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Those with No Allegiance to Reality

Some time ago, religious activist Be Scofield published an article criticizing atheists who say that religion is harmful, because they haven’t shown that concrete harms have resulted from the beliefs and practices of each of over 4,000 distinct religious groups. According to Scofield, organized religions often provide social services that aren’t available elsewhere, and religious belief has assisted marginalized groups in building community, developing personal identity, and resisting oppression. At the time, I sensed that he was somehow missing the point about the harms of religious belief, but I couldn’t quite pin down where exactly this argument went wrong.

More recently, Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum claimed it was largely irrelevant that 46% of Americans believe human beings were created by God within the past 10,000 years, because not believing in evolution has very little impact on people’s everyday lives. Instead, Drum noted that such a profession of belief is just a “cultural signifier” that they use to identify themselves as Christians. Again, it seemed that he had failed to grasp something essential about people’s beliefs, but I was still at a loss to describe the precise nature of the error.

And then I found a post from a Tumblr user who was looking for a religion that could account for what they perceived as a spiritual dimension and “sacred” nature of transgender people. When others questioned whether subscribing to a religion was necessarily a good idea, they responded:

There are reasons to hold a belief other than epistemological. If you’re better off for believing something, and you aren’t hurting others with that belief, that is sufficient reason to believe it.

That was when the mistake common to these examples became clear: These people have misunderstood the concept of belief itself, and in doing so, they encourage misuse of the very action of believing. They don’t seem to comprehend what a belief actually is, or what beliefs are for, and so they’ve mistakenly labeled a number of distinct concepts as “beliefs”. This can generate significant confusion in any discussion about belief, so it’s important to distinguish the different meanings that people intend when they refer to “belief”.

Belief is typically understood to denote a person’s idea that something is true – that is, they regard a certain state of affairs as actually being the case in the real world. If they believe “snow is white”, this is meant to correspond to the fact that snow is indeed white in reality. This should be pretty basic stuff, but it soon becomes vastly more complicated due to the many roles that people have repurposed “belief” to serve.

Beliefs are part of the larger category of functional ideas. They specifically function to represent reality and create an internal model of the world, offering people the ability to understand how things relate to one another, identify why things happen, and predict what may happen in the future. Obviously, a person’s belief does not cease to be a belief if it’s inaccurate or outright wrong. It’s still a belief as long as they consider it a genuine map of reality, even if this is actually incorrect.

All beliefs are functional ideas, but not all functional ideas are beliefs. Ideas can serve purposes other than generating a model of the real world. They might instead provide personal emotional comfort, encourage social cohesion, promote charity activities, be appreciated aesthetically for their perceived elegance, make someone seem interesting for how obscure and esoteric their ideas are, indicate membership in a certain group and aid a person in fitting in with them, or be seen as virtuous to profess a belief in or attempt to believe in even if you don’t actually believe it.

All of these purposes are completely unrelated to belief itself – the matter of whether the ideas in question are true or not. An idea which serves these purposes may also be a belief, if someone genuinely holds it to be reflective of reality. But if it isn’t meant as a statement about what they consider to be true in reality, it’s not a belief. It’s just a functional idea.

When people treat all ideas which serve these purposes as also being beliefs, the resulting confusion knows no limit. Collapsing these distinct categories into one group labeled “beliefs” suggests that these other functions have some bearing on whether a belief is actually true. They don’t, but treating them as if they do can badly compromise the goal of beliefs: accurately representing the real world. That’s what makes this conflation so insidious, and that’s why such cavalier and careless approaches to belief are so frustrating.

Certainly people still regard beliefs as being about what’s true, even when using them in a way that doesn’t reflect this at all, and this requires redefining truth as well. Instead of defining their beliefs solely by what they regard the state of reality to be, what they see as true about the world is now defined by whatever they “believe” in this new sense of the word, which is determined by any number of purposes other than modeling reality. When representing the state of the world is just one purpose of belief among many, this can become secondary to other considerations.

