“Weak” Atheism? Excuse me?

For years, I’ve described myself as ‘atheist,’ without batting an eyelid.  Nowadays, however, I prefer to call myself a ‘non-theist,’ as opposed to an ‘anti-theist.’

The differences between the two are substantial.  Anti-theists attribute every evil in the world to belief in the supernatural, whereas non-theists just don’t believe in any kind of deity.  We don’t care if other people worship one god, a pantheon or the animistic oneness of nature, so long as they don’t try to impose their beliefs on us.  The other term for non-theism is ‘weak atheism,’ highlighting the self-righteousness and grandiosity of the anti-theist camp.

Plus, anti-theists are fundamentalists.  Oh, they’ll scream and scream and scream ’til they go blue in the face if you dare suggest as much, but they are.

We agree on lots of things.  Church and State should be kept separate.  Knowledge, especially that imparted to children in schools, should be based on falsifiable evidence rather than belief for its own sake.  And yes, there are plenty of reactionary and bigoted passages in a great many sacred books.

We differ, however, on the blind assumption that religion is the cause of all evil.  To an anti-theist, the ongoing Israel/Palestine conflict exists purely because one crowd is Jewish and the other is Muslim, and incompatible religions have made otherwise peaceful people into mortal enemies.  Difficult sociological, economic, psychological and cultural ideas such as nationalism, deindividuation, relative deprivation, the frustration-aggression hypothesis, ethnic identity and culture-bound political ideologies go out the window. 

Thus, point the first:  Anti-theists are guilty of exactly the same logical error that fundamentalists are – the ‘fundamental attribution error.’  This logical error assumes that when somebody from a particular group does something bad, it’s because it’s somehow ‘in their nature,’ and situational factors are discounted.  Fundamentalists say that our crime rates are due to our godlessness; anti-theists say that violence on the part of believers is due to their belief in a higher power.  The guy who mugged me three years ago was wearing a gold crucifix; nevertheless, I am more inclined to believe that even if he genuinely was Catholic (and that the cross wasn’t just bling), he was probably more likely to have been motivated by the money in my pocket than the voice of Mother Mary in his head.

My second objection to anti-theism is the spectre of groupthink that hangs over the whole movement (a similar kind of groupthink, if you will, to that exhibited by fundamentalist groups the world over, from Al-Qaeda to the Ku Kux Klan).  Tropes and truisms are passed around, in-jokes functioning as thought-terminating clichés.

Have a quick gawk at this link to Dawkins’ website (subtitled ‘A Clear-Thinking Oasis’), wherein many of his recurring themes are helpfully summarised in poem format, there’s a photo of the famous atheist bus advert, and we see a few references to a point he made recently in his documentary, The Root of All Evil?, namely that labelling children as ‘Christian’ or ‘Muslim’ or whatever makes as much sense as labelling them as ‘Labour’ or ‘Tory’ children (I would have embedded a video clip from the documentary, but the BBC has blocked the video from Irish viewers, for some reason).

Now, have a listen to comedian Marcus Brigstocke’s standup routine on the topic of religion:

When one anti-theist says these things, it’s held to be a profound observation.  When another one says it, people laugh.  It must be the way you tell ‘em.  As yet, I have been unable to figure out which of them made these observations first.  Methinks that other anti-theist comedians will be rehashing the same points in their routines ten years from now, and the audiences that seek them out will still be laughing.  I bet that twenty years from now, first-year students in college will be quoting the same philosophical points to each other (when they’re not trying to pass off the ideas of Gramsci and Althusser as their own, of course).

