Religion

The Knowledge of Evil

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

Every now and then I think I can get it all down in a quick, clear and understandable form. I’m caught in a time loop. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t work this time either. But the title is true, that’s the topic.

I’ve sent the question out to the Oracle a few times now, and even classicists and ancient language experts can’t seem to comment, so in a healthy bit of self-affirmation I’m going to stop asking and tell you, this is how it is: the biblical English “knowledge of good and evil” phrase does not indicate awareness of our evil, it is not an expression of Christian Original Sin, or any other name for it. It is, rather, like most human knowledge.

You could say the knowledge of wood and fire, knowledge of land and crops. It means how to make one from the other.

It’s in the first few pages, well within the introduction for most books, often the part where the authors are telling you what the book is about, what you’re going to learn, and I’m not saying human life began with the bible, I’m just saying religion serves our biology, and our sacred texts either reflect our default core beliefs or perhaps they write them into our hearts, I’m saying the bible basically codifies default human life, so to talk about its tenets is to talk about basic human tenets. Wait – the bible is full of world domination stuff, discrete, nasty instructions I do not think are good and correct or are even our core beliefs– I mean its unconscious tenets are our human unconscious tenets. In this book, one could read it, you will learn the alchemic trick of starting with good and creating evil, turning that raw material into something someone can use.

And then, I guess, I don’t know – awaaaayee we go!

Into endless stories of what happens when a people refuses to follow the authority of God and doubly endless lists of how things must be and exactly what sorts of hurts to hand out for each transgression, and of course, not all just straight up exposition like that, but in story after story after story, you know – with feeling. As well as in interminable exposition, of course!

So, already a recap, because this is day two of this one:

A book, “knowledge,” ostensibly, about, in theory, “good and evil” – first, is this not the very First Sin you read from every Sunday, then? Do we not eat the forbidden fruit and cast ourselves out freshly every time we pick it up? OK, pointing out contradictions in the bible, there’s a worthy thing for a nearly sixty year old man to do! Ahem. Moving on.

. . . no sorry, what an annoying trick, second time now, I’m sorry, not moving on. This is how I think, I don’t figure it out ahead and then come write it down, the written page is my brain’s working space, I could never keep track of this train of thought and develop it all up in my head, I need to see it to remember it and to just plain see my own thoughts, know what I’m putting together. If you don’t write, you should try it. I often follow some thought that I thought was as good as any other and I end up backspacing over several paragraphs, and accidentally learn or unlearn something, either about the world or about myself. I’ve come to believe that a thought isn’t real until we say it out loud or write it down, most of our thought is free-floating crap that wouldn’t survive the audit of writing it down and reading it back to ourselves, and we know it, and we don’t commit to most of it – but it’s really powerful to write it, say it, put it into the world where you can see it. Then we can tell the wheat from the chaff.

So, not moving on, let’s run with that for bit, that first teenage atheist complaint – I’m not one, really, I don’t mind some high concept God stuff – knowledge of good and evil got us punted out of paradise and created the twelve hour work day, so you should come to church every Sunday and gain some more of this knowledge of good and evil – we got a full time staff to explain it to you . . . none of this makes any sense if we thought the knowledge of good and evil was against God’s rules and caused the Fall and all of our existential trouble forever, does it? Like, remotely?

Brother, how many times have you read the book of knowledge of good and evil?

How it makes sense is my crazy, outlandish theory here. It’s a how to manual.

Knowledge of ore and steel, knowledge of good and evil.

We don’t think we’ve been cast out and lost paradise, do we? Is it part of that meme that when we had our Fall, the rest of nasty old nature all changed character too? It used to be safe in nature? You want your paradise back, drop everything and walk out on the Mara Plain, enjoy. Do we assume that the humans closer to it thought that? Only in our current delusion!

Clearly, we like our knowledge and are glad to be indoors, safely cast out of such a paradise as is full of lions and tigers and bears and invisible death from mosquitos. So, despite the absolutely everything else, we think knowledge about only this stuff, good and evil, is bad? So we keep hearing and learning about it every Sunday long after all other school has ended for most people?

Or . . . despite the opening premise, really, this is a book, and you should read it for the knowledge therein. You may have the knowledge of many things, perhaps you are a master of one or more of them, the aforementioned knowledge of land and crops, of flint and fire, ore and metal – sound and music. The true story is that the knowledge of good and evil delivered Adam and Eve from this “paradise,” – and now you can have this knowledge too, dear purchaser of the Book. Read on!

Then, as I say, rules and punishments, obedience to a celestial being, or failing that, His Earthly representative. And that’s how you do it. Rules and punishments are the tools of the trade of the resource extraction industry of creating evil from a baby born to paradise. Straight up illicit abuse is even better of course, more isolating and such, but normalized, ubiquitous abuse is good too.

This is us, this is what I’m saying.

In biological terms, cruel, warlike humanity is not the default, natural state of this branch of the primate tree, this is not a past from which we strive to escape and are making any long term progress, this is still a choice we make every day and at least until very recently and we only hope it’s changing, our wars are still getting bigger. These are still choices we make every day or at least, in this conversation, every Sunday – knowledge of good and evil has separated us from God and made our life one of labour and strife – and now for today’s lesson, good and evil! Please open your Book to page two.

This is our goal, not our curse put upon us by the celestial being or nature. This isn’t easy, the “labour” part is no joke. We work hard to be like this, to be this, not so much the pious lover of God who fears nothing, yea, even in the Valley of Death because he trusts in God, but more the meanest SOB in the whole damned valley, that’s the truth of the matter. The competition requires that all trades be at their best, from farming to smithing, to the evil-making industries of child abuse and “moral systems” of punitive abuse generally.

Hmmm. This was to be more of an all-in-one blog.

The evil-making industry must work best in secret, I suppose, evil thrives in darkness, so it gets a makeover, a relabelling – and leaves us with this massive contradiction, knowledge of good and evil ruined our lives, so we clearly need more and more of it. You need to learn wrong from right, so I’m going to demonstrate, on you, how a full grown adult beats a small child. None of this makes any sense if good is good and bad is bad – again, the knowledge of good and evil is supposed to have been our mistake, the very thing caused our Fall, got us all this trouble – but without exception, every parent knows that children must be taught “wrong from right.”

