The researchers found that religious believers thought that descriptions of untrustworthy people — people who steal or cheat — were more likely to be atheists than Christians, Muslims, Jews, gays or feminists.

Cackle. I mean magical thinking really screws with reality doesn’t it. But I suppose all the money laundering in mega churches, the lies in court by those trying to defend intelligent design, the problems with pedophilia in Catholic culture (etc, etc) should have been a clue that the real “other”, that real person behind the projected mask, might not be too visible to the religious mind.

“If you believe your behaviour is being watched [by God] you are going to be on your best behaviour,” said Gervais. “But that wouldn’t apply for an atheist. That would allow people to use religious belief as a signal for how trustworthy a person is.”

Problem is that that sense of being watched doesn’t actually seem to work all that well. It’s almost as if they secretly know no one is there and just pull out the divine when needed for instant forgiveness for that which they did when—what—god blinked?

And the reverse?

The antipathy does not seem to run both ways, though. Atheists are indifferent to religious belief when it comes to deciding who is trustworthy.

“Atheists don’t necessarily favour other atheists over Christians or anyone else,” he said. “They seem to think that religion is not an important signal for who you can trust.”

Huh! Gee! Say no more!

I posted this in addition to the earlier letter because it is clear to me that the arguments have not progressed. Apart from some terminology specific to the time (i.e. prohibition), this could easily be some post on a site dedicated to atheism.  I find that a little depressing. Still, it took 100 odd years from the Civil War to get to the civil rights of the people brought to this continent to labour in our fields and (later) factories and more than 50 years after that before Black people really saw an opening to equality (I’m talking about Obama, of course) and the Tea Party and related Republicans have shown us that Emancipation Proclamation or not, Blacks are still scary, scary shit to some of us and to be destroyed if at all possible. So I’m not really surprised that at 115 years after the death of the “father of American atheism” that we have not resolved the atheist/religious problem.

Answer.– I indicate your bad spelling to support my contention that a scholarly man is not apt to believe in a God.

It has been said of spelling that it is a thing which it is no credit to know, but a disgrace not to know.

The “burden of proof” in this instance rests upon you. You affirm that there is a God. I deny that there is a God.

Greenleaf says, “To this general rule that the burden of proof is on the party holding the affirmative, there are some exceptions.” Greenleaf on Evidence, vol. 1, pt. 2, ch. 3. p. 105—L. B. & Co. ’52).

You offer no reason why your case should be an “exception” to the general rule and I see no such reason. I think you will find that “Jefferson’s Manual” will decide that the burden of proof is upon you.

The Bible and Sir William Blackstone and the courts of Salem Massachusetts affirmed that there were witches. The consensus of the competent said that the burden of proof rested upon those three, and that contention never having been sustained by any of the three, modern intelligence has decided that there are no witches. I do not have to account for any phenomena of nature, “leaving God out,” or leaving him or it, in. That is the graft of the natural scientist, I don’t have to account for anything. All I have to do is hear your argument and answer I, if I can. You say to me: “If you say you can do this, the burden of proof is upon you.”

Your statement is correct, but I do not say, “I can do this,” and therefore the burden of proof is not upon me. You say it would be foolish for you to try to prove to me that there is a God when I decline to accept your “testamony.” If you knew in advance, as you probably did, that I would not accept the testimony that you would offer, you were certainly “foolish” to offer it.

The testimony that you offer is the Bible and nature. If I accepted the Bible as a “competent” witness in this case, it would be “foolish” in me to discuss the question with you, for the Bible certainly says there is a God. But the competency of the Bible is a matter in issue, and, of course, I can not accept the Bible as competent testimony. You argue that the Bible is true because God wrote it, and then you argue that there is a God because the Bible says so.

That is what is called, in logic, “reasoning in a circle,” and it is recognized by all logicians as a common fallacy.

If it be true that the Bible, “for four thousand years has furnished indubitable evidence” that there is a God, why are you still arguing that there is a God? The very fact that you are making this argument shows that you do not regard the argument for the existence of a God as being “indubitable.” The multiplication table is indubitably correct.

If any man would say the multiplication table is not correct, you would not write him a long letter to show him that the multiplication table is correct. We do not argue about indubitable things. You would regard a man who thought the multiplication table incorrect as being an ignoramus or a fool, and you would wast no time on him, or would make an ass of yourself if you did.

The Bible says that man is a fool who says there is no God, and that goes with people who think the Bible knows it all, but it does not cut any ice with people who don’t believe the Bible any more than they do “Arabian Nights.” You say that beside this indubitable evidence we have in the Bible, we have the “book or nature” bearing the same testimony.”

If the Bible’s testimony that there is a God is indubitable why mention the additional book of nature?

If Euclid proves a certain mathematical proposition to be true, what is the use of saying that some other man, or some other book, also proved it to be true? Granting that nature is a book, there certainly is quite a diversity of opinion as to what it says, and your mere assertion that it says there is a God does not count.

I think it is “the height of folly and presumption” for you to offer the Bible book and the “book of nature” to me as evidence that there is a God, and you say it is “the height of folly and presumption” for you to do so, then why do you do it?

You certainly must have known that that same old racket had been offered to Atheists million of times, and as often rejected by them, then what was the good sense in asking me to fill up my columns with a long rigamarole that you evidently knew in advance would not amount to a hill of beans to me?

What was the use of your saying anything to the 15,000 hell-bent Atheists that “blow” themselves in my paper unless you had some new argument?

