Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Michael Gerson takes note of our heavily-publicized unholy triumvirate, which has been selling books like hotcakes lately (link requires registration):
British author G.K. Chesterton argued that every act of blasphemy is a kind of tribute to God, because it is based on belief. “If anyone doubts this,” he wrote, “let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.”
By the evidence of the New York Times bestseller list, God has recently been bathed in such tributes. An irreverent trinity — Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins — has sold a lot of books accusing theism of fostering hatred, repressing sexuality and mutilating children (Hitchens doesn’t approve of male circumcision). Every miracle is a fraud. Every mystic is a madman. And this atheism is presented as a war of liberation against centuries of spiritual tyranny.
Funny thing about atheists. Having a blog that nobody actually reads, I’m in a position to know certain things because it can be a highly educational experience. What I’ve learned, is this: Atheists are brittle. They make the most irrational and neurotic man-bashing feminist look like a sturdy, flexible oak tree by comparison. TRUST me. I can sit here and type in some nonsense to the effect of “there’s no way childbirth can possibly hurt as much as a kick in the nuts,” and I’ll never hear a peep about it. Say that out loud on a crowded city bus, next to a chubby goth chick with eyebrow piercings and a whale tail…you’ll probably hear a “peep.”
But if I type in “the trouble with those atheists, is they don’t know the difference between right and wrong” — my mailbox is full within a day or two.
See, it isn’t just that atheists must always get the last word, even on some blog nobody ever reads…although that is true. No, the situation is that atheists are “on patrol.” They look for stuff like this. At least that’s been my experience. Let it never be said that you need God to construct a priesthood, for they surely have one, and the priesthood has commanded them to jump on this stuff. To protest, night and day, that atheists have just as much a moral code as anybody else. They do! They do! They do!
They’ve sailed straight past the Shakespearean buoy at which too much has been protested. They’re past that point…and gaining speed.
Case in point, Hitchens waited only hours to — yeah, you got it. Make sure he got in the last word about morality. Well, I can be Johnny-on-the-spot picking things up, too. So quote I shall. And, since he’s requesting me to do so, I’ll also reply.
It’s uncommonly generous of Michael Gerson to refer to me as “intellectually courageous and unfailingly kind”…However, it is his own supposedly kindly religion that prevents him from seeing how insulting is the latent suggestion of his position: the appalling insinuation that I would not know right from wrong if I was not supernaturally guided by a celestial dictatorship, which could read and condemn my thoughts and which could also consign me to eternal worshipful bliss (a somewhat hellish idea) or to an actual hell.
:
Here is my challenge. Let Gerson name one ethical statement made, or one ethical action performed, by a believer that could not have been uttered or done by a nonbeliever. And here is my second challenge. Can any reader of this column think of a wicked statement made, or an evil action performed, precisely because of religious faith? The second question is easy to answer, is it not? The first — I have been asking it for some time — awaits a convincing reply.
Hitch, I’ll field that one. But I’m pretty far from an authority on history, philosophy, theology or anthropology. I know my answer satisfies your criteria, so there must have been some sleight-of-hand going on here if your challenge has really survived “some time” without being met. The answer is pretty obvious.
A believer can define and promulgate a moral code without imposing his personal system of beliefs on his peers. Atheists are incapable of doing this, and it is impossible to construct a free society without doing this.
Let’s take an example, Hitch. You and I live in a wild frontier, in which there is no society, free or otherwise. There are no laws. We come across a really big man kicking the crap out of an old lady who is rolling around helplessly on the ground. You and I agree on a great deal in the Iraq issue, and so we probably agree it is wrong for the man to kick the old lady. We don’t need laws to tell us this is wrong, it simply is; you know it, and I know it. It is so wrong that, having an opportunity to stop it, should we fail to do so, we’ll be accessories to the crime. The crime that isn’t actually a crime, since the land is lawless.
