My friend Max Kolbe has often described atheists, and especially prominent atheists on Twitter and YouTube, as cultists. I had always taken this as a metaphor, that is, as rhetoric. That is, that they had many of the qualities of member of a cult, such as an absurd degree of credulity, an astonishingly twisted and poor understanding of the outside world, and so on.

My problem was that, for whatever reason, I hadn’t realized which member of the cult he was saying that they are. For some reason I took him to be (rhetorically) saying that there was one giant cult and all of the atheists he was talking about were sycophantic followers in it. Obviously that wasn’t literally the case; they didn’t live on a giant compound and there was no leader for them all to have pledged allegiance to. And this sort of cult is always a cult of personality which requires a leader.

Then it finally hit me: he didn’t mean that these people were followers in one giant cult. He meant that they were each the leader of their own small cult. And that is way closer to literally true. It is, of course, possible to identify elements of a cult of personality in any popular figure because popular figures will have fans. Fans and sycophantic cult members do have some traits in common, and though I think that there are qualitative differences, it’s tempting to take the difference as being simply one of degree. But this is not what I mean here. First, the internet atheist’s relationship to his fans is one of revealing truth. Well, not exactly, since all the secrets of the universe he has to offer are that he doesn’t know any secrets of the universe, but this doesn’t seem to really bother the people involved. They still feel like somehow they have special knowledge.

They act like it, too. In a fair amount of talking that I’ve done with internet atheists, it doesn’t seem to occur to them that technically they are claiming to be ignorant. They invoke the words “atheism is a lack of belief” and “I haven’t seen any evidence” but then proceed in everything they say as if they said, “I know the truth: there is no God.” They like to talk about outsiders as deluded—which they are only in a position to say if they know the outsiders are wrong.

As we are moving from the era of YouTube ads to the era of patreon, we’re seeing more direct support of the leader from his followers, so I expect the cult-like aspects to intensify, but even in the ad-driven era, people will lead cults for affirmation even where they can’t get money out of it. And affirmation one clearly saw a lot of. And of course cults need to get to a certain level of success before the group sex with the leader begins; many would-be cults probably fizzle out before then. That they are not ultimately successful does not change the nature of the group dynamic. (Though of course that fact can be exploited to smear things which are in fact not cults.)

I’m also reminded of the gnostic heresy, in the second century. The gnostics were not a unified, hierarchical group, but rather a sort of network of cults where membership could be somewhat fluid. Cult members would be disciples of one or another gnostic leader, but the fringe members might learn from multiple teachers, though of course only the public knowledge, not the private knowledge taught to the trusted insiders. That structure seems very parallel to modern popular internet atheists, who work together to some degree and generally profess the same core principles. And you see similar dynamics where the existence of such an alliance is useful; it’s much easier to gain groupies from someone else’s group than from the general population, and the total population confers status by association on even the less popular members, but at the same time there will be vying for status and infighting, all of which we’ve certainly seen among internet atheists.

I’ve seen all sorts of numerous accusations about how I’m trying to prove “the God of the Gaps“.  (For those who don’t know the God of the Gaps is roughly the idea that you can identify God in those parts of nature which don’t work, i.e. in the gaps in our scientific knowledge.) I find this accusation hurled at me especially often if I’m discussing anything involving wonder at the natural world.  It’s often followed by assurances that atheists have a sense of wonder, though one is forced to wonder what it might consist of in the face of the unshakable conviction that we understand everything.

Anyway, I’ve been wondering where on earth the idea of the God of the Gaps came from, anyway. It feels like the sort of thing you might get from a Christian fundamentalist, though even they usually aren’t this obtuse. Oddly, Wikipedia isn’t much help. In the Origins of the Term section of the article on it, it says:

The concept, although not the exact wording, goes back to Henry Drummond, a 19th-century evangelist lecturer, from his Lowell Lectures on The Ascent of Man. He chastises those Christians who point to the things that science can not yet explain—”gaps which they will fill up with God”—and urges them to embrace all nature as God’s, as the work of “an immanent God, which is the God of Evolution, is infinitely grander than the occasional wonder-worker, who is the God of an old theology.”^[2][3]

In 1933, Ernest Barnes, the Bishop of Birmingham, used the phrase in a discussion of general relativity’s implication of a Big Bang:

Must we then postulate Divine intervention? Are we to bring in God to create the first current of Laplace’s nebula or to let off the cosmic firework of Lemaître’s imagination? I confess an unwillingness to bring God in this way upon the scene. The circumstances with thus seem to demand his presence are too remote and too obscure to afford me any true satisfaction. Men have thought to find God at the special creation of their own species, or active when mind or life first appeared on earth. They have made him God of the gaps in human knowledge. To me the God of the trigger is as little satisfying as the God of the gaps. It is because throughout the physical Universe I find thought and plan and power that behind it I see God as the creator.^[4]

During World War II the German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer expressed the concept in similar terms in letters he wrote while in a Nazi prison.^[5] Bonhoeffer wrote, for example:

how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.