You answer my question by saying that the testimony you offer is “the only testimony that can be brought to bear in this matter.”

Then what are you kicking about? The evidence is all in, and it’s a hung jury and we will go to the presiding judge and tell him we can’t agree on a verdict.

All that you say about what I would do or would not do if an angel were to come from heaven to Lexington is poppycock. You certainly cannot know what I would do under such circumstances, for I don’t know myself. You are merely talking through your hat. It will be time enough for me to consider what I would do under such circumstances when the angel gets here. I do not think it is commonly recognized as being dead certain that angels come to this country at all these times, and I don’t think an angel that had any sense would come to Lexington. He wouldn’t last fifteen minutes in Lexington. The “cops” would run him in for wearing woman’s clothes on the streets, or some Lexington fellow would shoot him because he would not come into Gus Jaubert’s and set up the beer, or, if he did go into Gus’s he would get drunk and the “cops” would get him anyhow. But I believe you are mistaken, or worse—lying.

Old man Bell, the manager of the cemetery, reported the other day that a man was buried in that cemetery who made just 15,000 people buried there in all.

If some fellow would come along and resurrect all of those 15,000 people buried, and they should come marching into Lexington, including some hundreds of old boys that I believed whisky killed forty years ago, and my precious little curly headed girl, whose death brought the first gray hairs to my head, I think it would shake my present opinions about the resurrection from the dead. If anybody will come to Lexington and even clear the whisky out of the town, by any means, natural or supernatural, I will give anything he has to say, on any subject, a very respectful hearing. I think you got that up wrong pard. I say “pard” because I think you are a Campbellite preacher. They are hell on “shearing Baptists and Methodists,” and they make the wool fly. I’ve been there.

I have nothing to say in defense of those fellows over in Jerusalem. I’ve been there, too. O, no, that’s not “mud-slinging”— nothing of the kind, all fair so far as decency is concerned. What does all that dissertation on the subject of “mind” amount to in this connection? That is the province of mental philosophy, in which Upham and Abercrombie are authorities, but you and I are discussing theology in which you and Moses, and the “book of nature,” are your authorities. Mind certainly “plays a very conspicuous part in everything with which man has to do” (unless it is preaching), but your remark is just as true of muscle and bread and butter and money and a million other things and so what is the occasion of a remark so self-evidently true?

We don’t look “within” us except with an X-ray and you’d better leave that out.

Your statements about the hop and the bean stalk would be well enough in a lecture on botany or horticulture, but are irrelevant here. We are discussing whether or not there is a God. As a “sky-buster,” you ought to stick to your text.

As a good Prohibitionist, I may recognize some relationship between the hop and lager beer to prove the existence of a devil, but I can’t see how a hop testifies for any brand of a God that is against liquor.

You say a great mind has had to do with the framing of this universe. The Standard Dictionary defines “mind” to be “the entire psychical being of man.” Webster defines “mind” to be “the intellectual, or intelligent, power of man.”

These dictionaries agree that “mind” is a part of man, and if “mind” had anything to do with “the framing of this universe,” then man must have had something to do with “the framing of this universe,” and I reckon he didn’t. Guess you are in water over your head and you had better try to get ashore.

The opinion of Mr. B.A. Wright, in the Blade may B. Wright, or it may B. Wrong, but even if man does stand at the head of the animal creation instead of the tail of the animal creation, as there seems some reason to believe, I don’t see how that proves that there is a God. All that about “mechanical arrangement” sounds well enough if we were discussing natural philosophy or dynamics, but we are trying to find out if there is any God. You ask me: “What is it that leaves the brain at death that renders it unable to think?” I give it up; ask me something easy. But what about it? We are discussing the existence of a God, and I am a theologian and not an physiologist. Same about the origin of life. I don’t have to know or even to have an opinion on that subject. We are not discussing biology. We are talking about the existence of a God.

You talk funny. You say: “If it is a fact (and a fact it certainly is),” etc. Why say, “If it is a fact,” which expresses doubt, when you say it certainly is a fact.” which affirms that there is no doubt?

They say that death and taxes are “certain,” but the domain of the certain is very limited, and you ought to go slow in asserting the “certain.” You want to know how an idea is carried over from the mind to the nervous system.

Not my graft; didn’t even know it was carried over; thought may be it just walked over. Ask some doctor. You ask me the same question a second time, but I don’t know any more about it that I did the first time.

Same about the pumpkin—give it up. Ditto about the pig and the lamb and the goose. I used to know that one about the fox and the goose and the corn that a mans had to take over in a boat, but I am not specially good on riddles. Same way about the oak and the acorn—which was first? I can’t give my 15,000 readers the origin of a single think in this universe, even with the “God idea” in, and you say I can’t do it with the “God idea” out, so why do you keep on asking me so many hard questions? Ask me an easy one.

You say I know that this world is made up of little things, but I don’t. I didn’t even know that it was made up at all—thought may be it had been here always.

I haven’t specially “limited” myself—could write this whole paper full if I wanted to, (missing text) I think five Blades full (missing text) be a little too much of a muchness. If you are going to write any more on this subject, I would be obliged to you if you would “limit” yourself some, unless you have some argument to prove the existence of a God. Please confine yourself to that subject and discuss pigs and geese in an article to some farm journal. This is a religious paper.

