Monday, May 17, 2010
Attempt to turn a theist
The world of agnosticism and existentialism is a very interesting world, and as a participant of both beliefs, theism and atheism, and everything in between I have to say that the spiritual connections that I feel as an agnostic are much more enlightening and rewarding than anything I ever felt as a religious theist. In a world without religion ... See Moremost people would continue to act morrally because thats what they would be taught from their responsible parents and their educational institutions. A society has norms and values and when you subtract god from the picture, people will continue to hold these. Things would continue as they are because capitalism and materialism currently run the world and both of those things don't change when god is subtracted from the equation. To feel that you are just one of an infinate amount of possibilities is one of the greatest feelings in the world if you choose to embrace it. It makes life a lot more worth living, and if we are here for any specific reason thats what we are here for, Living. What defines our character is how we treat other people, not what god we believe in or what laws we choose to follow. Life is ours for the taking(figurativley) so lets do that as best as we can. Use what we know to help people become more knowledgable; instead of confusing them with assumptions about how and why they were created and a specific guidline of how they should live their lives. As well as promising them and scaring them of an afterlife that there is absolutley no proof of. If life is what matters, and you make the mistake of confusing your connections with god with your connections with your own spirit/mind than you are ignoring exactly what we are here to do. Society without religion will continue in a more organized intelligent fashion because people will not only begin to see how much their lives are actually worth but they will see how much everyone else values their lives, they will have more respect for life of all kinds in all ways. Even if there were a god to judge us he would only judge us on the decisions we made and what we learned from them, not whether or not we believed in him or praised and worshiped him. If god really wanted us to do all of the things in the christian bible he would have told us himself, or at least given us a clear sign of this, not just an interpretive novel. Read some Frederick Nietzsche, Jean Paul Sarte, Martin Heidegger, Budism, Taoism. There are as many possibilities for why we are here as there are lives on the earth, I hope you can see the benefits of switching teams and what it means to the evolution and betterment of mankind.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
10 myths—and 10 Truths—About Atheism
10 myths—and 10 Truths—About Atheism
By Sam Harris
December 24, 2006
The Los Angeles Times
SEVERAL POLLS indicate that the term “atheism” has acquired such an extraordinary stigma in the United States that being an atheist is now a perfect impediment to a career in politics (in a way that being black, Muslim or homosexual is not). According to a recent Newsweek poll, only 37% of Americans would vote for an otherwise qualified atheist for president.
Atheists are often imagined to be intolerant, immoral, depressed, blind to the beauty of nature and dogmatically closed to evidence of the supernatural.
Even John Locke, one of the great patriarchs of the Enlightenment, believed that atheism was “not at all to be tolerated” because, he said, “promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human societies, can have no hold upon an atheist.”
That was more than 300 years ago. But in the United States today, little seems to have changed. A remarkable 87% of the population claims “never to doubt” the existence of God; fewer than 10% identify themselves as atheists — and their reputation appears to be deteriorating.
Given that we know that atheists are often among the most intelligent and scientifically literate people in any society, it seems important to deflate the myths that prevent them from playing a larger role in our national discourse.
1) Atheists believe that life is meaningless.
On the contrary, religious people often worry that life is meaningless and imagine that it can only be redeemed by the promise of eternal happiness beyond the grave. Atheists tend to be quite sure that life is precious. Life is imbued with meaning by being really and fully lived. Our relationships with those we love are meaningful now; they need not last forever to be made so. Atheists tend to find this fear of meaninglessness … well … meaningless.
2) Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.
People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.
3) Atheism is dogmatic.
Jews, Christians and Muslims claim that their scriptures are so prescient of humanity’s needs that they could only have been written under the direction of an omniscient deity. An atheist is simply a person who has considered this claim, read the books and found the claim to be ridiculous. One doesn’t have to take anything on faith, or be otherwise dogmatic, to reject unjustified religious beliefs. As the historian Stephen Henry Roberts (1901-71) once said: “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”
4) Atheists think everything in the universe arose by chance.
