Humbuggery

In a fit of flying fingers over steeled strings, it starts.

The ringing ostinato on the wrong side, the simple melody, the master and music inseperable. My eyes close, ringing fills my mind, first the brown colored experience, then a fit of desert sand.

The first drop, a low note on the bottom string, I know this part, I can play it. It pushes me, "Further, it whispers." Further into an abyssal darkness, a kind of quiet world. There is no fear in this abyss, it’s not an angry world like advertised by some minds, but rather a kind of sleeping dark, a place of pure thought. I will into this world a dream, a star, a string — the cosmic kind — nothing escapes the faculties of my mind and reason.

The triplets — Oh the Triplets! The former ostinato becomes a rolling hill. Verdant, the sand sprung to life, trees and birds — yellow and blue, finches and larks. High notes, deep drummed notes, the strum. The master’s hands crash against the strings in a fit of thunderous fury. The storm breaks over the quiet hills, lightning and thunder, rain and sleet over the trees, the birds are silent now, the crashes and the howling wind. The sky dark as a dagger splits into furious factions — on my right hand twisted armies of grotesque, beautiful demons roar; a legion against the storm. On my left the lightning, furies of gods older than I, the rain — washing as a flood — the hail and the sleet, cutting as thrown knives do. Then the calm.

The calm, quiet prelude to the war to end all things, an apocolypse contained in eight steps. The bloodied mouths of the demon horde drool with ravenous anticipation, the bright white lightning ceases for a moment on the side of Titans, the din is gone, the battle looms.

One man — I — stands in the middle, I become the master, I feel my fingers morphing and bending to the shape of the note. The first melody returns. The demons driven back by the sweet sound of a single bird echoing those sounds. The titans realize their folly and retreat; I am not the master, but I seem to inhabit him. His music fills my ears and my music fills the air’s, the demons vanish, the storm lifts, all that is left is wet grass. The strum flashes again, a last aftershock of a forgotten almost-war. Mean-whiles and never-weres and all manner of monster lost to time. All disapear, all burnt before the fury of a single melody. The wet grass lay beneath my feet, the cooled air drifts across my fingers, the melody again, the trees again, the flowers and the fields and the birds — oh the birds!

A ringing ostinato on the wrong side, the melody fades into a final, quiet strum. Another story told, another legend ended, and the old world fades back into view.

I’ve just been pondering, for an hour or maybe two — I can’t quite remember anymore as it’s late and I’m tired — about all the things I’ve done in my life. No distinctions made, just all the things I’ve managed to pack into twenty-two years of existence. I’ve stood atop cess-pool covers, barraging the myriad mystical creatures of my mind with my mighty bubble gun. I’ve fell in love. I’ve gone to summer camp. I’ve broken a bone. I had a dog.

I loved that fucking dog.

He died a few years ago, that mutt was my best friend. I know it’s cliche, but they really don’t judge you, he was always happy to see me even if I hadn’t been the best caretaker. I hadn’t been there much for the last few years he was alive. I’ve always felt like I let him down somehow. He wandered off one day into the woods and never came back — though I think that might be one of those comfortable lies my family has decided to tell me to help me deal with the fact that they put him down. He was old, he had a good life.

I loved that fucking dog.

His name was Randy, we played a lot. I talked to him, he listened. I would tell him my troubles and he would advise me that the proper solution was to feed him large quantities of human food, as it made him happy to receive it. By making him happy, I would be happy, and all would be right with the world.

I don’t know why I’m talking about him, this whole thing is half experiment in free-writing, half two-in-the-morning rant, half cocked and half shot-off and who the hell knows what kind of fractions are going on here.

I just miss my dog. I feel a little alone sometimes, I think we all do. We all have a friend we hold close and lose, a companion which leaves us for whatever reason. Maybe they move, maybe they just fall out of touch, maybe they die.

December seventh gets a lot of press. Before 9/11, it was the last time we had been attacked — really attacked — as a country. No one ever talks about December eighth.