What Scofield, Drum, and the seeker of transgender spirituality are telling us is that they are completely okay with the obsolescence of belief as a map of reality. To them, belief need not be tied to reality at all. Scofield is quite confident that religious belief can be good for people and societies, and this apparently outweighs any potential impact of holding beliefs that are actually false or basing one’s beliefs on how useful they are to individuals and groups. Drum protests that disbelief of evolution isn’t a cause of any harm, while failing to consider what it might be a symptom of. And our spiritual seeker cuts right to the heart of it: “There are reasons to hold a belief other than epistemological”, and one of those reasons is how good it makes you feel.

For all of their focus on whether beliefs are good or bad, harmful or harmless, they’ve paid little attention to the consequences of decoupling beliefs that are putatively about reality from reality itself. If you can believe whatever you like because of how you feel about it, and truth is just one aspect of belief among many (if it’s present at all), facts about the world can be helpless to alter your beliefs. Reality is now only a single factor that holds no privileged status here.

And if a belief comes to serve a deep emotional need, the cost of finding a replacement for this role may be unbearable, so anything that contradicts this belief must be denied and disregarded in order to preserve it. Just one strongly valued belief that must be protected at any cost is all it takes to distort someone’s entire world view. Any other belief or fact that might be connected to this will be filtered through the lens of the security blanket belief that cannot be denied.

Maybe you’re a transhumanist who takes great pleasure in the thought that a technological Singularity will inevitably occur in the near future, solving every problem and ending all suffering, so you might mentally downplay anything that suggests this might not happen instead of adjusting your beliefs accordingly. Or you could be a recently converted Catholic who’s so excited about your newfound religion that you’ll overlook your disagreement with the church’s official views on homosexuality and chalk it up to mere “confusion” on your part, rather than admitting that the church might just be wrong.

Perhaps you’re enthusiastic about the idea that cryonic preservation of your brain for future revival will allow you to live indefinitely, and so you don’t take any evidence of the shortcomings of current cryopreservation techniques quite as seriously as you should. Or you might be so attached to the supposed inerrancy of the Bible that you find yourself defending American slavery, because you can’t bring yourself to say that the Bible could be mistaken about the practice.

This is what can happen when your beliefs are determined by emotional need, social benefits, group identification, a perceived virtue in the act of belief itself, or anything other than reality. The possibilities for denial and distortion are as limitless as human emotional attachments. And when holding a certain belief becomes that important in people’s lives, it may become necessary for them to act in a way consistent with that belief on an individual or collective level, in order to keep up the internal charade that this belief is about reality.

Allowing your needs and social concerns to influence your beliefs – your mental model of reality – is not just a harmless personal indulgence, even if it may seem that way due to how universal confirmation bias and wishful thinking are. But defenders of faith like Be Scofield are unashamedly suggesting that the truth does not matter, and ensuring that our beliefs mirror reality is unnecessary. In doing so, they grant people an explicit license to believe anything they feel is good or necessary for them. And they don’t seem to have any grasp of the boundless epistemic chaos that they’re leaving everyone to languish in. They’re prepared to cultivate an approach to reality that revolves around believing whatever you find most comfortable and enjoyable, and they’re really trying to say that there is no harm in this.

But at the end of the day, the truth is not determined by what makes you feel warm and safe. It is not determined by what gets you the most friends. It is not determined by what makes people be nice to each other. It is not determined by a cost-benefit analysis of holding a certain belief. It is determined by reality. And those who willingly compromise their understanding of reality still have to live in it. They just might find themselves without a decent map.

Those with No Allegiance to Reality

Professional heterosexual Matt Barber writes about tackling gay people

In a letter to “average, ordinary gay people”, he says:

If you have a loved one, blindfolded and running full speed toward cliff’s edge, do you not yell, stop! Would you not run after them, even tackling them if need be to prevent them from plummeting to certain death? What would we think of the person who said: “Keep running; all is well.”