No one knows why the universe came into being. In fact, it is not entirely clear that we can coherently speak about the “beginning” or “creation” of the universe at all, as these ideas invoke the concept of time, and here we are talking about the origin of space-time itself.
The notion that atheists believe that everything was created by chance is also regularly thrown up as a criticism of Darwinian evolution. As Richard Dawkins explains in his marvelous book, “The God Delusion,” this represents an utter misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. Although we don’t know precisely how the Earth’s early chemistry begat biology, we know that the diversity and complexity we see in the living world is not a product of mere chance. Evolution is a combination of chance mutation and natural selection. Darwin arrived at the phrase “natural selection” by analogy to the “artificial selection” performed by breeders of livestock. In both cases, selection exerts a highly non-random effect on the development of any species.
5) Atheism has no connection to science.
Although it is possible to be a scientist and still believe in God — as some scientists seem to manage it — there is no question that an engagement with scientific thinking tends to erode, rather than support, religious faith. Taking the U.S. population as an example: Most polls show that about 90% of the general public believes in a personal God; yet 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences do not. This suggests that there are few modes of thinking less congenial to religious faith than science is.
6) Atheists are arrogant.
When scientists don’t know something — like why the universe came into being or how the first self-replicating molecules formed — they admit it. Pretending to know things one doesn’t know is a profound liability in science. And yet it is the life-blood of faith-based religion. One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be found in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while claiming to know facts about cosmology, chemistry and biology that no scientist knows. When considering questions about the nature of the cosmos and our place within it, atheists tend to draw their opinions from science. This isn’t arrogance; it is intellectual honesty.
7) Atheists are closed to spiritual experience.
There is nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing love, ecstasy, rapture and awe; atheists can value these experiences and seek them regularly. What atheists don’t tend to do is make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims about the nature of reality on the basis of such experiences. There is no question that some Christians have transformed their lives for the better by reading the Bible and praying to Jesus. What does this prove? It proves that certain disciplines of attention and codes of conduct can have a profound effect upon the human mind. Do the positive experiences of Christians suggest that Jesus is the sole savior of humanity? Not even remotely — because Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and even atheists regularly have similar experiences.
There is, in fact, not a Christian on this Earth who can be certain that Jesus even wore a beard, much less that he was born of a virgin or rose from the dead. These are just not the sort of claims that spiritual experience can authenticate.
8) Atheists believe that there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding.
Atheists are free to admit the limits of human understanding in a way that religious people are not. It is obvious that we do not fully understand the universe; but it is even more obvious that neither the Bible nor the Koran reflects our best understanding of it. We do not know whether there is complex life elsewhere in the cosmos, but there might be. If there is, such beings could have developed an understanding of nature’s laws that vastly exceeds our own. Atheists can freely entertain such possibilities. They also can admit that if brilliant extraterrestrials exist, the contents of the Bible and the Koran will be even less impressive to them than they are to human atheists.
From the atheist point of view, the world’s religions utterly trivialize the real beauty and immensity of the universe. One doesn’t have to accept anything on insufficient evidence to make such an observation.
9) Atheists ignore the fact that religion is extremely beneficial to society.
Those who emphasize the good effects of religion never seem to realize that such effects fail to demonstrate the truth of any religious doctrine. This is why we have terms such as “wishful thinking” and “self-deception.” There is a profound distinction between a consoling delusion and the truth.
In any case, the good effects of religion can surely be disputed. In most cases, it seems that religion gives people bad reasons to behave well, when good reasons are actually available. Ask yourself, which is more moral, helping the poor out of concern for their suffering, or doing so because you think the creator of the universe wants you to do it, will reward you for doing it or will punish you for not doing it?
10) Atheism provides no basis for morality.
If a person doesn’t already understand that cruelty is wrong, he won’t discover this by reading the Bible or the Koran — as these books are bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both human and divine. We do not get our morality from religion. We decide what is good in our good books by recourse to moral intuitions that are (at some level) hard-wired in us and that have been refined by thousands of years of thinking about the causes and possibilities of human happiness.