The joke about stereotyping children politically bleeds into my next point: Dawkins is given to making breathtakingly ignorant statements, such as, “If you raise your child to believe in God, you are committing child abuse.”  He expends a lot of effort building his arguments on the rhetorical fallacy known as the appeal to emotion, the most famous form of which is ‘Think of the children.’  I wonder what his own parents would say if they could hear him make such a statement – according to Dawkins himself, he enjoyed “a normal Anglican upbringing.”  Despite the ‘child abuse’ that upbringing apparently constituted, he grew up to become an atheist, just like most of the atheists in the world.  Being raised by religious parents does not automatically mean that the child will grow up to be a believer.  Is Dawkins trying to imply that, like Neo in the Matrx trilogy, there are certain human beings who manage to escape the world of religiosity through sheer will, while everyone else remains plugged into a parasitic social meme?  Well, however he squares that cognitive dissonance within himself, it makes him look a twit; like one of those painfully smug arseholes in the pub who insist that you must be influenced by advertising, because you’re talking about it, aren’t you?  I guarantee you that any man who argues that human beings are passive, mindless sponges is making allowances for himself, and when he speaks to you, be aware that he’s looking down the length of his nose.

The ‘think of the children’ theme recurs again and again in the liberal press.  Because Ireland does not have a liberal press, I’m obliged to read The Guardian if I want to see journalism that reflects my political views.  It tells me absolutely nothing about what’s going on in the country I live in, but I enjoy the opinion pieces so much that I buy the whole paper and end up recycling 90 per cent of it before I’ve finished my morning coffee.  Nevertheless, I want to puke every time I see an artice about insidious fundamentalists trying to smuggle creationism into school curricula.

‘Creationism-Scare’ journalism pops up every now and again, and every time it appears, it seems the problem is getting worse, with hints at the existence of some kind of fundamentalist underground trying to fill kiddies’ minds with toxic superstitions.  This is called a deviancy amplification spiral, and it’s the kind of moralising shit I expect from The Mirror or The Sun.  The argument goes that X is ‘just the one incident we know about,’ or it’s ‘the tip of the iceberg,’ and one day the Western World will wake up to a nightmare of mediaevalism reborn, with unbelievers stoned in the streets.

Anti-theists are recognised by their combative response to religion.  It is not enough to encourage debate (always a good thing), but a hard line must be taken – by attributing all the evil in the world to religious belief, they clearly imply that the eradication of religion is a just cause.  You’re either with them or against them, a backward religious moron or an enlightened man/woman of science.  Nobody ‘in the middle,’ so to speak - like an aunt of mine who is simultaneously a brilliant microbiologist and an extremely devout Protestant, or the many astrophysicists working in the Vatican Observatory - is worthy of consideration.  To be religious, according to the anti-theist camp, is to be intolerant and morally suspect, therefore we should erase religion altogether.

This was actually accomplished on a local scale by Taliban, when they tried to erase ’idolatry’ from Afghanistan by destroying the Buddhas of Bamyan, dynamiting beautiful works of art that had stood for over a thousand years.  They saw nothing in those statues except representations of something in which they did not believe, and they were incapable of suspending that disbelief to the meagre extent required to admit, “Well, they’re nice to look at, aren’t they?”  I have difficulty believing that anti-theists would pursue their irreligious utopia with any more decency, humanity or intelligence.

This belligerent attitude has caused them to snap at people who actually agree with them philosophically, hence the sneering label of ‘weak atheist.’  It’s redolent of the disease of ‘orthodoxy sniffing’ within socialist groups (illustrated by George Orwell with the phrase, “Sniff, sniff.  Are you a good anti-Fascist?”), implying that there are certain things you have to do, certain views that you have to subscribe to, before you can be considered a ‘proper’ atheist.  You can’t call yourself an atheist just because you don’t believe in God; you have to prove it with Good Works and proselytising.  Fundamentalist?  Oh, you betcha.

At the end of the day, though, the reason why stupid shit like the fundamental attribution error, groupthink, appeals to emotion and deviancy amplification spirals still exist, after thousands of years of recorded human history, is because they’re easy to subscribe to.  It’s easy to say that your neighbour is a bollocks because he’s ‘one of them’; easy to parrot received wisdom because you’re afraid to contradict it; easier to feel rather than think; and very, very easy to attribute everything you don’t like to some secretive conspiracy.