All of its citations are Christians who are saying that this is a stupid idea (there are more, I’ve cut for brevity). And of course it is; the God of the Gaps basically postulates that God is incompetent and didn’t make a creation which actually works and has to be constantly patched up. I’m really wondering why on earth atheists are so obsessed with it, since it’s something serious Christians criticize heartily.

There are a few explanations which spring to mind or were suggested by friends:

1. The atheists believe in a God of the Gaps, only they call it Science. (i.e. the mis-understanding of science commonly called scientism).
2. They really want Christians to propose an idea they can beat up by some method other than denying  that human reason can reach truth.
3. The sort of people who tend to become either atheists or fundamentalist Christians use this argument if they become fundamentalist Christians. As a result, non-fundamentalists never see it but atheists do since they’re almost the only people who regularly interact with fundies.

I’d be curious in hearing other explanations, if anyone has any to offer.

This was originally a blog post of mine, or if you want to see something moving while you listen, you can watch the video:

The Frank Friar released an interesting podcast today.

https://soundcloud.com/thefrankfriar/christ-the-pilgrim-in-our-lives-ep-22

He mentioned the difficulty he was having saying several masses which involve a lot of standing and walking, and that he didn’t want to appear weak by limping, but reminded himself that if this is carrying his cross and following Jesus, then he would do so. He called it his vanity—and certainly he knows himself, so I wouldn’t presume to say he’s wrong—but I can’t help but wonder if there’s at least an element of not wanting to let down the people who look up to priests to see the strength of Christ, which would not be vanity but a concern for the weakness of the congregation. Something to think about for those of us in the pews, anyway—do we sometimes let ourselves confuse the man with his office?

Be that as it may, it reminded me of my own minor struggle, which I mention not because it’s important but just because it’s a trivial and therefore potentially relatable example of the same sort of thing. Last night after the children were asleep (I have three young ones) I was getting ready to record a video when my almost-two-year-old started crying. So up I trudged from my office to see what was wrong, and she wouldn’t go back to sleep so I carried her around in the dark, her head resting on my shoulder, so she’d feel secure enough to go back to sleep (she declined the offer of a bedtime snack). And as I was thinking about how frustrating it was that I was about to record and instead here I was having to put her to sleep again, it occurred to me that at least I wasn’t partway through and so didn’t have any lost work, and then it occurred to me that in fact I didn’t have lost work because clearly at the moment caring for my daughter was the work God had for me to do.

It’s very easy to let ourselves forget that when we make plans they are guesses as to the work God has given us to do; it seems to me that part of how to live without anxiety is to remind ourselves as often as we can remember that our plans are nothing more than guesses, and when we receive more certain information as to what God has given us to do, it should not be cause for regret but cause for contentment, like when a parent turns on a night light for a child.

This does mean rather a large project of changing how we think of plans during the planning stages, of course. Something I learned in partner dancing (Lindy Hop) is that the problem usually starts several steps before you actually notice it.

I’m going to start my explanation of the theory of unbelievable stupidity with an example. In a video of mine which was called The Dishonesty of Defining Atheism as a Lack of Belief, I took issue with the approach many internet atheists say should be the standard human approach of believing nothing until one is spoon-fed enough evidence to finally be won over. Of course many people misunderstand this to mean I’m in favor of people believing whatever they’re told, when all I’m suggesting is that people should actually try to find out what’s true rather than being as passive as possible. To try to convey that, at one point in the video I said:

In fact, scientific discovery is entirely predicated on the idea that you shouldn’t discount things until you’ve ruled them out. It’s also the entire reason you should control your experiments. You can’t just assume that other variables besides the one you’re studying had no effect on the outcome of your experiment unless somebody proves it to you, you’re supposed to assume that other variables do affect the outcome until you’ve proven that they don’t. This principle is literally backwards from good science.

I recently got this rather stupid response:

You have never taken a class is science, specifically experimentation, have you? In an experiment, you DO assume nothing special is going on, and then try to disprove it.

There is the tiny kernel of an idea inside of this idiocy, which I think is a good place to start in unpacking it. The idea he’s grasping at is related to the concept of the “null hypothesis” in statistical testing. In science, one sees it often used in drug trials, but there are other places too. The basic idea is to run an experiment and see how often some effect occurs, and then to ask how explainable it is by pure chance if there is no underlying causality in the experiment. This clearly has nothing whatever to do with not controlling one’s experiments because the default assumption is that confounding variables don’t confound.

Two questions arise:

1. Why did this guy think something this irrelevant was relevant?
2. Why does this seem so incredibly stupid?

Rather than answer these questions directly, I’m going to introduce the Theory of Unbelievable Stupidity, instead. So, here goes: People in the modern west are raised from a very young age in a standardized school system which needs to graduate everyone regardless of ability. Because it needs to pretend that it’s teaching students things rather than just running them through a fancy day-care, the general contract drawn up between teachers and students is: “I’ll teach you how to pretend to know the material if you agree to pretend to know it on the test.”

