What if Facts were True?

So, it happens that a Trump surrogate made an interesting statement regarding "facts"--they don't matter anymore. Things are true if people believe in them. So, maybe Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim--who knows? Maybe aspirin is a good birth control pill. Maybe climate change can be dumb because your dumb face, right?

Of course this is an appalling thing to say. There needs to be common ground for people to be able to get together and discuss their wants and needs. If facts--the concrete understandings that are the underpinning for our shared reality--don't matter, then how can we ever deal with the subjective responses people have in reaction to those facts? It seems like a casual way of dismissing groups one doesn't want to listen to--"I reject your reality and replace it with my own."

It seems to me that the problem is one of "epistemic closure"--a fraught subject in right/left relations in these here United States. The mainstream media makes a game of false equivalence regarding traditional conservative and liberal discourse, but there does seem to be a higher propensity amongst conservatives for believing sheer bullshit. That's not to say liberals don't ever believe in bullshit--it's just that your bullshit has to be pretty immaculate to get us to the table.

I've considered "epistemic closure" to be part of the right/left communications failure for a while, starting with the rise of the Tea Parties, and noted it as being a particular reason why "outsider" candidates were winning the 2016 primaries. But the electoral wave that made Trump possible has lead to disturbing notions like a "post truth world".

That should not be a thing. Facts have to matter. Things like how climate change happens and how other countries feel about their borders and their economies matter. A leader has to be aware of facts because those are your handles, the grips, the ways of understanding what needs to get done.

This post is, in part, a riff on Big Bad Bald Bastard's post, about which I'm copacetic. Where two separate and barely overlapping cultural, mental, emotional, realities occur, it is hard to find common ground. We don't share the same folklore or necessarily appreciate the same ideas about what constitutes "values".

But if I have to find a place to plant my spear and stand like Horatius Cocles, and admit facts matter? Ok. Here goes--facts matter. Reality and government need facts. No matter what corner tells me different. I will stand on the facts.

Raif Badawi Has Received the Sakharan Prize

Raif Badawi, the Saudi Arabian blogger who still faces serious injury for the kind of speech I take for granted every day, has been awarded the Sakharan Prize, named for the Russian nuclear physicist who became a human rights activist. If Saudi Arabia, a petrostate on the brink because of lowered oil prices that might not economically be able to survive the next ten years because they can not produce wheat in their climate and they can not eat oil, wanted to show goodwill to the outside world, the kind they don't get from killing Yemeni civilians, why, I think it might be very nice of them to consider pardoning Raif Badawi.

It would be only a start. But it would be a noble start. Continuing to punish Badawi is not a proof of the strength of Saudi Arabia, but of its weakness. They punish bloggers because they are not strong enough to deal with what questions are raised, or what activists might be aroused. Reacting to the individual who points this out and not the questions he raises, is a sure sign of a failure to be communicated to. This should hand SA its Royal Ass eventually. But for now, were they just to let Badawi go, they might at least earn a little good will from one of their sometime allies?

How do they not see this gesture as a positive one? Free Raif! You have nothing to lose but some of your horrible human rights reputation!

Some Thoughts About the Pew Religion Study

So, by now, most of my readers have probably heard about the Pew 2014 study on religion.  I find it an interesting document, especially because religion seems to be politicized in this country, and I blog about politics and religion. As an atheist (or probably more precisely, "militant agnostic"), I find the sharp rise in the "unaffiliated" category to be comforting as a probable hedge against political forces thrusting a theocracy on us. (Think I'm paranoid? One SCOTUS member has voiced the opinion that while there can be no federal church, there is no reason states can't have official churches, And polls have shown a high percentage of people who would make Christianity the national religion. I'm a regular reader of Rightwingwatch.org. I take the threat of theocracy fairly seriously.)

I find the reactions of other people interesting, as well. Because marriage equality has been a big topic of conversation lately, I find it interesting that some anti-gay politicians, like presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, and activists like Phyllis Schlafley, seem to believe that LGBT activism and especially the marriage equality movement are out to destroy the Christian church. And yet, nearly 50% of gays consider themselves to be Christian, and there is increasing acceptance of LGBT people in several Christian denominations.