We are far more committed to this war against God than this nominal atheist ever dreamed, ha! I kid, the point was our actions do not match our story. Ah, there it is.

We don’t teach our children wrong from right with the beating or any version of it. We make our children wrong from babies that had been right.

The knowledge of good and evil, if it means simply awareness of the two things, or less, awareness of our nakedness, is not the great sin they tell us it is, clearly, and in certain contexts, no-one argues this. We get used to religion sounding meaningless, no slag. I still find “taking the Lord’s name in vain” similarly indecipherable! (I’ve heard more than one reasonable take on it, but those few words aren’t much use, is my point.) Rather this knowledge is not simple awareness of the two words, but again, the relationship, one from the other, perhaps the translation could have been the technology of good and evil. One from the other.

And in this truer story, this knowledge is not only not a bad thing, but the point of the Book, a very good thing, in fact such a good thing that it must be forced upon every last human being in existence. Everyone must have the knowledge of good and evil, all must learn wrong from right. Everyone must have the scars to show they subscribe to someone’s “system of morals.”

 

Minus the sarcasm, this is the logic that makes sense of this biblical meme, not the one usually offered, this plot at least works.

Do you care if it works? If life has any logic to it?

Warning: it won’t make you “good,” not the popular kind of good. It’s a new kind of good some of us are looking for, a rational one, a good that makes some damned sense.

 

Jeff

October 9th., 2019

Beyond Evolution VS Creation

Jeff/neighsayer3 Comments

New idea (sort of), that what Darwin, what evolutionists are up against is not some offense that we are “just animals,” but rather what I’m up against, the mimic meme, the great social myth that humans are different because we’re nicer, that our special development isn’t just a special version of mean.

This is our species’ false origin story now, maybe always, that we rose above the animals through “cooperation,” or “altruism,” and in that sense a “morality handed down by a god or a godly messenger” would fill the same purpose in one of those forms, in any given sentence in one of those arguments -the myth that we dominate this world because we are better and not because we are worse. I think the offense evolutionists face has the same flavour as the offense voiced in opposition to permissiveness, to leniency and the advance of liberalism generally, and that’s the larger context for it, not so much whether humans are partly divine, or whether there is a god or not – but whether our lifestyle, the social order, supported by these rationalizations is right or wrong. I don’t mean capitalism, or the patriarchy, for me, all these serve the human warrior society; capitalism means money may abuse, patriarchy means men may abuse. I mean the abuse itself, not who or what is allowed to do it, but that someone always is. That little factoid gets flipped upside-down in this false backstory of ours, that is what’s supposed to make us better.

(New readers may have some confusion. For me “abuse” includes all abuse, socially sanctioned punishments included, because punishment is a technology that includes the application of abuse. Punishment, in our world, is supposed to make us “better,” while abuse, punishment’s major component, has been shown quite robustly to make us “worse,” at least in the eyes of the law, educators, medicine, etc.)

Perhaps something here explains that while evolution generally had popularity, even its adherents had resistance to Lamarck, to the idea that we create ourselves, and that that resistance is still alive and fighting, apparently. If it’s the great machine, OK, we say, fine, evolution, and we are still created beings, formed by forces larger than ourselves and beyond our control. We are still not self-aware or self-responsible in this state, and there is still the room for and a need for God, despite the apparent conflict. Indeed, this would seem to be the creature we see in the news and any dreams we may have of great human destinies do tend to fade with experience and age. We can be managed in certain ways, but humanity cannot apparently be reasoned with.

That’s the mimic meme too, not just some parent, beating their child to “make them good,” but the larger, social idea that it has worked, and that we are good, again, that we have won the tournament against the rest of the world and bent it to our stupid, stupid will – because we are “good,” altruistic, cooperative, empathetic . . . a lovely list of words, to be sure. Evolution is acceptable if we are horrible but powerless in the process, and evolution may be acceptable if we have had a hand in it, but if that’s going to be the story, we had better look “good” in that story, or first, who wants to hear it, and second and more importantly, what good does saying it do? We’re not supposed to tell a child they’re bad, only that their action was bad, because we don’t want them to take it to heart, so how do you tell apes that their bad actions have the unfortunate effect of making them bad? Talking about abuse still, always.

I tell myself I don’t write for children. I know I’m looking for dangerous places to be – honestly it’s all just talk now, I’ve already ruined my real life by taking this issue on with my child-rearing – looking for dangerous things to think about. I hope I’m not making anyone crazy with this, but I’m operating at a very young age in my cynicism; I’m still clinging to the idea of truth above all. If I didn’t have that delusion to chase, I’m afraid I wouldn’t have anything at all.

I think I understand about crackpots now, about people that get obsessed over a viewpoint. For me, this is the heart of the matter, of all matters, and so any talk at the higher levels in these matters, cultural, political, religion vs atheism, all seem secondary, but I’m sure a lot of people have their own idea of where the heart of the matter is. I’m willing to allow that matters have more than one heart, an unknown number, no doubt, but honestly, this is the one I’ve found, and frankly, whether it’s big enough to explain all that I think it does, I can’t have the certainty I’d like about that – but it’s big enough to keep me busy for awhile yet, I think. Honestly, I am staring into the abyss, I’m not trying to share that part, but you probably see. I need something that I can fool myself is important, to keep me busy, you know what they say about idle hands.

At least until I get some sense somebody else has gotten the idea, that I’ve been able to breathe life into this meme, and see it thriving and reproducing out there in nature.

 

 

Jeff

May 25th., 2019

 

Here’s a Part #2

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2019/08/03/beyond-evolution-vs-creation-continued/

Here’s Part #3

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2019/08/06/psych-101-or-beyond-evolution-vs-creation-continued-continued/

 

 

Forgiveness VS Morality

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

Forgiveness is how you and I feel good, and it’s how our people never have to worry about goodness. I know the Hallmark/Psychology Today definition of forgiveness. It’s something like acceptance, at least acceptance is the component I agree about, it’s the good part, and the folk part of the theory is that we can have no peace without it – and you know what, bare-bones like that, if we say, no value judgments attached, I’ll agree also. But because all things can be judged this way, I will say: your sense of peace in this matter, while it may signify an alignment between your life and your predispositions, is only as objectively good as those predispositions, and when we find peace by accepting terrible crimes we are terrible people. If morality is defined by an attempt to lessen crime with punishments and deterrents, then forgiveness is morality’s very opposite, and the peace we feel is the freedom from the tension of moral strivings, acceptance of the world as it is, warts – and war – and all. And child abuse.

