There’s been a really great ongoing debate happening over at The Daily Dish surrounding atheism. It started when one of Andrew’s temporary replacements likened atheists such as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins to fundamentalists and religious extremists.

As it’s developed, I’ve read many intelligent arguments on both sides. But the truth is most of the religious side of the debate presumes a level of deference to religion. Atheists, it seems, are not allowed to compare religion to belief in Santa Claus or similar fanciful beliefs. At first it was attacked for being glib, but that does little to alter the fundamental similarities in the belief in Santa Claus and the belief in God.

Subsequently, the argument was made that people spend a great deal of time developing their religious stance, whether it’s through thorough readings of the philosophies of theologians across the ages or merely an internal conflict, and so the comparison is unfair. Admittedly, there are people who examine their beliefs thoroughly, break down all the preconditions of life that their parents instilled in them to arrive at a self-determined philosophy, one which includes God, but those people are a far and away minority. For many people, religion is a part of their life because they’ve never thought about it¹.

Similarly, following an atheist argument that religion can undermine the “development of logical thinking” in children, a religious reader responded with:

I have an 18 year-old and a 15 year-old which my wife and I have raised in the church. They are both at the stage where they are questioning and challenging everything. The idea that I could possibly “brainwash” them into believing anything is specious.

Which isn’t wrong so much as it is unsophistcated. The fact is that the reader almost certainly could “brainwash” their children if they wanted to. We always read of the children who escape from a cult they were born into, but we ignore the fact that many children remain in the cult, contented and certain that their way of life is the true path to salvation.

I use cults as an example, but parents with enough religious zeal can just as easily cause many problems for their children. Home schooling children that the Earth is the centre of the universe and that it’s only 6000 years old and evolution is a lie — all things that Christian parents do² — absolutely affect the child for years to come. No one is claiming that the damage is irreparable — after all, there are atheists out there — but to ignore it because it lacks 100% efficacy is exceedingly naive³.

The problem with having a religious debate is that when atheists argue with fundamentalists nothing is accomplished, but when they argue with reasonable, temperate theists like those reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog, we get nice nuanced arguments which describe God in a manner very different than the norm. The theists seems to forget that atheists are mostly arguing against the edge cases.

I’m staunchly atheist, and confident that there is no God. But when I attack religion, I don’t attack the muted and temperate version that intellectuals believe in, the kind where God is a passive observer, or where he sets the pieces up and has spent the past 12 billion or so years watching them all fall around him like a massive set of dominoes. I attack the religion that forces genital mutilation, stonings, oppression of women, ignorance of science, and all the stuff that the brainy version of religion has eschewed in its development.

Often, atheists (and theists) are accused of ignoring the moderates of the debate, instead focusing on the fringes of their debate, but one thing I’ve noticed as time goes on is that even the extreme atheists, so far as I know, do not argue for the abolition of religion. What they argue is that religion is irrational and that the world would be a better place without religion. The first half of that argument is absolutely true. Religion is the belief in something for which there is absolutely no evidence, an inherently irrational stance. The second half is much more contentious and an argument that I personally don’t accept. That said, the “atheist fringe” is much less extreme than the religious fundamentalists, so to act as though they are equal criticisms seems disingenuous to me.

The edge cases matter⁴. So don’t call upon the “civility” of atheists to sit down and shut up when it comes to the pernicious ills of religion.

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Footnotes

1. I speak from experience; many members of my family have no actual philosophy with respect to their religion, they merely accept it as what they’ve always “believed.” [↩]
2. Obviously not all Christian parents, but these extremes do exist [↩]
3. I’m not advocating the abolition of religion here, nor would anyone suggest state-enforced atheism, but ignoring the problems of religion accomplishes nothing. [↩]
4. On both sides of the discussion [↩]

A few years ago, I took a philosophy course and one day my professor asked the students of the class to raise their hands if they would want to live forever. Not a single student raised their hand. No one but me, that is. I wasn’t sold on the whole immortality deal, but I was at least interested. I wondered if this hypothetical offer was enforced or endorsed. In particular, I wanted to know if I could choose to die at some point in the future when I’ve finished, or at the very least grown tired of, exploring the infinite expanses of both the universe and of the mind. His response was no, so my choice was no. Just as the eternal immortality of heaven and hell seemed unappealing to me, eternal immortality in our world was not a goal of mine.

But still, I chose to explore the possibilities. I thought for at least a moment that immortality would be a good thing. No one else did. What the fuck is wrong with everyone?