We have made considerable moral progress over the years, and we didn’t make this progress by reading the Bible or the Koran more closely. Both books condone the practice of slavery — and yet every civilized human being now recognizes that slavery is an abomination. Whatever is good in scripture — like the golden rule — can be valued for its ethical wisdom without our believing that it was handed down to us by the creator of the universe.
By Sam Harris
December 24, 2006
The Los Angeles Times
SEVERAL POLLS indicate that the term “atheism” has acquired such an extraordinary stigma in the United States that being an atheist is now a perfect impediment to a career in politics (in a way that being black, Muslim or homosexual is not). According to a recent Newsweek poll, only 37% of Americans would vote for an otherwise qualified atheist for president.
Atheists are often imagined to be intolerant, immoral, depressed, blind to the beauty of nature and dogmatically closed to evidence of the supernatural.
Even John Locke, one of the great patriarchs of the Enlightenment, believed that atheism was “not at all to be tolerated” because, he said, “promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human societies, can have no hold upon an atheist.”
That was more than 300 years ago. But in the United States today, little seems to have changed. A remarkable 87% of the population claims “never to doubt” the existence of God; fewer than 10% identify themselves as atheists — and their reputation appears to be deteriorating.
Given that we know that atheists are often among the most intelligent and scientifically literate people in any society, it seems important to deflate the myths that prevent them from playing a larger role in our national discourse.
1) Atheists believe that life is meaningless.
On the contrary, religious people often worry that life is meaningless and imagine that it can only be redeemed by the promise of eternal happiness beyond the grave. Atheists tend to be quite sure that life is precious. Life is imbued with meaning by being really and fully lived. Our relationships with those we love are meaningful now; they need not last forever to be made so. Atheists tend to find this fear of meaninglessness … well … meaningless.
2) Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.
People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.
3) Atheism is dogmatic.
Jews, Christians and Muslims claim that their scriptures are so prescient of humanity’s needs that they could only have been written under the direction of an omniscient deity. An atheist is simply a person who has considered this claim, read the books and found the claim to be ridiculous. One doesn’t have to take anything on faith, or be otherwise dogmatic, to reject unjustified religious beliefs. As the historian Stephen Henry Roberts (1901-71) once said: “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”
4) Atheists think everything in the universe arose by chance.
No one knows why the universe came into being. In fact, it is not entirely clear that we can coherently speak about the “beginning” or “creation” of the universe at all, as these ideas invoke the concept of time, and here we are talking about the origin of space-time itself.
The notion that atheists believe that everything was created by chance is also regularly thrown up as a criticism of Darwinian evolution. As Richard Dawkins explains in his marvelous book, “The God Delusion,” this represents an utter misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. Although we don’t know precisely how the Earth’s early chemistry begat biology, we know that the diversity and complexity we see in the living world is not a product of mere chance. Evolution is a combination of chance mutation and natural selection. Darwin arrived at the phrase “natural selection” by analogy to the “artificial selection” performed by breeders of livestock. In both cases, selection exerts a highly non-random effect on the development of any species.
5) Atheism has no connection to science.
Although it is possible to be a scientist and still believe in God — as some scientists seem to manage it — there is no question that an engagement with scientific thinking tends to erode, rather than support, religious faith. Taking the U.S. population as an example: Most polls show that about 90% of the general public believes in a personal God; yet 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences do not. This suggests that there are few modes of thinking less congenial to religious faith than science is.
6) Atheists are arrogant.
When scientists don’t know something — like why the universe came into being or how the first self-replicating molecules formed — they admit it. Pretending to know things one doesn’t know is a profound liability in science. And yet it is the life-blood of faith-based religion. One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be found in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while claiming to know facts about cosmology, chemistry and biology that no scientist knows. When considering questions about the nature of the cosmos and our place within it, atheists tend to draw their opinions from science. This isn’t arrogance; it is intellectual honesty.
7) Atheists are closed to spiritual experience.