I sort of get we forgive a soldier, we ask them to murder, we already know they represent us, like it or not. But if the victims of extreme child abuse also need peace, eventually? The way we talk about it, the victim’s peace is on the other side of a wall and that wall is allowing whatever happened, albeit after the fact, so in what looks to me like a simple logical equation, a victim’s path to peace goes through accepting the crimes visited upon them, as though it were all fine and necessary if it had perhaps happened to someone else.

Which, of course, Chinatown calculation, game theory, Mafia-style logic, these days dragged into the sunlight for all to see and fear, is that’s how you win, by allowing your guys to do anything, anything at all. Those who will not use the carpet bombs or the landmines, or some plague are going to lose to those who will, if the police are bound by the law, the gangsters will win every time. So, forgive. It’s what Jesus would do for the war effort, isn’t it? Again, aside from that last ironic headbutt, it’s all very logical and if I wrapped it up here, I’d be one more evil evo-boy crowing macho from his bunker, this is what I was made for! All fine and good, can’t make an omelette without cracking a few eggs.

Again, if it were happening to someone else.

Of course it’s not just someone else. If it were just someone else, we wouldn’t have people to forgive personally, we wouldn’t have been taught to forgive, pretty much each and every last one of us.

Perhaps we think of forgiveness as the opposite of punishment, the opposite of retribution, and in a sense it is – but that does not indicate an inverse relationship between the two in a group or a society, it’s a direct one. The more rules there are means more things to punish and more things to forgive. The more punishments handed out, the stricter and more punitive the society, the more we must forgive the punishers; punishing is all fine and necessary. Of course the first person we ever have to forgive, and sometimes the last, is Mom or Dad, and the first crime we ever forgive is usually child abuse.

Well she is only three years old, and that’s a real fine way to start.

That’s badly out of context, but I can’t stop listening to Led Zeppelin these days.

But if she can forgive that, whatever it was, she is going to be a fearsome hominid. You want her on your side, because she will do anything, anything at all. Now blink once, she’s your mom, and you had better forgive her, because with that history, you don’t want her to be thinking of you as one of her problems.

Basically, I’ll believe there are peaceful religions when I see a peaceful society, but if my local church is going to forgive me no matter what I do, where is the pressure to behave? What selective forces are going to restrict crime, violence, and war when all is forgiven? It would seem that the idea of the Church as an opiate, pacifying the masses was a scientific blunder, that it is exactly the Church’s gift of forgiveness and acceptance of the warrior and warrior society that enables violence and chaos by restricting the society’s ability to punish and control its own worst elements. Again, too easy to see and say in Twenty-Nineteen, look what the evangelicals can apparently forgive.

We could forgive a little less, is all I’m saying.

 

Jeff

April 2nd., 2019

“Codified”

Jeff/neighsayer23 Comments

It’s a self-deception, where we tell ourselves one thing while doing quite another, Boston Strangler style, or just a matter of the situation deconstructualism has described, that we only think things the mind can see, ideas that we have a line to, like sight, and many thoughts are out of reach behind something or over the horizon and never come into view – but it’s not as clear as it seems: our rules aren’t the point.

The point is simply that we have them. Not in the usual, conservative headmaster speech sort of a way; I’m agin’ them, but we have them and like it or not, that is a point, specifically, my point, today.

The Ten Commandments really weren’t the point. It wasn’t the rules that were codified that way, so much as the penalties, and more so, the idea of penalties. Doesn’t “codified” have an aspect of hiding the message, of code? Well, the rules themselves, they are not coded, they are explicit. What is coded, perhaps, is the rule behind the rule, that the rule is a reason to hurt someone. Punishment is assumed. We may debate the rules, change them from time to time, explicit modifications of discrete  wordings.

“What should the rule be?” is open for debate sometimes.

“What should the penalty be?” is also a debatable, adjustable thing, a topic for talk.

But these questions require specific, concrete answers, and one answer, “nothing,” seems to be behind something or over the horizon. It’s a rule, that we have rules and penalties. That’s what you codify, the rules that are not up for debate or modification.

So it’s a rule that penalties are levied, while the rules themselves are somewhat fluid . . . so no rule is “hard,” even “Thou shalt not kill,” is suspended when said killing is now a penalty and not an offence. But that penalties are levied, this is “hard,” this is unquestionable. Anybody feeling this? Feeling what is the constant in this equation? The punishment is unquestionable, no-one debates, “punishment, yes or no?” – this rule is unwritten and therefore un-editable. Almost no-one, anyways. It’s visible, if you look. I hope I just made you look – you see it now, right?

Unfortunately, if a couple of big, musky hominids like you and I can see it, there is probably more to it than that too. At this level it’s still the headmaster’s bastions of civilization speech, right, rules sort of are civilization? The very best sort of lie is a “hidden truth,” by way of some Tom Sawyer-style duplicitousness, and the only essential part of this rule is that somebody gets hurt. I’m sure there is another layer to this onion, but this layer is novel to us. Let’s stop and have a look around, we don’t even know where the next layer after this is yet. We need to spend some time, get oriented and acclimatized to a world where everything they told us we do to control our animal selves controls our animal selves in exactly the wrong direction.

Rules, those are written down explicitly, and litigated endlessly.

Abuse is what has been encoded in our sacred texts and our lives, and what we are thus unable to litigate. Hmmm. In lieu of an actual objective, maybe short and sweet is the best thing I can add at this point.

Cheers,

 

 

Jeff,

Jan. 19th., 2019

Human Nature, Guns and Freedom

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

I have another blog for politics, and I don’t want to distract, but here’s a theory, straight out of antisocialization theory or game theory –

The connection between the memes of “freedom” and “guns” in America and Canada is no accident, and a new meme might make the point: these data analysis companies working on our Facebook data generated some of these memes the NRA uses, “guns and freedom.” They know the connection is there in your mind.