When I finally opened the door to that question, the professor asked a few others why they wouldn’t want to live forever and none of them gave the answer I thought. I assumed that most of them, being philosophy students, had thought it out in great details. But no, they all said it was because of global warming.

Global warming. Seriously.

More abstractly, they all talked about the disastrous effect humanity has had on earth thus far. They didn’t think they would want to live forever when 100 years from now the world would be a desolate wasteland destroyed by the cruel banalities of man. More reasonably some thought that earth would survive but humanity would likely be extinct in the near future and then they would be alone forever. To wit, a majority of the students believed not only that humanity would be gone within their lifetime, but that earth would be irrevocably damaged by us.

Our planet survived an impact with a Mars-sized planet. Without ten thousand more years of technological improvement humanity could not irrevocably damage the planet even if we tried. We could destroy the majority of life on the planet and possibly all of it, but life would grab hold again. It’s tenacious like that. That innate tenacity in combination with the intelligence of our species is what makes us the dominant species of our planet. We’ve made many mistakes over the millennia, and with each new generation’s greater reach and power those mistakes become more and more dangerous but we’re not done yet.

There has been talk recently of what might happen if the Yellowstone Caldera erupts as it did 640 000 years ago, because of a recent increase in tectonic activity there. The level of damage that would cause is beyond catastrophic. Ash from the eruption would blanket most of North America and change the climate of the entire planet in ways far more drastic than the accumulation of greenhouse gases we’ve contributed in the past 200 years ever could. It’s hard to imagine just how much the world would change because of an event like that, and yet I’m not worried for the future of humanity. I’d almost certainly die, but humanity would persist.

It seems like the environmentalists have managed to scare the shit out of the world. Gone is the quixotic optimism for the future of the 50′s, replaced by the dour nihilism of now. We talk of alien archaeologists examining our cities thousands of years from now wondering what killed us, but we’re not going anywhere.

We’ve reached a point in our evolution where our intelligence is almost a detriment. Given the comfort of our more base needs, we have more time to think and greater minds with which to think. And so we think of what can go wrong. Each new generation imagines new terrors capable of destroying us with their free time. These thoughts of dread can paralyze us with fear of the inevitable or they can spur us to imagine new solutions. Lately there has been far too much of the former and not enough of the latter.

Here’s what I know about the ultimate fate of humanity. We will go away. There will come a time when no humans exist. That is inevitable. But the question is when. Do we want to give up and whimper away in the next hundred years, or do we want to keep growing, keep getting smarter, keep fighting until the end, until the universe dies around us?

Each new season, most shows get at the very least a cursory glance on the tv blogs and sites I read, but every year a few shows slip through the cracks. There might be more exhaustive sites out there but I don’t know them, so as far as I’m concerned, this is virgin territory.

It’s perhaps not a surprise that both of the shows I’m looking at today are on the CW, a network that has done nothing to engender the support or interest of the internet since killing off the much loved Veronica Mars. It’s also fifth in a three-car race when it comes to network television, but being in last place doesn’t stop a network from having spectacular shows. Just look at early 90′s Fox.

In addition to being on a D-list network, these two shows are both a part of the new deal between the CW and Media Rights Capital which outsourced Sunday night programming to MRC, so the odds of anyone giving these shows more than a read through of their synopses before moving along were already pretty low. So, let’s take a look at two lesser-known television shows premiering this year and their odds of survival.

Valentine

Valentine is a dramedy that focuses on modern day love stories. So far each episode deals with a pair of soulmates who have come to a crossroads in their lives and if not pushed in the right direction their love will not come to be, which typically means bad news for all involved. And at those crossroads are a team of love specialists who are actually Greek Gods. Headed by Aphrodite, now known as Grace, the team consists of Aphrodite, Eros (AKA Cupid, AKA Danny Valentine), Leo (AKA Hercules), and Phoebe who mans the Oracle at Delphi (no longer at Delphi) which helps them gain intel on the love struck soulmates they’ll be helping that week. And since every show needs an outsider who needs expositing at, the first episode introduces a mortal romance novelist to the fray because the God Gang is losing their touch when it comes to Love and they needed a fresh pair of eyes.

Beyond the basic “couple needs some love” weekly story, there seems to be an ongoing story related to the greater mythology of the Gods. In the first episode we learn that as Gods become less relevant they become weaker until they become mortals. Aphrodite demonstrates this by cutting her son with a blade and showing him the blood. Clearly, love doesn’t have the sway it once had in our cynical world. It seems as though this show intends to argue for a few related issues in its overarching themes: What the world needs now is Love, sweet Love; War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing; and finally, that our modern lives are eliminating romance and intimacy from the world and replacing them with instant messages and twitters. That last one doesn’t have a snappy song lyric to go along with it. Sorry.