Now, you may think that this is a tad cynical, but if you do, I challenge you to talk to high school students or college students and ask them about the things which they (in theory) learned prior to the most recent test. In general, you’ll find that they don’t know any of it. How, then, did they manage to all pass the tests? The tests in school are designed to be easily fakable with a combination of a little bit of disconnected knowledge and a fair amount of knowing how to make knowledge seem like understanding.

The problem is that while the easily forgotten knowledge fades fairly rapidly, the habit of faking understanding persists. If you look at the example above, consider the first sentence: “you have never taken a class in science, specifically experimentation, have you?” The first part of it uses more words than is necessary. It would mean the same thing to say, “You never took” as “You have never taken”, but the latter sounds like what a college professor would say. Then look at the bolded section; it clarifies what he’s talking about with the word “specifically”. Again, this has an erudite feel to it. Specificity is an academic pursuit. And again at the end there’s “have you” which matches the “have never” in the beginning. This means exactly the same thing as, “You never took a science class about experimentation, did you?”

There is a further aspect of it talking about taking a class rather than merely having an experience. Discussing classes suggests college, since after all who doesn’t take high school science classes? This lends the further suggestion that the comment comes from a college-educated person. Hence, by implication, it comes from a place of education an authority.

The second sentence is less egregious, but there is an over-use of commas which is a sign of erudition—educated people are, I think, more likely to over-use commas than to under-use them, in cases where they don’t get it correct. Further, it says, “and then try to disprove it” rather than, say, “and then prove it isn’t”.

All of these things come together to suggest a well educated man who is making a carefully considered critique. And if that were the case, he should immediately burn his degrees and repent in their ashes because this critique is so far from sensible. Just to list a few problems with it:

1. You don’t need to take a class in science to know how to experiment. Libraries are filled with books talking about it. (For example, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman has some very trenchant observations about experimentation.) Of course, he might being running this in only one direction—had you taken such a class you’d definitely have known, etc. in which case it’s not useful even as an insult-by-comparison.
2. There is no such thing as a class in “scientific experimentation” since the nature of experimentation varies with the subject matter. The way that you determine the charge of an electron is radically different from how you determine whether a drug is safe and effective which is again radically different from how you try to figure out what PRM1 does in the human body. Let’s not even get started on astronomy.
3. Statistical testing using a null hypothesis is relevant only to certain types of testing like drug trials. It would have no meaning in performing an oil-drop experiment to measure the charge of an electron to “assume nothing special is going on and then try to disprove it”. Nothing is either proved or disproved in taking measurements.
4. In one of the great natural experiments of all time, that proved General Relativity, the position of mercury was accurately predicted during an eclipse. No one assumed GR was false and then tried to disprove its falsity, they made a prediction based on it (which is, technically, assuming it to be true) and then checked to see if observations matched.
5. Even in drug trials you don’t actually assume that the drug has no effect. They’re quite careful with dosing in drug trials, which would be quite unnecessary if they were assuming the drug was completely ineffective.
6. Also in drug trails they don’t assume that the drug is perfectly safe and then have to prove some sort of danger; a fair amount of experimentation is necessary to prove the drug safe before clinical trials are even allowed to begin.

The list could go on, but it’s long enough for my present purpose. A man as educated as the signals suggest should have known all this. The result is that he must either be extraordinarily stupid if he knew all this but couldn’t put it together, or he must be simply dishonest, knowing it but not caring in order to make a rhetorical point.

The theory of unbelievable stupidity states that it’s much more likely that the guy doesn’t know any of this and merely sounds educated because of the schooling he received in his youth which taught him how to sound educated.

I recommend looking out for this. In my experience, it makes dealing with such people vastly less frustrating.

If one spends much time amongst online atheists, one is likely to come across the definition of atheism as:

A lack of belief in God or gods.

I like to point out that two of the gods commonly worshiped in the ancient world were the sun and the moon. The response to this I get is usually some version of saying that atheists believe in the sun and moon, just not that they have an intellect or will.

I usually don’t pursue this any further because it is obvious that the original definition is not really what’s meant, but it is actually a topic worth considering why it is that the atheists don’t worship the sun and the moon.

After all, it’s not like the ancients actually thought that the sun was literally the wheels on a chariot—all you have to do is look at the sun and you’ll notice no chariot that’s even bigger than it, nor a man significantly taller than the wheel above it. You would see those things if they were literally there. Of course much of what’s misunderstood by modern atheists is that the poets of the ancient world were not the scientists of the ancient world, but the comic book writers of the ancient world (and TV writers, etc). They weren’t trying to explain the world, they were trying to tell cool stories. This explains why they followed the rule of cool so often. I guarantee you that in Hesiod’s Theogeny when he said that the sky bedded with the earth to produce the titans, the ancient Greeks did think that this was a history of a giant air penis thrusting into the earth.