Of course, it’s there, because it truly is a level of freedom to be able to kill a person who would harm us. In one meme pairing, match that with something like the Noble Savage, the idea that we’re all born to health and rationality, and their answer makes sense: everyone can have a gun because everyone is healthy and rational. In another pairing, this freedom and something like Christian Original Sin, some idea that we are all born aggressive or evil, everyone needs a gun! How we can use both arguments, well . . . no real conflict if they’re both wrong, right? Let’s try that first, maybe we’ll get lucky. Do I have to argue the first one, if I think I’m arguing with biologists?

I think science has pretty much debunked rationality, maybe “health” too – certainly scientists don’t see any “starting point” or “pure early conditions,” anything like that. The noble savage has no believers in science anymore, maybe this idea of a good pure man is restricted to some religious points of view these days. Original Sin is holding out much better, there are other ways we can tell ourselves we’re born bad, evolution and biology automatically suggest the beast inside us all, right? Honestly, if it weren’t for . . . well, me – I wouldn’t think our low self image was going anywhere. This blog right here is my argument against that idea.

I don’t know why, I can’t explain it, I don’t bloody have that self-loathing thing, so I can’t agree with that basic assumption. The truth isn’t going to be some value judgement – although our value judgements play a huge part in our lives. It is everything to me that we mostly think that way, and especially so because it’s just not true. We’re not bad – except that we apparently want to be. For a reason, sure, but we want to be, and we’ve found a way to be, and the trick is to beat ourselves spare – and that’s what we are: born too good for our own fears and driven mad by our violent solution. That’s your noble savage, and that’s you and me, abused children with issues and complexes – that is human nature, and that is the human being every one of which probably shouldn’t have a gun.

So, the connection is there, freedom to kill an assailant is a very good definition of freedom indeed – but are the players who we thought they were? If we grew up knowing a human being is born a helpless loving creature and converted by abuse to be the beast next door that we fear, would we issue them each a gun?

 

Jeff

April 9th., 2018

Knowledge of Good and Evil

Jeff/neighsayer1 Comment

            A Question for Bible Scholars

            and

            An Answer for Everyone

 

Someone who knows the ancient Hebrew, the ancient Greek, someone help me. Is this a possible matter of interpretation or translation? I refer you to the very second Book, Genesis Two, and

“. . . the tree of knowledge of good and evil . . .” and “. . . the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

My train of thought has brought me to a mindset where a very small tweak to that bit of scripture might have tremendous explanatory power. What if – and yes, only a “just so” story without some support from ancient language experts – but what if the original idea was more like “. . . the technology of good and evil . . .” – like the knowledge of how to work with good and evil?

I’ve said it elsewhere recently, I know.

I also said this was the original sin, gaining this knowledge – or perhaps rather, developing this technology – and if it’s a technology, is it a sin to turn evil to good? It makes more sense to me that our first sin was the other technology, that we learned to turn good to evil, to turn sweet little babies into soldiers, creating warrior sorts of human groups like the ones who wrote those early Hebrew scriptures. Hmmm. Perfect segue, rare for me.

The technology in question is child abuse, and the data is in: rough treatment in childhood makes for rough adults. This is available knowledge today, out there, poised for the hundredth monkey to pick it up, and all before I made a penny off it of course, but here it is again, for free: childhood is rough in the warrior societies, that is an equation: rough childhood = warrior society. “Warrior society,” though, just what is that, really?

Google the term, you’ll see references to American aboriginal tribes, maybe the Samurai culture, maybe you’ll wind up in Klingon space.

What you won’t perhaps see is any reference to white people, to our own WEIRD selves. Apparently, the peaceful societies of England, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Genoa, Venice, etc., mowed down every “warrior culture” on the planet without being warriors themselves. Amazing, isn’t it? Those warriors didn’t know how to fight! It’s a good thing our Christian “religious society” came along to teach them, huh? I guess if I can scream it with sarcasm, I can also just say it.

“Warrior society” is a racist term.

It’s one of those things “they” (people outside of our group or in another group) have and “we” (people in our own social group) don’t. “They” are a warrior society, “we” just desire security. They are a warrior society – one dimensional, all they do if fight – while we “stand to defend” all that is right and proper, all that other stuff that is what we like to say we’re really all about.

If the world has “warrior societies,” then we all are, or those of us who are not are feeding the crops of those who are, game theory one-oh-one, right? They all are, they all must be. Otherwise what’s the narrative – “we used to have all these warrior societies, but we killed them all and now we’re all peaceful?” If you eat predators, you’re a super-predator; if you kill warriors, you are a super-warrior.

You got a border, you got an army? Then “you’re a gangster now, and there are no late starters” – Carlito’s Way. Particularly if you win the wars, you are a warrior society, again – this is real life, not some evolutionary amateur hour. I’m sorry – “you,” I said? I’m sorry, it’s “we, we, us – white people, Europeans.” We are a warrior society, in fact, human societies are warrior societies. And this is why we know in our bones that children must “be taught right from wrong” – because of that lowlife warrior society next door, that we have to keep kicking their asses forever, because the fools never learn. Damnit. I wish I could say “irony” without ruining it, but, well . . . there it is. (“Ian Malcolm,” Jurassic Park.)

It’s not about smarts so much either, aggression is not intelligence and violence is not intelligence. It’s not about smarts, because if you can slaughter an entire continent of warrior societies and still tell yourself you’re a peacemaker, or an “information society,” or some crap, then you’re a great bunch of warriors, but let’s face it.

You’re not too fucking bright.

 

Jeff

Aug. 1st., 2017

Science Trolling

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

If your Twitter feed is anything like mine, you see it all day long: “educational” corporate accounts fighting negative public opinion regarding GMOs, biologists spreading the word about heritability and fighting their psychology professors about where behaviour comes from . . . PhDs chiming in about the Berkeley riots and disinvitations and voicing their free speech concerns. Ever notice how if you’re against anything big and powerful, that on top of everything else there’s someone out there telling folks you’re “anti-science?”