On the mythology front, Ares, the Greek God of War and Aphrodite’s husband, who now goes by Ari — which by the way is a really clever renaming, because Ari is a Jewish name and the middle east is basically the centre of war in the modern world — makes an appearance in the second episode and extols the power of War in the modern world and the uselessness of Love. There are other aspects to the God dramas but let’s not get bogged down in those details.

I’m going to let you in on a secret. The worst kept secret in the universe. I’m a sucker for a love story. Note that I didn’t say a good love story. A mediocre love story might not make my heart leap quite as much as a good love story, but it jumps nonetheless. Beyond loving Love, I also love mythology and the Greek and Roman mythologies in particular. (There’s a reason I watched six seasons of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and it wasn’t Kevin Sorbo’s brilliant acting.) So this show has the double whammy of mixing Love stories with Greek mythology.

That said, based on what I’ve seen so far it’s focusing far too heavily on the Greek God side of the story. It’s not that I don’t like that story line: it’s fairly interesting. But so far the love stories they’ve cooked up are more interesting and sorely underdeveloped, and given that each episode is unrelated they could really be milking that format and letting their serialized arc stretch out longer.

Easy Money

Easy Money is about a family-run loan shark company. It reminds me of Sons of Anarchy, though I’ve still only seen the pilot of SoA so I really don’t want to stress that comparison. The main character is middle child Morgan Buffkin, who is being represented as the smart one in the family. In the first episode, he buys a book and argues with his friend, who’s selling him the book, that Einstein invalidated Existentialism by showing that everything is connected…

Clearly the writers don’t have a strong grasp of either philosophy or physics (or want their audience to understand that their main character isn’t quite as smart as he thinks he is) but at least they’re trying.

Despite his bizarre understanding of physics and philosophy, he really is the smart one of the family. While virtually every customer they have tries their best to get out of repaying their debts, Morgan manages to get it out of them, whether by pretending to be the manager to a ventriloquist, or by uncovering adultery to cajole payments out of people.

There are quite a few disparate threads in the two episodes I’ve seen: there’s a new loan shark business in town is run by thugs who are not above forcing competition out of business through threat and theft; the husband of the ditsy sister seems to be getting into money troubles; and a few different customers have been introduced with varying degrees of grudges against the family.

In addition to these, the main story revolves around Morgan’s origin. He’s always felt out of place in his family and at the end of the first episode he learns why: he’s not related to them. This seems to be the mystery that the show wants to develop over the course of the season, but it’s not nearly as intriguing as they’d like it to be. It’s possible that these threads are going to align very smartly and give a really good pay-off to the progeny mystery, but at the moment it’s not really drawing me in.

All told, these two shows aren’t half bad. They’re nothing special, but they’re good enough for me to keep watching at least for the remainder of the season to see where it’s all going. As for their odds of survival? Well, seeing as both of these shows have already stopped production, to give the writers time to catch up, it doesn’t look great, but I’m cautiously optimistic about the prospects for both of these shows, primarily because of this: their ratings aren’t stellar, but MRC is an independent producer and its requirements when it comes to ratings might not be as grand as networks. And it seems to me that MRC is working towards establishing itself as a producer of quality television programming. They might not succeed, but the very fact that they have that goal means to me that they’ll give their material more of a chance than an established network. If the CW were calling the shows, these shows might already have been canceled.

I recently came across an… interesting blog that is written by a supposed proponent of incest, bestiality, and the killing of so-called “useless” members of society (which he mislabeled euthanasia). For the most part, the posts I read seem to be a devil’s advocate look at the extremes of human rights and freedoms that our society will likely tackle in the next few decades, though sometimes — like, say, when he’s writing that children from first cousins are not particularly at risk for defects, therefore direct sibling incest is equally acceptable, genetically speaking — I’m not so sure.

Here’s a post, with some editing and spelling liberties taken on my part, asking for some arguments on moral relativism, which are especially targeted at an atheist reader.

Today I will play the role of an atheist who subscribes to humanism and the relative nature of morality. Shall we begin?

THESE ARE MY TWO CORE BELIEFS:

1. I believe that certain nonproductive members of society – i.e. the terminally and painfully sick, unemployed and alcohol-addicted street vagrants, serial criminals, and those too old to contribute anything meaningful - should be euthanized for the greater of good of society and mankind.

