Adventures in Existence

Rationalism in the hard sciences.

noreply@blogger.com (Renee Katz) — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:01:00 +0000

Reason is okay, but faith is better.

noreply@blogger.com (Renee Katz) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:49:00 +0000

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"If you don't think that logic is a good method for determining what to believe, make an attempt to convince me of that without using logic. No one has even bothered to try yet." - Brett Lemoine

I hate it when people say they are not against reason and then proceed to list all the subjects that reason is limited to, while "faith" makes off like a bandit, laying claim to all the important, philosophical, spiritual spheres of human existence. Bollocks. Pure, arbitrary bollocks.

Reason and emotion.

noreply@blogger.com (Renee Katz) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 02:06:00 +0000

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This Disney cartoon, made during WWII, is about the relationship between reason and emotion. It encourages to be rational and not get hysterical with fear about Nazi Germany. On top of that, it basically says the cause of the conflict is irrationalism, because Germany is ruled by irrational emotions under Hitler. I'm astounded at how philosophical and how pro-reason this video is. I don't think they'd air something like this on television today.

Favorite unintentionally funny line from the video: "That's right emotion, put reason out of the way, that's great, fine ... For Hitler!"

Subscribe.

Interview with Nick Provenzo.

noreply@blogger.com (Renee Katz) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 21:04:00 +0000

I thought somebody might be interested in this interview Jim Woods did with Nick Provenzo from the Center for the Advancement of Capitalism in 2006. It is about effective activism; something, apparently, that Mr. Provenzo is very good at.

Some of the discussion points in the interview:

The key to activism.
Selling high school kids on Objectivism.
Selling college kids on Objectivism.
The importance of college activism.
Getting involved in political institutions.

Mr. Provenzo also discusses all the things The Center for the Advancement of Capitalism is doing and how important it is for Objectivists to support the organization.

Objectivist blogger vs pro-lifers who want to kill him.

noreply@blogger.com (Renee Katz) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 18:40:00 +0000

Here's a video about the recent controversy at Rule of Reason.

YouTube Christian-atheist drama.

noreply@blogger.com (Renee Katz) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 02:01:00 +0000

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This video concerns some of the recent atheist/Christian drama on YouTube - specifically an evangelical called "Yokeup" - so if you don't follow that, this could be meaningless to you. Therefore I will try to make it relevant by drawing some abstract moral from what I talk about in the video.

The moral of the story is: Don't blame all of your shitty behavior on God. When you say that you should not be held accountable for despicable things you do because God told you to do them, this is about on the same level of believability (real word?) as demon possession.

Even if you do believe in God, you have to take responsibility for your own actions. You can't just go around abusing people and then put everything on Jesus or Muhammad, or else no one is going to take you seriously.

Create a widget for free.

noreply@blogger.com (Renee Katz) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:20:00 +0000

There's this site called WidgetBox that let's you design a widget for your blog/website (I found this through Copious Dissent). Basically it's like a mini-RSS feed that you create and post on your blog or wherever, presumably in the hopes that people will copy the code and add it to their own sites. It's pretty cool, but I haven't decided on its usefulness. How many people are going to actually add my widget to their site? Oh well, it's still neat.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

noreply@blogger.com (Renee Katz) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:53:00 +0000

Today's episode of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal was particularly good. Can you imagine what it would be like if people took this quantum superposition stuff seriously and actually applied it to their lives? This video will give you an idea. (The last five seconds really say it all, don't they?)

The Bibel tells me so.

noreply@blogger.com (Renee Katz) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 00:53:00 +0000

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When you're arguing with Christians, sometimes they won't try to prove the existence of God to you, they'll just try to convince you that a wide variety of abstractions could not possibly exist in a universe without God. How presumptuous of them! These people are saying that they can prove that there is no and never will be a naturalistic, non-magical, cause-and-effect explanation for abstract concepts. I do not believe that they can do this it nor do I believe it is possible.

If you were amused by this consider subscribing by e-mail or RSS.

The distraction of eyes.

noreply@blogger.com (Renee Katz) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 19:41:00 +0000

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I'm going to quote something from an article I read earlier today by David H. I. Geoffrey, the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. It gets pretty deep:

"Narrativity is intrinsically a legal fiction," says Marx; however, according to Abian, it is not so much narrativity that is intrinsically a legal fiction, but rather the genre, and subsequent absurdity, of narrativity. Thus, the collapse, and eventually the defining characteristic, of Sartreist absurdity intrinsic to Stone’s Heaven and Earth is also evident in Natural Born Killers. Debord uses the term ’structural dematerialism’ to denote the role of the observer as poet.