But my point isn’t that there are merits to kicking little old ladies. My point is — this wrongness, this “ought not be done”-ness, is a matter of opinion. You and I share the opinion, true. But it’s still opinion. In fact, searching for someone who would contest it, we probably need look no further than the guy doing the kicking. We are going to stop him — the question is, by what authority do we do this?
As a believer, I can answer this. I take it as simply an article of faith, that we all were put here by someone or something more important than ourselves. I can’t prove it; I’ve simply made a personal decision that this is the case, and I only have so much to say to someone who wishes to assert the opposite. Contrary to popular belief, that’s a valid tactic of limited debate. It’s right in our Declaration of Independence, in a passage I’m positive has been paraded under your skeptical eyes many times before: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” [emphasis mine] Holding truths to be self-evident. That’s quite alright, you know…as long as there are no empirically-observed facts directly contradicting these truths you hold to be self-evident.
Atheists like yourself do that all the time. It’s the very essence of atheism. “Can’t prove there’s a God, can’t prove there isn’t one, so it’s up to my personal preferences, and my personal preference is that there is none.” You could be right, no proof existing to the contrary…so you simply decide that you are.
So I do that. I say, we were put here…by a Higher Power who watches over us, expecting us to do things that keep the whole experiment from collapsing into a jumbled heap of silliness and futility. You say — we weren’t put here, which must mean we grew here. Nobody watching us. All our zoological features, we acquired through a prolonged process of natural selection and survival of the fittest.
The problem that comes up, is this: The guy kicking the old woman, is more “fit” than the old woman. In joining me as I stop him from kicking her, you are therefore interfering with an atrocity that, from your perspective, is not an atrocity at all. Quite to the contrary: It is the very building block of the world and the creatures in it — as you see it. It is far more innocent than a lioness chasing down a gazelle, and stripping the flesh from his ribs while he’s still alive. At least, that’s my idea. It could be argued that I’m wrong…the lioness is feeding her cubs, the brute kicking the woman is in it — well, just for kicks.
And so it is “wrong”…
…but in the mind of whom? This stuff is all negotiable. Who gets the deciding vote?
Well, there’s just no getting around this point. You have manufactured a moral absolute where one previously did not exist. Your explanation for how we got here, has to be painstakingly erected without any regard for any moral code at all other than “might makes right” — a dictum you are about to violate, by helping me to thwart the will of the mighty.
You may say “there was no law that said this was wrong a minute ago, but Morgan Freeberg and I are about to make one because there are two of us and one of him.” You would be using democracy, then, to declare us correct and derive the moral authority needed to stop the brute from kicking the old woman. Fair enough. But that’s still imposing our ethics on someone else who doesn’t subscribe to them. We’re just using votes instead of force. The goal is the same.
At this point, you’re out of options. You can walk on without interfering; you can impose your beliefs through violence; you can impose them through a ballot box. There is no fourth option.
But I can do something you can’t. I can say — in the classic spirit of 1776 — I hold the truth to be self-evident that we are all endowed by our Creator with a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Because if I’m the Creator, logically, it would be awfully silly of me to create living things like these and not so endow them, right? That would be…constructing an ant farm. An ant farm with carnivorous ants.
I’m holding the truth to be self-evident that we were put here, and we weren’t put here to just run around and bump into each other. There is a certain logic to this. Homo Sapiens is a relatively young species, and there have been other things that can run around and bump into each other, long before we got here. Salmon being put here to feed bears, I can see; it’s ridiculous to think little old ladies were put here so ruffians can knock them down and kick them.
So, in harmony with the moral sensibilities of my “sky fairy” as you atheists sometimes like to call Him — His system of values, which He logically must have, and not yours or mine — we stop the ruffian. We save the little old lady. We will probably go pretty far in this. We will probably take the extraordinary step of saying “If we are all meant to be free, this guy must be the exception, since while he has freedom, others do not.” And we deprive him of what we contend the Creator intended for the species as a whole. But unlike you, once that’s done, I can cease and desist from imposing my own personal system of beliefs in other situations…since, unlike you, I never got started in that.