There is nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing love, ecstasy, rapture and awe; atheists can value these experiences and seek them regularly. What atheists don’t tend to do is make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims about the nature of reality on the basis of such experiences. There is no question that some Christians have transformed their lives for the better by reading the Bible and praying to Jesus. What does this prove? It proves that certain disciplines of attention and codes of conduct can have a profound effect upon the human mind. Do the positive experiences of Christians suggest that Jesus is the sole savior of humanity? Not even remotely — because Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and even atheists regularly have similar experiences.
There is, in fact, not a Christian on this Earth who can be certain that Jesus even wore a beard, much less that he was born of a virgin or rose from the dead. These are just not the sort of claims that spiritual experience can authenticate.
8) Atheists believe that there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding.
Atheists are free to admit the limits of human understanding in a way that religious people are not. It is obvious that we do not fully understand the universe; but it is even more obvious that neither the Bible nor the Koran reflects our best understanding of it. We do not know whether there is complex life elsewhere in the cosmos, but there might be. If there is, such beings could have developed an understanding of nature’s laws that vastly exceeds our own. Atheists can freely entertain such possibilities. They also can admit that if brilliant extraterrestrials exist, the contents of the Bible and the Koran will be even less impressive to them than they are to human atheists.
From the atheist point of view, the world’s religions utterly trivialize the real beauty and immensity of the universe. One doesn’t have to accept anything on insufficient evidence to make such an observation.
9) Atheists ignore the fact that religion is extremely beneficial to society.
Those who emphasize the good effects of religion never seem to realize that such effects fail to demonstrate the truth of any religious doctrine. This is why we have terms such as “wishful thinking” and “self-deception.” There is a profound distinction between a consoling delusion and the truth.
In any case, the good effects of religion can surely be disputed. In most cases, it seems that religion gives people bad reasons to behave well, when good reasons are actually available. Ask yourself, which is more moral, helping the poor out of concern for their suffering, or doing so because you think the creator of the universe wants you to do it, will reward you for doing it or will punish you for not doing it?
10) Atheism provides no basis for morality.
If a person doesn’t already understand that cruelty is wrong, he won’t discover this by reading the Bible or the Koran — as these books are bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both human and divine. We do not get our morality from religion. We decide what is good in our good books by recourse to moral intuitions that are (at some level) hard-wired in us and that have been refined by thousands of years of thinking about the causes and possibilities of human happiness.
We have made considerable moral progress over the years, and we didn’t make this progress by reading the Bible or the Koran more closely. Both books condone the practice of slavery — and yet every civilized human being now recognizes that slavery is an abomination. Whatever is good in scripture — like the golden rule — can be valued for its ethical wisdom without our believing that it was handed down to us by the creator of the universe.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
You didn't get mad...
You didn't get mad...
Apr 5, 2010 at 2:03 AM
http://daveward.vox.com/library/post/you-didnt-get-mad.html
You didn’t get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.
You didn’t get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate energy policy.
You didn’t get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.
You didn’t get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.
You didn’t get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.
You didn’t get mad when we spent over 600 billion (and counting) on said illegal war.
You didn’t get mad when over 10 billion dollars just disappeared in Iraq.
You didn’t get mad when you found out we were torturing people.
You didn’t get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.
You didn’t get mad when we didn’t catch Bin Laden.
You didn’t get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.
You didn’t get mad when we let a major US city, New Orleans, drown.
You didn’t get mad when we gave a 900 billion dollar tax break to the rich.
You didn’t get mad when the deficit hit the trillion dollar mark.
You finally got mad when the government decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick. Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, are all okay with you, but helping other Americans… oh hell no.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Anti-Intellectualism Is Destroying America
“It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant.” Barack Obama finally said it.
Though a successful political and electoral strategy, the Right’s stand against intelligence has steered them far off course, leaving them — and us — unable to deal successfully with the complex and dynamic circumstances we face as a nation and a society.
American 15-year-olds rank 24th out of 29 countries in math literacy, and their parents are as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution; roughly 30 to 40 percent believe in each. Their president believes “the jury is still out” on evolution.