But leaving aside whether the ancients who weren’t poets actually thought that the sun was intelligent, they did certainly think that the sun was very powerful. Because it obviously was. The sun is responsible for life on the surface of the earth, and not infrequently for death on the surface of the earth. The sun is enormous and powerful and we depend on it. Why shouldn’t an atheist worship it?

And here we get to one of the really interesting things about atheists which the noisy minority often called the new atheists tends to completely miss. Most atheists do worship something. For a great many of them, it’s humanity, or society, or science, or the state; but whatever is the object of their worship, they are clearly religious about it. They are generally not organized in their religious observance, so it’s easy to miss as no rituals have yet been codified, but it only takes a few minutes of watching Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey to recognize that you’re watching an atheist’s televised sunday worship service. Marxists are of course notorious for worshiping the state; so much so that even new atheists accuse them of it—if, granted, in order to get around admitting the many atrocities these atheist regimes committed.

Much has been commented on how the New Atheists weren’t really all that new, but in fact they did bring one new thing to the table: they don’t understand human nature even a little bit. They actually thought that most human beings can exist without religious observance. In consequence, it never occurred to them that it might be a good idea to formalize it, so that good—or at least harmless—ideas crowd out the bad ideas. Worshiping the sun and the stars has its dangers, but they’re very small compared to worshiping the state. The New Atheist movement was doomed from its inception because it really was the absurd attempt to get rid of religion. You can’t get rid of religion. You can only pick what religion will predominate. If you take away God, men will worship gods, and if you take away even the gods, men will worship far worse things.

It is very popular for secular people to attempt to base morality on consent. That is, anything is moral to which all relevant parties have consented, and immoral if they haven’t.

Obviously there are a bunch of caveats to both, in the form of cases where consent must be violated for the good of the person (e.g. children, the elderly, etc), and cases where the people are deemed unable to consent (e.g. children, drunks, etc). These do give the lie to the idea that morality is based upon consent since there can’t be exceptions to the foundation of a principle. Obviously these exceptions tell of a deeper foundation for morality which is some conception of the good of a human being which is independent of the human being’s wishes. But if we set this insurmountable objection to the side for the moment, there is a further problem with basing morality on consent: no one can actually give consent.

In modern cant what I mean is that no one can give informed consent, but informed consent is a redundancy. Consent which is not informed is not consent. This is because consent, as a verb, is a transitive verb. I.e. it takes a direct object. You cannot consent in a vacuum. You must consent to something. But in order to consent to it, you must know what it is. It doesn’t mean anything to consent to something, you know not what. What is the content of the consent?

There are generally two ways to try to get around this: the partially correct way and the completely dishonest way.

The completely dishonest way is to arbitrarily terminate the consequences of an action at what is foreseeable. This is attractive to the intellectually lazy, but it makes as much sense as saying that a person can consent to another sawing off the tree branch upon which the first is sitting, but that consent doesn’t extend to the subsequent falling down because they didn’t realize that would happen. The cases where this happens are of course less obvious than this one, but no different in principle.

The partially correct way is to say that a person can consent to classes of action which have some discernible characteristic. Thus for example a person who is having sex in order to produce a child is consenting to becoming a parent, even though they have no idea what sort of child they will receive. The problem is that this depends on the ability to know the outline of the class of action being consented to. And this comes back to the fundamental problem with consequentialism—only God can be a consequentialist.

There are only two ways to know the outlines to a class of action:

1. To be omniscient
2. To receive summary information from someone who is omniscient

Being finite beings, option @1 is closed to us, so the only possible way to achieve consent is option #2. Option #2 is, however, closed to the secular people who are trying to base morality upon consent.

This is, in short, the problem with basing morality upon consent. The only people who might possibly want to, can’t. Those who can, have no reason to try.

I caught the first half of the first episode of The Orville the other day. It was about what I expected from the trailer. That is to say: amusing, but not likely to be great.

I also suspect that the costumers, set decorators, etc. were all lawyers trying to get into their respective fields in show businesses because their instructions seemed to be: “make this as close to Star Trek as possible without getting sued”. And as has been observed, the comedy feels glued on the side. And not with epoxy, either, but more like Elmer’s that someone forgot to clamp.

There are several reasons I don’t expect The Orville, despite being pretty and light fun, to be worth investing time in.

First: Seth MacFarlane is an outspoken atheist. I’m sorry to say it, but at the end of the day the atheist worldview doesn’t admit of any rationally consistent stories to tell. Creatures with neither free will nor prescriptive natures can’t really be the protagonists of stories, and where good and bad are just feelings, it’s hard to come up with a reason to care about what fictional people fictionally feel about things that aren’t really happening.

