Crazy

The first video is, for no particular reason, filmed outside:

Click to tweet: http://clicktotweet.com/qcK8A .  Part I is here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPjF54RAAik&list=PLGWy7AFv1dkIn3UbP1E7XpvTAnXZY2yzv&index=9 .

This is a "morning after" video like the ones about us being an arrogant species and superficiality and depth.

First of all, i'm a little concerned that we may have been discussing a caricature of the idea of political correctness because none of us there was prepared to defend the position, although of course i made some attempt yesterday.  We can, however, transcend that by saying that the definition of political correctness on which the argument was based was taken from Wikipedia and reads as follows:

a term which denotes language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social and institutional offense in occupational, gender, racial, cultural, sexual orientation, certain other religions, beliefs or ideologies, disability, and age-related contexts, and, as purported by the term, doing so to an excessive extent.

Leaving off the end of that sentence is fine, incidentally.  We believed it was excessive, but for the purposes of this video, you needn't accept that.

Firstly, political correctness involves an attempt to avoid over-generalisation and recognises the flawed and possibly fallacious nature of inductive thought.  However, induction has to be used in order to function healthily and to abandon it completely would indeed be psychotic - almost literally, "political correctness gone mad".  Induction exists because of biological and social evolution and has been selected for.

Secondly, political correctness is an attempt to quantify ethically and politically acceptable behaviour.  It enables one to account for behaviour to an authority which may have legal force, and to convince oneself that one has done the "right thing".  In doing so, however, it misses out the messiness of empathic interaction in everyday life and as such may be more about making oneself feel better about what one does than actually doing well.  It reminds me of the Pharisees, in fact.

Actually, the reason this was done in the woody bit next to the erstwhile Bowstring Bridge is that i had to fit a lot in this morning, being assaulted as i was by incessant urges to make and upload videos, and this was a way of fitting two in today without it making the day unbearably frenetic.  I did, however, have some difficulty finding a quiet spot sheltered from the wind.  I'm happy with how it turned out though.

I also feel i should say we pursued a notion of political correctitude which was probably rather simplistic.  However, so do many advocates of the idea.

The second video is the reason i've entitled this entry as above, but seems to be a bit screwed up, which is a bit problematic.

Stop press:  it's now sorted and here it is:

Click to tweet:  http://clicktotweet.com/0aUyW .  Most people would probably either believe in the Fall literally and be creationist, probably Young Earth Creationist, or see it as a metaphor or allegory of a process we all go through in early life and believe in evolution, or of course they might reject both and simply believe in evolution as non-Christians.  I hold a third position.  Although i agree with the allegorical understanding of the Fall, i also think that it may reflect a series of real events.  Whereas i do present a particular hypothesis here, i'm not attached to it and am prepared to accept that i'm wrong.  In the context of the Fall, this is the correct and humble thing to do.  It would be perverse of me to assert that in spite of my sinfulness, limitation and proneness to error and self-serving "rational" thought, this is the definitive, correct version of events.  It's more presented as an illustration of how believing in a literal Fall is compatible with evolutionary theory.  I doubt anyone else at all believes this, including Christian palaeontologists and palaeoanthropologists.

This is my hypothesis:

Back in the Miocene, there were many different species of ape (incidentally, the Aegyptopithecus zeuxis in the video was not an ape although it was, like apes, a catarrhine primate - sorry about the mistake).  The climate back then was somewhat more humid and warmer than today, and there were widespread rainforests.  Apes were found in Europe, Asia and Africa.  Then, at the close of the Miocene, the climate became more arid.  This was due to the build up of ice, possibly due to the diversion of the Gulf Stream northwards and the appearance of snow in high latitudes, or orogeny (mountain building).  The following epoch, the Pliocene, was therefore more arid and the rainforests shrank.  Hence our ancestors were forced to survive on the savannah, where food sources were scarcer and not ideal nutritionally for a species which had evolved in the rainforest.  As a result, they effectively suffered from malnutrition, since the phytoestrogens and MAOIs in their diet were missing.  Even today it's possible to tell we are not eating the ideal diet because we cannot produce our own vitamin C.  This diet along with the harsh environment jointly led to a situation where foetuses did not develop healthily in the womb due to brain and hormonal problems, and the harsh environment and impairment of development combined to brutalise the species.  By the time of recorded history, this vicious cycle had been going on for many millenia and we had come to believe it was natural.  This is the biological explanation of how sin entered the world - this is the Fall, a uniquely human problem.