Steve Colbert interviewed Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland on “The Colbert Report.” Westmoreland co-sponsored a bill that would require the display of the Ten Commandments in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, but, when asked, couldn’t actually list the commandments.
This stuff would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous.
In the 2004 election, nearly 70 percent of Bush supporters believed the United States had “clear evidence” that Saddam Hussein was working closely with al Qaeda; a third believed weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq; and more than a third that a substantial majority of world opinion supported the U.S.-led invasion, according to the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. The political right and allied culture warriors actively ignore evidence and encourage misinformation. To motivate their followers, they label intelligent and informed as “elite,” implying that ignorance is somehow both valuable and under attack.
and from Way of the Mind:
In my opinion, anti-intellectualism is one of the world’s most serious problems, these days.
What is it? It’s the belief that what is good are the “simple people”, the “common people”, who are supposedly more honest and “real” than so-called “ivory tower” intellectuals.
It’s also the belief that thinking and learning are trouble, that they lead people to unhappiness, sinfulness, asking too many questions, and such.
It’s geeks, or more intelligent students, being called “brainy” or “nerds” and harassed by classmates. It’s science being seen as a waste of time and money. It’s a political candidate winning an election because he successfully depicted his opponent as an “egghead”. Incidentally, it’s likely that one of the reasons America currently has one of its worst presidents ever is that, by being less educated and articulate than Gore or Kerry, he appeared “more in touch” with the common man (of course, one should then wonder if you really want the village idiot in charge of the most powerful nation in the world… but I digress.)
There are several sources of anti-intellectualism. Religion is an obvious one, of course, since being intelligent and learning makes one less likely to accept arguments from authority, and to question unproven assertions. An intelligent, learned man has no need for religion – therefore, we don’t want any intelligent, learned men (to paraphrase The Fountainhead’s Elllsworth Toohey).
Besides “normal” religion, there’s also the usual mystical, new age thinking, according to which the mind is “flawed” and imperfect, incapable of perceiving any real “revelations”, which you supposedly can only grasp with “your heart” or “your spirit”. The mind is human, and therefore imperfect, while the heart/spirit are filled with “the cosmos’s love” or any other generic, meaningless terms.
Another reason is populism, the belief that the honest, hard working “masses” are oppressed by the corrupt, privileged “elites”. While they certainly are, sometimes (in dictatorships, for instance), populism is wrong because of its belief of “the lower, the better”, and its worship of ordinariness. Populism, like most forms of collectivism, punishes people for ability and for success – therefore, it promotes mediocrity and sameness. And a populist certainly hates and feels threatened by anyone with more “brains” or education.
Dictatorships (communism, fascism, etc.) always strongly promote anti-intellectualism, for mostly the same reasons as religion does: an intelligent, educated person is much more likely to question, and to see “what’s rotten”. The “unwashed masses” are much easier to keep in line. Higher education is seen as “dangerous” and “subversive”.
An intellectual isn’t necessarily someone more intelligent or with more knowledge than the norm. It just means that the person highly values the mind, thinking, and the pursuit of knowledge. And it’s frightening, to me, how few intellectuals (by that definition) I personally know. Anti-intellectuals (people who deride the mind, who pride themselves on not thinking, on not using their reason), on the other hand, are everywhere.
During this presidential campaign we’ve heard the terms “elite” and “elitist” used as pejorative terms. I agree with Bill Maher when he said,
Say it loud: I’m elite and proud! The right-wing crusade to demonize elites has paid off. Now the country’s run by incompetents who make mediocrity a job requirement and recruit from Pat Robertson’s law school. New rule: Now that liberals have taken back the word liberal, they also have to take back the word “elite.” By now you’ve heard the constant right-wing attacks on the “elite,” or as it’s otherwise known, “hating.” They’ve had it up to their red necks with the “elite media.” The “liberal elite.” Who may or may not be part of the “Washington elite.” A subset of the “East Coast elite.” Which is influenced by “the Hollywood elite.” So basically, unless you’re a shitkicker from Kansas, you’re with the terrorists.
