Differences of Opinion Among the Freethinking Community

by Gary Berg-Cross

We all get into disagreements and differences of opinion. Its safe to say that no one is right about everything. We don’t have the same experiences or exactly the same tastes and values. People’s knowledge and opinions are like composite structures whose ingredients have been mixed over time from purer substances. Understanding in many areas, including the social world, is limited by the complex nature of subject matters, the boundaries of human rationality, limited time for analysis etc. As a result, to paraphrase Thoreau, it’s important to know what really know and tread more lightly in areas we are less experience with and expert in. Even in the freethinking, secular humanist-atheists may stumble or be on the wrong side of issue. And this can produce some interesting discussions, but also disagreements of opinion that develop into real arguments.

I was thinking about this in the last few weeks perhaps sparked by Penn upcoming talk in the area. He’s one of the atheists stars with his “God, No!,” book, but also of libertarian fame. You can see him talking about is libertarian views on the Glenn Beck show and equating them to the Founder’s philosophy. He’s clearly intelligent and freethinking on a variety of subjects a great deal which he speaks about opening in a humorous way often ending with "I could be wrong.” But he expresses some ideas that I take issue with such as:

“..the fact that the government can't rally everybody to work together. That's to be celebrated. The government being is hamstring and as closed off and as clumsy as possible is exactly what we want. The last thing we want is a government that can get things done. A government that can get things done all they will get done is taking away freedoms. Its been shown over and over again. We want a clunky, sloppy, slow-moving, small, insignificant, weak government there all the time. And that's a government we can love and protect.”

I might have honest disagrees with other notables in the freethinking community. I might agree with Bill Maher most of the time, such as “"The problem is that the people with the most ridiculous ideas are always the people who are most certain of them," but be uncomfortable with other serious points wrapped up in a mix of provocative humor and scathing criticism that leave little room for nuance.

With freethinkers like Dennett, Jacoby, Doerr and Grayling, it might take a micro analysis to find serious disagreements on important topics. Then there are the core of New Atheists, whose prominent figures include scientist Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and author Christopher Hitchens. There is some disagrement in the secular humantist-atheist community on the New Atheists who claim that believers in 'the god hypothesis' should not be tolerated, but should be actively countered and the 'shoddy' arguments supporting their beliefs should be exposed. While we might disagree on strategic and tactical stances many of us are happy to have some vigorous countering, criticism, and exposure of religious to Belief to rational argument and evidence. As Hos notes in a prior posting religions often escape any criticisms. It's not a policy we should apply to ourselves, but be thoughtful about it.

Whatever you think of the strategy the 3 central stars, the new atheist giants have fallen afoul of non-religious issues where they may be less certain of the facts and complexities. Christopher Hitchens, a literary powerhouse with a clear prose and scathing style, applied the same rather famously as an aggressive critic of God and his followers. This comes after bringing Mother Teresa to earth in an earlier scree that exposed Mother Teresa's ties to various despots and thieves, and questioned the wisdom of handing out the Nobel Peace Prize to a woman whose famous clinic for the poor had repeatedly been found unsanitary and badly run, refusing, for example, to give painkillers to the dying—maybe because she really did believe, as she once said, that "[t]he suffering of the poor is something very beautiful."

Clearly a freethinker, but he seemingly embraced (believed in?) neoconservative ideology after Sept. 11. In effect he provided a freethinking champion for George W. Bush Iraq war. Always one to paint a vivid image he said that the mere thought of preemptive action gave him an erection. As usual Hitchens comes across as supremely confident of his position. In his new book he says he knows more about the Middle East than simple liberal bumpkins who "weren't there", meaning:

• he has traveled in and reported extensively on the Middle East,
• he has access to knowledge denied most of the rest of the world;
  
• he knows for sure that those Islamofascists are Evil (shades or religious categories) and need to be pummeled and taught a lesson.

