The Warfare Is Mental

Authority Effectively Undermined

March 7, 2009

I was cruising around the blogosphere this morning when I found this post at DaylightAtheism. Although I don’t necessarily share all of Haught’s conclusions as expressed in the source material, I felt Ebonmuse’s response was fraught with inconsistencies.

First on the list is the following peculiarity:

…Haught presumes for himself the right to judge which atheists are or are not sufficiently “serious”

Why should that be any sort of problem? After all, Ebonmuse certainly presumes which theists are sufficiently serious, for example, he says all that believe in demons are ignorant regardless of actual intelligence and should be unilaterally mocked. This makes Occam’s razor look more like a guillotine! As my heart goes out to the closet GLBT kid with a sternly homophobic and closed-minded dad, similar for the otherwise rational person who’s had experiences reasonably interpretable as psychic (‘psychic’ as in the Jungian sense of archetypal), spiritual or biblical in their ultimate nature. Such hasty generalization and harsh criticism in this regard can only effect cognitive dissonance, which is of little use in uncovering the truth.

Illusions Writers Face (Part Two)

In Part One we left off with the idea that there are many illusions a writer might face throughout various stages of his or her career. I discussed a few areas in which I believe I achieved some introductory success as a writer, and not to embellish those achievements. The point was to establish a small amount of success to show that even a small amount of success can lead to all kinds of obfuscations and illusions for a writer.

So you got a book deal and you're in Barnes & Noble? Produced some television? Saw your name on the big screen, maybe? Perhaps the most painful illusion related to success is that success is guaranteed to recur. It's not. Another major illusion is the idea that success will never happen at all. Keep plugging away. Another illusion is that success is guaranteed to happen in a certain way, or in the way we expect, or the same way as before, and it's quite easy to get discouraged because what one defines as "success" comes too slowly or with too much effort. Think outside the box. Although hard work tends to pay off in general, success is not something the writer can always predictably control. Paradoxically, the only guarantee with success as a writer is that there are no guarantees with success in writing!

MiracleQuest Continues: But How Do You Know You’ve Been Stabbed??

March 5, 2009

"How might we reasonably define a miracle?" asks cl.

"Regrow a limb on video, empty out a cancer ward, levitate a bunch of Christians out of a burning church and I'll be on the road to belief," says cl's opponent.

"I don't mean give me your own particular examples of a miracle," cl says.

"Oh, well what a disputationist and sophist you are!" quips cl's opponent only a little irrationally.

Errors Of Logical Treason

Just a quick log-on to vent about something momentarily. In my previous post about why I'd like to debate with a computer, we suggested that computers are effectively immune from errors of human pride. What's pissing me off at the moment is the amount of people that are perfectly willing to accuse others of all sorts of things that require some degree of clairvoyance, from arguing in bad faith to sophism to outright lying, usually all over some petty, related misunderstanding.

What's wrong with the idea of being cordial and extending the benefit of the doubt? I suppose the online world is just a reflection of reality, where far too many people are just impatient and all too willing to cast blame on the other person. Far too often, I feel like people are bumping directly into me, then telling me that I was in their way! They'll misunderstand some statement I made, then turn around and accuse me of sophism because my subsequent reasoning doesn't conform to their misunderstanding!! I mean this stuff would be hilarious were it not so maddeningly frustrating.

On Malfunctioning Bus Doors & Arguing Against A False Reality

March 4, 2009

So I worked late the other night and was riding the bus home. It was cold, it was one of those times where there's a mild to severe "flu scare" in the general atmosphere. You know, that stage which usually happens to correlate with what they call "flu season" where the media or some other authority has pumped the idea of a "new and improved more virulent strain" into everyone's minds. It was cold, and it seemed everyone else on the bus had just gotten off work and was tired. They all had that post-work, spent, lifeless kind of stare, that stare where you just sort of gaze non-descriptly ahead while processing the random background noise, that stare too many people have seen and felt before. You ever notice that when a person is experiencing some kind of privation their patience tends to plummet? How many husbands might crack an ovulation-related joke here? Okay maybe that's a little too much, but the point is that if we're not careful, strong desires to remove privation can blind us to an objective view of reality.

Trilobytes Don’t Deny Evolution Because Humans Weren’t Around In The Cambrian

March 2, 2009

The title will make sense later and this post has nothing to do with evolution.

