I've just come back from an "Imagine No Religion" conference in Richmond. Speakers included Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Matt Dillahunty, and lots of others. No Sam Harris though. I think he is becoming something of an embarrassment to the atheist/secularist movement. Anyway, here is why Sam is now persona non grata.

And by the way, it's worth saying: to the moral realism question, the people in Richmond had zero answers. I asked, in front of the mike, and on the sidelines. They don't even get the question. They're drifting on the values and habits of their childhood. Not good enough, folks. Not in these times.

Ah, well. Rant over. Here's an article on silly Sam. I admire in him the fact that he at least tried to tackle the moral realism question. Unsuccessfully, but at least he tried (in "The Moral Landscape").

But he is silly Sam in too many other ways.

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/10/why_does_anyone_take_sam_harris_seriously/

Siddhartha's Song

So subtle to discern Art leading Life

Suspend the Beauty, Truth, and Love mirage

Just up ahead

So near you'll surely grasp

Make nympho-fans, undress, back-stage ...on fire

Or grey-haired bankers nod wise, patient heads

the knowing, stoic mothers nobly bear

Ah, heroes all!

O Genius!

So pounce and seize the muse.

Compose your plays and songs to right the world

But to what melody?

And toward whose "right"?

The vision that informs the sad, still eyes

That now see lies in truths and truths in lies

(All sides of every rainbowed gem deceive.)

Will now believe that he should just believe.

In what? What does it matter what? Believe.

A spiral can converge eternally.

O chanting Eastern mystics lead me home!

I am prepared to sit and chat with Death.

A single sigh for my abandoned life

Is not too much to ask or in bad taste

Is it?

I am attending a convention of distinguished atheists and agnostics. Some call themselves "secularists" or "sceptics", believing with Lawrence Krauss, one of the headliners here, that the term "atheist" has become uncomfortable to many people in the progressive, science-minded West. I can't sleep. I have not been this frightened since I was 13. Back then, in the middle of the scariest weeks of the Cold War, with no warning of any kind, the air raid siren on top of my junior high school in Edmonton started to wail. 

An air raid siren is very loud. Jet-plane-taking-off loud. In my classroom, we sat and stared at each other. No one seemed to grasp what this might mean. Mr. Chalmers, my teacher, called down to the office on the intercom and asked what was going on. "Mrs. Game," (that was the head secretary), "Is this a drill or what?" Her reply was terse. "We'll let you know. Please wait for instructions. Don't tie up the intercom." We sat and stared, Mr. Chalmers and all of us.

After about ten minutes, the siren just suddenly stopped. We never got any explanation. No one from the school or the surrounding area mentioned the incident again.  

Or let me put this in another metaphor. After the Titanic hit the iceberg, she took a bit over two hours to sink. For the first hour, the men in the boiler rooms were hard at work drawing the ship's fires. That mean's getting out all of the burning coal, dousing it, and then cooling down the boilers. Mr. Andrews had ordered this because he knew the ship was going to sink. Coal-fired boilers explode when hit by icy seawater. But the lads in the boiler rooms didn't know what he was up to. They had some water seeping in, but they did their duties and worked hard. Their pumps were humming efficiently, and they got the fires drawn. Unfortunately, on the Titanic, the watertight bulkheads did not extend up to the main deck. She was taking on water and settling steadily minute by minute. The ship settled a little more, changed her angle, and a wall of seawater a meter high came pouring over the bulkhead at the front of the middle boiler room. The lads had done their jobs. Suddenly, it was every man for himself. In a few more minutes, the ship sank. Over 1500 people died. Only 705 survived. Probably only Mr. Andrews knew what was coming right up until the ship went down.   

In the main conference room here last night, I felt a kind of complacency that I can only characterize using these two metaphors. No one knows what to do. I have put to three of the main guests and some of my fellow attendees questions about whether there are any grounds in material reality for a moral code. I'm getting back blank stares. Science, the study of material reality, remember, is what these people live by. These are the clear-eyed, objective thinkers of our times. Some of the best that we have in the world. They have no answers. They aren't even aware of the question. They are doing the rote familiar, relying on the moral sense and the habits that were programmed into them when they were children. 

Not good enough, my gentle readers. I have said so many times in these pages. 

Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Jerry Coyne ...are sitting in front of a room full of admirers and talking at length, earnestly, about multiple-worlds models in quantum theory. 

They're nice people, the speakers and attendees here. But they're staring. 

It's a little after 3 a.m. In my dimly lit hotel room, I'm staring. 

Down below in this ship of state, millions of decent people are just doing their duties.   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBHoMvq_tmY

I think, to be thorough, I should discuss Buddhism today. I've gone into several of the other world religions. Let's consider a few of Buddhism's basic tenets, and the social usefulness and survival value of those tenets. At least, a few of them. Like Christianity, Islam, and so on, Buddhism contains many sects. I can't begin to discuss the full gamut of those sects here. Let's just focus on a few concepts that are salient from this social usefulness perspective. 