The fact that there were significant others with equally immediate and/or specialized knowledge, Brent Scowcroft comes to mind plus an assortment of generals and diplomats who were also "there," who had adequate security clearances and still opposed the war, goes unvoiced by Hitch. Taken as a whole liberals like Chris Hedges are uncomfortable with a slippery slope for secularists, who ally themselves with unethical people seeking pretexts to bombing "religious" countries. I'm uncomfortable with Hitchen's admiration of Paul Wolfowitz who in one interview he described as a bleeding heart and described neo-conservatism as a:

“distinctively new strain of thought, preached by ex-leftists, who believed in using US power to spread democracy.”

Hedges also crosses some lines with amateur evolutionary psychology and proactive hypotheses about men and women. In a Vanity Fair bit called “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” he argued that men are funnier than women for Darwinian reasons: hapless males need the gift of humor to persuade women to mate with them. Reproduced in his new book (Arguable Essays) we hear that women are not tough enough to master comedy. Because such engineered wit requires a strong stomach and a stoic acceptance of the futility of life. “Whereas women, bless their tender hearts, would prefer that life be fair, and even sweet, rather than the sordid mess it actually is.”

One of my favorite thinkers Richard Dawkins recently got on an uneasy side of the discussion about sexual harassment. During the informal after-hours socializing time at an atheist conference Feminist Rebecca Watson was talking with colleagues about her presentation and other issues. At 4 AM, she said she was tired & left the bar heading back to her room to sleep. But in the elevator ride to her floor, she was with a male only identified now as the “Elevator Guy.”

Rebeca was aghast at being asked by the “Elevator Guy to continue discussion in his room. She expressed her later ideas to the atheist community this way:

"Um, just a word to wise here, guys, uh, don't do that. You know, I don't really know how else to explain how this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I'll just sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know, in a foreign country, at 4:00 am, in a hotel elevator, with you, just you, and—don't invite me back to your hotel room right after I finish talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner."

Richard Dawkins got himself into hot water by commenting that she was overreacting by comparing her situation with more serious ones. Using the dangerous form of a sarcastic letter to a Muslim woman, he suggested that Watson's experience in the elevator was trivial compared to the abuses that Muslim women deal with daily:

"Stop whining will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and...yawn...don't tell
me again,.."

The exchange escalated with postings on PZ Myers Pharyngula website where he noted that, "Richard did make the valid point that there are much more serious abuses of women's rights around the world, and the Islam is a particularly horrendous offender."

But he went on to argue that:

"the existence of greater crimes does not excuse lesser crimes, and no one has even tried to equate this incident to any of the horrors above. What these situations demand is an appropriate level of response: a man who beats a woman to death has clearly committed an immensely greater crime than a man who harasses a woman in an elevator; let us fit the punishment to the crime."

A final, arguable mis-step is Sam Harris who I agree with on a vast swath of topics. I'm more than a little uncomfortable with his critical words on Islam appearing in his “The End of Faith,” (pages 128-129). Normally a cool, clear thinker Harris seems here to be considering if seriously not advocated a future pre-emptive nuclear strike against a nation based on its religious views. Part of what Harris said to give this impression is:


"It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of Muslims pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence. There is little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons. A cold war requires that the parties be mutually deterred by the threat of death. Notions of martyrdom and jihad run roughshod over the logic that allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to pass half a century perched, more or less stably, on the brink of Armageddon. What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? If history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe."
from sam_harris_responds_to_chris_hedges_fundamentalism_kills_column_20110726/

Liberal thinker Chris Hedges was astonished by Sam Harris hubris to advocate taking millions of innocent lives - since nuclear weapons don’t only kill the bad people). Hedges is very familiar with terrorist and totalitarian regimes, having spent two decades covering Central America, the Balkans, the Middle East, & Africa and is concerned with our reaction to it and vulnerability to intolerance on all sides. There has been a great running debate by Hedges and Harris on this which your can read on Truthdig. It's too rich a discussion to do justice here but the core point is that Harris' position seems to some a dangerous idea related to beliefs on the part of Harris. One must consider carefully claims of whether or not whole populations are dangerous. Who has the right to determine which people get to live and which to die? Like Hitchens and the idea of pre-emptive attack, it is not something that can mitigate by using apologetic language and saying you were just weighing the options.