In closing, let me return to that image of the bus-banner: “Relax, There Probably Is No God.”  ‘Probably’???  Richard Dawkins, the author of The God Delusion, gave his blessing (no pun intended) to an atheist shock campaign that said there probably is no God???  The man wrote a tl;dr poem about shocking the faithful with a juvenile prank, and yet the prank in question basically amounted to saying, “Well, we maintain that God doesn’t exist, but we could be wrong.”

And I’m a ‘weak’ atheist???

Published in:  on February 2, 2010 at 11:39 pm Leave a Comment

New resolution

I’m never watching an ‘alternative music show’ again.  They’re all the same: they all have stupid names; they hail pathetic bands as geniuses; and they’re all fronted by two people – one of whom is an ordinary-looking girl, the other a half-man/half-scarf creature that looks like he was blown backwards through a charity shop in the teeth of a hurricane.   The former will either have a ‘unique’ name or an exotic accent, and the latter will speak in a nasally monotone that suggests that all his adrenaline has long since drained away.  Extra points for ‘ironic’ t-shirts or musical tastes.

I could put up with all that, if it weren’t for the way in which these shows remind be of my undergrad years, being cornered at a house party by a pair of incredibly boring indie kids attempting to pass off reviews from Mojo as their own insights, singing the praises of obscure bands they didn’t know about before hearing them on this month’s free Uncut CD.

And what kind of music will you hear on these shows?  Usually, it’s an easily-startled-by-loud-noises creature, playing the same three notes over and over again on an acoustic guitar, singing lyrics that would have been laughed off Sesame Street.  Where the hell are AC/DC when you need ‘em???

Published in:  on November 17, 2009 at 6:30 pm Leave a Comment

Who Needs John Lennon?

Here, I would like to vent my spleen about John Lennon.

Yes.  That John Lennon.  The idealist, the rebel, the genius, the Voice of a Generation ™, the iconoclast, the Messiah, the poet, the artist, the philosopher, the astronaut, the horse-whisperer, the Klingon and whatever else you’re having.  That John Lennon.

The Beatles are a sort of conundrum.  They were a boy band.  Examine any of their song titles or lyrics, and that fact becomes abundantly clear.  Yet the same critics and music obsessives who never miss an opportunity to tear strips off the likes of N*Sync, Boyzone, Take That and all the others will go weak at the knees upon hearing a Beatles tune.  Why?  Well, the main reason seems to be that they were the first to do it, and for that they are afforded a kind of respect.  But at the end of the day, they were still a bloody boy band, despite all their later protests to the contrary.

Ringo Starr is the only Beatle deserving of any kudos in this regard – he knew that the whole enterprise was little more than stupid, fluffy fun for teenagers with a disposable income, and the songs he wrote reflect this understanding.  While Paul McCartney was writing painfully earnest shite such as “Let It Be,” George Harrison was indulging in Indian mysticism and Lennon was enthralling the gullible with his fiery intellect, Ringo Starr was creating innocent, catchy pap such as “Yellow Submarine,” not suffering from any of the delusions his bandmates were labouring under.

The Indian mysticism has often been interpreted as a reaction against Western capitalism, the Beatles enacting their generation’s search for some transcendent truth.  Looked at objectively, however, their spiritual awakening was no more genuine than the celebrity Kabbala craze that took hold a number of years ago, and it was just as insulting.

Following the break-up of the Beatles, Lennon realised that being remembered as a Beatle for all time was pretty embarrassing.  This, combined with his growing anger at the others for not accepting Yoko Ono into their circle, seems to have driven him to construct his solo identity in terms of extreme opposition to all he was before.

Except he didn’t.  Listen to “Imagine,” and you’ll hear the same airy-fairy boy band nonsense dressed up in playschool-level socialist rhetoric.  Lennon was the kind of ‘activist’ for whom it is more important to be seen to be an activist, and to have others believe that you hold radical beliefs, than to actually do anything constructive.  For example, take the “bed-ins,” where John and Yoko stayed in bed for seven days for peace.

If you seriously believe that Lennon and Yoko were intelligent people, then the only way to interpret this 1969 episode is as a bad joke.  Reading interviews with Lennon from the time, however, one is struck by the sincerity of his belief that by staying in bed, they would change the world.