It's crucial to recognise two things about this.  One is that every single neurotypical individual since this event has been confronted with the choice to avoid or commit sin, and with one single exception throughout the whole of the history of the human race, every single one of us has chosen freely to sin.

As i said this is an hypothesis, but i also believe there is some evidence for it.  One is the behaviour of chimpanzees compared to that of bonobos.  The relative harshness of the environment of chimps has led to them being more aggressive than bonobos.  They are examples of the kind of thing which went "wrong" in the Pliocene and led to "Adam and Eve" being "expelled" from the Garden of Eden.

It may be possible to test this hypothesis via the analysis of wear and tear on fossil teeth, dating the production and nature of stone tools and the isotope ratios of calcium and phosphorus in fossilised bones, but it probably isn't.

OK, so it sounds completely insane, but as i say i'm not 100% attached to this idea.  I'm just presenting it to show that evolutionary theory is compatible with a literal Fall.

This is a bit crazy of course, but it's not about the specific hypothesis so much as the principle that a scientific world view including belief in evolution is compatible with belief in the Fall.

Defusing religious debate

I've got a number of things to say in this entry but i'll start with questions of religion.  Religion is and ought to be emotive, but it should be possible for someone to step back from it and decide what it is.  One thing which bothers me about the conflict, apart from it being a waste of energy, is that people don't even agree on what a religion is.  Atheism, for example, is not a religion.  Even if it were a set of beliefs, atheism still wouldn't count as a religion because it would lack rituals and other aspects of religion.  There is way too much emphasis on belief when religion is talked about.  Here's the video:



There are other things going on apart from the religious stuff.  One is that i have temporarily removed 'You Could've Thought Of That' in order to prepare the second edition, which is aimed equally at adults and children.  This version will have a glossary, some ideas will be removed, the language will be clarified, there will be some illustrations and i will add forms at the back for the reader to add her own ideas.  There will also be a new cover.

Meanwhile, i have a few plans for the Other Channel.  I will put hypnosis scripts accompanied by slideshows there, along with a plug for the print version of the book and an exhortation, which will doubtless be ignored, to subscribe to the channel i actually want to work as opposed to the one which is 'phoned in but works anyway.  I will also ask for suggestions.

Beachballs and the existence of God

Phew!  Glad i got that out of my system.

Anyway, here's today's video:

This is about the ontological argument, one of the most interestingly silly arguments for the existence of God.  Basically, the idea is that God is a perfect being, that an idea of a perfect being is possible, that existence is a quality of a perfect being which would be more perfect than the quality of not existing and therefore that God exists.  This was thought up by Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury.  This is Anselm:

And this is Canterbury:

(I actually wanted to find a picture of the Clocktower as this is too picturesque, but then so's the Clocktower).

Anyway, this bloke Gaunilo came along and wrote a dialogue about it where he pointed out, respectfully and carefully, that the argument was rubbish because it was possible to think of a perfect island without that island existing.  I would take that further, but not yet.

Later on, the question of whether existence was a property arose.  Here is a beachball:

(it's actually a Wikipedia beachball, not the one in the front room, because the camcorder's still plugged in and i can't take pictures with it at the moment).  This beachball has various predicates - it is round, made of plastic, inflated, multicoloured and similar to the one in the front room.  However, does it have the predicate of existence?  Is existence actually a predicate?  Does it add anything to the description of that beachball to say that it exists?

This is what's meant by "wrong for interesting reasons".  The ontological argument is wrong for much more interesting reasons than any other argument for the existence of God.  However, when they were younger the children used to express the concept of existence as a predicate.  Instead of saying that something existed, they used to say it "was real".  In other words, they used the predicate of having an instance, instantiation, instead of the concept of existence, but it seems to mean the same thing.

I have a completely different reason for throwing away the ontological argument.  Well, i have several in fact but they're not all interesting.  My main reason for rejecting it is that i see non-existence as more commonly associated with perfection than existence.  Perfectly spherical or flat objects, for example, do not and could not exist.  The very existence of an object makes it less perfect, on the whole, than its concept.  Therefore, far from being an argument for the existence of God, the ontological "proof" is more like one for God's non-existence.

