Biking is something else I both love and hate. It takes a lot of effort but does provide good exercise and most days over an hour to listen to a good book or podcast. I especially like having ridden.
Here’s my bike, a Rockhopper by Specialized. I purchased it November 2021 from Venture Out in Guntersville; Mike is top notch! So is the bike, and the ‘old’ man seat I salvaged from an old Walmart bike.
Here’s what I’m listening to: The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams
Amazon abstract:
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “Delightful . . . [a] captivating and slyly subversive fictional paean to the real women whose work on the Oxford English Dictionary went largely unheralded.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A marvelous fiction about the power of language to elevate or repress.”—Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of People of the Book
Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning that the word means “slave girl,” begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.
As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.
Set during the height of the women’s suffrage movement and with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. Inspired by actual events, author Pip Williams has delved into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell this highly original story. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.
I encourage you to read these articles (and watch the videos) to gain understanding and perspective concerning the historical federal case of United States of America vs. Donald J. Trump.
#1 On Willful Disbelief: Can we control our thought? Can we tell what we are going to think tomorrow? Can we stop thinking? Is belief the result of that which to us is evidence, or is it a product of the will? Can the scales in which reason weighs evidence be turned by the will? Why then should evidence be weighed? If it all depends on the will, what is evidence? Is there any opportunity of being dishonest in the formation of an opinion? Must not the man who forms the opinion know what it is? He cannot knowingly cheat himself. He cannot be deceived with dice that he loads. He cannot play unfairly at solitaire without knowing that he has lost the game. He cannot knowingly weigh with false scales and believe in the correctness of the result.
The Bible quotes Jesus with having said, “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.” The Christians say that it is the duty of every person to read, to understand, and to believe this revelation – that a man should use his reason; but if he honestly concludes that the Bible is not a revelation from God, and dies with that conclusion in his mind, he will be tormented forever. They say,” Read,” and then add: “Believe, or be damned.” Suppose then I read this Bible honestly, fairly, and when I get through I am compelled to say, “The book is not true.” If this is the honest result, if the book and my brain are both the work of the same Infinite God, whose fault is it that the book and the brain do not agree? Either God should have written a book to fit my brain, or should have made my brain to fit his book. The brain thinks without asking our consent; we believe, or disbelieve, without an effort of the will. Belief is a result. It is the effect of evidence upon the mind. The scales turn in spite of him who watches. There is no opportunity of being honest or dishonest in the formation of an opinion. The conclusion is entirely independent of desire. We must believe, or we must doubt, in spite of what we wish. –From Col. Ingersoll to Mr. Gladstone
#2 On A Designer In Need Of Design: The idea that a design must have a beginning and that a designer need not, is a simple expression of human ignorance. We find a watch, and we say: “So curious and wonderful a thing must have had a maker.” We find the watch-maker, and we say: “So curious and wonderful a thing as man must have had a maker.”
We find God, and we then say: “He is so wonderful that he must not have had a maker.” In other words, all things a little wonderful must have been created, but it is possible for something to be so wonderful that it always existed. One would suppose that just as the wonder increased the necessity for a creator increased, because it is the wonder of the thing that suggests the idea of creation. Is it possible that a designer exists from all eternity without design? Was there no design in having an infinite designer? For me, it is hard to see the plan or design in earthquakes and pestilences. It is somewhat difficult to discern the design or the benevolence in so making the world that billions of animals live only on the agonies of others. The justice of God is not visible to me in the history of this world. When I think of the suffering and death, of the poverty and crime, of the cruelty and malice, of the heartlessness of this “design” and “plan,” where beak and claw and tooth tear and rend the quivering flesh of weakness and despair, I cannot convince myself that it is the result of infinite wisdom, benevolence, and justice. –From Ingersoll vs Black, A former Chief Justice of US.
“The victim shows us something about our own lives: we see that we too are vulnerable to misfortune, that we are not any different from the people whose fate we are watching…”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“Of all the parts of your body, be most vigilant over your index finger,” Joseph Brodsky proclaimed in the greatest commencement address of all time, “for … a pointed finger is a victim’s logo.” But while there is tremendous truth in the poet’s words, as is often the case with grandiose proclamations, it is only a partial truth beneath which lies a far more nuanced reality.
