Speedkill

So here’s a video of a song I quite enjoy:

Last week, Paul Campos wrote an article in the The Rocky Mountain News entitled “The Atheist’s Dilemma.” When I see a title like that I tend to think the article is going to be a train wreck, which this one is.

The first issue isn’t really an issue, but more like something I just want to mock. There’s no actual substance in the article; it’s simply Campos quoting Stanley Fish. I assume finding material is difficult (just look at me, I’m blogging about an article from last week), but it’s quite amusing that someone would publish a column to simply echo another (more famous) writer.
The essential claim is a variant of atheism is based on faith, just like religion:

Here is Dawkins on the evidence for religious belief: Such belief, Dawkins writes, “will earn the right to be taken seriously when it provides the slightest, smallest smidgen of a reason for believing in the existence of the divine.”

Consider what Dawkins – the author of The God Delusion and, along with Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, the most prominent of the current crop of evangelical atheists – is claiming.

He’s claiming that if one draws up a list of things that Dawkins considers evidence for the existence of God, and another list of things Dawkins considers evidence for atheism, one list has nothing on it and the other list has everything else.

I can’t say Campos has actually read Dawkins’ book. Dawkins point is that there’s is nothing that is evidence for religion. This is all atheism, at its weakest, needs. I see no reason to believe in God, so I don’t. I don’t need evidence against its existence if I don’t have any evidence for it. Dawkins makes a positive case that religion is wrong, but it certainly doesn’t include “everything.”

And he would, of course, be right. Dawkins is a true believer, and for the true believer literally everything is evidence for the truth of his belief. For example, Fish points to St. Augustine’s advice when confronting something that appears to contradict Christian belief: The phenomenon should be subjected “to diligent scrutiny until an interpretation contributing to the reign of charity is produced.”

…

Now Dawkins will object that he, unlike the religious believer, is committed to the methods of “science,” and will therefore change his mind when evidence refuting his beliefs appears – but it just so happens none ever has.

Dawkins would also object that Augustine explicitly claimed that was his methodology and he hasn’t. Campos (or Fish) has decided that this is Dawkins methodology based on the fact that Dawkins believes there isn’t any evidence for belief in a god. Which seems to me a bit like saying Dawkins is dogmatic because he doesn’t believe he’s wrong.

The striking naivete of this viewpoint becomes clear if one asks a simple question: What, for Dawkins, would constitute evidence of God’s existence? Suppose an angel of the Lord were to appear before Dawkins, even as he was delivering another lecture on the delusion that God exists. Would such an experience change Dawkins’ views?

Fish has spent his whole career pointing out why it wouldn’t: not because of the nature of angels, but because of the nature of interpretation. As long as Dawkins remains who he is now, he will remain incapable of seeing an angel of the Lord.

After all, a genuine atheist must interpret such an event as a temporarily inexplicable hallucination, or a sudden psychotic break, or a clever technological trick – in short, as anything but evidence that atheism is false. (An atheist who questions the truth of atheism is ceasing to be a genuine atheist precisely to the extent that he is asking himself a genuine question).

If you can explain the last sentence, you win a medal. Why Campos (or Fish) thinks atheism is special in that you can’t simultaneously subscribe to it and question it the same time, as you can any other belief or opinion is beyond me.

Continuing on, yes, those could be explanations of what Dawkins saw. Of course, Campos (Fish) is guilty of not actually understanding why an atheist would believe that. A one-off apparition, seen by one person only is highly questionable. What us skeptical types like to use to evalute these things is something called “science.” A singular, unreplicated event is not that convincing. Now, if multiple people could evaluate the phenomenon consistently and under controlled conditions, and came to the conclusion that the phenomenon was supernatural, I’d believe them. So would Dawkins. That hasn’t happened, of course.

Similarly, how about if any of the arguments normally advanced for theism were correct? I’d believe in a god if the appearance of design in nature really did mean there was a designer.

In other words, evidence must always be interpreted within the context of interpretive assumptions which necessarily determine what that evidence is understood to signify, and which by their nature are themselves matters of faith. Thus the only way someone like Dawkins will ever see any evidence for the existence of God will be if he loses his faith that he never will.