The following day, for example, I meet the guy who invented “Shopper in Training” grocery carts. I let him live. If I were in the habit of carrying out my personal sense of ethics wherever I could, this would not be the case.
I trust this answers your challenge. A believer can stand up for what is ethical, according to a system of beliefs that was not cooked up by him personally. I said you can’t construct a free society without this. The operative word is “free.” You can construct societies all day and night, allowing man & man alone to run around declaring this thing to be ethical, and that thing to be not. But the question you run into, is — which man?
And so, as a consequence of man intruding into a domain that is not his, those societies never end up free. Even if they have something to do with democracy. Because then, as questions arise that are much more complicated than “is it alright to kick old women in the gut,” what’s “right” and what’s “wrong” ends up being defined according to who stands to profit & who stands to suffer, according to tomorrow’s definition of right and wrong.
Freedom ends up in a healthier state if we just assume we were put here, and we’re supposed to be better than a pack of wild dogs. It’s an unprovable axiom. But we end up being better people, and freer people, if we just assume it to be true.
And that’s why the founders of my nation, they day they extracted themselves from yours, made it their first order of business to assume exactly that.
You’re welcome.
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No, the situation is that atheists are “on patrol.”
They really are…I just finished sampling the comments to Hitch’s article — 22 pages worth, and more being posted at an astounding rate of speed — and the atheists outnumber the believers by about five-to-one (my best guess). One of the more interesting things I got out of the comments I actually read were the number of well-reasoned, cool, and logical sorts of arguments advanced by the atheists. There was a dearth of “nah-nah-nah… I hate your Imaginary Friend” type of arguments, although there were some. I need to emphasize I didn’t read ALL the comments, so there may have been an idiot posting I missed.
Although I don’t consider myself an atheist, I’m not a card-carrying member of any religion. After living for extended periods of time in countries without a Judeo-Christian heritage or population majority (Japan and Turkey, specifically), I’m struck by the fact that good people are pretty much the same the world over. I believe in a Creator, I’m just unsure of what His/Her name is.
Just as an aside…my USAF dog tags identify me as “Buddhist.” I had to choose a religion — “no preference” wasn’t an option.
- Buck | 07/14/2007 @ 12:02Morgan, stop hating. It only damages any point you try to make. Furthermore, :
“A believer can define and promulgate a moral code without imposing his personal system of beliefs on his peers. Atheists are incapable of doing this, and it is impossible to construct a free society without doing this.”
is incorrect. All people impose their personal systems whether they “believe” in something or not. Faith has nothing to do with it.
- dcshiderly | 07/15/2007 @ 03:05Hating? There’s nothing hateful about it, it’s simply a fact. It’s also a response to a challenge Hitchens himself extended, and he didn’t just extend it to Gerson. When the opposition answers challenges, and you call it “hate,” that has a damaging effect on your own argument.
Here’s what you missed, and it’s probably because I wrote in my familiar bloated style: There’s a distinction to be made between a rule you think is good for society, and a rule you would impose if you were in charge of everything. It has to do with embodying a value, and upholding a value — one’s internal, one’s external. The Shopper In Training grocery cart guy is a great example. If I were in charge, that guy would be flayed alive. But society is probably better off if we just let him go about his business. So out of old-fashioned humility, if I really DID run everything, I’d let him go about his business. Atheists can’t draw that distinction. It’s not anecdotal, it’s simply the way things have to work.
Okay, I admit. Maybe there’s some “hating” going on toward the Shopper in Training grocery cart guy. 🙂
Anecdotally, though, I don’t remember anyone proclaiming to be an atheist, and saying “If I ran things, we’d do B, but we’re better off doing A.” Atheism, from what I’ve seen, is a carefully-constructed dedicated opposition to that: I just want things to be done MY WAY. When issues become more complicated than a big muscle-guy kicking an old lady in the ribs…especially moral issues, you need more flexibility than that for people to live together in an orderly society. A great example is, if a convicted killer promises he’ll kill again, should we execute him? That’s when you have to distinguish between a rule you want, and a rule you think people were “built” to have. Because it’s impossible for everyone to have everything done their way.