Second: The comedy seems generally willing to sacrifice characters for laughs. In complete comedies this can work, such as in 30 Rock. 30 Rock didn’t have characters, it had what might be called loci of jokes. The complete lack of consistent characters made the sacrificing of characters for jokes tolerable. The Orville wants to be a drama as well as a comedy, so I think that the willingness to sacrifice characters for jokes will play out very badly, unless the predictions of the comedy being dropped altogether turn out to be correct.

Third: There isn’t much of an attempt at consistency in the characters even in the dramatic elements. I’m told that the third episode of The Orville involves a plot where the member of the all-male species gives birth to a female and wants corrective surgery for her. The problem is, to begin with, it doesn’t mean anything to say that a species is all male. Male only has meaning in reference to female, and vice versa. It would be like saying that it’s a species where all of its members are above average. What’s meant is that they all look like human males. But so what?

(I should note that in a science fiction context it would be possible to have an all male species if you were to invoke cloning, such that it was a species with females but the females died off and so the species only persists through cloning. That is not at all what was described here.)

Fourth: the hyper-intelligent science officer males an imply/infer error. I used to think that this was only a trope to allow the writers to show that a character isn’t as smart as he thinks he is, and some other character is. The typical setup involves someone saying, “are you inferring that I stole money from the account?” and someone else says, “No, he’s implying it. You’re inferring it.” Or words to that effect. But this case seems to be a genuine imply/infer error. The captain asks the member of the hyper-intelligent species if they’re as racist as they’re reputed to be, and he responds something to the effect, “If you’re inferring that we regard other species as very far below us, that is correct”. He wasn’t inferring it, he was implying it. This is not auspicious for how the writing of the hyper-intelligent science officer will go. Granted, it could be a subtle tell that the species is not in fact hyper-intelligent and only think that they are, but I’ve heard this isn’t the case and the so-far-beyond-us-we’re-like-pet-gerbils-to-them aspect is played straight.

I don’t want to be this cynical about modern television, but as a Scottish chief engineer once said, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

Last night I watched an episode of Breaking the Magician’s Code: Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed. It’s notable for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that the direction the narrator received must have been, “Bored! You’ve never been so bored! Just read your lines like you don’t care about anything!”

The basic premise is contained in the title. Someone who went by the stage name “The Masked Magician” revealed how to do a number of very old magic tricks. But the approach is very curious: they don’t approach this with any sort of excitement or awe, but rather a sort of bored annoyance.

Now, the thing I find very interesting about that is the timing. Breaking the Code was released from 1997-1998. That precedes the emergence of the New Atheism by around 8 years, but of course the New Atheism would be better called the Warmed Over Atheism, and the market for the books which would come to define the New Atheism was forming over this time period.

I’m not asserting any sort of causal link between the two, but I do see a similarity of attitude. In particular, Breaking the Code was dismissive and very reductionist. It took an air of superiority, though to what was unclear. And more importantly, it presented tricks as if there was only one way of doing them, without variations. Yet I myself have seen plenty of variations which the explanation given did not cover, and I don’t watch much magic. I’m not, of course, claiming that there are real magicians practicing for entertainment—among other things, if a man had the power to levitate people, I don’t think he would be all that interested in being a stage magician. But I do think that there may be clever tricks involved in some stage magic, while the attitude taken by Breaking the Code is that magic is all really dumb, simple stuff. And that faith—that whatever has happened, it must be trivial—is very familiar from dealing with atheists.

If one hangs out long enough on the internet, one will hear it said, “you can’t prove a negative.” This is of course obviously false stated in this level of generality. You can easily prove that the sun didn’t explode ten thousand years ago killing all life on earth and leaving the earth a barren wasteland by simply pointing up in the daytime sky at the intact sun, and noting that you yourself are alive and on the earth while you do it.

But people do not, generally, mean the statement at that level of generality. What they do mean varies with the circumstance but is usually some version of either:

You can’t prove the universal non-existence of a thing which could be anywhere due to the limitations of finite time plus one’s inability to travel to everywhere.

or:

One cannot prove that a thing which would have left no trace did not happen over a time period large enough that there were no witnesses who saw whatever was not doing the action over the entire time.

Both of these are things no sensible person would object to, though occasionally you do see them come up. “You deleted a tweet you made over the last six months!” “How can I possibly prove that I didn’t since Twitter keeps no record of deleted tweets?”

(I think it’s worth noting in passing that the inability to provide physical evidence for things that would leave no physical evidence is precisely why we have witness testimony in the first place.)

These sensible things are not, however, the limits of that to which people will apply “you can’t prove a negative”. While not going so far as to claim that all negatives are strictly unprovable, I have seen this taken to rather ridiculous extremes. The one that comes to mind is a point I made in my recent video about Deconverted Man:

I pointed out that much of what he says rests on the idea that he’s never seen any evidence nor any “logically coherent” arguments for God’s existence, and that furthermore this is rather implausible because all the world is evidence for its creator and there are many sound arguments which demonstrate God’s existence.

