If love is a battlefield...

If love is a battlefield and happiness is a warm gun, then hate is a strawberry field and sadness is a white flag waving in the wind.

Comment on the Death of Christopher Hitchens

I have never understood my compatriots of the Atheist nation who railed so fiercely against Hitchens that they could not recognize his talents as a writer and debater for the cause of Atheism. His politics were a monstrosity, surely few would contest this, but these are separate from his extraordinary and exemplary contributions to the Atheist agenda. If anything we needed someone like him, who could potentially bridge the gap to Right Wing America and show them you can still be a war mongering, free market capitalist stooge without God. This is good when you consider the amount of them which I imagine would love to see us all in gulags. I was just reading through comments on various obituaries and couldn't help but find it striking how many people, Atheists among them, were dismissive of him even in death. We are unlikely to find someone with his unique perspective on the world, with the same strength of will and an equally well equipped intellect in our lifetime and there's something to be said for this sort of loss.

One other thing to be said for Hitchens is that the man was never mediocre. He was polarizing. You loved him or you hated him. You championed his words or you rejected them with disgust. You were never unsure of where you stood with this giant, even having never met him personally I could tell you without doubt where we would agree and disagree. When he rose he did so to new heights and when he failed, he failed spectacularly. Few men can boast that they lived a life where there was rarely a dull moment and which lacked any trace of mundanity; Christopher Hitchens was such a man.

On Judgments and Cultural Relativity

   People around the interweb keep saying it's wrong to judge the beliefs of others. This is not true. There are accurate portrayals of reality and there are inaccurate portrayals of reality. So long as one's judgments are based on logic and willing to change based upon the presentation of new evidence, there is never a problem with making judgments. Another thing people do everyday is to enforce these judgments when they're about to do other people harm.  The government constantly intercedes on the behalf of victims of other people's judgments that have been taken too far.  We do it every day and it's how we've survived for so long as we have.  If we didn't make judgments, we wouldn't have even made it to the monkey portion of evolution, as even they make judgments.

Family Guy's "Evil Monkey", casting a judgment.

   This being said there is a huge difference between judging whether or not someone's belief or opinion is of sound logic and bigotry. I think people far too often confuse the two. It could be said that judgment is deciding whether or not a notion is stupid or useful, etc., based on whether or not it makes sense; bigotry is deciding whether or not a person is stupid or useful, etc., based on their label as a person (black, white, Atheist, Christian, Muslim, Rich, Poor, Tall, Short, American, Russian, Bro, Yuppie, Goth, etc.). And there is such a thing as unsound judgment which is not logical, but even this is not necessarily the same as bigotry.


   Far more than I witness bigotry in religious discussion, I witness overly touchy religious people who go out of their way to disagree with you and then get defensive when you start dissecting their arguments and asking them to justify their positions, which they claim is unfair. They say they don't have to justify their position. And they're right, they don't have to, but in return they also cannot have any logical expectation of respect from me, as they have not given me enough to at least answer my line of questioning on their point of view. The bottom line is, if you don't even try to defend your position after making an assertion you don't get to whine about being persecuted.


Cultural relativists are the sort of people perpetuating the myth that judgments should not be made.  Earlier tonight one of them saw this aphorism and fired back with this delightful tidbit:
   
   "I understand your point, but reality isn't the same for every individual. For people who take a significant amount of comfort in a belief in God, God exists to them on a meaningful (but not material) level. Denying that is like denying that another person feels emotions like sadness or comfort. Just because something doesn't exist in your reality, that doesn't mean it doesn't appreciably impact someone else's life. 

A Computer Generated Rendering of Bertrand's Teapot

   If someone believed in Russel's teapot so firmly that it actually impacted his view of astronomy, it is real to him, even if it makes no rational sense to me. If I believed in fairies strongly enough that it affects the way I garden or decorate, they'd be real to me. Irrational beliefs can still have a significant impact on a person's life. Who are you (or anyone else) to try to alter that?"