That joke about my hair and whiskers is pretty good—only trouble about it is that we old Blade readers had worn it out years ago, and had let up on it; but you are probably a new beginner on the Blade and didn’t know about that. But if I were you I wouldn’t say it any more.

So much of what I’ve been reading and thinking about these last weeks involves these odd irrational slides into snarly meanness. Those idiots praying (snidely) for each other in the US is an example. It rather reminds me of a bit of footage I once saw where a Hindu woman, when asked about the fate of those people who believe in Christianity, said that when they advanced enough spiritually they would finally get it right and be reborn as Hindus. The idea  did not go down well with the predominantly conservative Christian students despite the fact that those same students, when questioned earlier, felt that unless Hindus accepted Christ as their savior, they would not be going to heaven.

We don’t seem to be able to help ourselves. We cannot seem to act reasonably when our identity narratives are shown to be just that, narratives that are not universal.

I suppose the US case bothers me because the egregious display of irrationality is setting fire to Western Civilization. There is real fear involved in the end of the American Empire and the consequences it will have before human life resettles in the coming centuries.

Despite this, my recent upset really got legs when I started to listen to the five, one-hour podcasts of Charles Taylor, the eminent Canadian philosopher who won the very prestigious Templeton Prize in 2007.

The Templeton Prize honors a living person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works. Established in 1972 by the late Sir John Templeton, the Prize aims, in his words, to identify “entrepreneurs of the spirit”—outstanding individuals who have devoted their talents to expanding our vision of human purpose and ultimate reality. The Prize celebrates no particular faith tradition or notion of God, but rather the quest for progress in humanity’s efforts to comprehend the many and diverse manifestations of the Divine.

Taylor is a practicing Roman Catholic, and while a wonderful philosopher and human being in many ways, he, nevertheless, fell prey to that need to play benevolent one-up-manship with (in this case) what he called the militant atheists. It was soooooooo depressing I had to take a break from the podcasts after hour two and I have yet to go back to the remainder.

(Don’t know about you but I find that “gentle-faced” whip-hand much more horrific than the more honest expression of simple outrage.)

What makes it so bad for me is that there is much that Taylor speaks to that makes sense. He is a devotee of Merleau-Ponty for example, and has many wise things to say about what knowledge can and cannot be. His ideas on communitarianism are outstanding and his sense of human beings as “situated selves” and “self interpreting animals” is clearly much more in line with how we actually are than the idea of us as radical individuals comprehending the world through a series of deep, logical rational structures and algorithms. In other words, we are unfolding narratives and not a series of running programs. My problem starts when it appears that Taylor conflates the unfolding narrative structure of human living with his particular narrative that casts god in its center. (Stars I hope I’m wrong about that.)

Taylor has this book called A Secular Age. I have yet to read it, although, now that I am so upset with the dude, I will.

He examines the development in “Western Christendom” of those aspects of modernity which we call secular. What he describes is in fact not a single, continuous transformation, but a series of new departures, in which earlier forms of religious life have been dissolved or destabilized and new ones have been created. As we see here, today’s secular world is characterized not by an absence of religion–although in some societies religious belief and practice have markedly declined–but rather by the continuing multiplication of new options, religious, spiritual, and anti-religious, which individuals and groups seize on in order to make sense of their lives and give shape to their spiritual aspirations. What this means for the world–including the new forms of collective religious life it encourages, with their tendency to a mass mobilization that breeds violence–is what Charles Taylor grapples with…

Sound good doesn’t it. Yet after that bit in hour-two of the podcast, a bit in which he speaks to Richard Dawkin’s brand of atheism, I have doubts about my mental stability when I get around to reading Taylor. (I have been known to throw a book or two at the wall in my ire.)

What Taylor does in that brief section is to compare the emotional quality of the religious reaction to the rise of things like Darwinism to Dawkins’ reaction to religion. What Taylor says is that the “militant atheists” thought the secular revolution was won and now, with the recent rise in religious sentiment, they are scared in the same way the bishops were with the rise in secularism: equal reactionaries. The only truth to that is that both Dawkins and the bishops displayed emotion with respect to their particular concerns. (Note: I’m off to get a written version of these lectures so I can look at this section in writing. I find it so hard to believe Taylor could be so silly. I’ll let you know what I find.)

High emotion is not enough to define whether a position is irrational. Compare: woman A is outraged at the attempted rape of her sister; woman B is outraged that woman A is mad at at woman B’s brother for attempting the rape. Woman A and B are equally outraged. Don’t you think that these two positions bespeak differing levels of rationality?

Anyway, I’m going to read a couple of Taylor’s books in a month or so (current TBR piles are perilously high and need to be whittled) and by that time I will have finished the podcasts and calmed down a bit. Hopefully he won’t do anything else to set me off again.

Then there’s Letters from the Earth which is actually the name of a book of mock letters (fragments, essays, short stories) about religious topics, not released until 1960 some 50 years after Twain’s death. A digital version of the material is made available at Sacred-Texts.com.

In this fine bit of fun there are a set of letters from Satan to his buds Michael and Gabriel. He talks, for example, about man’s pretension to being God’s pet. In addition, apparently the commandments were news to Satan, news which he found a bit hypocritical.

He was ordered into banishment for a day — the celestial day. It was a punishment he was used to, on account of his too flexible tongue. Formerly he had been deported into Space, there being nowhither else to send him, and had flapped tediously around there in the eternal night and the Arctic chill; but now it occurred to him to push on and hunt up the earth and see how the Human-Race experiment was coming along.

