Hitchens is Not Alive

Rug Burn Junky on 18/12/2011 at 17:53

Quote Posted by Vernon

Strange - he seemed to go pretty quickly. He only announced his sickness this year didn't he? Can cancer really take you that quickly? Or did he hold off on the announcement for a while? Terrifying.

It was actually about a year and a half ago, when he cut short his book tour. So the time since has been this odd sort of denial for his fans, since he kept writing, prodigiously, right until the end. Whenever I saw he had a new column up on Slate, or a new piece in VF, I was pleasantly surprised, but realized everything new was on borrowed time. After a time though, you came to expect them as though nothing were wrong, so you kind of felt like he was going to get through this... til the last (http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/01/hitchens-201201) VF piece this month, really. That's when you started seeing other writers with whom he was friendly start to make their peace publicly.

/edit: My favorite (http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/12/18/simon-schama-on-how-his-friend-christopher-hitchens-said-goodbye.html) eulogy of Hitch so far - all the more meaningful since I am personally acquainted with Simon.

Beleg Cúthalion on 19/12/2011 at 10:49

Quote Posted by jay pettitt

[...]The point I was trying to make (perhaps very clumsily, but current affairsy), is that Christians have a tendency to look upon other Christians with rosy spectacles on and end up turning a blind eye to obviously bad behavior and generally distorting the world view - I wasn't trying to say that Christians are children rapers.

I don't suppose it's even a particularly Christian thing. I'm sure all sorts of people think people of a similar sort are bound to be the right sort - and I'm sure it often goes wrong.

But that is the point. Christians do lie, rape kids and behave like shits on Internet forums. They're not statistically better people. Pretending that Christians don't do that kind of thing doesn't alter the fact that they do.

But, as you said, it's not a particularly Christian thing. It's a human thing and if atheists – who define themselves explicitly by being different from (and better than, since that's the point) believers – do the same thing (which can be seen all along the internet, left aside the IMHO worrying tendencies to actually appreciate "sins" or bad deeds in a the-world-is-bad-so-why-shouldn't-I?-attitude) you cannot nail it down on Christians. The only way you could criticize the religion now is that it didn't manage to fully catch these people and keep them from screwing things up. But how many people support Dawkins despite the criminally short-minded and downright wrong ideas he came up with? How many of them know about it and still take him as a figurehead? About the statistics, I merely wanted to throw in how difficult it could be to judge a situation based on figures, my post should have been written much more open-questions-like.

There is IMHO an interpretation of history much more founded than that "religion made people go to war": Religion tried to hinder them but couldn't overcome man's nature, who – to ease his conscience – declared himself as doing something religious. And nowadays critics lunge at the Crusades or the witch-hunting era as something religious (taking over the views of those who eased their minds with an excuse) – despite tons of "secular" evidence, mostly economy and desperation in these examples, and also intra-religious criticism – and, maybe on top of that, criticise religion (especially Christianity) for acting against man's nature, here meaning to beat the guy who stole your apples. This leads me to the next point:

Quote Posted by Harvester

The first response by some Christians when confronted with other Christians who are acting in a way completely opposite to the teachings of the Bible (and not in debatable things like having a different view on gay marriage or creation/evolution, but in terrible things like, you know, raping children entrusted to your care, which is clearly wrong, both morally and Biblically) is to feel angry and embarrassed, [...] they bury their head in the sand and pretend it doesn't exist. That is not my response, but I do quickly fall into the pit of immediately mentally labeling those people as false Christians and thinking "a true Christian would never do that", in an effort to ease my mind and deal with my anger and embarrassment.

The problem is about representativeness I guess. How many Christians for instance do actually approve things considered bad? How justified is it to take the more excentric phenomena of a culture and declare them the "real" ones just because they do or because it makes it easier for me to classify them? Plus, even if the plurality of phenomena suggests a kind of arbitrariness, you surely can find a few basics in e.g. the early religious texts and decide whether or not later developments depart from this original idea. This might be arbitrary as well, but the whole thing is too complex to arrive at reliable conclusions.