I don’t get it: In other fields — outside of government — elite is a good thing, like an elite fighting force. Tiger Woods is an elite golfer. If I need brain surgery, I’d like an elite doctor. But in politics, elite is bad (Source)
It’s not just politics, though. As the influence of fundamental religion grows worldwide, it is becoming perceived as honorable, honest, down-to-Earth to be ignorant and bad-mouth intellectualism. A 16 year old kid makes the news dropping out of high school to play Guitar Hero. Education and the desire to know are no longer priorities.
Do you value the intellect? Does the negative connotation of “elite” and “intellectual” bother you?
http://frethink.com/2008/08/25/anti-intellectualism-is-destroying-america/
Though a successful political and electoral strategy, the Right’s stand against intelligence has steered them far off course, leaving them — and us — unable to deal successfully with the complex and dynamic circumstances we face as a nation and a society.
American 15-year-olds rank 24th out of 29 countries in math literacy, and their parents are as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution; roughly 30 to 40 percent believe in each. Their president believes “the jury is still out” on evolution.
Steve Colbert interviewed Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland on “The Colbert Report.” Westmoreland co-sponsored a bill that would require the display of the Ten Commandments in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, but, when asked, couldn’t actually list the commandments.
This stuff would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous.
In the 2004 election, nearly 70 percent of Bush supporters believed the United States had “clear evidence” that Saddam Hussein was working closely with al Qaeda; a third believed weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq; and more than a third that a substantial majority of world opinion supported the U.S.-led invasion, according to the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. The political right and allied culture warriors actively ignore evidence and encourage misinformation. To motivate their followers, they label intelligent and informed as “elite,” implying that ignorance is somehow both valuable and under attack.
and from Way of the Mind:
In my opinion, anti-intellectualism is one of the world’s most serious problems, these days.
What is it? It’s the belief that what is good are the “simple people”, the “common people”, who are supposedly more honest and “real” than so-called “ivory tower” intellectuals.
It’s also the belief that thinking and learning are trouble, that they lead people to unhappiness, sinfulness, asking too many questions, and such.
It’s geeks, or more intelligent students, being called “brainy” or “nerds” and harassed by classmates. It’s science being seen as a waste of time and money. It’s a political candidate winning an election because he successfully depicted his opponent as an “egghead”. Incidentally, it’s likely that one of the reasons America currently has one of its worst presidents ever is that, by being less educated and articulate than Gore or Kerry, he appeared “more in touch” with the common man (of course, one should then wonder if you really want the village idiot in charge of the most powerful nation in the world… but I digress.)
There are several sources of anti-intellectualism. Religion is an obvious one, of course, since being intelligent and learning makes one less likely to accept arguments from authority, and to question unproven assertions. An intelligent, learned man has no need for religion – therefore, we don’t want any intelligent, learned men (to paraphrase The Fountainhead’s Elllsworth Toohey).
Besides “normal” religion, there’s also the usual mystical, new age thinking, according to which the mind is “flawed” and imperfect, incapable of perceiving any real “revelations”, which you supposedly can only grasp with “your heart” or “your spirit”. The mind is human, and therefore imperfect, while the heart/spirit are filled with “the cosmos’s love” or any other generic, meaningless terms.
Another reason is populism, the belief that the honest, hard working “masses” are oppressed by the corrupt, privileged “elites”. While they certainly are, sometimes (in dictatorships, for instance), populism is wrong because of its belief of “the lower, the better”, and its worship of ordinariness. Populism, like most forms of collectivism, punishes people for ability and for success – therefore, it promotes mediocrity and sameness. And a populist certainly hates and feels threatened by anyone with more “brains” or education.
Dictatorships (communism, fascism, etc.) always strongly promote anti-intellectualism, for mostly the same reasons as religion does: an intelligent, educated person is much more likely to question, and to see “what’s rotten”. The “unwashed masses” are much easier to keep in line. Higher education is seen as “dangerous” and “subversive”.