By and by he wrote home — very privately — to St. Michael and St. Gabriel about it.

Too flexible tongue! What a nice way of putting it.

Throughout the eleven letters Satan gets more and more appalled at what he sees so that by the time number eleven gets written Satan is a mite ticked at His Father. Still, there is humor. One of my favourite  letters in number seven. Here’s the first bit:

Noah and his family were saved — if that could be called an advantage. I throw in the if for the reason that there has never been an intelligent person of the age of sixty who would consent to live his life over again. His or anyone else’s. The Family were saved, yes, but they were not comfortable, for they were full of microbes. Full to the eyebrows; fat with them, obese with them, distended like balloons. It was a disagreeable condition, but it could not be helped, because enough microbes had to be saved to supply the future races of men with desolating diseases, and there were but eight persons on board to serve as hotels for them. The microbes were by far the most important part of the Ark’s cargo, and the part the Creator was most anxious about and most infatuated with. They had to have good nourishment and pleasant accommodations. There were typhoid germs, and cholera germs, and hydrophobia germs, and lockjaw germs, and consumption germs, and black-plague germs, and some hundreds of other aristocrats, specially precious creations, golden bearers of God’s love to man, blessed gifts of the infatuated Father to his children — all of which had to be sumptuously housed and richly entertained; these were located in the choicest places the interiors of the Family could furnish: in the lungs, in the heart, in the brain, in the kidneys, in the blood, in the guts. In the guts particularly. The great intestine was the favorite resort. There they gathered, by countless billions, and worked, and fed, and squirmed, and sang hymns of praise and thanksgiving; and at night when it was quiet you could hear the soft murmur of it. The large intestine was in effect their heaven. They stuffed it solid; they made it as rigid as a coil of gaspipe. They took pride in this. Their principal hymn made gratified reference to it:

Constipation, O Constipation,
The Joyful sound proclaim
Till man’s remotest entrail
Shall praise its Maker’s name

The discomforts furnished by the Ark were many and various. The family had to live right in the presence of the multitudinous animals, and breathe the distressing stench they make and be deafened day and night with the thunder-crash of noise their roarings and screechings produced; and in additions to these intolerable discomforts it was a peculiarly trying place for the ladies, for they could look in no direction without seeing some thousands of the creatures engaged in multiplying and replenishing. And then, there were the flies. They swarmed everywhere, and persecuted the Family all day long. They were the first animals up, in the morning, and the last ones down, at night. But they must not be killed, they must not be injured, they were sacred, their origin was divine, they were the special pets of the Creator, his darlings.

Amongst bits of behaviour that fall into this category are people who criticize new software programs without first having opened them, let alone used them, academics who write religious apologia as an academic rather than as a person of faith, people who critique books they haven’t actually read, and those who speak knowingly about subjects they don’t understand but don’t like (intuitively?) using broken logic and other acts of self-righteous justification.

What set this particular bout of irritation off? You should well ask.

Several years ago now I took a philosophy class in which a co-student gave his end of term paper presentation on the topic of why it is so difficult to be  a man of faith in these times, and why it is so easy to be an atheist.

OK, so I actually really liked the guy. He was a techie, and they tend to be my favourite kind of person. He was kind, thoughtful, caring and devoted to his family. All of these things are good things, at least to me. His particular religion doesn’t matter at all. Nor does the the fact that he sees faith as a difficult thing to maintain. I suspect that’s actually very true given  most of his life was dependent upon understanding the world of fact and science, which, of course, is one of the things continually eroding the ground on which faith is built.

What pissed me off was the fact that he thinks it’s easy to be an atheist without ever having attempted to understand what the world-view entails, and that the ease or difficulty of some position has anything whatsoever to do with its veracity. I mean Jeez dude, think. But it wasn’t my class, and I wasn’t going to step on the teacher’s toes and call him on it in class. I just let it go.

But then I ran into the very same argument yesterday on a blog. I’m not going to name it; I don’t really care what the blogger believes in, nor that s/he can’t summon up the will to think through his/her justifications for finding it difficult to maintain faith in supernatural powers. I don’t care what the blogger believes but I do care about how the blogger behaves; and the two seem clearly connected.

The obvious fact that atheism is still embattled, that one’s ability to hold a public position is compromised if one is not some sort of theist, seems to bely the position that it is easy. But this is a social sense of the word “easy.” By this sense being a Christian in North America is a much easier proposition. I suspect even being some sort of “deeply spiritual” person is easier than being an atheist in this sense.

But that word “easy” can be used in more than one way, right? I am sure that that some atheists find it easy in the way the blogger and my erstwhile co-student meant it—being a man of faith requires so much energetic creativity today, at least in the part of the world where all the facts central to our lives deny the likelihood of the objects of said faith, and none of this creativity is required of an atheist.

I do suspect it’s true that the rise in atheism of late has much to do with the hero worship inundating the four horsemen. With a mouth like the one on Hitch, what’s not to adore? Certainly our social and cultural dependency on science has much to do with the rise in athesim, as does the accumulation of data and video on the terrible behaviours of a whole historical bevy of men of faith.  I mean really, how many dead gypsies, Jews and broken towers do we need to see before that real-life horror story gets old?

Sorry. I really am irritated. I tend to rant when that happens.

