South Park evades a positive answer, again

One of the most annoying features of South Park is the creators’ hypocrisy. They’re so infatuated with tearing down that they never bother to build up. Trey Parker has an odd comment in an interview:

“All the religions are super funny to me,” Parker said. “The story of Jesus makes no sense to me. God sent his only son. Why could God only have one son and why would he have to die? It’s just bad writing, really. And it’s really terrible in about the second act.”

But Parker says atheism is more ludicrous to him than anything else.

“Out of all the ridiculous religion stories — which are greatly, wonderfully ridiculous — the silliest one I’ve ever heard is, ‘Yeah, there’s this big, giant universe and it’s expanding and it’s all going to collapse on itself and we’re all just here, just ‘cuz. Just ‘cuz. That to me, is the most ridiculous explanation ever,” he says.

Nah, he doesn’t even get the physics right. We’re here; we have the observations and measurements and experiments to show how we got here; it just is, no because about it.

But here’s the cowardly part of his statement: he implies he’s not a Christian, he implies he’s not an atheist — neither of which are particularly interesting comments — but nowhere does he say where he thinks we came from. You know why, and he knows why: he’s made a profession out of tearing down and ridiculing ideas (no problem there, it’s often a good thing to do), and he is well aware that if he actually gave even tentative support to some idea, not only would others reciprocate and rip into it with ridicule, but he’d be expected to do a show where he laughs at it himself. Of course, it may well be that he accepts the physical explanation of the universe — or even the Christian story, for that matter — but still thinks it is ridiculous because that is his only response to everything.

I think his show is often funny, and it does sometimes do a good job of satirizing even stuff I like (and often does a bad job, but heck, 95% of everything is crap), but the depressing pattern it constantly exhibits is that it is so damned hollow.

Oh, and I think the recent Mohammed episode falls into the 95%, and I really don’t believe their claim that the network forced them to censor it — I find it hard to believe anything they say, and think it’s just Parker and Stone gaming their audience some more. Just ‘cuz that’s what they do.

I guess I’ll have to watch South Park tonight

Are you ready for civilization to end? I guess the television show South Park is going to show a cartoon rendition of Mohammed tonight. I think the show has been steadily declining in quality, but I’ll tune it in one more time just to support the public desecration of the sacred.

Have they ever done a show where they lampoon juvenile libertarianism? I’d also tune in for that, but that probably hits a little too close to home for the creators.

Love should be something we can hold onto all of our lives

I’ve been married for 30 years, and there’s no end in sight, fortunately. But just imagine that, in my imminent old age, I were to seriously injure myself and be hospitalized for a long period…and my wife wasn’t allowed to see me. And then it was decided that we were both so feeble and in need of care that we were put in nursing homes, for our own good…and they were separate facilities, and we were not allowed to see each other. Then, since we were obviously incompetent, our home and belongings were sold by the state to cover our costs. And finally, one of us dies…and we aren’t allowed to see each other in those final days.

That would be a nightmare. I’m pretty sure it won’t happen — oh, the dying part will, someday, but not the right to find comfort with each other. But that’s because my wife and I are acceptably heterosexual. If we were gay, it would be a completely different story.

I’m sure someone somewhere is gloating that a couple of old perverts were locked out of their sinful ways, but all I see is a tragedy of love stymied by hate.

A priest, a scientist, and a Communist discuss morality

We had a fun evening on Friday—a crowd of a few hundred people sat down to consider the problem of a morality at the University of Chicago. At the front of the room we had Bob Bossie (a very liberal Catholic), Sunsara Taylor (a very articulate Communist) and me to make a few opening remarks and open the floodgates of questions from the audience. It was interesting and thoughtful, and nothing at all like this incredible session on Fox News.

Let me emphasize that Bob was not that crazy priest in the video, declaring that godlessness meant the death of hope and the decline of your money making ability, that socialism and secularism were a failure, and capitalism was the only economic philosophy that could possibly lead to morality. That is, Bob was not freaking insane. He does believe in God, but his God seems to be a superfluous entity bobbing on top of a core of very humanist values, and when he talked about what he really cared about, it was communities of people.

