Theocrat Gary North: No ally of mine.

Miscellaneous General
61

I did comprehend what you wrote. Surviving and having sex causes offspring. This in no way disproves that mental torture (and other forms of abuse) goes on. Religious people tend to have a lot of offspring, actually.

Yep. I linked this earlier. It’s relevant again: Viruses of the Mind, by Dawkins - http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Dawkins/viruses-of-the-mind.html . There are ideas with are self-perpetuating and do not benefit the host but also do not kill the host.

PS
I made two videos educating people about evolution:

Really? So based on the evolution of DNA you’re going to say that abuse is simply a myth? Humans have very capable brains. This means they can traumatized as well. And this means that psychological problems can exist and be passed on for many generations. Evolution works on many different levels, not just DNA. Religion evolves (as per the virus of the mind), and culture evolves as well. In the last century we’ve had absolutely self-destructive ideas floating around in society. How do we explain that? Because as human beings we can be exploited as well. We’ve had a huge gap left open to be exploited, namely our bad understanding of reality. Hence, we got religion and then we got statism. And the period we’re in now is where we’re becoming immune to those viruses that plagued us, in our early days of a technological society.

The problem with mental abuse of children is that from the outside, they will appear mostly normal. They will grow up, go to work, etc. But what has actually happened is that they can no longer live out of joy, but instead are living out of fear, shame and without a balanced sense of self-worth. We like markets because it enables people to become happy. But religion actually turns people into living zombies. This is somewhat of a sliding scale. The more religious, the less capable of living happily.

If someone is older and has been raised rationally, then a religious affront is in no way aggression because it has no effect. When children are young, the situation is very much different.

62

That’s what everyone says. They’re almost always wrong.

I think this is the logic underlying the moral pragmatism that most statists hold. The police officer may be vaguely aware that, in some sense, his paycheck is collected coercively but then, why should he care? He may not even “believe” in the system of coercive collection of his paycheck but he can be paid this way, so why not?

I think you’re sensing the root problem with collectivism… of course you should spend your time bettering yourself because you can’t know how to better society in any case.

Well, I think that’s precisely why States exist… they keep winning at what they’re doing, why the hell should they quit?

I’m not so sure that the link between selfishness and immorality is as strong as the Catholic worldview would suggest.

Clayton -

63

You’re begging the question. What makes one happy? Personally, I find great hapiness in helping other individuals and society at large. The insight that certain actions are detrimental to other individuals and society at large greatly repels me from doing them. The knowledge of having done those actions would cause me personal unhapiness to a great degree; to the point of damaging my capacity to have positive emotional joy.

You must have heard of post traumatic stress disorder.

It’s dogma that prevents you from making sense of the world.

64

Wish this forum had rep points! This is awesome!

I am an agnostic theist, meaning, that I reserve a vague, back-of-the-mind angst regarding the ultimate reason that anything exists rather than nothing. The idea that the universe exists at the behest of an intentional being of some sort is no worse an explanation than any of the others out there.

Clayton -

65

Giant Joe, who says there can’t be right or wrong in an atheistic worldview? You’re providing reasons apart from theology as to why having rules in society is a “good” thing (and “good” could be irreducible). This is/ought burden of proof on the theistic side is never met because they assume “God has a prerrogative to assign moral value.” Says who? “Well he just does.” Okay, why should I do what God tells me to? Answer #1: “Well that’s a silly question, in essence what you’re asking is ‘why should I do what I should do?’” Answer #2: “Because he’ll torture you forever if you don’t.”

Answer #1 makes a little sense, but there is no reason as to why this couldn’t be the case given atheism. Yeah, some people are going to get away with killing others. I guess that means we should make a better effort to protect ourselves and enact justice in this world. And I’m even closer to Ricky James Moore on this particular topic, but it has nothing to do with my atheism. I just think the Argument From Morality is an atrocious one on so many levels. Ideal Observer Theory works perfectly in a Godless universe, if morality is to exist objectively and ontologically. The problem is that the theistic side (a la Greg Koukal / William Lane Craig) in this debate is being, for lack of a better word, obtuse.

66

OK, but you’re still not comprehending what I wrote. I said we are not the descendants of people who tortured their children. In fact, quite the opposite, we are the descendants of people who meticulously - even self-sacrificially - cared for their children.