The first of those two points is arguable only by trying to creatively redefine “evidence” to mean something like “unambiguous evidence” or “conclusive evidence” or something else which cannot in theory exist because what they really are asking for is something which would force them to believe in God, and that’s not how the human mind works.

The second, though, is curious, because I was told by more than one of Deconverted Man’s fans that it’s impossible to prove a negative so he has nothing to prove. Of course they didn’t think this through and don’t really take it as a principle, but it is amusing to consider what the principle would mean: as long as you phrase it negatively, you can make the most outlandish claim and it’s up to others to prove you wrong. “I’ve never stood on a floor” is a negative claim, as is, “I am not affected by gravity.”

(In case you’re wondering what would happen if I were to try to push that issue, in addition to being told I’m stupid, I’d then encounter the average online atheist’s inability to distinguish between a Straw Man and a Reductio Ad Absurdum.)

A very odd thing I’ve noticed is that online atheists only know how to be on the defensive. Many of my friends have observed that this is because they’re on a one-trick pony, and their one trick is rejecting all arguments presented to them. This generally doesn’t work with me because while I’m willing to answer questions, I’ve no interest in trying to force people to believe anything. To that end, I made the video, Dear Lack of Belief Atheists, I’m Not Your Father:

This puts online atheists who want to “argue” with me in a difficult position, since if I will simply accept that they don’t accept an argument, they’ve got nowhere to go. Some of them merely say, “OK”. I’ve even had a few of them thank me, which I find a bit odd since they all came to me, I didn’t seek them out. It just seems a bit odd to me to walk up to someone then thank them for not talking to you.

But the ones who do want to argue now need some way to try to get me to prove things to them. And while there are several techniques that I see, the one I find oddest is what I’ve called strategic narcissism. Basically, they tell me about how they don’t find arguments compelling. In general, I tend at this point to ask why I’m supposed to care, though of course I’ll vary the specifics with the circumstances. And then the usual response is to get offended. I’ve had more than a few tell me that they’re magnanimously overlooking my rudeness. I’ve never yet had one tell me why I’m supposed to care. Now, I doubt that they’re genuinely so self-absorbed that they think everyone must truly be interested in their (lack of) thoughts; I suspect most of this is various people trying various things combined with an evolutionary monkey-see-monkey-do approach, but it is none the less a very strange thing to be on the receiving end of. I’m almost tempted to start developing better rhetorical strategies for atheists just so I don’t have to listen to all of the terrible ones all the time. Almost.

There’s probably a sense in which this is a continuation of Is Philosophy for Private Gardens?

Most people are not equipped to deal with hearing contradictory opinions on fundamental subjects. Once you accept that, a great deal of human history makes sense, and especially recent reactions to a free-for-all in which everyone became allowed to trumpet their opinions into the public sphere. And if you don’t think that this is new, recall that for most of its history blasphemy was a punishable offense in the United States. And in fact this was most of the world for most of its history. Publicly proclaiming what the ruling powers found offensive was illegal to various degrees in most places and most times.

Of course, this has never meant that offensive opinions weren’t held, simply that they tended to go underground. But going underground poses a problem, because how do people who don’t already know that they share a view share that view?

They came up with ways to communicate subtly.

That is to say, they got around censorship laws by not being explicit. They did things like write out the argument but left the conclusion unstated. Or they talked about parallel situations. I’m told that this is a popular approach in China—when one wants to criticize the Chinese government, one writes a historical drama in which the villain is doing the same thing as the present government. Since China has a very long history, one can find a suitable bit of real history for almost any narrative, I’ve heard, and since the present government holds itself to be in distinction to the previous dynasties, it’s not in a great place to complain about depicting how awful the previous governments which the present government overthrew were.

Getting around censorship is of course a neutral thing; it has been used by heretics to spread lies to undermine truth as well as by saints to spread the truth to undermine lies. That is to say, it’s just a tool. So I think as society degenerates further, it’s a tool very much worth studying.

In service of which, here are a few elements of avoiding censorship which seem to be useful:

1. Don’t argue directly with the powerful. It attracts their attention. It also makes them assume everything you say is against them.
2. Make your arguments without stating your conclusion. Someone intelligent enough to understand how the conclusion follows from the argument is intelligent enough to supply what the conclusion actually is. Those who aren’t will get no benefit from the argument anyway. But the unintelligent oppressors won’t realize what you’re saying.
3. Talk more about first principles than about specifics. This can be over-done, but if you can win people over on first principles the specifics will be relatively easy. If they’re not won over on first principles, they’re not likely to be persuaded on specifics. If a man doesn’t first love God, it’s pointless to argue with him about loving his fellow man.

