Like most Americans, I used to hold some self-evident beliefs about food:

The three dogmas of the food phobiac:

1. There are foods I “like” and foods I “dislike” and I ought to stick to the things that I like.
2. The better something tastes, the more unhealthy it must be and vice versa.  You must choose between a long life of disgusting food or indulge yourself and die early.
3. There is a value hierarchy for all the edible parts of any animal. For example, top sirloin is the ideal for beef.  There’s a similar value hierarchy for animals themselves. Decisions about which animal and which part of the animal to eat are therefore a simple cost/benefit equation.

Two things completely changed by attitude on food: getting married, and moving to China.

The psychology of taste

Our perception of taste is closely associated with our memories of things such as the taste of past meals, our emotional states, and sensory associations with similar foods.  We come to associate foods with sensory reactions based on many factors such as familiarity, the quality of most meals, the people we were with, etc.  By dissociating taste as such from negative experiences we can learn to appreciate food for its inherent taste, without emotional baggage.  We can learn to prefer the taste of healthy foods by the same process.

Sensory integration therapy for food phobiacs

The first step to fixing food phobias is to recognize the problem: it’s not OK to exclude foods because of food sensitivities.  All the “most hated” American foods are delicious when prepared properly. Having recognized the problem, here is the program that worked for me:

The strategy is to gradually introduce foods in different settings, gradually building exposure and positive associations with certain foods.  For example, when my wife learned that I hated zucchini, she gradually introduced it into my diet starting with small amounts balanced by other flavors, and growing to having zucchini be the dominate ingredient.   Here is what she cooked:

One of the main differences between the Chinese diet and the Western diet is that the entire animal is considered edible. Whereas Americans stuff everything other than “choice” cuts into burgers, sausages, and McNuggets, the Chinese proudly consume the head, claws, organs, and other miscellaneous parts of animals as delicacies. This is not because they’re poorer – the head and feet are the most expensive parts of the animal. Neither do they restrict themselves to a few “blessed” animals – the entire animal kingdom is on the menu.

The difference is that of the food elitist versus that of the food connoisseur. The elitist believes that only a narrow socially accepted list of foods is good enough for him. The connoisseur is an explorer, who uses his palate as the universe-expanding sensory organ it was meant to be.  The elitist lives within the small dietary-social circle he was born into. The connoisseur traverses the biological and cultural realms.

The approach I now take to eating new things now is exploratory one. Instead of responding with “like” or “dislike” I try to understand the flavor components and texture of food. I appreciate meals from many perspectives – sensory, anatomical, social, and historical, to fully integrate it with my worldview.

None of this is to claim attitude alone will make everything taste good. Meals must be prepared skillfully to taste good. The notion I want to dispel is that taste is either genetic or set by undecipherable psychological factors we cannot affect. Human culture has a rich history of many culinary traditions and we ought to learn to appreciate them without emotional baggage or provincial bias.

If you had a $1,000,000 budget to spend within a year, how would you use it to help people discover Objectivism on the web?

There is no commitment or promise entailed in this post, but if have a good suggestion, don’t be surprised if your idea is implemented, or someone contacts you for more details.

Having lived through war, the Founders recognized that during war, it is necessary to suspend the normal function of law, as “law” is a concept that is only possible in civil society. But they also recognized the danger of allowing any exception that would lead to the violation of rights. So, they provided strict limits: the President is the Commander in Chief, but he may only act with the consent of Congress, and that consent expires after two years. Furthermore, Congress has the power to issue letters of Marque and Reprisal, which authorizes specific individuals to attack specific groups and bring them to admiralty courts. In both cases, enemies were to be explicitly identified by Congress and enjoyed the protection of the rules of war.

We may argue about how practical these principles are and how earnestly they were followed from the start, but it is worth considering how they are routinely violated in the so-called “war on terror” going on today:

There is no war: “Terror” is an emotion, not a group of people. Therefore, no actual “war” and no actual “victory” (which requires clearly identified parties) is possible. This makes a congressional declaration of war impossible.  While Congress makes occasional statements in support of the executive office, they are Constitutionally meaningless.

There is no enemy: The Constitution provides for Letters of Marque and Reprisal in cases where a war is not possible or desirable. But there is no enemy in the “war on terror.” “Al Qaeda” is a quasi-mythical entity which has more existence as an entity in the minds of those who hate/fear and/or admire it than as a physical organization of material command and support. Most of its “followers” are non-violent. Many more advocate violence (not admirable but not an act of war) than practice it. Many of those killed as “terrorists” have only some vague emotional bond with its ideology, others none at all. Certainly there is no physical network in which all such persons can be proven to be involved.