   Whaaa? That's not what I'm saying. What I am saying is that we all still reserve the right to make judgments about the strength of a person's logic, whether we ever decide to share it with them or not. Their right to their belief doesn't change this. And no one is saying they have to defend their belief, I'm simply saying they can't come on other people's facebook walls, blogs, network t.v. talk shows, etc., proceed to disagree, and then get offended when their beliefs get challenged, and I think most people would agree that this isn't unreasonable. I also firmly believe we all have the human right to forcibly alter any belief of any person when it starts to do more than "appreciably impact" someone other than theirself in a negative way. For example, does a person still have a right to their beliefs if their child dies as a result of denying them medical care because they "believed" in their holistic medicine over scientifically proven modern medicine? I should think not. That's where I draw the line, and thankfully the government sides with me. They charge those parents with homicide. We have to face facts that there are universal parallels within all of our perspectives on reality, and whether you believe these truths to be true (for example, getting a tetanus shot upon cutting yourself with a rusty blade is a universally good idea no matter what one believes, as we all have a universal biological make up that doesn't change even if a person might be ignorant or oblivious of the fact, and even if that belief is "meaningful" to them) or not, meaningful or not, there is only one version of reality, and despite what our individual perspectives might be reality does not bend, change, or fold to cater to these.

A fun slogan for cultural relativists!

   It's exactly this sort of cultural relativity that gets people killed, and is why I also felt inclined to say something about this person's particular comment. It's this idea that we should respect a person's beliefs even when they're doing something dangerous, that comes along with cultural relativity, that I am especially attacking.I let someone, who was very much a cultural relativist, talk me into drinking the kool-aid of cultural relativism one time. And when it really counted, when I could have perhaps stopped someone from being reckless, I didn't. Why? Because rather than valuing their humanity and respecting them as a person who has value and who is capable of being fallible, I respected their, supposedly inalienable, right to their belief. They're dead now. They left behind a wife and 3 young daughters. The youngest one is 5 now. It's a dangerous game to value pride and respect of concepts over logic and reason and people. I often ask myself, in retrospect, what would have been more respectful, standing up and telling them what I thought the flaw in their logic was, or letting their belief "appreciably impact" them into cement at 120 miles an hour.  The point I'm making here is that cultural relativism isn't just a naive notion, it has the potential to be, and is at times, incredibly destructive, as it breeds apathy for the potentially harmful, and at times, incredibly destructive beliefs of others.

And to this point here, someone else disagreed earlier stating,

   
   "Individualism inherently has a breaking point to which anyone's comfort level is crossed. And since not everyone subscribes as strictly to logic as others, you will always be faced with argument of any kind, in any given society. Difference of opinion, and conviction in one's belief is what gives rise to the offense one takes when challenged or presented with any concept. However, do not be so naive to think that you can successfully alter someone's belief or deny them respect if their rationale does not follow the same standard as your own; it is counterproductive to gaining a higher-level understanding of the world we live in. Not everybody wants to be changed, nor challenged, and some do. But all are equally deserving of respect, at the very least, as equal human beings."

   I don't disagree with people's beliefs being deserving of respect, I only argue that I lose all respect for any belief that endangers the lives of others. At this point there cannot be respect for it would not be mutual. Why should I respect a belief that does not respect a certain value of human life?  


In closing, and as a friend of mine who is a Psychology of Religion professor would say, "You just got truth bombed!"

So Apparently, I Inspired A Poem.

Taking a break from the usual format and purpose of this blog, I found out recently that I inspired someone to write a poem based on my musings about American society.  The poem can be found here:
http://poetrydiaries.com/2011/04/25/the-white-picket-fence/

The bit that inspired it was on my Facebook page.  I was feeling depressed and pissy, and as usual when I get this way I can't seem to stop myself from ranting.  Nobody's perfect I guess, heh.  Anyhow, here's the word vomit that caused this poem:

Facebook Status: Great, I get to start another week that's going to be pretty much the same as the last week was and the week before that as well. This is all so pointless. I work to amass and what I amass I have to work to sustain. It's such a vicious cycle. No new insight is obtained. No meaning or purpose is derived. There is no catharsis to be found and no end in sight.


Follow Up Comment: There is only the faint realization of these few things and the feeling that everything has gone horribly, terribly wrong.

My late night, incoherent rage faces.