All is not well, and you know it. On this path, “it” decidedly does not “get better.” It only gets worse. You will fall and you will die – perhaps not physical death, straight away – but certainly, an emotional and spiritual death. Homosexual activists, “progressives,” Hollywood, the media, academia and popular culture are telling you to keep running.

I’m yelling, stop!

Professional heterosexual Matt Barber writes about tackling gay people

Guest post: Is Feminism About Choice?

by Heather

Recently, as I was procrastinating something important or another, I came across a picture on somebody’s Tumblr. It was a silly graphic of a woman shaving her legs, and it said, “To me, feminism means choice. I can choose to shave my legs, and I can choose not to. There is no right answer, one option does not make me any more or less of a feminist than the other. I can shave or not shave. Whatever the hell I want to because it’s my choice!” This was reblogged hundreds of times and posted on Reddit and various other places online. It received quite a lot of support.

I find this disturbing. It’s as though somebody took the entire lexicon of feminist theory, feminist literature, history of feminism, and women’s studies, and then crossed out billions and billions of words and circled the one that justified literally anything they wanted. Feminism is not about choice. Feminism is about equality of the sexes.

Does the word “choice” sometimes occur in arguments and discussion about women’s equality? Absolutely. We want choices. We want our choices to be sexy, be parents, or be feminine to necessitate sacrifice no greater or lesser than those of our male counterparts. We want to be attractive and have sex without being reduced to a sex class, where every inch of skin, pound of fat, and follicle of hair on our bodies are monitored for youthfulness and open to all for comment. We want to choose to be parents without having to choose between putting brand new babies in expensive daycare ten hours a day, or lose our careers entirely. Those are the choices we want. Those are the choices we don’t have.

When a woman chooses to shave her legs, she is making a choice that has absolutely no negative consequences, real or imagined. For feminism was never about not shaving legs. It was never about being sexually unappealing, not having children, or not sleeping with men. In fact, when a woman “chooses” to shave her legs, she is choosing a course of action that will earn her approval from men and women alike. When a woman chooses not to shave her legs or underarms, she is making a choice that will earn her almost universal disapproval. Her femininity and heterosexuality (if she is heterosexual) will both be called into question. Her politics will be assumed radical and man-hating. Her decision will be considered an aggressive rejection of men, sex, and femininity. She will have broken the barriers of her class, assigned by her sex, and for that she will be rejected and punished. The choices to wear makeup to work and parties, or not, follow the same lines of consequences, as do the choices to battle wrinkles and gray hair or not, eat daintily or not.

Nonetheless, a choice either way on any of those questions does not determine whether a person is feminist or not. The defining choice that determines whether or not a person is feminist is whether they’re going to be satisfied with the unequal set of choices they have. It is the choice between being complacent with a society that teaches us that we must put financial independence and ourselves second to men and babies, or wanting a better reality that gives us the options to have both, as men have had since the beginning of time. The future of feminism is in breaking the glass ceiling, unraveling the sex classing of women, and equalizing the sacrifices of parenting and careers between the sexes. It has nothing to do with the state of your legs.

Guest post: Is Feminism About Choice?

Congratulations, Leah Libresco

I’d like to congratulate formerly atheist blogger Leah Libresco of Unequally Yoked on her recent conversion to Roman Catholicism. Particularly, I applaud her choice to join an institution that officially regards any same-sex sexual activity as “acts of grave depravity”, “intrinsically disordered” and “contrary to the natural law”, claims that it does “not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity” and that “the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder”, demands lifelong celibacy of gay people, and has repeatedly solicited donations from its parishioners to fund campaigns to ban gay marriage in multiple states.

Additionally, I’m quite proud of her for choosing to become part of a religion that disallows any use of birth control for controlling birth, condemns any sexual activity that can’t result in pregnancy, excommunicated a nun for approving of an 11-week abortion to save a woman’s life rather than letting both the woman and her fetus die, and then revoked the Catholic affiliation of the hospital in question when its management refused to deny life-saving abortions in the future – because saving women’s lives did not reflect “authentic Catholic moral teaching”.