God is on your side, especially if you're atheist

Once again twiddling my thumbs waiting for the video to process and upload, but there's other stuff going on provided i get some privacy and computer time today.

Right, here's the vid:

Basically, i believe that if Jesus was around us today, he'd be on the side of the anti-religious new atheism to which we lazily refer as atheism.  Militant atheism and Jesus's mission have a lot in common and share many motivations.  Gandhi once said that he liked our Christ but didn't like our Christians.

Here's a bit of a rant list about what people professing to be Christian have to my knowledge done:

• Plant people in a crowd to pretend to be converted by a street preacher.
• Make posters deceiving people into thinking a meeting was organised by spiritualists when it was actually propaganda against spiritualism.
• Suggest that God wouldn't want my wife to wear a black T-shirt but a nice long floral dress.
• Accuse a friend of lying when he thanked God in a prayer that he was getting more freelance work because it was the "wrong" kind of work and they couldn't believe God would bless something which wasn't a "proper" job.
• Gang up on a gay member of their congregation and chant "OUT, OUT, OUT!" like they were at a Nuremberg rally until he left the church.

Obviously there are many other examples, but these are close to me in the sense that i know the people involved or have experienced them personally.  I'm conscious of things like the embezzlement, active paedophilia, greed and materialism of people professing to be Christian, but these are not my personal experiences.  My own current experience of church is wonderfully positive, as it happens.  I should also mention that once again i've failed to express quite what i meant because i believe that in some circumstances, glossolalia is a valid emotional or spiritual activity.

But, how can you ever say it's Christian to exhort the poor to give all their money away to the church as a test of faith?  An individual might make that choice for themselves, but they can't impose that decision on anyone else, particularly when the person attempting to impose it happens to be a millionaire.

So it comes as no surprise, really, that actually looking at the sayings of Jesus, assuming him to be merely a fictional character, come out on the side of anti-religious atheism on the whole.  You can even go further than that and play with the idea that he was actually an atheist himself, although going by what it says in the gospels that would make him dishonest and a hypocrite.  However, if you wanted to get a powerful message across and the whole world, as far as you knew, was theistic and would probably kill you before you got anywhere, it wouldn't just be suicidal to assert that God didn't exist but also stupid, because it would defeat your aim by getting you murdered before you got anywhere.  Epicurus was very probably atheist but decided against saying that he was for similar reasons.  However, of course i believe that Jesus knew there was a God.  I also believe he was a historical character, and the idea of the Jesus myth is an example of the oddly old-fashioned views taken by the so-called "new" atheism, but that's a blog entry for another time

Some Christians are telepathic

This is addressed to atheists who used to be Christian.  Have you ever had a conversation with a Christian which goes something like this?

You:  I used to be a Christian but I stopped believing in God.
Christian:  Ah, but the Bible says you can't lose your salvation, so if you stopped believing, you can never really have believed in the first place, can you now?

Well, this is my response to that:

Unlike some of the other claims certain Christians make, this is practically known to be false by ex-Christians.  For instance, the claim that homosexual acts are sinful might be backed up by an argument and the claim that the planet is only a few thousand years old at least has the merit that yes, the world could've been created last Thursday for that matter with a load of spurious evidence and false memories, although it very probably wasn't, particularly considering that God, being perfect, is not supposed to deceive us.  This, however, requires a much higher degree of scepticism on behalf of the Christian because unlike the other claims, it seems to be one of two things.  Either the Christian is accusing the ex-Christian of making a false statement, possibly of lying in fact, or they are claiming their memories of being a Christian are false.

This is an extremely silly thing to do because this means the atheist doesn't just believe confidently that the Christian is incorrect, but is so close to certainty that it would be laughable to quibble about the hair's breadth of difference between the two.  And yet they still do it.

In Christian theology, there is a concept known as the "perseverence of the saints".  This means you cannot give up your salvation.  It's a bit like being British.  Provided you have at some point in your life honestly believed in God, God's goodness and you have acted on that knowledge to repent of your sins and commit yourself to Christ as fully divine and fully human Lord and Saviour - basically, what it says in the creeds - then you are, in terms of evangelical Christianity, now permanently saved, i.e. a Christian. You can't lose it again.