A generation after the great composer Leonard Bernstein defined democracy as “the difficult, slow method in which the dignity of A is acknowledged by B, without impairing the dignity of C,” Nussbaum turns an eye to classical Greek philosophy and tragedy to examine the mediating role of dignity in the question of agency and victimhood in a just society. She writes:
Compassion requires the judgment that there are serious bad things that happen to others through no fault of their own. In its classic tragic form, it imagines that a person possessed of basic human dignity has been injured by life on a grand scale. So it adopts a thoroughly anti-Stoic picture of the world, according to which human beings are both dignified and needy, and in which dignity and neediness interact in complex ways… The basic worth of a human being remains, even when the world has done its worst. But this does not mean that the human being has not been profoundly damaged, both outwardly and inwardly.
The society that incorporates the perspective of tragic compassion into its basic design thus begins with a general insight: people are dignified agents, but they are also, frequently, victims. Agency and victimhood are not incompatible: indeed, only the capacity for agency makes victimhood tragic. In American society today, by contrast, we often hear that we have a stark and binary choice, between regarding people as agents and regarding them as victims. We encounter this contrast when social welfare programs are debated: it is said that to give people various forms of social support is to treat them as victims of life’s ills, rather than to respect them as agents, capable of working to better their own lot.
Art by Shaun Tan for a special edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales
Writing a decade and a half before today’s crescendoing debates about the societal complexities surrounding rape and the criminal justice system, Nussbaum critiques how this “stark and binary choice” between agency and victimhood is keeping us from establishing a foundation of basic human dignity upon which to build our society:
We find the same contrast in recent feminist debates, where we are told that respecting women as agents is incompatible with a strong concern to protect them from rape, sexual harassment, and other forms of unequal treatment. To protect women is to presume that they can’t fight on their own against this ill treatment; this, in turn, is to treat them like mere victims and to undermine their dignity.
[…]
We are offered the same contrast, again, in debates about criminal sentencing, where we are urged to think that any sympathy shown to a criminal defendant on account of a deprived social background or other misfortune such as child sexual abuse is, once again, a denial of the defendant’s human dignity. Justice Thomas, for example, went so far as to say, in a 1994 speech, that when black people and poor people are shown sympathy for their background when they commit crimes, they are being treated like children, “or even worse, treated like animals without a soul.”
But we confer these judgments selectively and the arbitrariness of these selections, Nussbaum points out, is itself suspect — we don’t, for instance, believe that we’re undermining artists’ and writers’ dignity by protecting their freedom of speech, nor do we believe that laws protecting personal property are turning property-owners into victims. Nussbaum poses a necessary question:
If, then, we hear political actors saying such things about women, and poor people, and racial minorities, we should first of all ask why they are being singled out: what is there about the situation of being poor, or female, or black that means that help is condescending, and compassion insulting?
Art by Andrea Dezsö for a special edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales
In this unease lies the seedbed of our conflicted relationship to agency and victimhood:
The victim shows us something about our own lives: we see that we too are vulnerable to misfortune, that we are not any different from the people whose fate we are watching, and we therefore have reason to fear a similar reversal.
Trauma and tragedy — the circumstances that create the basic framework of victimhood — force us to confront this dual nature of the human experience: we are at once agents of our own fate and vulnerable to the whims of a larger system over much of which we have no control. But discomfiting as this duality is, Nussbaum suggests, it holds our greatest opportunity for goodness:
Tragedy asks us … to walk a delicate line. We are to acknowledge that life’s miseries strike deep, striking to the heart of human agency itself. And yet we are also to insist that they do not remove humanity, that the capacity for goodness remains when all else has been removed.