Killings are extra-judicial:

The executive branch has created a new class of enemy: the “unlawful combatant.” This person is exempt from both civil protections as well as the rules of war. (By the way, the purpose of so-called “rules of war” is not to protect the enemy, as in any conflict at least one party is by definition willing to violate rights. Their purpose is enable peaceful coexistence possible afterward. By contrast, the historical purpose of disregarding the laws of war is to dehumanize the enemy and thus make post-conflict peaceful coexistence impossible.)

No one is off-limits: in a war, combatants and non-combatants are clearly defined, and non-combatants are off-limits. While this is never perfectly practiced, at least the enemy and the conflict are clearly identified and so are violations can be exposed. But by identifying an emotion as the enemy, no end to the conflict is possible, and no one is off-limits.

For example, the U.S. government has no problem killing its own citizens without any judicial process for advocating violence outside of the country. That is a crime within U.S. territory, but not an act of war when conducted abroad, so it violates both the legal rights of U.S. citizens and the sovereignty of other nations.

Most “terrorists” tried in the U.S. since 9/11 were actually recruited and provided with their targets and plots by the FBI. They are not guilty of plotting any attack, as the government did that for them, but of the emotion of hate and/or the desire to spread fear in the public. In fact it is the U.S. government that terrorizes the public by finding peaceful but angry people and training them to be terrorists – and then prosecuting them for the same crime.

Guilt is tautological: While the “war on terror” is nominally against “terrorism,” it is actually defined not in terms of any particular action, but by the potential emotion created in the (hypothetical) victim. The final result is that anyone may be imprisoned or assassinated for the sole reason that something they thing did scared someone. Until there is a fundamental change to human nature, no end is possible for such a conflict.

Why was Anwar al-Awlaki (and his 16-year old son) killed? Because he is a terrorist. How do we know that? Because he is dead. If he were not guilty, he would not have been assassinated. No legal proof is needed because this is a military decision, and military decisions are outside the realm of civil law. Why is killing unarmed U.S. citizens for their violent rhetoric a military matter? Because we’re in a “war on terror” and fear is now an act of war.

There is no victory:  One of the worst aspects of the “war on terror” is the impossibility of victory.  How can we possibly defeat a basic human emotion?  When every single Muslim is converted to Christianity or killed?  But the war has already been extended beyond those fighting for ideological reasons — much of the “anti-terrorist” activity within the U.S. is actually in pursuit of the drug war (a conflict with a similar history).  And just like the drug war, when the enemy is a mental state, no victory is ever possible.

Conclusion:

The ultimate purpose of making an emotion the enemy is to take the rules of military action (which are properly outside the realm of civil law) out of the limited context of war and allow them to be applied to anyone. Thus is justified endless war, unchecked expansion of the power and size of the state, and a total end round around Constitutional checks on the State’s power to violate individual rights.

For example, AIDS kills very few Americans versus heart disease or cancer, yet gets significantly higher research funds than the two major killers. The majority of government research funds is directed toward better ways to kill (via the Defense Dept) and heal (via the NIH) people. Yet the government-funded research is good at neither, since breakthroughs consistently come from private search, which composes over 60% of science funding in the developed world.

What standard are politicians supposed to use to decide which scientific and medical projects show the most promise? Popularity is not a suitable standard, since popular scientists are the champions of the big discoveries of the past, not the future. Unfortunately, when your one’s own investment money is not at stake, the only remaining standard to guide research dollars is political pull, which is exactly what happens with government-funded science.

More:

• Wikipedia: Science policy of the United States
• Yaron Brook: Government vs. Science
•  Malini Kochhar: Government Funding vs. the Progress of Science
• Liberty Institute, India: Should Government Fund Science?
• The One Minute Case For Science

In a populist democracy with a mixed economy, every group that participates in the political system is a “special interest”, with the incentive and the power to use the political system to extract benefits for its members at the at the expense of everyone else. Corporations, unions, disease-awareness organizations, “minority” groups, and anyone who organizes around a common cause has the power believes that their fate or cause is more legitimate, important, and “special” than that of everyone else.

The welfare and regulatory systems are the primary means to coercively redistribute property and confer monopoly benefits to various groups. In a mixed economy, everyone is constantly on the defensive against organized groups extracting benefits from him, and on the offensive attempting to use the coercive power of the state to extract benefits from others. Interventionism creates a vicious cycle hardly unique to corporations: first a lobby tries to extract special privileges from some politically neutral group, the group hires lobbyists to defend itself, and ends up using the influence it has gained to extract privileges at the expense of another neutral group, which must defend itself in turn.