Quote Posted by Kolya

So that's why Hitchens was justified to go this route of simplification. But it will never work, because the largest part of any religion is concerned with active immunisation strategies and have been for thousands of years.

Simplification is never justified, especially when judging about people. However, considering the discussions and apologetics etc. inside religion (or rather church) as immunisation strategies is anachronistic if referring to anything before 300 years ago since there was no atheism threatening the general idea of belief. Nowadays it's a cheap killer-phrase to avoid confronting the actual complexity of how religion developed and worked by declaring it useless from the start – even if believers indeed hide themselves behind tiny little self-made worldviews. But this kind of conclusion has to stand at the end of a thorough research and not at the beginning.

Quote Posted by Kolya

Discussing religious beliefs on their inside (like: If your god is so good how can all these bad things happen?) means to take the hallucinations of a psychotic person seriously and try to prove their incongruity inside the dream.

What struck me most about new atheist media is that usually their strategy is to bombard the audience with unfounded statements. Take Dawkins' God Delusion for instance, choose a page where he's speaking about religion in general and count the times he says something like "it's all illusion" or "Catholics said...but they lied". No arguments, no supporting footnotes, no founded chain of cause and effect, just repeated statements, as if their great number alone would hammer it as a truth into the reader's mind. So, to reply to this on the same level of quality would read like: You have no idea about religion because you cannot have and your brain is probably infested with theories of chaos and that only things which you can touch do exist.

DDL on 19/12/2011 at 11:39

I've always felt that there were perfectly understandable, rational reasons for why something as powerful as religion would arise: when you have a species as "intelligent thought"-driven as ours, cultural evolution happens at a pace that actual evolution cannot ever hope to match. It is subject to essentially the same pressures however, merely on a high-condensed timescale.

So, something that causes increased in-group loyalty, increased out-group hatred, advocates generally sound principles like basic higiene and not raping people (in your in-group at least), will be successful. Add to this the fact that adherence to this is allegedly monitored by a magical sky-monster who sees everything you do, and it's more successful. Add a totally unprovable post-death reward/punishment structure? More successful. Add ecouragement to breed, combined with raising of offspring in the same thought processes: hugely successful.

The last few thousand years have simply been a crucible for forging the most successful cultural idealogies. The only real difference between religion and any other ideology is the presence of the magical sky-monster and the unprovable reward/punishement structures.

And that's fine. I totally understand why religions arose, and what purpose they had in shaping our society and thought processes. They moved from "explaining confusing natural phenomena" and boosting herd-identity, to keeping the masses tame, to providing a mental crutch for those afraid of death, and so on. They're adaptable, as thought processes (that's why even the most devout have to apply caveats to the literalistic interpretations of earlier writings -those were effective texts for their time, but times change).

The point is they're rapidly becoming irrelevant for a large number of people. I personally feel like this should be more or less allowed to happen at a pace dictated by general lack of religious interest, mostly because attempting to force the issue simply leads to increasingly entrenched viewpoints on, in all honesty, both sides. The more we devote time to caring about religion or lack of it, the more time we've wasted debating something that's increasingly obsolete.

Still, there are reasons for supporting the combatative approach adopted by Hitchens and others, such as the horrible, horrible things that have been done in the name of religion, and that are being are done in the name of religion even now.

As he frequently quoted weinberg: "With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."

Which is...to a certain extent, fairly true. I'd qualify religion as being more of a "herd-identity over self-identity" state, here (thus someone 'just doing their job' would fall under a similar remit), so the fault does not lie with religion per se, it lies with the human brain's basic wiring, but religion is simply a honed, optimally-evolved example of the thought processes necessary for exploiting that wiring.

Now, the question is, would any of this improve without religion? Like Beleg says, a lot of this is down to basic human nature. We like to think we're civilised, but it's largely just a thin cultural veneer under which we probably have far more animal than we'd like to admit. Frequently religion acts as an excuse for the horrible horrible things we'd secretly like to do anyway.