You’d think he could come up with better examples if that were the case. The thing is, though, my assumptions about the world are shared by nearly everyone. Science and reason are reliable indicators of truth. Very few dispute this, except when applying it to religion. Why do they make this exception? Because they have faith. Why? Just because. They feel it to be true, which is the same as saying there’s no reason. So, how can a framework that’s based on a logical fallacy be on equal footing with a framework that says science and reason determine truth?

Please, no. I can’t take any more of these self-righteous “everything you know is wrong” Internet documentaries. 9/11 wasn’t an inside job and Christianity isn’t merely cobbled together pagan mythology.

The ranks of the religiously unaffiliated are growing. Good. We don’t have dogma, but I thought I’d list some benefits:

• If you want to believe the world was created by a giant hamster, you can!
• You don’t have to listen to people in funny hats
• Abortions for everyone!
• Don’t care about who begat whom? Don’t read the book
• Everyone is just as confused as you are

If you’re looking for an even more select group, you can join the atheist subset of the unaffiliated. We have even more excellent benefits:

• Feel superior to the rest of the population
• All that praying by your fundamentalist relative will probably count for something if you’re wrong
• Most of the population thinks you’re a disease-ridden degenerate – low expectations!

Most influential book in the history of Western Civilization meets most annoying Internet fad yet: the LOLCat Bible Translation project.

I’m going to go impale myself on a rusty fence post.

On the other hand, I think Revelation makes more sense now.

Nader is running…again. This time, man, this time he’ll put corporate America in its place. This is his justification:

Nader, 73, said he is running because mainstream candidates are too closely tied to corporate America. “The issue is do they have the moral courage, do they have the fortitude to stand up against the corporate powers and get things done for the American people?” Nader said. “We need to shift the power from the few to the many.”

“Many” is not a word I’d use to describe the base of Nader and the Green party.

It’s going to be hard, but I think we do this. There are certainly a lot of them, but we can not rest until they are corrected.

That comic explains far more of my life that I care to admit.

Obama wins again.

You know, I’m trying my very best to remember that Clinton’s policies are solid, but holy hell, her campaign seems to be run by a bunch of sleazy assholes of late.

Also, this is ridiculous. Obama has said some stupid shit about religion, but this isn’t it. Fix our souls? In context, I read that as an assertion that our indifference to inequality is due to personal, moral failings that we need to rectify. She used religious language, but it’s a leap to think she means we all need to take Jesus into our hearts and be saved. I would rather our candidates stay away from religion, but this is pretty mild.

I keep seeing ads for Zicam on TV. Zicam is a homeopathic cold remedy that, unlike most homeopathic remedies, has progressed beyond anti-modern medicine hippiedom and found a marketing department. Homeopathy combines two stupid ideas: the claim that taking a substance that causes symptoms similar to an illness will cure that illness and that such a substance is most effective when diluted to the point where you’ve only ingested a couple of molecules of it.

I guess the moral of the story is that next time you get a headache, hit yourself in the head with a bat. A really tiny one.

Can you tell I’m bored tonight?

Apparently there are weird lights in Texas. Not all that weird, but then there’s this person, who posits that since they appear to be spinning, the Air Force could be experimenting with time travel. Now, you might think that’s a bit of a leap. You’d be wrong. It’s actually several gigantic leaps the landing points of which may not even exist. I prefer my simpler theory, which is that the Air Force has created enormous bits of rainbow colored Kabbalah string and is throwing them in the air in order to protect us from terrorists.

Item 2 is the fact that people actually watch professional wrestling. Apparently Vince McMahon has a midget son who is going to fight him in a steel cage. Every time I see an ad for one of those events I seriously consider becoming one of those Christians who thinks everything on TV is satanic.

Item 3 is that a city council in England paid a psychic to rid a house of poltergeists. She put a “circle of salt” in the house and the ghost left. Apparently ghosts are deathly afraid of getting clogged arteries.