The existence of “special interests” is just a symptom of the disease: the growth of government power to a degree that allows those in power to violate our rights and steal our property for the benefits of their constituents. Populist “maverick” politicians who claim that they will “fight special interests” and “change the culture in Washington” are just attempting to subvert the power of the state to favor their particular constituency. Campaign finance regulations are just monopoly privileges created by the political élite to hide corruption from the public and make it more difficult for those without political connections and money to get elected and in order to defend themselves or join in the looting.

The only solution to the problems caused by interventionism is to end interventionism – to separate government and economy. Take away the power of the government, and you will remove both the incentive and the power of the “special interests.” As long as governments try to control people and businesses with laws that go beyond the protection of property rights, the “special interests” will have the incentive to control governments.

More:

• The One Minute Case Against Interventionism
• The One Minute Case For Capitalism

Loan-sharking (charging high interest rates backed up by the threat of violence) reflects the fact that the loans are being given to creditors with a high risk of default. The need for violence is due to the failure of governments to see this fact, or to adequately enforce the loan contracts (such as with overly lax bankruptcy laws), rather than any immorality inherent in moneylenders. There is no such thing as a single “just” interest rate because interest rates in a free market move towards an equilibrium determined by the time-preferences of individual debtors and lenders.

See Also

• The One Minute Case For “Price Gouging”
• The One Minute Case For Unrestrained Profit

If a court can make a definitive causal connection between an injured party and a party responsible for a pollutant, it should demand compensation of harms. If it cannot find a responsible party guilty, but punishes an innocent party, it punishes man for his nature as a productive, industrial being and thus makes human life impossible.

More:

• The One Minute Case Against Environmentalism

Fact: There are poor people.

Socialist: Give me all your money, I will take care of them. Or else.

Capitalist: I can make lots of money from them because they’ll work for less.

Moderate: Give me half your money, so I can pay them not to work, then hire anyone who doesn’t want your money for free. If you make a profit, I’ll take it to pay more poor people to not work.

Fact: People lie.

Socialist: The government ought to teach people how to think and decide who is allowed to say what because people can’t tell lies from truth.

Capitalist: Honesty is just good business. Suing frauds for everything they’ve got is also good business.

Moderate: Say whatever you want, as long as no one is offended. But just in case, a “truth board” will censor anything anyone might find objectionable.

Fact: Some people are more successful than others.

Socialist: Since men are all equal, differences must be due to education and inheritance. We must seize inheritance and other gifts, and replace education with standard government schools. If anyone is still more successful than anyone else in school or in their career, they must have cheated, so we must punish them until they are equal.

Capitalist: Let’s find out what makes people successful so we can make a fortune doing or selling it.

Moderate: It’s OK to be successful as long as you don’t make anyone jealous. You must make those who envy you feel better about their failures by sharing your success with them. Or else.

Fact: Some people don’t like each other.

Socialist: Since men are equal, they must all love each other equally. We must take away anything that make them different or special away from them so that they cannot tell any group apart.

Capitalist: More customers is always good for business. If someone doesn’t want to work with someone for irrational reasons, I will happily take their customers and employees.

Moderate: People ought to learn to get along. Therefore, I will force people who hate each other to live and work together so they can learn to appreciate their differences.

Medicine requires reason

The human body operates according to certain causal principles. If we wish to make a change in our health, we must understand some of those causal principles and act according to our understanding. To act without a rational basis is to disconnect our goals from their achievement. Irrationality does not guarantee failure — it just means that success, to the extent that it happens, will be due to other factors that our goals.

The study of human health is especially difficult

In the field of health, especially rigorous rationality is necessary for at least five reasons:

1. The human body will solve, or at least try to solve most problems on its own. This makes establishing causality due external factors quite difficult and introduces biases such as the placebo effect and the regression fallacy.
2. The body is very complex! Because it evolved over billions of years, the causal relationships in the body are extremely complex and interdependent.
3. For example, even if we know that the body has too little of a certain substance, taking that substance may: a: not do anything b: cause the body to produce even less of the substance or c: cause an unpredictable side effect. On the other hand, if the body has too much of something, then the solution may be to a: consume less of that substance b: consume more of that substance or c: the consumption has no relationship at all to the level of that substance.
4. It can be difficult to measure the extent to which medical problems are solved. While some things can be measured, many things, such as pain levels are very difficult to quantify.
5. It is difficult to isolate causal factors in human beings since changes in health take time to develop and we can’t control every factor during an experiment or dissect human subjects when it is over.
6. Humans tend to be irrational when it comes to their own mortality! We fear death, leading us to irrational over or under spending on health as well as being especially vulnerable to all the logical fallacies.