The pro-GMO stuff paints the anti-GMO movement as superstitious and paranoid, mindlessly set “against science” and progress – as though there aren’t corporate ownership and legal issues with the giant corporations that are running this science: anti-Monsanto is not anti-science, and it is not science the anti-GMO people don’t trust, it’s the huge, soulless multinationals who will own it. It’s no trouble finding boatloads of geneticists to explain the detail of why these new proteins etc., aren’t bad for you, and that’s the public discussion they want to have, the science one. They don’t want to have a legal one, or a financial one – especially not a historical one. That’s a form of trolling, if it it’s not a form of lying: we only talk about science and we only talk about the present and the future.

How could we possibly know a giant corporation would do something bad with this science? It’s brand new! It’s a trait of online communication, to be sure, but it’s not a positive one, so it’s part of the trolling phenomenon: history, people, the world, everything else we know is left out of this specific conversation. To include the world at large in an online argument is some sort of logical fallacy, apparently. Especially so if you keep it hidden for several comments and then try to pull it out in a “gotcha” sort of move. Ha.

OK, that’s not the big one by me. Now for Berkeley and the Dawkins radio interview disinvitation.

The New Right, the New Atheists, the New Naturists, call them what you will. I can’t stand to think of all those names as a monolith myself, but if there are overlaps, then what’s the difference? I don’t want to address the Alt-Right, but in America there are only two ways to vote, so we all line up on one side or the other, I’m afraid.

I abhor that North American atheists can be criticizing Islam while our countries are bombing and exploiting Muslims the world over. When the enemy were godless communists, our hawks were Christians, but now that our enemies are God fearing Muslims, then atheists can be hawks too, I guess. That’s the point that needs to be made because it’s the point no-one wants to hear. I’m not having any luck online with this idea, but the difference between criticizing Christian fundamentalists and Muslim ones, is that our anti-Muslim sentiment kills Muslims, while our anti-Christian sentiment not so much. There’s a lot of anti-Muslim feeling around already, you see, enough for us to bomb Muslims to Hell on a regular basis, so when we add our voices to that river of emotion, the net effect is that more bombs fly.

Complain about treatment of women, FGM, and they get more drones again, not schools, not hospitals, from our countries. War co-opts everything, there are no innocent voices. Muslims see this, as do I: we criticize and kill Muslims and we criticize and elect Christians.

Any of you young logicians see how that’s not cool?

Perhaps we can postulate a new creature, a hybrid, the Christian  Atheist, maybe that can explain it, with Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins as prime examples.

I get it, atheists, I mean, I’m an atheist, although I’m not really committed to it. I don’t think learning that God existed would make me unhappy for long, it would almost certainly be good news. But I get it, religion causes all these problems, wars, I get the lack of reason in the stories. Don’t you know though, that persecuting people is guaranteed to strengthen their religion? Why do you think people believe, because life is too good, too easy?

Not only that, but are you really happy to add your voices to the Christians’ voices in the Islam slamming? Like you agree with the Christians, you approve of them? Are you truly Christian atheists, maybe a little?* Somebody’s either forgetting there’s a war on, or there’s hating religion and then there’s hating religion, right? Wait – I don’t even know if that’s why Dawkins is being deplatformed, it’s just that I follow him, and that’s my complaint about him. Again, he complains about Islam along with other religions, but it won’t impact the other ones the same way. Maybe that’s not it? Maybe the Christians blocked him, for the Selfish Gene?

Joke, at least I think so. It’s almost too bad they didn’t let it happen, have the riots if it got that far, though. It would be another level of weird to see the Trump enabled fascist Islamophobe pseudo-Christians who rioted for Yiannopoulos and Coulter lining up to fight for the atheist scientist geek professor against local Berkeleyites and students. (Barry Crimmins snort.) On second thought, just imagining it was enough, I’ve had my weirdgasm, no-one needs to see that. No wonder things are as bad as they are, seeing things like that fractures your mind in terrible ways.

I like Dawkins, I’m an atheist, as I said, and I’m into biology, evolution, genetics. I’m not happy to shut him up because I think he’s on an evil mission, I just assess the net good or bad from his stance differently than he does. If Christian maniacs take his anti-Muslim speech and hurt people, he can blame those Christians and their religion, and he’s right and he’s consistent, all that is fine. I just see the misuse of him as more powerful than the proper use of him in the present environment, is all. I have more, some detail, but again, pragmatism. I don’t want to spend my time today railing against someone who I basically think is one of the good guys.

This is all grey area stuff, folks, don’t pigeonhole me, ask me. Being on the “dominant Left,” I’ll tell you what I think, without fear of exposure or reprisal, because apparently folks like me are running this business and whaddayougonnadoaboutit?

 

 

 

 

Jeff

July 24th., 2017

 

* Of course, most North American atheists are culturally Christian, and there are sure to be a whole lot of Muslim atheists out there, and every other kind too.

HBD – Reframing the Problem

Jeff/neighsayer7 Comments

First, apologies for my first attempt at this. New thoughts and a terrible, incomplete presentation that can only destroy my case. I hope I can make more sense this time around.

Premise: liberalism is not denial of human nature, only the denial of the warrior culture. Secondary premise: Human Biology Denial, same deal.

I’ve had this insight, the Dark Matter analogy that we are antisocialized tenfold to how we are prosocialized, and that basically all human societies are warrior societies, and with that viewpoint, I’d like to weigh in, try to help resolve some stuff.

Safe to say, no organism that denies its biology lives to tell the tale; insofar as the HBD people and I overlap, we do not deny biology, we only deny what some people are saying our biology means. More, maybe only sixty percent accurate:

What I and the HBD folks are denying really, is the “deep roots of war” narrative.

Sixty percent is good in this business, right? The point I’m getting at here is, this is why you can’t make a dent with them (and only a small one with me) when you spell out your theory and your method over and over, because you’ve decided what they don’t like is being told they’re animals and you’re not addressing the real, emotional issue, the “deep roots of war” problem. I think that problem is that we don’t all like the picture of never-ending war – or worse, one that finally does end it all – and there is some unspoken shared social belief that the “deep roots of war” are all that any of this science can show us. It seems that, at least in the minds of the geneticists in my Twitter feed, that us being animals and the “deep roots of war” narrative are inseparable. I’m here to try to tell you, not the case.