Taylor’s position was very similar in a lot of ways — that we need to change the world through liberation of the oppressed, and the way to do that was through revolutionary Communism. In her case, though, the philosophical justification wasn’t at all superfluous — Communism was the best strategy for bringing about change. We had a little set of questions we’d worked out before the event, and she had the advantage of us all in providing the most coherent answers to them…I just don’t think she’s entirely right. I don’t like the idea of a revolution led by a vanguard, I’m more of an evolution driven by the education and inspiration of the masses kind of guy.

Here are the answers to our guiding questions that I gave (sort of) in my opening remarks.

1. Can science provide a morality to change the world?

NO.

Science merely describes what is, not what should be, and it also takes a rather universal view: science as science takes no sides on matters relevant to a particular species, and would not say that an ape is more important than a mouse is more important than a rock. Don’t ask science to tell you what to do when making some fine-grained moral decision, because that is not what science is good at.

What science is, is a policeman of the truth. What it’s very good at is telling you when a moral decision is being made badly, in opposition to the facts. If you try to claim that homosexuality is wrong because it is unnatural, science can provide you a long list of animals that practice homosexuality freely, naturally, and with no ill consequences. If you try to claim that abortion is bad because it has horrible physiological consequences to pregnant women, science will provide you with the evidence that it does no such thing, and also that childbirth is far more physiologically debilitating.

If you want to claim that homosexuals should be stoned to death because the Bible says so, science will tell you yep, that’s what it says, and further, we’ll point out that the Abrahamic religions seem to be part of a culturally successful and relatively stable matrix. “Science”, if we’re imagining it as some institutional entity in the world, really doesn’t care — there is no grand objective morality, no goal or purpose to life other than survival over multiple generations, and it could dispassionately conclude that many cultures with moral rules that we might personally consider abhorrent can be viable.

However, I would suggest that science would also concede that we as a species ought to support a particular moral philosophy, not because it is objectively superior, but because it is subjectively the proper emphasis of humanity…and that philosophy is humanism. In the same way, of course, we’d also suggest that cephalopods would ideally follow the precepts of cephalopodism.

So don’t look to science for a moral philosophy: look to humanism. Humanism says that we should strive to maximize the long-term welfare and happiness of humans; that we should look to ourselves, not to imaginary beings in the sky or to the imperatives written down in old books, to aspire to something better, something more coherent and successful at promoting our existence on the planet.

Science wouldn’t disagree. But it would be a kind of passive agreement that says, sure, nothing in that idea is in violation of reality, go for it. It would also be egging the cephalopods on, though.

2. Are science, religion, and communism complementary, conflictual or mutually exclusive of one another?

Science and religion are definitely in conflict. Again, science is only acting as a policeman, though: it’s firing up the sirens and flashing lights to pull over the priests and tell them that claiming authority on the basis of an imaginary man in the sky is fallacious and discredits your entire paradigm. Rethink the basis of your beliefs, and maybe we can get along.

I think science and communism are also in conflict, but perhaps less dramatically so. There, we have to point out an empirical problem, that communist societies haven’t fared so well. The concession I would have to make is that communism is a young philosophy, unlike religion, so it can be excused to some degree for being at the start of the learning curve. I find it a little hard to excuse some of the human costs of communism, but then science also has had human costs.

But science isn’t a moral philosophy. I’ve proposed humanism as our tool; are communism and religion in conflict with that? And that’s where the answer gets murkier, because more progressive versions of those philosophies all seem to converge on humanism, anyway. The quest for social justice is a humanist ideal, and it’s also front and center in communism and liberal religion; you can be either of those and also be a humanist. I wouldn’t exactly call them complementary, but I would call them compatible.

3. How will we motivate people, and with what moral paradigm to change the world?

As I’ve said repeatedly, science doesn’t provide a morality. What it does provide, and what I optimistically and subjectively think will motivate people, is that it provides rigor and a path to the truth of the world. I know, I could be cynical and suggest that what people really want is delusions, distractions, and reassurances to help them hide away from reality — but what I’ve noticed is that people who accept reality seem to be better able to deal with it, and are often happier and more content. And further, they are better prepared to change the actual world, rather than burying themselves deeper in their fantasies.

All three of us disagreed on many things…but trust me, this wasn’t Fox News. It wasn’t a coterie of flaming idiots, for one thing.