Clearly there are a lot of people who no longer believe, and i was one of them for something like twelve years.  This was after i committed myself to Christ.  I genuinely, honestly believed and i really lost my faith and stopped believing.  That really happened.

I also suggest that atheists can use this fact to annoy Christians and defeat their claims, by claiming honestly still to be Christians in terms of that theology.  The trouble with this is of course that once again, a Christian is being presumptious - i am suggesting that this is what you do, which isn't really my place, is it?  However, i do think it might be amusing, on occasions, to be arsey and say "Yep, I'm Christian.  Of course, I don't believe all that rubbish about imaginary sky beings or God being his own father and turning into a zombie who went into space, but none of that matters.  All that matters is that I committed myself to Christ one weekend a quarter of a century ago when I was in an emotionally vulnerable position, then recanted when I came to my senses on Monday.  Praise the non-existent Lawerd!"

Atheist religion

Normal service is resumed!

If i've got this right, today's video ought to be on atheist religion:

Yep!  After a bit of fiddling, that's done it.

Jainism is an ancient world religion though it hasn't spread far beyond Northwest India.  Here in Leicester, however, is the Jain Samaj Europe, the European centre of Jainism.  This isn't as impressive as it sounds when you realise how few Jains there are.  However, Jainism is very interesting because it is unlike many people's preconceptions on religion in several ways.

Firstly, it is strongly atheist.  It actively denies there is any such thing as a creator of the Universe, a sustainer of the Universe or an omnipotent being.  There is even a lengthy passage in one of its sacred texts which wouldn't look out of place in 'The God Delusion':

"Some foolish men declare that creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill advised and should be rejected.

If God created the world, where was he before the creation? If you say he was transcendent then and needed no support, where is he now?

How could God have made this world without any raw material? If you say that he made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression.

If you declare that this raw material arose naturally you fall into another fallacy, For the whole universe might thus have been its own creator, and have arisen quite naturally.

If God created the world by an act of his own will, without any raw material, then it is just his will and nothing else — and who will believe this silly nonsense?

If he is ever perfect and complete, how could the will to create have arisen in him? If, on the other hand, he is not perfect, he could no more create the universe than a potter could.

If he is form-less, action-less and all-embracing, how could he have created the world? Such a soul, devoid of all modality, would have no desire to create anything.

If he is perfect, he does not strive for the three aims of man, so what advantage would he gain by creating the universe?

If you say that he created to no purpose because it was his nature to do so, then God is pointless. If he created in some kind of sport, it was the sport of a foolish child, leading to trouble.

If he created because of the karma of embodied beings [acquired in a previous creation] He is not the Almighty Lord, but subordinate to something else

If out of love for living beings and need of them he made the world, why did he not make creation wholly blissful free from misfortune?

If he were transcendent he would not create, for he would be free: Nor if involved in transmigration, for then he would not be almighty. Thus the doctrine that the world was created by God makes no sense at all,

And God commits great sin in slaying the children whom he himself created. If you say that he slays only to destroy evil beings, why did he create such beings in the first place?

Good men should combat the believer in divine creation, maddened by an evil doctrine. Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning or end, and is based on the principles, life and rest. Uncreated and indestructible, it endures under the compulsion of its own nature."

This is from the tenth century CE text the Adipurana.  Note the date.  Jainism is considerably older than that.  It's an ancient religion, itself claiming to be the world's oldest religion, but then so i imagine do many others, so that particular feature doesn't make it special.  Note also that it does not respect the idea of worshipping any God that might hypothetically exist.

Jainism is also entirely physicalist and naturalist.  It sees the world as entirely physical. The physics is of course somewhat different from contemporary scientific physics, but this is to be expected in an environment where alleged hypotheticodeductivism or other scientific methods had yet to be used on a systematic basis by a community of intellectuals.  Nonetheless, it sees the soul as physical, karma as a form of matter and enlightenment as the process of ascension to the top of the Universe, which incidentally is seven hundred light years high.