Nussbaum considers how this understanding of tragedy can help us begin to foster such foundations for dignity:
If we understand that injustice can strike its roots into the personality itself, producing rage and resentment and the roots of bad character, we have even deeper incentives to commit ourselves to giving each child the material and social support that human dignity requires. A compassionate society … is one that takes the full measure of the harms that can befall citizens beyond their own doing; compassion thus provides a motive to secure to all the basic support that will undergird and protect human dignity.
Biking is something else I both love and hate. It takes a lot of effort but does provide good exercise and most days over an hour to listen to a good book or podcast. I especially like having ridden.
Here’s my bike, a Rockhopper by Specialized. I purchased it November 2021 from Venture Out in Guntersville; Mike is top notch! So is the bike, and the ‘old’ man seat I salvaged from an old Walmart bike.
Here’s what I’m listening to: The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams
Amazon abstract:
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “Delightful . . . [a] captivating and slyly subversive fictional paean to the real women whose work on the Oxford English Dictionary went largely unheralded.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A marvelous fiction about the power of language to elevate or repress.”—Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of People of the Book
Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning that the word means “slave girl,” begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.
As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.
Set during the height of the women’s suffrage movement and with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. Inspired by actual events, author Pip Williams has delved into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell this highly original story. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.
I encourage you to read these articles (and watch the videos) to gain understanding and perspective concerning the historical federal case of United States of America vs. Donald J. Trump.
The following is an actual question given on a University of Washington chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so “profound” that the professor shared it with colleagues via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now enjoy it as well.
Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?
Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle’s Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.
One student, however, wrote the following:
First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.
As for how many souls are entering Hell, let’s look at the different religions existing in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there are more than one of these religions, and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.
Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle’s Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.
This gives two possibilities:
1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose
2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.
So which is it?
If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year, that, “it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you,” and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then Number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over.
The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct…leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting “Oh my God.”
How does religion get away with it? It relies on the ignorance, gullibility and, yes, the complacency of those are committed to piety. And the consequences can be calamitous. In an article I posted here in January, Humanity’s Urgent Need to Outgrow Religion, I mentioned the plan to spend big bucks to build what amounts to a theme-park at the supposed site of Jesus’ baptism—but the developers have been careful not to call it a theme park. It’s a scam, a prank, a joke, because nobody knows where Jesus was baptized, in fact the gospel of John omits any mention of Jesus setting foot in the River Jordan. Yes, John the Baptist is there, but mainly to announce that Jesus is the “lamb of God who takes way the sins of the world.”
But a baptism theme-park is a minor offense. We keep being hit with news about the cruelties, crimes, and abuses done in Jesus’ name. Three headlines of recent vintage illustrate the ongoing problem.
One:
The New York Times, 14 May 2023: He told followers to starve to meet Jesus. Why did so many do it? by Andrew Higgins. This happened in Kenya, when members of a cult founded by Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, “a former taxi driver turned televangelist” urged his followers to flee to Shakahola, “an evangelical Christian sanctuary from the fast-approaching apocalypse.”
“Instead of a haven, however, the 800-acre property, a sun-scorched wasteland of scrub and spindly trees, is now a gruesome crime scene, scattered with the shallow graves of believers who starved themselves to death — or, as Mr. Mackenzie would have it, crucified themselves so that they could meet Jesus.”
The article notes that, so far, 179 bodies have been found, and many people are still missing.
“Mr. Mackenzie’s journey from destitute taxi driver to cult leader with his own television channel began in 2002 in a stone courtyard opposite a Catholic primary school in Malindi.”
“Evangelical Christianity and freelance preachers have surged in popularity across Africa, part of a religious boom on the continent that stands in stark contrast to the rapid secularization of former colonial powers like Britain, which governed Kenya until 1963. About half of Kenyans are evangelicals, a far higher proportion than in the United States.”
Mr. Mackenzie “…said that he would stay alive to help lead his followers to ‘meet Jesus’ through starvation but that once this work was done, he, too, would starve himself to death ahead of what he said was the imminent end of the world.”