Nothing is foolproof, of course. #2 was, as I understand it, the approach used by Averroes, but unfortunately for him Al-Ghazali understood and exposed him. Still, I think that these things are worth bearing in mind and developing further, the more dangerous it becomes to be explicit.

The Frank Friar reflects about keeping our eyes on God as discussed by Br. Lawrence of the Resurrection:

For Br. Lawrence, our treasure is God.  All actions we say or do, must be pointed to this treasure.

It’s a topic I’m very fond of; it’s related to the instruction to “pray always”. The really interesting question is how to do this? One approach (which is a good one) sounds like this:

For him even the most mundane task  can be blessed by God and offered up for the Divine Glory… Thus, as we journey through our day, I believe Br. Lawrence would ask us to take minute, then during that minute to actively think about whatever it is that we are doing.  When we understand, what it is we are doing, then we can begin to see if we are eye keeping our eyes fixed on God.

There is a another—related—way to look at this, which I’m not sure how to describe, but is something to the effect of fully considering what we’re doing. It is probably not the intention, but when I hear language about offering up our tasks for divine glory (which is common language), it sounds to me as if there is somehow a way in which the task is not involved in the divine glory but can be made so. Now of course no one would say, if it was put this way, that there is anything which does not serve God’s good purposes, but even so, there seems to me to be a tension between doing things well and always thinking about God; one can’t put one’s full attention in two different places at once.

And I think the key to resolving this tension is that one does not need to put one’s attention away from creation to put it on God. This is because all things in creation point to God. There is nothing in creation which, if seriously considered, is not fundamentally about God. Clouds and ships and chairs and dust all point to the one who makes them in every instance of their existence; each thing, insofar as it is good, is a reflection of God. It seems to me, then, that the most effective way of turning a task into a prayer is to take the effort to truly be present in the task; to really focus on the task as it is in itself, which is to say to focus on it as it is part of God’s creation. All of creation exists relationally; truly it is not good for man to be alone. And neither man nor dust is alone; God has put us together.

The problem comes in when we think of our tasks only as a means to an end, because that means we consider our tasks not in themselves but in ourself; when we focus on our goals we think only of things as they relate to us and our purposes. We may wash the dishes worse if we fold our hands in prayer while washing them—with what would we wipe the dish if not our hands?—but we will not wash the dishes worse for considering the dish we’re washing instead of absent-mindedly thinking of something else. The dishes want to tell us of God, if only we’ll listen. Perhaps the most effective way to be always praying, while we do the dishes, is to pray with the dishes instead of ignoring them.

Atheists often want to concentrate on the secular, because they think this is a common ground with believers where they don’t have to hear about our faerie-stories. They are, in this, gravely mistaken. The secular world all shouts about the glory of God, if only we’ll stop talking inside our heads about what we want, and listen to it.

There is a sense—a very limited sense—in which holy places are the enemy of sanctity, for holy means “set aside”. In this fallen world it is good that there are places we set aside to do nothing but think of God; still, I think it’s a worthwhile goal to figure out how to make that unnecessary because there is no place where God is forgotten.

Fr. Ayre started a twitter thread on the misapprehension of sacramentality like this:

(Read it all for context. Also, in this post all references to The Church are to the fullest sense of The Church, i.e. the mystical body of Christ, i.e. all people, angels, etc. who in the end love God including those who may only come to know Christ after their death, such as Abraham or Moses and we hope as stated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church all those who through no fault of their own do not know Christ or his church but following the dictates of their conscience sincerely seek God.)

I think a lot of the problem is that the Church is necessary as a mediatrix for a full relationship with Christ, but not for just any relationship with Christ. That is to say, a relationship with Christ is not only through his Church. You can see this in the prayer which Christ himself gave us. It begins “Πάτερ ἡμῶν.” Literally: “Father ours”. Jesus himself taught us to pray directly to the father. Our primarily relationship is directly with God. But, our secondary relationship is indicated in that second word: ours. We are to pray directly to God, with our fellow creatures, that is, with the Church.

However, in the modern era, only one one of those two words is deeply felt. And this is all the more so because we live in a polyculture. Human beings by nature live in small family groups; we’re not made for widespread dissension. Some of us are better at handling it than others, but most aren’t good at it and so naturally try to compromise. That is, they try to find common ground, or put more depressingly, they try to go to the lowest common denominator. The extreme of this is atheism, where people figure that everyone agrees on secular things, at least, so let’s just get rid of the spiritual part and all agree. Within Christianity and especially in America we’re plagued with Protestantism; people’s natural desire to compromise in the practical sense leads people to compromise in the worse sense of damage.

This is especially the case given that what many protestants believe is some variant of Believe or Burn. Long story short: Martin Luther turned faith from living according to truth into an abstract pledge of allegiance to Christ in theory but (often) in practice to the dominant culture. The Church as mediatrix is—if one isn’t paying attention—awfully close to “pledge allegiance to the group or burn in hell”. This makes unmediated relationship with Christ all the more attractive, since believe-or-burn is repulsive.