Furthermore, Jainism seeks no converts and claims not to have a monopoly of truth.  Its doctrine of anekantavada involves the claim that humans cannot perceive the whole truth and that apparent incompatibilities can mask a deeper unity inaccessible to the human mind.  It also claims that it will die out - there is no real eschatology, no idea of the world ending (or beginning for that matter), no day of judgement.

OK, so what makes it differ from a philosophy of life?  Well, Epicureanism is substantially similar.  Nonetheless, that is not a religion.  Jainism has temples, images of its "heroes" such as Mahavira, which are of course to be emulated rather than worshipped, a total world view, rituals, priests, ethics (in spades!) and, well, everything on Ninian Smart's list.  Epicureanism had none of those.

So it's an atheist, physicalist, anti-proselytising organised religion.  It has deeply dodgy characteristics of course - people are admired for starving themselves to death, menstruating women are not allowed in temples and humans are seen as spiritually and physically the centre of the Universe and superior to all other beings - but one thing it does not do is share any of the major characteristics of the Western concept of religion.

Interview with my godless offspring

My son, of course, is an atheist.  I too used to be one.  However, Liz and i are now long-since lost to atheism and have a cosmic imaginary friend instead.  Here's my interview with my son about his atheism:

Incidentally, this is the wrong upload.  There was a better version, subtitled all the way through, which was unaccountably smaller than this file and i naturally assumed it was the older version, wrongly as it turns out.  Anyway, there it is and there it stands.  The audio is also annoying, although comparing it to this:

reveals that it's at least partly due to my son not speaking more loudly.

Of course, it could be that this video is entirely staged and bears no relation to how my son and i really feel about the issue.  That's something you're just going to have to take on trust for now unless you find evidence in the video to the contrary.

An interesting comment, and also one some might find offensive, is that he describes the Gospel depiction of Jesus as "a hippy", which was certainly a cultural depiction of the figure popular in the late '60s and early '70s, and in fact one i would've agreed with at his age.  This is all, of course, socially constructed and the historical Jesus is very hard to reach and sketchy, as he noted, although interestingly he does in fact believe that there was such a historical figure.  This perception probably reflects what might be seen as our anachronistic lifestyle and values, although i would myself in no way regard myself as a "hippy" - i have long hair, but so do Rastafarians, for similar reasons.   However, hippies are a bete noire in my son's personal cosmos.

This video was primarily uploaded to demonstrate that we needn't be at loggerheads with each other just because one of us is theistic and the other atheist, or even, though this isn't illustrated here, theistic and anti-theistic.  I'm happy that there were several helpful responses underneath and plan to make more videos on this, for instance as interviews between myself and anti-theistic friends.  However, the main point of this is to indicate that there is no need for hostility between people whose beliefs differ, and that there's a stereotypical version of "Christianity" out there which both the New Atheists and a certain strand of people who call themselves Christian share.  They agree on what Christianity is.  However, in fact there are a whole load of people describing themselves as Christian who feel no sense of affinity with that belief system.

The technical difficulties with this video were considerable.  The sound is bad due to our positioning and distance from the camera and the subtitles disappear in the middle.  However, i'm keeping it up because it's got a response.  Could do better, i think.

Creationism is blasphemous

Here is an annoying video:

The reason this video is annoying, apart from the fact that it's annoying, is that the file size is unnecessarily large and that there's a glitch in the middle of it.  It is of course also deliberately provocative.  I've uploaded it because the previous video on religious matters, "The Bible Is Not Pro-Life", was liked by various people (though not in the sense of people coming along and clicking on the thumbs-up sign).

I really do feel that people find two big things off-putting about Christianity.  One is that we are perceived as being negative about sex, and the other is that we are seen as antiquated in our attitude to science.  This needn't be so, and it's a barrier to evangelism.  Of course, it can and has been said that if something is true, we shouldn't just cave in to how the world sees it and accept it for the sake of popularity, which of course is the case, but on the matter of Creationism, the problem arises because people think taking the Bible seriously is the same as taking it literally.  In fact, Biblical literalism is a new idea, dating back only a couple of hundred years.  I haven't covered that in the video, but might do in future.

By the way, YouTube went mad providing me with relevant tags on this video in a way i'd never seen it do before.  I wonder what this means.

The next video will, I hope, be an interview with Holly about her bilingualism or the lack thereof.