In medicine, rationality requires quality science research

There is a name for the field that applies rigor to the discovery of facts about nature: science. Science has been so successful in improving the state of human knowledge that many irrational, anti-scientific quacks have begun to use the term “scientific” to describe anti-scientific practices and ideas. In response to this, the medical community has come up with a term which identifiers the distinguishing aspect of rationality: “evidence based medicine.” This phrase is a necessary redundancy that identifies the essential characteristic of science: that it is based on sensory evidence. The alternative to non-evidence based science is not science at all, but emotionalism – “I feel it is true, so it must be.”

In the last hundred years, we have discovered certain practices for ensuring the conclusions of our medical experiments are valid. We know experimentally that observing these practices leads to more accurate conclusions. Let me emphasize that: the truth of medical claims is strongly correlated with the degree to which experiments follow accepted scientific standards. There are a number of objective scales for measuring the quality of an experiment.

Five characteristics of quality medical studies

Here is the essence of quality medical studies:

1. The experiment and its results are fully described in enough detail to reproduce and compare the results
2. There is a randomized control group
3. The selection of control subjects is double blind
4. The methods of randomization and blinding are accurately described and appropriate
5. There is a description of withdrawals and dropouts.

How to judge health claims

Unfortunately, it is difficult to design good experiments and more difficult still to reach firm conclusions from most experiments. In the legitimate (“evidence-based”) medical community, the degree to which practitioners adhere to the principles varies greatly – but they at least try. Fortunately, in the “quack community,” while there is sometimes the pretense of evidence, basic scientific principles are so grossly violated and ignored that is becomes easy to distinguish fraud from legitimate science.

Here is an important point: it is difficult to make firm conclusions in medicine. But when valid scientific principles are not followed, it is easy to conclude that no valid conclusion can be reached. In other words, you can’t always be sure what’s good for you, but you can be sure when someone is talking nonsense.

Another important point: When someone makes irrational health claims, it does not mean that those claims are false. It just means those claims were not derived by rational (scientific) principles, and so we cannot anything about their truth – we can only ignore them as arbitrary. It is as if someone claimed invisible, undetectable pink unicorn in the sky - that which cannot be proven or disproved can only be dismissed.

How can we apply these ideas? It so happens that most health claims in the non-scientific media and many health “practitioners” are unscientific. This does not mean that they are wrong, or that people don’t feel helped by them. It means that their claims have no connection to reality.

In some cases, the practices that quacks suggest are helpful — but not for the reasons they identify. More importantly, in all cases following rational, scientific principles leads increases the likely hood of successful outcomes over quackery (aka emotionalism).

To conclude, to judge whether a medical claim is legitimate or arbitrary nonsense, check whether:

1. It is based on quality experiments
2. It is consistent with medical consensus (of evidence-based medicine)
3. The certainty of the claim is well-established (by numerous studies, systematic reviews, etc

More:

• “Bad Science” by Ben Goldacre
• Ben Goldcare at TED: Battling Bad Science
• The One Minute Case For Science
• YouTube: “Alternative Space Program”

I am writing these words on my first computer designed under Steve Job’s watch, and unfortunately, my last. Even though computers are my career and passion, I have never been attached to them as individual objects, only as an idea. I feel like using this computer for the last three years has been kind of like living in a building designed by Howard Roark, and knowing that I can never have another products created by him (even if Apple continues to be inspired by his vision), I feel far more reluctant to sell it when it is time for the inevitable upgrade.

Steve Jobs was an intensely personal man – his means of expressing his values was almost purely through the products of his work. Unlike most other tech companies, prototypes and discarded ideas rarely leaked out of his laboratories. He only announced new products when he was sure that they could be made. I think he wanted to be known and judged solely by the things he could mass produce, as the “Apple product” included everything for him – the supply chain, production process, company campus, storefront, even the carefully orchestrated box opening ceremony. Still, I think he was able to communicate his basic sense of life in his one public speech. I strongly recommend that everyone watch it and take its ideas to heart.

My introduction to the “Apple experience” came from folklore.org – a collection of stories about the creation of the Macintosh computer. Because he was so private, I eagerly anticipate his upcoming authorized biography. But ultimately, I think his products speak for themselves. They are the concrete (or rather aluminum and glass) embodiment of the values that made Apple successful – and changed the world for the better.

Steve Jobs, you were insanely great.

Today Sarah asked me why China is only now building subway systems in all its major cities. I pointed out that non-local mass transit is a capitalist phenomena: totally aside from the fact that you need the wealth generated by capitalism to pay for such systems, there is no need to travel in a socialist economy.