Still: without religion, at the very least, we'd lose a mental fallback. No longer could we do horrible things because god demands it, we'd either have to go with "coz my boss told me to", in which case we'd have to confront the fact that we are actually honestly capable of doing horrible things rather than exercise any actual thought and challenge of the status quo, or admit that we are basically capable of horrible things, essentially of our own volition. No excuses, no fallbacks.

Do I think this would eliminate the tendency for humans to do horrible things? Fuck no. Do I think it would reduce the incidence of such things? Tentatively...yes.

So really, I don't think there's any doubt that religion as a whole is going to die out (unless we go totally the other way and turn into a crazy fundamentalist planet), and it's really high time this particular crutch was kicked out from under our species. And while I personally feel that kicking it hard and angrily (as advocated by Dawkins in particular and to a lesser extent Hitchens) is likely to lead to a subset simply clinging on even harder, waaay past rationality, I still find his writings and debates to be enormously entertaining.

OMG OMG RELIGION THREAD aside, I'm less with Hitchens on the politics...Though possibly this is just because I'm generally less-informed on politics.

Beleg Cúthalion on 19/12/2011 at 12:09

Quote Posted by DDL

As he frequently quoted weinberg: "With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."

Nobody seems to pay attention to the other possibility, that religion might turn a reckless scumbag into a caring and more or less decent person. Examples for this are usually brought forth by religious institutions but that's probably the reason why they are dismissed so easily. It cannot be relevant. After all, hey, terrorists, they are much more important. And a negative world view seems more elegant and/or socially-accepted, at least among those who think they have found the great scourge of humanity.

The question of religion's purpose nowadays is a relevant one, but I usually come back to the question: If people didn't manage to behave decently despite they believed in afterlife punishment (to make a rude simplification), how decent are they supposed to behave if they intentionally dismiss outworldly ethical measurement? How could someone have a pessimistic view concerning religion and its effects and then expect an open-minded atheist ideology (after all believing that there is no god is a belief as well until proven) where people live in harmony and peace?

DDL on 19/12/2011 at 12:22

So what you're saying is whether or not it exists, you think we need the idea of a magical sky-monster to keep us in check?

Well, if even the believers are accepting that it's basically just a crutch, then we're getting somewhere.

:angel: (inappropriate smiley alert)

More seriously: nobody is expecting a harmonious and peaceful atheist utopia. Just a more honest one. "There is no god, your mistakes are your own. Deal with it."

On the flipside, everything you achieve in life is yours to be proud of: god had nothing to do with that either. The world doesn't get any less beautiful because there's no god (loving or otherwise). It would certainly get a lot more sensible, though, and might possibly get a little less horrible.

Beleg Cúthalion on 19/12/2011 at 12:33

I think that the question of what comes after religion to preserve humanity is not as easily answered as it is presented. I also think that people in the future will still need more or less worldly guidelines and not just abstract ideas to put this new philosophy into effect... and to avoid sidestepping etc. - simply because people in general won't be clever enough to do this step on their own and as intended. Third, to come back to your first question, I strongly think people need an untouchable reference point in order to establish an ethical system that's more exalted than nature's eat-or-be-eaten. I think (but that's indeed a personal opinion) that e.g. a severe punishment must be avoided as long as possible and not be considered ideal but a compromise to the practical world. I came to this because the already mentioned German atheist foundation includes things like death penalty or penalties in general among its ethical guidelines. But I wonder what happens to the practical aspect of it if already the ideal version includes such things? Anyway, got to go and catch my train...

Kolya on 19/12/2011 at 12:47

Quote Posted by Beleg Cúthalion

However, considering the discussions and apologetics etc. inside religion (or rather church) as immunisation strategies is anachronistic if referring to anything before 300 years ago since there was no atheism threatening the general idea of belief.

Yeah, because NOT believing in any religion was only invented 300 years ago, right?

Quote Posted by Beleg Cúthalion

You got it the wrong way. There is actually no hint that the axioms of your religion were true. Instead there is lots of evidence to the contrary. So asking for proof against your belief, is like asking for proof that your teddy is not alive. Why would anyone care to prove that to you?
It's obvious that isn't true and also that this fact doesn't faze you because you want to believe it.