Metal Darwin

There may be a few metal fans here and there…and this song is for you. If you don’t enjoy music with lots of hoarse shouting and banging instruments into rocks, DO NOT PLAY THIS VIDEO. You will cry. I’ve got two sons, so I’ve been inured to this stuff — and at least this band, The Ocean, has intelligent lyrics.

Oh, you say, you couldn’t hear the lyrics? Neither could I, because my ears were bleeding (but that’s one of the desired effects of this genre, don’t let it bother you). I had to look them up on the internet.

The Origin of Species

Yes, it’s quite hard to believe
That we all come from the same seed:
The scrub, the cockroach and the human being
It’s hard to see how the perfection of complex organs was achieved without an engineer

But all you see is the human eye
On top of the mountain peak, so high
A steep wall of rock
Impossible to climb
Our imagination is left behind

But there is a gentle slope on the backside
And even worms have simple eyes
That help them distinguish darkness from light

Our brains are accustomed to the scope of a lifetime
We will never be able to see how the sluggish vessel of evolution
Is slowly creeping up the hill
Uphill

There’s no other solution
There’s no other solution
There’s no alternative to the theory of evolution

Now excuse me, I need to get a bag of ice for my head and to load a few of this band’s songs into my iPod.

You can’t trust a Murdoch paper

I was a bit suspicious of this story that Dawkins and Hitchens were going to “ambush” and “arrest” the Pope when he showed up in England. It was just a little too sensationalistic, too out of character. I was right.

Needless to say, I did NOT say “I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI” or anything so personally grandiloquent. You have to remember that The Sunday Times is a Murdoch newspaper, and that all newspapers follow the odd custom of entrusting headlines to a sub-editor, not the author of the article itself.

What I DID say to Marc Horne when he telephoned me out of the blue, and I repeat it here, is that I am whole-heartedly behind the initiative by Geoffrey Robertson and Mark Stephens to mount a legal challenge to the Pope’s proposed visit to Britain. Beyond that, I declined to comment to Marc Horme, other than to refer him to my ‘Ratzinger is the Perfect Pope’ article here: http://richarddawkins.net/articles/5341

Here is what really happened. Christopher Hitchens first proposed the legal challenge idea to me on March 14th. I responded enthusiastically, and suggested the name of a high profile human rights lawyer whom I know. I had lost her address, however, and set about tracking her down. Meanwhile, Christopher made the brilliant suggestion of Geoffrey Robertson. He approached him, and Mr Robertson’s subsequent ‘Put the Pope in the Dock’ article in The Guardian shows him to be ideal:
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/5366
The case is obviously in good hands, with him and Mark Stephens. I am especially intrigued by the proposed challenge to the legality of the Vatican as a sovereign state whose head can claim diplomatic immunity.

Even if the Pope doesn’t end up in the dock, and even if the Vatican doesn’t cancel the visit, I am optimistic that we shall raise public consciousness to the point where the British government will find it very awkward indeed to go ahead with the Pope’s visit, let alone pay for it.

Joe McLaughlin will be an excellent journalist

I’ve spent far too much time in airports lately, and I think I might be going mad. I’m sitting, trying to type while waiting, and it’s just noise, noise, noise, noise — there’s the horrible repetition of “You are approaching the end of the moving walkway&hellip:You are approaching the end of the moving walkway&hellip:You are approaching the end of the moving walkway&hellip:You are approaching the end of…”, the frequent intercom warnings that “The TSA has determined that the current threat level is orange…”, which means nothing at all, and worst of all are the televisions located everywhere, blaring out the “news”. I’ve been thoroughly packed full of all the most important news, thanks to CNN.

And there’s the problem.

I was involuntarily subjected to full-on CNN at sampling intervals of approximately an hour and a half, with over an hour of their news coverage at a sitting. There was only one story, one all-important story that soaked up all the air time all day long.

Tiger Woods is whacking a little ball with a stick again, and he’s doing a good job.