Under socialism, the work unit is the basic unit of social structure. The vast majority of people are born, educated, work, live, and die under a single work unit (a city block, village, or factory). One cannot buy or rent a dwelling (that requires property rights) so one cannot move away from work: the State assigns nearby housing. One cannot change chose or change jobs, so one cannot move work away from home. Housing assignments are hereditary and based on local connections, so it is impossible to move away from relatives: thus no need to travel to see family.

Furthermore, there is no need to travel in order to shop: since all goods are identical commodities sold by identical state-owned stores. There is little demand to travel for tourism either, since all monuments are variations on the same state-promulgated patriotic themes. There is no incentive for entrepreneurs to promote any non-approved attractions – in fact, such activities can be quite dangerous.

Neither is it practical to marry someone across town: the work unit either regulates marriage directly (the work unit leader must approve the marriage) or indirectly: since permission is required to live together and often to have children as well.

Thus, even in places where the State created subway systems prior to the introduction of capitalist elements, they were/are vastly under utilized. In fact, their primary purpose was military defense, not transportation.

I’ve posted the photos from my trip to Qíyūn Shān on Flickr!

Is religion a value to mankind? Some alleged benefits which have been attributed to religion include: scientific and philosophical principles, technologies such as the printing press, the colonization of the new world, great works of art such as Michelangelo’s David and the Sistine Chapel, monasteries that preserved and carried on knowledge during the Middle Ages, social institutions such as charities, schools, and universities. It’s undeniable that all these things have benefited mankind and that religion played a part in them.

On a personal note, I have  benefited greatly from the Judaism. A Jewish organization helped my parents come to America, placed me in private school so I could learn English and Hebrew, sent me to summer camp, paid for my trip to Israel, and even helped fund my college tuition. In addition to these material benefits, I learned a lot about history, philosophy, ethics, Hebrew, and social interaction while attending Sunday school and then helping to teach it for three years. Many of my religious teachers were intelligent and inspirational people who taught me many things in the classroom and by example.

So, it is indisputable that religion has done many good things for man. Is this sufficient evidence to conclude that religion is a value to man? The fact that an institution does good is not sufficient evidence that it is good overall. Consider a profession which is not considered desirable despite doing some good for people: medical quackery. A quack who sells a fake remedy for all ailments provides some benefit to people: the placebo effect often makes people feel better, and the alcohol, cocaine, and other drugs contained in remedies were often effective and making their users feel better. However, despite the benefit he provides, the quack also defrauds people, does not fix underlying health problems, and often addicts his patients to his “medicine.” Even though the quack provides a benefit, a real doctor could provide a greater benefit to people without the accompanying harm. Thus, when evaluating religion, we must consider the total effect, not just isolated benefits, and evaluate whether the benefits religion provides are essential to its nature.

To make such an evaluation, we have to find the essence of organized religion — what is its basic characteristic? The Heritage dictionary defines religion as “Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe; A personal or institutionalized system grounded in such belief and worship.”

The essential trait of religion is not that it commissions works of art, funds charities, builds universities, runs hospitals, or sponsors scientific achievement – all these things are done by other secular individuals as effectively as any religious institution. The essence of organized religion is that it is an institution dedicated to the belief in and worship of the supernatural. What is the supernatural? Heritage dictionary: “Of or relating to existence outside the natural world; Attributed to a power that seems to violate or go beyond natural forces; of or relating to a deity.” The essence of religion is the worship of that which is outside of the natural world. Because the supernatural cannot be directly perceived by the senses or understood by reason, the theist claims that it can only be revealed, (or is best revealed) by divine revelation, emotional conviction, faith, and other non-rational and indeed anti-rational means. The essence of religion is not a rational, systematic, empirical, causal exploration of our world, but faith in the non-rational, the arbitrary, the supernatural, the uncaused, and the unseen. In short, the mystic says: “Believe it because I say so.” Or, “Believe it because this book says so.” Or, “Believe it because it feels right” Or sometimes, “Believe it, or you’ll be burned at the stake.” Faith is the distinguishing characteristic of religion. How does one have faith in the unseen? By suspending reason. Religious mysticism only survives to the degree than man is able to suspend his reason and “believe”, ignoring facts to the contrary, ignoring reason itself. Religion only survives to the degree that it can surprise reason in man. As Arthur C. Clarke said, “Faith is believing in what you know isn’t true.” Since the first the witch doctor first discovered that he could gain power and wealth by promising to bring rain and scare away ghosts, mystics of one sort of another have propped up the supernatural.

If religion does lead men to abandon reason, what is the result?