But guess who is still alive and under arrest! The venality of Mackenzie is clear from his story reported in the article. We can suspect that he promoted the scam without really believing it himself. Do Kenneth Copeland and Joel Osteen, who have become super wealthy through their “ministries,” really believe what they’re preaching? Whatever the case, they have discovered that ancient superstitions about meeting savior-Jesus work. The most natural thing in the world is that people are afraid of death—and this fear is so easily exploited. Thousands of religions have promoted so many different gimmicks to get out of dying, and the apostle Paul especially pushed the idea that Jesus would arrive on the clouds soon to rescue those who believe. It is no benefit whatever to humanity—now, in 2023—that so many minds are captive to goofy ideas: about half of Kenyans are evangelicals!
In the U.S., evangelicals have faced considerable pushback in their hostility to gay people, whose battle cry has become, “We’re mad as hell, and we’re not taking it anymore.” This resistance to hatred and abuse culminated in the Marriage Equality ruling by the Supreme Court in 2015. But conservative have the Bible on their side—they’re sure of it—because of the so-called clobber verses that show for sure that their god hates homosexuality. And armed with that certainty, some evangelicals saw Africa as a venue for advancing anti-gay hatreds and abuse.
Full disclosure here: I am gay, and just this week my husband and I celebrated our 45th anniversary. I realized my orientation as a teenager, and was curious to know how that had happened. My father was a doctor, and among his books I found Alfred Kinsey’s 1948 book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. There were the statistics, i.e., maybe five percentage of males are homosexual. No condemnation, no scolding: just the facts of the matter. In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its Diagnostic Manual because evidence was lacking that same-sex attraction is a disorder. Therapists should focus on helping their clients achieve productive lives acknowledging same-sex attraction.
Despite what we now know—after exhaustive study—about homosexuality, evangelicals are sure it’s a moral evil, and irrationally champion the few Bible verses that seem to make their case, e.g. Leviticus 20:13 and Paul’s condemnation in Romans 1:26-27. They have their blinders on: they don’t follow most of the other laws in Leviticus, and they laugh off Paul’s advice to heterosexual couples: “…it is best for a man not to touch a woman…” (1 Corinthians 7:1) and “those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Galatians 5:24).
Caleb Okereke’s article calls attention to the lies and misinformation perpetuated by the anti-gay campaign in Africa: “It has deep links to white evangelical Christianity and is an export of a made-in-the-USA movement and ideology that is polarizing African countries and harming and endangering LGBTQ+ people.” The article concludes:
“Proponents of ex-gay and anti-gay philosophies depend on the permanence of gay people for their message to be relevant. They require an enemy for their fight to be valid, and they go to great lengths to construct this enemy as a well-funded and all-powerful foreign movement while falsely presenting the local anti-gay movement as a grassroots underdog, despite its heavy reliance on U.S. evangelicals for publicity.”
This certainly qualifies as cruelty and abuse in the name of Jesus. How we wish evangelical would grow up. They zealously promote hate under the guise of love.
It’s a mystery to me that membership in the Catholic Church isn’t down to zero by now. These headlines have become routine for a long time, prompting Richard Carrier’s verdict:
“In actual fact the Catholic Church is an international rape factory. And has been for decades; possibly untold centuries. Religious belief not only allowed that to happen, it is still allowing it to happen, as believers refuse to leave the church, refusing to effect any substantive reform that would prevent it, refusing to find a less deadly and destructive religion to believe in and support.” (What’s the Harm: Why Religious Belief Is Always Bad, 10 September 2018)
Why in the world do believers refuse to leave the church? In the wake of this crime, cruelty, and abuse, Catholic churches in Illinois should now be empty. I have argued that, from the very first week of his papacy, beloved Pope Francis should have been holding weekly press conferences to let the world know exactly what has been accomplished to put an end to priests raping children:
· This is how many priests have been handed over to the police.
· This is how we have upgraded recruiting and training practices to screen for pedophiles.
· This is what we have done to ensure that criminal priests are not transferred to other parishes.
Above all:
· This is what we have done to teach priests about human sexuality.