I think it’s an interesting thing, that as a culture we are so good at remembering the initial shock of tragedy, but not the long pain of recovery. Look at 9/11, we are horrified by the images of burning towers against a cobalt sky, but we don’t think about the hundreds of people who were mutilated by the falling debris, the people who had (and have) chronic breathing issues from the dust. No, those people don’t seem to matter — only instant death is important, not slow suffering.

Look at Hurricane Katrina, people remember the shocking images of houses submerged and debris-filled-former-streets. People forget that, even now, New Orleans is a broken city. Many still have not recovered from the long term effects of the Hurricane.

No one thinks about the soldiers who survived the attack, the ones who had no cherry-red-lipstick "M" etched on their forehead by inexperienced nurses, overwhelmed by the gore. No one seems to remember these men and women who were too hurt to survive but not hurt enough allieviated from their pain by morphine.

"M"

Why don’t we react to this psychic stress? The 3000 who died in 9/11 — horrible, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died in the Second Oil War — who cares? The hundreds who died in Katrina’s onslaught — horrible, the thousands who died in the botched reaction, due to unsafe, unsanitary conditions — that’s just fine.

I recently read a quote from "A People’s History of the United States" by Howard Zinn (I fear I’ve just tagged myself an uncivilized radical, I am okay with this. I’m unkempt, unkind, and proud. I am caring, I am human). In which he talks about a man, another professor, he of Columbian (as in, Columbus) history, and the founding of the new world. This professor buried one line about the horror Colombus and those who followed him cast upon the Arawaks and other Native tribes. Slavery, Deathcamps, abject slaughter as livestock to an abattoir. He buried it in one line, in a page extolling dear old Chris’ virtues. Zinn responds by noting that this historian didn’t try to hide the truth, or lie about it, he just tried to make it unimportant.

Why do we seek to make the ugly things unimportant? As horrible as 9/11 was, it wasn’t that ugly. What was (and is) truly ugly is the flurry of death it gave painful birth too.

3000 deaths were enough.

Some say America as a power is fading, that other nations will soon take their turn as leaders on the global stage, I welcome the loss of this mantle of supposed responsibility (nothing we have done as a nation can ever be confused with any notion of being "responsible"). We are a broken nation, a broken culture, we have been for a long time. We think we are great but we are not. We hide from the ugliness, we hide from the bitter memories of our youth. We hide from the death, and genocide, and evil that we have done.

The Civil War

The Trail of Tears

The Massacre of Natives in General

The Corporate-Sponsored, Uncle Sam Approved Wars for Profit.

What are we?

Hiroshima

Who are we?

Nagasaki

We are a broken people. We are too hurt to survive, but not hurt enough for the cherry red

"M"

"Stop saying that."

These are the titular words. No profanity lies in any individual word, no deep offensive tone, no words amongst them means something vile. Together, though, they are the worst words, the most vile, hurtful words that can be said.

"Stop saying that."

I feel dirty writing them. The word "fuck" has been considered a terrible word for a long time, but it has no comparison with this phrase. Censorship is the worst sin commitable. Censorship against anyone, be they Atheist or Theist, be they Right or Left, censorship doesn’t just offend, it kills.

It kills culture, culture lives on controversy. Sociologists may disagree, but consider — how is our culture defined? Is it defined in peacetime? Are our collective mores and values defined when things are simple and straightforward, when the peaceful leader leads and the lion lay with the lamb? Absolutely not, it is defined by Depressions and Wars and Recessions and Death and Controversy.

I recently heard about a Facebook group with the (perhaps in the grand scheme, unfortunate) name "FUCK JESUS CHRIST". I heard that many thousands of people wanted to shut it down, for being offensive to they’re christian natures.

"Stop saying that."

Nothing offends me more than someone telling me to stop speaking. Freedom of speech is freedom entire. Not just freedom from censorship by the government, or from private entity, but censorship from anyone.

No one should be able to force me to "Stop saying that."

"But the majority wants it."