Lennon the Activist had obviously never heard the maxim that ‘pacifism is not the same as doing nothing.’  It takes a sizeable amount of arrogance to not only do nothing, but to parade your inactivity before the world.  Remember, 1969 was the year of the Tate-LaBianca murders and the violence at Altamont, the year that marked the end of the utopian hippy dream with bloodshed and madness.  A more honest response from Lennon and Yoko would have been to hide under that bed, not lie in it.

Then of course, there’s other things about the Great One that are irritating in the extreme.  Take “Come Together,” the tune that Electronic Arts used to advertise the Beatles: Rock Band game.  It was ripped off of Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me.”  And no, it wasn’t an innocent mistake, either.  When confronted on the issue by a music journo, Lennon responded by saying, “We resurrected him!”  The kind of lame excuse you might expect from a child caught red-handed with his hand in the cookie jar.

It’s obvious, too, what he meant when he sang, “Woman Is the Nigger of the World.”  It makes a forceful point, except that the dude who wrote and sang it was a white man.  Lennon comes across like the male feminists you overhear in Bohemian cafes, beaming as they tell their understandably nonplussed female comrades, “I believe in total liberation for women!  It’s time that women had an equal share in the world!  Now, what you gals should do is…”  His pseudo-feminism is all the more laughable considering the resurgence of his old boy-band drivel in ditties like “Every Man Has a Woman Who Loves Him,” and “Jealous Guy” – the anthem of creepy, self-important teenage stalkers everywhere.  His actual opinion of women is on display in “Woman,” where he praises them for their role as long-suffering mothers for ‘the child inside of man.’

This ties into another one of his singles, “Mother.”  The song is transparently about the pain he felt about being ‘abandoned’ by his mother (fact:  she was actually killed by a drunk driver) and his father walking out on the family. The end refrain goes, “Mama don’t go; Daddy come home.”  He recorded this song seven years after the birth of his son Julian, about whom Lennon the man-child once said, “He came out of a whiskey bottle on a Saturday night.”  At this point, Lennon obviously wasn’t prepared to give up being a child in order to be a father.

I’m going to lay off here.  I would say I could go on forever about this, but I can’t.  The longer I spend talking about this tissue-paper damagogue, the sicker I feel.  Suffice it to say I’m not partial to the man’s music, and I remain unconvinced of his status as a witty, spiritual, “Working Class Hero.”

Published in:  on September 29, 2009 at 1:21 pm Leave a Comment

Zombies

You might’ve heard about the Canadian mathematicians who used a zombie holocaust as a model for the spread of a highly infectious disease (it made the news in August).  You can find the paper here.

They take the ‘traditional’ pop-culture zombie as its template (y’know: slow, eats flesh, not too bright), and propose several models to cover the dead coming back to life, quarantine, etc.  A bit heavy on the mathematics for a layman, but still very interesting.  They say that this model could be applied to studies of party loyalty, among other things, which is pretty cool.

They did make one boo-boo, though.  Though they based a lot of this on the Romero zombie-world, they create a class of ’susceptible’ people to calculate the rate of infection.  In the Romero films, everyone is infected already.  It doesn’t matter if you fall down the stairs, or die of old age: in the Dead series, you will become a zombie when you die, no exceptions (this was implicit in the early films, and it was explicitly stated in Land of the Dead.  The notion first appeared in the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend).  If you get bitten by a zombie, it just makes you ‘turn’ faster.  Plus, they included a formula that allowed for somebody to develop a cure for zombification – which is really, in essence, a cure for death.  Which is handy.

I suppose maybe they wanted to create a model that left a margin for the possible survival of the human species.  Sissies.  Still, I haven’t enjoyed maths this much in quite a while.

Published in:  on September 10, 2009 at 8:20 pm Leave a Comment

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

Francisco de Goya

In the run-up to the second Lisbon Treaty referendum, this seems kind of appropriate.

I voted against the Lisbon Treaty last time.  I’m gonna vote for it this time around.  What can I say?  I had reservations about it last time, but in the interval, the EU have addressed those reservations to my satisfaction.  As an added bonus, it’ll feel nice to vote against the No campaign, who are really beginning to get on my nerves.