Congratulations on prioritizing whatever it is you prioritize over this.

Congratulations, Leah Libresco

Using "gay" as an insult should never be tolerated

A Tumblr user wrote today:

this is like when the lgbt community gets really, really angry about the word ‘gay’. Is it privileged and bigoted? Yes. Are you really getting anything done by yelling at straight people (and gay people) that use the word? No. You are just pissing people off and turning them off your cause, even the people that should, by all rights, be PART of your cause.

The use of “gay” as an insult is an issue that’s important enough to take a stand on even if it does cost us potential allies. When we tell people that it’s hurtful and harmful for them to use the very word we’re named as a synonym for anything and everything that’s negative and dislikable, that is a matter of basic respect. It is probably about as basic as this can possibly get: don’t use who we are to mean something bad. Taking a minority group’s name for your own use as an all-occasions pejorative is not merely disrespectful – it’s just about the most obvious way that you can tell us, “WE THINK WHAT YOU ARE IS BAD.”

If that isn’t what you mean to convey, then you need to stop using language in such a way that you openly associate the very names of minorities with everything you dislike. This goes beyond merely implying that gay people are bad. It’s tantamount to stating it outright. Is it okay to say that someone “Jewed” you out of something? Or that something that isn’t working must be “n*****-rigged”? Would any amount of “I didn’t mean it like that” rationalization make that alright? No one should ever think this is acceptable, yet so many people are under the impression that it’s a-okay to do this to gay people. Why? Because it’s a more recent development in language? Because social disapproval of this usage isn’t widespread enough yet? Because they just really like using the word? It doesn’t matter. It’s not okay.

If being asked to stop using our identity as an insult is all it takes to alienate potential allies, let me make it very clear that I do not care. I do not intend to sacrifice my own self-respect just to gain the support of people who can’t even bring themselves to listen to us and respect us in this most basic and minimal way. Are those the allies we want? Can they even be called allies in any meaningful sense?

Using "gay" as an insult should never be tolerated

Using “gay” as an insult should never be tolerated

A Tumblr user wrote today:

this is like when the lgbt community gets really, really angry about the word ‘gay’. Is it privileged and bigoted? Yes. Are you really getting anything done by yelling at straight people (and gay people) that use the word? No. You are just pissing people off and turning them off your cause, even the people that should, by all rights, be PART of your cause.

The use of “gay” as an insult is an issue that’s important enough to take a stand on even if it does cost us potential allies. When we tell people that it’s hurtful and harmful for them to use the very word we’re named as a synonym for anything and everything that’s negative and dislikable, that is a matter of basic respect. It is probably about as basic as this can possibly get: don’t use who we are to mean something bad. Taking a minority group’s name for your own use as an all-occasions pejorative is not merely disrespectful – it’s just about the most obvious way that you can tell us, “WE THINK WHAT YOU ARE IS BAD.”

If that isn’t what you mean to convey, then you need to stop using language in such a way that you openly associate the very names of minorities with everything you dislike. This goes beyond merely implying that gay people are bad. It’s tantamount to stating it outright. Is it okay to say that someone “Jewed” you out of something? Or that something that isn’t working must be “n*****-rigged”? Would any amount of “I didn’t mean it like that” rationalization make that alright? No one should ever think this is acceptable, yet so many people are under the impression that it’s a-okay to do this to gay people. Why? Because it’s a more recent development in language? Because social disapproval of this usage isn’t widespread enough yet? Because they just really like using the word? It doesn’t matter. It’s not okay.

If being asked to stop using our identity as an insult is all it takes to alienate potential allies, let me make it very clear that I do not care. I do not intend to sacrifice my own self-respect just to gain the support of people who can’t even bring themselves to listen to us and respect us in this most basic and minimal way. Are those the allies we want? Can they even be called allies in any meaningful sense?