Buddha aimed to help his fellow humans to stop suffering. The key to doing this is to give them the tools, that is the concepts, to see that it is their wishing and yearning for things beyond their immediate awareness that is making them suffer. You don't need those things that you yearn for. If you could have them they wouldn't make you happy. You need to stop yearning. Be fully here and now. The moment is beautiful and much more than good enough. 

To do this you need to see and experience the oneness of all of the universe. As the old joke goes, Buddha walked into a pizza shop and told the person at the counter, "Make me one with everything." All of our thought processes depend on concepts that in the end are illusions. There are no things made of matter and things not made of matter. No women versus men. No food versus poison, no future versus past. There is only here/now. Even thinking you are separate from everything you see is an illusion. Get over that, and your suffering will stop. End dualisms of every kind. Touch nirvana, the unimaginable. 

It has worked at a basic functional level for millions of people for thousands of years. Whether the historical Buddha really existed or not, the idea has great power. It can make life, even a very hard life, bearable for people who truly believe. They can even spend their mental energy concentrating on doing each task or movement in their day as beautifully as they can. In the humblest of lives, there can be beauty. Pumping water. Planting crops. Nursing a baby. Digging an irrigation ditch. Even typing on a computer screen. Buddhists tend to make good, hard-working, law-abiding citizens, which boosts the efficiency of the larger society.  

There have been abuses and errors committed by Buddhists too, however. They tend to illustrate how in the real world, people of different belief systems, including Buddhists, end up confronting one another and fighting even when both sides will tell you that they were doing their best to avoid that exact situation. The people of Sri Lanka are in large majority Buddhist. But they did some nasty things to women and children of the Tamil sect nevertheless. Just one example.  

But these failures are not what worries me about Buddhism. What does worry me is whether people who think the reality they are seeing is all illusion will be able to recognize and stand up to those who would turn them into slaves. Or to go even further, I wonder why Buddhists would bother to have families and try to provide for them. That seems irrational if they hold the contemplative life in more esteem than they do the active, involved, worldly one. 

Involved, caring people have made many mistakes down through history, but I believe they do in the end tend to be the ones who learn lessons from experience and take measures to right the mistakes of the past. 

We as a species can't live contemplatively anymore. The hazards facing us have just gotten too dangerous. I have to care. I have to try. I can't just watch the universe roll by and smile. Nor, I believe, can the vast majority of the human race if the vast majority of the human race is going to survive. 

But I do admire their philosophy. It is subtle, gentle, and profound. And once in a while, I really do see not just trees, but trees against the sky.   

                                                             artist's conception of Abraham 



To continue our essays on some major world religions and the survival usefulness of their moral codes, let's consider Judaism. 

Judaism is the first of what are called the Abrahamic religions, which means it was,  its followers believe, founded by a man named "Abraham" probably about three thousand years ago. 

Like Christianity is supposed to be, and like Islam is, Judaism is distinguished from many other world religions today, and even more so of the ancient world, by its belief in only one god. 

Are there survival advantages to such a belief as a cornerstone of one's religious belief system and practice? Actually, there are some clear-cut ones. 

If you believe in a deity, that means that you believe you are being watched and judged in all of the actions of your life every minute of your life. That's what belief in a deity means. Under such a worldview, you may cheat or lie or even kill in this life and escape punishment, but these sins are all being noted on your record and one day you will have to answer for them. 

The effect of such a belief on the patterns of behavior of ordinary people living ordinary lives is to make them more honest and respectful in their dealings with each other. This kind of behavior has clear value for all social interactions and especially those that we list under the title of "commerce". Buying and selling of all goods and services just happens more efficiently when every merchant and customer can, for the most part, trust that the goods are effective as advertised and that the price is fair. In short, belief in the kind of entity that qualifies to be called "God" is a very subtle even insidious way to make society more cohesive and efficient.

Belief in only one god toughens the system even further. Societies that believe in many gods are giving an opportunity to their citizens to try to play these gods against each other, like spoiled children do when they try to play Dad against Mom so that they can sleep over at a friend's house, or even Grampa against both parents when they want a motorcycle. 

Monotheism rules these machinations out. One god, one code of right and wrong, and one authority to whom you must answer. Judaism offered something very practical to the human race long ago.  

The downsides of modern Judaism are not so nice to look at. For example, schools for Palestinian children in Israel are funded at levels much below the level that is standard for Jewish schools. And Palestinians are denied other rights. All of this is easy to research online.

One further wonders whether, in Jewish eyes, the killing of a 9 year old Palestinian boy who is throwing rocks at an Israeli tank in Gaza is morally as serious as the killing of a 9 year old Jewish boy by a Palestinian rocket. The answer certainly appears to be, "Well, no." 

My biggest worry with the Jews of the twenty-first century is with the Zionists, a category that does not include all Jews, let us not forget. But I worry over the wavering, unclear standard of what makes a human being morally considerable under Judaism. Does the other person have to be a Jew to be considered fully human in Zionist eyes? 

I have a theory, though I'm not sure how one would ever verify it with hard, indisputable, physical evidence. My theory is that the biggest hurdle the Jews of the modern era are facing is getting over the whole idea of their being somehow "God's chosen people" (which is what they called themselves for centuries). In today's world, any such talk just sounds like one more form of collective madness. 