Bullshit, the majority of this country wanted to prevent the civil rights of black people in the 60s, they were wrong. They wanted the Panthers and King and all of those who wanted fairness and equal rights to "Stop saying that." Their words made them uncomfortable, their words made them squirm at the thought that a Black man might be treated like a White one.

Who’s ideas are disgusting now?

Yes, the name of the group is grossly offensive. No, I don’t agree with every single thing the group stands for. Yes, I could choose to keep silent in this solitary time which calls for screaming. But I will not, I can not, it is against the nature instilled into me by my raising. I was taught to believe that all words were sacred, even the damning ones, even the ugly ones.

Yes, Mom, you don’t like this group. But you cannot stand for censoring it. You cannot because it is wrong.

There are many groups which advocate the notion that Atheists are not true americans, that Homosexuals are "less than" and that we are all, collectively, going to suffer and die for all eternity in the hands of a malevolent, vengeful demiurge. These words are deeply offensive to me.

There are many groups which say I should not be afforded rights, that I am an agent of all that is evil, that I am not fit to be a parent, or to be a human being.

These words offend me.

Yet, still I stand here, silent. I will not tell them to stop, no! I will tell them to sing those words louder. Shout those offensive syllables everywhere, and I will shout mine. "FUCK JESUS CHRIST!"

"FUCK ATHEISTS"

"FUCK EVERYONE"

But I will never tell anyone

"Stop saying that."

Tom Lee and I have been chatting again, this time he presents an argument about the problem of evil, and makes a case for the whole "argument from evil"[1] being an unsound argument. Particularly, his argument is here, and I highly recommend taking a look. I won’t be directly quoting it, but I’ll do my best to be fair in my interpretation.

That said, Tom, if you feel I’m being unfair in my characterization of your argument, feel free to respond. I’ll add notes to this post indicating your disagreement, and respond to them in turn, in a different font or something. I will not delete anything I write here, so that in the future, I will not (if I were of the nature to do so) be able to deny having said it. I want this to be a fair and logical discussion, with no author/commenters bias. I say this here principally as a disclaimer, and so that in the future, no one will think otherwise. I respect your civility (I’ve had lots of uncivil commenters in the past), and as such I want to encourage it by being as fair as possible to you.

Okay, now for the fun part.

* Factual Errors

 First, just some factual errors. Hitler wasn’t an atheist. It’s a common mistake, since many ascribe that the use of social darwinism (a pseudoscience, I might add) requires atheistic beliefs, because only atheists could be so evil/whatever (so the usual gambit goes). However, as we can plainly see in here that Hitler spoke positively of Christian beliefs, and even referred to the Christian God as "His Lord and Savior" — now, this does not mean Hitler was Christian, but I don’t know of any atheists who would do that. Further, I’m not trying to imply that Hitler was the kind of Christian you or any other modern Christian is (for the most part, the KKK often claims they are Christians). In reality, I think that Hitler had a perverse notion of Christianity in which the Nation was the direct manifestation of God. However, I do my best to leave the Nazi’s out of discussion. As I do with Stalin, and Torquemada, and the myriad other piss-poor examples of human beings from history. These people had messed up beliefs, poor systems of ethics (Stalin was not the kind of atheist I am, his system of ethics and his beliefs were vastly different from mine and most atheists today).

 Further, Darwin did not imply that the "weak" should die — at least not in the sense you mean it. Darwin observed a fact. Those creatures who are not as capable at survival tend not to survive. This notion that Darwin advocated running around and murdering the weak is ridiculous. Babies are weak, and incapable of surviving on their own, the assertion that Darwin says the weak should die would imply that Darwin thinks we should go around murdering babies! But this is a gross misunderstanding of the theory. Evolution, particularly, natural selection, is just an observation of a fact, not a mandate. Furthermore, the notion of "weakness" is dependent on the environment. That is, I have poor eyesight, so in a long range marksmanship test, I am "weak" — I am thus likely to lose the test. However, I am very good at mathematics. The same person who may have bested me on the marksmanship test is now the "weak" one, and will likely lose if presented with a complicated math problem. Thus, this notion of Social Darwinism (which is what we’re talking about) is bunk on it’s face. The idea that we should actively "select" the "strongest" is stupid — we have, nor does there exist, any notion of fitness which is good for all environments. Hilter did not apply social darwinism, he applied genocide, and tried to justify it using psuedoscientific jargon. Darwin’s ideas weren’t the inspiration for the Holocaust, they were just abused to become a justification for it. A piss-poor one at that (though, I think there is no justification for the mass slaughter of 6 million jews and 5 million other minorities).