I know about the evidences, I know about our long existence as a group creature in competition, and I have some common sense about how our group dynamics affect everything in our lives . . . you know, frankly, my theory has our warring selves as having some deep roots too. What I do not accept is that all that nasty stuff somehow happens “in biology,” that we don’t think it over and decide. Proof that we do it, proof that we did it, proof that we’ve done it for a very long time – you say yourselves, genetics is not determinism, don’t you? None of it proves we aren’t making choices, that we aren’t responsible for the world we make, or that we couldn’t operate differently. There are not two worlds, a biological one where it’s all unconscious and instinctive and another where we can talk and reason. Our reason supports our biology, any other condition would be a fatal mutation. Who do we think is foisting this warring life onto humanity besides us? We talk as though we’re trying our best to be good but you know, whaddayagonnado?

I’ve been working through the logic, and I’ve come to see that all (don’t hold me to 100%, exceptions won’t disprove the rule) human societies are warrior societies. It’s a long story, and I’ve been writing it all down, it’s all in my blog, my entire learning curve that started with not wanting to spank my children twenty-five years ago and has me applying to go to school in my retirement, starting in 2018. The Twitter version, probably only helpful for people who have either been reading me or who are already in the conversation, is that I tried to figure out what “punishment” really was, because the explanations I’d always heard didn’t satisfy me. I had an insight that “discipline” and abuse had a way of looking identical.

When I read of the socialization researchers’ long failure to find evidence that kids become anything their parents wanted (in the Nurture Assumption) it became clear that the evidence for damage and abuse seemed to be the better-established phenomenon, and it wasn’t far from there to wonder what evolutionary advantage abuse could bring us. The overlap appears to be along a vector of “increased incidence of violence,” that function being well understood in both contexts, evolutionary psychology and the old, Leftist regular psychology. That looks like a powerful biological/evolutionary explanation for the human practice of the punishment of children to me, but even if it’s why half of our fathers gave us the consequences, society doesn’t allow that it’s why we do it. We have these stories why we’d be some sort of “bad” without the discipline, and “society’s” idea about it (and Mom’s) is that our discipline makes us more civilized, less violent.

That brings me to the mimic meme.

This belief, this meme, that our kids will be some kind of “bad” without the consequences, this is why we say we do it, but the evidence is all to the contrary. Why we do it is to create the “deep roots of war” ape that we are. Remember, game theory applies: if there is a human warrior society on the planet, then they all are or most must on their way to being selected out. If you believe there is one, you must allow that there are many, that they all are, else how do those peaceful societies defend? Even if you don’t see that as self-evident today, consider our long aboriginal hunter-gatherer past, the situation we evolved in and for. Damn.

That was the Twitter version.

Robert Trivers told me any decent theory can be stated in three or four sentences, and I know I could take a lot out of the above, and I’m sorry to disagree with the genius, but not everything in life is that simple! LOL. The things you get to say when you’re alone, talking to yourself! So, liberalism.

In some sense, we can apply the ubiquitous dichotomy of our politics to any debate, and as such, if conservatism is about what it sounds like, keeping what you have, supporting institutions and such, then we must allow that a nation at war’s conservatives wish to conserve that situation too. And fair enough, in a defensive sense. We are indeed at war, and that is not a good time for getting less warlike. Of course, that’s always the case, it’s never a good time, is it? This is an attribute of warrior society. So, along this vector, what is liberalism?

 

Liberalism appears to be an attempt by the non-warriors to create a new meme, to create a different sort of society. Sure, it’s the attempt of people within the society who have the comfort to consider it, the few who have gotten a glimpse of a life, at least a personal life without war, and sure, they were lucky. Liberals would like us all to share in that sort of luck – this has always been my own liberal mission statement at least, although I’m sure interpretations are legion. Perhaps liberalism is best encapsulated in the famous phrase that “the arc of the universe bends towards justice,” but I’m sorry. Warrior society says no.

The arc of the human social universe bends towards conflict.

The world described in that quote is the goal, not the present reality, but this is where this conversation turns, this is the pivot point.

This is the social world we’re talking about. The HBD movement is clearly grounded in and aligned with liberalism generally, and the mistake they make is just as the biologists say it is, they’re confusing the world they’re trying to create with the world in front of them – but they are not positioned against human nature. They are positioned against the warrior society. This seems to indicate that some geneticists, some biologists are not actually defending human nature, but possibly the warrior society, I mean if they think they are one and the same and they choose to defend one.

The deep roots of war and human nature, these are not the same things, this is the point and the news from antisocialization theory. There is a human nature, but the deep roots of war life we live is a response to our natures, a secondary effect.

This is the dividing line, and this is the obfuscation the New Atheists and the New Naturists are leveraging: if you’re against the warrior society in a particular aspect, if you think your children aren’t “born bad” and therefore are some sort of blank slates that don’t require discipline, then you’re against “human nature.” If you think crime is a social issue more than it’s an heredity issue because people are some sort of blank slates that can learn and change, then you’re against “human nature” and therefore you’re “against science.” There seems to be some conflation, some overlap between whether people accept a specific version of human nature and whether they accept any version of human nature. Clearly, many HBD people have a version of human nature in mind, not the blank slate at all, many have a rosy, hippy-dippy, sweetness and light version of human nature in their heads – but if they don’t share the New Naturists’ somewhat dark version they are blank slaters, Human Biology Deniers.

No, I’m sorry, the “deep roots of war” folks do not own the rights to human nature, not yet. We can believe in a human nature without having to accept your version, which by the way, smells of some bad attitude like Christian original sin, or some version of evolution infected with original sin, like we are 90% wild beast with a veneer of civilization. Nice try. That is not the only possible nature we may have, even if it gets an automatic pass at your bible college.

The warrior society, when threatened, fights like a cornered badger, again, sorry to complicate matters, that’s almost fair enough, the enemy really is at the gates, usually. So, let’s talk about a few of these New Naturists and see what this all means; again, I’ll start at the end: this logic has explained something to me this morning that I’d been having trouble understanding . . . well, three things. Bill Maher, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins.

There are no innocent voices in wartime. I’m tired of typing it, and of course, there are innocent voices every generation, young, inexperienced people pitching in where they think they’re needed. The point of the expression though, is that war co-opts everything. I’ve been frustrated, I‘d gotten used to the obnoxious attitudes of Maher, Harris, etc., but lately Richard Dawkins is tweeting about FGM and it challenged me to understand it. How can the brilliant Dawkins not know that to complain about reactionary Islamist practices in the middle of these wars only feeds the war? Does he imagine they will stop the bombing and build universities instead? During a time when the anti-Muslim talk in America and England is drowning out all other voices, how can he not know he’s adding to the chorus? Then it struck me.