It's always a humbling experience to realize that 3 pioneering thinkers and personal heroes may get into tricky situations. In some cases the disagreement might be modest on topics of limited importance. But in other cases it may be important. Fallibility remains a core part of the human experience. Something that freethinkers know and appreciate more than most and we can be proud of being able to discuss the phenomena is constructive ways.

Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) goes viral

by Gary Berg-Cross

I heard on NPR this morning that a manifestation of the church of the flying spaghetti monster (FSM) has surfaced in Austria. Well at least the concept of this Church made popular by Richard Dawkins has an adherent who worships that god-like idea by wearing a pasta strainer on his head. His name is Niko Alm and he adopted FSM pose to test the recent Austrian law that allows head coverings to be used in official documents, like drivers licenses, for religious reasons.

The FSM, concept was used satirically in response to the Kansas School Board's irratonality over evolution education. Later it was popularized in Dawkins book The God Delusion as an illustration of how religious beliefs are based on irrational thought. What is the evidence for the existence of invisible beings controlling our world and judging our behavior? None for FSM and none for Yahweh either.

Niko, a self-proclaimed atheist, built on Dawkins’ construct by applying for a new driver's license wearing the strainer as "religious headgear. " He claimed to be a "pastafarian" from that Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Members in the Church firmly believe in the existence of a flying omnipotent Spaghetti Monster – one that can even hide its existence from us. The “you can’t prove I don’t exist” claims for such a flying monster fits Dawkins' dictum about irrational claims:

"To claim a supernatural explanation of something is not to explain it at all and, even worse, to rule out any possibility of its ever being explained. Why do I say that? Because anything ‘supernatural’ must by definition beyond the reach of a natural explanation. It must be beyond the reach of science and the well-established, tried and tested scientific method."

After a long 3 year fight Niko won the right to get his picture taken with a pasta strainer on his head.

Some people were put out by Niko’s success. It seems like an irrational thing to do and isn’t the whole point of being an atheist is the celebration of being all logical and reasonable? Well yes, and perhaps Niko could have stuck to being an atheist as defined by John Bucha’s definition that “An Atheist Is A Man With No Invisible Means Of Support.”

But Niko makes a reasonable point lifting up a mirror so others can see how foolish unreasonable claims are. Doesn't matter if you can claim to be a believer in the FSM or Thor or Yahweh. As Dawkins said “Nobody even thinks to calls themselves atheist, just as nobody thinks to calls themselves athorist now.”

I wonder if we can expect there to be a surge of Athorists next.

Framing Arguments: You say Flaming Atheists and I Say Non-Confrontational Humanist

By Gary Berg-Cross

The choice of vocabulary is central to favorably framing an issue. Framing things from one point of view can be like taking the high ground and letting others climb a hill to get close to a fair conversation. Recent examples include calling the health reform legislation Obamacare. It’s official, and more neutral name, is the Affordable Care Act. The “right to life" is a good example of older, glib positive phrasing for one side of a complex topic. It seizes the high ground of an issue by siding with life. Aren’t we all for life? It’s a conservative slogan that packages lots of assumptions into it and encourages a defensive, catch-up conversation by the other side. Indeed since there is usually more than one side to an issue, as I discuss in my Binary Thinking habit blog, one value of a frame is to create a false dichotomy that buries the idea of shades of grey and nuance to an issue.

Being shoved around by a neat framing vocabulary makes it pretty easy to get into an argument. We can disagree just based on how we label things. Labeling one side of issue in a negative way often produces such misunderstandings and disagreements. It evokes negative connotations. Some call this a dog whistle to a group that hangs on emotional phrases. I saw what I thought was an example of this in the recent blog discussion of education where I was surprised to read the phrase “government education”. This labeled what I usually think of as “public education”. To conservatives calling it “government education” dog whistles in Milton Friedman-like overtones of government control, intrusion, carelessness and inefficiency (as observed in my blog contrast Scientific and Political Culture in the Capital views of life inside the Beltway).