Buck, Hitchens affords me a great opportunity to see both sides of things, since as I’ve said I agree with him lock-step on the coalition’s justification for invading Iraq. Relative to my perspective, therefore, he’s a formidable thinker who gets things right some of the time. And I think it’s interesting: On the Iraq question, on which Hitchens and I are badly, badly outnumbered, and becoming more outnumbered with each passing day — I see no need, and feel absolutely no compulsion, to log onto the Washington Post website, find an article of Hitchens supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and jot down some post talking up what a towering genius he is, and what doddering idiots the anti-war people are, with phony superlatives about their inability to understand words with more than eight letters or three syllables. The atheists who do this in the comments section of which you speak, with regard to believers, are clearly doing it more for the purpose of showing off for each other, than for the purpose of noodling anything out. What is this social phenomenon all about?
By way of disclosure and fair-play, I would have to comment that religious people also lose a lot of their credibility when they engage in things that are supposed to be about divining the purpose of Creation, but are really just social exercises. I’m not a church-guy by any means. I’ve attended services three times in the last fifteen years, twice for special occasions during a trips to see relatives, and once as a promise to my mother when she was dying. You know what I’ve had to say about people thinking in groups. I agree with the atheists on that one point. It’s a questionable habit to resolve critical questions, such as the purpose for one’s own existence, in a group environment, and over a long period of time probably a very bad idea.
- mkfreeberg | 07/15/2007 @ 11:52If I were in charge, that guy would be flayed alive. But society is probably better off if we just let him go about his business.
The problem I have with this is that the only choice are the two extremes. Either shoot the perpetrator in the head, or let him get away with everything. It doesn’t have to be this way. If everyone in line is in agreement that the guy’s being a jerk, tell him! The reason these people continue to act like jackasses is because nobody tells them they’re being jackasses. I stopped taking that kind of crap from people by letting them know it’s not acceptable behavior. If you don’t tell the turkeys they’re turkeys, how will they ever learn? It’s painful to hear criticism of one’s actions, and an annoyance to those providing the input, but that’s just too bad.
We’ve come to the point in our society such that even the anti-PC crowd still kowtows to some of the behaviors they purport to dislike, like letting people slide when they suck in public. This used to serve as a check against undesired behavior, but now we don’t want to hurt other’s feelings so much that we just suck it up and move on, never mind that eventually this becomes far more costly to the society because everyone has terrible behavior in public, and those of us that maintained a sense of pride and integrity stand around commenting on the degraded state of the civilization, an irony when we’re responsible for letting it get to that point.
- dcshiderly | 07/15/2007 @ 18:13Well, I don’t disagree with a single word of that. Except my point was a distinction between subject and objective. In my subjective viewpoint, the guy has commited a crime by inventing those forsaken child-sized grocery carts, whereas in an objective viewpoint, all he did was invent something.
Our secularists, I’ve noticed, are so incredibly free-and-easy with saying things should be done a certain way. It seems like an innocent opinion, until you remember that since they don’t believe in a Higher Power, their only possible moral compass is their own individual catalog of prejudices. It’s frightening when you think of it. Supposedly, they’re ready to make all the compromises necessary to create law in a democratic republic…but there’s no reason, really, to think they are. Just their insistence that they can do every moral thing monotheistic believers can do. And their pattern of discussing only one moral issue at a time.
In my experience, when you take all the moral issues as a whole, you’ll see our secularists want every single one decided their way. And they aren’t rational about it at all. For example, we can survive with “IN GOD WE TRUST” on our money just fine & dandy; our First Amendment still has meaning, with that phrase stamped there; but many among them act as if the republic cannot endure another day until the phrase is removed, and Moses is toppled from the Supreme Court building. (He is there, btw). The leftists among them, meanwhile, though they’re reluctant to admit it — they have forgotten about September 11. Every little thing you propose to do as a response to it, from military intervention to simply lighting candles every 9/11, to watching film footage of people leaping out of the windows of a burning building…they’ve got an objection to all of it. They want to live in a September Ten world.