The Greeks discovered reason 3000 years ago when the philosopher Thales proposed that nature should be understood by replacing myth with logic. They founded mathematics, optics, the theory of the atom, logic, geometry, and a system of ethics based on man’s happiness as its goal. When religion took over the Western world, many Greek ideas were lost to the West. As the Roman Empire was falling apart, religious fundamentalists seized the opportunity to consolidate their power by destroying all the secular learning institutions that still existed. In 529 A.D., emperor Justinian shut down the Neoplatonic Academy of Athens as part of is purge of all “heretic” ideas –formally (see Corpus juris civilis) ending the Hellenistic age of intellectual and religious toleration. From then on, the Christian Church engaged in a campaign of violent destruction of any source of knowledge that was not under the direct control of the church. Thus began 800 of ignorance and superstition known as the Dark Ages.

During the Dark Ages, life was a short, brutal, primitive, and thoroughly religious experience. The government was dominated by tyrannical warlords who forced their enslaved populace to fight bloody wars. The church dominated all levels of society, from the local parish to the highest advisors of the king. Monks carried on all the intellectual work of the medieval society – but only because anyone no one dared to study anything but the teachings of the church — after a sufficient numbers of purges, stakes, hangings, and stonings to demonstrate the dedication of the Church to stamping out reason. In 1349, over a third of Europe died because men believed that the plague was a sign from God and did not attempt to find out its source by any means other than faith. When great men like Copernicus and Galileo tried to discover the workings on the solar system, they were denounced and persecuted by the Church. Can you name all the great inventors, scientists, and writers who were burned at the stake or had their tongues torn out because they chose to believe what they saw with their eyes rather than what some raving mystic told them to “just believe”? What about the millions of Jews, Muslims, Witches, and Gypsies killed by a bloody power-grab justified by religion during the Crusades? As Johannes Cardinal Wildebrands said, “When religion sanctities hatred, it lends to that hatred a special ferocity. Normal moral inhibitors are erased.” But forget the Dark Ages. In today’s America, the Kansas and Texas Boards of Education is religious mysticism at work, with their violent opposition to the separation of church and state and the teaching of science in the classroom.

It was only when the church’s control of universities began to disintegrate through the sponsorship by newly powerful city states across Europe that intellectual freedom and innovation began again and Aristotelian and Hellenistic influence were imported from the East. The early intellectuals were all affiliated with the church – but that is only because the church murdered any intellectuals refused to conform to the church and destroyed all non-religious intellectual institutions.The rediscovery of Aristotle by St. Thomas Aquinas, who tentatively wrote than reason is not always incompatible with faith paved the way for the Renaissance of the Western world. The foundation of Western culture is the reliance of reason rather than faith to find out the basic facts of reality. By the use of reason, great thinkers like Francois Voltaire, John Locke, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson discovered that the laws of nature and that man had certain unalienable rights, among them the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. While the Islamic world plunged ever deeper into the stagnation of religious fundamentalism, the great minds of Europe and America woke up and asserted the right of every man to live for his own sake, and the proper function of government as an obedient servant, not master of the people. They recognized that voluntary trade to mutual benefit was superior to slavery and servitude, whether to a king or to a mob. When the Founders established the United States of America, they set up an experiment to test their newly found values. The experiment, for a while at least, was a great success. The civilized world experienced never-before seen prosperity, economic growth, and increases in the longevity and quality of life. Religion did not die out in the West, but its influence was delimited because the Founders recognized that the role of government was to protect men’s rights, not to enforce morality, and allowed men to their own meaning in the universe. Western civilization was far from perfect: slavery, war, and suffering persisted — but to the extent that men recognized the right of every person to his own life, their societies flourished. As soon as it became possible to form institutions of learning outside of the church’s power, they quickly surpassed the intellectual progress of the intellectually shackled members of the church. Today, religious institutions as such do not have any significant role in scientific progress.

In short, the rise out of the misery of the Dark Ages was a victory of reason over faith. “For the first time in modern history,” wrote one Enlightenment writer “an authentic respect for reason became the mark of an entire culture.”

America, the product of the Enlightenment, was founded by men who realized that religion everywhere tries to tangle itself into the government and puts itself in conflict with reason. This is why the First Amendment states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…” This is why John Adams said “The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion, ” Thomas Jefferson said “Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, more than on our opinions in physics and geometry. . . .”, James Madison said “Religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together”, Benjamin Franklin said “But scarcely was I arrived at fifteen years of age, when, after having doubted in turn of different tenets, according as I found them combated in the different books that I read, I began to doubt of Revelation itself”, Thomas Paine said “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of….Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and of my own part, I disbelieve them all”, and Ethan Ellen said “Denominated a Deist, the reality of which I have never disputed, being conscious that I am no Christian.” The Founders realized that if organized religion were tied to the government, it would forever more try to use the state to prevent men from using their minds, just as it had been doing for centuries in their former home, England.