It’s pretty hard to avoid running into frozen frames in most conversations and they abound in debate since they are powerful weapons to seize audience attention. One of the powerful ones is attaching the adjective “flaming” to a person. It seizes the attention and in today’s social network we run into that term and to real instances of flaming rhetoric. The old exemplar use of the phrase probably comes from calling someone a flaming a-hole. Not a complement. Some might use it in pejorative way as in discussing a topic and requesting that no flaming Xes (pick a category) participate. They say that flaming Xes just aren’t nice enough or tolerant of others beliefs. Flamers scorch up the conversation with put down phrases such as:

"obviously you don't know what your talking about....."

“You are both incredibly rude & incredibly misinformed, which is a deadly

Applying the adjective “flaming” to such rhetoric seems apt. But, back to semantics again, flames can have other, softer characterizations. Flaming could mean just TOO passionate, as in controlled by emotions rather than intellect. But it can be a judgment, since some arguments have both passion and reason.

I recently heard the term “flaming atheist” tossed about as a label. It’s simple enough to understand that the term used to characterize someone who is a passionate atheist. Indeed some atheist blogs use the term in this way. The Blog site thespitfiredragon's Flaming Atheist is an example. The fire dragon offers spirited but reasoned arguments which she explains this way:

“Logic and reason have led me to reject any and all belief in the supernatural, whether it's gods, devils, angels, demons, vampires, ghosts, werewolves, fairies or leprechauns. Since 2007, I have worked to discuss the fallacy of supernatural beliefs with as many people as possible in an attempt to ignite the fires of logic and reason in stymied religious minds in the hopes of making the world a better place for the coming generations.”

This is a flame I can live with, although I recognize that it is not impossible to imagine that there are some atheists whose emotions and conversational dynamics are vaster than their knowledge and thought. Atheists can be passionate about labels and what they mean too. I’m often in a discussion where different ideas and labels come up and someone says, “Well that’s just a question of semantics.” If semantics is about what things mean then that’s not just a simple thing of being bogged down in a word like say “tom-ato” vs “to-mato”. It is central to understanding what one is really talking about. What I think most people mean by the “only semantics” statement is that people are focusing on some framed vocabulary that is getting in the way of mutual understanding. This is even true when the atheist-secular humanist community talks about proper labels. What do we call ourselves? Is atheist best? Is it inclusive? How about skeptics, brights or freethinkers? Are they included in a broad term like atheist? What’s the best term or label? Any term may quite different things to different people. To some atheism means Militant atheism which implies an action oriented anti-theism. This means not only being philosophically opposed to theism, but actively working to end it.
We may use atheist as a means of distinguishing passionate belief from a "weaker spirited” freethinker, an agnostic or perhaps a secular humanist. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins formulated a 7-point belief scale that formalizes some of these ideas so that there is less confusion. The scale goes from:
1 Strong Theist: I do not question the existence of God, I KNOW he exists, to
7 Strong Atheist: I am 100% sure that there is no God.
In between (2-6) are people who feel they cannot be certain, are very uncertain about God or non-God; with a 4 being a Pure Agnostic - God’s existence and non-existence are exactly equiprobable.
I like the scale, but I’ve known some strong atheists who feel this scale is foolish. To them agnostics are wimpy, afraid of a fight and not willing to peruse an argument with the ultimate truth as an objective. To others flaming atheists are too certain. For still others it is more logical thing to be is skeptical, since you can prove or disprove every idea that comes up. To them it is wrong to choose a side if not enough evidence is presented and not enough proven.
To me it is very interesting to have conversations with people along the scale particularly 3s-7s. Some passionate religious folks (1s) prefer to have a conversation with a polite ardent atheist (7) than someone who is agnostic at a 5 or 6. They say that it’s just easier to dialogue about religious matters since they both know where they stand. But to me I hear more of 2 framed vocabularies passing in the night with little real interaction. I prefer conversations where there’s a good chance that the group will come out knowing and thinking about more than when we started. This often means that we have come to appreciate honest differences of vocabulary and the model behind it. But that’s just the intelligence I expect in a secular humanist community, or whatever term you prefer.

combination….”