In his book, In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy, Frédéric Martel notes that young men who loath their same-sex orientation opt for the priesthood to avoid suspicion. As soon as their decision is announced, questions about “Why don’t you have a girlfriend?” cease. But how do they not perceive what a huge mistake it is to opt to live in an all-male environment! Martel demonstrates (based on four years of research and interviews) that so many of the gays in the Vatican itself are virulently homophobic. This was sustained especially by popes John-Paul II and Benedict XVI, who brought their own versions of gay-hate with them to the Vatican from Poland and Germany. Even now the Vatican describes homosexuality as an intrinsic disorder.
So the pressure is there—for priests everywhere—to keep a lid on it, to follow the supposed ideal of Paul, “…those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” But this doesn’t work, hence children, for whom priests are ultimate authority figures, become the victims. How do priests explain to children what they’re about to do? “Don’t worry, Jesus is okay with this.” Do they clear their own consciences by going to confession?
By the way, in this context, “playing dress up” is not a best practice. What are they playing at? Trying to dazzle the folks who show up at church? Creating a distraction? The Vatican—to set an example for priests everywhere—should tone down theatrical ritual and absurd costuming. Its motto should not be, “There’s no business like show business.” The reputation of the Catholic church has been damaged severely, and it cannot be repaired by the over-the-top worship outfits: get back to the reality of child abuse that needs to be eliminated. And oh—here’s a thought—pay attention to the Jesus-script in the Sermon on the Mount about not giving much thought to what to wear: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these” (Matthew 6:28-29). Yet the Vatican seems determined to outdo Solomon is all his glory. But instead they have accumulated so much shame.
“Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. Hope without critical thinking is naïveté.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
To live with sincerity in our culture of cynicism is a difficult dance — one that comes easily only to the very young and the very old. The rest of us are left to tussle with two polarizing forces ripping the psyche asunder by beckoning to it from opposite directions — critical thinking and hope.
Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. Hope without critical thinking is naïveté.
Finding fault and feeling hopeless about improving the situation produces resignation — cynicism is both resignation’s symptom and a futile self-protection mechanism against it. Blindly believing that everything will work out just fine also produces resignation, for we have no motive to apply ourselves toward making things better. But in order to survive — both as individuals and as a civilization — and especially in order to thrive, we need the right balance of critical thinking and hope.
A plant needs water in order to survive, and needs the right amount of water in order to thrive. Overwater it and it rots with excess. Underwater it and it dries up inside.
I thought about this recently in observing my unease — my seething cauldron of deep disappointment — with an opinion piece commenting on Arianna Huffington’s decision to continue publishing necessary reporting on “what’s not working — political dysfunction, corruption, wrongdoing, etc.” but to begin giving more light to stories that embody the “perseverance, creativity, and grace” of which we humans are capable. The writer criticizing Huffington’s decision asserted, with ample indignation, that “to privilege happy stories over ‘unhappy’ ones is to present a false view of the world.”
Let’s consider for a moment the notion of an un-false view of the world — the journalistic ideal of capital-T truth. Let’s, too, put aside for now Hunter S. Thompson’s rather accurate assertion that the possibility of objectivity is a myth to begin with. Since the golden age of newspapers in the early 1900s, we’ve endured a century of rampant distortion toward the other extreme — a consistent and systematic privileging of harrowing and heartbreaking “news” as the raw material of the media establishment. The complaint which a newspaper editor issued in 1923, lamenting the fact that commercial interest rather than journalistic integrity determines what is published as the “news,” could well have been issued today — if anything, the internet has only exacerbated the problem.
The twentieth century was both the golden age of mass media and a century marked by two world wars, the Great Depression, the AIDS crisis, and a litany of genocides. Viewed through that lens, it is the worst century humanity has endured — even worse than the bubonic plague of the Middle Ages, for those deaths were caused by bacteria indifferent to human ideals and immune to human morality. This view of the twentieth century, then, is frightening enough if true, but doubly frightening if untrue — and Steven Pinker has made a convincing case that it is, indeed, untrue. Then, in a grotesque embodiment of Mark Twain’s wry remark that the worst things in his life never happened to him, we have spent a century believing the worst about ourselves as a species and a civilization.
