and eat fiber to achieve this.

6) They find a replacement for “religion.” Whether it’s the environment, political causes, sociological wrongs, whatever, but they find a replacement. They have the notions of sin, redemption, and salvation, in their substitute belief system.

7) They pretend their emotional and psychological system has nothing to do with their lack of belief. But readily attribute psychological factors to those who do believe (i.e., needing a crutch, simple minded, lacking education, delusional). They espouse that naturalism is the true faith of intellectuals. Only a simple and weak minded fool would believe anything different.

Here's my response to these (also posted in comments at his blog):

Re: #1: I think “taking the moral high ground” is a good thing, but that’s probably not what you mean–I think what you mean is claiming to have the moral high ground (and, by implication, when one doesn’t actually have it). Nobody likes arrogant people with an air of superiority, but we also must admit that there are also people who genuinely are stupid, small-minded, uneducated, ignorant, etc., and in my opinion, nobody should be exempt from criticism. If an atheist criticizes something a Christian says as stupid, ignorant, or fallacious, that may mean that the atheist is an arrogant jerk, but it may also mean that the Christian has said something stupid, ignorant, or fallacious.

Re: #3: I think this is much rarer that most Christians seem to think. In any case, the public behavior of prominent Christians shows them to actively engage in any sort of immorality I can think of (whether a genuine immorality or simply something that conservative Christianity labels as such), so Christianity doesn’t seem to be any barrier to such actions.

Re: #4: Most atheists of my acquaintance genuinely have most of those characteristics. Some do not. Most Christians of my acquaintance genuinely have most of those characteristics. Some do not. As for tolerance, in my experience atheists are far more tolerant than Christians (including more tolerant of Christians than Christians are of atheists).

Re: #5: Among my acquaintances, I don’t see any greater proclivity towards proselytization by atheists than Christians–in fact, it seems to me that it’s the reverse. There are numerous Christian streetcorner and campus preachers, Christian missionary organizations, etc., but I’ve yet to run into any similar atheist streetcorner or campus preachers or missionaries. If somebody knocks on your door to tell you about their religious views, the safe bet is that it’s an advocate of some sort of Christianity rather than an atheist.

Re: #6: If person A has a life filled with a rewarding career, raising a family, contributing to the community through public service, engaging in recreational activities, while person B is cloistered and spends all of his time praying and chanting, would you say that person A has replaced religion with other activities and has a less well-rounded life than person B? How do you distinguish someone simply filling their life with valuable activity from someone who is “replacing religion with a substitute”? I can think of some activities which are religion-like, including sports fanaticism, but I don’t think most atheists find religion substitutes which include correlaries to the notions of sin and salvation.

Re: #7: You really make two points here. One is a claim that atheists don’t recognize their nonbelief as a (or the) cause of their psychology. I think that in many cases, it’s not. Most atheists live lives that are indistinguishable from those of most nominal or mostly secularized Christians (of the sort who make up the majority of Christians in Europe). Your second point is that atheists often attribute some delusion or pathological need to religious believers. On that point I think you are correct, and that atheists who do that are mistaken. Pascal Boyer’s excellent book Religion Explained argues, correctly in my opinion, that religious inferences are just like other kinds of inferences that we make, and that it is the natural state of humans that they infer agency behind causes. Unfortunately, our natural inference patterns get it wrong much of the time–when we inferred that lightning bolts were thrown by the gods, that was incorrect, for example.

God took me off the grid

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 00:00 GMT

I had every intention of blogging during the long holiday weekend. Catching up on email and work at some point was on the agenda as well. However, this morning in the middle of email my laptop froze up. I could not do anything with it and so had to power down. On start up I got a missing media notice and it looks like my hard drive went kaput. Luckily my Windows Mobile phone has everything I need to stay connected. Email, typepad blog platform, etc. Well we went to my family in Hollywood Beach for a fireworks display and BBQ tonight. I left my phone in a backpack, so I would not take it in the beach or water with me. Great, it rained, the backpack got soaked and my phone is down now too!

So I think it is God telling me to go off grid this weekend. I am writing this on Bonnie's desktop machine. The kids are staying with my cousins and Bonnie and I are headed down to Key Largo for the weekend. I have her spare pink Razor with my Sim card for phone calls, but that is it. No email, no computers, no blogging! Speak to you all Sunday night or Monday, enjoy your weekend!

Hopefully, I had one article written scheduled for tomorrow morning. I hope it publishes.

Atheism and the difference between consistency and entailment

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 11:14 GMT

A Christian rural psychologist has posted on his blog about "some psychological aspects of atheism," where he claims that:

[Atheists] tend to not be able to understand that their position means “anything goes,” with respect to morality. If there is no God, then there is no objective thing as morality. It’s all subjective… They always find some way to justify the fact that they practice at least some moral principles. Whether they think it’s biologically ingrained through millions of years of evolution or morality is simply “adaptive in allowing the species to survive.” Most often; however, they have never even considered the logical consequences of atheism and morality.