Using “gay” as an insult should never be tolerated

Heritage Foundation baffled by criticism of flawed "same-sex parenting" study

The homophobic right-wing seems genuinely taken aback at how poorly received their precious Regnerus study has been. Clearly, being widely and loudly called out on shoddy science with a hateful agenda isn’t something they’re used to. And in another decade, these results might have been accepted at face value despite the study’s many flaws, simply because it aligned with the conventional wisdom of the time that gay people must be bad for children, society, and everything. This is no longer the case – these traditional assumptions aren’t assumed anymore, and the anti-gay movement have found themselves out of their element.

In their shock that someone would dare question their latest instrument of propaganda, the Heritage Foundation asks, “Why the Liberal Intolerance for New Family Structures Study?” To them, criticism of methodology is actually just a matter of partisan politics. This isn’t just deception, but self-deception: by characterizing any disagreement with this study as rooted purely in personal political opinion, it becomes completely acceptable for them to endorse its results without acknowledging or understanding its numerous errors. It’s no longer a question of reality and sound science – it’s “us vs. them”:

The author of a new study showing some negative outcomes for young adults whose parents had same-sex relationships is under attack because his findings conflict with what, in some corners, has become conventional wisdom.

Wrong! This study is not being criticized because some people found its results to be disagreeable. It is being criticized because its definitions, analysis, and conclusions are misleading and unsupported by the data. It’s been criticized because it used even a single occurrence of any same-sex relationship involving a parent to define that parent as a “lesbian mother” or a “gay father”. It’s been criticized because Regnerus treated these parents as representative of “same-sex parents” when a vast majority of their children spent fewer than four years living in a household with same-sex parents. It’s been criticized because its sample of “same-sex parents”, even by Regnerus’ distorted and practically useless definition, is too small to draw valid conclusions from.

Apparently, the idea that there is “no difference” between children of same-sex parents and their peers raised in traditional married mother-and-father households has become so entrenched among some advocates that new research presenting a contrasting picture is unwelcome—to put it mildly.

No! This study is not unwelcome because it contradicts an “entrenched” idea. It is unwelcome because it uses bad science to portray same-sex parents as being incompetent. It is unwelcome because Regnerus openly admits to boosting the sample sizes of his “lesbian mothers” and “gay fathers” groups (which, again, were defined in a ridiculous manner that defies all sense) by packing them with the children of divorced families, step-families and single parents, and because he then compared these groups to children whose biological parents were married throughout their entire childhood. It is unwelcome because he did not compare children who were raised by their married biological parents until the age of 18 to children who were raised by married same-sex couples until the age of 18. It is unwelcome because he ruthlessly stacked the deck against these badly defined “lesbian mothers” and “gay fathers” groups in a way that no one could avoid noticing, and then used these erroneous conclusions to attack actual same-sex parents who were underrepresented in his study, to the extent that they were represented at all.

And these are the folks who urge us to be tolerant of differences and respect scientific research.

Incorrect! We do not accept methodological flaws as simply a matter of personal “differences”. We do not respect “scientific research” that is poorly interpreted and used – indeed, seemingly designed – to perpetuate untruths. We do not respect just any damn thing that someone manages to publish in a journal, without examining its contents and verifying the soundness of the research. And we do not consider blind acceptance of faulty science, with results that will be deceptively used as a weapon of ignorance against same-sex parents and our children for the rest of our natural lives, to be a requirement of tolerance. The Heritage Foundation ought to tolerate Regnerus’ own admission that his study was completely unable to produce useful data about children from stable households with same-sex parents, and respect the fact that the study’s design does not support their assertion that its results are representative of the children of same-sex parents.

It’s telling that intolerance for lying and wronging innocent people is apparently limited to “liberals”.

Heritage Foundation baffled by criticism of flawed "same-sex parenting" study