An intellectual isn’t necessarily someone more intelligent or with more knowledge than the norm. It just means that the person highly values the mind, thinking, and the pursuit of knowledge. And it’s frightening, to me, how few intellectuals (by that definition) I personally know. Anti-intellectuals (people who deride the mind, who pride themselves on not thinking, on not using their reason), on the other hand, are everywhere.
During this presidential campaign we’ve heard the terms “elite” and “elitist” used as pejorative terms. I agree with Bill Maher when he said,
Say it loud: I’m elite and proud! The right-wing crusade to demonize elites has paid off. Now the country’s run by incompetents who make mediocrity a job requirement and recruit from Pat Robertson’s law school. New rule: Now that liberals have taken back the word liberal, they also have to take back the word “elite.” By now you’ve heard the constant right-wing attacks on the “elite,” or as it’s otherwise known, “hating.” They’ve had it up to their red necks with the “elite media.” The “liberal elite.” Who may or may not be part of the “Washington elite.” A subset of the “East Coast elite.” Which is influenced by “the Hollywood elite.” So basically, unless you’re a shitkicker from Kansas, you’re with the terrorists.
I don’t get it: In other fields — outside of government — elite is a good thing, like an elite fighting force. Tiger Woods is an elite golfer. If I need brain surgery, I’d like an elite doctor. But in politics, elite is bad (Source)
It’s not just politics, though. As the influence of fundamental religion grows worldwide, it is becoming perceived as honorable, honest, down-to-Earth to be ignorant and bad-mouth intellectualism. A 16 year old kid makes the news dropping out of high school to play Guitar Hero. Education and the desire to know are no longer priorities.
Do you value the intellect? Does the negative connotation of “elite” and “intellectual” bother you?
http://frethink.com/2008/08/25/anti-intellectualism-is-destroying-america/
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Twenty Atheist Quotes from Some Surprising Historical Figures
"The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church." - Ferdinand Magellan
"The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma." - Abraham Lincoln
"Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear." - Thomas Jefferson
"Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis." - Sigmund Freud
"There is so much in the bible against which every insinct of my being rebels, so much so that I regret the necessity which has compelled me to read it through from beginning to end." - Helen Keller
"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes." - Gene Roddenberry
."A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows." - Samuel Clemens
"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for a reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed." - Albert Einstein
"It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so." - Ernestine Rose
"All thinking men are atheists." - Ernest Hemingway
"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence." - Richard Dawkins
"Fear is the parent of cruelty; therefore it is no wonder if religion and cruelty have gone hand-in-hand." - Bertrand Russell
"Fundamentalism means never having to say 'I'm wrong'." - unknown
"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches." - Benjamin Franklin
"I don't believe in God. My god is patriotism. Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life." - Andrew Carnegie
"The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life." - Sigmund Freud
"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful." - Seneca the Younger
"Creationists make it sound like a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night." - Isaac Asimov
"My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a "they" as opposed to a "we" can be identified at all." - Richard Dawkins
"The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma." - Abraham Lincoln
"Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear." - Thomas Jefferson
"Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis." - Sigmund Freud
"There is so much in the bible against which every insinct of my being rebels, so much so that I regret the necessity which has compelled me to read it through from beginning to end." - Helen Keller
"We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes." - Gene Roddenberry
."A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows." - Samuel Clemens
"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for a reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed." - Albert Einstein
"It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so." - Ernestine Rose
"All thinking men are atheists." - Ernest Hemingway
"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence." - Richard Dawkins
"Fear is the parent of cruelty; therefore it is no wonder if religion and cruelty have gone hand-in-hand." - Bertrand Russell
"Fundamentalism means never having to say 'I'm wrong'." - unknown
"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches." - Benjamin Franklin
"I don't believe in God. My god is patriotism. Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life." - Andrew Carnegie
"The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life." - Sigmund Freud
"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful." - Seneca the Younger
"Creationists make it sound like a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night." - Isaac Asimov
"My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a "they" as opposed to a "we" can be identified at all." - Richard Dawkins
Monday, May 3, 2010
Who Got Our $1,000,000,000,000?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-alan-grayson/who-got-our-1000000000000_b_560964.html
Last year, I asked the Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board who received $1 trillion in funds that the Fed handed out to domestic banks and financial institutions.He said, essentially, "I'm not going to tell you." More recently, I asked the Chairman of the Fed who received the half trillion dollars - that's $500,000,000,000 - that the Fed handed over to foreign central banks. He said he didn't know. Half a trillion dollars, and he doesn't know!