Philosophy classes, like the internet, are full of people who don’t seem to understand that sliding between word meanings endangers the validity of the argument. Just because the terms “easy” and “easy” look the same doesn’t mean that their various meanings are equivalent. What is socially “easy”—as in conforming to the public sense of what is acceptable—is not the same as what is rationally “easy”— as in something so well supported by data that it’s plain silly not to “believe” in it.

Let me give you an example of rationally easy: I “believe” in the notions of force and cause and effect in the material universe. That is, I “believe” that if I throw a rock through my window I am going to break it. I don’t think that the spirit of the glass just happens to shatter itself as the spirit of the rock manifests in the space that used to be occupied by my window. It’s not only silly not to believe in force and in cause and effect in the material universe, not believing in such things bespeaks a mental discombobulation, and frankly, I’d challenge any sane person to behaviourally display such a disbelief. I mean what? They walk directly in front of speeding cars to prove that cause and effect doesn’t exist?

Gads! Such disingenuousness. Still, negotiating the divide between normal human behaviour and the proposed lack of belief in cause and effect does require enormous creativity. Some of the explanatory narratives that result are really quite interesting. Leibniz, for example.

So there’s the problem with the blogger’s lack understanding of the slipperiness of language and the frankly silly assumption that because something is difficult to maintain it is therefore more valuable. Under that guiding hand, we should still be struggling to reconcile Ptolemy with NASA’s need to get scientific instrumentation to places like Mars. Imagine, Ptolemaic rocket science! That makes me smile. Never heard of Occam?

But it doesn’t answer my question of why such normal internet thinking irritates me so deeply.

To be honest I don’t like atheism via hero-worship any better than faith by fallacious argumentation. Both are irrational. Not that there isn’t value in the irrational. Of course there is. I mean I interpret dreams, read tarot, read Leibniz and Deleuze for goodness sake. But one “belief” is not like another. The belief in cause and effect in the material universe is not the same as a belief in supernatural forces. It’s one of those slippery words, like “easy” or “theory”.

It’s “just a theory“…. that one is getting really old since it displays such a willful ignorance and the deeply disrespectful act of not even attempting to understand that which you repudiate. And this is what bothers me, I suppose. It’s the blatant disrespect, not only of me—which doesn’t matter since the blogger doesn’t know me, and my erstwhile co-student was intent on defending himself from my perspicacity—but also illustrates a deep disrespect of himself and his attendant beliefs.

You really care so little about what you believe that you cannot be bothered to think it through cleanly? I value what you believe more than that, and I don’t share in it.

But I suspect what is even deeper, and why the thorn of it still lingers after several years, is that it appears like my co-student and the blogger don’t value reason at all. They don’t reason because they don’t trust it. They think feeling is a better guide to human happiness. Romantics they are, alive and well long after Wordsworth climbed that particular mountain. Of course the problem is that reason and feeling are not seperable functions in the human mind and so such contemporary Romantics, untutored in sound logic because of culturally received distrust, use an ill-formed and non-viable “logic” to support their faith in their feeling – what the blogger called common sense. But still it comes down to a lack of respect of their own mind, of the very feeling function they so assiduously defend. Without sound reasoning feeling abhors human life. Just ask Phineas Gage. Or Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger.

Feeling, like reason, is critical to human life. This is why I am so fascinated by religiousity. It is a primary site of feeling in human beings and a site where narrative, feeling, reason and the material world meet. Religion might be wrong in its analysis of the material world, but it is still vastly important because it is a key part of the human analysis of human life. It is a phenomenological database. Religion and our metaphysical concepts of reality are, along with art, by far the best source of data that we have for what it feels like to be a human being.

Because of the importance of religion and spirituality in the human universe, just because you believe it to be materially true as well as narratively true, doesn’t give you a pass on treating the phenomenon with respect. Religion is dangerous and deeply human. Treating it with the disrespect attendant upon your use of faulty logic is like a cat fancier turning her back on a ravenous lion. Stupid, man. Stupid.

And that’s what bothers me the most. It’s so deeply stupid to take your life so lightly.

Our religions have not yet given us the rules and guidance for our relationship with Gaia. The humanist concept of sustainable development and the Christian concept of stewardship are flawed by unconscious hubris. We have neither the knowledge nor the capacity to achieve them. We are no more qualified to be the stewards or developers of the Earth than are goats to be gardeners.

Taylor quotes the passage in an early section called “living examples of dark green religion.” I love the phrase “goats to be gardeners”. It so simply portrays a situation where our natural inclination, our very talents and physicality, makes it all but impossible for us to do certain things. Goats have the talent of surviving nearly anywhere and they do that by getting every ounce of flora that is to be had in an area. Of course that means they denude a landscape. Very much like us. I’ve always thought the Jesus metaphor should have portrayed him as the shepherd who walked along behind his goats. It would have been so much more metaphorically accurate.

Anyway, whatever you belief about the existence of Gaia, Lovelock’s analogy is apt. We are very goat-like with respect to our talents for environmental transformation. Now you may say that we are much more aware than goats—the existence of National Parks is evidence that we can control ourselves.

I’d say that is both true and trivial.

The areas where we cannot control ourselves seem to me to be far more ultimately destructive and one of those is our need to reason from what it is like to be human to what it must be like to be non-human. It’s a bit like the is→ought fallacy: I feel I have a “self” therefore there must be a “self” as part of any complex, or living, organism. Bullshit, of course.