Resources that they consume can find much better use in advancing civilization and the happiness of other (and more) people. The good and survival of the human species takes precedence over selfish and petty individual needs.

2. I believe that bestiality as a sexual choice should be given the same legal rights and social respect as heterosexual and homosexual human-human relationships.

I am a practicing zoophile who regularly engages in group sex with my fully-mature rottweilers (both male and female) who willingly and often actively reciprocate the intimate eroticity.

We all enjoy it immensely, so what’s wrong with it? For some reason, most people – even the supposedly enlightened individuals at PFLAG – think my sexual choice is disgusting, morally repugnant and unnatural. To me it’s incomprehensible and inexplicable why.

Now please tell me why my stance is MORALLY WRONG from a atheistic, humanist point of view.

Quotes from the Bible or other holy scriptures will not be accepted. Arguments that some god or another forbids it will similarly be ignored. As a atheist, I WILL NOT ACCEPT ANY RELIGION OR PHILOSOPHY BASED ARGUMENTS.

I welcome and eagerly await comments which attempt to persuade me that somehow, my beliefs and practices are fundamentally wrong from a relativistic, humanist, liberal and pluralistic point of view.

Convince me.

Usually, when I read stuff like this on the Internet I just sigh and move along, but this time I couldn’t resist responding. What follows is a comment I posted on that blog in its entirety. Normally, I also don’t repost comments I write on other blogs on this site, but this one is fairly well written and much longer than I originally anticipated. Plus I haven’t posted in a while so I needed to put something up.

First of all, you say that you reject any philosophy based reasoning which is possibly the stupidest thing anyone has ever said. Philosophy strives to create logically valid reasoning. If the premises of that logic are true, then the reasoning is also true so to say you reject philosophy (but accept “atheistic” arguments which wouldn’t exist without philosophy) is really dumb.

As for your first point, there’s a difference between euthanasia and what you propose. Euthanasia is about ending the suffering of people who wish death. You’re talking about killing people against their will because they are no longer useful to society. That’s an egregious attack on the freedoms of people. Not only that but you then need to define usefulness to society. What if someone is intelligent, went through university and even went through medical school and graduated at the top of their class. But once that was all done they decided to make crappy clay sculptures that everyone agrees are not only a terrible waste of their talents but also just in general terrible. He is no longer useful to society and was even a burden on society by going through an unused education process so your proposal would be to kill him, but hopefully you can see that that is no more than cold blooded murder.

Secondly, regarding bestiality. I have a very specific opinion about sex: you don’t do it without consent. Until animals can be proven to be sentient and are capable of communicating with humans their thoughts and opinions, you cannot have sex with one without it being rape. If you want to stick your ass up in the air and wait for a dog to figure out that you want it to fuck you, well that’s fine by me, but you can’t do anything to the dog or any animal because you can’t reliably convince me that it’s consensual.

One final note. Your basic argument seems to be that without God all morality is completely relative. That may be true, but it’s a problem philosophers have discussed for millennia without making any real headway, so you shouldn’t assume your stance to be true. For one thing, morality may be a genetic trait, or a part of the structure of our brain. If those, or something similar, are true then there very well may be an absolute moral code built into us, or at least some moral absolutes from which we can extrapolate the rest. Regardless, a godless world is not necessarily a morally relative world. Furthermore, a morally relative world is not necessarily a world where you can do anything. Morality is a societal construct because morality defines the behaviour between members of a society. Which means the members of society need to agree on the basic terms. Agreeing on the basic terms of a morality, relative or not, will lead to certain limitations. Always.

(Before anyone starts accusing me of teaching Parrots to say “fuck me good” and then going wild, I should say that I personally would never fuck an animal other than a human; I’m just that kind of guy. But I also don’t think that I have the right to tell people who have those bizarre desires, along with animals intelligent enough to have and communicate those desires, that they shouldn’t do that funky business.)

So there’s my thoughts on those particularly grimy and unpalatable. I hope that I’ve both made some sense and also not completely grossed the fuck out everybody reading this.

P.S.: After having looked at a few other posts on the blog, it seems pretty clear that this guy is either bipolar and has two distinctly opposite personalities or he’s a racist neocon who likes to argue that atheism leads to rampant dog fucking and murdering by playing the part of a crazy atheist who thrives on dog fucking and murdering. C’est la vie, but maybe my arguments manage to convince him that supporting someone’s right to do fucked up shit is not the same as wanting to do fucked up shit.