History shows that during the brief times when man has rapidly improved his condition, reason dominated. Whenever faith took center stage, men followed the mystics into poverty and slavery. The history of the twentieth century is no exception. In one country after another, men worshiped not God, but the State, as a living, breathing mystical entity that had all the attributes of a god. Blinded by collectivism, the followed Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Kim, Pol Pot into suicidal policies and atrocities against their own neighbors.

In conclusion, the chief aim of religion has been to cripple reason – man’s basic means of survival. As a primitive form of philosophy, religion served a useful purpose. All men need philosophy, but religion has rarely, if ever been an adequate substitute for reason. As an institution that dominated society for millennia, the Church served many useful functions. However, to the extent that it has suppressed reason, religion has been a great destructive force. The witch doctor is ultimately a destroyer of values, with his hostility to reason and false promises of a supernatural repayment for the very real suffering he inflicts on earth.

What is the difference between science and philosophy?

Science is distinguished from philosophy by subject matter: science studies the specific nature of the universe, and philosophy (of which religion is a primitive form) studies the fundamental and universal of the universe and man’s relationship to it.  Both are concerned with facts, but they differ in subject matter and the standard of evidence.  In the field of philosophy, we must be logically rigorous, but we cannot, and need not measure the physical evidence quantitatively as in the subject-specific sciences.

Science is made possible by the acceptance of certain philosophical axioms in metaphysics and epistemology. In metaphysics, science requires recognizing that all entities behave in a causal manner according to their nature. In epistemology, it recognizes that man is capable of perceiving and understanding reality by the use of his senses, and because his consciousness is fallible and not automatic, he needs to actively adhere to reason and logic to reach the right conclusions.  Science requires a systematic method to collect evidence and correctly interpret it because knowledge of how nature works is not self-evident.

Science is different in degree from informal empirical methods such as “trial and error” and in kind from non-empirical methods such as revelation, astrology, or emotionalism.   But the basic method – of rational investigation based on the evidence of reality must be used in all fields, whether philosophy, law, chemistry, mathematic, or cooking.

More:

The One Minute Case for Science.

The Origin of Religion

The definition of “religion” varies between cultures and scholars, but generally speaking, it originated in pre-history as a solution to a problem:

At some point at the dawn of history, men discovered themselves to be in possession of powerful mental abilities able to perceive the events around them and communicate them to others, but they lacked an explanation for most of the cause of these events.  These men needed to know how to act in response to these events, both social and natural.  Instinct and imitation no longer sufficed in complex social structures and dynamic environments.  Men responded to the challenge by inventing religion.  Religion provided both an explanation of natural phenomena and a set of rules for social behavior.  It was a primitive form of philosophy — a set of beliefs about the fundamental nature of existence and man’s relationship to it.  The nature of these beliefs evolved dramatically over time:

1. The Animism of Primitive Man

Primitive pre-literate man dealt with the chaos of nature by creating animistic spirits which he begged to improve his condition.  Since his prayers and offerings were no better than chance, he led an unpredictable existence dominated by fear.  Nevertheless, a philosophy of existence, crude as it was, was an important survival asset to the first human settlements.  Many thousands of years of pre-history passed in this state.

2. Technological Priesthood & Early Civilization

The first civilizations organized spirits in polytheistic anthropomorphic cults, which held centralized political and religious power.  The technological priesthood was an elite which was either closely related to or was ruling elite and monopolized the dissemination of both practical knowledge and supernatural doctrines (there was little distinction between the two), and was thus able to control the peasant masses which it taxed and enslaved to remain in power.  Their monopoly of technical knowledge was the cause of their eventual downfall:  Egypt, Mesopotamia, Minoa, the Indus valley civilization, the cults organized around the Hebrew temple in Palestine, and the native New World empires successfully kept their secrets from the masses, but were all destroyed by innovative external invaders.

3. Classical Civilization and the Discovery of Reason

At some point, around 600 B.C., several classical civilizations developed an innovative intellectual elite which was distinct from religious cults which catered to the masses.  The first Greek, Indian, and Chinese philosophers introduced a secular natural philosophy, and broke the monopoly of the theistic cults. In these societies, and especially in classical Greece, the invention of a rational worldview, and the decentralization of knowledge made possible rapid technological progress, a rich cultural tradition, and military and trading empires spanning the globe.  Technocratic bureaucracies swept away the old pre-literate world in the Hellenistic world, the Roman Empire, and in imperial China.