Still further, Darwin didn’t "complain that keeping unhealthy people alive in hospitals and asylums must be detrimental to the human race", nor did he conclude "We must, therefore, bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind." At least, not in any of the books by Darwin which I’ve read, If you have a source, please provide it. Those things sound more like propaganda provided by Goebbels than any scientific observation by Darwin.

* The Argument Proper

Moving on, we’re actually moving back to talk about the substance of your argument, beyond the factual errors, let’s consider the first portion first, namely your discussion of — to sum up — "How evil requires an absolute standard"

First point, you make the assertion that the existence of evil requires a absolute standard, I disagree. If you’ll pardon a little math lingo, I can define any arbitrary standard I care for to the set of all human actions, and call it an ethical code (eg, something that delineates good from evil). More or less, I assert that I can arbitrarily ascribe an action to be good or evil dependent on nothing more than random chance. Is it a "good" ethos? Well, it is in the sense that it’s as valid as any other, but it does not appeal to our intuition of what is "right" and "wrong" morally, and there’s the rub. Humans have a sense of "morality" a notion which is more emotional than logical, there is an intrinsic "rightness" to some actions and a "wrongness" to others. However, where you see God, I see evolution and altruism. I argue that morality is principally genetic in nature. Namely, that as populations of creatures grew, it became evident that sometimes the sacrifice of an older member of the group (in some way, whether sacrifice means death, or other ill-effect to the ability of that creature to propagate it’s genetics) to protect a younger member was genetically "worthwhile" as the next generation would thus have more opportunity to propagate the genes of the species as a whole. Thus creatures with strong altruistic tendencies tend to spread their genes more, thus there become more genes which cause altruistic tendencies [2], thus there are more creatures who are altruistic, and so on. As mentioned in [2], this set of basic instinctual acts — protect the young, defend the tribe, don’t kill other tribemembers etc — become cultural mores, which in turn evolve into things like "Stealing someone’s car is immoral" etc. That is, I argue that a system or morals evolves based on ones culture.

But this implies that morals can vary across cultures — and sure enough, they do. If you examine the morals of aboriginal people of the various regions of the world, you find that some cultures treat Honor Killings as a moral necessity. Are these practices ethically sound? Well, it depends on who you ask. If you ask me, I think they’re horrific. If you ask someone with a different ethos and set of mores, you may find otherwise. That is to say, I don’t disagree that we judged, say, the defendants at the Nuremburg trials absolutely, but it was only absolute within the framework of western ethics and morality.

What’s more, Morals change over time. At one point, it was considered immoral to marry someone of another race, that is no longer the case. It was similarly considered morally acceptable to own slaves, persecute Protestants, etc. None of these things are considered valid anymore. If morals were granted by God and are immutable and absolute, how can it be that morals have changed so much over time?

In general, the existence of evil is determined by ones culture, but every culture has some definition of evil, so consider an omnibenevolent God in any culture, the existence of evil in that culture — I argue — is contradictory with the notion of an omnibenevolent god within that culture. So really, this is an error on my part, I should have specified that the definitions of evil and omnibenevolence are indexed by culture, but I still hold that the overall argument holds within a specified culture, and I was simply arguing from "our" particular culture. Thus, evil does not require an objective standard universally, but rather a objective standard within the particular culture where the argument takes place.