OK and Some Not OK Memes: The battle for Union Rights

Some ideas just catch on like viruses. You know the kind – tunes playing in our heads from the Oscars, Super Bowl ads, storylines and bumper sticker slogans attacking teacher union selfishness and campaign-like talking points (‘public employees need to start making some "shared sacrifice’). The idea of mind viruses, aka "Memes" was developed by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins came to this construct by analogy to how genes propagate themselves. Genes use the physical bodies they are housed in, as Dawkins said, selfishly. That is they have evolved to act only for their reproduction without knowing about or caring about their host’s quality of life. Genes succeed just as long as they are passed on. A side effect is that they help construct hosts that survive their environments.


Looked at this way genes are reproducing and infective specialists with side effects for hosts who need to survive environments to reproduce. Dawkins generalized this idea to propose that our mental life includes entities, which he called memes, that are similar to genes but a unit of cultural transmission. They are ideas that play in a mental host and "seek" to replicate themselves in one mind after another. Having a host with advanced skills (think of early humans making tools) and communicative abilities allows better reproduction of ideas, especially if they are selfish in spreading themselves. So without conscious intent (let along divine ones) our memes infect host-minds, copying themselves not for host interests but for their own reproductive ability. The idea is more of a framework than a well worked out theory but people like Daniel Dennett think that considering the meme focus on “who profits” answers some key evolutionary and cultural ideas, such as chain reaction of one innovation leading to and affording another. A simple example is the idea of a belonging meme for human gregariousness. The concept of staying with others is reproduced, since there was safety in numbers for our ancestor’s tribes.

Dennett and Dawkins along with others have applied the idea vigorously to discuss various memes that they hypothesize are involved in propagating religious ideas. In this formulation ideas giving people a feeling of belonging to a group (say a religious group) have an advantage. There is also the idea of distinguishing oneself by doing something new, innovative, or significant. An individual with memes about how to find food, shelter, and stands out from the crowd is more likely to find a potential mate. Religious leaders stand above others and so a religious story meme is likely to be reproduced as they are voiced by what a tribe recognizes as favored mates.

But other non-religious cultural advances and economies of scale efficiencies may also be propagated by a concentrated population. One group economy of scale comes with such innovations such as farming which requires stable groups. Population concentration also then works to increase mate choices and possibilities, who in turn can pass on innovations.


I was reminded of the meme model by 2 recent things. The first was a light BBC article called 'How did the word "OK" conquer the world' which illustrates why some ideas spread and take over. The article was based on Allan Metcalf’s book OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word in which he traces the word’s journey from “joke to business tool and then to staple of everyday conversation and an attitude toward life.” "OK" like "you know" or "I mean" crops up in daily speech dozens of times every day, although it seems habitual and carries little real meaning. My personal knowledge of OK’s origin was limited to what was declared in a Pete Seager song - "All Mixed Up". This asserted that OK came from Native American Choctaw - Okeh. But as Allan Metcalf explained the sound is also similar to Scottish German, Finnish and Greek affirmative words. Some idea-thing like OK is a good viral candidate in part because it sounds distinct but has simple acoustic components that are familiar to a multitude of languages. Thus its sound travels well and its graphic balance of the round /O/ and a /K/ made of straight lines makes it stand out clearly, easily distinguished from other words. These are good distinctions for a “Virus of the Mind” as Richard Brodie notes in his book of the same name. They help a meme virus get into the system and be communicated to others via a diffusion network. You can see some diffusion networks for recent memes that are afforded by the internet and social media online.