Yeah, you're definitely going to want to read this. You will never look at structural dementia the same way again.

Definitions of "atheism" and "selfishness."

noreply@blogger.com (Renee Katz) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:23:00 +0000

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I want to say something about the history of the word "atheism." Today, if you say you are an atheist, you mean that you don't believe in God. In the past, the word "atheist" meant that you were also evil. And I don't just mean that it had negative connotations, I mean that that was how it was defined in the dictionary and that is the way people used it. You would say something like, "without the state, society would quickly degenerate into atheism and lawlessness."

Some people still use the word "atheism" this way today, but I think the vast majority of people and dictionaries agree that this usage is obsolete and when we use the word "atheism" we simply mean nonbelief in God. We've basically changed the meaning of that word. Why? Well, I think it's pretty obvious: in the past, religious people were probably writing all the dictionaries, and it was more convenient for them if people did not distinguish between atheism and evil (even though people probably didn't distinguish them to begin with). Think of how much easier it was to deal with skepticism back then: Who would doubt the existence of God and automatically become wicked and evil?

We updated the definition because it was quite obviously wrong. It tried to integrate two characteristics that were not logically related and that should not be subsumed under one word. We now know that it is not the case that questioning the existence of God does arises from, or leads to, wickedness or immorality.

I'm saying all this because I believe this is exactly the case with the word "selfishness." There is a debate among Objectivists (Objectivism is Ayn Rand's philosophy.) about whether they should use the word "selfishness," or some other word like "self-interest," or maybe even an entirely different word. The "anti-selfishness" argument is that the word "selfishness" tries to integrate two mutually exclusive characteristics of people - being genuinely self-interested, and being a short-range, mindless hedonist type, - and so, where the "pro-selfishness" Objectivists saw this as the reason why the word "selfishness" should be redefined, the "anti-selfishness" group thought that this was precisely the reason why they needed to use a different word.

The reason I am for "selfishness" is because I cannot see how the case is different than with the word "atheism." No one argued that we needed another word to replace "atheism" or "atheist," because the people who used it and defined it in such a way to suggest that not believing in God was evil were so obviously wrong. It seemed to people that the essential feature of an atheist was the disbelief in the existence of God, not evil. Why have a new word? It would have been a concession to those people who wanted to define honest skepticism out of existence to let them have it.

Now, I think I should also mention that earlier this decade someone began a movement to lump all atheists, agnostics, and any other doubters of God under the term Bright. The purpose of this was to escape the negative connotations of the word "atheist." I think this backfired, because now some religious people think that atheists think they are smarter than everyone else. This perpetuates the stereotype of atheists as pretentious, elitist intellectuals. Who came up with the word "Bright," anyway?!

I used to be in the "anti-selfishness" group, but now I have changed my mind. I don't think you have to necessarily accept the general use of, or even the dictionary definition, of a word when the logic behind them is so obviously wrong. There might even be more examples of these kinds of sloppy defintions, but I can't think of any right now.

The Wishing Circle II.

noreply@blogger.com (Renee Katz) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 22:36:00 +0000

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I don't subscribe to the interpretation of quantum physics that says that our observing something causes it to exist. No amount of experiments in any part of the universe could possibly prove that. But then, that's why it's an interpretation I guess.

Christianity is a relationship.

noreply@blogger.com (Renee Katz) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 22:34:00 +0000

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This comic is intended to make the reader think about nonexistence, and the fact that it only exists as a concept and not an actual... thing. Also to make fun of Christianity.

Big Bang Theory: atheists vs theists.

noreply@blogger.com (Renee Katz) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 22:27:00 +0000

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Atheists and theists sometimes have surprisingly similar views about the origins of the universe. What really gets me is that Christians and other theists feel superior because they think their theory makes so much more sense. They'll say, "Something can't come from nothing. Nothing comes from nothing! You silly atheists!" but they think that putting God into the equation makes it more logical. "Some can't come from nothing ... unless there's a magical, incomprehensible, omnipotent being there." Yeah, thanks theists. That's much better.

The Wishing Circle.

noreply@blogger.com (Renee Katz) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 22:10:00 +0000

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A while ago, someone challenged my assertion that Christians cannot answer Euthyphro's dilemma by directing me to a post on a theology forum. This is a typical Christian answer to an argument, which uses it as an opportunity to prove that the Christian God is the only God that can rebutt this argument. What is it that saves Christians from this dilemma? Why, none other than the Holy Trinity! It is claimed that other, mere moral deities like Allah and the Greek pagan gods would not be able withstand this kind of questioning, but once again, the God of the Bible shines through.