Carl Sagan saw in books “proof that humans are capable of working magic.” The magic of humanity’s most enduring books — the great works of literature and philosophy — lies in the simple fact that they are full of hope for the human spirit. News has become the sorcerous counterpoint to this magic, mongering not proof of our goodness and brilliance but evidence of our basest capabilities.
A related point of cynicism bears consideration: Coupled with the assertion that giving positive stories more voice distorts our worldview was the accusation that Huffington’s motives were purely mercantile — a ploy to prey on Facebook’s algorithms, which incentivize heartening stories over disheartening ones. Could it be, just maybe, not that people are dumb and shallow, and algorithms dumber and shallower, but that we’ve endured a century of fear-mongering from the news industrial complex and we finally have a way of knowing we’re not alone in craving an antidote? That we finally have a cultural commons onto which we can rally for an uprising?
We don’t get to decry the alleged distortion of our worldview until we’ve lived through at least a century of good news to even the playing field so ravaged by the previous century’s extreme negativity bias.
As for Huffington, while we can only ever speculate about another person’s motives — for who can peer into the psyche of another and truly see into that person’s private truth? — this I continue to believe: The assumptions people make about the motives of others always reveal a great deal more about the assumers than the assumed-about.
This particular brand of cynicism is especially pronounced when the assumed-about have reached a certain level of success or public recognition. Take, for instance, an entity like TED — something that began as a small, semi-secret groundswell that was met with only warmth and love in its first few years of opening up to the larger world. And then, as it reached a tipping point of recognition, TED became the target of rather petty and cynical criticism. Here is an entity that has done nothing more nor less than to insist, over and over, that despite our many imperfections, we are inherently kind and capable and full of goodness — and yet even this isn’t safe from cynicism.
Let’s return, then, to the question of what is true and what is false, and what bearing this question has — if any — on what we call reality.
The stories that we tell ourselves, whether they be false or true, are always real. We act out of those stories, reacting to their realness. William James knew this when he observed: “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.”
What storytellers do — and this includes journalists and TED and everyone in between who has a point of view and an audience, whatever its size — is help shape our stories of how the world works; at their very best, they can empower our moral imagination to envision how the world could work better. In other words, they help us mediate between the ideal and the real by cultivating the right balance of critical thinking and hope. Truth and falsehood belong to this mediation, but it is guided primarily by what we are made to believe is real.
What we need, then, are writers like William Faulkner, who came of age in a brothel, saw humanity at its most depraved, and yet managed to maintain his faith in the human spirit. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he asserted that the writer’s duty is “to help man endure by lifting his heart.” In contemporary commercial media, driven by private interest, this responsibility to work in the public interest and for the public good recedes into the background. And yet I continue to stand with E.B. White, who so memorably asserted that “writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life”; that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down.”
Yes, people sometimes do horrible things, and we can speculate about why they do them until we run out of words and sanity. But evil only prevails when we mistake it for the norm. There is so much goodness in the world — all we have to do is remind one another of it, show up for it, and refuse to leave.
Lately Daniel Mocsny wrote a few separate comments for us. Here are some of them. Enjoy!
At risk of committing the No True Scotsman fallacy, I suggest that someone who deconverts from a religion and then easily reconverts probably wasn’t entirely deconverted in the first place. And the converse applies as well: a religion may attract new converts who quickly “backslide.” Religious hucksters are aware of the backsliding tendency, so they have systems in place to combat it, such as regular church attendance, and creating an entire religious environment for their marks to inhabit. A new convert is like a seedling plant – it has not reached its adult size yet and is much more vulnerable to drought and plant predators. A church may have training courses for new converts, to catch them up on the brainwashing they missed. Atheists tend to have none of that infrastructure, as we don’t normally have our own atheist churches or local communities. This may be part of the reason that religion began declining in the USA after the Internet became widely available – now we have online atheist / freethinker communities. Atheism doesn’t have to be an entirely do-it-yourself exercise now.