What I’m talking about here is the process of embodied cognition and its rational consequences. The fact that reasoning for human beings is something we cannot help but do, just as goats cannot stop before they uproot the plant and destroy its ability to return, makes the process of reasoning something critical to understand if we are to figure out when it misleads us and when it doesn’t.

We are such spectacular successes as technological animals that it seems impossible to argue that our brand of reasoning doesn’t work. We were, after all, evolved inside the environment in which our embodied reasoning takes place, so of course it fits. When we reason about distance and the control of objects based on our bodily experience of extending our arms and legs and picking up things from the ground, such extensions work so well they are essentially invisible. It just seems obvious, all of a piece, natural. We don’t think about it at all. To reach for things, is to grasp them, to understand. It seems so very clear that this is the way to handle the world. It works. We reach out with our minds and grasp a situation. We must, therefore, have it in hand. It’s such a horrible surprise to find that what we thought we had grasped, what we are so very sure we had understood, turns out to vanish while we watch. A phantasm.

And how we experience things is vitally important and horrifically strong. We have built-in images of which we are profoundly sure. It is most disconcerting to have these disconfirmed. Like an apotemnophiliac or a somatoparaphreniac we can sometimes refuse the evidence of our eyes and hands and insist that the evidence of error is not there, or insist that it be removed at once so that our inner sense of what is true remains unchallenged.

Some bits of our embodied reasoning are less sure than our assumptions about understanding and directly grasping the world or the ones that work like body image and body integrity. Like why is “up” associated with “good,” why “black” with “evil”, these kinds of metaphorical reasoning have long bothered. Religious and moral reasoning is of this sort. Still, like the concept of “grasping” as “understanding”, moral thinking is also a metaphorical extension of our bodily experience. We are deeply (largely, but not completely, unconsciously) aware of the dangers of being “down” and “in the dark.” Another example: that there must be a being to which we turn is a natural extension for a species that is fundamentally dependent on other existent, and more powerful, members of the same species to enable individual existence. Nothing in our evolution or our individual development leads us to bodily experience radical individualism. We are all dependent on the existence of others.

We can do nothing about this capacity to think through bodily metaphor except pay attention to our doing of it. We think through our body’s experience of life. Yet by paying attention to a limitation we can become conscious of doing it and try to circumvent the worst of its effects. I doubt we’ll ever be able to forgo the feeling that there must be a “self” like ours out there but we can recognize that it is an illusion of the sort that confuses us—as do all those wonderful optical illusions. Like the Müller-Lyer illusion, we are built to work with a specific kind of environment, to enable us to survive its demands. We are not built to perceive accurately; we are built to perceive effectively.

The concept of “self” is something that corresponds to the “error” in our reading the length of the arrows in the Müller-Lyer illusion through our bodily knowledge of depth perception. The “self” provides a perceptual tool akin to reading a 3D world. A “self” is something that is meant to interpret a social situation that has immense importance to human survival. Just as we see those line segments as being of different lengths because normally in a 3D world they would be, so reading the “self” onto others works for us because in the case of human society the other will have an experience of self like our own.The problem is that we don’t stop at other humans. We read everything that way, especially anything that triggers “other” like a feeling of awe, or the appearance of a big head and big eyes. Of course outside human society such a reading is almost certainly not true.

So? Well let me give you an example of how this kind of misapplied thinking can create more problems than it solves. For a long time women were thought to be misproportioned men, missing a vital bit of anatomy. Need I say more?

I think saving the earth is rather important; our lives probably depend upon it. And while it is true that the feelings of awe, reverence, wonder and the like that Taylor construes as Dark Green Religion can be seen as a new religion, is this the most useful way of doing so? Will it accomplish what Taylor wants—the change of our behaviour to reduce our goat-like destructiveness? Probably not if we keep using the same kind of logical patterns that created much of the problem in the first place. The thing is that those nasties seem to be tied up with the inherent bodily logic of the human religious impulse, tied as it is to seeing echoes of ourselves in the world around us. What I think we need to do is see that this is an illusion, and not despise it, but just recognize that it is not a true representation of the non-human other.

If we can do that, then maybe we can get down to the business of finding a more accurate metaphor for what is in fact the case in all things non-human, i.e. that they are not human. That they are something quite else.

Nevertheless, I wish that physicists would refrain from using the word God in their special metaphorical sense. The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.

Here’s how Taylor brings this into his discussion in Dark Green Religion:

Dawkins contended that it is “destructively misleading” when scientists label as religious their aesthetic and affective experiences when contemplating nature because “for the vast majority of people, ‘religious’ implies “supernatural.’ ” Dawkins even declared that it is “intellectual high treason” when atheists and others who do not really believe in the “interventionist, miracle wreaking…prayer answering God” confuse people with pantheistic or other religious language.

Do you see the twist? It made me mad, I must admit. But then I thought, what is this evidence of?

I mean, does Taylor think it’s OK to confuse readers with terminology? Of course not. Taylor is a scholar so terminology is important to him. I mean what is scholarship except the careful increase of epistemological clarity? That’s why Taylor spent so much time defining “religion.” He’s trying to be clear about why it is OK to call “religious” those persons who don’t believe in anything apart from the material world. Of course Dawkins’ argument is that this isn’t good enough. His reason? That to mix terms that sound alike / religion and religion or god and god / but mean radically different things is guaranteed to confuse the issue.