Materially, the classical age was a time of great progress.  Yet there was no unified philosophical basis for personal freedom, no systematic application of reason to nature, or a moral basis for self-improvement and ambition.  Self-sacrificing and self-abnegating philosophies such as Confucianism and Buddhism provided both stability and stagnation in the East, while the West gradually forgot its philosophical traditions under increasingly totalitarian political regimes.

4. Mysticism & Medieval Civilization

The invention of Christianity was an evolutionary yet radical change.  Its chief innovation was an individualistic moral theory.  Its success is due to two factors:

First, it is non-falsifiable, because it does not need validation by any specific material events or rewards (unlike animatistic and anthropomorphic polytheism and sacrifice cults, and much later, Marxism).  A policy of strict informational hygiene (often by the simple expedient of killing all apostates) kept the emphasis on the core ideology of individual reward in the afterlife.

Second, Christianity devolved secular authority from religious authority.  “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” implied a distinction between ideas about existence at large and submission to “practical” political authority.  Unlike most previous religions, Christianity did not depend on a central political authority, and could persist as a philosophy of existence apart from the current political regime.

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5. The Re-discovery of reason and Enlightenment Civilization

The distinction between secular and spiritual subjects was not realized until the thirteenth century, when, due to the re-introduction of Aristotle by St. Thomas Aquinas, the idea of reason-based thinking was distinguished from revelation.  This distinction is unique to Western civilization and is the origin of the Western concept of “religion” as a realm of thought distinct from “philosophy.”   From this point on, religion was increasingly seen as having a special domain apart from ideas of “practical” matters.  This distinction made all rational studies of nature, including what we know as “philosophy” and “science” possible.

The Enlightenment was the product of the recognition of reason as a tool for learning about and manipulating reality, first as a supplement, and later as a replacement for revelation.  Gradually, as the power of reason was discovered and applied, the role of religion was delegated to ever-narrower domains.  While the word “religion” (from the Latin “religare” meaning “to bind”) originated in 1200 as a reference to monastic life, the modern concept itself dates to the 1530’s, when it became necessary to distinguish rational philosophy from non-rational mysticism.   Western philosophers eventually replaced all the functions religion provided with rational (or at least what they claimed to be rational) explanations.   Today, every field of knowledge known to man has been transformed by the power of reason.

This is a controversial claim, because the majority of Westerners, at least in the United States, claims to derive ideas in certain fields from religion.  But the evidence is easily seen if we compared a medieval man from the tenth century to a modern man.  The modern man’s metaphysics, epistemology ethics, politics and even aesthetics have been all radically transformed by secular philosophy.  This was not always an improvement, as in terms of their validity and morality, some secular modern philosophies have been worse and more destructive than  the worst of the mystical ones: such as, Kant’s subjectivism, Marxist materialism, and all the varieties of Socialism, Communism, and Fascism which derived from them.  But in its essence, the Enlightenment was based on sound premises and vastly improved the fortune of mankind.

Conclusion:  What does it mean to “take religion seriously?”

The concept of “religion” as it is known in the West is a modern invention made necessary by Western civilization, due to the need to distinguish between rational philosophy (I mean its archaic meaning – the examination of the natural world) and the remnants of pre-rational philosophy.

While Western ideas have spread rapidly across the world, we can still witness the state of philosophy as it was prior to the split:   For example, in many Muslim countries the idea of a separation of church and state is absurd – what other source could there possibly be for law other than revelation?  In some African countries, albinos are hunted and eaten as a cure for disease – not as a “religious” practice, but as  “practical” medicine, because what’s so impractical about casting out evil spirits?  The unity of “practical” matters and “spiritual” matters is the default historical state for man – it is the classical Western world, and specifically the Greek philosophers which are responsible for recognizing reason as the proper means of discovering reality and discrediting mysticism and revelation as serious guides to existence.

So what would it mean to “take religion seriously”?  It means reversing 2500 years of Western philosophy and discarding the separation between rationality and mysticism as sources of knowledge and guides to action.  Whatever a priest, rabbi, imam, shaman, or holy book says would be just as valid a source of knowledge in any field as any rational consideration.  This means re-introducing, witch-hunts, astrology, tea-leaf reading, and flagellation to ethics, alchemy to chemistry, and the Inquisition and Crusades to politics.  No criticism could be made of these practices if no systematic distinction between supernatural and natural explanations were recognized.

And this is why I am glad that Americans don’t take religion seriously.  The near-universal acceptance of the concept of “religion” itself represents the progress of reason over pre-rational mysticism.  It is a largely unheralded and unrecognized victory, which leaves room for uncertainty, but is nonetheless a victory which is sweeping every field of human study and every part of the world, and I hope will never be extinguished entirely.