Removing religion from one’s brain may be like pulling weeds from your lawn. Failing to dig out every last weed root results in weeds quickly resprouting. It takes multiple sessions of weed-pulling to get all the weeds, and even then new weed seeds are constantly arriving on the wind or in bird poop, so occasional maintenance is an ongoing need.
The falsehoods of religion have been honed by thousands of years of selection – the religions that emerge from cutthroat competition tend to have the “stickiest” lies. Overcoming them, after a lifetime of brainwashing, may require a lot of cognitive work. Reading atheist books such as those written or edited by John Loftus is a big part of this. Unfortunately, many people rarely read books, or when they do, they read useless fiction, or disinformation.
Many religions declare threats for people who doubt them. Often the threats are more immediate, such as angry gods sending plagues, storms, or hostile human enemies unless we placate them with sacrifices. The concept of an eternal afterlife of unending torture at the hands of the loving God is an idea that evolved gradually. See Bart Ehrman’s Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife (2020) to learn how the concept gradually evolved within the Abrahamic tradition.
The Outsider Test for Faith always applies, of course. Probably no one among the world’s two billion Christians has ever lost sleep over the Muslim Hell, and conversely I doubt that any Muslims worry about the Christian hell. I would agree that most of the time you can’t argue an incorrect idiot into being correct, and you certainly cannot add a point to anyone’s IQ by arguing with them. But (and this is a but big enough to warrant Sir Mixalot’s scrutiny) it’s hard to win a war without showing up. The disinformation machine doesn’t worry about the difficulty of changing people’s minds. It understands that repetition is the most potent form of persuasion. Trump for example was able to fool about 30% of Americans into disblieving in our elections. For most of American history, there was no widespread doubt about our elections. People often didn’t like the outcome, but they understand that elections really do reflect the will of the people. Trump was able to destroy over 200 years of that belief in a few short years.
Christianity in the USA is losing about 1% of market share per year. So it’s clear that somebody is getting through to idiots with the voice of reason. Maybe we can speed that up a little by getting and staying in the game. Fox News doesn’t need to be the only voice they hear.
During the… COVID-19 pandemic, religious people complained loudly about the lockdowns that denied them their weekly churchy fix. Religious people have an ongoing need for group reinforcement. In contrast, once you learn some science, you don’t have to keep going back to science class every week to keep yourself convinced. Atheists may have griped about lockdowns too, but not because isolation in any way threatened to change their beliefs.
Inside every religious believer is a latent unbeliever waiting to manifest. In the modern environment, any number of potential triggers for change are constantly present. If outside influences like prayer or meddling gods cannot be excluded, then science cannot proceed – it won’t work. The same experiment will get different results depending on who was praying somewhere in the world, or on the whim of some god. Science doesn’t just assume that we only use natural explanations, it actually requires that only natural phenomena exist. Otherwise you can’t reliably replicate a result. Replication is fundamental to science, and even more important for industries built on science, which replicate the same products billions of times.
Thus the very existence of science is strong evidence against the kinds of gods people worship – gods who intervene routinely in the natural order. The burden of proof is therefore on the theist to explain how we can have science and smartphones that undeniably exist, and at the same time we have their God whose existence and behavior would make science impossible. The plain fact that during the past two centuries the intellectual elite (i.e., those who actually have some claim to expertise on matters of religion, philosophy, and science) have indeed become overwhelmingly skeptical in regard to the existence of a “conscious Creator.”
Joshi doesn’t present statistics, but it is at least anecdotally obvious that there are numerous fields of science and scholarship that are toxic to faith. The result is that people who acquire expertise in any of these fields, let alone several or all of them, rarely emerge with faith intact. At the barest minimum, the intellectually competent believer has to triangulate their way into some sort of liberal faith stripped of the most blatantly incorrect faith claims (such as Young Earth Creationism). But even the liberal believer must keep their eyes at least half-shut on their residual superstition.
If everybody could know what the intellectual elites know (that is, what the people who actually read a lot of books know), then religion would recede to the status of an oddball hobby like stamp collecting. —By Daniel Mocsny.
Richard L. Fricks 