There are two significant things you’re missing about this statement. First, it is a statement about “us” and “our ancestors”, that is, it is not a statement about any individuals then or now or individual bloodlines. So, sure, there can be exceptions to the rule… the children who managed to survive the torture and go on to have children of their own and (likely) pass on the genetic disposition for child-torture. Second, it is a statement about genetic dispositions but we are (obviously) not determined by our genetics, so the mild-mannered, passive person can commit murder in the right circumstances, for example. Nevertheless, the statement still stands unless you want to make the case that torture enhances survival.

Now, I had originally responded to a statement in one of your earlier posts that suggested that child abuse and torture is relatively common. It is this suggestion - the idea that child abuse is common, not that child abuse occurs - that is the myth and is easily disproved by the above evolutionary argument. Until just 250 years ago, the average human being lived at the subsistence level, on the equivalent of about $2/day in modern terms (Steven Landsburg explains this in his book More Sex is Safer Sex and in an online Slate article on the subject). The children of child abusers and neglecters would be at a massive survival disadvantage vis-a-vis their peers in loving, caring homes parented by self-sacrificial parents, all things equal*.

As for “mental torture”, I plead ignorance. I don’t know what “mental torture” is. I suppose there may be a case to be made that certain forms of education and indoctrination are bad for a child but, again, I think this is something that should be argued out by family members who actually have an interest in the welfare of a child on a case-by-case basis, not decided by the hoary head of Richard Dawkins for all of society. I think part of the problem in this discussion is that you seem to think that Jesus Camp is common in the US and elsewhere… it’s not, it’s a really fringe thing.

Clayton -

*This ceteris paribus is crucially important because explaining a lot of the abuse that really does occur within the family context relies on looking long and hard at the sometimes perverse reproductive incentives facing parents versus the interests of their children. For example, a parent may be better off (from a Darwinian point of view) abandoning his almost grown child to mate with a healthy, young woman who doesn’t want any step-children around. Two healthy children by her will give him more grandchildren than continuing to invest in previous child. These dynamics are explored in the book I referenced earlier by Kanazawa and Miller, Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters.

67

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMzwAEI56-4

This will probably give Nielsio a heart attack but I just find it funny as hell. And a little cute. It definitely is a commentary on the vapidity of this kind of religion.

Clayton -

68

Giant Joe, who says there can’t be right or wrong in an atheistic worldview?

Anyone who is not an apologist, pretty much. Will Provine, Max Stirner, Sidney Parker, L.A. Rollins, John Beverly Robison, Benjamin Tucker, James L. Walker, Dora Marsden, John Henry Mackay, Richard Joyce, Walter Sinnot-Armstrong and J.L. Mackie - just off the top of my head. And let’s not forget Harry Browne and Ludwig von Mises. Though they doesn’t really address it, Anthony de Jasay and - to some extent - Jan Narveson also fit as moral non-cognitivists. I also strongly suspect James J. Martin was an moral nihilist. Given this spread, it would look like the Rothbardians, Randites and religious nutters are the odd-men out in libertarianism and atheism.

Sinnot-Armstrong’s work is particularly interesting because it demonstrates dozens of arguments, none of which have been successfully addressed by moralists; and argues that even if almost every argument against morality were wrong there is still strong reason to doubt that there is any truth to morality.

Morality is a religious concept. Mores exist, morality does not. Ethos exist, ethics do not. Virtu exists, virtue does not. All of this rights and wrongs is just a bunch of hand-wavy rhetoric to convince tools to do things they have no logical reason to do.

69

Clayton,

You’re making a mistake similar to Hoppe’s. You’re jumping to biological evolution when psychological evolution is where you should be looking at.

The Childhood Origins of World War II And The Holocaust
http://www.psychohistory.com/originsofwar/06_childhoodOrigins.html

and

http://freedomainradio.com/FreeBooks/Psychohistory.aspx

70

And indeed, that would be the rational choice.

They shouldn’t and anyone who claims they should, is trying to impose some objective set of values on that person. All appeals to “society” fail the smell test of methodological individualism.

71

This ^^, contradicts

this ^^.