Another Blogger has Been Killed In Bangladesh

In a disturbing event, another freethought blogger, Washiqur Rahman, has been killed in Bangladesh, following on the bloody slaying of Avijit Roy.  It seems like there may be simply a hitlist for bloggers, where people strike out at these writers not because they are personally offended by their work, but because they were told to.

If I could find something more offensive, intellectually, than a pack of knee-jerk radical fundamentalists brutally hacking a living, thinking, human being to death because they found what he said offensive--not anything he did or bade others to do, just his ideas, then, I would consider that to be a pack of knee-jerk fundamentalists brutally hacking a living, thinking human being to death because they had no more wit than to find him offensive because they were assured he was--without having consulted his supposed "offensive" works at all.

Call me funny that way--if I have to hate someone enough to hack them until their own family can just about identify the puzzle of parts they've been presented with, I would very much like to see the offending material myself. Hacking someone to death because they wrote stuff, sight unseen, sounds just an awful lot like being no more than an appendage to another person's bile--just an organ twitching in sympathy with someone else's deranged hormones. A killbot. A drone.

The killers should be treated as if they were more than "bad code" of course. It gives them the benefit of the humanity they didn't bother to use.

Three Americans Gunned Down By Suspected Terrorist

Deah Shaddy Barakat, his wife, Yusor Muhammed, and her sister, Razan Muhammad Abu-Salha, were gunned down in Chapel Hill, NC by a self-professed "anti-theist" and gun enthusiast who maintains that he killed the trio over a parking space dispute.

As of yet, I haven't heard enough of Craig Stephen Hicks' side to be 100% certain that he didn't just snap out and kill three human beings over a petty neighborhood squabble that could have easily been resolved in a handful of other, adult, peaceful ways. From the sound of things, he was a guy carrying a shit-ton of anger who made other neighbors a bit wary--and that isn't a good sign. Some people are like powder kegs. When they go off is a just a timing issue with their particular fuse.

Maher, Noah, and the Paradox of Blasphemy

I watch Bill Maher--I don't agree with him all the time, and sometimes I think he can be crude (heh, me too, come to think of it), but what I find fascinating is the way he gets up the nose of fundamentalists. Here's Maher the other week regarding the bad image one might get about God from that Book people are always talking about:



And just between you, me, and the rest of the Internet--he has a point. Old Testament God is very smitey and doesn't seem to be especially discriminating about who he does the smiting against. And people to this very day use that kind of smitey Godhead to harsh the mellows of other folks the whole world round, whether it's saying Gays or Boobs cause earthquakes, or even personal messages of how people done asked for it by not forgiving their abusive parents.

So maybe it shouldn't be surprising that some followers of Smitey Godhead want Maher to be punished for blasphemy:

The evangelical activist said Maher is known for his anti-religious views, but Emmanuel said “this time he’s gone too far.” 

“He may have protection under the First Amendment to say whatever slanderous thing that comes out of his toilet bowl brain, but that does not mean Christians should turn the other cheek,” Emmanuel said. 

He agreed with the Psalms 14 passage that questioned the character of anyone who would believe in his heart there was no God, suggesting Maher and outspoken atheists Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens had much in common with the Devil.

Atheists excell in religious knowledge

My theory regarding why Atheists know a bit more about religion is that most of us took a long route to arriving at the "no-faith" viewpoint. Maybe some atheists are lucky enough to have not been raised in any particular religious tradition, and see atheism as a default setting, but a lot of us were at least nominally of some faith before we determined ourselves faithless. And I would venture to guess a lot of us searched around for a replacement faith-system before recognizing that no really valid system existed--there was no real reason for the "God Hypothesis". This exposure to multiple viewpoints enriches an atheists' perspective. And so, atheists rule on the religion category of "Trivia Whiz".

Hitchens and Dawkins aren't really arresting the Pope.