For centuries, Christians spoke of humanity as being made up of Christians and heathens. Those were the most basic categories of human beings. The ancient Greeks called themselves "Hellenes" and called everyone else "barbarians". The Muslims have spoken for centuries of the faithful and the infidel. The word "Masai" in Masai means "people". So does the word "Innu" in Innu. The Chinese saw only civilized persons (Chinese) and gweilo (barbarians). Everyone not Japanese, for centuries, for the Japanese, was Gaijin. The examples go on and on, from all over the world.  

I can't help but wonder if there isn't a gene in all of us that makes us lean toward xenophobia. It is so naturally a part of the human psyche that social conditioning alone doesn't seem like an adequate explanation. Such a human flaw would have the advantage of making us into our own predators, in the sense our using war to cut out the weaker societies and their cultures from the human meme pool. But that only used to be an advantage for the big picture of humanity. Our hazards today are too huge for us to keep on with this obsolete mechanism of cultural evolution. We have to grow up.    

In any case, the Jews are going to have to get over the "chosen people syndrome" just as surely as Muslims, Christians, Chinese, and all of us are going to have to get over our biases. They are either over or we're over. As a species. It is that clear cut. 

A very short post today, readers. 

There are no ads on my blog, nor will there ever be. Or at least no ads for any individual, company, or organization paying revenue to me. I may someday give in to allowing some charitable organizations to post ads here, but from them as well, I will ask no fee, nor will I accept any. 

This is not because I disagree with people making money. Honest commerce is what makes decent living conditions possible for us all. And I, myself, write some other things that I intend to sell. But not this blog. The philosophy being promulgated here is too vital to the health of my species and my planet for me to risk putting off even one person because I allowed an ad here. Ads are inappropriate here. And yes, I really do believe that. 

Now and then, here and there, someone has to try to stand for what's right. My long, long term goal is to put into the minds of human beings the tools that they are going to need to save this planet and themselves. Then, I aim to stir a deep motivation in people to use those tools. 

We can bring together a human family. We can build a better world. No physical limitations are preventing us from doing these things. The only obstacles standing in the way of courage, wisdom, freedom, and love are cowardice, obstinacy, intolerance, and greed. Thus, the most important riddle humans have to solve is themselves. The most important battles are now going to be fought in each individual human heart. We are striving to learn why for so long we have done the cruel and stupid things that we have, and then to learn to stop doing them. 

It's up to us.  

The discussion of various religions, their values, and the patterns of behavior that the values foster could go on much longer. But I feel this is a good place in which to reiterate a main point that is crucial to any reader's understanding my theory of cultural evolution, which is central to understanding why I think it is reasonable to choose to believe in God. 

A few prime values have been found valuable by all societies on this planet. That means that these idea sets, when they are used to inform a society's code of conduct for its citizens, lead to better odds of that society's survival over the long haul. I claim that they work to achieve this desirable effect because they are designed to match human behavior, over centuries, to the forces of physical reality. 

A balance of courage and wisdom is the large, general response that humans have developed in order to deal with entropy. Freedom and love, in balance, are the large, general response to uncertainty, non quantum and quantum. 

If we are rational, we should be trying to cooperate in writing a moral code for all of humanity that deeply incorporates these values. Right now. Consulting, listening to arguments, making our own, and coming up with a code of conduct that we can teach to our children so as to maximize their odds of surviving through the crises that are coming and then teach this code to their children. 

I believe that what puts many people off the whole idea of moral realism and the project that it points us toward is the thought of how hard the composing of this moral code is going to be. What that tells us is that people in most walks of life in most parts of the world really don't want to know how free they are. Instead, they want a code to live by that is clear and, unfortunately, also familiar. 

The Existentialist philosophers were right to claim that humans don't like to look at how free they really are. Freedom is terrifying. How could one individual possibly weigh and consider so many factors that should be included in his larger decisions, and how could we stand the responsibility of possibly having to answer at some point in the future for our choices? 

But the Existentialists also insist that the fact of the matter is that we are already that free; we just turn away from having to face it. We hide in our cultures, religions, and political parties and cling to what we know, because at least its miseries are familiar. If we stepped out of our familiar roles and really took a chance, who knows where that might lead us? 

All of this is leading up to my saying again, that I know many people don't like thinking about our freedom and responsibility in this modern age, but we have no other path to survival. Our old ways of xenophobia and war, if we adhere to them, are going to finish us. We have to smarten up. 

So what values must be given primacy in that code if we did decide to get started and try to argue our way through to consensus on a constitution for homo sapiens? The first one is pretty clear. It is the one that enables me to write this blog and you to read it. Freedom.

As much as is possible for citizens in a democratic society, and that is a wide range of possibilities, leave me alone. Let me be me, and I'll let you be you. Then, if we both choose to associate in a business relationship, or a personal one, we can negotiate terms for our relationship that we can both agree to live by. This constitution I'm envisioning has to guarantee that or it is not going to endure, nor will its adherents. 

Then, if two individuals do find a mode of communication and maybe even a bond, it's beautiful.