His score at some tournament was reported repeatedly, and then some self-important sports pundit would come on and seriously tell us what this meant to Woods’ self-esteem, and to the psychological state of millions of little-ball-whackers all around the world. I kept hoping at least one of these guys would stop, look incredulously at his fellow panelists, and point out that this soul-crushing inanity is not news, and definitely not worth hours of masturbatory reflection. Jeez, CNN programmers should just look at the front page of the BBC and plan on spending 50 minutes of every hour covering the important stuff. I’ll allow that they can spend 10 minutes of every hour covering pop culture trivia — golf scores, Lindsey Lohan vulva sightings, the Kardashians, celebrity face lifts, that sort of thing.

Because right now I’m just going to have to assume the media is packed full of mindless morons.

Speaking of mindless morons, my talk at RIT was ‘reviewed’ by a student named Joe McLaughlin. I see a bright future for him in American media.

I remember him well. I gave a talk on the conflict between science and religion, and afterwards, he came down and asked me some questions. Well, first he declared firmly that he was a Catholic…which told me right away he wasn’t going to have much intelligent to say. I could give a rat’s pungent patootie for his Catholicism — if he wants to ask a question, nothing is gained by declaiming his ideological position at the outset, and my answer wouldn’t change whether he’s Catholic or Cathar. But yes, I had to get his testimonial first.

Then he asked about the infamous cracker incident: Why did I offend Catholics? Didn’t I know the host was sacred? Why did I pick on Catholics and not other believers? It was the usual drivel. I answered him seriously, told him the multiple reasons I had carried out my protest, and asked him if he had read what I had written…he hadn’t. He’d looked me up on Wikipedia, and hadn’t followed a single link to the source.

Let me mention…not once in my talk had I even mentioned desecrating crackers.

If you read his article, you’ll discover that it begins with McLaughlin announcing his Catholic credentials, talks only about the desecration of communion wafers, and despite the fact that I took the time to explain to him personally at some length about the actual motivations for the event, he declares “He just did it to offend Catholics.”

He affirms my opinion of most journalists so well. He ought to think about pursuing the profession. Either that, or he can practice moving walkway announcements.

I am getting a bit exasperated at the obtuse cracker questions I still get. They’re all asking precisely the wrong questions. Here are two hypothetical newspaper headlines; which of them is trivial, and which is High Crazy, needing more explanation?

Headline A:

MAN THROWS BREAD IN TRASH
It’s just a cracker, he says

Or Headline B?

MAN BELIEVES BREAD IS GOD
It’s the most precious object in the world, milllions say

Most people are getting worked up about Headline A, which is ridiculously trivial (and that was the point of the exercise), but everyone who interviews me seems to sail obliviously past the weird world of Headline B.

Please, please, please don’t ask me about how I dared to abuse a cracker, or about Tiger Woods, for that matter. Neither are important. I’d like to consider the insanity of a world obsessed with trivia and delusions, instead.

We have seen evil, and it is us

Here is why we need Wikileaks — because when our soldiers carry out Collateral Murder, we should know about it. Good journalism should be exposing this stuff for us.

This is a video shot from an American helicopter gunship in Iraq. It shows real human beings being shot to death. I wish I could unwatch seeing it now, so be advised before you click on that play button…it is horrific.

A couple of Iraqi journalists working for Reuters are slaughtered in the above clip, gunned down from a distance by American troops who claim their cameras are weapons, that they’re walking around with AK-47s and RPGs…which I simply don’t see anywhere in the clip. I see a small group of civilians casually walking down a city street.

Perhaps the killers were merely mistaken, as happens in war. Perhaps they had better views of weaponry than can be seen in this video. But that doesn’t explain what happened next, when a van pulls up to help a wounded man and they open fire again, fully aware of what was going on below them, and fire several bursts into the people and into the van.

Maybe they could see weapons more clearly than I can. But then how did they fail to notice two small faces peering out of the passenger side window of the van? They shot journalists and children, all the while laughing and congratulating themselves on the ‘nice’ pile of bodies they had produced. And when they see soldiers on the ground rushing injured children to aid, they say, “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.”

I am ashamed. We are the storm troopers, the murderous invaders, the butchers of children, the laughing barbarians. We aren’t in Iraq to help those people, our troops are there to oppress them…when we aren’t gunning them down outright.

Oh, and go ahead, turn on your TV news. The top stories on CNN are the iPad, Jessica Alba planning to adopt a baby, and Tiger Woods. Doesn’t that fill you with confidence?

(via John Cole)