Last month I got involved in a thread which has turned out to be quite productive in my opinion. Although I can't speak for the others involved, I've gained considerable insights into a variety of epistemological arguments and ideas. Miracles have been the topic that have underscored our debate, and we've bantered about the amount of credibility one can reasonably assign to episodes like Zeitoun and Bernadette McKenzie for example. The blog's host, Deacon Duncan (DD), also made a claim he calls the Undeniable Fact, and commenters both here and there have agreed and disagreed with that.

DD devotes considerable thought to the comments which keeps the discussion going and for that he gets good mention. It also helps that he's a good writer. If you have good logic, you don't get good writing for free, so people that have both are fortunate. This related post of DD's is among the better I've read in terms of writing that succinctly and persuasively portrays the inherent dilemmas in miracle claims and the amount of credibility we can assign to them.

False Argument #22: The Unicorns, Leprechauns & Flying Spaghetti Monster Trope

February 24, 2009

I don't know why I didn't peg this one as a false argument much earlier.

You can often tell when there's an amateur skeptic lurking around some random debate, because at some point they're bound to upchuck their own particular version of the unoriginal and silly Unicorns, Leprechauns and Flying Spaghetti Monster (ULFSM) arguments made prevalent by the New Atheists among others. Dawkins did it with the Gospel and the Knights of the Round Table in TGD, and if you're at all into these types of debates, you've likely seen it go down for yourself:

"I've got legitimate reasons for what I believe," proclaims some reasonable believer.

"No you don't," quips a flippant atheist. "Do you have legitimate reasons to believe in Unicorns, Leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster?" (Hehehe I the atheist outsmarted you the God-dummy! is the usual subtext).

Just for fun, let's take a look at this idea that ULFSM are accurately comparable to God in an intellectually honest discussion of things.

Taking A Hike & Definition Of Purpose

February 21, 2009

Yep, I'm going to say something totally cheesy that I would usually expect only from the most unconvincing, mass-marketed self-help guru out: Life is like taking a hike. Whether we wander aimlessly or hike with purpose is of course up to us. I can respect both approaches and I can find something positive to glean from all hikers, whether they approach the hike nomadic and existential like Kerouac, or focused and determined like Obama.

Once we have a sense of purpose, the next step becomes fully integrating daily life in accordance with that purpose. To maximize the benefit of anything it is helpful to prepare the mind for the task at hand. Before undertaking any task, one could ask the question, ‘What is most conducive to this purpose?’

Mathematics requires a different mindset than sex.

Why Aren’t Less Science Students Atheist?

February 18, 2009

After all, the general trend of science has been to reveal that things are exponentially bigger, infinitesimally smaller and vastly more complex than what was once beyond our weirdest and wildest dreams, right? I mean come on, beer galaxies? Really? Point is, there's always been far more to reality than we imagine. Instead of producing insurmountable discontinuities, the horizons of human knowledge and objective reality tend to expand astronomically. We used to think this world was all there was. We were wrong. We used to think this solar system was all there was. We were wrong. Some of us think that this universe and this existence are all there is. Especially in light of emerging evidence combined with past tradition, isn't there a reasonable chance that they, too, are wrong?

How Would You Define A Miracle?

February 16, 2009

In the past few months, via several discussions with a variety of learned skeptics and religious people, I've come to better understand the disparities in our concepts of miracles, and specifically, I've been thinking about how falsifiability and confounders diminish the extent to which an alleged miracle can be considered authentic. It may very well be that proving a miracle is impossible, and on this matter I haven't quite decided yet, but I've certainly concluded that there is a wide range of skeptical positions one might take concerning the concept of miracles, and what we can justifiedly say about them, if and when they do occur.

One of the biggest hurdles to overcome regarding alleged healing miracles is developing a reliable method for excluding confounders of spontaneous remission and the placebo effect. Hitherto unexplained, either of these mysterious phenomena would provide good confounding cover for a genuine miracle, and that's not to say that all instances of spontaneous remission and placebo effect are intrinsically miraculous, either. Some skeptics are fond of claiming that only repeatable, observable, systematic instances of miracles would be sufficient to convince them that they were unjustified in their skepticism. This is sounds more like magic than miracle.

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