This is not an HBD person, is it, Richard Dawkins, but perhaps he’s a liberal. As a liberal, perhaps he does not like to always remember that our countries are at war, because we liberals don’t like to think of humans that way . . . the arc of the universe, right? How to understand this common phenomenon though, other than to imagine that these advocates forget there’s a war on? How else to understand intellectuals talking about Afghanistan as though their public policy problems can be dealt with while the bombs are still flying? It’s the mimic meme. Folks like Dawkins want to chastise Islam, give them a little pain, motivate them to be “better,” and they seem not to notice that we’re already doing a whole lot more to them than that.

These folks, by conflating human nature with the warrior society, do science a disservice by aligning it with the warrior society – case in point, the vapid war rhetoric of Sam Harris disguised as philosophy (see featured image) – same as the Church always has, and against peace. I’m pro-science, and I agree with a lot of scientists about a lot of things, but good science is not what is making some of these names famous, it’s their cultural “contributions.” I know I have to spell it out.

 

War culture.

 

Jeff

July 14th., 2017

Forget Forgiveness

Jeff/neighsayer2 Comments

for bd, AI, TTMO, pamela . . . i’m forgetting people, I know – oh, for thewalrusofsheol, wraith and noahbody . . . anyone who needs a break from platitudes . . .

with love from the dark side of parenting

Forget Forgiveness

Wait, wait, hear me out a bit. Believe me, I know the generally accepted narrative: you can’t hold anger in your heart, you have to let it go, all of that. I even accept that our worst tormentors probably never had a chance not to be the way they were, but still. Forgiveness is overrated.

First of all, for it to be what it should be, for the thing to live up to the advertising, forgiveness would have to be optional. As things stand today, in the view of this cultural Christian, that really isn’t the case. We all know that forgiveness is the endgame, and that it’s only a matter of time before we find ourselves somehow omniscient enough to forgive – almost without exception, even in some of the most horrible cases of abuse. The pressure to forgive starts the day our victimization comes to light.

That pressure leads many folks to a premature declaration of forgiveness, at a time when probably neither the abuser nor the victim have really learned their lessons. That sort of forgiveness is easily rescinded as soon as the abuser does what they do, and for that, rightly so – but the pressure simply restarts and it can become another dysfunctional cycle in our lives. Worse to my mind, is simply that in this Original Sin based Christian society, victims may suffer endlessly but abusers can too often sit and wait to be forgiven, that it’s automatic, that they are entitled to forgiveness from any decent Christian victim. That’s the Christian ideal, right, ‘Father, forgive them?’ Well, you know what?

The legend we have for the moral behaviour and teachings ascribed to that fellow, Jesus, are a rather impossible paradigm. We need to see that as a sort of bait and switch game, which is probably no more fair or positive for us than comparing our bodies to the impossible Hollywood beauties carved out of surgery and starvation. So with that in mind, and believing that there are more things to be in the world than saints or Hell-deserving sinners, I say f@#$ ‘em, our torturers. Let someone else forgive them, some moral savant or someone with less of a personal stake in it, someone who can afford to forgive them, because mostly, we can’t.

In this Christian culture, we know about Original Sin, we know we are all sinners and subject to the Christian message, that we will all sin, and we need Jesus’ forgiveness to avoid eternal pain and suffering. The human being cannot help but to reason and analyse, and when something goes wrong the human being wants to know why. We may need this information again, and so we find the agency responsible, we assign blame. In this particular culture, where we are prone to blame ourselves already, sinners that we are –

          if we forgive the obvious culprit, who will be left, who takes responsibility? For us, the default is us.

That is what I mean, that we can’t usually afford to forgive our attackers, because blame deflected from them too often comes back to us. That is some serious unfairness that the victimizer is freed from the accusation and victim suffers both, the abuse and the guilt. Forgiveness for the abuser is far too often a continuation of the violence against ourselves.

Second, real forgiveness is a process of maturing, a process of acquiring a longer perspective, and in most cases it takes time, real time, like the time between generations, like the time between the spring and autumn phases of our lives. Of course there’s part of the social pressure to forgive in that: we want to look like we’ve matured, and in a healthy way. It would be more ironic if it weren’t the normal situation: we are expected to go far too swiftly from so hurt as to cause a rift to a state where we have healed, matured and are now in the power position, bestowing forgiveness. That is not the sort of thing that the majority of sightings of it are ever going to be the real deal. That transformation is never easy and not often quick. Truth to tell? Several decades and the demise of our abusers probably go a long way towards bringing that achievement – and it is one – into the realm of possibility. Some of us don’t even want to heal as long as our parents are alive to see it; we need to be the open wound, the accusation; we can’t imagine goals for ourselves until they’re gone.

So my idea is this: we need to keep ourselves of two minds about it. Forgive in theory, know as you go about your life that ‘there, but for the grace of God, go I,’ and think that all of us could be that bad and hope that we can all be forgiven, sure – but let’s keep that in perspective, let’s keep that cerebral – cold, even. Let’s don’t invest our own feelings in it, give that idea our head maybe, but not our hearts. Our hearts need to be protected.

What I’m saying is, let’s stop treating abuse and forgiveness as personal, one-off situations, matters of the heart – after all the Big Data is coming in: we are not alone in our troubles. Not with 7,000,000,000 plus people running around – and start using our heads. Let’s consider that the prevalence of abuse and all manner of unpleasantness short of it and the near universal need for forgiveness likely indicates a social problem, and put our collective heads to it instead.

I just mentioned this rant to a wise woman I know and she told me a story about forgiveness. She was upset about a failed marriage, and she was always on a self-discovery journey anyways. She spent some serious time – three or four years – doing a lot of inner work, stuff involving her father, etc., and at a point, it became clear all the ways in which she had married her father – hardly all the fault of the man chosen for the part. She wasn’t looking for a way to forgive her husband, I think she was mostly still mad about it – but her own work towards self-knowledge took her to where she had to forgive herself, and forgiving him was just, uh, collateral repair.