Supposedly the triune nature of God solves this problem; but I do not see how the arguments in the afore mentioned post exempt the Christian Trinity from the objections to other, singular gods. To quote from the theology forum thread: “The testimony of three eternal witnesses [not parts, but People, with independent wills], that not one of them has ever been threatened by another is not arbitrary [nor circular]." So what? "And for them to therefore assert that they are good to each other and not evil, by the testimony of each toward the other, is not arbitrary [nor circular]." How did they decide their standard of good? "And for them therefore to recognize as ‘good’ traits which are consistent with their nature is not arbitrary [nor circular].” Again, how did they decide that they were consistently good and not consistenly evil? They are using their nature as the definition and the standard of what is good, so it does not impress me that they all agree that they are good.

Furthermore, saying that God's nature is the definition of righteousness doesn't solve the problem either. To quote from another article on this subject:

While some retort that goodness flows from God's nature, this merely changes the form of the dilemma: Is compassion good because it is a part of God's nature, or is compassion a part of God's nature because it is already good? The first option produces problems parallel to those for DCT. If malice were a part of God's nature, for instance, it is doubtful that malice would automatically be good. If there are any objective moral standards at all, then a god can be either good or evil, and the assessment of a god's character would depend upon appealing to standards independent of any god's commands, opinions, statements, nature, or character.

And so I must conclude that Euthyphro's dilemma hasn't been answered, and Christian morality is still subjective. Basing your morality on a person - God is supposedly a personal being - is the definition of subjectivism.

Theism = subjectivism.

noreply@blogger.com (Renee Katz) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 22:08:00 +0000

Atheists are constantly being accused of moral subjectivism. In philosophy apparently there is this big problem of where morality comes from when God is out of the picture. Without a Supreme Being to dictate ethics to humanity, "moral anarchy" ensues. Man simply can't be good without the fear of God and Hell.

Well, all this obviously rests on the assumption that religious morality is not subjectivism. Of course it's not! Religious morality is rigid, absolute - good is good, evil is evil, and if you're evil you go to Hell. No subjectivism here!

But is it really not subjectivism? I want to defend atheism against the charge of subjectivism in ethics (though I think that objective, secular ethics is possible). It is to show that not only is religion not an escape from moral subjectivism, it is subjectivism. Certain kinds of theism, especially Christian theism, necessitate subjectivism in ethics.

There is a question posed in Plato's dialogues called the Euthyphro dilemma. It basically says: Is what is moral commanded by God because it is moral, or is it moral because it is commanded by God? Now, it's not hard to see where each answer leads to. If you believe that God commands something because it's moral, then God is not the source of morality - there is a standard higher than God. If you answer that something is moral because God commands it, then - viola! - instant subjectivism. If morality has nothing to do with reality and is based on God's whims, then that is the very definiton of subjectivism.

(Some religionists will probably object: God does not have 'whims.' He has a divine plan! But this is completely meaningless because we don't know God's plan, and can never know his plan, and besides theists always claim that God's mind is unknowable by its nature. So even if we assume that there is a God, as far as we're concerned it may as well be God's whims. In fact and in reality what it comes down to is man interpreting some religious text and trying to give moral guidance, or trying to read God's mind.)

Religionists have never come up with an adequate solution to Euthyphro's Dilemma, and I don't think they can. So which side of the dilemma have they taken? I think it's pretty obvious that on the whole it's the Divine Whim Theory of morality. Religious believers are always proposing morality as a contest of God's whims vs man's whims. Either you do whatever God tells you, or you do what society tells you, or you do whatever the hell you want. There is no other alternative! Again, this is the definition of subjectivism.

The reason that Religious theism leads to ethical subjectivism probably has something to do with the fact that it is based on metaphysical subjectivism. In this view, reality is never absolute. The only absolute is God, who is basically just a disembodied mind (oh, and he's omnipotent and omniscient and all that stuff). So reality is just as subject to God's unknowable desires as morality is. Causality and natural law don't hold if God, for some reason, doesn't want them to. Believers readily admit this. It's called a "miracle" - when God suspends the laws of nature for some mysterious reason and makes something totally random and nonsensical happen - e.g., someone's head explodes or a computer lays an egg or something. (Another piece of evidence for this view is that people who believe in God always present us with a false dichotomy for explaining the origin and complexity of the universe - either design or "chance," both epistemological concepts. Natural law is never an option.)

And this is basically why atheists should never feel like it is their job to provide the solution to ethical subjectivism, especially when theists haven't done so and probably never will. Theists should never accuse atheists of advocating ethical subjectivism, nihilism, anarchism, puppy-eating, whatever. Who are you, theists, to cast the first subjective stone?!