He also engages in some armchair theorizing about atheism being caused by absent fathers, being intolerant, etc., all without any reference to empirical evidence. (And given the recent poll results where one in five self-reported "atheists" say that they believe in God or a higher power, I think any study of atheists needs to make sure that it's dealing with people who actually know what the word means.)

But the quoted passage is completely off-base. Atheism is a denial of the existence of gods. That entails the falsity of divine command theory as a basis for morality, but not much else. Most philosophers have rejected divine command theory as an adequate basis for morality since Plato wrote the "Euthyphro" and asked the critical question, "is the pious [or right] loved by the gods because it is pious [right], or is it pious [right] because it is loved by the gods"? Either fork of the dilemma leads to bad consequences--if the former, then there must be some other ground for moral rightness than because the gods will it to be so, and so the gods themselves are unnecessary. If the latter, then the gods could make acts that we consider to be clearly immoral into right actions according to whim. The latter seems more consistent with the morality of the Bible, since God is depicted therein as commanding murderous acts including the killing of women and children, but it is simply a "might makes right" philosophy of morality. But I think the former is clearly the right horn of the dilemma to grasp--morality is not something which requires gods.

Now, there are certainly atheist philosophers who have argued that atheism precludes more than the divine command theory. The atheist philosopher J.L. Mackie, in his book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, argues against morality being objective properties of the world on the basis of their "queerness." And I think he is probably right at least to the extent that moral properties are not human-independent properties. My view is that there are certain basic values, held by most human beings and evolutionary in origin, essential to social organization and beneficial to our survival and thriving, which objectively entail moral consequences for us, composed as we are and in the environment (physical and social) we find ourselves in.

But my view is not important for confronting the claim of the quoted passage. All atheism means is the denial of the existence of gods. It is not a complete worldview, it is simply a single component in an infinite number of possible consistent worldviews. An atheist can, like J. M. E. McTaggart, believe in reincarnation and immortality. An atheist can believe in the paranormal, in ghosts, in supernatural beings other than gods. An atheist can be a nihilist, a relativist, a utilitarian, a contractarian, an existentialist. An atheist can be a conservative, a liberal, a socialist, an anarchist, a monarchist, a libertarian, a Marxist, or hold any other possible view of political philosophy that doesn't entail the existence of gods. All of these views are consistent with atheism, meaning simply that no contradiction is produced by the combination of the views.

Amorality and nihilism are consistent with atheism--it is certainly possible for an atheist to hold that there are no moral truths, that there is no difference between right and wrong. But mere consistency is not the same as entailment--it does not follow that if you are an atheist, it logically follows or is necessary to hold such views. Yet that's what the quoted author is falsely claiming to be the case.

Note that amorality and nihilism are also consistent with theism--and in my opinion, both are possible for theists whichever horn of the Euthyphro dilemma is grasped. If the ground of what is morally right is something independent of the gods that does not exist, even while gods do, then that's an amoral theism. And if all there is to morality is what the gods will it to be, that makes morality dependent upon the values of the gods--if the gods choose to be amoral or nihilists, then again there's amoral theism.

The Christian psychologist goes on to write (citing this very blog for the quote):

Now, I have only seen or read about one logically consistent atheist…..Jeffrey Dahmer. There have been philosophers, I know, who have come to this logical conclusion. But I’m talking about someone who logically practiced what he believed.

“If a person doesn’t think there is a God to be accountable to, then—then what’s the point of trying to modify your behaviour to keep it within acceptable ranges? That’s how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all just came from the slime. When we, when we died, you know, that was it, there is nothing…” (1)
So said Dahmer.

The "what's the point" question is easy to answer--there are clearly consequences for us to our own behavior regardless of any accountability to God. Sane, rational people desire to live good and happy lives, rather than follow the example of Dahmer. Even leaving God out of the picture, where is the slightest appeal in following Dahmer as a model of rational living? I see none.

But the position this psychologist takes opens up an obvious question that he doesn't notice--God isn't accountable to anyone. Why should God be good, instead of acting maliciously, callously, and evilly, in the absence of any accountability to anyone? According to this psychologist, the answer should be that God should rationally act as an omnipotent Jeffrey Dahmer. Having no greater God to hold him responsible, he should not be bound to any code of morality, his word should be valueless, and every action based on the whims of the moment without regard to any future consequences.

That should be considered a reductio ad absurdum of his position. Either there are rational reasons to not act like Jeffrey Dahmer independently of being held accountable to a higher being, or God behaves irrationally by not acting like Jeffrey Dahmer. (Or perhaps, given the content of the Old Testament, God does act like Jeffrey Dahmer.)

UPDATE: I've engaged in further argument with the psychologist in the comments of his blog, as have others.