Revisit Wittgenstein’s language games and my earlier post on the term “evidence.” Why do that? What is it about religious terminology that Taylor really needs for his project? What about it makes it worth the confusion such religious terminology brings with it?

That’s a question I wish he would answer for me, because I don’t think it is necessary. That’s why I posted the underlying framework that gets beyond religious terminology.

Finally, what Dawkins said in that quote above is that the pantheistic god of the scientists does not equate with the personal god of most Western religious practitioners and that he is not criticizing the pantheistic god of the scientists with the same criteria as he does the idea and consequence of a belief in a personal god. Taylor seems to misread the passage as Dawkins inveighing against pantheism as he does against those religions with a personal god. Based on the quote above, this is simply not true. Bad, Taylor, bad.

Let me give you an example: am I a not-man?

Well, as a woman it is true that I am not a man. But if you try to define me as a not-man to my face, you are going to rapidly have one less eye-ball. I mean men have been trying really hard for a long, long time to define women as not-men. It’s called misogyny. When you set up a definition as a negative, you set the terms of the discourse in the hands of your “opponent.” If I defined myself as a not-man, I have then said that men are the “norm” and I am to measure myself against that standard – even if I rebel, fight, hiss and spit.

Men do not get to define me. Not no how. I define myself based on my own experiences, my own behaviours, my own desires, my own society.

(If you are a man reading this – try defining yourself in public as a not-woman for a week. Just a week. See what happens.)

In just the same way, theists should not get to define the terms of discourse for all of us with respect to interpreting human life. And that is what happens if you define yourself as their opponent.

I am not a not-man. I am a woman. There is a profound difference in power with the two definitions. Take a lesson from feminism; define yourself as something positive and not as someone else’s opponent, because if you do that you are going to have to carry them everywhere for fear that you will cease to exist should they go away.

Agnostics are not cowards. Atheists and theists are cowards because they are the people that are too fearful to live without knowing. So great is their fear that they ignore reason and simply fabricate reality to their liking.

My little reflection essay: I think of myself as an athiest but not as a coward and I know guango’s mind well enough to know he has strongly logical reasons to present his view about atheism this way. So immediately upon reading the post topic, given my predispositions, my mind went squirreling off to find a way to make both my sense of myself and guango’s experience both truthful representations of how the world of belief is. Because, of course, agnosticism, atheism and theism are all beliefs. Dictionary.com says of belief:

1. something believed; an opinion or conviction: a belief that the earth is flat. 2. confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof: a statement unworthy of belief. 3. confidence; faith; trust: a child’s belief in his parents. 4. a religious tenet or tenets; religious creed or faith: the Christian belief.

Despite being one word, “belief” is really many things. These various “things” can be expressed as vectors. A pair of commensurable vectors form an axis. One vector, for example, carries an increasing reliance on empirical evidence to support belief, and in the other direction, reliance on emotional states and social structures to support belief. The two together form an axis along which the various manifestations of belief – as they are expressed in human behaviour and discourse – can be positioned. We could name these vectors in a number of ways, but here I will use the terminology of the dictionary.com definition. (There’s a graphic representation at the end of this post to make these distinctions visual.)

The first pair of vectors:

“Opinion” here references the evidentiary vector; “confidence” references the emotional vector. Hence, having the “opinion” that the earth is flat, for example, is really very different than having “confidence” in the truth of the statement “the earth is flat.” Opinion implies that this matter of believing the earth is flat is open to evidential support so that if someone comes along that shows us that the earth is in fact round, then the opinion is changed. In other words, having an opinion that the earth is flat is (dis)provable because it rests on a body of evidence.

Having “confidence in the truth” is something altogether different. It rests on emotion, not evidence. If, for whatever reason, it is terribly important to you that the earth be flat, then evidence is not likely to effect your “confidence.” What changes this kind of belief is not evidence but emotional pressure, or emotional opportunity. So for example, if the world is flat, then going to the Americas to garner the wealth of others is not possible. If the world is round, it may be tough to do but it is possible. The desire for wealth weakened the “confidence” provided by the then current theology-science to the point that having confidence in a flat earth became an opinion about the flat earth, which belief then became open to change by a preponderance of evidence. And now, of course, there are very few people who believe that the earth is flat, and certainly it is no longer central to our concept of self.

Another example: I know a young man who was raised in a fundamentalist home. He was always, I suspect, a bit of an outsider. For one thing he has a higher than normal IQ. He has told me stories of his early years and his flight from the community. What he says is that he found out they were lying to him. He had found science in a library and realized that the stories about the age of the earth, etc. were simply not empirically true as had been claimed. But it wasn’t the evidence per se that booted him out of his family and religious community, it was his outrage at having been lied to. Emotional pressure; and later, an opportunity to develop his sense of autonomy, to pursue the life that he wanted: these things were made possible by his outrage and its consequences.

It has cost him though. The pressure of exile is never easy for any human being. Sometimes those things in which we have “confidence” are such that if we give them up, if we try to shift our emotional needs to another set of beliefs, we simply lose too much. The young man lost his community and faces the deeply saddened looks (probably mixed with anger and contempt although the young man did not say this) of his mother and father, who really do have confidence that their son is going to hell.

The thing is that there is the same thing in some parts of the atheist community. There, if you play with the notions that come with the idea of a transcendent reality, you get the same looks as the young man gets from his parents. Of course not all atheists do this, and not all religious people need to be RIGHT. But the young man comes from a fundamentalist community and the need to be RIGHT is what, in part, makes them fundamentalists. Human beings are prone to this need. I think this is what guango is referring to when he says atheists and theists fabricate reality. I think he is referring to the kind of person who think they KNOW.