What offense does the public commit, if we don’t do things the way they want? They don’t have an answer to that one. We just should, and that’s all. What offense are we committing if we don’t do things the way the “believers” want them done? That inspires an airtight answer: They hypothesize that an intelligence put us here, with a purpose to our existence, and if we veer from that moral code we are defeating that purpose and ultimately ourselves. That is really the crux of my response to Hitchens’ challenge.
On your points, my Dad has always said something that covers this nicely. It seems to me it’s a quote he plagiarized from somebody, and Google has failed to reveal the original source. It goes like this: “In a society where anything goes, ultimately everything does.”
- mkfreeberg | 07/15/2007 @ 21:05I have a friend who, given about 5 minutes, could probably come up with a torrent of hilariously blasphemous statements about Thor. Thing is, they wouldn’t be blasphemous to him or us, just to Thorists.
I hope that dcshiderly’s “stop hating” comment was tounge in cheek. I’d bet my last two nickels that anyone who knows Morgan would not classify him as a “hater”. There are things he dislikes, and that includes the behavior and thought processes of certain people or groups of people. But come on. Who’s gonna throw the first stone on that one?
“Hate” is the equivalent of “ungood” in the Progressive Left’s Ingsoc. Any judgement of any group’s general behavior or thought process (unless that group is some Judeo-Christian subgroup, it seems) is called “Hate”, and therefore can be dismissed. Nay, derided. End of discussion.
Thing I Know #7 says: Tolerance and acceptance are not synonymous.
I can tolerate behavior I disapprove of, but that doesn’t mean I have to accept it as something I approve of. It just means I won’t try to force anyone to change their behavior, or get someone else to do it for me — as long as it doesn’t directly interfere with my persuit of Happiness, or Life, or Liberty. Saying what I think about it doesn’t constitute hate. The first amendment says I get to do that. The minute it becomes a crime for me to do that is the minute the First Amendment becomes meaningless.
Morgan, you’ve once again taken something I think but haven’t taken the time to put into a concise statement — and done just that.
And I, like you, go to church only when some social function in honor of someone I love and respect such as a wedding or a funeral requires it. I think Judeo-Christianity has gotten an extremely bad rap. It’s done far more good than bad, only the good things it’s done we all just take for granted and don’t notice them.
Now I think that there are Athiests — and by that I mean people who actively believe there isn’t a higher power – that don’t believe they need to impose this belief and its corolaries on others. You rarely hear from these people for that very reason. I could be wrong but I believe the reason why it’s so easy to get the impression — and we both get the impression — that they all do want to impose their beliefs on everyone else is because they are the only ones we hear from. And we hear from them often and loudly.
Personally — do I believe there’s a white-haired guy in robes running the show? No, I don’t. I also don’t believe there isn’t. There might be. Ergo, I’m not an Athiest. I’d probably be classified as agnostic by most.
I could be wrong about the existence of a group of Athiests who don’t feel the need to impose their belief system on everyone else. Maybe the ones I imagine exist are really agnostic.
The most important point to take from your post, though, is that Atheism isn’t a lack of belief as many think it is. It is a belief (positive) that there isn’t. It’s not a non-religion, it is a religion like any other belief system.
- philmon | 07/16/2007 @ 12:48Well that’s all very true, and thanks for the defense. But dcshiderly has commented on these pages before and I think it’s safe to say s/he’s not part of the “Progressive Left,” in fact, very far from it. And yeah, I think the “hate” thing was tongue-in-cheek.
- mkfreeberg | 07/16/2007 @ 13:23I kind of got that impression, too. I suspected it might be true, which is why I worded it that way 😉
- philmon | 07/16/2007 @ 13:44