Quote Posted by Beleg Cúthalion

So, to reply to this on the same level of quality would read like: You have no idea about religion because you cannot have and your brain is probably infested with theories of chaos and that only things which you can touch do exist.

First of all, I don't know any "new atheist media" in whose level of quality you're answering me. Remember I live in Germany. People here, including Christians, just shake their head at this sort of discussions (creationism et al).
Also, just because I don't believe in an organised religion like you do, doesn't mean I had no spiritual life. The way you assert that is pretty vile. I doubt your God would appreciate that.

DDL on 19/12/2011 at 12:54

Nature gets a lot of shit it doesn't deserve: "eat or be eaten" and the "scrabbling for survival by the vigorous fucking over of all those around you" that it implies is far from the norm in nature.

Really there are so many damn ways evolution has produced for species to interact that assuming there is "a natural way" and "a better way" is comically naive at best.

There are better and worse ways of intraspecific interaction, yes, but these also differ from species to species. Referring to the rest of nature for any form of human-specific reference is really fairly idiotic at this point.

But that aside, what we're coming down to here is that you think we're incapable of self-regulating without an arbitrarily invented external reference*. Which does make me wonder if you believe in god at all, or simply think that "the idea of god is necessary". The latter would make a much more interesting field for debate, I think.

*as determined by whom, exactly? Bearing in mind the only real source of human morality is...humans, who would set the properties this external standard should have? How does one come up with a 'perfect being', and who determines the definition of perfect? Maybe we settle for less than perfect (by modern metrics, the christian "loving god" makes a hell of a lot less sense than the old testament "hilarious bastard god", since at least with the OT version the explanation for why horrible things happen is "yeah, well: god does that :erg:"), but then if we settle for less than perfect what's the point of the entire exercise? And again, who determines what properties this "less than perfect but still better than us" being has?

Beleg Cúthalion on 19/12/2011 at 13:22

Quote Posted by Kolya

Yeah, because NOT believing in any religion was only invented 300 years ago, right?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this idea wasn't even notably widespread until 100 years ago. Or are you referring to this little series of questions ascribed to Epicur? Did it notably ever leave academic circles?

Quote Posted by Kolya

Did I mention my personal faith some pages ago? Or do you need it to deconstruct my argument right from the start? I won't do you the favour. Plus, I didn't do it the wrong way. Even if religion was "false" in some way, one cannot write a book consisting merely of accusations without proof. And you cannot prove that god doesn't exist, like it or not, that's why Dawkins for instance invented his probability idea which is based on the ridiculous assumption that god is natural (and then improbable; ridiculous in that respect that I don't know a single religion that considers god natural). This is about dealing with methods and arguments in a clean way and it's clearly not the strength of many loudmouths. However, the most important thing here is: Why does the question of (non)existance of a deity and its arguments allow you to resort to those unfounded cheap accusations? That's not the way to argue properly, even if you think you're right a thousand times. And if we're talking about transcendent stuff then look for a different approach if you cannot tackle it with your "proven or not" schema.

Quote Posted by Kolya

Never did that, don't know where you got that impression from. But Germany, despite having far less problems with religious extremists (I think the terms fundamental or radical are a bit off because they refer to foundation anyone can have), still has a lot of people who throw things together that shouldn't be etc. etc., just read some news commentaries on web.de or gmx.

Sorry DDL, this time I cannot miss my train like an hour ago. The nature image was however simplified; I'm aware that you can find more elaborate natural/worldly justifications for not killing the guy who stole your apples (again, pars pro toto). Maybe later...

jay pettitt on 20/12/2011 at 02:11

Quote Posted by Beleg Cúthalion

...you cannot nail it down on Christians

I can, because that was the thing being discussed at the time. But as I said - credulity, bias and err are not particular to Christianity - we all do it.

But it's not an innately human thing either - to have to behave like what the church does. It's not as though normal civilised society hasn't developed other institutions and a better (in my view) morality based on transparency and accountability and informed by rationality. Shit still happens, but it does usually get dealt with in a more adult and responsible way.