Follow Up Comment: And I'll state this much as well, for the record, I can't keep on like this forever. This has to have an ending sometime. I need a way out. Maybe this form and fashion of living is good enough for some people, but I really don't know how much longer I can degrade myself like this. And it is degrading, you know. Daily answering to someone who's less intelligent than yourself and having your livelihood in their hands. Constantly being looked down upon for wanting evidence rather than blindly believing in whatever is fashionable at the time. Occasionally watching my ex-girlfriend prance about with my ex-friend and next door neighbor. Perpetually trading 1/3 of my life in exchange for pieces of paper that tell me exactly what it is I'm worth. And there is nothing to be done about any of it. Nothing that can be done about any of it. A worse alternative isn't a choice, it's just negative reinforcement, like a cattle prod, keeping me in check everyday, making sure I don't step too far out of bounds. I'm sick of it, this whole system is repugnant. I can smell the stench of apathy all around me, and hear the sound of cheerful acceptance and happy embracement of a system that asks you to take a little so they can have all of you, all that you are and all that you ever would be, molded in their image, but like a bad copy most of us just don't quite make the grade or fit just right into their mold. And for what? For what? Seriously, what is it all for at the end of the day? When we look back at it all, why did any of us ever bother getting out of bed? To appease a God? Our conscience from a barrage of perpetual guilt tripping telling us we need to "earn" things so we can "deserve" what we have? I hope I'm not the only one who see's the absurdity of that notion. If I am, that's okay, but we are truly cursed if that is true, doomed to repeat the same tired mistakes again and again and again, and we will only wind up damned this way. People in this society, we tend to make our own hells.


Post Script: This whole bit of trashy, inarticulate bullshittery reminds me of the ending of one of my favorite movies actually:

On America

   I am beginning to realize just how fortunate I am to live in America. If I lived somewhere else, where healthcare isn't a privilege but a right, where zealotry and proselytization is far less and where pacificity and education is far greater... well, I very well may have found myself being quite well adjusted to it and I may have been unable to see those aspects they share in kind with this hemorrhoid of the earth.


   Until you're at the apex of delusion, selfishness, greed, waste, carelessness, and general backwards thinking, you really can't take in the full view in all it's horror and awe. Being only half way up just isn't the same thing. Worse than a country where the people and the government are obviously dangerous with vivid displays of violence and overt, campy propaganda is a country where they subtly harm you a little bit every day, chipping away at you with concepts and traditions that devalue you and trap you, creating, in a sense, a sort of quiet desperation in all who live there, all the while trying to convince you that what they're doing to you, and those around you, and to themselves even... is really for the best. 

"You may call me a dreamer, but I'm not the only one."

   And why is the latter worse? Because, it's much easier to define the former and in turn fight against it, the same cannot be said for the latter which, for many people, is ineffable and, indeed, for good reason. The last thing that people in power in a place like this really want is for you to be able to express this notion articulately, with passion and fierceness. And even if you, singularly, can express it, they certainly don't want you to be able to find like minded individuals within the area around you with whom you could discuss the matter without the whole conversation collapsing and falling apart because these people have also overcome that notion which states that, "this place and it's ways, flawed though they might be, are still better than any alternative". No, such a thing would simply not do. So give me some shit hole in Africa any day, give me North Korea, give me the places with the most obvious problems, because at least there I might be able to rouse people to the pursuit of true liberty and real freedom, because at least there people can admit things have gotten as bad as they actually have.

On Monsters

What they do to us in this society is monstrous and, in turn, they have created monsters. Congratulations, we have reaped precisely what we have sown.

On Utopias

Courtesy of The Venus Project

Just as any technology that is sufficiently enough advanced will be indistinguishable from magic, it is my firm belief that any society that is sufficiently enough advanced will be indistinguishable from a Utopia. But just as in the former, the effect experienced in the latter is not real and simply denotes a lack of understanding on the matter. A sufficiently advanced society is not a Utopia, it's simply much better than what we have now to an extent that is incomprehensible to a people living in such a base society and in times of such scarcity.  Just as we do not let the perception of magic and it's connotations stop us in the pursuit of better technology, we also should not let the perception of a Utopia and it's connotations stop us in the pursuit of a better way of life for all.