That kind of ignorance and arrogance must end. We need to audit the Fed. And now we're closer than ever.
The House passed our bill to conduct the first independent audit of the Fed in its 96-year history. Now it's time for the Senate to act.
A bipartisan group of Senators is pushing for an amendment to audit the Fed. This amendment is similar to the legislation that we passed in the House last year. It's called the Federal Reserve Accountability Amendment. It will ensure that the American people know to whom the Fed is lending our money.
The amendment is simple. If it passes, the Fed finally will be audited. Regarding all those billions that the Fed hands out like party favors, we will find out who, what, when, where and how. (We already know "why" - the answer to that question is "Wall Street Greed.") But if this amendment fails, the Fed can continue to make hand out our money to whomever it wants, without telling Congress or the American People.
We think we can pass the Senate Amendment, with your help. The amendment is already cosponsored by progressive heroes like Bernie Sanders, Pat Leahy and Russ Feingold. And joining us in this strange-bedfellows coalition are John McCain, Jim DeMint, David Vitter and Sam Brownback. (We hesitate to use the terms "bedfellows" and "David Vitter" in the same sentence, but that would be changing the subject.)
With such bipartisan support, you'd think that passing this legislation would be a slam dunk. Wrong. Wall Street bankers and their lobbyists are twisting arms and pouring millions into the campaign coffers of politicians on both sides of the political divide, to keep their sweetheart Fed loans under wraps. It's time to counter their influence-peddling by making the Senate listen to the united voice of the American People. (That would be you.)
Last year, I asked the Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board who received $1 trillion in funds that the Fed handed out to domestic banks and financial institutions.He said, essentially, "I'm not going to tell you." More recently, I asked the Chairman of the Fed who received the half trillion dollars - that's $500,000,000,000 - that the Fed handed over to foreign central banks. He said he didn't know. Half a trillion dollars, and he doesn't know!
That kind of ignorance and arrogance must end. We need to audit the Fed. And now we're closer than ever.
The House passed our bill to conduct the first independent audit of the Fed in its 96-year history. Now it's time for the Senate to act.
A bipartisan group of Senators is pushing for an amendment to audit the Fed. This amendment is similar to the legislation that we passed in the House last year. It's called the Federal Reserve Accountability Amendment. It will ensure that the American people know to whom the Fed is lending our money.
The amendment is simple. If it passes, the Fed finally will be audited. Regarding all those billions that the Fed hands out like party favors, we will find out who, what, when, where and how. (We already know "why" - the answer to that question is "Wall Street Greed.") But if this amendment fails, the Fed can continue to make hand out our money to whomever it wants, without telling Congress or the American People.
We think we can pass the Senate Amendment, with your help. The amendment is already cosponsored by progressive heroes like Bernie Sanders, Pat Leahy and Russ Feingold. And joining us in this strange-bedfellows coalition are John McCain, Jim DeMint, David Vitter and Sam Brownback. (We hesitate to use the terms "bedfellows" and "David Vitter" in the same sentence, but that would be changing the subject.)
With such bipartisan support, you'd think that passing this legislation would be a slam dunk. Wrong. Wall Street bankers and their lobbyists are twisting arms and pouring millions into the campaign coffers of politicians on both sides of the political divide, to keep their sweetheart Fed loans under wraps. It's time to counter their influence-peddling by making the Senate listen to the united voice of the American People. (That would be you.)
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