But I think all this points to the way to recover sacramentality. Jesus said that he came that we might have life and have it to the full, not merely that we might just barely scrape by. The natural virtue people in the modern age most need to develop is courage. It takes courage to strive for living to the full instead of just scraping by. Scraping by is safe precisely because it is minimal. The less you do, the less you can do wrong. We need to remind people that the less that they do, the less that they do right, and life is fundamentally about doing right and only incidentally about not doing wrong.

I think that in this, too, humor might be helpful. What are we to make of a man who is willing to be tortured and executed for Christ, but can’t bring himself to tell his sins to a priest? What are we to make of a man who is willing to be beaten instead of renounce the name of Christ, but isn’t willing to listen to a few bad hymns in order to eat his body and drink his blood? What are we to make of a man who won’t judge a woman who abandoned her husband and children to take up with her new lover, but who will judge someone for gossiping about that woman?

So in conclusion, that I think that reinforcing the sense of the Church as mediatrix of Christ will be done most effectively by calling on people to be courageous. I don’t think anyone really objects to loving their fellow man in principle, I think that most of the time they’re just too scared.

Though like all things it traces its origin back to having faith—that is, trust—in God. Our fellow men are imperfect, and if we pray with them they may screw up our prayers. If we use the sacraments, we may have to wait or get them before we understand or all manner of imperfections. At the end of the day, like in all things, the only solution is to do our best and trust the rest to God. And in this specific case, if we trust God, what have we to fear from our fellow men?

Over on his blog, Brian Niemeier comments on a video talking about the rise and fall of The Simpsons. This to me is the crux:

…The Simpsons was a reaction against a long-gone age that would have eventually exhausted its fuel supply, anyway.

Matt Groening & co. set out to deconstruct the conservative establishment’s vision of post-Reagan America. Along the way they became the establishment, which is always fatal to subversive projects.

The lesson for writers: undermining traditional culture can be good for a quick buck and fleeting fame.

This stands (somewhat) in contrast to the video which Brian describes, in which (at the end) Super Eyepatch Wolf says:

And that’s what The Simpsons is: one of the purest and most raw expressions of social and political unrest… and despite what it’s become and how it’s all ended, I can’t help be so glad that we got those early seasons. It was a show that shaped a generation and transformed entertainment as we know it.

I think that of the two, Brian is far more correct. And I think that Super Eyepatch Wolf is actually rather dangerously wrong. Satire is a nice vacation from the main work of fiction, but it should never be the main work of fiction. I shudder to think what a generation shaped by satire would be like, though in a sense we’re living it out. It’s the spiritual equivalent of people who grew up eating nothing but frosted donuts: lazy, flabby, and useless, they’re terribly warped versions of what a human being should be.

Actually, rather ironically, The Simpsons later years is described as “Zombie Simpsons,” but this seems largely to be what became of people who grew up on The Simpsons. Unable think or feel anything sincerely, they know nothing but a desire to destroy those who can think. Perhaps it shouldn’t be such a surprise that zombie shows are extremely popular these days; it’s a metaphor for what a generation who grew up on tearing down ideals became. I was recently in a discussion about the live action Beauty and the Beast where someone mentioned that the live action movie would probably have had to be darker for it to be something that a modern writer could write and have it work. I asked, something like this (paraphrased from memory, embellished a bit):

Gaston introduces Belle to heroin and she gets hooked. She falls in love with The Beast who tries to help her kick her addiction but she can’t and eventually goes back to Gaston, who pimps her out to pay for her heroin. She’s eventually killed by a customer and the Beast, learning about this, kills Gaston in a murderous rage, then commits suicide before the police arrive. The last part is witnessed by a pretty young girl who just arrived in the city looking to become an actress, and she asks a man nearby who turns out to be the brother of Gaston what happened, and he charmingly comforts her from the scene and invites her out to coffee. As the movie closes, we get the sense that the story will be played out again, no one having learned anything.

Here was Russell’s response:

https://twitter.com/rnewquist/status/899724125228466176

In a sense he’s right; that’s part of why I like cheerful, adventurous fiction: I’m very familiar with dark. But the thing is, dark is really easy. It’s practically no work at all. Just start telling a story and keep making it go wrong. You could almost train a monkey to do it. Everyplace there is order, break it. Everywhere there is hope, crush it. The only thing approximating creativity in going dark is figuring out how to prolong things before you kill everyone except for the people who most deserve it. Given that most dark works seem to contain plot holes anyway, this is the epitome of easy; it only pretends to be hard because there’s a constant sense of violation of decency that requires a certain amount of willpower (or sheer degeneracy) to continually violate.

This is the problem with growing up on satire; it’s too easy. It trains people to not do the hard work of having a good time.