But this is what the The Sunday Times had as its headline:

Richard Dawkins: I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI

Which naturally grabs the attention and makes one read on:

RICHARD DAWKINS, the atheist campaigner, is planning a legal ambush to have the Pope arrested during his state visit to Britain “for crimes against humanity”.

Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church.

The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998.

The Pope was embroiled in new controversy this weekend over a letter he signed arguing that the “good of the universal church” should be considered against the defrocking of an American priest who committed sex offences against two boys. It was dated 1985, when he was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which deals with sex abuse cases.

If your mind worked anything like mine, you'd envision a kind of "odd couple" buddy cop film: One is a mild-mannered Oxford professor, the other, a rough and tumble journalist, and together they are "Atheist Cops!"

PZ Myers (drat him and his being logical....) directed the attention of all who hadn't already checked out RichardDawkins.net, where Dawkins clears up what he actually means to do in the comments of a thread about the article. And supporting a legal challenge to a religious figure who has engaged in the cover-up of fairly ghastly abuse seems quite reasonable to me.

I still say that would be a hell of a buddy/cop pairing, though....

Rick Warren fails to win over yours truly.

I don't even think he's trying.

Life is cheap to those who think they're god. Mao,Stalin& Hitler(God-deniers) caused 110 million deaths without remorse.

Yeah. You know, that sort of thing--it doesn't make atheists think you want to be friends, Rev.

Now, I have said before and I'll say again, I don't care for the Atheist/Believer Body Count pissing contest, because it's nonsensical. We can't really, really know what a person does or doesn't believe, we can only know what they say they do. Hitler, for example, frequently represented as a believer. Does that make him a model Christian--oh no! The killing and so on--very not Christ-like. Was he a nihilist? Maybe. Some people gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back, and those people say, "I see your endless nothingness and raise you absurdity and nightmares." But one can be a nihilist in a world with a god in it, too--sure, an incomprehensible and possibly mad god that howls in the vacant wastes of an expanding universe and gazes uncaring on life and death, but you know--still a god. There just isn't reason enough to assume that Hitler either thought he was god or denied god. Same arguments can be applied to Stalin and Mao--although I'll give him Mao, and he really did suck. For that matter, I'll give him the Kims of North Korea--and the father did and the son does seem to act as if they are like gods (incomprehensible and probably mad gods that don't actually run a country especially well, but mean to run it very thoroughly.)

I also think it possible that people who believe that God talks to them or through them can do a lot of harm. Maybe not on the scale that leaders of nations can. But serious harm nonetheless. Take Uganda and the proposed death penalty legislation. Now, I'm not putting Pastor Rick's involvement on Scott Lively's footing (although, Mr. Lively is a believer, and so are, presumably, the people who put up this legislation in the first place. But there is a correlation between the Saddleback Church's AIDS mission, which doubtless is well-intentioned, and the message that church carries regarding homosexuality. The pastor definitely has made his views on that clear--albeit not necessarily in front of more secular audiences:



He has repudiated the Ugandan proposal re: the death penalty, but probably doesn't realize that he helps nurture the notion that people who are gay are wrong or unnatural. His likening of the relations of consenting gay adults to pedophiles--which are non consensual abusers, is ridiculous.

And let's take it just a step further--sometimes the crime isn't in leaving dead bodies behind, but killing part of the human imagination, the spirit of exploration, the impulse of human dignity to seek liberation. His ministry, shiny, happy, and recently flush with many donations after he sent out a poignantly poor-mouthing letter, represents in many ways the triumph of feel-good rhetoric over works, the anti-intellectualism of creationism, the judgementalism of the bigot.

I am a god-denier. That doesn't mean I think I'm god. For what it's worth, since I don't believe in god, I don't believe any of us mere humans are god, either--I'm suspicious of idols and would prefer they not track their clay-footprints on my mental carpet. To me, life is pretty precious because it's all we have. I also value that people should be able to enjoy a good quality of life, and be able to make certain choices for themselves that hurt no one, without censorship from one purporting to speak for god.

Perhaps he didn't mean to cover all atheists with a blanket slur that puts us in bed with Hitler, but you know what? I'm kind of seeing it that way.