But as Dawkins noted early on, we are now aware of memes and so are at a new stage where people can intentionally design mind viruses. Those of us aware of the danger or having an interest can track some forms using a tool like Truthy .

Viral marketing is now a well known phenomena, which brings me to the 2nd phenomena that reminds me of memes – the attack on organized labor and the various memes of conservatives echoed my a mostly passive and tame media. It starts with simple sounding quotes as recorded in a NY Times article on dueling protests in Madison WI.

“‘You don’t care about this country! Shame on you, you’re selfish,’ one supporter of Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal told union supporters, wagging his finger as he spoke.”

Eric Alterman, for one, believes the issue of selfishness implied here isn’t merely rhetorical, but something we need to understand. It is dangerous. Alterman asks how did our country become a culture where “poor and middle-class folks willingly engage in internecine class warfare against one another, with one side essentially acting as a cat’s paw for mega-wealthy conservatives intent on undermining every worker protection in existence.” See http://www.thenation.com/blog/158844/whats-matter-wisconsin for the full article and the analogy to crabs fighting to escape a steaming pot. Altermann thinks that Thomas Frank framed an understanding of deceptive efforts by conservatives in his 2004 book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? The problem is that many of us have fallen for well designed memes disguised as populist, conservative messages that are in fact in conflict with the middle and working classes best interests. These have been called truthy memes since they rely on deceptive tactics to represent misinformation and half truths as fact. In a phrase we are infected with some bad ideas, which we are also in danger of passing on. They are spreading through the culture in part because they are driven by some basic fear of decline and by being packaged in a simple, relatively message about who to blame. Easy targets make for simple messages, which move along more easily than cognitively complex ones.

One thing that makes these messages difficult to resist is that the mainstream media has adopted conventional storylines as their hot button topics. This is done while crowding out competing and less sexy memes that provide the larger context digging into the real causes of the accelerating budget deficits seen in Wisconsin and elsewhere around the country. The real story might be to understanding the confluence of the failed housing market, high unemployment and Wall Street speculating and wild leveraging. These, rather than meme stories about public-employee union activity, are much better predictors of which state’s revenues are now in the red. But they are not simple, “OK” stories. They appeal to higher understanding and not the sexy, fear-based, scapegoating message being pushed.

Nor do you get much hard to resist messages about how the new cohort of Conservative governors have (or are) enabling state budget deficits by slashing corporate tax rates. Ron Brownstein had a column on a new war front role that Republican governors are playing in Washington's conflicts now –“American politics increasingly resembles a kind of total war in which each party mobilizes every conceivable asset at its disposal against the other. Most governors were once conscientious objectors in that struggle.” Instead of these ideas being widely discussed we hear echoes of misinformation dressed up as good statistical analytics. One cited example is the talking-point meme-statistic used by GOP politicians around the country. It appeared in USA Today in this form in August during the campaign:

“At a time when workers' pay and benefits have stagnated, federal employees' average compensation has grown to more than double what private sector workers earn.” USA Today, August 10, 2010

This notion of public union employees milking excess benefits from local government while the rest of the middle-class is simultaneously struggling sparks much of the public’s resentment. But it is a designer meme that is easily refuted by grounded realists like Ezra Klein of the Post who pops meme bubbles like Organized labor is in the hands of the teacher's unions. Klein points out that, "Wisconsin public-sector workers face an annual compensation penalty of 11%. Adjusting for the slightly fewer hours worked per week on average, these public workers still face a compensation penalty of 5% for choosing to work in the public sector."
(see http://www.politicalruminations.com/2011/02/truth-about-wisconsin-public-sector-employees-compensation.html)

That’s a meme we need to hear more about. Like conservative stories it needs to be made ubiquitous and give some organic growth time to put down hardy roots into the public’s mind. This is what Conservative memes echoes over their media and do it religiously. When they are wrong on an issue, based on a hard look at the facts, they ignore the facts and keep repeating their meme story. Dangerous designer memes...Beware.




















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