If you could get beyond your anti-religion, anti-theist bias you might really benefit, assuming you can muster an open mind, from Gerard Casey’s Lou Church lecture a year ago. You worship, it’s just a different mental abstraction, and just as subjective as any other. No better or worse.

72

Ricky James, yeah I’m aware of them and their arguments. I’m not really sold either way, although I would classify myself tenatively as a Nietzschean. I just think there are defensible views supporting morality on atheism. Not right per se, but defensible. Craigians and Christian apologists (about every one of them sans Swinburne I think) I don’t think make the case that objective morality exists given theism but not given atheism. Their standard of reasoning for morality on atheism is much more taxing and persnickety than the standards they grant themselves while defending theistic morality. That’s why I can’t stand that particular argument.

73

Well, I don’t believe theistic morality makes any sense, either. God can be some kind of all-seeing hangman, but he can’t change the laws of logic or subjectivity.

74

Without derailing the thread, I thought I’d pose a quesiton to Ricky in light of his thoughts of morality as mere sophistry and illusion: Is it because the claim to self-evidence is futile? Is it because you’re a nominalist? Is it because you’re a materialist?

After that, what are the laws of logic and what sort of being do they have?

75

It’s because I’m a radical subjectivist. Value only exists in relation to actual values of a specific individual, and these only relate to the world according to ideas he has about how to act on those values; whether he is correct or not doesn’t change this in the slightest. The idea of value or good apart from my value and things I perceive as goods is an abuse of language; and the idea of some ‘imperative’ floating out there apart from whatever exists within the bounded rationality of a real person is just blatant ignorance of subjectivity.

No amount of sophistry and moralizing can ever get over the ‘if I don’t care, I have no reason to do it’. Reasons are always an individual’s reasons; physical objects exist whether a person is aware of them or not; imperatives consist of a person wanting to do something.

The laws of logic and materialism have nothing to do with it, but the laws of logic are just non-precisive abstractions about being in general. Anything that was not non-contradictory would not count as real, or as a thought, or as a proposition.

That being said I don’t consider everything usually classed as moral philosophy to be useless or meaningless, I just hold it to be substantially more contingent and hypothetical rather than moral. I’m an Epicurean, not because I believe in eudaemonia, but because I think Epicureans are more or less correct in how to achieve what they aim at, and what they aim at is more or less appealing.

76

I know what DNA is. I don’t know what a meme is. While there is something to Dawkins’ memetics - ideas are repeated, they change over time and they even influence the behavior of their host brains - I think the idea is pretty vague because what an idea is is so vague. Evolutionary psychologists use the criterion of “culturally universal behavior” to filter through the vast array of culturally-conditioned human behavior to find those behaviors which we can reasonably conclude are down to genetic disposition, I see no similar criterion in memetics.

Also, I don’t see how you can just conclude, like that, that it’s “a mistake”. On what basis do you judge it to be a mistake to look at how evolution impacts human behavior??

Clayton -

77

Virtu exists, virtue does not

Which is why I like the concept of the Hellenistic word “arete” a littile better. Also good call on Dora Marsden, it is sad she is almost forgotten (I have not been able to fing "The Definition of the Godhead anywhere yet though).

78

While I wouldn’t say that Jesus camp is an agression per se (I define it as positive action), but it is surely a mental torture. Nielso has a point here.

P.S. there is a good word, passive agression. I think that could be applied to jesus camp.

79

Not only is that hilariously untrue,it’s ironic given the word’s historic usage.

80

While I don’t agree with RJM, I see where he is coming from. I think it would be more acurate to say that Capitalism = Markets, and that economy is just witnessing and studying of markets.

However the reason why I want to respond here is to ask you Scott. Please don’t let historical lingo influence you so easily. Simply because the communists used Capitalism in a defamatory way, doesn’t mean it’s defamatory. Any group of individuals could start using any word they want in a derogatory way. In fact people do this in slang, and we generally acknowledge it a very poor way of intillectually getting your message across.

Even though capitalism was used in a defamatory way histoircally, and even in it’s origins, it is really inconsequential. The definition most widely adopted today is entirely compatible, entirely relevant, and really is the best word to be employed when describing a privately directed economy.