That, I think, is how it works, and I know that’s what we’re advocating when we recommend forgiveness, but a few things need to be said.

One, that was a very intense, directed bunch of work that lady did, we don’t all do it, and even so, years.

Two, that was an adult situation. I’ll check, but if my wise friend has forgiven everyone, her own parents, etc., I think I can safely say it took her a bigger chunk of her journey than that focused three or four years of father-work. This person is on the lifelong plan. And that’s the sort of approach that produces real forgiveness, always as a by-product. For our caregivers, our parents, our abusers, the situation is very different, most obviously because we don’t choose our parents (at least those of us who aren’t reincarnationists don’t think so).

Whether we believe that all our damage from our earliest days can be healed or not, surely we can agree that the chance that it can’t be must be considered in any calculations we’re making. A full understanding of what even happens during our earliest days, while some people have remembered and dealt with some things, would remain impossible to guarantee considering that limited understanding we had during the experience. I think, given the inevitable unknowns, that true forgiveness could only result from our achieving a state where we could forgive literally anything.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, it happens all the time. I’m just saying it takes time, and if its schedule is even in the same ballpark as the abuser’s idea of a proper schedule, then it’s probably not the real thing. (Forgiveness is something taught to us as children by the very people – parents, preachers, teachers, in short, adults – that we might end up having to forgive. That is a conflict of interest at the very least, and an outright, cynical scam in the worst cases.) There is tremendous social pressure to forgive, to look healed and mature, to show the forbearance and mercy of a good Christian martyr – and unfortunately, the form of forgiveness usually satisfies the social pressure even if the substance is lacking and the true healing delayed. I worry that if forgiveness can become an entitlement, then there is no mechanism to change our behaviour, that if we must forgive our cruelest caregivers then perhaps we can make lax choices and do our own kids wrong, knowing that we’ll be forgiven in the end.

These are my concerns about forgiveness as a given. That if we forgive too soon that we’re blaming ourselves instead. That if we find a way to forgive our tormentors, that we may be less aversive to making the same sort of mistakes with our own kids. That forgiveness is only a treatment for a problem and not a solution, that we need to spend more energy on stopping the abuse and harm in the real world rather than accidentally trying to minimize or legitimize it by declaring all sins to be not only forgivable, but that they all must be.

Finally, let’s compare our usual attitude about forgiveness for a moment with our attitude about punishment as a parenting tool: that a cultural Christian or possibly a person from any bible culture is expected to aspire to forgiveness as a moral obligation, and along with the same culture’s injunction to ‘honour thy parents’ means that erring parents are to be forgiven if at all possible and to be pretend-forgiven if not. Contrast that with the parenting situation where the dealing out of penalties for misbehaving children must never be shirked. Discipline must be consistent for it to work. That has the potential to give us a glimpse of the measure of the gulf between our experiences of child- and parenthood:

Parents, abusers, even if they get no penalty other than their child or victim’s ill feelings, can wait for their socially entitled forgiveness while the child can be secure that his or her penalties will be swift, rarely waived, and even more rarely apologized for.

The social pressure to forgive is always there, irrespective of detail. I’ll just let you imagine how society’s will gets expressed when someone stands with the children and tells parents that the apologies and forgiveness are all traveling in exactly the wrong direction.

Jeff

July 6, 2015

Authority is the Problem.

Jeff/neighsayer6 Comments

Muslim extremists, Zionist extremists, Christian ones, Buddhists – people, the extremism is in the authority, not in the flavour. This one takes your refusal to eat what they allow as a reason to punish or kill you, that one some other reason, the common denominator, the really bad thing with all these attitudes is the punishing part, the killing part, the authority. So the Christian authorities decry Muslim “extremism” (read “authoritarianism”), but they won’t ever decry authority, because they enjoy their own too much.

Folks, let’s don’t be divided and conquered in this way. Eyes open – it is authority that is the problem, power and force. If you are going to kill me for some behaviour of mine, then it is irrelevant to me what the name of your God is. What is relevant to me is that you are a killer, that you think you have the right to bring punishments down on me. The brand of psychosis you have is a minor detail, Christian, Muslim, whatever. Authority – the idea that some people have the right to control others – that is the problem. That is the core belief all of our authorities share, Christian, Muslim, whatever. And they’ve all struck a deal with one another that they will never talk about that.

(The above argument regarding authoritarianism versus the world’s great religions’ versions of authority also applies to political systems. It is the nearly impossible to kill kernel of authority that turned the great Communist experiments into oppressive dictatorships, just as it has with so many non-socialist societies. Muslim, Christian, Capitalist, Communist, doesn’t matter: the common thread, and what should be the obvious evil, is authority.)

I hate to tell you: belief in authority, that is even more impossible to cure than belief in religion. It’s the basis of religious belief. All religions are a set of rules to follow to achieve some spiritual end, and acceptance that life is about authority is a prerequisite to believing that, a rule, and a punishment or a reward for it. Now here’s the thing.

Authority is a necessary evil. Adults need to control their babies, for their own good. We’re responsible for them, and they’re helpless and clueless, so there’s no talking to them. Sometimes parents need to act unilaterally, and in that way, authority can be a necessary thing for the survival of babies and young children.

After that?

After that, authority exists in a state of arrested development, or rather, it has us trapped in a state of arrested development. If we raise our kids right, they don’t need someone telling them what to do and how to live. A human being that has successfully matured to adulthood should be able to operate autonomously and cooperate autonomously. If we raised each other right, we could live in a world run with reason and communication alone. The reason we can’t is because we are all damaged and made stupid by authority and its abuses. The science is in regarding abuse and corporal punishment which are the tools of authority: it’s damaging us.

Without this damage, the world would not be full of screwed up, evil people who can only get the things they want done by way of authority, because the things they want to do aren’t supportable by logic, reason, morality or communication. If the things you want are social or economic inequality (power or wealth), then you’ll need authority for that. Healthy, mature, intelligent human beings probably won’t give you that willingly and consciously. For a world with lessening inequality, for us to develop normally, individually and collectively, we need to wean ourselves off of this belief in authority. It’s holding us back. Individually, and as a species, we are not growing up as long as we’re buying into the system of authority.