So there is an axis along which “belief” slides. On one end there is “evidence” and I have called that vector “opinion,” and at the other end there is “confidence” which rests on emotional and social supports. Belief in something can be further analyzed with a second pair of vectors. Context, or to what the “belief” is being pointed is the basis of this second axis.

The second pair of vectors:

When I say “I do not believe in god” what I am “pointing” at is human history. The human representations – Zeus, Odin, Isis, Bumba, Eshu, Astarte, Demuzi, Dionysus, Kali, Amaterasu, Yahweh, Allah – are what I do not believe in. I am saying that I understand there there is a “sense” in which these ideas of divinity exist but I am also saying that the referent to which they point is a human idea or a set of social events and not a (non)corporeal being. And since I understand the person to be inquiring as to my belief in the literal existence of Zeus-Allah, I respond with “I am an atheist.” Having said this, could I be wrong about this lack of literal existence? Sure. Is it likely? No.

The thing is that my response to questions about my belief in transcendental or other non-corporeal realities is gauged based on where I think the person “lives” on the graph below. In another context, with someone else, if asked do I believe in god, I would have to say I have no idea. Do I have an opinion about the possibility of some non-corporeal powerful intelligence? Nope. No way to think about such a thing; no evidence for or against. In fact, it’s not really thinkable for human beings: we inevitably reduce such a potential to some human imaginative creation that is based on our metaphorical representations of existence. This is as we were wired to do, so it isn’t surprising and in Star Trek that’s fun, luminous intelligent clouds and such. As part of political or educational decision making, it isn’t. So really, as in most things human, context is everything.

A bit more about the following graph:

If I were to draw a cloud over it to show the density of individuals falling along these two axes, I would say (an opinion) that the heaviest representation would be over the inner portion of the lower-right quadrant and the lightest representation would be over the extremes of any of the four quarters. I do think that at the extreme upper right a person here cannot say that they know anything for certain, because all things (well except for Descartes’ “I exist”) can be doubted. A person here always references evidence and always points to the inferred referent of any statement. Because the state or even existence of the said referent can always be doubted, there can be no incontrovertible evidence, and therefore, no incontrovertible truth. This is a “true” agnostic, in the sense that they are a philosophical agnostic. And this is not a cowardly position. It simply doesn’t care about the other three quadrants of the graph because the bases on which those others declaim their positions are not logically sound.

The thing is, does this matter? I’m not really sure about that. People are wavery when it comes to the practice of reasoning, that’s just how we are. It seems futile to expect consistent rationality when it so clearly does not exist as we have defined it in our philosophy.

Most agnostics fit into quadrants other than the upper-right. Some will be agnostic because it is what is least socially divisive. Some will say “I don’t know” because they are on an inner journey that simply hasn’t reached any coherence with respect to their sense of self yet. These are more methodological agnostics.

Personally, I think one enviable human attribute is the ability to slide one’s understanding along each of these axes to mentally embrace (temporarily) the various cognitive positions that these vectors make possible. In this way, even though each person has a “home” position, actual communication (as opposed to positional posturing) becomes possible.

This, I think, is deeply courageous, especially for those whose “home” is further along the “confidence” vector. So to respond to the question of courage and cowardice: It is difficult to live with the fact that philosophically we cannot know, that we are all, at this level, necessary agnostics, but it is easier for some of us than others. How difficult it is for you depends on where on the graph you live. So to me, the most deeply courageous of all are those, whether agnostic, atheist or theist, who habitually cognitively locate themselves in the lower-right of the graph, who then force themselves to slide toward the “referent” and to “opinion.” That takes far more courage, I would think, than philosophical agnosticism takes for a person on the upper right.

In the introduction to the book Versluis remarks that until recently the currents of esotericism in American history have not been much researched. What he says is that “there was not much reliable scholarship on Western esotericism.” Delightful.

The subtext, of course, is that there is much unreliable scholarship on the subject. Hence, my difficulty when first contemplating graduate school. I wanted to study the practice of magic amongst white middle class people in North America and my faculty wouldn’t let me. They were doing it to protect me of course. It was not a respectable topic: it was one that would have ended my academic career before it began. I could study Indians (and did) because I had familial links to Indian Country and because everyone knows that Indian magic is something suitable for academic discourse. Sometimes!: What a silly world I live in: just sayin’.

Perhaps Verluis’ book marks a change? It was published by Oxford University Press afterall.

What fascinates me about the academic taboo is that it takes place in a world that is heavily into magical thinking. Think about the percentage of Americans that claim for themselves religiosity. Even more telling to me are the number of people deeply afraid of atheism – as if it were some kind of magically infectious understanding – as if being an atheist is the result of some kind of demonic possession that can spread like an air-borne virus. I can’t help but think that only someone who cannot break the back of magical thinking needs to be so afraid of someone else’s ability to do so.

So if Verluis’s book does indicate something about the mental state of academia then perhaps all the work done by “rabid” atheists is really having some effect. Interesting if so. Might explain some of the recent resurgence of the religious right – the traditional flailing of the drowning man. Then again the resurgence could just be another of America’s “Great Awakenings.” The only way to tell is time and rigorous study.

Maybe I’ll do a PhD afterall?