Thus, I argue, the atheistic argument is not invalid, in fact it is quite valid, given appropriate specification — I was implicitly arguing from a particular cultural definition of "good" and "evil". This is somewhat ethnocentrist of me, and so I should have been more careful, however the argument is sufficiently parametric to function in any context, after noticing that the good/evil question is not absolute. I leave you then with the following question, which I dearly love to ask, a kind of thought experiment.

Consider if your particular god (so that we remain polymorphic over all gods, I don’t specify which one, just assume it is "absolutist" in his or her moral code) ordered you to murder all shorter than 5′ 6”, without prejudice or hesitation. This was written in no uncertain terms in a book you believe to be perfect and infallible. Is it therefore "right" to simply slaughter all of those people? Is is morally sound to do so? I argue it is not, that murder (at least in our ethos and with our set of mores) is wrong regardless of the particular deity who advocates it.

This thought hearkens back to the "Lawgiver" fallacy, that is:

1. Every law has a lawgiver
2. There exist natural laws
3. Thus there must be a lawgiver for natural laws.

However, this is an equivocation fallacy, natural laws and civil laws are not the same thing. Similarly here, evil, more specifically good, is being equated with following the absolute laws provided by some deity, which in turn assumes that moral codes can only come from a deity.

So, in summary, Tom, I disagree with your argument, however, I think you also misunderstood my argument. You end your comment with "Thus, the theist does not have to defend his position" etc. (that’s paraphrased, by the way) — but my argument doesn’t attack your god, or any god. If you observe my axioms as I laid them out in the beginning of the "Deconstructing God" series, I argued that the only gods I could address would have to obey the following rules (paraphrase):

1. Everything obeys the rules of a consistent logic.
2. There is no logic that is both complete and consistent
3. There is no unexplainable phenomenon, no inherently impossible feat within the universe.
4. Any entity must obey the Self-Consistency Principle

These rules are completely inapplicable to the God most Christians worship (I assume you’re Christian based on the content of your comments, please correct me if I’m wrong), who generally is assumed to exist outside of the realm of so-called "human" logic. What I’m saying, effectively, is that there is no way you can possibly convince me that this particular kind of God exists — that is, one that exists outside of logic — without demonstrating my axioms to be incorrect, which — I’ll be honest, I don’t think is possible, I’ve tried very hard to do just that! I just felt that there might be a little hostility / resentment in those last lines, so I wanted to assure you that I could not care less about disproving your particular deity. I just like asking questions, the whole series was mostly an intellectual exercise.

Alright, I’ve procrastinated enough, I have English homework to do, and then I get to work on Topology and Abstract Algebra, so I really want to get through the English homework…

/Joe

[1] As he puts it, which I think is not a bad bit of terminology, modulo the implicit association with fallacies, which I think is not particularly strong.

[2] Though, I would argue that altruism spreads more on the level of meme (eg, evolution of ideas, rather than genes proper. The term is due to Richard Dawkins), there is (in my opinion) some level of genetic basis to "jumpstart" the notion.

This was originally going to be a reply to a comment on reddit here. But unfortunately it grew to 11000 or so characters, and Reddit wouldn’t have that. Surprisingly, this is the first time it’s happened to me, even though I have a penchant for incredibly longwinded comments. Enjoy this little TL;DR Internets.

Let’s start at the beginning.

It’s true, I’ve never taken a “real” IQ test. I have read _quite_ a bit about them though. I’ve cited some links which are representative of the materials I’ve read, there is more- and if you feel that those sources are somehow biased, I am very open to being presented with new evidence.

First, for those not aware, I just want to summarize the history and original purpose of the Stanford-Binet IQ Test and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, another important intelligence test which is based on an earlier test due to Wechsler-Bellevue[7]. Note that I’ve cited the Wikipedia entries for these ([2,7,8]) as being relatively representative, I’ve read other materia that. To be frank, I don’t want to bother finding, this is just a silly internet argument after all. One that does come immediately to mind is Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of a Man.

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