Last time round, the No campaign carried the day through the use of disinformation and conspiracy theories.  According to them, a vote for Lisbon was a vote for: abortion on demand; the formation of a Federal European State (TM); conscription into a Euro super-army; increased power to France; increased power to Germany; the marginalisation of Ireland; AIDS; Space Invaders; Your Mother; weasels; whatever you’re having yourself.

The EU gave us legally-binding assurances on every single issue we brought to them.  Did that do anything to quell the anxieties of the No campaigners?  Of course it didn’t.

(disclaimer: this post isn’t aimed at people in general who want to vote No, but at those currently involved in campaigning for that result)

So, what’s the European Super-State gonna do to us this year, hmm?  Well, it seems that they still want to take away Ireland’s neutrality, the lying bunch of bastards; not only that, but they want to slash the minimum wage to just under €1.50.  Grrr!!!

And it seems that people are starting to believe this stuff – despite the fact that there is no way in hell that the EU can dictate a minimum wage level to any of its members, and there is no conceivable situation in which the EU would rely on the Irish army to fight its battles.

It was said of the Irish army in the 1960s that it was “A WW2-standard army, with WW1-standard weaponry.”  I can’t remember who said that or where, so sorry about that.  Well, today it’s a Desert Storm-standard army, with WW1 weaponry.  We have no air force, and our coast-guard doesn’t do much apart from picking up the occasional lost delivery of cocaine from the seas around Kerry and West Cork.  The issue of Irish neutrality, while contentious, is laughable in this case.  The Irish army is a puny peacekeeping force, nothing more – the EU hawks would have nothing to gain by eroding our neutrality.

Then there’s the posters that say, “95% of Europeans Would Vote No: Stand Up For Europe!”  Leaving aside the truism that 87.6% of all statistics are made up on the spot, I have to say that if you’re STUPID ENOUGH to fall for it, you deserve to have the No campaign treat you like a moron. 

95% of Europeans?  Really?  Who carried out this research?  What was the size of the sample group? Because if you take it upon yourself to speak for the inhabitants of an entire continent, you might want to make it a big sample – in fact, the only sample big enough to give any credibility to this statistic is 500 million.  Yes, if you’re gonna make claims like that about how ‘95% of Europeans’ would vote, I would like to see documentation that proves you personally went and interviewed 500,000,000 people across the European landmass, and that 475,000,000 of them said they would vote against the Lisbon Treaty.  If there was some proof of a process like that, I would accept the figure of the magical 95%.   Otherwise, you’re just making stuff up.

Yeah, the No campaign is lying to you.  Shock horror.  Quelle surprise.

Ahem!  So, yes indeed.  Voting for Lisbon, and against the No campaign, will make me a very happy bunny.

Published in:  on September 9, 2009 at 10:12 am Leave a Comment

Take it from me…

…you only love crazy until crazy loves you.

Published in:  on September 8, 2009 at 11:56 am Leave a Comment

You ever drunk Bailey’s from a shoe?

Howdy.

The story is, I started off with a blog on livejournal.  Two years ago, I stopped posting in it, an earlier this year I deleted it.

Why?  Because I started it when I was 16, and I didn’t want a reminder of how stupid and petulant I was back then to remain floating around in cyberspace for all to see.

Two years ago, I started another blog on blogspot.  A few weeks ago, I deleted that.  Why?  Because I noticed it was starting to fill up with the same kind of shit, even though I had intended it to be a quasi-serious politics/pop culture commentary thing.

Yep, if you’re doing the international sign for ‘wanker’ right now, you’d be spot-on.

I resolved never to blog again, but a few weeks ago my oul’ mucker barryclassic invited me to join that august publication, 3Berkley.  So I figured why not.  Oh yeah, I got a will of iron, so I do.

So, herein will lie the contents of my brain.  ‘cuz posting crap is what blogging is all about.

Published in:  on September 7, 2009 at 8:06 pm Comments (2)